Gaming Podcast Episode 218: Introducing Paul

The listeners of Gaming Podcast finally get introduced to the third member of the Videogame Roundtable podcast team, Paul S. Nowak, who only desires hate mail and more time playing Dungeon Overlord on Facebook. This week, the Gaming Flashback looks back at the Gamecube title mentioned by Jordan Lund last week, Eternal Darkness, and the guys respond to the reader mail from episode 217, and if you’re interested in other types of games such as escape rooms you can visit the Room escape games in Portland Oregon just for this.

The trio also discuss the following news items:

  • Microsoft: Halo won’t be a yearly franchise
  • Analyst: Kinect appealed to “more hardcore” than expected
  • 2M users sign up for COD: Elite beta
  • Wizardry Online announced, will feature permadeath

This week’s Question of the Week: How much do you think the Wii U will cost? All this and more in this delightful podcast that will have you begging for more.

0 thoughts on “Gaming Podcast Episode 218: Introducing Paul”

  1. @ Halo won’t be a yearly franchise:
    Right, I’ll take their word for it. Thing is, with their current schedule, yearly franchise or not, they will have sales for the earlier one eaten up by the later game.

    @ Kinect appealed to “more hardcore” than expected:
    Microsoft doesn’t have to do anything. I believe that the game developers will manage to create a control scheme for hardcore game(r)s.

    @2M users sign up for COD: Elite beta
    Protest or not, this is just an improvement in the matchmaking service. Why not play Quake Live?
    What I am saying is that there will always somebody willing to do this for free.

    @Wizardry Online announced, will feature permadeath:
    Permadeath + PVP = niche market. The only thing that can make it worse is high-damage / insta-kill weapons.

    Speaking of MMOs:
    http://thenoobcomic.com/index.php?pos=19

    @How much do you think the Wii U will cost?
    Man, I hate price guessing …
    I say 150 USD. Middle way between a plain controller and the 3DS. Bare in mind, this is just for the controller.

  2. QOTW:
    I’d say $350 USD including the console and a controller. Which will probably end up being $550 Australian or more 🙁

  3. QOTW – I’m going to say $350. Probably 250 for the console and 100 for the controller. Maybe less for the controller and more for the console, but I’m thinking somewhere around 300. I can’t see it going much higher than 400 though, I don’t think the casual audience that the Wii appealed to will want to shell out the extra 300+ dollars for a new console. Its going to be interesting to see what the official price is.

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Gaming Flashback: SimCityGaming Flashback: SimCity

SimCity was released in 1989, was originally called Micropolis and was designed by the infamous Will Wright. For those that don’t know Will Wright, its suffice to say he’s one of the most popular and influential game designers of our time. SimCity, TheSims, SimAnt, SimFarm and Spore are a few of his hits and TheSims has taken many records since its original release.

Wright had trouble finding a publisher for a game in which you couldn’t really “win or lose.”  Turned down by Broderbund, Wright eventually pitched the idea to Jeff Braun of Maxis.  Maxis agreed to publish Simcity as one of its first two games.

When near complete, Wright and Braun took the game back to Broderbund to clear the rights for the game.  Broderbund executives Gary Carlston and Don Daglow saw how addicting the game could be and signed Maxis to a distribution deal.  Four years after initial development, SimCity was released for the Amiga and Macintosh platforms, followed soon after by the IBM PC and Commodore 64.  On January 10th 2008, the SimCity source code was released under the GPL license as… Micropolis!

The objective of the game is simple, build and design a city.  Though the player could focus on building a highly efficient city with an ever growing populace, it was by no means required.  In a sense, open ended, the player was free to design the city as they chose.

Included in the city building experience was the possibility of natural disasters such as flooding, tornadoes and more.  Pre-designed scenarios were also included in the game such as the Boston 2010 nuclear meltdown, or mass coastal flooding of Rio de Janeiro of 2047 … even a Godzilla attack of Tokyo in 1961.

In the years to follow, the SimCity franchise would continue to expand with greater detail as SimCity 2000 (1993), SimCity 3000 (1999), SimCity 4 (2003) and a host of other “Sim” games and until the release of “The Sims” in 2000, the SimCity series was the best-selling line of games made by Maxis.

In Fall of 2008, EA will release the next child in the SimCity family, SimCity Creator for the Nintendo Wii and DS systems. And thus, history continues!

Gaming Flashback: River Raid (Atari 2600)Gaming Flashback: River Raid (Atari 2600)

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.