Rebel FM
Rebel FM - Episode 3 - 01/21/09
This week we're joined by Geekbox.net's Ryan Scott and Italy's Giancarlo Varanini, as we discuss what we've been playing recently, the ups and downs of the reviews process, and answer some more letters from a recently closed magazine. And stick around for a very thorough shout-out to those who have helped us thus far.
You are now in possession of the Rebel FM podcast. You are welcome. Now let us enjoy some cake or pie. You may begin in 3, 2, 1. It is Wednesday, January 21, 2009. Welcome to episode 3 of Rebel FM. My name is Philip Kohler. Joining me this week is the staff of eat-sleep-game.com. Anthony Gaeigos, Arthur Geese, and Nick Suttner. Also joining the Rebellion today, we have two special guests, former one-up reviews editor and founder of GeekBox.net and the GeekBox radio podcast, Ryan Scott. Say hello, Ryan. Hello. All right, and former EGM senior editor, Giancarlo Verinini. Hello. Thank you guys for joining us today. Today, we've got a couple of things to talk about. First, we're going to do what we've been playing segment. Is that not paying attention? Do you not introduce the rest of us? We weren't paying attention. You were paying attention. I'm going to make sure you're not popping our speakers. I think we're okay. I would like to pop the speakers. Cutting your hair took your attention span with it. That's true. That's where all my brain cells were. Nick now has a sellout hair shot. He does not look like a homeless person anymore, or not as much like a homeless person, still a little bit. Well, not a unemployed. I got to look good. I have a job I can take back and relate. I'm wearing torn jeans. Let us know when you pull that off. All right, we're going to talk about what we've been playing, and then we're going to have a discussion about reviews, sort of the reviews process. Since we have Ryan here who was former reviews editor, Nick was involved with reviews, Anthony was involved with reviews. Giancarlo has written a lot of reviews in his time for various publications, so I'm sure we all have lots to say about that. Then we'll read some letters. Hopefully this episode sounds a lot better. We're recording through all sorts of fancy new things right now. Anthony did a post, I think, on Eat Dash Sleep Dash game with our new equipment, pictures and everything. That said, we have equipment, but not really the knowledge. Hopefully this is all hooked up right and sounds fine. Lots of lights are moving in the right direction. This is what we've learned from scares. You know, it's moving up good. I know that's moving up bad. I do think I hear it like a carpet cleaner. Obama didn't get inaugurated today, so when we're recording, so it is very likely that Oakland will write in happiness. Write in happiness. You introduced me to this concept. I'm just saying in the past, Oakland has rioted when the Raiders won the playoffs, and then they've also rioted when the Raiders have lost the puffs. Out of a flaming garbage can come through the windows. I'm just saying Oakland's been in a rioting mood lately, so they're looking for an excuse. Ouch. We live here, too. I'm about to break some shit. Why don't we start going around with what we've been playing? I'm going to start with you, Arthur, because I know you have some thoughts here burning to tell us about Metal Gear Solid 4. I don't know that I'm burning to tell you because I feel like I don't want to be the contrary guy with Metal Gear Solid 4. I just have very strong opinions already, and I'm only two acts in. But I will say that the thing that I'm liking most so far is the combat, and I'm not saying that the combat is amazing or really well done. I'm just saying that that's what I'm liking the most out of what I'm playing. See, I actually think that the combat in Metal Gear Solid 4 is really, really satisfying and well done, and I mean much more so than in previous games in the series. Yeah, no, it's definitely the first time where I feel like the combat is fully implemented as opposed to something that you're really hoping never happens. I have no problem moving along. And that feels like the western influence, right? I mean, it's pretty clear that there was a pretty heavy action game influence on it, and the ability to buy more ammunition at any time is good, and the ability to buy new weapons is nice because I don't recall that being in any of the other ones. But yeah, I like rolling up on dudes and capping them with a P90. It's satisfying. The story is not so much. I feel like I'm going to dig myself whole here if I start talking about the Metal Gear Solid 4 story. So it's not what Shane said last week that I said something about PMC's. I mean, you're not done yet. It still might change your life. I don't want to be. I like Shane. He was full of shit. That story is terrible. The story of Metal Gear Solid 4 is terrible. I watch it and I think... I don't think it's terrible. I thought this was bad when I was 15 watching crappy anime, and now this is what I mean. It's not like years of work. It is a story, and you don't mind watching it. I think that's a big step. I do mind watching it because for every bit of knowledge that you need in the game, there's ten minutes of mindless exposition on almost completely unrelated topics. And I'm getting like a wall of Death of Glares. And Snake repeating everything that you say. Yeah. PMC's, PMC's. I wish I had played this because this is like the biggest amblesher that I had played. I played like the first act. But I don't know. It's kind of an intimidating prospect to sit down and play it because there's so much story and there's so much to it. It's like the least casual game ever. I really have to want to be in a specific mood to sit down and dig into it. Yeah, and they made the game friendlier to new people coming into it. I have it paused on a cutscene in the other room right now. So it doesn't demand your attention for as long, although the space between checkpoints is kind of a long time. I will say, when you're getting to the last couple of acts, there are a few cases where the cutscenes are so long that you will need There's a screen between cutscenes already. That's true. There was ten minutes of cutscene save, ten more minutes of cutscene, play two minutes cutscene. Let's go. You'd appreciate that if your game crashed. Yeah, no, I do. On the one hand, yes, it's kind of them to give me a screen between cutscenes. And on the other hand, I just feel like there's just so much exposition that it feels more like I'm watching. Not a movie, but a TV show. And it shouldn't tell you. They should just keep saving periodically, not make you aware of it, because then you feel like your time is really good. No, I need things to nitpick. So it's good that that's there. Well, what did you think about being able to control the Mark II during the briefings and stuff like that? I've only done a little bit of Mark II so far. I mean, I'm not done with the game by any means. So this isn't a final judgment. This is an review. It's just eight hours into the game. And I don't know how far that is. I mean, how long? It's, I mean, you said you're on act two. I'm at the end of act two. Like, I don't want to say what's happening right now, but... All right. Well, it's, I mean, it's five acts and the last two are a little bit shorter. So, I mean, you've got a way to go here. I just killed laughing squid and the section after that. I wonder if people are going to hear your cat taking up litter right now, probably. I don't think they're going to hear you. Well, they wouldn't have done anything if you hadn't said anything. So what do you think of all of Audicon's crying so far? I haven't seen any Audicon crying. I've seen Audicon guilt tripping me for making Sunny feel bad about eggs and Sunny not being able to make eggs and me thinking, "I'm really surprised that Snake isn't just berating her because he's kind of a crouched eel dude." Just wait. You will see Audicon crying. He will cry. Yeah, that's sort of what Audicon is known for. I mean, Audicon pissing himself. Audicon crying. It's good. It's his thing. He's a man. It's a good thing to have. Audicon stealing intellectual property. Well, I'll try to play some soon. Yeah, no, it would be good. I'd like to debate the merits of Metal Gear Solid 4. Again, I'm not passing full judgement yet because I'm not done with it, but it is what it is I suppose. I would really like to see what other people do with the Metal Gear universe now that Kojima has supposedly gotten out of the system. We'll see. Unless you really want to play an iPod touch game. So, have you been playing anything you actually enjoy? I haven't joined parts of Metal Gear. I'm playing more Left 4 Dead, although not as much as I'd like. Let's see. I played a little bit of Quake Live. We got into the beta for that. How was that? I think, man, people are going to hate us already for saying we can't really talk about it, but I think all the beta testers can't talk about it. It's Quake 3 in your browser. And it runs. Well, I'm not the person to ask because I have a pretty fast computer. Anthony, you know. No, I haven't really gotten much retanks to try it. And B, I don't think that we're supposed to talk about anything, basically at all. And his computer is even more of a beast than mine is, so... People are going to hate us already. Yeah, already. Well, but no one can talk about it. Yeah, I mean, it's not really coverage or anything. We got really access. It was just a beta that we're trying to... Yeah, I'm not. We're not going to chain it into... I was playing this amazing game, and I can't talk about it for a month. Isn't that what you just did, though? Well, you know, I think it's actually like the beta terms are probably up soon in that, and like 10,000 people were playing that beta. Alright, well, hopefully soon we can talk about that. Anything else that you did want to talk about, or should we move over to Jean-Carlo? I think we move over to Jean-Carlo. Jean-Carlo. Oh, God, let me see. What have you been doing in general? 'Cause I haven't least spoken to you since the last two weeks. Oh, just stuff. Just trying to take care of some business here and there. But yeah, I have had minimal amount of time to play some games. Actually, I finished Fallout 3 over the break. Excellent. Which I actually really regret doing, because since there's a little bit of extra time now, it would have been nice to have one of those really huge games to just kind of waste time with. Did you really finish everything in it, though? 'Cause that is the kind of game that a lot of times you finish it, but you can still go back and do a lot of stuff. No, I mean, I finished the main storyline and did a lot of the side stuff, but there's still a time I haven't seen yet. And there's the DLC coming really soon. Right, which is another big reason why I kind of want to go through and check out as much as I can before that comes out. But that game is just amazing to me. And as much as I liked Oblivion, this kind of shows that I think Bethesda is capable of doing a slightly more focused product. Whereas Oblivion's main quest was really sort of uninteresting and lame Fallout 3 is much more focused. And I think what makes it great, too, is the fact that you can just do the main quest and get through the game in eight to ten hours. And that's it. You don't have to do all the side stuff. But they've made the side stuff worthwhile. It's entertaining, it's funny. So yeah, it's a great game and probably one of my games of the year. It's interesting when I was playing through Fallout 3, I kept looking for the Fallout 3 version of the different guilds in Oblivion. I assumed that would be in there, and maybe that's something they will go back and add. But I kind of realized as I got through it and as I did more and more of the side stuff that they didn't really need it here, because the side missions, like the side quests, were so fleshed out already and had such interesting storylines without that. So you didn't need that sense of progression. In Oblivion, though, that kind of was... that also depended on how you learned to act if you wanted to be, like, evilly when joined, like, whatever it's called. See, but I disagree. I think I don't think being good or evil played much of a part in Oblivion, because I finished every guild questline, including the assassins and fighters. Right, I was thinking Oblivion that felt like part of the choice was, "Okay, which do I want to be good or want to be evil today?" Because I haven't played much Fallout in Fallout, is it that it kind of takes you through all those different kind of... Well, likewise in the main story. In Fallout, you can choose whether you want to be good or evil in each separate quest, basically. It's not depending on you're not choosing which quest to do based on that, but each quest you have a choice of, "Do I want to do the good thing? Do I want to do the evil thing? Do I want to do something that's sort of in the middle of those two?" Well, aside from the moments of Moral Ambiguity in Fallout, I don't know if you did the Tenpenny Tower quest with the ghouls. Yeah. Where there's just no good way. Yeah, and that's right, there is definitely some, like, darker moments where... I feel like the whole guild system in Oblivion was replaced by deciding whether or not you were going to be good or bad in Fallout 3. I think that it was a much clearer moral choice, especially with 3-dog falling you around on the radio talking about whether or not you were cool or an asshole. Well, that wouldn't even say it's like a clearer moral choice, but just that you have more of a choice. Like you said, in Oblivion, well, I mean, you have to make a choice and follow, whereas in Oblivion you didn't really. Like you said, you can do everything without making real choice whether you want to be good or evil. Well, that was the funny thing for me with Fallout 3, in every kind of game where you can be good or bad, I always play as bad. Nights at the Old Republic, Fable One, Fable Two, all of them I play bad, because I'm just... I play them all good. Yeah, I feel guilty playing as bad. Well, the only game that actually made me feel guilty playing bad was Kotor, and there was that scene where there's the Wookiee who's like, he has his leg trapped in like some kind of trap or whatever. What's his name, Anthony? And what's that Wookiee's name? I am a pit of failure. I don't think Anthony played through Kotor. Yeah, I've never played any of the Kotor games. Oh, exactly. What kind of Star Wars fan are you? I know, I know. Well, I didn't know the next box. I don't know the joy that is finishing Kotor 2 and realizing that they didn't finish the game. I've never played, I didn't know the next box, and I've actually never played any BioWare game all the way through. Ever. I'm just more shy than you ever played Kotor. I mean... I'm shocked that you just called it Kotor. What the hell else do you call it? I hear Kotor. Nights at the Old Republic. Yeah, Kotor's. Sorry, what was your point? Anyway, there's Wookiee, he was stuck, and he's like, "Oh, help me, please." And I was like, "Yeah, no." And I shot him or whatever. But like, in Fallout 3, the world is just so miserable, and it's so depressing that I'm like, "What could I possibly do to these people that could make their lives any worse?" Maybe that's kind of part of my problem is like, that's the whole reason why I haven't wanted to play much while it is because I started, I got out the vault, I started walking around, and just like, it's just felt like a miserable place to be, and like, I don't like that. And it's like, maybe because I felt like there wasn't anything good I could accomplish in this world. Well, and that's a thing. I mean, it is really dreary, like, if you play it for an extended period of time, you're walking through the environment and just, "Man, this really sucks for these people." And even when you do good things in that game, you're just kind of like, "Wow, these people are still totally boned because they live in this really terrible world." And so, I don't know, but yeah, it was like the first game where I'm like, "Wow, I actually want to play as a good person this time." So someone who finished Oblivion and Fallout, how did you feel about the way that Oblivion ended versus the way that Fallout ended? As far as, I mean, I don't think it's... Maybe that's about spoilers. I don't think it spoils Fallout 3 to say that when you finish Fallout 3, you're finished with Fallout 3. You can't go back. Yeah. Unlike in Oblivion, where you finish the final quest. You can go back and Fallout. I mean, it's just... Well, you have to go back to save, though. Right. I mean... Hmm. Without spoiling it, yeah, I mean, I think more could have been done with the ending. But it's also the kind of game where just playing through up to that point is kind of... There's so much thing that happens up to that point that you're kind of like, "Okay, that whole last portion, that last quest is kind of like the entire ending for me." And apparently, like, they are going back and with one of the DLC packs is actually going to continue where the story leaves off, which is interesting. Which is... But that's when they're releasing in March, which seems as strange as to me. That's the third DLC pack that... Yeah, I mean, I think it's the idea, but at least as far as I got, the impression is that they want to, like, build up to it. And this is like the thing that's actually going to continue the story forward. So that'll be... I'm still waiting for the Tomb Raider DLC to finish the game for me. Yikes. Aw. I was going to play that this weekend. It just never got around to it. Good game. It's a good game. I'm about halfway through. I think I'm... See, I think I'm halfway through. Halfway through. That probably means... That probably means I'm a quarter of the way through. Alright, anything else? I went back to playing Castle Crashers because I learned that over the break that the patch came out. Yeah. Were you playing with Ryan? Because Ryan, I am you last night at like 3 a.m. and was like... Is this the Castle Crashers just fucking awesome? No, I actually, I have yet to play it with Ryan, but we totally should. What does this patch do? Well, I have no knowledge to repatch. Well, the thing was that, like, when the game came out, everyone said that there was this save game bug or whatever. That basically wiped out all your data. That's awesome. I played through, like, a bunch of it. Well, the bigger issue was that you couldn't play it a lot. It had a... But it would randomly drop people, like, all the time. It had a bad habit of disconnecting our route. I mean, online play was broken, and so it took this patch to fix that and fix the save bug apparently. Which is weird, because I actually didn't have any problems at all. But I was like, "Oh, man, I don't want to lose my save data." How long did it take them to patch it? A year. Wow. It wasn't a year. It was the end of the summer. Come on, four months. It feels like three or four months. That's longer than, like, two days at Fails. But it sounds like that was more of a problem with Microsoft's kind of, like, certification process. No. No. No. My, uh, my, my leads on that developer, they've got some issues with, with enough staff to finish the, the code that they needed. I mean, that game got delayed over and over again. Yeah, I was just going to say, just look at how long it took to actually make the game. They're a really small developer and, uh, they, they work pretty slowly. They also apparently, like, you don't give it to Microsoft. And they were like, "Oh wait, hold on. We need it back. We need to change something." So, I think it's, I don't know. It's probably a problem in both ends, I imagine. Okay, so now that it's patched and it's all good, though. You two loving it? Yeah. I mean, it's, it's the kind of game where you can go to and it kind of just reminds you why you like video games to begin with. Like, it's just simple, kind of fun. Um, and it's entertaining. I mean, there's nothing, like, super innovative about it or anything. It's like one of the old school brawling games. I don't know. I mean, I wanted some more depth, though, in the combat or something. Like, I mean, a friend, Tyler and I just played through the whole thing and, like, a sitting. And we were just kind of like, it was... You beat the whole game? Yeah. Obviously, I mean, it's a totally, like, great art style and everything. And, like, that's, that's why it's enjoyable to play, because everything looks so cool. But, it was pretty mindless. I mean, it was... Can you ever play, like, Double Dragon or Ninja Turtles or anything? No, no. Did you ever play Guardian Heroes on Saturn? But also, you also really enjoyed, like, the EverQuest hack-and-slash games and those... Oh, the Norathans? Yeah, those are pretty mindless. I mean, you'd literally set that half the time just mashing X and score it at the same time, so you can take it out to set that. No, that's definitely true. But I think going into Castle Crashers, I was... I don't know why I had different expectations for it. And I think the difference also with Double Dragon and stuff is that the progression of those was so much slower. Also, it was harder, because I was younger. But now it's like, there wasn't really times when it got held up that much in Castle Crashers. We were just kind of straight through, and there wasn't really much, like... Even when it was hard, in fact, there was that much I could do to play better, so get it done. I mean, I like the game a lot, I just don't know. I wanted something more. I thought as a game, it wasn't nearly as good as, like, the presentation. Yeah, I mean, there were certain aspects of it that I was kind of disappointed, at least in terms of, like, using, like, the magic and melee and stuff like that. Like, it's not... I mean, at least not till the very end of the game, for me, did that stuff really even come into play at all. I mean, you can go through the whole game just using melee stuff, but... But yeah, I mean, it's just, it's kind of, you know, it harkens back to the TMNT games and stuff like that. And I used to love those games as a kid, so... I still love them. Even though the TMNT game that came out for Xbox Live is so fast. It didn't suck ass. It was the arcade game. Your, uh, your youth goggles prevented you from it. No, and I had infinite continues. Well, there was that too, but I mean... Like, which is, like, certain games I really like that in, but in that game, it kind of also killed it at the same time. Well, I think the, the thing that Castle Crashers has over the, that game is, Castle Crashers was never designed to take all your money. I mean, it's a freaking X-Men game on Live. I'm just gonna throw this out there. Didn't he use that, like, two screens? Like, you had, you played on, like, two or three screens? That is another game that is not as good as you remember it being. Well, it depends who you are. If your classes are Wolverine, it's not good for anyone else. No, it has the worst. I'd like to point out that's the only X-Men game that I'm sure will ever exist that will let you play as Dazzler. I remember that with your leather jacket. Roller Skating Disco Diva. Oh man, best character ever. Tell me more. I had like Nightcrawler, but yeah, oh man, the fucking dialogue in that game was so bad. You don't remember it, but just look for videos and you'll mark my words. I believe you. I don't know if I'd care about that going back to it now, but yeah. It's just weird that games like that aren't all on, you know, I just feel like. I wonder if we're gonna get the, uh, Dazzler Origins movie. I'd be really excellent. Hopefully soon. Yeah. Can we get Ryan Reynolds in that too? He's dreamy. Get Ryan Scott. He was dreamy. Ryan Scott playing Dazzler. Yeah. Alright, Anthony, why don't you tell us what you've been playing? Um, I've been playing a lot of Civ 4 because I've never played any Civ games and, uh... This is your first time ever playing. This is my first time really playing like... You were like popping cherries every other day with your game collection. Yeah, it's weird too. Like a lot of big franchises like that. I mean, I play a lot of games, but it's like, uh... And I really like turn-based strategy games. That's why I like to, no, but not because I'm Bishin. It's not Japanese, Coder, or Civ. Well, it's like, yeah, I guess it's like a... No, but this had a way to subjugate a people, and that is definitely right up Anthony's area. I really liked it. I really liked it before. I started off with the Aztecs in a randomly generated world. Ran into the Japanese Mongolians and just like... Was super peaceful at first. I was like, all of our trade routes are open. And then eventually, like, I realized that England was small and all these other countries were about to invade them. So I was like, fuck it, I'm gonna do it first because I want the land. And then after that, it was like... You know, like I said, Japan and Mongolia were still like, stuck pre-gun powder, and I had machine guns. So I was like, I'm gonna make war on them while they have no chance. And, uh... Eventually, I had to call it truce though because, you know, that game is so cool because you do see like the disadvantages of fighting a war on two fronts and stuff like that because even though they had like samurai, they were still like killing my people. So what religion were your Aztecs? Well, they were Jewish because that game is so weird because it's like the first person that does like a random thing, like the first person that discovers law, discovers Judaism. And then like before that, we were just tribalistic. And then like, it'll be like the first person that does something else discovers Christianity. And the only reason I stuck with Judaism is because I found a way to have a temple where they would constantly donate money so I'd make money per turn. And someone pointed out that that sounded like a racial thing. I have a totally racist thing because it was Jews making money or something. But it has that same thing with every religion. When you put it that way, it sounds even better. The thing, it has that with every religion in the game. If you manage to have like their holy of holies in there, like whatever. If it was Islam or something and you built like the, I can't think of what it's called, that dome where Muhammad is in the head. But if you have that, like whatever you have that's like the staple, the people will bring money. So, and I eventually I embraced open religion, you know, like years down the line when I had like a UN and everything. And it was funny because in that game too, I was like, I became such a tyrant because like once the UN existed, I owned so much of the land. That I had like a, not enough of the vote to vote myself as the head of the UN. But enough that I could keep anyone else from being able to be voted in. So since everyone hated me because I was constantly waging war, they were always trying to vote the Greeks into power. And so I would always be like, no, I vote all my votes for me. And so it would always just be stagnated so the UN could accomplish nothing. That's my, that's my story. But yeah, I've been playing all this and then I also beat condemned, which I'm going to be writing something up. The first condemned so I'm going to be writing something on the side about that soon. And I enjoyed that game a lot. If like, if I had been around reviewing games when that game was launched title, I could have seen like giving it like an A minus or B plus. That's what I get the second one I think. The second one's really good. You should play that. I do really need to play the second one because the first one, I've got to copy it. The first, yeah, I'm actually probably going to start it tonight or something. The first one ends so disappointingly though. Like, I just, I really wasn't happy about the ending. So for me, the convenient part is like having played it so late. I'm not like everyone else that was like, well, there's a year and a half before I know anything that happens. Like for me, it's like, for two years. Well, I never expected there to be a sequel to condemned. Yeah, I really didn't either. But I guess, I guess like getting the game out at launch with the 360 probably helped them sell all right. Yeah. And that was a monolith set of production other than fear. That was a really good launch game. Like the launch had some good games, but that was just kind of like a new IP that was really good. And actually like trying something, you know, relatively new with the gameplay. Yeah, I actually think that that game, like I was saying prior to games like Mirror's Edge and stuff, like it does like a really good job of like making you feel more involved in a first person view. Like even the little things like when you're like crawling over a wall and stuff the way that the camera moves and stuff makes it feel like you're there instead of just being like the camera bumps quickly up again or something like that. Like when you have the more in-depth melee fighting, there's some really intense stuff. Like just in terms of your view being hit back when you take a hard hit or hit someone. Like it's like the most visceral combat out of any game pretty much. Also, they've condemned sort of picked up the torch from where the chronicles of Riddick started that whole trend. Or even before that, what was that game that first did first person hand to hand? I also really liked the investigation elements in the first one. I've heard that they get a lot better in the second. Like in the first there are very simple. But it was, I always found them to be like a nice way to break up the gameplay and like build some tension. It's true. I just wish that it almost makes me want a whole other game where that's all I'm doing. There's a lot more of it in the second one and it's done in such a way that it encourages you to do it well because it rewards you for it and unlock things. And the second one is that there's multiple ways of doing it. Like I think it was like Greg for it myself and David Alice. We all did it. We did like the same solution three different ways. Like when we were trying to figure out something in the hotel room and none of us even realized there were multiple other ways, but we all did it completely differently, which is really cool. That's like Phoenix Wright, but with bum fights. Yes. Then all of us eviscerated corpses like laying in the middle of a room. Yeah, I'd better be on the box. The second one is like way more visceral. Like I remember the second one I know. I mean we can talk about more coming next week, but I've seen how like they're like environmental kills that are like so much more intense than anything that was in the first game. I think my favorite part of the first game is when you're in the mall and you get shoved down the escalator backwards. Like that's just one of the most like. And then there's like five guys. Yeah, because I wasn't expecting it all. Yeah, I mean that game has plenty of moments like that that are like, you know, of course there's like the most infamous moment in the first game and then they repeat it. I know in the second one with them scary mannequins. Yeah. So I mean, you know, there's just some truly disturbing shit in that, which is always my favorite type of scare. I like disturbing scary before I like. They're going to taking something like that's inherently scary like a mannequin or a little doll and like ratcheting it up but not making it. Man, they really they go they go way overboard. The scary doll thing in the second one. Yeah, that's actually one of like one of the less scary levels, I think. It's more just like it's really scary when they're kind of scuttling past your vision and you see shadows and things but one there once they're actually in front of you. It's kind of like, man, that's kind of bizarre. Well, after the 17th doll, but the first time you see one, you almost crack your pants. But I did I just played that this summer as well. Anthony, I agree with you that the ending is pretty awful. Like it just it gets weird and like supernatural, but like in a very convoluted not. I didn't really feel like it made a lot of sense, but that's fine. The second one just takes that shit and runs with it right from the beginning. Well, did you finish the second one? Oh, no, I did. Oh, and the letter third of it is just like, okay, whatever. The second one ends. Anthony, we should play the second one together. I'm playing the second one this week, so we could play. The second one ends just as strangely as the first and with less closure. Good. Excellent. Hey everyone. Welcome to Xbox launch. Yeah, well, and then I'm also playing. You want to play some Call of Duty 2? I'm good. No, no, but I am. I'm even going older than that. I'm also playing the original clock tower for PS1 currently. Whoa. Well, brought that on. I went to Alameda Game Exchange and Jay bought it, and then I was curious about it, so I started playing it. Cool. So, and it is still, even though it looks utterly terrible, like the 3D models and stuff, or like even worse than like the first ones you saw. We need to have an opportunity to go see the movie that's coming out. But it's like, they do such a good job of making that game genuinely scary with like the really like horrible scissor sound following you around the whole time. And the fact of the matter that you can't defend yourself really, so you're just trying to like find ways to avoid it. And I always think that that's a lot more scary. Is it the PS2 survival horror game where you were a girl being chased by this huge dude and you had a dog? Oh, no. That's not haunting ground, right? That's the... It might be haunting. That's for PS2? Yeah. Yeah. Where there's really disturbing sexual undertones and like themes of assault. I think any game, well, there's also that, ah, what is it? Red, or something rose? Is that a ring of rose? A ring of rose. A ring of rose. Yeah, that's another ring of rose. The one that got banned in the UK or something, I think. A big game that has something like chasing you regularly throughout it is like... It doesn't have to be that, or do it that well even to be scary. I mean, that's kind of like one of the better parts of like Nemesis 2 in Resident Evil or Tyrone. They're like just something that keeps coming back. Even games like Hawk Hour where it's like through a lot of the game too. They have a... They have that in Dead Space as well. Like there are certain areas where there's this giant creature chasing you that you can't really destroy so you just have to run or figure out. Fuck that thing. It just reminded me that. Yeah, I mean, so that's pretty much it for what I've been playing. We'll pass it on to Nick and I'm about to get up real quick. So if there's any background sound, I apologize. We'll have something in the freezer. How old did you leave in the present? Like your cell phone or something that you needed? That was something that I would slip. I should mention too, you reminded me as well. Just a side note, two people were asking about Jade being on podcast and we should just tell people as well that she actually got rehired at the Davis for doing so one of the things she was doing in production. So she'll certainly be on the show when she can, but she now has a day job unlike us. So we're recording at like two in the afternoon when she's in the office, but she'll be on the show. Yeah, and you know, Matt and Ryan will be back as well. They're just really busy at the moment too, but you know. Hopefully by the time this is out there. Oh my God, Anthony just almost got everything. Everything's fine. Shut up. Everyone can enjoy the fact. You almost dropped the banana kit test. It's still horrible. Yes, sorry about that. I left a vitamin water in the fridge and it was starting to crack. So that would have been a horrible list. I'm just going to leave it. So what have you been playing Nick? Skate 2 is pretty much it. And I'm freelancing the review for one up, which might be up at the time you read this or tomorrow or something. I mean the embargo should be up by the time. The embargo is up. Yeah, so I can talk about it. How many words is your review? Shut up, Ryan. It was assigned at 600 at 30 minutes. It's not what I asked. That's a legitimate question. It turned into 1239 I think. Wow. Jesus. See, I kind of feel like an ass like as the freelance feel. You don't ever change like those 700 words. I'm not being paid for them. No, I mean, it's the game like that. There's a lot to talk about because it's kind of like, well, I don't know if any of you guys play skates. Phil, you played somewhere in the first game. Yeah, I played some of the first one. Also, I want to point out just right now, you probably actually can't hear it this time. But there's a car alarm going off outside. Is the rioting starting? Yeah, it might have. Awesome. Maybe there will be a closer one. Abomination. So, Skate 2 is kind of weird as a sequel. It's still a really good game. I really like it. It's just like the things they chose to focus on. Like, expanding the basic trick set to things like hand plans and foot plans and finger flips and one foot flips. And kind of these specific things that really only actual skaters were like bumped or weren't in the first game. So, the tricks are expanded and it's nice that they're there. I have to ask a question about that, actually, because I have played a little of the first one. I want to play some more. The first game is already really complex with the way the tricks work. There's a lot of different tricks and a lot of ways that you can mix them together and everything. I'd say it's deep, but I wouldn't say it's complex. I would say it's complex. I would say that the average casual gamer is going to be frightened by the game. Like, totally scared and it's a hard game. Like, even for hardcore gamers, I know a lot of people who got to a point in the game and just couldn't do anymore. See, that's the thing is, I talked about this a little last week too, I think briefly, was that the first game is kind of about learning how to skate. It teaches you kind of the basic control scheme and then it gives you very specific things like, you know, you have to do a nolly 360 flip down this rail. And that's the point where a lot of people got stuck. And that's where I got stuck for a long time when I was reviewing the first. It took me a while to get past that. And there weren't that many like, you know, career choices at any given time in the first one. So you kind of had to do that or not advance. Skate 2 is different in two regards in that way. One, it's a lot more open ended as far as objectives. Like, you'll get to an area and it'll be like, okay, you know, in this general area, you need to do five different flip tricks off different banks. But it won't tell you which ones you have to do. So in general, it's a bit more open. And so it's more about just skateboarding and like, it's more about getting better generally at the controls and at skating. And about learning very specific, you know, specific skill. What I'm concerned about though is like, I mean, I think the fear about this franchise is that it goes the same way as Tony Hawk. And with Tony Hawk, like, I played some of the original Tony Hawk games like the first two or three and enjoyed them. But then it just, they kept adding moves. Everyone, it was like a new, they had a new move thing that made the game infinitely more complex. And it just got like crazier and crazier and eventually like, it was just too much for somebody who wasn't playing every single one of them to handle. Well, see in Tony Hawk that, you know, they added a manual and that was really important. And then they added the revert and that was really important. And then everything else that added beyond that was kind of like, didn't change the fundamental gameplay. Nothing in skate to change is the fundamental gameplay. And that's one of the problems. It's not a risky game. It's not refreshing. It's still a really good game. But I wouldn't worry about that so much because it's, there's rare times when you actually have to do those new moves. It's more just another thing in your arsenal for when you're like, you know, going in competition and stuff. So it, it doesn't do as good a job of teaching you like specific things. And so it's not, like I said, it's not a game about learning how to skate. It's just a game about. Yeah, I guess I'm just saying like, you know, if somebody who hasn't played skate picks up skate to, are they going to be even more? Like, I know people, like I said, people are already intimidated by the first one. Are they going to be even more intimidated? And then like, if they add a whole bunch of new moves to skate three, is it going to get even worse? And it's like, it's hard to like think about it from that mindset. It's like hard to, you know, like, that's hard to picture myself not having played a new skate going into the second one and how I feel about it. Because definitely the tutorial and everything is getting as much brief or it kind of just tosses you into it. So I'd say it's, you know, it's, if you played the first one, obviously you can get in the second one easily. If you haven't played it, I don't really know. I don't really know how tough it would be. I think because the goals are a little less specific, it wouldn't be as frustrating. And because there's tons of different like kind of career paths, you can get any different time. There's like the, you know, the still the skateboard mag and the Thresher mag and the pro career paths. There's also like tons of side missions. There's like the hall of meat stuff you can do where you can just try to like hurt yourself at any given time and like break different bones and like, you know, throw yourself into a cannonball and hit a car or pedestrian. So there's things you can do anywhere. There's always something to do. You're never stuck doing one specific goal. And if you can't do that goal, it's like you don't have to worry about not being able to advance most of the time. So can you say what you ended up giving it on one up? I probably shouldn't do that just in case it's not. Let me ask, did we need another skate game already? Like, was it something where it's like... At least it was a little longer than a year. Everything they added was totally necessary. It's really not longer than a year. Didn't it come out? No, it's longer than a year. It's longer than a year. Well, late fall. I mean, it's a little over a year. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I mean, it's not really a game. It's maybe not a game that ever didn't need a sequel. Yeah, I mean, the first one was almost perfect. It just needed the ability to get off your board, which you can do now. And it doesn't work that well, but it still adds to the gameplay. I think the reason I asked is because something that I liked that I saw last year was rather than there being another burnout. This year, an annual burnout release. They're just releasing more and more DLC for it to augment the experience. I was actually about to say that is that I think a game like Skate or Skate 2, I guess now, would be better served in that model of like... I don't know, expanding the game in different ways just through DLC. And I mean, you know, obviously I don't think they could have added the ability to get off your board to the first one in a patch. They should definitely add motorcycles to Skate 2. Yeah, and hovercraft. Hovercraft, yeah. Two rollerblades. There's a lot of burnout in it. There's a lot of burnout in it. I would be awesome. Like the multiplayer now, it has the same kind of cooperative online thing, which is actually really cool. What I wish they did take from burnout as well is just having kind of being able to like own any street in the game. Like having a running score tally on every single street in the area. Because that would have, you know, that would have added even more to just the basic skating around and being engaged doing that aspect of it. But it's a good game. It just, it is kind of a weird sequel because it's not a game that was dying for a sequel. Maybe we'll go longer between Skate 2. It was this time since EA seems to be willing to let harmonics go without releasing a rock band iteration. And because Black Box was just kind of like rearranged and moved and everything. Oh yeah, I saw something about that today. Do they do layoffs at Black Box? I think the, I'm not sure about this, but I feel like the need for a speed team doesn't exist anymore. And they're going to do that somewhere else. And that the Skate team just got moved to a different building or area or something. But I could be totally wrong about that. I just did layoffs at EA Mythic. That was sad. Okay. Anyways, Ryan's a very important man. He's getting all sorts of like phone messages. But hopefully he can tell us about what he's been playing. He's one cactus cooler in. He's ready to be out. I feel a little loopy. Yeah, I just like to point out that, you know, if anybody who's listened to me on some of our one-up podcast knows that I'm being for cactus cooler. And up until today, I thought it was only available in Southern California. But there's some magical store here in Oakland that carries cactus cooler. So I'm very happy. That's the dream store. There are time warps in Oakland. Sitting here with three bottles next to me. So I'm excited to be here. Ryan's waiting for him to ride. Does break out and he's just going to go over there. Smash the windows and take as much gank as cool as he wants. Maybe. So like I said, I've been playing Castle Crashers. That's a lot of fun. Buy yourself? No, I've been playing with friends. That was actually the reason I started because I was like, "Dude, you're a complete castle cutter. It's awesome." So I'm like, "Okay. Let me try this." It's pretty cool. Have you played N+ yet? Like I told you to? No. Six months ago? Because you love platformers? I have not played N+ yet. At this point, are you not playing N+ despite Nick Suttner? Basically. Ryan does a lot of things despite me, like not answer aims or emails. Are you still playing Street Fighter II HD remix? I actually haven't played it in a couple weeks. I'll go back to it though. I'll go back to it when I get one of those mad cats fighting pads for which I have an indecent amount of arousal. You know what? The fact that people are like... The fact that people are like... The fact that people are like... I can't wait to get my hands on this mad cat controller. It sounds so weird to me because... It's like saying... EA put out some of my favorite games last year. Yeah. I thought... Because usually it's like... I can't wait to get those mad cats stink off of me. Very strange. Man, I touched the mad cat controller like three days ago. It's true. I've hardly ever in the history of my life played like with a third party controller that didn't feel like to avoid some sort of lawsuit they put the stick in the most obviously uncomfortable spot or something. Well there are PS3 controllers that have sticks in the 360 positions, right? I think watch it. I need to find one of those. Probably. There's that one where you can rearrange it. Like you can take out the analog sticks and there's different slots you can put it in. Why don't I just talk to Ben Heck and get him to make me one? Because you don't have a job. They're pretty controllers. Yeah. I don't want one. I think those are things that aren't intended for people like us. Those are like... intended for people with disabilities. Well... I don't think that's where we're going with that. I'm being totally serious. Doesn't Ben Heck make special controllers for like the guy I've been on. I didn't ask for a controller I could work with my feet. I'm just saying. I prefer the 360 stick places. You guys are building in a way out of proportion. Well I mean I mean just like hearing your... Doesn't mean you don't really make controllers for people with disabilities. Just your average third party controller like who's gonna use that other than like my girlfriend's dad cause it's cheaper and he doesn't know any better. That's exactly why. Yeah. Yeah. Now. Now Mad Kids is actually putting out some good stuff. Like they did some pretty good rock band peripherals as well didn't they? Yeah sure. I think so. Like the split... the split fret button base that they released last year was pretty cool. So what are you playing besides the castle treasure? Um... Any PC games? I went back to left for dead. I've been playing that for the last couple of nights. Alright. It's so awesome. I've been playing with the uh... the cheat mode to see what kind of stuff I could do. Against other people? No, no, no, no, no. I did just messing around like a single player. What do you mean? What do you mean cheat mode? You can... all the console commands? Yeah. You can like spawn tons of zombies or... Or spawn like a hundred tanks. The one that's shot in a worry like inflicted on everyone the first couple of weeks of left for dead was that. And once I play matches. What was that? It was just that if they were hosting the matches themselves and stuff like that and people joined they could like randomly like if they realized the other team was about to win. It was like spawn like a hundred tanks and all of a sudden it would be like everyone was a tank smashing everyone. I don't know. Made for some hilarious YouTube videos. Yeah, exactly. I mean it's fun for a brief Samantha. So I've been doing that. I actually haven't touched World of Warcraft in a couple of weeks now. What? Which is kind of nice in a way. It's because you're like home all day with your girlfriend. So it's like... Well no, I think um... The last day I touched WoW I think was New Year's Day. After that I was like okay I'm going to take a break. Well there was a patch that I wasn't there. Yes. Oh did it come out? Uh oh. Yeah the patch came out today which changes some stuff. Add some cool things. But also Ryan you may not have played since New Year's but you did play one night vicariously through me. I don't know if you remember this is at like 4 in the morning so I don't know if you remember entirely. I was playing PVP which I never do and I was talking to you on aim while I was playing and complaining about this death knight who kept killing me. You asked his name and looked him up on WoW armory and then started giving me specific strategies for how like looking at my character and looking at his for how I could beat him and they worked. Did you actually fight him? No I didn't actually that guy he killed me like three times before you'd given me the strategies and then I he left but then the next like probably a week later or something I was doing PVP in the same area against a death knight and you use the strategies that you'd given me and I beat him. So your training is complete. So so you you use the strategies like okay use your free spells to freeze him and then fireball him a lot and then freeze him again and move back and fireball him a lot more every day. So you should have ever had yourself on Craigslist Ryan. It was insane no like Chris he's making it sound simpler than it was but he was like giving me very specific like use this spell then this spell and he's only going to be able to use this against you and he doesn't have any trinkets that he can use. So like it was ridiculous. I feel like this is really funny too because I've never actually thought that Ryan's very good at PVP from what he told me. So it's like Ryan's like a boxing trainer like one of those guys that could never quite make it himself but he knows enough about this court. No you know what. So you want him in your corner he's like oh he's bobbing a weave and you've got to just do this this night. The thing about me playing wow like the class I played before I played a hunter and a hunter just is not going to win in situations where somebody jumps you. That is not true at all. You like you do like a spell to like make yourself faster you run away drop a freeze trap real quick and then turn around. The hunters hunters are not favored in surprise situations. I've seen hunters kick my ass when I got the drop on them. Well it depends on like how far away you are. Like if a road jumps up and like stuns me I'm dead. You know like it's a far wrong conclusion like I'm going to die. I think Arthur is enjoying this conversation entirely. There's going to be some message word post about why Ryan says. Arthur has a sleep on his past lap. Yeah. Um. You're urban. Wait. As a death knight I've had much more success with PvP. That's because the knights are overpowered. Uh they I think they are a little powerful but it's it's nice. Two things off that might change after the thing is not stopping before I forget one. I saw a gaff threat today saying it was like cults up saga online. Let's play it because I guess it's dead online right now so anyone out there I'll probably be playing this weekend if anyone wants to play and Phil you should play some as well. Sure. Do you actually mean weekend or do you mean like during the week? No no. Weekend. I have been losing track of days but I do mean weekend. I'll look at a calendar and the other thing we're talking about in the car I got to ask Ryan. Uh Anthony and I were postulating the contents of your closet. Is it all green shirts like Doug or how does it work? Wow. Um no I what do I just wear this shirt? Yes we literally have never seen you in any other shirt. What the hell that's not it's not true. Wow. We don't like half an hour for the first what the hell the only time I've ever seen you wearing something else was that night when we spent the night together. What what? Well whoa. I wouldn't say I was wearing anything. No you have Blizzcon me and Ryan shared a room. Oh right. At a moment. No we each had our own bed. I mean but. But I mean. Was you wearing some of your in parachute pants? I'd just like to point out to the snore really loud. Did I snore really bad? You did that. You did go one night. Oh. So answer the question. How many of those green shirts do you own? I only have. Why don't you watch every day? I own one green shirt. Or every week. I own a lot of. Or do you just not sweat? I own a lot of long sleeve button up shirts. There's a blue one and there's like a beige one and sort of a gold one. Sounds like a lie. I've got one for every army that I might try to infiltrate. Here look hold on. Hold on. Uh oh. What? What is going on here? Alright I have an issue of EG in here. I'm going to flip it open to my staff box shot and we're going to see what I'm wearing. What my shirt is. No it is in fact a blue shirt look. I actually do own more than one shirt. I claim photo. I like that. I'm like that. Yes. That was my last staff box shot. I like how a Giancarlo's picture and this is a Wilfred Brimley and Horstaceo from Pinata. Yes. Very nice. I can see it. Hmm? I can see it. No. Alright. Alright. Phil what do you plan? Okay um well for one thing I did get to level 80 in WoW so that's exciting but I'm working on an article regarding Wrath of the Lich King that I will be uh I'll be talking about that more so hopefully that'll be on the side. So the article that we've been waiting for is an article on WoW. No the article the first article I'm working on is about the other game I've been playing which is Prince of Persia. In case you didn't know WoW's hot right now. What? So. WoW is always hot. Basically Anthony sent me an email. WoW is like six. Here's what everyone says. I know about that how often was WoW the cover story of GFW after it came out. I mean it was like. Wasn't it like. Or like if it wasn't. Four of the 13 issues. If it wasn't the cover story it was like how can we make sure that WoW something about WoW appears on the cover. I think that we did for GFW specifically I think we did two WoW cover stories and how many times did it appear as a tagline though on the cover like something from WoW discussed. That's the cover though. Yeah that makes sense I mean Halo GTA you want those words in your cover that just like smart business. I'm not. Guys here's essentially what happened here's what happened a couple nights ago I go check my email I've got an email from Anthony and he basically orders me he's like you need to write an article about World of Warcraft on our site because we need clicks. I'm just I'm not going to lie about it this is what after Jeff Green left a GFW podcast and all that I he assigned me the rule of clickmeister that's become me ever since like all the time like I just like at all these like Google search things to our page is just like six Phillip shake your ass we need customers that's why that's why we're going to hopefully we're going to buy a camera real soon on the next podcast so we'll be wearing low-cut shirts yeah no okay anyways I've been playing Prince of Persia which I actually completed last night at like four in the morning and I played about three hours I had you like it you can top of John Carlo about it because yeah I have to fight you I mean how much did you like it what I don't remember I liked it quite a bit I mean I thought the hand holding was a bit much at times but I enjoyed it I think the issue with this is that it's it's difficult because it's a game that has really high production values and it you know it looks beautiful but I think there's some really like glaring gameplay problems that I had and specifically I think what I realized was a like last night after I've been playing for like three or four hours I realized that I really really didn't like the combat and there was a while I hated it at the beginning and then I started getting into the flow of it and thinking that I mean it felt a little bit like it people talked about I think Nick you've said it's like sort of like Assassin's Creed combat which I liked why I loved it I liked Assassin's Creed combat a lot okay because if you were about to insult Assassin's Creed combat I would have to throw a knife I'm one of those people who totally like Assassin's Creed including the combat but I don't think it works I don't think it ends up being quite like that here and specifically like where I had problems was a okay so there's four bosses in the game and there's essentially like four worlds each of those bosses has one of the worlds each each world has six stages and you have to fight that world's boss at the end of every one of those stages and the bosses all have these like as you're fighting them they have these moves that they do over and over again where you're doing like a time button press to escape or sometimes you have to tap a button to escape and then otherwise they hit you and you have to like they knock you down and they do these over and over again as far as I know like there's no visible like cooldown timer or anything they just they can do them over and over like four of them in a row and it ends up really really interrupting the flow of combat and it's essentially like what they're doing is they're taking like what you do in the in the actual like the outside of combat gameplay as you're running around as you're you're tapping buttons the same way to do different things and they're trying to implement that in combat but it really gets in the way of the flow for me and that ended up being super frustrating are you talking about the stuff like when you mess up and then they like attack you no no not when you mess up but like just they just do this throughout from what I at least unless maybe I was messing up and just didn't know so John Carlos saying that you suck it's possible it's totally possible parts parts of the combat are designed where if you if you nail it completely you can beat a guy in like 10 seconds so pull the balls in that in that not the bosses right on it well no some of the some of the bosses and there were there were points where I would like two or three of the boss encounters where I was able to defeat them really really quickly but then there were other ones where the boss encounter went on for like 10 minutes and they just kept stringing together these moves where they were doing like okay now they're jumping in the air so I have to press a to avoid them and now they've grabbed me so I have to tap B to get out of their hold you know yeah I mean I guess I mean I see what you're saying yeah I mean I I especially when they would change the different forms where it's like okay now you can only throw them now you can only use elica now you can only use this yep that like that kind of bothered me a little bit but then I was kind of okay well they're just trying to vary it up a little more I mean I think that was I think I think the problem was just to me that it happened too often in the combat for me and it ended up like lengthening the battles to a point where I was just annoyed with them rather than enjoying them and I never I never felt like I was able to just like enjoy the the flow of the combat and enjoy like trying out different combos and everything you really have to be paying attention because it's entirely timing so I mean you can't like I think saying it is something you have to be you know actively really like I don't know it's just very involving yeah sort of but I mean like they do have this really like really interesting well done casual combat system where you can do different combos really easily by pressing the different buttons but I know like I said I never felt like you have a lot of ability to explore that at least especially not in boss battles I mean in boss battles like you said they're they're doing those those specific economies over and over and you have to you have to do a specific move to stop them from doing that again and the the fourth of those bosses is one who you can't hurt at all you have to just knock him off ledges yeah that ends up being really frustrating in certain areas like there's one battle where you have to knock him into the corner and it's just like these you know like maybe four inches of corner space that you have to get him directly in that area in order to hurt him and if you don't then like if you're just a little bit off then you need to like work really carefully to reposition him and it I don't know so that was really so my biggest problem with with Prince of Persia I mean like I actually enjoyed the combat and have too much trouble with it but for me it was the the way like the way they did the storytelling because I mean I talked about this a bit before I think but uh like Prince of Persia stands of time was one of the best examples of storytelling and gaming for me whereas the prince was actually narrating things as you were playing and you know that's how the story came across like that's most of the story was called that way just in narration while you were playing whereas here it's like all the dialogue you have with Ellicott like I like it it's clever it's well written well added for the most part but you have to stop and talk to her to get the depth of it you how far did you get into the game like half probably okay because I mean I think I wasn't notified at first as well but as I got further and further into the game I actually ended up not being as annoyed with it and it may have just been because the combat was annoying me so it was a nice little break after it because they usually have new conversation bits right after combat so yeah I never wanted to break they killed the passing them for me I'd be so much happier if they were just kind of entering back and forth while you were exploring and yeah like into the levels again like I said I was feeling that way at first but by the time I got to the end it sort of it was sort of like it made sense because like they were they did constantly emphasize the fact that they were stopping to have these discussions and it was like sort of despite the fact that there was this pressing thing going on they were still trying to take they were still taking time to get to know each other it was sort of like I think that was an important part of the character building like I think that was on purpose yeah I was totally expecting to hate the characters too I mean I mean the prince is essentially just you know Dante typical smart ass guy or whoever I don't say that you're gonna make me know I want to play the game but but but he actually turns out to be like a really interesting character and charismatic smart ass yeah I mean it's not like that's an amazing thing that we don't see a ton of and all sorts of games well I mean the problem is that it seems like it's really gonna be bad like it's just gonna be totally derivative every character yeah exactly I think the only other example I can think of is maybe like Nathan Drake well that'd be as a same voice actor god that'd be a step up from like Assassin's Creed where you're just hand out here as a fucking dick the entire game it's definitely a step up from Assassin's Creed like I I like Assassin's Creed again but I didn't I never felt like much connection to Altair so um what did you think of the ending without getting into spoilers I actually liked it because much like fall out you know kind of the stuff leading up to that and including it is kind of the ending for me so it's not like I mean I know that that what the argument is out there about it being um how can I say this without spoiling it um a waste of time I guess but I don't know I thought it was cool and unlike Sans of Time or something yes yes it is um but I think that it's cool that it does that because it's so counter to what everyone expects from this type of game absolutely and I will say like um the final boss um without ruining anything again has two forms one where you're just doing the normal combat but then it switches like the second form you're actually doing the platforming that you're doing throughout the rest of the game so I thought that was really awesome and cool uh and very well done um and then the actual like the end segment I actually I actually did like it a lot I liked how natural it was like there's a there's a couple of like objectives that you have to do after you beat the final boss in order to finish the game and uh but they don't they don't tell you what these are you just kind of like know that you have to do them they don't give you like any flashing like text on the screen telling you what to do you just kind of figure it out yeah absolutely yeah I'll give it to you and I think for me it was also really interesting going from straight from Mirror's Edge to Prince of Persia because their total ends of the spectrum like they both try to accomplish the same thing in terms of acrobatics and things like that but one gives you total control over the character to the point where if you screw up even just a little bit you're dead whereas the other game it's like okay we're gonna do a little bit of hand holding you don't die in the typical sense and there was sort of opposite ends of the spectrum yeah I mean but they both kind of ultimately they both were kind of at their best when the main characters and full motion and kind of swinging and doing wall climbing and all that crazy stuff and it's funny how different they are but how they kind of deliver similar type of entertainment I guess uh one other thing at one other game I wanted to bring up really quick uh have any of you guys played gravity bone yet? Did an iPhone game? No no no no I knew what you're talking about it is a free downloadable game for the pc it's a first person shooter sort of and um like all of you it takes like 30 minutes to play I think it's down on the Quake 2 engine or something and all of you need to go play it like it's 30 minutes Nick you can borrow Anthony's computer after this and play it and it is really fantastic we should talk about it next week when all of you have played it gravity bone gravity bone yeah and it's seriously really really good Nick you will love it I promise you all right I'll talk about it's in it's played through a browser or no no you download and install it but it's like well it it made the source code for Quake 2 available for free yeah I'm just saying something but Nick can't play it on a Mac I don't think it works on a Mac so but like I said you can just you can play it here or play it at my place or play it somewhere where you have access to a pc it only takes like 30 minutes and it's fantastic so anything else for the break because we've been talking for an hour yeah we should definitely take a break all right come back and talk about reviews yeah reviews all right we're back we're ready to start talking about reviews the review process Ryan why don't you start because I mean you were the reviews editor and you're involved in some of the big decisions that went up including switching to a grading a letter grading system and you've been brandishing a knife so you can kind of run the conversation how you want boy well um I guess the letter grade system came about because this is your legacy huh this is your legacy well we all kind of collect all sorry I guess the one man interviews your legacy well we'll get to that but we all kind of collectively decided over time that the the whole like one to ten scoring system just didn't work like nobody really understood it because I feel like I've said this many times but like um you know the way that our scale worked at all those have publications is that you know be it one to ten or stars or the dots or whatever it is the opm did whatever the halfway point in that scale was so like five out of ten free gm um that was average right anything above the five we were saying is this is a good game this is a game you should spend your money on you know five is average it exists it's nothing really that special and then um anything below that you know was pretty pretty subpar and um people who didn't understand that you know if it's like below an eight hold on to be fair they didn't understand that because not all game sites use that same well right I mean that's the reason it isn't average for everybody right and we were we were essentially trying to say something different because I don't know I mean I none of us really ever agreed with I guess what we saw is the the uh sort of juicing of scores on other sites you know what I mean and the problem is I mean you know if if we gave us if we gave him a five another site gave it a seven that was more or less the same thing because seven was average for a lot of other sites and publications but obviously when a publisher sees that they don't they don't care there's like hey you guys gave it a five five sucks you know we're upset about that right and so um so we uh well at CGW we we went through this period where we had no scores on reviews which I thought was really cool that was actually uh I don't know if you remember that was the first time you and I ever communicated Ryan because I got a hold of you guys when I saw you were doing that and was really excited and I wanted to have you guys on my old podcast in the evil avatar radio and I had Jeff Green on to talk about it but I wanted you on he told me you wouldn't talk to me though oh what he just probably wanted to steal a limelight for himself no but um but so so we did that for a while and you know it was it was something I had actually wanted to do ever since I started at CGW but what we found was that was a huge failure with everybody with readers with um other people with ZIF thought it was pretty dumb and so when we when we made the switch to GFW we adopted you know a one to ten rating system and decided that sucked too and then the letter grades we figured was a really easy way of conveying like you know when we say this game is a C everybody knows what that means right like see your average you'd think so um well I mean you know people people understand that yeah we still ended up having you know being hassled by publishers even with that and well that was gonna happen no matter what the scale was I mean it's that's just that's the nature of their existence well once you equate a score with a grade it starts to feel more like judgment as opposed to evaluation I think does that does that make sense I think that when you were in school like a 70 is just a number but a C means average it's like a 70 can be curved 70 can mean a lot of things right well I mean like we we tried to not put numbers in the system like we tried to not not ever describe anything in terms of numbers like no one in the office had except for like Ryan and I had a conversion chart because we didn't want people thinking in those terms and I think that was a lot of tough uh it was tough for a lot of people in the office especially people who had been like doing just EGM stuff for so long of switching this mindset of like you know you don't think about a number first and then equate it you just think about it in this new letter scoring grade right we um go ahead I was just gonna say what was kind of surprising because I wasn't working there at the time is that you guys went back and switched all the old old scores to the and that kind of to me kind of ruined it because it's just like well people are just gonna equate that that was kind of a weird decision that was sort of it just kind of happened well I think that was also by necessity because I think like our CMS wouldn't support leaving it you know leaving that field as a number and having letters separately I think we kind of had to do that but yeah I wasn't I wasn't happy with that either that actually led to a bunch of problems because they were um you know so while we like b plus's weren't in the system so well I mean those I don't mean those kinds of problems those are just silly little bugs but like there were certain aggregator sites that that um I mean you know aggregators are two of them well there's there's more than more than a couple of different aggregators I mean you can I don't want to name names but like you know aggregators will take whatever um the different scales and they will normalize them into whatever their their system is you know and so we we had we had sites that would take like um like a B minus or a C or whatever and they would they would convert it to some some arbitrary number that made it made it seem as though we were being um harsher on the game than then we intended and it's because once you translate it and you again you line that up against the other big-sized draining systems it doesn't equate it doesn't make sense so like if you're gonna translate it to a number it's not gonna work it anyway it's like our our letter system was self-contained so anyway you go with it in terms of the aggregation it's gonna screw it up yeah and I know I did see like I mean just talking about whether or not people understood the letter system I still see like comments sometimes in reviews where like if a game got a C there will be people saying oh like a C that's like a seven 70 percent so that's that's okay because they're thinking about it like in the school grading system way so well but that's also kind of industry standard is like yeah 70 yeah so there but there's still like some weirdness with it I guess I guess that's the point of like not trying to equate it to numbers but and I think I mean to be fair and this is kind of something that like play magazine has said you know they they get a lot of crap for giving like really high grades and things but you know they've said we only review stuff we're interested in so of course our average grade is going to be higher and I mean they don't have scores anymore which is great but you know I think I think that is something that's understandable why 70 is kind of considered the average for a lot of sides because they're not covering every little tiny last piece of shovelware so their average grade is going to be higher than you know average well and a game spot back in the day I mean they used to use a weighted average system so actually getting a low score was really hard in some cases because you're not ever going to give like a game like a zero or whatever for gameplay and then you know a four for graphics but then you know an eight for tilt or whatever whatever the weighted average system was at the time well I mean well how edgian is that no ijin doesn't break it down by categories now no I think their final score their final score um if you look at the reviews like this score is not based on an average it's not but game spots was based on a weighted average so the scores were actually calculated based upon the individual categories and so you know a lot of the times you just you know you plug in the scores and you get the overall score and you're just like wow okay hmm you know and I mean like I know we haven't really talked about this off-air so I don't know if I should be bringing it up on here but I'm going to but uh well I mean we're you know we're thinking about like we're dealing with uh what we want to do with reviews on on Eat Sleep Game and how we're going to tackle that and I mean you know whether or not to have a score at all is definitely one of the considerations I mean do you guys think like is there a scoring system in your opinion for reviews that really works I think the only thing is that it actually worked is something closer to you know rented by it avoided or like thumbs up like a down like actually four or five stars or something I've done I think any way of I think any way of doing it that can be translated to a numerical thing doesn't work like I think I think it depends what you want to do with the site but if you're if you're running a site that you have any interaction with interaction with like publishers or anyone else like that can't work if it's going to be translated like if you're going to be able to be listed on Metacritic where you know they choose the grade then well I mean but also the problem is that like if you don't have a scoring system at all like and if you don't have one that can be translated numerically our publisher is even going to care about working with you because actually I mean I experienced this firsthand at GameTap the editorial side of GameTap that wasn't around for very long obviously but when we were coming up with the reviewing system one of the things that a few of us pitch was buy it try it skip it and we actually went around to publishers and said hey this is what we're thinking up for our reviews game and basically they're like yeah no that's not going to work and we're like well why not and like because you guys are not going to work out they're not going to send you a review code well part of it seemed like well you guys aren't going to get onto Metacritic or GameRankings or whatever and then sort of the illusion was that yeah we're not going to give you code if you're not going to get on GameRankings or Metacritic and it was just like an enormous slap in the face because like what do you do do you you know basically be like well we should just stick to our guns on this or do we go appease the publishers so we can get code and actually do our jobs right I mean and again that depends on how big a site you're wanting to make how commercial you want to make it and I can tell them to understand that but I mean again play doesn't have you know they they reuse stuff in time for print leads and they don't have scores anymore so I mean that's I think that that comes back to play being very positive about everything that they cover if you're in play then the response you're getting from them is generally something that's encouraging people to buy it and that's not necessarily a slap against play I mean they cover what they want to and that's cool and I mean they have some of the best art design of any magazine in the industry and I really like looking at play but maybe but publishers I think if there is like I think they wouldn't they wouldn't send out games just assuming that they were going to get get a good response if like if they think there's a serious chance of like it getting a you know a bad route up of any sort it's easier for them to just not send it and not have the game covered yeah the the possibility of them getting a skip it in that case was just so bad for them because they're just like well you're just basically telling them not to play the game and we're like well yeah that's that's a harsher assessment than a numerical yeah somebody can find something to love in a game that gets a six yeah exactly I mean if you're giving something a six or a c or whatever there's always you know okay there's some good aspects of this game but if you're just like yeah don't waste your money skip it that's a much stronger statement we're saying rent it even is kind of but in in the eyes of publishers I mean anything below a five essentially was that slap in the face I mean if it's below a certain point it's like really does it matter but people and and even I guess that said anything below like you know a four versus a three sometimes there's a big deal to people because it's like well and now it's they feel like you know we're being insulting when really it's just like hey this game's really bad but well what I've heard from from publishers is that the people who the scores really matter to are retailers you know like eb will we'll we'll look at scores and be like you know we'll order you know x amount of your game you know based on the average score you know so those are the ones that are ultimately looking at those though that's that's where that matters I guess getting games sold in retail outlets so when we like when that people ask that question of like do reviews actually influence game sales at all like maybe not on the consumer side but actually on the retail side there's some potential that it could which is understandable because I mean if if retail buys 50 copies of a game that sucks they're going to take a bath on that I think that I mean that state we heard a state of emergency in the past that screwed a lot of retailers I small retailers seriously I remember listening to like uh cheap ass gamer podcast they were talking to this guy you know him sub ladies M's Jesse used to run a small gaming store in New York and that seriously heard him because he had bought so many copies of state of emergency he just thought there'd be demand based on yeah the the idea of the demand and then so many people like didn't pick up the period or didn't bring it or didn't want to buy it or brought a pack or something and that's a that's a problem so and I think going back to what you're saying about the the skip it rented by a thing as soon as you have a hierarchical rating structure it will be turned into numbers by someone I mean because numbers are just a way to cut things off and as soon as you say well this is our hierarchy hierarchical method for validating this experience people are going to say okay well one of those is good enough for me and the other two aren't and I mean even saying rent it is essentially saying well this isn't good enough for you to buy but you should totally make sure the publisher doesn't get revenue for it when you play it well I think I would think a system like that like you'd be looking at like a zero 50 and 100 on you and that's just well I mean we were always looking at rent it as being like okay um you know check it out and if you like it then go buy it I mean it wasn't necessarily yeah just it's not even worth buying just rent it at Blockbuster or whatever and then that would be a very specific type of game so it's like hey if these are your taste you're gonna love this game but it's not you know for the average person then I want to try it first yeah so I think Ryan's getting ready to cut me I'm I'm brandishing Anthony's uh awesome pocket knife all right we should also talk about uh like just some of the reviews we've done in the past like you guys have any uh good review horror stories because I know people always like hearing this I think one of the I mean you know we always do our best to finish to finish games I think some people better than others I mean I always tried my best to and I did you know the best majority of the time but one game I certainly didn't finish because I couldn't I was blazing angels for we uh the first one because it was just like I did one where it's basically unplayable and it was just too hard because of the crappy controls and I gave the game a two at a time which I think is now an F on our one up but uh that was a game I'm just awful to play not fun at all and I got to a point where I just couldn't play more um I think in general the worst the the I don't know the worst or I guess the hardest reviews I've ever had to write were for games they they're totally mediocre right would they either I if it wasn't really bad or it wasn't really really good like all those games that are in the middle of this like sort of just like this this game exists those are always the hardest reviews to write yeah for sure I mean it's easy to write a review about a good game obviously and it's fun to write a review about a bad game who's lost to say and it can be entertaining well and I think it's like there's certain games where when you're reviewing them like you go into a review knowing like like you know just from from reading other publications what most reviews are going to say about the game and then like the challenge for me becomes how can I say something that's interesting and unique about this game so like a good example of that for me was with um lego batman which I think was one of the first reviews I wrote for one up that I was really really happy with um and but I went into it knowing like I was like all right I know that most of the reviews for this are going to be like hey it's another lego game if you like the other lego games it's like that so pick it up and I wanted to say something more interesting than that so I had to really like I spent a lot of time thinking about the game and trying to come up with an interesting thesis for my review and like I don't know so those those are always the most challenging for me yeah I think for me like one of the best or most enjoyable review experience I've had recently was for uh the world ends with you where I didn't know anything about the game at all like went into it totally blank and started playing and it's just like wow like why have I not heard about this game before and just like so excited about it and it was really just eager to write the review because I'm just like I haven't heard anything about this game I haven't been following it but it's totally awesome and uh oh god I hope somebody just didn't die um um but you know certainly yeah the the hardest reviews to write are the ones where the games that are really bad because you know that there are people that worked on this game there are people where this is their livelihood but that you're also you know you're performing a service for your readers you're trying to tell them look like this just isn't worth your money so it's it's kind of weird to kind of think in the back of your head that wow you know people you know there are people behind these bad games too something once you look in you get into the mystery too for me like I quickly you quickly get that feeling like once you start you know meeting meeting developers and doing previews and stuff and it's like wow I really need to you know that's a quick realization of like wow I really need to take this seriously and not kind of like I have to give something a score and write it up it's like wow you know that is like you said there is someone behind it so it's like if you're gonna you know if you're gonna be insulting to a game you really need to like be a good writer and know how to also be constructive right and at the same time you also have to temper your like inclination for people like you and I who are the same people like I play good in every game because you're like man like I was really nice but I'm about to tear this game a new one it's like I mean even great people make terrible games Anthony you were uh you were sort of on the uh dynasty warriors review beat for a while right like you reviewed a few of those right yeah I enjoyed typecast I enjoyed the first one for PSP and then after that I just like how many how many did you end up reviewing do you remember or was it just a few or anything it was like three so like how that's one I'm really interesting we're like how did you approach those like how did you approach writing something interesting about those because that that's another series we're like you know 90 percent of the reviews for each one of those is just like it's another dynasty warriors game and they've got like a hardcore fan following that's a good question I don't even remember if I did approach them interestingly or not I don't think you kind of brought up that I think you said like this you know like you said in your review like most reviews just talk about how yeah I mean I I don't know I I guess uh my conclusion was the in the end was if you like you know if everyone's tired about these then quit buying them because I'm tired of reviewing this shit I mean I don't understand who's still going up there buying them they have a huge bad base and um it is it is uh upsetting sometimes just uh so like I've had times when a developer would would email me you know after we published a bad review I once had the CEO of this company email me over it it was a pretty big game and he was basically like you know you're you're you're affecting you know my my livelihood and my studio with this review and it's like dude I I can't control what what game you put out right you know like we are reviewing the product industry where that's great huh I mean that's the difference between working with like uh you know what we think of as good PR and like frustrating PR to work with is like good PR knows that once the game is out there it has you know it has to stand send by itself and it's like it has to speak for itself and it's a good game of good reviews if it's a bad game it'll get better views right yeah except this was named PR this was the developer and right this was like the head of the company and um you know it's it's kind of so you know I do feel bad for those people but at the same time it's like well we're you know this is what we do like you should have made a better game well it's it was like the like the two human review for me like you know I've met Dennis Dyak a few times like I like the guy I like what Silicon Knights has done in the past but yeah at the same time you kind of have to block all that out when you're writing a review and you know just kind of get down to it because you have to tell your readers hey this is the experience that I had you know I didn't really enjoy it as you know did he uh contact you no but you know I know from you know third hand sources or whatever you know that obviously he was not happy about it but at the same time it's it's just kind of like you know I have my own job to do as well like I'm performing a service for our readers you know if they disagree with me great I know there are a lot of people out there that enjoy too human if you did fantastic but it's my job to kind of convey what my experience was with that game and if it wasn't a great experience I'm going to tell you that if it was a good experience I'm going to tell you that and I'm going to try to tell it to you as clearly as possible without you know kind of beating around the bush and I think maybe that's kind of my problem too is that you know I don't really usually beat around the bush because I'm like if I was reading someone's review I would want to know just tell me straight up is this game like good or bad and you know like rise of the Argonauts for example you know people got on me for that for being like really negative but I'm sitting here and I'm like this game isn't good like it's not a good game like I don't want you to go out and spend money on this because it is not a good game right and as I said too another issue publishers have with regularity is that uh you know when we're we don't want to preview a game and sometimes we're more positive or they get the impression that it's going to get a review and it comes down it gets like a you know a negative review they're like what happened you know whereas where's the disconnect it's like you guys are positive about this we thought it was going to get a good score and the problem with us in one office it's like regularly it would be you know totally different people reviewing it and previewing it I mean I think we're all very subjective and it's all about like our individual personalities and tastes and that's done on purpose right like it was done on purpose that you know a lot of times we would try to have different people doing the review than did previews previews right if someone gets oversaturated on previews you don't have a different person to do the review but then that's tough for publishers to kind of you know they didn't and it's just their job in PR they're trying to plan they're trying to like set expectations and plan for it but they're like hey what happened and we're like well it's a different person reviewing it that preview and it's not even that it's it's also like just that the previews are sometimes like for example I mean I did two previews for uh the new spider-man web of shadows right um I did two previews for that uh last year both of them were very positive previews because the first one I went and I just saw the game and it looked awesome and then the second one I actually got to play some and it and it played really awesome but sitting down and playing the game for whether you're playing it for like you know 20 minutes or playing it for like three hours or something that doesn't always tell you what the full experience is going to be when you're playing through the complete game so then when you got to sit down and actually play through the whole game nick you discovered that like it was fun for the first few hours but then it ended up becoming it ended up being not good and I was gonna say I mean I've done previews and then done reviews and had different opinions because I mean having knowing people who are working on development side like the they they take vertical slices of really cool things and throw it out there because they know like this will get positive buzz it isn't like they're ignorant about like the fact that they're bringing out like an awesome part of the game and I think you're always writing for the reader so I think it is important like go you know going into previews we're often excited it's like hey it's a brand new game it's new ideas so that is going to come across more like positively as it were but that's because the people reading it also you know they want to hear that they also have the same excitement as you so it's like if it's you know if you're sad about it you're going to share that with readers but you know when it comes down to the review and you have all game in front of you it's like yes you're going to be you know very realistic and clear about everything in it well that's another another interesting thing is kind of the way that readers identify with reviewers like certain once you kind of get into a groove reader start identifying you with reviewing certain types of games I think since my my second go at one up was so short and that you know I've been in print for a pretty long time people just didn't know who I was so that when my name was attached to the two human review nobody nobody could identify it with me they just didn't know what my tapes were in games they didn't know what I liked and what I disliked I seem to recall reading on the internet that you were an intern or something yeah if they had just tossed in an intern for 10 years wasn't wasn't that the one where they were like he's just a PlayStation fan boy all right I mean was that that one yeah and it's like well actually you've worked in engine of power opm and you were the Xbox guy at game tabs yeah I mean I played about I mean I try to play everything the only genre that I haven't like really played a lot of recently or JRPGs but you know because I myself like I'd like to be educated on everything that's out there so when I am reviewing something I know that there's you know there's always something that you can compare it to or whatever so that readers can kind of also identify with that so like I remember when I when I said that oh you know Fable 2 is kind of like for people who hated oblivion you know because oblivion is just kind of the sprawling thing where Fable 2 is really focused like people automatically got it they're like oh okay like I understand that whereas you know sometimes you would take you a thousand words to say that but in like three words you can say the same thing you know so you know we've also heard that you know different publishers have like files on individual ones of us especially larger ones so they that's definitely yeah depending on who's reviewing games they have expectations and that you know I think like you know I'm kind of known as the A+ guy because I gave three in a year and I hear Ryan Scott's generally hard to work with I've uh but uh I've heard that from a couple who I do you know I can be overly combative I will else I will also say that uh and I mean you know this is a while ago so I don't know if this is still the case but when I just started or I just arrived in San Francisco and started working for one up one of the first previews I got um the uh the people who are giving me the preview and I won't say what it was for but they uh they told me that one up was uh had a reputation in the industry for being assholes yeah which I mean I just think probably just because we we generally write I mean at one up like there was a tradition of writing harder previews and reviews like and the other thing like I mean like we we always sort of stood up for the things that we wrote when publishers had a problem like we never like backed down to them you know I mean I remember sitting on my wrist and we said this we stand by it like there's nothing you can say that it's gonna change that. One of my first reviews for EGM uh we ended up having a follow-up call with the publisher like a roundtable with all the reviewers and them on the phone and she went in the room to talk it out like we're like sure we'll back up our review we'll talk about it but you guys want to it's like yeah if that helps your you know your it helps you sleep it and it helps your peace of mind it's like yeah we'll talk it out that's totally cool it's like if we're you know we shouldn't be publishing reviews we can't back up anyways so we were totally open about that and like you said right not back it down but I was what I said about the A+ thing is it's like you know really it's kind of a silly stereotype I reviewed at least twice as many games as anyone else had won up in the time I was there because I that's what I did most of the time was an intern that's all I did was play games interview stuff and I played a lot of terrible games so if you play enough games you're gonna get up giving a lot of good scores as well so I think there's an idea now maybe on the publisher end that I give higher scores and some people on average and so the reality is like if I review bad game it's gonna get a bad score yeah there's also just this idea though that uh like some people don't think a perfect score should ever be used and I think that you were you've been a person who disagrees with that and who wants to use it's a it's a bad thing that people call it a perfect score - yeah yeah exactly so exactly um the other thing that that kills me fortunately I didn't have to deal with this too often but the really aggro publishers you know Karla knows wrong with those who who get who flip out anything less than like a perfect score like the publisher that you can give like a nine out of ten whatever to their game and you say like one slightly not completely goingly positive thing in the text and it just they they think that you're you know public enemy number one or or an entry like you know there was a feature on the back of their box that you didn't discuss in your review and it's like well it's really up to you you know what what you want to talk about and how you want to approach your review so well I mean that's one thing that again like I think that the way that we approach reviews might be different from the way that a lot of other people approach reviews which is I think like we're all interested in tackling reviews in a more subjective way in talking about the stuff we think is important in the game the stuff that was important to our experience with it whereas some sites you know some some sites I mean they want to hit on the graphics sound yeah some sites want to cover everything and want to make it a very like a reviewer they talk about everything like as though it were a game manual and because it gets clicked through using page views let's be honest I mean that's what I think of when I read uh sites uh I guess I won't throw names because that wouldn't be cool sites with long reviews yeah sites with long reviews well I think to play doubles advocate obviously there are people that want that though that want like a giant review that they can dig into I bet you those people are like me I go and read those longer views and I read the intro paragraph and then I'm like page five I mean there comes a point like I mean how like how long how much can you write before you just eventually devolve into just insane rambling I just this is a veiled instantly veiled insult towards me no no I mean like no okay you might you might your share went through a copy I didn't you you might write like a 1200 word review whatever I'm talking about the people who write like like 7 000 words or something like how can you possibly make a game that's right it's called it's called repeating yourself and changing the words um I always you know a lot of people used to um this kind of ask like people why doesn't want to do longer reviews oh this is a pretty short review I think that shorter um very very concise reviews are better yeah and I always find I always I always think my the best work I've ever done has been with short word counts because I you know everything you say it has to matter like um the small the very very small um in the three man easy interviews the smallest ones would be like 90 words you know you had to yeah that's they just as much as you could use this magazine is dead and here we are not working for them well that always really bothered me it was hard but then was some of the most enjoyable and I think best reviews I wrote is like him and I write like 90 words or something like uncharted like that's really difficult but I kind of liked having to sit there and go in 50 maybe 90 90 always but having to like distill your entire thoughts about you know 20 hours of your life into like into three sentences and try to take you 20 hours there's something wrong well I'm not in charge well well part of the reason that we um mostly retired three man reviews me gm was because it was for most people it was it was difficult to get much out of those 90 words well and it was labor intensive having three people maybe we were doing three different games well there was that no god that's a lot of that's a lot of time I mean I you know speaking of not finishing games the only times I never finished games it was like during the holidays and it was like yeah I have like four games all going into EGM that could you know I sucked I'm sorry well it's funny too about the about one-ups reviews that people would complain about their length but I'm always in the back of my head I'm thinking well but you actually read it right you know whereas with these really long reviews they don't really I mean a lot of people don't read them they just look at the score and they're sitting right at the top too so it's like people could just come and get that and go away but if they're actually like staying and reading past that you know what I mean it's like I always liked that we laid it out like that and I think a good compromise to the long reviews would be a more more compelling preview content I feel like that's a line that that went up tread well a lot of times but there were some games that people were interested in where there was just no means to do that extended preview content especially in EGM yeah and I would say like you know like four people who are looking at reviews and wanting reviews to be like just descriptions of what you actually do in the game to me that was always the territory that was that's what you do with a preview and I mean you can talk about that when Grand Theft Auto 4 came out how much could you have left to say about the game other than well this is how it turned out yeah um it just made me think of a Grand Theft Auto 4 review that I read in a magazine where they basically opened their review section saying um well you know our game in the month is Grand Theft Auto 4 and we don't need to tell you that this is an awesome game and then they proceed to tell you how I submit it here's like four pages that tell you just that and it's like well if that's how you're approaching it why why bother like it's it's this this review the verdict was decided before you ever put it typed a word that's like reviews that say we don't need to talk about how great the graphics are let me tell you how great the graphics are well that and that's exactly why like like I said there there are these certain reviews that you enter and you're like you know how certain certain review or you know that a large portion of people reviewing this game are going to talk about it in that same way so like trying to come up with a unique way to say something about the game or something interesting and that the other people aren't saying that's always been really important acknowledging the cliche and then using the cliche is arguably worse than just using the cliche and as far as like well the graphics are amazing we don't want to talk about the graphics because everyone's saying that they're amazing but oh I'm not saying like I'm not saying like in the review you should acknowledge that necessarily I'm just saying like you should like that's why like I was saying it like I'm always interested in trying to come up with something unique to say not not just acknowledging it in the text but like yeah we're in any other thoughts where we take a break all right we'll be back with some letters from a recently shut down magazine and closing thoughts all right we are back for our final segment of the show we are going to be reading some letters from a magazine that is no longer with us and we will just be reading where they're from not who wrote them yeah to protect the innocent yes uh there's on carlo why don't you start us off wow okay I'm writing response to the letter you're all nerds to us in blank issue number blank specifically the comment is there really a need to have the game at 1201 a.m. and my question is is there really a need to disc gamers like that I mean just because I am my friends don't sleep with a different supermodel and have a six pack and all this shit that makes you think you are better than us doesn't mean we don't have a life and you can do this without expecting some sort of retaliation wow this guy's angry and I'm really sick and tired of morons like you and people I know who think that they're better than us because of the aforementioned sex and six packs sex and six packs say that fast all right I like the piece that I ever mentioned to and trust me when I say we are not the fat balding overly well balding overly skinny full of full of acne under 12 and what was it 35 year old loners just look at the staff of EGM they're I mean cat fancy I really wish that I could hear Jeff Green reading this letter in his angry nerd voice I know of no one on the staff who fits your profile wow I know of no one on the staff who fits your profiling bitch in all probability one of the two things are going on one you are spoiled rotten brat with too much money in time and two you were mugged by someone and a four the horde shirt wow if it's if it's if it's one then go chisel your ass before I talk about your insecurity problem if it's too so what no really so what the world isn't going to care and only because of your blatant disregard of courtesy do I care what does that even mean that's the best thing about this none of this is context yeah uh too many big words for uh too many big words for too tiny iota of a brain you have use a dictionary you ask so while you drown your sorrows in booze and choose condoms or not I will choose frag or sticky can i get a copy of the elements of style I would like to point out that actually all the people um on the uh aforementioned the undisclosed magazine staff actually do have six packs and do sleep with a different super model every night so we're good rather i don't know where this letter comes from but oh it i'm just gonna story ain't there no intro no like hey how you doing it's just have you seen new screenshots of dragon ball z burst limit for the xbox 360 and ps3 it looks better in graphics and the looks of it goku and vegeta attacks great in this game by so and so the end did you write that letter and then yeah the dragon ball z burst limit balls my face um and then uh and then this one is not that there's anything wrong with this one's written by someone who has the same first name as me it's an anthony so dear EGM oops cat fancy cut from tree i read issue number blank and dante seem to have turned into the dark the dark side in devil may cry for is there any reason capcom would make him do this it's question mark exclamation question mark oh and who is the new the Nero guy you keep talking about and what is up with that devil bringer arm from what you wrote it must be really powerful and if there's written a pencil and you can see spots where you like erased it to like change bell hanging shit rad oh yeah i like how you know what's enough makes fun of people but kind of like a lot of those. This is uh - i think that letter was endearing personally i could have editor shane bedonhausen hello we've never met and you have probably never heard of me yet i'm in prison over some bs and i'm not going to lie i got drunk when i had fell asleep with some lady's car which i thought was my own and she happened to find me on her way to work so i got a three-year sentence but only i have to do one year anyways i'm putting together a graphic novel and i would like to see if i can get some help from you the novel will be it be about what happened after final famous seven advent children based around three solar deserters there were smart enough to get to get out just as emerald weapon attack i'm creeped out by the way that philip is nodding as he hears this he's like yeah it's sold do this concept novel i would even hear to refresh my memory about where towns are their names and about the extent of the destruction and whatever else you could uh you could send to and you could send would be helpful if you decided to agree to help the 23-year-old artist slash felon thank you for your time and effort please help can uh can people listen to podcasts in prison yeah a lot of prisoners i sure have an internet access i just think it's weird that he wanted chaine's help to like figure out where location is all these town like why isn't he a milling like square or something all right well chaine's uh chaine knows his final fantasy i think there's all two remotives here i'll help him all right i have a good letter here this letter uh says uh i'm very impressed with the content of the magazine i love the game reviews and previews they give a lot of information and they give me their opinion about a certain game i also like how you give your opinion about certain games and ranking them because it tells me what games i shouldn't should not get like these are all different things or something like this is the same you see in last scale from cadaver by the way oh yeah this is how the aliens talk although i think your magazine is awesome in my opinion there is one major flaw that i noticed in this magazine i i think that there are too many ads and some ads aren't even about video games other than that i really love your magazine now too many ads let me explain someone in ziff love that too now the reason that we are all sitting here doing this podcast and reading this letter to you is because uh of just the opposite of what you described you described too many ads um that's actually not a problem that's a good thing that's a good thing that keeps magazines sounds like they're not really good problems yeah so they they don't just magically stay around that's not a real question ads mean that they are doing very well for the cods for the like the cost of him having to turn another page it's like the difference between that and unemployment yeah a lot of people okay we said we were gonna do this this time i'm just saying all right i have a much much more upbeat letter here i need backup now my big brother has declared that the we is undergoing a private recall and will not be selling for three to five months he also says that nintendo is losing money fast and that ps3 will soon be the king of all systems if this is true that my plans are purchasing a we are obliterated please tell me he's wrong because my xbox 360 would look great with a nintendo we besides yeah i actually think that uh what you should go out and do is you should buy like a a seven inch really thin spike and then what you do is you insert it just next to the eye push it in there and then jiggle up and down real quick frontal lobotomy is that what that means brother yeah because that fool is obviously not in his right mind you know this was a letter now advocating murder it's not murder it's a lot of these letters are written on half a line piece of paper with pencil was this sent from like earth to like what in what universe is nintendo losing money fast you know you know what's weird about that uh my friend who works at toys or us who know someone who works at tj max said the exact same thing wow yeah and no not really i'm just also signed by an executive from sony like please print this letter that was like uh economists unsure whether tj max is being hit hard by an option and it's a picture of like a shelf of stuff in shambles uh but seriously the ps3 is going to be the king of all systems we're just gonna wear a crown it's gonna wear a crown and a cape i think it's gonna be excellent all right let's wrap this one i have a way to have a fan mail email for us for a rebel FM whoa um guy writes his name is guys and i'm not saying he is a guy like the guy from final fight guy yeah awesome man i loved him it's true fighter alpha he says by now every popular gaming venue be it blog podcast or newsfeed has covered the ugio buyout of one up but it was not until i saw the mega-64 satire that i came to question the impact of all this coverage on all of you how do you feel about the way the situation is being portrayed more importantly how is this affecting all of you i find it strange to have this amount of sympathy for people i've never met but at the same time i feel okay asking because it was the individualistic nature of your dialogue that brought me back to your blogs editorials and podcasts to begin with and he signs it a die hard man so uh yeah how is the the way that all this is uh i'd like to find out how it's affecting ryan personally i want to know what is your day-to-day life like no i think that at this point we're beyond all that good answer maybe you are no well i mean like the way that people are portraying ugio buyout and whatever however the characterizing it like that's we're not in that loop yeah you know like it's cool seeing like a mega-64 short kind of about us in a you know like game drew song about us like yeah and the mega-64 thing was really goddamn funny yeah go google we will we should put it in the mega-64 we should put it in the show we should put it in the show and on or on like the blog post so what but in podcast have you been on this week fell well no i was gonna say though that uh i was gonna say just that i mean i think that the biggest way it's affected all of us is just like the awesomeness of seeing like the outpouring of support and like all the people still who still are subscribing to our podcast and still want to see what we're talking about and what we're saying even if it's independent instead of on a big website so that's that's really excellent so well i i don't yeah i wasn't trying to like i didn't mean i didn't mean to like that kind of stuff and i appreciate it for drunk on cactus cooler but but i mean like what the way i interpreted like what you read is like i mean just like all the coverage all the news stories on like the kotaku is into a six and all that how they're covering it and it's like i'm not paying attention to that stuff anymore but the mega-64 thing was really cool still trying to worry about how to put food on my girlfriend's table but um metaphor yeah all right let's wrap this up um everybody's listening please check out eat dash sleep dash com uh dot slash eat dash sleep dash game dot com man we need to get a better website what are you or you if people just type in eat sleep game dot net now he redirects oh really so we're just gonna turn everything into something that redirects like bacon dot com or redirect to eat sleep game yeah so that's a good idea have you guys all right check that out podcast check that out for all the latest episodes of rebel fm as well as writing for myself nick anthony arthur and others also be sure to visit talking orange dot com for the latest um creation from the minds that brought you the one up show you can find donate buttons on talking orange and uh an eat sleep game should you feel inclined and for a complete ridiculously long list of everyone who's donated so far stay tuned at the end of this episode all future donations are going to get your name read on the air the week after you donate and we're actually talking about some cool other cool ideas to make your donations count so oh so we'll have news about that don't forget to check out geekbox radio geekbox don't worry don't worry i'm going to give these guys a chance to pimp their own thing the donation thing applies there too thank you hold on hold on now this does sound uh i did want to send a special shout out to the uh the guys that megas 64 for their hilarious e gm metaphors video so yeah like like we're saying search e gm metaphors on youtube or check the show notes like the blog post for this we'll try and link it there um so let's let's find out where we can find everyone on the internet this week ryan you can start since you're so eager oh boy you can find me on on episode three of rebel fm which you're listening to right now if you if you spill cactus cooler on our couch we're gonna have words there's no there is no spillage i realize you're the ryan's god no i work so hard to get that cat pee out no more it is cactus cooler so let's go cooler believe me i don't want to spill my cactus cooler anymore than you want it to be spilled all right what you got damn website all right so so you can uh find my podcast uh called the geek box or geekbox radio whatever and our tunes now what you were fretting about for like four days i wanted well apples look so long to validate my feed which is weird because for us itunes is like right away and soon it was i did it oh i did it on a on a saturday so it was over the weekend i think that kind of led to the lag but uh yeah response has been good so far which always been very good um we're is beating us we're number one and for now on itunes yeah wait till this podcast comes out and i'm i'm i'm no one because we we've taken your power well the uh the site is www.geekbox.net my my twitter account is ryan scott ryan what ryan scott ryan okay oh okay so i have i have three first names my name is ryan kurtis scott okay so people many people just forget that my name is ryan and they'll be like he's scott or whatever he watched us on l last week or channel i did not let's get about people with their first names and one of my freelancers tom check um a lot of people listening probably know his name would always forget which name was my first and last so he just started calling me ryan scott ryan so that he just covered on it yeah and so ryan sandwich so when i registered my twitter account ryan scott was taken so i registered ryan scott ryan so you can you can find my update on twitter uh you can find the podcast on my website on itunes so subscribe dig donate thank you yeah i got a twitter you can just uh do a search for my name on there and uh i will have something else going up soon but uh i have to take care of some other business first before that happens and you're on the uh giant bomb podcast yeah i was on giant bomb uh last week or yes last week so go check that out phil what have you been on no wait you're turning oh my okay i got this don't worry don't worry i got it what go last night i recorded the everyday gamers podcast it's everydaygamers.com you can search on itunes for them that should be up by the time you hear this also the cheap s gamer podcast last week so go check that one out i must like to say thank you for all the tons of reviews on itunes for us i mean thanks for everything as usual donations all that is fantastic and we're still getting them which is amazing um actually i think i think we should try to maybe dig this episode again because last time we had like thirteen hundred digs or something but we didn't get the front page because they were registered to spam because we had so many new users and then all those people dug right into the first page all right we were sacrificed on the altar so we should we should try to pick the front let's try to actually get on the first page proper so uh what about your twitter did you uh and sudden are we gonna put all that in the show now it's on the front page what about you yeah it is what uh we'll find you on the internet i'll be writing on the side i seem to be the uh the most prolific poster currently because you've done one yeah i don't know because i try to keep people abreast and i like saying breasts people like breasts people do like breasts i like i'm a fan um yeah i'll i'll be posting more um thanks for the comments on the mirrors edge thing you'll notice that i didn't mention the fucking game once on this podcast so that was a good way to get it out of my system good all right anthony people find me nowhere but here i'm not selling out to a bunch of other places like the rest of you fucking we'll see we'll see where you are in a week i'm just kidding if you want me on your podcast is fucking ping me and i will be there all right and then uh i've been on a i've been doing like a podcast tour i've been on a bunch of podcasts so you can find me on a i didn't interview with uh in-game chat just the old evil avatar radio guys um with gamers with jobs i was on their show and also the super happy fun time show which if you only listen to like the first minute of that we didn't actually buy that that was a joke and also uh twitter.com/p cola do you want to uh throw a thank you out to the slash film podcast for their uh yeah well i mean a lot of podcasts a lot of different people out there have been a lot of different blogs and podcasts have been mentioning us and sending people our way so thank you to everybody for all the support um you can subscribe to rebel fm on iTunes and zoom so please subscribe leave us a review and uh i think i should end this by saying and i watch us this day real quick uh you know we're still figuring out like how we want to cover stuff on the side and the podcast too we don't have much of a structure yet but i mean if you guys have any things you want to hear us talk about specifically or any you know segments or anything like throw that in the in the show comments and we'll yeah um i think we should end this by saying midweek confirmed hump day confirmed hump day confirmed can we say hump more often yes all right uh so yeah after this after the closing song whatever we'll be doing a list of all the people who donated see you all next week those guys do you think you know what we're doing? just take a look at the other side of the video. [Music] all right so uh i'm here with jade hi hello you weren't on the show unfortunately not you guys suck it's not our fault well it's kind of our fault we did want to avoid having you on the show so it was essentially our fault actually so all right this is uh this is sort of our um oh my god what's going on quit it computer computer okay this is sort of our uh i don't know rebel FM after hours thing all we're gonna do is really quick we want to read off the names of all the people who donated because i mean since since we started rebel FM we've had a ridiculous number of donations like literally this list i have here is i think close to uh maybe over 800 names it's pretty impressive so yeah so we're gonna read all of them we're just gonna go really fast um essentially we're just reading names here so if you're not interested you know that's fine you can tune out now and uh we'll be back there will be an actual show next week um like the one that was before this all right so starting off with a mcwell e michel d s ross s mike e jeff l wolfgang d robert b michael d victor l elfredo b norman l jeffree r gens k matthew g daniel b and jimmy n all right and we've got lee r russ m steven f stan s brad a andre s k cal e or cal m not sure andrew j mattias b ryan m simon c jan s work here to be yawn also yawn s perhaps michael t roovin g ben m tomie k bjorn w chris o chris h and robert m all right we got a shane m jibrel j greg k drizen r jucker l uh apo b james l ryan s dan j christopher o emil j brenda m ravi m lincoln t michael h edwin l jens b ross c nathaniel d and jesper b and uh we should apologize here also if we mess up your name um i'm very sorry we are ignorant americans so um you're still very thankful all right defen b callen b kyle c will k dusted w mon el calib e jonathan k philip k nicolas s christopher f susan s frederick o robert s robert t mike k brice m victor m andrew d and van lee c all right uh tami s joseph d josh r gram p juhap p christian a eran m benjamin f ronald b mark m steven h david m uh christian n m i h angri turnip incorporated richard k john n and alisa c patrick r and timothy d brian g ben n justin a steven w nathan s sid o huan m daniel h vincent a yasun d michael w destructoid.com emelio o chris h john w guy t thomas b matias s and hana c okay chris m ed s eran b josh b mark r nathan l mark anthony d michael b matthew p derrick b robbie s jeremy g matthew m kellen b randy k michael u jordan c nate c nicholas p jack b team o el james c shoe kanth r zakari s patrick b joshua h and d p chris s jake m david g henry k and i lost my place uh oh there we go oh steven w nathan s sam t christopher w rob c andrew h paul s christopher b shawn h all right christopher b paul r keith s andrew v john w scott r joshua b randal w alix w jonathan c brian h tyron h timothy j Nicholas r kody h daniel e gareth h sarah b brent h martin p andrew m martin p brian m frank r iden m john c carol w william p mohamed f samuel d rame v douglas v rodney d hullio l h t gold arthur l michael w lars eric d john r matthew r waid r eli s paul f jeffrey a mr fid race uh karen b james w lennard m earnest h jimmy x don e charles l michael g jonathan m matthew n erick h spencer g robert m william q david c joseph d shaun t jake v martin s kenith t steven r julian l michael b grainiger o hose l alexander k s w davidson harry h chad f kevin d dordin h michael v abraham r penny h and john m also if you hear anything in the background like rumbling of dishes and stuff this is this is anthony he is cooking us food at the moment so he's amazing after we finish reading this list we are going to eat uh david s luke h john g justin j mobile gadget news william e joshua m robert b michael a brian b json r ryan b berry s joe h matthew o marcus c richard d jc and jared j brad a man hold on computer difficulties brad a and david s chris l brian r rails j mark h steward r steven p steven l steven a david t david p dennis g jonathan c richard n dustin p kinder s ray f chrystopher g james b anthony is now doing a dance while we read and now we last interpretive uh bradley c mark s miguel m joe l yes it's me again miguel m sorry joe l uh dean p jason l uh geroen b vica v uh jonathan m joshua l cielo c carlos o uh tyson i eric p jeremy b katharina g jason g james p nicholas c justin y b matthew s patrick c david h alex h mike b chrystopher l mike b rufo s ken p derrick j jared s brine m james n william g steffano c drift incorporated why does computer keep doing this to me joshua h mattias d joseph b and frank m impure keeps screwing up just on me uh anthony w jeremy d nancy m adam e eric h edward z all over j jc thomas v jason m jeremy a john s gram h lezley s ben u michael r randal b enl michael m raffael d ryan p matthew m michael a nicholas f jeremy r hectare h alex j thomas w william b christian r daniel s travis f william h terence s tyler c sara m anthney k p a garcia gram m josh b okay michael c charles m nathan w thomas f dale j glenn g jkub m amando r lane d jason d vincent f robert l brian w berry f thomas p jkub r joshua e christopher s david s and douglas b gentry n steven m rall a adrien w sober-minded roman g greg m zack s andrew h conlan m james g dustin b james p ben k ryan s peter m robert j adam m george m phillip j jason g daniel d collin g angus m joll b robert d kl w kurt a mark b adula a Richard k danny p fizzo tv tyran s derren a mark s bjorn t brian l fran sua d and jan steffen g eric m gram a hulio m polo a antony m Richard h marvin h james b Richard a robin m cori c jeffery d jeffery r Russell p biong p chris s jerry or gerry c not sure which one john d jackson w Richard a Derek k kevin j andrew r adam b Nicholas s jeff s john c ashley w steven h john f matthew g matthew f jeffery a greg k timothy b lewis b jason t timothy l adam s and step on t craig r joshua k darek p Ricardo c Courtney d christian t andrew h jillian r jenn u s alicia c lance y john c bliam m kevin j nick d brian h david s david s david s david r gram c those are actually two different david s's right one after the other uh lewis s david t phillip n james b steven t Nicholas b john b zack t bronson z shan v Helen c andrew w christopher f jeff s justin m phill e dave h Cheryl f james p adam h christopher r kris p kevin n neel g Matthew e ben s jason k matt a james t Martin h uh hosiah l or josiah jeff m rob g matthew m rodney j brian h oogart i diago v marcus d and nogan matthew r jonathan v brian s james h shan m mark b kim w edward d eric m chris i jeff s w phillip s ryan f michael h ben s cray chris k won k uh scott p kyle c michael t ken w chris m ethan b justin h sherman r anthony p dancey frank c matthew n david o kenice s okay i'm going to butcher this one oyen oyen h o-e-u-n-h your name rocks pune c justin j tang h torben j j daimanto pol list i think that's the one that's the one that's the one that's the one that is the daimanto polis excellent andrew w andrew g james s that's a serious name yes uh matthew o nathan b andrew g peter t camera and s christopher g jeffury g uh heirland h lucas l benedict c doug a peter b david b philip m uh mohamad f scott g chris r no s c mark o v and cori brothers simon i william g robert m henry b daisy g evlin d raimand l adam c matt s gregory b anthony c mark m daniel s nelson w benjamin o kevin b eric a matthew g richard w andrew w blair j kevin h edmund b ismail h brandon a kneel s james s linda v carolyn o hank k david b jkabel andrew c benjamin i ulysses e mica g david j erin c kevin p john h abby l lick w justin f matt b michael l jr d matthew n michael b david h vedron p timothy l matt g mattias j george t frances d brian y jicop t timothy w Diane g michael s eric m nicolo a matthew g brandon s john o jonathan m matthew k where lindo m max s shawn e racee co j dale c erin l gram o william j to moor h adam s mary b mike k tahir h bob m erin b demitri i robbie h james d ashkan d chris k let's o tyler l james h corbin k dylan c paul s ryan m steven l wain s nic j daniel d diego m edward c trever a robert r rishad q kori c and tony o m josh p sam l thomas b jeremy w eric d excuse me uh michael m wendell c kennith m christopher r patrick w henry g jennifer h cori s mark a erin j j jason b jeremy p martin s craig c clayton l ray c ray s steward b zahir p daniel t steward m kevin w alex p shawn m cliff o gram r robert c anthony c ryan s all right uh daren d tom k daren e james s jeffrey g john r demetrius l peter t john a lars i paul m louise i johann w sibastian v callin c brian s nelson u married mary w chris g and june y c wow okay so that was that was the whole list um that is an insane number of people it is uh as we said in the future um if you donate we will be reading your name off at the end of every episode the week after you donate we're also thinking up some other ways um hopefully to uh you know encourage people to donate make you make you get some more out of it than just the good feeling of donating to us and uh whatever we come up with i mean anybody who's on list list who's already donated we'll be sure to include you guys in on already so um yeah thank you for listening thank you so much for donating this is a crazy number of people yes thank you very much thank you [BLANK_AUDIO]