Friday, November 2, 2012

Schilling Sued, Warfighter Sucks and NFS most UNwanted

The Midaged Gamer Report 11-2-2012

This week: Curt Schilling's getting sued, EA admits that Medal of Honor Warfighter sucks and Most Wanted is great, except for that crashing in the cities thing...

Portal 2 for PS3 is getting some new DLC next week.  "In Motion" is the new DLC is coming out November 6th from Sixense and has 20 levels designed for the Playstation Move controller.  The DLC is priced at $9.99 with a discount of 30% for Playstation Plus subscription holders.


Hey, want a free copy of Crysis?  Then go get yourself hooked up with the  Crysis 3 pre-order and EA will graciously let you download the first Crysis for free.  Due out February of 2013, the pre-order will provide you with a code to download the game.  PC players can use EA's Origin client, PS3 can use PSN and Xbox live for Xbox players.

This is your chance to take advantage of yet another milked franchise in EA's dairy farm. 


Former baseball great Curt Schilling's game development studio, 38 Studios recently went under, that we knew.  This week the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation has filed suit against the principals of the failed company including Schilling seeking to get their $75 million investment back.  Their claim is that the company was mismanaged and that the state's investment was" squandered."

 The part they left out was that nobody thought to do an assessment of the game developer before loaning them the money.  At the time the 38 Studios was working on Project Copernicus.

Liquidation of 38 Studio's assets have only netted the state $830,000 so they've decided to go after the management.  Good luck with that.  It's called Bankruptcy protection for a reason.  Want to blame someone for losing 75 million?  How about the state officials that let the deal happen.  Governor Lincoln Chaffee stated,

"I know you work hard for your paychecks and for your tax dollars to be squandered is unacceptable.  The board's legal action was taken to rectify a grave injustice put upon the people of Rhode Island"
Really?  Where was all that concern when your state made the loan?  Sounds like straw man to me.

I'm sure they'll blame it on Obama somehow...


I love PS4 news.  It gives me a chance to say..."Orbis" and do the funny hand thing...
Apparently game studios have begun receiving new PS4 development kits based on AMD's A10 APU series which includes a built in GPU.  While impressive, the A10 APU's integrated graphics can best Intel's integrated offerings but don't say much more than that for the platform without a performance GPU.  Although they are saying they'll support 1080P (not 4K) gaming which isn't exactly stressful for even midrange GPU's these days unless you're playing Crysis.  Look for the announcement at next June's E3 conference.


Halo 4 is coming out November 6th and so far reviewers like it.  I don't know anything about it but if you do at least you can say I told you about it.  Looks to be around $55 for the Xbox 360.


Borderlands 2 has sold 5 million copies to date says 2K parent Take 2.  Guess there's no economic downturn after all with $60 pre-orders and the $30 season pass that gets you access to all the upcoming  DLC.  Oh yeah and Borderlands: Legends is out for IOS now.


Poor EA, First they announce that their lackluster upcoming release of Medal of Honor: Warfighter and canceled NBA game, NBA Live 13 would cause a soft quarter then a day later blame the loss on disappointing "packaged" (boxed) sales.

New CEO Blake Jorgensen may be learning the lesson his predecessor didn't. Specifically that EA can't get away with premium prices for substandard products.   The official numbers for quarter 2 show EA lost a net 381 million.  They blame it on declining packaged sales but state digital sales were up.  A loss is a loss EA, learn your lesson and don't push overpriced garbage on your customers.


At least EA can be proud of their 30 million Origin subscribers.  Although that isn't saying much considering PC gamers with EA titles in their collection are stuck with it if they want to play their games.  It's the same kind of worthless statistic as the number of driver's licenses issued.  Not like you have a choice if you want to take that Prius out for a spin.


Whoopee! Battlefield 3 premium subscriptions topped 2 million this month.  Somebody got a hold of mom's credit card..


Ok, I can care less about Assassin's Creed 3 but some people do.   So I found it amusing that players of the newly released game on the Xbox and PS3 (PC version coming in late December) already had a patch waiting for them on launch day.  Nice that Ubisoft is on top of the issues but how did this get by the QA department?  There are a lot of fixes in that patch!  What, 3 years since the last major release wasn't enough time?


Been waiting to rekindle those warm fuzzies of rising through the ranks of the criminal underworld by offing the competition and murdering prostitutes?  Well your wait is almost over with the announcement of Grand theft Auto 5 releasing in the Spring of 2013.  Apparently this iteration will be a sun and sand affair with bikini clad victims to match the decor.  Pre-orders begin November 5th for PS3 and Xbox 360.


Finally, it seems EA's new Need For Speed Most Wanted is a great looking arcade racer with an open world layout that is both liberating and annoying.  Apparently there's been reports of a number of game crashes when trying to speed through cities and roads to nowhere due to flaws in the open world design.  Might be worth a look when it goes on sale and maybe a few patches.  By the way I mean sale as in discount not full retail.


That's it for this week.

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