Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays – did you get what you wanted this year?
Let us know what you got from your loved ones.
We have a few fun reward tiers – our most hardcore fans will definitely want an MP3 of one of the crew or any of the crew recording a voice mail or answer machine outgoing message, or the entire podcast bantering for a few moments. There’s also the requisite T-shirt, which will have the awesome Gaming Podcast logo.
If you’re looking to see what the next greatest DS hand-held will look like, plan to wait until Nintendo starts to see declining sales trends for their current DS hardware. Sensible from Nintendo’s standpoint, but a major bummer for those hand-held gamers who want to see something new and cool out of the Nintendo camp.
While the DS sells great, many of us tech fans would love to see what a new generation of DS would look like. Perhaps something closer to the iPod touch in screen size and touch-abilities with real WiFi capabilities connecting to the Internet? Wouldn’t it be neat if they added GPS location and tilt abilities much akin to the iPhone or iPod Touch?
Personally, I envision a system where you are in total control of your character from leaning, to sliding, to moving your fingers around the screen and communicating over the Internet sharing high scores, drop-in drop-out multiplayer titles with complete voice communications.
Alas, Nintendo tends to gimp most of their hardware from hot innovation such as Internet communication, much like the Wii. While Nintendo has the next-generation capabilities now for Internet communication they’ve constantly opted to have a more useless version of connectivity to “protect the consumer.”
We need a DS store, much like the Xbox Live Marketplace for downloading DS casual games, considering DS game size is much smaller than a PC, PS3 or Xbox 360 title. We need a smaller form factor mimicking the iPod in thickness and durability with a larger screen or unfolding dual screen to double the size of an iPod style play area.
Hardware innovation seems to be more acceptable to Sony and their PSP product while Nintendo always opts for something more simple. Unfortunately, the PSP cannot compete against the DS which will leave them in the lead with very little desire to re-up their hardware with new capabilities and sexy new designs.
Oddly enough, the DS is the perfect device for the mass market which means they’re not going to be forced to innovate beyond its current capabilities for now. Apparently people don’t desire huge leaps in technology, screen size and speed, or we’d would probably see a decline or dis-interest in the DS hardware, thus forcing Nintendo to re-innovate and evolve.
The day will come, but probably not for a long time.
Looking for a place to leave podcast feedback and you don’t feel like firing off an e-mail? You can now login/register to gamingpodcast.net and post to our forums! We’ll be building forums for all styles of discussions if people start to use them, it’s an experiment, we’ll see how it goes.
You can chat about topics discussed in the podcast with us and suggest new topics we can speak about on future gaming podcast episodes. We’re also starting our own World of Warcraft podcast guild called Fallen Souls and we’re looking for new members.
We’re looking to open discussions on all genre’s of games, all styles of play and anything else gaming. If you’d like to setup an avatar, you can head over to gravatar.com and build an avatar associated with your login email address and it will appear on the site and in comments.
The last few weeks we’ve often brought up, on the gaming podcast, our reasons behind why Gears of War 2 wouldn’t be a PC title and only an Xbox 360. Our theory was more of a marketing tactic, assuming there would be no PC version because Microsoft wants to focus the attention of their big titles to the Xbox 360 as it’s a real gaming platform and they want more attention on it. We might have been wrong.
In a recent interview, IGN asked Epic’s Cliff Bleszinski some pointed questions about the PC release. Like us, everyone has been questioning the move to NOT release Gears of War 2 on the PC especially considering the first game made a PC debut and Epic has always been a big PC developer. Turns out, Epic is utilizing the Xbox 360 as a nice big can of DRM.
“Here’s the problem right now; the person who is savvy enough to want to have a good PC to upgrade their video card, is a person who is savvy enough to know bit torrent to know all the elements so they can pirate software.” (ign)
Following this answer he confirmed with a definitive no that we won’t see GoW2 on the PC. Of course, they also underscore the fact that the PC can have a wild array of hardware chipsets for video cards and catering to the masses with compatibility is pretty much a nightmare. A system with great DRM and a closed hardware platform is hard to pass up.
I did get what I wanted, because I love money.