Daily News Spin — August 14, 2001 (Tuesday)

Desslock's Throne of Bhaal guide up

Gamespot has posted Desslock's massive guide to the expansion for Baldur's Gate II.

For years now, you've battled across the Sword Coast to discover your destiny. Are you, in fact, destined to ascend mortality and succeed Bhaal as the new God of Murder? Or is it your fate to finally put an end to the machinations of the dead deity and his offspring? In Throne of Bhaal, the final chapter in the Bhaal saga, you'll finally realize your full potential and determine your own future. It won't be easy.

It will be easier with this guide, though!

Ziff Davis CEO canned

From Ziff's own press organ:

Ziff Davis Media, Inc., the holding company for Ziff Davis Publishing, today announced that James D. Dunning, Jr. has been replaced as Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, effective immediately. Avy Stein will serve as interim Chairman and CEO until a permanent replacement is appointed.

And:

The company further announced that it is not seeking buyers for its consumer titles, or any other titles. It is also fully committed to the recent launches of CIO Insight, ExtremeTech and PCMag.com, as well as the upcoming launch of Baseline.

The great thing about working in the publishing and the game industries is that they're both so stable. Thanks Dan!

Make games, go broke

Makegames.com has a royalty calculator that shows you what you're likely to make as a game developer. For example, selling 20,000 copies at $29.95 will net your development company about $16,000. One developer adds some commentary:

I gotta tell any kid thinking of getting rich some brutal facts from my own experience in writing PC games as a sole author/programmer/designer several years ago for major publishers (I did 9 games under pen names for Sierra On-Line, Adventure International, Electronic Arts, Konami and Broderbund). At least 2 of these sold in excess of 100,000 copies. All (but one) were done on royalty agreements ranging from 5-15% of net.

But in every case I had a hell of a time getting an *honest* or *any* accounting of my earned royalties from the key accounts payable person(s) at these companies. Let alone getting my royalty checks from *its in the mail* to physically in my mail box. Beware. If you're contracting as an individual with these business machines, you will get *f---*! The most common form is to send the programmer an UNSIGNED contract, asking him/her to sign and return it ... only to discover that, as time passes and the market changes or something else, the programmer ends up being contractually committed, the clock starts running, but the company cant find the right person to sign and return you a complete two-way contract.

Make game, give to charity

Also from Makegames.com is an interview with the creators of Battlesphere, a new game for the Atari Jaguar, of all things. It's a billed as a "cross between 3D space sims like Wing Commander and Freespace and the old mainframe Star Trek games of the 1960s and 1970s." They're working on an OpenGL version too.

Makegames: What kind of market did you perceive for this game? Has the market changed since you started working on it?

Scott: Back in 1993, we thought there was a huge hole in the market for this sort of game. A lot of gamers and game magazine editors agreed with us. Interactive Magic tried to plug it with _Star Rangers_, but that was a very disappointing product and I think it may have scared anyone else off from trying. More recently, I think the release of _HomeWorld_ might spur another mainstream attempt. The hole's still there. Unfortunately, since this game is not an example of a recently successful genre, it's hard to convince a suit to take a chance with it.

The official site for Battlesphere is here. The charity they're supporting is diabetes research, which is close to our hearts.

Pirates of the GBA

Game Boy Advance piracy is already a problem, according to Wired:

It already looks set to become the fastest-selling console ever. Two million units have been sold in Japan and one million in the States. Nintendo expects to sell six million worldwide by the end of the year.

But instead of paying $40 for each game cartridge, the $129 Flash Linker Advanced allows games to be downloaded from the Net and played for free.

Featuring a 64-MB memory card, the Linker plugs into the game cartridge slot at the back of the Advance console. The Linker is ostensibly used for saving games and game data, like levels and extra points.

But it is basically a burner for Game Boy games.

From Myst to Mudpie

Red Herring has an article about Mudpie, the mysterious, ambitious game being developed by one of the creators of Myst, Rand Miller.

Although he hopes that Mudpie will recreate the Myst phenomenon, Mr. Miller hasn't let success go to his head. He built a cool headquarters with a dry moat and a faux drawbridge, but a new building includes a transparent-glass conference room with a garage door, in honor of the company's humble beginnings. And Mr. Miller is still a devoted Christian who lives with his family in Spokane and drives a two-ton Ford F150 pickup.

Financing Mudpie won't be easy, even for a veteran. Myst and Riven generated $320 million in retail sales, 10 percent of which landed in the Miller brothers' pockets. They used a chunk of that money to pay their production expenses. Then, a few years ago, Robyn decided he wanted to make a computer-animated movie, so Rand bought out his brother's stake in the Myst franchise and formed Cyan Worlds. He put his remaining $5 million into the new company and got additional funding from Sun Electronics, a Japanese company that helped finance Riven.

God damn, we're happy he's a devoted Christian! That erases any and all fears. Of course he knows what he's doing!

Scorpia, remember her?

One-time and long-time RPG and Adventure game columnist for Computer Gaming World Scorpia has been interviewed by Just Adventure. It's really a weird interview. We'll just excerpt the little word association game they played:

Okay, let's play word association: Johnny Wilson.

Great guy!

Jeff Green [current editor of CGW].

Who? ;)

George Martin.

Never heard of him ... or did you mean George Jones?

Uh, George Jones [editor of CGW before Jeff Green].

Heh. Well, he's the one who gave me the "good news," so I'll leave that one to your imagination.

Mark Asher.

He's a dreamboat. I want to have his children! He should be in charge of CGW, CGM, and PC Gamer and should be drawing a salary that would make A-Hole jealous.

A-Hole?

You know, that ridiculously high-paid shortstop for the Texas Rangers.

George and Jeff, she loves you but apparently doesn't know baseball! And yes, we made up that last part. It's called poetic license, and if you don't have one, you haven't been eating the right cereal and sending in your boxtops.

Like we said, weird. Guess there's not much adventure game news to talk about.

Casanova coming...

....but wasn't he always, the cad? Still, Casanova the game? Apparently so, according to Eurogamer. It will have swordplay and seduction. To wit:

...a special "seduction-based interface" will allow you to charm your way into a lady's heart and/or bed chamber, presumably for plot-furthering reasons rather than simply to get some nookie.

Hey, nookie's all the motivation we need. To hell with the plot. Let's rip some bodices!

Dynamix officially closed...

The word is out. Dynamix is gone and so are 97 employees. Tribes 2 will be continued and supported as a franchise, but not with the help of Dynamix.

Aw fuck, there's just not much left of the old Sierra. Kinda sad.

...but Throne of Darkness demo ready to download

Yep, Sierra's posted the demo. It's 125 megs of negative corporate image fightin' gameplay.

Throne of Darkness is the samurai-inspired RPG made by Click Entertainment, a group of former Blizzard employees. As you might expect, some Diablo comparisons are in order.

Loki goes chapter 11...

...and we used the ellipsis out of sheer habit. Bad news for Linux gamers. Loki, the developer who has made many ports of PC games to Linux, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, according to Blue's News.

Somewhere, a Windows fan with the handle "Thor" is chuckling.

Gilman Louie and In-Q-Tel get thumbs up

A Congressional-mandated study (ooh!) has determined that In-Q-Tel, a CIA-related venture capital firm, "makes good business sense." This is a company headed up by former Spectrum-Holobyte and Microprose executive Gilman Louie. Yahoo has the story:

U.S. intelligence agencies have been criticized in recent years for being behind the curve on technological advances made by the private sector.

To address that issue, the CIA set up and funds In-Q-Tel as a five-year experiment in investing in high-tech companies to acquire innovative technology for the spy agency's use.

If Louie does for the CIA what he did for Microprose, better start learning Russian or Chinese now. What's next? John Romero and Killcreek designing the Star Wars missile defense system? Actually, they probably couldn't do worse.

Thanks Tim!

You've been warned!

We're sent word that the disclaimer for Steel Soldiers is somewhat alarming. See for yourself.

Before you begin playing the game or allow your children to play it you must familiarize yourself with this chapter....Fits can happen to people who have had no previous history of epilepsy....If you or your child suffers from any of the following symptoms; head spins, disturbed vision, eye or muscle spasm, fainting, disorientation, uncoordinated movement or convulsions, you should immediately stop playing the game and contact your doctor.

What about pernicious vomiting? Anti-social behavior? Torturing animals? That's all ok? If after playing Steel Soldiers our children grab a corkscrew and attempt to drill a hole in our foreheads to better drip mercury into our brains, should we call the doctor? Please, cover every damn contingency!

The suggested safety procedures violate all practical rules of gaming as well.

Sit an appropriate distance from the monitor, ideally as far away as the wires and controls allow.
Use a computer with a small monitor.
Avoid playing the game if you are tired.
Make sure the room you are playing in has appropriate lighting.
Take 10-15 minute breaks every hour."

What? No admonishments to spray the keyboard and monitor with disinfectant? No dire pronouncements about global warming? No reminders about the illegality of removing mattress tags?

Thanks Jason!

Solid Snake waxes existential

You think these video game characters have no feelings? You think they're just mere playthings to be used at your whim? Damn you and your thumb-happy kind! The Onion knows better:

Snake, who has been fatally shot 2,143 times in the past six months, said he does not know why God deems it necessary for him to endlessly repeat his mission, which involves sneaking aboard a hijacked military ship and discovering who stole the walking nuclear-equipped battle tank known as Metal Gear Ray.

"Why will the Lord not grant me my final rest?" asked a reincarnated Snake, crawling underneath a lifeboat on the ship's weather deck. "Certainly there must be a greater purpose for me than to kill dozens and eventually be killed myself."

Added Snake: "As Goethe said, 'Man must strive, and in striving he must err.'"

Goethe also said, "Woe to me! I'm allergic to quill pens and they haven't invented typewriters yet." And then added, "You know, I bet a lot of people will mispronounce my name. Damn."

Thanks Eapen!

3am

Lum the Mad is reporting that CEO David Allen is no longer with Artifact. They're working on the MMOG Horizons. What, an MMOG game in turmoil? Hard to believe.

According to Stomped the CPL will now refer to its "athletes" by their surnames instead of their nicknames to foster more professionalism. Goodbye Thresh, hello Fong, and where the hell's the Beefeater gin so we can make sense of it all? To further a professional atmosphere, Mountain Dew has also been banned, as has all talk of comic books, The Simpsons, and Star Trek. (By the way, it's ok to ask for Beefeater by name in bars in every city except for San Francisco. Asking for some Beefeater there may get you unexpected results...ba-da-ding!)

Sega's made it official. The Dreamcast is now $80, representing one of the best buys in gaming right now. Meanwhile, Daikatana can be found for $5 in the bargain bins, representing one of the worst buys in gaming right now. Good lord, will we ever get tired of Daikatana jokes? [ed. No.]

Cisco fizzles instead of sizzles. If you like irony:

Cisco had flattened the corporate pyramid, outsourced capital-intensive manufacturing, and forged strategic alliances with suppliers that were supposed to eliminate inventory almost entirely. Sophisticated information systems gave its managers real-time data, allowing them to detect the slightest change in current market conditions and to forecast with precision. If anyone had the "vision thing" nailed for the new digital era, it was supposed to be Cisco CEO John T. Chambers.

Oops! The surprising abruptness and severity of Cisco's downturn--marked by a shocking $2.2 billion write-off of inventory in April--showed that it was just as vulnerable as any other company to an economic slowdown.

Wonder why TV often sucks? Here's a revealing bit from the New Yorker. It's a quote from an NBC television executive:

Noting that people had high expectations of NBC because of shows like "Frasier" (whose charms have always been lost on me) and "Law & Order," Zucker said, in a rather bald lack-of-mission statement, "I think that if we continue to try to produce multiple hours of programming at that level, we'll get left behind."

It's too hard! One Frazier's all we can handle! Stop yelling at us!

Sticky eyeballs from Archie McPhee. Cool.

You say, 1) Where was the news on Monday? You say, 2) We looked but didn't see it? You say, 3) Hey, you're getting lazy! Our answers are, respectively:

1) Look in your ass.
2) That's because your head's in your ass.
3) You're right, we're lazy, but look at this.

Actually, no one complained. This is just our way of working out our guilt over not updating. Please forgive this lapse in the civility and decorum that so otherwise characterizes this website, and does anyone have some links to some smokin' pr0n?

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