Well it’s Turkey Day, and I hope you all are enjoying it. I haven’t posted in over a month, but I have been busy. I had a chance to play through all the games in this year’s Interactive Fiction Competition, and there are another 24 reviews under the IF Section.

At the beginning of the month Bioware finally released Dragon Age: Origins, and this might be the next user-creation tool for D&D type of games for the next 10 years to come. Of course it’s going to take at least a year for the wikipedias to pop up in order to program the thing, but what I heard so far sounds real promising. While I wait I’ve been playing through the main campaign in my spare time, and this thing is top notch. All the cut scenes are fully voiced acted and it really feels like a playable movie with a bloody story that forces you to take sides at some point. But Bioware knows how to make good games.

The Xbox 360 also released the Facebook download this month. So it now looks like Microsoft is moving into social networking, tying Microsoft Live to Facebook. I’m convinced that Microsoft is going to take over our lives, but that’s another subject. To their credit Media Center works real well, allowing you to stream video from your computer to the 360, giving you access to downloadable content and watching it on your TV. It’s almost like they’re supporting piracy, but there’s legitimate stuff out there too. Plus, that whole argument gets into the Freemium Economic Model and in the end some of that stuff will sell.

That’s part of what I’ve been up to, but I’ve also been looking at the story structure for ATS II. I’d like to start working on that sometime in December, and it would be nice to see something in testing by the middle of summer. I’m hoping that with a clear design I can knock it out without having to change a lot of stuff around. At least that’s the plan.

Later - D

Currently Playing: Dragon Age: Origins