If this quote isn’t living proof that Electronic “Fuck your mom in the ass” Arts has too much power and money, I don’t know what is. EA’s CEO John Riccitiello made the following quote:

“When you’ve got a competitor like Take-Two on the sports side, and they launch a football title using some of the industry legends, you want to make sure that ends up being a blip and is not repeatable, because we like to defend our franchises aggressively.”

Wow. Talk about arrogance. Sounds like EA wants to buy an exclusive license for something they really couldn’t get an exclusive license for. Here is an idea EA…make a game that is fucking good instead of destroying all chance for competition. Focus your efforts on, oh I don’t know, game improvements and design instead of buyouts and assimilation.

Source: Gamasutra

Consider the following quote:

Given different costs of living, the price of an Xbox 360 is not the same in San Francisco and Topeka. How do you deal with that?

Moore: It’s more expensive in Topeka. But we don’t just look at the console cost in isolation. We look at what it takes to be up and running and have the best experience. We call it “TCO,” total cost of ownership.

Now this is pretty interesting to consider. What if Game Consoles were priced according to cost of living in an area. I know some consumer electronics are SLIGHTY adjusted for this, but we’ve never seen it on consoles. The thing is now that console prices are so high there’s a huge difference between the cost for someone. $200 might not be a big deal to anyone, but $400 most likely is, and surely $600 is a big deal to everyone.

So why not adjust the price accordingly, even if just slight. I wonder if sales would increase in areas where it’s typically lower. I mean, cost is already different per region of the world and with a country as big as the US why not adjust cost per region in the country?

Building an empire, an Xbox at a time | Newsmakers | CNET News.com

technorati tags:why, do, consoles, cost, so, much?

Danny Ledonne created the controversion Super Columbine Massacre RPG! The game is sick and twisted, yet somehow it’s brilliant and engadging. Why? It explores the horrible tradgedy from alternate perspectives very much like Film.

People have made films about the Columbine incident and they’ve won Oscars and film festival prizes [most notably Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine - Ed.]. Clearly this is at least in part about the medium chosen and not the content of the work alone. I think, based on the subject matter, a videogame is a unique way to explore the subject in an interactive way unlike films or books. Ours isn’t a culture that has yet viewed videogames as an academic, scholarly, or truly artistic field and instead regards interactive electronics primarily as an innocuous plaything. I think Super Columbine Massacre RPG! challenges this.

I think this is a very good point. It’s a way of expanding our knowledge of an incident as well as applying some personal influence into it while we play the game. That is something that can’t be said for a movie, TV Show, or even a book.

Next Generation - Why I Made the Columbine Game

technorati tags:columbine, video, game, controversy

What? I don’t know about you but I think this is just pretty lame. From The Gamerscore Blog.

In an interview with Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, the author writes:

But the name Wii not wii-thstanding, Nintendo has grasped [an] important notion that (has) eluded its competitors. …Don’t listen to your customers. The hard-core gaming community is extremely vocal–they blog a lot–but if Nintendo kept listening to them, hard-core gamers would be the only audience it ever had. “[Wii] was unimaginable for them,” Iwata says. “And because it was unimaginable, they could not say that they wanted it. If you are simply listening to requests from the customer, you can satisfy their needs, but you can never surprise them. Sony and Microsoft make daily-necessity kinds of things. They have to listen to the needs of the customers and try to comply with their requests. That kind of approach has been deeply ingrained in their minds.”

I understand where he is coming from, but there comes a point where you have to listen to some degree to your target audience. Granted, Nintendo’s TA with the Wii is the non gamer, but to completely alienate your loyal following is pretty lame IMO.

Exhibit 1: “Its popular and newly released Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has now been re-rated “Mature” and recalled by the ESRB because Take-Two and its co-publisher have been caught embedding nude figures and scenes in the game which can be unlocked with a code provided by the developer. This is not a modification or “mod” of the game by gamers. It is an unlocking of content that was put there by Take-Two with the unlocking code provided by the developer!”

What the FUCK are you guys talking about? There is no CODE. It is a 3rd party modification. Graphic models have a skin on them, and a lot of times it comes in layers to make it more realistic. Just like you have clothes over your own fucking skin.

Who lets these people put out this un-informed BULLSHIT. I think it’s time the video game community come up with a centralized group that regulates shit like this to the mainstream media.

Read the rest of this entry »

Gamespot has the scoop. For the most part they stand behind their ratings submission for Oblivion. They fully disclosed all that was in the game. This is what worries me though.

There is no nudity in Oblivion without a third party modification. In the PC version of the game only - this doesn’t apply to the Xbox 360 version - some modders have used a third party tool to hack into and modify an art archive file to make it possible to create a mesh for a partially nude (topless) female that they add into the game. Bethesda didn’t create a game with nudity and does not intend that nudity appear in Oblivion. There is no nude female character in a section of the game that can be “unlocked.” Bethesda can not control tampering with Oblivion by third parties. Bethesda is taking steps to ensure that modders can not continue to hack into Oblivion’s art archives to create partially nude figures.

On top of all this, the ESRB is really losing credibility by going back and changing ratings. Now they are making game developers and publishers as well as themselves look incompetent. Something needs to change at the ESRB, and they need to stop being such fucking pussies to political bs.

The ESRB has changed the rating of The Elder Scrolls: Oblvion from a T to an M.

The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) has changed the rating assigned to the game “The Elder Scrolls® IV: Oblivionâ„¢” from T (Teen 13+) to M (Mature 17+). The content causing the ESRB to change the rating involves more detailed depictions of blood and gore than were considered in the original rating, as well as the presence of a locked-out art file or “skin” that, if accessed through a third party modification to the PC version of the game, allows the user to play with topless versions of female characters.

SourceÂ

Absolutely fucking ridiculous. This shit has GOT to stop. The ESRB apparantly doesn’t understand software or how it works. What locked content is, what a hack is, etc. Go to fucking hell ESRB.