King’s Quest IX In Production
On November 29th, Vivendi Universal Games (VUG) announced that Phoenix Online Studios, the group producing the sequel of their King’s Quest franchise, would be allowed to continue their endeavors, granting them a fan-license. The negotiations required that the name of the sequel be changed from “King’s Quest IX: Every Cloak Has A Silver Lining” to merely “The Silver Lining”. The VUG press release is as follows: “After extensive evaluation, Vivendi Universal Games is pleased to announce that the fan developed trilogy project ‘The Silver Lining’ (previously known as King’s Quest IX: Every Cloak Has A Silver Lining), based on characters from Sierra Entertainment’s ‘Kings Quest’ series, has been given approval to continue development. We look forward to seeing the first of its three upcoming chapters, ‘Shadows’, completed soon.” This is great news for the KQ series, as now the halted fan-developed project of the ninth sequel has been officially revived and should debut in the main-stream market sometime in 2006.
Xbox 360 Legal Action
Engadget writes and reports: “Chicago resident Robert Byers isn’t buying Microsoft’s claim that “only” 3% of the Xbox 360s that have been sold were faulty, so he’s filed a class action lawsuit against the corporation in an Illinois federal court calling for undisclosed damages, litigation expenses, and the replacement or recall of 360 consoles. The suit claims that Microsoft knowingly released a defective product in order to beat Sony (and presumably Nintendo) to market and gain an early foothold in the next-gen console “war.” As we’ve reported several times, users have been complaining that their new Xboxes crash during regular and online play, displaying various error messages or blanking the screen, and that many units have right toasty power bricks. We sure hope this all gets resolved soon, because we are still on hold waiting for customer service to troubleshoot our store-bought 360.”
It sounds like another frivolous lawsuit to me, and in no way a “class-action”. Defective Xboxes represent an incredibly small fraction of the total units sold (as it should be), and thus its unlikely that this is a fruitful lawsuit. At best, the prosecutors are looking at a restitution similar to that of the PS2 lawsuit (which was just settled): $25, a game, and any necessary repairs/replacements. And how long did the PS2 lawsuit take to get settled? Almost until the Xbox 360 came out…
