Rebel FM
Rebel FM Episode 81 - 10/22/10
GREETINGS FRIEND TABITHA! This week we go on (and on) about Fallout: New Vegas, Vanquish, Super Meat Boy, Fable 3, and more. Then we read some letters, discusss some accountability, and generally make asses of ourselves. BACK TO THE WASTELAND!
This week's music, in order of appearance:
Nirvana - Lake of Fire
Peggy Lee - Johnny Guitar
(upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to Rebel If I'm episode 81. I'm your host, Anthony Agos. With me is Matt Changerney. - Hello. - Tyler Barber. Hello everyone. And last, but certainly not least, Arthur Gies. - I hate it when you do that. - That's because I'm-- - When you look at me and say Matt's name. - While I like to try and keep you on your toes and see now you're on your toes. He's literally standing on his toes right now. - Yeah, he's sitting there. - The weird thing he does when he's put on it. - Sitting in a chair. - Most of the ballet dancers need point shoes to do that, but Arthur can just do it. It's kind of impressive. - That's actually how I take stairs. I take stairs on the balls of my shoes. - Strong muscles. - Not on the balls of your feet, on your toes. - What are the balls of the back? - The balls of your feet is like right under your toes. I wear your toes. - No, no, that's where I do that. - Oh, regardless, I take it like a goat or a dog or something. - Arthur can climb the sides of the mountains just like goats and see them. - I've seen him do that too. - Slam my head near balls. - Yearly, Arthur goes out shirtless and battles mountain goats to death, throwing them from the cliffs. - That's why my brow is so hard. So we talk about video games. - Tell us about enslaved, so we can get there all the way. - All right, real quick. I tried enslaved finally and I love it. - Nice. - So far. Now, one thing that I-- - Is it because monkey swings a staff that is surprisingly like the staff and beyond good and evil? - Maybe, but it's also because the characters have such a good rapport. Like in the way that develops and the facial animations are so on par and it's just like, they develop this relationship that you slowly see. Like other games between the face with it, going from antagonistic to like-- - To lovers. - Nurturing and it would just be like instant. This is very subtle with the way it does it where you can see like, oh, she feels a little bit of sadness about putting a slave collar on it, but not enough to take it off, you know. - Reminds me of uncharted. - Reminds me of uncharted. - Does this ever happen to you 'cause it didn't happen to Arthur? 'Cause but sometimes I wander off from her 'cause I see some orbs and then I just die. - Yeah, that's happened to me a couple times. It was annoying. - Okay. - I literally never died from that, ever. - It happened to me a couple times. - Yeah, I just see some orbs and I'm like, wait, I want to get those and she's like, wait, where are you going? (laughing) - Is she supposed to give you a lot of notice that you're leaving? - It didn't really feel like a lot. - Are you feeling sick a lot? - I'm playing after 16. - Yeah, I don't know, I don't know. - I guess I just, I guess maybe I think the warning you get is where are you going? And that's all the warning you get, not like-- - Well no, like kill your ass, well like his headband, I think like start to glow and then there's like stuff around the edge of the screen. But it's like, what happened to me is like, I did it and she was, and it was like, you need to come back and I was like, oh shit, I'm going to die and I turned around and started to run back and while I was running back, I died. - Right. I think I was, I think I was trying to go get orbs when she was like on the move. - Yeah. - So basically you guys need to stop sucking your games. - Well, I just need to not go after every orb is what I've learned. - Right. - I definitely went after every orb. - But that game is beautiful too. - It is. - For obviously not having the same budget as say something like Heavenly Sword. - Yeah, well and you look at it and the, well I already said this, but the areas tell stories, but the one area that I didn't mention was that you probably got into already is the big chasm in New York City. You got in there yet? - No. - Well they were mine then. - I've only played for like an hour and a half. - Oh okay. - Yeah. - But is there like a planet of the apes moment? - Well no, you're just looking at this giant chasm and you can tell that it was made by big, big fucking robots. - There is a planet of the most. - And there's just a planet of the most. - But it happens in like the first 20 minutes. - Yeah. - I mean the first three hours of that game is a planet of the apes moment. - It's a good point. - But yeah, that game is really awesome. Man, Namco has finally released two games in a short span of time that I think are good. - This Naruto is the other one? - Naruto is the Namco game as well. - Naruto. - We just got that today actually. - Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm II. - Yeah. - We talked about that last week didn't we? - We did. - Yeah. - It's good, you know? - We just got it sent to us, that's what I'm saying. - One thing that sucks though is you guys don't like it enough, like Naruto, I mean? - Right. - To want to sit there and grind it to unlock all the characters. - Right. - But for you guys, if all the characters unlocked, I really think that Ryan is a fighting game enthusiast. Stuff could find something to like in that. - It was funny because I picked it up and I was like, "Oh, Anthony said this was good." And Ryan, my partner at Area 5, he was like, "That's 'cause he doesn't play fighting games." (laughing) - I kind of knew he was gonna say that. - Yeah. - So you were saying this is something that Ryan could love. I was just silently shaking my head. - Yeah. - It's basic, but the people that get really good at it do some mind boggling shit, man. - Yeah, yeah. - It doesn't seem particularly well balanced, just from what little I've seen though. - Yeah, I don't know. - Ryan wouldn't like it simply because you don't have to spend 26,000 hours mastering it. - There doesn't need to be a training montage of getting the controls down. - Yeah. (laughing) - Yeah, other than that. - Tell us about Saw 2. - Oh yeah, I reviewed Saw 2 since I last saw you guys. - Was that so awesome or so, so awesome? - So it's funny 'cause in the comments in IGN, right, everyone's like, "Wow, this one must've really gotten worse "since the first one." 'Cause this one got a 4.5 in the last, and the first one in IGN got a 7.5. And I would just like to clarify to people that like, I love David Klayman, the guy who reviewed the first one. But I did not enjoy Saw, like David enjoyed the first Saw. I thought the first Saw sucked as well. So this one is in my mind actually, marginally better than the first Saw in some ways, but the first Saw sucked horribly. And the second Saw does all the same shit over again. Surprise, surprise, a game made in less than a year does a lot of the same shit over. - Uh huh. - Like, it is the same repetitious bullshit. Like, you open a door and you can be sure like every one out of three doors is either, is going to have a quick time event where it's either going to be, you have to hit a button real quick, so an ax, or no. Yeah, you basically have to hit two buttons in a row, so then an ax or a shotgun doesn't instantly kill you. - Right. - And other than that, you're prompted for everything. So it's like, if you run down the hallway blindly and you go by a tripwire, you're given a quick time event to jump over it. And if you don't, you just die. - Right. - Or like, if you finally run into combat with a guy, there's no like, clunky resident evil style combat. Instead of even that, in my mind, they made it even worse because now, guys just run up to you and initiate the quick time thing. So like, a yellow slider goes back and forth, like a vol, like, you know, like on a golf game or something. - Right. - And then you have to hit it in like the bar to block. And then after you block, then you have to do like three quick time button presses to kill them. Like you have no ability to swing your weapon yourself. - See, I don't mind quick time events generally. You know, heavy rain is basically all quick time events, but like, I don't know, that just sounds like quick time events done wrong. - It is because it's not like the combat, like in heavy rain, when you were doing quick time events for combat, it was these quick time events that were specific to that combat. - Right. - Like this was gonna result in that one punch being dodged. - Right. - And this one, it's like the same killing animations made for every fight, you know? It's not, there's no unique battles. - Gotcha. - You know, and then anything, just like the first saw, any good idea that the game has, it'll beat into the ground. Like, hey, remember when you had to flip wires around so that the yellow wires touch the yellow wires and the red wires touch the red wires? Well, now we're gonna have you do that like every third door. And on the doors, we don't have you do that. We're gonna have you do these puzzles where you're pushing light switches to make all the lights, you know, go up and out. Like it's just they beat every idea into the ground. I just-- - That actually reminds me of a game I played this week, but we'll talk about it later. - But I just think that, you know, there are some people that defend that game and actually a game on some other sites gets reviewed really well. - What sites? - Other sites. - What sites? (laughing) - I'm gonna lick this up right now. I'm gonna say it out loud. - So it's just, but it's just a, it's funny 'cause, you know, I think people are starting to think that like I just really hate games or something, but like I keep getting a lot of bad games and I'm gonna give bad games, bad scores, man. - Right. - And saw as a bad game, like saw as so obviously a cash in. - Right. - And the few remaining people who still go watch that movie every year, you know? - What do they have? Did they release one this year? I don't even know. - Well, this game just came out and the movie's coming out this week. I think this Friday. - You actually give it the exact same score as a game informer. - Good. So, but yeah, I mean, you know, people are still going to see it. Obviously it must've sold well enough the first time around. - Yeah. - But, you know, it's just like, I don't know. That company is zombie. It's like, it just sucks because Konami does make good survival horror games, but this is not, this is far cry from that. This is just a crappy licensed tie-in game. That isn't, the one thing I will give it is that it isn't just telling the story of one of the movies. It is a unique story in the saw universe. So if you were like super into the saw universe, you'd get a unique story out of it, but I mean, come on. - Oh, fuck. - That's a franchise that I'm okay with dying. - Yeah, really. And then-- - At least until they do saw 18, the revenge like after a 10 year hiatus or something. - And then real quick, I'll just mention I played a couple of indie games this week. - What'd you play? - I played explosion aid. - Did we talk about that before? - No, I know, that's from the-- - Explosion aid just from the people. Mommy's best games. You know, the people that famously-- - Did more contest entries for a weapon of choice? - Yes, weapon of choice as well. - And grapple buggy was another game they did. And shoot one up was another game they did that I've played that was cool. And so I tried explosion aid and it's really cool. Met game still done in the same typical art style that Mommy's best game does. Like you can tell one of their games instantly. - Right. - But yeah, it's cool and it's only like a dollar. - Wow, nice. - 80 points, like it's nothing. And then another 80 point game I tried that I really liked was a zombie estate, which is basically just a, I mean, it's not, nothing basically, just it is a, it is a survive as long as you can game. Except done with like almost like Nintendo style 8-bit graphics, but done where they look like a pop-up book almost. Like they're just standing up. And so you're just fighting wave after wave of really cute looking zombies in this backyard. And you have to like funnel them through a house 'cause there's a house on the property. - Right, that's funny. - It's just, it's very similar to like, you know, that game I made a game with zombies. - Yeah, yeah. - But this one just has like such a unique little art style and they use really cool, this really cool epic sounding classical piece, probably public domain. - Yeah, probably, yeah. - But it just fits so well with it. - The, it's funny, you said zombie estate and I was hoping you were gonna say that it was a game where it was like sim mansion, but with zombies. Was there a sim mansion game? - No, I'm just saying that like it would be cool. - I guess the sims sort of could be sim mansion. - Oh yeah, and I never talked about it, but I can talk about it now because I play the Assassin's Creed brother the first like three hours of it. - How was it? I'm looking forward to it, the Assassin's Creed-y. - Yeah, it's pretty much Assassin. I mean, it is Assassin's Creed like 2.5, you know, it's an extension. It picks up quite literally where the second one ends. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - So I've had that spoiled for me 'cause I never beat two. Nice play this, but you know, there are some cool things. Like you finally get to play as Desmond, like not just like Desmond walking around a room. - Right. - Like if he does like pick up the ninja moves right at the end, you know, or sorry, the Assassin moves. - Right, so that's so now you get the ninja round. - Did you ever finish, you didn't finish Assassin's Creed? - No, I was like three hours into it and I deleted my save. - Right, I don't think it spoils anything to say that at the end, you get to beat Smash as Desmond. - Oh, see, I didn't know that. - Yeah, you do. - So now in the new one though, you get to, I think the impression I got was you're going to jump between Desmond and Ezio a lot more. - Nice, cool. - But yes, kind of assume that was the case 'cause that's really where the end of Assassin's Creed 2 goes. - Right, and so they definitely do, you know, castoroid you at the beginning of Assassin's. I mean, you know, you're at your state and they've shown it in the previous year, your state gets attacked. And so that's how they pretty much take away all of your stuff. - All of your stuff, yeah. - But the premise of the game is interesting because you know, in the other ones, there was always guards and you had to not look suspicious. But in this one, the guards and stuff, it's all like a ruling family that you're just trying to sabotage. So it has a little bit of almost that savatour vibe where you're trying to liberate areas of Rome from the oppression of this family. So you'll have to like kill a leader and burn down a tower. - Right. - That sort of thing. But the best part is easily the fact that you have like, you know, you are building your own guild of assassins. - Nice. - And so as you liberate areas, you do like, you'll find like little quests, like save the sky who's getting his ass beat by these soldiers. - Mm-hmm. - And then he's like, dude, I owe you my life. And then he becomes one of your assassins. (laughing) And then-- - You're like, yes, you do. - Yeah. (laughing) - And so then you can level them up. And so the way you do it is you go to like a-- - Do they follow you around? - No, no, they basically just disappear. - Oh, okay. - They're doing things. - Right, until the multiplayer. - And so, but so the way it works though is that you go to these pigeon coops and these pigeon coops have assignments that people are looking for hitstone and stuff or like espionage, all these things around the world. - Right. - So then you can be like, ah, yeah, Matt's a good enough spy. I'm gonna send Matt to go to Russia. - Right. - It'll take him this long. - Oh, nice. - He'll be unavailable for like 20 minutes of play. - Right, so you're not just like, you're not just sort of the leader of the assassin. - No, you are, yeah, you are. - Yeah, and it tells you like their percent chance for success. - Nice. - And then, you know, you go do that, you come back, you've gained experience and I can spend that experience when you level to like in armor or weapons. - Mm-hmm. - So I can give you like better weapons, better armor, which actually does increase your health bar. And then at any-- - So it's sort of a little, like mini metagame. - Yeah, and then, but beyond that, just you being able to do that and giving me money, I can also call upon my assassins like Matt once he's leveled up. So at any time, like later on in the game, like I'm like, man, I'm not gonna be able to do this fight without a distraction. - I'm gonna call my assassins down on that group of guys, and so all of a sudden your assassins down there, and you can use that as like a distraction real quick to run in there and finish someone off. - Oh, that's awesome. - You know? And they'll pretty much just roll in, like, then just kill as much guys as they can and then get the fuck out. - That's great. - But they can get killed and stuff, and when they get killed, you have like the option to like go and hear their last words 'cause they are characters that you build up, you know? - Oh, that's super cool, so. - Does anyone know where that sort of mechanic came from? Is it from the mafia war style games where like you send off a character for this long, like you have to wait a period of time and then you gain your experience or gain whatever? - I know it's been in other games before, but like I can't. - Yeah, basically where you're like guildmaster. - Yeah. - Yeah, I wonder if, I wonder if those Facebook games were sort of the ones. 'Cause there's probably something before that. 'Cause there's some stuff like that in the Mass Effect Shadow Broker DLC. - Oh, really? - Where you're just like looking in a menu and it's like what mission would you wanna fund, this mission or this mission? - Right, right. - And you pick which one and you just wait, you come back and see what the results were. - Nice. - And I don't know. I, the time I messed around with mafia war is like, I mean, I tried it once, you know, for like 10 minutes. It seemed very similar. - Yeah, I don't know. I think people will get a kick out of doing that in Assassin's Creed though. - Right, yeah. I mean, 'cause like-- - Definitely. - I remember getting way into running around, getting all the art. So my little-- - Me too. - Palace place. - Right, and now you can actually gather up guys you can actually use. Like the resource are these assassins. - That's cool. - And then you can actually use for something. - So one thing that I loved about Assassin's Creed 2 was when I went to Venice, I was like, this looks exactly like fucking Venice. - Yeah, I don't know, I've never been to Rome. - Oh, you haven't been there yet? - Well, no, I've been to the city of Rome in Assassin's Creed, don't I see it? - No, I'm just saying like in a, how does it look? I mean, is Rome like really cool? - Yeah, it's where it, it looks a lot like other cities. - Or is it lame, or is it lame? Is Rome like-- - I mean, I guess I, I guess it looks like a European city. - Yeah. - That's all I can say. - Yeah, I just, I'm, I'm just, you know, I want to like run down to the, the Colosseum and all the dugout parts of all of Rome, you know? - There are famous things, obviously, throughout like landmarks, you know, those are definitely in the game, for sure. You actually have to meet people at certain landmarks and stuff, you know, but, but as far as the authenticity, I don't really know. - Yeah, well the only part I guess that would really need to be authentic would be the old city and the, the excavated city. - Something I didn't mention my previous video you get to do is you get these chance to go back and do like Ezio's fucked up dates. Like, yeah, like, like there was like one where, you'll see this girl with like a heartbreak thing of overhead and you'll go talk to her and that'll start like an old memory quest. - I never did any of the romance missions in Assassin's Creed 2. - Where it was like, it's like Ezio and his brother and his brother's trying to teach him how to talk to girls. He goes and talks to this girl and the girl blows him off. But then he's like, I'm gonna follow this girl. I'm gonna try and talk to her one more time. And then she, and then, so now you're playing back in this memory and then the girl like gets attempted rape and you beat the shadow guy, tries to rape her and then she flies in love with you and that's like the mission. You know, it's just like little things like that. Like just additional little side stories to kind of give you little bits of their character but that really have no bearing on the course of the game. - Right, yeah, yeah. There were romance missions in Assassin's Creed 2, Arthur. - I thought there were. - No, I don't think so. Not that I remember. The only ones that I remember were like some women telling me, "Gazoon type." - Sorry. - Were like random women telling you to go and beat up their cheating husbands. - Right, well, that's what I meant. - That's romantic. (both laughing) - I feel sorry for your girlfriend. - Anyway. - You want me to beat up someone for you? (both laughing) - With this whole recruitment scenario, it sounds like that game for the Wii that came out sometime back King's story, Little King's story. - Little King's story, yeah. - Kind of sounds like it would almost like make a great crossover like Assassin's Creed mix with that game where you're like getting your group band of assassins to take down on their kingdoms. (both laughing) - There have been cool games like that, by the way. Like Warband is a really cool PC game where it was kind of like about recruiting people and building up your Warband. - Yeah, I didn't play it, but I know later. - But yeah, there are options. But most of them, the games that take a really niche concept like that, they're almost always PC games. - Yeah, and I'm sure like all the assassins that, like all those, that, you know, in the multiplayer, all the assassins that you get or whatever, unlock them so you can use them in multiplayer or something probably as well. - Yeah, I would guess. - I would play works in that game, yeah. - I played it at, was it E3? Yeah, I played it at E3. It was fun. - I mean, is it just you running around? - Oh, no. - Oh shit, I didn't play it. I watched, I watched it. - Did you see me trying to run like one of those assassins? - Yeah, only it's like the way that it works is that you have, like, you'll have somebody who's a target and then you'll be somebody else's target. So it's always you have somebody you have to kill and you always have somebody who's trying to kill you. And you can blend in so that they can't really see you like they might know a general area where you are but then they have to try to pick you out in a crowd. And if they start running and go after you, then the person who is on them can see them, you know? So it's like when you make your move, you basically become visible to the person who's hunting you. So it's like eight player death match but it's not really like, you know, everybody against everybody. It's like you have specific targets. And I think you can, if I remember right, you can still take out other assassins or whatever if you happen to see them. But I think you do have specific targets that you're trying to hunt. - Fair enough. - Yeah, I'm done. I'm done with the world. - Done with the world. - Someone else? - Fucking kill the world. - Just while I'm thinking about it the, when you were talking about saw and repetitive bad game ideas, there was I played Dead Space Ignition yesterday. - Yeah, I hear that's not very good. - It's totally not very good. It was like the art was-- - One more time, what was it? - Dead Space Ignition. - Totally not very good, is that what you said? - Totally not very good. - It's not very good. - It's totally not very good. - What is this game? - Is it so, it's like an animated comic book thing that's sort of a prequel to Dead Space II. - Right. - And the animated comic book is punctuated by little minigames. So the main star of the comic book is an engineer and like he gets to a lock and he has to unlock it. And there's one of three minigames that'll happen. Sometimes two will happen right in a row if it's a particularly difficult thing to hack. And the three minigames suck. The art sucks. The animation sucks. The voice acting, not so good. The writing, not so good, you know? It's just, it's kind of an overall failure. And fortunately it wasn't made by Visceral so it's not really on their shoulders for this really bad product. But most gamers out there aren't gonna know that. - It reflects poorly on their stuff. - It does, it reflects poorly on Dead Space. And it's too bad. I mean, because like I like the idea of it and I like seeing companies sort of reach out in this regard and try to do something different to bring people into the game as opposed to just a trailer or a preview or whatever. And this was not a successful venture for them. - I'm gonna ask you what I asked Greg Miller of IGN who's the one that reviewed it for us. Is it worth free? - The fact that I had to think about that is probably statement enough. - Okay, well, they have it. (laughs) - I mean, if you are like super fucking-- - That's based on worse than cancer. - Yeah. If you are super fucking hardcore into Dead Space and really, really want to try to figure out like how Isaac gets freed on the sprawl, then maybe. - No. - Yeah. You're pretty much not gonna care and you're not gonna miss anything. - Don't do that. And don't go watch the animated thing either. - Yeah. - I don't care how much you like Dead Space. - The animated movie was pretty bad. - It was an abortion. - Ugh. - I don't know what it is with like this. The art in this was so bad. It was totally animated by people different from the people who drew it. And you could tell because you would have like a scene where let's say there's a piece of the art that's like moving toward the background and there's a piece of art moving toward the front ground and the piece of art moving toward the background was cut off off frame. So as it's moving towards the background, like imagine a train that's partially off frame and then they move it towards the background and you can see where it was cut off frame. They just like shrunk that piece smaller without like adding more art onto it or something. And so it's like you're looking at this and you're like, man, what happened was that like some guy and the plus the art looks like it was storyboards that were drawn in like five minutes. Like it's really, it's not good. And then it's like somebody drew the storyboard quality comic book art. Somebody did an okay job coloring it and then they handed it off to some intern to animate, you know? - Yeah, I'm pretty sure the guy who does the art, I can't remember his name, but I'm pretty sure it's the same guy that they did the Dead Space comics and he does draw like he's storyboarding and that's it. His art sucks. - Mm, I wasn't impressed. - I mean, the comic art and extraction was good, right? Wasn't there art and extraction? There were comics and extraction. - He was okay. - I haven't seen any extraction comics. - I like that, that's Steve Niles or Steve Niles. - Oh, he writes the author. - Yeah, there's you unlocked comics and extraction that he could watch. - Yeah, I don't remember those being very, I remember those being okay. These are guys that did 30 days of night. - I haven't seen it. - The comic. - Yeah, I haven't seen it. Fuck you, man. I haven't seen it, it's like you read it. - God, disgusting. - Well, anyway, he should have done a better job on Ignition Art. - What else? - I've been playing bit trip beat for the iPhone. - Yeah, you know, I've never played any of the bit trip games. - Yeah, you might want to try the iPhone version. 'Cause the touch controls are actually easier, I think, than the motion controls on the Wii or on the iPhone. And some people who are really big fans of the motion control in the game might disagree with me, but I just find it easier to like move my paddle with touch rather than tilt. - What's up with that company, man? Why do they make all their names for Wii? - Because we wear a Nintendo where the people that agreed to publish them. No real-- - Why do they actually are published by Nintendo? - Well, they have a third party publisher, but I think Nintendo published the first two, and now they have a different publisher, a different third party publisher. - Yeah, it just seems like I always hear people say a lot of good things about all the bit trip games. And then-- - And they are, and they're good. And like, I'm glad that they're reaching out to different platforms, you know? Bit trip beat shows up on the iPhone. I hope the other bit trip games show up on the iPhone in some capacity too. It would be really hard, I think, oh no, Void would be a good motion game. But anyway, it's hard, just like it is on Wii. You know, like, I'm on the third stage now, I beat the first two stages, which is actually further than I got on the Wii version. And it's funny because sliding my finger up and down the screen, because for people who don't know, it's a lot like a bit trip beat is like Pong, it's reminiscent of Pong, but without the other paddle on the right, it's like the dots come from left to right, and then you have to bounce them or come from right to left, and your pads on the left hand side, then you have to bounce them back. But they come in very strange patterns, but they're all like on beat, and they make music when you hit them. So it's all about like kind of getting into the beat and bouncing the dots back and the right time. And like, if you get it up high enough, it has kind of this cool eight bitty, 16 bitty soundtrack that the better you do, the better the song gets. So it's actually a really cool concept, the sort of like integration of audio and music and gameplay all together. And it is really enjoyable on iPhone with headphones, but it's so funny because it gets so frantic and so hectic, because it is a very hard game that like my index finger is sore. Like I could from rubbing on the glass. And it's like I try to be all like lightweight with it and like touch it because that's totally the way to do it. But it gets so intense that I'm like pressing down really hard on the glass. And like if it was a little bit moist or something, I'm sure you could hear it cool. (laughing) And so yeah, it makes my fingers sore. That was a lot. So that game's a lot of fun. And yesterday I just started Fallout Vegas, New Vegas. - Me too. - Yay. So that's a fucking Fallout 3. - Yeah, it is. It's Fallout 3, but like at least, I feel like it has a better, at least so far it feels like it has a better directed storyline. And the NPCs are, they seem to be better looking. - Oh man, I don't think so at all for the NPCs. I think they're terrible. - What system are you playing on? - 360. - I'm playing on PC. - I have it on PC because it's on my press account, but once they announce the DLC stuff, I was like, well, that makes my decision for me. - Well, what's the DLC stuff? - It's exclusive to 360. - Wow. And well, that just means it'll come out on PC later. - And also, it makes me a whore, but I am a little bummed that Games for Windows Live is not in Fallout, New Vegas. - Yeah, that was kind of a little strange for me as well. Like, 'cause it was in Fallout 3. - People bitched because PC gamers hate Games for Windows Live. - Yeah. - As much on a conceptual level as a practical one. - I kind of don't mind Games for Windows Live. It doesn't seem to hurt anything. - I would imagine if it wasn't good this time, it would probably be more because they have to pay for it. - No, maybe. - No. - I've heard people are running into a lot of bugs. I haven't run into any yet. - The PC version is the most stable, by far, from what I've seen in a hurry. - Really? - I've, I'm probably only three to four hours into it, which I'm sure isn't very far at all. And it's enjoyable. I mean, like, I actually, because you can look down the iron sights of your guns, the, like, shooting it a little bit more, like, shooter style, I find fun. - You could aim your gun in the old one, right? You just didn't look down the iron sights. - You didn't look down the iron sights, that was, okay. And then, let's see. Oh, I played a little bit of Fable 3, but we can't talk about that. Here we can. - What can we? - First five hours. - Oh, 'cause that's right. You told me that earlier, 'cause it's already been previewed. The first five hours have been previewed. - Tell me what you think about the first couple of minutes of Fable 3 because that's what you played so far. - Yeah. Well, the opening movie's fucking great. It's really good. - It's a chicken. The travails and trials of a chicken. And that, it sounds like I'm totally unimpressed by that, but it's fucking awesome. - Well, didn't they release that a while ago? - It's really good. - Yeah, yeah, it actually gained quite a bit of popularity around the webs. - Okay, 'cause see, I've been avoiding Fable 3 just 'cause I don't want it spoiled for me. - Yeah, they're there. And I was like, what does it have to do with Fable? - Yeah, that one was really good. And then they recently came out with another one that has just this rock band playing in the background. And it's just this really dramatic slow-mo animation. I don't know if you've seen that promotion too. - Oh, I did see that one. That one was good. - It's good as well too. There's an extended and a shortened version. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, that one tries to capture the revolution, I guess, that they're trying to present with Fable 3. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - So, have you gotten as far into any of the economics? - No, not yet. All I did is start making pies in order to make some money. This is far in the economics as I've gotten. It has this thing where it calls it the road to rule where you get past a certain story point in the game. And then the amount of hero points that you have allows you to open chests and that sort of how you get your abilities. And so, you kind of pick and choose your, it's almost like a metaphor for a skill tree. And like you open chests to spend your hero points, you know? And then it's actually kind of cool because your menu works the same way. You hit the start menu and you go to your sanctuary. And you walk around in your sanctuary, like you go to the clothing area or the weapons area or whatever to equip yourself. And it's a little bit like Ezio's Mansion. Only you can access it at any time. And then you can go back, immediately back to where you were or you can fast travel to any other location using the map room. - Cool. - And it's actually really cool. And like, I've never been a fan of the idea of walking around in a 3D virtual world to access your menus, but I really like it in Fable because it's done so slick. And so far, like it has all of the same kind of like charming character and stories and great voice acting that like Fable 2 had. - One thing I'm curious if you've, I mean, you're so early in the game. If you've seen like how much the, and this might seem very trivial, how much does the hand holding come into play? - So far it's only coming to play once, like right in the beginning. - Right, yeah, that's how far I got. - Yeah, the tutorial like teaches you how to do it, you know, like right in the beginning. And, but at the same time, it's like, I'm just wondering, like, if it's going to come into play at all, like who cares? - Yeah, the reason I ask is because I was kind of watching, you know, the hype, the, the Molyneux hype machine before, you know, the development, and I've read an interview or maybe I saw in a video interview who I'm saying how they took a bunch of inspiration from Eco and specifically was the tension when you would grab, what's the female's name? - Yorda. - Yorda, when you grab her hand and like walk away from her, that tug, that little bit of tug, and there was even like vibration and like a control, you know. - In the controller, yeah. - And just that Eco is like one of my favorite games of all time. You know, I just wondered how much of that. - Doesn't seem to do anything yet because in Eco, it was all about, you did that for puzzle solving purposes, you know? - Right, yeah. - And I don't think there really is any of that in fable, fables in action RPG, so I don't know, I haven't run across any puzzles yet. I mean, I guess it makes it a little easier if you need to get somebody to a demon door or something like that. I can see that happening, but I'm curious, Arthur, what kind of character have you made in New Vegas? - I'm doing something similar to what I did last time because I enjoyed it so much, which is I use rifles from a distance as much as possible and I sneak around everywhere. - Right, that's kind of actually what I'm doing, which is sort of what I did last time except last time I used energy weapons. This time I'm just time I'm doing all guns. I was thinking about doing like all hand to hand combat. - Right, and now there are new perks that support use of specific kinds of guns. Like there's the gunslinger perk, which is like single handed pistols. - Yeah, yeah, nice. - And there's a rifleman perk, which is rifles. - Right, yeah. - So that's all, it's all interesting. It seems like you can be much more sort of specific with the kind of character that you want to play. - Yeah, I think so too. Have you played, are you playing on hardcore mode? - No, fuck that. - I actually am and it's not too bad. - No. - What are some of the-- - Not for me. - So bullets have weight, you have to keep yourself hydrated. - Your bullets have weight, but it's like 0.03 or something. - Yeah, but if you have like thousands of bullets. - I don't know, well so far I haven't, so far I haven't had a problem running out of bullets. - At first I was thinking weight like traveled, like you know, bad company, you know, like your bullets drop as they travel, but you mean weight as an over and covered way. - No, like a right, right, right. - Over and covered way. - Over and covered way. - Remember in Oblivion how your ass weights stuff. - I will never play, I will never play but that's the game where things weigh stuff like that again. - You know what, you have to eat too, don't you drink it? - What's this hydrated? - Yeah, you, so it's like you have like two others, like you know how you had the rads meter before one that you have meters that count down and that's food and water. And like, I haven't had like anything where it's been like you get hungry but I have like gotten thirsty. And I think is the, if you go to a sink or a toilet or whatever, you just fill up your canteen when you use it. It seems to be what happens anyway. And every now and then you'll get a little message that says, you took a sip from your trusty canteen. And then after a while it'll say your canteen is empty and then you have to just go fill it up again. - That's only in hardcore, you don't have to drink it. - Only in hardcore. - That is the optional thing. - Yeah, so it was like, it comes with a message at the beginning, it's saying, do you wanna turn on hardcore? Here's all the things that'll happen if you turn on hardcore. - And then it says you'll get a special reward, I think. - If you play, it says you can adjust the difficulty at any time, but if you play from now to the end of the game all in hardcore, you'll get a special reward. And I was like, well, I might as well just turn it on now. And then if it really pisses me off, I'll turn it off. But so far it hasn't upset me at all. - The game is already really hard. - Really, I'm not, I don't know. - Maybe it's because I didn't do the dick around with little quests first, I was just like, all right, well fuck it, I have to do the first town you hear about a prison where the inmates rioted and took over, I'm going there. - Oh, see like you, but that's one of the things that I like about New Vegas is it kicks off really strong. Like all the little quests in that first town lead up to a really cool battle. - Right, it gives you, it also gives you weapons right away. It doesn't make you wait with like a fucking pistol and a fucked up hunting rifle for a long time. - No, I started with a shotgun and like a grenade launcher and something else. - I didn't get a grenade launcher. - Well, I think it's because like the download press version or whatever is like the deluxe version. - Oh, right, it has all this different starter kits. - The cowboy repeater is my weapon of choice right now. - Oh, where did you get that? - I just found it off dudes, which is, if you played Fallout 3, Lincoln's repeater, was the rifle that fired Magnum shells? It's the same thing, it doesn't make the ding noise when you fire it, which is just too bad. - So do you pick your difficulty like, and then you pick hardcore on top of that? Like, could I play easy, but hardcore? - I don't know. - Like, or is hardcore like-- - I think hardcore is a difficulty. - Yeah, as you can say, so it's also like a difficulty, like it's harder than normal. - I think I chose normal. - I think I chose normal, and then it said hardcore mode. - Okay. - So I think hardcore might be a separate thing on top of the difficulty. - Yeah, I'm not gonna do it. - How much can you guys tell do the factions play into the game like this? - Pretty heavily right away. - Yeah, like in terms of like, does it change like your resources, some of the things that are available, or just missions? - I think it changes a lot. - I think it changes a lot. - And just generally like where you can go, like you have faction-specific karma. Like, I'm getting bad karma warnings all the time for doing things like taking out an evil faction. But that bad karma is just applies to how that faction views me. - Do they actually call it karma? - Yes. - No, it's funny. - It's got the little thing in the April of Corona that says you've received bad karma. And I'm like, what the fuck? - But it doesn't, but it doesn't-- - I'm stealing from evil people. How's it gonna be in trouble? - It doesn't say bad karma with X. - No, it just tells you-- - It hasn't done that for me, like when it-- - Well, maybe you're just not stealing enough. - Well, no, I mean like the message that pops up is different than the karma message. It'll say like-- - I have a little face with horns in the April of Corona. - Right, but mine, that doesn't, I'm saying that doesn't happen for me. It says like, powder gang you have now become despised by the powder gang. - Or yeah, I'm definitely vilified by the powder gang 'cause I went to that prison and killed everyone. - Right, but I mean like, it might just be giving you bad karma for stealing period no matter who it belongs to. - Oh, it definitely gives me bad karma. - I think the karma stuff is, again, I just feel like it's particularly faction based and that's interesting to me because it's just codifying what was sort of in the game before, like occasionally like the outcasts and follow through. - How can you see like, does it have, is there a screen that says like you have bad or good karma with different factions or just whether or not you-- - I think it's in your stat screen and your overall stats. - Okay, that's cool. I thought it was just whether or not they liked you or disliked you. - I don't know, there's so much shit in that game that it's hard for me to remember everything. - So you actually like, so you gain karma too so other people will be like, man, we really like you. - Yes. - It's kind of like, wow then. - And certain factions, if they really like you, other factions will dislike you. - So you kind of have to pick at some points. - Right, I mean, it hasn't been hard because it's been like, well, those guys are dicks. - Right. - And these people are cool. So I'm gonna hang out with the cool people and fuck the dicks. - Who are the dicks? (laughing) - Escaped conflict so far, the Legion of Caesar seems like the main bad guy force. - The main dicks. - The Nash, the NCR. - That's what I'm talking about, California. - Yep. (laughing) - But I mean, even they act like dicks, kind of, but they act like less of a dick than the Legion. - They act more like a government dick. - Right. And we all like government dick. - Yep. - Like, with the Legion though, you'll walk into a town and you'll see a bunch of people crucified and like fucking bonfires with bodies on them. You're like, okay, these guys are not so cool. (laughing) - Right. - But I find myself much less diplomatic so far in New Vegas, I'm just like, I am going to kill everyone who's bad. - Right. Did you have you been putting stuff into speech? - Yes. - Just like one of my traits is the wacky wasteland trait. - Mm. I thought about choosing that one, what does that do? - So far I've only seen one thing where I think it affected me, which is that I found a skeleton in a refrigerator and had an Indiana Jones hat. So I found Indiana Jones a skeleton in a refrigerator. (laughing) - Sude. - Yeah. - Popped up like a whittle thing in the upper left corner that showed the icon, the face of the wacky wasteland thing. - That's hilarious. - But how could I not take that trait? Like, the trait description image has a chihuahua with sunglasses. (laughing) - What does it mean? Like, just weird things that happen to you? - It's going to show you weird shit. - Yeah. - I think the weird shit becomes like landmarks on your radar or something like that. I don't know about that. All I know is that-- - Will it be there? - Play these games to see that crazy shit. - Will it be there if you don't have the perk? The perk just sort of like directs your eyes? - No, it won't be there. - Whoop. - If you want to see that stuff, you have to take it. And I mean, there's like the traits. I didn't feel like there was anything in the traits where I was like, man, I just have to have that. Like, eventually your combat prowess is going to be so high that it doesn't matter. And in that case, all that's left is going to be seeing all the cool shit. And I would rather have more cool shit to see. - This time I decided to up my luck a lot too. I'm going to try to max out my luck. Just because like-- - I'm not doing that. - Just because I've never done it in like any game. I've never taken the luck trait. And this time I'm going to. - I've always just assumed this. But is luck, does it just mean that they round your stats up? - It affects, it says that it affects all of your stats. - So like your dice rolls? - Like probably, yeah. - Yeah, if it's like a remainder or something, they round it up for your right-- - Well, I think it's also you definitely get a higher percentage of critical attack chance. - And you also find better stuff. - You find better stuff in boxes. Like the random loot chest will have more bottle caps in them. - I think when you repair things, like it probably affects it more. - Yeah, I think like you can do things, don't quote me on this, but I think you can do things like if you have a lock picking skill that's not quite high enough, you have a chance of like actually doing it or if-- - Or you can read a magazine. - Yeah, or you can read a magazine. - And that's another addition that I like is that you can buy magazines that give you temporary skill boosts. - Like plus 10 or whatever. - And you can also find them in mailboxes, like almost every mailbox in that game has a fucking magazine in it. - So coming from Obsidian, a company that's famously taken on sequels and released buggy ones that were awesome. - Right. - How's this? - I'm not far enough to have seen many bugs. I'm seeing like a lot of bugs that were in Fallout 3, like something you would see in Fallout 3 every now and again, like would be like a rad scorpion or a giant ant that was perpendicular to the ground. - I was gonna-- (laughing) - I was gonna talk about it. I was like, yeah. - I see that a lot. - You just keep going. - I've never seen that. - I've never seen that. - So far. - I have never, ever seen that. - You were playing on PC and I am playing on console and from what I have seen, the PC versions are more stable, right? - Certain things in that game look pretty dated now too. Like in my mind's eye. - Like in most of the textures. - Yeah, like in the way I saw this guy's dog running, the dog basically goes on like a pivot. - Oh man. - I was trying, their animation is pretty bad. I was trying to follow somebody. Oh, it was right in the beginning when I was trying to follow that woman who has the dog and her dog ran around in front of her and then her model was like scripted to go a certain way and just kept running into the dog and the dog wasn't moving. And so she was just kind of like stuck, gradually pushing the dog out of the way until she finally like went around its head and started running. - Which is sort of realistic really. We've seen dogs do that. - Yeah. - Which is not to say that the game is not buggy. Like nothing has broken the game for me so far. - Right. - But it behaves a little jankly. Like I'll open a door and the screen will just sort of freeze. Like it won't go to loading. It'll just like everything will walk up or it'll turn black and stay that way for a while. - Wow, weird. - See yeah, I was looking around at different reviews like at the, you know how like Joystick will post up a bunch of different reviews and then I'll click through those links and check out what they have to say. And then I was coming across Giant Bomb and they had like a little video thing of them playing it. And they were, and from their impressions, like the longer you play the game, those problems sort of get exponentially worse. - Right, which makes sense. Like that's the odd living. - Fallout got that way too. - Yeah. - Fallout behaved worse and worse the more DLC you had. - Yeah, exactly man. Stuff like that's frustrating. - Well, I'm glad I play these games on PC then 'cause I experience a lot less of this stuff apparently. - Right. But you don't get achievements. Okay, the reason, I mean, yeah, I like achievements. - Do you need achievement? - Achievements in Fallout 3 are particularly useful because of the way that they help you track your progress at the game. Because there's really no way you'd ever know you're finished with Fallout 3 or Fallout New Vegas. - Yeah, well, you would when you can't play anymore. - Well, no, because you can always walk around and there's literally no way to know if there's not something else out there unless-- - Oh, no, I'm just saying if you beat the story, it ends, right? - Right, well, there's that. That's another thing. - So that's what you do. - If you finish the last mission, the game ends. Again, just like Fallout 3 did. - They didn't learn. - No, they did not learn. - So as I was saying, so you do know. - I don't know if that's something they're gonna tie to the first DLC or it's gonna be a free patch. But for those of you out there, when you beat the fucking game, it won't let you continue. So just keep that in mind. I know you couldn't possibly finish it by now and if you did, then I can't fucking help you. You need a lot more than a podcast on you what to do to help you. (laughing) - By the time they hear this, they very well could've been it. - No, it's been out for 48 hours. - Yeah, and-- - Oh, well, by the time they hear this, they'll have been out by for like 96 hours. - Yeah, so what could've been it by then? - No way. - Definitely. - For sure, dude, people will have-- - Yeah, people are-- - People will have people or beat it in the course of like 96 hours. - People will have beaten it and the game pack will already be out. - Yeah, but our reviewer also literally spent 24 hours consecutively playing that game. - Right, I'm saying here's the storyline. There are people out there that will do it. - Yeah. - It'll happen. - Then they have much larger problems than not being able to continue after the game is done. (laughing) - What was I gonna say? Better their lives are better than ours. - Well, you were talking about it, you don't really feel like it-- - Yeah, I just feel like it's difficult to know when you're done with a game like this, or a Blavian, or Fallout 3. - I would agree if they let you keep going, but they don't in this one. - And achievements are a good, but what I mean by that is like exhaust the content on them. - There's no way to know that you've done everything in the game without the achievements, maybe. - And achievements are a good way for you to know like, okay, well, stick a fork in me. I'm done. - It's important to open world games, yeah. To have some sort of progress. - Totally, like I have getting ready for the zombie DLC for Red Dead. I've jumped back in just to kind of get more familiar with the controls. - Yeah. - And I was like, well, what do I wanna do? 'Cause I've already beaten the game, so I just like looked up my achievements, and like the first one I read was, knock somebody out and every saloon in the game, and I was like, that sounds exactly like what I wanna do. (laughing) - Right. - Awesome. - I mean, I'm really enjoying Fallout New Vegas. It is, from everything I've heard and seen, other than my experience with it after six hours, more buggy than Fallout 3. - Yeah. - So, if you kind of wanna wait to pick it up, I could not blame you for doing so. - Right. - Well, they were supposedly, yeah, I mean, they released a PC patch already. - Yeah, I downloaded it today. - And the 3.16 PS3 ones are coming. Stability patches, so. - Right. - Who knows? - And Fallout, I really wanna be playing Fallout New Vegas right now, so. - When you're not like talking to you, either. - And you're listening to it, Arthur's probably sitting somewhere. The bucket under is butt playing, so you don't have to get up to pick shit. (laughing) - No, I can turn myself away long enough to poop. (laughing) - It's a joke, jokes. - This is gonna be a rough week for me, because I need to go down to Los Angeles this Saturday for this Friday for a wedding. I'm gonna be gone until Sunday night, and I have Fallout and people. - Fuck weddings, they'll probably get divorced. (laughing) There you go, the next thing's good. - Dude, I wish I didn't have to go to any more weddings. I go to the three or four every single year, and since I was like 20. - Why? - Because everybody I know gets married and wait. - So you just send them a gift. - Right. - I'm sorry, I can't make it. Here's a gift. Here's a juicer. - Yeah. - That's gonna fight over. - Or here's a nice card. - The receptions are fun. - The receptions usually are fun. I've been to a couple that were off. Here's a nice card. - Yeah, that's gonna be bad. - Sorry, I didn't make it to your dumb wedding. - Dude, at my sister's wedding, we tied the tablecloth together and started playing jump rope with a tablecloth. We were super drunk. - That's awesome. - And then we loaded up the keg in the back of my friend's explorer, dude. But like we had to get the whole shit. (laughing) - Matt, was there anything else you've been playing? - I know that was it. - Yeah. - I played many other things 'cause I did extra life on Saturday and had play games. - How did that go, Arthur? - It was fucking miserable. - Really? - You didn't have any fun at all? - The first 18 hours were fine. It was the last six where I was like, what was I thinking? (laughing) From the, in the witching hour, from two to eight, is when I was in the most pain 'cause I had slept like shit the night before. - Oh. 'Cause you were nervous. - No, because I did not used to getting up. It's six 30 in the morning on a Saturday. So I can get ready and get into the office by eight. But I played Super Meat Boy. That game hates you and you will probably love it for it. - I would like to point out real quick that Area 5 made a Super Meat Boy ad. - You can check that out. Is it supermeatblog.com? - I think it's just supermeatboy.com. - Okay. They have the Super Meat blog on Supermeatboy.com. - But I think the ad is like up on game trailers and a few other sites and everything. - Oh, really? - You can see in lots of places. We're gonna do a behind the scenes blog post, which is probably gonna go up tomorrow because there are several scenes in that commercial that obviously required many, many takes to get right. And there's some hilarious shit that happened. And the blog will also show like, how to make fake blood, which is a good lesson for Halloween. Edible, delicious blood, actually. - Corn syrup, right? - Corn, you know, it's a recipe you can find anywhere, but corn syrup, chocolate syrup, and blue and red food dye. - So, Supermeatboy, it's trials HD meets N+, I think is probably the best way to put it. - I never played N+ but trials HD. - It's just as maddening as that. Like people are-- - It controls awesomely though. - It does. Just make sure you turn off the movie mode on your TV. - Oh yeah, good point. - You wanna minimize lag, input lag on that controller as much as possible. - Yeah, you do, definitely. - I played some Plants vs. Zombies on 360, which is still fun, but I mean, I just can only play that in small doses 'cause it's more fucking Plants vs. Zombies. And I played most of the way through Vanquish. - Yeah. - I'm not really feeling Vanquish. - No. - No, not so much. I know that IGN gave it a very high score and a lot of sites are giving it high scores. - Come in for your favorite, favorite-ly. - For that game, the scores are. - But the consistent thing I'm noticing is a lot of these people seem to have giant boners for God Hand, which was a pretty divisive game by which I mean, 90% of people thought it was awful when there's this very aggressively enthusiastic 10% that thought it was the most amazing thing ever, and then Clover shut down. - I'm sort of on the opposite side of that with Demon's Souls. There's all these people out there that thought that game was awesome and I hated it. - I think that there is a much larger contingent of people that think that Demon's Souls is not good than think it is good. - No, you wouldn't get that from reading the-- - Well, yeah, because no one else gives a shit about that game except for the people that volunteered to review it, and I think that Vanquish is very similar. I just, it's overly idiosyncratic and it's approached the third person shooting and it commits the Japanese action game cardinal sin of making you wait over and over again in like, it's almost like a disrespect for your time. - What do you mean it makes you wait? - So, almost everything your suit does is tied to this heat meter and everything that you wanna do exhausts that heat meter at varying degrees, like zooming around with your rocket skates or whatever slowly depletes it, using a melee attack, completely depletes it, activating bullet time slowly depletes it. If you get hit a lot, it will automatically invoke bullet time and you have to wait for slow motion to completely unwind, which you can't break out of or stop, and then you have to wait an even longer amount of time for the screen to stop flashing and then you have to wait a longer time for it to charge up so you can go like maybe 30 seconds before you'll be ready to fight again. - So, by the tone and the voice and your expression, it seems to me like you are implying that this is not in service to gameplay. - No, that is precisely correct. I feel that it's pretty antithetical to what it seems like they're trying to do with the gameplay. - Yeah, you know, this one in Fallout New Vegas were two that I've been poking around the reviews a whole bunch for some reason and exactly everything you just laid out were all the things that put up little red flags for me. I mean, one thing a lot of the reviewers seem to agree on is that it controls really, really well. - I don't think it does. I think that you move around pretty well, but the guns don't aim particularly well while the shooting doesn't feel very good. - I mean, it looks, I mean, I can only go off what the video was looking like. I mean, the slow motion animation and stuff looks badass, but exactly what Arthur is saying is that being antithetical to shooters, it reminds me a lot of this hack and slash game I reviewed. And it was a, it was like Kingdom Under Fire and the whole thing was it was a hack and slash game, but like attacking like, you know, drained your SP meter. So it was like, you weren't supposed to button mash. It's like, why even, you know? - I mean, there are other things like the upgrade mechanic is idiotic. You have to, your weapon needs to be full. Like you, I need to have full ammo and then pick up more of that weapon to upgrade your weapon. Except you have to do like three times before you see an actual upgrade. - Oh. - You heard me. - It's weird. - You heard exactly what you think you heard. - It's just kind of weird. - Saying it again is not going to make it make it more sense. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - And then if you die, like for example, with a cheap fucking one hit kill from an enemy that is not a boss, but just some random thing, then when you continue, you will have lost the most recent round of upgrades for every weapon you're carrying. - Wow. - So Japanese. - Yeah. - You will get knocked down and not be able to get back up for a good five to 10 seconds. You will read in reviews an emphasis that's awfully strange, like in its veracity and prevalence on the style of the game over the actual substance of the game. And it is very much one of those games where people are fixating on like, how cool the game is over and over and over again. And I don't think it's cool. I stopped jerking off over McCross when I was like 12 years old. And I think the visual style is interesting. And I think the main character looks awesome. And a lot of the visuals in the game look awesome, but it's visually inconsistent and you're looking at the same fucking robots the entire game. If you downloaded the demo and really liked it and could see yourself doing that for six hours. - Right. - Like, and just that because that is pretty much it. - Wow. - Except for certain parts where, stop me if you've heard this one. You meet another guy who has the same technology as your suit except it's better. And he beats your ass until it's finally time to fight him and then he's a giant vagina. And right as you're about to beat him, he decides that he doesn't need to be there anymore and flies away so you can fight him again later. I don't know, it's pretty inventive. I mean, I don't know that you've ever heard of this before, but it could blow your mind when you encounter it in the fucking first chapter of the game. - Wow. - And the voice acting is awful. - Oh, see, I thought you were gonna say awesome. - I was scandalized by how much they said fucking shit. (laughing) I, they have an M rating, I'm pretty sure. - Right. - It's exclusively due to profanity. - Right. - 'Cause you're shooting robots the whole time. - Fuckin' robot. - Yes. - I'm gonna fuck that robot shit up. - More fuck. - Fuck. - Yep. And it's Steve Bloom. - Of course not. - Anthony's favorite is Steve Bloom. I, I, I didn't care for it. I think that it's getting way overrated. I think that there's a particularly enthusiastic audience of God hand aficionados and clover studios aficionados that's sought out this game to review it and are giving it way too high a score. And in my opinion, I mean, it's their opinions to find whatever. I just feel like having approached it from what I feel is a fair perspective. I just don't think that it's very good from a mechanical perspective. And I don't care for crazy Japanese imagery and that seriously dampens my enthusiasm for the game. Just like my distaste for Bayonetta's aesthetics, combined with some pretty shitty level design decisions later in the game to lower my opinion of that game, even though it was really good for a big part of it. I don't even think Vanquish has the mechanical chops to stand up to Bayonetta. Bayonetta was a much better game. Also Vanquish is like six hours long and there's nothing but single player. There's like no real challenge modes or anything to speak of. Like you just unlock a harder difficulty and would play through on that. - Right. - Well gee, I'm gonna go out and grab that right now. - Yeah, well now that we're sold. - Again, I mean, there's an easy way to know if you like it, if you download the demo and play it on the hardest difficulty for like an hour and want more, then go buy Vanquish 'cause you are gonna get another five hours of that. - All right. - And a lot of cutscenes. And a really dumb tutorial. - Yeah. - God, I hate Japanese cutscenes. - Vanquish. It's just playing Vanquish pretty much solidifies in my mind why Clover was closed. - Yeah. - Like because they made these very particularly idiosyncratic games for a very small audience and for a very Japanese focused audience that is diminishing. I'm trying to remember if there's anything else that I played. - Well, you did have 24 hours. - Yeah. - Right. I mean, there's other stuff I played that I can't talk about. Like I'm played a little Sonic Colors on DS. - Yeah. All right, well, let's not even mention it if we can't talk about it. - Need for speed underground or need for speed hop pursuit. - 'Cause then people are just gonna be like, well. - Yeah, thanks for naming a game. - I'll talk about need for speed hop pursuit as soon as I can. I played a lot of Halo Reach multiplayer on Saturday, actually. - Oh, yeah. Nice. - I need to do more of that. - A, I was better than I thought I would be and B, it was a hell of a lot more fun than I thought it would be. - It's good. It's really good. - It is really good. - I really like Halo Reach. - Like the way that they changed the shield and the assault rifle really changes the way that game plays in multiplayer. - Totally. - As long as you remember that you have to pop the shield before you can kill someone. - Right. - Which is different than it was in Halo 3. Like in Halo 3, if they had like 10% shield and you hit them in the head with a sniper rifle, it would take out shield and health and in Halo Reach, it just eliminates the rest of their shield and they've got the full health bar. - Yep. - Yeah, I mean, it changes the way it plays a little, although in some maps, it still just feels like, I mean, it still very much feels like Halo. Like it's just like crazy chaos. If you get, if it's two people, you're going to die. - Not two, two on ones are not winnable most of the time. - Yeah, I took my Xbox to my girlfriend's house last weekend anticipating that I was going to play some Halo Reach with the guys and like, I never got around to it, but I really want to play some more of that. - I played a good eight hours or so this weekend. - Nice. - I like it a lot. - Multi-teams are a lot of fun. - Yeah. I think so. - They are certain maps. - Like 16-player matches where you're-- - Yes, there are certain maps that with multi-team is just like what I spawned and I got blown it back. - Well, those are the most fun. Like they're just totally fucking ridiculous multi-team matches where you're always running into somebody. - Have you, well, I think the same thing, there's some like maps that shouldn't have big team battle on them either or big team Slayer or what is a big team invasion. - They've added Rocket Race to multi-team too, but the Rocket Race, all the ones I've played so far, suck, they're just the go drive to this circle before everyone else does instead of ones where it's actually like-- - Yeah, that's Rocket Race. - No, that's not. Rocket Race and the old one was get from point A to B. You had to drive through circles on your way to A. - Oh, but on this one it's just like who can go into the most-- - It's like King of the Hill or whatever. - Yeah, yeah, and that's fun, but I like the best part of Rocket Race was everybody trying to keep pace with everyone. - I suck at Head Hunter though. - Yeah, Head Hunter, I'm awful at Head Hunter. - Yeah, I'm definitely okay on team Head Hunter, but like I can't do normal Head Hunter. - I'm not good at team Head Hunter. Like the multi-team Head Hunter, just terrible. - Yeah. - I embarrassed myself, but it was a lot, I was actually surprised. I've actually, I was sort of dreading having to go online to play Halo Multiplayer because so I haven't played this in a long time. I wasn't very good in the beta and then I ended up having a lot more fun than I thought I was. - You're ass kicked. I think the matchmaking has drastically improved. From what I've talked to everybody, like there's a lot of people that I talked to that are like, yeah, like I feel like when I go in and just to a random multiplayer match, not when I'm playing with my friends, I get matched up a lot more fairly than I used to in old Halo's. So I don't know if that's true or if that's just because Halo Reach is still new enough that there aren't like ungodly good people out there that are just like destroying noobs all the time, but I don't know. Who knows? I like it. - Has anybody played Kirby's Epic Yarn yet? - No. - Ryan has, he really, really loves it. - God damn, I want to play that game. I need to try to fit that in a short one. - It's super short from what I understand. You can get through it real fast. So if you, you know, it's a great little experience. - Yeah. - Probably just baro copping. You could beat it on a Saturday. - You have a nice little Saturday, but you won't because you'd be playing Fallout. (laughing) - We're having a social life outside of games. - Oh, yeah, 'cause you're cool. All the rest of us aren't. (laughing) We'll go back to my room. - That's what he's important. - I realize you went to hang out with dogs to play video games. (laughing) - I do, I just sit there with my DS. Look at this dog. (laughing) Isn't that awesome? - Tyler, did you play anything last week? - Just more sieve, red, dead, mass effective. - You should have this mass effect too, again, didn't you? - Yeah, yeah. - And you still couldn't keep it together. - So I guess, - Really? - I guess the two things I fucked up on are, I failed the fame mission this time because I lost track with the guy you're supposed to watch. - Oh shit. - And so I failed it. So he wasn't loyal to me. And then I guess I put, who's the white chick? - Miranda. - Miranda. - Miranda, yeah, yeah. - I put her as the one to do the shield. - Really? - I guess so. - The climber can do that. - And so that's how Jack died for me. - Oh, okay. - So I guess that's how I lost it. - That's so funny that she's not the one that dies, that she gets Jack killed. (laughing) - But the bigger takeaway from my second playthrough, I went to every galaxy and saw 100% of all the galaxies and man, some of the side missions in that game are so fucking good. - Like the ship that's the old ship that's suspended between the two mountains. - Oh, that one's great. - Yeah, yeah. - That one's like fucking nerve-wracking. - Yeah, it's like tilting and like falling, yeah. - Like you'll jump from a platform and like half of it'll just fall down and then the whole thing will be shaking. You're like, are they really gonna do this to me here? - Yeah. (laughing) - I don't think I did that one. - It was cool. - It was cool. - I found a few missions that seem to like lead into other missions that would point me to go to other solo systems. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Yeah. - That happened. - And there's some really- - But it was better in the second one. - Yeah, there's some really great unfolding narrative in some of those things. - Yeah. - Totally agree. - My game's so good. - Yeah. - I've been looking to pick up my copy of Red Dead back from my friends too, mostly 'cause I wanna try the zombie thing when it comes out. I'm getting excited for that. - So what are some of the details on that? I haven't been following it just 'cause like when I think about it, it doesn't really interest me, but yes. - Zombie bears. - It's got a different, it has a whole storyline to it. - Yeah. - There's actually like a story component. - And one thing that's really cool is they're actually gonna sell it as a standalone disc to like box, like you don't have to own Red Dead. - Wait, what? - To play it. - Wow. - You can go in and buy a box copy of just the zombie thing and it comes with all the multiplayer DLC as well. Just not the single player Red Dead. - And take two must really need another game at retail to do well this year. - I guess it's one of those things where they just need something there. - Yeah. - Well, they don't have more borderlands DLC to sell and Mafia too tanked. - I have something in the store. - But yeah, Red Dead. - All right. - I actually just bought the rest of the Mass Effect 2 DLC that I didn't own on Saturday and I need to go through that game again. - I have like, I still haven't done the Shadow Broker mission. - I haven't done any of the DLC. - Oh really? - Except for the Normandy crash site stuff. - I'm kind of jealous. - I mean, I spent like 40 hours before it came out. - Yeah. - Like blowing through it and 100%ing it. - Yeah. - And so after that, I was like, well, I've got other stuff I have to do now. - Yep. - Totally. - Man, Tyler, you and I need to play some SID 5 multiplayer. - For real, I've played you in Anthony or something. Like, I never get to play. I've never played a multiplayer game of SIV in my life. - You finished your game, right? The one that was destroying you. - Oh, I did actually. - Yeah, I went and I lowered all of my settings and then I played it almost entirely in tactical mode and got a science victory that way. And then I actually started a new game but I only played a large map, not a huge map. And then I disabled the anti-aliasing even though it was recommending to keep it on. And that totally, I mean, the map size improved it but I think the anti-aliasing when I did that seemed to improve it immensely. - That is definitely a card killer. - Yeah. And so I actually played a whole 'nother game and got a cultural victory using the Indians with only two cities. - As in the Indians from India, we're not saying Native Americans. - Right. - In this game, they're not really Native Americans. - They're the Iroquois. - They're the Iroquois. They're just natives. They're just Iroquois. - Well, they're all native. - They're just fucking savages. (laughing) - I think that's how they're selling them as DLC. You saw that they're adding another faction, right? - Yeah, I did. - Another faction. - The Mongols are gonna be free and then you can buy the Babylonians. - Buy the Babylonians which are already in my game, but yeah. - And mine too. - What's the Babylonians? Buff, what's their thing? - They get a, when you discover writing, you get a free great scientist. And you create great scientists at twice the normal rate. So like the first time I have-- - That's Nebuchadnezzar. - Yeah. - That guy's a dick. - It's a big place. - Yeah. - Fucking Nebuchadnezzar. - I can see, I've never-- - Him and his scary dark throne room with fucking torches and shit. - Green fire. - Fuck that guy. - I use Nebuchadnezzar to get my science victory. - I don't care if they did name a ship in the Matrix after you fucking Nebuchadnezzar. So I think Anthony is saying we should take a break. - Yeah, take a break. Yep. (upbeat music) ♪ I can't believe it ♪ ♪ If I'm done with the rabbit tooth ♪ ♪ She went to a rabbit's a little too soon ♪ ♪ Fluidly down on the yellow moon ♪ ♪ Where the bad books goin', they die ♪ ♪ But don't go to heaven where the angels fly ♪ ♪ Go to a lake of fire and a fry ♪ ♪ See 'em again ♪ ♪ Tell them for the two light ♪ (upbeat music) - All right, first letters from Dom, who's written into us a couple of times, and as I read the intro, you'll remember 'em. Our relationship has been strained. He's talking about us, with us and him. Our relationship has been strained since April when I sent you guys some letters about my girlfriend and I and my unintentional racism. - Oh yeah. (all laughing) - We're gonna turn you to black guys, yeah. - To the black guys. - But I hope we can put that beside us, besides us, for I have a serious question. I am now a senior at my high school. My grades in the past have been awful, but I am buckling down this year. My dream is to work in the gaming industry, and I really want to go to the expressions college in Emeryville, I don't know what that is. - Expressions? - We pass by that place, more than once. - They are a for-profit school, but I'm not sure. - That is generally a bad thing. - Generally. - But I'm not sure I'll get in. I'm currently taking art one, film in literature, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm taking the ACT on the 23rd SATs, but I have a problem. I never took geometry or anything past algebra one. So I'm pretty sure I am fucked on both of the ACT and the SAT. I never, I really want to live my dream and go on to a digital art college, but I don't know which one would take me, what if any info do you know about digital art colleges and their traditional requirements? - Digital art colleges don't give a shit about math scores, typically. - They will take you, they'd make you take some math courses, but they'd take you. They just want you to go out and, you know, take out 80 to $90,000 in loans. That's what they really want. They want your money. - For-profit colleges are kind of an iffy thing. - They are. - Like you can, there's some really awesome work that comes out of some for-profit colleges. If you fucked around in high school and really, really sucked at it, you're not going to get your money's worth out of it for- Jesus, your cat is going crazy. - Is it my cat or your cat? - Even though it was Arthur's cat. She's wanted to spread litter as far as she could. - Oh good, well. - She's always terrified that she's going to get ambushed coming out of there. People's like the fucking Viet Cong. (laughing) - So that's the, because we're in those for-profit colleges, honestly, they don't give a fuck if you have good work. You might be lucky enough to get to one of those colleges that has enough good professors that they're going to force you to do some good work, but you really have to be an excellent self-starter if you're going to come out of one of those colleges with a good portfolio. - What isn't a for-profit college that is in a state school? - They are- - Art Institute is a for-profit college. - Art Institute is one, yeah. - Oh, so they aren't a for- - They are not a phoenix. - They are not a for-profit, like they aren't, like I thought- - They're business- - They're trying to make money, you know? - Yeah, but I guess when they say like the for-profit thing, it's not like- - They're not using government funding, I don't think at all. - And it's not like some liberal arts college, you know? Like back somewhere, these are like national institutions or regional institutions that have lots and lots of campuses around. And their goal is to turn out as many degree-having individuals as possible. And like, I'm not saying that you can't get into one and have like a really great time and come out with a really good portfolio at the other end. But if it's, but Dom, if Expressions is your only option down there, I would make absolutely sure that the stuff that's coming out of there is good and that they're not just showing you the top 1%. I mean, ask a lot of really fucking hard questions. Like, you know, like how later your computer lab opened, what's all of your, what software are you working on? How hard are you working on? - What kind of job placement there is afterwards? - Yeah, and I mean, like they're gonna, and I'm gonna tell you right now, they're gonna lie to you. And they're not gonna lie to you in the way that it's gonna be like, you know, an out and out bald-faced lie. They're just gonna, they're gonna skew all the statistics to make it sound like they're the best school in the fucking world. And that they're gonna find you a fantastic job when you get out. But the bottom line is, is like your portfolio when you come out of one of those schools matters more than anything else. And so if you don't think that you're enough of a self-starter to do your own portfolio, like without a whole lot of help and have a whole lot of good work to show, then you're probably better off going and getting a very solid education at a community college first. - There are a couple of sites. Go ahead, Tyler and then I'll go. - Oh, I was just gonna say, you know, I'm not of the opinion that someone would need a technical degree to get hired at a video game place. I imagine you go into any developer in the United States and you could find a whole handful of people who just did the community college roadmap. I'm sure there are plenty of people who have just haven't associates. - I will say at this point, if you want to enter the field, a degree is probably more important than ever because there is a glut of qualified personnel applying for every job. - Sure, a degree, sure, but-- - Particularly in the Bay Area. - Although I will say that like for, anything art-wise, like, they don't ever ask to see your degree. - That degree is more important than you think. - Well, in some cases, but honestly, like even when I've talked to people, for instance, when I worked at one up, they would kind of giggle when people would put their degree on their resume because it just comes off as amateurish. Like, you just don't need it if you have like, the work to show that you're badass. - Right, your portfolio is gonna mean more than anything. - There are a couple of sites I'd recommend you check out. CGsociety.org is a good one. - Yeah, they're great. I love this one. - And it's a good resource to find schools and opinions about schools you might be looking at. And conceptart.org is another one. And conceptart.org actually runs their own school and training program. They run an Intellier in Los Angeles that those guys don't fuck around. There's some really amazing stuff coming out of there. conceptart.org is the site that's behind Massive Black, who you may or may not have heard of, but they do a lot of contract concept design. - They're quite good. - Yeah, I mean, they're responsible for a lot of stuff that you guys have probably heard of. I'm looking them up right now. They did some stuff for Bioshock, Dragon Age, Hellgate, London, Infamous, Killzone 2. - All right, so that works with the names. - They got some names into their belt. - Red Faction Guerrilla. - I'm just trying to talk up the general liberal arts education because I think the type of critical thinking education you might get there, whereas you won't get in an art focus school. - Right. - It would be more valuable in life in general than, - Yeah, there's so many factors that go into a school. It's just really hard to know. I would like expression out of all the for-profit art schools that are in the Bay Area, expressions would probably be my last choice. - Really? - Yeah. - I haven't really heard much about them. I thought I heard that they were good, but I don't know. - It's just be, I went to the Art Institute here in the Bay Area and like, that's kind of like, that's kind of why I went on a front of a rant about these schools because like that was my experience. And I did not get my money's worth. I got a lot out of it and I don't regret going, but it was not worth $74,000, let's put it that way. - I will say that prior to moving to San Francisco, I was, I would just write off. The Art Institute is just like, oh well people just, anyone can go there, they just pay. You know, like there's no admissions criteria, but I have seen some fucking astounding stuff come out. - And I did some great stuff while I was there and like, my senior project was a lot of fun and I worked with some very good people and got a lot of good experience. But like, that was because of my classmates. There was a few instructors at the school that were excellent, but for the most part, it was a waste of fucking time. So be very careful about where you go. - There are a lot of hot girls that go to Art Institute in San Francisco. - Art girls go to any college. - Yeah, I was gonna say. - But they might as well rename New Montgomery Hot Girl Boulevard. - Well, that's the Art Academy. - And fuckin' San Francisco. That's the Art Institute, isn't it? - No, the Art Institute is separate from the Academy of Art. - Oh, I'm, Academy of Art. - The Academy of Art actually has a fairly good and deservedly good reputation. But like, you know, it's like kind of like the Art Institute and that like you'll find a number of disgruntled people that went there too. - I would recommend checking out the Art Academy. - Yeah, that's probably, that's probably the one in the Bay Area as far as like for profit, easier to get into schools. That's probably one that like, I would look at first. - I would say CCA. - CCA. - That's, hell of a school to get into. - Yeah, yeah. But that, to me, that would be my ultimate. - Like CCA is one of the best art schools in the country. - Yeah, it's great. It's awesome. All right, next. - Moving on. - My name is Thomas, SPC Thomas. I'm not gonna read his last name, but he's deployed to Afghanistan. And he says, he has an issue he's trying to bring up to the gaming community, which is more and more games require internet activation for single players, specifically PC. More and more of us deployed gamers are excluded. I'm stuck here for a year. My number one past time is playing video games. I have a laptop that I can play most anytime, most any game out, any game out right now on, 'cause he probably has a really nice one, I imagine. Unfortunately, the majority of games I want my wife to send me would require activation on Steam, or in the case of StarCraft II, a log on to BattleNet. I recently had to completely restore my laptop, which has made it impossible for me to even use Steam in offline mode. I've been replaying Dragon Age for the last four months, but now I can't even do that, because the industry is afraid I'll steal the game or already own. So now it's me and my tent for the next eight months. I don't profess to have the answer to this problem, but I do hope smarter minds than I can one day come up with an alternative to online activations. I can't even play modern warfare to our Medal of Honor, at least I think Medal of Honor requires activation. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Civ 5 is at the top of my wish list. It could easily carry me the rest of this deployment. So imagine my surprise when I learn it requires Steam to run. So he's just saying, I guess next time I'll buy an extra console to bring out here, but it's just kind of PC. - Yeah, it sucks. - Yeah, I feel like online activation is bullshit. - I don't think it's bullshit. I think it's a totally reasonable expectation. It's just certain people are gonna get fucked by it. - You know what, I think it's a Band-Aid and I think it's a crappy Band-Aid at that. - I mean, these publishers need to do something 'cause if they don't feel like they have any options, then they're just gonna stop putting out PC games. - That's not true. - That is not true. Like PC games still sell well enough for people to make a profit off of them, especially if they're-- - Right, and one of the reasons that PC games still sell as well as they do is because piracy is becoming more difficult. - Yeah, I mean, it's a question of degree, I guess. - When you have eight times as many people pirating a game as buying it, that's a difficult income proposition. - It's not a difficult income proposition if it sells well enough to begin with that that doesn't really matter in regard to you making your money back with some profit. - Right, with an indie developer, that's one thing, but with a publisher like EA, it's not a reasonable expectation for them to say, "Oh, well, we're gonna lose three or four million of these." But it's cool 'cause we'll sell like 800,000. Like the orders of magnitude of product that a large publisher has to ship make piracy an extremely large concern. - It just makes me wonder like, you'd have to imagine somebody would set up a site something like registers for soldiers or something. You know, where it's like game activation for soldiers. You know, I mean, come on. - And you know what, maybe you should-- - These guys are big girls are over there. - Maybe you should write to EA and explain your difficulty and tell them that they're-- - No, tell 'em motherfucker, I am tier one. - Yeah, exactly. - 'Cause I tell 'em tier one this bit. - I mean, don't like-- - Exaggeration aside, like it's just not a perspective that comes up very often because it's such a small percentage of people over there, but it would be a public relations win. For EA, who is having problems selling Medal of Honor at fucking exchanges to say, look, we're gonna do this thing so military personnel can play these online games over there. And I mean, Valve is a pretty customer friendly company. So if you were to write to Valve or write to EA and express your concerns and detail your difficulties, then I mean, first of all, someone in tech at Valve might be able to help you. And second of all, I mean, maybe that would trigger something else. - To me, it seems like Valve would be a more forward-thinking company that would actually step out in front of something like this, you know? - Totally. - But they can't. This doesn't bring it to their attention. - I don't know how, yeah, I don't know how it could, it would be done, but you send me a letter stating your exact concerns, address to Valve and I will make sure it ends up in the inbox of a person. - Of Doug Lombardi? - Yeah. Yeah. - You do that for me. - That's not an exaggeration, that'll happen. - Didn't he just send you a letter that claims his exact concerns? - Yeah. I guess I just wanted to want to address the Valve of the thing. - Right. - That was kind of just us. I just meant more of the key to it. - For real, man. - Make it out to Doug Lombardi. Okay, that's simple. Make it out to Doug Lombardi because that is who Anthony will attempt to get it to. - L-O-M-B-A-R-D-I. - Yes. - Okay. - D-O-U-G. - The next letter is from Jesse. It says, "I write this the day before Fallout, New Vegas hit stores. I can't find a review anywhere. My guess is that there's a review embargo on the game until release day. I realize there's probably not a direct relationship between an embargo and a game's quality, but lots of users on the major gaming message boards are convinced that the only reason there aren't any published reviews is that the game is going to suck." - That happens. - It seems like a bad idea. When movies aren't screened for critics, it's always because the movie sucks. Also, one would think that a good review week or so before the game come out with generate buzz, they could lead to more sales. Can you explain how embargoes work, especially relating to reviews versus previews? Does the developer or the publisher set them? Do they make your job more difficult? Do you think an embargo on information is a good thing for the industry's old pun? - Publishers and more specifically PR tend to set embargoes? - Yeah, I mean, unless it's a release date, then it's just, "Hey, the game's out too bad." - Yeah. - Yeah. - And that doesn't necessarily mean the game sucks. Certain company, we talked about this last week, didn't we? - I don't know, yes. There are certain companies that always just have release date. - Like Activision is almost always a release embargo. I think the embargo for New Vegas was 9 p.m. Pacific time on Monday night, which was midnight the day of release. Flat out, one of the reasons that you may have seen some sites put up their reviews late is because there were difficulties with shipping for review code for Fallout. I don't think that it's a big deal. - No, I mean, I just don't think a lot of people got it until they had very little time to play it before it came out. - And they wanted to make sure that they could play enough to accurately appraise it. - That's a big game. - I mean, there's not much else to say about embargoes because embargoes are like Fight Club. You do not talk about embargoes. - Well, part of it is, like if you're a PR person, you look at the release landscape that surrounds your game and you try to hit a point where it's not going to be overshadowed by somebody else. You try to get the reviews for your game out on a time where they are likely to garner the most attention. - Right. - Or you try to run damage control, but it's difficult to tell which is which. I mean-- - Sometimes you just can't, sometimes. I mean, usually it's just like somebody gives you an embargo and you go like, "Yeah, okay, sometimes." - With movies, I mean, they're, studios don't necessarily put out movies without screening into critics because they're afraid of reviews. So much as they just don't think critics are going to get it sometimes. - That happens too. - With "Jackass 3D" being an example. - With "Jackass 3D" being an example. - Sometimes too, it's like sometimes they're working on it right up to when they take the very last day possible to send it off to the factory to get disc printed. - Right. - Sometimes you have a day of patches that like, as soon as the game hits your Xbox as a patch available for it. - We could not play "Starcraft 2" until nine o'clock the day before it came out. - And that was because they didn't give a shit about reviews? - No. (laughs) - I mean, that's, yeah, exactly. That's not because they were afraid of how it was going to review. I'm pretty sure they knew how it was going to review because they knew their game was awesome, but they just didn't care. They took a press out of the equation. - I would say if you're trying to read, if you're not finding a game anywhere and you think it might be embargoed, just find some European sites. They break every single embargo. - Yeah, but you know what? I just flat out, like, I would not trust 90% of European sites, particularly the ones that aren't in English. - Yeah, well that happens too. But I'm just saying that like Europeans break every single embargo. That's like a giant headache for PR and press over here. - Because over in Europe, apparently they get a slap on the wrist and here we would actually get like major things happening. - Right, well that's because like here, everybody abides by embargoes. So if they pull access on you for a particular company or a game because you broke an embargo, that's a big deal. But in Europe, since everybody breaks the embargoes, it's like if you're not breaking the embargo, then you're not competing. Anyway, next letter. - Yeah, sorry, I was trying to find one. - Dude, people send in really fucking weird letters. I got, some of them I don't even read, like one's like enslaved strangeness. In enslaved Odyssey West, Monkey has what looks like a yellow handkerchief in his back pocket. Here's the link to Wikipedia. Okay, maybe trying to allude to the whole yellow. handkerchief is kind of like the down low way of saying you are a man of homosexual preferences. - Huh? - You guys ever heard that? The yellow handkerchief? - No. - Yeah, that's probably what the wiki link is to actually. What does it mean though? - It's like an old way of saying like, hey, I'm gay. - Really? - Yeah, I hadn't heard that before. - That is a thing. - But yeah, since you guys gave me like the login and password to the Rebel FM letters, I was like looking at some of them and I was like, yeah, there are a lot of weird letters in there. - Yeah, that's what I'm saying. - Did you get a letter from the person asking about Dora the Explorer? - To my Gmail and I haven't read it. What did it say? I'll read one for now while you find it. Steven says, hey guys, you asked for more gaming questions. I've been listening for the last few shows and they've been dominated by Civ 5 because I know that you enjoy RTS games. I was wondering why Ruse has never come up in conversation. Civ 5 is an RTS though, it's turn-based. - Yeah, well, we've talked about star cards and stuff too, but honestly, I haven't played Ruse. - No, you never once played Ruse. - Were she supposed to review Ruse for move and dodge that bullet? - Yes, because it was already being reviewed by someone else for every other system, so why was I gonna review it for move separately? Yeah, I don't know. Seemed a lot of the critical reception of that game. It was pretty panned. And the last art strategy game I played for Ubisoft was just okay. - What was it? - There was Endor. - Oh, Endor was not okay, it was not good. - Endor was okay, it was just middle of the road. - Right. - Kind of boring. - Oh, well. - Okay, so I have that letter. This is from Phil. A few weeks back, Tyler mentioned he gets Gads of Dora the Explorer games, magically sent to him and last week you offered to give them away. I'd like to know what kind of flaming hoop I have to jump through to win your hearts over and obtain a copy. Here's the thing, Christmas is two months away and the office I work for just cut salary by 30%. The bright side is they don't lay me off. I start my third regularly scheduled job this weekend to offset the income deficit the best I can. I've got two kids, four and three. They love themselves from games, mostly Lego games and the occasional movie tie-in titles. So with Christmas on the horizon, they'll be expecting some gaming goodness, which I will not be able to supply. If you guys could hook me up, I would be extremely thankful. Phil. - Sure, I think I might have like a DS in a Wii game sitting on my shelf. - So if you want to contact Tyler. - Yeah, I usually just bring him and drop him off at GameStop and be like, "Hook me up." (laughing) And they're like, "This is 25 cents." - So if you actually might have a couple left over. - Yeah, I might. - It's worth looking at you. - I'll look, I'll look. I'll see. - So contact you. - So contact a barber. - I have no idea what this letter is. It's titled Heroin. And I don't get if this he's talking about something in gaming or actual Heroin. How do you feel about L-dosing? When I did it, I actually took my headphones off because it scared the shit out of me that it worked. Like what, is he talking about something doing games? - I have no idea. - Some bullshit, I know what he's talking about. - What's he talking about? - It's bullshit. - It's this new thing that like you download these songs and there's like drugs, it's like audio drugs. It's complete bullshit. It's complete. - That like certain, certain audio tolls are supposed to get your brain to release chemicals and get you high or something like that. - And it's completely bogus. - I'm sure it is. - Tyler has tried and tried and tried. - No. If anything's happening, I'm sure it's a placebo. - Yes. - Yeah. - Every generation has like their like urban mist drug, you know? - Urban mist drug. - Did you get the one from James? - I don't know, not in this. - About hypocrisy and such? - No. - That was two art email addresses. - You should read it. - Anthony Arthur and Tyler. - And Matt. - But I didn't have an email address for him. - It's clear from the letter section that you guys want to be role models and it's clear from your stance in the R word using gay to mean stupid, racism and Resident Evil 5 in the Children's Miracle Network episode that you guys want to use this platform to be good influences. - I don't know about that. - Decent human beings would be a good start. But I tell you that I cringe to hear you guys laughing so hard at the hardcore gamer civilization from the Civ 5 contest because recently you've been exhibiting some behaviors that you condemn in others and I'm sure you don't even notice. - I'm sure that's absolutely true. - First is a minor example of fairness. The group often rightly criticizes commenters on reviews for brainless ad hominem attacks, bashing the reviewer without any content to their criticisms. Well, the extent of Arthur's criticism of Kotaku's Top Gun review was I don't know what they were smoking. And often Kotaku is alluded to as having done something nefarious or unethical but never with details. Either say it explicitly or don't bring it up because in the end it makes you look like hypocrites and it's unfair to in essence spread rumors minding others that lack the substance with which would allow people to decide if they're true or not. Kotaku appropriates content and doesn't source it particularly well. - That's a direct criticism. - That's direct criticism. Their journalistic ethics are non-existent. - When it comes to that. - Their posts are intentional flame bait. They repeat posts, their writing is bad. - I did read this letter. I just wasn't going to read it on here. - I was like, yeah, but see, when you say that, you have to recite examples otherwise it just becomes - Well, I mean, it's just a statement of fact that they don't cite. And their top interview. - The don't cite thing is a statement of fact but the thing where you say that other things are bad, like they have bad writing or whatever. - Well, I mean, that's just an opinion that someone's going to have to come to for themselves. That's why I think that we all concur that Kotaku's writing is generally on the not good end of the spectrum. Certainly not the worst. - What? - This has to do with the five? - We were making fun of the hardcore gamer stereotype. - Making fun? - Anyway. - Oh, yeah, I think so much of like this letter, it's just so much of them just misinterpreting. - I laugh at it because I am a part of that. - Yeah. - And the top of the OCD comment. - The Kotaku Top Gun review, I just don't understand how anyone could think that game was good in any way, shape or form. I just played it again for PC. - Really? - And it was terrible. - You played it again? - Yes, I had to. Secondly, and perhaps more egregious, is the attitude towards women in recent episodes. No game raped you. It demeans you to say that. Rape is serious and horrible and why are you belittling other suffering for laughs? I'm not going to make any arguments about the importance of language because you've already made them in response to the R word and the use of the word gay. - Rape is not-- - To a lesser extent, calling games abortions might also be problematic in this context. - Abortion? - I'm pretty sure-- - Does not mean exclusively the abortion of a fetus. - Right, abortion just means to terminate something that's developing. - Well, I will say I think of a bloody fetus when I say it. (laughing) - I mean, come on guys, let's get real here. I mean, number one, so he's saying like yeah, like we don't want to be saying like use retard a lot. We don't want to use gay a lot. - We don't. - And I understand like using rape's a bad word, but on the other hand, like we are four friends getting together and we want to have like a casual setting of-- - Occasionally we slip and it gets into that locker room quote unquote, type of talk. - We've talked before about how saying rape is dumb and use that exact same argument. - Yeah. - And yeah, occasionally it slips. Occasionally our sensitivity is not where it should be. - Yeah, that's something-- - Sometimes like when you're just hanging around with your friends and you're talking though, you can use a word that you wouldn't use in any other context and the people who are there with you understand that the intent and the meaning behind the word isn't something malicious and that you're using it to be funny. - Of personal immediate friendship that listeners don't have. No offense guys, we love that you listen, but you don't know us well enough in that regard to understand where we're coming from necessarily. That doesn't excuse everything. Like I still think that saying gay to describe dumb and using is awful and saying a retard is undesirable. - Retarded. - It's so ridiculous. - Exactly. (laughing) And then he complains about Scott. Scott Bromley. - That whatever. - Scott Bromley. - It's got some polarizing figure. - It's flat out, Scott plays a character on this generally to get a rise out of certain people. - Exactly. - Scott respects women even though I don't think that he would admit it on a podcast because he wants to be a character that you guys hate. - I say shit to get a rise out of people and Scott takes it like 10 steps farther. - Right, totally. - He says every story is a prop to make him look good. Again, that is certainly the character that he plays. - Yeah. - Knowing him personally, that is not the way that Scott is. Scott is a very down to earth, self deprecating dude. - All true. - Most of the time. - Although, sometimes he plays that character even with his friends. He like, Scott, you've stopped it. - And we laugh at how ridiculous it is generally. I don't think that that laughter is inspired out of a ha-ha disrespecting women kind of perspective. - Yeah, I mean, it's a lot. - Yeah, most of the time. - And I disagree that using the word rape disrespects women. - I think using the word rape is an adjective for anything that happened to you online in a video game is marginalizing of the experience to someone who's been sexually assaulted. - It could be, yes, that's a fair criticism. But saying that it's misogynistic or something is untrue. - I don't think it's misogynistic so much as it's insensitive and it does demean that experience somewhat even if it's unintentional. - That being said, some of the most offensive shit sometimes is really funny. - Yeah, it's a hard thing. - And it has a place. - 'Cause sort of the bush we're beating around here is like, we want to sort of like, you know, carry a flag for some, you know, less childish behavior in our hobby, video games. - But we're four guys and we say dumb shit. - And in the pop culture where like family guy, like look at some of the shit that's on family guy. Like on regulars. - I would never hide behind family guys. Under the guise of what is or isn't appropriate. - No, no, no, I'm not trying to split hers that way. I'm just saying as an example of this is the climate we live in, I'm like, I try and cultivate a personality of mindfulness and what I'm saying and trying to not be offensive and be aware that what I'm saying. - I should write that shit down, that was good. - But I also appreciate things like family guy and the offensive shit in there because I understand it's for jokes. - Yeah, or like, I mean, even South Park, like. - Yeah. - I, you know, like when I watch family guys like clicking the button and modern one for two, I promise I will not be offended by this. (laughing) I'm trying to turn that off sometimes, that was fun. - Exactly. - So I'm not irritated at James for sending that in and he doesn't know. - No, no, not at all. - I understand where he's coming from. I just, I mean, certain things. - And that's true. And that's true, no, no. I think it's good for him because-- - Go fuck yourself your retires. - I was gonna say, go get fucking raped your retires. - But no, it is true though. It's just 'cause we have some whole R word thing. And I have noticed raped has slipped some lips, so. - I mean, there are other things that I want to apologize for like, espousing progressive values on the podcast and castigating hyper-conservative and far-right thinking. I, you know what? Fuck it, I don't care. - Some things, yeah. - Sure. - Good. - If you want to talk about health care. - I'm always the apologize when it comes to these things. I want to believe people can be redeemed. - Like if you want to talk about health care, like I will absolutely boil that down to the most infuriating way possible because that is the way I view that debate, but it doesn't typically come up. But I want to apologize for that kind of stuff. But as far as some of the stuff that James is talking about, I can understand some of his points and I want to do acknowledge them on the podcast. I want us to be accountable for the things that we say. - Oh, see, I don't. - I do. I don't want to be accountable to anybody. - I don't want to be accountable for the things Anthony says, but I'm willing to-- - I don't think the necessary, we need to read every email that comes in like that. - We don't though. - We do, I know, but I'm just saying like, no. - If we can read the dick sucking emails-- - We're not NPR, we're not reporting. - The stern finger wagging. - We're not NPR, we're not reporting the facts. We don't need to be like, last week. We know we offended some of you with this, but you know what, too bad. - I'm not gonna stop calling games abortions though. Like parts of the Caribbean, that parts of Caribbean game is a late-term abortion that's very sad for everyone involved. - I just realized that I can never run for Congress because of the line that I used about 10 minutes ago, or five minutes ago, so. - Man, we have a fucking, there's someone running for Senate that didn't know that the First Amendment prevents the-- - She didn't say go get raped retard. (laughing) - But we didn't have the other end of BC-- - No, she said that she would prevent everyone from having sex if she was elected. That is just as ridiculous. - I don't know. - In any way. - Granted, that's on the other coast, but. - Can I go home and cry into-- - Matt, all you need is $140 million, and you too can not wait for the governorship. - Yeah. - Hore myself out to whoever's-- - Also, if you could run a couple big tech companies into the ground, that'd be-- - This is not talking about politics in general. I've just gotten to this point in my life, we're talking about politics either side, just gets my nerves now. - I think that's the case with most people, because we went through one side and now we're at the other side, and it just sucks. But I do think it's really cool that there is a case coming up to the Supreme Court. I think it's going to be actually on November 2nd is when the opening arguments are gonna be heard, and it's about video games as protected speech. - I'm concerned about that decision. - I don't know-- - The judicial scholars I've read about. - What is it? For people that haven't been following. - So, the-- - It's a California v. ECA or? - Yeah, I think it's California versus the ECA. And so basically, the California legislature in a bill sponsored by state Senator Leland Yee, it was a bill passed, the idea was to restrict violent video game sales to minors, but it went too far. And now the question, now it's, it got, it went through I think the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is like our areas of the country, our area of the country's appeals court, that is, I think, one step below the Supreme Court, and now it's gonna appeal to the Supreme Court. - Schwarzenegger versus the EMA. - Ah, that's what, the entertainment-- - What is the boil down to now? - Well, now it's basically a free speech thing, you know? 'Cause like once a case gets to the Supreme Court, the decisions involved there can kind of morph into other things. - So what we're saying is whether or not it's free speech to sell M-rated games? - Yeah, whether or not video games in general are protected speech the way that other forms of media are. - Right, but I mean-- - Like music and music's right. - Music's protected speech, but we still bar people from buying that. - Right, that's a business decision from the recording industry. It's not mandated by the government. - Oh, but they can still be fined, can't they? - No. - No. - Oh, okay. - No. - I didn't know that. - Right, it was the restrictions on movie viewing, and the restrictions on selling violent material or offensive material in music. - Are entirely voluntary. - Are entirely voluntary. - Oh, but the movie thing I know you can get fined on, who do they get fined by? It's not a government organization. - I don't think so. - Maybe they're self-regulating body, but if I'm correct, this is so the government can find places that sell mature games to young kids. - Exactly, and it's sort of the whole thing. - And at some point, criminal penalties would be involved. So like, let's say a particular game stop store was caught selling violent video games to minors, then there are people that could go to jail for that. If there, I think if there were enough infractions in that kind of thing. - Right. - And so the idea here is that video games are a protected form of speech and the government doesn't have the right to regulate it. But the industry, of course, can still self-regulate in order to not have a bunch of people get all up in arms about it. - Stay tuned for that. - Yeah. - I'm just hearing some pretty pessimistic predictions for the way that's gonna go, by illegal scholars. - I don't know, it's tough to say. - I mean, granted, this is the same Supreme Court that ruled that corporations' campaign spending is protected speech. - Right. (laughing) Who knows, who knows. - Who knows. - So yes, politics are occasionally relevant to the gamer. - You can send us your own letters about politics to letters@eat-sleep-game.com. Letters@eat-sleep-game.com. - Good job. - Letters@eat-sleep-game.com. - Ah, hit me, stuck. - You dumb bastards, I shouldn't have to say it three times. Quit sending me emails. (laughing) - I don't mind if you send me emails. - Yeah, we're on Twitter. I'm @chuffmoney. Tyler's at dirty tea, like the drink. Matt is talking orange. Arthur is at AEG IES. - I'm a U of C. - Sorry. - We're, tell two of your friends about us. - Yeah, tell three of your friends about us. - Preferably not people that know about us. (laughing) - Yeah, yeah, exactly. Don't just talk to your friends, you always talk to about us. - Make new friends. - I love you. - And have a nice life. In case I'm dead, you hear this? (laughing) - Fuck you. ♪ There was never a man ♪ ♪ Like my journey ♪ ♪ Like the one they called ♪ ♪ Johnny Guitar ♪ ♪ Play it again ♪ ♪ Johnny Guitar ♪ ♪ Johnny Guitar ♪ ♪ Johnny Guitar ♪ [MUSIC PLAYING]