Yesterday I played a minor role in a report on games on the Dutch news show 1Vandaag, the videoclip is online here. I blogged about it on Bashers.nl: “Geweld en games bij EénVandaag op Campzone”. The report itself is not that long but behind the scenes I had great fun and good discussions with the journalist (+crew) who put this together. After years of waving off TV interview requests, maybe I should do this more often.

Last tuesday I wrote a (short) review of Guitar Hero: On Tour for my favourite free newspaper. Great game, loads of (portable) fun. My only gripe is the set list. Too much pop (No Doubt… come onnnn), not enough Heavy Metallll. Pick it up if you have the chance!

There’s some more news, interviews, writing and other stuff coming soon. My seemingly endless writing crunch is almost over.

After weeks of solitary confinement and writing hoity-toity academic stuff (a.k.a my PhD) I was able to do two newspaper pieces. The smaller one was on Echochrome, a perspectival puzzlegame (yes, perspectival, how about that). I love the concept, the execution, i.e. the game’s bare bone approach to game design being in black-and-white, classical music, very minimalist and all. My brain is not optimally wired because I found many of the Echochrome puzzles very (painfully) hard to complete. The game is only 10 euro in the Playstation Store, so that’s a no-brainer.
The other story is somewhat longer and on Buzz (or Buzz! Quiz TV for the PS3 to be exact). I had the game on my debug PS3 since march and played it with over a dozen friends. It’s still a very groovy game. True, there’s room for improvements and minor tweaks, but that’s the hardcore gamer in me speaking.

On an unrelated not, last few days I’ve been playing quite a lot Battlefield: Bad Company. Good stuff, always loved the Battlefield franchise. I did a preview on it way back for GMR but I can safely say that the game, as they say, ‘delivers’. To ‘honor’ the fact that the game is so well done, I uploaded the preview I did (.pdf is here) for GMR. Oh, and Rock Band apparently will make it to the Netherlands. How about that… Wrote about it in De Pers mid-march. We’ll see if the game actually will get a place on the shelves and which gamer will be rich enough to buy it.

A blogpost, a post I tell ya! I joined the Bashers.nl-crew, mostly because I believe in quality game critique (& journalism) and one way to get there is the way the guys & girls at Bashers are doing it. That, and the fact that I have huge respect for Niels ‘t Hooft (who now writes for nrc.next). For your information, it’s a labour of love, it has nothing to do with downgrading anything else and it is just to keep me from going insane by reading critical theory.

My first post is a opinion piece on the new ‘bandpack format’: “Het Aerosmith-bandpack, of: de flinterdunne grens tussen uitbreiden en uitmelken“:

Maar is een bandpack nu iets waar we op zitten wachten? De fan zegt natuurlijk: “Ja!” Die kan de game met een gerust hart kopen. Maar de grens tussen uitmelken en succesvol uitbreiden is flinterdun. Vraag maar aan EA. Pietertje Moore moet er hard aan trekken om het beeld van EA als ultieme verkrachter van sportlicenties bij te draaien. Als dat ooit nog lukt. Nogmaals, Guitar Hero: Aerosmith is een kwalitatief goede productie. Geen bugs, voldoende content en het kern-gameplay-mechaniekje werkt nog steeds als een trein.

Meh, if only writing a PhD was as easy as blogging… I won’t post regularly on Bashers (the coming weeks), mainly because of PhD related time constraints, but later this year I probably will.

This is the first in a series of updates on my “secret summer”. Most of the time I’m in an undisclosed location, to which I lovingly refer as my “PhD Bunker”, to write and read.

June 19 I did a lecture on Marketing & Games for the CSN Conference 2008. I went smooth and had some great discussions before and after. What still struck me is how insanely media illiterate most marketeers are.

Last week was all about writing. I finished a book chapter on games & war: “Empower Yourself, Defend Freedom! – Playing games during times of war” in Digital Material: Anchoring New Media in Daily Life and Technology. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. It will be out later this year. I am also working on another book chapter (on the same subject) but more on that later.

As my newspaper is having sort of a summer break as well there’s not much room for longer stories. Today I filed two reviews (page 16 & 17 .pdf) on Battlefield: Bad Company and on Guitar Hero: Aerosmith. Both are worth your money.

I am still waiting for Amazon to deliver me Scott McLellan’s book (What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception). Look forward to read that besides the enormous pile of books on game studies and such.

Expect more (academic) news soon, until then its typing typing typing.