After more than a year of covering Orange County’s biggest and best-known developer, we’re ending the Blizzard Blog.
But not because Blizzard Entertainment is no longer worth covering. In fact, when we wrote exclusives about the Irvine game developer, we captured fan attention big time. We’d like to thank all the fans who checked us out, especially especially the guys at WoW.com for the great linkage.
In the last several months, Tamara Chuang (aka the Gadgetress) and I had personal and professional obligations that severely limited the time we had to devote to this blog. In the end, our editors decided the topic was best covered from Tamara’s Gadgetress blog, where it began, rather than use the resources required for a separate blog.
So we’re moving all future coverage to a category of Tamara’s main blog at The Gadgetress (here’s a shortcut: gadgetress.com/blizzard). You’ll find a new page with links to older stories, photo slide shows, videos and all good things Blizzard.
There are still plenty of Blizzard-related events that happen – from BlizzCon to the company’s developer-attended game launches. Thanks for following us and reading the coverage that we provided, and we hope to see you all again.
Attention gamers and art fans: The Laguna Art Museum is hosting an artists’ forum at UC Irvine from 4-6 p.m. Oct. 1. The forum will take place at UCI’s Winifred Smith Hall.
The forum will include artists featured in the museum’s current exhibition, “WoW: Emergent Media Phenomenon,” as well as Blizzard Entertainment’s cinematics project lead, Jeff Chamberlain. The forum will be moderated by the associate director of UC Irvine’s Beall Center for Art and Technology, David Familian.
The artists participating will be Antoinette LaFarge, Robert Nideffer and Eddo Stern.
LaFarge is an associate professor of digital media at UC Irvine. She’s a faculty member for the arts computation engineering graduate program in the studio art department, and is the director of academic computing at the Claire Trevor School of the Arts. Her digital print “World of World: The Adventures of Malbec and Player” is on view at the Laguna Art Museum.
It’s about time UC Irvine offered gaming as a major to incoming freshman. The university has long offered a game-friendly course for graduate students and supported several undergraduate programs, like mobile gaming and development.
But according to the OCRegister’s Irvine reporter Ian Hamilton, the school may add a gaming major as soon as next fall. This is partly due to the brand new Computer Games and Virtual Worlds Center, established this quarter. Virtual worlds? C’mon! That’s Blizzard’s specialty.
This should be a nice fit to what the Laguna College Art+Design is doing in Laguna Beach (read “Get taught by Blizzard — a perk if you attend Laguna art school“). The art school includes some Blizzard employees on faculty and last year had an exclusive art exhibit with original art from the gaming company.
We’re still recovering from BlizzCon 2009 and have just selected winners for our goody-bag giveaway. Readers are being notified right now.
If you missed any of our coverage, check out our new photo gallery archive, at gaming.freedomblogging.com/photos, where we have put together links to all previous photo slide shows and video taken by us and the professional photographers here at the OCRegister.
So far, there’s three years of BlizzCon footage and we’re trying to track down photos from year one. Plus, we’ve added a lot of other goodies from times past.
We’ll be adding to the collection from here on and when we find time, will continue to add older coverage. Are we missing something? Ping us!
“Diablo III” is shaping up to be a fine addition to the series. The demo Blizzard offered at BlizzCon was smooth, looked wonderful and — most importantly — built on the point-and-click Diablo interface without becoming cluttered or complicated.
We also talked with “Diablo III” Game Director Jay Wilson. While time was tight, we had a chance to go over some of the guiding principles behind the game as well as how the developers are tackling some of the thorny class issues from “Diablo II.”
One of Wilson’s goals with “Diablo III” is to expand the game’s role-playing nature. The core gameplay, he said, is still action — and our time playing the demo supports that — but Blizzard was looking to strengthen what role-playing elements, like quests and storyline elements, that help define the series. Read the rest of this entry »
We haven’t closed entries to try out for goody bags yet, but we’re getting close — in fact, we’re closing the contest tonight, Wednesday, at midnight PST.
If you want a BlizzCon goody bag, make sure to register with the Web site and leave a comment on any of BlizzCon coverage. We’ll randomly select winners from anyone that’s said something on the coverage — it’s that simple!
BlizzCon may be a great thing for Blizzard’s fans — they get to ask designers questions, they get to hear breaking news and they get hands-on time with upcoming games. However, it’s not just the players that look forward to the annual convention — Blizzard employees find there’s a lot to appreciate at BlizzCon, too, including their interactions with the fans.
We got a chance to talk to some Blizzard designers and executives who talked about what they got out of BlizzCon and how the convention impacts their games — including “Cataclysm” and “Diablo III,” straight from the mouths of lead designers like Tom Chilton and Jay Wilson.
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Know those fancy goody bags Blizzard is giving out? We can’t keep ours so we’re going to give them away to readers. Leave a comment on any of our BlizzCon 2009 posts and when it’s all over, we’ll put all the names in a digital hat and pick some winners. Good luck!
“Diablo III” is shaping up to be a fine addition to the series. The demo Blizzard offered at BlizzCon was smooth, looked wonderful and — most importantly — built on the point-and-click Diablo interface without becoming cluttered or complicated.
Know those fancy 
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