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?
What a week. QuakeCon material from last week spilled into Gamescom and Blizzcon bonanzas this week. Not much got left on the cutting room floor or in my notebook. There are a couple of stories I have in the works for early next week, but of the stuff I just can't cram into a post? Not much...
Billy Hatcher's Kind of Back: A couple of weeks ago, I played a bunch of Sega games and wrote about them. The one I didn't get to was Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing. I played it and still plan to write a Preview. But I also was half-tempted to post about how the game surprised me by acknowledging the existence in Sega's past of Billy Hatcher. Hatcher was the star of 2003's Billy Hatcher & The Giant Egg, a GameCube-launching game from Yuji Naka's Sega Team that was the wrong game at the wrong time. While the gaming world was craving Grand Theft Autos and Halos, Sonic Team made a new cute mascot character who rolled giant eggs to safety so they could hatch partner animals for Billy. I believe the game was a flop. But it turns out that this early 2010 kart-racer from Sega has a Billy Hatcher stage, complete with giant eggs rolling across the track. And Hatcher is a racer in the game with his own egg car. So... Billy's back.
An Extra Two Seconds: I sort of already did post this, but no one noticed and I felt it wasn't worth a standalone post. Based on testing the original PS3 and the PS3 Slim, recording their boot-up sequences and syncing them together in split-screen (all of which you can find elsewhere on this site), I discovered that the Slim takes two seconds longer to boot up. Why? I'm not sure. Maybe because it has a single on-off switch and isn't in perpetual stand-by mode like my original PS3, which has an on-off switch in the back and a sleep switch in the front. I used my PS3 controller to shut down each machine, recorded them each booting back up. And, well... I guess two seconds isn't really that big a deal.
Lots Of Screenshots Unseen: There comes a point when enough is enough with all the Gamescom screenshots and trailers. We've slowed that down because that's not what we want the site to drown on. I had some new-screenshots posts in draft I left linger. I'd rather write something that would be read.
I didn't get to a Rage interview I still need to run, believe it or not. And a piece that had me talking to John Carmack about something Hideo Kojima said to me — that one's for Monday. So there's more. I'd suggest you have a nice weekend, but I'm not saying goodbye yet. Gotta do a little more work for the site today.
All hail Fahey, McWhertor, and Crecente, the hard-working road warriors of the week!