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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Episode 236: Now With PandasEpisode 236: Now With Pandas
This week, Paul is not around, as Jonah Falcon and Jordan Lund discuss the latest news, which includes pandas. Lots and lots of pandas. That, and a Gaming History profile on David Crane.
The news this week includes:
- World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria announced
- Sony: April PSN outage has resulted in improved service
- Deep Silver: “There is a clear technology gap“
- Starcraft II DOTA mod will remain free but monetized
- “Literally, there’s three of us” on console Diablo III
- Minecraft dev wins interim injunction over Scrolls name
With that is Reader Mail and the Queston of the Week: What was your favorite Atari 2600 game?
Distributed Game Development Using ContractorsDistributed Game Development Using Contractors
Gamers around the world have noticed a large trend in the video game industry in the last 15 years, massive growth with massive projects and unbelievable costs, goals and sales. We’ve seen the impossible become achievable in epic projects like World of Warcraft and huge sales figures from Halo 3 but we’ve also seen game titles fall down in a burning wreck.
Each studio tries to beat the next studio with crisp realistic graphics, real time physics engines, life-like explosions all with huge costs. Does it all sound familiar? If you’re a movie buff you’ve probably seen movie studios cranking out the same style of movie, high computer graphic effects with talented high priced actors making longer and longer films.
The only big difference? A game studio hires most of their talent for full time positions and then has to figure out what to do with them when the project ends. Perhaps this explains Microsoft’s effort to remove game studios like Ensemble, Bungie and FASA, it’s all too much to handle when a high budget project ships and time frees up in the studio.
Episode 404: Rebel ScumEpisode 404: Rebel Scum
This week’s episode is a little late thanks to unforeseen circumstances, but nothing will stop us from posting new episodes. It’s actually one day late, since last week was a week off, thanks to Podbean limits and Halloween. On that note, this week, Jonah had to erase a spoiler segment about The Force Awakens, but enough remains of the convo discussing other parts of the upcoming movie.
This week’s news:
- Sony not to offer backwards compatibility
- Advertising Standards Authority rules Valve misled customers with Grand Theft Auto V Steam Sale
- The Witcher movie slated for 2017
- Ubisoft admits poor Syndicate sales are due to franchise fatigue caused by Unity
- World of Warcraft paid subscribers at a nine year low at 5.5M
The Question of the Week is what we usually ask ourselves, but with all the new games coming out, “What have you been playing this week?”