Episode 573: A Very Special Returning Guest

This week, Paul fills in for Scott, who has more pressing issues than discussing videogames, though some very serious topics about them do pop up, such as how misogyny became pronounced in the hobby. The Gaming Flashback is one of the legendarily panned titles, Bomberman Act:Zero.

The news for this week includes:

  • Video game spending reaches record high during pandemic
  • Epic Games Store keyless integration with other digital stores announced
  • Minecraft sales now exceed 200 million (from PC Gamer)
  • Star Citizen will hold a free fly event starting this week

There’s also some Listener Feedback from longtime fan Ralf from Germany.

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Episode 237: Half a ShowEpisode 237: Half a Show

This week’s episode is abbreviated due to Paul’s move to California, and various Halloween delays. That’s not to say there’s no great stuff in the show, as there are some big debates about privacy and bugs.

The news this week includes:

  • Electronic Arts insists that Origin is not spyware
  • Rumor: Grand Theft Auto V to be download only?
  • Dev: Sword of the Stars II is a “turnip

All that, and Paul feels older thanks to the Reader Feedback.

Question of the Week this time is non-videogame related: What’s your favorite vacation spot?

Outtakes Episode – September 2012Outtakes Episode – September 2012

Since Jonah Falcon is in London this week, there is no proper episode this week. However, that’s not to say we’re leaving you high and dry, as a new Outtakes episode is here for your listening pleasure, highlighted by Paul’s bile, Paul’s love of Shrinkydinks, and a long conversation between Jordan Lund and Jonah about Rob Liefeld’s Charlie Sheen-like departure from DC Comics.

See you next week when we have a normal episode.

Sony’s E3 Conference: Fairly ImpressiveSony’s E3 Conference: Fairly Impressive

We’re all used to Sony falling on their face at E3 in the last few years, but, this year, things were different. They’re information was delivered well, they had a great presentation medium using Little Big Planet‘s game engine as a presentation platform over the standard PowerPoint slides and everything went smoothly.

The format for displaying their facts, figures and sales numbers was well played. Nobody wants to sit in front of a chart and listen to an executive blab on about what they did and where they’re going. But, when you add some Little Big Planet flair, such as having the graphs built within their game engine and Sack Boy hopping around on the statistics things smooth over well.

I was confused on why they chose to display the Little Big Planet graphic engine followed by Resistance 2 and then taper into talk about the PlayStation 2 with game previews. It seems more appropriate to bring in the PlayStation 2 product line first, then blow the crowd away with the current generation graphics. Instead, we were awed by the epic Resistance 2 graphics and then presented with old generation stale game engines… silly.

They went on to show off the wide array of PSP games arriving and a little trailer for Resistance Retribution for the PSP. The game system is definitely more mature than their DS competitor but seems to have a bit less sales momentum.

Overall, Sony did one right by talking about their three tiered solution to gaming instead of focusing too much on a single system. PlayStation 3 numbers are good but not mind boggling (like Wii) and their PSP product is doing much better than it used to and the PlayStation 2 numbers are high but falling compared to last year (as would be expected).

By focusing on the full suite of products they’ve put their eggs into many baskets rather than rely on their bleeding edge flagship product which still needs time to grow.

Well done Sony.