The reviewer, unfortunatley, missed his chance to really grill Spector. Spector admitted that not having a drag and drop interface for the PC was a mistake. I really would have liked to have seen the reviewer go in and ask about other mistakes. And to see if those are going to be worked on for Thief.

Oh well. I suppose the interviewer was afraid that if he really grilled Spector, then Sector wouldn't do any more interviews with gamespy.

I guess we can only hope that Thief benifits from the lessons learned in makeing Deus Ex 2

Well he does admit it was too short, and too action-y, which I'd agree with although it didn't ruin the game for me. Nor did the lack of drag and drop, since the menus never really stifled me.

Biggest error in DX2 I think was over-fiddling the rendering engine for unrequired lighting tricks. The Unreal engine was perfectly apt to make their game world before they "improved" on it - which largely ended up doing two things: capping the top end performance at mediocre and ruining any chance for a level editor or mod community.

So who's ready for a unified arrow system in Thief 3?

After reading that interview, I have now decided the man is crazy.

He thinks the worst thing he did in the game was not having drag-and-drop inventory? Trust me, that's pretty bad, but FAR FAR FAR from the worst problem.

And his comments on the demo don't touch on the fact that they released it with the Xbox settings activated.

Either he is in denial that he released a crappy game or he is crazy.

In this interview, Spector comes right out and tells us that posting complaints in the various forums is important!

[W]e had people scouring the forums and then we collected the big issues people were raising. I mean, some guy complaining about something or some girl complaining about one thing, whatever. But we tracked the trends and put them up on a big whiteboard and said, "Which of these should we address, which of these can we address, which of these must we address?" And we culled it down to the things that we thought we should do. That's how we created our feature list for the patches.

So keep posting. Keep complaining when things like DX:IW suck. You have more power than you think you do. They listen!

I would be pissed at Deus Ex II like everyone else but the demo never loaded up on my computer. In fact, it would just freeze my computer. But, I did like the black screen I was presented with.

That was a very impressive lighting effect, and I could tell that the engine had been improved.

Bigbigbison makes a good point [slashdot.org] here that I'd like to elaborate on.

Basically, the gaming media blows chunks. Not only should the issue be, "Where are the grilling questions to Spector" but extended, "Where are the grilling questions TO ANYONE." I have yet to really see some nice "journalism" in gaming. When we do have it, it is from the lower level gaming sites, such as the work by HardOCP on Infinium (kudos to them). EGM was all over Enter the Matrix and Dave Perry like prom night before the game came out, spilling their orgasmic spew of screenshots and quote-y blurbs throughout the centerfold of that issue. But when the game bombed, EGM resorted only to cowardly making scattered funnies here and there throughout the issues that followed. What they should have done is sent one of their writers to the doors of Shiny and camped outside with a pen and notepad like Harry Knowles for Obscure-Comic-Book-Superhero-Movie until they could "grill" Perry, instead of taking lame-ass joke-shots at him from the safety of their own pages.

The fact is, Spector has given dozens of interviews since the release of DE:IW, but no one has the balls to really ask him the hard questions. When these magazines interview someone from a dev house that puts out a bug-infested game, the first question on the lips of the media should not be, "Ooo what goody goody game is coming out next tell us more give us screen shots! Mmmmm...screenshotss......" It should be holding the gaming houses accountable, the first question should be, "Why did your game crash computers? Did you know it would?." Etc. They might rely on people like Spector for interviews and advertising, but at the bottom of the structure supporting the gaming meda are the readers and it's to us that they ought to be directly serving.

That's not even taking into account some of the more culturally relevant issues that are largely going ignored, like the treatment of war and Vietnam or Iraq by gaming publishers, for example. Why hasn't someone done a printed piece on why minorities are all but ignored in anything save sports video games? Why aren't our magazine writers playing the role press and critics are supposed to play and holding the publishers to the wall?

Video gaming is, by and large, still infant and immature, and part of this is because our gaming media is more immature than the audience. Gaming isn't taken seriously by overall culture as is the case with film, writing, or visual arts, because our representatives, the gaming media, don't act seriously. If they're not big nerds (the bad kind), they're acting like them when, for example, they allow events like E3 to parade around objectified women to advertise games. We've never really advanced beyond the Nintendo Power stage of writing. There is a place for this kind of amateurism, sure, as there is in any viable medium, be it books or film or otherwise. But we have nothing else to speak of save that. That's sad, and it bodes poorly for the maturation of an industry and an artform.

Someone really needs to smack these writers in the head with a large, heavy, and basic journalism textbook so that maybe, maybe!, they'll snap out of their adolescent obsession with ratings and screenshots and start acting like journalists and writers. That is to say, as journalists quote-unquote, they have a legacy behind them of cultural accountability that they have all but ignored because a sequel to Game X is coming out and just looks so AWESOME DUDE. It's time to start thinking about the games we're playing, and it's in the hands of the gaming media that the initiative lies. They've all but ignored it, as sadly demonstrated by the mentioned interview with Spector.

Just one print magazine or website is all I ask for. Here's hoping.