Episode 611: Not So Legendary Mass Effect

This week’s edition has Jonah being really down on the Legendary Edition of the Mass Effect Trilogy, and it has nothing to do with any sort of bugs. TJ empathizes, recalling his frustration with the remaster of Demon’s Souls.

In other news:

  • Civilization devs have “several” games in development that will be revealed “this year”
  • The Apple vs. Epic lawsuit has sparked ‘Xbox Game Pass on Switch’ rumors again
  • No Hollow Knight: Silksong news at E3

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Fanboy Turf Wars and Metacritic’s The TurfFanboy Turf Wars and Metacritic’s The Turf

Gamers are passionate about gaming, love their games, follow the industry all while living and breathing all things game. This is the green pastures upon which fanboys are born. As we’ve seen at gamingpodcast.net, where we were hit hard by fanboy rage a few days ago the blood boils with hate and rage.

Although our site only received 30+ comments, other sites whom picked up the article have 100+ comments on the article about Blu-ray and my opinions of it. PS3 fanboys ran wild telling me how my name has been “dragged through the mud” followed (and preceded) by many curse words and name calling, many of which I simply refused to post because of the vulgar content.

They have moved on to larger more popular platforms to voice their opinion, by dinging Gears of War 2 prior to the games release on metacritic.com dolling out a 3.5 user submitted review (which has since gone up upon the release). Why did they target GoW2? Because the 360 fanboys nailed LittleBigPlanet with crappy reviews, says smashpad.com.

The response was to hit Resistance 2 for another bad user review score all while forcing metacritic to change their user review process to only allow users to post reviews after a game has hit store shelves. Metacritic isn’t to blame here, although it is sensible to only allow reviews prior to a games release, the fanboys have found a way to hold their turf wars.

Who’s next? Amazon.com allows reviews as well and, as we saw from Spore, it can get pretty dirty there too. Now that Metacritic is altering their review process will gamers wait until they’re allowed to spam with bad reviews to do so, or will they hunt for new social networking proving grounds to give games a bad name?

Perhaps they’ll compete for google keywords to rank #1 for a fraud review of a title to beat out other sites or they’ll find another popular user-generated review site to scar the name of a to-be released title.

There is a gang war on the Net and it involves fanboys finding social media outlets to spread their hate and deception on the opposing consoles. For us, we’ll stick with gaming and leave the rage to someone else.

Gaming Flashback: DOOMGaming Flashback: DOOM

DOOM is a PC game titlat that wasn’t initially released in stores. It was uploaded to an FTP server in the University of Wisconsin-Madison and on the Software Creations BBS on the 10th of December; released as a shareware game, people were encouraged to download and spread the game around to all their friends.

In days before social networks and the wildfire of the Internet (or high speed networking) this game still managed to spread around to everyone in the gaming community. From1993 to 1995 the title had an estimated install base of 10 million computers. We were one of them.

Granted, ten million copies were installed but most were not registered and simply remained as shareware. However, over one million copies were sold for the registered version of DOOM and this brought momentum to their next non-shareware copy of the DOOM series. The Ultimate Doom (version 1.9, including episode IV) was released, making this the first time that Doom was sold commercially in stores.

(more…)

Xbox 360’s Fable 2: No Online Co-Op In BoxXbox 360’s Fable 2: No Online Co-Op In Box

Much like Kameo: Elements of Power, Fable 2 ships without online co-op mode on day-one. However, Kameo didn’t promise the co-op mode prior to the games release, or talk about it in their presentations and hype machine conferences.

How does that happen? It’s easy to promise a feature but words do not make games true. More than likely the online co-op was a bit more complicated or had some bugs that needed to be shaken out prior to shipping. Microsoft is talking about releasing a patch for the new co-op play on the first week or so of the game release.

There are two options: ship a product that’s buggy and deal with the online PR nightmare with bugs and day-one patches, or, ship it without the feature and promise it early in the launch phase of the game. Once the code is complete, game software has to go through the packing, duplication and shipping phase. A lot of last minute testing can get done in the time it takes to produce the boxed product.

Hopefully Microsoft is doing some last minute testing to make a more reliable presentation of online co-op which everyone can use. However if it releases with a bunch of bugs…

(Thanks, GameSpot)