MacSoft To Publish Neverwinter Nights In Fall 2002

Oddbod writes "Hot on the heels of yesterday's gold news, Bioware has announced that IG arm MacSoft will publish the Mac version of Neverwinter Nights. They hint at porting the toolset over to Mac, which originally wasn't expected, but no promises so far."

Comments

In honour of WIPO's return...

[Anal Cocks]

THE OFFICIAL TACO-SNOTTING FAQ By J. Wipo Troll, Esq., $Revision: 1.16 $

[This article attempts to document a vile, ungodly practice that runs rampant through the homosexual geek and hacker community, a practice known as Taco-snotting, or simply snotting. Taco-snotting is something that few geeks dare talk about in free or open conversation, but it is nonetheless a widely-practiced and dangerous form of homosexuality. If you or anyone you know has ever engaged in Taco-snotting, please get professional help before it is too late. ed.]

Why do I keep receiving emails from an individual calling himself CmdrTaco?

You have been receiving unsolicited mailings from a certain Robert CmdrTaco Malda, owner of the popular technology website slashdot.org. Actually, its not a very popular site in the common sense of the word; the site is rife with pimply, antisocial geeks and hackers, zit-faced nerds, communists, dirty GNU hippies, and other societal rejects and outcasts. Its also home to one of the worlds largest suspected pædophile rings, the infamous Slashdot crew.

Whenever Mr. Malda gets bored (and who wouldnt, running a site like Slashdot all day), he roams through the user database, penis in hand, looking for people who might enjoy engaging in homosexual activities with him. How he determines this is anyones guess; but if you have a homosexual-sounding nickname, or a nick with a letter of the English alphabet in it, youre a potential candidate.

This time, he found you. Lucky you.

Mr. Malda seems to be speaking in some sort of code. Do you know what it means?

CmdrTacos code language is relatively easy to decipher. This pervert prefers to speak in thinly-veiled sexual innuendo (yes, thats right: he wants you) to evade the watchful eye of Slashdots parent corporation, VA Software. Mr. Maldas Commander is, of course, his penis: a small, withered little thing that lives in his pants and only comes out in the presence of other male geeks or at the beck and call of Maldas own lubed-up right hand. His Taco bells are the shriveled testicles that droop beneath his Commander, and his Taco sauce is his thin, runny semen. It should be more than obvious to you now what he means if he asked you to ring his Taco bells or taste his gourmet Taco sauce.

I would also guess CmdrTaco asked you to engage in a practice known as Taco-snotting and, if he was in a particularly depraved mood at the time, a circle-snot.

Good Lord. And, yes, he did. What is Taco-snotting?

Taco-snotting is the term used by Robert Malda to refer to the depraved act of fellating another man (homo- or heterosexual; CmdrTaco is rumoured to prefer raping unwilling victims), then blowing the semen out his nose and back onto the face and body of his victim. Naturally, a long, bubbly stream of milky-white semen is left on CmdrTacos face, dribbling out of his nose and down his cheek: hence the term, Taco-snotting.

And if thats not bad enough

A circle-snot is a Taco-snotting circle-jerk, another practice common among the Slashdot crew. CmdrTaco, CowboiKneel, and Homos get together and snot each other with their gooey, sticky cum spooging their jizz-snot all over each others faces and pasty, white bodies, until theyre covered head to toe with their own and each others man juice. This vile, ungodly ritual can go on for hours. For the homosexual penetration that follows this lengthy foreplay, Roblowme is usually there to provide plenty of anal lubricant; he owns a limousine service and has ample supplies of motor oil and axle grease ready to go.

To complete this perverted orgy, fellow faggots Michael, Timothy, and Jamie will usually join in, dressed in tight leather mock-S.S. uniforms, jack boots, and leather gloves. The homosexual shenanigans that follow are nearly beyond description. The whole group begins to snot each others spunk and whip each others pudgy asses with riding crops and chains until their pale, white geek bodies are exhausted and soaked in stinking sweat from the hours of passionate, homosexual revelry.

Ewwwwww. So, can I stop receiving these emails?

Hopefully, but I wouldnt count on it.

To begin with, you most likely forgot to uncheck the Willing to Snot” checkbox in your account preferences. CmdrTaco has probably already got the hots for your wad (do you have a homosexual-sounding nick?), and hes probably already been lurking outside your bathroom window for weeks with a camera, some tissues and lube, just waiting to pounce and declare you his new bitch. Theres no escaping a geek in heat (trust me), so its probably too late for you, but you can possibly rectify this situation. To remove yourself from CmdrTacos sights, log into your Slashdot account, go to your user page, click on Messages, and uncheck the box next to Willing to Snot. Maybe hell ignore you. Probably not.

I cant stop receiving these emails from CmdrTaco!?

If you indulge him in a Taco-snot or two, he might leave you alone. You might also want to look into mail filtering, restraining orders, or purchasing a heavy, blunt object capable of warding off rampaging homosexual geeks in heat. Trust me, when they charge oh, the humanity. If he gets you, and you let him Taco-snot all over you, you will most likely end up tied up in his basement to be used as his sex slave for the rest of your life (or until he accidentally drowns you in spunk in a circle-snot).

Have you ever been Taco-snotted?

Unfortunately, yes. I first met Mr. Malda at an Open Source Convention. He invited me back to his room for a game of Quake and some gourmet Tacos, but when I got there, the perverted geek jumped me and handcuffed me to his bed, stripping me. After taking his Commander out of his pants, Mr. Taco made me suck the withered thing six times, virtually nonstop. He then performed his vile Taco-snotting ritual on me three times over the next two hours, bringing me to orgasm after orgasm after sweaty, mind-numbing orgasm then he snotted my own thick, gooey jizz back onto my face out of his nostrils! He snotted me two more times, first into my mouth, then again on my exposed belly.

CmdrTaco invited several of his Open Source (or rather, Open Sauce man sauce) buddies over to continue their ungodly snotfest. European hacker and known überfaggot Linux Torvalds raped my ass with his monolithic kernel; his partner-in-crime Anal Cox used their network stack in a multitude of unspeakable ways on and in every orifice of my defenseless, tender, young body. Michael Sims was there in his leather Nazi uniform, caning my previously-virginal ass with a bamboo pole and ranting about all those Censorware freaks out to get him.

That is so disgusting! How did you finally escape?

After about 16 hours of countless unholy, homosexual atrocities perpetrated against my restrained body, they all finally went to sleep on top of me, sweat-soaked and exhausted. I was left there, completely covered in bubbly, translucent jizz-snot, chained to the bed, with half a dozen fat, pasty-white fags lying around and on top of me. Fortunately the spooge coating my flesh worked wonderfully as a lubricant I was able to squirm my way out of the handcuffs and slip out the back door (of the apartment, not their back doors). Im just glad I survived the awful ordeal. These sexually-repressed hackers had a lot of built-up spunk in their wads I couldve easily been drowned!

Thats horrible. Does Taco-snotting have anything to do with CmdrTacos special taco?

No, thats a different disgusting perversion CmdrTaco indulges himself in. Mr. Malda is usually not satisfied with merely snotting your own jizz back onto your face, he most often enjoys involving his own bodily fluids in his twisted games. WeatherTroll has spent some time trying to educate the Slashdot readership about this vile practice (emphasis added):

You may be wondering what CmdrTacos special taco is. You will be wishing that you hadnt been wondering after you finish reading this post. To make his special taco, CmdrTaco takes a taco shell and shits on it. He then adds lettuce, takes out his tiny withered dick (otherwise known as his Commander), puts his special taco sauce on it which means he jacks off on the taco, and adds a compound to make the person who eats the taco unconscious. Of course, the compound does not make the person unconscious until the taco is fully eaten. Thus CmdrTaco force-feeds the taco to the unsuspecting victim. After all, who would knowingly eat shit and CmdrTacos jizz?

After the victim is unconscious, he is held against his will and used for CmdrTacos nefarious homosexual purposes. This includes shoving taco shells up the victims ass, Taco-snotting, and getting Jon Katz involved. Trust me, you do not want Jon Katz anywhere near your unconscious body. Also, rumor has it CmdrTaco is looking for a new goatse.cx guy. Dont let it be you!

Different ungodly perversion, yet no less revolting. It should be clear to you now that Robert CmdrTaco Malda is a very, very sick individual, as are most of the Slashdot editors.

Does Jon Katz get involved in any of this? I thought he was a pædophile, not a homosexual.

Actually, Jon Katz is a homosexual pædophile. Hes also a coprophiliac, and, many suspect, a zoophile.

Mr. Katz is somewhat of a loner and doesnt involve himself in the circle-snots, but that doest mean hes any less of a freak than the rest of the Slashdot crew. Katz often engages in a game called juicy-douching with a harem of little-boy slaves that he has collected over the years: yet another vile practice which involves administering an enema to himself of the little boys urine (forced out of them with a pair of pincers), spooging the vile muck from his ass back into the enema bag, then dribbling and slathering the goo all over himself and the boys chained, naked bodies. If hes in the mood, he will sometimes skip refilling the enema bag from his distended anus and just squirt it from his ass onto the crying, terrified boys. Unwilling boys are further tortured with the pincers until they comply and allow Mr. Katz to juicy-douche them at will. A boy will usually last about two years before Mr. Katz either accidentally drowns them in diarrhea or kills them once they get too old, usually around 13 or 14.

Not content with being a pædophilic coprophile, Mr. Katz is also quite the zoophile. As if the sexual escapades with the helpless little boys arent enough, Jon usually enjoys his juicy-douches best when his penis is firmly planted in a female goats anus. He is also rumoured to get off on watching his little boys eat the goats small, bean-like turds, and he often kills his older boys by letting his goats trample them.

Are you getting hard writing this?

Why, yes. :) Join me in a WIPO-snot?

No, thanks. Im already CmdrTacos boi toi.

________________________________________

• The URL of this document is <http://slashdot.org/journal.pl? op=display &uid=267426 &id=2346>
• Previous revisions are publicly available at <http://slashdot.org/journal.pl? op=list &uid=308209>

$Id: tacosnotting.html,v 1.16 2001/12/28 21:20:03 wipo Exp $

Copyright © 2001 J. Wipo Troll, Esq. Verbatim crapflooding of this document is permitted in any medium, provided this copyright notice is preserved, and next time you take a dump, you think of the WIPO Troll and all hes done to make Slashdot a better place.

Re:In honour of WIPO's return...

[marktwain]

Can this crap just be deleted? Some of it seems to hang around forever. I need to do a little volunteering again. Yes. I know.

Re:In honour of WIPO's return...

[marktwain]

What's "off topic" about my comment. The original post is spam. I see no reason why it should be allowed to just hang around. We're not talk troll here. It's plain vanilla spam and it keeps popping up all the time. It is intrusive and should be deleted by the mod. I called attention to the spam and I addressed the issue of what the top was: it was about spamming Slashdot,CmdrTaco, open source, and any number of things I couldn't stomach reading.

Re:In honour of WIPO's return...

[Anal Cocks]

Hi there. You just made my day, sir. I creamed my pants reading your reply to my comment. You see, I crave attention. I need it. I will die without it. So I post garbage in the hopes people like you bite onto it and make idiotic comments like that. Thank you, sir, for the laugh.

Port to macs?

[littlerubberfeet]

It is a shame they didn't start development on a mac. The graphics and animation tools work together so much more easily.

But what do I know about game development?

Re:Port to macs?

[beme]

I was under the impression (from an IRC log from quite some time ago) that development was cross-platform from the get-go. Seems strange that it 'suddenly' needs to be ported when in the past it just required a rebuild to get the Mac version going. Things change, I guess. Hefty amount of bummed out Mac users on the Bioware boards.

Re:Port to macs?

[SandSpider]

This was originally meant to be Mac, Linux, and Windows versions all on one disc with concurrent development cycles (more or less). My guess is that they had too many platform-specific engine issues, and it would have delayed their windows release to work on those. Once the product's finished, the original team members are probably going to be reassigned to various other projects according to their studio schedule. Thus, rather than tying up the team members on bug fixes, they probably decided to farm it out to MacPlay.

The reason they decided to finish Windows first rather than the mac has nothing to do with ease of development. The reason would be because they will have more sales on the windows platform than the Mac or Linux combined, so that's what they chose to finish.

I have no insider knowledge about Bioware or this particular situation. I do know quite a bit about game development, and I have released a product on Windows and Mac on a single hybrid disc, so I have made some pretty good guesses.

=Brian

annoying...

[Nathan Brazil]

The official NWN sites (the Bioware site, Amazon's page, EB's page) I've been looking at all this time have all implied that the Mac version would be released simultaneously with the Windows and Linux versions, in the same package. Some of them have said things like "Mac requirements forthcoming" even, IIRC. Now I find that it's going to ship in a seperate box? Bleah...

Argh...Why not OmniGroup

[blakespot]

They should've gotten OmniGroup to lay down the conversion, Cocoa style, while magically enhancing the original PC code (and game performance) beyond all expectation, as they did with the rather hardware-itensive Giants, Citizen Kabuto ...

From OmniGroup:

• "This is the only version of Giants that can use multiple processors. We actually added multi-processing support while we were doing the port, as well as doing various optimizations on the graphics routines (and changing the graphics library from Direct3D to OpenGL). The end result is we're getting the same framerates on our Macintosh dual 500 MHz G4s with a GeForce 2 on an AGP 2x bus as we do on a brand-new, top of the line Wintel AMD 1.3 GHz Ahtlon with a GeForce 3 on an AGP 4x bus and DDR RAM."

blakespot

...because of InfoGrames

[Creepy]

Well, for one, OmniGroup is not owned by InfoGrames, the company distributing NWN, and MacSoft is. A port of the toolset may take a while (depending on how portable they made it), but a port of the game itself should take very little time because a Linux port already exists (at least, a port to OS X).

Fall of 2002 isn't too bad... better than Fall of 2003 :)

btw, having a separate box is often a good thing, because numbers aren't counted as PC sales, but I digress.

No surprises, only disappointments

[Thenomain]

...but no promises so far.

Of course not. The promises made so far haven't panned out. Expecting promises at this point would be like ... expecting promises from a game company. I don't know why I ever got my hopes up about a multi-platform release.

As an aside, all my PC friends are laughing at me. (Well, a few are; I'm not kidding.) When will Mac martyrdom end?

Re:No surprises, only disappointments

[dalassa]

Never, we'll always be shorted by those jealous PC gamers :-).
I am very disapointed by this though. I was also under the impression that the Mac version would ship with the PC version. I suppose I just have to go back to worshipping Blizzard for keeping D2 and LoD on the same disks.

Gotta update the FAQ...

[ChrisDolan]

The FAQ still says that they're doing a simultaneous release for WIn/Lin/Mac. It looks like the Marketing is not in sync with reality yet.

Here's the deal:

[DoenerMord]

It became apparent to anyone following the situation that Bioware's recent utter silence regarding the non-Windows clients means they had fallen behind. The company has been in a huge push to get the game out (as well as changing publishers), and so of course the first things to fall off the radar are going to be the Mac and Linux clients when in a crunch.

The NWN Gold press release yesterday mentioned the Linux client would be out *after* the Windows version, confirming the statement above. So there goes any hybrid Mac/PC/Linux idea.

If the Mac client is some indetermined length of time older than the Windows, someone's going to have to go back and get it up-to-date.

Therefore, if the hybrid box idea is shot, it makes *much* more sense for MacSoft (another Inforgrames label) to do the Mac-specific marketing, QA, and even try and port the toolset (a beast in itself) so Mac users don't pay the same price for half the game. This is a *much* better idea than Bioware (who has never published a Mac game themselves) to try and do all this themselves.

And for those wanting Omni to do it, MacSoft has stated to Insidemacgames.com that the porting house has not been decided yet. It could be them, Westlake, or some other programmers they often use for their work.

Mac toolset should be a no-brainer

[bsartist]

I would have thought that porting the authoring toolset to the Mac would be a no-brainer. The Mac-using demographic is heavily slanted towards creative types - writers, artists, musicians, and so forth. Who better to write good story lines, create monster illustrations, and so forth?

Re:Mac toolset should be a no-brainer

[Alex Thorpe]

That's a nice theory, but it's never worked in the past. Mac users begged for UnrealEd for a long time without success. About the only editors that have made it to the Mac are StarEdit for Starcraft and the one with Heroes of Might & Magic II.(not III) Oh, and the Myth and Marathon editors, of course.

Free download or not?

[PaxTech]

The real question is "Are they going to release the Mac binaries as a free download for those who bought the Windows version and want to run it on their Mac?"

I believe it was mentioned the Linux binaries would be downloadable, they better do this for the mac version as well..

this totally sucks!

[azosx]

What about all the Mac and Linux users that pre-ordered the title expecting it to be a multi-platform release as promised? Not that we can't likely cancel our orders and get our money back, but it really sucks having to go through all the hassle and disapointment. Now that the Mac version has been pushed off onto another publisher, there is certainly no hope for us now. Just like with Return To Castle Wolfenstein and practically every other game, we'll be the last to see a version for our platform and weeks behind everybody else with updates. This truely saddens me Bioware. You had the opportunity to usher in a whole new era of commercial multi-platform software development and distribution and totally blew it. Yeah, you'll still get my money but you've certainly lost my respect.

Bioware has been lying

[frankie]

This is bad news by any reasonable definition. Note that the official FAQ still says "we are planning a simultaneous PC/Macintosh/Linux release for Neverwinter Nights, with all three versions to be included in a single box."

Also note that Macsoft expects it will take them two months to finish the Mac version, not including the toolset. No clue how long the toolset would take if they decide to port it at all. Third, note that Bioware has never released a single Mac (or Linux) demo appliction, or even a screenshot of a partial prototype.

For comparison, other porting houses like OmniGroup and Westlake can plow through an entire port, starting from raw Windows-only DirectX-based source code, and turn out a complete Mac game in the same amount of time.

The obvious conclusion is that Bioware has spent the past three years working solely on the Windows version, and their claims about parallel simultaneous development were a crock.

Look on the bright side

[Avumede]

By the time it's released for the Mac, the major bugs should be fixed (at least those that would affect both versions). It's always better to wait a little while for these things...

Grraah! Rant time!

[Valdrax]

It's not portable at all. The bastards wrote it in MFC and DirectX. Not that I'm bitter. It's only that the most innovative thing to happen to PC RPGs -- being able to DM like in real life -- is the one feature they left out of the Mac/Linux versions. Oh, here. We're giving you every bit of the game on your platforms except the part everyone's excited about. Let's just dangle it under your nose instead.

Now, there's a second middle finger for Mac users by holding off the publishing. I'd honestly rather them have not ported the game at all than to release a late, crippled version. It's just like that time I bought HoMM3 only to find out they didn't port the damned campaign editor.

Try reading the press release

[TrentC]

The real question is "Are they going to release the Mac binaries as a free download for those who bought the Windows version and want to run it on their Mac?"

No, the real question is, "can you bother to read the press release before asking pointless questions?"

It states that MacPlay is doing the port, not Bioware: therefore, the game will be in a separate retail box, since I suspect MacPlay is unlikely to give away their work for free...

Jay (=

What *about* the pre-orders?

[Ambiguous Coward]

Someone posed the question, although it seemed a little more in passing...but seriously, what *about* the people who pre-ordered? I was this close to doing so myself, but I decided not to at the last minute. I know, though, that if I had ordered it, it would be coming in soon, but all of a sudden, I wouldn't be getting the product I had ordered. With Bioware claiming to have a hybrid release, supposedly pre-ordering would get you said hybrid. But then, *later*, you find out that it is not, in fact, a hybrid...well, that just doesn't work. They were taking orders for hybrid copies, not single-platform copies. So, my question is, did any of you pre-order it? And if you did, what is Bioware telling you? Or are they just ignoring you and playing innocent?

-G