Too Much News to Keep up With

Posted 2/19/08
Tags: , , ,
Categories: General

I’ve been a little busy at work… sorry I can’t lie, I mean occupied with Culdcept, and as such keep holding off on posting. The problem is that with GDC going on, the news and rumors have been flying lately and I simply couldn’t decide what I really wanted to talk about at length. So instead I’ve decided to do a quick roundup of some of the news that caused me to read more than a headline (aside from the recent Lost Planet required 5 gb install news, don’t get me started on that crap).

First up is the obvious, yes Ponn mentioned the impending signs of doom earlier this week, and now Toshiba has made the officially official, official announcement. In what was the most graceful egress from a product seen from an electronics giant since Sega segued from hardware to just software, Toshiba took a long hard look and thought it best to bow out now to avoid causing the continued market split that would ultimately slow growth of the next gen disc media. Or, if you peel away all the layers of BS, they saw that after all the major players in both Hollywood and at the retail/rental front jumped ship to Blu Ray they would only lose money beating the dead horse that was their R&D and advertising campaigns for HD-DVD. The good news, is that I own a PS3, and am therefore covered in the Blu Ray front. The other good news, is that I also own the HD-DVD add on for my 360 and I expect some spectacular blow out sales of whatever is left once all the dust settles. The bad news is I am a sucker for tech toys who blew too much money in the first place, but oh well.

Next up are a few game tidbits from GDC. Left 4 Dead, Valves recently sponsored blast fest will not just be a PC title, but come exclusively to the Xbox360 for it’s console iteration. Word over at left4dead411 reveals that the latest issue of OXM (people still read print?) got the scoop after a recent visit to Valves developers. If you are not familiar with Left 4 Dead, think Dawn of the Dead rip off, but with team based Counterstrike gameplay. I don’t know about you jokers, but shootin’ zombies always makes me feel better, and co-op is just the icing on the cake. In less gory game news, Microsoft is allegedly hoping to steal some of the buzz away from Sony’s Home and Little big planet, and stifle any potential awareness of Nintendo’s Wiiware by making an XNA announcement soon. To help drive up the anticipation to 11 they have literally “shrouded it in secrecy” by shrouding their XNA booth at GDC. Will this be another huge player in the user created content bandwagon that is so popular with the industry right now, or is M$ just trying to distract us while they swap out that RRoD unit that got left on the show floor at GDC earlier. We will all know soon enough sometime tomorrow afternoon.

And now for my personal favorite. Although unrelated to the big show, but just as important to gamers (at least the ones from my era) Variety has confirmed additional cast member for the new StreetFighter Movie reboot. Although it saddens my heart that Raul Julia (dead) and Jean-Claude Van Damme (career dead) will not be able to reprise their roles, the new cast makes it seem as if they may actually be trying to make this movie entertaining. I mean, come on… they’ve got Kristin Kreuk, Michael Clarke Duncan and Chris Klein! These are some decent to good actors piling up here, I would like to believe in my heart of hearts that these kids aren’t just signing on to collect a paycheck. Time will tell, but I’m going to cross my digits and wish on stars that my most beloved fighting franchise might be done some justice on the big screen.