Sally emphatically said, "More Cowbell!" ? Huh?

No, I said, "Simon Cowell said 'No more, no more.'"
3 Jun 05

Wow, confusing day. It seems Evil Avatar reported on a Gamesradar story covering a Gamespot interview with Nintendo Vice President George Harrison. There was some misunderstanding. Gamesradar and Evil Avatar ended up reporting that Harrison stated first party downloadable games would be available for free. Unfortunately, that's not what he said.

If you go back to the Gamespot article, you'll see he said they hadn't determined what they would do as far as distributing first party Nintendo titles. The free part he was talking about was network access. They wouldn't charge to download bonus content (levels, skins, etc.) nor for first party online play. Those are good moves, but a far cry from releasing the entire Nintendo back library for free download. Like I said before, given Nintendo's charging $20 for NES classics on the GBA, I don't expect downloads to be surprisingly cheap. I'm willing to be amazed however.

Just a reminder, the Xbox version of Conker is coming out next week. It will be interesting to see how the second fruit of the Rare purchase fares for Microsoft. I imagine people will be watching closely as it could be a barometer for interest in Perfect Dark Zero that Microsoft is counting on to be a system seller.

Speaking of releases, the top selling game in Japan is a new release. It's Namco X Capcom, a strategy RPG pulling in characters from the companies respective universes. I'm hoping the hot sales indicate that reviews haven't been scathing. It's a neat idea that I hope succeeds and comes stateside (and to PAL territories).

Finally, speaking about our pals in the PAL world, in one of the Nintendo interviews, they admitted to poor treatment of PAL territories. They also promised another Animal Crossing incident wouldn't happen again. It's nice to see all the big three take a more global view. Once again, I think it benefits gamers.

Jason