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.
The iTunes App Store is jam packed with video games! There are 6,200 games in the App Store to take advantage of, with 23% of those games for our puzzle gaming friends with arcade following a distance second place with 13% App Store market share. In that bulk of games, 1,485 are free download games but we’re not sure how many are “lite” versions of pay-for-games in the store, with limited game play. If you too are looking for ways to optimize your phone, see here the plans available at Circles.Life mobile.
Apple could cut down on that clutter if they let developers publish one game with a demo/shareware release and a full release, perhaps than we would be able to wade through a realistic amount of game titles. Of course, Apple isn’t exactly the most friendly of companies when it comes down to allowing us to share our thoughts and opinions of their closed box products.
Unfortunately for the new game developers, they’ve got a few games to compete against in the App Store space. While great games should rise to the top like cream in your coffee, it’s obvious that 6,200 items can clutter up an otherwise friendly space. iTunes tends to have a very unintuitive interface and isn’t really built for great online game shopping experiences, we’re sure they can exploit many of the great games in this archive of titles if they had a bit of a re-design.
You’ll find plenty of educational games in the 6,200 titles, matching if not exceeding that of the strategy genre.
(Thanks, kotaku)
This year many gamers will open new consoles for the holidays and many of those same gamers are going bring their console “live” on Xbox Live the same day. Traditionally we’ve found Xbox Live falls under the weight of the holiday rush much like Apple’s iTunes. Will we repeat history again?
Although a fully loaded Xbox Live service is money in the bank, how much money will Microsoft lose when gamers login for the first time to a service in a state of destruction? People say first impressions are extremely important, but Microsoft makes a poor first impression every holiday. Xbox Live’s Jerry Johnson told Eurogamer:
“I can tell you that when Robbie Bach is on the phone on Christmas Day calling people asking what the hell is going on, and that’s coming down from Steve Ballmer… that’s the kind of attention it got last holiday.
Many things have changed since then, and we realised [sic] the kind of growth trajectory we were on and had to prepare for it.” (Kotaku)
It’s obvious the top executives at Microsoft want to give customers a great first impression and, after a few repeated holiday down times, this year is the chance to change it all. By now, Microsoft should be fully aware of the holiday flash crowd and have a system ready to cover the load.
Plenty of gamers login because their console automatically signs in on startup, but a handful of those gameres will be shopping for Xbox Live Arcade games to see what Microsoft is now offering them and their new console. Many XBLA games the current 360 crowd is bored of will be fresh and new to holiday adopters so it’s very important to keep the system online.
Much like Amazon, sales will decrease when the service is busy or under heavy load. Hopefully Microsoft is ready to make a great first impression to new buyers and give them the option to buy high valued (high markup) electronic downloads.
Unfortunately, Skype decided that since Jonah’s webcam was connected, he wanted to use the webcam’s mic instead of the actual mic Jonah uses, making it sound like he’s in the next room talking to the others. It’s unfortunate, since this was the 350th episode of the Videogame Roundtable and longtime co-host Paul Nowak took the time from his busy schedule to join in the landmark episode.
This week’s news includes:
Let us know what you think.
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