Life, RTS, and Nintendo Hard(arses)
Now this is a REAL “holiday season” game.
In the latest in a long line of excuses for my laziness, this time my absence from posting is mostly to do with a wedding. No, not my wedding – deity knows that’s a long way off, if ever. No, instead I get to play best man – paying lots of money for a suit I’ll probably wear once, dealing with frayed nerves and delicate sensibilities, trying to deal with the fallout of the bucks night (see: delicate sensibilities) and being subject to the whims of a certain someone in a dress. It has a lot of the same aspects as what the groom has to deal with only it costs me just a little bit less, and at the end I don’t get to fuck the bride. One more week to go, and then over a year of having to hear about every aspect of the planning for the wedding is done. Hoorah. Queue the veiled jabs in the speech.
In news more relevant to this blog, going to Blizzcon in 2007 is the gift that keeps on giving, because a couple of weeks ago I received a beta key for Starcraft 2. I wasn’t really into the first one very much, and I have made comments about my ambivalence about RTS before, but having had a think about it, and considering that I enjoyed Warcraft 2 back in the day, and Company of Heroes, World in Conflict, and the small parts of the two Dawn of War games that I’ve played, I guess that’s not really true. I couldn’t get through Warcraft 3, and it’s fair to say that I suck at RTSes, but the good ones still do something for me.
Of course, I had to boast about it on twitter, and it took less than 5 minutes before I had a bunch of ‘OMG, WHAT DO U WNT 4 DA KEY!?’ from a bunch of people I didn’t know. Ah, the internet, it’s magic.
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On another note, you may have seen the case of my stupid fellow countryman who bought a copy of New Super Mario Bros. Wii a week before the official release date and then boasted about it on the internet, not by posting photos of himself with the game, but instead by uploading it to the internet in a way that led easily back to him. The end result was a $1.5 million AUD settlement with Nintendo (should’ve got a better lawyer, amirite?) I think he got what was coming to him – a stupidity tax, more or less. I think the amount announced is probably largely meant to set an example, and I doubt that he’ll have to pay back anywhere near that much. Nintendo, to complete the image of being the evil empire, have also announced they’re going to release a black Wii – WTB a faux-woodgrain PS3 chunky.
Although an incidental detail to the main story, I found there was something interesting in how he received the game – a store sold it to him a week before the ‘official’ release date. To me, this is another example of the stage-managed nature of the hype machine that largely surrounds games these days. If stores have stock of a game, why is there an embargo made to prevent them selling it? What possible harm can there be for someone to buy a game as soon as a store receives stock? It’s obviously supposed to be a complete product at that stage, or it shouldn’t be sold at all. But then this is just one example of the ridiculousness of the typical yearly release schedule. “People are affecting our sales by, um, buying our games…”?
This year, to be fair, has had a fairly good amount of games released through the first couple of months, with a few big names like Mass Effect 2 and Bioshock 2, but this is not usually the case – a large number of games usually get released in a glut around “holiday season”, the specific holiday being, of course, Christmas. Then it’s often a pretty barren landscape until around April, with a few months of games popping up before the northern summer leads to a bit of a wasteland again, and then the industry ramps up towards the next holiday season.
I suppose when you work off a pile like I do, exactly when the games are released doesn’t matter too much, but I can’t help but to think how many games are lost in the shuffle when there’s a release glut, that could have their chance to shine if given a release window with little competition.
Image snagged from Kotaku.
