Episode 416: Blowing Winds

Unfortunately, we had to skip a week despite recording a good podcast thanks to technical difficulties – don’t worry, we’ll air it at some point in the near future. It was a good episode. This episode had its own issues, as Jonah was unable to record the podcast at home, so he was outside in the New York City night air podcasting with TJ and Scott.

This week’s news includes:

  • Microsoft cancels Fable Legends, closes Press Play Studios, considers shuttering Lionhead Studios UK
  • Report: SpinTires developer sabotaged his own game
  • 10 months later, MAME finishes its transition to open source
  • Valve announces The Lab, a compilation of free VR “experiments”

Let us know what you think.

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Gaming Podcast 201: Just A Day EarlyGaming Podcast 201: Just A Day Early

This episode starts with an MMO focus and ends with community feedback, we’re looking back at an MMO that never made it to life: Ultima X. We give a quick and dirty first-look at Cataclysm, the next World of Warcraft expansion. This episode arrives on day early as Derrick is flying off to Germany early this week on business. This weeks news includes:

This week’s question of the week, “as 2011 approaches, what game really surprised you this past year?”

We Need Another Ikari WarriorsWe Need Another Ikari Warriors

In 1986 SNK released Ikari Warriors, it had all the makings of a classic title. Cool weapons, time strategies, two player action and a great challenge. We’re now seeing folks reproduce some of the essence of classic games by creating platformers like Little Big Planet and Mega Man 9, where is the love for the top-down scrollers?

Ikari Wariors was one of the first game titles to use a rotary joystick along with a directional system. Looking at the current generation Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 it’s plain to see the joystick is equipped with this design. We’ve seen Geometry Wars utilize the analog stick to create a 360 directional attack, so it’s possible to utilize this behavior for Ikari Warriors.

Given SNK is still alive under the name SNK Playmore the intellectual property must still exist to breath fresh life into an Ikari Warrior remake, with about six to eight months development time a classy title could be re-developed using old concepts brought to the current generation hardware.

Blast grenades, RPG’s, smart bombs, air strikes the options are limitless and the concept has been proven to work. Given the gamer demographic of 18-34 it’s plain to see old gamers of the Arcade and NES would recall and rebuild their love for the title while attracting younger audiences whom have never seen an Ikari Warriors title; if it worked in 1986 are we so adverse to it working again?

Games do not have to implement full 3D perspective graphics to be cool, we’ve seen proof in that with the Wii and the demand for titles like Little Big Planet. We neeed another Ikari Warriors.

Episode 353: E3 Swag BagEpisode 353: E3 Swag Bag

Jonah returns from attending E3 last week, as Jordan is a sick latecomer into the podcast. Jonah and Paul relate his near-disaster loss of his iPad Air, while Jordan does his best Don LaFontaine impressions in this episode which is 50% longer than normal.

The news discussed includes:

  • Hirshberg: Console transition pains not a bad problem to have
  • Destiny may possibly come to Windows PC
  • Nintendo’s top designer has “uneasiness” about virtual reality
  • How the Xbox One’s 10% GPU increase works without Kinect
  • PS4, Xbox One seeing much higher digital download attach rates

In addition to the news, there’s Listener feedback, and even better, a new contest to win an E3 Swag Bag – listen in to find out how to win (US listeners only, sorry.)