Year In Review Part 2

Here’s the second  part of our year in review and lets jump right into things in July. The summer drought was really in effect now and the really big news of the month was that things weren’t going so well over at Nintendo. The company announced that they were disappointed in sales of the 3DS and would rectify the problem by slashing the price by a third only months after launch. The companies head Sakura Iwata took a fifty percent paycut along with the rest of the board. Fans who had bought the system on launch were to be rewarded for being 3DS ambassadors with free games which have just started to trickle out. The price drop seems to have worked with sales of the console increasing to pretty respectable levels as of this week.

July also saw Bioware announce that fans would get to choose the default look of the female Commander Shephard in Mass Effect 3. One of the early leaders in the poll was a blond Shepard which led to calls from some quarters that the voting was simply men picking the model they found most attractive. It also led to a blog post which insinuated blonde women shouldn’t be in positions of power because they are stupid. The argument never really rose above that level of idiocy on both sides. The eventual winner had red-hair.

The summer drought began to come to a close in August. PC gamers got the deeply flawed but incredibly interesting FPS/RPG E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy before all platforms got to experience the magnificent Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Noel Gallagher said some profoundly stupid things about gaming causing the London riots and that made us (especially Lee) mad as all hell.

The Trenched debacle was finally solved by Microsoft renaming the game to Iron Brigade and announcing that it would release in Europe by November. The situation arose when it was discovered that a Portuguese board game designer held the copyright to Trenched in the EU. I bet he’s kicking himself for not taking whatever he was probably offered by Microsoft at the start of the incident.

September next and EA got things off to a nice start by killing uber-nerds dreams by revealing Syndicate to be a first person shooter and not a complex strategy game. I got a chance to play it and found it be decent fun and definitely a change from the current style of FPS that is flooding the market. It also looks extremely grim and not in the usual Dante’s Inferno “blood and tits hardcore metal yeahhh!!!” kind of way but more in a way that actually deserves the descriptor “mature”. It’s out early next year.

Beta’s were also prevalent during September with Battlefield 3 and Diablo 3 entering testing periods. Battlefield 3’s was perhaps a litte bit more of an actual beta than people have come to expect but DICE apparently got some decent data before the game launched. Diablo 3 offered thirty minutes from the very first quest in the game and has gone down as an addictive hit with series fans and newcomers alike. Whether it can sustain itself for as long as it’s predecessor will be one of the most intriguing parts of the gaming new year.

October got off to a sad start with the news that L.A. Noire developer Team Bondi shut it’s doors. The move came after good sales for L.A. Noire but persistent rumours and accusations that the lead, Brendan McNamara, had mismanaged the project and created an extremely hostile workplace. These are claims he never really denied and the result is that a game that should have a legacy of bringing a modern adventure game to the masses will instead be remembered for the controversies surrounding it.

On the good news front Taoiseach Enda Kenny announced that he was making it a goal to have Ireland become a global hub for gaming companies. He said that “our goal is to become a hub for the games sector as we have for ICT, medical devices and pharmaceuticals.” The speech was given just weeks after he attended the opening of the massive new Bioware operation that opened in Galway.

November began with two of the years most eagerly awaited titles: Battlefield 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Though Battlefield 3 could never hope to outsell it’s rival the “competition” between the two that had been drummed up by E.A. and Activision did it’s job and saw Battlefield 3 sell massive numbers. A week later and Modern Warfare 3 managed to do the incredible and beat James Cameron’s Avatar’s record by making a billion dollars in just sixteen days.

With the heavy release season up on us the actual news pretty much slowed to a trickle. Heavy hitting titles were releasing every Friday. Things were even busier on our end as the first episode of The Splitscreen Show aired on November the twenty-fifth. It was the product of months of hard work and is something every member of the site feels incredibly proud of.

December brought the PS Vita to Japan and sales figures that Sony seemed to be pretty proud of. We also watched our industry being painted in a dreadful light at the risible VGA ceremony. For reference this was the show where a developer accepting an award had a grown man squat over his face repeatedly. It was terrible, embarrassing and genuinely disappointing since G4′s usually on-the-money Geoff Keighley promised the show would be different.

So, it’s been a busy year and, to my mind anyway, one of the best for gaming in a long time. We definitely highlighted some of the problems with the industry but the games were good and some decent steps forward were taken. The success of L.A. Noire, Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Skyrim shows that not everyone wants dumb shooters. The tepid reaction to the shooter overload of E3 was also really indicative of this. My hope for 2012? That developers, publishers and marketers stop treating us like morons. I’m tired of following some gruff cliché around the same dusty battlefields. Choice and player agency can create moments better than even the most masterfully crafted set-piece. Here’s to another year of gaming!