Gaming Notes
First off, here's the good news (thanks Blue's): Frogster Interactive has secured the PC rights to Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe.That's right: Speedball 2. For my money, it's the best futuristic sports game ever made. And all I've wanted for the last fifteen years is version with updated graphics. Which is apparently what FI is going to do--it's a "re-release" with updated graphics, apparently, the Bitmap Brothers are going to be "involved" in the "development process," and it's coming out next year.
Frogster Interactive is also going to re-release The Chaos Engine, which is also a Bitmap Brothers title.
Like I said, that was the good news.
The bad news is that while the North American version of The Guild 2 went gold today, the official game forums are full of pissed-off Europeans who are making full-throated claims that the game was released in an unforgiveably buggy condition.
That would not surprise me, particularly, because the original was certainly released in that condition, but if they've done it with the sequel, it's nothing short of a disgrace. The original U.S. version of The Guild had serious bugs for over a year. Do you know that the patch was called? The expansion pack. That's when the patch finally came out.
And it should tell you something about how damn good the game was that I put up with all that. I don't think I'm willing to put up with it again, though, so I'm going to be closely monitoring the situation until the game is released over here next month.
The one glimmer of hope: there have been two or three patches (already) since the release, and it looks like they're headed in the right direction.
Jesse Leimkuehler let me know that Hollywood Mogul 3 will be coming out shortly. Here are the details:
The indie developer of the Hollywood Mogul series is putting out a new version (Hollywood Mogul 3) sometime in December. However, he is offering a pre-release version of the game on some of the text-sim message boards. He's offering the pre-release version for $20.00. It's a fully-functional version of the game. Basically, he's offering everyone the chance to be a beta tester on the game. The game is $30 when it's officially released, so you're getting a bit of a break on the price as well. It's a fun game if you're interested in business sims.
Hollywood Mogul website
You can download the trial version here:
Hollywood Mogul 3 trial version.
[Please note: what I'm apparently linking to is the demo version, not the pre-release version, and the demo link isn't even working. I'm trying to get all that sorted out and I'll post an updated link as soon as I have one.]
Lastly, DQ reader Fredrik Skarstedt sent me a link to an interview with the creators of the Wii. It's on the Nintendo site, so it's hardly unbiased, but it's still a very interesting read and you can find it here.
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