Game Industry in Crisis?

As you can see, I had a pretty good weekend. One of the co-ops threw a pool party yesterday and a good time was had by all. According to GameDaily though, the party is over for the video game industry. They believe that the industry is now broken, and I'm not sure whether to agree with them or call them crazy. They make good points, and they still have one more part of this series of articles to write, but this one seems to be the meat of it. I think that if the industry was really broken, people would stop buying games. On the contrary though, game sales seem to be rather strong. However, the creation of the Xbox 360 and PS3 do bode bad for the future since they propagate development environments that make life harder for programmers and require studios to pump more money into their games to really take advantage of these new systems, which is a big reason why I think Nintendo will win this round. When you up risk like this in a title Game Daily is right, creativity does take a hit. You can't risk your money on something that may fall through, which is why you saw so many GTA clones when it did well, and similarly for survival horror and the like. I'd rather wait until the next generation starts before passing judgement on how deep of a hole the industry is really in.

IGN managed to discover a few new things about the Wii, including Bluetooth functionality, the buttons all being digital, and the uses of the LED buttons. Nintendo refused to comment on what IGN has learned, but it all sounds pretty legit. VMWare has released its VMWare Server product for free, which will likely be misinterpreted as a response to Microsoft giving Virtual PC away. However, this was supposedly planned for a good while now as a further impetus to encourage business to purchase VMWare Infrastructure 3 (meant for server farms). Microsoft has pulled a feature from Vista that would allow people to password protect folders due to an uproar among companies worried about lost data due to lost passwords and employees keeping secrets. It seems like it would be a good idea for home users though, so I don't understand why they wouldn't only pull it from certain versions of it since there are like 7 of them anyway. Current Windows users will love this little tool, which allows you to see the size of your folders when looking around in Windows Explorer. I've wanted something like this for quite a while. If you've played around with the idea of graduate school (which I have, personally), you'll probably want to think over this article highlighting some of the plus points to grad school. The only problem with grad school, in my opinion, is the cost since it's hard to get a fellowship that covers your whole term or make enough money from being a TA to go to school and feed yourself. If you're not convinced that a dual core processor is better than having two chips under the hood of your machine, then you'll want to read this. The most glaring difference to me though has always been the cost differential. Lastly, if you're interested in the Nike appliance for the iPod but don't want to buy new Nikes, then you should check this article out on how to set it up with your pair of shoes. If I jogged more, I'd probably do it.

A little movie called Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man's Chest took over the box office this weekend, once again, with over $62 million and is the highest grossing movie of the year thus far and the best first ten days of any movie ever. What's really sickening is that Little Man weaseled its way into second with over $21 million, and You, Me, and Dupree followed close after that while A Scanner Darkly's very limited release actually made #10. Next weekend will be much harsher with Clerks 2 and Lady of the Water hitting theaters, and I should hope that one of them take over. It turns out that Reservoir Dogs will be re-released (or triple dipped) this October in a special edition 15th anniversary set with a bunch of new merchandise. This movie is not good enough to warrant a third release, and I'd much prefer a good transfer of Kill Bill in a tidy set. Yahoo Movies has another Snakes on a Plane trailer, but don't expect a whole lot more than what we've already seen. Lastly, a poster has popped up for The Fountain, but it's pretty weird and I don't know enough about the story to explain it, I'm afraid.

Now for some Unconscious Mutterings:

I say ... and you think ... ?

1. Video :: Game


2. Fantasy :: World


3. Homework :: School


4. Crush :: Jennifer Love Hewitt


5. Late :: Registration


6. Husband :: Wife


7. Soccer :: Match


8. Wine :: Tasting


9. Before :: After


10. Romantic :: Evening