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The Phoronix forums have posted a review with Tomas Pluharik of Mindware Studios. Pluharik, the lead designer of Cold War, talks about the process of creating a unique stealth based action game, Mindware's upcoming projects, and the possibility of OS X releases of future games.

Phoronix: The game engine for Cold War is using Mindware's MENG engine, could you please shed some light on the benefits or technical features of this engine, and why it was developed over going with something like the Doom 3 engine or Unreal Engine 3?

T.P.: This engine is running on more then one platform and was built proprietary for the game. This allow us to make easier what we want and make port to Xbox, Linux and MacOS very easy. Currently we modified MENG and it is strong backbone technology of our prepared projects. It supports most of the modern features, as Patrik has mentioned.

Phoronix: Some gamers have criticized the game as simply being a clone of Splinter Cell. Do you have anything to say that, to clear up any misconceptions on the part of gamers?

T.P.: There are two points I want to clarify. At first the idea and development of Cold war started even before Splinter Cell was announced (and probably developed), problem is that we did not have Ubisoft's money to push the development so fast. Second point is that Splinter Cell is "supertechnology inhuman agent linear game" and Cold war is more "improvising Indiana Jones of journalism". Good gameplay example is that when you start solving problems like Sam Fisher you always have some super high-tech thingie or somebody will fire from orbital laser cannon, but when you get into troubles like Matthew Carter you have to improvise with ordinary things (build gadgets from garbage etc.). The approach to playing is completely different. We took inspiration more from Thief series when we created primal design.

Phoronix: Will there continue to be Macintosh ports of your titles? Such as Runesoft had done with Cold War for Mac OS X.

T.P.: Because of architecture of MENG engine, the port to MacOS was quite easy. From marketing perspective the port of Cold war was a probe. We will see.

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