Features// SPOnG's Review of the Year: July / August

[b]Frank Gibeau - President of EA Games – 01/08/2007
EA: Christmas Will Be "Murderer's Row 2"[/b]


August kicked off with bad news for publishers, good news for us. Frank Gibeau, president of EA Games, told the world, “The way the market works this year, we've been calling it Murderer's Row 2 inside EA. There's some terrific competition coming. Call of Duty 4 is spectacular. You look at Halo, and you look at a lot of first-party titles, and there's some good stuff coming. We like our chances in that mix, but you never know. The customer gets to vote."

Basically, whoever lost, gamers were going to win. I, for one, liked those odds.

Blizzard, not wanting to lose out on the momentum afforded it by World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade (WoW itself made hit nine-million users globally last month), got around to announcing its second expansion for World of Warcraft, this one going under the mucky-sounding moniker of Wrath of the Lich King. When release rolls around we'll be getting the 'Death Knight' hero class, the 'inscription' profession and new levels of power we were told.

August got a little bit hotter thanks to Nintendo, when it entered into the time-honoured tradition of dressing some nice(ish) young(ish) ladies in fetish outfits to promote... something? SPOnG's sure there was a point, but the image seems to have stayed with us long after the actual message. There were nurses involved... Were we supposed to buy something? (Yes, bloody Trauma Center: Second Opinion. Informative Ed.)

Things took on a much more severe tone when Microsoft announced the dropping of its prices for the Premium and Core models of the Xbox 360 – the console's first official price cut since launch. £30 and £20 were shed off the two models respectively, with the Core model down to £179.99. Not only did this separate the Premium from the Elite it also put the Core in direct competition with the Wii… somehow. Did I say ‘Elite’? Oh, yeah - the Xbox Elite was launched – complete with its 120GB of hard disk space and HDMI port. Quite why this all demanded a severe tone we weren't sure – perhaps it was the matt black finish of the Elite...

August, if you didn't know, is the month of the Edinburgh Festival – that’s Scotland rather than Adelaide in South Australia, in case you were confused. SPOnG was on-hand and caught up with Sony's Jamie McDonald, VP of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios, for a chat about the future of online and social gaming on the PS3. You can read all about it here.

As the end of the month drew near, the European games industry piled into the giant greenhouse/sweat box that is the Leipzig Messe to get stuck into the Games Convention. It was, it must be said, relatively quiet news-wise. What we did get was the announcement of the suite of Go! software applications for the PSP in Europe. Sat-nav? Check. Video recording functionality? Oh yes. VoIP... well, we already knew about that one.

Sony also took the opportunity to smoke cigarettes indoors and complain about the constant smell of drains and life-endangering quantities of meat... no, hang on... Sorry, that was me. Sony took the opportunity to announce Play TV, it's Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) service for the PS3, complete with PSP remote functionality.

The games industry also breathed a sigh of relief in August as civil liberties and freedoms were restored in that liberal-thinking bastion of culture: America. As had happened in the UK back in June, Rockstar had been prevented from publishing Manhunt 2 by a draconian judgement from the ratings board (the ESRB in this case). Following submission of a modified version of the game, however, the game was given an 'M' rating which would allow it to go on sale. Admittedly, it wasn't the full release, but at least it showed that the ESRB wasn't going to ban anything with the name 'Manhunt' on the case.

It didn't take long, of course, for the Right Wing and the lily-livered, lefty liberals to strike back, with the outraged Senator Leland Yee kicking up a stink like a goat with dodgy glands. He felt, apparently, that if any game in this life deserves an 'Adults Only' rating that will stop it getting published, it's Manhunt 2. Well, actually he just referred to it as “Manhunt”, but SPOnG's positive he knew exactly which game he was talking about and spent many hours playing it to reach that opinion.

As for the lily-livered, lefty liberals, we couldn’t get a quote out of them but I’ll get ‘em one day… and when that day comes… it’s an axe to the back of their ponytailed necks and an ice-pick to their lilly-livers!

Still for every tale of Take 2 having a game on one of its publishing labels raged at by a Californian senator in August, there's another of it having a critical darling on another publishing label going by the name of BioShock. SPOnG rather liked it. We also caught up with the boss of Irrational (which developed the game), Ken Levine, for a nice meaty chat.

While we're on the subject of meaty chats, I also caught up with Free Radical's Rob Yescombe and Derek Littlewood to talk about Haze. So epic was the interview that SPOnG ran its first ever interview outtakes, running across subjects as diverse as downloadable prostitutes and Buddha's special moves.

In addition to BioShock August also saw the release of Blue Dragon over here, Trauma Center: Second Opinion on the Wii and Worms: Open Warfare 2... It was August! What do you want from us?!