The Introduction to "The Clone Alliance."

After reading emaster's post about my getting my dates wrong on the publication date for The Clone Alliance, I asked Anne, my editor, if I could post the introduction from the book. She said yes.

So, thank you, emaster. You have inspired me to post this sneak peek:

THE CLONE ALLIANCE
By Steven L. Kent

INTRODUCTION

I held the grenade in my left hand and fingered the pin with my right. I stood in the shadow-filled belly of a military transport. They called this the kettle. You could cram 100 Marines into a transport like this, but I was alone… almost alone. Ray Freeman, my partner, lay unconsciouson the bench that ran along the wall.

A tough bird like this transport would survive the grenade. The blast would not do the ship much good, however. The shrapnel would shred cables and piping. The force of the explosion would dent the walls, but the shell would remain intact. The insulation around the fuel tank would protect it from the explosion. The thick bulkheads around the cockpit were made to withstand a lot more than a grenade.

Ray and I, on the other hand, would be nothing more than juice splashed along the walls. They would identify us by our DNA and wash us out with a hose.

If he were conscious, Ray would want me to pull the pin. He would probably shoot me and pull the pin himself if he saw me hesitating. That was our agreement. “No going back.” “No slow death.” I would have given anything to be able to pull that pin.

Ray would have put an end to this, no doubt about it. But Ray was a natural-born. I was a military clone. Most of my thoughts were my own, but some of my psyche was hardwired into my brain through neural programming. I always knew about the violence that was programmed into me. They built me to kill. What I never realized was that they also programmed my kind to survive.

If I pulled the pin, I would die in an instant. I wanted that. If I turned the transport around, I would starve on the long flight back to Little Man. If Ray woke up, he would shoot me. I wouldn’t mind dying, but I didn’t want him to think that I lost my nerve when it came time to pull the pin.

I didn’t even need the grenade. If I opened the hatch, we would get sucked out to space. Without protective suits our bodies would burst. Just press the button…
But I couldn’t make myself do it. Could not pull the pin, could not press the button. Programming. Sliding doors don’t swing. Mathematical engines don’t spell words. Liberator clones do not kill themselves.

So I would try to fly this bird back to Little Man and take the slow death instead. I had one week’s worth of food, six week’s worth of travel, and a ship that had been taken well beyond its limits more than a month ago.

On the bright side, maybe Ray would wake up and shoot me.

Obituary is one of the sadder duties of journalism.

In an interview with GameDaily, Nintendo's Perrin Kaplan said that Nintendo has stopped making GameCube. The company has stopped making games for GameCube as well. I will admit it. I liked GameCube, but I am not sad to see this rather impressive console put out of its misery. This was the little system that could, and it deserves to go out with whatever little dignity it has left.

GameCube began life with three strikes against it--its purple case, its lunchbox handle, and its lack of DVD playback. At a time when mainstream gamers were crowding out nerdy old-time players like me, GameCube was unabashedly old fashioned. It did not look like a stereo component or have a futuristic green tint. It looked like the kind of machine on which you might play a game about a plumber saving the world. Cool? Not in the slightest. But those strikes were not what shut GameCube down.

There are those who will say that it was the lack of software that did GameCube in. Ultimately, I think this is true, but I will get to that in a moment. First though, it should be pointed out that GameCube had it rough from birth.

I was in Japan for the launch of GameCube. I was also in Japan one year earlier for the launch of PlayStation 2 and a few months earlier for the launch of Game Boy Advance. The crowds that assembled for PS2 were epic. I still remember thousands of people waiting in line in front of a Laox store that only had a few hundred units. I remember people waiting outside stores for days. The climate was chaotic.

Not only did every store sell out, they sold out before they technically opened. In the middle of the night, most stores opened to hand out inventory to people who had pre-purchased their systems. The few stores that sold that first shipment of PS2s on a first-come basis opened at 6:00 am so as not to cause traffic problems. By 8:00 am, the entire shooting match was over and Akihabara closed again until its standard 10:00 am opening hour.

Things were less chaotic for Game Boy Advance. The lines were smaller. Every store around Akihabara sold entire inventory by mid day, but you could still find a small supply of GBAs in department stores around town.

That was not the case with GameCube. For one reason or another, Japan showed no interest in this system at launch. Maybe it was the lack of a Mario game. Maybe it was the lack of advertising.

In America, where gamers were losing interest in adventure games and turning to Grand Theft Auto, Nintendo's little purple console was no match for Xbox and PlayStation 2. It did not help that Nintendo only released one Mario Adventure for GameCube, and not a very good one at that. Personally, I think they should have replaced Mario with a sheik character and called the game Doki Doki Sunshine... but I digress. Nintendo gave us enough Mario sports games and Mario Party games to fill our footlockers, but only one Super Smash Bros.

Too bad. GameCube was a great piece of engineering. It had a great controller. With PS2 and Xbox controllers, the buttons are mostly identical. Lose your grip during a games and you have to peek to get your fingers on the right buttons. With GameCube's layout, you NEVER needed to peek. GameCube was less expensive and more than adequate in the power department.

It could have been a contender.

So how did I do on my console sales predictions?

On October 6, I posted the "Today Let's Talk Video Games" story on my blog. Boiled down, here is what I said:

* Microsoft will win the holiday next gen battl because it will have the most hardware to sell.
* Microsoft will have more good games.
* Microsoft would have an even larger lead over PS3 and Wii after the holidays.
* Nintendo and Sony will have hundreds of thousands of units, not millions.
(I retracted Nintendo the very next day but felt I should bring this up for full disclosure)
* Nintendo and Sony would sell out on all hardware.
* That Nintendo looked stronger than Sony despite the inflated price of Wii.
* That I had questions about Nintendo's ability to properly support the Wii controller.
* That I have questions as to whether Nintendo will support Wii with sufficient games.
* That I have significant doubts about the viability of Blu-Ray.

A lot of people were offended when I used the analogy of an old friend with a drinking problem to describe my feelings about Nintendo. (All I can say is, you should have seen the analogy I had originally intended to use...)

Now that the holidays are over, it is no secret that PS3 came in third place with approximately 1.2 million consoles sold. (For the record, Sony led console sales with PlayStation 2, but PS2 is not a next gen system.) Nintendo came in second with 1.7 million Wiis sold. Not quite the multiple millions people expected Nintendo to ship, but everything the Kyoto giant brought to sell was sold in an instant.

Microsoft stumbled into the holidays with 4 million consoles sold and finished up with 6 million units in American homes. Microsoft sold 1.1 million 360s in December alone and gained another 500,000 units over its closest competitor. Despite the nearly one-to-one sales ratio of Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princesses to Wiis, Gears of War was still the biggest game of the holidays. More than 3 million copies of that game have been sold worldwide.

Looking back at the holidays, most people agree that Gears of War was a phenomenal game. People raved about Resistance on PS3. I loved Twilight Princess. Beyond Wii Sports, Twilight Princess, and Rayman, I have not seen anything particularly interesting on Wii. WarioWare is not dazzling and the only good thing about WiiPlay is the extra controller that comes in the box. I am still willing to have my doubts about Nintendo's ability to support the Wii with enough great games proven wrong. In fact, I hope they are proven wrong, and soon. For those of you who disagree with me about WiiPlay, I apologize. I guess, if you like WiiPlay, you should be quite happy with the Wii line up from here on out.

For those of you, who, like me. are waiting to be dazzled by Super Mario Galaxy, Metroid, and Super Smash Bros., let’s hope Nintendo delivers. Nintendo is a company that can deliver big time...

As to my comments about the price of Wii being inflated, I stand by that comment. I checked with analyst Richard Doherty, chief researcher at Envisioneering. He places the price of the hardware at about "one half of retail."

And now to Sony. I understand Sony has declared Blu-Ray the winner of the holiday digital format war. I will admit, if I had to abandon DVD in favor of some new format, Sony's exclusive lock on Casino Royale would be a deciding factor. But I do not need to buy into a new format. DVD is alive and well and as I understand it, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sales did not make up so much as a pimple on the overall posterior of movies sales for the holidays overall.

Sony declaring Blu-Ray the holiday winner reminds me a bit of Andy Kaufman declaring himself the World Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion. You can call yourself anything you want, it doesn't mean anything. The battle between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD is just beginning, and I have seen nothing to suggest that either of them possess any staying power.

As to PS3, Sony certainly seems to have solved its inventory prolems early on. Walking into any GameStop or Fred Meyer store, I have a 50/50 shot of finding PS3s in stock and on the shelves. That is not the case with Wii.

Typically, hot new systems are just about sold out through March. Congrats to Sony for finding a solution.

The thing is, this early lead matters. EA has already announced that it is stepping up its Wii support. What happens now is that game designers look at the install bases and say, "Hmmm, we might be able to sell 6 million copies of our game if we release it for Xbox 360. If we concentrate on PS3 we might sell 1.5 million or 2 million if we go Wii."

In console wars, having a lead comes with its own inertia. That was why the gap between PS2 and Xbox/GameCube kept growing. That was why the original PlayStation continued to build such a significant lead as well. The folks at Sony used to brag about that phenomenon, now I suspect they pretend it doesn't happen.

Go figure.