The rights to Interplay’s baby, Fallout, were sold off to Bethesda Softworks in April. As posted before, Bethesda is hard at work on Fallout 3 and will be releasing a teaser trailer in about a week.

Interplay retained one right from their famous game, the right to make an MMO. Here is the SEC filing they have released, looking for more investors in the project:

Interplay Fallout MMOG

The Star Wars 30th Anniversary, we knew it would come to this…

Three things that seemingly have nothing to do with each other, but John Kanzius stumbled on a link between them. While trying to do his own private research on ways to battle cancer, he was working with radio frequencies to attack cancer cells. What he found was that the radio frequencies he was using separated the hydrogen and oxygen from salt water, enough to hold a constant flame above a test tube filled only with the salt water.

Discovered just as most great inventions through time: while researching something completely different, someone stumbles on something completely new and unrelated.

The only thing I wonder about is the same I wonder about the other guy who ran his car on water recently, it’s (sort-of) conservation of energy. Or rather, does it take more energy to get the “fuel” out of the water than is obtained from burning it as a fuel?

Randall Munroe writes xkcd, one of the very few webcomics that I can truly laugh at, connect to, and that I never get tired of. (I love dangling prepositions!) He’s a very smart and insightful guy, and often interjects math and science into the strips, as well as purely philosophical ramblings. He gave a talk at MIT a few weeks ago.

Here is a link to some pictures from the talk.

And here are some videos of the event, including him being pelted with plastic balls (which is homage to one of his strips about the nature of becoming an adult.)

and you can find a few more by using this xkcd query to YouTube.

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It’s the 30th anniversary of Star Wars. This week there is a celebration and convention at the Los Angeles Convention Center called Star Wars Celebration IV. A featured exhibit at this event is called The Vader Project, in which 66 artists were invited to submit their own version of the Darth Vader Helmet.

Here’s a Flickr gallery with the helmets. Some samples:

This is all coming fast and furious, as it appears three different stories are being exposed at once. To preface: CCP are the developers of the MMORPG called Eve-Online. A year or so ago, some of CCP were caught by players to be cheating by handing out items to an in-game alliance called Band of Brothers (BoB). In an odd display, CCP did not fire the developers involved in the cheating, nor did the in-game corporation receive any reprimand beyond the offending items being deleted (or at least they said they did). They did set up an Internal Affairs group within the company after this event, with a statement that they would oversee and have authority to investigate all matters.

Now there comes to light evidence of more cheating: on-call requests from the BoB corporation straight to the developers to which they have on MSN chat at the ready. There is clear evidence of devs joining BoB rival corporations and making themselves directors. There is evidence of rigging in-game events. And there is evidence of CCP employees being silenced and forced out when they question these happenings.

I’m having a hard time myself trying to glean exactly what is happening, but there are many specifics in this document:

An Open Letter to CCP

The Eve-Online forums have been taken down, possibly because of the sheer volume of outcry and attention, or possibly to prevent more things being posted. I do know that the first few posts about these happenings were almost immediately shut down and deleted.

This doesn’t bode well, more updates as I find them

update: After the Eve-Online forums came back up, there were many threads and posts on this topic that were deleted. The forum mods made one post for responses and it appears to be staying open, albeit with heavy-handed moderation.

It is not our fault that we, as gamers, see a trailer for an upcoming game with impressive graphics and say to ourselves, “That must be just some cutscene, that isn’t how the game actually plays/looks”. It’s not our fault because for a decade or more that’s been the truth with nearly every trailer or teaser released. If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.

It looks like those days are somewhat over. Sparked by next-gen consoles, game developers are pushing the limits on the hardware to make stunning games. One of the first we’ve seen was in Gears of War for the XBOX360, which, when released matched the trailers in look and feel. At least for current expectations, games look good enough to make their own cutscenes.

But still, old habits die hard, so last year when the first trailer for Assassin’s Creed were released, they looked just a bit too cinematic and reactive to be true gameplay. As such, while the trailer was very impressive, it got shoved in the back of people’s mind as just a pretty cutscene. Fortunately, now we find that the game truly plays much like the trailer. (I say much because some of the angles of the trailer aren’t really seen in gameplay).

As the launch date of fall of this year approaches, and UbiSoft has their showcase gathering in Paris called Ubidays, more trailers and gameplay have been shown, and all of them are impressive. They back up the gameplay by showing, well… gameplay.

Thank goodness this isn’t console only, because I still haven’t purchased any nextgen consoles, and am planning to beef up my PC a tad this summer.

There’s still a trailer for a game I can’t believe is indicative of real gameplay, even though there have been countless suggestions that it will be, and that’s the stunning Killzone 2 trailer released before the PS3 went to stores. It will be hard to keep my money in my wallet if it truly looks and plays that way. And if it does, it may shake the trailer cynic out of me.

No longer WWII centered, and as the subtitle says, it is now focused on modern combat. The gameplay shown in this new trailer seems to be all close-quarters urban combat. Looks like a winner, and this time the game will not be console-only, which was the big disappointment with Call of Duty 3.

Barely a blip on the news radar, another great author passed away on May 17th. Lloyd Alexander wrote one of the finest children’s book series ever made. Harry Potter ain’t got nothin’ on Taran in The Chronicles of Prydain. Oh, you don’t recognize that name? How about the most famous book from it, made into one of the best Disney films, The Black Cauldron?

When I was young, these were some of my favorite stories, and I knew very few kids who hadn’t read them, or at least watched the movies. Why is there so little press for this man’s passing? I actually searched for it on Reuters and CNN and nothing came up. Very odd.

Farewell, Lloyd Alexander, you planted a truly great adventure in my head, that joined the list of the few things I can still bother to remember as I get older.

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This video is of a 7 year old back in 1982 talking about programming on some local access show. He demonstrates coding BASIC on an Apple ][.

This strikes a chord with me, because around the exact same time, at around the same age, I went to a summer camp for budding computer nerds in the deserts of southern California. It was the same scenario too, we were kids learning BASIC on Apple ][. Our imaginations were fueled by shows like Whiz Kids and movies like WarGames. Not to mention the explosion of science fiction novels at the time. I still have the binder I used to map out my programs and keep printouts of them some 25 years ago.

I’ve never shaken that love of computers and programming, and I’m glad I got to grow up with it. Now that computers are ubiquitous, “hackers” aren’t such special snowflakes, but I still feel the nostalgia of when it was a budding science and I was still a bud myself.

Man, this website really is turning into a blog. So be it.

Well, here’s a video cap of the Starcraft 2 announcement video at the Blizzard Worldwide Invitational:

But, they also released some of the videos in much better quality on the newly launched Starcraft 2 website.

IGN also has a few, in similar quality to the official Blizzard ones.

Wordpress has an upgrade out, and drzy has been updated to the new version. Apparently this is a pretty major release including many new features, RPC calls, and bug fixes.

As usual, let me know if any weirdness occurs.

Blizzard announced that Starcraft 2 is under development, just a few minutes ago, at their Worldwide Invitational in Korea.

This after almost ten years since the original game was released, and after a cryptic countdown on the Blizzard main site this week. They are showing videos of it now to the audience in attendance, but all I can grab online are minute-by-minute recaps from some sites.

3:00 - FMV sequence in a spaceship - looks Terran - zooming in on a metal door - door opening - reveals a guy with a cigar in chains - prisoner - door shuts behind him - there’s so much bass the room is shaking - guy steps into some kind of metallic devicce - legs are strapped in - guy rising toward ceiling - Korean text on screen got people very excited - another part of the machine is dropping metal arms on him - machine whirring - applying armor to his torso - extremly detailed visuals here - now guy is strapping on gloves - armor is molding together - seems like a Terran marine - rockets turn on - zerg now onscreen - Marine delivers a line - StarCraft 2 officially announced.

Of course, there is no release date announced yet. Hopefully we’ll get the above movie posted here soon.