In case you have't already read in the Anime blogs, Naruto is coming to the X-Box 360. Ubisoft (the only French company I'm not boycotting) has secured the rights to the IP and their Montreal studio will be handling development. The Montreal team has an excellent track record so this should be a good one.

     Delays, delays, delays... No surprise Portals has been delayed, again. Maybe if Para would stop stealing Valves source code they could start getting games out the door in a timely manner. I hear Gabe Newell's old friend Bill Gates has ninja assasins out looking for Para right now. Other X-Box 360 games currently delayed (is "currently delayed" an oxymoron?) include Shadowrun, Bioshock and Mass Effect. Team Fortress 2 and Episode 2 have been delayed simply because they are bundeled with Portals. Speaking of delays, what in the world is going on with Duke Nukem? Can anyone please explain to me why a franchise that was loved by all and made a bundle of cash has lingered in development limbo for over ten years? I'm starting to feel like one of those Mac owners still waiting for that RTS called "Halo" that they were promised way back in '99. You say you didn't know Halo started as an RTS? That's another story. I'll tell it in a later post if anyone's interested.

     The 360 Elite comes out on April 29. Lucky for me it's a Sunday because Gamestop isn't taking any reserves (due to lawsuits surrounding the 360 release, another story I'll tell later if anyone cares) so I have to do the "Fanboy Lineup" as I like to call it. I just found out that the DVD drives in the Elite are made by BenQ and run allot smoother and quieter than the old ones. Speaking of DVD drives, I was getting allot of disc-read errors on my old 360 and was grumbling about it and calling it shoddy workmanship but I had to eat my words because as soon as I quit smoking I stopped getting the crashes and errors. Seems the problem wasn't my 360 it was my smoking. I'd heard that second hand smoke was a killer but....

     Speaking of killers, was I the only one who breathed a sigh of relief when I found out that psycho at Virginia Tech wasn't a gamer? Can you imagine the s**tstorm THAT would have started? You know they would have blamed it on violence in video games and we wouldn't have heard the end of it for months and months. It turns out he may have been influenced by a film called "Oldboy" which showed at Cannes in '04. Now, my heart goes out to anyone involved in this tragidy but given the video game industry's tendancy to implode at the first sign of trouble (Take 2 Interactive's stock just now got upgraded back to "hold" after the Hot Coffee Mod scandel) I'm relieved to see the film industry take the hit on this one.

INOX     NYC