This week is a little special as Jonah, Jordan and Paul discuss some of the things that were common in the golden age of 1990’s consoles that are no longer around.
In addition, the news includes:
The Question of the Week: “What gaming activities do you no longer do?”
This weeks gaming podcast includes community feedback, game flashbacks to FX Fighter for the PC and gaming history about Hideo Kojima. The gaming news of the week includes, but is not limited to:
This week’s question of the week is pretty simple: What’s “the best” video game to movie that you’ve seen?
Believe this, Nintendo and their Wii console takes another month as top seller. The only product that moves more hardware than the Wii is the DS. As a gamer, it’s hard to understand how the Wii product continues to sell like this with the least supported game library on the planet.
The DS is completely understandable as it has a huge library of games, is more cost effective, comes in pretty colors and can save you tons of arguments and fighting from your kids on a long trip. In many ways the DS is synonymous with peace and quiet. What does the Wii offer us? Wii Sports and a new control scheme along with a few hit titles from Nintendo but little else for now.
I’ll be the first to admit, I thought this would be Nintendo’s chance to turn it all around and get the third parties involved. They have everything going for them in terms of sales, third party developers should be pushing out games each month considering the craze factor of the hardware. This just isn’t true.
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.
Hey guys,
A short comment on Naughty Dog. While it is true that people often leave studios after the game is completed this is not the case with NG. The game is far from done, with one of the main villains also leaving and being recast. The game seems to be in trouble and will probably come out later than previously expected. Still, I trust Naughty Dog and believe they will be able to put out a quality product.
Onto the ‘gaming nostalgia’ theme. There are many things I used to do as a younger gamer, playing mostly PC games. Mostly, I no longer buy gaming magazines. I used to be a long-time subscriber of one such magazine in Poland but then I lost interest in PC gaming and when I came back to gaming with PS3, I realized I can get all the info online and/or listening to podcasts. I don’t mind reading as a whole but as far as gaming goes I’d rather read books such as ‘The Maters of Doom’, which I just finished, than read gaming magazines.
Also, I very rarely play couch multiplayer games. Mostly because those modes are rare in games nowadays but also because when we meet up with friends, we usually play board games that can accommodate more people and which our wives can enjoy too. However, Move-based games such as Sports Champions or Just Dance, get played occasionally.
I really enjoyed the episode with all the old-school gaming talk and I find it more interesting than reading pre-prepared gaming history segments. This episode had much more discussion and excitement than previously, but maybe that’s just me. Also, there was something different about Paul’s voice. He sounded clearer and less grainy so I hope that’s permanent 😉
Hi guys great show I loved the Top Ten fads article no longer in use.
@Gamestop: that just seems sad, I guess they were going for a joke but it would have been nice to show their actual female execs the ones that Jordan had mentioned.
@Naughty Dog loosing people: That does concern me if people are leaving the franchise which has done pretty well so far. I wonder if the quality of Uncharted will suffer because of this. I have enjoyed all three games so far. If Uncharted 4 is going to be PS4 only I may have to break down and get it. I have enjoyed this series so much, any one of the games would have made a better Indy (this time I really do mean Indiana Jones) movie.
@Top Ten Fads:
1) I don’t remember the blockbuster exclusives and the store exclusives seem to be more recent like when you pre-oder a game from Target versus Best Buy and get a different exclusive depending on where you bought it.
2) I was an abuser and sucker for the hint line before game guides and the internet. I think Sierra and Nintendo, though I love them, was perhaps making some of their puzzles so obtuse you were forced to call their hint line or buy their magazine. I remember having a gotten a lot of game guides both from Sierra and Nintendo. This is one “fad” I am glad is gone thanks to the Internet.
3) Demo discs I remember well, it’s how I got Doom and Hexen. It was a nice way to try out games before buying at least.
4) I didn’t mind physical DRM I thought it was kind of fun. There was a Tabloid space magazine with Space Quest V and in it had a star chart for planets for you to go to. So long as you had those coordinates from the chart you could get to any planet you needed to. I think when the DRM was more seamless and less heavy handed like the enter code from page, paragraph, line and word 3, it was more fun and immersive. The SQV star chart felt like it fit with the tongue in cheek nature of the Space Quest series. You could imagine yourself as Roger using a tabloid magazine to chart his way through space.
5) The slips thing I understand though now these days I am buying my games digitally and less from stores.
6) Can’t say that I played any games from cereal boxes, mostly felt they wouldn’t be good games so why bother? Especially when I could be playing games I knew were good.
7) I don’t remember any pin pads for saving progress in Arcade games, that would have been nice to have had more often. Probably would have helped kids memory if they had to quickly remember a password for their next play session.
8) I do miss having those huge gaming magazines that would just seem full of gaming goodness. The Ads were nice since they were tailored for gaming desires as opposed to things that wouldn’t have appealed to us gamers.
9) I remember the cleaning kits and I’m like Jordan I kept my games in their sleeves when not in use also pins facing down so not to collect any dust on those metal pins. The rest of my room was a mess but my games were clean dammit! I do admit to blowing on them a few times but not a lot. There is an article online showing the affects of a (don’t laugh) daily blowing on the cartridge versus one that just used a cleaning kit.
10) I think a sweet one is the one with Robin Williams and his daughter and him explaining how and why he named her Zelda. I remember Sony trying very hard to make Crash Bandicoot a beloved mascot and failing miserably.
I also remember the game genie and it’s game breaking ways of cheating. I’m glad Jordan mentioned that.
QotW: I had to think about this but I suppose going to game rental store like Blockbuster or even going to a game store period. I do everything digitally now. No more worrying about scratched discs or losing a cartridge or any of those worries with physical media.