Late Night Consoling

Run for cover, fanboys, because here it comes, the nightly Xbox bashing...Reuters ran a story about the "slowing momentum" of the Xbox, which is hurting Flextronics, the company manufacturing the system for Microsoft. Of particular note is a quote from an analyst who says American retailers have shown a "surprisingly clear" preference for displaying the PS2 over the Xbox in their stores. I'm sure the fanboys have already stopped reading and have decided that this is biased system bashing, but it's not, I assure you. I don't think this spells gloom and doom for the system...it's typical analyst behavior. If a company doesn't meet their expectations, whatever they are, and even in many cases if it does meet those expectations but doesn't surpass them by a large enough margin, the investors get worried. And that's what we've been seeing here for the last week or so. As I pointed out yesterday, a huge percentage of those early Japanese PS2 sales went to people buying a cheap DVD player, not a game system. The Xbox has not flopped in Japan or Europe, and has sold fairly well in the US. Whatever else it may have been, last Christmas was not the real console war. This year is the real battle, when the PS2 and Xbox will both be online, and all three systems will have second generation (third in Sony's case) titles to sell. Wait for E3 before you write off anyone just yet.

• GameSpot has posted a preview of Medal of Honor: Frontline, the upcoming PS2 debut of the MoH franchise.
• That's pretty cool and all, but what's even cooler are these first screenshots from Medal of Honor: Underground for the Game Boy Advance. The game obviously looks more like Doom than Allied Assault, but it's still pretty nifty.
• While real details are still sketchy, Computer and Video Games is reporting that Appeal put Outcast 2 on hold because they have been handed a major license from publisher Infogrames. Anyone care to guess what that might be?
• PSX.IGN (yes, they still update occasionally) has conducted an interview with Vic Ireland of Working Designs, who are about to ship their massive Arc the Lad Collection, which is easily the most ambitious console RPG product ever attempted by an American company.
• Here are a bunch of new shots from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, the upcoming Xbox (and PC) RPG from BioWare.
• Xen Gamers has posted a hands-on preview of Hunter: The Reckoning, an Xbox survival horror title from Interplay and White Wolf Game Studios.