Ultima VI – The German Intro

There never was a German version of Ultima VI, and in my humble opinion it never really needed one. But sometime in the mid-90s, I felt compelled to create one anyway – probably because I liked computers (and Ultima!) a lot and had too much time on my hands I The result isn’t Earth-shattering prose, but I remember the effort fondly: German is famously longer than English (supposedly by approximately 30%), yet I couldn’t exceed the predefined character limit. And I was still in high school, and this translation actually applied some of the knowledge I had gained in class.

I had thought the translation long lost, rotting on a trashed hard drive somewhere in a German landfill – but as I was digging through my classic games folder today, I noticed two Ultima VI executables in the same directory and got curious. After some more digging, one .EXE turns out to be the one I hacked all those years ago.

This might interest me more than anybody else. But after the cut, for historic purposes, here’s the Ultima VI introduction – in German

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Dead Space 2 Release

Dead Space 2 was released just over a month ago! If I haven’t posted about the game yet it’s not because of a lack of love – I’m absolutely stoked with how the game turned out. I just got sucked into my new job at LucasArts and GDC talk preparations. I might post a more complete postmortem later, but for now I’ll leave you with the information that I was the senior level designer on the project and worked on chapters 2, 3 and 6. In other words, everything from the hospital to the church, and the mall/school spaces after the church. I hope you enjoyed the game!

Dead Space 2 Trailer

The latest and greatest trailer for Dead Space 2 has been released, hope you like it and will buy the game! It’s hands down the best title I’ve worked on so far. I did the level design for all those “Sprawl in chaos” sections shown in the video.

First Dead Space 2 Trailer

You can watch the high-res version of this video on the official Dead Space page.

Isaac Clarke, Patient File

Build a Tower, Build a Team

Important lessons to learn for game development (and many other walks of life).

Dead Space 2 Footage

Coming out of PAX East, here’s a small video of Dead Space 2 in action.

Kotaku has the full story with additional commentary.

With this said, I won’t get into the habit of writing about every little future Dead Space 2 snippet (non-official, no less) that makes it onto the internet. But since it’s the first moving footage of the game, and a scene from one of the levels that I’m working on (I don’t deserve credit for the implementation of this particular sequence, though), and I’m happy to link to it. Hope it gets your imagination going, and thinking about the possibilities.

The Intelligent Design Movement

“If you really want to know what is at risk from the anti-evolution movement, look at Kansas. And the reason of that is, when the anti-evolution movement got control of the state board of education, what did they do? They rewrote the definition of Science itself. Not just Biology. Not just Evolution. Science.”

This is a great speech by Ken Miller about the dangers of the anti-evolution movement in America, and the very real danger that they pose to our education system. In the process, he presents conclusive proof of evolution (as if we needed any more) and rips apart the reasoning behind intelligent design. It’s almost two hours of video, but half of that is taken up by the QA session. Even that part is well worth watching all the way through.

New Wheel of Time Game

Red Eagle Games has partnered with Obsidian Entertainment to develop a new Wheel of Time game. Awesome! It’s a tough universe to do justice to (I think Glen and everybody at Legend did a good job, but we weren’t making an adventure/role-playing game at the author’s request). If I imagine developers like Feargus Urquhart, Chris Avellone and Josh Sawyer working on the franchise, I get my hopes up!

The only worrying part is this quote:

We are not licensing our WOT development rights and stepping back from the process of building these video games. Quite to the contrary, Red Eagle Games will have an internal development team of its own. However, rather than staffing up a 200 person studio from scratch, we decided some time ago that for our first games it would be far more prudent to hire a small in-house team (e.g. positions such as Art Director, Game Designer, Story Writer, Software Architect, Quality Assurance Director, etc.) and rely on a third party developer to provide the majority of developers and their associated overhead and infrastructure.

No offense to Red Eagle Games (to be honest, I don’t know much about them – even after reading their executive bios), but Obsidian isn’t the kind of studio you hire to do the grunt implementation work, or try to impose creative decisions upon. I hope there will be a real exchange of ideas here, and the development effort will allow Obsidian to do what they do best: create great RPG experiences.

Why High Fructose Corn Syrup Is Evil

Much has been made of the food industry’s overuse of High Fructose Corn Syrup as an ingredient in… well, pretty much everything (especially in America). Is it unhealthy for you? Dangerous? Or simply a natural sugar replacement that, just like anything else, can and should be enjoyed in moderation?

For the answer, I urge you to watch Robert H Lustig’s lecture “Sugar: The Bitter Truth”. While not singling out HFCS, it makes a very compelling argument against high fructose corn syrup, and for cutting foods with HFCS (and that includes most bread you buy these days) out of your diet.

Wondering why HFCS is bad for you? And in fact worse than regular table sugar? The short answer is “because it’s ubiquitous and metabolizes like fat and a toxin”, but I suggest you watch these videos for a much more comprehensive answer. It takes 70 minutes (don’t worry, I promise you’ll get hooked), and will help you make much better food decisions in the future.