bruceb news

Make no mistake: MySpace is old news, YouTube is beginning its slide out of the headlines, Yahoo is over the hill, Flickr never stood a chance. Second Life is the hot online destination, the next cultural obsession, soon to be a household name.

Second Life is an online world; the visuals will remind you of online games, but there’s no gameplay, just an enormous open-ended space designed for endless exploration and creativity. I can’t describe it in a few words; visit the Second Life web site, read this article about its background and features, and look through this online tour from Wired Magazine. […] continued

Products are appearing on the market faster than we can understand them – and manufacturers are moving so quickly that the products are too often half-baked, or not documented well, or not supported well. Technology is bringing us wonderful things, but too much of it comes with a full measure of frustration.

Here’s a couple of anecdotes. The details are different but the theme is the same for many, many other products on the market this holiday season.

Half-Life 2 is an incredible game. It lives up to its hype. It combines a compelling story with glorious and varied visuals and a breadth of game play that is unparalleled. […] continued

A few years ago the gaming industry was in the doldrums. I recall articles predicting that computer gaming was on its last legs. New games looked like tired rehashes of old games. Gaming magazines were shrinking.

The turnaround is complete. The sales numbers are huge. Halo 2, a hotly anticipated game for XBox, had sales of $125 million in its first 24 hours on the market – and analysts see so many other big releases on the horizon that they weren’t sure Halo 2 would set the record for 24-hour sales this year. For the past two years, the gaming industry has generated more sales dollars than the movie industry – and it’s catching up to the music industry. […] continued

The computer gaming industry is about to get a double-barreled blast of publicity and revenue. Watch for the hype to begin, and be tempted by the extraordinary games that will be released soon – but keep a close eye on the hardware requirements!

Doom 3 will be released on August 3 – the most hotly anticipated game in years. The company behind it, id Software, has single-handedly raised the bar for the entire industry several times in a row, and they appear to be poised to do it again. Doom 3 promises graphics and sound that are close to the level of computer-generated films like Finding Nemo or Shrek, in the service of an experience that is intended to be relentlessly tense and scary. […] continued

Here’s a funny article predicting the death of the video game industry. The author makes some telling points – the technology used for games on computers and consoles has reached a plateau, the original gamers are aging and about to bail out of gaming altogether, and games are increasingly likely to be copies of games from previous years.

I’m one of the “original gamers” described in the article, and my game-playing days are winding to an end. Much as I’d like to think the article is exaggerated, I sense a lot of truth in what it says.

Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 promise to be exciting games this year – although the numbers in the titles tell you a lot about originality. […] continued

If you’re a gamer, you might enjoy reading a review of the most accessible and widely accepted massively multiplayer online role-playing game to date – GameSpot’s review of real life. “Real life isn’t above reproach. In one of the stranger design decisions in the game, for some reason you have no choice in determining your character’s initial starting location, appearance, or gender, which are chosen for you seemingly at random. . . . Player death is a serious issue in real life, and cause for continued debate among players, who often direct unanswerable questions on the subject to the game’s developers, who are apparently (and understandably) so busy that they generally keep silent.”

Microsoft has been losing money on the Xbox, and it hasn’t made much headway against the Playstation for market share. In part the reason has been a lack of high-quality games exclusive to the Xbox.

When Doom III is released late this year or next year, it will have a huge impact on the PC games industry. Like its predecessors from id software, Doom and Quake, gamers will start dreaming of faster processors and better video cards to take advantage of the new game engine developed by John Carmack.

Carmack said in an interview recently that Microsoft was offering a lot of money for id to develop Doom III for the Xbox as well as the PC. […] continued

If you’re a long-time gamer, you might get a nostalgic kick out of an article over at Gamespy listing ten types of PC and video games that are dead or dying. Number one, of course, is the late, lamented graphical adventure game – all those hours spent with King’s Quest, Space Quest, Zork, Monkey Island, Grim Fandango, and the rest.

The genre is not completely dead, though. LucasArts is working on sequels to Full Throttle and Sam & Max. Elderly gamers, plan your social life accordingly.

LucasArts announced that another game is in the works featuring Sam & Max, “popular madcap dog and rabbity thing.” Here’s the press release. The original game, Sam & Max Hit The Road, was released in 1993 and became a cult classic – one of the signature games for LucasArts. It’s one of the most wonderfully bizarre items ever released by any company. The thought of a sequel makes me very happy, even one that’s eighteen months away.

Got a new computer, an Nvidia GeForce 3 or 4 video card, and a bunch of free time? Check out the reviews of Dungeon Siege and see if it looks like you might be tempted. I don’t normally play role-playing games, but Dungeon Siege is so compelling – easy to get started, beautiful graphics, fun gameplay – that I’ve buried more hours than I want to admit over the last few weeks. (Suitable for kids in my opinion – it’s hard for me to imagine that killing monsters with magic spells will corrupt a ten-year-old, but parents should know that you kill a lot of monsters.)