“Video games couldn’t kill foosball. In fact, its popularity is surging.”
So begins the summary for a Boston Globe article on the resurgence of foosball, an awful decades old game that’s surely going to bring about the end of video games with its casual feel, ancient design and non-digital controls.
I mean seriously, this archaic tabletop game doesn’t even have the HD graphics—how could it possibly be growing in this age of high technology?!
Yes, this is sarcasm. I happen to love foosball.
Dante’s Inferno is a cruel joke masquerading as a video game, but I still laughed at Penny Arcade’s take on giving the “hardcore treatment” to classic literature.
Glancing at the December NPD numbers tonight—you know, the ones that showed Nintendo annihilating the competition 3:1—it struck me that games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 blow their load with six million sold on launch day, and then take a permanent nap thereafter.
Meanwhile, Mario Kart Wii, that quirky, stupid little racer that a MW2 player would have you believe seniors play at the nursing home, somehow sneaks into the top ten for one of the most important months of the year with nearly one million sold. That’s 700,000 copies behind MW2 (360 version), which launched the month before.
Don’t forget though, kiddies: 2010 is the year of the PS3!
Seriously, what the fuck is going on in these hardcore development studios? First Rockstar (shocker), and now…another Rockstar studio. And I thought it was just the people who worshiped their games who were insecure assholes.
If developers are scaling back Wii development because the platform is so volatile, as Ubisoft and other have claimed, then how the hell are 80% of Xbox 360 developers actively working on Natal-exclusive games?
We must assume Ubisoft, ever the bandwagon whore since its days of releasing new Wii games every month when that platform first launched, is in that 80%. How do they justify working on Natal, an unproven platform that completely eliminates a controller from the equation (that *may* come out by Christmas), while simultaneously dumping Nintendo?
Rhetorical question, obviously.
Developers hate Nintendo because they believe its low power console and quirky motion controls are “destroying” gaming. Project Natal, the savior of gaming, will use only 15% of the Xbox 360′s power and the games created for it will be low power, quirky fare. We learn today that a purported 80% of developers/publishers worldwide are eagerly creating Natal games for a system that’s got half the install base of the Wii. Fucking hypocrites.
These arrogant assclown developers and publishers deserve every bit of failure that’s coming their way in 2010.
Are all hardcore video game developer studios/publishers this shitty, or is it just Rockstar?
Microsoft’s magnificent Natal device might not work with powerful games. You know, the kinds of mature, resource-hogging HD fare that defined the system in the first place?
It sounds kind of like the Wii: Low power, focus on the innovating game play…But in this case it’s OK not to yell and scream and attack Microsoft for “destroying gaming,” as people do with Nintendo, because reality and common sense don’t really apply to video games world anymore, do they?
That’s the percentage of people who own an Xbox 360 that are on Xbox Live. It’s also really close to the number of people who play Gears of War 2 in HD. OH, and how many of the 39 million consoles sold are replacements for this system’s utterly spectacular RROD failure rate?
And this is the “next generation” publishers, developers and a majority of hack game journalists say Nintendo is missing out on with their “GameCube 2.0″? These emperors of gaming, wearing their invisible clothes, laugh at Nintendo.
Nintendo is laughing all the way to the bank.
Blame the audience, not yourself:
Capcom France Boss: Less Wii After Darkside Chronicles Sells Only 16k
Further expanding on this curious line of reasoning, I can only surmise that, after the colossal failure of Capcom’s Bionic Commando hardcore “re-imagining” in 2009, the publisher will no longer be selling games of any kind.