Daily News Spin — August 7, 2001 (Tuesday)

Hall and Romero working on new game

Blue's News dug up an interesting quote from Next-Generation magazine about what they're doing now:

The two founders of ION Storm may have completed work on Anachronox and been all but banished from their Dallas-based, 54th-floor ivory tower. Still, the two are collaborating on a new PC game and shopping it to publishers, including Eidos. According to sources, the game is being described as Sin meets Rollercoaster Tycoon meets Age of Empires. It's being planned for Xbox and Game Boy Advance.

True confessions! Sordid tales! Explicit non-sex!

CGOnline, the website AKA as CDMAG AKA Computer Games Online, has posted their "True Confessions of the Game Testers" article that appeared in a recent issue of Computer Games Magazine.

Keep in mind that testers test crappy games too. Testing Daikatana wore out Eidos' Colby McCraken, who says it was particularly tough due to a lot of problems, specifically design issues, and he knew it wouldn't live up to the hype and expectations. "It was such a big mistake to put weak levels in the beginning of the game, but who knows how the public is going to receive it?" he says with a sigh. "Red Alert 2 looks like a game that was made five years ago, but it's really doing well."

A tester at another company laughed about testing one of their upcoming A-list "big hit" games, saying it was way outdated and behind the times that there was nothing exciting about it. But when a really bad game comes to the department, testers pray that their managers will have mercy on them and assign those games to the newbies and temps.

Castle Wolf's multiplayer has Nerve

Activision has announced that Nerve Software will create the multiplayer content for Castle Wolfenstein. Kind of an interesting arrangement, having one developer do the single-player and another do the multiplayer. From the press release:

Gamers will join the fight as an axis or ally soldier and be challenged to intense, realistic campaigns like storming beachheads, infiltrating military installations, holding strategic positions, and more. The game features multiple objectives spanning a variety of maps, including an Axis airbase, a war-torn German village and a secret Nazi laboratory.

It's team-based stuff. Hey Valve, someone else is stealing Team Fortress 2's thunder.

Timeline news

Remember Michael Crichton's game development studio? We had heard they closed, but they didn't. The laid off all but one, according to this Eurogamer story.

Michael Crichton might be a great novelist and script writer, responsible for films like Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain and Sphere, but when he turned his attentions to the gaming industry the results were rather less impressive. Timeline Computer Entertainment's eponymous debut game Timeline was based on the Crichton novel of the same name and launched at the same time as the paperback version of the book. It was still a critical and commercial flop, apparently selling less than 50,000 copies worldwide and proving that simply printing the magic words "Michael Crichton" on the front of a box isn't enough to make a game a hit.

So it was perhaps no surprise when the company "temporarily" closed its doors at the end of June, sacking all but one of its staff and aborting work on a PlayStation 2 version of Timeline. Thank god. The sole remaining employee of Timeline is now CEO David Smith, who ironically moved to Timeline after leaving another company he had founded with another best-selling author - Tom Clancy's Red Storm.

Ironically, Red Storm is about to release a Dragon Riders of Pern adventure game. Let's sit back and see how that game based on a popular series of novels is embraced.

Laser Squad Nemesis tidbit

Freelancer has some news about Codo Games (formerly Mythos) and their current game in development, Laser Squad Nemesis. This was plucked from Codo's message boards, apparently:

As long as somebody is permanently connected and checking for new mail every minute or so, whether they have a 56Kbs or faster, it is perfectly possible to play quick games of LSN. Unfortunately email does occasionally let you down and there can be delays (depending on how well your ISP manages your mail - if you have your own mail server, then there is no problem). We will also be providing a feature which will allow you to find an opponent whenever you want a game. This works simply by flagging the desire to play a game, and finding the most recent person who has also indicated a desire to play. A game is then initiated automatically as soon as an opponent is found. Having said all this we will probably be building a direct login version after we launch the email version. The direct version will allow chat rooms and instant games, as well as allowing normal email game to be played without the hassle of having to use another piece of software to manage your communications. Direct connection to our server from the LSN client will allow us to develop more scenario types, including team based fights, three way fights, time limited turns and so on.

The original Laser Squad predated X-COM and X-COM refined a lot of the elements presented in Laser Squad. Nemesis is a multiplayer-only game.

3am

Cyberlore will not have to lay off any staff due to the cancellation of the Borg Star Trek game by Activision, according to an Avault story.

Wizards of the Coast may have another Pokemon-like hit on their hands with the imminent release of a card game based on Harry Potter.

The Hollywood Wax Museum now features Lara Croft as played by Angelina Jolie.

Funcom's announced that they're abandoning the console market to focus on online stuff. Good. Fix those Anarchy Online bugs.

The Writer's Guild has ranked the all-time best screenplays and guess what? Phantom Menace didn't make the list! Go here for the story.

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