This week is shortened due to Thanksgiving and Black Friday, but there’s still some fun to be had, especially when the Gaming History is about The Legend of Zelda cartoon series.
The news:
The Question of the Week: “When do you start your holiday shopping?”
Microsoft is reporting their European sales are the best they’ve seen in the history of Xbox 360 sales. They’re claiming the sales are double what they were in the 2007 holiday season. They are saying 8-million consoles have been sold to date in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).
Microsoft’s fast to push out their press release, probably hoping to overshadow any reports Sony may be releasing for sales numbers. At this point, we’ll have to believe their press release as fact until someone proves it otherwise; Microsoft would hate to be caught in a lie. Unfortunately, NPD figures aren’t collected in Europe so we have to wait for all the other metric gathering companies to release final December 2007 figures.
Sony could, in fact, see a doubling of their sales figures as well, we’ll have to wait and see.
This week we’re flashing back to Grim Fandango and looking back at developer Steve Meretzky and his destruction of our lives in the social gaming space.
We’ve got other news this week which includes:
The question of the week is: How many hours do you devote to video games, including social networking games?
Paul’s attending BentCon, Jonah has additional work, and Devin passed out. See you next week.
A great nostalgic episode, I do enjoy gaming flashbacks, keep them coming.
@Nintendo Game boy emulation: I do hope this means they will port more of their games to other platforms. I do remember the Bleem! Emulator for Sony games but that ended up getting sued for it. As for Nintendo I can only hope this will lead to more access of their games legally.
While we are on the subject of Nintendo I was thinking we could really have explored more of the Greco-roman games, not just Kid Icarus but also Battle of Olympus another side scrolling game from NES days. They seem afraid to try to push new IP’s and just stick with their tried and true ones. Which I think tends to make them feel stale. When Paul was discussing the end of the Zelda Cartoon and how Link and Zelda had to team up to find her father, I thought ‘Well that would have been a fine game right there!’
@EA: I guess they can’t be all that bad if they really are equal treatment. They HAVE had a long history of games with LGBT relationship options. I remember in Sims 2 there were apparently hidden stats you had to use an external program to see. One of these stats was a persons attractions tendencies, a score both for male and female, which ever ranked higher the character tended toward. I just thought it was neat that they went to this extent to make a character unique and even a little beyond your control.
@Sony Settles: I do remember those ads and I was tempted by them. Boy would I have been PISSED to find I would have to buy the game TWICE. I thought the whole point was that any game bought on the main PS3 could be transferred and played on the vita.
QotW: I started my shopping in November, but not on black friday or cyber monday.
First I want to apologize for not commenting much, but I tend to be too shy to comment much (and I didn’t get your podcast because I have been with my family doing a vacation-type thing for a few weeks). I feel like your commentaries on this, though have garnered my responses.
About Nintendo:I feel like they are trying to make a bit of a fuss over something that was not a very big fuss in the first place.
About EA: I have a number of friends that work for EA here in Orlando (mostly they worked on Tiger Woods games back in the day and now work with Madden games). I love that ya’ll commented on this and brought it to light to your followers. I really like that they truly care about their employees. I think you missed the nail when you say that you think Bioware was inclusive before EA was invloved.
On Sony Settling: Those ads were quite frustrating to understand as a consumer and, luckily, I was not willing to buy their pitch. Deutsch was quite poorly represented before they even posted those twitter comments. Barring them from repeating the exact point – I feel – doesn’t exactly prevent them from doing the same thing again: something I feel like they may do in order to make more money. You really do nail it when you say they only “got caught.”
On a side note: I think Jonah is incredibly insightful in general.