Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 6.9.06

Jaws Unleashed

Majesco makes money
I’ve written about this company a few times because they dared to take a chance on some creative games and nearly went bankrupt for it. Now they have a different direction that focuses less on making premium titles and more on making shitty games that sell. Their portable lineup is actually respectable, but with console titles like Jaws Unleashed, it won’t be hard to turn my back on Majesco and hope EA buys them out only to make them all sex slaves (they’ll be paid for 40 hours a week, but not for the overtime they put in).

Hillary Clinton’s Media Guide for Parents (complete with cute drawing of children)
Clinton basically suggests we read Common Sense Media’s take on media ratings. The Common Sense Media people are about “media sanity, not censorship.” This sounds a lot like the Islamic cartoon debacle to me. A lot of people who do lip service to the first amendment but then also say things like, “free speech must be responsible speech.” This position couldn’t be stupider. If these groups just came out and said, “Look, we are interested in censoring media and making it less accessible, but it’s because it is harming your children,” I’d respect them a lot more.

Kutaragi insists the PS3 is a computer
This insistence by Kutaragi that Sony doesn’t make game consoles is absurdly hilarious. The PS2 was supposed to be the be all end all media hub in my living room so I’m slightly skeptical about the PS3. Actually, I already own a computer that handles music, videos, email, and other software just fine. It’s a shame Sony isn’t selling game consoles because I’m very interested in buying some new ones.

A Sony guy admits his company isn’t more infallible than the Pope
Niall O’Hanrahan from Sony Ireland reportedly said “We would never say we cannot fail.” If all Sony suits, nay, if all PR suits across the industry were as honest and humble as I judge this Irish guy to be based of a paragraph long news quip, then the world would be a better place. Or at least much quieter.

Little of Nintendo’s profit to come from Wii
Because it’s really going to be called the Revolution! Just kidding. Nintendo seems to have a grounded idea of how well their system will sell since they expect most of their next year profits to come from the DS. They plan to sell six million Wii’s, though how you can plan how well you do is beyond me. It’s speculated that they will be selling this new console at a loss or near a loss, which is not typical for the company.

UCLA professor talks about booth babes and Frag Dolls
How is an artificially constructed group who is paid by a corporation to exist representative of anything?

PS3 rumored to have a PS2 inside of it
This is one way to make sure you new system is compatible with your old. Sony hasn’t made an official comment on the rumor but we should find out soon enough. The benefit of having a PS2 in your PS3 is that there should be zero backwards compatibility problems, something Microsoft can’t come close to saying. The down side is that it is presumably more expensive to have the additional hardware, as opposed to doing backwards compatibility through emulation.

Sony America won’t touch Rule of Rose with a ten foot pole
Because it has some sexual undertones between prepubescent girls. Some argue games like Rule of Rose are bad for the industry because they give politicians ammo. I will defend the right to make stupid mini games like GTA’s “fuck your girlfriend” game, but I can understand how things like that are bad for the industry. But designers should not refuse to tackle complex, messy, and potentially offensive subject matters.