Posts tagged Miscellaneous Links

‘allo to all! Yes I know I haven’t really been around much lately, but I have the greatest excuse ever! No seriously, it really is, short of my own death, I think the birth of my own son would be the only acceptable reason for me to be so blatantly absent from the beloved Normalinauts. At any rate, I am returning, there are certainly webcomics in the future and of course, if at all possible I will be uploading some picks of the incredible monkey-toed life form what came from APrilhead‘s belly on April 6th 2008…. he’s adorable, so wait for it – Salem Ezra Grey!

In the meantime, I’ve been asked (oddly enough) what it is I actually do for a living. Good question, erm, not entirely sure exactly what to say to that other than the fact that I work in the vid-game industry, specifically for a company known as NtreevUSA (which by the nationalistic abbreviation at the back-end I’m sure you can deduce that it is part of another company, that being Ntreev proper/[Korea]). What we do is publish online vid-games, specifically Trickster Online Revolution and Grand Chase. While I’m sure not everyone is an avid gamer, or particularly interested in PC/online titles themselves… someone did ask, so this is what I do. I’ve made the comic guides for both games live on the relevant websites thereof, and until the end of 2007 committed a full color, weekly webcomic known as MegaloLife for the TricksterOnlineRevolution website (it was cancelled – still not sure ‘why’ exactly… let your imaginations run wild as you will).

But all of that aside, one of the other things I do, is sort of ‘cool hunting’ to quote Gibson, which is looking for current trends as well as predicting plausible projections both short and long term for the vid-game industry itself. One of the ways that I do this is to watch the current stable of industry spurned news from across the internet. I do this every. single. day. without fail, and over all it does a nice job of at least keeping me up to date on the current stories of interest. And since I figure that there are likely some other vid-game enthusiasts out there in Normaliland I thought it might be fun to try posting some of my little findings here on NR proper. This is an experiment and may or may not be continued depending on interest. After all, if no one cares about this, I won’t be hurt, but I’m not going to keep throwing it in your face either. So here it is, my lovingly titled GameNewsOfInterest (or GNoI) for today, April 16th, 2008, unabridged, unedited and all for you:

Welcome to the wonderful world of GNoI, your daily source for the industry news you crave, without all of the pesky, time-consuming and likely damage-inflicting and possibly dangerous web browsing. That’s right, we take the damage for you, so you don’t have to. Think of GNoI as your own personal meat-shield in the dangerous abyss of the vid-game industry news and more… but don’t think that hard, it is afterall, time to read some news:

The EU has finally approved Vivendi to fully merge with Acitvision. The apocalypse is nigh to be sure, and EA really has to be feeling burned on the whol being snubbed by Take2 thing now.

The Sims (combined of course amongst all iterations) has passed the 100m mark in worldwide sales, which is really, and simply crazy, because it’s, well, the Sims… /sigh

Variety is getting in on the GTAIV fever, and has predicted a return of $400m in the first week for the title. Gee, um thanks, Variety, now how about that whole Firefly show that you essentially ignored and helped to kill….?

NC Soft has just introduced their own online currency, the NCcoin. A little astonished that it took them this long to come out with a real micro-transaction currency all of their ownsome.

Dev house and notable game creator of yesteryear, Petroglyph in partnership with TrueGamesInteractive will be creating and releasing f2p games with the usual micro-transaction model attached.

CCP is all over the recent leak of the source code for EVE, and is making sure to a, well, assure the players that even though the code is out and can be manipulated, it won’t present any unfair advantages for hackers in-game.

The unlikely and uncanny VW juggernaut, BuildABear is still at it, making even stronger ties and tie-ins between the created v-space and the real-world stores. Currently on offer is the ability to watch supermullet-Cyrus-spawned-Hannah-Montanna footage… this is why we don’t have teley in the Gilgrim household.

Animax has announced a new Branded Entertainment Div, to work in conjuncture with UInplugged TV and create Animax Unplugged. The hope is that this will allow a better focus both on internal IPs as well as expansion into multi-platform[media] outlets and tie-ins down the road. Like we need more Ty crap anywhere let alone online…

German created VW, Panfu, teaches the kiddies proper Spanish, and has received 1m+ reg’s in 4 months, for the browser-based, advertFREE, language immersion and socialization world…. why are Germans out to learn Spanish anyway?

With the announcement of the closing of Disney’s V-MagicKingdom, a very impressive 70% of the daily users (of which there are only 15k total to be fair) have signed an online petition basically begging the house that Mickey built to rethink its current plans. I’m most shocked at the numbers that show only a 15k daily usage O_O this is Disney after all, how sad…

Take2 is set to broadcast its annual shareholders meeting tomorrow, and speculation abounds regarding how much will be discussed regarding or in direct correlation to the recent and failed attempts of EA to try and hostily take over the major pub/dev. We’ll have to wait until tomorrow…

Browser based (truly?) and ‘freemium’ titled Quake Live is now accepting email addies for consideration in the Live Beta. If you fancy this sort of thing – go, go now!

Likely in conjunction with the upcoming NY ComicCon, Prototype from Sierra Entertainment is getting the proper comic-tie-in-treatment from none other than DC. Then again, it’s not coming in on the Vertigo imprint… so this could hold as much water as say, the MortalKombat comic-tie-ins of long ago… meh

Reportedly, 7 out of the 11 available servers for Pirates of the Burning Sea have been shut down. The reason: lack of user base… PotBS has chosen, in answer, to close down many of the low-pop servers to better promote pop-density. Really hope this works out for them… it’s very nice to see an online title that doesn’t have a clichéd fantasy setting, like oh say, all of the others…

Shepard Fairey (yes the guy who co-opted/aped John Carpenter’s TheyLive for his own ObeyGiant brand) has been tapped by 2K to create a series of promotional posters for the upcoming Civ-Rev release. Very smart, very edgy, very forward thinking in many regards…

Sega’s KingOfGames T-shirt line is now being made available internationally, officially for the first time ever. Neat!

And now to conlude today’s daily GNoI report, as we do every day in honor of the proud tradition of one John Stewart, here it is, your moment of zen. Today’s zen includes, Yahtzee, YHTBTR, Special-kiddie-firendly-Sonic-smokes and a little bit of Bailey.

Begin Zen integration now:

Yahtzee brings us his take on Condemmed 2: Bloodshot, hobo bashing, Indigo Prophecy Syndrome and other funness.

YouHaveToBurnTheRope a simple game with a great ending theme.

Sonic is all about promoting youth tobacco use… next up, Night Train?

–Aleister

My Chemical Romance – Thank You For The Venom

PS

Kilian has an original piece of artwork that I made for him on his birthday (when the drunken Cranium was played) and he’s supposedly looking for a scanner to use in order to share it with the digital world at large… If you want to see it, pester him, or give him a scanner. And if you’re giving away things, don’t forget me, I want things, I have a kid now afterall…