Friday Downtime Feature

The week ending January 30th 2009: a week when Nintendo demonstrated the ability to defy the laws of economics. By posting earnings figures that not only failed to show any knock-on effect of the global recession but, on the contrary, seemed to do nothing but report even greater growth for the console manufacturer, we've been left aghast by the company's ruggedness. By this point we shouldn't have been surprised really. After all, Nintendo has previously managed to return from the brink of GameCube oblivion by releasing a next-gen console retaining suspiciously similar technical capabilities only with motion sensitive controllers tacked on for good measure.

While Nintendo reported a 17% increase in net sales for the 9 month period between April and December of last year, it's been a much bleaker time for Sony. With the Japanese electronics giant amending its financial forecast for fiscal 2009 to a loss of £2.1 billion last week, this week has only bought even bleaker news for its gaming division. The Computer Entertainment sector of the company posted a 97% loss in operating income for the third quarter of the 2009 fiscal year (between October and December of 2008) compared to the same period last year, which casts even more doubt on the future of its ailing PlayStation 3 console.

At least the 'crunch' isn't affecting EA's Need For Speed series; the publisher announced a raft of three new titles that are due to surface during the course of 2009. Need For Speed Nitro will be coming to Nintendo's Wii and DS, for which EA plans to stand fast with its arcade racer formula. There's also Need For Speed World Online, a free to play racer coming to the PC that will utilise the same micro-transaction based model EA first latched onto its Battlefield Heroes project. Finally, and most interestingly for us, is EA's decision to return to Need For Speed's routes with a racing sim entitled Need For Speed Shift on Xbox 360 and PS3.

The last time EA released a racing sim for the Need For Speed franchise, Bill Clinton was still in his first term as President, Aswad were in the charts with 'Shine', and Keanu Reeves was trying to stop buses exploding. Needless to say that was a long time ago (answers on a postcard for the year). Let's just hope they haven't forgotten how to do it right, because we're certainly in the market for a racing sim other than Forza to rival the mighty Gran Turismo.

Another publisher that's been in the headlines this week is Capcom, which is shaping up to make a big splash in 2009. As well as having the two most significant game releases for the first three months of the year under its awnings (Resi 5 and SFIV), Capcom also has Dead Rising and Lost Planet sequels in development if comments made by Keiji Inafune, the publisher's Head of Research and Development, are anything to go by. An unnamed Capcom UK Spokesperson was quick to pour water on the story though, suggesting that the original report emanated from a mistranslation of Japanese magazine Famitsu, although our sources suggest otherwise, at least where a Dead Rising sequel is concerned.