It was the summer of 2008 and Guitar Hero was riding high. The little franchise that could has started in the tiny Boston development house known as Harmonix, and in just three years had blazed a billion-dollar trail to the top of the charts. The last Guitar Hero effort had been the second most successful American release of all time, and imitators were springing up left and rights to steal a little piece of the exploding genre Gutiar Hero had almost single-handedly created. But it was all about to come crashing down...

Ok, maybe that's a bit dire, but I just finished playing through Guitar Hero: Aerosmith and I do not foresee good things for the franchise, or the rhythm genre in general. I simply found the game boring, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. After all, I generally like Aerosmith (at least the older stuff, up through Permanent Vacation). And I really liked most of the opening act material they used for this game, particularly the songs from Lenny Kravitz, the Black Crowes, and Mott the Hoople. And it's not like the developers phoned it in; I was especially impressed with the Steven Tyler and Joe Perry animations, which were true-to-life, impressively varied, and well synchronized to the songs. As for the price of the game ($60 on PS3 and 360) and the relatively short track list (about 40 songs, compared to the 80+ expected in the next full Guitar Hero game), neither of those played into my enjoyment. I rented the game and was already wishing the thing was over by the time I was halfway through the already abbreviated tracklist.

So maybe I'm just burned out on the tiny toy instrument genre. The advent of downloadable content and competing products like Rock Revolution and Rock Band means I can get my fix of new songs essentially whenever I want, and I'm rapidly discovering that the qualities of a great song and a song that's fun to play--while not mutually exclusive--are rarely found in the same place. Knowing that makes it more difficult to get excited about a setlist, no matter how good I think it looks on paper.

I think all rhythm gamers will eventually hit the same point, where the simplistic gameplay loses its novelty and they think of themselves not as pretending to play an instrument, but instead just tapping buttons on cue. Once that happens, expect a pretty significant shakeout in the genre and a surplus of discount guitars at GameStop.

It reminds me in some ways of the death of the fighting genre. Before it all-but collapsed (taking the arcade industry with it, or vice-versa), the fighting genre was the easy-money destination for a wealth of companies who'd seen Capcom ride Street Fighter II to the bank several times over. Just about every publisher had a fighting game, most of them ill-advised. And for every commercial hit like Mortal Kombat, there were a dozen forgettable failures like Power Instinct or Martial Champion.

The big difference is that fighting gamers got tired of memorizing move lists and combos needed to excel at a billion different games all doing their best Street Fighter imitation. I think rhythm gamers will instead just grow tired of accumulating tiny toy peripherals with stupid compatibility issues. What it comes down to is a handful of idiots racing to kill the goose that lays their golden eggs out of fear that someone else will do it first.

If you're ever tired of hearing game publishers talk about how great they are, I'd suggest taking a trip through their SEC filings. Publicly traded companies are essentially allowed to lie to the public as much as they want, but they have to play it much straighter when it comes to the government and their own investors. While looking through THQ's annual report for a story earlier this week, I was reminded just how different the messaging from the company is depending on who's listening.

Take the company's section about "risk factors" for example. This is sort of a "Murphy's Law" smorgasbord of all the catastrophically terrible things that could happen to throw the company way off track, just so investors who might not be familiar with the ins and outs of the industry have some understanding of just how precarious the company's financial standing really is. THQ's risk factors take up about seven pages, and range from the obvious (we have to keep making and selling games to be profitable) to the still-obvious-but-shockingly-honest (we may not get hot licenses because other companies have more money and name recognition and can better market games than us).

More than anything else, the risk factors portray the publisher as an entity not in control of its own destiny. This isn't limited to THQ, by the way. It's sort of remarkable anything in this industry gets made because every company has a delicate web of interests to maintain, and it just takes a single weak thread to bring things crashing down. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo are three such crucial threads. As THQ points out in its report:

"Our platform licenses require that each title be approved by the manufacturer. The manufacturers have the right to review, evaluate and approve a prototype of each title and the title's packaging and marketing materials. Once a title is developed and has been approved by the manufacturer, the title is manufactured solely by such manufacturer or a designated vendor of the manufacturer. ...The amounts charged by the manufacturers for both console discs and handheld cartridges include a manufacturing, printing and packaging fee as well as a royalty for the use of the manufacturer's name, proprietary information and technology, and are subject to adjustment by the manufacturers at their discretion."

So if you're a third-party console game maker, the big three have you by the short-and-curlies. They are the gatekeepers who decide whether or not your game gets to market. Oh yeah, and they're also the people making the big-budget, heavily hyped games that will likely be trouncing your game on the NPD charts next month, and will certainly be taking up all that valuable shelf space at retail. They might even pack their own game in with the system so new owners don't need to go out and buy anyone else's game, much less yours. And they have to approve your game every step of the way, right down to the boxart and commercials you run for it. What other industry has companies seeking so much permission from their biggest competitors before they can introduce their products to market?

Then there's always the ESRB. The rating a game gets can be a huge problem, and not just if an expected M-rating slides over into an AO for Adults Only, as happened last year with Manhunt 2. That's obviously catastrophic because console makers don't allow those games to be sold for their systems, but a game that slips from a T-for-Teen to M-for-Mature could be problematic as well. The FTC has scolded the industry in the past for marketing M-rated games to children, so publishers don't--or aren't supposed to, at least--place their ads for adult games in media or locations targeted at children.

While those problems are common to all third-parties, THQ has a few risk factors that hit it particularly hard, specifically its reliance on licensed product. As mentioned in the article linked above, THQ gets more than 50% of its sales from games based on Pixar, WWE, and Nickelodeon. Furthermore (and this is just my assessment), THQ's hold on each of those licenses is a wee bit shaky.

The WWE has filed two lawsuits in federal court seeking to have its game publishing agreement with THQ and JAKKS Pacific nullified. There's some question as to whether the WWE just wants to renegotiate its deal in more favorable terms or if it would prefer to walk away and have an Electronic Arts or an Activision handle the license, but I can guarantee that's more uncertainty than THQ is comfortable with.

Then there's Pixar. THQ has made games based on all the Disney-owned studio's movies since Finding Nemo, but it looks like the parent company might want to bring development of those games back into the fold. Disney Interactive Studios is making a bid for legitimacy as a big-time publisher and has already claimed the game rights for the upcoming Pixar sequel Toy Story 3. (Expect to see more license-holders try to start their own development in the future—Marvel got into the movie business because it wasn't happy with its royalties, and I could see it doing the same for games.) THQ has a few more Pixar movie-based games under contract through 2011, but it seems to understand the writing is on the wall, as it went ahead and picked up the rights to DreamWorks Interactive's 2010 animated film MasterMind. That deal is only for one game though, which hardly replaces the revenue stream provided by Pixar's powerhouse properties over the last five years.

Finally, there's Nickelodeon. I think of these three big licenses, this is the one THQ has the best chance of holding onto. It already has the game rights for series like SpongeBob Square Pants tied up through 2010, but Take-Two's move on the Nick Jr. licenses like Dora the Explorer could make it a strong challenger for the regular Nick license after 2010, especially if games like Dora sell well.

If I were the CEO of a third-party publisher, this is the sort of stuff that would keep me up at nights. In short, THQ has to stay on the good side of Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, the ESRB, WWE, Pixar, DreamWorks, and Nickelodeon if it wants to have a chance of meeting its projected profits in the coming years. And China, since it's starting an online Company of Heroes game there. And the government, since THQ notes as a risk factor the fact that "standard business practices in China may increase our risk of violating U.S. laws such as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act." (Man that sounds shady.) So if it can keep all those people happy, then all it has to do is make good games and convince us to buy them. Simple, right?

As a lifelong anti-socialite and aging member of the coveted 18-34-year-old-male-with-disposable-income demographic, I'm used to people trying to target me as a marketing strategy. In fact, I'm downright cynical about it.

So from the moment I saw a trailer for Wanted on Xbox Live back in January (I believe), I resented being mindlessly targeted with a movie every bit as cynical as my own personal outlook. I love what I do for a living, but when I think of some of my friends (and I) have done over the years, the target demographic for this film, I think of a lot of smart, talented people who aren't being used to the best of their abilities. I think of nerds trapped in boring jobs, who sometimes measure their worth by what they do instead of who they are, who live perfectly normal, fulfilling lives supported by an uninspiring 9-to-5 job that was never on their list of life goals, and I think there's a quiet honor in what they do to keep their real lives and their families going, even if it means doing something they don't inherently love.

Wanted wants no part of that. Wanted instead plays on their darkest, most selfish desires. Find out you've been destined for greatness all along and your present life is beneath you. Abandon the job. Beat the hell out of your supposed best friend. Tell the girlfriend off. Run off with a tough chick who has no reason to see anything special in you beyond your being "the chosen one." A decade or so ago it was Carrie-Anne Moss; today it's Angelina Jolie.

If you have a job, a friend, or a significant other you actually care about, this probably rings a bit hollow. It seemed like the kind of thing I would have loved in junior high school, which perhaps explains my utter distaste for it now.

Don't get me wrong. On a certain level, this movie was fun. It had some creative action scenes. But ultimately, it was calculated. It was designed from the ground up to appeal to a certain demographic, not to interact with an audience or inspire them to think, but to appeal to them, to get them to plop down $10 for a ticket and walk away in an hour and a half considering the possibilities for a sequel. It was made so that IT guys in their 20s and 30s could have an hour and a half of escapist fantasy that made them think for the briefest of moments what they would do if a super hot chick came into their unspectacular lives tomorrow and told them they were actually the son of the world's best assassin who had somehow inherited an amazing ability to kill people. Oh yeah, and what if you were an instant millionaire?

It was Harry Potter for man-children, just without the Magic.

Parents of the world, lock up your daughters because Electronic Arts has designs on them. And as for how honorable its intentions are, I'm inclined to say "not very."

I've seen publishers go after the young female demographic before, but EA's latest lunge for the market seems a little forceful to me. Consider this line from the press release for Boogie SuperStar:

"Boogie SuperStar promotes self-expression, creativity and empowerment for girls worldwide," said Robert Nashak, VP of Casual Studios, EA Casual Entertainment. "We have created a game where girls don't just observe someone else's rise to fame, they experience it themselves, singing and dancing their way through a world most girls only dream about."

Granted, it makes it a lot creepier when I bold the one word over and over like that, but it seems unusual that a publisher would so specifically target girls with a game like Boogie. It's not exactly core gamer fare, sure, but it's not quite female-specific either.

I find the whole thing a bit insulting to women, but I guess it's still better than Ubisoft's Imagine Alimony or My Knitting Coach.

So I'm a big-time shoot-'em-up fan. I might not be the twitchiest kid on the block, but I've been able to hold my own in the genre, from old-school hits like Life Force, Thunder Force III, and Blazing Lazers to more new-fangled greats like Mars Matrix, Ikaruga, and Geometry Wars (topped out at #21 on the leaderboards with a high score of about 3.5 million, and as far as I could tell was the first person to achieve all 200 gamer points for the game).

So when I saw that Space Invaders Extreme was coming to the US at a budget price point, I just assumed I'd pick it up. When it started to get positive word-of-mouth from importers and message board shmup nuts, I figured it was a done deal. But something happened along the way. I'd already preordered Blast Works (I hope to play more and write about it soon) and picked up Metal Gear Solid 4. I didn't really feel like blowing any more money on games, so I settled for renting Space Invaders Extreme from GameFly for the PlayStation Portable.

I've been playing it for the last week or so, and I have to say I'm a little disappointed. Sure, it plays smoother than the original Space Invaders. There are power-ups, a chaining mechanic, boss battles, and a neat soundtrack that coordinates with the action on-screen like you'd see in a Mizuguchi game (Rez or Lumines, for example). But that's all there is. And you've seen it all done better before. If it weren't for the iconic invader shapes of the enemies, this wouldn't even need to be a Space Invaders game at all. There are branching levels, and I'm dead certain I didn't take the most challenging (or efficient) path through the game, but I never felt pushed to dedicate any more time or effort to the game.

I doubt I'll be able to explain it well enough, but it never challenged me in the right way. With any of those other great games I mentioned above, there were always points where I could see that the jig was up. Some boss monster had just vomited up an orgy of bullets in my general direction from which there could be no escape, or a small battalion of irritants had spawned around me and sealed my fate, and I would rationally give up, but my thumbs would find a way to slip out of death's grasp, to dance between the raindrops and see me safe to the other side. That feeling, the exhilaration of stumbling my way into accomplishing what I thought to be impossible, is the pinnacle of shoot-'em-up fun in my book.

I never got that from Space Invaders. It did challenge me, and I died with great frequency, but it was never because the game threw more at me than I thought I could handle. It was instead always a careless death, the mistake of thinking I could slip underneath a falling enemy missile, or that I could sneak up next to a laser blast and hit the invaders without incinerating myself in the process. Sometimes it was just a really irritating enemy type that would race to the ground erratically once you had damaged it, thus taking one of your lives in true Space Invaders fashion. Even then, I always just felt like my death could have been avoided by playing a simple, conservative, deadly boring style of game. And that does not entertain me.

And I'm sure the game's defenders might point out that had I played more aggressively and with more skill, I might have earned passage to branching missions that were more challenging at their heart. But I've never much been entranced by games that have a single "right" way to play, games that insist not just on getting the job done, but on getting it done in the most efficient way possible (like Pac-Man Championship Edition, or even the highest levels of score-based Ikaruga play). I just want to nail the basics. Kill the bad guys and don't die in the process. You can put more depth into your game if you want, but you better not make it core to the experience if you want my $60.

I can feel a big-time tangent coming on, so I'll just say Space Invaders Extreme was good, better than the original even, but just not my bag.

There are stories in the blogosphere that you never see reported on GameSpot. There can be a number of reasons for this, but sometimes it's simply because the news being reported isn't actually news.

Kotaku has a story up today saying that Sony just revealed that it lost over $3 billion over fiscal 2007 and fiscal 2008 due to the PlayStation 3 being sold at less than cost.

That report is untrue in parts, and wholly lacking in newsworthiness. First of all, the source of the story appears to be a Sony Corporation SEC filing of its annual report for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2008. That's actually Sony's fiscal 2007 year, so the $3 billion in losses Kotaku reports is really for fiscal 2006 and fiscal 2007, not 2007 and 2008. That's the first issue.

Now for the second issue. $3 billion is a staggering number, to be sure, but Sony didn't really reveal it today. If you look at the coverage of Sony's full-year game division losses in fiscal 2006, you'll see they lost nearly $2 billion. Combine that with the story last month that talked about how the game division lost another $1 billion in fiscal 2007, make adjustments for recent currency fluctuations, and you have a total of more than $3 billion lost in the last two fiscal years. Remember kids, if you have the power of basic arithmetic, you can know tomorrow's news today! Or today's news last month!

This would bother me less if it weren't the type of thing to creep into the news cycle and be repeated often enough that people think it's fresh news again regardless.

Sigh.