The Year in Games 2006 - August

We take a look back at the highlights, lowlights and things we'd rather just forget about the past year.

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E3 was in the news again in August when rumours of the death of the event turned out to be spectacularly true. It seems that companies were unhappy about paying (in some cases) millions of dollars for overly flashy stands only to be backhanded by professional and amateur journalists when their games didn't live up to the company's own hype.

Pro Evo would be all Microsoft's - if only in 2006

Desperate to finger someone for the show's downfall, eyes turned to Sony, which was still reeling from a terrible showing at E3 where some treated its multibillion-dollar PS3 as something of a bloated non-starter. Rumours of E3's demise had been around in July already, as part of the post-show chatter that seems to spring up each year. Event organisers denied that this was the end of E3, revealing a significantly cut-down version of the show to take place during summer 2007.

Nintendo had had a great E3 in 2006 and it was carrying that momentum further. The DS hit 10 million sales in Japan as New Super Mario Bros and the non-game Training games led a charge of unique experiences. Even EA said the DS was more fun than the PSP and decided to concentrate more on the portable.

This was giving publishers confidence, who in August announced their support for the Wii. It wasn't just in Japan either, as Ubisoft said it had seven Wii games in development, including yakuza-themed Red Steel.

P L E A S E   V I S I T   O U R   S P O N S O R :

Microsoft was going after a similar audience as Nintendo through its Xbox Live Arcade. Street Fighter II finally arrived in August and the first talk of Konami's PlayStation classic Castlevania: Symphony of the Night came too.

Quite where the PS3 stood in August was fuzzy, mostly because of misinformation. Sony did, however, say that it had not yet started production on the console, even with the launch just three months away. It was starting to look like Microsoft would have a good chance to push the Xbox 360 this Christmas, something made easier when EA and Konami handed both its next-gen football games to the Xbox 360, shunning the PS3 in Europe until the end of 2007.

(Continued...)

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