Week in Review – 10/20/03

October 27, 2003

Dots here to bring you your weekly news update. News was spread a little thin as I drudged through the volumes of “news worthy” articles out there. But, none the less, there is news to be told, so here it goes.

First off, for all you people who are just dying to have a Nokia Ngage of your very own, but aren’t ready to make a $299 commitment for it, this is for you. Both EB and Gamestop now have the Ngage available for just $199…for a limited time. Nokia is claiming this is for a soon to be announced Halloween Special that will only run through November 4th. Yeah, we’ll see.

Why buy an Ngage when you can buy an Xbox? Apparently, that is the opinion of other people in this world besides me. I know this because, once again, Xbox sales are up. In fact, they are up a whole 20% since last year. Of course, this is not entirely contributed to the Xbox, as the success of Microsoft put out games, both console and PC, played a role as well.

Nintendo is making the news again this week, and it isn’t in a bad number dropping way. Word around the water cooler is that there is now a way to system link your Gamecube over the internet. Called the “Warp Pipe Project” (aw, how cute) it now only supports one game, but promises are there to soon encompass others, like Mario Kart: Double Dash. It isn’t as easy as linking up a couple of Xboxes, but the potential for some fun times is definitely there.

Now some news on something I will never understand; the modding of PC games. I just don’t see how that the developer like people messing with their stuff…anyway, back to the news. There are some new modding tools for Max Payne 2 that were just released. Click on the link for all your Max Payne 2 modding needs. Just remember kids, mods for Max Payne are not compatible with Max Payne 2.

For all of you people that have been living under a rock for the past couple of weeks, I am going to point out one of the funniest articles I have read online in a long time. It is about kids and playing our beloved classic video games. It will make you think, give those kids a Quaker chewy granola bar!

Since we here at Snackbar keep such close ties on all things gaming, I wanted to show you a picture of the upcoming Phantom that was snapped at a Q&A session last week. Think that will fit in your entertainment center? Think again. In this Q&A, Infinium Labs spent a lot of time dodging questions and not releasing a whole lot of information about how things are going to work if and when the console comes to market. The big thing that is still unknown is exactly what companies are developing games for the “console” and Robert Shambro of IL had this to say: “I can tell you I can’t tell you. I can tell you I’d like to tell you. I can tell you who we don’t have. Do we have EA? No.” Thanks for clearing that up Rob!

Just a last tidbit that I read in my weekly News of the Weird newsletter that comes to my e-mail every Monday morning that I thought you guys migh
t find interesting. According to a BBC report, the police in South Korea are being forced to look into some odd 22, 000 complaints that their characters and online property is being stolen by Hackers and sold to other gamers, thus making their own EverQuest characters more built up. Right. The “experts” are saying that such theft should be punishable under law due the fact that players development of that property might equate to hundreds of hours. So, if these said players then die from not eating while playing EverQuest, are the characters then punishable by death?