Click here to view the embedded video.

What do you think? More soon.

Anyway, while I know many of you who attended cons we were at (particularly Bristol ’08) probably already have a sketchbook, not many of you will have it signed by the artists whose work is inside the covers!

Well, now’s your chance to own one of ten sketchbooks that have been defaced by artists like Dave Gibbons, Doug Braithwaite, Mark Buckingham, Andie Tong, Phil Winslade, Bryan Talbot and many more! Oh also there are pictures.

All you have to do is bid on this charity auction, with all proceeds as ever going to EveryChild!

Seriously folks, this thing is lovely, with loads of sketches inside depicting the well-known signature characters from City of Heroes, including Statesman, Back Alley Brawler, Ms Liberty, Sister Psyche, Lord Recluse, Ghost Widow and more. If you don’t believe me, click the image on the right to see some thumbnails of the imagery inside.

Considering the sketchbook was only available at a few UK conventions last year, and there’s only nine of the signed ones in existence, if you’re any kind of fan of City of Heroes you should really go make a bid! It’s for charity, after all.

Stay tuned for more hot auction items including original art from the sketchbook!

Somehow John managed to cut our two hours of chat down into a relatively svelte 90 minutes, so if you fancy a listen head on over to the Limited Edition site for more info, and to download.

Lots of work related stuff happening right now – both in my actual work and in potential, possible work. When/if any of it breaks I’ll let you know.

In the interim, I’ll try to come up with a few more things to say around here, but honestly, life’s keepin’ me busy….

PS – There are two new big games confirmed above…

The future revealed – well, the short-term future anyway.

Thanks to the contacts of the man in the photo above, and my own (ahem) smooth talking, James Spafford and I will be working part-time for Eurogamer.net for the next six weeks or so, helping to promote and then ultimately run the first ever Eurogamer Expo.

What’s the Eurogamer Expo? Well, only the best gaming event you’ll see this year… c’mon, what d’you expect me to say? Happening on October 28th and 29th, as part of the London Games Festival, Eurogamer is taking over the Old Truman Brewery off Brick Lane in London. There, loads of top publishers will be showing off dozens of games, and on top of that, Eurogamer’s serious older brother will be upstairs at the Gamesindustry.biz Career Fair.

So whether you want to play some games or just get into the games industry (and if you want to do one, why wouldn’t you want to do the other?) there’s something for you here.

Oh: and a tank. No really. I wouldn’t lie to you.

Want to know more? Better, want to buy a ticket right now? Good move, as they’re already starting to disappear and there’s only 2,000 available per day – get yourself over to the registration page! Tickets are only a paltry fiver, and better yet, all the cash is going to GamesAid, the UK videogames charity.

More info to come, naturally (you’ll get bored of me talking about it) but for now, I need to go relax. It’s been a long first day with plenty to take onboard!!

PS Before you ask: no, NCsoft Europe is not exhibiting there.

They’re performances of the winning entries for Set the Stage, the competition that we ran to get players to write scripts for the Aion and Guild Wars characters to perform. (The scripts were reworked by me to become suitable for performance, but these two are quite similar to the original material, with many lines remaining intact. You can download my script drafts for all six final entries at the official Aion and Guild Wars sites.)

The sound quality is not excellent – source was basically the speakers on the stand, which had to compete with everything around – so I’ve embedded the ‘normal’ and English subtitled versions. (There are also French and German versions of each – see below.)

As I said before, these stage performances were probably what I was most proud of achieving during Games Convention. Trust me; there were some obstacles to overcome! However, I personally feel the performances were excellent, given the lack of rehearsal time we had and the environment they were performing in, and I’m very proud to present them to you.

Aion: The Tower of Eternity – ‘Captive’ by Will Carpenter

Script performance draft by Stephen Reid

Click here to view the embedded video.

Subtitled in English

Click here to view the embedded video.

French subtitled version | German subtitled version

Guild Wars – ‘No Beautiful Day’ by Melanie Lauterbach

Script performance draft by Stephen Reid

Click here to view the embedded video.

Subtitled in English

Click here to view the embedded video.

French subtitled version | German subtitled version

As well as myself yabbering about getting into games, we also have the Aion community team, Izzy and Mike from ArenaNet and Tom Potter from Destination Games to listen to. Pretty good line-up really. You can listen to all four of ‘em online, subscribe, get the MP3s etc all right here.

Credit goes out to Chris for editing these at real short notice.

I said five podcasts though… and the fifth is a new kid on the block. John AKA Shuttler of TabulaCast fame, along with his co-host Matt, have moved on from talking about Tabula Rasa to talking about everything superhero – whether it’s comics, movies or indeed City of Heroes. I expect we gave ‘em something to talk about yesterday.

Anyway their new ‘cast is called Limited Edition, although confusingly the site’s at yellowspandex.com (and yes, I get the reference). You can grab episode 1 right here, and subscribe through the usual methods.

While I swelter and work on final A/V touches I just wanted to let you know about the ‘Live!’ page that I’ve created here – easy enough to find, it’s at totheblogmobile.com/live/

The idea’s pretty simple – gather all the material that’s getting posted to the web from here at GC. There you’ll find my Twitter feed, streaming video files from Qik, our Flickr photos, the official Vodcast (currently just Quest for GC, but more is coming) and even more stuff probably before too long.

Anyway; if you don’t see any new posts here, feel free to visit that page and you’re bound to see something.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Oh and to the first smart-arse who points out that we released our stand renders days ago? That sure as hell wasn’t the plan when I scripted, filmed and edited this puppy.

Coach to plane leaves in about four-and-a-half hours. Hmmm. Better get to bed. Speak to you from Germany!