If you still have your eyes glued on World Cup fixtures, don’t forget that Microsoft pre-empted everyone today by announcing a new 360 model as well as the final name for Natal, now rebranded as Kinect. I’ve been talking a little bit for the last while around here at Game Over Online that the 360 really needs a winner to turn things around. It survived the RROD fiasco but it’s not exactly in a thriving position. It needs something to turn it around. Will the $150 Kinect do it? I don’t know. I’m a little worried there isn’t much to show that regular 360 owners can use Kinect when their new model says it’s Kinect ready.
More concerning is on the software side. Yes, Microsoft has some of its heaviest hitters like Halo, Gears and Fable all announced. But look at Kinect’s launch lineup versus what’s coming down the pipe for 360 in general. There’s a huge difference in the quality of titles. Kinect’s titles so far look like clones of Wii games and a few predictable rhythm and dance titles. Not even Fable III is in the first list, which is a little worrying. And some of the biggest franchise titles coming out like Halo Reach and Gears of War 3 – all really the final kick in the can for the 360 as Bungie is leaving to do multi-platform and there have been rumours Epic might as well, you would hope that Kinect would have leveraged some of that.
Hopefully as third party publishers work through their announcements during the week, there will be some more quality titles for Kinect. And of course, Microsoft needs to work on bundling this into a reasonably priced holiday bundle. I wouldn’t be surprised to see another round of price cuts by the holiday to install a Kinect+slim 360 at the current price point.
No doubt Microsoft got the message that their platform was getting a bit tired. With the departure of some Xbox originals, the 360 will heavily depend on Kinect to turn around its fortunes. It’s been a good console for the last 5 years. It needs some push to give it some legs to last a few more years. It would have been more bold to impose Kinect as a mandatory add-on in the current slate of hardware but I do understand Microsoft needs to consider the millions upon millions of consoles out there and what game designers would have to do to accommodate them.
Microsoft’s shown its cards for the rest of the year. Let’s see what Sony and Nintendo have up their sleeves tomorrow.
I’ve been scratching my head these days trying to look for external reviews of movies from IMDB and realized that now that Roger Ebert does not review every movie in the theater, my second go to person, Reelviews with James Berardinelli apparently had his site “skipped” by the IMDB bots. A full post can be found here: Reelviews
Alas, that’s really how the world works these days. Legitimate material doesn’t get linked to but those SEO guys and domain squatters get all the impressions.
According to VGChartz.com, it looks like new game sales for multi-platform titles like 2010 World Cup FIFA from EA, Lost Planet 2 from Capcom and Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands from Ubisoft are all selling better on the PS3 than 360. This has to be worrying the Xbox guys at Microsoft considering their argument all the way through the holidays was that games just sell better on the 360. It doesn’t look like it anymore and it’s not even from publishers or titles that traditionally do well on Playstation. Lost Planet did quite well on 360 and I have to think both the World Cup game being from EA and not Konami, and Prince of Persia had a 50-50 chance to do well on both platforms.
If Microsoft is holding off for Natal, it better come up with something big at E3 or I’m seeing this trend precipitating until they get a new console out.
Interestingly, God of War III has dropped to 63K sales at 2.5M cumulative. Maybe game sales are poor in general. ODST did 5.1M and is still doing 55K in sales and that was a luke warm filler title in the Halo franchise.
As for me, I just wrapped up my Shrek Forever After review for iPhone; don’t have much good to say about it. I heard the movie is also running on fumes as well but I’m a sucker for all things Shrek so I might actually try it.
There are two movies that come to mind in recent days that feature the Al Green cover of How can you mend a broken heart. That’s the Book of Eli and Notting Hill. Polar opposites in film but they share the same song selection. Seeing as how I don’t own too much soul music, I went on YouTube to listen to the track again. Interestingly enough, there were plenty of younger kids (I’d say teens to 21) who are saying MTV should start playing this type of “music” again instead of Lady Gaga or something of that banal nature.
I just got FIFA 2010 South Africa for iPhone. The interface seems a bit more clunky than RealSoccer. I really am irked about this moving dpad thing – sometimes I can’t seem to get my finger on the pad to make a move. But at amateur, England is doing not too shabby against Andorra at the moment. We’ll see how the rest plays out. 300MB game though. Those iPods better get bigger from Apple.
Published at: 04:11 pm - Wednesday November 11 2009
Much has been written about the demise of network television and the coveted primetime showings that go from 8:00 PM to 11:00 PM in North America. People are using DVRs. People are saving their shows and skipping commercials, ignoring advertising that companies spend millions upon millions on. The recent disgruntlement with Jay Leno’s NBC show is representative of that fight amongst networks par excellence. I have a work mate who tells me he used to watch late night TV, but since he and Leno have aged and he has children now, 10:00 PM became late night for him.
The interesting thing is when I went to my parent’s house this past weekend. My father, a person who would likely never leave the eastern timezone because he believes he’s in the middle of “primetime” and watches a daily diet of television is now barely turning on the television in the evenings. He watches the odd show now and then, plus live sports and maybe some news. But he says he goes to the web and watches things posted on YouTube and other online services. He cites the fact that he doesn’t have to record anything and he can get international content. He can fast forward or skip episodes he doesn’t think is interesting. Save for CNBC, which he still watches fairly religiously, he’s almost abandoned cable. If old repeat movies were offered freely online, I’m afraid the television networks and cable companies may have lost my father for good. Since my father is in his late 50s, that’s probably the demographic these networks were counting on judging from the number of Cialis and Viagra ads.
My brother and some of my friends have the same thinking. I rarely see them in front of a television unless it’s with a movie on and even with movies, some of them prefer being wired and chatting or surfing while watching the movie.
What do people think? Will streaming and the Internet eventually displace passive television? It certainly looks like it from my viewpoint, although I do live across from an apartment neighbour who religiously has the television on at 6:00 PM to 11:00 PM every night.
A day of watching football has yielded this neat Stella Artois advert. Those who know French will likely know the lyrics are very male oriented..but hey with eye candy like this, I think it’s hitting its demographic.
Apparently the N-Gage is once again dead. This on again off again platform that Nokia wanted to push all mobile gaming towards was a great pipedream but ultimately resulted in too few publishers, games and to be honest, handsets. iPhone and the iTunes App Store is where it’s at now:
