|Forum|Articles|Screwed by "The Man". By Anubis   -The Man In recent weeks I have seen not one but two instances of a gaming community getting screwed by "The Man". The first revolves around Myth 3. Shortly after Bungie was pithed by Microsoft, they sold the rights to Myth to a game publisher called Take 2. Take 2 contracted a manufacturer, called Mumbo Jumbo, to write a sequel to Myth 2 so they could make more money off the franchise. Mumbo Jumbo, and much of the Myth community started railing about how great this was. I was not one of them. The emissaries from the community that Mumbo Jumbo hired to be their front end said the game elements would be in 3DS/TIKI format. This is a proprietary PC only format that requires a 2000 dollar piece of software to make, along with a PC. apparently the mostly Mac community did not realize this. On top of that the maps had to be in Photoshop.PSD format, which has to be made on a 600 dollar program that is for all intents and purposes confined to the Mac. So a potential mod developer would need both a Mac and a PC along with several thousand dollars worth of software. This did not bode well for the games future. Take 2 has made a heroic effort to try to prove me right. It came out that the development tools were not going to ship on the CD. The reason, they claimed there was not enough room. I find it hard to believe that they could not fit 3MB of development tools on the CD. They claimed the Mac version was being delayed a month behind the PC version, the 90% Mac community actually believed them. When the game shipped, users found some 500 bugs in the first week, many due to Take 2's retarded move of releasing it only a week after new target audience of gullible PC users would have upgraded to Windows eXtra Propritary. In the last week Take 2 terminated their contract with Mumbo Jumbo, bringing closure to the fact that their would be no tools, and no Mac version. The sad irony is that the only other person who seemed to see this coming and told the community what was going to happen was God Lord Clem.   --- In the world of Unreal the file hosting equivalent to the Mill is Nali City. With over 5000 third party levels, Nali City is by far the largest repository of Unreal maps on the net. Nali Citys files were hosted under FilePlanet, and their actual site and forums were hosted under PlanetUnreal. About a month ago Gamespy, the parent company of PlanetUnreal took away their forum and tried to force them to use Gamsespys slower and inferior proprietary forum setup. A private site, BeyondUnreal, offered to host Nali Citys original forum so they would not have to convert over to the slow clunky Gamespy forum. When word of this reached Gamespy, they deleted Nali City from their server without warning. They then deleted the irreplaceable 5000 map archive. The owner of Nali City is using his own money to keep Nali City running on a private server but no amount of money will bring the deleted map archive back.     Syntax Error/:|Forum|Articles|