This podcast has a little storminess to it, as it was recorded during a thunderstorm. There’s also tons of interesting news.
This week’s items include:
Let us know what you think.
There is a bit of confusion regarding the release dates of both M.A.G and God of War 3 for the PlayStation 3. Initially people believed 2009 was the target drop for both titles after a Sony press release mentioned great games being “ushered in” this year following Killzone 2.
The “year” Sony may be talking about is fiscal year 2009… which rolls into March 2010. Although Sony hasn’t tagged either title with an ETA, it’s being assumed that we’re talking 2009 until spring 2010. Given most games launch in the September and October time for the holiday season that leads us to believe it will either arrive for the holiday or slide to 2010. If the title isn’t ready for prime time by the holiday season, can you wait a full year for these games?
More importantly, can Sony?
The best way to build up momentum for the console is to release some hot long awaited titles, M.A.G and God of War 3 seem to be just that product. We now have LittleBigPlanet, KillZone 2 and Metal Gear Solid 4 which were three big hopefuls for the console it would be a huge smash in the face of Microsoft to follow that up with two more one-two punches.
A year seems a bit too far to deliver the blow to their competition. What game are you waiting for on the PS3 and believe will kick unit sales into high gear?
(Thanks, 1up)
Most folks in the game industry are already writing off E3 as an actual event to be attending. Even Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter is calling it “virtually useless” for both retail and investors. The writing is on the wall and the reasons are obvious.
Publishers and developers didn’t want to invest the millions of dollars to make E3 a glamour show of epic proportions anymore. The lights, camera and action are all what the industry is about; the hype wagon in full steam. Gamers eat up the hype, bloggers and journalist rely on the hype and action to build readership and keep them coming back for more and retail uses it to gauge new releases and get a grip of the future.
Without the entertainment value of E3 nobody seems to care anymore. Large scale gaming entertainment is reflected in the large scale events and, at the end of the day, we want our conferences and shows to reflect the emotion and exciting of the industry.
“E3 had much more of an impact when it was a show,” comments IGN.com vice president of games content Tal Blevins. “The video game industry is about fun and entertainment, and we should have a show that reflects it.” (gamasutra)
Everyone is sad to see the state of E3, it’s like a cancer patient waiting for their final diagnosis. It’s unfortunate, it’s going to get worse and life will go on without it. In its wake, new shows will crop up while old shows increase in audience, excitement, intensity and cost.
As one show begins to fade others will grow to replace it and developers will yet again find themselves spending millions of dollars to be the best of show.
This week’s episode has nothing to do with April Fool’s Day, since that was a week ago. There’s nothing surprising about the crew this time around, though Jonah does finally give his final (?) thoughts on Mass Effect: Andromeda, and Zelda keeps getting heavy praise. The Persona 5 news item alone spurred a ton of debate.
This week’s episode includes the following news:
Let us know what you think of the heated discussions in the episode.
I like using keyboards for racing games that have simplified acceleration, braking, reversing, and turning such as TrackMania (four keys for all), but fighters and etc. are difficult for me via keyboards.
Mice allow for more angular granularity than controllers because of the area of movement across the mousepad/surface when using an adequate sensitivity, and mice can be polled around 1KHz or more versus controllers being polled around 250Hz, as far as I know.
If mouse sensitivity is set too high above 800 CPI or so, noise becomes an issue (quantization occurs at too low of CPI), so I recommend mice equipped with the 3360/3366 sensor as the older mice with 30×30 or less pixel/photo-diode arrays might have more trouble with noise because correlation imaging sensors will always be imperfect.
Here’s a thread regarding mice with said sensors from a reputable forum:
http://www.overclock.net/t/1602282/lets-compile-all-3360-3366-and-their-release-dates-for-everyone/0_100
The reason of 800 CPI or so being the sweet spot for current mice is, each pixel on the tracking surface or “matrix” is approximately 30 microns in diameter because of the lens magnification and sensor height from the tracking surface, so 25.4mm to convert an inch / 0.030mm = roughly 846.666 of these pixels are able to fit in an inch on the tracking surface, and the aforementioned sensors should be the same.
Each pixel is divided to achieve a higher resolution, so noise becomes an inevitable issue making a larger photo-diode array more ideal.
http://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-mouse-myths-busted/#page-1