Daily News Spin — March 22, 2001 (Thursday)

Harpoon 4 cancelled

Lost in all the turmoil over EA's layoffs and game cancellations was the news that Harpoon 4 was cancelled. This was an SSI/GAMES game and new owner Ubi Soft has decided to can it.

Destroyer Command and Silent Hunter 2 are still in production, though, so not every naval game has been sent to Davy Jones locker.

GameLoft to close online portal

The Register is reporting that GameLoft is closing its online portal.

"Seeing no profit perspective in the exploitation of its Internet portal, GameLoft has decided to discontinue this activity while reducing significantly its overhead," the outfit said in a statement.

"Gameloft will now on [sic] concentrate on exploiting its game catalogue on a pay per play basis, on the web and interactive TV where strong business opportunities have already been identified."

Another victim of the "let's get traffic and then worry about how we'll make money" crowd.

EA's memo to staff

If you're feeling particulary voyeuristic, Fuckedcompany has posted the internal memo sent around about the layoffs. Nothing earthshattering, but here's the link if you want to read it.

Disconnected debuts!

We're excited to have Scott Jennings, better known as Notorious L.T.M. (Lum the Mad) write his first column for us. Scott's not going to cover massively multiplayer games for us (unless he feels like it), but will instead be writing about some of the other games he's playing. For his intial column, he's writing about Away Team.

Read it here!

Lost in the fire

We've been trying to get something going with CGW's Jeff Green. We tried a three-way, but Tom was unavailable so the three-way became a two-way that was never completed -- call it writing interruptus. Still, rather than throw this away, we'll go ahead and post the only fragment still extant here. Let us know if this is something you'd like to see more of in the future, namely Jeff and Mark clowning around and Tom making up excuses not to join in.

Jeff Green: So I thought for our first "three-way" I'd start with a question about the name of this web site. Seriously, are you guys really playing games at 2:45 a.m. anymore? Mark, don't you have a family and stuff? Doesn't your wife yell at you to go to bed? Tom, I would imagine that you have never actually been with a real woman, so you have an excuse. I used to do that a lot, especially in the old days of Doom, when I would download .wad files all nite, but now, at age 112, I really need to go to bed earlier. At 2:45 a.m. I am usually midway in my recurring naked-volleyball-with-Gabriella-Reese dream. Is there any game right now that really has you guys up that late? Let me know what it is so I can quit trying to get past the tutorial in Hitman and actually play something fun.

Mark Asher: Yes, I have a family, Jeff. I'm married with children, which means that Steve Urkel is much more likely to be "getting busy" than I am. That's why I play computer games at a quarter to three -- it's the only kind of action I get. I don't know what Tom's excuse is. I did once try to combine gaming with sex, urging my wife to wear shorts, hiking boots, and a backpack. It was great until she asked what this new fetish of mine was. I told her I wanted her to look like my favorite computer game heroine, Lara Croft. At the Emergency Room later that night the doctors told me I was the first patient they'd ever had with a Voodoo card inserted there. Vegetables and even a Captain Crunch spyglass they'd seen, but never spare PC parts. Note to the kids out there: We humans don't have PCI slots.

But you wanted to talk about games that kept me up, right? This will mark me as a stodgy traditionalist, but the game that had me sneaking into bed fifteen minutes before the alarm was set to go off was Diablo 2. Yes, I'm aware of the Battle.net problems, the bugs, the weird save game thing, and so on. It just didn't keep me from enjoying that game immensely. There's something almost hypnotic about Diablo 2, about searching for that slightly better item, trying to go up a level, wanting to clear just one more room. I just kept saying "Five more minutes" all night long.

More news coming

We're updating the page now because we're late, but we'll have more news plus the debut of a new columnist. Stay tuned!

Rune expanison

It's early in the eleventh century. A group of Vikings led by Leif Ericsson have landed in Newfoundland, becoming the first Europeans to set foot in North America. They name it Vinland, or Wineland, for the plentiful grapes to be found. The following year an expedition of three ships and 250 Vikings return to establish a permanent colony. This time they met up with the "Skraelings," the natives of the area who were probably Indians but may have been Eskimos.

At first they trade milk and bits of red cloth to the Skraelings for furs, but the Skraelings, feeling swindled perhaps, eventually attack the Viking settlement. The normally brave Vikings are terrorized by a buzz bomb the Skraelings throw, probably an inflated moose bladder. As they run Leif Ericsson's sister Freydis shouts at them: "Why are you running from wretches like these? I thought for sure you would have knocked them on the head like cattle!"

They continue to flee, and soon enough Freydis finds herself left behind - she's pregnant - so she pulls the sword from a dead Viking's hand as the Skraelings approach, pulls out her breasts, and slaps the flat of the sword against them. Seeing a woman behave in such a manner apparently unnerves the Skraelings. They turn and run and the day is saved.

This was the Viking's finest moment in America. They returned to Greenland soon after the battle. By 1020 all that was left of the Viking presence were some camp ruins later to be unearthed by archeologists and tales like this one in the Greenlander's Sagas.

What has this got to do with the Rune expansion? Nothing really, but we always wanted to work in this interesting bit of history, and the news of the Rune expansion from Gathering may be our last chance. There's not an abundance of Viking games.

Halls of Valhalla is an add-on focused on online play but can also be played offline. It will be a $20 expansion published in April and will offer two new modes -- Headball and Arena -- and additional maps. Better yet, it will have new creatures, including three new female characters.

So here's to hoping for some historical accuracy in Valhalla; namely let's hope we can make these new female characters bare their breasts and slap the flat of a sword across them, because that would be educational. It would be cool too!

Battletech not cancelled, as rumored

We published an EA rumor yesterday about Battletech being cancelled. Apparently it's still a go, as one EA staffer wrote us.

It is way delayed from what it was originally planned for, because the original design was contracted out to a third party. They screwed up. The entire thing was taken in-house and restarted from scratch last summer. A more or less complete game, with basically no role-playing/strategic features, focused entirely around mech combat, was pretty much finished by early February....

It is practically done, which is probably the only thing that saved it....At this point it needs a few glaring bugs fixed (not complicated ones - they're more oversights or brain farts on the part of the programmers than fundamental problems), about a week of hard-core banging on it by the testers to make sure nothing is broken that used to work, and it'll be ready to enter the publication process (which, on EA.com, is notoriously slow - takes about a month for things to make it through to be actually live on the site).

As I understand it, the plan is that there will be a beta test while the game itself is going through the publication process; I don't expect that to turn up much more than hardware compatibility and driver issues at this point. If you have a decent system, the game should run fine (it's a pretty impressive game, graphically, for being just 15 megs of download).

We saw this game at Gen Con a year-and-a-half ago. It certainly had some impressive persistent world elements planned, like chains of command, different worlds to fight on and control, and more.

3am

Tom's not much of a massively multiplayer gamer, but Mark's a big fan, so he's still reeling from the shocking news from EA and Origin yesterday. It wasn't enough that UO2 was cancelled, though. Events continued to torment Mark as the day wore on. Last night he had to run out to the grocery store and while on the road he noticed a huge, dark shape coming up quickly behind him. It was nighttime, so he had trouble making out just what it was until it was close. Was it some kind of small truck? Maybe an SUV? Or maybe...no, it couldn't be...not that harbinger of doom...not that!...not the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile!

But it was. The truck that's a rolling commercial for hot dogs and Freudian psychoanalysis tailed Mark all the way to the supermarket parking lot, taunting him, flaunting its immense weiner in his rearview mirror, making him feel small, inadequate...and hungry.

Later, at home and still shaken, Mark decided to watch TV. So he sits down and the first commercial he views is one about erectile dysfunction. Noooo!

It was just that kind of day.

Click here to read yesterday's news