His last LucasArts interview on Develop is an interview with Haden Blackman conducted prior to his
just-announced departure from LucasArts. Included is
Blackman's account of the creation of the first Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, saying the multiple factors they had to deal with almost killed the project a couple of times: "It was the culmination of everything. We started The Force Unleashed with ten people, so we built a brand new team, the studio was going through a lot of changes and we were building a brand new studio, a brand new engine, a brand new toolset, three different integrated technologies – one which we never worked with before and two others that hadn’t shipped before."
Tech Interview: Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit on Eurogamer.net talks with Criterion technical director Richard Parr and senior engineer Alex Fry about
Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, the next installment in the racing series. The conversation probes the reasons they created another new engine from scratch for this game, battling latency, parallelism versus threading, lighting, polygon counts, and more.
GamePro - The Cost of Piracy. Thanks Mike Martinez.
Indeed, while it may not always be the case for every new video game, it's hard to imagine that piracy does not result in a significant loss of revenue. Infinity Ward's Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, which has recorded over 10 million copies sold, has been the target of piracy on the PC. In an online post, Infinity Ward Creative Strategist Robert Bowling ironically muses, "They wonder why people don't make PC games anymore." Bowling writes that while the number of PC gamers playing the last Call of Duty game was "fantastic," what wasn't fantastic was "the percentage of those numbers who were playing on stolen copies of the game." Piracy tends to be more rampant with PC games, and thus the platform serves as a cautionary tale for the rest of the industry.
Ars Technica - Why lack of StarCraft 2 LAN play still matters.
We'll see how many of those people break down and buy the game for the single-player campaign. What's clear is that a large part of gaming's past is being deemphasized. This story isn't over, but for now, LAN gamers are going to angrily shake our canes at the younger gamers and even—amazingly!—Blizzard, the company that used to be so welcome to frolic on our lawn.
BitMob - Badvertising: The Art of Abusive Marketing.
Both Blur and Saints Row 2 openly attack the games posing a threat to them. In both instances, the games they poke fun at happen to be obvious inspirations for their respective creation. Without the success of Mario Kart's power-up racing, Blur would likely have been a very different game. Without Grand Theft Auto, the similar Saints Row probably wouldn't exist. These commercials shouldn't be insulting their origins. They should be acknowledging them -- beyond saying "look how terrible this is" -- or simply ignoring them.
I just re-watched Diamonds are Forever with MrsBlue, which is always entertaining. It also helped me realize that in my mind Jill Saint John stands out as the all-time best Bond girl. I just read her bio, and on top of her impressive physical measurements, I learn she has an impressive brain, as they say she has an IQ of 162. Wowser!
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