Daily News Spin — August 1, 2001 (Wednesday)

Game music, an informal history

The Portland Mercury has a look at the history of music in games.

The first video game soundtrack on a home system was a series of two hollow ringing sounds--a tinny "pong" and another higher-pitched "pong." It was Pong, released by Atari in 1976, and, though such simple sound effects seem primitive by today's standards, the computer-generated, technological sounds of ping-pong gave atmosphere and depth to an otherwise one-dimensional, line-drawn game.

Oh yes, without those sound effects Pong might have been boring. Wait, it was boring. Never mind.

Good times for Timegate

The Houston Press has a brief writeup about Timegate Studios, makers of Kohan, one of the better games released this year.

The founders of TimeGate Studios are a group of successful businesspeople who made their money in boring ways: biotechnology, real estate, health care, oil and gas. For fun, they played computer-gaming tournaments, but soon found the current titles on the market lacking.

This article's from May, but hey, we just saw it.

RSI from PSX?

The Telegraph explains that young gamers are at risk from repetitive strain injuries.

Mark Bender, the British Davis Cup tennis team physiotherapist, believes that the addictive nature of computer games makes them doubly hazardous: "Children spend hours in an unnatural position, while carrying out habitual repetitive micro-movements with their hands - punching the keys or battling with tiny consoles."

Then they get older and become teenagers who spend hours doing unnatural things with habitual repetitve micro-movements of their hands. These poor kids just can't win!

Game writing Babylon

Jeff Lackey explains why so many game reviews suck.

There are some factors more insidious than simple inexperience and ignorance that result in higher than justified ratings. While not directly related to advertising or corporate pressure, these factors are a result of the type of relationships that writers can develop with programmers, producers, and PR folks. Once you get fairly experienced in the writing game, you�ll find yourself regularly chatting with and meeting the people who produce the games you�re reviewing. Life would be a lot easier if the people who create and promote bad games were evil cretins and the people who create good games were all cheerful saints, but alas, life is not so simple. For some inexperienced writers, it is very difficult to know and genuinely like someone and then write a review that destroys the game to which that person has dedicated the last two years of their life. Thus, you will see some articles in which the reviewer goes out of his way to emphasize the good he can find and blunt the criticism of the bad, desperately trying to avoid hurting someone he knows and likes. The problem, of course, is that the writer works for the readers. And the irony is that the reviewer owes everyone � reader, game designer, PR rep, editor - precisely the same thing: a fair, accurate, articulate review.

Read on, MacDuff, and fasten your eyes to the rest of Jeff's editorial. And if you want to know why the paintings, we were abducted by whimsy, we're tired of screenshots, we couldn't find any fresh monkey pictures...something like that.

Activision registers for stock sale

Gamasutra has the story, which basically says that Activision wants to issue more stock to take advantage of their recent market success. They could raise as much as $177 million.

3am

Games Radar, which looks like Daily Radar with "Games" substituted for "Daily" and the word "pants" substituted for "ass", has interviewed Nintendo's Miyamoto.

Tribes 2 has registered 200,000 players. We asked and Sierra confirmed that yes, Tribes 2 has sold more than 200,000 copies. It's not that we're stupid but that we never know about these things. Game companies are like movie studios when it comes to tossing numbers around. Ok, we're probably stupid too.

Mediaweek mentions that a Mechwarrior TV series is planned. We'd already heard this, but each new story makes us believe it might actually happen. Whether that's a good thing or not is yet to be seen.

Luddite Industries sells computers in wooden casings. Yes, we don't understand how selling computers qualifies them as Luddites of any kind, even if they are wooden ones, but that's the beauty of free enterprise -- you can pick your own name for your business whether it makes sense or not.

We often talk of rock/paper/scissors strategies in computer strategy games. Why not go to the source? Visit the home of the actual rock/paper/scissors strategy guide. A sample:

One of the first tricks learned by the novice is to hold back a throw of paper until the last possible moment to dupe an opponent into believing that you may actually be throwing a rock. This allows you the extra few milliseconds for fine-tuning your approach and delivery. Both paper and scissors have this ability, however unless you are employing a "double-back" strategy, cloaking a paper throw is likely to draw an instinctive paper from your opponent (as a reply to your phantom rock). Therefore, the stalemating effect of paper cloaking has lead most RPS enthusiasts to view this tactic as a very defensive move.

Homo aquaticus? The Boston Phoenix takes a look at the past and present for setting up homes underwater. Short answer? Don't trade in your sneakers for fins just yet.

The Sausage and Egg Hermit is dead. Irwin Rose was found dead over the weekend in New York and managed to leave this world without leaving behind any kind of a paper trail besides eight years of deli receipts. No ID, no bank book, nothing. He hadn't left his apartment in the last 13 years and ate the same meal three times a day for the last eight of those 13 years, which was rice pudding, chicken soup, two eggs over easy, sausages, cheesecake and sometimes a milkshake, according to this brief New York Press writeup. Sounds like what we eat every day.

We have another one of those man vs. machine chess match things getting ready to start. World chess champ Vladimir Kramnik will play Deep Fritz, the successor to Deep Blue. Kramnik wants to restore humanity to the top of the intellectual food chain once more. He's doing it for all of us! Oh yeah, he's also guaranteed at least $600,000 for playing, according to this MSNBC story.

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