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What an eventful week it has been, dominated by the ongoing developments of highstreet entertainment retailer HMV, which may or may not live to see another day.
After appointing Deloitte as joint administrator, the positive news was that the aim was to keep the retailer operating, although almost certainly in a different capacity to how it had existed in the past. Whilst stores continued to trade, HMV.com was taken offline. Most controversially, it was revealed that the retailer continued to sell gift vouchers right up until the point of entering into administration, leaving many consumers with vouchers from Christmas unable to buy the goods they wanted. One Irish grandfather took matters into his own hands and walked out with three games without paying, whilst a senior MP accused HMV of theft. Somewhat bizarrely, last year’s major highstreet struggler, GAME, has showed an interest in taking over up to 45 HMV stores in locations without a GAME presence.
And if all this wasn’t bad enough, DVD rental chain Blockbuster announced it had entered into administration too, putting the jobs of over 4,000 people at risk. The news followed the recent closure of electronics stores Comet and Jessops. There was, however, some good news for consumers, with Blockbuster deciding to honour gift cards and store credit.
Oblivious to all the doom and gloom of UK retail, Deep Silver got everyone talking with its Dead Island Riptide Zombie Bait Edition, which features a 12 inch, 2.5kg statue of a bloodied female torso, hand-painted and made from synthetic resin. The model features no head, no arms and is probably 50 per cent boob. The following day publisher Deep Silver issued an apology, but not before all the attention helped the zombie sequel top the Amazon pre-order chart.
Now almost seamlessly onto Disney’s Skylander’s rival, Disney Infinity. Mixing a video game with actual toy figures is what all the cool kids want so Disney sure isn’t going to disappoint when Infinity launches this summer. There’ll be 17 figures available alongside the game, each priced around £13 – this totals a whopping investment of £221 not including the Starter Pack which is around £60. Furthermore, GAME is already likening Infinity to the second coming of Jesus, telling anyone who would listen that it’s going to be a sure fire hit.
And let’s not forget all the next generation console rumours. Not only have we been treated to all manner of contrasting information on terraflops, but there’s the growing sense of expectation that we’ll hear about the next PlayStation and Xbox around GDC in March, which is around two months away! The winner will be the exec who manages to talk about flops without grinning like a child. On top of that Sony’s rumoured to be abandoning its classic DualShock for a touchscreen controller.
Finally there was great news when it was confirmed that imprisoned ArmA 3 devs Ivan Buchta and Martin Pezlar were released on bail after their arrest back in September 2012.
That’s me done for another week. Be sure to listen to the latest episode of The VideoGamer.com Podcast and enjoy the snow. Bye.
