This week is another short one as the news is pretty light. However, there is another Gaming History as The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! is examined.
This week’s news includes:
The Question of the Week: “What is your favorite giant monster?”
This weeks gaming podcast we stroll down memory lane with Gauntlet, ponder Microsoft’s role as a PC game publisher, hit up some news:
We’ll also take a look at the history of the joystick and pimp our new gaming podcast forums. You can also checkout our new World of Warcraft guild, Fallen Souls.
Why release a single block buster game with a two week pop when you can simply lower the price of your console and boost sales by 100%? That’s a question Sony may be asking themselves right now, as Metal Gear Solid 4‘s hype may have lasted years but the sales and console unit sale boots lasted a month.
Gamers show how they feel about costly consoles with their wallet. With 100% increases in sales, it’s clear that many gamers have been holding out from the “next-generation” of consoles because the price was too high. Now, Microsoft can report huge sales numbers this quarter with a special thanks to their price cut. Imagine the sales boost the PlayStation 3 would have if it was competitive in price?
Microsoft could have kept the savings of manufacturing costs to themselves but they chose to pass savings onto the consumers. The increase in unit sales means more households own the product and newly released games will probably see larger spikes now that people have invested in the 360 console.
End result, developers will want to produce games for the Xbox 360 because they’ve got a larger audience and publishers will be less likely to pick Sony as an exclusive because the 360‘s got sway in the market. It might not be a Wii in total sales records but it’s not half bad!
(Thanks, gamasutra)
Circuit City seems to have a problem paying their bills or so it seems, as Sony stopped their shipments mid-transit and returned them before hitting the distributors command center. In this unfavorable market climate, with the holidays around the corner, it seems bad for Circuit City to lose the trust of Sony.
Sony is afraid, “Circuit City couldn’t pay for the shipments” so the merchandise was turned around and returned home. Considering Sony, more than likely, wouldn’t have shipped the products to start with unless Circuit City was in good standing suggests things might have been “learned” after the shipment left the docks.
Circuit City’s been in some bad situations before, having a rough time dealing with competition in a very low margin, high volume, world of electronic retail. I’ve witnessed CompUSA disappear after the local Best Buy moved in and now Best Buy sits about 80 yards from Circuit City.
This is unfortunate because Best Buy can use some competition before they take over the bulk of this industry leaving only Wal*Mart and a few smaller stores to keep them in check. Considering I just purchased a 2-year warranty on my Rock Band 2 drum kit at Circuit City I’m fearing I’ll have to break the hardware sooner than later!
(Thanks, Gizmodo)
Hello guys.
(First of all: i am not a native english speaker, so please excuse me, if some sentences sound horrible 😀 )
I really enjoy every episode of your stream. Thank you for your time doing such a nice podcast!
In the latest episode you asked the listener to comment about Ono mentioned, that there will be no pay to win in Street Fighter 5. I am a huge Fan of Street Fighter (since i played it the first time on the SNES (i think it´s called super favicon in th US 😉 )). Regarding SF4 (and all the updates: super, ultra and so on). there is NO opportunity to pay to win. The only thing you can buy, are other costumes and stuff like that. All balancing is for free, which means, you can’t buy an updated version of a character to make it stronger. If you have a newer version of the game (for example the lastest one: ultra street fighter 4) you are only able to use the new characters against other people who got the latest version. But you have the opportunity to select an older version of the game, before you look online for opponents. This means a person who has NOT the newest version of the game, and with this, neither the new characters is NOT able to play against another player with a new version. He is only able to play against other players with the same version of the game. so it is NOT able to pay to win … except you feel like a winner, when your char has another costume 😉
Belonging to your question of the week, my favourite “monster” is not a real monster … it´s only a giant turtle: Groß-A’Tuin. I don’t exactly, if it has the same name in the english version, but this is the giant turtle from Discworld, on which back are standing the four giants, which carry the disc world 🙂 I really like big giant things .. such as this out of the world turtle … it´s so smooth and gentle 🙂
I have two question for you: is there any possibility to get older episodes than the ones in itunes-podcast?
second one: do you have experience in upscaling devices, so i can play my old consoles (like NES and Master System) on a new Plasma tv? A friend told me about this site: http://retrogaming.hazard-city.de … but i hope you may have some experience already and could share them with me 🙂
Thanks again for your great work, and please keep on doing this podcast.
If you ever want to visit germany, maybe to join the games con or just for fun, contact me … i can help you around in germany and you can stay at my place 🙂
So long, greetings
Ralf