Keepalive and Biz Talk

I finally started singing "If I Didn't Care" to myself again, so I went back and finished Bioshock, review forthcoming.

Titan Quest is on an indefinite hiatus. That game is long and dull and a pain in the later levels. I'm playing the most tanked up class in the game, and I can't pop potions fast enough to stay ahead of the damage some groups do. So I stand at the edge, pulling off one to three at a time and running back a safe distance to fight them. Dull and painfully slow is just to much for my ADD to bear.

Super Paper Mario isn't going that much better. There's a lot of backtracking in the game. Were these art assets really that hard to develop? And the action elements of the game don't satisfy. The humor is amusing at times, but overall it just makes me wish they'd done a proper sequel. (The older Paper Mario games were actiony RPGs, not platformers.)

Out in the world, Sony seems to be doing well. The 360 never caught on in Japan and is enacting price drops to try and stay in the race in Europe. And the PS3 actually outsold the 360 in the US in January and February. Microsoft is crying supply constraints, but that's probably a lie. When people can't find something at the store, they go online, and Amazon, still not able to stock the Wii a year and a half later, seems to have plenty of 360s (the new ones with HDMI) available for sale. Best Buy has it online. Circuit City is sold out online, but it says that all three locations within driving distance have them in stock. I don't see why they're not writing it off as a temporary bump due to HD DVD losing. Maybe it's because they know there's more failure on the horizon.

Sony has projects in the pipe that are targeted at broader audiences. I'm thinking specifically of Little Big Planet and Home. Microsoft has nothing broader audiences care about. Microsoft had an early lead (exaggerated by channel stuffing, of course), and it looks like they're squandering it very effectively.

At some level, though, it still feels like all of this is ridiculous ivory tower spitball fights. No real money starts changing hands until these machines drop to Wal-Mart buyer prices. The 1UP folks predicted a price drop on the 360 to coincide with the release of Grand Theft Auto IV, but that would only get the 360 down to the launch price of the PS2, so we're still only talking about serious gamers here. Speaking of which, the PS2 still outsold everything but the Wii and DS last month. Case closed.