PC Gamer’s Feb. issue notices four game-related weblogs:

Ron Gilbert — In 1989, Gilbert wrote “Why Adventure Games Suck, and What We Can Do about It,” which led to his creating the wonderful Monkey Island adventures. The blog is spunky.

Unknown — The writer claims to be the spouse of an EA game developer. The “blog” is a single entry pointing to an essay on why life as a game developer sucks. The page also promises a ” a non-corporate-sponsored watchdog organization specifically devoted to monitoring quality of life in the game industry” which will eventually be available at Gamewatch.org

American McGee – He was the producer of Alice, a nicely-imagine first-person shooter. He has since been turned into a brand, although his second game — the “brought to you by” Scrapland — has gotten mediocre reviews. He writes in his blog every couple of weeks about industry news. One entry points to the personal website of Norm Felchle, the artist responsible for much of the look of Alice. Among his galleries you’ll find a moderately scary collection of photos from fans modeling Alice outfits.

John Romero – Romero was half of the duo responsible for Doom. He’s all of the singularity responsible for what may be the industry’s biggest fiasco, Daikatana (free 107MB demo here), a mediocre game totally killed by hype. Among the goodies: A collection of game music. (I have to say I’m a little — and unreasonably — put off by the “planetromero.com” url of the site. I think he’s maybe up to Village Romero or possibly Canton Romero, but not a whole planet.)

The article doesn’t mention, but should, Terra Nova, a blog devoted to the academic study of virtual worlds. Don’t let the “academic” part scare you, though. This is a lively place.

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From Germany comes this nicely-done game that pits you against the computer or another human, as you each try to take over the world by doing Google queries that turn up documents localized in various parts of the world. The game uses netgeo which finds the geographic location of the IP address of the page. Once you start the Flash app, you’ll get instructions in English…

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Not only has Internet use cut into this country’s sacred TV time, we are not paying strict enough attention to the glowing screens in our living rooms. BIGresearch reports (via Center for Media Research) that a survey of 12,000+ “consumers” shows that we’re doing more multitasking while watching TV:

# 66.3% regularly or occasionally read the mail.
# 60.1% regularly or occasionally go online.
# 55.0% regularly or occasionally read the newspaper.
# 51.8% regularly or occasionally read magazines.
# 0.4% mentally undress Larry King

Please, America, let’s focus!

PS: I made up one of those statistics.

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Kelly Freas, who I knew as the artist responsible for some of MAD’s best early covers, died in his sleep at age 82. Among his accomplishments, according to the AP:

For many years, was the main cover artist for MAD

Designed the official NASA patch for Skylab I

In WWII, he was stationed in the Pacific and in his spare time drew pictures of beautiful women on the noses of bombers. (So he was the guy!)

“Received 11 Hugo awards for his achievements in science fiction, five of them awarded in consecutive years”

And here I thought he was just the guy who made Alfred E. Neuman famously dopey.

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I’ve reviewed The Lion King musical over at BlogCritics.org.

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Modern Drunkard claims to be mainly serious with the goal of returning “drinking to the glorious Rat Pack/Jackie Gleason Era.” It celebrates the fun of drinking and rails against what it thinks of as Puritanical forces of repression (including MADD). The latest, and perhaps last, printed issue was published last August. [Thanks to my brother Andy, who is not any sort of drunkard, for the link.]

And with this post, I am now the record holder for the shortest cognitive-emotional distance. Yes! But, heck, it’s a blog. We’re supposed to have short cognitive-emotional spans.

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Susan Crawford did not have a good time at a Bach concert yesterday. I wouldn’t mention it except she writes about it so amusingly.

I’m reminded of a conversation my friend Joe Mahoney had with another friend of mine, Tim Anderson. According to Joe, who is an amazing musician, it went like this:

Joe: Can you imagine? Bach had to write a cantata every week!

Tim: Not only that. He had to write a Bach cantata.

(Joe has a great post from November about the joy of growing up with a son and his son Quentin’s manic performance in “Cinderella.” Unfortunately, I can’t find the permalink…)

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Q: Which host of Saturday Night Live exhibited the biggest gap between his/her talent and his/her performance on SNL?

A: Robert De Niro. Twice.

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The award for the most narcissistic performance by a recognized actor in a real movie, where the aforementioned narcissism is completely undeserved is ….

…Mickey Rourke, after plastic surgery that pulled his face back so tight that it stretched his nose holes, in The Last Outlaw.

(FWIW, I discovered this while lying awake with jetlag at 2:30 am. I may never sleep again.)

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Garden State (the movie) has a blog written by Zach Braff, its author and director. He’s also the star of Scrubs, of which my son and I are inordinately fond. Zach’s latest post tells how he drunk-dialed an Australian movie reviewer.

Yes, the blog takes comments…lots and lots of ’em. Yes RSS. No blogroll. No Creative Commons. Yes, a video thank-you to bloggers (yes, complete with a plug for the Garden State dvd).

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