While I was still traveling back from E3, news of the Mythos beta going on hiatus for an unspecified period of time. This was announced on their Website.
This came just a few days after a press release from Flagship Studios that they were still open! This had impact of course, on their currently running MMOG, Hellgate London.
San Francisco, CA (July 14, 2008) -- Flagship Studios has announced today that despite rumors to the contrary, the company is still operating.
“It is with deep regret that I must announce that Flagship Studios has laid off most employees. However, the core management and founding team members are still at Flagship.” said Bill Roper, CEO of Flagship Studios. “The past five years have been an incredible experience for us, but unfortunately, we couldn’t sustain the size of the company any longer.”
Flagship Studios owns the rights to all its technology and IP, including Hellgate: London and Mythos. Due to the current situation, Flagship will not be taking any new subscribers for Hellgate: London, and all current subscriptions will not be billed.
The 3rd U.S. Circurt Court of Appeals upheld on Tuesday a 2007 lower-court decision that the Child Online Protection Act violated the First Amendment since it was not the most effective way to keep children from visiting adult websites.
Both courts also found that the standards for material that had to be hidden from open browsing were so loosely defined that any content not suitable for a four-year-old would have been hidden behind a age-verification firewall.
"Unlike COPA, filters permit adults to determine if and when they want to use them and do not subject speakers to criminal or civil penalties," the court wrote.
Now... we know that video games improve hand-eye coordination (Yes, there are lots of studies, including one on a group of young medical students), but improve your health? On the heels of the Wii Fit (which was the brain child of Shigeru Miyamoto - Mario, Donkey Kong), come Ubisoft's "My Weight Loss Coach" for the DS which just shipped, and they are about to ship a program to help people quit smoking.
Of course hundreds of us aging gamers (Mea Culpa!) bought the Nintendo DS with "Brain Age" as our excuse - even my mother has one!
Indie game developers are finding a market with the big Three of Console Games, Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony. According to this Analysis, the big three are finding innovative exclusive titles at a relatively low financial risk by going with Indies. Reaching out to the Indie developer helps them keep up with new talent, and helps them find titles beyond the expensive, but familiar franchises that dominate the market.
Encouraging developers and players to step away from the standard subscription model.
A couple of things before I get started here - I'm mostly familiar with EQ1, and Eq2, So this is where I'll be focusing my ideals - This isn't to say that these ideals couldn't work for any other company. He or she who is flexible survives, those who fail to adapt die.
In North America - Every MMO we play, along with a few normal games (Like Hellgate London) have a monthly subscription cost. These costs range from $10.00 to $50.00 a month in American dollars and cover your basic monthly subscription. For most of us in the America's, further perks are not available unless they are freely given as a monthly update.
First we hear about the use of the Nintento DS's WiFi capabilities at sporting stadiums for ordering food and drinks from the concession stands and obtaining game scores & playback, now the PSP get's a Google search function.
Sony Computer Entertainment America sent word today that with the next firmware upgrade (4.00), which will be available this week, the PSP will get Google Search added directly to the portable's XMB (XrossMediaBar). The search functionality will be listed as "Internet Search" under the Network category on XMB.
Neat idea, and something I'm going to have to try out.
Are we mainstream or are we mainstream? According to this Variety article, Paramount Pictures has signed Leonardo DiCaprio to star in a movie named "Atari" as it's founder, Nolan Bushnell.
Gamespot has more to say, and tells us that Bushnell has recently been pretty vocal about his feelings about the modern games industry. He has called current games "pure, unadulterated trash," Sony "arrogant and capricious," and added that he thought some titles on the market are "truly despicable."
The 64 dollar question is... "Will you watch this?"
The Shadow of Odyssey or The Shadow Odyssey – Sony Online Entertanment [SOE] hasn’t picked an actually title for it yet, and I can’t seem to get any concrete information.
So here is my list. Who knows some of these might actually happen. While I can say that I have almost as much experience in games and the fantasy genre as some of the developers out there, I don’t work for Sony. (Or sadly, Have any programming or design experience – yet anyway)
This is fairly long, I've attached the more tag so I don't completely run anyone else’s column right off the next few pages... Continue on, Said the spider to the fly...
I spend at least a bit of time each day perusing sites such as Kotaku. Today on there I saw this post listing out the drinks EA came out for the EA Games Spring Break 08. Other than what I write on here (not much recently, I know), I spent a lot of time in the Scofflaw's Den, an online speakeasy that my friend Marshall and I started primarily to talk about cocktails.
NVidia is planning to make all your PC games 3-D as reported by CJNet News. It's a software driver that they are developing that beginning this summer, any PC with an Nvidia graphics processor will have the ability to run a game in normal mode, or in 3D, with the aid of 3D glasses.
So here's the challenge. How to make those glasses stylish and not geeky? Only time will tell. Will it really work that well? Which series video cards will they work with?
