Best of GameSetWatch: From American Idol to Fatale

[Gamasutra highlights a week's worth of alternative video gaming news, media, and other curiosities from sister blog GameSetWatch, as written by editor Eric Caoili.] This round-up brings news on paying girls to play games with you at Akihabara's Cute Room, impressionist-style procedural MMO Love, and the graphic adventure cover letter that got Tim Schafer his job at LucasArts. Other highlights include the cancelled American Idol karaoke arcade game and Tale of Tales' biblical interactive vignette Fatale. This past week's top stories: - Raw Thrills' Eliminated American Idol Arcade Game "Though Raw Thrills didn't give a reason for killing the project, programmer Cameron Silver's voiced frustrations provide a hint: 'These [Star Studio machines] would have been a star, if only they weren't blasted out if the sky by petty politics and brain-dead morons.'" - Tale of Tales Post Fatale's Audio Trailer, First Screenshot "After revealing Silent Hill veteran Takayoshi Sato's involvement as the character designer for Fatale's biblical heroine Salome, Belgium developer Tale of Tales is now calling attention to the interactive vignette's voice acting and music with an audio-only trailer." - Metanet Shares Robotology Walking Demo "'It’s definitely a huge improvement from hard-coding everything — making a biped now only takes ~20 lines of code to define some parameters which are then used to generate the necessary data, instead of 200+ to make all the shapes and constraints by hand.'" - Tim Schafer's Lucasfilm Cover Letter Adventure "Schafer eventually stumbled upon an 'Assistant Designer / Programmer/ job posting for Lucasfilm's Games Division and put in a disastrous call for the position -- after raving about Ball Blaster, his favorite Lucasfilm release at the time, the company's interviewer pointed out that Ball Blaster was the pirated version of the game and that Ball Blazer was the real title." - Play Games And Have Your Ears Cleaned At Akihabara's Cute Room "You can watch a DVD or play video games on a number of consoles with her for around ¥1,000 ($11) every 30 minutes, or you can pay your companion to fake her affection for you by massaging your hand, giving you a love letter, reading a bedtime story, slapping you in the face (both sides), or just looking at you." - Test Your Love With An Alpha Client "Developer Eskil Steenberg has brought Love, his procedurally-generated MMO with impressionist-style graphics, into the Alpha stage with a non-playable client. While you can't login and take control of the much anticipated game, you can preview how its engine will run on your machine." - Isis Novel Pulls In 1.3 Million Players With Tie-in Game "In advance of next week's bookstore release for Isis, horror author Douglas Clegg's latest novel from his Harrow haunted mansion saga, Vanguard Press and FlashGameLicense.com put out promotional Flash game that has so far attracted more than 1.4 million plays from 1.3 million unique players." - Infocom Disk And Manual Glamor Shots For Upcoming Book "Photographer Jennifer Lyseng recently shot a photo series of game disks and manuals from Infocom's classic adventure titles, presenting them with relevant objects (e.g. like a sword and a stone for Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur)."