New On XBox Live: Gnerd's Movie of the Year, King of Kong

King of Kong, the beloved 2007 documentary about two men's battle to become the greatest Donkey Kong player on earth, may not have been nominated for an Oscar (seeing as the nominees consist of four Iraq docs and Sicko, that's hardly surprising) but it's not all bad news for the film. Official Xbox blog Gamerscore has reported that as part of a deal with MGM, February will see the release of King of Kong on XBox live, where hopefully the doc will pick up a bit of gamer-love and achieve the cult classic status it so richly deserves. Because I'll tell you what's not helping it get seen; this god awful DVD cover. WHAT happened?! Did a focus group find that DVD consumers hate good design? Granted, the DVD cover "tells the story" more than the enegmatic one sheet, but when your movie largely focuses on seated men playing arcade games, you might want to highlight the explosively grandiose tone of the film more than the literal events therein.



A look at the other titles coming to Xbox, including Lost, after the jump...

Other Feburary releases for Xbox Live include a bunch of stuff from ABC and Disney, including HD episodes of Lost. The movie releases they're promoting for February are:

* Mr. Brooks (MGM, available in SD and HD)
* The complete Rocky series (MGM, available in SD and HD)
* Films from the James Bond series (MGM, available in SD and HD)
* The Usual Suspects (MGM, available in SD and HD)
* 3:10 to Yuma (Lionsgate, available in SD and HD)
* Saw IV (Lionsgate, available in SD and HD)
* King of Kong (New Line, available in SD)
* The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Crawford (WB, in SD and HD)
* Michael Clayton (WB, available in SD and HD)
* Stardust (Paramount, available in SD and HD)

With the exception of KoK and 3:10 to Yuma, this is pretty dull stuff. Even more disturbing was this list of the top ten movies downloaded of the system since the launch...

1.) 300
2.) Beerfest
3.) Crank
4.) Superman Returns
5.) Employee of the Month
6.) Ocean's Thirteen
7.) Transformers
8.) The Departed
9.) Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
10.) Jackass Number Two

I understand that the Xbox 360 is not the Wii. That it is not a system for everybody, but more serious gamers, and that the Live component is going to shrink that audience even further to a section of the populace who have the time and inclination to do multiplayer gaming and download things not via bitorrent, like normal Americans, but with their all-in-one consoles. BUT COME ON. Beerfest is number two of all time? In the words of Jerry Seinfeld, "Who are these people?"