Solver:	You said that sequels are rarely done well. Is Half-Life 2 a well done sequel?
Sirian:	Results from the Capture the Flag (mod) team game of Descent 3, at SCL 2000. I scored seven goals and helped my team come from behind to win. You can see that my teammates were playing the "hit man" roles while I was in the speedy ship type running flags. Great fun! In most ways, yes. My only real disappointment was the ending. The original had a fantastic final set of scenarios, which I had not expected to be there. When I thought I had reached the end, there turned out to be a whole other part of the game to play, and the most exciting part of all. System Shock was the same way. The exact same thing! The best part was saved for last, and on top of that, the game didn't give it away. I didn't know until I got there. Half Life 2 lacked that extra element. I enjoyed the final sequence, but I saw it coming, and it was not as long as I would have liked. Sequels have a rough row to hoe. Unless they are better than the original, they disappoint. Even if they are better than the original in many ways, if they fall down on one or two, that may be what sticks in players' minds.
Solver:	Yet HL2 was a relatively long shooter, many now only span 8-10 hours. Isn't that a disappointment?
Sirian:	I don't play every shooter that comes along. I still have Far Cry sitting here on my desk. Going to be giving that a try here at some point. I'm a tough customer. Praise from me is hard to win. HL2 was long enough. I had a great time with it, even played it again. I liked the flow and balance of it. I liked the story. I wanted more at the end, though. One more chapter, with something, anything to really catch me by surprise, and I'd have rated it top of the line.
Solver:	Do you have anything to say about the Age of Empires series?
Sirian:	Title screen for one of my Descent 3 maps. You can see part of the level's architecture in the skeletal framework. A good friend of mine is a programmer at Ensemble. Marc Hanson. We have promised to play each other's game in some multiplayer over the winter. Marc was a Descent player. He kind of got the bug for online PC gaming when he joined a multiplayer Descent 2 league that I had founded. I still have his first Descent 2 level, a copy of it. (It was... er... well, it was different!) I played and enjoyed the original Age of Empires. I played it more single player than multi, though. I got the expansion pack, played that through. One of our testers in the CivIV play session, Aeson, was a big AoE player. He played a ton and a half of it in MP, he says, and mostly free for all games, and the lessons he learned from that were very helpful to us in developing CivIV. In a “beat down the AI” sense, he was our control group almost by himself. He is the only [one] to have beaten the AI on Deity, after it had been improved quite a bit. (I beat Deity earlier, but it's a different beast now!) I skipped AoE2... Just one of those thing that fell through the cracks. I tend to find some favorite games and get all I can out of them, rather than moving from one title to the next. Sometimes if I find a favorite, I may not look at other games for a while, and miss out on some good ones. I got Age of Mythology over the summer but haven't had time to play it much. (Been busy! As you can imagine.) I'll be getting AoE3, but I'm not the biggest real time strategy enthusiast, just as I'm not the biggest Civ [multiplayer (MP)] enthusiast. The games take an hour or two to play, and the learning curve demands more of your time. At least that is my excuse! (Maybe I just suck at the “bigger” strategy games. I've never been better than a journeyman competitor at RTS. That's tough when I've been a ladder champion at shooters!) AoE3 certainly looks pretty! It will be one of the games I try over the winter.
Solver:	Do you now play any board games, or is it only video gaming?
Sirian:	My childhood friends are scattered across the USA. We played a lot of board games growing up, and play when we get together but that's not very often these days. When I get around to having a family, I will surely play too many board games with my kids. What can I say? I love gaming. "One more turn!"
Solver:	"I'd rather read the worst book ever written than watch the best movie ever made" – what would you say about that?
Sirian:	Generalizations rarely hold much wisdom. How's that for a self-contradictory statement? I'm a writer. I have thousands of books I've read, most sci-fi and fantasy, but some smattering of other topics and genres. The best book is always better than the best movie, but there are some -bad- books out there. Some godawful examples of letters strung together in useless ways. There's good, there's bad, and there's ugly... in any field. Books, movies, games, music. One man's trash is another man's treasure. Freedom is a beautiful thing.
Solver:	As a sci-fi fan, do you watch sci-fi television shows? If so, which ones would you rank as being the best?
Sirian:	I actually collect sci-fi television. Picking the best is tough. There have been many good ones over the years. How about instead I pick the worst? The worst all time, ever, was a British series called "Blake's 7". I can't believe I haven't yet burned my copies.

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