Vykarian @ ChinaJoy 2006

For some time now I’ve been involved with a video game art outsourcing venture called Vykarian, located in Shanghai and founded by my buddy Xin Chung. We’ve been building towards an eventual goal of the “best and biggest” outsourcing venture in China. It’s our plan to establish art “factories” which are capable of cranking [...]

WGA and Activation Failures Don’t Faze Redmond

WGA and Activation Failures Don’t Faze Redmond
While Microsoft insists that problems with the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) program are much overblown — claiming last week that “only a fraction of a percent” of the systems that fail the WGA verification are actually legal — Microsoft’s customers keep saying otherwise. What’s worse, the WGA false negatives [...]

A Call To Ban Things #3

Hong Kong is a densely packed forest of high-rise business and residential buildings. In many respects it is a modern, high-tech place. But it’s also China, which translates to “a little backwards”. For instance, people often seem unclear on the concept of gravity. There are many tales told of random objects falling from the [...]

Mainland China Factories

They spew out a ton of polution, but hey, it makes for nice sunsets:

Mercury Steam developing next Clive Barker game

Great news today from Codemasters and Mercury Steam:
Clive Barker returns to gaming
Today, Codemasters announced that master of horror Clive Barker will be returning to video games when Clive Barker’s Jericho ships for the PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 in late 2007. …Jericho is being developed by Mercury Steam, who last worked on Scrapland.
The Mercury Steam [...]

The Video Game Business Is Broken

GameDaily is running an excellent opinion article on why the games industry is broken:

GameDaily BIZ: Opinion: The Video Game Business Is Broken
We all know this a year of change in the video game market place. The future of the industry is very much at a crossroads with the big 3 bringing out their new platforms [...]

Bad Day LA - US Publisher

This morning it was announced that Aspyr will publish Bad Day LA in the US. This isn’t the first time that Aspyr has dealt with one of my products - they previously did an amazing job with the Mac version of Alice. I’m excited to be working with them again and hope we can have [...]

NOT a video game murder…

It’s not hard to believe that video games cause violence when you read headlines like these:
“Video game slayings trial gets underway“
“Witness won’t testify at Xbox murder trial”

Both of these stories relate to the same murder trial taking place in Florida. Three men are accused of killing six of their friends. In the initial story the [...]

Bad Day LA - Translation Laughs

Living in Hong Kong, I’m constantly frustrated by the complexity of the Cantonese language - what some have called “the most difficult language in the world.” Others call it “WTF?!”.
As an example, take the word “Gau” (say it like “now” with a “G”). Depending on the tone you use, Gau can mean: 9, enough, dog, [...]

BDLA Tour - Paris

In Paris I met with the guys from Gost Publishing, who are publishing Bad Day LA in France. After being relieved of my luggage at Charles de Gaulle airport (honestly, it was too heavy anyway) I made my way into Paris via the train and subway system. One thing I noticed was the French attitude [...]

BDLA PR Tour - Berlin

We’ve all heard the saying that money cannot buy happiness. I read recently that an investment firm researched the root of happiness so that they could better serve their customers’ needs. They discovered that buying luxury watches, expensive furs, and fancy cars did nothing to improve long-term happiness. Instead, it was revealed that world travel, [...]

BDLA PR Tour - Hamburg

Press tour update - so far so good. Aside from the moment where someone (not sure if it was the French or the British) lost my luggage for three days, the tour has been going great.
This was my first time to visit Paris, and even though I was mostly a “taxi-cab tourist”, the city was [...]

Bad Day LA - Euro Press Tour

Leaving tonight on a midnight flight from Hong Kong to Paris. Looks like I’ll be spending the 4th of July amongst those wussy, traitorous Frenchies. Man did we ever show them, running off to Iraq and kicking some major terrorist ass. I’ll be sure to rub their faces in how NOT bogged-down, costly, and pointless [...]