Mentions!

By: Derek Yu

On: January 14th, 2009

Some great news to report: Mousechief Co.‘s Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble has been nominated by the Writers Guild Association for “”http://www.wga.org/awards/awardssub.aspx?id=1516#videogame">Best Writing in a Videogame [sic]," an honor it shares with Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, Fallout 3, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, and Tomb Raider: Underworld (I didn’t know boobs could talk!). The WGA Awards have been celebrating writing in television, radio, and movies for 60 years, and added an award for video games just last year. The 2009 show will take place on Saturday, February 7th.

Congratulations, Mousechief!

Also: Petri Purho’s Crayon Physics went on sale January 7th, and shortly thereafter became stripped by the popular gaming webcomic Penny Arcade. PA, which has been dabbling in independent game development through its episodic adventure-RPG and its online game store, has been friendly toward indies in its comic before, when it mocked the internets outrage over Braid’s $15 price point on XBLA this past summer.

Congratulations on both the release and the comic, Petri! You should ask them for a print of that one, if you haven’t already.

Finally, I’m pleased to report that TIGSource was picked as one of the Guardian’s 100 Top Sites for the Year Ahead, along with Eurogamer, Pocket Gamer, Metacritic, and Jay is Games. We even made it to print (many thanks, Harvey James)! Not only that, but I picked up a copy of the latest PC Gamer US last week, to find that they did a full page on the Bootleg Demakes Competition. The compo has also been mentioned in the UK edition of the magazine.

2008 was undoubtedly a big year for the independent side of games, and also for TIGS (and for me personally, as an aside). As we start in on 2009 we’re looking at a very interesting and slightly controversial IGF, and, with so many big releases out of the way, I can’t help but feel that there’s a somewhat bigger question mark hanging over this year. Or is that always the case? But anyway, when it comes to games, I personally enjoy a surprise, and I can already tell there are going to be a lot of them in the months to come. If you’re looking to make a splash, now is always the time to do it. Let’s make it a good one!