Gaming Podcast is back after the one week break, and finally truly weighs in on the announcement of the Switch – and aren’t impressed. What does impress the crew is the latest addition to the survival horror genre, Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, which takes the radical approach of being a survival horror game. They also ponder about how great a Zelda/Minecraft game would be.
The next episode will be Gaming Podcast’s 10th anniversary, so longtime listeners are encouraged to write in.
This week comments on the crapshow that is going on with most of the third party publishers. That, and some updates to games that people really care about.
The news includes:
Let us know what you think.
Lode Runner, a game many of us logged hundreds of hours upon. Lode Runner has a great deal of replay value thanks to its great map editor. The game was first published by Broderbund in 1983, but was first prototyped by Douglas Smith, an architecture student at the University of Washington.
The Lode Runner prototype was called Kong and was originally written for a Prime Computer 550 minicomputer on campus, but shortly after it was ported to the VAX minicomputer. Originally programmed in FORTRAN and utilized only ASCII character graphics (the most basic of characters).
In September of 1982 Smith was able to port it to the Apple II+ (in assembly language) and renamed it to Miner. In October of that same year he submitted a rough copy to Broderbund and he’s said to have received a one-line rejection letter, “Sorry, your game doesn’t fit into our product line; please feel free to submit future products.”
The original title had no joystick support and was developed in full black and white…not exactly exciting. So, Smith then borrowed money to purchase a color monitor and joystick and continued to improve the game. Around Christmas of 1982, he submitted the game, now renamed Lode Runner, to four publishers and quickly received offers from all four: Sierra, Sirius, Synergistic, and Brøderbund.
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This week’s gaming podcast covers a bit of the Microsoft Press E3 news, a tiny portion of our own opinions on Kinect and a slight bit of a gaming flashback on Beat ’em and Eat ’em, an Atari 2600 “game.” A game by any other name would have to be a porn… and that’s as close as we get to one. This weeks news includes:
Question of the week: Does Kinect sound more desirable with all the new information and rumored pricing make you consider the purchase?
Nintendo should make money off its intellectual property accumulated over the past decades; I’m sure that a lot of people would like to own an online library like that of Steam, Origin, Uplay, and etc. exclusively of Nintendo games.