Giant Bombcast 02-15-2011

[0] Hey, everyone.

[1] It's Tuesday, February the 15th, 2011, and you are listening to The Giant Bomb Cast.

[2] I'm Ryan Davis.

[3] Hey, Ryan Davis.

[4] Hitting the wrong syllables.

[5] What's up with your intonation?

[6] Do you like that?

[7] Vinnie Caravella.

[8] Yes, I do.

[9] How's it going, sir?

[10] It's going well.

[11] How are you doing?

[12] You have a haircut since the last time I saw you.

[13] Yeah, I do.

[14] I'll clean.

[15] I did.

[16] It's military Vinny.

[17] Was it because your brother was here?

[18] Did you feel like the comparisons were coming too fast and furious?

[19] No, because his hair is short too.

[20] Is it?

[21] Yeah.

[22] I thought it was longer.

[23] No. No?

[24] He's not a hippie.

[25] No. Watching the Friday show from Vegas with Jeff.

[26] Hey, Jeff.

[27] Hi.

[28] We watched the Friday live show from a hotel room in Vegas.

[29] And watching the chat.

[30] become unglued when your brother and Dave's sister were on screen.

[31] Sibling.

[32] They're like, oh, it's like the people I know, but it's not them.

[33] But they kind of look and sound like them.

[34] Just dressed up and weird.

[35] Dave and drag.

[36] Sorry, this is Beverly.

[37] This is your Back to the Future Part 2.

[38] That was actually Vinny.

[39] Yeah, he came.

[40] Robert Zemeckis, thank you so much for your help on that stuff.

[41] Man, that happy hour cost a lot.

[42] I believe the budget.

[43] A hotel room in Vegas, probably the best place to be during that happy hour.

[44] Will smacking champagne bottles.

[45] Well, I don't know.

[46] Nothing about that trip to Vegas seems safe.

[47] I want to hear about your trips to Vegas.

[48] We went to Vegas.

[49] We went to Vegas for Dice.

[50] Design, innovate.

[51] Create, customize, enrich.

[52] Entertain, I think is what it stands for.

[53] A bunch of high -end game makers and publishers and such.

[54] High -end, only the finest.

[55] Well, it's expensive to get there, so your Maya dudes and your artists are not showing up at DICE.

[56] Sure.

[57] It's people who are kind of at the leads.

[58] Captains of industry.

[59] Yes.

[60] Are who show up at DICE.

[61] And drunks.

[62] Which turns out there's a big overlap.

[63] The Venn diagram there.

[64] It's like this.

[65] It's like one circle.

[66] Yeah, it's the one circle Venn diagram.

[67] Yeah, as it turns out.

[68] Also, Brad.

[69] Hi, Brad.

[70] Hi.

[71] Brad's here, too.

[72] Thanks for having me. You didn't bring a sibling and you didn't go to DICE, so we have nothing to talk about.

[73] I didn't even get a haircut.

[74] Although I desperately need one because I'm playing with it now.

[75] It's a little shaggy.

[76] As soon as I start playing with it, I know it's time.

[77] A little shag.

[78] You know what?

[79] Hot tip here.

[80] Keep twirling.

[81] I'm all for, like, you know, bring it down tight on the sides and the back.

[82] Leave a little length on top.

[83] Leave a little length on the top.

[84] I said the last time I got mine cut, and I think I'm going to keep going that route.

[85] I don't know about that.

[86] Give it a shot.

[87] A little high and tight?

[88] Yeah, just, you know, a little high top fade.

[89] I think you just go bull right across the top here.

[90] I can do that at home.

[91] Don't listen to him by hair advice.

[92] Come on.

[93] Trust me. Trust me. I'm going to go the other direction.

[94] I'm going to go for the flyer.

[95] Oh, yeah.

[96] So, like, a ticket to go to Dice to get, like, a badge is, like, $3 ,000 or something.

[97] Yeah, something like that.

[98] I thought GDC was expensive.

[99] For, like, floor entry or Dice floor entry?

[100] Well, so that's the thing.

[101] I was looking at the actual, like, schedule of stuff while we were at Dice and realized there's not – There aren't really things that happen at Dice.

[102] There aren't a huge number of scheduled events.

[103] There's a golf tournament.

[104] And for the first time this year, they had a go -kart tournament.

[105] What?

[106] They had a poker tournament as they usually do.

[107] Yeah, a poker tournament that happens every year.

[108] And then they have a bunch of sessions, but it's one at a time.

[109] So you can see every single thing if you want.

[110] And then every three sessions they have on the schedule, it's like networking break.

[111] which is kind of maybe a little ridiculous, but 15 minutes for networking.

[112] Everybody gets in the circles with the people they know already and then kind of talk shit.

[113] I think everyone just goes to the bathroom.

[114] I mean, that's what we did.

[115] We went and talked to Tom Magrino during our networking break.

[116] It makes their evening plans.

[117] Saw T -Mags.

[118] Talked to Bob Coleco for a little while.

[119] Know that guy.

[120] Oh, he was there.

[121] He was there on a little network.

[122] He was there for a minute.

[123] I don't think he was there that long.

[124] Oh, cool.

[125] So we have a contact at Blizzard now.

[126] Yeah, met someone from Blizzard.

[127] Sweet.

[128] Bob Calico?

[129] Yeah, something like that.

[130] It's Jose.

[131] I don't know.

[132] I'm confused on the name.

[133] I just want to know who won the poker tournament.

[134] I have no idea.

[135] No?

[136] I think what happened is a couple of, like...

[137] I heard different stories that somewhere between two and five guys just split the pot at the end and just said, like, forget it.

[138] It's like 1230.

[139] Let's just get out of here.

[140] All of our poker faces are too impenetrable.

[141] Everyone was fairly evenly stacked.

[142] You whittle it down.

[143] It's just going to be this grind of everyone playing super safe and not taking risks.

[144] And everyone had to get up in the morning for actual dice to start.

[145] I just want to know how Dr. Ray did.

[146] He did not win.

[147] He was not one of those five.

[148] He was high up there, though.

[149] He was definitely high up there.

[150] He raked pots.

[151] And there was a bracelet.

[152] So they had, like, a loser's table.

[153] Yeah, like, after he lost, he could go to this loser's table and play some more.

[154] He could do multiple buy -ins.

[155] Yeah.

[156] All real money, right?

[157] Yeah, all real money.

[158] They had, like, World Series of Poker style.

[159] tournament bracelet for the winner of the loser's pot.

[160] And then this dude bought the bracelet off that guy for like 300 bucks.

[161] Oh, man. Basically, he was going around the rest of the show wearing it like in a very like, let me check and see what time it is.

[162] Pulling it out in a very flashy.

[163] Presenting his wrist in a lot of social situations.

[164] Which was never not funny.

[165] Always.

[166] I will say, so if there's one thing about dice.

[167] It's that it's hilarious.

[168] Funny.

[169] Yes, I would say that the inside jokes running fast and furious before the show even began.

[170] How inside?

[171] I can't repeat any of them here.

[172] Okay, super inside.

[173] You had to be there.

[174] Yeah, and even if you were there, you probably didn't entirely understand what was going on.

[175] Jeff, do you have any deadness?

[176] You're correct, and I'm trying to think of a better way to describe it.

[177] Other than to say a lot of people got introduced as being people that they were not in the group that we were running with.

[178] There was a lot of deliberate obfuscation.

[179] A guy was introduced as – he works for Giant Bomb.

[180] Have you heard of them?

[181] And this guy who was like pretty drunk at 2 .30 in the morning.

[182] At the Fat Burger.

[183] At the Fat Burger.

[184] As everyone at 2 .30 in the morning at the Fat Burger.

[185] Yeah.

[186] It's inside the casino.

[187] It's like, no. And then the response was, oh, they're a developer.

[188] They got eight games on XBLA with Metacritic of 80 or higher.

[189] Oh, so just really funny kind of like industry kind of like, oh, really?

[190] Yeah.

[191] And I was like, yeah, we're pretty proud of it.

[192] Just going to have to roll with it.

[193] I mean, there's some truth in there.

[194] On Giant Bomb, there probably are eight games that have been in Metacritic with ratings of 80 or higher.

[195] Yeah.

[196] The developer parts maybe.

[197] So back to like the actual.

[198] Dice.

[199] Contents of Dice.

[200] There were some pretty good sessions.

[201] The first one we saw was Adam Sessler with the Hot Topics, which kind of just very rapidly cycling through.

[202] So Sessler was just moderating these talks where you'd have two developers or people of that nature.

[203] Just kind of quickly interview them about this versus that.

[204] But it wasn't super adversarial necessarily.

[205] It wasn't just like I'm taking this position hard and you're taking games versus gamification.

[206] Like it was a little more gray space than that but definitely people from different perspectives at the very least.

[207] Yeah, and you got that a lot.

[208] There were definitely a lot of people talking about kind of Facebook games and social games and where that stuff's heading.

[209] And agents.

[210] And yeah, like that's kind of not necessarily stuff that came out of the talks, but definitely the realization is that this business is really run by agents in a lot of cases.

[211] So people representing other people basically.

[212] Yeah, or people representing independent studios of like work -for -hire guys and stuff like that.

[213] Like, hey, we're this company that does a lot of – we get a lot of outsourced projects for art, but how do they get those projects?

[214] It's because they are represented by like – the various agencies out there specializing in this sort of thing.

[215] Which, you know, I guess we kind of all knew at some level, right?

[216] It's like CAA.

[217] It's like Hollywood agents.

[218] There's definitely some of that stuff.

[219] But it seems like the agencies that actually matter are game -specific in a lot of ways.

[220] Like CAA is involved in it.

[221] And I guess they do have like a game division that probably is pretty good or something.

[222] That's the Shames Blackley joint, right?

[223] I think so.

[224] I saw Special Thanks, number one, in the credits for stacking Shames Blackley.

[225] Oh, yeah?

[226] Like I wonder if, you know, CAA.

[227] had something to do with getting that game side or whatever.

[228] But if not Tim Schafer, then they'll probably all have a double fine.

[229] I mean, there's like the personality.

[230] Like Ken Levine is represented by CAA, so is the Respawn guys.

[231] But that's separate of any of this other development facilitation stuff that's going on.

[232] But we've been seeing that stuff pop up in credits.

[233] You've been hearing about it, but getting a sense of how prevalent it was at DICE, of how many of those dudes were around, how much business gets done because of that.

[234] I'd have to say that this is probably something that happens for the bulk of games now.

[235] It's not something you hear about with the big, huge franchises, because a lot of those, it's like EA has its internal studios, and they've got their huge staff.

[236] and all this other stuff, but for the companies that are not these, like, we have studios in five continents, that whole thing, they're out there looking for these kind of work for our studios and bringing people on when they need them.

[237] But those big ones are still very dependent on these.

[238] Treyarch did not make these Call of Duty games on their own.

[239] There are these support studios that exist out there.

[240] I think it makes perfect sense.

[241] In fact, the drunk guy that we told that we made games kept saying that he worked on Black Ops and then wouldn't say how.

[242] I think it helps.

[243] I guess what you've seen in the past is game ships, big layoffs, right?

[244] Because they staff up and now you just have your contract for your studio.

[245] Yeah, now it's just like you're a studio working on art or something and you have to make sure that you're an agent and you're out there hustling.

[246] and making sure that you have a steady stream of work coming into your guys so that they can stay employed.

[247] So you don't get people who get laid off and they're like, fuck all this.

[248] This is shit, bullshit, motherfucker.

[249] Yeah, compartmentalize.

[250] Yeah, that seems to make sense.

[251] Movie's been doing it.

[252] Video games are big business.

[253] Yeah.

[254] Yeah, it kind of is that like, you know.

[255] 17 FX houses.

[256] Here's a dude who's a good key grip.

[257] All right?

[258] It's not an art. This is not – he doesn't have to have some weird Peter Molyneux vision.

[259] He just fucking has to know – You're insulting so many grips right now.

[260] How to – but I'm saying he is really good at his job.

[261] You hold on to that guy, all right?

[262] But what I'm saying is he's very good at his job.

[263] I was thinking more.

[264] Any movie can rely on him.

[265] Yes.

[266] I mean it's kind of privatized union basically.

[267] I was thinking more like the effects houses where you look at the credits now and there's like 17 different effects houses and we did the spaceship exploding shot and we did dude running on the wall shot.

[268] And you're like, dude, how many different effects places did they rent out for this?

[269] So I could totally see that happening.

[270] If you were like, we do physics real well.

[271] We'll work on that stuff.

[272] What do you do?

[273] I'm really good at making cut scenes.

[274] All right, you guys do that stuff.

[275] What are you going to do?

[276] I don't know.

[277] You're fired.

[278] Oh, no!

[279] And then there's like, oh, we're making an Unreal Engine game.

[280] and we totally realized we don't know how to do that.

[281] So here's this team of coders that come in and engineer it up.

[282] And then when the project's done, you don't have that horrible news story that's like, you know, we just laid off 75 % of the staff.

[283] It's like, no, we just ended everybody's contract.

[284] And, like, you know, those studios are not working on that other game.

[285] Well, actually, it turns out you do still get that story.

[286] Yes?

[287] Right.

[288] Yeah.

[289] What have you been playing?

[290] I was playing Dice.

[291] There were some other – Mark Cerny.

[292] Of Cerny Games.

[293] Yes.

[294] Really?

[295] Creator of Marble Madness.

[296] Yeah.

[297] He gave a talk that was really, really interesting and really good.

[298] Yeah, but what's he done lately?

[299] Like God of War 3.

[300] Like Uncharted 2.

[301] Killzone 2.

[302] No, but really, what's he done lately?

[303] He's consulted on a ton of Sony games over the years.

[304] He's still deeply in business with Sony.

[305] So one of the big, I would say the single theme.

[306] And I think this kind of echoes in some ways what we saw at E3 last year is, yo, Facebook.

[307] What's up with Facebook?

[308] It's crazy.

[309] Really?

[310] Yeah.

[311] I just saw the social network.

[312] I think this was interesting because it was people talking about what that actually means and not just – because when you hear about, oh, Facebook social games, it's always some – High up business guy going, that's big, so we're throwing a lot of money at it.

[313] What are you doing?

[314] I don't know, games.

[315] Frontierville's big.

[316] So this was actually more from the perspective of like, how are you going to make that not shit?

[317] Sure.

[318] So he was taking it.

[319] It was really interesting because he was taking it all the way back to kind of the beginning of his involvement, which is arcade games and kind of the design philosophy of arcade games and how that all revolved around the quarter.

[320] Okay.

[321] And that was the payment system and that was how the exchange was designed.

[322] So the gameplay kind of followed suit.

[323] You had short, really hard gameplay because these machines were super expensive.

[324] So the people who were running them had to have some way to pay them off.

[325] But even as things evolved, even as you go to consoles and it's a slightly different market for that and even through to today how certain things from that original arcade mindset are like still permeating things.

[326] Even if they shouldn't?

[327] Or even like in a good way?

[328] Like how death works in games.

[329] Like how adversity works in games.

[330] Yeah.

[331] The idea that games have to be hard to be valuable or stuff like that.

[332] Well, there's some stuff that I feel like has come over from the arcade scene that shouldn't.

[333] Right.

[334] Yeah, definitely.

[335] Sometimes in brawlers where you're like, it's not fun when you have unlimited continues because now you can just mash buttons to high hell.

[336] Yeah, I mean that's a bad solution to that problem.

[337] Right.

[338] But he mentioned the first Crash Bandicoot, which he worked on.

[339] kind of talked about specific stuff like even to get a password like if you lost all your lives it dumped you back to the title screen and said press start man let's go and it had a password system and to get the passwords you had to complete some kind of special bonus level So it was like they were throwing all the stuff in the way of people that had already paid all they were going to pay.

[340] They should get the enjoyment out of the game.

[341] Right.

[342] And it's like kind of unlearning those lessons from arcades.

[343] That does sound interesting.

[344] And he talked about some interesting stuff about kind of the crash of consumer games and the arcades and how that went and kind of the things they were trying to do to stave it off, like multiplayer games.

[345] like gauntlet probably wouldn't have existed if it wasn't for this notion of, well, if we can get four quarters out of people every three minutes instead of one, like, like trying to stave off the, like, like everything going rotten.

[346] So like all those Konami brawlers are a reaction to like, we just need to get in while the getting's good.

[347] Or, or, or just like, you know, maybe this'll help.

[348] Maybe this will work.

[349] Maybe this will be the thing that kind of saves it.

[350] But a lot of that design was done for business reasons, not necessarily because, well, The Simpsons.

[351] So maybe putting multiplayer in every game to make sure that used game sales don't destroy the market nowadays, maybe sometimes seem more like a business decision than this game doesn't really need multiplayer.

[352] Well, yeah, I guess.

[353] You could probably look at it similar.

[354] Well, the difference is that this had actual major gameplay.

[355] changes that were meaningful and core to the experience.

[356] They didn't just tack on, there are three more joysticks on this cabinet that didn't quite work like that.

[357] He was also talking a lot about, another interesting point is if you're making an arcade game, your budget is primarily hardware.

[358] Like the amount of – like the percentage of the cost of what you're making actually going into software was like this crazy tiny fraction.

[359] And when you went to the NES, which, again, you have these flash ROM carts that are crazy expensive at the time to produce, mostly going towards hardware, very small amount towards software.

[360] And that got worse and worse as time went on to where by the end of the SNES era where you're getting these $80 square RPGs and stuff like that, it's because those – Those cartridges cost a lot of money to build.

[361] $100 cart.

[362] Yeah, exactly.

[363] Like when you went and paid $80 for Strider, or when I went and paid $80 for Strider.

[364] It's because of the cart.

[365] It's because I'm an idiot.

[366] So he was very big on, like, you know, optical media was a...

[367] Like saved the business.

[368] Yeah.

[369] Because, you know, you could actually...

[370] They were cheap, and you could spend more money on the software and not just on the delivery mechanism.

[371] He covered – and I think maybe the craziest thing about the talks at Dice for Me was like they were all a half hour.

[372] Wait, so how did this come back to Facebook?

[373] Basically the end of death.

[374] Kind of the third age.

[375] Yeah, the end of death and reworking like what the penalty is or what were the challenges.

[376] Or the philosophy of like is there still value?

[377] Like does Farmville have value even though there's no explicit storyline?

[378] There's no like end goal.

[379] Right.

[380] Like, is that still a game that's really very little adversity?

[381] Right.

[382] There's no way to die.

[383] There's no way to really fail other than not doing as well as other people.

[384] It's just a series of roadblocks.

[385] It's just...

[386] Right.

[387] And cost an obstacle standing in the way of you progressing.

[388] Or, yeah, or just like, you know, you need to put time into this.

[389] Right.

[390] And alternately, if you don't want to put time into it, you can put money into it.

[391] I mean, he wasn't there, like, handing out answers or, like, saying, and here's the solution.

[392] Just my observations.

[393] But very much kind of philosophically.

[394] A lot of the stuff at DICE was sort of like, here's a way of thinking about this.

[395] And you can come to your own conclusions from there, but they weren't selling shit.

[396] And in a half hour?

[397] And in a half hour, which I thought was great.

[398] The amount of information that Mark's already packed into his presentation that half hour was pretty impressive.

[399] Yeah.

[400] I wouldn't have minded more time.

[401] Kind of talk about game budgets and how they're spiraling out of control and making it harder and harder for the big game to exist.

[402] I mean that's why you see so much leaning into the Facebook stuff is the $50 million game is high risk, takes a long time to make.

[403] Right, but the profit margin on this Farmville game.

[404] Yeah, like these small games can be huge.

[405] I mean that was another thing we saw a lot of was a lot of people talking about we are looking at small games, looking at downloadables, looking at micro developers, small, small teams where potentially.

[406] The profits could be – the payoff could be huge.

[407] So were they talking about like shifts in audience where like – I don't think any of us are playing a lot of Farmville.

[408] But like reaching into that Facebook kind of our parents or whatever audience is – We haven't really talked too much demo.

[409] Yeah, exactly.

[410] I think Richard Garriott kind of got into the point of like, well, now everyone is a gamer.

[411] But mostly he just talked about space.

[412] But mostly he just talked about space.

[413] Did he really?

[414] It was dope.

[415] Oh, man. His whole talk was about – Here's how I got to space.

[416] And at the end he was like, and me and John Carmack are partners now and he makes games.

[417] All right, peace.

[418] But it basically ended with like, and we're going to take all of you to space.

[419] Yeah.

[420] You're going to space and you're going to space.

[421] Everybody look under your chair.

[422] There's a helmet.

[423] Who would have guessed Richard Garriott and John Carmack are going to be the men to send us to fucking space.

[424] How awesome is that?

[425] Everybody.

[426] I was so stoked.

[427] Even though there was not anything other than his great anecdotes about going to space.

[428] So jazzed after that session.

[429] Yeah.

[430] We're all going to space.

[431] We're all going to fucking space.

[432] This is going to be awesome.

[433] Oh, yeah.

[434] We'll start learning Russian now.

[435] How's he looking?

[436] Good.

[437] Does he have his little rat tail?

[438] Oh, yeah, rat tails.

[439] It has multiplied.

[440] It is now split in two.

[441] Oh, no. That happened in space.

[442] Operated.

[443] Yeah.

[444] Yeah.

[445] He's cloning himself.

[446] We saw him there, and then we saw him at a burger place the next day.

[447] He's the guy at the fat burger.

[448] Oh, that's right.

[449] Okay, yeah.

[450] He was there, wasn't he?

[451] Yeah.

[452] Yeah.

[453] Walked in.

[454] Fat chain.

[455] Ow.

[456] Did it say I was in space, motherfucker?

[457] It implied it, maybe.

[458] But it was in the tabula rasa language.

[459] Ask me about space.

[460] I couldn't decode it, unfortunately.

[461] So DICE.

[462] And then the awards.

[463] And then the awards.

[464] Yeah, the awards.

[465] With Jay Moore hosting.

[466] I thought he was pretty good this year.

[467] He seems to have kind of figured out how to present to that audience.

[468] I mean, it's a delicate balance between talking some shit.

[469] Without being overly familiar.

[470] I mean, he's been doing it for a while now.

[471] Yeah, yeah.

[472] Six years.

[473] He is the industry's official comedic MC.

[474] He does BlizzCon.

[475] Yeah.

[476] He does everything.

[477] He talks some shit about BlizzCon.

[478] Some good material.

[479] The Activision stuff.

[480] Bounced around the room a little oddly.

[481] Just timing.

[482] Yeah.

[483] Just like the day after that all those layoffs had hit.

[484] So it was like everyone – basically the joke was like, you know, you make all this money on games but still no one wants to work with you was kind of the punchline without describing the whole thing.

[485] And everyone was like, I thought it was hilarious.

[486] And then basically like wave of laughter and then it kind of sunk in like – Oh, like maybe I shouldn't have laughed at that.

[487] Oh, right.

[488] Totally.

[489] But then people were like, oh, wait.

[490] I still don't want to work there because anyone who runs – their business in such a way that they're laying off 500 people is not the company I want to go be with.

[491] So still played.

[492] Still played.

[493] Yeah.

[494] There were some – I don't know.

[495] That thing moved.

[496] The awards.

[497] Yeah.

[498] Once they got down to it, they were not joking around.

[499] Like they were presenting four or five awards at once.

[500] You won this.

[501] You won this.

[502] You won this.

[503] Yeah.

[504] They were kind of getting a bunch of awards out of the way.

[505] And then for the – I guess the major awards or what they deemed to be the major awards, they would have people up for acceptance speeches.

[506] So what's – I've been the – I think – Maybe twice.

[507] And I always liked the vibe there and I always hated having to go down and somebody to try and cover it because the vibe there always seemed like everybody's real comfortable.

[508] Everybody's – they're not being surrounded by PR and they're not being led around.

[509] They're kind of doing what they want to do and talking to people they want to talk to.

[510] Is it still – Yeah, absolutely.

[511] I mean – Like it's not guarded.

[512] It doesn't seem like everybody is super guarded and like puts on their kind of saccharine smile.

[513] Hey, how's it going?

[514] No, I mean there isn't like – it's not press -facing.

[515] Yeah.

[516] In that way.

[517] I think that smiley and handshaking is happening, but it's happening between developers and people in – B2B.

[518] There were definitely some people there that were doing like a little more hardcore businessing than some others.

[519] Like basically there were people there with games, pitching games to publishers and stuff like that.

[520] Sure.

[521] And, you know, trying to get money to finish their game and stuff like that.

[522] But some serious pitching.

[523] Yeah, exactly.

[524] Like, you know, it's like, hey, we've got this suite set up and we're going to take pitch meetings for three days straight and so on and so forth.

[525] Yes, there's some of that, but a lot of just, you know, handshaping.

[526] Basically, there is a large bar in the middle of this casino and that's pretty much just what everyone would eventually gravitate to there.

[527] And you're like, man, this is a...

[528] ridiculous cross -section of people standing in here right now.

[529] That's cool.

[530] Yeah.

[531] And then someone has the Xperia play out the day before their press conference talking about it.

[532] It's so weird.

[533] So a guy just pulls out a phone and says, check this out.

[534] And it's like, it's your phone.

[535] What?

[536] And then he slides it.

[537] And you're like, oh, it's that thing.

[538] It's that thing.

[539] So I actually got to have my hands on the Xperia Play for a couple minutes.

[540] Call it the PlayStation.

[541] What people have been calling the PlayStation phone since before it probably existed.

[542] So now that has officially been – Yeah, they had a thing I think in Spain or something like that.

[543] It's going to come with Crash Bandicoot preloaded onto it.

[544] So have fun digging up those passwords.

[545] So I didn't actually get to play what you would call a game on there.

[546] It was like a little 3D kind of tech demo -y.

[547] It was a room.

[548] It was a room with some stairs.

[549] You could go through a couple of doors and – Like in first person?

[550] Yeah, yeah.

[551] It's King's Field sequel.

[552] And it seemed like it was designed to – to kind of show off the way the little touch pad stuff works because you're basically using that like dual analog.

[553] So you have this little pad in the middle between where the D -pad and the four buttons are.

[554] Okay.

[555] And that is where your touch space is.

[556] And there are actually these two little like nubs that stick out that you aren't actually moving, but they are useful for knowing your center.

[557] Gotcha, just registering your fingers.

[558] It's kind of like the F and J keys on a keyboard so that you know, okay, that's where I am.

[559] They serve that kind of a purpose, and I thought that was significant in making that stuff feel better.

[560] So I don't know really anything about this.

[561] I didn't see the news.

[562] So this is Sony putting out hardware.

[563] It's a Sony Ericsson phone.

[564] They've been putting out phones for a long time.

[565] They're putting out an Android phone.

[566] That has these like mostly – it doesn't have dual shoulder buttons.

[567] So that's kind of the only thing it doesn't have from a standard PlayStation controller.

[568] But they are actually creating their own hardware standard within – So other Android devices will be able to get certified for the PlayStation suite, which is the thing they announced alongside the NGP.

[569] Kind of got buried a little bit.

[570] But the NGP will play these games as well.

[571] And they're going to set up their own separate store, separate from the Android store.

[572] That will be PlayStation stuff to be able to buy PS1 games.

[573] So I felt like the controls felt good.

[574] The phone felt decent.

[575] It looked like what I was seeing looked good, big screen.

[576] Is it bulky?

[577] No, no. I mean it feels like kind of a modern Android phone.

[578] Does it feel kind of like it's a slider?

[579] Does it feel like it's going to break in your hand or something?

[580] No, it felt sturdy.

[581] It felt sturdy.

[582] I didn't actually hold it.

[583] Like my issues with that thing are not hardware.

[584] It's not what that thing is.

[585] It's like where that thing exists in the market.

[586] Like who does it serve?

[587] Who is it for?

[588] What is it competing with?

[589] Because I feel like the way it's sitting, it's almost like it's competing with everything.

[590] It's almost like by being – An Android phone and a PlayStation product, you both have to compete with like the iPhone and other Android, like non -Sony Android stuff.

[591] Yeah.

[592] As well as potentially – different market, but NGP, it's a handheld PlayStation device.

[593] It's convergence, man. It's all coming together.

[594] So – So, yeah, I think that device has some challenges.

[595] Also, I think they're going to develop their own games for it as well, but there's nothing appealing about playing PlayStation 1 games on my cell phone.

[596] From a technical perspective, I'm like, okay, that's okay.

[597] You can do that.

[598] Yeah, that's the thing you could do.

[599] Not a big selling point.

[600] I agree.

[601] I agree.

[602] It was still totally crazy to be playing with that thing in that bar.

[603] Yeah, it was a little weird.

[604] Anything else we can talk about from DICE?

[605] You wanted to bring up chest models.

[606] Chest models and Ms. Pac -Man tournaments for money.

[607] I want to let you know that MTV Skins is coming out January 17th.

[608] Look for it.

[609] What did you guys do while we were DICE?

[610] Oh, we did all sorts of things.

[611] Stuff.

[612] Brad, what did you do?

[613] Ran a website.

[614] Yeah?

[615] Yeah.

[616] How'd that go?

[617] Into the ground.

[618] Pretty well.

[619] How was TNT?

[620] It was okay.

[621] It's a sensitive topic.

[622] Yeah, it was not talking about it.

[623] TNT happened.

[624] It happened.

[625] How was the...

[626] You mean Thursday night tested?

[627] I saw the Friday.

[628] It went well.

[629] I saw the Friday show.

[630] Friday show was...

[631] That was...

[632] We can talk about that.

[633] Congratulations.

[634] That was a...

[635] Well, welcome back, let's say.

[636] It went well.

[637] I thought Will did a good job.

[638] He did a fantastic job.

[639] He brought an insane segment to the show.

[640] I was sitting there.

[641] So in this hotel room, one of the rare sober moments of Dice, watching everyone here be drunk, and watching Will bring out the champagne bottle, I'm like, he's not actually going to.

[642] Try this.

[643] Holy shit, he's going to try and savor that bottle, isn't he?

[644] Oh, this is going to go horribly.

[645] I was really nervous.

[646] I had never heard of that.

[647] The whole thing was crazy to me. I had only heard of it going poorly.

[648] Yeah, that's all I'd ever seen is people try to do that and then glass shattering in their hands.

[649] I think you shouldn't have showed the videos of it being done beforehand because once you saw how it was supposed to go, it was less magical when it happened.

[650] Well, we showed the videos.

[651] Because for me, it's like having never even heard of what was going on.

[652] It's like, I'm going to open this champagne bottle with a knife.

[653] I'm like, that's fucked.

[654] Well, I wanted to show the videos of it going poorly.

[655] Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[656] Here's what – I just want to let people know before you – so you're not following along at home.

[657] Here's what could go wrong.

[658] Right, yeah.

[659] In case it doesn't go horribly wrong here.

[660] And I want to voice my opinion that – I think this is really dangerous.

[661] Still super dangerous.

[662] We had the mop bucket under Will and had cleared out all the wires and cables from the way from him.

[663] I was really worried somebody was going to get really hurt.

[664] Oh, yeah.

[665] Kind of like fun, fun, fun, and then, oh, my God.

[666] The show's over.

[667] We're done.

[668] Somebody just lost an eye on a life.

[669] Well, you guys cut back to an empty couch and you're like, we're done.

[670] You guys did street tests.

[671] We did, and that went oddly.

[672] The cork popped off before we even did it.

[673] Went like 35, 40 feet into the street.

[674] Almost hit a car.

[675] I don't know.

[676] We shouldn't leave anymore.

[677] Will took a piece to the face, didn't he, on the show?

[678] It didn't get captured on video, but the cork ricocheted.

[679] He had a nice red spot on his cheek afterwards.

[680] And that cork had an inch of sharp glass around it.

[681] I don't know, man. Don't try that at home.

[682] Under any circumstances.

[683] Especially in a smallish studio where walls are there.

[684] It's not hard.

[685] Under any circumstances.

[686] It's not hard to open shame.

[687] It almost wants to open on its own.

[688] It's so easy.

[689] You get the two thumbs.

[690] You just kind of push up.

[691] I'm even bigger worse than that.

[692] Just put a towel or something.

[693] Do a twist and pull.

[694] Yeah, and it just comes right off in your hand.

[695] You don't need – You need to save – you don't need a knife.

[696] It's like I don't like champagne.

[697] So the idea of having fun opening crazy bottles, that's the only appealing thing about it.

[698] Well, yeah, I was – yeah, I don't know.

[699] It was a good show.

[700] It was a good show.

[701] And Will did a great job, fantastic job holding it together.

[702] He had to sit on the couch, get up for a segment and go back down.

[703] Yeah, good covering for that.

[704] That was nice business.

[705] Hey, did you have a chance to play any games?

[706] I did play some games.

[707] So, play through some more Bionic Commando Rearmed co -op.

[708] Two.

[709] That game kept hitching up on the co -op.

[710] And so I think I'm just going to have to go through it single player.

[711] Now that my little brother is gone, it's going to have to be single player because there's obviously no online talk.

[712] You mean it hitched up or it locked up?

[713] Locked up.

[714] Okay.

[715] Yeah.

[716] So it came to a dead freeze.

[717] Pretty long hitch.

[718] Yeah.

[719] It never resolved.

[720] Eternal hitch.

[721] Yeah.

[722] It's still going now.

[723] Hopefully it'll come back.

[724] From NIS.

[725] We tried three playthroughs and everyone ended with a hard freeze.

[726] Played through extraction.

[727] Dead Space Extraction.

[728] Now I'm ready to play Dead Space 2, which I also started.

[729] Really enjoying that game.

[730] Extraction is the shooter.

[731] That is, yes.

[732] I played through it on the PS3.

[733] And then I read Salvage.

[734] Yes.

[735] And then I read a synopsis.

[736] But you're totally playing Dead Space 2 on the 360.

[737] Yes.

[738] So there's nothing that carries over from Extraction.

[739] So you have two copies of...

[740] No, I bought the...

[741] I bought the standalone extraction on PS3.

[742] Oh, I didn't know that existed.

[743] Yeah, it came out the same day as Dead Space 2.

[744] Oh, I thought it was only – It was just there on PSN to buy.

[745] Oh, okay, okay.

[746] I thought it was just on the disc.

[747] I didn't know that it was also – No, yeah, you can put down a lot of money getting all your Dead Space kind of peripheral knowledge.

[748] So like – which I'm kind of happy I did because a lot of that stuff overlaps in really kind of small, not very meaningful ways.

[749] But it's like little winks and nods and stuff.

[750] And I'm sure the books add a little bit more.

[751] But Dead Space 2, I'm not terribly far into it.

[752] Brad, I told you where I was, and you said decent.

[753] But I feel like I just started maybe because that game moves really quickly.

[754] I'm going to say you're 15 % in.

[755] But I'm really enjoying it.

[756] I thought that game opened so strongly.

[757] And the visuals, the first scene in that game are fantastic.

[758] That whole opening coming out of that.

[759] It looks like it should be CG.

[760] Maybe one of the best kind of up -close model transformations.

[761] Best face -exploding animation you've ever seen.

[762] Best exploding producer face.

[763] Yeah.

[764] That part's a little creepy.

[765] I mean, it's weird.

[766] I've seen...

[767] non -stop adulation for that specific scene.

[768] The guy's face bursting open.

[769] It's just like one post after another on form after form.

[770] It just looks like it should be rendered differently than in the game engine.

[771] Maybe they do do some trickery, because the fidelity on it looks so good.

[772] So 2012, every game is going to open with an exploding face.

[773] Yeah.

[774] Great!

[775] That's going to be...

[776] Bionic Commando is really going to come back in 2012.

[777] That's next year's trope.

[778] You know what?

[779] Actually, Dead Space 2 contains a couple of notable tropes, one of which needs to go away, which is the sort of frantically scrawled graffiti -style messages to the player on the walls.

[780] Oh, we're done?

[781] We're done with that?

[782] Bioshock came out almost four years ago now.

[783] I think we could probably put that one to bed.

[784] I was telling you...

[785] I'm sorry.

[786] I was going to say this has kind of a Bioshock feel to it.

[787] This definitely has some other traits in common.

[788] Some guy had stopped long enough to write shoot their limbs off in his own blood on the wall before he, like, crawled away.

[789] No, the best one I saw was I don't want to die written in blood on the wall.

[790] Like, you're not helping.

[791] Maybe you should stop writing on the wall and start running.

[792] Or, like, hopefully you're not using your own blood for that, because that would be a really bad idea.

[793] But the truth that we need to see more of, helmets that automatically form around your face.

[794] Dark void.

[795] Yeah.

[796] Kicking it off.

[797] Okay, fine.

[798] All right.

[799] They got it.

[800] Army of two.

[801] This base got it.

[802] Tron.

[803] Tron.

[804] Yeah.

[805] Army of Two.

[806] We're talking specifically about ones that...

[807] Helmets that mechanically form around your face.

[808] Yeah, Iron Man. Sure.

[809] I mean, the Army of Two was like the proto version of that with the slide up.

[810] Slip it up.

[811] Oh.

[812] Yeah, I like the helmet stuff.

[813] I can't get enough of that.

[814] Yeah, so I'm kind of getting that Bioshock -y vibe of, like, here's this, like, space wonderland.

[815] Like, now you're in the nursery.

[816] Well, it's like Space Metropolis, right?

[817] Yeah.

[818] It's like, here's a functioning residential area with, like, here are living areas that normal people would do normal stuff.

[819] But it's gone all the hell.

[820] Except they all died in those places.

[821] But I'm really, really enjoying that.

[822] What else is going on?

[823] You don't know Jack.

[824] Man, fantastic.

[825] I want to know more you don't know, Jack.

[826] So I've been playing a bunch of single -player, and I played with you guys, you and Gary Witta, a bit over the weekend.

[827] It's the only game I think we would have the patience for when we had a bad connection and somebody was hitching up.

[828] Yeah.

[829] We still tried to crank through a game.

[830] How is that represented in the game?

[831] Does it just like pause what's going on?

[832] Yeah, just hitching up.

[833] It seems like it is directly related to voice chat.

[834] We're talking about the 360 version specifically.

[835] I don't know how it works on the PS3 version.

[836] The PC version doesn't have any online multiplayer at all.

[837] No, no online, no DLC support, which is why it's $20.

[838] Okay.

[839] But, yeah, that was a lot of fun.

[840] But whatever, that $10 for the multiplayer to me is worth it because playing online is good.

[841] And it seems like it's smart about choosing question packs, choosing episodes that no one that's playing has played before.

[842] So you don't run into that issue.

[843] Which made me wonder what happens when you make it through every episode.

[844] I think you start going – you start recycling.

[845] So that's what people complain about playing with like randoms is that there are people out there that have just jammed through everything so they can try and game the system.

[846] That's silly.

[847] So whatever.

[848] I just don't ruin your own experience.

[849] I don't play with people that I don't know.

[850] Are there a bunch of performance -related achievements, like get through an episode without missing a question or something?

[851] Some people are out there just trying to game those things.

[852] That's an achievement, but that's easy to get.

[853] You can get that by yourself.

[854] You don't have to do it online.

[855] Just be smart.

[856] No trivia.

[857] Or don't, because those questions are real twisted.

[858] Sometimes just a well -placed guess is all you need.

[859] It could definitely go from, like, the, okay, I kind of know what they're talking about, to, like, you guys are talking about quantum physics, and I don't know how many planes of reality there possibly are in string theory.

[860] 11.

[861] That's when he launched the screw.

[862] The answer is 11.

[863] God, don't fucking, you're ruining the question.

[864] Too late.

[865] You asked.

[866] Spoiling shit again.

[867] Nice going.

[868] Nice going.

[869] I also never get tired of the commentary in that game, which is a testament to how well it's done.

[870] I have a copy.

[871] I haven't had time to play it.

[872] I'm really looking forward to it.

[873] It's really fun.

[874] It's nicely written.

[875] It's nicely done.

[876] I hear it's got really good chests.

[877] Yep.

[878] Well -modeled.

[879] Well -modeled chests.

[880] The voice of Cookie Masterson, of course, is expertly done.

[881] And I also love the end each time, just the you -don't -know -jack slam that comes immediately after you finish the game.

[882] Yep.

[883] I mean, yeah, it's...

[884] It's paced well.

[885] What's up with a dude named Cookie?

[886] It's funny.

[887] I guess.

[888] I don't know.

[889] What, you got a problem with Cookie?

[890] Oh, I love Cookies.

[891] All right.

[892] It's a good game show host name.

[893] Cookie Monster is a dude.

[894] Cookie sounds like a...

[895] In fact, I have known a female Cookie.

[896] Yeah.

[897] Weird.

[898] Not in the biblical sense, but...

[899] Anyway, it sounds like a lady's name is what I'm trying to say.

[900] Hey, Brian, tell me about the female Cookie.

[901] Tell me a lot more.

[902] I want to know about the female Cookie.

[903] I'm just saying Cookie sounds like a girl's name.

[904] That's all.

[905] I'm just saying Cookie Masters and Cookie Monster.

[906] Two male cookies.

[907] Put it together.

[908] You've never seen him in the same room at once.

[909] No. Think about it.

[910] I think cookie is an adjective.

[911] If you were to model Cookie Monster's chest in a game, who would you get to do it?

[912] Who's like cook -ish?

[913] So it's a monster that's...

[914] He's a monster of cookies.

[915] So I have a question for you.

[916] Hey, what's up?

[917] Jack, your Jack head.

[918] Yeah.

[919] Whoa.

[920] Is that the head?

[921] Is that Jack?

[922] Or is that Cookie?

[923] No, that's just a head.

[924] That's just a head?

[925] That's just a head.

[926] That's not Jack?

[927] No, because there have been a number of different hosts over the years.

[928] Has Jack ever been a host?

[929] I believe there was a character named Jack that at one point was a host, but I don't think it was even the first one.

[930] Did Paul Rubens play Cookie Masterson?

[931] Did they give him a name in that show?

[932] In the live show?

[933] Yeah.

[934] It might have been his own character, but it was not Cookie.

[935] But there's a reference to that.

[936] Okay, we got a question.

[937] There's a question that basically, like, Does not acknowledge the existence of the TV show You Don't Know Jack game show that they made briefly.

[938] But totally.

[939] If you know that, it's a hilarious question.

[940] Otherwise, it's just a trivia question about Paul Rubens.

[941] Actually, but it's not even.

[942] It's actually about.

[943] Wouldn't it be crazy?

[944] It's actually about pointillism in a fucking weird way.

[945] That's how most of them are.

[946] That's how You Don't Know Jack rolls is start with either a high or low culture.

[947] framing device and then spin it around on its head.

[948] And the this or that questions are always...

[949] You mean dis or dat?

[950] Yeah, I can't.

[951] Yeah, dis or dat.

[952] Straight off the streets.

[953] That's what they're called.

[954] They're called dis or dat.

[955] Really funny.

[956] Always.

[957] Yeah, they do good juxtaposition.

[958] Ridiculous.

[959] I love seeing that.

[960] I realized last night, I love seeing that game on just a giant fucking TV.

[961] Because all my memories of that are like 13, 14 -inch monitors.

[962] from the 90s, CRTs, because you play it on a PC.

[963] So now I'm like 63 -inch big screen HDTV.

[964] It's still the same solid color background, moving text across it, but it just looks so fucking good.

[965] It just looks so crisp and bright.

[966] I don't know.

[967] I enjoy it.

[968] Yeah, having a lot of fun with that.

[969] It's too bad.

[970] I hope they do something about network issues because I haven't noticed it in every game, but it definitely...

[971] certain players, for whatever reason, over the course of a game, you'll start off fine.

[972] Everyone's like, okay, everything's working good.

[973] We're clipping through.

[974] And then by the time you get to the end game, someone's hitching it up real bad.

[975] Yeah, we had a lot of problems making it through the last round.

[976] Yeah.

[977] Which I assume is because the last round is so...

[978] Very timing -oriented.

[979] But timing based on everybody else.

[980] I assume for the other stuff, you get your own counter.

[981] It doesn't really matter.

[982] Yeah, but the synchronization...

[983] Of the last thing is where it gets crazy.

[984] I would imagine they were just...

[985] look at all that stuff locally, and then as soon as anyone buzzes in, it compares notes with everyone else to say, like, yeah, here's when this person buzzed in, here's when this person buzzed in.

[986] It doesn't seem that way.

[987] Yeah.

[988] Well, at least not at the last one.

[989] No, yeah.

[990] Well, yeah, because the other ones, it doesn't, like, everyone can buzz in.

[991] It's not a buzz to take control and then answer.

[992] They're all just, like, everyone answers, and then your score is based on how quickly you answer.

[993] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[994] But the last one is one player gets the score, so whoever is actually first, that matters.

[995] So it's different from the rest of the game in that way.

[996] Fun, fun, fun.

[997] But still, actual contents of it are a blast.

[998] So I'm glad you should play some more.

[999] I'm glad you're still having fun with it.

[1000] Yeah.

[1001] Hopefully there's DLC out already.

[1002] Yeah, I already bought like $5 for the first.

[1003] Oh, you got it?

[1004] Yeah.

[1005] Well, it's $5, and it's the 10 -question pack or 10 -episode pack.

[1006] So you have to 80.

[1007] 83.

[1008] Yeah, something.

[1009] Cool.

[1010] I will never run out of you don't know Jack's stuff.

[1011] I think they added achievements for those question packs.

[1012] You can see them for the first three packs already, what the achievements are going to be.

[1013] Wow.

[1014] Yeah.

[1015] That will add up at some point.

[1016] And it's like 125 points per pack, so they're throwing some achievements into that stuff hard.

[1017] Stacking.

[1018] Stacking.

[1019] You played some stacking.

[1020] I did.

[1021] What do you think of stacking?

[1022] I think it's really fun.

[1023] It seems like it's going by very quickly.

[1024] It's a short game.

[1025] Brad, you finished it, right?

[1026] I got up at 6 .30 this morning and finished it.

[1027] So the puzzles, they give you hints to get through them if you want.

[1028] Optional hints.

[1029] You have to pull up a menu and highlight the challenge that you want to hint for and then press a button to get the hint.

[1030] So it's not like it's popping up a message saying, hey, go do this thing.

[1031] It's like go through these steps.

[1032] Are the hints like procedural?

[1033] Like we'll give you like a vague one at first?

[1034] Yes.

[1035] They are in sequence, yes.

[1036] So yeah, hint one is kind of vague.

[1037] Hint two is a little more like, all right, come on, guys.

[1038] Do this to do this.

[1039] The first two were both pretty abstract.

[1040] And hint three is just like, dude.

[1041] Just go over to this guy.

[1042] That is some LucasArts hint guide.

[1043] Yeah, it's tight business.

[1044] It almost, the wording of the third hint always almost sounds a little impatient.

[1045] Yeah, it's kind of condescending.

[1046] We already gave you two hints.

[1047] Are you an idiot?

[1048] Like, no, go do it.

[1049] Like fucking stack with the pirate and take the parrot over here and put it in the nest.

[1050] What the fuck?

[1051] So it's not like you're playing through, because there are like multiple routes to accomplish something, right?

[1052] And they'll say like, all right, you've gotten three out of five of them.

[1053] And you're like, well, I don't know what else to do.

[1054] You go into the hints.

[1055] you can kind of burn through the rest of them.

[1056] So you can complete everything in an area pretty quickly.

[1057] I'm going to give you a piece of advice because I know you're only about halfway through the game.

[1058] Don't play it that way.

[1059] Don't try and fast that.

[1060] If you play the game that way, you will get burned out on every area that you do it in before you move on and you'll just continually get annoyed and sick of the game.

[1061] I really like it.

[1062] I'm having fun.

[1063] It seems like the hints are stopping me from getting too annoyed of being like, why isn't this working?

[1064] And you go to the hint and you're like, oh, you don't even want me to do that.

[1065] It's like, you want me to use this other thing.

[1066] The way I played it was pretty cool.

[1067] much to solve each puzzle once with whatever solution i found first and then just kind of move on to the next stuff and if you do that it's yeah it's probably a three hour game but you can always go back and do the other stuff yeah so i'm enjoying it it does seem like it's going to be over pretty quickly for me but uh i like the art style i like the concept i think the uh Overall, creativity of it is great.

[1068] Fantastic.

[1069] I think Double Fine, if they keep going down this road, has a very bright future ahead of them.

[1070] As long as they're making money on these things.

[1071] I mean, I don't know if they are.

[1072] I don't know.

[1073] I mean, it's not exactly geared toward the mass market.

[1074] Yeah, so I hope they are because, like, in these smaller chunks, that creativity really shines when you're like, all right, that was really cool for, like, five hours.

[1075] And, like, let's move on to something else.

[1076] And it's working really well for me. They nailed that, like, early 20th century industrialist, like, high society thing so well.

[1077] Like, from Steamship to Zeppelin to, you know, Big Train.

[1078] To child labor laws.

[1079] Yeah, yeah.

[1080] But it's like everywhere you go, there are all these, like, evil industrialists with monocles.

[1081] Right.

[1082] There's a lot of...

[1083] Yeah, there's a lot of real hoity -toity.

[1084] Oh, it's brilliant.

[1085] It's a slow start.

[1086] That game takes some time to kind of wind up.

[1087] I'm only maybe, you know, I'm still kind of tutorializing a little bit, but it's...

[1088] They hold your hand a little bit.

[1089] They definitely do.

[1090] Well, Vinny was complaining about the length of the titles on all the silent film stuff.

[1091] Yeah.

[1092] So they're looking at text for quite a while.

[1093] Yeah.

[1094] Every time somebody says something.

[1095] And it's not that I don't appreciate it.

[1096] It's just that kind of like, you know...

[1097] I mean, it's a good framing device, again, for kind of the era and the style they try to evoke, but I...

[1098] I'm with you.

[1099] Yeah.

[1100] It's just they're up there too long?

[1101] Not even that.

[1102] It's just a little too much back and forth with the hobo and stuff like that.

[1103] Oh, man. I mean, some of it's funny.

[1104] The hobo is pretty awesome at the end.

[1105] It's good material, but you'll see the little guy sit there and move around like he's talking.

[1106] Oh, the movement.

[1107] And then you will see the screen.

[1108] Here's what he's saying.

[1109] Right.

[1110] That's up there.

[1111] And okay, okay, I read that, and then go back, and then that guy's going to move around some, and then more.

[1112] So it's, yeah, just the pacing on that stuff.

[1113] And you can't, like, button through it.

[1114] No. I'm always afraid to hit it because I'll skip it.

[1115] Right.

[1116] But it's very much in the style of old silent films where there's an actual orchestra there playing music to the dramatic beats.

[1117] So it all needs to be kind of timed out.

[1118] It makes sense that, yeah, I guess it makes sense that they do it first.

[1119] It's stylistically style stuff, but, yeah.

[1120] I'm kind of that way in games too.

[1121] When you know where it's going, once you kind of figure that stuff out, you're like, all right, all right, come on, come on.

[1122] But I'm having a good time with it, and I think I'm glad they're putting this stuff out, and I hope they continue to do so in the future.

[1123] I do think if this were like a full game, that concept wouldn't hold up.

[1124] Not at all, not at all.

[1125] Because you do start seeing a lot of repetitions.

[1126] It's probably about the perfect length, I think.

[1127] Do it for Costume Quest, I think.

[1128] They've found a...

[1129] a good avenue for their crazy ideas.

[1130] I wonder if there would be any DLC for this, like there was with Costume Quest.

[1131] Is there room for it?

[1132] Well, I mean, they wrap the story up in this pretty well, but the episodes are so compartmentalized that they could easily add another one on, like another hour or two.

[1133] I love the names.

[1134] Of what?

[1135] All the dolls' names.

[1136] Oh.

[1137] Oh, they're so good.

[1138] Like the Widow Chastity.

[1139] Stuff like that.

[1140] It's a clever little piece of business.

[1141] Anything else?

[1142] I can't think of anything right now, so I'm going to say no. Jeff.

[1143] Hi.

[1144] What's up?

[1145] I don't know.

[1146] Want to talk about Killzone?

[1147] Yeah, we can talk about all kinds of stuff.

[1148] We can talk a little bit about Killzone, but we've got a quick look.

[1149] Kills -In is awesome.

[1150] I haven't finished it yet.

[1151] But in terms of just like first impression stuff from playing, probably about an hour and a half, two hours of the campaign and messing around with bots.

[1152] As soon as we're done here, I'm actually going to go play multiplayer for review purposes.

[1153] But it just looks so incredible.

[1154] Drew was starry -eyed after he came out of that quick room.

[1155] I was like, oh, how did it go?

[1156] I was like, man, that game just looks amazing.

[1157] Does it look dramatically better or different from 2?

[1158] It's faster.

[1159] It's at least as good as 2, if not better visually.

[1160] And then on top of that, everything moves faster and the controls are better.

[1161] Is it smoother?

[1162] It's pretty smooth.

[1163] It is an impressive game.

[1164] Is your guy taller?

[1165] Did you have like a belly high crowd?

[1166] I hated that.

[1167] That was awful.

[1168] Sorry, I was actually getting confused with the giant beer can in Duke Nukem that we saw earlier today.

[1169] Those were pretty big.

[1170] Oh, yeah, we did play that earlier.

[1171] He just drinks Fosters, man. That's what I said.

[1172] Oh, nice.

[1173] So, yeah, I don't know.

[1174] I'll have to go back and I'll keep an eye on that as I play more of it.

[1175] It really stood out to me in 2.

[1176] Because there are those murderous melee attacks that you're kind of at eye level with dudes.

[1177] Yeah, you are kind of at eye level with those guys.

[1178] That's good.

[1179] So you kind of have to be bigger.

[1180] Yeah.

[1181] Yeah, I mean, it seems like they are being smart about it.

[1182] From what I've seen, which is even less than what Jeff's seen, because I sat alongside on that quick look and talked to him some about it.

[1183] This sounds like this is the game they've been trying to make.

[1184] I feel like Killzone 2 was great.

[1185] It had some caveats.

[1186] I feel like this may be them finally nailing it.

[1187] It looks very exciting.

[1188] Still have the cover mechanic and pop over the wall?

[1189] Yeah.

[1190] It's the same as the duck button with the way I have the controls configured.

[1191] And so it's like you can get behind cover and hit it and you'll get behind it.

[1192] Does it feel snappy?

[1193] Because I remember from Killzone 2, I remember it being kind of like a little floaty or something.

[1194] Something a little mushy about it.

[1195] No, it's like it's a toggle, basically.

[1196] You hit the button and you just pop on the thing.

[1197] And you're ducked behind it.

[1198] And then from there, you can push up to shoot.

[1199] over or just hit the aim button to pop up and aim.

[1200] Would you say there's a little less animation priority?

[1201] Yeah, I think so.

[1202] That was kind of the complaint was whether people were calling it input lag or just they spent so much time making smooth animations and goddammit you're going to watch them or whatever it was.

[1203] This game feels very snappy with the way you play it.

[1204] It's pop, pop, pop.

[1205] You're shooting guys.

[1206] You're zooming in.

[1207] You're zooming out.

[1208] You're running.

[1209] It feels...

[1210] like other shooters in that way without necessarily feeling like it's just ripping off other popular shooters.

[1211] Does that go for the aiming?

[1212] Because it was the weight of the weapons.

[1213] It was like how slowly you swung your gun around in the second one.

[1214] The aiming is significantly faster.

[1215] It's like the thing.

[1216] Run speed is faster.

[1217] Everything moves faster.

[1218] As a spectator, I'm sure it's different actually playing, but as a spectator there were times that it was kind of overwhelming.

[1219] The speed of the game fucking moves.

[1220] Did they take it too far in the other direction?

[1221] No, I mean...

[1222] I think it feels great.

[1223] I think it's just because I was not controlling it.

[1224] It's just one of those...

[1225] You're out of control.

[1226] It's just like when you're standing at a demo station trying to watch someone else play a first -person shooter.

[1227] It's like when you're watching somebody play Marvel Capcom 3.

[1228] Well, you know, you start doing that.

[1229] You start rocking a little bit.

[1230] You start kind of like, wait, hold on, center of gravity, where is it?

[1231] Did you shoot a helmet off anybody?

[1232] Yeah.

[1233] Great.

[1234] Lots of helmets.

[1235] Constant helmets.

[1236] Absolutely.

[1237] You kicked a helmet off of a dude.

[1238] What?

[1239] I stuck my head off.

[1240] my thumbs through a dude's glowing eyes.

[1241] Oh, no. Oh, yeah.

[1242] So the animation priority still exists in these kill animations, these melee kills.

[1243] Brutal melee, they call it, which is maybe a little ridiculous.

[1244] Well, accurate.

[1245] Accurate, though, yeah.

[1246] Though...

[1247] You kind of see similar animations again and again with that stuff from what I've played.

[1248] You stick your thumbs through that.

[1249] Yeah, that one I've only seen once.

[1250] So what's in there?

[1251] What's behind those goggles?

[1252] I mean, the glowing thing is just some kind of eye mask, right?

[1253] Yeah, yeah.

[1254] Yes.

[1255] So basically when you get up close, it'll come pop up and say hit R3 and you will basically just...

[1256] slit his throat or break his neck or something like that.

[1257] They've got a bunch of different animations.

[1258] Stab him through the eyes.

[1259] Yeah, that look...

[1260] Pretty fantastic, though it has this side thing of while you're doing that, you are getting shot.

[1261] So it's not always the right move from what I can tell.

[1262] And are you the same guy you were in 2?

[1263] Yeah, you're set.

[1264] So it's continuing?

[1265] So this game, I mean, it's got a little prelude.

[1266] Previously on?

[1267] No, it's like...

[1268] it's going to start at the end and show you some crazy stuff and then go six months earlier and then it is you sitting on the steps.

[1269] It is literally like 30 seconds.

[1270] Fuck that guy.

[1271] Yeah, so it is 30 seconds after the end of Killzone 2 basically where it really picks up.

[1272] That's where it should pick up because that was fucked up.

[1273] Yeah, and the first thing I did is gun down Rico.

[1274] Good.

[1275] And then I had to heal him to bring that gun so he could keep moving.

[1276] That is not a part of the story.

[1277] But definitely, if they're really part of the story, you're kind of looking to move away from there because shit's...

[1278] Bad.

[1279] And everyone who encounters Rico fucking hates him.

[1280] Good.

[1281] And you, too, because you were there for some of that stuff.

[1282] That's a dirtbag.

[1283] It's a little questionable about whether you should be court -martialed or just shot on sight and that sort of stuff.

[1284] Not only did he do fucked -up stuff, he spent the last battle shooting at a banister for me. Fuck that guy.

[1285] Yeah, I've got a real fuck -that -guy attitude as well.

[1286] Jeff has unresolved anger issues.

[1287] Oh, he's terrible.

[1288] I hope he gets his at some point.

[1289] But I don't know.

[1290] where it goes I appreciate the restraint from Gorilla that they don't just ice him that it's not just like the knee jerk like oh fans hated him we have to get rid of him it's like no if you can get that sort of response at the same time like if there was a good storyline reason for like if that game had opened in the first 30 seconds was your commanding officer showing up and putting a bullet in his fucking head that would have been just as awesome maybe you haven't seen how it ends yet yeah I guess not I guess not but that would have been pretty cool that makes me really excited for Killzone 3 how's the story stuff from what I've seen so far, seems cool.

[1291] How's Malcolm McDowell?

[1292] So that really is Malcolm McDowell?

[1293] Yeah, it is.

[1294] Okay, great.

[1295] Finally.

[1296] I hadn't looked it up yet.

[1297] During the quick look, we're like, that's a real Malcolm McDowell sound.

[1298] It kind of looks like Malcolm McDowell in the game and certainly sounds like Malcolm McDowell.

[1299] Ray Winstone.

[1300] Oh, fuck, that's him.

[1301] I was going to say that during the quick look.

[1302] Yeah, go watch the video.

[1303] I put it up a couple weeks ago.

[1304] It's like them with the ping pong balls on their faces.

[1305] Oh, they actually did the stuff.

[1306] Oh, wow.

[1307] Avatar style.

[1308] The voice of Winstone is very specific.

[1309] Well, again, not just the voice.

[1310] It's his facial expressions, his everything.

[1311] Well, I mean, I couldn't pick up on that.

[1312] So Malcolm McDowell is awesome as a character from what I've seen so far.

[1313] He plays, I guess, Chairman Stahl is his name.

[1314] And he is...

[1315] A bad guy.

[1316] He seems like he pretty well embodies the British space Nazi aesthetic.

[1317] Absolutely.

[1318] Yeah.

[1319] The British space Nazis are eviler than ever.

[1320] They've stepped up their British space Nazi game.

[1321] That makes me very excited.

[1322] I think after this podcast I'll go put in my Amazon order because that's next Tuesday, right?

[1323] Yes, next week.

[1324] So that's coming up.

[1325] Cool.

[1326] And I haven't tried it.

[1327] I have not tried it in 3D or with the move for any real length of time yet.

[1328] So I don't really.

[1329] It's got support for all that stuff.

[1330] Seems like Move would be something that might be kind of cool for single player.

[1331] It'll, like, draw targeting brackets on enemies and stuff like that when you're using it.

[1332] And you kind of go to the edge of the screen and turn, from what I can tell.

[1333] But multiplayer, you're probably not going to want to do that.

[1334] That seems like it'd be a bit much.

[1335] Do you want to talk about Marvel vs. Capcom 3?

[1336] Yeah, sure.

[1337] Okay.

[1338] Today's the day.

[1339] Yeah, it's, you know...

[1340] I don't know, man. All right.

[1341] I really think that that game – I really respect that game.

[1342] But right now, where I'm at right now with it, and I need to play more, I don't know that I like it.

[1343] Okay.

[1344] What's the divining line?

[1345] Pardon me one second.

[1346] I – Then he can't be here for this.

[1347] Spoiler.

[1348] He's going to walk out.

[1349] I don't know that – it's like I like fighting games.

[1350] I'm not the best fighting game player in the world, but I have enjoyed them for a good long time.

[1351] I can get reasonably good at fighting games and probably be about as good as anyone who's not going to go devote – Like tournament level.

[1352] Yeah, yeah.

[1353] People that are not going to go devote themselves to one specific game and get into like that side of things.

[1354] Yeah.

[1355] So I'm all right.

[1356] You feel confident in your skills.

[1357] Yeah, and I'm picking up more and more, I guess, as I play more Marvel vs. Capcom and kind of getting into the different systems and when you should use them and that sort of stuff.

[1358] But it's kind of like you reach this point where the more I learn about it, the more I just kind of don't want to play it.

[1359] Like the air combo system, they did some really smart stuff with kind of turning that into this cool guessing game where you're tagging characters around and a character can counter out of it when you're attempting to tag in the middle of an air combo.

[1360] My snap judgment on that system, having played, like, what, three matches?

[1361] Yeah, yeah.

[1362] So the guessing game that you're talking about is that you're basically trying to guess which way they're going to juggle you, right?

[1363] Yeah, if it's up, sideways.

[1364] And if you match that, you break out of the air combo.

[1365] It happens so goddamn fast.

[1366] Like, what can you really do besides just spam on the different directions and hope that you hit one?

[1367] That's kind of it.

[1368] That's basically it, right?

[1369] That is kind of it.

[1370] But at the same time, everything in that game happens that fast.

[1371] Now that I've spent a lot of time playing it, the speed is not the thing anymore.

[1372] I've got to understand why you, in your first three matches, trying to pick that stuff up, you'd be like, man, fuck this.

[1373] Because it is a much faster game than we've been playing lately.

[1374] So that definitely takes some getting used to.

[1375] I don't know.

[1376] It's like the Marvel cast really holds very little sway for me personally.

[1377] I think they've made some great fighting game characters out of some of those guys.

[1378] And I think some of the additions, like I think Taskmaster is really cool.

[1379] in there.

[1380] He has some fun moves.

[1381] So the roster is not necessarily doing it for me. I think the Capcom roster is not really doing it for me either.

[1382] Who's the notable omission?

[1383] Ken. I don't know.

[1384] Guile.

[1385] Charlie.

[1386] Do you think...

[1387] I mean, I never played much to, you know, not really a fighting game guy in general, but do you think that they have maybe focused too much on playing to the audience that loves MVC2?

[1388] I don't really know because this game kind of has some similarities to Tatsunoko versus Capcom with what they've done.

[1389] That's kind of the other thing.

[1390] That game doesn't have kick buttons.

[1391] It's got light, medium, heavy.

[1392] And I don't really like that.

[1393] It's kind of a weird thing, because I think that the system that they've built works well enough, but it's not what I want out of a Capcom fighting game.

[1394] But it sounds like a lot of this stuff, like you're saying, I think I'm starting to understand.

[1395] It's like you just kind of slam your way up the tree, light, medium, heavy, special.

[1396] But I mean, there's a difference between...

[1397] What's good and what you like and what's good are not necessarily always exactly the same thing.

[1398] I think it's a well -made game from people who know how to make fighting games.

[1399] They definitely have spent a lot of time thinking about these systems.

[1400] And I think it's immediately, though I don't know that I can necessarily tell you why just yet.

[1401] I didn't like Tatsunoko versus Capcom at all.

[1402] This game I am borderline liking and kind of into it.

[1403] Yeah.

[1404] Depending on, you know.

[1405] five -minute chunks of playing it, you know, ask me in 20 minutes and I might just say, like, this game's fun.

[1406] So I'm really torn back and forth on a lot of this stuff right now.

[1407] Interesting.

[1408] But Tassinoko, I didn't really like at all.

[1409] And, you know, it had kind of the additional side penalty of, like, half the roster was just dumb as far as I'm concerned.

[1410] So...

[1411] taking those systems and taking them to kind of the next logical level and refining them and enhancing them, it's still kind of based on that core.

[1412] It still kind of feels like that core.

[1413] And I think that can only go so far for me. There's a lot of stuff like...

[1414] I'm glad that we didn't review this game before it came out because now it's out today and it's got the exact same problem that Street Fighter and Super Street Fighter had of sometimes you hit quick match and it just – so I had like 30 matches in a row that I was trying to get into and it says the connection with the opponent is lost.

[1415] This is the 360 version.

[1416] PS3 was fine before launch.

[1417] I haven't tried it today to see if it's as bad.

[1418] But that was something that Street Fighter did.

[1419] And I'm like, I can't believe we're still...

[1420] They haven't figured out the match.

[1421] So it also dumps you back like two menus.

[1422] And that's just like shoddy.

[1423] They don't have spectator mode in their eight -player lobby stuff.

[1424] So it's just like seven...

[1425] You could potentially be sitting through seven matches staring at menus, staring at life bars.

[1426] It's just...

[1427] How do you take that step backwards?

[1428] I haven't seen it officially from them, but when we were saying that earlier, there was some response saying, like, oh, they're looking at patching that in.

[1429] It's like, well, how do you not ship with that?

[1430] Also, the tutorial stuff from that quick look seemed wanting for a little...

[1431] It's similar to Street Fighter IVs, but I think that was a missed opportunity there as well, and especially you get into this game that has...

[1432] more systems to it and stuff that people who play more traditional fighting games might have some questions about.

[1433] We're kind of in this age now where fighting games are coming back.

[1434] Street Fighter 4 did really well and appealed to a lot of people and stuff like that.

[1435] And if they want to prevent it from going away again, they need to find a way to make it more inviting.

[1436] And I think the roster kind of does that for some people.

[1437] But if they had actually taken the time to say, hey, here's...

[1438] Here's kind of the basics of the combo system.

[1439] And then they kind of do some of that stuff with the mission mode, but they're not explicit about it.

[1440] If they said, you know, try to do the advancing guard five times here and then had just like a couple of sentences in the game saying, here's why.

[1441] This is here.

[1442] Right.

[1443] Or here's why you want to use it.

[1444] I think that that's something that would have been hugely beneficial to – it would have made the game easier to play for a wider audience instead of saying like, oh, now you have to go look around online for all these character videos.

[1445] They're like well made.

[1446] Like the fighting game community has done a great job yet again.

[1447] Picking up the slack.

[1448] Yeah, exactly.

[1449] Picking up the slack.

[1450] But they shouldn't have to.

[1451] Like Capcom should be doing that.

[1452] Like fighting game developers should be putting some of that stuff in the game and not – Not putting it into the strategy guide they're selling or community outreach stuff.

[1453] It should be part of the core experience.

[1454] For me, it was terrible at that stuff.

[1455] Like in the tutorial, there are a few things and some of the top ones are a button to show me the move.

[1456] Show me what you want me to do.

[1457] Just like execute.

[1458] Maybe hit select and show me what it is that you want me to do.

[1459] Let the AI just show me what to do.

[1460] Also, some of that stuff.

[1461] Let me just do it in stages.

[1462] Like walk me through the stages.

[1463] Like jump in.

[1464] All right, now just keep me there until I do the next correct button press.

[1465] Okay, you got it.

[1466] You got it.

[1467] You got it.

[1468] You got it.

[1469] Now let's try it again.

[1470] Yeah, let's try it again because some of that stuff gets really intense.

[1471] It's like learning guitar.

[1472] And sometimes you just don't know.

[1473] We talked a little bit on the quick look.

[1474] Sometimes there's specific positioning you need to be in or you need to do something up against the wall.

[1475] Or you're waiting for timing on like a juggle or something like that.

[1476] And you just don't know.

[1477] Where there's like multiple spots where you can hit them with that move and you spend a lot of time doing it one way only to realize like, oh, wait, I need to wait.

[1478] Yeah.

[1479] It can get really frustrating and I think makes you just go back into mash mode where you're just like, I can't do this stuff.

[1480] I'm just going to mash up the light, medium, hard again.

[1481] Right.

[1482] If you had spelled it out a little bit more, maybe I'd be trying more complicated stuff.

[1483] Yeah, and it's like that's stuff that I'm kind of past that point now.

[1484] I understand how stuff works for the most part, and I'm trying to get better.

[1485] But I'm still at this point where I'm losing matches and not knowing why.

[1486] I'm not learning anything from my losses, and it's super frustrating.

[1487] It's just like I'm getting into these games and just getting the fucking shit beat out of me, and I'm like, I don't know how to.

[1488] That wolf won't stop hitting me. And someone wrote back and said, block low.

[1489] I was fucking blocking low.

[1490] Kill that guy.

[1491] But, you know, it's one of those things that, like, that's just a well -timed combo where you're just hitting with that normal, like, over and over again, and it just kind of, like, looks lame, but...

[1492] Plus, it's a crazy game.

[1493] I mean, you jump into that, you're immediately...

[1494] playing with three different characters.

[1495] It's not like in, let's just say Street Fighter, where you're like, all right, I'm going to learn how to play Ryu for a while.

[1496] You've got to figure out a team and the assists and how they work together.

[1497] Yeah, it's a lot to take in.

[1498] There's a lot more to pick up.

[1499] I'm really excited to jump in.

[1500] Get your ass kicked.

[1501] Online is not going to be where I'm going to play.

[1502] It's got some issues that I think it could have been better, but it is a well -made game, systems -wise.

[1503] Once you get past this online.

[1504] menu is not as good as it should have been or you know like some of the ui stuff is not as clear as it should have been and you know they could have been more uh instructive to uh new players and and that sort of stuff like the the core game is well made the the disconnect for me about the core game though that makes it less approachable than street fighter 4 right again my brief experience correct me if i'm wrong but like you mentioned that this is this has more systems going on it almost seems like it's all systems Like you can jump into Street Fighter IV having no idea what a focus attack dash cancel is.

[1505] Right.

[1506] If you know how to throw a fireball and do a dragon punch, you can still have fun with it.

[1507] I think that's the thing is, you know, like the core level of Street Fighter IV is fun on its own.

[1508] And also there, as you get better, yeah, it's fairly standard.

[1509] And there are systems that they've put on top of it, like focus attacks and, you know, canceling, you know, like just the additional layers that as you get better and start to figure that stuff out.

[1510] It becomes more rewarding.

[1511] It becomes more intricate.

[1512] But that bottom level is awesome.

[1513] And fun.

[1514] But the bottom level of MPC3 is mashy and kind of ridiculous.

[1515] Naturally, I picked Ryu for my first match yesterday because, hey, I think I know how to play that guy.

[1516] I try throwing fireballs and doing dragon punches and hurricane kicks.

[1517] Fucking jack shit happens.

[1518] I just get smeared all over the ground.

[1519] It's like you need stuff that's going to...

[1520] you need moves that are going to cover two thirds of the screen when they come out.

[1521] Like taskmasters, normal, just reaches out with that sword.

[1522] And, and so that's what I'm looking for right now is characters with a ton of reach.

[1523] Right.

[1524] And Ryu has like, doesn't seem to have a whole lot of it.

[1525] And I'm not saying that makes it like bad or that it's designed in a wrong way.

[1526] It's not fundamentally messed up.

[1527] It's just like, it doesn't make sense to somebody who has no experience with it.

[1528] Yeah.

[1529] So it, it kind of provides a learning curve and it becomes that matter of like, do you want to?

[1530] put in the time to learn it or not.

[1531] And are the learning tools robust enough that you actually can't?

[1532] Right, yeah.

[1533] For me, it's that frustration of, like I said, losing these fights.

[1534] more or less knowing why I'm losing, but not knowing what the next step is other than to just like, I mean, I guess I just have to bang my head against it.

[1535] Like if I really wanted to get into this game, I'd probably have to bang my head against it for like a month until every single attack that was coming out of any single person was something I recognized and knew how to deal with.

[1536] Whereas right now it's just like, oh, that one hit high, that one hit low, that one, you know, it's like getting crossed up all over the place because it's just, everything happens so fast.

[1537] It's, yeah, I don't know.

[1538] How many characters?

[1539] 32, I think.

[1540] I think it's 36, I think.

[1541] 36, maybe.

[1542] With the unlocks.

[1543] Yeah, 36 with the unlocks, and then there are two more coming.

[1544] It'll be packed in, or the code is in with the...

[1545] you know, the collector's edition, but it doesn't work yet.

[1546] It won't work until the 15th.

[1547] That's a lot of dudes.

[1548] And then combinations of all those dudes.

[1549] Especially considering the three -way assist combos.

[1550] And then like three supers for each guy?

[1551] Multiple supers for each guy.

[1552] I don't know that it's necessarily three per person.

[1553] It's a lot of...

[1554] But like not even just like...

[1555] Damage -wise, when you were showing it to us, it was like, this is going to launch them high, this is going to push them back.

[1556] That's a lot of...

[1557] Oh, three assists.

[1558] Oh, three assists, sorry, yeah.

[1559] That's a lot to keep in mind.

[1560] Yeah, I mean, I understand why people like that game, but I was never a big MVC2 guy, and MVC3 is more approachable in some ways, but still just buck wild.

[1561] I think it'll be real fun to watch.

[1562] matches of tournament dudes just go and fill in that screen with craziness.

[1563] I don't know what's going on.

[1564] It's beautiful.

[1565] MVC2 was all about filling the screen with craziness, but this looks...

[1566] It is always on in that game.

[1567] Akuma's Fireball Hyper is fucking beautiful.

[1568] It's just a giant purple flower.

[1569] Just waving up and down as it's just decimating anything.

[1570] It just looks great.

[1571] Like that engine, the art, everything about it.

[1572] Presentation.

[1573] I think some of the art doesn't work.

[1574] Some of the stylistic stuff doesn't work with every character.

[1575] I think Tron looks a little weird.

[1576] It seems like it might be the shading they're using or some of the character shadowing.

[1577] Severe, hard, self -shadowing stuff.

[1578] For the short guys like Arthur and Amaterasu and stuff like that.

[1579] It looks a little weird with the shaders they're using on all the characters.

[1580] I don't know.

[1581] It's really cool, but I...

[1582] The more I play of it, the more I'm just like, man, I just know I'm never going to be able to or really even want to put in the time to master it.

[1583] But at the same time, I really respect it.

[1584] So it's this whole horrible thing of trying to review this game that I think is really quite good.

[1585] But even as someone who likes fighting games, I'm just like, I don't think it's for me. I'm now staring real hard at our scoring scale and starting to write reviews and playing a bunch more and just going like, I don't know.

[1586] Brad Shoemaker.

[1587] I feel like I understand now, finally, why people wouldn't want to play StarCraft online.

[1588] That's what it looks like to me, right?

[1589] Specifically having played this yesterday against human beings.

[1590] I'm just like, Christ, man. That's exactly what you said.

[1591] Yeah.

[1592] It's like a months -long proposition to get good at this.

[1593] Yeah.

[1594] Fuck.

[1595] And it's like in a situation where, you know, like in StarCraft, like I understand the basics of StarCraft just fine.

[1596] But then you lose about 30 matches in a row before you realize like, oh, he made a bunch of roaches.

[1597] I should have gotten something that's good against armor.

[1598] Right.

[1599] But that takes a while.

[1600] Let's make more immortals.

[1601] Gibberish talk.

[1602] Yeah, it's all nonsense.

[1603] Let's go play more You Don't Know Jack.

[1604] Yeah.

[1605] So if you made your robo after your second gateway, you would have been good.

[1606] Sure.

[1607] I'll keep that in mind for next time.

[1608] When you play MVC3, remember.

[1609] More rojos.

[1610] When they put StarCraft characters into MVC3.

[1611] Drink more Robitussin.

[1612] Fuck.

[1613] Keep talking.

[1614] Drink more Robitussin and that'll just happen.

[1615] What is Jim Rayner's special?

[1616] His assist, is he just one of those, the Valkyrie?

[1617] What is his ride called, his motorcycle?

[1618] The first one?

[1619] Yeah.

[1620] What was that?

[1621] Valkyrie?

[1622] Vulture.

[1623] Vulture.

[1624] I think it was Vulture.

[1625] Yeah, you just hit the button and a vulture drives by.

[1626] All right.

[1627] Drop some spider mines.

[1628] What?

[1629] Just one vulture?

[1630] It's not 72 vultures?

[1631] No, that's for his hypers.

[1632] Oh, okay.

[1633] We'll get there.

[1634] It's just like that Strider one from 2 where it's just like every single sprite from Strider they could put into this game just comes on the screen.

[1635] Dude, where is Strider?

[1636] He's not in it.

[1637] I know.

[1638] Like, what?

[1639] It just occurred to me. What the fuck?

[1640] They made some adjustments to the roster.

[1641] Give it some time.

[1642] Yeah, but did they really need Chris Redfield and Wesker?

[1643] And Jill is the downloadable character.

[1644] Could they not have dropped one of them?

[1645] People like Resident Evil.

[1646] They haven't made a new Strider game in a very long time.

[1647] But dude, that sword.

[1648] Look at that curve.

[1649] Keep in mind that there was a good year or so.

[1650] where we were talking to people about Capcom who were kind of winking and nodding about how there was a new Strider in development, and now that doesn't happen anymore.

[1651] Huh.

[1652] Not a lot of people wink and nod.

[1653] If I had to guess, at some point someone was working on some kind of Strider that is now totally dead.

[1654] Now I'm extra depressed.

[1655] That sucks.

[1656] We'll go back and play Strider 2 and be even more depressed.

[1657] Oh, God.

[1658] People liked that game.

[1659] I was never...

[1660] I actually went and played some of it pretty recently.

[1661] Oh, really?

[1662] Yeah.

[1663] I was like, eh.

[1664] It's just that 2D, 3D combo is just so gnarly.

[1665] Sometimes it works really well.

[1666] Sometimes it doesn't.

[1667] So does a PS1 game?

[1668] Yeah.

[1669] Yeah.

[1670] Hmm.

[1671] And arcade running on PS1 hardware.

[1672] It was the first eight mega disc.

[1673] Yes.

[1674] Brad Shoemaker.

[1675] Hello.

[1676] Anything else going on in your life?

[1677] Duke Nukem forever.

[1678] Duke Nukem forever.

[1679] Duke Nukem forever.

[1680] Duke Nukem forever.

[1681] Forever.

[1682] Duke Nukem.

[1683] Forever.

[1684] Forever?

[1685] Exactly.

[1686] 2K came through.

[1687] Yeah.

[1688] In more ways than one.

[1689] And gave us a good couple of hours with Duke Nukem Forever.

[1690] They're pretending like that's a video game that's going to ship to stores.

[1691] They continue to act.

[1692] They're talking.

[1693] They're saying special editions.

[1694] They're putting a lot of work into that fake demo build that they're running out as Duke Nukem Forever.

[1695] It's amazing.

[1696] They gave us a pair of balls of steel as a little promotional item.

[1697] Did they?

[1698] Yeah, they did.

[1699] Oh, wow.

[1700] Yeah.

[1701] Well, their special edition is called the Balls of Steel edition.

[1702] It's true.

[1703] They're leaning into that gag pretty well.

[1704] That game should come with Ventrilo support.

[1705] Actually, they just announced full Steamworks today, so that's a good thing.

[1706] For sure.

[1707] Especially after the Borderlands debacle.

[1708] Anyway.

[1709] Brad, you played...

[1710] I guess I played the most of it.

[1711] We all played it.

[1712] Out of the office, we've all played it, but you played it the most.

[1713] I played it from the beginning.

[1714] Yes.

[1715] It was like the first 90 minutes of the game or so.

[1716] Yeah, ish.

[1717] Two hours.

[1718] They said it took you longer, but...

[1719] Yeah, they said it was about the first 90 minutes.

[1720] Because I had to run around hitting X button on everything.

[1721] Everything.

[1722] Picking up poop.

[1723] You can...

[1724] You can pee on the poop in the toilet.

[1725] I heard the statue puzzle.

[1726] I was told that took you like 10 minutes.

[1727] Took me 10 minutes?

[1728] Yeah.

[1729] Maybe.

[1730] I don't know.

[1731] I thought I went through that pretty quickly.

[1732] I didn't see all of it.

[1733] I came in at the end.

[1734] To be fair, it was a dumb puzzle.

[1735] Oh, did you guys do the statue puzzle as well?

[1736] I did the statue puzzle, yeah.

[1737] I didn't know you could make the statue talk at first, and then you make them talk and everything blows up.

[1738] That's where I was stuck.

[1739] Well, it's two buttons.

[1740] You hit speak to make a talk, and then alien invasion, and that makes the buildings come down.

[1741] I didn't see that button down there.

[1742] That game takes a while to get going.

[1743] I was surprised.

[1744] Yeah, it seems like there's a lot of ramp up.

[1745] The intro is that stuff from PAX, which is the end of Duke 3D.

[1746] You run out in the football field.

[1747] You kill the cycloid dude.

[1748] Kick his eye through a field goal.

[1749] From there, you don't pick up a gun again for, God, like 30 minutes?

[1750] No, I don't think it was that long.

[1751] It was a while.

[1752] It was 30 minutes because you were talking to...

[1753] But that's what you would want to do if you were really playing it.

[1754] You're going to play a Duke Nukem game.

[1755] You're going to run around messing with everything you see.

[1756] You're going to play the pinball machine.

[1757] You were going to pick up the poop in the toilet and throw it at everything you can.

[1758] I guess if you count all the cut scenes, it could have been 30 minutes.

[1759] What did Duke say when you picked up poop in the toilet?

[1760] All sorts of stuff.

[1761] There was a surprising number of lines of dialogue.

[1762] One of my favorite was...

[1763] Specifically related.

[1764] Who the fuck would do this?

[1765] Why am I picking up wet feces?

[1766] Oh, God, what is wrong with me?

[1767] Something like that.

[1768] It was super weird.

[1769] It was really weird.

[1770] And he just started throwing it at everybody.

[1771] You can throw it and it'll splatter, but then it's still whole and you can pick it up and throw it again.

[1772] Then you throw it at the whiteboard and it does not splat on the whiteboard.

[1773] Then you do it on the whiteboard.

[1774] Yes.

[1775] Then you draw your own poop.

[1776] Yes.

[1777] Poop.

[1778] That game is weird.

[1779] It's weird.

[1780] I don't know what to make of it.

[1781] It's a throwback.

[1782] It's a throwback.

[1783] I don't think it counts as a throwback.

[1784] Yeah, I think you're right.

[1785] Throwback has to be made in modern times intentionally looking back.

[1786] This was just made a while ago.

[1787] But you see it.

[1788] I mean, you see the spots where they modernize some stuff, like you hold two weapons at a time and you have recharging health.

[1789] But it's still a health meter.

[1790] Yeah, well, you know, whatever.

[1791] Halo had meters.

[1792] I guess so.

[1793] It's not necessarily.

[1794] But it's not like a red haze around the edge of the screen.

[1795] You still get that, though.

[1796] You can add more health points.

[1797] More ego.

[1798] More ego points.

[1799] You can get the ego boost.

[1800] By doing stuff like bench pressing.

[1801] Yeah, doing Duke -like things.

[1802] But that is a modernization.

[1803] Like those systems, even if it is not the most modern.

[1804] But there's...

[1805] The feel of that game, the pacing of that game, the way you're kind of like, all right, we're coming up to this arena -type space, and you're going to see several waves of enemies come through it, and you have to kill all those enemies before you then move on to the next thing.

[1806] There's something – the set piece kind of flow of what I was shown, at least of what I played, felt like an older first -person shooter.

[1807] It felt like the way they – fucking kind of used to make first -person shooters.

[1808] And it's a weird, it's a very weird, very dissonant experience.

[1809] There's some rough -looking geometry in that game.

[1810] Certainly.

[1811] We were playing the 360 version.

[1812] The buses in that one outdoor spot were just kind of big rectangles that were rounded on the front.

[1813] It was some real hard edges on some stuff.

[1814] And you saw a lot of Unreal pop -in type stuff as well.

[1815] The game's not done, so that stuff's not necessarily indicative, but I think it's probably safe to say that they're not going to add geometry to the buses at this point.

[1816] They're not going to round out the buses.

[1817] I thought it did feel...

[1818] uh like pulling the trigger and kind of shooting shooting guys well we were playing the uh i think if that game gets really silky smooth and the frame rate and stuff could be real fun to kind of run through yeah and kill guys which is totally why i'm going to play that on a pc yeah some of the footage they released in some of the the b -roll the in -house b -roll looked a lot higher res yeah and the we played it on the pc at pax and it played really smoothly yeah yeah and this xbox version was It needed some optimization.

[1819] They still have some time, so we don't know.

[1820] But I think that will be pretty key in something that fast.

[1821] Because you want to run up dudes, smack them around, shoot guys.

[1822] You want it to be basically as fast and as smooth as 2D was.

[1823] It kind of needs to be that for, I think, that style of game to really work.

[1824] And, you know, it's like they've changed some stuff.

[1825] Like you can kind of zoom or, you know, you can look down the sites, but it's just a zoom.

[1826] Some stuff that the only thing.

[1827] It looks a little awkward, I thought.

[1828] I didn't even use it.

[1829] It seemed to be of no use whatsoever to me. Unless, I mean, if you're shooting.

[1830] From a distance.

[1831] Shooting like the pistol from a long way away maybe.

[1832] The only thing that kind of bummed me out a little bit that I feel like was a poor holdover from those older games was.

[1833] the kind of bigger boss fights of just unloading unloading go reload at an ammo crate and just unloading unloading unloading just like trying to get this health bar to come down right while you're just kind of like unlimited ammo over here and you're just like kind of running around dumping ammo run back and it just felt like i don't know this is just kind of a longer boss fight it's not that interesting i'm just kind of doing the same thing like hide behind this pillar pop out shoot rockets out a guy's face and i can't decide if i think it's funny or not Some parts of it genuinely are.

[1834] There are definitely some parts that make you groan.

[1835] It wasn't just the one boss fight.

[1836] It seems to be the model for...

[1837] I saw you fight two, I fought two.

[1838] There are a lot of strategically placed ammo crates.

[1839] It's a whole lot of pouring ammo into a huge guy who barely flinches when you shoot him, but you see the health ticking down so you know you're doing damage.

[1840] Right, and he's just shooting rockets at you, so you're just kind of circle strafing around him.

[1841] Yeah, totally circle strafing that guy in the football arena until he's dead.

[1842] Which, I don't know, it raised a question for me that I don't really have an answer for, but I asked them, you know, when Gearbox got this game, on a bunch of hard drives or whatever.

[1843] How much work on top of what was on there have they done, or are they just cleaning it up and getting it ready to go out the door?

[1844] And they said, you know, philosophically the way they're approaching it is they are trying to bring as pure...

[1845] They're trying to bring the vision of 3D Realms to market in as pure a form as possible.

[1846] So that they can get this out of the way and start making a real Duke.

[1847] Is that your theory?

[1848] Yeah, maybe.

[1849] Maybe that's right.

[1850] But I mean, I don't know.

[1851] Is that...

[1852] Does that serve this game well to do that, to say this is the game they were making?

[1853] Nothing serves this game well.

[1854] I don't know.

[1855] Starting over is crazy.

[1856] Well, you couldn't do that at this point.

[1857] Yeah.

[1858] That's impossible.

[1859] So if you're going to use anything from this game, you might as well use it all.

[1860] I don't know that the game will be awesome, but I don't think they're looking at making an awesome game.

[1861] They're going to finish it.

[1862] I think they're looking at finishing this game and putting it out and saying we're the ones we...

[1863] We did what nobody else could do.

[1864] We made it happen.

[1865] We facilitated this game making its way to shelves and it'll be a really interesting curiosity regardless of quality.

[1866] And I think there will be a generation of people that will need to see that and have to know for themselves.

[1867] And there will definitely be a generation that doesn't have the context.

[1868] They'll probably just look at this game and go, this game is garbage.

[1869] They'll probably look at it and go, I don't understand why any of this game is like this.

[1870] Go back to Serious Sam, old man. Yeah, why is this even interesting?

[1871] Yeah, you absolutely need that context.

[1872] If they could finish Duke Nukem Forever, regardless of frame rate and buses and whatever else, they could finish Duke Nukem Forever.

[1873] That's true.

[1874] That's insane.

[1875] Achievement unlocked.

[1876] It's like a madman's quest.

[1877] Yeah, absolutely.

[1878] Because even when you win, you still kind of lose because it's not like the game is going to – Yeah, you're not going to win game of the year with that.

[1879] But you're going to put out an interesting game that gets people talking about Duke Nukem.

[1880] Yeah.

[1881] hopefully isn't such a horrible mess that it turns people off to the future of the franchise, which I don't think it'll do that.

[1882] It seems cool, if not completely archaic and crazy.

[1883] And it puts them in a position for Gearbox to say, all right, now we're actually going to make a proper Duke Nukem game, and guess what?

[1884] It'll take like 18 months and be totally better than this.

[1885] It's about keeping that property alive.

[1886] Closing the book on this chapter that...

[1887] is fucking ridiculous.

[1888] They wouldn't have ponied up for the IP itself unless that was exactly their plan.

[1889] That's the only reason to do that.

[1890] I think the humor in it is kind of what I expected out of Duke's mouth.

[1891] It was kind of like, take it or leave it.

[1892] But the part I actually found really entertaining was everybody's reactions to Duke.

[1893] Just like the world around Duke.

[1894] It's funny because you've never had that.

[1895] You've never had people reacting to Duke.

[1896] Duke is pretty much the only person in his game.

[1897] You want to talk about stuff that doesn't exist.

[1898] shooters uh how about the scene with government guy just talking at you while you're in the world for probably like a minute and a half or something, right?

[1899] And he's just like, we need to go get this, Duke.

[1900] You did this.

[1901] I don't know if the president's a bad guy.

[1902] I sure hope not.

[1903] Well, you have full control.

[1904] I got to the point where I'm just like, I'm going to start meleeing items in the environment.

[1905] Is there no head tracking?

[1906] Does he look at you as you move around him?

[1907] No, he's just standing there going through his animations.

[1908] He is exposition dump.

[1909] I was just throwing the trash cans at him and everything.

[1910] Maybe I should have done it.

[1911] I was really close to getting into that.

[1912] And it's stuff that doesn't exist in truly modern shooters.

[1913] I loved how Vinny was running around plugging every guard he saw in the head with the pistol and the guy would take it in the head and he'd be like, hey man, I'm on your side.

[1914] But the funny part is they just love you.

[1915] All the dudes are like, fucking dude!

[1916] Duke in there.

[1917] Don't look at Duke.

[1918] And there's the first cop.

[1919] I don't know if it's the first cop, but it's the cop that we saw when you get to the Vegas streets.

[1920] There's a very cursy cop.

[1921] Yeah.

[1922] They're just like, hey, man, just fucking get some pussy.

[1923] Fuck this shit.

[1924] I'm going to go get some guys.

[1925] Fuck this.

[1926] We're going to go kill these fuckers.

[1927] And then pussy's awesome.

[1928] And then fuck this shit.

[1929] This shit's for pussies.

[1930] Yeah.

[1931] That part makes me crack up because I feel like everybody's trying to play up to Duke.

[1932] Yeah, like that guy's just cursing extra because it's Duke.

[1933] this bullshit retirement's bullshit and that's and fuck that bullshit yeah the world they have constructed around that character is is like did they tell you all the backstory of what he's been doing in the last 12 years he retired or something yeah but he also became an MMA champion and he owns a successful burger franchise he's a poker champion and he's they talk about the duke dome world series of poker champion and yes he has a duke dome Like, he is a renaissance man. World Series of Poker Champions.

[1934] Really funny.

[1935] I think there was one guy when, I don't know if you guys got this cutscene when you walk out and some guy's like, yeah, Duke, we're going to get it done.

[1936] And the guy next to him was like, you don't say we're going to get it done to Duke Nukem.

[1937] You say, we're going to fuck some shit up, bro.

[1938] I'm going to put a boot up your ass.

[1939] You don't say cause extreme damage.

[1940] Yeah, extreme damage.

[1941] It's like, oh.

[1942] Yeah, that stuff to me was really funny.

[1943] It's like the whole game is set in idiocracy.

[1944] Yes, basically.

[1945] There's some good gags.

[1946] And then, like, there are, like, just here's a line ripped directly out of the movie Old School.

[1947] Like, no, but he says, you're my boy, Brew.

[1948] Oh, does he say Brew?

[1949] Oh, is that what he said?

[1950] Not you're my boy, Brew.

[1951] But again, like.

[1952] But yes.

[1953] And he says that, I think, every time you drink one of these gigantic cans of beer.

[1954] But I expect that.

[1955] If Duke isn't ripping off frat boy gags, repeated lines from popular sources of humor, that's not Duke.

[1956] And power armor.

[1957] What is it?

[1958] Power armor.

[1959] Power armor.

[1960] It's the straight up master chief.

[1961] It is the halo armor.

[1962] So the Dice Awards were – the opening of the Dice Awards was – Duke Nukem and, uh, and they showed that power in there too.

[1963] Okay.

[1964] And I thought that that was just – I was really surprised to see it in the real game because I thought it was something they just built for dice.

[1965] I was just bullshitting with the PR like five minutes before that scene about them skirting copyright on something, and then I run up to that.

[1966] Oh, it was Bellagio, right?

[1967] Oh, yeah, it was because there is a Bellagio knockoff called Fellatio.

[1968] Of course.

[1969] Of course.

[1970] I want to – Well, you know, like Gearbox made a Halo game, so.

[1971] Oh, yeah, that's true.

[1972] They have those assets?

[1973] Well, yeah, they certainly have the assets.

[1974] I choose to believe that game is set in the world according to George Broussard.

[1975] And I think I'm okay with that.

[1976] Seems like it.

[1977] If you told me that George Broussard was an MMA champion and a World Series poker champion, I'd be like, of course he is.

[1978] The baddest motherfucker on the planet, as far as I can tell.

[1979] He would own a fast food chain, wouldn't he?

[1980] What a weird game.

[1981] Weird game.

[1982] What a weird game.

[1983] But it has that level of weirdness that you're interacting with all these objects in it that is just like, this is really weird.

[1984] It's like you look at it and go, this is why it took so long.

[1985] We need a fully functional pinball machine.

[1986] Right.

[1987] Like, fuck you.

[1988] You don't.

[1989] Okay, it's pretty cool.

[1990] You need to actually be able to play basketball with that basketball and hoop.

[1991] You need to get a health bonus for throwing the basketball through the hoop and hitting.

[1992] the heavy bag and lifting weights and finding all the weights to put on the weight thing before you lift the weights.

[1993] Yeah.

[1994] Weird game.

[1995] Allegedly.

[1996] Allegedly.

[1997] Assuming it actually is.

[1998] Assuming any of that happened.

[1999] Jeff, like you said, you'll have to go and buy it in a store.

[2000] Yeah, I mean, they'll send us copies or whatever, but I'm going to go buy a copy of Duke Nukem Forever.

[2001] And until that happens, until I open that copy of the game and put it in a console and see that it runs and see that that's what they're selling to people out there, that's when I believe any of this is actually happening.

[2002] I think you have to go a step further and make it to the end of the game because maybe after that it's like, thanks for playing the demo.

[2003] See you in five years.

[2004] All right, so that's Duke Nukem Forever.

[2005] Or is it?

[2006] Yeah, whatever happened today.

[2007] Pizza was drugged.

[2008] We'll find out in a couple months, I guess.

[2009] Anything else?

[2010] No. Oh, I got to meet the lead writer of Assassin's Creed at Dice.

[2011] That's cool.

[2012] The first one?

[2013] No, all of them?

[2014] The series.

[2015] Did you ask him what happened?

[2016] So I've been wondering.

[2017] He knows.

[2018] He didn't tell you.

[2019] He would not tell me. I've been wondering, but I can't ask very specifically because I haven't quite finished two yet.

[2020] But, I mean, basically the creative director of that series departed.

[2021] Yeah.

[2022] I don't know if you got any insight into this, but I wonder how much of the vision of this series was flowing from him.

[2023] I did not talk about that.

[2024] How much other people were supporting it and if it's kind of gone in a sideways direction since he left.

[2025] Yeah, I didn't get into that stuff.

[2026] Because Brotherhood has this weird appearance of being kind of like a side story where they used a bunch of assets again.

[2027] And kind of the company spin on him leaving was kind of his...

[2028] heavy lifting with Brotherhood was done when they departed.

[2029] Brotherhood, sure, but what is to become of subsequent Assassin's Creed games?

[2030] That's the big question.

[2031] 500 person staff on Brotherhood.

[2032] How much sway can any one person have?

[2033] That's what I'm wondering.

[2034] Are they going to try to draw this series out?

[2035] These are the questions that I do not get into at DICE.

[2036] Let's talk shop.

[2037] Sit down a bit.

[2038] You know, it's, yeah.

[2039] That's when you get him drunk.

[2040] It's not the time to get, like, to do the hard journalist grilling.

[2041] It's, yeah.

[2042] Well, you just got to get them drunk and start saying things that you just can totally conjecture.

[2043] It has to be offered.

[2044] Sure.

[2045] But also ran into the Monday Night Combat guys.

[2046] To get the story from him.

[2047] Yeah, you want to know about Assassin's Creed, we'll talk about that later.

[2048] They had the scoop.

[2049] At one point, I pitched Sega that they should do a Night Trap sequel and have Double Fine develop it.

[2050] Wow.

[2051] Right?

[2052] What was the exact reaction that everyone I was telling that to had?

[2053] It was just a Night Trap sequel.

[2054] I was like, yeah.

[2055] I was like, and have Double Fine do it.

[2056] Everyone was like, oh, wait a minute.

[2057] That could be FMV still.

[2058] With the Muppets.

[2059] News.

[2060] Let's take it into news, gentlemen.

[2061] News.

[2062] I can't see them wanting to work with FMV.

[2063] Did you just say Night Court?

[2064] Yeah, Night Court.

[2065] Night Court game?

[2066] Yeah, Night Court the game.

[2067] You play as Bull.

[2068] Oh, Bull Shannon?

[2069] Yeah, Bull Shannon.

[2070] Get Telltale on the line.

[2071] We're doing a Night Court game.

[2072] God, that would be great.

[2073] 2K has announced The Darkness 2 for later this year.

[2074] Starbreeze ain't making it.

[2075] Guess who is?

[2076] Brad, guess who is?

[2077] Digital Extremes.

[2078] You guessed correctly.

[2079] What do you win?

[2080] I don't know.

[2081] You mean the makers of Dark Sector?

[2082] Yes.

[2083] No, the makers of Unreal.

[2084] Right.

[2085] Digital Extreme.

[2086] Digital Extreme.

[2087] This or that.

[2088] This is either a developer or an 80s electronica band.

[2089] Digital Extreme.

[2090] One or the other.

[2091] I never played the first Darkness, but I know people really liked it.

[2092] It was quite good.

[2093] Yeah.

[2094] I liked it.

[2095] But that was also made by Starbreeze, and they're not making this one.

[2096] Yeah.

[2097] That's a long time since The Darkness, though.

[2098] It's true.

[2099] It's been a while.

[2100] It's been a while.

[2101] You never got any sense that that was ever coming back.

[2102] Who was it?

[2103] Tommy?

[2104] It was something where they said a while ago.

[2105] It was like one of the top cow, the comic company, said like, oh, yeah, Darkness 2 is totally coming.

[2106] And then you're like, okay, well, we wrote a news story saying that.

[2107] And then here we are like two or three years past that.

[2108] And they're saying like, oh, actually, yeah, and it's totally coming out this year.

[2109] We forgot that was going on.

[2110] We gave those guys a deal like two years ago.

[2111] It's like, oh, these guys are working on syndicates.

[2112] So we're going to give it to these dudes.

[2113] Mike Patton's coming back.

[2114] Mike Patton's.

[2115] Mike Patton?

[2116] Mike Patton?

[2117] I don't know.

[2118] Is Mike Patton coming back?

[2119] I don't know.

[2120] I hope so.

[2121] I don't think they said.

[2122] They didn't say.

[2123] Yeah.

[2124] He was the darkness.

[2125] So Gears of War, connect to title.

[2126] This is, I guess, being rumored around right now.

[2127] Microsoft hasn't said anything official about this.

[2128] Don't believe so.

[2129] Steven Totillo has weird sources with blurry screenshots.

[2130] The screenshot's great because it's picture -in -picture of a real person.

[2131] in set of a Gears of War shot and I think that's the actual leaked screen and not something they just cobbled together because it's funny either way but it is just literally Marcus with two hands to like two fingers to his ear and the in set of the real shot is someone with two fingers to the ear and I'm like nailed it done great fucking ship it great what an awesome game you've already done exactly what you need to do just put it out hold this up and go on yeah and Great.

[2132] Ah, hell.

[2133] Great.

[2134] Xbox Anya.

[2135] Yeah, exactly.

[2136] To preface everything.

[2137] They should let you change what you have to say.

[2138] You should be able to name your Xbox Anya.

[2139] Anya, ESPN.

[2140] So it sounds like this is not going to be like Gears 3.

[2141] This would be its own thing.

[2142] Like a rail shooter.

[2143] Right.

[2144] Whether that means it's a downloadable thing or its own separate disk -based thing.

[2145] It's all current.

[2146] Or even true at all.

[2147] Yeah, it's rumored conjecture.

[2148] Using Gears 2 assets, though, it said.

[2149] I feel like that kind of constrains what it could be.

[2150] Supposedly, again.

[2151] Well, if any of it is true.

[2152] Right.

[2153] Well, and also if that's true.

[2154] I don't know.

[2155] Oh, that was another thing we heard from a few different developers.

[2156] I think this ended up coming out as a rumor somewhere.

[2157] I guess it's still technically a rumor now.

[2158] But I guess the Kinect SDKs, the libraries are being updated to TrackFingers.

[2159] Yeah.

[2160] That is apparently happening.

[2161] That's a big deal.

[2162] Yeah.

[2163] More fidelity.

[2164] Yeah.

[2165] So it's interesting kind of realizing that the actual backend, the libraries that they get to use to access the Kinect are being improved upon.

[2166] Yeah, that the hardware is already there.

[2167] Potentially significantly.

[2168] Now if we can only track my hand first, then it'll be real.

[2169] And I mentioned stuff like, you know, we just kind of talked about the future of Kinect with some people.

[2170] And I was like, I mentioned that, you know, you had seen Child of Eden and came back and thought that it looked like.

[2171] Kind of trash because the lag.

[2172] Well, the game looked fine.

[2173] Well, the Kinect support was too laggy.

[2174] Noticeable lag.

[2175] Trash is maybe a bit hard.

[2176] And was basically told, like, that's no longer an issue.

[2177] That's good to hear.

[2178] With Kinect games.

[2179] That's definitely good to hear.

[2180] With the way the libraries are now.

[2181] So who knows?

[2182] We'll see how that takes to actually reflect in games.

[2183] Right.

[2184] Everyone is fired and out of jobs.

[2185] Everything is closed now.

[2186] That's the big news right now.

[2187] Let's warm it up with Hudson closing at the end of the month.

[2188] which I guess Hudson has kind of existed as a part of Konami, right?

[2189] It's like Konami owned something like 60, like some kind of controlling percentage of it for a good long time.

[2190] I didn't know Hudson was still around.

[2191] Where do you think Bomberman was coming from?

[2192] This is what?

[2193] What was it called?

[2194] Hudson Entertainment was the U .S.?

[2195] Yeah, it's the U .S. Which was just a subsidiary of Hudson Soft.

[2196] Right.

[2197] Which is the Japanese company, which is what's owned by Konami.

[2198] Right.

[2199] Ultimately, it's all owned by Konami.

[2200] Ultimately, it's like, do we really need U .S. people or can the people in the Konami U .S. office handle all of this business for us?

[2201] I bet those people are stoked.

[2202] Yeah.

[2203] And we get the shill bomber, man. And we get all the skateboards that are in eggs.

[2204] You know, considering some of the stuff that Konami's been shipping lately.

[2205] At least you can say, hey, Bomberman is an established franchise.

[2206] Well, that's a bummer, Ryan.

[2207] Yeah, but that's just the start, Vinny.

[2208] Okay.

[2209] Activision, while we were at DICE last week, Activision dropped some bombs.

[2210] Our man. Closing a bunch of studios, killing entire business units and laying off roughly 500 people in the process.

[2211] That's a lot, dude.

[2212] So Guitar Hero is done.

[2213] No, that's officially done or?

[2214] I believe the official statement was that there would be no Guitar Hero this year.

[2215] Okay.

[2216] They're never going to come out and say, but they've also dissolved their entire music games business unit.

[2217] So there's no DLC for that or DJ Hero past March.

[2218] And Freestyle is done.

[2219] Are they?

[2220] I believe so.

[2221] Okay.

[2222] So I feel like they didn't necessarily get into which studios are closed.

[2223] Right.

[2224] Or anything like that.

[2225] Because I know some people were like, oh, Neversoft's history.

[2226] But Neversoft was supposed to be rolling off of Guitar Hero so that Vicarious Visions could pick it up.

[2227] So does that mean Neversoft is still alive and working on something?

[2228] I know everyone just jumped to the immediate conclusion that Neversoft was shut down.

[2229] But I was on the road, so it was kind of hard to track down exactly.

[2230] what had happened with this stuff, but it seemed like there was a lot of stuff up in the air and people saying like, well, there's never going to be another Guitar Hero game, which is not true.

[2231] That seems kind of ridiculous.

[2232] But they disbanded the business unit.

[2233] Right.

[2234] No Guitar Hero games for the foreseeable future.

[2235] And that's 500 people company -wide.

[2236] That's across all of Activision.

[2237] It doesn't mean that's 500 developers or people coding.

[2238] That's business teams and marketing.

[2239] No, but it's people.

[2240] People with game jobs don't have them anymore.

[2241] People with families.

[2242] No, absolutely.

[2243] You insensitive bastard.

[2244] I don't mean to undermine that.

[2245] Not people that count, right?

[2246] Not the good ones, right?

[2247] No, I don't mean that.

[2248] It's those people, right, Vinny?

[2249] You know what I'm talking about.

[2250] They still have jobs.

[2251] I mean that that is – Bobby Coddick still has a job.

[2252] I suspect there are a lot of people out there selling Guitar Hero.

[2253] making deals in that business unit.

[2254] Not anymore.

[2255] Not anymore, which is a shame.

[2256] They also canned True Crime Hong Kong.

[2257] That's crazy.

[2258] I don't know what it was looking like, but man. It's crazy that it was allowed to go on as long as it did before they canceled it.

[2259] What I had seen of that game in various states did not look good.

[2260] Granted, again, you've got to do your grain of salt of...

[2261] unfinished games and what have you.

[2262] And that's United Front developing that, so it's hard to say.

[2263] It's the Modern Nation Racers developers.

[2264] It's kind of hard to say what impact that's going to have on them.

[2265] They posted something on their site about it.

[2266] Really?

[2267] I can't remember what the phrasing was, but it was just something like, you know, we're sad or disappointed or something that we didn't get to bring our work to fruition with Activision.

[2268] We're pursuing, you know.

[2269] If they've got other projects lined up, then it'll be fine.

[2270] I don't know what their situation is.

[2271] I don't know that they do.

[2272] But sometimes that sort of stuff can be devastating to a studio if all of a sudden there's no money left to pay people or something.

[2273] But Mod Nation and the Racers seem to do okay for them.

[2274] What I saw of True Crime, nothing about it stood out.

[2275] Isn't that the one -world crime?

[2276] Isn't that the one that started with female protagonists and it was called Black Lotus or am I getting that mixed up with something else?

[2277] Yeah, I think that is.

[2278] By the time they started showing it, it was no longer a female protagonist.

[2279] That was the one that sparked the big conversation last year about why aren't there more female protagonists.

[2280] And that was one where it got focus grouped into having a male protagonist and being an open world game or something.

[2281] I don't know.

[2282] So that's a big shift for Activision then, especially with the guitar and DJ Hero stuff.

[2283] No music games for 2011.

[2284] No Tony Hawk game for 2011.

[2285] Spider -Man's still on for 2011.

[2286] And can you guess what else is still on for 2011?

[2287] The one where you shoot people.

[2288] Transformers.

[2289] The one that makes them a whole lot of money.

[2290] Madden.

[2291] Transformers.

[2292] For now.

[2293] Yeah, Transformers is also, yeah.

[2294] Transformers is still on.

[2295] That's on.

[2296] Same developer.

[2297] Blizzard's still.

[2298] Blizzard.

[2299] Big Cup Blizzard.

[2300] Blizzard's still.

[2301] Pulling the great chain.

[2302] All three of them.

[2303] Yeah.

[2304] So how do you guys feel?

[2305] Obviously the layoffs, horrible, really sad news.

[2306] But taking a break from Guitar Hero is – I mean these are the fruits.

[2307] But the kind of unnerving thing is it doesn't seem like any fucking lessons are being learned here.

[2308] I feel like we are – prepped to see the exact same path for Call of Duty in the next year or two of just as part of this thing.

[2309] They announced their new beachhead studio slash initiative.

[2310] I'm not even going to talk about that because I don't understand what it is, but other than trying to further monetize the online stuff like they've been talking about for a while.

[2311] But if they don't fucking change things on a fundamental level about the way they run their business, they won't have Call of Duty to rely on anymore in a couple of years.

[2312] But they may not care.

[2313] Because they may, at that point, be poised to purchase, to acquire the next big thing and start exploiting the hell out of that.

[2314] So that's what they have done over and over and over.

[2315] Yeah.

[2316] This is the third time this is happening.

[2317] It went from Tony Hawk to ex -hero, guitar hero, band hero, whatever.

[2318] It's Call of Duty.

[2319] But the business is shifting also.

[2320] They are still relying on the 2000 model.

[2321] But they're doing a pretty damn good job of it.

[2322] They're still number one.

[2323] They're still number one, but they had to fire 500 people to maintain that position.

[2324] They don't have another 500 necessarily to skim.

[2325] There are three potential outcomes here.

[2326] They modernize and come up with a more viable long -term business model, or they find the next explosive thing to acquire to take Call of Duty's place when that burns out.

[2327] Or they don't find that thing.

[2328] And all of a sudden, they're not the number one publisher anymore.

[2329] All of a sudden, they're mediagenic again.

[2330] Right.

[2331] Back to those days.

[2332] I mean, yeah, it's kind of like you can't help but think about the way EA has transformed their business and got punished into second place as a result.

[2333] Yeah, it's sad because they began a specific initiative to kind of bolster internal development and quality of internal games.

[2334] But to pull that off, the games actually have to be great.

[2335] which they weren't always.

[2336] Yeah, there are a few great games.

[2337] Yeah.

[2338] And a lot of okay games.

[2339] Yeah, it's like it's hard to, you know, you look at that initiative and go like, well, that's the environment that led to Dead Space, so they must be doing something right, but it's also the environment that led to like Mirror's Edge and Medal of Honor.

[2340] Yeah, sure.

[2341] And, you know, stuff like that.

[2342] And like some fairly assy Need for Speed games.

[2343] I mean, Hot Pursuit's solid.

[2344] You know, they're turning around, but.

[2345] It's just, it's.

[2346] It seems like an irresponsible way to run a business.

[2347] It seems like it is taxing on the industry at large.

[2348] And then, like, right around the same time as this, you started seeing rumors that they were looking to line up to try to buy Take -Two.

[2349] Yeah.

[2350] Which, the thing that came out of Dice that I heard from someone was that, you know, they had to take such a huge stock write -down as a result of a lot of the stuff that any money that they would use to buy Take -Two just got used up.

[2351] So...

[2352] the viability of that questionable.

[2353] Well, it's good if you don't want to see three Grand Theft Autos a year, I guess.

[2354] Yeah.

[2355] Yeah.

[2356] Yeah, I mean, that's the pattern, right?

[2357] Yeah.

[2358] So, yeah, it's a poor one out for a shitload of people out of work because of this.

[2359] Because Activision is the number one publisher in the world and extremely profitable.

[2360] It just makes you angry.

[2361] It's not how you want it to be a responsibly run business and one that allows people to have a livelihood in it.

[2362] Not drive a car into the ground, get out of the cars and jump in another car and drive that into the ground.

[2363] Yeah, exactly.

[2364] And then at some point say, there's no room in this car for you.

[2365] Right.

[2366] Sorry.

[2367] Sorry I drove your car into the ground.

[2368] Can I borrow your car?

[2369] Sure, yeah.

[2370] You want some sustainability.

[2371] And I don't feel like that.

[2372] It doesn't.

[2373] It seems like it has every appearance to me of being a business model that does not see past the next quarterly earnings report.

[2374] Yeah.

[2375] Yeah.

[2376] Like as long as we are increasing shareholder value quarter by quarter.

[2377] And it's also one of those things that is reflected by the changing nature of development and outsourcing and a lot of that stuff as well.

[2378] That, you know, it probably doesn't benefit Activision in some cases to have as many employees as it did.

[2379] And so this is a correction based on that.

[2380] And anything they do going forward, they'll probably have to shuffle some things around and kind of figure out how they want to play it.

[2381] And all the talk about what they've been doing with Call of Duty and calling in additional studios and all this sort of stuff is sort of indicative of that as well.

[2382] I don't know.

[2383] Again, it's all in service of saturating their market.

[2384] Right.

[2385] possibly more product than it can bear.

[2386] Let's wait and see what they actually do with Call of Duty this year.

[2387] If they make some changes or not.

[2388] If they ship two games or one.

[2389] If they ship this game and then say, by the way, we're doing one with Jets.

[2390] Or we're doing one that's a third person, this and that.

[2391] It's not beyond repair.

[2392] No, but the establishment of the Speech Head studio.

[2393] It doesn't seem like a portent of good things.

[2394] There are already three other Activision studios that we're not real sure what they're doing at the moment because it seems like they're probably working on or supporting Call of Duty.

[2395] Now they've created another studio that is explicitly to support Call of Duty.

[2396] But that's supposed to be to support it in an ongoing digital.

[2397] Sure.

[2398] Instead of like, let's pull these guys on to do a map pack.

[2399] Let's have this unit that is specifically built to do a map pack.

[2400] Again, you look at the history.

[2401] When something is hot for Activision, they pour everything into it.

[2402] When Tony Hawk was hot, they were buying developers and putting them onto ports and handheld versions.

[2403] And yeah, they bought Vicarious Visions in the wake of that stuff.

[2404] And then when Guitar Hero got hot.

[2405] The shift went in that direction.

[2406] They had four or five different studios working on that in one way or another.

[2407] It's why I feel bad about it is because the pattern is there and it's very easy to see.

[2408] I think the haunting part about it is that all that stuff was kind of running all at the same time.

[2409] It wasn't like Call of Duty didn't exist at the same time as Tony Hawk.

[2410] The sales were not such to incentivize this kind of behavior.

[2411] It was still kind of on the rise.

[2412] But what is on the rise for Activision right now?

[2413] That's the real question.

[2414] It's like they go ahead and they say, oh, we're doing Transformers and Spider -Man and Spyro.

[2415] And you're like, well, that's fine and good.

[2416] You should continue to make those games.

[2417] But where's the next big thing for Activision?

[2418] That's your point about going out and just buying the next big thing.

[2419] It makes a lot of sense.

[2420] It's hard to see a lot of that stuff coming because it's like...

[2421] Guitar Hero went from blowing up in the fall of, what, 06?

[2422] Or was it 07?

[2423] 05.

[2424] It wasn't that long ago.

[2425] It was 05.

[2426] 05 was the year the 360 launched.

[2427] Right?

[2428] Yeah.

[2429] Yeah, maybe you're right.

[2430] Anyway, I mean, it went from that franchise blowing up to the owner of that franchise being acquired in less than a year, wasn't it?

[2431] Yeah.

[2432] Sometimes this just comes out of nowhere.

[2433] And they are poised to strategically snap it up.

[2434] Well, they had put out two games.

[2435] They had already put out Guitar Hero and Guitar Hero 2 on the PlayStation 2 before Activision, before purchases started happening.

[2436] Well, they announced their acquisition at E3 of the year that they bought them.

[2437] So I think that was...

[2438] I think two came out under Activision, I believe.

[2439] Well, and both of them were published by Activision.

[2440] Red Octane put the first one out by itself.

[2441] I'm pretty sure Activision's name was on it.

[2442] No, Activision wasn't involved with the first Guitar Hero.

[2443] Yeah.

[2444] Maybe developers will be cautious if they can look past some of the money and stuff and be like, I...

[2445] Don't want my franchise to get burned out.

[2446] I don't know.

[2447] If you're the owner of the company and they come calling with a five -foot -wide check, it might be kind of hard to turn down.

[2448] It's like, okay.

[2449] I'll admit, though, I'd have a hard time turning down any check if they brought it in like that.

[2450] Yeah, if it was a publisher's clearinghouse.

[2451] You're like, it's for 50 bucks.

[2452] Fuck, I don't care.

[2453] Oh, man, are you going to take my picture?

[2454] Am I on TV right now?

[2455] Do you mind writing a regular one so I can put this one on the wall?

[2456] I don't actually have to cash this.

[2457] What else is the news?

[2458] Double Fine is making a Sesame Street game.

[2459] Of course they are.

[2460] It's fucking so weird.

[2461] It's just a documentary.

[2462] Yeah.

[2463] And it's a Kinect game?

[2464] Yep.

[2465] Is it called Once Upon a Monster?

[2466] Yep.

[2467] Warner's publishing it this fall.

[2468] Man, those Double Fine guys are weird.

[2469] Crazy.

[2470] I love the statement from Tim Schafer.

[2471] Do you have it in front of you?

[2472] It's like simultaneously so boilerplate press release speak, but also like he's trying to...

[2473] Make it sound like he feels good about it, which I'm sure he does, but it's such a weird mix of business talk and not.

[2474] I feel like this game is a direct result of Tim Chafer having a kid.

[2475] Yeah, totally.

[2476] He does that.

[2477] He straight up says that in there.

[2478] Let me just read this then.

[2479] It's great to be working with Warner Brothers, especially on a game like Sesame Street, Once Upon a Monster, which brings together so many things we all care about.

[2480] Sesame Street had a profound effect on me and many members of the Double Fine team when we were children.

[2481] So did video games.

[2482] Now many of us are parents and we want to share with our kids the great experiences we had, but also the completely new ones made possible by cutting -edge technology like Kinect for Xbox 360.

[2483] So it's a labor of love on many levels.

[2484] Yeah, that sounds like a press release, but also I'm sure there's a fair amount of truth to that.

[2485] Yeah, totally.

[2486] Double Fine can have a sincerity to their work.

[2487] that I think makes them a good fit for something like Sesame Street.

[2488] Not everything has to have an ironic wink and a nudge to it.

[2489] They can go straight up.

[2490] But they can tuck that stuff in when they need to.

[2491] And Sesame Street kind of has a wink and a nudge to a lot of their stuff as well.

[2492] It's not just kind of like pedantic kind of nonsense.

[2493] I feel like they can imbue this with sort of the Pixar quality of primarily being targeted at kids but containing enough of the subtle humor.

[2494] Or kind of the broad -reaching humor that adults can appreciate, too, so that when they're sitting there having to play this game with their kids, at least they can be entertained by it.

[2495] And Kinect is great for little kids.

[2496] Little kids could give a shit if Kinect works or not.

[2497] Heard that a couple of times from different developers.

[2498] Just talking about, is the Kinect viable?

[2499] It's like, I don't really know, but when my kid gets in front of it, it's like...

[2500] Awesome.

[2501] Yeah, they don't care of fidelity.

[2502] They move around, something happens.

[2503] They know that they can wave to make it go, and they can then use it and move around.

[2504] Right.

[2505] Like that basic interface thing.

[2506] If it's like, now all you have to do is spin around in a circle, and that's the letter S. Spin around in a circle, and it's like, woo!

[2507] Awesome.

[2508] I love it.

[2509] I just got to go watch like old seasons now so I can catch up.

[2510] Of Sesame Street?

[2511] Yeah.

[2512] I just don't know what's going on anymore.

[2513] Oh, man. You don't know what happened to Grover?

[2514] Mr. Hooper is not around.

[2515] What?

[2516] Who runs Hooper's quarter then?

[2517] This new guy called Elmo.

[2518] He's been moving in on the block.

[2519] Is he a drug dealer?

[2520] Yes.

[2521] Yeah.

[2522] Absolutely.

[2523] Don't mess with him.

[2524] Things have gone dark on Sesame Street.

[2525] Sesame Street's gone dark.

[2526] It's racist.

[2527] I don't know.

[2528] I'm looking at these screenshots like, yeah, that's Cookie Monster.

[2529] Yeah, that's Elmo.

[2530] I don't know who this tall monster is, though.

[2531] Is that it?

[2532] It's Tim Schafer.

[2533] Don't be mad.

[2534] So there you go.

[2535] Sesame Street, what's Potter Monster?

[2536] Coming to Kinect.

[2537] Doesn't say if it's a disc game or not.

[2538] Or if it's downloadable.

[2539] I think they did say that they were working on a disc game.

[2540] Yeah, when Schaefer announced that, like, we're doing a bunch of projects, he was like, yeah, some of them are downloadable.

[2541] I don't know.

[2542] I think for a kid's game, you've got to have a box.

[2543] I think you're right, yeah.

[2544] And if they can do fingers on the Kinect and you do, like, counting games, that'd be great.

[2545] Flip off the Cookie Monster.

[2546] Yeah.

[2547] You don't want to do that.

[2548] That dude will take you down.

[2549] Guys, not mess around.

[2550] So report saying that Mirror's Edge 2 has been canceled.

[2551] Came out.

[2552] Even though it hasn't actually been announced.

[2553] From Eurogamer.

[2554] There's a Mirror's Edge 2?

[2555] Didn't they say they were trying to work on one?

[2556] Or they were prototyping?

[2557] It sounds like this game has lived and died multiple times now.

[2558] So it's kind of a weird story to come out and say it's been cancelled.

[2559] Because it sounds like it's never been alive.

[2560] It has been...

[2561] It has been – it's like the public quotes they've been given is like, hey, Mirror's Edge would be a cool thing and it's a good franchise and there's something we could do with it there.

[2562] And it sounds like they've been trying for a while and this is at least the second time as far as I can tell that they have passed on whatever was being worked on.

[2563] So it's just kind of a weird – it's a weird story.

[2564] I think it's just like this little tidbit got out there but the full story.

[2565] Didn't and probably won't, but I guess it's, yeah, there's been multiple times they've taken a crack at Mirror's Edge 2 and had it not work out.

[2566] So I wonder if they will take another shot at it now or let it go.

[2567] I think that for EA right now, DICE's time is better spent elsewhere.

[2568] Yeah, same story with that PC version of 1943.

[2569] That got canned and those guys are working on Battlefield 3 now.

[2570] I mean, yeah, right now it's like...

[2571] Probably all hands on deck for that.

[2572] EA got to make games that sell, and Battlefield has been a pretty good earner for them for the past few years, and ramping up with three.

[2573] That's probably the best place for DICE to be focusing right now.

[2574] I'm not saying that there's not a future for Mirror's Edge.

[2575] There's probably a right time for Mirror's Edge, and maybe they get to a point where...

[2576] Dice doesn't even have to be the ones to do it or something.

[2577] It's like Visceral does it.

[2578] I also have no sense.

[2579] Cutting up baby heads the whole time.

[2580] I have no sense of how big Dice is either as a studio.

[2581] I mean, keep in mind, like they were doing like Medal of Honor and Battlefield 3.

[2582] Yeah.

[2583] And still doing like 1943.

[2584] And, you know, there's the Vietnam pack.

[2585] Yeah.

[2586] Like they've been able to split their time.

[2587] Helping with hot pursuits.

[2588] Yeah.

[2589] Right.

[2590] Dude, they're all over the place.

[2591] So, you know, there's a. A lot of people at DICE is the impression I get from that.

[2592] But, yeah, I don't know.

[2593] In my mind, I would like it to be all hands on Battlefield 3.

[2594] Don't mess that up.

[2595] Maybe they have so many people they don't actually need that many people on Battlefield 3.

[2596] And they probably just have some skunk works crew that's just like, oh, you didn't like that Mirror's Edge 2?

[2597] All right, we're going to try it again.

[2598] We'll be back.

[2599] We'll be back in six months with something else.

[2600] Got this new prototype.

[2601] Yeah, so let's all just collectively agree.

[2602] Let's just not think about Mirror's Edge for a little bit.

[2603] I can't.

[2604] We'll come back around.

[2605] We'll come back around.

[2606] I know you love white things.

[2607] Of course he does.

[2608] Shiny reflective surfaces.

[2609] You're like a bird.

[2610] Yeah.

[2611] A weird game.

[2612] Crumple up a little piece of tinfoil and give them to you.

[2613] And look in a mirror and be like, ah, it's me, I'm Faith.

[2614] We didn't actually talk about PF3, did we?

[2615] Last week?

[2616] We had the trailer.

[2617] Did we talk about this stuff?

[2618] We talked about 64 player limits.

[2619] Yep, yep, covered it.

[2620] Magicka free and paid DLC forthcoming.

[2621] Also bug fixes.

[2622] Anyone still playing Magicka?

[2623] I never actually played it.

[2624] After that quick look, I was like, man, this is amazing, and I never played it.

[2625] I should have just finished it.

[2626] I'm pretty close at the end.

[2627] Anybody want to play it?

[2628] I want to play co -op.

[2629] Sure.

[2630] Everybody says that three or four players is the way to play that game because it's just crazy.

[2631] They also say you need voice.

[2632] Yeah, totally.

[2633] I could see you needing to coordinate your spells and stuff.

[2634] That's all good for news, unless you guys got any other news stories you want to talk about.

[2635] News in the world of any?

[2636] What's going on in your world?

[2637] My world?

[2638] Nothing.

[2639] I'm really excited to play Dead Space 2.

[2640] Fantastic.

[2641] Jeff, any other news for you?

[2642] I spoke with a WiiWare developer.

[2643] at Dice.

[2644] Bullshit.

[2645] And he...

[2646] Those aren't real.

[2647] He said that his product was selling okay.

[2648] And kind of an interesting perspective.

[2649] So, you know, it's like we look at WeWear and DSiWare and go like, man, what a goddamn shit show.

[2650] Yeah.

[2651] What a mess of garbage.

[2652] Yeah.

[2653] What a hot steaming pile of no quality control notebook, like non -games and crazy stuff.

[2654] And no marketing.

[2655] Right.

[2656] Like just...

[2657] But the one thing he pointed out that actually seemed pretty interesting is think about how hard it is to get on Xbox Live Arcade.

[2658] Sure.

[2659] You hear about people, it's like, okay, a publisher has so many slots to put out downloadable games.

[2660] Once a week.

[2661] We want to try to get one of your slots with this game, so we're pitching you on this and that sort of stuff.

[2662] If you are a company that has shipped a quality product on WiiWare, maybe it's not going to be gangbusters huge for you, but maybe getting that game out there gives you something to show to publishers and say, hey, what if we put this out on Xbox Live Arcade?

[2663] What if it's out on the PlayStation Network?

[2664] Or at worst, what if we made a new game for your service?

[2665] Right.

[2666] Wow.

[2667] That's an interesting perspective.

[2668] Yeah.

[2669] Still doesn't mean that I don't want to find no book on Xbox Live.

[2670] I should have to pay for your resume.

[2671] You're right.

[2672] Well, whatever.

[2673] I mean, that's not to say that these games are bad or whatever.

[2674] Right, but there are probably – there have got to be some good WiiWare games out there, right?

[2675] It's just the sifting.

[2676] Like the BitTrip games, Cave Story.

[2677] I own a handful of great WiiWare games.

[2678] Tomenes Honor.

[2679] Art style.

[2680] Yeah.

[2681] Pretty good.

[2682] But that's sifting.

[2683] That's sifting.

[2684] I mean, yeah, yeah.

[2685] Because there's no quality control.

[2686] Finding it is hard.

[2687] What you're saying I don't think requires anyone to even buy those games.

[2688] As long as it's on the service and you can point to that as an example of your work.

[2689] I don't think anyone's expecting any of that stuff to really sell gangbusters because it is not.

[2690] And I acknowledge the value to the developer.

[2691] That makes sense.

[2692] I get that.

[2693] But it's still...

[2694] It's still a shit service to the end user.

[2695] Bummer for the consumer, yeah.

[2696] It's almost unusable.

[2697] It's a shit service because it's poorly presented.

[2698] If they put out that same flow of games every week but actually had better ways than a podcast to tell you about the weekly downloads.

[2699] Pirate podcast.

[2700] Bootleg pirate podcast.

[2701] The number one bootleg pirate podcast.

[2702] The saddest, soul -crushing podcast.

[2703] It is the greatest podcast recorded in my bedroom.

[2704] This week.

[2705] Since our podcast was recorded in your bedroom.

[2706] Yes.

[2707] No, we recorded in the living room.

[2708] That's right.

[2709] We recorded in the living room.

[2710] Fuck the bedroom.

[2711] That's gross back there.

[2712] Yeah, it is.

[2713] Yeah, it is.

[2714] Want nothing to do with that.

[2715] I feel like a lot of indie developers are getting a lot more candid about the trials and tribulations of getting on to download services.

[2716] And it's crazy when you think about it.

[2717] Like publicly.

[2718] Like the whole thing about these digital services was supposed to be like, it's not an issue.

[2719] Yeah.

[2720] You just put it all out.

[2721] Right.

[2722] There's nothing to make or ship.

[2723] But then that's what Nintendo did and look at where we are.

[2724] And granted, if they had a better way to surface the good stuff with WiiWare, then they would probably get the press a little more interested and maybe start to actually kind of – I mean, yeah, it's clear that throttle creates value.

[2725] When there isn't just...

[2726] When done properly.

[2727] When there isn't a dozen games out for you to compete with every week.

[2728] Yeah.

[2729] You do hear about Xbox Live and Play developers kind of complaining about getting lost and that a lot of it has to do with whether you get into these programs.

[2730] Like Microsoft's just starting a new one this week with Hardcore Uprising, isn't it?

[2731] It's like House Party?

[2732] House Party.

[2733] Kid and Play.

[2734] Last year it was Block Party.

[2735] They're downsizing.

[2736] Well, this is House Party and then Block Party will be over the summer.

[2737] It's just them inventing another new thing.

[2738] Yeah, I know.

[2739] Because the games that are in those promotions that sign those deals to not appear on the PlayStation Network for a year, whatever it is, they end up selling a lot better because Microsoft gets behind them.

[2740] But Microsoft can't get behind every title and probably shouldn't.

[2741] Speaking of which, Modern Night Combat coming to PSN soon, so look for that.

[2742] Is it really?

[2743] Yeah.

[2744] Oh, cool.

[2745] That's interesting.

[2746] It's weird.

[2747] It's weird looking, like trying to look behind the curtain on the way that some of this stuff gets pushed.

[2748] Yeah.

[2749] Even something as big as Dead Space 2.

[2750] Because Sony put a lot of effort into Dead Space 2, surprisingly, because it's a multi -platform game.

[2751] Right.

[2752] But they had it at their press conference last year.

[2753] Yeah.

[2754] It's got that free extraction on it, which the Xbox lacks.

[2755] I think there may have been some other stuff involved there.

[2756] But then if you looked at the Xbox dashboard the week that Dead Space 2 came out, that game was nowhere to be found.

[2757] It's all money.

[2758] That's all money.

[2759] It's all like co -marketing.

[2760] It's all like co -marketing stuff.

[2761] Yeah, exactly.

[2762] I could see them just going like, well...

[2763] They cast their lot with the other guys.

[2764] Right.

[2765] Fuck them.

[2766] I bet.

[2767] Yeah.

[2768] Probably.

[2769] Yeah.

[2770] And I bet there were some cases, you know, like Tron was in 3D and had move support on PlayStation 3, did not on the 360.

[2771] That's dollars.

[2772] Yeah.

[2773] That's money.

[2774] Yeah.

[2775] Mortal Kombat, 3D and Kratos on the PS3.

[2776] They're still dodging questions about what the 360 exclusive character is going to be.

[2777] If any.

[2778] Yeah.

[2779] I think that's the reason they're dodging it.

[2780] It's probably not going to be one.

[2781] Ow.

[2782] That hurts.

[2783] All right.

[2784] Let's bust out some new releases and then let's do some emails and then let's get that value out of there.

[2785] All right.

[2786] What do you guys say?

[2787] All right.

[2788] Dragon Quest VI, Realms of Re...

[2789] I'm sorry, Vinny.

[2790] You can open your ears like...

[2791] No, it's stretching my jaw.

[2792] I'm getting ready to say VI, that's it.

[2793] That's all we're up to.

[2794] Pooka's Kissing Games out on DSiWare.

[2795] No, we're up to 11.

[2796] This is an older Dragon Quest game.

[2797] Dragon Quest VI, Realms of Revelation for the Nintendo DS.

[2798] That Gears of War triple pack, you know, the three Gears of War games.

[2799] Oh, awesome.

[2800] I've been waiting for Gears of War 3 for a while.

[2801] Gears 3 is out already.

[2802] No, that's 1 and 2 and some map pack business.

[2803] Marvel vs. Capcom 3, Fate of Two Worlds for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

[2804] Dance Paradise from THQ for Kinect.

[2805] For the Xbox 360.

[2806] What is that?

[2807] It's a paradise of dancing, Jeff.

[2808] Is it centrally located?

[2809] I can't say it's geographical whereabouts or not.

[2810] Do I need to be a master of dance to go to the paradise?

[2811] I can't tell you anything about if it's that or the para -para nature of it.

[2812] Dance paradise, Xbox 360.

[2813] Only the lord of the dance may enter the dance paradise.

[2814] Can I have any Michael Jackson -esque experiences while...

[2815] Inside the Dance Paradise.

[2816] It's got Rihanna in it.

[2817] Okay.

[2818] Sold.

[2819] Just so you know.

[2820] Tactics Ogre, let us cling together for the Sony PlayStation Portable.

[2821] If you like crazy turn -based strategy RPGs, I think that might be up your alley.

[2822] I think it would be a really good slogan for the PlayStation Portable.

[2823] Let us cling together for the PlayStation Portable.

[2824] It's the only way we're going to make it through this, people.

[2825] For heat.

[2826] Yeah.

[2827] We need it.

[2828] Now I'm picturing about 50 people adrift in the ocean, clinging to a giant PSP.

[2829] As you said, Jeff, hardcore uprising out this week, 1 ,200 Microsoft points on the Xbox Live Arcade.

[2830] And we've got Pure coming to the PlayStation Network this week.

[2831] Okay, so digital version of Pure.

[2832] Digital version of Pure.

[2833] Acceleration of Suguri X Edition.

[2834] Don't ask me anything.

[2835] Is that the subtitle of Pure?

[2836] No, this is a separate title.

[2837] So Pure, comma.

[2838] Acceleration of Suguri X Edition.

[2839] I have no fucking idea what that is.

[2840] It's Japanese as hell.

[2841] Back to the Future of the Game, Chapter 1, hitting the PSN this week.

[2842] Oh, 2 should be soon on the PC.

[2843] Yeah, 2 should be very soon.

[2844] But they're starting it off on the PlayStation Network this week.

[2845] And that seems to be what's happening.

[2846] Like I said, Tactics Ogre on the PSP.

[2847] They originally had Hyperdimension Neptunia showing as shipping today, but now everyone's saying it's like 10 days from now or something.

[2848] All right.

[2849] Yeah.

[2850] They still list it here, but they list it as a disc release, but then the retailers do not list it anymore.

[2851] So, yeah.

[2852] Who lists it where?

[2853] On their drop Sony listed as being like, this is coming out this week, but then you look at a retailer.

[2854] Yeah, like GameStop updated the 25th.

[2855] Yeah.

[2856] Best Buy just says like, or Amazon says like, ships in the next three to five weeks, which is a secret code for, this didn't come out.

[2857] I don't know.

[2858] We don't know yet.

[2859] Yeah, I feel like we can't talk about that again until we can show it because it's too crazy.

[2860] I pretty much snipped in here.

[2861] That's fucking weird.

[2862] That's a weird game.

[2863] That's it for releases.

[2864] Catherine's out in Japan this week.

[2865] You've pre -ordered or you imported or pre -ordered an import copy of it.

[2866] Brad, take us home.

[2867] Emails.

[2868] Bombcast at GiantBomb .com.

[2869] First email comes in from Tony in Seattle.

[2870] Hello, Bombcast.

[2871] Hello, Tony.

[2872] I was recently playing Mass Effect 2 and I realized how much Jacob Taylor reminds me of Kanye West.

[2873] He actually has a side -by -side here.

[2874] fairly compelling.

[2875] Fairly convincing.

[2876] I see where he's coming from.

[2877] Is it possible that the likeness of Jacob could have been based off Kanye West at Bioware?

[2878] Do this just for shits and giggles?

[2879] Or is it just coincidental?

[2880] Well, Tony, I went ahead and emailed Christina Norman at Bioware about this and said, hey, could you guys use Kanye for Jacob?

[2881] She wrote back and said, you're a racist.

[2882] And she said, I know this is a popular joke amongst fans, but no, he was not.

[2883] I still find the jokes funny, though.

[2884] So there you go.

[2885] Official word.

[2886] Oh, they didn't say who is the inspiration?

[2887] From the mountain.

[2888] No, I did not ask.

[2889] I just asked if it was Kanye.

[2890] I assume all those human main characters.

[2891] Because Shepard and Miranda, obviously, you know who they're based on.

[2892] Gareth.

[2893] That's Kanye.

[2894] All the Krogans.

[2895] No, based on people.

[2896] God damn you.

[2897] What?

[2898] Ian in Richmond, Washington.

[2899] Greetings, Bombardiers.

[2900] I'm writing to share a sad obsession of mine.

[2901] I have 11 copies of the demo disc for Metal Gear Solid 2 that came with Zone of the Enders.

[2902] It started instantly enough, but eventually I just started hoarding them out.

[2903] I find myself wondering if any of you have any products that you compulsively buy whether you need them or not.

[2904] Yeah, Ryan, do you have any products you compulsively buy whether you need them or not?

[2905] I may have a stack of copies, sealed copies of No One Can Stop Mr. Domino for the original PlayStation.

[2906] I remember going to Wasteland PS1 shelves when Best Buy was getting ready to get rid of PS1s.

[2907] And a stack of copies of fucking No One Could Stop It.

[2908] It was like that and all those like age tech games that were just like the remakes of like the Simple series.

[2909] Right.

[2910] So just like boxing.

[2911] Right.

[2912] Right.

[2913] Those were crazy.

[2914] Like yo, billiards.

[2915] But it was like three bucks a copy or something for these No One Could Stop.

[2916] And I'm like.

[2917] Did you buy them all?

[2918] Yeah.

[2919] All right.

[2920] Bought out their stock.

[2921] So I've got a ridiculous stack of those.

[2922] Like how many?

[2923] Like ten?

[2924] Probably got like seven left.

[2925] Wow.

[2926] Make great gifts.

[2927] Some have been given away.

[2928] There was a white elephant last year that someone got a copy of No One Can Stop Mr. Domino.

[2929] I think you should hang on to the rest of those.

[2930] Yeah, I'm good.

[2931] You never know.

[2932] I'm good.

[2933] Although, honestly, you can still get them anywhere else.

[2934] They're super cheap.

[2935] You can buy them now for about five bucks a pop.

[2936] Not a high level of rarity for a lot of PS1 stuff.

[2937] Yeah.

[2938] And no one but me gives a shit about No One Can Stop Mr. Domino.

[2939] What about Incredible Crisis?

[2940] Is that good?

[2941] Did that ever get rare?

[2942] I don't know.

[2943] Good question.

[2944] It was a Titus release, so I could see that happening.

[2945] I have an Incredible Crisis t -shirt laying around somewhere.

[2946] I gave away my shirts, but I still have my framed poster, so there's that.

[2947] Love me some Incredible Crisis.

[2948] Anything from you, Vinny?

[2949] Any weird, dumb things that you pick up?

[2950] Yeah, totally.

[2951] Steam games.

[2952] Fair enough.

[2953] It's an obsession we all fall victim to.

[2954] Brad Shoemaker.

[2955] I have two copies of Metal Gear Solid 2, the trailer.

[2956] That's pretty good.

[2957] That's the official title of this DVD they put out in Japan.

[2958] Or when you had that stack of copies of Unreal Tournament 2004.

[2959] Oh, that's right.

[2960] Sitting in your fucking closet for years.

[2961] Yeah, and then I ended up expensing them all for retail price because they needed them.

[2962] That's right.

[2963] They actually needed both the...

[2964] Oh, right.

[2965] You'd bought those because at the time there was a weird run on them.

[2966] It was that 10 box, literally the metal box special edition.

[2967] I saw six of them at CompUSA.

[2968] that place was going out of business and those things were hard to find.

[2969] So I was like, Kimmy bought like $300 worth of intending, intending the Pat to pass them on to other people who wanted them.

[2970] They couldn't find them.

[2971] Right.

[2972] Uh, and then no one cared.

[2973] I don't remember what happened yet.

[2974] Nobody wanted them or whatever, but, uh, eventually our, yeah, our place of employee needed a bunch of UT keys and headsets for some tournament.

[2975] And I was like, Hey, Hey, I got something.

[2976] I can hook you up.

[2977] I, for a while, was purchasing any copies of, and this is limited to like, you know, one or two weeks a year for a few years, buying any copies of Samurai Shodown, one or two that I could find because they were about $3 for Neo Geo, which is the big cartridges.

[2978] Oh, yeah.

[2979] I was like, these big cartridges used to be like hundreds of dollars.

[2980] So I have like three copies of Samurai Shodown 2, which is good in case one catches on fire.

[2981] That will happen.

[2982] But they're all used.

[2983] Some of them are like out of box even.

[2984] It's just like loose cartridge.

[2985] And stuff like that.

[2986] But, yeah, I was getting weird about Neo Geo stuff for a while.

[2987] That's when I bottled that copy of Mark of the Wolves for all that money.

[2988] Yeah.

[2989] I was like, man, got to get these.

[2990] Got to get these.

[2991] I got to bring that DVD in sometime because it has an extensive documentary around the first airing of the trailer at E3.

[2992] I saw that.

[2993] Who is?

[2994] Ben Stahl.

[2995] It is rife with late 90s, like turn -of -the -century luminaries of the games press.

[2996] Because, yeah, because they were shooting everything at E3.

[2997] Like there are Che Chows and Mark McDonald's for days in this video.

[2998] Right.

[2999] It's crazy.

[3000] Like babies.

[3001] Yep.

[3002] Little tiny Che Chows.

[3003] Chibi Chows.

[3004] Next email comes for Ron Harper.

[3005] Hey, Bomb Squad on last week's show.

[3006] Vinny said he needed a new Super Bowl to help consume all the frozen food he purchased recently.

[3007] How's that going, by the way?

[3008] It didn't last very long.

[3009] Oh, is it gone already?

[3010] Oh, yeah.

[3011] We'll skip this email.

[3012] Super Bowl Monday.

[3013] Crushed it.

[3014] It was great.

[3015] Dan, New York, New York.

[3016] Hey, Bomberinos.

[3017] Is he okay?

[3018] I don't know.

[3019] Bob Marito's brand frozen pizza?

[3020] We'll work on that.

[3021] Shop that around a little bit.

[3022] I like that everyone's trying at least.

[3023] Give it a go.

[3024] I was browsing Steam and noticed that they were having a sale for the game Railworks DLC.

[3025] I don't know if you guys saw this.

[3026] On sale, you can buy all the DLC for $199, not including the original game.

[3027] If you were to buy each piece of DLC individually, the total cost would be $1 ,073 .35.

[3028] Again, not including the game.

[3029] Do you think this is whack or crazy?

[3030] Man, that's a good question.

[3031] I don't know.

[3032] If people are buying it, then neither.

[3033] Whack or crazy?

[3034] Jeff?

[3035] Go with whack.

[3036] Vinny, whack or crazy?

[3037] It's pretty damn whack.

[3038] All right, sure.

[3039] What do you think, Fred?

[3040] Fine.

[3041] What do you think?

[3042] Fine.

[3043] What is it?

[3044] Whack.

[3045] I'm going to go crazy.

[3046] Actually, I'm sorry.

[3047] It's crazy.

[3048] Are you going to go crazy?

[3049] Oh, no. Trains.

[3050] I think I wish I were on the other end of that deal.

[3051] I feel like it.

[3052] I wish I were selling that stuff.

[3053] I mean, it's.

[3054] That's not a game market.

[3055] That is a train collector market.

[3056] That's taking advantage of people.

[3057] That is like a drug dealer.

[3058] They probably released it a little bit at a time.

[3059] Oh, sure.

[3060] It's one of these things where over the years it's like, how much do you think all Rock Band DLC would cost if you bought it at once?

[3061] Dude, I ain't saying that's not whack.

[3062] That's also whack.

[3063] Alex ballparked that in like around $3 ,000 I think one time.

[3064] It's like how much – It's like trying to ask somebody to pay for like if you were to like release like packs of like little arcade games every week and like somebody's just like, I got to buy them all.

[3065] I got to buy them all.

[3066] I got to play all these little arcade games.

[3067] I got to buy them all.

[3068] Why would someone do that?

[3069] I don't know.

[3070] It would be crazy.

[3071] It would like add up.

[3072] Eventually it would be a lot of money.

[3073] You know what I'm saying?

[3074] What?

[3075] You want to see my Venetian Blonde?

[3076] Ryan in St. Louis Moe.

[3077] Yeah.

[3078] Comparing game awards is the subject.

[3079] There's Dice, GDC, and Spike Awards as the top three game awards.

[3080] How would you compare these to the movie awards?

[3081] Which one's the Baptist?

[3082] His guess is Oscars, Dice, Writers, or like, you know, the Writers Guild, Directors Guild is GDC, and the Golden Globes is Spike.

[3083] Thoughts?

[3084] Golden Globes is voted on by press, right?

[3085] Specifically the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

[3086] Oh, right, right, right.

[3087] So that's, yeah.

[3088] So are the Spike Awards, but not foreign press.

[3089] It's the basic idea of...

[3090] I guess that makes sense.

[3091] Spike is tonally more like MTV Movie Awards.

[3092] Yes.

[3093] Or perhaps the Razzies.

[3094] Yeah, sure.

[3095] That makes sense.

[3096] I liked what I saw of the Dice Awards.

[3097] I felt like it was...

[3098] Even if I didn't agree with the choice that was being made, I felt like the categories and who was in them more often than not made sense.

[3099] I think that there was some weird stuff like Limbo 1 Adventure Game of the Year.

[3100] There was some categorizing that was odd.

[3101] I agree.

[3102] Absolutely.

[3103] And it just led me to realize that video game genres are so fucking broken.

[3104] That doesn't make any sense at all.

[3105] There's nothing adventure about Limbo.

[3106] Other than that in that any game is someone's going on an adventure.

[3107] A sports adventure.

[3108] You're a football team.

[3109] That's specifically why we dispensed with genre.

[3110] Yeah, it's crazy.

[3111] It's crazy.

[3112] And the games it was going up against were just like, what is this?

[3113] These games aren't even the same thing.

[3114] Like, yeah, would you like...

[3115] reached the point where it's kind of fucking hard -pressed to call Mass Effect 2 an RPG.

[3116] It's a convergence of eight different types of games.

[3117] Or a shooter.

[3118] Right.

[3119] But it's as much dialogue -driven and story -driven as it is combat -driven.

[3120] I'd say it's more driven, or at least more appealing, because of its non -shooting content.

[3121] So that's why I'd feel okay calling it something around an RPG.

[3122] Sure, sure.

[3123] Like people going like, oh, finally a new RPG, Fallout New Vegas.

[3124] Like, oh, no. I see what you're getting at, and there are elements of that in there.

[3125] You're playing a role, but not really anymore.

[3126] I'm also playing a role.

[3127] So is Duke Nukem a role -playing game?

[3128] I'm playing as an asshole.

[3129] Is that?

[3130] Yeah, no. Does that work?

[3131] I don't know if you're role -playing.

[3132] Do you roll dice in Duke Nukem?

[3133] You're in Vegas.

[3134] Probably.

[3135] Probably.

[3136] Probably.

[3137] Cratch table, fully functioning.

[3138] I played pool.

[3139] There you go.

[3140] Did you just press the A button and watch the balls bounce around?

[3141] I sunk a ball in the corner pocket.

[3142] Wow.

[3143] You did.

[3144] You did.

[3145] You saw me. Did the stripper's top come off then?

[3146] Oh.

[3147] Damn it.

[3148] Robert in Cambridge, Ontario.

[3149] Hey, guys.

[3150] I was listening to your podcast and interested in your talk on You Don't Know Jack.

[3151] I was wondering if you might know if the game works with the CNET game controllers.

[3152] My understanding is yes.

[3153] Those controllers do work on the Xbox 360 with You Don't Know Jack.

[3154] You don't want that big button, really.

[3155] It's not a buzz -in.

[3156] Other than the Jack Attack, the final round, it's not really a buzz -in type game.

[3157] Everyone's playing at the same time.

[3158] I actually find it one -handed with a regular Xbox 360 controller.

[3159] Best way to play that game because you can trigger the screws using the right trigger, and then all of your responses are going to be with those face buttons.

[3160] Especially for like this or that.

[3161] You kind of don't want.

[3162] The little buttons on that Scenic controller?

[3163] Yeah, because they're in a vertical row.

[3164] You're doing this kind of horizontally oriented.

[3165] You can hold them sideways and put two thumbs on them or something.

[3166] My understanding is, yes, it will work, but I don't think it's ideal.

[3167] I don't think it benefits that experience.

[3168] And I read somewhere that it does not work on PS3 with the Buzz controllers.

[3169] That's my understanding as well.

[3170] That's it for your mouse.

[3171] That's it.

[3172] Thanks to everyone who wrote in.

[3173] I didn't write in.

[3174] Well, no thanks to you then, Vinny.

[3175] That's kind of lazy.

[3176] Screwing it up.

[3177] Over and over again.

[3178] Hey, it's good to be back, guys.

[3179] Hey.

[3180] Oh, God.

[3181] We're not in Vegas anymore still.

[3182] Thank God.

[3183] You know what?

[3184] Just not to stretch this out.

[3185] I just wanted to quickly mention because it was only on the live show so far.

[3186] Messed around with the guitar for rock band.

[3187] The Squire.

[3188] Yes.

[3189] The Squire we had in the office.

[3190] That thing's pretty cool.

[3191] I can't find anywhere to preorder or buy that thing.

[3192] Have they not put it?

[3193] I think they're selling it directly.

[3194] Maybe go to the Guitar Center.

[3195] Yeah.

[3196] I really don't know.

[3197] Because I was kind of trying to look up and see.

[3198] What the final retail price is.

[3199] You need to get that MIDI box too, which that's kind of been out there a little bit.

[3200] I've seen that at stores.

[3201] So it's – I've at least seen that in retail places unlike the guitar.

[3202] But the short of it – and maybe we'll do something else on it.

[3203] The short of it is it works and I didn't expect it to.

[3204] I really didn't.

[3205] I really thought it was going to be really kind of iffy on, you know, is it going to register the right notes and all that stuff.

[3206] But it does exactly like it.

[3207] It's just too bad that harmonics was dissolved.

[3208] And it doesn't exist anymore.

[3209] Yeah, this activism stuff has to have hit them really hard.

[3210] It's really sad for our friends.

[3211] For those guys.

[3212] John Drake and Eric Pope and the rest of them there.

[3213] So Collector's Edition.

[3214] Everyone in the Finger Lakes region.

[3215] Just, you know, I feel for you.

[3216] That's not funny.

[3217] Those poor guys.

[3218] What guys?

[3219] This is what being at DICE is like.

[3220] It's that constantly.

[3221] It's a lot of – It's like what ways – how many different ways can you think of to give someone shit?

[3222] For no good reason.

[3223] For no good reason.

[3224] They're your closest friends and it will be nothing but shit talking.

[3225] Oh, no. Those guys, fine.

[3226] But all the actual people who just got laid off.

[3227] Well, yeah.

[3228] Shawty there.

[3229] No, Johnny was not.

[3230] Because that sounds like that environment would be hell on earth for him.

[3231] Yeah, probably would be.

[3232] Johnny was not present for DICE, but Craig came in for a little bit, so he was filling the role.

[3233] I forgot Disney was just two weeks ago, wasn't it?

[3234] I was just talking about he takes good -natured ribbing pretty hard sometimes.

[3235] It wasn't pure as Disney, wasn't it?

[3236] Yeah.

[3237] Okay.

[3238] Putting that out on PSN.

[3239] Yeah.

[3240] The makers of Split Second.

[3241] All right.

[3242] That's it.

[3243] Oh, no. Thank you for plugging that in.

[3244] That's good.

[3245] I forgot that it happened.

[3246] It's cool.

[3247] It works.

[3248] And it's cool that that works well.

[3249] I'm glad that we have you, someone who can – I took it home because I want to mess with it some because I'm like, okay, I am the non -guitar playing dude.

[3250] Let's see what happens.

[3251] What did you think?

[3252] I still need to mess with it some more.

[3253] I haven't gotten too deep into it.

[3254] I didn't get any further than I got with the Mad Catz fake thousand button.

[3255] controller sure uh so i feel like i need to get a little deeper before i can i will say that if it is like 300 bucks which maybe 280 right you're starting to get into the realm of like you can get a pretty decent just straight guitar at that point so you might want to weigh your options if you got a less decent guitar that also could hook up to a video game that could kind of maybe teach you how to play a guitar right so at that point you need to seriously start looking at your budget right if like because it is a bit funky on the real guitar end like the neck is a little like It's plastic.

[3256] But it works as a guitar, and it works as a controller.

[3257] It works as a guitar.

[3258] Those things are true.

[3259] It works as a controller, right.

[3260] But at that point, you can kind of start getting a really nice sounding guitar.

[3261] I think the issue is that for that money, you could get better than a Squire, or better than that entry -level model.

[3262] You could start moving up the chain a bit.

[3263] Like any guitar, you should be able to go play it.

[3264] Maybe they do have them at a Guitar Center, and you should probably check it out and see what it sounds like.

[3265] Excellent.

[3266] But, dude, technology works crazy.

[3267] Again, it's one of those things where just it doing what they said it would do is a triumph.

[3268] Yeah.

[3269] I don't know.

[3270] Over the long run, maybe it poops out in a month.

[3271] Who knows?

[3272] We'll see.

[3273] We'll see.

[3274] But that's going to do it for this week's show.

[3275] Thank you, guys.

[3276] Welcome back.

[3277] Good to be fucking back.

[3278] TNT later this week and live show on Friday as per usual.

[3279] Tune in then.

[3280] But we will then, after that, see you on the next Bobcast.