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Warshaw Awards Celebrate 2003's Gaming Missteps
Thanks to Shacknews for their feature revealing The Warshaw Awards for 2003, celebrating "some of the worst missteps of the year" in videogaming. The awards are named after Howard Scott Warshaw, creator of the famously poor E.T. for the Atari 2600, and victors include Namco for R: Racing Evolution, which "eschews virtually everything that Ridge Racer fans had come to expect", David Duchovny for "quite possibly the worst [voice acting] I've ever heard from a mainstream actor" in Ubisoft's XIII, and the IGN gaming website for their "obscene McDonald's advertising campaign."
I believe it's more of an iTunes for games type thing than an all-in-one console. They intend to set up a server, and sell games off of it for download. There are supposed to be rental schemes, downloadable patches, etc. They want to let indie developers put their games up there for cheap, to get some exposure and profit. It supposedly will run Windows games, but you must download them from their server.
It would seem that cutting out the middle man (store), and shipping/production, the cost of distrbuting a game would be very low. With so many gigs of games needing to be transfered, though, I can't imagine it turning a profit. How easy would it be to set up a hacked mirror of the server, or something, and give every user acess to every game free?
Seriously! Enough! It was a bad game. But was it the greatest pile of crap in history? No. I saw my friend beat it recently, and it actually wasn't that bad when I got to see someone play who knew what he was doing. Just my $0.02, it's just getting old is all...
I think the author is being a little hard on Duchovny. When have we ever seen him as animated as Michael Ironside? Lacking the subtle clues of minute physical gesture, generated characters in videogames need to put a lot of variation in tone and pacing. Duchnovy traditionally relies upon eye and minor head movements. That's not to say he isn't a great actor, but he's far too subtle and visual to be a great voice actor. He has less intonation than Ben Stein. Thinking that would translate well to an audio-only role is Ubi Soft's fault.
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A lot of what this guy says is just duh hay kind of stuff. And while I'll agree Nintendo's press releases were not as funny as intended. Mario Party still freakin' rules. If you don't like Mario Party its probably because you don't have 3 friends 3 controllers and a freakin' party.
The rest of the article is like "The N-Gage sucks". Not even close to news.
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