Recent content by maantren

Love it. Welcome back to The Escapist. Cheers Colin

Absolutely. Also, there's really no such thing as a 6-season commitment, or even a 2-season commitment, when it comes to a new drama series. Everything beyond the first season is just an option. Weird to see the '6 season' thing getting repeated by entertainment journalists - outside The...

Australia's federal labor laws (which don't apply to everything but should I think apply to Team Bondi) say that the maximum average hours worked per week should be 38, though there is the usual 'reasonable additional hours' wrinkle that always crops up. I haven't seen real evidence of the...

His repeated emphasis that it'll have exactly the same gameplay seems like a dangerous design choice to me. Shooters have evolved a LOT in the last decade, there's a reason most successful updates/remakes of classic games focus on capturing the spirit of the original rather than the exact...

I thought Russell Davies and Steven Moffat were a great counterpoint to one another: you got big, fantastical optimism wrapped up with scary fairy tales. Now that Moffat's piloting Dr Who alone, I wonder if his tendency towards cleverness is being allowed to run a bit too free. Cheers Colin

Great review of a great game. Re the inspirations it draws extremely heavily on James Ellroy's LA Quartet of 1940s/50s crime novels, especially The Big Nowhere, to the extent that it's almost a videogame remix of them. Cheers Colin

Great review, thank you, I look forward to playing it. My wife and I love working through the Lego games. Cheers Colin

I agree with Russ's multi-sided take. There are more great games being made now than ever before, amid a set of opportunities and platforms that were practically science fiction not long ago. I couldn't agree more that some of the smartest, most interesting individuals I've ever met are...

I thought this was a great set of questions, in that they allowed the interviewees to take them where they wanted. V interesting to see how some people immediately drilled down into detail, while others took a more strategic industry view. There's a third group that just repeats things they've...

Also, in re Valve: remember that Valve is privately held and effectively doesn't have external shareholders. In other words, they don't answer to anyone financially. This makes a HUGE difference in how you can run a company. All the other big players have to factor in public shareholders or...

Thank you for bringing sanity to this thread. Activision - like EA, Sony, and Microsoft (though not necessarily like Valve, for various reasons)- is a large corporation ultimately driven by shareholder return. By most measures they're very good at this, especially because they don't operate like...

Seasons 1-4 of the new Dr Who are available on Netflix streaming which is less than $10 per month. Season 5 can be downloaded via Xbox Live for less than $20. Cheers Colin

This is similar to James Cameron telling an audience of film students that they're unlikely to ever work on something like Avatar, but that it is possible to find satisfaction in other projects. It's good, realistic career advice. Breaking into the 'AAA' side of the games industry will soon be...

It is (often, not always) and it does. In my experience many game designers will sort of wave their hand and refer disparagingly to 'the fiction' that's going to be overlaid across their awesome game mechanics and levels. There are extremely few people who understand both game design & story...

These are the same people who took two words out of Russ P's largely negative review and put them on the release trailer... Cheers Colin