The hits just keep coming

Manager In A Strange Land, Part...Something. I've lost count.

Those reading the article may wonder: so, did it work? Is Michael Vance the lead I hoped for? Since I actually wrote the article months ago, I can answer. And the answer is: Yes! Yes, he is! He kicks ass.

Those reading the article may also wonder, what's the first law of bad management? I should make you read Tom DeMarco's book. But I won't. The first law of bad management is: if something doesn't work, do more of it.

Something I didn't mention in the article: promoting people to their level of mediocrity might be a symptom of a company that's growing too fast, and taking on contracts that it shouldn't. Right now the industry is contracting - projects are getting cancelled, studios are getting closed - so we're probably not going to see too much of it. In a couple, few years, however, the cycle will reverse, and we'll start seeing those disaster projects again.

I'm 99% sure that Amazon's support system is automated

They almost had me fooled. I'm not sure if they passed a Turing test or I failed one. At this point, I keep clicking the "No, that didn't help," button and writing e-mails swearing and accusing them of being robots and I continue to get bland e-mails apologizing for any frustration I might be having.

Do Movie Games Suck?

Generally people agree that movie games suck. This is a topic close to my heart, of course, so I stopped and wondered. Do they actually suck statistically more than other games? If we look at various movie titles and their gamerankings scores:
Goldeneye: 95
Return of the King: 81-85
The Two Towers: 77-81
Spider-Man: 74-79
The Hulk: 70-72
Enter The Matrix: 65-72
Minority Report: 52-59
Blade 2: 52-57

Did I miss anything? I'm purposely leaving out spinoffs such as Jedi Knight, KOTOR and Trespasser...these weren't tied directly to their movies.
Looking at these, and knowing that a score of 70 on gamerankings is about the mean, I'm thinking that movie titles are more or less distributed on the bell curve as you'd expect. In short, they do not suck statistically more than games in general.

A question you might ask is, with the larger budgets that these titles tend to have, why aren't they *better* than average? And then you can pull out all the reasons people have always pulled out for why movie titles suck: shorter timeframes, constraints of the license, and so on.

You might also say: average games suck. I can't really argue with that.

Scott Miller has started blogging

I expect greatness.

No pressure, Scott.

Yet another action-packed episode of Manager In A Strange Land is up

This time with special guest star Mick West.