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.
Much like Kameo: Elements of Power, Fable 2 ships without online co-op mode on day-one. However, Kameo didn’t promise the co-op mode prior to the games release, or talk about it in their presentations and hype machine conferences.
How does that happen? It’s easy to promise a feature but words do not make games true. More than likely the online co-op was a bit more complicated or had some bugs that needed to be shaken out prior to shipping. Microsoft is talking about releasing a patch for the new co-op play on the first week or so of the game release.
There are two options: ship a product that’s buggy and deal with the online PR nightmare with bugs and day-one patches, or, ship it without the feature and promise it early in the launch phase of the game. Once the code is complete, game software has to go through the packing, duplication and shipping phase. A lot of last minute testing can get done in the time it takes to produce the boxed product.
Hopefully Microsoft is doing some last minute testing to make a more reliable presentation of online co-op which everyone can use. However if it releases with a bunch of bugs…
(Thanks, GameSpot)
Last week’s episode was a bust, and there was a strange glitch in this one that caused the audio on Jonah’s side to completely cut out. However, it’s been recovered, and this episode deals with the direct-to-Blu-Ray animated film Batman Ninja.
This week’s news includes:
Let us know what you think.
This episode was recorded on short notice thanks to last week’s late posting, so the Listener Feedback that responded to 382 couldn’t make it here. Paul and Jonah discuss some board games with remarkably similar themes they played in the past few days. Paul also waits for his compensation for The Sims Freeplay.
The news of the week includes:
No Listener Feedback this week, so the Question of the Week remains the same: “What do you think the future is for old games?”
