This week the gang covers the Xbox Partner Preview, while also discussing the closing of Rooster Teeth.
The news includes:
Let us know what you think.
The post Episode 716: Xbox Partner Preview first appeared on Gaming Podcast.
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This weeks gaming podcast flashes back to Drakkhan, touches on the history of Infocom and battles some gaming news in a time when gaming news is light. We’re reading some community comments and tackling these difficult headlines:
This week’s question of the week, what occurred in 2009 that “wowed” you, made you happy, built your excitement or just generally rocked your face off?
Now that Blizzard feels their engine is solid, it’s time to move on to creating content for the full game. Jay Wilson, Diablo 3‘s lead designer, says the game engine is in an advance stage of completion and much of the art team has moved onto Act 2. Don’t read into that, he said game engine.
Blizzard is obviously not hurting for money, given the success of World of Warcraft and they’ve always taken their time with projects to make them solid products. Blizzard’s name is on the line and they’re brand consists of three major franchises: Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo. When you produce so few games you’re expected to do them perfectly.
How do they do it? As Wilson says, “If we haven’t rebuilt something five times it really doesn’t deserve to be shipped. That’s pretty much our policy.” (eurogamer) While a game engine is the foundation for a great game experience, the content is king. Blizzard is deep in the mire of content production so, although the engine might be solid, the final product is probably still far from complete.
End result, expect a high quality product once again from Blizzard.
Unlike Japan, Nintendo has not invaded the entire home consumer market here in the United States. This leads them to believe there is room for both the DS and the DSi here in the United States. The DS will no doubt be a cheaper alternative to the DSi and the DSi isn’t going to make its way to the US for some time now (well into 2009 we hear).
Right now we’re still working through what the strategy’s going to be here. But we think that there’s huge untapped potential for the DS Lite. Because when you’ve got only one in every five households in the U.S., compared to one in every two in Japan, it says there’s potential.
You’ve seen some of the work we’ve done this year with celebrities, that we’re bringing a lot of new consumers in to the DS. So I think there’s opportunity for both of them to coexist for some period of time. (kotaku)
We all though the DS was taking over the market, apparently it’s going a long way to go. Nintendo probably feels the DSi may take some of the market share for the original hand held so they’re going to keep them both in the market, initially. No doubt, the DSi will eventually out-live the DS over time, but there is no reason to take the DS out of the US market until the market dominance dies off.
