In a talk Thursday at the Game Developer's Conference, attendees were exposed to a rare treat: technical information behind development at Square/Enix. Programming supervisor Taku Murata, co-director Hiroshi Minagawa, and lead realtime rendering programmer Yoshinori Tsuchida were onhand to shed some light on a game many years in the making. Though the session didn't provide any dirt on those interested in the departure of game designer Yasumi Matsuno, there was plenty to take away from the highly focused discussion. "Final Fantasy games require a lengthy development process, and this presents the very real threat of being obsolete by the time it ships. To combat this the team allocated its resources with a heavy emphasis on art."

Gamasutra is reporting on a panel put on by the folks at Media Molecule, just hours after Phil Harrison's keynote yesterday. There, they talked about the formation of their ambitious company. They began with just a lot of hopes, and knew hard work was in store for them. Just the same, using techniques they'd picked up in the mod community, they drew up a very successful game concept and got someone else to pay for it. "[Essentially], the company's sole mission at the start was to do the most ambitious game it could produce, asking 'how hard can we make it for ourselves.' 'If we were jumping into the abyss,' said Evans, 'we were going to do it with rockets on our back.'"

Parallax Blue writes "The Washington Times reports that Homeland Security has developed and is testing a new computer system called ADVISE (Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement) that collects and analyzes personal information on US citizens. Relevant data 'can include credit-card purchases, telephone or Internet details, medical records, travel and banking information.' The program apparently uses the same process as the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness project, which was aborted in 2003 due to privacy concerns."