Today on Headline
RePLAY: Mass Effect fans catalogue novel errors, THQ layoffs and Zynga’s
response to copycat allegations.
When it comes to
videogame tie-in novels, you would think an author would’ve done their homework
on the source material. Apparently this wasn’t the case with the recently
released Mass Effect: Deception, as
fans opened up a public Google Doc to list the extensive lore and continuity
issues the novel is plagued with.
“This includes a
character ‘growing up’ from being autistic, turning Mass Effect’s only gay male character straight and then killing him,
and being literally impossible to reconcile with the timeline made by the
games, comics and other books,” the document noted.
Videogame novels are
infamous for these sorts of errors, but Mass
Effect: Deception seems to have reached an entirely new level. The title
currently has one star on Amazon.com filled with negative reviews.
*Source: Destructoid
A lot of
finger pointing and three infographics later, Zynga responded to allegations by
NimbleBit and Buffalo Studios by throwing the accusations right back at them.
Zynga
countered that Buffalo Studios copied off them with BINGO Blitz, launched in March 2010, looked awfully similar to
Zynga’s Poker Blitz released later
that year.
“It was a
little ironic to look at BINGO Blitz.
Pull that lens back. Look at our game Poker
Blitz, and then BINGO
Blitz, you see striking similarities in those pictures,” Zynga’s Chief
Executive Mark Pincus told VentureBeat.
“You
should be careful not to throw stones when you live in glass towers,” said
Pincus. “When you pull the lens back, you saw that their tower game looked similar
to five other tower games going all the way back to SimTower in the early 1990s.”
Brian
Reynolds, Zynga’s game design chief, wondered what the big deal was, “So when I put it in perspective, with having
been around the game industry a long time, I’m not exactly sure why it’s
considered such a big deal right now, or why someone thinks there’s anything
really surprising going on.”
“At Zynga, of course, I feel like we’ve got
lots of innovation going on, so I certainly want to talk about that,” Reynolds
told Gamasutra. “But I was there in the '90s when Doom came out and then
everybody made a shooter, and I was there when Warcraft and Command
& Conquer came out in 1997, and then like 50 different [real-time
strategy] games launched, and it was the year of the RTS.”
Is it “innovation”
to expound on another’s ideas or is it “theft?” Does it really matter where the
idea came from?
And can 42
be used to answer these questions?
*Sources:
VentureBeat and Gamasutra
When it rains, it
pours, as an industry insider revealed today that THQ has plans to dismiss as
many as 240 employees in addition to implementing an executive pay cut. Since
last week THQ was plagued by rumors of its 2014 lineup being cancelled and warned
that it’ll be de-listed from the NASDAQ stock exchange.
“This is probably
going to break in the morning, I have sat on it for a week or so. The culling at
THQ was 170+ souls including Mark DeLoura [VP Technology at THQ],” Tweeted
Kevin Dent, an independent industry suit.
To confirm Dent’s
report, a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission late today detailed
the number of employees fired and the executive pay cut.
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