Movie tie in games are big business in the video game industry. For just about every big budget movie which hits the theater a video game is almost guaranteed to appear on Gamestop shelves across the country. While these games are almost universally reviled as being shameless cash ins by reviewers they create just that...cash. Usually far out of proportion to their quality and budget.

So, onto this scene in 2007 rolled Brash Entertainment. Founded in 2007 it was created with the expressed goal of producing nothing but movie based video games. With start up cash of somewhere around 400 million dollars things were looking good. The somehow got the licenses to such big movie franchises as Saw and, rather puzzling since there hasn't been a movie in years, DC Comic's Superman. However the only games which ever saw the light of day under their name were Alvin and the Chipmunks, Jumper: Griffin's Story, and Space Chimps. While they came out on multiple consoles, as any good movie tie in should, their review scores were brutal. Averaging out their highest metacritic scores only brings their score to about a 40. Apparently the public agreed these games weren't so great because the company quickly went out of business in November 2008.

The fallout from Brash Entertainment's spectacular failure is still being felt. Just this past week Factor 5 announced it was closing its doors due to the falling through of its deal with Brash to creat the aforementioned Superman game. This implies that said deal must have had a rather large payroll riding on it which never materialized. Exactly how Brash managed to waste $400 million dollars in about two years is a topic I might cover in a future blog.

Now, to the point of this post. Has GRIN become more Brash Entertainment than Brash Entertainment ever was? In the past two months they have released Wanted: Weapons of Fate and Terminator: Salvation. Tie-ins to major blockbuster films. While averaged out they only have a metacritic rating of about 59 that is light year better than Brash ever dreamed of. It's important to point out that most of those low scores were a result of the games being criminally short. They both have clocked in somewhere around four or five hours.

While the jury is still out on whether or not these two games are going to sell things are looking good for GRIN. The fact they managed to get those two major franchises and make the games decent is a miracle. If they can just make them a little longer with some additional polish they could finally achieve the magical alchemy necessary to create good movie video games. I'll admit that the only game of theirs I own are the two recent Bionic Commando titles but the potential is there.

They can't do any worse than Brash.

Whether or not the used games market is a problem all depends on who you are asking.

If you ask the Publishers and Developers they will probably say yes. If customers are walking into a store and picking up the used copy of a game for $5 or $10 less than a new copy then they are seeing none of that revenue. While their initial sales are still likely to be high it will quickly taper off as an abundance of used copies come into circulation.

If you ask a retailer like Gamestop they will of course say no. Used games are what has put them on the Forbes 500 and made them one of the fastest growing companies in the country. In a time of economic recession they are posting insane year over year growth. On every game that someone trades in they are making around 300% profit over what they give.

If you ask a consumer they will likely say there is nothing wrong with it. While many have a problem with the low value which they can get from trading games in they often have no qualms about buying used games.

In the long run it's all a cycle. Publishers sell new copies of games, which people trade in, which are then sold as used, and the money from that sale is used to buy new product to begin the cycle all over again. It's the video game circle of life.

As I was heading over to Xbox360achievements.com to figure out how to pick some stuff up for Army of Two I noticed this article.

http://www.xbox360achievements.org/news/news-2612-Batman--Arkham-Asylum-Delayed?.html

...linking to this article...

http://gameinformer.com/NR/exeres/1777F2A2-72E2-4765-B961-020EE151514B.htm

So, things don't appear to be looking good for a June release of Arkham Asylum. I have to agree with the articles that the only real reason they are probably doing this is to cash in on the holiday shopping season. The recent release of the demo in retail stores says that the game was incredibly close to completion. They were one of the only heavy hitters coming out in the summer months and could easily go the way of  Resistance 2 in the holiday madness.

I'd also be curious to hear what hand Square Enix (the new masters of Eidos) might have had in this decision. Could they be trying to hold back a big game to pad their Final Fantasy XIII lacking North American holiday release schedule?

I just threw up a review of Army of Two. Picked it up at the Gamestop B2G1 sale last weekend. Not nearly as bad as the reviews and word of mouth led me to believe. It could have really benefited from a lot of polish but overall not bad.

Anyone who reads this blog regularly, and who does, will be wondering what became of my quest to play all the Jak and Daxter games. Well, the brutal difficulty of Jak II was killing the fun for me. So, I decided to take a break and commit some mindless violence. I shall return to it shortly.

Well, it appears that Batman fans are going to have to wait a couple of more weeks to delve into Arkham Asylum's horrors. I was looking through the Gamestop release date list earlier today and noticed that they had moved Arkham's release to June 23. Double checking on IGN and Gamespot this seems to be confirmed. I hadn't seen any official announcements of this two and a half week delay so I thought that everyone deserved a head's up.

If I were a speculating man, and I am, I would say that this was done to seperate it from an action game heavy period of time. Infamous will drop on May 26 followed closely by Prototype on Arkham's old release date of June 9. A little more than a week ago all three of these major titles were to drop on the same day. Since then they have done their best to get some distance between one another.