This week’s episode covers a wide variety of topics, with no set news list save talking about Nintendo Direct’s oddly uninspiring conference. There’s no news list, so feel free to discuss what you found interesting or frustrating about Nintendo’s stream or anything else mentioned in the podcast.
Episode 602: Nintendo Directionless
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New Castlevania Title For 360 and PS3: 2D or 3D?New Castlevania Title For 360 and PS3: 2D or 3D?
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?
Episode 316: Talkin’ About Candleja–Episode 316: Talkin’ About Candleja–
Jonah is getting ready for Vegas this weekend, so you know that whatever he does there will probably stay there. On the other hand, Jordan’s just beginning to check out State of Decay, while the winner of the T-shirt contest is announced. Also, for the first time in a long while, there’s a Gaming History – this one on the PlayStation 2.
This week’s news:
- UbiSoft: Xbox One version of Watch Dogs more dynamic than PS4 and current-gen versions
- Microsoft prez Don Mattrick leaves to be Zynga CEO
- Sony: DualShock 4 controller’s light bar cannot be turned off
- Indian PC gamers upset at Origin price increases
This week’s Question of the Week, “What’s your favorite indie game released in the last year?”
Final Fantasy XIII – Xbox 360Final Fantasy XIII – Xbox 360
Yoichi Wada of Square Enix has let the cat out of the bag. The cat is Final Fantasy XIII for the Xbox 360 and it will be simultaneously released with the PlayStation 3 version. This may be an end to an exclusive era for Sony as all their big brands jump to non-exclusion.
This is probably a result of gamers slow adoption of the PlayStation 3 hardware for various issues, one being cost. Personally I think Sony’s move to say “no price cut” in our near future is a grand mistake. It is well understood that they want profitability over quantity but you’re losing your exclusives to a broader audience.
Each generation of consoles brings new industry trends and, for now, exclusive games from third party developers is too risky when you look at overall cost to produce a block buster title like Final Fantasy XIII. Consider the sales of GTA IV, although they were in the millions, imagine how low it would have been if they only released on the PS3. They’d might have actually lost money on the game.
Square Enix can see the writing on the wall, that writing says “ship on as many mediums as possible.” Gamers are split between consoles with a huge segment on Wii and Xbox 360, if you can at least ship on one of those consoles along with the PS3 you’ll do better financially.
(Thanks, Kotaku)