By now most of you have seen the huge announcement that Ctrl+Alt+Del will soon be available in delicious animated form. The feedback has been outstanding, and I’m happy to see that so many of you approve of the animated trailer. It’s very important to me that the animation remain as true to the comic as possible, which is why we went through a number of animation studios to find one that could reproduce the look I was going for. We even looked at a sample of Ctrl+Alt+Del in 3D, which was neat, but too far from the feel of the comic.

Luckily, the art style I use for CAD translates wonderfully into traditional animation, and we found an animation studio that was very enthusiastic about a direct port from still to motion. They are working from character model sheets that I drew, as well as the full library of published comics, and the scripts are 100% written by me, so you can expect a very authentic feel to the animation. I’ll get into the animation a little bit more in a follow-up newspost.

Registration for Digital Overload is still going strong. I expected it to screech to a halt alltogether once people found out that Brian “I Just Now Played Fable, A Year Late” Clevinger and Scott “I Don’t Want To Go To School Today, Mommy” Ramsoomair were attending. I mean honestly, who would want to be in the same room with those two jokers? Well, I would, I guess. They’re pretty cool guys. I guess.

While Digital Overload 2006 is predominantly a computer LAN event, there will be other things for people to do, such as console gaming and good ole’ table-top board gaming. We’ll have more announcements to this effect shortly.

I noticed the biggest problem many people are encountering is with hotels/rides. You have to be 21 to check in to a hotel room. So if you have a room or are looking for a room, or a carpool situation, post on the forums. It’s been working pretty well for people so far.

My Xbox 360 is still happily churning out good times. Before I get to that, I do feel I should direct 360 owners to this video. I cannot vouch for the validity of this effect, and I am certainly not about to attempt it with my system and games. Not that I can imagine any reason why you’d want to rock the system back and forth while it was spinning a game, but obviously don’t. (UPDATE: A reader has informed me that this effect will happen with any disc drive, if you rock it back and forth while spinning a disc. Our computer disc drives are just usually bolted into a heavy tower, so it doesn’t become an option.)

Anyway, NFS: Most Wanted still rocks, which I already went over last Wednesday.

Due to numerous positive reviews, I picked up Condemned: Criminal Origins. I don’t know why I still buy these games. I always force myself to play them alone, at night, with all of the lights off, and end up too jumpy to even concentrate on what I’m doing. Maybe that’s why I play them…

Anyway, the graphics are really great, apart from that plastic sheen over… well practically everything. Like Doom 3 had. As if everything was an action figure. The character models leave a little something to be desired. Maybe I only notice it because I’m an artist, but the anatomy seems… clunky.

The lighting is spectacular though. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve turned a corner and freaked out at my own shadow. Honestly I don’t know why they even give you the option to turn the flashlight off. It never runs out of batteries, and it’s not like you are ever going to want to forego that warm, safe cone of illumination it provides.

So far the voice-acting and story are a little bit cheesy, but the enemy AI is outstanding. I’ve heard the game is short, but if it’s fun, that doesn’t matter much to me. We’ll see how it plays out.

And of course, tomorrow Dead or Alive 4 will be all mine. Honest to goodness, my 360 drools when I mention it.

(Update: Noooo! The Gods of Game forsake me! Dead or Alive 4 has been pushed back again. Curses!)