This week’s episode has no news, despite the beginning of 2019 having some earth-shattering news items, which will be discussed next week, probably.
Instead, Jonah, TJ and Scott talk about their favorite games of 2018. Let us know which game was your favorite last year.
DOOM is a PC game titlat that wasn’t initially released in stores. It was uploaded to an FTP server in the University of Wisconsin-Madison and on the Software Creations BBS on the 10th of December; released as a shareware game, people were encouraged to download and spread the game around to all their friends.
In days before social networks and the wildfire of the Internet (or high speed networking) this game still managed to spread around to everyone in the gaming community. From1993 to 1995 the title had an estimated install base of 10 million computers. We were one of them.
Granted, ten million copies were installed but most were not registered and simply remained as shareware. However, over one million copies were sold for the registered version of DOOM and this brought momentum to their next non-shareware copy of the DOOM series. The Ultimate Doom (version 1.9, including episode IV) was released, making this the first time that Doom was sold commercially in stores.
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Dan Quick returns again to cover for Paul Nowak, and this week, the Gaming Podcast is offering free copies of The Darkness II Limited Edition, which comes with the main game and some free DLC. The guys are giving away an Xbox 360 version and a PlayStation 3 version. To win, just listen to the podcast and post what your favorite scary movie is.
The game news this week includes:
And yes, they know that the announcement was just made today – May 15th release date for Diablo III.
The contest to win either the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 version of The Darkness II will run this and next week, with the winners announced in Episode 257.
Baldur’s Gate isn’t too old, it was released in November of 1998, but that’s still a bit dated now. The gaming industry isn’t friendly to the years, often working in what seems to be accelerated “dog years” in terms of technological advancements. It figured this was worth covering because it’s one of the best selling and considered a top tier single-player RPG by most accounts.
It was also developed by BioWare, who, at the time, only had one other game under their belt from two years before called Shattered Steel.
The story begins just after a devastating event in the Forgotten Realms D&D campaign called the “Time of Troubles.” This was a great twist in the standard D&D campaign, it caused all curative magic (clerics) to lose their ability to heal unless near their deity, magic didn’t function correctly (I believe this is where the Wild Mage came from) and was unpredictable and gods walked the earth as mortals which caused magic to, in effect, die while the gods were away. Since the storyline starts slightly after this event, the game contains healing and magic but the storyline is impacted by prior events of course, people have trust issues.
The game was made great because it held “mostly true” to the 2nd Edition D&D roots so the learning curve for D&D player’s wasn’t so rough; some things were adjusted to handle the real-time effect of a video game RPG. You could party with up to six Non-Player-Characters (NPC’s) whom would swap in and out of your active party over time as part of the storyline (something also implemented by the US release of Final Fantasy 2).
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