Late Night Consoling

Adelaide, Australia newspaper The Advertiser has confirmed that Midway shut down its development studio in Adelaide yesterday. The studio was rebranded from its original name Ratbag to Midway Studios - Australia just this August. Apparently, Greg Siegele and Richard Harrison, who co-founded Ratbag in 1993, attempted yesterday to convince Midway worldwide studio senior VP Matthew Booty to allow the studio to remain open.

The article also mentions some previously unconfirmed news, which is that Midway has also closed its San Diego studio. Midway - San Diego just shipped Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows (PS2, Xbox), which reportedly had something of a bumpy development cycle. The game's designers, John Romero and J.E. Sawyer, both left the company early this year while the game was still in production.

Specific details of the San Diego closure have yet to surface, but the Australian studio had recently been hiring and was surprised by Midway's announcement. In total, over a hundred developers will be either let go or relocated.

Yesterday, GamesIndustry.biz posted an excerpt from an interview with Sony chief of development Phil Harrison regarding the difference between Microsoft's take on HD and Sony's. Today, the full interview was made public, and it mainly consists of talk about Sony's future plans. Lately there has been a rather notable lack of information regarding the PlayStation 3, and true to form Harrison's responses to questions regarding the upcoming console tended to dance around the issues. He explained that "we're in a period when we would rather focus on selling PSPs and PS2s," and "next year the emphasis will start to shift, and we will start to share with you at the appropriate time a lot of the cool things about PS3."

The one topic on which he was quite keen to speak is that bit about HD in PS3 versus in Xbox 360. He made a point frequently shared by PlayStation executives, which is that "true definition of HD" is "the display, the content and the hardware to play back that content, and PlayStation and Sony is the only organisation that has all three bits of the value chain together." In relation to Microsoft, he noted that "Xbox 360 doesn't play high definition movies and doesn't have true HD functionality," nor does it support 1080p. One of Microsoft's biggest Xbox 360 marketing angles is that the console ushers in what they call the HD Era, but Harrison said, "The HD era really only starts when we are on the market."

After recently announcing then retracting its November sales data, the NPD group has released final sales numbers for the month of November, including data on Xbox 360 consoles and games. The report shows that the console sold 325,902 units during November, a number clearly limited by Microsoft's limited supply capabilities. By comparison, Xbox sold 556,000 in the same time period upon its release in 2001. Where the 360 improves is with software sales. Customers bought 3.9 games for each console, though there were certainly consumers who bought games before the launch then were unable to actually secure a console, as well as reports of electronics chains requiring customers to buy bundled games in order to receive a console at launch. The top selling game was Infinity Ward's Call of Duty 2 with just over 250,000 units for a 77% adoption rate. Following that was EA Tiburon's Madden 06 (178,000) and EA Canada's Need for Speed Most Wanted (108,000). Then Rare's Perfect Dark Zero (86,000), Bizarre Creations' Project Gotham Racing (70,000+), and Rare's Kameo: Elements of Power (70,000+).

Peter Jackson's King Kong (PS2, Xbox, GCN, X360, DS, PSP), designed by Michel Ancel of Beyond Good & Evil (PS2, Xbox, GCN) at the request of Peter Jackson, has been cited as a rare example of a quality film adaptation in gaming. However, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot warns gamers that the the Xbox 360 version of the game "is dark on some TVs and it totally changes the experience. When it's dark, you don't see where you have to go." The Xbox 360 version was primarily developed on high definition TVs, and apparently when played on standard definition sets the game is simply too dark. Such unsolicited candor about such a fault is surprising from the CEO of a major publisher, especially considering there hasn't been any particularly visible outcry from gamers regarding the problem. Perhaps they simply adjusted the brightness value on their television sets? Guillemot recommends playing the game on a current generation console, saying that then "you start to see that it is beautiful," and promises that such flaws will not happen in the future.

Despite the launch of the Xbox 360, overall game sales last month dropped 18% from November 2004, confirming expectations by some that despite the usual holiday season sales spike the industry is in something of a slump. In terms of hardware, Game Boy Advance did surprisingly well, leading the pack with 690,000 units. Old standby PS2 followed with 531,000, Nintendo DS with 370,000, GameCube with 272,000, and Xbox with 197,000. As is often the case, PSP numbers were not available. The bestselling software was the Xbox version of Pandemic's Star Wars: Battlefront II (PS2, Xbox, PC) followed by the PS2 version. Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories (PSP) made the list at #7, so the PSP must be doing alright, and Mario Kart DS was #10. Mario Party 7 made the chart at #9, somewhat uncommon for a GameCube title. The highest-charting Xbox 360 release was Call of Duty 2, which made #3.

Bungie has posted some backstory of the female Spartan character from Team NINJA's upcoming Dead or Alive 4 (X360).