There’s not a whole lot to share with you this morning, but I’ll highlight what has my synapses firing today. First off is the trailer for Hitman, which our Jeremy wrote up right here. I’m with him in opinion; it’s a stylish trailer, and the use of classical music is a clever hook. I hope that the Kronos Quartet gets a lot of play on the film’s soundtrack. (While being sick, I played a fair amount of Hitman: Blood Money, and also watched The Fountain again. The Quartet are awesome components of both.)
Evil Avatar is running a story that hints at an HDMI cable coming soon for the non-Elite Xbox 360s in the world. The distinctions between various output methods for HD content are still cloaked in mystery for mor consumers, for whom the vagueries only stand as buzzwords that Best Buy employees use to swindle them; but as a cabling standard capable of the full 1080p output, HDMI is worth adding to your lexicon. The solution is coming from third-party hardware developer XCM, with whom I have no experience. XCM is claiming, though, that the solution is only four weeks away. Microsoft hasn’t spoken up, yet, and probably won’t, so this will likely be an At Your Own Risk thing at best.
Joystiq links us to a lengthy interview with FASA Studios head Mitch Gitelman conducted with the OXM Podcast. FASA’s recent Shadowrun game for Vista and Xbox 360 has underwhelmed those audiences who attention it has managed to attract, and Gitelman is none too happy about that. It’s an odd kind of post-mortem for his team’s labor, since he tends to get emotional in his analyses; and rather than being inwardly focused, Gitelman instead looks beyond FASA’s walls for the source of the game’s commercial failure. He does have some valid points regarding the gaming industry, but most of those are depressing: publishers are going to be less likely to take risks on games with every successive failure of titles that deviate from the norm, as Shadowrun did.
I’m not sure to what degree I agree with Gitelman. On an emotional level, I get frustrated when big publishers work to homogenize games; at the same time, I read the IndyGamer blog every day, and so I’ve got no concept of there being a stifling of creativity to the level that Gitelman asserts. Innovations rarely come from the driving forces in any market, because they become locked to their own production momentum. It’s the small, nimble inventors who tend to come up with the new stuff. It’s important to note, though, that this dynamic doesn’t parallel the noble little knight against the big, bad dragon. We don’t want the independent gamers to defeat the big publishers.
See, ’cause dragons are cool, too.