This week has a very special guest, former IGN editor and current Dog and Thimble podcast host Hilary Goldstein, as he teams up with Paul to razz Jonah incessantly, as well as add a certain amount of NSFW spice to this week’s proceedings.
The news items include:
- Rock Band DLC hints at a comeback
- Sony appears to have ‘abandoned’ its trademark for The Last Guardian
- Final Fantasy 15: Episode Duscae demo detailed
- Nvidia’s big March 3rd event – is it a gaming phone?
- After raising $114,000 on Kickstarter, dev goes silent
- BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk has come back from retirement
All this and Listener Feedback.
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Gamers around the world are going to feel the pain in the 2009 holiday season after the economy shakes apart many great development studios. Electronic Arts feels the pain of being a public company as their investors complain about lackluster revenue, THQ deals with closing studios to extend their runway and other firms will lose more headcount in the coming months.
Welcome back guys, another good show.
I’m sorry I can never manage to send hate mail for Paul cause I’m just too busy sending it to Jonah. Just kidding, this is more “nerd rage mail”, because of the topic of Final Fantasy from previous episode.
Saying your not into FF because you’ve only played 10 and up is like saying you don’t like Star Wars because you’ve only seen the pre-quels. I’m sorry but as far as I am concerned you’ve only played the BAD Final Fantasy games. The Golden era of FF was parts 4, 5, & 6; 6 being my personal favorite. It had the best story, art, music of the entire series.
The thing about Final Fantasy was the first one was supposed to be the last and only but it had done so well they decided to continue, so the only thing final about them was that you only saw one world per game, you never went back so there wasn’t truly a sequel in the sense of a continuing world.
That changed after FF10,now even FF4 and 7 have sequels. FF6 was the last to have that 2d style art that I still love, ff7 had a real mix bag of art from beautiful backgrounds to horrendous 3d models. FF8 just had a terribly convoluted story and it felt too modern, FF9 I think was the last one that I really enjoyed but still missed and preferred the 2D art style over the still awkward 3D models. FF10 had unrelatable characters, it looked pretty but felt so shallow.
FF11 was the first MMO which I never played, FF12 was too easy to cheese with grinding out the chessboard skills. Just about everything is wrong with FF13, I know the bird in the dudes hair was wierd, but they did it in Suikoden V as well, maybe it’s a cultural thing. I couldn’t stand the dude with the beanie who constantly had a lock of hair in his face.
What was really obnoxious was the star rating they would give after each battle, after the first few I realized they were going to be doing this the whole damn game, I couldn’t go on after that. The game just insulted my intelligence way too much. It was a great run but I think I’ve had my Final Fantasy with that series.
@Kickstarter: It is true you have to be careful with investing but I wouldn’t say 9/10 video game kick starters have failed. You guys keep seeming to forget to mention the ones that have succeded: FTL, Divinty Original Sin, Shadowgate, Shadowrun, Pillar’s of Eternity, Wasteland 2, etc
Here is a link with a long list of them:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_game_crowdfunding_projects
I will concede one has to be careful in choosing products or at least keep in mind that the project may fail and you will get nothing. Kickstarter DOES have on it’s site that there are no guarantees of any products being completed. I like what Hilary said about trying to help these developers out and giving them a chance and I do think Paul is also right that there are those shady individuals that make crowd funding look bad.
@Greg Zeschuk: It’s a shame the title made me think he might work on Baldur’s Gate or something. The idea sounds well meaning but I agree with Jonah I remember just using my imagination to fight strange aliens or playing spys or whatever.