Rebel FM
Rebel FM Episode 86 - 12/03/10
This week we're joined by Greg Miller of IGN and Ryan O'Donnell of Area 5 as we talk about Gran Turismo 5, Battlefield Bad Company 2 Vietnam, Splatterhouse, and more, then move on to letters before engaging in an hour long spoiler filled discussion of Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood and the future of the series. All the spoiler-y bits are after the letters, and there's ample warning. Revealed penis!
This week's music, in order of appearance:
Nine Inch Nails - Sin
Jesper Kyd - Selections from Assassin's Creed Original Scores
[Music] Welcome to Road Love of Episode 86. We're already 86 this episode. I don't even think I can put the theme song before that. I think I guess. Not a starter like that. No theme song this time around. You don't get a theme song. With me is Arthur Geese. Wow. Wow. Ryan Adonnell. Joining us after a long absence. Yeah. An exile, if you will. I was an exile. And then there's M.A.S.H. Andreene. Hi. And then for the first time ever. The second IGN employee to ever appear on this podcast. So Scott doesn't work for IGN and either does Brian. Oh. What about Jim Riley? I was thinking Jim Riley. I was thinking Jim Riley and then you. That's Greg Miller. Hey, what's up? The first PS3 channel head we've had. There you go. And the last. He works for IGN. He's the Executive Editor of PlayStation Channel. And he is the host of two podcasts. No, no, no. I host podcasts beyond on Thursdays. And then I am just a character on Game Scoop. No, I never know. You're pretty much a character all the time. What are you talking about Arthur? You're flattering me. So it's true. So games. You have a Jewish housewife all of a sudden. See? So we talk about games. Here. I'm on edge. Do we talk about games? Okay. So this show is going to go a little different. That's going to be games. And then probably a short letter segment. And then after the letters you should all stop listening if you haven't beat Assassin's Creed because everyone's going to discuss the time with Assassin's Creed and spoil the shit. Spoiler cast. You're not going to do it. No. You haven't beaten it. He hasn't even made his way through Assassin's Creed 2 yet. Actually you spoiled him. He doesn't know. That's why we're walking from where to say. That is rad. Did you really? You didn't know that? No. Holograms, dude. With out context it really means clearly from the gibberish that Greg was spouting. It means nothing without context. I think I just summed it up for you. Punch Pope. Holograms and it's over. It's pretty much true. So the spoiler cast for Assassin's Creed 2 is happening now. No, it's cool. If you read our review it was all spoiled for you anyway. Yeah. So I feel like we've all played games the last week. I played a ton actually to get right into it. I played a ton of Assassin's Creed Brotherhood multiplayer over the weekend. I have not played a ton but man I played quite a good amount of it and I really love that game. So we talked about it a little bit last week but dive in sir. Multiplayer. You know I still want to just tell more people to play because right now it's really hard to find a match because enough people aren't playing. Even on 360. Yeah, this is true. It takes like 5-10 minutes. That's what a player is doing. But it's really fucking good. It's kind of a thing this year actually. There have been a lot of games that's really cool multiplayer to these communities just evaporate. This is the thing is that this game is like the first multiplayer game I played in a long time. I was like oh this is different and no one's playing it. That's what's a bummer. And it doesn't feel forest right? You've talked about it before. It doesn't like other games like honestly when we were thinking about our you know I don't think I don't know if we included it or not. But you know I was like oh this should be a game of the year nomination for basketball. It was so nominated on 360 I'm not sure. Just because yeah because it is it is like you know we've all experienced call of duties and all those things before and those are fun I'm not saying they aren't but this is like such a unique and different thing you know you're getting to. It's just that really cool spy versus spy mechanic that they have going on and it does get a lot deeper as you sit there and level up and get new abilities and stuff and. Like you were saying it was very different. I had a lot of friends in the past who are the type that can jump around between games like let's play some Call of Duty then let's move on to some Halo. You know Shawn Elliott is definitely that way. Whereas I'm the type of person that usually finds if I play multiplayer I find a game that I really like and I'll stick with it for as long as like human. It's over for a while. But this game actually feels so different that I would love to you know spend an hour with my buddies playing black ops and then move on to you know another hour of that. Yeah it's it's it's not something you would sit there and play every day like I like that's one thing it kind of bothers me about the leveling is like it goes all the way up to 50 and I've played a lot and only gotten to like a little 15. It's like I will never reach level 50 in this game. See I I leveled up so fast like I have probably only I mean obviously at the time you get to the teams. Yeah I'm pretty concerned. I got up to level two three so fast. I got to level four in my first match. I still haven't played any multiplayer. It's me either. I will get it done. I think I think that it's I feel like whatever I'm a seasoned Assassin's Creed player and I know the mechanics very well. You played three of them now. Yeah. And for me the new you know there's enough new mechanics just in the multiplayer of things it's it's not mechanics it's more like the rule set of the the actual game that you have to learn when you hop in. It's kind of daunting even for an Assassin's Creed player. But if you. Sorry Brian. What's that? Sell me on it please. Well I know I'm I'm trying to explain why there aren't people playing it. I understand why they're not because I I don't think that like my friends who play Call of Duty all the time would be able to just buy it. If I told them the multiplayer in Assassin's Creed is super awesome you should totally be playing this with me. There's going to be this learning curve at the at the front end of it to learn the actual just had a climb and jump around and do the actual game mechanics of a set. Not to the plant off the wall to your death. Yeah exactly. Because it's it's just it's not. Assassin's Creed I think when I when I first played the first one I thought it was a very simple game like oh they simplified these controls to make it very easy but in two and three and even that first one in retrospect thinking about it. It's not like that like you really can miss a lot of jumps and you can just like fuck up over and over again and not have a fun time. But there's a lot of depth in those controls and if you get really good at it you can make it look so smooth so delicious and that's how the multiplayer is as well. See the thing is that a lot of people I think like refried beans a lot of people that played the Assassin's Creed all the way through the single player and then jump into this. We'll screw up a lot though too I see it all the time with people that you can tell are coming straight out of the single player because they're first impetus when they jump into levels like to take off running and go climbing up a wall and all that shit is not the way you play multiplayer. You basically walk the whole time you got to blame. You got to act like an assassin. Yes but you know in the game a lot of times you spend time at the rooftops. You spend your time at the rooftops you just are painfully obvious where you are you know so no one does that like. Why is it jester up on the frick yeah exactly. I have surprised myself with how sometimes I pull off some really awesome shit and I make a lot of mistakes and do dumb stuff as well. And I see a lot of players running around being crazy assholes and not playing it correctly but those moments when I get destroyed by someone in a really unique or awesome way. It's rare in a shooter when I get shot that I think like a nice one that could work like in this game that happens a lot where I'm like oh man good job. Good job and it's a lot of times it happens right before I've gotten my target as well so it's like I'm just about to like come up behind someone and stab them and throw it and like right then I get you know taken by. I'll be like walking through you know I'm like oh my targets just in front of me past this group of five AI guys that's just standing there and I'll walk through the five guys and then you know one of them turns and stabs me. One I'm sure that the thing is like you reveal yourself when you like get to the point where you're like oh I got this guy and that's when you get a little too eager and you reveal yourself to the guy. Or sometimes people are just really good they can tell like the AI does a really good job of like occasionally like doing quick steps and stuff that you're like man a human would do that like why would the AI do that. But they do it too and so sometimes though you'll make the guy will just see that little movement and like even when I fail a lot of times it's really rad because like the guy will see me he'll drop a smoke bomb and then punch me in the face and knock me out and that's like an instant fail on your assassination. And I'm like man that was awesome because that guy totally called me out everything. The game is really friendly about I sort of expected that you would have to be the one watching for players to act humans like humans but a lot of times there's some sort of trigger I don't know what it is if you bump into someone or if you run into your target you the if your target the guy who's chasing you does that you will get a red indicator on your hood telling you hey on the side of the screen over here is your attacker he's coming at you you should run away now. So it is there are times when the game is it gives you that warning ahead of when you actually might have noticed it yourself. Right it's like it's pretty friendly about that if he if he's not being stealth except all like if he starts walking or starts to climb something it immediately cuts down on a meter on the side and once that goes down it alerts everyone around him like oh that's an assassin. I was not expecting there to be the giant upgrade path that there is in this game and I think that that is I'm hoping that's what I'm going to be able to use to sell my friends who were planning to get the game into it like there's tons of things to unlock. And even at the beginning of the game you feel like you have enough tools to do what you need to do you're not a total disadvantage. Okay do you think that the whole unlocking experience leveling up thing is actually hurting the longevity of certain multiplayer games. I can tell you that if I don't want to do it in dead space like that's not a game I want to jump in and get their ass kicked that's what I'm saying yeah what Greg is saying I like new players can't really jump in because they're playing against people who are way higher level than them way more abilities. Yeah obviously it's a really careful balancing act for the developer to make it so that that happens as little as possible but for me it's a it's a it's something where after a while if I get into the point and if I get to the point that my level gaining slows down too much then I just say to myself all this is too much work and I stop playing simply because you know I'm not leveling up quick. How am I going to do this but you didn't level 50 is way too far away why is that I mean you didn't level up when you played tribes back in the day. Yeah but I didn't even think about it you know and it's because like with tribes everything is unlocked there's no leveling up goal to achieve. You know like if and I still wish that more multiplayer games at least would have modes where everything is unlocked. Because I'm a big fan of horde multiplayer every time you jump in it's brand new you start from square one everyone's at the same place go or whatever you want. Yeah I was thinking that's like something good that horde does and also games like company heroes you level up in that one match and then it's over at the end of that match. Yeah and I'm fine with that and I'm actually fine with leveling up and stuff like that I just want some alternatives to when I'm done when I'm done with the experience game you know or when I'm done with trying to. When I'm done with the treadmill you know like and I always get done with the treadmill before I'm done with my levels. So I just want some alternatives. I just thought it was a really bad idea at first like when Call of Duty Modern Warfare came out I was like this is fucking stupid why would you do this you're going to obviously this is what's going to happen you're going to have the good players that have everything and the. The players starting out having nothing but I think that the weapons that you started with in Modern Warfare were strong enough that that didn't turn out to be a problem and there's also the classes that are pre-generated that you picked that come with two perks and I have that stuff and I'd. In Assassin's Creed it seems like you have nothing and then you work your way up and there's no like but a lot of the things really aren't all that they're like useful like making yourself look like a different character class. Yeah but that that that often gives you away because everyone sees you when you change to it's like a huge like it's always actually worked my disadvantage and you get that at like level four. It's the very first thing yeah right but I mean there are other like weapon slots that you unlock to. I would say that I don't know about because I'm not far enough along but I can't imagine using a weapon at all in this because you know the the car it doesn't seem like it should have the Assassin's Creed combat system I have been in many games. I've never seen a fight a fight does not break out there's no fighting that's what makes this game so so interesting is like it's essentially like. Like people joke about the term cat and mouse and multiplayer but it really is. People do get things like a pistol on their wrist and stuff like that eventually okay but using those is kind of like you get those by like level 12 and to be fair like using those isn't very fun because it's like worth almost nothing. It's only good for getting so like while they're running away right I guess you know points trying to reason out just the surplus of games that have come out the share that have had really cool multiplayer options but have never the less. Just been abandoned that had transformers transformers for example is a great example that another unlock shit yeah that's it's definitely what it is. There's another unlock shit extraordinarily powerful stuff that you unlock that you just run all over people unless they have countermeasures for it and you unlock the countermeasures for it. No everyone can use an energon cubes. No like rocket turrets and and like the ability to turn off everyone's ability to transform and things like that. What an awesome move. So I just wonder is that one of the reasons why the multiplayer died on that so quick and is that one of the reasons why people were so intimidated about jumping into multiplayer in a leveling environment like the one that Assassin's Creed has. I just think most people buy Assassin's Creed they don't even think about it. 60 according to Ubisoft 62% of the people that bought Assassin's Creed Brotherhood jumped onto the multiplayer. Probably to see what it was right and that's the one that's the one wild. Like this is a little bit slow whatever I want to see what's happened with Ezio and then you know 15 hours later you're still trying to buy every goddamn bacon room. What a what I mean I didn't follow much of it but I get the impression that the vast majority of the preview coverage at least the early preview coverage for this game was the multiplayer game. Totally it was they were pushing knew that it was there so I think a lot of people didn't even realize that there was a full single player. A lot of people didn't actually a lot of people I talked to early on like like not in games press that I talked to you still played games are like oh that's a multiplayer only game right like that's how they thought of it is just a multiplayer game. That's how my friend thought of it and I talked to you a few months ago I thought it was that when I saw when I heard about a DD 3 I thought it was a multiplayer only game. Wow well and then they showed campaign stuff yeah. Anyway I'd highly recommend people at least give it a shot especially if you've ever liked Assassin's Creed or you know it's good this cliche thing that I've seen in every review that I've seen of this if you're the type of person that talks about wanting a different type of multiplayer experience and this is where you should be playing so speaking of games where you level up I play a battlefield bad company to Vietnam today. Nice did you level up I did so does that start you like it's all new weapons. It's all new weapons so it's starting from scratch it's all levels present day Vietnam. Yes but you do you have it's actually about negotiating peace treaties. Yes it is downloadable content for battlefield bad company too. That's awesome expensive piece of DLC. I played that at EA several months ago actually. Did you? No I didn't those were the maps never mind I'm dumb. I was like never mind never mind. I think it's totally different. So in an effort to ascertain whether or not you would like this let me ask you a question. Did you like battlefield bad company too. Yes. Did you like battlefield 1943. Yes. Would you like what dice does if battlefield 1943 and battlefield bad company too had a baby. Yes I like baby. No I hate is there infinite ammo. What do you mean? Well because in 1943 there was infinite ammo. You never ran out of anything. You just reloaded all the time. Oh there's definitely not infinite ammo but the weapons are a step backwards from bad company too. There's no that's battlefield minus 1943. There's no scopes on any weapon except sniper rifle. No scopes on machine guns for medics for example. Good. You know ACOG scopes for engineers. You're not special forces. Or for assault. I mean so just one side plays the Viet Cong. Yes and man. I'm going to change your name to opposing forces. I'm kind of. We can't talk about that until next week we have a press release for sitting. Okay good good good. The maps are very very similar to 1943. They're very open with lots of ways around them. Lots of islands. And hills lots of islands. Not so much islands but lots of trees lots of vegetation rice patties. Plains. No plains. We helicopters. I was going to say like I just wanted like napalm of each head. Quad bikes. It makes sense to me that Americans out of helicopters but VC no. Quad bikes are no longer in the game instead they're sampans. What does it make sense? Those tiny little cars that have one wheel on the front. They're like little motorcycle kind of scooter cars. Yes. And they have no weapons and it's funny seeing someone puttering down a hill in one of those things. Those things you just caused too. Probably yes. They're flame throwers. And the flame throwers are fucking ridiculous. Do they burn vegetation? I don't know if they bring vegetation down but stuff catches on fire. Right. Like the terrain will catch on fire but it won't like destroy. Burn down yeah it's not far crowd too. But it has all the destructibility of bed. Yes all that is there. And well 1943 had most of that too. It has tanks. Far Cry 2 that was awesome. Far Cry 2 was a good lesson game. Far Cry 2 had a good lesson game. Yeah I was mostly talking about the fire but I agree with you. Super flawed. I don't want to talk about that because if I get started I'll keep going with that fire. I wish that that would come to more games. That's the game. I'm not usually the guy that says you need to play again on a PC but that was a game you had to play on PC. I had no idea I played it on either I think PS3. I remember talking about that on one of the first episodes of the podcast. Yeah like Matt pulled his PC out when he put his new video card in we hooked it up to our TV and my guy. It's not even that you can just quick save. That was one of my very last magazine reviews. So the maps in Bad Company TV at Nam play really really well. That's good. And they're all very very visually distinct and many of them are modeled after stuff that people have heard of. I don't know if Hamburg or Hill was anything that any of you ever heard of. But it was a hell of a movie. The Viet Cong and the American army fought over for like a week going back up and down it and eventually it was blasted and almost nothing. And hundreds and hundreds of American soldiers died and thousands of Viet Cong died. It's just you start on one side and it's like okay well in rush it's like the American start. And it's on an island on the opposite side of this mainland area that you make your way through. And as you slowly unlock objectives eventually you get to this area that's so blast it looks like the surface of another planet. And tons of stuff is on fire and there's like glowing coals all over the ground and it's in trenches and there's a ton of that shit. There's a lot of trenches in the maps because that's how a lot of Vietnam stuff is fought. Boats are a bigger part it seems like. Oh I'm sure. It should be. You can swim. I don't feel like swimming was something that was big in bed company too. Well it just sucked when it happened. It's always sucked in any battlefield game when we were filming the water and we're like fuck. And it's just the weapons feel much different and they're powered down because they're not it's not modern infantry weaponry. I mean it's still M16s. Yeah but M16s have been. I mean M16s are still using them. Right but M16s haven't been in wide use in US military for like 15 years. This is like they feel a firing range right now. We'll pay a hundred dollars for a clip. It would be super expensive. The point is that it feels different. Like all the weapons feel different. I'm just saying accurately it wouldn't be that much more. And the grand and the top center in there if you want to use them. I'm not sure how it works as far as having unlocks in bad company too already going into Vietnam but I don't think that that stuff is unlocked. Playing through Vietnam seemed to unlock stuff in bad company too but that could have been because the debugs we were on didn't have anything in bad company too unlocked. Twenty bucks, six naps. Six naps. Yes. It's really really good. Cool. It's really really good. I have to stop. No I will be playing that. It's not a spotter house. Spotter house is really really bad. Money hat. No surprise. Come on. Chex didn't come on time. The royalty from that enslaved review didn't show up. I don't think any of these guys think that's bad. Would you fist somebody's ass in this? You do fist someone's eye. Okay so there's anal fisting in spotter house. That's the one thing that's been missing in video games I think. Well all of it. Apparently it's because spotter house took all of it for itself. Okay. Oh thanks. No no keep it going. Don't stop. Don't stop. How are you? Really? Coming out over the mics. How do you guys like that? Do you guys like that? Oh there we are. Okay we're still. Now we're back. See I've played enough dead nation that scares me. They run into the car. Run up the back door. Let's get out of this fucking place. Grab the Twinkies. A spotter house is the glorious game I've ever played. You start the game in a CG sequence and you see your characters and test and spilling out of a stomach. It wasn't through a mastodon t-shirt. I feel like it's more gory than Dante's Inferno. Yes. That's true. Did you put that in the review gory game I've ever played? Yes. I can't wait for them to ask for a tip pull. Yes. A million times. They don't need to because they gave fangoria fucking review copies and bloody disgusting insights like that. I'm pretty sure that bloody disgusting got review code for Swatterhouse before we did. Well I mean they knew there's people that might actually like it. Which are people that don't. Right because I hate horror movies. But I'm saying like the tip people that might that are just going to be the type of people like ha ha ha gour. Yeah. That's what I mean. Tit. I'm not saying that you don't like horror movies. I'm just saying that your tastes go above oh look how gory this is. I mean I can appreciate. I like gory movies. I like dead alive. Again I'm not saying you don't. I'm saying they sent to these places where that's like what they get off on. You have more fine tastes. Now I'm thinking of somebody jerking at Splatterhouse and I'm really disturbed. Well there is fisting involved. Right. So anal fisting. There are these monsters that run around halfway through that seems like a boss but it turns out go figure you start running into them as regular enemies. Have you heard that in the game before? I sure hadn't. That alone doesn't mean it's going to be a bad thing though. No it's just very cliched, very rote. That's very this generation. Sure. Yeah. You can blink out of war. So I'm punching this thing and then the quick time sequence activates and you'll know you activate a quick time sequence by them being outlined in red but not the kind of outline in red that means they're covered in blood which is what you usually see or what the screen is usually covered in but it's a special glowy red that's about one pantone value away. Oh Jesus Christ. So you hit B and you do quick time kills, stop if you heard this one. And you hit buttons at certain times to do stuff. Totally heard that one. Right? Sounds groundbreaking. Right. So the first thing it does is tell you to pound I think it's B which hammers him in the asshole over and over again with your fist. You're punching him in the asshole. Okay. Not penetrating yet. Not penetrating yet. Okay. Then the last move is to actually shove my fist into it and its asshole is like a volcano. It's like puckered outward like in pink on the end of it is very clearly an asshole when you see it and after playing a spotter house for like six hours seeing that I'm like I already know where this is going. So I punch it again and my fist goes in and apparently I broke through its rectal wall because I come out with its spine. So I pulled a monster spine out through its asshole. See I mean all that other stuff doesn't necessarily bother me in general that it can be generic and stuff because I think there can be good God of War clones and stuff like that. Totally don't do this in front of us often a competent God of War. But when I watched you play it I was like this just said but this just looks like even more generic than than that. It was really. It's not just formulaic. It's like boring. It's just it it goes so over the top so quickly that it just becomes boring like the game plays in there and the content is just in your face so often and it's like okay it's like when something is two feet in front of your face for so for long enough you're just like okay well this thing is in front of my face well not really that but it's like they wanted so like it seems like you know it's them sending to Fangory and stuff like that. It's like okay the spectacle is the blood isn't the blood cool but when you're seeing it all the time it seems like even that would be like man this is just dumb ten minutes later. It's hard to look at the blood when the game slows down into single digits and frame rate. That's because they want you to appreciate it. Right. That's a really good thing. It's true. It's so good that we're going to leave it on the screen for like six milliseconds. Yeah so you can take very careful screenshots. And yeah like you'll rip guys arms off occasionally your arm will get cut off which you can then pick up and hit people with. And all that sounds kind of cool you know like oh if I hold the both analog sticks to the left and right as I'm doing this quick time thing I'll pull that guy's arms off and then I can beat up other dudes with it I could get behind that. But it's boring it's really mind-numbingly monotonous. In this game. Yes. Yeah. And they... Not that you're not that you're purpuing the entire concept of ripping. No I actually enjoyed Dante's Inferno. I finished Dante's Inferno. Yeah I remember. I finished Bayonetta. Yeah Bayonetta and eight even though it was all teenage all the time. So there's that as well. To pander even more they have your girlfriend Jen leaving torn up pieces of pictures around the mansion because she takes photos. That's what she does. And several of the pictures she had in her purse just happened to be of her topless. Yeah. Of course you did. So you find pictures of her topless and put them together. So you can see tits. Or you can just buy Playboy this month because that's where she is. I just don't want... Yeah. They put her digital version of her in Playboy. Playboy's done stuff like that. I just don't want to... I don't even want to hear about this game. This game just makes me mad hearing about it. You unlock the three spotterhouse games you're playing. The silver lining. Silver lining. Um. Spotterhouse 3 is actually still a pretty interesting game and totally different spotterhouse. I didn't even know that there were more than spotterhouse. This is a long running, for example. Like spotterhouse 1 and 2 are just total sidescrolling like bullshit. And spotterhouse 3 added like a 3D plane that you move up and down which is pretty big for a spotterhouse game. And it did away with most of the cheap hits and you have a life bar instead of a... One hit kills or something. Like... Well I mean you had like... Two hearts or something. You could take hits but it's just different. And also there's a timer and in the first level if you don't beat the first level before the timer runs out then your girlfriend dies. And now you're just seeking revenge as you make your way through the rest of the house. And it's like these different rooms that are sort of like a maze but you can bring up a map to try to make your way through them more quickly to get to the end. But you might miss some hidden stuff and collectable stuff. So that right there sounds way more interesting than the spotterhouse remake. And it's just it's... So this is just to show you I guess that spectacle can never outclass gameplay. Right. Um. It's just sad. If this is what... If this is what bottle rocket gave Namco, I understand why they took it away. Well not only that but what the fuck was bottle rocket doing for so long? It's like we talked about last week. Bottle rocket was working on it for about 20 months. Well it seemed like because that was like we had like one of the exclusive like reveals of that I think back in the day at EGM and it's like... And then what? Like now it's coming out like four years later and it sucks ass. And I actually looked at some of the screenshots for it when bottle rockets still had it. And they did some weird shit to the graphics and redesigned some of the characters like originally like the story is that the scientist has been working at this university for like a hundred years under various like as a series of ancestors because he lives forever. And he's been taking... We'll see through this. Yeah right. A quiet cart Kent. It's impossible if you change his hair. So when bottle rocket had it like you'd go in and like all these monsters like a bunch of them would be wearing like normal street clothes so you could tell that they were kids at one point that were taken and made into monsters and all of that is gone now. Like there's nothing recognizable about them. It says... It still says that oh well he's been taking students and performing experiments on them for years but that's all gone. And the story is dumb and not dumb in a funny way but just dumb and like it just doesn't try very hard. Question. How annoying is the mask? During the preview of the mask? The mask talks to you quite a bit and I did not enjoy things. It just talks to you quite a bit. He does. This has paint the walls around a lot. Way to go Johnny. There's a two by four. Let's do some fucking carpentry. All right. That was up a lot. Or just there's a two by four when he's feeling tired. There's a two by four. Cool. All right. You've been playing anything else. I don't want to hear about this anymore. Nailed. Nailed. Yeah. What is it? Dragging out the hits. No, I feel bad about Nailed because Nailed is from the guys who brought you both Call of Waras games. Oh wow. Which is weird. Yeah. These guys who do Cowboy First Person Shooters decided to make a extreme ATV game. Yeah, weird. That's what they did. That's what I had a review and it's not very good. Right. Mainly because the whole point of it is just to barrel through everything as quickly as possible and to facilitate that. They've taken out normal physics and put in totally extreme physics. Which means that you have total control of your shit in the air all the time. Yeah. So you like weave in the air in and out of hot air balloons. But you also do like a 3,000 foot jump and stuff. Right. But on the ground, you can also do just crazy turns at top speed without any consequences. So funny thing about driving games is part of the fun is dealing with the limitations of your vehicle and when you can do a totally reasonable turn at top speed and not be penalized for it, then there's really no reason not to do that every time and that gets kind of boring. Yeah. I can see that. You're just supposed to love it for the extreme jumps. And the music is-- So at that point, kind of the game-- I thought you were supposed to love it for the title. It's just-- yeah. It feels old. So it's got to be-- so like you said, if you can control your vehicle perfectly fine in any situation, then the whole game has just got to hit just that one note. Right. It's very fun. Like there's not much challenge to controlling it and whenever-- the only times I felt like I was struggling was when I didn't know what the course wanted me to do. And I just didn't-- I didn't feel like it worked. And I felt bad because those guys have done some interesting stuff. They have. I really liked "Bounded Blood" and the first "Call of War" is actually. Yeah. And then I played a bunch of Pac-Man. Oh. Of course you did. Oh, Pac-Man. Now I am 347 in the world on 360. Whoo. In less than the last 10 minutes, people have surpassed you. Or in the last day, which is totally plausible. Like right, Og. Like right. Oh, Ryan Scott is way higher than me. Greg, what have you-- what games have you been playing? I started playing Pac-Man last night. Pac-Man came out when I was back in the Chicago for Thanksgiving. So I couldn't play it. So I started playing last night. I'm fucking awful. I am terrible. I had asked Scott Brownlee for tips today. I'm like, I don't-- how do you even came over and we're watching replays and explaining what people are doing? I'm like, yes. This makes sense. I'm like, no. Now I'm ready to get home and try that. I just reviewed "Dead Nation." This week, he came out on PSN. Talk about that a little bit on the show. How is "Dead Nation?" Me and Anthony are big fans. We're fans. I don't know. Here's the problem with "Dead Nation." I wanted it to be awesome. I wanted to come around a way of loving it. I gave it a 7.5. I think it's a good game. I think it does a lot of things. But I never had that spark. You know what I mean? You played like "Left for Dead," and you're like, holy shit, this is-- or even like "Super Stardust HD." This is from the guys. How smart. I just never really totally clicked. It never-- yeah, it never does anything that's super amazing. I sat there and played through the whole thing with a friend on the couch and we had fun. But there were difficulty spikes for sure where we were all screaming, like, you know, fucking ready to hurl our controllers out the window. And then other times it was just like, okay, we're going, like, story's uninspired. There's nothing-- No, the story's completely idiotic. Yeah. It's really-- it's dumb. And it's not-- and it's not told in like a B-movie fashion. Like, it's them trying to be serious with it. Is there, like, a loot cycle? Yeah. There's loot to pick up and then you get to buy-- We basically just buy-- collect gold and then you spend gold, like, every-- so often in a level. Yeah, basically, there's all these checkpoints in a level, so you'll stop and then a door will slam shut behind you so you're in, like, a safe house. Then you can buy new weapons. You can buy upgrades for your weapons. There's a cool upgrade system for all that. And then hidden throughout are, like, you know, the special loot drops that are new armor configurations that you can then get in and toy around with, which is a cool idea. But, like, I don't know. The armor, like, I found something I liked and stuck with it for the rest of the way because, like, this works. You're using a flamethrower. I'm using a machine gun. Let's go through and try to get done it. But eventually, it's just, you know, same thing, after same thing, after same thing. You beat it right. I beat it as well. Like, it seems like it sort of devolves into old-school arcade gameplay rather than something more-- Totally. But that is why I played it. More one. Exactly. And, like, I said, like, there's nothing horrible. I don't know what they're doing wrong. It's good. I liked it. I had fun with it. But, like, I think a good example, like, if you remember when you're coming up the end of the day, and you are going on a conveyor belt kind of thing, like, there's a conveyor belt bringing you back towards, like, spinning machine blades. Yes. I know exactly what you're doing. That level was so much fun because it was so out of the blue. Like, you've done, like, I think it's a chapter game, and that's, like, chapter 8, and you're so used to doing one thing, and it's like, "Oh, it's just--okay." And then it's, like, over. It's true. They really don't--90% of the game is just running on streets with cars, and that's all it is. And sometimes you have to smash a, you know, like, a switch or whatever and wait for something to come here so you defend the spot for a while. Right. But, yeah, there wasn't very many cool environments. And, like, they have the giant fat zombie who runs at you, and he'll explode if he knows. That sounds familiar. Yeah, yeah. Well, he doesn't attract more zombies. He just hurts you, like, again. Yeah. Right. I don't know. There's these really annoying zombies that just scream, which calls in more zombies. Yeah. They don't even attack you, though. You can walk up next to them, and they're just screaming. Like, "Oh, my gosh. Jesus, shut up and die." But there's some cool stuff. As I said, have you played that, Ryan? I feel like that's a game you would really like-- Really? You'd love Super Stardust? Not as much as most people. Yeah. I think I actually would like to know you, Ryan. We're not next up, man. I don't know you. You don't know me? Yeah. No. I liked-- Or you would. Or you would. Like, a pixel-junk shooter, sort of. No, you would be. That's funny, because when I heard I was reading a tweet about someone, they mentioned Housemark, and I was like, "Housemark, Housemark, who are those guys in Stardust didn't come to mind?" I actually thought it was the band behind the music for a pixel-junk shooter. Oh. Which is called "High Frequency Bandwidth" or something like that. It's just me. Yeah. But yeah, I haven't played-- I don't know. I feel like I'm zombied out, and I left for dead. There is lots of zombie stuff. Are you ready for Capcom to announce something in all likelihood next weekend? No. More zombie stuff? Probably. Resident Evil from The Makers of SoCalm. Oh, yeah. I heard about that. Yeah. Yeah. Wait, what? You ever heard this? I was going to announce another Resident Evil game next week at the VGA's, and there were rumors a few weeks ago that-- I don't know if it's a zipper. I think it might be a SoCalm 3 guys, right? No. SoCalm confrontation. Right. The PS3. SoCalm. Which was completely fucked. [LAUGHTER] That's awesome. Right. So I was working on a online multiplayer Resident Evil game. That sounds really dumb. Wait. So from what I've heard, Outbreak had promised, but was awful? Yeah. I played Outbreak. It was super cool in the sense that you were in this dynamically changing story. And you were having to work together as a team, except that it was completely fucked because there was no voice control. So it was like this really convoluted system to be closed the door. And the fuck the thing about that was it was the first Resident Evil game I played where zombies could follow you through doors. There was no running to a door for safety. So yeah, Outbreak was cool. If someone were to do Outbreak nowadays, well, I guess nowadays it would just be like a really slow level for dead. [LAUGHTER] So maybe it wouldn't. It would suck. We're like, I don't know, like the zombies in Call of Duty. But Outbreak still relied on tank controls as well to make it kind of scary. Right. Yeah. So. I'd rather play a Slant 6 Resident Evil game than Gears of War Connect. Oh my god. If there is a Gears of War Connect, that's just dumb. I mean, maybe they can show me something to impress me, but I can't imagine how I would-- I'm ready to be wild. I've made, say, plenty of things. I've been wrong. With a Kinect launch, a lot of you said there wasn't anything for hardcore gamers. Will we fix that? Can't you war? [LAUGHTER] Yeah, maybe it's just that you play with a controller except for when you want to chainsaw people. [LAUGHTER] I don't know. I'm totally game for games that I play mostly with a combination of motion control and a regular controller. Well, you're going to get an extra. Good. I asked Greg today on Bart, as we're coming out here, how he would feel about playing Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, where instead of hitting the left bumper to call on Assassin's, you just held up your hand and pumped it, bringing out Assassin's. He nayside me. No way. That would be sick. I don't-- What if you had to make the eagle noise when it happened? [LAUGHTER] If I wanted to make the eagle noise when I synchronized, yes. [SCREAMING] [LAUGHTER] I don't want a fist bump to get guys to come out, fist bump. Whoa. It would be-- some of these things would-- No, you don't even fist bump, you just close your fist and hold it. And that's what signals a hail of awesome flying down on top of people. And you have to whistle differently. I was going to say, or a whistle, like, whistle commands. I can't whistle. Yeah, but a lot of people can't whistle. I can't whistle. I would be the world's worst assassin. [LAUGHTER] Anyway. Ryan, anything else? Well, I know that-- I asked Matt. I know you guys talked about it a bit last week. But the other game that I've been talking about a bit last week, the other game that I've been playing a lot of is Gran Turismo 5. Yeah, we haven't talked about that much. I have a copy of that. It's not of us really play this. Yeah, Arthur is the only one who's played it some. I haven't played Gran Turismo 5 at all because I had to fucking review Splatterhouse and nailed it really. Oh, I thought you did play it some. No, I wanted to, real bad. But nailed is pretty much it, right? Yeah. It's the same thing. Exactly. It does say, nailed is the real driving simulator with non-existent physics. [LAUGHTER] It's a-- man, that is a weird story. Sorry. Gran Turismo. Yeah. You played a fair amount of Forza. I have. I mean, not a ton, but enough to tell you everything that's different about these games. You just have ample driving game experience in general. Let me just tell you. And you played a lot of pro-log, too, didn't you? Not a lot. I was the guy that said-- I was one of those guys. But you did play a ton of the PSP one. Not a ton of that either. Well, so basically-- She's like a tele-story. And every comment or assumption we have about Ryan is wrong. Yeah. I spent 100 hours-- over 100 hours with Gran Turismo 3. I played-- I did something similar. I played a fair amount of Gran Turismo 4. I thought the PSP version was OK, but the dithering and the interlacing and the graphics drove me a little nuts. And the fact that there was no campaign. And-- Really? Yeah. There's no campaign. What? Yeah. The Gran Turismo 4 PSP does not have a campaign. There's no GT mode. There were license tests. Yeah. And there's an arc. It's basically a bunch of unlocked cars. I don't want to get this wrong. You may have to unlock stuff, which makes it-- Well, if you get it wrong, I'm sure the internet will tell you. Oh, yeah. I'm certain of that. It's been a long time, and I didn't play that much of it. It's either that everything's unlocked from the get-go, or that you have to unlock the cars and all the tracks are unlocked. But there's not a campaign. It's mostly-- And so far as we understand it. Yeah. There was objective kind of things. You could jump to what you wanted to go do, but there wasn't the-- I mean, even Gran Turismo 5 has-- It has about the same amount of campaign as Gran Turismo 3, whereas that you slowly unlock cars. They go in your garage, and there are a series of races that you can choose from, and each of them is-- You know, there are some at the beginning where you can race whatever races you want, but then they'll start to be things where it's like, "You must use this--" You know, this is a classic race. So only cars before 1969, or classic Japanese race only cars before 1969 that are also Japanese cars. That sort of thing. That is how Gran Turismo does its campaign. Gran Turismo PSP does not have a campaign. That is why it scored, like, 7s and 8s. So tell me about Gran Turismo 5. So, Gran Turismo 5, I think it's basically impossible to, you know, play that game and not think about the fact that it's been in development for 7 years, right? It's basically impossible. Okay, well, Gran Turismo 4 came out in 2004. Okay, 4? Yeah. Okay, so-- OK, so-- Gran Turismo 4 came out in 2004. Okay. 6 years. Anyway, same-- It was, like, 5 years and 11 months or something like that. Okay. Between number Gran Turismo. It's been a long time. It's been a long time. But let me put it this way. It's their fault for that it feels so long. When you release a, you know, a demo three years ago-- A $40 demo. No, no, no. Demo first, then about six months later, then a $40 demo. There was a Gran Turismo 5 demo that featured one stage, then about three to six months later, Gran Turismo Prolog came out with several more stages. It was, like, between 6 and 10 or something. I thought Prolog was the paid demo. Yeah, it was. There was a free demo before that. Right. It came out at Christmas time. It was just one stage, totally different content months before Prolog came out. Okay. So that was, like, a December thing. And then Prolog, I think, was-- Metal flowchart, right? Yeah. You're keeping track. Gran Turismo 5 demo around Christmas time of right around maybe second year of PS3. 2007. Yeah, I remember thinking, like, because it was, like, oh, Christmas present, Gran Turismo demo, get ready, like, free stuff, then that holiday season-- Or was it 2008? Maybe. I can't remember the years. I'm bad about it. All I know is that it's been forever. There's been many, like, pre-releases of things that are Gran Turismo-ish and PSP came out during that time as well. So there's been a lot of bad Gran Turismo stuff, in my opinion, like, not representative of what a full Gran Turismo experience is supposed to be. So now, it's finally done. Like, it's out. All of a sudden, it's out. We've got it. There's an optional hour-long install. So, you know, I'm the type of person I'll go for it, so I spent the time installing it. I had other things to do, so it wasn't like I was sitting there, like, waiting for it. Wait. It will also-- I thought it was cool that it will install as you play it. Yeah. Except-- oh, so that's the-- I heard that it did that, and I was like, that's kind of cool, but I'm not doing anything right this second. I'll have the full thing install. It doesn't really work that way. It's still installing stuff as I'm playing it, so I don't know. I guess it installs, like, a bunch of this stuff, but not quite all of it. It's a very strange-- okay, so that's what I will start by saying is that this is a very, very strange experience. I don't think I've ever played a console game that feels so disjointed and weird like this. So, after my hour-long install or whatever, I mean, I played a bunch of these Gran Turismo games. Like, I'm going to hop right into the Gran Turismo campaign mode, especially considering the PSP version didn't really have that. So, then there's another couple of 20 minutes or so of setting up, and, you know, maybe in that time, maybe a little longer, I was trying to figure out what the hell first car I was going to buy, so you get about 20,000 credits to start. There's new dealerships and use, like, a use car store. All the new stuff looked pretty lame. I didn't have that much money. I was going to buy a better-- I'm going to get some bang for my buck and buy a use car that's actually worth a damn. I found a Civic Racing Series hatchback, which is a car actually like, and it tends to be the car that I picked first in a game because it's relatively cheap but fast. So, I buy this car. It's faster than all the new cars you could buy. Exactly. It was like, yeah, yeah. What's the point of used cars in a video game? Like, what's wrong with it? It must have been great or something. I had to give it an oil change at first. Had to get the car fax. It does have-- that's the thing is, like, I didn't-- you know, my thought was like, "Fuck it, I'm just going to get the car that's faster." It did say it had, like, 80 to 100,000 miles on it, so I'm like, "What is it? Is it going to break out?" It's going to smell like old rusty-- or old coffee or something like that. You do the in-cockpit view and, like, the paneling's cracked. Yeah, it's great. What the fuck is that? Someone tore out the car stairs. So, let me let me move forward. I know. I know where this is going. So, I know you do, but a lot of people listening might not. So, basically, spent all this time plus the five years of development. Finally, like, woohoo, going to get to show off the awesome, like, graphical powerhouse that is Gran Turismo. The race starts, and instead, it's my car sitting on the starting line. The first shot is a shot, like, a medium shot of the car from the front. And it's sitting there, and I'm looking at my car going, "God damn this thing. This looks like an upper-sps2 game. What the fuck have they been doing for five years?" Well, I mean, you should say that. And then, and then, I start driving, and, or, you know, the race starts in first-person perspective. And I'm like, "Okay, what the hell?" Which is, like, the sort of camera on the road. Yeah, just a regular first-person perspective. I'm like, "I know this game's got a cockpit. I want my cockpit view. Select button, third person. Select button again, third person wide. Select button, first person again. What the hell is going on? So I go out to the options menus, worst menus ever, too. This game has awful 2D art and awful menus. Just terrible UI design. And there's no menu item to enable cockpit view, which is when I pull out my phone and do some googling and find out that there are premium cars and non-premium cars and the premium cars are the ones that actually are rendered at full quality and have a cockpit views and the interiors are rendered. And there are all the shitty regular cars that you start the game with that are basically the PS2 versions of the car. So just to clarify, which one did you buy? What do you mean? Which kind of car did you buy? It was a Civic. It was not a premium car. So because you bought a used car, it didn't have a cockpit view? All the used cars are non-premium cars. So? And there are actually non-premium and premium versions of the same car in Gran Turismo 5, if I understand correctly. This is idiotic. So, continue. I felt very-- oh, I mean, I can't even express how bad the anger-- the six years of anger. [LAUGHTER] It's mind blowing. The door handles that you would use to open the car doors are like these-- Rectangle polygons. No, it's not even-- it's a texture. It's like awful looking texture. There's no geometry for it at all. The cars look awful. These people don't know what cars look like. They don't drive cars. No. They don't premium cars look like. They just haven't bought a used Honda-- None of them have any cars. It's actually just that they use different cameras to take pictures of the non-premium cars that were really low resolution. These webcams take pictures of those cars. At that point, I went back-- went into arcade mode and played with a regular premium car. And I was like, OK, this looks a little bit. All right, now this is a-- this is what I was expecting. Still, not quite as good looking as I was expecting it to look. But I was like, OK, here we go. This is more correct. That said, to go back to the point, I think that's a very, very bad mistake. Like, what fan of Gran Turismo that's been really itching for this game is going to go into arcade mode at first. And what fan is going to buy a piece of shit car with their 20,000 credits at the beginning when you can get something that's faster and better and actually going to win you races by getting your used car. That is definitely the smart thing to do. And then you turn the freaking game on and it wasn't just my car. It was the cars I was racing against as well. Everything looked really bad. That game made a very bad graphical-- like a very bad presentation off the bat. Why wouldn't you just-- especially in a game like this, why wouldn't you put your best foot forward? I don't know. Then I went to arcade mode and I chose a track that was the one that they gave away in the first demo of Gran Turismo 5 because they had a-- Is it Nurburgring? No, it's-- no, it's-- How's it called? It's the one in the Alps, right? Yeah, it's a Swiss Alps. Some of the-- I understand that some of the tracks are also up sampled PS2 tracks that they didn't completely redo them. I am totally-- I totally believe that. Including one of the most famous racing tracks on the planet, the one that everybody remembers from Gran Turismo 3. Which one? Laguna Seca? Oh, yeah, I love Laguna Seca. Laguna Seca for those people who played Gran Turismo, but don't remember the track names, is one where you'll go really fast down a hill into the last turn, try to take it too sharp and slide out into sand. Yeah. It's right after this sort of wicked S-curve. Right. So have you tried playing it online? I haven't yet. No. But I do have plenty more to say about the crazy experience of Gran Turismo that is not-- I didn't run into any of the online problems. This game has been patched two times already since I started playing it, and they already announced the third patch that comes out December 14th, which is supposed to add damage. So that was the other thing. I was like, you're still-- I still felt like I was bumping off walls, and it had the same weird fit-- like Gran Turismo physics that the game always had. I mean, I'd heard that there's actually damage, but you have to get up to a high enough level to unlock it. Again. So weird. Like level 40. OK, so-- but we-- Martin posted something to try to solve this even more, and it wasn't that it's leveling or some other-- Who's Martin? Martin Robinson of IGN UK reviewed Gran Turismo first. He's the one he had who reviewed it. He gave it an 8.0. A5. A5. That sounds like a reasonable score. So I know that I sound like I don't like this game, but there were things. Like when I played this other-- this track in the arcade mode, I turned weather on so there was rain going on, and all of a sudden, like with the premium cars in motion, some of the lighting effects off like the cars started to look really, really impressive. Like the details on the back lights, the rear lights of the cars-- Which are totally fully modeled on the premium cars. Just incredible looking. And like racing in rain, that became like a really interesting challenge, because there's rooster tails of water getting kicked up in front of you. It's hard to see. I played a rally track in snow where I literally couldn't see what was going on and I was just like, that stuff is pretty fun. Like when you're totally blind, go ahead. So to answer this, Sony said in a statement, "It is not unlocked." Confusion seems to stem from different implementation across the game's extensive garage, a point Sony further clarified by saying, "Standard models have minor deformation in scratches. Premium cars have greater visible level of damage, and premium racing models have the highest level of damage." Simple. Who's going to pay attention to this issue? Wait, wait, wait, wait. But damage, like to your car's performance. Like I've heard that that doesn't unlock until later. That could very well be good. Like that it actually introduces penalties for pinballing at 120 miles an hour off the wall. No penalties. Because that was the way to win races. That was always the way that I played in Gran Turismo 3. That was the reason that Laguna Seca was such a horde, because that last turn you couldn't bounce off a wall to draw a full speed. That's when you get into second place and when somebody else really had a turn. Yes, absolutely. I used to, like whenever there was a sharp turn, like I would sometimes go, if somebody was close behind me, I'd purposely go into second place and wait until they took the turn and then smash somebody inside of their car so I could take the turn more sharply. Yeah, a lot of people would. It's easier to take turns in Gran Turismo 3 when there are other people in the turn. Because they're closer to the wall and you can bounce off them. Right. The main thing that makes this apparently Gran Turismo 5 is not that good. Different than Gran Turismo is that, so I really liked my, even though my car was not premium, I still have an emotional attachment to that car because that's the car I always drive in Gran Turismo to start with. In a game like Forza, the game is constantly tailoring itself to you. If you are the type of person that only wants to make logos in the logo editor, by all means do it, all you have to do is race one race at the beginning and then that editor is open and you can spend the whole rest of your time doing that if you want. If you want to sell cars in the online shop, go for it. But the important thing is if you are the type of guy that has one car that you love and that's the only car you like, you can buy that car, mod that car out however you want and race pretty much, or maybe every race I can't remember. At least multiple tiers. Most of the races. It's divided into grades but different upgrades can take a car from one grade to another. Yeah. That's the other thing. In this game, I bought my car and was able to race a few races with it. After that, I needed a new car. Should I save up for the car that I really want next? Or should I buy something purposely to be able to enter one of these races that's in front of me? It feels very Japanese. I ended up spending a lot of money to upgrade that car to enter a higher level race because the way it works in Gran Turismo for me anyway is that I'll enter a race and either my car is fast enough to win or it's not fast enough at all so I just lose because there's no way I'm going to keep up. And then when I'm like, okay, screw this, not even going to try to quit the race, go take the money I have, put a bunch of upgrades on my car and then enter that race again and the game doesn't scale. So all of a sudden, I'm just like a thousand times faster than everyone else and I win the same amount of awards. Which is sort of quintessentially Gran Turismo. Exactly. Where is Fortinet? Something is not like that at all. Something they took out that I heard they took this out and I was really surprised because playing a lot of Gran Turismo 3, this was something that you had to do was you can't adjust gear ratios anymore. You can? Can you? Yes. Where you can... You have to buy a fully modified... Right, but you always had to do that. But basically, you could make it so that you'd speed through the first five gears and the sixth gear would be where you... Yeah, I have a fully customized one. I fucking read online that that was taken out and I just... My jaw. No, no, no. That's there. Oh, thank God. I can simply Gran Turismo 5. So somebody who's not going to buy Gran Turismo 5, but I did play a shitload of three back in the day too, is do you feel like playing this? Does this feel like a game that they spent five years working on? I mean like maybe they spent all of their effort in the simulation part of it so the simulation just feels so tight and they didn't spend it all in art resources. It is the most uneven experience of any game that I've played in a long time. That's really weird. Like the fact that it can be at times the best looking game or maybe not the best... That's it. It's not the best looking game, but it can be a very, very, very great looking game and it can be a very ugly game. The fact that it can seem so advanced in some ways and seem so bass-acquard in other ways. The fact that they're constantly talking about... I mean Kaz Yamuchi is talking about all the patches that they're going to be releasing next week and the week after and how they're going to be adding functionality to the game. Clearly it wasn't finished. This game was clearly a game that was not finished but also is one that he, that guy, just had to make compromises and I'm sure there were tons of people, everyone telling him, "Put this fucker out!" and he just couldn't stop. He's like, "We got to get all these cars in there. It has tons of tracks. It has tons of cars and it feels fun when you're playing it." And at times it's really wonderful and at other times it's not so great. But I still find myself playing it. I still like it. I want to ask you and Greg something coming from two different directions. You, as someone that digs Gran Turismo and Greg is someone that follows PlayStation stuff really closely. Should they have released the game in the state it's in? For me, I mean, they definitely, they shouldn't have missed that last ship date. That's what I think has fucked up everything for everything, right? They missed their original ship date, the one when they finally put a date on it and were like, "We're going to hit it?" The one where they were printing discs. Well, this is what we heard, that they were printing discs, that they were actual blue rays being printed and they pulled it back at the last second because someone cracked the latest firmware and they wanted 3.5 on the blue rays. Yeah, that's the ongoing rumor. And because there are so few blue ray production facilities on the planet, they had to slot more time at another facility to produce enough discs to meet initial demand. That was such a punch in the stomach for that game's momentum. You know what I mean? That happened and people were like, "When's it coming out?" "Oh, I don't know." They told it, it wasn't even a full two weeks when they were like, "All right, it's finally coming out this day. Get ready." I just tried to get it out for Thanksgiving and Black Friday and all that, you know what I mean? It felt like it just looked like the most disorganized launch, right? It didn't have that hype. This is, I mean, look at it, this is Sony's only giant first party game coming out for the Christmas holiday, for the holiday season, right? And it totally didn't feel like a big launch. It still probably sold really well, just off like... I mean, in Japan, it sold like 400,000 copies. Yeah, I mean, it's not like they're not going to make a boatload of money off of it. Are you just saying that it probably could have been a lot bigger though? Yeah, I just think, you said it's, in the state it is, should have been released. I mean, they had to get it out. I think that's how they felt. I definitely think they were putting pressure on it and caused me like, "It's gotta go." You know what I mean? And I think that in their best interest, they should have held off longer, but they couldn't, because it was like, "We need this for the holiday." Everything else is getting worse. They should have canceled the PSP version. PSP? They should never have released it. PSP, yeah. Because number one, it's not that, it wasn't, it's the same thing, it's not finished. I mean, dude. And it put a bad taste in people's mouth. It lowered scores. So, the, you know. It established a precedent for 18 for Gran Turismo. Exactly. Gran Turismo was a nine game, and now Gran Turismo is an eight game. Gran Turismo 4's Metacritic average is 88. Yeah, it was great. It was good enough, but it still felt too similar to Gran Turismo 3, but it came out, you know. It actually came out. There's that. So, I never mind. Do you feel like it should have come out right? Um. Or did it just, should they have waited? Was it about, was it a mistake? I think it was. I honestly think that there's so much game there, that it's fine, that it came out. Even being all fucked up. I think that it should have been communicated. And I don't mean, the sort of disjointedness needs to be communicated, and I don't mean through preview coverage. It needs to be communicated in the game itself. For people that don't read preview coverage like me, like, I, I should not have been surprised by the, the experience that I had. Like, it should have been very straightforward in telling me all of these weird intricacies that it had. Yeah, I totally should have been upfront about its deficiencies. Yes. Yeah, if I went into that, if I went into that game, like, you did, because I, I'm blind on it too. I haven't been reading the preview coverage. If I went into like, you didn't, I saw that first race, I would have been like, what the fuck have these been guys doing for the last six years? That's it. I'm not saying this anymore. I'm going to go play this. It's just like, you go on a date with a girl and the first thing she tells you is, look, uh, I fart all the time and I punch in my sleep. There it is. All right, at least I'm ready for it. How good do her non-premium models look? Yeah. Not great. I would think I could tie her to the bed. There are some very inflammatory images floating around online of a couple of non-premium models that look really bad. I, I, I was telling the story that I just told you all. One of them is the car is a car that's really cool and hopper suit, like it starts with the V or something like that. I don't know. Varon. It's the Varon. Yeah. That can't be a non-premium car. There is a non-premium-- That is the most expensive car in the world. You got to pull it up for me. Just one last thing. I was telling the story to please, please, Anthony. Okay. All right. Thanks. I was, I was telling the story the same thing. I just told you all podcast listeners. I was telling Jay Fresh the story and he couldn't believe me. So he made me turn the game on and show him what my first experience was like. So I did that and remembered that it was worse than I remembered and you can, you can turn the, you know, you can control your view with a left analog stick and look over at cars. So I was trying to show him like, it's not just my car buddy, like, look at all the other ones around. I pulled up next to some car, turned the camera left and hit pause and honestly, honest to God, the shadowing, the textures, everything, like beyond worse than PS2, like just like, it was the type of thing that people would put on a forum like you go to Gaff and you'd see like, oh, it's like, it was more incriminating than wall guy. It was more incriminating than, um, I'm trying to think of any of the other like ridiculous screenshot threads that have gone around, but like it was, I could have put out the worst screenshot that you've ever seen of Gran Turismo last night, just like showing the game off. It can look like the worst thing you've ever seen. Shadows are so, so bad. So bad. There's like, so bad. And that's the thing is like, all the video, I didn't watch that much coverage of this game, but the, the coverage that I did see was around the time that they first started showing off cockpit view. I think like a gamescom or something like that. And it was all this like, um, HD off screen footage, you know, shot with these shot with video cameras. Off screen always looks better. Oh my God. It looked, and I can, you can see it when you're playing it, you're like, yeah, if you shot this with a camera and all of a sudden it was just a little more contrasty, maybe the white balance is a little off and the edges are smoothed on the polygons because you're not seeing the edges of the polygons. This game would look like real life, but as soon as you see in the game, it doesn't quite look like what it looks like if you were to shoot it with a camera off screen. So those videos, those old videos, like they didn't really, they sort of set my expectations at a different level. This game looks like a game. It doesn't look like real life, but I can see how it would need to see shift still has the best and cockpit views of the car. Yeah, that's, that's got a really crazy cockpit view. Yeah. I heard that there's some screenshots of shift to that looked insane. So, um, Veyron is only standard in Gran Turismo. So that is insane. I cannot believe we did, uh, we made a video for, um, turn 10, uh, that was like the introduction of the Bugatti Veyron. So full disclosure, they paid us to make a video. They paid us to make a video for them, um, pastures, I know, about the Bugatti Veyron. And you know, they, I saw the laser scanning process and the, the renders of the interior of the car. So they have full cockpit view and everything going in that game, obviously, obviously. And I can't believe that it's like, I, I need to see these. It is right now like the hottest car in the world. It's the most expensive. It's really fast. You know, it's a, it's a crazy car. I can't believe it's standard. That's ridiculous. Wow. The only other game I've been playing is Elo Milo and it's cute and charming. And it's kind of worth playing. If you, you can find a link online to go to a website, download a demo and then you can buy it. Why is it like that right now? I think it's an experiment. It's kind of interesting. It's a Windows, I think it's partially because they're not ready to. I don't know. You can buy it on Xbox Live right now. If you do the download code thing first, yeah, that's just so weird. Yeah, you have to buy it through the demo. That's so bizarre. It's a Windows Phone 7 game also. They should be marketing the shit because it's awesome. Yeah. Yeah, it is pretty awesome. I mean, you're not, you're preaching to the choir here, I think. I just, I, yeah, I thought it was, it was weird. I, I had seen screenshots and videos of it. I thought it looked cute and has good graphics for, you know, the graphics. It does. It has cute characters and cool graphics and the gameplay seemed, at least, you know, charming and interesting. So go off the topic of video games for a second. Yeah. Can I go? It was a few minutes ago. Yeah. You talked about Gran Turismo and you called it. Graphics. You called it Bass Accords. Yeah. Was that intentional? Yeah. Did you intentionally say Bass Accords? Oh, yeah. You never heard that before? No. Oh, really? I was, I was like, was that an intentional punter? Was that like the best slip of all time? You've never heard Bass Accords? I'm still with the kids and anything like that. Bass Accords. I was like, that is awesome. Sorry about that. I can't just, it can't just be because like Ryan and I are in our third decade. Yeah. It is. That's sad. Ah. Anyway, sorry. I just thought you were like the clevers person I'd ever met for a second. I just knew open it. I just invented that, right? Yeah. I also invented thumb wrestling. So is anyone else been playing anything? Because I'm going to play DA Sports Active 2, but that's not really a video game. I got a buffier on it. Huh? I got a buffier. It's been working. Oh, yeah. That's true. That's too bad this isn't a video player. I just saw you feeling your own pecs. Yeah. Wiped beater, drinking your muscle milk. I was actually, I was massaging my peccon. Because the game actually made me really, really sore. It's fun on connect if you have a lot of space. And if you have connect. Yeah. The other way. It's an expensive investment because you need to connect and then it's also $100. Which sucks because the PS3 one's $100 too. But it comes with stuff. Well, then you don't need anything but that. Yeah. Yeah. And the PS3 one may not track you like precisely, but in the scheme of things that kind of works to your benefit because you know if you're doing it, right? Yeah. Like, and it's not the type of game you cheat at because you're trying to actually work out. When you connect one, you're like doing it right and it's trying to check you so precisely that when it doesn't track you exactly precisely and it'll be like better to do it this way and you're like, "Oh, the fucker fuck you." No. You say, you know, you'd be trying to work out how are the trophies? If I just got on there and flail around, am I going to get the trophies? If you started it up and answered a survey, you would get a trophy. Yeah. And it would work out. Am I going to gold there or silver? Oh, I don't know. I don't know enough about trophies. I never pay attention. Okay. But you can get trophies very easily in this. Interesting. So, it is an intense workout if you, you know, I heard even the first one was... The first one was? Even for we, it was intense. I tried the first one. If you did what it had. It was rough. But this one's actually really cool. And you connect if you have like a six by eight space and your connect is at least three feet off the ground, it'll work all right. But it has very specific kind of parameters that it needs to recognize a lot of things. I've been so out of the game that I have not played with it connected. Yeah. Wow. I still want to, eventually, you know. Me too. I mean, I say like... I just want to see it. The thing when it turns on and then it scans the room, that's the part I'm interested in. Yeah. It did when I started up connect. But yeah, I mean, this is really my first extensive connect experience too. I got you. And I'm not excited about any motion controls, right? Like I bought a move off of a Sony employee because it was cheap and I haven't even taken out of the box. So, well, for sure. So, yeah. I don't know. I like the auto move. And then did I talk about it last week that I've been playing the room factory 3, which I know sounds like such a lame game. Room factory 3. But it's actually not lame. It's Harvest Moon Fantasy. Yeah. It's a Fantasy Harvest Moon. I've never played a Harvest Moon game. So for me... What? This is like my first Harvest Moon experience. And I'm the type of person that likes movement piñata and that sort of thing. Yeah. So for me, the total mind numbingness of sitting there and clearing off my field, hoeing it, planting seeds, watering it for a few days, like all that shit is actually really engaging to me. Which I'm sure like it's probably like someone that picks up Samurai Warriors for the first time. Right. They're like, "Oh, this is really cool." But people nowadays, I imagine like room factory people have to be bored of shit by all that. But to me, it's cool. And unlike Farmville, you don't get offered net like subscriptions every time you do something. Yeah. And it's really super silly and stuff, but for some reason, I kind of like it. Yeah. I like it. And you know what? Your gut transforms into a sheep. Sweet. Swamp Command. A sheep man. That's awesome. So. Well, sheep are gross. But unfortunately, in the video game, sheep always cute. Sheep and flock. Come on. A door. Yeah. So I don't know if I'm playing some of that. It's a cool DS game. If you like farming. Whoo. I don't know. Who doesn't? And you don't want to. You don't want to sweat. It's like it's such a weird game because you level up everything. You level up like your cutting skill. You level up your sleeping skill by going to bed at night. You level up your hoeing skill, your watering skill, your seed planting skill. You level up your sword skill. If you swing a sword for a while, you level up your talking skill. If you talk to people. It's very intense. Sleeping thing doesn't feel quite right. I feel like the more I go on in life, the less good I get at sleeping. No, I would say you get better, right? Because you do a lot. You need less and less to keep going on. Yeah. There you go. So. Eventually when you're like 60, you only take like four hours. 30 minutes. Let's go. Let's go. 30 minutes and you have to pee. I did play the funniest game that I played in a long time. Yesterday it's one of the games that I got in my IGF independent games festival 2010 that will be a GBC 2011, I guess. Yeah. I'm judging that and there's a game that has pretty much the best bad dialogue that I've heard since, I don't know, since Resident Evil 1 or something like that. I hope it's not. Chris's blood. The dialogue that it doesn't sound like it's intentionally bad, it's just poorly translated and poorly acted. And poorly written. Thank you, Barry. Yeah. Exactly. You do. The master of unlocking. We almost made a Jill's sandwich. You were almost made of Jill's sandwich. If you, the type of person that gets a kick out of that stuff as long as usually there are, I mean, it's usually their games like that, but the games are so annoying and bad and hard that like it's such a slog to get through them that it's not fun. It's not fun enough to do it to actually enjoy all the bad dialogue. This game, Genetic Garden 2, which I don't believe is out yet, so I hesitate to tell you about it, but put it on your radar if you're the type of person that likes bad dialogue and stuff like that, because man. And the gameplay is just good enough to keep you playing. Yeah. I never felt lost. It's basically an overhead game with really weirdly pixelated graphics. It's a PC game that is like a combination between metal gear, overhead metal gear with like sneaking and stealth killing and resident evil because it's got doctors and it's there's a sort of virus and very simple puzzles, but the level design is relatively like it's solid, nothing mind blowing, but like I say, it's the, if you're a gamer, the game stuff that the actual mechanics are easy enough to get right into so you can really appreciate the terrible, terrible, terrible dialogue. I was playing it laughing, literally like side splitting hurt like pain in my body because I was laughing too hard and almost falling out of my chair. That was looking over my shoulder laughing his ass off as well. So it's really funny when you pick up an item, the little text pops up that says item has been picked genetic garden to check it out. So I think we're going to take a break and then, hey we're going to take a break, read a few letters and then break and go straight into the spoiler. Yeah. Okay. The secular. All right. All right. So, let's go. Jeffrey writes in and Jeff Jeffrey spells his name. Gee Offrey? No, he spells it J E F F R Y. Oh yeah. Why is there? He's in a hurry. He wants to sign it in a hurry, isn't that the way that it's not the way the kangaroo guy or the giraffe from Toys R Oh, I thought didn't I thought he was the first Jeffrey I ever met with the G offering and I think he posts a video and show now. Wow. Okay. So Jeff was kind of a whore. So Jeff Ray says, Jeff Ray writes in and he says, what happened on live? I was hoping to hear from some average users on how that performed. I've been checking in on the PC client pretty regularly and it seems subtle performance improvements over the last couple of months, but I was hoping that the use of a dedicated hardware decoder supposedly built into the micro console might make for a smoother experience. The joystick review was nice, but seeing the guy was rocking a 68 megabyte connection really deflated my trust to that review. Also, he made no comparison between the client and the console. Any updates would be great. I can, I can talk about online. I have a micro console, but I haven't had a chance to use it. But use it. You have, right, right? I have just played with the PC client and I believe the Mac client. I don't think that the tech is the problem at all. Like I think the entire problem is the business model. Like I don't want to purchase, purchase full games that don't exist anywhere in your vicinity whatsoever. I already have steam for that. If I want to steam, it's on your fucking computer and it's, well, it's on my computer and I know how steam works. If I switch computers, I can re-download it to any machine. What I want is a net. Steam works. Steam works. Yes, yes. I want it to be a subscription model like Netflix. Even if it's relatively expensive, like I think you could, I would maybe go up as high as something like $20 a month if it had a selection like Netflix. The other problem is that there are no... It's like Netflix. If Netflix had 35 movies. Then you had to pay for each one separately. You can rent though, which is kind of cool. It's true. This is true. But there's no consistency. Different games of different rental prices, different games have different purchase prices. And right now, there's only like 30 games or something like that. So all in all, I think it's a, they hired the wrong business people, but man, the tech is interesting. I don't even know that they hired the wrong business people. I'm just, I don't know if that exists. Yeah. So the funny thing is to me is that like the, for me, the coolest thing about online, for me personally, is like the ability to watch other people play games. I'm totally a bystander when it comes to watching people play games. I can do that for hours and hours on end. I like to do a star card for you plays. So I guess with like racers and stuff, it'd be interesting too. I would totally do it. I'd totally hop into people's games and watch them play just cause for like 20 minutes and then switch to another game. I watched someone playing Assassin's Creed 2. I think it was kind of interesting. I can lend you a micro console for a week. I actually, I could come up your house and play games and sit on your couch. I, to be honest, I haven't, I haven't, I don't think that the micro console is, I'm not, that doesn't appeal to me that much because the, I mean, it works, it worked great. I played fear to the demo cause it was free. And as far as like the actual, my, the response time and being able to play it, I could play it perfectly. How good is your internet connection though? I have cable from Comcast, but we don't spend that. I mean, what is it? Three, maybe? Um, you guys don't pay to upgrade it. Speed wise. You guys, I think, I think our maximum is like 30 or 40 or whatever it is. And usually we get between 14 and 20, which is how it goes. In any case, it worked perfectly. It's, it's like playing a game through, you like, imagine HD YouTube in real time, like that's what it looks like. It's weird. Like the text will sometimes have compression artifacts in a way that it looks like it is video, but you're controlling it in real time. It's a very funky sort of experience. And I'm sure you get used to it really fast. I'm just, I feel on record and say that your internet speed and our internet speed is orders of magnitude higher than the average internet speed in this country. Okay. Yeah. I mean, if that's, I can't recommend it to anyone right now. There's not enough games there. Can you try it for free? Can you? There are trials and demos. Okay. I believe you can now, when it started, that was the other thing is that it wasn't a free, it wasn't free to have, you had to have a subscription service just to be on online. And then you pay for the games. And then you pay for games. Yeah. They've changed it now so that it's actually free to subscribe, but you still have to pay for the games. I'm old. My hip hurts. Give me a break. And he made funny faces as well. Well, Arthur, it gets cold and Arthur gets rheumatism. Oh my God. It's gonna rain tomorrow. It's actually. Oh, I'm sorry. I think. It's the cat on my lap just fucking kills me. Her hips hurt too. All right. If there was a bunch of games on it, it would be the perfect way to try games before, even if you had to pay for a $25 per month subscription renting games, like the equivalent of renting games and trying things before you buy your physical copy of them, that would be great. And in the circumstance that there were happened to be games other than crisis where you had a PC, but you didn't have a strong enough PC to actually be able to run them at full quality or something like that, it might be interesting. But for games that you can run on your consoles or whatever at full, relatively full quality, the graphics aren't quite good enough going through the YouTuby-like filter that it makes it worth it. So you're gonna get, it's gonna look better if you play it locally, unless you're playing a crisis or something like that, I guess, but they don't even have crisis on the service. No, that was one of their big like, yeah, they was the first thing that they showed and it was all the testing that they did ahead of time was with crisis as far as I know, they made sure that crisis worked on the, like that was how they sold the thing, but when you think of a game that people can't play on their PC, is crisis is usually. As far as I know, it's, I mean, when I was using the service, it wasn't one of the games that was available. Yeah. So in GDC, they were showing me his edge. And GDC, they were showing crisis as well. Basically, I mean, I'm not, I don't want to make people lose their jobs, but I think that there was a business failure at online. The technology seems to totally work. It's amazing. It's freaking amazing. And it should think of all the applications that this sort of technology can enable people to do outside of gaming. Like, there are people that pay and wait so long for like super computer time at a college or something like that, where, you know, now they could be standing anywhere and have access to the super computer to, you know, do protein folding and all that kind of wild stuff or, um, exodocad, exodocad, exactly, you know, like, or rendering if you're a video guy, or, you know, video guy, I don't know, there's all sorts of reasons why this sort of technology would be life changing. And right now we're using it only for games. And there's about 30 games you can do. And you have to pay, you know, you have to pay per game. And it's just not the grand scheme of things. It's not worth it to use it right now, but the technology is amazing on live. Next question. - Avi writes in and I, his letters kind of lame, but I just liked it because he bolded his key points. Can you read it the way that it's written? - I have an almost impossible task and was wondering if you could help me out. I'm looking for some good character action games on the PC. The only one I could come to mind with was Shank and I remember Arthur didn't like that as much. I don't care as much for story or sound since I plan on playing these games while listening to podcasts. But if you guys had any suggestions, if you can't think any, could you suggest some other good fast-paced action games? - I just want to actually super tofu boy. I was just going to say that, wow, Jason Rubin got his way, right? Because he was the one that said that they shouldn't be called platformers anymore. They should be called character action games. - Arthur? - No, no, no, no. - Character action games are games like God of War. - Okay, but they, okay, so, but that's post Jason Rubin saying this comment. - Yeah, I know. - This was around Arthur's. This was around this, his big to-do about this whole thing was around Crash Bandicoot, sort of, you know, this is like PlayStation 1, early PlayStation 2 era. Yeah, I don't call things character action games and I haven't really heard that term. - Dante's Inferno is the first modern, or not Dante's Inferno, don't make cry. This is the first modern character action game. - Why is it character action game and not an action and adventure game? - Because this is a third person game with an emphasis on one character doing really cool shit. - There's, what about Legacy of Gain Soul Reaver? What about- - This game's combat was not the focus, like, where is Devil May Cry very much was? Us, that's my theory. - It's not Reaver, I think the combat was the focus, right? - The combat in Soul Reaver sucked. - But it was the focus of it was still like putting guys on speed since then? - No, it was puzzle solving, primarily in world exploration. - That's half of God of War. - No, God of War is an extremely linear game with some puzzles. - Move this brick here, move that brick there. - I'm okay. - In any case, I think it's a silly distinction, but I'm glad that Ian used it here. - I didn't- - I didn't create it. - I'm not saying you did. I'm just saying that you used it. - I know, I know, I know. - I would just like to say, play Super Meat Boy, not Super Topo Boy. - Devil May Cry 4 is on PC and quite a few people liked it. - Thanks to the disclaimer. - All the Capcom stuff is apparently runs perfectly on PC, so. - Well, after Devil May Cry 4, anyway, that was the first competent PC port I think they did. - Yeah, that was the right. - It was, or Lost Planet 1? - Lost Planet 1 was a PC game, too. - Yes, Lost Planet 1 then Devil May Cry 4 and everything after that. - Yeah. - MT Framework, I guess, was a catalyst. - Yes, catalyst. - It don't make cries really the only one I can think of, because Dante's Inferno never came to PC, which is too bad. - God, that's the fourth time you mentioned Dante's Inferno today on the spotguests. - Because the character action games are coming up. - I really don't like Dante's Inferno. You have to wait through a lot of shit in that game to find the good. And the good that's there is awesome for a lot of it. - It's so weird for a game to feel totally like it's hitting all the checkbox barks like 60 frames per second, like combat system that really doesn't seem all that flawed. But like for me to feel so unenthusiastic while I was playing. - The puzzles are fucking atrocious. - And some of the platforming is awful for me today. - Let's be honest, the platforming you out of war is an abortion. - Right, but you told me in this, it's even... - Yeah, well God of War 3 is markedly awful platforming. Like I feel like I died more platforming God of War 3 than any other God of War game. - I don't like God of War 3. - Dude, degree does he agree? - I don't remember standing out to me as far. - Like the harpies? - I remember being way more frustrating God of War 1 and 2. - Like the harpy jump puzzles over chasms, stuff like that. But Dante's Inferno has some really awful platforming and some really awful puzzles. And puzzles are often prone to murdering you if you do them incorrectly in Dante's Inferno. - As they should be. - It's hell. - That's exact. Thank you, Anthony. You're following the story. - It's hell. It is hell. - You're really... - Blaine writes in. And he says, "I was wondering if you guys ever impose unnecessary restrictions on yourself from playing an RPG." He says, "For instance, on my second play through Fallout 3, I decided I had to play a character as an abject psychopath. Whenever I encountered drugs or alcohol, I had to use them. It's presented the opportunity to fight or kill someone. I had to take it. Whenever I made it to Tenpenny Tower, I slaughtered everyone in the building for dismembering their corpses and piling the arms, legs, heads, and torsos and their respective files. Finally, when I picked up the cannibal perk, I'd always stop to eat my kills in the middle of the battle. It wasn't always fun. There reaches a point where you maybe want to save stimpacks for when you need them. But this bitch is crazy. All drugs immediately. So is this a common way of playing, or should I just never talk about this again? - I'm pretty sure you shouldn't talk about that, but Anthony does something similar. - I think that's awesome. - To be fair, I play, I put an abject restriction. - I put Anthony talking about his character with his girlfriend on the phone. He's like, "I don't know. It's just what I thought my character would do." - Yeah. My character's a gun slinger. And like, the student came now with it. - And really, really disturbing D&D flashback. - So I owned these pistols, and there's one point in Fallout New Vegas where you're trying to get these two guys off drugs, and there's this drug dealer. I think I talked about this. That drug dealer's selling them bad drugs. After I've talked him out of not selling drugs to those two guys anymore, then you wouldn't shot him. - Yeah, I wouldn't shot him to death. Because I was like, "Well, I wouldn't just let him live." That ain't right. - I'm sort of jealous of Wayne. Maybe I need to force myself a little more, but I don't-- - To be evil like that? - No, no, no. Just to give yourself some really interesting, but arbitrary restrictions that you impose upon yourself and then play the game that way, I've read stories about people doing that, or like, very long essays like, "Oh, one guy doing a single life in Fallout Far Cry 2," and making sure that he never died, and if he did, that would be the end of his experience. And he wrote about it, and took screenshots from first-person-- wrote about it from first-person perspective and took screenshots and put together a really long PDF about his adventure. That shit's super interesting to me, but I've never played a game like that. And I play-- I'm the worst, man. I play every game just like good, you know? Like I do all the good choices, and I played Kotorra a second time and played it with the exact same character model, like I built the same character and played it the exact same way. Well, it's like, I think-- I'm getting better about it. You know, it's been a lot of years since Kotorra, but I want to play like that. Well, I feel like what Blaine is doing is he's actually using video games in a really great way, because one of the things we always say is the strength of video games is the collaborative storytelling possibilities in it, and that's exactly what he's doing, is he's using the universe to collaboratively story tell to himself, and that's actually super cool. I like to put arbitrary restrictions on myself in MMOs too, like, wow, Cataclysm's coming out, and I've been considering playing again a little bit, but if I play again, I want to start-- me and my friends want to start a group of goblins who are extremely racist towards all other horde. We would never group with them. If we did, we would just berate them the whole time and call them racial epithets that we would make up, because they're orcs and stuff like that. Right. You gotta work on that. I just really like the idea of being a racist goblin. Well, that's what-- I mean, games are supposed to be what you make them. You know what I mean? It's a fall game. Like, you know, fall out, I'm real boring too. Like, I'll set up-- at the very beginning, I make my choice. I mean, they're going to be Kalel or Zod, and it's very, very clearly defined what I'm going to do in the game. But when I'm playing as Kalel, and I make sure I get the horn and glasses right away and wear them the whole time, I'm making a backster, and I'm like, I bet he crashed there. He crashed on this planet, and they found him and got him in the vault somehow. But the sun-- sun's not yellow here for some reason. You know what I mean? Like, you just invent your own little back story or whatever's happening. So I want to know where this guy lives. Joe writes in. He says, did you guys know you can rent games from the library for free? The selection is less than stellar. But I found a few gems here and there. Yes. Yeah, you absolutely can. It's becoming more widespread, too. I know that certain libraries-- I guess libraries want people to count. Exactly. I did it. I did it in high school. This was in-- and high school was a long-- The big old floppy disk. A big old floppy disk. Yeah. No, so they had Nintendo games, Nintendo and Genesis games at the library. He also says, if I take a music CD from the library and then rip it to my computer, is that stealing? Yes. I legally acquired it, but I'm not paying for it. Yes. Yes, you're stealing. Yeah. You're stealing in the coolest way possible. Yeah, you'll never get caught. Yeah. What? No one will ever catch you. Literally. Exactly. You're fine. Keep doing it. Yeah, I didn't use my library card for much. It got me out of getting busted once for underage drinking, but that's what it-- Nice. Your library card? Yeah. I was selling a party at my dead grandmother's house and the cops showed up and they were all set to go with it. They didn't care. They were going to let us off the hook, but I needed to be able to prove I lived there. And of course, I didn't live there. So I was like, I got nothing. And then I remembered that I lived in an incorporated Glen Ellen in this house. I was in Glen Ellen. So to get the cheap library card, we used a fake bill from there. So I'm like, wait. I have a library. And I'm like, you know, 18 drunk off my ass. I'm like, you got a library card. It's like, awesome. See you later. You're like, perfect. Thank you. Sweet. Um, why did you have to prove you were there? Like, they were going to say like you were broken to this house to throw a party. Totally. Like, I mean, it was just, it was just a normal suburb or whatever and they show up and there's kids here and I'm like, yeah, you know, it's, it's my, it's my grandmother's house. We're just here hanging out. And he's like, well, prove it to me. You know what I mean? How are you not just some guy here, you know, throwing a party? How did you just get in here? Because none of the, you know, the other old people in the condominium had never seen me. Right. Grandma's dead. I don't come by all that often. Right. Right. I guess that's a good thing. Hello. Back. Hey old people, Steven writes in, he writes in a lot. He says, I've been playing through the new DK game and been having a blast with it. Donkey Kong? Yes. Donkey Kong. The game sticks to the exact same formula Mario has and from what I've played Kirby's Epic yarn does as well. All of these titles have been enjoyable and I'm not near fatigue, but what do you guys think about Nintendo rehashing the same title, but with different characters and graphics with maybe one or two mechanics that differentiate them from one another? Who's known to Nintendo's track record for the last 20 years? It's also not entirely fair. No. I only played, I don't have a copy of Donkey Kong yet because I have a lot of other games I'm playing so I haven't gone out and bought it yet, but Matt and I did go to a preview session where we had about three hours with the game and I know he's talking about fatigue from Nintendo platformers. I thought there was just a tremendous amount of variety in the three hours we played. We had an unlock save files where we were able to pop from world to world stages stage. I was really into Kirby Epic Yarn and it was around the time that that had come out. I thought it was a really great platformer, a little easy, but just really had terrific controls, really interesting levels. And Donkey Kong. Fucking charming. Yeah. Ridiculously charming. And Donkey Kong seemed better and I was not expecting it. Donkey Kong gets so challenging. It's so hard. It's so hard. It's just like, maybe I played co-op with Simon for a preview and I was like, man, I think maybe I should have gone farther with it done more with it because Kirby, I played a few levels and I was like, okay, I'm done. You know what I mean? But like Donkey Kong, it seems like keep, you know, get through the stuff that's, you know, obviously looks just like what you played on SNES. I was watching Ryan Scott play Donkey Kong and it didn't look fun. But you were watching him at the final part, right, where he's trying to die and there's the level of the world. No. I don't think it was the final part. There's been various parts in the game and like just the amount of instant kill or like very little warning to the level design where it's like, well, you're gonna have to die here a couple of times before you know what to do. It just didn't, like I'm not interested in that kind of platformer. Yeah, I didn't see much of that sort of stuff. It still looked fun. We did die a lot but it was like because there were two people playing together and they weren't like doing a good job of communicating and Jason wasn't getting, our coworker Jason wasn't really getting the hint. Is this one stage where there's this tsunami that comes from the background over into the foreground and if you have to duck behind these stones in order to not get washed away and it's a one hit kill or maybe it's not. It is. Is it? Okay. Anyway, Jason did not learn very fast. It's listening to Ryan play it. It was like listening to one of our guide's writers play a game which is to say angry. But that's how Ryan always plays games. Well, it's not. Not like this. I've watched Ryan play other games. Yeah. I don't know. It is hard. It's very challenging. Yeah. I just think that the way that Nintendo tries to combat that fatigue problem is by giving you kind of a boundless creativity in the variety of stages. Like all the stages are so vastly different. They do so much awesome stuff and you know that was definitely the case with Galaxy. That was the case with New Super Mario League. Keep in mind this is retro who made the only things under their belt are the three Metroid prying games which are actually pretty fucking fantastic and I was very skeptical because Donkey Kong Country is not my favorite franchise. I think the art direction like horrid from the original things they were showing off. I just don't like the look of Donkey Kong the characters of the world and agrees not not for me. Yeah. But it was computer generated, but I hate you both. But the this game like once I saw other stages that weren't from world one. Like there's some amazingly good looking stuff in there. There's this one like a level where you're running away from a giant bat that fills up the entire left side of the screen. It's an auto scrolling stage. It's startlingly realistic. No. It's crazily cartoony to keep it. Did you? Can we address the adverbs please? Yeah. Sorry. But you're it's a what they call a rocket barrel stage. There are barrels that you hop in like all over the game, but there's rocket out of it and you ride it like crazy flying. Right. Anyway, anyway, that bat looked really cool. How about we do one more letter and then we move on to do our spoiler talk. Oh, we're still doing that. Yeah. I know you're fucking here. You're sitting down. All right. All right. Let's figure we do. Yeah. I was just planning on doing till we felt fatigued or whatever. I feel fatigued. Not other podcasts just in general. Matthew writes in. Got up early. No, I didn't. We'll do the rest. We'll do this last one. What do you guys think of me? I'm writing to ask you a question about a serious problem. I recently moved from a cold Midwestern state to a southern coastal city, currently enjoying the 75 degree winter days, but I'm covering with fear from March. That is when the beach season starts and runs through September. The cause of my fear is hair all over my body. Last back, shoulders, ass, legs, arms, and head for now. I seriously could walk out of my house naked on Halloween and have an acceptable wookie costume. My body gives the impression that I will turn into a wolf during the full moon. If I passed out, face down in your bathroom without a shirt, you would probably confuse me for a bath mat. So what do I do? Shaving is impossible as I need more than a stray razor and can't reach all the parts of my back. Waxing, surgery, start smoking to get cancer so I can undergo chemo. This is what he says. I like how Anthony looks at me to make sure I know that he's not making it up because it totally sounds like something he would say. Your thoughtful help is appreciated. I don't know. I figured, you know, I've never had a problem with body hair. There's like laser, well I understand that some people it's a little intense. I just say it's abrasive though. There's laser treatments for stuff they can keep hair from going back for a long time. I just say embrace it and go for it. I mean, actually if you were in San Francisco in gay, that would be a guaranteed big man. It would be the awesomest bear that I've ever been in. You know, I feel like even they have limits. No, they really don't. You're in San Francisco, really limits? No. Yeah. I would say do a wax job first. I'm guessing that. I don't know. You can pray you'll do it. They're grooming places that will shave your back. I mean, I realized that that's a phrase that typically is associated with ridicule, but. I just, I thought where he was going with it, he's overweight. I know. I just need to do it. I mean, that's at least your problem. I just say you just gotta just. I don't know. You should get a slip inside and cover it in there and slide down. I mean, if it's so bad that it prevents you from having any self-confidence. Yeah. If you're totally worried about it. Then. In there, there's something on TV out there, some spray that you can do. That's what I'm saying, right? There, slip and slide. It has some fun. Oh my God. Yeah, but then you take a bump wrong, your head's in there. Then what do you do? No eyebrows. And all of a sudden you're going to get yourself conscious of the beast just because you're some. You look like a weirdo doll. At that point, you just pull some off your chest and stick it on your eyebrows. I think you should be totally self-conscious for the next 10 years, stay in your room, like really get angry, listen to some angry music, some night and snails might be good. Then develop some sort of artistic, you know, like develop your art, find something you want to do, really like get good at it, get yourself a job. And then after you have proven yourself with your art and you're making some money, you'll find it. Still being insecure about all the hair all over your body. Yeah, you'd still insecure, you'll eventually through your artistic prowess, you'll meet someone who accepts you for who you are and then you don't have to worry about that. I should ask you to shave your hair. I actually think that you're awesome or you can have her do it for you. I was thinking that actually would be an, he needs to start an art project where it's just giant wax strips and he goes up and presses himself against it and pulls off. And it's just like impressions of a hairy person. I just think that that's a good album title, that is an awesome album title for a band. Yeah man, that's a good idea, start a band and then make the album cover, you're, you naked and eventually people think it's so like crazy and badass. You just make it cool, you'll make it cool. Thanks Ryan. Have you heard the Pretty Hate Machine Remaster yet? I have. Alright. Always sound advice from the Rebel effect. If it spoils me, you know, like I want, I put in ritual day low habitual from Jane's addiction the other day because I don't know, it somehow came up in conversation. And man, now I want that remastered. It's so bad. Yeah. I want everything remastered that came from the 80s and 90s, Pretty Hate Machine. Spin doctors, I keep waiting for, I know, when I get my new remastered pocket full of kryptonite. Wish you want to come my way. Okay. So we're going to, this is, I guess that's the end of the letter. This is the end part if you are not interested in having Assassin's Creed spoiled for you. And I am not. This is where you get off. Yeah. Me and Greg are leaving. No, it's you three. No, I thought Greg was staying. I've decided I want to. Okay. I've decided I've made my choice. I don't want, I don't want to run a risk of ruining it and then not finishing it. I love the game too much. I want to finish it. Okay. I want it. I hear that. I still haven't read our review because I don't want to have anything spoiled. Yeah. I've stayed away from everything. Right. Our review kind of does that. I agree. I don't even read what I write. I don't even read what I write. I don't know what you're talking about a quarter of talks If you might I say type this up. I'm out of here. Don't read reviews. They're for suckers. I review our first spite All right, thank you guys for joining us. You can send us your letters to letters that eat - sleep - game Dot-com you can follow us on Twitter. Yeah, I'm not gonna tell you all our Twitter names. I will though Greg your game over Greg II correct Matt. You're talking orange Ryan. You're Ryan O'Donnell And Anthony is chuffed money with one F and Arthur is a G's A. E. G. I True. I get the fuck out of here I'm gonna meet you Greg. It was a pleasure meeting you. Yeah, it's good to meet you too man. You guys can make up I know you we've been on other podcasts. I know but it's funny too because when we met it packs remember I made a joke about you only watching games and then today you're like, oh, yeah, I love watching I nailed you. I called you the latest babe I I I I I I I I I I I I I All right, so three of us are back. It's myself Matt and Ryan hello and this is where we are gonna spoil some of us ask your brother We haven't decided what we're gonna spoil because we don't know how we're gonna talk about it But I'm just saying that well, I definitely want to talk about the ending. This is your This is the moment where you get the fuck out if you're yeah, I don't want any of it spoiled So those of you who completed the homework assignment last week, so we just want to talk about the ending first Is that why not is that what you want to do because it seems like that's what you want to talk about yeah Why not well It's because it's fresh in my head because I did just beat it earlier today, and it's like I just want to know like I Missed some of the voices that were happening under the credits because I wasn't paying attention right close enough And it sounded to me like they said oh Man, she's gone critical or whatever get her back in the animus and it sounded like Desmond was talking They're putting Desmond back in the animus. I it sounded like Desmond's voice. That's the way Desmond said no oh That's the protest, and that's why I dumped you back into the animus Right afterwards. I can verify this cuz I play in Italian so with subtitles, and so I read they got to read the right So okay, so after he after he stabs Lucy then like is it the is it supposed to be like The other assassins come and find him cuz I didn't recognize one of the other voice I mean Sean and Rebecca are there right, but they aren't the ones talking at that in part are they no So you have to wonder if there if it's one of the other Assassin's cells that are spread around the world or if or if it's or if it's a sturgo or something Right, and I don't know if that's what it is or maybe it's a third entity and that's kind of what I'm wondering if that's what the ending implies because one of the things that it repeats a lot in Brotherhood because you're inducting new assassins all the time is that Nothing is true. Everything is permitted. Like that's the assassins motto. Yeah, and It also seems like the truth is going about establishing that the Templars and Abstergo are doing what they're doing because they feel that it's the only way to safeguard humanity Which is the same thing at the assassins exactly and yeah, you get the sense throughout the game that they're both wrong so what if the third game is Desmond being pitted against both the assassins and the temple are because neither actually knows what's going to happen and he's the only one that can put it together because the assassins are This hierarchical organization that have lost sight of what they're supposed to be doing Abstergo obviously have an idea of what they should be doing. That's very authoritarian and totalitarian Yeah, and it does seem like a very reasonable conclusion. Yeah, during the ending of Assassin's Creed 2 where You basically have the what's the holograms name? I think it's Minerva. Yeah, Minerva is speaking, you know to Ezio But through him at Desmond directly to Desmond and we had any still love that line when Desmond's like says to himself like when she said he saw Really good, but you know she she seemed it's very clear that Desmond is special outside of the fact that he's an assassin and Special when compared to every other assassin through history So and and reading the emails like once you get the password for everyone else's emails and you start reading them Reading these sort of cryptic communiques that Lucy is having with this shadowy figure about having second thoughts about not being sure what she's doing About not being sure about the relationship that she's having it kind of makes us Like feelings for Desmond. Yeah, that she's been encouraged to establish this relationship But not to have feelings and that she feels like she needs to pull back and she's being ordered not to also Rebecca's fucking Sean And that's weird Yeah, and you get the and actually one of the lines that Minerva says when you're doing the final platforming unlocking the Apple section that section is weird. It is weird, but Minerva does say that like, you know A product of both sides or whatever like he's both like he's both Templar and Assassin and the weird thing is like all of Minerva's stuff seems Distant but kind of supportive and and establishing a relationship at the end of Assassin's Creed to In Brotherhood every time you encounter her she sounds pissed. Yeah, and all of the voices in that chamber at the end sound pissed Yeah, like like humanity rebelled or it's like it's their fault that this is all happening They're fucking it up that there's no chance that they can fix it that they hit it away because humanity couldn't be trusted And they say that like humanity was their creation and they gave humanity only five senses And then they tried to add the sixth sense in afterwards because they figured out that having only the five senses Was why humanity was flawed? So they said that they tried to add the sixth sense in back through the blood or something like right and that like things got All fucked up from that point. So I mean, I wonder if that's what equal vision is like if that's why assassins can do that and why The assassin stuff is largely familial. Mm-hmm. Like Ezio We're all in there And and yeah, obviously Desmond is related to Altair and they're related to Ezio and and Minerva implies that Desmond is also related by blood to the Templars right and there's Remember there's a girl in Assassin's Creed. Mm-hmm that Altair had some kind of relationship with mm-hmm But it's never really established what well he had a baby to continue the blood talking about that Did you ever play bloodlines the people yeah? No, yeah that it's all explained. Yeah, that's that character is a major character in blood I mean, what who is she she's Altair's love her. Yeah, right, but I mean She's a Templar She starts out as a Templar. So she is she joins forces with With Altair and they end up like doing some stuff together and then and they do some other stuff together Yeah, at the end they imply that like, you know, that's how Altair's line is continued is by them having a baby so, I mean in that respect that ties in very well to the combination of two that that this specific line of assassins Is a combination of the assassins and the Templar But yeah, it just her tone in that whole section. It just makes it seem like there's The balance of power is going to shift because things are not what you thought they were Mm-hmm, and I think that every Assassin's Creed game has done something to establish that things are not what you thought they were Right like an Assassin's Creed one it turns out that the head of your order is actually with the Templars and Assassin's Creed two it turns out that Let's see a whole other like yeah, there's like it's not just this non supernatural thing It's like something that's just like totally fucking way out there with with higher beings that created humanity that had high technology before our civilization even existed that they hit it that it exists and now The revelation in this is that the balance of power is not what you expect It would be that they're forcing you to kill Lucy for some reason Mm-hmm. Well, they she says again. Minerva says weird things, you know, which is obviously they do that on purpose So that we're having these kinds of conversations, you know They she says like you can only choose one to take with you through the door And then and then he's and then like he's forced to kill Lucy like some and also Half-templer half a sense. It could be or she could be a dull agent. Yeah It's not answered about subject 16. Well, the funny thing is is then like after you stab Lucy then Minerva also says You know Go and something about like now you're going to go find her or something like that or you still have time to go find her Is I don't know it's weird, right? so like the the thing the I mean like the overall themes of like different ways of looking at the world like trying to save the World through ultimate control and trying to save the world through, you know, essentially the Assassins at least in my mind represent kind of, you know, the the view that it's almost an anarchistic view You know, like when they say that everything is permitted They're basically saying that like, you know, humanity's ultimate virtue and peace is through total freedom And then like the the Templars are saying that humanity's ultimate quest for peace is your suggestion by total subjugation in order Yeah, right and that's carried through a lot in the subject 16 puzzles. Yeah, and this one From a gameplay perspective, I think a lot of the puzzles kind of suck I'm actually having more fun with the subject 16 puzzles than I did in I think No, I think that they've gone beyond game into like mensa test And in ways that even like there's a point where I just gave up and I've looked up certain puzzles at on facts Even finding the answers. I don't understand how they got to them Are there are there are there 16 10 I've got I cuz I've only gotten through just over 50% of them so far Oh, yo, you have some fucking Anguish in your pretty really really hard. Okay, the ones that should have been hard like the I think the ones that you're referring to as mensa tests are the ones that I was able to Either totally solve or if I couldn't figure out exactly why did you brute force it? Not totally, but sort of like I had a basic idea usually their number number puzzles. Yeah, the code wheel puzzles. Yeah, where I would I Had a basic idea of what the general answer was but I couldn't quite get the right answer Like I would have gotten partial credit on a math test or something like that, right? The ones that really drove me nuts and that I did actually look up one or two answers Videos online for where some of the just the picture. I did that on one which was the last one I did it on the one I think it's the second to last which has like an Indian television like a chief head and it's like a television signal for me. It was the one that goes from Adam and Eve to to like the planet with the the solar flares on the outside that one I somehow I think it might have been left over because I did The last two really close together Like residual memory from how to solve the one before it. I was able to solve that one pretty quickly But yeah, I just didn't have to be honest much fun solving those right the chest stuff original at first It was kind of cool and after that it became a little tedious and I mean, I don't play chess so that's very I had to look up the last I did look up the last the last the last puzzle is I don't understand like if you take the the motto of the assassins and Try to apply it then I understand how that works. Mm-hmm, but It's spend so much time establishing this system Yeah, like the thinking outside of that system Doesn't even make sense. I liked the I sort of respected the answer for it Then when I saw it, I was like, okay, and I did immediately think of the assassins motto, right? How did how did this last puzzle work? So basically your if is it your king or your queen your king? Your king is totally boxed in mm-hmm on the board and it says I don't remember what it says But it's like something like all hope is lost and then a bunch of gibberish. No, it says it's just something like along the lines of It's totally botching it, but be be free. Mm-hmm. Something something like basically pick out rules think outside the box So the way you win is by taking the king and moving it off the board Right the way you went the way you saw that part of puzzle. Yeah, I felt I felt dumb after looking it up Even because I felt like I should have been able to solve it and it that bugged me that I didn't solve it I think that there's I liked the audio puzzles mainly because of the stories that they told. Yeah The one about the cable company was one of my favorites. Yeah, the guy calling the calling about the weird channel Yeah, it shows like channels all his him and his son's biometric data and their purchasing history and the things that they like And how those at at the end of the call there's a guy banging on their door like there's some very I think they could have got that a little bit sooner, but They were a little heavy-handed they were but I mean there's a really great sense of menace and that and they do that a lot Actually, like the guy who's gonna write a book about the hysterical corporation that no one's ever heard of and the phone call Like this is recording. It's cut off and it's like another group that says all right. Well We just have something we need someone to take care of it should be simple like here the coordinates or whatever And it's like that's that's very dark and it's sort of establishes the kind of people that abstergo are in case you weren't aware, right? It's some of this stuff was pretty heavy-handed like I did like that they compared modern political events and Contextualized it within this fictional reality where everything is conspiracy Mm-hmm particularly something as recent as citizens united. Well, that's what that's so nice about like, you know Having a game that's based around the ultimate conspiracy theories because you can really can take any political event and Conspiracy eyes the shit out of it if you want to so and they do it so Adeptly and so quickly that you just buy it. Yeah, you're like, okay. God. Oh, man. That's amazing that that's part of it too cool. Let's keep going So like I guess the one thing that that I want actually spoiled for me because I kind of don't really care Is what's what's the truth in this one? So I haven't completed all the videos like in Assassin's Creed 2 it was that you know Adam and Eve are escaping from like some sort of Techno Atlantis with the Apple and so what's this one all about? So once you finish all the puzzles It plays all the videos and it's still black static with some occasional images and it flashes words that say the truth is in the execution And everyone is confused and no one knows that it means because the imagery doesn't make any sense Mm-hmm, and then Rebecca has this or was it Rebecca or Desmond? Someone realizes that it said exe Cution. Mm-hmm. So They realize that it's not a video file, right? It's a program gotcha So you it gives you the option that it says Launch program or not because if you want to the program like you'll lose it's like exiting the animus Basically, you watch the program and it takes you into a VR simulation Cool where you're doing a bunch of platforming and there's some platforming puzzles that involve like movement at specific areas and climbing in certain areas and that Making things appear. It's like The puzzle solving stuff of the truth combined with platforming stuff with the trials, which is really kind of cool Yeah, it's it's much more involved than just like unlocking some story element, right? And you encounter a Approximation of an avatar of subject 16 Okay, and subject 16 is the one who spread blood all over the walls in Assassin's Creed one. Yeah He went crazy, and yeah, he's he's definitely crazy. Mm-hmm. I'm Trying to remember exactly what he said, but a lot of it actually sort of reinforces what we've been saying about the ending that people can't be trusted that it's going to come down to the sun and It he says Desmond's son, which doesn't make much sense, but that could be an interesting direction Mm-hmm, and that he can't keep himself together, but he'll be back Hmm am I forgetting anything? I don't think so. I can't I He says a lot really fast. Yeah, it was the type of thing like where when I was playing through that section because I knew that I could play through any other you know this that's the great advancement from this game that Assassin's Creed 2 didn't or one of them is that you can replay any of the things that you want to memory usually Almost always which ones can't you it's not that you can't do it with certain ones It's that after a certain point it will no longer let you go back until you finish the game. Oh Right. Yeah, like the the last the last section of the last sequence. You can't I pretty much after as soon as you find the Apple Yeah, you can no longer play an old memory, right? Yeah, and so you finish the game to and that really snuck up on me. So talking about it didn't need to actually Oh, really? I felt like the ramp to the end was pretty. No, like I got it and it made sense to me I just didn't expect it to just like lock me in locked into this Because usually it's like you do a memory in a sequence. Yeah And then it spits you back out into Rome and you can run around and you have to go back to the exclamation point activate the next memory in The sequence what you find the Apple is just memory memory memory memory sequence memory memory memory, and that's it There's no breaking out of that sequence It's funny because I've been playing You know very very leisurely Up to this point because I didn't think I was gonna be covering I figured you guys talked about this game last week so I wasn't trying to play it for any you know coverage or anything like that just for fun, yeah, and Last night was when I found out we're gonna come on and do this I was queued up right at the like I was literally right at the mission before that stuff It's over before you think it's gonna be over like the last two sequences are really short the ones that actually relate to the real like the ones that Yeah, wrap up. We'll wrap up the the Borgia Story basically like that stuff gets like wrapped up pretty fast. Mm-hmm. I felt like I could tell that it was coming up though I knew I was close to the end the night before I think the reason that maybe it ends faster than I expected is because It paints a lot of familial tension in the Borges like between the Pope and Cesare. Yeah, but there are plenty of games where there's tension in that kind of situation But you're still the one that kills them. Yeah, and in this that actually unfolds the way it probably should which is that Cesare is almost poisoned by the Pope. Mm-hmm, and Cesare kills the Pope Mm-hmm, and Lucrezia gives up Cesare and after that, it's just like it's I skating downhill like toward the end, but it's just it unfolds naturally But I didn't expect it to take that turn. I thought it was gonna make me do everything, right? I really liked it because it just sort of surprised me throughout the whole end of it like I You know, I knew that of course that Cesare was gonna be the final battle somehow But I just like the way that it all wrapped up together because while I don't think Well, I don't think this has this nearly as strong a story as twos does like it's not as strong in the telling Anyway, but the villain's story is more interesting in Assassin's Creed Brotherhood than it is in two. Yeah Well, that's essentially what I'm getting at like I feel like it I feel like the the way that the whole world ties together and ties into the story Might be a little bit more effective than Assassin Creed's - but like I really would have to go back and play two again to make I think as a story about Ezio as a character Assassin's Creed 2 superior because it's It's Ezio warning about the world. It's Ezio warning his place in it and the Borges are Just sort of there. Yeah, they're the big bad face Where is this the Borges get almost as much screen time in a way as Ezio does? Assassin skilled drama notwithstanding which was cool because I I thought that Machiavelli was gonna be a traitor And it was cool to see that he wasn't and it was funny to hear him make a reference to the prince Yeah, that was funny - yeah, I'll write a book about you. So make it a short one. Yeah, so to hear him imply that Ezio is like the inspiration for the prince was kind of cool It's supposed to be In real life. It's written. It's Lorenzo Dementici, right that he the book is I think so yeah That's funny I think that yeah in a way this felt like Imagine a TV show got 18 episodes and then they decided to film six more like and that was after the arc of a TV show for that season ended And they had six episodes to do a new arc Mm-hmm, and this was like a very self-contained sort of arc covering these things and it unfolds in episodes much I feel like it unfolds in episodes a little more effectively than two did but I was I Was annoyed that I couldn't break sequence break out of sequence eight because I Wanted to know the truth before I did the end See and I didn't which is why when I did the truth and all of a sudden Desmond is talking to Lucy Sean and Rebecca again It's like this is weird. I Just stabbed that bitch. Yeah, why is she talking to me? Yeah. Yeah, I see I Once they threw after the ending and when they throw you back into you know Rome right the first thing I did was press start to make sure that leave animus was missing as an option from the menu And it certainly is and also a new quality of memory opens up after sequence eight is finished And you can't do it until you finish the game. It's true I and I haven't done it yet either and I'm really looking forward to figuring out why they decided to unlock it that way Right because wasn't like weren't the quality of memories the implication that that's one of the things that Ezio was distracted by When they tried to enter sequence 9 or whatever like I didn't like that I thought I'm pretty sure I did the last Claudia memory or the not not Claudia Oh, I'm thinking Christina Christina. Yeah, that's what Christina not Claudia. Yeah, we may just Yeah, I wanted unlocked at the very end. Really. I thought I did the last one I'd you watch the credits to the end of the game. I did and you went back into Rome. Yes, the game load up again Yes, it should be in the very last memory of Christina. She dies. I Have not done that. Okay. The reason why I'm saying I got the chance to spoil something for us Well, the reason why I'm saying that is because I did that before I did any of the Apple stuff I have no idea how yeah, because that's when it unlocked for me. It said new Christina memory unlocked and I went and did it I didn't appear to me for me until after the Apple really yeah, huh, or maybe it was maybe for me. It was like a unlocked on the chapter right before I will say that occasionally Messages seem to get backed up and fucked up and usually that's when you send assassins out on missions that can happen, but Yeah, I just the thing that I like the most is that everything is interconnected now Okay, and I as an example did you do all of the Romulus layers. Yeah, okay. Did you yeah, so I? Thought it was really cool that you couldn't do all the Romulus layers until you fixed all the aqueducts Yeah, I like that too I and it didn't even I fucked around and there's only one layer in particular that you can't do right But I kept trying to get into it. I've fucked around in that thing for like 20 minutes before I realized you know what? I bet the water is really low. Yeah, and there's an aqueduct overhead I've seen it actually made a point of showing me that when I fixed an aqueduct next to water Water started flowing through that aqueduct to the next one. Mm-hmm. I have to fix the fucking aqueducts I I think that this this game most of the things that are really good about it. Let me step back for a sec Because this sort of relates to the story and I think we're sort of wrapping up talking about that this game I Had a such a blast playing it, but it's clear that it's a man cash in is the wrong word But I would like to know exactly when they decided to make it two games instead of one You know cuz at some point, I'm sure they were like I feel like they like they were like ex Ezio We're gonna do it. We're gonna do Italy. It's gonna be Florence Rome Venice It's gonna be awesome and then at some point they realize like well to do Rome. We got to make it pretty big like We already got a shitload of stuff to do for these other places. Let's split them up. Let's do two games. I Don't think that they made the decision to split it in two games. I think that maybe they had Ezio's story ready for some other medium and They decided to put that into a game. I just don't I'd be very curious So perfectly it does Essentially when Etsy the point of Ezio's life should be finished like that should be the culmination of his life Like which is to relay a message to Desmond in the future. Mm-hmm. You know like everything else is just sort of jerking off Mm-hmm Or so it seems until you get to the end of this It's clearly like it's not impossible that they could have as you're proposing Figured out how to make this game important to the overall storyline You know after most of the work on Assassin's Creek - was completed I Would be curious to know if they decided to To make the game that late or if it was a if they knew they were gonna do it earlier This is totally separate from the game. I kind of wonder if brotherhood is why Patrice left That's what I've been thinking as well. Hmm. That's exactly what I'm thinking. Really that's what I'm talking about Assassin's Creed is such is so his baby. I know that yeah, and they're like we're gonna make another one We are going to Exploit the hell. I mean you can say leverage if you prefer you're going to leverage the hell out of Assassin's Creed because it's the only franchise We have right now that's making any money. Mm-hmm I honestly like it III the new producer for Assassin's Creed said There's not gonna be another one in 2011 and then it very isn't it. I mean Ubisoft has final say obviously this could change But I don't think that there's gonna be another one in 2011 and then not a week after brother It comes out. There will be another Assassin's Creed in 2011. Mm-hmm, and that makes me really fucking nervous Yeah, and because as much fun as I had playing this game and I had a lot of fun. Mm-hmm, you know, I Feel more assassin doubt more quickly with brotherhood than I did with two Yeah, it's there's It's There are a lot of advancements in this game. This is what I wanted to talk a lot of good systemic advances So so what's interesting about this game is like you said there's a you know You had to fix the aqueduct before you go to the Romulist and that just indicates an interconnectedness of systems It was not present into so let's let me hint at another one that was like really Game-changing for me when I started playing this game I don't know if you remember when we were talking about when we were talking about the last one But um I played with most of the HUD turned off I found it really really intrusive. So when I started this game I did the same thing. I put the mini map on which is the only thing I had on before and turned everything else off I know how to play the game I did two games on screen any of that stuff Yeah, and I started playing and then at some point when I realized I saw the shop quest system I was like, oh, so there's items in the world. This is cool This is new that you got to pick up and then you sell them back for money That's nice and at some point probably four hours in I realized I'm getting I'm getting where do I get this stuff all this stuff is coming from somewhere Oh, it's these treasure items showing up in your inventory. Yeah, they're all in my inventory And there's also carry a lot of those items right, right and so do the bandits the bandits have really good stuff actually so so So I'm realizing okay. I'm picking this stuff up from treasure chest. It must not be just money anymore Okay, that's really interesting. I better turn the money HUD element back on and at that point I was like So I so I did that and then I opened a treasure chest and saw that I was getting money and items I was like all right. This this is pretty cool. This is really really cool and then I Started flipping more of the HUD back on just to see and I was like, oh, they made the health bar smaller It's not super huge and in your face anymore like, okay, the the HUD is a little better And maybe I'll leave it on for a while just to see what that's like Actually becomes pretty important once you get your assassins recruits up, you know And it's right so you can see the the indicator so you can see if you have If I had pressed the button and it didn't happen. Oh, I would realize at that point Okay, I know after a while I figured it out and I figured like in the beginning I couldn't figure out the timing because I just knew it took a long time to recharge But I didn't really know how much they're what about the way they could have worked at like a visual cue that uh that you had them like maybe every time you had Yours one tier of assassins available You'd see like one assassin peek up over the horizon over our building and like when you got the second you'd see pairs of assassins looking over you and then when it's full like, I don't know I can see that being really hard to do so to go back to the what I was getting at the main thing Was that all of a sudden because I had turned the HUD back on and most importantly the money element of the HUD I um just out of instinct or something Uh pickpocketed a guy which is that you know something that they put in They teach you that very early in assassins create one It's like the first thing you do to get money in the in the game And then you kind of stop doing it because all you get from it is money and uh You have so much money who cares and sometimes notoriety and it's not worth it Exactly. And then so I pickpocketed a guy and you know after I turned the HUD back on and I was like holy crap I'm getting a whole bunch of items back and not it's all my consumables, you know if I throwing knives, throwing knives, medicine, crossbow balls Oh god looting bodies now. It's super important because crossbow bolts are Did I say pickpocketing? No, I'm sorry. I meant looting. Yeah, I meant looting bodies I'm sorry. I meant looting bodies looting bodies. Yeah, I never did looting bodies into after the first hour because I didn't need it Yeah, sorry, not pickpocketing looting bodies. Yeah looting bodies is really valuable super important So all of a sudden I loot a body because and you know you don't have to run back to a shop Not important exactly because you're if you're in combat using your consumable items Now all of a sudden you pickpocket or you loot the guy afterwards and boom you get all that All that shit right back And that makes the game totally differently that also makes the crossbow an actually useful weapon because you can like basically reload in the field Because you can find bodies with crossbow bolts exactly and it just they connected so many systems to other systems and made everything more important like Rebuilding Monte Monte Rijone and Assassin's Creed II was cool, but ultimately that was kind of pointless Because you just get money like that's all you'd get. Yeah, but that's the same thing with the But no, but rebuilding Rome affects the missions you have it affects how much you can see like taking out Borgia towers enables Like Borgia towers are viewpoints, but they also mean that you can actually Buy stuff in an area buying stuff in an area. Let you set up guilds right? Reload in the field. Yeah, I think for a year-long game development cycle Because this game came a you know a year after the other one you're right Great step in the right direction and moving the Monte Rijone elements into the actual environments making Rome your environments totally brilliant um, and it's it's a step in the right direction, but what I'd like to see is When the okay so shops is one thing, but there's all the landmarks throughout the world And they make a mistake The text the text box when you go up and and say do you want to interact with this? this this landmark it'll say something like purchase this landmark for 40,000 florens B. Cancel a upgrade. Yeah, so when I read the when I read it the first time I was like upgrade So weak and then it pulls out and it does the sort of fade out and you're like, oh my god, is it gonna rebuild it? It doesn't do anything. So again, I realized this game was only made in a year, but what if instead when you Did upgrade or purchases to this thing these items in the city all of a sudden visually visual changes? That would be one thing that would be really cool but what if all of a sudden it rebuilt parts of the the structures so that there were more platforming or what yeah What if it what if it added like a few outbuildings around the structure or something that made it so that you now can get to its new area Reach a new area and they do that a little bit with the aqueducts and the aqueducts are actually only Pretty fast way to get around if you want to use them. Yes, something to run on Yeah, that's how I got my that's how I got my run 300 meters without stopping Thieves challenge was really one of the aqueducts to get certain flags you do. Yes But I mean and they all the only building that they ever really do like completely upgrade is your Assassin's base well that and the main mercenary guild in the main Thieves I do think that those are a step back from montre zone or from the your villa in montre zone The actual house like the what that looks like at the beat just you know step back from the whole like town That surrounds it But just the house just the mansion like what that looks like the beginning of assassins creed 2 versus what that looks like at the end of assassins creed 2 I'd rather Grand scheme of things if I had the choice I'd rather have montre zone II than the way that they did it in Rome, right? But yeah, that's fair, but step in the right direction if they can do the combination of both these things and like I said eventually make it so that if you're It's too. It's too much like farmville right now. There's not enough There's this I'm actually stealing that line from chris colars review He said he realized at some point after he was like, you know buying this shop buying the shop that it was just farmville And to be honest, I I think he's right because I very rarely used any of the shops Outside of the ones on my home base on time. I use the other ones all the time because they have The shop quests. Yeah, that's the other thing I think that's that ends up being a broken system for me personally based on the way that I play Because what I did was I didn't want I didn't know how many at first how many shops were gonna have shop quests or how many shop quests were gonna Uh appear in the game So I was scared to sell off items that I would need later and wouldn't be able to find and I had enough money to get by I was like, I'm just gonna save all this stuff So I even now have every item I do too in my inventory and I've only finished one shop quest I've only finished one shop I've finished like three or three But I haven't finished off the one that I wanted to finish due to a bug where I grabbed a shrunken head and it didn't appear in my inventory It took me forever to realize that the the only the shops on your island are the ones with shop Right like for a long time I was like I was going up to every blacksmith shop going where the fuck was that shop quest because it never told me that only the Where those shops were I thought there were only certain shops in the world and why brotherhood seems more friendly to completists Yeah, like that you can check everything that you can buy maps to buy maps for everything. Thank god That's that's totally one thing The other the other big addition that we should talk about and try to wrap up because it's getting late Is the assassin's guild Yes Uh at first I didn't give a shit about the assassin's guild and then I saw that I could level them up And that consumed a couple of days. Yeah. Yeah, really that much like I I got real systematic like with it Oh, so did I but I would basically like send them all off on stuff And then I would do other stuff in my room waiting for them to get back to send them off again Like basically I had almost completely full level assassins before I even started using them in the game Oh, that's funny Me too is I mean I got as many as I could like I was Constantly at the limit of what I could have until I needed to go take down more borsha towers or whatever to be able to get The next one and for some reason it was just so satisfying sending them on missions and having them come back and having them level up And I I don't know why that is but it was like nothing's actually happening except that like you get a message Except you see these characters that you find out there and they're all these are the characters That are becoming assassins and just it's cool to try to imagine that little story that they're off to russia Right my little charlie's angel street of assassin And then like they come back and then when they become assassins they take their leap of faith and get the brand on that ring finger And stuff that was all so cool. Is there a way to change their colors? You can not once their assassins. No, even before that. Oh, yeah Yeah, it's right. Yeah, I selected color and it never gave me any options. Yeah. Yeah, it's always there You always can't do it in the very first level once they've gained one level. You can choose every child over and over here. Let me Um, that sucks. I was doing I was I had them like sorted kind of by level groupings like if they were levels like Like four through six or something. I had them as green You know it was fun because I would hit my call assassins button And I would see somebody come out in like red and somebody come out green and I would know who their levels were I mean you can always see who what level they are by their wife's square Yeah, exactly. But um, I really liked that That part of it was really cool. Not that I didn't like sending them out I thought that was a fairly I thought that was a fine addition also a system that could be Made much better in a sequel if they decided to do that But what I really liked was the variety in the way that they came in when you called them in So like if you if you call them in an area where there's a bunch of buildings They'll jump down from the top of the building and if it's open area, they will ride their fucking horses Drive up. Yeah, and they'll run over the guys in their horses. Oh, yeah I I brought them in in a very extended battle and we were fighting for like five or ten minutes and they were there the whole time Yeah, they know they didn't last quite a bit of health and I was like, oh shit. Yeah Uh, but I do like that it ties into their whole strategy of making it so that Once Ezio has recovered a bit and even like pretty much right away you are a master assassin. Yeah, you are a a murder machine Um and they make up for that by coming at you with a ton of guys and guys with guns but I actually grew to like the chain kill system more. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, I love that. I think nearly every mechanic and system is better in this game than it is in the last game. And they also they make it I agree. You assemble a traditional action game even less by doing that. Yeah, okay, so here's the thing that I thought of the other night And I'm like, I'm a genius and everyone's gonna tell me that I'm freaking retarded, but uh, sorry retards It's okay. You're not on off and you forget. I forget. Uh, no, we've been added. Uh, it's a long story. Anyway, um uh I was like assassins creed to me now really Feels like an rpg like it does it is an art. It is an rpg almost thrown through there with like uh, there There are action elements the most esoteric combat system of any rpg ever Yeah, because it's all timing based just it's like a it's like super mario rpg Although that's timing base toward the end when you're fighting more armored people It gets a little more actiony because you have to use the kick and you have to use other stuff. Yeah, so I okay, so yes, I'm thinking more I'm not saying i'm taking back my rpg. No, I think that the main combat system does feel very Assassins creed 2 made it an rpg for an action rpg, but an rpg for sure But the the part that um Seems really rpg to me is the way that I play it now, which is that I rely heavily on the crossbow You know now that I can loot bodies and take the crossbow waltz and other medicines and those things back You know, there's at some moment. I realize that um, I have such an awesome moment with the crossbow where this is in sequence eight I think when you're in the castello And you go into the library and there's like a dude like a heavily armored dude down there and two dudes on the balcony And I killed the dude on the bottom with the the crossbow. I ran up the side ran up to the ledge jumped off uh Spiked the guy on That was to the far left of the balcony and then as the other guy right as he was turning around to see me Walked on instant crossbow kill and felt like such a badass So that so that's the brilliant thing is like how how amazing you can feel because the animations are so good um Because everything is so simplified So what I realized I was doing a lot was like walking up to an enemy like locking on Uh, switch holding down rb to switch to my cross crossbow Which I realized this is like the you know, the bio where pause button essentially We can like figure out what the hell i'm gonna do choose my proper weapon of choice And then i'm already locked on all I have to do is hold down the button like oh, i'm always gonna hit You know, it's uh, it's me making a choice to do something not my quick reflexes That's causing me to win this battle Right and that's something I was thinking about yesterday because i'm frequently i'm Often the guy that's like these controls have too much lag in them. It's not fast enough. They're not responsive enough It's unacceptable in an action game or this is too animated the response isn't quick enough But assassin's creed is super animated and you definitely have to wait But it feels it that never The combat in it is designed to anticipate all of that. Yeah It's amazing that if Back to straight up sword play and kicking and blocking and doing the counters and the chain kill system It's amazing that it feels as fulfilling as it does I mean that's been true of assassin's creed from one But like the fact that Combat so simple as a guy who really likes, you know fighting games and god of war and that sort of stuff Man I am I feel such like such a badass when I do like an awesome set of kills in this and the button press is required or so few I mean, they really like There's not another combat system that feels like this that Is so minimal Well, it's because it's because you don't feel it's because they're Like you can mash on buttons a little bit But you don't you just don't have to in this game like in most other action games And you know, I haven't played ninja guide in as much as you guys did But I was always kind of button mashing even a ninja guide and and I know you could be really really precise with it But in assassin's creed like i'm doing The and I feel more like a ninja in assassin's creed. Yeah, I mean it makes you feel like a badass. Yeah, can I I felt like Brotherhood makes you switch weapons more like they're In assassin's creed to the sword will always do you no matter what? Well unless you're up against like in assassin's creed too You really had to like if you were up against a guy with an axe or a spear It was almost always better to go barehanded. Oh, well. I don't mean barehanded like it always had the most forgiving like like time period where you could counter and in this i'm finding that There are certain enemy types where it's actually the The blade the assassin's blade That's the best weapon to use because if you try to use the sword against The swiss guard or whatever like with spears or axes They'll you'll never counter. Yeah. No, you won't but and that was the same thing on assassin's creed too That's what the kicks for and it's like what you what it like And I didn't do this until the very end of the game And this is probably the kind of thing that you can use like the The combat challenges for whatever in the dna menu to learn how to do the type of stuff But like um, I saw a tip in one of the loading screens It said after several successful attacks with the longsword out. Oh, yeah, you hold x and it shoots Yeah, and you shoot them and you do it and execute like that's how I beat Chesler And not nice. Yeah, that's cool So basically with Chesler, I had the sword out and I would kick And I would hit three times and then on the fourth time I'd hold the x button and it shoot him Right and then it would take me into the little mash B quick time sequence And it cut off another piece of armor, which is awesome Awesome. Yeah and see the the thing and I didn't master this that that move until right right at the end of the game But like there was one particular sequence where Uh, I attacked a guy Several times with my longsword. I didn't execute. I did an execute on two other guys, you know, just like Pushing in the direction and hitting x and then I another guy was coming at me And I was like, oh shit. He's gonna kill me and but I did the I did the the pistol execute on that guy And then went right into executing another guy kicked another guy did a couple You know, it was like and like I just flew from one guy to the next to the next to the next and it's the kind of thing that like It's the same sort of combat flow that like I got out of uh batman, you know, like like batman Yeah, it's like if you feel it's so much better executed. Oh, yeah, no doubt like I totally agree with you But I'm saying that like um that sort of endless flow where all you really have to do is pay attention And like know the right combination of buttons depressing in the right order Like you can really make it a kind of a beautiful satisfying experience and also I love that when with the chain kills if you fuck up and you don't Do your next chain kill with the guy that's about to attack you You can still break out of that attack and counter if you're holding down the left trigger Yeah, exit the right time like it never you are never caught off your feet right ever because Etcio shouldn't be caught right exactly like I am the The deadliest man in the world. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I'm batman. You can take down a whole army if you want to do you do Uh, one more thing about combat and then I wanted to talk about The platforming a bit also actually hated using the apple. I was gonna that is exactly what I would say it's terrible Yeah, that was okay. So I feel like that was their attempt Was that what you were gonna go into right now? I was actually I was gonna actually what I was gonna cut you off and try to bring up Yeah, um the I feel like that's their attempt to do a super gravity gun, um, you know, sort of fails it fails Bawful and the and every time I would I seriously during the course of those however many sections that you had to use it I probably hit rb like 15 times hoping that like now they're gonna let me change weapons like please let me change This is also when it wouldn't let you use your assassins. Yep, right? Yeah Yeah, and the synchronization thing when you get the apple is to get away without losing any health I know it would yeah, that's one of the few where I was like fuck you. I'll take how I'll take half sync Yeah It was fucking terrible like the you really like that I was thinking the until the entire time the apple should be the fucking wind button I should be able to walk into a group of guys and it's not it's just frustrating Yeah, hit something and like watch everybody attack each other or die and like not feel like I'm constantly on the verge of death Because I can't use my I think they should have let you use it in one sequence once Not and no none of the mechanics they have and basically do exactly what you said like You know, it should have been like more like a narrative element than an actual combat element Like let him have it. He's in a room a crowd with a bunch of people I mean I guess a diamond street and he hits the thing and they all start fighting each other Why no one should have it. Yeah, yeah, but it just it wasn't fun Particularly when you and for other assassins like hardcore assassins like machia velli Christina and volpe and volpe like go to confront Claudia go to confront chesare and his remaining guards. Yep. That's the exact sequence I'm thinking Yeah, I did I did think it was really cool that Claudia becomes an assassin at the end But then like nothing else happens with her. Yeah, she's like, oh, she's an assassin That's such a great moment when you walk outside of the the rosen fioré and it has the two whores outside crying You're like, oh fuck. What's going on in there? Mm-hmm, and you walk in and the guards are dead and she's and she's the one that killed them it's like She's also she looks like she's yeah, she was 14 and she's like 40 It's supposed to be at least 30 by then or something. Um So there's nothing in this game in my opinion that This this game visually just doesn't match up to the venice I think roem is gorgeous, and I love the ruins. I love the ruins I love that you can explore all those fucked up parts of the coliseum where all that bad should happen I I think that there's more interesting structures in roem I think that the visual performance of a sassy screwed brotherhood really hurts how good it looks That because it tears like crazy. It does. I just I miss Standing atop the rooftops in venice That game looked like a living watercolor painting and I think the scale of roem compensates for its lack Don't get me wrong. I'm just saying visual. I'm not saying that it's worse. I'm or anything. I'm saying Visually as pretty as a picture like the visuals. It is not venice and that is what it is um but To to go to to go back to exactly what you were just saying From a gameplay perspective, I think Brotherhood is a huge advancement like most of the usually okay most of the jumping Puzzles especially in the core Campaign memory sequences are really fantastic like I really liked infiltrating the castella the first time I will okay. I agree and also I like that there are multiple ways to do the castella the second time. Yeah, but there are Certain and sillier areas and optional areas where I feel like the platforming puzzles Are rushed and not particularly play tested see that's that I I was gonna say the opposite I think that the optional the optional the last layer of romulus platforming section where you're in the old church I think is a wreck and I think the entire sequence where you're chasing the cardinal To get his key to the layer of romulus is garbage it was poorly designed it's It has too many sections where you can instant fail And the guy will pull ahead of you and it'll set you way back Ezio behaves like a spaz around ladders and it's fullest of ladders with shitty camera angles See yeah, okay That may have been your your experience and i'm not remembering that one as much because I did that one very near the beginning of the game But um you can't do it near the beginning of the game where you're chasing the cardinal Yeah, you can't do that until sequence eight because that area you go to get the apple It's before that. It's in the same area. That's what i'm saying. Oh, I'm thinking of a different area But that whole area is totally locked off until you get to sequence eight and you can't even find a vantage point It will never be on your map right right right? Yeah, no, I know I searched I thought the game was broken for a while. I'm like how the fuck do I get this armor? There's nothing on my map. Don't know what to do. We talked about this earlier, but um the number one I get to play I have the special edition so I got to play the two extra templar Layers that aren't available to people. Mm-hmm. Um because that's smart Yeah, it's annoying the specifically the um The aqueduct one, you know, I paid a hundred dollars for a special edition of Assassin's Creed 2 last year I couldn't justify doing it again this year. Yeah, and I didn't last time and it made me very unhappy So that's why I did this and I don't I don't need a jack-in-the-box. I already have a hard enough time Oh, I put all that all that freaking dumb box shit is still in the fucking box I literally bought it for the two the two extra single player levels where was it worth it? Probably not, but I will say What makes it more worth it than the last time is that I can play them again if I want to which is great and the aqueduct one is really really really awesome And it's a damn shame that that you guys don't get to just well eventually. I'm sure they'll try this right in a year I did yeah, you can now get all the ones from Assassin's Creed 2 And I have played them all now. So a hundred percent sick in that game. So elaborate a little more on the right So let me let me say that we're running out of time. Okay, so um I thought a lot of the camera angles maybe not during the chase sequences but definitely during the jumping puzzles were the type of thing where uh They would set the they would position the cameras mostly perfectly the jumps all were tricky but not impossible. I Rarely made mistakes and I really started to I feel like when I played Assassin's Creed 1 I I got into this much earlier in the podcast, but it felt very gridded like, you know, you didn't have much area to sort of um Be precise. It would do it for you. That's the problem with the game My problem with the game like Prince of Persia is that you are you don't have any you can't you can't you're not Living yeah, you're not let it collaborating with the game at all. You're just letting it do its thing and right in Assassin's Creed 2 didn't feel that way typically And a lot of parts of Assassin's Creed Brotherhood don't feel that way typically. I think that the controls have just they're they're They really let you It's not an easy game to play like there's a very there's a very big difference between watching someone who is new to the game or someone who Dropped it and tried to come come back to it in you know several months later Man like someone playing it like that the drop-and-grab is something that That you lose and have to learn again. Oh, I think the just little thing like when I watch people play it They hold down r they hold down a and press almost forward but not quite on the stick because the way To be really good at Assassin's Creed you have to control your camera properly as well Um because that is I hear a lot of people complain like look 80 percent of the time It works just the way I want but there's like that 20 percent of the time where I jump in a totally wicked direction Those things happen if you're trying to do something that is like Jumping towards the camera or to the side of where the camera is pointing and usually it feels It'll happen this You it it read you think that because you're holding r pressing a and holding essentially up on your analog stick that you're going to jump forward But it really does register You know if you're 10 degrees off of straight up if you're 15 degrees off of straight up You can get Ezio to jump in any of those very precise directions that you want That is what makes me truly love this game You know, I like the climbing and I've always loved the climbing in Assassin's Creed It's this game to me. They could break it and make me hate it Instantly by locking down That jump like if all of a sudden I couldn't miss my jumps Like you were saying about racing games before if you need the possibility of failure If I couldn't fail Then I would hate this game and it's the fact that I can and I have that much control It makes me feel like a badass when I'm doing my moves That's great. And it's that's why I'm so surprised about the combat and the rest of it where I feel like Well, where it's riding this very thin line to being not fun to me and it's very fun So I don't know how they how they pull it off So where I feel like I'm really fighting the controls when I'm jumping and I felt like this ever since Assassin's Creed 1 is that uh The I can't get the camera to snap around behind Uh, Ezio enough quick enough because it just like bangs against a wall No, like uh, let's say let's say I'm in one of those chase sequences and I know Ezio needs to jump You know Let's say 45 degrees to the left in order to go because I can see it off to the left But but and the and Ezio is facing that way, but the camera is slowly turning that way And I want to face it's infuriating Yeah, and I want it to be more behind Ezio so that I'm more pushing up on the stick So I know I'm going to get the jump more correct And it's like I just want there to be a setting to where if Ezio is Stepping forward or facing a direction. I want the camera to move on its own quicker And it's like I yeah, I get used to adjusting it with my right thumb But I feel like the flow is best when the camera is more following Ezio Rather than me having to move the camera on my own I think that's worse than this one than it was in the last one See, I'm I and and honestly, I I feel playing it I felt playing it that I can almost tell what they outsourced to their B and C squads and what was done in Ubisoft module because that's Say say what I always gonna say is that I don't I don't remember having much problems with the chase sequences So I obviously didn't have the same experience. I mean, it's not about not being able to do it It's just about moments of frustration and it not doing what I know it should be doing So like this is exactly what I'm talking about is like I don't have those problems Like I constantly am controlling the camera with my right thumb Unless they take the control away with me from me And the only times that I can really think of them doing that is the chase sequences And I didn't have problems during those chase sequences for me. It's like I I just don't like if I need Ezio to I don't want to have to stop in the middle of what should obviously be a completely fluid jump sequence Stop to move his camera because yeah, because Ezio wouldn't stop doing his camera Like let's say I need to jump onto a pillar Onto like a single pillar and then I need to switch left really quick and jump onto a series of beams And this is clearly supposed to be a path that I can just go jump jump jump jump You know and uh, but I can't do it because when I press to the left Ezio doesn't actually jump to the left. You know, he'll like jump a little bit more back left towards the screen Because you know when when your past that when the camera has passed a little bit off to the left or the right It can be a little bit funky. Sometimes I'll press to the left and I'll look at my stick and he won't jump left He'll jump a little bit more up I feel like all I'm saying is I totally am not disagreeing with the fact that it's there Well, what I I'm saying that you can anticipate that I'm coming and you can move the camera When you don't expect it though, it happens during sequences that don't seem complicated I'm saying like there are some incredibly complicated jumping and platforming puzzles in this game That you can go slowly feel completely naturally You need to not rush through them. That's when you're at that and I don't want and I don't want to stop I don't want to go slowly. I don't want to have to stop in the middle my jump sequence Move the camera and then continue my just like stop and pay attention and consider is one thing And I can do that right every single time I can jump right every time if I stop in the middle of a jump And move the camera, but I just want to go jump jump jump jump jump That's what that's how the combat feels the combat feels like an endless fluid motion And I want my jumping to be an endless fluid motion and it's almost there I just think they're saying and I don't want that I don't I don't want that because what I fear is that in order to get to what you're talking about They have to take control and no no they don't like all they have to do all they have to do is make it So that just give me a slider to make it so that the camera snaps to behind etsio's shoulders quicker Because right now it does move behind whenever etsio is moving in a direction the camera auto moves to behind etsio Just make it so that I can have that camera move behind etsio quicker And like I will never have a problem with the camera moves. Okay. I just I think that there are certain levels where the camera is placed well And there are certain levels where it's not I'm I'm just talking also about like just being I was gonna say if you sound like you're talking about free room open world areas And I don't know that the camera does snap to I I have mine said to off I have it set to where I am constantly in control of the camera No, I'm saying there is no setting for it. There is and I'm telling you there's a setting on and off one Okay, okay for auto camera and one there's not and I have it set off and I control the camera solely There's no auto reset and I'm complaining about something entirely. I know you're talking about indoor areas that were outsourced to different oobies Right. I just I and that's my concern is that in their rush to put these games together That's going to be more of an issue that I don't think that they put That they had time to really finesse these things the way the assassin's creed two felt so polished and I think that That is going to be a continuing trend with this series and something that is going to be Worries them. This is this game. It worries me. This game is A game that I had a tremendous amount of fun with but it worries the shit out of me. Yeah, it's like really really fun In a very scary way Reminds me playing with fire. It reminds me of what they did with splinter cell Yeah, I just didn't have that love for the franchise I wasn't a splinter cell just like the way that splinter cell became like a tale of two cities Like it was two different oobies off studios working on it at the same time Yeah, and now it's not oh well This studio is working on multiplayer and this studio is working on single player now It's well this studio is supervising everything and we're just going to outsource a shitload of asset creation and certain levels to these other places That I don't want this to sound bad, but they their third world country is essentially And the labor is super cheap and we can do a ton there But they don't we're not sending people there to get the finesse done on this stuff that it would would happen in our a Our with our a team. Yeah, I mean oobie soft singapore may do some good stuff for the price But I don't I feel like I can tell when they're doing things on this game I try not to pay attention to it because every once in a while. I do and it bugs this shit out of me It's just yeah, it concerns me. I uh, so Yeah, so is this a situation where I'm sorry. I'm just gonna say we just all love this game Yeah But we're all Worried about where it's going So is this a situation where the entire assassin's creed team is working on each game or is somebody else working on assassins? Creed three right now and they're the real team I gotta think that someone's working on the the next numbered. Yes creed game while this is happening This game has is is code of you know, the lead developer on it is oobie soft Montreal, right? but Shanghai's on it Oobie soft everywhere. Yeah, there's Eastern European country. Yeah, there's a bunch and which concerns me because Oobie sauce Eastern European country Eastern European studios when putting out some truly awful shit over the last couple beers like hawks And the we version of ghost recon have come out of Eastern Europe I want to care about every part of like I want to I want the reason that this game is super worrisome to me is because it's it's better in many many ways but If all those improvements had instead been compounded with all the improvements that they are going to make in the next year Before assassins creed three comes out That then we would have had twice as many improvements. So I Don't necessarily I didn't need necessity screed this year. I had a great time playing it But god I did not need it and I was I purposely tried to make myself not excited for it and read no previews none of that sort of thing help it it's just so that I could hopefully, you know Have a great experience with it when I find when it finally did and that's what happened I had a really fun time. I thought it was really great and I like all the changes that they're making but a lot of them seemed like in the last game hint at better changes down the line and um Man if the story from this game hadn't been fun and good and like a good addition to the previous story It wouldn't wouldn't have been cool. Mm-hmm. And They rode the line real close. Mm-hmm. Like I really love this game. But man, Ubisoft. Don't play with our fucking emotions Well, it does seem so yeah Yeah, it does seem It still seems that you know, at least they're on the right side of that line I don't like I don't think it really positive experience. I'm just gonna name off some games from the last five years And I don't want a response. I just want you to think about it Uh, raving raving rabbits rainbow six vegas ghost recon Hawks Tom Clancy like Prince of Persia. I was gonna say why My the first one I was waiting for you to say was Prince of Persia. Beyond good and evil Prince of Persia Prince of Persia the sands of time is Single-handedly responsible for many modern video This is this is the spiritual successor to to Prince of Persia definitely um and That series has Seriously failed Seriously, and this is the only Game that Ubisoft has put out this year that I can think of that has been successful It's the only assassin's creed is the only series That Ubisoft has put out that's been a blockbuster for the last five years And the guy responsible for it has left the building And that's after the woman who was also responsible for it his left form Ubisoft Toronto So patrice des lee moved to thq, right? Yeah, something like and jade raimin is Ubisoft Toronto Which are working on a new splinter cell game So i'm not saying that there aren't a ton of talented people there But they've lost patrice des lee jade raimin and clint hawking That's like essentially all the Well, especially patrice and and clint and clint like those they they were some forward thinking That was yeah I am i'm scared like I I don't I think okay. Let me put it this way Assassin's creed three is gonna come out and I think it's going to be Very good. I think we're going to be having many similar conversations to what we're having now But it needs to be more than very good for me to play it again I think I played again a very good assassin's creed games since 2007 Yeah, I I think I would play it and still enjoy it Even if it was an iterative upgrade from what what they have now But I think that I won't especially now that he's left I won't be able to to think about or won't be able to forget um that patrice is left and that the grand vision for the series might have been somewhat tarnished her bust bust with yeah, yeah, and um It's sad, but then it but then again, you know That happens to a lot of games now Didn't want to see it happen with this after how amazing assassins creed two was And the promise that assassins creed one obviously showed it didn't happen And on that note, we've been talking about assassin's creed for more than an hour And it's 11 o'clock at night So we should probably go to bed. So you guys need to get to part before you get stranded in this way for the night I would suck Uh, I'm worth a geese for Ryan O'Donnell, Matt Shannon, A and Anthony Gagas Could be something to get there Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh