The Coffee Corner The Coffee Corner:
The Coffee Corner is a weekly review of the last week in gaming, chock full of opinions, sexual innuendos, and hot ladies... well maybe not, but still, it's pretty cool. It's not meant to give an ultra in-depth look at the news, but rather a glance and a quick quip.

This past week saw two fairly large releases: X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the video game, and the movie. While neither were recieved by amazing reception from critics, both managed to sell fairly well. While video games based off movies haven't been regarded as the best games (Read: Jumper, Tale of Despereaux, Any Brash Game, etc). Heck, the best one, Goldeneye 007, was released 2 years after the movie had been released and was considered more of a tie in with the Tomorrow Never Dies movie, which would come just 4 months later. Origins does manage to scrape along as a fair game, but ends up taking the same shortcuts that all movie video games take. Major plot holes, alternate storyline than that of the movie, and acting that only goes as far as that in the movie all make the game that much more boring.

Another comic book based game made it into the gaming headlines this week, Batman Arkham Asylum was pushed back to a very unspecific "end of summer" release date. According to Eidos, the extra time is to let the developers make sure that the game "is of the highest quality for gamers". While it's a fairly standard excuse, all the marketing and all the hype will have to die and then ramp up again. They tried it with Godfather 2, it didn't work. They tried it with Grand Theft Auto IV, it did work. Whether or not Batman: Arkham Asylum will benefit from the extra time remains to be seen, however I have a feeling the game was fairly close to going gold before they decided to go into extra development (Read: The closer a game gets to being done, the worse it is to announce extra development).

Six Days in Fallujah, a game based on the 'more recent than WWII' Second Battle of Fallujah in 2004, has lost its publisher. While the recent Iraq war (in fact, it's still going on) is a very touchy subject for many people, I fail to see how it is different from any other war video game. I understand that there are different sensativities between the Iraq, Vietnam, and World War II, but there have been plenty of movies and TV shows that depict it. Konami caved into pressure to drop the game from it's lineup, although Atomic Games (the developer) wishes to complete and release the game.

Mass Effect: Jacob's Story was announced by BioWare as an "branching storyline" game for the Apple iPhone/iPod Touch. While it is not a 'prequel' to Mass Effect 2, it is a side story that takes place before Mass Effect 2 involving the side characters. It's a top down view (as a full blown third person perspective game would be a bit outlandish on the iPhone) and features a more cartoony look than the original Mass Effect. Its announcement is just another in a slew of games that are making the console to iPhone and NOT the PSP or DS.

QUICK HITS

Ghost Recon 4 got announced and is in pre-development for an anticipated Q1 2010 release.

Peggle will be released for the iPhone on May 12th.

Tekken 6 will be released on PSP as well.

The Witcher: Rise of the White Wolf has been cancelled.

Dead Rising 2 will feature multiplayer.

Resident Evil Archives (The wii version of a Gamecube version of a Playstation Game) will be released June 23rd.