This week’s episode takes a look at the success of World of Warcraft Classic and maybe yet another Batman game.
News:
Let us know what you think.
This week we’re one person down, but we’re carrying the torch anyway. This gaming podcast covers the latest news, hits up a flashback of Qix and digs into the history of Taito. We’ve got some great comment this week from ipod gaming to console generation predictions. This weeks news includes:
Longest Pre-Order Wait EverWe’re also going to hold a little contest to give away to copies of Plants vs. Zombies from popcap. Listen to the gaming podcast for the details! We want to thank all the folks who wrote in and cheftafoya for some of the news articles.
Question of the week? Are you going to sign up for hte Starcraft II beta on hype alone…?
This weeks gaming podcast covers a bunch of hot topics along with a bit of gaming history. We take a flashback look at Tapper, a great arcade classic and we’ll hit up some popular news articles:
This weeks history covers the Havok physics engine and we stand upon our soap box and talk about the rumor Starcraft 2 will arrive after Diablo 3 hits the store shelves.
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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