So for those of you who have been living under a rock for the past week (myself included), there's this thing in San Diego going on right now. it's the San Diego Comic Convention, or SDCC for short. It used to just be about comics, but now it covers al aspects of geekdom, including movies, TV, graphic novels and- yep- video games.

The industry's big names go there to show off shiny new upcoming titles, to get their respective fanbases excited, and to sell lots of merch and publicity for their corporate name and their products. It's kinda cool.

Now me, I'm a retro gamer. With the resurgence of retro gaming- remakes of old titles (Ocarina of Time3DS), new 8-bit style titles (Mega Man 9), and demakes of current titles (Dark Void Zero), it's always nice to see these things from my childhood come back from the dusty recesses of my closet, to bask in the light of day once more.

And so this morning, I log on to check my email, look at blogs, and catch up to what's going on. Lo and behold, I'd missed something. Something important for earlier this week.

Mega Man Legends 3 has been canceled.

For those not in the know, Capcom announced last September that they were going to revive the Mega Man Legends franchise, by making Mega Man legends 3 for the Nintendo 3DS. It was put on hold after the March 11th earthquake and tsunami in Japan, but was reannounced as resumed this past April. Fans rejoiced, angels sang, and my heart grew three sizes that day. "Surely!" I cried. "Surely this means that I shall at last have closure on this wonderful set of games!"

Mega Man legends was a lot of fun for me. I loved playing Legends 1 and 2 when they were out, and to have us left in suspense over the fate of our heroes. To have Capcom tell us- the fans of MML- that we will have the third and final chapter in this story was a moment of joy.

Oh, but it was short lived. As I said above, Capcom announced earlier this week that Legends 3 was canned. Going into the bin with it was the prototype demo that had been worked on as well. 

Capcom might as well have recited a list of every dirty, foul, raunchy joke known to man, and aimed the punchline at their fans. The hurricane of verbal and textual lashing out has begun. If you look at this link (also seen above), you'll see that the list of comments is over a hundred pages long, and after browsing the first five or so, I saw that almost all of them had the same message: Capcom had broken a promise to their fans, and many were planning on outright boycotting the publisher as a result.

There were other posts, from people who were in the devroom, with their own personalized letters to Capcom, or their rants about the whole fiasco, or just musing over the whole sorry series of events.

There are better ways to do business and work with fans. You know Valve software, right? Those guys? They make that multiplayer wargame with the hats (Team Fortress 2), and that awesome pair of games about crazy computers and science experiments (Portal, Portal 2). Or that other game they did, with the scientist and the crow bar and the aliens (Half-Life, Half-Life 2, HL2 Episodes).

See, TF2 was originally done by a bunch of college students in their spare time. Team Fortress Classic was such a hit that they started working on a second one when Half-Life 2 came out.

And then Valve hired them. Suddenly, these guys who were fans of HL multiplayer, and gaming were hired, and could make their mod into a full-fledged game.

Then there was that group of students who were doing a game as their senior project, and then they got hired. And then we had Portal. And there was amazing, overnight success, meme-generating gaming done. (I will not make a cake joke. Really.) And then another group of students at a different university had the same thing happen to them. And then we got Portal 2, which was brilliant. Also, there was space.

When Capcom announced that Legends 3 would use this Devroom thing, it seemed like a sort of halfway version of what Valve was doing. Valve has an amazoing reputation for culling talent from their fanbase, and listening to their fanbase as well. They make amazing games, and listen to input and suggestions from the fans.

Here, we just see Capcom showing they'd rather make a buck on risk-free stuff like Street Fighter Alpha Turbo Extreme Deluxe Seven with Sprinkles, instead of a ten-year-old franchise that had great storytelling, likeable characters, and a plot that had me on the edge of my seat at the end.

So, before I launch into an all out rant, I'll close here. Thoughts, opinions, comments. Share em with the web, gentle readers.