Another blog that I have left too late to write up, when will I learn? Never, that’s when, because screw common sense.

Firstly I want to  touch on something that I mentioned last week, about Mojang and funding a Psychonauts sequel. The price that Tim Schafer came up with was a fairly reasonable (for current gen titles) $13million. Reasonable compared to other games being developed now, but still a huge chunk of money. A huge chunk of money that Notch seems willing to stump up. It surprises me that Mojang has that much money to invest in something. It’s quite amazing that Minecraft has made such a huge amount of money that the developers have $13million sitting around to invest. For an indie game that’s just insane.

Another story about Tim Schafer has been around this week. Seems that everyone wants to throw money at Double Fine at the minute, seems people just love their games. Schafer started a Kickstarter fund, and made over $2 million for an as yet unspecified adventure game, like Schafer used to make. Kickstarter is a website that allows people to raise money for their project by asking people to give them money. In exchange they can give rewards to the people who donate, in this case things like signed poster or even lunch with Schafer and the dev team. It’s an interesting concept, and it’s readily apparent that you can make a lot of money doing it. It’s not quite the $13 million for Psychonauts 2, but I imagine it’s a very decent amount for a point and click adventure game.

My next story is one that really makes me worry for the human race. You may have heard of a dating-sim from Japan called Love +. In it you date random school girls and, well, I’m not really sure. I guess that’s about it. Kind of a strange game in itself, not what I would usually play. Anyway, if that game isn’t sad enough, it’s about to get worse. Now, you will be able to sign up to a new subscription service, which will send you letters from your “girlfriend.”

I don’t get this. Who is so desperate they want to get letters from some game character, who doesn’t exist, who will be sending the same letters to (hopefully very few) other people. I just really can’t wrap my head around why you would want that.

Another announcement is from the world of Little Big Planet. The next LBP game is going to be a karting game. I love the LBP games, they are quirky, fun and have a lot of replayability due to the user made content available. And now they are going to make karting game. A lot of franchises have tried to make karting games over the years, and most of them are fairly forgettable, apart from one.

Mario Kart must be a looming spectre over every developer who thinks about making a kart racing game. It’s incredibly well known, very popular, and great fun. Then again, since it’s a Nintendo exclusive, it is only competing with LBP-Kart in the sense that if it’s worse it’ll just be another inferior clone.  But with the user created content, and knowing the creativity of the user base I’m sure as long as the basic gameplay is fine, then the game will be great.

That’s it for another week, I’ll be back next time.