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I'm not suprised that people can't complete a 40-hour game. Most give up on a Sin Episodes: Emergance, although it could be dismissed as people not submitting stats after winning the game.

In my opinion, games should take around ~10-15 hours to complete properly for at least one of the good endings (best ending can take any amount of time), perhaps ~5-10 on a low difficulty level.

However, endings that require grinding to acquire tend to kill interest in the game very quickly. Long battle-sequences qualify, especially when you have a tactic that is guarenteed to take out anything (but each hit-point sponge takes 3 minutes to destroy even when inflicting maximum damage per second.)

The soundtrack info is available on the official site: http://www.sinepisodes.com/index.php?soundtrack

As has already been mentioned, the whole "album" is available via iTunes.

Am I the only one hoping to get high quality videos of these two booth babes going at it? *drools*

First off, I should probably lay out my credentials. My name is Michael Russell, and I'm the QA Manager for Ritual Entertainment. We're going to be releasing "SiN Episodes: Emergence" over Steam on May 10.

In some ways, Greg Atkinson is absolutely right, but he seems to be right for the wrong reasons.

There are three global problems in game development: marketing usually promises a date that cannot be met, throwing more people at a problem cannot fix it, and bugs found at the end of a project are hard to impossible to fix.

The marketing date is a huge issue because 90% of the time, the people making the game have no buy-in regarding it. They're working towards being done when it's done, and then when they get told that they have six months when they need a year, things get implemented too fast and half-assed.

Of course, here we are at six months out with no testing so far. In fact, the game is generally in an untestable state due to the huge influx of new, untested, unstable code and/or assets. Several major developers and publishers are now moving to the "monkey" model of testing: hire 100 temps for six weeks at the end, have them hammer on the game, and the end result is 5,000 bugs with little time to fix it.

So, the team gets the game to a basic level of functionality, throws it in a box, and gets to work on the patch while the box winds its way to retail.

Until the industry as a whole learns that QA is no longer just a line-item expense but a necessity, we're going to have issues like this.

Console developers are starting to get it, but mostly because the platform holders have a set of tests that every game released on the console must pass. Fail one test or a permutation of one test, and there is a high likelihood that you won't ship. Suddenly, spending an extra few dollars on testing early to find and fix the problem doesn't seem like a big expenditure compared to the nightmare that is missing your street date.

I'm happy that we've had testing on "SiN Episodes: Emergence" from day 1. Are there still going to be bugs? Always...there's nothing you can do to eliminate bugs entirely. It's the nature of software development. But by getting on the project early and testing through to the end, we're able to make sure that the game is stable, completable, and fun out of the box.

And for a game, that's all you can ask.

Half Life 2 was incredibly well received, both in terms of reviews (metacritic, rottentomatoes and sales numbers.

It sold massively, created a new method of distribution, which other vendors have embraced and cuts out the middle men so hated on Slashdot.

It was first to feature real-time radiosity lighting, scaled from DirectX 6 to 9 and pushed the character animation and expression envelope considerably.

Do you ever look in the mirror and ask: "Maybe I am wrong this time?"

Well, SiN: Episodes is going to be single-player only for the first episode at least, so not everyone is ignoring those who enjoy single-player games.

Also, Ultimate Spiderman had the cartooney-cellshaded look very right.