The Gaming Podcast is back after a week off, and it celebrates the 10th year anniversary of BioShock with its own Gaming Flashback. They also touch on its sequels, BioShock 2 and BioShock Infinite.
It’s not all BioShock, however, as the following news items are discussed:
Let us know if you enjoyed any of the BioShock games.
The place to be, this week, is Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA) as Popcap’s now released Feeding Frenzy 2 on the 360 platform. Xbox Live Arcade has been the go to place for awesome new content brought in high definition on both shrink wrapped box games along with classic casual titles.
Not into casual games? Perhaps your spouse or children are into them! If you’ve got an Xbox 360 and continually consider it a “big boys hardcore console” it’s time to change your perspective because that’s old world thinking. Microsoft, together with Popcap, plans to change how people game on the Xbox 360 console system.
This isn’t Popcap’s first title, many may remember Heavy Weapon on the Xbox 360. This sure won’t be the last!
Read on for full press release details!
Once upon a time, Activision Blizzards CEO Bobby Kotick kicked a few franchises to the curb: Riddick and Ghostbusters. No doubt, this was a result of the Activision and Blizzard merger requiring some resources to the merged together while others were cut from the lineup. Phil Harrison, the new big suit at Atari/Infogrames has raised these little birds from the ashes with a dream to build them into 100-million dollar franchises.
While Bobby Kotick said the titles, “don’t have the potential to be exploited every year on every platform with clear sequel potential and have the potential to become $100 million dollar franchises,” Phil Harrision sees it as a personal challenge to prove him wrong.
“What Bobby, perhaps unhelpfully said, was that those games were franchises which wouldn’t make $100m of revenue and generate sequels. If that’s his benchmark, then fine — and we’d love to aspire to the same benchmarks. But you know what? I would love to turn Ghostbusters into a $100m franchise, just to prove him wrong.” (1up)
In many ways, this is the difference in attitudes from a large firm compared to a smaller firm with strong goals and a vision for success. Activision Blizzard is big now, perhaps the biggest publisher in the industry, they can’t be bothered with minuscule 80-million dollar franchises. Others, like Atari, strive to take a title from nothing to something of greatness. Granted, Atari’s failed in a lot of franchises, but with their new ex-Sony executive behind the helm things could turn around and this might be the first step.
Most of the best game franchises in existance today started from nothing but a dream. Big publishers don’t have time to dream, they’re too busy making money off the fanboys of their current franchises.
This weeks gaming podcast is a his and her podcast as Don is out sick. Oddly, the episode is shorter than normal, apparently we just didn’t have enough to rant about this week. We did cover some community responses, covered some game history and busted through some news articles including:
This week’s question of the week, would it bother you if EA started charging fees to play used games?
