Features// SPOnG's Review of the Year '09: January

When January wasn’t being broody for the good ol’ 2008 days, it was looking into the future - we played a hell of a lot of Street Fighter IV ahead of its eventual March release, and were pleased that after a good few years, Capcom had been wise enough not to mess with the original formula. We also looked at Damnation, and spoke to the Lead Designer about the ‘vertical platformer’ that was born from an Unreal Mod back in 2004.

Some people got a bit too excited about what the future held. US mag Game Informer (15th January) had it down that the “next full, home console-based Grand Theft Auto game will be out by Christmas”. That’d be this month, ladies and gentlemen. Clearly, that’s not happening, and while Rockstar avoided the subject entirely at the time we eventually see a release of Chinatown Wars to the DS and PSP. Not really the same though is it?

More rumours circulated around Sony, this time over a ‘PSP2’ (27th January). In one of the more original ways of debunking rumours, our Sony representative said that “Many are making up stories about PSP2, and how it allows you to teleport across the globe, travel through time, and will be powered by the horns of baby rhinoceroses.”

Ooh, handbags out, ladies. We should point out that the PSP Go was eventually launched later in the year. It could only download digital software. We were so intrigued by a teleporting handheld, as well.

Sony also decided that, following a poor run of finances, that it was going to spend even more money marketing its AAA games for 2009. Lucky it worked, eh?

Speaking of money, Microsoft was uncharacteristically quiet in January. It had its reasons - earlier in the month the company announced it was laying off 1,400 staff, effective immediately. On the 23rd it was revealed by a tech industry reporter that the bulk of the redundancies were to come from the division responsible for the Xbox.

Finally...

A little bit of retrospective face-palming. According to mother Rachel Jones, THQ’s Baby Pals was trying to brainwash her daughter with Islamic messages. At various points during the DS game, the baby would make babbling sounds. Someone keen to hear what they wanted to hear took one of the phrases as saying, “Islam is the light.”

Now we all know that it was simply gibberish, but TV studios were on the story like flies to dog crap. Crave Entertainment and InXile had to make a public statement just to say that it was all in their heads. The funny thing was, once people told you the phrase was in there, it was difficult to ‘hear’ anything else in the clip. Some say it solidified their case, but we reckon it just made it more ridiculous.

Of course, Baby Pals would only be the first instance of the mass media going haywire over a computer game. No, they were only just warming up...

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Gears of War 2 Tops 4 Million

The Sims 3 Delayed?

PSN/Xbox Live Deja Vu

Limited Edition Resident Evil 5 Coming to UK

PlayStation 3: Firmware Update 2.6 Due

Wipeout and Motorstorm Devs to Merge