Thanks for the recommendations. Truth be told, I’ve neglected my DS horribly these last months… Well, WoW ate -everything- up, I guess. But I think I’ll dust it off and give “The World Ends With You” a spin. (I saw the Zero Punctuation on it, I’m intrigued.)

Besides that, for Ubi… The delays for Conviction were in the air for quite a while, to be frank. I don’t think the success of Assassin’s Creed has to do with the current rumors… I think the game’s difficulties are its own. There were resemblances to Assassin’s Creed, and I could tell you the insanity that led to that situation, but ah well…

For the casual stuff, I’m not so sure. I mean, it’s all good, but it feels they’re trying to copy Nintendo’s approach instead of analyzing the casual market in a new light. Right now they’re doing ‘Let’s find different ways of creating Brain Age-like benefits in the form of a game.’ We’ll see. By the way, I interviewed for Production Director for the whole casual division… I’m rather happy to be at BioWare instead.

For BGE2… I’m actually surprised they’re giving this a shot. I think it might get the big bucks because it’s Ansel, and nothing else. The guy created the Raving Rabbids, I think they probably reluctantly gave him a chance at this. But that being said… The teaser trailer was the most BORING TEASER TRAILER ever. I don’t understand how they thought that would be compelling.

For TGS… You know what, I might just make it this year!! Not sure yet. The draw isn’t TGS itself, but some of my friends from Shanghai (hey guys!) have a habit of converging on Shibuya around that time of the year… I might go there for the heck of it myself.

It’s be awesome to run into you there!

Game-wise, if you’re looking for something fresh and have some spare time, I absolutely recommand not only playing, but finishing ‘Prof.Layton & The Curious Village’ and ‘The World Ends With You’, which are both for DS. Amazing stuff!

Side-note: I now have a Wii, a 360 and a PSP at home but these things pretty much act as expansive shiny dust collectors compared to my DS. My relation/obsession with the console as reached ridiculous new meta-levels of awesomeness now that I’m actually working as a game programmer on a DS title. It’s a license title for a TV show – nothing that will set the industry on fire – but I’m loving every minute of it.

By the way, I’d be curious to know what you think of Ubi’s recent moves. Not sure where they’re going with this. Assassin’s Creed was trashed by the review circuit but was a huge commercial sucess, which seems to have created problems with their portfolio. The buzz around Splinter Cell: Convictions is that they’re going back to the drawing board to some degree because the title wasn’t groundbreaking enough to distance itself enough from Creed. They’re rebooting Prince Of Persia, obviously they want to keep the brand alive with the movie coming up, but can they really push both Creed and POP as two seperate franchises to the average consumer ? They have this weird line of self-help titles coming up (Stop Smoking, etc), which I admit they could be onto something with. And Beyond Good & Evil 2 is amazing news, but I’m surprised they’re willing to spend big bucks on giving the franchise another go, after the first one was such a commercial failure. And the new Tom Clancy franchises came of so far as very rental-ish. So what the hell?

Just one more thing: It’s a longshot, but going to the Tokyo Game Show this year, by any chance ? Still need to confirm some details, but it looks like I could be flying over there myself.