Wednesday – Microsoft Game Room
After the soul-destroying horror of Perfect Dark XBLA, I didn't think it was possible to see something on the 360 this month that was even shoddier. Man, I was all sorts of wrong.
Alert WoSblog viewers will have noticed the absence of posts yesterday, which was entirely due to having most of my day wasted by these idiots:
I used to go to the original Computer Exchange shop in Rathbone Place in London regularly in the early 90s. While the staff were prone to certain amounts of the sort of elitist arrogance you often find in independent record shops, it was as exciting and fun as videogame shops have ever been.
Perfect Dark XBLA is out today, for 800 MS points (about £6.80).
I've been looking forward to this one excitedly for months, as I love PD even more than Goldeneye and the thought of being able to play it in shiny high def and without the framerate catastrophes was almost too thrilling for words. However, knowing how moronically incompetent and lazy modern developers are, I warily downloaded the trial version first. I'm not a complete idiot.
Why don't they make arcade cabinets any more?
(I mean, obviously they do. There are still new arcade videogames being made, but they all run on boring generic cabinets, and they're not really what I'm talking about anyway.)
Why is it that you can't just call up Taito and buy yourself a brand-new classic-style Space Invaders machine?
The Definitive Defender, originally published in 2006, is the first in the Definitive series to be freely available online. It's the shortest feature in the series, with even this specially expanded and updated WoSblog version clocking in at only 3000 words or so and covering just 11 different games.
It also serves as an illustration of why plummeting standards of literacy might yet finish off videogames magazines once and for all.
Is, I've today concluded after 33 years of videogaming, this one.
But hey, don't take my word for it – you can give it a shot for yourself.
It's good to know that Sony still has one market-leading piece of highly efficient and productive hardware on its books. The ailing megacorporation seems to expend most of its effort these days launching acres of cretinous lying drivel into the ever-compliant media, blaming anyone but itself for the catalogue of ineptitude that has beset the company over the last few years.
The space of that single hardware generation has seen Sony's games division crash from being the overwhelming market leader by a factor of 6:1 over the nearest opposition (the PS2 has sold around 140 million units worldwide compared to the original Xbox's pitiful 25 million and just 21 million for the Gamecube) to a dismal last place in every field of operation it competes in.
The company's products populate the Blue Square Football Conference of the videogaming leagues – the PS3 is still making basically no inroads into the Xbox 360's lead and gazing far off into the distance at the dust trail of the Wii in the mainstream market, and the PSP has been humiliated by the DS and now the iPhone and iPod in the handheld field. But who's responsible for the latter catastrophe? You'll never guess in a million years.
So there I was, putting together The Definitive Xevious – Deluxe Edition for WoS viewers this weekend, and discovered that there was a new Xevious game, Xevious Resurrection, on the PS3 as part of the Namco Museum Essentials download compilation. (Which features the all-new Xevious, plus the original and the same old versions of Dig Dug, Pac-Man, Galaga and Dragon Spirit that Namco have already milked about fifty times.)
Namco Museum Essentials came out in Japan and the USA in June 2009, but still hasn't shown up in the UK Playstation Store, despite already being in English (with the manual also in French, Spanish, Italian and German) and clearly, as a digital download, requiring no translation or adaptation of any sort or new packaging or anything. Still, WoSblog has a US PS3 account, so with a price of $9.99 it should be a fairly straightforward business to buy some US PS Store credit and pick the game up for the current-exchange-rate price of £6.50, right?
WoSland – now at wosland.podgamer.com