Episode 455: It’s Been a Fun Ten Years

Back in 2007, Derrick and Jennifer Schommer, along with Don Dunn started the Gaming Podcast, with their unique sense of humor and take on the biz of video games (as well as starting a popular World of Warcraft guild.) The trio would move on, with Derrick starting his Everyday Drinkers podcast and Common Man Cocktails site. Jonah Falcon took over, and merged it with the Videogame Roundtable. In that time, we’ve had hosts including Jordan Lund, Paul S. Nowak, Dan Quick, Scott Dirk and most lately, the inestimable T.J. Denzer. We’ve also had guest hosts including Hilary Goldstein and the late Andrew Yoon.

This episode celebrates the past 10 years, including an intro by Dan Quick and Paul S. Nowak joining this week’s episode, to discuss this news:

  • ‘Father of Pac-Man‘ Masaya Nakamura dies at 91
  • Nintendo is gearing up for more mobile games, plans 2-3 per year
  • $500 million awarded to ZeniMax in lawsuit over the Oculus Rift
  • Asheron’s Call comes to a quiet end after 17 years

Let us know how long you’ve followed the podcast for!

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PSN Outage Causes 200% Rise in PS3 Trade-InsPSN Outage Causes 200% Rise in PS3 Trade-Ins

The patience of PlayStation 3 owners is wearing thin as retailers are reporting a 200% increase in PlayStation 3 trade-ins, usually for Xbox 360 consoles, as well as sales slumps for PSN points cards and fewer multiplatform game sales for PS3.

“In the first week of downtime we did not really see any major change in sales or trades,” says one source, a store manager at a major UK retailer speaking on condition of anonymity. “However from the second week onwards we have seen an increase of over 200 per cent on PS3 consoles being traded in, split almost 50/50 between those trading for cash and those taking a 360 instead.”

Another UK source has reported that the independent retailer had seen a “massive increase” in the volume of PS3s traded in in recent weeks, and has pegged the biggest trade-in demographic as “the hardcore online shooter crowd”, who are logically the group most likely to defect when their online gaming is wiped.

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DSi Will Be Region-Locked, Sad Face…DSi Will Be Region-Locked, Sad Face…

One of the greatest things Nintendo has done was allowing the DS to be unlocked for regions. This allowed gamers around the world to share their favorite games from all cultures and countries with just a click of the “buy” button at an online store.

The DSi loses this great freedom by locking it down to a region. “Nintendo DS software is region free so you can play any DS software on DSi from any region. You can also browse the internet on your DSi wherever you are in the world and exchange your photos with friends from around the world,” says Nintendo (CVG).

Much like the US Entertainment Industries need to lock down everything and contribute to global piracy, Nintendo follows suit with their hand-helds, tis a sad day indeed. Of course Nintendo reasons it all away by yelling parental controls and making it easier for regions to access their own content.

“DSi is region locked because DSi embeds net communication functionality within itself and we are intending to provide net services specifically tailored for each region. Also because we are including parental control functionality for Nintendo DSi and each region has its unique age limit.”

Specifically tailored for each region is a nice way of saying that each region has to pay the penalty of not being “first” (second, or third) to get some cool new features. Although Nintendo could put emphasis on the region the gamer lives in with complete access out of those bounds if they wanted, they’ve chosen to use this as a crutch to lock users out of content.

Users will get their content, of course. It just means more home brews, software hacks, hardware hacks and workarounds for the system. If that’s what Nintendo is trying to inspire, then they’ve done their job right.

However, wouldn’t it be great if they could just come out and say “we don’t want certain people accessing specific content until we say you can.”

Gaming Podcast 140: Cookie CutterGaming Podcast 140: Cookie Cutter

This week we’re pulling a 2-person shift while Don is away being sick and tired. We substituted his astute comments with extra epic insight… okay, we just did as best as we could without him. We flash back to Venture, we do an audio review of Zuma’s Revenge and we kicked it free style with some news:

  • podcast-200x200Halo: ODST Reviews are in
  • Turbine working on an MMO for the console
  • Price Cuts boost sales, initially, but not over the long term
  • Infinity Ward Responds to Gearbox … sort of
  • Red Octane considering Natal controls

This week’s question of the week, can big companies still innovate with new games?