Daily News Spin — May 25, 2001 (Friday)

Rolling Stone on E3

The focus in the story is on the music and parties. The writer must have been hanging out with Wagner James Au.

Every year, the big game makers churn out the free booze and finger foods for bloodshot E3 attendees. Past performances have included Beck and Macy Gray. This year, Nintendo kicked things off on Wednesday with a set by jazz singer, Diana Krall. Microsoft's bash at the Palladium Thursday night earned the highest marks from party-goers with surprise performances by Third Eye Blind and Blink-182. Sony followed up Friday night with its own prize, a raucous set by Everclear in the company's downtown movie studios. Third Eye singer Stephan Jenkins summed up exactly why he and other bands are so eager to play E3 events: "Me get free games!" he said.

Live action Mechwarrior TV series?

Trek Today reported a while back on a new Mechwarrior series that's in development. We missed it originally, but were linking to it now.

Voyager visual effects company Foundation Imaging announced today it will be developing a MechWarrior television series together with Original Series writer Dorothy C. Fontana.

MechWarrior will be a one-hour live-action series, but will also feature computer-generated effects similar to those seen in shows such as Roughnecks: The Starship Trooper Chronicles and Max Steel. It will be based on the popular role-playing game franchise in which players do battle with massive walking combat robots.

EB reports first quarter loss

Electronic Boutique has reported a first quarter loss of $1.4 million in the fiscal first quarter ended May 5. Last year for the same period they had a profit of $2.4 million. Revenue for the quarter was $179.9 million, up 18.7 percent from $151.5 million last year.

Electronics Boutique predicts they will be profitable for the year with a strong second half.

TDK to make Robotech games

According to Primagames TDK is going to make Robotech games.

TDK, as sub-licensee under Mattel's license with Harmony Gold, Inc., has been granted exclusive rights to develop and publish games featuring Harmony Gold's Robotech brand for personal computers, current and next-generation consoles, and handheld systems.

TDK Mediactive has retained the services of game developer Vicious Cycle Software to develop an advanced 3-D game engine tailored to the Robotech series of video games. TDK will create and publish next-generation games that will appeal to the core Robotech audience, and take advantage of each platform's unique abilities.

Microsoft to Sony, phoey!

Yesterday Sony bashed Microsoft, saying that the Xbox was going to fail. Today Microsoft has responded. They're quoted in an article posted at Computer and Video Games.

Microsoft was quick to respond today. "We did expect some reaction from the competition, but for Sony to react in such a way means we must be doing something right," head of UK Xbox marketing Richard Teversham told CVG. "Ultimately, whoever brings innovative games to market that people want to play will win. We�ve shaken the whole industry with Xbox. We set a new bar and now the rest of them are trying to match it. At the end of the day it means better games, more choice and better gameplay.

We love this stuff. It's better than a couple of farm girls wrasslin' in the mudpen.

3am

Gamespot UK has a playable demo of Startopia, the game built by Muckyfoot bots. It's 84 megs in size.

Someone fiddled with the ROM in a Gameboy cart and inserted an obscene image and message in a rental game. "Then, for about four seconds, a drawing of the princess character in the game appeared with a sexually explicit message above the image." Here's the story.

DDR may be a bust for computers, according to this Eurogamer story.

Click here to read yesterday's news