There comes a time in the week to reflect on what got into my reporter's notebook but didn't turn into Kotaku blog posts. Shall we?
I wound down my coverage this week in preparation for going to Tokyo tomorrow. On Thursday I had my first day of not posting any original stories on Kotaku since I started. Today, I'm only doing two posts... well, plus my Halo 3: ODST review, which will run while I'm away. There's not been as much from me on the site as there usually is, to say nothing of there being less in my notebook.
But there is some stuff I didn't get to and didn't think merited a post. Not surprisingly, it mostly comes from the two interviews that I pulled a number of stories from this week: My PAX chats with BioWare's Greg Zeshuk and Ubisoft's Patrice Desilets. You can learn a lot from 20-minute interviews with game developers, but too much info can clog a story. Because of that I didn't think either of the following needed to run anywhere but here:
Future Mass Effect 1 Expansions Unlikely: Some things just seem too obvious, like BioWare co-founder Zeschuk telling me the following when I asked if we'd get any more downloadable content for the original Mass Effect: "We're getting close to Mass Effect 2, so I would say it's highly unlikely." I had to ask, and had he said yes, that'd be a post. But this answer's not that surprising.
AC2's Short Scenes: Assassin's Creed II creative director Desilets and I spoke about a lot of things, including his series' cut-scenes. In the first game, the real-time cut-scenes permitted the player to move their hero Altair through the scene as they played. In the new game, however, there will also be non-interactive cut-scenes. Desilets didn't want them to be long. So the longest one, he told me, runs just two minutes.
No Cakes: Last Sunday I went to the Nintendo World Store in Rockefeller Center where Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment was hosting a Scribblenauts launch event. There was a cake there, and I took pictures. Then I remembered, we don't do cakes at Kotaku like we used to. So I skipped it. But you can see the cake (and me) in this thread. That's the cake in message #997.
The video at the top of this post is self-explanatory, but in case you're wondering why that's here now, well... I ran a lot of other stuff from my visit to Microsoft. This thing wasn't very video gamey. So I thought it'd be best to put in a Dump. So here you go.
I'm off to Japan tomorrow. I'm packing a bunch of portable games for the long NYC-Tokyo flight: Scribblenauts as well as the new Drawn to Life and Mario and Luigi games for the DS. If my bags aren't getting too heavy, NBA 09 and who knows what else for my PSP.
Thanks for reading this week, and please be extra nice to the weekend crew!