iPhone

Last night on Twitter, I made a comment about shopping in the app store and apparently it wasn't nearly as clear as I thought it was. I had several replies chastising me afterwards, and I wanted to clarify what I meant to say. If you still want to chastise me after that then that's totally cool, but it seemed pretty obvious that I was not able to make my point in 140 characters.

Do you love spending hours in front of a computer writing code? Do you prefer spending many more hours debugging software than spending time with your loved ones? Do you want to spend time justifying your hard work to fickle gamers and an even more fickle gaming press? Then you want to be a video game developer and this video might be right for you.

Hmmm, criticizing The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim's opening for being lackluster compared to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare's now (in)famous opening? Is it fair to compare two games from two seemingly disparate genres like an open-world role-playing game and a scripted, set-piece-heavy, first-person military shooter? Maybe it isn't, but it does sound like something GameCritics would do. No wonder we like this video.

When this Cake Pop's a-rockin...

HIGH Great for children.

LOW Almost requires micro-transactions.

WTF It's a sugary sweet money-trap.

This Time, She's not in Another Castle

HIGH Smooth, intuitive controls.

LOW It's a reskinned Cut the Rope.

WTF What is that thing catching the princess?

Objects in Motion...

HIGH Sense of speed.

LOW Difficulty.

WTF Trial by error.

January has flown by and it's time for the first NPD predictions column of the year.

Them's Fightin' Words!

HIGH Getting the anagram in a game-winning skirmish.

LOW European spellings and foreign words not in common usage.

WTF So "JUNE" isn't acceptable, but "JUN" is?

I'm still trying to complete Yakuza 3 before anything big comes in for review, and I'm almost done. If my guess is correct, there are only one or two chapters left, so I'm hoping to wrap it up tomorrow. I've got to say, out of the three Yakuza titles I've played so far, this one has definitely been the weakest.

Software sales were the highlight of November's NPD report. Strong Year Over Year (YOY) comparisons were the result of one of the strongest months of software releases in recent memory.