The Sandbox

If you blinked last month, you may have missed game designer American McGee's announcement - and retraction - about his next game.

But now GameTap has confirmed that the acclaimed designer of Alice (and former whiz kid at id Software) is doing Grimm: a 24 part game that will be released in episodic chunks via GameTap. Gamasutra reports that Grimm promises a "'sandbox world' in which players will take on missions in episodic fashion starting in 2008."

Of course, I'm not calling you on an iPhone, I don't work with one of those. But oh, I want to. Get back to me about that, will you?

Yeah, the iPhone needs flash in the worst way. Why? Games, man, games. It's all about the games. Give me games on the iPhone. Imagine what you could do with that touch interface....

It's a nice idea, episodic games: developers love the notion of low-investment, fast-turnaround, high-upside games. Crank something small and polished out every 3-4 months, and it will eventually be an unstoppable juggernaut of cash that keeps building, as you keep churning out small highly-polished little gems, without killing yourselves with crunch-schedules and Mountain Dew.

Why doesn't it work out that way?

Cat with Bow Golf. A cat, with a bow, playing golf: it's perfectly simple. And now my life is whole and complete. Halo what?

I bow before our new End of Year Best-of list overlords. Here's my short list of my favorites of 2007:

1. Lord of the Rings Online. Because I worked on it for four and a half years to ship it, and have worked on it since then, and it's clearly the best MMO of 2007. No personal prejudice here, no sir. But I'm playing it, which says a lot about a game that I've worked on (which I seldom play post-launch).

2. Rock Band. My childhood dreams of drumming, stifled by my parents who desired peace and quiet in their house, are now finding outlet, and obliterating my wife's goodwill towards me.

3. Portal. Great little game. Suffers from the "giant thick client to play a teeny-tiny game" problem, but who cares when it's this fun? You want thin client, play Flash Portal.

4. Super Mario Galaxy. I used to disdain Nintendo, early in my gaming career, as nothing but Cute. Jeebus, was I an idiot.

5. God of War 2 / Heavenly Sword. They're the same game, with different avatars of destruction. But they're both onslaughts of epic annihilation that appeals to the little kid in me that still writhes with excitement when I see shiny things.

6. Bioshock. Great art direction. Gameplay and story were sort of meh, but they tried.

7. Team Fortress 2. TF is back, and it's still fun. I miss EMPs, though.

8. Phase. Addictive little iPod game. Five bucks well spent.

Not on the list, but still decent: Halo 3, Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect. They're really good, but I was not inspired to finish any of them, so I can't feel good about giving them a final score.

Didn't play: Call of Duty 4, Crysis, lots of other things. I only have so much time.

It was a good year for games. 2008 will have some work cut out for it: Metal Gear Solid 4 doesn't look so "ZOMG" these days, now that we've seen other games that look just as good.

As a relatively hard-core gamer (for some liberal value of "hard-core", as I don't have a lot of time to play these days), I am constantly surprised at the odd successes in the casual game market. I would think that among the most played games on the Web these days are Slayers, Werewolves, Vampires, & Zombies, and Scrabulous. I mean, I know, personally, only a handful of people playing. But none of those people are hard-core gamers, and the number of people in the world that are not hard-core gamers is counted in billions. And they're all apparently on Facebook, making Mark Zuckerberg a billionaire.

Meanwhile, I still grind away at more "important" games. Something's not right.