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Bob Somers is happy to announce that his mic quality is much better thanks to ditching Vista RC1 and reinstalling XP. He also would like to announce that he’s fixed the problem with the ID3 tags and Windows Media Player should now digest the podcast just fine.

This week’s podcast features the following on-air personalities:

• Bob Somers - SteamPodcast.com
• Ramzy Bekheet - Steam Powered Forums
• Thomas Arundel - Commercial Director of Introversion Software

The following news articles were discussed on the show:

Valve Announces Dynamic Weapons Pricing for Counter-Strike: Source

The cost of weapons and equipment that you purchase in Counter-Strike: Source are now based on an algorithm that calculates the global market demand for various weapons. As more people purchase a certain weapon, the price will rise and other weapons will become less expensive.

Starting October 11th, the prices you pay for weapons in Counter-Strike: Source will be updated every Monday based on the volume of purchases over the previous week.

This is a very interesting addition to CS:S. I always felt that the wide diversity of weapons types in CS:S was kind of pointless since most players only used 3 or 4 different weapons. However, this offers a direct incentive for players to choose a variety of different weapons and adapt their gameplay style accordingly.

However, I don’t think this dynamic pricing algorithm should apply to ALL items. For example, everyone is going to buy a suit/helmet combo for armor, so making it more expensive because everyone buys it doesn’t make much sense.

Many players are also saying that this feature will kill competitive play, but because this is a “free market economy”, in a sense, I don’t think that will happen. The market should naturally balance itself out over time.

We’ll see how this all plays out on October 11th. (full story)

Valve Releases Updates for Steam and the Source Engine

Valve released two updates this week, one for the Steam client and one for the multiplayer components of the Source Engine.

The Steam update fixed a bug where Steam windows would get moved around when you played a low resolution, full screen game and fixed a bug which gave users an “access denied” error when trying to play a media file.

The Source multiplayer update fixed a console command exploit that could be used to crash multiplayer servers and a bug that caused a game crash when swapping teams. (full story)

Sony’s Keynote at TGS Called a “Meltdown”, “Total Disaster”, and “Trainwreck”

Apparently Sony’s Ken Kutaragi made some big mistakes at his TGS keynote speech. A major problem stemmed from the translators who stumbled over common terms like “VoIP” and used a limited vocabulary that made Kutaragi sound like a repetative rambler. There where other things that weren’t up to snuff either:

• Kutaragi never mentioned the word “console”, but he said the word “computer a lot. This could have been a translator problem, but honestly nobody wanted to hear about how great computers are, they wanted to hear about the PS3.
• Kutaragi went on and on about how great the internet is, and how many possibilities it gives us. Some people thought he was leading up to talking about the PS3’s online capabilities, but alas nothing of importance was mentioned.
• Very few visual aids were used, and reportedly roughly 80% of the speech was nothing but Kutaragi speaking.
• At the end of the speech when the lights dimmed for the final video, everyone was waiting at the edge of their seat in hopes that they would get a glimpse of something exciting about the PS3. Instead, they were quickly disappointed by a video of one of the PS3’s least anticipated games, Afrika.

(full story)

Sony Demos PS3 Interface at TGS

• The PS3 interface is based on the cross media bar that should be familiar to PSP owners.
• The PS3 will have a ‘firmware’ update system, much the same as the PSP. These updates will add more functionality to the PS3. Things such as the PS3 theme will also be tweaked and updated over time.
• The PS3 will feature a media-station, enabling it to play movies, picture slideshows, listen to music, and more, all with full 1080p.
• The PS3 will include a fully fledged web browser allowing you to view multiple websites, all being displayed in multiple windows.

(full story)

PS3 Price Drop a Sign of Weakness?

Mike Wallace, a US-based analyst calls the new price for 20GB PlayStation 3 in Japan a “questionable business decision”, stating that Sony said it made the move “in response to consumer complaints about the console’s price.” Wallace paints the decision as window dressing at most.

Sony’s Ken Kutaragi said yesterday that in Japan, Sony would cut the price of the lower-end PS3 (with the 20GB hard drive) to less that 50,000 yen from an original 60,000 yen, or about $429 US from an original $515 US.

“This price cut is only on the 20GB version of the PS3 in Japan, which in our view is not significant given that the US is the key market for the PS3,” Wallace said in the memo. (full story)

Battlefield 2142 Shoots Down Gold

On the game’s official web site, publisher Electronic Arts has announced that the game has gone gold. Battlefield 2142 is set for release on October 17th. (full story)

Metal Slug 6 Anthologized

SNK Playmore confirms that all the Metal Slug arcade games will be included in a single PSP, Wii game. When the Metal Slug series debuted on the NeoGeo 10 years ago, gamers had to part with hundreds of dollars to own a copy. Now that arcade action classic and the six 2D Metal Slug sequels it spawned will all be available for the cost of a single PSP or Wii game. (full story)

We’d like to thank Introversion Software for coming on the show and talking with us. For information about Introversion, you can check out their website at www.introversion.co.uk or you can purchase their games, Darwinia, Uplink, and DEFCON right now on Steam. If you preorder DEFCON through Steam before it’s released on September 29, you’ll get $5 off.

    

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 24th, 2006 at 5:31 pm and is filed under Podcasts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.