Give me a horse...a pony...anything

Quite possibly the one game that I'm wholeheartedly and unreservedly waiting for is Empire Total War. Aside from looking as hot as Imogen Poots, the gameplay's shaping up to be even better than Medieval. And I've see more dawns with that game than any other. They're releasing some videos showcasing the different parts of it. The first two are available online: Naval battles and Land Battles. You'll be able to pirate and bayonet to your hearts content.

Get your ass in gear

Want to know what the first 2 chapters of Gears of War 2 look like? I did, and now I do. You can find them both here on Kotaku.

On a completely different note, I keep seeing things on Kotaku like "more after the jump", "video after the jump". Except, there is no jump. Not even a subtle one in the html that doesn't show up. Am I missing something, or is this a some sort of subtle psychosis rearing its head? At least I'm not smelling burning rubber... why are you running away psychosis? I'll just shoot you in your ass!

This actually goes on in the industry

Yesterday, EA cancelled Tiberium, the FPS set in the Command & Conquer universe.

"The game was not on track to meet the high quality standards set by the team and by the EA Games Label," says EA spokesperson Mariam Sughayer in an official statement to Gamasutra, commenting that "...there were fundamental problems with the design of the game that the team struggled to correct."

Aside from taking 4 years to realise that the game was a bit of a turd (and sinking $50 million or something into it in the process), what's actually most relevant to this story are the comments, most supposedly from people that worked there. Aptly described in a few places as a clusterfuck, it really does open your eyes. And in my case, my vocabulary. Btw, give over at least twenty minutes to reading them, there's a lot.

"If you look at how they actually became who they became in the industry you will see a string of people who are relative to someone [sic] or were doing cocaine with someon [sic] etc...or drunk off their asses. I'm not kidding, I am so tired of that here at EALA I hope someone at REdwood [sic] starts to drug testing a a policy! [sic]"

Sigh...inevitably, quoting someone's comments from the internet involves a lot of copy & pasting [sic]...

A-tilting and a-shifting

This is quite a cool effect that we were looking to turn into a shader. It's called tilt-shifting, and basically you get a big ass expensive camera, fiddle about with it, take a super long range shot, and vóila! Everything looks like it's a toy. Which is quite cool. Alternatively, you can fake it in Photoshop. But it's not as cool, and you should feel bad about yourself.

Some sort of history was made

Falcon 1, the privately funded rocket from company SpaceX, made history a few days ago and the first privately funded rocket to get into space. There's a big ass 10 minute video of the rocket being fired into space on the news page, which aside from showing what's it's like to be strapped to a rocket, shows a great view of the transition from ground to space. Which is sweet.