This week’s podcast is a little late thanks to life interrupting, but better late than never. We discuss the Gaming Flashback, Robocop, and other weird tangeants that have nothing to do with videogames.
The news this week includes:
All this and Listener Feedback.
This week’s episode was deliberately delayed because there will be a new day we record: Friday, which means the podcasts will be released on Saturday or Sunday. Therefore, the Dr. Who episode preceding this gave us a little space, and now this podcast will be setting the stage for future episodes.
This week’s news includes:
Write in the comments and let us know what you think.
In a world of 3D worlds, dynamic lighting and intense shadows we see far too few old school retro style platformer titles. With the advent of Xbox Live Arcade, WiiWare and the PlayStation Network we’re seeing a few new indy developers getting into the game.
Castle Crashers, developed by The Behemoth, is an upcoming side scroller of cutely neat beat ’em up action on Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA). The game will be 1,200 Microsoft Points (USD $15) and will launch August 27th, very soon. This side scroller allows for 4-player action, local or over the Xbox Live system with your friends and there is another mode for battling each other known as Arena.
This is like an artistically rendered version of Golden Axe with Knights! There are many different knights, each with their own powers of attack, Blue Knights can attack with Ice while the Orange Knight attacks with Fire, the Ninja Knight fires shurikens and a host of other unique Knights do battle with their own methods of madness.
If you checkout The Behemoth‘s Castle Crasher Website you’ll see a host of images and their recent trailer showing off the action. It’s safe to say, this is going to be a fast paced slightly silly slightly retro beat ’em up game paying homage to Golden Axe, Double Dragon and TMNT (original arcade one at least) with the graphic style of Alien Hominid HD, their last title.
Stay tuned, we’ll be announcing a contest to win a copy of Castle Crashers in the very near future!
Most folks in the game industry are already writing off E3 as an actual event to be attending. Even Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter is calling it “virtually useless” for both retail and investors. The writing is on the wall and the reasons are obvious.
Publishers and developers didn’t want to invest the millions of dollars to make E3 a glamour show of epic proportions anymore. The lights, camera and action are all what the industry is about; the hype wagon in full steam. Gamers eat up the hype, bloggers and journalist rely on the hype and action to build readership and keep them coming back for more and retail uses it to gauge new releases and get a grip of the future.
Without the entertainment value of E3 nobody seems to care anymore. Large scale gaming entertainment is reflected in the large scale events and, at the end of the day, we want our conferences and shows to reflect the emotion and exciting of the industry.
“E3 had much more of an impact when it was a show,” comments IGN.com vice president of games content Tal Blevins. “The video game industry is about fun and entertainment, and we should have a show that reflects it.” (gamasutra)
Everyone is sad to see the state of E3, it’s like a cancer patient waiting for their final diagnosis. It’s unfortunate, it’s going to get worse and life will go on without it. In its wake, new shows will crop up while old shows increase in audience, excitement, intensity and cost.
As one show begins to fade others will grow to replace it and developers will yet again find themselves spending millions of dollars to be the best of show.
Hi guys.
Thanks, as always, for the entertaining episode. Regarding PUBG: i like their approach to increase the performance, but they should have the player decide, if he wants this or if he wants to play on a server of “another” country. And for the mobile version (same as for the Fortnite mobile game): no! just no 🙂 FPS are PC only games for me … i even dont play FPS on a console .. i prefer mouse + keyboard … and for sure not on a 4 inch touchscreen 🙂
I loved playing WOW (and still will play it with the next expansion) but fishing was .. nar .. i did it to get some special fish or some achievments .. but not for fun 🙂
The fishing game for Dreamcast (Sega Bass Fishing) with the “real” fishing rod was fun 🙂
Thanks for the infos on Ys, i think i will give it a try.
@Jonah: a “Let´s play” of mass effect would be nice. A friend recommended me the series, and i bought all the games, but did not get into it so far 🙂
The easter offtopic: We have “kinder eggs” in germany. They are called “kid´s surprise” (dont know if it is tranlated correctly). The yellow plastic “egg” around the toy has changed, its “one” part right now … i think so that kids are not able to swallow one part of it? Don´t know 🙂 Never swallowd one of them as a kid and i had a lot of them, because my mum got me one, everytime she went shopping 🙂
And that you mentioned April fool: did you fell for one? 🙂
Have a nice week guys and hope to have a new episode soon 🙂
Greetings from germany,
Ralf