Episode 499: A Long Delay

Yeah, we recorded this on April 2 and are just releasing this on April 12 — because during this time Jonah went to PAX East, then visited his mother in NYC, and things have calmed down about now. This week’s Gaming Flashback is the overly cute LittleBigPlanet… and to think it was a major topic of conversation in the early days of the podcast. How time has passed.

This week’s news items include:

  • You can play de_dust2 in Far Cry Arcade
  • No Man’s Sky coming to Xbox One later this year

You’d think that wouldn’t be enough news for 90 minutes, but that’s ok. We go off on tangents all the time.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Post

Episode 649: Activision-Blizzard Sued AgainEpisode 649: Activision-Blizzard Sued Again

[This episode has been re-uploaded due to technical issues]

Another week, another time that Activision-Blizzard suffers legal issues — in fact, there are lots of legal shenanigans going on. No Gaming Podcast this week in this short episode, while Microsoft Movie Maker has a comeback.

This week’s news includes:

  • New York City sues Activision Blizzard, says Bobby Kotick is ‘unfit’ to negotiate the Microsoft buyout
  • Reggie Fils-Aimé warned Nintendo about GameBoy Micro
  • Xbox and Bethesda Games Showcase announced for June 12
  • Xbox has helped Fortnite sneak its way back onto iPhones

Let us know what you think.

Episode 595: Two Hours of Sound ProblemsEpisode 595: Two Hours of Sound Problems

This weekend’s episode is two hours long, but due to some software recording issues, the audio sounds like it was recorded from the desktop. However, there’s a ton of discussion of news from around the industry, not just the two news items listed below. In addition, this week’s Gaming Flashback is Alan Wake, which was actually one of the news items back in Episode 252: “Alan Wake on PC because Remedy ‘a nagging little kid’ to Microsoft”.

This week’s news includes:

  • Xbox hedgehog picture kicks up Sega purchase rumors again
  • Super Gore Nest Master Level arrives in DOOM Eternal update

Let us know what you think.

Sony’s E3 Conference: Fairly ImpressiveSony’s E3 Conference: Fairly Impressive

We’re all used to Sony falling on their face at E3 in the last few years, but, this year, things were different. They’re information was delivered well, they had a great presentation medium using Little Big Planet‘s game engine as a presentation platform over the standard PowerPoint slides and everything went smoothly.

The format for displaying their facts, figures and sales numbers was well played. Nobody wants to sit in front of a chart and listen to an executive blab on about what they did and where they’re going. But, when you add some Little Big Planet flair, such as having the graphs built within their game engine and Sack Boy hopping around on the statistics things smooth over well.

I was confused on why they chose to display the Little Big Planet graphic engine followed by Resistance 2 and then taper into talk about the PlayStation 2 with game previews. It seems more appropriate to bring in the PlayStation 2 product line first, then blow the crowd away with the current generation graphics. Instead, we were awed by the epic Resistance 2 graphics and then presented with old generation stale game engines… silly.

They went on to show off the wide array of PSP games arriving and a little trailer for Resistance Retribution for the PSP. The game system is definitely more mature than their DS competitor but seems to have a bit less sales momentum.

Overall, Sony did one right by talking about their three tiered solution to gaming instead of focusing too much on a single system. PlayStation 3 numbers are good but not mind boggling (like Wii) and their PSP product is doing much better than it used to and the PlayStation 2 numbers are high but falling compared to last year (as would be expected).

By focusing on the full suite of products they’ve put their eggs into many baskets rather than rely on their bleeding edge flagship product which still needs time to grow.

Well done Sony.