Todays Review

'Call of Duty,' Wii U can't stop video game slide

Despite new console and fresh 'Call of Duty,' 'Halo' games, video game sales dipped again.

7:11PM EST December 6. 2012 - Despite fresh titles from powerhouses Call of Duty and Halo, as well as the debut of the Nintendo Wii U, video game sales have plunged for the 12th straight month.

Total video game sales were down 11% compared to the same period last year, according to a report from the NPD Group. Hardware posted the biggest decline, falling 13%.

Not surprisingly, Call of Duty: Black Ops II and Halo 4finished as the top two video games for the month. The open-world adventure Assassin's Creed III, set during the American Revolution, ended the month in third place. It was also a good month for the sports genre, occupying four of the 10 spots in November.

The complete top 10 (publisher in parentheses):

1. Call of Duty: Black Ops II (Activision)

2. Halo 4 (Microsoft/343 Industries)

3. Assassin's Creed III (Ubisoft)

4. Just Dance 4 (Ubisoft)

5. Madden NFL 13 (Electronic Arts)

6. Skylanders Giants (Activision)

7. Need For Speed: Most Wanted (EA)

8. NBA 2K13 (2K Sports)

9. WWE 13 (THQ)

10. FIFA Soccer 13 (EA)

NPD analyst Liam Callahan noted that fewer games were released in November, compared to November 2011. However, the top five games had 5% more sales, unit-wise, than the top five from 2011.

"These new titles are holding their own and generating the same number of dollars per title on average," he said. "Unfortunately, declines this month stemmed from softer sales from catalog titles, which launched outside of this month, with dollar sales down 11 percent, collectively."

Other optimistic points: November's 11% overall decline was the smallest year-over-year decrease in 2012. "This is a sign of momentum going into the December holiday period," Callahan says.

Nintendo announced that it sold more than 425,000 units in November -- and more than 1.75 million systems (Wii U, Wii, 3DS, DS) in the U.S. Callahan noted that Wii U sales generated 21% more revenue than the Wii launch in November 2006,. "With an average price 35% higher for the Wii U at launch, compared to the Wii, this is an example of how consumers are willing to come out and spend when they see the value of the product."

Callahan compared this time period to November 2005 when the industry began transitioning to the Xbox 360 and, the following year, the Wii and PlayStation 3. Retail video game sales, he says, "are nearly twice as big as they were then. This really demonstrates the long-term health of retail sales even as many platforms are quite late in their lifecycles."

Additionally, NPD estimated that consumers spent another $410 million on digital games -- such as full game downloads, add-on content and online social games -- and $207 million on used games and rented games, to bring the month's total spending to more than $3.1 billion.

In other platforms, Xbox 360 led system sales for the 16th consecutive month. Microsoft said it sold 1.26 million Xbox 360s in November.

Sony's PlayStation Vita handheld had its second highest month of sales since launching in February, thanks to attractive bundles with third-party software such as Assassin's Creed: Liberation.

Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter deemed the November sales results -- a record 12 months of declines -- as "worse than I expected."

The culprit, he says, was Wii U software sales, which came in about $50 million below expected, and software sales for Nintendo handhelds, the DS and 3DS. "Wii U hardware was sold out, we checked, so it's a supply issue," he says. But Wii U software sales "was abysmal, only Super Mario sold any meaningful units."

Steady Wii U sales should help the industry to growth in early 2013, along with arrival of new games such as BioShock Infinite, Pachter says. Then, the eventual new consoles should lead to an industry rebound in 2014.

Gamers can get in the act during Spike Video Game Awards

11:32PM EST December 6. 2012 - This year's edition of Spike's annual Video Game Awards show, to be broadcast live on Friday, looks to get gamers involved.

Rather than just sit back and watch, viewers can tune in on Xbox Live and interact with the show using Microsoft's SmartGlass application. Poll questions will pop up regularly during the telecast, 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT, and viewer responses will affect how the show progresses.

"It will be everything from what do they want to see (host Samuel L. Jackson) do next to which (video game) premiere we play next to 'The coolest weapon' and Sam will walk out with it," says Casey Patterson, executive producer of the VGAs and Viacom's executive vice president of entertainment production. "They will be programming the content they want to see when they want to see it via these questions in real time. And our host will be in a conversation with them live, which is just unbelievable."

In addition to live broadcast on Spike and Xbox Live, the 10th annual Spike VGAs, dubbed "VGA Ten," will also be simulcast on MTV 2, MTV Tr3s, Spike.com andGameTrailers.com. (And USA TODAY's Brett Molina (@bam923) will be live blogging here on usatoday.com if you want to add another screen to your experience.)

Joining Jackson will be several hosts of the previous award shows including Jack Black, Zachary Levi, Neil Patrick Harris and Snoop Lion, known as Snoop Dogg when he hosted in 2004. Black and Tenacious D will perform as will Linkin Park.

Also planned: a retrospective of a decade's worth of video games and live skits including one that tweaks Hobbit director Peter Jackson and debuts a new video game mode, "Samuel Jackson mode."

And in addition to announcing awards such as Game of the Year – the nominees areAssassin's Creed III, Dishonored, Journey, Mass Effect 3, The Walking Dead: The Game – new trailers for already announced games such as The Last of Us will be shown, as will five debut trailers.

"For hard-core gamers this is the first place you will ever see those new games," says the show's executive producer Mark Burnett. "Imagine if the Academy Awards was on and they announced five movies that no one has ever heard of. That is the equivalent. You will be on a rip-roaring, two-hour ride of television."

Viacom decided to team with Microsoft on interactivity to keep the attention of the second-screen generation. "The distraction is there no matter what, we are just harnessing that," Patterson says. "We are now, for the first time, engaging in that so it so that rather than (viewers) doing something else, they are fully engaged with us."

It's a perfect fit, says Marc Whitten, Microsoft's chief product officer for Xbox. "The first audience that wants more from their experience than just to sit back and watch it is the gaming audience. They are the tip of the spear of a change that is happening all around us," he says. "This is a great example of where entertainment is going and the interactivity is really going to show off the future of television today."

Prior to the broadcast, viewers should download the SmartGlass app from the Google Play store or iTunes store.

Television must embrace the second screen and interactivity, says Burnett, who createdThe Apprentice, produced Survivor and is executive producer of The Voice. "Survivor was one of the first shows to embrace social media and on The Voice we have tweets on the screen," he says. "NBC are brave enough to step up and realize it cannot be all NBC.com, so we have Facebook and Twitter and all kinds of different social media coming together. We have tweets on the screen and real feedback in that moment to the coaches while live on air on Twitter."

For a while, there will be a love-hate relationship with the second screen, Burnett admits. "On one level, certain people stuck in a time warp don't like the second-screen thing. But that is like when people said, 'Why would you need a cell phone?' I completely believe you will look back two or three years from now and remember the VGAs were the first show that did this. It's going to be a normal thing."

'Menace II Society' filmmaker tackles 'Crysis 3'

Another big video game franchise, 'Crysis 3' is getting a web video treatment from a filmmaker. Albert Hughes, who directed Menace II Society and From Hell with brother Allen, is helming a seven-episode series based on the game, developed by Crytek.

11:41AM EST December 5. 2012 - Another big video game franchise is getting a web video treatment from a filmmaker.

Albert Hughes, who directed Menace II Society andFrom Hell with brother Allen, is helming a seven-episode series based on Crysis 3, the futuristic first-person shooter due Feb. 19 for PCs, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. "The 7 Wonders of Crysis 3" series will begin hitting next week on Dec. 12 with debut of the first episode "Hell of a Town."

Each episode will explore one of the seven areas in the game's setting, New York City in 2047, which has been encased in a "nanodome." It's there that main character Prophet continues his battle against the Cell Corporation.

Hughes says that when he was introduced to the game's environment, it reminded him of a National Geographic show World Without Humans. "It became just overgrown jungles and rain forests. That's the closest thing I've seen rendition-wise to what is going on in the nanodome," he says. "New York is like a rain forest. It's like a jungle. There are swamps and levels where you are almost in the clouds because you are on broken down skyscrapers. … It's a very eerie strange kind of environment."

Describing himself as a retired gamer – "I was a big sports guy in the Nineties with NBA Live and Madden." – Hughes used says that he "took my ignorance as an advantage. They were not coming to me because I was a gamer, they were coming for the filmmaker side."

Crytek is known for its visual prowess and the new game wowed Hughes, who in the past who several years earlier had worked on a Ghost Recon game. "This time I think I was more shocked by the lighting and the grading and how photorealistic everything has gotten," he says. "I was really blown away and surprised and shocked by level of detail."

When it came to setting up shots and directing the sequences, Hughes says the Crytek designers had, within the game development software, all the tools that filmmakers need. He had to restrain himself from moving camera angles just for the sake of it. The world itself is a gem," he says. "I don't need to do anything special to tell the audience, 'Hey, look at this.' When you see one still from that world, you are like 'Oh, my god'."

The Crysis 3 web series comes on the heels of the Halo 4 prequel series Forward Unto Dawn. Hughes expects projects like these to become commonplace going forward. "This is a new generation. They may be into the theater experience but they are also into their iPads and iPhones and laptops," he says. Studios are "going to the Web and using TV and, of course, using apps and different kinds of mediums to get the marketing across."

Webisodes were created to flesh out the back story of characters in Hughes' last film The Book of Eli. "It doesn't matter what the subject is as long as it is good and the story shows through," he says.