I recently had the chance to chat to Nicholas from Portal Prelude about the mod over on hafllife2.net in a lengthy interview covering all kinds of stuff such as:

Chris - How do you feel fans of Portal are going to react to seeing other NPCs in the game?

Our testers were not that annoyed. Because there’s no GlaDOS, and because it’s in the past. We needed to find something a bit more “realistic” and “familiar” to talk with the player. The former human employees of Aperture Science were a really good idea, because basically, we never really see them during the test. You hear them, and you know they’re watching you, just like if it was GlaDOS.

Why don’t you read the whole thing?

I am a big fan of the Football Manager games and it was a pleasure to recently do a little Q&A with two of the biggest figures in the series, Marc Duffy (MD) and Miles Jacobson (MJ). With chatter about topics as varied as Football Manager Live, E3 and piracy this is a must read for anyone interested in the Football Manager series and in the anti-piracy debate. Check it all out after the jump!

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I conducted an interview with City of Heroes Lead Designer Matt Miller before the recent announcement about City of Heroes Issue 12 going live and I have only just noticed the interview is live on 411 Mania!

The full interview can be found here and we share some thoughts such as these:

Q: How do you see the MMO, or as I like to call it, the MOG (Multiplayer Online Game) scene today. Do you think it is getting ever better, or are there too many World of Warcraft clones?

MM: I think there are a lot of WoW clones because everyone wants a piece of WoW, not surprisingly. A lot of publishers the last couple years have looked at backing MMOs to compete for WoW’s users.

The fact is, though, we don’t need the kind of numbers that WoW reports to make a game that is fun and profitable, and the sooner the industry remembers this the better. Our game is a perfect example. Sure, you always want more people in. But you don’t have to have a customer reach that, say, Lineage and WoW have worldwide to be a success. Let’s just make some really fun and unique games.

Q: Do you think that MOGs are the future of the PC? Will we ever see MOGs become successful on the consoles?

MM: I think that we’ll see MMOs on the consoles, but they will be/feel different than PC MMOs. It’s like RPGs, PC RPGs and Console RPGs are both RPGs, but they can play and feel radically different from one another.

So head over to 411 to read the full thing.

Sometime last year I read an article in PC Gamer about a little game called Masq. I went and downloaded the game and immediately fell in love with it for its extremely strong story and general brilliance. Earlier this year in my weekly PC column on 411 Mania I talked a little bit about Masq. Soon after that Javier Maldonado got in touch with me and we decided to do a little Q&A. What you read below is the result.

Javier talks about the beginning of Alteraction and Masq, the development of the game and his thoughts on the story in video games today.

Chris - How did Alteraction come into being and what is the company ethos?

Javier - A few years ago I was looking for way to participate/play in a movie-like story, meet exciting characters, etc. However, all that I found were games which seemed to be trying to stop me from living and enjoying the story, either with twitching challenges or difficult puzzles. And the story was not that good either. So I decide to make my own. I figured many others would enjoy playing these kinds of “games” so I decided this was an enterprise for the long term to trigger a new game category. I went to some friends and asked them to invest some money–and Masq and AlterAction were born.

Chris - Masq is brilliant, how did the game come into being?

Javier - It was inspired a little bit by David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and Latin-American Soap operas. Over many years I wrote and programmed Masq in Macromedia Director. My wife was my editor and main tester. I even drew the first three episodes, but soon we came to the conclusion that this was too much work and we needed some help, so we set up an office in Mexico where we hired local artists. In the US, well known game designers such as Ken Melville and Noah Falstein helped me to localize Masq in English and introduced me to everybody in the gaming industry. I must say that with a few exceptions, the industry was very dismissive.

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Thanks to my work on Half-Life2.net I have been able to get in touch with the guys behind the Half-Life Short Stories mod and have a chat with them. We covered a good few areas of interest, the genesis of the mod, talking about the different parts to the whole thing and much more. Interview after the jump

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In an ideal world I would have done this interview face to face, me and Frank one on one discussing anything and everything under the sun. As it is I was lucky enough to do this very nice, very good, very frank interview with Frank. (No pun intended!) We talk about everything from the G.A.N.G awards, the Universe at War soundtrack, working with Petroglyph, Red Alert 3 and much much more..read on my friends!

Chris ’Evo’ Evans -First off thanks for doing this interview with me Frank =]

Frank Klepacki - No Problem!

Chris - Congratulations on the nomination for the G.A.N.G awards, how do you feel about this nomination?

Frank - It’s really nice to know that enough people on the advisory board, who are all pros in their own right, believed that track should be among the nominations. So I’m very thankful for that.

Chris - What are your thoughts on the song that got you the nomination – ‘Divine Intervention’?

Frank - I’m very proud of the track, it’s something different I was able to do for a change, a sort of hybrid of epic meets contemporary sound. It’s the defining song for Universe At War, the rest of the team picked up on that as soon as I wrote it.

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Jon Hare, the man behind the Sensible Soccer games and the Sensible Software range has recently claimed that the standards of programming have fallen since the Americanization of the gaming industry. The interview posted on CVG reveals his thoughts on what is happening today in the industry.

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