So yesterday I trundled off through the back roads of Monterey to the track for the first MotoGP event of the year at Laguna Seca. I will have pictures to upload at some point but

As with last year, the place was packed. We got in a little later than I'd hoped, arriving at 11AM, but I had to wait at my hotel (The Hyatt Monterey, which is beautiful) for a couple hours for some folks to arrive.

I affixed my VIP parking sticker to the windshield and entered the highly secure area. Cops and checkpoints were everywhere on the way in. The beautiful thing about the parking access is that you're about 200 steps away from the paddock... otherwise you have to park like miles away.

So we headed to the VIP village, which is nicely air conditioned, catered with open bar to see if any of our Dorna contacts or agenty types were around. At the time they weren't and some of the rookie series were still practicing around the track. You could tell instantly they were the rookies on the smaller bikes because the noise levels were completely bearable. :)

Our small party decided to have a drink, eat a bit of lunch while we hung out and it wasn't long before Phaedra, our primary licensing contact at Dorna came by. I ditched my party and she and I chatted about a number of things for the next 45 minutes or so before I let her get back to the rigors of the event. She and I don't get to catch up that often as most of the interaction she has with Capcom is at a producer or product manager level.

About 15 minutes after that, another of my guests and Andrew, Dorna's agent (but who also does a few things for Capcom on the side) came by. We caught up briefly and he'd been busy prepping a schedule of meetings for me since he'd arrived Friday morning with potential partners. First up, I caught up with at GlobalE, a company members of this site will get to know more clearly in the coming months. I'll keep it a secret what they do but suffice to say, it involves more and better functionality in certain areas here.

Then we ran off to the Red Bull Energy Center, which is even more VIP than the VIP Village in some sense  (at least if you like watching celebrities). Michael Jordan is a partial owner of a MotoGP team and this tends to be where he and other Hollywood types hang out. Last year Michael Mann and other A-listers made themselves known there.

At Red Bull I chatted with several of their execs about ways we could work together better in the future. They told me some of their plans, goals and strategies. I did likewise and I think we'll have several opportunities in the coming months.

While this chat was going on, I was slying sneaking a peak at the time qualifiers for MotoGP that were going on. I missed some of the highlights but I seemed to have heard that the track record was broken by Casey Stoner to take the pole position. As an American, seeing Nicky Hayden qualify high up the list to get a place on the front line is nice too. Laguna is said to be his "backyard" and his disappointing performance here last year was a bummer for American fans. Hopefully this year will be a bit better.

Anyway, we then hit the infield to take a look at the kids training flat track that Capcom will be sponsoring at Indy and at all US races next season. The amount of signage and exposure Capcom will get should be fantastic for the company and the game.

By this time it was past 4PM, and the place was still packed with people, and oddity for a GP race on just a qualifying day but a testament to how quickly the sport is finding an audience. In any event, today's the real race. I'll be there in an hour to have breakfast with some of the Dorna folks. Race starts at 2pm this afternoon. Should be exciting so watch it on TV today.

And I'll get some pictures up later too when I get access to a silly mini-USB cable.

As I post this, I'm checked into my hotel in Monterey. I'm just waiting for a couple more of my guests to arrive before we head over to the circuit to watch the qualifying laps for the Red Bull MotoGP race at Laguna Seca. :)

I'll have pics and such later this week.

I'm up, dressed ready to go to the MS event... already have gone through my email, updated a few things here. Read some news.

Last night I went to 47 Communication's media get-together, then hung out at a friend of mine's place in the Sunset hills to have some BBQ. A bit later, I swung by the Kotaku party to say "hi" then wound up back at the Sheraton bar, hanging with some of the guys from Bioware. I was a good boy though, I was in bed before midnight. :)

Former Microsoft Games Studio head and current Airtight Co-founder, Ed Fries, recently spent some time chatting with Game Daily about such topics as Dark Void (and the trials and tribulations of pitching projects to Capcom :) ), where the idea's for the game's vertical combat came from, Sony's improving position in the marketplace, the value of Nintendo expanding gaming audiences, the state of the Xbox business and more.

Here's an excerpt:

 "We were talking about doing a sort of continuation of the ideas of Crimson Skies but adding on-foot, but that's a lot to do in three months. ... It was a herculean effort. We got it all together for the prototype meeting but it was just barely holding together. [Fries chuckles] I remember we went down and visited Capcom and we knew it wasn't everything we wanted it to be... In the end, even though there were a bunch of problems with it they agreed to fund the full project. It was weird; we flew home and I had mixed feelings. On the one hand we were excited that we got the project funded, but on the other hand something was kind of eating at me... I realized as soon as you started walking around the game just felt like every other first-person shooter. I felt like we were doing the same thing everyone else was doing.

"I sat down with the team on Monday and told them 'I think we can finish the game as is and it would be an OK game but I don't want to spend the next couple years making an OK game. I want to do something new, that hasn't been done before... If we're going to make a change now's the time to do it; we're right at the end of prototype'," Fries elaborated. And so with that, the project that was to become Dark Void was about to get a facelift.

The reality is, at that time it was waaaay more than a facelift that was about to happen, but a complete "do-over", from the backstory, to the art style to the gameplay mechanics. But that's a story we'll share another day.

In the mean time, Ed talks about a lot of interesting topics, so head over to Game Daily and read the whole story. It's worth your time.

Greetings gentle Capcom-Unity users!

Those who frequent our forums will start to see some folks now have access to signatures. In the near term, you've got text-only signature options but fear not, in the longer term we'll have something that supports HTML.

We're currently leaning toward a "rank based" unlock for HTML sig support mechanism  somewhere down the line (I'm told "soon"), so that it's something we use to reward folks who actively participate here. Noobs need not apply.

You can access the signature options at the bottom of any forum by clicking on "forum preferences". If you didn't know it, you can also set the number of posts/threads displayed per page in that area as well.

More upcoming features and refinements can be seen on our status page here.