In memory of Lode Runner (Gaming Thread 9/14/14)

In sad news, Doug Smith, creator of Lode Runner passed away.

From Tozai Games:

It is with great sadness that we learned today of the passing of our friend and colleague, Douglas Smith, the creator of the iconic game, Lode Runner. Our hearts and prayers are with Doug's family during this difficult time. In Doug's honor, we call on the legions of Lode Runner fans everywhere to take a private moment to reflect on your own personal memories of Lode Runner. What a contribution Doug made to the video game industry.

Doug, from all of us at Tozai, and from all of your fans, may you rest in peace.

Have a lot of fond memories playing the stripped down "lite" C64 port, most of them amount to me almost breaking the console with my abuse to the keyboard. My dad was a huge fan of the series, I remember him having to hide his copy of Championship Lode Runner.

And then of course Japan ended up turning the series on it's head in the 90's and it really bloomed over there (same with the Wizardry series).

So yeah, the big news of last week is that tomorrow it appears that Microsoft and Notch will announce that Microsoft has bought Mojang for a cool $2.5 billion.

Out of all of this, I'm surprised that the rumors say that Notch is the one that initiated the talks. He had a throw away joke tweet that his price would be $2 billion and it looks like he might get more than that.

Bunch of people thinking the price is coming from the cash that Microsoft has floating out there out of the country (estimated to be bout $80 billion) and frankly that's a good assumption.

Is it worth it on the other hand? Eh, that's a bit murky because it is Microsoft. I mean as is, with licensing and game sales, you're looking at about $500m a year ($350m in merch licensing). If they're smart, they don't do much on the surface level outside of getting it off the hellspawn that is Java and have Azure and Bing running the back-end tasks while selling it on every platform known to man. It does raise the question on who is going to caretake the IP. Do they try to keep Mojang together or do they give it to Team Dakota (Project Spark)? And if you're going to go down this rate, I'd see if Squad was up for sale as well to pick up Kerbal Space Program. Have a whole new Edutainment sector right there with those two.

Of course if I had that money, I'd buy Take Two (keep Rockstar, Firaxas, Visual Concepts and then gut everything else), Capcom (their library is very nice) and probably a cup of coffee for about the same price. Of course business wise, buying the Minecraft IP is a better move but that's what I would do.

Best thing to come from Destiny's launch is Jeff Gerstmann's Destiny Drinking Game

Destiny Drinking Game (Don’t Try This At Home)

1. Drink every time your flying robot buddy has to scan something.

2. Chug if you have to fight off waves of enemies while your robot buddy is scanning.

3. Die of alcohol poisoning before you get off the Moon.

Now, I'm not surprised HipHopGamer is the one to make Gies look good, but still it's an odd day when Gies looks good

Though at least Activision got to tout that they shipped $500 million of Destiny product on opening day even if it is a meaningless number.

And there has been a reason why they haven't done much mentioning that Paul McCartney made a new song for the game

• This is a long read but it's very much worth doing so. It's a look back at NEC and the Turbografx-16, one of the more under-rated consoles of all-time (especially in the west)

• Arcade Heroes with some pics of the upcoming Walking Dead pinball table. Really don't like the IP but the table looks real good, especially the deluxe edition.

• Capcom with a good pricing structure on the upcoming Resident Evil Revelations 2. $6 an episode or $25 for the four episodes and other bonus stuff. $40 if you care about it being on a disc.

• Forza Horizon 2 gets it's launch trailer

• Alien Isolation also gets a new trailer

• So 800 of the 1300 dug up ET Atari carts are going to be sold. I'd be lying if I didn't say that I want one.

• Take Two: GTAV comes to the PS4 and Xbox One on November 18th. Master Race gets it in January :(

• Wouldn't be Japan if Dr. Watson wasn't turned into an 8 year old waifu

Eliminage Gothic (PC) - Want an oldschool dungeon crawler with a good OST? This is the game for you. It got a bunch of positive reviews of this in Japan for the 3DS and PSP releases and this is the only way to play it in English (don't think anyone on the translating community has taken a stab at translating it). And it's cheap to boot with pre-order price being $7.99, normally $9.99 which also gets you some pre-order bonuses like the OST and a artbook. If you dig the genre, we don't get many bones thrown our way so we're kinda stuck playing what ever we can get. Biggest release this week for me

Wasteland 2 (PC) - After a lengthy alpha and beta, this kickstarter project is finally coming out. On one hand, it's new Wasteland which is cool. On the other it's being made by InXile. I honestly haven't been paying too much attention to this one. For me at least, it really comes down to how well it reviews and depending on if I finally get around to buying Xenonauts, I might pick this up when it's on sale.

Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm Revolution (360, PS3) - Rule of thumb is still in effect, if it's based on an anime, walk away. Seriously, you can count on two hands the good games based on a anime and have a few fingers left.

ArchAge (PC) - I keep forgetting this game is coming out which is kinda sad as the main person behind this game created one of my all-time favorite MMOs, Lineage. It's almost all Korean MMOs, F2P which means I would expect a ton of grinding. But from the beta, the impressions have been positive outside of server stability. I'll be checking this out on Tuesday

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posted by Gang of Gaming Morons! at 03:10 PM

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