Things aren't looking so dandy for Capcom this week, but SNK and Activision are doing pretty good for themselves.

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The Week in Review

April 1, 2006

Trudging through the week following the Game Developers Conference has proven quite uneventful, though this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody. We got to see some interesting announcements from both Nintendo and Sony eat up the majority of the headline space last week, so now most companies are taking a bit of a breather before they start trickling out information in the weeks preceding E3.

One thing to stand out these past few days, though, was Capcom changing their profit forecast for this year, reducing it by about $20 million US. Now, the company claims that poor sales in the US and Europe, coupled with some tax issues are to blame, but could it also have to do with the sheer number of uninspired duds that they’ve released in the last twelve months? Off the top of my head I can think of a good half dozen boring games that Capcom has released that never really needed to be made: Without Warning, Beat Down, Haunting Ground, Killer 7, Viewtiful Joe Rumble, and Shadows of Rome. These games ranged from poor to mediocre, and made up a large chunk of what Capcom put out last year.

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While these games generally weren’t all that great, it does leave us in a bit of a conundrum. Look at all of the titles that I listed above and tell me what you see. There’s a lot of original titles up there, no? However, they all performed horribly at retail, and often times didn’t score that well in reviews. So, what is Capcom going to think about all that? Granted they backed some duds, but in a year where the publisher made a

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concerted effort to break away from it’s long standing tradition of releasing almost nothing but sequels, sales of these games just weren’t fantastic. Now one has to wonder if they will revert back to a safer route and start pumping out sequels post haste, especially with the expensive next generation consoles around the corner.

Despite the troubles at Capcom, there was quite a bit of good news to come out this week. One thing that was quite nice to hear is that Activision is bringing on professional film and comic writers for the narrative in their upcoming X-Men game. There’s been discussion on several occasions in the past about how it can be difficult to attract writers from these fields to contribute to the creation of a videogame. Some have said it’s a money thing, and others pride, but in any event games desperately need a lot more qualified writers than they have had in the past if the industry wants to be taken more seriously as a story telling entertainment medium, even if it is interactive. We can do a lot better than the tripe in psuedo-intellectual, self-important series like Metal Gear and Xenosaga. Perhaps this move by Activision can help with that.

The last thing I want to touch on for this week are the announcements out of SNK Playmore confirming that King of Fighters 2006 and Metal Slug Collection are heading to North America. In particular, I’m quite interesting in this Metal Slug compilation. We’re talking six Metal Slug games on one PSP UMD. That’s a lot of Metal Slug, and quite awesome. Hopefully other companies will start to go hog wild on their PSP classic compilations too.

Anywho, that about does it for now, hopefully next week will wind up being a little more exciting. Perhaps a sex scandal?

Mr. Nash

(April 1, 2006)


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