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.

As it seems to be the happening thing to do around these parts, I have up and gotten myself a personal blog at thedudehasgotnomercy.com. I haven't had a personal website in years now, so it's been interesting trying to get back to setting it up.

Game-related stuff will continue to be posted here, I guess. I don't have much to say about games, since I'm not a game reviewer and never really have to think about the games that I play in a critical manner. Some quick hits, if I must.

Advance Wars: Days of Ruin is probably a bit worse than Dual Strike. The de-emphasis on CO powers is a blessing and a curse, in that you can't be jacked up by a lucky enemy CO power, but a lot of the later missions become unbearable slogfests where you just have to push the enemy back for 35-40 days until you grind them out. (I'm looking at you, Mission 25!) Still, it's fun enough for what it is. The story doesn't do much for me, and the characters are all incredibly one-dimensional, but it's still worth checking out if you like TBS games.

Devil May Cry 4 is pretty good. It looks fantastic, obviously. The difficulty worries me a bit, though. I mean, DMC3 was a beast to get through, even on easy mode, but I'm playing DMC4 on the harder of the two default difficulty levels, and I've managed to kill every boss in one try so far. Granted, I'm not too far into the game, but I certainly hope there's some kind of challenge in here somewhere. Apart from that, it plays almost identically to DMC3, but there doesn't appear to be much in the way of weapon switching. I'm not even sure if there are any additional weapons apart from the default sword. I guess we'll find out.

Burnout Paradise is alternately great and disappointing. I basically play these games for Road Rage events, so it's a little annoying to have to drive around finding out where they are. I think they should've had all the events shown on your map from the outset of the game. The racing aspect of the game is dead to me; it seems like you basically have to memorize the entire map in order to know which way to go, or, alternately, have to check your map as you drove. Stunt events are pretty amusing, however. My big aggravation, however (and this has been one of the series' big drawbacks since Burnout 3), is the unskippable screens that are constantly popping up. Win an event? Enjoy watching a screen that tells you that you won an event for ten seconds or so, and add another 10 seconds to that if you unlocked a car as well. Unskippable stuff is unacceptable, especially since I was playing this at the same time as Advance Wars, where basically everything is skippable. A lot of the presentation stuff is gorgeous, but when I have to wait for a car to drop out of the sky before I can pick it out of the garage, that's just lame. The garage, now that I'm talking about it, is probably the worst part of the game thus far. Why bother classifying cars into different types if you don't even let us organize our garage with a filter?

So it seems like things will only get busier at work from now on. Obviously we're a bit understaffed at the moment, but we'll see what we can do with what we have.