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Numbers are fun: But charts are amazing

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Market capitalization is a measure of what investors think a company is worth, so it basically represents size. In order to get a little perspective on the relative size of some of the companies with which we, as gamers, are most familiar, I have thrown together the below chart.

As with all thrown together financial charts it has its shortcomings. Private companies, such as Bioware, SNK Playmore and Treasure cannot be included since they are not required to reveal their size and there is no market to determine it. Also, (and this may come as a shock to some of you) several of these companies are Japanese. This means that in addition to their market cap changing day to day based on price changes, when expressed in US Dollars, they change with foreign exchange rates as well.

I have also included a few other relevant companies. Exxon Mobil is the largest company in the United States (probably the world, I was a bit too lazy to check). →  Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Bore me and I sleep.

Mindlessness in games

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I read a good article recently on the heavy use of the word “gameplay” in games journalism. Agree with it or not, the author makes a good point; there is no equivalent word in any other industry jargon. Most sentences that use the word gameplay can be rewritten in some form to create something more descriptive and authoritative. It got me thinking about another mainstay of the lingo that has been bothering me as of late – “mindless”.

The word is used all too often, so much so that I can’t even generalize about whether it is usually in a pejorative or positive sense. According to my scouring of IGN, reviewers and gamers find the following games to be “mindless”:

Tomb Raider Legend
Rainbow Six Vegas
Sonic Riders
Resident Evil 4
Trigger Man
Ninety Nine Nights
Both Half Lifes
Painkiller
Call of Duty 3
Tekken Tag Tournament

For the sake of discussion, let’s just say this (very partial) list is a mix of terrible, average, and a few Game of the Year winners. →  SaGa Frontier Readmastered

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 4.20.07

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Sony’s Q2 release schedule
Between the PS3 and Wii’s upcoming releases, I wish I had a 360. Though some (Matt) would disagree, it looks like adopting a next gen system early is a bad move. After Paper Mario there’s nothing I want to play on the Wii, at least nothing at the current going rates of titles. Maybe I’d pick up Metal Slug for $30, Excite Truck for $25 and only ask to be paid $20 to take Wii Play.

At least my stupid investment only cost $250 and there are plenty of good Virtual Console games to play. If you’re one of the few rich people with a PS3, look on the bright side — you’ll be able to download Joust soon.

New Wii/DS studio CEO speaks
I like what co-founder of Jet Black Games has to say:

“With game team sizes at the time already easily exceeding 100 or even 200 people, it seemed like this might be the last opportunity to work in a smaller, more creative environment… given our company’s values and goals, it was natural that we align ourselves with Nintendo.” →  Holy crap, show me more!

Numbers are fun: Super awesome stock update

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While at work today, and trying to justify thinking about video games, I became curious about the recent performance of the three companies gamers (probably) follow most closely. Thus you now get to read a rundown of how Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo stock has performed since the launches of the 360, PS3 and Wii respectively. But first a few caveats. With nothing besides perception to back this up, I’m going to say that Wii sales are more important to Nintendo than either of the other consoles are to the their companies. While I’m not sure, and I would be willing to listen to arguments to the contrary, I would say Microsoft is least reliant on its games division, but Sony obviously has diverse business interests as well. This means that stock moves could have nothing to do with game sales, and I am completely spinning my wheels. Maybe it will be a fun ride anyway.

In any event, on to the stats. →  When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a game.

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 4.13.07

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Bethesda buys Fallout IP
Anyone who thinks a series can change developers and still be the same series is encouraged to pay me to write the fourth Lord of the Rings book.

Cheap PS3 discontinued
No more 20 gig harddrive PS3. This makes some sort of sense because Sony loses more on each of the 20 gig sold than on the 60 gig. But it also doesn’t make other kinds of sense. Specifically, the “release two models for absolutely no reason,” and “eliminate the cheaper model because the console is too expensive in the first place” kinds of sense.

To make matters more hilarious, Sony is considering releasing a third model of the PS3. Some magical hardware that could play PS3 games (which are on Blu Ray) but not come with a Blu Ray player was what I was hoping for, despite the obvious impossibility. A 90 gig PS3 that will no doubt retail for around $700 was what Sony has in mind, though. →  50 Cent: Readproof

Shenmue 3 would rock your Wii

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Shenmue failed for a number of reasons. I’d argue it was too awesome for normal people, but others insist it was slow-going, chock full of stupid “That day it rained…” plot, and ultimately boring. The Shenmue games also cost huge amounts of money to develop – many reports approximated a cost of $20 million (Wikipedia simultaneously claims $20 and $70 million) and the first game in the series was supposedly entered into the Guinness Book of World Records for being the most expensive game that had been yet been produced.

Sega would presumably allow development of Shenmue 3 if it weren’t such a huge risk. A costly game that sells poorly is never an attractive prospect to accountants. Deciding the MMO format may make them a profit, Sega has dashed hopes of Shenmue 3. Shenmue Online, if it is ever released, will likely not be what rabid Shenmue fans want. And when Shenmue Online also bombs, it will likely signal the end of the series altogether. →  Read or die.

Console Predictions from a Gamer

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After what felt like three bajillion years (which seemed to be filled with pointless bickering), all three systems are finally out on the market, waiting for whomever wants to jump into the next-generation console war. The last few months have been a very telling period for gaming, with the PS3 not performing as well as some would hope, and Nintendo’s new console coming completely out of nowhere with some amazing numbers, especially considering it’s coming off the heels of possibly the worst performing Nintendo console ever, the GameCube. With that in mind, we can get into the nitty gritty: the future. What’s in store for each player in the console war? We can’t say for sure exactly, but we can have fun predicting.

Xbox 360: In a startling revelation that I’ve found while roaming this clogged series of tubes, many people who were on the fence about the 360 went straight for it the moment the PS3 stumbled coming out of the gate last November. →  Ask not what this post can do for you - ask what you can do for this post.

The Worlds of Power book series

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Strange as it may seem, video games and reading have always been closely related in my mind. When I was four years old, I would watch my older brother play RPGs and other text-heavy games. After a year or so of observation, I could more or less understand what was going on. Eventually, I figured out that letters written on paper were the same as those shown in Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy, and thus I “learned” to read all at once (naturally, my kindergarten teacher took the credit).

Astonishingly, terrible game cover art is also terrible book cover art.

Back in the NES era, there were a lot of random game-related paraphernalia. Nintendo had merchandising on its side, and Super Mario towels, sheets, lunchboxes, etc. abounded. All well and good, but a more interesting event during this time was the publishing of the Worlds of Power series of short novels.

Again, this was during the time of the NES. Action and even adventure games didn’t have much memory space for plot, and even the instruction manuals were too short to have more than a brief blurb about why you’re liberating an island nation or killing a vampire. →  Jesus: Readful Bio Monster

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 4.8.07

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Resident Evil games coming to Wii
Capcom loves to remake and rerelease Resident Evils. Resident Evil 1 was released first on the PS1, then the Saturn, and PC, then the director’s cut came out on the PS1. This was followed by the remake for Gamecube and the slightly modified Deadly Silence version for the DS. Somewhere in there a mobile phone game was released, but at least Capcom had the sense to scrap a GBC version. Some PS1 games don’t look good on an NES — who knew?

Good news for people who have only played this game eight times — the Umbrella Chronicles game coming to the Wii looks very much like a recreation of the first game (with some of the second thrown in to placate whiners like me). This version drastically changes the gameplay, though. Prepare for an on-rails shooter RE style. Which may be very similar to all the other RE light gun games I never played. →  Lose belly fat now!

Best Game Ever / Review – Dragon’s Trap / Curse

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It’s somewhat bizarre that my normally useless extensive knowledge of the Sega Master System would come in handy because a Turbo Grafix 16 game is released on the Wii. But despite the comical circuitousness, I happen to know a thing or two about Dragon’s Curse. You see, as far as Master System games go, this game is anything but obscure. It’s actually so beloved that a great Master System emulator is named after the game.

In an attempt to completely confuse America as revenge for dropping atomic bombs on them, Japan has seen it fit to rename the game called Dragon’s Trap (Master System) for release on the TG16, where it would be called Dragon’s Curse. That wouldn’t be very good retaliation, though, considering the cancer rates are still abnormally high in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. So to make things harder, this game is also known in the states as Wonder Boy 3 the Dragon’s Trap, or Monster World 2.

OK, Wonder Boy 2 for the Master System is actually Monster Land 1, though it’s called Monster World 1 in Japan. →  Postlanser: Heritage of Read