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There hasn’t been much to report over the weekend, other than that Lost Planet is an incredible game.  It’s got the same kind of tense, difficult situations that Dead Rising has, where the enemies are absolutely relentless and the action is frantic.  The difference is that in Lost Planet, the firepower tends to be much more powerful…and explosive.  Lost Planet is the perfect way to start off 2007.

Matt (GT. YourExWife) was one of the few people to send in the story of Walmart.com now featuring Halo 3 on their website, with a placeholder date of 10/1/07, which means nothing as far as the game’s release go, but they do have some larger pictures of the Legendary Edition case

DavidGX sent in the following story today as well -

Valve boss blows a gasket over PS3 -

The MD of US development studio Valve Corporation has labeled Sony’s PlayStation 3 “a total disaster” and predicted that Nintendo’s Wii will win the next-gen console battle.

Speaking to Game Informer magazine, Gabe Newell suggested that Sony should scrap plans to release PS3 and develop an entirely new system.

“The PS3 is a total disaster on so many levels, I think It’s really clear that Sony lost track of what customers and what developers wanted,” said Newell. “I’d say, even at this late date, they should just cancel it and do a ‘do over’. Just say, ‘This was a horrible disaster and we’re sorry and we’re going to stop selling this and stop trying to convince people to develop for it.’”

Newell reserved special praise for the Wii, which he said would outsell Microsoft’s Xbox 360 by next Christmas.

“The happy story is the Wii,” he added. “I’m betting that by Christmas of next year, the Wii has a larger installed base than the 360. Other people think I’m crazy. I really like everything that Nintendo is doing.”

Newell is a co-founder of Valve, which made its name by developing the multi-award wining Half Life and Counter-Strike series.

Also: Analyst: PS3 to miss target by 25% due to “poor sales”

I agree with him that Sony should just start over with the PS3, but since they don’t have infinite money, and are actually severely in debt, that is never going to happen.  I disagree, however, that Nintendo will win this generation as far as sales go.  Nintendo always has a large niche of gamers each generation that buy their console, but usually it’s more spread out through the life of the console.  I think the main reason the Wii has gotten such a huge surge of sales since it came out is due to several factors.  For one thing, its price of $250 helped a lot in a market where PS3 is $600 and the Xbox 360 is $400.  Another thing that helped is the (mostly) friendly media hype that it received, mostly due to its controller.  The third reason is because the GameCube is starved for games, and has been for a very long time. 

This generation, a lot of Nintendo’s fan base decided to move on to the next system a lot sooner than they have before, because they knew nothing else was coming for the current gen.  The Nintendo Wii will plateau sooner or later, and even though I would have no problem with it tying or even surpassing the Xbox 360’s sales, I don’t see it happening.  Look at the line-up for Xbox 360, and then look at the line-up for the Wii this year.  It doesn’t compare, and the novelty of the Wii-mote will wear off with time.  NIntendo is a pure gaming company though, so if they were to take the lead, it would do nothing but help the industry, which is always a good thing.  The only way the industry loses this generation is if a company who is more concerned with pushing a disc format rather than good developer tools and great games ends up dominating once again.  Fortunately, that is very unlikely these days.

In other news, more news about Crysis for the Xbox 360 have found its way online.  As I (and probably many of you) did with Counter-Strike, Half-Life 2, F.E.A.R., and many other games, I have been arguing that Crysis, like those games, will come to the Xbox brand, and not be PC exclusives.  As usual, there are PC elitists, among other people, who continue to deny that these games will ever come to the console, and will continue to tell you “it’s impossible”.  I guess we all did “the impossible” last November when we played F.E.A.R. on our Xbox 360’s, or when we’ll play Half-Life 2 this summer on the Xbox 360 (it was also released on the original Xbox in 2005), we’ll be doing “the impossible” again.

Developers make games for profit, not just for fun.  There’s just simply no reason to stay exclusive these days unless you’re being paid off by a certain console maker, or if you have a personal problem working on or with a certain system.  This is the reason most top PC games will come to the Xbox 360, especially with XNA dev tools being mainstream now, and this is also the reason that most, if not all, non-first party PS3 “exclusive” titles will make their way to the Xbox 360.  I talk about this more in my “Konami MGS4 Damage Control” entry a few weeks ago.

When developers have to sell 500,000 just to break even on the PS3, they’re going to look elsewhere, and the first place they’re going to look is the system that has the biggest install base, and the best developer tools…guess which system has both of those, along with much more.  Hint: it’s not the PSP.

The other great news of the weekend is the announcement that Gears of War has now sold three million since its release back in early November.  I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot more DLC for this game as well.

XBLAddict.com has just begun a contest where you can win a free copy of UNO.  Click here for the details.

Finally, a few days ago I was contacted by GamertagRadio.com to be featured in a Community Shine segment over on their site.  It’s very nice to be recognized by such a prominent site in the Xbox community, and I appreciate the chance to reach even more readers with their help.  You can read the interview I did with them here.  After that, you can read the Showcase I did over at Unscripted360.com a few months ago if you haven’t already.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 15th, 2007 at 4:59 pm and is filed under Nintendo Wii News, Playstation 3 News, Site News, Xbox 360 News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.