For the past week or so, the Internet has been asking: "Where's Nandrew?" Of course, by "the Internet", I really just mean one or two of my bosses, and by "Where's Nandrew?" I'm really referring to "Where the **** is Nandrew?"

So after dropping the ball over these past few days (which may as well be a lifetime online), I have no choice but to do something which I solemnly promised myself I'd never put on the Dev.Mag news: a links round-up of interesting articles and newsy tidbits from the past week. Enjoy.

Scribblenauts Postmortem

Like Scribblenauts? Like postmortems? Well, this link shouldn't be too complicated to explain. It's a short read because it's only an extract from the full thing, but it's still worthwhile.

Indies rally against Edge Games

Tim Langdell is the sort of figure who I will politely refer to as being "somewhat notorious" within the indie community. His aggressive copyright pursuits have landed him in quite some hot water already (even EA have stood up and taken notice) but he shows no signs of slowing down as he pursues another questionable copyright case. The indie community, however, aren't taking this lying down and have laid down plans for a few more games in Langdell's honour. The results are hilarious and hidden somewhere in that there hyperlink thing.

Interview: Hitman dev IO Interactive

I opened this one up hoping to get some juicy information on Hitman's development (the recent Kane and Lynch announcement kinda has me hungering), but it seems to deal more with what it's like being a game developer in Denmark. Which is a pretty interesting read in itself.

Differences between Indie and Pro

An important look at what it's like to move from indie and student development to professional game dev, though I imagine that the term "professional" is used rather narrowly considering the bread-and-butter indies who are out there fighting the good fight (as small as their numbers may be). Read this if you're thinking of moving into the big time.

Publishers are doing their best, dammit

In an article entitled Dirge for the Sinking Ship, Sean "Elysium" Sands from Gamers with Jobs rants about the unsustainable gaming market that we have today. He points the finger of blame at the gamers themselves for mercilessly forcing those poor game publishers to turn into the sort of people that we love hating and criticising today.

Free tools for XNA Premium

A post on the Game.Dev forums alerted me to the existence of some new, free goodies for XNA Creators Club Premium members to play around with. Autodesk Softimage Mod Tool Pro and MapZone are available for zero buckaroos amongst some other specials and member-only discounts over here.

Play this thing: asynchronous multiplayer

Play This Thing recently reviewed a game called Hell Is Other People, and the premise sounds absolutely fascinating. The game is definitely considered "multiplayer", but instead of playing against real-time human opponents, you get to fight against past "ghost" versions of their playthroughs. Imagine that: a world where you have real-time action against human-generated behaviour, but get to drop all the tedious teabagging and swearing in the process. Sounds like a little slice of heaven.

The future of modding

Rock, Paper, Shotgun asks how the modding community will be affected by the release of those free engine things from Unity and Unreal. The writeup is interesting and reasonably brief.

Game design site

This is just some link love for Brice over at The Game Prodigy, who recently approached us for some article reprint permissions and stuff. The site publishes game design articles on a weekly basis, and they're mostly quite well-written and informative. Add this to your RSS feed if you're not suffering from information overload just yet.

Modern Warfare 2 now has dedicated servers

... sort of. This has absolutely nothing to do with indies or even game development, but everybody's been kicking up a fuss about it. A good post ender, yes/no?

Look! More cheap stuff! Steam (surprise, surprise) is offering Popcap's anti-zombie gardening-defence game (that sounds less awesome than it is) for half the price until tomorrow. That's $5 for Plants vs Zombies. Who can say no to that?

And while you're shopping, don't forget to grab Time Gentlemen, Please for the same price. In fact, the only reason you should ever say no to a $5 PvZ is if you're going to buy this instead. Get shoppin'.

- Chippit

Because Amanita Design are so awesome, they not only created the awesome Machinarium and accompanied that release with a totally awesome soundtrack, but have now chosen to extend that very same soundtrack with an awesome additional set of 5 unreleased songs, totally free.

If you're not already convinced (but you should be, because Amanita are awesome), you can preview the tracks over on their blog page for the official announcement, but since you're obviously already convinced (because Amanita are awesome), you can just click this link here and wisely invest 31 megabytes in your aural wellbeing. It even comes with awesome cover art, just like the full soundtrack itself.

- Chippit

Nandrew, in his eagerness to post all the news in one go (sellout!), has made his sloppiness evident by missing the really important stuff. "What," you say, "is this that is more important than Scribblenauts postmortems and MW2 dedicated servers?" Actual games are.

And because they're so important, it's wise to get them at the best possible price so you can buy lots of them; something Valve and Steam seem to advocate heartily. This is evidenced in the fact that AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! is half price on Steam at the moment.

As I said, this is the truly important news for today. Ignore all that other stuff, and buy this game now. It's only $7.50, and you get to flip off people as you jump off buildings. This is cool.

And then maybe you can go and read all that other stuff while it's downloading. Maybe...

- Chippit

The guys over at Mo'Minis, creators of mobile development platform Mo'Minis Studio, have recently announced the start of their new two-phase GameCast #2 competition. Like its first incarnation, GameCast #2's theme also revolves around exploiting common gimmicks – and they once again present a slew of suggestions – and offers a whole horde of prizes as motivation. The only twist is that you have to do it three times; three twists on the same gimmick, or three gimmicks linked by a common theme – it's up to you.

So, if you've got an idea of a gimmick you want to turn on its head or a plan for something you could play on your cellphone while you turn yourself on your head¹, you have until the 31^st of January next year to go and grab Mo'Minis Studio and submit your games. There's a wad of 4-thousand Ameri-monies waiting for you if you win, plus all that fame and glory stuff.

- Chippit

¹ This makes most mobile games better. Believe it.