Bug Island

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 10.5.07

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Dream team created to make MMO
One of the three guys behind Fallout and 17 ex-Blizzard guys all in one development team? You know these are going to be amazingly well crafted fetch quests that change absolutely nothing in a static MMO world. And think of the grinding!

Halo 3 is the biggest event in human history
The release of Halo 3 makes John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald look like footnotes in history. The moon landing is dwarfed by Bungie’s newest game, which sold approximately thirty thousand times more than any other product ever created. There are now significantly more copies of Halo 3 than wheels, and just about the same number of grains of sand.

This game topped the charts in Japan last week, proving that in a tepid market environment an American game can actually sell well in the East. →  Read the rest

Why does the Wii have so many terrible games?

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I’m not particularly upset about Nintendo’s shift towards casual gamers. Wario Ware, Animal Crossing, and Mario Kart are all awesome series and if I need a second console to play long jRPGs then so be it. Even if expanding the market somehow eliminates niches that are occupied by Japanese RPG developers, which seems counterintuitive, there will still be more good games than I have time to play.

What upsets me about Nintendo is how they allow publishers to use the Wii as a toilet. Boogie could have easily been a good game but it seems EA just gave up halfway through development. Sega had an unknown (to me at least) developer work on their Alien Syndrome game. The best way to pay homage to an arcade classic and to revitalize a franchise is not by making a mediocre game. →  Read the rest