Gaming Podcast is back after the one week break, and finally truly weighs in on the announcement of the Switch – and aren’t impressed. What does impress the crew is the latest addition to the survival horror genre, Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, which takes the radical approach of being a survival horror game. They also ponder about how great a Zelda/Minecraft game would be.
The next episode will be Gaming Podcast’s 10th anniversary, so longtime listeners are encouraged to write in.
This week the gang reacts to Ubisoft’s pseudo-E3 presentation showing off their upcoming games, including Watch Dogs Legion, Immortals Fenyx Rising, Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World: The Game: The Remaster, and Riders Republic, and Yves Guillemot’s strange pre-show video.
Other news items include:
Let us know what you think.
After 11 years, VGRT Gaming Podcast, nee “Technical Diversions (TD) Gaming Podcast”, has hit the magic 500th episode, with not only former co-host Paul Nowak joining in on the celebration, but 2Old2Play’s Derek Nolan and former co-host Dan Quick sending their congrats as well. Paul’s presence is the go-ahead to give TJ and Scott permission to razz Jonah to no end, while Parker Brother board games are compared. This week’s Gaming Flashback is World of Goo.
The news for this magical 500th episode includes:
Question of the Week: “If you were a classic Parker Brothers board game, which would you be?”
[Song: “The Field Of Cormallen” by David Arkenstone.]
One of the first games I was introduced to on the 2600 was River Raid, back in 1982. I remember it vividly, as I was at my cousin David’s house, who was older than me, and he’d “baby sit” me so the adults could have some adult time hanging out in the dining room. We’d sit in the family room playing 2600, mainly River Raid.
This is an Activision game, and was later ported to Atari 5200, Atari 8-bit, C64, ColecoVision, IBM PCjr, Intellivision, ZX Spectrum, and MSX. The player controls an airplane in a top-down view over a river and gets points for shooting down enemy planes, helicopters, ships and balloons (for versions after the Atari 2600). By flying over fuel-stations, the plane’s tank can be refilled. The player can shift side to side and change the speed of the plane. Sections of the river are marked by bridges.
The game was highly acclaimed for its ability to stuff tons of map into small amounts of space. The map was huge and it fit on the disk because it’s randomly generated using a common starting seed, basically, imagine some of the Diablo dungeons…they’re randomly generated but the starting seed which starts the random process is also ‘random.’ (probably based on clock time which isn’t too uncommon). Atari, rather than try to make a random level each time used the level random generator to build a procedural based level rather than drawing it and saving it into the cart. GENIUS.
A more highly randomized number generation system was used for enemy AI to make the game less predictable.
Germany consider this game harmful to children, indexing it on their list of games “harmful for children” along with the game Speed Racer. It remained on their list until 2002 (since 1984) when developers petitioned it off the list before the PS2 launch of Activision Anthology (otherwise they’d not be able to put it in the game)
Some of the Germany reasons: Minors are intended to delve into the role of an uncompromising fighter and agent of annihilation (…). It provides children with a paramilitaristic education (…). With older minors, playing leads (…) to physical cramps, anger, aggressiveness, erratic thinking (…) and headaches (wikipedia)
All in all, a great game! To hear all the details on River Raid and our opinions, checkout TD Gaming Podcast Episode 78.
Nintendo should make money off its intellectual property accumulated over the past decades; I’m sure that a lot of people would like to own an online library like that of Steam, Origin, Uplay, and etc. exclusively of Nintendo games.