• Xemu liveblogs DICE

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 5 Comments

    I’m sitting here at home, sick with whatever nasty cold is going around again — three or four of us out of the office today in fact! — so I am not at DICE. In fact, I’ve been asleep most of the afternoon. But Rob “Xemu” Fermier is at DICE, and apparently awake even, and he’s been liveblogging the talks. Two in particular caught my eye.

    One was the Blizzard talk, which really does reveal just how not like any other company in the industry Blizzard is, or really has ever been — hardly any publisher supervision, ever?

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  • ImagiNation Network revived!

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 6 Comments

    If you are hankering for some Shadow of Yserbius action, looks like innrevival might have your fix.

    The goal of the project is to create a server architecture that is compatible with the ImagiNation Network client software that you may still have lying around somewhere, forgotten, on a stack of floppies or a CD-ROM. This goal is being pursued by reverse-engineering the client software to determine the network messaging protocol that was used. We have had great success with this process so far, and by watching this site regularly for updates you will be able to keep up with our further progress and see what we have already done.

    Looks like you will need to run an original client within DOSBox, but they have shots of a bunch of working pieces already — Boogers, 3d Golf, the Clubhouse…

  • Stuff that caught my eye

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 21 Comments

    MMO gold trading akin to prostitution, says RuneScape’s Jele // GamesIndustry.biz

    The logic given is that it isn’t the activity that causes the problems, but the organized crime that builds up around it. Of course, the opens the question of whether legalization helps or not… And at the end of the article, there’s the oft-heard comment “and if the game were fun enough, this wouldn’t happen” — something I increasingly disagree with.

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  • The Sunday Poem: Herbie Hancock on a Headache

    Hours Categories The Sunday Poem

    I had a headache today. Fell asleep multiple times. My son’s got a fever too, has had for a few days. Blah. I’m ready for illness to stop going ’round. Anyway, caught intermittent pieces of a documentary on the making of Herbie Hancock’s Possibilities CD. And the experience of drowsing off the music while headachy got me this:

    Herbie Hancock on a Headache

    The thundundering of the duhduhdurums,
    The lashing of the cymbal crasharashing.
    Piano diddledaddle flatting fives and nattering,
    The bass boom thrumming thump thrump on.

    Play the drum head, pound that skin,
    Send jolts of timbre dazzle down my spine.
    Blow my mind, bounce the skull, a countercoup,
    Ivories xylophoning tickles in a line.

    But the music, music, music ocean sloshing close,
    Washing-whipping, whirl-a-looping, a vortex
    Vast and varied with snatches of a song;
    In fugue I fade before too long, the scribbled charts

    Rocking me to sleep, eleventh for a pillow,
    The tang and ride a blanket muffling me to dark.