Business

Since NPD stopped sharing its domestic sales figures with the press (and therefore the general public), it's very difficult to pinpoint numbers and interpret larger trends. Over at NeoGAF, fellow armchair analysts have taken the time to sift through press releases and have posted what available information that's been released regarding November's sales numbers. I'm going to borrow from that data to forge a bit of analysis.

EA Games' Frank Gibeau is quoted in the piece as saying that single-player games are "finished". It's funny to me how the desire to play a game alone is now perceived by the industry to be some sort of cancer that needs curing. It's obvious that the single-player model doesn't appeal to the industry any longer because it's far easier to produce DLC for multiplayer functionality.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent is highly likely to be my 2010 game of the year, and is the proud recipient of only the second perfect 10 that I have given out. Jens Nilsson, one of the developers at Frictional Games, was kind enough to answer a few of my questions about Amnesia and the future of Frictional.

I was one of those kids who, when all of the other kids were out playing tag and ring-around-the-rosie, I was on my IBM compatible Windows 3.1 machine programming QBasic games because I enjoyed it. I started learning programming when I was 6 and it didn't take long for 6-year-old me to stump my dad (the computer engineer) so I was self-taught from an early age. My first program was "Hello World" but everything I wrote since then has been a game. I've always been attracted to making video games for some reason. I spent a lot of time when I was younger making MUDs and building mods for Quake, Half-Life and Source. One of the bigger projects I worked on was "The Specialists", a Half-Life mod that was pretty popular back in its day.

While we all wait for the promised marvel of 3D gaming to go mainstream and infiltrate our eyespace, the fine, fine folks of AMD have cooked up something to tide us over. It's the EyeFinity system for your PC (obviously), and it's shaped up to be a pretty robust marvel. On a recent trip to Austin, Texas, I was invited to the AMD campus to check out some of their new technology and products, and I was impressed with their dedication to this new system.

As I write this entry in the wee hours of Monday morning, there are literally dozens of reviews of Medal of Honor that have been completed and will not be read for another day or so. Meanwhile, many more consumers are looking for some sort of indication as to whether Medal of Honor is going to be worth spending $60 on… and they won't find out with much notice before the game's release. See, Electronic Arts is holding reviews hostage by way of embargoes—which basically seal away all reviews until a specified time of the publisher's choosing.

Now that we're into the key final quarter of 2010, it's time to gaze into the Consoleation Crystal Ball and make some predictions as to how key hardware and software players will perform.

I've been asked on more than one occasion about how I approach the review writing process and what I like to see in reviews. I never have a firm answer, which is kind of unsettling to me since I frequently engage in discussions on the Twitter and such about what reviews should and should not be. There is no one answer to that question, but it does get me thinking about about the half-cocked ramblings I regularly try to pass off as game journalism.

The results for August are in, and while they seem to have shaken Michael Pachter, I'm here to tell you that there should be no surprise. Microsoft's continued success stems from its revisions of the Xbox 360 hardware—first with the $300 250GB model and now with the 4GB $200 model. These are "new", and combined with recent strong sellers like NCAA Football 11 and Madden NFL 11, the Xbox 360 platform has separated itself from the pack over the course of 2010 so far.

It's not too often that a first-party Nintendo release is disappointing, but Metroid: Other M is one of those rare titles. It's been facing adversity on two fronts. The first problem is that the game strayed from Nintendo's recent trend of releasing first-party titles on Sundays by releasing on a Tuesday. The second problem is that the game has been receiving some criticism from various sources on the internet, ranging from issues with the controls to focusing too much on story to even issues with sexism.