So this weekend I dropped AC2 and started playing Shadowbane. This could be trouble, because when Shadowbane is behaving, its really very fun. My only hope is that it will continue to misbehave, as it has been doing from time to time (slow drawing in of terrain and monsters, leading to sudden deaths). Otherwise…I’ll be back into the 12-step program for MMRPGs!

To balance things out a bit, I started playing Zelda: The Wind Waker, too. I’m embarassed to say I’m in the first ‘real’ area and already hopelessly lost. *blush*

A while back, a company called Infinium Labs announced that they’d be introducing a new gaming console called The Phantom. Between the very near-future release date (December 2003) and the amazingly high number of games they claim would be available (upwards of 30,000) most people wrote it off as a big hoax.

This week, G4’s call-in/chat-in talk show, G4TV.COM had a phone interview with Rob Shambro, COO of Infinium, to talk about the product. And it turns out, product might be the wrong word for it, as The Phantom sounds more like a service. Shambro referred to it playing “PC and ported Console” titles, which may explain the 30,000 title figure, in the first place. Second, there’s is no CD or DVD drive in the unit, and your cable or broadband provider has to provide support for it. In fact, it sounded like the hardware will come from your provider when you sign up for the service; you won’t go out and buy a box at all. It’ll be more like your cable box. Games with be streamed down to a 100-plus gig hard disk on the unit, and you’ll pay some kind of a subscription fee to play them. The box features an Intel processor and nVidia graphics chipset.

So, hoax or reality? The jury is still out, but the product Shambro described sounded a bit more feasible than a console system rolling out with 30,000 titles, y’know? Infinium is supposed to be showing more at E3, so I guess we’ll have to wait until then to learn more.

Well, I finally finished Eternal Darkness, 9 or 10 months after starting it. Of course, I took an 8 month break in the middle of it. I don’t recall what distracted me from it, but it was a distraction, and not disappointment with the game, because start to finish, this was a great experience. ED has a great soundtrack, very good voice acting, a nice creepy plot, a huge variety of environments to play in, and a sweet mix of puzzle solving and combat and of course, the ‘insanity’ hook. The very end dragged a tiny bit, but I’m not sure if that wasn’t just because I knew it was the end and I was anxious to finish.

At the end [gameplay spoiler warning] you get to play, briefly, half a dozen of the characters you’d played earlier, in rapid succession. This really brought home to me how different each one was. Not just chronolgically, but how they were modelled and especially how they moved. Younger characters were lithe and fluid in their movements, while the portly old men were stiff and clumsy. Little details like that are what made Eternal Darkness special.

Not for the kids, but a great horror game (real horror, not gore-fest ‘Resident Evil’ horror) for everyone else.

Codemasters released some new Dragon Empires screenshots…they certainly have some amazing environments:

Interesting article in the Times talking about the military’s use of war simulations to train soldiers. Free registration required.
More Than Just a Game, but How Close to Reality?
I say “war simulations” because that’s the term they used, but in many ways, these are the same games we play for fun. And the better our games get, as we layer on voice chat and team-based contests and persistent worlds, the closer we get to the realistic simulations the armed forces are striving for.