Hi everyone!

Like the rest of you, the Bear Clan is looking forward to playing Mafia II when it is released on August 24th, 2010 – we’re stoked that so many of you have downloaded the demo on PS3, Xbox 360 and PC. Especially the PS3 version, naturally! It was a real pleasure to have members of our coding team work with the 2K Czech studio in optimizing the PS3 version of Mafia 2, and after playing the recent demo, it’s gratifying to see how well it represents the game as a whole.

By the way, if you have any additional questions about Mafia II, why not join the 2K forums? It’s a thriving community of gamers like you who can’t wait to get their hands the next installment of this AAA franchise. 2K Elizabeth and the community management team can give you the straight goods on all aspects of the game!

http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/

Enjoy Mafia 2, and keep an eye out for bears wearing fedoras and toting tommy guns on August 24th!

Cheers

-TIM

Vancouver was host to yet another stellar event Friday evening, as the Bear Clan™ celebrated the official one-year launch of the Massive Bear studio. Nestled snugly after the close of Vancouver’s Winter Olympics and just before the Paralympics and GDC San Francisco, members of Vancouver’s interactive media businesses and press filled the Granville Room in downtown Vancouver. Following the successful completion of a co-development deal with 2K Games on the upcoming "Mafia 2", along with the recent launch of the brand new Massive Bear Studios website, the time was right to share that success with the development and publishing community.

Fresh from LA, celebrity deejay, JudiLew was on the one and two’s spinning deep house, funk and mash while guests mingled and congratulated the team. With the closing of yet another unannounced deal that same week, the night was an absolute success.

Here are a few pictures from the evening.

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