bonus-round

Latest

  • Uncharted 3 was 'the hardest thing any of us have ever done,' says Hennig

    by 
    Ben Gilbert
    Ben Gilbert
    11.01.2011

    Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception creative lead and writer Amy Hennig isn't one to mince words, it would seem. On the latest episode of Geoff Keighley's "Bonus Round," Hennig and a cadre of other Naughty Dog leads speak in great detail about the process of building their latest, most ambitious project yet -- in just two years. "We absolutely killed ourselves on this project. I think this was the hardest thing any of us have ever done," Hennig asserts. Game director Justin Richmond agrees, breaking down why the project was so hard on their team, beyond the aforementioned time constraint issues. "It's a lot of things. We didn't wanna let ourselves down, we didn't wanna let our fans down. We try to do things that no one's ever done before in a game," he says, referring to the game's massive moving environments and setpieces. It's also a measure of the game being the third entry in an established franchise. "I've worked on two 'third games,'" he says, "And they're always harder ... people expect a certain level of sophistication." Finally, the most pressure came from the team itself. "We made it even harder on ourselves I think than it had to be, because compared to the previous games, we wanted it [Uncharted 3] to be perfect," Richmond concludes. And, at least from our perspective, the game certainly turned out to be not too shabby. You can find out for yourself right now as the game launches worldwide today.

  • Pachter says Sony is 'ripping off' consumers with PSP Go

    by 
    Ben Gilbert
    Ben Gilbert
    06.09.2009

    Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter hates the PSP Go. Alright, alright, he doesn't quite hate it, but he does despise its price point. On a recent episode of Bonus Round, Pachter matter of factly states, "$249 is too much. Period." He goes on to say that while the handheld is priced to compete with Apple's $229 8GB iPod Touch, it doesn't deliver the iTunes App Store or downloadable music from iTunes (as conveniently, at least, as the iPod Touch). Furthermore, he posits the $250 price of the PSP Go is vastly overinflated considering its contents, claiming it costs Sony less to build and ship the PSP Go than the PSP-3000 model, "The $169 PSP-3000 is a profitable device -- the disc assembly, for a UMD, costs more than 16 gigs of flash does. So this new device doesn't cost them as much as the PSP-3000 and they jack the price up $80?" When Keighley presses Pachter as to whether Sony is "ripping off" the consumer or not, he answers, "They're rippin' off the consumer ... they're making a lot more money on the PSP Go than the PSP-3000."%Gallery-64545%