Hello! Welcome to the Geeky Brummie Gaming Roundup!

This week, Bungie, Team 17, the Switch, Sega and American McGee’s Alice all feature.

Sony Buy Bungie

In a move that many are erroneously calling a response to Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision, Sony have acquired Bungie for $3.6bn.

Bungie, of course, are currently the developers behind Destiny, although in a past life they were also notably the creators of the Halo franchise. What this means is that while Microsoft will own the franchise that put PlayStation on the map (Crash Bandicoot), Sony will own the developer that helped put Xbox on the map. It’s opposite day, I guess.

Of course, this is not a response to the Activision deal as these things are worked out over months, not a fortnight. It is certainly a surprise though. PlayStation acquisitions usually have a pattern of being development studios making projects exclusively for PlayStation that became successful, so Bungie is a left field choice that doesn’t immediately make a lot of sense.

It makes even less sense when it’s been confirmed that nothing Bungie make will be exclusive to PlayStation and will still operate semi-independently. It’s not clear what Sony will be getting out of this deal outside of Destiny profits, so it’s a strange deal all round.

However, let’s swing back to that Microsoft x Activision deal for a second, because it’s hit a snag. The Federal Trade Commission will be reviewing the deal, and this could spell trouble for the deal going ahead. Current FTC chair Lina Khan has made it clear that she wants to crack down on mergers and acquisitions among large tech firms. She’s notably directed ire at Apple, Facebook and Google, and this Activision deal involving Microsoft may be seen as in the same ballpark.

Sony’s Bungie deal is unlikely to face severe scrutiny because of how much smaller it is, but it’ll be interesting to see how all this turns out in the coming months.

Team 17 Worm Their Way Into NFTs (And Then Out Again)

Indie publisher Team 17 are the latest games company to jump on the NFT bandwagon despite it being a grift that benefits no one but those who started the pyramid scheme.

Team 17 announced this week they would be launching a series of NFT collectibles based on their long-running property Worms, announced with a gaudy glittered-up worm that was apparently supposed to be appealing, I guess? They claim it’ll be environmentally friendly but that lie’s been peddled so much at this point it’s meaningless. Also, NFTs are worthless no matter how much energy they’re using.

As with all NFT announcements, there was intense backlash immediately, including from employees at Team 17 who had no idea the plans were happening. They also sparked backlash from several indie developer partners whose games they’ve helped release. These developers included Aggro Crab Games, Playtonic Games and Ghost Town Games, known respectively for gig economy roguelike Going Under, platformer throwback Yooka-Laylee and friendship destroying chef game Overcooked.

Playtonic and Ghost Town each issued separate polite opposition to NFTs as a concept, while Aggro Crab leaned into their name by releasing an expletive-laden denouncement of Team 17 and vowed to never work with them again.

Unsurprisingly, within 24 hours, Team 17 issued a new statement that said they were cancelled the NFT programme in response to criticism. Which you’d think they’d be aware of considering how poorly received every NFT announcement has been so far.

Speaking of which, Troy Baker has also walked back his involvement with Voiceverse NFT, and three months after EA announced that NFTs were “the future of the games industry” they quietly dropped all plans in a recent earnings call. Which is all excellent news.

Meanwhile, while on the subject of NFTs, a ton of musicians discovered that their music had been stolen by a music NFT site, once again showing how terrible the whole concept is for artists. In a silver lining, they may have been a little too overzealous in their scrubbing of Spotify for music and grabbed songs by The Beatles and music owned by Disney. I hear they LOVE copyright infringement, so let’s see how this plays out for them.

Switch Dethrones the Wii

The Switch has now surpassed the Wii to become Nintendo’s best-selling home console. It’s still their third overall, as it still lags behind the Game Boy and DS, but it’s further proof that it’s a system that simply refuses to stop selling.

The Switch’s lifetime sales are now 103.5m units, beating the Wii’s total of 101.6m. This figure also puts it past the original PlayStation’s 102.5m and straight into 5th place overall. It still has a little way to go before it reaches the PS4’s 117m but at the rate it’s going I wouldn’t be surprised to see it soar up there.

Mario Kart 8 remains the best-selling title on the system, with 43m copies sold, while the Pokémon Diamond and Pearl remakes have sailed into the top 10 after only a month or two on sale.

Impressive work for a console following up the financial disaster that was the Wii U.

Sega Closing Arcade Business

Despite so much of their history wrapped up in the industry, Sega will be pulling out of the arcade business.

Back in 2020, when arcade business unsurprisingly shrunk, Sega made the bold move of selling of 85% of their arcade shares to Genda Inc. This week they have now transferred the remaining 15%, seemingly unconfident that the arcades will pick up back to their pre-pandemic levels. With this sale, Sega’s arcades will be rebranded with the GiGo name owned by Genda by next year.

It’s a real shame, as Sega and arcades are so deeply connected, whether that’s the like of Golden Axe or OutRun helping them build their name in the 1980s, or the Sega Club locations that adorn much of the Akihabara district of Tokyo (and show up in every Yakuza game). It’s a real end of an era as the arcade business loses more ground to home systems and mobile, the latter especially being a growing market in Japan where the arcades are still massive.

There’s also a personal sadness here too, as I visited Tokyo back in 2011 and had a great time wandering around the Sega Clubs, and knowing they’ll soon be no more is sad.

David Hayter’s American McGee’s Alice

American McGee’s Alice will be getting a TV adaptation courtesy of David Hayter.

American McGee’s Alice released back in 2000 for PC and presented a twisted gothic version of Alice in Wonderland. It got a sequel back in 2011 called Madness Returns, and there has been talk of a third game for years from its creator, American McGee, but no news on this has surfaced in a while.

Instead, a TV adaptation is coming, it seems. It’ll be produced by Abandon Entertainment and the showrunner will be David Hayter, best known for penning the first two X-Men movies and also playing someone called Solid Snake. You may have heard of him.

No further details have been released, so we don’t have a release date or platform just yet.

New Releases

Quiet week again for new releases, but don’t get too used to it. The coming weeks are going to get busy. But for now, here’s what we’ve got this week.

The Life is Strange Remastered Collection (PC, PlayStation, Xbox) brings together Dontnod’s beloved time-travelling teen drama Life is Strange and its prequel Before the Storm into a single collection with improved visuals and animation. I’ve only played the first of the two, but the series as a whole is absolutely worth playing if you enjoy narrative-driven titles (the latest instalment, True Colors, was one of my favourite games of 2021). If you’ve never jumped into the series before now, this is the perfect time to do so.

The Hundred-Year Kingdom (PC, Switch) is a turn-based simulation game where you manage a small peaceful kingdom over 100 years, guided by a goddess. Each turn represents a year of your civilisation as you nurture it into a paradise.

The big release of the week is Dying Light 2: Stay Human (PC, PlayStation, Xbox), finally releasing after a somewhat troubled development cycle. The sequel to 2015’s parkour zombie game, this sequel expands the game drastically, adding in a whole bunch of RPG elements, including different factions who respond to choices you make throughout the game.

Game of the Week

Game of the Week is a student project, albeit one you can buy from Steam. Fayburrow is a third year project from The Animation Workshop in Denmark, but it looks superb for these humble beginnings.

It’s a mystery adventure game where you play detective in the protagonist’s hometown. Beatrice’s friend Agnes has gone missing, and it’s up to both Beatrice and her curious fairy, Lu, to uncover the mystery.

It’s a game driven more by narrative and choices than action, but that art style is gorgeous, evoking a Burton-esque atmosphere. It looks like something magical, and I’m even more impressed that this was made by students. Definitely something worth supporting.

And that’s all for now! See you again next week with more from the world of gaming!