So for the last two months I’ve been under a boulder, localizing a sort of insane Russian RPG. It’s taking way longer than it should, for a bunch of reasons (most of them out of my hands, for once!), and it’s kind of driving me batty. As if that’s not enough, last week I had GDC to contend with! So that put back the work another week, while I saddled up the BART and began to regularly drink coffee for the first time in my life, just to keep myself moving.

Most of the fruits of my labor, for what they’re worth, are now up. Pay especial attention to the content of the last one. (That’s the animation panel.) There’s a real howler coming up; I’ll amend this post when it goes live.

• Sawyer, Smith On Serious Gaming For Life (A half-step toward a workable theory, for once.)
• Video Games To Build And Retain A TV Audience (How is this different from advergames?)
• The News Game: Using Neverwinter Nights To Teach Journalism (A hack for hacks!)
• GameLab’s Zimmerman Says Casual Games are Dead (Sort Of) (It’s true; someone really needs to rethink this market.)
• Filling the Void Between Casual And Mainstream Games (Like… Nintendo?)
• The Media Myth Of The Casual Gamer (Yeah, pretty much.)
• Baer, Alcorn Talk ‘Brown Box’ Beginnings, Industry Birth (Baer is getting a little senile, I’m afraid.)
• Emotiv Knows What You’re Thinking (Control videogames WITH YOUR MIND!)
• Nintendo Reveals Wii Pay-For-Online Play, WiiWare Compression (Now with more throat warblers. What may not be clear is just how clueless Nintendo is about the whole concept of The Internet.)
• The Future of Animation is Games (No, Really!) (Oy. Just let the quotes do their work.)
• (NEW!) Peter Molyneux’s Top 10 GDC Proclamations(This was edited to be a little less irreverent.)

There was also a session on using games as tools for meditation, that I just didn’t have the time to write up. I’ll go into more detail if anyone is really curious. I thought there was some neat stuff in there, even if three-quarters of the session was an infomercial for a new agey revival of early ’90s-style multimedia starring Deepak Chopra & Company.

EDIT: I just noticed that someone switched around a few things in the animation article, such that it’s not completely accurate. (I also notice a lot of grammatial errors; this is what happens on an instananeous deadline.) Early on, the hour-long program they were discussing was literally just all the cutscenes from one game or another, edited together. They example they used was Prince of Persia: The Two Whatevers. The third game, you know, that’s got both the good and the evil Prince in it. (Or the sixth game, if you include the originals, plus that weird 3D thing for the Dreamcast.) Hi ho!

EDIT 2: All fixed! Well. As far as information goes. It could still use a copy edit.

EDIT 3: See above!