This week’s episode is full of rumors, which the crew try to parse.
The news includes:
Let us know what you think as usual at the Facebook page.
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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Paul, Jordan and Jonah continue to rock on, as they discuss the bizarre circumstance of the iOS app Flappy Bird, while Paul deals with Pinsanity issues (behind the scenes). They also discuss the classic The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay in the Gaming Flashback.
This week’s news includes:
There’s Listener Feedback with a new Question of the Week: “Did you introduce a non-gamer to gaming?”
In a WTF moment, Neilsen Ratings shows more gamers are playing the classic Microsoft Xbox console than the PlayStation 3. While 9.7% of gamers are playing the Xbox 7.3% are playing the PlayStation 3 but Sony isn’t out of the picture by a long shot, having 31.7% of gamers playing the PlayStation 2!
Only 13.4% of gamers are playing the Wii even though it’s the hottest selling console on the market, showing the fury of the casual gamer it seems. It’s trendy to own a Wii but it’s not trendy to play it; it would be interesting to see how much of the 13.4% is Wii Sports.
We’re guessing there are more classic Xbox gamers playing their console compared to the PlayStation 3 because of the console cost. You can find a used Xbox for under $25.00 on eBay but the question remains, who wants a used Xbox? The audience for the PS3 is more hardcore, more elite and more rare compared to the cost conscious gamers in the larger game industry pie.
More than likely, in ten years, we’ll see most gamers playing the PlayStation 3 while Microsoft works to claim demographics on whatever their next console will be. However, we’re not so sure how many Wii gamers will be playing their current generation console in ten years. Probably very few given the two year old console still has a small amount of gaming public.
(Thanks, 1up)
