Watch as Wii destroy your base…
This year is shaping up to be a fantastic time for Nintendo. The Wii continues to sell incredibly and the 2008 release list looks great. Titles of note set for 2008 include BomberMan Land, Go Diego Go! Safari Run, LEGO: Indiana Jones and the ‘I will sell my car for this game, if I have to’ Mario Kart Wii.
It would be very wrong of me (to the point of having to take myself out to the garden and beat myself with frozen sticks) not to draw your attention to ‘De Blob’ coming from THQ, slated for a June release. De Blob started out as a student project in the wonderful city of Utrecht, produced using the Ogre3d engine with Open Dynamics Engine (ODE) physics. The original single level PC version of the game is still available for free download from the ‘Banana Games’ website - it’s a great way to spend an hour or two. Once you’re done playing, you’ll probably be feeling just like THQ did when they played it. THQ noticed that it was such a great idea and before you could say ‘Students do make some awesome games, don’t they?’ the Portal-esque fairy tale produces a console title. Fantastic!
The ‘big boys toys’ can look forward to Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2, Devil May Cry 4, Fifa Street 3 and GTA4. There sure are a lot of numbers after games these days. OK fair enough, I admit that I’m just picking fun at them!
Check out the 2008 Nintendo release schedule on Shacknews.com, then go ahead and compare it to the PS3 release schedule on Futuregamez.net or the XBox360 schedule over on XBox-Scene.com. Draw your own conclusions, have your own arguments about them in the pub and bore your co-workers to tears with your theories as to why the schedules make ‘console A’ so much better than ‘console B’. Since I’m in ‘the biznezz’ I know all the answers, but I’m not going to tell anyone because they are top secret and I keep them locked in a biometrically protected area of my brain. Don’t even think to ask where the scanner is, either.
As we’re bordering on the insane, I’ll say something about a new website that’s like YouTube only dedicated to in-game footage. It’s WeGame.com.
WeGame primarily gives Counter Strike players the opportunity to demonstrate their ever-so impressive handling of the ‘newb’ (also known as the ‘lamer’, ’suxxor’ or just about any kind of expletive you can think of) and the videos range from mind-numbing to downright strange.
After the first 10 videos of ‘newb’ getting ‘pwned’ it all starts to lose its novelty for me and I’m back to Chad Vader on YouTube. It’s certainly an interesting idea; Bragging and bugs do have a certain casual entertainment value and I found myself trawling the site for some time. I wonder if (due to the niche nature of the content in the first place) diversity of theme actually matters here. Will they need to diversify or can the site continue to grow with pure game footage? I guess we’ll see. Feel free to comment on this - I’d certainly be interested to read what other people think.
Next week: My prolific, ground-breaking article “Do games imitate life or does life imitate games?” aka ”How I spent my weekend doing nothing productive but thinking a lot”.
This entry was posted on Saturday, January 19th, 2008 at 4:33 pm and is filed under Gaming, Online Marketing, Game Industry, The Future. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
February 4th
2008 at 8:55 pm
Lego: Indiana Jones? Looks hilarious! I haven’t played the Lego: Star Wars games but I love the concept. Who says I have to grow up??
February 12th
2008 at 3:26 pm
I know! I have a five year old who is a massive fan of anything Lego, so we’ve played the Lego Star Wars games backwards and forwards! Certainly, if you get chance give them a go. Lego Star Wars 2 is the better one IMO, since it’s the ‘real’ Star Wars movies
and they ironed out some of the annoyances from the first one. The cut scenes are hilarious and they’ve captured the themes perfectly.
Lego Indiana Jones looks better than the AAA Indiana Jones game … yeah, so they got some fancy shaders and some new fandangled physics system in the big game, so what? Lego will always be far more entertaining
February 18th
2008 at 8:34 pm
Is Lego Star Wars worth the money or is it something that gets tired too quickly?
March 7th
2008 at 4:10 pm
I hear nothing but the finest things about…looking to pick it up soon and check it out. From the reviews, it seems like it’s an absolutely legitimate and deep foray into the Start Wars universe, from the perspective of all your favorite characters…just without knees.
March 10th
2008 at 10:58 am
My son is obsessed with the game and we play together in co-op mode. I actually prefer the Wii version to the PC mainly because it’s both Lego Star Wars I and II in one and it’s kind of easier to access, since you just throw the disk in and play rather than mess around with controller config settings on the PC. It’s a really solid game and the cut scenes are hilarious. Go for it, seriously. It beats the heck out of Far Cry on the Wii but that’s another story