Intelligent Artifice

Confessions of a UO Gold Farmer January 27, 2005

Another quick one: a tale from the shady underworld that clings parasitically to the grand-daddy of modern day MMOs, Ultima Underworld. It’s a thrilling yarn of swashbuckling hackers, despicable pirates, vast hoards of gold and farms full of bots, forced to dig for gold and repel attacks by other bots. It is told by a former scoundrel, who has now turned all of his pirate gold into more reputable currencies, and is selling the empty hulls of his pirate fleet. Can it be long before he weds a fine governor’s daughter?

(Via Slashdot Games.)

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China Bans The Sims 2

China Bans 50 Games

“Stargoat writes ‘The official mainland Chinese news agency, Xinhau, is reporting that China is banning 50 gaming titles. These titles include Battlefield Vietnam, The Sims 2, and FIFA 2005. A similar game banning event occurred six months ago in China, but not to this scale.’”

Manhunt is one of those 50 games, but that was surely one of those “Didn’t you ban that? No, I thought you banned it” oversights.

But The Sims 2? What’s up with that? Does it include references to Chinese provinces such as Tibet and Taiwan? Is it against the official ideology? Or is it because it’s published by EA?

(Via Slashdot: Games.)

Update: There’s a comment over at BoingBoing explaining what is probably really going on.

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It’s like a car crash in slow motion

EA stock goes up, sixty people are fired (in that order).

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Penny Arcade on Exclusivity

It’s funny because it’s true.

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What EA TV might look like January 25, 2005

Read the UK-centric humour here.

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Changes at a previous employer January 24, 2005

This is probably not of interest to most people, but the CEO of my previous employer, JoWooD Software Productions, is stepping down. Read all about it.

Update: I just read in this German-language article that JoWooD has closed two development studios: Wings, developer of Soeldner, and JoWooD Ebensee, developer of Industry Giant. The manager of the Ebensee studio was a co-founder of the company (and one of the few people who knows why the company is called what it is). A mere two years ago, Industry Giant was the flagship franchise of the company.

From the article:

Für die Produktpipeline des Unternehmens ergeben sich daraus allerdings keine negativen Effekte.

Die Strategie von JoWooD sieht eine Fokussierung auf wenige Genres vor. Strategie-, Simulations- und Rollenspiele stellen hierbei den Kernbereich der Genres dar.

Which means:

This will have no negative effects on the company’s product pipeline.

JoWooD’s strategy involves focussing on the strategy, simulation and role-playing genres.

Which makes a lot of sense given that Industry Giant is a fast-paced action game puzzle game dating sim  text adventure um. Maybe that doesn’t make sense.

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The Cell Processor Explained January 21, 2005

Read the technical details here.

Update: Here is the Slashdot.org discussion about the above-mentioned article.

Update: And here is an interview with NVIDIA’s Vice President of Corporate Marketing about the PS3’s GPU.

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EA signs ESPN licensing deal, rolls out new Death Star January 18, 2005

After signing an exclusive 5-year deal with the NFL (and an exclusive 4-year deal with the AFL), EA has signed an exclusive 15-year deal with ESPN.

Read all about it over at Kotaku, Video-fenky.

(more…)

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San Andreas, the methodical way

Kotaku writes:

Some guy wired a PS2 controller to his computer’s parallel port. Then he had it run through all of the button combinations at high speed to find all of the cheats for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

How wonderfully methodical. The cheats can be found here. These guys also claim to have looked at the source code, although I’m sure they mean disassembly.

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The first PSP virus January 15, 2005

Eurogamer writes about Planet Moon’s first PSP game. It has a fascinating multiplayer idea:

“As well as a single-player mode, Infected will also take advantage of the PSP’s wireless multiplayer functionality, and should put an interesting spin on things as, in addition to just blasting each other, players will be able to create a unique avatar which then spreads like a virus through the handhelds of players who lose to them. You’ll then be able to check your rankings and see how far your virus has spread amongst your victims.”

How cool is that? Non-Internet-based P2P game token exchanging. You could take that idea a lot further if you wanted to.

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