sent to 422 people this week, it's the .… ------------------------- ANIMORPHS ~ weekly ~ NEWSLETTER ------------------------- ISSUE #117 WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 24, 2000 <HI EVERYONE!> Last week of September coming up! But this past week, I was seriously thinking of never going on the internet again and stopping my newsletter for good. See, my computer went wacko (again) and I’m just so fed up with it. As it seems, I’m always the one who does something when the computer fails. But I’ve decided I’m not letting you down by not sending AW, so I’m still going to be sending the newsletter every weekend as I have been for the past two years! &&&&&&&&& AW FORUM &&&&&&&&& Last week's forum: if you have the Animorphs PC game, what’s your review of it? Only one. “Well, the game is "at" my house, but I have to wait 3 months to get it. As in Hanukkah. That really sucks, doesn't it? But, the demo was cool, so the game has to be, too.” - Andrew Check out the news for tons more info of the Animorphs games! This week's forum question is: what other things should the Animorphs be able to morph into besides animals? %%%%%%% AW POLL %%%%%%% Last week's poll question was: Do you think what happened in #45 was too early to happen in the series or just at the right time? Too early 2 Just right 3 Don’t know 1 This week's poll question is: would you think it would be better if the Official Site was more like Morphz (with a message board and news on books way in the future)? Please send in your poll response to me at aw_newsletter@hotmail.com with "poll" as the subject. Thanks! ====== NEWS ====== Lots of great news this week! - Here’s an exclusive sample chapter of The Ellimist Chronicles thanks to Willie! The chapter is found in the back of book #46! The Ellimist Chronicles have 29 chapters and this one is chapter 29, however, it does NOT give anything away from the rest of the book! Also, Jeff says an Animorph member makes a surprise appearance in the book! I don't know how long I floated through the eerie, brilliant, wondrous landscape of pure energy and purest beauty. Time was for other creatures. Time's arrow did not carry me along with it. I knew nothing of this. I was a mere creature, for all my multitudes, for all my powers I was, after all, a mere mortal creature. It was as if one of the primitive Andalites I'd known had suddenly been thrust into the command center of a starship. I was an ignorant savage. An extreme primitive. But I knew this: as simple and primitive as I was, I could literally touch and move the vibrating lines of space-time. Was I grown extremely big? Or had I shrunk to submolecular size? Size meant nothing. There was no size in this place. I lived, and that was all I knew. I was alive without form, without sinapses to fire, without food to devour, without limbs to control. I saw without eyes and tasted without tongue and moved without wings or pads or engines to move me. This I knew. And I knew one other thing as well, a lesson hard-learned from millenia of war: my foe would find me. An absurdly rare event, a cosmic coincidence had fashioned me. The odds? The odds were billions to one, trillions to one, incalculable. But those were the odds of this thing happening once. The odds of it happening again were great. Crayak learned. Crayak watched. Once I revealed myself to him, once I acted in such a way as to show myself, Crayak would find the way to follow me here. And as I was unchanged in mind and morality, so he would be unchanged. Carefully, frightened at last into true humility, I began to study this new environment. I found I could see into the real world, the events and peoples that made up these space-time strands. They seemed to rise and mature and age and fall in the blink of an eye, and as I watched and studied and learned I knew that hundreds of thousands and finally millions of years were passing in real space. I saw Crayak out there, still at his evil work. I saw lines go dark, unravel, coil up into nothingness as he massacred planets. Billions of lives become nothingness. I had planted a great deal of life, and my Pemalites still lived to spread more, but the tide was turning once more in Crayak's favor. At last, knowing I had so much more still to learn, knowing my own deep inadequacy, I struck back. Crayak entered a system of nine planets orbiting a medium yellow star. Two of the worlds, a red planet and a blue, were populated. The red planet was already doomed, its atmosphere was oozing away and there Crayak could do no real harm there. But the blue planet teemed with life. The dominant species type were huge, brutish beasts in a fantastic array of forms. Giant, slow moving plant eaters and violent, rapacious killers with tearing teeth and deadly talons. There was intelligence there, but no sentience, I could see it so clearly. Not in the great, domineering brutes, but in a handful of small, swift, fur-bearing prey animals did the future of this world lie. They had only to be left alone and in forty or sixty million years there would emerge a great people. Crayak saw none of this, he saw only that there was life there. He aimed his weapons on the blue planet and fired and I drew gently on the fabric of space-time and his weapons struck nothing. The planet was gone, halfway around its orbit. He tried again, and each time I applied my crude but powerful countermeasures. And then, in confusion, Crayak withdrew to consider. I knew he would be with me soon. "So here you are, Ellimist." "I've been expecting you, Crayak." He appeared to me as he always had. As a dark monster. I knew how I appeared to him: I had mastered the simple trick of projecting myself in whatever disguise suited me best. I appeared to him as a simple Ketran. "Your advantage is gone, Ellimist." "We are equals now," I agreed. "You can no longer harm me personally. You understand that?" "I cannot harm you, Ellimist, but I can hurt you. I can kill the things you love." "You can try, Crayak. But in the end you are a fool. Do you not see that everything you do I can undo? You can slaughter and I can reverse time itself to restore life. But I tell you this: If we carry on our war inside the bowels of space-time we will end by collapsing this universe and killing ourselves as well as everything in it." "It's a pointless game that has no winner," Crayak admitted. "But what else is there for the two of us?" "We could sit back and watch. We could admire the advance of evolution." "Unacceptable. I would choose my own destruction over that. To live all of eternity as a passive observer? There must be a game. If there is no game there is nothing for me." "Then let us play a game, Crayak." "There will have to be rules." "Yes, there will have to be rules." "And a winner?" "Yes, that too, though it will take millions of years." Crayak smiled his hideous smile. "I'm not going anywhere." "Then come," I said, "let us play the final game." - Lots of title news this week! BIG thanks to RYA (http://rya.virtualave.net/anihome.htm), they have the scoop of the title to #51! The title is “The Absolute”. If you don’t remember Marco morphs a duck on the cover and the book is about Visser One hard working with the army and comes out February 2001! Jeff from Morphz has an interesting story about the title to #51, “there was a small movement trying to get it changed to The Consequence, but, unfortunately, that wouldn't fit on the cover.” Jeff also says #50 should be called The Loss, and #51 The Consequence. - Thanks to Nothlit, Orson and David Mattingly are in the inner cover of #46: “If you look VERY close, you can just read "CAPT DAVID MATTINGLY CAPT ORSON" on the side of the fighter plane in the foreground.” - This review of the Animorphs Playstation game is an exclusive thanks to MorphBoy12. The review has some spoilers and they will be warned: “Well, there's a lot of things to say about the new Animorphs Playstation game -- most bad, very few good. I'll start with the good things first. Well, if you think about it, at least there IS an Animorphs game. There's the morphing, the aliens, and stuff. The graphics are suprisingly good, showing detail in the scenery and beginning, ending, and game over little movies. The background music and their voices are really good. The game's really cheap compared to other new PSX games, which are usually 50 bucks, only $30. That's the good part... There's a lot of things that they could have (and should have) done to make it a lot better. The gameplay is terrible. It's really boring, and it's not that difficult. I beat it in less than a day. They should have made the characters so much better. When they morph into animals, there's blue, yellow, and pink smoke with like these sparkle swirls surrounding them. They go behind it for a second and POOF! The smoke is gone and suddenly they're a bear. There should have been a ton more morphs. There's 7: Tiger (Jake), Bear (Rachel), Wolf (Cassie), Rhino (Marco), Dolphin (all), Dragonfly (all), and Bat (all). Those are supposed to be their base morphs. I mean, come on. Marco morphed into a Rhino, what, 2 times in the books? And that's his base morph? Jeez. Really inaccurate if you ask me. And what about the 20+ morphs they said were going to be available to us, huh? You don't get to choose when you want to morph. You morph when you get close to an alien to battle, which is like 3, maybe 4 times on each level. There is no challenge in it whatsoever. If you know what Gedds are, you know that they're weak, clumsy, and worthless. I guess that doesn't apply to the game. At the beginning of the Gardens game there's 2 that you can barely get passed. They are HARD! The next hardest aliens are the Skrit (spelled Skirt in the game). They're supposed to be a little better than Gedds. WARNING, SPOILER! On the last level, "The Finale", who do you think you fight? Visser Three in maybe a Lerdethak morph like they said? Or a different morph? Or as himself? Nope. You don't even fight him. You fight this big robot. Nothing else. Ax kills Visser Three. There's quite a few glitches in it, like you fall through tree branches on the Gardens level, and in the city, you ride on these platforms that stop for a few seconds then float between the two platforms. SPOILER OVER! They messed up there. They really should have made the game a lot longer with more characters. Well, I was really depressed after I bought the game. Here I thought the game was going to be really good, but it wasn't at all. I thought it really sucked. I give this game probably a 4 out of 10. Gameplay: 2 Audio: 7 Graphics: 5 Action: 2 I don't recommend you buy this game. If you really want to play it to see how it is, rent it. Then, if you REALLY like it, buy it, but I don't see why you would. I'm just hoping that, if they make a Harry Potter PSX game, it isn't made by the people that made this.” More PlayStation game news! Thanks to GameShark.com, we now have cheat codes for the PlayStation, Shattered Reality game! Here are those codes: Infinite Health: 801ee8f40005 Infinite Lives: 801ebfcc0063 Infinite Coins: 801dd48c0063 Stop Timer: 801dd48800a5 Infinite Turbo: 801dd088003c Unlock All Levels: 801ebfd00008 GameShark also says that in Animal Mode, Cassie/Wolf is the best to use because she is too small to get hit. Also, the Official Site ITSELF has a demo of the computer game to download! http://www.scholastic.com/animorphs/games/pc/downloads/ - Word all over the internet has said Animorphs fans have bought and read #46. I still don’t have it, but I may be getting it this week and I’m more than half way done “Goblet of Fire.” +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ ON THE BOOK CHARTS +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ Amazing though, #45 is off the charts and there are no new books on the charts. <><><><><><><><><><><><> WEB PAGE OF THE WEEK <><><><><><><><><><><><> The Andalite War-Council http://fangor.cjb.net/ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ CLOSING REMARKS ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Thanks for reading this week’s issue! Send your comments, forum, polls and any information to me at aw_newsletter@hotmail.com Thanks again and see 'ya next week! - Guillermo <QUOTE OF THE WEEK> “How art thou out of breath, when thou hast breath to say to me that thou art out of breath?” - Juliet from “Romeo and Juliet” (2.5.33-34) ANIMORPHS WEEKLY NEWSLETTER #117 is copyright (c) 2000 by Guillermo Larocca (aw_newsletter@hotmail.com), NO NEWS SHOULD BE POSTED ON ANY ANIMORPHS WEB SITE OR NEWSLETTER WITHOUT GIVING ANIMORPHS WEEKLY PROPER CREDIT.