Daily News Spin — April 9, 2001 (Monday)

"The 25 Types of Fantasy Role-Players"

Ok, it's about pen and paper games, but it's funny nonetheless. At Gamegenre. Here's a sample:

2. The Real Roleplayer - "Don't start yet!! I need my two minutes to get properly into character."

3. The Loonie - "I sheathe my longsword and kiss the ogre on the lips."

4. The Munchkin - "Five arch-devils and two demigods? That's ALL?! I guess I'll only need to use six of my rings for this encounter."

Fake breasts, real passion at BioWare

The Toronto Star has a profile of Edmonton developer BioWare, and there's a just a tiny bit of new information revealed about the Star Wars RPG they are developing. Here's a quote from joint CEO Dr. Ray Muzyka

``You'll get to play a Jedi in the old republic, a few thousand years before the movies (take place) . . . the peak period where there were lots of Jedi running around,'' he said.

The article's really just an overview of the company, but if you don't know much about them, it's an interesting read. Oh, and one more quote:

But there are stressful, wacky days ahead. When people reach their wit's end at Bioware, they go all out.

Osler (sic) recalls one red-headed staffer running past his door, screaming. He remembers that incident quite clearly because the guy was wearing fake breasts at the time.

``We often kid around here that it only takes two doctors to have you committed for a month,'' said Osler.

That should be Oster, as in Trent Oster, the man heading up development of Neverwinter Nights.

Jane's Combat.net to close

Avault is reporting that the online gaming service will close April 30th. While EA.com will host the new version of games like Fleet Command, F-15, and USAF without dedicated servers.

More on Majestic

The San Francisco Chronicle has one of the best looks yet at Majestic, the conspiracy thriller game that EA is working on completing. Here's the event that sparked the idea for the game.

Majestic may be one of EA's simplest-looking games, but for the company, it's a complicated, and somewhat risky, endeavor.

That significance isn't lost on Neil Young, production chief at Electronic Arts, who got the idea for Majestic in 1999 after hearing a panicked man call in to an Internet radio show that focuses on paranormal events. The man said that since he had recently left a top-secret military base he was being chased.

Just as he was about to reveal a key bit of information, the line went dead.

Ooh...creepy! One of the interesting bits of information in the article is the game length.

The Majestic pilot, which takes between three and five days to solve (three if you allow the game to call you at all hours of the night), will be available free via EA.com, the firm's online hub. After that, consumers must pay about $10 to receive subsequent Majestic installments, which take about 12 to 15 days on average to complete.

Doing 5 to 10, 32 bits at a time

The Brits are rewarding prison inmates who exhibit good behavior with Sony PlayStations, according to the The Sun Newspaper.

Thousands of pounds have been spent on the Sony computer gear.

A prison source said last night: "There are PlayStations on most of the wings.

"Certain inmates are allowed to have them in their cells overnight.

This doesn't seem to sit well with some people, and we don't just mean Nintendo fans.

Dee Warner, of support group Mothers Against Murder and Aggression, said: "I'm disgusted. It is ridiculous.

We're disgusted too. They should make them play computer games. Blue screens, GPFs, driver problems -- that's the way to really punish someone.

The Austin Massacre

Jessica Mulligan at Happy Puppy mulls over the week that saw 107 jobs lost in the massively multiplayer online game industry in Austin. Mulligan looks at some of the thinking that may be behind the cancellation of Ultima Online 2 and Dungeons and Dragons Online and why this may be short-sighted in her Biting the Hand column.

Of the world's population of about 6 billion, only about 400 million are internet enabled. Over 5 billion people are left, and that's a boatload of potential gamers who haven't jacked in to the net yet. It seems likely that at least another billion of them will connect up in the next five years. That's almost triple the users we have now, and they should represent at least a doubling of annual online gaming subscription revenues.

What that means is the people who get in now, create loyal customers and internal knowledge bases about how online game development is done, have a better chance to be the big winners later on down the line. That also means having the will to compete over the long term and to spend money.

You can read Mulligan's latest column here.

Can Nintendo compete?

Forbes asks if Nintendo can avoid being squashed like a turtle under the wheels of a semi in the coming video game wars.

Nintendo's got kid appeal with the lock that Game Boy has on the $1.5 billion portable game market. But Nintendo risks confusing customers with its influx of new products. Fans are sure to flock to the portable Game Boy Advance, but the new product will hurt sales of the old Game Boy. And Nintendo is venturing into risky territory with GameCube, which will likely be mauled by the stylish PlayStation 2 and Xbox. The games developed for Sony and Microsoft have more sophisticated graphics and themes, and appeal to a growing market of late-teen and adult videogame players.

What this article really does is point out how silly some game articles are in the mainstream press. Why will Game Boy Advance confuse customers? By that reasoning, the PS2 must also confuse customers. We spotted the link to it at Evil Avatar.

Waterloo demo

Strategy First now has a demo available of Waterloo: Napoleon's Last Battle. This 37 meg demo is based on the engine first used in Sid Meier's Gettysburg.

The worst games of all time

MyVideoGames.com asks four different writers about the worst games ever made. Here's Steven Poole, a British writer, with his pick.

"Dragon's Lair" was actually a huge commercial success -- but then, so was "Myst". No one said there was any justice in capitalism. Yet even among those who love the tension and thrill of real videogaming, its name still lives on -- as a code-phrase for cynical design failure and total interactivity bypass. I pray we don't see its like again.

Digipen University

No, it's not a Digimon something-or-other. It's an article at Happy Puppy about a university where you can get a four-year degree in Real-Time Interactive Simulation, which is a fancy term for game programming and design.

Time and money are also a factor. DigiPen students are expected to attend lectures and workshops and work on independent projects for about 13 hours a day, Monday to Friday, and eight hours on Saturdays. Tuition isn't cheap, either. At $300 a credit, the entire four-year Baccalaureate of Science degree in Real-Time Interactive Simulation runs students over $46,000. Summer courses are available for those interested in fast tracking through the desired programs.

Yikes. Instead of enrolling, can we just study the Cliff Notes?

Wild Tangent grabs $34 million in financing

Seems like they've made a lot of believers in their vision to deliver interactive media and games that are playable over the Internet via web browsers.

The Web Driver's unique compression technology allows interactive multimedia content to be streamed and cached on a user's machine with minimal wait.

They've raised a total of $51 million now. This latest round of investment comes from Sony Pictures, among others.

Wild Tangent's also the company that former id employee Paul Steed ended up at.

3am

Are you going ape over Black & White? PlanetBlackandWhite is one of several sites, we're sure, that have some bonus creatures available for download. You can grab a gorilla, leopard, mandrill, and horse. Where's the yeti, though? We want an abominable snowman like the one in the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Christmas special.

Salon looks at the predictions in the movie 2001 that have come true.

Not to be a shill or anything, but we noticed that Amazon.com has a jewel case version of Fallout and Fallout 2 for $10. If you're enjoying Fallout Tactics and never played these RPG forebears, this is a pretty good deal.

Finally, get those Amigas out of the attic. Hyperion Software says that Shogo for the Amiga is gold, and they're also working on Amiga versions of Freespace and Majesty. Spotted this at Blue's News. Shogo? Why that game of all games if you want to port something to the Amiga?

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