Raph was nice enough to give the BBC a preview. From the looks of it it’s building heavily on Raph’s personal quest of The Virtual World, except in this case there are going to be a whole BUNCH of worlds in addition to Raph’s, and WE make the content. Cuppycake, the Community Manager, tell us why we should care: apparently the Modders have all been bodily absorbed into the firmament, and thus we need to take up the reigns of design ourselves and make our OWN game worlds.

Reaction, predictably, has been mixed from both sides of the aisle. Mainly because, well…it sounds like Second Life. Granted, it appears to be a Second Life where you can play it ZOMG EVERYWHERE according to Cuppy³ up there. She says you’ll be able to play it on cell phones, blog sidebars, bars, refrigerator TVs, your iPod and your mom.

My question (and the question a lot of people have had) is “who’s responsible for the lawsuits?”

After all, the thing you’re going to run into is that some people may try and clone any number of games that already exist, and we certainly know that some companies are so anal retentive that they trademark relatively generic gaming terms and get litigious over it. Sometimes even real companies get in on the action, though when you have enough money and lawyers you can get pretty creative with your settlement terms.

I for one think it’ll be interesting, but unless it’s better-done than Second Life (which seems underdone, overhyped but with a great PR machine), I’ll be out in the cold again.

¹whether you pronounce it “air-ee-ay”, “air-ee-uh” or “air-ee-uh-ee” is up to you
²Can’t take credit for the lulz there: from f13, via Lum
³not CuppaJoe, who is totally a different CM

It’s all about how CCP, magnificent overlords of Excel Online, not only had their own little GM Darwin problem, though to a slightly lesser degree. Only slightly, because it can’t be proved that there was anything more going on than in-game bonuses being given to his friends and cohorts.

The problem being that apparently the person responsible for everything, t20, hasn’t been fired. He actually posted his first and only dev blog, helpfully titled On Recent Allegations. In it, he admits that the only allegation that is true is that he handed over original blueprints to the Flameburst Precision Light Missile, the Phalanx Rage Rocket, the Havoc Fury Heavy Missile, the Bloodclaw Fury Light Missile and blueprints for what appear to be two ship chassis, the Spike L and the Sabre.

The comment I made on brokentoys rings even more true knowing that they covered this up since June 2006. Seven months is more than enough time for an alliance the size of BoB to stockpile more missiles, rockets and ships than they know what to do with, and so far CCP’s response has been that the blueprints were “handed back to CCP” (read: deleted) and that they’d be raffled off.

I didn’t read anything stating that the ill-gotten gains of BoB were deleted along with the blueprint handover. I’ll willingly admit that I’m not sure of the process of manufacturing from blueprints, but if my assumptions are correct, it’s not going to matter.

What CCP needs to do is come completely clean. Lay it all out.

Then fire the person responsible.

After all, it’s been laid out in front of you in your CEO’s dev blog:

We now have resources dedicated to performing audits of dev activity on Tranquility with much more frequency than before. This, combined with additional layers of security, and the non-negotiable penalty of employment termination upon conviction of such acts, represents the full extent that we will go to deter dev misconduct.

You owe it to your player base to do the right thing.

Well basically, new ideas don’t go anywhere. So the industry is just rehashing the same stuff over and over. During the 80s there was a lot of experimentation, a lot of new ideas being tried (many of them really bad) but there was at least experimentation. Now we don’t see any experimentation whatsoever.

At first, I thought “right on, Chris! Give ‘em hell!” because after all, what is EA but The Place That Madden Made? They built a massive company on releasing roster updates for fifty bucks a shot every year. The more I read the interview, though, it sounded more and more like a crotchety old man shouting at the kids to get off his damned lawn.

Trust me, it’s hard to disagree with the man who made Eastern Front, but when he says that Nintendo is “…just sort of reshuffling the existing set of ideas” and then goes on to say that his company is doing “interactive storytelling.”

Well that’s just breaking all sorts of new ground there, Chris, isn’t it? “You’re the hero…and you let the story go” applies to quite a few things out there, not the least of which is Oblivion. Going forward, it’s even more odd because, well…it sounds like he’s just building a MUD. When asked if players would be creating their own content in his system, which he refers to by the groundbreaking name of “Storyworld,” he replies:

We can’t let the player create his own verbs because the verbs are the heart of the game. And in a sense they are the rules. However, we can have… I differentiate between designers (who we call Storybuilders) and players. The designers create the rules within the systems, and then the players get the palette of verbs to play with.

Sounds a whole hell of a lot like a MUD to me. Worse, it sounds like a man who’s going that we as modern gamers can’t appreciate what came before. He used to program in Assembly, folks. On stumps. They didn’t even have fingers back then.

Dang-nabbit.

First off we have Phil Harrison spouting off at German mag Der Spiegel with the following statements:

We believe that the PS3 will be the place where our users play games, watch films, browse the Web, and use other computer functions. The PlayStation 3 is a computer. We do not need the PC … In a certain way, I understand why people would say such things [about the similarity of the PS3 controller to the Wii's], but it is stupid, if you’ll forgive me saying so. We have already worked on it a long time, and Nintendo almost certainly has done likewise with something similar. It is perfectly naturally for two companies to work on identical devices. It’s like that with technology.

Shits and giggles all around in the Sony camp I figure. There’s got to be something in the water there for them to think that not only is the PS3 priced accurately for what it’s worth, but that it’s probably too cheap for what we’d get. After all, we should be thankful that they’re even allowing us to have the opportunity to buy the PS3, because they have hordes of loyal customers waiting to buy them all out.

This on top of the rush job these guys had to do after Sony sprang the “new” Dualshake controller on them, which some have referred to as having merely tacked the ability onto their old controllers.

On the other side of the next-generation camp, Microsoft VP of Gaming Peter Moore told Kikizo games that nobody gives a crap about backwards compatibility on the 360.

Nobody is concerned anymore about backwards compatibility. We under promised and over delivered on that. It’s a very complicated thing… very complex work. I’m just stunned that we have hundreds of games that are backwards compatible … more are coming, but at some point, you just go, there’s enough, let’s move on, or people aren’t as worried about a game being backwards compatible – and I like to think we’ve upheld our end of the bargain in making at least two or maybe three hundred games backwards compatible.

Here’s the list. Notably missing are Project Gotham 2, Blitz: The League, The Warriors or any of the 2K Sports series except World Series 2K3. On the bright side, all of the die-hard gamers that were clamoring for Barbie™ Horse Adventures™ Wild Horse Rescue™ have been satisfied.

We should all be more thankful that the console companies know us much better than we do.

To double the amount of stock currently available to the public from 600 million shares to 1.2 billion.

I’m wiping tears of laughter from my eyes from reading that, I really am.

What’s more:

Our loss from operations for the quarter ended March 31, 2006 was $2,752,327. Our loss from operations for the year ended December 31, 2005 was $29,814,606. At March 31, 2006, we had a working capital deficit of $11,523,869 and accumulated losses since inception of $69,331,794. In their report on our audited financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2005, our independent auditors expressed substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern.

All I know is I’d like to be allowed to spend almost $70 million of other peoples’ money to come up with a keyboard and a mouse. It’d get me into E3 as an exhibitor, wouldn’t it? Hell, it’d be almost worth it! MONEY HATS FOR ALL!

That said, I don’t know how the hell a strategic alliance between Infi…er, Phantom Gaming Service and Itron Technologies is going to benefit anyone. I mean, sure, the lapboard/mouse combo is about the only solid thing they came up with and actually demoed, but doubling their stock offering isn’t going to raise any more money, what with last pump and dump scam that they came up with.

You gotta love it, though. It’s like, “What if Red Dragon Software was REAL?”

Hm.

Actually I suppose that would be Dark and Light. Ah, well. Carry on.

He’s trumpeting his usual battlecry of “I’m important, I’m important” and as per usual, he’s getting all sorts of backlash.

Popcorn, anyone?

The new reality sitcom, “Bruce n’ Brad” coming to you this summer season, from CBS! CATCH THE FEVER!!

There’s always something about Bruce talking in the third person that makes me laugh.

Just so you know that you could conceivably kill yourself over there, Scott.