Every console manufacturer has their “face”. The person who interacts with the public and represents the organization. These folks aren’t your typical PR shills who toot their own horns or bash the competition without regard; they communicate their respective platform’s positions and strategies to the public in a very human way.

Microsoft lost their face last year when Peter Moore left Microsoft for EA Sports and now Sony is losing one of their most respected personnel, Phil Harrison. Nintendo still has Reggie — no worries there.

Next-Gen’s editor wrote a nice recollection of the importance of Phil Harrison and all the good he brought to the PlayStation platforms. To me, I’ll remember him as the well spoken bald dude who announced LittleBigPlanet and PlayStation Home at GDC 06.

Another take over bid! Take-Two Interactive is being offered $2 billion from Electronic Arts. GTA franchise and BioShock under the EA banner? No more competing sports games from 2K?! Hostility ahoy!

Take-Two should refuse. Even though EA has some stake in Ubisoft, they should merge with Ubisoft instead.

Update:

Take-Two says, “Not right now. We’re worth more than that, but let’s talk after GTAIV is released.”

EA provided a nice FAQ site to outline their intentions and answer questions people may have concerning the take over bid.

Microsoft’s XNA initiative, which allows amateur game developers create and share games on XBOX Live! Arcade, is something they hope will catch on with gamers. I don’t know how it will be received by others, but I thought it was solid idea with a huge amount of potential. The entire initiative could be described as the YouTube of Games and as with most YouTube content: quality will vary. After installing the XNA game launcher and trying out most of what was available, the stand out was definitely The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai.

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Did you people like all the Game Developer Conference’s stuff I posted? I thought there were plenty of interesting bits of news from this year’s GDC. The keyword is ‘bits’ since nothing huge and/or surprising was revealed. The best of GDC was in listening to all the developers talk about their games, the industry and just shootin’ the shit. 1UP’s coverage of this year’s GDC was immaculate. The podcast discussions were both very informative and entertaining. It’s just something you cannot do via an formal interview. Well done, 1UP.

Personal highlights from this year’s GDC were as follows:

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Surprise! Nintendo wants more money. Nintendo announced at GDC that certain future titles will be pay to play online. Details are very scarce at the moment. I have no idea which titles will be employing this service or how much it will cost. Nintendo did state that this new Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection Pay And Play service will be clearly marked on Nintendo Wii game boxes in order to warn users. How nice of them.

There better be huge improvements to Nintendo’s online capabilities if they have the intention of charging for online. Some are speculating that this is a precursor to something big like an Animal Crossing MMO or, better yet, a Pokemon MMO. Other than MMOs though; I do not see how anything online on the Wii could justify a fee.

I don’t even pay for XBOX Live! and it is significantly more robust than Nintendo’s current offerings. We’ll just have to wait and see what Nintendo has in store for us all.

The GeForce 9600 GT launched a few days ago, but what about the mid-high ranged card or the true high end card? They are coming soon. Very soon! The GeForce 9800 GT and its bigger brother, the GeForce 9800 GTX, will apparently land between end of March and April. The dual-GPU ultra high end GeForce 9800 GX2 will launch within the month, on March 11th, 2008.

I’m looking forward to the GeForce 9800 GT. It’s fitting the bill of being a second generation DirectX 10 video card; just like how the GeForce 7800 GT (my current card) was a 2nd generation DirectX 9 video card. For the right price and performance, I may actually upgrade to it when it’s released.

It looks like Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo: HD Remix won’t be the only one who may suffer due to the XBLA size limit. Capcom’s upcoming Bionic Commando: Rearmed will be inferior to the PC and PSN versions thanks to these silly limits.

To Capcom, thanks for not gimping the other versions.

To Microsoft, get rid of the limits and put a hard drive in every XBOX 360.

During an X-Play interview, the lead designer Portal admitted that Portal 2 is in the works. She thought that Valve’s marketing honcho, Doug Lombardi, announced Portal 2 earlier. Unfortunately, for her, nothing of the sort was revealed.

While Portal was definitely a great game in its own right, I’m not sure how I will respond to Portal 2. More of the same? I wish Valve and the Portal folks the best of luck, because it’s going to be hard to top the original.

When Nintendo revealed their intentions for WiiWare, I was hopeful. Finally, there was a PSN and XBLA-like service for the Nintendo Wii. Aside from classic rereleases, Nintendo had no means of enabling developers to create new and original content for their console.

After many months of waiting, WiiWare will finally launch in North America on May 12th, 2008. I wonder what kind of games we’re going to see. I also hope that at least 25 of the 100 games being developed for the service are good.

Windows Vista Service Pack 1 is just around the corner (even sooner than you think) and now, so is Windows XP Service Pack 3. Microsoft released Service Pack 3 Release candidate 2 for public testing earlier this week.

Fixes include the usual hotfixes and performance improvements. As for features, here’s a sample:

- Microsoft’s Network Access Protection (NAP) support
- ‘keyless activation’ - Allows IT administrators to install SP3 without entering product keys for each copy

Other than the above, don’t expect Service Pack 3 to be as significant as Service Pack 2.