There’s a new online gaming mag! The Escapist wants to do serious gaming journalism with a polished presentation. There’s something a bit elitist about it (not unlike UK’s printed Edge Magazine), but the effort is commendable and the reading well worth your time. Best of lucks!

Reading the piece about Bungie’s Marathon, I can’t help but remember my impression of that game back in 1995: an ugly doom clone. Apparently, I missed a LOT of great stuff! But hey, it was hard to experience a Mac game – in fact what I saw was the PC port. Seeing the butchery that was the PC version of the awesome Halo (an external work, like Marathon’s port probably was), I am willing to give Marathon the benefit of the doubt.

The creator of A Tale In The Desert wrote the following:

Interesting fact: Over 50,000 people have [my personal] phone number, and in the 2+ years that I’ve been giving it out (since ATITD 1 went live), I’ve only had 19 inappropriate phone calls. And my favorite of those 19 was from a developer at Blizzard who said "some of us here just wanted to know if this was for real."

The nutters at ImperiaL TeaM keep working on new units and civilizations for Praetorians:
http://www.mod-project.com/modproject/modules/news/article.php?storyid=74
http://www.mod-project.com/modproject/modules/news/article.php?storyid=55

It’s really cool to see a small but still active modding community for our beloved game. Thank you guys for your support!

Edit: Also released is a small tool to compress music files for use in the game. Thanks to Rubén Ramos and Jason Walker for their effort making this happen.

Very smart article

Although it’s been over two years since it came out, it’s still cool to read about people who are enjoying the game. This review showed up at GameRankings.

After so many months, Sin City opened in movie theaters in Spain last week. What a movie! I was more curious than really interested, since I’m not a fan of comics, nor of Robert Rodriguez. But this was really worth the wait.

Check the singleplayer demo, it’s really neat. There’s a certain blandness everywhere (controls, weapons, textures), which is my main gripe with every single Monolith game, but the atmosphere, AI and combat effects are really worth experiencing.

Obligatory comment about The Island: brainless script with very good action and production. Entertainment business in its purest form… except it seems to be a commercial flop. Was marketing badly done? Were people not interested in the theme of the movie? Was it too sci-fi for the mainstream crowd, while too mainstream for the sci-fi crowd?

Whatever the reasons, expect Michael Bay to go back to absurdly bad movies like Con-Air or Pearl Harbor.

Oh another thing… the way they used product placement really sucked, talk about destroying the suspension of disbelief with those Nokia and MSN logos, and especially the current XBox logo on a 2019 videogame! Other stuff like Chrysler cars did work for me, but maybe it’s just that the Chrysler logos means nothing in Spain.

Slashdot spotted this from good old Joel on Software

One word of caution: the article seems like an appeal for the prima-donnas in the software industry. Anyone with a few years of experience has endured the pains of diva team members screwing the mood, atmosphere, and ultimately the project. Talent and dedication are the most important traits in a programmer; knowledge can be acquired, experience is just a matter of time, but talent is innate, and dedication is a part of the personality.

Dedication to what?

Dedication to create the best software that can be created. That’s what separates the divas from the truly good programmers. Divas usually care only about the code they write, and bitch about the code they didn’t write.

Somewhere in the /. comments, someone gave this interesting link: http://thedailywtf.com/