Amtrak Wars is an excellent, original and incredibly bankable series. When Orbit reissued the books a while back, they renamed the main polity the Lone Star Confederation to avoid issues with Amtrak, but I swapped emails with Tilley many years ago and he said that they’d never been approached by Amtrak about it.

Its named for the network itself, which the future civilisation uses as references on maps. The actual physical infrastructure has decayed into nothingness. So, also accurate.

“Amazon had the rights to the Culture for a minute, but pulled the plug for unstated reasons a few years back.”

They show up about 5 minutes into the game (fairly low-key though, to start with). The game doesn’t exactly hide its tie-ins with Control.

It does make me wonder if GTA6 will open with one of the three being unceremoniously executed out of the blue (in the same way one of the GTA4/Episodes protagonists was instantly killed off at the start of 5).

Based on Take Two’s projected advertisement spend for financial year 2024-25, probably Spring 2025 (unless they have another game with the marketing appeal of GTA6 launching before it, which seems highly improbable).

Philip Glass on the GTA4 first trailer is still their peak trailer announcement.

Rockstar work in terms of eras. So the original 2D games gave us Liberty City, Vice City and San Andreas (then a city, not a state), plus London and a futuristic cyberpunk city. The 3D era then gave us Liberty City, Vice City and three cities in the now-state of San Andreas (Los Santos, San Fierro and Las Venturas).…

Well, London and an unknown future cyberpunk metropolis.

Remedy have been in my “interesting even when they fail” category for a long time, and I always buy their games to support them. There’s a few other devs in that bracket (Blackbird, Mimimi until their recent demise, Obsidian, Harebrained Schemes) and a bunch more who used to be in that bracket but aren’t any more…

Data fired his phaser at the guy set on kill, and the only thing that stopped the beam from hitting and vapourising the dude was the beam-out, and O’Brien deactivating the phaser in transit.

The game is published outright and was part-funded by Epic, rather than being exclusive due to a deal, so nope. It’s going to stay an Epic exclusive indefinitely.

I believe it was Brandon Tartikoff who showed faith in Cheers and then, eight years later, Seinfeld, when both had disastrous ratings launches.

Elayne shows up like she does in the second book: she meets Egwene in the White Tower.

Not at all.

It’s a shame they’re releasing this way around. Starfield will have the standard BGS game format, so you can spend hundreds of hours on it exactingly solving every single side, faction, companion character and plain old random quest, or you could just mainline the main quest and polish it off in ~30 hours or less.

Data tried to straight-up murder a guy in cold blood, was only stopped by a beam-out and then blatantly lied about it to Picard, and he absolutely was not malfunctioning or under some external control at the time.

He’s directed 28 episodes and 2 movies.

“TV is only getting better over time,”

A guy called Tom Smith was doing that with the original models on YouTube, until Straczynski flipped out and got WB to shut him down (WB already knew about it and wanted to let it be, but had to act once it was reported to them). The results he got with a home PC and just the original models and scene data files were…