This weekend I picked up two old GameCube favourites of mine: Metroid Prime and Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. I had not played these games since I beat them years ago, and dipping my toes into those worlds brought on a deluge of memories.

My last game save on Wind Waker was in 2006, but I played the bulk of it the Spring & Summer of it’s release in 2003. Between the time that I was fully immersed in that archipelagic world, and when I went to the disc channel on my Wii to play it this weekend, I’ve:

• Completed 4 years of University
• Moved out of my parents’ house and in with my fiancée
• Abandoned organized religion
• Created the entirety of my portfolio
• Got engaged
• Moved to Ashley and my 2nd apartment
• Watched my cats give birth (The first birth I’ve ever seen)
• Went to the states for the first time that I can remember
• Started shaving and slowly became perma-scruffy
• And made some amazing friends

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How good a deal you ask? How about a free conference pass worth $700?

GDC Canada has announced that they will be offering free passes to the Vancouver conference to those who have been laid off from their games industry job in the past 12 months. Potential devs who want to take advantage of it can’t be currently employed, and must present a Record of Employment at the show to be eligible.

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Roger Ebert brandished his old media sword as he crept into the lair of the internet, defiantly shouting that games could never be art. He stood against a torrent of nearly 2000 comments on his personal blog, and an innumerable quantity of blog posts like this one referencing his mantra. He remains stalwart; a protector of all true art until the day he dies no matter how many flames he must endure or 20-somethings telling him he just has to play Shadow of the Colossus.

The question we, as gamers, must ask ourselves is thus: who cares?

Who cares what labels are placed on a medium? Who decides what is art? Certainly not a critic grounded in only one medium and certainly not a games-obsessed youngster either.

What does the label of art imply? Prestige? Government funding? Respect? Saying something is “Art” does nothing to the content. It’s simply a superfluous packaging on top of a product that already affects our emotions one way or another.

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I had a lengthy Twitter discussion with my friend Andrew Bernacki a few days ago regarding several things including Apple’s domestic squabble with Flash and the App Store & it’s various quirks.

And by quirks, I mean big flaws.

Don’t get me wrong; the App Store has been the absolute best thing to happen to digital distribution in a long time. It was the first mobile platform to get application distribution right. It certainly helped that the single platform meant your application could be in the hands of any present day and future iPhone/iPod touch user, rather than creating a different version of your application for every crappy monochromatic Nokia phone available now and in the future.

This is a 2007 phone. Compare this to the 2007 iPhone.

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CP_Blastoff is a Team Fortress 2 map made by Jason Lamb and I for our senior thesis project in the Multimedia program at McMaster University. We’ve already handed it in, but we’ve still a presentation to do on it this coming week. We plan to add more lights and fix some textures up before we make the final .bsp release to the public, but you can check out what it looks like right now in the photos posted above.

We’ve spent roughly 100 hours on it between us learning the SDK and Hammer (properly!) and doing multiple “orange” revisions before settling on a design that both we and the beta testers agreed was fun and fair for all classes.

I created an Etch-A-Sketch clone in PHP and Javascript for school. I used the jQuery and jQuery Mousewheel plugin libraries for this particular project.

Check it out here.

This post contains possible spoilers for Heavy Rain and Prince of Persia.

Recently, I’ve begun to think about how the actions of the player impacts the game world, the plot, and the overall experience in a game. This came about through finishing Heavy Rain a few days ago with my fiancee and then moving on immediately to Prince of Persia on PS3.

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