Columns

After spending the balance of the last three years in storage, I finally set up my Samsung GxTV this past weekend. It's here in my office, just to the right of my workstation. Despite literally thousands of hours of use, the GxTV still works. The picture isn't quite as sharp as it once was, but it's good enough to make my PlayStation 2 (PS2) games look great again.

You know, I wouldn't have been as upset about the cancellation of Mega Man Legends 3 if it hadn't been for the PR ineptitude that followed the announcement. Let's face it: games get cancelled all the time. It's a by-product of a constantly changing industry and some games arguably have little chance of being successful on a grand scale. I know that Mega Man fans were looking forward to it, and a game in a familiar IP might have been something that the 3DS needed to help turn its fortunes around.

Wouldn't you know it… the night after I post about Nintendo's woes with the 3DS, the company announces a huge price drop which will kick in less than five months after the launch of the platform. As of August 12th, 3DS units will drop to $169.99, which is a 33% price cut. This is likely going to work out well for Nintendo as price drops are usually the best course of action to take when a platform's sales numbers are weak, but this same move also leaves those who bought the 3DS before the price drop looking pretty silly—and leaves Nintendo looking pretty bad.

After spending some time thinking about why there's been an uptick in press activity talking about how pricing for Xbox Live Arcade games has been rising of late, something clicked. At first, I thought it was weird that people were talking about it now, given that it's been a trend for well over a year now. But then… it made sense to talk about how XBLA games are getting more expensive.

Looking at the calendar, we're less than two weeks away from what will be one of the most important E3 events in recent memory when it comes to what I call the Hardware Trinity—that is Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. Each of the three companies have issues to address. Nintendo is facing lackluster 3DS hardware sales and the lame-duck status of the Wii until its new platform is launched. Sony has to deal with the aftereffects of one of the largest online security breaches in history and major losses in the last year. Microsoft may seem bulletproof, but the stagnant nature of the Kinect sensor and a slow trickle of software for it call into question the viability of the technology.

Time has been gradually marching along since the news broke that I would be attending this year's Electronics Entertainment Expo—or E3, as most of us know it—and I thought that it's time to start talking about some things that I'm expecting to see happen during what will be one of the most important shows in recent memory. Some of these are already confirmed, and some may be a bit more unexpected. We'll certainly see how my predictions stack up versus reality when the show actually gets going in early June.

As of the time of this writing (May 12th), the PlayStation Network enters its third consecutive week of downtime, there are some signs damaged relations between Sony and PlayStation 3 software publishers and developers… as well as with consumers. It's a battle that is being fought on multiple fronts, and the casualties mount with each passing day.

Recent economic trends—notably rapid increases in fuel prices and associated price hikes in the general cost of living—should be something that the console video game industry starts taking seriously. Everything is getting more expensive at a most inopportune time for the domestic economy, and with the decline of disposable income, it's only a matter of time before pain is once again felt by the console gaming industry.

Why is the industry so quick to dismiss the single-player experience? What happens when an online service goes down, which happened to Xbox Live a few years ago and is currently affecting PSN? What happens when your internet service provider has connectivity issues or goes down completely? If today's games are more about connectivity and playing with others, wouldn't the $60 spent on each game be a waste at that point?

I was excited for Mortal Kombat. The demo played pretty well, albeit a little on the slow side. The special editions of the game looked pretty neat. It felt like a throwback rather than an attempt to keep expanding in the direction that the games took during the last console generation. It seemed like a day-one purchase for me, if only to support the revival of a fighting game that used to share the spotlight with Street Fighter some 15 years ago.