Look, we’re back, and as promised, the new podcast is now up and recorded on the final day of E3 in Devolver Digital’s off-site space. Jonah and T.J. hang out near the Fable Fortune booth as they discuss the games they scoped out on the show floor. If T.J. seems a lot more chill than usual, keep in mind he’s enjoyed a few beers by then.
Next week will see Scott joining in with his impressions of the conference from afar.
This episode was going to focus on the Toyko Game Show, but a massive leak of Grand Theft Auto 6 trumped all conversation.
Meanwhile, TJ’s mic still makes him sound like he’s in the bathroom.
The news includes:
Let us know what you think.
This week’s podcast features the Gaming Flashback of Final Fantasy VI, which takes up a third of the podcast as Paul and Jordan enthuse about the Japanese roleplaying game at length – so much so, that some news items were skipped over due to running length. Jonah prepares for his trip to PAX East 2014 for the weekend. He also proclaims Emperor Palpatine dancing in Kinect Star Wars the best thing to ever happen for Star Wars.
This week’s news includes:
A lot of Listener Feedback this week, and the Question of the Week is “What mobile games have you played recently?”
We’re all used to Sony falling on their face at E3 in the last few years, but, this year, things were different. They’re information was delivered well, they had a great presentation medium using Little Big Planet‘s game engine as a presentation platform over the standard PowerPoint slides and everything went smoothly.
The format for displaying their facts, figures and sales numbers was well played. Nobody wants to sit in front of a chart and listen to an executive blab on about what they did and where they’re going. But, when you add some Little Big Planet flair, such as having the graphs built within their game engine and Sack Boy hopping around on the statistics things smooth over well.
I was confused on why they chose to display the Little Big Planet graphic engine followed by Resistance 2 and then taper into talk about the PlayStation 2 with game previews. It seems more appropriate to bring in the PlayStation 2 product line first, then blow the crowd away with the current generation graphics. Instead, we were awed by the epic Resistance 2 graphics and then presented with old generation stale game engines… silly.
They went on to show off the wide array of PSP games arriving and a little trailer for Resistance Retribution for the PSP. The game system is definitely more mature than their DS competitor but seems to have a bit less sales momentum.
Overall, Sony did one right by talking about their three tiered solution to gaming instead of focusing too much on a single system. PlayStation 3 numbers are good but not mind boggling (like Wii) and their PSP product is doing much better than it used to and the PlayStation 2 numbers are high but falling compared to last year (as would be expected).
By focusing on the full suite of products they’ve put their eggs into many baskets rather than rely on their bleeding edge flagship product which still needs time to grow.
Well done Sony.
