This podcast just has the guys talking about the games they’re looking forward to in 2025. It’s shockingly longer than expected.
What game(s) are you looking forward to in 2025?
The post Episode 740: Goodbye 2024 first appeared on Gaming Podcast.
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This week’s edition is a little different, in that there’s no set format, just a roundtable discussion of the past week’s events. TJ raves about Owl Boy, Jonah talks about N7 Day and the new Mass Effect: Andromeda revelations, and everyone on the podcast discusses how games have really been a disappointment this year and not much is coming. Oh, and a $99 3DS coming for Black Friday.
Let us know what you think.
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.
The videogame world has been stunned by the news that GameSpy, 1UP and UGO are all being shuttered. GameSpy had been around since 1999 (back when it was a mere online match service – game-spy, geddit?) UGO was a site that I wrote for both indirectly as an editor of GamePen and directly when I wrote DVD and game reviews for UGO.
UGO’s Chris Radtke bid farewell stating:
I’ve spent many years of my life trying to turn UGO.com into something entertaining for you guys. Hopefully you stopped by recently to watch one our funny videos. Or you found yourself debating one of our nerd culture lists, read a movie review or pondered the age old question “Who would win in a fight, a minotaur armed with a trident or a centaur armed with a crossbow.” Could be you tried to win something off our homepage or you Googled “Hot Girls” and found a couple of pics you liked. I don’t really care how you got here, just as long as you were entertained when you did.
