Daily News Spin — April 4, 2001 (Wednesday)

Green new CGW EIC; Jones moves up

We just received word of a couple of promotions in the Ziff Davis oligarchy. Pretty Fly Guy Editor In Chief of Computer Gaming World George Jones has been promoted to Editor in Chief of the Ziff Gaming Group's Internet operations. Cool. George is a good guy who once gave Mark tips on where to get size 15 basketball shoes for his son.

And, since magazines abhor a vacuum (especially Hustler -- what a dirty magazine that is!), Jeff Green AKA "That Guy with a Finger Up His Nose" has been sucked up to fill the empty slot and has been appointed the new Editor In Chief of Computer Gaming World. Double cool. Mark once gave Jeff advice on how to get his finger unstuck from his nose.

We extend our congratulations to George and Jeff. And Jeff, we'd shake your hand, but we don't know where it's been lately.

Halo NOT cancelled for PC

Time to dash some water on a hot rumor. Halo has not been cancelled for the PC, according to a spokesperson for Microsoft that we contacted.

"Nothing on Halo has changed,� said the spokesperson.

EB apparently emailed some customers who had pre-ordered it and mistakenly said it was cancelled for the PC. It's not. Microsoft is now looking into why EB sent out the email in the first place.

We now return you to your normal rumor-mongering.

Runesword 2 announced

Shrapnel Games has announced that they will publish Runesword 2, developed by Crosscut Games. From the press release:

RuneSword II features include:

* Two full-length adventures, The Land Beyond and The Hunt
* Three mini adventures.
* Turn-based, strategic combat system that's fun and fast
* New combat options that reflect latest RPG trends
* 35+ skills with multiple levels
* 13 races
* Pick a response dialog
* Diabolic creatures, insidious traps, fantastic magic items, you know the rest
* Creator construction set and on-line community that adds more adventures
* New AVI and MP3 support
* Tome Wizard automatic adventure generator - just answer a few questions

You can find out more about this game which is expected to go gold at the end of the month at Shrapnel's website. No screenshots are currently available, though they are promised.

Veteran game designer Tom Loper interviewed

IDevGames has interviewed Tom Loper, who has worked in the game industry for a long time -- he helped design the old Vectrex sytem, for instance. It's a short but moderately interesting interview.

Game concepts come from a variety of origins, as I said in my Classic Gaming Expo talk in 1999. The four usual sources for game concepts are:

1. Brilliant inspiration
2. Licensed intellectual property
3. A technology hook
4. Orders from upper management

Shelley on developing games

O wild west game, thou breath of Autumn's being...oops, wrong Shelley. Bruce, not Percy, gave a presentation at the recent Game Developers Conference entitled Guidelines for Developing Successful Games. Ensemble has posted the article online.

A player must be actively engaged by a new game within 15 minutes of starting play or we risk losing that player forever. There are three keys to getting a new player into a game: (1) an interesting starting situation; (2) minimal barriers to entry (interface, back-story); and (3) giving the player only a few decisions to make immediately but growing that number exponentially (this is the inverted pyramid of decision making). Get the player into the game quickly and easily so that he or she is absorbed and having fun without frustration. When done properly, the player gets into the game successfully and significant time may pass before he or she is aware of it.

It's a bit dry, but Shelley makes a lot of good points and never once drops into archaic, poetic language.

The Last Therapy?

With the possibility that Gamepen may no longer be updated, we may have seen the last Strategic Therapy from Bruce Geryk if Gamepen does indeed wither. As always, Bruce does more than just write about Usenet ramblings.

Unlike books or films, computer games offer at least some (false) sense of achievement because of their interactivity. That�s one of the reasons people get divorced because of EverQuest, but not because of Anna Karenina. If you�re really able to escape so easily into computer games, you�ll never achieve anything since it�ll be far too easy to just take refuge in the game rather than actually doing something. You can do this with a lot of games, but without the open-endedness of a MMORPG or a real-life simulator like The Sims (soon to be a MMORPG itself) the reward is fleeting. A friend of mine summed up a long session of Civilization about ten years ago by saying, "after I was done, I felt acutely aware of the fact that those ten hours in front of the computer had been, essentially, completely wasted." That�s a nice safety device to remind you to get back to fucking work.

Great stuff. Let's hope it's not the last of Therapy. We don't want to be forced to go back to Zoloft to make sense of Usenet again. We need Dr. Bruce!

Crossroads and Warcry merger off

Lum the Mad is reporting that the proposed merger between the Crossroads MMORPG news network and Warcry, a maker of online games, is kaput.

What does this mean? We have no idea, except Crossroads is left without any notable revenue stream.

Another day, another Tribes 2 patch

Last night Dynamix released another patch, the third, for Tribes 2.

Better buy this game now. If you wait and get it a month or two from now you'll spend the first seventeen hours having the game download updates when you first connect to the Dynamix servers.

Rails Across America announced

No, it's not a new Paul McCartney CD. It's a game about railroads, and it's being published by Strategy First. From the press release:

Rails Across America depicts a network of hundreds of tracks with thousands of trains crossing the entire continent. Players focus on strategic decisions, such as where to expand, where to compete, and when to engage in a well-timed price war. Rather than simply operating individual trains, players must build and monitor the rail network, moving cargo from one destination to another. Similar to the �SimCity� model, the level of direct control is limited, but the subtleties that arise are immense, which makes it possible to control large numbers of trains.

While freeing players from managing the "train dispatcher" functions that are common in games such as Railroad Tycoon 2, Rails Across America allows them to focus on higher-level decisions. While many games use money as their sole victory condition, Rails Across America players will compete for �prestige�, which is earned by good railroad management and specific goals for different eras. Multifaceted victory points will mean players will be less likely to find economic loopholes by which to dominate the game.

It's a multiplayer-only game. That's one way to lick the problem of coming up with good AI. And of course the most important question is can we make the trains crash headfirst into one another?

3am

Verant's flexing their muscles and re-releasing EverQuest as a $10 game. It will come in either a small box or simple jewel case, so Sony will still make a few bucks on each sale. Verant claims they've sold over a million copies of EverQuest, but we're sure they're combining sales of the original game with the two expansions. The new jewel case version will have the latest patches but will not include the Kunark or Velious expansions.

Games Workshop, makers of the Warhammer miniatures games, has the rights to make a tabletop game based on the Lord of the Rings movie. As you might expect, they're dropping all but one project to focus on this potentially lucrative title. Thanks to Kazz for this information.

The real Death Star? Richard A. Muller, physicist at University of California at Berkeley, believes a companion star to our sun is the cause of mass extinctions every 26 million years, according to this article at space.com.

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