Week 737

What’s this? I’m blogging about my work on a weekly basis – a simple way to track and archive whatever it is I spend my time on.

After the previous week’s dramatic after-deadline dip, last week was OK. While waiting for feedback on my upcoming novel De verdwijners from the ‘persklaarmaker’ (a specific type of proofreader), I went through my manuscript slowly, tweaking it slightly and color coding it by character and subject.

On Monday, I went to Two Tribes and wrote a blog post about the lack of text in Toki Tori 2. I also worked on the sales text that will appear in the Wii U eShop.

On Tuesday, I met up with game designer and friend Sander van der Vegte, who is now really nearby on a near-daily basis, at his desk in the Hubbub office in the Dutch Game Garden. We had noodles for lunch. By the way, Sander is doing weeknotes now, too!

That night I visited Rogier Kahlmann in Weesp. We reminisced about the Bashers.nl days, and talked about future plans: we both like fiction writing and are also dabbling in the production side of games. Bashers may be gone, but the world is not yet rid of us!

On Wednesday, I went to Schiphol-Rijk to play the new SimCity for a few hours. Later in the week, I worked that into an article for nrc.next, which will appear this week. The piece goes into how this game series is really about system dynamics.

That afternoon, I went to the BNR radio studio in Amsterdam, where I talked about the PlayStation 4 in Herbert Blankesteijn’s BNR Digitaal. Last week’s show (in Dutch) is online for your enjoyment, my item starts at 3:30.

On Thursday morning, there was another radio item I appeared in, on Radio 1, in a KRO series by Jet Mok. I was in the games journalism episode of a 5-part report about games in The Netherlands.

On Friday I went to Amsterdam again. First I had coffee with Fredo Houben, who I’m planning to start a podcast with, then I went to a presentation of the upcoming BioShock Infinite, which made a great impression on me. I also interviewed director of animation Shawn Robertson.

That night, I started playing the new Tomb Raider, finishing it the next night. Then on Sunday night, I wrote my review, which will also appear in nrc.next this week.

Finally, the new issue of the Dutch Official PlayStation Magazine appeared, which had my retro column about Ico and Rez, and a 4-page interview with Vlambeer’s Rami Ismail. Get it!