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 we’re pulling a 2-person shift while Don is away being sick and tired. We substituted his astute comments with extra epic insight… okay, we just did as best as we could without him. We flash back to Venture, we do an audio review of Zuma’s Revenge and we kicked it free style with some news:
Halo: ODST Reviews are inThis week’s question of the week, can big companies still innovate with new games?
Rhythm games are the new FPS for a lot of gamers, a broader audience of gamers, and the market is thriving and demanding new titles. Harmonix and Activision are at the front of the battle with Konami following a bit behind but still contending (we think) very soon.
Each company plans to up each other with cooler instruments, tighter controls and new in-game options and multi-player fancies. It’s a business and each competitor tries to gain a lead by whatever means needed to win… or do they?
Harmonix stops short when it comes to purchasing exclusive rights to music artists, for now at least. Harmonix’s Eric Brosious went on blogger record saying, “We prefer not to sign exclusive deals with artists because while it seems like the competitive “business” thing to do, in the long run, it’s really not good for anyone. We think we should be working to get more music out to more people.” (kotaku)
As Marky Mark once said, we need “Music for the people” not for in-game exclusives making us choose between Guitar Hero and Rock Band titles. We’ve seen what EA has done to the football franchise by taking control of the NFL roster, money talks and the best game doesn’t always win.
If Activision decides to buy up a ton of great exclusive content and you’re a rock band gamer, you’ll lose out in a ton of great content. For some gamers, that might mean losing out in some artists you’ve never heard before which also means the artist loses out in new fans. We’ve seen younger gamers fall in love with the sounds of Boston and The Police, bands famous way before the birth of many of the Rock Band fan base.
You can tell Harmonix is a development group with roots in music while Activision is a development group with their roots in business. While exclusive access brings you an advantage, in terms of broadening the culture of music, it does very little. Harmonix may be in the right but will that matter in the end when business deals hit the table?
p.s. sorry about the Marky Mark reference, but it had to be done. Bringing out a bit of my own childhood there…
This week’s gaming podcast is a bit short on news and lacks a gaming history segment but we still managed to bust out a 1-hour show, so who knows how we pulled that off. The news is light, perhaps because of the US semi-holiday known as Columbus Day or because no company wants to rattle the news waves while they’re working on finalizing holiday launch titles. In any case, we’ve got Chrono Trigger as our flash back and this as our news:
The question of the week, what actor do you want to see do a voice-acting role in a video game?
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.