The Game Jam took it’s toll on my two weeks ago and I found myself in the unique position of being too tired to accomplish anything. Well, that and my son caught a nasty bug from daycare thus transfering it to myself a couple days into the week. Every try to care for a 11 month old while your stomach is being ground away with naseau? It is as awesome as it sounds.

But you don’t care about that, I promised info and I intend to deliver.

The game jam was truly a unique experience for me as I have no real ties to the game industry other than playing their product—this time I gave back. While my role was a bit more subdued than I had hoped, it was nice to know that I actually COULD do art for games. Could it have looked better, sure, but for less than 24 hours of actual working I think it looked pretty damn good! Additionally, and I don’t want to brag but my type skills actually came in handy and our game had a fairly kick ass logo/title screen. Type is good people! Can’t have a kick ass product with some generic looking Helvetica screen.

Team Awesome (my default team name) was composed of three programmers, three art folks and one reserve art guy that happened to bring mixing equipment with him and thus became sound-guy. One of my cohorts pretty much summed up the experience and I pretty much agree with everything he said except fo the technical shit that is, frankly above my paygrade nerd-wise—so in effort to save space I’ll just link his post here.

My emphasis, we needed someone in charge of the art. I think we did a fantastic job considering the three of us had TOTALLY different styles and I’m fairly good at mashing my own shit in with other folks work but at times it was a touch chaotic on who was working on what.

I like structure ok? Regardless, we pulled it off and it was pretty god damn fun. I still disagree with some of the mechanics but whatever. I’ll let it slide. I’ll post a video with commentary in the next day or two, just need to gather my thoughts a touch.

Moving on: Mass Effect 2. Yeah, I fucking got it and have since played the living shit out of it. Currently on my second play through on INSANITY level and trust me when I say it’s hard. No metaphor needed, just crazy hard. I have LOADS of things to say about Mass Effect 2 but to whet your appetite a little I’ll just say, no more driving, it’s essentially a shooter now, shotguns REALLY suck unless upgraded and even then they still suck, Sniper rifle ftw, graphics blow my mind, load times are a pain in the ass (especially when you die tons on insanity), good v. evil thing is fixed, oh yeah . . . story = fucking amazing.

Phew! Need a breath after that wall of text! As I said, LOADS to say and that paragraph didn’t actually hit on EVERYTHING I would like to talk about. For now this’ll do, night folks, time to go get my ass handed to me 80 more times by three very pissed off Heavy Mechs.