This week’s episode of Gaming Podcast features the first news of 2019 for the podcast, and there’s some juicy items to discuss. There’s no Gaming Flashback, but there is more discussion of the latest Civilization VI: Gathering Storm civs to be discussed.
The news includes:
Let us know what you think.
NOTE: THIS ARTICLE DISCUSSES THE ENDING AND EVENTS OF MASS EFFECT 3. DO NOT READ IF YOU DO NOT WISH THE GAME TO BE SPOILED FOR YOU.
In this day and age, one learns to take internet outrage with a heavy dollop of salt. The videogame community tends to be reactionary in the worst way, for a few reasons: they tend to be young, they tend to express their immediate feelings almost as a stream of consciousness, and let’s face it, the Greater Internet Dickwad Theory comes into play as well.
When it comes to game endings, when I hear that the community is upset about a game’s ending, I almost always take that as a good sign that the ending is daring and provocative. For example, there was an outcry over the abruptness of the ending of Halo 2, which had the nerve to conclude with a cliffhanger. The 2009 Prince of Persia reboot ended with the player undoing all of the work to free an ancient evil god they’d just imprisoned.
So when I heard that there was a growing outcry about the endings of Mass Effect 3, my interest peaked, because invariably, that meant the story was provocative and daring, instead of predictable and boring.
It’s the last episode before the start of E3, which both Jonah and Paul will be attending, as Paul fantasizes about having some fancy footwear for the conference.
The abbreviated episode includes the following news:
Question of the Week this time is, “Do you prefer a silent or voiced protagonist?”
The Castlevania series was born in Japan on September 26th back in 1986. That knowledge in hand, you can imagine the demographic of 30+ year old gamers who would kill to get an old school franchise title on a new graphic intensive console.
We’ve had many new Castlevania releases since 1986 including releases on the Nintendo DS in 2006 with more titles arriving with the Castlevania branding. However, we’ve not seen a true “full blown” Castlevania title in some time. As a retro style gamer, I’d love to hear news that this would be a 2D game with “next generation” graphics.
There are far too few really great 2D side scrolling platformers for this generation of consoles. Outside of Nintendo, most side scroller systems become “arcade” titles in XBLA or PSN. Over the last fifteen years we’ve had plenty of 3D games with jumping and crazy camera work. Lately, we’ve had some new titles arriving that are 2D platformers like Little Big Planet and the recently released Mega Man 9.
More than likely, Konami will follow the flow and design yet another old franchise with new 3D graphics. Given the demographic for this franchise it would almost seem like a selling point to jump back to a 2D world view.
What would you like? A 3D or 2D Castlevania title on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3?
