capek
Latest
'Robot' marks its 90th anniversary as a word
It's not often we mark the anniversary of a single word around here, but this one's particularly close to our cold, electronic hearts -- it was ninety years ago today that the word "robot" was introduced to the public in Karel Capek's play "R.U.R." (Rossum's Universal Robots), which first premiered in Prague in its original Czech language in 1921, and came to New York a year later in English. As Gearlog notes, however, Capek actually gives credit for the origin of the word to his brother Josef, who suggested the term "roboti" that he derived from the Czech word "robota," which literally means "serf labor," and can refer to drudgery or hard work. Of course, robots themselves have evolved quite a bit over those ninety years, and -- given the pace of development as of late -- we're a bit hesitant to guess what things might be like when the 100th anniversary of the word comes around.
Red Faction: Armageddon and the balance of open-world versus story-driven
THQ and Volition brought Red Faction: Armageddon to Comic-Con last weekend, and even though the demo on display was the same one we saw behind closed doors at E3, we threatened to collapse their headquarters with a Nano Forge if they didn't tell us something new about the game. Volition producer Dan Sutton and writer Drew Holmes gave us a little insight on what they're planning to do with the story of Darius Mason, Alec's grandson. Let's get the important stuff out of the way first: The sledgehammer is coming back, so don't worry about that. As for the Ostrich, I didn't get confirmation so much as laughter from the developers, but they said that there would probably be something silly in the game this time around, depending on what the community came up with. "It's up to NeoGAF," joked Holmes. "Someone will photoshop something, and then we'll be stuck." %Gallery-97741%
