This man, known only as Takase, has been working on this PC game all by himself since the late 90s. We saw this get mentioned as recently as last month on GameSetWatch, but it completely slipped our minds.

To make up for it, here’s a link to download the game, if you haven’t yet seen Robo-Valjean avenge the mistreatment of his human peasant buddies. (The download will start automatically)

Metafuture infobit: It’s called Arm Joe because in Japan, Les Misérables is called Ah, Mujou (”Ah, Cruelty”).

Details are light, except for the promise of two new classes, the Paragon (a “paladin” “guardian angel of the Elonian people”) and the Dervish (a “dual-wielding paladin” “scythe-wielding holy warrior”— whirling skill cooldown time still under press embargo).

Mark Rein is the vice president of Epic Games. His job is to get people to license the Unreal Engine. He goes about this by visiting conferences and sounding so out of touch that people will think the Unreal Engine must be really good to keep Epic in business with Mark on the team.

His latest trip was to England, where he kicked things off by announcing that “very little of [the episodic business model] makes any actual sense.”

He apparently didn’t elaborate on which parts of it do make sense— Metafuture guesses one part might be the statistics for Half-Life 2: Episode One, which show the game has been launched close to 1.5 million times so far.

Mark also told his audience that he hates Intel— their graphics chips are what’s really killing the PC gaming market. The second part about the PC games market getting killed, I can confirm that’s definitely true— I was at PC-only game developer Ensemble Studios on Monday and, well, the queso dip for their catered chicken and steak fajita lunch was frankly overspiced. And plastic forks and knives! I really needed to slap Bruce Shelley down, but I felt a little sorry for this captain of a sinking ship. Plus, one of his over a hundred employees probably would have taken me down eventually— probably somewhere between the studio’s private elevator and the elevators that could take me to the first floor of the building.

Getting back to the problem with Intel: according to Mark, it’s that they’re selling these wonderless graphics chips for $5 cheaper than a gaming chip would cost the hardware manufacturers. Mark can’t understand why companies would want to save a lousy five dollars on each the millions of computers they sell instead of supporting the games industry. I’m pretty sure this means he would also be completely OK with just giving Metafuture a mere ten cents for each copy of Gears of War that sells, because that’s just a lousy ten cents. You can just send a PDF of that contract via email, Mark.

Another Metafuture Hooray goes to GameSpot for still not having the file. I guess the weekend came a little early for El Juegopunto.

If you want the patch, you’re going to have to stand in line at Fileplanet or look for it on your favorite “click here then here then here then here oops server queue is full, thanks for the CPM-rate-depressing ad views” site.

• The central tenet of the Cherokee tribe is, as noted by the opening voice-over of the Prey demo, that “the world is full of stories, and from time to time they permit themselves to be told.” The Cherokee are proud of their centuries of peaceful and harmonious co-existence with the obstinate herds of story in their lands. In the Cherokee tongue, the story that tells of a brave single-handedly stopping an invasion is known as a “hacknee”.
• The Cherokee talk to themselves almost all the time, to the point where psychiatrists now have a separate DSM classification for their unique predilection for schizotypal personality disorder.

  

  Here we see Prey’s actually-named-Tommy-Hawk protagonist, Tommy Hawk, looking in the bathroom mirror of the bar his girlfriend owns and being sarcastic with himself about being scared of women. That may seem somewhat whiny and nebbishy, but being a total dipshit is the traditional Cherokee hero’s tragic flaw. For instance, the great Cherokee hero Kanati, also known as “The Luckiest Hunter”, was so perplexed by the concept of vaginas and the people who own them that he ended up marrying an ear of corn.

• The Cherokee, like all Native Americans, love nothing more than drinking themselves into a stupor whenever they can sell enough turquoise to buy booze.

  

  Pictured above: This is the very first thing Tommy’s grandpa does after giving him a prophetic warning that he will need to embrace his Cherokee heritage to survive.

• The Cherokee are from what is now the southeastern United States, namely Tennessee, Georgia, and the Carolinas. Here is a screenshot of the spirit lands of the Cherokee, where Tommy goes after dying.

  

  This is, as grandpa says, the ancient land of the Cherokee forefathers, before the white man came and filled in all the canyons and replaced the desert climate with the more temperate and less arid conditions the region is known for today.

• A Cherokee brave, even those that reject their heritage like Tommy, can instantly learn the ability to “spirit walk”, which looks cool and makes you immortal.

  

  All that is required is for your mystical dead grandpa to tell you to “let your spirit carry you where your body cannot pass”, which you can simulate by pressing the ‘E’ key. For unknown reasons the Cherokee saved this secret specifically for the case of alien invasion, giving the Trail of Tears and the smallpox stuff a pass. Luckily Tommy is not smart enough to think about this, because it would probably make him hate being a Cherokee even more.

  Also pictured: a Cherokee “spirit guide” in the form of a hawk. Cherokee spirit guides have all played Quake IV, and thus have the ability to translate alien gibberish on a computer screen just by sitting on the top of it.

Though 3D Realms has now got to take some of the blame for this continuing, because George “The Decider” Broussard himself can’t even be bothered to know for sure what the deal is. Or maybe he really does, and the plan is to let this story ride until even Take-Two starts thinking that they owe 3D Realms $4.25 million when Duke ships. Naw, that’s too clever, or at least too not-cribbed-from-a-Bruce-Campbell-or-other-iconic-gamer-movie.

And they’re going to do it with all Blizzard franchises. Which really means Starcraft and Diablo.

Blizzard, on the other hand, denies vehemently that they are working on any such project.

Analysis: If you want to work on World of Starcraft, send your application to Vivendi.

Maybe not.

But regardless, what ATI and Havok are working on— doing physics simulation acceleration through an extra graphics card in SLI with the main card— is a way better idea than doing it through a physics-only card, because then games that aren’t based on wiggly cadavers and exploding crate mountains can use the second video card as, well, a second video card.

The most interesting part of the interview says that this SLI solution is more capable than even unloading physics onto a dual-CPU machine, even when the CPUs are in turn dual-core. We’ll see if that’s marketing fast-talk or not.

Read – Havok FX/ATI Interview [Firing Squad]