Daily News Spin — July 25, 2001 (Wednesday)

Ziff Davis looking to sell three magazines?

The New York Post has a story purporting that Ziff has put three magazines up on the block.

The magazines said to be in play include Yahoo! Internet Life, Family PC - which in September is being reflagged as Family Internet Life - and Expedia Travels, a travel magazine which was launched last year.

"They are shopping those hard," said one industry source.

Dunning was said to be looking for $60 million for the trio, but nobody seems to be willing to step forward and cough up anywhere near that figure in these troubled times.

Ziff Davis, the publisher of Computer Gaming World, denies that they're attempting to sell the magazines. Ziff has laid off 85 people this year already, or about 8.5% of their workforce.

Sega to cut Dreamcast price again

Avault's reporting that on August 14th Sega will cut the price of the Dreamcast to $79.95 and will follow up with an addition price cut to $49.95 at or around Christmas time in an effort to clear out their inventory. That's a great price for a nice console system with a good library of games, some now priced at $19.95.

Snowball (IGN) avoids NASDAQ delisting for now

Don't know how they pulled this off, considering the already did a three-for-one consolidation of their stock and the price is still anchored well below $1 a share, but NASDAQ has granted them an extension from the scheduled delisting until September 24th. Until then they'll be listed on NASDAQ SmallCap Market under the symbol Snowc. Here's the Businesswire story.

You can spell ECTS as D-E-A-D

The European gaming trade show is generating about as much excitement as a Lawrence Welk rerun. Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft are all skipping the show, according to this Eurogamer story.

Other publishers shunning the main show include Virgin and Take 2, our top picks for Publisher of the Show at last year's event. Another addition to the growing list of absent friends is Vivendi Universal Interactive, the company formerly known as Sierra, who today confirmed to us that they won't be turning up either. Staff favourite Cryo is also a no-show, along with Acclaim, who have been distributing the French company's games here in the UK since Cryo retreated back to the continent following a run of dismal sales. 3DO aren't likely to be around either, so that's no Army Men, no Might and definitely no Magic by the sounds of things. Meanwhile THQ will be holding their own private event for the press at another location nearby.

It's not all bad. Blizzard is set to announce their new game and Brian Reynolds and Big Huge Games should be unveiling the RTS they're working on for Microsoft. Still, the show is looking pretty limp. You have to wonder how much longer it will be around?

Kesmai closing Gamestorm

Some good news, though — the games are being rolled over into EA.com's service it looks like. Here's a bit from the announcement from Kesmai:

With the upcoming launch of MultiPlayer BattleTech: 3025 on EA.com, GameStorm will be closing down. All good things must come to an end, and the service from Kesmai that pioneered massively multi-player gaming is unfortunately no different. Fortunately, our great games like Air Warrior III: Millenium Version and MPBT: 3025 will be pushing online gaming to the next level as part of EA.com! Go there for the best in online sports, action, puzzle, and parlor games. Coming soon are the titles everyone's waiting for: Motor City Online, The Sims Online, and Majestic!

Dancing the summer away

One Ironminds writer observes the regulars who play the Dancing Stage Euromix video dance game in Spain and finds two who stand out:

They are the Torvill and Dean of video dancing, and however good the others might be, in truth, none of them come close to this pair. They are both boys, around 15, one with light hair, one with dark hair, both a bit pudgy and inevitably clad in the standard two-sizes-too-tight Spanish jeans. Neither looks like he should have even the least bit of natural dancing ability. Neither looks, in fact, like he should have any great athletic ability at all.

Once, however, they take their place on the platform and throw their pesetas down the hatch, it quickly becomes apparent that these are not boys to be messed with. The group, which is normally a loose, disorganized affair, tightens around them. The arrows flash, the floor pads blink, the pixelized Carson Daly begins to yell, and the two non-descript, slightly overweight Spanish teenagers put on the greatest display of video-game virtuosity seen since Fred Savage starred in The Wizard.

Mark tried Dance Dance Revolution once at an arcade, but he danced like a centipede with bunions, and that was in the first ten seconds before he got worn out.

Redbook straps on game ratings

If you've successfully managed to get past your first big test in buying computer games, which is figuring out if you need a Mac or Windows version according to Redbook, you'll then have to figure out the ratings system. Fortunately for us, Redbook has cracked the code. First, they translate them into movie ratings, and then they tell us what they mean. Here's their description of a "T" for "Teens" game.

PG-13 "these sometimes get a T rating only because the games are complex."

The article's really not that interesting. Instead, we were fascinated that under the title "Sex Tips for Married Girls" the wholesome, family-oriented Redbook links to and advertises on women.com's forum on sex advice. You can then read all about "anal sex with strap on for men" which apparently is what Redbook readers do when not busy trying to decipher game ratings or trying out new cookie recipes.

Husband and I have been experementing anal sex for my husband (me wearing a strapon) I love the control it gives me. Its like being "wonder woman" only better.

Er, we'll stick to computer games, but thanks anyway Redbook!

They're fighting for your Internet soul

Or so says Forbes in reference to the console battle between Sony and Microsoft.

Sony's digital convergence masterstroke will be the PlayStation 3, a few years out. PS3 will be more network than box. The brains behind PS3 will be an extremely fast "supercomputer on a chip," now in joint development by Sony, IBM and Toshiba at a well-guarded lab in Austin, Texas. The chip will function as both a network server and a game processor and reside either at a central location or in hardware in individual homes. Games will no longer come in packages but will be played directly with other gamers over speedy fiber-optic links.

Sony will stop charging licensing fees to game developers and will make money only from sales of its own games and hardware, all fitted with the chips necessary to play games pulled down from the web. "Who wants to pay $1,000 to $2,000 for a Pentium PC when a $100 tv can do the same thing?" the Sony exec says.

Who wants to play console games when much more interesting PC games are available? Ok, lots of people, apparently. But that doesn't make it right!

EA set to announce Lord of the Rings rights

Red Herring is claiming that EA will announce today that they have acquired the rights to make games based on the Lord of the Rings movies.

Previously, the Tolkien estate (also known as the Saul Zaentz Company, based in Berkeley, California) had licensed Vivendi Universal's (NYSE: V) Sierra Studios unit to make Tolkien-related computer games. But when Sierra's prior owners canceled one game and delayed another, the parties became locked in a lawsuit. They settled the suit earlier this year, but the delays cost them dearly in game production time. As a result, Sierra won't have a game ready until January 2002 at the earliest.

Under copyright law, New Line created a new work of art with the Lord of the Rings films because it modified the story in its scripts and created new artistic assets for the movie. Hence, New Line has the right, separate from the book rights held by the Saul Zaentz Company, to license the stories it created for the movies to EA.

As a result, EA and Sierra will produce rival games under the Lord of the Rings name, much as publishers like Activision (Nasdaq: ATVI) and Interplay (Nasdaq: IPLY) dueled with opposing Star Trek games.

Can a Sierra lawsuit be far behind? We think the behind-the-scenes jockeying may be more interesting than any games produced.

Now if only someone would license the rights to make a game based on Bored of the Rings because that's about how exciting we find all this folderol. The term jejune comes to mind, but we can't remember what it means and we're feeling dull and not interested in looking it up.

3am

As we surf the web in constant search of gaming news, we liken ourselves to the Silver Surfer because he's just kind of cool, except for the Surfer's wardrobe, which gets kind of repetitive. We're more of a Fleshy Surfer with several changes of clothes and we don't know anyone named Galactus: Eater of Worlds, although we do have a friend named George who sometimes orders the chili inferno special at the Eat Rite. But that crazy surfing is also how we found this interesting picture, and no, it could never be us despite what the Taipei Times says. Ok, it could be us on a hyper-caffeinated day, maybe.

We see that Aaron Loeb, the former big honcho at Daily Radar, has bounced into a job as a producer at Planet Moon, the folks who made Giants: Citizen Kabuto. Congrats Aaron!

Europa Universalis II has been announced by Strategy First. There will be 100 playable nations to choose from in this sequel. Sounds like a good historical geography lesson.

TGI Fridays has a 1 meg download of a new game called Moofia in which you play as a cow who lactates animal gangstas to death. Apparently they got carried away by the prospect of making "udder destruction" puns.

The memo that CNET CEO circulated to employees about the upcoming 15% job cut has been circulated on the web now. One of the weird things is that they're going to make everyone work for six weeks before they make the cuts. One of the more startling aspects of CNET's loss is that while they dropped from about $100 million in revenue to $70 million for the quarter compared to the same quarter last year, CNET had not yet acquired ZDNet. So CNET's substantially bigger now, yet their revenues have taken a nosedive.

The Village Voice takes a look at the place that Lord of the Rings occupies in literature.

Not only do pigs taste good, they make good watchdogs too. Read about Arnold the crime-fighting pig. He's a goddamned American hero!

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