Jonah considers Elden Ring too grind-y, and talks about the name of an infamous handheld console.
News items include:
Let us know what you think.
Tech Cruch is reporting that Electronic Arts is about to acquire casual games giant Popcap Games for a cool $1 billion, which would exceed EA’s market cap by over 13%. If true, this would be EA’s definitive entry into the casual games market, a field they broke into 7 years ago.
Despite consuming a significant chunk of EA’s reserves. buying Popcap would bring them IPs such as Bejeweled, Plants Vs. Zombies, Peggle, Zuma and Bookworm.
We’ll keep an eye on this deal as it happens.
One of the first games I was introduced to on the 2600 was River Raid, back in 1982. I remember it vividly, as I was at my cousin David’s house, who was older than me, and he’d “baby sit” me so the adults could have some adult time hanging out in the dining room. We’d sit in the family room playing 2600, mainly River Raid.
This is an Activision game, and was later ported to Atari 5200, Atari 8-bit, C64, ColecoVision, IBM PCjr, Intellivision, ZX Spectrum, and MSX. The player controls an airplane in a top-down view over a river and gets points for shooting down enemy planes, helicopters, ships and balloons (for versions after the Atari 2600). By flying over fuel-stations, the plane’s tank can be refilled. The player can shift side to side and change the speed of the plane. Sections of the river are marked by bridges.
The game was highly acclaimed for its ability to stuff tons of map into small amounts of space. The map was huge and it fit on the disk because it’s randomly generated using a common starting seed, basically, imagine some of the Diablo dungeons…they’re randomly generated but the starting seed which starts the random process is also ‘random.’ (probably based on clock time which isn’t too uncommon). Atari, rather than try to make a random level each time used the level random generator to build a procedural based level rather than drawing it and saving it into the cart. GENIUS.
A more highly randomized number generation system was used for enemy AI to make the game less predictable.
Germany consider this game harmful to children, indexing it on their list of games “harmful for children” along with the game Speed Racer. It remained on their list until 2002 (since 1984) when developers petitioned it off the list before the PS2 launch of Activision Anthology (otherwise they’d not be able to put it in the game)
Some of the Germany reasons: Minors are intended to delve into the role of an uncompromising fighter and agent of annihilation (…). It provides children with a paramilitaristic education (…). With older minors, playing leads (…) to physical cramps, anger, aggressiveness, erratic thinking (…) and headaches (wikipedia)
All in all, a great game! To hear all the details on River Raid and our opinions, checkout TD Gaming Podcast Episode 78.
We review our experiences of PAX East in this podcast and the second half is full of gaming news and community comments. Derrick reflects at his fun experience of Orcs Must Die while Jonah spent some time with LA Noire and Star Wars: The Old Republic. The news highlights include:
This week’s question of the week: Which convention would you want to attend most: E3, PAX or Comic Con?
Hi guys.
As usual: thanks a lot for your effort and work to bring us this and every other episode 🙂
I am not able to say so much to this episode because I don’t know all the games you talked about ?
I played a lot of Magic Arena as usual, some WoW and since it is released some days ago: Itorah, a hand drawn Meteoidvania Indie Game.
But some things I can say sth about:
Dorfromantik: I own this game and it is really relaxing and I can play it over and over again. You can’t loose in some way so it’s not frustrating 🙂 I really recommend it 🙂
PS5: I am happy i gut a PS5 some months ago, but sadly I did not play so much with it. I only played some hours God of War with the 4K HDR Upgrade.
Gizmondo: I owned this console and yes it had a SIM card in it 🙂 I never played with it, it was only a nice upgrade for my retro gaming collection. I sold
It for way to much money in my opinion, but because of the fact that it is rare and I owned the packaging box, manual and all that stuff it was a nice catch when I bought it 🙂
Super Mario Guide: why is this a topic? Such an old game and now it is a topic? ? but I think some collectors or hardcore fans are really interested in this thing. The game is still played a lot by speedrunners, afaik?
Switch Topic: I really love my switch. It doesn’t need any upgrade, because the games for this console should not be such graphical monster games in 4K HDR… I like it for the simplicity. You can play the games even if you don’t have that much time, they are easy to understand, easy to solve or finish and you can can get back to them after weeks and are in to it after some minutes. No need for an epic storyline which is hard to follow. But for sure that’s my opinion and I understand every person who wants complex storys, hardcore mode and complicated as hell 🙂
Sorry for late commenting, but I wanted to drop the lines to make you know, that I am still a listener and follower even if I don’t comment every episode 🙂
Guys, that’s all from my side. Please keep on the good work, stay healthy and enjoy whatever you do 🙂
Greetings from Germany,
Ralf