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Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 9.1.06

The better graphics only make it abundantly clear that football players have dead eyes.

Double Fine finds a new publisher to bring their flops to market
Tim at Double Fine is working on another game. Rumors suggest it may be Psychonauts 2: Straight to Bargain Bins. The good news for us perpetual whiners is that if it’s as creative and fun as the first game and does as poorly, there will be plenty of hell to raise.

EA predicts you’ll buy 18 copies of the new Madden
Good news, tons of people still buy new Maddens despite the fact that they are basically the same game. The proportion of internet whining I mentioned is directly proportional to how many times Maddens sales quadruple the new Double Fine game. My estimate is 32.

Tecmo to support Wii Virtual Console
Tecmo’s big designer(s) may insist on only using the best hardware available for the graphically intensive games, but years ago the company was content with making good bad looking games. The first few Ninja Gaidens and Tecmo Bowl games are coming to the Wii. Ironically, Tecmo Bowl is more fun than the newest $60 Madden game.

Nintendo and Sony’s battle to secure the rights to developer’s old games is almost comical. A lot of the companies will probably do what Sega seems to be doing — selling the rights to both companies and enjoying the profit. When it comes down to it, though, even if the PS3 had every non Nintendo old game ever made, it’d only be about even with the Wii having only old Nintendo games.

Imagine how great this would be online.

Red Steel and probably other 3rd party Wii games won’t be online…this year at least
Nintendo must have an official bullet on their business meeting agenda for “Fuck ourselves,” because, without fail, they always do. They’ve made a cool system, increased or at least attempted to increase third party support, but they’re still dragging their feet on this whole internet thing. Though maybe they’re right and the internet is a fad.

Edge magazine is almost affordable to fat, lazy Americans
Any game snob worth his weight in copies of Suikoden 2 and Tactics Ogre knows that video game magazines mostly suck (because video game journalism mostly sucks, take this site for example). Edge magazine, and to a lesser extent Play, has always been a save point in the dangerous world of…bad magazines. The only problem with it, besides being written by nancy boy Brits, is the exorbitant cost.

The good news is now a subscription is Edge is only very expensive. I encourage you to contemplate purchasing one because most of the better articles in American magazines are directly inspired by Edge articles. Take this month’s Game Informer chat with localization people. Edge ran that article months ago.

Nintendo destroys Japan almost as efficiently as America
Nuclear holocaust jokes aside, Nintendo mushroomed to victory this past week in Japan. They sold the usual shit ton of DSLites but also conquered the entire top 10 list. In case that wasn’t profitable enough, half a million copies of Final Fantasy 3 were sold. Could this be the beginning of another Square — Nintendo love affair? Only Square knows, but Nintendo fans (who don’t hate Square) can hope. Personally, I hate any company that never released a title on a Sega console.

I couldn’t find a Final Fantasy 3 for DS pic so this one is from the remake on the Wii.

Tech demo disguised as game too good for PS3 and 360
So this game’s graphics are too orgasmically amazing to run on the next gen systems. I look forward to the day when developers will have to focus solely on gameplay to sell their products, but I might as well be waiting for world peace, the end of hunger, or the second coming of Jesus. Five generations from now tech nerds will be arguing over which game’s microscope zoom in feature reveals better rendered bacteria on a character’s ass.

Sony Europe hires the people who came up with the name “Wii”
“This is living,” is the PS3’s European tag line. Nearly every possible joke about the line’s already been made, including “they left off the “in hell,” and “shouldn’t there be a question mark at the end?” so I won’t even try (that’s the spirit!). Oh, what the hell. How about “they left off the ‘Shoot me in the face if’ part of the slogan.”

Whatever bad jokes come from the line, it’s clearly stupid. It sort of reminds me of a poor man’s, “It’s thinking.” Maybe “it’s thinking this is living.” Maybe I’m thinking of mortgaging my house to get a PS3.

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