Following yesterday’s assault of newsworthy items, today’s offering feels like the lull before the mustard gas hits. I’d like to stress that none of the items below are important in any way, especially my commentary on them.
First off, as a followup to the announcement of Devil May Cry 4‘s multiplatform future, here’s a new trailer of the game.
The Wired Game|Life blog has a little snippet of an interview with a vice president of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe in which the following words are spoken: "For Final Fantasy XIII, I can tell you that exclusivity is being discussed." This is firmly in the territory of rumor, but it’s interesting that exclusivity is being discussed, rather than being assumed, especially for a project as high-profile as FF.
There’s not much to say about this story other than, "Okay, 3D Realms. You can come down and eat your supper. But no dessert until you make it right."
Hurrah! Phil Harrison doesn’t subscribe to draconian philosophy! Thoughtful gaming site Three Speech has posted some results of an interview with the fair Phil from GDC, in which the subject of pornography via the Home infrastructure is pursued. After expressing his disappointment in the line of questioning, and thus missing the point, Harrison says, "I think Home should be used for a much wider and more beneficial scope than [hot sexy XXX action], but I think that people can express their creativity inside Home in a wide variety of ways and it’s not necessarily for us to dictate what that should be." Good for you, Sony. Unfortunately, you’ll get backlash from people who blame tools over tool users.
Game Set Watch has a funny writeup about fixing game review scoring, which seems to cause a lot of fuss for fanboys of particular games. The solution is to remove the typical 0-100 scoring and render all marks as a binary "7" or "8," 7 being pretty good but not as good as 8. A cognitive science professor once told me that humans aren’t good at grading things on anything above a seven point scale (which might explain why I’ve mysteriously avoided giving DVDs scores of 1, 3, and 10.) An alternative solution is to ignore silly people.
I really don’t like covering anything related to Jack Thompson, because he subtracts from any reasonable discourse on videogames, but I would like to note, courtesy of GamePolitics, that his countersuit against Take Two alleges the publisher is a participant in a vast conspiracy to deprive him of his civil rights. A conspiracy to deprive him of his civil rights. I don’t want to imply that Thompson is a criminal, but the first analogy that leaps to mind is of a convict filing a similar suit against the police force who caught him masturbating in front of an elementary school.
Good man Jon Cassady will be heading the roundup tomorrow, as I’ll be attending the wedding of people I don’t know very well. This is why handhelds were made.