[This episode has been re-uploaded due to technical issues]
This week’s is pretty short, featuring a Sonic the Hedgehog and Halo discussion before delving into what’s okay and what’s not okay with in-game advertisements. The Gaming Flashback for this episode is the tripping Journey.
The news includes:
Let us know what you think.
This week we read off some of our Audience Survey Dislikes and requests while plowing through some great community comments. We self-analyze Don to see if he’s really a freak based on some community feedback while tackling some news:
Nintendo Making Users Pay for Wii HacksWe’re also taking a flashback peak at Return to Pirate Island and a bit of history on Scott Adams, the interactive fiction game developer (not the Dilbert guy). This week’s question is a reverse take on last weeks, thanks to Jonah Falcon: What games did you give up on, due to difficulty, despite wanting to see how it ended?
This week’s gaming podcast covers a bunch of topics you’d expect to hear in a gaming podcast. What? Yeah, we’re flashing back to Master of Orion and taking a little look into the background of Stephen Barcia all while covering a bit of news and community comments. This weeks news includes:
Microsoft Having Trouble With Halo:ODSTThis week’s question of the week is pretty simple: what, in your opinion, is the best generation of consoles from the earliest until today’s consoles?
One of the great downfalls of an acquisition or merger, in the game industry, is the loss of great franchise titles. Sierra, or Sierra Online, once stood on its own as a company with great gaming titles but later fell into the depths of Hades under many different company names.
Sierra’s last stop on the acquisition highway was Vivendi, years after much of Sierra’s steam had slowed. Now, they’re part of Activision Blizzard so we had high hopes they’d find a great use for some of the old Sierra properties long since collecting dust. Space Quest, Kings Quest, Leisure Suit Larry and especially Gabrielle Knight were some of our favorites, but times have changed.
“We are retaining only those franchises that are a strong fit with our long-term strategy including Crash Bandicoot, Ice Age and Spyro, as well as Prototype and a second game that has not yet been announced. We will not publish any other titles that previously were part of the Vivendi Games portfolio and we are currently reviewing our options regarding those titles,” says Activision Blizzard (joystiq)
This is unfortunate news, Activision Blizzard now has a large set of franchises on their hands, many of which have collected dust for years. Those dust collecting franchises could rise from the dead and reinvigorate their old fan base… or be dropped to the earth as unwanted scrapes after a big hunt with the vultures awaiting their take (sorry, too much watching of Animal Planet)
A reworked Kings Quest or Gabriel Knight could have seriously awesome potential in this time and age, imagine a dark comedy version of Gabriel Knight or a huge scaled world in King Quest using todays graphic engines. Although, these titles could also go the way Atari has gone and taken a well remembered franchise and made mud of its great name (*cough* Alone in the Dark).
Unfortunately, we’ll probably never know the distance an old franchise could go in this new world. We’ll have to pull out an old copy of our prized posessions and remember just how great they once where.
