Depressingly, sexual harassment in a development studio is once again the lead news item this week, and from a studio most gamers would never think it could happen. That, and major seismic shifting in the power structure of the digital storefront landscape.
The news includes:
Let us know what you think.
This week’s Gaming Podcast is bittersweet as this is the last episode Paul S. Nowak will be appearing in for a while as he goes in for serious surgery. In the meantime, the Gaming Flashback is the classic PlayStation 2 game Ico.
This week’s news includes:
This week’s Question of the Week, “Do you consider social networking games real MMOs?”
Jonah discusses his renewed views of Mass Effect: Andromeda after his long, long rant last week. It fits in with the theme of nerd rage in the news items, as well as some new games coming out. TJ and Scott talk about the games they’ve been enjoying in the past week as well, as the latter is burning through Pillars of Eternity so he can play Torment: Tides of Numenera and the eventual Pillars of Eternity II.
This week’s news includes:
Let us know what you think.
It seems we’ve seen a lot of great concepts from Sony for their PlayStation 3 product line but very little has managed to hit the software virtual shelves. We’ve heard of Sony’s Afrika for the PS3 back at E3 in 2006 and we’re looking at it for 2008’s holiday lineup.
We’ve heard about Sony Home for years as well, but that’s now in some type of beta. It was supposed to be an open beta but that didn’t seem to work out and now it’s closed beta only. Recently they pushed out a firmware update that bricked PlayStation 3 consoles or at least screwed up many of them in varying levels.
Are they just really bad at software development and road map predictions? As a hardware development company they’ve put out some hardcore products, stone cold stable in terms of design and efficiency from the Walk Man to the PS3. Their products are practical in design, for the most part, fairly pretty, stable and function as designed. Yet they come up short on software time and time again.
One of the contributors at 2old2play had some things to say about Sony’s development efforts:
“Having worked at Sony as a Creative Designer two years ago, it doesn’t surprise me that they have still yet to release Home. While there, I was working on their Station Launcher application which was supposed to be released in late 2006. However, the Launcher app is still only in Beta to this day.” (2old2play.com)
In many ways their the anti-Microsoft in their approach and commitments. While Microsoft ships hardware that has what must be a 60% failure rate Sony ships hardware which works fairly well. On the flip side, Microsoft publishes a large quantity of software for all their products and has done very well in the business. Nobody can say it’s 100% perfect but it tends to get better with age or, at least, grow on you.
