Well, yes, it is real, just unannounced. The Xbox Series S is probably the worst kept secret at this point. In addition to the rumors, there’s some other interesting stuff going on pre-Gamescom.
The news includes:
Let us know what you think.
Paul is not in the podcast, and will be out for the next couple of weeks as he recovers from major surgery. In the meantime, the podcast chugs on with three podcasters, as Jordan relays what he thought of the Sony Gamescom 2012 press conference.
In the meantime, the news items include:
All that plus Reader Feedback wishing Paul well (sorry, Kizer, we didn’t moderate your message til after recording), as well as this week’s Question of the Week, “When is the right time to cut the price of a console?”
The Castlevania series was born in Japan on September 26th back in 1986. That knowledge in hand, you can imagine the demographic of 30+ year old gamers who would kill to get an old school franchise title on a new graphic intensive console.
We’ve had many new Castlevania releases since 1986 including releases on the Nintendo DS in 2006 with more titles arriving with the Castlevania branding. However, we’ve not seen a true “full blown” Castlevania title in some time. As a retro style gamer, I’d love to hear news that this would be a 2D game with “next generation” graphics.
There are far too few really great 2D side scrolling platformers for this generation of consoles. Outside of Nintendo, most side scroller systems become “arcade” titles in XBLA or PSN. Over the last fifteen years we’ve had plenty of 3D games with jumping and crazy camera work. Lately, we’ve had some new titles arriving that are 2D platformers like Little Big Planet and the recently released Mega Man 9.
More than likely, Konami will follow the flow and design yet another old franchise with new 3D graphics. Given the demographic for this franchise it would almost seem like a selling point to jump back to a 2D world view.
What would you like? A 3D or 2D Castlevania title on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3?
Nobody is perfect. When it comes to creating an epic story arc, awesome pre-rendered movies and a fully fleshed campaign Blizzard has done well. Now, Blizzard speaks of Starcraft 2 and the world shuts their mouth and listens to each and every word. What’s the word?
A Trilogy.
We’re not talking about the Lord of The Rings style trilogy, but three games with full stories which all end with the gamer being satisfied at the closure, not cliffhangers.
The three standalone games will be (says GameStooge):
Gamers are probably thinking, “so, I can play multiplayer with only one race?” No! The campaign is split into three separete games, not the races and multiplayer features. Although, each title is sure to introduce something new to the game engine, Blizzard has said:
“Nothing changes for multiplayer or skirmish mode. All three races are fully implemented from the get go. Each campaign will feel like an epic story – not a cliffhanger into the next one. They will each have separate arcs that have a clear start, middle, end – and you will feel like you’ve really finished *something* at the end of each game. More content than we’d previously planned – many more Movies, Missions, etc.” (games.on.net)
From our perspective, it seems Blizzard is itching to release the multiplayer system to the world sooner than later, considering some countries use Starcraft as a professional league, but they don’t want to rush out fast to market campaigns just to satisfy this multiplayer desire.
Instead, they’re going to take their time, in usual Blizzard style, by releasing the game as they finish it… per races story. This should give us a less watered down storyline or having one or two races with a piss poor storyline while another has a kick ass storyline because it was done first.
End result? Multiplayer gamers will be happy in the end while those that play Starcraft for the story will need to wait for each game to be completed. We know Blizzards release schedule is “when it’s ready” so we can only imagine how long it will take to reach that third game in the trilogy.
