Despite the title of the podcast episode this week, nothing is boring. Rather, there’s a ton of banter between Jonah, Paul and Jordan, as they discuss next-gen console gaming.
This week’s news items include:
- Amazon testing package delivery by drone
- Microsoft advises gamers against turning the Xbox One into a dev kit
- There’s “no lack of ideas” at DICE, CEO ponders local weather for Battlefield
- Xbox One beats PS4 sales at Walmart, Target
- Epic: “We’ve yet to see the real value of the second screen”
- Sega: Shenmue 3 trademark listing a hoax
All this and some Listener Feedback.
The pink slips should be issued by March 31, 2009 and we’re hoping the folks that have lost their jobs will find new jobs as soon as possible. An Electronic Arts representative said:
Formerly Green Monster Games, 38 Studios is growing a large pool of talented folks for their MMO endeavor. First, we heard R.A. Salvatore (writer of the Dark Elf series) was heading over to work on a story, art direction by Todd McFarlane (creator of Spawn) and now Irena Pereira from Blizzard and a sound designer, Aubrey Hodges.
Hearing about Drones delivering packages I have to agree that will be abused and people will attempt to steal and break them. I’m sure the paranoid people will think they are being used to track everyone.
On the continuing discussion of boss battles I agree with Paul that just because there are bad implementations of it doesn’t make it a bad concept idea. I think Jada Empire was a very narrative game and had just fine boss battles. I do agree there are games that don’t need them or have them in a way that doesn’t make sense.
I was watching a PS4 game about Zombies, the hero went through hordes of zombies with ease until he came up against some human bikers. I watched as he drove a car through several of the bikers causing explosions and the bikers just continued somehow to survive. Then after an some invisible timer ran out a Boss Biker suddenly appeared.
The Boss Biker rode a huge bike that spewed fire forth and had grinding blades in front of it. Otherwise the bike was unarmored and the hero free to pump several dozen rounds of blood splattering shots into the guy. Slowly lowering the the large life meter.
A boss battle like that is a slag and not fun. I do have to say also my favorite part of Fable 2 was indeed being able to kill the final guy and interrupting his evil overlord speech.
Quest For Glory series was good at having multiply paths to victory depending on what character build you went with.
QOTW: GTA also had a companion app, the IFruit. It was nothing more then an a glorfied Tamagotchi game only your feeding your dog so he can have better snooping skills. I didn’t find it necessary to do this app thankfully.
Hey guys! I had to take a break from posting comments with all that new-gen stuff going around…
It’s great to have Paul back. His sarcasm and no-bullshit approach to the news items and his fellow podcasters add a lot to the show 😉
Let me add my 2 cents to the boss battle discussion. In the past I usually didn’t have a problem with them but the more I play the more I dread the inevitable final boss battle in some of the games. I hated the final battle in Killzone: Mercenary. Ultimately, I wasn’t able to complete all the contracts on the highest difficulty settings and I simply gave up.
On the other hand, in games such as Resogun or Super Stardust, the boss fights add a lot to the titles. It’s like Paul said – there’s nothing wrong with the boss battles intrinsically but sometimes the implementation blows.
As far as the QOTW goes, my ‘smartphone’ is not so smart anymore and most of the companion apps don’t work on it. My only 2nd screen experience so far has been the PS Vita Remote Play with the PS4 and I really enjoy it, although it’s not really 2nd screen. It also has this functionality but there’s nothing to use it with at this point. The Vita is similar to the WiiU in that your 2nd screen is also a controller so it should work as a gaming companion and I can see myself using it in the future.
I know that Knack has a companion app that is a Bejeweled-style game. The one thing I don’t really get is why they don’t release those same apps on the Vita.
By the way, since Dan is enjoying Tearaway so much, maybe he’ll also enjoy my blog post on it – http://playstationpalo.wordpress.com/2013/11/29/platinum-tracker-tearaway-29 😉 Shameless plug FTW !