Jonah is in LA, TJ is at EVO, and who knows where Scott is.
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Episode 345: Old in the ValleyEpisode 345: Old in the Valley
This week’s Jonah discusses an article about ageism in Silicon Valley, while Paul complains about an achievement ruining a casual game he’d spent $200 on. This week’s Gaming Flashback is Dance Dance Revolution.
The news includes:
- Facebook acquiring Oculus for $2 billion
- Valve’s Portal coming as Tegra 4 Android App to Nvidia Shield
- Xbox One may allow loaning of digital games
- Nintendo, Sony won’t attend PAX East
All this and a little Listener Feedback, with the Question of the Week being “Do you subscribe to videogame magazines now?”
Jack Thompson Says Take-Two Chairmen Must Repent His SinsJack Thompson Says Take-Two Chairmen Must Repent His Sins
The washed up Jack Thompson, also known as the thorn in the side of Take-Two has gone off the deep end. Originally, Thompson would do everything in his power to bring the negative press (and lawsuits) to Take-Two for Grant Theft Auto, Man Hunt and any other game he didn’t like.
Rather than allowing parents to utilize the ESRB rating, Thompson found it in his Christian heart to pursue game companies like his own personal holy war. Luckily he’s lost all his power because people finally realized he’s a lukewarm loon with a one track mind. But wait, there’s more!
“Mr. Zelnick’s problems at Take-Two are miniscule [sic] compared to the eternity of punishment that is coming his way unless he repents and accepts Christ as I did 32 years ago this month.” (1up)
When the law doesn’t work out for him, he takes it into Gods hands. He fires right over at the chairmen, “there is no blessing for Strauss Zelnick, who is not a Christian, when he gets what he deserves…”
The game industry was doing well before Jack and it will thrive without him in the way as well. One man cannot change the world, especially when that one man tends to act like a raving lunatic. Parents must guide their children down the right paths, show them life’s possibilities and understand what content is rated for what age. We’ve figured out how to handle movie ratings, we’re sure adults will figure out the ESRB rating as well.
We give too little credit to parents when it comes to making decisions for their children. If they cannot make the right decision on allowing a six year old to play Halo or Resistance, then can we actually trust them to keep a child out of R rated movies or finish their dinner before getting a snack?
Fanboy Turf Wars and Metacritic’s The TurfFanboy Turf Wars and Metacritic’s The Turf
Gamers are passionate about gaming, love their games, follow the industry all while living and breathing all things game. This is the green pastures upon which fanboys are born. As we’ve seen at gamingpodcast.net, where we were hit hard by fanboy rage a few days ago the blood boils with hate and rage.
Although our site only received 30+ comments, other sites whom picked up the article have 100+ comments on the article about Blu-ray and my opinions of it. PS3 fanboys ran wild telling me how my name has been “dragged through the mud” followed (and preceded) by many curse words and name calling, many of which I simply refused to post because of the vulgar content.
They have moved on to larger more popular platforms to voice their opinion, by dinging Gears of War 2 prior to the games release on metacritic.com dolling out a 3.5 user submitted review (which has since gone up upon the release). Why did they target GoW2? Because the 360 fanboys nailed LittleBigPlanet with crappy reviews, says smashpad.com.
The response was to hit Resistance 2 for another bad user review score all while forcing metacritic to change their user review process to only allow users to post reviews after a game has hit store shelves. Metacritic isn’t to blame here, although it is sensible to only allow reviews prior to a games release, the fanboys have found a way to hold their turf wars.
Who’s next? Amazon.com allows reviews as well and, as we saw from Spore, it can get pretty dirty there too. Now that Metacritic is altering their review process will gamers wait until they’re allowed to spam with bad reviews to do so, or will they hunt for new social networking proving grounds to give games a bad name?
Perhaps they’ll compete for google keywords to rank #1 for a fraud review of a title to beat out other sites or they’ll find another popular user-generated review site to scar the name of a to-be released title.
There is a gang war on the Net and it involves fanboys finding social media outlets to spread their hate and deception on the opposing consoles. For us, we’ll stick with gaming and leave the rage to someone else.