That Was The News

April

Interest returned to all things game as April kicked in, with The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion winning you all over - even if Bethesda's infamous horse armour really didn't.

But really there was only one story in April, and that was Nintendo's then-controversial decision to rebrand its Revolution. "It's called Wii. Seriously," we wrote, still struggling to believe. A few days later, Nintendo of America defended the decision.

May

As it turned out though, the timing had been largely inspired. With most of April's announcements procedural at best, as publishers and platform holders saved things up for May's E3 event, you all had nothing else to talk about - and got over it relatively quickly. Obviously we tried to keep you entertained - even getting Nintendo UK boss David Yarnton to call Wii "fresh and all encompassing" - but by the time we landed in Los Angeles you were more interested in the games.

Like Super Mario Galaxy, Zelda, Metroid Prime 3 and the others that made up Nintendo's press conference. On the show floor, queues to go hands-on with the Wii were hundreds deep. Where there had been laughter, many of you soon discovered love. Whether you loved Microsoft was another matter, but a slick conference kept a lot of you up after Nintendo's, with first sightings of Halo 3, Live Anywhere and plenty of other titles, and of course Peter Moore's Grand Theft Auto IV tattoo.

Sony hadn't bothered to mention GTA IV the previous day, even though it's due out on PlayStation 3 as well, but in the end that went down as one of the least embarrassing things about its wretched event in Culver City. We were in a bad enough mood anyway - we had to queue for hours - but somehow Kaz Hirai's prancing smugness didn't make up for it. Nor did the astronomical price, or the loss of rumble support, or the wacky motion sensing (which, remember, was in no way a case of copying Nintendo).

The fallout was like radium soup pulsing down the gullet of Sony's dignity. It turned out PS3 would probably cost £425 here. Force feedback specialists Immersion started telling people that there was no reason for PS3 to dump rumble support. Others agreed. Peter Moore had a pop, obviously. But then so did publishers like Ubisoft. There was confusion about whether the UK would get both PS3 models. And even though retailers were sure that it would still sell when it eventually came out, that wasn't the story. Instead it was things like Ken Kutaragi's post-E3 comments that the console was "probably too cheap". Not a popular view.

Your mouse-buttons found these stories with increasing regularity, and your voices rang loudly across the Internet as you wondered: is Paris Hilton really stupid or is she just badly staffed? Sorry, you didn't realise we'd moved on there, did you. And then Wonder Woman was thrown out of E3 - an expulsion of dire portent for the heaving trade show, despite the redemptive potential of Lara Croft's presence, which saw her admitting that she really does love Eurogamer.

June

With summer fast approaching, serious news more or less dried up in June - unless you count all the exciting stories about how everyone's a liar or a copycat.

As it turned out, you did, with lots of you getting excited about the fact a GTA IV "screenshot" turned out to be a hoax, while Sony was forced to defend itself against rumours that the PS3 specifications were to be downgraded, and lovable scamp Kaz Hirai won himself more fans by slagging off Microsoft. "Every time we go down a path, we look behind and [Microsoft is] right there - we just can't shake these guys," he said. "I wish that they would come up with some strategies of their own, but they seem to be going down the path of everything we do."

Sounds mean, but there is an example that fits - that of Peter Moore suggesting that we might be able to upgrade the Xbox 360 hard disk one day. Sadly there's still no news on that front.

Elsewhere, as World of Warcraft continued to quietly take over the world, many of you started to latch onto stories related to its dominance, gravitating toward otherwise innocuous reports about mass-bannings of gold-farmers. Equally popular was news that THQ's Brian Farrell had thrown his hands up and said nobody could compete with WOW. Sony tried to sound a bit more positive about the future, and there was a lot of clicking on news of its crazy new patent for a handheld computer that's sort of floppy in your pocket and hard in the hand. (Although, come to think of it, most of that traffic probably came from inventive Google searches.)

And Rockstar, even though it would end the month shaming hoaxers, had to begin it with a mea culpa, accepting a slap on the wrist from the FTC over the Hot Coffee nonsense. You all enjoyed that.

But the last word in June, fittingly enough for a man whose films find the bottom of IMDB lists with impressive regularity, goes to Uwe Boll, who became entangled with BloodRayne distributor Romar after he decided he wasn't happy with the way they handled his film. The fact that everybody who saw it wasn't happy with the way he handled it wasn't mentioned, but Romar co-founder James Schramm did have a pop back, declaring: "He complains so much about people stealing from him and taking from him, and the one and only company that's left in Hollywood, us, that have done good business with him, now he's screwing us."

Not for the first time, people getting screwed on the Internet proved popular with you lot, and there'll be much more of that when we come back tomorrow for a look at what caught your eye in the second half of 2006.