THQ went bankrupt last month, and was sold piece-by-piece at auction over the last day. Here are the results:
Quote:Sega agreed to purchase Relic [studio]
Koch Media [European company that owns the console publisher Deep Silver] agreed to purchase Volition [studio] and Metro [game]
Crytek agreed to purchase Homefront [IP and game Homefront 2]
Take 2 agreed purchase Evolve [game] and
Ubisoft agreed to purchase [THQ] Montreal and South Park [game]
We expect these sales to close this week.
Some assets, including our publishing businesses and Vigil, along with some other
intellectual properties are not included in the sale agreements. They will remain part of
the Chapter 11 case. We will make every effort to find appropriate buyers, if possible.
Also, EA seems to have bought the WWE license. Or maybe Take Two (for 2k). No announcement yet.
It's too bad for Vigil (Darksiders), looks like they're dead... kind of surprising, but you never know, obviously. As for other IPs, like the Darksiders name rights, or Red Faction, or such, either they're unwanted, or that news has not been announced yet. I never liked THQ all that much myself, and haven't played too many of their games, but they have been around for a while, and seemed to be getting better (game quality wise) recently... but unfortunately, it seems that they overreached, and it took them down. Too bad, and particularly too bad for Vigil, who joins the very long list of developers who went under this gen.
As for Atari, they're not quite dead yet, but are heading that way; their American branch, Atari USA (once known as GT Interactive, before Infogrames bought them back in the late '90s), declared bankruptcy recently, so that they can separate themselves from their troubled French parent company; apparently the US branch, which is just a publisher and doesn't own game studios itself anymore, actually is profitable, so they don't want to go down with the unprofitable main company. Understandable.
Yes, really, we're going to get the third of the Wii games Nintendo passed on releasing here, thanks to Xseed; apparently The Last Story was very successful for them, so they're going to release this too probably as a result.
It's too bad that "Operation Rainfall" only focused on these three (first-party Wii) titles, it would have been nice to see Earth Seeker too, and there are plenty of DS games they passed on that also are probably better than Pandora's Tower... oh well.
Yeah, the movie. Overall, I thought it was really good. The main flaw is that there's obviously only two movies worth of material from this book (the film is quite slow paced compared to the LotR movies and covers half of the book), so I don't know how they're going to manage to find three movies worth of stuff here, but other than that, this is great.
The big question for The Hobbit has been, though, do you like the slower pace, and all of the added stuff in this film? The LotR movies, even though 12 hours in length all combined, cut out a lot of stuff from the books. The Hobbit, in contrast, not only includes nearly everything, but it adds lots of stuff too, like Radigast's scenes. Of course as with the LotR movies they make other changes (adding orcs, adding Saruman, etc.), but that's to be expected. But returning to the issue of pace in The Hobbit, I like the slower pace, myself. I really liked that they did have room this time for stuff like the songs; it was too bad that the LotR movies cut out almost all of that stuff. The song the dwarves sang in Bilbo's home that night was moving and important to the plot, too, but I can't see the LotR movies making time for something like that. So yeah, you can see the "padding", but in this one at least, the padding's so well done that I don't care. It's great.
Oh yeah, they did stretch credulity a bit by having at least three different times when people fell from high heights with no injury... I know they were trying to add some somewhat comic bits, but... some of that stuff was going a bit overboard (in that "movie" kind of way). Ah well, it was fun anyway. :)
So yeah, overall, it's quite good, but I do seriously wonder how they're going to find three movies out of this.
The main negatives would be that it's not a complete film (18 minutes long, and it's really only a beginning), that Sonic's not in it enough (like maybe 5 minutes, max), and that the acting is expectedly iffy. But otherwise, it's actually okay. Definitely better than I was thinking... sure, it's silly, but it's probably worth a watch. :)
Please reject the Senate's "Fiscal Cliff" deal and send us over the cliff, that's the only way we'll get anything remotely like a decent deal out of this... (once everything is a tax cut, that is) the Senate deal just gives up way, way too much to the Republicans, and doesn't get nearly enough for us. I have no idea why the Democrats keep being willing to compromise away advantage into disappointment, but they've done it yet again... we give up the only leverage, tax hikes on everyone, in exchange for only two months respite from the sequester? Seriously? That's just crazy, and horrible negociating when you're supposedly trying to save social programs, but set yourself up to get crushed on them in two months. But fortunately, the House GOP is so nuts that they might blow up this deal... here's hoping. No deal is better than a bad deal, right now...
Oh come on TC, why did no one make a thread (or post at all)? Poor site...
Anyway, I got a few interesting things for christmas, at least (with one more thing coming). I got the PC game "The Secret World" (now that the monthly fees are gone, I need to play Ragnar Tornquist's latest work! First impression is good; graphics are very nice, and the story's interesting.), $165, several books including GRR Martin's "A Dance with Dragons" and three history books (all look interesting for sure), and other stuff like some t-shirts, a frying pan, a suitcase (since my cat peed in one of mine... annoying thing, she's so cute, but that "peeing on things" habit of hers is so awful...), some christmas tree ornaments since I needed more, and some other stuff. Overall, a fine year for Christmas I think. :)
Oh, and i don't know if I mentioned it, but back in November when we were visiting my cousins in Vermont for Thanksgiving, they gave me their old 38" rear projection CRT TV, because they got a new 40-something inch plasma TV, and had no need for the old one anymore and were going to give it away or something, so they told me "please take it". I wasn't sure how to fit it in my place, but managed to find a way through reorganization. At only 89 pounds it's not as heavy as it looks ,but of course, RP-CRT isn't quite as good in terms of picture quality as real CRTs are, and I can see the difference in screen clarity when I compare stuff on it to my other TV, the 19" SD CRT I've been using for years. This one has a bigger screen, but you can tell that it's rear projection and not a straight tube. Of course, a 38" tube would probably have weighed like 400 pounds, not 89... that would be fun to try to move. :p
Still it's pretty cool (and is my first widescreen tv/monitor), but does have a problem: everything except for the center of the screen has yellowed, so most of the picture is somewhat discolored. It's pretty annoying in some things, less noticeable in others; it depends. I imagine it'd be expensive to fix though, so I haven't tried. Maybe someday... But yeah, now I want some Wii component cables... I already have some for PS2 and Xbox, and have hooked them up (progressive scan, widescreen-compatible Xbox games like DOA2U and Burnout 3/Revenge look amazing!) but not Wii. (The TV has component, composite, and S-Video input only, so if I wanted to get a DC VGA box and play it with that, I'd need a VGA to component converter...)
