GamesCom: Microsoft forget to turn up

So, the Microsoft conference… didn’t happen. Instead we got Peter Molyneux waffling on for far too long about Fable III – a (not entirely unexpected) new reveal but with very little to actually show other than a pre-rendered teaser and some concept art. We all waited eagerly for him to bugger off so we could see the rest and then… there was no ‘the rest’!

Seriously, Microsoft – what the hell? Even if you didn’t really have anything new to show, would it have killed you to get up and show a few videos of things we already knew about?

/slow clap

Things that irritate #1: ‘Hidden songs’

Hidden tracks. On CDs. Why? Why do they do this? What is the point exactly of having the last track on your album absent from the track listing and magically separated from the rest of the album up to 20 minutes of fucking irritating silence?

“Oh, what a great surprise – a bonus piece of music!” you might say upon first discovering it. Followed by roughly 5000 ‘why the hell do I have to keep fast-forwarding all this stupid silence to get to the last track?’ rants every time you listen to the damn album in the future. If someone can explain this to me, I would be very grateful. But no less irate.

/seethes

Welcome to the brave new digital world…. Eventually.

The new issue of Edge was waiting for me when I got home last night, and I sat down on the sofa to flick through it with my son (who’s six). At the end of the reviews section, we came across a review of a game called ‘Bonsai Barber’ for the Wii. I knew nothing at all about this, but my son instantly took a liking to it and wanted to know if we could order it from the shop. Realising it was a downloadable Wiiware title, I told him we could do better than that – we could get it right now if we had enough points kicking around. And lo, there was much excitement! Well… from him, anyway.