Rebel FM
Rebel FM 55 -- 03/17/09
This week the regular crew is joined by Area5.tv's Ryan O. and ex-1up (now 343 industries) David Ellis. Join us as we talk about the games we've been playing (like GoW III, Metro 2033 and more), talk about the current state of DLC, and conclude with some hot and steamy letters. Join us next week in Boston, MA for PAX East. Tyler, Arthur and myself will all be in attendance, and will be having an IGN/GameSpy/Geekbox/RFM meet up at Daisy Buchanan’s at 240A Newbury Street on Saturday from 6-9pm. Also feel free to come watch Ryan Scott and I make asses of ourselves in our Game Scoop! meets GameSpy Debriefings panel in the Naga hall at 2pm on Saturday. Enjoy!
(upbeat music) (upbeat music) ♫ There's nothing good on the radio ♫ Once again I didn't know ♫ There's your hard time too ♫ The rebel of hell ♫ The rebel of hell ♫ The rebel of hell ♫ The rebel of hell - Well, and welcome to Rebel FM episode 55. It took us 15 fucking minutes on the mic to get everyone sound checked. That's because we got a lot of fucking people here. - It's actually seven minutes and 34 seconds. - It's the same number of people we usually have here. - No, shut up. First off, you're not normally here. - That's, I'm just saying, there's four of us here whenever I come. - I'm not always coming. - Shut up. I'm Anthony Gallegos with me as Tyler Barber. Hey, are they everybody's three or four three industries? - That's incorrect. That'll start until next Monday. - Soon to be three, four, three industries. David Ellis and his agent, Ryan Adama. - I know nothing about Microsoft. You're not freelancing, you're shill on the street. - That's right, I take that. That works, part time shill. - Just like Anthony and I are now part of the evil empire officially. - Yeah, we now work for edgy unofficially. ♫ Bum, bum, bum, bum ♫ - Job security. - I used to work there. That's all. I got nothing. - I know people that work there. People still remember you, fondly. - Except he's angry all the time. - Apparently, I'm the guy that everyone remembers was mad all the time. Well, there you go. - Just David. - Just David Clayman. - David Clayman. - You know that Ryan though, if I could be completely honest, just from judging when I would see you on the one up show, you did come off as a more serious guy. - There's a difference between serious and mad. - Okay, but I wouldn't say mad, but I wouldn't say serious. - You came off serious. - You came off serious. - It was not a stretch to imagine people thinking of you as being angry. - Well, he loves dick and fart jokes. - I don't know. - For a second, I thought you were just saying that he loves dick to stop there. - It's cold enough. - That's cool. I mean, I don't know how I come off on the show 'cause I just make the show. - Or that would have been a good spot for a comma. He loves dick and fart jokes. - Fair enough. You are at IGN, the land of unnecessary commas. - Oh, that was nice. - I kid. - I did go on the three red lights podcast today. - I didn't like, I did not like that offering to David just put in. (laughing) So, so let's talk about games. - Check out Regum, folks. - Games that you've been playing. Games you've been playing, playing the games. David, you're gonna go first 'cause it's you. - It's your show. Remember the stage show, but you're the star of the episode. - Games you've been playing, not games you've been whoring. - Yeah. - We don't wanna hear about it. - I was gonna say, I didn't know this arthur was playing Halo 3 all day, and that didn't make me happy. - I wish that I was playing Halo 3. - Well, I said you a message like first thing is where he's like, why are you playing that amazing, fantastic, amazing game? So amazing. - I believe my response is corporate man. (laughing) - Let's see, what have I been playing? I've been playing a ton of just cause too. In that I've been playing a ton of the demo. I probably play it through the demo. - You didn't score a debug build on your way out. - I may or may not have acquired a green disc today. - Should I cut that out of the podcast? - I don't care. I think it's all right if I got a green disc. But I've been playing the demo a ton. I've played through it like seven or eight times and it's 30 minutes a pop. So I've played. - Jesus. - Maybe four hours of the game. - Is the timer on the demo actually half an hour? - It's half an hour, but you can get around it. So give you a pro tip for those of you who didn't have get green disc today. When you're playing the demo, when it's counting down, the last 10 seconds, and this works on PS3 and 360. When it gets to two seconds, hit the guide button on 360, hit the PS button on PS3, and then hit the button to back out of it, and then hit the guide button again and back out of it. - On the timer, I'll stick it two seconds and you can basically play unlimited as much as you want to. - Brilliant. - I like it. - No internet. That's awesome. - Unfortunately, I didn't learn that until my seventh play through on the demo. - That's the second dirtiest thing I've seen someone do to a game this week. Someone showed me the gold glitch in Dragon Age this week too. - There's a gold glitch? - Yeah, if you go to a merchant and you put a, like you put an expensive item in your junk. - He means testicles. - Yeah, I do. I do mean testicles and you go to a merchant. And if you hit the sell and buy back buttons at the same time, it gives you the gold, but gives you the item back. - That's awesome. - So like this person had 1200 gold in Dragon Age, which is a lot of gold. - That's what you need gold for in Dragon Age though. - In Awakening, you use it to buy ruins for rune crafting. - Oh, okay. - Rune crafting. - Yeah, hopefully this is the last mention of rune crafting this episode. - Oh no, there's much more rune crafting to be had. - So just cause two, we're not familiar with the series, just cause one was came out last gen, but they did like a 360 port of it, I think early in this generation. - What do you consider last gen? I mean, it came out in 2006. - Did it? - Yeah, it came out. - It's a 360 only one. - Okay, was it 360 only? - I don't know why I thought it was Xbox and PS2. - Wasn't there? - And then there was a 360 port. - I'm gonna pull up the phone. - It's start, no, it started as an Xbox game. - It doesn't matter. Whatever platform it on, it was a pretty mediocre offering. It wasn't that good. - By all accounts. - What was it? - It was mediocre offering, it wasn't that good. - Oh, not for me. - Don't sugarcoat it, David, tell us how you really feel. - No, no, no. I was just worrying about the offerings though. - We're seeking a one offering for five minute ratio. - All right, you got it, I got it. - So, David, what you're saying? - I was expecting confetti to drop from the sky and I'll have pewees, pewee, pewee, pewee, pewee, pew. - What you're saying is that Microsoft feels that the original Just Cause was a pretty shitty game. - I should preface this, nothing I see in this episode represents Microsoft or all its holdings and subsidiary's LLC, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. - I'm gonna cut the next episode. - I'm representing myself. - I'm gonna cut that part out and know I'm gonna hear it. - That's cool. - It's all good. - Everything David says is representative of Microsoft. (laughing) - But anyway, so I saw It Just Cause 2 first time in last year, they came by and did a preview, like first look of it. And I walked out of that demo pretty much blown away but what I was seeing because it's the open world game. They're kind of a dime a dozen at this point but it's tropical setting, much like the first one. But the game starts and you can pretty much go anywhere in this whole just huge island of ants. If you've played the demo, you only get like a taste of it. But I mean, you can pretty much fly, drive, parasail, run from one end of the island to the other and it probably takes something like 45 minutes real time if you're just kind of driving along, like it's huge area. And it's, I don't know, it's just an excuse to just fuck around and blow shit up, all a red faction or crackdown or any number of those types of games but I like open world games that don't think of themselves seriously, especially the ones that lead to just wanting you to fuck around and explore and just try different stuff out. And that's what this one definitely does. I mean, you can shoot off the top of propane tank, attach yourself with your hook and propane's bank will shoot up in the air like you're riding on a rocket. Then you drop off that right for a blows up and parasail on top of a mountain. Now think about that sentence I just uttered. Every part of that sentence is awesome. - It's true, there's an animated GIF all over the place and the guy shooting the grapple hook to a tank flying in the air and him sailing away with it. - Yeah, and like, if you get a chance, you should check out like YouTube. There's tons of, people are taking videos of them just in the demo, doing crazy stuff. I saw someone recreated the opening of Goldeneye where he had a plane and was riding in a long top of mountain towards the cliff. Jumped out, hops on a motorcycle, starts chasing the plane. The plane goes off the side of the cliff. He chops behind it with a motorcycle, jumps off the motorcycle and then free falls for hordes to plane and then hooks onto it, gets in the plane and flies off and doesn't crash. And he's playing like James Bond music underneath it, so. I mean, don't go into this game expecting something on the level of Uncharted 2 or, you know, good action game kind of fun game stories. - How about red faction gorilla? - I was gonna say how does it compare to red faction or infamous. - Pretty similar to red faction gorilla in that it's like, you're not gonna care about story at all. It's just an excuse to just blow a bunch of stuff up. - I liked being a terrorist, all right. - Well, this game is about. - This one, you're like this CIA guy and there's this third world kind of island country that the previous president was kind of puppet of the US government and he's been knocked off and the guy's taken over. He's not friendly to the US government, so you're going in there to like start shit up and try to overthrow it. - You're gonna rake in that shit? - It's yes, something like that. So hopefully the sound will work. - And you have a chaos. So a lot of the game is all about causing chaos, right? - I mean, it's like you have a chaos meter, so. - Just cause three starring Ollie North. (laughs) - I'd pre-order for an Ollie North skin. That would be hilarious. - They had Obama and Sarah Palin and mercenaries too. Should anything could happen. - That's true. Hopefully they'll have them in the upcoming NBA jam remake. They don't, not buying that shit. - Right. - But yeah, I mean, you have this chaos meter, so you basically just go into each one of these areas and blow a bunch of crap up 'til you, it's 100%. Then your people kind of take over it and they're all friendlies and stuff. And for each, for the amount of chaos you build up, then it opens up new areas with new missions. And yeah, it's just crazy. Like I said, I've played the demo a tons times. And every single time, I've had a completely different experience because I've just approached it different ways. And who knows if it's that fun will stretch over the course of a 10 to 15 hour game. I don't know how long it is, but it definitely, I've put more time in that demo than a lot of actual games that I've been playing. And I think that's pretty great. - Do you feel like you have any bone or left for the actual game that's come, I mean, they come out, I mean, you have the green disc. Do you have, how much enthusiasm do you have left for that game? - I mean, you only get like a small piece of the island and a small piece of the stuff that you can unlock. So, eventually you don't like this whole black market in the game. And once you unlock all these upgrades and stuff, you basically drop a grenade down, a helicopter comes in and drops whatever you bought. So you can just have like motorcycles, other helicopters, all kinds of crazy weapons. - It really seems like mercenary. - I was gonna say, I think it's like mercenaries, what mercenaries two should have been. - Exactly, exactly. I think it's gonna be mercenaries two done right. - Or it's like someone took mercenaries two and broke it in half and one half became red faction gorilla and the other half became this. - Well, the cool thing is you have kind of a grappling hook mechanic, Allah by on a commando, which is pretty cool. So you can like free jump off anything at any point you can hook onto something else. But also anytime you jump off a mountain, you just instantly free fall, but you can just pull a parachute at any point and kind of parasail. The game takes its physics, it's very unrealistic. But that's kind of what I want out of these games. And you can parasail anywhere. And if you're parasailing around a mountain, you can actually use your hook to prepare yourself forward in hitting these air currents. So you actually gain speed and altitude and you can just basically fly around your parasail everywhere. - That's pretty awesome. - So in the game, I can't stress how good this game looks. And both versions should be virtual identical. PC should look better 'cause it has some new shaders and stuff with it. And especially if you're using an Nvidia card, apparently got some new tech that helps it work better. Sorry if you're on ATI, but it still should work fine. - You can console yourself with DirectX 11. - The basically, exactly, but the basically, the only difference between the PS3 and 360 version is PS3 has the built-in U2 API stuff. So you can actually capture stuff through the game and spit it straight out YouTube. - And that's, I mean, the 360 version doesn't have that because I'm pretty sure Microsoft won't let them include it. - I don't know the details on like the YouTube API and why it's weird. - Don't you? - Stuff's not built into the system. - Don't you? - You're in the movies, had it? - Was it YouTube? - Yeah, it went straight to YouTube. - Yeah, who knows, but either way, like that's the main difference. It's just one of those things where if you notice your friends on or on either system, you're probably just gonna pick up that version anyway 'cause so you can keep in contact with it. - I feel like that's why I pick games though. - That's like a super cool game that no one's talking about. Everyone's like, "Spooner sound, spooner sound, spooner sound, spooner sound." But that game's gonna be so cool. - I think it's gonna be a lot of dark siders, a lot of red faction last year. I think it's gonna be one of the big dark horse releases for the next couple of months. I hope it's as good as I think it is based on the demo. And if it is, there's no reason it shouldn't sell tonicopy. - Is that THQ doing that? - No, it's querying it's pink. - Oh, no, you're at Squeex. - Oh, okay. - But they're doing the PR for it. Sandbox. - Yeah, Sandbox shows. Yeah, that's why I gotta confuse the South beak. - One of squares to PR. - That's still weird though, it's still weird seeing a game like that load up and it says Square Enix before it loads 'cause I'm expecting like tie-dye shirts and bare red midriffs. - Oh, absolutely. Like during that I have expected the Deus Ex trailer to end in J-pop last week. (laughing) - But I don't know, I mean... - Why are you looking at me like that? - 'Cause I was burping actually. - Oh, okay. (laughing) - It was a very concentrated burp. - So I think, I don't know, I think I talked enough about just cause too, but I would say if you're listening and you've been playing the demo and you've found some cool videos, do they have a way to contact you guys? Like put some links out there for a little bit. - That's what letters that eat dashing dash game account. - Or just even in the comments section of the show. - Yeah, like post links 'cause I want people sharing that kind of stuff because I think that's one of the things that's gonna make like a cool community. The only thing that the game's missing that I wish it did have, if I had co-op, it'd be like a done deal, like rock solid, no bones about it, but it's just single player only, but being able to show those videos, you kind of get some of that community kind of getting together on it, so. Available next week for Xbox 360. - Say why? - Nothing. Is it out next week, I think? - No, it's out in the mid-April, I think. - Is it the embargo's next week? - I thought it was. - I think it's March 23rd, it's the embargo. - Yeah. - I think it's like the week after though. - Oh, okay. - I think it comes out either last week or last week of March or first week of April, but whatever. - I give Cesar our green disc and now I'm gonna have to fucking steal it back. - You guys, or just play it all together and just fuck around the other, 'cause that's actually how I started playing the demos. And Andrew Fister was staying with me last weekend. And just messing around and I decided to download it. - That's the controller, back and forth. - I would do it 30 minutes, he'd do it for 30 minutes and we do be doing it. - This is sexy. - It's so hot. - That's hot. - But we would just do things differently and just having fun, just watching. It's one of those games that you can have fun with tons of people watching and play. - Right on. - So I'm so sad that this is the last time you're gonna be able to be on this show, David. - Not necessarily. - Just, well, in the capacity of David Ellis, man, he'll be David. - It was David Ellis Moore. - They're gonna turn me into a unit on my first day. (laughing) - Hey guys, what's up? - My dick off. (laughing) - I'm really glad to be here. - Welcome to the order, David. (laughing) Money will await you, women you will no longer need. (laughing) - Guys, why does David sound like Mickey Mouse all of a sudden? (laughing) What else have you been playing here? - Who are my games? Who are my games? Who are my games? - Hey, what else? - Um, just picked up God of War III. And I know pretty much everyone else has been playing that. - Certainly. I'm about a little bit. - I think Ryan, you're probably further than anyone else in the game. - I am at, I think we decided that it's been a few, it's been a little while since I have been playing it 'cause of GDC and all that. But I think I am at the Chronos battle. - Oh my god, there's so many Chronos in the game and you fight them spoilers. - No, I just, I mean, I just have people to know where, oh, I guess it's not out yet. - Right. - It's not out yet. - No, this game, no, it's not out yet. - What are you talking about? - I went botting with my own bodies. I don't know, but I meant like out enough, well, I guess if you're rushing through it, I guess what I meant is it wasn't out like a week ago and so there aren't many people who have beat the game or any of it. - It had been my intention to play through a lot of it yesterday, but I felt a little distracted. - Yeah, I don't understand it. What's the big deal like it? - It's no big deal. - I just got it 'cause it's got to work. - I was making a storyline to me. - I was making your comment on just spoilers in general. I happen to mention that you fight Poseidon towards being in the game and someone on my podcast last week was like spoilers. I just kind of lost my shit for like a half a second 'cause it was like really? There's only like five gods left in the God of War II. You're pretty goddamn sure you're going to fight every single one of them. I guess what? They're going to die. - I don't know. - I can't end any other way except for him killing all the gods. - I, who can say? - I'm saying right now. - What? Anyway, like if you've seen anything on this game, you've probably seen the opening like 40 minutes 'cause that's what they've been mostly showing. - And I think it's badass. - I would imagine, I would urge you not to look at it if you haven't yet. - Yeah, it's not actually it. - I mean, it's a successfully avoided. - Yeah, I stopped. As soon as I heard End Guy and Hip Hop gamer talk about how it was a-- - Wait, wait, wait, wait. Let's break this in and sound a little bit. - All right. - Why were you-- - Hip Hop gamer? - It was a video. They went around on Twitter like, you know, whatever. - Awesome. - You've used the video? - No, End Guy was hanging out with me. - Okay, quick question. Did you know Hip Hop gamer wasn't it before you clicked on it? - Yeah, I mean, yeah, it said End Guy and Hip Hop gamer see God of War III and say something, you know, say that it breaks, you know, whatever. It's better than uncharted and all this stuff. And I was like, I gotta click on that. - It's like watching a train wreck. - No, well, they just made some very like, you know, crazy statements about the game saying it was like a PlayStation 4 game. All this crap, you know, it was all crap. But like, I was like, all right, well, at this point, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna wait and not look at any more media that comes out from the game. I had played the E3 demo and at that point, that was like all I needed to see. - And a few, if you got game informer and looked at their coverage of God of War, like not speaking at all about the writing, but it looked like shit in the most recent game informer. So don't let that, yeah, the paper just makes it awful. - That game does not love that shit. - That opening 45 minutes to an hour, one of the most, especially if you have a big, nice TV, even if you have a reasonable size, decent TV, like myself, that game looks fucking awesome. - I honestly don't think the TV size matters. - They're literally doing-- - What it does when Kratos is like half a micron and if you got an 80 inch TV. - But that's what's so amazing about it is, they do, the camera basically doesn't stop moving, and there's a point where there's a couple cuts at the beginning of the, where they actually like, cut the camera, and then after that, it's solid for like 40 minutes straight where the camera never cuts and you do and see amazing, amazing, amazing things. - And it's all in game. It's all real, like it's not the best gameplay in God of War, like the combat is not the best, but in terms of a presentation in the camera moves, it is incredible for like 40 minutes. - The most aggressively visually designed game I think I've ever seen. - I think it was a really good interpretation of what they're doing. - Everything that they did, everything in that shot, like everything you see, it was like okay, this is what the engine is gonna do, this is how the game is gonna play, this is how you're going through, every part of this is designed specifically to frame it in a certain way that it will look badass. - When they immediately, like from the outset, break one of the cardinal rules of God of War games, and that Kratos' entire body is always supposed to be on screen at all times in every God of War game, and they decided to go away from that to kind of add these kind of cinematic angles where they show him from like, you know, the mid rift up from the back over the shoulder shot of a huge, you know, tight and low outside of Mount Olympus. - Like while you're playing? - Oh, it's incredibly, it's really aggressive with the camera. - God of War II, I mean, you, anyway-- - Of course, seeing the first trailer-- - I would say it's not a spoiler to say because this is how God of War III started. - This is the premise. - Yeah, it is, yeah. - At the end of God of War II, I was like, holy crap, they're gonna have a bunch of titans climbing up Mount Olympus. - Right, I've seen that. - Like, how are they gonna do that? And God of War III delivers on that. It does exactly, like, it starts with the largest stone breasts ever created. - Well, it really, yeah, yeah, I'm not gonna get it. But it's just like, they pulled it off and that was completely surprising. - Was it though? Is that really surprising to you? - It was. - When they've presented, like, things like the, like, two had that moment with those, like, giant horse chariots that, like, yanked part of the island forward and stuff, like, all those things used to blow me the fuck away back. - Just wait, man, it's like, it's, it's, it's, we've never seen anything like this in a game before and not even they can keep up that momentum because that is the other thing that no one's really talking about in the game is that once you pass this opening sequence, all of a sudden the camera stops moving the way that it did in that opening scene. - So it's like, they were really ambushes and they're like, man, that was a lot of fun? - No, no, no, no, no. - What you see is them having different portions of the team working on different portions of the game and as they went chronologically, they got more and more aggressive once they got the tech down. So they took more risks in being able to kind of do things like that. - I think the God of War games made a point of starting with a bang and, like, every single one of them taking away all your powers. - Well, yeah, but, I mean, I would say the difference, the difference is that in God of War II, which I would argue is the best one, I haven't finished three, I'm only halfway through, but so far, anyway, there's only three games, including the PSP one, but God of War II is pretty incredible all the way through and maintains a sort of narrative and visual and puzzle driven, it's the moment of its solid all the way through and it's constantly blowing away. Whereas in God of War III, from what I've played so far, it starts with the biggest bang you could possibly imagine and then after that, you're like, okay, this has just got a born HD, but that beginning part of the game is like-- - Is the best God we're offering it? - It's the most technically impressive that God of War. It's the most technically, one of the most technically impressive video games that we have seen yet. - And it's not necessarily like the raw power of the PS3, it really is the strength of the fucking team. - Preach it. - We'll learn about those SPUs. - I don't think it is. - The system just is good, right? If you break it up, if you break up the game in spots, like if you look at like this part or this part, the textures are blurry. Like there are things where you're like, okay, if you're doing that-- - Okay, if you're doing that and pointing that out, you are playing games wrong. That's what I've said to, like-- - Yeah, but I'm also the guy that-- - People like point out details in college duty four and college duty like modern warfare two, like, ah, textures are blurry. I'm like, well, guess what? That game's always moving six frames a second. You should always be running. If you're stopping and staring at a wall, you are doing fucking wrong. - But I see that and appreciate what they're doing. - Okay, fair enough. - Like they-- - You're celebrating its media protection work. - Exactly. Well, Killzone 2 did the same thing. Killzone 2 with a lot of really crappy textures. - I've seen it. So just for someone that I've seen, I've seen a lot of screen shots of God of War, but when I actually saw Arthur like playing it today and fighting miniatures and stuff, man, just the movements of things in that game are going to blow me. But like, yeah, I guess just like I'm like, man, it's like the most real human movement I've seen in a long time. - They gave some great stuff with the combat and it gets really, at some point, pretty early on early in the '80s, you get the sort of grapple move, which is basically, I think, I wish Fresh was here 'cause it's his line, so I'm gonna steal it right here. But he said that when he was-- - Dante's Inferno is really a good game, you should-- - No, no, no, I don't like Dante. I played about quarter of the way through Dante's-- - Of course, to say that contractual. - Yeah, no, he's not. I think he's allowed to say that he doesn't like Dante's Inferno and I think, I mean, whatever. - I'm sorry, sorry to be real. But basically, in the Wolverine game, which is a God of War style rip off game, they have this really great sort of lunge move that looks cool where you kind of jump between enemies to the other enemy and stab him. - It closes the gap. - Exactly, but you can't combo it into many different combo moves, whereas this can be used, this grapple move does the same thing and can be used at any time in the air, on the ground. You can go in and out of combos with it, so it's very versatile and it's just, it makes moving around, it would make going back to the other God of Wars. Moving around the battlefield feel really slow. - So if you talk to the guys that are still on the combat team there, they say that consistently, the game they've always tried to aim for in combat was Devil May Cry. That's because it's not too hardcore, but it's still more than a hack and slash and God of War has been somewhat of a hack and slash over the course of the series, and I don't say that to insult it in any way, shape or form, but they like it. - Also, this time they finally make the other weapons. Really cool to use, like for me personally, I pretty much always use the base weapons and not really much anything else. - Me too, until the PSP version of the game which had great weapons. - But the effect of the tie, the special abilities to the weapons now encourages you to want to switch weapons on the fly, and the fact that you have kind of a quick, you eventually get the ability to hit L1 and X in the middle of a combo and you can change weapons and keep comboing and then switch back to another weapon, and just kind of rotate your ram limitation probably. - So the weapons and abilities are tied in the sense that it's like, I can only use this ability with this weapon. - It's more like, certain combos are unable as well. - All right, it depends on which weapons you're powering up. - But like the special ability is tied to the weapon. - But the way it works like that, I was talking about the, whatever, the grapple move. That's a blades move, but then when you switch to the second weapon you get, you do the same maneuver and it does something that looks similar, but it actually does a different thing. So there's a, a lot of it makes sense. Like you switching between the weapons and you can basically do the same style combat, but it'll just play slightly different. - I do want to get back to kind of the pace of the game because it does, I agree with you, it does hit kind of a little lull, just because not that it, what's there is bad. It's just kind of more the same, and especially compared to what comes before it. It's noticeable. - Exactly. - But then once you hit the portion of the game where you go into where the E3 demo was kind of built out of, I feel like that's when it really starts to take off again because you finally with these big scales, and there's a section where you're kind of platforming where like Kratos is tiny and this world is huge and you're still moving around and can fight enemies. And then there's like a really action-packed chase scene, which is really cool, which does a lot of cool scripted events within it. - Yeah, I mean the scale is the thing they know. The combat is really good. I don't know if I'd say it's better than the other God of Wars yet, it definitely has some merit that's like really good. They're good things that they do. And I finally, I would say that I wasn't, maybe it was because I already played the E3 demo, but I didn't feel that way until I got a little bit further. The battle I'm in now is the first time that I'm really feeling that scale again. But still, I have to say, maybe it's just the dumb filmmaker in me, but the camera movement and stuff from that opening section, they don't really do anything like that for the rest of the game. - No, and in point of fact, the camera can kind of fuck you at times because I haven't really as bad as it used to. - I don't recall falling into pits as often because of weird perspective issues. - You had some issue with the double jump, bud. - I was gonna say, platforming in God of Wars has always been bad. And it is worse than this than it has ever been. - You have to press the double jump at a particular sort of rhythm. And the entire time, and Fresh, Matt and I, we're all playing this at the same time. And all of a sudden, I wonder if you were falling down. - No, well, we passed the game up. But we were thinking, why can't, why doesn't double jumping in this game work like it does in every other game? I don't know what else to say other than that, but didn't they play it and fall in a bunch of pits all the time too? Didn't they test it and that's what happened? - Yeah. - I don't know. - Who knows, but Arthur, you said something on Twitter I think yesterday about Kratos being like a son of a bitch. - The dick, he's not even a likable. - I agree. - He is not likable in the least. - I agree. - I feel like in the first two games, you didn't necessarily think, oh man, that Kratos, he's misunderstood. You're like, Kratos is an asshole, but there's something-- - He's a lot more asshole. - There's a motivation behind him, behind the way he behaves, like you understand him. Like in this, it's just like Kratos is just a fucking jerk. - At least at this point, it's not, well there's no accident, it's not an accident, like everything he does in this game is awful. Just downright awful. - I was like, I'm not killing people, I am murdering people. - Oh yeah. - And I felt that way about God of War before. - You can just kill the people. - No, I'm talking like, whatever he attacks, like the fight against the first boss, like once you have him in human form or whatever, like what you do to him is not just, oh, I beat the boss. - He gets worse. - It's, I brutalize, it's like the curb stop moment in American History X, like it is-- - Not only that, but then what there are consequences for everything that he does in the game, and the way that it affects the world around him is completely, I mean, he is, wow, I don't want to score anything. - He's killing tens of thousands of people. - Over and over and over again. - But you see, Ryan, you're a little further along than me. It seems like where I'm at, they're getting ready to introduce this new character, which I feel is going to be kind of a narrative crutch to allow him to kind of redeem himself a little bit. There's a character you encounter-- - You're talking about the child? - It initially looks like Cortana and you're talking. - I feel like there's no redeeming his character. - No, no, he's done like, yeah, no, I mean-- - No, it's not even a character. - It doesn't matter. That's the other thing is that, man, the graphics at the beginning, I mean, we said enough, that the beginning of this game, incredible, and then there are parts where other main characters are talking as you go later in the game, and the writing just doesn't seem good, some things laughable. - Can I just say that Guy looks like Aunt Jemima made out of rock. - Whatever it takes you to get there. - They didn't do a good job of saving some of the best. - I do have a thing for syrup. - The best characters from Greek mythology, you know, to put in to this game. Like, you're like, oh, that's why they weren't in God of War one and two, like God of War two, they clearly had an idea of how they wanted it to end, obviously, and so they didn't shoot their load too early, I guess. - I've always been curious though, 'cause I mean, Jaffe always said it was supposed to be a trilogy, but I think he's also said that the trilogy that they're making is not trilogy. - Didn't go the direction he expected it to. - Right, I would love to get him talk to him sometime and figure out just for curiosity's sake, what his vision was. - I'd be curious what fucking Corey Barlow's like planned, Corey Barlow, I'm sorry, what his direction was for it, because I wonder like how that affects the team that they've had three different producers. - I'm pretty sure two and three were sketched out at the same time. - I would agree that that would probably be the case. - Yeah. - Well, at least the intro, I mean, anyway, I don't know. - I would get, they seem really connected. - If you have a PS3. - There's no reason for you not to buy this game. - Exactly, I mean, here's the important question. Right now, my bag is sitting on the floor. There's a sealed copy of God of War three. I'm about to pop it in. - Should I got a work collection and play that first? - First, this is my first God of War. - I would do it first. - Oh man, that's an awful lot of time spent waiting. Like, that's a lot of frustration. - I was glad I picked up God of War collection 'cause I want them to sell as many copies as possible 'cause I want more of those types of-- - Just, here's my piece of advice. - I want my piece of advice for you. - Yeah, right. - Here's my little piece of advice, Tyler, don't play on hard. - Oh no, no, no, I don't want that, I don't know. - Like the first half of God of War two on hard, I was having fun, I was challenged the second half, I was just like, I fucking hate everyone that had anything to do with this game. - Yeah, no, I never play games on hard. - Yeah, I don't know, I mean, I feel like God of War one and two are really great games even now. I haven't even played the collection, but-- - Looks amazing. - I believe it, they're visually just stunning games and they're incredibly fun. - The original God of War holds up shockingly well other than that one section of the end where it's kinda broken. - I would say there are two sections at the end of the broken, but that's just-- - The second is so polished, pretty much from beginning to end. I would actually say it's more polished and I might be crazy here, but I just played 'em so recently. I would actually say it's more polished than God of War two. - I disagree, I think two is-- - From a story standpoint maybe, but from a game playing - No, I'm saying game playing standpoint. - No, not me, I think the game-- - 'Cause there are some roles in God of War two and some backtracking stuff that's just kind of-- - Yeah, I disagree. - Going back to what I said earlier, I'm not saying that there are issues here and there with like, or like it's got a blurry texture here and there. That's not to insult the game. Every game is a sort of a result of compromise. - Exactly. - Like people figuring out, well this is what we can do. Like what can we do with that to make this amazing thing and every God of War has been really effective at taking the limitations of its hardware or the possibilities of their hardware and really directing it really aggressively to create this arena, like the series of spectacles and so for God of War three, it's the same thing. And I mean, like I said, Killzone two is another example of a game that like was very aggressively designed. - Totally agree. - Yeah, I mean, my-- - But it sucks because it's on PS3, obviously. - Yeah, it's not a Microsoft game. - You haven't even worked for Team Xbox anymore. - No, but I'm-- - It came a lot of other things. - Once in Xbox, always in Xbox. - Oh, geez. Next. - What other glorious offerings have you paid? - Everything else I've been playing has been XBLA games and I'm not gonna talk about those. - Toy soldiers. - Played it, it's cool. It's a little disturbing. Fucked up. - Gassing toys. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. And making that your avatar thing is the gas mask. It's kind of weird. - I actually know something. - It's got a cool vibe. I think it's an interesting game and I've had fun with it. I did not pay money for it though. - It's an interesting combination of tower defense and action. - Yeah, it's cool being able to actually take control of individual characters and play third person. - I think we just perked Tyler's ears up. - I know, right. Yeah, I've had a few people actually email me and say like this game is built for me. That's why I asked you guys about it when we were in the grocery store. - It's definitely what's checking out. - Yeah, like download the download and try it. - Oh yeah, I want to. - And it's got multiplayer. - I played an awesome game today. - What'd you play? - I played the first two hours of Dead to Rights Retribution. - Oh, you can talk about that today. I'm sorry. - Dead to Rights, that's the one that you have a dog? - The dog game. - Yeah, that's the dog game. - But this dog do you not do double G? - This is dog do double G. - I don't know. - No, we're still waiting for that game. - You play as Jack Slate and your dog Shadow. - You did not just make that up. - I did not. - Jack Slate's his real name? - Yeah. - Wait, is this the game that they had like strippers during GDC for a while? - No, no, that was true crime. - Oh, they're completely different experiences. I forgot. - Yeah, I'm sure they're completely different experiences. - One is an Xbox game and the other is. - Which one's an Echo? Is that Dead to Rights? - Yeah. - One is an open world game and the other one is not. - So Dead to Rights is a very linear game and it's like the character moves a lot like the character from the first GTA 3 moved. You know, like how he ran, like he just had like these giant blocky legs. Like this dude's kind of the same way and the game has improved visually a lot from where it was like six months a year ago. But man, it is still not very good at this point. Like, I'll have to say it's not very good. It's coming out in a month. - Did you have fun playing it at all? - There were times that it was like, it was interesting, it was a little fun. Like if the game was just Koojo, the game and you played as the dog the whole time, it would actually be more interesting. - Did you find fun or gratification? - No, 'cause it's actually the dog killing things are actually two gratuitous for me at times. Like they really draw out the pulling off of people's throats and stuff. - Can you pee on them when you're done? - No, but there is. - Why take it too far? - There is an achievement for killing someone by ripping their scrotum first. - Classic. - So. - Nice. - Yeah. - What is it called? - Scrotum is somehow integrated into achievement under what it's called. - Of course. - So. - Scrotum ripping in three, four years today. - And it's funny because he called it hate you very much. - It should be, but that it wasn't. It's funny though, 'cause it's like, there's like this whole dialogue between like your dad's voice is done by the guy that played the general in all the Metal Gear games. I can't think of that dude's name. - I know the character's more Campbell, but I don't know. - He's vision-made. - You know, is that better? - I don't know. - So it's that guy and he's your dad and he's telling you like, there's still some good people in the city and he's like, gets in this one other cop's face 'cause he just shoots these two guys. He's like, we don't just shoot people. We arrest them. That's how we do things. And then he's like, and then like 20 minutes before that, he was like, well, we don't have the key to get to this door. Shadow, go get the key. And so then you play a shadow and you just violently murder like 17 people just for this key. You know, it's like, there's no reading rights right there. - Did you, did you as the dog shoot them? - Huh? - Did you shoot the people? - No. - That's it. He just doesn't like gun violence. - Yeah, we just worked out there. - But so the dog part's cool, right? You do like stealth things 'cause you can't be seen. And so when you go into like stealth with the dog, it does almost like a detective vision where you can see people's heartbeats 'cause the dog's like super sensitive to sound. - It's like Daredevil. - Is it in black and white? - No, it's like blue with like, you can see their nervous system. - No, everyone speak gibberish when you're the dog. Like that sounds like episode. - No, exactly. - Well, that's what I'm saying. Like when you're not using X-Ray mode is everything in black and white. - No, it's in color. - Fuck, shit. - But yeah, and then, you know, it's just the thing about Dead Rights, it makes it such a weird game is that they try and combine like third person shooting with brawling, like you get up close and so-- - Like every, I mean, that's Dead Rights thing. Like that's what I'm trying to do. - And so like if there will just be guys that even though you have a pistol in your hand, they're like, yeah, I'm gonna run straight at you 'cause let's do this. And that's when you're supposed to like pull out your hardcore wrestling moves on them. - I think they're taking cues from Roadhouse here. - Like Swayze, maybe-- - Dude, don't you talk shit about Roadhouse? - I'm not, Swayze, maybe I've been packing heat, but he was breaking out his roundhouse cake. Gotta save those bullets. - But-- - Can you tear out someone's throat with your hand? - Uh, no, I'm not saying. - Apparently you can rip someone's scrotum out with your teeth out of the game. - That's what the dog does. - And that, the game does have like-- - If this were Patrick Swayze, you could rip someone's scrotum off with your hand. - In general though, the thing that worries me the most about that game decides the fact that overall it's so far out of time, that the president is just like, it's like a month out and it lacks some pretty bad polish like all over the place. Like, I mean, ever since I first saw that game, I remember the first words that came out of people's mouth was, "Man, that kind of looks like a PSP game. What a fun TV." - There is a PSP version. - And so it's just, I don't know, man. That is not a game that I think anyone's gonna be super impressed by. - What is it, it's coming out next month? - Yeah, it comes out next month. Yeah, just, it's just, I don't know. If you, if it was cheap, that might be one thing. - Is it a whole price? - I don't know. Maybe they're just like looking for like the only empty release area. So like, like, if you're trying to bring a satellite down in an unpopulated area, so it doesn't hurt, it hurts as few people as possible. - This might so come out around the same point. - April 13th. - Yeah, not to mention just cause, but I just caused before you buy something like that, but another game, I played the you guys should, maybe consider buying if you were looking for a game to play right now as Metro 2033. And even though in the end, that game did not end up living up to everything I wanted it to be. - Your tweets killed it, man, sorry. - I still think, I still think that it's worth buying. - What do I think the first hour? - You said like-- - Tichon? - Yes, the one Tichon. - Oh, cause I said that he was like, man, first 15 minutes, this game's oppressive. - And then you said, that's what I thought too, but the rest of the game, not so much. And I was like, oh, the Anthony doesn't-- - That's the thing. - You're starting to go down the way. - You had a straight subway chase? - Yeah. - As I played through the subway chase, you're like, oh, this game has a lot of personality. - Yeah, that's where I stopped playing it. It was right behind that. - You should keep playing. - No, you should. I still think it's a game that's totally worth playing. - I heard it looks awesome on PC. - It does, it's just that, it's just that like all that stuff they do to introduce you to the world and all that. - They don't take advantage of it. - They pretty much never get into that again, cause the next time you go to a town, you're like rushed through and then you'll go to another town and again, you're rushed through. - It's like they were afraid to have it not just be all action. - Anthony actually was saying that he thinks that they were forced to follow the book. - It seems like yeah, because it's based off that book. - Right. - And they were so religiously following that book that I think people that played the book are gonna be like, well yeah, you rushed to the town because that's what happened. He didn't have any time there. - They might be disappointed when they read the game. - But for us, yeah, it's like, you know, and like there are parts towards the end where there's like a very clear guy that is like, follow me and at one point he's like, oh God, we have to get to that tower. So I sprinted and ran ahead of him, but if you ever run ahead of him, a monster just appears and auto kills you. It's like the game is like, no, we have a story to tell and this is how it happened and you're gonna fucking follow it. - Well, the game told you to follow him, I don't know. - Why he also said, he also said, run for it. So I was like, I'm fucking running. I can script faster than you. But another thing that really bothered me in some ways, I feel like they didn't strike a very good balance between like giving you a lot of ammo and giving you no ammo. Like the early builds they had, when the team was really committed to it, like early on they had like no ammo. Like ammo was super, super precious because I think in the book that's how it was too. Like that's why-- - It was the monetary system. - Right, that's why it was like you had bullets that you shot and then you had bullets you used to trade for stuff. And if you ever had to use those bullets to shoot, it was like dire times. - 'Cause those are the crappy bullets. Ones that are like hand packed. - Right, yeah. - And so I've been in this one. Like when I played through, I never once shot my money bullets, never once. I never even came up where I was like, man, I need to. I was like, no, I just have a million bullets for this other game. - I need to make a sound board of you saying, I never once shot my money bullets. - So, right, or the next metro game needs more money. - And they do cool things with like shots. - The gas mask and stuff like that. But again, you find filters so often and you always have money to buy filters. - But if you did have to constantly search you, I think would that make the game more enjoyable? Or would you just not-- - I just feel like there wasn't a balance at all. - Well, I'd include it if you're not gonna use it at all. - Is it just like there's less tension? - Like it should have just been that you go outside, you have to put on a gas mask and it makes a smaller view. There should never have been having to worry about any filter management at all. - It was weird watching Anthony's sort of emotional rollercoaster going through this game. - I wanted to go back to him so bad because they showed me the first 15 minutes and I was like, that is fucking cool. - Yeah. - And then just like other things, right? Like the flashlight, you used to have to charge it up all the time. Now it's like even when it goes completely uncharged, you can still use it just fine. It's like there's never any need to basically really ever really charge it. - It's like one of those like shake your flashlight things from TVH and things out. - Exactly. - And you know, just, I don't know, I just feel like a lot of the things that they had introduced that made it seem like it could be really cool and unique didn't end up working out as quite as well. - How far do they go with presenting everything, all the information of the game through the game? Like on your clipboard, I hear it does stuff like that. Like you look at your watch. - Right, you look at your watch, that's how you check to see how one of your filters doing and then you use your clipboard anytime you're lost because your clipboard has like a magical arrow that'll point you in the right direction all the time. - It's a mental arrow. - Except it, it points you in the right direction but it doesn't always tell you if you're like in the second story of a four story building that the spot you need to be on is in the fourth story. - Right. - So you're like running to that spot in the second story and you're like, "Oh wait, I need to get up to the fourth floor." - That sucks. That's a problem we've solved as game, well I'm not a game designer. - Right, I just feel like it's like a good example of a company that made like a really cool engine and they had this really cool idea. And then it was like maybe a combination of not having millions and millions of dollars along with the fact that they were so beholden to this book that people in Russia were like so in love with. But it was like, we gotta do it right. - Is there two different versions of the game? Like a Russian version where you have no bullets and you have charge of flash. - I would not be surprised if the European PC version was hard or hardcore, like the real version or something like that. - Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I wanna read the book and see if that ever comes out here in America and see. - I think it should be coming out in April. - It was supposed to come out and then it got the publishing deal. - Well see, that's the crazy thing. It's like the book wasn't even really translated while they were making the game. - Right. - So how do we feel that it really does follow the book. - They're strange. - Maybe there's some fucked up levelization. - They just made me cheap stories told me that. - But I still think it's worth playing. Like if I had given it a review score, I would have given it like a seven or something, right? - You were supposed to give it a review score. - Like seven out of 10 on one up scale. - Okay, I was gonna say that seven was average or seven. - If I was gonna give it like a game spy score, it would have been like a three out of five. Like it just, it had a lot of cool ideas, but man, by the end it was just, eh. - That's fun. - Yeah. - That's another one of the things. And I would have trouble spending 60 bucks for something. - Right now? - Like for 40 bucks, sure. - Right now, when there's like so many cool games coming in the next couple of months, like yeah, the idea of like spending $60 on a game that's like, eh. - Yeah, and I hear like one of the ultimate things is that like it's a shooter, but it doesn't do the shooting all that well. - Yeah, it's what I've heard on the monsters. You know, it's like their AI basically boils down to run at you, right? - How many games do monster AI's? - Right, right, but then the human AI is like, they'll either just run between like two covers or sometimes they'll run straight after you two and then like have that oh shit moment where they see you and then just turn around and run the other way, but then they'll repeat that. - Like they forgot their short term memory loss. - Yeah, I don't know. - Memory limitation. - Everyone was like memento. - On the opposite of that, in a THQ game that I thought was really excellent that I played that's worth the price of it is the Donna War expansion, which, you know, it's like it's an expansion, but it's also like an 11 hour game, and you know, which is short for Donna War, but that's like, it's really cool. I mean, you know, it's totally for the single player, right? You're gonna play that to import your characters from the first Donna War playthrough 'cause you can do that 'cause now the level cap's been raised from 20 to 30 and, you know, you still have all the crazy RPG stuff of gear and talent trees and all that. And they're, one thing, like that was actually the last review I ever wrote for games by was, you know, I said that one thing I love is that they're totally, those guys are totally in love with the 40K universe and it shows, like, they make really great RTS games relic, but they also, like, know their shit about it. - Used to paint 40K figurines, right? - No, I didn't. - That's not true. - I've actually-- - That's not true. - I had a fantasy war hammer. - Oh, okay. - But I still, I have read 40K books. - So you say you are the target audience? - I am the target audience for them. Like, yeah, the multiplayer is like, okay, but the single player, like all that nerding out about them, you know, adding like the way they always, they talk about everything in the stupidest ways, like a library, you can never be a library, it's a librarian, you know, and it's like, you know, just-- - It's a subscription barrier, right, this? - I don't know. - I mean, where is I? I'm not super annoying or 40K, but I really love Dawn of War II. I'm just waiting for a chance to play this. - Right, 'cause in general, the strategy combat's great and the loot and everything really keeps it going. - And the story is good and the voice acting is, for an RTS, especially good. And man, the loot, the loot is so good. - Yeah, if you're a loot person, like, you know, where Borderlands or Diablo, that sort of stuff gets to you. It's like every time when you're done with the mission, you see shiny things and you-- - It does loot, but it has borderlands. - You're like, fuck yeah, shiny things, you know. - When you flat out, Dawn of War does loot so much better than borderlands stood loot. - I don't understand that you can say that. They're like two really different systems, really. - Because-- - Borderlands, you're constantly getting it. - Borderlands, you're constantly getting loot that you don't care about. - Yeah. - Whereas Dawn of War, like everything-- - Like, you can't like-- - You don't even have to weigh the balance of one of the-- - Sometimes there are plenty of other than Dawn of War, though, that's just the garbage that you immediately throw away as well. - But you get experience for it. - Right. But you get money for it in borderlands that you use for stuff. But yeah, I don't know. At Dawn of War, expansion, excellent. - I wish I had something to offer to this conversation, but I'm just not an RTS guy. - Yeah. - If you're not an RTS guy, Dawn of War II is actually a good game to play. - I mean, there's no base building for anything, right? - I couldn't even get through the first level in Halo Wars. - No, no, it's-- - 'Cause I kept dying. - And it's like Diablo II, it's like Diablo II with squads. - Yeah, really, it's more like you're just controlling like a few characters, it's just that they're represented by multiple little dudes. Like, but they're still just one guy. - Like emphasis on tactics and strategies that pose to-- - Like there's no individual health bars on guys, it's a unit health bar, you know? And as long as you can think like, oh, I put these guys over here, and that means that they're behind cover. Like, that's the most impressive thing to me about all those relic games is like-- - Covers for some time. - Yeah, like you're fighting a tank and your Marines take out a tank-- - Right. - And that tank suddenly, the game recognizes that that is the equivalent of hard cover. So if you put guys behind it, it's hard cover. It's like, you know, the game dynamically changed that from being a unit. - Is there a movie called hard cover? - Oh, come on. - During Steven Seagal. - How could there not be a Steven Seagal hard cover? - I'm sure you could secure funding for it if it doesn't exist. - Speaking of guys who run funny, Steven Seagal, Steven Seagal runs funny. - I still don't watch the A&E show where he's a deputy sheriff in New Orleans. - Oh, yeah. - Still can't believe that's real. - That is a real thing. - Holy shit. - Yeah. - I understand he's quite the marksman. - The last preview I ever wrote for GameSpy also was about the old Republic, which I also played. - Oh, you played it? - Yeah, you were into trooper class stuff, right? - Yeah. And I'm still not convinced that game. - I'm not either. It just feels like a vanilla MMO. - It's like, yeah, to me, it's like, why is it even online at this point? It feels like it might as well just be co-tour. Like, just really send another co-tour because so far they've never let us play online with other people. They've always had us by ourselves. They always give us like 10 minutes to play, which I think is part of the reason that I'm not coming with the best impression. They rush us out of there every time. But also it's just like the quests and everything. It's like, okay, you get these really cool dialectries and stuff you expect from a buyer. And then the combat is just mash one or three to win. It's like, I remember when I did this in every quest, you know, I'm kind of over that. - I had to say like, Ryan Cucente, I had a really good write up on Kotaku about it. And like, he doesn't come out at it from like an MMO perspective, which is did target audience are going at for this game. And he's like, so I start fighting this group of guys. And there's like a bunch of other enemies that are in eyeshot of me, who should come over and start fighting too. But somehow they don't see me until I'm like three feet from them. So he just kept moving from one squad and enemies to the other. And they don't see him until they're like three feet away. And he's like, talk about pulling you out of the experience. And I couldn't agree with him more. I mean, you can, I guess people, I don't know. - That is a typical MMO thing, right? - It is, but like, I'm sorry. - Pulling mobs. - I would even run around them. - I mean, like walk along a wall to a point. - I feel like as a player, like someone, you eventually just have to say, no, this isn't acceptable anymore. Like if you made co-tour, you could do that in co-tour. - Are you doing work that way in Mass Effect? - But it's been years since I've played it. Yeah, Mass Effect, you can't play that. Why is it okay in an MMO? So it's maybe has something to do with the network latency, dealing with servers, and they have to do it that way. I don't know. - I would guess that it's not that, that it's probably-- - Yeah, it's just an MMO thing. - So far, it's like part of it that's also bothering me is like, they wanna make everyone feel like they're here or right off the bat, but I don't know if they've just dumbed down every demo, but so far the game is completely unchallenging. Like I never once-- - Well, then they level up the characters for these demos, pretty beefy. - When I was playing it, I was level three, and the guys that were fighting were level three, supposedly. - Really? - 'Cause the last time we played a shift, they had us playing like level 25 or something. - Well, I wasn't sure, but either way, it was just like, there was never a threat. Like I was like, you know, I just like, eventually I would gather like 15 guys around me at once, and then just fight 'em. Like it's one thing to feel heroic, right? You want everyone to feel like they're a bad ass Star Wars character. - But to feel like as class of preschoolers and nipping at your ankles, and you're just waiting to kill all of them. - Right, like I feel like more of a bad ass. - That's why I do a preschool. - I feel like more of a bad ass when I barely get through it. - Have you ever been to the website, how many five-year-olds could you take? - No. - No. - It's like you ask, answer like a 25 question there, and it tells you how many five-year-olds you could beat up in a fight. - That's-- - I'm like 48, I think. - Nice. - So. - Before they take you down. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Overpower me. - Oh. - Yeah, and the other thing, you know, that when we talked in our interview with the guys that, you know, they basically hinted to me that as far as they're concerned at this point, there's gonna be no space anything really at launch, except like somehow some sort of transportation, like boats, you know, that you take between planets. And to me, like, that just seems like such a big part of the Star Wars experience. - Anytime I think we hear someone say, at launch about an MMO, I think people should fucking rise up with pitchforks. That's just so bullshit. - It's interesting, it seems like it's almost like the polar opposite of Star Trek Online, where the space combat is fucking rad, and that's the best part of that game, and the on-foot stuff is bullshit and pretty terrible. - Right, and it just seems like when the Star Wars, they want it to be like your Star Trek fantasy, that Emmy Star Wars fantasy. That's what they always say, it's your Star Wars fantasy. We want you to feel like, but for me, it's like my Star Wars fantasy is like the shit that I watch in the movies, and when you watch the movies, they spend half the time in fucking spaceships. - It's called Star Wars, not Planet Wars. - Right, I want to fly with my friends. - That's fucking brilliant. - I want to participate, and even if it's like, Instanced, I want instant space battles. - I feel like I've played the space battles in Star Wars, like a fucking million times now, I don't need that. I'm with the Christian day thing sounds interesting, 'cause I'm a type of guy that really co-tour a lot, and so the idea, I mean, what they've been pitching is, it's like co-tour whatever, it's three through 12, all together, except I don't pay-- - I don't think they sound like they're drunkards, right? - Except you won't pay a monthly fee for co-tour. That's why this isn't co-tour, because you will fucking pay. - Yeah, but if it really could be single-player experience, well, I'm only probably gonna pay $50 or whatever, $50 or $60 from the get-code, get it, and then if it really is that much gameplay where I get single-player solo through all those different-- - Stories. - Stories through with all the different character classes, it might be worth it for me, but if the combat's like that, if it's just all stupid mob MMO combat, that's not fun, then I'm not sold anymore. - They're wrong about the space combat thing, though, because it's a shut up, 'cause it's important to me. - I'm just saying, the co-tour didn't have that. - I don't give a shit like that. - No, it had the turret stuff. - You didn't play co-tour? - No. - What? - No, you owned a goddamn Jedi robe. - Of all people, right? - How do you never play co-tour? - You would fucking love that game. - Seriously, I can't fly Z95 at an fucking game. - It was like 2000 years or so. - I've never once thought, like, you know what, man? You were fucking wrong. - I'm gonna straight up wrong. - A goddamn space bar and stop this podcast. So help me, God. - No, no, no, I'm just mostly being a dick. - Oh, okay. - You did play co-tour? - No, he didn't. - You really, really, I'll give you my copy. - No, he's got it. He's got it. - I just downloaded it on Steam last night, as a matter of fact. - Play it. - But when-- - Yeah. - Trying to widescreen heck first. - I think that space travels are a big deal. Like, space is a big enough deal to me, though. - There's not much in co-tour. There's, like, for instance, I never played, well, it doesn't have to in a lot of Star Wars games, right? But if it's an MMO, like that's-- - How is cooler would it be if it did have Rogue Squadron, like, combat? - But that's the whole thing to me, though. - Those games exist. You can go play them right now. - Is that other Star Wars games didn't matter to me, but with this one, an MMO, like, so much of that is I want to be in space with my friends, even when galaxies came out originally. - See, to me, it's the planets, dude. Space is just black in their ships, but the planets are like the alien spaces that are interesting that you can go visit. I don't know, man. - See, lava planet. - How can I explain this to you is that my fantasy is not to be a fucking asshole on a planet. - And this is to be Admiral fucking asshole. - My fantasy is to be an asshole in space. - My fantasy is to be a pirate in space. I wanted, when I heard about Star Wars-- - That's a mutinear. - When I heard about Scallops, he's originally, I was like, dude, were you gonna be Ewoks? Me and all my friends were gonna be Ewoks in a little Ewok rating party, and I was gonna have a Z95 headhunter. My call sign was gonna be the Fuzzle Bunny one, and we were all gonna gather with my friend who flew a freighter, and we were just gonna rob people. That was our goal, like when I heard about the other-- - You know, there was a New Walk pilot in the Rogue Squadron books. - No, I didn't know it out there. If you've read 'em, they annotated it. - Yeah, I have read some of 'em. How do you not know this? - I haven't read that one, apparently. - I'm not gonna lie, I've read every single Star Wars book. - Every Star Wars book? - That's a public edition. I admit it. - Were you excited or sad? - It's like hard to-- - Were you happy or sad when Karen Travis said she wasn't gonna write any more Star Wars books? - I liked her stuff. - So did I. - In many ways. - I got nothing except that really, I mean, you should place both of 'em. - That's his rebuttal. - Yeah, that's true. - Literally, it's a rebuttal with that. - Anthony, what it sounds like to me is like, you almost wish that they would give you a ship that could be like your hub world. - Right, basically what I'm saying is I just need to go play Eve Online, apparently. - Right. - Ooh. - I don't have ewoks anymore. - I'm just talking about it. - Do you ship stuff and start to check online? It's fucking red. - The problem with you playing Eve Online is that you have a job already? - Yeah. - You could be a CPA in eight months in Eve Online, though. - I would want to get educated and play games at the same time. - I know, if I was gonna be playing Eve Online. - What are you from the University of Phoenix? - But yeah, I don't know. I've always just wanted to be. - I told you she'll fry her this week. - I feel that. It's just like, is a guy who likes Star Wars, the Star Wars story is arguably never been done better than in co-tour. It's worth it towards checking it out. - I mean, I'm just expecting David to turn around and there to be ads on his back surrounding his Star Wars logo. - I will play it. - Yeah, it's worth it. - I will. I've been meaning too forever. - It's incredibly good. It was a really moving experience. It was the first Western RPG I really needed to. - The reason I didn't is 'cause I didn't on the Xbox. That's what it came down to. That generation I only had a PS2. And that was before I cared enough about games to go out and ensure that I could play every game. - Fair enough. - So I actually didn't play that. I never played things like Strangers, Wrath, you know, like all these cool Xbox games. - Strangers are F is supposed to come to PC soon. God damn it. - Never played Psychonauts. - I like, yeah, Kotor was a, it just, it has a really good combat system for a turn based RPG. Like I like it better than Mass Effect 1 probably. I like it better than, which is more of a shooter, but I even like it better than the combat in Dragon Age. Oh, although I played a Warrior class in Dragon Age, which is kind of like boring combat, but. - Which funny 'cause there's a Rogue, the combat was really fun. - That's what, and Matt told me he was a major, I think in the combat was also really fun. But the way you queue up commands in Kotor, like, it's actually, so I have played the first like hour. - It sort of gets much, much better once you're a Jedi and you're doing cool force powers and light saber stuff. - Is that anything like Final Fantasy 13 stuff? - No. - No. - 'Cause you do queue stuff in that for if I remember correctly. - No. - Not like that. - I was playing a Japanese, I don't know what I was doing. - I was hitting, are we ready for Final Fantasy 13? - I was playing an English and I didn't know what I was doing. - Well, sure. - All right, so tell me about Final Fantasy 13. Is that what we're-- - Do you like it? Just let's get that out. - I don't, I don't even know. I mean, it's hard to say. - Everyone says, how many of you have to play 30 hours? - How many hours are you liking? - I am not 30 hours into it. - But you're like over six hours into it. - I will probably, I can't see myself stopping, but it's like, I don't know if you like it at this point. - No. - I think that says everything. - Well, that's just what, okay, so. - This is what I'm saying, like every time someone bitches about Fitch's review for Team Xbox, I'm like, he played it for so long. - No, no, I like it. It's not that I don't know if I like it or not. I would say, at this point right now, failure. Like, real big mistakes here. It's really slow at the beginning. The story is pretty atrocious. Like the voice acting is pretty bad, and it's even worse because the character models are really good looking. They're like-- - Which version are you playing? - PS3. - Okay. - So it's like, to steal Miguel, again, I stole J. Fresh's words before. - This time I'm still speaking as a community manager, EA now, so no one cares what he is. - Yeah, but Miguel Lopez is not, and I think he put it best. The characters look real, and then they open their mouths, and all of a sudden, it's Teddy Ruxpin. And that's kind of what it's like. You're like totally in it until they start speaking, plus the Japanese sort of cultural, the way they emote, and that sort of stuff, is it's just really weird in this game. It would be, honestly, I really wish they had left the Japanese dialogue option in, just because it would all of a sudden feel like it's-- - They took that out of the PS3 version, too, right? Because the 360 wasn't gonna have it. - Is that what it is? I honestly, I didn't even check, I just assumed-- - Were they in there a previous version? - No, no, no, no. - I think Blu-Ray, people expected that it would be there, but Square said flat out, if it's not gonna be in the 360 version, it's not gonna be in the PS3 version. - It's a mistake. - So the dialogue's really that bad, 'cause I'd heard that, too, the personal review for GameSpy said it was like the Sesame Street writers wrote for all these characters. - The worst thing, the writing is not good, the voice acting is not good, but the worst thing is the naming of everything. Like, I'm totally over-character's named after weather, and that sort of stuff, but-- - I really like "huminal" and "imblest." - Yeah, she's really likable character. - And the worst part is like you're like, I mean, I can say the following words, "lussy," "falsy," "pulse-falsy." They just clean up your language. - They throw these really kind of out there terms out, and it's all kind of the same stuff that they've done in the previous Final Fantasies when everything has a name. But for some reason in this game, when the lines are delivered, maybe I'm just slow or something, I wasn't catching it all. I didn't really know what I was doing. And then, so the first area is also the demo, and I had played the Japanese version of the demo. And it's pretty long, it's like an hour long, or something like that. So after I was done with that part, I was like, "I'm gonna take a break from it." And I say the game has stopped. And it turned it back on, and while it's loading again, there's this text that comes up during the loading that's like "Snow" and "Vanille" like, escaped from the "Falsy" base and blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's kind of boring, straightforward text, but then all of a sudden, I knew what was going on. I was like, "Oh God, this, now I understand." And I thought it was a failure of our medium, or of video games in general, to just be able to put a paragraph or two of text in front of me and have me know what was going on. - Whoa, whoa, whoa. - When sound, whoa, whoa. When sound and picture, being delivered to me before couldn't tell me, like I couldn't figure it out. - And months and months and months of development time. - That is not a failure of the medium. That is a failure of the creators of this game. - That's what I mean, a failure to properly use the medium. - Okay. - Correctly, yeah, yeah. - No, no, I said that wrong. - They failed the medium. - They failed the medium. - They're failing at using the medium medium. - Not really. - Not really bad offering. - Yes, it was a bad offering. But everything that I wanted to say is-- - But strangely compelling. - The combat is really-- - I hear it's visceral. - Visceral. - Visceral. - Visceral. - We're just trying out. - Okay, avoid, we're still avoiding. - So, it was clear that the idea of the combat, like everything, this is a game about, this is designed by subtraction, right? They cut out nearly everything. It's super straightforward. I know you know how linear it is. It is, it's super linear. There's almost, there's no talking to characters. If you walk up to like an NPC that's standing there, they just speak. You don't press a button, they just talk. And the dialogue's not that great, so it's not that cool, but, and there's not the many of them around. You just kind of walk towards your destination. Everything's on a map that's right in front of you, with the high guns on it. - Yeah, I've heard the game that way almost feels like you're just in a tunnel the whole time. - Yeah, or like on "It's a Small World." - It's the highway they had in with Michael Lando. - Yeah, some of the tunnels are very beautiful. - I play the game. - Some of the areas are gorgeous. And they make you think like, oh wow, yeah, like this area looks, you know, more detailed and rich than maybe an area in like a mass effect or something like that. They've obviously, they've done something really beautiful here. But, all you're doing is walking forward and fighting groups of enemies. Now, when you fight the enemies, they clearly understood that in earlier Final Fantasy games, all you do is like walk into a random battle and then jam the X button over and over again. So in this game, you're rewarded for beating enemies very fast and most battles, if you do them right, end in like 11 seconds. And so it's kind of cool because they can, if you do them wrong and they can go on for minutes and minutes and you die and they give you a little score at the end and tells you fuck you and you sucked at this battle. So when you do do it right, and a lot of it is actually doing MMO things like you have to pull an enemy, get them to flip around and turn around and then attack them so that you get a preemptive strike. And then if you do that right, then there's this thing called staggering where a certain number of hits raises this bar and then once they're staggered, you can actually do real damage to them. So the combat system is really cool. And then the other way they reduce, you only control one character instead of all three and there's this thing called paradigm shifts, another awesome term, which basically tells your characters, all right, now do healing spells. Now everyone attack really, or hard, viscerally. Now everyone attack and now everyone do like buffs and debuffs, you know? And so instead of having to micromanage every little attack, you do like these kind of overall team management moves. So there's less button pieces. - You're like a coach. And it moves really fast and it's cool when it works right. - We talked about it pretty extensively at the end of my last podcast last week. And I think it was Garnet or Mark McGowan who brought up Edge's review. Their takeaway was the problem with the game is that it was a game that tried to excel on the strength of its combat. And the combat unfortunately wasn't good enough to sustain everything else, a 40, 60, 70 hour experience. - Yeah, I'm not far enough along to make like an overall judgment about it, but the combat is the thing that's good in this game. And I would say 100%, I'm missing all the stuff that they cut out of it. Like, you know, there's like, you collect, the spoils of battle in the game are random items, dumb named items that just sit in your inventory. - Here's the thing that throws me off about this, is that I read, I think it was on Gama Sutra, they did an interview with a creator, they ran an excerpt from a Famitsu interview. And they talked to the producer and he said, at first they were saying that all this was a design choice, that they wanted to take it in a radical direction. And then once people started complaining that it wasn't like older Final Fantasy games, he said, flat out, you're never gonna get those games anymore. It takes too long. We didn't have enough time to do all of that. Like in the future, we might try to put that back in again, but we just didn't have enough time to do that in this game. It feels like Assassin's Creed 1, it feels like Mass Effect 1. - It feels like game has been in development. - Final Fantasy 13 had serious problems during the over the course of development. I've told this story before. - We didn't Final Fantasy 12 also have serious fucking problems. - It did. - But it's absolutely true. This is the reason Final Fantasy 14 was announced last year at E3. It was because the Square Enix bosses were so pissed off at the Final Fantasy 13 guys, they announced that at E3'd publicly shamed them before Final Fantasy 13 was out. Because at that point in time, 14 was further along the Final Fantasy 13 and could have shipped before it. So that should tell you everything. - I need to cut that out of the podcast, David. - No, I said it publicly. I've said it publicly, it's absolutely true. It's absolutely true, I've been told by people who know or are very familiar with the process. And that's a sad reality. - I'm tempted to say that as a hazard of guess is to the name of the person that told you that, but I would have to bleep it out. - 14 if I'm correct, it's a lot like 11, right? Which 11 is an MMO. - Two different teams. - Which they haven't even confirmed all the platforms for yet. Do I need to cut that out too? - Yes, please. - Okay. - Sorry. - One 13, folks, one 13. - Sorry, sorry. - No, it's okay, I'll just bleep it out and people pine and wonder what it was and it'll be great. - They're like a lost mystery. - Yeah, it's the most interesting thing about this game is that if there were other, I don't know who it appeals to, really. I just don't, I don't get it. Like maybe Japanese players will like it, but they don't own PS3s and Xbox 360s. - Six words for you, sir. Stockholm syndrome. - Maybe, maybe, but that can't be a huge audience. Like I think this game will sell on the name alone. Like Final Fantasy people who have bought, like me, like I bought it, but if I found out that the next one that was coming out was the same thing as this, I wouldn't buy that game. - I admired that they, at first I admired that they were trying something new, but then when I read all that shit. - I do something that was like every game, every game's different than one. - Well, but I mean like 12 was a radical departure from previous Final Fantasies. And at first it seemed like, well, they were really taking a chance on this, but the more I read about it, the more it seems like they didn't have time to fucking finish anything. So they shit out what they could and put the name on it. - To go back, like if it had just been stripped down, if the story and the characters were good, I think I would be okay with it. But it's that the only time that the game feels like it's doing what it's supposed to be doing is during the combat. And the rest of it just doesn't hold up. The story is bad, but the, okay, so the graphics and the scenery are good. That's the other thing. But it's just not enough. It's not enough, especially for a game that took this long to develop and that has the legacy of this brand behind it. It's not as good as the other Final Fantasies. I don't think. - Not even close. - No, I mean, I would much rather play 10, eight. - I think just the fact that wins the last time you saw a Final Fantasy game, get a five out of 10. - Yeah. - Yeah. - I think that says everything. I mean, we had Fitch do our review. Like people talked about how he gave it a five. - I gave it a five out of 10. - There were other places that gave it similar score. - I mean, Chris Collar at Wire gave it a six, a Eurogamer gave it a five, I believe? Or Edge gave it a five. - Yeah. - And there are some other sites that gave it a five as well. - Yeah, I mean, I had fully intended to play through this game. It was one of my new year's resolutions. - I still might. - And I'm breaking it 'cause I just, I refuse to spend that amount of time playing a game before it gets good. - People don't give MMOs that long to get good. - 30 hours of play time now. - 25, no, well 25 hours is generally what I'm hearing for like when the game opens up. - I heard it was just one chapter that opens up. I'm not even expecting it to open up actually. - Well, and yeah, that's the other thing, is that it opens up for about three or four hours and then it's over. - The best level design that I saw so far of any of the stages was there was this area where you walk forward and then all of a sudden there's like a ring and each of the spots on the ring has a switch that you have to hit to power a generator that moves this thing forward. And I was like, oh, something different. I'm not just walking in a straight line. It was pretty sad. Like. - Which is funny because that whole statement it seemed like the motif of this game is walking forward. - It is walking forward, walking forward and running into enemies and triggering a cutscene now and again. - It seems like it's a step back for this. - Final Fantasy Space Harrier. - The cool, the one other cool thing that it does that may or may not be cool in the future, I don't know, is introducing completely different gameplay elements whenever the hell it wants. It might be bad, it might be good. It definitely keeps the game fresh as you're going forward 'cause you're playing it this one way and then all of a sudden boom, brand new mechanic totally different changes everything. It's, it is what it is. I don't know, I'm not far enough along to have seen everything but at least the game isn't the same boring stuff at the beginning. It's like it gets better as it goes on but-- - What else have people been playing? - All right. - That isn't Final Fantasy. - It aren't shitty fucking Japanese games. - Okay so I'm playing this indie game for free that anyone can go play on new grounds called Redder which is by Anna Antthropy and it's like a platformer. The pretty basic setup at the beginning of the game you're in a spaceship and your spaceship begins to crash 'cause it's losing all these crystals that are around the world there and you land on basically Mars and you're this little space dude and the entire game is platforming through these really cool puzzle-y stages to try to find the rest of these crystals. It's kind of like, I don't know. Make a man with no shooting, Redder, R-A-D-D-E-R and it's 'cause you're like on Mars or something like that but just really great level design, really great platforming puzzles. It's all about, it's like exploration, the game. You're constantly going into new areas of like space stations that look totally different so it does a great job of touching that sort of nerve. If you like new art all the time, if you're like constantly ready for the stage to change up like it does it all the time and it constantly looks good if you're into cool a bit looking. How do you hear that on Twitter, the internet? Okay, so this isn't like something that's going around from like the indie kids or the other indie developers like, oh, this is cool shit. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess I follow indie nerds on Twitter. But yeah, it's a new thing came out week ago or something like that and it's free. Usually what I'm playing, it's a flash game but you wouldn't be able to tell if it was running in full screen, that sort of thing. And usually when I'm playing a flash platformer, if I can't play with a controller, it makes it super hard to play because you're trying to do these crazy platforming jumping moves. But you're a little guy in a spacesuit and it's kind of set up so that it doesn't matter. I've been playing on a keyboard on my Mac and it's a lot of fun. It saves when I close my browser window and then come back and it's in the perfect location last time. - So I'll clear your cookies. - Yeah, it's exactly, it's just really good and it's free. I'd highly recommend it if you like-- - Are there achievements, new grounds of achievement. - Yeah, there are achievements, maybe. - There's new grounds of achievements? I knew congregate. - Yeah, I don't think I've gotten any achievements yet but I haven't beaten the game and I haven't done anything super spectacular yet. So it's like I just enjoy exploring the game. It's just a fun, it's fun to walk around, you'll see a shiny thing every once in a while and you're like damn, how do I get that? And you really have to think about moving around. It's like a giant world sort of metroidy sort of I guess and yeah, figuring out how to solve the puzzles and get to where you need to be to get the crystals this fun. That's it, play it, it's free. - Tyler? - Man, I've been playing a lot more Cortex Command. I actually bought it and downloaded it. - That's awesome. - The game's been in development a long time. - It has and so like a couple of listeners since I mentioned it last time emailed me and told me like there's a very lively mod community and so Anthony, I thought you might be interested to know like someone was telling me like some guys have gone through and made like a bunch of Warhammer like Marines and stuff for it and like saying that their armor is like really badass and you know, you can-- - Anthony just covered his lap. - Right, I will check that out. Yeah, so that's only available through their site, right? Yeah, Data Realms. - Okay. - Do you guys, do you know much about how the game was made or the history of it or anything? - Not much at all, man, school is-- - I don't know much. We covered it GDC last year because it had been entered in the IGF like two or three years prior to it every time and never made it and then last year made it and actually won a couple of awards. And what's really interesting about it is that this is kind of like this guy's pet project he's been working on it for a really-- - He was apparently, like six years, right? - Yeah. - And so he had to, he wouldn't, before the game was actually complete he started allowing people to pay him to get into like whatever the beta until it was done and then you had it for a much, much lower price than you would have if you, you know, bought it once the game was actually completed. So he just, he made a business out of an uncompleted indie game and was able to basically keep himself alive doing it. It's like really commendable. - Well, it's apparently still not finished. Like there's still a campaign-- - Oh, it's still a bit. - But there's still a working one. But it's a bit, but you know, you can download and there's quite a few missions you can run and basically you can also run skirmishes which are kind of like never ended fun. - There's a good mod community that must add some-- - Yeah, apparently it's huge. Like I had several listeners email me and they're like, "You have to check out the mods, they're really good." - It's incredibly complex. Like I'm not a strategy guy. So when I tried to play it, I was just failing and plus the controls are really twitchy. It starts with you controlling these little like robot dudes and like flying them around. And if you, you know, you have jetpacks and if you kind of hit the ceiling, you can just like break your guy or make him fall. It's like really, it definitely appeals to the segment of the PC market that likes a lot of customizability and like the ability to master something. - So the PC market. - Yes, the people that still play PC games. - The real PC game market, yeah. - Yeah, I mean, the game's just fucking great. Like I was playing one mission where you have to like go into this cave that is a spawning zombies. And it's also, there's also like a random grenade spawner and then the zombies will grab the grenades and throw them at you. And so like I actually, you order units. And so I ordered a human from, you know, I had them drop down. And instead of like doing the drop ships, like which I would always do like this big rocket that would always crash. And it would usually kill whatever I've just bought. I figured out like, oh, it's best to just get supply crates where they basically just, if you're a human, you're just in this fucking crate and they just drop it from orbit and it just smashes in the ground. - Does the human die? - No, no, no, no. - Okay, it's a low-packed crate, there are peanuts. - Yeah, so the human jumped out, man. But I get them in the fucking zombie cave. And it's just hilarious because a grenade went off kind of near me, but only near enough to blow my legs off. And so like my guys just sitting there like crawling around, it's just a torso and like the jetpack can still work. - So your torso flying around the level? - Yeah, it's dripping blood as you'd fly. - Mm-hmm, oh man. - Jetpack amputee, coming to us and near you. I would play that game. - My platform's only. - I think you like it, Anthony. - I think so too, more and more I keep hearing about it. - So I can pay my own war hands. - I love turn-based strategies. Can you pause it and stuff? - It's not turn-based. - Okay, it's a 2D game, like it's side-scrolling, but like everything's really small on the screen, so you're focusing a lot on that terrain. - I will check this out. - Yeah, I think you like it. - It is really challenging, like I fail a lot. - Oh, then Anthony's not interested. - I don't know if you know that. - I am actually not bad at video games. Working when the, where I work has taught me that, I'm actually better than a lot of people. - I said it last week, and I'll say it again, and Shane Benhausen is the worst fucking video game player I've ever been around in my entire life. And I used to live with the guy, and he'd be playing something to live in a room. - He'd be like, "You're doing your own." - I'd just be like punching my leg. I would have like a huge bruise on my thigh if I'm just punching myself, 'cause I just can't believe what I'm saying. - I've had that experience at work. - Yeah, you just like give it to me for two minutes. Two minutes, that will get you past this. - He's passionate. Dude, do you want me to show you something really quick? Do you want, oh, okay, here are a few dark ciders, and I was just watching someone else review dark ciders. - Who was it? - And they were just like- - Give us an issue. - I was seeing the shit beat out of him. And I was just like, what the fuck is going on? Why are they getting the shit beat out of him? And I realized I just never realized that there was the ability to dodge. There's never once dodging. They're like, man, I just mash. I just swing at everything. I'm like, this is the way my dad would play this. - 'Cause you're like, what are they like Bo Bridges and the wizard where he's like playing a Wii 20 years for the Wii holding it up so I down, going back and forth. - Man, that's the second time I've heard of Bo Bridges joking, like a month. - I think it should be at least one Bo Bridges joke. - Well, he's hit. - Is that your offering for today? - He's the brother of Oscar award winner, Jeff Bridges, right? - Yes. - He's gotta hate that. - Is he really? - Yeah. - He's like 10 years older, I think. - Yeah, he didn't have Bo Bridges. They were in the fabulous Baker Brothers. - I don't know who Bo Bridges is. I just didn't know he was Jeff Bridges' brother. - I didn't think he has any idea what's the fabulous Baker Brothers' service. - But that person is feeling a little bit shit. - No, his dad was the dude from- - Lloyd Bridges. - Yeah, Lloyd Bridges. - From an airplane, right? - Oh, son of a bitch. Okay, well, that makes more sense now. Sorry, Bo Bridges. You don't look that much older than Jeff Bridges. I was just fucking with you. - There's a great- - I was mistaken you were for your old father, who's really old. - And dad. - Oh, right. - For a while. - For a while, it was a- - Yeah, no, no, it's not a reason, right? - It's not too soon. - Even if it was, whatever. - Cares. - Messed up. - He's dead, he doesn't care. - You know, the sad thing is like in my brain, I was thinking, who died recently? That I can make a joke about it. There you go. That's just how twisted my brain is. That's the first thing I was thinking about. Yeah, how can I take this a step further from where it should go? - Coming to Halo franchise near you. (laughing) - Stop bringing up Halo, you're gonna get me in trouble. You're gonna get me in trouble. - Halo, Halo. - Last week I started pitching Halo games. - Oh, I heard that's too funny. I heard, I was excited. - Super Halo, Halo Yo Card. - Do you have any idea how hard it is? - Merge Lincoln Force, which is a game they've been solely creating on the podcast, which acts in a venture shooter with Abraham Lincoln. - Character action game. - Character action game, that's true. So, I'm just saying you've never seen-- - Do you have any idea, I was listening, and do you have any idea how hard it is to run with the boner, David Ellis? It's hard. - Did I say run with a boner on the podcast? - No, I was running, listening to the podcast. - Oh, you are a boner. - It's hard to run with a boner. - Oh, that's unfortunate. You should strap that sheet down before you go out the door. - Like duct tape. - So, is anyone else actually been playing games? - Yeah, I have one. - Yeah. - I had fucking marathon to Dragon Age Origins awakening. - Oh yeah, that's right. I forgot that you did that. - How about as long to finish as it takes to pronounce that fucking name? - Well, is it, it's not Dragon Age Origins awakening. - Yes, it is. - Oh, I thought it was a Dragon Age awakening. - No, at that point, is it an origin? 'Cause it's an expansion. - I should show you the box. It's like, it says Dragon Age, and then you see some colon awakening, but underneath age, like in tiny script is Origins. It's like, oh shit, we're supposed to put Origins on the box, what do we do? - Fuck, that's funny. - So, they've been saying 30 hours for that game? - I finished that shit in 13 and a half. - Right, we can always divide that stuff into it. - And one, you theorize that it was mostly because people probably micromanage way more on the-- - Well yeah, that's my theory, is that every estimate the Bioware is always for Dragon Age. - That's when I come from QA, like QA people. And I think we had Corey Lewis, she used to be a pandemic, he's at two camera right now. And in QA, they do hire specifically people who are terrible at video games. - To see how long it will take out. - But they don't know they're terrible at video games, so if you're doing QA-- - Come in and play this game. - But I mean, I've also heard, like-- - Yes, you're looking nicely. - I finished Origins in 44 hours, and that's probably about six hours more than it actually took 'cause it counts time it's paused. And meanwhile, Matt Channernay is saying things like, he's been playing Dragon Age for 60 hours on the single playthrough. So my theory is just that the console versions are so much faster because you're not micromanaging, you're not pausing and strategizing, it's just like, I'm gonna run into that thing and do some skills and hope my guys don't get themselves killed. And that's it. - Yeah, that's how I play. - So my issue with Awakening is that it's 40 fucking dollars, and RPG time is not the same as other game time, like-- - I mean, how much of it is action, like battle, and how much of it is other stuff? - It's pretty action oriented, right? - Even Dragon Age is pretty action oriented, honestly. I spend time crafting, and if you don't spend time crafting, then that's another hour that it's not gonna take you. - So you wouldn't spend $40 of your own money playing? - I'm not sure. - 'Cause I mean-- - I feel like last year Fallout sort of changed the what we expect from DLC offerings for shit like that. - I expect them to be good. - Well yeah, not only that, but like a $10 piece of DLC, like last year, like point lookout was six or seven hours of content, and this is 13 hours of content for $40. - You played both, though, right? - Pardon? - Did you play the Fallout 3 stuff? - I played most of the Fallout 3 stuff. - So you're comparing the two, and you're saying that-- - I'm saying Fallout 3 is a hell of a lot better of a value. Like, not just in time spent playing, but in price. - Yeah, see, Donna Vores though, so only like an eight or nine hour expansion, but to me it's like, that's totally okay. Like, 'cause it's again, it's like-- - How much is the Donna Works mansion? - It's like probably 40 bucks. - It's 40. - So ancients costs $40 now as well. - But my-- - For PC months, that's typically-- - Well, when you press it to a disc, I think that increases how much they have to charge for it. - Well, the DLC, like online, it's the same. - Yeah, but-- - It's-- - You can't sell them at different price points. - Well, my theory is that the amount of time you spend playing an RPG, like the quality per minute is not the same as like a shooter or an action game or a fighting game or things like that. - But is that really true? Is it just conventional wisdom? - That's just my opinion. - Yeah. - Like, flat out, like, I played Dragon Age Origins Awakening for 14 hours or whatever, and I didn't feel as fulfilled as I would playing 14 hours of, like, Bioshock 2 or something like that. - 'Cause some people have been complaining that God of War III is a little on the short side. I don't know, I haven't gotten there, but-- - I played an hour and a half of that over the last two days, and I feel like that was a lot of game. - Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I guess everything's different, and if that's how you felt, that's how you felt. But it's like just kind of reducing everything to price per minute of gameplay. And it's just, that's reductionism taken too far for me. - Sometimes, yes, but this is $40. - Yeah, but you didn't have to spend $40, so-- - I didn't have to spend $40, but I think it does a disservice to the people that are asking me about the game to just ignore that and say, "No, it's good." Like, I mean, the characters, anders tell some funny jokes. - Honestly, I'm not knocking, you're dissing or anything good, but that's something I always struggled with. Like, how accurate is the kind of cost benefit, or cost to gameplay ratio when you're not actually spending your money? Like, you're just having to do your best guess. - Here's the important part. If you play Dragon Age through to completion, is the story or whatever? Is it enough to, like, would you play this? Would you want to play this? Price no object? - Price no object, I suppose so, yeah. - Would you play it again? Like, that's one thing for, like, don't worry. - I don't know, I played a debug version, and now that I have the retail, I'm playing through the retail all over again. - There's impetus to play it all over again, like, not just because it's more content for whatever character you do in Origins, but also because it has a brand new character class. - And you take that character class through the old version of the game? - No. - No, I don't think so. - Let's do that. - You can, however, just buy the disc, having never played Origins and play through Awakening. Flat out with the new character class, which surprised me. - Right. - Like, there's no, it's not an expansion in that way. But it's just like living in a post-mass effect to world, like, it felt really disconnected from Awakening, like a game that came out five months ago. - Origins. - Or from Origins, sorry. And they've just been putting out a lot of DLC that seems very expensive and not with not a lot of content. And it just, I-- - For Dragon Age? - For Dragon Age, yeah. It just seems like the-- - Clearly they have two different economic models that they're experimenting with. - Yeah. - The same time, with Mass Effect and Dragon Age. - And I would argue that Mass Effect is probably appearing more successful, but-- - I wonder if it's successful economically though. I mean, that's-- - Well, Mass Effect 2 has already sold more copies than Dragon Age did. - Right. But, I mean, people are still buying that expansion pack or buying the DLC they've been releasing for economically that I could make up for some of the sales differentials. - It's supposed to. - I don't know-- - I mean, Dragon Age also had a much bigger budget considering how long it was in development for. But, like, I was talking to them when I previewed it and they were talking about how Dragon Age was in development before this generation of consoles was even announced. - Yeah. - So. - It was, I think it was CGW's first issue, wasn't it? - Yeah, but I mean, they'd been working on it for a couple of years before that even. - Right. - But I enjoyed some of my time, but it's not as polished in Dragon Age Origins was a rough game to begin with. - So, why did you mainly rush through it? Or, not saying you rushed through it, that's the wrong word, but why did you just kind of-- - Well, we did have to rush through it. - Because we got it-- - Yeah, because we had to get it done by an embargo. - I got it Wednesday of GDC. - I just wanted you to say that 'cause, like, that sucks that you had to do that kind of thing. Maybe had you not been playing through an embargo, maybe it would have taken longer to play through it. - I probably would have taken a couple more days because, honestly, I powered through Dragon Age Origins near the end of last year. - You're saying I've suffered through that shit as well. - And I try to take that into account. Like, I factor in-- - As much as we all can. - Yeah, and I mean, that's, I gave it a seven out of 10, which is good, but, you know? - Yeah, I know what you say, I know what you mean, David. I've struggled with that same thing, though, wondering if that shit is getting to me because there's definitely been games that it's been like, I have two days to do this. This game ended up being twice as long as I thought it would. - I actually factored in more time to play it than I needed. Like, I finished it early Sunday and had fully expected to spend my entire day playing it. So I had more free time left over after than I thought I would. - Yeah, that's like one of the biggest things that I've gotten back since being independent is being able to play games over long periods of time if I want to, and it's really nice. - That, honestly, that's one of the things I was so happy and grateful to Sony for sending heavy rain review builds out as early as they did because I played it over the course of like five days. I played, like, two hours a night, and that's how I played it. - For Assassin's Creed II last year, like, they sent it out pretty early, and Mass Effect II came in early enough. - You can't do that in every situation, but, god damn, when you can, it's nice. - I think it's doing your game of favor. - Exactly. I think it's definitely doing your game of favor. - That's also how I would imagine that most people play it. I mean, obviously, they're the hardcore game fans, whatever that just they're gonna marathon, anything comes out. There's always gonna be someone that, like, I'm sure there are people that'd be gotta board three now already having just come out yesterday. Plenty of people. - Oh, right. - But, you know, like, most people put in an hour here or there, and I think the games that take that into account and make it easy to hop back in are the really good ones. Because then you don't have to keep putting in new game mechanics all the frickin' time just to excite people. You can just have your core mechanics be good and solid and play it an hour at a time. They won't feel repetitious, you know? - I mean, yeah, I could talk for much longer about awakening, but we've been going for an hour and a half on what we've been playing, so. - Geez. So we'll take a quick break. - Yeah. - And then we'll come back and discuss a little bit of another topic that-- - DLC. - Right, and then-- - DLC, DLC. - Dilt. - And then we'll do a couple later. - Dilt. - And then at those next weeks, podcasts can have to be a lot more later focus, 'cause maybe we'll be both at the point of style. - Oh, well, we should just do two other services next week, but we'll talk about that at the end of the show. Bitches. - No, stick like this! - Break time. - One is born. - Fight the war, fuck the norm. - Now I got no patience. - So soon I'm complacent. - I'm keeping evil after I've laid the end of sleep - I need mine, I'm a revolutionary. - So clear the lane. - I'm finger to the man of the chains. - What? - The land of the free. - Whoever told you that is your enemy. - Now something must be done. - About thinking so bad and I'm done. - Drop it, the right with the state, with the system. - I'm a born away against them. - Now what you must be taken. - We don't need the key, we'll break it. (upbeat rock music) - I got no patience. (upbeat rock music) - Time has come to. (screaming) (upbeat rock music) (upbeat rock music) - We don't even know that. (upbeat rock music) - Don't think about that. (upbeat rock music) (upbeat rock music) - You're cute little collet. - It's cute too. - It is over there. - Welcome back. It sounds a bit just quite down. Serious business time. Arthur's gonna lead this topic discussion. 'Cause really it was your topic that you thought of and I'm gonna try and chime in with some user feedback. - Okay, so the end of the last segment, as David said, was sort of a good segue into this, which is the state of DLC right now. What prompted this is obviously the announcement of Modern Warfare 2's DLC, which comes out on March 30th. Five packs to remakes $15. - We'll even mention that in the comments and I don't think anybody-- - I saw it a couple times. - We'll label this segment from Horse Armor to Awakenings. - Yeah. (laughing) - I like that. - I'm good at killing conversations. - No, no. - This is good. - That you would have been great before we started talking. Thanks, David. (laughing) Just flat out, I think the Modern Warfare 2 DLC is bullshit. - If it was $10, would it not be bullshit? - Yeah, actually I do think it would be less bullshit. 'Cause it is, I mean, we were talking about it before. I do think that it's a value proposition and yes, I will probably get a code for it and not have to pay for it, but that doesn't change the fact that it's bullshit. - Why do you think it's bullshit? - I think it is the same or less value as previous content offered for comparable games, including Call of Duty Modern Warfare for more. - They charge $10 for three maps. - How many maps are in the game? - I don't even know anymore. - Can't remember, this is a bunch. - Although, to be fair, this is really good. - They charge $10 for three maps. - I thought it was $10 for four. - Is it four? - Does it do four? - And then for World at War, I think offered more maps for less money. - Well, World at War is a separate thing entirely 'cause it's an infinity award. - I know it's not an infinity award, but I don't think infinity award is making the pricing calls on this DLC. - Who knows, but I think pretty much the standard pricing model is three multiplier maps for $10. - I don't know what the standard pricing is, but I know that new art is expensive. - Yeah. - And... - Except two of these maps aren't new art. - Yeah. - But you do have no idea the amount of work they have to do to get into it. And also they have to tweak and rebalance the maps for all the new perks and everything. And I do have a pretty good idea, but I know how expensive art is to create. But like we said before, games are a compromise of what you can offer within time and budget, and... - So I would assume, and I don't know the specifics here, but I guarantee they are putting those two remakes in there because the community demanded we want those two maps so we can play it in modern warfare too. We want these two maps, and so they put it in there. But like I said, I guarantee you they had to really tweak and rebalance and maybe even change some of the geometry of the levels to take into account all the new perks and stuff that's in modern warfare two versus modern warfare one. - Yeah. - I mean, there's a ton of new content in there, and the way the game even plays is drastically different. - What are the two maps that are the remake? - I don't even remember. - The one with the chopper in the middle of the level. - Okay. - Which is... - Yeah, rush. - Yeah, which is pretty much one of everyone's favorite maps. - Yeah, that was great. - The original modern warfare, and I can't remember the other one. - Okay. - Unfortunately. - Something else I've seen from some people, and I thought this was a valid point, was that they would have appreciated a patch fixing some of the many exploits before they released more DLC. - Well, they've had a few patches, but they're still... - That's kind of exploits. - Every time they patch anything, there's like a bunch of new stuff, like clearly an example of not really realizing how many... Like when you have that many people playing a game, how many people are actively trying to break it every day. - Yeah. - Yeah, it's a serious issue. Seek gears one, and gears two, especially gears two. - I just feel like the power is in the player's hands. No one's forcing your hand to buy this game. - Yeah. - If $15 is too much, like, don't buy it. And they'll either lower the price or not charge as much for the next round, or not do DLC that, you know, if it's so expensive that this is actually how much it should cost. - Yeah, see, you say that, but I do wonder at some point what social pressures people who bought the game feel that they have to buy the DLC to keep up with everybody else. - Like the answer is mature. And so you need to be an adult to buy it. So act like an adult. - I mean, it's easy to say that. Like, it's easy to say, "Oh, well, this is practical and you don't have to buy it." But there is a sort of groupthink mentality to that, and a peer pressure aspect of online presence and achievements. - Yeah, but who's to blame for that? Are you going to blame them for releasing maps for the peer pressure associate with wanting to buy maps? - I think that they're taking advantage of people who feel captive to the game. - I blame the players. - Yeah. - It's our own fault. We're in this situation. We, you know, you said horse armor at the beginning and obviously like-- - Did I say horse armor? - No, you said horse armor. - And it didn't sell all that well and we've-- - But still, it was their most profitable piece of DLC for oblivion. - Really? First one. I mean, every time I feel bad about some piece of the price of some piece of DLC, I'm like, I'm not mad at developers for this. I'm mad at the players for spending this much money on this crap. Like, if we didn't buy it, if we could just hold back and not like spend that, 'cause it's so easy to just click in Xbox Live, it's so easy to make that sort of purchase. - Bless you. - Bless you. - That I feel like, yeah, I just wish more often we'd restrain ourselves and then make them lower the price back to a more reasonable amount before saying, "Okay, yes, that's what it's worth to me," and making that purchase. I don't think many players exercise that sort of control. - How do you guys move on? - Well, I was also saying there's another dimension to it. Like, I can think of my buddies back in Houston who don't follow the games as closely as I do. They might look at the Call of Duty map pack and in their mind, it doesn't seem like a lot of money and they'll buy that, but if I'm trying to turn them on to a certain Xbox Live arcade game, they might look at that and think, even though it's the same price, they might not see the value. They'd be like, "Well, I play Modern Warfare all the time," you know? - Yeah, I mean, if you want to get into the whole price per hour's playing a game, I mean, how many hours are people going to play with this new map pack? And is that worth $15 of your time? And I'm saying this not as someone who's going to be working for a development studio or anything like that, but I'm just saying that as someone who has bought shit that probably -- I've probably been that person, right, you were describing it shouldn't buy shit, but still do it because it's so easy. I'm just as much of an asshole as anyone else. Like, I have the fucking Ezio avatar skin for my avatar twice. I bought it. - Oh, that's right. - I'm done it twice because I like that game and because I thought it was cool looking on my character. - Do you feel like you got $3 worth of enjoyment out of it? - You know, maybe I did. It's still on my character. I'm still wearing that stuff. I was a choice that I made. I'm just as responsible as anyone else. - I tell you this much, I have less problems spending two or three bucks for like a little RC war hog than when they were charging like $2 for like a series of JPEGs as a theme. - Right. - But remember that? Like, things have gotten a little better. - Yeah. I mean, it was -- this morning, Cesar was playing just costume and obviously we got a green disc. He didn't pay for this. But he was having a great time and I was sitting next to him on my computer playing a redder the game I just described, which is a free game. And he's like, "Man, I'm having so much fun right now." And I was thinking like, "I'm probably having -- I mean, we can't measure the difference in fun that we're having, but I'm having just as much fun. I bid $0 for this." So, you know, if you don't think that the DLC is worth what you're paying for, wait until it makes them lower the price, man. Like, wait, don't buy it. - You were like the kid that Cesar was playing with his Voltron and you were like, "Fuck you, man. I got the stick." - Hell yeah. - I got the stick spaceship and you know what, ten seconds from now it's going to be a sword. - It's like Calvin and Hobbs. He had his box. - Turn it to the time machine, he turns it to spaceship. - No, I honestly think that my -- he was playing with the car Voltron, I was playing with the lion Voltron and my lion Voltron was better than his car Voltron. - I think you were playing with Voltron and he was playing with Transformers. - He was playing with fucking Go, Bob. - Yeah, that's what I say. - Aww. - So, is there like a price that you guys feel like at some point for DLC, it reaches a point where it's like if it was a disc that released, you would be okay with paying for it because like one of the commenters, Seven Dead, he said like once it hits $20, that's like where all of a sudden he wants it to be on a disc. Like he sees it in the store like the Balletgate Tony, it's on a disc. Okay, I'll buy it. - So I know, I'm saying this and I know I'm in the minority. Like I've kind of moved all the way over to the digital future of things where I have bought a lot of games on demand. - Do you have 120 gig hard drive? - I do. - That's why. - That is the opinion. - I am the same way. But I did not pay for that 120 gig hard drive, so in case anyone's curious, I'll say that out too. - I did. - But... - I can't pay for that. - Yeah. - I mean a few people can, it's a lot. - It's just I can't pay for it on principle. I had a job when those things came out and I just couldn't, I don't care about the... - I got the money cheap on the eBay. - Although they've spoken about how they need to be expensive. - I still think that part of the reason they're so expensive is because they have to tie Nvidia royalties for backwards compatibility to the hard drives. - I really, really, really think that when all the content that goes onto the hard drive is going to be, you know, filled with stuff that I'm purchasing off your store, the price should be at least somewhat subsidized. It should be at least... - I'm flat out saying that one of the reasons they lost money with every Xbox sold is because of the unnegotiable royalty they owed Nvidia. So if they owe Nvidia royalties for backwards compatibility and their APIs, they have to get people somewhere. And why charge people who can't play back? - I really want to start talking about it. Controllers are $50. I mean like every single accessory costs way too much when we're talking about Xbox 360s compared to what it would cost if you bought a PC equivalent of that sort of thing. - Isn't a Xbox 360 controller the PC controller standard now though? - Yes it is, but I meant like what they think. - I don't think controllers are a good point. - I'm talking about Wi-Fi adapters. - I'm talking about cables. - One of the issues initially was you couldn't, especially when they had the video market places, you could only put a few things on there and your hardware is full. So at the very least, now you have the option to stream most of the content. So you don't need a huge hard drive for anything other than downloading game stuff. - As far as controllers go, controllers are the one thing where I'm like, I always see controllers for like $25 or $35. The wireless adapter. - If you know where to look. - Every online retailer, the only places that sell controllers for full price are GameStop and Best Buy. - Or most people probably buy their controllers. - Exactly. But I lost my train of thoughts. - How do you guys feel about DLC that's like? - I want to say that the Ballad of Gay Tony, I mean because it came up briefly, how much were those 20 bucks each? - I think 20. - Man, I think those were perfectly priced. I got exactly the amount of gameplay out of both of those campaigns that I wanted. I know that they didn't do too well and not many people bought them and I think it's a damn shame because I really really enjoyed both those games. Probably more so than GTA 4 in both cases. - I kind of wonder if those were aimed at an audience that doesn't typically think about DLC. Like if Grand Theft Auto appeals to an audience, that's what you'll see. - What audience is that? - A specific Madden audience. - You dug this all. - No. - I meant an audience. - No. There's a specific sort of 18 to 24 year old male demographic that isn't necessarily going to be like, "I'm the hardcore Xbox live player." - That is who is fucking Grand Theft Auto marketed to. They're marketed to the MTV generation that buys like two games a year and that's one of them. - Why are you arguing this, David? You know where he's going with this. - Fair enough. - Oh, are you trying to imply that I'm saying urban youth? - Possibly. - That's what you're saying. It's because I'm actually content. - I immediately have a sense. - Urban youth of every ethnic. - I did not accept until a clan meeting here at the fuck. - Jesus Christ. - I think, well, sure. Urban youth of every ethnicity, they just don't care about the FBI. - I have friends that are white and suburban and all they play. The only game they play is Grand Theft Auto. - I'm just being an asshole. - 40 million, 360's and have 20 million or 25 million live accounts. Like, where the fuck are those other 15 million and 360's? - I think the main problem was they weren't on a disc from day one. Had they been on a disc from day one, it would have been a different story. I think the percentages, and I'm not saying this from any knowledge, but I assume the percentages of people who buy downloaded content and buy digital games through 360, PS3, those percentages are still really low. - I would bet money that 80% of the people that bought Grand Theft Auto 4 don't have the famous fucking clue how they would buy the Liberty City stories. - I just think they probably don't even know that it exists. - Or that. - And I would say that, you know, if anything, they're ahead of their time by putting something that's this meaty out as a download only. - But then you have companies like Bethesda with the Fallout 3 DLC, which I think is probably the pinnacle of DLC that we've seen this gen, just with consistency and quality, and also even Borderlands. - I think Borderlands, two-case done really well. - Yeah, and now Borderlands is releasing retail discs of their fucking downloadable content. - So how do you guys feel about the DLC stuff that we've been hearing like specifically Bioshock 2, where it's like you're paying for an unlocked code of something that's already on the disc? Like we've seen that with EA games where a code comes with it to encourage you to buy it new to unlock things already on the disc, but this is where you have to actually pay. - It's not new, this has been happening. - Yeah, there's no deal to that one. - No, I'm not saying that this is new. I'm saying that this is just coming up because of the Bioshock thing. - Amy, that's a stupid PR. - I think it sucks, but like, again, it's the type of thing where we're voting with our dollars here. If we decided that it was bullshit and said, you know what? No one's gonna pay for this stuff, then they would stop doing it. - I think the way this works is that you have profit and loss budget for the main game. And then separately, pretty much at the same time, they have a separate profit and loss or probably towards the end of development. They have a separate profit and loss for the DLC stuff. And a lot of these times, I think with these unlock codes, they're not trying to screw people. At least I don't think so. What they're doing is they're throwing that on the disc so that if you do only have a 20 gig hard drive, they're able to throw it in there at the last fucking second 'cause they finished it on time and just throw it in there and do it that way. But I'm thinking this way. How hard does it do five to 10 megabytes of just ones and zeros? - This is what I'm saying. - How fucking stupid is it? - Maybe they're being honest. - Don't be honest. Why to us? - For fuck's sake, make us feel like we're buying something, even if it's an unlock, like 10 megabytes of garbage data or something. - Yeah. - Just make us feel like we're actually downloading something. - Hmm. - I don't need to be lied to. I think I need to be lied to. - So I'm unfamiliar. What exactly is the content in the workshop, too? - It's a new character and some new really high level perks or whatever they are. - For the multiplayer stuff. So nobody's gonna buy it anyway. - Point to Tyler. - Well, I mean, that speaks to the percentage of, like, the percentage of people who play a multiplayer version of a game more than once. - That's sad. - It's really low itself. - I've heard so many good things about that Bioshox. The multiplayer, the fact that I know it's playing so bad. - Well, with stuff like that, that's where EA comes in with Project $10, which I think is I've heard some people complain that they're mad that EA won't let them sell their games because you have to buy it new to get this stuff, but I think it's genius. - What is Project $10? - It's basically where they have a consistent stream of downloadable content that's free with a code that comes with a new retail copy of the game. - Oh, yeah. - Sure, sure. - It's a pretty good idea. - They started with the Madden League last year. - I mean, I think that that's a fine, like, I don't know if that's a fucking genius. - That's a great compromise. - That's a great compromise. - And so far in the comments, most people were like, yeah, that EA thing is like, it's cool. I mean, it's a good buy. - Yeah, the only downside is you lock out half the audience. We just aren't online. - Which is good because the used game market hurts the industry as a whole. In general, we, you know, they've been looking for a way to fight it. This is the best thing so far. - I know who thought of that. Jim's like in a meeting like, "I fucking got it, guys." - No, I mean, it's the application for Jim. - Wait, wait, wait, wait. Epic did that with Gears of War II. There were five multiplayer maps that you got for free with a new copy of the game. - Right. - That otherwise-- - It was the first ones to really do it. - That you couldn't get at first unless you had a new copy of the game. And eventually, I think they sold them for like 10 bucks. - Mm-hmm, yeah. - But I think it's smart because even if someone buys it used, they still have the option to get that content. It's not like it's like, oh, well, you'll never play that. You're gonna pay a $15 tax to get all this stuff to get away from free. - Which is fucking genius because fucking GameStop is-- - And there's such bastards for, like, if I buy a used game, at least price it low. Not this $5 below the retail price sheet. I mean, that's how it was even when I worked there years and years and years ago. And it hasn't changed. Like, that's just the way they do it. - All right, well, it's just because if you're going in there and you only have $60 spend, like, and it's only $49 for a new one, you're like, oh, well. - Yeah. - I wonder what's gonna happen. I wonder if GameStop will eventually make a deal with EA where they buy these unlock codes in bulk and just start throwing them in the used copies of disk. - That's still a win for EA. - Yeah. - Mm-hmm. - I kind of wonder if this is a way that certain publishers will try to get around. This is Microsoft specifically because I don't know that Sony does this around Microsoft's prohibition on free downloadable content. Like if they'll say, this is our customer loyalty program that's only one person gets it with this code. So technically, we're still kind of charging for it. So we're gonna keep giving this stuff as a way to incentivize new purchases. Like if that's a way that they can get around it, like all the trouble that Valve had as far as updating Team Fortress because they didn't want to pay all the submission fees that Microsoft wanted. - That's submission and certification. - Well, submission, certification, and then like just charging for DLC. Like, I wonder if that's a way to get around that. - We'll see if it works in a multiplayer scenario with battle. - I mean, there are so many free things for Mass Effect 2 already. - We'll see if it works in a single player capacity because Mass Effect 2 is about to have its first paid DLC. - Is that the one with the-- - The fire storm. - That probably raises the level cap. - No, the fire storm stuff, that's all, that's free, that's service network. This is a new character story. - So how do you guys feel then about DLC that's like store exclusive? Like for instance, in MAG where they had like this faction, you get fucking armor if you pre-order from this store, this store, this chain store. That fucked up MAG's balance because of course everyone went and pre-ordered it GameStop. - I think that's-- - So suddenly everyone played this one faction. - Yeah, that's a unique example. Like I haven't seen that happen with anything else. Usually it doesn't fucking matter what the pre-order says. - Usually because yeah, because a lot of times it's not something that's so centered to a multiplayer only game. - Like I think I got an Apollo skin for buying God of War 3 off Amazon. - Right, a skin has one thing, right? - Yeah, that's, I mean that's what, in Mass Effect 2, I got a specific armor that I'm not going to wear because, you know, your helmet has to be on all the time. And then Jay got a better one for ordering it somewhere else. - You could get some armor for Dr. Pepper. - Yeah, but realistically we're not ever going to wear those armor anyway. - Yeah, I have one of those sitting on my desk. I think it was some random piece of shit. - Yeah. - What are some reader comments? - Well, they're all random related to all these random topics we've been talking about. - For sure, bring one up. - Don't tell me what to do ever. - You know what-- - That's a weird comment. - Who said that? - That was actually your mom. - He's a really good poster. - Yeah, your mom would comment a lot. - I think I blocked your mom's IP address. - I should have. - All right, here I'll read one from Icefield since that's someone that comments frequently. He says, "I love DLC, but developers need to slow down. Let the desk settle a bit before flooding gamers with extra content. It's hard enough finding the time to play all the great games that have been released unless that even considering the time and money for DLC." - He's totally wrong. - I think he's wrong. - We're all shaking our head here. - Yeah, the dust settling is when you sell that game back. - You have to keep, yeah. - I think there were some developers that did a talk that says it has to be six to eight weeks. - Yeah, I was watching the Player Experience panel where there's this group at Microsoft that's tracking behavior, like that. DLC that comes out sooner does better. - All the competition in the gaming space is Mindshare. I guess the reason these people probably think like that I imagine is that they're probably the idea of all this shit. They're like, "Man, all the shit that they're giving me right away is shit that they just held for me in the first place." Then fuck those guys. - I mean, but I know for a fact with Mass Effect 2, they didn't even start developing that stuff. They did all the development for the stuff that went up initially in the 12 weeks from when they sent it to CERT to win it launch. - Awakening was development begun basically once Q&A for Origins started. - I think Mass Effect's a great example. The downloadable content definitely feels like downloadable content. That does not feel like main story quest of. It doesn't have the same level of care. - But the stuff with the ship where you go and visit the ship did feel like main storyline. In fact, I encourage people to go down like once you went through the opening to download that shit immediately and do that first because for emotional impact, it worked way better. - It's true, but it wasn't as important as any of the other places that emotionally it was, in terms of the art. I mean, the things that cost money in game development, it would have been an easier thing to make. So I like that. I could tell that I was getting extra stuff, but it wasn't taken away from me from the main game. It wasn't just something real. - It's from Demon OD. He says, "Free. This is his synopsis of deals here. Free equals good. Large and cost money. Still equals good. Comes too quick after main event equals bad. Free hookers. That's a good thing. I don't know. I don't know if I want to free hookers. - And a expensive hookers also. - If you guys don't like hookers, then I do that you can get something for free. - A mouse mouth. - I mean, somebody's paying, but if she's like, "Ah, I'll do this from on the house. I'll do this from the house. I'll do this from the house. I'll do this from the house. I'll do this from the house. I'll do this from the house. I'll do this from the house. I'll do this from the house. I'll do this from the house. I'll do this from the house. I'll do this from the house. I'll do this from the house. - You should probably cut that off. - I was trying to go with the process, which is someone who loves you no matter who you are, but I kind of took it a different direction. - You went to a dark place there, David Ellis. Can we get a couple more comments? - I was trying to go darker place myself. I was trying to think of something to do with somehow DLC and hookers both in raging. You would have to want to hit them. - I think we've talked ourselves into a corner. The art is just a big corner of SUVs and General Awards. - An example I think of DLC this year that everyone thought would be awesome. The kind of flounder would be a Assassin's Creed II. Do you agree? - Yeah. - That felt like cut content that was cut for a reason. - It's such an awesome concept, but it just didn't add anything to the story whatsoever. - It didn't make me mad. It didn't make me mad that the chapters were snipped during the game. That was fine. - I feel like it's a better game without those two chapters. It would be because those chapters don't feel like they have the same level of care as the rest of the game. - It's like there are directors' cuts of movies that aren't as good as the theatrical cut because the pacing isn't as good and that is one of those situations. - Yeah. I was pretty disappointed by those. Although I haven't beaten the second one yet and it does seem better. It does seem better. There's just a lot of good stuff coming in that's out right now. - I got about halfway through that content. It's just really monotonous. - Yeah, it's a bummer. I think if we're talking about DLC, we should go back to the Valve model for a second and say that those guys do fucking rocket the most. - I mean, if you're a PC gamer. - Obviously, Left 4 Dead was standing. The way they've treated Team Fortress 2 has been just wonderful and that community keeps growing and growing and that game is nothing like what the game it was when it was released. - And then there's Portal. - And then there's Portal. With what? - I mean, adding a new achievement and then basically teasing a next game and creating this ARG through DLC. That's just like Day Zero DLC that they don't talk about. They just put it out there. - Yeah, I don't even consider that DLC, but that's just brilliant marketing. - Yeah. - Just a great-- - Well, I think that-- - If you're into alternate reality games. - You hit on a good point there. I think DLC, in its core, is marketing. - Yeah. - I mean, it can be good game content. - Some companies grasp on DLCs marketing. - But it's marketing no matter what because it's all about trying to keep your mind share in that game and it's trying to sell you on that game even after you've purchased it. - I think some studios see it that way. I think other studios just look at it as another product. - I would later they all think of it that way. - Why are we waiting eight or nine months for Halo DLC? - Have you waited eight or nine months for Halo DLCs? - How long did it take for the first Halo map pack to come out quite a while? - Halo 3? - Yeah. - It's like five months. - I think it was longer than that. - I might be wrong, but I mean, they put out-- I'm not doing, you know-- - Shouldn't you know this? - It's a position for me, but-- - Shouldn't you know this? - No, I think they put out-- I think they're pretty-- I don't know the details. I'm not even going to open that can of worms. - Anyways, let's all wrap up this conversation with a few comments or at least one more random comment. We're trying to find a really good one, but none of them have come across as like a zinger of a great way to end it. I thought maybe that hooker won, but then that led to a discussion about hookers and-- what do you know? - Hookers is what I know. I paid for some really cool costumes in Dead Space. - Thank you for saying costumes. - I know. I thought you were going hookers on us. - I'm curious. - I know. - You bought all the Dead Space costumes, right? - Not all of them, but some of them are really cool. - Did you buy the Dead Space costume in Dante's Inferno? - No. - I don't like Dante's Inferno very much. - Most people are pointing to Fallout being like the way to do DLC as far as-- - How much were the Fallout expansions? - $10. - $10 every-- each one? - Okay. - This like Borderlands was $10. $10 feels like the sweet spot for me for DLC. - Yeah, I mean, again, most people like Twist. It says that they really hate the bullshit like 2K pulled to BioShock. This is a common recurring thing to the comments. Even though we all said that it's like just don't give it your dollars. - For some reason, the whole DLC on a disc really seems to be getting underneath everyone's skin. - It feels like they're insulting your intelligence. - Unlike other DLC, unlike other DLC, the cost of producing the content in BioShock 2 was covered during the initial development period. Otherwise, it wouldn't already be on the disc, and therefore it seems like why are you charging them? Like, it's not like this guy's arguing that we're not helping them make it or, you know, paying for work they're doing after the game is done. So why are we still paying for it? - They don't like artificial walls to content, I think is what-- - Right, anyway, I just don't think it's a new argument. It's been there since-- - And you're basically at all things down too random. I was saying use your fucking dollars. - Yeah, like, fucking don't buy it, don't pay for it, and then they won't do it anymore. - Yeah. - Stop paying for it. I think even the people who don't pay for it get mad because they feel like they're being deprived of something. - Yeah, actually, I doubt any of the commenters that have commented about this properly will ever buy it. - I agree, but then convince-- - But-- - Anytime you see your friend playing that DLC content that you know was on the disc, tell him he's an idiot for supporting that practice. - I mean, I would wager-- - I would wager, and I don't know this for a fact, but I'd wager that content would never be on the disc if it wasn't going to be sold separately, because it was probably developed using different funds in the main development house. - Don't put it on the disc. Just don't stop or make us feel like it's not on the disc. - Yeah, I mean, I think that's the thing. I mean, that's the one thing. I think you need a level of transparency. If what I'm saying is true and I don't know for a fact that it is at all, but if that's true, come out and say it. Say, "Hey, we finished it like this team that we put on it after the main development, finished it faster. We thought they would." So we decided to throw it on the disc, but since it's a separate P&L, the cost of the game doesn't pay for it. So we have to charge for it separately, but it was post of when the game was set up, sir. - Like I remember last year, the Resident Evil 5 stuff actually didn't bother me. Like, it was like a four megabyte downloader. People were like, "That's too small to be content." - And it was on the disc. - But I feel like it was, they used existing content on the disc to create new stuff, which is something that some things do. Oh no, I'm just totally wrong. - Give us an unlock code. - A four megabyte unlock code? It's needed to be a tiny bit bigger. - Maybe it was exactly what that crap you were saying. You just want something fake. - Until David fucking ruined the illusion. Thanks David Ellis. Thanks Microsoft. - See, they did exactly what you were asking for. - And I wasn't bothered until David shattered the illusion right now. - Shattered. - Doesn't that make you sad though? That all it takes is a little lie to make it okay? - No. - All right. - Let's close this shit out real quick and we'll come back with a few letters. - Righto. - Great. - A few. - Lies. - Few. - Few. - Lies. (upbeat music) - Bring it down. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Hello and welcome back to the letters. This one's called Ryan O'Donnell's Promises, Worst Childhood Memories. - What? - That's why I picked it. - Worst childhood memories. - My name is, hey guys, my name is Sam and I went back and listened to the call through the Game Club channel. - Oh good God. - And Ryan O'Donnell made a promise that Rebel FM would do a game club for Brutal. - A game club for Brutal Legend when it came out. - That hasn't happened yet. - But I'm curious if it will ever cause I want to play it and would want to play along if you guys did. - No. - Random question I thought of. - And this is all juxtaposed right next to each other, right? - He throws that in there and all of a sudden. - Random question. - What is your worst childhood memory? - It's minus from fifth grade when some kid was laying on the floor and I sat over him and being the boy I was had to fart. - So I pulled all the power I had to push it out as hard as I can and bluish. - I shit myself in middle class right over that kid's face. - As a side to that there was a guy with elementary school named Greg. He just pants in your glass. He was wearing white bag khaki pants. And as he's walking it out you can see this smoke monster poo working its way down his thighs. He's running out of room. - Oh man. - Oh. - He actually says he had to go to the nurse's office to get a new pair of pants. - There. - He just brought you back huh? - Is that guy's name Greg? - Oh yeah. I just said his full first and last thing on the podcast. Can you believe his past thing? - God damn it. If you're mad about the bleeps in this show, it's David Allison. - Yeah. But I just, I read that guy's email just because it was like that random kind of game. - All that stuff. - All of a sudden Jack's supposed about this fifth grade thing and then it ends with cats are for cool people. - That's true. - That's true. - It's ironically time considering we were just talking about brutal legend before we started recording. - Yeah. - No, we will never do a brutal legend. - You guys have a worst childhood memory that we do on the floor. - Yeah. - My friend Alex and I, my friend Alex Graham and I, I'll say his full name because that's cool. - I leave it in there. This guy's not on the internet. - He and I were standing sort of in your house. We were pretty young and he was doing this thing. He was like, suck. Muck. Ruck. Luck. Tuck. Knuck. And like, finally he got me to go like, fuck. And he was like, fuck man, I am telling your mom on you right now. I'm telling on you right now. I'm telling. And he started to run back towards my house. - No. - That triggers that moment and you were like looking for a stone to beat him to death. - No. I just started crying. Like I started crying like a little baby and ran back to my mom to try to like, uh, mitigate disaster. - He said fuck. - You said it. You said it first. He's like, I don't care. My mom doesn't care what I say. She wouldn't care, but your mom will beat the crap out of you. - Man, he's like the good son. - Jesus Christ. - Man, she should have grabbed a bit seriously. - And then another bad childhood memory is I got kicked right in the asshole by this really big guy who was a friend of my street. And you know what? That really hurts if you get kicked. - No, I didn't, I didn't bleed or anything, but man, I thought I was going to, I got kicked in the balls before, but getting kicked right in the asshole hurts a lot if you're bending over and then, boom, kicking the ass. - One of my worst childhood memories was there was two. There were one was all the big kids. My brother and all his friends were standing around with this park around a tire swing. You guys remember tire swings? - Oh, hell yeah. - Back when they used like real tires, like, semi-truck tires. So they weighed a lot. - And they were ball tires because it was like a little bits about it. - Yeah, and they weighed a ton. You know, and so they're all staying around in the circle pushing it, getting as fast as it goes. The candle was on it. They're just standing in a circle, you know, barely touching it as it comes by. And I'm a little kid and I'm like, I'm going to get in there. I'm going to smack that fucking thing. I go in there and that thing clocks me so hard against my head. I go flying and there's blood everywhere. Because you know, head wounds bleed a lot. Even though it wasn't even that bad. It just split the skin and all some blood was everywhere. - That's awesome. - I need to get another sound board of answers. You know, head wounds bleed a lot. - Just imagine my little ass running in there thinking you're going to be bad assing for all my brother's friends and then getting bludgeoned through there. - So, you know, I'm one of three boys and I'm the youngest. So I was always trying to prove myself to my older brothers. So my brother Mike had built this piece of shit bike ramp. And we were trying to make bets with one another, what was going to happen. So I was like, I'll lay down, put my head in between the ramp and where it lands. And you can jump over me. And he did that and it didn't make it. And it dug tire marks into the side of my head. It ripped hair out. It basically had a tire mark, vanilla ice, hair fade. I had to go to school the next day with that shit. - I'm so embarrassing. - I was begging my mom. I was like, tell me, we go to school. Come on, just let me be sick. She's like, you're never going to learn. She's like, you're the idiot who let your brother do that. That's why we're not even punishing him. Because you're the one that did dumb shit. You let him do that. So, land a valuable-- - Everyone has-- - Everyone has embarrassing childhood stories. - Oh, yeah. - Tyler-- I think Tyler's even told some if you go back and listen to the podcast with Robert. Or Tyler recounted football day stories. - Oh, yeah. - You play football? - Yeah. - Yeah, the coach used to just throw the ball at the back of Tyler's head. - Yeah, he'd send me out for a formation run. And before I even-- it was time for me to turn around. He would just throw the football as hard as he could at the back of my head. - Not gonna lie. I probably would have done the exact same thing. - Yeah. - Or the best way-- like he would try to time it from right where-- right when I turned around. So, like, I didn't even have time at all. So, Jim writes in and he says, "I would be braving my first gaming conference this month. And even though we've talked about our plans to go to PAX East, I thought we'd just reiterate it since it's getting closer. I was hoping you could impart some of your knowledge with regards to activities for under 21-year-olds. - Gee. - I will be turning 21 three weeks after the conference. I'm traveling with my 21- and 22-year-old friends in an effort to balance, not making their weekend suck and not hanging out by my cell phone and be proactive in getting some plans for the nights where in Boston. Any ideas you have will be great. We are two males and a female, probably up for anything. So, there is an IGN. - I'm gonna give you some ideas. - I love you. - I can't. - If you're up for anything. - It might actually be easier for you if they're drinking in your colonnade hotel. - And if you're really up for anything. - Oh, hey. - You really need to. - Is that where I'm staying? - Yeah. You guys, you're both staying there. - Yeah. - So, me, Tyler and Arthur are going to PAX East, and we'll be going to the IGN meetup thing Saturday night. And originally we were gonna be there representing Team Xbox and Game Spy, but that's not the case anymore. - We'll be attending the Game Facts meetup. - But if you're also looking for something else, you can come see me participating live podcast on Saturday. - Oh. - So. - No, there's not a Game Facts meetup. - Do other drugs that don't require you to be 21 years old. - What drugs require you to be 21 years old? - None of them. That's what I was gonna say with the fucking talking about. - I just heard this image from my head of a mushroom asking for ID. - Yeah. - No, I'm not telling you to do drugs. - But he just told you to do drugs. - Well, if you have a cold, drink some NyQuil, whatever. - If you don't have a cold, you could drink some NyQuil. - All right. So, this is just like a really short relationship letter. It's not even a really relationship letter. I just thought maybe we'd have some letters on the show. - Oh, I like relationships. - So, funny things to say, though. - It's really, really qualified to answer his relationship. - Yeah. This name is called his name, first of all. I like it. It's called additional pylons. That's his name. - We must construct additional pylons. - My life for iron. - So, he says, "Dear your love, Lion, what is the best way to get over an ex-girlfriend? We are both in our final year of high school and we see each other every day. I really want nothing to do with her, but I'm having trouble letting go. Any vice? - Yeah. - Love the show, pylons. Do you like her best friend? - That's funny. - That actually is my head pretty good way to get over. - Look, it's your final year of your video. - It's pretty awesome. - Both your sponsor are high school men. - See, you say, you guys say fuck her best friend. Tyler's going to say fuck her mom. - No. - Yeah. - Reply back. Is her mom hot? - I actually have... - Is he on jim? - Pylons? - Is her mom hot? Does she have crystals and best-being gas? - Yeah, exactly. - Seriously, find someone who's more attractive than she hated and talked about when you were dating her and date that person. - See, I have no idea. - It'll piss her off. - I have no idea. - Play upon her insecurities. - Totally. - You have the secret to fucking her over now. - We are bad people when David is around. - Yeah. - No, I don't. Like, who broke up with who? - It doesn't say. - I'm sure that... - I read the entire line. - If he's having problems letting go, you're all my advice. - But no, the whole point is that it's your final year of high school, dude. Just get through it and then you're going to fucking move away. - You're good, yeah. - You're way hotter girlfriend in college and come back your first break and make sure everyone... - Or Facebook friend her and then make your profile picture. - Holy shit. - You and your hot girlfriend. - Every picture with like all these hot girls at parties in college. - Or just make your Facebook picture you and a hot girl and make your relationship status. It's complicated. - There you go. - You don't even have to date someone to make her jealous. - I have no advice on this because every girl that I wanted to date in high school told me they just want to be my friend. That's another childhood memory. That's another awful child in memory for you. - That's unfortunate friends. - No fun friends. - Let me ask you. - How do you get over... - Did your relationships typically... - Oh, yeah. How do you get back? - No, no. That helps you get over. - Did your relationships with these girls typically involve like becoming better and better friends and thinking you'd work your way up to telling her you were a loved one. - Oh, yeah. - You've been telling her. - Oh, that's a classic. - And having her slowly squeeze your hand. - You guys are ready. - Squeeze your hand. - You guys are ready. - Shut up. - Shut up. Everyone shut up. - Podcast is over. - That's too funny. - But that is that is pretty much it. - Anthony and I have lived the same life. - I know. - I've totally had that situation. - She can't. She just got crazy eyes. - What? - A cat in Arthur's lab just got like crazy suicidal... - It's because she saw you looking at Arthur and she's like a crazy obsessed girlfriend. - What? - That's like staring at me. - Yeah. She's very protective. - Those are like zisude crazy eyes. - Even the seat bitch. - You take that back. - Yeah, sorry. - Nice. - I was going to read a letter about someone raging on us about our talking about the PlayStation move last week. - What'd you guys say? - We just said that it was like completely under fuckingwhelming. We just get like, I was only one of us that played it, but all of us saw it and we were just like, eh. - Not only that, but everyone I heard talk about it just said nothing good to say about it. - Yeah, and if they didn't have anything good to say about it, they didn't have anything to say about it. They're just like, eh, who cares? - I urge you to pay attention when Natal comes out. If Natal looks as bad as move did, we will say shitty things about Natal. - I will not say shitty things about Natal. - David cannot speak about Natal, but we will say shitty things, I guarantee you we will say shitty things about Natal. - I didn't play it, but I'm cautiously optimistic about it because I think the things they showed were super dumb, but like in real gameplay, it could be really cool. Plus Dr. Richard Marks is one of the coolest doctors that's in the gaming space. - Still holding on to the night. - You're excited to play So Comde Amiga? - No. - Nice to care for that. - Like I say, cautiously optimistic about real games coming out that use it, like I think the tech is cool. I think the controllers look kind of dumb, but you know, whatever, they look dumb because that's the functionality of them and they work, it makes them work. - Did you ever in your mind think that Sony would release a controller for the PS3 that looked dumber than the Boomerang they premiered it with? - Well, that Boomerang they premiered it with was like, there was a third party controller for PlayStation 1 that was exactly that controller, and I hated it. One of my friends had it. It was a third party thing. - Is that why they didn't do it? - No. - Or is it just negative reaction? - Because everyone fucking ripped on it. - And especially developers. But we had a controller that was that controller, and it was awful, and my friends used to try to tell me, oh yeah, it's better to play Wipeout with it. It's super nuts. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. This thing sucks. Like every other third party controller that's come before it was awful, I never wanted to touch it, and that one looked like it, and so I thought it looked dumb. So I don't know if I think it looks dumb or less than the Boomerang, but it's pretty dumb with people. - I can't wait till the porn knockoffs. - I think those are already out. - I'm trying to find a relationship letter for us to read. - Because we like making people angry. - But some of them are just like so long, like it's not that I'm opposed to doing it. We should do an all relationship. - Are we gonna run out of internet? - Just do one. - Let's do one long one. - I don't want to hear-- - I'm running joke today for some reason, running out of internet. I don't know why that is. - Okay, well, I'll read this one because I don't-- so I feel like a dick. I don't remember this guy, but apparently we read his letter in the past. - What's his name? - Harry. - Now you're on his kill list. - He did not remember that. - He says it is I once again. - That's what I heard. I was on [bleep] - Shit list. - Now with an update on the current relationship thing. So as I said before, in the Juneteenth special, I like this girl and she seems mixed towards me until several days ago when this happened, this is his update. I was recently involved in a play with her and a couple of friends and-- - Sounds familiar actually. - A couple friends and after the play, I go to get my headphones from my back so I can listen to tunes while I ride my bike back home. I walk in on this girl and my friend, making out. I then grabbed my headphones and left. My friend and I discussed it and I said I was cool with him and her, but I'm not. I only said it 'cause it's better two people be happier than none. - That is a very mature way to look at it. - He's been a complete asshole to her for over a year now and suddenly they're together. So my question is, what should I do? - Dude, you just answered your own question in your final sentence. In my experience as the guy who doesn't get girls until I got a girl but I never got girls, just be an asshole. Pretend like you don't want them. Like don't ever, ever make it clear that you want them. Just try to be the cool guy that sometimes is mean to them and eventually you will get the girl or that's the exact opposite of my style but it seems to have worked for all my friends. - I hear you also then supplements his letter and ask, but what if you can't do that Ryan? - What if you can't be the asshole? - Did you say Ryan? - Because that would be awesome if he did. Like he anticipated Ryan saying, what if you can't do that then or move to Japan where they're sorting out different. - But then Harry also supplements that question and asks, what if he's really been trying hard for a long time, Ryan, but things just haven't worked out over again. - My dating suit, I was very much like Ryan and Anthony, I'm trying to get over her David's comment which may or may not make it in the final sentence. - That's all I need. - I just blame you guys because I keep trying to like, I always try to say the worst shit just to like get a rise out of Anthony because I just go to that dark. - Is that may or may not be in the podcast? Was anybody else picking up on the fact that Harry did not add anything to his letters? - What was her name Sally? - I was just supplementing Harry's questions. - Oh yeah, yeah, I got that. - Because I'm a fucking failure. - Yeah, no, I got it. No? What? - Hmm? - Harry did not add anything to his letters. It was Anthony that was doing the adding. - Yeah, I just had an additional question from me. - I wish he had tied up his letter. - Oh, okay. - Harry met Sally. - I was about to like give a genuine response to that shit because I was just so Anthony asking. - No, that was Harry's original question was real. - Oh, okay. - Then all the rest was just me throwing shit in there because, you know. - Wait, the like the thing about her dating his best friend or whatever? - I was outside. - Okay. - Let's go one more. - I just confused everyone. - We have one more. - Chips, I'm moving to the barrier from Ben. - Don't. - I'm gonna, I was strong as I had to relocate to the barrier. I graduated with a degree in media. - If you say to get into the game's press and I've realized there are little to no opportunities for me here in Maine. - There is an opening at one up in video production. - From my time spent with you guys in podcast form, I've gathered that you guys all moved out to the barrier from other areas of the country. - It's true. - From all over the place. - Oh, but most of us from California, but you two are Southerners. - I'm Southern California. - I think I'm the only Southern California person. - They fought in the Confederacy. That's for me. - Ryan, could you stop playing your iPhone for a second, tell us where you're from? - I'm from Orange County. - Orange County. - Orange County. - Okay. - I went to school in San Diego. I went to Buffalo, New York. - So his questions, when did you live in Buffalo? - When I was very small. - So his questions for us are the following. Did you have a job lined up before moving out? How about finding a place to live when you got there? How did you guys go about the move and what are some things you would tell others to do? - Wait, is this guy saying he wants to move to San Francisco to the barrier? - No, he's not necessarily, he doesn't even know what he wants to do. He's just like, I'm thinking about moving out to the bay. - Oh, cool. Right on. - Tip agency. - But finding jobs is really hard here now. Like our friend, one of Cessar's friends is just going around trying to get jobs at Starbucks now because getting a job is really hard. - Oh yeah, the California's unemployment rate is like 13 percent now. - How do you better try to look in LA? - Yeah, I would say LA is slightly more happening now with jobs. - But let's say he was going to move to the bay area. He asked what neighborhoods would you say? I'd say if you're going to live in the East Bay. I would live in either Berkeley or in the Lake Bay area. - I don't know where he lives now. But I think the sunset is an awesome transition place to move into San Francisco because it's quiet. It's all by itself. - We're thinking of price as well though. - It's super cheap out there. - Is it? - Yeah. I paid like 500 a month when I first moved out here. - When was that? - That was like three, three, three and a half years ago. - When Jody and I moved out here, there's these apartments right in downtown. San Francisco that rent by the month. So we rented it for two months while we looked for our apartment to find a good deal so we could get a really good space. - Those are for businessmen who wants to keep his lady friends on the side, but doesn't want long-term commitment. - I like most of the areas of San Francisco. I just don't think you can go wrong. Find a spot that's cheap for you. I personally like areas that are-- - Yeah, I was supposed to declare the tender one. - I think Turk in like Powell, you can definitely go for all-- - It's a pen plan. It's an exciting place to live if you live there. There's lots of great food in the area, there's lots of great nightlife. - Crackheads dying on the street. - In a lot of the survival element to living there. - Transvestive prostitutes fighting over a $20 bill. - If you go to the tenderloin to look at places, you're not going to be surprised. No one's going to get the fucking sheep's wool pulled over your eyes. The tenderloin is the most beautiful area of town, it's simply not true. So move-- I like places that are bard accessible. I think that's a really nice thing. Okay, you should look at that. - Yeah, I think that that's true. Look for bard accessible, but if you're looking to live cheaper, like we do live in the East Bay. - Oakland and Berkway are cheaper. - But then you have to factor in the cost of riding that bard. - If you're going to work in the city, maybe you get a job working on the East Bay. - Claremont Pixar is an Emeryville, did you know that? - Yeah. - The Richmond area is really nice, but if you-- - Wait, Richmond? The Richmond? - No, the Richmond. - Not Richmond. - Yeah, the Richmond. - Okay, it's still clear of Richmond. - Yeah, the Richmond district. - The Richmond district in San Francisco is really nice, whereas there's one bus. - It's really kind of out there. - The city of Richmond was the murder capital of California for a good amount of time. - No, no, no, no. You really want to experience San Francisco. - You need to ride the dirty eight. - Yeah, exactly. And it's bad public transportation. It's just like-- - I still ride it. - I know. It's unavoidable. - You know what? I'd be willing to bet that it's better than the public transportation he has in Miami. - If he's a large beer-- - Oh yeah. - Man, he'll be fine. No one will ever bother with him. - I just mean he's probably not going to get a-- - No, listen. - He probably doesn't have a car--or maybe he does, I don't know. If you-- - Well, transportation is great in San Francisco. - The other part of his question was-- - Unless you plan on selling when you get here. - Yeah. The other part of the question was did you have a job when you moved here? Anthony and I both had jobs lined up before-- - I had an internship, $10 an hour. - I was moved out here. - That's what I also had. - For my job, so-- - Dude, IGN, move you up here? - They did. - Okay. - That's because the whole company moves, so that makes sense. - And again, like-- - Game Spice editorial team was moved up, yeah. - Temp agencies are something you might want to look into, simply because they usually pay pretty well in San Francisco and they'll get you all over the place and you'll sort of warn San Francisco if you're wandering around it for jobs. - So-- - I would line up a job first. - So-- - Or whatever. - You should also listen to our other friends' podcasts, the mobcast@bitmom.com, the Geekbox at geekbox.net. I don't know if you'll be able to hear me on the Game Spidey Briefings anymore. It's in limbo if that podcast is going to continue, but you will be able to hear me in Arthur on podcast this week, like the Game Scoop podcast for me at IGN this week and Arthur on Three Red Lights. - Which one up today apparently? - Yeah. - And visit me on area5.tv or on my Twitter, it's just Ryan O'Donnell, all one word. - Yeah, and then you can find me at twitter.com/chefmoney, and you can find Tyler at twitter.com/dirtyt, like the drink. - Who's actually been updating lately. - At twitter.com/agist, and you and my David on Twitter at twitter.com/DavidLs. - Yeah, and-- - Capital D, capital E. - Yeah, well I can be lowercase, it doesn't really matter. - Yeah, it's not good case. I'm going to try like next week, it's my first week at Microsoft, and I'm hoping that I don't get in trouble, but I'm hoping to kind of do a lot of tweets throughout the week kind of offering kind of real talk on my first day of orientation, and I don't know, I think it could be interesting. - Are you going to lock your account, David? - No, I'm not going to lock my account. Hopefully, I don't think it is going to be an issue, hopefully I still am allowed to kind of post what I want to, but I just, you know, obviously have to be a little smarter. I can't go out there and just-- - Can't bleep a tweet. - And salt, but you can't delete it. - I think Che does a good job of maintaining his personality on Twitter just fine. - Totally. - Right. - I have no towing the company line. - Well-- - That's him. - I'm kidding. I actually-- - Uh-- - Che is cool. - So yeah. - Che is cool. - We'll join you all next week. - Fuck Sony! - David Ls. - David Ls. [laughter] ♪♪ ♪ No one's gonna take me alive ♪ ♪ 'Cause I was come to make things right ♪ ♪ Here and I must fight for the world ♪ ♪ I must fight for the world ♪ [BLANK_AUDIO]