GatorAIDS

Depending on what decade you were born in the Activision company was one of many things: the “first third-party video game developer in the history of gaming” (the 1980′s), the “hardened team of veterans who knew how to keep their old classics alive” (the 1990′s), the “old school company who liked to cash in on their old titles but also created Guitar Hero so that’s okay I guess” (the 2000′s), or now most recently “that worthless shovelware publisher who very rarely puts out anything marginally worthwhile and just shit all over Spyro the Dragon” (the 2010′s). Activision, like the more infamous Electronic Arts, isn’t so much a developer anymore as they are more or less now portals for third-parties (making these mini-developers… sixth-parties?) to pipe their awful games directly onto store shelves. Rather than actually having to posses some amount of technical finesse and knowledge to create a game these “developers” can just copy tech demos from back issues of PC Gamer magazine and release them as games so long as they fork over a handsome amount of money so Activision can make a profit and then press copies of such grand titles as Guitar Hero 17: The Best Tracks from the Performances at Woodstock that Weren’t Rained Out or Canceled Due To Rioting, Hippies Having Sex on Stage, or Hell’s Angels Raping Their Guitarist. Where would we be without such memorable titles?

In a less crap-saturated market. That’s where.

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This week’s episode of GMO2 pits the cast against their first piece of shovelware for the Nintendo Wii: Glacier2. We figured fifteen episodes without a single Wii game was proof enough that we can make more than a dozen episodes without resorting to a default standby. Of all the terrible Wii games out there we settled on Glacier2 solely because of the fact that its implied predecessor, Glacier, doesn’t exist.

We looked.

- Dracophile

[UPDATE: Apparently Glacier does exist. It was a shovelware PC game.]