Cortjezter brings us another 'End of day' post, which you can find below. I'll let him do the talking this time, and just sneak out the back door. I'll see you guys in a few, short hours. Have a fantastic morning, everyone!

Ok, so it's really another post about Winter, and I'm sure some out there are sick of hearing about it, so a sneaky trick headline is the best I can do for you. Come to think of it, with a title like the game has, I can definitely imagine a quadrilogy coming out of the I.P. Anyway, this End of Day Thought has a slightly different purpose than simply continue the push for this campaign, so join as I wax semi-poetically...

The other day, RMC asked me to whip up a little sidebar graphic to help give a little more omnipresence to the campaign, and after missing my target deadline by only one day, I finally came up with something... actually 2 somethings, because occasionally I like to impose my indecision on others and have them do the dirty work. It turns out one will work just fine for our sidebar, but in the event other gamers out there passionate to the cause of Winter feel proactive, they can steal the other for whatever promotional reasons they devise.

Steal us. We insist.

When I began, two thoughts circled in my head as vultures around a collapsed beast in the desert. First, "What the hell assets do we even have to work with?" And second, "I don't even like suspense/zombie games...why should I even care or bother to help?"

Well, as you can see by what I came up with visually, you simply make the most of what you have, or you create something on your own from scratch.

But the second one actually made me think for a moment. Why support a rather grass roots effort if you're not particularly aligned with the goal? For me, it turns out that Winter isn't really the only goal. As grass roots go, it's a single blade of grass in a much larger field of gaming, and therein lies my motivation to support this game.

Personally, zombie/suspense games like Resident Evil, Silent Hill, etc. have never appealed to me for reasons only a *cough* real man like me can understand, but looking at the sales of titles in the genre clearly show that a strong following does exist for them, even on Nintendo hardware. However, no one has ever questioned that in the planetary diagram of gamers, the Big N commands strong legions from the deepest reaches of its core all the way to the fringes of its casual crust. Yet the most dedicated, passionate enthusiasts among us can't help but believe—especially with the runaway success of the Wii and DS—that so much more potential exists on this gamer planet like so many resources to exhaust, than simply a blue ocean teeming with shovelware reefs and schools of mini-game collections.

And that's what Winter represents for me. It's not about personally wanting to buy it or spend hours alone in the dark (no pun) accomplishing each new objective. It's about gathering and showing support for the kind of game that not only deserves to be made (and ultimately enjoyed by those millions of us who have deeper attention spans than a round of carnival balloon darts), but also for the developers of such entertainment. And above all that, it's a blunt reminder to those developers and publishers who lately are blinded by so many other things it seems, that when it comes to game design, one size certainly does not fit all. --cortjezter

PS... if anyone wants any of the assets for these "promotional" images to tweak or derive their own, just drop me a line!