Thursday, September 25, 2008

Retronauts last gasp?

The latest Retronauts podcast was an interesting one.

For those not in the know, Retronauts is 1up.com's retro-gaming poodcast. After 50 episodes, Jeremy Parish [sic] has said the format is changing because he doesn't know enough about retrogaming. But after saying he doesn't know enough about retrogaming, he then announces that Retronauts is going to a weekly podcast. Considering he also said that he was having a hard time thinking of topics, it make me stop and think about the viability of the podcast from here on out.

Now, Retronauts hasn't been the most reliable podcast to listen to. In fact there were times when it updated every week for 3 months, and then nothing for a month. They tried going every other week, but even that fell through. So how are they going to make a weekly podcast viable?
I have no idea. Hopefully they will keep it interesting, because I think the podcast is funny, insightful, and very informative.

And as for topics, they've done 50 (although 3 of those were repeated - Castlevania, DragonQuest, and MegaMan). And personally I thnk they haven't even scratched the surface of retro-gaming. For the most part they have stuck to console gaming, but PC gaming has been around longer, and there is treasure trove of info to be mined. I have a few topics that come to mind.

1.) History of the Ultima Series
2.) The evolution of the 1st person shooter
3.) Atari 8-bit games
4.) Colecovision/Intellivison
5.) The evoultion of the 4x game genre
6.) Multiplayer gaming
7.) Puzzle games
8.) Movie Based Games (a crapfest, with few exceptions - but would be a great bitch-fest)
9.) Tomb Raider
10.) Bard's Tale
11.) Star Wars games
12.) Rogue-likes/NetHack (evolving to Diablo)
13.) Construction Set Games
14.) PC RPG'S (non-Ultima)
15.) Tetris/Tetris Clones/Tetris Spinoffs

And that is just a start.

I'm just hoping that Retronauts doesn't change to much. I like my Retrogaming goodness.

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