Review. Looking damned good.

Better than I can say for the Fantastic 4. Gaaahhhh. I don’t get why anyone thinks it’s a good idea to make movies that make fans of the original material ashamed of ever having liked it in the first place. Fox needs to stop fucking up comic book movies, for real.

It was indeed a good day. One day I hopefully will have leave to say more about it.

Also, the joys of keeping an ICQ list:

Hey! Well, hell hath frozen over and I started my own website. Anyhow, I plan on doing some game design discussions on there and would love your input on it so if you ever have some free time, check it out: http://www.ashentemper.com/

So there. He’s got some interesting stuff here and there (including the rumor mill up top right now), so there he is in the menu at left.

I’m sure many readers have seen “There She Is,” aka “that Korean Flash music video with the cartoon cat and bunny,” by three guys who call themselves SamBakZa.

They made a Part 2. Click below for screenshots.
Continue reading Cake Dance (There She Is, step 2)…

I just realized I have more beer in my fridge than food. I should do something about that.

At least it’s good beer. Mostly.

Just got back from Austin, funky weasels and all that. Saw Willie Nelson at The Backyard, an open-air ampitheater on the city’s western outskirts. For being nearly totally unplanned by me, and for as many things I did that could have been good but turned out disappointing, it was one of the more fun days I’ve had.
Continue reading Austin Splendor and the Almost Wet Willie…

From Ubisoft’s 2005-06 fiscal year report:

Fourth quarter: new adventures for Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell® and three new brands

With Killing Day (working title), an FPS specifically designed for next-generation consoles, Ubisoft plans to demonstrate once again its technological lead and highlight the capabilities of the new consoles. The group will also mark its entry into the sports segment with a basketball game (And 1(TM)) and reinforce its presence in the strategy segment with two games under the Might & Magic brand.

To recap, Might & Magic was purchased by Ubisoft for a reported $1.3 million from 3DO’s Chapter 7 fire sale almost two years ago. New World Computing founder Jon Van Caneghem (who originally sold his company and creation, M&M, to 3DO) expressed regret that, among other things, he wasn’t able to make an online version of M&M when he was at 3DO (which would have been based on Meridian 59.) Caneghem also said Ubisoft had contacted him about maybe helping out with Heroes of Might & Magic V. Two months after that interview, however, he got hired by NCSoft.

Ubisoft’s announced last fall that Chinese developer TQ Digital was going to make a Heroes of Might & Magic Online game. Now it’s saying it’ll be done by the fourth quarter of 2005. Which unless there was undisclosed work in advance, means there’s been scarcely more than a year’s worth of development time spent on it.

Not to say things don’t work out in the games industry, but you’d think some people would know by now that they rarely work out the way they’re planned. But I guess that’s what financial reporting is for — so you have something on which to look back on and laugh.

Postscript: Here’s hoping they come up with a better name than Heroes of Might & Magic Online. Not that I have anything against HOMMOs.

http://www.leisuretown.com/

All the stuff from up until when it went offline two years ago is there, anyway. No word on how long it’s been up, though Scott McCloud noticed it yesterday, and FYAD noticed it last week. Guess Tristan Farnon got tired of just playing Spigot.

Ray over at Corpnews has mostly-speculative rumors about Wolfpack (A Division Of Ubisoft) working on a sequel to Shadowbane.

Might not be a bad idea, and perhaps the one time when a MMOG sequel wouldn’t be an altogether bad idea. I mean, the game was/is about scorched-earth world conquest and (to a degree) server resets where everything gets wiped so everyone can start over. Maybe after hacking Shadowbane 1 for the past year or so into the state it probably should have been at launch, it’d be time to cut bait, and fish again.

I dunno. Two months to speculate. And no, I don’t know anything. Like I’d be told.

Dr. TwisTer, friend to you and me, is once again ranting about games, this time for WTFMan Dot Com. Makes perfect sense for him to be there — he and the WTFMen go way back to their days on UO’s Baja server, and Nighthawk’s been the only one associated with the site to make very many posts (except when Greybeard wants to talk about his cars.)

So WTFMan gets moved up on the menu at left. Expect it to get updated a lot more often.

Pretty much everyone but me and Lum went to GDC last week. Anyone asking why I would go to GDC need to talk to the people who were telling me I ought to go, “so I could make contacts.” Contact THIS.

Cosmik has many links, most not about GDC. Raph’s keynote reveals that he’s still talking about the same things, and a rant session transcript reveals that game makers would just as soon see people trade their games over the Internet for free if it meant the game industry could collapse and somehow be rebuilt from the ruins. (Seriously, it looks like a good session. Warren Spector, Greg Costikyan and Chris Hecker. Glorious.)

Then there was this thing about Emily Dickinson. Because I could not stop for Will Wright, he kindly stopped for GDC. He wants to make a game called “Spore”. What, was “Simegma” taken?

EDIT: Spore pictures. Thanks Rei.