For serious.

How's tricks, GameSpot? I been down in Irvine for the past year, still working at Obsidian, cranking away at Alpha Protocol (recently nominated for the official RPG of Show nomination from the E3 judges). Been a busy year!

I went to Germany when I was in the 11th grade, but I don't remember much of anything. I remember it was gray and gloomy the entire time I was there for some reason. But now I'll get to go for work and the Leipzig Games Convention, which should be entertaining. I've never been to Leipzig, although my experiences in Tokyo can't be that far off from it, I would imagine. Although the flights are a bit more complicated: Orange County to Oakland to SFO to Frankfurt to Leipzig. That could've been a bit less complicated, but I wanted to stay over in SF on my way back and see some friends (although I imagine I'll regret that when the jetlag winds up destroying me).

Anyway, it should be fun to show off some more of Storm of Zehir to the enthusiastic European press. I'm not much of a cameraman but I am planning on taking plenty of pictures...

All of Obsidian's artists are pretty awesome. If you've seen any of the concept art behind our games, then you'd know that. Anyway, I was thumbing through the personal site of Justin Cherry, our art director, when I found this sketch of Dante from DMC as a woman. Pretty interesting, as are the more final artwork that he has up there.

Right-click, view image for full size.

One of the funner things about working at a game company is seeing the concept art for things like characters and environments. I think some of Justin's work is also in some of the galleries for Obsidian games, like Mask of the Betrayer. I think this is another one of his, tho I could be wrong.

To borrow a phrase from the Kasavin...

Been a while since I updated this. I haven't had much to talk about, game-wise, as I haven't had the ability to play much lately. All of my consoles are still locked up in a self-storage place up in San Fran, whereas I'm down here in Orange County with a mostly-broken TV and cable that's probably not quite legal. I got my copies of GTAIV and Ninja Gaiden II in the mail today, which is making the wait all the more tantalizing. But I should be up in a week or so to retrieve my stuff, and I'm thinking of borrowing a 360 from work this weekend to get started on them. So that's good.

Apart from that my work has mostly revolved around working with the new Neverwinter Nights 2 expansion, which is shaping up to be a pretty cool project, especially for people who enjoyed the older, party-based RPGs that the PC used to revel in. So allow me to pimp that for a second.

Ok, done pimping.

So, I'm the new Marketing & PR Producer at Obsidian Entertainment down here in sunny and hot Orange County, California. Suffice to say that I wouldn't have left GameSpot for just any old job. When the Marketing/PR position opened up down here at Obsidian, though, I had to leap at the opportunity.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a big PC RPG guy from way back, and I was an especially big fan of stuff like Baldur's Gate and the other Infinity Engine games. So the opportunity to work with the people who created stuff like Fallout and Icewind Dale, you have to know that I'm going to take it.

At any rate, things seem pretty cool down here at Obsidian. People are hard at work on Alpha Protocol, Aliens RPG, and some other projects which I look forward to talking about in the future. We'll see what happens from here on in, but it should be a fun ride.

As some of you may have already surmised, my time at GameSpot is coming to a close. It's been a mostly enjoyable three and a half years at CNET for me. I started in September of 04 here at the 'spot, and it's been a pretty amazing journey since then. I've met a lot of good people, written a couple million words about games, and overall I've had a pretty good time.

But just like in Star Trek, all good things must come to an end, and as such I've accepted a position on another seat of the developer/publisher/journalism merry-go-round. Today is my last day at GameSpot, but I'll be around on the site for the foreseeable future, I suppose. I don't think I should say much about my new gig at the moment, considering I won't start for a week or two, but suffice to say I'll be working for one of my favorite companies.

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I typically like Obsidian's games, so I was eager to check out the April cover feature in Game Informer on Alpha Protocol, their just-announced spy RPG. Unfortunately it looks like the copy that Chris Watters got featured a bit of a goof, in that pages 1-25 were repeated twice. So it went from pages 1-25 to pages 1-25 to page 50 and up. Too bad, because the Alpha Protocol feature was on page 28 or something, so it's not in the magazine.

Anyone else have any similar experiences? I kind of like goofball printing errors (I found a book way back when in a bookstore that had the front half printed correctly but the back half printed upside down), but I like them less when they prevent me from reading the stuff that I want to read.

Yep.