Daily News Spin — September 5, 2001 (Wednesday)

Levelord gets to it

Can he make good levels? Hell, we don't know, but he's a lively game personality. From his home page, Levelord's adventures with a rented mustang and a vibrating cell phone.

EA had a nice `Stang waiting for me at the airport when I got here. Remember, I drive a Yoter Van back Texas way. A Mustang! Give me the wheel! ...now!

By the way, I have my cell phone set on "silent" so as to not interrupt meetings and such on my first day back at EA. That means it vibrates instead of ringing.

I had a great day yesterday at EA. At the end of the day, I headed for the Mustang on a beautiful Californian day. It's 100+ degrees in Texas and horribly humid. Here? ...72 for a high, cool breeze, and bright blue skies. Into the car I went, windows down and throttle opened. Speeding tickets are like paying for a ride at an amusement park if you have the right perspective ;)

I'm about high way to the hotel when I hit the radio button. To top off a perfect day, ...they're playing Pink Floyd. I crank up the volume and then go for the bass. Just as I peaked the bass setting, my nuts started vibrating! I thought "Jumping crickets! ...this is some kick ass sound engineering! They must have a woofer under the seat or my gonads have become resonant!".

No, Richard, it's Rob calling you on your new cell phone in your front pocket.

Lineage to be relaunched

So says the Korean Herald. The previous U.S. launch of this massively multiplayer RPG was a disaster. It's huge in Asia, but tiny here.

In a bid to mount another attack on the potentially lucrative U.S. market, NCSoft is now preparing to re-launch Lineage and stage a massive marketing campaign.

In May, NCSoft entered the U.S. online game sector for the first time but Lineage failed to create a buzz and its concurrent users are numbered at around 1,000, while the number of paying subscribers is about 4,000.

The flop dealt a blow to NCSoft, keen to expand its multi-user online game into overseas markets.

Analysts said the disappointing debut resulted from a different gaming culture. While Korean game buffs sit in PC salons equipped with broadband access, U.S. gamers tend to play games at home and find it a bit difficult to learn the basics to play Linage.

As part of efforts to recover lost ground and go forward, NCSoft is now customizing Lineage for U.S. game players. The company said Garriott [yes, that Garriott] will take both direct and indirect roles in maintaining Lineage services in the U.S.

For the re-launching of Lineage, NCSoft plans to bundle its Lineage software CD with 1 million copies of major PC game magazines.

Er, it's more than just not knowing the basics. We've sampled it and Lineage just doesn't compare favorably to the U.S. MMOGs. The article also has some news of NCSoft's games in progress.

NCSoft is working on two next-generation online games, Lineage 2 and Tabular Rasa.

Garriott, is leading a development team for Tabular Rasa in the U.S., a fantasy game allowing users to enjoy a variety of adventures in a virtual theme park environment.

Garriott founded a new company, Destination Games, and formed an alliance with NCsoft in May. Garriott gained fame by creating Ultima, the first title in what became one of computer gaming's landmark series.

"Tabula Rasa will create a second-generation online game, going beyond Lineage or Ultima," Garriott told reporters, adding he's confident the new game will be a global hit.

Virtual theme park? Ok, who gets to be the leering carny and who plays as the bearded lady?

Tired of Majestic coverage yet?

This game gets mainstream press attention like no other game, with the exception of The Sims. Here's a Yahoo reprint of a KPIX story.

It has taken Brian Green about three weeks to get through the first episode, playing about 40 minutes a day. He says it's nail-biting entertainment.

"When you are sitting all by yourself at night playing the game, you wonder, 'Oh my God, is there someone at my door?'" Green says.

Sometimes sitting by ourselves late at night we wonder, "Oh my God, is the world full of morons?"

What do game developers make?

We've already established on our message boards that game critics make squat, but what do the people developing the games make? Gamasutra conducted a survey.

Should massively multiplayer games go to peer-to-peer?

GIGNews has an interesting article arguing this very concept.

The secret to reducing the costs of MMOGs lies in developing secure technologies that allow games to return to the advantages of peer-to-peer architectures. New, hybrid systems combine the low cost of peer-to-peer with the security of client-server architectures. In these systems the majority of the server and bandwidth costs are offloaded to the player computers. These systems benefit from being tremendously more scalable than client server systems, often have faster response times, are less costly to maintain, and require less upfront expenditure during the development process.

It's all kind of wonky, but if you're interested in new networking ideas, you may want to check it out. How secure can peer-to-peer ever be, though? That's what we question.

GIGNews also posted a long, rambling essay by Raph Koster (Star Wars Galaxies designer) about games as art. It seems rather to be about the art of reviewing games, though.

Steve Bauman of Computer Games Online/Strategy Plus described the role of the gaming press to me after that panel as being largely like Car and Driver magazine. Or, in another comparison, it's like TV Guide. It's not truly critique, but there are gestures towards it, and someday perhaps we will see the emergence of a Cineaste for the gaming crowd. I don't doubt that plenty of the stalwart journalists working in the gaming press today eagerly await such a day as much as developers do.

Cineaste? Yeah, sure, we read that while we sprinkle our scrambled eggs with cavier. Then we douse it all with ketchup. Raph, baby, we don't want art! We just want to kill Jar Jar and some ewoks.

Timegate on the Kohan expansion

HomeLAN interviewed Timegate's Adel Chaveleh and Ian Klimon about the new standalone expansion they're working on.

HomeLAN - What have you done to improve the AI in the single player game?

Ian Klimon - A number of improvements to the AI have made their way into Ahriman�s Gift. First and foremost, we have added a Building Template feature wherein AI creators can specify which components should be built in what settlements. We have upgraded the aggressiveness of the AI, so when it wipes out the militia of an outpost or town, it will immediately go after the town (where before it would sometimes look for another target in the area). We�ve created 15 brand new custom AIs for Ahriman�s Gift, as well as adapted many of the most popular AIs from Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns. We have learned a lot about how players play, and how they expect the AI to play against them, so we made tweaks to the individual AIs so that some will play more like a player, while others will try to do the unexpected.

Kohan was really a refreshing RTS experience, as you can see in our review. We're looking forward to the expansion.

3am

Looks like Computer Gaming World is running a cover story about World of Warcraft in their November issue, according to the CGW website. They also have some screenshots there that might be new, though we're not sure. There's too much WoW news to keep up with. We need an intern to help out, preferably one from a modeling school. In related news, Penny Arcade's latest strip is about WoW.

Atriarch, an MMOG in development, is looking for beta testers. This is a game where you can play as a mobile plant. We're guessing that's a niche market that has yet to be exploited.

Here's why we're writers instead of programmers. From GameDev.net:

There is a new article called Quaternions Demystified posted at http://freefall.freehosting.net/articles/quaternions_1.html. It is aimed at the mathematically fearless covering everything from quaternion arithmetic to spherical-cubic interpolation.

We attempted some spherical-cubic interpolation once, but our date promptly slapped us.

OSOpinion has a brief editorial about how computers are portrayed by Hollywood.

I'm constantly amazed with the database queries that private investigators perform in the movies. For example, just when the plot requires it, our man Joe types quickly at a convenient, nearby computer and announces: "I just cross-referenced all the people with a Black Camaro who have purchased something with a credit card in San Diego last week."

Dot commers are going back to school, according to this New York Times article. How crazy was the lure of quick riches?

At one point last year, Mr. Thet said, eight dot-coms were up and running in a single fraternity house at Stanford. By the end of the year, though, he had run out of money and shut his down.

"Ignore the frat boy behind the curtain," said the great Oz.

Garrison Keillor writes his farewell Mr. Blue column for Salon.

We missed this. It's a bit of news about the goings-on at Ziff Davis regarding its Internet initiative.

Loving Hitler is the title of a London Sunday Times piece that looks a book written about the 'mad, mad Mitford girls' and the relationship of these daughters of an English peer with Hitler.

Interested in speech recognition and why it hasn't taken off? InformationWeek examines the technology.

Russian journalism is bought and sold? Looks like it if you believe this story. We spotted this at Frictionless Insight.

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