The Friday Funspot for 5/24

Let's see.. nothing much happened this week right.. er.. right?

Oh, Right.

Anyway, let's hit the Friday Funspot:

Xbox One: The first ever FBI-approved Console

I know, I know it seems like every day I'm finding new things to hate about the next Xbox console from Microsoft.

Well, that's because I am finding new things to hate.

Here's the latest bit of insanity:

"In one scenario, Kinect used its facial recognition software to scan a room full of people and determine there are people there it didn't recognize. It then told the console owner that there is someone in the room that it didn't recognize and asked the new person to identify themselves. Once the person said their name, Kinect welcomed them and saved their information to the console."

I'm sure that there is no way that this information could be hacked and used for nefarious purposes. Nope. No siree bob. What's next? Scan the room and prevent a R rated movie from playing if there are people under 17 in the room? Xbox One is a walking, talking (it is supposed to have a Siri like talking interface sometime during launch or shortly thereafter) privacy violation. I don't understand how Microsoft could get it this wrong.

It's a standing-eight count for the Fight Night Series

With EA Sports acquiring the UFC license, it was a natural to wonder what was going to happen with EA's OTHER Combat Sports series, Fight Night. It stood to reason that they likely didn't have enough backing, or an audience to release BOTH a Boxing game and a UFC game in the same year.. so one of them had to step back, and it looks like Fight Night's going to be the one standing in the corner for the forseeable future.

Yooooooo, JOE! The Card Game that is

Saw the news that they're making a mobile device card game based on the GI Joe cartoon. And normally, I'd scoff, call it a cash grab, or what have you.. but apparently the folks who make it are really big GI Joe fans.. they even are going so far as to negotiate for the rights for Sgt Slaughter and William "The Refrigerator" Perry. Yes.. if they appeared in the cartoon, or the toy line the cartoon shilled for, they want them in the game.

That's dedication.

Capcom offers 17 arcade games for the price of.. Um...

That's the problem with using Microsoft Points, you can't easily say things like 3 games for the Price of 2 or what have you.

But it's interesting to see Capcom offer all the arcade games it made from 1984 to 1988 in one big bundle (previously they had been available piecemeal)

Unfortunately, no Street Fighter in the list, but they do have some really good ones, like Black Tiger (featured in the novel Ready Player One), 1942 (and its sequel 1943), and hidden game Vulgus (which had no pre-set levels, just threw more difficult waves of enemies at you till you died.

And finally.... Atari dies (again).

Not to surprise anyone, but no one wanted to fork out the bucks for the Atari catalog, so they're going the THQ method and selling off their assets before the bankruptcy court tried to put the stake in the heart AGAIN. (seriously, they've gone through what, five, six, more iterations at this point). The company hopes to earn up to $22 million, so if you have a spare $3.5 million hanging around, you can buy the rights to the Rollercoaster Tycoon series, down to a mere $250,000 for Total Annihlation. That is, the series Total Annihilation, not Atari's Total Annihilation.

Although at this point, I think that folks who owned Atari systems and games WOULD prefer that Atari suffer Total Annihlation, rather than continuing to sully the name of a video game classic.