Daily News Spin — June 25, 2001 (Monday)

3am

Springsteen sang, "My machine she's a dud/ she's stuck in the mud/ somewhere in the swamps of Jersey." Some days, our figurative machines toss a rod, crack a block, bust a hose, or otherwise get stuck in the metaphysical mud of whatever approximates our own private New Jersey. Today's one of those days. So for the first time we present the...60 Second News Ticker!

Turbine announced an expansion for Asheron's Call coming later this year for $20. The good news is a new land mass and housing. The bad news is the game will still have the pillow creatures -- er, we mean the drudges, which may or may not be related to Matt Drudge...probably are, actually....Games Domain has the latest Serious Sam demo. The others were beta demos, but this has the official demo seal of approval. It's at Games Domain and is about 77 megs. "So good it can cure your acne," said one reviewer.

Ion Storm's Dallas office looks more and more like it will soon be history. According to an MCV story, Eidos CEO Mike McGarvey told MCV: "We've made no public statement about Dallas yet, but the truth is a lot of money went in and not much came out. I'm sure those guys will be making games in the future, but whether or not it's with us remains to be seen." Doesn't look like Eidos has much faith in Anachronox either....Interplay's no longer up for sale, for now, according to principal shareholder Titus. Either the rumored buyer dropped out or didn't meet their price or Titus got cold feet over a deal that would have given them a nice cash infusion but probably would have seen their stock price drop as a result of selling their most valuable asset. Titus saw their stock price jump 10 percent on the news.

Oops! 3DRealms was selling Max Payne via preorders for $39.95, which is $10 less than the MSRP. That's a no-no, even if you do have black camelhair coat, alligator shoes, lots of guns and your name is George Broussard. Retailers were upset at being undercut and 3DRealms had to raise the preorder price, though they have promised to honor all preorders so far....Microsoft has announced that the 2001 Virtual Golf Tour has begun, with over $75,000 in prizes that will be awarded to players who win the Links 2001 competitions.

Sony poised to lose marketshare to Microsoft and Nintendo, according to this Financial Times story. Basically, when you have over 60% of the market, chances are your share will go down instead of up when confronted with aggressive competition. How aggressive? Let's just say that with $500 million to spend on marketing, don't be surprised to see Xboxer shorts -- as a giveaway in McDonald's Happy Meals. Or maybe not....It's the "Citizen Kane of Web games" according to the National Post. It's the A.I. web game based on the Speilberg movie. "The murder mystery at the heart of the game is no simple puzzle. The clues involve everything from Shakespeare to T.S. Eliot, from Dadaist painting to the periodic table..." In other words, whatever weird, pretentious stuff they can think up gets thrown in. Spoiler: It was Colonel Mustard in the study with a pipewrench.

Remember the NOD nuclear strike in Command and Conquer? Researcher Mark Seager has done Westwood one better, according to this New York Daily News story. ""We ran the first 3-D simulation ever of a nuclear explosion. It took 492 hours on 1,000 processors," said Seager, a researcher who helps oversee supercomputing at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. "With supercomputers, we can do diagnostics and find out what happens to extremely corrosive stuff like plutonium without having to conduct actual experiments and clean up after them." Seager's part of a team helping the government maintain its stockpile of nuclear weapons. Let's hope they don't hire any bald men named Kane. In the wrong hands, this technology might produce another Westwood RTS. Dear god, no! Anything but that!

Against our better judgement, we can't help but admire the Whisky Robber:

It's a story made for Hollywood, but this is a true-life tale of a Transylvanian-born ice-hockey player turned bank robber. A gentleman- bandit who slugged back a shot of whisky before each of his 29 heists across Budapest, and who, when finally arrested, escaped from prison by tying sheets together. Now incarcerated in a high-security jail, Attila Ambrus, known as the "Whisky Robber", is serving 15 years for armed robbery, but his status as a Hungarian folk hero is assured. He gave flowers to female cashiers as he held up the banks, went home to pick up his dog with the police on his tail, and fled one crime scene by diving into the Danube.

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