Episode 328: No Rusty Ventures Allowed

This week is on the short side, though Jonah and Jordan discuss pop culture like Red Letter Media, The Venture Bros. and Cave Johnson’s lemon ranting. There’s no Gaming Podcast or Gaming History, but there’s plenty of Listener Feedback and news items.

The news includes:

  • Source: RI governor Lincoln Chafee deliberately torpedoed Studio 38
  • UK online retailer SimplyGames enforcing PS4 bundles
  • Half-Life 3 removed from trademark registery – Portal 3 appears
  • The Last Guardian developers “re-engineering” the game, never was on “hiatus”
  • Grand Theft Auto Online microtransactions disabled while server issues persist

No “Question of the Week” – this week is Listener Questions – send ’em in!

0 thoughts on “Episode 328: No Rusty Ventures Allowed”

  1. I think I just vomited in my mouth a little bit and then almost had that vomit leave my mouth from laughing so hard; also, I really need to do some catching up on Venture Bros.

    *God mode: typically a carry over from the days when developers would build tools into their games to facilitate testing and debugging. Nowadays most developers disable access to those tools before shipping a game, but removing them entirely is typically inefficient and may unintentionally break a game.

    fun fact: The first movie tie-in Spiderman game for the ps2 had a cheat to actually bring up a panel showing debug information while playing.

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Starcraft 2: A 2009 Release ScheduleStarcraft 2: A 2009 Release Schedule

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Activision Blizzard hardly makes a game we’d forget. The reason we all have fond memories of Starcraft, Warcraft and Diablo is due to the craftsmanship that goes into the game titles (and a bit of the marketing). The developers take their time to hand craft and test a solid product, which is reason alone to see a release next year rather than in this one.

“Next year’s offerings from Activision Blizzard should include highly anticipated PC strategy title StarCraft II, the sequel to one of the world’s most enduringly popular games.” (starcraftwire.com)

It won’t make the 2008 holiday schedule, making us wonder if it’s a 2009 holiday schedule. Although Activision Blizzard doesn’t need to time their games for the biggest sales seasons it doesn’t hurt to push the title out when gamers are actively looking for new blockbusters.

Personally, we’d love to see a Spring/Summer release time frame to give us something to fill the void, but we’re sure Activision’s marketing team has plans revolving around money than a few gamers personal preferences. Regardless to the launch time we’re at least privvy to the knowledge that it’s coming next year.

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The patience of PlayStation 3 owners is wearing thin as retailers are reporting a 200% increase in PlayStation 3 trade-ins, usually for Xbox 360 consoles, as well as sales slumps for PSN points cards and fewer multiplatform game sales for PS3.

“In the first week of downtime we did not really see any major change in sales or trades,” says one source, a store manager at a major UK retailer speaking on condition of anonymity. “However from the second week onwards we have seen an increase of over 200 per cent on PS3 consoles being traded in, split almost 50/50 between those trading for cash and those taking a 360 instead.”

Another UK source has reported that the independent retailer had seen a “massive increase” in the volume of PS3s traded in in recent weeks, and has pegged the biggest trade-in demographic as “the hardcore online shooter crowd”, who are logically the group most likely to defect when their online gaming is wiped.

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