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http://9dragons.acclaim.com/

Tried it, it was decent, but that was a couple years ago.

The only US(?) based release I can think of that plans to turn free to play, pay to buy is http://bots.acclaim.com/index.htm but this may just be a port of some game unknown to me.

"Race for pink slips" indeed..

Taken from Acclaim's own pages, right now (linkage):

Acclaim Entertainment is one of the world's leading developers and publishers of video games. We are proud of the brands we have made famous over the years - brands such as Mortal Kombat, Turok, All-Star Baseball and Dave Mirra's BMX - but we are not content to rest on our laurels. Our industry is evolving at an ever increasing speed and we must continually push the boundaries of technology to provide entertaining, exciting and challenging video games.

To do that, we need the best and brightest stars in our game development studios and our corporate departments. We need ideas, solutions, new innovations, strong opinions and dedication. We need YOU!

Take it to the next level - Send your resume to Acclaim!

Don't think I'll be sending in my resume after all

With recent titles such as American Pro Trucker and Mary Kate and Ashley: Sweet 16, it's almost hard to believe they were losing money.

With recent titles such as American Pro Trucker and Mary Kate and Ashley: Sweet 16, it's almost hard to believe they were losing money.

Best car racing game ever. You get bonus points for driving as dangerously as possible, and the crash mode has you try to flip and smash your vehicle at an accident blackspot so as to cause the maximum possible carnage.

I know, +1 Funny, but Akklaim have a page about how "Burnout 2 saved my life".

This game is all my childhood, i played it for month, and if there's someone around here that knows the carribean sea better than me, he'll taste my sword for sure. But for /. readers it's perhaps out of sight, i played it on the C=64 last century, then on the amiga, and got it on the PC for a birthday. Anyway, i hope the "remake" will keep the promises of the first game.

Other games i like: "Soul reaver", "Black & White", "Trick Style", Tibia, Nomad Soul, and of course all the Lucas Art Series..

I agree with most of what you say, but not all of it. The lack of non-localized damage is odd, and unintuitive. Unified ammo is also odd, but not something we should hold against it until we see how the finished game plays. I tend to feel Unified ammo will free the player to play in a way reflective of their style. The interface isn't great, but it isn't terrible. The AI? I can't say for sure because the two areas of the demo were pretty severly separated, but the AI seemed to handle itself OK.

Demos always run like s#(t. They're usually finished a month before the game is, and are based off of really old code. I would be surprised if the final game was running 100% better, but many problems will have been ironed out between demo and gold.

BTW, apparently you haven't seen the depths of crappyness of modern acclaim games. Let me remind you what they're capable of.

I agree with most of what you say, but not all of it. The lack of non-localized damage is odd, and unintuitive. Unified ammo is also odd, but not something we should hold against it until we see how the finished game plays. I tend to feel Unified ammo will free the player to play in a way reflective of their style. The interface isn't great, but it isn't terrible. The AI? I can't say for sure because the two areas of the demo were pretty severly separated, but the AI seemed to handle itself OK.

Demos always run like s#(t. They're usually finished a month before the game is, and are based off of really old code. I would be surprised if the final game was running 100% better, but many problems will have been ironed out between demo and gold.

BTW, apparently you haven't seen the depths of crappyness of modern acclaim games. Let me remind you what they're capable of.

Sadly, if you go to the images page, it is apparent that gladiator is not actually all that bloody. It's not a member of the elite class of games where you can hack your opponent's limbs off, for example. There are no explosions, so bits of grizzle don't spray everywhere like in FPS games. No internally bits are ever on the outside. It's not even funny. Where is the violence? The nastiness? Where is the dark foreboding nature of of the world laid bare like scraped flesh covered in dirt and pebbles?

No, what we get is a series of repetitive blood textures added to the grounds around where a traditional penetration damage model is taking place. Nothing new here.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some Happy Tree Friends to watch.

zoocube ads will excrete poo?
ducatti world leaks oil?
I don't even want to know what liquid they'll use to promote Iggy's Reckin Balls!

zoocube ads will excrete poo?
ducatti world leaks oil?
I don't even want to know what liquid they'll use to promote Iggy's Reckin Balls!

zoocube ads will excrete poo?
ducatti world leaks oil?
I don't even want to know what liquid they'll use to promote Iggy's Reckin Balls!

I can see Acclaim all over this.

This is going to be a lengthy but serious discussion of MMORPGs.

Usually, when I read these kinds of articles about game addicts, I always think, "if only we could use his powers for good!" If only we could make it so that people get more out of games than just fun. If only we could actually get something genuinely useful at the same time (so we don't end up with stories like this one from The Onion).

My canonical example is Crazy Taxi. In this game, you drive a taxi, taking people from place to place in a pseudo-San Francisco city. You get more points for driving recklessly, getting as close as you can to crashing things without actually crashing into them. What if...you could actually learn the streets of San Fran while playing this game? I hate driving there because I don't know what the streets are, because of all the one-way streets, because of all the cars and pedestrians. But what if you could actually learn the streets incidentally while playing the game? You would actually be learning something useful beyond the game console.

Now, analogously, what if we could get something useful out of MMORPGs, more than just entertainment and player-killing?

Here's a crazy idea: what if we could actually simulate real problems of society in MMORPGs and harness the power of players in solving those problems? For example, homelessness or pollution?

What if these MMORPGs were modelled such that they actually reflected real aspects of the world, creating an environment where we could actually experiment with different public policies, or even have the numerous players (who are clearly very intelligent people) try to figure out different solutions to these problems? Try out different ideas that may eventually influence what we actually do in the real world?

One example that's pushing in this direction is University of Washington's UrbanSim, where they try to predict what the impact of different public policy decisions will be on the environment. (They also run tests on old data to make sure their model matches the actual results).

I'm aware of how difficult this would be, all of the barriers in making convincing and realistic models, in making an appropriate reward system to incentivize people, in actually convincing academic scholars in sociology and public policy as well as policy makers that these ideas can be realistically and feasibly implemented with the expected results. (I'm in the Phd program in Computer Science at Berkeley, I have a pretty good idea of how difficult it would be).

But think about the potential here as well. A simulation with thousands of people interacting with one another, where we could try out radical new ideas in solving problems. Think of it as SimSociety. Think of it as a variation of Doug Engelbart's vision, where we need to get better at solving problems because the ones we're facing these days are far harder than anything we've ever seen before. Players could be doing more than just having fun. They could also be making a difference, for the better.

The version for the PlayStation(R)2 computer entertainment system has been edited to eliminate the topless nudity, while versions for Xbox and Nintendo GameCube' will contain topless nudity.

Hilarious scripted events written by Hollywood's best comedians and mind-blowing mature content that you won't believe you're seeing.

From reading the blurb from the acclaim site I would say it is not near X rated. While I do think it is compleatly distastefull, I think you can find more sexual content in "Not Another Teen Movie" or "Too High".

"As a desperate New York cop drags his shattered body from a blazing tenement building, his partner and friend perishes inside at the hands of a huge, demonic creature. His death is not in vain, however, for it gives his colleague a chance to escape with the very thing the creature seeks; an enormous and ancient book, sealed shut by a series of powerful clasps...

Some ten years later in the southern United States, a near-empty passenger train thunders through the haze of an early evening dusk, as it makes it way to New Orleans. On board, alone, sits Michael LeRoi. As night falls and the moon rises, white-blue sparks of "Shadow Power" surge from his chest and envelope him as the train's interior lights plunge into darkness. Michael LeRoi, as he does every night, transforms to become the Shadow Man."

Shadow Man 2 for Playstation 2 will begin shipping to North American retail on March 7th.

"As a desperate New York cop drags his shattered body from a blazing tenement building, his partner and friend perishes inside at the hands of a huge, demonic creature. His death is not in vain, however, for it gives his colleague a chance to escape with the very thing the creature seeks; an enormous and ancient book, sealed shut by a series of powerful clasps...

Some ten years later in the southern United States, a near-empty passenger train thunders through the haze of an early evening dusk, as it makes it way to New Orleans. On board, alone, sits Michael LeRoi. As night falls and the moon rises, white-blue sparks of "Shadow Power" surge from his chest and envelope him as the train's interior lights plunge into darkness. Michael LeRoi, as he does every night, transforms to become the Shadow Man."

Shadow Man 2 for Playstation 2 will begin shipping to North American retail on March 7th.

"As a desperate New York cop drags his shattered body from a blazing tenement building, his partner and friend perishes inside at the hands of a huge, demonic creature. His death is not in vain, however, for it gives his colleague a chance to escape with the very thing the creature seeks; an enormous and ancient book, sealed shut by a series of powerful clasps...

Some ten years later in the southern United States, a near-empty passenger train thunders through the haze of an early evening dusk, as it makes it way to New Orleans. On board, alone, sits Michael LeRoi. As night falls and the moon rises, white-blue sparks of "Shadow Power" surge from his chest and envelope him as the train's interior lights plunge into darkness. Michael LeRoi, as he does every night, transforms to become the Shadow Man."

Shadow Man 2 for Playstation 2 will begin shipping to North American retail on March 7th.

"As a desperate New York cop drags his shattered body from a blazing tenement building, his partner and friend perishes inside at the hands of a huge, demonic creature. His death is not in vain, however, for it gives his colleague a chance to escape with the very thing the creature seeks; an enormous and ancient book, sealed shut by a series of powerful clasps...

Some ten years later in the southern United States, a near-empty passenger train thunders through the haze of an early evening dusk, as it makes it way to New Orleans. On board, alone, sits Michael LeRoi. As night falls and the moon rises, white-blue sparks of "Shadow Power" surge from his chest and envelope him as the train's interior lights plunge into darkness. Michael LeRoi, as he does every night, transforms to become the Shadow Man."

Shadow Man 2 for Playstation 2 will begin shipping to North American retail on March 7th.

"As a desperate New York cop drags his shattered body from a blazing tenement building, his partner and friend perishes inside at the hands of a huge, demonic creature. His death is not in vain, however, for it gives his colleague a chance to escape with the very thing the creature seeks; an enormous and ancient book, sealed shut by a series of powerful clasps...

Some ten years later in the southern United States, a near-empty passenger train thunders through the haze of an early evening dusk, as it makes it way to New Orleans. On board, alone, sits Michael LeRoi. As night falls and the moon rises, white-blue sparks of "Shadow Power" surge from his chest and envelope him as the train's interior lights plunge into darkness. Michael LeRoi, as he does every night, transforms to become the Shadow Man."

Shadow Man 2 for Playstation 2 will begin shipping to North American retail on March 7th.

"As a desperate New York cop drags his shattered body from a blazing tenement building, his partner and friend perishes inside at the hands of a huge, demonic creature. His death is not in vain, however, for it gives his colleague a chance to escape with the very thing the creature seeks; an enormous and ancient book, sealed shut by a series of powerful clasps...

Some ten years later in the southern United States, a near-empty passenger train thunders through the haze of an early evening dusk, as it makes it way to New Orleans. On board, alone, sits Michael LeRoi. As night falls and the moon rises, white-blue sparks of "Shadow Power" surge from his chest and envelope him as the train's interior lights plunge into darkness. Michael LeRoi, as he does every night, transforms to become the Shadow Man."

Shadow Man 2 for Playstation 2 will begin shipping to North American retail on March 7th.

And lots of administrators won't bother. The network of NT machines at the high school i went to, just for an example, had a random administrator who was given the job just becuase he'd been a teacher who knew some stuff about computers, and he knew how to set up racks of ethernet switches, and he read some books. This person didn't really have much concept of security; he just disabled anything at all anyone might possibly have wanted to have done, making the computers somewhat irritating to use. And then he went to the people who'd hired him and said, look, on the NT machines you can only run netscape and wordperfect and notepad! It is secure! You will not have to worry about the students abusing the computers! And they were content.

Despite this, there really was no security to speak of. All he'd done was limit the programs that could be executed to a small list of "approved" software. But he did it by name-- which meant that if you dropped winamp on a machine and renamed it to "notepad.exe", you could run it. The machines all had borland 5 on them, and you could execute programs you had the source to by running them in borland. And those programs could exec() others. And the write permissions were set such that one user could install Snood!, and every other user who used that particular machine forevermore would have Gator Download Assistant or whatever the hell it's called popping up every time they used netscape.

The point of my story is this: Admining is not all that simple, and many people don't try that hard at it. Windows administration gives you *lots* of options. Lots and lots of options. There's always going to be a couple configuration options that every administrator misses, somewhere, even if they're trying really hard. And lots of the administrators out there are just doing the bare minimum they have to to get their paycheck.

So, basically, even if it *is* really easy for an organisation to set up a windows xp machine to be really secure and locked down and 'safe', and even if the vast majority of deployers do go in and work out the settings just the way they're meant to,

If .NET blows up into something really, really big, then the networks of that minority of sysadmins who *don't* know what they're doing, like the one at my high school, are *all* that the next great internet worm needs to wreak quite a lot of havoc.

Just a thought.

Burnout for the Playstation 2.

Played this on demo at the local Wal-Mart, really good arcade-style racing controls, and when you slam into traffic going 100+ mph it's really fun to watch how many times your car flips :).