What about the ethical implications of using other companies' intellectual property? Are royalties paid to Sony Computer Entertainment each time a Wanderer/Agro t-shirt is sold? I'm thinking about emailing Meat Bun to find out.
Every year, my friend Soulman goes to an RBI Baseball (yes, that RBI Baseball) tournament in Chicago. This year, he made a video tribute to the festivities. Watch as history is made by The Snake winning his first ever game. Very amusingly well-done!
I was actually looking forward to the release of the "gun metal" PS3... I probably would have actually bought it, due to the fact that it looks a lot better than the glossy black plastic of the original PS3 chassis. Oh yeah, and it would have come with really the only game I'm interested in playing on the PS3 – Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots.
I still might get it ('cos I'm a sucker for that sort of stuff... remember the dilemma regarding my Mario Galaxy commemorative coin?), but I'll be very annoyed while forking over my money to the morbidly obese cashier.
There was a bit of a furor on the intar-nets today, after Kotaku linked to a Gamasutra post-postmortem on the XBLA title N+. The developers, Metanet, expressed their frustration regarding the quality of titles on XBox Live; I believe "shit" was the exact word used. At first, I sympathized with the Kotaku commenters. They lambasted Metanet for being arrogant a-holes; the impression they gave was that they felt their hardcore niche game should be more actively promoted by Microsoft, and that N+'s sales slagged because there was too much shovelware on XBLA. This view might have been justified, if Microsoft had come forward saying that they were going to curtail bad games from making their way online. Of course, this is not the case... or is it? One of the devs states:
Nick has this racing...do you know Iron Man Off-Road Racing, like the old arcade game? It's four-player, and a little isometric. Nick made a racing game like that, and Microsoft was like, "Well, racing is too saturated on Live Arcade." But that's because they've greenlit like ten really shitty racing games. There's no good racing games.
If this is true, then it seems that Microsoft is taking a more active (and arbitrarily) role in limiting games on XBLA. Definitely no good... either Microsoft should be very strict with what they allow quality-wise, or else they should let everyone who passes their QA process publish, regardless of market saturation.
The interview with Metanet has another interesting tidbit, though. They mention their frustration with the amount of bad titles on XBLA, saying that it hurts the sales of their (admittedly better, original) game. While I have a huge amount of respect for the investments they made to port the game to the Xbox, their ideas about what XBLA should be are somewhat misguided. They seem to think that Microsoft shouldn't let "bad" titles be published, which would mean that their game would stand out. There are a couple of problems here. One of the Metanet developers compares XBLA arcade with a Flash games site, complaining that he had to search for hours to find just a few good games on said site. The problem here is that no self-respecting gamer actually does that. He or she will rely on gaming media to find out what games look promising while they are still in development, and then make choices on what to play.
(Sorry, I realize I'm just rambling here)
While Microsoft may have some jacked up policies, it does allow smaller developers to viably create a game for a major, modern console. If Metanet doesn't like the XBLA publishing model, they can simply not use it.
