Repost! Repost!
Mr. Pundit, I quite recall you wanting to know if The World Ends With You was any good. Well, here you are:
Indignant Desert Birds
Peaking under the Veil of Ignorance
Mr. Pundit, I quite recall you wanting to know if The World Ends With You was any good. Well, here you are:
Summer is an incredibly boring time for video games. Everything that our wonderful developers had wanted to churn out quickly comes before Christmas, and everything else, mostly big name titles, comes out in the spring. E3 hasn’t happened yet, if it is going to happen again, and video games journalists are searching desperately for something to talk about.
Granted, mainstream news sources are not entirely up-to-speed on the video games industry, and after a 3-day experiment in which I typed “video games” into the Google News Search bar every few hours (though it generally wasn’t updated that often), I found all sorts of information about how exercise games are good for you(!) and whatnot. Come on, people, I played Workout mode in Dance Dance Revolution when I was in *9th grade*. Exercise games, no matter what Nintendo wants you to think, are *not new*. This is vaguely interesting to me because I have just started a very expensive and time consuming diet, and any exercise is a good thing, I suppose, but I really prefer to just ride my bike.
ANYWAY, for the last couple of days, news sources have been ablaze about this sort of thing: In-game advertising will ruin the video game industry. The whole idea of in-game advertising is, of course, NOT new, but the Sony deal is. Regardless, I don’t really see his point as being realistic. It’s a sad fact of life, but we quickly come to terms with things like $60 games and advertisements all over the place.
I think there is one thing that he didn’t bring up, though. In-game advertisements could provide a framework by which smaller game companies could have more funding to make better games, much like ads in the past gave amateur web developers a way in which they could actually publish their material. We finally have some sort of distribution in place on game consoles, it’s just a matter of being able to actually MAKE the games.
more cat pictures
My GF swears she has a plan around getting us one. Mario Kart Wii, I mean. I’ve already got a cat…
I was going to write a big essay supporting this proposition, but in the process of googling for the relevant quotes I found that somebody already wrote more or less the essay I wanted to write.