Episode 339: Defective Ears

This week’s episode is chock full of very industry-specific news, dealing with sales and numbers and other stuff that would bore Paul.

The news includes:

  • Microsoft acquires Gears of War IP from Epic
  • Sony issues invites hinting at ‘Slimmest’ product launch
  • Apple sells record number of iPhones, iPads
  • Surface and Xbox One hits with buyers during the holidays
  • Japanese newspaper says Nintendo is about to unveil its approach to mobile development
  • Kerbal Space Program lands on various schools’ curriculum
  • Sony’s credit rating cut to “Junk”

Sadly, no reader mail this week.

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Has Rare Lost Touch With The Gaming Industry?Has Rare Lost Touch With The Gaming Industry?

In an interesting interview this week at 1up.com, Peter Moore, now at Electronic Arts, believes the skillset that Rare holds is a bit dated for our gaming industry. Moore, best known in his role of VP at Microsoft in their Interactive Entertainment Business division, understands how great Rare and their games once were but seems to believe the industry has passed them by.

Looking at their latest Microsoft titles, mainly Perfect Dark Zero, Viva Pinata and Kameo: Elements of Power, it’s not hard to believe his statements as fact. None of the titles have blown away a market full of Grand Theft Autos, Halo’s and other top selling titles. None of their games hit the epic review scores of Bioshock or Crysis. It’s not all first person shooters are taking the big sales numbers; Spore was given rave reviews by online review sites (sans Amazon) and that’s a completely different style of game.

Popcap’s Peggle has had more fame and glory than some of the bigger titles from Rare, probably made with less money. Is Rare a dying breed of developers with no good direction to react to the changing ways of the game industry?

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Fanboy Turf Wars and Metacritic’s The TurfFanboy Turf Wars and Metacritic’s The Turf

Gamers are passionate about gaming, love their games, follow the industry all while living and breathing all things game. This is the green pastures upon which fanboys are born. As we’ve seen at gamingpodcast.net, where we were hit hard by fanboy rage a few days ago the blood boils with hate and rage.

Although our site only received 30+ comments, other sites whom picked up the article have 100+ comments on the article about Blu-ray and my opinions of it. PS3 fanboys ran wild telling me how my name has been “dragged through the mud” followed (and preceded) by many curse words and name calling, many of which I simply refused to post because of the vulgar content.

They have moved on to larger more popular platforms to voice their opinion, by dinging Gears of War 2 prior to the games release on metacritic.com dolling out a 3.5 user submitted review (which has since gone up upon the release). Why did they target GoW2? Because the 360 fanboys nailed LittleBigPlanet with crappy reviews, says smashpad.com.

The response was to hit Resistance 2 for another bad user review score all while forcing metacritic to change their user review process to only allow users to post reviews after a game has hit store shelves. Metacritic isn’t to blame here, although it is sensible to only allow reviews prior to a games release, the fanboys have found a way to hold their turf wars.

Who’s next? Amazon.com allows reviews as well and, as we saw from Spore, it can get pretty dirty there too. Now that Metacritic is altering their review process will gamers wait until they’re allowed to spam with bad reviews to do so, or will they hunt for new social networking proving grounds to give games a bad name?

Perhaps they’ll compete for google keywords to rank #1 for a fraud review of a title to beat out other sites or they’ll find another popular user-generated review site to scar the name of a to-be released title.

There is a gang war on the Net and it involves fanboys finding social media outlets to spread their hate and deception on the opposing consoles. For us, we’ll stick with gaming and leave the rage to someone else.

Episode 626: New Mic, New WorldEpisode 626: New Mic, New World

The new mic used for the episode has improved the audio by a factor of 1,000. In fact, Episode 625’s audio is so bad, it’ll take a lot of effort to make it even bearable, so it won’t be published for a while.

In the meantime, the new Amazon MMO New World has made a giant splash, but is it worth dipping your toes in, especially since it costs $40 to buy? Meanwhile, the frustrations T.J. has as a PlayStation 5 owner come to the fore.

This week’s news includes:

  • New World goes live in North America
  • 343 makes Halo Infinite’s next multiplayer preview available to everyone on Xbox
  • Civilization 6 modder has brought back upgradeable throne rooms and palaces
  • Sony: Still many PS5 features to add

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