The gang discusses the just-released Captain America: Civil War as well as mention the upcoming X-Men: Apocalypse film, but they also do get into this week’s news, which is heavy on the Nintendo side.
The news includes:
This week’s Question of the Week is “What era war would you like to see in a shooter?”
This week is full of crazy energy. We seem to have gone 100% Sony on news chatter but we level that out with some great community feedback about our question of the week. We hit a little Burgertime action in our gaming flashback and bust through some Data East company history.
Analyst says Sony Motion Control beats MS NatalThis week we’re asking the question, what is your favorite end-boss in a video game from todays games to the past classics?
Nintendo’s WiiWare channel is reported to be doing well (says Nintendo) and their Virtual Console games continue to invoke nostalgic downloads. Now, as Networked based gaming slowly starts to crawl on the console Nintendo has begun to realize they’re going to hit some storage issues.
The 512MB of internal flash memory is a bit lacking, especially considering you can purchase a 2GB flash drive for under USD $50.00 in todays market. While Sony and Microsoft work to increment their disk capacities in 20GB intervals Nintendo’s still trying to figure out how to solve their internal storage issues.
Although we initially heard that geeks would be the ones to hit the storage limitations Nintendo’s North American President and COO is readily admitting the pending issue, “we have a consumer base who loves virtual console. We have a userbase who really is enjoying WiiWare content. So for us really our challenge really is how do we satisfy all these consumers who are loving all of the product we make available on a download basis?”
The challenge in being a Japanese based company is understanding how American users consume your product. We’re much more likely to download content and spend money on products we’ve purchased 20 years ago. This is why we’ve got an American based Nintendo HQ to understand the ways of American thinking and trending.
While Nintendo Europe’s Europe’s Laurent Fischer sees only “geeks and otaku” utilizing the minimal disk capcity we here in the States can consume this space overnight. Imagine if we had downloadable content for Rock Band or Guitar Hero to pull down and play!?
As this becomes, as Reggie put it, a “mainstream problem” Nintendo is going to find their harder core demographic moving to other consoles that do it right and allow for expandability. There is a reason, after all, the other consoles cost a bit more to buy.
(Thanks, IGN)
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.
Anyway, a well done series, classic RPG and helped build a foundation for games like Morrow Wind and Oblivion in my opinion.
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