Massively Multiplayer News

A mix of gaming news:

• Blizzard has apparently pulled the plug on StarCraft: Ghost, at least for this console generation. This is something of a surprise to me, if true, and a shame: A demo of it was playable at BlizzCon and a long-ago demo I saw of the game when I worked at Blizzard, featuring Nova sneaking her way through a rogue Terran base, stealing a flying motorcycle (sorry, SC fans, I don’t remember what they’re called) and then zipping out into a battlefield with the Zerg and Terran armies clashing all around her looked amazing. (And for those keeping score, this makes two franchise-related games Blizzard has killed for not being all they can be, with the first being Warcraft Adventures, a painful-to-watch old style adventure game developed by a Russian firm.)
• PlanetSide, Sony Online Entertainment’s Starship Troopers-flavored MMORPG — well, they call it a Massively Multiplayer Real Time Shooter, which seems to me to be slicing this particular hair needlessly thin — is now free for a year, sort of. In PlanetSide Reserves, players can check out the game but are restricted as to what rank they can achieve in one of the three warring futuristic armies. I’ll definitely be checking this one out.
• Raph Koster, the man behind Ultima Online and who brought a distinct UO feel to the Star Wars franchise in the troubled Star Wars Galaxy MMORPG — because, when you think Star Wars, don’t you just fantasize about paying $15/month to be a droid repairman? — has left the building. Rumors that Sony would be losing the Star Wars license and that Bioware would be creating a massively multiplayer version of their wildly popular Knights of the Old Republic computer roleplaying games appear to be so much bantha poodoo, however.

From Alcatraz to Hesperia

Here’s a portion of a letter we just received at the Star:

It was with great excitement that I read your article on the school district move, forwarded to me by Goggle. My name is Nicki Phelps, and I am the Director of Visitor Programs for the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy in San Francisco. We run all fee based programs on Alcatraz Island.
 
Currently, we are in the midst of refurnishing the Alcatraz Cellhouse. When I read that some of the school district furniture is came from Alcatraz, I felt compelled to write. Would it be possible for you to forward this email to the school district, especially Ms. Baker? At the very least, I would sincerely appreciate seeing the furniture by photo or in person.

I hadn’t even thought about this aspect of the story, really. Very cool for all those Alcatraz history buffs out there.

Mid-season

So, it’s the lull in the entertainment year, when Hollywood finishes up off-loading its most awful movies that it doesn’t want to send direct to video and television shows are in re-runs and cancelled shows are replaced.

The replacement shows are a mixed bag this time around, but there are two surprisingly good ones:

• The New Adventures of Old Christine is really, really funny, which is remarkable, considering how Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ first post-Seinfeld show, Watching Ellie, was unbelievably awful. (It even had a character quite clearly intended to be almost identical to Kramer.) It’s not changing the face of comedy or anything, but that’s OK: Just being a really solid sitcom is plenty.
• Conviction, which is set in the Law & Order universe, but without the theme song and stilted structure, is also pretty good, although maybe not quite as good. It’s odd seeing a kid who looks like Fred Savage — but isn’t — as a lawyer, but the rest of the show is pretty darn interesting, although only on TV would they refer to someone who makes more than $50,000/year as “underpaid.”
• Heist, though, ouch. It should be noted that I like stories about criminals. One of my favorite comic books of all time is Secret Society of Super-Villains #1, where Mirror Master and Captain Cold rob a fast food restaurant in lieu of paying for lunch. I dig villian-centered novels (my father introducing me to Slippery Jim DiGriz was probably a bad role model to set up for me) and caper movies. This, though, this is just bad. Leaving aside that it’s trying to cash in on the buzz generated by Andre Braugher’s Thief on another network: It’s got characters named Lola and Pops. It has scenes painfully clearly written while the screenwriters were rewinding and watching key scenes from Pulp Fiction. It has people amusingly punching each other in the face. It has the actress who plays the really, really bitchy wife of Shane on The Shield as an impossibly young chief of detectives. I actually felt brain cells of mine dying as I watched this, and wouldn’t be at all shocked to learn they’d left a note.
• According to Tom Shales at the Washington Post, I’m probably being too easy on Heist, if anything: “‘Heist’ seems derivative of an imitation of a copy of a clone — so plastic-coated and phony that it’s hard to tell what it’s ripping off.”.

Two fun Wired articles

• In praise of duct tape. I had no idea that it really was once called “duck tape.”
• An American Idol “fan” attempts to screw it all up — even worse than the regular voters do — with a site dedicated to promoting the worst singers.

Flying solo in this week’s podcast

It’s been a while since the last Hesperia Star podcast, for which we can only plead crazy schedules and all sorts of other things tripping us up in this new realm for the newspaper. Things haven’t calmed down, but in an attempt to get back on track, I did a solo podcast last night, using the high-tech equipment of Peter’s cellphone: I literally phoned the podcast in.

It should be posted on the Hesperia Star blog in the next day or so.

The next hurdle to leap, once we’re back to regularity with the podcasts, is getting a working feed up to automatically “cast” it to the waiting masses. (OK, to my dad.)