Well, you could try to convince me WoW, but it sounds like we both know that discussion would be massive. As you pointed out, the core of the argument is a philosophical discussion about the nature of objectivity (is it even possible?), and that's a discussion better left for when we're falling asleep and spooning at night.

Well, as much as I expect it on the other consoles, that's IGN... they do that all the time.  They had Dues Ex 3 listed for 360 a while back.  Besides, the one console that we actually know it probably won't be on is the PSP.  

It sounds to me like PC/Mac/DS/Mobile on Day 1, Wii later. And probably PS3/360 further after that, but I'm guessing not from Maxis.

EA wants the first game to be a mega-hit, and then they'll slowly, painfully drive the franchise into the ground. But the first game should be insanely awesome.

But anyone saying the delays are a bad sign is nuts. This is Maxis. The Sims had a 5 year development cycle too, and it only became the biggest PC game ever and one of the defining games of the 2000's, turned the Sim franchise into one of the biggest in history, and eventually prompted EA to establish an entire seperate label for Sims games. Citing the ol' "sales and success =/= quality" earns you a "STFU" from me.

When we talked about the game back in '05, you spoke about procedurally generated music. Where did that end up?

Well, that was one of the things I was really at the outset very skeptical of because I never really heard any decent procedurally generated music. At some point in the project, though--probably right around then--we hooked up with Brian Eno who ended up working with us on the procedural score. So actually we ended up with over probably--about half of our music is now procedurally generated within the game based upon things you make.

We found it was so fun,  we've actually built this little kind of harness where Brian and our sound engineer could play around with the underlying levers on the procedural engine. This is one of those things that became so fun to play with, we decided we had to surface it the player. So in the game right now, when you're designing a city, one of the things that we allow you to do is open this little device and compose your own theme song for your city--

Wow.

--and it's actually using the procedural generator. So I can hit the "roll the dice button," and it generates a new procedural melody with rhythm, or I can actually grab the notes, and if I want to even put in my own tune on the notes. We've basically turned the procedural music generation into its own little toy and embedded that within the game as well.