Matthew Davis, one of the designers of FTL just agreed to doing an interview with us. I am wondering if anyone has any questions they want me to ship over with the interview? Id like everyone to submit their questions in the comments by Sunday.

Woop!

I have a desire to own a well made gameboy styled handheld that I can do with what I wish. After searching for a bit about what was available the recently Kickstarted GCW Zero caught my attention. As such I asked them if they would answer a few of my questions about it and the retro community that surrounds its potential awesomeness.

jdodson: For you, what is the coolest thing the GCW Zero does?

GCW Zero: It allows people to do things for free gaming wise they would normally have to pay more then they can Afford and if a cost is involved it is so low it won't hit you in the bank where it hurts most.

jdodson: I find that touch games just don’t draw me in when compared to something like Tetris or Link’s Awakening with thumb controls. I am not saying some stand out games don’t break the mold here, Sword & Sworcery being one such example. For you, do you think the analog controls offer a better experience over what a touch interface can provide?

GCW Zero: Yes that was one of the reasonings behind not putting a touch screen on the device beyond just wanting to stay more retro.

jdodson: How does the GCW Zero set itself apart from the PSP, Canoo, DS or Pandora?

GCW Zero: It's cheaper or very comparable in price and it is open source so the sky is the limit on what you can do with it or use it for.

jdodson: How is the March 26th deadline for shipping to your Kickstarter backers going? With that, I wasn’t a Kickstarter backer, when can I order one to partake in the GCW love?

GCW Zero: We plan to have them out before May 2013 for the Kickstarter orders and Mid May for retail release.

jdodson: Will the GCW Zero come with any sort of App Store or ability or the community have a place to discover and buy new games?

GCW Zero: We are working on the app store and numerous licensings deals we already have made some C-64, Amiga, and Apogee/3D Realms.

jdodson: What have some of the challenges working with hardware manufacturers been? Anything crop up you didn’t expect?

GCW Zero: This whole experience over all is great I've learned delays happen and all you can do is roll with the punches get backup and make it work and make it right.

jdodson: What game have you played on the GCW Zero that showcases the best of what the GCW offers?

GCW Zero: Duke3D, Rise Of The Triad, and the device has even more potential once we have OpenGL.

jdodson: What Super Nintendo Emulator does the GCW Zero ship with? For you, how are the games running?

GCW Zero: It does not ship with any emulators some like DosBox can be downloaded free after you get it and C-64 and Amiga will be sold on the app store. That is not to say that numerous 3rd Party developers have not developed great emulators and they will be available on third party repo's.

jdodson: Even with the advancement of video game technology seen in such huge titles as Skyrim and more recently with Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm, retro games are still very popular. It seems many Indie Games are trying to ride this wave of awesome too. I wonder what your thoughts are on this aspect of gaming?

GCW Zero: We very much embrace the Indie scene that is where all the new innovate games with new ideas and strategies are coming from. Big studios are just cranking out repeats of old IP one after the other with a small new twist. We have a great Indie game coming to the GCW Zero from Ackk Studios called Two Brothers.

jdodson: For you, who would win in the following matchups?

Han Solo VS Indiana Jones?

GCW Zero: Han Solo

Michael Jackson VS Prince?

GCW Zero: Prince

Gameboy Prime VS GCW Zero?

GCW Zero: GCW Zero

iPhone Hipster VS Android Hipster?

GCW Zero: Android

Ocarina of Time VS Link to the Past?

GCW Zero: Link to The Past

Sonic VS Luigi?

GCW Zero: Sonic

Coffee VS Tea?

GCW Zero: Tea

Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace VS Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Cystal Skull?

GCW Zero: Star Wars

I want to thank the GCW team for taking the time to talk with me today and I am very excited about its release next month!

http://www.gcw-zero.com/
http://cheerfulghost.com/jdodson/posts/1096

Starcrafts Season 2 will begin April 27th and each episode will drop on Saturdays. Looking forward to the new season and since I dig zerg, the new focus should be awesome :D

Some rumors surfaced that the next console by Microsoft would require you to be "always online" to use it. Kotaku started things off with the first "insider source leak."

http://kotaku.com/the-next-xbox-will-require-an-internet-connection-to-st-470062456

When I heard the news I wasn't really surprised. After the news broke a Microsoft Studio rep exchanged tweets with a few people that were not received well. Telling people to "just deal with it" over the always online requirement apparently didn't go over well with folks.

http://metro.co.uk/2013/04/05/microsoft-response-to-always-online-xbox-rumours-is-dealwithit-3584410/

The rep Tweeted:

"Sorry, I don’t get the drama around having an ‘always online’ console’. He then followed that up with: ‘Every device now is ‘always on’. That’s the world we live in. #dealwithit."

I would have said that differently if I were him, but he isn't half wrong ... sort of anyway.

I was thinking about the the idea that all our stuff is always online and for the most part its true but not from the angle he means and not in the way Microsoft will build the NextBox. My iPhone is connected to the ol' Internet 99.99999% of the time. Occasionally I reboot it for fun OR on my commute to work on the Max(Portland light rail) I go through a tunnel and it is disconnected for a few minutes. It stops working during that time in that I can't make a phone call or surf the web. That said, I can still listen to music, play a game and compose and read emails. I can also even take pictures, thumb through my photos and do a ton of other awesome shit. My iPhone is practically speaking always online but that doesn't mean it shits the bed when I go through a tunnel or travel on an airplane. In fact my iPhone still operates awesomely during a flight as I listen to music, watch video podcasts and even... play games...

So yeah, when a random Microsoft rep says we live 99% of the time online they are correct. We do. Its just how things are and I love it. Thing is, my phone is still amazingly useful on a flight and in a tunnel. It doesn't shit the bed when I lose my internet connection, it doesn't warn me the world ended, it just keeps doing its thing. So why can't the NextBox do that too? I get that the NextBox couldn't download a new game or stream something, but it has a big ass harddrive right? So... can't it work like my iPhone or my laptop? Steam has an offline mode where I can still play my games, why can't the NextBox?

The problem with the "always online" requirement for anything isn't the headache that it causes today, its the impossibility of tomorrow. What I mean by that is yeah, yeah Simcity 5 sucks for a week or something but eventually EA will sort that out and the game will work fine. The problem isn't right now with Simcity 5 or even the NextBox with this "always online" stuff. The problem is when EA and Microsoft decide tomorrow that thing you use will no longer keep working. Which is essentially the problem with DRM in general. Its not the immediate that is really the problem its always tomorrow. Yeah sure you can use your shit now, but what about tomorrow?

I bought some DRM songs on iTunes years ago before I knew what DRM was. That crap is totally unusable to me now and as such I just tossed it away as a really bad purchase. Partly the reason I still buy CD's even now as I don't have to toss my 320k MP3's because they still just work.

That said I have jumped head first into the Steam-a-palooza and haven't looked back too often. Am I am bit nervous that I put all my eggs in one basket this way? Yep. Do I trust Valve? Hell yes I do. So really, if you are going to jump into a situation where your money is being put somewhere, I recommend you invest in a company that deserves your trust. I am not particularly endorsing Steam but perhaps asking a question. "What company do you trust with your gaming dollar to do right by you tomorrow?"

One could simply buy games direct from Indie companies and maintain all the installers on some kind of portable harddrive. Thats a fine option. But if you want to partake in the new BioShock or Borderlands games you need to jump into some kind of ecosystem. I have a Playstation 3 and a PC. Right now the PC looks like the best investment for my gaming dollar. If the Playstation 4 comes out and all my games "just work" on it then it might look like a better deal, but that remains to be seen how that will pan out. Frankly I don't trust Sony with my gaming dollar tomorrow, they proved the PS2 wasn't important to them as my PS3 doesn't play those games.

At the end of the day I am really guarded to what ecosystem I am going to jump into with my gaming dollar. Just realize that whomever owns the digital bits we buy controls how and when we play our games. Remember, we are just buying bits to download now, we don't actually buy game discs anymore. Hear me out though, I think Steam is awesome and I prefer downloading games to getting a boxed game 99% of the time. But at the end of the day what company do you trust to do right by your gaming dollar tomorrow?

**EDIT**

Thought this was pretty funny and illustrates the point I was trying to make pretty well.

http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3tq5xe/

This is a painful Kotaku piece to summarize so ill just let you read it now and go over some of the more cringeworthy aspects of it.

http://kotaku.com/five-years-and-nothing-to-show-how-doom-4-got-off-trac-468097062

So first off, this is nearly entirely based on a hidden source at iD. I am not saying this is bad information, its just hard to validate. That said, this years QuakeCon is coming up and Carmack always gives a keynote and he will talk about some of this I imagine. Since I am a huge iD fanboy ill be watching it, I always do and its usually very awesome because Carmack is rad.

"Larger creature ambitions turned into mediocre garden variety behaviors,” the source said. “[The story] again became lame and unfit for a late night sci-fi channel, and the team didn't feel a whole lot of ownership and contribution to the project. Cue the exodus of talent leaving ever since."

I have worked for companies where that happened and it can turn out to be good, but often times signals the end. iD has been around since the infancy of PC gaming, I really hope they come out swinging with Doom 4. Not just because I love Doom, but because I really fucking love Doom. Kind of knew about a few people that left, I wonder how widespread it was.

The Kotaku piece outlines that they merged the Doom 4 and Rage teams together and it was challenging and that makes sense. Its odd they couldn't nail down a design because they could simply take the Rage engine and remake Doom 1, 2 and 3 and it would sell fairly well. I think the next logical evolution of Doom is some badass war on earth in cities, so you know something like that.

"One source described a meeting in which ZeniMax executives told Id leads that “Doom 4 can and should be as big as Skyrim,” as far as both sales and cultural impact. (Skyrim, Bethesda’s massive role-playing game, shipped 7 million copies during its first week on shelves in November of 2011. And everyone had heard about it—not just hardcore gamers.)"

On one hand, I would love a Doom game as epic as Skyrim. On the other hand, the way this is worded, it sounds like ZeniMax is being a bit unrealistic. I mean how does someone simply make a game as impactful as Skyrim because you say they must. That said, I could see Doom 4 being as impactful as Skyrim given the right design.

At the end of the day this news isn't awesome and if this is all true, its sad to hear. I hold out hope for iD to do well with Doom 4 but as with many things, time will tell.

Updates are coming for Terraria on the PC and to spoil some of them, Redigit, the developer working on them posted some screenshots to the official Terraria forums. After sending these screenshots to the official Cheerful Ghost labs for deep analysis we have figured out a few things.

• The new update contains turtles. From the looks of it, a possible pet and enemy turtle. Pet being the turtle in the house and hostile turtles in the over world.


• Waterfalls are coming to Terraria.


• New Wizard armor and a flying sword looks to be added.


• There is a pot with slightly different art.

I sent these results back to the lab many times but it came back with the same results as before. I am really looking forward to getting the new PC Terraria goods and I wonder how much of them include the recent console updates as well?

Time will tell.

http://www.terrariaonline.com/threads/its-been-a-while-since-i-posted-a-spoiler.97577/

Totally can't wait for Starbound to drop later this year. Heralded as a spiritual successor to Terraria in space with quests, planet exploration and a ton more awesomeness this game looks to be completely bad-ass. Recently Chucklefish released the Starbound Roadmap as well as added lots of information about its current completion level with all the games features.

Some of the larger features are mostly complete such as World & Universe Generation, Dungeons and Villages, Items & the User Interface. Many of the remaining items with much to go have quite a bit complete already.

When a more formal date drops for Starbound ill let you know. Can't wait to try this game and at some point run a Cheerful Ghost server for it :D

http://www.playstarbound.com/roadmap/

Doom: The Board Game is my favoriate board game of all time. So when I saw Plaid Hat Game's upcoming Bioshock Infinite: The Siege of Columbia I was pretty interested. The goal of the game is to build an army to fight booker for ultimate control of Columbia. It looks like you and the other players can have control of Elizabeth in some fashion but the details are a bit sparse as of now.

The game pieces and overall build look fantastic to me. I imagine ill see this in my local game store pretty soon and want to give it a shot when it does.

Have you picked up a board game for a video game before? If so how did it turn out for you? What do you think of Bioshock Infinite: The Siege of Columbia are you going to pick this up?

http://www.plaidhatgames.com/games/bioshock-infinite-the-siege-of-columbia

"After evaluating our position in the games market, we've decided to shift LucasArts from an internal development to a licensing model, minimizing the company's risk while achieving a broader portfolio of quality Star Wars games. As a result of this change, we've had layoffs across the organization. We are incredibly appreciative and proud of the talented teams who have been developing our new titles."

Can't say as this is really surprising. Making games is hard and LucasArts really hasn't had a home run in some time. They did create some fantastic games of the retro era in Full Throttle, Day of the Tentacle, Tie Fighter and a ton more.

LucasArts was working on Star Wars 1313 and that seems to have been put on hold unless LucasArts can get someone to finish it up for them.

Goodbye LucasArts, we had some good times!

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2013/04/03/disney-closes-game-publisher-lucasarts.aspx
http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2013/04/03/lucasarts-rep-says-star-wars-1313-might-be-saved.aspx

I have been pretty excited to try out Terraria on the PS3 and today I took it for a spin. Its a fairly small download and it was running in a few minutes. The demo has Tutorial mode available and as such, played that.

The tutorial is fairly interesting as it runs you thorough a few game basics from mining to crafting a few pieces of starter gear. I never realized how much stuff Terraria packs in to the PC version. The console version has to make sense of all that and as such, its a very dense system of menus to navigate through and is a bit overwhelming at first. That said, after a few minutes I was fairly acclimated to things and didn't have a problem crafting and equipping. The tutorial places you on a decent sized floating island and allows you the ability to do whatever you can within that space. You can't save your progress in the demo, but that is fairly par for the course.

Movement and attack is very fluid. You can switch between your items with L1 & R1. Its easy to bring up your inventory and switching between that and your crafting and equip screens is pretty simple.

The graphics looked very good on my HD TV. It was fun seeing Terraria in the living room and got a kick hearing the iconic music in my living room. Speaking of music, it seems they have remixed the in game music and some of the sound effects sound slightly different. All told its not bad, its just different and thought it was worth mentioning.

All told, if you have a console and haven't played Terraria yet, I recommend you give the demo a shot. Its a very good port of the game and if you do the majority of your gaming on your couch you should check this up!