RISK is a classic board game of global conquest. First published in 1959, this war game remains a popular pastime.and continues to attract mathematical attention. Recent analyses reveal that the chances of winning a battle are considerably more favorable for the attacker than was originally suspected.
I'm a Star Wars fan, but other than a few weirdos, who isn't? Now I'm not the rabid type of fan who dresses up as my favorite character, but I know a sarlacc from a tauntaun, and I care enough to be angry that Greedo shoots first in the Special Edition release.
Which is why, along with thousands of others, I was really looking forward to the appearance of Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided. And ultimately, it's why I am disappointed with the final product. On the other hand, it's still much better than Episode I
![[Star Wars Galaxies.jpg]](http://www.zuckervati.com/archives/images/technicolor_luke.jpg)
Now that Star Wars Galaxies is shipping, you're going to need a name for all your characters. Since you can't use regular human names, like "Joe Smith", or joke names, like "Chewintobacca" or "Oggie Ben Doggie", this is the site for you.
"Welcome to the SWGS Random Name Generator, now powered by PHP! To start generating names, choose a species from the menu to the left, select the number of names you want, then hit submit.
"If you would like to see the basis I used for creating the names, read our naming guide. In it, you can find ways of creating your own Star Wars names, and see the various naming patterns found amongst the eight playable species of SWG."
![[boba.jpg]](http://www.zuckervati.com/archives/images/boba.jpg)
At E3 2003, we managed to sit in for a demonstration of The Movies, Lionhead's upcoming strategy game. The Movies will let you play as the owner of a movie studio over a period of about 100 years, from 1900 until the present day. You'll begin by making black-and-white films, though over the course of your 100-year career, you'll research such groundbreaking technologies as boom microphones and color film.
Though we were able to see only a temporary, "placeholder" version of the game's interface, Lionhead designer Adrian Moore assured us that the developer wishes to make playing The Movies as simple as possible. In the menu screen we saw, Moore was able to plan a movie from a single menu, choosing the genre (horror, in this case), the actors (Bruce Campbell, Drew Barrymore, and Vincent Price as "the monster"), and the writing allotment. Coming up with a good script will require a lot of time and effort from your team of writers, represented by a five-star meter that gradually fills up as you wait. However, waiting as long as possible to let your team put together a five-star script will cost you a lot of money, since you'll be continuously paying your writers and your actors and other staffers in the meantime. In the demonstration, Moore chose to rush the script by interrupting his writers at about a star and a half, which resulted in the perfect script...for a cheesy B movie.
As perhaps the clearest evidence yet of the power of sophisticated but inexpensive game consoles, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has assembled a supercomputer from an army of Sony PlayStation 2 devices.
A software maker that specializes in tools for measuring performance of PC components has accused graphics chip giant Nvidia of manipulating test results for its latest graphics chip.
Saratoga, Calif.-based Futuremark on Friday said in a statement that Nvidia tweaked software needed to run its new GeForce FX 5900 processor to distort performance in Futuremark's 3DMark 03 testing application. Futuremark is one of the leading independent providers of software and services for performing PC "benchmark" tests.
You could say that the film Tron did a good job of typifying the 1980s--it had frizzy-haired men, greedy corporations, a helicopter landing on a rooftop, and people throwing away hours of their lives each night on a new fad called "video games." It's been more than 20 years since the motion picture's premiere, and Monolith Productions and Buena Vista are now hard at work on a game-based follow-up to the movie. Tron 2.0 will be a first-person action game that will follow the motion picture closely, but will also have pretty much everything you'd expect from a first-person shooter, plus several unusual new features and gameplay modes, like the lightcycle racing and disc battles featured in the movie.
![[tron-20.jpg]](http://www.zuckervati.com/archives/images/tron-20.jpg)
After 20 years, the world of Tron returns.
By PETER WAYNER
The Sims Online is a clean, well-lighted corner of the Internet where people work to build an elaborately decorated, chat-filled virtual world. But if playing by the rules in this realm isn't entertaining enough, there are after-hours joints where rogues and grifters gather to swap schemes for gaming the game and growing rich.
![[devil_cheat.jpg]](http://www.zuckervati.com/archives/images/devil_cheat.jpg)
Let's get this out of the way right now: Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided is one of the most highly anticipated games ever. It's a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, and like other online RPGs, Star Wars Galaxies will let you create an in-game character to venture out into an online world with other like-minded players. But no other online RPG has ever taken place in the Star Wars universe--specifically, in the time frame between the original Star Wars: A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back motion pictures. And no other online RPG has ever offered players as many intriguing options as to how they can play their characters, whether they wish to play as architects, smugglers, bounty hunters, or even would-be Jedi knights. Sony Online Entertainment and LucasArts graciously invited us to Sony's Austin, Texas, office to take a firsthand look at how the game is shaping up.
![[stormtooper.jpg]](http://www.zuckervati.com/archives/images/stormtooper.jpg)
As far as online virtual reality metaverses go, this one's pretty good. It's apparently been around since 1995, and has a similar interface to ActiveWorlds. But it's much much better, and didn't cost anything to get online. There's a pretty extensive avatar list, and you can probably make your own. Still looks like a Dire Straits video, however.
Communities of users build their own houses, cities, and, in some cases, worlds. With 900,000 subscribers, AlphaWorld is supported by advertising and by subscription fees ranging from $10 to $1,000, based on how many users there are and how big a virtual space they occupy.
![[cybervenice.jpg]](http://www.zuckervati.com/archives/images/cybervenice.jpg)
