Daily News Spin — March 19, 2001 (Monday)

Duke Nukem goes silver

Dimension Films announced they've acquired the rights to make a Duke Nukem film, which will be produced by the man who brought us Mortal Kombat. The movie, not the game. Of course, this is no guarantee a Duke Nukem movie will actually make it to the silver screen, but it's already gotten a lot further than the long rumored Doom movie. Earlier this year, Dimension Films also picked up the rights to American McGee's Alice, which has been given to Wes Craven under the title Dark Wonderland.

How fitting that a game based on B-movie silliness is actually wending its way towards becoming a silly B-movie. We're wondering who would hold the rights to a game based on the Duke Nukem movie. And at what point does the worm swallow its own tail and vanish?

PKers? Rapists or roleplayers?

Sorry for the alarming headline, but Jessica Mulligan flat out states her opinion about pking in massively multiplayer RPGs in her new Biting the Hand column at Happy Puppy:

If it isn't consensual, it's rape.

What it seems to come down to, according to Mulligan, is that player-killers tend to kill because there's a lack of anything else to do in the game that's as interesting as preying on other players. This is compounded by the complete lack of in-game context for player-killing in most games.

What do I mean? Well, were the bad guys in North by Northwest trying to kill Cary Grant just to sell his clothes on eBay? Of course not; he knew something about them, and they wanted that knowledge to die with him. Plus, he didn't know what it was he knew. Nor did Humphrey Bogart kill to acquire the travel papers in Casablanca or try to auction them off to the highest bidder.

Mulligan's usually a good read. What do you think about her views? Will you play a game where another player can jump out of the virtual bushes and whack you and steal your underwear? Is it ok if the player does it because of some in-game reason, like he needs your underwear to complete a quest? Does context like that make it ok?

Post your comments on our message board.

EB to offer streaming game rentals

Yahoo has a press release from EB and a couple of other partners about EB, Enron, and Into Networks partnering to bring us streaming games over the Internet.

Beginning June 1, Electronics Boutique will offer customers leading game titles via its website powered by Into's streaming software on demand technology. This technology allows users to access software without requiring downloading or installation. To ensure security, the content will be encrypted and encoded using Into's proprietary technology. Through its alliance with Enron, Into will provide technology integration services and an e-commerce solution. Electronics Boutique will be responsible for marketing and customer service.

Into's streaming technology platform provides publishers and retailers another distribution channel for generating revenue and gives customers a new option for renting games. Electronics Boutique will acquire the streaming rights from leading publishers to aggregate popular and newly-released game titles.

The press release doesn't mention what kinds of games can be distributed this way, and how rental "returns" will be enforced -- surely there will be code built into the game that will disable the game after a given period of time? We don't know, but June 1 isn't that far off.

The 7-Up of first person shooters

It's the closest we've come to fisticuffs since our argument about who loves Flying Heroes more. Undying gets one thumb up and one thumb down from us. Read our 60 Second Review of Undying to see who's right and who's wrong.

"Direct Hit! We have ass"

The professors at Joystick101.org have graded Daily Radar and are making them repeat the third grade.

Speaking of content, let's look at their target audience. Generally aimed at gamers, Daily Radar tends to aim squarely at that young boys. That's fine, but they're not pushing the envelope beyond the gaming's stereotypical market. The truth is that there are many other gamers out there, but Daily Radar isn't acknowledging them. Keeping their market in mind, here's Daily Radar's "best Material":

- Edgy fart jokes
- Who has the sexiest retail catalogue
- See a Sesame Street character copulating with Pamela Anderson
- How to get free porn

This may have been the funniest line, though:

First do a search for a common gaming term, like graphics off of Daily Radar's site. You'll get 2533 results. Then do a search for Ass. You'll end up with over 7,000 results.

Holy assification! That's a lot of ass!

Oh, and you really feel like kicking them when they're down, check out this Penny Arcade cartoon. (All of this review goodness was spotted at a link on Lum's.)

Earth and Beyond screens

We're normally not crazy about linking to screens, but a Belgium site has 14 new screens for the Westwood MMOG Earth and Beyond, and these are the first besides a few that Westwood has released.

Earth and Beyond is a massively multiplayer space sim. What's weird about it is that the NPC enemies in space are massive creatures instead of spaceships. What's up with that? You can still fight other players if you want to battle it out spaceship vs. spaceship, but we're not rushing to embrace this idea of fighting giant orcs in space.

Snowball stock in a freefall

Snowball, the parent company of IGN, is seeing its stock price drop like the ratings of an XFL game. Just a few weeks ago Snowball completed a 3 for 1 stock consolidation to boost the price of shares to over $1. Now the stock has fallen to $0.44, not too far off the pre-consolidation price of $0.37. They're seeing most of their paper value wiped out.

Tribes 2 gold

Someone at Sierra finally got done counting all those dimpled and hanging code chads and managed to declare Tribes 2 gold. We're looking forward to this, even though Mark struggled getting a beta copy to play correctly.

It's been a long time coming. It's likely that the fate of what's left with Dynamix rests on the performance of this game. Sierra's sinister foreign Uncle, Havas Interactive, has been in a downsizing mood lately.

EA betting on pay to play

Reuters has a story about Electronic Arts and their recent move to a $4.99 monthly subscription fee for some of their games. In contrast, Infogrames, which recently purchased Hasbro Interactive and its service games.com, is no longer going to invest in their online game network, according to the article.

Bruno Bonnel, chairman and chief executive of French video game publisher Infogrames Entertainment SA and its New York-based subsidiary Infogrames Inc.(IFGM), is skeptical that money can be made with online video games, which are best known for free card games like Solitaire.

His company's Web site -- http://www.games.com -- costs about $25 million annually to maintain and Infogrames recently stopped investing in it, he said. Bonnel argues for expanding the market for games, predicting Web games won't turn profits for five years.

"The formula for interactive entertainment means reaching the mass market," Bonnel said. "We're not making enough games that are sing-a-long."

Sing-along! Good gravy, and this from the publisher sitting on all those fantastic Microprose and Avalon Hill licenses. We can't wait for the X-COM sing-along CD hosted by those silly dilly Sectoids!

The article does cite how confident EA is about their online venture, though -- they're building a new headquarters in Redwood, CA, and they expect to be profitable by the spring of 2002. Of course it doesn't hurt to have a powerhouse title like The Sims Online waiting in the wings. This was tagged on at the end of the story and was a bit chilling:

"We think the next wave of Internet content will be fee-based as the Internet evolves toward other forms of media," said Justin Post, a Deutsche Banc Alex. Brown analyst, in a recent report to clients.

We're all for people who are willing to work hard on Internet content finding ways to make money. We just hope that there will be plenty of free alternatives to the fee-based sites.

3am

How am I immature? Intellectually, emotionally, and sexually. Yeah, but in what other ways?

- Woody Allen

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