I've forgotten most of the things I read in video game instruction manuals when I was a kid. But one thing I read in the instruction manual for the Commodore 64 version of Double Dragon stuck with me. More »
The totally improvised, 7 1/2 minute filibuster from an episode of NBC's Parks & Recreation last month, in which Patton Oswalt outlines his vision of Star Wars: Episode VII (with Marvel crossovers) could not possibly have been more perfect, could it? Well, yes, it could, actually ...
Kevin Conroy will be in Batman: Arkham Origins, and he's already spent 10 months in the studio recording those gruff-yet-dulcet tones. Conroy confirmed his involvement at Dallas Comic-Con, but didn't specify if he plays The Bat himself - not that he has to. He opened the panel with, "I am vengeance. I am the night. I am Batman." Because, you know, he is.
NAG magazine reported in April that Warner Bros. had passed on Conroy for Arkham Origins.
Conroy voiced Batman in both Arkham Asylum and Arkham City, and he was the man behind Bruce Wayne in Batman: The Animated Series, Batman: Beyond and subsequent DC universe cartoon spin-offs. Arkham Origins is scheduled to launch on October 25 for Xbox 360, PS3, PC and Wii U.
At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as "crap" and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether.
"The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet," tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. "Nintendo are walking dead at this point."
Though the tweets, made early yesterday morning, have since been deleted, screenshots of them mushroomed across multiple sites, most prominently on NeoGAF.
Summerwill didn't let up after that first tweet. "Nintendo are still operating like it's 1990," he goes on, saying it should have gotten out of the hardware business and made its Mario and Legend of Zelda franchises exclusives on either the PlayStation 4 or next Xbox.
"Instead, they make this awful console," he added. Then, of EA's withdrawal from developing for Wii U, he said, "It is an utterly intentional decision to focus our resources on markets which actually matter."
Kotaku has attempted to contact Summerwill. An EA Sports spokesman at the publisher's headquarters gave this statement:
EA has a strong partnership and an active agreement with Nintendo to develop games for the WiiU. Last year we released Mass Effect 3 and several of our EA Sports titles on that platform. So far, we have not announced any new titles for Wii U this year, but that does not preclude more games in the future.
Summerwill's comments recall another Twitter flap not long ago; in early April, Adam Orth, then a creative director for Microsoft, said that those with reservations about a console with an always-on requirement should just "deal with it." Microsoft later apologized for the remarks, and Orth is said to be no longer with the company.
