Report: Used and digital sales make up 35% of total console spending in the US

by Jordan Mallory on Nov 7th 2011 8:00PM

American gamers buy more used and digitally distributed games than their European doppelgangers, according to a study released by market analysis firm NewZoo. The organization's statistical findings show that 23 percent of console games purchased in the U.S. are used; slightly more than the European market where used games account for 20 percent of total console sales.

Digitally distributed titles rank lower in both regions, taking up 12 percent of the console market in America and 9 percent in Europe. That 12 percent, by the way, represents approximately $960 million, on account of 54 percent of American console owners reportedly spending an average of $49 a year on console downloads.

American PC gaming culture appears to have adopted the idea of digital distribution much faster than the console market, as an estimated 58 percent of all PC gaming dollars are spent on digitally distributed games or DLC. Now, we're no market analysts, but we think the disparity between PC and console download shares has a lot to do with PC gaming's readily available plethora of hats.

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Heavy Fire Afghanistan Wii New Images

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Ecco the Dolphin: unexpected terror in the deep blue sea

by Heidi Kemps on Oct 31st 2011 2:20PM

It's Halloween, the day we all turn our attention to all things spoooooooky. In honor of this occasion, Heidi Kemps makes a convincing case for the secret scariness of the seemingly non-horror-oriented Ecco the Dolphin. Later, the Joystiq staff will share their own picks for unintentionally frightening games. We'll just leave you in suspense for now (boo!) Dolphins! Every adolescent girl on the planet loves dolphins, but being a fan of marine life in general, I really liked dolphins. I was certainly among the many, many girls with Lisa Frank school supplies emblazoned with imagery of brightly airbrushed, neon-colored dolphins, but I was far more into porpoises than even that, with plenty of other themed baubles in my possession. So, of course, when Ecco the Dolphin came out for the Genesis, I was excited to check the game out, especially with the rave reviews it had received in magazines at the time.

Little did I suspect the horrors Sega and Novotrade had in store for me.
The game is surprisingly unsettling, that much is inarguable. The protagonist feels incredibly fragile and defenseless (it seems like everything in this game can/wants to kill you), and the stage design, music, and incredibly tough difficulty create a weird sense of despair and loneliness -- which is further augmented by the bait-and-switch in the plot midway through the game. Why did your pod vanish? Oh, they were all kidnapped for food by terrifying, H.R. Giger-inspired aliens. And now they want to eat everything on Earth. And only your adorable and amazingly fragile little dolphin hide can stop them!

So after a bunch of weirdness involving time travel, you wind up in the alien spaceship, which looks like a terrifying mess of green futuristic slaughter machinery. You're also fighting the aliens, who take several hits to die and separate/explode into separate body parts along the way. And the second-to-last stage is an unpredictable autoscrolling level that can crush you instantaneously. I suspect other people who played through Ecco cried a little inside just remembering that level.

This all is disturbing enough, but what really left me terrified was the final boss. After dying constantly (and being sent back to the aforementioned nightmare autoscrolling level several times), I admitted my weakness and used the invincibility code. The final boss is the massive, many-fanged, bug-eyed head of the alien queen, who sucks everything in the arena inwards periodically to feed. You can get sucked in and eaten, which sends you back a stage.

Except that didn't happen this time. Instead, the background went completely red, and all I could see was a black, dolphin-shaped silhouette spinning around in the center of the screen, unable to move. Every now and then, something that looked like bubbles would come and poke the silhouette, only to quickly vanish. I jumped to a terrifying conclusion: I was watching Ecco being slowly, painfully, eternally digested by the alien queen. I turned off the Genesis and ran back to my room completely terrified by what I had just witnessed.

I was told many years later by Ecco fans that this screen is actually a bug that happens *only* if you get eaten with the invincibility code. (The "digestive bubbles" I saw were actually enemy sprites overlapping mine.) I went on Youtube to see if anyone had recorded this bug happening, because I certainly wasn't going to try and recreate it myself. Alas, no luck. You'll just have to take my word that it exists.

I never did finish Ecco.

[Image: Ecco Dark Sea] Heidi Kemps is an intrepid freelancer living in the lap of luxury in Daly City surrounded by games, Japanese comics, and far too many figures. She contributes to G4, GamesRadar, GamePro, @Gamer, GameSpot, and a wealth of international publications, some of which do not start with the letter G. She enjoys long walks in Akihabara as well as meaningful discussions about Virtua Fighter. You can follow her ongoing freelance adventures at @zerochan.

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Disney Universe Wii New Images

These are some new images of the Nintendo Wii game Disney Universe

More About: Nintendo Wii, Disney Universe

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Joystiq's favorite unintentionally scary games

by JC Fletcher on Oct 31st 2011 5:30PM

Earlier today, we brought you one brave admission of childhood trauma caused by a game you wouldn't normally think of as scary. Now, the Joystiq staff is chiming in with their own tales of games that, despite not being traditional "horror" games, still managed to inspire absolute horror.

Let the nightmares of our collective youth entertain you! Happy Halloween! Christopher Grant (@ChrisGrant): (Ed. note: Chris initially read the prompt to be about any horror game. However, he was able to make one quick stealth edit and save his entry! See if you can spot it.) I remember playing COMEDY ADVENTURE GAME Resident Evil 3 in my sophomore year of college. My roommate and I took the opportunity to play only at night, and only with the lights off. For those of you who haven't played RE3, I should note that the subtitle is precisely what made the game so scary: Nemesis. You see, Nemesis chased you the entire game. Think Scissorman in Clock Tower, but horribly mutated ... and without the vagaries of a point-and-click interface. Oh, and he has a rocket launcher. The nice thing about playing Resident Evil 3 with a friend is that if one of us got too freaked out to play, knowing Nemesis was right around the corner, the other would tag in, replete with a fresh reserve of steely nerves.David Hinkle (@DaveHinkle): Serious Sam. The first time I played that game, panic crippled me to the point where I couldn't even move. As I played it more and more, fear and tension grew to an extent I haven't felt in another game since. I was literally frightened to death to walk forward in that game. The occasional much-needed health pack off to the side taunted me to the point of anguish. It may not have been a horror game, but I still have nightmares to this day about crazy kamikaze dudes running after me. That scream is something that will stick with me for the rest of my life.Griffin McElroy (@griffinmcelroy): Willy Beamish was supposed to be an edgy, animated point-and-click adventure game for kids who were too young for Monkey Island, but too old for baby toys. The result was utterly horrifying: Imagine an adventure game featuring a kid whose failures were frequently met with his grisly murder. I had nightmares about being slowly devoured by my vampire babysitter for months.JC Fletcher (@jcfletcher): I don't think the top-down NES shooter Ikari Warriors 2: Victory Road was meant to be scary, but I don't think SNK could have made it any more terrifying if it tried. From the very first scratchy, nonsensical voice sample, this game genuinely freaks me out. The monsters, the environments, the items, the blinky Michelin Man characters -- it all looks too weird, too off to have been made by a deliberate human process. It's the "numbers station" of classic video games.Jess Conditt (@JessConditt): I never played Ecco the Dolphin because, as a game that takes place in the ocean, I expected it to include oceany things, such as sharks and vastness (ahem, Richard), and I am psychologically opposed to all of that. However, I didn't expect Batman: Arkham City to include a giant, hungry shark that leaps out of an icy sea to devour your tender, caped flesh. A. Giant. Hungry. Shark. I can handle insane clowns, demented doctors and immortal madmen, but that shark just about ended the game for me. I still haven't played past that part and honestly, I may never be the same again.Jordan Mallory (@Jordan_Mallory): Mega Man Legends. It remains one of my all-time top-5 favorite games, but something about the tall, isolated, quiet construction of its dungeons paired with the abstract, ferocious nature of the creatures encountered within sent me into several panic attacks during my tenure with the title. The Lake Jyun Sub-Gate, specifically, forced me to quit for months at a time, several times. In fact, it was probably a full year before I was able to make it all the way through a game I desperately loved, all because of some deep, primal fear that was triggered by an integral part of Capcom's design philosophy. I'd like to say that I've since conquered this abstract fear, and that I'm now free to enjoy one of my favorite games without panic attacks, but just a few seconds of that YouTube clip is enough to make my skin crawl. Some things never change.Justin McElroy (@JustinMcElroy): Double Switch: A lot of FMV games have this quality, but for some reason, Double Switch's focus on monitoring several rooms at once was genuinely scary to me. Seeing people in my TV get angry at me, knowing that I could miss things if I wasn't quick enough made the danger more real in some way. Somehow, to my mind, letting a terrible actor in 1994 down is a genuinely scary prospect, a fact I'd prefer not to analyze too much.Ludwig Kietzmann (@LudwigK): Don't laugh -- I was creeped out by a comedy adventure game. Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers sees the janitorial protagonist trying his best (read: not very good) to avoid a time-traveling assassination attempt. Early on in the game, he winds up in an unnerving, desolate future that wouldn't be out of place in one of Robocop's nightmares (assuming he still has those). The atmosphere was chilling -- thanks to those 256 colors and the CD-ROM version's excellent audio -- and the visible departure of human life was tough to shake as you moved from screen to screen. Oh, and you could die instantly if a robot spotted you. Eek!Mike Schramm (@MikeSchramm): Black and White was a strategy game unlike any other, and as goofy as it was, it kept me up late a few nights on college, trying to tame and wrangle both my creature and my followers. When you lost a follower's life, however, the game didn't play a sad song or just put a minus one near your population. It very quietly, in a woman's voice I can still hear to this day, whispered "death" into your ear. After experiencing that very late one night in my dark dorm room, I was too spooked to keep from turning it off and sleeping with the lights on. I only played it during the day after that.Richard Mitchell (@SenseiRAM): One game that unintentionally scared me (and I doubt I'm the only one) was Ecco the Dolphin. There was something about the vastness of the ocean and, of course, sharks – the movie Jaws horrified me as a kid. Throw in the fact that Ecco is almost always on the brink of drowning, and you've got a recipe for terror.

And let's not even get started on Ecco's 3D Dreamcast outing, Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future. Between the great white boss fight and the cyber sharks, I may never go swimming again.

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Taiko No Tatsujin Wii Ketteiban Wii New Images

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Michael Bay trailer for Need for Speed: The Run doesn't remind us of anything

by Jessica Conditt on Nov 5th 2011 10:30PM

Michael Bay knows his way around swiftly moving metal machines, which may be why EA Black Box recruited him to direct a cinematic trailer for Need for Speed: The Run. It's fast-paced, sleek, sexy and gritty, and we could easily see it, starring Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox's lips, in the previews before The Rum Diary. However, EA would have to change the name. Need for Speed: Rise of the Runatron, would work, we think.

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