The Asian Dynasties: Our recent patch continues to be well received. Our community team reports that people seem to be really playing the game rather than raising issues over the changes. We are monitoring how the game is playing and trying to identify civilizations, units, and Home City cards that seem to be out of favor. They are candidates for revision to make them more attractive. But nothing seems way out of balance at this time. Even the amount of online cheating seems to have backed off. So the recent patch seems to be one of the most successful we have done. Thanks again to the group of top players in the community who helped us with it.

Ensemble Studios Live Team Blog: Ben Donges of our community team has kicked off a new blog to let you know about stuff of interest to our online players and people who come to our sites for information on our games. If you haven’t seen it, check it our here.

http://www.ensemblestudios.com/blogs/Default.aspx

Halo Wars Update: Archive build #703 just went by and on a recent day I saw eleven work builds go by, but we still can’t say much about the game. However, Game Pro magazine was in town recently for a first look (while we were in the middle of a two week crunch period) and there will be an extensive early article on Halo Wars in their July edition. This will be the most extensive media coverage on the game yet. It should appear on newsstands in late June. If you are interested in what is happening with Halo Wars, you need to check out this article. We think it will wet your appetite and as the first major media coverage it should begin to allow us to say more about the game ourselves.
I got in four multiplayer games over the last two days and they were tense, engaging, fun. This is a real RTS in every sense of the word. There is always more to do than I can manage and figuring out what to do immediately is part of the challenge. Stuff continues to change every day and we have a lot of balance issues to resolve, but we are deep in that design-by-playing process now, smoothing out the edges.

Roy Rabey Meets Microsoft CIO: Roy, our information technology manager, got to take part in several meetings with Microsoft’s new chief information officer, Tony Scott, including a dinner with eight high level managers. Roy was pretty excited to take part in conversations with such senior people and apparently did a fine job of making everyone aware of the unique cultural, production, and IT support issued that a game development studios has within a larger IT framework. Tony Scott has some experience in game development issues, having previously been the CIO for Disney, and that should help us.
Roy and his team keep the nearly 500 PCs, Xbox development kits, and Xboxes we run working properly, plus the network, phones, security, etc.

Game for Windows Magazine Ceases Publication: The April/May issue was the last for this periodical, the longest running PC game magazine in the US (tracing back to its roots as Computer Game World launched in 1981). I believe most of the editorial staff is shifting over to 1UP. I am sorry to see GfW/CGW go (and not just because I recently sent in payment for two more years ). I have been reading it for over 20 years. I remember when founder Russell Sipe and Johnny Wilson came to Microprose around 1990 to prepare articles about games in development. I remember reading the articles by Scorpia and more recently Greenspeak on the back page. I was in the CGW offices a number of times over the last ten years to show off Age of Empires games and I recall that visiting game makers could not pay for the lunch of CGW staff.
I didn’t always agree with what was written in the magazine (including a pretty negative review of the original Age of Empires), but it was where I usually caught up on the overall industry. I wish everyone involved the best of luck with whatever is next for them.

Desperate Housewives and Age of Empires: This ABC television show used our game in a recent episode. At one point a boy in one of the families asks his dad if they would become a stronger family if they learned how to play Age of Empires III together. The dad responded positively saying he wanted to learn how to play the game. We were totally unaware this was going to happen and assume it was just the whim of the show’s writers.

Age of Mythology for the DS: Publisher THQ has announced that they will be publishing a strategy game inspired by AoM for the Nintendo DS this fall. The game is being created by Griptonite, which is part of Foundation9, which used to be Backbone Entertainment. Backbone created the Age of Kings game for the DS several years ago, so if you liked that, you can look forward to the AoM game. Several ES’ers are helping Griptonite with the game, including Brian Lemon as our producer/liaison, Rob Fermier helping with design, and Don Gagen helping with art. Here is a Kotaku blurb about the game.

http://kotaku.com/5012605/age-of-empires-mythologies-coming-to-ds

What ES’rs Are Playing: Yes, our people bought a lot of copies of Grand Theft Auto IV. Several voiced the opinion that is the best game ever made, while others find a number of faults with it. It seems to have an amazing amount of content. One colleague is slowly going through it trying to see everything. Another finished it fairly quickly but says he saw only 70% of it. He’s going back to do the things he passed first time. And the WoW fans are still going strong. A number of people who closed their accounts have been pulled back. I hear several people are looking forward to Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures.

Bruce Shelley