"Oh shits! This guy has got Uno!"

"Get your head out of your ass, PointySwords, with your draw four shit!"

"Oh shits! This guy has got the Uno again!"

"So close yet so far, just like my ancestors at the Mason-Dixon line."
"... What?!"

"PointySwords is about to win the game. What color do you think his last card is?"
"I dunno, but I'd say I think that little bitch is holding fuckin' blue!"

Great stuff at 3 am. I also got to play Derek in a few hands of it. It seems like most people who play it get hooked. I'm surprised and pleased about how well a simple card game can succeed. :)

The last half of 2005 was pretty insane. And I should have catalogued the details of the insanity to give it structure, and order--to give it more purpose. But I didn’t. Having missed that opportunity, I’ll gush retrospectively.

Just about all of the insanity was a push towards the Xbox 360 Launch at the end of November 2005, which collided with the Thanksgiving Holiday. I’ve added a new photo album with pictures of the Xbox 360 ship gift everybody on the development team got, and pictures from the launch party that we had at the beginning of December.

E3 2005
Working towards the launch became progressively more surreal as we approached the date. I remember that E3, in May, had felt bizarre. Now that time has passed, I’m able to look at it more clearly.

See, the scope of this thing had exploded. Before E3, I was part of an elite group—the few hundred people who knew anything about the Xbox 360 aside from the fact that “another Xbox was coming out.” It was our baby! Surrounding E3, information and the presentation was surrendered and scope of the thing was now the hundreds of thousands of press and gamers who follow E3 as we presented our product and delivered its messaging.

When I started working at Microsoft, everybody wanted to know how my new job was going and, invariably, I would go on about how awesome the product was, but I couldn’t provide details. I was so proud to be working on something so big and so cool that its success was guaranteed. So with E3 having revealed those details, something personal was on the line. And with those details exposed, they drew criticism because that’s what details released by Microsoft do best, no matter what their content is.

My previous experience was around my school assignments that, if they weren’t solo endeavors, were massive projects with up to five people! I had never before contributed to something so visible and well known. I had never contributed to something so polarizing. I had never put as much time or effort into anything, even though my role was limited to a sliver of the final product’s success. And while others on the team are way closer to the product that I am, I took criticism the very personally.

Oh. And I am totally awesome at taking things personally.

It was disorienting and surreal. During E3, I became a clumsy and angry combination of pride, genuine competitiveness and defensiveness. I probably still am.

Xbox 360 Launch
As November approached, the bizarreness did not ebb. Playing games that were in-progress was weird. I got to see the elements of the product for which I was responsible become realized in each game, in awkward pieces. Seeing the advertising campaign lumber forward on a billboard in Seattle, in a store in Manhattan, in a commercial on TV, and in countless interviews on the Internet caused genuine double takes.

The night before launch, many of us from work piled into vans and visited those who were waiting outside various electronic stores for midnight. These people were sitting in the cold just for a chance to drop the better part of a thousand dollars on what we had worked so hard to create. Stopping at Fry’s, we had learned that the store wasn’t actually opening at midnight, but the next morning instead. The people camped in the cold had already been there for twelve hours and were ready to put in over twelve more.

On launch day, I was on a plane to Buffalo to celebrate Thanksgiving with Kate. Flying makes everything surreal. It’s this whole day that just gets lifted out of your life because of useless overhead between you and the people you want to see and the things you want to do and now I had chosen to do this on the day that I had been anticipating for over a year. The CNN broadcast shown in the terminal in Cincinnati featuring stories about those corresponding lines everywhere in North America compounded this.

Launch Party
So I had several months of “weird,” but it all was capped off with a really great party shortly after launch. We hired Presidents of the United States of America to play during the party. They did a great medley of 80s songs along with their hits. They were pretty awesome. I flew Kate up for that weekend and proved to my suspicious coworkers that she was indeed real. The party marked the beginning of things starting to feel normal again.

The short version of all this is that for me, things have relaxed. I have a lot more to say now and so I’m you’ll hear from me a lot more. ;-)

Alright, I stole the title idea from Tristan. Bah!

I am getting another visitor in July! Well, it's the same visitor as before. So it's more like I'm getting another instance of a visit. Ack, look at what my job has done to the way I think! Curses!

I bought Kirby Canvas Curse for Nintendo DS. If you haven't heard, the game uses only the touch screen and the stylus. The idea is that instead of pushing a button to move Kirby, you use the stylus to draw a path on which he can roll and gain momentum. So if you want him to "jump" you draw an upward ramp and he will roll up it and go airborne. You can draw another path to catch him and swing him around in another direction. You can also use the stylus to touch Kirby to use his current power, or to touch enemies and stun them.

What's interesting is that at first the different interface is really distracting and consumes most of your focus. But once you learn it, it becomes much more intuitive than I would have originally thought. The lines I need to draw have become more intuitive and natural now and I don't really focus so much on them.

I also bought Psychonauts, but I haven't had a chance to play it. People tell me that I will like it because I like Conker so much. I guess there's similarities there in that there's lots of focus on bizarre gameplay and funny voice acting and story. I had seen a couple scenes before at a friend's house. The Milkman bit was really funny. So I'm looking forward to that.

For a while, I've toyed around with the idea of maintaining a blog. We'll see how it works out. I was originally going to use something like wordpress, but MSN Spaces seems to be really easy to use. The integration with MSN Messenger is what ultimately sold me. I like the lists and layout options too. I'll use that to maintain lists of games, books, movies and favorite kool-aid flavors.

Today was a pretty lazy Saturday. I slept in as much as possible and then went to work for a while. I watched the South Park movie again. It's been a while since I watched it. It's better than I remembered. All the jokes were familiar, but they had they had that little bit of a punch which was lost after having seen it so much once it came out.

I've been spending a lot of time thinking about moving from Redmond to somewhere in Seattle. So today I walked around a neighbordhood in North Seattle called Wallingford. The area reminds me a lot of the West Side of Buffalo, except with a really cool skyline. I took some pictures.

Recently, I bought, framed and put up a new Napoleon Dynamite poster in my office at home. I also put up some other things.

Tonight, I drank Fat Tire, which might be my new favorite beer. I also tried Katamari Damacy, a game which clearly should be combined with alcohol. If you don't know already, the premise of the game is that the all of the stars in the sky have been destroyed. It is your job to go to Earth and build up a collection of random stuff into a giant ball, which ultimately turns into another star in the sky. I really like the sense of scale since you start out picking up candy and packets of soy sauce. Later though, you pick up buildings, cities and islands.

I want the soundtrack.