Rebel FM
Rebel FM - Episode 10 - 03/11/09
Freelancer Tyler Barber joins the regular Rebel FM crew to discuss the games we've been playing. After that the crew discusses a host of topics selected by our users, and concludes with a few of your letters.
[Music] It is Wednesday, March 11, 2009. Welcome to episode 10 of Rebel FM. My name is Philip Kohler. Joining me this week is the staff of eat-sleep-game.com, Anthony Giyegos and Arthur Geese. Also joining us today, freelancer Tyler Barber. Howdy. And yeah, that's it. That's all of us today. It's a smaller crew than some episodes and we've got a pretty weird, but still more man than you can handle. That's true. We've got a weird episode planned, I guess, because we're not doing just one topic this week. We're doing three and then we're just going to have smaller discussions about them. So we'll see how that goes. We've got a lot of user comments to throw in there. It's my head shaking. It doesn't translate well on the radio. Nobody can hear that. There's already a cat scaling the boxes behind me. Excellent. Why don't we just get going with what we've been playing, Anthony? I want you to start us off. Hold on. So I've been playing... God, what have I... I've finished Halo Wars, but I'm not going to really talk about that because I don't want to anymore. I've talked about it on the coming-up co-ops thing that people can see. And then I've been playing a ton of Killzone multiplayer with you. That's right. I'll send... Also, we were joined by Nick Suttner yesterday representing Sony and also Mitch Dyer, who's a freelancer buddy of ours. We were joined by Nick. Yeah, and we kept on criticizing and telling him it was all his fault that we were using Xbox Live for our chat program while playing on our Twitter channel. Okay, that is fucking shameful. We should explain that both of us have access to Bluetooth headsets. I do thanks to you. You gave me one, but I could not get it working on my PS3. It's totally possible that I'm just an idiot. 100% possible. Yes. Arthur seems to think it wasn't even that we had these Xbox Live, but we were basically just doing it out of convenience. And Mitch didn't have a PS3 headset. Yeah, that's true. So it was more convenient to turn on another console. And start a private chat there is what you're saying. It really isn't that hard. That's the thing. So I'm really sorry to any of our energy conscious listeners. Right. Sony's also hurting the environment. Not just... Their lack of robust chat support is making us waste so much electricity. For real. I mean, okay, so let's talk about the actual like process of playing multiplayer though, because I really enjoyed we spent a long time playing like over the course of the last two days, we've probably played eight hours. Yeah, we played a lot. But the thing that sucks about it that really got to me is that you can't create a like a party. We can't just group up as a party and be on the same team every time. Yeah. So we had to like go around finding a server that would let us choose what team we were going to play or before we were just joining and hoping we would be placed on the right team. Yeah, there was that as well. And sometimes we would be on opposite teams, but talking to each other through Xbox live. There's nothing wrong with that. Hey, our guys are doing this. You should come over so we can level up. I did when I was playing like against Phil. I'd be like, Phil, where are you? So we can battle. I wanted to... I kept trying to like when assassination would come up. I would try to tell Anthony to team kill the target on his team. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, it's really enjoyable. I like the way that they switch objectives mid mission like mid map. You do like five different objectives and then it's who's faction overall does the best. It felt like the map never maps never went on too long because of that because we were constantly switching up what we were doing on the map. It's certainly something I haven't seen in any other shooters. Console wise, this gen is something that mixes it up that way. It's always will pick a mode and then you go in it and then you're stuck in it until the end of the match. The only thing is that I wish there were a few more different objective types because as it is, there are just enough that you play through every single one on every map. Yeah. But I wish there were maybe some so that you might not play this type on any given map. It's been patched a couple of times. How was stability now? Because I know you had played before. I played last week and I had a problem where I quit out of the game and it didn't save my stats. Like I quit on the screen where it was racking up my stats and then it just didn't save those. Yeah. That's not that's been a non-issue. It wasn't it wasn't an issue the last two days though. That was like last week when I played. And me and Phil had a problem where our game crashed at one point but it was weird because then it didn't for Mitch and it didn't for Nick. It just crashed for me and Phil. So I don't know what the hell happened. Maybe it's the type of internet connection we have set up or something but both of us crashed at the exact same time and neither Nick or Mitch. Yeah. We were both in the same area. So maybe it's maybe I have no idea. Dude either you get a chance to to go back in a single player after the controls patch. The thing is is that I've played the thing with with both and I can't tell the difference but I think it's just because I already got so used to the controls the way they were anyways and if they if they fine-tuned them then it just feels much better to me because like I just got used to the controls the way they felt before kind of floating and stuff like that. It just didn't bother me. So I think I mean I think that happens for any game. I've played plenty of games from like many controls or balls but then eventually after a while you just kind of adjust what you know to playing that way. Have any of you guys turned down your sensitivity to kind of get a better feel for it? No I haven't turned down my sensitivity only because as it is I still feel like I spin sort of slow as it like it needs like faster uh what's that word I'm looking for where it picks up speed acceleration. Yeah the acceleration sometimes can be better. It kind of doesn't have a lot of good acceleration. I mean I haven't touched my sensitivity at all. When I play when I play shooters on 360 I tend to turn the sensitivity down with the 360 controller because it's got a bigger dead zone than the original Xbox controller had. So I might I might do that in Killzone. I haven't played enough of it to uh to really have that figured out. I'd like to point out right now you're not speaking at all like you sound checked. I just like you didn't know that. Okay this is Anthony Paul. I'm taking a next set. I'm just wanting you to project a little bit better. That's all. I'm going to project right near balls. That is hot. I'm just fucking with you. Uh the other the other thing that stood out to me um that kind of bothered me but was also I mean that one of one of the things that's supposed to keep you playing is that they have a uh a really long lasting unlock system where you rank up long lasting because it's so far in between. Yeah that's that sort of the problem is there's like 11 ranks that you can gain by gaining experience in the matches and um and then in addition to that by doing certain tasks in the matches like for example if you I think like there's one for if you get 20 points in a match and then don't hurt any of your teammates to get negative points then you you get a certain ribbon and if you collect enough of those ribbons you unlock medals that give you more bonuses. So anyways you unlock weapons, classes, all of that um but it it's there is such a long time between unlocks it's unbelievable. I kind of feel like uh you kind of get spoiled with games like Call of Duty because since Call of Duty uses like well I'm saying you get spoiled in a sense because Call of Duty uses real guns and so there's like a plethora of real guns they can draw upon and constantly be giving you new ones and you're like fuck yeah a new gun but as Killzone they only have like those like established like eight weapons so they have to space out the unlocks a lot more which sucks because I almost feel like just create fucking make up 20 more weapons. I don't even care even if they're not even playing. Or just some more perks or something like the the cool thing about the level up system in Call of Duty 4 is that there's consistent reward for play like you I mean like the first 30 levels you basically don't go more than two or three matches without getting something. I guess the difference though here is that in Killzone the upgrades you get make even a more dramatic difference in the play. I would argue then they do in Call of Duty. Yeah because you're in like ability. Full classes. Yeah when you get the ability to be a medic all of a sudden that completely changed the way we were playing like but I'm at the same time and it's like it's like they are cool because they're big but at the same time it's really fucking annoying playing for four hours and yeah well there's like in a way like it probably takes three or four hours of play just to unlock any new weapons and then you get like the SMG and shotgun and then for me it took almost like six hours I think to unlock the medic class which is the second class you get and then like I just I don't even know how long it's going to take to unlock everything else because it's a total of like right now I'm at about eight hours total of multiplayer and I have just under 500 experience and you need like 3000 experience to get the last rank. Yeah I mean I guess it just depends how much time you're willing to put into it because we've already seen people that are fully ranked out and yeah that's like that's the other thing is to mention it yeah we went into like non-rank locked servers and got to see people who had everything and it's just kind of crazy seeing like suddenly you're you're up against all these insane weapons that you hadn't seen these insane abilities there's people who can cloak there's people who can switch the skies themselves as a member of your team and it's it's insane and people are running around rocket launchers and throwing turrets down it does feel a lot like a like Team Fortress 2 mixed with Call of Duty 4. Yeah because you die easy like Call of Duty but it's like you have the classes of Team Fortress in the sense. It also seems a little odd that the unlocks are so spread apart because the rounds are really long since they have the four or five game types that rotate and but at the end of the match you might only have earned 28 points of experience you're like 34 and you mean it in the meanwhile you know you have 300 points here next summer. Yeah I mean if you want to level up though there are already people making servers that are like the equivalent of like Team Fortress 2 achievement boxes right like they're just grinding boxes to gain experience. It's just strange with me because like one of the evolutions of MMOs we've seen over the last like four or five years since wow came out as an emphasis on more consistent reward and faster leveling up than MMOs used to have and I mean Call of Duty 4's experience system was likened to MMOs and this is sort of a similar thing but for them to slow down progression instead of keep it a pace or even speed it up just seems a little counterproductive. Yeah I mean it's just like it's not even I guess it's just that there just aren't as many rewards Call of Duty like if Call of Duty was like Call of Duty in a sense is slow down or fast sped up but it's almost like getting from the highest like level 1 to 55 and Call of Duty is probably going to take the same amount of time as getting from like level 1 to whatever in Killzone it's just that there's so many fewer levels like it's like I guess almost it would have been better if they just made up like 10 ranks in between to just give you those. Yes it wouldn't because at least then you have the illusion of advancement. Well on the other hand though with the classes that you do have you know while you're waiting the long time between unlocks there are sort of little steps in between you know for example like you mentioned if you don't shoot any of your teammates and you get eight of those badges a ribbon yeah it'll get like a new ribbons or you unlock more ammo or and you know unlock more grenades and you know for the medic you unlock the healing packs but yeah the it does seem a little bit. I mean I'm not shitting on it like I will probably start playing it. I mean can't you not be it because you haven't played it honestly. No I haven't played I mean I haven't even played enough to really form a strong opinion either way but I'm not I'm not shitting on it I'm just curious. Yeah it's the reasoning. It's a little frustrating in that respect but honestly like I wasn't expecting to be interested in Killzone 2's multiplayer at all but I'm I'm actually really really enjoying it and I'm probably going to play a lot more so we have a clan. Yeah that's what people can join I don't know I don't know if there's like a way through Killzone.com to look up the clan I think there is but our clan is called Ephemeral Fantasia. Can I throw out my clan? The one I created this name is the best name in the world. Donut Fever. I like that I'm just saying I'm just saying in a way Tyler you're kind of already competing with our clan and I don't like that. This is a one clan show. Why aren't you on our clan Tyler? That's a better question. I just want to point out Donut Fever last night when I was playing I was talking uh I was talking to Anthony and I said something about our clan brothers and Amanda who obviously could not hear the conversation did not know what I was referring to got really really freaked out. Did you look at her and say you're safe? You're very white. Oh man. No I did not. I'm just kidding come on I'm half Mexican. It's like the self-loathing half. All the time like that skip from Dave Chappelle where I'm just like the hardest core clan member. So yeah we do really want people to join a femmer of Fantasia and get our clan up to the top 10 in the ranking. Basically yeah we need you to bring up our stats like we want really really good players who are going to poop socket. Do you want your you want Fantasia right us? No I just want everyone to come and join the Fantasia. That's what I want. Ride the fantasy. We have enough brooms for everyone. Yeah. Can I ask you guys something since you unlocked the medic class? If you put the controller in your lap you get it in a femmer of Fantasia if you shoot enough. Since you unlocked the medic class is that the only class you play or do you ever go back to a soldier? I've mostly been sticking to medic just because the only thing that you can't do it as a medic is you're you're stuck with just the two rifles. Right. I got a piece of litter stuck to our nose. Oh my. Oh sorry. As a soldier I've only locked the SMG and shotgun and there's very like so far from what I've played there's very limited uses for that like you have to be in a map that's very close range for those to be useful. But at the same time it's nice too that he's because he's the only one out of us four that's unlocked the medic and we always the first thing we do is I make a squad for us and so then Phil at least has that one person in our squad that can feel less when we go down which is nice too because now like it actually is cool that you can make squads like frontline feels awarded where you can spawn on each other. Call duty should have that it'd be so much nicer because it actually changes the way that I play in particular because I'm just it's changes the way everyone plays but I'm saying like specifically a squad leader like I'll know that like there's like there was that one level we were doing where there was that room where everyone was just like slamming into a meat grinder so instead of like trying to run in there and get kills I pulled back way far back like where we could see in the door and I was just throwing rounds in there but I was just doing that so I was like a spawn gate for our guys to keep pushing forward. Well the infinity war guys put up a Twitter for suggestions for modern warfare too and one of the most popular ones was the ability to spawn on you know some kind of squad leader. Don't you kind of do that and call duty for anyone not on a squad leader but you just spawn you spawn your people. I guess maybe just being able to pick your spawn point maybe people would like that but I don't know that can be dangerous too I mean kills them does a really good job with it because they keep people from being able to spawn camp by having the best spawn point having those turrets there yeah so people can't just totally. Have you guys seen people in your in your matches that they had the green smoke where their own teammates like it's like yeah I saw that last night I didn't know that that's what that smoke was yeah I saw that last night yeah well do you know how how that hat like that must be some unlucky good at some time. The name slips my head on the class but I think it's one of the later classes like general or it's you know one of the good that because that's really crazy because then like when you have a certain objective you can just set the set a spawn point so that your team can keep spawning on that objective which makes it a lot harder. I think anyone that gets kills on multiplayer should play it just the base game and work up some skills but then just for fun go and join like an all rank match and just go watch because it like has like more dramatic battles going on than the single player ever has like it is insane watching like 32 people 16 on 16 meet in a big old area and people are summoning flying robots and launching rockets and running at each other. I wouldn't say the I was in one match where it seemed like everyone on the other team had rocket launchers unlocked and it was just chaotic I mean yeah I mean to some of the maps it depends on the map to some of those level box ones we did were definitely not good for 32 people like it would just be like nothing but like everyone running into a room and dropping grenades as they died and blowing up so I mean I'm gonna I'm gonna throw out my PSN name is kefkaterin and I want you guys to add me to your friends list so that you can join a family I'm sure there is I don't have any though I will just as as you join and as I add you to the to the clan I will delete people off of my friends list so that just that you can get in the clan I'm saying we need to get you into femoral fantasia unless you can just send like a request or something to be I don't know I mean or either that or uh I guess you could try uh emailing me your names and I can just add I can search for clan members so email me your names or Philip because we're both yeah officers anthony is well aware of searching for clan members so wanted by the FBI I'm right right next to my google search for mine com I just want to also mention I've got a a review of the killzone 2 multiplayer that should be up on geek.com tomorrow let's uh focus since I already had the single player one this one's focused on just the multiplayer so please go check that out all right anthony please um and then uh beyond that I've been uh I've been waiting to play in pyro total war because every time I hear Roy talking about it I'd say waiting because it's a 15 gig download so it's a huge download well because it's so many different countries yeah so I've been doing a little bit of time but it's kind of like sieve you know but except you can totally do like crazy exploitation in ways that sound awesome like Roy's playing right now is the Dutch and she should be good and Roy's like been like uh the first thing Roy does is he goes and conquers india because india and people are ridiculously good at like making a bunch of goods for him to sell imagine that um and so I don't mean that in a racist way jesus christ I just mean that in the way that I man you're sensitive today faces you guys made I didn't I was trying not to make an oven joke god give me a break should I edit that out no I don't mean to sound racist I'm just saying you know like they are one of the world's greater expert or of goods right now and it's like true in that game too like they make it that way so the Roy's like exploiting india and then like going and like like I don't know just the way that he can like bully people into giving him like cities and stuff like that and also like ros like even a more fucked up dictator than I am like ros decided I don't know that I believe Roy's decided that Protestantism is the only true religion so like when he took over india he burned every like mosque there and just and just put up his own churches like this game allows you to do fucked up things on a level that sieve didn't even allow you to do which I guess is maybe part of the reason I find it potentially appealing so it's funny because I'm not like that type of person in any game like I play I always pull a game checklist more fucked up potential than I always pick the good dog like in bioshock I saved all the little sisters and Bolivian I always do the right thing but when it comes to these sieve games where I'm not like a particular character I allow myself to go down that more evil streak and then I'm excited to hear stories about this so then I was been playing more world of war Warcraft grubcats is like one boo bubble away from 65 yeah um and then beyond that I've also been playing a viva pinata with Arthur Kathleen oh yeah I want to hear all about this they started off the game level 11 um by the end of the first night we were level 34 yeah so that took us about an hour and a half because I yeah which is ridiculous man I don't know I I don't know how I feel about playing viva pinata too with you it's like work it's like you do this the first day I'm gonna fucking share crop until I'm ready to let you go and do I get some like an indent yeah I'm like a peasant from Europe that's working off my back at the same time you you got rewards out of it like you were like man I'm so low on money and then all of a sudden 2,000 coins rained into your pocket which I would then spend to get someone else something that's what I'm saying I mean there's a given I was a kept man I don't know I feel that thing is then now that you're 31 and you have access to all these seeds where you can plant all these plants and make all your money back and like heartbreak heartbeat but like I'm very practical about it I'm like we're low on money and then I would just like delete everything and just plant sand and then plant a rope like a fucking farm of cactuses grow those cactuses sell them back to grass now we're ready to proceed now that we have cash to farm our fund like so you know it was just like all right you guys I would just be like I'd plant a ton of plants in the back what are you doing I was like just shut up and water these keep them alive it got to the point where I left the garden I went I went on safari looking to trap pinata so I wouldn't have to look at what it put monstrosities he was wreaking on the garden and then like Kathleen would be like she still had her worms in her garden and I was like worms of the first pinata you get I was like gone delete so I was like then after that Kathleen I've taught Kathleen the the virtues of like she's like why don't want to get rid of them all I'm like you don't get rid of them all you get rid of all but two you mail those to yourself so that she's like no it was our cue of two of every animal should you ever need to bring him back and then it was fudgehog fucking season yes that we were succinctly there and raised fudgehogs like till they were just running around in the swarm in the garden and but they're good money too so you just raise a bunch of those good money in fudgehog fucking and then you sell those off once they're master romance do you move on to the next one so I mean it was I thought it was highly productive by the end you went you went Anthony's Anthony's what he can say about this is not that it was fun not that it was a good night but that it was highly productive well at this point what's funny to me is that he talked shit about achievements last time yeah but he's talking about how awesome it is we got levels that will mean nothing in anything no but the thing is is that they do mean something because in viva piñata unlike an achievement you have what is an achievement if you get points that you can stare at that's it no I get points that other people can stay there across all of my games in viva piñata how dare you even fucking compare the two because in viva piñata you get levels and unlocks in-game content like that's the difference you have access to more content in the actual video game nothing like achievements at all so now you have levels and now you can access all the things all the plants except for oak trees so did you did you guys play any without Anthony no no because I've been playing other things but so did this leave you like shell shot well at this point you know you can go in and he could start a whole new garden and have access to all kinds but the problem is now if I start a new garden it will be swarmed by eight million piñata and I will have no idea how I should go about maintaining that it's not that hard you just only keep the ones that you want what if that's bullshit when you restart a garden in viva in the first viva piñata after your super high level like that's where no one really realized that you could start other gardens and just be at the same level that's not bullshit as soon as you start all of a sudden it's like you have piñata invading like like a legion right but they won't they won't become residents because you don't have all the requirements met so only the ones you have requirements met so you can pick and choose the ones you want to be residents it's not that hard it really isn't there's something to show up based on an uncertain levels like they'll prow around and it's like yeah you just let them prow around you don't worry about them you just focus on the ones you really want it's stressful working up to high piñata levels is fun being tossed into high piñata levels is stressful well that's what Kathleen wanted so that's what I did Kathleen wanted to come in Kathleen wanted to breed variants and you're all fucking variants I know I said breed variants it's fine look how to do it online that's fine just do it but I mean the important thing was to get master room answer so that we could get higher piñatas I do my one my one favorite Anthony we have a story that whole time is that I don't remember what Kathleen bred but she bred some crazy piñata or said oh well you need to do this and he's all fuck I had no idea how to do that did you look online so now I hit the y button I mean what everyone knows the y for information well yeah but apparently you did not hit while I don't know how to do that I wouldn't have known I can go look for it yeah I think you're making shit up I'm definitely not making shit up yeah you are not the piñata scholar you think you are sir compared to you I'm a fucking piñata genius moving on that's what I've been playing no that's that's a good thing yeah I'm Tyler I want to let him have it so I got a chance to play a Resident Evil 5 and a Street Fighter 4 over the weekend wait like the actual Resident Evil uh yeah no and that that was uh it was it was pretty fun I don't know how to play that um a good buddy of mine just got a press copy from Capcom this guy I was creating a website with how did he get a press copy from Capcom we'll talk we'll talk about it off the air okay okay anyway um yeah and so like I don't know I was just running around like shooting you know it was a lot of shooting black people I ended up like shooting just end up like shooting at their knees I'm like running like the most racist episode ever maybe we need to reset this episode okay I can't tell if you're serious or not but we're not going back we've come too far it's all right it's all right we'll just keep going I mean yeah I don't know for a second let me pause for you Tyler it has really been that bad because yeah I didn't mean to I was just messing it's all right it was my fault too it was all downhill since mine com freely it's not anything crazier than you would hear on family guy it's a it's okay we're fine we're fine keep going though but um you know I don't know after playing a little while you know I understand a lot of people have gripes with the shooting controls but it just seems like a fun game like you know I like for a whole lot do you go by it probably for the cop because I want to experience a Resident Evil 4 style game with co-op which is what five is so I will bye god damn it what else are you playing Tyler you let her go and she went right for it like I said also played a story like we stopped this before I'm just watching her rib a packing paper now she thinks you're playing just stop I'll get her keep talking Tyler um yeah I got to play Street Power 4 a little bit but I'm not like too much into fighters but uh it was fun were you playing with friends then uh yeah yeah I was just over my buddy's house and he was just kind of showing it to me and uh you know it was it was pretty good uh which platform is this on the 360 and you know what I was using the analog stick and I was kind of finding it um a lot easier just to throw like fireballs and do yeah it's definitely as far as 2d fighters or 2d fighters go the analog stick is more responsive than it's been anything else that as far as those kind of games go but it's still not it's not an arcade stick yeah it's not perfect like I felt like I would jump um at times where I didn't didn't mean to jump that's bad so yeah that's not very good but uh other than Killzone 2 online that's pretty much uh all I've had a chance to play oh and I also played a little bit of the world at war multiplayer okay because uh you know I hadn't I hadn't played Call of Duty World at War at all and I just it's me it's everything about that game seems generic dude off brand Call of Duty sorry I gotta hate on that game dude it's my games I didn't mind it that much I did it was okay the only thing that redeems that game is the zombies mode and honestly Activision if you're listening a go to hell uh not all of Activision save that for the next segment oh good point oh god I should have said that at the end it would have been a great segue uh in B is that the zombie they should just take the zombies mode from that game and throw it on Xbox Live Arcade and PSN yeah that's not bad yeah I'd be more interested in playing that than you know try to get all the way through the campaign just to open it up so they patch that out you can play it oh yeah that's right yeah yeah that is correct it's still not worth me buying World at War mm-hmm I mean I play it all the way through World at War so it's not like I'm saying oh I just don't like Treyarch it's I didn't like that game very much and I forced myself to finish it I felt like I felt like you went into it with a pre-hated bias though too ah I mean I wouldn't have played it if I wasn't hoping it would be good I don't know in some ways I felt like you were do you knew it wasn't going to be good and you're playing it to to just yeah so I spent 16 hours playing through Call of Duty I mean to some extent they're on unhardened there are times a there are times getting grenade spam because I wanted to hate it there are times that both you and I have played games that we didn't like just so that we could say we finished it when we criticized it like what like lots of games that we've played that we didn't necessarily like but you play it because you want to be able to create when people critique it you know like did you finish it you can be a guest bitch I did show you that's the reason I review games so you cannot want to say mean things about them but also sound like I I'm allowed to say that those things will call well I should you know I you know I probably only played it you know 30 or 40 minutes and to me it just felt like the the multiplayer level design you know what wasn't as good as uh you know the modern warfare game that's great um a lot of you know especially on the spot on the smaller maps it's just spawned a death spawned a death the bigger maps in it though are fun like I thought if if it does have one read even qualities the multiplayer with the big big team battles are actually really I think you're just making excuses because you like the World War II weapons better no I just think that it's it's it's not a better game than modern warfare by any stretch of the imagination I just don't think that it's like a bad game by any means I thought it was actually pretty good like I just I still haven't played world it doesn't compare to modern war I mean I can lend you a piece of happy I have a copy the point I'm making is that is that no one should mistake that I'm ever saying that it compares to modern war because it doesn't but it's still fun in its own ways in a lot of ways and the big team battles in particular the modern war doesn't have it does that pretty good it sounds it sounds to me like basically like the major problem is just that I know I think a lot of people went in expecting this to be at least as good as modern warfare and I still think that Call of Duty 2 is a great game and the thing is is that I do in some ways like like the the satisfaction of killing somebody with the bolt extra rifle and more than with an automatic weapon I was gonna bring Call of Duty 2 up because I mean I loved that multiplayer and I played it for days and for real days in my life you know and and it's it's very different from a modern warfare we're called Lothar so everybody's name Lothar of the hill people was what it came from that's and so all of our clan names we didn't really have like a clan tag but everyone would be named something like like I like I totally Lothar'd your mom would be like someone's name and then like another person was named Lothar my eyes bleed dot dot dot why like just names it didn't make any sense and so we'd all just join in together and people would kick all the Lothars like because they would know us when we'd come in and just kick us I guess see I modern warfare is the first Call of Duty game whose multiplayer is actually really interested in before that I just wasn't I don't know man I just feel like yeah I mean that's what I'm saying like they did a great thing with Call of Duty 2 I just in some ways you're right that I do find shooting some of the bolt extra rifle like like when you shoot someone from a big old distance with a bolt extra rifle it is rad I don't know I mean that's why I think people sometimes find so much satisfaction in modern warfare using a bolt extra sniper rifle and stuff it's got that same sort of feel except every gun was like that and Call of Duty 2 again modern warfare is is the best is superior one just not terrible the other one's not terrible I just be happy I to be fair world at war is a better game than Call of Duty 3 was definitely I just bet you buy leaps and bounds but it's still like I didn't there were there were parts that I enjoyed but they were always overwhelmed by the parts that felt cheap and like they weren't very well designed and I mean even in the single player of Call of Duty 4 there are plenty of parts that if you play on hardened or veteran feel cheap I didn't there was nothing in Call of Duty 4 that felt as cheap as a lot of parts of war as cheap okay well we're going into great including enemies that spring out of the ground we're going into gradients of cheaper well that actually happened and I understand that that happened but still okay I don't know I don't even know how we got on this discussion this one a long time for world at war which only which Tyler only played I guess I guess you know it's it's just a conversation that's important because me and Arthur never had a chance to talk about it and we both did beat it so that's fair um Tyler do you have anything else that's all okay Arthur uh I finished Dawn of War 2 on single player or I beat Dawn of War 2 there were still missions that I could have done that I didn't um Dawn of War 2 good Dawn of War 2 good introduction to RTS game for people who are not into RTS games yeah called Co for Babies by Rory the guy that I play games with all the time multiplayer he says is like is like not very satisfying for people in Co that like to like micromanage the direction that it tanks facing and shit like that I mean it really is it really is stripped down but I think for a lot of people they're going to find that much more inviting I feel I was extremely daunting yeah and I don't know I just accessibility was a big problem with company of heroes and I maybe they're just they don't like it that they don't have as many options to run around all over people that they didn't go no I mean there's plenty of options that was the problem they said though is that it was so easy to run all over people in Dawn of War because it because it's involves so few or things that there's easier to find exploits that really work but I mean I'm interested to see I haven't gone online since the the beta just because I've been more interested in the single player campaign I mean just did a different game hero play with heroes in every unit and stuff that completely changes the way that people play and stuff so really it's just a different game but it is very stripped down for company heroes but that's not necessarily a bad thing it's just you have to go into it you don't go into it expecting oh this is from the people that made company heroes I'm gonna play a company heroes game involved in 40k no it's not that and I mean since we both finished it I think it's come to it's come to our attention that that the stuff you get in the some of the rewards you get in Dawn of War are randomized like I definitely got items that Anthony never gotten it changed my style of play whereas he got certain items that I never saw that let him blow through parts a little more yeah I mean that's that's sort of the where the diablo comparison comes yeah where there's a little bit where there's very randomized there are very specific loot at times as well yeah there there's that like the Terminator there are three sets of Terminator armor total in the game so you have to make choices as far as who's wearing Terminator armor and you'll never have enough for everyone okay so you have to decide if you want your hero to have it or if you want to give it to your squads and decide what squad you want to take and at the end I only had one squad that wasn't level 20 and they were a squad I never used just like that's the case for most people so it's not that Cyrus didn't seem cool he's not as useful that's exactly what it was there's a unit in the game that basically you'll play and they'll be eternally worthless throughout the whole game I mean I'm curious to see what expansions they have because it's I mean you know it's only a matter of time before they release like an elder campaign yeah I mean that's very typical I mean just like the last dawn of warhead such a long life I'm sure this one will have extremely long life of them releasing expansions what do they want to have like four or five expansions four I think four I think was it four yeah well four expansions five games total yeah maybe um I don't remember that I mean there's a lot of armies in 40k so that's the best little thing I mean I'm curious about dawn of war like I don't think I asked this before in one of our previous discussions but is it actually interesting at all from maybe I did ask it like if you don't know shit about it but no is it actually interesting at all from like a plot point of view I mean it it does have a plot and it is that plot to move the gameplay forward but it's it was interesting to me a first thing that's read some 40k books and stuff is a shameful human um but uh I mean there's a lot of there's there's a there's a really cool fiction behind it but as far as story goes and the game it's it's pretty light the characters and the characters are pretty cliche there's like the guy that's like the gruff and tough guy and let's see that's that's too bad just because I mean obviously I think especially the first part of starcraft 2 makes it out this year I think dawn of war 2 is going to get a lot of comparisons to starcraft 2 and yeah I mean I know that starcraft 2 plot wise like starcraft that's one of the reasons I love the original starcraft was the story I thought the story was actually really well written and engaging yeah I mean as far as like any game getting its plot compared to like a blizzard rts game it's like not fair blizzard actually is like the only company in my opinion that makes rts single-player stories that are interesting and also I mean the the Diablo stories were never all that special and that's true again those had a great fiction but not great stories so in a lot of ways I feel like dawn of war almost compares more to like Diablo tactics than it does plus I mean in a lot of ways yeah comparing dawn of war to starcrafts can be totally different because in dawn of war you don't build units and yeah starcrafts still very much a game about yeah I just meant like on the core level like as a sci-fi artist oh yeah for sure I mean visually there's a reason you know I mean starcraft ripped off 40k yeah so yeah although at this point they've managed to to come up with enough interesting characterizations and histories for their races that they oh yeah don't get me wrong fuck man I'm starcrafts like the game I'm the most excited to play for the single player in a long time so but it's going to be a throwback after playing I'm kind of glad that it's not coming out around the same time as dawn of war because it's gonna feel it's gonna feel like a few steps backwards because I mean there's just not a lot of micro and dawn of war like you're not constantly babysitting your units it's more babysitting like you're overall standing on the field you mean starcraft well now in dawn of war there's not a lot of micro is what I'm saying whereas a lot of micro with your individual units pushing them behind cover using their individual abilities that's micro well yeah but no micro in reference to clicking 200 times a minute to get all your units very specific spots and all that yeah I mean it's a different type of micro it's I when people think micro dawn of war is not what they think of I don't know when I think of micromanagement I think of stuff in company here it was like changing the facing of a tank and using special yeah see when everyone else thinks micro they think okay well I need to have four drones to harvest and then I'll start a hive and then I'll do this and this and this and then I'll have for everyone else I'm fuck you that's that's sort of true that's what that I don't speak for everyone else no I don't speak for everyone else but that's what the the the idea of micro is an RTS games just because you don't think that it is I all the people I play RTS games wouldn't are not I would say both of those like both of what you're talking about I mean I understand it I understand that you and Sean Elliott are company of hero elitists and I really like company of heroes too but if we're going by sales numbers company of heroes is sold dick in comparison to those not anything command and conqueror starcraft no but those that's what people that's what micro is when people think of it in RTS games well what well would you say that the that the AI and don of war is capable of sort of taking care of themselves a little more than maybe the AI and oh that's the AI has personality and don of war yeah I mean they they jump behind cover and jump out of the way grenades and I mean they've that's been one thing relics always strive for is making units right so so about themselves so in that way I could kind of see what you know what what you're saying Arthur about not being as micromanaging I mean unless micro is god damn it my fucking assault marines decided to teleport back into the fray after I told him to leave I better go grab him again but uh like I said I guess it's just a different type of micromanagement one is about how fast you can click ones about like the way in which you use the very few clicks that you do you use I guess yeah that's I when I when I I consider company of heroes and don of war more tactical but what else are you gonna play uh in that segue into halo wars which wasn't necessarily a kind segue but um I think we've we've touched upon this but basically if halo wars really like it I do I really like I really like halo wars even though apparently I'm one of the only ones because when you sign on there's only like seven thousand people playing online like which is not anywhere near like any other halo game has had but uh I I enjoy halo wars for what it is and I enjoy it as like part of halo cannon even though it kind of shits on halo cannon and uh like the I the graphics are good and the missions are fun and the the objectives are fun but it but it doesn't necessarily should on halo cannon by the time it gets to the end well yeah but that's the important part to know I don't know I just for essentially you meet the flood 20 years before the first halo game so that's that's taking all of the accepted halo cannon and saying oh well there's this other thing that happened again you have to get to the end where they can explain everything yeah is it happening on harvest yeah okay well then it kind of makes sense then yeah so well no it doesn't like it starts on harvest and then it bounces all over the place you know of course I mean these guys were being watched by halo people so of course it's like any star wars thing where it's like they consult the lore and they're like all right well to explain this away we'll just have to do this in the story line and and they're interesting they're interesting mission conceits like there's the defend these transports in these civilians long enough to get enough of them off the planet within this amount of time which was really a major bitch of a mission but it was still a cool idea um there's a mission where you're running around on a on the whole of the spirit of fire like trying to clear off flood infection forms and defending its covenant and every three minutes this cleansing beam from the ring world you're on will streak across the hole and take out any dormant flood so basically you have to get rid of all the flood and you can you have to have as many flood pods dormant as possible while that thing goes by and it'll also fuck up all your stuff so I mean that's that's fun and and I like the way that the flood the covenant like work against you but there are so many things that it does not well like the pathfinding is some of the worst I've seen in an RTS ever every time you give a unit an order everyone stops and like pivots for a second and then starts moving and there's no match the a button while they're running to stop every time you push it yeah there's no there's no attack move or retreat so if you send them in you have to hope that they'll attack or if you try to retreat you have to hope that they'll leave wait there's no attack move that's isn't yeah there's no like you can't say like move and attack or attack everything on your way to the spot oh yeah oh wow and there's no retreat which means I stop firing and leave so you'll try to pull your units out and they'll go and if you click on a specific area of a map it's almost like well I want you within a screen distance of that map and you can attack everything from that area and that's caused me to lose a lot of units and in the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter because you can still win losing a lot of units in that game but it's frustrating coming from any other RTS where your units have value yeah I mean I still like the game but I have to be honest I'm glad I didn't pay for it I mean yeah I I I like it and it is yeah I like it for what it is but as an RTS it's almost like they they simplified things that they shouldn't have because it makes for a less a less compelling game and a more confusing game because you have less control and they didn't simplify other things enough so but the cinemas are awesome yeah if it does one thing right man has like way better looking cinemas than even the halo game had yeah I mean the halo three cinemas were an abomination in spots yeah yeah but uh I mean in the presentation is awesome and the interface is great and like snapping between bases and units is pretty good and I mean for halo fans it's definitely still like fanservice all over the place and it's actually like you can throw yourself against things and not have to like do too much strategizing like you just have to know what to build and what to do and and on normal anyway I haven't played it above normal so and I'm going to give it a try online a multiplayer just to see what it's like but uh but yeah and then I finally I broke my peggle cherry today oh yeah because it came out in Xbox Live because it came out Xbox Live and I mean I'd wanted to buy peggle about tonight a while back but are you like even though you already owned it on PC yes the multiplayer is fucking great oh there's I've heard the multiplayer is there's four player multiplayer I've heard it has a ton of maps and I didn't want to spend money there's so much there's so much shouting going on over the mic and yes there's four player multiplayer online huh yeah so the way that the way the multiplayer works is that at least in the in the peg party mode which sounds like some kind of weird gay sex party at studio 54 um basically everybody takes their turn at the same time and you hit the y button to look at everyone else boards oh what nothing what did you say I said shoot to the glory hole I was throwing in sexual reference oh once you said peg party and you said you're sexual then my mind I mean do you know it already plays I don't know if anyone else actually knows what pegging means but I don't know is that talk about yeah no do not do a google search for pegging I want it well that is my warning to you and if you do it looking up now if you do it you get mad just know that I said you don't want to look up pegging especially with safe search off um so so everybody goes at the same time and you have 13 seconds to make your shot and then at the end of each round it compares your your scores so so it sounds it sounds not good or I mean it doesn't sound especially compelling but in practice it's a hard game to sell to anyone that doesn't know what it is that's so good like a weird pachinko luck game and they're like fuck that it doesn't honestly like when when peggle sells itself is at the end of the round when ode to joy kicks in and it like zooms in on your ball that's when peggle clicks is when you realize that you're in this crazy universe with a unicorn named Bjorn with ode to joy going on in the background and then there's dual mode where everyone takes turns on the same board trying to get the most points and all right I'm sold even even after being unsold earlier you naysayed peggle because I forgot that there was multiplayer yeah because it was just a single player again then no and that's that's why I waited because I was gonna buy peggle months ago because it was on sale and then I saw that the live arcade version was gonna have a bunch of multiplayer and stuff and I was like fuck so peggle all right I wish I was playing peggle right now you will be soon okay uh so are you are you done yeah that's it what are you been playing Phil um I checked out a lot more dragon quest vibe of course um I'm gonna give some minor minor spoiler warning here it's pretty early in the game but at about the 10 hour mark like I like I was saying last week I got the feeling that you start off as a kid and I got the feeling that eventually you kind of like jumps in time and you grow up and this happened to me finally I like the 10 hour mark you're playing and it's just the sort of this generic fantasy thing but then suddenly uh the game takes this really sudden turn for the serious and uh you and this this prince who you're traveling with get kidnapped and your dad dies you go from whimsy to holocaust over the course of 15 minutes see here's the thing your your dad dies and you get kidnapped and then it jumps ahead 10 years and for 10 years you've been a slave building this awesome it's Conan the RPG you've been a slave building this church that's like uh dedicated to this evil cult god that really is Conan the RPG it's pretty fantastic and it was it was just very unexpected and then of course you do like the whole you have to break out and then you're traveling the world like searching for the legendary hero who can bring down this evil cult and I'm assuming at some point you probably find out you're the legendary hero but I don't know yet I'm not that far philips my legendary hero thank you I don't know what i'm supposed to do for you now but we can talk about it during the whole savior world i don't know i i mean i'm familiar i it's been called that before i've not i've not seen it since i was a little kid so but the game is fantastic and i guess the best thing i can say about is just that i've been spending a ton of time and it just grinding like more than i need to and what is going on between don't mind don't mind the sex on the couch i'm sorry i mean this cheers this thing squeaks a lot it is it is squeaking a lot tyler is a very attractive young man it's very flattering drinking water is amazing everybody should check it out i'm probably like 20 hours in now or something jesus and wow a stupid amount of that has been spent just grinding and like chilling out and listening to podcasts while i grind and i've got a bunch of monsters in my party now which is awesome it was actually really interesting because amanda is playing it at the same time and uh she's she was at the same point as me but had not got any monsters and when i got to that point i already had like six different monsters join my party because it's completely random when a monster joins your party it's there's like a random chance at the end of battle of them asking to join you that's red what monsters do you have in your party Phil uh right now my main monsters are i have a poke a man i have a heel slime which can heal and i have a drag color is the heel slime it's blue cute it is cute and i have a draggy and then i have a restless armor which is like a just armor ghost armor thing that yeah it's pretty awesome party okay do you like scratch like a crack addict or something what he's restless yeah i guess god damn you Phil and your lack of understanding killing my joke i think you killed that joke okay i also played a bunch of uh retro electrical i have a lot to say about retro game challenge other than that it's just amazing at capturing that feeling of nostalgia if you grew up playing NES games which i did like this i guarantee you this will transport you back to like sitting on your living room floor are you playing retro game challenge for fun just for fun yeah and it's yeah i i sunk a lot of time into it when i probably should have been playing other stuff you're gonna make me buy that goddamn game why don't you feel cool i will lend you my copy when i'm done with it i need it sooner than that you should buy it then it is really excellent um and also Anthony we broke out the sonic ultimate genesis collection which you forgot to meringue up oh yeah well i think it i i forgotten intentionally you blocked it out wow that's sad no i didn't it wasn't bad actually but i i well okay the sonic ultimate genesis collection is not bad the games that we played on it might have been were awful that's the thing about any time you play like old collection games or you find like an emulator and you download a bunch of the games you used to like you play them and then you're just disappointed a lot of times okay so so give me a rundown what what did you play on the ultimate collection my cat is chasing them off we spend a long time playing uh dr abatnik's mean being machine which is amazing uh that that was like dr mario basically yeah and that one that one was good but then we decided to have some other stuff um we wanted to unlock zaxon so we we were playing uh decap attack which i had never heard of it's where you're a mummy and you throw your head at things right yep you are correct wow i had a fucking genesis i know these things when we had that eternal champions discussion a couple weeks i was like yeah fucking eternal champions yeah it's a robot kickboxers i'm sure back in the day if we'd played decap-tech like as a person known to genesis i think we would have had a different light on it maybe no no you would have thought it was dumb then too i don't know i mean i would it's no booger man i liked a lot of stupid things back then i might have liked it but this was it was really bad platforming that's all i can say and then i i don't know what else we played Alex kid um how many Alex kid games are on that disc and there was only one that we played and i can't remember which one it was well then we played kid chameleon as well chameleon was was kind of kind of interesting and um it was bad like the premise of it is that you're like a kid with a leather jacket and big ass 80 sunglasses or what would nowadays be hipster sunglasses and you're like uh you look like one of the kids in the sandlot and yeah and you're like and there's this arcade where people go and into virtual reality and the owners uses the game to make them into slaves oh except one kid kid chameleon this game is from 1992 by the way that's pretty good the genesis game i really want to see any compilation and i just haven't his chocken and man that game was fucked up i don't even know what that is it was based on the comic where you're like this like voodoo dude with swords that like fucked shit up and they were making they were doing a sequel to it and it got canceled i think it got did you ever see the the second legacy of king game the one where you were cane again the one that was really bad yeah yeah that started as like the sequel to chocken and got co-opted in something else the last second genesis game i ever bought was lethal enforcers with two guns for 1999 from kaby toys when the second genesis was going out that's my story anyways the genesis collection is pretty awesome i mean there are a lot of games and it's it's cheap but there are also a number of pretty awful games the alix kid game was not awful but it was just weird because none of us had ever played an alix kid game before did you yeah the thing is is just i find anytime you go back and play collections or old game sorry to interrupt you was that uh it's just that you you never end up playing more than a few minutes of anyone game like it never sucks you in like you used to let's see but i feel like if you're in the right mindset i feel like that's that's how retro game challenge works for me even though it's not real old game but actually i mean that's how i felt when i was a kid and i'd be at a friend's house with like eight million games like i'd play something and say uh okay i want to trust something else uh okay i want to trust something else like having that overwhelming sense of variety is sort of intimidating it makes me want to jump from game to game you should check out the uh angry video game nerd on on his sights and a massacre he just put up a video of his NES collection he has almost every NES game ever made well i thought he had every NES game because not everyone i remember that one time we were talking to that guy on the phone i thought he told us they had every single one he has very close and uh this includes unofficial then like non-Nintendo licensed ones like the tangent cartridges the black um and i used to have people that were in the navy whose family would bring those back like rbi baseball and shit it was a black tangent cartridge gauntlet was a tangent cartridge yeah he has so he has almost all of them and he was just he just did a video that went up a couple of days ago showing them off it's pretty intimidating and it would probably cause that same problem for you i don't know i wouldn't even be able to pick i wouldn't i just used a femoral fantasia i would i would walk in and then i would look down and i'd look and i'd look away speaking of a femoral fantasia we need to take a break so ampony you just got your haircut today tell us about it i uh my haircut was cut by a lame lady oh wow because her name is sumi so my mind combined words it does that sometimes um so her name is sumi goutieras which is weird because she's like six years here from japan but i just thought it was weird her last name is goutieras i mean she obviously married someone one of my distance cousins like um another mr. from in spain yeah so uh but i mean uh she was very nice and then she kind of asked me like she was talking to me about how my earrings were so big and then like my hair was so long and i was like yeah i just had a job that didn't matter about that and then that came into what i did and i told her i played video games you know when you're recounting this conversation which i only heard from a distance that kind of sounds more intimate than i than i thought it did well because she pulled my hair back to wash my hair it's uh she was cutting his hair she was gonna ask about his hair yeah she pulled my hair back she pulled my hair back well she pulled my hair back to wash my hair because you know i had such long hair that i had to get that done and she saw my earrings she's like jesus did that hurt and i was like no and so i explained whole process to the fair you have horseshoes stretching my ears you know and uh and so then yeah then she just like flat out asked me like what's the difference between american and japanese games and i was all uh i was like that's a loaded question that's where my book slowly came down to my head slowly came with our like really really bad broken english like because like i was speaking english but you know she she is good english for a person that came here only six years from japan but it's just not she didn't know how to say certain things so it came down to us deciding that the major difference was that japan makes cute things in japan america makes violent things that was our conclusion so because she was like pointing out games like catamari and stuff like that and i was like yeah and then we were talking about and then she's like you know and then in america you got games where like she's like what's that car game where you wreck the car it's just like how bad you can wreck the car and wreck it into things and i was like i don't know burnout maybe and she's like maybe so you know and then we the sounds like burnout and then we talked about uh like the handheld games that she was super into because that's what she mostly plays like she said she owns a psp so she can play lemmings and uh and i forgot what the other one was yeah she was cool can we get her on the show we we could get her on the show she uh she then she asked me about piracy and stuff too because she wanted to weave it she didn't want to she didn't want to have to buy a american we in a japanese we so she wanted to know about mod chips and then she wanted to know if there was a way to copy games so i was like why are you asking me why you wear a wire so yeah why why would you want american in a japanese one i don't even understand why that would be an issue because there are certain games that only come out in japan for the way that she wants maybe yes so um we should get her on the show and then get her arrested all right anyways our deportation special i just wanted to ask you about your haircut i didn't know it was going to lead into this but that was good it's a less magnificent quaff than it than it was but it's it's still beautiful it is beautiful it's more manageable i'll still run my hands through his hair any day hmm i had to decide right then whether i should take that further or let it let it down that's good i didn't sit where it was that was good uh all right so we're gonna we're gonna talk about a number of different topics this week we're going to start with uh these were recommended by our uh people on twitter yeah so we i've got the user name series because when we don't plan ahead we rely on you people oh well we just wanted to know what people wanted to hear us talk about so this one's from twitter user jss lifelike he says what are your thoughts on the idea that activation and need to have switched places with act with activation taking on the role of pariah amongst the more enthusiast gaming audience do you agree or disagree um so yeah why don't why don't you go start off taylor one i think pariahs kind of like taking it too far with calling like ea being a pariah yeah i think that's that's maybe a strong word for it more like the the really rich douchey guy at your high school that i think that's good at you and fucking i don't like i think that's too far too no no i totally see that what's uh what's the activation ceo bobbing coddick yeah he always comes off that way to me oh i was talking about ea sorry oh no no not ea they're well that that's that's the premise of this question i guess that ea is ea used to be that way right and in the recent like the past year and a half or two years they've kind of switched places and ea is more doing more of the uh yeah it's the popular kid that ea is the popular kid that quit the football team and then and then was less successful and then his parents got laid off oh no that's sad so we're just gonna use i like this though we should use high school analogies for everything we talk about pain pain every podcast um yeah i mean i i i activision bad i mean maybe not activation bad but activation um raping and pillaging for profit as much as possible i guess i mean i guess back when i was uh not playing you know nowadays i try and play everything that comes out that's you know considered good just that i can have a good understanding of everything but before i was doing that there was a time when i like just basically wouldn't buy ea products just because i felt like uh they weren't doing good things for the industry was this around the time of the ea wife story yeah yeah this is around that time and uh i like again now i'm playing kind of everything but i do feel like if i wasn't that i would maybe be leaning towards that direction with activation do any of you guys feel that way yeah i mean i i'm not a big activation fan i mean ever since they just like have gotten more concerned with pumping out like a call of duty and guitar hero all the time and they've like have that budget wings of their games where they release like these shitty budget games under the activation label that are terrible i have a buddy who worked at activitions budget label did he make history channel games he he did make history he was involved in the uh he was he was just qa but he was involved and he taught he told me stories he was a good german all right let's let's read uh that sign was priceless let's read it a comment here revost a lot says it's like activation discovered cocaine cocaine cocaine cocaine being the figurative symbol for the action of rehashing and when they tried it the first time they liked it and decided to do it more they like it so much that they turned into deceiving friends and family for capital gain to buy more cocaine and that's so good eventually they're going to reach a plateau and that cocaine is going to run out that's so good or they're just going to be found in their office because then when activision realizes that their cocaine's run out that just fall back on meth with just blizzard blizzard more like crack i don't know it's like yeah it's like super addictive like i guess it's more like black tar heroin you could try it once and be addicted i think i think that to the metaphor cast one day they'll just walk into activision's audience and they'll see them like face down in a pile of cocaine so they always have blizzard to fall back on i'm imagining more of a scarface scenario at the end where oh man i'm just having images in my head of like the greatest activation earnings call in history where bobby coddick is just on the phone all of a sudden you hear like doors breaking down and gunshots okay that answers your question no well like uh well we're having a discussion yeah okay so like let's let's talk a little bit more about where do we where do you guys think ea started turning it around because it was it was very subtle for me but i realized like at some point i think when i realized it was early last year or or maybe maybe just the year before that but i realized at some point that i actually had started liking ea as a publisher and really enjoying a majority of the games they put out igniting when they started announcing a bunch more of uh their unique ip's as well i mean uh they they at the time they were announcing things like at the time when i started to like them it was because they were announcing things for the first time like army of two and mass effect dead space and dead space and uh i think i think it started when fight night three came out is when people started that was the first ea game in a long time that i i'd seen that people were excited about and critics seemed to really like and it was really innovative and people were into the idea and also i still like d_a_ when they were making games like black too there was like a few things like yeah you know uh you know to me uh another you know sign of a light on the horizon for ea was even far back with their lord of the rings games like the way they were able to make really really good licensed games and um i'm i'm really surprised that you know i haven't seen ea do anything with that sort of like same engine like the combat in those in those games were amazing the the levels well they just recently released uh i forget what it's called lord of the rings conquest or something like that which is like a modern version which is totally garbage and sold really well for some reason i thought it was more like a battle front yeah it is a battle front um there was one other game there was one game that was released on the same engine as lord of the rings games from atari it was called demon stone it was a forgotten realm steamedy game oh i had no idea yeah i've got it and it's not especially great because it doesn't have co-op but it was a cool idea um i don't know i think when it when it clicked for me that maybe ea was becoming a different company other than peter more leaving microsoft to work for them was uh when the sports division yeah was when they delayed army of two actually yeah yeah that's right that was a big deal yeah because they probably could have squeezed army of two out during the holiday well they well they had it already they had it already they didn't their view and they didn't already gone out yeah and they didn't even though they probably could have marketed that game in such a way that it would have sold well i think that that holiday there were opportunities for that assassins creed comes to mind because it was reviewed very poorly in a lot of circles but still sold really well because the advertising is reviewed pretty well it like averages like a 7.5 i think which is way lower than people expected the assassins creed to get but i'm saying a lot of the bigger name places guy gave it a high enough score that it would have been okay yeah but i mean the the point is like even amidst review controversy assassins creed did well and a lot of people attribute that to marketing and i feel like ea probably could have sold a lot of copies of army of two in that that christmas era or that christmas period with with really heavy marketing uh nikji in our comments says i think that ea is now becoming a company that can understand what the enthusiast gamer wants variety and quality sure they make sports games year year after year but at at this point they have to looking back at the past year there were many games that caught my attention i think this year is going to be another great year for games from ea brutal legend rock man beetles etc although he brings up the sports games here and says they still have to i actually think ea sports is going to be one of the lines this year that we see kind of getting cut back a little i don't know i feel like ea sports is like the only thing that's funding their ability to make things like i think i think last year the sports games actually started selling a lot worse than yeah i know they're uh the man didn't sell as well the problem with the madden games last year's they could be though that they sell worse but they're still not selling like they're still making money i have it so i'm just they only sold a hundred copies of madden i'm just saying because the problem is is that is that i mean like those other games like dead space and stuff i don't think they've i mean i'm sure they've cleared the million market but i'm saying i'm saying they didn't perform necessarily like for the budget that went into everything you know it's a little questionable and the decrease in madden sales is at least in part attributable to a virtual disappearance of ps2 sales uh of their games like the the ps2 madden isn't really selling anymore and that's possible so i don't know yeah i mean i i think that if uh if ea keeps releasing games like a mirrors edge to a dead space too and they don't perform as well as ea might hope we might see a stop being the a that we really like and that's that's sort of the problem and i think one of the things we have to talk about is like you know we we are talking about this from an enthusiast standpoint from a critical standpoint ea has become much more well-liked than activation but from the point of view of making money activation is clearly winning out on this and that's why they become so much bigger um so so we have had trouble i mean they've had trouble making money with this new this new uh their new approach which i mean john rickatello is saying that his approach to to new ip is that he wants to lay the foundation for long-term goals instead of destroying their brand credibility which is something i think that they were approaching before but in the meantime it is costing them money and i we actually had we had some really good comments that were that pointed out to that in the meantime it's costing money in the meantime we're in a recession and in the meantime they're still a board of people that he either can change that decision they are publicly traded company um but uh there were did you want to i don't i'm pulled on i'm still looking through these um at the same time i mean you know i believe that some of the titles you know like we keep bringing up dead space that seems like a game to me that has really long legs and and uh you know can have strong cells you know a long time after uh you know kind of like grand theft auto you know sell strong every month so yeah i mean uh especially if you go into like game stop like the used copy of dead spaces still relatively expensive compared to you know another use game that was released the same month electrics uh says the only thing that's keeping ea less hateful is the fact that their partners program puts the development of games with the dice criterion harmonics and other reliable names with ea taking some of the credit because their logos on the box i think that's a little bit harsh i mean obviously ea is still ea is still pumping money into these and we've got to give them some credit for that it's not just because their name is on the box they're actually putting money into these projects but the partners program is huge i mean i think that is a big deal like yeah like what is a isn't ea working i can't remember i mean remember gunness ea's working with epic on what like uh yes like a multi-platform ip using unreal free i thought it was like uh another like uh from the guys that made uh like uh painkiller i think it's like they're working with those guys or something yeah that yeah you're correct so and they're also working with um uh aren't they working with grasshopper manufacturer yes yes yeah so as part of as a publishing agreement but i again that's part of the partners program yeah i a big big step for ea i don't know that i mean criterion isn't a publishing partner criterion is owned criteria yes um so every move that criterion is made in regards to their content way they give stuff away by ea as well yeah so this this guy didn't actually name any partners i mean but rock band and and the orange box and and left for dead are are good examples of games that ea's name is on that they didn't really have a lot to do with but i don't feel like people are giving ea a ton of credit for what left for dead is doing or what rock band is doing like they harmonics is the name that we associate it's is the associate with left for dead i don't think they are left for dead ea published left for dead did they i remember seeing any elo when i start that up as well no i love it dead they there is no logo on it but they did publish it right they did publish it huh well i'm asking if i can question myself i was like wait they did didn't they i just didn't realize i mean i got to do with vlog box but i didn't know they did yeah no they're partners and and they're i mean i can't think of any other publisher that would have done that like would have kept such a light hand on it because everything else ea has forgotten there uh when it's valve as well true so mike mike says the saddest thing about activation becoming a pariah is i think the hatred that spills over to upstanding companies like blizzard five years ago the announcement of three full starcraft games would have elisted euphoria now it brings up cries of sellout and accusations of charging three times for a single game yeah and having gone to blizzcon though like honestly never even once occurred to me that this is because they're part of activation it occurred to me that it was more like when i had that brief thought was like this is because blizzard only has like three ip's and so they need to milk it for all they got yeah at the same time then i you know then people learned about how long the campaign is and how much work is going into it and i think most people's attitudes changed well i don't know i don't know that most people's have but i think that until blizzard fucks us they have the benefit of the doubt like yeah there's never been a time where i felt screwed buying a blizzard product and i mean people who have been forking over upwards of a hundred and forty dollars a year on their wow habit don't feel screwed over yep so uh let's see here summit saarkar saarkar summit yeah he's from the destructory yeah he's from destructory he's from destructory he's a cool guy hopefully i didn't mangal your name but uh he brings up some of the different he's he basically said that what we can bring this down to is the different attitudes of the ceos who've been talking about john rickatello for ea and bobby kodick for for activation he says rickatello has gone so far as to come out and admit ea's past transgressions like at dice 2008 when he denounced the buy and assimilate model regarding their prior consolidation of studios since he took the company's reigns in early 2007 there's been a market change in the kinds of games they've published as well as strategies they've employed this is a company that used to be vilified but they've taken chances on new ip such as dead space mirrors edge and henry hatsworth um so and i also like that he brings up henry hatsworth is really interesting like that they are continuing to push out new ip's this year as well even though they've been struggling with it a little bit and then they also come out recently and say like oh we can also release games in another time of the year other than the fall you know yeah they're i mean they're part of the uh the sort of movement towards realizing that there is people should release games in the goddamn summer that's what i think for real like any other time besides right before christmas yeah i mean in effect i wish they would have released like mirror's edge at sometime before right before christmas like mirrors it or after christmas yeah like february was kind of driving a lot of monies well yeah i mean in it's just it's just unfortunate that they're only now realizing that because i think publishers like 2k demonstrated a couple times in 2007 that releasing a game with less marketing behind it could sell well like they did with the darkness and bioshock the other thing that that he brings up which i think is interesting is because he has a he has a sports gamer much more so than any of us in the room so yeah he does bring up his sports and he said that actually the attitude has manifested itself in a renaissance of sorts of the a sports under peter morris guidance um he says a sports developers have engaged gamers in all kinds of ways such as the new inside ea sports blog they've also given promised community sites unprecedented access to the development of their games so they can take feedback directly from the hardest of the hardcore gamers and implement it into their games to give their fans what they truly want so apparently this is this is showing through in the sports division as well even if the sales are slowed down yeah i mean uh i think uh peter morris also done a good job whether or not he spearheaded or you know but when he came in is when it all changed uh that whole all play thing has actually been pretty well received even people like that are hardcore enthusiast sports gamers have actually said that they all play games are actually pretty fun so i think there's there was one comment in particular or a couple comments in particular i i was interested in just on the point of of devil's advocate for activation is that ea and activation are both publicly traded companies and ea got their teeth kicked in earnings wise last year whereas activation was one of the only major publishers that actually made money and they made a lot of it i mean so here's here's what i guess of what it comes down to then is do we think that this new attitude free a is eventually going to pay off are they going to end up making more money than they're losing and then also as like a sort of follow up to that it would they possibly be making more money if in a better economic time and this kind of leads into the next question as well i suppose yeah i'm sure that they're making everyone's making less money because of the economic time but i don't know i'm like cautiously optimistic that they can make money on this in the future but i'm still scared that people won't buy enough of it that it'll like to the investors come off as like this is a great plan what i'm up with yeah like what i'm wondering is cat will they be able to stick with this for long enough to make money or are they going to get scared at some point like halfway through 2009 are they going to be like oh god it's not working let's start pumping out sequels and and licensed products now i think i think last year is when um is when they had pretty huge rnd outlays because they last year was the year where ea really said okay well we need to have fully competent versions of all of our ps3 stuff um for all our games we need these to be the same on the ps3 as they are on the 360 we want parity feature wise and graphics wise and performance wise i think the money that they spent in in researching ps3 development and the money that they spent in developing engines that could be used for both platforms isn't money that they're going to have to spend this year i don't think they're going to spend as much money this year so hopefully i guess we're all hopeful yeah because we all i mean i really like what ea the directions the ea is going yeah and i and also i mean i think that's important for us to point out yeah i mean i think i'm not as big of a fan of activation like i'll be upfront about that but also like i still love a lot of activation products i mean i'll buy modern warfare too yeah i'm definitely by modern warfare too i'm curious about a lot of other stuff they're putting out as well i can't we'll see what happens with the guitar hero games this year with the kind of one twenty six different guitar heroes cues coming out that kind of want guitar hero Metallica because i'm a filthy whore definitely a filthy whore is there is is there anything else activation published coming out this year that's interesting not that i can think about something i've been i'm sure there are i am sure although they've also given up a lot of stuff like when when the uh the merger happened they gave up a lot of interesting stuff like that's gone to other people now such as ghostbusters game and riddick and just a lot of random things brutal legend i'm gonna say this right now if activation gets in the way the brutal legend publishing deal with electronic arts i will lead the internet revolution against our corporate offices so help me god oh and of course also i mean we we forget this of course but starcraft activation so oh yeah barely counts as activation all right let's go to the next one here uh twitter user our bristo too he says how do you think shrinking budgets and industry cutbacks will affect games and gaming this year how will finances affect you as a gamer in particular i mean i think it's clear how they've affected us already i love is like talking like so are we gonna are we gonna get resident evil or i'm like talking about i don't want to buy peggle it's ten dollars uh that's a burrito that is a real that might even be two burritos if you're careful or two talkable trips advice if i spend it right i'm just saying yeah i mean the reality reality of is it is that everyone on this podcast no one on this podcast right now has a job and so i mean all of us are having are now considering our game buying habits differently like i know that you recently went in and like bought games but even that was like uh you were like yeah and up some games but it wasn't i had i had like a uh a card that i had a gift card for game stuff that i had left over from christmas and um i had been just kind of holding on to it because i was like i want to wait until i really want to buy something and i was very like going back and forth on whether or not i was going to get anything yeah i mean i i got used to working as if and uh having money like disposable income to the point where any game that came out that i wanted i just went and picked it up it wasn't even like i hesitated now i'm like like picking and choosing yeah i mean like my last game my last job was like between 40 and 45k or which isn't a ton but it's enough to it's enough that when you're living with a roommate yeah i mean as as like someone without family obligations or anything like that it's enough to live comfortably and buy a bunch of shit that technically i don't need yeah whereas the shear is definitely that's not the case like i'm definitely glad that right now we're in the middle of a console cycle rather than at the end because if there was consoles coming i would definitely have to pick like one to go with like right now if i could even do that like i couldn't even buy a console you would pick your side in the console or i mean honestly like one of the things that i am thankful for that i think is probably going to be affected by the rough economic times is i think there is going to be longer now until the next round of consoles comes out and that's to me that's a very good thing like i'm very okay with that yeah me too i mean i i was i mean you know i was resistant to even buying a next gen console like a 360 at the time like because i had my ps2 and i was pretty dedicated to it and i had so many games for it yeah you know it's just like it was oblivion stories that's holding me yeah i just i just don't want to i'm just i right now i can speak like for a lot of people out there probably i am not ready to make a financial commitment to like for controllers in the system and everything all over again anytime soon yeah so and also you know we were talking earlier about the classics and how you know when we were young we would play you know games that we might not have liked very much just because that's all we had well it's sort of like we're going back to that now where you know i'm i'm you know i'm returning to games that when i was making a lot of money i just didn't even play to the end through you know and just like going back to them because like i got shit to play i feel like in that respect we've been lucky because in a lot of ways this console generation has been an embarrassment of riches there have been so many awesome games that all came out at the same time that maybe we picked up yeah i don't know maybe people will see uh some sales of games that never quite got a chance pick up i don't know if you'd like to nominate your game for game club i'm just saying i'm just saying like maybe out of those games that have dropped like 30 bucks and stuff like that that's sold pretty well off slowly like we'll pick up i don't know because nowadays like that's definitely like there's been a couple games that i've seen come out and i'm like uh maybe when it drops to 40 i'll get it like i just i have become a more conscious buyer video games were one thing that i always just kind of was uh frivolous with and not anymore so how about moving into how it's going to affect studios and like the developers are making i think we i think we've you can read katakware joystick every day and see how it's affecting studios i mean we see clear notices i just said to uh to you before coming over here um i saw a story today about how warhammer online shut down 63 servers today 43 in the u.s 43 in the u.s and then 20 in europe wow honestly like was just crazy and you made me feel bad you can say part of that's like people giving up on mmo's but i'm sure that there is a portion of that that's people that's like i don't have 15 dollars i'm gonna spend every month of disposable yeah i mean like half of it is people going back to wow and the other half is right but i'm just saying yeah there are obviously people that are probably canceling their netflix accounts and all kinds of things just um i'll make i i didn't make this prediction when we did our prediction show much like no predictions got made that show but i think game tap closes this year uh maybe i mean they i mean they close their editorial arm to save money so we'll see i don't know how much it really costs i just think it's because like turner has so much other stuff leveraged and so many areas that are affected by unlike uh warhammer where they need like full-time gms and stuff i don't know really how intensive game tap is for people they had to pay licensing yeah for every game maybe i'm just i'm just not sure how much it is i mean i'm just curious you could be right but i don't know uh Trevor england says i think celebrity voiceovers will be going out the window i've always wondered how many people a delta birk voice pushes over the line to purchasing a game it seems that this can be cut completely not a fair reference i agree 100 why do we need celebrity voice actors i don't care i mean like as long as the voice acting is good it doesn't matter yeah i think we've already seen there are plenty of people that look like terrible chids that are probably amazing voice actors who don't get enough of a shot yeah like i mean look at i mean let's look at GTA 4 i mean they had some celebrity voice acting in that right but the like the main characters in that weren't really celebrities i think we're we're not seeing right we're like the guy that does the voice of prince of persia a guy that does the voice and then charted like those guys aren't celebrities we're not seeing the spectacle of voice actors anymore it's not like Bruce Willis is starring in this game or Samuel Jackson is in this game it's like usually and like i don't know it seems like usually when they have celebrity voice actors they're awful too yes like they don't know how to voice act in a video game yeah i mean voice acting can be challenging if you've never done it i'm sure it's not the same method as a regular actor i think we're getting to the point though where there's a good steady cast or a steady stable of character actors that like can do good game voices like Ron Perlman does a lot of stuff like tenor's and does a lot of stuff Ron Perlman's one of those guys that just does like everything like Ron Perlman i'm pretty sure you pay Ron Perlman like ten dollars in a cheeseburger and he's like already your voice record on your game and then he'll go make it a win get like three million dollars yeah you can get him a cheeseburger yeah i mean the show i mean well he's totally willing to do not so great movies so that's what i'm saying Ron Perlman's everywhere i mean it's everywhere he was the beast easy Mac says shrinking budgets and industry cutbacks will eventually result in a smaller selection for consumers but it will take a while for this to trickle down to gamers as a whole see it's only been about six months since the world realized that the economic shit had hit the fan not enough time has passed for the inevitable title delays and cancellations to really affect our choice at the retail counter this is something i've been worrying about and i'm wondering if if and when we're going to see this because i do it does feel like a lot of studios are closing a lot of stuff's getting canceled it at what point is this going to start showing in retail and that like there's just a lot a lot less games i think uh you can say it'll show in retail as far as like a store like game stops concerned but i still think that there's going to be a lot of choice out there for gamers they're just it's not going to be the same type of choice as like studios like spider monk the ones that make that uh that rugu game that i really liked yeah you know like they're one tiny studio game ten people but they can make something that's really unique and cool and they'll do it as like a downloadable pc game like i still think that we'll see like a lot more actually actually development teams like forming small ten man things and making like steam games or private internet releases easy mac did say i'm hopeful that budget restrictions will lead to 360 and ps3 seeing more experimentation and download only exactly i think download only in a lot of online pc games like things like world agoo i think we'll see some of these teams that are being laid off going and forming like five or ten man things realizing that these big studios that soak up millions of dollars making a triple a title it's just it's just not viable right now i mean if you factor in iphone games there have already been more games published this year than possibly last year i just i just think that like a you're right a retail presence it is going to change it's going to be a lot different for what you're going to go out and buy for a 360 or ps3 but i still think that if you're if you're in the know the choice of games out there is going to be pretty substantial i do think that you they're going to be some some cancellations where people are sort of taking it back and are surprised by them yeah i mean that won't surprise the name it's just the money's not there uh call me sarge says his biggest fear is lack of patch support especially now the ps3 and xbox 360 require patches almost as much as the pc patches are in the column of does not make money on the finance guy's spreadsheet if relics company furos tales of valor valor comes out with broken multiplayer balance and we have to wait months and months for a patch that is going to be a real kick in the nuts yeah see but uh relics actually one of the companies i think it's good about constantly working on patches like they have teams that are constantly relics a bad example as far as that goes because they really do pump out patches like all the time and and they're smart i'm yeah but i really cast so few games that they know that their lifeline was like relies on continued sales although a real example for him like but in general do you like is that something i mean i think he brings up an interesting point that is something we could see getting affected i guess it depends if how much they're going to support that game with patches slash downloadable com i don't i don't think game viable i don't think relic is a bad example simply because they're tied by a rope to t hq and there's a lot of worries that t hq could could go out of business this year yeah the t hq goes out of business relics like one of the few studios i think the t hq has that wouldn't have to worry too much i would i would hope not i hope um but yeah and then there's also like free dlc i think we'll be seeing a lot less of oh and for sure i mean i possibly dlc in general hopefully uh we won't see anything like the Tomb Raider model though where they're like christa dynamics we're making little money let's release half of our game is dlc later on something i'd like to see is people experimenting with price point on retail games i think that they've been putting it off and yeah it wasn't there's something recently written like about how someone was saying that the sixty dollar price point like is kind of ridiculous and that there that there was actually a couple big names that were saying that like dropping it down to 40 or 50 wouldn't actually be yeah no i mean i'd be great not a 40 or 50 just for certain games like uh they were actually on on listen up they had a discussion about about this last week i think and they they said how something like 50 cent for example the new 50 cent game the new 50 cent game is a lot of fun but it's not it's not a game that most of us are going to spend six months but about forty forty dollars maybe pick it up every podcast i've listened to where they've talked about blood on the sand it said i really enjoyed this game it shouldn't be sixty dollars yes i mean i play games like that all the time i mean gamers in the uk should be prepared to pay more for games this year because as of now in nintendo because of the i think the weakness of the pound are charging more per week to retailers than they were great so the question is whether or not retailers are going to eat that or if they're going to raise the prices on on the hardware so the way he doesn't get a price drop this year in uk it's a price that's the whole thing is the other way doesn't need a price drop as long as people are fucking buying them but you know that like going back to what you guys were talking about with like the patch and everything i think um a lot of games suffer especially from budget with unnecessary multiplayer um i i would like to see more games in the future not have multiplayer i mean darkness i definitely agree with darkness i mean even games like prey if that was an aid game maybe i don't need it multiplayer just wasn't really good at some point there just needs to be someone that comes in and says your multiplayer sucks out the window yeah like i mean kate lynch is another example and again that might be a case where they say like okay we're gonna we're gonna cut multiplayer of this completely but then we're gonna charge $10 less for the game exactly and that's okay that would be to awesome like i'm i'm fine with games just being a single player and then i'm charging a little bit less and i mean you might we might start seeing more multiplayer only games too because the single player experience can cost a lot more money to craft and a multiplayer experience i mean i'd be okay with paying $40 for multiplayer only experience or what if i even i would i would even be curious to experiment with the idea of paying $40 for a single player retail experience and then if they had a $20 multiplayer add-on like later on wait on the line i think we're actually going to see that soon anything i would be like okay i might give it a shot today the story broke that resident evil five trophies have revealed a multiplayer mode that isn't in the game yet that is sort of like a left for dead add-on to resident evil people do patch in things like i know that i think total war is a game that came out recently and it doesn't have multiplayer right now they're going to patch it like it's like it is something that people are going to do all right i guess that means we're moving on to the next question because you all looked at me is that so we're that was cutbacks and now we're talking about games uh twitter user dave dray says what are your thoughts on use games how do you feel about game stop amazon and toys eros and their respective use game strategies and of course with the economic situation that we just talked about and then we're always talking about um obviously a lot more people i think are going to be looking at buying used games i'm going to try the amazon service i shop on amazon a lot but in general like even amazon i started to feel guilty about in a lot of ways i feel like amazon is the internet's walmart like they may not treat their people badly but amazon's putting a lot of people out of business i bet you know just because they are so convenient for a lot of things which isn't necessarily to knock amazon it's not their fault they've came up with a great fucking idea but it's just like sometimes i kind of feel bad but they're also broadening the audience for product that might not have been there before again i obviously use amazon on a regular basis just sometimes i kind of feel like you know but but as far as these products go i will buy them if it's like the only one they have because for certain things like man tetris ds that's the only way to get it but like even the other day when i went to go buy civilization i didn't want to buy a used one but they didn't have a new one like it says like you know i will do it but in general having met the people that make these games sometimes i feel like i want to support them with this yeah and i was talking about arthur this little and like for me it's i've never really bought used games i mean i do every once in a while like you say but in general i try to avoid buying used games especially in situations where it's like i bring a new game to the counter at a game stop and they say you know you can get the used one for five dollars less and i'm like i'm not gonna save five dollars and then not support the people who made the game yeah and sometimes i guess it's dependent on the game too like if it was a guitar here or something sometimes i might do a fine five dollars fuck i don't care about supporting guitar here there's enough of it but when it does come to something like arthur and i did specifically go out like i specifically ignored getting certain games in the game giveaway so that i could go support the game like a little big planet i went out and bought even though i didn't want to because nick told me like i should support and i was like you're right like you know there there are times that i will do that like avoid getting a game for free and stuff if it's something that i think is worthy of my support whereas for me trading a game in use is almost like my show of of disdain yeah that's another thing i also am kind of like i don't trade in games yeah i don't either and actually i do agree with arthur though like if i have a game that for whatever reason i just was really really displeased with then maybe i will i just it's a weird moral code like for example if you're gonna revolving door sequel me then i'm gonna trade in the first one and get some credit yeah i mean like rainbow sticks or something like that where it's like the first one's kind of made obsolete or like i think the last game that i traded in mostly new was called duty three because i was so incredibly disappointed in it um yeah i traded in called duty three for rainbow six vegas yeah um i i should also say like i think for the people who do like use games and i mean obviously we don't do a ton of used games around here but you know there are a lot of listeners i'm sure who do and and you know that's understandable i think that the fact that you know we have so many different places doing it now that we have toys are us doing it and amazon and best buy and game fly just started creating trade-ins yeah so i mean i think that's a really good thing that's going to create a lot more competition in the use game space which is going to be good i mean maybe at least get more fucking traded exactly yeah my my issue with game stop isn't the fact that they sell use product it's the way that they make use product the primary driver of their business model i mean i mean like evaluate and play performance yeah stuff based on it's i don't i don't blame game stop for that it sucks but i don't blame them just because i know from working on the retail side with video games before that it's very difficult to make money off of just selling new games yeah because they're buying it for practically the amount they're selling it for yeah they make like what like ten dollars probably on a game well it depends i know that once the sixty dollar price point came up i know in our retail system it was like a forty five dollar wholesale cost for a game with a fifty dollar price sixty dollar price tag but um we're having mic difficulties i i i don't know if people understand like the how how a lot of game retail employees are held hostage to to selling like used copies i think that i think that's gotten really bad at game stop especially yeah um but yeah i mean i'm gonna try the amazon thing because if nothing else the amazon thing is at least more value because you get a gift card for amazon i mean as far as a game trading things go the best system i've ever heard about is that website goosex it's like not spelled like goose it's spelled like g-o-o-z-e-x or something like that where you join and become a member and then you put up your games that you're willing to trade and that accrues you x amount of points and then you spend those points on other games and the point systems actually a lot more fair than a dollar value and so everybody's just on this committed like ebay contract to basically send the games to each other and stuff apparently users i always hear about it i see a munchy bass gamer and stuff they're always super popular i mean if you're gonna enjoy that if you're gonna buy used games if you could find if i think the problem with this is that people equate this similarly to music and movies or music specifically um at least with music there's a way to support artists that isn't necessarily tied directly to the retail sales of their product shirts and so i mean if you're gonna buy used if there's some other way that you can support it public or developer that you really like then by all means like it's like uh what's this face said right yeah uh tim shafer go to double find and buy it's double find right yeah sorry double find and buy shirts it's a two-headed flipper baby is their mascot download it and buy some shirts pirate if you want but buy some shirts yeah all right uh so let me let me get into some comments here krissey says i wonder if any game retailers have ever considered the following strategy approach a major game publisher retailer offers some percentage of used game profits of said publishers games to said publisher say 10 percent in exchange the retailer secures exclusive game promotions with said publisher uh exclusive additional content or exclusive one day early release something like that and repeat with any other major game publishers i just don't i don't think that would make the retailer that much more money well i don't think that the retailers ever felt the need yeah there's no retailers aren't feeling heat right now like people don't understand like the position of power the game stop and walmart are in i mean those are the two retailers yeah like a member sam sam actually wrote that blog about why sony isn't talking about the psp two yet and he actually made a good point which was that sam was talking about how if it really is getting rid of the umd format and going to download only sony doesn't want to talk about it right now because they're in no position to threaten retailers which is yeah exactly it's funny to me that sony is pushing the downloadable retail space the hardest because they are the ones that are in the weakest position to leverage retailers i mean retailers are not happy with sony just if or no no other reason than the constant price fluctuations on ps series have caused them to lose a fuck ton of money so yeah i mean uh i forgot what the original question was used games oh yeah so i'm just saying yeah as far as what that guy said i i just don't think yeah jeff jeff jeff i'll also wondered why why retailers don't work with publishers yeah it's just retailers don't need to be with the publishers it's the publishers that are desperate to work with the reason i mean if anything like that that might be a strategy that a new game game retailer would take like it might be something for some love house store i mean exactly the game publishers are opening the game publishers do work with retailers so in order to make sense like there's definitely been times like when the darkness came out that 2k worked to like a special uniform for a guy that was a game stop exclusive if you pre-order or something in game stop is is pulling i mean most exclusive stuff you find is game stop only but i mean game stop has the ability to fuck you um game stop was extremely just unhappy with the fact that don of war two requires a steam installation and a steam validation of your key and so they pulled it yeah um a sera strike says i think they're i think publishers are more afraid of the idea than the actual reality of use games the number one use game you'll see a game stop is grand theft out of four my local game stop has like 30 use copies is anyone going to argue that the use game sales heard gta 4 they just announced that it sold 13 million copies it's probably not take two lost 50 million dollars this quarter the more popular and better selling the a game is the more used copies of it you will see just like movies and books but i mean that doesn't really stop the fact that you know they the publishers aren't getting anything for that used copy they still might be getting more even if they just for selling cheaper copies of the game after it had been out for i mean maybe if if companies were were willing to be more flexible about their retail pricing new then it wouldn't be as much of an issue but it's still going back to that that would be an issue of demand whereas i mean it's it's hard for retailers to be flexible on that so uh and that comes in greg says i'm four used games as consumers there's nothing wrong with being solely interested in getting the best deal publishers need to a lower the price of new games to the point where used copies aren't as enticing um he said he mentioned steam's amazing weekend sales come to mind true and those are fantastic uh and don't even have restel value or be keep coming up with irresistible pre-order bonuses and unique unlock codes for dlc that only come with new purchases which is what my west preferred means because something always goes wrong with that shit and there was that idea that uh who has that uh was it epic that brought that up was it mark rain or whatever uh no it was fuck was it their like liaison for microsoft or something with epic games or something but he was talking about the idea of selling something like the ending of gears of war two only only comes in in new copies dlc in a new copy and if you didn't get a new copy then you have to buy it off of xbox live which he wasn't proposing he was saying that there are developers that are tossing ideas similar to that around in theory which is still i think everybody recoiled at that so maybe there will be some pulling back from the yeah of course the recoil from it because in some ways it feels like you're robbing consumers of their ability to even have the choice of use i don't know uh Socrates says buying a used video game is just as damaging to the industry as it legally downloading a video game that's not true that's not true i mean because you know if if if uh i think there was like a game stop representative like the ceo talked about he was defending use game sales and he does have a slight point even if it's not a hundred century that i mean a lot of used game trade-ins do go towards like buying a new game like so that does help with the sale of a new game sometimes so it's definitely you know pirating doesn't ever help i mean towards that also i mean and also i mean just from a stand a creative standpoint whether or not use game sales are making you money at least it's more people playing your game so that's something good for the developers and pirating causes so many other issues that aren't just directly related to sales i mean yeah like yeah that's because of the whole podcast i've never had to fucking deal with spyware on my computer so there's something like that you know some fucking malicious software that's checking my bullshit for confirmation so that guy's that guy's a hundred percent wrong uh shums also says trade-in value just isn't high enough nor is the discount on use games large enough for me to consider the whole game stop proposition it's worth more to me to have a collection of games and to know i'm supporting publishers and developers i don't amazon system will change my mind you are in the minority unfortunately that's by i don't think most people feel that way most people don't care about a wall horde i mean you're yeah this is like we're the wrong people to talk to you like i have yeah like 40 xbox 360 games and almost all of them were bought new yeah and i mean yeah that's something that keeps coming up is supporting publishers and developers but i i think that is something where the average consumer just doesn't really care that much about me most people don't feel any tied to a publisher or something i mean it's not just with video games that's the same with music and and movies as well even speaking as a consumer with movies i'm a lot less prone to be like fuck i don't care about supporting this movie studio like you know they probably think the same thing they probably think the same thing well again i mean gaming studios are just like mega giants that can't be touched you know like the the nature of a game is a retail product is different than music i mean music there is i i do think that there is promotional value in distributing your content in a a digital form that's lower fidelity but easier to access i mean it adds value to what you're presenting as an artist where i mean the only thing a game studio is selling is that game for the most part i mean tim shafer has t-shirts but i mean fuck EA isn't going to open up a merch booth yeah with the exception of a few games like halo and stuff that managed to make it in store yeah eggs and everything like that well yeah most games don't have the marketing behind it like that that you can ever support it in any i mean halo is a is a franchise like is an entertainment franchise yeah it's very much different than like dead there's no there's no merch movement behind dead space yeah all right i want to move into our final question oh god um i don't have it was did i don't have written down who's asked this no it's in there though i i noted the guy who uh suggested it so this guy on twitter and we'll find his name eventually he wanted he wanted us to describe our sex lives in three moves from pokemon um when i wrote that post i just want to read some of these from other people because they were a funny funny user when i when i wrote that post i thought it would just be us talking about it but man people really yeah they connected with that question i'm going to start off with this one from aims he says one girl uses serial monogamy then three years later two the effect wore off aims is no longer confused three girl commences for an occasion of nearest friend of aims aims fainted is aims of pokemon that means is aims is the user so wait i don't i don't understand how that's related to the question of pokemon those are pokemon moves it's way to kill the segment anthony oh i thought i thought the pokemon moves were time out was like which three pokemon we summoned that would would it was a very loose question and people so if i was going to say that it'd be like it'd be like uh jiggly puff because she just goes to sleep uh what's that pokemon that's a hand and then and then snorlax because again it's just like lazy and nothing's happening and then uh and then i don't know ephemeral phantasia is there like one pokemon that abuses himself like really badly this one that's a there's one that's a giant hand yeah i see but it that would yeah that was me and arthur both scary and anthony has tried to talk his way out of that one and then he just gave up or is there like one pokemon like really depressed and just wants to give up the fight all the time like you never summoned him that would be my sex life so sorry all right rebel box rebel with them donation money is now being contributed to by anthony a wife or i would like throw my pokeball and it would have been so long since it was used it would open up and it would just be a little pokemon skeleton would fall out oh dust dust clouds would be your attack i'd try and some of my pina chew and nothing would happen you couldn't find your pina chew either that or you just throws it way too early in the battle yeah i mean that would happen is there pokemon with an invisibility power ice i'm in a fair moral phantasia all right uh chase chase k says one focus energy two flail three frustration uh tyler says one flash two glare three double slap whoa i want to be part of that pokemon universe number number one it says quick attack discharge and frustration man a lot of frustration in the comments uh let's see attack somehow i'm just waiting for the person that's like roofy attack jakes oh jakes that's hard and hyper beam flee uh hold on man there are a lot more in the comments uh big red jake says lock on pay day milk drink okay is milk drink really a pokemon move i don't i think it is it's like maybe something you can give for health or something like the worst people to ask about this because i don't think any of us gives a shit about pokemon i watched i watched uh the second pokemon movie the day came out in the movie theater with my friend Ian and for some reason we went and no we don't smoke pot or anything like that so there was no good reason for it and i remember we got we got um mu two card for showing up the day one people pulled their children close to them one two grand man walked in that is excellent uh so yeah that was just our wacky are there any there more there keep reading some more but we should we should move on that was we i read the best ones and uh and we all know how anthony's would be i guess now but i haven't done enough research yeah iron grip iron grip iron grip i am doing it i i may or may not be doing an interview with somebody who makes pokemon games next week and i may or may not have to bring this question up i like how you don't actually remember their name there's one of the pokemon like iron grip epineas name pokemon i know it maybe mine should be revised to be like iron grip early fire summon tears so okay we're gonna end now with the letters if you guys are ready for this arthur okay all right i hope we got some good ones well wait is there hate mail this week no hate mail this week okay mark jay says i wanted to know if any of you get towards the end of any games perhaps only a level or two away and then quit playing i find myself occasionally doing it because i'll be sad that the story is over and the game had me captured granted this only applies to single-player story modes if i'm lucky i'll put it down for a week or two and then come back to finish it just wanted to know if it's just me or if other people do it sounds like the story of everything i try and accomplish in my life man wow i'm along depressing right uh i will say i have a lot of friends who who got to the final area in kill zone two and then quit and you forgot to bring this up when you were talking about kill zone two but i wanted you to talk about the final area a little so maybe this is a good yeah i mean that that is a game where i i mean i didn't look at a faq or anything but i looked at an faq out of desperation fills faq actually that's not an faq i had my cheat super guy my cheat super guy because i was so desperate to like find out if i was just doing something wrong because it felt so broken like that was one that if it hadn't been for the fact that i really really really had no life because i'm not working and i don't mean that's unto pressing i just don't i just you know i have nothing to do you have anything going on so it's yeah i just have anything going on so i was like but if i if i had like only a little bit of time to play video games fuck that i would have given up on that in a heartbeat i was just dumb and speaking from experience me and artha gave up on army of two right at the end i gave up on uh on grand theft out of four right at the end i'm on i'm on the final mission i'm saved on the final mission i gave up on it and i just like i couldn't beat the final mission and tried so many times and then was just like i don't really care anymore i don't care enough to keep trying um the new tomb raider i'm pretty close to the end and just stopped i mean that happens to me generally if i'm playing a game and then something comes out that i really really wanted to play all band in it and then forget about that i'm actually worse this gen with starting something like for like an hour and then not going back to it like i do that as well like fable two is sitting on my shelf barely touched fable as well i gave up on twilight princess during the last boss thought i was just like uh i got to the last like this game dungeon of twilight princess and i really want to finish it because i loved that game but i just got distracted by other stuff i did that not care enough time like i stopped about like an hour and a half away from the end so the answer is question yes it happens to us this happens to us apparently especially when we used to be able to buy a lot of games i mean well and now as you get distracted now i feel like i should be playing stuff that we can talk about so i feel like if i don't finish something within a week then then i have to move on to something else you should just play what you love people want to hear us talk about it well i don't play stuff that i'm gonna hate but i i try not to dwell on anything like i gave up the chance and i also like didn't play halo wars until i knew i could talk about it sorry uh bill k wants to know which ninja turtle do each of you identify with most as a kid i don't know and you want to be asked this question yeah you're like totally well i because i wanted to bring up the fact that i had two turtles growing up one that was named donatello and was a girl and then and then i had Michelangelo so i mean the turtles you can't tell what sex they are just by looking at them like i had to find out from the vet so you know and uh when the turtles started fighting each other and i had to ask my parents why they were fighting why are the turtles wrestling why is Michelangelo hurting donatello they're sparring yeah sparring with penis um but uh sounds like my gym class uh but i'm just kidding i'm just kidding come on i just wanted to make everyone awkward and uncomfortable mission accomplished and you're sitting there that's enough um now that yeah you know pants i guess vibes oh yeah pants would help i would say uh Raphael maybe you know he was a conflicted young turtle i felt conflicted as a young turtle myself so you guys don't actually have answers for me it's definitely splinter for me i mean he's not a ninja turtle you son of a bitch fuck i'm sorry he was just the one i identified with the most please yes okay uh donatello actually that's because i was very smart just like donatello and i always wanted to invent things and fight with a bow you didn't know i could throw my voice i'm a talented young man although i always wondered why why he was named donatello and not Leonardo because Leonardo out of all those artists was the one that like created shit like a helicopter yeah but he was also like uh i don't know donatello no that's true no let's say you were not getting in a renaissance artist no no i'm just saying i was thinking to myself like which one which one of the ninja turtles was like closer to being like way gay because Leonardo da Vinci was gay and i was thinking you know donatello was pretty just was that of all the turtle you were gonna say Leonardo with the gay turtle probably gay i think Raphael would be a slightly with the like uh with his like he's always so angry he's just mad about he just needed to accept himself yeah that's true everyone else everyone else when the turtles got alone was like man that april dude i would fucking bend her up and he was like and he'd always be like yeah i would touch her boobs but then really he was just staring at kasey jones Raphael i'm really not covered with the way you're touching my tail oh don't worry all right we got to split up and go this way don't worry i'm with kasey right kasey slap some on the edge bale turtle palms i feel like i feel like we need to have some ninja turtle watching parties no do some commentary i'm telling you we could just watch for sexual overtones like for Raphael all the time this frustration anyways i like the other an answer you want to give or can we yeah definitely i always in uh michael angela was always the one i didn't fight with the most because he was just kind of like the happy go lucky guy that is super convenient no one picked the same turtle i didn't even pick a turtle i guess well you get away an arno you're an arno you're the you're kind of the asshole that no one likes it's not really turtles but a barn later i'm gonna go home and cry i mean if we were doing it by that i'd probably learn arno there's this great video on on youtube that's uh it's like the watchman saturday morning cartoon i saw that but it's uh it's just acting as if there was an intro to a saturday morning watchman cartoon it's almost like seen for seeing the ninja turtles intro but it's also replaced with like watch watchman characters uh nichal good nichal says i was hoping phil and anthony anyone else who writes guides could talk a little bit more about that process i'm always curious how people are able to dissect games and write write guides writing a guide can be a lot more than just a step-by-step walkthrough so i'm curious what's your process how do you begin and finally how do you manage to identify all of the intricate ins and outs secrets etc i can give you the first part of anthony's process i start playing whoa no the first part of your process is put game on for look at for seven hours while on aim yeah so i like uh i start playing and then basically i just write the way i did it i don't even necessarily consider like what would be the best way i just assumed the way i did it is the way you should do it see it's so it's really interesting uh kills on was the first guide that i wrote and uh i actually had a very different way which was i mean i i played the game how i would normally play it but then i like sort of carefully looked through all the environments and figured out what would be the best way to tackle it because i don't i just assume that i i'm playing like and it's a shitty way it's different too when you're writing like an online guide like we did especially where they're edited by users we didn't have to find every secret along the way because it's assumed that those get added by users which they often do um i mean if we were working on a prima guide and stuff like that it'd be a lot different because we'd also have developer support and we wouldn't actually have to go and find all the intel items and shit like that because they kind of hook you up with the locations yeah so it just depends on the type of guide you're writing yeah i definitely like i mean i played through twice and the first time i played through uneasy so that i could look for like carefully look through the environments and figure out the best way to do stuff and find all of the secrets and everything and then the second time i played through i kind of was able to look at my notes try some of the strategies that i'd come up with that seemed like the best strategies and then tweak them before i actually put up the guide it's a lot of work yeah it's a lot of work i wouldn't recommend you do it unless you're getting paid a lot of money um can i so can you talk about the screenshot process or is that sort of uh it just depends if you're using capture software like phil was it's just that you play and the consoles hooked up through a machine that goes through the computer yeah you can take screens and video basically the second time i played through it um it just took video of the whole play through and we i mean we split it up and took videos of the whole play through and then i went through and found screenshots it was actually really difficult with killzone because that game has a lot of motion blurring and obviously in a screenshot you want it to look as nice as possible you don't want it to be motion blurred at any point so there were a lot of times where i had trouble finding a screen that worked whereas on the on the 360 it's a little different it's not really that interesting to tell you though honestly no one's gonna really care i mean it's just that you take screenshots through proprietary microsoft software that makes it really easy just through an instant link over an ethernet cable so uh but yeah so i don't know that's that's sort of our process i guess like i said this is the first guy i ever wrote i don't know if i did any good although someone on twitter some very nice person who had originally written to me and said hey i saw that you did the killzone two guide i only played five minutes of that game and hated it and then like a week later they wrote they responded me on twitter and said actually i read through your guide and then i went back and tried killzone again and now i really like it so that was that was cool at least yeah i mean if nothing else those guides look a lot better and like we only deserve half the credit because we take all the screens and stuff but then like the layouts and everything get done really nice by the guys that actually post it yeah so all right art s this is a guy who asked us last week about being a freelancer and we gave him freelance writer and we gave him lots of depressing news uh he says following the email from last week how do you all decide what to write about i really love discussing video games with friends and really like to respond in my mind written on a forum post or talking to a friend about it to many criticisms and ideas but when i try and write on my blog at cheap cheap ass gamer i usually write great first paragraph but then totally get totally stuck this always happens to mean 75% of the time i never get to finish my article as i lose interest and have other things to do such a school work i wouldn't call myself an amazing writer but i can churn out something decent once in a while as your writing process and how long does it take you for you to write an article etc now it is uh what determines what i write is uh dollar signs next to uh a number so uh that's to be honest i mean a lot of the writing i do these days as far as video games is freelance stuff yeah but i mean he's talking i think he's going up but when it's like when i used to do my blog and stuff it was like i would find uh a news topic that was particularly interesting to me and that i felt i could you know talk about for a while with an opinion that was actually unique and that's the main thing it's just like play through a game and write a mock review if it actually interests you to write a mock review and something that i think every writer has to deal with the fact that there is there are a million distractions and it's really easy to not write it's writing is work exactly it's really easy to sit down in front of a blank wordpad and then be like i'm just gonna check my email again quick before i write it i'm gonna turn on aim if you really want to write yeah you should be off aim you should not be on email you should basically try and disconnect yourself from what i what i would suggest and what's always helped me is like set aside a time for yourself like once a week like sometime on the weekends when you don't have to worry about school work and you can just disconnect yourself from the internet besides whatever you need for research and just sit there and like bang out an article and it's not it might not be the best article every single week but then like you can edit it before you post it you can hold on to it for a while you know whatever you need to do to feel comfortable with it and and just make sure you're you're continuing to write stuff about whatever topic interest you like anthony said just and i can speak from uh first like from both me and phil i've seen it where writing something can take like as easy as like an hour if you really are like on a flow and then it can take days if you just i mean i will like i will my kills on two multiplayer review i sat down to write that for the first time on monday night after we finished playing and it was really late so i was pretty tired so i was only able to get like a paragraph done and then i sat down again on tuesday and i finished up a bunch like i finished most of it but i still had a couple of paragraphs left to write and then i finally actually just finished the review today right so i mean like when you're distracted and when and you're on aim all the time as well yeah like all these things are like so easy to get yeah so when you're distracted and when you're or when for whatever reason you can't focus on what you're doing yeah it can take a long long time there's a reason why when you're at a normal job they don't want that shit on your fucking computer because all that is distracting keeping you from getting work done and i mean you can love writing or love like doing anything but if you're not it's work yeah like you have to work at it absolutely all right colar this is our last letter this week he says i'm a college student in since nadio hio getting ready to attend my first game industry event gdc in san francisco i'll be there on the student day looking for an internship since this is my first conference i wonder did he pay for it himself it's like two thousand dollars or something i hope not and and he's coming from ohio this since this is my first conference i'd like to know if you have any etiquette tips and by no means a slavering fan boy and i fully intend to dress nicely and behave properly this apparently is not the norm if the horror stories about old e3 are to be believed what tips do you have someone looking to stick out from the herd gdc is totally different like uh and the thing that if he's going there to look for an industry job it's going to be very different like the thing you have to understand is that uh you'll there's a there's like the normal show floor where they're showing games and showing a bunch of technology and then they keep like the upper floor the upper floor of the masconi center is just for people looking for jobs like it's a bunch of booths but it's it's recruiting booths it's not set up so you can go sit there and go go over a game it's like they have posters like activation is hiring the studio is hiring and they have people that are genuinely there interested to talk to you especially if you're coming from a college where you have like credentials they are looking and scouting for talent it's as much of a job fair as a trade show exactly so i mean honestly did you going there looking professional having like a nice business card made up like if he goes there looking nice and has a great resume with him and a business card that's what you need just go there and and sell yourself if you work in art tools or you want to do like writing or anything like that you should you definitely need a portfolio and try to make sure that it looks professional yeah i mean that's the thing is like you think that it'll just be a bunch of nerds and stuff like that which does some extent i mean all these game developers are nerds but i mean professionalism is still like something that should not be overshadowed yeah especially at gdc yeah like i mean e3 is one thing but gdc is just so gdc is tons of students from like the cal arts and whatever that tech that actual game school is here in california can't think what they're called full sale or something like yeah like people from art center all those kids are there looking for jobs and the jobs range from people that are just looking to get into qa which there's a ton of that going on but i mean even lucas arts will do on the spot interviews for design positions and stuff like that at specific times so i mean there are a ton of opportunities so go in there as professionals you more professional than you probably think you should let us know how it goes mm-hmm i don't know we'll probably be doing something at gdc we haven't decided exactly what yet but hopefully we'll have some cool gdc stuff and gdc is not going to be as nuts as the stories you've heard about e3 i mean yeah or i mean they they've definitely cracked down on non-industry attendees and gdc's made for people who make games it's really not as interesting as you think they're not making crazy game announcements or anything yeah and even just like last year um actually gdc was the first live event i've ever covered and i did that last year and it was uh a lot of the panels that i went to had really interesting like titles they sounded like they would be fascinating but it's so developer focused that it's technology and shit you don't even understand yeah a lot of them were just like for me just way over my head like the kill zone two panel this year is about like they're rendering pipeline and i mean like all that shit and exactly for me that's interesting but for most people it doesn't mean shit i went to the halo matchmaking one for halo three and it was math literally screens of math put on the stage and people were taking math notes so i'm just saying it is i should as above and beyond what most of us care about yeah all right so i think um we didn't give the letter of the week last week to art did we the guy who asked about freelance writing i don't think we did i want to say no so let's give it to him this week and if we did yes it was good for you yes since we should have done shit all over your dreams last week so now we're gonna get we should on your dreams here's peggle uh also wanted to mention that uh we are doing a giveaway contest for xbox copies of call of cathulu to go along with our game club uh so if you haven't been following along and you didn't hear this on monday's episode of game club maybe we should make them listen to it that's a thing yeah how you don't think so so we're just gonna hook all these people up they don't even listen to game club no but i mean i think that a lot of people might not listen because they're like i don't have a copy and maybe if they had a copy they would god damn you and your logic if you want a copy of one of you over if you want a copy of call of cathulu for the xbox uh send in what we want you to send in your worst gaming related nightmare it's like a night a real nightmare you had well sleeping that was related to video games in some way send that to p-color at eat dash sleep dash game dot com that's also where you can some letters that we will read next week and uh sending it to me is an automatic like failure disqualification yeah i've gotten lots of nice letters but most of them aren't stuff to read on the air so so if we i don't know what that means i'll tell you afterwards all right there have been some saucy ones i want to touch your balls like what is like that's what is instantly what i thought of like what you don't want to what why shouldn't you read that on the air that's what i want to hear anyways uh so you ask what was weird splotches where on my computer monitor we will read those we will read the top three entries next week during the show and uh those people will get free copies of call of cathulu for the xbox i feel bad like me and arthur were just going back and forth trying to derail you with weird sex comments oh sorry made me want to like just say balls every time he tried to speak you should yeah i was speaking which i had a funny little story yesterday when i went out to eat with fili yesterday uh i was walking through borders and this little kid all of a sudden just looked up at me and went cock and i was like what that was my funny story with a child so and then you saw the child walking around and then i saw him walking around and he tried to do the found that i tried to do his mom with it a little bastard you tried to do the call to him yeah i did i said i said cock hoping he would respond back did he like point when he said i don't know he just died or did he like make like like the finger inch symbol or something one thing over all right please check out eat that sleep dash game dot com for all the latest episodes of rebel fm and arthur your amazing new site design that's up now right yeah well you know i have to show that i hate sony somehow so it oh wait that's right it's fucking kill zone and that's right it just goes shut in the background fuck up people just it just to be clear too that is not an ad we were not doing that no i do the idea is just that every every few weeks we will switch out the background with the game that we're interested in playing and if you could click through all of our articles and say to change yourself every time i would appreciate it hey we need to add impressions just like everyone that's uh what i don't know that but that is that is uh the idea behind this yeah it's just games that we like unless you want to advertise in which case fuck games you like please emails uh also uh so yeah go check that out um let's see word listeners can kind of come with me first so i can pee afterwards yes okay you can find me at uh twitter.com/chefmoney you can also find me at eat sleep game and uh i guess i recently had a preview of uh battle forage go up on one up so there's that and then really that's about it right now um oh and i'm going to appear on some more podcast soon i'm going to be on the co-op show scene whatever fuck right i got pee i wish you probably sent out a big congrats to the co-op guys for their revision trees co-op they're huge news that they are now on revision three which we've actually known for a while and i'm able to talk about because but we've been so excited for them yeah it is it's very exciting and i i don't know if you watch the first episode it is version three episode but it's excellent that fucking intro is fantastic very very good uh tyler working people find you on the internet they can find me on itunes and cd baby my band's new album is now available on itunes we're called the generic tribe the new album is in guns we trust excellent texas i yeah if you're just going to go buy a few tracks i would suggest the title track in guns we trust in town and z makes z or z equals z something z something what kind of music is it yeah what kind of like what kind of music or what bands which you can be compared to well the thing about us is every song is basically kind of a it's a different genre but what happens is we do have this overall unifying sound but if you're into bands like gorillas that do sort of a lot of different stuff you might like us and i'm not saying we sound like gorillas but you're better than them well we're not cartoons yeah so but we exist yeah it's a lot of uh some some of the songs might sound like saturday morning cartoon songs but but the lyrics and everything are very devious you know stuff you would listen to uh in your getaway car after you got through robbing a convenience store or something i'm excited i'm definitely going to check it out i've actually heard only i can only think of one song where i thought about robbing a convenience store much twitter dirty t so twitter.com/dirtyt has in t the drink all right your turn arthur uh eat eat dash sleep dash game dot com twitter dot com slash a-e-g-i-e-s excellent all right thank you i'm the boring one i'll be at uh twitter dot com slash p-cola and then i as i mentioned earlier my kill zone two multiplayer review on geek.com will be up tomorrow that is on thursday so if you're listening to this anytime after thursday go read that you can subscribe to rebel FM on iTunes and soon if you use either of these services please subscribe and leave us a review thank you all for listening we'll be back next week boughs yeah you've got problems you want fashion disease you're making progressive dysfunction with your busy it's a logical conceptions for all your ball breaking exceptions and we're into with all this good and mean. you [BLANK_AUDIO]