With work taking up much of my time, not being able to play games as much (in particular MMOs), and me not thinking about random events of the world as often; I’m finding it difficult to figure out what to talk about here. I think part of the problem is that this really is a dead time for the video games industry. This is for a few reasons…
First, the months of May and June traditionally don’t see many big games released. Actually with WiiFit, WIiWare and GTA4 I think this year it turned out to be a much bigger year than normal, but even with that it is kind of shallow. I don’t know why this is true. If memory serves many in the industry tend to say that people don’t play games as much in the summer time and so they don’t like to release here. But honestly I think it comes down to the industry just wanting to launch all its games for Christmas. April through June tends to be where you see big games that would get overshadowed or games that got delayed but people want that later year X-mas rush and so pretty much any other time of year is nothing. After all, if the problem was that people don’t like to sit inside during the summer times to play games, then the movie industry wouldn’t put out its big guns for the summer (essentially sitting inside isn’t it?). I think this is mostly circular logic… people don’t play games because devs don’t release them because people don’t play them. Truth is, I think there would be a decent amount playing games in the summer as kids have a whole lot of time all of a sudden to play games without homework and school getting in the way. (Portable I would think in particular would be great as people may want to travel more and hence have a cool game to play.)
Another reason is the obvious E3 effect. Many companies button up in prep for the E3 event. Though this is diminishing each year as more and more companies realize that E3 is no longer relevant to gaming. Many companies still take the time to make their yearly game announcements between the time E3 used to be (I believe it used to be in May) and the time it is now (July). Hence, there really isn’t a ton of good info out there on anything new going on. Especially from console manufacturers who still adhere to E3 as the big show. The companies who show do show, such as Capcom’s recent game announcements, tend to be smaller in scale and less surprising. (Resident Evil 5 is big, but nothin people were caught off guard by, the biggest thing I think no one knew about was something like NeoPets Adventure Puzzle which who cares really).
Mostly my big problem is that I am just not gaming right now so how the heck am I supposed to talk about it? It is kind of sad to me because I really do enjoy gaming. Not that there is really much new out there to play, but that is beside the point.