Archive for February, 2010

The Bear Clan™ recently returned from a lengthy stint in Brno, working with the good folks at 2K Czech on Mafia 2. Brno is a beautiful place – there’s nothing like walking around a downtown area with buildings older than Canada. The weight of history is palpable, weighing on your shoulders and filling your vision no matter where you look. More churches than Abbotsford. My personal favourite was The Shrine of Our Lady of Mount Carmel – as I write this, I’m playing a CD of choral music purchased from their gift shop. Our guide was a wonderful lady who kept apologizing for her English, despite being quite good at it. Better than my Czech and German, anyways.  She was kind enough to allow us past the black velvet rope and into some of the more cloistered areas of the church. The Order of the Carmelites dates from the 13^th century – the priests from Kostelní Vydří were able to maintain a presence despite the events of World War 2 and religious oppression from the Communists.

Let’s talk beer, people. Excellent quality, wildly inexpensive – when a can of Coke costs more than an equivalent tasty road pop, you know that you’ve arrived in a country of taste and sophistication. Unfortunately, if one does not pay attention while ordering off the Czech menu and happens to point at the wrong item, it is entirely possible that your beer will be served to you, tainted with banana flavouring.  Yes. The object of much ribbing throughout my tenure there, but to my defense, the iPhone app that was supposed to help translate Czech-to-English was worth pretty much squat. Banana beer has now been crossed off the bucket list. Yay.

There’s a medieval restaurant in downtown Brno named Středověká Krčma, where apparently David Copperfield and some famous-in-Europe shirtless guy like to eat. Servers in authentic old-school medieval dress run around serving grog (yes, grog!), real sheepskin on old wooden benches and meat dishes specifically designed to knock you for. Of course, you wouldn’t know that since the only menu on our table wasn’t translated – so picture a bunch of Canadians crouched around a piece of paper, muttering things like:

“I think that means ‘meat stick’ or something”

“That’s not what the translator says”

“What does it say?”

“…this menu is in old Czech so the app can’t read it”

“COME ON, MAN.”

After providing much unintended hilarity to surrounding patrons, our waitress finally came by after a few minutes, took one look at us and queried:

“English menu?”

Cue uproarious laughter.

Now, I ordered the duck. Apparently ducks in Brno are some sort of super waterfowl, specifically developed to double as attack avians of a sort, because this particular dish was the size of a hefty toddler and surrounded by roughly two thousand dumplings and orange slices. It tasted delicious but there was no chance of me finishing it in this lifetime or the next. Oh, did I mention the two drunk guys chopping apples on a stool next to our table using a real sword? That, my friends, is the sort of in-house entertainment that Chuck-E-Cheese simply cannot match.

Brno rocks and I demand you go there right now.

More pics on the Massive Bear Facebook page.

-TIM

Our new website is alive!

For those of you unfamiliar with the previous incarnation of Massivebear.com…lucky you. We threw it up – literally – in the space of a few hours last summer just for a web presence. It was fine for what it was, but the company has grown exponentially since then and a Massive Bear requires a massively improved website to match. I think this baby is it. We’ll be providing constant updates on the news and you’ll find our devs actively participating on the forums, where we’ll hop on to answer your questions about whatever the latest goings-on are. Not necessarily game-related either, we’ve got a wide variety of interests up in here and will be touching on them all as the site grows.

If you think you’ve got what it takes to join the Bear Clan™, holler at us in the Careers section – we’re careful in how we expand the internal team, but are always looking for talented individuals in various disciplines. You can learn more about the company and what we’ve been working on in the Company and Portfolio headers. The Services link is geared more towards publishers and our fellow developers – our experienced crew of coders and designers have a history of making our clients look good.

It’s been a hell of a ride so far, just returning from the Czech Republic and getting the site up and running. Things are going to grow over the course of the year, so hook up the RSS feed and you’ll find us on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and LinkedIn also. No excuses!

MB out.

-TIM