Daily News Spin — March 8, 2001 (Thursday)

Official sites officially open

The official site for Freedom Force the superhero game in the works at Irrational is open.

Also open is the site for the game with the dumb name, Necrocide: The Dead Must Die.

What, no Flying Heroes?

We don't understand it. Eidos has announced a Game of the Year Edition for Deus Ex and will sponsor a fan mod contest. The Game of the Year edition, which will be released in May, will include the multiplayer mode and the SDK for Deus Ex.

The Midas touch

A number of games are reported to have gone gold. Fallout Tactics is gold, according to Interplay. Ultima Online Third Dawn is gold, according to Origin, though they say beta testing will continue as well as patching. In other words, it's getting duped and shipped no matter what.

Tribes 2 isn't exactly gold, but they're saying it will be gold on the 19th. Star Trek Away Team is gold. So is Fate of the Dragon, an RTS based on a famous Chinese novel, Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

The Sims House Party is also gold. Gold, gold, gold. Kohan Immortal Sovereign is gold, just a day after Mark asked Strategy First if it was possible to get a beta.

3am

One of us has been sleeping and the other has been too busy posting at Planetcrap to update this page. In other words, Tom's sleeping the sleep of the blessed participants of Shoot Club while Mark's full of crap.

Speaking of crap, one of the world's most expensive coffee goes through nature's crapper, so to speak. Kopi Luwak is a rare coffee out of Indonesia. There's perhaps 500 pounds of it produced each year, and it sells for upwards of $300 per pound. After reading about how it's produced, we have to wonder if the buyers know where it's been?

Kopi Luwak comes from the islands of Sumatra, Java and Sulawesi which are part of the Indonesian Archipelago�s island chain. On these Indonesian islands, there's a small marsupial called the Paradoxurus. This marsupial is a tree-dwelling animal belonging to the Sibet family. Once regarded by the Indonesians as pests because they climb into the coffee trees and eat only the ripest, reddest coffee cherries. What these animals eat they must also digest and eventually excrete. Some brazen local gathered the beans, which come through the digestion process fairly intact, still wrapped in layers of the cherries' mucilage. The enzymes in the animals' stomachs, though, appear to add something unique to the coffee's flavor through fermentation. Yes the most expensive�the rarest coffee in the world is partially pre-digested and excreted by the Paradoxurus.

There's a bit more about this coffee here. We'll stick to Maxwell House, thanks.

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