May flowering, birdies singing

While I've been keeping the linklog fully stacked, not so many updates on the main weblog, recently. But in the meantime, here's a pic of the April 2005 issue of Game Developer magazine, as mentioned in the last post, featuring the KOTOR II postmortem - mmm, lightsabers.

More to the point, the May issue should be shipping from the printers soon, and, with bonus distribution at the E3 Expo (check the Kentia Hall entrance, mag fans!), should be a pretty darn cool issue. Our cover feature is a postmortem of The Behemoth's awesome Alien Hominid under the theme of 'Indie Power!', and elsewhere in the issue, Alex Handy has a great, rare feature interview with all the folks at 4orty 2wo Entertainment about the ilovebees ARG and the future of alternate reality games. Plus, Neversoft co-founder Mick West contributes a super-smart piece about disambiguating player input - do coders have to interpret joypad mashing so people get the reactions they want? Plus, our GDC-conducted interview with J Allard asks some tough questions about Rare, Xbox Live, and portable console concepts.

We've really nailed the five-days-a-week Gamasutra feature updates, alongside the beefed-up news, too - there are too many good features to mention, but some of the recent highlights include Terence Tan on South-East Asian game development, the Question Of The Week response on next-gen game pricing, and Fortugno and Zimmerman's Soapbox on educational game design.

Other than that, just picked up the extremely elusive Ridge Racer PSP, I'm nearing the end of Netflix-ing Angel (oh my, the 'Smile Time' episode rocks), and I'm still blasting through library books on the train, yay. I'm also in early planning for a possible new literary project - maybe. More soon.