Episode 511: Grim Sky at Riot

August 9, 2018| Jonah Falcon| 0 Comment| 8:00 pm

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The guys discuss the recent report by Kotaku released this week on the shady institutionalized sexism at Riot Games, the people behind League of Legends. There’s also hints of racism as well, especially since everyone in charge is, well, a white male. Otherwise, T.J. gushes about his experiences at EVO, the fighting game convention/competition, and is looking forward to QuakeCon.

The news this week includes:

Siege’s next season Operation Grim Sky unveiled
The World Ends With You for Switch gets release date
IGN pulls review and fires writer for plagiarism
Grand Theft Auto 5 still going strong after five years

And Jonah confesses he still hasn’t played GTA5 because, well, GTA4 soured him on the series.

TD Gaming Podcast 92: Apples to RaisinsTD Gaming Podcast 92: Apples to Raisins

This weeks gaming podcast covers some fun hot news topics and a gaming flashback of ClayFighter. We also cover a bit of the history on Vicarious Visions some game news, including:

128MB Xbox 360 Fall Update [ Today’s update ]
Starcraft 2 Trilogy
Fallout 3’s been pirated on Xbox 360
November Spore Expansion Pack Coming.

We’re also asking the question, is the Sony decision to NOT drop the price of the PlayStation 3 for the holiday a big mistake?

Gaming Flashback: Lode RunnerGaming Flashback: Lode Runner

Lode Runner, a game many of us logged hundreds of hours upon. Lode Runner has a great deal of replay value thanks to its great map editor. The game was first published by Broderbund in 1983, but was first prototyped by Douglas Smith, an architecture student at the University of Washington.

The Lode Runner prototype was called Kong and was originally written for a Prime Computer 550 minicomputer on campus, but shortly after it was ported to the VAX minicomputer. Originally programmed in FORTRAN and utilized only ASCII character graphics (the most basic of characters).

In September of 1982 Smith was able to port it to the Apple II+ (in assembly language) and renamed it to Miner. In October of that same year he submitted a rough copy to Broderbund and he’s said to have received a one-line rejection letter, “Sorry, your game doesn’t fit into our product line; please feel free to submit future products.”

The original title had no joystick support and was developed in full black and white…not exactly exciting. So, Smith then borrowed money to purchase a color monitor and joystick and continued to improve the game. Around Christmas of 1982, he submitted the game, now renamed Lode Runner, to four publishers and quickly received offers from all four: Sierra, Sirius, Synergistic, and Brøderbund.

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Gaming Flashback: Double Dragon II [NES]Gaming Flashback: Double Dragon II [NES]

Double Dragon II: The Revenge, this is a sequel title to a game which arrived earlier on the NES as an arcade port, something pretty standard back in the day of arcades, and like it’s original port, has variations from the arcade.

The trick is, the variations are much less than that of the original (which might as well been it’s own version of the arcade game but sucky). I was a huge fan of the original Double Dragon title in the arcade and was met with extreme disappointment when I found out it was strictly single player on the NES console.

This game was 300% better than the disappointing Double Dragon release on the NES. Granted, the NES version was fun to play, in single-player, but I purchased it for the two-player nature of the arcade version so I could play the game with my friends. Double Dragon II, on the NES had finally restored my faith in Technos Japan and the american publisher Acclaim. They took a bad situation and made it much better in the second release, why they didn’t make the original multiplayer is beyond me.