Blog Dump

The rumor mill is reporting that Lucas Arts may be stripping Sony Online Entertainment (makers of the much maligned Star Wars Galaxies) of the Star Wars license. Internet conjecture conects that to the known fact that Bioware (makers of the well received Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic offline RPGs) has opened up a new studio exclusively for producing online RPGs. Still very much a rumor, but the nerds are atwitter with the possibilities for an online Star Wars RPG that doesn't suck balls.

Nintendo is saying that not only will their console be cheaper than other consoles, but the games will be cheaper too. Now, hardware can be cheaper for a few reasons, primarily because 1) The hardware manufacturer takes a larger loss on the hardware in hopes of selling more machines and making up the difference in increased game sales to those extra users, 2) the hardware manufacturer cuts out frills that the other machines include, like a hard drive or network adapter, or 3) the hardware manufacturer uses less cutting edge technology in their machine. Nintendo has said that they're not trying to compete with the cutting edge graphics of the PS3 or Xbox 360, but also that the graphics will still look good. Producing games, however, as far as my knowledge goes at least, is a bit different. It's all man hours; the better you want the graphics to be, the bigger you want your game world to be, the better you want the online component to be, all these depend on putting more people on the job. You can also increase the game's quality without increasing the cost through better management, but I doubt that's something Nintendo can guarantee enough to remark about.

Now the difference between PS2 games and Xbox games, graphically speaking, was noticible this generation, yet the games cost the same. So if companies are going to charge less for Nintendo Revolution games than they are for the 360 or PS3 that tells me that the margin between the work it takes to make a Revolution game and a PS3 game is bigger than the margin between the PS2 and the Xbox. We'll see, but I can't help but think that either A) Revolution games will look significantly worse that PS3 and 360 games or 2) Revolution games will generally cost the same as those other systems. As always, we'll see for sure when they show games at this year's E3, coming up in May.

Supposedly Microsoft changed from shipping Xbox 360s by airplane to ship recently, which means that though they've been producing lots of systems lately there's a gap of time between when the last plane left and the first ship, uh, shipped ahoy or whatever they do. Supposedly in the next couple weeks there should be massive amounts of systems in stores. The link also talks about some mysterious event when this first ship shipment arrives. It's from the MS PR guy, so I guess take it for what you will.

The 360 has shown up Down Under and evidently has sold rather well.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is an awesome single player game for the 360. A wide open world to explore and nearly limitless possibilities of things for your character to do, this game should be on most owner's lists of must haves. Don't just take my word for it though, the paper of record agrees!