Rebel FM
Rebel FM - Episode 8 - 02/27/09
And this weeks episode was so well planned. Please join the usual crew of Anthony Gallegos, Arthur Gies, and Philip Kollar and our special guests Tyler Barber and Robert Ashley as we demonstrate exactly how off-topic a video game podcast can get! This weeks music is courtesy of Death From Above 1979(Romantic Rights), Evergreen Terrace (Chaney Can't Riff Quite Like Helmet), and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart (Young Adult Friction). This is probably why there was never any alcohol consumed during GFW Live.
You are now in possession of the rebel at Amf. Thank you. (Music) I now let us enjoy some cake, or pie. It is Thursday February 26, 2009. Welcome to episode 8 of Rebel FM. My name is Philip Kohler. Joining me this week is the staff of eat-sleep-game.com. Anthony Gallegos. Arthur Geese. I have almonds in my mouth, so I'm backing away from the mic. I don't think we're supposed to eat anything crunchy anymore. Isn't that the rule? Fired. You can go work for Sony now. Darn! Also joining us today, freelance writer Tyler Barber. Hello. And the creator of the fantastic new podcast, A Life Well Wasted, Robert Ashley. Hey! Thank you for joining us. Is that how you enjoy it? Can we do that again? Yes, we can, dude. Hey! Alright, we'll fix that in post, right? Okay, yeah, cool. So why don't we just start with what we've been playing? Robert, you kick us off, how about? Me? Man. I mean, I haven't had a lot of time to play games, but the games that I have been playing, I've been playing a lot of Lost and Damned. I'm not sure how far along I am. I must be like five hours in. And I've been playing Street Fighter 4, but I only play Ken. And... You son of a bitch. Yeah, yeah. I've discovered that I can't play any other Street Fighter character. Actually, it reminded me. I played so much Street Fighter as a kid. I don't think I've ever been good at it with any other character besides Ken. And when I played that game in particular, the new one, I just... When I tried to play any of the charge characters, I just feel totally lost. I mean, I'm awful at fighting games. I've talked about this before, and I'm not even going to try Street Fighter because I'm just so bad at fighting games. But it does seem like the kind of series where if you're really good at one character, that's going to stay that way throughout multiple iterations of the series. Yeah, I mean, but I feel kind of like a pussy. I mean, when I play online with people, which is really fun, I mean, they have this option where when you're playing solo arcade play, you can be interrupted sort of like you used to be interrupted in an arcade. Yeah, a challenger is a period or whatever. And that's really fun. And you don't have to have your mic on. You don't have to talk to whatever Mongoloid is on the other side of the world playing you. Or on the other side of your phones. Listen to me in this podcast, for example. Yeah, well, but I can almost guarantee that that person is a Mongoloid. And you would not want to listen to them in any way. The idea of meeting a stranger on Xbox Live and having an extended one-on-one conversation with them is just absolutely frightening to me. But thankfully you don't have to do that. And so it's just this sort of fun fight you'd have, you know, pop up in the middle of nowhere. But whenever I'm playing, I feel like, you know, I feel bad because I keep playing kin over and over again. And most people I play will end up switching characters all the time. And I feel like they get annoyed with it. Like they'll usually drop after, you know, four or five games with me. Because it's like, the fuck is this guy ever going to play? Like, what makes people like drop is losing. I mean, it's part of the game, like, you know, how to play against kin. Well, as much as I would like to claim that I'm pwning noobs, you know, and that people are dropping because of that, it's not. I mean, I'm okay. I'm decent. I tend to rise to the occasion and to win half the time just about. But sometimes I'll get like the crazy kid who I just imagine is like sitting there with a Bible of street fighter moves and sort of polishing their skills. Like a picture of sort of like rocky montage scene of them, like exercising their thumbs and getting into shape and I don't even know. It's like the interesting thing to over the top. Yeah, yeah, I actually knew a guy in college who was really obsessed with playing Street Fighter 3 and he played so often at the arcade across the street from school that he had these calluses on the palms of his hands where his hands rested on the joystick. It was actually kind of gross. They were really hard calluses. It was like pieces of plastic on the edges of his hands. And I got to think of it. I must have been. Yeah, well, he was gay luckily, but I got to say. I bet there are guys who were into that. Yeah, I would think though that it would really inhibit any sort of masturbatory efforts either on yourself or on someone else. So, I mean, I'm sure it was really scratchy. But the guy really loved Street Fighter. And Jesus too. He was like a real Jesus freak. Well, then he didn't have to worry about the masturbatory thing. Yeah, I guess so. He was kind of a self-hater. He was in my Japanese class. I used to like meet the biggest craziest nerds in college in Japanese class. But it was not surprising. Yeah. Not at all. It was awesome. I mean, I was a big crazy nerd in college too. But then I would meet people. You were in the Japanese class. You know what? I think that I'm kind of low on the totem pole now that I've met these folks. Yeah. How are you feeling about Lost in the Damned so far? Because I know I've been playing that. Are there actually going to be played some more? I have played some more. Yeah, I'm really digging it. Actually, I really feel like a lot of it is stronger than Grand Theft Auto 4. I'm feeling that way as well. Yeah. It's definitely the writing is way better. The voice acting is way better. I'm... Meow! Meow! Sorry. Your cat noises of a rebel FM. Yeah. No, the writing and the voice acting are pretty great. And I'm enjoying the story a lot more. I really dig that, you know, Grand Theft Auto 4 felt like sort of overly ambitious and trying to create this sort of coming to America, you know, story of like we're going to show you what it's like in America, like skewer all of American culture. Whereas this game feels like it's sort of a smaller story about a few people and their lives. And it's a lot more manageable for, you know, a video game. I think. And also just gameplay wise, the addition of checkpoints in the missions has made it so much nicer. Yes. Because they're like, even one of the earliest missions, you're kind of driving around fighting off gangs in different areas. And I died about halfway through and was just depressed because I knew I'd have to go through the whole part, the whole beginning part again. That's what I was expecting from GTA 4. And then I actually ended up loading like just moments before I had died. Yeah. Awesome. I mean, they probably had to mostly because I feel like they start you off almost from the sort of the top of the difficulty of Grand Theft Auto 4. Yeah. There's a lot more combat. That's only something I noticed right off about having not played Grand Theft Auto 4 is that I don't give you any help at all. Like, get on a motorcycle, you figure it out. But I do get change weapons, you figure it out. I like that. I mean, it took me a while because honestly I hadn't played Grand Theft Auto since I beat it like eight days after it came out. Because I played through that game really quickly. And so I was a little lost. But I figured out really quickly and I've enjoyed the level that it's playing at. It's not any of this, you know. Go steal a car and get chased by some gangsters. No, and I mean, the nice thing about the main character is that the main mechanic of Grand Theft Auto 4 lends itself very well to what that kind of character does. I mean, he's a motorcycle. He's part of a motorcycle gang. Like, they ride around on motorcycles a lot. It's not like, I'm an immigrant from the Eastern Bloc. And I'm going to drive cars when I get to New York or whatever. Yeah. I mean, in general, I think that it does a good job of almost fixing the problem that Grand Theft Auto series has always had, which is that the playing of the game is almost always opposed to the story that it's telling. Exactly. It's like, you know, you could sort of believe for the first few hours of Grand Theft Auto 4 that you're this guy who may be, you know, a good guy on the inside who's being forced to do some kind of crazy things just out of necessity. But, you know, after you kill three or four hundred people, you start to think this guy's pretty much a psycho. But meanwhile, they keep on trying to make you think that he is this good guy. Whereas, you know, with a biker gang, you know, like, yeah, he's a killer. And, I mean, Klebitz is also the voice of protest amidst the crazier shit, like, that they do. He's the sort of voice of reason, which is kind of nice. I mean, he's not a good character, but he's an interesting character and not completely one-dimensional morally. Yeah, although being the voice of reason makes, you know, that's where they have the biggest discrepancy with the stories. When, you know, he's the voice of reason, then all of a sudden, like, for a lot of missions, he's like, well, yeah, let's go kick the rats. He's like, really? You just seem like a kind of one to chill. The dialogue during missions is like, oh, fucking kill you. I don't care if I die. I'm like, really? Because you kind of seem like you cared if you died a minute ago. Yeah, but, you know, it's one of those things that I think must be really tough. I imagine if I were, you know, if I were someone who had worked on this game and I was listening to this conversation, then I would just be frustrated because I'm sure that it's something they think about all the time and that it's just one of those sort of riddles of game design. You know, how do you create a world that's open in which people do all these things if they want to? Or how do you create a game that's based around, you know, interesting gameplay that happens to be about killing people and then create a character who isn't, you know, a psycho killer? But I mean, there's a lot of gameplay in it that isn't focused around killing people. We're around, like, just wholesale mass slaughter. And I feel like this, it came so close in spots to being a game where it didn't have to be about mass violence. -Yeah, but sometimes mass violence is fun. -Yeah, but I mean, there's a GTA game. There's been six, seven, eight other Grand Theft Auto games with all of that, so it just would have been kind of interesting to see them. And the downloadable content would have allowed them to try something a little different without committing to a full retail release. -Is it still more of a step towards that direction? -Yeah, no, I'm enjoying it and that's more than I can say for any Grand Theft Auto since one, literally the top-down one. -So... -Yeah, yeah. Well, I've been a big fan of, actually, I'm not a fan of anything. Anyway, I like Grand Theft Auto a lot, and I especially enjoyed Grand Theft Auto 3. I was unemployed after college when that came out, and that was something that I played a lot of when my wife was at work, and I was supposed to be looking for a job. I would turn it off like thirty minutes before she got home and... -Turn on the computer and start typing resumes and stuff. -It sounds like me right now, but with World of Warcraft. Craigslist wasn't around. I was looking at Monster.com, or even I would go get the paper and look at the... That's how old I am. And in a few places before she'd go home, you'd just circle some in red, and she'd be like, "If you want a nanny." Actually, it was during that period that I was spamming all of these game magazine editors and it's sort of how I got into the business. It was right after I graduated from college, and I'd been the music editor at the entertainment section of my college paper in Austin. And really, instead of writing about music, I'd spent most of the time writing about video games, and my plan was to get out of college and go to work at a game magazine, but then my girlfriend, who was to become my wife, ended up getting a real job, and I had to sort of follow her because it's like, "Oh, but I wanted to do impractical things." So I went to DC, and while I was unemployed, I would just start spamming all of these people, and I ended up spamming like shoe and all these folks. Anyway, it's a fucking long story. But lost and damned, I think the most interesting thing about it is it's obviously, to me, a sort of prototype of the inevitable Grand Theft Auto massively multiplayer online game with episodic content that just sort of strings people along in these various stories while adding new gameplay elements. I think it's obvious that Grand Theft Auto will be that someday. Whenever they figure it out, it's such a perfect thing. It'll be like a television-- That sounds like a prediction, yeah. Yeah, it's a prediction, yeah. We were talking about-- You should've gone last. Apparently, we're going to do some predictions later, but I'll do my prediction right now. Grand Theft Auto will almost definitely go this way, because it just makes a lot of sense. They're doing it basically like a TV show already, and I could so easily see this game that you would play online. While there wasn't new story content, you would have all these sort of interesting things that would pop up in the world, and then new story content comes. People sort of drop out of the online game to do missions, because you can't have people killing each other in the streets while you're trying to do some frustrating mission, but-- I guess missions could be instanced or something like that. Yeah, I'm sure they've been thinking about this forever, though, because it's such a great idea. I mean, I'd be interested. I mean, it must be, because I had it. I would be interested. I actually hope that they keep doing content like this after the second exclusive content pack. Yeah, I only wish that the world, that the city had been a little bit more interesting. I hope that they add more things to the city. I would hope that the best thing they could do would be to continue to add new interactivity and new locations in the city. Not necessarily changing the way the city looks, but I've noticed that there are places in the city that used to be nothing. Like, I stumbled into, like, a bar the other day that didn't exist before and there were people in there hanging out. I was like, "Oh, what is this? This wasn't in the game before." They've definitely added new places, and if they can continue to sort of fill out all those empty storefronts that now are just sort of fake walls that are supposed to be part of a city and make it real, then I could see it being, you know, really interesting in the long term. I don't know if they really have plans to do more stuff like Lost and Damned, but I hope it succeeds, because I do dig it a lot. I'm liking it a lot as well. You are there. Okay, that's a beautiful plan. So, other than Lost and Damned, we've been playing a lot of Call of Duty 4 lately for some reason, possibly because we all own it and it's easy to jump into and get angry and jump out of. I spent a lot of time over the last couple of days playing Dawn of War 2 because Dawn of War 2 is amazing. Do we want to talk anything at all about that? You're just going to sit there with nuts in your mouth? Don't make him stop. I'm loving it. We can talk about Dawn of War if you want. Oh, I've already talked mostly about it though. Well, but had you blown through the full campaign last time? I'm not meeting at this point, yeah. And I guess it took me about, I don't know, 25 hours to do it. And most of that was done over the course of a day and a half. He did not leave his desk except to piss and get something to drink while we play it through that game. That makes me sad. That makes me sad a lot sadder than I feel like my life is. No, the thing is... Sometimes you have to poop-sock a game. Yeah, I just haven't seen you sucked in by a game single player like that before. Even Company of Heroes you didn't get sucked into like that. Yeah. It took long breaks from Company of Heroes like an hour. I just haven't had a lot to do lately. No, that's nice when you can relax and get into a game. I never feel bad about that because I personally have a hard time. I'll play a game for an hour or two and then I start feeling this nagging. You know? You gotta do something else. Yeah. But I love, there's nothing better in the world to me than hopefully on a rainy day. Like a rainy Saturday spent inside playing a game that you really enjoy playing. And like hopefully my wife is like reading a book that she's really liking. He's got this twinkle in his eyes. He's getting really misty-eyed and looking at the ceiling. You know those commercials when we were growing up of like, was it Maxwell House coffee? Yes. The international flavors were the ladies would get together and they'd drink a cup and it would remind them of amazing times they had in Europe. Yeah. Doing like middle class aspiring activities. Yes. Yeah. That was easy shit. Yeah, yeah. Well, this is like that for me where I think of, you know, the time that like, you know, I played Half Life 2 for the first time maybe three years ago. And when I, because I finally got like a computer about three years ago that could actually play games. And when I started playing that game, I was just like, "Oh my God!" And I just got so sucked into it and spent, you know, a whole Saturday playing it. And honestly, I think it was probably the best day of my life in the past three years. So, so, so, I mean, as, as lame as that is, it's great when you can, when you can find a little beautiful. Yeah, it's really interactive romance in your life. I guess people probably think, maybe they do, maybe they don't. I don't know. I'm pretty boring. I don't really go out of water or anything like that. Yeah. So for me, it was like perfect. Yeah, it was like I got on Donavoir and I downloaded it at like six and then I played from six to three a.m. And then woke up the next day at eleven and played it again until I went to sleep. Fucking awesome. And then I beat it the next day. That's crazy. It's a ridiculously long game. Having played through the single player now, what are your impressions of it? I have a player watch. It's Diablo three meets, or Diablo two meets the hero micro from Warcraft three with company of heroes in loot. Yeah. Single players really good. If that doesn't give you like a giant blizzard boner, I don't know. The single players are really good. The single players like is really easy on the default skill, but it's still really easy. It's still really fun and rewarding, especially because they just do the loot drops and stuff. Then in the same way, it kind of gets you the way that you are when you're playing World of Warcraft. Like you see the reward for a quest and you're like, "I'm gonna do this because it'll tell you before you go into a mission." Like what the reward coming up is. And you're like, "It's a sword. I want that sword so bad." And so it's really easy. Like most missions take to an eight to ten minutes too. So you can sit there and lose far too much of your life to it. But yeah, having beat it once I immediately then created a new character and started over on the next skill up. We need to do some co-op too, because it does have co-op support in the campaign. Here's the thing. I mean, company heroes is always this GFW radio boner. It may have taken up 40% of the talk ever talked about on it. I think that's a problem. And I tried so hard to play that game. I remember actually the night that I sat down after installing it. It was like a Friday night and I played through the tutorial. And my wife was sitting on the couch reading a book and hearing this thing. And it took like two hours. And after about 45 minutes she was like, "What the fuck are you doing? What is this?" I'm going to a rally point. Because it's just so insanely complicated. Someone like a doofus like me who grew up on twitchy Nintendo games. I have a really hard time coming around to something like that. Even though I know that there's something in there that I would really enjoy. Like some incredible depth that would grab my mind and tweak my balls or something. The access analysis for a lot of people works in a way is closer to what company here should have been for you. Because Don of War, the AI is smart enough that all you do is right click near cover. And they're smart enough to jump in to cover and go the right facing for you. It's much more accessible. You don't have to sit there and think about, "Fuck, I got to make these guys face the right way and do this at the exact right moment." I mean it always said fucking Sean Elliot talking to me about it. And it's just intimidating. He's like, "You got to try this and go into some crazy high level strategy thing." I'm like, "Dude, I don't even know how to make a Jeep." Well Sean, Sean, what button do you press? That's the level that I'm on. Sean's level of play on company of heroes is literally so high that he literally runs circles around people, feels bad for them, and then starts giving them stuff. Did you ever hear that story about how the airborne tree has that ability to drop things out of the sky? And Sean was beating this guy so bad that him and Rory started flying over his face, dropping supplies, saying, "Ho, ho, ho." It's very Christmas at Santa Claus. And essentially the single player in company of heroes is just multiplayer scenarios, whereas Dawn of War is an extremely single player driven campaign experience. Yeah, it's all about leveling up your characters and spinning their experience points. Like an action RPG, almost like a Bioware action RPG. I spend just as much time working on how I'm going to tailor my characters' experience points and how I wish you could paint their armor, but you can't. You can't in this one. Because they're specifically blood ravens. Well, you can in multiplayer. You can paint your armor. You can pick different... I don't want to play this fucking game. If I can't paint your armor. But this one specifically... I wish that you could actually use MS paint to do it, you know? You can do like crazy calico colored fucking space marines. I want to do my own custom stuff. I'm going to have like my own plaid. This is what real Warhammer 40k is for. Yeah. Alright. You can paint your own soul. That's exactly what you need, another expensive hobby. Yeah, no I don't at all. But I think I will play Dawn of War. I mean I've been wanting to anyway, and the only reason that I haven't installed it is that it never like showed up on Steam Press account. Because the sheep is fucked. I mean I eventually bought it because it never showed up on the account too. I tried to wait as long as I can. I mean it's probably the best implementation of games for Windows Live that I've seen so far. Like even in the beta. So you get to keep your achievements on your gamer tech as well? Yes. You get to check on your Xbox? Yeah. It uses the same tag. My Xbox tag is so pathetic. I mean I could use any achievements that you get. Because I've never gone even like 30 seconds out of my way to get an achievement in my entire life. And I had to sort of reset my whole thing halfway through the sort of life of the Xbox so far. Yeah, but I mean like joining co-op games, joining skirmishes, joining multiplayer matches is all done the same way you do on the 360 and it all works really seamlessly. Yeah, I really want to play. And I have a fear too. That's also pretty good. That was sort of what I was planning on playing next on the PC. Maybe I should play Dawn of War. Yeah, fear too. Fear too is still very good. Yeah. I'm interested in it although I never finished the first one. It's a lot more interesting than the first one is but it's still not great. But it's a really fun shooter. I mean if you haven't played a really good shooter in a while it's like it's fun. Yeah. Yeah, I'm interested in it. The first one, I don't know, I really lost interest in it. I'm sort of a weirdo about games. I would like to say that I'm completely gameplay driven and be like a real purist nerd. But honestly if there's nothing interesting going on with stories or characters and it's not a super abstract arcade game that I bought for five dollars then I tend to really lose interest. Like oh it's the psychic witch next. The ending in that game is, yeah, I don't even know how to explain it. Yeah, I don't know. But I've always, I appreciate the combat. Yeah, I don't play for the story. I just play for the combat. Yeah, definitely a good combat. Definitely an unusual, interesting feel to it that I never encountered in any other game. And hopefully that transfers the second one. And I guess it's really dumb for me. I sit around and hypothesize about a game that I've not played. You know what, I have played. I've been playing a lot of, and I'm, maybe I should be embarrassed. The past few nights and I've been working on the new episode of a life well wasted. And I've had no time. At the end of the night I would just come downstairs at like two o'clock in the morning and drink a beer and play Nobby, Nobby, boy. Oh, that's what I've been playing. We can talk about that. Yeah. I've been playing that as well. Alright. Every year's. Everyone that's been playing that has currently reached the moon. I don't know if you saw that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because, you know, it's a good group effort of stretching yourself out. And eventually everyone has stretched enough to finally reach the moon. Tell me, what's the goal? I greatly enjoy the thinly veiled sexual metaphor of Nobby, Nobby, boy. That the whole point is that you stretch Nobby, Nobby, boy. So that you can make Nobby, Nobby, girl bigger. So, it's sort of like you grow a Nobby, Nobby, boners. Thank you for breaking down that very quick wall between metaphor. Yeah, yeah. I just thought I should explain. I know it's a gaming audience and sometimes you should be explicit. Okay. You know, we can't say finger without someone giggling. Yeah. That's true. But yeah, what's, what were you saying? What's my funniest, like, story? Is that what you're saying? I want to hear your best combination, because I know that's cool. Oh, I don't know. Mine's been a whole draw of the game. At least from what I've seen so far is basically that you eat two things and then it poops out a combination of those two things. I didn't even pay attention to it. I mean, I created a cat person. I ate a cat and a human and then shut them out into one thing. I mean, I've noticed combinations, but honestly, like I see all of the, uh, the, the set pieces and the characters and stuff. And the characters and stuff in the world that's just pure psychedelia. That's pretty much the game though. Yeah. And so I'm not, I'm really, I'm actually entirely focused on the motion and like kinetic feeling of, of it. Of, of just sitting around like playing the game and, and eating stuff and sort of randomly wrapping, uh, knobby, knobby boy around obstacles and sort of inventing stupid things like, you know, how many times can I wrap myself around a cloud. Yeah. That's what I was doing earlier. Like my mini game that I was doing was just, I want to get myself tangled between all three clouds and pulled them together. Yeah. And that's what I did. I mean, put himself in a knot in the process. It was awesome. I think the hilarious thing about the game is that it just seems to be made to baffle anyone who actually plays games on any regular basis. Yeah. Totally. I remember when we first started getting like preview copies in the office or whatever and, uh, back when we were working out one up and on one up on one up on, we had someone on the show to try it. Like Matt Leone on to try and talk about it. And it was just impossible to explain in audio what this game was. Yeah. Because it's just so weird and... You know, it's actually, I think, I think a lot of, a lot of the weirdness and explainable things is a little overdone. Like it's a, it's actually a really simple game. I mean, you're a thing that eats stuff like pastrons and then when you eat stuff, it makes you fatter and when you're fatter, you can stretch longer. And then all around you are these crazy objects that if you've ever played Katamari to Masi, you should be familiar. You know, just random sort of things from the world like cars and forklifts and skateboarders and ninjas and, and, uh, you know, just anything you might encounter in your dreams. Uh. I mean, okay, so some of the chatter that I've been seeing is, like, a debate about whether or not it's a game. Do you feel like it's more a game or a toy? People who think that things aren't games are fucking idiots. Like, you can, anything is a game for fuck's sake. No, I'm so sick of, like, the game or not a game thing. Like, was Pac-Man that much of a game? I mean, get, get the fuck over it. I'm so tired of, like... But to be fair, Pac-Man had goals. Like, Pac-Man had conditions for fail. It's all these kids who are raised in an America that demands achievement. In an America that's like, you better go to college, you better do something with your life, and what they get out of video games is this match laboratory achievement sort of thing where, like, what you want is to do something and feel like you've accomplished something when, in fact, you've just wasted your whole fucking life. Um, and, and so I, like, the people who must have goals... You know, it must have goals... Stared at during the start. I'm sorry. No, I just got to stare at somebody. I'll stare at the skateboard. No, it's fine. I'm just going to look like that. Skateboard. I didn't mean, I'm not yelling at you or anything. And I know you're just representing the internet. You're representing a side of the argument. But I'm just saying, like, having a goal in a game is like having, um, having the little things in the gutters when you go bowling. Like, that, that keep you from going, that keep you from, from what do you call it? Got a ball. Got a ball. You know, it's like, it's, it's, it's for people who don't have... What kind of a chocolate is that? The, the self will or, uh, well, Jesus. I'm just saying, like, you don't have to have a goal in a game. You can't just play around. You can't just sort of, uh, make your own fun. Uh, and it's not, it's not like a bad word. And I don't need a high score or an achievement or to save the world or whatever. But yeah, and in that game though, you do have the goal, which is to stretch and then everyone's stretching to make the girl bigger. Yeah, exactly. It's, it's just very, very simple and, and not like individual. Although there is like a ranking thing online. If you actually care about being number, you know, number one on the Nabi Nabi Boys circuit. Like, hey, I've been playing Nabi Nabi Boy for eight hours a day. Hooray for me. Um, then it's out there. But yeah, I don't know. I've, I've had a beer and I guess it's brought up the mean in me. But... It's alright. It's alright. It's actually mean to be his name. You're Texas's show. I haven't been on like a talky podcast in a while, so I guess I have a lot of bullshit to talk. That's good. Just dismiss it entirely. Are there anything else that you wanted to bring up? Uh, I... Are you been playing? Uh, let's see. I got burned by a Nick Suttner recommendation. What was that one? Uh, that would be Death Tank. Death Tank is a steaming pile of crap. Oh, that's a community game, right? I saw it. No, no. Death Tank is a full $10, $15 retail game. Like my kid. Uh... Not, not my kid. I did not like it. I will say that if you want to try it, the demo is the full game for 60 minutes. That should be more than enough time for you to decide whether or not... Thank you, sir. Do you hate money or want to go play worms? Um... Isn't it basically like Scorched Earth or whatever? It is not Scorched Earth. Scorched Earth. Scorched Earth, but it's also turn-based in that game. Okay, so it's all simultaneously... It's real time. I say this with their quotes. And you can kind of move your tank. Mm-hmm. But then they start offering power-ups. And one of the power-ups is a cursor that shows you exactly where your shot is going to land. Which sort of... Basically, it's like the point of the game. It's like Scorched Earth if every round lasted like 10 seconds. Because that's about how long they last. Just like... Everyone blows a shit out of each other 30 seconds later. It's all over next round. Like, did you play Call of Duty 4 online? Like, you know, there's sort of a vicious cycle where the people that are doing really well will continue to do more and more well because they keep getting power-ups? I've never played Call of Duty online. Okay. But I'm aware that you can keep on growing your, your uh, knobby-knobby girl in the game. Exactly. Yeah. Stuff. Yeah, basically it's a very similar thing in Death Tank where it's... You join a group and you have rounds. And after every round people get points that they can spend. And so the people who keep doing well keep buying more powerful stuff. And... Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, if you want to know for sure whether or not I'm full of shit, Death Tank is... The demo is 60 minutes. I played it for like five minutes and never played. I will never play. The angriest I've been after spending Microsoft points and I bought... It's $15. I bought premium themes, okay? Jesus. I know anger from spending Microsoft points. Ouch. Yeah. I mean, it seems like the whole point of a game like that is to be able to get into that fun of predicting where your shots are going to go like playing with the... I mean, cause it's like that, right? Yeah. Like it's all about like, angle and power. That's why it was so much fun. Yeah. And there was a lot of skill to it. It was just a skill based game, partially based on memory. Like I'm not saying that there's not skill involved with Death Tank, but I feel like it's... I hate saying imbalanced in such a simple game concept, but adding power ups. Yeah. Yeah. I... I, you know, played a lot of scorched earth with my dad. My dad is not a gamer, but he was kind of amazing at that game. I guess he was really good at figuring out the angle stuff, but I don't think he would play... Death Tank? Death Tank. Yeah. He plays Gran Turismo on the PlayStation. Gran Turismo 2 spends a lot of time playing that. Which is a great game. Yeah. And so yeah, I mean, that's not the worst burning that someone has gotten this week from a Nick Sutton or game recommendation, but we'll talk about that later. Yeah. Tyler? Tyler? Yeah. Have you been playing? I just finished Killzone 2 today, and I was enjoying that just a whole lot. Really loving the finesse of the gun play and everything in it. Now I'm just excited to play online. Can't wait for the multiplayer stuff. Did you hate the last level as much as I did? No, no, I enjoyed it. I thought it was fun. It was just... It was a really tough battle. That's what I like about it a lot. I just... I'm really liking Killzone a lot. And then as well playing a battle for the bad company a lot and just loving that is the greatest non-GIO game ever made. And that's not GIO. I played... I remember playing like the demo for that. What's the deal with that game? I sort of forgot about it. Bad company. It's not a new one, right? They're making like a sequel, but you're talking about the... Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think it came out during the summer and it seems like a lot of people forgot about it, but I know a few people who are going back to it now. I have a copy sitting around and haven't played it, so I'm thinking about trying it out soon. The single player, I heard... I mean, I played some of the single player because I was gonna have to do a guide on it and the single player was... Yeah, I'm so much more sure. It was not good to me. But I heard the multiplayer is amazing. Like, I mean, Sean Elliott went back in the day he reviewed it and ended up giving it like a B+ and he thought the single player was like a D, but he loved the multiplayer so much that... Hmm. He gave the game like a B+. Yeah, I'd have to agree with that because it's... To me, the amazing thing about the multiplayer is that there's really one game type. They recently added a new one, but that one game type, it's so well done that we're fine playing that every night. Is there a good community online playing? Are you playing with bodies? I have friends in Houston that I play with regularly. Cool. Where are you, Texan? Yes. Holy shit, man, you should have said so. What the fuck? We're supposed to do the handshake. I know, well, it's all right. Yeah, we can't show these Yankees our handshake. I know. Yeah. Am I a Yankee if I'm from California? Yeah. No, no, no, you're just a stoner. Well, Phil's the word, though, because he's from Minnesota and they were definitely... No, actually, Minnesota, like the Midwest and Texas are totally like Batman and Robin. Like, totally the same... Yeah, but it wouldn't have the same... I have a war in Minnesota, it's definitely on the side of the Union. Yeah, well, Texas was just wrong on that shit. So, we're okay with that, Minnesota. Right. Thank you. Can I say something? Does it seem just me? Or are there a lot of like, mid and north westerners in the gaming, writing industry, gaming journal industry? Do you guys notice that? Is it just me? Well, I mean, a lot of the reason that may seem that way, too, is because EGM was based out in the Midwest for a long time. Okay. So, a lot of them came out here. There's also... Isn't a game in former... Game in former... Game in former... Yeah, still out there. I don't really know any of those guys. But everyone else is in New York in the Bay Area, basically, in some people in LA. I feel like it's pretty spread out nowadays. I mean, there's definitely a lot of California folks because it's sort of the Hollywood of gaming out here, but... But I've definitely met people from all over, you know. Yeah. Girl! Girl! That cat... The way you're petting that cat is... Honestly, it's making me jealous. I guess... She's a very lovable cat. Unfortunately, she is retarded. Yeah. Like, if you look at her face, her eyes are too close together and her head is too small. That doesn't mean anything. Yes, it does. Her brain is so tiny. Your brain is really smart. Now, I think she was a little preemie. Yeah, I think that she was the one. And sometimes she'll just freak out and start meowing really loud for no reason. She also likes to bolt down the hallway when I'm walking toward the kitchen and, like, jump into a cabinet and stare at me. Do you think that cat would eat your face if you died? Actually, I've heard that most... Actually, I was just like... I was just like to say that I've heard the reason that you said that lady passed out in the cast reading here is that cats will wait at most 48 hours to eat you after you died. And that dogs will wait two weeks, though. You're full of shit. I'm totally... No, I'm being 100% serious. I'm being 100% serious for shit. I'm being 100% serious that this is one time why someone was telling me dogs are better than cats. Because cats will only wait 48 hours to start eating and dogs will wait like two weeks. I'm not buying it. But in the second Batman, the cat started eating a... She'll fly for, like, immediately. That's what I say, up to 48 hours. That is science. So, like, as a background, before we started recording... I was talking about my obsession with the chimpanzee mauling. And I don't really want to talk about it because honestly, it's a really bad thing. It's a bad scene. I listen to the 9-1-1 call, and I really wouldn't recommend it. It's a really grisly, horrible thing. But I tend to do things that are bad for me. Like, like... Like, before I get on a plane, I like to read for a couple of hours about horrific plane accidents. Or, you know, I do things like that. And so, on one of these sort of Wikipedia hunts, I was reading about the chimp mauling. And the woman who got mauled apparently is going to the clinic where they did the world's first face transplant. And so I started, of course, reading about the world's first face transplant. And apparently, it was this woman who had passed out from either drugs or alcohol abuse of some sort. And apparently her cat mauled the shit out of her face. And because I was reading about this, I discovered that apparently it's fairly common that when people die, that cats will rip the shit out of you. And only she was not dead. That's what I'm saying. I guess cats will wait up to 48 hours, dogs will wait a lot longer. That's why people think dogs are better. I could very well see this scenario with Anthony's cat, I'm just saying. Maybe dogs just get a little riper. They're like a little more flavor in their dinner, they like a little mushroom. Chances are that lady, if she passed out from horrible drug abuse anyway, she wasn't feeding her cat. So by the time her cat saw something to eat, she was like, "I'm honest." But what I want to know is, I know, maybe she was really cracked out. She didn't have a lot of body fat. But there's got to be a more nutritious part of a person's body from their face. No, there's a lot of meaty tissue in the cheek. I understand the whole idea of the logic behind what you're thinking. I think we're going to start morbid, but if it's like the entire way, what else should we play? But I'm thinking the reason it chows on her face is like maybe this chick was totally in long-sleeve shirt and everything. And the face is just a lot of exposed flesh. This is a really interesting line of thinking. This is the best thing about living in the internet age is that we don't really have to subject ourselves to truth or reality. We can just sort of make it all up. And so we can just sort of speculate what happened. I like that. So anyone who's listening, don't even bother to let that stuff up. It's all true. Please bleep. Tyler, the bad company is fun. Chimpanzees are bad. Cats are kind of dicks. Chimpanzees aren't bad. They just don't live by the moral code of humans. You know? They're just... Man, this is like a podcast in and of itself talking about the vagaries of chimpanzee. I also saw on CNN that Obama has overturned like now you cannot have primates as pets. That's good. No one doesn't seem like a federal level at all. That's okay, right? No, it shouldn't be. I mean people shouldn't have primates or large cats for pets in their states that allow both of those. Yeah, I mean it's a really bad idea. But I'm just surprised that it's like a federal level thing. You're on cat food with our special guests in Robert Ashley. Maybe Obama would date with sitting there with her. This really is. It has become cat fancy. It has become cat fancy, yeah. Obama's sitting there with his laptop and he's like, "Oh shit, and I'm a one call from the lady who got chimp mauled." He clicked and he was like, "Oh my god, I need to make a bill for this." Just... Have you guys ever seen Grizzly Man? Yeah, I think he lived with him until he got eaten and his girlfriend? So if you've ever seen this movie, it's a Warner Air Zog movie. And it's about this sort of idealistic Californian guy who liked to live with the bears every summer. Out in some Alaskan wilderness and he ended up getting eaten. Him and his girlfriend got eaten because he just sort of stuck around too long. But there's this moment in the movie where the guy who was out there with the bears, he would videotape everything. And when they got attacked by the bear, he had his camera with him and he tried to record it. The shutter was on, the lens cap was on, so it's just audio. That's even more terrifying. Yeah, well there was this moment in the movie where Air Zog listens to the audio of the mauling and he tells the woman who has the camera who's friends with the people who died or whatever. Never listen to this, destroy this tape, no one should ever hear this. And he doesn't play it in the movie. It's like he sort of saves you from it. I really wish that someone would have saved me from listening to that 911 chimp call. Because it was literally like this woman saying, "Oh, he ripped her jaw off. He's eating her face. He's eating her. I mean, I'm sorry to bum you out out there if this is horrible." No, it's fine. But chimp's eating people is something that really fucks with me. We're earning our explicit tag right now, that's cool. I think we're just going to put that down for one call as the transition music between the two. No, save people from that. I hope I'm not stoking anyone's curiosity. It's really not worth it. Don't go lookin' up. Yeah. Anyway, video games, escapism. Away from chimpanzee mauling. I actually have been playing a little bit before. I don't know if I talked about it last week. Please tell us a story. I've been playing as a mouthsong in charge of the Chinese Empire. We're currently not very communist though. We're very open to all religions. It's a series of violence, archipelas. That's a beva pinata or something. And so I took over my whole island and then slowly I've been encroaching on France and America's islands. I'm aggressively expanding my navy so that when I finally do declare war on someone, my ships will be everywhere and they'll just be fucked. That's how I like to play. I like to imagine that the second they declare war on me, every little merchant vessel they have every little boat out on the ocean giving tour guides all of a sudden just gets fucking rained on by my ships. That's sort of worldwide control of the ocean's interior. That's your fantasy. That's your fantasy. It inspires me. You like to think that you're a guy who just wants to get along. You know, kind of a chill guy. He just wants peace. He's a loving guy. But if you fuck with him, he's gonna fucking rip your jaw off into your face. There's just no recovering from that. I think it was the first podcast though that someone or the first or second podcast is someone I did talk about how I would kill and eat the person that said we should eat my cat like in a post-apocalyptic situation. The first person to suggest such a thing I just like they would wake up to me standing naked over them with lightning flashing and me dropping a rock on your head. While he's singing a piece from Phantom of the Opera. And the last thing they would see is my balls and then a rock on their face. Would you then make clothing out of their skin? Could you make a pair of chaps out of human skin? I'd probably bustle. You could go to the face instead too. You could make a kitty sweater with it. I didn't know what people at home can hear the squeaking behind me. I'm really sorry. I'm really not moving that much. It's mostly me. I think it's me actually. The levels are going to be kind of fucked on this part because we laugh so much. I'm sorry. So I played a little bit of support and then I played a Nobby Nobby Nobby whenever you say it. And then I've been playing Flower a little bit but we already talked a lot about that. So is everyone else in the comments? And then I've also been playing... Halo Wars? Halo Wars but I don't even want to talk about that yet until I get farther along in it. And I guess that's really it. I've been pretty boring I guess. I feel like I should have played the... Is that the point we've reached in society where if you haven't played a lot of video games you're boring? Well I'm boring in general. As a person I just have interesting stories. But I'm saying as far as my video game playing habits have gone... Oh I know what I've played. I've played World of Warcraft for the first time. We're going to... I want to talk about this. Five months. Because I pulled you in. Five months last night and I got on around like 11 o'clock at Phil's behest. And I started a new Death Knight character because I could... I've been pushing you to start playing WoW again for quite a while. But I refused to start all over as a level 1 character on Phil's server. But I found out I could create a Death Knight and start a 55. And I was like I'll do that. So I created a Halo 55 orc and his name is Grogchaz. Which is Dwarven if I remember right for Goblin work. So... Yeah. I don't know what to say to this because honestly the only time I've ever played World of Warcraft I did it because I had to do it for a story. And I played it for like 10 hours and I was like oh I can kind of see what's cool with this next. I just hate it when I see all these people that are always named things like Billy Babble. Something like that. I always like to have like a real like Robcat sounds like a name I could imagine an orc father giving his fucking spawn. So you're not much of a role player? We have a shaman in my guild named Julia Roberts. See I don't want to roll. I don't want to roll your name he has a warrior ult named Julia Roberto. I don't want to roll play like my character I just played. But I just like him to be named something cool. And Grogchaz is Goblin work in Dwarven. You know I don't know why I know that it's pretty sad. I know why you fucking know. And so yeah I started a little 55 Death Knight and when I went to sleep last night he was already 58. So I played quite a bit last night. Wow. I mean it was just a couple hours but you went really fast. And I enjoyed it. Actually you know the weird part about it that I wanted to talk about Phil was that I kind of now see why everyone was all hot on the Wrath of the Lich King expansion compared to like the other WoW expansions. Because it was the first time I ever played WoW and I felt like I cared about the storyline. Like I wasn't clicking through it like I always did. The storyline was actually genuinely interesting about how you start off as this really evil person and then go into like a more neutral territory. I don't know. Yeah actually whoever wrote that story at Blizzard deserves a fucking... I was actually... I was excited because this week I wasn't going to bring up World of Warcraft at all but because we delayed a day I actually had a really interesting story happen to me last night on the game but I wanted to bring up. This will be quick. But and also I knew we'd be talking about it because Anthony started playing. But last night I logged on I wasn't really going to do anything. And then I noticed some people were getting a group together for an achievement called For the Horde. And this is the achievement you get on the Horde side. If you go and you kill all of the Alliance leaders in the capital cities. Which is ridiculously hard. Well it used to be ridiculously hard. I remember when the game originally came out like getting huge raids together to do this. And here that we got a rate of 40 people which which also like just doesn't happen much anymore. Because the actual in-game raids are only like 25 people now. So we got this huge rate of 40 people and we went to all the capital cities and it was actually really interesting that we just we had no trouble at all. Like even against players other players trying to stop you. The first three capital cities for the Alliance had no other players in there who tried to stop us at all. We didn't run into anyone. I guess if there's 40 of you they just realized like what's the point? Well we just didn't run. There was no one there. And then Iron Foragers is the Alliance city that usually has a lot of people. We ran into two or three people and then killed them and killed the leader. And then this huge force arrived to try and see that's what I was talking about. That would have been me. Because back in the day like me and my friends when we played were always like that nerdy where it would be like one person, one person. One person would be in town and it'd be like he sounded the horn to Gondor and we'd all be like we'd all mount up and be like to the city. But we'd already killed the leader so they like they arrived just as we were portaling out of there. We're like so later. But I mean isn't that sort of anticlimactic to show up to a couple of cities and there'd be like no one there. We will take your capital city. It was really sad how like how easy it was. It was just this rate of 40 people. Like I said there were so many people that I just didn't even know what was happening most of the time. So like I would go through and there would be other people killing guards so I'd just let them kill the guards and sit in the middle. And then when we got to the actual city leaders I'd be like alright I'll target that guy and hit ice bolt over and over again. So you basically just like got credit by doing little next to nothing. You were just along for the ride basically. See that was like the best days of World of Warcraft for me. Like when I used to play were always things like when the game first came out me and my friends started day one. And I remember like most of us were like level 20 and the highest level of us was like 35 which was probably close to the highest level on the server at the time. So this was like five days into the game maybe. And I remember we organized a raiding party into horde lands to just go PVP. And nobody had mounts or anything like that so we were all running on foot. And like we took a fucking boat ride to the other continent. Ran like an hour and a half through fucking forests. Hurting this group of like 50 people that we gathered up. And then we arrived on their fucking planes and we stood outside their city. And so then a bunch of them fucking started talking to each other in Ork speak because you can't understand it. And they all gathered and there was a huge battle line drawn and eventually I was just like let's do it And I rushed them and then everyone rushed behind me Fucking epic man, I like the way you're talking about that like When I played World of Warcraft, we didn't even have them out You should hear a bunch of us two hours to confront the horde You should hear him talk about Everquest, it's even worse Yeah, Everquest was, Everquest, like We didn't have any of these options I'll share one Everquest story, right? Yeah, I was like back in the, I have two Everquest stories When I used to play with my friends You see, you did film? Yes, I did I used to play with my friend Ian My friend Paul used to tell us all these epic stories about fighting people in Everquest And in my mind, it was like It was like something like World of Warcraft, but in reality it was Everquest Which is like still to this day, 20 years in the past And I remember, I had, for the first time, found this boat in Everquest Because you know, it was such a daunting world Because I was my first MMO experience You know, it was a lot of people's first MMO That when I ran all the way to a boat, the idea of taking a boat to another continent It was like totally frightening experience Because I had no idea where it went I had no idea what to expect when I got to this other continent Because I didn't check the internet at this point for like, just to tell me where to go So I would arrive in this new land, there's no maps in Everquest So I didn't know where I was going I would explore this fucking town It's like Anthony goes to communist Russia And eventually I found my way out of the town and I just started running down the road Because generally on the road, there aren't too many monsters And so I just started running on the road hoping that I would reach another town And eventually, at some point on my run to the road, I got attacked by a fucking snake and it killed me And so then I respawned at my hometown on the other continent So we're talking like four hours and when you respawned, you didn't have any of your gear That kind of sounds way better than World of Warcraft Or any sort of massive multiplayer game that would cater to your needs for fun Like I kind of hope that like 50 years from now that people play world games Or it's like, you know, it's like in the 1400s And you're like going to be an explorer and you real-time like get into a boat And sail across the Atlantic So you check in with your friends for like six weeks And all you do is basically like fight off scurvy with little mini games Where you try to eat oranges or something Yeah, I mean, I think that sounds awesome Because like the investment is huge The investment is... It took me so long to get here The investment is huge Like I remember at the time like nowadays in Everquest Like people wouldn't even bother to pick up bronze armor But at the time bronze armor was utterly amazing Like no, no stats, just bronze armor Like it just had some armor rating And I remember me and my friend had managed to save up enough money between the two of us That we had acquired full sets of it So we were running around these two gold dwarfs And we saw this dragon And so we were like, I was like, let's try and attack it man And so we attacked it and we both got killed And then I had a date with this girl The one serious girlfriend I ever had in high school And so I had to bail But we had both died and when you died in that game You didn't turn it to a ghost, you respawned as an actual person And you didn't have any of your gear So you just had to go find your body and get your gear back But we didn't know where we had died Because the zones at that point seemed so daunting to us That we just had no idea where we had died And there was no map so we couldn't just know that we died here So I remember I was on my date And I was making really expensive cell phone calls Because it was in the past and I had a cell phone for emergencies only And I was still calling him up during my date Like I would go to the bathroom and be like, hey, did you find our bodies? Because we were going to lose because after like six days And every quest if you didn't find your body, your body just disappeared forever So I was going to lose all this armor Just in case anyone's worrying I can tell you even though Anthony and I have never talked about this But Anthony definitely did not get laid that night It's almost certain Every quest was announced Possibly ever with that girl Every quest was such a ball-breaking game too That like there was another time I remember I fell off the boat Riding from one con into the other How do you fall off a boat in a game? Because I was being dumb running along the edge No running! And I fell off the boat And my character got so tired he eventually drowned And so I drowned and my body sank to the bottom of the ocean I had to fucking pay a necromancer to come out to the ocean with me and summon my body To me so I could get all my gear I almost wanted to cry in like real tears This is the kind of shit that makes me wish I call shenanigans all that almost This is the kind of thing that makes me wish that we could sort of transport someone from 100 years ago into this room And make them listen to you To see the shock on their faces Of having absolutely no idea what it is that humanity has become Like what the fuck is this guy even talking about right now? I have no idea I mean all the stuff I'm about to explain Every quest was a problem of mine for a long time I love the fact that you have to distinguish between real tears I'm going to be sad too Because there was the one time in life that I remember for my birthday that same year That same friend that I played with all the time For my birthday he got me two rings and a request And he paid real life dollars for them on eBay That was really kind of gay I'm watching your average respects for me tangibly trying I don't know I think that's really sweet actually That's nice This is a guy who just told us that is the best day he's ever had in three years Yeah And to be... Sounds like you were on the wrong way And to be a point of fact I did not get laid by that girl ever Ever I fucking guarantee it Actually I guarantee that it was never even really remotely an option It was true but it was mostly because she loved Jesus so much That's what she told you Jesus is such a cockblock here He's a pretty terrible wingman I remember in high school Like I remember at the blast doing that In like 11th grade we had some... We could come out to talk to the entire high school His whole thing was like about abstinence And his speech was focused almost entirely on making girls cry for their innocence And I think that that was such an absolute clampdown on campus for months You know like every girl on campus suddenly was like 14 years old again It was really brutal Like what? I was like what? Yeah every girl felt incredibly guilty Every girl closed up shop It was like a sexual recession Everyone was fired, we were all jobless and sort of employing ourselves constantly Not that people would hear like stories like "I heard the Nancy's given workout on the docks today" That's what you chill up with Man no doubt It was fucking brutal Like you know like girls that you've been working on for months You're back to like you know over the pants shit It was like the 50's I am 30 years old I should not be even talking about this stuff right? I don't think I'm ever going to grow up We're not that funny I've been married for five years and this is how I am We're not that far behind you in age, most of us so Yeah You are Let's take a quick break Let's take a quick break Let's take a quick break Let's take a quick break Let's take a quick break Let's take a quick break [Music] You're no man, it's a cries of all that you got Put your down, son, it's more than just me Come on girls, I know you know what you want Come on now, come on [Music] Alright, I know we're a little bit behind on this discussion But we don't have a little bit of a talk about predictions for 2009 I haven't seen this covered by many places, so It should be fun, right? People seem to be into it enough with the comments Yeah, so that was Robert's first prediction Robert, you were just a before it was all hand-forward Why are we even talking about video games? It was a fun, just hand-forward into the microphone [Music] Online or air? That was a guy that was really, did you ever show you that video That guy that could do really amazing hand-forward videos? But he doesn't call himself a hand-forward because he's like Oh, he doesn't song He calls himself a manualist, yeah [Laughs] And he would do like a, he would do like a fucking, like a [Music] [Laughs] I used to practice trying to shake people's hands and pull up a hand so I were doing But the problem is, you can't always count on the moisture content of another person's hand Like if it's too dry, you can't pull it off How much do you edit O.I. full-waisted? [Laughs] Holy shit dude, like the new episode is like 12 hours of raw material and then I'm editing it down Yeah That makes sense to me But also, I mainly don't sit around talking to people by hand-farts I just show up to other people's podcasts [Laughs] And it's all about that, it's about just them with hand-fart stories I honestly thought the first fart noise we'd hear on this podcast would be Anthony's I mean, it's a day of surprise Nah, actually, you know, when I was on GFW and stuff, I never once farted, like, audibly Yeah, but this is your home Oh, come on, we were down there for like hours sometimes Of course, I was going to light some up sometimes [Laughs] For sure, I would hope that no one would ever notice that Sometimes I'd smell it and be like, "I'm pretty sure they know" How do you know how to get back on track? I can smell them from the other sort of thing I'm sitting here wondering if I should just, like, make it a point to derail any conversation [Laughs] Alright, anyway, prediction I don't want to fuck it up Prediction? Ah, it's too late for that [Laughs] So, we did, we want to start with the two clearly greatest predictions that we come across Yeah, let's start with this Okay, so our first prediction comes from Evangelion He says, "I believe this is something" He's not even bald, man He's in it right there Yeah, I know, hey [Laughs] I believe that this is the year the 360 dies Microsoft [Laughs] Microsoft has no first person No first party studio worth mentioning No great excuse of this year Sony will destroy everything DUR-ing E3, there's a lot of R's in that Nintendo will just continue selling their toy Wow We with no games So, that is someone you could debate the whole game not game thing with Yeah So, that's followed by our second greatest prediction for this year Which is, if the world economy continues to worsen Sony will shut down the PlayStation division Sony is taking huge hit and sales across the board [Laughs] I'm trying to get a straight face What was that guy's face? Slit disco Okay, well that's what you want to remember I recognize that guy Like, wait I think that he may subscribe to my Twitter feed So, I'm going to thin He's right [Laughs] He's right, that guy is fucking right You're really not helping PlayStation going down in flames You're really not helping our anti-sonie image here Jesus It's only a matter of time before someone there grows a pair and pushes for its demise No, honestly, if anything's going to shut down it's going to be your job Like, it's not going to be the PlayStation or the Xbox Those guys, they're going to have jobs But you know, you're working at McDonald's You're going to lose your job, dude Like, that's I feel like in this recession McDonald's is probably making fun of you No, that's true Like Starbucks Starbucks is the new McDonald's Well, did you know Starbucks is fun? I recently introduced instant coffee for cheaper prices Didn't they? They're doing, like, value meal things now Yeah Yeah Nice Predictions Yeah, actually, it's pretty dumb I'm pretty dumb to say that McDonald's is going out of business Alone after that [Laughs] I was inspired by these really dumb predictions I know, I know Okay, so Is this just where we're going to insult our people? No Honestly, I'm surprised by their quite a few good predictions Were there actually rumors like genuine rumors, I guess, as genuine as anything posted on Kotaku? That, um, that Well, I'm just saying, but were there genuine rumors, though, that, like, Sony was talking about, or There were possibilities that Sony would be shutting down their PlayStation brand I mean, I agree, seems totally absurd I don't, of the two predictions It is the less absurd But It's still, it's still pretty I think that they would have to be in, like, bankruptcy trouble Yeah, I mean, because they would be seeding, basically, like, Why wouldn't they sell it to someone? Yeah, well, they certainly, I don't know, they would certainly sell the brand But I just don't see them doing it I mean, they would be seeding this huge future market for stuff Yeah, it's like, like, the biggest electronics proprietor of Japan is going to say You know what, I don't think we're going to bother with this whole computer and video game Internet thing I think we're going to stick to, uh, television And CD player, CD players And Walkmans, yeah, no, it's not going to happen Yeah, I mean, the only way that the PlayStation brand would go under this gen is if Sony went under, and even that And Japan is not going to let Sony go, I agree No, they are a national fixture Whereas the Xbox division is actually profitable for Microsoft now So Yeah, although Microsoft is having problems I mean, everyone's having problems, but honestly, that's stuff still going away It's ridiculous, yeah, so nothing is going away this year, so we'll move on to some predictions that are Although, I mean, I think that is common thread that you're going to find in a lot of the comments is just people trying to figure out how is the current economic state going to affect video games And I think what a lot of people are guessing is that there's probably not going to be that much exciting happening this year See, I don't know that I agree with that I think that what that demonstrates is that as the economic situation gets worse the console war bullshit is going to get worse because people feel even more tied to the system that they own So, I mean, expect more Yeah, well, I mean I'm willing to have holes poked in that theory Yeah, but I don't know, because I honestly don't understand what causes people to go on the internet and argue with each other about their fucking video game console insecurity I think it's the people that only own one Yeah, it's a kid When I was a kid, I owned I mean, I guess we didn't have the internet back when I was a kid, so maybe I don't understand Yeah, but you know, you didn't ever feel or I really was your friend who had a genesis and you were like, "Super Nintendo, bitch" Dude, I will come out and I will admit But mainly I was like, "Oh, dude, you've got a Super Nintendo..." I had a Genesis and a TurboGrafx I was always on the losing end of things So, it was like, "Oh, you've got a Super Nintendo? I'll be over in five minutes!" If I had had the internet when I was a kid I would have been on there talking about how much I love my Super Nintendo and how much I don't care about Genesis It was Zelda I don't know, man I don't think I've been rivals since childhood Yeah, well, I was all about Super Nintendo Except for when it came to Mortal Kombat then it was always at my friend's house playing Genesis because it had blood What's funny is, as a Genesis owner, I actually like the Super Nintendo version of that game more Well, it was a better game It was hard to play on the Genesis controller and it was something weird about it even though actually looking back on it but not the most fun game in the world to play Anybody ever play Eternal Champions on the Genesis? Yes, that was a fun game It was before a Street Fighter game and so it was the only fighting game The whole game of the characters were huge Yeah, with the stage-specific fatalities I'm sure that that plays like, absolute shit now but at the time it was great And it had a shitload of characters too Yeah, yeah It was cool, I mean, I'm sure lots of people feel that way about games nowadays when you're younger and you haven't spent many jaded years playing every video game under the sun like, you can latch onto any video game and think it's awesome What do you think will actually happen in the year 2000 2009, Robert? In the year 2009 I hope that I won't have to take out a large loan to pay my rent It's it because you won't be able to get it Yeah, probably not Although my wife is in school so we've got the whole student loan angle But yeah, I don't know what's happening with the video game industry I don't actually follow business stuff in games I find it really boring Like, whenever people go on one-up years and they argue with each other about the sales of games I honestly don't give a fuck who is selling the most games I just play the games This is why I was a bad news editor because NPDs came out and I was responsible for writing the stories and I did every month but I didn't care about NPDs at all I'm awful at analyzing numbers and sales I find it Like, interesting sort of academically It's interesting trying to see the way that consumer strategy and branding and stuff like that works Almost is a sociological thing Yeah, to me it's so tied up in the sort of console war arguing stuff that I steer very far clear of it Which is completely understandable But you're going to fucking hear some of that shit now Let's have another comment You know, I guarantee you that this year there's going to be a game that you never thought about that's going to pop up and it's going to be fucking awesome because that happens every year There's always going to be something that people gamers are so active and getting every bit of info about games before they come out and they think they know it's going to happen and then every year some cool game Crackdown? Yeah, some kind of stuff Well, that, I mean Microsoft has changed their strategy for the last couple of years to say, well, we're not going to make big announcements a year and a half in advance We're going to blow our load in June and let you wait until November sort of I think it's a good idea Especially because I just don't think the attention spans there I think the old hype cycle really early was based on game magazines and the long lead times of print Yeah, yeah, exactly and I think if you want to stay on the minds of people, it's better to do it a little bit later Well, maybe you should, maybe even that note you should go into one of the comments So, I mean, I have one that I think is interesting Socrates says Blizzard will partner with Valve to release Starcraft 2 on Steam while in their back catalog will follow with incentives to register your keys with Steam Gabe Newell will be transported back to the mothership leaving us to the PC gaming paradise he has created for us Somebody else brought up and I think he's coming right there There's a response from Evil Genius who says Blizzard may announce that a new battle net is a Steam clone and with the power of having WoW Starcraft and Diablo it would quickly rival Steam I actually think that's much more likely Well, having been to Blizzcon and talked to people that were working on games for BattleNet I can almost 100% guarantee that Blizzard is not going to use Steam and that they're going to use BattleNet and BattleNet isn't going to be like the old BattleNet and make a billion user names and it's going to be one user name tied to all your games and there's going to be no more anonymity because you can only have that one user name and it is going to be like their online store eventually Blizzard is already doing stuff that Steam doesn't even do that people want Steam to do right now I mean, why would these Steam... when they already have like all the account services? Well, and that and not only that but with Blizzard games you can take all your old Blizzard games go to their website, enter the key and redownload the entire executable Exactly, that's what I'm saying Blizzard is not going to put that into the hands of someone else and I have a sneaking suspicion that Activision might try to leverage whatever Blizzard is doing with BattleNet as a content architecture delivery system for their own stuff down the road I mean, I think we can look at the downloadable services as the sort of new version of the platform wars as computing moves further into the internet and obviously we still need to download programs and everything but everything is becoming so software-based and people want to own that show people want to be the place where you go to get games or the place where you go to play games and no one is going to just see that territory to Steam just because Steam is the popular thing right now everyone wants to be iTunes everyone wants to be Steam everybody wants to have a piece of that pie and that's going to be where the war is at and really, I don't see why we would want Steam to be the ultimate thing I mean, it's sort of inconvenient to have a few programs that you use to play games online but at the end of the day, it's better to have the competition and have people trying different things against each other and there is some competition I mean, there's a direct drive and then there's also the there's not really any good competent competition but, no, there is there's impulse that's like one that's trying to change well, I mean, Penny Arcade has the one that they work with yeah, so I mean, there are, it's just that again none of them have the far reaching like when people think downloadable games for PC, they think Steam I mean, they just have that iTunes thing going for them in a way and they definitely have the lead on that stuff but, I mean, I just don't see them as having, you know, one, some sort of platform war it seems easy enough to just I mean, obviously, Blizzard has stuff that they can use to leverage that it's like, they're the ones with, wow, they don't have to play by Steam Blizzard and Activision have enough titles that if they wanted to make their own store and they would house their Call of Duty and wow, and all those Blizzard games they could have a pretty significant yeah, and I mean, I don't know Activision has shown a willingness to have some of their content on Steam like they've got World of War and some other stuff but I just I feel like Activision isn't going to want to put that much power into the hands of another publisher or developer especially when they have a close relationship with Activision's biggest competitor yeah, so, so yeah, I don't think that we're going to see Blizzard's stuff on Steam noop, they don't need it yeah, they never will need it, that's the thing yeah, unless people stop playing WoW which seems impossible you know, my nephew just recently all he does now that he quit football is play WoW he didn't read Great Gatsby in high school he had a test on the Great Gatsby, he didn't read it if you're going to be in high school and take an English class and skip a book skip Frankenstein, skip the Scarlet letter the Great Gatsby is so good the fucking Great Gatsby it's like 200 pages long and it's kind of lazy as you have to be to not read that book I mean Frankenstein is not a... I think he should probably not listen to this I'm supposed to be like the responsible uncle but uh... Wow yeah yeah there's no good place to go from there I'm surprised the version is my tactic to know it's something we saw from a lot of people I'm not going to name any specific user names because I saw it so often as people seem to think that the PS3 is going to get a price drop pretty much immediately there have been some stories in the press lately or an analyst specifically says that the PS3 is going to get a $100 price drop in the next few weeks I mean I think that would be really really smart but like which skew there's so many it's like confusing to know even like what they would be talking about yeah and I think that Sony would love to lower the price I just don't think that Sony isn't a position to do it or they would have I've also heard a water cooler talk from a friend of mine who has a good friend that works in the games division like the people that actually developed the 360 who have they've been talking a lot about supposedly that it'd be really cool to have a 129 arcade skew for the 360 by the end of the year yeah and I would expect them to aggressively pursue that like because having a 129 360 would make their ideas that it would make the Wii look ridiculous in a way yeah that would be that would be pretty insane so I can't even imagine that but I just don't know you know what goes into that well it's like what it's 179 right now right? yeah the arcade is 179 so it's just another 50 bucks yeah and they are this year they're releasing the 360s with the unified CPU and GPU on the motherboard so they're although I think at some point I mean when the Xbox begins to be like cheaper than the Wii drastically the same price as the PS2 yeah and the Wii continues to make a lot of money at its own price point it's like you start to look like the cheap competitor people have got to be like why is this 129 dollars if it's like way better technology and has all the fancy shit I don't know Nintendo isn't shown any I think this year might finally be the year the 199 price charts yeah this will be the year that we finally see that not because they want to necessarily just because I think that the economy is going to get worse I don't know I mean until the Wii stops selling like crazy well they've already seen demand in Japan I'll say this I've still never seen a Wii in a store to this day I've seen Wii's in stores yeah yeah I mean they might not need to but I think if the yen gets a little weaker in comparison to the dollar which may happen then Nintendo will finally use it as an excuse to lower the price they'll just suck up the little bit of loss in the Wii by all the DSIs they're going to be selling this year so wouldn't it matter I just don't even know how much the Xbox is competing with the Wii I think it's really not over the way Microsoft desperately wants it and it's just not I think the DSIs is going to be something interesting to watch to see how it sells just like you know a new product in this one Japan starting selling like stupid amounts really what I'm curious about is yeah it's selling like crazy in Japan but what I'm curious about is that since they said they're not getting rid of the DS Lite so now there's going to be the DS Lite cheaper alternative to the DSi I'm curious the DSi is like what 149 or something I think when the DSi is 179 so I'm curious if the DSi is going to sell in North America or if it's still just going to be people buying lots of DS Lite I don't know I think that it can exist as a premium option but I don't think that Nintendo sees any point in releasing a successor to the DS so maybe it's the closest we're going to see for a while yeah I know I agree with that any just like sales wise it'll be interesting to see like like Tyler says I don't know is anybody here going to buy a DSi I'm actually well I mean part of the reason I'm part of the reason I think it'll be interesting to see is because I don't think I'm going to buy a DSi but I might use that as an excuse to buy a DS Lite that's right you have a DS fat yeah I have like an old school DS and I'm thinking maybe I'll grade to a light finally I had a brief love affair with the DS Lite I've been played it in like 40 years though I'm sure it's not even I actually bought with it that I went forward and then back in time I play my DS on a regular basis almost every night a lot of times I had this thing for portable games for a while and you know I work at home so I don't have any sort of commute and so I did but I loved playing portable games around the house on the PSP and the DS and for a while it started to feel like kind of a different kind of gaming because you'd sort of curl up in a chair and get sort of into it in this way that it's almost like reading a book or something but then the games that I was interested in playing to sort of trickles to a stop you know I think the last handheld game that I was really interested in playing was the God of War game because I'm just a fucking sucker for God of War I can't get it. I mean how do you handle this is a random off topic but I just want to have a bit. How do you handle working at home so much? because I predict that I'm going to go myself a lot of people in the gaming industry that are really curious about this yeah I am slowly going insane that helps one is that I've always been a mega loner an only child I grew up you know latchkey kids spending lots of time by myself always growing up also I'm married so I have someone who comes home often and is there a lot you know she's in school and so you know she'll stick around oftentimes my days don't put me as like the spousal substitute in Anthony's life please don't put me like she'll let her hear what yeah it's not really the same you know I don't think you know I don't think no I would imagine when Anthony is having a bad day he's not going to come and cuddle up with you why don't we cuddle that one time doesn't mean that it's the same okay yeah my bad but also like every afternoon pretty much I work on music with my bandmate so it's sort of like having a different job that pops up at one o'clock do you ever just get like that impulse or like I gotta get out of the motherfucking house right now yeah although it used to be that when I felt that way I would get on my bike and I would go to amoeba and spend $50 on records and now that I make negative you know $50 every day I don't have that luxury anymore so I'll just sort of walk around my neighborhood and stare at all the crazy people and think to myself like am I becoming one of these people I think so but yeah it's not a lifestyle for everyone but I haven't had a job since 2003 not like a real job like yeah I've worked at home I mean I was like a design contractor for for a Washington DC non-profit organization for three years before I became a freelance writer and yeah but yeah it's it's fucked up don't do it kids I was gonna say I feel like what you've hit in six years I've hit in like in two months I'm starting to lose it doesn't even been two months it's been like a month and I'm gonna lose my fucking mind yeah you know I don't know I hated having a job honestly so my prediction for 2009 is that Anthony is gonna lose this fucking mind it could be it could very well happen that was my prediction I'll become I'll become like game informers like like that guy that was what was that was that guy that used to write like the weird fucked up columns like for for like EGM or game now I forget which one it was but remember he was like he would write things like what if what if oh that is a Swedish kid that I used to write the letters yeah yeah so that's good to get septic and telly yeah I'm gonna become like the gaseptic and telly but I'm gonna be writing from fucking mental institution oh god it's gonna be like those sad prison letters we used to get free jam that was like remember wait here okay if you're gonna work at home you got to have schedule you got to have certain things you got to do every fucking day you got to go exercise got to leave the house you've got to eat well you've got to not spin your whole day on the computer so this is okay so you might as well have a checklist of the way that Anthony spends his day and except for that last one like the opposite of all of that yeah keep in mind like I'm fighting this constantly so it's like a self-battle because it's all about a discipline and I'm not a hugely disciplined person I'm just saying yeah it is good that I don't drink and stuff because I would know maybe you should actually because sometimes like that's the thing you need like after a long day at home you need to get into a different mental space and that's the thing you know like a like novelists you know that's why novelists are such huge drinkers because at the end of the day you've been sitting at home all day what the fuck are you gonna do you can't leave your office you go to a bar you meet some people you have a couple of drinks you get away from work and when you come back to your place it's no longer the office anyway for anyone out there who might be considering the freelance lifestyle I will give you tips tips and tricks okay so I will write a thank you I'm revising my 2009 prediction Anthony's either going to go fucking insane or he's going to start drinking and using drugs heavily yeah that's not a very good idea it's one or the other he's gonna he's gonna change this like online that's something that you should definitely ease in he's gonna pay to have his gamer tag change to Hemingway yeah that guy shot himself with a shotgun okay it's hard to shoot yourself with a shotgun you gotta you gotta have a serious reach but I guess like I was a boxer you use your toe what was that you use your toe you should tell me for the trigger well yeah I I'm pretty sure that one day I'll shoot myself but this is probably not a topic that I want to talk about because then someone will go back and find it and be like he predicted that he'd shoot and none of those fuckers did anything yeah that'll mean there'd be like an insurance Bst moment where they're like he's not really dead he's like an anti-coffman thing yeah yeah fake your bed all right anyway anyway sorry video games wow who really wants to tune in and listen to people talk about video games for over an hour I can tell you I'll tell you who like me like I I've lived the freelance lifestyle for the past four years as well and like nothing like helps me just like not go crazy than people yapping just about whatever that's why I can't keep me focused no actually that's true and that's that's something that I've always uh but Anthony talks back when he's listening to of course if you're if you're if you're by yourself you talk to the people even if they're virtual people even if they're cratose or a cat or a bottle of mpr or uh or any other sort of entertainment you might find but yeah I mean you gotta you can't just be alone all day and and listening to the radio certainly fills the lonely void i mean we'll never get out of pornography i feel like in a way like uh you and uh Tyler here like kindred spirits like i feel like it's a texas thing to like yeah that's what i'm saying but you guys both don't have to do like the jobs you've been like working this freelance and stuff i feel like there's something going on about texas that i we're independent motherfucker like we're our own country we used to be our own country uh and wait didn't you used to be part of mexico well and then for a while yeah but we took that shit fucking took that shit all right remember the alma that now obviously that's a joke oh if nobody if nobody thinks that's a joke in 2009 right actually we'll secede from the end no i'm excited now that now the george bush has left the white house i feel like you can be like more of a proud texas and you can't go back to texas because yeah yeah yeah man when i you know what when you moved away from texas did you get this feeling of like you were dissing the homeland yeah it's not cool believe it's not cool to leave people don't people only go into texas we used to talk about this concept of escape velocity like uh like you know if you were everyone every every kid who grows up like sort of uh disenchanted maybe punkish outsider alt kind of uh kid uh dreams that they're going to move to california from texas like we're not graduating man i'm moving to california um and nobody does it like nobody i mean i'm i'm like one of the only people i know of my friends back in texas who achieved escape was uh yeah and michael donahoe as well yeah michael donahoe and i think that's a lot of small towns sort of yeah i know that that's how it wasn't my small town like it's like fuck this i'm getting out of here i mean i one ever does i mean minnesota is robin here but yeah exactly but even if it's not a small town i mean people in you know dallas and houston even austin people people want to leave austin who would want to leave austin i feel like it might be kind of a semi-white trash thing that if you grow up in like a little a slightly white trash place as i did like it's just like there's some kind of gravity there that keeps people from from pulling away it's called meth yeah it is actually called meth i am from meth california what do you think you know it's also that when you don't grow up in california or new york city uh that you grew up with all this television culture that is about a place that you don't live that's like if you lived in california things would be so much cooler that's where all the cool people live and see you're you're dying all this time to to leave your town that's full of like really nice people who are good to each other and come to some place where people treat each other like shit um and so that you can realize like oh my god this place is hell um and think like why did i leave it's actually leaving texas is not unlike immigrating from another country god they should put you on the travel you know if you don't feel like when you're in berkeley it's a place of a love and acceptance no no did i i mean i'd say like this is where hippies go to die now it's where hipsters fucking dominate and judge each other it's not even that though it's just like angry people i mean when i first moved to berkeley it used to shock me i remember walking back from the berkeley bowl which honestly is my my favorite thing about berkeley it's this amazing grocery store but anyway i was walking back from the grocery store and this guy who works with the daily planet uh which is a berkeley institution newspaper like super hippie guy long hair was actually carrying a carton of soy milk from the berkeley bowl crosses the street and some other dude in a car like is trying to turn and turns out in front of them and the hippie dude freaks out throws his soy milk and you know it's like motherfucker fuck you and the guy in the car is like fuck you cracker and like they're having this crazy argument and i was just sort of surprised i had no idea that that's what this place is all about but it is anyway i have a question who's putting this episode up are you out there how the fuck are you going to describe how are you going to write the show this is a cluster swap most off topic podcast ever if you enjoy it when they didn't talk about games this is the podcast for you it's not you know it's not just about games it's about you know the lifestyle of a gamer yeah i think that's a hundred percent pallet yeah there's a certain way of looking at life this is just so that people don't listen to our podcast and listen to yours that's where you're here i'm just thinking that it's like you know all this play games but they should but we only play games so much and then we have such a life outside well yeah i mean like the i i like to read i think people get to know our personalities way more than they ever do when i'm talking about knobby knobby boy stretching i feel like it's it's very revealing when you talk about so forth that is the Anthony that i know this is for us no that's today when i play sept when we talk about things when we get back to predictions we could get predictions let's do some more business predictions or there's some we can well there are some some business predictions there's also some media ones yeah i mean i can go to a media one i go to a media prediction it's which doesn't sound i mean go ahead i don't think anyone in this room will be surprised uh robert el says the biggest trend this year is going to be a total revamp of games covers and press obviously you're kind of talking about that robert the big impetus for this movement is the fall vgm and i predict game pro game informer and the like won't hold out much longer um he predicts that the smaller sites like giant bomb and area five or what's going to take their place um i mean i think people think that certain sites are way bigger than they are i mean giant bombs not a small site by any means like they get a ton of traffic i mean i bet you their site i mean even people think like small kataku is a small site but kataku is in a small site they have a lot of riders and a lot of freelancers and they get more hits than one up does on a regular basis i mean you know it's like they aren't small they're huge they just happen to run in a blog which makes it seem a blog format which makes them seem like they're like unimportant somewhere or something like that and also the way that nikden run sites nikden is the head of gakar is aggressively frugal yeah i mean they're they're not spending a lot of money but they're also making probably money hand-refished in comparison what i think is interesting is that now that these magazines are closing some of the the blogs which had previously been just sort of um places where people getting like up to the minute information and to a certain degree kataku is still like that you know i i sort i complain about this a lot on my twitter because i'm i bitch a lot uh but you know kind of what twitter's for kataku like updates their site every five minutes and when i don't read my feeds for a couple of days it's so daunting to to try to catch up on it but i mean it was lately that they they're actually starting to do more features and stuff and it's really hard to consume in a blog format it's one of those things where like the thing that made kataku interesting which was that it was this linear information feed suddenly becomes unwieldy when you start throwing in thousand word features and i love features and i'm down with it but i just don't know how people are going to read these things in a blog format it's going to take a lot of effort to get someone to stop and spend a certain amount of time reading that text when you have a site that's dedicated for it to like information browsing and i mean i think it's really cool that they're gonna that they're trying that stuff and i really hope that feature writing about games continues uh because it's super in danger i mean i i think you could easily see a gaming media that just becomes the most um a regurgitation of press releases yeah press releases and and uh stupid lists which i write stupid lists because everybody's got to pay their bills but uh i mean you know i i'm in a miss someone sitting down and and calling up 10 people from the game industry to talk about some interesting topic that's popped up lately and i i don't know who's paying for that uh as a freelancer i i don't know anyone who's paying the kind of money that it would take for me to get 10 people on the phone to interview them and talk to them about like a trend or a news story nobody's paying that uh as far as i can tell i hope that that will exist uh yeah and it might be something and i hope that i read it one more it might be something too where like it is again like the economy is obviously really negatively impacting uh a lot of uh the gaming journalism side too so why are things that are like looking up at some point then i mean yeah i guess i guess if people are like so desperate for ad dollars then if they're like trying to get clicks for those ad dollars then they're going to be more concerned with putting up a a an article that's proclic zone as jeff green used to say rather than like rather than like uh something that's like a as i've as i once heard someone say behind someone's back at one up uh beard stroking bullshit uh i just practically speaking from that prediction he talks about magazines folding um i i don't think game informer is gonna fold because i don't think that i mean i don't think as long as they're tied to people i really understand what game informer is which is just another way for game stop to leverage their influence in the gaming industry yeah i mean i i will also say like not that totally no i mean game informer occasionally sometimes i'll open game informer because like everyone else in the whole fucking world i have a subscription to it um and sometimes they'll have like really interesting stories the amazing thing about them is that they have such a like a huge real estate of space they'll do you know two pages on little like uh you know downloadable games from indie developers sometimes it's not the most interesting read sometimes it comes off really stock but they do have a lot of space and sometimes they use it for good stuff i mean their cover stories aren't exactly the hottest thing in the world but uh but the front the front of the book is interesting a lot of the time i mean as long as you recognize what you're getting into like you're not going to see a lot of coverage if oh i don't know steam in game informer yeah although they did have they actually had the biggest as far as i remember the biggest story on steam i can remember they had like a they had like a four or five page feature a couple of years ago on steam and valve so they do stuff like that um you know and and people you know people think that their their business interests are aligned against that i think that game informer probably has a significant independent uh editorial power i'm sure they're what they do and and you know they are compromised especially now that egms gone because i think that those magazines served to check each other you know i i think it was definitely like you know egm was you know always trying to behind mighty and like we're gonna be the more for our readers than game informers we're gonna look out for them and game informer you know would definitely be pushed to not be in the pocket of the interests that fund their magazine and now that that's gone maybe maybe that'll decline but yeah i don't know i mean you know as if davis used to have a magazine in the pocket of someone as well and i mean i think people still looked up to that magazine and thought it was pretty credible which but are we talking about gmr gmr was gmr was owned by ev games before the merger of oh really that was a pretty that's what that's why gm that's why gmr closed was because game stop and ev emerged in the game stop already had a magazine yeah speaking to uh other publications too like i don't know about something like game pro but i know like um i would say that like in my personal opinion um i think that like future for example i think they're going to be fine just because a lot of their magazines are sponsored see i i think that the future is going to introduce some new publications that are sponsored but as far as game pro goes and unfortunately i mean if you look at the trajectory physically and editorially of egm as far as what it looked like leading up to the end of the magazine if you look at game pro it's definitely there's not a lot of ad content the the the directory of advertises on the back is like a quarter of a page right but they also have a company that's more competently they do so they aren't like having to sell off assets and close ship because they're in bankruptcy but there's i think that the possibility exists the game the game pro could be in trouble i mean people it's they're there's talk that future is having some financial difficulties so well everyone's having financial do yeah i i feel fairly certain that when the economic shit pile is cleared out that there will be new video game paper magazines that will operate on a different model than the old model which was to try to grab grab news stand sales instead of that they're they will be expensive exactly magazines dedicated to smaller sort of like a sort of like the stuff that future yeah exactly it's harder to do here because you have to distribute across a much larger space but i think it's doable and someone will figure out how to do it and it'll be cool i i mean i mean i can see video game magazines being a lot better i agree i mean the niche does the niche does exist for for expensive magazines for a smaller audience and whoever's working on that wants to hire us it always been weird to me that uh that egm was twelve dollars for a whole year like a dollar issue just always blew my mind well i mean that that's where they were trying to compete you know they they were always trying to be the the rolling stone of video games and uh and i just don't think there was any room for that or at least not the way that zif was operating so what we're saying is uh my prediction is uh 2009 early first quarter 2010 a life while wasted turns into a print magazine after a storm rolls out oh my god iris robert i cannot operate a magazine i could i could never be any last bomb you're destined i would be i would be like such a horrible boss can you please can you please like maybe turn turn this in by the deadline please please please i mean i don't really care but it might be cool you know it's done when it's done dude i mean if you think you need another couple weeks to insert this shit out three thousand more words cool yeah all right and i i sorry i i got a i got a good p you'll be right back okay do that we'll we'll continue with another prediction uh okay so this one's from adam this one is just as much of hope is it is a prediction but i think we're going to see further growth of the indie games market last year at a number of big indie games like braid world go and audio surf and this year has already seen some high profile indie releases and flower the fact that games offer such unique experiences or showing how successful they can be um this is going to expire a lot more people to get into indie game development you know i i really i hope that this one is right and certainly at least personally i can say i'm looking at indie games a lot more and i just feel like they're a lot more visible there's more discussion going on about them i mean like look at something like gravity bone which we all played and talked about on the show and i feel like a year or two ago i never would have even noticed that that game existed but now there's there's people out there talking about it and uh this stuff is just popping up more yeah i feel like um i'm really glad somebody brought it up because i was going to bring it up actually in the previous segment just my friend and i were talking earlier today and he's into a lot of video freelancing work and i'm a freelance graphic designer and we're just talking about how it's all the little people who are actually not doing so bad in the recession it's anyone who has like a payroll who is going to be hurt so like all these indie all these indie developers for games i you know i believe 2009 is their year really yeah um okay uh and i think that in in the spirit of indie games i think one of the things that i really hope we see is a sort of redefinition of the xbox 360 community games initiative just something that's more intelligible oh yeah i mean i forgot to bring up but i uh i talked or i i downloaded one of the games that nik talked about last week which was the uh johnny uh johnny biscuits romp or some playing form romp yeah and it's fantastic and i never would have found it out uh if nik hadn't brought it up so yeah hopefully there will be a better venue for talking about x and a games we actually have one that we'll talk about a little bit later um well i just wanted to take a second before we forget just to say we have a lot of we'll talk about okay um okay let's see uh rudy r actually has a few questions for us as far as what our opinions are uh let's see so we have what game companies do you think will not exist by the end of 2009 man uh it's all all started off in gearbox gearbox will not exist by the end of the year gearbox gearbox brothers and arms gearbox man i've been to gearbox this people are fucking loaded and smart and working on all kinds of shit they're in the high like they're actually in my hometown like you picked like the absolute worst person you're like i think gearbox do it out they're actually in the the top floor of of the highest office building in play no taxes so what you're saying is that like sell their golden toilet seats first before they shut the doors yeah i know i just get the impression from from hanging out there for a couple days for a story i did for for games for windows how long ago was this uh it was it was right before brothers and arms came came out they have borderlands they have the aliens game uh they do not have the aliens game anymore so you pulled the plug on their aliens game the fuck is that uh that is gearbox not being able to meet a schedule actually really yeah and okay so the reasoning behind my gearbox prediction it's not because i don't like gearbox because i really like gearbox's games and like for example when i heard that they were the developer on the aliens call me a marines game i thought or i said to somebody that's a really good fucking choice for that game because they can totally do a squad based action game they've done that game but i i think that studios that have a hard time meeting deadlines for their contracts with bigger developers are going to have a lot of trouble i mean we've already seen just the last few weeks they at least three studios get the rug pulled out from under them when it comes to the games that they've been contracted like sega has done it i know right what is with my logic gearbox on basic hometown pride you're coming up with all this like information i know and facts i have to know i have to surprise people when i was there they seemed really with it and i mean i've been to a lot of game studios but they seem like they they really had they really had it figured out in a lot of ways is this like an almost famous moment but they made you feel like no it's actually the opposite because randy pitchford is um super nice guy and like an interviewers nightmare because he is the most talkative rambling person i've actually had to get like someone to transcribe my notes from that story because i had like five hours of randy pitchford anyway um but like i don't know they seem like they they had their heart in the right place maybe maybe i'm looking at it strictly from a gamer point of view and not from a business point of view because they really you know we're we're emphasizing quality and they were working on some really crazy cool looking stuff i mean part of it could depend on how borderlands does yeah like early impressions have been kind of negative and not only that but borderlands is such an ambitious project and yeah i mean if they don't have funding coming in from other places because it does sound like i mean i i i i honestly it had not heard about aliens and this is how much i follow gaming news these days i guess but uh but man yeah that's a bummer for everything to be running riding on borderlands because that was supposed to be their like experimental project that was you know from from what i understood at the time of going to look at it it was like you know that that was the thing that they were putting money into experimentally while they were working on things like aliens yeah and and brothers and arms that were supposed to be yeah and i and i'm almost positive brothers and arms didn't perform new as well and i mean if you if you look at it like the companies from last gen that started this gen putting all of their effort into one huge game that were sort of small like a mid-sized studio if they released it and succeed then that studio has since folded like fact five has folded in terms of uh in terms of uh other people i think that could be in trouble i mean i would have said um i had asked before the whole square innings thing but now now i would say the one publisher that looks really sketchy at the moment is um midway i would be i would be uh i mean they're definitely going to have problems this year i think and i would be totally surprised if if something bad goes down i could still see uh as far as even after the i just acquisitions gone that crystal dynamics is a studio in particular could be in trouble i see the the whole the whole square enix buying i don't think it doesn't make me worried about their games it makes me worried about the people that we know who work for crystal dynamics that's what i'm saying i just i just think maybe they'll just be like well we'll just keep the crystal name but get rid of basically gut the studio i hope they don't i basically i think that that fox now that they've taken aliens away from gearbox well it's not fox it's um sega has pulled colonial marines from gearbox and they pulled uh and not only that but the uh aliens are the alien rpg from obsidian which is which that that seemed kind of cool as well yeah uh from the the chatter about the alien rpgs that they didn't really have a direction and they were so my predictions now that that's been taken away they're going to give it over to nd swedish developer cactus and he's going to make a really uh david lynchian um lo-fi 3d take on aliens that that he'll make over a weekend and and you'll be able to download free that's my prediction rpg lobster 2009 excellent if you really want aliens in a first-person shooter just buy kills on two like it seems like a lot of the gun design sound design scene design i mean you might as well be saying action sci-fi in the aspect yeah right yeah uh i i wish i really wish that i liked to kill zone two but i i just i tried really hard to like it but uh i failed miserably liking it because you didn't have a saturday did you're failing to it no i i had to review it so i i mean clearly you're an expo so clearly i see the thing is like he he failed miserably to like it and he's failing miserably to slag it right now it's like the thing that's an ambivalent negative review oh no i mean i could be more specific about it like i thought that um it was the most egregious example of sort of the cynical sampling of successful tropes and video games i've ever seen it's like hey what's popular people love shooting nazis how about we uh have them shoot space nazis or you know people love like manly space marines why don't we crank that up to 11 you know it had like all of this machismo like fake ass machismo just like gushing what do you know about over the serene um i mean it's it's trying so hard to be excited and uh in your face all the time what do you know about your soldier got out there and kill some hillgast like fuck you that didn't remind me we're talking about we're talking about lunch that's exactly how we had lunch with the uh uh with uh tom and redden from uh game spot and we were talking about how uh the one thing that was really impressive too about the game is that they invented their own like a new racial slur for the hellgast they called the higs throughout the game and it's like clearly that's very offensive yeah yeah but you know what like honestly i i didn't get a lot of the meatheadedness from it like i just you know i know texas was every day texas was every day your life like that's how i picture it in my mind see that's why that's why i have our time with it growing up in texas is definitely like looking down the barrel of manhood and you're constantly like yeah it's it's a it's a struggle and so so i don't i don't you know i don't play like real with with machismo and i find it you know offensive like me too like and you know i've i've been on reviews of shooters where like it was so offensive to where like i i felt like it deducted from the score in a little bit like conflict um denied ops denied ops was one recently where like the headlines like give them an orange suit for guantanamo or some shit like that i was thinking like are you fucking kidding me like am i hearing this shit uh you know but i and and you know what like i i've heard other people say that about killzone two and i think i think it's like goes back to what we were talking to earlier about gta four and the lost in the damned and them just running at a crossroads of like you know they need lines of dialogue doing action scenes where there there's this you know and and and really in killzone two there's one character who's sort of the most meathead of them all it's it's the i don't know it's like the bald guy it's always dude i feel like dude i feel like of course it's like a bald guy i feel like uh after we get out of this podcast when i go out to take you guys home shit we're gonna go out there in a fucking 76 Chevy's gonna have manifested itself lifted with the confederate flag on the and you and tyler are gonna get in and just fucking drive off to go there like hey boys get in there yeah um you know i i think it wasn't just the the story and atmosphere which struck me as incredibly focused tested and cynical and creatively bankrupt uh but it was also real cool Robert that i didn't feel like the the game played well at a distance and and they're constantly um you know they're constantly changing up level designs to encourage you to play at different distances and up close the game the game was a lot more interesting to me like i think the ai was was was kind of fun to play with and and you would have these really intense battles and then you're getting these situations where you have like epic battles where you need to like pick guys off from afar and would turn into like time crisis you know where you're just like duck for a while then get out of cover and shoot some dudes then duck for a while and uh and i just i don't think that it was built to have that kind of uh variety in uh in combat um and i don't know and you know maybe i'm just not crazy about that style of shooter because you know if you're if you're listening to this right now and you and you're wondering if maybe you wouldn't like killed on two i really don't like call a duty at all either so i mean that probably disqualifies me you know right there for most people who like shooters it's not really my my thing i also feel like it disqualifies you from a chismo yeah i'm well i was disqualified from a chismo in like third grade gym they actually pulled me aside and said i'm so i want to tell you this but you you actually do not have a male testicles yeah yeah i i played middle school football and like i was the wide receiver and like i could never catch and like the coach caught on to like i was never gonna learn how to catch so he just started like when i would run like passing drills he just started like throwing the ball like as hard as he could like at the back of my helmet just like smashing you in the back my head like i have a very similar story no but you are not gonna tell me to tell this i mean tell it my i i played little league my coach was my uncle and i was really scared of the ball so after my first game of like stepping too far away from the plate when i was batting he kept me behind for uh after everyone had left and threw baseballs at me for 30 bucks holy shit he's like if you're gonna be scared of the ball you're gonna know what it feels like to get hit with one that wouldn't frighten me even more yeah i was friend it's next for i grew up man i still can't catch like you guys ever see like like uh who's that uh who's that comedian he was on arrested development and all those films uh but like like uh like uh on the rest of development like anytime's like someone throws them like hey catch these keys like these turns just like back oh that's me all the way wait what is that guy's name it's uh like it's sarah and michael sarah oh michael sarah i was thinking of the other guy you know the the like the like weird office boy yeah that's why i was thinking too oh michael yeah michael sarah is actually just an icon i'm really sorry to everyone listening you know next week's episode the topic is going to be uh just it's just going to be youtube reminiscing about taxes in texas that's gonna be more podcasts like that yeah about texas i would actually listen to that podcast i'll let you know after i see our subscriber numbers after this episode how many people are gonna people are gonna fucking love it okay okay okay let's do uh let's move on okay so let's do one more prediction there's chocolate art there one more prediction from the comments and then if any of us have any predictions we want to make to close it off well okay well why don't i just want to i will just run down a list of games that people are predicting will come out this year or won't come out this year and i want to hear what you guys think uh Mass Effect 2 coming out this year not coming out this year uh not coming out yeah beginning of next year Bioware's got a big project of the nammo under their belt already and they're also dragging it just out this year right supposedly yeah so i i would guess that'll be out first allen wake will disappoint everyone what oh no you were not alone in that prediction i really hope that allen wake turns out great that's how that's where i'm at because it's a bottle of good and that's like exactly my thinking like everyone wants it to be hype and like i want it to be hype like who doesn't like i feel like what could it be a really fucking talented guys i actually this is gonna be a second time i'm like calling out my credit on this but i've visited Remedy and i wrote a story about allen wake like five fucking years ago remember whenever we did that but uh but they have really cool technology really cool ideas they've got like 20 people working on the game and they've outsourced every all of their their stuff so they can just keep like the most the smallest most creative team working just on like you know writing and making this really interesting experience but it seems like they've really run into trouble with that idea and i'm sorry that that happened but i hope it ends up uh you know turning out okay because it really seemed to me like they they had some really progressive ideas that even though you know it's two years later whatever if that game came out today and it ends up being good it'll probably seem futuristic compared to a lot of the retread you know bullshit that's cool i hope so okay uh i i also don't think mass effect is coming out this year because EA has demonstrated a willingness now that they might start releasing games at a time period other than September through December but uh okay so god of war three yeah i think that'll probably be late this year mmm maybe i think i want to play it i'm leaning towards yes so any thoughts does it definitely like what else would sony have for their like big first party holiday i i don't know but i don't i think that it's not i think it'll be out in february next year because they they recently clarified their statements and also there's never been a god of war that came out in the fall hmm so i'm just saying even more reason for one to happen there's just never been a god of war in the fall it's god of war so fucking good it's all spectacle i like that you know that that's a game that appreciates the fact that the ultimate thing for a game is for you to like hit a button and for you to feel like you have all this incredible power like you're sitting there on your couch being like the laziest fucker on earth and you do the most minimal thing on earth you hit a button and the button it's not like you gotta like press it real hard it's that you just got to barely click it and then all this crazy violence happens like you're an insane badass that game rewards you it's like x button equals chimp attack or something it's just like that it's this ridiculous feedback for the most minimal input you know you're not even trying and then like ripping people to shreds and the and the fucking music comes on it's like i don't know it's just like it's the most satisfying game it's like it's like the kind of macaroni and cheese that you get that has the bread crumbs on top and like the fancy cheese it's not like the craft macaroni and cheese bullshit from the powder it's like really good cheese i went to an event where they had that and i ate so much i made myself sick oh man it's just so good it's my however gaming the new one i have a segment of the show where every week like it's just you describe the game no like we'll pick a game at random and you just describe what it's like now robert ashley on three beers this is why there was never any alcohol the games for windows recordings it was so dandy i think though maybe this is a reflection of the fact that i really haven't done it anything like this since uh land party so i'm i'm sort of pent up you know you've got to sew your podcast seed while you can yeah it's like it's like what it's been a long time and and you bust a nut and it just keeps going and going and going and you're kind of embarrassed and it's kind of gross you're like oh god but at the same time at the same time it's kind of a little bit hard okay it's a little bit hard i would like to say i knew i knew i was opening i knew i was opening the door for that i didn't realize he's gonna walk in the room and shit on the floor i think you have to be separate it sounds like it's well i'm mostly laughing because the the image of that is so ridiculous to me because i don't know what it's like to not bust a nut and are very on time you know what happened is like what like six hours seven hours a day of accident yeah in fact i tied one up in the bathroom and i break oh my god i really hope that i do know that you know that you know that john davisson's dad listens to this podcast oh yeah why you know i just like insert people listen to this podcast and then why when i think of john davisson's dad i think he must be like this really nice englishman sitting in like a crash velvet like robe yeah smoking a pipe by fire i mean i listen it looks like the dad it looks like rosus dad on family guys that is like but i'm not john davis and i feel weird cussing yeah i well we have we had john davisson like two weeks on the show and it was like it was like before arthur came over i was like papa davis since coming over we got to make this matter clean exactly we did we cleaned up you guys serve tea all right anyway uh all right uh hey we got a war man robin would like it if god war came out this year i would love it i want to see chimp face dismemberment as the new quick time event that's actually that sounds like a band name you mean i can't you picture it like cradus reaches up and grabs the person's jaw and you have to hit the x button like over and over again and he's like uh and then it clicks off well and nine one one call goes on in the background oh i i can't make fun of that right yeah that's horrible i think you already give cynicism that i've reached that i'm willing to live in berkeley and like here's a thing like i think i'm listening to that i think listening that men were one called really messed you up before you are no i was there already okay i heard about that story like right before i was going to go see antony and the johnson's in concert which is like this really like soulful singer you know i get totally bump me up out man like god damn okay so you know what i'm just going to end with one last prediction that one person made which fits into this anthony's cats attack a podcast guest on air perhaps a podcast guest who is following the state or appears to be that ep doesn't attack people uh unless she knows them really well or unless they hold her on her back and fuck with her and uh art this cat isn't attack people at all so i'm gonna say that one's wrong my prediction is that gaming podcast podcast will drop the preethins and just stop talking about mams just stop it you just blew my mind yeah back all right we're gonna wrap this up it's only idea what we just went into this way all right let's let's read it just a couple of letters this week and wrap things up first off nick writes in hey i just finished listening to podcast seven and was excited to hear you guys mention that you wish somebody would look at all the x and a games and highlight the good ones i was like hey that's what i've been doing sweet uh this guy writes for or actually does videos on www dot xn a roundup dot com and it's also on youtube at youtube dot com slash user slash nick of the dudareno um so yeah i i want to check out how do you spell dudareno d-u-d-e-r-i-n-o just wondering is it you think is that actually italian i i think so probably okay it's probably italian i mean i watch i watch the dude's videos he looks Italian we'll say so that's really racist and actually i'm not gonna have any part of that fucking higs that just sounds like so bad because it's like one letter removed you know oh no everybody go check this out i watch the community games i watch the videos they're they're pretty fantastic um and and at least somebody is doing it yeah yeah there's so many good community games out there no knows about them apparently he's local he said we could be on any time we want so now maybe he could be on sometime when he wants there's did you just throw it on the fucking gauntlet i think he could come on our show if he's local yeah all right you guys could do like the same podcast but you know different files like he could bring his recording equipment and he could bring yours it's like shooting with different cameras it's like a split seven inch you can be the hardcore band and he could be the scavant i'm going to go ahead and wear the hardcore band yeah of course i don't like check it out honors wrote in to rebel fm thanks for continuing to give me something to listen to at work my question given the controversy over the killzone to review an edge which seems to go against the perceived rating system of many sites and publications a scale of six to ten i want you to assign the blame for this to one party um he says no politicking or half measures blame someone and say why is it the publishers the developers the media consumers metacritic me assign the blame for review score creep now why it goes only six to ten most the time i guess uh why do we what do we always need to blame one person like this is the internet that's why hey he said no politicking are half measures no half measures so fuck that it's uh it's odd don't you play united nations this is this america the culture of gaming uh is responsible for the way that people think about games it's not anyone culture of gaming there's it's one one entity we've created this this monster and uh and we are all responsible for it so there okay i will answer this question i think Robert's answer is getting as good as any cause i'm sorry i can't pin it on one person kyle redson he has a really long letter but he had a point that i wanted to get to um i know robo if i'm a senator on gaming but it would be interesting to hear you guys talk about what music you're currently listening to as well i feel music is just as much a part of the games as are the controls visuals and interaction with the game itself and i find myself hooking on my ipod a lot of times while enjoying a game on my pc or 360 it would be really enlightening to hear about what music you guys listening to while playing games if you do as well and uh he says i know for one that i would like to find out what kind of music Anthony listens to while crushing his enemies and building his jewish japanese empires in civilization i see that it's funny that he asked that because i don't listen to anything when i'm playing civilization except the in-game music to civilization there's actually times that i play the i start up civilization and i don't start a game just so i can listen to the menu music in there which is like some weird fucking like it's pretty good it's just like some some like group singing nonsense it might be a real language i don't know but it just sounds like nonsense but it's beautiful it's like i don't know i think the in-game music to sit is beautiful i it's actually pretty often that a playing any game whether it's world of warcraft or anything i tend to listen to the in-game music rather than bringing my own stuff just because i don't any of you guys listen to music while gaming uh it depends on the game like i've been playing a lot of geometry wars again lately and i try to listen to other stuff when i'm playing that because the music is good but it gets repetitive um i've been listening to a band called the pains of being pure at heart which i saw you link an interview to earlier today with pitchfork fucking twitter man it's creepy i know yeah um they're sort of like i i think i described him before as uh like morsey went to your high school and had a girl in the band yeah that that's just about right they're a little bit bit poppy yeah cool songs like good brit pop not sort of the shitty brit pop that i think i'm talking about oasis hey i like a lot of oasis and so so yeah uh it's uh but i mean my my musical day is as good to phrenic so i'm listening to that um the new the new walls of jereco is actually pretty good um and uh death remove of 1979 again lightweight for some reason yeah i mean i personally like i don't i don't listen to musical gaming either but i do listen to a lot of different stuff and i'm kind of all over the place um lately i've been listening to a lot of rogue way if i've been getting into and uh black kids and brand new and uh buddy weight field how about you Anthony i went and saw murder by death and uh murder by death it was good and they the band that played before them was called the builders and the butchers and they were pretty incredible so you guys should check them out and then uh also i love to hear that by the way when somebody goes to a show to see a band they like and they see the band that opens for them and they like that band and they go out of their way to like check it out how often does that happen i bought i bought their cd yeah when i was there i would have bought a vinyl but the vinyl was only like three songs that's fucking heartwarming you know so like electrolanes though so electrolane is a incredible band i saw they opened up for somebody and i was like um bands no they don't think they exist anywhere that's no yeah that's how i heard an idiot pilot but yeah i mean like i've heard of a great number of bands that way uh like rocky vodelato i saw him because i went to go see the lead singer thrice and rocky vodelato was opening and it turned out like i rocky vodelato was like the highlight of the night for me or like when i went to see murder by death last time i saw a guy named william eliot wittmore just a guy with a guitar and a banjo on stage beforehand and i actually thought when he started playing that he was uh just sound checking for murder by death at first and then he started playing songs and it turned out that again that was like the highlight of my evening was discovering like that band instead yeah so i ended up spending all my i always bring a little bit of merch money and i end up spending it all on his shit instead of murder by death stuff yeah the the first time i ever heard of like tv on the radio as was when i saw him open up for the faint and i was like wow this band's amazing and like it turns out like they're like one of my like second favorite bands now tv now the radio is great and like and like all of it has still happened yeah i mean people definitely it is my practice that you shouldn't show up just to the last band you know i was only impression that you only listen to pomacartney i love pomacartney though i will defend it to you like do you like do you like wings albums at all so we got to have this game actually yeah they had this game up today uh i don't necessarily like a lot of wings but i think wings had some great songs but actually i like uh pomacartney solo stuff including like his most recent album which was like chaos in the backyard like that when i thought start to finish was a great album i i didn't get a chance to really listen to that but i've i've always liked pomacartney i i think he's a solid guy i mean a lot of people don't like him because he tends to write you know as far as Beatles you know as far as Beatles right that's what i'm saying yeah as far as the Beatles go like you know john was writing real experimental music and and paul was always writing kind of pop music and but yeah i've always been a pop music kid at heart yeah exactly when it comes down to it you know john london was fucking cool and when he was really working well with george martin and mccartney he would come up with some really awesome compositions like happiness is a warm gun or whatever but when it when it comes down to it i think that most of his songs were really underwritten and mccartney had much more of a musical gift he didn't really have a lot to say but but his songs are are a lot more a lot more interesting to me in some ways not not in like a feeling way but just in like oh wow this guy really knows his knows his songs like he can really sit down and and pick up pick out a pick out an interesting you know tune if not come up with anything to say you know see the fact like the thing about like john london i like the most was the fact that his stuff was underwritten like that to me like that to me that was the highlight of it like that what it wasn't as like polish like song righty yeah yeah well i mean i i don't know i think probably people assigned too much uh too much to individuals and the beatles i think they probably worked a lot with each other and and with george martin and this could be a ridiculous so but right yes i agree with that was a really like ram i really like ram that's a that's my favorite pommel cartney i'll i own that on vinyl i think but i'm still not super familiar with every track on it but i think i think if you played that for someone today they could totally think that that was like a modern indy pop band see and that right there that was a great answer to that person's letter they got a little bit of taste of what everyone's listening to robert and pyla oh i did whoa tv on the right oh yeah uh well you know like one thing like that was like kind of interesting with me like with games and bands was um when i started playing final fantasy tin was the same time was uh like that i got turned on to segar Ross who like turned out to be like this band that i really really like yeah they're i'm pretty into them as well yeah like i felt like segar Ross music i felt like it's it sounds like a culture that would exist in like a final fantasy world like i'm not a final fantasy fan and any any stretch of me like the only final fantasy game i've ever played is tin but like i felt like they're music you know i feel like there needs to be a video game equivalent to the breakfast club like there needs to be a game and like the grant of dottos have been the the ones that i would say i've gotten the closest to in terms of like where you associate certain songs with the game but like i would like to see a game that has like you know these amazing bands attached to you know the sounds is like really attached to the game and the the visuals of the game and the feeling of the game. I think the last time i noticed that in a game and this probably gonna get me made fun of was mirror's edge like the theme song for that game like fit with the game content really well yeah yeah or a mass effect i felt was like the sounds of mass like oh god i love the music it looks like brine you know like shoudy roger core music i really associate gaming with music in a fundamental way because when i was growing up i would always uh i would always game with the sound off and play music on top of it i would listen to the radio or i'd listen to tapes those are um little thin sheets of magnetic material that people would listen to music on it they came in these little cartridges tell us more grandpa robert yeah man i had a lot of fucking cassettes when i was growing up yeah but i mean i would listen i would i would always listen to music and play games and so those things are really merges in my mind um to the point where i mean i have a friend who is really into video game music you know he he's always like when we were talking about video games he would always be like oh man you know the music in that game is so great and i would try to think about it and be like you know what i just never really listened to the music i was always listening to music instead of the game music so it's it's still that for me and and to this day instead of even instead of even like uh you know putting the iPod up and and adding the music to the background noise of a game i'll just turn the game noise off like i'll play skate you know do you even just turn turn the sound off entirely and and just listen to music like that's one of the one of the things where i was like oh my god when the 360 got announced they're like custom soundtracks and everything yeah yeah although you know i i find that i don't even want to hear the background music um and i know i know that's uncool you mean like the the sound effects i mean yeah sorry the the sound effects like i find really distracting sometimes it i mean sometimes it's fine like for a while i was playing fallout uh fallout three and i would um and i would load up all of this old sort of turn of the century uh like folk and blues music that that was really uh perfect for it like oh fuck what the fuck is the name of that that uh album that um i can't i can't remember the collection of of old like blues 78s from the turn of the century if you remember it you can ping me and i'll put it in the show notes yeah but as far as what i'm listening to right now i'm really um not listening to a lot of music the only the only thing i'm listening to is sadly like the the final mixes for my band's album which i have to listen to like i don't think there's anything sad about that yeah it's really it's really annoying where can people check out here well actually never mind we'll pump that later we'll have a thing oh okay okay but other than that i've been listening to like environmental music and things that are sort of easy to not concentrate on because i've been working a lot lately like i've gone back to this album by the field uh called from here we go sublime and it's just this guy that's like really minimal i it's minimal techno but when you say techno people just imagine like really boring like this is um this is great stuff and it has more in common with like the ambient i am familiar with it yeah yeah it is pretty good it's more it's more brian enoe than than like a club kind of thing uh and and i and i find that i can listen to it pretty much every day pretty much even twice a day i just never get bored of it and it's like the music of productivity for me um along with you know like a stack of jazz records but anyway all right so there is a great answer for you we told you what music we're listening to maybe we'll come back everyone smile and talk about what music we're listening at the moment but uh all right final letter this comes from patrick this is our letter of the week he says dear rebel fm after listening to rebel fm episode seven and listen up slash four guys one up or whatever garnet calls it i was intrigued by mr suttner's recent forays and xn a titles and decided i would investigate minor dig deep on the following sunday evening i turned i turned my 360 on after a couple months of in activity download the update check up on my friends and sort through my messages then i browse the xn a catalog for the title and download the demo as soon as the demo is downloaded my 360 freezes and the unbearable sight of red ring of death appears i would just like to thank mr suttner for killing my 360 right before he leaves for sony thankfully my 360 is still under warranty great show guys and best of luck to mr nik suttner so there we have a response to that guy nik killed his 360 no i didn't i didn't get an extra response uh nik's response was just something like uh i got a sign on bonus with sony for doing so so thanks so we lost yeah so i have to say like uh rhino donald's impression nik suttner on uh that's pretty excellent yeah i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't think nik quite sounds like he has like uh like he smoked i know it sounded like a solid snake impression but i saw it was hilarious the guy that the voice of solid snake wrote the watchman screenplay yeah yes you sure did no fucking idea yep who was that david hater yep he's a hater hater hater one day i'll recount my epic david hater meeting i wonder that guy must be really conflicted then like if he if he's a writer if he had to read all that shit oh wait can we not get into middle gear writing because man he seems like a megalomaniac to me who david hater i don't i don't he seems like the type that would be david hater is a very nice guy he wants to be jack bowers are you're saying i will tell you all about david hater on the on a future episode excited about them but not right now because we're too long um so anyways let's let's close out here please check out eat dash sleep ash uh game dot com for all the latest episodes of rebel fm let's talk about where listeners can find us this week starting with you tyler uh free press uston.com that's where you can find some of my stuff what about your twitter oh twitter dirty tea tea is in the tea you drink excellent where the fuck do you get that man dirty tea my nickname like when i used to have like dreadlocks like i thought there was like one time where like i died my hair like fluorescent orange and like the time before it was like me on stage for people you were like the the hipster is looking kid that has ever walked in this apartment i would never know if he was okay he's not hipster i i i subscribe to gq i'll just leave that there um silence i i think i think he's a very sharp dressed fairly catable guy yeah it's yeah the the show's in our gals let's feel like a fashion podcast hey you don't think the games can i see the holes in the bottom of my socks no but what you have something there like a cat oh no tains what's the graphic you know me and my bandmate both were the same socks because like we both went on this giant sock buying um trip the target you know at least you made it to the end of the third segment yeah you want to know why where our gals because like yeah yeah i do want to know why you wear my like i'm a really skinny guy and like my older brother you know he lives at home nice to live at home with my parents i'm like my older i'm like really skinny and my older brother is really not skinny like the opposite and so a lot of times he would get my socks and it would be stretched out from his big big foot feet from his elephantitis so i said we wear those socks so he wouldn't mistake his socks for my socks and now they're very fashionable that story sounded like some of my grandma would have told me to the way he said it and now they're fashionable that's awesome yeah if that was good we're working people's idea i'm i'm a little confused about the concept of this just so just this week working people no you know in general i mean i hang out in Berkeley like i i go to the virtual phone number yeah i mean it's like five five five uh five five you know whatever but now i i guess uh working oh i've got i've got a new episode of a life well wasted which is found at um a life well wasted dot com let me give you a preview of it like it sounds like this hello and welcome to a life well wasted it's like me talking really close into a microphone like getting really intimate with you so this have you recorded intro for this episode that makes it sound so much better than it's going to be it's all in my voice it's like the golden golden voice um actually i get a lot of complaints about my voice that people think i sound like a stoner which it's they don't understand i'm just a Texan yeah fuck that you know it's like the the the first podcast i was everyone i think i think i came on like one of the fam all one of the film on how we did i think yeah no no no no it was it was to talk about the dark night yeah like everyone was talking so fast and at the time i had never met you but i was like fuck this man i need to be on a podcast with robert ashley like no one else talks slow like i can't do it right now like people need to take their time when they talk man like you got you gotta let it sink in okay treat anyway uh a life well wasted.com and i don't know what do i i think do you want to give people your twitter or pimp your one up artist oh yeah like subscribe to my twitter i'm just robert ashley on on twitter um and you can see robert's feature on recession gaming or in games for the unemployed oh yeah games for the unemployed which is like the kind of shit i need to pay my bills and thankfully written by someone who is unemployed so you don't have to be mad yeah but i haven't been unemployed since like back when the economy was fucking awesome so so i feel kind of like an idiot like maybe maybe i should have had a job like you missed the boat when i could have got a job it's that whole employment thing yeah like man now everyone's unemployed i feel a little less special i thought i was like a little snowflake but uh yeah what about there here my band um which you know we're gonna have our our mythical insane album uh out and about a month uh the band's called i come to shang high i come to shang high and uh and that's the website too you know uh and there are a couple songs up on the website but the album is it's it's an album album so when you listen to the songs you really don't know you don't know anything and so you hear the whole shabang so yeah excellent don't look at me like i don't listen to flowers i listen no no i keep i keep on looking at you because you're like right across from me you just want also i mean you're beautiful so yeah i mean i'm on my third beer now and i'm starting to wonder like i wonder which way this guy swings i kind of like to pull on those those piercings like grab that eyebrow piercing and get you close to me you know like twitter dot com slash chuff money chuff money dot blogspot dot com where you can find me along with eat sleep game dot com uh let it pillow take us out i think uh or 30 of any where you want it you know the way that robert actually is looking at me i think you might find me on whatever the megan's law website is your particular neighborhood possibly an amber alert um it's you old man always an amber oh it's about you you're not you're not innocent enough but you won't even make it on to a milk carton no they'll put me on like those little fires to eat in your post office box except they won't want to waste one on me so they'll put me next to a picture of a child and everyone will think i'm the one that took him oh twitter dot com slash agis uh eat sleep game dot com all right twitter dot com slash p goler uh my killzone two reviews up on geek dot com uh which is this tech site but they have game stuff too so you should please go check it out uh my afro samura reviews up on green pixels and all of more stuff coming and then uh you can subscribe rebel if i'm on items in zoom of course if you use either of these services please subscribe and leave a review thank you for listening thank you guys for joining us today we're really sorry i'm not this will be the last time you guys hear me but i just want to say like don't let them fucking talk to video talk about video games to you anymore just make them you want to know like what they're like as people so in letters to two people are at eat dash sleep dash games dot com so so so