Episode 631: Nintendo Dislikes Virtual

November 16, 2021| Jonah Falcon| 0 Comment| 5:27 pm

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This is the second attempt at Episode 631, as the previous episode had bad audio, and was boring to boot. This week’s episode features a lot of questionable content, as well as a Dark Souls Gaming Flashback.

The news includes:

Surprise Halo Infinite multiplayer launch buckles Steam servers
Grand Theft Auto Trilogy back on PC after Rockstar removes ‘unintentionally included’ files
Microsoft adds 76 more games to Xbox backwards compatibility
Nintendo explains why there is no virtual console on Switch

Let us know what you think.

Episode 734: Third Party ShowcasesEpisode 734: Third Party Showcases

Among the discussions are the original 1997 Backyard Baseball finally coming to Steam, the original Horizon Zero Dawn removed from Epic Games Store, Hi-Fi Rush 2 already in development six months when Krafton acquired Tango Gameworks and Mario + Rabbids director and Red Dead Redemption lead designer found new studio Day 4 Night.

The news includes:

Everything revealed in State of Play September 2024
Xbox Tokyo Game Show 2024 Broadcast
Sea of Stars free content update Dawn of Equinox adds local co-op, revamped prologue

Let us know what you think.

The post Episode 734: Third Party Showcases first appeared on Gaming Podcast.

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July NPD Unit Sales: Wii On Top… AgainJuly NPD Unit Sales: Wii On Top… Again

Believe this, Nintendo and their Wii console takes another month as top seller. The only product that moves more hardware than the Wii is the DS. As a gamer, it’s hard to understand how the Wii product continues to sell like this with the least supported game library on the planet.

The DS is completely understandable as it has a huge library of games, is more cost effective, comes in pretty colors and can save you tons of arguments and fighting from your kids on a long trip. In many ways the DS is synonymous with peace and quiet. What does the Wii offer us? Wii Sports and a new control scheme along with a few hit titles from Nintendo but little else for now.

I’ll be the first to admit, I thought this would be Nintendo’s chance to turn it all around and get the third parties involved. They have everything going for them in terms of sales, third party developers should be pushing out games each month considering the craze factor of the hardware. This just isn’t true.

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Gaming Flashback: Lode RunnerGaming Flashback: Lode Runner

Lode Runner, a game many of us logged hundreds of hours upon. Lode Runner has a great deal of replay value thanks to its great map editor. The game was first published by Broderbund in 1983, but was first prototyped by Douglas Smith, an architecture student at the University of Washington.

The Lode Runner prototype was called Kong and was originally written for a Prime Computer 550 minicomputer on campus, but shortly after it was ported to the VAX minicomputer. Originally programmed in FORTRAN and utilized only ASCII character graphics (the most basic of characters).

In September of 1982 Smith was able to port it to the Apple II+ (in assembly language) and renamed it to Miner. In October of that same year he submitted a rough copy to Broderbund and he’s said to have received a one-line rejection letter, “Sorry, your game doesn’t fit into our product line; please feel free to submit future products.”

The original title had no joystick support and was developed in full black and white…not exactly exciting. So, Smith then borrowed money to purchase a color monitor and joystick and continued to improve the game. Around Christmas of 1982, he submitted the game, now renamed Lode Runner, to four publishers and quickly received offers from all four: Sierra, Sirius, Synergistic, and Brøderbund.