Well, when I talked about Take Two’s financial woes a couple of weeks back, I told you there would be more bad news coming, and indeed the universe did not choose to disappoint. Kotaku recently reported on some pretty ball-slamming financial results coming out of Nintendo and Sony, with year-over-year sales being down 40 and 18 percent respectively. Yep, you heard that right - the little white box that your grandpa loves so much is not doing so well.
Here go the hopes of seeing reduced game prices any time soon. Bye-bye, hopes!
Seems like Borderlands, a Mad Max style game I’ve been watching, is shaping up rather nicely. I am glad they have made the move to the cell-shaded look, for one - it’s making the game look real artsy and distinctive. I hope they share some more of the story background next, since that will be one of the key elements for me (in addition to core gameplay, obviously). In the meantime, take a look and enjoy!
10 years ago today, at the Macworld Expo (*gasp*) in New York, Bungie unleashed their first glimpses of Halo upon the unsuspecting world. No one could have guessed back then that it would become one of the most successful video game franchises in the history of the medium, but it definitely turned some heads, and over the course of the last 10 years, the series has launched consoles, shattered records, given rise to Xbox Live, and spawned an empire that reaches into novels, comics, action figures, machinima, online fanbases and communities, and countless other forms of merchandising and support.
Like it or not, Halo is huge, and it’s not going anywhere.
Wait, that’s the Chief?
So today, the crew at Bungie.net posted an article about that initial release upon the Macworld crowd, giving some pictures of the blocky supersoldier who would become the Master Chief and the ringworld he blasted through. It’s an interesting time-warp of sorts, especially considering how far the game, the series, and game graphics in general have come.
Fight finished. For now, at least.
There’s also an excellent video detailing the game’s progress, as well as what’s in store for the future. With the upcoming release of ODST and next year’s Halo: Reach, it looks like Bungie is going to continue riding their Halo wave as long as they can. Really, can you blame them?
Bungie.net: “So Our Game’s Called Halo…” Thanks to Bungie for the original Halo pic, and for giving us the ability to take awesome screenshots like the one from Halo 3.
Summary: Moderately fun spiritual successor to the Sly Cooper series, if Sly were a human, and his cane were electrical powers, and Carmelita Fox was an even more annoying nurse, and Murray was an equally annoying fat guy, and Bentley didn’t exist.
Setting: New York City’s sick, decrepit, creepy younger brother: Empire City.
For a little while there it had almost seemed like the gaming industry was impervious to the threats of the crumbling economy, but of course it was just a matter of time before reality bit us gamers where it hurt. Take Two’s stock crumbled a whopping 13% yesterday, after the company cut its financial forecast and pushed the release date for Bioshock 2 to next fiscal year (i.e. after October). I’d like to hope this is the last of the bad news, but in all likelihood, this avalanche is only just beginning. Get your plasmids ready and brace yourselves.
For the second straight year, some good folks have taken over a small portion of the internet and spent their time garnering donations for the Child’s Play Charity by completing a Mario Marathon. The group has spent over 50 hours to this point (as of 12:30 pm Sunday) playing through the NES, Super NES, N64, GameCube, and Wii Mario games, attempting to get 100% completion on each one, and they’ve raised over $14,000 dollars from fans across the globe for their efforts.
You can watch the marathon over at (appropriately enough) http://www.MarioMarathon.com and donate via PayPal directly from the site. They’re also trending pretty well on Twitter, with loads of people “chatting” via the message service. Head over and check these guys out! It’s like hanging around the house playing games with 1200 of your closest friends.
Since 2003, over 100,000 gamers worldwide have banded together through Child’s Play, a community based charity grown and nurtured from the game culture and industry. Over 3.5 million dollars in donations of toys, games, books and cash for sick kids in children’s hospitals across North America and the world have been collected since our inception.
As many Halo fans know, the good peeps over at Bungie have a sort of fetish with the number seven. As such, they choose July 7 (07/07, get it?) to celebrate Bungie Day, and give their fans some sweet stuff in the process. Last year, they celebrated the fact that, altogether, people had amassed nearly 7,000,000,000 (that’s seven billion for those of you who forgot math class already) kills in the Halo 3 campaign mode. Today, it’s the much-sought-after Recon armor up for grabs.
How do you win it? Beat a foursome of Bungie’s own in a random online match today. You’ll need all of the downloadable maps, but if you jump into today’s special playlist, you have a chance of going up against four people with flaming heads (in-game, of course - it’d be tough for them to talk through their headsets if their heads were really on fire), and if you and your buddies can find a way to defeat them, you’re on your way to fancy Recon armor.
There are other ways that the Bungie folks may be doling it out, but they haven’t yet revealed those secrets. In fact, they’re not going to until sometime after 07/07, so the best advice is really to just go play as much as you can (and try to win and do cool stuff, probably).
So get out there and have some fun in matchmaking! I’ll be joining in the fun after work.
Summary: A 2D platformer from an independent developer that lets you flip the game world around and lets you run away from a photograph of a hamster (with horns).
Setting: Bizarre world made of low-budget and paper.
Systems: PC
Genre: Platformer
Mood: Well, if you’ve got to ask, I was pretty bored.
