I am here, or rather, was when I started the post yesterday morning. I know I’ve been neglecting the site for too long, having moved most all my Awesome Links to my infinitely-easier-to-update and more community-oriented makeshift tumblr for now, but as you’ve no doubt sussed out (or heard me talk about ad nauseum for the past few weeks), there are major changes afoot, and so it’s probably best to get The Last Word down here.

So, first, the big news: as you will have heard, with Boing Boing’s relaunch, I will no longer be working on Offworld, and will instead be doing weekly columns on the Mother Boing (the first of which should be going up soon): round-ups of the indie/iPhone/retail games you need to be paying attention to, galleries of amazing things to lay your eyes on, and wider-ranging features that reveal something of the shape games are taking, still shining a sharp light on the stuff at the periphery and the people who make it, as was Offworld’s wont, but for a bit more generalized readership. In a sense, it’ll be quite a good thing, putting Boing Boing’s obviously sizable audience in more direct touch with indies and the rest.

But, a site like Offworld needs to exist, and I’d always approached it since its launch last November as the site I’ve been waiting ages for someone to do, so there should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that I’m cooking up Something New basically like as I write this, and that there are a lot of exciting things that will go hand-in-hand with it.

Whether it’ll still be called Offworld or something new is irrelevant, I think: the site itself has been subsumed by the network and community of wildly intelligent, passionate game makers and game lovers that have grown around it and congregated through it (even if the commenting was too wonky to talk easily on it), and I’m not worried that we’ll find each other again quickly wherever we land.

As for the more personal rest: as of last Wednesday, I have left Austin for a bit, first to head to LA for Indiecade (which turned out to be proof positive of the collective wonder of the makers/lovers above: you should see my flickr [or Tiff's or Greg's or Felix's or Eric Nakamura's Giant Robot post] for some of the wicked times), and following that, to here — here being San Francisco — where I’ll be spending upward of a month. Or so. I haven’t exactly bought a return ticket yet, we’ll just see how that works out. The plan? Good time spent with good friends, particularly Ginger Anyhow, Steph, and Tiff, to say nothing of the billion other people I want to see while I’m here.

Don’t hesitate to contact me about anything at all on the past/present/future of my games coverage and involvement (brandon@tiger-town.com works fine!), and it’s probably easiest to see what’s happening when via twitter (@brandonnn, which probably everyone who reads this will be well acquainted with anyway). Let’s all talk more soon!

As you may have seen from the proper announcement, the various links and writeups, the now official Laugh-Out-Loud Cats comic, or the ‘tweets’ of others, it’s official: I have joined the league of Happy Mutants at Boing Boing, and have just — against all odds — launched their new games site, Offworld.

I won’t rehash what I’ve already said in my introductory mission-statement type post on the site, but instead will simply thank everyone involved, as Joel did officially: the Mother Boing crew, BB Gadgets’ Joel, Rob and John, Leigh and Jim, and everyone else that’s given me advice, assurance, and in general put up with my half-dazed/half-crazed state for the past few weeks.

I can still remember the first time I’d heard of the then-mythical Boing Boing print ‘zine in my Gibson-reading/Daydream Nation-listening/SubGenius-following early teens (though I’ve lost track of whether it came to my attention via the debut issue of Wired, a random issue of Mondo 2000, or the glossy-pastel-color-covered edition of the Whole Earth Catalog I can’t seem to find online): suffice it to say it’s a fantastic honor that they’ve put the rudder in my hands, and here’s to steering it somewhere amazing.

It’s true — I’ve been a bit slack in updating post-Austin GDC, as I’m still not quite up to speed, life-wise. Everything important is still inside boxes underneath other boxes behind other boxes, but I’m slowly getting there.

The conference itself was somewhat understated, but had its moments: for those that hadn’t seen, I eked out some session coverage for UK business site gamesindustry.biz, notably breaking news that Arkane’s local Austin branch was at work on an iPhone strategy game, and covering Bruce Sterli– err, NOT Bruce Sterling’s curious but basically delightful futurist keynote (a full transcription is here), a panel on why URU: Myst Online failed commercially not once, but twice, the typically-cantankerous Chris Crawford yelling at his reflection about the state of story, Club Penguin’s Disney-inspired roots, and, finally Google’s somewhat bombshell news that it was indeed opening up its virtual world Lively to game developers.

That last point has been continually perplexing me in the week since, not least because the attendance at Google’s session was so slim (save the notable presence of Areae’s Raph Koster, quietly and hurriedly typing away at the back of the room). For a locale and a conference so heavily invested in the virtual worlds business, shouldn’t the entrance of the most ubiquitous technology company in the world have competitors quaking and desperate to spy a glance at their future plans?

And those plans couldn’t have been more clear — as noted in my coverage, Google’s short term goals are to open Lively to let developers create interactive Google Gears for the space, a somewhat jargon-masked way of saying that web apps will be playable on the surfaces of in-world 3D objects. Art director Kevin Hanna offered virtual arcades — similar to those Sony has prepared for Home (pictured above with a version of its PSN/PSP puzzler Echochrome) — as the very least of the possibilities coming soon to the platform.

But beyond that, Hanna let slip that Google’s long term prospects for Lively include opening up the platform itself to game developers — a fully featured web-embeddable 3D engine that, if guided properly, could reach Flash-like ubiquity in less time than we all might think.

I talked to Hanna for a good hour on the final day of the conference, for an interview that has yet to show up on GI.biz, and while he smilingly could “neither confirm nor deny” that Google itself was developing Lively 3D games projects internally, it shouldn’t escape anyone’s attention that the company has helped form the “game development studio” X-Ray Kid, helmed by former Warner Brothers, Disney, EA, Sony, Marvel Entertainment, and Microsoft talent, including Hanna himself (who’s worked on Xbox titles like Crimson Skies and Shadowrun, and oversaw some 50 Disney Interactive games) and studio president Jeff Matsuda, who previously was a character designer for cartoons like The Batman and Teen Titans. It might lack the dream-team punch of more recognizable games industry celeb-designers, but it’s a formidable bunch, to say the least.

Maybe it’s not all that surprising. Two years ago (concurrent with the formation of the Lively team, actually), Margaret did a bang-up job at looking at how Google was first dipping its toes in the industry water through Sketchup and ARGs (just prior to Goog’s $23mil buy-out of upstart in-game ad firm Adscape) which went similarly unnoticed, save for the one now-forever-archived snotty comment.

It could be nothing more than the Google-beta-fatigue that’s been remarked about on a number of tech blogs in the past week. As Hanna told me during the interview, there are very few ideas to be had that someone at Google isn’t currently plugging away at in their 20-percent time, and the industry’s pulling a wait-and-see on Lively’s buoyancy before sounding the alarms. But with a stockpile of new content still being sat on, Google’s not giving up any time soon.

On a different note, after I shut the tape off on Hanna, we moved on to a number of less-Lively topics, and I soon learned that in his spare time he’s also been hard at work in the comics arena, having just had his own original work, The Clockwork Girl, not only published, but optioned for a film by Telefilm Canada, on which animators have apparently already started production.

Even more excitingly (but only because he had a copy to give me at the conference), he has published another graphic novel though his own vanity label Frogchildren: Sixteen Miles To Merricks (found here on Amazon), by Barnaby Ward, who by Hanna’s own description is a Brit toiling away in a tropical paradise in absolute obscurity (and who also supplied the Clockwork pinup above).

Thank heaven for Frogchildren, though, because the book is honestly quite stunning. Apart from his keen eye for doing idealistic girls that cut straight to my core, the dreamscapes peppered around the various stories within are gorgeously abstract. I’ll leave you with the trailer so you can (mostly) see what I mean.

With just a week and a half before the game’s official unveiling, the UK PC gaming league of gentlemen collectively known as RockPaperShotgun have been so kind as to reprint the feature on Will Wright and the team behind Spore I originally wrote for Edge magazine in the summer of 2006.

I updated the piece with a few additional details surrounding the visit and gleaned from coverage of the game in intervening years, and a few bits on features the team was still considering at the time but have since been cut were removed. Overall I think it still holds up quite well, as I focused less on the rote details of the game (how many levels? how many guns?) and more on the people behind the game.

One of these days I’ll need to do an official update on the rest of my day out there in the Bay Area, which was taken up unofficially visiting some of Wright’s compatriots at the equivalent of J.F. Sebastian’s sentient robot filled workshop in Blade Runner.

In the meantime, you can hear the Spore team’s take on enabling players to create their own universe, whether its sci-fi convention will limit its mainstream appeal compared to The Sims’ domestic trappings, and what’s left to Sim after Wright has finished his SimEverything.

Read more at RockPaperShotgun.

As you may have spotted, as of the end of July I am no longer the editor of Gamasutra.com, a post I kept both part and full-time for the past two years. With all due formalities, I had a great time running the news section of the site, meeting and talking with some of the games industry’s most interesting people (a selection of which can be seen below), and working with smart characters like group publisher Simon Carless and Leigh Alexander, who is as able a replacement as I could imagine.

Without my time there, I would have never had the pleasure of accepting the site’s second Webby Award in New York, which, contrary to photo evidence, I did with my eyes open, looking out at tables where the Beastie Boys and David Bowie sat staring back at me, providing one of the most surreal moments of my life so far. That was just before I walked off stage and shared an awkward handshake with former Daily Show correspondent Rob Corddry, and just after sitting at my own table eating, drinking, and generally carousing with the vice president of programming at National Public Radio. Surreal all around.

There’s not much yet to officially say about what I’ll be doing next, outside of a planned relocation from Chicago to Austin, but with this site now essentially ready for prime time (far too late), I’ll be updating with everything that both comes in and goes out of my desk. In the meantime, have a poke around at some of my older work and miscellaneous nonsense from around the web.

As The Outsider and Thrillville studio Frontier Developments announces LostWinds, its 3D platformer WiiWare launch title, Gamasutra talks to studio founder David Braben about the game’s collaborative genesis and his thoughts on the WiiWare service and downloadable landscape as a whole.

Read more at Gamasutra.com.

When Gamasutra attended the GameCity conference in Nottingham, England late last year, we encountered a series of intriguing presentations, films and demonstrations centering around games, and presented in a film festival-esque format.

While there, we also got the chance to speak with some of the key speakers at the conference — including Alexey Pajitnov, creator of Tetris, who was there to participate in a Q&A session following the presentation of the documentary Tetris: From Russia with Love. We engaged him to discuss the state of the casual game market, a form he helped to birth, as well as his current game projects and the storied history of Tetris.

Read more at Gamasutra.com.

David Braben made his name by co-developing (with Ian Bell) Elite, a seminal space trading game originally released in 1984. The title is massively popular with European gamers, and prefigured the open world stylings that are so relevant to today’s gaming.

Braben’s went on to found Frontier Developments, the studio behind the Thrillville franchise, and his current project is The Outsider, an espionage game which he hopes will challenge preconceptions of how game narratives are crafted. That desire follows controversy he invited in 2007, when he told consumer site Eurogamer that BioShock’s gameplay was “not next-gen.” Gamasutra recently caught up with Braben to discuss all of this and more.

Read more at Gamasutra.com.

Whittling down a list to a small handful is becoming increasingly difficult year over year as the tools available to amateur and hobbyist developers become more accessible — a trend reflected in the continual record numbers of Independent Game Festival entries each new year brings.

This year has seen a number of noteworthy games that didn’t quite make the list but should be mentioned, from the compelling mechanics and wanton violence of Death Worm to the slapstick comedy of Sumotori, and all of the games recently showcased at Kokoromi’s Gamma 256, especially Jason Rohrer’s somber pixelated memento mori, Passage.

But regardless, the full list of the top five freeware games — all picked by the editor’s choice — are as follows:

5. Gesundheit! (Underwater Base)

Putting Gesundheit! on the list may be gaming the system just a bit, as technically its download is just a taste of a fuller production to come, but keeping it here is important if only to say that it represents some of what the industry could use more of — outsider inspiration.

Primarily a traditional illustrator, creator Matt Hammill has put together one of the most whimsical and fantastically sketched worlds in indie games this year, and Gesundheit! will likely be forever remembered as one of only a small handful of games to make mucus a core mechanic.

4. Clean Asia (Cactus Soft)

Between Clean Asia and the grainy Super-8 constructivism of his more recent Protoganda: Strings (think Tetsuya Mizuguchi taking his synaesthetic Kandinsky inspiration and channeling it instead more blatantly through El Lissitzky), the pseudonymous Cactus has a serious crack at becoming a new Kenta Cho-esque hero for the brass-knuckled bullet-hell set.

It’s not just you, Clean Asia is a relentlessly brutal trip, but one so audaciously designed from the obscurely configured attacks of its dual ships to its crisply neon-outlined Two-Bad-Dudes pilots that it’s worth sitting up (and getting immediately knocked back down) for.

3. Chain Factor (area/code)

Chain Factor holds two distinct honors: one of being the only freeware game released in 2007 to receive billboard and subway advertising campaigns across major metropolitan areas, and the other of being the first game to make perfectly clear that Steve Reich should be scoring every puzzle game from here on out.

Despite being only one (albeit major) part of an alternate reality gaming campaign concocted by TV network CBS, Chain Factor is an almost too-clever game in its own right, mixing falling-block- and number-puzzling in a deceptively simple way that’s most surprising in that no one’s thought of it before.

Now that its involvement in the ARG campaign has been duly exposed, the biggest secret it’s still keeping locked is the development team behind it, who — with references to obscure Neo-Geo puzzlers tucked away in their source code — are surely One Of Us. Feel free to leave any hints in their direction (or outright unmasking!) in the comments below. [The developer has since been revealed to be area/code, the studio behind Facebook game Parking Wars.]

2. Crayon Physics (Kloonigames)

Allowing for Gesundheit! gives fair room to put Crayon Physics — again, just a sampling of more grand things to come — near the top of the five best freeware games this year.

Easily the most widely played game on the list, Crayon is also notable for being the freeware game most achingly deserving of a DS translation (outside the forthcoming translation of Line Rider). Like many others here, its beauty is in its economy, and in the the undeniably affecting way it gives players direct access to and impact on its world inside.

1. Knytt Stories (Nifflas)

Where the aforementioned Cactus stands directly on the cusp of possible indie-stardom, Nifflas has firmly cemented himself as a new critical darling — a refreshing low-bit blend of Cave Story author Pixel and Ico and Shadow of the Colossus designer Fumito Ueda.

Taking the former’s firm grasp on the still-infinite joys of pure platforming and exploration, and the latter’s propensity to strip away all of a game’s unnecessary layers until its shining core is revealed, Knytt and its subsequent Stories are exercises in elegant simplicity. With very few mechanical contrivances above and beyond run (or scamper, in this case) and jump, Nifflas has left nothing to get in the way of you and the ambient visual and audio aesthetic of his worlds.

Best of all, realizing in true Game 2.0 fashion that his users might have just as many Stories to tell, he’s opened up his toolbox to allow everyone to construct their own tales in a set that has and likely will keep giving well beyond this year alone.

[As part of Gamasutra's year-end retrospective, discussing notable games, events, developers, and industry figures of 2007, we take a look at the top 5 most deserving but overlooked titles for the year, from Nintendo's green-minded Chibi-Robo Park Patrol to Harmonix's iPod debut Phase.]

5. Chibi-Robo Park Patrol (Nintendo, DS)

Chibi-Robo’s sophomore outing was given a limited release that saw it — in a somewhat tenuously argued case — sold near exclusively at Wal-Mart because of the company’s “strong environmental program and social giving campaign.”

While exclusivity tactics are usually reserved for obscuring sub-par games, Park Patrol was an exception to the rule, and managed to pack big charm into its diminutive body, with a mostly non-combative and environmentally-minded ethos typical of the lineage of the staff at developer Skip.

4. Dungeon Maker: Hunting Ground (XSEED, PSP)

XSEED generated a tiny amount of radio static with its localization of Dungeon Maker, but the game’s bottom-up approach to dungeon delving — where players themselves architect ever more elaborate surroundings to attract ever more powerful enemies — made less of a dent than it deserved.

With a DS version already on Japanese shelves, a localized port might bring that handheld’s wider and more adventurous audience to discover why the game was one of the most one-more-round addictive games of the year.

3. Earth Defense Force 2017 (D3, Xbox 360)

Cult and import enthusiasts won’t have missed this one, but the first Stateside release of the Earth Defense Force series shows how even a low-budget concept — carbon-copy insect models that have hardly progressed since the series’ 2003 debut and appear to be ripped straight from stock art catalogs — can have thrills and tension nearly as high-impact as the AAAs, if you play the numbers right.

The very definition of economical design — choose two weapons from an arsenal of hundreds and face off against wave after tidal wave of enemies in any style you prefer — the game pulls off a surprising amount of strategic flair for using so few tools out of the industry’s box.

Its attempt at squad mechanics and the honestly disappointing lack of Live integration made it a bit of a step backward from the last in the series, but with any luck Sandlot’s toiling away at a proper sequel as we speak, or D3 might find it in their hearts to support the still vital PlayStation 2 with a surprise release of the superior second.

2. Raw Danger! (Irem/Agetec, PS2)

Probably truly the most woefully overlooked game on the list, Irem’s follow-up to its original disastrous adventure (also released by Agetec in the States as Disaster Report) keys up not just the catastrophe, but the story-telling ambition as well. Hidden beneath its b-movie cover and budget price is — stay with me here — one of gaming’s first great interwoven storyline equivalent to films like Short Cuts, Magnolia, or Three Colors.

Played out over a tragic Christmas holiday, the game is broken into a series of episodes following the progression of a cast of characters including a wrongly-accused prisoner, a tormented teenage schoolgirl, and an amnesiac that has to literally piece together fragments of his former self (through a cleverly designed minigame), all of whom cross paths at key moments, each under the player’s control from every angle.

With pitch perfect comic relief and a (albeit more lo-fi) suffering slow-crawl scene that pre-dates Call of Duty 4’s emotional climax by over a year, the game deserves far more careful industry attention than it was ever given.

1. Phase (MTV/Harmonix, iPod)

At the top of the list, though, sits Harmonix’s little-sister to Rock Band’s big-daddy that, perhaps simply by nature of its platform and the timing of its release (just a few weeks before Rock Band took the stage), seems to have gone generally yet-unnoticed by the industry at large.

Even driven as it is without the human touch given to the rest of Harmonix’s output, its note-chart algorithms show a near Turing-test-passing understanding of what drives music and connects it to a listener.

Anecdotal evidence, like the game somehow knowing to place an iPod wheel sweep in Feist’s “My Moon My Man” at precisely the same point as her dramatic music video twirl, is just some of the reason that Harmonix has made it a thrill to plumb the depths of music collections.

Other recent music-based releases have shown just how confidently and skillfully the studio can execute on obvious ideas, with a result that’s less about beat matching as it is rhythm-feeling.