Role Playing (Games)

SOE Picks Up Former Monolith Employees 23

eXxy writes "1UP.com talked to SOE about the Matrix Online announcement, and came away with some info that wasn't in the public PR. SOE is picking up many former MxO employees and offering jobs at their Seattle office, the DC Comics game is PSP/PS3/PC and should be cross-compatible between all three platforms, stuff like that."
Role Playing (Games)

Matrix Online Sold To SOE? 63

SirBruce writes "Corpnews is reporting that two separate sources have told them The Matrix Online has been sold to Sony Online Entertainment. Monolith is getting out of the MMO business altogether. SOE has also acquired the rights from Monolith for another MMO that was in development but recently cancelled a DC Comics MMOG. (ed: Remember the DC vs. NCSoft squabble?) Most of Monlith's MMO employees are being laid off with SOE taking over." Commentary at Plaguelands. Obviously at this point still just a rumour, so have some salt with this news.
The Matrix

Morpheus is Dead 145

MTV Games is reporting that the latest live event in the Matrix Online has permenantly changed the topology of The Matrix: Morpheus is dead. From the article: "Morpheus' demise was not without controversy. In the days leading up to it, the developers' live team, who orchestrate the game's big monthly story-advancing moments, carried out a Wachowski-Chadwick plot that had Morpheus, in the words of some users, 'turning terrorist.' According to storyline, Morpheus wanted to reclaim the body of the fallen Neo, which was being held by the Matrix's machine overlords. Morpheus tried to pressure cooperation by planting bombs throughout the Matrix infrastructure."
Data Storage

Matrix 3D memory is World's Smallest 183

nokiator writes "Most of the headlines about cool new high density memory technology are from DRAM or Flash manufacturers these days. Matrix Semiconductor, a small Silicon Valley start-up, broke the trend today and announced that the world's smallest 1-Gbit memory chip. Matrix's chip is an antifuse-based one-time programmable ROM. The total die area of the 1Gb chip is 31 square millimeters (smaller than the blue/red pills in the Matrix movie). Matrix claims that they can achieve this density through a proprietary 3D circuit technology that combines 150nm and 130nm process geometries. When Matrix moves to 90nm process technology, it should be possible to manufacture a 8Gb memory chip on a reasonable sized (i.e. cheap) die. There are many potential applications of this kind of low cost, very high density ROM technology, mostly in content distribution area. One 8Gb ROM chip would have sufficient storage capacity to store the contents of an entire movie using H.264 encoding."
Role Playing (Games)

The Cast at Camp Matrix Online 38

Kate Thompson writes "The Boston Phoenix followed up the news that Matrix Online would be hiring live performers to play characters from the movies (Morpheus, the Oracle). The article looks at what qualifications you need to be an events implementer (or "imp"), how they get their scripts, and how Lawrence Fishburne felt about watching an imp play his part. Warner Bros. apparently has big plans for this - they consider the Matrix Online to be the 'fourth Matrix movie,' and they want players to feel like they're actually shaping the Matrix story. It's not clear, though, how far they'll really take that."
The Matrix

Sony Patents Matrix-Like Game Technology 532

howman writes "Reuters is reporting that Sony has been granted 2 patents, both describing 'Method and system for generating sensory data onto the human neural cortex'. These are patents 6,729,337 and 6,536,440. The patents go on to 'describe a technique for aiming ultrasonic pulses at specific areas of the brain to induce sensory experiences such as smells, sounds and images'. The story was first broken by New Scientist magazine." Commentary also available via Ars Technica.
Supercomputing

Gigapixel Tapestries & Gigadecimal Pi 215

RobotWisdom writes "The new New Yorker magazine has posted two long non-technical articles about the Chudnovsky brothers and their homebrew supercomputers. One is a 1992 article about how they calculated pi to over two billion decimal places using a $70,000 cluster with 16 nodes. The other is a brandnew piece about how they spent months creating a seamless multi-gigabyte image of a fifteenth century tapestry for New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Tapestries are essentially pixel-art on a non-rigid (cloth) matrix, so the manual labor of photographing it inch by inch had introduced many tiny deformations in the images, which they had to mathematically iron out. Old lo-res pix of the tapestries are on the Met's site, pix of the brothers are in the world brain."
The Matrix

24 Hours In The Matrix 71

Both E! Online and Gamespy have looks at the most recently launched Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying game, The Matrix Online. From the Gamespy article: "Since the close of the beta, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment announced that it has employed a troupe of 20-odd people whose job it will be to enact narrative scenarios in The Matrix Online live. These people will assume the roles of popular characters, interact with players, and generally move the stories in ways that only live "actors" can."
Role Playing (Games)

The Matrix Online Launches 77

Another large, commercially built virtual world has launched. The MMORPG Matrix Online, based on the popular Matrix movie series, is now online and accepting red pills. From the launch announcement: "...a specialized role-playing live events team at Monolith will assume the roles of the actual Matrix characters and support the continuation of the game's storyline through choreographed interaction. Players will meet, battle and eventually team up with the familiar characters on high-profile missions or at player-organized events."
Education

Learning a Language in the Digital Age 450

UmmRa points out his discussion of four flash-card programs for language learning, excerpting "As someone who has learned three dead languages in the past six years (Latin, Egyptian, and Akkadian) I have had my share of experience with language software....If there is one thing I have learned from the experience, it is that no program is a panacea. Until we all have Matrix-esque jacks at the base of our skulls, learning a language will be a process that requires some amount of work and time. However that does not mean there isn't cheap (or free!) software out there to greatly simplify the process." None of the program compared are free (or Free), though two are shareware; two of them are for Windows only, one is Mac-only, and the other is "Java based, so it can operate on any platform." Update: 03/21 02:34 GMT by T : The actual link got dropped -- my fault -- in editing this post; now fixed.

Joss Whedon to Write/Direct Wonder Woman 480

bigbear writes "'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' and 'Firefly' creator Joss Whedon has signed on to write and direct the big screen adaptation of the DC Comics character Wonder Woman. The film is being produced by Joel Sliver ('The Matrix'). No word yet on who will play the "iconic female heroine of our time.""
Games

WoW Board Game, Shadowrun 4.0, and City of Heroes RPG 44

Among the many announcements made at the GAMA Trade show this week, one of the most exciting is the revelation that Shadowrun 4.0 is on the horizon, to be released at this year's Gen Con game fair. Other news includes a World of Warcraft board game, an "Ultimate" version of Rifts, the Production Schedule for Dungeons and Dragons for 2005, a City of Heroes Table-Top RPG, and a 10th Anniversary Settlers of Catan edition. From the Shadowrun Website: "The core mechanics are completely revised to be simpler and more streamlined for quicker, easier and more consistent play. Matrix 2.0! An all-new level of wireless "augmented reality" overlays the real world, unleashing hackers to be mobile digital wizards."
Biotech

Stem Cells Cultivated Free of Animal Contaminants 444

qewl writes "In a follow-up to this story, researchers at Massachusetts-based Advanced Cell Technology have created a new method of growing human embryonic stem cells that has overcome the major obstacle of animal contaminants to their use for human treatments. As President George W Bush has restricted federal funding of this research to limited cell lines existing since 2001, scientists have strived to find ways to keep the lines pure. Irina Klimanskaya and colleagues at ACT grew the stem cells from the beginning on a cell and serum-free mixture called an extracellular matrix. "The importance of this work, of course, is that by eliminating contact with animal and human cells, you minimize the risk of contamination with pathogens that could be transmitted to patients and the population at large," Dr. Lanza at ATC said."
Mars

The Indirect Case For Life On Mars 334

Deinhard writes "Space.com is reporting that '[a] pair of NASA scientists told a group of space officials at a private meeting here Sunday that they have found strong evidence that life may exist today on Mars, hidden away in caves and sustained by pockets of water.' It is all based on methane signatures and not direct observation. Now plans for using the Genesis Device on Mars are out ... unless this is just a particle of preanimate matter caught in the matrix."
Role Playing (Games)

The MMORPGs of 2005 41

MMORPGDot.com has a two-part piece on the upcoming Massive games of 2005. The first article in the series touches on big name titles expected out this year like Matrix Online and Tabula Rasa, while the second article mentions lesser known small budget titles. From the big-title article: "If a list of features could make a great game, Dark & Light would be the first. NP Cube is promising some really ambitious things like a 40.000km gameworld without any loading, the possibility to become the king or conquer a town and enough goodies to whet your appetite. The question is how many of those features will actually be present at release?"
The Matrix

Interview With Sundog of Radio Free Zion 100

RosethornKB writes "KillerBetties.com has an interview with Sundog of Radio Free Zion, an internet broadcast whose purpose is to entertain players of The Matrix Online and will broadcast live events when the game goes live. From the article: "Rosethorn: How will you manage multiple server coverage? Sundog: We are trying to develop enough of a following in beta to allow us to support a different stream for each server, with its own DJs and coverage. So far, the community has been wonderfully supportive of what we are trying to do and hopefully that will translate into the right numbers to allow us to expand that much when the game goes fully live this spring.""
AMD

Intel and AMD's 2005 Plans Revealed 272

Takemedown writes "There's a good article on CTZ that talks about Intel and AMD's plans. Intel, continuing on their 18-month chipset refresh rate, will introduce their Glenwood and Lakeport chipsets for the Smithfield dual core desktop microprocessor in 2005. The chipsets will support SATA II, Matrix RAID and a higher system bus speed for the new Pentium 4 name holder. As far as Intel's dual core strategies are concerned, they will most likely bring their dual core additions by the very end of Q2 or Q3 this year, so for those waiting for these next generation chips are better off with a due upgrade. Secondly, if you are hoping for a noticeable performance gain in regular computing tasks are in for a disappointment. Dual core microprocessors are for those who like to do multitasking or work on multithreaded applications. For example, if you are gaming and burning a DVD at the same time, dual core chips will come in handy and will definitely give a smooth computing experience."
Classic Games (Games)

Whippersnappers Bad-Mouth Old Games 699

1up.com has posted the second in an article series called "Child's Play", where they invite youngsters to experience the joys of classic gaming to hilarious effect. From the (sob) article: "Bobby: After you beat the Death Star level, there should be a snow level, then a small speeder bike level. They should make a Matrix game in the theme of Star Wars. So then you take out your sword and run up to a guy and go, "Chiiing!" And after you saw through his head, you fly inside your X-wing."

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