I should have been a pair of ragged claws

I assume thanks to being a Google blogger, I was invited to use their new GMail system. What's cool about it: they provide every account with 1 gig of searchable storage space. Downside: they peruse your mail to provide ads at the top of the page. That sort of information could be used for all sorts of nefarious plots and plans, but could they be any worse than what Microsoft is already doing to Hotmail users? Oh, and I got scott.lewis@gmail.com . I actually got my own name. Rulin'!

A friend from work let me borrow a few Hellboy comics and wow, good stuff. Mike Mignola's paranormal storylines can require more than usual suspension of disbelief, yet his engaging, witty characters, brilliant gothic art, and amazing page layout more than make up for it.

Wow - Day 2 of GDC coverage nearly a month late! Game Design: A Love Story - Raph Koster, Warren Spector, Will Wright, Eric Zimmerman A lightweight session with Warren Spector, Raph Koster, and Will Wright all designing games about "love." Raph Koster blatantly ignored the instructions of "no interactive fiction" and created a multiplayer romance novel game called "Passion's Tender Embrace" where people play out different parts of a generic romance novel online. Warren Spector didn't finish a game idea claiming "I just can't design a game that doesn't have guns." He discussed what he thought was needed to make a game where the player falls in love with a computer character. He clearly did a lot of research on the subject but the design area he was approaching was very difficult and possibly intractable. Will Wright made (yet another) sublime presentation. He proposed a mod called "Collateral Romance" for Battlefield 194

Bessie says: "Don't listen to Scott. My singing rocks! He is just jealous that I am the next Whitney Houston. Thank you. -Bessie" Does that make me Bobby Brown? Do I need to check her into rehab?

Serendipity! Last weekend I was doing the dishes singing FreezePop's " Science Genius Girl " and Bessie said that she wanted to play Karaoke Revolution to sing it with music. I immediately tried to defuse the situation. I dearly love my wife, but I must either be out of the apartment or unconscious when she dons the KR headset. So I humbly recommended Harmonix's sublime Frequency as an alternative, because the "Science Genius Girl" appears in that game as well. Shockingly she agreed and I got her in front of the PS2 sans headset. Bessie had some difficulty completing the initial few songs in Frequency. Her opinion of the game was not improved when the game actually booed her if she failed a level. Frantically struggling to keep this dim light of gaming interest glowing, I hastily replaced Frequency with its successor, Amplitude . Harmonix mentioned in its post mortem that they did significant usability testing on Frequency in order to make Amplitude a m

I ignored Mind Control's little web game when I passed by it at the IGF . Something about the weird dude on the left side of the screen and the scarab with sparkles freaked me out. It won the "Innovation in Game Design" award and I thought I should give it a shot. Oasis is Civ on speed after a few mountain dews. Cities, roads, mines, technology, research, armies, barbarian hordes come flying at you at a blazing pace. Everything is simplified to make you want to play fast and furiously. The tension between exploring the map, building roads between your cities, and investing more workers to do research is tight and enjoyable.

Arriving in Japan Winter 2004! Hopefully in the US by Summer 2005 if the localization can get done by then. There was some images of Japanese ads that I linked to, but they've been taken down, so I have to link to the lame ign galleries . The images aren't very clear. :( Edit: Some blessed soul translated the previous advertisement for us to peruse. Hurray!