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.
In a world of 3D worlds, dynamic lighting and intense shadows we see far too few old school retro style platformer titles. With the advent of Xbox Live Arcade, WiiWare and the PlayStation Network we’re seeing a few new indy developers getting into the game.
Castle Crashers, developed by The Behemoth, is an upcoming side scroller of cutely neat beat ’em up action on Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA). The game will be 1,200 Microsoft Points (USD $15) and will launch August 27th, very soon. This side scroller allows for 4-player action, local or over the Xbox Live system with your friends and there is another mode for battling each other known as Arena.
This is like an artistically rendered version of Golden Axe with Knights! There are many different knights, each with their own powers of attack, Blue Knights can attack with Ice while the Orange Knight attacks with Fire, the Ninja Knight fires shurikens and a host of other unique Knights do battle with their own methods of madness.
If you checkout The Behemoth‘s Castle Crasher Website you’ll see a host of images and their recent trailer showing off the action. It’s safe to say, this is going to be a fast paced slightly silly slightly retro beat ’em up game paying homage to Golden Axe, Double Dragon and TMNT (original arcade one at least) with the graphic style of Alien Hominid HD, their last title.
Stay tuned, we’ll be announcing a contest to win a copy of Castle Crashers in the very near future!
Microsoft has announced they’ll be giving Xbox Live silver accounts access to play some multi-player cross-platform games for free until the fall update. Recently, Microsoft announced free online play with Games for Windows titles, effectively giving PC gamers “gold accounts” to play online.
Most people agree the move to give gold subscriptions to PC gamers was done because PC gamers don’t care to play Games for Windows games online if they have to pay for it. The culture of PC gaming is much different than console gaming on XBL, gamers expect the online experience at no cost; they’re already paying an ISP for network access, paying for a match-making system with a yearly subscription is not desired.
Console gamers don’t have a choice, buying the 360 experience arrives with simple to play games (no drivers, no installs) but limited online choices: pay or go away. Now, silver members will get a little taste of network play, along side PC gamers in the cross-platform Games for Windows titles.
“Supported cross-platform titles include Universe at War, Shadowrun, and Lost Planet: Colonies Edition.” (gamespot)
We question the intention here… is this as a good faith move or are they wetting people’s appitite for XBL so they’ll want to upgrade to gold in the fall? Or, maybe there are some logistical reasons to doing this in the Xbox Live infrastructure to prepare for upgrades where making it free solves a few of their internal upgrade paths and, as a side effect, gives gamers some games to play.
Of course, we’ve seen few people playing Shadowrun or Lost Planet lately. Maybe this will re-popularize a few older titles as well.
This week’s gaming podcast covers a host of topics about Kinect, Diablo and more unknown news from Sony. We’re hitting up a bit of gaming history on Donkey Kong Country and getting the inside scoop on what we can expect from the latest Wii incarnation known as Donkey Kong Country Returns in a short game review from Jennifer.
This weeks news:
We’ve also got some listener comments and a small announcement about what the TD Gaming Podcast will look like after Episode 200.
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.