007: License to Suck

I want to touch on two things here. First, I think the new Bond looks like a drug addict. Second, I think the news that EA has dropped the Bond game license is really good news. Activision will be picking up the license, now. That in and of itself isn’t super great news. Activision hasn’t really proven itself capable of doing well with certain licenses, case in point: Star Trek. What I think is really outstanding is that EA seems to be actually following through on this whole reinvention phase they’re going through. They really meant it when they said they were going to rely less on licensed properties, like Bond and Lord of the Rings, and release more unique games.

In the same article is news about the upcoming Superman Returns game from EA.

Meanwhile, Warner Brothers and EA have delayed the Superman Returns game from the theatrical release date in June to the DVD release this fall. The film is slated to open June 30.

I like this returning trend of delaying games until they’re better. It used to be this was the norm in the indutry, until all the heavy hitters were more concerned with getting a game out before a certain date, than whether the game was finished, case in point: Knights of the Old Republic II. Now, we’ve seen this happen with Heroes of Might and Magic V and a few other titles from Ubisoft. A game that has really shown some benefit from this practice is Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter for Xbox 360. The Xbox version was craptastic, but the 360 version was delayed from its original status as a 360 launch title and has now become one of the platform’s strongest offerings in the FPS genre. It is easily good enough and fun enough to hold everyone over until Halo 3 comes out.

Anyway, the general trend seems to be that more of the high profile games are becoming much better in terms of overall quality. Yay!