This week’s Gaming Flashback has no cake — instead it’s the history of Portal. The guys try to keep the podcast meme-free as they discuss Valve’s first person puzzle platformer.
There’s also non-Portal related news items, too:
Let us know what you think in the Comments section.
Eidos was founded in 1990 and has been the king of its own destiny since its inception. As part of Square-Enix, Eidos and its destiny were called into question, would they continue to run the show or would they become one with Square-Enix. Square-Enix has come out to say they’ll be leaving Eidos to themselves and allow creativity to flow between the companies.
“This is an exciting beginning to what I believe will be an incredible journey. I am very happy that Phil Rogers has agreed to lead Eidos in what I see as an international marriage between our two companies, a marriage that will give birth to great things. Eidos is a content rich company and a culturally significant business to the Square Enix group.” (kotaku)
Square-Enix is playing it safe with this acquisition because this isn’t a great enviroment for shaking things up internally within a development studio. Eidos is well known for Tomb Raider, Hitman, Deus Ex, Thief and many other great projects and have built a solid foundation for the future.
A mind-share between these two groups is a powerful enemy to the competitors if they’re able to open a good dialog between the two companies and share resources, tools and engines. In a world of cost savings and salary cuts, leaning on each others resources to build a better product is a win.
At least we won’t have to call them Square-Enix-Edios because that’s just a mouthful!
Most folks in the game industry are already writing off E3 as an actual event to be attending. Even Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter is calling it “virtually useless” for both retail and investors. The writing is on the wall and the reasons are obvious.
Publishers and developers didn’t want to invest the millions of dollars to make E3 a glamour show of epic proportions anymore. The lights, camera and action are all what the industry is about; the hype wagon in full steam. Gamers eat up the hype, bloggers and journalist rely on the hype and action to build readership and keep them coming back for more and retail uses it to gauge new releases and get a grip of the future.
Without the entertainment value of E3 nobody seems to care anymore. Large scale gaming entertainment is reflected in the large scale events and, at the end of the day, we want our conferences and shows to reflect the emotion and exciting of the industry.
“E3 had much more of an impact when it was a show,” comments IGN.com vice president of games content Tal Blevins. “The video game industry is about fun and entertainment, and we should have a show that reflects it.” (gamasutra)
Everyone is sad to see the state of E3, it’s like a cancer patient waiting for their final diagnosis. It’s unfortunate, it’s going to get worse and life will go on without it. In its wake, new shows will crop up while old shows increase in audience, excitement, intensity and cost.
As one show begins to fade others will grow to replace it and developers will yet again find themselves spending millions of dollars to be the best of show.
The place to be, this week, is Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA) as Popcap’s now released Feeding Frenzy 2 on the 360 platform. Xbox Live Arcade has been the go to place for awesome new content brought in high definition on both shrink wrapped box games along with classic casual titles.
Not into casual games? Perhaps your spouse or children are into them! If you’ve got an Xbox 360 and continually consider it a “big boys hardcore console” it’s time to change your perspective because that’s old world thinking. Microsoft, together with Popcap, plans to change how people game on the Xbox 360 console system.
This isn’t Popcap’s first title, many may remember Heavy Weapon on the Xbox 360. This sure won’t be the last!
Read on for full press release details!
I wanted Killer Instinct on the mini SNES.