SP Happenings #48

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(Originally posted by Sorcerer)

To say that the past week had been eventful would be a bit of an understatement. The first big news was Interplay's complete relinquishment of all D&D game titles and rights, followed by the removal of any mention of all published D&D games from the official catalogue on their website. What is actually going on behind the scenes at Interplay is still somewhat shrouded in mystery, but one thing is painfully obvious - Interplay is in very serious trouble. As far as D&D gamers are concerned, it is dead already. Whether Interplay will manage to remain afloat (or, better put, for how long), and in what shape, is anybody's guess. Certainly the leadership's incompetence is not doing it any favours. We will just have to have to wait and see how this drama plays out.

Coincidentally, right after the near-death of Interplay came another interesting piece of news. A real-time strategy game set in WoTC's new Eberron D&D setting is on schedule to be released in 2005. Developed by Liquid Entertainment under Atari's wing, it is quite obvious that while Interplay is finished with D&D games, Atari has merely begun to warm up. Since there practically haven't been any PC D&D games that wouldn't be RPGs, the title is bound to spark a lot of debate before (and after) the release. SP will, of course, be keeping tabs on it all.

Now, as far as the new site redesign goes, I haven't managed to make much progress this week, but due to circumstances beyond my control. I've had my primary hard drive replaced, which took a lot of preparation to back everything up from the old drive, and time to install everything back again on the new drive. Twice. I won't bother you with details, but suffice it to say, I lost nearly 4 days on this wretched exercise. Luckily, with two decently sized hard drives, I won't have to worry about the lack of space any more for quite some time.

Incidentally, with all the reinstalling I've had to do, I chanced upon a completely free virus scanner named avast!, which I recommend to everyone. With all the viruses spreading around these days, you really can't afford not to have decent virus protection on your PC. And when it's completely free (to use the avast! 4 Home Edition they only require you to make a free registration in 30 days, and then issue you a registration code valid for 14 months, freely renewable), you have no excuse not to download and install it. Previously I've been using McAfee VirusScan, and during my experience with avast! over the last 5 days or so, I have noticed avast! to be as good (if not better) at catching and blocking viruses, but much more configurable and drastically less system resource-taxing. I know it sounds too good to be true, but I really can't think of a single complaint over this software. If only all anti-virus companies had the conscience to offer free downloads of their programs for non-commercial use, we'd have to worry about viruses far less than we are forced to now.