Category: Games

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I’ve started installing games on the new computer, some of which I haven’t played in over a year.

Arcanum seems to work fine, and maybe now I can actually play it. (It stopped working on the old computer, so I moved on to other games.)

Heroes of Might and Magic IV installs fine, but Game Update can’t find the server to grab patches. I assume that’s because 3DO doesn’t exist anymore. If I’d been able to just download the installers and save them locally, I’d be able to run them. So I’ve got a fully-patched copy on a computer I’m getting rid of, and I can’t install it on the new one. This is a major problem with download-on-demand software updaters.

Arcomage, the card game embedded in Might and Magic VII, which was later released stand-alone, and is a fun puzzle game to while away 15 minutes…refuses to install on Windows XP.

And now the good news. Since Ubisoft bought the rights to the Might and Magic brand, I went there looking to see whether they had picked up support of any of the older games. They do have the patches… and I just learned that Heroes V is in the works!

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According to The Beat, a judge has thrown out about half the claims in Marvel’s lawsuit against City of Heroes.

Apparently several of the “infringing” works they cited were in fact made by Marvel, not by players. The judge also threw out claims that the game makers infringed trademarks directly and refused to issue a declaration that they are not a service provider (if they are considered a service provider, then they are shielded from liability under the DMCA as long as they take action quickly enough).

The post mostly reprints a press release from NCsoft, so it’s noticeably upbeat, but they do have precedent on their side—such as Sony vs. Betamax. Well, as long as none of the morons in Congress manage to force the Induce act through. That would basically declare that makers of pens and pencils are liable for any copyright or trademark infringement.

Follow-up post: The suit was settled in December.

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OK, this is bizarre. Apparently a Hong Kong software company is preparing to release a Virtual Girlfriend for high-res mobile phones. It—or I suppose I should say “she”—is structured as an online game, on the virtual pet model. (Remember the tamagotchi fad?) You hold conversations with “Vivienne,” give her virtual gifts, even work up to a virtual wedding—which adds a virtual mother-in-law to the game.

The graphics are nice, and apparently they’ve put together a very elaborate conversation engine, but I have to wonder who this will really appeal to. The way she’s described she’s pretty high-maintenance—why go to all that effort when you don’t get the benefit of a real person?

Of course, there are other possibilities for the technology:

Vivienne, for instance, will double as a translator for travelers. Type in the desired words in English while traveling and, with additional programming in the next few months, her synthesized voice will coo it back in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Spanish or Italian.

Just as games have driven desktop computing to keep pushing the envelope, this could lead the way toward the conversational interfaces that are so prevalent in science-fiction.

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Marvel is suing City of Heroes’ makers for copyright and trademark infringement. What’s that, you say? The game doesn’t have any Marvel characters or lookalikes built-in? Of course not—they’re suing because it’s technically possible for players to design a character with a similar costume and use a similar name. Sure, it’s against the terms of service, and they try to stop it when they find it, but people do it anyway.

But note: the game makers aren’t the ones doing the infringement. As I understand it, the character designer is rather like HeroMachine: you pick a body type, colors for different parts of the costume, accessories and masks, etc. So sure, you can create a brick, make him green and give him purple shorts… but it’s not as if they built in textures and symbols specifically to make a Spider-Man costume.

I’ve only read about half the comments on the thread where I found this, but many of them seem to misunderstand the situation as if CoH were the ones designing or providing patterns for the knock-off characters. If someone puts out a “How to Draw the X-Men” book without authorization, then sure, you sue them, but if they sell “How to Draw Super-Heroes” and people can apply those skills to Wolverine, you don’t have a case… and you definitely don’t sue the people who made the pencils and paper!

Follow-up posts: A judge dismissed half the claims in March, and the suit was settled in December.

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We have a “yours, mine and ours” set of computers at home. My system started out as a Compaq Presario in 1994 and has been upgraded piecemeal over the past decade, Katie replaced her Power Mac with a G4 last year, and we picked up an eMachine to use as a dial-up server when we moved in together. (I was going to cobble something together out of the leftover bits from my computer, but it was cheap and saved me the effort of figuring out what was working and what needed to be replaced. Plus it gave us an extra Windows system.)

I’ve been dual-booting Linux and Windows for about 5 years, and spent most of my last year in college using Linux almost exclusively. (Student housing with Ethernet. Having worked in a college computer lab for several years, I didn’t trust Windows 95 to be safe on the network.) Well, a few months after we got the eMachine, hardware problems corrupted my Windows installation. I didn’t want to “borrow” a Windows 98 install CD, I didn’t want to buy Windows Me (piece of ****), Windows 2000 was too expensive, and I really didn’t want the licensing nightmare that is XP. So I delayed, using Linux exclusively, and eventually came to the conclusion I didn’t need to reinstall Windows at all.

Unfortunately, there are very few commercial games written for Linux. Now I’m not much of a gamer, but I do enjoy RPGs, turn-based strategy, and the occasional FPS, and No Windows meant No Might and Magic. Continue reading →