Typically Gabe just scowls when stubborn traces of French II surface in a conversation, but yesterday he decided instead to mine la belle langue for his own perverse ends.
Most of us are probably still familiar with the term "Foxed," I imagine - it is the process by which your Aliens mod, done in reverence, a natural outgrowth of your obsessive enthusiasm for a corporation's intellectual property, gets you sent a terse communique on official letterhead. The old Cease and Desist, as it is called. No actual foxes are involved. I know there are still furs who read the site on occasion, and I apologize if I got your hopes up.
Since it is usually my presumption that things will go terribly awry, off the rails so to speak, possibly off a cliff to be submerged in lava, whenever I hear about a fan project - pure of heart, as I said, done only in reverence - I try to avoid mentioning it. I hate that, but if the powers that be can pinpoint a single S&M Strawberry Shortcake amongst the high-grown wilds of Interspace, I don't want to be the one to instigate a good and proper foxing. Again, just so there's no confusion - it's a neologism, jargon: class, legal. No foxes.
So it's actually kind of fun to mention King's Quest IX: The Silver Lining, because Vivendi Universal has (in what I find to be a startling manuever) given them the go ahead.
I hope that this "royal seal" draws talent out of hedges and holes that might otherwise have simply observed the process from a safe distance, outside what you might call the effective range of the legal apparatus. Such a game is like a no-cost expedition into the dark twists of Sierra's sleeping archive. If it produces a hit, a strike somewhere in that twilight realm, they already own the rights and can make excellent decisions regarding the franchise in the future.
Halo Zero I saw mentioned over at 1up, a sidecroller like Codename: Gordon but locked into the Halo franchise instead of Walve's own scrumptious continuity. I don't know if it gets much bigger, in raw brand terms, than Halo - and I haven't heard word one about retaliation of any sort. It's pretty neat, and I get the impression that H0 is a codification (perhaps?) of Eric Nylund's prequel novel, The Fall of Reach. It was made in France, which I think lends this post a nice sort of concenptual continuity.
(CW)TB out.
sun so hot i froze to death
December 14, 2005
