Come take a trip through the best podcast audio of 2011 we have to offer.
By: 1UP StaffDecember 20, 2011
1UP's podcasts have seen many changes this year. We saw the end of long-running shows like at1UP and Active-Time Babble, while the Retronauts torch was passed to a new host and Friday mainstay Games, Dammit! undertook a total relaunch. From the return of Oddcast favorite Scott Sharkey to 8-4 Play's excellent launch-day coverage of the Japanese PS Vita launch, 1UP continued to tickle your ear tubes with exciting podcasts all year long. Check out some of our best below.
Jump to: Best of News | Best of Podcasts | Best of Blogs | Best of Previews Best of Features | Best of Community | Best of Guides | Best of Video Best of Reviews | Best of Retrospectives
This extra special 8-4 Play podcast holiday special breaks down two of the hottest topics in Japan and crams them together into a massive four-hour episode. First, the crew brings you the most detailed coverage of the PS Vita launch with day one impressions from Japan. And after three hours of Vita-filled discussion, the 8-4 Play team comes back at ya' with roundtable impressions of Capcom's latest portable Monster Hunter entry and the 3DS Analog Slide Pad attachment.
For this very special Retronauts episode, the crew tackles Konami's Silent Hill, with more than two hours of discussion featuring super fan VoidBurger, music from Akira Yamaoka, and lots and lots of the one and only: Bob Mackey. Shortly after recording this episode, Bob wrote a big feature on Silent Hill 2. We hope he's got it out of his system by now.
This marks the end of an era. In the words of the cast themselves, the final episode of this 1UP institution is "one last gun-blazin', rootin' tootin', wildest ride in the west, cockney-accented showdown in the Admiral's Club at 1UP Towers." Don't miss the final at1UP podcast.
Let Peter Molyneux's soothing voice wash over you in this special GDC edition of Games, Dammit! Back in March, 1UP welcomed the ambitious designer of Populous and Fable into the studio to discuss all things gaming. In this episode, Molyneux is joined by Scooter, Matt, and 1UP Alum Justin Haywald. The foursome wax poetic on all manners of GDC excitement, including Battlefield 3, The Last Guardian, and just what the hell the enigmatic number on Molyneux's hand means. Regardless of your opinion on his games, there's no denying that the man speaks with an elegant bravado that solidifies him as one of the true visionaries of our medium.
In the spirit of tradition, this annual Retronauts special takes a look back at the history of video games during specific years; for the 2011 installment, Jeremy Parish, Ray Barnholt, Frank Cifaldi, and Chris Kohler examine 1971, 1976, 1981, 1986, along with other memorable dates that fit the pattern. If you enjoy retro gaming and/or subtracting by multiples of five, this is the podcast for you.
Alice left, but Sharkey returns! Everybody's favorite curmudgeon sits down and chats about the Sony security breach, Alan Wake, and more. And we know this may be hard to believe, but at one point, Tina talks about Call of Duty.
Most 8-4 Play episodes cover a wide variety of topics. This one does that too, but spends a good chunk of its two and a half hours devoted to Grasshopper's Shadows of the Damned, which the 8-4 team worked on, and then brings on composer Akira Yamaoka for an interview. Check it out for rare insights into the development process, and a joke or two along the way.
Tactics Ogre and Dragon Age II couldn't be more different; the former's an intensely old-school remake of a game that essentially defined a genre, while the latter suffers from paring down its nerdier elements for the sake of wider appeal. Listen in as Kat Bailey, Jeremy Parish, and Thierry Nguyen discuss these two RPGs, which may be slightly forgotten thanks to their first-quarter release dates.
A month before the The Retronauts podcast delves into B-list RPGs of the past with guests Christian Nutt and Kat Bailey. Everyone's played and knows the big RPG names like Final Fantasy, Elder Scrolls, Dragon Quest, Diablo, etc.; but what about the likes of Wild Arms and Lufia? These long-lost semi-classics get themselves a little much-deserved love in an epic two-hour podcast.
In this episode, Jeremy Parish and then-news/features editor Frank Cifaldi invite Tim Rogers to talk about such things as cookies, real-world cities with the best level design, and dead sites like nothingbut.net. Also, Tim does his best damn Christian Bale Batman impression the whole time, so this episode can tide you over until The Dark Knight Rises.
Australia's Classification Board has refused to grant Syndicate a rating. In effect this bans the title from being sold in its current form, and publisher Electronic Arts has no intention of changing the game in order to make it acceptable.
It would not be the first time something like this happened -- a number of games have been refused classification over the years by Australia including Mortal Kombat, The Witcher 2, and 50 Cent: Bulletproof. The latter two were ultimately altered to make them more acceptable while Mortal Kombat remains unavailable in Australia.
Sony's latest handheld gaming system, PlayStation Vita, went on sale this past Saturday, December 17, in Japan. During its first two days of availability, 321,407 units were sold according to Japanese magazine publisher Enterbrain.
These numbers, cited by Famitsu (and translated by Andriasang), reveal the system wasn't able to completely sell through its initial shipment of 500,000 systems over the weekend. There had been reports last week that Sony intended to increase its initial shipment to 700,000, but Enterbrain's figures didn't provide any information on the number of systems that ended up being shipped.
3DS owners in North America and Europe will be getting at least one RPG from Square Enix in 2012, as the publisher today announced Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance is coming to both regions next year.
The game, which is officially branded as KINGDOM HEARTS 3D [Dream Drop Distance], complete with unnecessary caps and brackets, was first revealed at E3 2010 as a part of a long list of games headed to thew newly-unveiled 3DS. It was described as a "completely original title" and during its showing at this year's Tokyo Game Show in September, it was looking pretty good. However, the inevitable international release had not been confirmed until now.
We look back at some of the most noteworthy news stories of 2011.
By: 1UP StaffDecember 19, 2011
Every year feels like it's full of news for the video game industry, and looking back 2011 was no different. It was a year packed with plenty of highs and plenty of lows. While we saw no shortage of big stories in 2011, we don't want to overlook some of the smaller ones -- sometimes, they're even more interesting than the headline-grabbers. So, for example, despite all the excitement that Nintendo's new Wii U caused at E3, we were just as intrigued to learn why Project Draco won't work with an Xbox 360 controller. Together, these extremes make for a healthy mix that puts everything that happened in gaming this year into perspective. Check out the full list below.
Jump to: Best of News | Best of Podcasts | Best of Blogs | Best of Previews Best of Features | Best of Community | Best of Guides | Best of Video Best of Reviews | Best of Retrospectives
Nintendo's reveal of its next home console, with a large touch screen that can be used in creative ways, was certainly the biggest news story of the year. It was so big at E3 2011, in fact, that Nintendo has said nothing significant about the console since and it's still what everyone talks about when they think 2011 news. We have lots of questions about how it will work, how powerful it is, and what the game lineup will be, but the creative approach got people talking in a way few other announcements did this year.
Ken Levine dishes on how developer Irrational Games crafts BioShock Infinite's character-driven narrative and points out some of the studio's philosophy and tech during the creative process.
Director Yukio Futatsugi delves into all the reasons why upcoming Kinect game Project Draco -- a game that's reminiscent of the on rails formula from Panzer Dragoon -- wouldn't work using a regular Xbox controller.
The word "pioneer" is oftentimes thrown around with reckless abandon, but believe us when we say that Bill Kunkel was a true forefather of video games journalism. Without his creative vision, this site would not exist in its current form. As a co-founder of Electronic Games magazine, he saw the potential held within the enthusiast press long before it became a mainstream staple of our industry. Kunkel's work influenced every single video game-related website, magazine, and blog that followed, and for that we are all immensely grateful.
The last thing anyone expected from the DS's successor was for it to hit the market with a resounding thud. But thud the 3DS did, in large part because the smartphone gaming market had disrupted Nintendo's turf the way the DS and Wii disrupted Sony's. To their credit, Nintendo worked quickly to reposition the system, beginning with a $70 price drop less than half a year after its launch. Early adopters weren't forgotten, either, as Nintendo gave them 20 exclusive NES and Game Boy Advance games by way of apology.
In his closing comments during a 1UP interview at Tokyo Game Show, Tekken series overlord Katsuhiro Harrada lamented the absence of trash talk from former rival and Team Ninja general manager Tobunobu Itagaki -- a man who selected the first five Tekken games as his most hated video games ever.
The size of the Tokyo Game Show in recent years can't match the event's former bi-annual glory, but the lines for strange merchandise seem just as long every year. We looked into this strange gathering and found Mario Dolls, $300-plus Bayonetta Glasses, and Resident Evil 5 gun replicas might land you in Jail should you sell them in the US.
We usually associate security breaches with high level affairs such as Watergate or data theft that affected the banking industry. But in early April, the hackers hit our industry. After a sudden outage, which stretched into nearly a week, Sony Computer Entertainment America then admitted that there was an intrusion, and that user data -- ranging names and addresses to credit card information -- might have been compromised. It still remains as the largest and most public data breach in games, and a reminder that no one is safe.
A month before the Wii-U's official debut, news, rumors, and leaks about "Project Café" quickly surfaced. Again, since this was before Nintendo's E3 press conference, all we had to work off of was "a Nintendo system with high-definition graphics." Despite only having that morsel of information, we took a step back and examined what this possibility meant for Nintendo. And we also noted how -- despite readers' misgivings and theories about Nintendo abandoning its vision -- such a system was indeed in line with Nintendo's philosophy.
EarthBound's soundtrack might not be the most important achievement of Hirokazu Tanaka's storied career, but it's one of the most memorable. Jeremy's TGS 2011 interview with the Nintendo visionary covers one of the 16-bit era's most idiosyncratic soundtracks, and the influences that made it so special.
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