Coonskin hit on this earlier today about the over 100 million used games being bought/sold every year, but the one thing about the Wedbush Morgan report, from which that tidbit of news came from, that had me going and rolling in the aisle was their whole imagined concept for a “Wii HD” that would end up pwning everything in the market. I can’t help but think that all of the planets of the galaxy would have to align for something like this to be made by Nintendo:

“…Nintendo will wait until the cost of a console with technical specifications similar to the Xbox 360 (1080p output at 60 frames per second) is sufficiently low that it can launch close to the $199.99 price point…be fully backward compatible with the current Wii…have additional features and functionality…Nintendo will redesign the existing Wii controller to include built-in Wii Motion Plus…the Wii Plus (our best guess for the name of the Wii HD) will include a hard drive.”

“If Nintendo can offer such a device by year-end 2010, it will be in a position to seriously damage Sony’s chances of a comeback this cycle. We would expect publishers to support such a move, given that the cost of porting an Xbox 360 game to the new Wii Plus HD format would likely be lower than the cost of building a ground up Wii game (we estimate under $5 million). Should Nintendo be able to convince publishers like EA and Take-Two that the Wii Plus should be supported by the entire EA Sports catalog and by the next installment of Grand Theft Auto, it should be in a position to successfully convince consumers that the Wii Plus is the last console they will ever need to purchase.

And pigs will fly. Not to come across as completely Nintendo biased, but Wedbush Morgan has to be smoking some great kush to think that Nintendo will even bother to make a new Wii when the current SKU is still printing cash by the truckload.

The Ghostbusters are right about this one. Allowing people to go from Alliance to Horde and vice versa is just a seriously bad idea. There are just tons of things that won’t transfer over right and let’s face it…Blizzard hasn’t exactly had a great track record this week when it comes to making decisions about what features to implement in their games.

I do think it’s somewhat cool that you can finally join friends on an instance when they’re the opposite alignment, I just don’t think it’ll be done quite right…but we’ll just have to wait and see now won’t we? We don’t know when it’ll go live, but I’m sure Evan Burkey will let us know as soon as he uses it.

Over on Olivia Munn’s website, she is promising to sign her Playboy cover issue if you send it to her (well not really to her, to G4). And if you send her multiple issues, she’ll personalize it and write whatever you want. If I was going to send an issue to Olivia, I would want her to sign it with a picture of her tits. Because, ya know, that’s what’s supposed to be in Playboy when you appear in it.

Gamestop is rich, bitch

According to a report from Gamesindustry.biz (via Destructoid), the game trading business is a’boomin. Those scoundrels at Wedbush Morgan have estimated that 100 million video games are traded in annually. In related news, the fine gentlemen who run GameStop are taking baths in melted Godiva chocolate and using hundred dollar bills as cumrags. I mean, I know GameStop isn’t the only business that does trade-ins, but I’m sure whatever percent of the 100 million that wasn’t handled by GameStop is near negligible.

The article then goes on to say that despite this huge quantity of trade-ins, the sales of new video games is not diminished by much. I understand that, but to me the point is that GameStop and their conspirators are making 2 billion dollars a year selling things that people already paid for. That to me is just mindboggling. The person who originally thought up the idea of trading in games should be in the Smart People Hall of Fame, alongside the inventors of the polio vaccine, Albert Einstein, and these guys.

The President of EA Games, Frank Gibeau has stated that we could see as many as nine new IPs released within the next 3 years. That’s 2-3 each year for those of you that are horrible at math. I know that it’s not nearly enough new content to make all of the gamers who have lost faith in console gaming with all of their “boring sequels” talk, but for the few of us that relish the time we get to spend gaming, it’s great.

From the interview with Gamasutra:

“It’s hard to forecast, but I think we’re probably looking at two to three new IPs a year…We’re looking at a three-year SKU plan right now. Between EAP and our internal studios, both of which are in our group, I can safely say it’s at least two to three new IPs.”

He stated in the interview that there were mistakes on how EA handled its other IPs last year.

“I think we launched too many new IPs all at once in Q3…I would have spread them out and found better windows for them…We didn’t have enough assets to really build the fanbase, build the community, and get that long lead demand built.”

After all gamers, video games are a business and a serious one at that. Games don’t fail because of them not being any fun, or too short…they fail because of the lack of marketing.

I’m coming to close to being ready to do my Red Faction: Guerrilla review now. All I need to do is play Wrecking Crew and the Multiplayer since I finished the single player campaign last week. Here’s a clue: I enjoyed it. Anyway, in the mean time here is some news about Red Faction: Guerrilla DLC. Volition recently announced that there would be 3 DLC packs coming to Red Faction: Guerrilla and the first pack has been announced today as Demons Of The Badlands. There’s nothing specific yet, but we’re told that it will be a single player arc taking players outside of the previous boundaries and will feature new weapons and vehicles, all that jazz.

The pack is coming to Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 (no PC love it seems) on August 13th for 800 Microsoft moonbucks or $9.99/£6.80. Not a bad price if it gives a few hours worth of new single player content. What is interesting is that all of the screenshots shown show only the game’s Marauders and there’s no sign of Alec Mason, the game’s protagonist or even the Red Faction. Does this mean we’ll be playing as a new character? Maybe, I’m just speculating. There is also what looks like an EDF vehicle in the distance on the screenshot above so perhaps the game even takes place before the events of Red Faction:Guerrilla and showcases the fight between the EDF and the Marauders? I don’t know, but I do know I’ll be picking it up if it’s as good as Red Faction:Guerrilla has been. What are your thoughts?

(screenshots: Kotaku)

NBA 2K10, 2K Sports popular yearly Basketball franchise is about to be released and to celebrate a decade of the franchise 2K are releasing a special edition (act surprised).  Costing $99 the package includes the game, an exclusive Kobe Bryant figurine by McFarlane Toys, a Kobe Bryant poster, a video about the NBA 2K series, and an account on the “Gold Room,” a special VIP online lobby for the game.  The figure is a nice addition especially because it’s made by McFarlane Toys who put out high quality figures and I’m sure the poster could be nice if you’re into that sort of thing but the video will probably go unwatched and what the hell is the “Gold Room”?.  Not only does the package include all of this it also includes a storage locker designed to hold up to 20 games, does anybody really want to buy a game that comes with furniture?  I’m sure most gamers already have their own ways of storing their games collections and don’t need a storage locker that’ll probably break after a couple of months.  What do you guys think, are any of you planning of picking up this special edition?

So here is Resident Evil 3, the last game in the main series of RE games (not counting side-games like RE: Code Veronica or RE: Outbreak) to feature zombies. This is because Las Plagas becomes the new virus in RE4 and replaces zombies with Ganandos and later in RE5 Majini. Even then, RE3 was more of a side game to RE2 than a true sequel. It took place once again  in Raccoon City (although with some different locations to RE2) but also within a similar time frame to RE2 as part of the game takes place before the events of RE2 and then the other part takes place during and after the events of RE2. However it does bring some closure for some of the characters of RE1. This time around you can only play as Jill Valentine, star of the first game, who is now trapped in  Raccoon City since she decided not to join Chris on his fight against Umbrella in Europe. Although I said you can only play as Jill, there is a short section where you play as Carlos, a member of Umbrella’s private military, who is trying to help Jill escape Raccoon City.

As for the game itself, not a lot had changed at all. The differences were more asthetic than anything. Firstly graphics got another improvement but at this point there wasn’t a lot more that they could do with them. It wasn’t the same jump as RE2 was to the first game anyway. Weapons were also changed slightly, as you could start with quite a few weapons this time around instead of the usual pistol. There was also a lot of more ammo around and this impacted the game’s difficulty in a negative way. It’s certainly one of the easier games and it had less of the feeling of dread or nervousness that the previous two games had.

Pete Hines is wasting no time getting the recently sold id Software up to snuff. They’re currently building up a 3rd software development team. Bethesda’s head honcho said in an inverview with TechRadar:

“They’d like to start building up a full third team and, as a result of this deal, they’ll be able to do that more quickly than they could have previously with the additional resources they have to work with now,”

id Software, much like Blizzard, is known for few, yet quality, games and since the new Wolfenstein is out soon and they’ve currently got two other teams working on DOOM 4 and Rage…I can only speculate that the mythic third team will be working on Quake 5. To hammer the point home, Mr. Hines also was quoted as saying:

“We expect id will keep doing what they’ve always been doing,”

Nice way of saying ‘more of the same’. What do you all think?

I’m guessing that Cliffy B isn’t satisfied with just killing the Locust anymore, he now wants more and more trees to be chainsawed…only difference is that the trees don’t fight back. What the hell am I talking about? Why, the second Gears of War novel that was made available this week of course!

Titled Jacinto’s Remnant, and penned by Karen Traviss (who has done tons of Sci-Fi fiction in the Star Wars universe, and even wrote the other Gears of War book that came out last year) chronicles the goings-on of the survivors after the Jacinto was sunk at the end of the last game.

I’ll be glad to give this a read, anything is better than the game novelizations we used to get from Nintendo back in the 80s. If you haven’t already, might I also suggest the novels based in the Mass Effect and Halo universes? They’re a damned fine read and in some ways, even more immersive than any of the games could ever be.

The Peoples Republic of China has, in its infinite wisdom, banned gold farming.

Next thing you know, Mexico or India will join suit then people in all the different MMOs will actually have to you know work at making their in-game monies. While not quite a billion dollar industry, the banning will affect millions of users in the PRC, and probably ruin a few people’s businesses.

SiliconEra released an interesting tidbit of information recently that Sony has patented a PlayStation 2 emulator that runs off of the PlayStation 3’s Cell processor…meaning that they are currently able to run PS2 emulation on the hardware that the current batch of PS3s have.

What’s Sony to do? If they were a kind company that loved it’s users, they would release it on the PSN or through a firmware update. However, I know that Sony is as black-hearted as a software engineer once wronged, and you guys that unfortunately got the PS3s that didn’t have the built in backwards compatibility will probably have to pay a premium to get it. I’m gonna wager a guess and say that it would run $49.99…prove me wrong Sony, prove me wrong.

Capcom has announced that they will be releasing their new IP, Dark Void, on both the PC and consoles simultaneously. This is quite unprecdented seeing how no other company has been able to match up having the different platform versions launch same day before. It’s just more proof to me that PC gaming is going to eventually take the world over before cloud computing kills the PC gaming market.

Along with Dark Void, Capcom is starting to put much more emphasis into the PC gaming realm with Street Fighter IV, Resident Evil 5, and Bionic Commando all coming down the tube to all of us eventually. We’ll keep you posted.

It seems like the Nostradamus of gaming, Michael Pachter, has yet again pulls predictions and numbers out of his ass for the game journalists to eat up. First, he predicts that the ever popular Xbox 360 will fall to third place in the game market due to the system’s continuing struggle to gain a foothold in Japan. He seems to think that the Playstation 3 will gain a significant amount in the market due to its victory in the format wars.

Let me get something straight.  I’m not going to add fire to the console flamewar.  As an owner of all three current-generation consoles, I can safely say I’m an equal opportunity consumer whore.  But to say that the PS3 will dominate the Xbox 360 in only a year just because of Japan and Blu-ray is absurd.  We’d be more likely to see a gradual evening out between the two systems than a complete turnaround in sales.  If the Red Ring of Death controversy wasn’t able to kill the system, nothing will.

Tinfoil hat in hand, Pachter gives his second prediction: the Wii will continue to have a dominance in the market with the rumored release of Wii HD.  Now, I’m not a video output expert, but the Wii was built with standard definition TVs in mind.  Creating an HD version of the Wii would not only be a money loser for Nintendo, but it would be completely unnecessary.  Upconversion only does so much to improve the image of a game.  If Nintendo is hesitant to support online gaming, why would you think they would jump on the HD bus?

Fail, Pachter…just fail.

When Ex told me this week’s theme was Gothic metal, I was both parts excited and ashamed; excited cuz I could share some of my favorite gothic bands with all of you and ashamed because I would have to share some of my favorite gothic bands with you and actually ADMIT that I like them. The things I do for this site.

My taste in gothic metal tends toward either bands with female singers and symphonic elements or else growling, harsh male vocals with very industrial-sounding guitars. So I’ll start off this one with a female singer, they’re prettier anyways.

Epica hails from the Netherlands and have been playing since 2003. I first heard them courtesy of my goth metal station on Pandora. So give it a listen and tell me what you think. I promise you’ll like my pick on Thursday even more.