I didn’t work on this project, but I am happy to see it released by my group: this is a quick Kinect game replicating the “seven minutes of terror” NASA will experience as they bring the new Curiosity rover to a safe landing on Mars this August 5th. We’ve been talking with NASA about various collaborations for a long time and it’s great to see this free app hit the Xbox dashboard today.

Mars rover lands on Xbox Live

Microsoft and NASA have teamed up on a Mars rover landing game that lets you try to successfully land the craft on the planet.

Tonight I was remembering my days working on IP for Magic: The Gathering back in 1994-95 and how I insisted that we stop using Shakespeare quotes and the like as card flavor text and instead I wrote the Ice Age and Homelands flavor text as IP characters of one magic color talking smack about IP characters of other magic colors, so we could pack double flavor into every line. That was kind of an internal debate at the time. I can’t say the quality of the writing improved — hey, I’m no Shakespeare — but I did create Jaja Ballard out of that, among other characters, so I think it worked out okay. I wrote most of the Ice Age flavor text sitting in my basement apartment late at night listening to the Hellraiser soundtrack. Not sure if that showed . . .

Fascinating project. I’m in.

This French RPG looks intriguing and beautiful and free of chainmail bikinis. For $10 you’ll get a PDF edition of the rulebook. Check it out.

Finally finished playing Max Payne 3, which is about 75% great and 25% train wreck. Fortunately those percentages occur in sequence so you can just eject the disc after chapter twelve and call it good.

The drum Tim Sweeney is beating here, that freemium is the way of the future, is one that has been apparent to a lot of people since the early days of Nexon’s Kart Rider in South Korea circa 2004-2006. But for Sweeney to beat that drum, and back it up with actual scalable tech and production pipelines in Unreal 4, is a watershed moment for AAA development.

And note his big reveal, which Gamasutra should have led with: Infinity Blade has the best ROI of any title Epic has ever shipped. No wonder Epic is changing gears, and good on them for not being stuck in the past.

Epic's Sweeney: Platform convergence, freemium the inevitable future

In a GDC Taipei keynote, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney discussed how his company is pushing high end graphics, and how western games need to learn from the Asian market and its business models.

My condolences to the family of longtime wargame designer Craig Taylor, veteran of Battleline, Avalon Hill, and other outfits, who passed away this week after a long and storied career. His games Naval War and Wooden Ships & Iron Men were a big influence on my game design work.

One of my projects, Kinect Sesame Street TV, is shipping this September. It’s the lead-in for this great article in Forbes about our strategy for the Xbox.

Microsoft Xbox Is Winning The Living Room War. Here's Why. – Forbes

This story appears in the June 25, 2012 issue of Forbes Magazine. Don Mattrick, chief of Microsoft's interactive entertainment business, home of the Xbox. Photo: John Keatley/Redux for Forbes Cookie Monster wants a snack. Sure, he could have a handful of you-know-whats, but even a Muppet has to watc…