Leaks seem to be de rigeur for Bungie's new game, codenamed and possibly titled Destiny. First, court documents relating to legal disputes involving new publisher Activision revealed some of the general parameters of the game and the intended products, platforms and publishing schedules.

Now, apparently a third party employee forgot a flash drive at a restaurant, and supplied the gaming press with a few more documents and a few pieces of what appears to be concept art. In response, Bungie appeared to acknowledge the leak as legitimate, and replied with a bit of concept art of their own.

Since the leaked images have all been watermarked from hell to breakfast so that sites like IGN can stop other sites from stealing their "found footage" so to speak, I'm only going to take a close look at the shot Bungie actually wanted us to see, as well as the text quoted by some of the leak stories, and only describe the other images to try and back up some interpretation of the text or the official image. If you really need to see those other images, I'm sure the Internet will find a way to accede to your wishes.

Between the official image and the quoted portions of the text, it's possible to build up a few tentative ideas about what to expect from Destiny, and the kinds of ideas and themes the new game might share with past Bungie works.

This article boils down to this paraphrase:

Everyone agrees sequels are bad. I mean, not all sequels are bad, but sequels in general are bad. And just like every game downloaded by a pirate is a lost sale, every dollar budgeted for a sequel is a dollar less for one of the kind of fun and original games they made when I was a kid and they just don't make anymore because the industry is full of beancounting sellouts who like sequels because they're safe. And that's why I don't want another Bioshock game.

This is almost complete and utter poppycock. It's so ridden with nostalgia masquerading as judgment, logical fallacies taken as common knowledge, and flawed premises that it's hard to know where to begin. But the beginning is as good a place as any.

"this is not a hate piece towards the Bioshock franchise. It is a deep look at one of the biggest problems in the video game industry right now, sequels and how they kill originality/creativity."

So we've got sequels kill originality/creativity. Let's separate those out.

Thank goodness Sony is a Japanese company, because they can at least claim that English isn't their native language when someone points out the nonsense in claims ilke the latest regarding PlayStation 3 sales.

Things start out fairly innocuously:

"In terms of units, it is true that PS3, as compared to last year, is slightly worse, but on a full-year basis we believe we are on track to sell the 10 million units that I said at the beginning of the year."

Okay, that's not so bad. Specious perhaps, but possible. After all, the fact that 2008 was not as good a year for them as 2007 doesn't necessarily mean that 2009 won't be as good as they are planning. It would strongly indicate that, given that presumably they predicted that 2008 would be as good or better than 2007 (which they did); and if that prediction turned out to be wrong, might not this one, too?

Then they start digging:

"...Relatively speaking, [compared to] the growth of other platforms, we are behind, but it's not the case that we are not meeting the target."

If they are behind the other platforms but still meeting their target, this means they were planning to be behind at this stage? I think that's not true. I seem to recall that initial projections from Sony for the PS3 included catching up to MS and the Xbox 360's one year head start fairly quickly, and in no way included getting trounced, month after month, quarter after quarter, by Nintendo, a competitor that many commenters gave up for just about dead last generation, myself included.