Slow News Day: Resident Evil 4 not announced for PS360
One advantage that print publications will always have over their online counterparts is the ability to wait on information. Most game magazine publish one issue a month, so if there is a particularly slow news day, they’re unaffected. However blogs, with a constant need to keep you clicking through to advertisers, need to fill up their sites with as much fodder as possible. Do you really think Go-Nintendo does a thousand posts showing you screenshots of “Imagine: Petz, Babies, and Chauvinism Training” because they know their loyal readership is dying to find out as much information as possible on DS shovelware?
A positive to this kind of news cycle, however, is that a lot of times, blogs will scoop traditional magazines or even bigger game websites. The unfortunate side effect is that, on days where there is little to actually report, unsubstantiated, easily photo-shopped rumors are given their moment as bona-fide news. Case in point: a recent story about a “friend of a friend” who managed to take some cameraphone photos of boxart for ports of Resident Evil 4 on the Xbox 360 and PS3.
While no one is saying that this kind of thing is a concept so totally foreign to Capcom as to immediately cause disbelief, the details of the story just don’t really add up. Add to it that Capcom rebuked the story repeatedly and nearly immediately, and you have the makings of a “not-news” mega event.
I’m positive that these ports are probably already underway over at Capcom Japan. Resident Evil 0: Wii Edition, a port to a console that can already play the original version, proves that this is nothing out of the ordinary. This just isn’t the way we’re going to find out about it, is all.
And yes, I am painfully aware of the hypocrisy involved in discussing the newsworthiness of other websites’ “news” and chalking it up to a “slow news day” on a slow news day. At least I am upfront about it, dammit.
- Rob O’Reilly
