Happy Birthday Rolling Stone

42 Years ago today, the newspaper, magazine, journal, etc... ROLLING STONE came into existence. Some remember it as a bastion of modern music culture, others as alternative culture, and some as a highly liberal political voice. The fact is, that whatever you consider it, it has had an impact upon our popular culture, it has maintained a mostly powerful voice, and it is still going strong.

“To be on it is to be recognized, is to make it, especially in a world where every week, something that used to mean "making it" kinda goes extinct.” John Mayer on being on the cover of ROLLING STONE


ROLLING STONE website

I don’t pick up a lot of issues, but if I want to get honest reviews, or read a great interview I choose it to other pop culture magazines, out of respect for the years in service they’ve provided.

NPD: SHADOW COMPLEX's Spotlight Sales

When Xbox Live Arcade, Microsoft’s downloadable games service, first launched in November 2004 for the Xbox, it had a grand library of six titles, all of them retro arcade classics. A year later, to coincide with the Xbox 360’s launch, the service was greatly expanded, ballooning to include original content (such as the perennially popular Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved, largely considered the 360’s best launch title).

Just two months ago, XBLA was given a shot in the arm that was a long time coming: Chair Entertainment’s Shadow Complex, a retail-caliber game, containing a narrative, gameplay, art assets, and, even, a graphics engine all fully capable of appearing in a full $60 game gracing GameStop’s shelves.

Released on August 19, the title raked in over 200,000 sales in its first week alone – enough to make the NPD Group’s top ten list for the month, one of the very first times a $15 game has managed to sneak its way in with the likes of EA’s Madden NFL Football and Nintendo’s Wii Sports Resort. This is more than banal videogame trivia; it’s a watershed moment for gaming.

As Live enters its sixth year, more and more publishers will take Chair’s example, pouring an ever larger amount of resources into downloadable development, furnishing experiences that will compete with – and, as is already evident, steal from – traditional games’ clout. In an economy that is still faltering, this means gamers will be just as likely to spend their hard-earned money in their living rooms as in Best Buy, playing titles that aren’t that dissimilar. Much like cinema in the wake of television’s grand arrival in the ‘50s, publishers will have to find even more reasons to entice gamers into retail locations for retail experiences.

Of course, Sony is betting that all games, big and small, will soon find their way to users exclusively through digital distribution: the PSP Go, the latest iteration of its handheld, released on October 1st, is completely physical media-less, making it the first system of any stripe to do so. And even Microsoft is already dipping its toes in the market, having launched Games on Demand – a service that offers (slightly) older retail games for (slightly) discounted rates – in August.

And behind this latest evolution of the interactive industry will be games like Shadow Complex, a bestselling title that has put the still-fledgling Chair on the map – along with, for many gamers, digital distribution itself.

VIPER COMICS The Middleman

I like VIPER and wish them tons of success. Hence the PR here, I recommend their products, in general for all ages, they have a serious coolness about them.

VIPER'S THE MIDDLEMAN : THE COLLECTED SERIES INDISPENSABILITY HITS 2nd PRINTING

The series hailed by critics and fans, and named by the American Library Association as one of 2007's "Great Graphic Novels for Teens, " is going to a 2nd printing.

The Middleman might spend his days and nights fighting evil so you don't have to; training the unflappable and ever resourceful Wendy "Dub-Dub" Watson to be his eventual replacement; taking an occasional break for a frosty glass of cow-juice; all the time dealing with a smack-talking robot provided by OTS2K, but what happens when fans can't get enough of this clean-cut, square-jawed defender of all things right and just in the world?
Viper Comics steps into the fray, dons a trusty Eisenhower jacket and pushes out a second printing of Javier Grillo-Marxuach's and Les McClaine's The Middleman : The Collected Series Indispensability, that's what!

Available November 11, 2009, from your nearest comic book retailers, book retailers, or pre-order your copy from the Viper website ( Viper Comics ) for the Ri-GOSH-DARN-DICULOUSLY cheap price of $19.95. Don't miss your chance to see where it all began, today.

Reviews:

"A Fun, fast-paced, and quick-witted comedy-adventure in the vein of Men in Black, Ghostbusters, and Hellboy." - Ben Lathrop, The Library Journal

"If you're still resisting buying The Middleman, not only do I fear for your immortal soul, but I fear that you are not worthy to buy comics at all." - Greg Burgas, ComicBookResources.com

"With a dashing, retro, ass-kicking secret agent, a spunky fish-out-water hottie partner at his side and adversaries that include muck-encrusted monsters, mob monkeys and mexican maulers, we guarantee you'll love being stuck in the middle, man." - Jesse Thompson, Wizard Magazine

The Middleman : The Collected Series Indispensability
ISBN 10: 0980238544 ISBN 13: 9780980238549
Diamond DCD Item: MAY084177 Retail $19.95 / B&W/ 336 pages

Soupy Sales

One of the old-time comedy greats has decided he is too good for our world. And ya know what?

He's damn right.


Milton Supman
January 8, 1926 – October 22, 2009

NPD: Sony's September Superiority

A funny thing happened on the way to the store…

Since the Nintendo Wii’s release on November 19, 2006, there have been only three months when the system wasn’t number one in console sales (in terms of overall system sales, the Wii has been frequently oscillating with Nintendo’s other mega seller, the handheld DS) – and two of those were November and December 2006, when, as is common with all console launches, the big N couldn’t produce enough units to satiate the demand of technological evangelists everywhere.

September 2009 is now the fourth month. And as if this weren’t surprising enough by itself, it is compounded by the fact that it isn’t Microsoft, the company responsible for the first three lapses in the Wii’s dominance, that has dethroned Nintendo.

It’s Sony.

To come from dead last place – the PlayStation 3 was typically outsold on a monthly basis not only by the Wii and Xbox 360, but also by Sony’s two other systems, the now-obsolete PS2 on the console side and the PSP on the handheld – to end Nintendo’s 22-month consecutive streak, and outselling the 360 by nearly 150,000 units in the process, is quite an impressive feat.

It’s a miracle the likes of which has been evading Sony since the PS3’s launch two days before the Wii’s, nearly some three years ago. So why now? What makes September any different from the previous 34 months, when the PS3 was in a sales slump so severe that it looked as if it were unending?

It turns out there are two possible reasons. First and foremost, Sony dropped the price of the system to $299 – finally – on the first of the month, making it half the price of the original (high-end) model, with 60 times the hard drive space, to boot. (It’s not all deals and sunshine, however; Sony has stripped some of that first iteration’s features over the years, including slots for PSX and PS2 memory cards and, much more importantly – particularly for a company that skewered Microsoft for omitting it – backwards compatibility.)

And then there’s Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, what just may turn out to be the PS3’s killer app, the next-generation equivalent of Super Mario Bros. or Halo (indeed, it was Halo 3’s release in September 2007 that caused the Wii’s last momentary tumble from the top of the sales charts). Although it didn’t ship until last week, on October 13, it may very well be that diehard gamers were already attracted to the title and they more than happily pounced on the opportunity to play it for a price point that was less than $460.

But U2’s release in and of itself probably isn’t enough to account for the massive surge in sales numbers, no matter how excellent the game may be – a point reinforced by two previous AAA titles that, while garnering critical praise and hardcore followings, still failed to break Sony’s behemoth of a console into the mainstream market: Konami’s Metal Gear Solid 4 (June ’08) and Sony’s own Killzone 2 (February ’09). And $300 is still a significant amount of money to spend, particularly if there are no up-and-coming titles to get the newly acquired userbase excited. It is more than likely the combination of the two, forming a one-two punch, that delivered Sony its single stellar month of sales (and less the nebulous lineup of 2010 software, as some venues are hypothesizing, even if that roster includes the likes of Gran Turismo 5, God of War III, and a new motion-sensing controller [assuming, of course, that it doesn’t get pushed back, as all Sony hardware inevitably does]).

A better question than why just may be what next? Will this prove to be an aberration, as with Microsoft’s sudden leap to the front of the line two years ago, or will it be the basis of a new trend: Sony resurgent, slowly but efficiently climbing past the formidable install base of the Xbox 360 and, perhaps, even beyond the unprecedented success of the Wii? Will Sony truly have the last laugh, riding the slower-but-stronger wave of a ten-year generational cycle, as it has been boasting since 2005, or will this merely be a flash in the pan, more a September “curse” for Nintendo than anything else?

Microsoft and Nintendo both have followed Sony’s suit in the several weeks since Gamescom, slashing their prices to $299 (the starting price of the original Xbox eight years ago) and $199 (the starting price of literally every Nintendo console for the past 24 years), respectively. Whether this affects the PlayStation 3’s sales or not, a financially scarred public, at the very least, will finally have the laws of economics on their side for the very first time this generation.

At a time when all previous console generations were ending, this one is finally getting started.