E3 may be miniaturized, and your chances of seeing something unexpected may be close to none, but the big publishers are keeping the channel plenty full.  Sites like TIGSource and even Joystiq do their best to bring some indie news from E3, but if I were a smaller developer, I think I’d wait until the inevitable lull afterwards (unless you’re in the unenviable position of fighting for retailer shelf space).  This E3 is a fight between the giants.

That said, anything catch your eye?  I found the first gameplay footage of Halo Wars interesting– it looks surprisingly like a whole ton of people playing Halo 2.  It has that pleasant feeling of seeing something in a new context, like seeing Overlords float around in the ill-fated Starcraft: Ghost.

Beyond that, there’s a ton of eye candy, which might be expected to dominate in a show like this.  Halo 3’s single player campaign looks a lot better than the multiplayer.  Killzone 2 does indeed look quite nice, and might move some PS3s.  Microsoft’s new RPG looks very pretty, Assassin’s Creed still looks good, and on and on– devs are really hitting their stride on the new hardware.

There’s no way any one person can keep up on all of this coverage, so be sure to mention anything that strikes you as worth seeing!

This is another post totally unrelated to game or web development, but here’s a shot of my dad from our recent trip to Palau and Yap:

More great shots here.

Also,  thanks to Dagon Design for the tip on how to change thumbnail size in the latest versions (2.1 and later) of Wordpress.  My old fix wasn’t working after the upgrade.

I’m sure you’ll see this linked at dozens of other sources, but I can’t resist.

“Eyeball tattooing, to attain the electric blue eyes of the Arrakian spice melange addict.”

Matt Mihaly (CEO of Iron Realms, developer of numerous highly-polished MUDs and now working a graphical one called Earth Eternal) has written about a very interesting case between Linden Labs and an ex-user of Second Life.

In short: Marc Bragg bought quite a bit of virtual property in Second Life (through the official Linden Labs auction system). Later, Linden found out that Bragg was guessing at the URLs for various auctions that hadn’t been publicized yet. Linden banned his account and re-auction his properties. Bragg is suing for damages.

Linden has actually been taking a beating. First, the judge invalidated their Terms of Service. Then, in response to Linden’s assertion that the defendant was just buying bits of “memory allocation and computational resources”, Marc Bragg brought up this public statement from Linden’s CEO:

We launched Second Life without out of world trade and after a few months we looked at it and thought, ‘We’re not doing this right, we’re doing this wrong.’ We started selling land free and clear, and we sold the title, and we made it extremely clear that we were not the owner of the virtual property.

Ouch. I’ve always assumed that most virtual world companies were pretty well in the clear with virtual goods, and could handle their users however they chose. This case will be interesting to watch, because Linden may find they’ve promised a bit more than they want to deliver.

Raph Koster’s just posted a number of sources for online worlds coverage, including the latest, Worlds in Motion.  Compared to the regular trickle of MMO news, these sites are just packed with updates: new serious games, government involvement, MTV’s rapidly expanding offerings, innovative new revenue streams (and their success or failure), and much more.

It’s eye-opening, though what it may really open your eyes to is that most of these worlds aren’t that interesting– unless you’re really into the business of online entertainment.  The real news, the heavy hitters for the most part, are often very casual games, or not games at all.  They may be aimed at someone a lot younger than you, who speaks a different language, and isn’t looking for a two year commitment.

One page to keep an eye on is Worlds in Motion’s Atlas, an in-progress roundup of the major virtual worlds.  They’re targeting two new worlds a week, and it promises to be very informative reading for the casual onlooker who doesn’t already know all about worlds like Habbo Hotel and Club Penguin.

I’ve been playing a free sidescroller RPG called Cave Story. It’s low res, with minimalist midi music, but it’s also full of tons of different characters, environments, enemies, and weapons. The story and dialog are surprisingly developed for a free game.

After the first five minutes I was about to quit, but I ended up playing for a couple hours. I’m not sure it’s great, but Cave Story does have a charm that grows on you. (It also has some die hard fans working on homebrew DS and PSP versions.) It’s somewhat Metroid, but a lot less solitary– and perhaps because of that, Cave Story’s atmosphere isn’t quite as strong as Knytt. If that sounds like your sort of thing, download the game first, then download the patch (it’s an English translation) and install in that order. If you’re not sure, here’s a lengthier writeup at 1up.

I’m back from Palau and Yap.

I’ve added topic subscription/new post notification, and upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress.  The new post tracking should be helpful for the topics you’re interested in.  I didn’t bother adding the ability to subscribe to a topic without posting to it, but it’s easy to add with the plugin I’m using.  I don’t like how it clutters the interface, though.  Let me know if you want that functionality.