Rebel FM
Rebel FM Episode 99 -- 04/07/11
Hello and welcome to this week's Rebel FM. Arthur is unfortunately out this week, but you can join the terrible trio of Matt, Tyler and myself as we talk about Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age 2, The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile and more! We end with some letters, putting the final thoughts on the whole steroid issue. Enjoy!
[MUSIC] [MUSIC] Hello and welcome to episode 99 of Rebel With Him. >> What? >> Round two, we fucked up the first one. My name is Anthony Gallegos with me, it's Matt Changerine, and Tyler Barber. >> What's up everybody? >> And there's no Arthur, Arthur's a captivate. And we were gonna try and get Walter from IGN directed drive here, but he's also gone. >> Do we have any idea of like some of the things Arthur might be checking out at captivate? >> As news started to trickle out yet. >> No news is, it's all embargoed, but I haven't heard about anything, so. >> Right. >> They'll probably show the multiplayer at Resident Evil game I imagine. >> I would think so. >> I hope so. >> Isn't there like a Resident Evil Connect thing or something that's coming out too? >> I don't know. The only Resident Evil I know that's coming soon is that 3DS one that they've like showed, I guess. >> I'm sure I'm talking out of my ass anyway. There's no more Arthur here to call me on it, so I'm gonna do it the whole episode. >> Yeah, this episode is gonna be nothing but iPhone games and a bunch of dumb bullshit. >> iOS games, yeah. >> And if the levels are fucked up this week, it's 'cause I'm in control. >> [LAUGH] >> Gotta tighten up the graphics on level three. >> [LAUGH] >> So this week, a game that I played just to get right into it. >> Yeah. >> It came out is the new dishwasher game. >> Oh, for God, I'm afraid to get that. >> Yeah, that actually is like the only game that came out this week, of any note. >> I mean, no, yeah, I need to get that. >> Well, wait, didn't red faction. Again, the only game of any note that came out this week. >> Oh, okay, okay, I didn't know if it was bad or not, so. >> No, I've seen it at my work, and it's like only red faction in the most vaguest of terms. >> Really? >> Like, it's like arena battles with vehicles. >> Right, right, right. >> It looks a lot like that old school off-road arcade cabinet game. >> It had the wheels. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, it looks like that. Except this is just battling, and the whole way they try and sell it as red faction is that you're training to be a terrorist, basically. >> Sort of like when you played that DS Ghost Recon game. It was only Ghost Recon in name only. >> So this is, I think, part of THQ's new strategy of trying to find other ways to interlink their brands and push their things that are coming up. But in my mind, all this game does is hurts the red faction brand. It seems like they took another game that was just being made, and they were like, we got this okay car combat thing. I know, let's make it red faction, and have it come out like a month before to promote red faction. But if I was playing this, I'd be like, fuck that red faction game. It's going to be some dumb combat game like it's a person that you'd be ignorant. >> Right, it's a detriment as far as I'm concerned. >> I wonder, it would be really interesting to be a fly on the wall in their sales report meetings and see that like, well, we put this game out there, and we can actually work as an effective marketing tool. Or we put this game out there, and we totally fucked ourselves. >> Right, I mean, man, I'm really loud, I'm sorry. Anyways, I don't know how that really goes for them. But I don't think that this was a smart decision, so. But I will say that the dishwasher on the other hand, that is a really cool game. >> It looks really cool. >> It's done by James Silva. I mean, SCAS studios is the name you'll see associated with it, but in reality, SCAS studios is pretty much this one dude. I think he might get maybe the tiniest bit of help from a couple of his friends with a little bit of art here and there. >> Did you do the music too? >> I believe he does, I'm not sure though. But yeah, for the labor of one person, it would be the best Xbox Live indie game on the indie marketplace if it was an indie game. But it's being published as an XBLA game by Microsoft Game Studios. But I will say that even that considered, he is like, it's come so much, so well long compared to the original dishwasher. The original dishwasher was impressive because you were like, check out this indie game, it's actually really cool. >> Yeah, the visuals were great. >> Right, and so this one, the visuals are way better. And the first one, I don't mind hard games, but I thought the first one was Ninja Gaiden Hard, it was like, like, unnormal, it was like impossible to get through. >> Unfortunately, never got a chance to play the first one either, it was the first one, the kind of Ninja Gaiden Hard where if you play well enough, you just get really good at it or it was like, punishingly, so punishingly difficult that it felt like it was broken. >> There was just certain things that I felt like at the time you were like, wow, this is really impressive and that was like enough to sell you on it, that you ignored the fact that the combat in a lot of ways just wasn't, like, I don't think it's that fun, especially having played two and going back to one. Because in the first one, you were just fighting so many guys at once and they were just like, it was so hard to actually cause damage to them because they would block so much and I didn't feel like, I never felt like a badass and in the second game, it's very clear that it is tuned to make you feel like a badass, like, right off the bat, you, like they, in the first game, you had a dodge mechanic as well that they introduced slowly over time and in the second game, you have the dodge mechanic right off the bat and it's not just a dodge, it's a dodge where you can, like, go through the air, like, almost like when you would tap the button in the super Metroid where you could spin and keep going. So in this one, you, that way, now you're using the whole environment. So you're using the air, traveling through the air and that was cool cause that's one thing that they added into, like, God of War 3's combat that I really loved was you could air dash, you know, it was, that was awesome. So in this, you can air dash and then on top of that, now enemies hurt each other, which I know sounds like such a weird thing, but in the first game, enemies could drop grenades around each other, shoot each other and it didn't matter, but now because enemies hurt each other and you have all these different enemy types you're fighting at once, it's like, almost like, half the time I'm not even doing all the comp, the battle myself. Wow, cat fight. Half the time I'm not even using, you're a bitch, half the time, I know, half the time I'm not even doing all the fighting myself, I'm actually just letting the enemies play off one another while I'm avoiding combat, like I see a guy's about to shoot so I roll to the other side of the guy so he just takes the bullets, like, yeah, I think it's a really well done game. The one thing I will say is it's extremely repetitive, like the levels boil down to go into a room, door shut, kill everyone, doors open, do that a few times, reach a boss level in. And the story's kind of nonsensical, it's not necessarily a knock against him, I just don't think he's, like, a particularly great storyteller, which isn't to say that he isn't talented in any numbers. Right, hey, other great ways. Sorry Matt's breaking up a cat fight. About where it knocks over at HDTV. Yeah, exactly. My cat is a super whore. So what are some of the other features that the sequel brings that kind of set it apart from the first? Honestly, I feel like it's more just a refinement rather than, like, it's, like, not radically different other than the first one you only have to play is a dishwasher and the second one you can play is both the dishwasher and his sister. And they have separate stories, even though their campaigns are largely the same. But then they play mostly the same, they have slightly different weapons, but I just feel like the dishwasher sister actually has, like, cool moments. I won't say that she has, like, the coolest story, like, because I still think the story on both sides is kind of nonsensical, but, like, for instance, she has all these moments where she's constantly having, like, these psychological battles with the demon. So it'll go from the, what you're in the game to all of a sudden being, like, her in a mental hospital and then switch back to the fighting and stuff. Hers does some really interesting story, things like that. And there's one battle in particular where you just see, like, how creative this guy is because, I mean, there's a battle where you fight a paraplegic and since he can't attack you, what he does is he fights you with his mind. And when you fight you with his mind, it does random things, like, make you fight in other genres of games and stuff. He transports you to random genres. I don't want to spoil that for anyone because that's, like, one of the moments of that game. But yeah, the dishwasher vampire samurai is a vampire smile. It's probably the best game to come out, like, in the last week or so. And then, on top of that, I haven't really seen, like, a whole lot recently. I saw, like, LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean, but that's pretty much what you think it is. Yeah, it's a LEGO game, yeah. But yeah, and I've just been playing a shit ton of Mass Effect 2 all over again. So did you, did you start over? I had to because I lost all of my saves. That's right. I forgot. So, but it's actually been good. I've been playing it a lot differently. I've been, like, before I did all, I recruited everyone before I did any loyalty missions. And this time around, I plan on trying to romance someone else and-- Yeah, yeah. I don't know. And I've been making some decisions that I didn't make the first time. Yeah. It was my new game, plus, that I played through my second playthrough on, and that, you know, I played the deal, a lot of the DLC on and stuff like that. And my second playthrough, I didn't romance anybody because I'd done the Shadow Broker DLC, which brings Liara back into it heavily. And so it sort of reaffirmed, like, my personal and my character's loyalty to Liara's love interest. Right. And so, like, I didn't romance anybody else, and then at the end of the game, you know, right before you go on the Suicide Mission, Shepard, my Shepard's sitting in her cabin, and like, all she does is, like, look at a picture of Liara fondly, you know, instead of somebody coming in and, you know, you getting your nasty on. Nice. Yeah. That's really cool. Yeah. I thought that was cool, too. Yeah. I don't know. I've been playing some smaller iPhone games. I will give a quick shout out to Tiny Wings. That game is still so good. The game is the perfect example of someone using a one-touch game and making something truly, like, magnificent out of it. At this point, I haven't got to try Sword and Sorcerer yet. Sword and Sorcerer alone has almost made me buy an iPad. It's going to be out soon on iPhone though, too, so. I know. That's the only reason I have temporarily been able to stay myself that, and, you know, the iPad is a significant investment. Yes. Yes, it is. Yeah. Have you, I don't know, what have you guys been hitting up? I played a couple rounds of Call of Jewelry Duty. Yeah, how was that? You talked about that before. Do we still? No, we're good. Okay. Yeah. It was pretty painless. Yeah. I know. Actually, the San Francisco, like, waiting area was really tight. Like, that was places where you could bring your Wi-Fi. You can plug your laptop in. Yeah. I had neither. I had no Wi-Fi on me. But also, you know, I mentioned, you know, listeners buying me games on Steam. They're still buying me games. It still makes me feel weird. You want to receive more games? Yes. What bought me Killing Floor today? Nice. Now we need to play that though. That's a, that's a, that is a really fun game. Yeah. Yeah. I want to check it out. But I checked out Magica. I wanted to ask you, how was that? Did you like it? I had a great time with that game, actually. So like, I, I, you hated it. No. I remember when Guitar Hero was first becoming popular, no punctuation, which if you're unfamiliar, he's sort of a, a video game reviewer. He does video reviews and he- Zero punctuation. Yeah. Yeah. On a, he's one of the, it's one of the escapist shows. Yeah. He's a lot of humor and stuff. Yeah. There was a Guitar Hero one where he had an analogy about like, you, your hand needing to be a spider hand. Yeah. You know? Like basically you need eight fingers. It's like a kind of how I feel about Magica. Uh-huh. You kind of need a spider hand. Yeah. It does take some muscle memory to learn the spells. But eventually if you practice it, like I know it sounds stupid to practice it, but if you do practice it, you can eventually cast things like meteor shower, you just like have like a muscle memory. Well, then you have, and it gets really complex because you know, there's the, you can do the, like an area of effect around your character's body for every spell variation, you know? Or, or a shoot, like you could shoot it out like a projectile. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah. What I like about that Anthony is the whole, you know, learning the spells and getting the muscle memory down is, you know, I, I work in the Adobe Creative Suite. So. And I use a shit ton. I mean, I'm a short. All shortcut keys all the time. Yeah. It's fine. It's like you get like ninja fingers. Yeah. Exactly. It's a different type of ninja fingers that I'm not used to. And then I think the other thing that sort of is a little bit confusing for me is I don't understand their rationale behind the opposite elements. Kind of doesn't make sense to how they cancel each other out. Like, or, or like, yeah, this element is opposite to that element. Like, why? Like, why? Because it's a way to eliminate combinations. Sure. Yeah. So you don't have unlimited combinations. No, I understand it from a gameplay. Which elements, like where do you. It doesn't make sense to me. Like where, like where are you carrying? Well, that one makes sense. Yeah. And then it's like, which one are you countering? That's like what? I think like earth and air are opposite, aren't they? Yeah, that makes sense. There's like air, earth, like, fire water. And then there's arcane and health. Yeah. I don't know if arcane and health. Maybe that one didn't make sense to me. I don't know if arcane and I don't, it, it was like life or something like that. Lightning and stone or something. Maybe. Yeah. But some of them are. There were two that didn't make sense to me. I was like, what? You know? But, but overall, you know, and it's also, so, it's also the first PC game I've ever played where you like, um, click where you want your guy to walk instead of like, you know, because obviously instead of WASD for controls, you're using that for your spells. Right. I guess you never played a Diablo. No. No, I haven't. No, I haven't. No, I haven't. Diablo was like the, the mouse destroying game. Yeah. And every guy you wanted to swing at. That's right. Well, you know, one thing I think that's really cool about magic is it has the handy little mouse wheel with all your spells. Yeah. You can mouse through them. Yeah. That's cool. So you can see them all. You don't have to memorize everything. It's even harder if you try and play two player on one computer, which you can do. Yeah. But the second player uses like a 360 controller. And to access all of the spell colors, you have to do stick air directions on the right stick. Oh, really? So you have to be like, up, down, left, right. Fire water. This, this. You know? Well. That's crazy. I can see how that would actually be easier for some people though. Sure. I mean, people, I've just never been much of a fighting game player either. Yeah. So for me, that's really hard. Yeah. And to me, like the difficult part about it is like not just the spells, but also, you know, just like navigating enemies, because if you just throw a regular spell, it just sort of like, it's like a force push, you know, I guess, and I guess, you know, I'm just not good yet at like clicking and controlling my guy and doing spells and I'm just constantly getting surrounded. Well, you have to think of it a lot like a real-time strategy game with one guy. Yeah. Yeah. Like you have to control him kind of like that, you know, only you don't have to select him before you can get him to move somewhere, right? And the, the, for me, the big thing was the spell combinations. Like there were, I really realized that I was becoming reliant on like three or four spells and that was it. And I noticed that when I play, because I played a lot of games online, it's actually really fun online. As long as you don't get somebody who's a douchebag greeper who just kills everybody all the time, because there is friendly fire. And so I would, I would go online and I would see everybody else doing the same thing. They would all start relying on like the same like three or four spells and every now and then I'd see some, somebody else cast a different one and then I'd be like, oh, I'm going to cast that one too. And then somebody else would go, okay, I'm going to cast that one too. You're all casting like the same spells again. It was really funny. Um, a quick PSA though, I want to give to people is that, man, everyone needs to check out. It comes out tomorrow. If I don't get it on my press count, I'm definitely going to buy it. I feel like I should buy it for someone just to support it because that Dino D D day game comes out tomorrow. Really? You guys know what that is. I, I'm, I'm aware, I've heard people talk about it, but I don't know what it is. It's a silly source mod that pits Nazi dinosaurs against American people and it's like, it's like TF2 meets Nazi dinosaurs. I saw the YouTube, a YouTube video about that and it's it and it's like, isn't the description something like, uh, Hitler, uh, brought back dinosaurs and that's like the only description. Yeah. It's just like Hitler in search for the ultimate weapon brings back dinosaurs. Right. It's all you need to know and it's awesome. That's great. All right. Yeah. I totally need to play that. I don't know. It just seems like a really well done, like cleverly made mod. Cool. I don't know. Um, and it has dinosaurs. Yeah. I've also gone back recently and started playing a Warhammer Mark of Chaos. I don't know if anybody remembers that game. They probably don't. No, I don't. Why? Uh, Namco of all publishers got the rights to like fantasy Warhammer RTS games. I'll never know, but they are really good. It like, it's like the best example of like Warhammer done in a video game in the sense like of tabletop Warhammer in an RTS sense, not because there's no unit building, but even more than dawn of war, it's like Warhammer because before every battle, there's a deployment zone. You have a deployment zone. So you can arrange them in the formations you want. And then you start. It's very much like Shogun in that regard or, you know, any of the total war games. But you know, you have to deal with all the typical things like morale, like all these things that are a big deal attaching heroes to units, detaching heroes from units, magical spells, like, I don't know, I just think it was such a cool game, but they must have just sold terribly. I don't know because there was like one and there was an expansion that came out for the 360 and then it died, but there's a there's an interesting that that video going around of the Warhammer game that relic, man, I know what you're talking about. Well, it's a developer diary. Yeah, it's a I mean, actually, we were talking about that in our office today because it was like, what the fuck, why didn't IGN get that when so who got it was machinima, machinima got exclusively, right? And which isn't that surprising because while machinima may not be like a household name to a lot of gamers, like they are still the biggest YouTube channel, I think, the biggest gaming one. No, the biggest YouTube channel that's gaming related is Call of Duty, like, just like the Call of Duty channel, like the like the Call of Duty channels or whatever they they are the biggest machinima, though, has is is like just to give you the perspective, IGN's YouTube channel is huge, and machinima is is way bigger than ours. To me, when we start talking about this stuff, it makes me think of like thinking of the size of different stars, like, man, how big is our fucking son? Oh, yeah. How big is a white star? Or how big is a red giant? Right. But the thing about machinima, though, is that machinima isn't like a big business. Yeah. It's like a smaller, like tiny operation run by these dudes who just were like, you would drill that by seeing their booth at E3. Yeah, well, it's just like these dudes that are like brilliant and took advantage of YouTube before everyone else knew that that was going to be like some way you could turn it into something. Yeah. And they produce a ton of content. They do. They do a lot of content. And they have some good stuff. But to go back to your point about that trailer, it is, man, I saw that and I was like, it looks cool. I want that game to be good so bad. I know it does. I just feel like you got to keep your guard up. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Relic makes great RTS games. But when it comes to like a third person shooter, I don't know, man, I'm scared. Yeah. Like action-y. I'm having a hard time like getting a grip of like what kind of game it is. I think it's primarily the way I gather it is like a third person shooter with occasional moments where you have to do like, like dark ciders or God of War hand to hand. Mm. You know what I mean? But it's primarily a shooter. Mm. I don't know. It looks really nice. I think the graphical look that it has is actually cool. I think that relic, if there's one thing they've always had is that they've always nailed that aesthetic of War Hammer 40K. And to some degree, it looks like they've taken War Hammer Dawn of War II, up-resed it quite a bit. I get that. And somehow made the character models giant. Yeah. Like almost like somehow they zoomed us down behind the shoulder of a Marine in Dawn of War. Right. And then through some smart blur on their motion, you know, like I feel like a lot of the art and stuff, it's all the same. Like if you've seen Orcs in the cutscenes in Dawn of War II, you've seen the Orcs that are in. Right. Like this. But that's not a so bad thing. But a lot of people in my work, the thing they don't get, and I'm sure it's like it's got to be a common thing here in America is why the fuck is that game called Space Marine? Like, to me, it makes perfect sense. I'm like, oh, well, that's because Space Marines are the biggest army in 40K, it's the primary army everyone plays. You know, they kind of almost, I don't want to say they invented the term Space Marine by any means, but when they were one of the original, like, progenitors of the idea of a Space Marine. But that term later became a derogatory part of the word. Yeah, exactly. Like when people talk shit about games, they're like, what, it's going to star some bald-headed Space Marine. Right. I mean, if it was called bald Space Marine, then that would be an old thing. Yeah. That would be the dis-title. It's just hard because it's like, what else are they supposed to call the game? Because anything they call it is probably going, like, it's like, do you take that risk and do you make it something that's supposed to galvanize fans that would recognize that name and be like, oh, shit, or do you call it something that's supposed to try and grab people? I feel like, I feel like Space Marine is only derogatory to, you know, sort of the core gamers. Yeah. Most people out there are going to be like, dude, I want to play a game where I'm a Space Marine. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I mean, it's just like Dawn of War II, right? We all call it Dawn of War II, which is interesting because the real name of the game is War Hammer 40,000, Dawn of War II. No one even calls it War Hammer 40K. They don't even really call it War Hammer 40K, but it's like, I don't know if that branding, like, it's still on the box. I wonder how important that is for like the Euro market and stuff, just because War Hammer 40K is like ridiculously big, I don't know, but I'd like it to be successful because it'd be cool to see as just a War Hammer nerd more things, but I don't know. You know, I can't really tell what type of game it is either when you watch the video. Maybe it'll surprise everybody in this video is just supposed to, like, misdirect you somewhat. I would like that. It comes out in, I think, September or something like that. Huh. I don't know. I don't know. It's September area. Yeah, I don't know. Relic doesn't have the greatest track record with console games. I mean, they made the outfit, which wasn't particularly great. That was like a 360 launch game. Yeah. Yeah. Man, I sort of talked about it on Twitter a little bit, and we struck up a little conversation, but I recently beat the first portal on PC again, like, the third time or something. Yeah, baby. That's all like the new ending now. Baby's first mouse FPS. Oh, cool. Yeah, dude. Oh my God. It's the perfect, like, mouse training, like, keyboard game. That's awesome. Wait, what's the new ending? I don't think I've played it and seen the new ending. The new ending, it sounds like a robot is dragging you away. You hear someone, uh, you hear a robot voice behind you say? When you land? Yeah. It always was. Uh-uh. It just fades to black. But you hear the robot say, like, thank you for assuming the position and then it starts dragging you away. Hmm. Interesting. Hmm. But, um, but, you know, I put on Twitter and I, and I want to reiterate it here that I feel like portal and, you know, I feel like there's a few different angles you can come at it, but portal is one of the best examples of successful use of story and game of using the medium as a story. I felt like such a valve, like, defense force lately, because people, like, are talking about, like, like, effective storytelling and it's because, like, when you play something like Gears of War or when you play something like a Killzone or any of these games, they're constantly telling you how to feel. Yes. Like, oh, it's sad. He died. We're going to play sad music now and we're going to tell you, like, oh, he's crying, see, whereas, like, I was talking to Sean Elliott recently and he was saying, like, you know, to go back to Half Life 2, the reason that they're so effective is, like, they're always making you do everything that makes you care, like, like, you hang out with Alex, you build a relationship with her for hours. And then when it comes time for them to heal her, they're like, well, you have to protect us if you want us to heal. Right. Yeah. And so now you're doing this thing where you're directly having an effect on her life without being a cutscene that's just you healing her. Right. And then you bring it back to Portal, having to incinerate the companion cube in order to move on, or, you know, discovering, getting behind the wall for the first time. Oh, right. I mean, that's like the heaviest moment I think I've ever had in a game ever. Was when I walked behind that wall and I was like, oh, shit. People have been here before. People, yeah. I mean, that was seriously. That you have been there before. I did a different you. One of the biggest fucking moments ever for me in a game. I just, yeah. I think that Valve always does it well because they never tell you and be, you're always doing it. They're never, not only they're not telling you, but they're not being like, and we're going to remove control from you and the camera is going to guide you into this room. And you're going to spend time looking at the pieces of art on the wall we want you to look at. Right. And it has a really good soundtrack, you know, but it's not there all the time. It's only there are very specific moments where it's like, this is clearly an action sequence, and you're going to feel, you're going to feel under pressure and it's going to feel action-y no matter who you are. So we're going to go ahead and put another layer on that with the music. Or when you go behind the wall the first time, they fade in, like really kind of unsettling ambient sound. They let you know you've discovered something fucked up with the music. Yeah. Here's one thing. One question I came up with like Canon-wise was, how far do you guys think the rat guy got? The what? The fur, whoever was in these chambers before you, who was riding on the wall and all that. Oh, the way that I got, well, the way that I see it is that, you know, Chell is a clone, right? Yeah. And so it's like, each time she's cloned, they put, she gets pushed through the maze. And the idea is to, yeah, the idea is to get her farther and farther. So what you're seeing is that like, you know, Chell clones, it's sort of like Memento, you know, or she's like writing messages to her future clones. Here's the thing. I don't know. To me, when I look at the inscriptions on the wall and stuff and the way it's done, it just seems like a male would do it. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I get the impression that it's a male that came before her. And I understand the whole cloning thing. Yeah. I don't know. Well, yeah. I don't know. Yeah. I really think that it's just previous clones of Chell talking to the ones that are going to be after her. And like sometimes it's like, you know, she's driven mad because like she can't get out of the maze and all she is is stuck behind the wall and can't get me further, you know. And then eventually there's a clone that figured out how to get further. And it's because like the way that I see it is because Aperture has been closed down forever, but the program is still running. It's still running. Right. Yeah. Yeah. You know, that makes sense. I guess. Which is cool. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's totally cool. Yeah. Anyway. But yeah, it's cool. I need to play it now to see the other ending. I mean, even if it's only, I guess I could just go on YouTube or something. Yeah. Well, you know, you might have a save game that's from near the end of the game too. Yeah. You play it anyways, just because it's like so close to portal to its point. Yeah. It is so good. I feel like they changed the PowerPoint presentations that you watch when you go back in. Oh, really? It could be completely wrong about that. But I could have swore like they threw in a few graphs the first time around. I didn't see any graphs the second. I don't remember. No, no bar graphs. I couldn't tell you. I completely making that. I mean, that's why memory works, right? Yeah, exactly. You just fucking fill in the blanks. Yep. Shit. You don't remember. Yeah. Well, you know, and of course the other side of the coin, another company that does things well and they take a completely different approach, you know, BioWare, they tell the story to you, but the way they use the medium is allowing you to choose some of the directions of the story. Yeah. That's how they kind of way with your thing because yeah, they do tell you what's going to happen. The whole time. But they let you choose how you feel. Yeah. I think that's what it is. Yeah. You're still choosing like you only get a limited option of how you feel. That's true. There isn't like an ultimate outcome, but it is interesting, you know, I think they're just still learning a lot from that. Like even between Mass Effect 1 and 2, like them, like, I don't know, isn't it like in Mass Effect 1 and 2, the difference was like when you picked the bottom option, it would be like, tell me more, but he wasn't going to say, tell me more. He's going to say, I'd like to know more about this or something like that. You know, you never quite knew you were like, well, that's going to just kind of convey the attitude. They're going to come at it with. I think that helps. Yeah. You know, I don't know, to me, a lot of the games that are really successful with story tell it heavily through the environment, too, and that's one thing I feel like I wish BioWare would adopt more. Like you see a little bit of it in Mass Effect 2 where you like run into maybe a space station where, you know, somebody committed suicide or something, you know, it's an easy one. But, you know, I mean, you know, it gives like BioShock, let for dead, you know, really tell the story through the environment. And, you know, I think Mass Effect 2 does a, Mass Effect does a pretty good job of that, but it could, it could use some improvement in the environmental storytelling. Yeah. I mean, other than just being settings, you know, like they do tell stories, but they're, the Mass Effect storytelling is almost all in the characters. It's true. I mean, and it's hard to, I think, because in something like BioShock, you're constantly in Rapture. So that's like a way that they can set the tone and kind of tell a story through that whereas Mass Effect, the setting is constantly changing where I think it's kind of hard to tell. But, I mean, like you get it, you, I mean, there's some environments that are just obvious and that they do really well, like, you know, when you're on, in Mass Effect 2, like when you're on the Krogan home world and it's been destroyed multiple times over and it's very clearly been destroyed multiple times over. Yeah. And they do a tiny, they do a tiny little bit of that with like Jacob's loyalty mission. Yeah. Like meeting all the crazy people and stuff. That's like kind of an environment where like, okay, I'm getting some sort of backstory. And that's one thing that I think Mass Effect does that some games don't always do well is I think Mass Effect more than like a lot of other games does a really good job of toying with your expectations. Like, you know, you go into that Jacob thing assuming you're there to save his father or like the Morden loyalty quest, you assume you're saving Morden's guy and I just love the way that- Yeah, they change it up on you like that, yeah, definitely. Yeah, and they love those shades of gray area. They do. I love to take it. Once I wasn't here for the Mass Effect's boiler cast back in the day, I'm curious, did you guys tell Morden that the genophage was wrong or right? I told him, and the first time I played it, I think I just kind of avoided it. I think I kind of just avoided the question. But this new one, I told him it was the right thing to do. I decided it was the right thing to do. Yeah. I don't remember. I'm playing polar characters, so I probably did both. Yeah. I like to pick, like I hardly ever pick renegade answers, but I will say that almost without fail, every time a renegade like quick time thing comes up, I always take it. Really? They're so good. They're always so good. Like one to one time was like in the quest where you go to find Thane, is that his name? Yeah, Thane, yeah. There's that guy that's like standing by the window and you put your gun up to him and he like talks some shit and so you just throw him out the window. Yeah. All right, through the window, there's, yeah, Mass Effect was the first RP, Mass Effect too anyway. It was the first RPG where I just went for how I think my shepherd would go in that moment and it was like, cause like I felt such a rich connection with the character that I was like, oh fuck you, and I would choose like a renegade answer. Exactly. That's what it came down to. It's like with that, in the Krogan and Grunt's loyalty mission, that Krogan that comes up and talks shit to you. Yeah. I was like, I'm a headbutt this fool because he's talking shit. Yeah, I did that too. It was awesome. So yeah, I mean, that's definitely a thing that BioWare does as far as their storytelling is you really do have a connection with a character who doesn't even have your voice and has a completely different voice. And I like that in BioWare games, I don't want that in my Valve games. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I don't want to be making decisions for Shell. Yeah. Where you don't want to be like, you don't want to be a guiding hand to your decision-making. Yeah, I just want to experience her story. You just want to do it. Yeah. I don't know. I think these divisions are interesting, I guess, is what I've ever thought about. Yeah. And they're different methods of effective storytelling. Yeah, I guess you're right, because it's totally right about the telly, because when I play Mass Effect, I often tell people when I'm talking about it, well, my shepherd does this. I never think about any game Valve has ever done, and it's like, well, my Gordon Freeman. Right. I play as Gordon Freeman, and I get to see how Gordon Freeman lives. Right. But there's also only one way that a Valve story can play out. Sure. You have a lot of agency in the way that you move around the level or whatever, but the story is only ever going to end in one way. Yeah, and I guess that's why I enjoy playing Valve games for the same reason I enjoy it. I'm watching evocative films and stuff, because the way they make me feel, whereas when I play Bioshock, I'm not playing it to how they make me feel as much as the thrill of choosing my own adventure. I feel like-- You don't mean Mass Effect? Yeah, Bioware games. Bioware games are like reading books, and I feel like Valve games are like watching movies. So where do we feel like games like Oblivion or Fallout kind of hit? They feel like the cool thing about Bethesda RPGs is that they're the only ones left that are going for the-- we are going to give you an alternate life-to-live kind of experience, you know? Yeah. They're really-- Even more. Yeah. Like, it's not, "This is my night," or, "This is me." Right. It's not, "You and third person." Yeah. I mean, even in games like Mass Effect, you're always on a quest. Mm-hmm. And there are definitely times when Fallout, you're like, "And there's never a time that I've ever played Mass Effect 2 and been like, "You know, I'm just going to wander." Right. That never happens. Yeah. Right. That's kind of nowhere to wander. Exactly. I don't ever just go wandering and be like, "Here's a building I've never been in before. Right. I'm going to go see if I can find anything good in it." Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's exactly what Bethesda games do is that, you know, that's why I'm so looking forward to Skyrim is because the one thing, a very big thing that BioWare RPGs have over Bethesda RPGs in my mind is that BioWare RPGs make you feel like you are on a mission with other people that you have relationships with. Mm-hmm. And Bethesda games are all about a relationship with the environment and with the world. And the other people that are in it are kind of window dressing to that world. Yeah. And Bethesda games I very much so more than any other game feel like I'm telling my own story. Yeah. And Mass Effect, I feel like I'm picking my story, but I'm picking it from like several drawn lines. It's like a set of lines. A story. You can go in. Yeah. Yeah. And where as in Fallout, Bethesda games in general, I'm pretty much like, I don't know how this is going to go. Yeah. I might go and do Quest for this random vampire for a while and then move on to this ghost guy. But maybe never even finish that. And I do feel like my BioWare stories have a more emotional resonance with me. Agreed. Yeah. Yeah. My Bethesda stories may be more my story, but they have less emotional resonance. Agreed. Yeah, I'd agree. I mean, there's never been a particular character that I, in any Bethesda game where I've been like, I feel very attached to you. Yeah. Or if it was... I feel attached to their stats. Yeah. Because I built those. Oh, there is a... The only character I ever felt very vaguely attached to is Fallout 3, the Super Mutant. Yeah, that's all I was going to say. It's like, he's because he has like an interesting sort. And you know, and I think that's partially because like, while there are like the equivalent of like, I don't know, like the new Fallout has like the equivalent of like loyalty missions in a way and stuff like that. In Vegas. Yeah. But you know, they don't... But you have to find them. Yeah. You know, whereas like, so a lot of people, I'm curious to see like how many people ever even experienced that. Yeah. I've only heard about it. Third party through people telling me about it. I liked the fact that you had so many companions, that they all came to live with you in your apartment and stuff like that. Yeah, me too. It's just, it's hard to do that character development when it's not like, Mass Effect kind of makes... I mean, it doesn't make it 100% mandatory, but it's very easy to feel like, oh, they lay it out for you very clearly. It's the main... This is where you go to do that. It is. Yeah, it is the plot line. So they have character development in the plot, whereas they feel like Fallout 3, a lot of the secondary characters, you can never really get much out of them out of hearing, except hearing them talk shit when they kill someone. Right. That's your funny incidental dialogue. Yeah. Like, you know, that's the other thing, like incidental dialogue in games that in particular... It's so important. Yeah. It's incredibly important in a... Yeah. Well, that's the reason that enslaved or like, or like uncharted, those games do it so well that you get the story in between the lines. And sorry, I was just like, I was thinking that like, that reminds me so much of, you know, why I like Dragon Age 2. And it's like to get into one of the only games that I'm still playing, you know, like his Dragon Age 2. That game, they really use a bunch of incidental dialogue, like, whoever's with you. Yeah. I mean, that's the whole fun of like, changing your party, to me. You know, aside from the... You know, the tactics are fun too, but it's like, what are these two going to say to each other? I think it's the biggest incentive. And like, you can have three companions, and if you have the right three companions then those, it won't just be two companions talking to each other. They'll play off each other. They'll play off. All three people will play off. And I don't think I've ever had a situation where all three people have played off each other, and then my character said something, but there have been situations where two of the characters played off something, and then my Hawk said something as well. Ah, man, that's just so mind-blowing when you think about it sometimes, because it's like, when I try and think about like, just to, for all the people that like to talk shit about people that make games, it's like, thinking about having to write a situation where you're like, if they bring this character, then this, if this, then this, but also if they bring this, then this. Right. It's like having those interplay dialogues like that, especially even with like DLC characters and stuff, because of Mass Effect I bought the Kasumi DLC, and she has all these dialog that plays off other people's dialog. I'm like, dude, they did that so long after the fact, like, I can't even imagine what it was like to go back and be like, oh yeah, we have to remember to record lines for you for fucking random side quest number 47. And yeah, that happens all the time in Dragon Age 2 as well, and with the DLC character, because the first time I played through Dragon Age 2, I didn't have the Sebastian DLC. The second time I played through I did, and then the first time it was because like, for some reason my, I couldn't figure out why it wasn't loading my save game and why it wasn't loading any of my DLC and stuff like that, and I was fucking, I'm just going to play through it anyway. And then the second time I figured out what all the problem was, it was user error. And yeah, like I did, it didn't load my save game from origins because, or from Awakening or whatever it was because I didn't see the menu option. And then online I hadn't, apparently like, I hadn't linked my EA account properly or whatever for the DLC, but whatever. Yeah, so like the second time I've been playing through, I played all the way through the first time is a rogue, a melee rogue, and the second time I'm about probably 60, 65% through with a mage character, and the experiences are really, really different from one another, but it's also interesting having Sebastian with me in his dialogue coming in at other times because he wasn't there. So it's been really obvious to me that like, wow, okay, so like, they probably, or like, let's make a character that can be a DLC character right from the beginning and we'll just snip him out for anybody that doesn't have him, but when he's in there, it actually does make the experience richer. It doesn't feel like you have that Sebastian character. You don't feel like, oh, okay, 'cause like, I think Kasumi, even though she has like, incidental dialogue, the fact that you can't have actual conversations with her and stuff. You can't onboard the ship, you can go up and talk to her, but it doesn't turn into a conversation. It's just like a call and response, call and response. Right. And both her and the mercenary guy, what's his name, I can't remember. The two of them, both are the same kind of downloadable character and like, you can talk about things in the room around them and they have them say stuff and it's all cool. But there's no dialogue trees. Yeah, there's no dialogue trees, there's no depth and I, you know, and Sebastian isn't like that. Sebastian is a lot like Shale was from Origins where it's like, okay, this is a full on realized character. And it's cool. That was a great character. Shale? Yeah. Yeah. Shale's great. And it's funny because like Sebastian is a super religious guy and like, I think in Dragon H2 probably more than any other Bioware game that I've played, your party can either really like each other or really hate each other. Is Sebastian the one that hates, hates mages? No, he doesn't hate mages. Okay. No, he doesn't. Well, he, at least he hasn't really acted like he does yet. I mean, like he's definitely for the Chantry and stuff like that and he's very religious but he doesn't seem to hate mages. Dragon H2 is like a game that I'm very much enjoying in spite of very, very strong flaws. Like the, I just wish that I could marry Origins in Dragon H2 because that's like my perfect fantasy RPG. And like, because I went back actually after I played Dragon H2 once and played a Dragon H Origins character that was about 60% through and I finished that character. Because I was like, I just want to compare the two games, see how they play from one another. And I got so sucked in that I marathoned through the end of that game and then played all the DLC again and then reloaded that and then loaded that character into Dragon H2 while the save game anyway, into Dragon H2 for the mage character that I've been playing now. That's cool because there's also like quests and stuff that pop up in Dragon H2 if you've played the first one that they don't, if you don't load a save game, even if your character doesn't transfer over directly. But anyway, the combat in Dragon H2 is way, way, way better than Dragon H1. Oh, I see that's one thing I always wondered because you know, a lot of people were like, oh, they're just going to make it really dumb and simple and sometimes it is simplified but to the vast benefit of the gameplay. It's so much more exciting and like sometimes it comes down to simple things like the animation. Like you play a mage character and the way that they fire their staff at the enemies, they're all twirling it around and every now and then they slam the butt of it on the ground and then the spell effect like hits the person from beneath them, you know, and depending on whether it's like a nature staff or an eye staff or fire staff, you know, it has different effects all the time. Even if somebody gets within melee range, your character is like a fucking kung fu master with their staff the way they hit everybody around them with it, you know. That game seems, am I wrong, like I haven't played it but I've watched it being played by the person that's writing her a guy to work and I'm pretty sure I see her hit people with swords sometimes and they blow up into pieces. They do and that's one thing that I don't like because it's like you can like hit people with an arrow and there is a skill called exploding arrow but you're hitting people with an arrow just normal arrow and they get everywhere. Yeah. There's way too much giving in that game and it's like I actually think it's a shortcut because I'm pretty sure that what they intended with and this game takes shortcuts and some really interesting ways and I think what they intended was for the game to have a lot of dismemberment and a lot of violence but they were like ah fuck it just make him explode and we'll call that messy kills, you know, yeah, exactly. Yeah, having an individual dismemberment hit detection to say oh his arm got cut. Yeah, exactly and I think they also had kind of the same philosophy when it came to the setting and the environments like because you know the whole thing centers around the city of Kirkwall and you spend like eight or nine years almost a decade or something like that in Kirkwall. This game takes place over a long period of time in the life of your character. Wow. I thought it would have been like a month or something like that. That's a really long time and Kirkwall never changes, never. The only thing that's different is when you get into the third act and you're in mind and you know by now if you're doing all the side quests and you're talking to your characters or your sub characters a lot you know you're going to be spending a good 60 hours in this game and 60 hours later you're still in the same goddamn city and nothing has changed. It really greats on you. The farmer's market is in the same place the farmer's market is always there. The same guy is manning the stall in the same clothes. The only difference is he's selling stuff that's appropriate to the level of your character. You know it's like the only difference that I could see in the environments between like the first act and the third act was that in the third act it's like sunset in high town. I'm like come on BioWare I know that Dragon Age 2 came out pretty quickly but the fact that the setting just doesn't change at all and it's like the one thing that BioWare games have always been pretty good about is making you feel like you're kind of having an effect on stuff even if it's only superficial in some ways and in Kirkwall I feel like I'm having an effect on the other characters in my party but I don't feel like I'm having any effect at all in the city because it looks exactly the same and there's just so much repetition like every cave that you go in is a variation of the same cave just with different passages cut off. You go through the same environment because there's some outside environments outside of Kirkwall and you're always going to those same environments. You're always going to the battles in the same spot that you always had battles before. The streets of Kirkwall are the same, the doors are the same, everybody's the same and there's just so much repetition that it's like I really can't believe that I'm as far through into the second playthrough as I am. Yeah it sounds like that it sounds like an artificially extended game that succeeds because the story is just good. It's good enough that it doesn't, you don't care. What it feels like to me is that they had all of this really rich story for you and for all of your party members and it's there. That's like 100% there but they didn't have enough setting to have it all happen in. So they were like yeah we'll just repeat the same shit over and over again and like people won't care because the RPG-ness of this is so good. Then you know people kind of do care, I mean like you know on Metacritic it doesn't have as high a score as Dragon Age Origins and I think I really think it's because just because of the setting, because everything else in that game is better than Dragon Age 1. In the individual set pieces too none of them are as epic as some of them that are in Dragon Age. Like Dragon Age Origins you know since I went through that marathon through that second playthrough of Origins you know, I saw a lot of the really awesome detailed environments of the game, massive vistas, lots of geometry, sections in the deep roads like when you go into, you know how in the, you played Origins right? Yeah. Not the whole thing but. Oh not the whole thing. Did you get to the deep roads? I don't know, I don't know, it's been a while. So you go into Orzamar. So you go into Orzamar. It's already looking. No. It's not at all, not even close so you didn't get there. So you go into Orzamar which is the Dwarven City which is a massive awesome underground city with huge high ceilings and lava everywhere and you go into the deep roads you fight all the way to the other side of you know where the doors have carved out into this old tag and these tags I guess are what they use as names for the old Dwarven cities. And I mean you get the sense that you've gone from one end of the world to the other on the surface and you've gotten from one end of the world to the other underground through the Dwarven tags and the deep roads and stuff like that before you even get to the end of the game. And there are so many massive settings in between all of that that you know it just increases that feeling and there really I can't think of anything in Dragon Age 2 that feels as massive or as amazing as some of those settings in Dragon Age Origins. And it's a shame because there really is so much awesome stuff to really enjoy about Dragon Age 2. You know and that being said maybe the rest of the stuff just is good enough because I'm you know about 60% through my second playthrough I also started a rogue character and a warrior character which you're probably about six or seven hours in both of those. Wow. And it's like I think it must just be because the moment to moment combat and because the sub characters and the different ways that you can approach things are enough to keep it going. And you know in a way that like to me that speaks of a good developer because it tells me that they focused all the resources in the right places because it's obviously the sweet spot that's keeping you on. Yeah exactly. Yeah. Because even in Mass Effect you revisit the Citadel two years later and it's completely different. Yeah. You know granted it's a different game. Right. It's a different game. It seems like though in Mass Effect 2 the Citadel is extremely limited. Yeah. It is. It's way smaller. But yeah. Yeah. I don't know. It's just I love the Dragon Age series. It's great. It's just the Dragon Age 2. It's missing the key components that could make it like a as amazingly an epic experience as the first one was it's you know and it just it actually makes me really hopeful for Dragon Age 3 because there's got to be more because they started an entire new story. Well that and they said they've said since then they've sold a million. So any game that I'm sure sells a million they're not going to get that franchise. Yeah. Yep. Yep. I would still you know people who I think people who are afraid that the second one is really going to like ruin Dragon Age for them or something. I just don't think so. I don't think that's the case at all. You're likely to be disappointed in the setting the way that I was but you shouldn't be disappointed in the rest of the game at all. So is there anything else you gentlemen have played? It's okay. It's not. Seems medieval. I've been playing more Sims medieval but I talked about that last week. I've got four more C4 kills in Bad Company 2 and I will have every award in that game. Holy shit balls. Four C4 kills. I've been playing some Call of Duty Black Ops recently. Yeah. I don't know where with my friend and I while I will say we were playing split screen online. So take that as a grain of salt with what I'm about to say that that that engine is really starting to show its age. Oh yeah. I kind of feel like that in general like I mean even if you play single player I'm just saying like you know when we saw the first modern warfare we were like holy shit but I think at this point like if honestly if like the Call of Duty franchise wants to compete with like battlefield and like crisis and these other games that are pushing beyond blue graphically they have to get over the whole 60 frames a second thing. They need to be willing to drop it down to 30 and just push and find out what a new engine could do. Like it just seems to me like. Are they the ones that run Quake 2? They're Quake 3. It's a ridiculously modified Quake 3 engine. So yeah to me it just seems like at this point like even in Sonic I realized that they had to drop it down to like 30 and like do more with it because 60 you make sacrifices to make it 60 and I don't feel like even Call of Duty needs to run at that crazy smooth thing like frame rate to make it like a game that could like be that great and especially in the year when you have battlefield coming out where all signs point to the way it's going to look man. I don't know. Yeah but PC is their primary platform for that one. We haven't even seen it right now. I'm constantly. It's true and I'm sure it won't look as good but I still feel like I feel like the Call of Duty games days are numbered if they're just going to try and turn them out with that engine. I mean you know obviously big battlefield fan here but I just feel even now like if you look at bag company 2 and you look at like Black Ops I feel bag company 2 still looks great whereas Black Ops I do feel like it's starting to look dated to me. Well you do have to keep in mind also that Black Ops single player is better looking than Black Ops multi-core. Sure yeah. Right and that's again why I said split screen online right and they dump things down for both of those reasons. Yeah. You know what I will say is like fuck yeah it has a split screen online. That's pretty cool. That's awesome. Battlefield does not. But also before we talk about Matt's new venture I wanted to say that I only recently found out that Tim Longo the guy we had on this podcast that we had him on the final episode of the Star Wars Republic Commando Game Club because he made that. Yeah I remember that. We just left Crystal Dynamics and went back to LucasArts. Really? Yeah. And now he's in charge of a new game. Yep. Wow that's awesome that guy was rad. Yeah and now I'm wondering if he works just down the street from me. He's creator Jedi Starfighter Republic Commando. You know he's like he's done these great Star Wars games so if there's anyone I feel like can bring LucasArts back from the realm of Matt to crap Star Wars games hopefully it's him. I hope so. I mean something had to be good enough to make him go back you know. Yeah I mean like maybe they promised him the right thing but I mean bad management can tear down anybody. I'm sure he was staring down like a whole fucking hallway of Laura Croft titles that they wanted him to shout out to right. I mean. Well he's been at Crystal for a while too and that's mostly what they I mean you know and the time he's been there what has he done outside of Laura Croft games. Truth. So but yeah I just thought that was really cool to see that. Totally. Come long go. I would like I would like to see if they're making Star Wars Republic Commando 2 or or the next what was their battle game Battle Stars Republic commitment no fuck you Tyler what was it was called Battlefront Battlefront and no we don't want that game don't ever make that game. Well I'm just saying no no no don't ever make that game if it means we're not going to get investors would be like oh this is some kind of multiplayer they have to realize that Republic Commando is hot right now yeah not because of the Republic Commando but because Star Wars the Clone Wars is so hot that that the whole idea of Republic fighting and stuff during that era which that game takes place in right could be done right and they left Republic Commando at such a cliffhanger he did Republic Commando was so good. So it needs it needs to either that or just make a really awesome Clone Wars game even if it's done all cartoony like right well and yeah and to those of you that are new to Rebel FM go back and listen to our Republic Commando game club yeah yeah a month from now I'm going to tell you guys that I'm quitting everything to go and be an advisor and public combat too. Yeah the higher extent we'll do voice acting yeah yeah well that's they got off cheap with voice acting oh no they didn't never mind I was thinking because you know if it's all the same guy but they actually had different voices yeah they decided to change them up so that you could tell who was talking yeah and the sniper yeah so so now that we've talked about games we've played just an important announcement oh my oh me yeah yeah this is super exciting so area five finally released the project that we've been working on for months now and it's a joint venture with these guys atomics and it's called atomics well of course it's called Tommy but with an X atomics with an X ATOM IX I'll be honest I'm not thrilled with the name but it's all but it's a brand that is already pretty big in areas that are not the United States and so it's the Tomics magazine it's on the iPad it's an iPad magazine it has we're area five is doing 80 to 85 percent of the content and then they're taking our content and translating it into Spanish and subtitling our videos so there's also a Spanish version of atomics but of course everybody listening to this podcast probably wants the English version which is out now and so you can go and you can download the atomics app for free and the it but the first issue in every issue since is 99 cents but you should watch the promo video which you can find it very if I'm not TV right yeah go to our website you can kind of see what it's like because it's not just like a shitty like oh we took a PDF and we made it to where you could flip through pages of a PDF yeah definitely not doing that route it's very interactive and it's very definitely thinking like how can we use the iPad to make something that is like truly unique and taking digital magazines in a way that feels like they should go rather than just trying to simulate a magazine experiment experience on paper that was the whole point is it like how can we make this feel like you can't have this anywhere else other than the iPad and I think that so atomics were they've been working on this app for a long time before they even talked to us about doing content for they talked to us right they were going to do it either way yeah they were going to do it either way but then they were like we want this to be an English magazine not just a Spanish magazine and it needs to have a lot of video in it who do we know who does video so then they got it so they got a hold of us and they were like how would you guys like to do the content for this magazine and everything and we were like hell yeah we'd love it we've been wanting to actually do an iPad app for a while but we can't afford to hire somebody to work nine months on an iPad app for us and these guys so it's kind of the you know the perfect synergy between two companies is they have an app that needs content and we have content that needs an app yeah and it works so slick like you know when you when you were shown it to us last week I think it's so smart the way they handle content instead of doing multiple pages it's all just on one page that you scroll from bottom it very much so works the way that I think people are used to browsing the web yeah like instead of making it like a magazine you made it like you were browsing through like a series of web pages in some ways like I think it's even better than the web because like a most web pages these days they don't want you to scroll very long either you know because you they don't get page views for that right yeah they want you to page two page three page three yeah and so like what the way that this works is that when you bring up the magazine you can see this if you look at the demo video to is like if you if you swipe left or right on your iPad imagine holding it in portrait mode you swipe left or right and that'll take you to a whole new story and then you scroll up and down and the whole story is contained in the up and down and it's you know and our stories are anywhere from 500 words long to 1500 words long right and they all have embedded videos they all have embedded videos and if you turn it site if you turn the the iPad into landscape on a lot of the articles that brings up a screenshot gallery and then you can flip through the screenshot gallery then you turn it back and it moves it back to where you left off and it's nice because it leaves you so much real estate to have like articles say what you want them to say rather than being beholden to like a format wrapped around or wrapped around images yeah exactly and the design isn't restricted by a website template or anything like that that's the other thing the design is amazing and the scrolling like when you scroll pages there's multiple layers like so it's like a parallax scrolls yeah you know it's like almost you know that and dude that shit is all asher his whole name is Miguel Sandoval and but his middle name is something strange that like it's shortened to asher so anyway everybody calls him asher and he pretty much did all the design for this first issue by himself it looks great fucking amazing he's he's really really talented and all those guys are talented they did great stuff too with the LA noir assets were like the neon sign I love the way the cover of the magazine is like interactive like I know that it's probably like like you know working in online publication we still deal with a lot of people that are like oh they'll give you know a big reveal to game informer even though that has like 120th the reach of an IGN but they do it because there's that certain like like pride of seeing something in a print magazine have being able to put on your wall right and I think that'll be kind of a tougher sale maybe for atomics at first two but man you guys have like that unique thing that no one else can do like other sites can do like really shitty and in invasive like flash like things that pop up when you first up in the page you know where's the close button yeah like when I get me to the content exactly where when I saw that I was like oh that just like made you feel like oh this is that is really cool makes you want to explore it and yeah and plus I mean like you guys being on the iPad I mean shit you guys can own you know you're in a great position to own that sort of market of like the iPad games well there's no one else to have an iPad gaming publication no is it no and that that's that was part of our goal was like you know what if we can get this and you know like we were thought because the atomic skies when they came to us they were first of all let us know what you think of the app and like we had a lot of feedback on it so there has been a lot of design changes since they asked us to to help with it as well and they were super receptive to our feedback and like they would come back to us and say well no actually this won't work and be like oh yeah you know you're totally right and those guys came from the print world atomics was a huge print publication they're actually going all digital with this too they were a huge print publication in Latin America and it's it's just changed so much since like we first saw it and almost in yeah pretty much always for the better and so it's just been a really really cool collaborative experience and we were thinking to ourselves like when we were first seeing it well let's let's wait until we can get an iPad app out and an Android app out and everything all at the same time but after a while we were just like you know what we need to get this out now so that we're first as I said being first to the market can be so important and yeah for now it's iPad only but I mean down the line if tablets really do become this kind of ubiquitous like ubiquitous part of our life or the point where people carry tablets the way I mean even when I go to the airport right like nowadays like everybody's putting a laptop into the thing like it wouldn't surprise me somebody to see everyone putting a tablet and so yeah as long as it's you know if this obviously this where you got a lot writing on this and it needs to be a financial success before we can start development on other on apps for other platforms of course we're already working on the second issue we're already working on our main issue and you know we're committed to making this making this happen as I mean quite frankly we're prepared to lose money on it in the short term I think you have to be with especially with anything where you're taking where you're going to like basically uncharted territory yeah exactly because there aren't any metrics for this shit you know like we can't go out and like oh we expect to hit this number or that number or for you guys to be like oh selling it this way doesn't work we've seen that because X Y and Z failed so we're going to try this new marketing strategy well there's a little bit of that because there's things like wired you know where wired was everybody was like oh shit digital magazine and everybody downloaded and they were like fuck it's just their magazine yeah and then they were like and I'm paying more for it than I would if I had a subscription it's like no I don't think so so that was another thing it was like you know what screw that 99 cents an issue that sounds so good yeah we're like we're we're going for we are absolutely going for volume on this yeah and that's perfect a cup of coffee yeah it's like the subscriptions aren't available yet I mean cuz Apple announced the way that they were going to do subscriptions right way too late into our development process to get it out there it'll happen of course eventually they're all you'll be able to do subscriptions for now you just have to buy each issue manually from inside the app so you download the app once and then each issue will show up in the app as it's becomes available and you can buy it individually it's not such a pain in the ass I mean I've done that with things like the histomatic camera yeah and I bought and stuff within there it's very yeah exactly so there will be subscriptions eventually you can't do it now but we're still thinking that like even if you can't get a subscription and get a little bit of a discount 99 cents a month really isn't that much too isn't too much to ask no I mean I pay 599 man I just realized we've been in infomercial mode for a while oh yeah because I was about to say 99 cents isn't really that much I pay 599 for X5 and I hardly use it does this ever happen to you but the what I will say is that while you you can obviously take what we're saying with the grain of salt because Matt is obviously and all the area five guys are friends of ours yeah it's like Tyler and I his excitement for this is genuine because we saw it and we're like holy shit like it's doing things like you know I shared the sentence with people online they were like oh this makes me want an iPad like if there were more publications like this I would have an iPad right now and it's just because it's like it's like when you see something like this you're like oh if this is the way publications are going to move I'm going to need one of these because it's because what I like about that is you download all of the I guess everything onto the actual iPad so to me if I'm a user I'm thinking like if I'm somewhere where I can't get internet but I want to read about games it's right well not just that but since you download the whole thing at once you get all the screens you're not trying to load screens you're not trying to stream a video you have that video there yeah it makes each issue pretty big like this first issue is I think like can't remember I want to say it's like 800 megabytes or something like that so they're big but if you wait for it to download you've got the whole thing on your iPad and then there's a little archive button you can say archive this issue for later and basically it just makes it so that you know it frees up that space on your iPad but you bought it you can still re-download it if you want I feel like a lot of savvy gamers though that's not such a big deal to us anyways because all the time now I download Xbox Live Arcade games that are 800 megs yeah but you also don't have the restriction of a 16 gigabyte iPad that's true but I mean to me it's always like if you have something like an iDevice and you know I don't ever view outside of a few games I've gotten a lot better about it but I try not to view content on my iDevice as like something that once it there has to stay there because to me it's like it's always constantly backed up on your computer right so why not just to me I constantly switch it out because I only have 16 gig phone right right it's more like a playlist yeah exactly I only keep certain songs on there yeah I don't know I think I wish you all the best thank you I appreciate that and I wish I had I wish I had an iPad right now so I could get it but since I don't I expect several of you guys to go to I mean you can go to what you can go to find it you can go to the app store and look for atomics yeah you can go to atomics mag dot com and you can go to well there's atomics mag dot com and then blog dot atomics mag dot com is like the tumblr blog for it and of course there's a facebook slash atomics mag and there's a atomic mag twitter and you know all that stuff I like atomics makes me think of physics I think I think to me I like the name only because it's like at least you guys didn't just find some way to throw in the word game and like game crowd no game and former game spot game and it's just like well the thing about the you know it's like game game I'm not I'm not especially namard with the name like I said but you know it's it's a brand that has recognition beyond our shores and it's it's kind of something that's I feel like people in other languages could actually sort of see and understand what it is maybe you know easier easier maybe because you know like you said if it has game in it you know like the because this is this is launching in both English and Spanish you know and if it's a success we absolutely want it to be a worldwide product that is available in multiple languages Japan it would be great to have atomics in Japanese it would be great to have atomics in French you know like it would be really fucking cool if it got big enough to where we could do that we'll see we will see that though that's like that's like total pie in the sky way pie in the sky I put on the blog post I like I put a little fact two years from now at E3 is for there to be an atomics booth I put on it's a fact on the blog post on the area if I website that like what about other languages in like it said like German French Klingon and then I ended that particular section with Kapla for all my Klingon friends out there yeah we gotta find some crazy ways that I will market their topics so we'll figure it out but uh anyway sorry for the infomercial everybody but we've been working on this a long time and I'm really excited but you call now no I mean I just I we gotta give it a shout out because we have this it's cool and exciting and it's that is genuinely awesome exactly I mean there's no need to apologize and by the time this podcast comes out on Friday hopefully you'll be able to get it in every region because apparently we didn't know this until we launched the app but Apple rolls out their apps and different time frames different time frames for different regions and they roll out in app purchases after that so there are people that could get the app but couldn't get the in-app purchase even after the app became available so um but by Friday that should all be sorted one thing I will say is since we're since we're pimping things let's I will give a quick shout out also to a kill screen if there's like other gaming publications you wanna support kill screens the great one what's that kill screen is so kill screen started is a kick starter project yeah and uh it's it's a very it's a very small but very dense magazine has a super super cool design it's probably like like I want to say eight by seven or something it's like it's kind of something like that it's not like a full magazine size it's more like a but it's pretty thick and it's very thick and dense and it's like they're not like trying to cut out words for no for images it's kind of like yeah because I know Jeremy Parrish yeah it's like when he does like his game spite volumes except Jeremy does them like in full on books yeah you know and this is more just like these are like magazines and they come out regularly okay well they it's quarterly kill screens quarter right and I'm just saying but they're completely supported by people buying them yep exactly that is not like one where they're getting ad revenue and stuff yeah yeah exactly there are no ads in their magazine well I like them so like and look yeah look up kill screen and uh totally worth your money if you're a person who like loves games and loves the culture of it and doesn't want to just read previews and reviews exactly because the stuff they do is evergreen it's not supposed to be like hot new news on Call of Duty it's like oh here's some shit and themes that you didn't even really consider when you're thinking about yeah kill screen is like it's a totally collect collectible magazine like ten if it keeps going ten years from now I would be proud to have a shelf that was all kill screens yeah I mean I'm not trying to blow it up proportion but there's definitely some some sort of things in there where people are going to look back and be like oh shit you actually have some of those like whether 60s or fails yeah people are going to look back at that is like oh man that was like someone taking advantage of like a new era of self-publishing and yep so um all right we'll take a quick break back to the letter so it's okay we're back with letters Sean writes in and says this is a letter I would like you guys to read out to all rebel family listeners with gaming relatives in the armed forces or who have served and or are currently serving excuse me my younger brother by about two years is going to boot camp for the Navy this July after high school and of course I will miss them and would love to be able to send them something I've read and listened to letters about soldiers in the armed forces or tried to see PC gaming soldier with online activation issues I'm curious to know about what's permitted regarding handhelds slash consoles slash rules and regulations etc basically can I send my brother a 3ds or Xbox or whatever at some point will he be allowed to use it at all obviously I need relevant info for sailors but any insight would be appreciated I doubt it during boot camp it's only six months not during boot camp no way no basically no way in basic they don't want to have anything during boot I've had some family members military they don't let you have anything but when he's over when he's overseas and stuff like that and on the boat I don't know that I like since your brothers in the Navy he's going to be serving on a ship I think there's probably much stricter regulation well lots of ships have wreck areas and a lot of them apparently do have consoles in them now but yeah this is totally one of the situation where we need listeners to write in and tell us what's up yeah yeah because reply because to me it's like it's like when I briefly spent like the week that I spent on aircraft carriers stuff like your brother's not going to have like a spot where he can set up a TV or wait you spent a week on an aircraft carrier did that's awesome when was that that was when I was like 13 that is fucking cool yep did you have a good time I had a good time I slept in a bunk like the normal like the normal guys but what I will say is is he isn't going to have like a room or anything he's going to have a book yeah so the best bet of that's why I think a laptop is such a great my buddy was in the Navy but he was a CB construction battalion air so he was on land all the time and yeah so there's totally those options but if he does see time which is what a lot of people do yeah I'd be really interested to hear what like listeners out there know about this stuff yeah um okay the next letter is from Andy and he says I was happy to hear the letter from last week's podcast discussing examples of good storytelling as it happens I am doing an independent study for college credit right now on that subject for the first part of the semester I play and write about some games that I thought had strong storytelling techniques man this is fucking college class I know right I will attempt to use what I've learned and make a series of levels in big little big planet to to tell my story that's a cool idea I want to see your project when it's done so I'm in the planning stages of the little big planet levels right now but I've written two essays dissecting the narratives techniques of mass effect one two and bio shock I had made a few of the same discussion points mentioned during your talk such as me to having the structure of a season of television rather than a movie as well with a few things you didn't touch upon so if you want to read these he's posted them at actn.wordpress.com cool I would recommend since he's making a game and a 2D platformer engine look at flashback and look at another world or out of this world the way they tell stories because that's the medium you're going to be working in you know yeah I've actually mastered work because those are first and third person you know it's kind of you're dealing with a different can of paints good point okay the next letters from Oliver and he says what up all this question is inspired by your discussion on crisis to storytelling have you ever missed or under misunderstood information in the game with hilarious consequences for instance all playing bio shock and trying to understand atlas's accent without the subtitles I thought I heard him call the main character bio when actually what he said was boyo the game is so me the game is awesome so far but what is but is the guy's name really bio how stupid is that did they name the game first or call after the character did they really call him bio just to justify the name of the game why is his name bio to Kate Boston in my head see it's called bio shock the game's name is bio and his first ability is the power to shock things electrically she was naming games is easy he says I fully believe that that was his name until I started reading bio shock wikis that is awesome I know that I can't think of the example but I know what's happening before or I misunderstood something and I spent like three or four hours looking for a quest or looking for a key or trying to talk to somebody I remember what it was but it was because I I had misunderstood what was said to me yeah there's definitely been a couple games that I I can't think of specific examples but where I've been like oh wait wait someone said it was his father like like where I totally didn't pick up on that because it was like mentioned in passing Alex wants to know Tyler he says being a graphic designer I was hoping I get here some tips and tricks that Tyler has learned over the years if anyone else does graphic design I meant no offense by excluding you I would love to hear your tricks as well tips and tricks do shortcut keys right but well I'm curious if he means like on like starting a freelance client base I don't know I think it's more like like I actually think that he's actually asking for like like tips like in doing things because he said that he's like listen to Arthur give art tips okay well I mean I suppose like the number one thing I would say is that like anything you want to do in Adobe suite you can do it and there's probably a thousand ways you can do it just find the one way that's easiest for you it's like I use shortcut keys like crazy whenever I'm in Photoshop Illustrator whatever but then I went to the penny arcade expo and you can watch micro like draw a comic live and he does everything like the slowest way possible like it's the most sort of direct and obvious way but like he doesn't use shortcut keys he like instead of using selection tools and stuff he uses the eraser you know like all kinds of stuff like that but you just got it yeah basically just keep you find your own flow yeah I mean essentially you say it too because like I was watching a 60 60 minutes report on an author I like a lot Christopher Hitchens and it was showing him typing and he was straight up typing with both index fingers yeah well I mean even Ryan Scott you know he he still to this day does not ever type without looking at the keyboard and not only does he type looking at the keyboard but he only uses like he uses like his entire right hand and only like the first two fingers of his left yeah it's funny like everybody just develops their own muscle memory that's what I will say that in high school while I took a otherwise completely worthless typing class it did teach me how to type correctly I would I would just finally sorry just on the graphic design tip thing I would say the most important thing that you can do when you're working with Photoshop or Illustrator documents is name your layers name every single layer that you do and organize them very very well because it will make changing things that much easier the next letter some Stephen and I feel like I can answer your letter so I've got a problem I would like some advice and people who are more familiar with the barrier I have been accepted into SFS SFSU for the fall Wow I am worried because I have a dollar shakes is I am I'm I'm worried because I have a fifty five pound female pit bull I've tried moving out where I live now in Southern California and found it nearly possible to find affordable place that'll allow pit bull yeah I realize affordable in the barriers a relative term but judging from what I've seen the prices aren't terribly different from around where I currently am my parents have offered to take care of the dog but I can't imagine leaving her behind that being said postponing college is an option do you have any advice in finding a place in the barrier with large often vilified breed of breed of dog or am I going to have to make an impossible choice the dog is naturally docile very people friendly house broken and will change any of that matter to you what would you do okay so working with dogs all the time and especially pit bulls I will tell you the first off people in the barrier are much more open to pit bulls than a lot of other places because we have a shit ton of them too if you're looking for place in the ask you a breed of dog you have you should lie I know it's crazy I'm not telling you to lie and say that it isn't a pit bull if they ask but I would tell you to tell them that it is a mixed breed of terrier to say it's a terrier mix like and some people are wise on that and some people will be like oh it's probably a pit bull or I mean do you know for a fact is a pit bull when you say fifty five pounds fifty five pounds is it's not huge that's a medium sized dog and I think that you could tell them it's a Staffordshire terrier and Staffordshire terriers look almost identical to people or tell them it's an American bulldog like all these dogs look so similar I'm saying that I'm not saying that you should just go out and lie why but you are saying that if it takes that to get your dog to live with you like I think that like it's it is a ridiculous thing and a lot of times the only reason they do is because homeowners insurance won't cover pit bulls or rottweilers but if they're not ensuring you then it shouldn't really be an issue it comes down to them just feeling like some sort of personal thing about it so I just think that unless they ask you to specifically disclose the breed of the dog I would just call it a terrier like cuz it is a terrier I would have to say though like cuz Jodi and I are looking for a place that allows dogs because I want to rescue a Yorkie and a lot of places we're having a hard time finding good places that allow dogs and a lot of places will have stipulations like small dogs all right right when the other point I was going to make is that you should not live in San Francisco like flat out like you can find much more dog friendly places out in the space almost been all my friends experiences in the in the East Bay or like South San Francisco a daily city area right like living in the city itself yeah it's just harder because I mean I would say that like if you're if you're looking for the awesome college experience you're gonna want to live in the city and if you can't find a place it may be worth leaving your dog behind for a couple years while you're in now the others the side of it I was gonna say is that if you're not getting accepted till the fall that's still a few months away and you have enough time you could look into getting your dog you say it's well trained bright but the thing is is that you saying it's well trained having some sort of documentation that you can have oh that's a and so what I so what I would look into if I was you is either get trying to get your dog like canine good citizen certified because when you have that that's like a huge deal to people you can present this documentation be like oh my dog's been certified is like you know friendly bubble walk or you should talk to a doctor and see if they'll write you a prescription for an emotional support animal if it's like really concerned to you because the point where you can get a doctor to write you an emotional support animal prescription which is really not the hard they can write it just like a prescription for medication and at that point the dog is more like a wheelchair and that sort of thing they can't allow you to not have it wow that is crazy I didn't know that I know that because I have a prescription for one I did never take advantage of it right you should that those are just options I mean San Francisco has some of the most lax laws about support animals that's well that's not sure you can look into that okay show more letters more letters do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do this is just a funny letter from Mike and I could see this because I've seen the way people might work treat their 3ds's with Street Pass I don't understand exactly what Street Pass does other than I think if you come close to someone who has it turned on you guys trades me's and you might trade like puzzle pieces that you need okay so it's like a metagame and he says he says my 3ds is turning me into a pedo and all he means by that as he says he says I walk around with my 3ds to get pedo points which he means like it actually keeps track of your pedometer and gives you points right right but then he says then I slowly drive by school bus stops so I can get Street passes from kids I guess as long as you don't go by the same school bus stop more than once yeah it's just funny dude I don't know like find a less creepy place like I hang out at a mall or something don't do that just just don't care about it yeah just don't care about it Rob writes in and he's wanted to just know where he could find the Beyond Good and Evil game club and the thing is the reason you can't find is if you're looking in our feed you'll never find it yeah it's like one up FM game club and if that's still one of them one of them one up FM backlog yeah one up FM backlog you might be able to find it otherwise I would just try and Google search one up FM like Beyond Good and Evil and see if someone's catalogued it someone has to have it's got to be up somewhere hard to say I mean like one up took down a lot of their podcasts yeah and some and eventually on iTunes if you don't put up new episodes they'll kill it yeah so sorry using my phone like the future okay Tim writes and he says I write to you today about writing sweet so I have any of you ever tried your hand at writing stories ifs or other fiction if so how did it go personally I have a story I've been writing myself off and on the top 60 pages I find it helps if I imagine it as a movie and right from there I don't know any other way and sorry to go for the two for one deal but one more question what are your favorite ways to get around writers block if it's really bad I walk away and do something else often battlefield bad company to I'm simply stuck I'll watch my bat shit insane eight month year old kittens romp around with the slightest sense of preservation that's great I have I've tried writing a novel before I'm it's for a long time I was just writing handwritten pages from the time I was about 16 till I was like 23 or something like that and I got to 300 and so handwritten pages I don't know how many that is in an actual novel or whatever I never finished it and then recently I've actually gone back and started a whole new thing I found this really cool program called Scrivener and I use it on my on my Mac and it actually helps me organize everything really well for the for the book that I'm working on I am writing a lot of course for the new atomics I don't know enough to say if I am an excellent writer or not but I do know that I really enjoy it and Scrivener helps me for the novel stuff yeah I mean I think Stephen King's the one who said and like you know there's like famous memoir on writing that like the most important thing is is and his opinion you will never be a good writer if you cannot set aside like four hours a day to write like at least every day if you cannot do that every day I thought it was like an hour a day or something no I'm pretty sure he said it was four hours like it was like yeah like not only that but his whole motto is like writing 2,000 words a day every day no matter what like but uh I can understand that if you want to be if you want to be a writer that has a lot of volume yeah like yeah I like to write fiction stuff I've only ever started one story and I'm only two pages into it but it's sitting in a Google Doc to meet with intentions to someday touch it again well I actually think that it's it's more difficult to be to write fiction if your job is writing like you know you write reviews and stuff all day yeah I don't use the fiction muscle very much yeah it must well I would just think it must be hard to actually be a writer at all if your job is a writer of some other kind yeah just like it's kind of hard for me to to want to edit my family's uh like reunion videos and stuff because I edit so much video all the time oh yeah I like don't want to do it as a leisure activity yeah I mean it's just like there are days when I come home and I don't play games and I just paint models yeah there you go so Benjamin was wondering why white wine dot com why we never talked about dead space severed like the severed DLC for two hmm I thought we did like real briefly I think because was I the only was I the only one who played it I think you might have been the only one that played it I haven't played it yeah I mean I mean you talked about it because you talk about it I guess he was just expecting the story he was expecting more talk I guess uh just because but it's because I was the only one who played it yeah I think that's why it's interesting you know if you played especially the on rails one because it continues with stories but right such a weird disconnect and like and storytelling is hard when all you're doing is shooting things and that's all that guy does yeah um oh well yeah you know that's it's kind of true I wish they would do more dead space to DLC I don't know I don't know if it's going to be uh me too one of those um I'm sure they could I mean that's a it's such an expansive universe now they could do a lot of stuff with it especially if you've read the books like this like uh whatever the uh whatever that crap there's I even did an article in the first issue atomics on gaming novels where I call that the dead space book what's it called again oh uh mother idiots yeah martyr like martyr would make an awesome piece of DLC there is like especially the end of that book I'm like man this would be a fucking great game level anyway next layer okay well I'm reading this one because it's the subject line was Anthony helped me throw up from Trent and he says uh I was drunk last night and I had a little too much so I got in the shower and started to feel like I was gonna blow some chunks I resisted at first because I didn't want to puke at the time but after a few minutes I knew it was gonna happen eventually I didn't want to I didn't want I didn't waste time so I decided I was going to go ahead and do it however I didn't want to walk all the way to the toilet because oh Jesus I was too damn far so I bent down in the shower oh how did the blue I thought of Anthony or maybe been Tyler saying on the podcast who knows how long ago that he throws up in the shower because he doesn't want to stick his face in the toilet no no yeah I don't know who he's talking about maybe or maybe Arthur or maybe Brian or something one of our guests maybe he said he clogged the shower long straight and he did of course he did so that's why you do it in the fucking toilet oh I can't think of anything worse and if what you know what what I always do if I is like if I feel like I'm gonna throw up dude it's finger down the throat and I swirl my finger in circles do you really yeah I just like it works so good for me it's something just like and I keep my bathroom really clean so it's not like my toilet is disgusting or something but there's just something about like leaning over the toilet that if I feel like I'm going to it it goes that's enough that's enough that's enough triggered response for sure um so now that we've gone through that pleasant subject hey is there somebody following up about how to best take a dump no that there was a couple more follow up emails about the steroid thing like that's like really that is like the most trending email we've perhaps ever done makes sense that's cool no one thing I was wondering though I have been watching an idiot abroad with oh yeah that show is fucking hilarious Stephen Merchant and Carl Pilkington yeah and uh and yeah man they they discuss on there a lot of the you know when you go into some foreign countries like Italy I know it has a few toilets like this like they're the toilets that have no seat no seat or they're just a hole in the ground squat basically over a porcelain hole yeah yeah yeah it's so crazy it's actually better for you really yeah like taking a dump while sitting like most of us do on toilets actually isn't near as good for uh your muscles or your bowels that it is to squat all the way down to the ground I imagine it's a circulation off well not only that but I feel like uh it's too easy to spend too much time on the toilet when you're sitting like we are no and I mean that in a serious in a serious way just because uh just because like hemorrhoids are such a problem with people and that often results from spending too much time sitting on the toilet and straining and stuff and I wonder how much of that could be alleviated if we just fucking squatted yeah I don't know oh well um toilets are for old people so squatted hey that's what a lot of Asia does yep so okay they're also more sprightlier in their old age is there a connection I think so um I guess we can do a relationship with her what about this steroid one what's somebody else saying well so I will say to the guy that takes steroids like several people wrote in and no one no one thinks it's a good idea yes right like including people that we've had who are medical professionals oh really that's what some of the medical professional advice I mean we never have any professional advice on this show it'd be interesting to hear some okay um let me find it okay so one guy writes in and he's not medical professional but his name he says not to read his name but he says I'm glad you got that first he says that he took out his cousin and it was a sister's 20th and his cousin was annoyed all night which seemed really weird and as he drank it got worse and he talked to him and he found out he'd been taking steroids so he left at them and then his cousin started hitting street signs brick walls denting steel garages um wow and it caused it an argument between his ex and him uh well now his now ex right um so and you know basically this his whole cousin was just belligerent angry the whole night and it all turned out that it was basically having the steroid mood swings yes and and you know he by he's saying is this caused two things to happen I broke up with my ex into this day I won't drink with my cousin partly for the history partly out of fear so before you think it's steroid you should think of who might I hurt and know that there is a large side story to that so I mean you know his cousin was doing these things and his cousin might not have punched anyone his cousin might not have done these things but you know his behavior obviously you know and it impacted the people around him yes yeah definitely so so you can't find the medical professional one should we just move on yeah I think we should just I think we should just move on all right sounds like a bad idea yeah the medical professional basically said if if you've done research and you think that it's time to take steroids you haven't done research enough I like that and he said basically because while like what everyone points to is not the physical things like no one has pointed to like oh you're going to you know have problems with your heart and stuff everyone points to the fact that it it psychologically affects your your health like the one guy can the medical professional I only remember because I read his letter compared it to like taking your awesome body like a $60,000 or like a $600,000 sports car and then deciding to like open the hood and just fucking hit it with a sledgehammer for a while wow like you know you take this thing that you've worked really hard to do and like you give it like a crazy boost or something that might do something good for for like 10 for like a while but it's gonna break down right right right wow um watch the wrestler yeah you know I don't know I can't tell you what I can't tell you so Sean writes in a different shot and he says uh don't use my name earlier THQ stated that relic's next game will be announced in august I haven't heard this I don't know what it is but I would like to hear speculation my hope call I mean uh my hope is company heroes Vietnam um I mean I think a lot of people are thinking they're working on a on a big company heroes update like a new I think company heroes are dead to them I don't think we'll ever see another company in this game well because that online thing they did they shut that down pretty quick I just don't think that uh that tanked already I think so they they just they just said that it's uh it's indefinitely basically got you they're sitting on it they're not sure what to do with it yeah I don't think that they'll ever do another one just because I don't know that those games made that much money like at this point if they're doing RTS is it's more lucrative for them to do war hammer things yeah but I could see them maybe doing a return to something like home homeworld that they did back in the day our homeworld that game was fucking hard yes it was so I mean maybe something like that but I or maybe a company heroes that would be modern but there's definitely no way we'll ever see a world or two and again I don't think so at all no I wouldn't think so either um but I also don't know that company heroes Vietnam would be any good because while the Americans had all kinds of armor and stuff like that like playing as the Vietnamese would suck ass you'd have to give them all kind well I don't know it could be interesting if you weren't afraid to give them all kinds of suicidal tactics yeah it'd just be like this hardcore infantry based army yeah I don't know and yeah I I think that you're right they would have to take some some pretty intense like uh risks as far as uh yeah it would be it would be uncomfortable in terms of game design so I will say that I found the letter and his his name was William and uh what he says is he is a he's a microbiologist but he said his major in college was behavior and neurobiology so he said I did a lot of research on intersex people so I know a bit about how unbalanced hormones affect the body and mind and so I guess since I read it it's found it should I read it so yeah read it I read it I want to read part of his metaphor he says uh he says basically he says I'm not going to go to Wikipedia and list all the horrible things that stories can and probably will do your body but let me just say that athletic doping with steroids is like buying the most complicated intricate and expensive sports car in the world and then charging the spark plugs with the sledgehammer what you can what should concern you even more though is how the stories will affect your mind admittedly it's been a few years since I was reading journals and keeping up with interchronology but there's still a huge amount we don't know about hormones like how hormones like steroids interact with the brain words like the soul or consciousness have lost all of them but have a lot of metaphysical metaphysical baggage but something in that gray matter up there tells you who and what you are and if you take steroids you will be altering it just as much as your biceps chemical alteration to the brain isn't always a bad thing it happens naturally it can be good and some people even need it today but the chemicals you're dumping up there are the ones that can amplify the basis least desirable qualities of the human psyche you'd essentially be trading the person who you are now for something that could be taken away from you with one failed drug test or a word to the wrong person he says I can't tell you how to live your life but it seems to me like you're a pretty nice guy the person that comes out of the end of that needle might not be that says it better than I ever could um yep um all right that was part two i'm gonna find one more to kick it off with or you mean to end it off with yeah yeah because we kind of already kicked it off all right the final letter is from matt he says i've been with my crowed i learned in a lot current girlfriend yes he did a little over a year but i can't help it feeling like our relationship is reaching its end the issue i have here is that i feel like we're just becoming two different people we're both 18 but i've experienced quite a bit more than she has and i like to think my outlook on life is a little more realistic i used to be the kind of kid who had no problem doing stuff i shouldn't have done but nowadays i have a lot more to think about and do she gets mad that during the week i'm tired and whenever she wants to tell me about what she did with her friends i really don't want to hear it because it usually turns into her telling me she did something stupid not like cheat or anything just shit i've come to not approve of i don't know what to do and i'm quite angry as i write this all i can think of is to ask you guys what you would do he wrote this from his iphone i would say if you're both 18 years old then you're both changing very very rapidly i mean like you might be thinking that you're one way that you think you are now that's not actually man i can tell you that there was a bunch of shit i believe when i was 18 that i don't really believe a struggle anymore definitely and you may think that because you had a maybe i don't know maybe a harder life you did a lot of stupid shit that she didn't when she was younger and that she's going through now that somehow you're ahead of her in maturity but dude when you're 18 the most the most difficult thing that you can ever admit to yourself is that you are not mature and that you do not know and you are not sure about yourself yeah i mean i know that sounds kind of crazy probably to you right now and i know that you'll hear everyone say exactly the words coming out of her mouth but now that we've all gone through it too like through it like i've uh my parents said it to me all the time i didn't believe them you know like my older brothers and sisters and step sisters said it all to me and i never believed them you know i like back of the person i was when i was like 21 and stuff i'm like man i was like a baby yeah i just did not know anything yeah no you really really don't and i don't know maybe that maybe that's just part of it like when you're that age you can't admit it to yourself because you have no frame of reference you know it's it's it's an old saying you know uh someone with knowledge knows what they don't know yeah it's like you don't even know what you don't know yeah but i mean like relevant to your particular situation perhaps more relevant uh it sounds to me like you're just two different people and if you're if you're so annoyed by her that you can't see the things that you enjoy about her anything you don't even want to hear about like what she's done with her friends like i know that's definitely one thing that i learned is that like you know the um listening to my girlfriend means that i have to listen to the things that i want to listen to and the things that i don't want to listen to and it's like usually what comes out on the other end is that like all right i am listening to you now even though i would kind of rather finish this game she's talking to me so i'm going to listen to her and invariably what happens at the at the uh as that's happening as i go like oh wow i really did want to listen to her yeah and that's kind of one thing that you have to like you know that i think that comes with being involved in you know more relationships or whatever is that like those kind of realize you got to connect yeah yeah like if you have that connection you do kind of you want to make you want to sacrifice your own i don't know i don't know what to call your own playtime or whatever autonomy or something yeah you're willing to give a little bit of yourself up yeah and because like the rewards that come out of the other end of of being patient with the other person are worthwhile but i mean that's part of i mean i've broken up with people before because you know the those rewards weren't worthwhile so you know like even if you're putting out the effort and it still doesn't feel like it's working for you then it probably isn't working for you that's the word and you're still a baby you can send in your baby letters to letters at eat-sleep-game.com you can find me on twitter at chuffmoney you can find taylor on twitter at dirty tea like the drink you can find matt on twitter at a talk no just talking orange yeah there's no a there's no talking orange just talking orange so an arthur who's normally here should we give his to yeah you find it a e g i s nice you can also go out and buy an ipad from apple.com/store at which point you can download the atomics app and subscribe for a low low price of $0.99 a month yep so much more important than you know i don't know $0.99 a month you know you could teach a kid to read or you could buy or you could buy it. No fuck it uh all right thank you for joining us we'll see you next week okay let's let's all take turns talking hello i'm talking this is me talking hey i'm talking right now this is me talking to you i'm talking to you hey oh man i'm so talking i can't believe i'm talking right now [BLANK_AUDIO]