Episode 414: We’ve Done Better

February 25, 2016| Jonah Falcon| 0 Comment| 6:26 pm

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This week’s podcast isn’t the best, but at least we tried, right? There’s a lot of chatter, and Scott gets really angry at people criticizing Star Wars.

This week’s news items includes:

Iranian state television mistakes Medal of Honor footage for reality
Street Fighter 5 Arcade Mode being considered
Experimental 5D data storage could store 360TB of games for 13.8 billion years
Ubisoft boasts about The Division beta’s huge numbers
HTC’s Vive VR Tech will launch in April priced at $799

This week’ Question of the Week: “When, if ever, will you be getting VR?”

0 thoughts on “Episode 414: We’ve Done Better”

Link says:

March 1, 2016 at 8:32 pm

I don’t know about VR. It could be cool but I can’t afford it.

Reply

Episode 236: Now With PandasEpisode 236: Now With Pandas

This week, Paul is not around, as Jonah Falcon and Jordan Lund discuss the latest news, which includes pandas. Lots and lots of pandas. That, and a Gaming History profile on David Crane.

The news this week includes:

World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria announced
Sony: April PSN outage has resulted in improved service
Deep Silver: “There is a clear technology gap“
Starcraft II DOTA mod will remain free but monetized
“Literally, there’s three of us” on console Diablo III
Minecraft dev wins interim injunction over Scrolls name

With that is Reader Mail and the Queston of the Week: What was your favorite Atari 2600 game?

Has Rare Lost Touch With The Gaming Industry?Has Rare Lost Touch With The Gaming Industry?

In an interesting interview this week at 1up.com, Peter Moore, now at Electronic Arts, believes the skillset that Rare holds is a bit dated for our gaming industry. Moore, best known in his role of VP at Microsoft in their Interactive Entertainment Business division, understands how great Rare and their games once were but seems to believe the industry has passed them by.

Looking at their latest Microsoft titles, mainly Perfect Dark Zero, Viva Pinata and Kameo: Elements of Power, it’s not hard to believe his statements as fact. None of the titles have blown away a market full of Grand Theft Autos, Halo’s and other top selling titles. None of their games hit the epic review scores of Bioshock or Crysis. It’s not all first person shooters are taking the big sales numbers; Spore was given rave reviews by online review sites (sans Amazon) and that’s a completely different style of game.

Popcap’s Peggle has had more fame and glory than some of the bigger titles from Rare, probably made with less money. Is Rare a dying breed of developers with no good direction to react to the changing ways of the game industry?

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Distributed Game Development Using ContractorsDistributed Game Development Using Contractors

Gamers around the world have noticed a large trend in the video game industry in the last 15 years, massive growth with massive projects and unbelievable costs, goals and sales. We’ve seen the impossible become achievable in epic projects like World of Warcraft and huge sales figures from Halo 3 but we’ve also seen game titles fall down in a burning wreck.

Each studio tries to beat the next studio with crisp realistic graphics, real time physics engines, life-like explosions all with huge costs. Does it all sound familiar? If you’re a movie buff you’ve probably seen movie studios cranking out the same style of movie, high computer graphic effects with talented high priced actors making longer and longer films.

The only big difference? A game studio hires most of their talent for full time positions and then has to figure out what to do with them when the project ends. Perhaps this explains Microsoft’s effort to remove game studios like Ensemble, Bungie and FASA, it’s all too much to handle when a high budget project ships and time frees up in the studio.