Harley Quinn's Revenge Is Batman: Arkham City's Bad New Ending 
High Scores And Egos: There's Always A Bigger Doodle 
The Last Moments Of GAME 
How Bad User Interfaces Are Ruining Video Games And Other Wonderful Things 
She Tried To Make Good Video Games For Girls, Whatever That Meant 
The Story Of Doodle Jump: Brotherly Love And Digital Snacks In the real world, sitting in front of a bank of video monitors watching people go about their business sounds booooooring (unless you’re William Baldwin!). As a game, though? Interesting premise, especially when it’s got bubblegum-cute presentation. Enter CCTV for both the Wii and DS, by Ukrainian outfit Nikitova Games. Never heard of them? You may have heard of the game’s designer: Jon Hare, formerly of Sensible Software, and co-designer of Sensible Soccer, Cannon Fodder and Mega Lo Mania.
We could hear about how Hare thinks it’s the best thing he’s done since his Sensi days, but we’d rather show you the charming outline for the game from Nikitovia’s site: Starting as a lowly shopping mall guard, the player can rise to International head of security as he travels the worlds most famous shops and art galleries scrutinizing car parks, trains and airports in a bid to capture the thieves, smugglers, vandals and other low life littering the world’s streets and bang them to rights.
“Bang Them To Rights”? Such a better name. CCTV [Nikitovia Games, via Siliconera]
Today is a special day. Really special. Some benevolent person has taken the awesomest game music from the worst game ever (Cheetah Men II) and made thumping club remix called Cheetah Girl. It’s even got effervescent vocals and fluffy lyrics! This here is the song of 2007. Go ahead and listen. It’ll change your life.
GripShift’s pretty fun. Which explains why it’s gone from PSP to PlayStation 3 Network and now all the way over to Xbox Live Arcade. Developers Sidhe Interactive have announced that the downloadable racer will be made available on 360 sometime in December, though a firm date and price are still undecided. 360 fans worrying over the quality of a game that’s been double-ported, relax: Sidhe claim it’s the “definitive” version of the title. Until it’s ported to the Wii and/or PC. That one will be more definitiver. GripShift Heads to Live Arcade [IGN]
Holy crap, Nintendo has sold a lot of DSes in Japan. How many? A lot. For those of you into frivolous things like numbers, “a lot” comes to the tune of 20 million DS portables according to Famitsu publisher Enterbrain. That’s since the handheld went on sale way back in December 2004. Sure, we’ve heard this before, but Entertain has done the number crunching: The actual breakdown is 6,449,206 original DSes and 13,602,806 DS Lites sold for a grand total of 20,052,012 aka A LOT. The top five games sold are all first party Nintendo titles: Pokémon: Diamond and Pearl (5,337,424), New Super Mario Bros. (4,894,287), Brain Age 2 (4,731,990), Animal Crossing: Wild World (4,443,340) and Brain Age (3,571,030). So, yeah, the DS it prints money. A LOT. DS Sales Japan [Famitsu]
Let’s keep this brief. I think Assassin’s Creed is a poor game built on a great engine. Which when you tally up the averages leaves us with something very…average. Confused? Let me explain.
Ubisoft have nailed Altair. Nailed him. Nailed the game world, too, while we’re at it. It’s not often you get to play a game where your character is so responsive to your commands, and is so firmly attached to their surroundings. Altair doesn’t float, he doesn’t skip awkwardly between animations, he feels heavy, solid and real. It’s a joy to simply run around a town, skipping over rooftops.
Shame, then, almost every other part of the game is either broken, rubbish or missing. Combat is rudimentary. Altair’s voice-actor is awful. Missions are repetitive. The sci-fi plot is hammy as a room full of ham steaks. You get the idea. It’s like Ubisoft spent all their time/effort on Altair and the beautiful game world, only to forget to work on the stuff you can do once you’re actually in that game world. You know. The important stuff.
As a tech demo or a teaser for the franchise, it’s wonderful. But as a game in its own right? With missions and variety and opportunity and all those gamey things? Not wonderful. Very average, in fact. Indeed the game’s most lasting achievement might be that it laid the foundation for inevitable, superior sequels, where we get to keep the controls but also get hold of an involving quest or two while we’re at it.
Activision honcho Robert Kotick is not a nerd. He has a totally cool nickname, “Bobby.” And cool guys have a nickname like that. His company puts out cool games like Call of Duty 4 and Guitar Hero. Bobby recently told a room full of press:
I was at the BA terminal a few weeks ago and I had to take my belt off and it was 20 minutes before the plane was leaving and it was an international flight. I started running and realised I need my belt. My pants fell down. And I tripped.
See? Cool guy. Best part: The plane was four hours late. Hear Him Recount The Story [Sound Clip via Reuters]
Guitar Hero III for Mac and PC is a goer for the States, as you can read for yourself in the post below, but what about us? I contacted Activision earlier today, but I’m still waiting for a reply. I’m hoping the answer doesn’t include references to next year, extreme pricing or trouble with the OFLC… more for the publisher’s sake than anything else these days.
Update: Alrighty – Aspyr Media, the company distributing the game in the States, has a local partner here in the form of Try & Byte. Contact has been made, so let’s see what the price will be, and if it will hit the US street date.
That about sums it up. Aspyr, who are handling the publishing of the game for home computers, have announced that the Mac version of Activision’s bread-winner has gone gold, and will be shipping to retailers on December 10. The Mac version will include the PC version (it’s a hybrid bundle), as well as allow cross-platform online play between Macs and PCs. Sadly, Mac fans, the bundle will not include a sleek, stylish and minimalist all-white guitar. Sorry.
[via Blues News]
Ready for the Holidays? Japan is! Without Thanksgiving, Christmas decorations start going up sometime right after Halloween. What kind of decorations? Christmas trees, wreaths, Pokémon lights. You know, the usual.
Holly jolly Pokemas [Siliconera]
There’s an interview with Shigeru Miyamoto up over at Next-Gen (by regular Kotaku contributor John Gaudiosi), which as you’d expect from a writer who hob-knobs with Hollywood, is mostly about the movies. There’s some interesting stuff from Miyamoto about why most videogame adaptations are rubbish. The Mario Bros. movie, for instance: Well, when we first initiated talks about a Super Mario Bros, movie, I tried to emphasise the point that the Mario Bros. games are fun as videogames and if we were going to make a Mario Bros. movie, that movie should be entertaining as a movie, and not a translation of the videogame. I think that they tried very hard and in the end it was a very fun project that they put a lot of effort into. The one thing that I still have some regrets about is that the movie may have tried to get a little too close to what the Mario Bros. videogames were. And in that sense, it became a movie that was about a videogame, rather than being an entertaining movie in and of its self.
He’s right, you know. Next time, it needs to be less close. A human-looking Bowser, perhaps. That’d shake things up. Or a sci-fi setting. Maybe even some mechanical boots for our plucky plumbing heroes…
MIYAMOTO: THE INTERVIEW [Next-Gen][Image: Yoshikazu Tsuno/Getty]
