Hollywood Elsewhere is tinseltown-centric, but the videogame industry is becoming more and more a part of that world. English dubs of CG movie sequels to videogame megafranchises courting bona fide Hollywood name talent (plus Mena Suvari) is just a piece of the larger integration of intellectual property crossover.
I'm thoroughly convinced that the Godfather videogame is a sign of the apocalypse, but there are some good things coming out of the Silicon Valley/Hollywood crossbreeding: specifically the failed, horrendous genetic mutation-level failures going on. The telling sign is that a Japanese giant is specifically embracing a different path with their new console: The Nintendo Wii.
You must have heard about it by now. It's the system your paralyzed-from-the-waist-down granddad can bowl on and everyone has on the Must Have list for Christmas. With this curiously-named machine, The Big N is poised to reclaim a massive marketshare they haven't had since the days when everyone "The Old Nintendo" and were blowing into cartridges.
The tide-altering aspect of the new system is the control interface, which integrates motion-sensing technology to track the player's movement. Mo-cap has been used badly in the past by most of the major console manufacturers, most memorably by Nintendo themselves with a heavy-handed peripheral that was called The Power Glove. In a scene from The Wizard (finally on DVD), it was touted as the end-all-be-all of controllers, and wouldn't you know, now it is, just in a different form.
What this lets you do, foe example, is swing your "Wiimote" and have your character on screen swing their sword/fishing pole/butterfly net/butcher knife. The brilliance of the thing is that you really don't have to be good with a standard game controller to be able to play.
The game packed-in with every console features Tennis, Bowling, Baseball, Golf, and Boxing. You can just all around the room like the hopped-up-on-speed kids in the commercials, or you can barely move from your seat with the same result on-screen.
The development team apparently started from a good place: drive a new user experience and please moms shopping for their kids. The company as a whole did good by the consumer by producing an apparent more than ample supply for the entirety of the holiday season.
But what about this PS3 everyone is shooting each other or breaking into cars for? It's a hot item, but it's going directly after the hardcore gaming crowd that's been catered to by way of the system's very existence. The fact is, analysts and layman reporters alike are saying hold out on the PS3 and grab a Wii as fast as possible. Even software companies are saying they find the Wii preferable, probably due in large part to the 50% (or more) lower cost in developing a title on Wii vs. PS3.
All this came through prior to reports (on launch day) that the PS3 may not have shipped in even smaller numbers than the reduced figure of 400,000. Nintendo stock is at an all-time high in Japan, mostly thanks to the huge sales of Nintendo's killer touch screen-enabled DS handheld, put in part thanks to expectations of their new Sony Killer.
I worked on 10/26/2000, the launch day of the PS2, a system that became a huge seller mostly thanks to three games (Grand Theft Auto 3, its sequel, and