If you want to stay up to date on things, you're going to need to move fast. Or you're going to need to spend most of your time sifting through the Internet's dark corners, where even your Google Alerts can't reach.
Or you could just realize that you only care about the top level stuff. If that's the case, here are some things you might want to know.
Activision's been doing some talking to Bloomberg about what it plans to do with its $3 billion in cash. No, it's not going to blow it all at the horse track. No, it's not going to use it to buy me ice cream, either. Activision's looking at the recession-powered valuation drops and seeing opportunities to perhaps acquire some other companies.
“The combination of Activision holding a fair amount of cash and presumably prices being depressed, not only for publicly traded companies, but also likely for new intellectual property licensing rights, should certainly create opportunities,” Mike Griffith said yesterday in an interview in San Francisco.
...hey, I hear Midway might have a couple of things they want to sell. Think Activision could end up with Mortal Kombat in its sizable stable? Activision never really seemed like a fighting game kind of company to me, but MK's a big franchise, and we all know how much Activision loves franchises. An annual fighting game installment would probably burn out the market... so they'd have to put it on a Call of Duty two-year cycle with the core fighting team doing a game every two years with some sort of Shaolin Monks-like offshoot to run in the off years. OK, now I'm just speculating on top of speculating. Let's move on.
I distinctly remember seeing N'Gai's exclusive Killzone 2 hands-on coming out shortly after E3 2007 and thinking about how crazy it was that the enthusiast media, with all its emphasis on securing exclusives at any cost, was suddenly competing with the mainstream media for yet another style of content. Though it didn't lead to screenshots of games showing up on the front page of the New York Times or anything like that, it was definitely a moment that made me feel like the mainstream acceptance of gaming (and games coverage) was on the rise.
QuakeCon registration opens on Friday at 6:30PM Pacific time. The actual thing itself goes down in mid-August.
MCV reports that Square Enix and Eidos have agreed to buyout terms. Shareholders are expected to approve this month and the deal should close by May 6. Do you think that the Eidos name will live on as a brand once this goes through? Seems like they might not need to say Eidos when they can just say "Square Enix."
Capcom's Christian Svensson spoke with Rock Paper Shotgun about PC gaming and how important digital distribution is for games on that platform. While I don't mind going to stores for console games, buying physical PC games just seems totally backwards to me these days. I can't quite express why I feel that way. Might just be an unhealthy love of Steam (which is weird in its own way since I'm not exactly a huge fan of Valve's games, either).
Anime Vice has a bit up about a new Final Fantasy VII OVA. Then I had to go look up "OVA" to remember exactly what it means. It means "animated movie," I think. It's going to be called Final Fantasy VII: Episode Denzel: On the Way to a Smile. In it, Denzel enters a virtual world and fights Cid 6.7, who isobviously played by Russell Crowe. Man, they should just make a Virtuosity anime instead.
And this video that Legend posted in the forums is kind of the greatest thing ever made as of 12:40PM on March 4.