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Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 10.6.06

posted on October 6th, 2006 by jay

Uwe Boll in talks for a second BloodRayne movie
If you missed the first BloodRayne movie, you owe it to Ed Wood to go see it. It’s not as terribly good as House of the Dead, but its crappiness is better than the mostly just bad Alone in the Dark. I will also be going to see Dungeon Siege on opening knight (hahahahaha, get it?) if anyone wants to join me.

For some odd reason a lot of people hate Boll and want him to have a massive heart attack and die, or at least stop directing movies. I come from the Leprechaun school of horror films (Leprechaun in the Hood is overrated, I recommend Leprechaun in Space) so Boll’s schlock is something I really look forward to. Some argue that movies like BloodRayne keep games from being taken serious. It’s more like games like BloodRayne keep games from being taken seriously.

If you’ve got a moment, take a gander at this write up of the state of video game movies. It’s informatastic!

Me and my skinhead Neo Nazi friend Klaus socialize with the Dreamcast.

Social gaming on the rise and a bunch of other statistics
As the only person on the planet who still doesn’t give a shit about online gaming, all I have to say is duh! Everyone knows social gaming is growing! Call me old fashioned, but I prefer to play a game in the same room as someone else, preferably while they fold my laundry without speaking. It’s actually getting harder to play a game alone as I age. Maybe that makes me a social gamer.

Casual gamers are old
And going to die soon. Nintendo’s chosen strategy seems to be grounded in reality, only most of the casual old gamers are playing crappy online games like Diner Dash. Convincing them to buy a Wii will be challenging since they already own a word processor that plays Bejeweled.

I’m also worried about too much of a focus on casual games. Every Sudoku game is using the resources a much better game should have had. Miyamoto has even publically waffled between saying he wants to make accessible games but then sometimes wants to make even more complicated titles. Will Nintendo let him add complexity to games they need to sell, like new Zeldas and Marios? The overall theory, I hope, is that after saving games from the oblivion they were headed for, Nintendo will have expanded the market enough to make and sell even more deep games for the serious gamer.

Sony pwned by analysts
Due to a report of the PS3’s at the Tokyo Game Show behaving erratically, the European delay of the PS3, and the company’s crappy laptop batteries, Sony has taken a beating recently from multiple financial analysts. The upside? One of the analysts is my arch nemesis, the always wrong or right but painfully obvious Mike Wallace.

Is it just me, or are anyone else’s pants getting tighter?

Everyone in Japan buys the new Pokemon
And it’s just like every other Pokemon game! Awesome! I think instead of waiting for the game to come out here I’ll just mail Nintendo my money. It’s all much easier that way. None of that bothersome catching of Pokemons, not to mention the hassle of removing Rocket Slime from my DS.

An evolutionary scientist really needs to study the Japanese people and figure out what the deal with their cuteness obsession is. America’s violence and breast obsessions at least make biological sense. We like to kill things because then they can’t kill us and the boob thing is hard wired (huh huh, I said hard). But such rampant adoration of cuteness? What possible function could it serve? Children and girls are cute, and both are weak and should be weeded out for the benefit of the species. Besides aren’t the Japanese just tired of all that cute by now?

PS3 controller given a stupid name
SIXAXIS. Wait, wait, now I’ll type it backwards. SIXAXIS. Oh my god, it’s the same thing!!!!!!!! Incredible! Not “Swap God for a Janitor, Rot in a jar of dog paws”? incredible, but incredible nonetheless. But why is it in all caps? Maybe…sixaxis…sixaxis….nope, still a palindrome in lower case.

Breaking news: unfinished game has bugs
It has been said that this is a “good” site (actually, it was “decent,” but I upgraded the rating for…emphasis) with “crappy” bylines. Perhaps I do suck at writing attention grabbing, intriguing titles for articles. That’s why I read the major blogs that regularly lie/exaggerate/distort things in their headlines and report vapid speculation hoping to learn something. Today I learned that Gears of War, which isn’t out, may have a few issues. This is news in a month, but not now. Ultimately, I feel it’s my job to bore people with bylines instead of over hype non-stories in order to return balance to the universe. Don’t blame me, I’m a true neutral.

I’d be content if Sony just threw in a copy of this classic on Blu Ray with every PS3.

Rumble and motion control would cost too much
For some reason, Sony is still talking about why their controllers are rumble-less. They’ve said that they passed that technology and motion sensing is better and new, I think they’ve said it’s impossible from a technology standpoint, and now they’re saying it’s just not worth the cost to add it. Nintendo’s site seems to say their Wand rumbles and it certainly senses motion. So why can’t Sony add rumble and sell the SIXAXIS for $40?

Oh, right. Because Sony is completely full of shit and they aren’t including rumble because they lost that Immersion lawsuit.

Wii is a GameCube!!!!111
Thanks to Joystiq for reporting the story as news but then later realizing it was just a retranslation of two month old interview. No thanks to Kotaku who didn’t find it necessary to inform its readers of this.


  1. Matt said on October 7, 2006:

    It’s funny, Immersion has been begging Sony to include rumble tech in the SIXAXIS (retarded name, by the way) from them. You shouldn’t have sued them, you freaking idiots! Why would Sony want to do business with you? They’re Japanese, and they don’t take kindly to lawsuits. Especially ones they lose. And man, how many times will people buy a Pokemon game that looks almost exactly like the original GB one? I’ve always like the Pokemon games, but someone please put more time into the presentation. 

  2. pat said on October 7, 2006:

    i may disagree with you that dedicating resources to sudoku is a bad idea.  i think the more people who pick up the system, the more likely tastes are to be varied and the more new concepts for games we are likely to see.  think of sudoku on the ds or some accessible title on the wii as a gateway system (like a gateway drug) that increases the number of people buying games.  there are the risks that the new zeldas lose complexity as a result or these new gamers do not move beyond simple puzzle games, but theres also the chance that some of them are actually turned on to gaming in general and the industry thrives.

  3. jay said on October 7, 2006:

    It’s just the risk that has me worried. This could be a very flawed analog, but the rise of the blockbuster in Hollywood has made the industry a lot of money but they don’t seem to have used it to make more great, deep movies, they more or less just keep making bigger blockbusters. Also, the rise of the pop star has not facilitated more underground music. The reduction of recording costs due to the march of technology and the internet (also technology) are what have made non-pop music viable.


    I want to be wrong and I want you to be right, but it seems possible to me that if casual console games make a lot of money the industry will respond by making better looking casual console games. 

  4. Matt said on October 8, 2006:

    I just can’t see Nintendo making games solely around "Simple is better." They will make games that way, but I think they really would never change completely. Nintendo’s development environment is supposedly very open. Many games are just little ideas that someone came up with. It usually is never built on the idea of what will sell best, like what you’re saying will happen with casual games. And look at the DS. Many people were worried that it was going to be home to nothing but mini-games. We sure got those, but far more popular games are games just like the old ones. Nintendo would be blind to not see this fact, and only put major resources to casual games.

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