Apologies for being a little link-heavy and opinion-light in recent days, btw - a very busy 2008 budgeting season and a trip with my folks to San Diego are slowing me down.

But hey, that just means that I get to parcel out more neat GSW-worthy Gamasutra links to you, and the latest is the in-depth piece 'Naughty Dog, New Tricks: An Interview With Jason Rubin', just posted yesterday.

As we noted in the intro: "You might know Jason Rubin for his co-founding role at Los Angeles developer Naughty Dog, creator of the Crash Bandicoot and Jak & Daxter series, but the developer, who largely left the industry after amicably departing Naughty Dog a couple of years back, is currently involved in a number of new projects. These include his Web 2.0-styled slideshow/transition-enabling website Flektor (which was created with his Naughty Dog co-founder Andy Gavin, and has just been acquired by MySpace) and his new IP, comic book and reported 'multimedia project' Iron and the Maiden."

This interview is based on a Comic-Con follow-up that Brandon Sheffield did, after we had lunch with Rubin a couple of months back, and there's plenty of notable material in there (yes, including more on the Metallica game!) - we particularly extracted Rubin's comments on next-gen hardware:

"I would much rather have a console that’s 30% weaker and have three times as many of them in the first year sold, so your game reaches a broader audience, and you can be a little bit more aggressive with your budgets up front and things like that. I don’t think it’s about technology. It’s about entertainment."