Rebel FM
Rebel FM: Episode 103 -- 05/18/11
Arthur's out this week so Anthony's in charge! Fear for your lives, mortals. No, it's actually just a normal show, only Arthur is replaced with Direct 2 Drive Community Manager Walter Lopez. Join us as we discuss Starhawk, LA Noire, some iOS games (YOU LOVE THEM), and a bunch of other stuff. Per usual, we close with your letters. Enjoy!
[MUSIC] [MUSIC] >> Hello and welcome to our Bluffam, the return of the Mexican edition. I'm Anthony Giggas. >> Would you say that you are a minority? >> I would say a minority. I would say I'm a minority for a lot of reasons. I'm a minority in that my father's Mexican and my mother's white. That's not that common, and my dad was the first Mexican in my family to marry a white woman. He was the only guy that didn't marry another Mexican. >> Wow. >> Which always made family reunions and stuff a little interesting. But as soon as my mom would come in blasting out Spanish, she'd top bilingual education, they're like, she's one of us. >> Nice to be with you, okay? >> That's awesome. >> Yeah, so I'm going to think I was with me, it's Matt Changerney. >> Hello. >> Also representing the majority, Tyler Barber. >> Hey, what's up, guys? >> And Walter Lopez. >> Hello, fat penis, still the old listeners. >> Yeah, Walter is not a Mexican, Walter is Nicaraguan. >> There you go. >> I think that's important to distinguish distinction to make a lot of people at our work always assume you're Cuban. >> Yeah. >> Because he's from Miami. >> Okay. >> So. >> So they jump to conclusions. >> They jump to a conclusion that you're Cuban or Puerto Rican? >> Yeah, yeah. They immediately jump to that conclusion on their jump to conclusion, Matt. >> So games. >> Games and shit, yo. >> And there are so many good, new, interesting games. >> Yeah, and we didn't have a show last week that was partially my fault, I apologize. >> It's okay. >> But yeah. >> But partially mine too. >> Yeah, actually it was all Tyler's fault. Fuck you, Tyler. >> Liar. >> Seriously, fuck you. >> So since Arthur isn't here, man, I've been playing a lot of iOS games. >> Hell yeah. >> Cuz my current gig at IGN2 has been kind of manning the iOS channel since our iOS editor left. >> What have you been playing? >> I've been having to give a shout out to, for most recently, two things. I played Pulse, which is a fantastic- >> Yes. >> I've been seeing a lot of- >> That is great. >> A lot of blog traffic about that game. >> It's from Cypher Prime, which is the company that made Auditorium, which was that game where you bent light to make music. >> Very cool. >> And so this is their take at an iPod game, and it basically looks like- >> Or else they're taking a rhythm game. >> Yeah, rhythm game, sorry. And it basically looks like a sonar, or imagine a drop of water hitting, and when it hits out there are little concentric circles, right? So a pulse comes out from the center, and as it hits the circles, dots will appear on the circles, and so as it radiates out from the center, you know you have to hit the dots as the line crosses it from the pulse. >> Cool. >> And so it has this really cool visual effect, like if you're playing the song where you're playing that's obviously Japanese themed, it's called Sakura, like Cherry Blossom, I think. And as you're hitting it, like all of them are exploding into like blossoms, you know, like all the little notes, and it's very forgiving. You can't fail. There's only eight songs, and the music doesn't get that screwed up if you don't manage to do it. >> I think that's one of the things that I don't like about it. >> I agree. It kind of takes away the challenge, right? Sometimes you just almost stop and just listen to it. >> Yeah, it doesn't feel like you're actually playing the music, because you know you hit the note, and you hit it on the right time or whatever, but there's no satisfying feedback of like, I am helping this music to occur through my awesome rhythm skills. >> So wait, let me understand this, right? It's not like rock banding a tar hero where a successful tap will then play the sound? >> Right. >> Right. The sound is going to play anyways. You're just making sure that it plays without a little "blah" sound happening now. >> I think I've showed you a tap-tap revenge, you know, like, you know, that looks like a standard rock band kind of thing where the notes are scrolling down, then you have to tap on them. >> And, but the music plays no matter what you do, you know, it's like, it's not actually related to the instrument. It's the same thing with pulse, and that's the only kind of bummer about pulse. >> Yeah, but it is really pretty, it's really simple, and it's a great multi-touch game. Like, there are definitely times, like, when it's like notes are blasting, and so they not only do they appear in these circles, but they'll appear and they'll be moving, and sometimes two of them will be coming on the same circle, coming together, and that's when you have to hit them. So it almost is like times like you're using both hands, you know. >> You have to. >> Like, especially on the more advanced songs, like, if you're not using multiple fingers on both hands, you are going to lose. >> Yeah. >> And it's so cool because it's like, it totally is a kind of an evolution of the rhythm genre, because rhythm games have been so defined, I mean, other than, you know, like, ones on the DS, you know, like, rhythm heaven, you know, like, where they're just all these little mini-games. But most people think of them as like, the whole rock band guitar here with me. >> Yeah. A line coming on. Either coming down or coming at you. >> Right. Or coming from the side or whatever. And this, actually, it seems like such a simple change to make it this pulse that comes out from the center of the iPad, but it makes all the difference in the world. And it really is a game that could only exist on the iPad. >> Yeah. And Cypher Prime is just one of those developers that's doing really, like, you know, auditorium was another great example of just a way to do something with music that's totally different. >> To me, when I look at video of this game, like, I imagine someone playing this game in the background of, like, Space Odyssey 2001, like, you know, it kind of looks like that. Like, one of those, like, like, like, what kind of made-up game is this game? Like, no, it's actually a game. >> Yeah, exactly. >> I also tried out the Infinity Blade multiplayer. >> Oh, yeah. >> Which comes out. Which comes out tomorrow. >> Oh, okay. >> It'll be out by the time you hear this podcast. It's a free update to Infinity Blade. >> I didn't know that. >> Online multiplayer. >> How is it? >> It's pretty interesting. You know, the head of chair was the guy that demoed it for us, Donald Mustard. And the way it works is, like, you know, one person obviously plays the hero style character, right? To people controls, tap the sides to dodge, swipe your finger to slash. The other person actually plays the boss character. And so they don't have to do the slashing to attack. They pretty much just say, like, attack, attack and do this. They can choose, I think, whether it's, like, a horizontal or vertical attack. And then what they get to do is they have a slider on the left side of the screen that allows them to quickly screw with the speed. So they can be like, I'm going to do an overhead attack, but I'm going to do it really slow. So that person will, like, go and be like, oh, I should block, and then they'll block way too early. >> Right, right. And that's exactly what happens to you in the single player, too, is like they vary up the speed of the attack. >> Exactly. So now this is a person doing it dynamically on the fly, and then, you know, you play a few rounds of the hero. They play a few rounds of the hero switching back. And then after each round, you get money that you can use to upgrade that hero right there on the fly. I don't know. It's nothing like ridiculously elaborate or anything, but it is just a free update, like, to the game. >> Sounds clever. >> Yeah. >> I mean, I'll totally play it. I mean, Infinity Blade is still a great game. >> You know, it was interesting when I was talking with Don Mustard about it, you know, he held no illusions that this was going to be like all of a sudden make Infinity Blade like wildly popular again, because he doesn't, he is not in the impression that that many people play iPhone and iPod games like online, which I think is true. >> I don't think that's, you know, people have made business out of businesses out of it. >> Okay, but actually he said, I think I missed quoting a little bit. He kind of said that wasn't that they don't play them online, they just tend not to play them where you have to be online together at the same time. Like a lot of times, you know, he's like all the games that he plays online are like words with friends, something that sounds like a push notification, people take turns. >> Carps on. >> Exactly. So he was like, you know, I don't, it's kind of hard to coordinate two people with iOS devices to do it. >> I think that's, I think that that's a fair assessment, but then you have, you know, like that game-off game we talked about in the last episode, you know, where clearly people are online. >> Ordering chaos online? >> Yeah, that's it. Where people, people are playing, you know, like wow on their iPhones and they are online a lot. So I mean like, but yeah, I think when you think about multiplayer, it's just when it's, when it's asynchronous multiplayer, that seems like such so appropriate for the platform that you think that it's the natural assumption that maybe this should be sort of the default multiplayer mode for iOS devices. >> Other quick ones that you should get, just my weekly iOS recommendations. Starfront HD, the Starfront Starcraft clone is finally out of an iPad. >> Yeah. >> It's actually really competent. Army of darkness, defense, actually, a good game, like the movie, Army of darkness, it's a license game that has no business being any good. >> Yeah. >> And it's actually pretty damn fun. >> Is it tower defense? >> It's more in the genre that I didn't know existed before, it's castle defense, whatever that means. It basically means that you have like one building. It's like, I guess it's more like plants versus zombie in the sense that if something gets through, you're in trouble, right? But it's unlike tower defense where you're building towers, this is just like what you're doing is you play as ash, obviously from the army of darkness things. The only controls for ash is you moving him left to right by touching the left and right side of the screen. He'll attack automatically, so you actively control ash, but then at the same time you're slowly accruing iron, almost like sun power in plants versus zombies, and you're calling in soldiers. And soldiers have various powers, like sword and shield guy doesn't have very much attack, but you can take a lot of hit points, spearmen can attack through the sword guy so you call them afterwards. >> Do the spearmen go, hoo, hoo, hoo. >> So that's the other thing, it's definitely an army of darkness soundboard. >> Awesome, awesome, you know, all the time they're saying like this is my boom stick, and they're saying things, and so it's got that a little bit of fan service going for it. It's not the greatest looking game, but it is actually just like a really fun take on like that same sort of style of plants versus zombies and stuff. >> That's hilarious. >> So I've played the shit out of that, and it's like 99 cents, so it's like to me, so that, and the other one on me of shout out is this game coming out tomorrow from a recording called contraptions. It's a really cool take on like physics puddles. >> Oh, nice. >> So. >> Sounds awesome. >> Besides that, since I'm already taking the rain, the reason I wasn't here last week for the last time I recorded was because I was packing to go see Starhawk, which I did go see, which is really cool. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, you know, it's different than Warhawk, which is where, you know, they're basically abandoned, besides the Warhawk, it is basically abandoning most of what you ever thought of a Starhawk. Like it's not returning to the PS1 days of just being like a mostly on rails jet game, and it's definitely not just a World War II, vaguely World War II inspired like multiplayer game. Now it has a full single player campaign. That's the first thing they want to emphasize. It's a retail game that they're hoping to build out into a franchise. And you play as Emmett Graves, and. >> Emmett. >> Yeah. >> Emmett. >> Emmett. >> Emmett. >> Emmett Graves. That sounds like classic video game character name. >> Sounds like classic Western name too. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> It's very firefly. It's totally cowboys in space. All of the art they put out and stuff is always like dudes with revolvers on their hips, you know. >> Cool. >> But also. >> Laser revolvers? >> I think they still shoot bullets in this. But it's a third person shooter, just like the old ones. But the whole hook of it now is that like even in multiplayer, you can build everywhere. So now it's like, you know, instead of like in Battlefield, where you just go to where the tank spawns, and this one, you would call down the depot that builds tanks. And so you would, it would come, you know, and it does like the whole like slamming from the sky thing, slams into the ground. And then you use your resources to then buy a tank from the depot. And once it's there, everyone can buy tanks from that. >> So there's a proper like single player experience in this. There is a proper single player. This is, it's a single player game as much as it is a multiplayer game. So. >> Sweet. >> And yeah, just like section 8, too, when you come into a multiplayer game, you come in like a drop pod from the sky. You can totally aim it slightly, so you can totally slam, kill enemy players, vehicles. And so the reason it's called Starhawk still is that it's still definitely as Hawks, except now the Hawks are these jets that on the fly can transform into mechs. So you can be flying through the air, hit a button, and then it transforms out of the jets, slams into the ground as a mech, and you can just lay waste. >> Nice. >> So the multiplayer maps must be pretty big, then? >> The multiplayer maps are really big, and the whole thing is you can build anywhere. You can build even in the enemy base. You can drop a depot into the enemy base. >> That's what I love about tribes, you know. >> Yeah. So it definitely, yeah, actually has a little bit of a tribes feel in that sense. The only thing that they had a problem with in the early build that I played, and they said they're trying to adjust it. I just don't think they figured out how yet is that each side in the multiplayer map map could only build 16 structures, and there was no way to destroy your own structures. So one map I played, everyone right off the bat, because you all start with enough to build a jeep depot, everybody didn't, no one was saying, are you gonna build a jeep depot? We all just built them. So all of a sudden we have four jeep depots, that's four structures taken up in the first minute of the game, and then people are erecting walls, that counts as a structure. People are erecting sniper towers, and then all of a sudden, eight minutes into the game we realized, oh shit, we never built a pad to deploy hawks. So the other team's just like bombing us with hawks, and we can't deploy hawks, because we don't have any more building space, you know, and they're trying to figure out how to address that, right? They want to give players the ability to destroy their own structures, but how do they do it? Do they do it so you can only destroy your structures? >> Right. >> Do they do it so that a team vote has to happen, because they don't want to just make it that anybody in your team can destroy structures, because obviously someone, they're worried there's a grief or could come in and just blow up everything right behind someone. >> Sure, but they need to make it so that like you destroying your own structures, that just seems like the easiest way to go there. >> Or it would seem like you just give the structures a range, like say you have a jeep structure, have it have this wide range that would recognize anyone trying to put another jeep structure close to it and say, hey, you can't put it here, just go to this other one that's close. >> Right, so these are all of us disbouncing ideas, I'm sure they're doing the same thing. >> Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> The game's not coming up to 2012. >> Yeah. >> I have faith they're going to address it, but when I played it, I was like, that is obviously a problem. >> It's like tower defense, like you sell your towers that you don't need anymore. >> Right, there's, yeah, to recoup some costs or something, but yeah, Starhawk looks really cool, I think. >> I'm glad to hear that. I'm glad to hear like people branching out and doing new and old game ideas, you know. >> Yeah, and it was nice because I got to go to Austin, and they did the whole reveal event in the Alamo draft house, which is like such a cool place, exactly. So that was just like a really spectacular reveal, and they gave us, I will say in full disclosure, they gave us these awesome posters, they were the guy that does all the custom art for the Alamo draft house movies, he did a custom one for Starhawk, it's bad ass. >> That is fucking cool. >> That's why I like the game. Not because it was cool or anything, it's just because Sony gave me a bad ass poster. Also, Sony's awesome, even though they've released like my personal info twice in the last two weeks, because yeah, I lost not only my PSN account information, but I had an SOE account as well, so. >> Shit. >> And I better hope you not sign up playing their blogs too, because that shit got out today. >> The only other game I've been playing more recently, since we met last, is I've been playing the first Templar. I don't really want to get into it that much, other than to say like, it's the perfect example of like a European developer that, you know, I'm sure they meant well, but you know, God bless them, but it's just like, they wanted to make a big ass game that was really, really outside of their capability, and they're probably their budget and their timeframe. And so I've, like this is a 360 game I'm playing in, it's crashed on me like nine times. >> Oh, wow. >> I'm like multiple consoles, so it's not my console. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> I mean, it has stability issues as a 360 game, and it doesn't look good enough to warrant those stability issues. >> That is for sucked up. >> Do you get the feeling though, playing it, like it's a, it was a labor of love? >> I still get the feeling, yes, like these guys really wanted to try and create a historical adventure about Templars, and not like, not like a completely cheesy one, like they wanted to have it somewhat grounded in history, like vaguely. >> I mean, that's interesting. I think that's a fertile ground, you know, I would love to see historic games. >> Me too, but they should have done it as like a 2D adventure game, maybe, or something. You know, instead of, because what they did is, it's like- >> It's like third-person action. >> It is. So they spent all this time building out like a third-person action system and a bunch of combat stuff that really detracted from the whole historical experience and just turned it into a really repetitive, mindless hack and slash. Like all the historical stuff gets lost because all you know is you're like some dude going around that is supposed to be super religious murdering hundreds of people. Like, dude, that dude kills so many people, and not only that, but they have these crazy kill animations, and that guy murders people violently, like he takes the hilt of a sword and speeds them in the throat, and just like- >> And he just would ask you to. >> Yeah. >> So it's just like a, like, I don't know, I think, yeah, obviously it was labor 11. They try and throw some history and stuff in there, but like if this is a game that would be soft to tackle or something like that, someone that has obviously kind of an understanding of making historical setting games and stuff, it could have been cool, but it's obviously just super budget. I mean, it's published by Calypso, you know, and they're obviously a much smaller publisher that does- >> What, bro? Simulators, mostly, and sales. >> Yeah, they do. >> And they do. >> The probably? >> Yeah, they do. >> The probably. >> They do, like, sell both simulators. >> Tropical is good. >> Yeah, they do tropical. >> So, I mean, yeah, you know, they have some hits, but again, even tropical is obviously like more of a budget game. You know, these are all smaller things, and I just feel like in the case of the first temporary, it was like definitely eyes bigger than their stomach, you know? >> Yeah. >> That sounded more like it could have existed as a PC game. >> Yeah, especially like anything- >> Anything- >> Anything- >> Is it? >> Is it a PC game? >> Is it a PC game? >> Yeah. >> But I just think- >> I just think- >> Wow. >> I just think that they should have scaled it back, you know, it's like a company that's smaller that realizes, you know, we're just gonna do really cool XBLA games, like, I don't know, no one says that you can't make a long, like, XBLA game, I mean, it's been done, so- >> Yeah, I'm sure they wanted, you know, broader market sales in XBLA, though. >> Right. >> And, well, their big competition would be, I mean, directly right now, the Witcher 2. >> I mean, that's- >> And then that, in the sense, at least, when you look one next to the other, the Witcher destroys it first off in the looks department. The Witcher is a great looking game. >> It is a great looking game. >> You know what I like about the Witcher, I'm sorry, the look of it, I haven't played it. >> Yeah. >> But they pay attention to detail of all the detail. It's like, you know, every little, like, zipper, pouch, buckle, strap- >> Mm-hmm, yeah, absolutely. I love the things they're doing with lighting, too, like, just like, like, it's one of those games that, like, when you enter from an attempt into the outside and stuff, you're like, wow, man, it's just so beautiful the way that, I mean, I don't know the technical terms for that. But, you know, like- >> HDR. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, and just the way that it almost has, like, that, oh, my, it's just got shocked with light. >> Yeah, it's, yeah, the high dynamic range lighting, yeah. >> So- >> Yeah, and it's, it's just because, like, just like in real life, you know, games that use HDR, you're able to have different exposure levels. So it's like, you know, when your pupils dilate inside and outside, because of the different amounts of light in there, you know, you can do that same kind of thing in simulation in games. And it's really cool when it's done well, and it's done well in, in the Witcher 2. >> My problem with that game, I've only played two hours- >> I've played a couple hours myself, early build, mind you. >> Yeah, I've only, I've only played two hours. >> Yeah. >> This is, like, you know, heavily cobbiotic, but is that a word? >> I think so. >> It is now. >> Yeah. >> But the combat sucks, I hate it so far- >> It is, it is very hard. >> It's not just hard, it sucks. And it's like, it's the kind of thing where, like, okay, don't give me a block that still does almost as much damage as if I didn't block. >> Oh, man. >> Yeah, you basically- >> And not only bad- >> You know the other thing that kind of kills me about the combat in that game sometimes is that it got a war. >> Yeah. >> You know, since it wants to be more of an action game, I'm going to compare it. It's like, it got a war when you roll. If you're rolling an enemy swings, even if it technically would hit you, you're rolling, it misses you. >> Right. >> In this game, if it's going to clip you, it's going to clip you and still be dead. >> Yeah, yeah. >> So you got to roll way early, you know? >> Yeah. And like, yeah, like, and granted, I've only done some sword combat, you know, like, and there's no notion of like, which sword I should be using, the game is very unforgiving. It doesn't have any kind of stuff to tell you that like, you should be using your silver sword now, or you should be using your iron sword now, you know? It's like, I'm sure that's the kind of stuff I'll figure out as I go along, and I don't need to have my hand held the entire time, but you need to teach me some basics, and it really doesn't do a good job of that. I like the first time I ran into, I ran into this battle zone area, and there's like three guys that come up and attack me, like, I got my, you know, I swiped a couple times with my sword. The guys didn't really, there wasn't a whole lot of weight behind the swing, like, when you hit the guys, they react to it, but not in the way that you really want them to in an action game, and everybody was attacking me at once. And so it was like, all right, well, I better roll out of here, because like, I can clearly only take on one guy at a time, but then they all chase me all at the same pace. And it's like, all right, this just isn't timed well, it doesn't feel right. Yeah, early on, I definitely felt like it was really hard to either engage in one-on-one or even effectively tie up dudes long enough to get someone one-on-one. You've been playing it too, right, Walter? Yeah, and it's definitely with a sword thing. They definitely expect you to know the lore, and knowing that the silver sword for monsters and the other sword is for humans. It actually at some point, they never told me that. So if your cat just jumped on my lap, they do that. Yeah, I wish the ladies did that. You're sitting in Arthur's chair, therefore, Arthur's cat is using you as a symbiote. Yeah. So they expect you to know this stuff, right? And what I do love about that whole franchise is the lore behind it. It's kind of, it's so deep, and it's so freaking vivid, and the fans are so like, hardcore and loyal. Like, it's just playing a little bit of play with Witcher 2. It's kind of like, damn, this should have been what Dragon Age 2 was all about. It's like, you set the premise, right, now dive in, expect me to know everything about it already, and just open it up to new gameplay. Yeah, the game is like, I mean, you really have to go in and find the in-game instructions and help stuff, though, because when I was playing, I was like, how do I use a potion? Like, I didn't even know, I was like, I have potions. You have to go into meditate mode. Exactly. Yeah. Like, am I supposed to go into meditate mode in the middle of my head? It's broken down so much, where if you want to become like a swordsman, you concentrate all your level ups into swords, and you get to the last point, and you open up a whole new fighting stance, that's actually really good at blocking and reacting. That's what it's all about. Okay. He just stands there with sword, like, at a different angle, and anyone comes in and just counteracts everything. Well, like, right off the bat in the game, they start you off with like four magic powers too. Yeah. And it never tells you, like, you should, it never has that moment where it's like, use the, oh, you know, girl, you use the power to hold the guy again. It does a really bad job explaining it, but if you, like, concentrate in alchemy and something you have a little bit of magic, you can throw like a gas potion, like a group of enemies. Gas will fill the air. You throw a fireball, the whole place lights up and you take care of a big group, just like that. All the people who listen to this podcast all the time and are like, man, you guys whine about games being too hard. You guys are a bunch of bitches, like, this is your game. This is it. Yeah. If you can get it, they're run properly at first. Yeah. I think, yeah. That's my thing is like, I always try, even though my PC is a couple of years old, I always try on the highest settings. Of course. And I know that the Witcher two is a, as Arthur would say, a PCS PC game, you know? Yeah. So clearly it's not designed to run on consoles. And if I put up the details all the way, it chugs and it does chug. And but, you know, it's like, I turn it down just a little bit, runs fine and I can hardly tell the difference in the visual fidelity, it's a really good engine so far anyway. I don't have any stability issues, at least in a couple of hours that I've been playing it. Well, I found a ton. I found a ton. I have a PC that can run crisis in the highest setting and it chugs with the Witcher that went online and a lot of people are having video issues and even ATI. So you have to play around with your settings and turn certain things off and in order to get it stable. Yeah. I mean, our co-worker was having the interviewing. It was having a lot of problems with, and our grandson, he's on an Alienware machine. And those have been nothing but problems for us. But he has some bad ass graphic cards. He does. And he still has an Nvidia mix currently. Yeah, but like Alienware machines, they seem like such a good idea until you've actually owned one. I've yet to know anybody who's ever had a positive experience in the end to talk about what they're Alienware. Yeah. But anyway, the Witcher. So like, I watched, like I said, I haven't played it and I'm going to get it. And I just haven't yet because I've been playing the other new games. But I watched the first 20 minutes and they do a really good job of setting you in a quote unquote war zone without quite having the technology to do so. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. I thought so too. They do that really well. It's almost like the adventure ride aspect of video gaming, you know. Yeah. Presentation is great. The animation with the way they're talking is amazing. He's such a great character, man, I hate to admit it, but he's such a badass character. He is, dude. He sounds like solid snake to me. Dude, he's like console-o-meat solid snake. So the people in the world just kind of owe like the Witcher. That's all the normass. They're all kind of scared of him at the same time. So you walk around and people are like acting weird. That's what I like. I like the idea that you're playing a character who like people respect because they need you, but they obviously don't like you. Yeah, exactly. And you know who like right off the bat, who I've really enjoyed, is the whoever's playing the king character, that the king is really well-written and really well-versacted. Yes. And I'm like, dude, this king is super awesome as a character. Yes. So to delve a little bit into the lore here, get a little bit nerd, there's like different kingdoms, right? Is this what I understand? They're multiple. I mean, they're definitely warrior, kings fighting other kings. Right. And you as a Witcher, you're a king assassin? No. No. You as a Witcher are actually in the employment of a king in the start of the game. And there are other witchers. And not all witchers are good. The actual title of it has something to do with like a plot point in the actual, in the game that's explained via flashbacks. Okay. Like there's a certain point in the beginning where he's talking to somebody, right, and you can actually pick which part of the battlefield you actually jump into, yeah, which part of the flashbacks. So you can kind of tell the story. You can uncover it at your own pacing. So yeah. But yeah, I mean, there are many witchers. I don't know exactly what witchers are. I know they're tainted somehow. They're definitely not normal humans. And they're like mutated with magic and stuff as far as I understand. So people need them for their services because they're especially good monster hunters. But again, people don't exactly trust them because they're also tainted by magic. Right. Yeah, in a game you get called like the monster slayer and all these, yeah, all this, this reputation and kings want you on their side because you can turn the battle for them. You know, that's what that's, that's you as a player. Yeah. Cool. You can turn the battle for them and you can protect them and stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah. So the, the lore in the world is really cool because like I, you know, I don't know, I didn't play the witcher. So I don't know anything about it. Yeah. But like I did, you know, like you were saying, Anthony, if you, you, if you dive into the help menus and stuff like that, then you can start like finding out a lot of information if you're willing to read and I'm the kind of person who's willing to read. So when it comes to the game like that, I want to play it so bad that I am willing to read. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, what, what else has everyone been hitting up? Um, I'm getting bored with Darkspore. That's it. Yeah. I don't blame you. Yeah. I'll blame you at all. I really like, um, I really actually like playing multiplayer co-op, you know, like some comp stop type stuff, but it's, uh, I'm only, I've hit like up to world five, two. And I've had to go back and like play through world four to five, two, like five times now to try to level up my characters and get some more loot and everything so I can get my squads up high enough level to, uh, go on to the next one. And that's just too much, you know, like I'm not progressing quick enough. Like the, I really think that they made a mistake halting, halting your progress and making you repeat levels before you'd gone through the campaign. Now like I would have much rather have like gone through the campaign and then be able and then like go back and do like multiplayer just as a loot grind, you know, um, but like I'm, since I'm halted in the campaign mode and I, and if you go back even further, like if you go back into world two or something like that's not like the monsters are harder. It's just boring. Yeah. So it's like you have to repeat like the last like three or four stages that you played over and over and over again. And that's just not smart. It doesn't, uh, it, it immediately shows me where the game is limited. And uh, that's, that's just unfortunate because, uh, the actual use of the powers between the squad members and the everything that you can do and all the items that you can collect and the way that you can customize your characters. I love it. I love it. It's great. I'm like, man, this could totally be my, uh, my holdover until Diablo comes out and I would want, and I want it to be, but the game is fighting me. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. So it sounds like the interplay of powers and all the, like the, the systems they've designed are really cool. And then the levels just don't kind of match meet up to that, you know, to the, that's exactly my problem with, I love dungeon crawlers, you know, it's just so, it's too bland for me. Getting home and attention. Yeah. You know, so that I just had it like put it down and just wait for torch, torch like two until I'm waiting for dungeon siege three, that's the next one that I think could actually be pretty cool. Yeah. I'm hoping that that one will tie me over until Diablo or to, and torch like two, right? You have those two at least two camps. And, and I'm hoping that that, uh, Lord of the rings war in the north will actually be someone too, because that's my on that too. It looks cool. You know, that's no blind. The people that made the really cool Baldur's Gate console games. Right. I played those. I, who, who went, you guys go to packs at all? They don't. You didn't go to the packs. I went to packs. You didn't play that packs? No. Oh, yeah. I said and nope. Yeah. It's a, it's a hack and slash all the way. I, I only saw it. I only saw it in three last year and I was, I was pretty impressed. Yeah. War in the north, but who knows. And other than that, I've been playing some galaxy of fire two on my iPhone and on my iPad. It's cool because you, there's actually cloud saves through open faint. So I did not know that. Yeah. It's really. Holy shit. Yeah. You can go back and forth between your eye, between your iPhone and your iPad. That's fucking cool. That's awesome. This is fucking cool. Other game developers need to do this. Matt, did you see the screenshots that released of the new tribes, by the way? Yes. I know. I saw that too. I saw that too. And I was like, holy shit. It actually looks awesome. That's awesome. That's awesome. Dude, dude. Yeah. The tribes, the tribes announcements, they just like, they make me moist. I definitely, yeah, I'm, I'm so hyped for some sort of, yes, and it's like, and I love it because I'm looking at it and I'm like, you know, the other tribes, the last one was basically just unreal, you know, with some jet packs. And, but this one is like, you look at it and it's like massive rolling hills, like bases clear in the distance. I'm like, these guys look like they get it. Yeah. Let's hope that it, it's mechanically sound and let's hope they didn't screw up the skiing. Does anyone care that modern warfare three was announced since our last podcast? All right. You know, I've been playing black ops a lot. Yeah. I've been playing black ops a lot, but I still didn't care for that. Yeah. I mean, I've been playing black ops too, actually, but again, yeah, they talked about the premise and all that and the leak and stuff and I was like, eh, this sounds more and more ridiculous. That's all. I was just curious if you guys cared. People. For me, I just want battlefield. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Better for looking. I mean, you know, I'm a huge shooter fan and I'm just like, oh man, with Call of Duty. I mean, maybe there's going to be some really new stuff that's going to make me excited, but I really have a fatigue with the series. I mean, just been there, done that. I think I would even have a fatigue if the next battlefield had just been bad company three. Three. Yeah, exactly. I agree. Yeah. I agree to that. Yeah. And but you know, I don't know. I don't want to get this big old battlefield Call of Duty comparison. The way I see Call of Duty is kind of like the Michael Bay of video games every few seconds that giant explosion someone jumping in the air. It's a shame because you know, I'm kind of tired of that formula. You know, I think if you look back at their lineage, I mean, it's like, there's a lot. There's a lot to respect there. Like Call of Duty two on the 360 was an amazing multiplayer game. Yeah. Oh man. One and two were votes on my favorite. You know, early early Xbox play. Yeah. Black Ops. Yeah. Call of Duty still controls better than any of the others. Yeah. I mean, it controls smooth. I don't like how fast it is though. It's too twitch forming. I don't don't like that aspect of the thing is those that like, it can be that fast because it controls so well. Yeah. And like, that's like anybody else who's making an FPS who is, it's even sort of like Call of Duty, you know, should be. I'm sure that they look at it and go like, man, how can we get our controls to feel like this? Cause then, you know, like I've said before, the marvel is that it controls that well on console and then you go to PC and it feels perfect on PC too. Yeah. Yeah. They, they've got it. They've got a lock on that shit. Nobody else beat them yet. I was going to make that argument. I played on a PC for months on an end and then I got a 360 and I was like, why say it was so slow, you know, cause on a PC, I mean, I don't want to, I don't want to down tack anyone's skills on a console or anything. But on a PC was freaking, it still takes skills. It's just a different skill set. Yeah. On a PC, you pick your head out and headshot to do jumps in the room. You're down. Yeah. I will say on the side. We're a sniper gun. Yeah. My friend Tina convinced me the other day to pop in Call of Duty 4 and to see if people were still playing. And so we finally found a match and, and do that game is so busted now. Really? And this is the console version. Uh huh. Like they don't even bother to try and stop hacks. I didn't even know you could do these type of hacks on console. Like on the level I played, we were definitely all jumping around like the incredible Hulk and we all had infinite ammo and we were all running faster than flash. So everyone was just equipping a saw because you had infinite ammo and just flying through the air shooting streaks of bullets trying to like survive. It was pretty awesome. It was insane. So that's just my side. What do you, you were about to say something earlier though about something you've been playing. Well, I've, I've been playing Brink a lot lately. Oh, actually, yeah, that's a good point that came out and we haven't been talking about it. Yeah. That's because I'm waiting for it. I'm waiting to play on PC. Oh. Just because I keep hearing that the PC, it actually is functional and that the console version sucks. What do you think, Tyler? I, you know, it's everything, you know, God bless them. Everything negative like people say about the game is completely valid, but I still find like there's still enough new, new elements there to me, you know, especially I didn't play the enemy, enemy territories. There's enough new possibility space that keep, that's keeping me interested. You know, for the simple fact, you know, I, I think that they made some really smart decisions like the damage that their grenades do not do, you know, was your smart decisions upon, by the way, no, no, I, I try not to try not to make it with their movement. Isn't there, isn't that what it's called? It's called the smart movement. Yeah. It's like, it's whatever it is. That feels, you know, it feels great when it works. I'm sure like everyone has read in their reviews, but then there will be moments where you come up to a countertop and because you hit it at like a 37 degree angle, he doesn't hurt all over it. You know, like, oh, fuck, you got to like back out and kind of hit it perpendicular, you know, but still like, it has a fluidity of movement and like that I really don't get in other shooters, like, you know, we, we talked about how call of duty is real like snappy, silky, fast, you know, this bring to me feels more like, I don't know, feels more like an improvised sort of, I don't know, shuffle or something. I don't know. I'm failing to come up with an analogy, but it'd be like mirror's edge of a shooting mechanic. A little bit. Yeah. You know, look up to go over shit, look down the gonder, but yeah, and I think, but what about the shooting? I mean, everybody, I know who's played it says that it just feels ridiculously mushy. Like controls are just like the console anyway. Yeah, it's so far, you know, I have always set my sensitivity up to the highest anyway to begin with. So it's, you know, it doesn't, like I said, all, all, all the criticisms are valid. It doesn't control that great. The animation is jerky as fuck and I think there's like, there's one down animation and it looks, it's the animation that like, it looks like you have the carpet pulled out from under you. So it's like, no matter what angle you're killing someone from, they do that animation. Yeah. And I've seen where like four dudes are all doing it and they all, it just looks like four little films. It looks really bad. You know, the other thing that kills me is, is, is correct me wrong, but like from what I've seen, like when people get shot and stuff, it just looks like they pitched to the side. Like they're just like, no one actually looks like I'm being injured and it looks more like someone's punching them with an invisible hand to make them like tip over at the waist. Am I wrong? Right. Well, I mean, maybe I haven't, I haven't been examining it that close me. I've been playing it. I, well, I think when you don't play it and you're watching someone play, yeah. Maybe I would notice it more. What, what, what, what, I, cause I've only watched people play it. I haven't played it myself either, but what really annoyed me about the level design is it just seemed like a point straight point A to point B. Like here's the next choke point where everybody is fighting. There's no real like navigating around the levels or anything. That's, that's another concern that I was going to bring up. That's also very valid. It's like, um, I'm, it's really sad to say, but it's very corridor-y. Right. That's a really funny sounding word. Yeah. It's very much a corridor, ass corridor shooter with the spread out, open spaces. You know, and, and I feel like a lot of the maps aren't so well designed. You know, there are some that are really fun to play, but then there are others that like almost feel battle filled in the amount of time that you're running before you get to the choke point. How is it a single player, like that's what I was always wondering, right? Cause you know, battlefield, right? Part of the reason I love it is cause it has a great single player. Yeah, but is it pretty much just like I'm playing sync multiplayer with bots in like levels that have a vague story? That's all it is. Yeah. It's the, you know, in fact, it's, it's the exact same thing. You know, it's like, it's just your, you get the little cinematic lead-up multiplayer, same cinematic lead-up and single player. How are the, uh, the whole like dynamics shifting objectives thing? So that stuff is like where they really do some really, uh, cutting edge stuff. Some, or I mean, you know, a lot of other games have multiple objectives, shifting objectives. Right. But this, this constantly shifts. Yeah. And so like there's always a, uh, you know, if you, if you're familiar with battlefield rush modes, there's always like a frontline, like either one team is defending a point and the other team is attacking it or hacking or trying to blow it up, trying to open a door or something like that. And then on the side, you have these, um, uh, if I can't think of what they're called, they're like called control points or something and a, like one of them is like a health control point where if you capture it, it buffs your whole team's health. Um, and then the other one's like an equipment, which gives you ammo and all, and all that sorts of things. So, so those are the sort of, uh, sideline objectives that can shift while you're on your primary, but then just like rush when you take out a frontline and then moves further into the map and you have now another objective that you need to do. And they all require different classes to sort of, uh, take care of the task. Do they do a different, do they do persistent like weapon upgrades and stuff like that? Okay. Yeah. And that stuff's actually really cool. And here's the other thing. It's like they do a lot of really smart stuff. Here, here's example number one, a lot of people complain on these multiplayer shooters, uh, about the whole unlocking of weapons progression and brink. You can go in without jumping in a single online match and you can play these challenges that unlock all the weapons. It's like they're specifically, they're, they're, they're very specific challenges to show you how to play the game in different ways that you didn't think, and they, they actually force you to play all the different classes. It's almost like tutorial. Well, speaking of tutorials, did you do the 20 minute tutorial video at the beginning? It's not a 20 minute video. I think it's just like a little, everyone told me it's like, it's literally like over like 10 minutes long. No, it's, you get an achievement for doing it. You do. You also get points you can spend. It's, it's the little, it's one of the little promotional videos they released. It's not long. People are exaggerating, but, uh, but yeah. And another thing I really like about brink is playing a lot of shooters. There's a lot of times where like I'm playing battlefield and there's a piece of information. I wish the HUD or something would give to me, um, that's like really specific and really minute brink gives you that. And so sometimes that could be a bad thing. But when, when you're playing at a game, really, really long term, you know, you start to really, you know, need those little bits of information, you know, like what, like little stuff like a gray, a grenade lands near you. And if you look really closely, there's a timer that ticks down that shows you how much time is left for the grenade detonates. Mm. Like other things like if you, um, if you cite an enemy in your crosshairs, it shows you a tiny little icon of what their class is. So it's like you can decide whether or not to, you know, if it's like a medic, I usually focus on medics because they can revive that. Can you not tell what, uh, a character's classes just by, like, do you need to cite them to tell? Like, you know, in Team Fortress, right? It's obvious. Correct. It is very much like if you play ahead, right? There is no way to tell just sort of by looking, um, the, and, and, and so that's another interesting thing is like they, they sort of split up the classes in two tiers. So it's like, you have the one tier of classes that are like soldier, medic, engineer, operative, which is like the spy. And then there's a whole other side of it that is like your body type, uh, light, medium and heavy, which dictates like, uh, how well you can travel through the levels and what weapons. So if I was a light soldier, I could move really fast, but I would, and jump higher and die easy. Hmm. What fascinates me about that game is that from the moment it went live a few hours later, it went from, fuck yeah, bring, yeah, fuck this game. Yeah. Pretty much. You know, it's getting a complete, it fascinated me. Wow. People turn on this quick. Yeah. Well, that's because like there's two things that a multiplayer shooter has to get right. And that's controls and level design. Yeah. And if you don't get it right, it doesn't matter how much smarts it has in all the other categories, you failed. I don't feel the controls are all that bad. I would, I would say they're more guilty in the level design department. Right. I would, if, if you're listening to that, that's my takeaway. Yeah. What do you think? Sorry. Go ahead. No, no. As I said, what do you think of their character design? I still think it looks pretty good. Dude, I think that's another strong thing. Their art design is great, but sometimes the graphics, you know, this is like kind of like splitting hairs. Sometimes the graphics aren't up to snuff. It's like, oh, like textures popping in, muddy textures. Mm-hmm. They're, like I said, do the animation is bad. Yeah. It's bad. So would you say this would be one of those games that has the great ideas. They couldn't execute, but somebody else is going to pick them up and put them together. Or, or Brink, too, could be like Witcher, too. I mean, Witcher, the first Witcher was really, really problematic. Right. Yeah. And, you know, to me, Brink is all about the value proposition. I mean, some games aren't like, there's some games that I would, when they come out, it's like, no, this is, it doesn't matter, buy it at full price, buy it now. Right. But Brink, it's like, it's the value proposition, you know, I, I would recommend it as much as I would recommend Monday Night Combat, which is a great game, you know? But Monday Night Combat controls really well, too. It does. Yeah. Brink isn't bad. It doesn't control horribly, but it's not, it's not that smooth either. So. Yeah. If I was going to spend my money on any game out right now, I think it would probably be Elinor. Which I'm also playing. Nice. I haven't played that. I haven't played that yet, but I've seen it played a lot and I'm like, ah, yeah, I'm sitting on my, on my counter there. Nice. Like, like the people I work with and everything, nobody can stop talking about like the facial animation stuff. And they look good. Although I, one thing I will say is, is it just me or do they occasionally, like the facial animations are so good that they almost look like disconnected from the body or something? Sometimes if they turn at a certain angle, the mouths can look weird, like they're not actually deep. If that makes any sense. Yeah, it does. But yeah, I really love how the characters look. It's like, it's great. And I think it's, it's interesting too, because, you know, it makes it, like even just watching, it's so much easier to connect with these characters. And I think that's because, you know, like how much do they say as far as communications between humans is like body language and stuff? Absolutely. And games always get that wrong. So you feel like, Oh, I'm talking to a robot. Yeah. And with this, it's like in heavy rain, you had it to an extent. But in this, it's like, wow, like, like, oh, that's a human making expressions and I can tell like, oh, someone's angry. Even if you were to mute it, I think there are times you could tell someone so upset. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Like Ryan, my co-founder was telling me he was like, yeah, it's, it's actually disturbing when somebody yells at you and they're angry at you. Like you're like, whoa, shit, they're angry at me. Yeah. And I think, I think one of the magical things about the technology is that, you know, it seems like it's a quote unquote easy. And what I mean by that is they're capturing the actor's face as opposed to modeling a face, animating a face, all that. You know what I mean? It's, they've, they're, they're, they're able to take the video capturing stuff up to snap, you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. I'm still noticing, though, with a lot of people who are expecting like a grand theft photo experience out of it, how they're, I've seen a lot of people like small amounts of backlash, believe it or not. Because they're like, this, this game is too slow, I can't believe this is crap. It handles like, you know, they're expecting another like, I can run over anybody and go in a rampage kind of situation. And this game for rockstar is very different. Yeah. From what I understand, it's very paced. But I was going to say it's, to me, in front of, I've heard it sounds like it's more in line with like, it's not a completely good comparison, but it's more like bully than it is a grand theft auto in the sense that yes, there is a degree of you being able to travel around, but it's very much oriented towards you doing this specific thing. It's actually structured almost exactly like mafia, too. If you, if anyone played that, like, it kind of sets you into a mission, you're always on a case, but you can kind of go and do what you want. Except now you're playing a good guy for once. Yeah. And, you know, a lot of complaints, you know, levied at rockstar, you know, we should make sure to say this is a team Bondi game in Australia, but rockstar. Published it. Yeah. Sure. You know, had a lot of heavy producer role. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Heavy role. But, um, they did, you know, they got a lot of criticism in like Grand Theft Auto 4, where, you know, a lot of people are saying you're trying to step sort of the story up, tell this mature story. And this guy, you know, I'm supposed to feel for this guy, but I can go and be a homicidal maniac when I'm out on a mission. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like the way they completely answers it. It's okay. You're a good guy. They didn't pull out your gun in public. I love the idea of being an investigator too. Yes. Actually, if you look at the game since Grand Theft Auto 4, then Red Dead and then this, they kind of, you can tell like their storytelling is getting better and better, because Red Dead was like, his motivations were pretty clear. Yeah. And then this one, they're crystal clear. He's a good guy. He's not going to, he's like, if you go around running over people and all this stuff, you're going to get a game over. You know, it's that simple, you know? Yeah. And it never felt like, like you just said, like in Grand Theft Auto 4, it just never felt right. Like Nico's story never came around, right? His character never came around, right? You know, it was like, it started out so strong and by the time you're halfway through the first act, you're like, I don't believe this shit anymore. This is like, I've got a major disconnect between like what I'm doing and what the world tells you to be feeling. And it was still like, in typical like old rock star fashion in the sense where it was like one second, it'd be like, this is a really passionate thing about me and my family. And then all of a sudden it's a guy that's like, whoo, I'm just a crazy stoner with making really inside weird dick jokes. Yeah. That's funny. Yeah. And now, yeah. Or as I have to say, my cousin. Yeah, exactly. And I like that pigeon. Yeah, exactly. And now Ellie Norris seems very much like they set the tone and they're going to hold on to it. Right. And, you know, like you just said, Walter, Red Dead seems like kind of the bridge because, you know, in that story, like you had, you know, you had a character whose motivations were pretty clear. And then you felt like generally you were following along and that's what you were trying to do. But you still have the issues where you would run across these like incongruous characters that were almost displaced in the world. But yeah, it sounds like LA Noire like solves those issues. Another thing that I haven't seen a trace of, which to me is almost completely fucking antithetical to a rockstar game is there's, oh, fuck, I'm spacing on the word. Sorry. Tell us, tell us around the word. What's the word mean? Is it boobs? There's no. I'm thinking about boobs. There's no satire. Okay. There's no satire in the game. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've heard pedestrian say thing that maybe it's a little bit funny. I'm like, I'm like GT over the pedestrians, like, oh, I sold my baby online. Yeah. Yeah. There's no satire in the game. Yeah. Like that's a what? That's rockstar. You know? Well, think about how like how much the satire would ruin the movie for that kind of game. Yeah. And the thing is the writing and the acting is so strong. You don't miss it. Yeah. No. You know, I found like like GTA four was just like, here's a big sandbox bunch of weird shit going on over the place. There's a story you can follow if you want. Yeah. Red Dead was like this. This is a guy who is who he's the way he is because of the world around him, you know, which is very much like the Western stereotype where there's gray lines all over the place in that era, you know? And then this game comes around and like the satire could be found in just like the historical points like the music you listen to, which is authentic to the TV. You're listening to that stuff. It's perfect. You know? Great. And you know, the mannerisms and the people and the way they talk and the slang they use, that's pretty much where I think you're going to find a satire in that game because they're just trying to make it like a time cap. So you're, you're a part of this, this era, you know, and everyone talk proper, dress proper, but there is very dark undertones. Yeah. And they're very truthful to the era. Like they deal with controversial subjects with race, with class, peaceful station with men and women, which could be argued like back in the day that was spoken in like in, you know, in not clearly, it was spoken like quietly. It wasn't like a thing to talk publicly about. And it's funny. They probably, I haven't played it, right? But I imagine they handle the race thing where it's if someone's being a racist, they're being a racist in a way that is subtle almost like he's saying, like it's more subtle. It's still blatant, but I'm saying it's, it's not like it is in, in something like Red Dead where he go to sell things to the guy and he's like, you know, the Jews own everything. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, what? Why'd you say that? Right. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. But yeah, you do see, you know, racial tension actually really quickly in the game pretty early, but you know, So have you been playing in color or black and white? Have you switched back and forth? Oh, no, no, I've just been playing in color. Like I saw the black and white option, but I was like, huh, it's supposedly you can switch it at any time. Yeah. Cool. Like I would like to, I think the criticism that I've heard levied at the black and white is that it's too clean. So it kind of looks like a modern black and white movie, you know, like a man who wasn't there. Instead of like putting a pop filter and stuff on something. Yeah, something. Yeah. Green. I don't know. I'm definitely going to jump into that. I'm going to play it on PS3. They also, they've, the driving mechanics are nothing like the driving mechanics in GTA 4. I mean, I personally really like the GTA 4 driving mechanics, but it's like they went back and they tightened them up, you know, like the corners turned really, really tight. I kind of don't like it. It doesn't work with those kind of cars. I was going to say, yeah, especially because I would expect big cars like that to have a really hard time training. Yeah. Because when you played mafia. Exactly. The cars of mafia too, like, oh, they were like, they were like what you expect. Lead sleds, dude. They took turns like they weighed four tons. Where no, like in LA Noire, you feel like you're turning from the middle of your car. You know what I mean? Like it's like you could, you almost like snap into length. Exactly. And speaking of snap into other gameplay sort of things that that they've done, I feel like are really, really smart decisions. You know, there's always a scene in a Grand Theft Auto. We've all been there where you have to chase somebody up a fire escape. And it's like, you have to navigate your guy around the fire escape, around to the ledge, up the next, and it's like you miss it. It's like 3D. It's like, do I press up? Do I press up into the right? Dude. LA Noire. It's up. And he goes. He turns the corners. It's all up. Dude, they automate a lot of that kind of stuff. And to the point, even to the point where, say you're running out of a door and the person you're chasing sort of made a 180 degrees turn around a corner, it'll just automatically trail you around that corner to him, like, while you're in pursuit, like to spin you around to say, like, hey, I don't know what you mean, like you're coming out of a doorway and the guy just like kind of like booked it around the other way. Oh, I see. Turned. Like the door's on the corner of a building. And he like immediately turned around. Yeah. It'll come and it'll spin you around the direction. It's interesting to have that sort of, I guess that help. I mean, I imagine it's nice at the time, although I imagine some people would be like, what? Why is it controlling it for me? Well, it doesn't smoothly, though. It doesn't do it all. Like the issue in that kind of situation, usually though, is that, you know, if the camera reverses, which direction do people hold the stick, and it's like, yeah, if the camera reverses, some people want to just keep pushing up and just have the guy just keep going in the right direction. Yeah. Other people want to change. I intuitively always change it to whichever way seems front to me. Right. Exactly. So like if you just just remove that issue, just take that variable out of the equation and you won't have like, you won't have these uncanny valley moments pop up. So I'm one of those few that I can get disconnected from my experience very easily. Like like a heavy rain, you know, the controls is completely in the animation, really, you know, in certain points, just completely, it's like, all right, cool story and then they're acting retarded. Well, that's what Matt's talking about is like, especially in some of the heavy rain, you'd be like, wow, I'm really feeling this character. Wow. Their legs caught on this coffee table. Like, wow, you can't walk up a fire escape. Exactly. So it insists like that for me. It goes a long way. Because I can keep, I mean, I'm going to chase if he's the best detective he's going to round. Yeah. And he's like, I didn't lose him because I couldn't fucking find the stairs, right? Or like another thing they do, you know, just they're, they really are cutting the fat in LA Noire and it's all for the better. Like running is no longer tapping the A button, you just hold down the right trigger. Yeah. So automatically, and you're, you don't have to hold down the right trigger and forward. So like when you're running up a staircase, it just like, you know, you don't even have to direct your guy if they need you to turn you around, you know, as long as you're running, you're on sort of a quote unquote track, you know. Yeah. It's not, it's not the kind of game that like you need to feel rewarded for mastering thumb control. Right. Yeah. You know, there, there are shootout sections and those are definitely like, you know, it's like clear, like here we are, we're having a shootout, you know, there's, there's lots of other great gameplay there as well, you know, and so far I haven't been getting bored of it. You know, I'm quite a few cases in and just enjoying it. I'm, I'm unclear on the whole doubt thing. All right. So have you guys been playing Walter? You've been playing, right? Yeah. I've run the office a little bit here and there. I haven't, I haven't, I'm waiting to get home and you have like time to put headphones on and just lose myself in it. So when you're interrogating someone, yeah, and when it kind of comes down to the interaction point, you sort of, you have three options, right, where you can acknowledge that they're telling the truth, call them out. You can call them out for being a straight up liar, which you would then have to present evidence of why they were lying. Or you have this doubt option, which kind of don't get. Okay. So it's when, when I talked to the guys at PAX, I was like picking them apart because I was like, how is this going to work? You know, and basically there's, there's, in the questioning lines, when, when the music kind of does like a little high pitch, like you hear like a piano kind of like a little, I don't know what you call that. It's a chime. Yeah. It's like, you hear that? That means it's a critical question, right? And that's the one where you can kind of almost like say you're lying or this is true and keep going, right? Everything else, it's just based on the clues you found prior to sitting down to that questioning. So that's where the doubt will come into play. If you have a clue that kind of doesn't go with what he's saying at a particular moment, you can kind of call him out a little bit to see if he opens up something else that either completely this, you know, matches up or it's, it's a complete opposite and then you can say, all right, you're, you're lying. Oh, I get it. You get me? Okay. I think I understand. So that's when you hear a little piano part. Yeah. That means it's like, all right, you're coming up to the crucial part of the questioning. Pay close attention to your, to your clues. See, that's not how I set up. You know how I understood it as like, you use that when you think they have more information on whatever that question was. You can use it like that way too, because there's no like proper way to go into questioning, right? If you, if you missed clues, you can just be like, I have a gut feeling is lying. I'm going to let me call him out. You know, you can start going down that line of questioning to see if he kind of puts himself in a corner, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. It's definitely a game where you have to be paying attention. Yeah. It's not like the previous Grand Theft Auto's where you can, or even read that you can just kind of be playing and riding a horse and doing whatever. Right. That's right. If you're not paying attention, you'd be like, oh, what the fuck am I doing now? Yeah. There you go. It's like one of the very first cases you're on. You're like, you're looking through a gun book registry and they're like, you have to remember the description of the book and find it in the registry. Yeah. You know, like find the guy's address and shit. Yeah. I mean, they do really, really cool stuff like that. And the whole, they use music a lot, you know? Anytime you're in, quote, detective mode, you know, it's, they, everything is communicated to the player through music. So like if you're walking near something, you know, you might hear like a little. Does it get really cheesy nor music going on or music? It's not cheesy. Okay. It's really well done. The music is excellent. Like a, like a Blade Runner saxophone. Yeah. Not at night, God, I would love a rock star to do a Blade Runner game. Right. That would be awesome. They're freaking awesome. Or Lego on fast five. That's what I want to see because that movie doesn't need dialogue. It just be like, ma, ma, ma, ma, ma, it still, it still works. It can work. That's what I want to see. And I've seen a lot of dumb movies lately. Sorry. As an aside, I thought not only fast five, I still the best movie I've seen in the summer. And I saw a priest. Oh, wow. What about Thor? Have any guys seen this? I've seen it. It's good, but I still, and I'm a comic book fan and I still had much more fun watching Fast Five. I've heard a lot of people say like Fast Five is a fun movie. It's entertaining. It's very entertaining. But one thing you have to realize is like they build them as like these criminals with hearts of gold. I just want to get a new life and start for themselves. But man, they fucking are willing to put civilians and everyone in such jeopardy. They might not kill them, but they're going to maim the fuck out of them in the name of getting a new life. Hey, man. That's what a man does. Apparently. All right. That's what I learned from that movie. Yeah. And priest and priest. I'll just give it a quick shot. Don't you? You could do without seeing that. Yeah. Every time I look at the movie, I think of the game Thief. It looks like a game. That's because of the poster. That's because of the poster. The poster. The first poster was just. Yeah. It was like a Thief Four. Wait. That's not a novel series. I didn't even know that. Of course. Let me give you a quick. Let me give you a little premise about priest. It tells you it's in the first five minutes of the movie, so it's not that big of a deal. It's just the setup. No one's going to watch it. It's a world where there are vampires, but vampires are not humans. They're a whole different race. They're just a complete. They're like humans and vampires exist. Vampires cannot change humans into vampires either. They just kill them and eat them. So humans and vampires have been at war on this planet for a long ass time. And eventually the humans create this order of crazy vampire fighting warriors called priests that defeat the vampires and turn the tide. Once they beat the vampires, instead of wiping them out to the fucking last man, they instead put them on reservations. Things go bad. Why would they put vampires on reservations? Anyway, sorry. That just blew my mind. Dude, just tell me the ending. I don't want to see this one. Yeah, exactly. You can spoil priests for you guys right now. If you don't want to spoil, stop listening. You can fast forward about 30 seconds. The vampires all re-breed and get on a train and they're riding this train throughout the desert into human cities and attacking at night. And throughout the movie, they're like, "How are we going to fucking stop this thing?" And then at some point, they realize, "Oh, we can just blow up the tracks." And the de-rails in the sun and they all die. Yeah. Wow. Olivia. Olivia wows in it, at least. You got to see her. Nah, she's not. Who isn't it? The girl that plays me. Maggie Q. Maggie Q. The girl that plays me. What's her name is? Maggie Q. Uh, but I will say the coolest part of the movie is when, uh, and I'm not, this is facetious by the way, is when he's going to jump at this one vampire and not reach it. So this other priest throws two stones, like ninja stars and he jumps off of them. Oh! Wow. Not even physically possible. Wow. Anyways. Does anyone have anything to add? Minecraft. Minecraft. Minecraft, and there's some other new game that came out that's like 2D Minecraft. Yeah, yeah. They talk about how it's like, it has similarities, no, it doesn't have similarities, it's fucking 2D Minecraft. Right. Yeah. That's funny. Yeah. I forget what it's called. It's called Google 2D Minecraft. Yeah. You can see it. I mean, it is pretty much like in 60, or like a SNES Minecraft, complete with the fact that you dig in the ground, you get the various type of things, you create like wooden pick axes, then stone pick axes, build homes. My friend that I got back into Minecraft emailed me and he was like, I deleted it off my hard drive. Was he bad? Yeah. Like really into it? He was just like, he was like, what kind of life is that? Dude, I get it. Like our heart. He had to sit back and question himself. Yeah. How am I doing? The world's at least has like the fallback excuse of like, you know, he's been doing it for work. But dude, when he showed me his mind, it's just like a horrible, I'm never going to get laid tunnel. It starts at the surface of the planet. And then when he goes down, no joke, it takes like three minutes to reach the bottom of his mind. Jesus Christ. Because it just goes down so far. And not only does it go down like probably an in game mile into the earth, but it's all been very, you know, meticulously cut out with torches and ladders and everything in place. I'm just like, that right there, that's a testament to your time for like people like me who are like OCD, persnickety, very particular about how things look and are designed. It's like, that's everything this game is. Yeah. That was my problem with Minecraft too. That's why like I haven't played anything in the new version because, oh, you haven't played the update, not not the latest update, but like you bring in your map and it doesn't have all the new features and stuff. And I don't want to give up my old mind and my old mind is leaning everything. So yeah, see, that's what my friend did. He jumped into the new one and he was like, snow? What? He's like, it's raining. Yeah. Yeah. I've heard people actually, I know a few guys that play in the same server and he became like, oh, let's just build houses and then it's like, hey, we need to make an interconnecting highway. Hey, let's build a giant bender statue. Hey, you fucked my house over. I'm pouring lava all over yours, you know, it's one thing he leads to another waiting for when there's Minecraft murder. Yeah, exactly. Well, it happens a lot of time. These guys would be like on tiny chat, you don't tiny chat, jump in there sometimes with the IGN community, they have bloggers and they're like, hey, come here, come follow me up to the top of the of the bender statue, push them off, that's for taking my stuff or whatever. When are we going to see it on CNN, the man kills wife after wife deletes his Minecraft level? Yeah. He was like, you know, two years into making a replica of the Battlestar Galacti. Wait, is this someone working on Death Star right now? Probably. I could have sworn I read somewhere or saw an image. I bet if you go on YouTube, there's probably like 10 Death Stars out there already. Yeah. Well, someone's working like in the detail, like ridiculous detail in and out. Not surprised. There are a lot of really interesting mods for the game. Like there's one called Humans Plus and it basically adds a whole bunch of human factions to the world and like there are good and bad factions and you like align yourself with them. It's funny that there are mods for what is a mod, basically. I would like a Minecraft where it was one order of magnitude smaller blocks so that like your guy wasn't, I realized that this like totally changes Minecraft and it wouldn't even be the same. But I just like when I'm designing my architecture, I hate that everything is two blocks tall and that's human size. Right. It's not enough to do the detail that I want to do. Yeah. Probably still a good thing when I look at it objectively. Just gonna get bigger. Yeah. You can do the detail. Yeah. And then you're like a little miniature human in like, yeah, like a big boy world. Um, so should we take a break? Then we're gonna take a break and then we're gonna come back and do a lot of it. It better be fucking good. And we're back. And we're back. The first letter comes from Jerry, he says, uh, he's from Canada and he says, Hey guys, some months back, Matt invited me on Twitter to email him at area five about this. He never got back to me, but I know he's crazy busy. So he's not. I appreciate your understanding, but was it a boot? He says, well, it's a boot, uh, I've been supporting a couple clients who do hobby video production for a few now, a few years now. And after seeing some really neat amateur content recently, I've decided this is something I'd like to try and get into as a hobby. My main interest is more in documentary style stuff and smaller creative projects and I think theatrical. I'm a Windows user, nothing against Final Cut, but I'm not prepared to buy a powerful Mac for it. So I would likely be either be using Premiere or Vegas. I have some experience with cannabis, Edius. I don't know if I'm just saying that right. That's not familiar. From a client of mine, but I'm not the biggest fan of its interface. I've just been playing around with my Kodak ZIA and Vegas Studio HD recently. Most of the vacation footage I can get my feet wet. I was wondering, would Matt have any suggestions for learning materials that I could use both for learning the best ways to use the software and basics of how to shoot and edit in general? Whether reading materials, online classes, in-person classes, or other means, I'm open. I know this is a field where a lot of experimentation and practical learning is required, but I figured there must be some good resources available to get started. I know most of the area if I've guys started from scratch without much professional training. That's not true, right? No, that's not true. Most of them went to film school, right? Yeah. All of them went to film school, except me and my degrees in animation. But yeah, so I think it seems like the answer to this question might be, get some schooling. That's possible. You can learn everything that you need to learn on the internet, fuck, dude. If you want to learn a lot about proper shooting techniques, I know this won't be too relevant to you because you're using a ZIA, you're not using a DSLR with some nice lenses and stuff on it, but there's a guy out there, his name is Philip Bloom, and he's sort of like the DSLR filming master, but he has just a lot of good tips on filming in general if you surf through all of his stuff, and there's kind of a big community that's grown up around him specifically, and you can get a lot of information about that. You just kind of follow the thread from him out into the broader amateur filming universe, and you'll run across a lot of great information that's applicable no matter what kind of camera and software you're using. I actually really would recommend moving on from a ZIA. I mean, it is a good way to get your feet wet, but like, dude, you will not regret investing in a more expensive camera setup. I mean, if you can put your hands on it, it isn't very expensive at all, it's like 180 bucks. Right, and it does, for what it is, it's good, but I mean, if you really want to learn how to shoot well, you have to have the right equipment to shoot on, and a ZIA doesn't have a manual zoom and focus, you know. And you can't change things like, I don't think you can change things like set the white, like what's it? I don't think it has a white balance. No, I'm quite balanced. It doesn't have a white balance. You know, any of that stuff, and like all that stuff, like a camera that can, even just a basic camera, like, like just, I would look into, you don't have to get like a, like, we use Canon 70s and 5D Mark IIs, which are really expensive bodies, at least for, you know, it sounds like what you're able to afford, like, but there are lower level cannons, which use the same glasses, those more expensive bodies. And so really what you want to do, like, if you're going to go the DSLR route, is get a body and then just try to save money to collect lenses and find lenses on eBay and stuff like that. Basically, it just comes down to like, trying to get, trying to save some money to get a more expensive camera. It will actually serve you better than some of the software even will. And one thing you're going to realize at some point is if you ever have a buddy who has a Mac and has final cut, I suggest you not go and use it because it'll just depress you. Because if you're not going to get a Mac and you're not going to have a final cut, you're going to feel like, man, I can't ever use another piece of editing software after I've used final cut. It really is the best thing out there. There you go. Yeah. Go online. Go online, like, just start researching and like there's, actually, there's a couple things you can definitely look up. Look up the rule of thirds and look up the 180 degree rule. And those are like the two most basic cinematography techniques that you need to understand. Rule of thirds is a good general compositional rule. It is. It is. All around. It's especially important when you're talking about a 16 by nine frame. It becomes really, really important. And a 180 degree rule. So just go look those up. Well, I have was, yeah, I use it to do all the YouTube stuff or, you know, all the social stuff for IGN. Nice. And it would be fair to say you can start just learning how to edit and all that stuff and just learning his software with this stuff, but that you shoot, like really compelling video and stuff. He definitely is the upgrade. Yeah. I mean, this would be just the start for him to get used to editing. Yeah. You need something with a manual zoom and a manual focus. And like Canon has some like a prosumer. They call them level camera bodies that you can get for less than a thousand dollars. Yeah. Something like a zi and stuff is good when you're filming like improv stuff. Like your friend starts doing something funny and you want to capture right then and it's going to make a great viral video. But if it's something that you want to produce and stuff like that, I don't know. Yeah. I totally agree. All right. So we're going to jump into a relationship letter. Yay. Awesome. Did I send it? No, this says this relationship letter is apparently from an M night Shyam on. That's what he signed it. But your real name's Karen. I'm going to read it. Fuck you. He sent this message from his iPod, which it's pretty long. So he must have. Wow. He says, I need advice. Okay. Like there's one just camera that I want to recommend real quick. Yeah. Go for it. If you're not looking for the super expensive cannons, look into the Canon T2i. There you go. That's the one I was going to mention. I think that's the one even one of our coworkers has and you just for shooting stuff that you see on IGN sometimes. Yeah. And if you start getting lenses for that, you can upgrade the body later and you can still hang onto the lenses lenses or an investment. Camera bodies are disposable. So Karen says I need advice. I'm an extremely unsatisfactory relationship. I'm reading his name because any of his friends and or this girl that would listen, she's going to know. Yeah. Let me explain. I had my eyes on this person for many months in 2010. She was incredible, smooth, perfect black skin and amazing eyes. I had heard from my friends how unique and fun she was, how spellbinding and mysterious. I knew that we all wanted her, but I was determined around Christmas time. I finally managed to go up with her much to the jealousy of my friends and the honeymoon period was incredible. We danced, partied, even played sports sometimes, incredible as I am not an athletic guy. But it was brief and I found myself bored of her presence, angry even. She developed irritating habits like sitting in front of the TV staring at me while I tried to play games. Her hygiene seriously dropped and she actually looked dirty most of the time. I could not bring myself to try and turn her on anymore. She just turned me off. Her constant insistence that I should get up and do something fun made me mad. All I wanted to do was sit in the sofa, get fat and play games. That was my depression. All I can think of is how much she has cost me, how we have nothing in common, and how she never wants to do anything new. I have thought of ditching her, thought of it, but I am scared. I don't think anyone else will want her and there is still a part of me that loves at least what she was to me. He still may be thinking things will get better, but I am losing hope, so I need your advice. Am I right to think there is no future for us? I mean, geez, I even stuck by her when I found out her name was connect for God's sake. Have you ever heard such a dumb name? Wow. It's an illusion. But what's this? Is this a fake? I don't. This has to be fake. What's the timeline? It sounds like he's describing like a 20 year marriage that just fell apart and no one knew why. But this has to be fake. I mean, like this guy is like bitching about like her habits. I mean, look at him. Like, yeah, you're such a huge catch. Yeah, I want to sit on the couch and play video games all day and you annoy me because you want to be with me. I either way, if she's so mysterious and beautiful you're talking about, I'm pretty sure she's gonna find someone else. I don't think that that should be what told me back. Yeah, exactly. Hey, well, it sounds like we're just hearing one point of view here. Yeah. I still think this is fake. I mean, you know, you know, yeah, but if it is real, if it is real, obviously, it's so ridiculous that it makes me think it is real. It's not working. Just walk away. Yeah. You know, be it much of an adult as you can possibly can and just walk away. Dude, like, I don't think this guy is capable of being an adult. Look at the way that he's been talking this entire time. He clearly does not recognize his own faults, and that's what an adult is. This somehow this kid wrote this, he says, if he's real, he says Zachary says, Zachary says, I've recently been grounded, but for some reason not off Gmail, weird, I know, and my dad took away everything. People ground kids from Gmail? I don't know. My question is what's something I can do that's not based on reading or playing a game. What? Well, I will say this. What's wrong with you? He said in his title, it's a 16 year old. He's 16. What can I do? You should go hang out with that guy in the last minute or-- My question is, is he grounded from books? What is something I can do? Well, I think, I don't think he means reading. I think he actually means reading or play like he's based on reading or playing like reading about a game. I think is what he's thinking. Oh, OK. Well, you could start by reading real literature or you could do what I did when I was 16. If I can just rub it out until there's scars. Although, you know what I would have to say? We've been doing it at work, like on the side, not rubbing it out, but-- I was going to say HR is going to frown on that, dude. In Skype chat, we've been playing rounds of like hangman, like pick up games of hangman. He's by himself. Well, if he's on G, if he can get on G chat, like he can play maybe a game with a hangman with his friend. That sounds super lame. Start drawing. Start painting. Yeah. I can't fucking believe this. He's in Gmail, right? They have free books. The next letter. They have free books and Gmail. Think of something to do. Google has the free books. You can go read some, you know, Treasure Island or that. Read the Lord of the Rings. It's fucking awesome. There you go. Listen to audio books. You probably have some sort of music device I bet. I don't know, man. Catch up on something else. Come on. Yeah. I just want to sit on the couch and play video games. And five solutions to fix the healthcare for next week. That's what you got to do. Yes. Whoa. Snap. Photo. All right. So this letter is from Danny. You seem confused. Well. Sounds like there's a photo attached. No. Yeah. There's a photo attached. Oh, no. I would like to start this off by confirming that you guys all roll. Not true. He said, even Matt, who for some reason in my mind is still not part of the main cast, Matt is part of the cat. I would definitely work on that if you guys helped me out with my little problem that I think is big. I was dating this girl, whom I am in love with for four and a half years. We broke up about half a year ago after I left Pennsylvania to move to Florida and go to college. We worked it out for a little bit, but it ended up not working. Now she was a wreck when I left. She didn't want me to go. She cried and she was going to move down, but I told her to wait out, waited out a bit since her parents would disown her and hate me even more since they took, they look at me as, at moving as, as if I abandoned their daughter. I see this letter is already getting longer than I wanted to for the sake of time. I'll just tell you that we broke up, still talked and decided to drop and I decided to drop out and move back. This is one of the problems. Back to Pennsylvania. Yeah. This is where the problem kicks in. She still loves me, but is still mad at me for leaving in the first place. She says she can't be with me because I fucked her up, which she can be a little crazy. So I see that. She's realizing that she doesn't need a guy in her life to be happy. It wouldn't want to mess that up. I was always the best boyfriend, best boyfriend, but I love her and I know I can be the guy she needs. Okay. Hold on. Yeah. Yeah. Why is there a picture from this question? Also, okay. I'm just going to read this so you can see the transition he does here. I'm telling her. She says she wants a house, a husband, and a daughter. I told her I could give her all those things, but she's not as into them so much now. Is there anything I can do to show her? I'm the right guy for her and realize that she hopefully still wants those things. Also I attached a naked photo of her. I have a lot more, but they have her face in it. I told her you guys aren't assholes and no one outside your room would see. You told her what? But she doesn't know you and won't let me send those. Oh, yeah. We still talk all the time. She let you send the one without her face. We still talk all the time and hump. We just can't hang out around people that will know and tell her parents that's a whole another thing. That's the end of his letter. I don't even know what he was at. I think he was asking. How can you convince me? Show and tell. Show and tell. All right. All right. All right. Come on. This sounds like a ridiculously dysfunctional relationship. I'm resizing for you guys. Wow. Oh my God. Okay. Thanks for sharing. Hey. Whoa. What a minute. I didn't know. It was like full body. Yeah. He just didn't. He just didn't include her face, her face, but he included her Bennigan's face. I don't understand why the naked photo was there at all. Are we supposed to go like a hot body? Stay with her. Yeah. Stay with her. She's hot. Yeah. I don't know either. What's his name? Danny? Danny. Danny from that photo is obviously evidence. It's like you guys are young. Like he says he says actually he said the second letter said she is of age. All right. Thank you. It's 22 and 9.4. But I mean it's like... But it's for not sending us underage porn. You know. Right. Here's... Save. Look. [laughter] Well, look into evolutionary biology. I don't know. That's... I mean... I've been having a lot of insights with that. Well, you know, good for him first of all. We just don't start sending us naked pictures. No, but good for him. He has that to play with from time to time on the download. Right. Right. But take for me, good sir. That wasn't the army. I've seen plenty of naked women's. You could find something like that in college. If you both need to have that time away from each other to kind of grow and find out who the hell you are, which is perfectly normal, right? Yeah. Fucking do it. You find someone else that has a tattoo in that particular area that you worry. And all I can say is that like if you love her and she really wants to be independent right now, you can only support her in that independence. Absolutely. At some point she'll either realize that you're the support that she needs or she'll want to move on. But I mean, like you can't keep pining over it. That just makes it worse. Yeah. The last thing you want to do is he doesn't want to be resented for anything in the future. Yeah, exactly. Of her saying I missed out on the opportunity to be with you or some shit like that. That's the last thing he wants. Yep. And send us the rest of your archive. Just kidding me. Losing someone always sucks. No matter what. But... It's true. You sound like you're all kinds of confused. I'm going to fall back on the old Anthony standby of therapy would not be a terrible option. Therapy's never a terrible option. I've done therapy. Yeah. They've wondered for me. Yeah. Sometimes even if it's just like I need somebody to talk to isn't who aren't my parents or friends. Yeah. Yeah. Someone I could just sit there and not judge you immediately just hear you out and just sometimes all you got to do is talk it out and it makes sense to you when you're allowed. Quick. We don't typically talk about it. We talk about it a ton in the past. Phil writes in and he says, "I've been listening to some old episodes and you guys were pretty pessimistic about anyone else getting into video game journalism." Let's call it enthusiast press. That bothers me. Yeah. Game journalism. Yeah. Where exactly does this negativity come from? I understand that it's not the highest paying line of work but that doesn't bother me. I write for a small site and I'm trying to eventually work my way up to bigger sites by the time I graduate from college. Is there any reason I should give up? I don't think that we are pessimistic in the sense that everyone should give up but what I will say is that just consider fostering other options because, man, there is probably less than 100 people in America that get paid to do it full time. Full time? No, I still think you're low-balling. You think so? Yeah. I just think that you're just thinking about the sites and the magazines that we see and read regularly but there's a lot out there. Yeah, just wondering if they can pay enough to support someone full time as well. Right. I mean also consider that a lot of people can get paid full time writing for a site but their full time pay is a fraction of what you would need to live in San Francisco. True. There's a lot of people that work for smaller sites or work for local or regional papers that are actually video game reporters and they get paid to do it. Okay. It's only a little bit, I guess, more pessimistic than if you want to write for some of the sites that you would name on the first five fingers or your hand or something like that. Right. Well, and I would just go one step further and say that you say you're okay not making a lot of money but imagine yourself 15 years from now still making that same amount of not very much. Trying to raise a family. Trying to raise a family. Yeah. To me, they're not a sustainable future unless you move up out of the writing and you start moving into the management in one of these companies at which point you were never in it for the writing to begin with. Maybe if you're in it for the writing to begin with, there are very critical systemic problems with the gaming industry and quote unquote. Gaming journalism. Integrity. Yeah. To put it, I mean, cronyism, the amount of, I stopped trying to write about games just out of sort of, out of frustration partly of, you know, some of like the cronyism and nepotism that I see and also to, you know, Anthony sits here as a perfect example, like sometimes because of the audience as well because it's like what I like, well, I feel like sometimes they're being treated badly by the audience. Yeah, like I feel like like there's a lot of rebel FM audience. Yeah, like it's hard to find a reading audience that you can have like really good mature deep discussions about game but also be able to flip back to like silly, fun, joking stuff and like, and they won't try to obscure you for it. You know what I mean? Like there's simple like troll comments that we all see of just like people using shoddy thinking, shoddy logic, you know, like that stuff is really discouraging to me and that's that got me out. I think you got to think about like, you know, what you, what you want out of your writing career as well. I mean, like there's a lot of, there's a lot of awesome things to say about games. Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of awesome venues to do it. Exactly. And you got to know those. They're out there. Like a lot of people have been reading and I have to lately like rock, paper, shotgun. Like those guys are doing really, really good content there and that's not to say that there isn't good content on it because they're totally, you know, I know, but look at the shit they have to put up with. You know what I mean? And how frustrating is that Anthony tries to bring up a really interesting implication to talk about in the game, but people get, people use elementary level like fucking first second grade level logic and reasoning, you know, and it's like, I told Anthony no, no, bring your grown up pants to the conversation table. You know, that's what's frustrating to me. Yeah, I don't think that it's not something everyone should do. I just think that you have to examine what you want out of life. If you're like, by the time I'm 30, I want to be married with children. It's a little tough on what you would be making. I mean, there's many- It's a good point to have a career go before you go in because, you know, like me, I kind of, I'm not a journalist, I don't consider myself a journalist, I don't write a tutorial for the I.G.N. but I am part of the industry and I very much stumbled into it. You know, it just kind of happened, you know, but I also see a lot of people who are just like, I want to be one of my video games or OMG, like I'm a gamer girl, I'll give me a job, I look cute, you know, which is, is probably going to piss off some, but some people out there, but it's, it's the truth. Yeah, it happens to happen. I've had emails saying like, I want a job for I.G.N. and here's a picture of me, is like, that's your credentials. We're actually going to be giving the job to Danny's girlfriend. I mean, you guys have said it told me, I mean, you have seen this exact, okay, I mean, you know, there's, there's systemic problems with the industry that's just, it's a very good thing. He's, he's still in college, he's still writing about it, like picture yourself five years down the line and, and if that's through your thing, fucking go for it, who cares what anyone says or do it. Yeah, I would just, I would just encourage you to cultivate skills that can be used for journalism in general, not just games. Yeah. I don't want to come off as incredibly cynical too. I just want to say like, it's, it's an uphill battle. No, it's great. Right. When you make any time you're making, no, any time you make a decision, you have to look at the whole picture. Yeah. You can just go in there just hoping, oh, it's going to be, I'm writing rainbows the whole way around and I'm a, you know, it's, it's, which, why would a hell of say you writing rainbows? Right. Yeah. I get what you mean. Yeah. But I mean, you know, I think you have to look at it as kind of like internet and writing and journalism as a whole. I mean, like things keep going downhill and there's a lot of people that are really noticing it. But the internet is still young writing on the internet. Yeah. Absolutely. This is true. If you look at it in terms of like the overall life span of media and art and that kind of stuff, it takes a while for shit to grow up and at some point what we think of is enthusiast press where you're talking about gaming or whether you're talking about movies or whatever. It's going to grow up and it's because you can see the signs out there. You can see like the people that are trying, that are starting to make names for themselves. You know, like everybody talks about, oh, who's the Lester Banks of game journalism? Right. It's like, well, there's no rolling stone of game journalism yet. Right. Yeah. So it's the kind of thing that like it'll, it'll all happen eventually and you know, maybe if you're a young guy in college right now by the time, you know, you're making a really good career out of it for yourself, those places will exist. Yeah. All right. So this one hits close to home. This is a letter from anonymous. I'm not going to read his name because I, this is actually, we have your password. They say, um, I'm 26 years old and I've been living with my girlfriend for about three years. That hits close to home. We met online back now. This is, you're going to hear it's close. We met online back in 2004 and have been inseparable, inseparable ever since. We recently got into an argument though, because she found out I masturbate to pornographic websites while she's at work. That was like so scientifically written. I beat off the porn. Yeah. I tell you what you could have said. I told her as nothing to do with me being satisfied with her or not, but done out of boredom and a way to relieve stress. She threatened to leave me if I didn't stop. So I've been avoiding porn sites for almost a month. Sure. I could look and clear the browsing history, but I try and respect her request. It's a noble view, but which brings me to my question. Is it wrong for me to masturbate when she's not around? She feels like it's cheating when really all I need is to blossom steam. She doesn't mind me masturbating when we have sex, but she feels like she's not wandered involved if I masturbate to woman other than herself. We've been together for so long. I'm tempted to break, almost break it off and find someone new just to get a breath of fresh air. But I love her. And he says, thoughts. Okay. So look, those two, those last years. She an only child. Wow. That's weird. She's the center of the universe. This is actually a, I'm pretty sure that this is like a disorder, like that, and it has something to do with like an extreme kind of like reaction to pornographic websites. I forget what it is though, but you should look it up. Maybe for him or for her, for her, for her, for her, where you have like this really negative opinion of it. And then that therefore, once you have this really crazy negative thing about porn, it starts to influence your associations with it like, oh, anyone that watches porn, you devalue them. But Anthony, what, the, the just that I'm getting from it is that it's that she's not a part of it. Well, and I think, am I wrong in reading that? I think, I think the thing is for her is that she feels like she's cheating. Like there, she has like, not involved in, but there's, but there's two issues here, right? There's the masturbating when she's not around. And then there's the porn. Yeah, it seems like the problem is that, is that he's thinking about someone else or doing something, right? So, so it's like, I wonder is like, if he, what, if porn wasn't involved, would she care? If you were laying just information we don't have with your, yeah, if you're using your imagination, yeah, you should try and, I mean, I'm just curious if she would watch porn with you. It sounds like, no, it already sounds like, no, I, yeah, I mean, I don't know, like, it just sounds like she's extremely jealous. Yeah. Yeah. I would. But it sounds like it is completely normal to look at pornography. I would sit her down and be like, like, I love you, but if you think I'm close my eyes in the middle of sex and picture someone else from time and time, you're kind of foolish. Yeah. Well, not only that, but I mean, if you're cool with that, you got to be cool with me. You want us to stay with them. But yeah, but like looking at porn and stuff is, is it, there's no romantic inclination to that. It is purely just the satisfying of a human instinct like, even, even porn as an act is just a fucking fantasy. You have the time. Yeah. Right. Well, I mean, like, there's a, there is a fair point about porn that the, like, it depends on like, it does depend to some degree on the kind of porn that you're watching. Okay. I mean, it's like, I mean, like, there is some crazy gonzo shit out there that is nothing, but a, what's gone? Oh, there is some crazy gonzo shit out there that is nothing but harmful to women. Completely agree. Everyone. Everyone here. I agree. But I, when he says that I imagine he's just watching pretty pedestrian man, woman, consensual sex. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's normal shit. Yeah. Let's assume that, let's assume that is porn. Watching isn't that weird. Yeah. Just a girl talking really dirty. I don't really, I don't watch porn. My, my imagination is good enough. And I live in a, a, and I have a long distance relationship right now. So there's a lot of self gratification going on on both sides. Yeah. And it's like, it's just standard. Like my girlfriend says she doesn't give a shit if I watch porn, you know, like, she understands that we love each other and that, you know, when we're together, we do this stuff. It's hard. Well, we do it on our own. When I was dating someone long distance, it was the same thing for me. Yeah. You know, it was just like, this is just how we roll and, you know, if anything, I was kind of curious about what she was into, you know, I don't know. He has to visit the fact that if this is making him this like uncomfortable and it's, and it's taking this much time out of his day to keep thinking, like, don't think about porn, you know, then he needs to sit it down and be like, look, this is really, you know, affecting me. Yeah, he should talk about it. Obviously, he cares about her otherwise he wouldn't be writing. Right. And I think it's, I think it's a very fair question though, to also ask yourself if you need the porn. And like, if you really do need the porn, like you can't fucking live without it, then I think you've got a problem too. Yeah, that's another thing. Yes, another. I don't know. Right. But I don't get that that's this. I feel like he has a very like he's, he's a very reasonable porn consumer. Yeah, I think this question was more like him feeling like, and why do I, should I feel like a weirdo? No, no, no, he, that need to have a sit down and just, just toss things out on the table with, if, you know, before you start talking and be like, look, we're going to be honest while you're getting pissed off at me, this is just, let's just put this things out here. Would it make you feel uncomfortable if I jerked to a Victoria's Secret magazine, you know, like find the steps like what's, like what's your, yeah, what's your threshold and why does that exist? Like, let's find the irrationality here. Yeah. Cause it's irrational. There you go. It's completely, it's just like you said Walter, it's foolish to think that an impure thought does not enter someone's head. Another, so that just struck close to home with me only cause I was like, masturbation's awesome. Son of a, so this other question comes in, I'm only going to re-liquid it too more, but this one also very quick question hits close to home as well for me from Chris in Canada who says, how the fuck can you get rid of P fright? No matter what I do, I can't piss with someone near me unless they're shitting in a stall. Dude. Wow. Welcome to my world. Really? Really? Oh my gosh. When I'm at work, if someone comes in while I'm peeing install at the urinal, I will literally stop. Wow. I can't even tell it not to, so then I have to move to a stall. I have to, I just had to move to a stall. I have no clue. Wow. Just peeing stall. I don't know what to tell you. But one time that that almost resulted in horrible catastrophe for me, I was in New York City, could not find anywhere to piss, went into this one public bathroom, there was a stall, tried to go in it and a drug dealer came in right behind me and forced me out of it. So then I was like standing in this subway station, this point is pouring down my face because I have to pee so bad. Oh my god. And then eventually I realized, oh man, it's happening, I'm about to pee my pants as an adult. So I ran up the stairs of the subway and just peed on this court street corner in front of everyone. That's what it is, man. You're traumatized. Ow. Yeah. You know how you can get over it, you need to go in a stall and have someone just cheer you on. No, that's not true. Go, go, go. Do it. You know what, like I think this might be one of those points, Anthony, where the solution is therapy. It's the only solution I can name. I tried P-Shies. Man. Yeah, I don't know how to tell people to get over their fears, you know, like. I think it's a, actually, you know what, I think it has to do with like alpha-mel thing. Like any time I'm going to the, any time I'm like, I'm, I know I'm approaching a stall next to another guy. I kind of take this position of like, I am the dominant one. Really? In my head. I don't know why, but I'm thinking like, I'm dominating this year in a motherfucker. I don't know what it is. Ow. I wish, man. Yeah. I've been P-Shies for. Well, make, put yourself in that state. Made that. Yeah. Now it doesn't happen to other. I've been P-Shies for like eight years, man. Wow. I just don't. I don't think about it. I just don't give a shit. Just go in there and get it. You know, they all, okay. So wait. So to get a little bit of deeper into my psyche. Yeah. I got it. I got it. Not only am I P-Shies, but then the times when I'm not P-Shies when I'm peeing outside. If I'm peeing outside, not in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, I think. I love the P-Shies. I love the P-Outside. Made in front of a bunch of people in New York City, I love peeing outside. I could go outside my apartment right now and pee. Are you sure it would like beat you up in a public urinal or something like that? I don't think about the formalized setting of like, you must perform right now. Yeah. Like, and if you're not performing, like, you're not being efficient here. So if that, if that, if that stall had a, like, a window, you can look outside and pretend you're peeing outside and someone came over and pee, you wouldn't have an issue? Yeah. I just need to be peeing on grass. All urinals need to be grassed. Grass. Apparently. God. What's wrong with me? He's shyness. He's shyness. Uh, I don't know. You know how I always take care of anything I'm afraid of, but just fucking dive in and do it. Yeah. Right. That would be like flooding. Uh, yeah. It's like, I don't know if that helps in, I don't know how this helps in this situation, but whenever I've been, come across anything where I'm like scared of heights or whatever, I get a, you know, jump out of a fucking plane, fix it. Just stand there long enough if it just gets so bad, you don't have any control and then you have to. The problem is that he's going to start thinking about it way too much and he's torturing himself the whole time and it becomes something where it's in an event and he doesn't want to do it ever again. Yeah. That's true. You know? He just has to get himself in like a good place to go in there, fucking listen to music and doing your sewing next to you, put headphones on and pee. The reason why that has to do with like the alpha male personality is because I can know the times where the few times where I've had pee shyness is when like a guy where I feel more badass stepped up next to me, you know, like, ah, this guy's more badass bitch. I'm going to show him by peeing. I'm old school, man. I go into the peeing. I, I look straight ahead. I don't want to talk. You say hi to me. I'm like, what the fuck? You even know I'm peeing, dude. You know? Have you ever seen like those, those studies and stuff on like how guys, they, how they space out the urinals and everything about how like there's this, this untold etiquette that like you don't take the urinal right next to somebody if there's, oh yeah, absolutely. It's just, if there's one that's one away, you know, stuff like that. Yeah, I'm a hilarious one more letter. All right. I'm not going to read this whole letter, but this is from kit. Um, and apparently this is something you guys talked about on the podcast last time about homosexuality. Uh oh. Being a choice or not. Oh, yeah. And Tyler said, Tyler said they were born that way. It's not a choice. And he said, uh, and kit writes in, and before anyone responds, just let me read a shit. Just thought the rebel of him crew should do a little more internet research about genetics and homosexuality as is not as clear credit as they might think. Then he pulls out some excerpts and all that, but right off the bat in bold fucking font, man. This is the problem. H T T P colon slash slash w w dot God in science dot org slash evolution slash genetics of homosexuality. I don't know what that means. God in science.org that already reads me trouble. And this is a, this is an excerpt from it. There's a common belief among liberals that people are born either gay or straight. You know, like, all right, it's like being used. So I guess I, okay, I can elaborate on how I feel about this then being gay can be genetic. It can be a choice. It can be either one, you know, like, I don't care if you choose to be gay. If you, if you are born gay, then be gay. No, Matt, because the important distinction is that it does matter whether or not it's a choice or it's not a choice. They're born this way. They have the same rights that everyone else does. And I'm saying that that's fine. It's not safe. But like, I know people who chose to be gay, you know, they, they were like, they didn't like being heterosexual and they wanted to, and they chose to go have gay sex. But when I talk to them, I'm like, so are you gay? And it's like, no, I just, I just like, I just like dudes better than, I like dudes better than women right now. So they're not gay. But what difference does it make if it's a choice? I mean, like, who, who gets to tell you that it's wrong to choose that lifestyle for yourself? Oh, no. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. Like, you can choose it. Right. All you want. I think that's this guy's problem is that he can't get into that mindset, right? Where it shouldn't matter either way. To him, I think I'm thinking there is some underlying ideological problem where he wants to believe it's genetic so that he can throw that in the face of his ideology. Right. But because it's not proven, he can't, and he's conflicted about it. I would say, as far as I'm concerned, like, if somebody chooses that lifestyle, they deserve all the same rights as everybody else. If somebody is born that way, they deserve all the same rights as everybody else. It's just like, it's pretty cut and dry. I would familiarize yourself with confirmation bias to the person who wrote this in. It's the simple, logical fallacy of just looking for evidence that supports your decision, that just supports your position to support your position, and you don't seek out any evidence that just confirms it, which is exactly what the website obviously is. Some scientific journals and stuff about it have been done on the website that starts with God because religion and science are incompatible. I'm an incompatibleist, just to let you know. That's a heavy, debatable talk I had to be debatable talk. I hadn't gathered that from our past discussions. I'm an incompatibleist. But no, I mean, I'm sorry, Matt. I think you're unread in the literature and everything. Someone can make the lifestyle decision, like, I'm going to have gay sex. I mean, that happens. I'm not saying it can't happen, but people are born gay, period. It's a genetic thing. Okay, well, that's fine. That's the distinction. It's fine. People are going to have gay sex, but that's what I'm saying. I get what you're saying, and I totally agree with you, and I understand that point. All I'm saying is that if somebody chooses to live the gay lifestyle, then they deserve equal rights. Yeah, completely. You know, whether or not they're born gay, if they choose to live that lifestyle, irrelevant as to whether or not they deserve words. Yeah, yeah. I hear that. So, yeah, I didn't speak correctly earlier. Right. Yeah, sorry. This guy, no, I mean, they want, it's that Christian agenda, like, he said he ended his letter with, I want to believe it's genetic. It is. So, I don't know, just do more research. That's heard by him. It is genetic. And then look up logical fallacies. They're really, really interesting. Before we're telling people to read things, go read mistakes were made, but not by me. Great book. Right now. What's that? It's a psychology book about the cognitive dissonance that people have when they make decisions and they rationalize them to themselves. Ah, yeah. So, nice. I never do that, except that I do that all the time. Yeah. And people, and kind of that whole thing, where people go out, once they've made a decision, they seek out information that will specifically work with their rationality. Conspiracy theories. Say hello. Yeah. All right. So, you've listened to us. You can send in your own letters to letters@eat-sleep-game.com. You can find me on Twitter at chuffmoney, you can find Matt at Talking Orange, you can find Tyler at 30T, like the drink, and you can find Walter, your, what's, it's snack pack, right? Snack pack. So, it's S-N-A-K-P-A-K-K. Yeah. Oh, nice. Thank you. Yeah. That's it. It's coming on Walter. Yeah. Thanks for coming on Walter. Thanks for the invite, man. All right. We'll see you all. Arthur will be back next week, where he'll tell us all about all the crazy games he's seeing in the L.A. Will he be able to? He'll be able to talk about quite a few of them. Okay. Quite a few of them don't have him, Martin. Yeah, he's a, he's a E-3 judges. Yes. He is. So, he's seeing all kinds of nifty stuff. He needs to feel better, too. Plus, Arthur's been playing a lot of games, too, that I don't think some of us have been touching. So, he'll be able to talk about this. Yeah, he's been sick. Yeah, he's been sick. Expect more L.A. Noir talk next week, too. Everyone should sound like a Twitter dude and say, "Get well soon." He's been a trooper. He's got the TV's out there and the judges speak it up. All right. Thanks for listening. ♪ All the girls that Johnny knew never seemed to be his type ♪ ♪ They only cared about being cool and look down on his rodeo lives ♪ ♪ But that day when the news came by, Johnny's life is about to change ♪ ♪ He met a girl with a demon to ride and his heart started feeling strange ♪ ♪ 'Cause all he wanted was someone who would stand by him ♪ ♪ All he needed was someone who wouldn't create it ♪ ♪ So, it's him ♪ ♪ Yes, he was her name and that short for Jessica ♪ ♪ And she really loved horses but she used to live in the Marriott ♪ ♪ So, Johnny asked her if she'd like to go riding on Saturday ♪ ♪ And that was the start of the best scene that had become Johnny's way ♪ ♪ They were married in the little church where his dad would preach ♪ ♪ Johnny started to make a name for himself in the rodeo ♪ ♪ 'Cause he was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man ♪