Like Trivial Pursuit. It's fun for about a week, then your friend goes through the box, reads all the cards, and has the game entirely memorized, and the game becomes all pursuit and no trivia.
Load times, yes. Neckbreaking go-and-get-lunch load times. There has to be some problem with the game, because the loadtimes are considerably worse than FFVII, despite the drastically lower amount of data that needs to be loaded. The audio isn't so much problematic as it is MIDI-fied. It's the same way with the PS version of FFVI. The music doesn't sound as nice as it did on the SNES.
When I was graduating from high school, we wanted to have a gaming party (There was a LAN party, but a lot of people brought in their consoles as well), and we were told to get permission from the copyright holders.
We contacted a bunch of companies of games we figured people would bring (I know we didn't get half of the developers that were actually present, but we seemed to have satisfied the school), and none of them gave any trouble. Most of them responded quite graciously, in fact.
Several companies sent us promotional posters/flyers and such, and asked if we'd display it at the party. One sent a gift certificate for Poppa John's Pizza. The coolest thing is that probably half of them even sent us disks with game demos or the partial releases they package with some video cards to raffle off and such.
Technically, you can have the LAN party without permission (I think, anyway - IANAL), but if the university says they want you to get permission, don't worry about it, and just get permission. I'd be very suprised if any company said no (and frankly, if they do, I wouldn't buy their games anymore), and you'll probably score at least a couple freebies if you word your letters well.
Ants is a bit too degrading a term, despite the often degrading nature of the relationship your describing. "Resource" would be more accurate, as workers and consumers are both subject to the laws of supply and demand, and labor is obtianed through a relatively simple market (from the buyer's end, anyway, since the resources come to you). At the budget level, workers are reduced to numbers: 50 in this department, 70 at this location, 5 on this project, etc. Lay offs are decided the same way: fire 10 from this division, 6 from this office, etc. It's the lower management that actually has to deal with workers as humans, and lower management themselves are reduced to the level of a resource when it comes down to it.
A minor air-burst impact over the western US or eastern Europe should about do it, even if it ends up hitting a relatively desolate area and only kills a handful of people.
It won't take a full-scale disaster like an air-burst over Chicago or an ocean imact off of Tokyo, as long as somebody gets it on tape, it'll shake people up plenty.
If that was their main reason, they probably would have changed a long time ago. There have been a couple arcade systems based on the Sega Dreamcast, and as far as I know, the Dreamcast hasn't been emulated very well yet. And that's not even mentioning that there are other places they can look for arcade hardware.
They certainly gain some headway against MAME by switching, but I think they were being honest about why they're making the switch: The NeoGeo is just getting old.
Actually, the NES (Famicom/FDS) and SNES (SFC) were both discontinued in 2003, around September or so. They didn't sell outside of Japan, but you can still find new games comming out for the Famicom Disk System in Japan. They're mostly cheap two-week development cycle Hentai games, but still, when it comes down to it, the Famicom wins.
In a lot of cases, it's not that easy anymore. If you can find a functional Chrono Trigger cartridge anywhere, you'll end up paying a goood $50 to $80 for it. You can get the Playstation port for $15 if you're lucky. CT isn't even an extreme case. I bid $80 for a Star Ocean SFC cartridge, but the thing ended up going for $260. The original games are becomming collector's items, while the remakes and ports are bargain-bin junk.
TKO recently bought up Asylumsoft, which already was comprised mostly of people who'd worked for Origin on the later-half of the good Ultima games (6 through 8, which wasn't all that great, but a lot better than 9), Wing Commander, and Crusader.
In addition to that, they've already scavenged a few Origin people before this happened, as well as picking up a couple Looking Glass developers. There's a rumor that they have a Black Isle guy, but he's been silent thus far, if he exists.
The whole plan is working towards developing Asylum's MMORPG, which is a lot like Ultima Online was before EA bought Origin and turned it into an EQ clone. I'm betting they'll try and pick up a few more Origin workers after this, which could be a good thing or a bad thing.
There are other games that try to address that. The one I play is set up to put a greater emphasis on equipment than levels. I've only put in about 50 hours of work into my current character to get to level 30 (after deleting probably 5,000 hours of work for no good reason except I didn't like his stat distribution), and with good equipment, I can go with my guildmates into all but the very few most dangerous areas of the game - and those are mainly because my guildmates can barely handle them without having somebody thirty levels below them tagging along and pissing off the hell hounds.
This is exactly why MMOGs with small player bases are more fun. Ashem Empires has probably about 10,000 players (if that), split onto five different servers. It's small enough that a newcommer can gain some level of notoriety among the active members of the community. Just about everywhere you go, you'll usually see somebody saying, "OMG IT'S _______!" about another player like they're celebrities. On games with hundreds of thousands or millions of players, it might as well be the line at the DMV, because nobody knows anybody.
The major ones generally don't steal userbase from predecessors, but there are hundreds of smaller MMOGs out there, and that's about all they do.
I know of several games (mostly defunct now) whose core user base is almost entirely composed of former Dransik players. Dransik itself got the greatest bulk of its players from Runescape and Hellbreth. Tibia and Dransik have been exchanging players for most of their existence. When Dransik was reworked into Ashem Empires, it was heavily targeted at people who played the original version of Ultima Online. Heck, most of its developers worked on Ultima VIII and Ulimta Online.
With all this going on, most of these games are trapped in perpetual limbo. They get a steady influx of new players, but they lose the old ones just as fast and they never really get anywhere.
Actually, most of them have not. Peking man turned out to have arthritis, true, but it ended up being Homo Erectus.
Utah Man was a fabrication by antievolutionists, although they like to twist it around and say they weren't really the ones to be fooled. It was originally found, and claimed to be a human tooth and jaw, the presence of which (in North America) would prove that man didn't have time to evolve and migrate from Africa. It was triumphantly presented to a scientific institute, and rejected because it was a pig.
There are still over seven hundred significant skeletons that haven't been debunked, and in fact, only TWO that have been, both of which were cited as proof by antievolutionists.
I'm going to kick myself for biting flamebait in the morning, but oh well. I have room for a couple more hooks in my mouth.
I am not opposed to teaching evolution in schools, I am in favor of treating it as a theory though.
The problem here is that you don't know what a theory is. A theory is not a hypothesis. The exact definition is fairly complex, but the rough meaning is that, by all emprical methods, a theory is as right as we can get with the data we have.
Newtonian gravity is "just" a theory. It's also been overthrown: The only way to overthrow a theory is to make one that A. mechanically encompasses explains all observations explained by the existing theory, B. by the same* mechanism encompasses, explains, and/or corrects observations not covered by the previous theory, or in conflict with the previous theory. Relativity covered everything the old theory of gravity did, plus it corrected for things like Mercury orbiting too fast and partially explained why Neptune and Uranus are all out of orbital-mechanical whack.
My biggest problem is that it is used as a defense to try and disprove the truth of the Bible and is treated as fact when it has yet to be and probably can not be proven.
I'm not going to get into the proof, but there's enough of it that Henry Morris as encorporated evolution (or what he calls "selective diversification") into his antievolutionary model. He dresses it up nicely, but in the end, he's showing you a Zebu and calling it a Nene, and banking on the fact that most people probably don't know the difference anyway.
Anyway, science has NEVER, and in fact CAN never attempt to use Evolution against any Theological construct, because the bible covers matter that is not proximate in nature. Science can cover the proximate all it wants, because it has access to the proximate within its means of action.
It can draw no conclusions on nonproxmiate or superproximate events or actions, and in fact has very clear boundaries set on just where it has to stop.
It is Christianity that bears full and complete responsibility for saying that Evolution means the end of Christianity, and all that other slippery slope gloom and doom. Christians published The Genesis Flood, God and Evolution, and The Fall of Noah. Not scientists, but Christians. They had help from a few secular philosophers like Sagan and Asimov, but for every secular attack on Christianity, there's a thousand self-inflicted wounds.
If you plan to talk to your kids about evolution, remember not to build a dam around your house in the river. The more parents attempt to protect, misinform, uninform, or isolate their children, the more those children learn about things for themselves, and when they do, they know nothing but their parent's determination that what they're told on Sunday disagrees with what they see the other seven days, and the more we drive our own children out of the Church forever.
Err... 2001 to 2005. Four year turn around. I've been buying a new console every year/two years, with only one gap of 5 years between my NES and my Sega Genesis, which was broken by buying no less than five system in two years.
Yes it is. It itself has no pronography, but neither to all those pornography linksites out there. They're still porn. The only reason to use Booble is to find pornographic websites, meaning that if you're actively using it, you're looking for porn, and for all intents and purposes it is pornographic in-and-of itself.
And it's another thing again to make a 5 minute knockoff of said search engine and then NOT stick anything behind it.
Come on, under 200 results for the search term "XXX Hardcore" on a search engine that only indexes pornography? I can get hundreds of thousands of hits for the same thing on Google.
I saw one on an online jokes site about a brand of chainsaw manufactured in Sweden that has a warning on the blade that reads, "Keep hair and genitals clear" in English. I thought it was made up until the same site posted a picture of it actually STAMPED into the plastic blade guard.
The thing that makes it scary is that if America is any sign, they only put those sort of obvious warnings nobody should need AFTER somebody goes and does it.
They're reporting so that we can see how full of holes their whole scheme is. Every new post brings more little holes and contradictions to light. It's just like reporting the SCO mess: We already know they're full of shit, but the more they talk, the less credible their arguments become.
Anyway, I'm currently 50/50 on it being a scam or not. Right now, I think this is the most probable scenario: Infinium drums up millions in investment, ships some half-assed POS console for $500 a pop, sells in numbers that are put to shame by the N-Gage, then goes bankrupt with a $50 million hole in their budget, just like all their CEO's previous companies did.
Note that they never made any mention of WHICH Christmas. Something I've learned from the very same third-party no-name developers they're talking about carrying: "Before Chrismas" does not neccessarily mean "Before THIS CHristmas."
It's also a good way to make sure the playerbase doesn't get bored with a game still in active development (which nearly all MMORGPs are for most of their existence).
I play one called Ashen Empires (Used to be Dransik). About a year and a half ago, they made a major graphical overhaul (from highly dated 16x16 256-color tile sprites to a full isometric system).
When they launched the new version, they didn't include any of the high-end equipment that had been in the old version (partly because they seriously unbalanced the game, and partly because there were a lot of graphics to render). People had to work very hard just to save up the insane prices for high-end iron armor, and people with a full set of platemail and a broadsword were social gods.
Then, they added the low-end magic items, and people with magic padded leather and a +2 sword were the gods. Later on, you needed an elemental shield and a +4 sword, since everybody had MPA and a +2 sword.
Each time a new level of advancement is added to the game, the last one becomes substantially easier to achieve. The people who had the last plateau of godliness complain for the first few days when suddenly there are entire guilds full of n00bs wearing Mystic Robes, but by week's end, most of the former social gods have a Robe of the Archmage, and those Mystic Robes are n00bcrap.
The only problem I have with SWG, though, is this: What is the new standard of advancement? The SW universe really doesn't have something higher than Jedi...
Of course, from the article, it sounds to me like they're just making it more straightforward or realistic to become a Jedi, not easier.
Actually, the $50 up-front charge is mostly a marketing deal. TKO Software just bought up a small start-up MMORPG from Asylumsoft, and there's been some discussion of selling the game commercially. The point is that a game on shelves at stores will be seen by many people who would never randomly happen accross a free download. As TKO's developers have said, oftentimes a distributor gets the vast majority of shelved-box sales, and the game itself only gets the subscription fee.
It's been posted in a couple other Phantom discussions, and it's probably the most informative post out there on the entire company.
If anybody reads the article, I'd like to draw your attention most especially to the fact that the brains behind Infinium Labs were also behind Braodband Infrasturcture Group Corporation, who bilked investers for $15 million so they could live the high life; Intira Corporation, who carried $153 million into bankruptcy; and MCI Worldcom. I don't even have to remind you about their massive fraud, do I? Also, he claims to be the director of at least one company that isn't aware he works for them, and "can't find his email, address, name, or phone number."
While your at it, check out the pictures of their mailing address. Last I'd heard (in December), it was still a small empty room next door to Mailboxes Etc, and they are still using a PO box as a mailing address.
I don't think it's gaining any credibility. Picking up a major player in the industry doesn't mean much. 3D Realms has had sevral of them, and yet no Duke Nukem Forever. For that matter, once upon a time, John Romero could have been considered a major player. Didn't make Daikata any less bad.
Every time I see something that looks legitimate from Infinium, I go back to their games list: Misspelled titles and developers, games ascribed to the wrong developer, games listed several times for multiple developers (or for the same developer spelled several times), developers that have been out of business for months or years, games that were cancelled before release in the mid-90's, none of the flagship titles (more on these in a second, and not a single game released after the year 2001. For that matter, at least a third of the games on the list date between 1989 and 1995. And as for the flagship titles, they were touted to include UT2k3, Starcraft: Ghost, and Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. However, the makers of all three deny that they were developing for the platform, and didn't appear on the game list when it was finally released (and then retracted).
And if none of that sheds doubt on the entire operation, take a look at this. A lot of companies have done a lot of weird stuff, but I've never seen one buy itself out and then brag about acquiring their own flagship product from themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Like Trivial Pursuit. It's fun for about a week, then your friend goes through the box, reads all the cards, and has the game entirely memorized, and the game becomes all pursuit and no trivia.
Load times, yes. Neckbreaking go-and-get-lunch load times. There has to be some problem with the game, because the loadtimes are considerably worse than FFVII, despite the drastically lower amount of data that needs to be loaded. The audio isn't so much problematic as it is MIDI-fied. It's the same way with the PS version of FFVI. The music doesn't sound as nice as it did on the SNES.
When I was graduating from high school, we wanted to have a gaming party (There was a LAN party, but a lot of people brought in their consoles as well), and we were told to get permission from the copyright holders.
We contacted a bunch of companies of games we figured people would bring (I know we didn't get half of the developers that were actually present, but we seemed to have satisfied the school), and none of them gave any trouble. Most of them responded quite graciously, in fact.
Several companies sent us promotional posters/flyers and such, and asked if we'd display it at the party. One sent a gift certificate for Poppa John's Pizza. The coolest thing is that probably half of them even sent us disks with game demos or the partial releases they package with some video cards to raffle off and such.
Technically, you can have the LAN party without permission (I think, anyway - IANAL), but if the university says they want you to get permission, don't worry about it, and just get permission. I'd be very suprised if any company said no (and frankly, if they do, I wouldn't buy their games anymore), and you'll probably score at least a couple freebies if you word your letters well.
Ants is a bit too degrading a term, despite the often degrading nature of the relationship your describing. "Resource" would be more accurate, as workers and consumers are both subject to the laws of supply and demand, and labor is obtianed through a relatively simple market (from the buyer's end, anyway, since the resources come to you). At the budget level, workers are reduced to numbers: 50 in this department, 70 at this location, 5 on this project, etc. Lay offs are decided the same way: fire 10 from this division, 6 from this office, etc. It's the lower management that actually has to deal with workers as humans, and lower management themselves are reduced to the level of a resource when it comes down to it.
A minor air-burst impact over the western US or eastern Europe should about do it, even if it ends up hitting a relatively desolate area and only kills a handful of people.
It won't take a full-scale disaster like an air-burst over Chicago or an ocean imact off of Tokyo, as long as somebody gets it on tape, it'll shake people up plenty.
If that was their main reason, they probably would have changed a long time ago. There have been a couple arcade systems based on the Sega Dreamcast, and as far as I know, the Dreamcast hasn't been emulated very well yet. And that's not even mentioning that there are other places they can look for arcade hardware.
They certainly gain some headway against MAME by switching, but I think they were being honest about why they're making the switch: The NeoGeo is just getting old.
Actually, the NES (Famicom/FDS) and SNES (SFC) were both discontinued in 2003, around September or so. They didn't sell outside of Japan, but you can still find new games comming out for the Famicom Disk System in Japan. They're mostly cheap two-week development cycle Hentai games, but still, when it comes down to it, the Famicom wins.
In a lot of cases, it's not that easy anymore. If you can find a functional Chrono Trigger cartridge anywhere, you'll end up paying a goood $50 to $80 for it. You can get the Playstation port for $15 if you're lucky. CT isn't even an extreme case. I bid $80 for a Star Ocean SFC cartridge, but the thing ended up going for $260. The original games are becomming collector's items, while the remakes and ports are bargain-bin junk.
TKO recently bought up Asylumsoft, which already was comprised mostly of people who'd worked for Origin on the later-half of the good Ultima games (6 through 8, which wasn't all that great, but a lot better than 9), Wing Commander, and Crusader.
In addition to that, they've already scavenged a few Origin people before this happened, as well as picking up a couple Looking Glass developers. There's a rumor that they have a Black Isle guy, but he's been silent thus far, if he exists.
The whole plan is working towards developing Asylum's MMORPG, which is a lot like Ultima Online was before EA bought Origin and turned it into an EQ clone. I'm betting they'll try and pick up a few more Origin workers after this, which could be a good thing or a bad thing.
There are other games that try to address that. The one I play is set up to put a greater emphasis on equipment than levels. I've only put in about 50 hours of work into my current character to get to level 30 (after deleting probably 5,000 hours of work for no good reason except I didn't like his stat distribution), and with good equipment, I can go with my guildmates into all but the very few most dangerous areas of the game - and those are mainly because my guildmates can barely handle them without having somebody thirty levels below them tagging along and pissing off the hell hounds.
This is exactly why MMOGs with small player bases are more fun. Ashem Empires has probably about 10,000 players (if that), split onto five different servers. It's small enough that a newcommer can gain some level of notoriety among the active members of the community. Just about everywhere you go, you'll usually see somebody saying, "OMG IT'S _______!" about another player like they're celebrities. On games with hundreds of thousands or millions of players, it might as well be the line at the DMV, because nobody knows anybody.
The major ones generally don't steal userbase from predecessors, but there are hundreds of smaller MMOGs out there, and that's about all they do.
I know of several games (mostly defunct now) whose core user base is almost entirely composed of former Dransik players. Dransik itself got the greatest bulk of its players from Runescape and Hellbreth. Tibia and Dransik have been exchanging players for most of their existence. When Dransik was reworked into Ashem Empires, it was heavily targeted at people who played the original version of Ultima Online. Heck, most of its developers worked on Ultima VIII and Ulimta Online.
With all this going on, most of these games are trapped in perpetual limbo. They get a steady influx of new players, but they lose the old ones just as fast and they never really get anywhere.
Actually, most of them have not. Peking man turned out to have arthritis, true, but it ended up being Homo Erectus.
Utah Man was a fabrication by antievolutionists, although they like to twist it around and say they weren't really the ones to be fooled. It was originally found, and claimed to be a human tooth and jaw, the presence of which (in North America) would prove that man didn't have time to evolve and migrate from Africa. It was triumphantly presented to a scientific institute, and rejected because it was a pig.
There are still over seven hundred significant skeletons that haven't been debunked, and in fact, only TWO that have been, both of which were cited as proof by antievolutionists.
I'm going to kick myself for biting flamebait in the morning, but oh well. I have room for a couple more hooks in my mouth.
I am not opposed to teaching evolution in schools, I am in favor of treating it as a theory though.
The problem here is that you don't know what a theory is. A theory is not a hypothesis. The exact definition is fairly complex, but the rough meaning is that, by all emprical methods, a theory is as right as we can get with the data we have.
Newtonian gravity is "just" a theory. It's also been overthrown: The only way to overthrow a theory is to make one that A. mechanically encompasses explains all observations explained by the existing theory, B. by the same* mechanism encompasses, explains, and/or corrects observations not covered by the previous theory, or in conflict with the previous theory. Relativity covered everything the old theory of gravity did, plus it corrected for things like Mercury orbiting too fast and partially explained why Neptune and Uranus are all out of orbital-mechanical whack.
My biggest problem is that it is used as a defense to try and disprove the truth of the Bible and is treated as fact when it has yet to be and probably can not be proven.
I'm not going to get into the proof, but there's enough of it that Henry Morris as encorporated evolution (or what he calls "selective diversification") into his antievolutionary model. He dresses it up nicely, but in the end, he's showing you a Zebu and calling it a Nene, and banking on the fact that most people probably don't know the difference anyway.
Anyway, science has NEVER, and in fact CAN never attempt to use Evolution against any Theological construct, because the bible covers matter that is not proximate in nature. Science can cover the proximate all it wants, because it has access to the proximate within its means of action.
It can draw no conclusions on nonproxmiate or superproximate events or actions, and in fact has very clear boundaries set on just where it has to stop.
It is Christianity that bears full and complete responsibility for saying that Evolution means the end of Christianity, and all that other slippery slope gloom and doom. Christians published The Genesis Flood, God and Evolution, and The Fall of Noah. Not scientists, but Christians. They had help from a few secular philosophers like Sagan and Asimov, but for every secular attack on Christianity, there's a thousand self-inflicted wounds.
If you plan to talk to your kids about evolution, remember not to build a dam around your house in the river. The more parents attempt to protect, misinform, uninform, or isolate their children, the more those children learn about things for themselves, and when they do, they know nothing but their parent's determination that what they're told on Sunday disagrees with what they see the other seven days, and the more we drive our own children out of the Church forever.
Err... 2001 to 2005. Four year turn around. I've been buying a new console every year/two years, with only one gap of 5 years between my NES and my Sega Genesis, which was broken by buying no less than five system in two years.
You buy the game, you CAN play online. You have to break the rules FIRST before you can't play online anymore.
Yes it is. It itself has no pronography, but neither to all those pornography linksites out there. They're still porn. The only reason to use Booble is to find pornographic websites, meaning that if you're actively using it, you're looking for porn, and for all intents and purposes it is pornographic in-and-of itself.
And it's another thing again to make a 5 minute knockoff of said search engine and then NOT stick anything behind it. Come on, under 200 results for the search term "XXX Hardcore" on a search engine that only indexes pornography? I can get hundreds of thousands of hits for the same thing on Google.
I saw one on an online jokes site about a brand of chainsaw manufactured in Sweden that has a warning on the blade that reads, "Keep hair and genitals clear" in English. I thought it was made up until the same site posted a picture of it actually STAMPED into the plastic blade guard.
The thing that makes it scary is that if America is any sign, they only put those sort of obvious warnings nobody should need AFTER somebody goes and does it.
They're reporting so that we can see how full of holes their whole scheme is. Every new post brings more little holes and contradictions to light. It's just like reporting the SCO mess: We already know they're full of shit, but the more they talk, the less credible their arguments become. Anyway, I'm currently 50/50 on it being a scam or not. Right now, I think this is the most probable scenario: Infinium drums up millions in investment, ships some half-assed POS console for $500 a pop, sells in numbers that are put to shame by the N-Gage, then goes bankrupt with a $50 million hole in their budget, just like all their CEO's previous companies did.
Note that they never made any mention of WHICH Christmas. Something I've learned from the very same third-party no-name developers they're talking about carrying: "Before Chrismas" does not neccessarily mean "Before THIS CHristmas."
It's also a good way to make sure the playerbase doesn't get bored with a game still in active development (which nearly all MMORGPs are for most of their existence).
I play one called Ashen Empires (Used to be Dransik). About a year and a half ago, they made a major graphical overhaul (from highly dated 16x16 256-color tile sprites to a full isometric system).
When they launched the new version, they didn't include any of the high-end equipment that had been in the old version (partly because they seriously unbalanced the game, and partly because there were a lot of graphics to render). People had to work very hard just to save up the insane prices for high-end iron armor, and people with a full set of platemail and a broadsword were social gods.
Then, they added the low-end magic items, and people with magic padded leather and a +2 sword were the gods. Later on, you needed an elemental shield and a +4 sword, since everybody had MPA and a +2 sword.
Each time a new level of advancement is added to the game, the last one becomes substantially easier to achieve. The people who had the last plateau of godliness complain for the first few days when suddenly there are entire guilds full of n00bs wearing Mystic Robes, but by week's end, most of the former social gods have a Robe of the Archmage, and those Mystic Robes are n00bcrap.
The only problem I have with SWG, though, is this: What is the new standard of advancement? The SW universe really doesn't have something higher than Jedi...
Of course, from the article, it sounds to me like they're just making it more straightforward or realistic to become a Jedi, not easier.
Actually, the $50 up-front charge is mostly a marketing deal. TKO Software just bought up a small start-up MMORPG from Asylumsoft, and there's been some discussion of selling the game commercially. The point is that a game on shelves at stores will be seen by many people who would never randomly happen accross a free download. As TKO's developers have said, oftentimes a distributor gets the vast majority of shelved-box sales, and the game itself only gets the subscription fee.
It's been posted in a couple other Phantom discussions, and it's probably the most informative post out there on the entire company. If anybody reads the article, I'd like to draw your attention most especially to the fact that the brains behind Infinium Labs were also behind Braodband Infrasturcture Group Corporation, who bilked investers for $15 million so they could live the high life; Intira Corporation, who carried $153 million into bankruptcy; and MCI Worldcom. I don't even have to remind you about their massive fraud, do I? Also, he claims to be the director of at least one company that isn't aware he works for them, and "can't find his email, address, name, or phone number." While your at it, check out the pictures of their mailing address. Last I'd heard (in December), it was still a small empty room next door to Mailboxes Etc, and they are still using a PO box as a mailing address.
I don't think it's gaining any credibility. Picking up a major player in the industry doesn't mean much. 3D Realms has had sevral of them, and yet no Duke Nukem Forever. For that matter, once upon a time, John Romero could have been considered a major player. Didn't make Daikata any less bad.
Every time I see something that looks legitimate from Infinium, I go back to their games list: Misspelled titles and developers, games ascribed to the wrong developer, games listed several times for multiple developers (or for the same developer spelled several times), developers that have been out of business for months or years, games that were cancelled before release in the mid-90's, none of the flagship titles (more on these in a second, and not a single game released after the year 2001. For that matter, at least a third of the games on the list date between 1989 and 1995. And as for the flagship titles, they were touted to include UT2k3, Starcraft: Ghost, and Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. However, the makers of all three deny that they were developing for the platform, and didn't appear on the game list when it was finally released (and then retracted).
And if none of that sheds doubt on the entire operation, take a look at this. A lot of companies have done a lot of weird stuff, but I've never seen one buy itself out and then brag about acquiring their own flagship product from themselves.