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Interestingly enough, the latest issue of EGM's blurb from the editor talked about this very problem. He stated that he wasn't going to do any of this exclusive front-cover stuff that some of the publishers wanted to push on him.. The Game Rag has a little fun at EGM's expense because of that article..

If I were to recommend a site for reviews right now, I'm not sure what I'd go with. I know that right now, I listen a lot to The DreamStation's podcast, and their website does have some reviews and stuff on it. I'm not sure about the quality, but the podcast is fun to listen to. For a while there they were taking turns taking potshots at Nancy Drew, Secret of the Old Clock until they actually reviewed it and had to admit it was actually kind of fun. :) They're good folks.

Even the guys over at Penny Arcade are pretty shameless these days with their Xbox 360 endorsements. I think you have to take everything said by anyone in the game industry with a grain of salt. With a movie, you only see it one way, but with a game, each player generates their own experience to a degree. It's tough to really cover everything when you're faced with something like that, and sometimes reviewers just get excited about having been giving a certain choice without ever actually having chosen it..

These are my own opinions, not my employer's, etc. :P

What's still nice about podcasting, is that it's an audio/visual medium that doesn't have to dilute itself. Established media produces content aimed at the widest possible audience, and therefore ends up not being appealing to anyone at all. Whereas, I can create a podcast targeted toward the hardcore gamers, and it can find a loyal audience.

Furthermore, by using RSS as the delivery platform, basement hacks like me can go up against established media. For example, my friends and I do a gaming podcast that is beating out established entities like PC Gamer magazine's podcast (based on subscriber numbers from yahoo and odeo).

But numbers aside, it's fun. We don't make money off of it, nor do we think we ever will... but we do it for the love. How can established media beat people producing content out of love?!

Sega sold their 2K Games division to Take Two Interactive.

Sony and Nintendo had both already confirmed they would be demoing their consoles at E3 as far back as last July; we were just waiting on Microsoft. The only thing that's changed now is Microsoft, and that Sony's confirmed they'll have playable demos at E3 rather than playable demos around E3.

Nokia has been lying about their sales the whole time. As of Feb '04 they claimed to have shipped 600,000 units, even though after its first two weeks on the market they claimed 400,000 units, and claimed two weeks later to have doubled that. It seems a year later, a quarter of that sold inventory evaporated.

Of course, you should check the date on that article at The Register - it's Feb 24, '04. In fact, just three weeks earlier they had lied and claimed to pass the million unit mark.

Nobody in the industry was fooled. Unfortunately I can't link you to the speculation which I really want to give you, but the rumor is that Nokia never actually shipped half a million units, and that less than five percent of them have been sold, whereas an unheard of ninety percent have been returned by retailers. To give you a sense of scale, that famously bad Atari 2600 E.T. game which many people claim as the worst game in history not only outshipped and outsold the N-Gage in its entirety, but also had a lower return rate.

Listen harder. There are more hits for the phrase "n-gage sucks" than there were confirmed walmart sales of the device the world over in two years of carrying the monstrosity.

No I disagree. Sure your hacker come programmer could put together a gamecube solution but first theres the problem of gamecube SDK (if your not an official developer you break license) Here's the gnu toolkit, but that's it. There are enthusiasts that want to try their hand at consoles closer to the metal than gamecube, ps2 or xbox. I can think of a lot of good AUS, NZ and UK programmers who cut their teeth as ankle biters on (expensive) Acorns, Sinclairs, Apple][ etc, hooked up to tv's. This is simply the latest example.

This is where Lamonthe's idea comes in, sell cheap hardware to code against. It looks like he's giving you known hardware to code with that can spit out to any tv system (seacam, pal) with access to additional hardware like PS2 controllers. The other thing is that the system is embedded. No drives, os .. just you the code. Try that with gamecube.

for example your code might be something like

• ...
• 
  Init Hardware
  Init API
  JMP MAIN
  your_code ...

i must admit I've spent enough on Lamonthe books to keep him in plenty of pizza and look foward to reading more from his programming ideas. You can read a good interview here.

No I disagree. Sure your hacker come programmer could put together a gamecube solution but first theres the problem of gamecube SDK (if your not an official developer you break license) Here's the gnu toolkit, but that's it. There are enthusiasts that want to try their hand at consoles closer to the metal than gamecube, ps2 or xbox. I can think of a lot of good AUS, NZ and UK programmers who cut their teeth as ankle biters on (expensive) Acorns, Sinclairs, Apple][ etc, hooked up to tv's. This is simply the latest example.

This is where Lamonthe's idea comes in, sell cheap hardware to code against. It looks like he's giving you known hardware to code with that can spit out to any tv system (seacam, pal) with access to additional hardware like PS2 controllers. The other thing is that the system is embedded. No drives, os .. just you the code. Try that with gamecube.

for example your code might be something like

• ...
• 
  Init Hardware
  Init API
  JMP MAIN
  your_code ...

i must admit I've spent enough on Lamonthe books to keep him in plenty of pizza and look foward to reading more from his programming ideas. You can read a good interview here.

Sega/Pace Dreamcast Set-Top-Box Revealed.

I think it is this one, but there isn't much information on the games:

IP420

I remember this as one of the great, "let's throw the disgruntled say-it-ain't-so Dreamcast fans a bone so they won't realize they've got a dead platform" stories that the Dreamcast sections of game magazines were running when it was clear that time was running out for the Dreamcast.

1. Sega didn't need to put in the modem. How many people actually used it? It was wasted money.

and

they should've taken the money that they were spending on that stupid modem

Umm... More than 200,000 online players of Phantasy Star Online since December, 2000. See this Press Release from Sega.


-- Nik (Dacileva)