EA and Criterion know that you’ve been hurting for a good shoot ‘em up. The only shooter released so far this year was 25 to Life, which Eidos as a company should have been locked up for producing (for 25… to… life? HA!). That’s why they’ve been kind enough to finalize BLACK for release. BLACK, which looks incredibly cool by the way, is schedueled for release on February 28.

I know. You’re sitting in front of your computer screen asking yourself, "Why?" Well, I said I’d bring your more information, and it seems this is the last time I’ll have to do that. The High Court in the UK has ordered Tiger Telematics to liquidate its Gizmondo subsidiary. It had filed for the European version of bankruptcy, where by it is protected from creditors while the company is restructured, but that request was denied. Now, the pair of liquidation firms in control of the company will be firing all employees and liquidating all properties, intellectual and otherwise. Apparently Tiger is still attempting to secure some cash to purchase some of the Gizmondo properties and is "consididering its available options with its Texas games studio subsidiary and its kiosk sales units." They may do this with either a large amount of financing or they may just sell the company off entirely, which seems more likely. Here’s hoping for the latter. Goodbye Gizmondo, we hardly knew ye.

Because we keep buying them. This week, IGN released a list of the top selling 50 PS2 games of last year. Of those 50, only 8 were original intellectual properties. Two of those 8 were based on movies. One was a poker game. So, that leaves us with only 5 truly original creations: God of War (10), 50 Cent Bulletproof (20), Mercenaries (25), Blitz: The League (26), and Destroy All Humans (46). Two of those 5 games were build off of existing names and used those to jump start sales (50 Cent and Blitz, and neither was very good). In the top 10, 6 games were sports, as in they come out every year. Three were Star Wars Games, and of those, only LEGO Star Wars was good.

This isn’t my way of slamming companies or us as consumers really. Many sequels are of high quality and are definitely desirable. They’re safe profit for companies as long as they can maintain some semblance of quality. You could even attribute some of this to the thought that everything has been done before and even original intellectual properties are in some way picking from and dabbling in aspects of other games and genres. But am I the only one that feels that the Industry’s sequilitis has spun wildly out of control?

And now, for the soapbox portion of the piece: we as consumers need to show, with our money, that we want to see not just new games, but new characters and gameplay elements. That is, if you care about playing original games. If not, well I hope you enjoy your copy of the 16^th Madden game (that’s right, it’s been coming out year after year for over a decade and a half). 2.95 million of you bought it last year. I hope it was worth it.

http://ps2.ign.com/articles/684/684395p1.html

Gaming Blog Kotaku (Kotaku.com) reported a couple of days ago that "an insider with Nintendo" had fed them information that the DS Lite, the new version of the Nintendo DS, would be released in the U.S. in mid-May. This source also mentioned that a Player’s Choice line of titles would be coming for the Game Boy Advance with discounted prices, and that a new color for the Game Boy Advance SP, "pearl pink," would be coming. Nintendo has been releasing their handheld systems more closely in both markets (the DS and Game Boy Advance Micro shipped to U.S. and Japanese retailers within 2 weeks of each other), Nintendo has been facing shortages of the original DS in Japan. Given Nintendo’s trouble keeping the DS stocked recently, and the slow sales of Game Boy Advance titles in 2005 compared with 2004, these rumors (and they are rumors; Nintendo has yet to officially announce anything) seem pretty likely.