"Finish Him!" or "Midway Really is Dying"

So I just found out that Midway is selling the Mortal Kombat franchise, pretty much their only franchise remaining with any real selling power after the marginally successful MK vs. DC Universe earlier this generation.

Even though I do think the company pulled a lot of bad choices over the years I still have fond memories of some of their games and franchises. Obviously Mortal Kombat and most of it's incarnations were decent, sometimes completely awesome, in my opinion, I'd even say I enjoyed what I played of Mortal Kombat: Mythologies. When Deadly Alliance came out for the Gamecube I was actually impressed, they had turned what essentially had become a parody of it's former self into something with a decent and intriguing plot, it was a breath of life in the series.

Other fond memories include Crusi'n USA and World on the N64 and in the Arcades, as well as Gauntlet: Legends on the N64 and Arcades (Disney Quest in Chicago was so much fun back in the day when we Gauntlet: Legends there).

Midways major troubles started with the downslide of videogames that still hampers the industry as developers try to be more like Hollywood. They are all working on being the next big thing, for a little while. Midway's biggest blunder was arguably Stanglehold for the PS3 and 360, a John Woo directed game featuring Chow Yun-Fat, and the spiritual successor to the cul classic Hard Boiled. The game was well received, but did not make up for it's tremendous cost.

Also, late last year Midway changed hands as Summer Redstone, owner of National Amusements Inc. (which holds CBS and Viacom under it's control, amongst others), sold his 87% share in Midway to private investor Mark Thomas. Thomas took on $70m of Midways debt, however the sale of the stock caused Midway to have $240m in debt as clauses in bond issues triggered allowing for full repayment to be requested on $150m.

However, there is a silver lining to all this... Midway has filed for bankruptcy, but a company rep has said "We felt this was a logical next step for our organization, considering the change in control triggered the acceleration of the repayment options...we're looking to reorganize and to come out on the other side stronger"

It will not be with Mortal Kombat, or maybe not even Gauntlet, and for all intents and purposes Nintendo owns Cruis'n as much as Midway does... but Midway will return someday. When that is, and what form they will take is anybodies guess.

NOTE: Acclaim, the people who published Mortal Kombat I and II back when Midway was still Williams Entertainment have also come back since they dies last gen, but in name only it seems. Acclaim now does MMO games, including a dancing MMO... not quite sure how that works.

"What Have You Done To My Wii?" or "Holy Crap Nintendo Does Listen"

First off, please excuse the crappy quality of my pictures here, they were taken with my phone as I can't seem to find my camera, besides, off screen photos always stink.

I have not turned on my Nintendo Wii in like two months. Today i wanted to play some Gamecube games, which meant turning on the Wii. After an arduous time setting up my wireless router for the n-th time (that thing can't hold settings to save it's life), and a LONG, LONG, LONG download time for the update (almost 30 minutes!, this isn't a PS3 guys) I finally updated to the 3.4 firmware.

I realize this firmware has been out for a while but I was obviously in the dark, however I have not seen this posted anywhere as of yet.

For a long time people have been complaining about the speed of the shopping channel, the download speed of the system in general (ie. updates), the small amount of internal storage on the Wii, the sluggish speed of the SD Memory Card interface, the lack of core games, and more. It seems to me that maybe Nintendo has been hearing the cries of the core and tech elite and have started to do something about it.

Not only does the Shopping channel download games much much faster than it used to, not only does everything transfer to and from my memory card faster, but the games now take up less space after you download them.

For instance, I just downloaded Paper Mario, a fairly good N64 RPG. First I was greeted by the standard download screen with mario running on the bottom collecting points and such (I should also note that I also saw a new mario animation, him and luigi swimming like the ocean levels)... and the following screen:


As the download finished (much faster than it did when I downloaded the game for the first time months ago (though I have since deleted it)) I saw the screen still saying 11 for Blocks After Download... the screen changed to the confirm screen and this showed up instead:


So it would seem Nintendo has been doing incremental updates to the Wii, and the only thing people were wondering with 3.4 was does it ruin HomeBrew Channel (HBC is a way for people to play user made games, indie titles, and games from other regions, as well as pirated games (though I doubt most people play pirated games on the Wii in the US, Japan, or most PAL countries, though I'm sure there are some.) The channel is not licensed by Nintendo and it is therefore their right to remove it from Wiis with an update, that's a risk people take when they use unlicensed software (I myself have not been able to use my Action Replay since the 3.0 update, I got over it).

As I stated in another article there are some good Wii games on the way, and I will be covering more of those soon, but Nintendo has also announced that this spring they will have an update that will alleviate the issues with the internal storage by way of the SD Card slot, which most likely means the ability to run WiiWare and such off of an SD card, which would be a godsend imho.

My main point here to those people complaining that Nintendo isn't listenting, maybe they are, maybe they just don't feel the need to toot their own horn like other companies until they do something great, not something that was expected.