This week’s a lot of discussion of comic book movies, including the upcoming “Captain America: Civil War”. In fact, it dominates most of the podcast. However, there is some discussion of video games.
This week’s news includes:
Free money suddenly showed up in some people’s Steam accounts
“Obviously there’s going to be another Borderlands,” says Gearbox
Rumor: Nintendo NX to be officially revealed this or next week
Rumor: Xbox One upgrade under development at Microsoft
Question of the Week: “Would you buy a updated console like the PlayStation 4.5 or Xbox One and a Half?”
Mega Man, a series franchise was born in the month of December, a series we rarely hear about today but one that inspired many great games in the side scrolling genre. Mega Man was foundation brick in the early Nintendo consoles and a bread winner for Capcom, he was a mascot to represent a genre typically dominated by Mario.
The name Mega Man, in the 1980’s was synonymous with the word awesome. It was also synonymous with the word difficult.
A character that had so much potential you can now find him in mobile phone gaming and the virtual console in Europe.
“In the year 200X, master robot designer Dr. Thomas Light, and his assistant, Dr. Wily, worked on a project to create human-like robots with advanced intelligence.” (wikipedia) Each robot was designed to perform a specific task, Cut Man was designed to cut down trees, Guts Man is designed to pickup heavy things, Ice man for arctic exploration, etc. His assistant grew envious of Dr Light so he reprogrammed the robots to do his bidding, which was nothing but evil. Your job is to undo this evil.
This week’s podcast was delayed in publishing thanks to the holiday week being more hectic than usual. However, better late than never, and there’s even some listener feedback included!
The news items include:
Valkyria Chronicles 4 is mobilizing for deployment in the west in 2018
Clicker Heroes 2 developer abandons microtransaction model citing ethical concerns
In a world driven by the Internet, global economics and the short attention spanned reader we’ve been bombarded with social networks and 140-character micro-blogging. We’re constantly finding ways to promote ourselves, promote our brands or tell people what we’re eating for dinner. Is this obsession with ourselves and our creativity bridging into video games?
It’s games 2.0 people!. A time when we’re inventing our own video game stages, characters and full blown casual games! Not only are people getting a chance to design their own games with Microsoft’s XNA, Adobe Flash or from small independent casual games, but we can design our own stages in games like LittleBigPlanet.
Microsoft wants to remind us that Boku is much like LittleBigPlanet in its user generated video game content. Seen in this video below:
It’s obvious their going down the same path as Sony has gone with creating your own stages with LittleBigPlanet and creating a new way of gaming: playing other people’s stuff. You can find some similarities with Guitar Hero: World Tour‘s ability to create your own songs and publish them for others to play.
Are we heading down a generation of games where some of the best stages are created by fellow dedicated gamers? Or, is this just a distraction and means for developers to have gamers invigorate and create more of a demand for the games they are making the money on?