Hugenot

I think this proves definitively that the Japanese will buy any old crap as long as it's Japanese old crap.

MS should definitely be concerned about maintaining PC gaming, because if PC gaming dies, there will be absolutely nothing keeping most people from becoming Mac users instead.

NPD estimates for the PC are absolutely worthless. WoW pulled in more than $910 million in 2007 by itself. The latest subscription figure for WoW is 10 million, so lets be conservative and figure that the average monthly number of WoW subscribers was 8 million over the course of 2007. 8 million subs x $15/month x 12 months = $1.44 billion dollars. And that doesn't even include money made on people purchasing game boxes for the Burning Crusade and WoW itself.

It's nice to see EA standing firm on this (asking for Fox to correct the record and apologize). The more cynical side of me could easily see a company like EA with big dollar signs in their eyes jump at the opportunity for the free publicity for Mass Effect that another "debate" on the air would generate, even if the game might be portrayed inaccurately. We have already seen the depths to which Rockstar Games is willing to stoop in order to grab headlines to promote its games by actually putting gratuitous amounts of sex and violence in its games. If this was Rockstar and not EA, I bet they would be promoting the misconception that Mass Effect had lots of explicit sex in it.

Gah! I'm a 38-year-old video gamer and I'm embarrassed at how completely clueless and uninformed many people my own age are about video games. The "video games will corrupt your children" idea has long been discredited by both reasearch and by the simple fact that in the year 2008, most people under the age of 40 spent a signficant amount of their youth playing videogames. I would be far more concerned about the amount of sex and violence shown on prime time television, and the ease with which young kids can access porn on the internet.

The other unfortunate fact, is that when a news media outlet runs a story or segment like this, it is usually an excercise in the ultimate form of hypocrisy, since they are hoping to boost their own ratings by injecting racy/sexy soundbites and headlines into their normal boring news coverage. And the problem is that if someone like Jeff was to point this out on the air, he would never be asked back for future segments, because news media don't like it when you point out their own hypocrisy to them, especially live on the air.

Woohoo! Pinball FX is the best game on XBLA. If they had 20 more tables I would buy them all for $2.50 each.

This was one of the justifiable concerns that was raised about the increasing popularity of offering downloadable content. It is blatantly obvious that developers and publishers are now removing content from their $60 games in order to try and sell it to us as "downloadable content" for even more money. Halo 3 I'm looking at you -- the worst offender by far.

Is it just me or does this screenshot make it seem like a committee of marketing people at EA handed some screenshots of Bioshock and Gears of War to the game artists and said, "Here. Make a game that looks like this, since these games sold a lot of copies and we want to shamelessly rip them off."

This title just seems a little too formulaic to me right now, but I'll reserve judgement until I can play the demo.

It's because the brain-dead marketing teams looked at the success of Kingdom Hearts, and said to themselves "Aha! The key to great success must be to randomly combine elements from Eastern and Western fantasy/sc-fi IPs. We are going to make sooooo mcuh money!!!

Um, believe me, they are still going to have to provide pre-made 3d animations even with camera-based input. That is, unless you like the idea of trying to pull off the moves in Crackdown on your own.