Rebel FM
Rebel FM - Episode 6 - 02/11/09
This week we're joined by WhatTheyPlay's John Davison and MTV Multiplayer's Patrick Klepek, to give impressions of Halo Wars, Killzone 2, Fallout 3 DLC, and more, discuss the casual/hardcore gamer divide, and answer a few letters in which what is yours is replaced with prizes.
[Music] Now let us enjoy some cake or pie. It is Wednesday, February 11th, 2009. Welcome to episode six of Rebel FM. My name is Philip Kohler. Joining me this week is the staff of eat-sleep-game.com. Anthony Gallegos. Harry. Arthur Geese. So. And Nick Suttner. Hello. Also joining us today, we have two special guests. Fellow ex-one-up news editor and current West Coast editor. Is that right? Yeah, something like that. MTV multiplayer. Patrick Kleppek. Hello. What they play, John Davison. Hello. Thank you guys for joining us. You spoiled your appearance, John. I don't know if that could happen. Whatever. We're going to be a big surprise. And everyone that you were coming on. I spoiled it. He spoiled it. He spoiled me. I said there we go. I like getting people excited. Yeah, I think I think it's good. Yeah, I don't know. So we have a bunch of stuff we're going to talk about. We're going to talk about what we've been playing. Even though you're probably already doing this again later this week, John. That's okay, though. But this one will beat it to it, so. Yeah, that's right. Take that one up here. I'm not sure. Let's not carve her back with this show all the time. Hot, scoop them with John's. It's mine. It's yours anymore. Right here, right there. Listen up. Yeah. Is it? So we can talk about other podcasts. Do we make that decision? They're not, quote unquote, the competition. I thought I heard David today when I was in the office joking around that the podcast should be called Four Men and One Up or something like that, but. Four Men one up. That was what he wanted it to be. Yeah. Wow. Patrick. All right. What are we talking about? So we're also going to be doing a discussion on sort of mainstream gaming. John, I think you'll have a lot to add to this with your site and sort of some, yeah, I don't know exactly where that's going to go. And that's all Patrick covers too. He doesn't do hardcore at all anymore. No, we got some. We got some. High phone. Only. Yeah. He just twins about Dead Space and freaking fall out. We got lots of games already. What? Dead Space? Sorry. So, I don't know. I was aggravating so many of you. Why don't you kick us off with what you've been playing, Patrick? One housekeeping thing before I forget, I got to say, our theme song that you've been here in the last couple of weeks was made by my good friend Alfredo who also made the One Up a Fem theme song and named One Up a Fem at the time. But it was actually a collaboration between him under his SKES cause name. This is in all like Mario Brothers reference, but he like makes electronic music under that name. Him collaborating with some other friends of mine in this hip-hop group called Bilitic and I'll put links to both of those places in the show notes. Next week will be the actual like final version of the show intro. But that's what it's been so far just cause I want to make sure to give them some props for that. Thank you guys. Anyways. All right. I'm Patrick. Well, I guess everyone's getting upset about my Dead Space videos cause I do them all like 3.30 in the morning. So that's like the first thing you see when you wake up, but yeah, I just been doing right now just sort of general cleanup on stuff from '08 that I hadn't got to, which is more or less Dead Space and Gears of War II. Dead Space I just never got to because Fallout 3 came out, I don't know, the week after, and I ended up spending an entire month playing, you know, 68 hours of Fallout 3 and played nothing else. You like Dead Space? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's not, it sort of loses its scare factor after a little while, like, after three or four hours you sort of get its gimmicks, but it's just really fun to play. And I finished Silent Hill Homecoming, which I think Anthony you really liked, but I thought it was pretty awful. I gave it a, I think I gave it a B+ at the time, which I thought was, it was good, but it's like the weakest of the Silent Hill series. Yeah, and so I'll play almost anything scary, like I'll play through, I'll play through Fear, Fear of Two Project Origin even though it sounds like it might just be mediocre, but I'll play through anything scary and so I'm really enjoying Dead Space, I'm kind of just plowing through it, Gears of War, same thing just kind of plowing through it, other than that it's just- So you're playing Gears of War by yourself? Yeah, I know, I'm actually playing with Captain Sanders, who's over at Microsoft now, so I'm only playing through like two hour chunks every two weeks, because it's just whenever our schedules line up that we can play together, just because I actually found out last year that I would always avoid playing multiplayer games and I never was never quite sure why, and I combined with the fact that I found myself avoiding the phone sometimes, like I wondered if that was something weird if I was just like, I just had social anxieties, but apparently I have a mild case of what's called telephone phobia, and it's when you just have this aversion to picking up receiving calls, I don't mind calling people, but when I get a phone call, I get really stressed out, and I will ignore a phone call repeatedly, because I don't want to answer it, it sounds very bizarre. No, no, no, actually, I'm having like one of those revelation moments where I'm like, oh shit, earlier I beg for it, okay, I know it sounds crazy, I know it's- I know it's- I think it's a bad example. I know it sounds crazy, but I was just like, that's not a condition, but there's a condition for everything, so I'm allowed to say that I have a mild case of telephone phobia, but anyway, it's like, I identify with this, and I was like, well maybe that's why I consciously will turn down when people are like, hey, let's play some halo, and I'm like, nah, I kind of do want to film a halo, so why did I say no, and like, I have this weird aversion to- So I need to like aim you and be like, hey, Pat, come ask me to play- Is it also like, I don't know, does this extend to like, people are like, we should all go out tonight, and you're like, yeah, that sounds fun, and then you're like, that ten minutes before you leave, you're like, I don't know about that. No, it's literally only like, phone, like when there's not like a face- So does this- Does this apply to voice chat and games as well? Yeah, yeah, I will like disable voice chat, like I don't like, I don't like talking to strangers- You love playing voice chat. Yeah, make it fun of mine, I come un-rubble it then when I- How does this happen? How does this happen? I'm very on the field, Patrick. Yeah. And so, so I'm- It's serious. I think, but I also think it's ridiculous, and I think it's something that like, it'd be easily overcome. So I've been trying to play, so I'm playing Gears of War 2 with Kathleen as like, I'm going to finish this game completely through co-op, and that's not all I'm going to do. And so, I'm only like, four hours in, but I still have my- I still have the last active Gears 2 to finish, because I'm playing with a friend co-op and we just don't have time. Yeah. Yeah, so that was well. Yeah, I'm kind of playing with Gears of War, and that's sort of my plan with Resident Evil 2, just because the controls haven't really been jiving with me, but I think it would be one of those games that, regardless of how you feel about the controls, you would probably enjoy it. You got- What was the thing you linked to where you called out by Joystick? Was that Resident Evil related? Yeah. Well, I was trying to figure out where he said he called out. You got called out because- Well, he just linked into it as the reason he was writing this sort of editorial on everyone getting upset about Resident Evil and saying, "Well, it should be more like Gears of War or Dead Space." I had written a story two weeks ago, essentially just saying that I think Resident Evil should have taken some more cues from games like Dead Space or Gears of War that, you know, Dead Space uses, like, closed corridors to kind of focus your attention on what you're supposed to be fighting, just like Gears of War uses cover, even when it's got cover in places that don't make sense because the cover focuses your attention where the action is. Resident Evil, there are guys coming at you from everywhere, and you're supposed to be constantly pivoting, you know, like you're in Gears of War where you're a turret, and you're just moving. I think, John, you use that analogy, and like, so you're just a turret moving around, but whereas in Gears of War, you sort of know where things are coming from and the action is directing you. Resident Evil is coming from everywhere, and so the fact that you don't have full range of movement is really frustrating because the environmental design doesn't lend itself to the way that enemies are coming, even if they're coming slow, not just still coming from everywhere. I think it's a fine line, too, between, like, stressful in kind of a good, like, scary game way and frustrating, and that that seems to be, like, you know, like for different people, depending on how they're playing it or, depending on their preferences, that seems to be falling in different sides of that line of how you feel about the experience. There's a pretty vocal RE5 defense force that seemed to think that frustration is a big part of the game design. Well, that's what Joysticks argument to me, countering my dead space point, was that the whole mechanic of it, like, is a survival aspect, and I argued that survival hasn't been a part of Resident Evil since the first one. When you were sort of doing ammo consumption, you were wondering, "Do I have enough ammo to get through the next room?" Since the first one, I don't think that's been a fact. You've always had plenty of ammunition, there was no point in one, two, three, Code Veronica or four that I ever felt like, "I'm not going to make it to this room because I've only got a knife." So, I don't think the survival mechanic is necessarily a reason that it should be designed that way. And the only thing that's frustrating is that they just left the Resident Evil 4 controls in and just said, "This is our tradition, this is how we've designed our game." I would be less frustrated with it, but the only reason it frustrates me is because they, at the, it seems like towards the tail end of the development cycle, they realized, you know, this is how people are playing these kinds of games, we need to put in something for them. And they just didn't have time to go all the way. And so, rather than just sticking with tradition, they went halfway and the halfway just makes me keep wondering, "Well, if they've gone all the way, I would be enjoying this a lot more rather than just going into it. This is Resident Evil, it's take it or leave it, this is how it controls." But instead, they gave you sort of a, sort of a halfway thing. Yeah, that makes sense. And it's frustrating because Dead Space does almost everything that it seems like RE5 wants to do with better controls. Well, but Dead Space, Resident Evil has larger environments, like you're running from building to building. Like, I actually, I sort of discovered as I was coming up with my argument back to Joystick was that I don't think my problem with Resident Evil is that you can't run and shoot at the same time. I think it's more that there's no cover mechanic because in Gears of War, you don't do a whole, a lot of your time is spent just behind cover, or hop and shooting. It's not a lot of running around randomly shooting in enemies by your, so like, I think if there was a proper cover mechanic, so that you could have, you kind of got that sense of safety, you can realign yourself in a place that wasn't just like having to go in the center of a room and sort of pivot around, I think if there was a cover mechanic that would actually make up for the whole lack of run and gun. At least that's, that's my impression, just having just played the demo. And I mean, yeah, Resident Evil 4 I think was just a change of combat a bit and was empowering in that you have kind of new like close quarter stuff with like, I mean, there was like a knife in previous Resident Evils, I believe, but like, it was different how you'd interact with things like close and long range and everything, but since all those other games have come out since then, like Dead Space and Gears of War being a big thing, it's like, yeah, they need some sort of other mechanic to make all that work. Yeah, you're going to go in that direction, which they started to do with the new controls game then, you've set an expectation, like, if they didn't set the expectation and just said, this is how it controls, it's just like Resident Evil 4, people can get upset, but you can't get upset that they led you to believe you're going to be possibly getting some sort of different deal than you did, so, I mean, I'm still going to play it like it's Resident Evil, I play it since the beginning, I want to see where the story goes, I'll adapt to it, you know, I can imagine if you play enough of it, you'll sort of get the jive of it, but yeah, that's just where I was coming from with that was just, I wish, I wish they had gone all the way instead of just leaving me wondering what if. Oh, it was to take a second to clarify that I was 100% wrong, apparently you can play with friends and the demo, it's just some convoluted process, it's just a joint session in progress or whatever, but apparently you can, I was wrong, which everyone on the board seemed to think was a one up FM tradition of making a mistake, talking about a game. It was a few per show, yeah, so that was my bet. See if you can catch them in this episode, anything else besides Dead Space? Just sort of, the same sort of casual stuff, a lot of stuff I cover over it, into multiplayer is like iPhone games, so, any of note, I imagine because you've had Ryan and a couple of times most of it mentioned, like sort of same standard things, like field runners, Rolando, which is the local. Rolando played, yeah. Yeah, and Rolando is like, is the reason that I, when I got local Rooker 2 in the mail, like in the past week, I just dumped it in the pile because I've heard it's an excellent game, but the moment I played Rolando, I haven't played Rolando, but Lucker Rooker 2 is not a slip-a-dive in the first one, so if the first one was like remotely intriguing to you, I'd say it's the worst. It's always like, I don't know if I want to play a million versions of Loco Rooko, so like when Rolando introduced the tilt mechanic, like that was what I wanted from the original Loco Rooko, and so I just, I'm sure Loco Rooker 2 was great, but I just had my fill of that sort of like, collecting little blocks to the end of the, and then the other one I've been playing is Edge, which is the game where it's like, sort of Marble Madness where you're controlling a cube, and I just, that's like my favorite game I find. There is a Silent Hill iPhone game coming up. Oh, it's out, and it's out. Oh. It's not very good. Oh, it's fun. It does do... I have no idea. Yeah, it's got Silent Hill... The Escape? The Escape, yeah. It's kind of like a shooting arcade. It's kind of, you know, it's sort of a first-person shooter, and it actually does something slightly interesting with the iPhone in terms of like, all sorts of developers are trying to find ways to make shooters work on the iPhone without, you know, some of them do, they map the analog sticks to different, you know, multi-touch on the screen, and what Silent Hill does is that you move forward, left, and right by touching the screen, but to aim, you use the accelerometer, so you're tilting the phone to aim at objects on the screen, which Anthony seems... Anthony, it works. It's like... It doesn't work that well, but I thought it was like an interesting way for them to sort of come up with a way of solving that problem. I think actually... So you could like, never put that on the bus. I mean, your body has to be completely still on the bus, you're like... Yeah, you have to... You have to be sitting at home, like, still, like, or else it doesn't work. I played Time Crisis, which is terrible on the end. And Time Crisis was tradition. But at least Time Crisis, like, that model of games seems to work for a point-and-click input device. Who thought that a Silent Hill first-person shooter was a good idea? Well, there was actually a popular Silent Hill, like, shoot, arcade machine in Japan. Was it a popular? Yeah, it was popular in Japan, mind it. The problem with Time Crisis is actually, you're right, a touch-the-screen shooter should work fine on the iPhone. And it does. That mechanic works fine. It's that Time Crisis, the whole gimmick is being able to duck out of the way, and to duck out of the way... Like, that's your iPhone on the floor, and then pick it back up real quick. The way I thought it would do is like, "Okay, well, I'm gonna tilt it left or right." Right. Like, as though I'd be leaning. Instead, it should lean it forward or backward, so you're constantly tilting the screen away from you. See, by the time you tilt back and your character moves back, the enemies are already shooting at you. So... I mean, the enemies should all have iPhones, too, if they're gonna deal with them. Yeah, the enemies should have to look away, too. Yeah, like, it may... I mean, they can patch it. Like, that's the nice thing about iPhone games is that these sort of fundamental problems where it's like, "Well, if you can tilt forward and backward, it's probably got a whole lot of effort for them to edit." But the problem with iPhone games is also, first impressions around everything, because there's so many games. Is there like a... Like a friend's list on iPhone, where you can see what everyone's playing? No. Yeah. I mean, it's stuff like that that I think people are building on the back end. Right. It still works a lot like the podcast store, where every day, like, the big truck of games and other fart applications mainly gets, like, tipped up into the app store. That's the guy who made a fart little big planet level. Yeah, it was my only level. Hey, that's funny. But I don't think when he's 31 different applications on the iPhone for it, but they tip up the truck every day and they all pour in there and you can extract their feed from iTunes of the stuff going in it, and there are hundreds and hundreds of crops going in every day. Like, I'm just kidding. It seems like, you know, everyone's playing the same iPhone games, but is that just because they've filtered the top of the app store? Is that just a lot of work? I mean, it's just a lot of word of mouth. I interviewed Neal Ng from Angie MoCo, and he was saying it's all about the top 100. Like, you can get in the top 100 and stay there. Then the best thing to do is to use your popular products to promote your new products. So what they did for when Rolando came out was they had a bunch of apps that were like $1.99. Hey there. Dr. Awesome. Yeah. They dropped the price on all of their products by a buck, so Topal ended up being free, and then the front end on the game said the people that made this game have this, like, premium game called Rolando coming out, and if you hit there on the game, it would take you to the app store on the phone. Oh, nice. Yeah, so it's possible that Apple could develop sort of a social network back end, but it just seems like the impression now it seems like it's going to be it's more on the, you know, the developers to sort of like create a brand. So it's like Angie MoCo brand, like the Angie MoCo games have achievements across every Angie MoCo game or could have a friends list across every Angie MoCo game. They also have, they have this thing that they, they put into the background on all their games. They call it the platform and it's their analytics program. So they can track your behavior in a game to like how long you're playing it and what, and if you get stuck on levels and then they, they collate all this data, and if everyone is getting stuck on a level, they update the game and push it out through iTunes so that next time you sync your iPhone, you get a new version of the game where that level isn't as hard. Yeah, that's really smart. That's the same thing that like Steam does with a, with all early battle dropship, you play dropship. It's a twin, twin stick shooter where it uses the, it maps onto the touch screen. You know, the PS2 dropship? No, it's like a, it looks kind of like an old school vector graphics. It's kind of like what's the, what's the old, it's called defender game, the game where you like would collect the people from, on the planet, you'd shoot down a wire and you'd collect people from the planet. It's got a bit of chop lifter and a bit of defender and a bit of twin stick shooter to it. Anyway, so people are beating it really, really fast. So they added a bunch of levels, like just, they just pushed it out through the code. So when you synced your phone, it'll say there's an update for this game. And the update was the game had a more challenging part to it and then they added four brandy levels and stuff. So they can dynamically update stuff based on how people are playing, which is only, we're going to see that more certainly on iPhone games and we're already seeing them on the, the, I mean, we can talk about this in the casual things. Yeah, this is, this is a larger, this is a big part of the other conversation that we're going to have. And then we should just pause there. Yeah. Just come back to that. I soon, when the, when the app store first launched games, I think there was a game that actually had like a unified friends list and like you could see all your friends have scores and then they figured out that it was broadcasting all your contact information to the developer from the phone. I know. Like all the phone numbers, all the information on your phone. Okay. So the stuff that you can't do on the iPhone as well, that's a shame. You can't do ad hoc multiplayer, which is kind of sad. So you can't, you can't link iPhones directly to each other. You've got to go through a hotspot, which is sort of annoying. So for something like, I mean, any, but you can't, and you can't be on separate hotspots. So yeah, you have to be on the same router in the same room on two different iPhones. I mean, that's only because Apple hasn't built the libraries for it. And there's not a lot of motivation right now for companies to, I mean, they can do it. Like there's a chess game on the iPhone that has matchmaking functionality, it's a very basic chess game, but they have their own servers and they run them and they can match make with you. But it's very, you know, expensive doesn't make sense for someone like electronic arts or ng-mo-co to invest in multiplayer. And when it's just, that's just not what people are using the device for. Right. Are there. What do you even plan? Uh, well, let's see, we, for whatever reason, maybe it was the discussion last week, we just started playing Halo 3 again, which yeah, I mean, we've just been bored. I mean, I don't want to say bored because we just needed a break from left or dead every night. Yeah. And gears, like we had the conversation that I'm not sure if we're actually having fun when we play gears on insane on co-op, it's more like it's an existential test. Yeah. I mean, that came on insane, especially in co-op where if one of you dies, it's over for both of you, like, or if you both go down, like, you know, like a, when you play in single player, like, you know, you go down, but it's like super easy for your team to come rescue. But in co-op, it just seems like it's so much more of a problem between like the two of us getting down all the time. It's really bugged out. Like, they're definitely. Oh, and you, and that's the thing. It seems like they did a lot of bug testing for single player, but co-op, there's like, there was like one part where I cloned myself as Dom. And so like, I could see myself walking around, but I was also mounted on a machine gun and the camera got fucked up and it couldn't pick which one to follow. I mean, I saw it like a dream where I'm like watching myself do it for me. Like during the cutscene, I saw Dom on the Trica and Dom running onto the platform and I was like, well, yeah, so there's a lot of like little bugs. And you really notice like a lot of like, I don't know, parts where it just seems like they designed it to be like unfairly difficult and hard. It's just really annoying. So. Whereas Halo 3 is pretty seamless as far as the co-op experience goes and we played on Legendary with some skulls turned on. Well, the fact that you can just respawn, people when they die, just makes it like so much more of a casual thing for us where we just go in there and throw ourselves into the death and then just respawn. It's fine. Yeah. It's a good time. We then we jumped on some multiplayer and I realized how bad I've gotten to Halo 3, which is kind of like kicking the ball. It's weird though because like what, because I mean, you know, I felt that as well, like none of us are doing perfectly well, but like what I've, it's like what I've lost is kind of the very like, the right mindset of the skill. It's called duty four. So I haven't played quality before. I haven't played since Halo 3 like a lot of. You mean to find into the skill as far as like playing it's multiplayer like against other people? Yeah. It's like, I was talking about co-op. A lot of players throwing ourselves around like. Right, right. We're just throwing ourselves at them, but like all the basic movement and like level knowledge and all that for Halo, like that will never leave me. Like that always makes sense to me just the basic like balance between like, you know, guns and grenades and mainly like their big drive factor and vehicles and all that. Like, all that totally still clicks and that was immediately like that just worked again, even though I hadn't played it in like five months, but it's kind of the more like, you know, very specific, just like, you know, aiming situations and stuff like that, that's the stuff that goes away that I need to like work back towards when I pick it up now. That's all good. I remember when you started on one up and Martin with Donald, like selling you was like a Halo God. Well, then David came in though and David's probably a little bit there than me, which I would. David's probably better than you. It's true. That's so bad. I know. David's better than most people. I mean, but because of that though, because of the fact I remember when we got. Yeah, we were like, we were like Halo ringer. You were like, you were like this big shooter person and everyone knew you were really good. I remember when I had to play a stranglehold multiplayer with you and I was like totally beating on your ass really bad. I was like, I felt really good about myself. I just got a job there. It's the little things. So. That's weird though. That made him feel better about having to play stranglehold. Yeah. Oh gosh. Yeah. Strangle. I forgot about playing that. That was awful. Were you there for the EGM versus Bungie stuff? No. No, I wasn't. That was right. Cause like when Luke left, they kind of remade the team because, I mean, I was there for it. But I wasn't on the Halo team. Oh, you were? I just watched it. Okay. Yeah. I don't think this might have been different. I think we could have used you. I know. But yeah, that was fun afterwards. We, we end up playing, oh, we played game pro in a bunch of matches. That was fun. Need the shit at him. That's true. Um. Uh, so Halo 3. Play Halo 3. Was good. Um. Save films and all that still blows me away. Yeah. I know. And like the screen, the screenshots that, that we share that are all phallic in your case. That's true. The screen shot on your share that didn't have a penis stroke. Um. Fallout 3, I'm playing the DLC, which is good. It's way more combat focused than I thought it would be, but that seems to be what everybody is saying about it. Um, someone spoiled. Patrick, I had a long discussion about this for you. Did. Still not. I'm fine. Yeah. It'll be a, I think, I think Philip and I recorded a session with the area five guys who co-op and there was some technical complications. So I think the episode goes up on, on Friday, but yeah, we, we, yeah, this week and we, we were talking about that too. And what I ended up, uh, like kind of coursing Philip into believing was that I think that, I think the DLC is great, but I think Bethesda like screwed up their messaging in terms of what the expectation was for that DLC. Cause I think people wanted new regions, new quests, new weapons and, and, and not like a total change and a dynamic of the gameplay. The way that I, the way that I just, I mean, because you're playing a game within the game essentially. Yeah. I didn't expect them to add new areas. Like the fallout world's, uh, version of Call of Duty, but it's not a very good version of Call of Duty. How does it go? I haven't downloaded it. Okay. How does it present it to you as a, is it presented as a simulation. Yeah. Go into a called and play it. Like you found the outcasts, right? Yeah. You've run into the outcasts. So basically you get a, you get, uh, a quest saying that you picked up an outcast signal and you go and find the outcast, which is a pain in the ass because it's in a really weird part of the DC metro area. Um, so you find them, you help them fight a bunch of super mutants. You notice that you have a pit boy, you go in and they want you to go through this VR thing so they can unlock a vault. And so you go into the VR thing, which is very similar in its, in its sort of intro to another VR part in the game, which I'm not going to talk about because it's probably the most awesome part of Fallout and I don't want to spoil it. But, um, so when you're playing through, there are just things that are very clear that you're playing through a simulation. Like you go in with nothing. You have none of your equipment. Right. So any of the gear stuff that you've grown to love, like Lincoln's Repeater is not there for you. You don't, you also don't, uh, loot stuff from enemies anymore. They just disappear when they die. And like a digital red sort of effect that's kind of cool, but weird when they get knocked off a cliff and all of a sudden you see them bounce back up from fucked up gravity and they turn into red mist, um, there are ammo boxes and health regen stations and stuff like that. In the game, the game funnels you forward. It's very non-linear and the way that, because you're not picking up ammo and so the game's not playing on the scarcity mechanic that the rest of the game does or you're constantly searching for new things through, to people's bodies, is that it, you never have to worry about ammunition or health because pretty much every 10, maybe 15 minutes of gameplay you run into these flashing red stations that fill all of your ammo up, fill all of your health up and they don't run out. So you can go into a firefight, screw up, come back, refill at these health stations. And so, like what's Phil's saying, like it's very much, they sort of took what was the kind of agreed to be like the, like the most mediocre part of the game, which is the shooter part, at least as a straight shooter and sort of made that the focus of the DLC, which I thought made, makes the shooting part more fun, but in terms of getting a lot more lore and, uh, information on the backdrop of Fallout 3 and like why the bombs dropped and what sort of the political climate was, you don't, you don't get nearly as much as that as I was hoping for it. It also places a way of your emphasis on the stealth mechanic if that's what you want. Sneaking around is a viable option for a lot of it, more so than a lot of other parts of Fallout, since it's taking place in hilly areas that there are a lot of height differences where you can actually sneak by with how people seeing you. How does this compare to the Oblivion DLC, I mean, compared to like the stuff that originally came out for Oblivion, it's much better because like the first Oblivion DLC was just like one little area that added some bonus stuff that wasn't as long as you were talking about. It's more like Knights of the Nine, if you remember that, which is like, it's like another quest line that you can do and it's, you know, it's fairly lengthy, but it's not, it's not like a full expansion area. And like Knights of the Nine, the main goal was a shitload of loot at the end of it, which was supposed to be awesome. Knights of the Nine, you didn't just get, like, you didn't just get loot though, you got to have knights that would follow you around the world at any point in time for the rest of the game. I was also disappointed that Fox doesn't follow you in the simulation, which shouldn't surprise me, but still. Also, I was wrong last podcast, Fox is not a girl, this is according to someone at Bethesda. But to be fair, someone at Bethesda thought Fox was a girl based on the war they saw, so I wasn't the only one that was confused. But someone ruined the loot for me, like they, they said what you get at the end of it. It isn't really that exciting. It actually is. This is actually the most of the stuff that's easy to counter in the simulation. Which I didn't know. And now I do. I think we ruined it on the end. And now everyone who's listening to this podcast knows what you get in that DLC. Spoilers. Spoilers. It's not the weapons that I'm interested in. It's the... Continue to spoil. Even though you're supposed to be upset about it. Oh, I think the cat is out of the bag now, but yeah, so I play in that, play in a lot of PC games just because I've been reviewing a laptop. Anything, anything of note? Dawn of War II, which I think we maintain with awesome company of heroes. Dead Rising. We're not Dead Rising. That's projection, something else I want to talk about later. Left or dead? If you want to talk about Dead Rising II, I mean, I'm just fucking stoked that there's a Dead Rising II where you're either in a giant hamster ball, or you're riding a motorcycle on the inside of a giant ball as it rolls through zombies. Is that something, Alan? Is that Vanessa? Those are the... Those are the... There's a part where you see a giant red ball rolling through a casino over zombies. I think you're right. I didn't think of the possibility of the motorcycle. Yeah. Well, he's got a motorcycle jacket, and he rides a motorcycle pair. I've seen that real life. It's kind of intense. Someone brought up the policy. We have zombies. We have zombies. We have zombies. So let me get the... You ride a motorcycle inside a ball, and there's zombies, and the ball runs over the zombies. Okay. Yeah. That was where the project got green lit. No. I don't think everyone's pretty psyched about the horizon. I kind of... I hope you do play as Frank, for at least some of it. I don't think Frank is going to be in any way. Doesn't... I don't think anyone really likes this... Can we talk? Spoilers. Spoilers. From the first game. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Does Frank die or something? Does Frank become infected or something? No. Obviously, I never finished either. It was spoiled for me. He just made that up. I never finished the epilogue part with the tank and everything. But I finished the main thing. Was that just one ending? That's possible. That game was such a clusterfuck narratively. I love the game, but I don't remember the ending at all. No, because no one cares about the story in that game. It's all about chainsaws and hedgeplays. I care about the individual scenarios. Little bits of story in between. I don't care about what's happening overall. Yeah. Anyway. All right. I'm called through, which we'll talk about. We'll talk about that. Yeah. That's like coming out on Monday then. We're going to put it out. This coming. I would just like to go like one quick thing about Call of Duty. This is not going to be backlog related, but just when you save your games in that game, make sure to save not in the same file every time. Sequentially. Face out your saves and then go into. We'll be talking about the PCA one, right? Yeah. And then go into your My Documents folder, Bethesda. My Documents, Bethesda. And there'll be folders there for all your save games. Pull those out because you can only have so many in there and keep making new saves. It is a Bethesda game. Save like it is a Bethesda game. Because I got it. It only allows you to have a limited amount of saves unless you go in there and move them to a different folder, which is a very smart idea. And it's bugged on me while I was saving, so I lost like four hours of progress. It corrupts the save lives. It's a big layer. We are all blowing it together for backlog or whatever we're going to call it, which will be something. How long did it come out? 2006. 2006. Oh really? Is that recent? It uses that. It's not a bit. That's okay because it works more. It's published by Bethesda. Made by a company that went out of business right after they released it. Right. That's fucked up. I mean, it has a lot of problems. I mean, there are a lot of amazing games that have that track record, like Vampire Club lines. Studio full part after releasing it. Did I tell Michael about the little story on the air last time? No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. That will be coming out on Monday. Yeah. I'm excited to talk about it now that I've played so. Are you doing it the same way you did it on one of FM where you're going to have comments from people on the boards? Yeah. We don't have comments. We will have comments from people somehow. I mean, people on other boards. People are commenting on the thread where we first posted play up to this point. Okay. On the post. Yeah. If you want to have your comment right on there, comment on that thread and we'll try and pull in some from there. And by thread, do you mean post on me? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I got whatever. Threaded comments are coming people. I'm working on it. And also other forums like people have been talking about backlog. Apparently, the- We'll talk about that actually with letters too. Okay. Okay. And yeah, no. I just beat- I just beat- Steal your Friday. No, no, no. I just beat Killzone 2. Should we talk about that? I've been playing that. I'd like to talk about it. I'd like to talk about it. Finish it as well. You finished it? Yeah. Can you talk about it? Yeah. As long as you talk about it, of course, as long as you don't. No, the embargos. The embargos. The embargos are up. The reviews are up. That's the reviews. Okay. Yeah. That's not for all the platform. I have not finished the game. I'm excited to play. The first game. Yeah. I can talk about it. I loved the first game. In fact, when I beat Killzone 2, the first thing I did the next morning was dug out a copy of Killzone Liberation, which I never played. I had a copy. I had a copy. Because I was fascinated by the fact that these Dutch developers clearly hate Germans so much that they made an entire franchise about them. Yes, it's true. But I really like the storyline the first one, so I am, and I like the characters in the first one, so I'm interested in the second one. I'm liking the second one a lot more than I expected to. It's not really because of the storyline at all, but I am enjoying it a lot. I'm not thinking the story is good, but I just think that the whole, the fascist bad guys are really well realized and that sort of notion, that sort of, it's like this huge revenge fantasy, basically, where it's like, you fuck with those and we're going to fuck you right back and it's like this sort of constant back and forth on that. And the thing, I mean, yeah, I won't spoil anything, but yeah, there is a very like really interesting back and forth as the missions progress of like, sort of, you make some progress and then you get set back. And there's nothing like altruistic or particularly noble about either side, which I think is really interesting, and that the good guys, the ISA, are just as messed up as the Hellgast, really. As far as they tell us and like, you don't, you don't seem to learn a lot about them, but there's nothing to make you think, make you like them really. Didn't the Hellgens invade Earth and try to steal out the ISA and let us know. It's nerdy like vector, which was like this, there was this place that Earth doesn't really come into it at all. As far as like, so there's these planets that have been colonized and the Hellgens stuff, they were a corporation or something that sort of seceded and went and started colonizing things. And then the first game was this battle over this planet that the Hellgens had colonized initially and it was Earth sort of reclaiming its, you know, its possession of things and then the, the Hells, Killzone 2 is all about taking it to the Hellgend homeworld and sort of like, you know, taking it all the way to the top. So as you get further and further into it, you realize that what you're doing is quite mean too. You know, it's not as, it's not as noble as a lot of missions are like, you're going through like cities, like, I mean, they're really like grimy, dirty looking cities, but they're like, they're cities. Like, you don't ever see any civilians or anything. I thought that could actually make it a little more interesting, but you are going through these. Like, it's just every once in a while I would stop and look around and realize, oh, like, this is like a building. This is where somebody could live. Right. Which is interesting. I mean, overall like setting and the cutscenes and the way the larger story plays out, like, I think that's pretty well done. It's just kind of the, the problem for me is that the like moment to moment dialogue between your squadmates and everything, that for me just kind of drags down. It's the same with yours. Well, there's a war level. Yeah. It's just a little comedy, you know. It's one of them, like, with your mama joke. Yeah. I don't remember anything like that. And the first one, and the first one I thought the character dialogue, even during shooting parts was pretty smart. And all the characters with the exception of the guy named Rico and the first one were all pretty smart too. Like Rico was like the one bro dude, but then you had like a really smart spy woman. Rico's in this one as well and he's, I mean, having sort of gone back and played liberation now you kind of realize that Rico is kind of the series hero in a weird kind of way. Because you aren't the same guys you were in either of the previous games and kills on two and it's, and what I do like is it takes that call of duty idea of casting you in no way as any kind of super soldier. And very often you are just present for monumental events, but you aren't the instigator of them and, you know, and all the way through to the end of the game, you aren't, you aren't the guy that necessarily sets off the, the big event. You just happen to be in the room when it happens or, and there are battles like that as well where, you know, there's like, you know, that kind of matrix you kind of float fighting, floating robot thing, right, right, right, there's a scene towards the end where, you know, you're like, Oh God, I'm going to have to take this thing down. And you kind of, you get into that first person shooter, this is all down to me mentality and you kind of getting into cover and getting all the ammo that scattered all over the place and then the thing explodes and your guys are taking it down for you. Well there is, yeah, there are even like just fights in the game where I would be like running around, like kind of not really paying attention, I guess. And then I would realize after a couple of minutes, like, Oh, my, my partner's already finished off the rest of the bad guys and I can move on to the next area yet just because I had been like looking at something else or running to get ammo or something. I think they also do a better job. I mean, there are, there are still lots of lots of spots in the game where the game doesn't advance until you do, like as far as like when you're by like the tank or whatever on the bridge and like you have to move forward, then everyone also move forward, but I think they do make a, like do a better job than something like Call of Duty or it's not as transparent when that happens. I mean, the game responds to that very aggressively. So if you, if you kind of a bit of a pussy player and you tend to hold back, it keeps throwing people at you, but if you advance and get super, there's some levels where you feel totally pinned down and feel like there is no way in how I'm going to get out of here. And it's going to, you know, rocket power grenades coming over and, you know, the guys are coming right up in front of your cover and like, you know, slashing you with a knife rake. And you're like, how do I do this? And then what you realize is you have to just run and like take down anyone that's in your line of sight and your guys will come with you and pick off the people that are in your peripheral vision, and there are certain scenes in the game where that's what it wants you to do. But I think if you tend to be a more cautious player or you've just come off playing something like Gears of War where you're used to using cover more tactically, it doesn't really want you to do that. But the weird thing is except when it does, I haven't run into many problems with that. And I am more of the kind who like holds back and will hide under cover and stuff. Have you got to the part, there's a part with a, with a bridge where you're advancing over a bridge and there's like all these like cars and trucks and you kind of work your way towards the end. And it's like you start off kind of underneath it and you work your way up over to the top and there's like a big gun in placement. I got pinned down forever there and I realized it was because I was playing it. I was too softly, you know, I was like cautiously edging forward. But yeah, what it really wants you to do is just go for it. But I was, I was telling this guy to send him in the car on the way over here that at some points in the battles, I feel like to like later in the game where there are some tough moments. I feel like the way I've, I've solved them was like almost, not cheating, but like, I was like, okay, there's a solution to the situation. If I go and run behind this wall, there's no way I'm going to die and I can just wait until I have a shot at this guy and take him out. So in, in some of the battles still felt like there were some scenes where I could kind of like break it, even if it wanted me to play aggressively, you wanted me to play a certain way. But that's just me kind of being very, very picky about the combat. But overall, I really liked it and I felt like the, the way things played out. I mean, comparing, I think overall the structure is very called duty, adrenaline, generally in terms of fighting like pockets of guys, but you're right. It doesn't, the game is a lot more responsive to how you are playing it. And it's, I think overall it's sort of the video game equivalent of like a popcorn movie. You know, I think that's, I mean, people, people that are decrying it for lacking innovation, I wasn't looking for innovation, I was just looking for a good shooter that looks really cool and, you know, I mean, it had the dialogues, not great, but so what. And it just delivers good fight. And yeah, at first I was like, wow, this is kind of very like, even though it's gorgeous to tell me it's kind of like bland and gray, but it's like, you always, you're always doing things. You're never really just wandering through these environments, you're always engaging people. So you never really stop to like, you know, be bummed out of everything. I wish, I mean, I wish, like, and again, I haven't completed the game. So I don't know what the last few levels are like. But I wish that there was a little bit, a little bit more variety, because it does get a little bit tiresome running through the same like alleyways and like sewers and I don't know. It feels like they could have done a little more and like the first, the very first level you start on your like home, like your ship and it's really colorful and that was, that was really awesome because the screenshots I had seen of the game so far hadn't looked that way. And that's like, that sort of got me hopeful that there would be more of that in the game. I mean, I think people have seen, there's like the one deserty environment. I don't know if you got that yet, but I think I'm, I think I'm right there. But I was kind of hoping that after that, it kind of, it went more buried, but it doesn't really. As you said, you look like the first one. I liked it as well. I remember the parts where like the drop ships would come in and the guys would like kind of abseil down out of it. And there was that kind of feeling of it, being this very complete world where stuff was coming. There's a lot of that. And I, and I thought that like, not only parts like that, but at the time I, you know, I played a ton of shooters on the PS2 and just like the way you reloaded your gun and you were always looking down at your weapon and stuff like that. Like, that sort of thing just seemed so cool to me. Like, even though I guess some people probably found it annoying that you had to like look down at your weapon or something like that, but the sort of reloading mechanics and little touches like that that made me feel like it was like real. Those were a big real strategy in, uh, in Killzone 2. I just, cause they're all shooters, I'm just constantly reloading all the time. Like, I got the trophy for like a thousand, or it's like a thousand reloads. I got that like, um, I'm, I'm sorry, much. Killzone 2 has a line coming with black as well. Which is also a game I love. Yeah, I love black. Let's talk to them developing black too right now. They haven't talked about that for so long. I hope so. I mean, the rumblings have renewed. I mean, I've got to be doing something besides like brown paradise deal. Black. Black's still one of my favorite shooters I've ever played. Yeah. Yeah. So. Have you played any Skirmish? I've been actually keeping out of the press multiplayer sessions cause I want to play it when it goes live. I have not played any of that yet. But Skirmish is fun cause it's... That is very... It's right. Yeah, it's about to 15 bots. I mean, bots alone is a, is great. I love bots. Yeah, so you get to kind of play the game very differently. The pace is very different. It's much faster game when you play Skirmish. And there's no cover, right? And there's no cover. Right. But I'm fascinated by the whole job system online that you, that you start off as a sort of blank slate and based on your behavior in the game, you can assign things towards the job system. Yeah, I'm really interested. I'm really interested in seeing how that goes. I haven't played a multiplayer at all either. We should play someone to come to that. Yeah. I don't think we're a PSN friends. I think we should. But not. We should do something about that. Yeah. I mean, I think Patrick won't because he doesn't like talking. Oh. I don't like having to like kill some. It's been sad about it. It's been sad about it. It's been sad about it. I'm just avoiding playing a Bluetooth headset for that very reason. Yeah. We haven't been talking about iPhone yet. No. I think it's played through his iPhone. Either. Yeah. Do you have any other non-kills on stuff? I've been meaning to do the Burnout Paradise download because I'm a big Burnout. I just did it like three days ago. I've been meaning to buy Burnout. Yeah. See, I just re-board it on PS3 because I have some friends that work at Criterion. They're like, what the hell are you doing playing it on Xbox 360? Stop. Buy the PS3 version now. We'll see. I finally got around. Can we put up a new story? Criterion says play the PS3 version now. All of the Criterion guys are like, it is a PS3 game. Black 2, PS3 exclusive, it'll spin out of control. And it's like, that is how it is meant to be played. So you can download the whole thing for $30 or the greatest hits version of Paradise is 20 bucks now. I really want to seem to be running a little better post patch for me, but I've had my affiliate. You don't have to, for PS3, you don't have to buy a disc. You can download it. You can download it. Anthony, you have a Steam press account. You really need to buy the PS3 version of the game. Yeah, I would rather have it on console. That game than a PC. But, yeah, I mean, the restart functionality alone is-- Which is why I bought the game. That's funny. I waited a whole year to buy the game because I knew that would just-- I know that you were supposed to play the game without the restart. I totally forgot about it. Like, I played a post patch last night for myself for like two hours in the night. And off of the team, you're like, oh my god. One second. I guess it's because I didn't do that many things. I was just trying to still find the 500th gate I don't have. One goddamn gate that I don't have. Of course, you got to build a burnout like a cleantist. I might teach that on slash first. You and I used to talk when I first started working to one up about it because I burned out-- What's it called? The bench. Yeah, but I revenge. Actually, 100% of the single player. But, you're the only person I know that you've done that. I'm being serious, though. Are you opposed to using guides because the super guide on my teeth is actually really phenomenal. I have a little-- You get it. I know. Mike Nelson made it. But I remember it is really good. I'm sure it's good, but it's like if you use a guide or something like that, I have to go and look where you're-- It's one bit. Huh? One. I know. I'm like on the picture. It's going to be asshole to find it that way. But I'm getting desperate. So we'll see. Yeah. The only way you're going to be able to do it is you're going to have to start in a corner of the map. I'm trying to link it up. I'm trying to link it up. You're like a search battery. You're looking for-- Start an amber alert for the 500th gate. See, I bought burnout paradise a long time ago, but I've been waiting to play it until they added the restart thing. Right. So, not that it's here. It was perfect for me. And I was only 20 bucks. And it was nice to just have it without a disc and just sitting there on the piece of your dash. And I knew it would just annoy the hell out of me. So I just felt patched eventually and then sure enough, a year later. And even the other little changes in them were like they changed the colors of some stuff in the environment. Like, where there's going to be a big jump, the little barrier in front of it is now like a bright blue. So you immediately know as soon as it gets in your range that that's going to be a jump. And the billboards are now bright red. Like you just highlighted different things in the environment to call out to trick your parts down. So you upgraded the physics model on all the cars, do you notice that? What I read about that was that it was mostly for the lower end cars to make it easier for new players to like not spin out and stuff. I felt like I did notice it in the one in the kind of like, I'm like, you tear a license, some of those cars that I was racing. I felt like it was a little easier. I don't know if that was just because I was like playing well or something. The only thing that I don't like that they did was they changed road rage so that it doesn't keep adding to the clock. Because I'm kind of like... Because I would play forever. That's what I liked about it. And you kind of get up to that point where you're chaining like 10, 12, 20 of these things in a row and you start getting to talk up to the point where you can keep going. But it gets really intense and they're kind of not that on the head. Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, I certainly like would love to get begin to it now because the night was like great playing by myself post patch and I want to try and multiplayer stuff now again because that's love to do. I've done I think all like the eight player challenges and six, but I have to do like seven player stuff. Like it's what I have left is really specific. One gate and seven player challenges. That's pretty specific. Can't really game with the horses. Actually, I've heard a lot of complaints about the seven player challenges specifically. Really? Yeah. Like the giant bomb game of the year thing, they spend a good 10 minutes bitching about seven player. Weird. I mean, anything else you were playing before I... No, just some sort of odds and ends of iPhone games. I don't really have much besides I mean, things we've been talking about burnout and halo. We talk about the Halo Wars demo. I'd like to cover that. We haven't. I've gotten past the opening cinema. So I haven't played the Halo Wars demo, but I did do it. I've played it. Hold on. Hold on. But I did do a preview of the first three levels of the game like months ago. So I have played the first... You've covered a whole level past the demo. I've played... Yeah, I've played more than the demo. So I want to... I haven't played this yet either, but uh... When you tweeted about it. It was great contribution. I don't know. But when you tweeted about it and you said that it was like Diablo you compared it to? It was no other... That was you. I'm sorry. I think... And that was like, I was immediately like, "Oh, now I'm actually interested in this game." Because it feels very much, they've removed a lot of these sort of... There's base building in the game, but it's so not the focus of the game. You have some customization, but it's really... You only have so many... I think it's not really smartly though. The ice falling started. It's still a compelling part, even though it's not as big a part. I guess it's not like... I don't know what to do. It's just... I think it's compelling, but I think in hindsight it's a mistake to have any base building having played Dawn of War II now. Like, Dawn of War II, that model would work. I think in hindsight it's a mistake to make Halo Wars as a traditional RTS, but if it's going to be, I think this is the right way to do it, at least. So the way that base building works is just like you have only X amount of spaces to work with. Like you have this essentially this little map. It's like a... It's like a nine slot grid. A nine slot grid. You just get to pick and choose, you know, what you put in there. But in addition to whatever you pick, you can always upgrade those. And so you're... You only have X amount of spaces to work with. So it's not like you're constantly like, "I gotta go back and build a new barracks. Just upgrade the barracks. You don't have to worry about it. It's just pumping out enemies." But it's a strategy to what you put in those. Yeah. Because the more things there... Sometimes you might build like power things, but you might realize that you don't need as much power as you do, like need like other items in there. Like if you build multiple, like the... There's like this one resource in the game, I don't know, that's what I don't know. Power. So it's essentially... So if you build multiple like resource harvesting things, you can do it more quickly, but it's like, do you want to... You might have enough room for a factory. Yeah. Or you want to build like the tech to research new types of guys for your barracks. You don't need to go like in a traditional like sort of command and conocross. You don't have to like go out and fetch resources, you just build something that invents resources out of nowhere. Well, no, you do have to go... Well, they're scattered, but they're really not necessary. Like at least if I found the demo of the little boxes, like the little pill box, you can go fine. Oh, you don't have to even get those? They don't really give you like... They're just like a quick boost. Yeah. Okay. I gotcha. So anyway, like the whole Diablo comparison comes from the fact that because you're working out of control, and I think Ensemble did a really fantastic job of making what a console RTS could work, because it feels like an action game. Like it feels like this sort of simplified RTS where like you click an enemy and they go and do their animations, you compress why to do a special move. So like the Warthog, you know, we'll normally just have a guy chain gunning, but if you hit why, he'll go and run him over. I was like, you wanna... Just to add how you do that. So it's got sort of these like little things that you would normally do while you were playing. Just why then? But why? I was like, fuck, he just keeps driving around him. And who I? And so because of that, because you just sort of, you click on these little encampments, you can use cover, and it just felt like you just sort of set up, you know, the dominoes and then just like fall as they may, and it feels like Diablo where you just kind of go up and you just hack. So a quick hack? How about the wide thing? As far as your troops, why would you not want them to always throw grenades? Like I don't understand the balance there, because usually they do what? Because there's a downtime around grenades and you might like want to save your grenades for a more powerful enemy that like maybe they throw grunts up in the face to absorb the initial attacks, so then you save your grenades for the guys that are going to fall behind that. Just in terms of timing? Yeah. I mean, I just don't play a lot of that. I'm just saying a smart player would do something like that would like do that on purpose, so you'll waste it. Like I got the retail today, and so I had a chance to play through anything more than the first two missions. So a lot of the things that I was sort of complaining about like, it feels really simple, it does feel like sort of an action game that just kind of takes place from a third person perspective. Like, why would I want to play this when I just could go play Halo where I'm down on the ground, I'm actually doing these things instead of hitting, you know, Y for a warthog animation. Yeah, I think that's- But I feel like maybe that changes as the game goes on, maybe gets more difficult. And like when Anthony was talking about like, it should have just not included base building or like, I kind of agree with that because like, I wish there was complex base building where I get to do a lot of customization, I get to pick my play style off my base. I just don't worry about the base at all. Yeah, I think it's like a great- I think it's a great element because it is- it feels like more of an action game because more of the focus is on the combat and like I guess the strategy when you have your guys out in the field. But I like having that one kind of strategic element to rely on, to kind of birth your guys from, you're like, which guys do I want to play? No, I understand. I think I don't want to research this. I just think if you'd played Don of War, you would agree with me because in Don of War, there's only two resources the whole time. And even though you don't build any new structures to your base, you still have to use those same two resources to upgrade tiers. Right. I mean, I'm just- It's what you're talking about. The question of Don of War is what you want is you just want to focus on, like, you have this base, you're essentially just using it to farm out stuff. And that's what Don of War just, you don't mess with the base building mechanic. It's just there to farm stuff. And you never have to return to the base either. You can still build units from the base on a whim anywhere in the field. So you'll be like watching and directing this battle and that's the same time. I don't even know. See how it's going and being like, oh, I need two more of this tribute. Let's click a quick icon to be like two of those at the base. Oh, and you can set- You can set a rally point from there from where they need to. From where they need to. So they'll come right up to the fight and you never once have to go and back look at your base. It's just all happening. Like, you know, he really does give you that feel like you are a commander seeing that. There's also the difference from me speaking, like, you know, 100% console gamer and not having played a lot of RTS games in the last decade. And like, this for me feels like a great balance of like, what I still want in an action game with the strategy that I miss from playing, like, good RTS. Yeah. And to me, it's just having played, I'm just saying, I probably sound like with the biggest rally court something, but I'm just saying like, having played Don of War II, it just seems like there's been no RTS to date to me that it seems like it was more perfectly like suited to be transferred to a console than Don of War, like even like there, the amount of buttons you would need, there's just really not that many, like you could easily map it to a controller. I don't know. I think what Nick's talking about is just like, I agree with you, like the last RTS that I seriously played was like, StarCraft or Red Alert. And those were back in the day and I still like the sorts of games where you just build a crap load of enemies and then just sort of deploy them in different ways. It's like, I appreciate games that have this sort of intricate strategy and you're sort of using fog of war, like to your advantage, like, I'm just really building stuff and sending it out and like, you're thinking about it, but it's not like, you don't have to worry about it too much. And I feel like Halo Wars is going to be able to strike that balance. It's all a little bit like myth to me, which was the last RTS I played seriously, which is a lot because the focus is on the combat and it's funny because that was Bungie and this is not going back. That's what's over myth. Right, no, I know, but it still has that kind of like, you know, more, it's still like a starting element. Yeah, so I've been looking for a console RTS to play, like I've had Red Alert 3 sitting and I used to love Red Alert, so I think Halo Wars will actually be the one to actually sit down and just because it felt within 10 minutes, I was having no trouble flicking through different unit types and so I think I'll definitely be going back to it. You should be get less afraid of the PC and then there are lots of RTS's and in general most people playing PC don't voice communicate. I think your reputation has been sealed as the... I know, type of phobic, whatever, I'll leave you and do it, it'll be good. Thanks, appreciate the help guys, no problem, you've been playing things, other things. I don't think I have. Alright, I played a shit-litre call at the concealer, like way beyond the backlog point because that happened and I paid for it with Karma destroying my save file, but conveniently if you look online, there are other people who've had the same problem, so there's like this Call of Cthulhu forum where all these people post their save games, so like I found one that was like close enough to where I was that I can play from. Oh, one quick, really cool thing about Burnout is that you can apparently give your PS3 game save to... I think it was Criterion, it might be a third party thing, and they can like analyze the game to help you find the remaining gates or whatever you needed. I'm paying a 361 so I can't, but this is like a service if you send in your PS3 site. Does that cost money? No. I think the download of a PSN one is also game shareable, so you can, if one person buys the PSN version, I've never even used the game share, you know, functionality, you can say with like three people or five people or something, and so if one person buys Burnout, you can share it with five people and apparently it's not like the betas that you can share where if one person was using it, no one else can, apparently, that's fine because you couldn't get that with Warhawk, so that's cool. Apparently you can do it with Burnout. This is the same company that had like a five activation limit with Spore or whatever, is letting you game share. Yeah. Well, no, this is like, not the PC version, the PS3 version. Well, no, I, no, I get that, I just fell, I would, I would say it seemed like a concept. Well, that's where my Sony, Sony, Sony dictated feature. Well, and we also saw how well that worked out for them, so I didn't know that. Well, yeah, but it didn't sprout them from D.R. I mean, other stuff there. Right. So, well, it's been playing Sif 4, which I've talked about before. I have a question about, about why you're playing so much Cthulhu though. Yeah. Is it because of the game? Well, 'cause you're a Lovecraft fan. No, I actually, I've never actually let Red anything except for Call Cthulhu, and I only ever read Call Cthulhu when I got an iPhone this year, and I downloaded like that free book app. I forget what it's called. Right. And Call Cthulhu was on there, so I read it on my way to part back and forth over course of the week. That one's actually one of your board, his more readable works. Yeah. And so like, I'm not really that big of a fan. I think the universe is kind of cool, but I thought the book was kind of boring, but actually it's just the game, like, because, I mean, without going into it too much, 'cause we're going to do the backlog. I think the thing about Call of Cthulhu, that's such a cool thing about the game is it feels like if a LucasArts team could have done a first-person game instead of like a third-person point-and-click adventure, that's exactly what it's like. Like, you go up to things and he gives a little banter about like what he's seeing, like, "Oh, nothing of interest here," and, you know, there's still all those-- Yeah, you can go over and over. Yeah, exactly. There's still this complex puzzle. So that's really what it goes for me. I always love those old LucasArts games, and to me, it just feels like almost in the spirit of that, except it also still has like scary and creepy parts too, which also-- I also get to hear him. Jives with me. You also get to hear him sing with the door won't open over and over again? Yeah, it's locked. It's locked. It won't budge. So the, I mean, the original "Lone in the Dark" was based on Cthulhu. Cthulhu is actually very underexplored. Yeah. To the point that, I mean, there was "Lone in the Dark" one and two, and then, um, integrams actually did a-- do you remember the Cthulhu game they did that used the "Lone in the Dark" engine, 'cause it was-- No, I'm excited. The Lovecraft Estate got all upset that "Lone in the Dark" was borrowing so heavily from the Cthulhu mythology. I mean, it was starting-- I mean, particularly in number two, it was starting to get pretty overt. Pretty overt. And they did a-- I think I'm pretty sure it came out. There was a Cthulhu game that used the "Lone in the Dark" two engines, so I mean-- There's only been a handful of Cthulhu games, even though that, like, Cthulhu has permeated sort of like culture and-- Yes. Because all of it is unseen horror is unseen horror in Cthulhu, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's sort of-- The game makers can't help themselves but show its stuff to you. I think that's part of the problem we're doing. I think you should check out the "Lone in the Dark" game, because I think they do a great job of still making the horror the unseen things. Like that. Is it a shooter? Yeah. So-- I don't want to talk about it too much, but-- Think of it as a promo for "Lone in the Dark." I'm just saying, eventually, like, eventually, you first get a gun about, like, eight hours into it. Oh, wow. And then they repeat it. That's cool. And then repeatedly, throughout the game, you will have that gun taken away from you. Okay. So you spend a lot of the game actually doing stealth mechanics rather than shooting. Did you like the eternal darkness that a gun could leave? Actually, it turned out like it was one of those games that I just didn't get around to, but that was-- that is one of the last games that really sort of heavily played on the Cthulhu game. That was one of the first that used presentation as a means of delving into Lovecraftian horror with the-- the fucking with you as a gamer breaking the fourth wall. And this game also fucks with you, like, there will be times if you see something that's like so startling to your sanity, and you have a gun out, you might commit suicide. So you have to, like, when that happens, you got to put your gun away. Oh, wow. Wow. That's really cool. So in the game holds up aside from being-- Yeah, I mean, bugs and everything aside, if you can find it for-- it's backwards compatible for 360. There will be audio bugs and stuff like that, but I mean, it's still worth it to me. On the Elder Scrolls III, engine. Yeah. So, I mean, yeah, it doesn't look terrible. And if you're playing on PC, you can get a directed drive. Yeah. Let's check this out. How much is it directed drive? $30. Really? Yeah. That's surprisingly expensive. GameStop is not selling used Xbox games as of next week from my area. I think so. Yeah, that's what I heard off of. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Off of the-- from an EB games employee told me that they were no longer going to be accepting trades on Xbox original games and getting rid of all their stocks. Oh, no. I can't get my $1.75. No, I was going to say the one given much for them anyway, so yeah. So I also been playing Seph4. I played multiplayer for the first time with Kathleen last night. It sounds like it was an epic session. Kathleen, yeah. Kathleen was the English and I was the Japanese. I started off as a Japanese empire that quickly turned Jewish, but then eventually-- That's amazing. Yeah. Well, Judaism's like an early way to establish early on, like a state religion and not let other religions into your state. I'm really big into that when it comes to that, but eventually, like-- Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What when other people started, like, accepting-- You should do this everywhere. I love these stories about Seph4. I love them. When everyone else, like, Kathleen accepted Buddhism, and then Kathleen started sending, like, Buddhist and Christian missionaries into my land, and she started gifting them to me, and I was like, I don't even have to do with these. So eventually, like, eventually, like, you do need to accept things like freedom of religion, but then it's annoying because you got, like, four religions in one town, and they all want a temple, and you're trying to appease all these people, like, that's why having a state religion is so much easier, because you're like, no, shut up. This is the religion. You're not going to deal with it. Go to temple. Exactly. And eventually, that's what I did. I was like fine. You guys don't like it. Jewish missionary in your town. Jewish missionary in your town. And it's funny, too, because, like, I basically, like, we won that game, and I basically did it without ever firing a shot, because I would just, like, the Romans tried to colonize too close to me, and I was like, fuck that. So I built colonies on either side of them, and then just built, like, the most amazing cities right next to them. And eventually, their people were like, fuck this. I want to be Jewish, and I want to be Japanese, and they joined up. So-- So were you guys playing, like, together? You were allies? Yeah, we were allies. Yeah, I mean, and it was funny, too, because, like, Kathleen was, like, really aggressive in attacking all these people, and I didn't want to, like, be that aggressive, because I kind of had, like, Kathleen as a buffer between me and all the enemies. So, like-- She was expendable. So all I would do is, like, I built a shitload of technology, so I had, like, helicopters and shit while everyone else was still, like, chucking stones at each other. And so I would basically just build Kathleen a great fleet of, like, mighty dragons, AKA helicopters. Just gift them to her and be, like, go fight for Japan. So, you know, I just let Kathleen fight Poxy Wars for me while I just sat there building, like, the most epic city. You know, and it is cool, like, seeing how people play, too, that Kathleen focuses really hard on just making, like, cities and building roads between them, but leaving, like, a lot of her land undeveloped towards me on, like, hardcore, like, my land looked like a Japan wood or something. It was, like, just nothing but a grid of buildings, like, and eventually, my people were, like, please accept environmentalism. Be happy when we see trees, because I completely raped the land of everything. That's just how I roll. Like, I'm like, "Oh, there's beavers. We're making beaver farms right there, and I'm harvesting those bitches for fur." Like, I get so funny because when I play set, I'm like, the exact opposite of how I'm in real life, and I'm all big into conservation and, like, leaving land for all that, but when I play that, I'm, like, a ruthless dictator. Like, fascism. Awesome. Yeah, exactly, that's like, you know, I'm just like, harvesting from my own level. You got to show a firm hand in being a pinata. Exactly. I'm like, once you are no longer making me money or giving me levels up, you're out of the farm. I'm really desperate. I don't name them. Yeah, exactly. You got to make concentration camps. You got to build all the guys. Oh, okay. Yeah. Well, exactly. I did run a little pinata gulag. I mean, like, eventually, I would set benefit, I'd be like, "You're not worth 2,000 chocolate coins. You're out of my fucking garden." You know what I mean? I would, like, mail myself two of each species so that if there's ever, like, a horrible catastrophe, I can nose ark that shit and re-talk about it. Beyond that, it's like, I don't give a shit about it. I just want to walk through the pinata. I showed Alice the way I played cooperatively. I want to see Anthony raise a child. And I got Alice, like, level 35 within an hour, but she'd be like, "No, I want to try all these butter." I'd be like, "Shut up, butterflies. Nothing. Use them. Let something eat them." And we're moving on from the butterflies. We got the butterflies taken care of. I'm like, "Notting me, it's just not worth it." So, yeah, I'm funny because you have animals in real life. Yeah, so I'm saying, you know, these games, I don't really feel bad, like, you know, I actually think it's funny, like, when I'm playing, like, in real life, if I saw, like, horse archers and camel archers throwing themselves at a city with full of machine guns and dying, I'd think that's fucking tragic. Poor devil's. But when I was watching it and said I couldn't help but laugh picturing, like, in my mind, all these, like, hardcore guys that were, like, riding from Baghdad, which was the city in our game last night, and they wrote out from Baghdad to try and help out their ally that we were destroying. And they're like, "Oh, we send you all our camel archers," and they threw themselves against one of Kathleen's cities and got shot by machine guns. And I was like, "That must have been hilarious." So, anyways. And then, beyond that, I've also been playing fear, too. That's my new game that I've been playing. That came out now, right? Yeah, like, yeah. Came up. Today? Today, yeah. I got an email from Gary Drogue. I'm talking about it. Is it scary? Is it scary? No. Did you think the first thing was scary? Grant said I've been playing a lot of it during the day, but even compared to the first one, it has a lot less "boo" moments. The first one did a lot more crazy shit with your head where all of a sudden, you'd be in a hallway full of blood or something like that, and something would appear in your face at the end. This one doesn't do that. So far, I'm five levels in, and the stuff that you see is much more almost there to guide you through the level. I've seen ghosts, but when I see a ghost, it's like she stops and does a weird twitchy walk around the corner, and I'm like, "Okay, now I know that's where I'm supposed to go." So is that not supposed to be scary, because you just played Condemt too. It's creepy. Which is like the last game Monolith made, and Condemt does all that really well. Condemt bothered me a lot more, but I guess Condemt's more in your face, though. I think Condemt's crazy psycho's running at you. I guess you're also underpowered. Yeah, you're way less empowered than Condemt. That's what I'm saying. This game's totally empowering. I told you. I'm playing it on normal, but for me, it is too easy. I'll see nine guys go into a room, and there's not even one second where I'm like, "Oh, they might get through my armor and start hitting my health." I'm like, "No, this is going to be a breeze." I throw two grenades and shoot, and it's over. And then it's like... And he never uses the slow motion thing. I have never used the slow motion part, but once. It's just... So how much is the... Because I'm teetering whether I want to play it or not, but it was just a mediocre shooter. The only way they would tip me was if it was scary and fun. I still think it's a super. As far as like a John was saying about Killzone, it's not doing anything crazy or new, but the fights are really fun. I still think the fights in this are relevant. I think that siren is actually coming here. Well, maybe they're finally taking care of the wife and husband that hurt each other, that live across from us. I haven't heard Domesseva on Thursday, I don't know. Maybe they'll finally kill each other. I'm just kidding. That's a horrible thing to say. You're not kidding. You're not kidding. That was Steve Anthony that just came out right there. Leaked into the... That's the chore. Target got out of the cage, man, sorry. But it's still got really, really, really good fights. I still think that a lot of the scenes that it sets up are still really fun, and it's ridiculously gory. If you thought the demo was kind of gory, the actual single players absurdly gory. There are guys that run around for something inexplicable reason with these giant tanks on their back, and you shoot them, and it's like they're rich. Ribs just blow out of the front. It's obscene. The game is super fun. It might still get some of the same criticism it got from the first one of the environments. Which is like boxes of rooms. The environments being the exact same, like I've been in a hospital factory environment for forever. Isn't there a big outdoor portion now where you're going to macro something? Supposedly. Now granted, like I said, I've only played up to level five, from what I can tell from the achievement. They're like 14 levels, so. Yeah, I think it has some mech elements, so we'll see. Yeah, there's a mech in the demo. I'm writing a guide for it, and I still think it's really fun. Yeah. And that said something. So. Can we talk about the similar thing in Killzone? People know about that now. There's a mech. The mech thing in Killzone. Yeah. We talk about that. Yeah. So, I enjoyed that. I didn't know that. Okay. Well, it was a mech. I didn't know that. I haven't seen that. Yeah. Now you know about it. So, I just want to say one thing about it, which is really weird to me that when you play it, it's pretty much like playing the normal game, and it's all the same controls as from first person, it just raised up a little. It's pretty much like the rest of the game, only you're a little bit more powerful. It seems so weird to me that they didn't go third person with it or make it feel different because it's supposed to be a change of pace, but it has all the same controls. You can even jump like you normally can. It's got like. But you can jump further. I guess. It just feels weird. It just feels like suddenly I'm just this giant cyborg man, instead of actually being like, feeling like I'm all that part. That's not cool. That's not cool. Like that. That is not a cyborg. You're not telling me that being in a cyborg suit does not sound awesome to you. This is. When I heard that the US Army was developing semi-powered suits, I was like, "Where's your recruiter?" Yeah, that's a part of that. How does that not sound cool to you? This is Anthony's exosquad boner showing, don't mind him. Yeah. He's shipping. In theory, it should be cool. It's weird to me that for something that's supposed to be a change of pace. Like earlier in the game, where you're in the tank, and that's third person, it's weird that it looks and plays very similarly to the rest of the game. So you think if it was third person, you would love it? Not necessarily, but it would be a little more refreshing, at least, just kind of felt like. Because you've got an infinite supply of rockets on your left hand, and an infinite supply of bullets and a minigun on your right, and you can just go in and just lay waste. It's satisfying. I don't know. It's what. It's not different. It's just even a really weird design choice for me to play the exact same as the rest of the game. You just wanted more power. Or, yeah, more different or something. Did you pick up a tool on some people are complaining that in the entire game you feel like a midget? I never noticed that. I've only heard one person say that, and there are people complaining about a lot of other things about that review. To be fair. I didn't pick up on things. She doesn't know everything feels bigger than that. Yeah, I didn't get that sensation at all. I don't know. Specifically, it was Tom Chick that said your eye level is like at nipple height on all of the NPCs and stuff like that, right? Yeah. That's what we're talking about. And I never... Maybe he just likes me as an issue. I mean, like, maybe he had the crouch button held down. The entire game. This game, man. Whoa. Whoa. I'm really accurate, though. That's too much, right? No, I don't know. That doesn't strike me. Anyway, I'm fine. I guess I guess my complaint's nil. Go on. Yeah. If Phil tells what you've got. I'll just give my quick World of Warcraft update, which is I got the elder title from the lunar festival. Thank you. And I'm now getting my Valentine's Day achievements working through this. Phil's logging in every hour to make sure that he can work on getting his Valentine's Day thing works is... I'd rather you tell me what you're doing for real life or in real life. No, I'll tell you how the Valentine's Day thing works. Yeah, with girlfriend. I invited Amanda to a romantic date in Azeroth. Do you really? We will probably play World of Warcraft on Valentine's Day. I'm not going to lie to him. I'm not going to lie to him when weined in cheese. But so in the Valentine's Day event, you seriously, like, all the achievements are built around getting these gifts from the NPCs in the towns by giving them love tokens. And you can only give a love token to someone every hour. And then you get a buff that says you can't give this, you can't get up another token until an hour is passed. You need recovery time. So apparently. This isn't like Babel where you can be like, "Here, gift, gift, gift. You love me, you love me, you love me." So you have to wait and also the, and like, and then what you get in return from them is a gift. Like, you only have a certain percentage of getting different items from them. So the goal is to get every gift they can possibly give. Yeah, you have to get like every gift to get all the different achievements. And why do you want all the achievements, Phil? Because you get another title, The Love Fool. And then why do you want that? Because by getting all the achievements for this one, Phil's working on the overall achievement, which is getting every achievement for every holiday for a whole year. So every time they do a holiday thing, Christmas, Halloween, you have to get all the achievements. For each of us. For each of us. For each of us. It's a Patrick's Day. And in the end, he gets them out. So for dedicating a year, it's like a really good round. It's faster than all the other ones. Okay. What is the percentage faster that this mount is? 30%. You told me it's true. Is this mount like Santa on all fours with a pumpkin for a head, like a mixture of all the holidays? That would be amazing. That would be amazing. I don't think so. It's just a giant color dragon. Yeah. But it's faster than all the other ones. We lost opportunity on Blizzard's part. Yeah. Fail. Maybe they still have time to change it. They could change it. Blizzard's part. Guys, they have their audience so fucking dialed in. I know. I know exactly what it takes. I feel bad. I feel bad for being a part of this. But Nick, I'm going to try and get you in soon. Yeah, we'll see. All right. And then also, I did check out Afro Samurai. I'm only a few levels and I'm not liking it quite as much as you did. But I am... You said the cutscenes are laughable. Well, the cutscenes are laughable because here's the thing is all the cutscenes in the game are like no longer than five to ten seconds and have no context. You have no idea what's happening. Like the first time we got to a cutscene, Kat was watching me play and then she was like, "Did you just skip the cutscene?" And I'm like, "No. It just ended." And press a button. Yeah, I can appreciate that. And it's kind of hard for me to separate and see it that way because I know the backstop. Yeah. And I haven't seen the show. But it's amazing. They don't even take five minutes because the story of Afro Samurai, the general plot is so simple. It is. And I do a little bit of talking to you, but yeah, they don't explain it at all in the game. And it's not just the plot either. They've taken the let's not have a UI to an extreme where they don't have any tips pop up or anything. They don't tell you what anything in the game does besides they show you how to attack. But like, there's these teddy bears that you hit and then they make weird noises. Yeah, like I didn't figure that out until halfway through the second level. Wow. This is like an Nintendo game from the 80s of my instruction book. It does clearly. Hitting teddy bears for health. I don't know the way. If anyone, like, because I guess we're on it and I got stuck on the flamethrower boss, that's another problem where I didn't know I could run until then. If you hold in L3, you can run and that's like the way to beat that boss. They didn't break. You know how to gain a health or run in this game? At some point. They wasn't. There wasn't a problem ever until, like, the point where you have to. There's a room you enter where, like, it starts filling with poison gas, but there's no way to really tell that the gas is hurting you. So like, I was just kind of walking leisurely through this room taking my time. That sounds awesome. It does make sense. I was like, I spent some time after I cleared out all the enemies. I spent some time looking for like health. You can just run into the next room, but I was like looking around for any bonus items and stuff. And then I died. And I was like, oh. I don't know. I mean. The reason this is coming up is because Nick was going on about how much you loved after a samurai. Yeah, I do love it. I mean, I don't know. It's not bad. Like, I mean, the combat is very satisfying. Yeah, kind of especially when you go into like the special mode and you can just kill dudes with one slice. That's really cool. Yeah, I can really appreciate all the complaints, but it's just like, I don't know, just like something with the, for me, it's like the presentation value is that high and just like. Yeah, do you think you'd feel that way if you'd paid for it? I don't know. Nick said that I don't care about your problems. So last week you guys said you were going to play Savage Moon. Did you? Did you? You said that. You guys did. I mean, I was going to play that. I don't know. I was going to say that. I didn't say that. I was going to talk about it this week. I don't know. I don't know. I downloaded it. I didn't play it. I was hoping that one of them would have played it. I could have just knotted in this. Yeah, that sounds, you know. I will not promise to play it. I don't want to play it. I don't want to play it. Now that I've played it before, I started playing the review build, and I think I'd rather play more pixel-typing monsters. I mean, like I said, there's one interesting element where you can kind of give this blocking piece where you can change the path that the enemies are walking down, and it's kind of cool that you can look through a camera view down low in the field and see everything in 3D. But beyond that, there's not really any appealing aspect that would make me play it over. Right. Or play specifically. All right, let's take a little bit of a break and then come back. How about? That sounds good. [Music] [Music] All right, John, why should we care about mainstream games? Come on. God, you're doing your decorations. Wow. I feel like we just... You have 140 characters just inside the actors studio. Hold on. Dude, this is a Twitter post. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I got an easier intro for them. Right. I just want to ask you guys how the transition has been going from, or at least for I guess for John more so probably, but going from covering games for hardcore audience to covering them for a very casual audience in terms of like the reaction from the people reading your stuff and just kind of generally how you feel about it. People don't complain as much. Shocking. No, which was really refreshing when people, people like saying thank you. What? Yeah. I understand. People thanking you for writing and explaining things and I mean, there's a lot of people out there and it's, it's growing. I mean, if you look at last year's numbers, the games industry grew by just over three billion dollars and so did Nintendo. So 99% of the growth of the industry was we in DS sales and a lot of that was moms buying Wii Fit and lots of copies of Mario Kart and Hannah Montana and Hannah Montana and Disney Sing It and a bunch of games that, you know, on one up and Nijian in GameSpot, they wouldn't dream of covering, but these things, they're selling millions of them and it's getting people into video games. So, I mean, is it a mistake right now that those places aren't covering these games? Uh, no, I think that people get end of the same. I think the, the old fantasy of, you know, we're covering video games for everybody. Uh, I don't think anyone can do that and I think to a lot of people, a video game, people that are just getting into video games, a video game site is a really intimidating and scary place and, but people's behavior online is changing right now as well. I think people are starting to use the internet the way they should, which is the internet as a whole as media as opposed to this idea of you going to one place to get everything is, is a very antiquated notion. And you know, the days of the, you know, 20 million visitor, monolithic media entity, I think, oh, is going away. And like, if you want to read about MMOs, you go to an MMO. So, I mean, you know, I can say just from personal experience, like I've had friends who like, you know, when I first got my job at one up, they were like, so what are you doing now? And I'll, you know, send them a link to one up and you know, their friends who play video games a little, but aren't super hardcore into it, and then they'll go to one up and they'll be like, just totally overwhelmed, like, I don't know what to click on. There's so many things. And, and I mean, it's the same way with all, you know, a lot of the hardcore video game sites. So I know people's tastes. I mean, it's not, I don't think it's, it's more than just hardcore versus not hardcore split. I think that, that tastes are so split now and there's a lot of people that only play one kind of game and we say it, you know, there's people that only play sports games and there's people that, and there's always been the people that only played Tony Hawk or only played Madden, but that goes so much deeper now. Those people that only play Wow, or they only play even like, and that, that behavior and what's blossoming around that is that all the free MMOs, which are getting harder and harder core. I mean, the, it was, what was it called, what was the one they were taking around this week? I actually saw it either side. Yeah. Sorry yesterday. And yeah, so this is a game that is from this coming to call a perfect world international, or is that the name in the animal though? The, they call perfect world, the game is called perfect world international. It's, it's the biggest, um, MMO in China. Yeah. And so they brought out their first product was perfect world, which is sort of a, they, you know, transplanted. They're one of their popular games from China to the US. And I would install that and it was like six months ago, last August and the PR people were having like such a hard time just trying to find people to even show this to. And just because most, most outlets just didn't like these, I think it's intimidating. Like this, all, a lot of these spaces people, places don't know how to cover them. Before we go into Ather, little pop quiz to all of you. Great world online. Hey, have you ever heard of it? No. I have heard of it, actually. Yeah. Do you have any idea how big it is? Take a guess. Hey, are we talking about number of people playing world wide because it's, it's a global MMO. I'll say, I'll say it because it seems like this is a low, I'll say 10 million. 10 million. I would guess like 25 if it's based in China. 50 million people playing these games and in the last, in the last six months alone, it's gotten a million people in North America. And nobody's heard of this game. And so like that, like who, who's playing this game? They're finding out about it somewhere. But then this is free. He said? Free to play. It's one of those items. I don't base it. This is like a transfer. Yeah, because before I got laid off from Zip, like I remember I saw like over the course of last year, it must have seen like 10 coming free to play MMOs. There's loads. I mean like area games have a bunch, they have the Shin Megami Tensei one, which is kind of cool. It's the same model. It's on the 11089 role, which is, you know, 1% buy a ton of stuff, 10% buy a bit, 89% play free. Free, yeah. But when you, when you have that many people playing, that 1% that are dropping, you know, more than 50 bucks a month on items in the game. And they're really smart now with the stuff that they do. It's not, none of it is buy a sword to beat the bad guy. It's, it's all just a differentiator. It's just how you look. Yeah. It's paid 25 cents to walk back to your hometown. So you don't have to walk, you know, and you, and you play it enough, you know, you can spend 10 bucks on that over the course of a month because you want to get through the game so fast. And you can assist the grind with micro-pains essentially. What type of game is it? It's very typical sort of what you would expect from an MMO. It's sort of generic, like the art styles are sort of generic, but like they're free to play and I don't understand where they're advertising this, like is it like an AOL homepage thing or something like that? No, they, what they rely on, they rely on what amount, and all of these things are well. I mean, these are the, and I think a lot of it too is, I mean, I think they've got to be grabbing, like, you know, maybe younger kids who can't kind of afford to get like a credit card to pay for like, world of work, these things, they run on, but just about anything. The art style is very stylized. So it's low poly. If you have a good graphics card, it adds a ton of effects. But they, you know, it's, they're very structured. They're very templated in a lot of ways when you see these things that there's a lot of games that are currently recently that have the same basic structure to them. But they're all, they fall into two camps, there's the, there's the, the ones that like a gig download and they pull in everything and they, they manage it dynamically online, which is the area stuff like Shin Megami and Wizard 101, which is getting pretty big and this perfect world. And then as the, the stuff that's getting really interesting is the browser based stuff. And that's where the real explosion is happening. And on one extreme, you've got Club Penguin, Pixie Hollow, there's World of Cars, which is based on the Pixar movie, which is the kid end stuff, which is very glorified flash game. What's, what's the one that ever has a lot on a character network? Fusionfall. Yes. That's the new, that's the game. Apparently that's actually awesome. Amazing. Because I've heard so much good about it. I've been watching the new like new X-Men of Batman series a lot recently and they have a lot of ads for it. And like, I was thinking like if I, if I was like a kid watching this, it would seem so cool. I want to go check it out right away. So it's free. It's free. It runs on the Unity engine, which is essentially like a souped up plug in for Flash. The, so it runs on PC and Mac. It's entirely browser based. There's no download. You need to go out there. I need to be a kid. And it has that it, what, so what they did is they took every property that they have on Cartoon Network that belongs to Turner and it is fair game for this, for this game. So rather than try to integrate all of these different art styles, they've, the, the kind of the conceit of the world is that it's in the future of all of these different cartoons. So you have the Powerpuff Girls and Samurai Jack and Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends and sold. Yeah. And all of these, all of these characters have been redrawn in a sort of jet set radio sell shaded style and it's in their future. And is this that same sort of like as far as actual structure of the game also like those other ones? I've heard it's, I mean, I've heard it's very similar comparable to World of Warcraft just in that like you could clash some of those. It's, you should fall is PSO like it's a straight knock off of PSO. You lost me. And it's, you know, you go into the world, your, your question is like it's, it's very instant. And you know, it's a fairly simple story, but they can extend it. They can extend the world very, very quickly and add new areas. And they can also introduce new characters into the narrative all dynamically throughout the game. So that, you know, they've started off with the core cartoon, you know, a lot of the recognizable cartoon network stuff. But they said, you know, when you look at what Cartoon Network and Warner Brothers owns, you know, it's everything from Scooby Doo, Tom and Jerry, you know, you can do anything with it. And really brave move on Warner Brothers or, or on Turner's part to open up their, their IP library that way. It's a way of, it's, it's kind of a, it's a way of introducing like an alternate timeline to all of their IP, which is kind of interesting. And then the other thing is if it takes off, which it already seems to be, it's an opportunity for them to suck it back the other way as well. They're going to like turn, like make a show based on, yeah. Fusionful show that is Dexter's laboratory and power, you know, a crossover show. There's an opportunity there as well. And it's got, you know, I mean, it's all a very sort of modern look to it, but there's people playing that that maybe wouldn't, they certainly wouldn't play an MMO, you know, they're playing it on, you know, a 900 dollar laptop. So I think, you know, as opposed to, you might have to play this with me because this runs on Mac as well. It sounds like, and you introduced to, to introduce MMOs to me, then I'll come to their work up with you. Well, I don't even play Warcraft. Well, I'll play with build on. I mean, yeah. No, it does sound really cool. And in general, I think that the people at Cartoon Network and like Adult Swim and stuff, like, they in general have some of the better online games, like even just, you go to Adult Swim and check out like that. You see, then one is great. Flash games. They have great flash games. My little bastard launched this week. No, I have not. But I loved like the one. Which is their take on the pets, their DS games, but it's like some little psycho thing. I loved the, like the trauma surgeon ones that they did, which were like a knockoff of trauma center, but they were really good. And it was just like, they're like bloody and gory. They're really bloody. Wait, wait, wait, wait. And the amateur surgeon Christmas one, you're cutting up Santa with a pizza cutter. I mean, it's like, I just think, yeah, those are, those are great casual games, if you wanted to call them that. But there are people getting into video games that I think they're certainly not who we were speaking to and want to, and there really aren't a lot of places for them to look for recommendations. And so it is, that's why I, like I said, I don't go to sites, right? No, they, they get it through like just direct marketing, like you're watching Cartoon or what their, what their kid sees when they go to, you know, Disney dot com, what is the, what's the gamer? It's Disney. Yeah, the game is, is that kind of Xbox live that they, they run on the backend on, on all their DS games. Now, I remember being at the worst press conference I've ever been to at a three last year when they talked about that, the Disney conference is so bad. I mean, the, the sad thing is that a nominee, they're not very good at selling this stuff in. Cause what they do is they invite the wrong people to come talk about that. So they, they, they, you know, reach out, you know, someone like me, like, hey, come see this Xbox live type service for doing, you know, with their DS games and like, I think it's really fascinating. But then when I go and write about it, like the, the people I'm writing to are not the people. So it seems like it'd be better like with like a Newsweek or something or even local papers. Yeah. Why did, why did you go see Perfect World? Because I think it's fascinating. Like I, I feel like that's an important space that's clearly emerging and becoming large or larger. I don't, I don't play almost a lot of times. I'll go to these demos just so like, I know what's going on in these spaces. But I mean, like when they tell me, hey, in last, as much Perfect World, a million people are playing it now. Right. Where did these people come from? Like, and how did they find out about it? Right. And then I just, you know, I'm telling the PR person, I don't see like, no one is talking about your game. So like, tell them, like, how about you explain to me, how you, how you got a million people to play your game. And it's, and it is like what John was talking about. They're going to sites like massively.com. They're going the, a lot of these people, like for Perfect World specifically are sort of, you know, yeah, either people are looking for cheaper games or they, they just kind of, those people, there's a lot of MMOs and they just jump from MMO to MMO. And if you get that hook into a website, like massively, that has that massive audience that's just looking for the next free MMO client to download, that's how a company like that starts to thrive. I think it's super viral within themselves as well. So they, they're very, very liberal with beta keys early on. So like right now for Ethosaga, I mean, they're dipping out thousands of them, you know, they'll have 10,000 people, new people jump in. So they want you, they want you to just essentially pour out their codes to whoever will take one and download it because the more it gets exposed to is like, then as long as you hook a handful of those people, that's all they're, that's all they're looking for. And then they'll go tell their friends about it and they build their own communities around. There's a lot, these things, the fan sites that pop up around these things are insane. And, you know, and when they've kind of sucked the world dry, they move on to the next one, but in the, it, but because there wasn't millions and millions invested in the first place, if something, if a game starts to wither on the vine, then it's money fast. Yeah, I mean, you go to, you go to something like area.com, which, you know, where they gather all these things together. And there's a racing game MMO, there's the Shimogami one, there's a, like a sort of cute anime avatar game. There's like 20 of them that are all running off essentially the same engine. And it's sort of a natural selection process. And you go back a few months later and some of them disappeared and there's new ones and things have been tweaked. I'm just still hogging up on this perfect world thing and being so big. So why, I mean, why is that? That's apparently stuck with people. I mean, the fact that it's from China is big part of it. How long has that been around for? It's been a, it's been a, yeah, it's a couple years deep in China, but it's only been, it started in, you know, like a public beta, like roughly last August and then it rolled into, you know, the official release sometime last fall. But yeah, I mean, like the way that like their perfect world is approaching their games is actually a lot of the way companies are approaching how they're finding ways to become vibrant, like on the iPhone application store when like you had, how do you rise above the noise and the ways you rise above the noise is by creating sort of a brand, a core following that you take from product to product. So like area games, perfect world, like they get this core audience that gets hooked on this one game and they know they're going to be able to bring that audience over to their next game. And that's what, you know, NG MOCO is doing in the iPhone store is like the reason they slash the prices when they release for Londo at a premium price is like you get these people hooked into these other NG MOCO games. Next time NG MOCO releases something, you know, that got you locked into their achievements. Like you did, they find ways to hook you based on the brand. And that's like a lot of what these a lot is this branding has a lot of what's going on in these sort of free to play spaces. Like you see Cartoon Network, like using ways to hook people in that way to rise above the noise. And the thing really smart about social networking, like all the new ones, there's Facebook groups and MySpace groups and, you know, like Fusion Fold, there's a, there's a big Facebook group for it. And the other thing that they're doing is, I mean, you guys broke this actually, that they're looking at doing a Wii version and maybe an iPhone app that plugs in with it. Because I mean, it's unity. I mean, it's like, you can access it from anywhere. That's like the whole point. Like then you're, you're just, you have that much more invested in, in anything that you're doing in those places. And then the other, I think the other side that we're going to start seeing is the Sony's approach to it. So have you seen Free Realms, which is their kind of thing on this? I think that'll be something that we, I mean, it seems fairly obvious and there's a bit of a sort of nudge wing, wing on this, but it sounds like Free Realms and Home are going to be very tightly integrated in that there will be a Free Realms. I'm sure there'll be a Free Realms themed area in forums, also going to be free to play on the PS3. Yes. Okay. So you'll access it the way you access home. So I guess I'll, I'll use that to lead into a little further in the discussion. Like I, since home seems to have been met with a lukewarm response among the core audience. Do you, I guess I have two questions. Do you feel like the, the people that release these games, these games that have huge viral followings that are completely outside of the so-called core audience care that they're not reaching that core audience? No. They don't care at all. And so what is the attraction there for the core audience that should bring them into caring about these games? I think some of them are really just good games. And I think there's a tendency for us to be kind of elitist about products. And you know, you hear free MMO and I think for a lot of people, it's just eyes lays over and like, yeah, whatever, it's going to be, you know, and I think they're moving at such a clip in terms of how advanced they're getting and how, how close to a, I mean, this, this one we saw yesterday. Yeah, I like to get a lot of the Shin Megami Tansai MMO and I, I was like amazed by it because I was expecting like, I was like, oh, free MMO, but I'll check it out because I like the SMT series. You kind of preparing yourself for a, you know, crappy experience. It may be a very pretty flash game. Yeah. But it was, I mean, it was really good. Yeah. It felt like a fully formed MMO and it felt like there was a lot to do and a lot to engage me and something I could have gone back to even though I haven't really. Well, it seems like for a lot of these existing IP is sort of the gateway for the audiences to find their way in. So I think that, yeah, that one particularly I think is a good gateway one and then there's Wizard 101 which is by the guys that did Shadow Bane. Yeah, I think these guys that did like a super hard core MMO, Shadow Bane, which I think what like Ubisoft put out and was like, you know, he had a following, but it wasn't very big. He's very cold. He's very cold. And it's, it's, it's kind of Harry Potter crossed with the matrix is kind of the premise behind it. It's card based combat. I like all three of those things. So the, the, the idea behind it is that there are these wizards that live this, this wizarding school that essentially lives on the internet in a, in a weird kind of way in their, in their world. And then the beginning of the game, they're looking through their crystal ball and they're looking and what they're looking at is actually out at you through this, which is sort of the matrix connection. It's like, come and help us and then they're sort of Voldemort equivalent is, is wreaking havoc on the, on the wizarding school and you get pulled in as a recruit. And it has, you know, there's a, there's a PVP thing that they just launched. There's a very, it's a very cool, like the card mechanic, the card combat, pretty intricate and deep and the way they talk about, like the demographic they have with these games is like big, you know, they were describing, you know, like one of the, one of the developers like grandmothers was playing the game, not because she cares about Harry Potter, but like because she found the card, the card game really interesting. And so these people are getting hooked into these worlds for, for very different reasons. But this was like, she could interact with a card game in a massive world with all these different people. And she, and you have it dynamically changing all the time. And so people are getting hooked in and all these, these strange different ways. Some interesting things are the way the world kind of sucks you in as well. So in this case, the combat, you get sucked into what's essentially a little, a sort of instance combat where it puts this circle on the ground and depending on how many people are in the fight, you stand in your circle and you play your cards and it summons things and they fight and cast spells on each other. But when you're doing that, it, I can see you doing that. It's not like you go off into another room and then it casts this thing on the floor and you're in it. If you happen to start a fight where I'm standing, I can see this pentagram thing on the floor and you're getting on with it. And if I want to, and if I see that one of the, there's a hole in the fight, I can go, I'm going to go help him out. And if you're like way higher rank than me, I can just kind of stand there and marvel at how awesome your cards are and you're summoning these crazy creatures or whatever. And if at the end of it, you're like so tooled up, you could just like, you can toss a card to someone that helped you out. It's a very different attitude towards progress. It's very collaborative and it's very, it's very community folk. All of them have been, they've been learning a lot from the way that things like Facebook and MySpace particularly are building and growing and they, they take a lot of the things that traditionally have held games back and help people back from getting further in games and just say, why do that? You know, it's like, we'll give you this one card and you get to play it so you can summon the giant demon panda creature or whatever, you know? Like a bunch of these sound really interesting and something I want to try with the main appeal for me playing like multiplayer stuff online right now, I mean maybe this is why I've never played an MMO in general, is that like, like I want to play with my friends and is it, I mean maybe that's different for a casual audience where just kind of trying into one of these, I mean, are these kids talking to the friends and all trying it at the same time or are these just people that are kind of enjoying the very kind of anonymous but still, I think a lot of what I've encountered from like seeing with everyone in one of these types of games, it is like, it skews younger and they're not so much interested in necessarily playing with their friends, they just kind of want to play with people, like play with people maybe of their same age group and like when I, remember when I saw the game, you know, you would see kids like Wizard101 specifically has like very strong language restrictions so that you can't share privacy information with one another and you would, you would see kids like trying to find ways to like get around like attempting to like throw in tricks and, well not, no, like not even ask for, it's built very intelligently to get around that but so kids, you know, like sort of like have to describe geographic locations to sort of give a vague like idea of where they're at and like, and so like as I'm seeing this demo, I'm saying, you know, I'm seeing these kids try to do that and it was just like really fascinating and it didn't seem, the impression I got from just these sort of anonymous demos was more just that kids liked the experience of going on and playing with people, not so much that, you know, like we would want to together play with each other. It's just a system for them to interact with each other. What Patrick's describing is like, is the same way that I can use WoW, which is like, I thought, I like joining occasionally like a random group and stuff like that but most of the time when I spend my time in WoW, I'm doing these quests on my own but I still like to talk to people and use it like glorified chat room to entertain myself while I'm doing these things. Yeah, I do that all the time. Even with my friends, I sit there and whisper back and forth to them but we're not playing together. Honestly, the biggest difference between the hardcore stuff and the casual stuff isn't the game, it's the audience. It's the perception of life. It's the perception and it's the fact that the hardcore game is thinking and communicating very differently about what they're doing. I'm glad you brought that up because I do want to talk about that and this committee of us into talking about some of the more casual games that are retail games as well but I think there is this perception like looking at we, like some of the stuff, some of the trash we're seeing coming out on the Wii that like the hardcore gets kind of elitist as you were saying, hardcore gamers and I think there's this idea that there's more trash, like more bad games on the Wii than on any other system but I'm sort of wondering if it's maybe that there's not more bad games but just that there were just as many bad games in previous generations that were just hardcore games. I think there's a lot of them but I think that the audience is, I think a good example to use is we play. I mean it's not from the fact that we play was one of the biggest games of last year because it was what came with the second controller but there are a lot of people that like we play. And it's because they don't understand how video games work and we play as about as much as they can comprehend, you know, it's like you're saying like the revelation of hey the second stick moves the camera, I mean to a lot of people that is like so way like oh my god I would never be able to do that and the Wii has just got them like used to the idea of doing something in front of the TV and there's a lot of these very, very casual games that what they're really doing is just softening up an audience that this is going to take time. Yeah I mean the Wii and the DS are just like most of the Wii are just like stepping stones to people becoming comfortable. These controllers are like I think people forget like how complex they have become like or even just like you know over in the break of time my girlfriend like how she started to play left for then that was the first time she realized like the second stick on a controller aims and like that seems like idiot like of course it's been that way forever you know for the past like eight years. But you know to someone that just started playing, we get the place of running, the place is wrong. That is a sub-brainer. That is a sub-brainer. We might explode in a second. We're ill. Gwen. Yeah I mean every time like something like sorry but every time something shitty like that happens like the fact that that was probably like a Honda Civic driving by and our walls were shaking. Like I always have to like say that my Wii and Arthur is a mantra like this is why we pay $1,000 in total for a place $1,000. But you know people in the Midwest you're $1,000 and shit they're pants because that's why. Well okay but here in the Bay, we have a pretty reasonable amount of space for a place. It's true. Yeah in the city itself I pay more than that for my studio so. Okay so I have a question, I mean do you, what my contention frequently feels like is that it doesn't even seem like Nintendo is expanding the market so much as Nintendo is carving out this very possibly fleeting niche. But they did expand the market about $3 billion. Well but it's not expanding the market if the only people that are reaping the benefits from that are Nintendo. Yeah well I mean I guess he is. Oh no just because they don't, I mean they're not interested or at least haven't gotten to the point. Like I'll take my girlfriend like the example before like she's only interested in sort of Wii, DS, Mario Kart, Tetris sorts of games. She's interested in games but it was until like left for dead was this she loves zombie movies. And like that was the setting that hooked her into wanting to try to. But then there's nothing to do with what Nintendo is doing with this. But that's my question then and that's something I've been wondering too is you know will these like more casual experiences, more mainstream experiences that people like Nintendo are providing, do you think that those are going to lead people into what we consider hardcore games? Some of them might. If you only get a percentage of them that's huge because right now if you look at the install base the expansion of the PS3, the 360 they're pacing at the same way other generations have gone if not slower because of the price points. They're not expanding it's just the same people buying the same stuff all over. And they desperately want the generations to last longer and so to do that you got to bring in more people. And I think that's why we're seeing games like Prince of Persia built the way they are because they're not really for us. And well I'm all for Prince of Persia being a more friendly game. I mean I feel like that's a good direction for games to go. Like when I heard that EA wanted to make a Madden that was more friendly my ears perked up because I remember when I was like 10 and my dad and a friend of ours would sit in front of the Genesis for four and a half hours playing Madden they weren't intimidated by the controller because there were three buttons and a directional pad and that was it. And there was plenty of deep gameplay there but the second that there became a second row of buttons is when most adults I know lost interest in games. So I'm all for the simplification of controls and accessibility I just don't. $1,000. That was a slimy creature that was actually a bad fan belt is what that was. I'm glad you've kept that under science. Can I find my train of thought. I mean I'm all for making games more accessible and I feel that Prince of Persia is a good direction. Although it doesn't feel like it's marketed towards an audience that would appreciate it as much as it was. I think that's part of the problem with it is that the games industry has been a bit of a pussy about this and that it's making games for a different audience and then he's marketing them to the wrong people. Well what about I mean I think we wanted to talk a little bit about boomblocks and how it's kind of gotten its teeth kicked in. Well see but here's the game is a game has not sold poorly though but yeah the perception is that the game is sold poorly and there's a perception that a lot of these like the casual games at the hardcore ends up finding to be worthwhile end up selling poorly like boomblocks but I think in actuality boomblocks sold around. I think EA expected boomblocks to sell a hell of a lot better than it did that was part of their there were a couple problems that EA had last year that I think led to their financial issues which is that they way over estimated the sell through on the PS3 throughout the entire year that they expected it to sell more than the 360 did they also expected Wii software to way over perform. I don't think they did enough Wii I think that was part of the problems well and also I think people got tired of EA sports I mean that seems pretty clear from the from the sales numbers and that they just didn't pop the way it used to but look at like Tiger Woods I think is leading the leading sales on Wii right now the Madden Wii I think is still all the all play style is done so clip like the Oakland Ambien switch and melted monsters and dogs after after six thirty this place goes bad shit yeah it's like there's a fucking petting zoo upstairs sorry Patrick no answer but I think I think I think John Dryad is like the this idea that you can create casual games and like that also appeals to the hardcore is like creates this problem with the hardcore where they get upset where their games are getting quote unquote compromise to appeal to this casual audience and then it's not casual enough for the casual audience they were attempting to appeal to yeah that you end up shooting yourself in the foot because you're not properly appealing to either audience I think frustrations a lot of people are feeling and I'm frustrated about it too is like seven like the blob which I thought was like a really fun game it's accessible it's like I enjoy it as like a hardcore gamer but like if Nintendo were making games like that on Wii they could they would have like the marketing and be able to get it out there and get people paying attention to it I mean I know the blob did pretty well for what it is but it's like that was wasn't like it was made by tiny companies no well yeah people just did but but still it's like I think I think it needs to be Nintendo like leading a charge on that type I mean they have no reason to write it I don't think that's a lot of those interested in writing that I'm just saying I think that's a lot of the frustration I think what you were speaking to earlier out there about having games that kind of wants your hook to take you to the next step of like all right this next game is a little bit deeper little more interesting but it can still be enjoyed by like you know all all age groups and hardcoreness groups and interesting stuff coming out of it though I mean I think the Lego games are good proof of that you can you can break and you both you can do both I mean you know the interesting thing about that is I mean that each of those things you get the full narrative and there's not a single word spoken in any of those games and the way they present the game and the action is simplified down to a point that you not only do you understand what it's asking of you from a gameplay perspective but you also know the story it's telling or I think it's also they're kind of lucky that those games are good because if they weren't like actually good games in the hardcore would have no interest how did Lego Batman and Lego Indiana Jones sell in comparison to a they both did really well last year yeah I mean they those were two those are actually a couple games that didn't fare well at all and like and I mean I mean comparing them to previous moments there was a lot of I've played this before and I think 21 that did play a lot of them and Lego Batman particularly was like okay I'm kind of getting this and back that goes back to the whole I keep hearing people say elitism I don't necessarily think it's elitism in so many cases is feeling like our intelligence is being insulted by some of the stuff that we see I mean there's a lot of crap on the we and I don't know that I feel we just by saying well Pharaoh to or whatever is garbage there's never a fair one that is a twenty dollar game the best by bargain bin I don't feel we just think I think there's no but I think that if people the difference between hardcore and and and then the rest is if you're gonna be hardcore you gotta embrace it and we covered 1600 games on what they play last year and nobody can play 1600 games in a year and it's like you know you can play maybe 30 if you're realistic if you're gonna play them seriously and there were certainly more than 30 really hardcore games worth playing last year and I think it's this one of the things that the audiences audiences plural have to accept is that not everything is for you the same way in not every book and not every movie and you know it's like and I think it's unfair for both sides to sort of dabble in in the other side's game and go oh this isn't for me therefore it's bad it's like you know like just embrace for a casual player to play left for dead they're like like zombies but it was so intimidating and scary it was just a terrible experience and you know I think there's the game the games that seem to suffer the most of those ones that meet in the middle and a really good example that last year was force unleashed which a lot of people who really like Star Wars wanted a kind of cool simple new Star Wars story and they embraced they embraced it one way and then the core came at it from another action which is like this is gonna lame and it doesn't do what I wanted it to and it's still I mean I saw today's full version it's all sold really well but it's still sold really well it's still selling really well 5.6 million across all systems and the Cartoon Network TV show is is pushing star or any any Star Wars video game on sale right now is still selling well so Lego Star Wars complete saga is still doing really well force unleashed is still doing well yeah everything everything is you know because there's there's a sort of kids pop culture around Star Wars right now and they're everything it's lifting everything to the top and then the leg I think one of the side effects of the Lego stuff is that when Lego universe hits later this year that thing is going to be just monstrously so the MMO yeah I want to play that yeah and I think so we're seeing these different dynamics and I think one of the mistakes that games press is always man we used to make it years ago when it would when you know when we get towards the end of a generation when things were bigger is that you you start to forget that there are so many people out there that you you're you're not talking to everybody anymore and you should you shouldn't be trying to I think I don't think it's it's not necessary and it's it's certainly I don't think it's wanted once you get to that point and the way is already getting there and you know we're gonna see you know there's gonna there's always gonna be the Resident Evils and I was kind of interested seeing EA is gonna do Dead Space on the way I really want to know what you think about that because I don't think it's the greatest tactical decision I think I think it sounds like it there's a there's a lot of this right now like we need to cater to the core on Wii it's like you know what no you've probably done the core on Wii has the 360 European right and the core on with that has a way they wanted to play Dead Space already played it yeah you know and they played it and high-def and it looked awesome and it was scary and they played it the way Pat Patrick's playing it and I don't think that it's necessary to it seems I think for some people to kind of take away the value of the IP when they seemingly like do that and you know downgrade it as it were spread of thin like I think kind of for the people who very much enjoy it being such like the high-def you know next experience I think they kind of harm though like even if it is a port even if it if 300,000 people buy Dead Space on the Wii and enjoy it for what it is like I don't I don't I don't buy the argument that diminishes when I keep that franchise alive but I mean I don't know that the amount of copies that I think that it will sell on Wii would pay for that development I'd be interested what their approach is with it because if it's Dead Space I would I would argue that it might necessarily be the port that everyone thinks right but if it's Dead Space all play that's kind of interesting you know it taking that super deformed Dead Space yeah well but just that that completely different control mechanism that they need to do that's when they first did Madden when they did their sports line first on the Wii it was just all right map it to the controls and they did a good job trying to take advantage of the motion controls but it wasn't until they said you know what we have to go all the way with this yeah really simplify it this year's all play games are really good in fact FIFA particularly because I mean a soft I mean the you know my kid's only five coming up on six and a soccer game to him would just be way too complicated but he can play with the old play controls and I can play with the standard controls and we can play a game either on the same side or against each other and he can hold his own I feel like a soccer game for me is too complicated in the controls so I bet those sports games are just okay and they're starting to get the hanger because with the oh eight versions they they robbed you of too much control like you know playing Madden in in family play mode in in Madden oh eight was not I try is just soul crushingly boring I mean you you can't do anything you snap the ball and then you make it play and you choose something from a menu and you do that for 20 minutes and it's like oh and it's and you're just sort of watching it go through the motions but in the oh nine thing they gave they gave you enough control back where and still kept it very simple but that seems to be the role that the way is is taking one of the one of the one of the frustrating things I find MTV please stop listening is like with with rock band specifically and guitar here is guilty of this too is that like in rock band two they finally conceded that people not everyone that's playing this game is hardcore and people want to play and maybe a medium or hard even though they're not good enough to be playing on those difficulties and introduce you know a no fail mode but to get to the no fail mode you have to go to the internet look up a cheat code that you put into a sub menu that disables unlocking achievements and saving high scores so they're punishing you for wanting to enjoy the game a certain way and that's frustrating when like rock band is really one of those games that it does a great job of straddling between the hardcore and a casual audience and allowing those to to share and experience together and to enjoy it on different levels but then when you introduce like well the idea that you know what if you if you're gonna fail like you know what we're gonna make fun of you for we're gonna you're gonna have to search the internet for a cheat code like that's frustrating like that should be at the forefront I should turn the game over screen on right not turn it off yeah and or just when you boot up the game the very first you got before anything do you want to play this in this moment party mode yeah party mode like you know when traditional people playing rock pan they've been drinking like they they're not at the top of their game and like it's frustrating when you get three for us to respond four times in a row and you die at the same point actually because your drummer isn't very good but he got up the courage to like you know what okay screw it i'm gonna try the jumps they look really cool yeah and they screw up over and over and fail out and like so that was one of those games where like i really want them to to bring that more to the forefront because it is really simple but that's frustrating for like when i bring that home to family and they don't want to play it anymore because they got embarrassed because they keep failing the band so another thing i wanted to bring up to is um i mean do you guys think that the uh the current economic situation is going to like how do you think it's going to affect the whole mainstream hardcore i think these free games stand to do pretty well well what about the the direct pay ecosystem that sort of they're trying to spring up around the weed about basically hoping that people will buy software for for more casual audience like do you feel like like my one one of the things i'm curious to see is whether or not the the shrinking disposable income will weed the core to be the ones that the industry has to rely on to get itself through this because they buy a whole lot more yeah because they will continue to buy games when people talk about the industry being recession proof the basis of the industry for a really long time has been a relatively recession proof group that will continue to spend money even when they shouldn't right i think i mean the one thing i mean the last time we saw this was after 9/11 you know and everything shrank down and behavior changed and you know the economy definitely drank but the one thing that came out of that was people nest you know the nesting idea and the last dollars people tend to to lop off is their entertainment dollars and you know they don't go out to a movie but they'll they'll rent a movie or they'll you know and video i think the recession proof video gaming thing came out of that thinking which is you know people are looking for things to do at home and video games are actually in the grand scheme of things pretty good value for money i don't think it's recession proof but i think it's kind of a streamlined it's gonna be strange we're seeing you know nine where the only company today Activision blizzard announced you know they actually exceeded profits they their year-of-a-year twenty percent revenue increase they have three point one billion dollars in cash no debt and that's a company that is like for the the type of you know economy we have they're they're they're they're exploiting a prank upon guaranteed hits and they're and they're they're doing it on the we the activisions 22 percent of their profits last year were just the week and like that was their main memory i'm prepped that was just earlier this today well i don't know what's easily digestible twitter dates what did the activision put out on the we have beside guitar heroes music games between rock band and guitar hero and they say they're doing like the we fourteen new music games they're doing they're doing twice as many music game skews as they did in '08 but you have to you have to keep in mind that's like guitar her metallic across you know four platforms new ds so like i mean it's really not that and they're doing DJ hero so it's not out of the realm but like it is stuff like that you're gonna see companies like EA and you know THQ like buckling up and like streamlining and you know actor inside they're only introducing three new IPs this year like so that's that's the kind of stuff you're gonna see in '09 it's just they'll still be that and EA is what doing 50 percent of their future development is gonna be we base or at least lead on me i mean i'm okay if these companies have to make the casual games stuff to make money so that they can continue to make the games that's the thing the margin on the casual stuff is huge i mean like you look at some of those oops off pet stuff i mean like what it must cost to develop those versus you know they don't have to sell an enormous number of copies for them to start throwing off some cash and you know that that is what that's what's funding the Tom Clancy games right now you know it's like right speaking of budgets like i i just wonder with financials the way they are if we're going to see certain console versions of games get cut potentially yeah i think you know 20 million dollars is you know like at one point that was like the biggest thing ever and now it seems pretty average for a you know big big-time action game if it's on multiple skews like how many copies is it worth to spend four million dollars extra to build a psc version of your game right well i mean i guess uh i mean should we should we discuss what end guy had put up last week where he was a proposition that you should you know lead development on we and then kind of upgrade ports for the next-gen systems i mean that kind of got everyone up in arms but i mean is that that's more realistic i think it's probably going to be happening more often but i don't know what we're actually seeing instead is we're still seeing a lot of we ps2 yeah stuff coming together and that appear the we is actually gold's gift to the PlayStation 2 market you know i mean i mean the ps2 is coming up on what how many years now eight nine nine ten years you know i mean it was only in the last couple months where ps2 finally started to outsell it month to month but the ps2 i mean like you know the interesting thing with the with sony and its whole ten year plan is that you know when the ps1 was dying out they were like hey a console could maybe last ten years maybe the next one will think of a ten year plan and then ps2 came out and it's like well you know we're thinking five to ten year so that the ps3 ten year plan is based on what they sort of proved the point twice previously and now they're like okay we're going for it this time we're gonna start off slow and like you know write out the the latter five years in a much better way to start off the slow though but i think what the ps2 is proving is that there are a lot of people that you know really don't have the money to drop on a console and the ps2 is right it's two hundred dollars when they need to you know it's like the ds you know the ds is one twenty nine still and the dsi is going to bring it out a new ds that's going to be more yeah then yeah why does the dsi is going to cost more because why why not why would you reduce the price but i i think like what i guys bring up i think that might just be more we're going to see games scale back and scope just a little bit i know this idea that you're going to announce a trilogy i think is i did like oh yeah the days the days of the massive trilogy announced all at once i think right like gone no i mean we're just not going to see that sort of grandstanding at this point i don't i don't think we're gonna i'm sort of happy about that just because i'm sort of sick of like games getting announced as trilogy right just make game and do the complete story you know i don't need it to be a franchise yeah i just i just think what we'll see is less is less or is more just keeping all platforms in mind so that we can streamline the development going through for all three platforms not necessarily that you're gonna because the taking literally the hardcore response to end guys proposal was like well it's gonna call us all this money to make new textures and all that stuff like well that i think that's less not what he was saying he was just his more of his point was like the scope is gonna make sense for all three platforms rather than this whole notion of downgrading to the weeds just that we have this proposal that's going to work across all three and then we'll specialize it along the way right i feel like that's selling all versions of the game short though because gameplay mechanics to the we should be fundamentally different than what we're seeing the game mechanics on we games i feel like i want them to be different than what i could see on the other consoles like that's what the controller was supposed to be yeah as opposed to any motion plus might be a step in that direction it's so angry that they finally admitted that motion plus is what should have been in the first place i'm not sure as admitted as much as it was um like the the we was a gamble and in order to make it you know price efficient they had to to go with that tech as opposed to pricing it with i mean the motion plus was available in the we launch like that tech wasn't not around it was just you know if the we bombed you know they could have just just like the ds they could have written it off as a i want to go back a thought to what you were saying about the audience because something that that we've noticed by by speaking to like a different set of people is that the no i mean the notion of hardcore and casual is is getting a little sort of antiquated anyway because because part of it is it's not just i think when we think hardcore it's like people that are really into video games and it's it's about the taste and it's about your propensity to buy things and to you know to try new things but it's also behavior but there are people that are very casual in their taste that are extremely hardcore in their behavior like you get people that are that play pegal and pegal nights like religiously people like you know warcraft like people probably a warcraft hardcore but maybe aren't necessarily considered themselves games for those people they'll they'll they'll latch on to something and they'll play the crap out of it and like so they are and they don't even think of themselves as playing a video game very often it's like because in and rock band and guitar hero are part of this yeah i don't have any new behavior these aren't we're not playing a video game we're playing rock band yeah you're playing rock band and i think if if you the ways that you can get those people that clearly have you know they're they're okay playing a video game i think those are the that's the easy meat for the game game market it's not just the people that are dabbling in you know the my pets babies fashion designer or whatever later i mean like there's a new one every week you know and there's like four or five different lines in these pets type things that's fine and it's like they're toys they're toys exactly they're and then they're in a different realm but there's a lot of there's a lot of sort of very casual games that that prompt very hardcore behavior because i don't think people necessarily think that i'm playing a video game like you said you say oh we're playing rock band tonight you don't say hey we're playing xbox 360 with a rock band disc in it tonight thank you yeah playing rock band or hey you guys want to you guys want to play we sports you're playing the we like people they don't think of that in our construct of like when we you know like reference yourself as a gamer like they're just thinking that's just we're just gonna play rock band and we're just gonna play we like that's just a totally different concept to that i think some people enjoy the kitsch that they think that it being a video game adds to the equation but like oh we're playing rock band it's video game guitars and drums i don't know but i see what you're saying patrick like when my dad plays club pass games which he does a lot since i have you bought him a dance it's like it's like he doesn't think of himself as someone like if if i know for a fact my dad filled out a questionnaire right now that was like how often you play video games he would probably put zero hours a week yeah because he doesn't even think about exactly and that's like poker yeah and that extends into playing something like professor Layton i know there's there's a lot of people who gave a cup of professor Layton to their mom you know with an old ds a lot of thing a lot of people cast down the old clunky vest or mom or whatever the fat ds and professor Layton because it's like special reasoning puzzles or whatever and i'm sure there's a ton of people playing that and games like that which are the exact same way do you play video games oh no i played this call out and make your mom smarter i mean yeah when my dad plays that thing he probably views it the same as like turning on a digital poker player or something you know i mean he doesn't he doesn't think about it as a video game or something like that all right well we are we should probably move to the letter segment take a quick break and move to letters because this is going to be a super long episode but uh i don't want to miss anything yeah we should uh so yeah we will be back in just a moment [Music] all right so Anthony you explain this give me what is mine story because Patrick's not familiar and so yeah any listeners who haven't heard it was like one of the first episodes of Rebel often for a while we were reading letters from old magazine that got closed and then uh and one of them was from give me what is mine incorporated and from hawaii and he uh listed out a list of complaints it was an invoice yeah it was it was like a letter sent but it was an invoice and it listed out that gfw closed they wanted it they wanted money for their gfw and explaining like and then they also wanted the postage mailed back and like all these other like things that he wanted back but it was great because he wrote it out as an invoice from give me what is mine incorporated and we kind of read it in a mocking tone but not making fun of him we just thought the guy was actually really clever for the way that he put it all together and it read super funny so apparently he heard us read that on the air and he emailed me uh give me what is mine letterhead i got to read it to my email yeah i read it oh you want to read it all right oh yeah sorry we unpluged laptop that wasn't a good one that was a laptop okay uh so this is from give me what is mine incorporated you know it's got the official letterhead and this is dereble femme something can be said about you and the company you keep when it takes my invoice six months to be read or even acknowledge this is highly unprofessional in your part i don't suppose it will take another six months for me to receive my payment sadly this is not my only complaint i have had nothing but bad experiences in dealing with zdm and although you are no longer part of that corporation i believe it is the individuals who are to blame for this reason i have compiled a list of grievances mind you this is a shortlist i excluded a few dozen items here it is i paid twenty four dollars for a subscription to gfw i received only one issue before it closed i asked that you doubled the size of ecm or give me my twenty four dollars or something worth as much or more instead of doing either of those things you shut down ecm halfway through my subscription my invoice was ignored for another six months my first time playing this is one of his complaints mindy my first time playing company heroes i joined a multiplayer game called portal potty on which a player on the opposing team named peen orange repeatedly drops supplies on my basics claiming oh it's Santa Claus needless to say this player was your former colleague Sean Elliot who then went on to gamers with jobs podcast and made fun of me likening my co-skills to that of a cat pying at a keyboard i was personally insulted i would like you to relay this information in i will be expecting a formal apology from him hopefully sooner than six months thank you for your business that's sweet it is funny because shana told me that story before you went on gamers with jobs too that the that the guy was just so bad that like as a as the americans is the airborne you can do this thing when you drop machine guns and mortars it's somewhere on the field but it's normally for your own guys and so is Sean and Roy we're both playing as americans and just continuously dropping shit on his base because they felt bad saying oh oh merry christmas that's the most benevolent griefing that sean has done in company for us i just think it's great i mean sean at that point sean ellie didn't even have anything to do is it saves media but i like that he demands a formal apology for him this guy is like business business matters down and all the we should ask for advice needs to this needs to be a real company people come join give me what is that yeah in which what is mine is given back yeah that's it's a great slogan all right so that was that was our first letter and it was fantastic we also have a one from ericary says hey guys greetings from guatamala central america i'm 29 and red edm for almost 17 years straight i have a quick question can't believe no one has asked this but now that edm is gone can we all finally know who was or were sushi x and the q-man i do you guys have or know any funny stories about the gossip section all right two years all right so sushi x was um whoever wanted to be sushi x essentially christ um chris johnson i think wrote something about this on his blog yeah he he misdivided sushi as i i think he he's moving those over to player ones yeah so we would we would try out new people as sushi x and i think also uh if people wanted to kind of drop in on a review and sort of express something specific sushi x was a good tool for that but i think there was ever a person that was sushi x and q-man was kind of the same although it was it was a number of people that kind of led it over the years so christmas q-man i was q-man towards the end shane became yeah john who did it yeah but it would it tended to be you know the stuff that we'd heard that you know you couldn't print as a story but you could say you'd heard that maybe this was potentially gonna happen i one story about it when when shane was doing it uh which just because it kind of turned into a big clusterfuck is that um when i went to rare i saw the little thing hanging up about killer instinct three when we were on like the rare tour of the studios and they had one of their barns this thing kind of out of the way it's like the very end hallway ever tour this picture hung up of like the so something about the animation and killer instinct and the screenshot of it could be something about a new game and when i saw it i was like there's a good chance we're just putting it there to mess with us this might be nothing ridiculous but it's like all right it seemed kind of cool maybe it was like if you're got to take it down i don't know so i told shane about it i was like that's not a bad thing to put in and i but i told him i was like write something in the in q-man about how they could just be putting it there to mess with us how it could just be not serious at all but he didn't put that in and he wrote it very seriously and we totally got made fun of because it was actually debunked by the time that issue hit so that when i'm blaming shane for so that was when i got i contributed that totally got messed up when i so i started on agm in 98 and there were i was told all sorts of stories about you know people shuffling off from demos at developers and stuff to go to the bathroom and would be sort of like looking at people's cubicles and stuff to put into q-man and like some really like subversive stuff that would end up there but i mean it was yeah it was usually a collaborative thing someone would lead the charge on those things but it's very often you hear stuff and usually when people are drunk what are you supposed to do with it oh my god i know what the next GTA is gonna be excellent all right another letter here from art he says all of you say your hardcore gamers or seem to be but how hardcore are you what is your greatest achievements in your gaming history i know probably philip and matt have many days logged in world of warcraft but what games have you invested in most personally i have about nine days logged in call of duty four while a guy on my friend's list has 66 days long and then he's shaking his head well just got to just not hardcore now nine days is i mean nine days and come in uh call duty is a lot but like like uh i don't even know company heroes i've probably logged away 17 years like i make new user names all the time so that people don't get intimidated by how many matches i have under my belt and so you can grief them more effectively right what it's a term called it is called smurfing when you do such a thing but uh but then when i was uh when i would play uh you know like every quest like i told that story like that one time with my room with my roommate at the time we didn't go out for food we just made rice and we sat in the room for 14 hours like playing multiple characters together just trying to get this one item you know for 14 hours straight that's not like we took a break note we played for 14 hours you know what i mean like like that is that is by definition poop socking like well there's and then there's the story with Ian and the ending for metal gear yeah like our like yeah that's another hardcore story i mean me and my friends are pretty hardcore like we you know the ending of metal gear saw two is like super long cutscene and my friend he thought he'd be cool to go through it but he didn't want to miss it when you're in our dorm room and i just remember he ended up pissing in a big gold cup so he wouldn't miss it so he's like turning his back to me pissing in a cup so he can still see it that was that was a that was a pretty hardcore moment but i'm just saying like in every quest these guys are saying like nine days 60 days like in every quest by the end it was like it was measuring in months it'd be like three months four days this many hours so i'm just i'm just saying i it's way to go yeah at some point it was like sunny online was like thanks for being such a hardcore member of the eloquent team we're mailing you a complimentary pack of razors you know they've been like please do yourself a favor i i don't know if i i i've never done anything really like bragable like like well it's like final fantasy seven like you know you could cap out the timer like the cappers the timer stopped uh recording how much time you're playing the game in ninety nine hours nine nine minutes nine nine seconds that's probably the most hardcore thing what's interesting here that he like i mean he is saying like he's sort of measuring hardcore by how much time you've logged into a game but i'm sure this other like more interesting things are like a lot of mine would be what i mentioned earlier in the show is like hundred percent burnout yeah like see that that's that's i mean you don't take a long time your name is on a wall apparently you have to 100 you have to get all the if you get all the achievements oh you can send you a wall and they like send you a t-shirt i guess but i'm never going to do all the multiplayer stuff especially now yeah i don't even try in a hundred percent game that's been a lot of time in them but i have i mentioned before many times in one of them but like beating hexadeck was another great accomplishment of mine just because i played it like a few times a week for two years i don't even know you could beat that i know you know i didn't know i didn't know and it took me took me forever and the same the same game that i beat it in i also got the achievement for having played a hundred games but those games were like several hours long each by the end i mean and then even beyond that like i'd say some of the more hard things i've done you're right don't have anything to do with time it'd be like when i was uh before i worked in the industry at all and i drove 12 hours to go to PAX and you know stayed in a shitty hotel and then drove 12 hours back all for this gaming convention i mean that's like that okay well something like that hardcore is somehow convinced my parents to let me go to e3 when i was 14 in Atlanta and hang out with the what would be some of the egm crew at the time or how i managed to get myself into the egm offices when i was like 15 in the big suite in Atlanta is that what you said no no i didn't the only people it doesn't separate discussion but i i only knew like Peter Bartholow and like yeah all of them like that's what i knew back then but no i didn't i didn't know any of the like Ziff Davis crew ground was 14 it was like around 15 when that sort of thing happened i started invading the just like showing up at the ooprik offices and just hanging out in a cubicle so i don't know about that i want to hear i want to hear any of yours John because you play like the first the first review i wrote i was 14 when i was published it was winter games on the entire st low as i published in i feel like i'm the only one who didn't get into the games in a tree when i was like 14 no i got in when i was over 20 well at 20 good um it was uh it was an Atari magazine in the uk called page six which ended up being called new Atari user i mean this was back before like games mags were really you know an industry of any kind right do you have a copy of that yeah there's still one of my mom's nice my dad was really into because my dad got me into games because he used to work for IBM so he was into computers and he would bring technology home because he was just fascinated by it and we he's really into playing so he would play flight sims like he's someone not a gamer but hardcore behavior i mean like my dad will play will fly from you know in real time real time yeah you know and do the air traffic control stuff and like you know it's it's hardcore behavior but it's just very specific have you told him that Microsoft canned the entire flight simulator team no oh he listens to this podcast he does he knows now sorry sorry john's dad but i mean that's a franchise i mean before it was microsoft when it was i don't remember what the name of the company was but i mean that franchise flight simulator has been around for 25 years like a spider or something but i mean it's like it goes back and like the number of people that the user generated stuff that it prompted and but yeah so i mean that that was sort of early exposure to any kind of hardcore stuff but yeah 14 and then first full-time job when i was 18 nothing so uh art art ads here he says also i'm pretty sure this said on the podcast someone said that they hate playing online with random strangers and only play online with friends i think that's probably true that most of us yeah uh but he says as games journalist how can you review a game without playing online with random pickup groups as 99 of the people who buy the game will do that i mean the reason for that is because you're playing it before it comes out but no else is playing no but is i i i kind of take issue with his premise i think a lot i think a lot of people i think a lot of people do tend to stick to groups that they know or it's interesting actually talking to people about the sort of groups that they discover and then stick with because i don't think i don't think many people just throw themselves into the fray unless the game insists that they do that there's a percentage of players who will who will just do like pickup groups yeah for the most part i think people like playing with people craving their playing a game online multiplayer already then that means they're probably hardcore enough to know other people as far as reviews i think you need to just kind of make the assumption when you're reading multiplayer impressions of a review that like best case scenario that's with a couple days of you know playing it in the wild or a couple multi-player sessions with the developer i mean it just kind of something i think i feel like multiplayer parts of reason he kind of goes on to say um he wishes that there would have been better uh multiplayer like better reviews of the multiplayer in gears of war two because he was really disappointed with it and i i think multiplayer is something where well that game was reviewed on a lamb that was probably a problem with that yeah also like we just need to like there needs to be better ways to review multiplayer like you need to that needs to be something people are reviewing after the game afterwards yeah i mean it needs to be like a continuing process i agree 100 like donald war reviews are going to come out and i know that they're just going to be playing donald war over some sort of partner net thing because it's a game through windows live well do you i mean do you think that the beta has helped maybe to let them write or maybe but that's only like a limited access to maps and honestly when it comes to something like donald war company here is like the experience changes from like day one to like a month later it's tough because like a little big planet with a little bitch planet sony told reviewers to like hey you're all like a lot of your multiplayer online stuff played the beta and you're like i can say like for kills and i'm working on a review for a site right now where they said and i mean there was a little bit of uh uh there was some some sites had uh reviews of the multiplayer and some sites said they weren't going to review it until they could play the multiplayer games post say they weren't going to review the whole until the games out and i know this i'm working on i'm doing a review based on the single player and then i'm doing a follow-up based on the multiplayer after it's been out for a couple of weeks since i mean and as Anthony was saying i think you know and in a way to review and multiply a game you you're reviewing the the community as much as you're reviewing what the game allows because i think you know your behavior you're also reviewing the potential yeah because this behavior emerges out of the people that are really into it and they you know sometimes they change change the rules somewhat by the the way that they choose to collaborate and and there's also situations like with uh fracture which was just a random game that i reviewed or i actually really enjoyed the multiplayer which wasn't surprising it was the machus of the guys fresh fresh much there was fun but i probably gave in the review i gave the multiplayer much more of a chance than most people buying the game would like most people i bet would check it out for one match and or just dismiss it or not care that it was in there but it's like so it goes the other way sometimes too where it's like i'm pattering that i know our view but the person who checks it out might not even care what's the matter about fracture is that you know even though the multiplayer was pretty good the frustration for anyone to bolt the game knowing that having you said that is i never gonna get a game right that's true nobody's playing it banger kazoo is another case of that word that was like a game that i thought had fantastic multiplayer but i guarantee like almost no one's ever gonna buy that game to play multiplayer with friends so so i don't get to talk about my hardcore moment you just could pass me oh sorry do it i just like seeing that embarrassed awkward look on Phil's face go ahead i think most of mine relates to ninja guidance just because that game is like xbox ninja guide uh well i think uh well now xbox ninja guide and i remember wanting to love my life more when i was a child playing ninja guide and not really focusing on it um i think beat it on master ninja i did beat it on master ninja i think my highest combo and uh and ninja guide was like 170 and then i haven't had a chance a chance to play through ninja guide and two yet on on the master modes but i think my highest combo and it was like 245 one of my favorite uh like you like comments by a reader at all was uh on my my ninja guide and two review left the thing i was like i bet he hasn't even beaten ninja guide in a master difficulty you should not need to beat that game on that difficulty to enjoy it because that is definitely another existential test i also think converting your entire living room into a podcasting studio to do podcasting i'm pretty freaking hard call trying to wheel it out here in the east bay and we don't really entertain people that much all the friends live in the city but it's true i don't really mind it's kind of nice should we do like and mark what uh i'm sorry sorry just look i don't know like 190 hours in a oblivion that's a lot of my options not just every other i think and then we can fit two more quick because this one's really fast uh dan wants no one is wondering uh if we have any plans for a forum so this would probably be a good place to say i don't think we're really gonna do it's called neo-gaff that is our forum you can find me in the gap i mean there's other places i know that uh there's a fan with who wrote into gamers the jobs this week and uh those guys got a hold of me and he was wondering like if they could start a thread for call of cathulu backlog on gamers the job since we don't have forum or let's just do it on the one up board look you know at all you know like i'll look into forum stuff this weekend i just well i am not gonna make it a full time job during forum that's something the problem is like when you run and we bring in storms yeah i'm gonna bring in threaded comments that'll help um the main problem is just that there's a lot of forums out there right now and a lot of people do forums really well and if we were to bring in forums it's something where i think all of us would want to do them well and we want to spend time on it and we would rule that spend on it we would rule that shit with an iron fist or we would want to and i just i don't i don't think that we have time you need to moderate really aggressively yeah like i mean first step might be okay 18 and up because some of the the best forums i read some of the most productive ones definitely have very strict joining and age requirements so a short answer we don't know it's not because we hate you it's just because it's so much work and so much bandwidth and and i i should say like we are really appreciating all the comments on the site like we are getting some really intelligent awesome people i didn't even have a notification of everyone we want to i have to go in and approve all those comments even the ones that hate you have bad things to say about me all right they'll get over it all right one more question here um matt says i've noticed a tendency among podcasters not just on rebel fm to constantly qualify any criticism of a popular or well-received game why is this it's something i noticed during the half-life two discussion in the last episode even though discussion was about part of the game that some of you didn't like every sentence still started with half-life two is an amazing game but or i loved half-life two and everything val was ever made yeah well it's because of uh it's because of the uh other 98 percent of people that aren't reasonable like this kid right that's what he said it's super venison's right here at hominem attacks yeah he says right here i don't think it's because people are scared of having their own opinions or anything is it because listeners are quick to take any sort of criticism of game is saying you hate it and then he brings up the access alert killzone video which if people haven't checked that out they really should um xplay is at xplay.com it's g4 tv.com it's on there somewhere and it was a really it was the first one i've seen of those and it was really uh really amusing i thought but i mean sessler brought up this point of like you know he basically he begs the people watching to have some sort of intelligent discourse about the the review of killzone and uh and i mean we've seen a lot of this with killzone we saw that uh that ps extreme article that went up this week like it's taking a part of the taking talk talking about how the edge reviewer is a hack yeah like i think i think the premise was everyone's entitled to the opinion but some people's opinions are wrong yeah well i can get behind that but but i mean it is there is like this uh this weird double standard right now where i think a lot of hardcore gamers they want games to be taken seriously but if somebody says somebody they want to disagree with then they're not then the person like having any sort of critique is wrong then when everyone else they could seriously but um they cannot call it i think it's just going to get worse i mean the console worst thing is just going to get worse at the economy keeps up the way it is he answers his own question yes yeah so are we done with it were we done yes we are okay i just wanted to take a quick second to call it two things so before i forget one is uh thank you to the guy that yesterday when we were getting in indian food lunch ran up like a scary person and oh yeah he got on my window and said rebel FM bitches as we drove off but it was the first time i've ever been recognized in public outside of a game event it was it was pretty crazy yeah a terrifying way to do it it was too like for a second i was like i mean we're in like a industrial part of berk leading at this weird indian food place and i was like uh it's a crazy homeless person attacking my window no no that's not what you said in the car no that's what i said but i said i said to be funny joking if i like said on the podcast that i almost got out of the car and beat his ass for hitting my car but then i was like all right he's a fan so it's cool but that's not at all how to i think it was don't you ever fucking knock on my window but i'm not that's not true at all actually i was it was super flattering to have anybody uh recognize it's like he pointed to his ipod as though he were listening to us at the time that is what i don't know i don't know if he was it's where he thinks we live um yeah he actually was a crazy homeless person yeah even crazy homeless people and we're gonna have ipods so uh um and then i also wanted to say thank you to the guys from armchair empire which is a website pretty decent video game website he's been organizing this campaign to get a gfw reunion show at pax so he's like got all of us on board to do it and now he's gonna start like basically fundraising i think to get us there which in my case i don't really think he needs to do i'm gonna go to pax no matter but yeah you guys should definitely check out armchairampire.com give him some support because what he's trying to do is super cool just for some of it's a fan of the podcast yeah that's cool all right so please check out eat dash sleep dash game dot com for all the latest episodes of rebel fm as well as writing for myself nick anthony arthur and others uh we wanted to give a bunch of special shout outs today including huge thanks to popcap they sent us a big package full of games and i think we're gonna start giving them a way to our favorite letters each week we should probably pick one for this week uh i would say that the favorite one for this week is uh what is mine let's send that guy let's popcap game yeah we're gonna send what's we're gonna send you a shit for you basically you want something that's worth 24 dollars more we're gonna send a copy of pegal which in my mind is worth way more than yeah for dollar i agree with that and we're so you're gonna get a copy of pegal we'll keep giving away we have a a bunch of different games that they sent us so we'll keep giving those away to our favorite letters throughout the weeks uh also special thanks to matt m who donated some game-tapped subscriptions to us that was oh yeah that was really nice when you're game-tapped subscriptions thank you very much that we're gonna back yeah there is a there's a channel cool just not as expansive it's sparsely populated so uh let's talk about where listeners can find you on the internet this week patrick what is your twitter where my i'm you know i write for mtv multiplayer multiplayer dot mtv.com my personal twitter is twitter.com/xie exxy and then um multiplayer is twitter.com/multiplayers within us and you guys have done some cool like live blog twitter stuff on there i've noticed yeah yeah we're you know we're trying to convert that sort of stuff we started doing some sort of daily video chats um and stuff like that just started trying to do some more media focused stuff but if any of us any ideas make sure to pass them along excellent john how about you um my twitter is uh jw eight stavison uh we also have one for what they play which is what they play excellent um what they play dot com is the site and then we have a podcast that goes out every Tuesday i'll compliment what they play twitter by saying i unsubscribed only because you're very thorough and there's a lot of them so that's the compliment but you know just i mean that's kind of the distinction that we made is that the what they play one is the pimping articles one it feels good i actually saw a bunch of news there first i was like wow and then mine is the that's where i get most money to use all these niggies twitter yeah all right uh nick how about you use your browser again no i'm going to order um he's on the client list i forgot to it's my punishment it might be harder to find now i forgot to like mention it last week but i wanted to say i was pretty proud of the shadow of the colossus follow-up backlog interview uh yeah that is that i did for one up that it's now i guess probably in their features section um and it's sort of like uh just basically an email interview with committed oeda like i mean for people who listen to backlog on one up fm how we always tried to get on get people on to talk about um the game that we were talking about we obviously weren't able to do that with shadow of the colossus which was our first game but this was sort of you know that's like closure on that and just i mean like the guy who designed my favorite game was very excited and even hear back from him in that context so that then this week i just wrote a um like the arts here side of downloadable content or downloadable games feature for games radar which actually they approached me with not the other way around even if that's like right on mail you know it was like hell yes yeah it was excellent for you thank you thank you uh but otherwise twitter is and southerner um and that's all i got cool uh arthur well do i get to talk uh no there's a list yes no it's the same as usual also i should be uh don't hold me too but i should be contacting people about writing for the site this week i finally managed to go through the 185 applications excellent uh Anthony uh it's twitter.com/chefmoney other than that uh i'm uh i have a couple of laptop reviews going up on pc world which aren't interesting at all to probably anyone that listens to this podcast there might be people like looking to buy a new laptop and maybe they want to see what chop's opinion is all right that could be true but beyond that uh yeah i'm not really appearing anywhere i might appear in a couple podcasts but i'll detail that for next week cool uh i'm at twitter.com/pkolar and i've got a review of the mall that i mentioned last week is up now in games radar and i have a bunch of other stuff in the works coming soon including some stuff for what they play so uh i will be talking about that as it comes out all right uh you can subscribe to rebel if i'm on itunes and soon if you use either of these services please subscribe and leave a review and uh we probably won't do any uh donation info this week just because we're running late on recording but we will get back to that next week and we will cover all the people who donated this week and uh backlog on monday yes backlog like all i wanted to stay tuned up to the source bitches