It’s Thursday, Ninja Turtles are awesome, and the world mourns for Caesar. All of which might explain where there’s so little of substance to report today.
The crazy folks at the Wikipedia project have launched gaming.wikia to join their music, auto, and health community pages. These "wikia" aren’t exactly like the encyclopedia-format Wikipedia, instead filling a role more akin to that of print magazines. Users can add articles, op-eds, polls, and the like; the stringent call for accuracy is absent, since the wikia is a forum for interaction more than it is for information. Check it out, engage in a genteel exchange of ideas, and hold your breath for CHUD’s relaunch. We love you more than a dispassionate wiki does.
Jon reported a couple days ago on Gamespy’s agreement to provide the online infrastructure for Wii gaming, and now we’ve got a bit of new, confirmed information for you. It’s not good news. According to an interview Gamespy gave to Wii: Definitive Speculation, the game-specific friend code system will graduate from the DS to the console. This means that there will be no unified identification system for gamers, such as is provided by Microsoft and Sony. This takes a lot of the anonymity out of online matchmaking, but it increases the hassle of what should be a seamless experience.
Hot on the heels of the announcement of funding to complete the Longest Journey series, Funcom is threatening to cease all offline gaming initiatives. The company line is that rampant piracy is the prime mover of their shift in policy. It’s not clear whether Funcom means they will focus all their attention on their MMOs, or if they’ll invest in a Steam-like digital distribution plan to require user verification before play. The episodic conclusion to The Logest Journey has not been mentioned in connection to this story, but since the funding is already in place we can hope it’ll go off without a hitch.
Let’s close things out with Warren Spector, He who is the second star to the right. In a conversation with Eurogamer he revealed that his new development house, Junction Point, are deep into two new games, based on original intellectual properties. As an innovator, Spector earns my enthusiasm. One of the projects is apparently a collaboration with "a fellow you would have heard of out of Hollywood" and the other has been growing in his head for the last fifteen years like a watermelon seed, and is based on a world created by Spector’s writer-wife. Yum.