Kill Ten Rats

As noted several places on the web, Gods & Heroes has been indefinitely delayed, i.e. cancelled in favor of the other project that Perpetual is working on, Star Trek Online.  According to F13.net, some of the folks on G&H have been shuffled over to STO, while others have been let go.

Today’s Nobel Prize in Physics is for the discovery of Giant Magnetoresistance. This was discovered less than twenty years ago, and now you use it in your iPod. Less than twenty years from unknown to ubiquitous: The Singularity is Near. On that Nobel Prize link, note that the page 1 graph is logarithmic. That is a >100x improvement in a decade.

If you have an iPod and still have some money to toss around, why not convert your computer entirely to flash memory? Hard drives with moving parts are so unreliable, and that 320GB drive will cost a little less than $10,000.

: Zubon

Uh, okaaay. NC Soft announces Carbine Studios, and it is heralded in the press as a “new studio”, “acquisition”, “new team”, “unveiled”, etc. Someone has their wires crossed or NCSoft is trying to drum up some press to get past the tepid industry response to the Tabula Rasa open beta.

Carbine Studios “was founded in 2005 as a division of NCsoft North America by ten former members of Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft core development team.”

First, why wasn’t this news two years ago, and second, how the hell many people worked on World of Warcraft? Everytime I turn around, there is another new studio founded by former members of World of Warcraft (like Red5 for example). Even more curious, they all seem to be leading or key members of Blizzard’s dev team. Who the heck is left at Blizzard? Is this why Burning Crusade was more like “warm lint crusade” than something really hot? How is this an acquisition or a new studio?

[“This is a dev team made in heaven,” said Robert Garriott, CEO for NCsoft’s North American business. “This group is as experienced as they come in the area of computer role playing and multiplayer game design. Making successful games is second nature to them. They are a very welcome addition to the NCsoft family. The gaming community should be excited to see what great things come out of Carbine Studios in the coming years.”]

You have GOT to be kidding me. I mean honestly, I don’t mind a little hype in a press release, but “a dev team made in heaven” that is “as experienced as they come”? Then why is it, two years later, they need an “unveiling” and we still don’t know what they are working on?

[Details are scarce, but NCsoft said that Carbine is currently working on an unannounced project that “promises to break new ground in massively multiplayer gaming.”]

Ok, this line really makes me ill. Didn’t Garriot say this about Tabula Rasa (I have yet to rant on this, it is coming, I promise). There should be a law that says you can’t say something like this without qualifying it with some facts and examples. When someone like Garriot says stuff, people listen…he isn’t doing the industry any favors by fluffing up his own games or NCSoft “new” studios, particularly when there isn’t anything worth fluffing. Fine, say your game is great, awesome, or whatever, but don’t call it evolutionary (that’s my line by the way), “the most anticipated game ever”, or “ground-breaking”.

The bar must be getting really low these days…

On our new Wii, we have only played Wii Sports so far, and no boxing because we have only one nunchuk. On the tennis court, she serves much better, and I have a good net game. She bowls more strikes, but I can pick up difficult spares. We need other couples to play against, so that we can team up. We bowl better without pants. That could be an issue.

We need to get an MMO going together sometime. She likes hitting things with swords, and I like support. I hear that it is always easy to find some damage dealers once you have your tank and healer.

: Zubon