Welcome to the last gaming podcast of 2008! This week we’re flashing back to Nobunaga’s Ambition, a classic turn based Japanese strategy game. We’ll take a look back at the history of FASA and hit up some gaming news, including:
This weeks soap box segement, we ask if the video game release cycle is too fast or too slow.
Mega Man, a series franchise was born in the month of December, a series we rarely hear about today but one that inspired many great games in the side scrolling genre. Mega Man was foundation brick in the early Nintendo consoles and a bread winner for Capcom, he was a mascot to represent a genre typically dominated by Mario.
The name Mega Man, in the 1980’s was synonymous with the word awesome. It was also synonymous with the word difficult.
A character that had so much potential you can now find him in mobile phone gaming and the virtual console in Europe.
“In the year 200X, master robot designer Dr. Thomas Light, and his assistant, Dr. Wily, worked on a project to create human-like robots with advanced intelligence.” (wikipedia) Each robot was designed to perform a specific task, Cut Man was designed to cut down trees, Guts Man is designed to pickup heavy things, Ice man for arctic exploration, etc. His assistant grew envious of Dr Light so he reprogrammed the robots to do his bidding, which was nothing but evil. Your job is to undo this evil.
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This week, there’s no Gaming Flashback or Gaming History, but there is a ton of news and Reader Feedback as Paul is finally present to react to some hate mail.
The news includes some huge items, like:
The Question of the Week: What was the very first home videogame you ever played?
This week’s episode is short due to Jonah Falcon’s impending trip to San Francisco to cover a preview event of Company of Heroes 2, while Paul Nowak gets irritated at the complaints coming out of the Wii U launch.
The news items include:
The Question of the Week: “Do you play real-time strategy games. If so, what is your favorite. If not, why not?”
Derrick, that’s Shogun: Total War (it was the first Total War game in its series so the graphics aren’t that good compared to the recent Total War games). I liked that game too.
If you liked Nobunaga’s Ambition you might like Genghis Khan 2, also made by KOEI (http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/505/Genghis+Khan+II+-+Clan+of+the+Gray+Wolf.html)
What’s your take in Valve’s concept of episodic releases? They explained that with that kind of structure they can easily take advantage of new technologies as they come up, and not have to hold back using new technologies until the next reiteration of their game.
The problems with long release cycles, taking it to the extreme, with Duke Nukem Forever (I think) the reason why it was so delayed was by the time they reached mid-development, their game, the graphics, the engine look so obsolete, so they bought a new engine, and by the time they reached back to mid-development, the then new engine they bought gets outdated, and the cycle repeats.
Something like this happened with Blizzard with their Warcraft Adventures (it was never released).
I think episodic structures work well for some games (Sam and Max), and long development cycles for others. So long as I get a game I can enjoy I don’t really care that much
Here’s what *I* think about it, underdog: They take way too friggin’ long. They keep changing the engine, when all you need to do is create levels.
Look at Telltale Games – now they do episodic content right.
@jonahfalcon: yeah I know, the wait is killing me for episode 3.
but from a developer’s viewpoint, improving the engine continually will do good in the long run since it’ll not only help with that game their making at the moment, but they can use it for their future games as well.
keeping the engine up-to-date with new technologies is always good. I’ve worked with commercial engines that, while popular, they start showing their age in that we couldn’t incorporate features we had in mind because of its limitations that could have been fixed with newer libraries