Daily News Spin — September 28, 2001 (Friday)

Xbox production problems?

Penny Arcade has posted a letter they say they received that indicates the Xbox may be even further behind schedule than was thought.

According to Dave he has spent the last month doing.. (dramatic pause!) absolutely nothing. As a matter of fact he has been lingering around watching videos on the net and trying to appear to be busy. Why? because they didnt have anything to build! the xbox design finally went into production last SUNDAY! (september 23 2001) (truly shocking!!)....

To give you an idea, they were supossed to build 3 million machines by november, 3 million!

A few observations about this. First, Penny Arcade is a humor site, so this could be a joke. It's not really funny though, so we suspect it is an email they received and posted.

Second, the email could be bogus. That three million figure doesn't seem right.

Third, and last, if true it doesn't mean that Microsoft won't meet their new goal of having about 300,000 Xbox units in the stores by mid-November. Still, if true, an interesting turn of events.

"Launching your worst nightmare"

CGO has a story about how wonderful MMOGs are when they are initially launched. Here's a bit on WWII Online.

...The first sign of trouble came a month or so before the game's retail release on June 6, the anniversary of D-Day. According to company co-founder and COO John McQueen, the firm that was supposed to run the game's server farm in Dallas went bankrupt. Unfortunately, they claim it was not economically feasible to change the launch date. "If you miss it, it get can get expensive," he says. The developer was faced with having to quite literally rebuild its network infrastructure. "We basically had to take a U-Haul truck (in Dallas) and take them to somewhere else." The company reinstalled sixty servers, along with all the other networking equipment, at its headquarters.

Future Publishing in trouble

Future Publishing, lord and master of Imagine Media, who in turn are lord and master of PC Gamer and the newly launched official Xbox magazine, suspended trading of its stock today to make a financial announcement. They reported a Godzilla-sized loss, according to Eurogamer.

Speculation was rife about what that might entail, and eventually it was revealed that the company�s loss before tax for the six months ended June 30 2001 was some �106.8 million, a rather mighty figure by anyone�s understanding.

After a day of waiting, Future announced a new rights issue to raise �34.6m and appointed a new chairman. The six for five rights issue at 20p per share is being underwritten by Morgan Stanley and Beeson Gregory, MCV reports, and the firm has also secured a �35m five year revolving debt facility.

It's like the Red Sox and the curse of the Bambino, but instead of trading some English football [sic] star, they fired Coconut Monkey. Since then, things have gone downhill. Thanks Stefan!

Activision postpones offering

Activision had planned on offering six million common shares, but have postponed the offering due to the shaky nature of the market after the terrorist attacks.

The Old Man wakes up, scratches himself, ratchets it up

Old Man Murray has awakened! Unfortunately for the terrorists, he has awakened not with a hangover or an unquenchable desire to watch American housewives flounce about and squeal with consumerist ecstasy in front of Bob Barker, but with a thirst for vengeance that even a Double Gulp of vengeance from 7-11 couldn't quench.

I hate what happened to us. I hate and I hate and I hate, and it's burned away some of my lesser hatreds. I honestly can't remember why I was so made at Rune. American McGee's Alice, on the other hand, still pisses me off because every time I think "God bless America", which is pretty much all the time lately, there's a little voice in the back of my mouth that adds "enmcgeesalice".

There's one small problem though.

I'd kind of hoped that my life spent in the simulator would have prepared me for battle when the time finally came. Unfortunately, it seems to have mainly prepared me to play new videogames without having to first read the manual. As it turns out, the sedentary life of a gamer has made me physically weak and also a coward. I'm furious, but scared and impotent when it comes to meting out the Rutger-Hauer-style blind vengeance that I crave. I've spent thousands of hours playing Heroes of Might and Magic, but here, in the end, I'm simply a Victim of Might and Magic. Inactivity has left me with brittle matchstick arms. With one hard slap, a Muslim child could make me explode into a cloud of dust like a mummy. Touched by a relatively harmless Islamist sparkler, I'd evaporate in a burst of flame, also like a mummy. Gaming has effectively turned me into a mummy - a motionless,dessicated South American mummy like you'd see on Nova, though, not the Egyptian kind that can climb walls and punch a hole through your chest.

That sounds bad, but the Old Man is nothing if not resourceful, and on the days he's not resourceful he stays in bed, but this wasn't one of those bathrobe and slipper days. Read all about how the Old Man has struck a blow for us all.

"Bash bin Laden" removed

Ananova reports that a game called Bash bin Laden has been taken down from an unnofficial website for the 173rd airborne brigade stationed in Italy. The game is about hunting down and killing bin Laden.

It also featured a map on which Arab states were renamed with the names of Western oil companies. It has been changed following complaints in Italy where the brigade is based.

The Italian La Repubblica newspaper reports the website featured a future map of the Middle East which renamed Afghanistan "Texaco", Iraq "Chevron" and Pakistan "Exxon".

Galactic Battlegrounds demo today?

Galactic Battles has posted word that the Lucasarts newsletter promises that a demo of this Age of Empires II engine game will be released today.

LucasArts Insider Exclusive -- The destiny of a galaxy hangs in the balance, and you are in command! LucasArts.com is pleased to announce that the playable demo for Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds will be available for download on Friday, September 28th. Prepare to be thrust into an epic battle between the Galactic Empire and the Rebel Alliance! Visit LucasArts.com to check out the system requirements and take the Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds tour.

This is certainly interesting news. We weren't wowed by the game at E3, but it's Star Wars and AOE 2, so we're still hopeful. We spotted this at HomeLAN.

Update: Here's the Gamespot download, and here's a Fileplanet mirror.

Stomped tries donationware model

Some readers are unhappy that Redwood is no longer employed by Stomped, so Stomped has challenged them to donate money.

By scrounging up seven cents (well, 6.7 cents actually) per day and depositing the accumulated 200 cents each month into the Stomped.com PayPal account, we will be able to partially support a staff and things will go back to the way it was. At the end of each month, if at least 50% of our daily readers have made a contribution of $2.00 the site will continue (with Redwood) for the next month.

A dollar here, a five spot there — the information superhighway is starting to get lined with panhandlers. We don't mean this as a criticism of Stomped or any other site, but long-term we don't see this working. It may not even work short-term.

...this game is for retired guys, high school rejects, the unemployed...

In our daily meanderings for game news we stumbled upon three older articles about Ultima Online at Metroactive, an alternative press website. They're all interesting reads. The story below is entitled Ultimate Place.

One hot gray day Tony Yin hovers thoughtfully over his iced coffee as if it may be his last. Tony has a secret. He likes to slay monsters. You'd never know it from his small frame and soft-spoken, mild-mannered demeanor. But he's admitted it, right here in a coffee shop full of people who may or may not be listening to his declaration. "I kill monsters, that's what I do!" The word is out.

Here's a bit from The Surreal World:

This is Tyson's world. In it, he is Iron Monkey, the grand master of a well-known guild, a master armor smith, owner of a nice three-story castle, several houses, a few boats and a number of highly valued horses. Tyson estimates that his Iron Monkey account is worth well over $1,500. I asked him how long it took to build the character.

"Well," he said, "I've been building Iron Monkey for about seven months."

How many hours a week, I wondered aloud. Thirty hours?

"Way more."

Forty hours a week?

"More like 70. You've got to realize that this game is for retired guys, high school rejects, the unemployed ..."

The last article is called Bloody Ethics.

Murder and corpse looting are not the only malfeasance in Ultima. The real profits are in white-collar crime. The architects of the game worked long and hard to supply Britannia with a working economy, and like any other monetary system, it's based on circulating currency. Its success can be measured in the number of players who give up adventuring to spend their lives in urban centers as blacksmiths, fishermen, tinkers or tailors. But the number of clever scams, grifts and cons that have sprung up to separate these law-abiding Britannians from their hard-earned gold pieces would make David Mamet proud.

3am

Gamespot has a game guide for Operation Flashpoint, the hot game of the moment.

There's an Anarchy Online emergency patch, of all things. Maybe they should call it something else, like a quick fix patch, since we're guessing that the emergency is that everyone's cancelling their accounts.

Both Salon and MSN have started running interstitial ads, which are perhaps even more annoying than pop-ups. We suppose the hope is we become conditioned to them.

Click here to read yesterday's news