Microsoft

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 6.18.07

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Sony announces 9,648,319 games by March 08
Unfortunately, they counted each individual household a game would end up in as a unique game. If you don’t count your copy of God of War 3 as a different game from my copy, then 145 or more PS3 titles are coming.

Sonic RPG on DS being developed by Bioware
Funny, whimsical RPGs can be cool. Mario’s Super Star Saga and the whole Paper Mario series attest to this. Cute, colorful cartoon characters in RPGs can hold their own, too. Kefka may look silly this day in age, but he is still insanely evil. So what is so horrendous about a Sonic RPG? I’m glad you asked.

Sonic is uninteresting in every possible way. Running fast makes for a subpar to decent action game (or awesome 2D platformer) but is not solid foundation to build a character on. He is blue, has an attitude, a bunch of irritating friends and a fat arch nemesis who might as well be Dr. →  SaGa Frontier Readmastered

Sony decides PS3 is making a comeback

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Offering no sales figures or other sales facts, Sony CEO declared, “All the production problems have been solved. We are making a comeback already.” It seems Sony has figured out how important image is and so they’ve decided to take it upon themselves to tell the media what their image is. It would not be at all shocking if the PS3 begins to make a comeback only because an article has printed that it is making a comeback. Microsoft should try this tactic with the Zune.

In other breaking news, videolamer’s popularity is growing beyond all expectations.

Behind the names of our favorite companies and consoles

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Gamers speak the names of companies and systems on a daily basis, but many of us don’t know what these words actually mean nor their origin. And so here is a list of many of the biggest companies and consoles and what information is openly known about their names. I speak absolutely no Japanese and have no new information to add to this planet, but I have not seen all this info neatly compiled in one spot before. Thanks to Japanmanship and others who had already done much research on the topic.

Companies


Microsoft – Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems created the microcomputer Altair 8800 and Bill Gates offered to implement BASIC on their system. Micro is either from the Micro in the MITS company name or the micro in microcomputer, or both. Either way, it’s not terribly exciting.


SONY – Despite ads that say otherwise, SONY does not stand for So New York. The name actually derives from the proud language of South America – Latin. →  Your right post comes off?

C4T4N!!!1!1!11one

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C4T4N!

This is not a review. You’ve played Catan and you love it. If you haven’t, you will. If you don’t there is something broken with the gamer inside of you and it needs to be fixed. Let me suggest an age old cure: Play Catan.

I spent Memorial Day settling Catan. A great time, to be sure. Fun was had, Catan was settled, achievements unlocked and a whole lot of settlements were built. What was not fun, however, was finding out that Microsoft’s xBox Live skill based matchmaking service is actually a portal to a goddamned other dimension; one whose petulant inhabitants do things that resemble settling Catan but interpret any reciprocal action as some sort of lurid farce and act on what seems to be merely impulse when entering any sort of communicative contract.

I expect infantile commentary in Gears. I just put a chainsaw through your crotch, call me a f4g and respawn. That makes sense. It can actually be quite enjoyable as at once you have a free license to respond in any manner you deem necessary and discover new and interesting ways to pronounce/emit/modify any manner of explicatives in an effort to question your opponent’s sexuality, virginity, parental living situation or general inability to reload the fucking gun. →  Welcome to read.

You down with DLC (Yeah you kno’ me!)

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Some rumblings from Valve promising that they won’t charge for extra content in their future games. I’m still trying to figure out what this means, or rather, what importance this has. New maps were provided for Team Fortress Classic by Valve in the past, and Half Life Deathmatch was a gift as well. All this announcement does is confirm they’re the same thing as always.

Or is it? Many gamers have mocked the announcement as being a bunch of baloney, pointing out that Epic said the same thing about Gears of War before Microsoft twisted their arm to twist our arms. Maybe Valve is afraid the same will occur to them. I’m also skeptical about whether this will actually hold true simply because of Valve’s practices over the years. Garry’s Mod was free until Valve scooped up the guy behind it and made it their own. Same with Day of Defeat and Counterstrike when they got the Source treatment. →  To be this lame takes ages.

Paranoid Identity Crisis!

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Fanboys unite! Constant squabbles echo among Nintendo, Sony, and Xbox loyalists, but the real battle is elsewhere. It’s a battle between the different ways people choose to spend their free time and their extra dollars. Games are a big and growing part of this battle and they have taken a bite out of that tasty aged 18-34 male demographic. Can games hold onto it? Do they even want to?

Nintendo has set itself the challenge of trying to hold onto some of gaming’s biggest loyalists while making appeals to nontraditional audiences like retirees. And it’s well known that Sony and Microsoft have had their eyes on a bigger prize ever since they stepped in the ring. They both want to eventually establish their brands and platforms for the mythical must-have TV set-top box. They want their names on the machine that will serve as the gateway to all forms of digital entertainment in the 21st Century. That’s why Microsoft is content with letting the Xbox brand not make a dollar until next year. →  Fine, but this article then no more.

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 5.14.07

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Starcraft 2 is coming
Golden Jew was wrong. He is hereby stripped of one hundredth of his massive pile of gold coins, crowns, and swords. I’ll give it back when the Starcraft MMO comes out in two years.

Rare to broaden 360s audience with all age friendly games
But also don’t rule out that they will make mature games, says Microsoft’s Peter Moore. They will or they won’t. They may and they may not. I’m glad Moore cleared that up.

Rare is fascinating because Microsoft seems to think Rare can change the Xbox brand image and because I have a theory that Nintendo makes their second parties what they are. On the first point, Rare will fail. Microsoft is taking the same attitude towards appealing to the mass market as they took when attempting to appeal to the Japanese — “one or two games should do it, now let’s sit back and wait for the money.” Shockingly, Blue Dragon didn’t sell seven million 360s in Japan, and Viva Piñata didn’t sell four million 360s to kids and grandparents. →  They’re reading her… and then they’re going to read me!

What are you blind, Halo 3 looks like shit

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I just love how mainstream media can tear our little industry a new one with their annoying, but effective “gatekeepers of information” mantra. Apparently reporters for the powerful Reuters news service were on hand for the private unveiling of Microsoft’s Halo 3 beta on Friday, and they immediately went for the graphics jugular with their story.

Third sentence in, “the graphics could use some work.” Now, I don’t argue that fact (which was quoted from a journalist from evilavatar). If we compare all the footage and screenshots for Halo 3 that have officially, as well as unofficially, been revealed to the public, with last year’s Gears of War, we wouldn’t be wrong in saying it looks like complete shit. It’s like they took Halo 2, and just spruced up the textures. A little.

We could go into a long-winded rant on why these graphics look horrible, but I’m gonna leave that one up to you guys. Personally, Microsoft could make the game faintly resemble Super Mario 64 and it would still make them millions. →  Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatarticle

Xbox to make its first dollar in 2008

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Yeah, seven years after the original Xbox was released. If this was the plan all along, there would’ve been no way in Hell that the Xbox project would have been green-lit had it been anyone but Microsoft. It has cost the company billions already, which isn’t a very favorable position when dealing with shareholders.

From eWeek via Next-Gen.biz, Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices Division, states that through peripherals, software sales (1st and 3rd party titles), and Xbox Live, the Xbox platform will finally see a profit next year. Welcome, Microsoft, to the club that Nintendo has been a part of since, well, forever.

This fact just goes to show you how much money Microsoft can afford to waste on something like a gaming console. They’ve lost billions of dollars in the last seven years, but are still going into the console market with all guns blazing. Why?

Because Microsoft sees the console gaming space as the way into the all-inclusive home entertainment market, much like what TiVO is doing. →  You reading at me?

Console logos throughout the ages

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This year, 2007, marks the 30th anniversary of the Atari 2600 release, which is what many consider to be the very first commercial video game console. And since then, the gaming populace has been privy to 21 major home consoles. To celebrate this momentous year, I have painstakingly researched and categorized each of the 18 home consoles’ logos. Yes, I have nothing else better to do with my time. So, with that in mind, let’s take a quick stroll through history, shall we?

Atari 2600: Here we have the granddaddy of them all: the Atari 2600. I don’t really understand what this logo stands for, but it must mean something cool, as it can still be seen on t-shirts and stickers everywhere. If you’re trying to convey the fact that you’re a retro gamer, you probably have the Atari logo somewhere in your gaming bordello. Interesting bit of trivia: the logo was even featured in the cult classic, “Blade Runner.” After four major company restructuring periods, the main focus of the logo still stands strong today. →  I am become game, destroyer of words.