Trouble on the game front
By MIKE BERMAN
Scripps Howard News Service
March 26, 2003

Why is it that:

• When I finally get hooked on a game it gets banned in Germany?
• When a company I've been bugging for years finally sends me something to play with, it declares bankruptcy?
• When I have problems installing a piece of software or hardware, the folks in tech support tell me they've never come across the problem before and I never hear from them again?

When Westwood Games (now owned by Electronic Arts) issued its newest chapter in the "Command&Conquer" series of games, I immediately became addicted to it, as I have to all the other games in the series.

The game, dubbed "Generals," has players battling troops serving in a nasty, evil army in Iraq. The German government, fearing it may inspire its youth to become violent, has declared that the game is unfit for children.

According to reports on the Net, this means that Westwood cannot advertise the game on German TV and it can't be displayed on store shelves. Game addicts that simply have to have it must be over 17 and ask for it by name.

Gee, and I thought I was just playing another great, well-designed war game!

Meanwhile, back on the home front, the folks at SonicBlue finally decide that I'm worth their time, send me their new Rio Digital Home Theater to review and then declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Apparently the company was spending wads of bucks to fight the entertainment industry for the right to use Replay TV to record movies and television programs but skip commercials. Also, it had just survived a long patent battle with the manufacturers of Tivo, which performs a similar function.

Originally known as Diamond Multimedia, the company developed the Rio MP3 player, which took the electronics industry by storm in 1998 and spawned what I've come to know as the MP3 generation. The company eventually purchased SensoryScience, a rival MP3 player manufacturer and the company behind GoVideo, whose first claim to fame was a dual VCR that also raised the hackles of the entertainment industry.

Fortunately, the company's products will survive. A troll of the Net reveals that SonicBlue is negotiating with a couple of companies that will market them under their own brand names.

According to CNET, the company has signed nonbinding letters of intent with D&M Holdings and Marantz Japan to sell its ReplayTV and Rio subsidiaries for $40 million. The company also plans to sell its GoVideo business to Opta Systems for $12.5 million.

Finally, my latest efforts to install the new version of Roxio's CD Creator 6.0 have failed and no one can tell me why.

Although the installation process completes without a hitch, a simple reboot seems to send the popular CD-copying utility into a stupor, causing it to become dysfunctional and virtually useless.

Although the folks at Roxio tech support are stumped by this phenomenon, I continue to dig into the depths of this mystery until I either solve the problem or toss the software into my growing "used-to-be-great-but-is-now-useless" pile.

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