It's a working Saturday, and I'm editing and compositing an early draft of a video sequence for TLJ-Next. The whole thing will be completely redone at a later stage - preferably by people more skilled at this than I am - but right now it will serve as a placeholder.

I'm also doing a spot of play-testing, trying to isolate whatever problems remain for Monday's deadline. I never cease to be amazed when a game moves from theory to actuality, when you can actually sit down, grab a controller, and play the game instead of just visualising it in your head.

It's a great feeling, and a huge leap forward.  ¶ 16:40   

  Back in town after a very cold, but also very enjoyable, trip to New York. I got out just in time to escape the heavy snowfall, only to arrive in Oslo in time to catch the heavy snowfall. Yay.

New York's not at its best in January, but luckily there are numerous intriguing places to retreat to when it gets unbearably cold and windy. Like the Museum of Natural History, where I visited the Petra exhibit (excellent research), and the dinosaurs (whatever happened to the Brontosaurus?). Like movie theatres, where I saw the slightly overrated, but still entertaining, Mystic River. And like all the coffee shops, diners, delis, and restaurants that make New York such a fantastic (and dangerous) place for a food lover like me.

The flight back was one of those truly enjoyable flights that are all too rare, and very precious. The plane was almost empty, and I had an entire row to myself. The new Airbuses (the captain proudly announced that SAS, the airline, has eleven of them - each with a price tag of $150 million) also have exterior cameras (one pointing forward, the other down) which you can access via the seat back touch screen - great fun during take-off and landing, not so much when you're ten kilometres above the Earth, on a cloudy night. Lastly, the direct flight from New York to Oslo only takes around seven hours, which isn't bad. All in all, it was one of those everything-goes-right flights that you learn to appreciate when you travel a lot.

Unfortunately, the NYC-Oslo route is closing down in a few months, and it's unlikely that it will be resurrected in the forseeable future. This means that there will be no direct flights from Norway to the US - which just reinforces our position on the outer fringes of the civilised world.

And for those of you who only hang around waiting for news regarding The Longest Journey: The team has worked long hours lately to meet another important deadline, and things are coming along very nicely indeed. I'm sure it won't be too long now before the world gets the first glimpse of the second Journey.  ¶ 18:06   

  I'm off to New York City tomorrow, so don't look for too many updates this weekend. I'll be back in force by the middle of next week, however, so check back then.  ¶ 00:36   

  Hey! I've been reading your journals on your website, mostly looking for clues on TLJ-n. But it's always nice to read others opinions on the world.
Noticed that have started to add some photos to the site. Definitely a plus, they give it a unique style. On the Journals page I think the photo may dominate the page just a little bit. It's a nice image, but my eye goes there and stays there. I'd almost say it needs a visual line to lead the eye into the text. Like perhaps if the text were indented to line up with the "Voyage to Mars" text. But I'm probably over analyzing anyway, I've taken too many design classes.

As a design student I'm always interested in other person's designs and their process. I was wondering if there would ever be a "The Art of the Longest Journey" book. I think the art in Longest Journey would make a great coffee table book. I just wonder how many other people would want such a book.

Jeff

Thanks for the feedback, Jeff. I agree that the image above may be a bit dominant, and I'll try and tweak it as soon as I get the time.

We have actually discussed the possibility of putting together a "The Art of The Longest Journey" coffee-table book, combining concept art, renders, and screenshots from both games, at some point in the future. So yes, it might very well happen.  ¶ 13:14   

  In order to bring some "colour" (metaphorically speaking) to the site, I've attempted to incorporate a few of my photographs into the design. Lacking the technical web-skills of your average chimpanzee, however, I need to know if these images are causing anyone any trouble - and if so, how to fix it. Send me a message if anything looks screwy in the journal or on the front page. Your constructive criticisms are certainly appreciated.

Time permitting, I'll (slowly but surely) update the design of the rest of the site. It'll take a while, but the pyramids weren't built in a day, I'll have you know.

I'm jumping ship and leaving the country in a few days, so updates may be spotty during the next week, as the Busy consumes me.  ¶ 23:53   

  Winston Churchill's parrot 'Charlie' lives on, and though she's an incredible 104 years old, she's still her master's pet. As James Humes puts it: "Churchill may no longer be with us but that spirit and those words of defiance and resolve continue." Yes, "f*** Hitler" and "f*** the Nazis" are certainly words of defiance and resolve, a worthy legacy of the greatest statesman of the 20th Century.

Norwegian cable channel TV3 has decided to sell thirty-second commercial spots for their upcoming Super Bowl broadcast for 15 NKR - about the equivalent of $2 (that's right, two dollars) - as a way of drawing attention to the game which, traditionally, doesn't draw particularly high ratings in Norway. In comparison, spots for the US broadcast go for more than $2 million dollars. At least TV3 is getting press. Whether or not that will translate into ratings is anyone's guess.  ¶ 21:40   

  Cleaned up the front page a bit - it's looking a bit austere, but there you go: It's winter. My world is black and white right now. The photograph was taken in Central Park, near the reservoir, a few months ago - not far from where I used to live, on Madison and 95th Street.  ¶ 19:44   

  It's Jack-Frost-chewing-on-your-toes cold out there - arse-numbingly cold, like an arctic Hades; bitingly, icily cold; blindingly, deafeningly cold - as though January is asserting itself, reaffirming its position at the bottom of the list of the year's twelve months. Dark: check. Cold: check. As far away from the bliss of summer as you can possibly get: check. But we know this already, and January doesn't have to show off. We're already depressed, all of us, so just go away and let your only slightly less horrid - though thankfully much shorter - cousin February take a shot at it, okay?

I'm off to New York on Friday, but I'll be back in time to help wrap up work on a Very Important Deadline - our most important yet. TLJ-Next (I do believe we're not so very far away from revealing the name of the game) is close to being playable. All the bits and pieces are coming together, and this is where we find out for sure if we're on the right track or not. Given the experience and excellence of the team, I'd be very surprised if we weren't.  ¶ 15:55   

  For some reason - which I won't go into here - this device caught my attention. Yes, it's very, very silly, but wouldn't you love to design your own dreams? Or design dreams for other people? Thing is, though, how long would it take for the spammers to get in there and ruin it for everyone? We'll all have very vivid nightmares about viagr@ and Nigerian bank accounts.  ¶ 00:29   

  Eisner's ugly mug is an appropriate skull-and-crossbones for this particular story. The Big Bad has won.  ¶ 23:18   

  I missed this one when it was first posted. I really had no idea I was being interviewed, and regular readers might recognise the rhetoric, but luckily I'm in good company and it's an interesting read.

By the way, Adventure Gamers' extensive Christmas feature on the Future of Adventure Games is a cracking good article by a very talented young writer (who has certainly got a future in games journalism, if that's what he wants to do), so go check it out.

(And yes, Marek, the characters in 'TLJ-Next' will look as impressive as those.)  ¶ 23:56   

  It keeps snowing outside, and I think someone forgot to tell the winter gods that we have enough snow already. Because there are piles and piles of it, and it's getting quite ridiculous. Did you know that it's summer in New Zealand now? Well, it is. Those lucky, lucky bastards.

Ikea got me again. And this time, I even came properly prepared. But they still got me.

What happened? Well, usually when I assemble furniture from Ikea I make some sort of fatal, and stupid, mistake, and I have to take things apart and put them back together again. Or I'm missing a crucial tool. Or something breaks. In two. Or I get really, really angry and give up. Hey, I'm a writer, not a carpenter. Anyway, this time I came prepared. I had everything ready. I read the instructions first (and not afterwards, as I usually do). I took it slowly. After all, I had the entire afternoon. And everything did go swimmingly. Until I raised the cabinet from the floor and realised that I'd nailed the back wall on the wrong way around...with close to thirty nails.

I wasn't in a mood to pull it off and nail it back on, however, so it's going to have to stay that way. And while it's not a catastrophe, it's horribly annoying, because this always happens with Ikea furniture. I think that's their insidious Swedish plan - to annoy the world. They ought to include a carpenter in the package.  ¶ 22:38   

  Good news. With any luck, they'll get the funding they'll need to produce a feature-length animated movie, it'll be a resounding success, and Disney will scramble to get back on track. We can always dream. Hopefully, at the very least, this will encourage other animators and studios to do the same thing - buck the trend and take a chance.

Post-Christmas sales served me well today, and I've purchased some much-needed shirts, a sweater, and a pair of jeans - all at fifty percent off sticker price. I feel thrifty. But you do tend to feel a bit cheated when, mere weeks after purchasing Christmas presents, everything is half price. You'd think there was a conspiracy of some sort...and, why yes, there is.

I've begun watching Joss Whedon's Firefly from the beginning - courtesy of the new DVD box-set - and it's quite astonishing that Fox didn't air the original pilot (which I'd never seen before) until later in the season. It's exciting and action packed, it establishes the setting and the characters, and it's a very well written and directed mini-movie. It's a shame the show died an ignoble death, because it certainly had potential, and I'm quite sure the ratings would have picked up if Fox had done more to support it. Still, with fourteen episodes in the set, it's well worth picking up - especially since there may be a big-screen continuation at some point in the future.  ¶ 17:47   

  This week was a blur, with no breathing space whatsoever. Much has been accomplished, and also all the land has been covered in white. Snow, that is. Heaps and heaps of it, making walking from my apartment to the store - or to work - a struggle against the very forces of nature.

Here's a sampling of what's been going on: I listened to some of the first music for our next Journey yesterday evening, and it's a real departure from everything we've done before, but certainly something you ought to look forward to hearing. Not typical game music. All the better for it. Should be a real treat. I've also taken a look at the rough outline for the game's title sequence today, which, again, will be very original and inventive, and probably not at all what you'd expect. Sneak peek at this year's E3? Maybe. No promises. More details when we approach the month of May. Lastly, discussions are finally on regarding our first reveal - the initial batch of concept art and screenshots; more than a Christmas card - and we'll be finalising that by the beginning of February, most likely. This will be high profile stuff, with pretty pictures and tasty morsels of information. When, where, what? Again, stick around and you'll know. We've still got miles to go, guys, so use those lungs and keep breathing. Exciting times are ahead, but it's way beyond yonder horizon, and there are many other games to play in the meantime.

Bush has finally done something right. Now if they can only pull it off, I'll believe it's more than a cynical effort to draw votes for the upcoming election. We need the dream of space to lift us up, away from this world, to collectively regain faith in our future. Yes, it's expensive, and yes, there are people on this planet in dire need of the money and the resources - but at some point we will also need to look elsewhere to survive, and it's high time we got started. Sure, Bush is only trying the establish a legacy and get a leg up on those damn Europeans and Chinese, but if it gets us to Mars, I'm not complaining.  ¶ 01:49   

  Charles Singleton, an Arkansas death row inmate diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, needs medication in order to make him competent enough to be murdered by the state. How's that for a sick joke on justice?

Aside from the fact that capital punishment is, by its very nature, cruel and unusual - and also the ultimate irony, since it basically sanctions murder - doesn't the phrase "mentally ill" mean anything in the US legal system? The fact that you have voices speaking inside your head and that you cannot function without heavy medication ought to send up signal flares that this man needs help, not a lethal injection.

Most of the time, I have faith in the human species, but once in a while something will come along to cause me grave doubts. The death penalty in general is one of those things; this case in specific just makes me want to cry.  ¶ 23:49   

  Time yet again to dig into the old reader mail inbox - a 2004 first (although this one is a leftover from last year):

Hi Ragnar

It's me again... Just read your latest blog entry about the sun not moving around the earth. It's not true. Two bodies always exert forces on each other, thus the earth moves around the sun, whilst the sun moves around the earth. The sun with its bigger mass has greater inertia, so its movement around the earth is of small extent. Yet... it moves.

And our whole solar system and galaxy move around in space. What orbits what? It's a question of viewpoint.

However, on our small planet everything centers TLJ next at the moment, regardless of its final mass. ;-)

grin

If TLJ-Next had the gravitational pull of the sun, my job would be so much easier. And also, we'd all be dead.

The hardest part of returning to the 9-to-5 was, as expected, getting up before eleven o'clock - although it was much less painful than I'd feared. These last three weeks I've probably had enough sleep for the next three months, which is convenient. Other than that, it's been a very pleasant and productive day, and, with everyone back rested and inspired, things are already moving along quite nicely indeed, which bodes well for our next deadline.

I keep receiving e-mails and questions about when we're going to unveil the next TLJ-Next tidbit, and here's my answer:

...

Honestly, I don't know. We don't want to show too much too early, and the Christmas Card was our little present to our the oh-so-patient and loyal community who have waited four long years (and counting) for the next chapter. It's probably safe to say that, by the time E3 rolls around, we'll be showing more. More artwork, more screenshots, more information. How much? We don't yet know. It all depends on our 'marketing strategy', which, like witchcraft, is a strange and mystical force.

And then there's this:

Heya Ragnar,

Someone posted a TLJ-Next related link on my forums a day ago. It lead to a french site with the following information on it, which I translated into english with google:

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fcyberlander.free.fr%2Ftlj2.htm&langpair=fr|en&hl=fr&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools

Does this 'Alex' tell the truth, or is it just someone who pulled a prank or something?Please respond. I'd really like to know.

Cheers,
RaMa

I decree that it shall be our policy from this moment forth to not respond to all kinds of strange rumours...but since so many have asked: it's just a bunch of hooey.

Come to think of it, why would anyone want to know what happens in the game before it comes out? What's so fun about knowing all the twists and turns in the storyline months or years in advance? Half the fun of a story-driven game is the story. Don't let anyone spoil it for you. That's my advice.  ¶ 19:34   

  I've had very little time for gaming this Christmas - being away from all manners of schmancy electrical gizmagajooks(*) didn't help none - but yesterday and today I've spent a few fun (albeit often frustrating, and sometimes infuriating) hours with Prince of Persia.

Apparently, the game hasn't done very well at all in retail, to the point where UbiSoft is now offering a free copy of Splinter Cell with every Prince of Persia sold. That's a real shame, because PoP is one of the best platformers I've ever played. This is yet again indicative of a growing trend in video game sales; that original titles don't sell. It's all sequels, licenses, and bog-standard action titles. And while PoP is a sequel, it's a sequel to two 2D platform games from the early 90s and an awful 3D follow-up from 1999.

So despite some of the best reviews of the year, despite excellent word of mouth, the Prince just isn't performing...or, more correctly, people just don't care. I believe the same thing is happening to another one of my favourites from 2003, also a UbiSoft title, Beyond Good & Evil - which, like PoP, is an original creator-driven game. And this is very, very sad, because it means that even fewer original creator-driven titles will go into production, and we'll be stuck with more sequels, more licenses, more run-of-the-mill action titles.

Prediction for 2004, then? Publishers will be more wary than ever, and this will hurt the industry in the next few years. It's a pretty negative view of the future, but I'm afraid it'll get worse before it gets better. In the meantime, I'll just have to enjoy games like Prince of Persia and Beyond Good & Evil, and I suggest you do the same. If enough people vote with their wallets, things will change.

* giz·ma·ga·jook [noun] gizmo used purely for entertainment purposes; a toy for grown-ups  ¶ 00:19   

  Back to reality.

Yesterday was a Sunday afternoon to the power of ten. After two-plus-weeks of lazy days, the prospect of getting up at eight in the morning fills me with dread. Monday will be a test of my strength and resolve as a human being...and also the strength and resolve of my alarm clock.

The New York Post appears to think that Vice City is "10,000 times worse than the worst thing anybody thinks Michael Jackson ever did to a little boy". While that in itself is a ludicrous and offensive remark, they've also managed to get their facts wrong - like most media outlets commenting on the 'video-game scare' - and, to add to the fire, they're advocating censorship: "...sooner or later, I would imagine, we'll come to our senses and ban these games from public commerce".

Nice one, guys. Let's just burn some books while we're at it, why don't we?  ¶ 23:41   

  As promised, so it is:

HAPPY NEW YEAR! (wheee)

Welcome...to the future.  ¶ 00:31