Titillating gaming news I’ve come across in the last couple of days. Some old, some new – all pants-bulging!

Ikari Warriors Publisher Passes On [gamesindustry.biz]

After a lengthy battle with illness, businessman and civic leader Leland P. Cook Jr. passed away on Friday, November 6, 2009. He was 75. Gamers might find this significant as Cook was one of the founders of Tradewest, the now-defunct video game publisher that reached prominence in the mid-‘80s.

When Pundits Attack: Game Sales vs Game Quality [Chris' Survival Horror Quest]

This means that there is a correlation between game quality and sales which can be stated thusly: bad games do not sell. This does not mean that good games always sell, just that bad games cannot be saved by marketing. The data also suggests that the games that sell the most have to not only be really good, they also have to be marketed heavily. The conclusion is not that marketing is irrelevant, only that its powers are limited without the help of high quality game play.

The End of Hit Points [Trembling Hand]

While it stretches plausibility for an individual to take more than one hit from a mace (although Conan was known to shrug them off, to some degree), it is utterly suspension of disbelief-breaking to weather several hits from a phaser.