Oh my god, they recalled Kenny! Someone at Electronic Arts apparently dipped into the holiday punch once too often, got a little frisky, and slipped an unauthorized version of the South Park short cartoon "The Spirit of Christmas" onto the master CD for the Sony PlayStation version of Tiger Woods 99 PGA Tour. Besides showing Jesus and Santa fighting, the short is laced with profanities (of course, so is my golf game). Now EA is recalling the 100,000 copies that were shipped in November. Perhaps EA should rethink this recall. As a consumer, I feel I get added value when some low-level employee sneaks a cartoon or video footage onto my game CD. I'd like to see the best of Pamela and Tommy Lee on my next EA golf title. It would add a whole new dimension of meaning to the skins game option.

In other EA news, the company announced the signing of home run prince Sammy Sosa for its upcoming Triple Play 2000 title. Don't expect any unauthorized video clips on this CD, because as National League pitchers discovered last year, it's hard to slip a fast one by Sammy.

Because we're in Chicago now, let's talk about Midtown Madness, a just announced game from Microsoft. You will be able to drive 10 cars through Chicago in the game, whizzing by familiar landmarks such as the Sears Tower and Wrigley Field. The game will ship with 5 play modes and will also include a multiplayer Cops and Robbers game mode. Look for the secret "Michael's Gone" game mode that lets you play as Scottie Pippen, Steve Kerr, or Luc Longley, where the object is to race out of Chicago to another NBA team as fast as you can.

Half-Life creator Valve, perhaps a bit surprised by the popularity of Starsiege: Tribes, announced that a straight port of Quake Team Fortress will be available for free download at the end of January. Valve also released a patch for Half-Life that included some new multiplayer maps as well as other improvements. We'll see a big competition in 1999 as Half-Life Team Fortress, Quake III Arena, Unreal Tournament, and Starsiege: Tribes compete for the hearts and minds of the FPS online gaming crowd, who tend to be vocal opinion leaders.

Impressions, part of the Sierra family, announced two new titles in development: Pharaoh and Civil War Generals 3. The Generals game is a continuation of its Civil War titles, and Pharaoh hopes to do for Egypt what Caesar III did for Rome. Pharaoh will allow players to build not only cities but monuments such as the Sphinx and the Pyramids--which, as all UFOlogists know, were really built by aliens. Man, I gotta cut back on those X-Files reruns!

Blizzard announced that StarCraft has sold 1.5 million copies, marking the third successive Blizzard title to hit that mark (Diablo and WarCraft 2 being the others). There's a long list of the good qualities that Blizzard games are noted for, but one aspect of the company's games that doesn't get discussed much is that you don't need a muscle machine to play its games. Diablo is playable on a 486-66 and StarCraft plays well on a low-level Pentium. Lower system requirements means the potential audience is instantly larger. Wouldn't it be nice if more companies followed Blizzard's lead and we didn't have to upgrade as often?

Here's my new motto: Don't ever trust beta patches. There are scattered reports of BioWare's beta patch for Baldur's Gate causing problems with save-games. The concept of releasing beta versions of patches is a bit ridiculous anyway, because "beta" is synonymous with "bugs" in the game industry, and patches are supposed to fix bugs. If you're brave, the patch is supposed to enhance pathfinding and changes a couple of spells as well as squash some bugs.

Ken Levine, producer of the upcoming System Shock 2, posted comments on the Internet to clarify how the user interface is going to work. "The complexity of the interface of Shock 1 was to some degree a barrier of entry to most players. One of our primary design goals on Shock 2 was to simplify the interface WITHOUT limiting its expressiveness. This was no easy task, believe you me. However, I can say without hesitation that the player can actually do MORE specific actions in Shock 2 than in Shock 1. To that, I mean they may: walk, run, lean, crouch, manage inventory, drop items, load different types of ammo, install softs, configure cybernetic implants, configure weapons, hack computers, repair tech items, research technology, etc." Not too shabby, but if Levine really wants to impress me, my System Shock 2 character will be able to break that newspaper string that rolled newspapers are tied with. Man, that is the world's toughest string!

"The monkey has landed" was the secret code that g.o.d. CEO Mike Wilson sent to the Ion Storm Eight, who resigned en masse to form a startup to work on a Kiss Psycho Circus game. Indeed, the monkey landed right on the backs of Ion Storm, which now has to carry about 900 million pounds of bad publicity. This was Wilson's signal that an important agreement between Ion and g.o.d. releasing any side from any claims, present or future, had been signed. Once that agreement was in place, the Ion Eight tendered their resignations. Point your browsers to the Dallas Observer Web site if you want to read their excellent, if controversial, article.

In the meantime, here are just a few highlights from the Dallas Observer piece: Ion Storm has gone through $26 million in money from Eidos and continues to spend at a nice $900,000 per month clip, and in all this time has produced only one game, Dominion. Former male stripper and current Ion Storm CEO Todd Porter expects both Daikatana and Tom Hall's Anachronox to sell 2.5 million copies each. Those are huge numbers that only a few games ever hit (StarCraft just hit the 1.5 million mark, for example). Coincidentally, these games need to sell about 2.5 million copies for Eidos and Ion to recoup their expenses. Originally Ion projected Daikatana to sell fewer than 200,000 copies.

This was perhaps Todd Porter's biggest blunder: Ion Storm turned a sure financial winner into a loss with Dominion. They were guaranteed $3 million from Eidos for the title, and Compaq wanted to bundle it with its new computers, which would have netted Ion another $1.5 million. Even though Ion overpaid when it purchased Dominion for $1.5 million from 7th Level, if the company would have contained development costs and taken the Compaq deal, it would have made a very nice profit. Instead Porter squashed the Compaq deal thinking it would cannibalize sales of Dominion, which he was certain would be a "top 10" title. Ion managed to fumble with the development of the game until it drove up costs to more than $3 million. When it was finally released, Dominion was a sales disaster.

"The subpoena has landed." This past weekend Ion Storm's lawyers subpoenaed Dallas Observer staff writer Christine Biederman over her story about Ion. Biederman was nonchalant about the subpoena and characterized it as "basic press harassment." The Dallas Observer's official reaction was noted in a flip response it titled "Poop Storm," and ended with this amusing and possibly prophetic comment: "Lawyers for both parties are still working out what Biederman will eventually reveal about her sources. (Hint: not much.) But we'll give our lawyers some money. Ion Storm will give their lawyers some of their investors' money--and while this thing works itself out, the Observer will continue to publish. Chances are, the same thing can't be said about Ion Storm."

Be sure to send your news and rumors my way!

During the day, Mark Asher is a technical writer/marketing person. But get him outside of work and he's an avid gamer and writer. Game Spin is his weekly examination of the news in the gaming industry, as well as a collection of his own insights.