Twinity : Santa's sack and the Titty Twister

from the Ho Ho Ho it's Christmas dept.

Metaversum's Twinity crests 100,000 users this month and is laying on improvement after improvement, from cute Googlemaps inserts to help you navigate through the behemoth city to early testing of the city of London, Twinitized.


Friday this week, there are some shennanigans on inside Twinity, including a best outfit competition winners to be announced at the Titty Twister club, and you can celebrate Christmas at the Brandenburg Gate - also with a massive Virtual Tree - the biggest ever seen virtually? Currently? Outside Second Life? Who knows. Frohe Weihnachten.

Holiday spirit has arrived in Twinity and we want to celebrate with you! For nearly 700 years, the traditional German Christmas Market has endured as a fun holiday celebration where friends, family and strangers can meet and enjoy the “Weihnachtsstimmung” (Christmas spirit) together.

In Twinity, just like at traditional Christmas Markets, you can buy and give gifts to your virtual friends! Get fun holiday clothes and accessories for your avatar or Christmas trees for your virtual apartment! Bring your real-life Glühwein and we’ll sing Christmas carols together under the biggest virtual Christmas tree you’ve ever seen!

Author searches for sports metaphor in Schilling interview, punts.

from the Sounds like a tuning fork, smells like leather dept.

BigWorld licensee 38 Studios and the esteemed Schilling and Close team up in this interview with Gamesindustry.biz - titled 'A perfect pitch' - on the difficulties of protracted, long term undertakings like MMOs.

Q: Many developers with the financial clout of a company such as EA struggle to launch MMOs, how can a smaller company hope to compete in the same field?

Curt Schilling: It depends on your perspective. For the next two years until we launch our game we're competing with ourselves. I mean, we have to deliver internally and meet internal expectations. If you're a company with any kind of long-term vision the barriers, the goals, the hurdles you have to overcome are far more significant internally than they'll ever be externally.

If you stay focused on what it is you're trying to deliver and you are true to that focus and you have incredibly talented people you're going to create something special. I think the key behind any good product in any market is the passion and the investment that the company puts into the product. At the end of the day our goal is to provide the best user experience from product purchase to account creation, to game experience we can possibly create and we have incredibly talented people who have done that already.

Brett Close: Another piece of that are partnerships. What we're focusing on is building the game, there are things that we don't want to get caught up in… there are a number of areas that frankly we don't have any business being involved in and we're not going to and we will find partners that will help us with that. We have a number of conversations in play with very interesting partners who can help us…