There's a lot of truth to this. It's a trade-driven press -- not a news-driven press -- and I'm always happy to see a publication stop acting like a serf and break form. The challenge is going to be getting publishers and developers to accept that they need to be covered like any other industry -- and getting more pubs to behave like journalists.
... but I'd note that there was a tradition of unauthorized game guides from commercial guide publishers in the mid and late '90s. (A search for "unathorized strategy guide" on Amazon.com gets 210 hits.)
However, now you rarely see unauthorized guides and I wonder whether their legality was ever successfully challenged... or if it simply proved more timely and profitable for guide publishers to license the rights.
Peter
Developed by a French outfit called Exxos (later--and better--known as Cryo), that 1988 adventure incorporated a rudimentary iconograhic (but also spoken) language called Bluddian with dozens of words.
(It's a fascinating game, btw, though quite difficult--not least because of the need to sort out what the various aliens were burbling at you. I suspect this is the reason the language was sacrificed in two graphically resplendent but dumbed-down '90s sequels).
More info can be found on the web--notably at: http://argnet.fatal-design.com/bluddian.htm
Sad to say, but none of the so-called "straction" games of 1998-2001 (the first Battlezone, the two Uprisings, Urban Assault and Hostile Waters) sold worth a damn.:(
Peter
It's hard to comment on this until the interview airs. As quoted here, we can't really judge whether Coppola's wounded feeling are over the lack of consultation or general objections to a film-to-game conversion or some combination of the two.
But perhaps it's worth noting that this isn't the first game inspired by The Godfather. In the early '90s, U.S. Gold made a sideview shooter. I remember playing it on the Amiga. (There was also an IBM-compatible version.)
It was pretty, but the gameplay was very limited... and, as my Mom used to say, it was as slow as molasses in January.:)
Peter
I don't see any new reporting here... and anyone can speculate. This seems like "we don't know anything much" 13 times over. Why not make a few calls to studio contacts on each of these games and elicit a few new details?
Well, you might want to read some of these "new gaming journalism" pieces. None of the ones I've seen are reviews. They are essays about the experience--the idea to convey the range of thoughts and feelings that games can provoke.
Peter
A quote from Viacom documents included in the GameSpot story:
"The management of Viacom Inc. has from time to time considered the possibility of participating more extensively in the electronic games business, possibly by acquiring a company in that industry."
That's pretty funny! Viacom's been in the games business twice already and its track record does not exactly inspire confidence.
Just within the last year or so, it closed down Simon & Schuster Interactive (home to a couple of interesting latter-day Star Trek games and Real War--though it is perhaps best known as the publisher of Panty Raider and Deer Avenger).
Moreover, a game unit under Viacom's own name (Viacom New Media, perhaps best known for Virtual Stupidity and Dracula Unleashed) was shuttered in the late '90s.
In view of past experience (not to mention Midway's tradition of red ink), how long will Redstone stay in the market this time around?
Crawford sees "a vast wasteland of cold, heartless games, technological works of genius deficient in redeeming social value", and he's right.
Look what's out there. In one way or another, the market is dominated by killing simulations. It's a religion of polygon counts and frames per second.
Games with consistently poignant writing are beyond rare. (I can think of only one relatively recent one: Planescape: Torment.) The commercial text adventure, the literature of the games industry, is long dead. Games with meaningful inter-personal communication are impossibly rare. (Crawford's own contribution to this tiny genre, Trust & Betrayal: The Legacy of Siboot, a precursor of The Sims, is practically unique in this field.)
And try to name a game that displays more than a passing interest in any the humanistic studies--literature, history, philosophy and, arguably, religion.
Off the top of my head, I can think of only one: Morrowind.
I am far less encouraged than Crawford by the prospects for the next generation. The humanities have fallen in disrepute in many schools of higher learning, and "scientism" has being broadly applied to these ostensibly "subjective" studies in an attempt to endow them with scientific predictability. Given this pro-science bias, there is every likelihood that the games designed by this generation will be technological marvels... and colder and more clincial than ever before.
Actually, from what I've heard, in recent years E3 has cracked down considerably on awarding media badges to fan sites. Check out the current requirements at:
I had trouble getting a badge myself a couple of years back and I've covered the industry for 15 years. (And no, not for fan sites.:) )
But back to the Gamespot article itself: I have to question the value of debating what's going to happen a few days before it happens. I know this is the gold standard of Sunday morning TV punditry (a la The McLaughlin Group), but why not wait for E3 to unfold, and bring in the analysts afterward to discuss what actually happened--when they can talk about something concrete?
... the recent Singles: Flirt Up Your Life!--a Sims-with-sex game from Germany's Rotobee (recently released in English, though not yet in the US). I mean, that's the whole hook for writing about sex in games at this particular time.
Along with typical Sim-ian activities, Singles permits full nudity and builds the relationship between the just-met flatmates to one that includes sexual relations. ("Chose from twelve 3D fully functional characters," reads the back of the DVD case, "and we mean FULLY.")
The loading times were an issue with the Windows original only until the patch was released. And, since the patch is already incorporated in the Share the Pain edition...
Peter
It depends. I imagine that someone slaving away at a bad game on a tight deadline with little help from developers wouldn't have much fun.
But I've been fortunate in that sense; I've always been able to pick which guides to do, and it's always been fun. Often downright joyful, in fact. You never get closer to a game than when you write a guide.
(Then again, I'm not making a living doing guides; if I had to knock out 12 books in 18 months, as the feliow in the article did, I suspect I'd like it less.)
Game ratings may be handy for year-end lists and for inclusion in ads or on box covers, but, ultimately, they are counter-productive: They discourage the reader from actually reading. They don't support reviews; they pre-empt them. Ratings almost always appear on the same page as the text of a review, or on the first of several. It's like starting a book at the end.
I'm guilty of this myself. I see a rating, I know very roughly what the review would say, and I move on to something else. My curiosity has been satisfied.
Of course, ratings are handy. Even a casual viewer immediately knows, in essence, what the writer thinks. (Or, sometimes, what the writer's editors think. A game's rating may have many fingerprints on it.)
But, taken by itself, a number contains no degrees. No shades of gray. No hidden depths at all. Ratings only make games (or whatever is being rated) more similar; a "6" for shooter is a "6" for an RTS is a "6" for an adventure.
I suppose the convenience makes game ratings are inevitable; they're used for virtually everything else in popular culture (save for books), so why not games?
But it still feels like a battle lost in the war between instant gratification on one side and content and context on the other. People already are reading less than they once did, and this is just another small thing that to discourage them.
But one suggestion: I'd like to see ratings at the end of reviews, rather than at the top. That way, the rating is still available, but the reader now has to "earn" it by paging through the review. And if he's paging through a review, he might as well read it.
The problem isn't so much that games magazines have been over-shadowed by the Internet--once the net evolved, this was inevitable--but that they haven't yet responded to the challenge in a meaningful way.
Games magazines have been plowing the same field for as much as 25 years: news, reviews, previews, features, strategy guides and columns. When they innovate, it's typically in layout and "look." They need to rethink the format to provide content that readers can't find on the web.
On the reporting side, game magazines could adopt a more business-oriented approach and show more aggressiveness in their coverage. They could behave less like trade publications and more like newspapers. They could break stories that aren't handed to them by a publicist. They could report on the industry's foibles when they surface. When a game company goes under, or is called on the carpet by shareholders or the government, they could investigate.
There have been examples of hard-nosed games reporting on the web. On GameCenter, there was a superb piece on how retail space in stores is sold. GameSpot's run at least one excellent story on how a game developer (Trilobyte of 7th Guest and 11th Hour fame) slowly fell apart.
But I can't think of a site that does this on a regular basis. And magazines certainly don't.
On the writing side, the mags might take a lesson from the "gaming lifestyle" sites that have sprung up in recent years. There's a whole school of new gaming journalism out there--focused on the gaming experience--and it rarely turns up in game magazines. (Examples include this piece about an unusual light saber duel in Jedi Knight II: Outcast (http://www.extra-life.org.uk/articles/article.php ?id=a37)
and this one about an endearingly pathetic character in Soul Calibur (http://www.robotstreetgang.com/2002_05_12_robotst reetgang_archive.html).)
It's not a perfect form. Sometimes these pieces are self-indulgent and sometimes offer more style than substance. But by ignoring them, the magazines are letting the web steal the first new thing to happen in game writing in 25 years. And they can't afford to do that.
I guess they've forgotten the short-lived "Sili-wood" fad of the mid '90s, which produced works of genius like The Daedalus Encounter and Critical Path.
This on again, off again synergy has produced a lot of bad seeds over the years. (Just look at the history of a publisher like Ocean, which tied its tail to a series of film licenses in the early '90s.) Movie-makers rarely have contributed to fun games--they don't understand the principles of interactvity-and, on the evidence I've seen, most game makers don't have the independence to transport movies to another level rather than simply parrot them... or reduce them to action games.
Universal, one of the few companies that does both, did do a nice job with The Hulk and The Thing. So did Cinemaware in the late '80s--by effectively inventing its own movies.
But they're the exceptions that prove the rule: Movies and games don't mix.
They'll get over this fad in a hurry when someone loses their shirt.
To his credit, the writer raises up front the issue of the appropriateness of certain elements of the trip.
To his discredit, he then lets go of the issue just as quickly--with a potshot at a journalist who had the temerity to accept a free drink--and from there on in, it's all game, game and game. ("It looks staggeringly beautiful, and takes PC visuals to a place we've all been looking forward to for a long, long time.")
Indeed, beyond a reference to the 20 km "exclusion zone" around Chernobyl in which S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is set, the piece barely acknowledges the event itself. No reference to the deaths from the explosion and radiation at the nuclear reactor near Kiev, the courage of the people who contained the fire, the vastly increased risk of thyroid cancer among Ukrainian young people from the release of radiation, or the evacuation and resettlement of an estimated 326,000 people.
Not even the date (1986).
And while the writer does mention "reactor," it's only to inform us that "the small team at GSC actually went themselves down to the stricken reactor to gather source material, and have done a fantastic job of replicating the rust and decay."
But let's step beyond the article for a moment. It's amazing to me that someone would build a game around a relatively recent event that has been such a source of misery to the Ukraine.
Hell, make up a reactor accident in an imaginary country--if only to spare people's feelings.
It is further amazing that THQ would actually bring journalists to Chernobyl to promote the game--this surpasses the recent deliberate-bad-taste publicity stunts by Acclaim--and that a journalist could go... and then produce coverage that skirts the disaster itself.
How about a few pointed questions to THQ and GSC reps on the issue of taste? How about a word from people who live in the area on how they feel about the game?
How about even a passing reference to what happened that April night in 1986?
Time does have a way of softening the impact of events. Almost 30 years after the fall of Saigon, we've started to see games based on the Vietnam War. (I don't see the analogy that another poster drew to World War II. That was the defining event of the 20th century, and its outcome defined much of the world for the 34 years that followed.)
I'm unsure where exactly to draw the line, but I don't think 18 years is enough. Game developers need to think harder about this issue before turning a national tragedy into a shooting game. And gaming publications need to question of the value of such trips and the quality of the coverage they produce.
What's next? In 15 years, are we going to see a game based around the collapse of the World Trade Center towers?
I'll answer that question right now: Without a doubt.
I seem to recall something similar on video in the mid to late '90s. It don't think it went down all that well.
Moreover, the DVD-based zines I've seen haven't lasted. I'm not persuaded that people want to buy DVDs to read. For my own part, I don't like reading things off a screen all the time. It's hard on the eyes. (Then again, it's unclear to me how much of this guide is devoted to writing--as opposed to voice-acting and video--so this may not be an issue here.)
Also, while a great many people use the net for help in games, I've seen many gamers comment that they don't want to leave their game to consult a guide. They want something they can hold on their knee as they work through a problem. Or take to the bathroom, or to bed, or to the backyard. How many people have two DVD players hooked up in the same room? Hard-core gamers, sure. But are they the target audience for strategy guides?
A DVD tucked into a sleeve inside the back cover of a traditional guide for an extra fiver might be a better bet (as someone else suggested).
It sounds as though this guide is well put together. But I'd ask the reviewer what the heck the quality of the DVD intro has to do with the quality of the information that follows? (Surely we've all played -games- with dazzling intros and lackluster gameplay?)
And I didn't see a price. It's $14.95, a touch high, IMO. $9.95 would bring in more of the impulse buyers.
Peter
PS: It might also be nice if they could keep saved-game files on the DVD as well, and allow the player to off-load them into their memory cards.
It's been done at least once. Twenty years ago, a forward-thinking 8-bit game company called Synapse Software (Fort Apocalypse, Blue Max, Alley Cat and many others) released a hardware/software bundle called Relax. It included a game, called simply Balloon, I think, by the late game designer Bill Williams (author of Necromancer, Mind Walker, Sinbad and the Throne of the Falcon and others)in which you controlled a balloon via brainwaves. The whole point of the game was to stay calm at the moment when action on the screen was encouraging you to get excited.:)
Actually, this will be TW's -third- attempt at publishing games. In the early and mid '90s, Time Warner Interactive released perhaps a dozen games across a range of platforms. To its credit, these included Software Sorcery's first game (Aegis: Guardian of the Fleet), the Saturn version of Virtua Racing, the PS1 version of Return Fire, the sequel to the classic Amiga game Firepower.
It also put out a real stinker of a fighting game called Rise of the Robots.
Of course, it's one thing to have good taste in cherry-picking games that other people develop and quite another to make them yourself. I hope for the best, but Scott's warnings are well-considered.
Peter
Slashdot Mirror
But isn't that indistinguishable from an innocent who actually does wish he could help the officer?
... that this happened a couple of years back. Someone want to straighten me out? :)
"Ecosystem"?
There's a lot of truth to this. It's a trade-driven press -- not a news-driven press -- and I'm always happy to see a publication stop acting like a serf and break form. The challenge is going to be getting publishers and developers to accept that they need to be covered like any other industry -- and getting more pubs to behave like journalists.
... but I'd note that there was a tradition of unauthorized game guides from commercial guide publishers in the mid and late '90s. (A search for "unathorized strategy guide" on Amazon.com gets 210 hits.) However, now you rarely see unauthorized guides and I wonder whether their legality was ever successfully challenged ... or if it simply proved more timely and profitable for guide publishers to license the rights.
Peter
(It's a fascinating game, btw, though quite difficult--not least because of the need to sort out what the various aliens were burbling at you. I suspect this is the reason the language was sacrificed in two graphically resplendent but dumbed-down '90s sequels).
More info can be found on the web--notably at: http://argnet.fatal-design.com/bluddian.htm
Peter
Sad to say, but none of the so-called "straction" games of 1998-2001 (the first Battlezone, the two Uprisings, Urban Assault and Hostile Waters) sold worth a damn. :(
Peter
But perhaps it's worth noting that this isn't the first game inspired by The Godfather. In the early '90s, U.S. Gold made a sideview shooter. I remember playing it on the Amiga. (There was also an IBM-compatible version.)
It was pretty, but the gameplay was very limited ... and, as my Mom used to say, it was as slow as molasses in January. :)
Peter
Richard Garriott is working for NCSoft, where he's designed the MMORPG Tabula Rasa. Peter
Peter
Well, you might want to read some of these "new gaming journalism" pieces. None of the ones I've seen are reviews. They are essays about the experience--the idea to convey the range of thoughts and feelings that games can provoke. Peter
"The management of Viacom Inc. has from time to time considered the possibility of participating more extensively in the electronic games business, possibly by acquiring a company in that industry."
That's pretty funny! Viacom's been in the games business twice already and its track record does not exactly inspire confidence.
Just within the last year or so, it closed down Simon & Schuster Interactive (home to a couple of interesting latter-day Star Trek games and Real War--though it is perhaps best known as the publisher of Panty Raider and Deer Avenger).
Moreover, a game unit under Viacom's own name (Viacom New Media, perhaps best known for Virtual Stupidity and Dracula Unleashed) was shuttered in the late '90s.
In view of past experience (not to mention Midway's tradition of red ink), how long will Redstone stay in the market this time around?
Peter
Look what's out there. In one way or another, the market is dominated by killing simulations. It's a religion of polygon counts and frames per second.
Games with consistently poignant writing are beyond rare. (I can think of only one relatively recent one: Planescape: Torment.) The commercial text adventure, the literature of the games industry, is long dead. Games with meaningful inter-personal communication are impossibly rare. (Crawford's own contribution to this tiny genre, Trust & Betrayal: The Legacy of Siboot, a precursor of The Sims, is practically unique in this field.)
And try to name a game that displays more than a passing interest in any the humanistic studies--literature, history, philosophy and, arguably, religion.
Off the top of my head, I can think of only one: Morrowind.
I am far less encouraged than Crawford by the prospects for the next generation. The humanities have fallen in disrepute in many schools of higher learning, and "scientism" has being broadly applied to these ostensibly "subjective" studies in an attempt to endow them with scientific predictability. Given this pro-science bias, there is every likelihood that the games designed by this generation will be technological marvels ... and colder and more clincial than ever before.
Welcome to the wasteland.
Peter
http://www.e3expo.com/media_center/media_faqs/inde x.asp#4
They seem pretty stringent.
I had trouble getting a badge myself a couple of years back and I've covered the industry for 15 years. (And no, not for fan sites. :) )
But back to the Gamespot article itself: I have to question the value of debating what's going to happen a few days before it happens. I know this is the gold standard of Sunday morning TV punditry (a la The McLaughlin Group), but why not wait for E3 to unfold, and bring in the analysts afterward to discuss what actually happened--when they can talk about something concrete?
Peter
Along with typical Sim-ian activities, Singles permits full nudity and builds the relationship between the just-met flatmates to one that includes sexual relations. ("Chose from twelve 3D fully functional characters," reads the back of the DVD case, "and we mean FULLY.")
Peter
The loading times were an issue with the Windows original only until the patch was released. And, since the patch is already incorporated in the Share the Pain edition ...
Peter
But I've been fortunate in that sense; I've always been able to pick which guides to do, and it's always been fun. Often downright joyful, in fact. You never get closer to a game than when you write a guide.
(Then again, I'm not making a living doing guides; if I had to knock out 12 books in 18 months, as the feliow in the article did, I suspect I'd like it less.)
Peter
I'm guilty of this myself. I see a rating, I know very roughly what the review would say, and I move on to something else. My curiosity has been satisfied.
Of course, ratings are handy. Even a casual viewer immediately knows, in essence, what the writer thinks. (Or, sometimes, what the writer's editors think. A game's rating may have many fingerprints on it.)
But, taken by itself, a number contains no degrees. No shades of gray. No hidden depths at all. Ratings only make games (or whatever is being rated) more similar; a "6" for shooter is a "6" for an RTS is a "6" for an adventure.
I suppose the convenience makes game ratings are inevitable; they're used for virtually everything else in popular culture (save for books), so why not games?
But it still feels like a battle lost in the war between instant gratification on one side and content and context on the other. People already are reading less than they once did, and this is just another small thing that to discourage them.
But one suggestion: I'd like to see ratings at the end of reviews, rather than at the top. That way, the rating is still available, but the reader now has to "earn" it by paging through the review. And if he's paging through a review, he might as well read it.
That can't be bad, right?
Peter
Games magazines have been plowing the same field for as much as 25 years: news, reviews, previews, features, strategy guides and columns. When they innovate, it's typically in layout and "look." They need to rethink the format to provide content that readers can't find on the web.
On the reporting side, game magazines could adopt a more business-oriented approach and show more aggressiveness in their coverage. They could behave less like trade publications and more like newspapers. They could break stories that aren't handed to them by a publicist. They could report on the industry's foibles when they surface. When a game company goes under, or is called on the carpet by shareholders or the government, they could investigate.
There have been examples of hard-nosed games reporting on the web. On GameCenter, there was a superb piece on how retail space in stores is sold. GameSpot's run at least one excellent story on how a game developer (Trilobyte of 7th Guest and 11th Hour fame) slowly fell apart. But I can't think of a site that does this on a regular basis. And magazines certainly don't.
On the writing side, the mags might take a lesson from the "gaming lifestyle" sites that have sprung up in recent years. There's a whole school of new gaming journalism out there--focused on the gaming experience--and it rarely turns up in game magazines. (Examples include this piece about an unusual light saber duel in Jedi Knight II: Outcast (http://www.extra-life.org.uk/articles/article.php ?id=a37)
and this one about an endearingly pathetic character in Soul Calibur (http://www.robotstreetgang.com/2002_05_12_robotst reetgang_archive.html).)
It's not a perfect form. Sometimes these pieces are self-indulgent and sometimes offer more style than substance. But by ignoring them, the magazines are letting the web steal the first new thing to happen in game writing in 25 years. And they can't afford to do that.
Peter
I guess they've forgotten the short-lived "Sili-wood" fad of the mid '90s, which produced works of genius like The Daedalus Encounter and Critical Path.
This on again, off again synergy has produced a lot of bad seeds over the years. (Just look at the history of a publisher like Ocean, which tied its tail to a series of film licenses in the early '90s.) Movie-makers rarely have contributed to fun games--they don't understand the principles of interactvity-and, on the evidence I've seen, most game makers don't have the independence to transport movies to another level rather than simply parrot them ... or reduce them to action games.
Universal, one of the few companies that does both, did do a nice job with The Hulk and The Thing. So did Cinemaware in the late '80s--by effectively inventing its own movies.
But they're the exceptions that prove the rule: Movies and games don't mix.
They'll get over this fad in a hurry when someone loses their shirt.
Peter
To his credit, the writer raises up front the issue of the appropriateness of certain elements of the trip.
To his discredit, he then lets go of the issue just as quickly--with a potshot at a journalist who had the temerity to accept a free drink--and from there on in, it's all game, game and game. ("It looks staggeringly beautiful, and takes PC visuals to a place we've all been looking forward to for a long, long time.")
Indeed, beyond a reference to the 20 km "exclusion zone" around Chernobyl in which S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is set, the piece barely acknowledges the event itself. No reference to the deaths from the explosion and radiation at the nuclear reactor near Kiev, the courage of the people who contained the fire, the vastly increased risk of thyroid cancer among Ukrainian young people from the release of radiation, or the evacuation and resettlement of an estimated 326,000 people.
Not even the date (1986).
And while the writer does mention "reactor," it's only to inform us that "the small team at GSC actually went themselves down to the stricken reactor to gather source material, and have done a fantastic job of replicating the rust and decay."
But let's step beyond the article for a moment. It's amazing to me that someone would build a game around a relatively recent event that has been such a source of misery to the Ukraine.
Hell, make up a reactor accident in an imaginary country--if only to spare people's feelings. It is further amazing that THQ would actually bring journalists to Chernobyl to promote the game--this surpasses the recent deliberate-bad-taste publicity stunts by Acclaim--and that a journalist could go ... and then produce coverage that skirts the disaster itself.
How about a few pointed questions to THQ and GSC reps on the issue of taste? How about a word from people who live in the area on how they feel about the game? How about even a passing reference to what happened that April night in 1986?
Time does have a way of softening the impact of events. Almost 30 years after the fall of Saigon, we've started to see games based on the Vietnam War. (I don't see the analogy that another poster drew to World War II. That was the defining event of the 20th century, and its outcome defined much of the world for the 34 years that followed.)
I'm unsure where exactly to draw the line, but I don't think 18 years is enough. Game developers need to think harder about this issue before turning a national tragedy into a shooting game. And gaming publications need to question of the value of such trips and the quality of the coverage they produce.
What's next? In 15 years, are we going to see a game based around the collapse of the World Trade Center towers?
I'll answer that question right now: Without a doubt.
I seem to recall something similar on video in the mid to late '90s. It don't think it went down all that well.
Moreover, the DVD-based zines I've seen haven't lasted. I'm not persuaded that people want to buy DVDs to read. For my own part, I don't like reading things off a screen all the time. It's hard on the eyes. (Then again, it's unclear to me how much of this guide is devoted to writing--as opposed to voice-acting and video--so this may not be an issue here.)
Also, while a great many people use the net for help in games, I've seen many gamers comment that they don't want to leave their game to consult a guide. They want something they can hold on their knee as they work through a problem. Or take to the bathroom, or to bed, or to the backyard. How many people have two DVD players hooked up in the same room? Hard-core gamers, sure. But are they the target audience for strategy guides?
A DVD tucked into a sleeve inside the back cover of a traditional guide for an extra fiver might be a better bet (as someone else suggested). It sounds as though this guide is well put together. But I'd ask the reviewer what the heck the quality of the DVD intro has to do with the quality of the information that follows? (Surely we've all played -games- with dazzling intros and lackluster gameplay?)
And I didn't see a price. It's $14.95, a touch high, IMO. $9.95 would bring in more of the impulse buyers.
Peter PS: It might also be nice if they could keep saved-game files on the DVD as well, and allow the player to off-load them into their memory cards.
Peter
Actually, this will be TW's -third- attempt at publishing games. In the early and mid '90s, Time Warner Interactive released perhaps a dozen games across a range of platforms. To its credit, these included Software Sorcery's first game (Aegis: Guardian of the Fleet), the Saturn version of Virtua Racing, the PS1 version of Return Fire, the sequel to the classic Amiga game Firepower. It also put out a real stinker of a fighting game called Rise of the Robots. Of course, it's one thing to have good taste in cherry-picking games that other people develop and quite another to make them yourself. I hope for the best, but Scott's warnings are well-considered. Peter