Aside from cardboard products by Nintendo, there wasn’t much to talk about this week, thanks to the January slog. However, the guys did play games and there was some news to talk about.
This week’s headlines include:
All this and Listener Feedback, too.
One of the great downfalls of an acquisition or merger, in the game industry, is the loss of great franchise titles. Sierra, or Sierra Online, once stood on its own as a company with great gaming titles but later fell into the depths of Hades under many different company names.
Sierra’s last stop on the acquisition highway was Vivendi, years after much of Sierra’s steam had slowed. Now, they’re part of Activision Blizzard so we had high hopes they’d find a great use for some of the old Sierra properties long since collecting dust. Space Quest, Kings Quest, Leisure Suit Larry and especially Gabrielle Knight were some of our favorites, but times have changed.
“We are retaining only those franchises that are a strong fit with our long-term strategy including Crash Bandicoot, Ice Age and Spyro, as well as Prototype and a second game that has not yet been announced. We will not publish any other titles that previously were part of the Vivendi Games portfolio and we are currently reviewing our options regarding those titles,” says Activision Blizzard (joystiq)
This is unfortunate news, Activision Blizzard now has a large set of franchises on their hands, many of which have collected dust for years. Those dust collecting franchises could rise from the dead and reinvigorate their old fan base… or be dropped to the earth as unwanted scrapes after a big hunt with the vultures awaiting their take (sorry, too much watching of Animal Planet)
A reworked Kings Quest or Gabriel Knight could have seriously awesome potential in this time and age, imagine a dark comedy version of Gabriel Knight or a huge scaled world in King Quest using todays graphic engines. Although, these titles could also go the way Atari has gone and taken a well remembered franchise and made mud of its great name (*cough* Alone in the Dark).
Unfortunately, we’ll probably never know the distance an old franchise could go in this new world. We’ll have to pull out an old copy of our prized posessions and remember just how great they once where.
This week’s episode features a report by Jonah Falcon from Toy Fair NY, raving about the co-op board gane version of Dark Souls. T.J. continues to rave about Nioh and Scott texted while the podcast was going on, but you’ll have to wait for an outtakes episode to hear that story.
This week’s news includes:
Let us know what you think.
This week is packed full of gaming goodness, as the winner of the Civilization V contest is revealed. If that weren’t enough, the news items for the week invoked a lot of conversation:
The podcast also features some great, heartwarming Reader Feedback as well as a new contest to win a code for Magicka. The question of the week, “What books featuring magic do you like the best?”
