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Voodooextreme.com is back. Apache was gone. Now he's back. Billy is gone. Apache said noone wanted to work with Billy anymore. Apache said he was gone for that reason. He returned after Billy quitted. Voodooextrem said for two weeks they were offline because of database problems. Then Voodooextreme said they were gone for financial reasons. I am glad they are back, because they had a very complete coverage of quite some genres. but I have to say i don't like the smell of it.
As far as i have heard the problems start with UGO. Not only for VE, but for a lot of sites that carry their banner. It is said (but not confirmed) that UGO doesn't pay in time or doesn't pay at all. Poeple who should know say they can't talk. That's all I can say about that. But given the state of the dot.com's today, it wouldn't take me wonder if there is a graon of truth in those rumors.
Talking about dot.com's: Snowball, owners of the network of vaults, continues to perform poory at the stock exchange. As you might know, they started out with 60$ a share about 18 months ago. Now their shares are at 0.21c. Seems that a NASDAQ delisting is very close now. This doesn't mean they will die, but it's a strong indication that there is no fortune in the gaming news business. It never was. It always was venture capital those sites and networks burnt. Not money they earned.
Well, enough of that. Back to RPG's :-). Garrett and I joked a little about the mass of MMORPG's that are announced or under production right now. Who the hell will ever play them? And isn't it funny that the second generation of online games (Anarchy online, WWII) hasn't learned a damned thing from the mistakes the first generation made? Funcom is now starting to moderate ( spelled "CENSOR") postings on their forums. Kill the bearer of bad messages, I call that. The only light at the end of the tunnel for now seems to be Dark Age of Camelot (neglecting that other MMORPGs may as well have learned their lessons) - it looks like a decent and rather balanced game, from all that has been made public so far. But still I wonder how many MMORPGs do we need? How many of those titles will even see the light of day, how many wil actually receive enough funding to be developed? As if the risk doing a MMORPG is smaller than doing a decent single player RPG. As if the chances of success are higher. I really doubt that.
Another topic that is discussed a lot between folks nowadays is if Morrowind will make it in time, and if it can live up to the expectations. The leaked movie shows a nice, but rather unfinished game (at least from what you see there). If Morrowind is to be released this year, it's about two months from going gold. Is it feature complete by now? Are they already hunting down bugs? Not much is known about this. Nothing is really known about how complete NWN is. Developers still say it will be released this year, distributor says Q1 2002. Who is right?
The positive news of the last week is that we will see an english version of Gothic before christmas (November 30th). This is the game Ultima IX should have been. Poeple from Germany who played it already know what I am talking about. If everything else fails, this game will entertain you for a good while. Don' miss it :-).
And a final word to our financial situation (because I have been asked about that a number of times over the last days): of course we are losing money. Of course we still appreciate your donations. Of course we can't live from advertising. Of course every single game ordered through our games shop helps. But even if this doesn't happen, we will manage to stay around. Our burn rate is low. Nevertheless: Help is always welcome, especially because it enables us to host other sites.
Before we go back to the news: I have been to the movies yesterday. I saw a french movie called "The fantastic world of Amelie" (this is the translation of the german title "Die fantastische Welt der Amelie"). If you have the chace to see it, go for it. It is the most funny, intelligent, moving, touching movie of this year. Of quite some years. My rating would be 99% (sparing the 1% for the movie that we call life)... |
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Rend's Rants: Mixed bag of fuzz
