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This week’s game releases include Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, and on the very same day, another game (one that’s not so kid-friendly) will be released based on Dante’s Divine Comedy. I decided that this should be a growing trend, games based on awesome literature, so here are some games I’d like to see that fit that mold:

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – There is a classic, hilarious 1984 text adventure based on this classic, hilarious 1979 book. But text adventures are a little hard to get into ever since games got, you know, graphics, so we need a new Hitchhiker’s Guide game. Besides maybe the Ratchet & Clank series, not enough games are funny nowadays.
• Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – This mixture of a famous Jane Austen novel and, well, zombies is getting a movie made of it pretty soon. So it’s the perfect time for a video game beat-em-up adaptation to go along with it!
• The Three Musketeers – This book’s due for a comeback. Lots of good combat actions between muskets and rapiers, and a good story to back it up.

Although Nintendo faired significantly better at this year’s E3 press conference. The memory of last year’s terrible showing will never fade from the collective minds of gamers. Since the release of the Wii, fans have been quite outspoken about how Nintendo had forsaken them in their pursuit of bluer oceans. But there is a good reason for this.

There seems to be a descrepancy between the number of games sold and the latest game reviews scoring. Many games that should not even be looked at on store shelves are outselling all but the first party Nintendo games. Reviewers are gamers, the people buying Wii games are not. In fact, most of them are the casual crowd: soccer moms and seniors.

The head creative director of Nintendo is Shigeru Miyamoto and he is the man who oversees almost everything at the Big N. He is the creator of Mario, Zelda, Nintendogs, Wii Fit and Wii Music. While it is hard not to find the jolly guy loveable, it is interesting to see the direction that he has taken gaming.

At the beginning, when Shiggy first joined Nintendo, he brought life back into the industry with his Donkey Kong arcade game and the NES. The funny thing is, Miyamoto was around the age of 25 at that time, and was no doubt a gamer of the right mindset himself.

At present time, he is easily a senior citizen himself and admits that he does not play much video games anymore and rather relax with his dog and banjo. While the games he produced at the start of his career were considered hardcore and amazing, the games he is at the helm for now are significantly less challenging and almost seemingly practical in some sense.

Perhaps it is a sign of his age and he isn’t that concerned with kids issues. Most Nintendo fans of the past are now around the age that Miyamoto was at when he had a vested interest in core gaming. As fans, perhaps we have not grown up and matured enough to fully appreciate Miyamoto’s new brainchilds like our grandparents can.

Luckily for us, there are still other developers that Nintendo are partnering with to bring us games that we still like to play, like Metroid: Other M and other video games previewed at E3 2009. Read the summary of this year’s E3 and other gaming news on our safe kids website.