Pokémon: The Novel

Pokémon: The NovelSybex announced it will publish an officially licensed "novelizing" of Nintendo's upcoming Nintendo 64 title, Pokémon Snap. Video game expert Jason R. Rich has been tapped to write the book, and the novel version follows in the footsteps of Pokémon-Pathways to Adventure, which was published by Sybex in February 1999.

Scheduled for publication in early August 1999, Pokémon Snap-Pathways to Adventure will be illustrated with full-color art featuring characters from the game. "While this retelling of Pokémon Snap in story form provides readers with the clues they need to find and photograph Pokémon when playing the video game, it can also be read and enjoyed completely on its own," said Roger Stewart, associate publisher at Sybex.

The full-length book will be the third title in Sybex's Pathways to Adventure series, which puts characters from video and computer games into stories based on the games.

games for the mind

Games for the MindHas your mind turned to tapioca pudding from too many episodes of Baywatch? Do you find yourself panting and out of breath when you try to balance your checkbook? Does playing Mozart's D Minor Piano Concerto seem easier than programming your VCR? If so, Simon & Schuster Interactive's Mind Gym may be the game for you. "Sit down in front of your PC and give me 40!" That could be the battle cry for this game now shipping to stores.

Mind Gym is being billed as "a fun and challenging brain stimulator intended to open up the mind." Didn't Dr. Lecter do that in Thomas Harris's latest novel, Hannibal? Never mind. Mind Gym is a Windows game made up of several different activities that allow you to personalize a mental workout. You start in the training room, where a "sarcastic Mind Gym trainer initiates a sweat-inducing assessment of mental strengths and weaknesses." After sizing up your cerebrum, the instructor will suggest a specialized series of mental workouts to beef up your brainpower.

Mind Gym, which will have an estimated street price of $30, consists of three areas: The Games Room allows you to work on memory skills, numeracy, and spatial awareness. The Pool of Ideas helps you with expressive thinking and idea generation. Finally, the Think Tank lets you implement creative ideas and turn them into practical applications.

Walter Walker, VP of sales and marketing for Simon & Schuster Interactive, had this to say about the game in a press release: "There is an immense amount of pressure to stay in shape mentally in order to succeed in a world where employers want people who can think on their feet. Like any other organ, the brain performs at different levels and a brain that receives little or no exercise is prone to atrophy," he said. "Mind Gym is the software to make sure that doesn't happen."

Mind Gym is a British creation, coming from Melrose Interactive in England. Expect the kind of humor only the Brits can provide. "When we looked at it last year, we were laughing hysterically," said Peter Binazeski, PR director at Simon & Schuster Interactive. "It's also challenging and will make you work. Everyone at [Simon & Schuster] is playing it."

Mind Gym has an ESRB rating of Teen or above. If you're feeling like your mental pencil needs sharpening, Mind Gym may be just the thing for you. No guarantees about whether you will be able to program your VCR after a mental workout, however--this is a software program, not a miracle worker.

 

thrustmaster's new direction

ThrustMaster's New Direction  ThrustMaster announced today that it has entered into a license agreement with Intel for new multi-user voice and client to client information sharing technologies developed by the Intel Architecture Labs (IAL). The new technologies will allow the company to accelerate the development of its next generation of Internet community, collaboration, and communications solutions.

The license provides leading-edge technologies that enhance and complement technology previously licensed from Intel, and includes several advances that will increase the user-friendliness of the next generation of ThrustMaster's Internet communications products. One new technology will greatly simplify the launching of collaborative applications, such as games, videophones, or other Windows business applications. Another new technology will provide the backbone of a new, scaleable "buddy list" capability to enable work groups or friends to seamlessly find and connect with one another and form work and play communities on the Internet.

The license also includes IAL's next-generation Intel Multi-Point Audio software, which has added broadband and other capabilities to the core voice-over-Internet protocol technology previously licensed by ThrustMaster. Multi-Point Audio, a client-to-client technology, enables multiple users to have a full duplex voice conference over the Internet while seamlessly visiting the same or different Web sites, or viewing and sharing Windows applications.

QuakeCon 99

  What started three years ago as a way for die-hard fans of id Software's Quake to get together and frag one another on a LAN has grown into a company-sponsored, high-profile, three-day event, complete with workshops, tournaments, and plenty of prizes. Braving the blistering Texas heat (which reached more than 100 degrees each day), and dodging insects the size of bread loaves, more than 1,000 gamers descended on QuakeCon 99 in the Mesquite Convention Center last weekend.

Late Thursday, the night before the event officially opened, the line of gamers queued up to pre-register stretched down the hall, even as the final network setup was taking place. Security was tight, with a number of volunteers filling out and checking detailed inventories of each gamers' equipment, and two uniformed police officers on duty at all times. It was pretty quiet at the beginning, because the network wouldn't be live until Friday morning.

Schene Groom, the QuakeCon network planner, laid out the details of what his team had done to set up for this event.  The backbone of the network was comprised of two Lucent P550s, which, according to the manufacturer, provide a switching capacity of 45.7 gigabits per second. We weren't sure what that meant, so Schene told us that these switches were capable of processing ten million packets per second. To get the packets to the end systems, more than 60 Linksys 16-port and 24-port 10/100 switches (not hubs) were used. (The link above has information on the precise equipment.) This architecture was linked together by roughly a mile and a half of CAT-5 cabling. To top it all off, AMD donated ten K7-550 servers for the server farm, half running Red Hat Linux and half running NT Server.

Schene showed a monitor that graphically displayed the traffic, load, and usage. The average latency from the server to each machine varied--from .3 milliseconds to .7 milliseconds. He indicated that the biggest source of latency on the network was actually each user's machine, as all the packets from the server were reaching their destinations in less than one millisecond. This network architecture worked well over the course of the weekend; the network went down exactly zero times. Yes, not even once, despite the fact that the network was taking a beating 24 hours a day every day--to the point where the network had 75,000 packets per second being tossed around at 3:00 a.m. Saturday morning. To put it in perspective, Schene informed me that this network setup would be able to adequately service a corporation running up to 5,000 terminals, depending on the applications used.

 


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