This week’s episode is very long to make up for the crappiness of last week’s episode, and the crew have fun with the trolling of Target critics this past week.
The news this week includes:
This and Listener Feedback.
In this episode we’ve got a lot of MMO-style content and news. Although we’re not reviewing Wrath of the Lich King yet, we’ve got other subscription based news. This weeks gaming flashback is Defender and this weeks news includes:
This week we’re taking a look back at William Higinbotham, the man who created the first video game by accident but wants to be known for his nuclear nonproliferation work. This weeks podcast continues the contest to give away two copies of Bejeweled Twist on the gaming podcast and another two copies in our gaming podcast forums.
Is Blu-ray dead? Tech Sites around the Net are calling it a “death spiral” and we’re now looking at the downfall of the winning high definition format. Many non-PS3 Blu-ray players are still in the USD $200.00 range, a bit high for mass market adopters, and people aren’t planning to run out and buy a Blu-Ray player in our economic slump.
What’s the market share of the Blu-ray product? Four Percent. Blu-ray and the PlayStation 3 have a lot of battle scares after the fight with HD-DVD to “win” the format war. In the end, Sony won the battle but the war was not with the HD-DVD format, it’s with the average Joe consumer.
Does this effect the PlayStation 3? One of the up sells of the PlayStation 3 was the Blu-ray capabilities, it games and it’s an entertainment device all-in-one. It’s a great deal right?
“The advent of low cost up-sampling DVD players dramatically cut the video quality advantage of Blu-ray DVDs. Suddenly, for $100, your average consumer can put good video on their HDTV using standard DVDs. When Blu-ray got started no one dreamed this would happen.” (zdnet)
The obstacles against the Blu-ray format are huge, especially with NetFlix coming to the Xbox 360, high definition download options and licensing costs on the Blu-ray to movie creators. Blu-ray won’t die in this generation of PlayStation 3 consoles but many folks, including Apple, are pausing to see if it has any chance at all to break into the industry.
Four percent just isn’t enough to inpsire confidence.
This is a Gaming Podcast lite episode, it’s got less calories because we’re right in the middle of travel plans heading to New Orleans for Tales of the Cocktail (conference). This is also the reason the show is going out late this week as I’m posting it from a hotel room with crappy wifi, but we did it… we got it done. I’m keeping the show notes simple this week because we’re rushed for time.
Hi Guys, Good Episode. I’m sorry I haven’t posted in a while as I have been busy with my newborn son William. I like that you have now expanded to include other game types other thank video games. To Paul’s infamous comment Story is Game Play’s Bitch… I HATE THIS… I really only like games that have stories or enable me to make a story… I hate games that are pointless grinding. I need progression otherwise I stop paying attention and generally stop playing. I still play game from the 90s because back then they had good stories. As for the Steam Machine’s suspend feature, I like the fact they recognize the risk and disable the feature, nothing would piss me off more than suspending the game and expecting it to start back up and finding that the session had expired/become corrupt. It would be great if they can fix it but I don’t think that would change my buying decision. As for the steam machine, I don’t mind the idea if the boxes are cheaper and outperform my gaming PC… otherwise they don’t really make much sense. If I want to play my PC games on my TV I would connect my PC to the TV. Otherwise… keep recording and I’ll keep listening.