NBC fall previews

Watched three pilots from NBC's fall line up on demand cable last night. [spoiler alert]


Bionic woman is like Jake 2.0 meets BBC's Jekyl. The production values are decently high, the writing is hit or miss (generally unbelievable character responses, and poor pacing).
the Bionic woman is the actress from Jekyl. And she fights Kara Thrace from Battle Star Galactica (another Bionic woman). They aren't just machines though -- they seem to also be crazy 'evolved' creatures like Mister Hyde in Jekyl

Chuck was a decent mix of funny and action. It's their second Jake 2.0 rip off, and features an everyday joe (who works at a geek squad at a best buy) getting the entire NSA/CIA spy database downloaded into his head. The acting was better than bionic woman, and so was the writing. It also features Jane from Firefly as a NSA comando, who works at a best buy. The show will be pretty silly, but has its endeering aspects

Journeyman was the weirdest. It features the main character from Dog Soldiers and casts Kellerman from Homicide as his brother. The main character gets thrown back and forward in time, and tries to 'solve mysteries' each episode, while also trying to save his marrage... which is taking a pounding each time he 'blips' out. Good acting, good writing, nice 'heart' to the story, and probably the mot promice of the three shows.

the whole line up feels like they ripped a chunk out of the scifi channel. Bionic woman has 3 actors from Battle Star Galactica, (one was also on Firefly). Chuck has an actor from Firefly. Journeyman has the lead actor from Dog Soldiers (a scifi channel movie). The stories are all scifi too... from production values, to filming style, to actors.

Guess we'll have to wait and see if the public likes it or not

Getting up to speed in the slow lane...

I've been very 'meh' for a few days. More than a few days.
We've got three games working their way through development right now, which is good. Two of the games are pretty fun, which is also good. The website is coming along too, and the shopping cart error is now only happening like 10% of the time.

But I'm just not feeling the cat right now. Getting people to post/blog is a pain in the ass. Keeping the art moving forward isn't as bad, but it makes you hungry for faster progress. Talking to retailers and distributors - getting a lot of interest, but not usually at a price that makes any sense - fries the brain.

And i suppose the big thing right now is that we don't have a good lifestyle flow yet. Still haven't cracked the nut on getting to our clubs, getting the photos, and translating that to content for the website.

blegh

Bit Boys

Been crazy swamped with the Robot Martini home website, and haven't updated the blog in a while. So here's a little bit from my desktopI've been looking for something to give the site more identity and... well 'fun :)
I liked what i was getting with the Brikies, and in many ways their 3D nature makes them more flexible than the Bit Bots (working name), but something about their simplicity just feels right. The plan is to have them integrated into the user avatar system on the site... so depending on what your profile's race, alignment, gender and profession are, you would get a different BB.

I'm not super sold on the fem-design I've got here. I may want to tone the boobs down a bit (or at least offer that as an option). Some of the staff members will have unique avatars ( David Lovejoy's seen in the lower right ). Depending on Jery, we may be able to offer a number of character choices to our members -- maybe even different choices based on the member's "rank" (how many posts, comments, etc. the user has made).


like everyone else, I'm bummed about GTA4 slipping from the holiday docket (and my shares of Take2 dropping $1,500 in value). So here's a quick homage to Claude Speed of GTA3 (and a french soldier thrown in between for fun).

Wits and Wagers game show

a shot of the game show in hall E. good crowd, but my group lost pretty hard core!
end of the game show and everyone is happy. We left dom and satish as they quickly ate food and prepped for their next show.

Ran into Tom Vasel (spelling?) in the board room and had a good conversation with him, that I ended with an 'ass hole' statement i didn't mean to say (damn it!). Gavin "Thanks. ... I should actually listen to your podcast sometime..." Tom "... Yes you should." Damn it :P

Back at the hotel, can of soda, shower, blogging, now sleep!

Friday after 6

By 6pm (hall closed to the public) we were all pretty much wrecked. Satish stuffed a bunch of moldy sandwiches in my back pack and asked me to fridge them tonight. Dom and I joked about porn and having booze at the bar next year. we reviewed out sales figures -- we both did less sales today than yesterday, even though the crowds were larger (mysterious!)

Our day end was:

4 jetsetters
1 nerd trivia
1 inquisition
3 criminals
2 Tlip
1 Zolmh
1 bombshells
3 Get Bit!

which actually wasn't much lower in cash value than yesterday, but felt odd because the get bit orders didn't pick up. Lots of people seemed 'i'll get it later' ish in their feeling about it, though everyone seemed very happy with it as a product.


satish lets out a massive, earth shattering monkey fart and asks about putting porn in rule books. We're all happy and cracking jokes, but the guys are wiped -- they are doing even more than we are with 3+ game shows a day, and Satish's voices is almost gone by this point.


notes of the day:

Met a nice woman who teaches a grad program for game design in NYC. She seemed interested in having her students talk with us about the baby steps you can take from 'grad' to 'published'.

UK distributer dropped by and liked Get Bit. He feels like we could do about 90 units through him this year, though I'm not sure how that works into the first release. If he can hold on for a little bit, it would be awesome to produce a second run of get bit knowing 90+ units were already called for.

Dave Stopped in around 11'ish and there were no crazy pants, or wearing of crazy pants, which was releaving. I'm glad he got a press pass for Critical hits -- i had not known of suck things until yesterday morning when press pass wearing Mofo's were walking through the hall while we were setting up

Did a pod cast interview with some pod casting guys (I have their card but no memory of their names! Gah)

Ta Te Wu stopped by and asked to show us a submission later during the con

Steve and Steven stopped by and were the loudest most awesome demo guys so far :) It's hard to describe their awesomeness... they referred to the
swimmers in get bit as 'steves' and played down to the pelvic bones. I guess it was just a fun scene they made, and i miss having those kind of people around me.

Walked around the con wearing mister robot. got a hug and several more photos that i may never see on the internet. please send us links if you see them! I also danced with PikaChu while wearing mister robot.

Hell of a time, and sorry to anyone i missed!

Friday

Criminals demo (went sideways apparently). We actually got more than one demo of the game in, and people not only enjoyed the game, but bought copies. Must report back to John that Kory is now in the lead for sales (they jokingly said they were in competition over who's game would sell best).
Little more Get bit -- can we ever really get enough of it? We had a number of limb - injury players try it out (like this woman here). I wasn't sure how to respond to the man in the wheelchair missing both his legs, mostly because I didn't know how he would feel about the game, but he got a laugh about it, so al is good :)
back to criminals. the game got to heads up in the second round, and the "Trouble Shooter" got outed.

Friday morning cont

Fellowship of the Dice is behind our booth (the booth space on the otherside of them is totally empty). Nice guys that did a documentary on gamers and gaming. I hope i am awake enough to see the screening on sunday morning. It got a B+ on scifi.com so it can't be all that bad (a fear of documentaries about gamers). Both film writers and advertisement men, so they know a bit to start with. All in all, worth keeping an eye on in the future, if only because they are nice, and think my robot dance is funny