Yes, zombies will follow anything, you PC and Mac junkies. Amiga Forever!!!

I can see it now:

Hardcore gamer and developer-wannabe (HGDW): "Hello, investors. I'd like you to invest in my newest game. It will appeal to about 100,000 people and cost a buttload of money. It will not have much replayability beyond multiplayer battling. To cut costs, we'll just go with an existing genre... how about FPS? You'll make about US$0.75 per copy before counting server maintenance costs. You'll have to stop game support after 9 months, too, because the cost of support will begin to go above the sales revenue at that point."

Investor #1: "And, you, Mr. Wright?"

Wright: "I'd like you to invest in my newest game. It will appeal to anywhere from five to thirty million people. It will promote creativity among its players, and players can play peacefully or aggressively. In fact, the entire gameplay experience is open-ended, reactive, and interactive. You'll make about US$2.50 per copy because you won't have to pay millions for lots of graphic design, level design, or textures. The game will create most of these procedurally, and players will be creating their own creatures and sharing them with other players. The server system costs will be minimal, because they don't have to do anything but share data, so we can keep game sales momentum going far beyond 18 months."

Investors (all): "No, we'll invest in HGDW's game because it's HARDCORE."

Wright: "But you'll make tons more money, and players will get more enjoyment because they can do whatever they want! What can be more hardcore than a game that people will play for 12 straight hours, with no network overhead costs except when sharing creations? Are you insane?"

Investor #2: "yu suk Wil Write teh emo l4mer"

Wright: "Huh?"

That would be a sorry gaming world.

Remove this headline. It's sensationalism so Pocket Gamer could snag clicks for their advertisers. Anna Kang, not John Carmack (she's NOT "Mrs. Carmack"; she kept her maiden name), said one negative thing and many positive things about the DS. By pulling one line from the interview and using the same shameless writing style, I could've written a similar article from a completely different angle. For example:

"Carmack wants sheep BAD. Carmack obsesses about sheep. ‘OK, tell me: from all the stuff I told you, what can we do? Because I want the sheep!!’"

Time effects, plus the destructible environments, plus what seemed to be pretty cool AI behaviors... I loved the demo, and I'll consider buying the game.

The AI was doing stuff like dodging, rolling for cover, and jumping up to and down from obstacles. It was impressive to watch, especially when shooting them while they were in the middle of dodging, or shooting them with an explosive crossbow bolt while they were jumping and while time is slowed.

If anything, the game will be fun because of the creative ways to kill the opponents. I hope the effects carry over well to multiplayer mode.

This comment was edited on Oct 17, 19:35.

I'm surprised there is no Wii version. The Wii remote would allow the commando to easily aim at any spot in the 3D environment and grapple it. That would have been excellent.

If you look at the blogger's bio, you can see that he's not a "random blogger", as some sites have referred to him. 8bitjoystick is a journalist named Jacob Metcalf for the Seattle weekly newspaper The Stranger. I would tend to believe that a known journalist with no previous reputation for wild rumormongering would not risk losing his job by posting a rumor without first checking other sources.

I could be wrong, of course... but the dude does have cred.

Let me see:

2.5 x 10^6 fighters between two solar systems

assume 4.22 light years between Earth and Proxima Centauri

1 light-year = 9.4605284 × 10^15 meters

2.5 x 10^6 fighters in a length of 39.923429848 x 10^15 meters

62,619 meters per fighter

62.6 kilometers per fighter

38.1 miles per fighter

Bigger than Zentraedi battleships... wow.

It's not trivial... come on, the movie portrays a few thousand ground troops invading a planet. Would we really send a few thousand non-armored troops to invade a whole f'ing planet, or would we send a few thousand troops wearing powered armor and carrying heavy weapons?

I enjoyed the movie myself, but that's only because I can suspend my disbelief long enough to look at Dina Meyer's body.

The textures aren't AAA quality, but I like the ship designs.

They weren't trying to be contemporary. This was part of a multi-part series covering famous flops in history, not current times.

Geez, if you're only going to have one Heavy Crusaders Battalion in your home system, I would hope that there are hundreds of Light Crusaders Battalions backing it up.

What's wrong with the version of Jagged Alliance they're making? I haven't heard anything good or bad about it. Looks decent from the screenshots (can't tell anything about the gameplay from them, though).

1) Stardock had pretty good customer service, in my experience, when I had problems with Galactic Civilization and driver conflicts. I got replies really fast.

2) I just started weaning myself from Starport: Galactic Empires, and now here comes another free persistent multiplayer game. Oh, great.

When trees attack, take cover!!

Please correct the subject line of the news article.

(Bonsai = ornamental tree, Banzai = Japanese war cry)

This comment was edited on May 10, 17:04.

They should get back to their roots and make another kickass pinball game. Maybe one with a nice construction set. They shouldn't ride the Battlefield franchise into EA absorption oblivion.

Since Quentin Tarantino rips off Asian movies so much and passes his movies off as original, I wonder what Asian games the "Reservoir Dogs" game will rip off? I hope it's "Richman". That's a great game series.

Hey, MacD, change the ForceVoxel parameter in Alpha Centauri.ini to 1 and it shouldn't crash in Win2000/XP anymore.

Does anybody know how to make the numeric keypad work in Alien Crossfire on Win2000, though?

Does anybody know whether it's the Avalon Hill "Civilization" or Sid Meier's? I remember there being a big brouhaha about the two franchises a while ago. I can't imagine Sid's Meier's "Civilization" going for only E15 million, considering its popularity.

RPGs can definitely be single-player. A single-player RPG is an RPG with a single character and a AI DM. No big deal. Predicting that Vampire will have zero replay value is like saying Fallout, another single-player RPG by the Troika team, has zero replay value. And THAT has been disproven by hundreds of thousands of players. Hell, I didn't even know or care that they were even planning to have multiplayer in it.
This comment was edited on Oct 11, 21:35.