It was another slow, boring news day, but a few things got my interest. Check out this cool chart from Square Enix, pinched from Silicon Era (who inexplicably saved it as JPEG, so it looks like crap. Sorry!)
Square Enix Sales Figures April 2008-2009. 10K Increments
It’s pretty cool when game publishers put out their sales figures in such detail. People are misinterpreting things though, so keep some things in mind: FFIV didn’t sell that poorly – it came out in Japan before this fiscal year. The same goes for Crisis Core; it’s not like it was hugely popular in Europe, it just means that it was released in the other territories before this fiscal year.
The interesting numbers to me are how over-the-top popular Dragon Quest V was in Japan in comparison to NA and Europe (keeping in mind that it was only available in the latter territories for 1 month on this chart). Also, it’s nice to see that Chrono Trigger sold so well (790K copies) which many have been waiting to see, just to prove a point to Square Enix. Interestingly, Infinite Undiscovery sold better in North America than it did in Japan, which proves that Japanese gamers are more cautious of new IP’s than their western counterparts. I’m not exactly sure which games are included in “Others” unfortunately. But they sure sold a lot of those!
- As we mention in all our CPU reviews, the speed of the CPU is not nearly as significant as the video card being used in terms of gaming performance. But how do today’s CPU’s compare in playable game settings with crazy multi-GPU configurations? Hard OCP has taken a look at today’s latest CPU’s and played the latest games in super high resolutions on super high end video cards, and this is what they came up with: PC gaming still depends a lot on GPU speed, but faster CPU’s can impact performance. They found that it is still worth going with a quad-core over a triple-core (if you’re considering to get either a Phenom II X4 810 or X3 720), but not by much. Intel’s CPU’s are still faster than the Phenom II’s, and the Core i7 is the fastest of all. As we found in our Phenom II X4 955 review, if you’re spending $250-300 on a CPU, it’s totally worth upgrading to a Core i7 920. Especially if you overclock.
- Been craving some old school FPS action? Check out these completely accurate flash based emulations of Doom, Heretic, and Hexen. Heretic was one of my faves back in the day.
- Google Chrome has been updated, and Javascript speed has been increased significantly. This is especially impressive considering how fast it was to begin with. They also added some features, like form auto complete (finally!), full-screen, and the ability to remove thumbnails from the New Tab window.
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