Media Tours at 35,000 feet

I'm writing this from 35,000 feet over Chicago. It's incredibly clear out tonight so I can see all of Chicago it seems like and it is quite a site. And I say that as someone who travels regularly.

So this past week I went on the media tour.  In this case, a media tour is where I and our marketing goddess (Cordelia) fly out to visit the magazines to show them what we're doing in the hopes they'll cover us. 

On the games side, getting coverage is always a challenge. It gets a bit better each year though. In the old days, we could visit and those that showed up still rarely covered what we had.  That's partially because our games usually really looked like suck until the last couple months before release when we actually added..you know..the graphics.

When we wrote The Political Machine, we switched to a different system where we essentially now "skin" our games.  So we can have stand-in graphics but it's trivially easy now to update the graphics as we improve them so we now can have "near final" graphics much earlier.  This is thanks to DesktopX Pro.  This is a case where I'm glad we haven't gotten too much coverage on DesktopX because it's really been a major competitive advantage (for instance, I doubt even Blizzard has a DesktopX-level product for its user interface development).  Our games use read in the Pro-generated DesktopX objects and the Direct3D engine then does its magic.

But it went well.  IGN and Gamespot put up previews pretty early which was really cool. When visiting Computer Gaming World they told us that The Political Machine had been nominated as best strategy game of 2004. We lost to The Sims but still, that was incredibly cool.  At the risk of being politically incorrect (no pun intended), CGW was the one game magazine that really played The Political Machine.  I still think it's the best game we've ever made (better than GalCiv) as a game.  I'd lik to make a board game of it.

The non-games such as that of Object Desktop usually go pretty well.  Though for whatever reason, whenever I visit PC World, my machine starts to get flakey and things start to crash.  That's always a tense moment "Uh, well, this gives me a chance to show you BootSkin which changes yer uh, Windows XP boot screen..."  Seriously, happens every time I go there. My theory is that my ThinkPad gets jealous of their ThinkPads.

One thing that made my day was that on the way back, I used Blog Navigator to download for off-line reading my favorite websites with RSS feeds.  One of which is Penny-Arcade.  So as I'm on the plane here reading the articles I saw that Tycho wrote about GalCiv 2. Totally cool and thanks!

Well, we've crossed lake Michigan. Amazing how fast that goes when you're on a plane.  I can see Benton Harbor below me now. Time to sign off.