gwax's rumblings

It looks as though Microsoft has decided to cap­i­tal­ize on their own­er­ship of FASA Interactive and the rights to all FASA based video games. Production is under­way on a Shadowrun game for the Xbox 360 (related arti­cles here and here and else­where). It looks like Microsoft may have found a way to con­vince me to buy an Xbox 360 or, at the very least, get under my skin about it. God I hope this game doesn’t suck.

I don’t know whether to get on the Playstation 3 or Xbox 360 band­wagon and it’s not because they both look great, it’s because nei­ther of them stands out. I swear, it’s like a mod­ern elec­tion. I’m pleased by my Xbox because of its incre­men­tal graph­i­cal improve­ments since my Dreamcast and because of some of its won­der­ful games but I don’t think there’s been any­thing ter­ri­bly rev­o­lu­tion­ary since the NES. The video game indus­try has been stuck in a rut of incre­men­tal improve­ments and minor new game­play fea­tures. The Xbox 360 is turn­ing more into a PC, which aggra­vates me because I already have a PC and I don’t like the idea of a mod­u­lar con­sole. The Playstation 3 makes me think of a movie indus­try par­al­lel, sequels tend to turn out great, some­times bet­ter than the first but the third in a series usu­ally tends to go down­hill: ignor­ing a few decent trilo­gies, look at the Terminator, RoboCop, Predator and other movie series; why don’t you do some­thing new instead of the same thing again. However, look­ing at Nintendo, a com­pany I’ve ignored for years, we see some­thing kind of inter­est­ing; I just watched the teaser trailer for the new Nintendo Revolution con­troller and I was com­pletely wowed. The Nintendo Revolution con­troller looks like a com­pletely new approach to video games; dur­ing the first few moments of the video I thought it was just another cutesy thing like most of what they’ve been doing but by the end I was com­pletely agog. The seg­ment of the video where a guy seemed to be using the con­troller as a sword prac­ti­cally had me drool­ing. I’ve got to say, if Nintendo can pull off the sorts of things that trailer sug­gests, I may become a die hard Nintendo guy like Sherv and Sam.

Today is the 6^th birth­day of the Sega Dreamcat. The Dreamcast, which I have often hailed as one of the best video game sys­tems of all time (prob­a­bly sec­ond only to the SNES), was released in the USA on 9÷9÷99. So, Happy Birthday Dreamcast, you’ll always hold a spe­cial place in my heart.