This week’s Gaming Flashback has no cake — instead it’s the history of Portal. The guys try to keep the podcast meme-free as they discuss Valve’s first person puzzle platformer.
There’s also non-Portal related news items, too:
Let us know what you think in the Comments section.
The videogame world has been stunned by the news that GameSpy, 1UP and UGO are all being shuttered. GameSpy had been around since 1999 (back when it was a mere online match service – game-spy, geddit?) UGO was a site that I wrote for both indirectly as an editor of GamePen and directly when I wrote DVD and game reviews for UGO.
UGO’s Chris Radtke bid farewell stating:
I’ve spent many years of my life trying to turn UGO.com into something entertaining for you guys. Hopefully you stopped by recently to watch one our funny videos. Or you found yourself debating one of our nerd culture lists, read a movie review or pondered the age old question “Who would win in a fight, a minotaur armed with a trident or a centaur armed with a crossbow.” Could be you tried to win something off our homepage or you Googled “Hot Girls” and found a couple of pics you liked. I don’t really care how you got here, just as long as you were entertained when you did.
The TD Gaming Podcast heads to an uncertain future, as the TD Gaming Podcast will be closing its run with this cast. Derrick Schommer explains the reason that he and Jennifer will no longer be able to support the podcast, and thank the fans for their devoted support.
So, for old time’s sake, Derrick and Jonah Falcon cover the past week’s news:
We also cover the reader feedback over the past couple of weeks, and the Question of the Week is: what would you like to see happen to the podcast?
If this is the truly the last Gaming Podcast, thanks for your support and praise.
Much like Kameo: Elements of Power, Fable 2 ships without online co-op mode on day-one. However, Kameo didn’t promise the co-op mode prior to the games release, or talk about it in their presentations and hype machine conferences.
How does that happen? It’s easy to promise a feature but words do not make games true. More than likely the online co-op was a bit more complicated or had some bugs that needed to be shaken out prior to shipping. Microsoft is talking about releasing a patch for the new co-op play on the first week or so of the game release.
There are two options: ship a product that’s buggy and deal with the online PR nightmare with bugs and day-one patches, or, ship it without the feature and promise it early in the launch phase of the game. Once the code is complete, game software has to go through the packing, duplication and shipping phase. A lot of last minute testing can get done in the time it takes to produce the boxed product.
Hopefully Microsoft is doing some last minute testing to make a more reliable presentation of online co-op which everyone can use. However if it releases with a bunch of bugs…
(Thanks, GameSpot)
I wanted Killer Instinct on the mini SNES.