Beyond Good and Evil (Xbox Live Arcade)
Upgraded high-definition rerelease of the 2003 action-adventure game. The game will also be available for download on PlayStation Network at some point in the future.
Beyond Good and Evil was one of those games that had the sad fate of gaining an intensely enthusiastic cult following that still speaks fondly of the game almost a decade later while bombing with the general public. Though well-received by critics, the game was a commercial failure when it was released, the victim of the limited appeal of the game's premise, poor marketing support by Ubisoft, and a faltering market for games named after books by Friedrich Nietzsche that had already been oversaturated by prior 2003 releases Xenosaga: Die Wille zur Macht and the critically acclaimed The Birth of Tragedy: A Barbie Horse Adventure.
Rift: Planes of Telara (PC)
New MMORPG. Honestly, the only reason I'm aware of this is that the developers, Trion, had a legal battle over trademarks with Kevin Siembieda, owner of Palladium Books and creator of the long-running tabletop RPG Rifts. Which Trion really should have seen coming, since Palladium has long been notorious for continuously emitting IP-related cease-and-desist notices in much the same way that you or I exhale carbon dioxide. (Though, to be fair, Palladium's complaint was actually a lot more reasonable than the sort of thing they're often known for.)
Vagrant Story (PlayStation Network)
(PlayStation Network) Square Enix continues to mercilessly taunt me with reminders of why Square used to be my favorite developer with this classic action RPG from the original PlayStation, released as a downloadable game. Check it out if you missed it the first time around.
Beyond Good and Evil was one of those games that had the sad fate of gaining an intensely enthusiastic cult following that still speaks fondly of the game almost a decade later while bombing with the general public. Though well-received by critics, the game was a commercial failure when it was released, the victim of the limited appeal of the game's premise, poor marketing support by Ubisoft, and a faltering market for games named after books by Friedrich Nietzsche that had already been oversaturated by prior 2003 releases Xenosaga: Die Wille zur Macht and the critically acclaimed The Birth of Tragedy: A Barbie Horse Adventure.
Rift: Planes of Telara (PC)
New MMORPG. Honestly, the only reason I'm aware of this is that the developers, Trion, had a legal battle over trademarks with Kevin Siembieda, owner of Palladium Books and creator of the long-running tabletop RPG Rifts. Which Trion really should have seen coming, since Palladium has long been notorious for continuously emitting IP-related cease-and-desist notices in much the same way that you or I exhale carbon dioxide. (Though, to be fair, Palladium's complaint was actually a lot more reasonable than the sort of thing they're often known for.)
Vagrant Story (PlayStation Network)
(PlayStation Network) Square Enix continues to mercilessly taunt me with reminders of why Square used to be my favorite developer with this classic action RPG from the original PlayStation, released as a downloadable game. Check it out if you missed it the first time around.
Chuck E Cheese's Sport Games (Nintendo Wii)
I don't really have anything to say about this game, since any joke I could make about it is less amusing to me than the simple fact of its existence.
Now, I suspect that this will tempt some people to sneer that a Wii game based on the animatronic mascot of a chain of children's restaurants/entertainment centers is an example of how far Nintendo has fallen from its once-glorious heights in pursuit of the casual gamer market. So allow me to point out that, back in the halcyon era of the original Nintendo Entertainment System, when men were men and games were games and your mom didn't understand that the NES couldn't play Colecovision cartridges, the NES had games about McDonald's, the Noid from Domino's Pizza commercials, and even a game starring the red dot on bottles of 7-Up. (Though, tragically, Fido Dido's moment in the sun would be forever denied him.) We had everything short of Procter and Gamble's Adventures in Brand Management Land, so it's a little late in the day to complain about this sort of thing.
I don't really have anything to say about this game, since any joke I could make about it is less amusing to me than the simple fact of its existence.
Now, I suspect that this will tempt some people to sneer that a Wii game based on the animatronic mascot of a chain of children's restaurants/entertainment centers is an example of how far Nintendo has fallen from its once-glorious heights in pursuit of the casual gamer market. So allow me to point out that, back in the halcyon era of the original Nintendo Entertainment System, when men were men and games were games and your mom didn't understand that the NES couldn't play Colecovision cartridges, the NES had games about McDonald's, the Noid from Domino's Pizza commercials, and even a game starring the red dot on bottles of 7-Up. (Though, tragically, Fido Dido's moment in the sun would be forever denied him.) We had everything short of Procter and Gamble's Adventures in Brand Management Land, so it's a little late in the day to complain about this sort of thing.
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