Episode 293: Master of the House

This week sees the return of Paul Nowak from his holiday vacation. There’s plenty of news items and some reader feedback, but also the return of Gaming History as the crew checks out the failed portable console, the Game.com.

The news for this week includes:

  • Age of Empires Online won’t be seeing any more content
  • Sony patents tech to stop used games and rentals
  • Major Nelson posts countdown to E3 Expo 2013
  • PvP mode for Diablo IIIĀ delayed yet again
  • Telltale is in the very early stages of The Walking Dead Season 2

Finally, the Question of the Week is simple: “What did you do on your holiday break?”

0 thoughts on “Episode 293: Master of the House”

  1. @Sony patents tech to stop used games and rentals
    So basically both the medium and the console will carry unique IDs. Those get sent to Sony where they get associated, then if the game gets played on a different console, with a different ID, what then? What happens to people who bought new consoles?

    Digital only is not a guarantee. In case of Steam, for example, you can create an account for one game, then share the account info. And if you also create an e-mail account specifically for it, then the game/Steam account/e-mail account can be re-sold easily.

    Backward compatibility is important. Heck, I still play games older than 10 years.

    @PvP mode for Diablo III delayed yet again
    Meh, who cares; I’m with Paul on this one.
    From all the games that I saw in 2012, it’s actually World of Tanks that still stays on my radar. Too bad I have a crappy connection and I can’t play it.
    Back to Diablo 3, even if I had a good connection, I wouldn’t buy it because of the DRM system. Just because I hate that kind of DRM.

    @Telltale is in the very early stages of The Walking Dead Season 2
    Didn’t play the first one, but during the night watches when the dog was recovering from surgery I watched some lets plays, and it looked very good. I mean people cried over it.
    If the second one is just as good, then the devs and publishers will make quite some money.

    Shooters being dead: dunno. Sure, you get more and more RPG games that use the first person perspective, but I wouldn’t call FPS-es dead. Not after Serious Sam 3.

    @QOTW:
    Man :), besides regular chores (cleaning up the place, help out with cooking for Christmas and New Years Eve meals), I got to make cakes: brownies, cheese rolls, and the New Years Eve cake … mmm, yummy …
    I also got to play board games with the close family, got to play Serious Sam 3 BFE (damn, I missed you Sam!) and Rush for Berlin. The second one actually caught me by surprise, it’s quite a fun and yet challenging game.

    Shortly, I enjoyed my holiday a lot.

  2. @It’s time to go to the A-O-E-O

    A bit stupid to offer premium content for free. Anyone who cares enough about extra content will play the game long enough to get it for free. People who don’t care won’t pay. Kind of defeats the purpose of freemium games.

    @Turning PS4 into a software prison

    They might as well sell PS4 with a slot for a modchip. This tech won’t stop people buying PS4 but they will crack it on purchase. I don’t think SONY will go through. Simply because any of it’s competitors (i.e. XBOX or WiiU) will gain all SONY looses if they stay DRM free. This will only work if everyone does it.

    @E3

    Can’t wait for E3. I too think that the current gen has burned out. The gaming industry needs something fresh.

    @PVP in Diablo 3

    Oh wait. Diablo 3 was out?

    @Walking Dead

    Picked up the entire series during the Xbox 360 christmas sales. For 800 points. Sale purchase of the year. I enjoyed it. Although I did find it to be more talk less action. Very basic point and click style. But great value for money.

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I miss old SSI games and all the beauty and wonder they brought me as a child. Perhaps it’s more of the feeling of playing old MS-DOS games and that no worries feeling of playing games all summer long when your parents are out working; no cares in the world but that of the evil dragons and goblins of an RPG world. Secret of the Silver Blades arrived in May of 1990, developed and published by Strategic Simulations Inc (SSI), a company we covered in our gaming history back in TD Gaming Podcast Episode 9.

Secret of the Silver Blades is actually the third in a four-part game series which was eventually packaged in the Gold Box editing of the SSI games. It was a continuation of the game Curse of the Azure Bonds and the first in the series: Pool of Radiance. The cool part of the series was the leveling system where each would let you level to a certain limit just like most modules in D&D games, this game let you get to level seven which means a Mage could use the cool Delayed Blast Fireball spell which was one of my favorite magic spells in D&D (yeah, I’m a dork.)

The graphics were a whopping 16-colors, with slight graphical improvements over the other two prior games. This game didn’t have an overworld map like the others, going full first person for the length of the game. Another great enhancement was the ability to use the arrow keys to navigate menu’s without the need for “hot keys” like older SSI titles, given the game is very much menu-based for combat, equipment and inventory management it was very handy to have the use of those nice little arrow keys.

You create your party and start adventuring in a game engine very similar to all the games before it, so introduction to game mechanics was minimal, you could advance your characters further in level and, most importantly, import characters from previous games. The D&D world is really a character-driven game environment and you grow fond of your characters and understand the best ways to battle with them, importing is key and still, today, is a big part in well done RPG expansions (Guild Wars is a great example). Unfortunately, many games fall short of character import and it kind of blows away some of the magic of an RPG.

One of the frustrating issues with Secret of the Silver blade is the limitation on levels for the Cleric, because they can’t level up past 7 they can’t get the good ressurection spell, only allowed to use Raise Dead which lowers your characters constitution by 1 (much like the traditional D&D rules). However, given its a video game and not a paper-dice based game, the raise dead penalty is annoying, so it was easier to save often and re-load when you died to try again and avoid the penalty. I do recall their being some scrolls or something to get back your constitution penalty… but it’s been awhile I might be making that up.

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