Daily News Spin — July 17, 2001 (Tuesday)

Sixty Seconds over games with 2's in the titles

Tom has reviewed the Diablo 2 expansion and re-reviewed Tribes 2. Where's Mark? He's too busy playing the Diablo 2 expansion.

Dragonriders of Pern review

Some German mag has reviewed the game already and given it a 67%. We pass this on only because we've hardly heard anything about this game.

Violent games make us want to drink hot blood!

Avault has a story about another study that purports to link violent games to violent thinking.

The investigators found that playing violent video games seemed to cause a weak to moderate increase in aggressive thinking and aggressive feelings, physiological arousal, and the likelihood of acting aggressively toward another person. Playing violent video games also decreased the likelihood the person would help another person.

Bogus! We have it from a friend of a friend of a friend that Mr. Rogers is one of the top Quake deathmatchers in the world, and who's nicer than him? We'd like to find the knuckleheads who do these studies and knock their heads together like a couple of overripe coconuts and then just let their diseased brain matter squish out between our fingers, but fortunately we work out all our aggressions through violent videogames. Whew!

What makes a game mainstream? Elves, perhaps?

No!

It's Gamespot's question of the week, and Bruce Geryk has the answer.

I'm not entirely sure of what it takes to make a game mainstream, but I know exactly what makes one not mainstream: elves. As far as the rest goes, I looked up the official dictionary meaning of "mainstream," and it said, "things and stuff that happens a lot, right now." So for example, baseball, Balkan war crimes, and the plays of Eugene O'Neill. Those are things that everyone knows about and are happening every day. A good rule of thumb for what is not mainstream is basically anything that would make a girl think you were a dork if she saw you with it. That's why the first thing you don't want in the game is an elf of any sort. Or a spaceship. Or especially any kind of magic anything. "Oooh, is that a magic wand? Are you a faerie godmother?" You can just extrapolate the rest--I won't bother. Since a lot of elves are magic or at least know magic, that makes them just about the worst thing possible. Imagine for a second that you're on the train going to work, and a cute girl sits down in the seat next to you and wants to talk. Think about what you'd most like to be doing at that time to make her think you are really cool: reading a book about elves (with a big picture of an elf where she can see it), playing a computer game with elves in it on your laptop, or playing a computer game about reading elf books in your spare time. Or maybe you are just dressed as an elf for various reasons. Not very good choices, right?

Right! Everyone knows that if you want to get the girl, you're supposed to be a knight in shining armor. So if you have to be an elf, just wear a helmet that covers your pointy ears so she can't see them!

The 2600 lives!

Salon has an article we missed last week about how the Atari 2600 lives on. Fans are making new games and one fellow who makes a hand-held version can't meet demand. There are even "lost" titles that were never released now making the rounds among fans.

Several highly sought-after prototypes have yet to be found. "Holy Grail" titles include games based on "The Lord of the Rings," "The Incredible Hulk," "Rocky and Bullwinkle" and Dungeons & Dragons, as well as 2600 versions of classic arcade games like Scramble, Turbo, Zookeeper and more. Bilstein believes some of these titles will eventually be discovered. "Just as a wild guess, I wouldn't be surprised if 10 to 20 more turned up," he says. "At least 10 games were seen at [consumer electronics shows] back in the '80s that nobody has been able to find, so they may just be waiting in a storage locker somewhere."

Lord of the Rings? Can a Sierra lawsuit be far behind?

Phantasy Star Online 2 pricing

Sega's not giving away the milk anymore as far as online play goes. Pricing for playing PSO2 online will be $15 for three months.

3am

Fatbabies is reporting a rumor that G.O.D. is on the chopping block. If true, we'll miss the free beer at E3, but we won't miss the marketing acumen that picked KISS and Heavy Metal as game licenses.

GOD gone or not, the official Myth 3 site is now open.

Castle Wolfenstein will be ported to the PS2.

Avault's reporting that someone's already figured out how to crack the Windows XP registration stuff. It's as simple as copying a single file and then restoring it whenever you want Windows to quit barking at you for changing hardware configurations.

Mark's got a largish article about MMOGs up at Computer Games Online.

This is kind of nifty. In St. Louis a prototype of a print-on-demand vending machine for books was used for the first time. The book was ordered and downloaded from the Internet via a vending machine, and 12 minutes later a copy was bound and ready. The book? Mistress Ruby Ties It Together, a novel that deals with sadomasochism. Once again, porn powers innovation on the Internet.

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