Two Legacy of Kain games are being re-released, but for the Evercade retro handheld console.
The Legacy of Kain Collection will include both Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain and Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver on one giga cart priced £22.49.
The collection will release next month and will be available to pre-order from 30th August. It's compatible with all Evercade and Super Pocket devices.
When Bloober and Konami announced that they were remaking Silent Hill 2 as part of a comprehensive series reboot, it made immediate if slightly deflating sense to me. Silent Hill 2 is the more feted of the Hills - if I were a calculating franchise custodian tasked with 'bringing back' one of the acclaimed original trilogy, that's probably the instalment I and my spreadsheets would fix upon. I mean, it's the game with Pyramid Head in it - the nearest thing Silent Hill has to a mascot, and it's not like there's an issue of cutting out plot material: each game in the Silent Hill series is, on some level, a distinct story with a distinct protagonist.
Still, the decision to 'skip' the first game in the series, whose world, narrative themes, music and art direction set the parameters for all the rest, made my brain itch a bit, and when I ran into Bloober's creative director Mateusz Lenart and lead producer Maciej Głomb at a Konami event, I had to ask about it.
When Bloober and Konami announced that they were remaking Silent Hill 2 as part of a comprehensive series reboot, it made immediate if slightly deflating sense to me. Silent Hill 2 is the more feted of the Hills - if I were a calculating franchise custodian tasked with 'bringing back' one of the acclaimed original trilogy, that's probably the instalment I and my spreadsheets would fix upon. I mean, it's the game with Pyramid Head in it - the nearest thing Silent Hill has to a mascot, and it's not like there's an issue of cutting out plot material: each game in the Silent Hill series is, on some level, a distinct story with a distinct protagonist.
Still, the decision to 'skip' the first game in the series, whose world, narrative themes, music and art direction set the parameters for all the rest, made my brain itch a bit, and when I ran into Bloober's creative director Mateusz Lenart and lead producer Maciej Głomb at a Konami event, I had to ask about it.
Crystal Dynamics' beloved dark fantasy action-adventure series Legacy of Kain could be poised to receive the remaster treatment, if newly sighted branding at Comic-Con is to be believed.
As spotted by a user on Resetera, logos for an unannounced "Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 1 & 2 Remastered" were included on display plaques accompanying statues of game characters Kain and Raziel at this week's Comic-Con San Diego show.
A Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver graphic novel prequel, The Dead Shall Rise, was recently announced by Dark Horse Comics, and GameSpot has now received confirmation from the publisher's VP of product development and sales that this is due to release in August.
It looks like the Legacy Of Kain: Soul Reaver games could be getting the remaster treatment. An attendee at San Diego Comic-Con was looking at a set of figures based on characters from the series when they saw that the plaque accompanying the figures was labelled with the words "Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 1 & 2 Remastered" alongside the logo for Crystal Dynamics. I suppose if you throw a coin enough times, one day it will land on the side with the head of a jawless vampire on it.
It looks like the Legacy Of Kain: Soul Reaver games could be getting the remaster treatment. An attendee at San Diego Comic-Con was looking at a set of figures based on characters from the series when they saw that the plaque accompanying the figures was labelled with the words "Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 1 & 2 Remastered" alongside the logo for Crystal Dynamics. I suppose if you throw a coin enough times, one day it will land on the side with the head of a jawless vampire on it.
Limited Run Games has announced that 20 new-old games will be released in physical form, including Fear Effect, Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, Starship Troopers: Extermination, and Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus.
As part of its LRG3 2024 showcase, the distributor confirmed not only the 20th anniversary edition of Beyond Good & Evil, but also physical releases of classic PS1 games Gex Trilogy, Tomba Special Edition and Tomba 2, Fear Effect, and more – much, much more.
In true LRG style, the Limited Run Games editions of the following games will be released in physical form only, including:
Fear Effect, a horror action PS1 game from the year 2000 that I have incredibly fond memories of, is getting a Steam release next year, by Limited Run Games in collaboration with Square Enix. The news comes as part of the controversial (more on this in a bit) company’s digital LRG3 event. You can watch the full thing here, and the Fear Effect trailer below.
The original Resident Evil might be returning to PC - and soon! - if recent signs hold true. An age rating for the 1996 survival-horror classic was recently confirmed by European suitability judges PEGI, hinting at an impending (re-)release for the almost three-decade-old zombie game.
A remaster of Final Fantasy Tactics, the grid-based strategy spin-off from the RPG series that easily ranks as one of the best Final Fantasy games ever made, is reportedly in the works - giving hope of its first official PC release.
Fear Effect, a horror action PS1 game from the year 2000 that I have incredibly fond memories of, is getting a Steam release next year, by Limited Run Games in collaboration with Square Enix. The news comes as part of the controversial (more on this in a bit) company’s digital LRG3 event. You can watch the full thing here, and the Fear Effect trailer below.
The original Resident Evil might be returning to PC - and soon! - if recent signs hold true. An age rating for the 1996 survival-horror classic was recently confirmed by European suitability judges PEGI, hinting at an impending (re-)release for the almost three-decade-old zombie game.
A remaster of Final Fantasy Tactics, the grid-based strategy spin-off from the RPG series that easily ranks as one of the best Final Fantasy games ever made, is reportedly in the works - giving hope of its first official PC release.
Capcom is once again remaking Resident Evil 1.
That's according to noted horror genre leaker Dusk Golem and survival horror YouTuber Biohazard Declassified, both of whom have stepped up this weekend with rumours that Capcom is looking to breathe new life into the game that started it all, the very first Resident Evil.
Biohazard Declassified says they received an anonymous email that claims the game – with the working title, Biohazard: Resident Evil 1 – will be slower paced than RE2 Remake, feature a "different this person camera", and explore RE1's lore "further".
A month on from a Nintendo game emulator topping the iPhone App Store charts, a newly-released PS1 emulator now looks set to do similar.
Gamma, a free PS1 emulator for iPhone and iPad, was released this week. And, just as with the Delta emulator for Nintendo consoles and handhelds, it is taking advantage of Apple's recent change in App Store policy that officially greenlights game emulator apps for the first time.
The Gamma app is the work of developer ZodTTD, and like Delta had previously existed for years as a download for those who jailbreak their iPhones. Now, due to Apple's policy change, it has been released for general use - and it's currently the second-most poular entertainment app on the App Store (behind TikTok).
Deep in my heart I know that Hall of Fame-type accolades are largely just a way of dressing up a way of marketing your awards show/museum/whatever, but I also like to occasionally cast away the cynic in me and imagine a world in which this industry’s most important games and creators are rightly recognised, celebrated and preserved rather than being locked away in the vault of billion-dollar companies and left to rot. Imagine!
We are now entering the era of my blogging. Not quite this blog yet, but an earlier blog I was writing that was not about video games. Written under a different pseudonym, it was mostly to annoy some relatives in Nevada county by picking out amusing entries from the police blotter published in the local paper.
In the midst of that I recorded several entries about the big move that our new leader Mitch had been demanding.
I am going to repost what I wrote at the time, trusting my memories that were contemporary with the events more than my vague recollections of things that happened nearly 20 years ago.
In these posts I refer to our new CEO as “Tim” rather than “Mitch” because he was our CEO as I wrote this and I wanted to avoid being fired in the extremely unlikely scenario where these posts were revealed and pinned on me.
Some imagery the evoke feels
I have made some minor edits to correct awkward phrasing, typos, and my usual subject/verb mis-match issue. Otherwise, this is 2006 me speaking, trying to tell a story that had been in progress for a while. But at least I was about 18 years closer to events at that time.
Approximately five years and four month ago my company signed a five year lease on the building in which I work. The bubble had burst on the web frenzy, there was no more frantic Y2K buying to prop up the industry, my remaining stock options were under water and doomed to remain so for all eternity, and our director of facilities, in a move that some speculate lead to his being let go eventually, managed to lock in the sky-high monthly rent on our crappy building for another five years. (With increases incrementally over the five years to be, you know, fair to the landlord.) [This was demanded by the CEO, who I have covered in a previous post.]
So while 7 of the 10 buildings in our complex ended up empty, we still paid the internet frenzy era going rate for office space in Silicon Valley. We would hear in quarterly result meetings that the mill stone of the rent hanging around our neck was keeping us from being profitable. Occasionally some optimist would approach the land lord of the day (the complex turned over owners 6 times during our lease, although I don’t know if you should really count the bank repossessing the property as an “owner”) to try to negotiate some reduction in our rent, as though the owners could see some advantage in cutting off their minimal revenue stream.
Three years ago we got a new CEO. We will call him Tim. The new CEO, a former Next and Apple Exec and an neighbor of Steve Jobs, hated our building from day one. He had degrees in the “science” of Sociology, so he would bemoan the lack of “warmth” and “energy” in the building. He wanted more “buzz” and a better sense of “collaboration.” However, he was also pretty sharp when it came to business and got us to a point where the quarterly results meetings included a complaint about how much more profitable we would be if it were not for this 60,000 square foot drain on our bottom line, so we cut him some slack on the touchy-feely stuff. After all, not many of us were overly fond of the building at any price, and having the CEO tell us it was a bad building only built up our dislike.
About two years ago, Tim started to talk up his vision of a new building for us. While nobody was keen on his disdain for offices (a view shared by our engineering VP, who likes to sit in his huge office and tell fond stories of working at HP after college where nobody had an office) or his vague quest for more “warmth,” he did also talk about better locations (which, in the end, meant closer to his home), better facilities, exercise rooms, cafeterias, and carpets that did not leave a bad smell on your hand should you accidentally touch them. Basically, he wanted something that we would admit to working in with out duress being involved.
Around February 2005 Tim announced that we were going to begin looking in earnest for our new home. Tim told us how “A” level real estate was available at a fraction of what we were paying per square foot for our, at best, “B-minus” space. We were happy. We got whispers from our CIO, a very competent guy under whom the responsibility for facilities rested, about the places he and Tim visited. Some nice places in in the north county area where we would share a cafeteria and have access to a full gym, one on Moffett (north), one on Charleston (even further north), and another place on Sand Hill Road (cripes, too far north!).
Tim lives in Palo Alto (and is a neighbor of Steve Jobs) and so he concentrated on locations between his home and our current office in Santa Clara. That meant we were moving north. At the time a Dilbert cartoon ran about his company moving and the fact that the new location was close to the CEO’s home was purely coincidence. I still have this cartoon in my office.
About a month and a half later, Tim said at a company meeting that the search for a new building was being postponed. No landlord wanted to commit space to a company that was a year away from moving. At the six month mark, however, landlords would begin to entertain our interests, so the search would begin in earnest in September.
September arrived and we begin asking about new buildings again. More whispers about places in locations not far off from the past list, though at least Sand Hill Road was no longer on the agenda.
We were told in October that the hold up on getting ourselves signed up with one of these locations was getting a letter of intent passed through the legal department of our parent company. Still, we had enough time to get things setup, get access to the building, begin the move in early February so that come April 1, 2006, we would be free of our old building.
The legal excuse continued until early November when it was announced that we were being sold by our parent company to one of our biggest competitors. [This will get a post of its own.] This is the real reason nothing has gone on since September.
We are told that we won’t be able to sign a lease until the deal is closed because our parent company doesn’t want to be on the hook for anything and the buyer won’t sign anything until we belong to them. We are assured that the deal will close by the end of November, first week of December at the latest. After that, we can get on with our moving plans.
January 1, 2006: The deal closes.
During the second week of January, the Director of Facilities for our new company shows up. I will call him Smithers. He comes in and talks to us enthusiastically about moving. He is going to send out a survey for us to take so he can get our input. Some of us go talk to our old CIO. He has been given a nice severance package if he stays for a given duration and has been relegated to an advisory role. He tell us that all of his work has been tossed and that Smithers is here to start from scratch.
Smithers takes his survey and then talks to us about the results. He, at least, does not have a vested interest in moving the building closer to his home and through some very faulty calculations, declares that in our current general area is the best place, commute-wise, for our office to be located. We can see on his chart that he has left off the people in Fremont and a couple in Gilroy who would skew the whole thing south, but at least in the same area means nobody’s commute gets worse.
Smithers says he is going to hire a real estate rep out here (having let go the one we had been working with for five months) and that said rep will meet with the departments to find out their needs. Smithers will be off in the UK finishing up moving the one of the company facilities out there.
Departments without a lot of inherent infrastructure… people who can do their jobs at home on a laptop… remained unconcerned. My boss, who is directly responsible for a lab with 180 servers and the entire infrastructure for our software build system, was starting to get nervous. We got together our space requirements and delivered them to the real estate person who is working with Smithers.
She goes off to do her thing. She comes back and asks if a place that is all offices is okay with us. Well, Tim is gone, our VP isn’t opposed, so we say sure, why not. Despite the fact that I keep hearing different people claim that “such-and-such a group doesn’t like offices” I have yet to find anybody at our location who would choose a cube over an office.
Smithers gets back and tells us that they need to get some stuff together and signed, but we should be ready to move at the end of February. That gives us a month of buffer on the back side. That also doesn’t give us much time to get our crap together for the move.
We get shown the new location, the 7th floor of the Sun building off of Great America Pkwy, right next to Birk’s. [Which is still there!] We got in electrical people, cabling people, moving people, an architect, and started laying out how this was going to happen. We promised extra money to the contractors to get stuff done in time for the move. We cannot have any down time! We put in rush orders on equipment for the new place. We spend lavishly because timing is everything!
January 30th, moving boxes arrive. People begin packing up their cubes and offices. My boss packs up nearly everything in his office the day the boxes show up. I put together a few boxes in my office and haphazardly toss some stuff into them. I have collected a lot of junk over the last eight years and I suspect I won’t miss most of it if I just toss it. Certainly my binder of S1 company rules, including the notorious “how to answer the phone memo” won’t be any loss to me.
We put up a floor map of the new building in an empty office. We let people pick their offices. Only a few of us have been to the new building, but people are getting excited. New stuff, the promise of a better building, something we were told we deserve, and everybody gets their own office makes us feel good.
I am one of the people who has been to the new building. The offices are 7’x9′ and have sliding glass doors with ‘privacy stripes’ on them that look like they are etched into the glass from a distance, but are in fact stickers. If you took out the desk and put in a double bunk and a toilet, it would be about the size of a prison cell. I am asked to stop using phrases like “Orwellian” to describe the new place. My boss wants me to be more positive and I have to admit that yes, the place looks cleaner, nicer, and it lacks the distinct smell our building has had since the second floor men’s room plumbing gave out last May, and that on the 4th of July we can all watch the fireworks at Great America.
About the second week of February we are at the point where we can do no more without regular access to the building. We get the real estate lady to let us in to do some planning, but we need to have the place opened up for us to get electricity in place, air conditioning routed, labs build up, networking done.
Then the word comes down. We are working out some issues in the contract. It will be a little more time before we move.
Time passes.
Responses to questions about the move are few and far between.
Equipment begins to arrive. We find places to stash it. Routers, switches, a KVM control system for the new lab, 19 enclosed racks, power strips, and huge new servers are now sitting all over our building, waiting for a home.
People start digging through boxes for items they need. Two people who went on long vacations and expected to come back to a new building have to set their computers back up in their old locations.
March blows in. We are told that we will be “GO” to move on March 20th. Access to the building is just waiting on one more signature.
At this point I have to speculate. We are told that the hold up is that the owner of the building has to sign something to let Sun sub-let the 7th floor to us. Sun has no employees at all in this building, the company having pretty much collapsed into a shell of its former self with the end of the dotcom boom, so there is just a big sign on the outside. But it has managed to sub-let the first six floors.
My theory is that, somehow, Sun screwed over or otherwise pissed off the building owner while sub-letting the first six floor because the owner is dragging his feet big time. The first agreement of intent needs the signature of the building owner, but if the owner ignores it, the agreement will be considered signed after thirty days. The clock on that started running on March 1st.
On March 30, the agreement of intent is considered signed. Now we can move onto the details of the lease.
However, it is now April 1st and our own lease on the building we are in has expired. We are now paying month-to-month which, according to our agreement with the landlord, means paying DOUBLE our current, already way over market rate per square foot.
Smithers goes to “negotiate” with out landlord to try and get that number reduced. Hah. I can’t imagine what a landlord with seven empty buildings can see as the advantage to lowering the income he is getting. Still, through some inducement, he gets them to change it to a day-by-day lease, so we have an incentive to get out sooner, but the price is the same.
And things grind on at the new building. The owner is coming up with all sorts of restrictions and such to add to our lease agreement. We have to change back any construction we do on our floor when we leave. We cannot change the air conditioning. We can change the air condition (because it turns out Sun owns the A/C units) but we have to put back all the ducting as it was when we leave. We have to submit plan and permits for all of the work we want to do (but we don’t have access to the building yet!) We cannot have a floor loading of greater than 50 pounds per square foot. This technically means that I, and some of my co-workers, will not be allowed to stand on the floor in our new office. Others will merely forbidden to stand on one foot.
And these are only the items that made it to me and I was not plugged into the process at all.
Meanwhile the contractors are pissed at us, and justifiably so. We promised them work, made them accommodate our schedules, and now, two months after our proposed start date, we are still stringing them along without paying them a red cent.
On or about April 13th, Smithers, under heavy pressure from his boss and the CEO to finish up this move, decides he needs a plan B.
[I had delayed updating the story because we hadn’t moved yet when I wrote the July posts, but delayed the next installment due to unwarranted optimism that I would be writing the final entry soon.]
Deus Ex Machina?
Our current landlord shows up. He tells Smithers that we can have the top floor of the building behind us, which can be completely refurbished, and he will even throw in some money for custom construction and improvements, all for only twice the price per square foot of the Sun building. though he will lower our day-to-day rent to that price as well, as soon as we sign.
This is a Plan B on a silver platter for Smithers and he jumps at it like a hack writer on a mixed metaphor.
This change of plans will mean:
Morale is down on the whole subject as one would expect.
All Smithers has to do to come out of this smelling like a rose is get the deal signed and get us moved in July. The duration of the work to get the building in shape for us is estimated to be about eight weeks. That is the estimate he is giving us, anyway.
April becomes May. Again news is sparse. All we hear is that the Sun deal passed another deadline that allowed us to walk away without losing any money.
May becomes June. A company-wide note goes out to announce that Smithers has decided to pursue other career opportunities, which is what you say when you fire somebody in management. They don’t get fired or laid off, they go to a farm upstate or some such, like the employees would be sad to hear that incompetence was being justly punished.
June becomes July. A new guy is hired to take over the move. We shall call him Sanders. Sanders talks to all the departments to make sure that everybody is happy with what they will be getting in the new building. Not knowing how Smithers had built up a history of empty promises while ignoring everybody for the most part, he opens a can of worms. Jokes start about not packing any Halloween decorations because we will be hanging them in our current building.
July becomes August. Sanders is busy trying to incorporate suggestions as well as design and color scheme ideas. There is a plan to get better cube material and furniture. A committee is formed to review chairs and partitions. Jokes about Thanksgiving decorations begin to circulate.
August nears its end. There is no hiding that nothing is going on at the new building. We can look out the window and see it. We also learn that the previous eight week estimate was “very aggressive.” Jokes about New Years Eve in our current location start.
We have not heard anything about the move for a while. One can look out the window of our building and into the building we have been told we are moving into and can clearly see that nothing is going on. No work is being done.
Still, we have been spending time picking out cube furniture. Or at least the people who will be sitting in cubes have been participating in that process. There were several different types of chairs to consider and the color and texture of the cube walls and how much desk space people need in cubes.
Managers have picked out or have otherwise been assigned their offices on the big chart that shows how the new building will look when we move in.
We have become used to the idea of the new building. The offices promised to everybody in the last building choice have been mostly forgotten and people are becoming involved with the issues involving the building in our complex.
And then last week an announcement comes out of HQ. They have acquired another company. This company is only a few miles from our location.
The first question in my mind: How will this affect the move?
Details begin to crawl in over the following week. HQ wants all of us in the same building. The new company is small, but not so small that we can all fit in the space allowed by the building behind us. The new company has their own building in a nice location and lots of space because they used to be a much bigger company until they fell on hard times.
They also have tiny cubes with half height walls. This tidbit has not yet made the rounds as it came from a scouting report made by one of the managers. And the cube material is all pretty much new and there is a ton of it, so we won’t be tossing it out to buy new cube walls. We cannot afford to toss it out anyway as this will complicate things with our current landlord which is going to cost us.
And then the question comes around from Sanders, the director of facilities, “How can we get you guys moved into this new building by the end of the month?”
I keep thinking this story is almost over, then some new twist occurs.
Let the wailing begin.
There have been a lot of ripples caused by our ever impending move. At least one was to our benefit.
Back in February when we were planning for the Sun building, when it was thought that everybody would be sitting in a 7×9 office, accommodating people and their belongings was a concern. (It is again, now that we are all going into 6×8 half height cubes, but that is another story.) We gave serious thought on how to cut down on wasted space.
One thing that came up was monitors. All of us in engineering had 20-21″ CRT monitors sitting on our desks. Some people had two or three. They take up a large amount of real estate on your desk, and nobody’s desk was going to get any bigger. There was also some concern about the amount of heat generated by a big CRT in a 7×9 office.
As part of the plan to get us into smaller work areas, we asked for an LCD monitor for everybody in engineering. As it turns out, at HQ, a new standard LCD monitor had just been designated, the Dell 2001FP, a 20″ 1600×1200 native resolution monitor.
A pallet of these monitors arrived in late February. All of engineering got one. There are still empty 2001FP boxes sitting around like it was Christmas last week.
These are nice monitors. They are nicer still if you have a video card that supports DV-I output. The company was not going to pay for that, but a couple of people, including myself, had spare video cards at home with the necessary output.
So for the last seven months or so we have benefited from the move in at least one way. Well, most of us have. One engineer said that 1600×1200 isn’t enough resolution and he stuck with his 21″ CRT running at a very tight resolution indeed. He wears glasses and sits very close to his monitor and I do not wonder why.
It had been a tradition at our old company over the years to have a “yard sale” to get rid of old equipment. The usual suspects in the sale were computer systems that were 3-7 years out of date, lab equipment, some older network gear and the like. Occasionally office chairs and other furniture were included. Mostly it was junk, but there have been some gems including a very nice HP oscilloscope complete with all probes and the manual which I bought then donated to a local high school.
Of course we are now part of bigger company with headquarters in the South. The company is ISO 9000 certified and has a process for everything. Everything it seems, except documenting and publishing processes so that those of us not based at HQ can figure out how to get things done. And even when you can get documentation on a process, it always assumes knowledge you probably do not possess if you need to read the document.
Of course you know, if you have been reading here for a while, that we are going to be moving to a small and less expensive location. Some day soon if we are not careful.
We used the upcoming move as an excuse to clean shop here. In a couple empty areas of our building we collected over three dozen 20″ monitors (because we have all those new LCD monitors I mentioned in a previous entry), five dozen Pentium III 500-850MHz systems, a few early Pentium IV systems, four Sun servers, a dozen giant, rack mount Compaq multi-processor (PII or PIII) servers, a few dubious laptops, and a variety of printers, routers, and other stuff that could only charitably called “junk.”
Nothing terribly exciting, really. I have better junk, or enough junk, at home already, depending on with whom you speak.
My boss ended up in charge of this sale, mostly because nobody else would take the job. He spent some weeks trying to get somebody in HQ to okay the sale. Finally, with the cooperation of other local managers, he set the date for the sale for a Friday in late April. The Thursday before the sale an email went to everybody at our location that the sale would be at 3pm the following day.
The next morning, in response to the many inquires, an email finally arrived. It was from the company controller. Nothing ccould be sold without the express permission of the office of the controller. Before the sale could commence, the controller needed have a complete list of all items in the sale.
An email went out to everybody located out here saying, “Yard Sale Postponed.”
Being very organized, my boss already had such a list, complete with asset tags and serial numbesr, for the items our department contributed. Other departments did not have anything resembling a list. Still, we had segregated the stuff by department, so if we had to sell theirs at another time, so be it.
The controller, when asked about pricing of the items for sale said he did not care about that, but that any money from the sale had to be sent to HQ to be accounted for. (Thus ended or usual plan which has traditionally been “Fund a lunch time BBQ out back with the proceeds.”) He said that facilities would set the prices.
Facilities, of course, had no interest in pricing anything and left that to us. Facilities did say, however, that we would need to collect sales tax.
My boss asked the controller about sales tax. The controller was not interested in sales tax, but directed him to some other accounting group.
My boss sent an email to this other accounting group asking about sales tax and if we could just charge round numbers ($5, $10, and $20) and then take the tax out later rather than having to make complicated change for each transaction.
The OAG (other accounting group) came back and said that charging round numbers sounded like a fine idea and certainly we could take the tax out after the fact. And, by the way, if we chose to sell anything for under its current market value, the purchasing employee’s W2 at the end of the year would have to be adjusted to indicate the financial benefit from such a transaction.
Market value? I guess this keeps companies from selling business jets, homes, and cars to their senior execs for cheap, but what is the market value of a 4 year old Pentium III 700MHz with an 18GB SCSI hard drive and no operating system? (All of the Windows operating systems were licensed under our MSDN agreement, so we had to erase them before we parted with the machines.) It has zero value to the company, we have depreciated it as a capital expense over the last few years. And how attractive does a $20 PIII system look if it might mean that it changes your W2 at the end of the year?
And while we were pondering this gem, an email came in from OAG2 (or is that OOAG?) who had been directed by the controller to account for all of the items on our list in the list of assets they have for our location. OAG2 sent us a spreadsheet with all of the purchase orders for the last six years listed and asked us to please indicate which item from our inventory matched up to which purchase order.
Our local accounting group never bothered to associate an asset tag or serial number when putting together this spreadsheet. But then, all of the local accounting people handed over their data to HQ as they got laid off at the end of March, so we cannot blame them. The list of purchase orders only showed vague items, like “computer systems” or, sometimes, just the vendor in the description field. There was no possible way that these two lists could be reconciled.
So my boss was just about ready to call the whole thing off and call up the computer recycler we had lined up to take away the remains and have him come over and cart off the whole lot. But even that needed to be approved.
I suggested shipping everything to HQ, since we cannot part with the stuff without approval, but he thought I was making a joke.
Silence followed. Not a word more came from HQ. This is not an unusual situation. HQ is frequently unaware of our existence.
Then, a few weeks later, an email showed up from the controller. The sale was approved. My boss just had to hand over any cash to our local HR representative.
Sale on!
In the end, very little of the stuff was sold. The dubious laptops were purchased for the boy scouts. A monitor or two was picked up. There was no mention of market value or W2s. No inventory reconciliation was demanded.
I think somebody did threaten to ship everything to HQ.
A week later the computer recycler came by and carted away all of our left over junk. And one of our coffee makers! Damn them!
I never did end up posting a final entry about the move, though I can assure we did, in fact, move. We schelped our stuff from the corner of San Thomas and Walsh, where NVidia now resides, our old building just a memory, to downtown Mountain View and the old PayPal building at 303 Bryant. It was a nice enough building, certainly better than our wretched old space at 2840 San Thomas.
The series so far:
The dinky yellow Playdate handheld has plenty of odd games already - but here's an even odder proposition we thought we'd never see: WipEout.
Yes, that WipEout, of PlayStation fame. Except not quite.
For starters, this version of Psygnosis' classic retro racer is based on rewritten code that has been floating around the internet since at least last year for PC, Mac and Linux. This version, in turn, was written based on the original WipEout's leaked source code, posted online by Forest of Illusion in 2002.
There are 25 games leaving the PlayStation Plus subscription service next month, including some of the best Final Fantasy games.
They are: Final Fantasy 7, Final Fantasy 8, Final Fantasy 9, Final Fantasy 10 and 10-2, Final Fantasy 12: The Zodiac Age, and Final Fantasy 15: Royal Edition. There's also spin-off World of Final Fantasy.
The 25 games will all leave on 21st May and includes the brilliant Abzu, The Artful Escape, The Messenger, Jotun, and more.
In 1997, Diablo was everything to me; I thought about it at school, at family dinners, netball practice, recess. Even when I was allowed to play it on my dad's Gateway 2000, I wanted more. And the only place to get more Diablo, back then, was on the Diablo website. Yes, there were fan sites packed with cheats and the same gifs - but what I wanted was a pure unadulterated hit from the official webpage, its message boards filled with poetry and oddly civil flame wars and passive-aggressive posts titled "SUGGESTIONS for Blizzard to Read." There was no YouTube or Discord or Twitch, and certainly no influencer/streaming ecosystem. Sure, there was IRC and usenet and bulletin boards, which formed the backbone of social networks back then - and were the foundation for more accessible World Wide Web experiences that followed. But in the late 90s, there was something truly special going on for fans who wanted a direct connection to their games: the short-lived but holy institution of the official forum-based website.
Around the same time as my Diablo mania, a teenaged Dana Nightingale was asked to do her first professional web design job. She'd been a fan of Looking Glass Studios since Ultima Underworld came out in 1992; when she heard rumours of System Shock 2, a new shooter by ex-Looking Glass devs under the banner of Irrational Games, she and a friend made a fan site in anticipation of its existence. Nightingale was also waiting for Looking Glass to unveil Thief: The Dark Project. "[Thief] at the time was my most anticipated game by a long shot, and if you look at the landscape of 1998, that's saying a lot," she says. "So together with some other folks, we made a hub for fans of these games, and we called it Through the Looking Glass."
Irrational got in touch with Nightingale to make their sites. "I definitely wasn't even 20 at the time. I barely knew what I was doing," she says on a Zoom call. "I threw some HTML on there, took the copy they sent me - didn't know back then that it was called copy - and put it all together." For System Shock 2, the only visual she was given was a picture of Shodan's face. "I [had] to make everything based on just one image, that's all I had," she laughs, pointing to the website's splash page while sharing her screen. Today, Nightingale is level design director at Arkane Lyon, where she's worked for the past 13 years; a week before our chat, she'd unearthed the original Irrational website files by accident on an old hard drive. "I don't even remember how much [Irrational] paid me," she grins, "but it probably wasn't very much."
There are 25 games leaving the PlayStation Plus subscription service next month, including some of the best Final Fantasy games.
They are: Final Fantasy 7, Final Fantasy 8, Final Fantasy 9, Final Fantasy 10 and 10-2, Final Fantasy 12: The Zodiac Age, and Final Fantasy 15: Royal Edition. There's also spin-off World of Final Fantasy.
The 25 games will all leave on 21st May and includes the brilliant Abzu, The Artful Escape, The Messenger, Jotun, and more.
In 1997, Diablo was everything to me; I thought about it at school, at family dinners, netball practice, recess. Even when I was allowed to play it on my dad's Gateway 2000, I wanted more. And the only place to get more Diablo, back then, was on the Diablo website. Yes, there were fan sites packed with cheats and the same gifs - but what I wanted was a pure unadulterated hit from the official webpage, its message boards filled with poetry and oddly civil flame wars and passive-aggressive posts titled "SUGGESTIONS for Blizzard to Read." There was no YouTube or Discord or Twitch, and certainly no influencer/streaming ecosystem. Sure, there was IRC and usenet and bulletin boards, which formed the backbone of social networks back then - and were the foundation for more accessible World Wide Web experiences that followed. But in the late 90s, there was something truly special going on for fans who wanted a direct connection to their games: the short-lived but holy institution of the official forum-based website.
Around the same time as my Diablo mania, a teenaged Dana Nightingale was asked to do her first professional web design job. She'd been a fan of Looking Glass Studios since Ultima Underworld came out in 1992; when she heard rumours of System Shock 2, a new shooter by ex-Looking Glass devs under the banner of Irrational Games, she and a friend made a fan site in anticipation of its existence. Nightingale was also waiting for Looking Glass to unveil Thief: The Dark Project. "[Thief] at the time was my most anticipated game by a long shot, and if you look at the landscape of 1998, that's saying a lot," she says. "So together with some other folks, we made a hub for fans of these games, and we called it Through the Looking Glass."
Irrational got in touch with Nightingale to make their sites. "I definitely wasn't even 20 at the time. I barely knew what I was doing," she says on a Zoom call. "I threw some HTML on there, took the copy they sent me - didn't know back then that it was called copy - and put it all together." For System Shock 2, the only visual she was given was a picture of Shodan's face. "I [had] to make everything based on just one image, that's all I had," she laughs, pointing to the website's splash page while sharing her screen. Today, Nightingale is level design director at Arkane Lyon, where she's worked for the past 13 years; a week before our chat, she'd unearthed the original Irrational website files by accident on an old hard drive. "I don't even remember how much [Irrational] paid me," she grins, "but it probably wasn't very much."
Eiyuden Chronicles, the RPG series that’s effectively a sequel-slash-spiritual successor to nineties and early noughties JRPG classic Suikoden, will continue with a sequel despite the death of its creator earlier this year.
It's evident in one of the very early scenes, a flashback where two children (the central character, Cloud, and another main character, Tifa) sit by their village well at night and make a promise together as stars shine overhead. A woman named Elmyra cries at her kitchen table, reading a letter that tells her that her husband has died in a war. Two former friends, Barret and Dyne, try to talk over the trauma of their loss in a prison. A serene gondola ride during a date, fireworks exploding outside while Cloud and a flower girl, Aerith, peer out through the window. 'I want to meet...you,' she tells him, even though they have already travelled together for a while. He doesn't understand, and he won't until it's too late.
There's the death of a main character too, one that resonated to the point of almost defining the legacy of the entire game in itself. Tetsuya Nomura (the character and battle visual director, and the person who made the call to kill said character) explained that he wanted to convey how it feels to hurt, to suffer loss. As a nine-year old watching the scene at night while my older sister played the game, I don't think I really grasped that hurt completely, even though I still found it saddening. Perhaps, like Cloud on the gondola, I wasn't ready to understand.
Final Fantasy 7, which was made by Square before their merge with Enix, is still a masterpiece. The surprisingly deft storytelling contains one of the best examples of unreliable narration in the video game medium. The music resounds with character, tender and soft in 'Flowers Blooming in the Church', exhilarating in 'Still More Fighting', while 'You Can Hear the Cry of the Planet' is somehow both ominous and soothing. The pre-rendered backgrounds have a real sense of atmosphere and character; there is the honeycomb warmth of Costa del Sol, for example, and Cosmo Canyon is the colour of autumn leaves.
Yoshitaka Murayama, creator of the Suikoden RPG series and scenario writer for Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, has passed away.
The news was shared by Rabbit & Bear Studios, which Murayama founded to produce the Eiyuden Chronicle games.
"It's with a heavy heart and deep sadness we must inform you that the scenario writer and head of Rabbit & Bear Studios, Yoshitaka Murayama, has passed away on February 6th due to complications with an ongoing illness," reads the statement.
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