Wired.com has a really great (and reeeally long) interview up with Trent Reznor, lead and mastermind of the band, Nine Inch Nails. He talks at length about the surrounding story for the Year Zero album and how he went about, not only getting the story out to the fans, but getting them involved in it as well. Where each song on the album was just a snapshot of the times set fifteen years into the future, there was a surrounding story that needed to get to fans in a more modern way that didn’t involve marketing and squeezing profits from it. Reznor also talks on Radiohead’s recent ‘pay what you want’ offering for their album and how it went wrong.

There is audio for the interview, but its only 70 minutes long and will cut off toward the end due to the extreme length (about 90 minutes) of the talk.

Read it here.

Weather you wish to admit it or not, the Playstation installments of the Final Fantasy series, particularly VII and VIII, marked a major turning point in console role playing games. Up until then, role playing games were only enjoyed by a niche but dedicated audience. What they lacked in graphics, their epic stories made up for a thousandfold. Final Fantasy VII introduced 3-d polygon models, fully rendered cinematics, and graphics that were as epic in scale as the game’s storyline itself. Squaresoft had clearly outdone itself, and in 1999, it was tasked with having to following it up. Released in America on the same day as the Sega Dreamcast, Final Fantasy VIII managed to not only surpass the scale of FFVII, but it managed to set a new standard for role playing games. Despite its critical acclaim amongst gaming media outlets and fans alike, many purists don’t think too highly of this entry in the series. For the life of me I don’t see why, because next to Final Fantasy Tactics, this is arguably the best PS1 Final Fantasy game. In fact, it stands alongside Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil 2 as one of the greatest PS1 games of all time, and it’s also one of the finest console role playing games ever.

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Here we have my second attempt at a game review. I feel I’m gonna be sticking to the voice-over type for a while, so you all will have to deal. I’m a wee bit more camera-shy than the male staff here at Powet.

Umbrella Chronicles was a great game, and makes me wish I actually had a Wii, rather than holding a friend’s Wii hostage for the duration of my playing experience. Needless to say, I did quite fine without the awful Wii Zapper, which despite being made primarily for games such as Umbrella Chronicles, didn’t live up to my expectations. Live and learn.