3DS

Wow, it feels like forever since I've updated the blog, and now I've become one of those guys who starts off a blog with apologizing for not updating his blog.

When I was growing up, my family didn't have a lot of money. We didn't own a family console until my mom bought a Colecovision from a tag sale in 1987. Before that, my maternal grandmother's Atari VCS was sometimes available in 1979 onward when we visited or even lived there due to money troubles. I did get a VIC-20 for my birthday in 1984 and then a Commodore 64 for my middle school graduation in 1986 from my paternal grandmother, but those weren't so much game consoles as they were hybrid devices. I did own a few games for both systems, but not a significant amount.

It's the end of a generation, and the GC crew takes a look back at the era that was. We throw out our Most Overrated and Underappreciated games of the past gen, and somehow we were all still on speaking terms afterwards. Also, some bonus talk on the magic of Pokémon. With Sinan Kubba, Chi Kong Lui, Brad Gallaway, Mike "I Hate You All" Bracken, and Richard Naik.

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Speaking candidly, I don't believe that anyone was ready for the numbers that we saw from NPD for the month of April... regardless of whether you're an armchair analyst like myself or whether you're a top-line professional in this business. Hardware sales numbers, in particular, were just painful to digest. It wasn't a total collapse, but when you drop by more than 40% from the past year—and when that April's comp targets weren't crazy to begin with—it just looks awful.

In advance of this afternoon's release of NPD retail video game sales data for April, I wanted to compare my range projections with those of Michael Pachter from Wedbush Securities.

NPD sales data for April is set to arrive tomorrow (May 16th). I don't expect many surprises nor many changes to the status quo when it comes to hardware sales rankings for the month.

Extra Credits looks at employing scale (i.e. more enemies) and tone to break up gameplay and maintain a player's interest level. Extra Credits' example of a game that got this right was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare—who knew that Call of Duty could be the game to actually teach us something?

Let's get the hyperbole out of the way first. Not having a Madden game in 2013 will not kill the Wii U. It's instinctive to think that a lack of EA presence on the platform could be akin to a kiss of death, similar to what we saw with EA spurning SEGA and the Dreamcast. This is a different animal, I think.

Readers will know that I am a huge fan of the first game, and even though it had some rough edges, it was a pretty brilliant experience. Unfortunately, Riptide isn't able to match up to that first title. The new character who uses hand-to-hand combat is lots of laughs, but the game itself feels like it was slapped together with very little care and isn't nearly as immersive or as atmospheric as the original.

Intrinsic vs Extrinsic rewards. In this episode, Extra Credits tries to explain what keeps you playing through the tedious parts of games.