Episode 262: But Not a Dollar Short

Episode 262 may be a week late, but it’s definitely chock full ‘o podcast goodness, as the full crew rambles on and off subject about this and that. This week’s Gaming Flashback is the old coin-op arcade game Star Castle while begat Yars’ Revenge, with a twist ending to the classic game’s tale.

This week’s news items include:

  • EA deals with Rock Band iOS debacle
  • Microsoft “banned” in Germany
  • Analyst predicts 3.5M sales of Diablo III in first year of release
  • Report: Next Xbox already in production

All that, plus Reader Feedback and the Question of the Week, “What Kickstarter project have you backed or are most interested in buying?”

0 thoughts on “Episode 262: But Not a Dollar Short”

  1. @Diablo III I also think they will be selling more than those numbers tell, but I think that the goal of the “buy one year of WoW, get D3 free” is to get more money into Wow rather than more sales in D3.

    @QOFTW – I’m thinking about backing up Xenonauts, which is X-Com: Enemy Unkown kinda remake. The approach seems different from the official remake, where in Xenonauts they’re trying to keep it closer to the original.

    Meaning there will be two different games based on the original X-Com, and I hope I’ll enjoy both.

    PS:
    @What I meant with Korean Carebear fest (about Tera) – Carebear is what PvP-driven MMO players call to people who don’t like open PvP, full loot and overall activities that involve risking your virtual goodies.

    I didn’t mean it as an offense, its just at first it looked like Tera was bringing a lot of PvP action and a somewhat sandboxy experience, but the comunity started to realize that in fact it is more of a WoW kind of thing with some light sandbox tweaks.

    So for the community that has been waiting for a good game (pvp and sandbox wise) since Ultima Online, it was a bit of a disappointment.

    As for the Korean part, I was talking about the graphics.

  2. Sorry it was late guys, I was stuck with a sick MySQL server at work (yes, I do have a day job) and couldn’t make it then I guess the other guys had some kind of recording difficulty. C’est la vie… Hope the exams went well for everyone!

  3. @EA deals with Rock Band iOS debacle
    Oh man :)) Now it makes sense why EA won the award as the worst company …
    As for what Harmonix would do, well, you’re quire optimistic Jonah. What I foresee is a small update made to the game, then selling it, regardless if you had the old game or not.

    @Microsoft “banned” in Germany
    Oh man … welcome, global players, to a world that does not have a global legal system.

    @Diablo 3
    The minimum specs for Diablo 3 is within my reach. Yet I don’t have broadband, because we live in a remote area; we only have a 3G modem, but that’s not broadband.

    @ Next Xbox already in production:
    Ha! So they might launch it in the holiday season this year.

    As for concentration camps justifying a country to have stricter ratings, then Russia should impose the same rules for their game market. Oh wait, they won the war … nevermind …

    @QOTW
    Hmm … none, so far. I don’t bother visiting the site, so I have absolutely no idea what projects are there.
    I know that all type of ideas get presented there, from games to devices, but still, the site didn’t catch on me.

    “In Soviet Union, TV watches you!” 😉

  4. Wow Paul, you get whiny when you are discussing the new generation of consoles. 😛

    Almost finished with my exams, only 8 left.

    @QOTW: Currently, none. As a 15 year old, I barely have any money for indie games which I don’t know much about yet.

    The list I left you wasn’t a list of kickstarters I was excited for, but a list of successful video game kickstarters since Double Fine Adventure. I just thought it would be an interesting topic to discuss if there isn’t much news. I’m still surprised about how many kickstarters actually reached their goals.

    Here is a list of the links just to make it easier. I picked the ones which have earned at least $100,000 to make the list shorter:
    http://kck.st/xBJJ0N
    http://kck.st/HiG1V7
    http://kck.st/sRf3LL
    http://kck.st/yAfgj2
    http://kck.st/HYQbcy
    http://kck.st/I1vU2N
    http://kck.st/GTp0kn
    http://kck.st/HqymGE
    http://kck.st/HE8nZJ
    http://kck.st/HEHrEK
    http://kck.st/HujJPy

  5. Hey guys missed you last week, glad that you’re back!

    @Next box, although I don’t see it coming out for a while, I agree with Jonah. The sooner this next generation of systems comes out the better it is for gaming in general. Progression is one of the most important factors in the game industry. The better and newer the hardware, the better and newer the games and the opportunity for developers to really do some new amazing things with it. I hate to see the state of gaming stuck at the current peak of what the current gen systems hardware can do.
    The major companies trying to prolong the life of the systems with movement controls was stale and gimmicky before it even started, with a few exceptions. I think we all want some innovation and new things in console gaming, and I feel like we’ve run out of room the the current systems. And hope to see them revealed as soon as possible without hurting current developers of course.

  6. What does it mean if a comment is awaiting moderation? Is Jonah the moderator? If for some reason you can’t read my comment here it is again without links:

    Wow Paul, you get whiny when you are discussing the new generation of consoles.
    Almost finished with my exams, only 8 left.
    @QOTW: Currently, none. As a 15 year old, I barely have any money for indie games which I don’t know much about yet.
    The list I left you wasn’t a list of kickstarters I was excited for, but a list of successful video game kickstarters since Double Fine Adventure. I just thought it would be an interesting topic to discuss if there isn’t much news. I’m still surprised about how many kickstarters actually reached their goals.

  7. @EA and RockBand

    With all the mess ups EA is having lately I am surprised it didn’t shut down yet. Seriously, it’s starting to look like a continious marketing stunt to keep EA in the news. No one can screw the pooch at such a consistent rate.

    @Microsoft banned in Germany

    Corporations trying to skim each others profits. Move along. Nothing to see here. Capitalism at its finest.

    @Next gen Xbox rumours

    Remember the days when we would find out about new consoles AFTER developers began working on the concepts? Yeah, me neither. I am indifferent to when a new generation arrives. I am satisfied with things as they are now but wouldn’t mind if they changed. Since I am quite young and come from the poverty stricken Eastern Europe, if I ever run out of contemporary games to play, I can fall back on the extensive PSX or N64 libraries for new (if rather dated) experiences. It was lovely to hear how you were all arguing about it thou. It was starting to get so heated up, I thought Paul will eventually get FALCO PUNCHED (verbally).

    @QOTW
    Never bothered with Kickstarter. It sounds like a good idea but as a student I have more important things to invest my money into. Although I would join in if they had something like Shenmue III or a sequal to XIII (the comics FPS). I would love to see Kickstarter revive some franchises that were consoidered dead. Oddworld anyone?

Leave a Reply

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

Related Post

Classic Cinematics: DiabloClassic Cinematics: Diablo



Diablo is a classic title with endings for each class you can play, but all give you the same result: hell and torment. You battle your way through a very difficult game, defeating legions of evils minions, piling their corpses upon the floor as you dig deeper into hell.

Eventually, you battle the essence of hell itself: Diablo. However, the ending does not give you warm fuzzies. The ending shows the results of a man with a burden and ends with the transfer of such burden.

Pure evil. Pure fun. Exciting and well crafted ending. For more talk on cinematic endings, listen to the TD Gaming Podcast Episode 75.

Fanboy Turf Wars and Metacritic’s The TurfFanboy Turf Wars and Metacritic’s The Turf

Gamers are passionate about gaming, love their games, follow the industry all while living and breathing all things game. This is the green pastures upon which fanboys are born. As we’ve seen at gamingpodcast.net, where we were hit hard by fanboy rage a few days ago the blood boils with hate and rage.

Although our site only received 30+ comments, other sites whom picked up the article have 100+ comments on the article about Blu-ray and my opinions of it. PS3 fanboys ran wild telling me how my name has been “dragged through the mud” followed (and preceded) by many curse words and name calling, many of which I simply refused to post because of the vulgar content.

They have moved on to larger more popular platforms to voice their opinion, by dinging Gears of War 2 prior to the games release on metacritic.com dolling out a 3.5 user submitted review (which has since gone up upon the release). Why did they target GoW2? Because the 360 fanboys nailed LittleBigPlanet with crappy reviews, says smashpad.com.

The response was to hit Resistance 2 for another bad user review score all while forcing metacritic to change their user review process to only allow users to post reviews after a game has hit store shelves. Metacritic isn’t to blame here, although it is sensible to only allow reviews prior to a games release, the fanboys have found a way to hold their turf wars.

Who’s next? Amazon.com allows reviews as well and, as we saw from Spore, it can get pretty dirty there too. Now that Metacritic is altering their review process will gamers wait until they’re allowed to spam with bad reviews to do so, or will they hunt for new social networking proving grounds to give games a bad name?

Perhaps they’ll compete for google keywords to rank #1 for a fraud review of a title to beat out other sites or they’ll find another popular user-generated review site to scar the name of a to-be released title.

There is a gang war on the Net and it involves fanboys finding social media outlets to spread their hate and deception on the opposing consoles. For us, we’ll stick with gaming and leave the rage to someone else.