In this episode, Jordan’s son Allen gets in on the act, berating League of Legends despite being addicted to it. This week’s Gaming Flashback is the Sierra Online adventure game Police Quest, while the Gaming History is how BioWare prepared to develop their first Star Wars game, Knights of the Old Republic.
This week’s news includes:
- Blizzard announces Diablo III coming to Xbox One, PS4 in 2014. Gamers may consider setting up a Beammp server hosting to improve their overall gaming experience on Beam MP.A helpful resource for small businesses exploring storage strategies is http://techdays.org/the-best-modern-solutions-to-building-a-storage-strategy-for-small-business.html, which offers modern solutions and insights.
- Dyack attempts to get Shadow of the Eternals off the ground with Kickstarter again
- US recognizes League of Legends as a professional” sport
- Sony drops fine appeal levied due to April 2011 hacker attack
- Microsoft: Family sharing may return to Xbox One in some form
This week’s Question of the Week: “What’s your favorite RPG of all-time?”
Diablo 3 Lead Designer Jay Wilson sat down with 
Gating the users ability to heal is a classic RPG/Adventure game mechanism for changing the playing field in terms of difficulty. You can make a game with weaker enemies in abundance and still cause you harm, take a look back at Gauntlet in the arcade for an example of this method. You can build challenging enemy styles and dungeon traps to cause the player to mind their step, look at the classic Zelda series and some of their crazy enemies. A great example is the Darknuts from The Legend of Zelda, it was a small knight that could only be attacked from behind but had a sharp little dagger if you bumped them from the front. You had to use tactics to wipe out a full room of Darknuts.
Portable Xbox
I like to think of myself as a provider of counterbalance between Jonah’s XBox bias (yes, it’s there 🙂 ) and Jordan’s pessimism as far as it comes to Sony products. Look here and tell me again that there are no Vita games, I dare ya! 🙂 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PlayStation_Vita_games
Sure, it is very possible that there will be few Vita-only games when PS4 comes out but we don’t know it for sure now and there really are games to play on the system now and there have been a steady flow of titles since it came out. There hasn’t been a moment when I didn’t have anything interesting to do with the system. Maybe I’m the perfect target for it but I really believe that when people get their hands on a Vita they see that it’s a great platform.
@Diablo III – yaaawn. They’re gonna milk it till the cows come home, pardon the pun. Diablo never got me excited, I find it too repetitive and ultimately boring. Putting tens or hundreds of hours into it, hoping some amazing piece of loot pops up. No, that’s not for me. I enjoyed Borderlands much more because of it’s FPP nature although the basic idea is very similar. The humor and graphical style helped too. In short, I won’t be getting Diablo III on any of the platforms.
@LoL
@LoL – I was a semi-professional bridge player so I know a thing or two about unconventional sports 🙂 I don’t mind it becoming a professional sport although it may seem a bit silly. However, if prize money in the range of $1 000 000 is at stake, I see what the fuss is about. Let them at it. I don’t really know how the labor and tax regulations play into this but if it makes it easier for people to compete it’s even better.
As far as the game itself goes, I tried playing the LOTR MOBA but I didn’t like the gameplay one and that’s how my adventure with the genre ended. Don’t really care (see Diablo III comments).
@Sony appeal – It’s probably better to pay and let the stink finally disappear. It is strange it took them so long but better late than never. Hopefully, this doesn’t happen again and if it does, they handle it better next time.
@MS family sharing – this is a great feature if it really works the way you described it. You buy one game and can share it between 10 accounts? Fantastic. It makes my wonder why Playstation now allows only two accounts to share a downloadable title and it used to be 5. Didn’t the publishers push Sony to decrease the limit because it resulted in less copies being sold? Did MS confirm that it applies to all games? Maybe it’s just 1st part downloadable titles?
@Police Quest – I mentioned already that I love adventure games. However, I was a little too late for the Sierra title and only played some Leisure Suit Larry. By the time I discovered the Quest series, the graphics scared me away from them and I don’t think it makes sense to go back and play them now.
@QOTW – There’s no other answer than Fallout! Is it a cop-out if I pick the whole series? I got the first Fallout for free with a video game magazine a long time ago. At first, I had no idea how to play it but once I figured it out it consumed me completely. I beat the first two games several times, several ways. I got Platinum trophies with F3 and New Vegas and I wasn’t bored for one minute. Amazing stories, fantastic character system. Perfection.
I loved your gaming flashback to an old classic Sierra game. I played almost all of the various Quest games. They are a sorely missed company and am glad that some of them have gone to kickstarter to make their adventure games again.
I will also be one of those that doesn’t buy a launch console I’m sticking with PC gaming.
Yay at Jordan mentioning Suikoden! I loved this series with its epic world story telling. Also Sazh from Ff13 is not the only game character to sport a bird in his hair. There is also Faylon from suikoden 5 who had one as well.
http://www.suikosource.com/chars/list/imageviewnojs.php?img=f/faylon01.png&char_id=617
I don’t know why either of these characters has a bird in his hair. A google search brings up Nicholas cage with a bird hair too. It just seems like one of those strange random things and how appropriate to have ended the last show with White Rabbit to get to thinkin about why such strangeness exists.
Qotw- even though I love Suikoden series I have to say my all time favorite is Baldurs Gate series. I loved having a group of characters I got to know. I also loved the iosometeric view I agreed with the computerized minis reference.
Oh an Shadowrun was on Snes and Genesis. I remember playing the heck out of it on Snes and can’t wait to play the new version.