View From the Bushes

E3 is currently taking place. I've never been to one, though I imagine that it's similar to GenCon, just ten times bigger. The Washington Post had an article the other day about some of the depressing statistics currently weighing down the game market. One of the most telling quotes:

Of the top 100 games on the market today, only 13 are not sequels or tied to a movie, TV show or sports franchise, according to Jon Epstein, executive vice president at game Web-site operator IGN Entertainment Inc., which goes by IGN/GameSpy.

Of course, that's kind of depressing. I could see it coming, but I hadn't realized that we had already arrived at that point. In the article he also mentions Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, saying it was better than the last two movies. In a sense that's like comparing apples and oranges; in another sense the last two movies were so bad that it just about goes without saying that the game was better.

They recently announced that they were going to make a sequel to KOTOR. I read a preview of it in Computer Gaming World and it sounds pretty cool. Since the original game had a couple of radically different endings they are going to ask your character some questions in the sequel about how you remember the first game ending and based on that craft the game from there. A pretty cool concept when you think about it.

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Ross