Acclaim Enertainment was a notable video-game publisher from 1987 to 2004. After a history of lawsuits, talk of shady dealings and piracy, and criticism for tasteless and offensive advertising campaigns, Acclaim Entertainment finally was faced with falling sales, and mounting debts.
Monthly Archives: August 2010
The used-games market
Games publishers have been making increasing amounts of noise about the used market for games. So, let’s look at another industry example.
Stop that game! (2)
There are many grounds for which people object to certain kinds of video games. Another in the list concerns wargames that are made about modern conflicts, either comparatively recent ones, or actually ongoing military actions.
Stop that game!
Mafia II is a third-person action-adventure video-game following the fictional story of a man of Sicilian descent who joins an Italian crime family in the period around 1950, a time when Italian crime families were near the height of their power and influence. It’s a familiar theme, having been portrayed in books, games, movies and television for decades.
UNICO National, the largest Italian American service organisation in the USA who have never seen or played the game, nor apparently been in contact with anyone who has (because at the time of their complaint, it had not been released) are calling it “a pile of racist nonsense” and demanding that the game not be released until all Italians and Italian-Americans are removed from it.
It strikes me that this would result in a rather substandard story.
Realtime Worlds rehires some MyWorld staff. Grooming for sale
Troubled developer, Realtime Worlds has gone into administration now – an insolvency measure few companies successfully return from. Selling Project: MyWorld could pull it off for them, however.
Play it now — Alganon: After the Dawning
Way back when, I wound up with a place in the Alganon MMOG closed beta. I really liked it. I haven’t really played it since launch, though, and there’s been a lot of water under the bridge at Quest Online, the developer. A change of management, bringing in Derek Smart (of whom I understandably have mixed feelings), lawsuits and more.
Anyway, Alganon went free-to-play last Friday, so I figured it was time for another look.
Layoffs at Realtime Worlds. Project: MyWorld dead?
Over the last few hours, rumours have been circulating that the entire development team of Project: MyWorld were laid off due to an inability to secure publisher funding for the project.
Games are art, just as finger-painting is art
Are games art? Sure they are. They’re a juvenile art that (like finger-painting) we don’t generally tend to spontaneously think of as art, if we were pressed to name categories. That’s actually our fault as a society and as gamers.
Not so idle animations
Idle animations for video game characters are – to my way of thinking – generally very poorly done.
New comic: Alien Swarm?
Jump to the new comic, or new readers can click the banner to begin at the rather rough beginning:
