Daily News Spin — March 20, 2001 (Tuesday)

Slow PS2 sales are a downer for GDC

The San Jose-Mercury News has an article about the problems Sony is having in meeting it's goal of shipping three million PS2 units by the end of its fiscal year.

``Sony's shipments may be close to the 3 million that is their goal, with the key difference being that the product will have shipped, but it will not have arrived in North America -- let alone at retail or distribution centers, on the way to retail shelves,'' said Edward S. Williams, interactive entertainment analyst for Gerard Klauer & Mattison in New York

Game companies, listen to us. Just make PC games, ok? Oh, and Game Boy Advance games are ok too. Thank you.

Birth of game studio

It's not exactly D.W. Griffiths stuff, Gamasutra has an interesting article about the birth of a mystery studio in Spain. It's written by one of the founders of this unnamed company, and takes a look at their struggles to get going.

So, our research results show that we need to sell between 100,000 and 250,000 units to become profitable, and that the exact number depends on the negotiations with the publisher. As the break-even point cannot be reached by sales in Spain alone, the company has to start from the very beginning with an international focus, trying to reach a worldwide audience. This simple formulation has helped us a lot to focus our vision.

America, the politically incorrect game

Guest writer Jim Frazer has played America.

Just think of the most typical stereotypes of each of the factions in America and you will no doubt find them in great quantities. The Mexicans all sound like a couple of mice from a 1960s Speedy Gonzolez cartoon. I kept expecting my units to suddenly run off, grab some cheese from the fridge, and drop an anvil on my cat. And of course most of the units are portrayed as either lazy or drunk; the construction units all sound like they�re upset that you woke them up, and the Gunmen, one of the most common units I purchased, can only be recruited from a Cantina.

If you're not too lazy or drunk, click here to read Jim's Early Hours with this German game.

Doom powered by AA batteries

Activision announced that Doom is coming to Game Boy Advance. Sounds great. They're also going to do an X-Men and Spiderman game for GBA.

Wizards of the Coast stuff

We saw a press release yesterday announcing a new Chainmail miniatures game from WotC. This is going to be a Dungeons and Dragons skirmish game. It's called Chainmail in homage to the set of rules that gave birth to D&D a quarter of a century ago. Mark still has a copy of both Chainmail and the first set of incomprehensible D&D rules that TSR published.

In other WotC news, they issued another press release about the D&D Master Tools, the computer software based on Troika's Arcanum editor:

The D&D Master Tools is an essential tool for Dungeon Masters to generate characters, monsters, treasures, encounters, and maps which can be cataloged for easy and quick reference. The Arcanum World Editor adds a powerful, tile-based map editor to the D&D Master Tools program. Together, this suite of tools will enable Dungeon Masters to author adventures in the classic D&D module style. Additionally, the initial print run will include a unique Blackguard pewter miniature.

Nothing really new there, but they release did indicate that the tools would be out in August.

3am

Before computer games, there were other games. Before anyone reading this, there was Little Wars by H.G. Wells, the first miniatures game. When he wasn't busy writing The Time Machine and other works, he liked to play with tin soldiers.

The beginning of the game of Little War, as we know it, became possible with the invention of the spring breech-loader gun. This priceless gift to boyhood appeared somewhere towards the end of the last century, a gun capable of hitting a toy soldier nine times out of ten at a distance of nine yards.

- H.G. Wells

We're hopeless now, and it's all his fault.

Click here to read yesterday's news