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Totally crazy, totally canceled indie games, and the people who made them
From World of Goo dev Kyle Gabler to Plants vs. Zombies director George Fan (and everything in between), GDC's "The Failure Workshop" panel was full of thrills. Each of the panel's developers brought a project that never managed to make our acquaintance, offering a detailed explanation of what went wrong. Gabler, of 2D Boy, kicked the chair out from under his studio's robot-based sidescroller Robot and the Cities That Built Him when he and his cohorts finally decided that it simply wasn't very fun. After months of mock-ups and brainstorming, the game was finally turned into a fairly basic prototype (playable here) that sealed the project's untimely fate.
15 Minutes of Fame: Laura Shigihara, voice of WoW's Singing Sunflower
From Hollywood celebrities to the guy next door, millions of people have made World of Warcraft a part of their lives. How do you play WoW? We're giving each approach its own 15 Minutes of Fame. If you haven't yet lost hours (days? a week? ... more?) inside the zany fun of PopCap Games' mind-blowingly addictive Plants vs. Zombies, you owe it to yourself to click over right this minute (we'll wait here, promise) and take a whiff of those zombies on the lawn for free on the web. Wait, another game? Why should a WoW player like you care? Because the irresistible game with the irresistible theme song (above) is coming to Hillsbrad come Cataclysm in a new quest line celebrating the PopCap hit, and the adorable voice of songstress Laura Shigihara follows close behind in a commemorative Singing Sunflower pet. Shigihara, herself a longtime gamer and WoW player, has won the hearts of the WoW Insider staff with her impishly sweet songs -- the latest, last month's light-hearted Blood Elf Druids. My little fourth-grade daughter adores Shigihara; my big, burly coworkers sigh over Shigihara; and I, uh, seem to edit more than my fair share of posts to the beat of an endless zombie march across the lawn. Join us after the break for an exclusive chat with Shigihara herself about World of Warcraft, Plants vs. Zombies, singing sunflowers and more.
