SFist Tech Roundup: Super Boss-Fight Mega Edition Xtreme
The Electronic Entertainment Expo is so close you can almost taste the LA smog and the tangy sweat of desperation. In honor of that, this week's round-up is all videogame-related news.
Nintendo gave bloggers-who-think-they're-funny a present on Thursday by announcing the new name for their upcoming Revolution console (warning: slow-loading Flash site). It's going to be called "Wii."
Seriously. With a "distinctive ii spelling" that's pronounced like "we," "wee," "oui," and "Wheee!" Early buzz has been somewhat less than favorable. In Nintendo's defense, the company was forced to come up with a distinctive name to compete with another upcoming console, the Sony Deuxdi.
Kotaku has an entry about our state assemblyman, Leland Yee, and his ongoing quest to ride the coattails of the hot-button topic of the moment keep our kids safe from Grand Theft Auto. Yee spoke with a writer for gaming site 1Up.com, defending his position as being in the best interest of kids while still preserving the free speech rights for adults. Hal Halpin of the Interactive Entertainment Merchants Association responded to the article by pointing out that the statistics Yee used while making his argument were inaccurate, and that videogame merchants do just as good a job at policing themselves as movie theaters do.
News on Redwood Shores' favorite "sweat shop", after the jump.
Image from the Dutch site Puppycursus in Zeist which we can't read but looks awesome.
Electronic Arts on Tuesday settled a second class action suit brought against it by paying $14.9 million to the programmers named in the suit. (An earlier class action suit brought against it, on behalf of artists, was also settled with a multi-million dollar payout). The issue was overtime compensation, and in addition to the settlement, EA reclassified many of its programming positions as hourly instead of salaried.
While many blogs reporting on the story list this as a step in the right direction, it bears noting that the reclassification will also cut the newly-hourly employees out of some benefits, including the most lucrative benefit of working for EA: the stock options. On the plus side, EA is donating the unclaimed portion of the settlement to charity and re-organizing its deadline schedule to encourage a "normal five day working week." Whether this genuinely improves the quality of life for EA employees remains to be seen.
Related to that, the San Jose Mercury News ran a story revealing the identity of livejournal blogger "ea_spouse," whose entries about the working conditions at EA (and the comments in response to her entries) brought widespread attention to the story. Not quite Silkwood or All the President's Men, but still a minor case of internet intrigue solved. (But then, maybe we're just bitter because wii never got a signing bonus.)