First Resident Evil 4, now this. Admittedly it’s only two games in the space of a year, but why couldn’t Nintendo be doing this for all the rest of the time when Sony and Microsoft are walking all over them?

It’s great to see Link back in all his glory. I was one of the few defenders of The Wind Waker but seeing this and thinking about those prolonged sailing sections just makes it particularly galling that we had to wait this long for the real continuation of Ocarina of Time. That sequence in WW when you walk into Hyrule Castle, frozen in time, was brilliant, but it just can’t beat the first time you stepped out into Hyrule Field or into the burgeoning Kakariko Village. That wolf at the end of the new video just sent a shiver down my spine that reminded me how much I love this series.

I’ve just seen the first screenshot from the upcoming Doom movie, starring The Rock:

It’s one of those game-movie adaptions that’s been in development hell (no pun intended) for as long as I can remember, so it’s perhaps gratifying to actually see something real of it. It can’t really be a completely faithful adaption of Doom 3 considering that there’s a group of marines there, they’re not on Mars, and it’s not completely pitch black, but The Rock is potentially one of the best action stars around.

Most of the crap he’s been in has hardly been taxing but he has incredible screen presence and charisma. He very well could be the real successor to Arnie’s throne (and why he’ll make a great Johnny Bravo), hence the appearance of the man himself in The Rundown/Welcome To The Jungle to formally abdicate his throne.

To be honest I doubt that Doom is going to be any better than most game movies, but we can hope, right?

Just when I was beginning to think that creative game marketing was dead, along come Sega with My Big Ball, or as they call it, “The true adventures of Chad, the guy who was so into Super Monkey Ball Deluxe that he decided to live in a ball.”

Whatever you think of Super Monkey Ball, that’s some very cool advertising. I love the Swim Meet one.

I just read on the BBC about San Francisco’s new Walk of Game, the gaming equivalent of Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. It’s interesting to see some of the greats of gaming being recognised publicly with their own stars, and also that despite it being outside Sony’s Metreon Center, no Sony products or alumni were recognised – Nolan Bushnell, Shigeru Miyamoto, Mario, Link, Sonic, and Halo were the honours this time around.

It’s never going to be on the scale of the Walk of Fame and Halo seems like a bit of a misnomer, but more recognition for the greats of gaming outside of private award shows can only be a good thing. Even better when it heralds a new Sonic game, Shadow The Hedgehog.

The first feature to be ported from the old version of NekoFever.com has been completed. It’s the full story of how I came up with this web handle that no-one except me seems to get the reference to. I guess nobody’s quite l33t enough for me.

I had a visit today to the Southern Daily Echo as part of my course today, and I have to say I was very impressed with it. It’s not the dingy little office that you imagine for a provincial paper.

In amongst a cluster of industrial estates, it occupies its own compound complete with two of what look externally like warehouses – one is a printing facility and the other is the actual Echo office. We couldn’t go into the printing area because the insurance company didn’t like the possibility of forced amputations, but the office itself was a combination of plush management offices (seriously, they were like the ones you see in movies – all floor-to-ceiling windows, mahogany, and leather recliners) and an absolutely cavernous open-plan newsroom that could easily contain a few hundred people with their own terminals. It even has its own archive library.

It hasn’t made me any more inclined to work on a newspaper, but it’s certainly improved my perception of them. I can’t imagine what the facilities of a bigger national newspaper are like.