There's also the fact that some of these people people *could* be jailed for downloading Bryan Adams music. Talk about a good way to end up being the "catcher" instead of the "pitcher."

It'd be embarassing enough to have your friends find out you're listening to Bryan Adams, but the facing the prospect of Federal P.M.I.T.A. prison for downloading his music? There just aren't words enough to describe how sad a situation that is.

Currently we are up to 1355 dead US soldiers. Soldiers who signed up to defend their country or maybe just for some money to go to college, dead. All so the rich could get richer.

I have to object to this statement as a Veteran. Yes it is technically truthful, but anyone who signs up for the military knowing full well the amount of turmoil in the world today is voluntarily putting themselves at risk. Joining the US Military as it is right now makes you nothing more than a Mercenary. You're whoring yourself out to whatever the powers that be dictate be it front line combat duty or fixing trucks or shuffling paper while wearing the uniform. That's the bargain you make signing up and if they don't understand that when they sign up, they probably shouldn't be making themselves a party to that sort of contract in the first place. That statement of yours is also made in a rather spin oriented fashion to intentionally attempt to sway the reader's opinion with emotion.

I'm not saying the "pay for college" crowd wasn't there when I was in the military, but just to put it into perspective, most people that were in for that reason were typically the REMF types (Rear Echelon MF's) aka support and other MOS's that were considerably less likely to see combat. Now I'm not going to suggest that those people haven't died too or otherwise been harmed, but those are not the people you see in the video footage walking down the streets on patrol in body armor and so forth.

Now that said I'm pretty neutral on the whole thing and tend to take the detached slightly crazy libertarian outlook on government stuff anyway. Do I regret Saddam being taken out of power, not really, is it a waste of many things including lives to occupy Iraq?, definitely. Left, right or otherwise, most politicians are all a bunch of fucking liars that are generally only "in it" for their own selfish interests or those of whatever lobbyist group is paying them the most. As far as I'm concerned, anyone sucked in by the spin on either the right or left political extreme is just as much the "Kool-aid drinker" as their counterpart on the other extreme. Until this country gets away from this morally corrupt two-party system it's only going to get worse. Ditching the political parties and having candidates run on their own platform instead of jumping on a predetermined one would be a huge improvement to the situation but sadly it's probably more likely that there will be an armed revolution before we as a country pull our heads out of our asses and fix what's broken about the two-party system as it is today.

Swerv and Hump, That's what I was thinking as well, the sudden cancellation referring to data collected during the beta made them realize that their infrastructure wasn't going to support the users they wanted it to. I don't think it was content, the game had a hell of a big backstory etc. It had to be a technological and/or financial issue. Even though they had 68,000 downloads of the beta client, it's still pretty smallish compared to the half a million or so that WoW got.

What would be really cool (probably not gonna happen I realize) is if they were to open-source the code so people could make smaller servers for themselves and friends. There would have to be changes as they had licensed some middleware for this like the Gamebryo engine from NDL and the Realtree system. Then again that's client side so if someone hangs on to the downloaded beta client they've already got all that stuff and the genie's out of the proverbial bottle. Given their servers were using mostly open source middleware like the ICE engine, I suppose it is theoretically possible they could just say "here ya go, at least now all our work isn't for absolutely nothing."

Guess we'll see.

This comment was edited on Jan 10, 13:23.

The people in other branches of the U.S. military don't call Marines "Self-propelled sandbags" just because it sounds funny.

Well, yeah we did actually but it doesn't make it any less true, the typical Marine ground troop isn't generally a whole lot smarter than a sand bag is.

That said, for all the actual elitist cultured Europeans that a person may come in contact with, there's many more of the vast unwashed masses just as there are in the U.S. Numerically, the odds are, you're the latter category in either the U.S. or Europe.

Actually what's really funny is that the address listed for Tulga Games LLC with the Arizona Corporation Comission is Chris Tulumello's home address. Better still, if you do a whois on the domain name with netsol.com the technical and administrative emails are chris.tulumello@cox.net which means he doesn't even have a mail server setup and he's using his cablemodem ISP addresses.

Also interesting to note that Mr Tulumello was an employee of Artifact until two months or so ago and that he's also recently filed new corporations with the state of Arizona along with David Bowman and another guy that's Technical Director at Artifact all within a few days of each other.

The only thing it appears they're trying to do is avoid paying some of their debts as part of their bankruptcy.

Knowing that Tugla games appears to just be Chris Tulumello's fake storefront and he's the only person listed with the company with the AZ corporation comission, it makes the public release statement pretty amusing to read.

Basically this is just cooking the books. It may or may not be legal, but it damn sure isn't very ethical.


Oh and I would bet that if the sale is approved, no actual transfer of funds even takes place, the name will be changed and other than that it'll be business as usual for all the employees etc there, it'll even be the same folks signing the paychecks.
This comment was edited on Sep 25, 16:39.

At least there's a way to see some NHL hockey on TV this winter now. It's just not quite the same unfortunately.

Definitely works for me.

Just concerned that a first person RPG like that would be too much like a FPS these days. (Granted it's Bioware so I do have faith it wouldn't be).

If they could pull off a real time engine doing an EOB type game that actually plays like the old ones but with full animated 3D objects and monsters that would be just beautiful. I'm just worried that doing it like that with the click the button combat like the EOB's and Dungeon Master had using a realtime 3D engine could be tricky. Not impossible but definitely a bit different.

This comment was edited on Sep 17, 12:16.

I'm sure the 3 or 4 people still playing will be tickled pink about this.

Amusing considering they just announced today that the game is cancelled due to "technical issues."

I suspect that the fact that it was supposed to launch a couple years ago combined with the failures of some of the other more recent MMORPGs and the general saturation of the marketplace had a lot more to do with it than "technical issues" did.

Now honestly even for the most complex game does anyone actually read the manuals? That's like an unpardonable sin of gaming.

You are absolutely correct that any reviews this soon are shortsighted and that applies to any game but especially so with an MMORPG that you don't "finish" in a day or two.

What about a giant dung beetle to push that sucker around?

Sorry but to me, that just sounds like a totally ficticious excuse. (Might even go so far as to cry unadulterated Bullshit! in fact)

I have no doubt based on the funding and scale of this game that it's running on some serious enterprise grade equipment. There shouldn't be a single component of their whole setup that isn't redundant, or possibly doubly redundant and it's awfully convenient for it to experience that serious of a failure on launch day. I admit it could just be bad luck but the cynic in me is hard to convince otherwise.

Sure it sounds great since they're not mentioning what equipment it's running on and what failed so it's a pretty vague excuse that doesn't make anyone look bad including the hardware vendor. That said though, considering countless large companies are running on comparable hardware and depend on it to be operational, either SoE seriously has a flaw in their systems architecture that is a result of poor design or they're using it as a cop-out.

As for myself, I'm going to have to lean toward the latter scenario. I'm thinking about buying it, but I'm definitely giving it a few months before I consider buying it, went through the UO, EQ, and AO launches and they all sucked quite alot and had nasty issues, seems like EQ's launch worked out to a good extra free trial month or more. I honestly wouldn't have bought DAoC out of the chute had I not been in beta and experienced an extremely stable game.

I think I maybe had 2 crashes total with DAoC in beta, but I was pretty late getting in. The only bad day serverwise late in the DAoC beta was the introduction of the horse system and it was fixed within about a day of being put in. After the launch, I was surprised how well the DAoC start really was compared to UO's, EQ's and AO's. Absolutely it had it's issues like lack of content but it shows that it's not impossible to have a solid MMORPG launch from a technical standpoint.

Even with this week's housing launch and 3 days of patch downtime that the typical VN board DAoC whiners are bitching about, I still believe DAoC has excellent uptime as far as the whole MMORPG community goes and is probably an example that all future MMORPG developers would be wise to look at for how to do things right. Yes, there's the "game balance" issues that people love to bitch about in DAoC, but since those are largely a matter of perception on the part of the players it's a tough balancing act for Mythic Entertainment to pull off and I don't envy them in the least for trying to deal with that. Hell I really don't mean to sound like a Mythic Entertainment Fanboi, they definitely have their faults, but at least I seems to me that they're legitimately trying to do a good job at it whether or not it actually works out.

With SWG coming this soon after the disastrous SB launch the poor launch is pretty inexcusable, even had they waited longer, there's enough of a fan base chomping at the bit that would have bought it even if delayed for a few more months and with no new competition very close to release what exactly was the pressing need? Sony could definitely afford to float them a few more months I'm sure knowing the payoff is all but guaranteed if the game doesn't completely stink.

One other thing to consider in the MMORPG launch history is the fact that DAoC is all Redhat linux server side on Dell servers and their relatively painless launch shows that you don't even have to have the absolute best equipment to pull off a good MMORPG launch.

Da Stylin' Rastan:

You're very right that it only covers Postal not Postal 2, but the fact that it was dismissed with prejudice loosely translated from legalese means that the judge said not only is this suit dismissed, but the plaintiff can't waste the court or anyone else's time by filing a similar lawsuit in the future.

That said, I think both Postal and Postal 2 sucked balls.

I was kinda let down with NWN too. The premise is still good and after finishing the single player campaign fairly quickly when it first came out, I didn't see much in the way of user modules that impressed me. Maybe it's time to reinstall it and reevaluate that though, I know there's plenty of them out now. I think as more tilesets and so forth (official and the hakpak type) come out over time NWN will probably start to be quite nice. I do wish they'd allow some better camera options such as a first person view which would help alot with the immersion factor IMO.

Morrowind is nice too but it does get somewhat tedious. I have to say though that the nighttime sky in Morrowind is arguably the most beautiful I've ever seen in a game. Not that this is a major feature but it is very nicely done.