Uru Live was resurrected from the dead on GameTap. Unfortunately, it seems even the episodic nature of GameTap’s programming is not enough to keep it running forever. GameTap just announced that they are closing Uru Live. Here’s the official announcement:
Currently very busy at Turbine, so not much time to read or do commentary, but these are interesting enough to pass along!
Apparently, quests that involve “moral” choices are bad because this Brazilian judge thinks Brazilians are too primitive to understand that they are in the context of a game. Counter-Strike I can understand, it involves guns and military themed things. It’s a lot easier to rationalize that. But Everquest? I was totally expecting the judge to say, “it’s too addictive for our citizens,” which would be a lot more acceptable to me than saying that the quest choices can cause psychological problems…
Read more at Kotaku.com.
Ha! Didn’t see that coming… right. As reported by WarCry, the crooks folks over at P2 Entertainment (also known as the fraudulent-company-formed-to-escape-liabilities, formerly known as Perpetual Entertainment), will no longer be developing Star Trek Online. The license and content have been transferred to an unnamed San Francisco Bay area company. The code remains with P2. Not hard to understand as they are now in the MMO platform business. I am not surprised at all as I have heard around the industry that STO license is being poached by multiple companies.
So he started by writing an awful, ridiculous article about Mass Effect being marketed to underage teenagers. Penny Arcade ripped on him. Then, he wrote another one, responding to the outcries from the “Gamer-Nerds”, condemning the ineffectiveness of the ESRB rating. In the finale of the trilogy, he apologized for not getting his facts right, and realized that the ESRB rating does do something.
From an article with UK McDonald’s CEO:
“Then there’s a lifestyle element: there’s fewer green spaces and kids are sat home playing computer games on the TV when in the past they’d have been burning off energy outside.”
It’s a been a while since the Sigil implosion/explosion. Yet, still more insights are coming out of their former employees about what really happened to such a highly anticipated project. Here’s a long post on the Fires of Heavens board by a former designer. Copied here entirely in case of it being lost in the future.
From the blaming-everything-on-video-games department:
All I have to say is… /sigh Can we find some other scapegoat? Like D&D, rock and rap music, media violence, internet? Oh wait, those have already been blamed. For all you parents out there, you are supposed to be watching what yours kids are doing. If your 12 years old are playing GTA and get screwed up in the head, you are to blame because you didn’t catch him/her doing so, and provide proper guidance/parenting.
Also, I think the number of accidental gun shot deaths in households is way higher. In 1999, in 3,385 firearms-related deaths for age group 0-19 years, 214 unintentional were unintentional. Pardon my old numbers, I can’t find any newer ones, but with guns more and more common today in US, I can only imagine that number being higher. Let’s fight more worthwhile fights, shall we?
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