Another week, another blog. I feel I should start to plan these out a little ahead of time, instead of flying by the seat of my pants and just writing it an hour before I’m meant to put it up. That would probably stop me reporting on news that have happened in the last day or two, as well.

That being said, my first little piece is on something non-gaming related. Bleach is something that fellow nerds may be familiar with.  It’s a very popular manga/anime series in Japan, and it’s been going for years and years. It’s one of those seemingly perpetually released series that they have in Japan, along with the likes of Pokemon and Naruto. Well, that is no more. It’s been announced that Bleach will finish after the current arc has completed. Whilst I am glad that the writer, Tite Kubo, intends to give the series a proper finish, I can’t help but feel a little sad.

Don’t get me wrong: I know that Bleach is a little lame, and probably intended for a slightly younger audience than me, but I still like it. It’s pulpy and doesn’t require much deep thinking, and sometimes that’s just fine. Anyway, so the manga is going to finish. At some point. Thing is, I don’t know how they categorise the arcs. In broad strokes you could say there have only really been 2, possibly 3 different arcs since Bleach began, 2 of which are about 180 chapters long. At that rate there could be another 3 and a bit years of Bleach.  I guess 3 and a bit years is a long time, and after that maybe I will be wanting the series to finish.

So that’s my bit not on gaming. Secondly I want to address a mistake I made last time. Sony didn’t make those $2 billion losses in the quarter, that was for the whole year.  So it isn’t quite as bad as I made out, still not great though.

You might have heard of Notch, the creator of Minecraft. Love him or hate him, it’s pretty hard to deny that Minecraft is a global phenomenon. His small indie game has made him millions of dollars, to the point he no longer considers himself an indie dev. So much money, in fact, that he is seriously offering to help fund and publish an AAA rated game. A game that apparently no other publisher will touch.

The game in question is Psychonauts 2. I never played the first, made by legendary developer Tim Schafer, but it has a fan base who love the game a whole lot, and it was apparently one of the best games of the PS2 era. Tim Schafer must have a lot of pull in the industry, so it seems strange that the only person to offer to publish a sequel to the game is Mojang. To me it suggests that despite all his success, Notch just doesn’t have that keen a business sense. Maybe I am wrong, but it seems like, if this does happen (which is no where near certain), he will just be throwing a lot of money at a wall.  

So that’s my thoughts for the week, I’ll be back next Thursday.

Sorry for the late posting I had completely forgotten about uploading this review yesterday. So for this week tanya tuesdays is now tanya wednesdays. I shall however, make sure that next tuesday there is definately a review up for the site. Even if I upload it a day early and put it in a queue. Anyway enjoy the review

Dead Space Downfall (2008, Chuck Patton) is an animated prequel to the Dead Space game. Crew members of the Ishimura, a mining spacecraft, discover an artefact called the marker. The artefact is moved onboard the spaceship and a series of disturbing events occur. Crew members exploring the planet where the marker was uncovered, become violent, suicidal and mentally unstable. All hell breaks loose as one miner brings his dead wife, who commited suicide, onto the Ishimura unaware that an alien, a necromorph lies attached to her dead body. This necromorph then spreads throughout the ship and the body count and alien infestation rapidly rise. Vincent a crew member and her security team attempt to save members of the ship from the outbreak, slowly her team falls prey to the necromorphs and Vincent learns there is no hope for her or anyone on board the Ishimura.

The film is really quite enjoyable. There isn’t a lot of story of character development, the film is just essentially a gory bloodbath. It’s enjoyable though because the gore is not approach in a tacked on way. There are some quite gruesome moments within this film, you see peoples jaws ripped off and the like. The animation is well done, I wasn’t expecting the film to be so well animated.

It was quite unusual watching this film, firstly because Jim Cummings does the voice for one of the characters and unfortunately for me I will never be able to separate Jim Cummings and Tigger. I know he does a lot of voices for films besides Tigger and he is a good voice actor. Unfortunately throughout this film which was obviously supposed to be a horror film I kept seeing Tigger. That’s something more personal for me though. Secondly knowing the ending of the film because I was aware of the games ruined it slightly for me also. There was no climatic moment because I knew they were all going to die, I wasn’t concerned as to whether the characters would make it through the film because I knew they wouldn’t. The film is actually quite good though, I believe you can get it pretty cheaply and you can also watch it on netflix (like I did). It’s definitely worth a watch if your a Dead Space fan, or a fan of gore and violence. It’s even a film that now I’ve seen it, I’d go out an purchase myself actually.

Yesterday I went into Gamestation. I occasionally like to peruse that shop and pick out bargain games. Also, I went in to trade my games, to get new (not new new, but new to me) games. All that’s mostly irrelevant, my point is coming. Whilst I was in the shop, making idle chat with the (very pretty) girl stood behind the counter, my mind went to the Metal Gear Solid HD remake, so I asked about it. I was told it was out on Friday, but if I wanted it I would have to pre-order.

Apparently, they don’t stock HD remakes except copies for people who pre-order them. In fact, they didn’t even have any advertisements for it. They had advertisements for FF XIII-2, Mass Effect 3 and SSX, amongst others, but not for a game just about to be released. I found this very strange. Do they not make much money from these sorts of games? Is it that the only people likely to buy this sort of game are people likely to already know it’s coming out and anticipating it weeks beforehand?

I will say that I don’t know whether they meant they didn’t stock the game in all their stores, or just in that one. I will admit, it is a small shop, and the space for new games is very much limited to a few select titles, often with the words “Duty” or “Battlefield” in their title. I suppose that in a larger shop they probably will stock some copies, but I think that this shows that HD remakes maybe don’t sell as well as other games. That’s all speculation though.

I have also heard that there is the possibility that next year Game will go down, meaning there would be no games shops on the highstreet here in Britain anymore. That would be a real shame, since I need used games because I can’t afford to buy all my games new. Although I suppose by then I’d hopefully have a job.

Anyhow, Sony, a company you might have heard of, has just announced its 3^rd quarter takings. They made a loss of $2 billion. An entire $2 billion dollar loss, that’s just an insane amount of money. What makes it even more amazing is that this is on revenue of $20 billion. Over a year that makes $80 billion in turnover. That’s more money than the entire budgets of some countries. The fact that someone can make a loss of that much money just astounds me. Apart from that, I don’t have much to say on this story, because I don’t really know much about business.

My last story to comment on is the fact that Ubisoft is about to start some server maintenance on the 7^th. What with a lot of Ubi games having “always on” DRM,  that means people won’t be able to play their games. Games these people have paid hard cash for.  What I am saying is that this is bullshit. I mean seriously, this is exactly the reason why people straight away said that this system wasn’t going to work. I would suggest anyone that has any of these games cracks them so that the can continue to play.

DRM is a bad idea. All you need is a CD key for online play. DRM is going to get hacked, it’s going to be released onto the various torrent sites, and people are going to pirate it. What you have to make sure of is that you have something to offer paying customers. Multiplayer is one thing. Most games won’t work online if pirated, so you’ll need a new version to play online.  What a waste of money it is to have servers running constantly, and developing the programs and whatnot. How do company execs not realise this?

Anyway, that’s enough for this week, I’ll be back next week with a new post.