Okami is a really good game for the PS2, with truly inspired art direction. It didn’t sell too hot in Japan, but seems to have done reasonably in the US. It comes from tyhe same studio that earlier gave us the similarly unique Viewtiful Joe games.
This, of course, means that the studio must be shut down.
It may be what makes financial sense, but it’s a real shame.
Overall, I have been pretty happy with my Toshiba M405 Tablet PC. It’s a convertible tablet, so I have a keyboard when I want one (and in fact, that’s most of the time — I use the laptop above all for email when on the road). It has a DVD drive, so I can watch movies on trips, something I have done exactly once. It can burn CDs. It has a mediocre integrated Intel video solution, so I can’t do hardcore gaming on it, but that’s OK, because I find myself playing a lot of light weight and indie games recently anyhow.
But it does have stability issues.
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FWIW, IMHO I need more acronyms in this post.
In any case, Paul Hemp, Senior Editor over at the Harvard Business Review, let me know that there’s an article entitled Are You Ready for E-tailing 2.0? up for free for the next month. It’s interesting speculation regarding whether more and more traditional retail presences will move into virtual worlds.
Myself, I tend to think that we have a ways to go before this is widespread — and when it hits, is it ore likely to be retailers within virtual worlds, or retailers running virtual worlds?
A Theory of Fun made Next Generation’s list of “50 Books For Everyone In the Game Industry” written by Ernest Adams. It’s quite a good list — I think I have read 2/3rds of it.
This article exploring the connection between Spore and “Power of Ten” thinking and other cultural issues appeared yesterday. I chatted with Steven at some length for the article, and also went through two incredibly detailed fact-checking calls. (I’ve noticed that when I appear in Harper’s, NYT, New Yorker, I get these massive fact-checking calls about small things; when I am in gaming mags, I never get a call at all, including about big things).
Along the way, Steven (whom I haven’t managed to break from the habit of calling me Ralph) calls A Theory of Fun “one of the best books to date about games and culture.” Now if only he’d give me some of his spare New York Times bestseller slots — not like he’s short of them…!
