Day: December 3, 2008

Midway appears to be doing a lot worse than I thought.

D'Arque Bishop

http://www.mortalkombatonline.com/content/News/read.cds?article=1166

In an extremely surprising move, news came out today that Sumner Redstone, whose National Amusements, Inc. owned 87% of Midway Games’s stock, has sold all of its stock to a private investor named Mark Thomas for $100,000 USD. The move comes as Redstone is looking to pay off $1.6 billion USD in debt; according to the Wall Street Journal, this sale would secure a hefty tax benefit.

In addition, the Los Angeles Times is reporting a bit more information, in that the sale may not be as much of a steal as it seems. The company is valued at $30.4 million USD (with shares at $0.33 USD), but currently has well over $150 million USD in outstanding loans, not to mention the $70 million USD loan from National Amusements that is now owed to Thomas. With the company losing money this past quarter and Thomas reportedly being only a passive investor (with no plans of sitting on Midway’s board of directors or engaging in management decisions), the LA Times could very well be right that Thomas may be looking to divide and sell the company and hope to make a profit by the end of the day. However, this is only speculation; Mark Thomas has only released scant information on his plans through the attorney arranging the purchase, and is not granting interviews.

We’ll keep an eye on this story. As we learn more, we’ll report it here.

To read the Wall Street Journal’s announcement of the sale, click here. To read the LA Times analysis of the purchase, click here.

More and more, it’s looking like Midway’s getting closer to oblivion. While I have no doubt that Mortal Kombat will continue (if probably another developer and/or publisher), I can’t say I feel the same way about Midway itself. A shame, really, considering how many of Midway’s games I’ve liked over the years. We’ll just see how it goes…

I must be getting grumpy in my old age.

D'Arque Bishop

Earlier today while at work, I was contacted by one of the engineers who wanted to talk to me about an error he was getting. Apparently this software he was testing (which shall remain nameless) was causing an error because it couldn’t reach the NTP server at time.windows.com, which is the default timeserver used by Windows XP. We generally don’t give our workstations at the office direct internet access, so I wrote back saying that it shouldn’t need to talk to time.windows.com, as we run our own internal timeserver. The engineer relayed that to the software tech support.

A bit later, the engineer relayed the response from tech support: it contacts time.windows.com for licensing purposes. I gritted my teeth and sent the following response: “In the interests of being politically correct and diplomatic, I will forego my normal response and recommend you put in a ticket for direct internet access.” The sysadmin finally came up with a more efficient workaround that I frankly wish I had thought of (aka, pointing time.windows.com to our timeserver’s IP address in the local hosts file), and we got him squared away.

What would be my normal response? The engineer did ask that, thinking it’d be something like, “WTF?” Nothing so mundane, I replied. My normal response would have been, “Tell their tech support to take their developers out back and have them shot.”

Either I’ve become a misanthrope or I’m becoming less and less patient with programming silliness. Companies need to realize that a lot of enterprises do not A) grant the workstations direct internet access, and B) do not allow the users to have local admin privileges. I can’t tell you how tired I am of fighting with applications by developers that don’t follow those two rules of thumb… gah. Ah, well. At least we’ve gotten workarounds so far, but it still annoys me.

And now, for something completely different: a musical puzzle game.

D'Arque Bishop

I saw this mentioned over at Penny Arcade, and felt it needed to be shared with all of you. It’s a game called Auditorium, in which you need to use special icons/markers to redirect streams of light across the screen so that they hit these special targets that look like graphic equalizers. When hit, the targets start playing one part of a tune, so that when all targets are hit it comes together almost like a symphony. It sounds and looks beautiful, and is quite challenging. Fortunately, there’s no single right answer, so any way you can get it to work will be valid.

If you’d like to give it a try, you can play it here.