NPD: GTA IV Fastest Selling Game Ever, Nintendo Still Bulldozes Competition
April can be the cruelest month, but not if you're Nintendo, which managed to sell 714,000 Wiis bolstered by hot-ticket games like Mario Kart, Super Smash Bros Brawl, and Wii Play. Also not if you're Rockstar, whose Grand Theft Auto IV rocked the slots to become the fastest selling video game in history.
On the whole, the video game market hauled in a whopping $1.23 billion, a 47 percent increase over the same period last year.
"The industry continues to set a blistering sales pace, and now shows a year-to-date increase of 31% over last year's record-setting revenues," commented NPD analyst Anita Frazier. "This is the first month in many that we've seen a decrease in portable hardware and software sales, but it's important to remember that this year, the Easter holiday fell in March as compared to April in 2007." Frazier added that April 2007 and March 2008 saw portable sales rise in part due to the holiday timing.
The numbers...
Hardware
714k - Wii
415k - DS
193k - PSP
188k - Xbox 360
187k - PlayStation 3
124k - PlayStation 2
What's important:
- NPD's Frazier expressed surprise that the 360 and PS3 sales of GTA IV weren't even higher. "It was surprising not to see bigger hardware sales for the Xbox 360 and the PS3 given the release of GTA IV," she said. "However, since the game was only in the market for 5 days during this reporting period, that sales lift could very well be evident in May data."
- Nintendo, Nintendo, Nintendo. Have you heard about these guys? Get ready to hear even more, with Rock Band and Wii Fit around the corner. "As retail supplies become more plentiful we're seeing continued sales strength of Wii hardware," said NPD's Frazier. "With a couple of blockbuster games already in the market this year, and with Wii Fit and Rock Band still to come in the next two months, the pipeline of content to continue to drive hardware acquisition looks very good."
Software
1.85m - GTA IV (360)
1.12m - Mario Kart (Wii)
1.00m - GTA IV (PS3)
360k - Wii Play (Wii)
326k - Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii)
224k - Gran Turismo 5: Prologue (PS3)
202k - Pokemon MD: Explorers of Darkness (DS)
202k - Pokemon MD: Explorers of Time (DS)
152k - Guitar Hero III (Wii)
141k - Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (360)
What's important:
- Sony finally has two titles in the top ten, Gran Turismo 5 and GTA IV, making April the first month in as long as I can remember that you can say Sony's hardware sales were probably predominantly software (as opposed to Blu-ray) driven
- We won't really know the full GTA IV story until next month, since the game went on sale April 29, and NPD's numbers only reflect two days worth of sales. But in just 48 hours, "GTA IV captured two of the three top game spots, realizing an attach rate of 20% to the combined Xbox 360 and PS3 install bases," said NPD's Frazier. "With only 5 days at retail during the reporting month, GTA IV is one of the fastest-selling titles in video games history." Clearly the 360 version soared out of the gate, and crucial retailers like GameStop have claimed something like 64 percent of GTA IV sales went to the 360 during the game's first week at bat. My guess is we'll see a 60/40 split, but -- importantly -- it may be a 60/40 split the other way when we look back at sales of the game to existing owners and sales to first time console buyers.
- Did you hear Nintendo released a new version of Mario Kart for the Wii? I know, the press pretty much ignored Nintendo's latest banana-peel-lobbing racer, but you certainly didn't. All 1.12 million of you, anyway, who helped Mario Kart go on to outsell GTA IV on the PS3. (How's "by 120,000" banana peels spin you, Sony?) Said NPD's Frazier: "In a classic example of counter-programming, Mario Kart for the Wii captured the second-highest game sales for the month."
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Sony: 4Q Profits Surge, PlayStation 3 Losses Dwindle
Shrugging off losses a year ago, Sony capped its Blu-ray sales driven PS3 comeback in recent months by posting a $277 million profit for its fourth fiscal quarter on Wednesday. Full year profits tripled to a company record $3.5 billion, and the company pulled in 29 billion yen ($276 million) for the January-March period, a strong reversal of its 67.6 billion yen ($647 million) losses during the same period a year ago.
Interestingly, while sales were solid in LCDs, digital cameras, and Vaio computers, they declined in mobile phones, CRTs, and -- surprise! -- sales of the PS2. Surprise, I say, because even though it's outlived and outsold every other console I can think of pretty much ever, NPD's still been reporting U.S. sales of around 200k units a month. That's down from a year ago, and there's no arresting the PS2's descent from orbit, but you really have to hand it to Sony's eight-year-old scrapper. I remember playing SSX, Dynasty Warriors 2, Kessen, Eternal Ring, Madden NFL 2001, Summoner, and TimeSplitters back in November 2000 and with the exception of SSX, which played great, and Madden, which at least looked as much, wondering "That's it Sony? That all you got?" And here we are, nearly eight years later, staring at over 127 million PS2s sold worldwide.
Chances of the PS3 replicating that success? I'd say today almost zero. The PS3's chugging along at 12.6 million units worldwide since its late 2006 launch. It'll be lucky to sell half as many systems by the time the PS4 shows up (as early as 2010, by the way). Sony predicts it'll sell another 10 million PS3s for the fiscal year through March 2009. That would make around 23 million. Compare that to the Xbox 360's 19 million and Wii's 26 million already today.
The good news (for Sony) is that the company seems to have its operating costs in hand. Operating losses were improved, from 113 billion yen ($1.1 billion) a year ago to just 4.7 billion yen ($44.7 million) this quarter. That's largely the result of Sony getting its PS3 losses under control.
Speaking of PS3 losses, The Guardian's Jack Schofield speculates Sony may be losing $260 per PS3 based on reverse engineering Sony's figures in the context of its quarterly earnings report:
On Sony's own figures, the games division made a loss of $130 for each PlayStation 3 shipped. Let's assume that it's making pots of money on the PSP and the PlayStation 2: the PS2 is now hugely profitable and still sells more games than anything else. These two platforms could easily have made a profit of $1.2bn in the year. In that case, the total PS3 loss would have been $2.4bn shared between 9.24m PS3 consoles, or $260 per PS3 -- including any attached Sony games. Hm, is that a reasonable guess or not?
Of course we already speculated as much back in November 2006, though Nikko Citigroup suggested in January this year that Sony may have halved its production costs, from $800 down to $400 per unit (and who knows, perhaps less than that five month later).
Note that Sony's openly warning it'll actually take a 20 percent spill later this year due partially to the strengthening yen. As the yen gets stronger, export costs are likely to brutalize international Japanese manufacturers.
What's it all mean for you at the sales counter? According to Lazard Capital analyst Colin Sebastian (by way of Next Generation) Sony management is now considerably less enthused about a PS3 price cut in 2008.
During its earnings call, Sony management indicated the company is now more focused on achieving profitability in the PlayStation segment and rolling out online services (e.g., PlayStation Home) rather than chasing unit market share vs. Microsoft and Nintendo.
Importantly, management comments also suggest that a price cut is less likely on the PS3 this year, at least in the near term.
$400 for the entry-level PS3 for the next seven months? Don't bet on it. Speculation about price cuts on a in-no-way-cheap $400 piece of hardware can put buyers into standby mode, so of course Sony's going to ix-nay an ut-cay at the analyst / media level. Sony may in fact be thinking it can rest on its Blu-ray laurels and hit that "10 million sold" number based on video sales alone. That would be a mistake, especially with game sales poised to bypass video sales (it's already blown past film) in the near future.
That said, I don't think there's much chance the price on at least one of the models won't drop in time for the holiday season 2008. A $300 or even $350 40GB PS3 could put Sony past Microsoft at a point where coming in second (to Nintendo's Wii) is just as important as finishing first.
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EA Springs "Spring Break" Games, Posts $454 Million Loss
You know how E3's dead (long live E3!) and all the game publishers were supposed to veer off and stage their own annual "personalized" media events? Well EA held its annual "Spring Break" games showcase on Monday night in San Francisco, then followed with a modestly celebratory fourth quarterly earnings call last night.
First up, the games...
BattleForge (PC, RTS/CCG). Take an online PC real-time strategy game and mash it with a collectible card mechanic you use to build your own personal army. Everyone's calling it "Warcraft meets Magic: The Gathering" which makes it sound derivative, but you'll note that developer EA Phenomic were the guys who did the whole SpellForce hybrid RPG/RTS series, something that especially in SpellForce 2's case came off pretty impressively as far as I was concerned. With BattleForge, resource management is out, building a deck of 20 tradable cards by playing through a campaign is in. Stir with up to 12 players cooperatively (or not) pimping their decks by walloping Big Bads in battle. ETA: Q4 2008
Dead Space (PS3, Xbox 360, PC, Third-Person Shooter). Think Ridley Scott's Alien meets John Carpenter's The Thing with a dusting of Doom and a dash of Resident Evil to make Dead Space EA's shot at a "next-gen survival horror" game. Take a space engineer named after two of our greatest legacy sci-fi writers (Clarke, Asimov) and send him after the oldest hook in the book: An interstellar freighter issuing a distress call. What do you get? Space Hulk, I'm betting, which if you sabe "Warhammer 40k" means corridor crawl with lots of icky aliens-ate-my-companion's-brain moments and requisite plot shockers to keep things fresh. ETA: October 2008
Left 4 Dead (Xbox 360, PC, Survival Horror). It's -- gasp! -- another Zombie survival horror shooter! This one makes me think Gauntlet meets 28 Days Later through a Counter-Strike fishbowl (darkly, if also humorously). Gauntlet? Only in the sense that four human players cooperatively muscle through Mongolian throngs of Infected undead with splatter-ific zeal. Four additional players can pop in to control Infected "bosses" with special abilities, for up to eight-way neck-gnawing, bullet-clawing brawls. An "AI director" generates the population dynamically each time you play through the game to thwart predictability. It also scales the difficulty based on how well (or poorly) you're doing. According to Valve's Doug Lombardi, Left 4 Dead is the developer's attempt to do for cooperative gaming what Counter-Strike did for online multiplayer back in 1999. ETA: Q3 2008
Skate It (DS, Wii, "Extreme" Sports). Not a new game or a sequel, but rather an old one (2007's Skate, in fact) ported to the DS and repackaged for the Wii. The Wii version adds Wii Balance Board as well as 480p and widescreen support. The board won't be required, of course, and you can get by just fine using the Wii Remote to push forward, tilt left and right, or quickly "flick" your wrist to pull off a tricksy "extreme" move without buckling on a single elbow- or knee-pad. ETA: September 2008
Also...
Battlefield: Bad Company. The Battlefield series gets a "Commandos" style team-play world you can blow to smithereens, buildings to vehicles to vegetation (and more). Also, Battlefield Heroes, a cartoony action shooter that dishes out tickets and flags and pits two teams (national army, royal army) against each other in what looks to be classic Battlefield-style multiplayer done light.
- Warhammer Online. Or "World of Warhammer," as it's being politely referred to by some of us. Looks very pretty. Also monotonously combat-centric, which would make it, well, like any other MMORPG, just with Games Workshop's IP slathered everywhere. I'm a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay fan, so I'll probably play it whatever its genre cliches.
- Rock Band for Wii. Soon to be the bestselling version of MTV/Harmonix's game forever and ever amen. I mean, duh, right?
- Roy Taylor, the refreshingly forthright Nvidia VP of Content Relations I interviewed in January speechified about the importance of PC gaming at the show. While I sympathize with his position, tell it to gamers who prefer parking their keisters in living room comfy chairs with groups of friends bathed in the electroluminescent flicker of giganto-flatscreens rung round by Dolby 5.1 surround sound. That's "prefers" over sitting in front of a much smaller desktop monitor in a hard-edged chair pushed up against a hard-edged desk in much the same not-so-comfy slumped-forward position too many of us enjoy for 10 or 12 hours a day playing the game of life called "Our Day Jobs." (Never mind Vista quirks and audio-video driver inconsistencies.) No, PC gaming isn't dead, but I don't know that we'll ever see it become what Nvidia's after, i.e. a staging ground for the 189 million GPUs Nvidia counts as its install base. Sure, that's a ton of untapped potential, but convince the 188 million who barely blinked when the ostensibly heaven-and-earth-moving Crysis shipped last year. We'll always have our World of Warcrafts and The Sims, but there's a reason developers are hopping mad to get their stuff onto consoles, and it has nothing at all to do with recent media sourness about PCs and gaming.
As for EA's earnings call, EA boss John Riccitiello had several mouthfuls to share, including:
In fiscal 2009, we expect to add $1 billion in non-GAAP revenue. In achieving this target, we will have added $2 billion to EA’s revenues between fiscal ‘08 and fiscal ‘09. This would be the most aggressive growth in EA’s history.
What's non-GAAP? Stands for "Non-Generally Accepted Account Principles." Something bean counters hate and CEOs like Riccitiello love, because it circumvents straightforward asset representation and attempts to "recognize the future value of new contracts." Yeah, I know, more creative repackaging. Or voodoo. You pick. Anyway, Riccitiello followed that with:
What gives me confidence in these targets? Simply put, my belief in our teams and the quality of the products we will be introducing in fiscal year ‘09. Our label structure and newly energized publishing teams will be introducing the strongest title line-up in EA’s history, including: for EA Sports, Madden, our 20th anniversary edition, stepping forward with an entirely new way to play and learn the game involving a new holographic interface.
Holographic interface? Yeah, beats me too. Hey, at least it sounds like more than another boring roster update.
The "everyone's-talking-about-it" news? EA's $454 million loss on revenue increases up 19% to $3.7 billion. You can explain that number in part off EA's recent acquisition of Pandemic and BioWare (for $620 million), and overall, the company seems to be making money where it matters, so.
Me, I'm all eyes on Spore, the litmus test for PC gaming in 2008, as far as I'm concerned.
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I really do miss the E3 set-up. As it is now, i have no idea if/when people are gonna have a big updates on their games. E3 brought everything cool out at once, and I think the competition was good for the industry.
There was just soemthing nice abotu getting a yearly update from the entire industry at the same time. now it seems like a lot more work for the consumer to figure out when/what is coming out.
Impressions: LEGO Indiana Jones Demo for PC
I'm just back from leaping, rolling, tumbling, building, battling, and bullwhipping my way through the first level of Traveller's Tales' just-released LEGO Indiana Jones demo. The demo lets you play through the opening scene from the first movie, the sequence where Indy goes spelunking in a booby-trapped cave for a gold idol, goofs, then has to outrun a tunnel-sized boulder in what's arguably the most iconic scene of the series.
Roll-roll-roll your boulder gently down the cavern...
For better or worse (I say for better) LEGO Indy looks like it'll owe pretty much everything to LEGO Star Wars, and aside from the milieus, jokes, and a few of the special abilities, you'd swear you were playing the latter with whips and swords instead of lightsabers and grappling hooks. The first level gives you time to get reacquainted with the basics by roaming around outside the cave at leisure, swinging on vines, beating on plants and idols for LEGO bits, digging up chests, probing for sequestered collectibles, and of course building random stuff like bridges and boats. The humor's just as goofy, and while it's obviously skewed toward younger players, it's smart enough to elicit a chuckle or two from even this elder cynic, in particular a segment near the end where Belloq motions for the idol and Indy pulls something completely unexpected out of his bag.
"If only you'd attached my legs, I wouldn't be in this ridiculous position!"
Of course the demo exhibits a few of the problems that plagued the Star Wars games as well, namely places where the edges of areas aren't clearly delineated, making it easy to slip off into (literal) piecemeal oblivion. The fixed camera angles that sometimes sit punishingly low (skull-platform-dart sequence anyone?) don't help, though in the end they're probably the smarter compromise over a freely controllable camera, since the idea's to move fast and not preen over positioning.
Overall: At least one, leaning toward two thumbs up. Especially if you're looking for a breezy 30 minutes to kill, or want to try a few of the free mode characters (Henry Jones pulls out a briefcase, "Thuggie" throws swords, Jock whips out a wrench, Willie screams, etc.).
The "Dangerous Times" trailer that runs at the beginning of the demo.
I guess my only other criticism -- not of the demo, but the imminent full version -- would be the pointless political editing. Pulling the Nazis just seems like a mistake, and if anything, only reinforces their boogeymen mystique. Raiders of the Lost Ark is half as scary a film without them, and while kids under 10 probably won't care or notice either way, older gamers are just going to scratch their heads and wonder what led to replacing Nazis in the game with "an anonymous genocidal, occultist, trenchcoat-wearing master race." (Can you say six of one, half a dozen of the other?) Spielberg had no qualms poking fun at the Nazis, why should Traveller's Tales?
They were racist, fascist, cabalistic fist-waving lunatics, sure, but what better opportunity to lampoon than LEGO-fication?
The full version subtitled "The Original Adventures" ships in early June and lets you play through all three of the first films, as in only the first three. Meaning of course that a Crystal Skull sequel (and how about some Young Indiana Jones episodic content?) could be little more than a giant-killer-booby-trapped-boulder-roll away.
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Dell Quashes U.S. Game PCs, Launches New Models in India
A little deceptively gloomy news this morning about Dell discontinuing four of its high-end XPS game PCs. Travis Hudson has a note in Today @ PC World about Dell's latest seemingly retrograde move, pointing out I think rightly that it was probably in some sense inevitable given redundancy in the company's high-end lineup with the acquisition of boutique PC manufacturer Alienware two years ago. Alienware, by contrast, recently debuted its Area-51 m17x 17" widescreen gaming notebook packing an Intel Core 2 Extreme CPU, 4GB DDR2 memory, dual SLI GeForce 8800M GTX GPUs, and up to a 1.5 terabyte (yes, terabyte) hard drive.
But wait a minute, did you know Dell literally just launched the XPS 730 H2C Edition gaming desktop and XPS M1730 notebook (AGEIA PhysX plus Logitech GamePanel LCD) in India? While the U.S. PC sales market has cooled in recent years, sales are actually up sharply in developing markets like India and the Asia-Pacific region. India's PC shipments alone shot up 20% in 2007 to 6.5 million, and sales of notebook PCs specifically were up by 81%, according to market researcher IDC. IDC in fact predicts a compounded annual growth rate in India PC sales of 20% over the next five years.
With all the negative speculation about consumer spending in the U.S. driven by flagging consumer confidence indices, it's only logical that Dell would clean house, so I wouldn't read too terribly much into the high-end model nixing. And watch what happens with Alienware next (at least on this side of the pond) for the rest of the story. If Alienware starts slashing and burning, then it's maybe time to get nervous. (Or, you know, move to India.)
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PS3 Outsells 360 in April, GTA IV Sells 3.3 Million in Six Days, Predicts Analyst
Add to that US sales prediction overall game sales soaring 113 percent to $830 million for April courtesy Grand Theft Auto IV, Mario Kart Wii, and Pokemon Mystery Dungeon. An amazing April, in other words.
Riding high: Nintendo's Wii and DS cream the competition in Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter's figures with 600k and 550k in hardware sales respectively. Compare that to the PS3 (290k), Xbox 360 (275k), PSP (235k) and PS2 (160k). Ah yes, the tireless PS2. You can almost imagine the PS3 with its shamefully inconsistent PS2 backward compatibility features coming and going as the PS2 trundles on in the background to usher in the PS4.
Look at Pachter's numbers by brand, and you've got Nintendo on top by nearly half (1,150k), Sony in strong second place (685k), and Microsoft bringing up rears with a comparably anemic 275k. Would it behoove Microsoft to finally get in on the dedicated handheld game? I don't see why not. It's clear that market's nowhere close to saturated given DS and PSP sales trends in conjunction with general thoughts on consumer mobilization. I don't know about you, but I'm certainly playing more on the go than at any other point in my formerly-desk-locked-life. Whether Microsoft has the right stuff to fashion the coolest software, of course, is and probably will forever be the principal variable in that equation.
Following GTA IV's numbers can be a bit of a chore. After Variety reported that industry analysts were thinking the game would do $400 million in its first week off some 6 million units sold, Rockstar claimed GTA IV sold 3.6 million units worldwide on its first day of sales, generating revenue of $310 million. Pachter estimates U.S. numbers alone were 3.3 million units in the first six days, but the way that figures into worldwide revenue gets tricky because of the weak dollar, which made the retail price for GTA IV in Europe notably higher and inflated the $500 million worldwide number Take 2's claiming off 6 million copies sold in the seven days since the game was released on April 29.
According to Pachter, "The first week sell-through doesn’t change my view that lifetime sales [of GTA IV] will be approximately 18 million units, and doesn’t change my valuation of the company - still below $20 - meaning that EA’s offer still represents a premium to the intrinsic value of Take-Two." And according to Media By Numbers analyst Paul Dergarabedian (by way of Mercury News), GTA IV dovetailed with Iron Man (the film) to create in dollars spent "what may have been the biggest entertainment week ever." That's astonishing if it turns out to be true, buildup to or no. We'll know more after NPD drops its official numbers this Thursday.
What we do know: Halo 3's record was $300 million off 5 million units sold in a week. Any way you shake it, Take 2's epic crime opus easily muscled past Halo 3 by a million units and change to spare. The only thing as impressive, in my opinion: The Gran Turismo franchise, which broke 50 million units sold at the close of April 2008.
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I don't think it's really fair to compare Halo 3 to GTA IV. Everyone knows that Halo 3 was a Xbox exclusive and it still broke all kinds of records for only being on one system. It would almost be sad if GTA didn't break Halo's records.
I don't think that Halo's record really counts as it's Halo 3 and nothing of memorable importance. Sony is a bunch of douches from the old school and Nintendo licks twat like a carpet hungry lezzie at TGI Fridays. I put my money on the Sega Genisis making the come back of a lifetime (odd, considering that they aren't even in production any more)
Seriously though, Take Two's share being valued at less than $20 sounds like you've been paid by EA. Take Two's stocks were trading at a little more than $25 per share before they announced that GTA IV was going to be delayed 6 months. After Take Two announced GTA's delay their stock value dropped to the $15-17 area. Any market analyst with his or her weight, no offense to those watching their weight, knew that once GTA IV was released that Take Two's stock were going to take off, including Electronic Arts who jump to their and their stockholders front door with 2 billion dollars.
Give your head a shake.
Monday Gamewatch
This week: Race 18 of Ford and Land Rover's toughest off-road trucks, 4x4s, and SUVs, or break out your armchair baseball caps and spittoons. Welcome to middle-May, PC gamers, where it's a great time to be outdoors and away from your computer as much as possible, as confirmed by this week's soporific lineup.
Tuesday
Ford Racing Offroad. The screenshots look a little 1995 Sega Rally for a contemporary racer, but maybe you've got a thing for off-road Ford and Land Rover trucks, 4X4s, and SUVs (or maybe Strategy First just needs a new screen-capture tech). You get 12 race types, three off road environments divvied into 24 tracks, a bunch of hidden routes, "pick up and play handling" (whatever that means), realtime damage and repair, rollovers like repair pods, time extensions, artifacts, and cash, and multiplayer split-screen racing (But not online? Who seriously plays two-chair PC split-screen anymore?). Also: I'm not sure how it's a special feature, but power-sliding to "throw powerful trucks around the tracks." Hey, it may not be Gran Turismo 5, but it's only twenty bucks.
Tardy:
Baseball Mogul 2008. Should have shipped Tuesday April 29th; now shipping Tuesday May 13th.
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Xbox 360's New GPU: Jasper the Friendly Not-A-Ghost
Let's talk what's annoying about Microsoft's four-layer Intel-rific pee-cee-in-a-box. But first, fuggedabout all that "red ring of death" rumpus. After all, if your 360 croaks, you get a new one. Free. In a week, or at most, two. I'm double down and swinging steady with fixer-upper number three and believe it or not, pretty unruffled about the time I went empty handed. Hey, the replacements cost me nada, and you can't be too grumpy with a company that stands by its product with over a billion and change in warranty extensions and repair guarantees.
No, my beef with my 360 is currently that it's a roaring, blowing racket, like a smog-coughing city bus powering by outside an open window facing the street and cut into the side of a curbside flat. I'm talking leaf-blower, vacuum cleaner, answer-the-phone-in-the-other-room noisy. It makes my PC with dual Nvidia 8800 GTX video cards and an air-overclocked Intel "Penryn" QX9650 sound like the triple 120mm fans are whispering sweet lullabies. Once a game's good and running, my 360's vrooming like a surly Hoover you'll only tick off more with a pillow for a muzzle. I've tried sequestering it behind closed doors, but then I'm more or less cooking wood (or the rest of my A/V kit) and fretting about fire hazards. If you have a 360 -- especially if it's sitting inside an entertainment center, which, you know, is supposed to be what an entertainment center's for -- I know you know what I'm talking about.
Since the 360 debuted in late 2005, it's already enjoyed a CPU die shrink to 65nm (codenamed "Falcon") and while most pundits agree that shrink probably saved its bacon, the GPU's still been smoking along at 90 sizzling nanometers. Anyone with a smidgen of PC know-how knows it's the GPU that routinely muscles past 80C during gameplay, as opposed to an overclocked Intel CPU which, rigged properly, rarely pushes 60.
The incredible shrinking Xbox 360! Give it two or three more years and it'll finally be as cool and quiet and maybe even as tiny as a Nintendo Wii.
Meet Jasper. He's a 65nm GPU, coming this August to a 360 near you. His name means "treasurer" in Persian, which -- let's be honest -- squares a little weirdly when you figure the codename for the new version of the 360 in which he'll ship is "Valhalla," i.e. Odin's crib, i.e. the battle hall "for those slain gloriously in battle." Slain gloriously in battle? I dunno about you, but considering the 360's engaged in the holy-holy of console fracas, is it really smart to be naming your baby-bet-the-farm-on after a mythic version of the afterlife? I'm just sayin'...
Back to Jasper. In conjunction with Falcon, the theory goes that we'll not only put the red-ring-o'-death to bed in totem, we'll finally get a version of the 360 that doesn't chug like an air compressor. Great to hear, if true.
The only thing I'll miss? Using the thing as a foot-warmer-cum-space-heater when it's wintertime and my wife's in better-living-through-thermostat-plunging mode.
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This is by far the lamest article i have read...why bash on a subject thats been already beat to death. And make sure you learn to have an article that flows, because what i just read was ridiculous. And to Yuffiek133...the Xbox doesn't have a 56x dvd drive...it has a 12x dvd drive...know your shit
You sir, have obviously never used a vacuum cleaner or a leaf blower. Take yourself away from your privileged existence, go operate one of the previous mentioned items and then see if the the 360 lives up to your analogy. Or at least find yourself a decibel meter and do a legitimate article on the 360's noise level compared to other products. You have way too much time on your hands if this is what you to rant about.
I have too much time on my hands if this is what I need to respond to.
Indeed you do M1A1. ;)
And I guess you and memphis missed the part where my tongue was pretty obviously bulging (in cheek).
BioShock the Movie: Sister, Can You Spare a Mutagen?
Joy of joys, and I mean that in every sense of the double entendre, it looks like BioShock's set to receive the silver screen treatment. Variety reports Universal and director Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean, The Ring, and that daffy Home-Alone-with-mice Nathan Lane comedy) are shortly to embark on production of a movie version of Ken Levine's brilliantly disturbing underwater opus with a possible screenplay nod to Sweeney Todd scribe John Logan.
Verbinski claims the mechanical Big Daddies (pictured here) in particular allowed him to see the game as a film.
Variety says Take-Two is getting a ton of scratch up front in what's supposed to be the biggest videogame-to-movie handoff since Universal and Fox passed Microsoft $5 million for Halo in 2005. About the Halo movie... You probably heard it train wrecked a while back and that it's currently with Microsoft looking for a new distributor? The Take-Two cash infusion = designed to prevent that.
"The reason I structured it the way I did is to make sure it gets made," said Take-Two executive chairman Strauss Zelnick.
Amen, as long as Universal and Verbinski don't screw it up. And there's plenty of reason to think they might. No one's yet done a decent job translating a video game to film. No one. You can almost make a case for Final Fantasy: Advent Children, but that's a totally niche creature. And let's be honest, it's only been recently that games have started delivering stories written and produced in a way that's (almost) up to filmic and literary snuff quality-wise. Speaking about games as cinematic, anyway. I love games, love them quite appropriately for reasons that have nothing to do with their cinematic qualities, and once I do start thinking about them in filmic terms, have no illusions about their general puerility.
But it doesn't have to be that way, and it's plain as the nose on anyone's face. Like I said yesterday, all it takes to keep a good thing down is a real determination to fund the crappiest directors and screenwriters on the planet. If you want video-games-as-films to languish, keep buying tickets or even just renting Uwe Boll's Resident Evil and Bloodrayne and Alone in the Dark sequels. I guarantee you'll get more of the same, just like all of us who went to see Roland Emmerich's Independence Day in droves pretty much ensured there'd be a Godzilla and The Day After Tomorrow and 10,000 BC. Was anyone really surprised by how bad those were? Broom off your nostalgia cobwebs. Now does anyone think Independence Day was really any better?
"Dude. Popcorn flick. Clue. As in get one." Don't I know it. And to be totally fair, don't I know it'd be nice to have a video game movie at least as good as a Roland Emmerich dramedy.
"A man chooses, a slave obeys," opines the game's hyper-capitalist morals-monger. When it comes to writing, casting, filming, and editing this thing, let's hope Verbinski and Universal opt to choose wisely, now would they kindly?
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Stop Uwe Boll By Reading This
I hesitate to weigh in on the inimitable Uwe Boll because his quirks, foibles, and outright gaffes are so paint-blisteringly palpable, but this site's kind of fun, so what the hey. Here's a guy with a doctorate in literature from a German science institute who's made some of the worst films known to humankind, which I guess just goes to show how much an academic degree counts for anything these days.
Just a few of the mockeries made in Boll's illustrious career...
Alone in the Dark - 2005 flick based on the Infogrames survival horror PC game that started it all and somewhat improbably starring the otherwise talented Christian Slater, this movie was named worst film of 2005 by the Stinkers Bad Movie Awards. Oh, and apparently Boll had a decent script in the bag, but blew $10 million on special effects, chopping background and requiring Boll to slap a text scroll at the beginning just to help viewers figure out what's going on. (Kind of, you know, like those Star Wars prequels...)
BloodRayne - Boll's other 2005 action flick about a half-human Romanian vampire with all the usual "For vengeance!" tropes but none of the editing or acting chops to carry them off. Poor Kristanna Loken. Because she was so good in Terminator 3. You know, where she just had to look kind of prickly (well, a Cosmo cover model glacial-beige-blonde kind of prickly, anyway) for 109 minutes until the ineluctable Stan Winston-begat denouement. I only fiddled with the original Bloodrayne game, but everyone else told me it was only a half cut above average. A sliver up from "unforgivable," Boll's filmic translation is currently sitting at 2.6 out of 10 stars courtesy 14,536 discerning IMDb voters. Incidentally, the prostitutes in the scene with Meat Loaf (yes, that Meat Loaf) are the real deal. Boll apparently boasted that it was cheaper to hire real prostitutes than employ actresses.
You want the rest? Here you go...
In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (2007) - IMDb 3.8/10 (10,120 votes)
Postal (2007) - IMDb 3.9/10 (3,999 votes)
BloodRayne II: Deliverance (2007) - IMDb 2.5/10 (3,253 votes)
And coming soon...
Far Cry (2008)
BloodRayne 3 (2009)
Zombie Massacre (2010)
Considering there's never really been a video game made into a movie that's worth a hoot, and considering that Uwe Boll has done more in the past few years to encourage the public perception that video games are aesthetic junk, I think I'm going to have to raise both thumbs to Stop Uwe Boll (warning: shot of Uwe Boll flipping you the bird) as well as their petition advising Boll to cease and desist making feature films.
Re-Play
Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.
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