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The States, in a similar fashion to the UK, is a one horse race. PlayStation is the
brand blazed across all American gamers’ frontal lobe. The stores brim with Sony
titles and accessories and hunting down the more cult titles for the GameCube and Xbox is
a bit of a mission. Well, although this may be true in the less locally-commercial-driven
states such as Florida (at least, to some extent), but in the major financial States, the
picture’s a bit bigger.
The British press, for some reason, have a bee in their bonnet about the shape of
the industry in the US. It’s not as rosy a ride for Sony as many organisations like
to lead us to believe. Even the publications that sell themselves on GameCube exclusivity
seem to pride themselves on the misguided knowledge that their console of preference has
the same shortcomings as in Europe.
Upon a recent trip to the Big Apple, I stumbled across a humble Toys ‘R’
Us store, which to be honest, wasn’t all too humble. “Largest Toys ‘R’
Us in the World”, apparently, Time Square. Arriving two days before the DS’
launch, I was more than shocked to see half an entire floor covered in NintendoDS demo
units, and the rest of the floor holding all sorts of advertising and POS material known
to man. I descended to the gamers basement – how fitting, an American nerd
stereotype! – With a wall dedicated to PlayStation2 and about three demo units, Xbox
was central, pretty similar set-up, N-Gage? Zodiac? GP32? These were nowhere to be
seen… the other ¾ of game space was given to Nintendo. Approx. 30 Game Boy Advance
and Game Boy Advance SP units, ten GameCubes and - get this! – A Nintendo TV channel!
It seemed to be little more than about 40 minutes of footage on loop, but still,
that’s more than enough for the game hungry public to catch a glimpse of the
nine-screen TV wall.
It is true that many games have been delayed or cancelled altogether for the
GameCube in the US, as with the UK, the most recent example Mortal Kombat: Deception; pushed back till January
so that work could be completed on the PlayStation2 and Xbox versions before deadline. But
this has not harmed the release schedule in the same way as the UK has seen. There are
still hundreds of titles lining the walls of every games store I visited, with examples of
every genre for both GameCube and Xbox. Even the local K Mart had the PlayStation2
severely under presented.
There are many development teams and publishing houses that are completely
overlooked by the British press, due to being solely concentrated on the US, and seemingly
they’re sales figures are as unimportant as their PR campaign. It’s unusual for
me to have a pop at any of the mainstream games publications, especially those with the
supportive coverage of the NintendoDS and PSP system’s foreign launches recently, but
I feel that you, as gamers, are for once being very ill advised. It appears that the age
old lore applies once again; don’t believe it if you have no proof. |
