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 we had a huge gaming podcast but we managed to get it all down to 60 minutes of content but it wasn’t easy. We’re digging through some old history, Yoshi’s Story is our gaming flashback and we covered gaming history on The Biography of Yoshi. This weeks news includes:
No new Rock Band in 2009This weeks soap box segment, we’re looking at game audio and which music made the game experience, what game music we best remember. What’s the theme music you remember best?
Also, checkout the TFC information for DRM technologies and comment.
Interview at Casual Gamer Chick with SomaTone.
Here are some reminders!
Gaming is mainstream and growing, this is obvious to most video game enthusiasts. Even Jack Thompson has failed in taking down the industry in his efforts on video game violence and general FUD. In order to survive in a mainstream environment publishers and developers are going to target a broad demographic to make them as much money as possible.
The game industry, like other entertainment avenues, is a risky business in which publishers have to pick titles they “predict” will do well in the market while passing on other “risky” propositions. While a the good ol’ shooter title will break sales records, the market cannot rely on one genre to carry the business especially considering many of these titles are forgotten within two months from launch. Publishers are going to be forced in expanding their reach to “family games” in order to finance new blockbuster titles.
Enter family gaming.
The idea of designing a “family” game isn’t new to our industry, as a matter of fact, it’s one of the oldest cornerstones of video game entertainment. Pong, Centipede, Pac-Man, Space Invaders and many other classic titles were no doubt playable by the entire family, but things have changed. We’ve evolved from hit titles like Donkey Kong to hit titles like Halo. We migrated from 2D gaming to full 3D adventures and pixel graphics to pixel shaders, but where do we go next?
Nintendo has the correct vision for the next stage of the video game industry and it involves bringing the entire family into gaming. It’s mainstream, right? Mainstream isn’t your dad playing a video game in the basement after the kids go to bed, it’s replacing Sorry with Spore and bringing out Wii Sports and having little family tournaments. We must respect what the big titles have done for the industry in merchandising, novels, sequels and spin-offs but we should not rely on them to carry us into the next generation of gaming.
This weeks gaming podcast covers some fun hot news topics and a gaming flashback of ClayFighter. We also cover a bit of the history on Vicarious Visions some game news, including:
We’re also asking the question, is the Sony decision to NOT drop the price of the PlayStation 3 for the holiday a big mistake?
