That double post was intentional. It's all true. And yes, I'm still in the office. Again. A deadline is never dead until the game is actually on the shelves.

Amateur slash pictures featuring stolen IP.

This is the last all-nighter before the hopefully final submission of GTA III and GTA: Vice City to Microsoft. Most of the team started work at around 2PM today. The games need to be in New York by 9AM (12 PM our time), and we're going to keep working until then...

So this is why I haven't updated the blog. Soon, many entries I've been collecting over the last few weeks, plus some ruminations on crunching.

It was only a matter of time. Someone has written a C64 emulator for the Nokia 3650.

Update: Screw that ugly breadbox: there's a ZX Spectrum emulator for the Nokia 3650!!!1! The One True 8-Bit Computer!

What's wrong? Jurie had four days - four whole days - off work after months of crunching... and? No. Updates.

What's wrong with this guy? He must have dozens of cool items stashed away.

Pictures at eleven.

I'm finally allowed to talk about it: the game I've been working on ever since April is the Xbox port of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. It's a double project, together with the Xbox port of Grand Theft Auto III. This means that we have two sets of leads (including two project managers, I'm the one for Vice City) but we work together very tightly.

So now y'all know.

Once again I am in the office while we are all crunching, trying to hit our next milestone. I may be here for a while yet. In the mean time, here are some news items I just saw on Slashdot that might tickle your fancy:

• A Brief History of Pen & Paper Roleplaying, over at Skotos. There are interesting things to learn from pen & paper role-playing games, and from their history. There are still things done in pen & paper that we aren't yet doing on the computer, but that we could, and should do.
  
  
• Gloomy outlook for game console sales, over at CNET. According to this article, console hardware sales are slowing, and will decrease by 2005, putting pressure on console manufacturers to come out with next-next-gen hardware. Let's see who makes an announcement at next year's GDC - it probably won't be Sony. Apparently, this generation's cycle is shorter than expected. But I remember 1999 being the transition year from, uh, gen to next-gen, and that would be six years ago from 2005. In other words, a 6 years cycle. Industry wisdom says hardware cycles take 5 years (or maybe it's just Teut Weidemann? ;). So what's up? I'm too tired to think about it...

A whole bunch of stories about Nokia's N-Gage from Mobitopia.

Interview with Ken Kutaragi, the father of Sony's PS. From KokoRo. The actual interview is in Japanese.

What else am I going to write at 4:30 in the morning, except that Game Players are an Increasingly Diverse Group, Says Poll? Seniors are up, so are adult women. Draw your own conclusions.