Daily News Spin — May 3, 2001 (Thursday)

Diablo 2 commercials

For those of you who can't get enough of the big red guy with the horns, Blizzard's posted two Diablo 2 TV commercials for your viewing pleasure. Thanks Murph!

New Dune massively multiplayer game in development

Dune Generations is a massively multiplayer real-time strategy game from Cryonetworks. Blue's News has the story and links to the official site and a gaming site with some screenshots, but it's all in French.

Sony's bringing the muscle

If this is true, it's pretty big news. According to a story in Eurogamer, Sony will slash $100 off the price of the PS2 in the third quarter, right about the time that the Xbox and Gamecube are expected to be released.

Previously it was whispered that Sony would grab headlines at E3 by slicing $50 off the price of the PlayStation 2 in the USA, and �50 in United Kingdom / Europe, but now reports in this week's MCV suggest that the consumer electronics giant will hold off until Q3 when it will unleash a massive $100 / �100 reduction across the globe.

That's got to put some hurt on Microsoft and Nintendo. We wonder if they will respond by pricing their systems at $199? Nintendo has been aiming at that price point all along, but the Xbox is rumored to cost over $400 per unit just to manufacture.

Update: We just noticed that Chips and Bits is taking pre-orders for the Xbox at $429.95. They may just be guessing on the high side or they may have inside information. Who knows?

Microsoft buys Ensemble

Hmmm...we hope this doesn't mean that Ensemble's games will be Xbox exclusives. Real-time strategy games really need a mouse and keyboard or mouse and something else, like MS's Strategic Commander.

The press release also mentions that the Age of Empires series has sold 8.5 million copies. That's a lot of dumb hayseed farmers who have to told to replant their fields.

Yahoo on the Daily Radar closing

Nothing we really didn't know, but it's an interesting overview of Future Network's problems and some of the problems facing the print magazines too.

Daily Radar also had the misfortune to be covering the gaming industry at a time when advertising spending in that field was plummeting. The publishers of Imagine's rival print magazines at Ziff Davis Media and IDG say ad pages in their magazines have dropped off nearly 50 percent so far this year, and project little chance of recovery until the fourth quarter, when Microsoft and Nintendo (news - web sites) will introduce new consoles.

Fifty percent? Yikes!

Lord of the Rings is a Vivendi deal

Vivendi is Havas is Sierra, if you know what we mean. They've locked up the rights to do games based on the Tolkien novels for the next eight years. The first game will be The Fellowship of the Ring and is being developed for one of the consoles -- they didn't say which one. Seattle-based game studio MM3DF is also reported to be creating an online Lord of the Rings game. They're the ones that recently sued Sierra and then withdrew the suit without prejudice.

The rights to make games based on the movies are reportedly being snapped up by EA, so we may have competing Lord of the Rings games.

In the year 2005 there will only be Star Trek games and Lord of the Rings games released, we predict.

Yo! Check this shit out. We be tha Stone-Cold Hardcore Mack Daddies of the gaming news scene cuz we 'bout it 'bout it, brutha.*

It's the ultimate Magic Fingers experience. The Odyssee from D-Box Technologies can be installed in your sofa and make your movie watching or game playing experience unique, as this New York Times article suggests.

By installing motion simulators, called kinetron actuators, beneath the corners of, for example, a sofa (not included in the $16,000 price), and plugging them into a motion controller, viewers can bounced in three dimensions. To watch Jodie Foster being hurled across the universe in the 1997 film "Contact" is to share the ride as a D- Box Technologies-enhanced sofa rumbles, pitches and rocks.

The actuators, which are about the size of a brick, can lift a sofa or chair about an inch and at an acceleration rate of up to two G's. The system works with a CD-ROM that contains the motion instructions for dozens of movies, games and sporting events. When the CD-ROM is placed in the Odyssee's controller, it synchronizes motion with the action on the screen.

The article does caution readers about using The Odyssee with Battlecruiser 3000, though.

One man tried the Odyssee with a computer game, Battlecruiser 3000 AD. The game was apparently buggy, though, and the combination of feeback from the game bugs through the kinetron actuators caused a brief wormhole to open, swallowing up the player, the couch, and the Odyssee motion simulators. D-Box has promised to refund the purchase price to the man's family, though the cost of the couch is still in dispute.

Ok, so we made up that last part. We're sorry, Derek. What are you doing, Derek? Why are you pointing those ion cannons at us, Derek? Derek!

*Headline generated by Quarter to Three's proprietary "Voodoo Extreme Pimp Talk Simulator" software. (Actually, the pimp talk was stolen from The Onion's Herbert Kornfeld.)

"Blaming the media"

Freedomforum.org has an interesting look at a recent debate about the violence in the media, including computer games.

Heins' own research suggests that what really matters is not the media influence, but a history of personal violence, or "what the individual person brings to the television show or video game."

Rhodes, author of The Media Violence Myth, agreed, saying that the media receive so much blame primarily because they are visible targets.

In previous generations, he said, blame has gone to whatever passes for new media, whether that be comic books, which were initially attacked for their violent content, or novels, which originally were thought to corrupt young women.

Novels corrupt women? Instead of fixing them a drink we should be handing them a book? We're so confused!

3am

Funcom has announced that the sci-fi MMORPG Anarchy Online will be released June 27th.

The SFC2 Pirates of Orion website is live.

Tex Atomic's Big Bot Battles is done and will be released on the 14th as a purchasable download from RealArcade. We're feeling a bit cranky today, so we'll make a prediction about this one. It will be a huge sales flop. We expect that Monolith's headquarters will disappear in a fiery explosion and the area will be radioactive for years afterward. That's how much we expect this game to bomb. And now when we go to E3 Jason Hall, king of teh monstars, will probably kick our asses.

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