Derek is joining us again this week in Erik’s absence, and we start the game talk with Darksiders.
News from CES is the central topic this week with Microsoft announcing Xbox Live Game Room and an end of the year release window for Project Natal. We are not too excited about Game Room and the prospect of Project Natal’s loss of a built-in processor impacting game performance puts a damper on our excitement level for its release.
Jon gets a few words in about the trend of 3D displays being heavily pushed as the next big thing, and we hit on some of the other super-mega-trends from CES.
Covered topics and games: Darksiders, CES, Xbox Live Game Room, Project Natal, 3D, tablets/slates, phone announcements
Runtime – 30:19
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The news that Natal has been neutered is really bumming me out. I was really really looking forward to Natal coming through on its promises but now it seems that it’s going to pull a bait and switch just like Nintendo did with the Wii. Unlike the Wii though, whose motion controls turned out to highly inaccurate, it seems that Microsoft is going to disappoint not by being shoddily built but instead by limiting the games which can make use of the new peripheral. I believe that Natal could still turn out to be everything the Wii should have been, its just not going to have triple A developers behind it because they are not going to want to sacrifice graphical fidelity and complex gameplay routines for gimmicky controls(I HOPE). We will probably end up getting a bunch of shitass mini game collections. Personally, I really would much rather drop another 250 on a motion control peripheral that got it right than 50 bucks on one that didn’t.
Agreed. I would rather pay the $250 on something that works rather than $50 on something that doesn't as well, but we are the minority/hardcore. I was speaking more from Microsoft's perspective on launching Natal to mass market adoption, which requires a lower price, even if it is a worse experience.