This week’s episode was delayed due to serious Windows issues this past week. The episode was saved, however, and is 90 minutes full of discussion. The podcast deals with a lot of console hardware rumors.
The news items include:
All this and Listener Feedback.
This week’s episode is full of pop culture references, again, as Inspector Gadget, Matthew Broderick, My Little Pony and The Garry Shandling Show all get some airtime. In addition, Paul discusses his frustration with The Sims Freeplay, and Jonah threatens that in the next episode, he’ll be naked and Paul will wear a silly hat.
The news includes:
All that and a Listener Feedback.
As a huge fan of Showtime’s Dexter, we’re excited (afraid?) to hear they’re making a game in its image. We actually pay for an Amazon Unbox because we’re too cheap to buy Showtime for all their other shows. A Dexter game could be killer on the PC and iPhone.
Obviously the first problem to concern ourselves with is the franchise name, all too often we end up with ‘branded’ named games that produce awful results. It’s easy to get lost in the idea of making money on the name Dexter than putting in the time to a quality game release.
There is a high probability a Dexter game is going to suck, but we can hold up our hopes they do the franchise justice and create something scary but entertaining with a good storyline. How else can you represent a TV series in which the main character is a serial killer and he justifies his killings?
(Thanks, Joystiq)
In 1995 Ensemble Studios formed as an independent studio and kicked out a little game franchise known as Age of Empires. The title has received many accolades from the first in the franchise extended out to all the Age of Empires releases and spin-offs, all-in-all selling millions of copies.
Ensemble Studios had a mission “to create great games and a great place to work,” says Bruce Shelley from Ensemble Studios. Bruce Shelley also helped design Sid Meier’s Civilization and Railroad Tycoon with MicroProse prior to his work at Ensemble Studios. Now, however, he’s a bit upset at the closing of Ensemble Studios because they were profitable, created top-quality titles and had a great working environment.
Ensemble Studios, from his perspective at least, was a place you’d go to work and be happy with what you’re doing. When you’re working along nicely and become blind-sided by the news, it’s not surprising he didn’t take it lightly.
“Everyone at our studio was shocked, and I think remains very disappointed that this is going to happen. I believe we thought we were immune to shut-down talk because our published games have done so well and have been so profitable. Plus we felt we had built a really stable (low-turnover), talented, hard-working, and creative team, which is not easy to do. We thought we were among the best studios in the world, and that may be true, but we don’t fit in the future plans of MGS as an internal studio so we’re out.” (ensemblestudios.com)
What’s the future plans for Ensemble Studios? As we’ve stated before, they plan to live on in spirit, within the bounds of a new name and a new game plan. “I believe the spirit and mission of ES will be carried forward in this new company if enough of the key leaders agree to take part, which I expect to happen. There has been no announcement about what the new studio will be working on when it gets going,” says Shelley.
This is a horrible way to have to launch a hot new intellectual property. Usually creating a new title with a building fanbase would lead to excitement, parties and high hopes for the future of the franchise. Instead, people will be dusting off their resume in hopes to continue a life of game development.
Hopefully the leaders will indeed form a brand new company and build brand new hot products with their entire staff intact. Then, take their titles to a different publisher (besides Microsoft) and make some money and fans.
I liked the auction house in Diablo 3 because it allowed for more gear homogenization; if my character got an item that did not help that specific class as much as another item, I could possibly auction that loot and buy a better suited one.
The 6 TFLOPS available on Scorpio make it comparable to an overclocked RX 480, so it might be capable of running Doom without dynamic resolution scaling, and consoles use low-level APIs similar to Vulkan, but we don’t know the CPU specifications.
Thank you for mentioning me!