crouton days

A former mid-level manager (of whom we do not previously know) has got in touch with us to potentially expose what is a very disturbing alleged occurrence in the games industry. On the condition of anonymity, he has revealed attempts of Montreal gaming studios to fix salaries of employees and rampant spying by Ubisoft Montreal on all emails to and from its competitors. The source (he was responsible for setting up the e-mail spying) forwarded us along an email between former director of HR at Eidos Montreal (Tremblay) to the Vice President of HR at Ubisoft Montreal (Baillet). In the email, Eidos note there is no benefit of raising salaries and hope the two companies do not so for competitive reasons and EA must be convinced to do the same.

I wonder where else this is taking place.

Related Links: Gamasutra, GamesMontreal

• Dead Space Un-rented it, didn’t keep hope alive. Wrote about that one.
• Mirrors Edge - Still waiting for this arrive / contemplating cancelling GameFly.
• Fable 2 - Rental Queue
• Fallout 3 - Engorssing seems like the right word. Well it was engrossing but it got stale about 10 hours in. I think I’m gonna give it another try on a console but Fallout3 lacks the flavor needed to make that world less depressing.
• Left 4 Dead - This might be the best game ever made. Yes, it needs more content and fuck is the lack of a party system annoying. But my god, I have had some of the most rewarded gaming experiences (both with and without friends) of my life in this game.
• Spore - Haven’t touched this since my initial 3-4 hours investment.
• Little Big Planet - I’m still in love with this game but when I get text messages that say “Zombies” or “Zoey!!” I must oblige.
• Gears of War 2 - Rental Queue - Yeah I screwed with it a bit at work and it (like the original) didn’t do much for me. On a technical level it’s impressive but I don’t find the gameplay very compelling. It has a bit of that Halo/Golden Eye syndrome; it great for the console masses but if I can choose between this, L4D and TF2 why would I bother?
• Midnight Club:LA - Hiring a vehicle dynamics designer 2 months before ship? I wanna meet that Titanic. Also in the queue.
• Red Alert 3 - Not good enough to play for the cinematics. Ripped the cinematics so I can watch them later.
• Need for Speed Undercover - Reviews site tons of technical issues and lackluster gameplay.
• Resistance 2  - Beta’d this. Suckfest.
• Call of Duty:WoW -  Received & returned- More of the same for the most part.
• Wii Music - Queued 
• Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm - Queued 

Jesus?