Gama-ing XM to the max?

Phew. So the first few days at Gamasutra have been hectic, but fun. Mainly doing editing and commissioning, but expect to see an article from me every now and again too. There are plenty of news stories posted every day, and new features or galleries are updated on Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays at 9am PST, plus there's an XML feed for articles, if you want to play along at home. Oh, and remember the site requires free registration, since it's for people who work in the games industry, so sign up, or find the printer-friendly versions for unregistered reading goodness.

Anyhow, the much longer commute up to San Francisco (at least until we buy a condo closer to SF) means that I got a chance to go gadget shopping for the XM Roady 2 satellite radio receiver, and, well, the XM radio service is really rather good if you have a long drive to/from work. 100+ commercial-free stations for 10 bucks a month is a good deal, and having the artist and track name show on the LCD screen is the 'killer app' if you're into music knowledge geekery. Particularly favored channels are, oddly, all the indie/alternative ones named after people - Lucy, Ethel, and sometimes Fred, though their webpages are _not_ indicative of the depth of tracklistings - there's not much repetition, and some obscure gems get played. There's also some interesting niche channels, including stand-up comedy, a movie soundtracks channel, and an all-African music channel (apparently still around due to contractual obligation, but interesting nonetheless!)

But, heck, any radio network where you can listen to John Peel on the way home on Friday, find Ozric Tentacles on a chill-out station, and who play out Jellyfish from time to time is good with me. There's a lack of a more diverse college/indie channel (KEXP-style), though, and the electronica stations are pretty much all cheesy trance or house - with an occasional decent Essential Mix or Solid Steel show, thank God. But overall, the depth and breadth of choice mean XM is _SO_ much better than most of the commercial-spattered local radio abominations.

A change of scenery, hacking things up?

So, tempus fugit, and all that, and it's time for an exciting weblog-based announcement. As of this Sunday (22nd August), I'm stepping down as a Slashdot editor, after nearly 18 months (and over 3000 posts) - so I won't be editing the Games section or the main page anymore. In addition, I'll be paring down my Internet Archive activities to more of a spare-time dealio.

This is because I've taken a new position as Managing Editor of game industry website Gamasutra, which is part of the CMP Game Group - the group also includes Game Developers Conference and Game Developer Magazine. I've written for Gamasutra since 1997, even when I was working in game development, and so I'm absolutely delighted to be working full-time over at Gamasutra. I'm sure I'll talk about it more in due course.

[Incidentally, looks like Dom from MegaTokyo blogged about trying out for my Slashdot job before I'd mentioned it to anyone, which got me at least one quizzical email from Subi, hah.]

Finally, for those wondering about cryptic comments over my O'Reilly videogame-related book project, it's now been announced - it's 'Gaming Hacks' - and it's due out in October. Again, more about this soon, but we've tried to assemble a team of expert contributors and cover the pantheon of interesting, hackable game-related software and hardware. Yay.

Archive game videos exposed?

So I wanted to do a little pointing at the Internet Archive's Game Videos Archive, since I mentioned it briefly in the linklog, but didn't elaborate - it's been a lot of work to put together for me and (mainly) for lots of amazing contributors. There are actually a bunch of collections within the main hubpage, so let's check em out.

I may have mentioned the Machinima collection before, but it's now got more than 300 movies, with good metadata from Henry Lowood and others at Stanford - amazing stuff including the Soldats San Merci Battlefield 1942 series, and, obviously, Red Vs. Blue. Much of the catalog was grabbed from Machinima.com, so many thanks to Hugh Hancock for that.

The Speed Runs collection is shaping up to be amazing, too, thanks to the tireless work of Nolan 'Radix' Pflug from the PlanetQuake Speed Demos Archive. Over 100 movies showing games being completed as swiftly as possible - there's even captured movie versions of the original Doom Ultra Violence speed runs, as well as great stuff like Super Mario Bros in 5 minutes and 10 seconds, and many newer and more surprising titles.

One collection we got out of the blue is the Video Game Previews collection from Video Pipeline, a now-defunct company who provided video footage of the latest games to game stores and suchlike. There are over 2,000 movies from 1993-2003 in all, and some great stuff, including the canned N64 version of Eternal Darkness, semi-insane live-action ads for Boogerman, and a wealth of other material - particularly good since most commercial gaming sites only have video back to, say, 1999 or 2000.

The other game-related video material is on a smaller scale, but still worthy - this includes game/software longform EPKs, including goodness like the Riven B-Roll footage, the Pyst EPK (OK, maybe John Goodman singing a Myst pastiche interminably isn't THAT much goodness), and the previously-mentioned Neverhood making-of. Also just being added to is the high score/skill-based replay collection, such as playing GigaWing 2 without smart bombs - crazy stuff.

Finally, we have the CLASP Classic Software Preservation page, which is still heavily in Beta, waiting for an abstraction of the Archive.org site so it can handle uploads from 'software'-related collections in a much easier fashion. But, if you look at the details page for Dungeon Master on the Amiga, you can see what we're trying to do - using the DMCA exemption to do good-quality, private archiving of important game software. We'll have to see how we can progress this - there's already been some interest in it, anyhow.

birthday carmageddon tidbits?

So the whole birthday thing was low-key, but fun - got some obvious TV show DVDs (Firefly, Futurama), some not-so-obvious books (Lovecraft's library, cataloged), and have a GP32 handheld coming from Hong Kong - should be fun to mess with. Unfortunately, Holly's dachshund Petie (who lives at her parents) got ill with heart-related problems later that day, but he's out of the vet hospital now and looking to be recovering, yay!

This week saw a few odd bits of media attention, which you might have seen me pimp on the linklog - G4TechTV ran a 'Trippiest Games' Filter show which has a couple of on-camera appearances from me (filmed at GDC), including adoring comments on Parappa The Rapper, and my own tripped-out game nomination, the genius Carmageddon. [Unfortunately, G4 cut the specific reason I found it trippy, which was the drugs mode, but it's still fairly trippy even without that.] Oh, and there's an audio interview with me about Archive.org, netlabels, and Monotonik, as played on Interjamp Radio in Germany recently - I talk in English, though the announcer/questioner is all Teutonic n stuff.

Otherwise, it's just been movies (finally got to see Hellboy on DVD - Del Toro gets it right), music (the new Badly Drawn Boy vid for 'Year Of The Rat' is precious), TV (more South Bank Show on Ovation - excellent Paul Merton doc), and games (mainly ranting about 'fake' reviews.) That be all.