I wasn’t able to do a dump (not that kind) last week, because Brian Crecente was on holidays. I can only write so many soul-revealing personal posts 24 hours, you know?

But the Dump’s back this week. My notebook’s got some extras.

The IGF Gavel: I’m spending part of my weekend finishing my first round judging duties for the Independent Games Festival. This is something I always want to write more about, but I think judging for VGAs IGF awards and other awards I’m not running is best kept private. Nevertheless, it can have a major influence on what I write based on the exposure it grants me to more games (Being a VGA judge, for example, got me to see Assassin’s Creed II a little earlier than I would have otherwise). As far as the IGF judging goes, I’ve enjoyed doing it each of the past few years, getting a chance to see some wonderful, small, mostly PC games early. I played Braid more than a year before it was released, and World of Goo about half a year before it was out. I’ve played side-scrollers that you control with a Guitar Hero guitar and eventual award-winners such as Blueberry Garden. I don’t want to say much about the 17 first-round games I’m judging this year yet, but just imagine having to judge a game called Don’t Shit Your Pants on a scale of 1-100 in matters such as graphics, design, sound and so on. It’s a fun exercise. Once I’m further into the process and I get the OK, I do hope to turn some of these IGF playing experiences into posts.

EA’s PSN/XBLA Future: I interviewed EA CEO John Riccitiello a couple of Wednesdays ago and published a bunch of articles from it. But not everything. It’s amazing how much you can fit in to a one-hour chat. I still have big chunks of the interview that I didn’t publish. Some of that isn’t post-worthy. Other stuff is good food for thought that I’ll use as a basis for reporting in the future. Here’s a bit I thought I’d get to but doesn’t seem like I’ll be able to advance any time soon. He had mentioned EA’s commercially and critically successful 2009 XBLA and PSN game Battlefield 1943 a couple of times in our chat, and I asked him what his take on that market was. EA had, to the best of my memory, published only one downloadable game for the Xbox 360 and PS3 before that. He said: “We looked at [the XBLA/PSN market] and saw there’s a lot of stuff up there that generates about $US500,000 in terms of revenue. And they’re generally spending $US495,000 to a million in dev. And while that equation is very cool, it’s a hobby, it’s not a business. And while the gamers are having fun with it, they’re not having that much fun with it. And to be honest, how many board games do you want to play on your Xbox? So we looked at that and said, ‘This isn’t being addressed in the right way.’ So we tripled our budget and made something we thought would be really good, with no understanding of what was going to happen. We got a really great outcome with not just highly profitable business but one where consumers far and wide lauded it as a great game. We’re learning from that and there will be more like that.” Got that? More big XBLA/PSN games coming from EA.

Next Year, Already: There’s some other stuff in my notebook about games that I can’t write about yet. Publishers are always setting up new dates to define when a game they’ve offered an early glimpse of can be covered. It’s part of the deal of seeing this stuff in advance. Let’s just say there were games at Sony and Ubisoft events this week that remain under such embargoes. More exciting, though, is that I have preview copies of a trio of 2010 games that I know people will be excited about, and I’ll be able to write impressions of them on Monday, Tuesday and the Monday following. I mention this as a way to show how the years keep churning. I just wrote my last disc-game review of 2009 on The Saboteur and I’m already shifting in to playing major-label 2010 games. Some folks rightfully lament the gaming media’s constant look to the next big thing. It feels like eons since we last covered Halo 3: ODST in any meaningful way, for example, though that game was a big deal, just three months ago. We’re trying to look back a little at least with some of the catch-up reviews we’ve been publishing. Hopefully we’ll find other ways, too, to keep an eye on the games of recent past and the experiences gamers have with them.

Review Addendum: I always jot notes down in my notebook before I write a review, but I realise now that I omitted from my review this week of The Saboteur something that I thought was a telling problem: It takes three button presses to go from in-game action to a pannable view of your full game map. That’s got to be a no-no, no?

Games I Got In The Mail This Week But Didn’t Write About (Yet?): Tekken 6 (PS3 with fancy fighting stick), Hello Kitty Party (DS).

Check for my weekly review round-up a little later, but otherwise, make way for the night and weekend crews!

I usually use the Notebook Dump as a place to tell readers about facts I’ve picked up that don’t merit their own posts. Today, however, it’s more relevant to talk about why I don’t have as much to share this week.

A game reporter spends some weeks… distracted. This week was like that for me. I spent a chunk of Monday completing Assassin’s Creed II. I spent part of Tuesday sitting for a gaming-related interview for Spike TV (extending my streak of weeks during which I’ve worn make-up to two). On Thursday, I was indisposed for a couple of hours at one of those secret-for-now preview events for a game that comes out next year. All of this, in addition to spending a few hours chipping away at the Modern Warfare 2 campaign to keep pace with our Game Club, keeps a game reporter from doing that much, well, reporting.

That’s not ideal for me, mind you. For years, people have replied to my description of what I do for a living by asking me what it’s like to play games for work. They assume I play games from nine to five, but that’s something I’ve tried to avoid. It’s less easy to avoid that this time of year. Playing games spills into working hours. Working hours become added gaming time. Less reporting gets done. That’s yet another sign that the job of the reviewer and the job of the reporter aren’t made to overlap. Some would argue that they should not — or even that one person shouldn’t do both. Tell that to all the people who conflate games journalism with games reviewing.

Enough of this irregular Notebook Dump. By the way, that’s an image up top of a Mario t-shirt that I photographed at the Nintendo World store this past weekend. Say hello to his little friends.

Games I Got But Didn’t Write About (Yet?): NCAA Basketball 10 (Xbox 360, PS3), Assassin’s Creed Bloodlines (PSP), Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles (Wii)

Drone Confusion: Last week, right here in Notebook Dump, I posted about Mass Effect 2’s helper drones, having held that information out of an earlier preview until I had gotten some details in my notebook confirmed. Turns out that the confirmation I got from BioWare and EA wasn’t quite on the money. Thankfully, one of the game’s top designers dropped me a line to clear things up. So Dumpers, head on back to last week’s updated entry to find out the proper details on the ME2 drones.

FOX’d: The Fox News network made some news on Kotaku due to how they covered the terrorism level of Modern Warfare 2 (the most troubling thing for me was that they didn’t even talk about that topic for most of the segment). Later in the week, I showed up on MSNBC to talk about the same stuff. But did you know I made it to Fox today, as well? I was on their online show, with a less sceptical crew. We talked Mario as well. I’d share a link if I could find one. I was on the 11/13 episode of Gadgets and Games. It streamed live here but doesn’t seem to have hit the archives yet.

What Reggie’s Playing: I interviewed Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime today and will have a lot more from that interview soon. One minor detail not worth a post of its own but fun enough to share is his mention of which game he’ll be dislodging from his DS once the new Zelda is released: Scribblenauts.

A Few Discs: I met with Square-Enix people today to check out their holiday and early 2010 line-up. It was interesting to be with their US PR reps just minutes after the release-date announcement trailer went live. One rep was happily refreshing GameTrailers, marvelling at the rise in traffic on the clip. Given the excitement about the date, which promises both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 releases of the game on March 9, 2010 in North America and Europe, I asked a question I see our readers asking frequently: How many discs will the 360 version require? The Square reps recalled that this was mentioned in a developer interview earlier this year and said that the goal is 3-4 discs. While we will know a lot more about Final Fantasy XIII once it is released in Japan in December, it seems that details about the 360 version — which isn’t coming out in Japan — may take longer to become clear.

I feel bad that I’ve got so much stuff in my notebook that I haven’t shared, but most of it is full-post-worthy. Be sure to be back next week! I’ll be back on the site this weekend, hopefully, with a report from Nintendo’s re-creation of the Mushroom Kingdom at the Nintendo World Store in New York City.

Oh, and that silly shot at the top of this post was taken Monday evening at a Modern Warfare 2 New York public demo event. A company set up a green screen and promised people the chance to be added into a Modern Warfare 2 screenshot. I was expecting something a little more Forrest Gump. But it’s funny anyway, yes?

Dragon Age Bugs: Fahey mentioned in his review of Dragon Age: Origins that his PlayStation 3 version of the game had a bug that blocked him from completing the game. He had to revert to an earlier save file to get around it. These are the kinds of things that demand follow-up, and so I shot BioWare public relations an inquiry about it on Tuesday, hoping for an update on Wednesday. No update came, and with little to report on that front. I unfortunately let things slip and did not post because, well, there was no news. No sense in reiterating known bugs without advancing the story. This may turn into a post next week if I can finally get an update. To review the problems Fahey had — and hopefully avoid them yourself — scroll down in his review to the part marked “Bugs Aplenty“.

Mass Effect 2’s New Helpers: While BioWare’s Dragon Age people had no word for me about that game, their Mass Effect 2 people were able to clear something up. Omitted from my preview of the game this morning was a mention of the game’s partner drones. I left them out of the write-up because I wasn’t sure about a couple of details. Turns out, my notes were correct: The new game allows members of the player’s party to use combat drones. These floating drones, which looked like balls of light in the build I saw, will seek and engage enemies. Some drones will seek biotic-based enemies. Others may attack tech-based enemies. I had seen one in action a few weeks ago during my most recent demo of the game. But, as of the writing of the preview this morning I didn’t have all the details confirmed. So now you know of one new tactic available in the game.

Rabbids Quest: I was supposed to have received Rabbids Go Home last Friday, but FedEx mis-delivered the game. I’d needed it in order to review it this week. I wound up getting a new copy mailed to me by publisher Ubisoft on Monday, in time for me to review the game today. I’d hoped to at least get an adventure out of trying to track down that first delivery. It was sent to a nearby building and even signed for, according to FedEx’s records. Last Friday, after writing the Notebook Dump, I stepped out into the New York night to hunt the game down. I managed to sweet-talk my way into the building where it was sent, but the “apartment #3″ that supposedly received the package was not easily found. Instead, I wound up on a third floor lined with more than 15 apartments. None of them marked. I was on the phone with Crecente at the time, and it was the day before Halloween. He told me to “run away!” I made my escape, but with no game found, I decided my adventure was too pathetic for a post.

Games I Got But Didn’t Write About (Yet?): Hasbro Family Game Night 2 (Wii and DS), Jewel Master Egypt (DS) and three other games.

That’s it for now. I’ve got something artsy for Monday and will hopefully make a fun field trip that I can cover later in the week. This weekend, with luck, I’ll get to some people’s WWE Smackdown Vs. Raw custom storylines. Or I’ll play more Style Savvy. Seriously. More on that later.

Weird week this week for me, with reporting mixed in with new-house stuff and some exciting non-work stuff. But still there are these extra things I need to share.

Gears of War Comic Tops All? This didn’t become a post because it was old and nebulous and I didn’t have time to try to confirm it. But a report from earlier in the month from Rich Johnston, one of the comic book world’s top gossip reporters, indicates that the best-selling comic for Superman and Batman publisher DC Comics last year might have been the Gears of War comic.

They’re White? I got my first DSi-only cartridge game, Storm City’s augmented-reality game System Flaw. I’ll try it this weekend, but even if I wind up writing about it, I don’t think the colour of its cartridge would merit a full post, right?

There Won’t Be Blood I’m throwing out a bag of fake blood that was sent here, to Crecente’s attention, months ago. I don’t remember for what. I may be sending him some swag he can use at the annual Kotaku charity event. But a bag of blood doesn’t travel well. Not if packed by me. So no blood. No post about it. Just chucking it.

Games I Got But Didn’t Write About (Yet?) Style Savvy, System Flaw, Tekken 6, Ben 10 Alien Force Vilgax Atacks and some stuff I’m not permitted to mention yet.

There was going to be something else in here about an unusual fighting game. But my draft write-up began to seem like a full post. So it will be one on Monday. Can’t hardly wait, right?

To be honest, I was a little distracted this week because I was busy becoming a homeowner. And Crecente was in New York doing his thing. And… biggest speed bump of all, I was distracted by not being mentioned in Hulk Hogan’s new autobiography, “My Life Outside The Ring.”

Very sad.

I wound up with a few leftovers that I don’t plan to turn into full posts.

Ears-On With Ghost Trick: Maybe “ears-on” would even be overstating my exposure to Capcom’s 2010 DS game Ghost Trick. It was the one Capcom game I was hoping to see at the company’s New York City gaming showcase this week that wasn’t there. So I asked a public relations representative to tell me more about it. I knew the game was being made by Phoenix Wright developers. He fleshed things out. I’d be playing as a dead guy, a ghost that can inhabit inanimate objects. And there’s a talking lamp or something. That’s about all I need to be told to want to play this game, but it’s not enough for a post. I will predict right now that Capcom will return to New York, and that they will bring with them Ghost Trick.

Overhead HUDs: I got into a chat with Dark Void producer Morgan grey about the placement of heads-up displays. His game, which stars a guy on a jetpack and was made by people who developed Crimson Skies games, puts its ammo counter and mini-map across the top of the screen. There’s no HUD along the bottom. I asked why, and while he couldn’t offer me any theories or share any rules about HUD placement, he said that Dark Void’s was placed at the top because that’s the tradition in flight games. Makes sense. Somehow these decisions do get made.

Dragon Age Has Been Shrinkwrapped And Unshrinkwraapped: Back when my gaming schedule was dictated by when games were on sale in stores, I never thought that games might be finished, sitting in boxes somewhere, days or weeks early. Well, sometimes they are. As I’m typing this, I have a boxed copy of Dragon Age: Origins for the Xbox 360 on my desk. That’s not post-worthy, because it’d seem like bragging. But it’s kind of interesting, no? Shrinkwrapped Ratchet & Clank has been on my desk this week too.

A Plant That Eats Meat The always-gentelmanly PR man Rob Fleischer stopped by today at the Gawker Media (aka Kotaku parent company) offices where I work today. He was showing me two games that I can’t write about yet. And, somehow, even though I started here in May, he was the first PR person to do a meeting with me here. Most of my meetings are at hotels and other demo venues. Classy guy that Rob is, he brought me a Pitcher Plant. It eats flies…was he sending me a message?

That’s enough Notebook Dumping. I need to go home and pack. And if you want to be mightily impressed, check out how amazingly high I rank on the Ratchet & Clank leaderboards. Thankfully, the game isn’t out yet.

Have a good weekend everyone.

Oh, man. So late today for a Friday appointment that this post will barely even contain full sentences.

Busy week. Exciting new tech on the site. Our first fashion review. And did I get to everything? No way.

More Dragon Age, Spore Hero, SimsAnimals Africa, EA Sports Active coverage next week. And that’s not counting the games EA showed me that they won’t let me write about until weeks beyond that (you’ve heard of these games before; you just don’t know about the new stuff in them, unfortunately).

This is Notebook Dump (very special, Terrible Edition). I’m supposed to give an example of something I didn’t turn into a post and will never be a post. How about that EA has a game about being in high school coming out for iPhone, but I didn’t get to see it? Hmm. (At least I have a tiny screenshot of it in this post. It’s called Surviving High School.)

Oh: At the DJ Hero event, I played the guitar-turntable combo mode. I played the turntable to a Gang Starr song. A guy from Activision played the guitar. I can’t remember what his part of the song was. I played on Medium, he played on Expert. We couldn’t fail. I asked if the other player could play drums instead. Not in this version, but the team is open to seeing which kinds of songs people want for the future, he told me.

That’s all I can think of now. Sorry folks. Go back and read my massage story, then. It’s informative and partially funny, I think.

Have a nice weekend.

I pretty much got to everything I wanted to this week, though we’ve entered the time of the year when it’s less a matter of reporting not getting done but games not being played. I’ve got Half Minute Hero in my PSP for review and have been sneaking some time in with Uncharted 2 before putting it and any other game I’m not assigned to review to the side.

There were just one thing that got left in my notebook this week:

No Zelda: I was able to write a few posts about New Super Mario Bros. Wii thanks to Nintendo demonstrating the game in New York on Monday. I had anticipated writing some posts about The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks as well, because I was sure that the E3 build Nintendo had shown in June in LA, later that month in New York, then in September in Seattle, would be no more. The game is two months away, so time for a new build to try, right? Not yet. The special E3 demo is all Nintendo will show for now, keeping this highly-anticipated game still something of a mystery as its December release approaches. It’s a little odd that Nintendo wouldn’t have anything new, but I see it less as a sign that gamers should be concerned than that Nintendo is keeping this one close. (These Spirit Tracks impressions are the freshest we have for you.)

That’s it, really. I had a day off and was preoccupied by some non-post-related stuff (apartment drama!) that kept me from filling my notebook with much else. I advanced reporting on some pieces I hope to have until next week, but until then, a lack of Zelda is all I’ve got for you.

Have a nice weekend, everyone.

There comes a time in the week to reflect on what got into my reporter’s notebook but didn’t turn into Kotaku blog posts. Shall we?

I have written all but one of the Tokyo Game Show posts I still needed to get to this week. I’ve had little time to report on much else. So, today, on the even of the many October New York City visits from many of gaming’s biggest companies, I don’t have much left in my notebook.

Here are some leftovers:

The Best Thing I Saw In Tokyo: Witness the magic in the YouTube clip above. In a toy store that Crecente, McWhertor and I visited before the start of TGS, I took many pictures of Pokemon. And then, upstairs, I found this five-minute video of Aero Spider, a toy car that drives up walls and on the ceiling. Stupendous!

***
Hollywood Secrets: At TGS I covered a panel featuring top executives at Japanese gaming companies. I filed a story right as the event ended, focusing on Square-Enix chief Yoichi Wada’s comments about the next gaming breakthrough involving billing. There were a bunch of asides during the panel I didn’t take a lot of notes on, because they didn’t seem to be newsworthy. But maybe they’d be good for a Notebook Dump? One such statement—it may have come from Kazumi Kitaue, head of Konami Digital Entertainment—covered the accessibility of American movies. The gentleman who said this explained that, while living in the U.S., he’d realised that there are many non-English speaking people in the country who can nevertheless enjoy going to the movies.

Why?

Because Hollywood “makes entertaining films you can enjoy without even needing to speak the language.” I thought this was an odd analysis, even though I understood where he said he was going with it: “To succeed globally we need to look at action games and sports games and games that can be understood globally.”

(On my flight home, I watched part of the newest Fast and Furious with the sound off as I transcribed interviews I had recorded. )

*** Leaving With High Hopes: I usually end my interviews by asking my interviewees if there is anything else they want to tell Kotaku. Sometimes I get good stuff out of that, but I primarily ask it to make sure the person I’ve been interviewing feels they’ve been able to express whatever they wanted to get across in the interview. Often, the responses to the question repeat things we’ve discussed or sum things up about a new game in the most PR-friendly way.

And sometimes, as was the case with Level 5’s Yoshiaki Kusuda who discussed the 2008-in-Japan and 2010-in-the-US White Knight Chronicles with me, the response is one of apology and hope: “We are so sorry that we have been keeping it from users for so much time, international users who have been looking forward to it. But over the past months we have worked very hard to incorporate all of the feedback the Japanese users gave us since the release of it in the market and we have also worked to incorporate all the requests from the US users. We hope we can deliver the title.. I would like to ask for a little more patience.”

*** That’s all I’ve got for the ND this week. One more semi-TGS-related piece coming next week, plus my monthly Nintendo stats report and hopefully some hands-on with games I think people will care about. Enjoy the weekend, everyone.

There comes a time in the week to reflect on what got into my reporter’s notebook but didn’t turn into Kotaku blog posts. Shall we?

I wound down my coverage this week in preparation for going to Tokyo tomorrow. On Thursday I had my first day of not posting any original stories on Kotaku since I started. Today, I’m only doing two posts…well, plus my Halo 3: ODST review, which will run while I’m away. There’s not been as much from me on the site as there usually is, to say nothing of there being less in my notebook.

But there is some stuff I didn’t get to and didn’t think merited a post. Not surprisingly, it mostly comes from the two interviews that I pulled a number of stories from this week: My PAX chats with BioWare’s Greg Zeshuk and Ubisoft’s Patrice Desilets. You can learn a lot from 20-minute interviews with game developers, but too much info can clog a story. Because of that I didn’t think either of the following needed to run anywhere but here:

Future Mass Effect 1 Expansions Unlikely: Some things just seem too obvious, like BioWare co-founder Zeschuk telling me the following when I asked if we’d get any more downloadable content for the original Mass Effect: “We’re getting close to Mass Effect 2, so I would say it’s highly unlikely.” I had to ask, and had he said yes, that’d be a post. But this answer’s not that surprising.

AC2’s Short Scenes: Assassin’s Creed II creative director Desilets and I spoke about a lot of things, including his series’ cut-scenes. In the first game, the real-time cut-scenes permitted the player to move their hero Altair through the scene as they played. In the new game, however, there will also be non-interactive cut-scenes. Desilets didn’t want them to be long. So the longest one, he told me, runs just two minutes.

No Cakes: Last Sunday I went to the Nintendo World Store in Rockefeller centre where Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment was hosting a Scribblenauts launch event. There was a cake there, and I took pictures. Then I remembered, we don’t do cakes at Kotaku like we used to. So I skipped it. But you can see the cake (and me) in this thread. That’s the cake in message #997.

The video at the top of this post is self-explanatory, but in case you’re wondering why that’s here now, well… I ran a lot of other stuff from my visit to Microsoft. This thing wasn’t very video gamey. So I thought it’d be best to put in a Dump. So here you go.

I’m off to Japan tomorrow. I’m packing a bunch of portable games for the long NYC-Tokyo flight: Scribblenauts as well as the new Drawn to Life and Mario and Luigi games for the DS. If my bags aren’t getting too heavy, NBA 09 and who knows what else for my PSP.

Thanks for reading this week, and please be extra nice to the weekend crew!