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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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.

Episode 453: Videogame Piss-TakeEpisode 453: Videogame Piss-Take

Unfortunately, there’s no Donald Trump in this podcast – you’ll have to wait for an outtakes episode to listen to THAT discussion. However, there’s plenty of news culled from the past two weeks to enjoy.

The news includes:

  • Rumor: Beyond Good & Evil 2 Switch exclusive for first 12 months
  • ‘Game Mode’ for Windows 10 will power Xbox One and Project Scorpio games too
  • Square Enix strongly hints at Dragon Quest XI heading west
  • Xbox boss says Microsoft will still “take risks” after Scalebound cancellation

Let us know what you think.

Episode 324: Next-Generation ShowdownEpisode 324: Next-Generation Showdown

This week’s podcast has no Listener Feedback, and is sort of short because of it. However, in addition to the news items that were on script, there was the surprise news of how much Grand Theft Auto V cost to produce.

This week’s news includes:

  • Xbox One gets November 22 launch date
  • Each Xbox One to be sold at a profit
  • PS4 only supports 4 controllers
  • PS4 and Xbox One won’t support external hard drives for now
  • Sony refunds Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn PSN purchases

This week’s Question of the Week asks if you’ve ever gotten a new version of the console you already owned.