Features// SPOnG's Review of 2008: August

[i]"Even if you gave me a new... (if you gave me) the Xbox 720! I'd say, all right, it's got 32 GPUs, a terabyte of memory and we've got rid of hard disks, it's stored in the cloud.

"You'd go, 'Yeah, it's all very well, but can't we have five audio processors?' It's about analysing what you've got and the new ways you can do things."
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[b]22/08/2008
Rare Imagines the Xbox 720[/b]


August. Our dreams of a British summer were finally dashed. But we got dreams of other things. Dreams of the Xbox 720. Dreams of an unfettered World of Warcraft gold farming economy. Dreams of Miyamoto's family hiking game...

Dreams of Phil Harrison's reasoning for leaving Sony. Well, we got something insubstantial relating to the goings-on in Phil's brain. He couldn't face the prospect of the PlayStation 4, according to some "Highly placed sources".

Speaking of hardware, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata conceded that Nintendo won't compete online. At least not with the “exact same services” as Microsoft and Sony. If Nintendo can do something that plays to its own strengths, however, we'll have a different story.

One tale Nintendo didn't want us to get, however, is the story of what Nintendo's resident games guru, Shigeru Miyamoto, does in his downtime. Apparently Ninty's scared that the competition will mine the insights into his personal activities to create multi-million-selling software. Fortunate, then, that SPOnG had already picked Shiggy's brain about his personal pre-dispositions outside Nintendo's offices. We salivated at the prospect of Nintendo games about dog-walking and gardening...

August was, of course, the start to the Olympic Games. That was great for China, but the whopping great Blue Screen of Death that popped up in the opening ceremony courtesy of Windows XP wasn't so great for Microsoft. Oh, how we chuckled!

We didn't chuckle quite so much at the sensationalist rumblings of The Daily Mail about SEGA's MadWorld and how it was a blot on the Wii's family-friendly ethos and set to destroy our children. Parents, apparently, were disgusted. Not that there were any in sight in The Daily Mail's reporting. Still, moralising pressure group Mediawatch-UK told SPOnG it felt justified in condemning the game, sight-unseen, before a release date was even in view.