Wired Raves, Game Developer Stuff, Media Shenanigans..

So, I did have some more books/games/DVDs to mini-review, but I'm feeling a bit typed out, so I'll do some micro-reviews a little later in this post, I guess.

In the meantime, let's see what's happened recently. Rather marvellously, the Hacks series from O'Reilly (of which my book is one of, uhh, about twenty!) was nominated for a Wired Rave Award. So that's neat. Also, we just sent the February 2005 issue of Game Developer magazine to the printers, and it includes the previously-mentioned Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal postmortem, plus a very interesting article on women and gaming, and a preview of Game Developers Conference written by me, with recommendations for neat lectures/roundtables by the rest of the edit team (Brandon, Jill, Quang.)

On the web side of things, Gamasutra is still going really well, plus, we're in the beginning stages of resurrecting a cool, now 'freestuff'-related game download site as a spare-time project - maybe we'll have something to show in a couple of months. Or not.

Ah, yes, so those micro-reviews. Things wot I have been enjoying include DVDs (the Region 2-only Big Train, genius surreal sketch comedy from the Father Ted creators, including Spaced's Simon Pegg and Mark Heap), books (Everyone In Silico by Jim Munroe - a futurist, anti-ad, borderline cyberpunk, immensely entertaining romp), and games (Alien Hominid - an IGF finalist, and a gorgeously playable Metal Slug-styled side-scrolling delight.)