Daily News Spin — March 29, 2001 (Thursday)

Ultima Online gold = dong

Lum the Mad is really manic today, finding this wonderful quote in a Dell news story about eBay auctions.

This puts the exchange rate at around 15,000 to 25,000 Ultima Online gold units to the U.S. dollar, making a unit of Ultima gold nearly equal in value to the Vietnamese dong.

Somehow, we always intuitively knew this. And of course if the price of UO gold drops, then we can say that UO money isn't worth dong.

It's all good.

Dungeons and Dragons Online cancelled?

Lum's site is reporting on a rumor that the Austin-based team working on the unannounced D&D MMORPG has been laid off and the project cancelled. Remember, this is just a rumor at this point, but we wanted to bring it to you. Lum's doesn't have any more information than this yet either.

We've been hearing about this game for at least 18 months, but we have no idea how far along they are. In some ways a MMORPG D&D game seems like a sure hit, but perhaps Infogrames is concerned about the cost and feels that both the existing MMORPGs which obivously draw upon D&D for inspiration (EverQuest in particular) and Neverwinter Nights will make any new D&D Online game a risky proposition.

Pencil Whipped

It was Old Man Murray's game of the year. Now read the story behind Pencil Whipped at Feed magazine.

In spite of this simplicity, there's still a lot of variety here in terms of things that try to kill you: There are little, knee-biting thingies that are insanely hard to dispose of; gigantic mounds of crap that float around making farting noises and flinging smaller mounds of crap at you; guys who wield sabers, yelling stuff like "You think you're tough?" and "I'm gonna carve you a longer ass crack!"; and their pals who look like nothing so much as tailless beavers with battle axes. Flickinger is up to eleven enemies so far, with more on the way.

Wired on games becoming movies

Wired has an article that looks at how games are being leveraged into full-fledged multimedia properties.

"You can't just make a movie anymore in this environment, you have to make a multimedia event," said Larry Kasanoff, CEO of thethreshold.com. "You have to make your intellectual property into all the ways that people can consume that entertainment. Duke will be a movie at first, but it will also be a cartoon, a record. That's what being a producer means today."

Duke does hip hop. We can't wait. Yes we can.

Seriously Funny

Those pesky kids at Old Man Murray have another funny piece, this one a new interview with Croteam's Roman Ribaric about their game Serious Sam, which goes against the grain of these "one monster at a time" shooters that dominate the scene.

Erik: Exactly. You know who was scared by one monster?

Roman: No.

Erik: My grandparents!

Roman: Yes, and also a baby. Maybe George Broussard.

Ensemble releases screenshot from unannounced game

It's a teaser, but a bit intriguing. Here's the link.

It looks like the game has fantasy elements in it, what with the sea creature and the unit on the beach that looks like it's out of Egyptian mythology. This is a shot from the RTS game using the new 3D engine that Ensemble has been working on for months.

Elian the game!

Ok, it's a flak magazine spoof, but funny nonetheless.

The trick here is to take down Elian without killing him. Usually a shot to the knees works fine, but you'd better hope he doesn't duck because if you're so unfortunate as to plug the itsy bitsy immigrant, you have to face Janet Reno, a tough final boss who makes hitting the Death Star on "X-wing" look like taking down a "Resident Evil" zombie with a rocket launcher. Suffice it to say, no one on the Flak staff has bested Reno. We're beginning to suspect that fleeing the aggravated attorney general is the best tactic.

Prima to be acquired by Random House

The leading hint book publisher is being purchased by one of the leading publishers, according to a Daily Radar news story.

Prima will retain its name and the distinct editorial identities of its publishing programs, with its staff continuing to be based in Sacramento and Indianapolis, working closely with Random House counterparts in New York. Prima Games, which has about half the US stategy guide market, with annual sales of more than 10 million copies, will become a new imprint of Random House Information Group.

Doesn't everyone just go to online sites for cheats and walkthrus now?

Tribes 2 patch

The game should be in stores today, but you'll have to patch it before you play online. Here's a link to Sierra's patch.

3am

MSNBC has an interesting article about a possible change in the U.S.'s military strategy, shifting away from the heavy tanks and aircraft carriers towards lighter forces that can be more rapidly deployed and aren't as dependant on large bases. Smaller, faster, sneakier -- sounds like the NOD forces from Command and Conquer.

In another push for fee-based content, Major League Baseball will charge $10 per month to grant access to web broadcasts of baseball games. Yikes. Also, 3DO's newest High Heat Baseball has simmed the upcoming season and predicted that the Boston Red Sox will win it all. Right. We're guessing High Heat doesn't factor in the Curse of the Bambino.

�Do you believe you were descended from a monkey?� Rep. Denny Altes shot back. �If we teach kids that they were descended from monkeys, don�t you think they�ll act like monkeys?� So said Arkansas state representative in a debate about banning the Theory of Evolution from Arkansas textbooks, thereby himself providing a strong argument that some of us are descended from jackasses.

Finally, a "master of wizardry" will gladly have sex with you as a way to drive out evil spirits -- well, you may have to be an attractive 20 year old woman. We were never we're quite so creative with our pick-up lines, but then again we didn't end up in court like this wizard did either.

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