The Tuesday Cap is a new regular column capping of and commenting on game news for the past week.

The Big News:

The big new this week on the Australian game scene is actually a bit of a kick in the pants, two even.

It's a familiar story in the flash in the pan world of game development. Following a major new release, years in the making, the development studio behind the game closes up despite decent critical and commercial success. L.A. Noire might have had reviewers gushing and amateur gum shoes flocking to the game store to try their hand at the crime solving sim, but in the wake off it's success Team Bondi have sold their remaining assets and intellectual properties to the company Kennedy Miller Mitchell (no affiliation to me in case you were wondering), a multimedia production company cofounded by George Miller, he off Mad Max fame. In the wake of the sale L.A. Noire license reverts to Rockstar.

Staff with Team Bondi were apparently given the choice of taking a position at KMM or a severance package following the buy out. At this stage it's not clear whether or not Team Bondi will still exist as a studio or whether or not they'll even still be making games as staff of KMM. Details spelling out exactly what happened at Team Bondi aren't out in the open yet but rumours of bankruptcy filings and high turn overs of staff following L.A. Noire's apparently gruelling production schedule have plagued the Australian developer.

Don't feel too sorry for Team Bondi yet though, as the staff at Blue Tongue Entertainment and THQ Australia received an even worse deal when they're parent company decided on some restructuring. For the children in the audience 'restructuring' is a business term for firing a bunch of people in a company to make that company look a little better on graphs and spreadsheets read by people with no souls.

These two subsidiaries of THQ join a very long list of small companies (sixteen and counting) that THQ have bought and then sold. THQ Australia worked primarily on titles based on childrens films such as Megamind and The Last Airbender. Blue Tongue certained made plenty of similar shovelware titles, but they also produced the delightfully fun de Blob series, definitely hinting at a company capable of much greater things than a series of games based on Nicktoons. The restructure away from these types of licensed games has left THQ Australia and Blue Tongue staff out in the cold.

While it's pretty mercenary business tactics by THQ, you can't fault they're logic. The Wii market was not the never ending gold mine for casual game makers people thought it would be and the PS2 is now firmly a device of yester year most parents having upgraded their gaming spawnlings with the latest machines as they dropped in price over the last year. Shovel ware just ain't that profitable anymore and it's probably a wise decision to trim their licensed game studios for smaller companies to work on mobile and facebook games, where fans of movies like Tangled and Alvin and the Chipmunks are more likely to spend their time.

Cool News of the Week:

If you're anything like me (a jaded, grumpy, twisted old man that hates the fact no one likes the games he likes and hates the games everyone likes) you were probably really scraping for a reason to play Modern Warfare 3, it looks great in the way a chocolate cake looks great but you know you ate a whole chocolate cake last night, and while it looks great you still don't want to eat it.

But the Spec Ops Survival mode trailer just. looks. AWESOME. Exploding attack dogs, calling in airstrikes and all the goodies you get in multiplayer in coop, tackling waves of enemies as a team. This is a mode I can get behind.

Stupid News of the Week:

I'm really torn for stupid news of the week. First it was dead set going to Noel Gallagher and the policeman who said video games had inspired the riots in London. Because off course we never had riots in the UK or other developed countries before GTA and Modern Warfare. Except of course for the Brixton Riots in 1981 that resulted in hundreds of injuries, almost a hundred cars being torched and almost fifty buildings burnt down. Or, you know, the St. Paul's riot the year before or the several dozen other UK riots in the 80's, or say the 2005 riots in France, or Cronulla, or the fact Greece has been rioting for about a year now. Forget about  the racial issues, social marginalisation and economic pressures that caused those riots (because those things sure couldn't have been a factor this time right?!). No, instead lets drop out Grand flipping Theft Auto again, a game which, for the uninitiated does not involve any riots, or actual looting and had it's last major release over three years ago.

Yes, anyone be they mentally damaged pop star or brainless bobby, was surely our winner of stupid news story for the week for linking the riots and games. Then I saw this...

Which is apparently the peripheral used for playing GT with the PS Move. For those fanboys who sniggered at the Kinect players who looked dopey holding their hands in front of themselves and pretending to drive? Your uppance has come.

Weird News of the Week:

I’m graciously placing this under Weird News, although it could easily pass as plain old stupid, but director Paul WS Anderson has announced a fifth Resident Evil movie again starring the delectable Milla Jovovich (he actually did a while ago, but just to catch you up). That’s not what’s weird, Every Resident Evil movie has been a solid money maker (the last one Afterlife made almost 300 million on a 60 million budget); no the weird element is Mr Anderson calling out other video game film directors; in an interview with MCV UK he said:

“A lot of video game movies are made by directors who don’t know the video games they are based on from a hole in the head. They don’t do justice to the games, they don’t immerse themselves in the games, they don’t understand what people liked from the games. And that is the wrong approach and clearly those movies don’t work.”

What? He said that? Was his nose bleeding and his eyes twitching when he said that? Despite the greater focus on shooting and action moments in the most recent Resident Evil games, the series has always been about tension, creeping terror and the vulnerability of it’s heroes. Chris Redfield might have arms like tree trunks and a punch that can kill a zombie, but it doesn’t take much to critically injure him. In the Resident Evil game you feel like you’re in constant danger, health crates can even contain poisonous snakes for Jebus sake.

Anderson took these tense survival games and made a Matrix knock off that had a French super model kung fu fighting Doberman’s covered in Vaseline.

Now, I’ve enjoyed all the Resident Evil films, ridiculous and unoriginal as they often are (I actually accidentally switched Resident Evil Afterlife into Spanish when I bumped the remote and watched the whole thing like that, it was much better that way, seriously, give it a try), but the correlation between the games and films is down to few character names who bare no likeness to their game counterparts and a few monsters. Even movie Wesker, the character who seems the most copy and pasted from the game series, lacks the depth and interest of his game counterpart. While the action scenes are cool, and the special effects (excepting the aforementioned baby oil dogs) generally pretty great, I've never seen something in a Resident Evil movie that I hadn't seen in whatever was the hot action horror movie the previous year.

Thanks for reading. If you're an Oasis, PS Move or Paul Anderson fan, feel free to insult my mother in the forums.