The Week in Games
The biggest entertainment opening of all time! Hard times in the gaming industry! And the boomingest videogame explosions ever! … All after the break.
Hype of the Week
The buzz around Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (all major platforms; 89 – 95 at Metacritic, depending on platform) has taken us to a place that no buzz has gone before.
The title is on pace to become the highest-earning entertainment launch in history, grossing more than $300 million in its first day of sales in the UK and the US alone. The theatrical release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince holds the current record at $394 million, but that was for an entire weekend, and global sales.
Modern Warfare 2 is a first-person shooter set in the near-future, fighting the good fight against a reign of terror. As Wikipedia says, “Similar to previous games in the series, the player takes on the role of various characters during a single-player campaign. The characters’ involvement in the plot occurs simultaneously and overlaps the events in the game.” In their ‘A’ review, 1Up said:
Mixing real-world locations with bombastic set-pieces MW2 continues the guided, thrill-ride experiences of its predecessor, and adds even more depth to its multiplayer offerings. It might not have fixed all the problems from the first game, but there’s just so much quality content packed into this game that it will almost certainly be one of the most-played games in your library for a long time to come.
Here’s the launch trailer:
Predictably, Fox News suggested this week that Modern Warfare 2 is a training tool for terrorists. Christian Science Monitor thinks it’s making us soft and unproductive. In Pennsylvania, police are looking for a man who made off with 100 copies of the title. I suspect the search looks like this:
Business News
The game business was bleak this week. … EA, the largest third-party game publisher in the world, announced that they were laying off 1500 people, cutting a dozen in-development games, and closing “several facilities.” … GameStop was downgraded by Goldman Sachs. … Game sales for October were off 19% over last year at this time (although it was still the 3rd largest October the industry has had). Hardware sales were also down; Sony’s PlayStation was the only system to see growth in year-over-year comparison. … On the up side, a week after its launch, Dragon Age sold $1 million in downloadable content alone.
Games in the Arts
IGN produced a list of games that are on their way to being lousy movies. Titles include Pac-Man, Castlevania, Spy Hunter, and Crazy Taxi (although, to be fair, most of those are dead in the water).
“Like this, but with Zac Efron…”
Dhani Harrison, son of Beetle George Harrison, says that not only is he working on Rock Band 3, but the next version of the game will teach gamers how to play music for real. If this works, we could have a super-human army of shredders with no artistic merit. (Sounds like the 80’s!) … Indie band Vampire Weekend have announced that the name of their next album is Contra, after the Konami videogame. Frontman Ezra Koening told MTV, ‘Wow, everybody my age, when you say ‘Contra’, thinks of the videogame, and everybody my parents’ age thinks of the [1980s] counter-revolutionaries in Nicaragua. It couldn’t be two more different things.” Yeah, man. Deep.
The Week in Sins
Currently, if you were to get all possible Xbox achievements, you would have an Xbox Live gamerscore of 733,836. (To do this, you would need to have played every Xbox title, and unlocked every stupid, stinkin’ “Bet you can’t do this!” challenge the developers have built into their games.) Standing up for ‘gluttony’ this week, there’s a guy with a gamescore of 384,155 (52% of all available). He’s hoping to hit 1 million in 2015. … In for “greed,” GameStop plans to start selling downloadable content over the counter, with the help of a kiosk. Their plan is that, instead of getting content from your internet-capable computer, you would drive to them, and download it there. (On top of their usual stellar consumer experience.) They’re hoping that the lure of trading used games for downloadable content will help sell this absurd story. … For “pride” this week, a composer inadvertently bragged about working on Bully 2, a title which the manufacturer had not announced. Rockstar, the publisher, has declined to comment further. … And, finally, for ‘wrath’ this week, GameSpy rounded up this really nice collection of The 10 Biggest Videogame Explosions (and how they failed to settle minor disputes).
Miscellaneous
A bunch of gaming executives said that the gaming industry must develop new intellectual property to survive. (Duh. … Hey, have any of you suits played Torchlight? Machinarium? Osmos?) … New Scientist reports that gamers think about their characters in role-playing games with the same parts of their brains that they use to think about themselves. “It could be that people whose brain activity is more similar when thinking of themselves and their avatars are likelier to end up hooked, she says.” … GameDaily ran down the biggest disappointments of 2009.
Thanks for reading! … If you like the round up, tell somebody. Have a great weekend.
