theMediaman.com

The article on the front page of the Globe and Mail today is for a Canadian scientist who plans to go diving in the Indian Ocean. He plans to use a special submarine that will let him go 200 metres below the surface off the coast of Africa. He’s looking for a fish called the coelacanth that’s supposed to be at an evolutionary standstill for the last 400 million years (kind of like Conrad Black, the paper’s other front page news).

The trip will involve tracking and tagging the fish by “stamping their bony, limb-like fins with acoustic transmitters”. I didn’t think much about it, until the end of the article.

Coelacanths live at the bottom of the Indian Ocean in caves, and it’s believed this deep-water habitat - still largely uncharted by humans - has protected them from extinction.

So what are we going to do? Just go right down there and check them out! I hope they grab a few and put them in zoo’s first, or else we’ll have another dodo extinction on our collective consciences.

Speaking of species extinctions… I want to play Halo 2. Reg ran through it in “about 15 hours” which kind of disappoints me. He calls the two games “Halo Classic” and “Team Halo”. I like sitting in a livingroom, playing multiplayer games on one console, or shared over a LAN, but I just don’t get the same thrill out of whipping some newbie’s arse in online gaming (nor having some 12 year old kick my arse).

Halo (Classic) was one of the most involving storylines I’ve experienced in a game since Final Fantasy VII. While reports have been made that FF7 can be done in eleven hours, the usual experience I’ve found on the chat forums is that it takes no less than 70 hours for the first time through the game. Now THAT’S a storyline!

I’m sure the story is still quite good, but I feel as abandoned by the gamemakers now as I did when Quake 3 came out as “Multiplayer Only”… aka no single-player mode (except for “player vs. bots”). I’ve also received this kind of emotional abuse from the death of Sierra adventure games, and how LucasArts cancelled the Full Throttle 2 game (which looks like it might have had a multiplayer component in development as well).

In fact, if you look at the game history on LucasArts’ site, they’ve only produced about five non-Star Wars licence games since 1997. Seems to me that you risk monotony in game design when you do that. LucasArts used to be known as The Company to take a gaming genre and perfect it. Now they can’t even get out of their own slump.

Electronic Arts is to gaming what Microsoft was to Operating Systems around 1999. There was Microsoft, and then no one else. Sure there were the straggelers, but BeOS was dead, OS/2 was dead, all desktop AltOS’s were dead. Microsoft was THE company to build your Operating System. EA has that monopolistic status in the gaming industry, and they know it. They’re now suffering from a class-action lawsuit saying that they force their employees to work unreasonable hours.

Really, it doesn’t seem to be anything different than what has been going on since the 70’s, except that code-monkeys are a lot more disposible now. They get paid about 10-25% of what they did just five years ago (before the Bubble burst) and they fear losing their jobs because there are a hundred unemployed coders out there ready to take their job.

There are small throwbacks to the classic era of Adventure Gaming, like Homestar Runner’s Peasant’s Quest, and most Sierra “-Quest” games on eBay for under five bucks. However, if you still have your discs (or diskettes) lying around, let me know. While they aren’t considered Abandonware yet (and hardly anything legally is), you can usually trade around. Someone who used to have a 386 is likely to have had one or more of the Kings Quest games.

I’m going to see if I can find that Sherlock Holmes game. I’ve already played through it about five times, but that was back when the 30 MB install took up a third of my dad’s hard drive!