Rebel FM
Rebel FM Episode 89 - 01/21/11
Hello, and happy anniversary! This week, we're joined by Ryan O'Donnell of Area5 and we celebrate our two year anniversary by managing to talk about Dead Space 2 for quite a while without spoiling anything (surprising even us)! We talk about some other games that slip my mind, then move on to some of your memories of the show over our two year run of merriment and dick jokes, then close with some letters.
This week's music, in order of appearance:
Times of Grace - Strength in Numbers;
Rage Against the Machine - Wake Up
(upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - So to your anniversary show of Rebel FM, Episode 89. - No way. - No way. - No, you didn't like it. - That was way worse than I thought I was gonna be. - Way worse. - Yeah. - I thought it was fine. We entered in with some air horn. Here we are, Rebel FM, Episode 89. - Yo boy. - To your anniversary. I'm Anthony Gagas. With me is Arthur Geece. - Hello. - He's currently embarrassed. - Well, I do. - But he's easily embarrassed. - Well, I do, I'm with you. - So, a mesh-entering. - Yeah. - Man, it's good to be back. - And Tyler Barber. - Hey, what's up everybody? - 2011. - And Ryan Adano, who was here for the first episode. So it's good that he's here for this. - So is Matt. - True. - I was. - It's like a circle of life. - We did have a lot of people here for the first episode. - We did. - It was the Mad House episode. - They're all dead to us now. - How should we have entered the show since it's to your anniversary? I mean, I can't do fireworks sounds. - Well, three of us are drinking beer. That's a good start. - So I thought air horn. - That is a good start. - Um, what the fuck? - National Anthem, maybe. What's wrong? - Oh, okay. I was, oh, son of a bitch. Nothing. I was just planning on sharing just general info about how the show has done since we started. But of course, this is the day that Libson's data is down. - Um. - That makes perfect sense. - I was like, what? - So video games. - Okay. - Were you guys going to talk about Dead Space? - We can't talk a little bit about Dead Space. - Do that. - You show, we're going to just hop right into that. - Ryan O'Donnell and myself have played entirely through Dead Space 2. - I pre-ordered it yesterday. - That's good. It's good that you did get Dead Space 2 is pretty fucking awesome. - It's a really, really, really good game. - Um, maybe, I'd say better than the first one. - The thing that I like most about it is that it doesn't hurt Dead Space 1 in any way. Like, to me, aside from the fact that the combat is much tighter in Dead Space 2, that's-- - And there's a whole host of usability improvements too. - Oh yeah, totally. But having just played, I played through Dead Space 1 just before playing through Dead Space 2. And Dead Space 1, aside from-- - I played through 1 again. - Yes. - This is, I think, my third or fourth time from Dead Space 1. You know, the fact that it's on the Ishimura, almost entirely, or entirely, almost entirely. Don't want to spoil anything about Dead Space 1, but, I mean, that feels so much different than the sort of locations that you go through on the sprawl. - What's the name of it, the sprawl? - The sprawl. - It's weird for me hearing it called the sprawl 'cause the first three books that William Gibson wrote take place in a setting called the sprawl. - Yeah, and lately, I've been listening to a lot of Arcade Fire, and there's a song on that album called the sprawl. - I was going to bring that up, giving in the sprawl. - Exactly. - That's my favorite song on that album. - I really like the song on that album. - Wonderful live, too, but whatever. - Yeah. - That's beside the point. Yeah, Dead Space 2, you know, Dead Space, all right, let me start over here. Dead Space 1, I actually really like the backtracking that you do in that game. I know that's something that most people don't like, but it's sort of a-- - It works. - It works. - A hub and wheel, like, there are these hubs, and you start at them and you end each chapter at them, so you end up, like, basically doing a loop or going through some areas that you had before. - It makes it feel like a space, like, an actual--like, a place. - Right, and you have a tremendous amount of familiarity with it once you've gone through the game, and I felt like it was almost, like, eco-aware. At the end of eco, I knew what the castle looked like in my mind. - Exactly. - Even though I couldn't see the whole thing. Same thing with the Ishimura. - I mean, they do that. They help you, you know, even with the loading screens between stages where you get to see the layout of the ship and where you're, you know, headed to on the tram system. - Dead Space 2 is more like, you know, I don't know, a charted or a half-life or any of the sort of roller coaster ride linear sort of games where you're constantly pushing forward into new areas. I mean, there is some backtracking, but it's much, much different than it is in Dead Space 1. And it turns out to be good because, like I say, it feels very different. Like, the pace feels totally different. Do you still feel like a place? - It does. I think they do a good job of making it feel like it was lived in. And part of that is the way that the sets are decorated, the way that there's clear evidence that people were there until, it's like people were there until five minutes ago, instead of people were there until two weeks ago. You see way more instances of people, not just of their stuff, but of actual people and the things that are happening to people. - And that's different because, you know, I think Dead Space 1 did a great job of making you feel tremendously lonely and, you know, similar to, you know, an eco or a shadow of the Colossus, you know, where you're, there are other people. But when you see them, it feels strange. I was trying to figure out a good way to talk about this when I was playing through the game. But, you know, when you see a human in Dead Space 2 or in Dead Space 1, you know, you've been fighting necromorphs and you're exploring these vast areas and you sort of see someone in the distance and you're like, oh my God, that's a, that is a human. Like their animations are good enough and they're modeled good enough that, like, it has a sort of hyper real quality when you, when you walk up next to them and you're like, wow, this feels very strange to actually see another living human and there's a lot of that in Dead Space 2. - And they're something that the first Dead Space touched on here and there, but didn't do as much as you travel through spaces that people use. - Right. - Like you'll go through a shopping center or, for example, there's like daycares. - Or apartments, right? - Or apartments. And all of those things serve to tell you, A, this is designed for people to live here and B, is this what I'm going to see here? Is this this horrible, awful thing that it's going to show me and sometimes yes and sometimes no. - I was actually worried when I had heard that they were going to the sprawl. - Right. - Because I thought the, you know, part of the thing that was great about the Shimura was that it felt super cohesive. You know, like every sign is allowed to look the same because it's all one ship, every, you know, hallway, even though they didn't, they all looked wildly different, but they could have looked the same and it wouldn't have bothered me because, you know, it would have made sense in the context of the area in which you're in. - But they also did it like when the things looked the same, like the gameplay wasn't the same. It wasn't like in Halo 1 where you're going through the library in every single stage or some levels of the curtain taste. - So in a way that that's also much improved in this because first of all, weapons are useful in a way that they weren't in the last game. The plasma cutter was always your go-to weapon and it almost without fail except for it occasionally the line gun. That was it. - The pulse rifle existed for no reason whatsoever. - I disagree. I used the pulse rifle a little bit. I upgraded the contact laser, I used the force gun as well. - Are you talking about Dead Space 1? - Yeah. - Yeah, I didn't and I never felt the worse for it. - Oh, I mean, I think they're largely useful, especially, I mean, I would hold I think the ultimate setup in Dead Space 1 is like a plasma cutter, a powered up force gun, and like a contact beam. - I just powered my plasma cutter all the way up and never hit it. - My plasma cutter and line gun, that was all I ever relied on, Dead Space 1. - Yeah, I would say that you would be surprised and it's worth going back and checking them out. - I mean, in this, not only are the other weapons, I think more useful, but they're required. The harpoon gun has very specific uses and I mean, it's powerful just in general way, the javelin gun. It's powerful in general way, but there are certain situations where that is really the gun you should be using. - It seems like, in Dead Space 1, there were certain times that the certain guns were useful too, like the plasma rifles, that's what I'm thinking, that was only useful when you're fighting the little rolling things. Like that was like the only time I thought that that gun was going to be. - I don't think it's useful for those at all, I think the two best weapons for those guys are the force gun, which takes them all out in one blast. - I would do the alt fire for the line gun and we have a room to clear those things. That works, or it's the one good thing that the flamethrower works well for those things, but the flamethrower isn't very useful for anything else in the game, so you probably aren't holding it. - I mean, in this, the pulse rifle is much more useful. - Well, they changed the secondary fire and made it useful. In the first game, it just does this 360 spin in this game. It's like a grenade. - It's a grenade, yeah. - Yeah. - But in this, there are more enemies where unlike the standard necromorps, there are enemies that actually take body shots and die in this, like the pack I think they're called, who are like adolescents and children, not infants, but adolescents and children that are coming at you like they go down with pulse rifle rounds, the stingrays actually go down very quickly with pulse rifle rounds, which I found out by accident, which was a huge help to know later on. - The stingrays are the creatures that make more? - Yes. They turn the javelin, probably works well in those guys too. - They turn other things into the black necromorps. TK is obscenely useful in Dead Space 2, whereas it was just sort of a puzzle solver in Dead Space 1, and like the, I can grab stuff from across the room instead of walking over there. - They just like the delay is shorter on it. You can use it in the first game, but you're mostly, you know, if there's a flaming or like a gas tank or something like that. - It's like using the grab gun or the zero-point energy weapon or whatever and half-life. - Zero-point energy manipulator. - Just by virtue of the fact that you can use the TK to pull pieces off of a necromorph that's coming at you and then fired back at him. - Yeah, there's combat scenarios in this that would never happen in the first one, like hitting something with stasis and blasting off its arm with a plasma cutter using TK to pull that arm toward you and firing it back into the necromorph is not only a viable strategy, it is a necessary strategy. - I don't want to talk about the first chapter at all because I think it's brilliantly done and worth experiencing on your own, but I will say that they do teach you to use the telekinesis. - It's got a really strong cold open to you. - Yeah, it's really good. Yeah, so very early in the game, you'll be required to know that you've got to be able to use kinesis to fight enemies away. - Actually, the thing that surprised me is that it waits until about five or six chapters in to really explain to you exactly how much you can use TK to kill enemies because you'll stumble upon someone who will in their own way let you know that you could do it. - Well, the first, this is the part that I didn't want to say, so. - Right, so I'm not saying any more about it. I'm just saying that that. - I just mean in chapter one at the very beginning. - Oh, well, I'm not talking about that. I mean, before you actually have a weapon in the game, you do have to fight enemies with what you got and at one point all you got is telekinesis. - Right, it's a good way to teach you of this new mechanic because in the old game, it's like Arthur said, telekinesis was just a glorified way for me mostly to grab objects. - Yeah, I feel like the combat is much improved. Overall usability has improved, the objective marker has changed. - Yeah, they drop, so in this game they drop the map and they have what they call the advanced locator. So in the first game, if you press down on our L2, L3. - You click in the stick. - Yes, click in the stick that you'll just get a beam that shows you where you've got to go open. In this game, you can actually switch, you can go between objective stores, benches and any sort of waypoints that you want. So the map, which wasn't very useful and it was one of the things because they were trying to, this game like the last game has no HUD. It's all built into the character, into the actual world and it's extremely successful. I love, this is one of my favorite things about this series is that they've been able to pull this off and make it work and because the map was so unwieldy before, hard to use, they just dropped it and the advanced locator solves that problem, it'll point you to anything you think you should be able to find, you can use it to find it. So the other thing that they add is obviously the stomp forward, if you played the demo, the fact that Isaac stomps forward as he's saying fuck over and over again is in there. And melee attacks are actually useful, which is a change of pace since there wasn't really, I mean, there weren't melee attacks in that space. - Yeah, there are. It's the exact same moves, the stomp and being able to swing, but they remove, there's less of a pause after you do it, you can repeat it faster and move forward when you stomp. - And it's a little stronger. - The animation in Dead Space, and I don't know if this is actually, if anybody ever intended this, but the animation of him stomping, you know how he has gravity boots, right? Or like magnetic gravity boots, whatever you want to call him. It always seemed to me like, like he picks up his foot and then like turns on the gravity or the man, or the man. - That would make sense, 'cause otherwise, how are you stomping that hard? - I just think, man, I've stomped shit out of some stuff in life, and it would never improvise. - Right, but I mean, he's not stomping on metal, for the most part, he's stomping on like fucked up, stretched out a human bone. - It happens so, it's so forceful, and it's like, I don't know, if that wasn't the intent of it, that's cool. I just thought that that's the way it looked to me, and it makes the stomp more fun for me. - Yeah, that's not the case. - So the most major thing I think people were concerned about is Isaac talking? - Yeah, I don't think you need to worry about that. In fact, they handle it really, really, really well. - It's not a problem. - There's some of the stuff that I'd like to talk about, but we won't, we'll save it for another podcast. - For like a spoiler cast. - For a spoiler cast. - For a spoiler cast. It's all used. - Sons of Bitches have played it. - There are some enemies in this game that are like some of my favorite enemies to fight ever in a game. There's one type of creature in particular that the battles are just like amazingly cool. But it reminds me of something about Isaac talking, like during this one battle, you know, Isaac has been fighting for probably about a minute and a half, two minutes when he gets a call from someone on whatever it is they used to call him. And they're like, Isaac, you know, you need to get to and he's just like, not now and fucking cuts the person off immediately and goes back to fighting. This is all while you're in the middle of combat. And like, that is a perfect example of how it's integrated. He never really says like, dumb one liners, like, oh, that was some gross ass, whatever. You know, there's none of that. You know, it's all contextual and it really, it's really, really good. - Rarely flippant or funny. Like there are occasional moments that come off as funny, but it's more like a macabre sort of like gallows humor, like not making light of the situation. Like at one part, a companion says, are you? That's crazy. And he says, yeah, you, you just met me, stick around for a while. - Yeah. That's about as, as like funny as it gets. - Yeah. That's the closest thing to a joke that he tells. And at that point, you can tell like, this is very much Isaac's story. And this is Isaac coming to terms with what happened on the Ishamora. - Yeah. - It handles it in a very human way. - Yes. - And there's a lot that I don't want to talk about. - There's a lot of, like, the fact that he has a voice brings more personality to this story. - Right. And I just don't think it's a Gordon Freeman kind of story that they could tell. - Mm-hmm. Like, it's not you as, as, as Isaac dealing with this. It's Isaac dealing with this and you along for the ride. - Well, I don't think that, I mean, the reason that I think that works in Half-Life 2 is that there were these other characters that were so instrumental in telling that story that like kind of, and I don't know that does that, does that-- - This game really does have more characters than you'd expect. I'm not saying that you're, you know, you have an Alex that runs around with you the whole time or anything like that. - And there are side characters that-- - Surprising shit happens with those characters, but it manages not to feel contrived. - No. - You will be surprised by shit that happens, by shit you hear, by shit you see, by shit that they do. But it's always believable. - So I want to talk just a bit about, before we stop talking about this game, like a bit about presentation and, you know, art. I started to mention it in reference to the Ishamara and how, you know, to me I was afraid that the-- - It was like Jonah and the Whale or something, I don't know. - Well, that they had just bit off more than they could chew, that part of the reason that Dead Space 1 was just so good was that they had chosen a very succinct, you know, singular area to just render perfectly. - Right. - But, you know, Dead Space 2, I think that the art team really did a hell of a job like making every area look like, obviously distinct, but then also look like what you, look believable, you know, for what it's supposed to be like. - It's like unified aesthetic. - It does, but it makes sense in the context of the fact that this is one big, you know, whatever floating down. - Right. And it's just, I think it remains gothic, but-- - Right. - To me, it's like the Ishimura in the first Dead Space, I mean, it just totally reminded me of Alien, the movie. - It reminds me of 2001. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, and a bit of Alien, so one thing I've immediately sort of thought of when I heard about the sprawl and it going to other planets is, how does it maintain that level of like creepy isolation when it's on the planet? - It's not as isolated. It's a more dangerous environment than the Ishimura was. It's more fragile, which is surprising, but whereas the Ishimura was clearly a space vessel designed for stresses, this isn't. Like you're going through residential areas, you're going through bureaucracy and other public gathering places and it's clear that it's like, this is designed to withstand in very low gravity with virtually no atmosphere and that's fine, but it wasn't designed to take the kind of punish, it's not designed to take meteorites, and you can accidentally take out windows that will suck you out into nothing unless you can shoot their walk closed. And if they don't shoot you out into nothingness, then you can be dismembered by safety mechanisms. - Right, and the other thing is that the engine allows for much more destructible environments, so it's okay that it's weaker, it makes it feel more realistic, like if there's a glass barrier keeping you from moving across this one side of a thing to another, you just kick through that barrier and walk right on through. - And it's extraordinarily impressive from a technical perspective. - It's interesting that you think about it that way, because for me when I saw that you could break glass in this one, I was like, oh, it's like a new gameplay mechanic they've added, I didn't think about it in terms of, and it makes sense because this is not a military class ship. - Well it is, they call it decompression gameplay, so they have their marketing term for what it's supposed to be. I think in terms of the new mechanics or gameplay types they added, that's the one that's like the most half-baked or the least-baked, and that they could do more with it in the future, because it is really cool when you shoot a window and everyone gets sucked out of it, but once you shoot the lock, that's it, and it's kind of over. - And there are so many moments, and it's sort of split between moments that you create yourself through the way that you react to whatever the combat scenario is, and there's pretty much always multiple ways to handle any encounter, and there's also just so many really well-executed, well-laid-out moments in the game, and I don't want to talk about them because they're so fucking cool. And part of the, they're surprising without being cheap, usually. It doesn't resort to as many jump scares, I think, as Dead Space did, because it's more about building tension. - I don't even remember that many jump scares in Dead Space one. - Oh god, there were so many jump scares in Dead Space one, like stuff jumping out of vents, like stuff like popping up where you didn't see it before. - Yeah, I guess, I guess, yeah, you're right, I guess they're just more very scary. - I think Dead Space two does a better job of playing with you, and also playing with your expectations. Like, there's one very specific part later in the game where I'm not gonna describe the environment, but you go through it and you think you know exactly what's gonna happen, and by all right, it's what should happen, and it doesn't, and that, by itself, is more powerful than anything else they could have done there. - I like the sound of that. - Because there's so much emotional attachment in that moment, and that might not make sense right now, but when you play it, you will probably know it. It's just this part where you just, you know deep down, you're just waiting for this thing to happen, and it doesn't. - Yeah. - Nice. - Also, just from a technical perspective, it is the most platform identical game I've seen since Need for Speed, Hot Pursuit. Like I've seen extended sections of the PS3 and played through the 360 version, and the only difference is that the 360 version is on two discs. The, it visually, you know, in terms of the scenarios, I mean there are some stuff here, the action-y sort of moments. I know they've shown the train sequence and stuff like that. There are definitely moments in that, that are like that, that rival, the craziest roller coaster-y action moments in, you know, Half-Life 2 episodes, or Uncharted 2, or anything like that. In fact, there was one moment that really reminded me of something that happened in Uncharted 2, and so after playing through Dead Space, I put in Uncharted 2 and went back to it. And there's also a die-hard 2 moment. - That's true. - We need to. - But anyway, the Uncharted 2, when I went back and played it, I really, still really enjoy that game, and I think that the combat, the gameplay is fun in it, but I think in the long-term, I'll actually find it much easier and much more fun to go back to Dead Space 2 than something like Uncharted because the combat is just so darn good. The core mechanics are so good that that is gonna be fun to play in any number of different ways over and over again. It's the type of game where when you finish it, you really, like, I was like, "All right, let's go again. Let's do this again." - I mean, I think that's totally true, just because when I think about playing Dead Space, I think I played Dead Space for like the kind of encounters first and the story second. Even though the story is good, I'm not saying it's bad, but I'm saying perfectly service-able. - But I'm saying Uncharted is like, "Story first, everything else secondary," and it's like, so that's why I've never gone back and played Uncharted 2 yet. - The one thing that shares with Uncharted is that you are constantly wanting to see what it's gonna show you next, and it pretty much never disappoints you until I think it stumbles at the very, very end, but- - There's gameplay reasons for that, but we'll save those for- - But I mean, the payoff, there's always such great payoff for everything, including that last section. - Yeah, I think that's about as much as I can say. - I think we should. That's one game we've talked about so far. - It's a really good one, though. I mean, I- - I know that it's a really good one. - I'm glad I familiar it. - I'm glad I familiar it. - Personally, this year, we didn't forget about Mass Effect 2 when Game of the Year talks came around. I won't forget about- - Yeah, that's fucking awesome. - I won't forget about Dead Space 2 when Game of the Year, when I'm thinking about the best games of the year. I mean, it really- I, from Dead Space 1, was my favorite game of the year, the year that it came out, and it's very possible, although this is a very packed year that Dead Space 2 would be my favorite game of the year. It's that good. - Crazy. - It's a great way to start the year. - I only have a couple other things that I played. - Excuse me. - I went to CES, and CES was kind of lame for games, and actually for everything. - Yeah, I thought it was just lame. - I'm never gonna lie. - I'm never gonna lie. - CES, man. - I don't know anybody that likes CES. - I don't give a shit about- I get- give even less of a shit about 3D televisions than I did before. - And not 3D televisions and tablets, I'm like, eh. - I actually bought a non-120 Hertz non-3D TV after I got back from CES, because that's how convinced I was that I didn't want those things. - Nobody even had- because I didn't follow any CES coverage, nobody even had like non-glasses 3D TVs or anything. - They did. Toshiba had production stuff on the floor that they plan on release later this year, and they were okay, but they don't have very many viewing angles. There's like three viewing angles. - I'm sure, yeah. - Sony had some non-production prototypes, but it's still not there yet. - Right. - Visio, I think, had some on the floor too. - 'Cause that's where the tech's really gonna need to be out of course. - Game-wise, it was mostly shit that we've already seen just in 3D, primarily. - Right. - I saw Fable 3 on PC, and that is Fable 3 on PC. - Yeah. - I don't like that game. - I like that game. - I saw Age Vampires online, and that game is actually looking really cool. - It looks interesting. - It's like an NMO hub world for an RTS that's totally free. Like it's not micro-transaction-driven, it is free, and it also has achievements. - Weird. - How is it totally free? - They are going to sell content packs, like additional mission scenarios and stuff like that. - That's... I like that kind of micro-transaction. - Yeah, and it's being developed by Exxon-Somel guys. - Well. - So it's being developed by the people that always did the Age of Empires games. The games I played, the only game I played at CES that anyone should care about is Torchlight for Xbox Live Arcade, which funny is Torchlight. - Right. - The end pretty much, they add a new pet, like it's like a weird little jabber walk dragon. - Yeah, I saw Torchlight 2 at PAX last year, and like I so want that. - Yeah, I just don't want to play those games by myself. - Yeah, and Torchlight 2 has co-op, which is the one thing you're reading. - Torchlight on Xbox Live Arcade unfortunately does not. - Yeah, because it's the old one, yeah. - They did make some adjustments, like they made 360 friendly adjustments, like melee attacks actually puts you forward now. - Oh, that is insane. - And ranged attacks, have you stand still while you're doing them? You map skills to the left and right bumpers and the Y and B buttons. - Seems like it'd be difficult to manage inventory in an Xbox experience. - It's not cumbersome, just because there are so many sub-menus. It's like, right trigger, right trigger, right bumper, down, down, right AA. - Give this to my pet so it can go back to town and sell it. - Right, well that's all streamlined too. - Yes, but it looks great, it plays really well, it's really fun. It's Torchlight. - $15. - $15, which is less than it released for on PC. - It's a really good game. - And then I played, I've been playing more Mass Effect, I finally played through all the DLC. - Oh, I have played all of the DLC also. - Yes. - I think I talked about Project Overward last time, which is good at the beginning, good at the end and bumpy in the middle. - Right, and I told you you got to play the Shadow Broker. - Right, so I played Shadow Broker and Shadow Broker is fucking fantastic. - Yep, yep. - What about that last area? - All of it. - I didn't know all of it, but what about that last area? - The whole investigation scene and the intrigue, it's really, really good. And not only is it really good, I think it's really necessary, particularly if you romanced Lyara in the last game, it is a really vitally important piece of character progression. - It does feel like the, it feels, it's the one thing that I feel was like left out of Mass Effect 2, you know, it's like, this should have been in Mass Effect 2. - Yeah, it's-- - But the other DLC I could live without. - I mean, that's cool, like story development, world development, but this is like important character closure and development. - And you are clearly making decisions that will have ramifications in Mass Effect 3. - Right, exactly. And I'm really curious how they're going to handle that. - Yeah, me too. - If you don't. - Yeah. - What happens if someone hasn't played the Shadowbroker DLC, like, how are they going to-- - I mean, maybe they assume stuff went forward without your assistance. - Yeah, I don't know. - I guess so. - Or it could be like a decision you make when you set up your character. - All I know is that I really hope that Mass Effect 3, like, it really should, like, because there's a very serious, like, galaxy changing thing. - Yeah, it's pretty important. - It is actually at DLC. I also had the displeasure of checking out Mass Effect Genesis, which is-- - Oh, I'm sorry. - Mass Effect Genesis is the digital comic that accompanies the PS3 version of Mass Effect 2. - Well, you watched it on YouTube, right? - Right. - Yeah, and you mentioned earlier that it was terrible. - I just feel-- first of all, I feel really bad for people that-- who's-- that's their only opportunity to play, or to see that stuff. - To experience Mass Effect 1. - I guess, I mean, I just jumped straight into 2 and still had a good time. I mean, the important thing is that they get to play 2, right? - And they still get-- - There's just so much context and emotional resonance to the things you see and do and experience Mass Effect 2. If you played Mass Effect 1 and have that character from Mass Effect 1 that aren't present, if you didn't-- - I-- I obviously have-- you know, I didn't play Mass Effect 1, so I can't say exactly how it would feel to do it the other way, but I-- as much as I've wanted to play Mass Effect 2 again, I can't bring myself to just start it up. I know that I want to play through Mass Effect 1 differently first and I've started that play through with it. - It makes both games better. - Mm-hmm. - I mean, I'm sure it does. It's just that I jumped straight into 2 and still had like a great time. It was still like easily in the game of the year. - And I can totally believe that. It's just, you know, coming from the perspective from those of us who have played both games and have our one character through it, it's hard for us to imagine doing that. Like, if you feel like half is emotional. - Right. I guess I'm just saying that it's still at least like finally on the PS3, right? - Yeah. - And they have at least some sort of option to have those decisions, like I didn't get to make any decisions. - Oh, that's true. - No, I just jumped straight into the game. - And I almost feel like you should have played the PC version because you could use a save game creator to make the choices that you have the opportunity to make in the game. - Or you can go and find that one woman who made like 52 different PC game saves for all these different states from Mass Effect 1. - Supposedly, there's like 700 pieces of information between Mass Effect 1 and 2 that they're carrying over into 3. - Hmm, I love that. - So, the thing that really bums me out about Genesis is the dangerous precedent it sets for what isn't important for Mass Effect 1 and Mass Effect 3. - Right. Left out a lot of stuff that I would feel is really key after they explained it to me. - There's no, no, it's 12 minutes long, first of all, which is brief. - Yeah. - The funny thing is I would think that they wouldn't have a time limit on something that you can download, but anyway, it's been like 40 seconds talking about how it's all the little details and choices that make an adventure what it is, and then it proceeds to skip over enormous plot arcs and major points from Mass Effect. - Yeah, you said it like didn't even mention the guest, right? - It never mentions guest once. - Fucking crazy. - It just says, well, Saren sure did go to this planet with a big ship and fuck stuff up and leave. And that's all it says. It never mentions the guest, it never mentions that the Quarians created the guest. - What about the Thorian? - It skips entirely over the planet of pharaohs, which includes the Thorian. - So bizarre. - It gives you about five seconds of background story on the Rachnai before you have to decide whether or not to let the Rachnai queen live. It's like, man, these Rachnai sure are fucked up, man, that queen sure is pissed off, but she'll say she'll leave peacefully if I let her live. Should I let her live or die? Like it never discusses Cerberus, like it never gives context, it gives so little context for anything. - So weird. - The choice between Ashley and Lyara in there is there, but it's barely a choice because it says, Ashley is this chick we found on Eden Prime, man, Lyara is hot and smart and that stuff she did to jog my memory sure felt awesome. - They're like, cheers Lyara, so that way you'll want to download the Shadow Broker DLC. - Right, so I mean, it's like, well, that comes with the PS2 version. - Oh, that's right. - So I just, for all those reasons, it just makes me sad for PS2 players, but also for myself because it makes me seriously question what is important for Mass Effect 1 and what I will see in Mass Effect 3 and also what is important for Mass Effect 2 that will be in Mass Effect 3 because they're clearly hoping that Mass Effect 3 will sell exponentially more copies than Mass Effect 2 did because Mass Effect 2 did not do as well as it should have and they're going to try to combat that. I mean, that's clearly the reason it's coming on PS3. So Mass Effect Genesis bums me out pretty hardcore and if you're interested, there is most certainly Mass Effect Genesis for every possible outcome and femme ship on YouTube. So Major Bummer Dude, Anthony, make me happy. - But at least PS3 players. - Exactly. - Finally get Mass Effect 2. - Yeah, I mean. - Speaking of someone who just jumped into two straight ups from one, I didn't play one all the way through. - And it's like Mass Effect 1, they basically threw away your entire crew except for like a couple of them. And Mass Effect 2 seems like you're going to stick with it. - Yeah, I liked Mass Effect 2 but Mass Effect 1. What was that look for? Because I don't like Mass Effect 1? Shut up Brian. - I still feel like you should start Mass Effect 1 back up and set it to easy. - So I started playing this iPhone game which I don't normally talk about iPhone games so much in there but it's called Game Dev Story. And it's one of those games that I love mostly because it's like Sif 4 because you get to tell your own stories. So that's what I was saying before as we were out to eat earlier that there are two ways to tell stories in my mind in games and like one is like to have it be super intricate and super well told and have all these different avenues whether it's through dialogue and cut scenes and like you know implied things in the environment. All these different ways that you're going to tell a really detailed story so that the player gets it like not like Gears of War where they don't tell enough story to have it make sense but something more like Alan Wake where the story is like so integral to the game that you know the story is in like almost every moment of the game or something like a Sif or a Game Dev Story or even older games like Fallout and stuff where they weren't trying to tell a story. They kind of just had all these little implied things and then that was the fun part of the game was almost like you making up your own story and Game Dev Story is the same way for me because the whole premise of it on iPhone or Droid is that you start a game studio, you just decide what type of staff you're going to hire and then you just manage a game studio and it's like a game where you have to worry about budgets, you have to worry about the direction your studio is going to take like me whenever I want money. My studio whores itself out and does a bunch of game ports and game engine jobs but we do that so that we can afford the license for the next generation of consoles you know. And I like developing this whole entire ideal for my studio like we're going to be a hardcore PC developer so all I would make it first was like simulation battle games and they would like sell like 80,000 units and I'd be like well I guess that can be a success for us because PC license is so cheap but then eventually you know like the Nintendo clones and the second clones announce their consoles you're like battling to see if you're going to be able to get that license and develop for those and basically I loved my studio because my studio ended up becoming known as like the Ninja Action Studio so we made a bunch of Ninja Action games and our famous franchise our very first game that ever reviewed and gotten to the game Hall of Fame. So you were making games for me? Yes, I was basically we became the makers of Ninja Action games and so we made nothing but Ninja Action games and our first game that made it in Hall of Fame was game 39 because I had never named my games and so actually you name me. No I feel like that's like some of the most fun about the game is naming the games. Well now I do but there was yeah so I just didn't think about it. So game 39 and then after that if it makes no Hall of Fame you can make a sequel so then I would always develop sequels for the next platforms and it would always be like game 392, game 393, made all the way up through game 397 and I would like people just ate that shit up. My top selling game all time was 10 million units we have 10 million units of a shit of a game on PlayStation. When you did it, it was a super funny like named game like you know clown college 12 or something like that. Well I was convinced because in the game you go to the game you go to the yearly game awards and you have to like I thought you could you could tap to select like it's like a slot machine and you could stop it on your game to win the game award. I think it's just random I think I was wrong but I thought you could stop it so that's why I kept my games named numbers because they're easier to pick out in the list. Yeah I guess. Our colleagues says all of his game names were like rate master seven and like his child killer. Yeah I name mine really dumb things now like if it's a wrestling game I name it Rassler. But yeah that's the whole thing that's funny about that game is like you know just because especially for people like us who have been to these things like E3 and stuff. When you have to decide if you're gonna have like booth babes at your E3 booth or whether you're gonna have like a person in the animal costume and you have to sit there and take into account like it's just really funny taking things into account like demographics like well I mean most of the games for children so I guess I'll have people in suits at my booth. But most importantly like playing that game is kind of made me realize like how game developers must irrationally just hate people that do what we do because like even in this dumb game I'm not saying this is anything like making a real game it's not but I would sit there and put all this effort into making this game as good as I could be and it would be like the review score time would come around and it would be like nine. This game almost maybe cry nine best game I've played all year seven I didn't get it and I'm just like what the fuck didn't you get about it it's a fucking injection game fuck you and they don't even write real reviews and I don't even know what my games actually like but I was just like how you define a real review sir yeah I was just like I just think like now I understand why someone that probably worked really hard in a game could just have like this irrational hatred of what we do I didn't even really make a real game but I made my little fucking peons work their asses off to get some game that had better graphics than any game I've ever made before and this review to shits on it I just wanted to to murder that little thing I love it when your little programmers or your people they just get there and they get in front of their machine and they get on fire yeah the first time I have it I thought they were dying but that's all that's just what that happens when they're having like a breakthrough yeah so they might be like I'm gonna boost the graphics on level four yeah the bad thing is they also turn on fire sometimes and just put a bunch of bugs so sometimes like I'm gonna be fucking up but I'm on fire while I'm fucking going to really fuck the game up whoops yeah I don't know it's just such a cute like such a really brilliant game it's like the first thing they've done on iPhone you know it's just you can play it for hours and hours exactly also available on Android yeah it's an and now and it's a universal app so it'll work on iPad and Macs yes I played it all on iPad and you know it's just like a really cool like $3 game like one of the coolest fun games I've had on iPhone in a long time and they're just a studio out of Japan I just like I can't wait to see like I want to see what those guys will do next it's funny I keep meaning to play that game it's just because every time somebody rings up like oh fuck I need to go home and download that and I always forget it's a it's a brilliant little game and I also tried out the new Donna War expansion if you played Donna War 2 so Donna War 2 which you fucking should if you haven't Donna War 2 Retribution is the upcoming expansion of March it's gonna be badass I mean it's nice that's my guess from what I played like it's I mean it's more Donna War 2 right but it's a new campaign and there's and it isn't like the first two games where all you could play the space marines and this one you are given a choice of six armies to start with and then you play through the campaign without army so it's still the same campaign generally like you know the same missions with the same objectives like kill this guy except obviously they play out differently because you're like using a different army and uh not only armies of the same like the space marines in Donna War 2 you know they're kind of unique because they have a hero in every unit whereas orcs their heroes are completely detached from units and you can basically summon in a bunch of cannon fodder to have them die or the new army that they've included and this is the Imperial Guard which if you're a Warhammer 40k nerd you know is like that's like the other faction of humans they're space marines who are like basically like demigods and then there's imperial guards which would be like us if we got conscripted into the military they're really low morale but they fight to the death and they fight in hordes and it's just like you know just these little tiny mechanics I think that are going to create like such a different dynamic when people finally like jump in like it will give the campaign like a ton of replayability cool and the imperial guard in particular cool because you like build an infantry unit starts off with like 7 guys which is big already but then each time you attach a new commander unit to the unit it grows so eventually it's like 14 strong nice and then when they run this is this is really complicated for just people to play these games but they're the only unit that can break their retreat so you can retreat with them and if you have a commissar in the unit he can execute one of them to auto break their retreat and so they can keep on fighting yes but for multiplayer that's like a huge thing yeah you know because it retreating is such a tactical thing that you can now you can faint people basically like I'm retreating nope I'm not right you know it it just has like such cool tactical implications but the coolest thing about it to me is just that it's $30 and a standalone you know it's like you never played it it's like why wouldn't you just get this it has all the multiplayer features included has their last stand mode included and it has this new campaign like the only bummer about it to me is that you can't port in you know you can like the last expansion where you could carry over your save from your previous game and keep leveling up your Marines you can't do that that's a bummer it is there can you is there a space Marine campaign you can play the space Marines in the campaign that's included but it is not it is not a campaign about any one group it's a campaign about these six groups in this universe and they've streamlined a lot of things too because you only count on the old games when you leveled up you got points like oh you leveled up they get two points and you could distribute them how you wanted and the new game it's not like that when you level up you get one point and you can put and when you put it into whichever of your trees you get a power there's no waiting to get a power or working towards a power it's just every time you level it's a new ability wow that's cool yeah and they've also made all the trees a lot more viable because I don't know if you ever played the old dawn of war it was cool that they had like these trees for him but you were like one was like totally worthless for certain units you'd be like why would I ever go that route whereas in this one they're all great good you know and at the end of each mission streamline the base you got yeah you know at the end of each mission you always got loot too that's a big appeal of dawn of war is getting loot and this one now when you beat a mission you get to choose between loot and you get to choose between like passive abilities that will like affect your army like oh I could get this but I could also just get like plus damage to these guys seems like you'd almost always want to go for plus damage unless the loot was super good right you know that's the thing is I just think that this this is basically like them taking that don't work too formula and this is like at it's like this is distilled down to like what makes dawn of war two really great nice so so play it yeah and the other game I play is I played home front multiplayer front yeah very weird you know I mean it's weird to me that Microsoft is like like going out of their way to make sure that there's exclusive home front DLC for that for them yeah you know it's I just didn't picture home friends being one of those games that was like important enough that that like you know not that I'm saying it was bad or anything when I mean are they going out of their way or do you think THQ offered it to them in exchange for like promotion that could be I got the impression it was more the other way around that they got some sort of deal worked out with Microsoft just maybe some money or something but I only played multiplayer which to me seems like the not exciting part of home front because this is from chaos studios the guys that did front lines field war which was an interesting game single player wasn't good but the multiplayer was like the whole premise of it was where you pushed a front line and once you took all like the ABC if you managed to take all three it would push it to the next one it was basically who could take overtake a battlefield these are the desert combat guys right these are the desert combat guys so yeah so front lines is is you know they've they've really tried to beef up the single player game you know it's the scripts being like written by the guy that wrote red dawn okay and uh and uh you know the whole premise is that a unified North Korea with South Korea comes and invades the United States after launching like crazy EMP bombs so basically half the United States is like currently under siege or occupied so that sounds like an interesting premise like not necessarily cool but it sounds interesting right wow yeah but uh the multiplayer doesn't really get across any of that multiplayer it might as well just be like you're fighting in any other destroyed neighborhood you know it doesn't feel like it doesn't get across that theme of like besieging or anything like that um but it still is that same kind of multiplayer where it's like pushing a front line you know um even though it's weird because not once during the presentation I watched it they ever mentioned from the makers of front lines field war it's like they basically just that game should basically never existed um but it's it is a really cool it's fun I mean it is like a good multiplayer shooter it's just that I'm curious like who's gonna really care about it in the long run that's what I'm wondering like the games like battlefield and stuff like that out like even with their interesting takes on things like when you kill people you get battle points it's kind of like when you shoot people modern warfare you see like 10 experience 10 experience and this one you're getting battle points and it isn't and you do also level up your account overall but the battle points are usable in that battle right then in there right so like I killed four guys and I got 600 battle points I'm gonna buy a Humvee and my guys are now gonna be able to jump in Humvee's don't naturally spawn you have to actually people have to purchase them well well you know can you pull battle points together with your teammates not that I saw but you know and so like you know you can buy like body armor to make yourself stronger you know you can use some battle points and buy like the drones that frontline fuel war was like pretty people love the drones in that you know you could drive like little mobile tanks little mobile bombs helicopters this still has it one thing I really liked about it though is they have this this system that's like their version of kill streaks where it's like a so Ryan were to get three kills in a row all of a sudden it would tell one of us on the opposite team kill this guy extra bonus points nice and and so and so you forgetting three kills all of a sudden also got the ability to sprint indefinitely that's for as long as your streak goes so now you kill two more guys now two skulls appear appear above you and it and it signs like three people on the other team is kill this guy for extra points and we can see where you are we know your general location wow and so basically and then when you get like a kill streak at the second level all of a sudden now you have a radar that every 10 seconds beeps out from you and shows you enemy locations for one brief second so you're getting these passive little perks that will only last until you die and at the same time more and more teams because eventually when you reach like level five the whole entire enemy team gets bonus points for killing you and they can all be sided up on you but you also have these crazy perks that can help out your team it's actually how the assassins creed multiplayer works as well except for that you're are you I guess you're not getting more passive right that's the thing is you're not getting passive perks but everyone is coming in the more the longer history is the more right and every kill you get when you have to like five skulls is like crazy bonuses for you to battle points yeah I really like that though that like it gives you the potential victim it gives you some balancing and it did create like some crazy dynamic situations where all of a sudden like when we were playing we would see like oh shit one of our guys has three skulls so we know he's racking up points so just like without any heads that to communicate he would go into a house and we would start covering the doors right because we wanted to keep him alive and plus it drew people to us because they knew his general location yeah so it did create these really cool scenarios and I also thought that one other thing they do that's really cool is for spawning when you spawn in the game you drop you don't drop in it looks like you're air dropping in or something or you're coming down from a satellite view but all it is is just a camera swooping in that when it's coming in it gives you an overhead view and you can see where all the people are enemy and allied cool so not only as you're spawning in do you get a good idea of if I want to participate in a big fight I can see there's one over here but you also get a brief look of like no one's going to be able to get the drop on you as you spawn in because you see like oh shit three guys are coming this way right as I'm spawning in so I was really smart popping there yeah you know it just is a clever thing to let people not be screwed the same right right it yeah it helps it helps with spawn camping exactly yeah so that game seems cool like it's like it seems cool but it's again it's like is that on anyone's radar I just don't know that it is you know home front yeah not really yeah it's like coming on March and I just I just I mean I don't know that the premise is enough to set it apart from other shooters and we are in a pretty saturated modern shooter landscape right now as I'm saying like even more so than it was when front lines came out yeah and I just I see this and I play it and I'm like who's going to leave bad company or or like you know flak ops or this or a low yeah like who I just have a hard time you know Pia three kill zone is coming out so I would seems like this year's like mag yeah I kind of know what I mean like like it's still a good game you think oh that's a really cool thing but it's like it kind of doesn't really sit so com for comes that way to the sure yeah I just see I just I just I want to be really cool like maybe if the single players great you know like that's still what everyone's wondering about but like the multiplayer I'm like it's well done like the desert combat guys clearly know what they're doing when it has to making a multiplayer game yeah it's like I don't know we'll see it would be awesome if they put in helicopters that fly like the desert combat helicopters the helicopters they put in I will say that like the little choppers and I don't know I never saw big choppers if there are any but though the RC ones and stuff is nothing like battlefield they said their goal right out of the bat was that they hated certain things about battlefield because you would get a helicopter and if you people most people would try it and be like oh this is hard and then avoid it yeah and so in their game like everything is totally like intuitive like okay oh that's the opposite that's the opposite what I was saying like I love the desert combat helicopters because they were super hard to fly but if you had you know it was the PC mod so but if you had the right like stick with a throttle and a hat and everything and the stick that you could twist you could actually tilt your tilt the chopper and you could move the rudder and everything independently and so you could like do a thing where your nose is pointed at the same spot while you're like circle strafing down you know like you could fly complex maneuvers like a real helicopter but it took you like a day or two of like doing nothing but practicing with the helicopter until you could actually fly the thing which you know made it so that there were guys that were good at it and people have ordered yeah so yeah obviously a good pilot into your into your helicopter yeah and so obviously that's something you avoid when you're trying to form more mass market title but it's something I really enjoy it when they were talking about it too because they were talking about trying to make like super intuitive vehicles and they talked about trying to make their cars drive like halo because like everyone knows halo controls but it's funny because I think I was saying like in focus testing they did like everyone when they play halo takes to it naturally but he said for some reason with our game it just never felt right it was like halo cars it feels I don't know what the technology is it's driving home front I mean halo's cars drive on very specific physics models yeah so either way he was like you know just that stick using the two sticks just never felt right so but yeah home front there's a lot of stuff that I think developers think halo does simply that they try to emulate and just never quite manage it works for halo doesn't work for other things yeah and then one other thing I saw which I'll just I just want to gauge your guys' reaction to this because I saw this thing they're doing with PlayStation home today um Ryan you bet your eyes like dumbest thing like I'm not saying it's necessarily like the coolest thing but I thought the dumbest thing you've ever heard but I think that this is actually a really interesting way of using home is that when Killzone's coming out from like the 27th of January to like somewhere late in February they're they're basically changing the whole look of home to be like a destroyed ISA city and so when you're going around and home it's like a you know it's it's obviously under siege there's like dropships flying over shooting people and stuff the hell guests dropships and they actually shoot you no but I mean obviously it's mostly an aesthetic thing but they're adding this really silly mini game in there that you can go in and play for free and it totally you play it and if you get all the challenges done in it it unlocks like three multiplayer points like level up points for when the game comes out and it also offers you the ability to pre-order right there through home through Amazon giving you like a special home bonus as well as the Amazon bonus like to me it wasn't like when I saw it I was like it's it's a it's an interesting gimmick right it's like the most interesting use of home I've seen but for me it's like it's just interesting because it's like the the most like aggressive and smart way I've seen like the Sony people actually use home to be something of a marketing tool yeah but it's not going to make anybody use home they're going to go in it they're going to get their points and you're like this fucking sucks and get out that's what I thought you know most people are just going to pop in and be like I'm just here for the grind get my points believe but I think it is a it's it's something that they're planning on doing for a lot more feature games the most inventive interesting thing they're doing is linking to an outside retailer the ps3 yeah I just think it's interesting them having a built-in mini game like that too like yeah I mean like if if they did that kind of stuff and can make the rest of home not suck it might be worth spending time there yeah I just think it'll be interesting too because it just kind of brings up the idea of wonder I wonder what they're going to now that this is the first game they're rolling this out with and they obviously said as much that they have plans to others you know it's like what will we see for things like Uncharted and these other games you know maybe I'm just curious like if maybe eventually people like third parties will be like well we'll go with you Sony as an exclusive if you can offer some sort of home reskinning to totally advertise our game I just see like home as a potential marketing tool maybe I don't know how many people still use it I jumped in a couple weeks ago and there was people in there but yeah I jumped into it like I think I jump into it like twice a year exactly like twice a year and I'm like and there's always people in there but I'm but every time I'm like why are you here I just usually go up to everyone in home and say I don't have a keyboard it's like you can walk up to someone and say that was all I'm out I'm out I haven't been playing a whole lot of games I'm fired yeah I know but I have a good excuse my girlfriend is actually getting out of the hospital this week a whole week early from her cancer treatments so that's super fucking cool she's doing better at the game of being awesome exactly we're very very happy about that sounded we really need the sad prices right trumpet for that because I was really gonna say she's doing better at the game of life but then that just sound fucked up it's just it's it makes me very very happy it makes us very very sorry I was spending that much time with her you'd play a bunch of portable games that's like my mind what I picture no not really really no it's just I've been at the hospital a lot we've been watching a lot of TV and she's been sleeping a lot but I've mostly been watching Netflix that's what I was gonna say you've been playing the Netflix game I've been playing the Netflix game on my iPhone yeah and like I did play some more that game that I talked about like last year which is gun brothers just because it's something I could hop into play for half an hour or whatever but it's mostly just been because like oh one game actually did play a lot of like the last week at the hospital was powder which I think I've talked about before too which is a roguelike and they released an update to it and so I was like alright I'm gonna try it out and like it's it's still a roguelike the controls like it seems like it controls slightly better they added some more tap controls and stuff like that have you tried the game no human no no comma human no this really funny storytelling game like a command yeah it's this really funny storytelling game where it starts off with this guy in space and it's like once there was a guy in space and he's and he decided he was gonna colonize the universe and he's like I will colonize the universe and the universe said no and the space just pops up and it's like no human and then and then it's like and then the universe do rocks at him and then it just sits there at the screen and you still think it's a cinema and then it's like the universe through rocks at him and then you have to start throwing rocks at him to kill him basically the premise is that you're going wiping out human life throughout the universe after that we but I just think that if you want like a cute really cool style game to show people that's my quick shout out for that game because it's why and plus the name so awesome no human yeah and we've been and my girlfriend and I actually been playing a lot of words with friends so I've been getting back into that again words with friends is an excellent girlfriend game especially since she has my old iPhone now so just like we do a lot of back and forth on that even when we're sitting right next to each other it's funny and other than that it's just been like I'll hop into World of Warcraft for like an hour or two like usually in the morning or late at night and that's about it quick character sheet what level is your character highest 85 yeah I only have one character I only have one character yeah I'm a level 84 and I'm at the I'm at the endgame grind where it's just doing lots of dungeons over and over again but I actually over the Christmas break I got super into PvP which is something I've never done hardly at all in well before but I got really hardcore into it for like a few days that I had often it's really fun like I collected honor points and bought PvP gear with the honor points and everything and it turns out that either a lot of people suck at PvP or you're just really good or like I'm mysteriously good or maybe fire mages are sort of like a secretly awesome PvP class I don't know because like I'm usually at the top of the board and it's like I don't feel like I'm doing that good while I'm playing but then you know win or lose you know like I can't really affect whether or not the whole team wins or loses in a particular battleground but at the end of it like I'll usually be somewhere near the top of my team anyway yeah it's fun but like the I really enjoy the the way that the the new dungeoning system works how like you can group with anybody from any realm and it like the auto find dungeon thing but it does suck being DPS because you're sitting there for like 40 minutes waiting to get in I mean it never used to happen when I used to just spam in the looking for group channel you know the dungeon finder stuff that Blizzard added is like such a a testament to the way that they improve their games to make them just more and more and more user friendly right there is no more looking for a group on your own right like it's just like you say I want to find a group it finds it for you you join and when you're done with the dungeon it teleports you to write wherever you were in the world yeah right when you left off you don't have to even go to the dungeons no no you don't like you warp in with anybody from any other realm that's playing and you warp right back out where you left off so I mean granted I've been like if you're DPS you you really can wait half an hour 45 minutes before you get into a dungeon if you're a tanker a healer instant yeah so it's like if one of my tanker healer friends come on I'll be like you want to group up for a dungeon they're like sure and I'm like there I am I'm in but you know like in the meantime I'll just be flying around doing archeology stuff because that's like the new the new like the new hotness the new hotness the new profession that everybody can do it's like cooking or fishing or whatever anybody can do it on top of the when we talk about this Ryan's it's like babble to you know I understand he and he's played he played enough war world of warcraft in the beta and right when it first came out to sort of understand it oh I know how I mean I can like he's like I'm not I don't like I'm not fluent in the language but I can under like it's not it's not French to me I understand I just don't care it's more like British English yeah or Canadian or Canadian it's Canadian yeah anyway like I'm at the endgame grind again where you just have to do the same dungeons over and over and over again and I'm already losing interest so I did play the starting area of the worgen just because that's over really fast you know like maybe three or four hours of gameplay and you're done and then you're into the into the new old Azeroth you know and it was a really cool experience like because it's all it's it's really highly scripted single-player RPG style and it's they do the they do it really effectively in a way that there's like a massive battle going on that like you're losing then you're winning then you lose again you know and it's it's super fun and I'm like man the if if they because you know they've redone all of the old areas of Azeroth to make them more appealing and more fun to play through and I'm like if they've put kind of this level of polish into the old Azeroth that really really sucked then it could make it really fun to actually level up another character that's been a really huge barrier to me leveling up into the characters I just didn't never wanted to do that old Azeroth and now a lot of people are saying that like the the redone old zones like Ashenvale and the barons and all this stuff that's been redone is a lot better now and now people are bummed when they get to Outland because Outland still hasn't even though that was their very first expansion it still feels like the weakest yeah it feels the weakest now yeah so anyway that's that that was your that was your well minute exactly well well probably for your four while me that's too long yeah Tyler um yeah I've been playing a lot of bad company Vietnam enjoying that game yeah I haven't even touched that I haven't done the weird thing is like a couple if if I'm not like if I don't jump in with a random game with Mitchy D when I see him online I'm usually playing by myself because the two legit to quit crew really doesn't dig Vietnam is it because it doesn't it's not modern well I think I think that's sarcastic but I no no no no I think I think for them the level of chaos is just a little bit too high for them like it is a lot more chaotic than the other one up close yeah I mean I mean get your hands dirty it can get it can get almost like I played kills on to online a lot and it kills on to there would like be certain certain spots on certain maps where you would just be like a meet grinder where there would just be like so many dead guys from both teams and then medics just sitting on both side like reviving dudes right and that and that can happen a lot in Vietnam to definitely can what's how do you heal people in Vietnam you have a adrenaline syringe yeah yeah it's a hill kit or the syringe to bring them back to life and it's actually brings up where it starts out with the the M comm stations in the little valleys oh yeah that particular stage is a meet grinder it's dude it's so insane has such an advantage against the attackers like they will just mow you down again and again well and then here's the thing about like one side having an advantage over the other another thing I've noticed with all my gaming in Vietnam is if you join a team that's losing chances are you're gonna lose yeah whereas I've seen in bad and bad company many times you know you can come to from the book you can come from behind in Vietnam it seems like the winning team if you if you're on a winning team you will win every round why is that I think it's because and here's here's the reason why I'll tell you why I think because there there there's a straight bisection of the players there's the people who have been playing bad company two since it's came out and now they're playing Vietnam and then there's the fresh brand new players who are playing because of Vietnam and I think you know I can't tell you how many times I've been playing bad company two since it's come out and I'm just I'm barely level 36 because of the 50 you know I have almost 200 hours in the game and I can't tell you how many times I've been put on teams of just like nothing but like level 20s and like level 14s out you know up against like level 50s and 47s I just I don't know if it's that so much as it's just certain skill sets like or even just the combat you can't fight safely anymore like someone can't come into the game and be awesome like in conquest and just rob the other side of tickets from across the map because they're they have an M60 with a 4x scope you have to get up you have to get dirty and you'll probably only get like two or three kills before you get killed and that evens the playing field more but for the teams that are really good up close it just they just run all over the other side so but it seems to me like those are problems that could be alleviated by map design though and you know what and I think well designed the maps are great there's some of dice's best maps but I think it is specifically you know I think that's one of the major things that adds to it because they're all they're all designed with very specific and very tight choke points all the maps trenches trenches and tunnels I mean tunnels I mean there's kind of things where you could everywhere every time you spawn you throw grenades down that tunnel yeah if you're winning you're holding that line if you're losing you can't get across it you know but but on the until sometimes you do sometimes you'll catch that lucky break and you'll break their line of defense and then you'll start running all over them yeah you know and in situations where you do that it's like they're they're back at your base spawn killing you but like you have one squad breakthrough and planet charge your uber and then you know it requires much more effective teamwork than than bad company to proper did yeah but there's a lot of things that it does that I really wish would feed back into bad company to for example any weapon can damage the helicopter any fire from pistol to any machine gun yeah they're the small arms work again and it takes them down that's good that's something that bad company to definitely need like a six shots motherfucker yeah takes them down and it's fifth shot with one bullet left in the chamber you know I mean you know it makes no sense to me that you can't shoot like through the cockpit of an Apache you know I think there's a UAV either no no there's no you which is good yeah and I say this being a pretty hardcore UAV whore yeah right like I'm just like annihilating every like the other teams vehicle capability all the time like it's good that there's no UAV but yeah you know the some some of the things I think that that also really improve on the formula is I don't know in this in in this game it seems a lot more important to not compromise your position by like firing early like that seems to be like the thing because there's so much camouflage in all the levels one of the main like dead giveaways of like where there's enemies is the flash the muzzle flash so it's like you know I you know I remember like watching the Pacific you know when they get into their first conflict it's like all you see it like on the other side of the bank is muzzle flash like coming at you and that's very much what it's like in in Battlefield Vietnam at least it's in in Vietnam stuff you can you pick when you're looking to join a game I was just thinking about this like can you pick whether you want to be American or European you know it isn't it is I know isn't that funny it's like it's like back in the day I remember a lot of games having a search option that you can be like no I only want to play as deceptive I mean yeah on PC you can I suppose but it's just that's one of those things that people don't care about anymore you know it just seems like back in the day I used to well that's because I want only be blue team well that's because they realize that you know no matter how many incentives you have unless somebody decides to you know run their own server and set a certain flag everybody would stack to one side you know it's the only way to get rid of that is to not let people and I guess you know having open picking you know not came out factions makes for quicker quick matches it's just one of those things that I just noticed that I don't miss but it was one of those things that it was such a thing for me back in the day with picking factions and only searching for games where I could be certain factions nowadays no one cares an encounter strike there were certain maps where I would never be one side of the other exactly and just nowadays no one gives a shit yeah other than a battlefield Vietnam I've also been playing a little big planet - sweet pretty tight I got it yesterday and Jody and I you know I played through the first one with Jody and man it's the first one is just so much fun to play along like with my companion because I don't know I just enjoy experience going through a game and she's enjoying it even though my skill level is a little higher than her and I could be going a little bit faster but you know it's more fun my experience playing a little big planet the first one when you're playing with someone who isn't particularly good yeah because you'll have those moments where you'll jump and hit the thing and grab it and they'll be like barely holding on to your foot yeah exactly laughing because yes much harder with the second person I find for the guy I think it is to yeah I would like there there's some stages where you're like where you you know as the skill player you're still having trouble making those jumps and then you know because the platforming isn't very good right and then you know your my girlfriend when she was trying to do the jumps like a part that would take me two minutes to beat together and then takes us like ten minutes to get through or something like that but because they didn't pull any punches in the first one there were stages and stuff that was fucking hard to get towards the end like the ones that were Japanese themed mmm fuck those stages were hard oh yeah you had to make really precision jumps yeah little poles and stuff like that yeah I've been playing to also I got it yesterday I think it's I didn't like the first world as much as I did the stuff in little big planet one like little little big planet one I think right off the bat you know the music the colors of the stages is just like really vibrant and bright and you've never experienced it before so it all felt really fresh and you know just really appreciating like wow they did this in the editor like maybe you know I could do this as well the feeling of it kind of reminded me the first time I played Katamari a little bit like that yeah anyway it was just a really brilliant thing and so I'm into the second world of the single player and you know I just got it I haven't done any I'm sure there's already a bunch of awesome like user created stages and stuff but I haven't experienced anything yet but I did play through the first world and into the second one and off the bat the first world to me like it's dark it's really dark and it's it so I just didn't feel as happy as the first game did and the some of the tutorials are almost exactly the same like you're holding the arch r1 to pull your block over so that you can jump up this thing and and I don't think that the the platforming is aged gracefully you know it already wasn't that great to begin with it was something that you learned to work around and it it feels it felt harder to me to make jumps then it did in the first game and I don't know I'm sure it's not but it just did and then they start piling on more more mechanics in the first world they give you this grappling hook that using a bunch of the stages and if you thought it was hard to you know make up make a jump properly man it can be really hard to swing properly with the the way the physics are you know I just want them to like make it not physics based at all with the grapple and make it work more like by on a commando or something like that where it's really discrete and you know exactly how far you're gonna go but man you're I was I was struggling getting all the items if you're a perfectionist and you want to collect everything it will drive you insane then into the second world it's starting to started to brighten up a bit and some of the extra abilities that you get like there's one that lets you pick up blocks which is really a lot like a well I thought of the guts man ability and mega man one where you could like you know pick up a giant block and throw it like it's kind of like that and that was much more fun and there's a stage where you're shooting cakes that stick to things so you can like yes basically build platforms that you can jump on and that was much cooler I mean the cut their cutscenes and the secondary characters in this game are like way better than the first one and you can sort of tell while you're watching the cutscenes they were made using the cutscene editor that you have access to in the game and that is what's really impressive about it I mean when you're looking at all this and you're thinking man they made all this and I could do this if I was you know so inclined really into that time and other people will do things of this quality I mean there's no doubt about it that this game has so much more depth and will be much more amazing in the long run than the first one I was just a little disappointed that the first stage didn't grab me the same way that it I mean the first time I played little big plan I was like wow immediately and this one I think gets off to a little slower start you know I definitely agree with that in terms of even the way the first one you know a super creative the way it first started out the way they did the intro credits you actually played through them and I did the exact same thing this time you know it you know and from it's you know from a game where the intro movie tells you the whole premise is about creativity and like where creative ideas go it's like you know you're kind of using the same ideas you know to start your game off every year but but still and yeah I do see what you're saying in terms of like the first stage is you know there's like a lot of like the rats around like eating cheese and stuff it's just kind of not very it's just really brown and dark and shadowy and not like vibranine green and happy with trees I don't know like I just that first stage that whole first world of little big planet one I was just like it's really inviting it's it's graphically it's beautiful like the stylization of it all is just like I don't know I was like wow this looks so much this is like what I imagined you know Mario games would look like when I was a kid if they were something you know like it's it's this beautiful 3d it's great and the new game still looks like that in fact it's better technically it's just the particular art direction they chose for the first stage just doesn't throw me mm-hmm I don't know it seems dark but it's still it's still cool game I'm planning to go back and I'm sure in the long run it's gonna be awesome and people are gonna make awesome stages you know when I was watching you play earlier today in world two is when you started to hit some stages that had some really awesome music yeah I got a lot oh yeah that's the other thing is that right from the bat in in little big planet one the music is so awesome it's like man the soundtrack for that game was so good and it really took till world two in in little big planet two when I was like all right here's a really cool song I still haven't hit any vocal tracks that totally blow my mind but you know it's it's getting better so I'm happy about that cool tight man I also played a little bit of a Starcraft 2 sweet got my first taste of that over the the holiday break single player yeah yeah I played through the campaign on my brother's PC and I got I think I got to the very last mission nice like it seemed like some serious shit was about to go down but I didn't get to play all the way through were you playing on his account or yours I just like a guest or it was like an alternate save I just started a new okay campaign and man just playing through there it you know I really want first-person shooter designers to go play these to play Starcraft 2 and say look like this is an RTS game but they do so many like sub genres within RTS you know like there are times where it even feels like tower defense at times or like the stages where the the fire is creeping from one side it kind of reminds me of what what was that game where you're like a raptor like running from a fire I don't know you're a dinosaur it was like a side drawer oh but anyway but you know I I liked how they took the set variables of the of the gameplay and then just like scrambled it up and just made a bunch of different types of missions to do and to me I mean not many RTS games do a very good job of that now again with they pretty much are always like you build a base you collect resources and you stomp on them with them like big shit yeah well I mean well or or even a game like company heroes does a really great job of switching it up but they still don't go quite to the to the extent that Starcraft to know it's true almost every other way Anthony I were talking about this yesterday and don't award to actually does a really good job of mixing things up and that's because they don't have bases to be able to see this sounds hype to me and also I mean there's character development and loot grinding and skill progression in a way that I mean some of that stuff is there in Starcraft yeah the way it's there and all the way they do it different like in Starcraft you choose like what mission you want and that gives you a little bit of felt research like our research yeah the research I'm creating the troops and buying the troop types of stuff like that yeah I like I thought that was so fun like going all after all the secondary mission objectives when you get another chance to try to tell you should probably try some of the user created content because that's where the the really cool stuff is happening but I'm ashamed of that I haven't actually tried more like I played this game and I I bet there's a I bet there's a like a Dota mod out there is already Dota mods there's also this reason when I saw they got coverage which is like this guy made like a there's a world of Warcraft but in Starcraft where you go in you pick the character you're gonna play you pick a class I'm gonna be a human marine right pops up a human marine you pick you like yeah that'll be gone yeah I know this podcast well well yeah I was reading about it Blizzard C indeed that video on YouTube and now they're going after the people that did the game really it's in there it's in their game creating tools yeah and I don't think this is a Starcraft 2 thing I thought it was no no no it's it no it's a world of wow it's a wow hack oh I thought I thought it was a Starcraft attack oh if it's a like I thought it was done using using the mod was being the same right now I thought it was done using the user generated tools which me too because I found the video that they that they took down from YouTube and that you're right it was Starcraft tools used to attempt to create a standalone MMO yeah yes it just seems like oh it's because it's standalone that's the oh standalone yeah they're trying to create a standalone MMO that's okay I thought it was just something you can download a map to play it lights down Activision's actually been really aggressive this week and pulling down stuff that yeah if they were gonna if if if they were like fucking with somebody who just made a map I'd be like what the hell but right now trying to make a standalone thing that's odd tools in Starcraft to actually have some pretty severe limitations like I think there's like a 40 megabyte limit to anything that you do that you share publicly mm-hmm there are still some cool things being done oh I'm sure regardless I just haven't kept up on it but the occasional times I do go and look at videos and stuff I'm like wow man people really do some stuff that I still find it hard to find the good stuff like in their browser like you you do have to find it outside on the internets somewhere right and then search for a problem with user created content yeah well a little big fun always did a good job with that cuz you could just search for most hearted and stuff like that right it's better than most yeah it is better than most not great I saw when I was playing I saw something like Nick Suttner has you know just played this level and rated it this and then it had an actual written review like with more than you know three letters which I don't know if you typed it on his controller plugged in a keyboard or what but I was like well there you go sweetest lazy I don't want to have to find the awesome shit in a game to play I want them to deliver it to me that's pretty much the only reason why the only one I've ever really done that with this little big planet yeah kind of how it works easy but every other game like trials and stuff anyone or if someone's like I wanna make your friends so I can share my maps and like not like I think for just a fantastic idea but fucked if I ever play anything in it yeah I don't even know how to get custom maps like inhale I've never tried as I want to play the ski ball the forage ski ball I'm sure I'll really cool and play invasion on Hogwarts thanks you use that for you well well yeah and just getting into Starcraft two made me jump back into company of heroes as well you know it's good one to jump back into kind of scratch my RTS you know that sack yeah enjoy it because you'll probably never play another company here is until the free to play one that is to me why because it never made the money back yeah yes but that was basically an engine expenditure we can talk about it did you hear that it agaki studios using tech from relic no for their game probably the stuff they're using for space marine imagine probably but to me it seems that company of heroes is like the perfect like a human warfare game people don't care about World War II anymore I think I think too I think it's one of their it's their best RTS franchise to but yeah the only time we'll ever talk about that or really have reason to is when the free to play version comes out for all this yeah so you know Ryan one thing that I'm going to start replaying that me saying this will send you down a dark path is I decided I'm going to replay mirrors edge on my PC with everything maxed out it's an 80p running through to my new TV I wonder if that'll work I mean the does that with all the dumb physics stuff yes yeah like I tried that on my PC and turned on the physics and everything yeah I'm glad that yours is badass because it totally destroyed mine mine won't do it like as soon as as soon as I break a window my frame rate literally goes to one I haven't gotten far enough to break a window so maybe I still have said oh yeah I'm talking about is when windows break that's ridiculous we'll see I mean I could conceivably just throw an old Nvidia card in there and use that for physics hmm there you go here I think we're done with it we're done with that that's good because we went for an hour and a half we're fucking done here anyway I've played so many games I couldn't even choose I could do like a one minute wrap up I'm like seven games or I could ask you guys if you want to hear about any of the games that I played but I played so many games it's ridiculous you come on again next week yeah I guess I'll do it vanquish bow shock to red dead undead nightmare little big planet which we talked about the fracked beta which is really cool you should just uh everyone should Google go to fracked beta it's a playable on PC and Mac it'll take you like an hour to play through it it's mind-bending I mean we could spend another half hour time on games Anthony finished enslaved finally oh and here's another thing radian games they're Xbox live indie games if you go to the indie store just go to search by letter go to our radian like you know mathematical term radian radian games all one word they're all lined up right there they're 80 points each which I guess is a dollar pretty much any of those is a solid bet in terms of I mean like one of them's like geometry wars one's like abstract gauntlet one's like geometry wars pacifism mode but like amped up one's sort of like Pac-Man with like that's more abstract that one's fluid I mean there's they're just really cool if you're looking for something quick and cheap to play I would highly recommend checking out the radian games and I can come back and talk about other things later alright like vanquish you should talk about it next week so we can argue about vanquish why are we gonna argue about it because I don't think vanquish is very good I don't either oh really son of a bitch high five so that we can high five and give each other below jobs but how vanquish is totally overrated oh it's super overrated alright super friends this is how there is a strength in the world we must unite again there is a strength in the world our friends are deep inside we struggle we struggle so far we must come together we struggle we struggle and we will live forever two years ago well not from the day but a little bit over two years and a week this podcast was made and we asked I asked you on Twitter for some of you to give your best memories of the podcast and Jojo Fett 16 says that his favorite memory of our podcast is using the podcast as my pitboy station and Fallout 3 I didn't even know you could do that whoa neither did I on the PC probably I mean it's probably a PC mod yeah I mean on the 360 you can just use it as a soundtrack gravitics says that his favorite was Robert Ashley chimp face ripoff talk goddamn that was episode eight that's a long time ago X equals chimp attack yep it's funny because you know hardly any of them are like I really liked it the words you guys had to say about this game was really smart they're mostly like it's not memorable we actually have a lot of a pretty new listeners do you want to just quickly go over what happened like why this podcast started well two years ago me Matt and Ryan and a bunch of other people were laid off so we all came to the house and recorded a podcast on some really crappy equipment that day we got laid off and put it up and then there was no real plan to keep it going per say it happened I think there's a plan to keep it going there's just no plans for what it would be well Nick and Phil kind of had a plan to keep it going really the whole start of the show was really at Nick and Phil's like pushing because yeah it was like the one up FM was the that you know this was the new unaffiliated with one up version of one up FM to them right and so and so we kind of mostly at first provided a venue for Nick and Phil to like because they didn't have equipment or anything like that and I was like oh we have some really shitty equipment that could be a website I could host and then it just you know are there being my roommate and being friends with everyone kind of got integrated into it and then Nick and Phil left for one reason or another and then before the layoffs happened we had been talking with Nick about just starting up like a little side podcast for a couple of months and we were going to do that once the years started yeah so just kind of all worked out and then you know they left and we decided to keep it going because it was fun. So here we are. And I got one of us a Jourb. Jourb. Jourb. Let's see. UC Raiders says his favorite memory is the last Christmas episode though he also feels the bully game club episodes were especially good. Nice. Some of my favorite times were definitely some of our game club episodes as well. I love game club. I think our half like game club is the best game club we ever did. It's true if I were to quit. That was a good one. If I were to quit doing this podcast and say we would stop it would mostly be because I would want to do game club instead because sometimes game club was really fun. A particular club was always really fun. It's just such an enormous time commitment. It is but I also had so much fun. I mean to me maybe I'm like remember remembering a much better but man for some reason the call of Cthulhu and I just remember being really fun. I don't know why. The call of Cthulhu one was really fun and it was because the game was like so broken in some ways and but you could still like do things in different ways. I don't know. I'm glad we didn't specifically that game because it gave me an excuse to finish it and I know I know no no no no that I never would have finished that game even though I owned it and had started in the first you know. There are lots of games there's game club that I probably never would have played except for having that opportunity. I can think of the game that I would want to do for a game club if we were to start back up again. Dead Space One. Dead Space Two. Brutal legend actually. I mean it's one of those games that I would never play otherwise. I played it and I don't want to play it. We did we we never finished the Splinter Cell one that was our last one. Tyler, I'm assigning the blame to you on that one. It was a confluence of stuff that just sort of conspired to make it impossible to continue. Well you guys also got like real lives and real jobs. All the layoffs happened at IGN and Anthony. I got transferred to IGN and things got busier. Yeah a lot of people in general on Twitter. The general consensus. There are two things that people seem to say episode eight with Robert Ashley and and game club. But a lot of people really like to you. How can people not say when Robert and Tyler broke out into the Ghostbusters 2 theme song? What's wrong with you people? Basically it's just any any episode where Robert actually was on is probably a favorite moment for somebody. Doug Tron 33 says when you became Dear Abby and Landers alone the gaming geeks. I don't even I don't even know exactly how that happened. Originally the only letters we ever used to read on the show were letters that were sent to EGM right that we never that that were just going to get thrown away. So we just started reading them. My favorite of all those by the way was the guy that that wrote to EGM with that invoice about what you owe me. Oh yeah. And he had like the full invoice of like eight dollars that they owed him and he has company was called like you owe me incorporated or whatever. It's pretty funny. But I remember I remember when it started where it was just like you know I don't even I don't remember what the letter was but I remember us like you reading a letter from somebody asking for relationship advice and us going like none of us are qualified for this but fuck it. Let's do it anyway. My favorite rebel if a moment is the was the Mass Effect 2 spoiler cast. It was really good. It was like my favorite co-op moment was the Assassin's Creed 2. I watched that. It was really fun. That was fun. It just goes to show you that talking about an entire game is better than not talking about an entire game. Yeah. That's true. That's why I like game quotes so much. I still think there's got to be one day we'll figure out the way to make that a reality for you know permanently. Yeah. It's a permanent reality. It is so good. That is the best way to talk about games. It is over a couple of weeks. I think I think I've disappointed some people too against some of these Twitter comments because some people are like I really love the stories used to tell about Civ 4 because yeah I love to tell stories about the way I play that game is so horrible but I think I made that game sound more fun to some people than it is. It is fun right? To me it's honestly fun. But it's really slow and I think when someone tells you stories like I do about enslaving people and stuff you think you're going to get into this action pack game and then you sit down at Civ and you're like what the fuck? Something to me is that for Axis made fundamental changes to Civ 5 that pretty much killed your storytelling days in Civ. It's true. Religion. Not having religion. Yeah in Civ 5 like if you're going for a specific goal you have to be going from that goal from the beginning unless you're going to get a time victory. And in Civ 4 it felt like it could evolve a little bit more organically or you didn't really have to plan for it from the beginning. But in Civ 5 there are very definite key strategies and very definite technologies and you know like milestones. Like milestones. You need to get to. Yeah I always turn off the time victory. I don't like that one. Nope. Not that I don't want it. I still love Civ 5. Yeah but this one guy named Banana Rider. Banana Rider. I like this one because he says the time you shared pooping stories on Rebel FM and you shot poop with a gun on a hunting trip and it exploded. I didn't even know I talked about it. My friends when I get together and everything I shooting are always like man let's shoot another poop. That's the only half regret I have about the fact that the Game Spy debriefings from PAX Audio was irretrievable. Was that was the only time I ever told a poop story? Arthur's one poop story lost to us forever. There was concern that it would get us fired. I think if anybody was going to get fired for the Game Spy debriefings it would have happened by now. This was actually too hot for TV Game Spy debriefings. I'll be honest. We horrified a good many employees from IG on that day. Wow. Yeah more than a couple of people also said they just their favorite one was going home and listening to it you know right when all the shit went down. I was going to say that has to be up there for some people. Right just because it was like oh it came out the day we got laid off. Yeah I mean it was the best thing that we could have done was just get right back on the air and I was really glad to get to do that. You can still go back and listen to that somehow. I did listen to it. The sound quality is fucking awful but we're all there and we're all there. Well because we're passing around like two mics and we're hoarding into my digital 8-track. No it's cool you know it feels like one of my you know it feels like a garage podcast. The I still remember the episode where Nick didn't have any of the microphones on and we record the entire podcast through the Max internal mic. I totally forgot about that. There was a huge learning curve for us. It's actually it was an appearance by Robert Ashley that finally fixed the audio on the podcast. Yeah Robert came and showed us and he's like oh your buttons are all set up wrong. And then after that we just glued the knobs in place. I'm just kidding we didn't. I mean I think Skip had learned to do audio a certain way that involved analog equipment and that's the way that our stuff was set up and then Robert who has handled digital recording equipment much more frequently came in and was like oh well we'll just have to do this and this. Many many more years of recording and stuff as well. But Skip got us set up with equipment like he was definitely the one who put that on the right track. That was the first time it sounded good. So thanks for all your comments Twitter people. You all generally seem to love Robert Ashley. That's one thing I learned from reading that. Like we didn't know that already. Yeah exactly. But unanimously almost everyone said episode eight. Yeah I've never come back and listen to it. I remember that episode afterwards we went to Denny's at 1230 at night and had awful food and milkshakes. Oh yeah that's right. On your dimes. No that was when we were still we had just barely gotten donation money. Right. And we were still being very very very we're still very strict with it I'll say but we were very strict at that time. Yeah. So we were deciding we had all these lofty plans. Like are we going to start a business? Were you going to do all these things and make money? I mean there were offers to incorporate into other businesses. But none of them just felt right. Alright so now I'm going to go write into letters starting off with a really depressing one. Oh great. It's also our most recent letter but I couldn't not read this one. It's titled my girlfriend is going to die. Oh god. I've come pretty close to that. Mike says I am 19 and my girlfriend is 18. We've been dating for five months and we've developed a really good unique bond. The other day she told me that we needed to talk. I immediately panicked and when she started off by saying I've been hiding something from you. I assume she was going to tell me that she had cheated on me. However things turn took an unexpected turn when she told me she could barely go more than two weeks without getting sick and had recently started peeing blood. Her doctor suspects she has an autoimmune disease and she's going to see a specialist to get confirmation. Next week she told me that if her doctor's prediction is true she may only have two to three years left to live. I have no idea how to handle this situation or what to do. I was wondering if you've ever faced something similar? Yes. It's a short answer. It's a matter of speaking. There's always the fear that in my situation that my girlfriend's cancer would not respond to chemo in which case we had to talk about are you going to die. Yeah if it takes time for the worse. Yeah and you don't ever want to be in that situation so I super feel for you. But for us you know everything turned out very well. She had a very curable form of cancer. She responded to the chemo and everything looks to be moving on the up and up. All I can really say is that at least for me I knew that I loved her enough that if it was going to take her from me I was going to get every day out of it that I could and I was going to see it through to the end. If you don't feel that way then I don't really know what to tell you. I mean like the only piece of advice that I feel like I can give is don't fuck with her heart and don't later on. Yeah and if she doesn't have a lot of time then she should spend it as well as possible. I would say that's probably yeah. I mean like you may feel like oh I have to stick with her out of some misguided obligation in order to not hurt her feelings while she's in this bedtime. But I mean if you end up like if you end up not being able to handle it and leaving her later that's worse. And you're young and I know what I was like at 18. Yeah. You know you just have like a totally different perspective everything is smaller and more important you know. Because you're still not completely a person yet. Yeah so I guess you know even though it doesn't mean anything when someone tells you this like you're still young and you have a lot of life ahead of you and so try to keep your emotions in check and think before speaking and be a man. Don't be a little bitch. That's very interesting like I was a Jodie got for Christmas the first season of Breaking Bad the TV show. I don't know if any of you guys have seen it. I have. And it deals with the main character is dealing with cancer or terminal illness. And I tweeted about this recently there's like one particular episode in the first season where they really deal with cancer. And I was just like wow like it's one of the most amazing single television episodes I've ever seen. And you know it just really brings you through the whole complexity of you know of issues of dealing with mortality of someone you love. And yeah. I liked your advice Ryan. Be a man. Be a man. Don't be a bitch. I'm more I'm saying don't be a boy. Yeah. Be a man. Like for her. For her and for you. Like it's the type of thing where obviously if she passes like that that's terrible for her. But it's also going to be really bad for you. And it could ruin someone's life if they weren't careful. Yeah. So I don't know much about autoimmune deficiency. I mean well I know. It could be something like her immune system attacking. Yeah. Like ravaging her own system. It could mean a lot of things. I just. I'm just saying like if you if you know she's somebody that you want to be with then you need to stick with her. If you don't know that then you might want to figure it out. Like sometimes quote unquote being a man means sacking up and making the hard choice of being honest about how you feel either way. I had a horrible story involving autoimmune deficiency syndrome. Which I guess it's a form of it sounds like AIDS but it's without the virus basically it's it's not it's like I've heard people to get it and they get it. It's like a form you get though. It's not sexually transmitted like it just comes and on sets on some people as like a genetic defect. And I knew this girl in high school who had what how had it who was under karate class. And I remember none of us knew she had it. And it was just like she would always come in and she was such a jerk. She would always be like quit hitting me like a girl. One day I just I still regret it because I just outright slugged her man dropped her. She never came back and then they told me shit on immune deficiency syndrome and I felt like an asshole. Oh I hear that's caused by punching. She told me quit hitting her like like she was a girl and I was like fine. I'll hit you. And I just felt like she's and that statement with the word faggot. All right. Well next letter on a happier letter. William writes and he says what game made you feel the most accomplished after you finished Jesus Christ really we're following that up with I recently beat this little iPhone game called today I die. It is a hundred percent free and I urge you to buy it. Yeah. After getting past some of its tricky parts and beating the game 15 minutes I felt really good about myself. I then bought ice cream. Ninja Gaiden or Ninja Gaiden 2 on 360 or on Xbox 360? I will say that very recently I finally beat Indigo prophecy and that left me feeling pretty satisfied because I tried to beat it like five years ago and it never happened because I got to this part I just could not beat. So I haven't gone back and finally done it. I felt really satisfied beating Ninja 5.0. It's a it's a awesome game a fucking awesome kind of rare GBA game. It was this is like I don't know this must have been like 2002 or 2003 something like that and everybody I was working at games by the time and everybody around the office was talking about how hard this game was and I got it and I played it and I beat it in like record time. That's sort of a savant at that game. If you know the game it's sort of buying a commando-ish you have a grappling hook and only you can control it really well. There's lots of physics that you can do with it. So definitely not buying a commando-rearm too. No it's it's definitely worth tracking. It is a it is a very good game worth tracking down like small title. I think I want to say Konami but I could be wrong but yeah I've watched Matt play it and I have myself played it and he is ridiculously good at it. I started doing like all the speed runs and stuff like that and trying to get the the best possible times that I could and I don't know that's like one of those games like I'm sure everybody has one or two games in their lives. It's just they've super clicked with and this was the one for me and it was very satisfying. I can't think of one. I've beat a lot of games and lit more recently I stopped playing game like if a game if I don't want to play it I don't force myself to I don't have time for that. So yeah I have no answer. Yeah. I'm always really happy when I beat every game like I'm always excited. There is a conscious to finishing just like to feel like you finished something. Yeah. True. But I mean like the I think he is talking about more of that like sort of rush of accomplishing something through skill like Mass Effect 2 you can totally not be good at and still be you know. Right. Yeah I'm trying to think of a skill game I finished. I will say that beating Mass Effect 2 and on the first try having my entire squad survive. That's satisfying. That would be satisfying because I lost people and I lost like everybody on my ship. For me Mass Effect 1 beating it was satisfying because I told myself that no matter what happened I wasn't going to stop I was I might replay it but I was always going to let that first one be like oh that's what happened. Right. Right. Every rain was going for me too. You know. I did that with heavy rain as well. Yeah I didn't I never reload it. Oh you know I did I did reload heavy rain once and that was because like I felt like there was a bad. I felt like there was a bad user interface element where it was like you're in the water and you're trying to it's like when the car goes in the water and you're trying to to cut her free and there was there's like an indicator on something like right on the window on the door and I ended and it looked like I needed to press the thing to cut her out which is what I wanted to do but it ended up like him going out the window or whatever instead and I was like that wasn't fair that was not what I intended to do. I let her die. It was an exceptionally moving moment for me in the game and she was the only person that died in my first play. Yeah I would have let her die if I felt that I hadn't been cheated. Who? Lauren Winter. This one guy wrote in named Britain and he just wanted to know what our thoughts were on Star Wars the Clone Wars because he's surprised that we never talked about it. I think it's also awesome. I just don't know when we would have had an opportunity to talk about it say for the fucking abortion of a game that came out based on the show which doesn't know justice whatsoever. No not at all but the Clone Wars is pretty good. I think it's pretty good too. It's better than the movies. What was that? It's all like a preview of like a recent Lego Star Wars games that's coming out like it's like RTS or something. Really? I don't know. It's Lego Battles or something like that. Yeah. Oh well they know battles for it wasn't RTS for DS. Right they're releasing another one and I think it might be Star Wars. Yeah it's like 360 and you know it's all video of it. I hate you man so much because I said whacktastic. Did you guys see that news article out linked to today on Twitter with like Seth Rogen talking about his meeting with George Lucas the other day? Oh shit. George Lucas set him down and it was like him George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Oh shit. And that at first Seth Rogen thought Lucas was joking but he said Lucas went on for like 25 minutes about the end of the world in 2012. That's interesting. Like what does that tell you? Like wow like you know the future of a Star Wars franchise the person who holds it thinks the world's going to end. There are a lot of people that think the world's going to end. I'm not one of them I'm just saying. I know I can't wait I'm keeping an open mind. It could. It could also end tomorrow. What the fuck do I know? I always say I'm ready for a giant shakeup. I saw people were linking to the California Superstorm. Did you guys saw that? That was hilarious. Yeah you're fucking coworker link to that. That's right. And I didn't I like open the thing and read like the first sentence and a half and I was like yeah don't care. I don't want it I don't care like if it happens. I'm I'm always living in California. I think you always have to be ready for the possibility that some natural disaster probably an earthquake could happen in any moment where to Christ I felt an earthquake at like four o'clock in the morning on Tuesday. There was one just the other day like in the middle of there was one a week ago too. Yeah we were sitting there playing games while it happened. I was like crazy earthquake like I actually heard a rumble. Oh yeah. I mean I think if you want to be paranoid about like the things you're about next year being the end of the world you should be afraid to leave your house at any time or live life like at that because it's just as likely to me that you get by car or that a meteor is going to strike earth and kill all life. You know like your chair like could break right now you could break your neck. I guess that my perspective is that I'm semi like excited about it like for example if something happened where you know let's say San Francisco got flooded by the Superstorm and 25% of the people were killed or something like that assuming I'm not one of the 25% of three of you right here or your friends go right so assuming family assuming I make it right all the sudden life as we know it is different and I have you know I have to use the skills that I've accrued to this point in my life to you know decide how to move forward from that point. You know how you would move forward like move to Sacramento. It wouldn't be that exciting. Well okay maybe that was a bad example. All I'm saying is that if something crazy happened and life changed in a dramatic way that forced me to you know live differently I'd be up for that. I feel like I just can't I just can't picture that happening without somebody that I don't want to die dying. Oh no no I'm not sure worth it. Oh I don't know if there's a really bad earthquake. Guys I like I can't even believe you are entertaining these things is like something that could actually happen. No we're just imagining it as if. No I'm not taking as back I'm saying I'm saying like prophesied no no no no no no no no no no no no no no. I'm not saying that I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying I'm saying anything could happen at any point right. Yeah I'm saying I'm saying someone could attack us right there could we could get bombed by North Korea right and like it's it would be a total like the same way that 9/11 was a life-changing moment for us. Out of destruction. Out of the ashes of destruction rise creation. Sort of that but it's more like I've you know I know what that my life is like right now it's a very sort of even though my job has changed over the past few years it's a fairly stable sort of thing like I wake up in the morning I'm probably going to do a job go to sleep at night and on the weekends you know I'm going to chill a little bit. You're saying if there was a chance to become a wasteland savior you'd take it. Or if all of a sudden I just had to learn a new set of skills and like I think that would be an exciting thing for you know to live a completely different type of life that we've never gotten. Just you know Tyler I wasn't saying I wasn't saying that they're the 2012 things happening I'm saying they have equal credence to me as the idea I'm saying it's just as likely to me that a natural catastrophe could destroy the world as a meteor could do it tomorrow you know what I mean it's like all these things are within the realm of possibility. Yeah it's not worth worrying about. I'm not saying it's supernatural but I'm just saying that I don't worry about any of this stuff. Like I say slightly excited about the possibility of living a totally different life. Well get excited about little things. I am. I mean I think it doesn't that doesn't detract from my love of my current life either. So that's all I'm saying I'm just saying like I don't look at things negatively. I think that's the exact psychology that plays into the people who are sort of like way down with all the 2012 like conspiracy theories. They hate their life so much that they wanted something to change it. Yeah and it's a lot you know. They want George Lucas to make a new Star Wars movie. Yeah. Blank slate. Alright so after that strange tangent Chris writes in and he says what are some of the gaming trends from the last year you thought were great or are excited about for the coming year. Are there any recent trends you dislike and would like to see disappear from 2011. I feel like some of you would probably want to see 3D disappear. Yeah me and Claire 3D. I do. I don't know man. I think at this point it's become clear that none of the current generation consoles can handle 3D adequately. Like the 360 can handle it technically okay but it's HDMI connection doesn't allow for real time switching between 3D and non 3D so you have to do special settings and reset your console and it's a nightmare. Whereas the PS3 has really good HDMI support but the performance level isn't there. So it's fucked either way. The most to me the most exciting thing about 3D is Glass is Free 3D which is why the 3DS is actually interesting but I feel like 3D would be better on something like an iPad where you could sell 3D movies to a store if that was interesting to people and the screen size was a little bit bigger yeah but you know if you're in bed and you're laying it with it right in front of your face then it's basically full screen. Large scale Glass is Free 3D for people's homes is still a long time away like 2 to 3 years at best. Oh yeah 100% agree. I don't think 3D is going to sell the 3DS particularly well honestly. Yeah I don't want a 3DS for 3D. I want a 3DS just for a more powerful handheld system. I don't know why you would want that why not away from the PSP2. Well I also want a PSP2. I was going to say the PSP2 is very likely to be what you want then because you know you're going to get dual analog sticks, touch sensitive back areas so that you know you have basically the home console experience on you know on the go. Whereas the 3DS is going to be some combination of all of the above with the big overriding difference being assuming the PSP2 doesn't have 3D. Well a touch screen too. A touch screen is different. We still don't know. I question any handheld video game systems coming out now without a cell phone signal. That's another one. Yeah. Honestly. I think that the biggest the best trend of this year to go back to the question is very cheap downloadable games and I would like to see that trend continue. It actually does surprise me that going into 2011 that more of these publishers and developers don't make more iPhone games like EA is all over it like EA is even making games now that are completely unrelated to franchises. EA is scratching and scrabbling toward profitability though. Right well it's true but I'm saying that they they to me are smart and that they're taking advantage of the iPhone marketplace and the app store and stuff and all these other publishers like the THQs and stuff like that like they may hire someone else to do but even then that's not like they're just not very active there like I just don't see a lot of people active there and I'm just surprised that that market hasn't taken off with more of the publishers and game developers that we've heard of. I mean the bigger ones that have had success are like ID like they've done well you know and it's like but it's like an anomaly you know. Yeah infinity blade did pretty well didn't it? Exactly but I'm saying but these we hear about these but then we don't hear you know but it's more surprising to me that there isn't like smaller teams at these other studios like oh let's just do one of those like really it's such an interesting space to me. That is a trend I would like to see grow. Yeah and the sort of related the trend that I saw last year is it seemed like there were a few more games like full on AAA retail games that were available as downloads. Yeah and that's a trend I would like to see grow and continue like I'm kind of not the person who needs boxes anymore. I mean like granted you know like running out of hard drive space sucks and that's a problem that needs to be solved but I just like the idea of being able to download my big games. I don't think that that's going to happen very much. Honestly I think hackers ruined it last year. Microsoft was on the verge of starting it. Yeah and they and hackers just ruined it. So I think the like the thing that I loved that happened last year the most that I'm so excited for and it may not even be gaming application you know applications but it's all of the connect hack stuff that I've that I've seen. Those are all very interesting and and specifically the way robotics research is going to be affected by connect because it's been it's given all these robotics research teams very affordable eyes for their robots and that's an extremely valuable tool and so I'm super excited to see where connect will take robotics. This is now I'm just silly because I'm going back to 3D again but I sort of disagree with you about the 3DS thing like as a guy who got to play with it for 20 minutes it was I played with it too. No no I know I'm just saying like in my 21 minutes with it like it wasn't the power of the you know oh we can do like basically PS2 quality games or a little better with it that made me go like well it was the 3D but what game did you play the reality because I only played one that made a difference in 3D and it was like a demo it was a tech demo of like a pogo game and you actually needed the 3D to see the depth to do the jumps accurately but other than that like Mario Kart stuff like that I was like oh like this is just Mario Kart in 3D like I didn't see anything where I was like oh 3D actually changes the way I play. I just the games I see people asking about the most are just buying shit from 12 years ago again. I mean yeah I mean there's definitely a lot of that I mean not terribly surprising. I just mean I okay so I'm not talking about in terms of gameplay necessarily I'm talking about the wow factor of the screen like I feel like let's say for example PSP2 comes out and it's basically like HD quality games on a relatively large handheld screen right and then there's a 3DS which is the 3DS and you take it to your your mom or your grandma's house or something like that. I think if you hand them the 3DS you know and they position it right and their eyes are such that they can actually experience the 3D effect. The fact that you're not wearing glasses and you're looking at it and you're like wow this is 3D. I thought that was really impressive and like everyone that was standing around the place where I was looking at 3DSs was mouth agape like wow this is wild I've never I can't believe this. Whereas if you handed your grandma the PSP with HD quality graphics that looked almost you know like you were playing an HD game but shrunk down on a tiny screen they would be like not able to tell the difference between that and a PSP1 which came out six years ago. Sure. So to me there's that there is a wow factor of that glass is free 3D that is semi mind blowing and yeah we haven't seen many games that take advantage of that yet. That's the thing is I'm not saying that there won't be right because like I know when the DS original DS came out and we were all playing Game Boy Advance I was like this is idiotic. Like why is there two screens so dumb and I love my DS you know so it's like I'm not saying I'm just saying what the initial software line up oh yeah I haven't seen anything that to me makes it seem like the 3DS is like a necessity. Yeah I know I just want I guess the reason that I wanted at launch is the wow factor. Well there's that and there's I want to play Street Fighter on it on the go and yeah the Street Fighter looks really good. It's big yeah. So I'll just do one last quick letter and so this is from Knop. I feel like I should read this whole name just because Knop is such like how many Knops are there in the world maybe there's a lot I don't know. He says over the past week I have been catching up on old episodes at about episode 10-ish a femoral Fantasia clan in Killzone 2 was created. Oh yeah that's that's never anywhere. Well the same can be said about Tyler's donut fever and it came to my attention that Killzone 3 would be released in a month. That's my question is will ephemeral Fantasia make its glories to turn and I will say that I am going to be reviewing Killzone so I would if you guys created it I do not want to be in charge of it because I won't play enough but if you guys created it I would accept an invite. I use your name on PSN it's chuff money. The two legit to quit posse is getting Killzone 3 we've all agreed. So nice. I mean we're fucking legit. Maybe we should just call it that. You are legit and you do not quit or so we don't and then if we're in and if we ever have a round where we like rush them really fast we say too legit too quick. You can find Tyler and all his little witty remarks like that on Twitter. That's true. At dirty tea. You can find me at chuff money. You can find Matt at Talking Orange. Yep. And you can find Ryan at Ryan O'Donnell with two N's and two L's. I always have a hard time remembering that. Say that's Matt. I grew up with it being misspelled consulents. And then you can find Arthur at AEG IES. You can send your letters in to letters@eat-sleep-game.com. We love you. You should check out all of our work that we do. You can find there's at area5.tv and you can find me at arthur's@idion.com and Tyler's at uh I don't know. Around the internet. He's Mr. Phil Dancer dude. He's sort of everywhere. You know what I was thinking uh what what is Geekbox still around Ryan's? It is. Geekbox still listens. You should still check out it. It's at the Geekbox.com. It's at the Geekbox.net. They've just they've just had their anniversary as well. Don't do that. Oh don't listen to them. Now go to the Geekbox and compliment Ryan on his his bold new haircut. Yeah. Alright. Trust me. See you all later. [Music] [Music] [ Silence ]