Command and Conquer 3, eh?

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The Week in Review

April 22, 2006

There was a fair chunk of new games announced this week, but for myself, and likely a small army of other gamers, the one that stood out the most was Command & Conquer 3. It’s been an eternity since the last new C&C game came out, and a lot of fans have been itching for the series to be revived. Now it will be, and that’s probably a good thing (assuming it turns out to be a fun title).

While it is exciting to see the franchise on the comeback trail, what I’m still wondering about is how it will turn out. Is this new game going to be more like the slightly slower-paced original Command & Conquer games, or will it lean towards the speedier Red Alert games? It also looks like Louis Castle, creator of C&C, is on board, but to what degree is he going to be involved in the day-to-day development of the game?

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In any event, news that C&C 3 is in production is happy news for many, so lets not poo-poo on that for now. We’re less than a month from E3, so we can keep our fingers crossed that there’s a demo of some sort on display, allowing us to get a better idea of what's planned for the game.

Another interesting tidbit to hit the newswires was the results of some recent research that discovered that women actually play more games

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than men past the age of 25. Now stay with me here, because the results are a bit loaded. The survey takes into account games like Bejeweled, and other more casual PC titles, and still concedes that men make up the majority of console gamers still. However, these statistics do lend credence to arguments from companies like Microsoft that want to introduce more casual gaming into the console market via products such as Xbox Arcade so to expand their influence. It is something to keep an eye on. At this stage in the game, I can’t see putting a bunch of Bejeweled-like games on Xbox Arcade as a way to move Xbox 360s, getting the X-chromosome on board. The PC is still a perfectly fine medium for that. Maybe several years down the road, if the 360s eventually become cheaper, or as women get exposed to Xbox Arcade from playing on their significant other’s 360 they may slowly embrace it, but not yet. (Yes, I'm well aware that there is a healthy portion of the gaming population that are of the female persuasion, and own a 360, so not all will depend on their partner to play the thing, but, as this study, and several others still prove, this demographic is still very much in the minority).

Before signing off for this week, I want to touch on the tantalizing rumor about NiGHTS coming to the Revolution. Now, this wasn’t some Nintendo fanboy’s wet dream posted on a message board, it was actually in the rumors section of Famitsu, thus lending a little more wait, if only a little, to the possibility of the rumor being true. It’s one of those things that I desperately want to believe, but I just don’t know; the killjoy, fuddy-duddy pessimist in me just can’t accept it. There have been so many hints of a new NiGHTS, but all we wind up with are a bunch of Sonic spinoffs from the game’s developer. Part of me thinks that NiGHTS is just like Kid Icarus: a wonderful game that will live on as legend, but never ever see a sequel.

Anyway, until next week. Keep fit, and have fun!

Mr. Nash