Episode 228: Two Thirds Show

This week is a shorter-than-usual show as Paul S. Nowak is away on a birthday vacation. Instead, Jonah and Jordan discuss the Sega Saturn game Burning Rangers, and the following news topics:

There’s also reader feedback and the Question of the Week: What do you look for first in a game’s bullet-point features? Also, check out some of the outtakes after the show ends.

0 thoughts on “Episode 228: Two Thirds Show”

  1. @GameStop developing console and PC game streaming
    This is quite funny, since I remember Derrick and Jennifer talking about GameStop as the iconic brick-and-mortar type of shop, not willing to buckle up on the pressure put by digital distribution channels.

    The big problem I see is the fact that now there are quite a lot of digital distribution channels: Steam, Origin, Desura, not to mention the console based ones. It got crowded, and getting a slice of the pie is (now) very difficult.

    Now, in terms of streaming, the only competition is OnLive. They will need to do something differently, however, if they want to become top dog. I’m curious as to what will that be.

    @Is the Xbox 720 chip set
    Well, the technology is already there. Call it Sandy bridge or ‘fusion’, CPU+GPU+memory controller are here to stay.
    The hardware technology was already tested (well, Intel had some issues with Sandy bridge …) and deemed suitable for marketing.

    SoC means ‘System on a Chip’, meaning everything (CPU, RAM, ports etc) is on the same chip.

    Jordan, I see the 720 as just a hardware upgrade of the 360. It will be (just like 360) still based on PC-like hardware, so I say the 360 games will be perfectly compatible with the 720. This means the 720 already has a good library.

    The way I see it, Microsoft decided to steamroll the competition.

    @industry is failing female gamers
    I say put your money where your mouth is. Instead of complaining about the fact that the market represented by female gamers is not being properly exploited, I say take the opportunity and make a game that will bring you the moneyz 😛

    My sister also loved UT. She also played Quake 3 and Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, but her arena of choice remained UT. Another game she liked a lot was the first Unreal game.
    Back to the UT/Quake3/MOHAA, she also played them in multi player.

    @QOTW
    I take pretty much the same approach as Jordan. I don’t look at bullet points.
    But, be it FPS or RTS, I want a nice, plausible story.

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This week’s Question of the Week: “What game do you want to see a sequel to the most?”

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Sony’s PlayStation 3 has a 10-year plan. We’ve heard about the plan, we’ve seen Sony’s current execution and we’re starting to see some of the titles making their way to the PS3 for 2009. The Xbox 360? Kaz, Sony Computer Entertainment’s head man, made his thoughts clear when speaking to Official PlayStation Magazine.

kaz“Last time I checked, they’ve never had a console that’s been on the market for more than four or five years and we’ve committed to a ten year life cycle, so you do the math…,” he says. He goes on to state that the Xbox 360 won’t have a larger install base by the end of their 10-year plan has been completed, “unless things go really bad.”

Of course, nobody says Microsoft’s 10-year plan isn’t to push out yet another console. Is that wise? We don’t really know, but you can’t count them out on it. Maybe they’ll only have half the install base but two consoles in the market within the next ten years, nobody really knows.

The one major hole we can see in his comments revolve around their claims that the Microsoft doesn’t have any history of a console being on the market for very long. If I recall, Sony managed to squeek one by on Nintendo with the original PlayStation, which changed everything for the next ten years. Sony didn’t have a 5-year track record when they started taking Nintendo down, why does Microsoft need to have an extensive resume as well?

As for Wii?

“It’s difficult to talk about Nintendo because we don’t look at their console as being competitors. They’re a different world and we operate in our world — that’s kind of the way I look at things…” (kotaku)

Say what you want about Microsoft vs. Sony, but it sure sounds like Sony doesn’t want to acknowlege Nintendo’s success because it casts a dark shadow on their own product. Nintendo and Sony have been battling for years, that’s just the way it is and that’s how the industry sees it. When NPD releases numbers, when journalists write articles about consoles and when the war is finished one thing remains constant: all three consoles are included in the equation.