[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.
Bioshock arrived on the Xbox 360 almost August of 2007, about one year from this month. It’s set to arrive on the PlayStation 3 in October of 2008, over one year after the Xbox 360 version. Is it too late?
For those that have decided to buy a PlayStation 3 and hold out on the Xbox 360, it will be their first time with full access to the Bioshock title. For everyone else, it’s the same game with prettier graphics and a slight update in difficulty.
Bioshock was well received by both reviewers and video game players last year, will this be a repeat or simply sit on the shelf begging to be played? Bioshock sold 490,900 copies the month of its original release, we’d love to know if it can do it twice.
Kotaku is reporting that “they’ve instead decided to cut off pretty much all of your ammo, leaving you in many instances to pick up a gun with a single bullet in it. It’ll also jack up the price of plasmids, reduce the amount of health vita chambers give you and just generally make the game, oh, impossible.”
Harder, prettier graphics but … too late?
After four years of development, Popcap lit up Seattle Monday night with the launch of Bejeweled Twist sparing no expense to show off their new casual game. It took four years to complete but Popcap isn’t going to release a game until it’s perfect. You won’t play it until they believe it is a game their mom would love.
“Popcap builds games for people, not demographics,” says CEO David Roberts. At the launch the founders, John Vechey, Brian Fiete and Jason Kapalka talked about the casual game market while the “Gem Girls” walked around looking sexy and flashy. Roberts talked about the casual game industry and forecasts it growing to become an $8 billion market — not too shabby for USD $19.99 games.
Downloads of Bejeweled, of course, show no signs of stopping and Popcap explained that 40% of their revenue comes from the old concepts of “Diamond Mine.” Phil Spencer, Microsoft Game Studios’ General Manager, hopped on stage and explained how Microsoft saw Popcap’s vision in their Diamond Mine flash game and suggested a rename to Bejeweled, the founders hated the name but took the big companies suggestion on the change.
Since then, we’ve had many folks attempt to clone and replicate the success in Popcap’s flagship product. Complete with open bar, Gem Girls, camera flashes and glitter this game launch shows the growing casual games industry the great power and momentum of “simple” casual games.
Nothing about Bejeweled Twist is simple. The game play of Bejeweled Twist aggregates all the knowledge Popcap has acquired over the last seven years to design one blockbuster title. From classic Bejeweled to Chuzzle to Peggle, the game takes pieces of each successful title and combines the game play, sounds, graphics and modes into a product that will bring casual gaming to a new level. Bejeweled Twist is going to be the new bar to reach in the industry in terms of addictive game play and a unified casual vision.
Stay tuned for the full review as we get deep into the full features of Bejeweled Twist. Special thanks to Dale North from Destructoid for hanging out for some drinks during the after party.
Just last week in our gaming podcast we were talking about how Gears of War 2 wasn’t going to make a PC debut because it has a bit of a problem with piracy. We were afraid this movement was going to cause game developers and publishers to stick with console’s “big can of DRM” over the PC for many future releases.
Turns out, Fallout 3 was stolen before it was announced as finished and has begun to show up on torrents around the Internet. This, of course, has lead folks to believe the leak took place at the manufacturing plant given the obvious circumstances behind the event. Sure, the title could have been leaked at the developers studio, but who would want to cause their products sales to suffer? Perhaps a hacker broke into the studio and stole the raw images?
There are plenty of possibilities, but the fact of the matter is this is the “DRM” console version of the game. It has been stolen and downloaded by thousands of people who are going to actually take the time to make it work on their ‘tweaked’ console. Just when we said “it’s too hard to hack the Xbox 360 and its games,” some pirate comes out and does it!
While the pirates set sea with the glorious booty that is Fallout 3, Bethesda’s staying hush about the incident for now. In odd timing, Ubisoft came out, prior to this event, talking in respect to Tom Clancy EndWar saying:
“To be honest, if PC wasn’t pirated to hell and back, there’d probably be a PC version coming out the same day as the other two.” (gamasutra)
Perhaps, the pirates want to bring some attention to the console market in terms of piracy so developers continue to produce PC titles? If nobody is safe, there will be no one safe-haven console to run to when pirates are stealing “potential sales.”
