Nightly Open Thread
Yeah…it would seem that US law enforcement agencies (surprisingly!) “enthusiastically” make tens of thousands of requests for access to such information each year. Better yet, there’s no federal laws requiring that such requests be catalogued or reported.
In which we are glad that Ultima is not a Sega IP.
The Streets of Rage remake was eight years in the making, and was online for almost a week before Sega ordered that it be shut down. Says Sega: “we need to protect our intellectual property rights and this may result in us requesting that our fans remove online imagery, videos or games in some instances.”
The US IRS wants to pre-audit you.
In remarks to the National Press Club last week, an IRS spokesman unveiled the agency’s vision for the “look forward” model in which most of the pertinent reporting information for the average taxpayer (W2, 1099, mortgage interest etc.) would be submitted to the IRS well in advance of the individual deadline.
After a massive upgrade in technology, the IRS would be able to pre-calculate what it expects to receive in taxes and instantly reject any return that doesn’t comply with its determination.
This may work fine and well for some wage earners… but start throwing in a few investment accounts, small business income, private partnerships, etc. and things can quickly diverge from the IRS estimates.
Does anyone else feel like this has “solving the wrong problem” written all over it?
Is EA coming to Good Old Games?
Andy Panthro certainly hopes so. For me, it’s difficult to see EA going for it; they’ve never been at ease with GOG’s “DRM-free” policy. I will, of course, be happy to be proven wrong, but I’m highly skeptical that it’ll be EA that gets added to the site.
Just looking at their last couple tweets, it really seems more like LucasArts than EA. This one totally makes me think of Full Throttle, implying LucasArts. This one has Ultima Underworld written all over it, implying Origin (and thus EA), but…I don’t know, that’s almost too obvious, y’know? I’m thinking it might actually be a tease for Grim Fandango.
I guess we’ll see soon enough!
Tonight’s post brought to you by pens:
Indy would be proud.
Seems more likely we’d see them on Steam then GOG since Steam has built-in methods to authenticate and control copies.
Or on the EA Store proper.
I haven’t had a lot of opportunities to talk with people at EA about making the old games available, apart from the DOSboxing suggestion and some of the follow-up thereto, but the last time it came up I was left with the impression that EA would probably target its own digital distribution service as the first point of release, and then decide whether to open up the catalogue to other such services.
Heh. I love that add.
Unfortunate about the SoR remake getting pulled.
Oh, also of note, I’ve realized I’ve named the evil lich in my current tabletop RPG campaign Mondain. And his former apprentice turned player-character is named Minax. It seems I’ve been pulling a bit more from Ultima than I thought I was when writing.
Turns out those front-page GOG.com clues were about a new Atari promo, of which the first is the Alone in the Dark games (the old, good ones!) and the last will be The Witcher (with five others in between, one released each week).
The big new publisher? We have to wait until summer! GOG are such teases…
And if anyone wants the Streets of Rage remake, let me know. I’ve got a link to a german website that still hosts it, and I downloaded it myself.
Yeah, turned out to be Atari (not actually that exciting… don’t they already have a bunch of Atari games available?)
However – this is interesting (from their latest update):
“Microsoft, Electronic Arts, LucasArts, Take2 and SquareEnix – one of those publishers is already signed, while two more from the list are almost on board! Which and when is coming? Well, you’ll have to wait a bit for that :)”
If it’s Microsoft, we’ll most likely see Dungeon Siege get a release on GOG as well as Steam (which I’d prefer as the GOG releases tend to be more mod-friendly). There’s still no guarantee that EA will be one of those signings – I gather from that comment that it’s only going to be three of them?
One for sure, two more probables.
Which, out of five, means…what? That there’s like a…hmmn, I used to be able to do this…60% chance that it’s EA, assuming the other two publishers sign up for sure? Or…something like that?
I’m tempted on Alone in the Dark. The promo comes with the first three games, but I’ve only ever played the first game way back when. Are the sequels any good? Worth it? What say you?
I recall being fascinated by the graphics of the first game, and it successfully creeped me the heck out… But then again I was probably only 7 or 8 years old.
Yeah, something like that. One would assume they wouldn’t announce them as probable unless it was very probable.
They hope to begin releasing games from the new publisher by the end of .. Spring I think they said? (I’m in the Southern Hemisphere and always get confused about which season is when up there..) So I guess that will begin to narrow things down.
Surely it’s only a matter of time before EA do get in on the game of monetizing that enormous back-catalogue they have sitting dormant. It’s more a question of whether they use one or more of the existing platforms or distribute over their own download service.
I hear summer as the release timeframe, although some people on Twitter have suggested that it’ll be month’s end. Guess we’ll see who’s right.
It probably is only a matter of time, as you say; that’s really not the question. The question is through which service EA will release its back catalogue. Good Old Games is a good choice, though I could see them preferring to use their own online store (as I think I noted already).