For those of you who aren't philosophers, Roman centurions, or the Pope, that's Latin for "It is thus that the cookie crumbles." Yup, we didn't make it into the top ten finalists for the IGF. Good luck to everyone who placed!

But don't cry for us, Argentina. Turn that frown upside-down, Czechoslovakia...buck up, New Zealand, everything's gonna be fine. In fact, here are two new screenshots featuring The Tin Behemoth: Robot O...

NOVEMBER 30, 2001:
Who moved our cheese?

We're moving the game's release date to Spring 2002. Why, do you ask? Our top ten reasons:

10. Too distracted by this whole Harry Potter business
9. Having too much fun cooking with George Foreman grill
8. All our potential customers are wearing elf ears and "mithril" chainmail made out of Mountain Dew can tabs, sitting in line for Lord Of The Rings (who are we kidding? we'll see you there)
7. Morbidly depressed that Futurama premiere is so late in season
6. Spending entire days daydreaming about "Hall & Oates" reunion tour
5. Heck, it's going to take us weeks just to untangle the Christmas tree lights again this year
4. Sparky spends too much time trolling on Quarter To Three message boards
3. Our ship dangerously low on dilithium crystals
2. Peer pressure. That's also why we both got those tattoos that say...uh, never mind
1. We want the game to be more like Daikatana, so we're busy adding the robot frogs

Oh, and we added a few 3D screenshots from the trailer (er, which should come out sometime before Spring 2002).

NOVEMBER 2, 2001:
Yup, we've entered the Independent Games Festival.We won't know if we're actually finalists until December 10, but feel free to use your supernatural mental abilities to beam good thoughts into the judges' heads for us. Points off for psychically setting their toaster ovens on fire, or forcing them to hear the "It's A Small World" song over and over.

Status update from the programming front since we last posted: Lars analyzed memory and CPU bottlenecks and made some important performance improvements, and rewrote some memory management functions and other internal housekeeping code. He's currently working on asset compression, some development tools, and general game AI.

SEPTEMBER 23, 2001:
"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."-- Robert Frost

In light of recent events, we're removing the World Trade Center from the game, as we don't feel it would be appropriate.

SEPTEMBER 5, 2001:
Note: I'm gonna kick this "Max Payne" style (I am so "down" with you kids):

Icy raindrops are falling from the skies like those tiny cocktail umbrellas...points down. Ouch. That's why I gotta squinch my face up like Grandma trying to read a upside-down Chinese restaurant menu.What was that noise? BLAM BLAM! BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM! BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM! BLAM BLAM BLAM! BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM! BLAM BLAM CLICK CLICK CLICK

Geez, you can't trust anyone in this town. The cops double-crossed us, and the mob triple-crossed us. We've been crossed and uncrossed more times than Marty Feldman's eyes in Young Frankenstein. But hell, we're still plugging away here in the dark, dark, darkity dark of the night, and we've got the new screenshots to show for it.There's more to tell, but I'm fresh out of hollowpoints and Diet Pepsi. Until next time...shoot first, save often.

AUGUST 8, 2001:
"What we have here is a failure to communicate." -- Cool Hand Luke (1967)

Aargh! We seem to have been having an email problem with our TCFH addresses, so I've changed them over to phobe.com addresses for now. If you've emailed us in the past month and heard nada, please try again!

Here's what Lars has been up to in the past few weeks:

• Implemented rockets, guided missiles and bullets
• created a few asset management and manipulation tools
• implemented first stage of asset compression (several more stages to follow)
• evaluated and tested several artist tools for the new tile system
• developed the artwork creation process for the new tile system
• planned pathfinding (not yet implemented)
• animation creation for Newtrino (over 1800 frames, when you count all 16 rotations)
• implemented dust clouds
• updated and rewrote sections of maped to handle new tile system
• further development on building collapse sequences.
• ...as always, various debugging and core engine updates.

JUNE 30, 2001:
We've been busy...making major changes with the artwork, streamlining the process, experimenting with scale and improving things all around. I've also added a FAQ to this site, for all your burning questions (yes, I smelled something burning).

Two new screenshots, including one of our Map Editor, because nothing, nothing is more exciting than programming tools (to be fair, the other one is of Newtrino immolating a city street). And here's a programming progress update from Lars:

"We've gone to a larger screen scale, allowing us to show the tiny people and vehicles in more detail. This does mean less of the world around you will fit on the screen, but it'll be easier for players to see what's going on with those pesky humans at street level. This will also let us support a zoom-out option on the view if performance supports it (we'll see).

We've also moved to a much more flexible and higher quality tiling system, allowing the terrain to look more accurate and detailed -- city maps are now based on actual topographic data. This means we had to develop some new processes for the map making, but we think it will be worth it in the end.

In other points, I've implemented limited physics collisions, vehicle roll and spin, and a little extra AI for the people...they now panic in a much more realistic and amusing fashion."

JUNE 7, 2001:
The Attack Cam is temporarily on hiatus (archive can be found here), and has been replaced by the New Haiku Kaiju Review. Today's haiku: Mothra!

MAY 31, 2001:
Now that all the important, relevant people have covered it, here are my (mercifully brief) E3 comments...

MAY 21, 2001:
We're back from E3. I've seen all the giant Pokemons I can stand (which is to say, quite a few). Nothing much happened...I'll post a bit more of the E3 story later.

MAY 17, 2001:
A shout out to all of our friends in Poland and Finland! Unfortunately, I only studied Latin in school...so I know how to ask Julius Caesar where the nearest bus station is, but I can't figure out what you're saying about us. We hope it's good. Also of note, we'll be at E3 for the next few days. No booth, no booth bunnies, just us walkin' around enjoying the flashing lights, grating techno music and vertically challenged folks in foam rubber Pokemon suits. MAY 10, 2001:
We got a little writeup at eUniverseGames, and at Lemon (which is a great resource for Commodore 64 fans). I also updated the Monsters page with images of all (except one) of the monsters as they look in the game, along with their original 3D models.

MAY 5, 2001:
Below: Newtrino the atomic fire newt unleashes his not-so-secret weapon...

"DATS-A SPICY MEAT-A-BALL!"

APRIL 9, 2001:
Here's a funny Quicktime clip we threw together starring our giant robot... it's called "Compact Car". Click on the image below to watch the clip.

APRIL 5, 2001:
Screenshots! We got screenshots! And here's a wacky reject. Lars let loose too many tiny people -- as you can see, even the monster seems perplexed:

"How To Break Up A WTO Rally, Part 1" (click to enlarge)

APRIL 2, 2001:
Hey! An article in this month's Computer Gaming World mentions a "giant movie monster attacking cities" game as one of the "10 Colossal Games We Want Made". Well, ya'll settle down now -- we're makin' it...

MARCH 26, 2001:
Today Lars wrote some nifty tools for generating nicely transitioned terrain tiles that are saving us (well, primarily me) a lot of time and effort. Thus we can get some screenshots up here sooner...

My feet are still recovering from the GDC. Note: New Rocks look tres "Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome" but are none too comfy after 10 hours of standing. Nonetheless, I met lots of great folks (to all the CAs and staff: you rock), saw lots of Powerpoint slides, heard lots of crappy techno music, and ate some sandwiches that ranged from mediocre to downright frightening. GDC "business as usual".

MARCH 22, 2001:
What's new? Well, Lars ate some toast. I'm busy running around at the Game Developer's Conference in San Jose. Ooh, and we launched this website. Well, actually I just dragged the contents of this here folder into Fetch, and that was that. More of a "plop" than a "KABOOM".

But there I go again...spoiling the magic, dumping an icy bucket of reality onto your collective wide-eyed, hopeful visages.

But it tastes like Gatorade, doesn't it?

Stay tuned for semi-regular updates on our progress.