November began with good news for Sony, as they passed 30 million sales for PlayStation 4. In response Microsoft looked at the floor, shuffled it’s feet and then muttered it wasn’t going to publish sales figures any more and would be looking at ‘customer engagement’ factors instead. Ubisoft were also looking at their customer base as they posted huge losses, part of which they blamed on releasing games in an unfinished state.
Unlike EA, Activision have avoided the mobile market but in November it decided to enter the race and in the most Actvision-y way possible: they bought mobile giant and Candy Crush maker, King, for $5.9 billion dollars. We were closing in on the end of Kojima/Konami saga this month, as Konami went and closed down the Los Angeles studio responsible for Metal Gear Online.
Koei Tecmo, meanwhile, ruled out a western release of Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 as they did not want to get involved in any discussions about sexism. Unfortunately this created headlines across the globe about sexism and the depiction of woman in video games, so maybe they should have just kept quiet.
Shahid Kamal Ahmad announced he was leaving Sony’s Strategic Content division whilst man of many voices, Troy Baker, went through a load of his characters, including a very good impression of Mr. Nolan North.
Another big game fell by the wayside when Deus Ex: Mankind Divided got delayed by six months and I took a look at every single video-game-to-movie in production in a huge feature.
It was time for the big guns to come out and reviews for the month included Fallout 4 (9/10), Rise of the Tomb Raider (8/10), Need for Speed (7/10), Star Wars Battlefront (7/10), and Call of Duty: Black Ops III (8/10)
Sony continued the good news (let’s face it, they’ve had a damn good year) by unlocking the seventh core on the PlayStation 4, giving it an extra performance boost. PlayStation also picked up King Of Fighters XIV as an exclusive and Microsoft revealed the first batch of Xbox 360 games that would run on Xbox One. Meanwhile, Boris Johnson put on a VR headset and barked like a dog.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3Sx82ARCd8
In the real world, one story dominated the headlines, the terrorist attack in Paris. The unthinkable happened as the French capital was once again subjected to gunfire and the attackers killed 130 people, including 89 who were gunned down at the Bataclan theatre whilst attending a rock concert.
Things went from bad to worse in Syria as Turkey shot down a Russian fighter jet, and France carried out bombing raids in retaliation for the shootings. The so-called Islamic State also claimed responsibility for several suicide bombings in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 43 and injuring 239. It was a month that really highlighted the difficult times the world is going through right now.
November’s weather was remarkably mild but that didn’t stop the newspapers from publishing their annual “It’s going to be bloody freezing” stories – “Four months of Snow” reported the Daily Express. What actually happened was it was dry and exceptionally warm during the first few days, with record breaking temperatures, even though storms ‘Abigail’, ‘Barney’ and ‘Clodagh’ all caused some disruption. Overall the temperatures showed no signs of being actual autumn and remained a couple degrees above the average.