Usually for The Warp Pipe, March requires a certain writer's wallet to be sealed within a heavily secured vault to prevent him from spending too much money on games he'll leave sitting on shelf. Fortunately this year, a combination of lower income and a distinct lack of anything interesting being released, my wallet shall remain firmly pressed against my buttocks (with the exception of my import copies of Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Okami: Wii Edition). I'm really surprised as March used to represent a dumping ground for PAL publishers for all of those titles that hit North American at Christmas time. Ignoring Nintendo, does that imply that the situation is getting better? The games that were delayed seem to be mostly niche titles – Beautiful Katamari, Persona 3, Odin Sphere. We should really be thankful that they're getting released here at all.

This week, we'll weigh in on the recent movements in the corporate world, take a look at Activision's bizarre (and rather offensive) way of trying to teach Spanish on the DS, and revisit the hackneyed Wing Commander movie.

Corporate Harmony

EA used to gut great companies to get their IP – have they changed?

Prior to the commencement of the seventh generation of consoles, a lot of noise came from the business side of the industry regarding sustainability. Many analysts felt that increased budgets for the development of HD titles would put pressure on a lot of developers and publishers resulting in a rampage of acquisitions and mergers. They were absolutely right; since 2005 we have witnessed many purchases and mergers. Microsoft has bought Lionhead, BioWare and Pandemic merged prior to being purchased by EA, Activision purchased Bizarre and merged with Vivendi, Sony bought Naughty Dog, Evolution Studios and Ninja Theory, Warner Bros. picked up Monolith and Traveller's Tales, and Take-Two has purchased Irrational and is now in EA's sights – and that's just what I can think of off the top of my head. It's the last of those deals which really piqued my interest over the last week.

My immediate thought upon hearing EA's offer for Take-Two was "buy shares", which I now wish I did after they jumped 54% the day after news of the offer was released. Not quite as big a miss as not buying Nintendo back in 2004, but hey. I could not believe that Take-Two would refuse such an offer; their shares were marked at roughly $US15 a share on the Friday before the buyout offer of $US26 per share was made. Most of you are thinking, "Yeah, but what about GTA:IV?" but the thing about that is that the market already knows about GTA:IV, and it's already built into the share price. It's not like GTA3, where the game came out of nowhere – GTA:IV would have to greatly under or oversell to have any significant effect on the short term share price of Take-Two.

I was rather baffled when reading Strauss Zelnick's public refusal of the deal – disruption to the production of GTA:IV just doesn't quite cut it. These sorts of deals take months to work out, and seldom affect the day-to-day operations of said companies. The real reason for Zelnick's deferral of negotiation was uncovered by MarketWatch's Herb Greenberg; the day before Take-Two refused the initial EA deal, the company filed a number of changes to its management deal with ZelnickMedia. These included a 300%+ increase in monthly pay, increased performance bonus from $750,000 to $2.5 million, and a grant of 600,000 shares which would vest in 3 years or immediately if the company was acquired. The filing later goes on to state that the shares ZelnickMedia was set to gain will not vest immediately if Take-Two were to receive a genuine indication of interest or an offer for acquisition or merger before April 1 if said offer had not been publicly disclosed or confirmed by either EA or Take-Two prior to the latter's annual general meeting. Zelnick tried to keep the deal secret until after the general meeting so shareholders couldn't block his neat little compensation package or the company's attempts to prevent the merger/acquisition.

Does anyone really believe that Take-Two's management thinks that a 60% premium per share is somehow undervaluing their company? In Corporations Law, directors owe their shareholders what's called fiduciary duty; they must act in the shareholders' best interests. Is rejecting a 60% premium on the current share price really in the company's best interests, especially when the market already knows what the reaction to your next big product will be? Take-Two has a rich history of being pulled up by the SEC for bad filings and dodgy accounting practices, and management's lack of foresight in developing new franchises outside of GTA and Civilization (with the exception of BioShock) and handling of product scandals is really enough to instill doubt in their abilities.

Strauss Zelnick should be praying that his shareholders don't rip him a new one

Should the deal go through, EA is set to gain a large number of subsidiary studios: Firaxis Games, Irrational Games, Illusion Softworks, Venom Games, Visual Concepts, Kush Games, PAM Development, Gathering of Developers, Gotham Games, TalonSoft, Jack of All Games, Rockstar North, Rockstar Leeds, Rockstar Japan, Rockstar London, Rockstar Vancouver, Rockstar San Diego, Rockstar Toronto and Rockstar Lincoln. People such as Sid Meier, Ken Levine and the Houser brothers are attached to these studios – directors of titles such as Civilization, BioShock and GTA. 19 studios spread across the world, which would bring EA's total to 44. It's surprising that Take-Two can only muster $200M in sales per year when they have such talent in their ranks – perhaps EA will have better success.

It's interesting to predict what would happen to Take-Two's studios under EA rule. Obviously Take-Two's management would get the boot, so there's no need to think about them. The 2K Sports division is likely to get gutted – one would hope that the NBA Live series would be dropped in favour of the far superior NBA 2K, though the baseball and tennis teams may well stay on. A lot of people like to spell out gloom and doom for anyone purchased by EA; I admit I find myself putting EA on a pedestal to be of great amusement, but I do think that the company has legitimately changed under John Riccitiello (even if the BioWare/Pandemic deal is a tad iffy – as part of Elevation Partners, he bought them for ~$300 million, but EA paid $620 million a year later, when neither developer had released anything in between). EA doesn't want any more Origin, Bullfrog or Westwood style exoduses – they want the people, as well as the games. They don't want to change the games either – you're not going to see T-rated Grand Theft Autos every October until the franchise is run into the ground, or Dodge ads in BioShock.

I don't expect this acquisition to be settled any time soon, but I do hope that Take-Two ends up in EA's hands. They may not be the only big publisher on the move either – rumour suggests that EA is still eyeing off a purchase of Ubisoft, of which it owns 19.9%.

Weird Games

The success of the Brain Training games prompted a lot of publishers to rush out educational software for the Nintendo DS. Math games, dictionaries and language tools were all released in the aftermath of Professor Kawashima's cerebral tuning game. Many of these titles flew under the radar, most likely due to their dubious quality when compared with Nintendo's effort. One such game was Activision's Spanish for Everyone.

What makes Spanish for Everyone quite bizarre is its blatantly weird, and possibly racist storyline. Players take on the role of 10-year-old Shawn, a happy kid with an undying love for his Nintendo DS. Unfortunately, in the opening scenes, Shawn's DS is stolen by his friend Miguel, who is hoisted into his dad's limousine. See, Miguel's father is a "Mexican exporter" and is currently having a bit of police trouble. It only gets weirder from there – Shawn goes to Mexico in search of his beloved DS accompanied by his rather lusty aunt Gina.


Spot the things that are completely wrong in these pictures
Not only is Spanish for Everyone full of offensive Mexican stereotypes, but it encourages children to walk the streets of unknown places by themselves and accept rides from strangers. Worse yet is that the game completely fails to assist in teaching the player to speak Spanish, instead offering four mini-games which are practically useless to anyone without a pre-existing working knowledge of the language. Hardly effective educational software now, is it?

Crossing Over

You now have the Dawson's Creek theme stuck in your head

With the ever increasing popularity of video games, it's only natural that companies from other mediums would try to cash in on the success of a video game license. It's something that's been happening since the arcade boom of the early 80s, so I thought I'd dedicate a little section to looking at various movies, TV Shows, comics and such that have been spawned by video game licenses.

Cast your mind back to 1994. The Simpsons were still funny, The Lion King was playing in theatres, and angsty teenagers everywhere were mourning the loss of Kurt Cobain. PC gamers were playing Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger for the first time; its luscious live-action cutscenes featuring Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell, awesome production values and solid gameplay were on a level that far above the competition. A sequel followed two years later with the same crew and a bigger budget, which left some wondering when a Wing Commander feature film would be made.

It all looked fairly promising for the Wing Commander film in its early stages – Chris Roberts, the director of the games and live action sequences, was on board to helm the project. Several actors from the games were also set to return to their roles. The film had a mid-sized budget of $30 million, and the backing of 20th Century Fox. Unfortunately, the result was less than stellar. The movie was set up as a prequel, eliminating the possibility of casting most of the actors from the game (McDowell was in as Tolwyn, but scheduling conflicts prevented him taking the role), forcing producers to go with teen pin-up actors like Freddie Prinze Jr. and Matthew Lillard. Roberts decided he no longer liked the designs of the Kilrathi either, revising them to appear more human-like, with hilarious results.

The plot revolves around Blair and Marshall being assigned to the Tiger's Claw to fly their first missions. They soon learn of a Kilrathi plan for an attack on Earth, and the Tiger's Claw is assigned a rather suicidal mission to delay the Kilrathi fleet to allow time for the Terran fleet to reach Earth. Of course, you've got your typical female love interest (turning it into Dawson's Creek in space) and the Force-like "Pilgrim" ability to navigate through space, blah blah. Wing Commander is painfully boring, filled with cheesy dialogue and many cringeworthy moments. Low budget CGI effects, produced in-house at Digital Anvil, were arguably the nail in the coffin.

Fortunately, audiences had the good sense to avoid the film, as its US domestic gross was a paltry $11 million. Obviously, the lesson to be learnt here (for the nth time) is that if you're going to make a movie on a video game, stick to the original material.

---

Quote of the Week

Activision CEO Bobby Kotick said of his reasons for the merger with Vivendi; "We don't think that even if we made the USD 500 million or billion-dollar investment to get a product out [to compete with World of Warcraft] that we would even be successful doing it." $500 million to compete? Absolutely ludicrous. Do you think that throwing endless amounts of money at something will somehow force it to be successful? I don't think Fury would have been successful if Auran had $500 million – it's all about the design of the game, and making something that people actually want to play. Activision should stick to running the Guitar Hero franchise into the ground – seriously, Aerosmith?

---

Next Week

...call Scooby Doo, it's a damned mystery.