Daily News Spin — September 27, 2001 (Thursday)

The Pong guy on games

The LA Times has interviewed Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari and the Chuck E. Cheese pizza chain. Bushnell talks about how games have changes and his new venture, UWink.

In the 1970s, 40% of our players were female. Remember, it was socially acceptable for women to challenge men on a game of "Pong." Women were very, very good at "Pong." It was part of the dating scene. The number of people who told me they met their wife or husband playing "Pong" was huge. They were shoulder to shoulder, talking and playing. It was body contact and verbal contact. And it was fun. Virtually no women play games in arcades today.

UWink makes and distributes game machines in restaurants, hotels, and bars and the machines are hooked up to the Internet so they can be updated daily.

Wicked is out; Apache is in

That's the new lineup at Voodoo Extreme. What does it mean? No idea, but posts are being deleted on the message boards and the smack talk is back.

We want nicknames too, but we're kind of mild-mannered. We're thinking maybe Mark "Jaywalker" Asher and Tom "Attractive Nuisance" Chick. Cool, eh?

Dark Age of Camelot is Europe bound

Mythic Entertainment has signed a deal with well-known European publisher Wanadoo to ensure that their MMOG gets distributed in England, France, and Germany starting in January 2002.

Wanadoo is well-known for such titles as...hmmn, we have no idea. Actually, we've never heard of them before. We went to their site but it's in some foreign language and had stuff like, "Appel de Georges W.Bush au peuple afghan dans le cadre de l'op�ration "Libert� immuable". What's that got to do with games?

Update: We've been informed that Wanadoo is to France what AOL is to the U.S. They've apparently been wanting to get into game publishing for some time now. This is their first venture. Thanks Xavier!

Star Trekkin'

We couldn't help but notice as we made our rounds of the gaming sites that the new Star Trek series was a hot topic of discussion. Good? Not good? Was the Vulcan chick hot? We'll sniff and announce that we didn't even watch it.

Of course, it doesn't air until Saturday night here where the midwest branch of Quarter to Three is located. We discovered that after frantically checking the TV guide. Whew!

He's so grumpy!

The Grumpy Gamer looks at AI in computer games.

Here is a tactic so common and powerful that I saw it in strategy guides on the first Baldur's Gate. When approaching a group of enemies, do so slowly, one tiny step at a time, until the first member of the group is visible but the others aren't. Then run back to an empty area. The lone enemy will follow, and you can trash it with ease. Repeat with every member of the group.

What, precisely, are the other members of the group doing after the first member, we'll call him Joe, was pulled away? "Hey! What happened to Joe?" "I dunno." "Did you hear screaming?" "Don't we always?" "Hey! What happened to Sue?"

Creatures should not be inactive just because the player can't see them. I wish some of those super-bands of foes in the dungeons of Diablo II were active inside their rooms. Just little things. Poke their heads out. Maybe send one of their members on patrol. Don't rely on me to give permission for a creature to move.

If a critter has an AI, and the player is anywhere in the vicinity, that AI should be active.

You can tune your Windows but you can't tuna fish

CGO has a nice feature about tuning Windows for gaming.

It's a small thing, but if you're the kind of user who has a hundred icons on their desktop, animated mouse cursors, and a high-res high-color background graphic, you can definitely free up some memory. Use standard mouse cursors, trim your desktop icons down to a dozen or less (use the Start Menu more instead), and use a solid-color background instead of a graphic. If you've installed six hundred fonts and you only ever use twelve of them, you can improve the performance of some programs by opening the Fonts control panel and removing the ones you never use.

Let's see...we have dozens of icons, an animated mouse cursor, and a high-res background graphic. Looks like we're lean and mean and ready to rumble!

Adventureland author on EverQuest

This is back from May, but we didn't see it then. Scott Adams, creator of the classic adventure game Adventureland, was part of a panel about games at the University of Wisconsin--Eau Claire on May 3, 2001. XYZZYnews has a transcript of the panel, including Adams' account of playing EverQuest, which he enjoyed.

We went out and killed monsters and looted their corpses. And he was a level 7! Ooh! I was a level 1. So he could go after monsters I didn�t dare attack. And he got some loot that there was no way I could get. And he gave 90% of it to me. He was really generous and friendly.

At the end of the day I said to him �This is really nice. You were a tremendous friend to me.� I kept calling him Young Sir. �You were a tremendous friend to me, Young Sir. I shall always remember you when I become a famous fighter.� And I had a plan to become a tailor. I know, sounds funny, but hey, it pays well -- let me tell you.

And I said, �Maybe someday I�ll be able to help you out.� And he says, �Ha ha ha, I�m a level 7. You�re a 1. You�ll never be able to do anything for me. Never mind, just forget it.�

Yesterday, or just last week, I was playing and I ran across him again. I�m a level 12 now, he�s a level 7 still. I was able to help him tremendously and I told him it was because of the nice things he did for me while I was first playing.

The key to this whole thing is, though: I�m getting sucked into this world these designers created, and I�m creating the story as I go along. And there are a thousand other people doing the same thing at the same time. We�ve got guilds; we�ve got groups that play together. It is utterly amazing, what is happening.

There are also MP3 versions of these transcripts available on the site.

Blockbuster to warn against games and movies with "terror themes"

The video and game rental chain will put warning signs up for games and movies that have "terror themes," according to Reuters.

...the shelves carrying new movie titles with terror themes, will now carry signs saying: "In the light of the events of September 11, please note that this product contains scenes that maybe considered disturbing to some viewers".

Blockbuster Chairman and Chief Executive Officer John Antioco added in a statement that "we know that there is heightened sensitivity to terrorist themes right now. On the other hand, we do not want to pull product from our stores".

The first movie so tagged will be Swordfish. No word yet if it will also come with a warning that it depicts a scene with oral sex being performed on a grungy computer hacker. Well, we guess that really does belong to the realm of improbable, don't-be-alarmed fantasy.

No U.S. price cut for PS2

So says Sony in this CNET story:

"We're holding firm to the assertion made earlier in the year and one also made to our business partners that we will not be reducing the price of the PS2 in North America...at least for the course of this year," spokeswoman Molly Smith said....

But with Microsoft wavering on how many units it can get to stores at the outset and Nintendo unable to deliver extra units, the PlayStation 2 may be the only game console left on store shelves when consumers make holiday buying decisions, analysts say. With that prospect, Sony doesn't need to cut prices to stay in the game.

One wildcard that the story mentions is how parents are going to feel about violent games, which are more prevalent on the PS2 than on the Gamecube.

Majestic a dud

Reuters, in a Yahoo repost, is reporting that Majestic is something of a bomb, garnering only 13,500 active players for the second episode.

Electronic Arts Inc., the leading U.S. video game publisher, will offer a CD-based version its game ``Majestic'' at stores later this year in a response to lackluster online demand, a spokesman said on Wednesday....

The Los Angeles Times reported on Wednesday that ``Majestic'' has 13,500 active players, below the company's expectations. In August, EA had said the game had attracted tens of thousands in the weeks before its official launch.

What? We don't want to pay to be annoyed with phonecalls, faxes, and instant messaging? Maybe we'd rather play games than have the games play us.

3am

Sony Online has announced a new roleplaying server for EverQuest. Most notably, players will only be able to have one character on the server, good and evil alignments cannot group, and "human" will be the common language instead of "common." More details here.

You can grab a 500-turn Runesword 2 demo from Shrapnel here.

We like this game, so here -- GameSpyDaily has some new screens of the Kohan standalone sequel.

Seems like Voodoo Extreme's claims of server problems was simply a lie to cover up money problems and internal dissent. Billy "I Told You I Was Wicked" Wilson promises the site will be back. Sometime.

In other website armageddon news, Something Awful is on the ropes. Lowtax is looking for new server arrangements and has threatened once again to shut down the site.

Website armageddon part the third. Electric Games has suspended its operations while it transforms itself into a "community-driven site." Is that a site where people yell at each other and post porn links?

Ziff Davis, lord and master of Computer Gaming World, has hired a new CEO, one Robert F. Callahan, a former executive at Walt Disney Co.'s ABC radio and TV operations.

Computer game sparks scare among passengers, according to this news.com.au story. After the flight was diverted, passengers saw the words "Mission Failed" come up on a laptop screen and got tense and immediatelly depleted the plane of its store of tiny bottles of liquor. We spotted this at Frictionless Insight.

Danish scientists one step closer to Star Trek transporters.

We've got the best look at a comet yet, according to the BBC:

It's mind-boggling and stupendous," said Dr Laurence Soderblom, the leader of DS1's imaging team. "These pictures have told us that comet nuclei are far more complex than we ever imagined. They have rugged terrain, smooth rolling plains, deep fractures, a very, very dark material and a Krusty Burger franchise."

A Connecticut man was arrested after setting fire to a teddy bear he claimed was possessed, according to an AP wire story. Gee, our mother burned our teddy bear to be sure we didn't take it with us to college.

A couple of reporters have lost their jobs after criticizing President Bush after the terrorist attacks. Troubling.

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