-+@ Hived Airlock @+-

So, it's the weekend and things are going slow. Three more EL cards for preview, and there's only KT and universal left IIRC. TG is going slow - next week will probably see 2 each of Bograth and Paradwyn and hopefully the Arderial card and a Nar card. Let's see if Mikey can get me the blanket art for the Arderial card... and I'll just have to recycle images for Bograth and Paradwyn... unless I manage to get new stuff.

I've been playing quite a bit of gToons recently - but I'm still at the low end (or is that the high end?) of the mid-900s. It's hard to even maintain this level of ranking at this point, let alone advance. And to think that once upon a time, I went from 17000+ to 4000+ in a single day. Ah, those were the days.

I got a starter pack of WotC Star Wars... or Star Wars TCG as I have been told (there are just too many SW games... attack of the clones is right!) I haven't opened it yet or anything... time is always short, but it does look promising.

Talking about SW, WARS has its first expansion out. I'm glad that Decipher is staggering the WARS releases and LotR releases though. Black Rider info is still trickling out - the packaging details are already available on Decipher's sites. They've also just spoilt another one of Black Rider's card complete with image that's got nothing to do with the Nazghul! Yay! Oh why not... here you go.



And CCGW news? Not much really. I saw Thomas the other day... or rather he saw me and said hi. Oh well, I wonder what he's been up to. I haven't talked with him for a while. Would like to talk to Timmie for a bit regarding WARS too as well... but he's been MIA himself... probably too busy playing Halo 2 or WoW.

I talked with Ed the other day and apparently there have been 9 people who have sent in an NDA... but haven't gotten their keys to the kingdom yet (or in this case, the gear icon and the various other things). I think half of them doesn't even come to the engine anymore! Well, bug is handling that side of things anyways... hopefully some of those people will take over Imajica, the 2 Legacy games, Buffy and WoT. Orphaned games are no fun to watch - they are just like an uninhabited house that is going to the dogs, so to speak.

I had thought Monster Mash was already on the engine. It seems that it's not there yet. Oh well. I'll have to update my lists at some point for that. Maybe Martin will surprise me and get it onto the engine before the end of the month.

We are midway though the first month of 2005 and activity on the engine seems to be... slow. This time last year, there were a large number of games waiting to be turned into beta. This year, the only game that fits this description is JC's Tournament (of which I provided the framework so I guess I'll have to call it well done). Martin and Tomi and Mark have been busily plugging away at their games... and Kev and I seem to have an on-again, off-again relationship with Monkeys and Bowling respectively. So that's a total of 5 people working on new games. Martin, Logan, Tomi, JC and myself are of course constantly maintaining our games... and even then I haven't done much this year, but I guess if things are going swimmingly, there's no point in rocking the boat (hooray for mixed metaphors!).

I just got an IM from Nick Szankovics telling me he's continue developing Tanshihana. Yay for him. He does need to buck up and get his images going on. Yes, I know it's horrible finding images, and one has to find motivation working away on it, but the rewards is probably worth it IMO. Let's hope he gets that done relatively quickly.

I smell something on the horizon with Eric and a new CCG that he's designing. I wonder why the rush for PLs to want to develop their own games. Martin has Mega Monster Fight, Mark has Sideshow, Kev has Homestead and nowEric is joining the fray with something...well probably anyways. Only time will tell I guess.