Microsoft recently announced its intentions to purchase Activision, and... frankly, I'm struggling to find an end to this sentence. On one hand, it seems to be the only way to get rid of detested CEO Bobby Kotick, who will reportedly bail from the company with a golden parachute strapped to his back once the deal is finalized. On the other, Microsoft has been gobbling up a lot of companies lately, recently swallowing Bethesda whole and washing it down with a tall glass of Double Fine. These habitual acquisitions are becoming a problem... someone should stage an intervention before someone walks into Bill Gates' mansion and discovers that he's choked to death on Electronic Arts.
There is one silver lining to this, and I'm not just talking about Bobby Kotick's impending ouster. According to Microsoft's Phil Specter, all the companies within Activision who were forced to toil away on Call of Duty will be freed from this terrible fate, and allowed to make games that are a better fit for their unique skills. This news was announced on Twitter with a meme that carries the same high sense of relief and spirit-lifting liberation as, say, a hostage release or the last episode of M.A.S.H.
Let it all out, guys. The nightmare is finally over!
In other "how did this even happen" news, someone ported Tomb Raider to the Game Boy Advance. This is not an adaptation with creative liberties out the wazoo, as was so often the case on the system, but rather a straight port of the Playstation game. It's not entirely free of compromise, with a lower frame rate and less detail, but seeing a Game Boy Advance handle a fully polygonal video game that was all the rage on consoles five years before its release is a thing of wonder, like watching an ant carry a leaf many times its size back to its nest. This shouldn't be possible, yet there it is, happening right in front of your eyes!
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