TJ announces his nuptials the previous week, finally marrying his live-in girlfriend of 10 years. All that, and many parables that had to be cut from the podcast lest it last 90 minutes.
That said, there’s plenty of news this week:
Let us know if you spent $50,000 on a virtual spaceship.
Jonah Falcon and Jordan Lund discuss PAX Prime 2013, then delve into this week’s news, Listener Feedback, and discuss the 1990’s developer Psygnosis.
The news this week includes:
The Question of the Week: “How many times have you purchased a new form factor of a console you already owned?”
Unlike Japan, Nintendo has not invaded the entire home consumer market here in the United States. This leads them to believe there is room for both the DS and the DSi here in the United States. The DS will no doubt be a cheaper alternative to the DSi and the DSi isn’t going to make its way to the US for some time now (well into 2009 we hear).
Right now we’re still working through what the strategy’s going to be here. But we think that there’s huge untapped potential for the DS Lite. Because when you’ve got only one in every five households in the U.S., compared to one in every two in Japan, it says there’s potential.
You’ve seen some of the work we’ve done this year with celebrities, that we’re bringing a lot of new consumers in to the DS. So I think there’s opportunity for both of them to coexist for some period of time. (kotaku)
We all though the DS was taking over the market, apparently it’s going a long way to go. Nintendo probably feels the DSi may take some of the market share for the original hand held so they’re going to keep them both in the market, initially. No doubt, the DSi will eventually out-live the DS over time, but there is no reason to take the DS out of the US market until the market dominance dies off.
One of the first games I was introduced to on the 2600 was River Raid, back in 1982. I remember it vividly, as I was at my cousin David’s house, who was older than me, and he’d “baby sit” me so the adults could have some adult time hanging out in the dining room. We’d sit in the family room playing 2600, mainly River Raid.
This is an Activision game, and was later ported to Atari 5200, Atari 8-bit, C64, ColecoVision, IBM PCjr, Intellivision, ZX Spectrum, and MSX. The player controls an airplane in a top-down view over a river and gets points for shooting down enemy planes, helicopters, ships and balloons (for versions after the Atari 2600). By flying over fuel-stations, the plane’s tank can be refilled. The player can shift side to side and change the speed of the plane. Sections of the river are marked by bridges.
The game was highly acclaimed for its ability to stuff tons of map into small amounts of space. The map was huge and it fit on the disk because it’s randomly generated using a common starting seed, basically, imagine some of the Diablo dungeons…they’re randomly generated but the starting seed which starts the random process is also ‘random.’ (probably based on clock time which isn’t too uncommon). Atari, rather than try to make a random level each time used the level random generator to build a procedural based level rather than drawing it and saving it into the cart. GENIUS.
A more highly randomized number generation system was used for enemy AI to make the game less predictable.
Germany consider this game harmful to children, indexing it on their list of games “harmful for children” along with the game Speed Racer. It remained on their list until 2002 (since 1984) when developers petitioned it off the list before the PS2 launch of Activision Anthology (otherwise they’d not be able to put it in the game)
Some of the Germany reasons: Minors are intended to delve into the role of an uncompromising fighter and agent of annihilation (…). It provides children with a paramilitaristic education (…). With older minors, playing leads (…) to physical cramps, anger, aggressiveness, erratic thinking (…) and headaches (wikipedia)
All in all, a great game! To hear all the details on River Raid and our opinions, checkout TD Gaming Podcast Episode 78.
Congratulations TJ!