Episode 374: Lost in a Crowd

This week’s episode of Gaming Podcast has a special guest co-host, Andrew Yoon, formerly of Joystiq and currently in card game and video game development. The Gaming Flashback is the one that started them all: LEGO Star Wars: The Video Game.

The slow news week includes:

  • DDoS service targeting PSN and Xbox powered by home Internet routers
  • Japanese console sales continued to slide in 2014
  • Evolve’s questionable bargain: pre-purchase to avoid the unlock grind
  • Sony delays PS4 in China

The Question of the Week: “What is your favorite, if any, LEGO videogames?”

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Episode 251: The New Crew ReturnsEpisode 251: The New Crew Returns

After last week’s special appearance by Derrick and Jennifer Schommer along with Don Dunn, the regular crew of Jonah Falcon, Jordan Lund and Paul S. Nowak return, and they find themselves with some fascinating news items.

The news items include:

  • Blizzard brags Diablo III will have difficulties that are harder-than-hard
  • Sony passed on Demon’s Souls because it was “crap
  • Sony credit rating downgraded, “strong recovery in earnings unlikely”
  • Tim Schafer raises $1.6M (and counting) to develop an adventure game
  • Epic’s Sweeney: Lifelike graphics will come in our lifetime

Paul is also running a contest to earn “Pixie Diamonds” currency for Disney’s Pixie Hollow social networking MMO, with the prize going to the person who can answer, “Who is your favorite Disney Prince or Hero, and why?”

Episode 433: Kickstarter FailEpisode 433: Kickstarter Fail

The episode is posted a little late due to unforeseen circumstances, and focuses on Kickstarter videogames, both failures and successes. The podcast also asks Pokémon Go fans if they really needed those tracking software for the game.

This week’s news includes:

  • “Other surprises” in store for NX, says Ubisoft
  • Fixes promised for botched Marvel Ultimate Alliance ports
  • Pokémon Go fans rage as tracking site shuts down
  • PlayStation VR requires about 60-square feet of space to use

Let us know what you think.

Sony’s E3 Conference: Fairly ImpressiveSony’s E3 Conference: Fairly Impressive

We’re all used to Sony falling on their face at E3 in the last few years, but, this year, things were different. They’re information was delivered well, they had a great presentation medium using Little Big Planet‘s game engine as a presentation platform over the standard PowerPoint slides and everything went smoothly.

The format for displaying their facts, figures and sales numbers was well played. Nobody wants to sit in front of a chart and listen to an executive blab on about what they did and where they’re going. But, when you add some Little Big Planet flair, such as having the graphs built within their game engine and Sack Boy hopping around on the statistics things smooth over well.

I was confused on why they chose to display the Little Big Planet graphic engine followed by Resistance 2 and then taper into talk about the PlayStation 2 with game previews. It seems more appropriate to bring in the PlayStation 2 product line first, then blow the crowd away with the current generation graphics. Instead, we were awed by the epic Resistance 2 graphics and then presented with old generation stale game engines… silly.

They went on to show off the wide array of PSP games arriving and a little trailer for Resistance Retribution for the PSP. The game system is definitely more mature than their DS competitor but seems to have a bit less sales momentum.

Overall, Sony did one right by talking about their three tiered solution to gaming instead of focusing too much on a single system. PlayStation 3 numbers are good but not mind boggling (like Wii) and their PSP product is doing much better than it used to and the PlayStation 2 numbers are high but falling compared to last year (as would be expected).

By focusing on the full suite of products they’ve put their eggs into many baskets rather than rely on their bleeding edge flagship product which still needs time to grow.

Well done Sony.