Episode 645: Brought To You By the Swedish Mafia

There’s a lot of PlayStation news this week, good bad and indifferent. In addition, there’s some Gundam’s coming your way. This week’s episode features a double whammy of a Gaming Flashback highlighting Mass Effect 3, and the Gaming History of the infamous Gizmondo.

The news item this week:

  • Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart lead writer claims work has been “erased”

Let us know what you think.

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Sony’s E3 Conference: Fairly ImpressiveSony’s E3 Conference: Fairly Impressive

We’re all used to Sony falling on their face at E3 in the last few years, but, this year, things were different. They’re information was delivered well, they had a great presentation medium using Little Big Planet‘s game engine as a presentation platform over the standard PowerPoint slides and everything went smoothly.

The format for displaying their facts, figures and sales numbers was well played. Nobody wants to sit in front of a chart and listen to an executive blab on about what they did and where they’re going. But, when you add some Little Big Planet flair, such as having the graphs built within their game engine and Sack Boy hopping around on the statistics things smooth over well.

I was confused on why they chose to display the Little Big Planet graphic engine followed by Resistance 2 and then taper into talk about the PlayStation 2 with game previews. It seems more appropriate to bring in the PlayStation 2 product line first, then blow the crowd away with the current generation graphics. Instead, we were awed by the epic Resistance 2 graphics and then presented with old generation stale game engines… silly.

They went on to show off the wide array of PSP games arriving and a little trailer for Resistance Retribution for the PSP. The game system is definitely more mature than their DS competitor but seems to have a bit less sales momentum.

Overall, Sony did one right by talking about their three tiered solution to gaming instead of focusing too much on a single system. PlayStation 3 numbers are good but not mind boggling (like Wii) and their PSP product is doing much better than it used to and the PlayStation 2 numbers are high but falling compared to last year (as would be expected).

By focusing on the full suite of products they’ve put their eggs into many baskets rather than rely on their bleeding edge flagship product which still needs time to grow.

Well done Sony.

Episode 510: Red Dead SurpriseEpisode 510: Red Dead Surprise

This week’s episode didn’t initially have a Gaming Flashback, but the crew accidentally started one with 2010’s Red Dead Redemption, which shouldn’t be a flashback since it fails the “10 Year Rule”, but it was so fun to talk about, it became one. They also found some interesting stuff in a thin-news week, which is the usual for Summer.

The news includes:

  • Valve adds temporary fix for fake item scams on Steam
  • Halo devs not working on Battle Royale mode for Infinite
  • Nintendo Switch sales near 20m, down slightly on last year
  • Playground Games staffs up for the rumored Fable reboot

Let us know what you think.

Episode 470: The Sims 4 Contest Part 2Episode 470: The Sims 4 Contest Part 2

The The Sims 4 contest is still going on this week, with the winner to be announced in Episode 471. The crew gets back to discussing news, but as is usual, it’s a light week in July.

This week’s news items include:

  • Starcraft Remastered is coming in August in 4K
  • Star Wars Battlefront 2 loot boxes spark pay-to-win fears
  • Only main player will progress in Far Cry 5 story
  • Destiny 2’s getting rid of random perk rolls for loot and the response is divided
  • Nintendo Switch Virtual Console will be the only way you can play certain Super Mario games

Again, The Sims 4 Contest is only eligible for US entrants.