I just recently did something I haven’t done in years and years. I subscribed to Nintendo Power. I guess what’s more amazing than the fact that I’ve elected to subscribe to Nintendo’s premier propaganda rag is the mere fact that it’s still around to begin with.

Specifically, I’ve decided to subscibe to the magazine is the Zelda Classic disc bonus which you can get. This disc contains the NES games The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link as well as the Nintendo 64 games The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time and The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. I’m hearing mixed reports as to whether or not the emulated NES games obey the sprite limitations of the original NES (too many sprites on one line require a “flicker” to get them to work – think back to the cemetery sequences to see what I mean) or whether the emulator ignores it. Ocarina of Time has had its resolution bumped up (something the previous release of OoT on the GameCube didn’t do – they saved that for the Master Quest game), as does Majora’s Mask, though the jury’s out on whether or not that game looks better as a result (the game even has a disclaimer warning gamers that some sounds are screwed up as a result of the N64 to GC conversion).

Nintendo Power has been around since 1988, so it’s roughly fifteen years old. It’s fascinating to me to trace it back to its origins. It was back in the day when Nintendo’s dominance was far from a given. True, the NES at that point was rising as a force to be reckoned with, but it looked to be more of a “Tickle Me Elmo” type fad. Plus this was the era in which the videogame industry was still recovering from the throes of the 1982 crash. Nintendo had been publishing a small newsletter called the Nintendo Fun Club for several months and then decided to ditch that in favor of a new, full-blown magazine. They treated all of their Fun Club subscribers to a free copy of the first issue of Nintendo Power.

I’d go into detail about that first issue here, but it’s already been done here better than I could hope to. That article brings a hell of a lot of flashbacks to me. The guy down the street had it (I may have had it too) and I think I must have read that issue cover to cover a million times. I think at the time the only magazines I really ever read were things like Ranger Rick, so to have an entire magazine on my favorite subject was pure gold.

Of course back then we didn’t care that it was basically a commercial. Hell, it worked. I wanted all the games in that magazine (especially the then-hard-to-find Super Mario Bros. 2). Nintendo knew how to cater to their target audience and lure them in. Reading the Castlevania 2 walkthrough just made me want Castlevania 2. We didn’t care about objective reporting – as far as we knew or cared, there wasn’t anything to be objective about. Nintendo was (more or less) the only game in town and that’s all that mattered.

Plus, Nintendo Power had some cool bonuses. They had these little gold pins you could get with differing numbers of wings on them depending on how many years you renewed your subscription for. They had bonus strategy guides for their games (which told you everything since they made the game as well). They even offered renewers Dragon Quest for the NES one year, still hailed by many as the best bonus ever.

Nowadays it’s a different story. The game industry is competitve now. Nintendo doesn’t command a 90% market share. The median target age has moved up considerably and Nintendo has been slow to adjust to it. Most of the time when I see people refer to Nintendo Power, the words “propoganda rag” aren’t far behind.

Now, I haven’t seen the magazine in years (though I think I did pick up a Zelda related issue in 1998) so I can’t vouch for it. Still, when you make games and then make a magazine rating games from yourself and other people, the word “objective” is a hard one. Even if Sony made a magazine it’s not like Sony personally develops their own games.

Since Nintendo makes Nintendo Power, they won’t grant “official” status on any other third party magazines (since Nintendo Power is the official magazine), so this is why publishers are reluctant to make Nintendo-specific magazines. For some reason whenever a third party publisher gets an official magazine status, other publishers want to make unofficial magazines. Imagine had the Official Dreamcast Magazine, so Ziff-Davis decided to make DCM: Dreamcast Magazine. ZD’s Official PlayStation Magazine spurred PSM: PlayStation Magazine from Imagine. I don’t think there are any competitors to Official Xbox Magazine, since pretty much every single Xbox gamer mailed in their subscription out of their Xbox box.

“Official” magazines are odd beasts. On the one hand they’re objective since they’re not owned by the console maker. On the other hand, it’s not like they want to make the console maker mad, either. The Official Xbox Magazine will never label anything Microsoft does as “fucking stupid”, for example. The main thing that bothers gamers though is how official magazines usually take high profile games and give them rave reviews. Perhaps the games truly deserve it, but sometimes even stinker games get the star treatment. The concern here is not that someone outside influenced the review, more that it’s as if the magazine has a vested interest in presenting every high profile game as worth having, and thus the console worth buying. It’s not that the magazine feels it must play a crucial role in moving hardware, but rather that it feels like it needs to help its console “win”.

And this all goes back to the “who wins” debate. Ultimately it’s the latter day incarnation of the “mine’s better than yours – you’re stupid for liking yours” argument from the elementary schoolyards of the world. Don’t get me wrong – it’s fun to pick on other systems, but when professionals do it, it’s another story. I get the Official Xbox Magazine and usually the cross-platform title gets some digs for not having enhanced Xbox graphics – they decide to ignore the economics of development every single time.

But Nintendo Power’s been there through it all – through the debacle that was the Virtual Boy, through the sluggish N64 years, through the change from cartridge to disc media, through 14 years of the Game Boy, everything. I’ll read the issues as they come in the mail, since it’ll be fun. Actually the real test will be to see whether or not the magazine holds up better than GamePro, a platform agnostic magazine I currently subscribe to because I spotted a free subscription on FilePlanet dealie and got in for a year. GamePro’s alright, kinda fun actually, but it’s not really aimed at intellectual gamers – it’s more fluff. When I read PC Gamer I see white pages with paragraphs on them and nice descriptive reviews. When I read GamePro it’s all images, all colors, all flash aimed to keep the younger demographic interested. Oh well.

Like I said, I’m interested to see how Nintendo Power holds up. But all I really wanted was the disc.

I’ve been an avid reader and fan of Blue’s News for many years (more years than the site claims to have been in existence, so someone’s lying). Blue’s is a site whose initial focus was the game Quake (the original name was Blue’s Quake Rag), but has since branched out over the years to be a general gaming site, but still mostly focusing on 3D FPS games, and the offerings of id Software in particular.

Blue’s News curator, Blue, is one Stephen Heaslip of the NYC area. Once a full-time worker, he was able to quit his job in the dot-com era (I don’t recall, but I think he worked at Compaq) and was able to work on Blue’s News full-time. At some point a year or two ago, he even had two employees – Jason “loonyboi” Bergman and Frans (whose last name eludes me), who also created the database-driven system the site and comment system relies upon.

However, at some point Bergman left the site. It was vaguely reported to be related to the cost of keeping him around, and he’s since taken up residence at Shacknews, another gaming news site that’s strangely popular and profitable. Frans has since left as well, thought it seems his reasoning was more along the lines of wanting to do different things (he’s since become the administrator of 3D Files.

Blue’s main sponsor is an ad network named UGO (UnderGround Online), but when the Internet advertising bubble popped, UGO started paying sites less and less, and the future of Blue’s was in doubt. He even posted to that effect at one point.

For a long time nothing happened. Blue would even remove ads from his page that caused pop-up ads to occur. Blue was adamant that there would never be poups or other forms of annoying interruption based advertisements. However, when a Flash based advertisment that took up a good portion of the screen appeared, he asked that readers be tolerant of it, and understand the predicament he was in.

Then, about two months ago, the other shoe dropped. Besides having to employ pop-up ads, Blue’s also featured a “takeover ad” – once every 24 hours (cookie tracked) the main page redirects to an advertisement before the main page. These were in addition to the Flash ads. And a recent redesign of the front page now places a large, embedded frame in the page between days of news with a web page in it.

Now, I’m not here lambasting Blue’s. Like I said, I really like the site. I’ll tolerate the Flash ads (most have a “close” button now). I’ll tolerate the takeover ads. I tolerate commercials for TV shows I like, this is no different. But I draw the line at popups. They never get past the popup blocker in the Google Toolbar. If a site shuts down because I won’t let them do a popup ad then I’m sorry, but that’s the way it’s got to be.

My concern is this – as time has worn on I’ve seen more and more ads on Blue’s. More and more of the screen real estate is taken up, more and more annoyances are in place. What I wonder is when will it be enough. Or if it will ever be enough. If these ads don’t cover Blue’s costs, or if UGO forces more on him (I don’t know who’s more in charge there), what more can they do? And when they can’t come up with new advertisement methods, what then?

I’m not a prude when it comes to advertising. Some people rant and rave about the commercialization of this and that. Whatever. I live in a city where many days I go to my door to see advertisements rubber-banded to the door. That’s fine – people have to make a living some how. My mailbox is filled with spam. Into the trash it goes. Occasionally it’s useful, so whatever.

There’s people who encourage you to take those little ads that come with your credit card bills and mail them right back to the company, “to show them what you think”. Of course this is misplaced anger – the person who opens your bill (if it is a person) is some minimum wage drone who tosses your protest and doesn’t even bat an eye. People who wrote hate mail to Dell for advertising in PC Accellerator got that magazine cancelled. Good job. And those people who want to drive a million AOL discs back to AOL? What a great way to mask unemployment. And at this rate it’ll be twenty years before they get that million dics. Lord only knows what we’ll be storing AOL software on by then. Guess they didn’t do the math.

The thing is – I’m not your average Internet user. I’ve been web browsing since there was a web. And I can count on my left hand the number of times I’ve clicked on an ad online. Well, maybe on my two hands. And I’ve never bought something from an ad I clicked on.

And yet, I see television ads all the time for things I want to buy. I’ve bought things that I learn about through TV. I don’t complain when they interrupt my shows with commercials.

Is it that I’m used to seeing TV with ads? I mean, it’s not like five years ago there were no ads on TV and now they’re all over the place. Does acceptance just come with time?

The ad campaign on TV for McDonald’s is the “I’m Lovin’ It”. McDonald’s, for whatever reason, never keeps a slogan for long. I can’t wait for this one to go away – it’s annoying. Granted, my going to McDonald’s has nothing to do with their ads and everything to do with 26 years of comfort and whether or not they’re running a Monopoly tie-in. But Jack In The Box ads? I love those things. Everyone does. They’re funny, they’re not obtuse about their point, we actually look forward to those ads. That little stunt with the Jack Balls on antennas is a stroke of brilliance – we pay to get one so we can advertise them for them around town. And I even got one of the ones with the Dallas Cowboys helmet – and I’m not even a football fan.

I do take issue with a recent Dr. Pepper ad with L.L. Cool J and Run DMC. Besides being annoying, it just doesn’t seem right for Run DMC to be pitching soft drinks shortly after breaking up due to the murder of their DJ, Jam Master Jay. Originally, the ad featured an “in memory of…” bit at the end, but now it’s gone. Now, when I see Britney Spears shaking her nonnies with a Pepsi can in hand, it doesn’t bother me – I pretty much expect it, what with her being a young flash-in-the-pan and all (and now that I’ve said that, we’ll be following her past forty like we do Madonna), but companies should at least respect the dead.

But back to Internet Advertising. The problem really is that it just doesn’t work. We don’t click on popup ads. We don’t click on banners. If you buy something from Amazon and someone gets a comission, it’s probably because you went out of your way to refer off of a site. It’s not because you were too stupid to go to Amazon and look it up yourself. The only form of Internet Advertising that does work is spam. And spam only works because it uses ancient standards to scale incredibly well. Sending out millions doesn’t cost much more than sending out thousands. And pretty much any sales you get at all are pure profit. Of course, this too is doomed to ultimate failure. As more and more of the potential “penis enlargement” market becomes hip to the fact that these pills cannot work (nothing short of surgery will), their market will dry up. As spam software becomes better, less and less of these ads will even be seen. And the #1 thing spammers make money off of – lists of valid email addresses to each other – is bound to run out at some point as these lists become more useless.

The main difference between a television show with advertisements and a website with advertisements is that there’s a finite number of television shows on a finite number of television networks, and there’s an infinite number of people trying to run a website for profit. This is the other reason the bubble for Internet Advertising dried up – too many of them. Perhaps at some point only a few web sites will survive. In the FPS/Quake category alone we’ve seen the demise of a number of sites, like Stomped (which lives on as the frontpiece for a gaming place) and Aftershock. Places like PlanetQuake mostly survived due to the strongarm commercial tactics of the GameSpy network.

Of course I don’t want to see any popular site go away. I’m pretty sure sites like Blue’s News will survive, as they’re popular enough to have anough fans interested in keeping it going. Plus we need sites like that, ultimately. This site is run entirely out of pocket (though the hosting fees are nil), and I of course make no money off of it. But while you get what I hope is insigtful commentary, you’re not really informed of all that much.

But I wonder – when/if the Internet Advertising bubble completely dries up, what’s going to happen?

What if you made a game, and no one played it?

Obviously that’s really too broad of a question – I can write a tic-tac-toe game for Windows and perhaps no one would download or play it and so the concept of this happening is not all that improbable.

But what if you were a software development house, spent years and years and thousands of dollars on a game, actually enticed a publisher into publishing said game, and no one bought it?

Or rather, no one played it.

Prior to the introduction of 1996’s Quake, game modification was pretty limited – some levels, some graphics, perhaps new monsters if you could replace all the graphics correctly, but it wasn’t until Quake‘s QuakeC-based source code for rules modification was released that what we currently call game modification came into being. Suddenly people could modify the games they play.

Some took this on to great fame and fortune. Dave “Zoid” Kirch’s Capture the Flag modification for Quake was so popular it won him a contract to work for id Software to make a CTF mod for Quake II. He continued to work for id, helping to port their titles to Linux and doing level design and programming until he took a job with Retro Studios in Austin. He was the lead engineer on Metroid Prime.

And of course there’s the Counter-Strike team, who made a terrorist/anti-terrorist modification for Half-Life that was so popular, Valve hired the team full time to make standalone Counter-Strike titles. They did this same thing to the Day of Defeat team, and pre-emptively hired the Team Fortress team from the Quake days.

But not all teams or individuals were lucky enough to be courted by a game developer. Most go on to normal lives. A few, though, try and make a go at it themselves.

At the outset of the Quake, tons of people latched on to the idea of a “Total Conversion”. Since Quake allowed for more or less entirely different games, a number of people decided that that is what they would do. The flaw in this plan of course is that a TC required a ton of work, and more time than most people have to spare. Most TC’s were never finished.

The other problem TC’s had was that of copyright infringement. Many TC’s were based off of existing commercial properties. For some reason, most gamers didn’t stop to think that this was perhaps a bad idea, though this has something to do with the fact that the game industry wasn’t nearly as big in 1996 as it is today. The most famous example was when Aliens Quake was released – within 24 hours the site was taken down by lawyers from 20th Century Fox, and the term “foxing”a project was born. Today it makes perfect sense – there have been a slew of Alien-related games released and this project was threatening to those titles.

Another TC based off of a commercial property was a Wheel of Time modification. The Wheel Of Time is a series of sci-fi/fantasy novels by Robert Jordan. Jordan and TOR’s lawyers put the axe on using the WoT name in the modification (and the further reasoning why was made clear when a Wheel of Time game was released by Legend in 1999), but by that point the designers of the modification had different ideas anyway.

They called themselves Freeform Interactive and changed the name of their mod to Future Vs. Fantasy Quake. The game was slower paced, and there were specific teams and specific roles on each team. One team had a medieval fantasy twist, the other a futuristic science fiction bent. It was, along with Capture The Flag and Team Fortress, the beginnings of team based online gameplay.

FvF had a fairly hardcore following, albiet niche-based. Obviously, with mods like CTF and TF becoming popular, the fact that FvF was team-based wasn’t the problem. The problem with FvF catching on was that it wasn’t free. In their first effort to become a commercial software developer, Freeform Interactive created “shareware” and “registered” versions of the modification, the latter of which cost money. It made a sort of sense since id Software, developer of Quake, had used this model to make their fortune. However, it ultimately reflects a more innocent time – today id would never allow such a thing to happen without the involvement of lawyers.

Consequently, FvF could not catch on as quickly as its higher profile comrade modifications, though the niche following it developed was fairly hardcore about it. So much so that the modification group continued their efforts.

The path gets somewhat murky from there to here, but at some point within the last five years, Freeform acquired the rights to the LithTech engine to make a new game. LithTech an engine used by Monolith for their own games, but maintaned by a separate sister company to Monolith for the purpose of licensing out to third parties. Freeform decided to license the engine and make a sequel to FvF. The game would be called Purge, named after one of the game modes in FvF.

The game was released in April, 2003. Some time before, they released a demo. What followed thereafter was a flurry of patches to the demo, to the point that many felt that the demo was being used as a beta test. This, coupled with the built-in jokes the title had, didn’t bode well for Purge. The game was being published by Tri-Synergy, a newcomer with strong ties to Electronics Boutique, but little experience in game publishing.

The game debuted at $29.99 but before too long wound up going for $9.99. The critics didn’t care for the game too much, and the general public was ambivalent. GameStop.com dropped the product and most mainstream retailers either didn’t hold it in high volume or passed on it entirely.

Then about a month ago I noticed on Blue’s News that the game had dropped to $2.99 at EB. That’s less than a meal at a fast food restaraunt.

This intrigued me. So I did some research. It used to be a given that every game had some sort of small community surrounding it, but this is no longer the case due to the size of the industry, the tendency of people to latch onto certian titles (see Counter-Strike abd Battlefield 1942), and the failure of certian higher profile titles (like Daikatana). Still, there’s a community for Purge, most notably PurgeWorld, whose forum regulars include the now three developers at Freeform. Next thing I did was to fire up The All-Seeing Eye, which has far surpassed GameSpy 3D as the best server browser. Purge had between four and five servers listed. Games like Daikatana or KISS: Psycho Circus, whose popularity either never materialized or faded completely away, had zero servers. Games like Battlefield 1942 and Half-Life had craploads of servers – even more than free games like Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. Purge‘s bigger problem though was the players – at any given time there were maybe three players on one server. Puge is an online-only team-based game, but with three players on a server, things weren’t looking good for the game. More intriguing is that my research seemed to indicate that Purge had no real copy protection – anyone with a CD of it (however obtained) could play it online. There was no SecuROM or CD Key system in place. So people could play this online for free if they wanted to, but yet no one was.

Still, $2.99? I could get the game and still have enough cash to hit up McDonald’s on the way home. Super sized even.

So I roll into the local EB at the Stonebriar Mall. It occurs to me how stupid this is – going to a mall to find a $3 game that I was almost ensured was virtually unplayable. But sure enough, they had one copy left. It was in a sorta beat-up box and the $9.99 had been marked down to $2.99 with a red marker (I had read that some people on the PurgeWorld forums were mad that their local EB still wanted $10 for it – perhaps their local EB was really just too lazy to break out the pen). I picked it up and took it home.

Actually, I went to have dinner at a friend’s house first. He has a massive HDTV and before the night was out we played some Metroid Prime on it. I was sitting there thinking about how Zoid was some guy at an ISP who made a dinky CTF mod for Quake eight years ago, and now he was the lead engineer on this title which blew everyone away. Meanwhile the guys at Freeform, who also made an initially dinky mod for Quake had to lay down $250,000 for the Lithtech engine and now watched as their publisher lowered the price to $2.99 to get rid of it – a price which would ensure that they could never make back their investment. And still, on the forums they encouraged people to go out and buy the game at that price – at least it had a better chance of being played. I kinda felt like, by waiting for the price to drop 90% I was hurting their cause – and yet I felt better than if I had pirated the game.

So I install the game, patch it, and fire up TASE. I see one server has three people on it, so I go there. The Internet is full of assholes, but everyone on this server (all three) made it a point to say hello to me and be polite. That was kinda a nice change. Of course I don’t know how to play the game or anything, but that’s ok, I get killed nonetheless. They probably all know each other by name from previous nights and realize I’m new since they haven’t seen me before. I actually felt it neccessary to excuse myself before leaving the server. It was weird.

The graphics of the game won’t be winning any awards, but they’re fine. It’s the gameplay that’s odd. The game didn’t come with much of a manual – you’re supposed to read the one online at their web site – it’s synched with the latest patch anyway. Still, a PDF would have been nice. Plus, as is par for the course now – no CD case.

Getting back to what I said earlier about quiet demises – a game like this is multiplayer only. Quake 3 was multiplayer only as well, but Quake 3 had a couple of things going for it. For one thing it did have an attempt at a single player mode – you played up a ladder against bots. Purge has no bots. I guess this is the other side of the extreme – you never have to worry about bots filling out servers. When you filter out how many Unreal Tournament 2003 servers aren’t using bots, you’re not left with many. This isn’t to say there aren’t also human players on those servers, just that you can be guaranteed that someone on that server is fake.

The other thing Quake 3 had going for it – and this is key – is a more or less guaranteed user base. It seems like every post I make has to dig up id Software’s history, but the fact that they were so successful with the DOOM and Quake series to that point that Quake 3 had 50,000 copies sold in its first weekend alone. Purge will probably never sell that many copies ever, and even the copies it does sell will only ever have a small percentage actually play the game.

And the cycle is vicious – no one wants to buy the game because it’s unpopular – but it’s unpopular because no one bought the game. It didn’t have a big marketing push behind it (the Purge banners on fan sites are homemade), it didn’t have the name of an established developer on it, and really there wasn’t anything outstanding about it. It was a FPS with roleplaying elements. It has a plot, but it’s like the plot of Quake – a tacked on afterthought. It was doomed on retail shelves and now you’re more likely to find it on the shelves at Half-Price Books than you are at GameStop. In fact, you can’t even find it on GameStop’s website anymore.

But is it worth $2.99? I say so. That same day I downloaded a copy of Bejeweled for my cell phone for $4.99. If I change cell phone providers I can’t take it with me and it drains the hell out of my battery. This game licks it for value, hands down. I wonder how many people picked it up at $2.99 and continued to play? I haven’t played it much, but I rarely have time to play as it is.

As many strikes as it has against it, I must say – Freeform pretty much hauled off and did what many just thought about. They made a shareware modification and instead of independently making a mod for a publically available game, they made a commercial title. Of course, a group like Splash Damage made Q3F for Quake 3 for free and now they’re the ones who did Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and the multiplayer mode for DOOM 3, so perhaps this wasn’t the best course of action. Still, you have to admire the gusto.

Freeform is currently working on Purge Jihad. Jihad was one of the modes in FvF, so it makes a logical choice for their next title. For people who own Purge, Purge Jihad will be a free download. It looks like they’re not bothering with having this published as a boxed retail product (or perhaps are unable to) but it looks like they’re going to venture forth undaunted and try to make this project of theirs work under a new title and with a new upgrade.

Looks like Half-Life 2 has been delayed – no specific date now.

Half-Life 2‘s existence was a heavily guarded secret – the game has been in development for close to five years now (shortly after Half-Life hit shelves, in other words) – until late May or so. Valve took the odd step of announcing the game to print magazines under NDA restriction until their June issues – places like Blue’s News once again had to get their dish from people whose subscriptions came in early. Part of the bold claim they made – in addition to showing it off to wowed audiences at E3 – was that the game would be in stores on September 30th.

The entire affair was significant since the usual course of events is to announce a game as soon as you have an idea for it – or at least a screenshot or two. The development goes on for a while – oftentimes years – and the game oftentimes suffers delay after delay. This is assuming it’s not cancelled outright – I’ve seen print ads for games that never saw the light of day. The publishing marketing machine coordinates the hype – which is why it’s so disasterous when games get delayed, since it throws off their timing considerably. Gamers are so jaded to delayed games that it’s hard to get excited about a game anymore. So what would be nice is if someone made an amazing kickass game, didn’t tell anyone about it, then came out with it with a minimum of hype but a maximum of sales.

And that’s what looked to happen with Half-Life 2 – the original Half-Life is like a textbook on how to do a game right. The single player portion raised the bar on what electronic entertainment is capable of, without being too ambitious for its own good (see Shenmue). The multiplayer portion was helped considerably by the fact that, by accident or design, Half-Life became the platform to modify. Counter-Strike is the most popular mod of all time, with some 50,000 players playing it at any given point in time (almost as many people as live in Texarkana, my home town). Couple this seemingly perfect game to make a sequel to with the fact that the sequel actually looked pretty good, and the fact that the game was coming out on time and early for the holidays and it seemed to be a match made in heaven.

Valve contracted the team that made Team Fortress for the original Quake to make their planned Team Fortress 2 modification an expansion pack for Half-Life. Then, some time after Team Fortress Classic was released to fill the gap, TF2 was to be a full game. Its current status is unknown, though it’s thought that more will be revealed after Half-Life 2 ships (one theory states that it might be included in HL2). Other than additional patches, additional Counter-Strike updates (by then Valve had hired that team full time) and the occasional boxed release of Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat (standalone HL mods – the 2 HL expansion packs were done by Gearbox), all was quiet from Valve – which irritated gamers. Where was TF2? Had they even thought about HL2? Everyone knew that one of the most successful start up game developers in the world had to be up to something – but what?

Valve was more or less hearlded once HL2 was announced, but shortly thereafter problems started to arise. For one, there’s been something going on I haven’t really followed where cards from Nvidia didn’t do some FSAA right, but apparently that was resolved. Then they announced the game was, confusingly, in three versions – one cheap version with single player only that wouldn’t run mods, “aimed at the Costcos of the world”, a second version complete with single and multiplayer that could run mods, and a third that also had limited edition crap. The single-player version is baffling – how many people could have a system capable of running HL2 but not want multiplayer? And shop at Costco for their games?

Then there was Steam. Steam is this sort of nebulous client Valve devised. It’s a way for them (and you) to update the Valve content on your hard drive – so that way when a new patch comes out you can get it automatically, so you don’t have to worry about waiting until most of the servers are patched to play on. Also it’s a server browser, chat interface, and even a way to purchase games – a fourth Half-Life 2 option is apparently to pay $9.99 a month to play it – which will also apparently guarantee access to future commercial expansion products. Also, it seems it is destined to become the authientication method for Half-Life and Half-Life 2 – currently when you want to play Half-Life online, Half-Life sends your CD key to an authentication server (currently operated by WON) to make sure it’s not already in use. Essentially Valve pioneered the CD Key system for games. In about a year or so that WON system is going away, and you’ll have to play with the latest version of Half-Life and the latest version of Steam.

This irks gamers because it means that they’ll suddenly have to have more crap installed in order to continue to play a game they already own. Even this wouldn’t be so bad, except that Steam has problems. For one thing, when thousands of gamers suddenly need an update, the thing is darn slow. Recently they took Steam out of beta and tons of users needed to update their Half-Life installations. So thousands of users were downloading hundreds of megabytes of data. Steam was/is supposed to migrate your existing content over and update only what is neccessary, but this didn’t work so well. It got to the point where Valve released standalone Steam installers, more or less negating the point of Steam.

There’s talk that you’ll have to have Steam in order to play Half-Life 2, either at the outset or in the future. This bugs gamers to no end for various reasons. Steam’s auto update feature is a nice idea, but imagine if it was designed such that you couldn’t play unless it had updated. So you sit down to play a quick game but instead you have to sit and wait for the client to download an update along with a million other users. It’ll be worse if it checks between levels. I don’t know for sure that either of these will happen, but it goes back to one belief a lot of serious gamers have – they want the control, and they like having things separated. They don’t want to use the server browser Steam provides – they like theirs just fine (which won’t be a problem, assuming it doesn’t purposely lock out other server browsers). They don’t want or need the “Friends” system – having four IM paradigms is too many already – plus this is something their server browser does already. And most people – myself included – would rather a traditional boxed product.

Now personally I don’t mind the idea of Steam, provided they can work out the bandwidth issues (and also provided that it’s even possible to do so). I have little use for the server browsing or chat features, but having the equivalent of a critical update notification for my games isn’t half bad. But I won’t buy games from Steam. It’s funny – years back when it was predicted that they would or could do away with the boxed product notion I was resistant, and I thought perhaps I was the only one. However, it seems I’m not alone. People on the whole want something tangible for their money.

But then after all the fiascos with Steam, Valve delays their game from its etched in stone date. Personally, I don’t mind since it’s not like it’s Duke Nukem Forever delays (yet), but people who just upgraded their systems are livid. I guess this buys me some time to do some research and see what I want to get (or have to get) to run Half-Life 2.

Still, it would have been really cool if Valve could have delivered on their crazy claim of September 30.

The process of game software porting fascinates me. Porting (I believe from the “port” in transport or portable) is taking software from one platform and getting it to run on another platform. Every company does it differently, some do it better than others, and some do it horribly.

A recent and upcoming example is Halo. Bungie was primarily a Macintosh developer who thrived on the dearth of entertainment titles on that platform. Back in 1994 or so when everyone in the world was playing DOOM on the PC, Bungie was making a killing selling their FPS Marathon to the Mac users who wanted in on the fun. At some point they decided to start working on Halo. Originally a 3D RTS, they changed it to a third person action game. The graphics were amazing and the big question was: would it be PC or Mac? They confirmed they were working with both platforms, but refused commentary on which would get the game, or if they both would. Then in late 2000 or so it was announced that Microsoft was buying Bungie. Gamers smelled what was coming. At the insistence of Microsoft, Halo was transformed into a FPS and was released in November 2001 as an Xbox launch title. Some time later Bungie announced that they had not “started” on the PC port, and had handed it off to Gearbox Software to do. It’s about to be released (nearly two years after the game hit Xbox) and soon a Mac port will “start”. The maneuver paid off for Microsoft – they sold millions of Xboxes and almost every single one has a copy of Halo to match.

Then there’s Electronic Arts. EA is in the lucky position of having a few franchises which translate well onto multiple platforms. Their crown jewel is their EA Sports line, which contains their flagship title, their Madden NFL franchise. The game Madden NFL 2004 was released fairly recently for PS2, Xbox, GameCube, PC, GBA and PSOne (BTW, the traditional moniker for the PlayStation (1) was always PSX, which was short for PlayStation X, the original code name for the retargeted SNES CD-ROM drive Sony tried to do with Nintendo – but now that they’ve announced a new PS2 with DVD writing and TiVo capabilities named PSX, most people – myself included – now refer to the system as the PSOne to avoid confusion. Too bad it looks stupid). The “next gen” (or is it “current gen” now?) consoles have more or less identical versions, and I think the PC version is the same as these. I can’t vouch for the GBA version, but as far as I can tell, the PSOne version is simply Madden 2003 with new rosters and updated jerseys. Since there’s obviously no code shared between the PSOne/GBA/”next gen” versions, by some definitions the GBA/PSOne versions aren’t “ports”, but rather “versions”. No one says the “GBA Port” of Madden 2004 since they’re clearly have different source code.

But then there’s the GBA “port” of DOOM, which I don’t believe actually uses the DOOM source code (I’d be willing to bet it’s able to achieve what it does on the GBA due to assembly language) but it still gets considered a “port” since it’s essentially trying to be the same game.

EA also finds themselves in charge of the Harry Potter games. Their second title, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, released in conjunction with the movie, was on seven platforms – PC, Xbox, PS2, GC, GBA PSOne and even GBC. For the most part they were completely different games. I think it also has the distinction of being the (so far) last GBC game.

Recently the aforementioned Madden NFL 2004 was released and the PS2 version outsold the GameCube version 35 to 1, and the Xbox version 5 to 1. However another high profile game also recently saw a simultaneous console release – Soul Calibur II. The original Soul Calibur was only released on the Dreamcast console (and in arcades, running on PSOne hardware), and many people bought a Dreamcast to play it. Soul Calibur II was released on each console with one major difference (other than improved graphics to compliment the capabilities of each platform) – an exclusive playable character. The PS2 version has a character from Tekken, the Xbox has Spawn from the MacFarlane comics, and the GameCube has Link, from the Zelda series. So far the GameCube version is outselling the PS2 version 5 to 1, and is even outselling the marginally graphically superior Xbox version. This says that people will buy cross-platform games for the GameCube when there is compelling reason to do so (and it also says that there are considerably fewer casual gamers buying SCII.)

Of course SCII and Madden NFL 2004 benefit from simultaneous release – it’s not uncommon for a game to come out on a platform, sell a ton, and then sell considerably less when released for other platforms. Part of this lies with the perception that the game was done best on the original platform (not always the correct assumption), the fact that most people have already purchased it on the original platform, and the fact that some games just don’t hold people’s fascination as long as others.

The one exception to this seems to be when one platform is a console and the other is the PC. These platforms are sufficiently different that people don’t have a problem buying or re-buying the game multiple times. A good test of this will be whether or not the PC port of Halo will sell. Knights of the Old Republic is Xbox only now, but many people are holding out for the later PC port. Another reason is that often the PC is immune to exclusivity agreements (like with the Grand Theft Auto games).

And it’s not always taking advantages of strengths that works either. The game Splinter Cell was released on the Xbox and its developed with the intention of exploting its abilities to the fullest, including shadows and such. As a result, it simply couldn’t be recreated on the PS2 accurately, so to make up for it that version contained extra levels. It fared better on the GameCube, but to make up for the differences they programmed the game to link up with a Game Boy Advance to serve as a radar – a nifty feature at least. Neither sold all that well.

Sometimes ports don’t make sense. Sim City was ported to the SNES and sold badly – one magazine said titles like this were “too computery” to work on a console. Conversely, Star Wars: Rogue Squadron was lambasted on the PC but hailed on the Nintendo 64. My favorite conundrum was the port of Quake 3: Arena to the Sega Dreamcast – despite the best efforts of the porting team to make the game work for a controller, they also included the ability to use the Dreamcast Mouse and Keyboard for players used to playing on the PC. Why these gamers would then not just play it on the PC is beyond me. But then again the PSOne port of Civilization II sold pretty well despite the technical limitations of the PSOne – speculation as to why mostly centers on the fact that no other PSOne games were quite like it.

To some, Gearbox is a porting house. I suppose that’s unfair since they have done some original titles – albeit expansion packs. But most of their games are ports of other games. Some places do their own ports, others outsource them. id Software used to do all of their own console ports, but they haven’t done one of their own in years – though that may change as they say they are “commited to delivering” DOOM 3 on the Xbox. Any ports to other consoles will have to be done by other people.

In so far as ports amongst Windows, Mac and Linux are concerned, most modern development is layered – when properly done the layer that interfaces the game from the platform itself is the only thing that has to be rewritten. To an extreme, all development can be done this way – this is how those games like The Hulk and Spider-Man can hit all three consoles and the PC on the first day. The trick is that a lot of important decisions have to be made from day one – witness Neverwinter Nights. The plan/promise was to deliver on all the major platforms on day one – Linux, Windows, MacOS and even BeOS. The BeOS port was scrapped when Be, Inc. got out of the OS business (they got bought by Palm and more or less dismantled), but the other three were a go. Seems the developer Bioware got fed up with their Interplay contract so they got Infogrames to get them out. Consequently, when the Windows port of NWN was done first, Infogrames ensured it was shipped first. The Linux and MacOS ports were in unfinished states. Though the initial plan was a few weeks at best, the Linux port was out over a year after the Windows version and the Mac version was later after that – and due to licensing issues, the movie cut scenes couldn’t be in the Linux version (not sure about Mac though). In addition, the rich toolset only exists on Windows.

Another factor in porting is the costs involved. As we’ve seen, when planned ahead of time actual development costs can be minimized with forward thinking, but sometimes the costs in manufactuiring and distributions aren’t worth it. The Dreamcast port of Half-Life was cancelled even after the porting development efforts were finished, since the dwindling market share in the wake of the console’s cancellation meant the cost of manufacuring copies wasn’t worth it. When it became apparent that modifications and multiplayer would be impossible, the Macintosh port of Half-Life was abandoned as well. Quake 3: Arena was released on Windows, Macintosh and Linux simultaneously in 1999 in separate boxes. 95% of the sales were to Windows, over 4% were to Macintosh, and less than 1% were to Linux, mostly because of Loki’s lesser distribution power and the fact that most Linux gamers dual boot with Windows anyway. Simply put, often times porting to a niche platform simply isn’t worth it.

In any event, I have a good PC, a GameCube, an Xbox and a PS2, so I’m pretty much set. Of course since most people have at best one, maybe two consoles, it makes porting possible – if everyone had all the consoles then ports to multiple consoles systems wouldn’t be neccessary – just make the one version and everyone will buy it. The only way I’m screwed is if the game is Macintosh or Linux only.

But that never happens.

I’ve got some longer posts in the hopper but in the meantime I wanted to post this – according to several sources, Disney has decided to axe it’s 2-D animation unit in lieu of 3-D computer animation.

Disney, a suggestion – call up Shigeru Miyamoto of Nintendo. Talk to him about licensing the game engine used in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Use this instead of hand-drawn animation. Trust me on this. I know you see movies like Finding Nemo and Shrek making tons of money and Treasure Planet tanking and see a correlation. I know Ice Age cost $50 million to make and brought in $200 million. But here’s the deal – not every movie needs to be Toy Story, not every production house can be Pixar, and sometimes people really want to see something like The Lion King or Lilo & Stitch. Use the Zelda engine and make movies that can do both. Better yet – make the game (for GameCube of course) at the same time.

And if you were wondering who came first, the Dixie Chicken or the Garth Brooks egg, it turns out they all took a cue from Little Feat’s 1973 song “Dixie Chicken”. Thanks Misti. It’s kinda funny – I go and write some short novel and I’m always amazed that someone out there is actually reading it (though to be fair, I’ve met Misti in real life).

So it turns out I was kinda like those people who think that Rolling Stone magazine named itself after The Rolling Stones, or vice versa, when in truth they both stemmed their name from the Bob Dylan tune, “Like A Rolling Stone”. Of course that was something of an offshoot of “Papa was a Rolling Stone” by The Temptations, which itself was a mangling of the phrase “A Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss”. Before that, there was darkness.

In College Station, where I lived for nearly eight years, lives a man named Don Ganter. Ganter is an A&M Graduate and his main claim to fame in the College Station area is that he owns an establishment known as the Dixie Chicken. I don’t recall if the Garth Brooks song of the same name is related, but it was definitely around before the Dixie Chicks rose to fame and infamy. The Dixie Chicken is primarily a bar and local legend has it that it holds the world’s record for more alcohol consumed per square inch than anywhere else. So popular is this establishment that during my tenure at A&M I knew of more than one devoutly religious, ani-alcohol person who would go there to play dominos. There’s even a tradition, “dunking your ring”, wherein you take a very large mug of beer, drop in your newly acquired Aggie Ring, and chug the beer until you can grab the ring with your teeth (this tradition shifted slightly when local law outlawed pitchers). I’m not much of a beer drinker and even I did this with a group of friends the night we got our rings.

In addition to the Dixie Chicken, Ganter owns the Dry Bean Saloon, a shot bar. And he owns Shadow Canyon, a dance hall. And the Hole in the Wall Saloon (another bar), the Chicken Oil Company (a restaraunt), Alfred T. Hornbacks (a pool hall), Satchel’s Bar-B-Q & Steaks, and Brazos Hall (not sure). In all he owns eight establishments and they’re all similar – made almost entirely of wood, rusted old signs nailed to the wall, exteriror signs with more or less the same old western fonts, etc. Really playing up the stereotypical Texan angle.

Now the interesting thing I remember hearing (though I must confess I heard it back before I had learned of the concept of the Urban Legend, so I believed more of what I heard back then) is that every one of Ganter’s establishments loses money. Every one that is except for the Dixie Chicken, which not only makes money, but it makes so much money that it sustains the other seven businesses and then some. When asked why he bothers to own so many businesses when the one is sufficient (i.e., if he shed the other seven he could be even more wealthy), Ganter’s reaction is that he just likes being able to tell people that he owns a bar, a shot bar, a restaraunt, a dance hall, etc. It’s this sort of eccentricity Aggies love (plus it’s good for the local economy).

Stick that little anecdote in your head while we switch gears for a minute.

It’s been a given for many years that the PC can get online. Though a lot of people still use dial-up, PC’s have also had the ability to connect directly to the Internet or to another network with an ethernet port. Consoles have had to take different paths to get online.

The Sega Dreamcast shipped with a 56K modem in tow. The joke was that it was “narrowband”, but in 1999 dial-up was considerably more prevalent than broadband. It still is, but less so. The Dreamcast included a web browser and could do some interesting things, but playing online never really took off. Sega even tried their hand at being an ISP – signing a 3 year contract with them scored you a free Dreamcast.There was a broadband adaptor which had an ethernet port, but few games took advantage of it – not even Phantasy Star Online Episode II, the game that really really needed it.

Oddly enough, though the Nintendo GameCube has an online adapter – two of them, either Ethernet or a 56K phone modem – and the only online title there is is Phantasy Star Online Episodes I & II. One game, and no real strategy. Well, Nintendo does have a strategy – their strategy is basically to not have one. To sit back and watch. To let others figure out what works. While I usually admire Nintendo’s innovation most of the time, this time they want to sit back and let the others do the hard part.

This is more or less the exact same approach that Sony is taking with the PS2. The PS2 shipped without connectivity abilities, but for the price of a Network Adapter, PS2 games can go online as well. The difference between Nintendo and Sony however, is that Nintendo isn’t very anxious to incorporate online connectivity in their games, whereas Sony is (though Sony makes considerably fewer and less popular games). Sony is content to let the individual developers do the legwork to get their game online.

Compare all of this to Microsoft with the Xbox console. Microsoft made big headlines when they announced that they were going to ship the Xbox with a hard drive and an ethernet port, making for the first broadband (only) game console. However, while many games shipped with the ability to network via a LAN connection, none worked over the Internet. It wasn’t until a year later, when Microsoft unveiled Xbox Live, that the ability to play online was realized. Many gamers were mad that, after buying the one console which didn’t require a hardware purchase to get online, they now had to pay to get online anyway.

But Xbox Live affords several things that the other approaches don’t. For one, XBL ensures that there are servers to go to. The work to make games XBL compliant ensures that they all function the same way. And XBL allows gamers to go to one specific spot in which to find other gamers willing to play. For all its differences, XBL is a more sensical way to get online.

EA, however, has decided not to support XBL in any of its games. This is significant, since EA is one of the biggest game publishers in the world. Their Xbox port of Battlefield 1942 was cancelled for this reason, and their Madden franchise is fanatically popular. The reason boils down to simple economics and gamer mentality. Since gamers pay $50 per year to be on XBL, they don’t usually want to pay any extra for other games online. That being said, the Xbox port of Phantasy Star Online Episodes I & II requires an $8.99 monthly fee to Sega, so it remains to be seen whether this will work at all. The financial reasoning is that it’s not clear whether the expense to add XBL support to a game is worth it.

Pretend that EA’s Madden 2004 costs $1,000 to develop, manufacture and publish (we’ll keep these numbers easy to manage and completely unrealistic). And pretend that they sell 1,000 copies at $2 each. By this I mean, pretend that there are 1,000 Xbox owners who will definitely buy a football game, and Madden 2004 is the only football game on the Xbox. These 1,000 gamers buy the game at $2, meaning that the game makes $1,000 after expenses.

Along comes Sega’s new game ESPN NFL Football, which also costs $2. And let’s say that, unlike Madden 2004, Sega’s game is XBL compatible. And let’s also pretend that these 1,000 football Xbox customers won’t buy two football games. So let’s say that 150 gamers would buy Sega’s game instead of EA’s. This means Madden 2004 would only pull in $700 profit instead of $1,000 – due to XBL incompatibility.

So EA does the research and figures out that it would add $400 to the development costs of Madden 2004 to add XBL compatibility, meaning that if they could lure those 150 gamers back they would make $600 profit. In this case even though it sucks to lose those 150 gamers and the $300 profit associated with them, it’s still more beneficial than losing that $400.

That is, unless Sega lures 250 gamers to buy their game, in which case EA would lose $500 by not being XBL compatible, making XBL compatibility, at a mere $400 loss and in fact additional $100 profit, financially worth it.

So that’s one of the reasons EA has decided not to support Xbox Live. The other is that EA doesn’t stand to make any money off of XBL itself. Microsoft, who has undertaken the task of creating XBL, isn’t sharing any of the profits. Part of this is Microsoft business sense – they just don’t want to share profits. But the real reason is: there aren’t any profits. Microsoft has not made any money off of XBL. Actually, I don’t know that, but I do know that Microsoft hasn’t made any money whatsoever off of Xbox. In fact, they’re predicted to lose $2 Billion on Xbox before they start headed back to the black. Like manufacturing cars (again with the automobile analogies), the console business is prohibitively expensive to get into.

So why then is Microsoft in the console business at all? Well one would say that Microsoft plans to eventually turn a profit with Xbox (witness how PlayStation accounts for 45% of Sony’s income as a corporation), but a seemingly authentic memo leaked from Microsoft last year which claimed/admitted that everything Microsoft does or makes loses money. Everything except for Windows and Office, which not only make money but make enough money to keep just about everything afloat.

Sound familiar? Yes, it sounds like Don Ganter. Microsoft really just likes to have a console, even if it loses money. They want to have certian markets cornered, even if they lose money. Ever notice how you wind up paying $10-$15 for Microsoft Money every year after rebates? There’s things Microsoft’s not worried about losing money on, both on the vague premise of eventually turning a profit, and also because they just can.

So what does this afford Microsoft? The ability to innovate with less fear of going out of business. Namely, they won’t be. So they can try something crazy like XBL. Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t. Even if it tanks, they’ve got Windows and Office to fall back on.

Which leads back into Nintendo. Microsoft makes software, hardware, services, etc. Their game console is just one business of theirs. Nintendo makes games and game systems. Period. They do have some money in the bank and, to be fair, they make a mint off of all things Game Boy, but Nintendo doesn’t have tons of other businesses to fall back on. They’re not interested in losing billions in the quest to have their hardware in every home in America – they’re interested in doing what they know or at least strongly believe will work. And they can’t be convinced as of late that online gaming will work as a business model.

They’re working on Mario Kart: Double Dash, the GameCube incarnation of the venerable Mario Kart franchise. However, while it will be LAN playable with a network adapter, it won’t be playable over the Internet. Not all hope is lost however, since like they did with the Xbox, GameSpy and others are working on “tunneling” software which will allow people to play LAN games over the Internet. It requires a fast connection and it relieves the game developer of having to program the game with lag in mind, but I hear it works.

In any event, a lot of people can’t understand why Nintendo doesn’t want to go online with GameCube. Many can’t understand why EA doesn’t want to be on XBL. Maybe now people will instead wonder why Microsoft wants to be online at all.

I’m a Coke drinker. And not in that generic “everything in the South is called Coke” sense, I mean I drink Coca-Cola. I don’t drink Pepsi. I occasionally drink Dr. Pepper. I think at one point in my youth (and by youth I mean like when I was 10) I drank Dr. Pepper exclusively, but since then it’s always been Coke. I think at one point I was so adamant about Coke instead of Pepsi that I would refuse to drink Pepsi at all and even avoid restaraunts due to it, which isn’t so hard to do. I’m not so nuts about that anymore but there are still places lower on my “go to” list because of it.

I forget if Pepsi owns them or they’re owned by the same company or just exlusive or what but the same company owns KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. This is why you’ll often see in newer places two or more of these three grouped together, like a Taco Bell with a Pizza Hut Express in it. These three serve Pepsi products exclusively. So when I go to Taco Bell I had to drink Pepsi. Of course if I go to a place that serves Coke, I drink Coke, but when the options are Pepsi products, I decided to experiment a little. So I tried Mountain Dew, and I found it goes real well with Chalupas and the like. Then I tried Mountain Dew Code Red. I liked that, too – it basically boiled down to Cherry Mountain Dew. That worked so well that there’s now Mountain Dew LiveWire. It’s orange, so I figured it was Orange Mountain Dew, but it’s basically Tang with caffene. Oh well.

What I find odd about Mountain Dew LiveWire is that the bottles and cans of it proclaim “Only Available Summer 2003!”, so I presume that after August it will become scarce and disappear entirely. What I don’t get is why. Back on the topic of Taco Bell, I notice that they oftentimes introduce a new product, like the Gordita or the Frito Burrito, with the phrase “for a limited time only”. Since some items like this never go away and others do, I can only assume that it’s a proviso – that way when it doesn’t go over well and they pull it, it doesn’t look like a failure. But unless they’ve got something up their sleeve, Mountain Dew LiveWire is going away no matter what, since it’s clearly marked that way.

I’m not sure if my perception is right, but it always seemed to me like the cola market was one whose products rarely changed. This may have something to do with the old new Coke and Crystal Pepsi fiascos, but with rare exception Coke and Pepsi sold what they did and tried their best to sell more and more of it. Then at some point they figured out a couple of things – first that there was more profit to be had if they could successfully unveil more products, and second that new beverages that were unable to tie into the existing brand names were pretty much ignored. So in the last few years we’ve seen new cola products that are either variants of existing ones, like MD Code Red, or just use the name, like MD LiveWire.

I think the first for a long time was MD Code Red, which was so popular it had a computer virus named after it (the guys who found it were drinking it at the time). Coke followed with Vanilla Coke, which was their first variant since Cherry Coke. Astute and older observers usually note that these are the sorts of variants that were available at soda fountains and are still done at places like Sonic. Vanilla Coke was so successful that Coke changed the Cherry Coke labelling to match and later unveiled Diet Vanilla Coke and Diet Cherry Coke. Pepsi then decided to unveil Pepsi Blue, which was “berry fusion” or something. I never had it, but apparently it was like blueberries mixed with Windex. I think it’s pretty much been phased out. Coke has pulled together Sprite Remix, which is Sprite with citrus flavors. I had one once – they were handing it out at a movie theater. No thanks.

I was surprised to learn that Dr. Pepper is actually owned by Cadbury/Scweppes, so it doesn’t matter how bad chocolate eggs or gigner ale sells so long as there are people like my cousin-in-law Richard in the world. Dr. Pepper is like that rock group with the smaller but fanatical cult following. They unveiled Dr. Pepper Red Fusion, which, like MD Code Red, is pretty much Cherry Dr. Pepper. Not bad. And with their 7up line they unviled dnL, a drink whose logo looks like 7up upside down. Whereas 7up is clear in a green bottle and caffene free, dnL is green in a clear bottle and caffinated, so the Bizarro 7up. It’s not bad, but I think it’s destined to be a fad drink.

So what I’m really curious to see is if they follow through with the LiveWire bit, and how long we’ll still be able to see Pepsi Blue in stores. In the meantime, I have a dentist’s appointment next week – anyone care to guess why?

It would appear that our good friends Blogger went and implemented themselves a new site. It’s got many things that are much nicer about it, and it looks like their acquisition by Google is going well. Except for the fact that at the moment it chokes on long posts – which is of course a big problem for me. I had this incredibly long post ready and Blogger wouldn’t take it. I guess it’s a good thing I compose them in w.bloggar first. In any event, for the time being, I decided on the compromise of splitting the post into three separate posts (and I had to post them in reverse order so they’d look right here) so please read the three posts below as if they were the same post.

Hey, at least I can fix my template now. Still, if they don’t fix this soon I’m writing my own blogging utility – something which doesn’t make me pay for RSS.