I’ve always enjoyed writing, and since an early age I’ve pursued it. Recently I found a story I wrote 18 years ago with my friend Kevin when we were in the first grade. One title which has had a profound effect on my view of gaming was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and it stays with me today. As we were both fans of the title, and shared astounding artistic and creative writing talents, we believed it was the best time for share our efforts and create this masterpiece. If I ever needed to qualify my geek credibility, this should do it. I also have a Crash Bandicoot book I wrote in 1996, composed of images from an old Game Informer mag – I’ll look for that one soon too. ...

Here are some screens from the level layout I’ve been working on now that I’ve decided to go full speed with my project. I’ll add more as I finish more sets. I use SketchUp to layout the levels, in combination with Visio. It makes things much easier to have models for comparison before I actually build them in Unreal. You can find more of them on the Unreal Project page.

I’ll be attending Pax East 2011 with the rest of the Armless Ocotopus staff (minus the Canadian). We’ll be there interviewing XBLIG and XBLA developers, previewing the latest and greatest titles, and are considering another live podcast like we did last year. A video review may be in in order well. If you’re headed over as well, feel free to contact me so that we can meet up!

Who’s got two thumbs and is headed to PAX Prime 2011? This guy! If you’re going too, why not reach out to me before hand so that we can meet up while we’re there?

Thus far, the enthusiasm behind the uprising has been great. We have over 45 submissions at this point, with additional ones coming in. The press has been kind to us as well and really helped with spreading the word. I didn’t sent out a press release to any of the outlets, as the one listed below was really just geared toward the developers, but looking back I probably should have. I’ll have an updated one in the next week or so as more news gets solidified. The website should be up within the week, so be sure to check back here for a link for that. Andrew Currie of Evil Robot Logic has been doing an outstanding job of handling that for us. ...

While I was down in Philly visiting Armless Octopus Editor-In-Chief Mike Wall, we headed over to the “Too Many Games” expo, which I detailed more information about below. Here’s some photos so you can live through the nostalgia we experienced! Unfortunately, I didn’t find any copies of Panzer Dragoon Zwei :/