Let me make it clear from the get-go. This week’s blog post will not entertain you with new news or insigth into our secret game making lab. It will rather be about commenting some stuff that’s been going on in the game dev industry, both nationally and in the little big world, in the forgoing week.

International news and stuff.

And there’s been going on quite a bit. We’ve had Tokyo Game Show in , well , Tokyo, and some announcements like a sequel to No More Heroes made Kris’ day. However, the event was not home to any big surprises or revelations, and Nintendo as usual did not even attend. Other noticable surprises were Microsoft managing to get Tekken 6 to the 360, a series which have always been tied to Sony’s PlayStation platform.

Sony’s focus was on Little Big Planet, and that’s where it should be! We’ve had access to the beta on our office-ps3 for about three weeks, and it’s .. yeah, it just is so amazingly put together that it becomes hard to describe the awesomeness without sounding cheesy, let’s just say “it’s insanely great!”. It feels like a system seller, it deserves to be it, and it’ll be exciting to see if it’ll hit home with consumers when it’s launched.

Sackboy is also said to become the PS3 mascot. Actually, I’d like to state a personal opinion; I wish sony would base the default look of their Home service on the aesthetic of Little Big Planet. I think it would make for a much better and more inclusive look. I mean, looking at Sackboy’s facial expressions you’d be dead inside if you are not grinning from ear to ear.

So, on to some local news. That is Norwegian National news. News about Norway

The goverment put forward their budget last week, and there were three million reasons for us game developers to smile. The game development funding program has recieved an increase of three million NOKS. Now this is of course only 500 thousand dollars, so big budget games must still get funding through other means. It is however quite excellent as a way to finance prototyping of a big game, development of a smaller game, or just an addition to other funding.

There has also been a proposal about supporting marketing and PR for games in the release phase, which is a good initiative, cause marketing games is hard and costs money, and is often put on the back-burner because a development company is usually more interested in spending more money on development of the product, than telling everybody about how great the product is.

And now for the Good Coffee , Bad Coffee routine

Last week’s blogpost talked about the great coffee disaster also known as decaff. It’s a sad story of lost productivity and unfruitful coffee drinking. One would think we would be able to secure us real coffee after being through such problems.

Well, yeah, we did get us coffee with the goody good good caffein that we needed. There was only one problem. The coffee that Rolf bought, was utterly undrinkinable and horrible. It tasted so bad and so foul that it felt like higher powers were mocking and punishing us by this week providing us with something that had the caffein we needed, but was so ugly-tasting that trying a cup was like battling the need for caffein with the drawback of the taste of burned coffee shit-beans lingering in your mouth.

After some days with this atrocious coffee, the most expensive and luxurious nice tasting coffee we could find was bought, and now we’re fine until we run out again. At least we know what kind of coffee not to get.

So that was all for this week.. Or in fact, previous week, as this blog was published on a monday and revealed events based on the previous week. Keep following the blog and stay updated on what we’re doing, thinking and share opinions yourself by using the comment feature.

Bye