Features// SPOnG's Review of 2007: January/February

Frank O'Connor - Head writer, Bungie - 12/02/2007
Halo 3 To Silence 'Poltroons'

The year rolled on, the holiday hangover was starting to wane. Unfortunately, it was February, regarded by some SPOnGers as the worst of all possible months.

Good news from Sony though! Speaking in an interview with SPOnG, Sony Computer Entertainment's UK managing director, Ray Maguire, said that there would be 220,000 PS3s in the UK on launch day. Would the shenanigans of the US and Japanese under-stocked PS3 launches be dodged? Would we get to see a well executed console launch. We would have to wait until March 23rd to find out...

To sweeten the deal, Sony's senior VP, Takao Yuhara, even foreshadowed the PS3 price cuts with an almost obscenely vague hint that a slash would come before March 2008.

By the time Electronic Arts got round to confirming that Spore would be hitting the Nintendo DS – albeit in an unsurprisingly stripped down form - SPOnG didn't know which way to turn. What had we done to deserve such a happy February?

Even better – SPOnG's all time favourite anti-games crusader, Jack Thompson, was facing disbarment! You'll have to forgive me if that comes across as a bit mean, but if you will misbehave in court when you're trying to destroy Sony, Take Two and Rockstar, you probably deserve everything you get. We started to think that the Gods of Gaming were indeed smiling on us.

Jack can't have been any more cheered when he learned that Manhunt 2 was going to be released by Rockstar, either. Yup, SPOnG's pretty sure that Mr T spent a pensive night pacing around his Florida home when he learned that a follow-up to Rockstar's gore-fest – infamously linked to the death of Stefan Pakeerah – was to be gracing our shelves.

Of course, the good news couldn't keep coming forever.

It didn't take long for Pakeerah's parents to speak up with regard to the Manhunt 2 announcement. In an astonishingly bad piece of timing, Rockstar had announced Manhunt 2 in the anniversary month of Pakeerah's death. His parents, understandably, weren't too impressed.

We also learned that the PAL version of the PS3 would have less backwards compatibility than its American and Japanese counterparts. More unhappiness.

February also saw early rumblings surrounding the Xbox 360 Elite. Was Microsoft angling to spoil the PS3 launch for PAL territories? All these questions...

In other hardware news, Nintendo confirmed the death of the GameCube. It went on, of course, to unconfirm it, leaving us all a bit baffled.

And then there were games. Crackdown came out, for one. SPOnG liked it. Okami hit the PlayStation 2, too, which proved an undeniably superb experience. Every Extend Extra from Tetsuya Mizuguchi also served up a dollop of February delight to certain SPOnGers. Then there was... wait, it was still only the second month of the year. There was not a vast amount else.