deadkat's Recent Blog Entries

• Do you want franchise with that?

  Twenty five years ago there was clear evidence that game developers made the games they wanted to play - or at least the games they wanted to make. And if that game was very successful, you would probably get a sequel or two.

  Licenses were everywhere, pioneered by the likes of Ocean and Elite in the UK, but these tended to be organised around single events - you licensed the latest craze (or Hollywood block buster if you had the money) and shoe-horned it into a dodgy gameplay mechanic before moving on to the next big thing.

  November 9, 2009
• Jaw-Dropping

  Of all the cliches that exist in the dialect of English known as review speak, the one that really leaves me cold is "jaw-dropping" (as in graphics, of course - jaw-dropping is almost never applied to videogames for their sound effects, menus or control schemes).

  According to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, Jaw-Dropping is an adjective invented circa 1980 (suspiciously close to the birth of the videogaming specialist press) to describe "causing great surprise or astonishment".

  November 1, 2009
• Modern Warfare 2 delayed til Q2 2010 - Analyst

  "Specifically April, Fool"

  I am unapologetic about the title of this blog - and nothing short of a Carter-Ruck Super Injunction will make me want to change it.

  Don't get me wrong, I will be buying Modern Warfare 2 on it's release day, but it is the kind of game that I want to enjoy as part of a well balanced release schedule - and by all accounts this game is responsible for Christmas 2009 being delayed until Easter 2010. Most telling of all, if the title of this blog came true it would not bother me one jot.

  October 26, 2009