It was only a matter of time before I contracted some kind of illness, I suppose. Doing battle with The Horde until three already depletes a man, but when you meet thousands of people over the course of a weekend somebody there is a carrier. I'm currently flanking the condition with barely substantiated science and folk remedies of questionable efficacy.
The phenomenon described in the strip desperately needed some verbal identifier. It's ready-made for the Madden '06 footage on Xbox 360. They wouldn't let us see it at E3, and now I understand why. If we'd gone back there and seen something like that - especially given what they were showing in their ten million dollar circular theater - the cruelty and barbarism of our response would be the sort of thing you'd cut to maintain your M rating. Who did they let in, I wonder? And what did they see?
The video is suboptimal, to be sure. But it's not so bad that the disparities between it and the Madden '06 released in Bizarro World aren't apparent. You need a word like Bullshot at the ready, as though it were holstered, just to phrase the odd, skeptical enthusiasm engendered by these specious materials.
It isn't that it makes me mad, they're just not real or true and I think that when we have evidence to the contrary it needs to be presented and discussed. I think that rocking CSI-style investigations into small, zoomed quadrants of images is part of the fun. It's fun to imagine what the next generation, or perhaps in this case the generation after this one, has in store. Even if that Elysian field only really exists in promotional materials.
Personally, I wouldn't have shown that video to anybody. The system doesn't launch for another two months, and I've seen amazing shifts in the final builds of a game - it may be that they believe they can hit a target like that. If anyone could do it, I guess it would have to be the largest publisher of electronic entertainment in the world. I want them to put me in a situation where I need to come to you, sheepish and contrite, regarding my cynicism on these matters. I love being wrong about things like this.
(CW)TB out.
