So you’ve had all the family togetherness, awkward dates, spoiled sports stars and overrated high-brow writing you can take this weekend? We’ve compiled The Favs, some of the best connected entertainment stories from this past week. It’s all that you need to feed for intellectual growth — short of going back to work tomorrow morning. Some of it is original reporting, and some of it is the work of others.
[divider] Gaming [/divider]Nintendo has a disease.
There’s no doubt about it. Nintendo, makers of the Wii U gaming console and editions of Mario that seem to endlessly flow from video game stores everywhere, is in trouble. This week the company marked down its forecasts for its current Wii U gaming console by a whopping 70%. The move sparked debate from everyone. Can Nintendo survive? Will its sales finally force it to embrace newer technologies and putting games on phones? Polygon’s Ben Kuchera asks those questions and more in The Wii U is a Symptom of A Larger Disease. Clearly, the entire gaming community isn’t close to coming to a conclusion in the near future, but Kuchera’s framing of the actual situation at Nintendo is spot on.
[divider] Media [/divider]Less Indies are a good thing.
If you thought that the rise of indie games was causing a stir — think titles like Braid and Super Meat Boy, that’s nothing compared to the amount of ire the new incoming wave of indie films are generating. Apparently, so dangerous is this epidemic of independently written and independently produced movies that there are some entertainment insiders lobbying for distributors to stop buying so many films. No, you didn’t read that wrong. This week a piece in The New York Times entitled As Indies Explode, An Appeal for Sanity makes an impassioned plea for less independently made films, saying that “flooding theaters isn’t good for filmmakers or filmgoers.” We’ll leave you and the money you spend at the box office to come to your own conclusion on if that sounds elitist or not.
You want more music subscription services?
If we’d have told you that the world needed another music subscription service, you’d have laughed in our faces. We get it; who needs yet another app and service that’s designed to do what other apps and services already do pretty well. That’s why we found it interesting that Paul Thurrott of the WinSuperSite felt it necessary to actually cover the impending launch of Beats Music, the upcoming music subscription service from the folks who turned headphones into a lifestyle choice. According to Thurrott, the completeness of the Beats Music ecosystem, that is the service will launch with a ton of apps, and its human curators might make it a game changer. We weren’t exactly sold by Thurrott’s Beats Music Preview, but we are interested. That’s saying something for longtime fans of Xbox Music & Zune.
Find any interesting longform gems that you think others should know about? Leave those in the comments.
