TD Gaming Podcast 84: A Mount That Poops

August 19, 2008August 19, 2008| schommerschommer| 0 Comment| 10:43 pm
Categories:

This week we take a walk back in retro gaming history at Super Mario World, covering a bunch of great user questions and chat a bit about our favorite RTS of all time based on a user question. In the news this week:

We also announce the winner of Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords – Collectors Edition! This show was packed with content and material, we had to hold off on the Gaming History for this week, but we’ll hit it next week.

0 thoughts on “TD Gaming Podcast 84: A Mount That Poops”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Post

Xbox 360 Price Cut Leads To 100-Percent Sales IncreaseXbox 360 Price Cut Leads To 100-Percent Sales Increase

Why release a single block buster game with a two week pop when you can simply lower the price of your console and boost sales by 100%? That’s a question Sony may be asking themselves right now, as Metal Gear Solid 4‘s hype may have lasted years but the sales and console unit sale boots lasted a month.

Gamers show how they feel about costly consoles with their wallet. With 100% increases in sales, it’s clear that many gamers have been holding out from the “next-generation” of consoles because the price was too high. Now, Microsoft can report huge sales numbers this quarter with a special thanks to their price cut. Imagine the sales boost the PlayStation 3 would have if it was competitive in price?

Microsoft could have kept the savings of manufacturing costs to themselves but they chose to pass savings onto the consumers. The increase in unit sales means more households own the product and newly released games will probably see larger spikes now that people have invested in the 360 console.

End result, developers will want to produce games for the Xbox 360 because they’ve got a larger audience and publishers will be less likely to pick Sony as an exclusive because the 360‘s got sway in the market. It might not be a Wii in total sales records but it’s not half bad!

(Thanks, gamasutra)

Read MoreRead More

Gaming Flashback: Lode RunnerGaming Flashback: Lode Runner

Lode Runner, a game many of us logged hundreds of hours upon. Lode Runner has a great deal of replay value thanks to its great map editor. The game was first published by Broderbund in 1983, but was first prototyped by Douglas Smith, an architecture student at the University of Washington.

The Lode Runner prototype was called Kong and was originally written for a Prime Computer 550 minicomputer on campus, but shortly after it was ported to the VAX minicomputer. Originally programmed in FORTRAN and utilized only ASCII character graphics (the most basic of characters).

In September of 1982 Smith was able to port it to the Apple II+ (in assembly language) and renamed it to Miner. In October of that same year he submitted a rough copy to Broderbund and he’s said to have received a one-line rejection letter, “Sorry, your game doesn’t fit into our product line; please feel free to submit future products.”

The original title had no joystick support and was developed in full black and white…not exactly exciting. So, Smith then borrowed money to purchase a color monitor and joystick and continued to improve the game. Around Christmas of 1982, he submitted the game, now renamed Lode Runner, to four publishers and quickly received offers from all four: Sierra, Sirius, Synergistic, and Brøderbund.

(more…)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Read MoreRead More

Gaming Podcast 125: HologramsGaming Podcast 125: Holograms

This week we’re tackling a very small bit of E3 news because our recording occurs on Monday night. We did, however, get a bit of Microsoft E3 news and do not worry, we found lots of other great topics to discuss this week. We also tackle some great user write-ins and other crazy stuff.

This weeks history: The Bard’s Tale and we’re taking a look at what Satoru Iwata has done for Nintendo and the shoes he had to replace. The question of the week is crazy this time around, if you played the Video Gamer class in an RPG, what attributes and abilities would you have?

Read MoreRead More