This week on Jumping the Shark it’s all Mass Effect 3. Just kidding. No, this week, we talk about some of the rumors surrounding the possible announcement of the Playstation 4. In particular, the prospect of Sony clamping down on players’ ability to play used games on their console. Is it starting to get out of hand? Then, Bill reveals the shame of having sustained a Kinect injury while playing Tiger Woods. It was only a matter of time.
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Podcast: (Duration: 1:02:40 — 35.9MB)
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I’m glad you guys didn’t overexpand on the whole used games issue. Frankly, it’s becoming a bit tiring. For what feels like eons, piracy has been the scapegoat of games being expensive, performing badly and the industry losing money. On the PC, we are so used to games being tied to an account by now that it doesn’t even raise an eyebrow any more.
I remember buying a lot of my older PC games off Ebay. Since I am a bit of a collector, I bought a lot of these games for their physical appearance as well. Special editions or just hard-to-find items were what I went after. I had a store back in Germany that specialized in trading and selling used games. Now I look at my collection fo recent games and there’s a whole bunch that I couldn’t even *give* to someone else for free if I wanted to. Like Starcraft 2. The only way to get that junk out of my collection is to terminally dispose of it.
For years, the die-hard console fans among my friends defended the higher price tag of console games, compared to PC titles. ‘You can trade the games and buy them used’. One of the big advantages they had. Now that might go away, but what’s going to happen to the prices? If every sold copy of a game is in fact new, shouldn’t the prices go down at least a little?
Like you guys said, the industry will find a way to spin it if things don’t go their way. What they don’t realize is, every time they find new ways to patronize their paying customers, they’re pushing more people out of the market, terminally. People who aren’t willing to put up with all the shyte anymore and decide to spend their entertainment bucks elsewhere.
On the Kinect topic – yes, shoving ‘Kinect support’ into any game that didn’t run away fast enough, is bullshit. Especially – and that seems to be the case with Mass Effect 3 – when it’s limited to voice commands. Dear developers – you should and do NOT need a Kinect to issue voice commands to a game. It can be done on any platform. Heck, Tom Clancy’s HAWX and End War did that four years ago, and all you needed was a headset and a recognizable accent (which ruled me out). It’s a blatant marketing ploy to shove the Kinect into as many houses as possible, where the novelty will wear off quickly and the device will sit there gathering dust.
Just a correction about architectures the original Xbox had a Intel x86 and a Nvidia GPU they were not really custom parts just modified off the shelf components, as a consequence MS had to buy the chips from Intel and NVidia. MS dropped that for X360 because it was to expensive. In the X360 IBM designed the CPU with PowerPC architecture and ATI now AMD designed the GPU they sold the design to MS, and MS produced the chips allowing them to lower the cost over time but breaking all backwards compatibility. For the next XBOX they could maintain architectures, a PowerPC CPU and AMD GPU that would enable a easy backwards compatibility. But rumors point to a change to ARM that would make compatibility hard, but would make it more compatible with Windows 8 and Windows Phone. As for Sony you guy were right they just keep completely changing the architecture and because Cell was failure they are changing it again but at least this time they seem to be adopting industry standard with ARM.
You know, lots of popular series will do one-shot “What If?” editions that play with the idea of an altered continuity. What if Spiderman’s uncle Ben had never died? What if the Federation were at war with the Klingon Empire? What if everyone on Grey’s Anatomy decided to sing horrible karaoke for an hour?
Since Bill and Brandon are going to be gone, I would like to request that Episode 118 include panelists Bruce Geryk, Tim Turi, and Leigh Alexander so that we can hear what it would be like if everyone on Jumping the Shark genuinely detested one another.
I guarantee no one would ever take the regular format for granted again!
Ha! Well, I gave it a shot, but got the same response from all parties: “Who the fuck is this guy? Get lost, creep!” So instead you’ll have to settle for the vocal stylings of our won Brian Rowe and (fingers crossed) Matt Thrower. I call that a win!