Episode 620: Game Passing

Jonah thought that this podcast would be another short show — but it evolved into a lively conversation about Spiritfarer and other game news.

The news includes:

  • Stardew Valley is coming to Game Pass
  • Tales of Arise will get a PlayStation and Xbox demo
  • Take-Two trying to shut down popular GTA Online mod menu

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Episode 325: Civilized PodcastEpisode 325: Civilized Podcast

This week’s podcast has Dan Quick filling in for an ailing Jordan Lund, while Civilization V inevitably comes up in conversation with the Polycast host with Jonah Falcon. There’s no Gaming History or Gaming Flashback, but tons of news items.

The news includes:

  • Andrew Wilson named Electronic Arts CEO
  • PlayStation Vita TV announced
  • Sega buys Atlus for 14 billion yen
  • Star Trek video game “big disappointment” to J.J. Abrams
  • Chair on Shadow Complex 2: Fans “don’t want it more than we do”
  • Steam adopts Xbox One’s former family sharing program
  • Diablo III auction house closing in March 2014

There’s also some Listener Feedback from the T-shirt winning contestant.

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.

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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?