Week 682

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.

Last week, two game reviews were published in nrc.next: my review of Pullblox, and Harry Hol’s review of Final Fantasy XIII-2, which I edited.

The puzzle platform game Pullblox is pretty great, even though it starts out slow – and when it finally gets complex, your best bet is usually to just try stuff. However, it’s a downloadable 3DS game that really works with the 3D screen, and it’s a new IP from Nintendo (well, Intelligent Systems), which is always good. Plus, being an in-house Nintendo-game, it’s extremely polished.

Control published an older column on its website, about Uncharted 3’s ‘feel sequences’, which help connect the story and gameplay by making the player more aware of his environment.

On Tuesday I met with Stefan Keerssemeeckers, freelance games journalist and Bashers.nl’s favorite editor. That evening, I met with Nick Kivits and Bastiaan Vroegop, and we discussed Bashers.nl, and Bashers Beat especially. After a succesful launch, our link and video blog slowed down a bit, so we’re figuring out how to kickstart the thing.

On Wednesday I made a video about the PlayStation Vita for Bright.nl, together with David Lemereis. David was one of the writers for games magazine Power Unlimited when it first came out, and I was a devoted fan. So I was delighted to find some early issues in his appartment, and even better: the first magazine that I leafed through just happened to contain a letter by my 13-year old self. (Even then, I was annoyingly nitpicky. I guess I criticize because I care.)

That afternoon I visited Corrie Gerritsma and Erwin van der Zande over at the Bright office, where we discussed the long-standing friendly bond between Bright and Bashers.nl. Among other things, I asked them if we could use the word ‘Screenzine’ for our upcoming tablet magazine. (Erwin came up with it, Bright used it. And Bashers may well be next.)

On Thursday at around 5 PM, my throat started hurting like hell from one moment to the next. That developed into a full-blown stomach flu by Monday morning, 6.30 AM, but that’s a story for next week.

On Friday I made another visit to Two Tribes, where I saw and discussed their demo plans for the Game Developers Conference next month in San Francisco, and even sketched what might become the first level of Toki Tori 2.

Over the weekend, I edited the footage I shot during the Global Game Jam in Berlin (with my iPhone 4, a Glif and a cheap tripod). It was shown this week at Control Gamelab and will be shown for what might be eternity on YouTube.