Giant Bombcast 01-18-2011

[0] Hey everyone, it's Tuesday, January the 18th, 2011, and you're listening to the Giant Bombcast.

[1] I'm Ryan Davis.

[2] No Vinny Caravilla this week.

[3] He's on vacation.

[4] But Jeff Gerstman's here.

[5] Hello, I am here.

[6] And Brad Shoemaker's here.

[7] I also am sitting in this chair.

[8] And to fill the gaping hole in our hearts, well, you know, I guess do what we can.

[9] Alex Navarro's here.

[10] I'm like a sort of cylindrical block.

[11] You're dropping into a giant square block.

[12] To fill a little of the space.

[13] You're an Alex -shaped peg in a Vinny -shaped hole.

[14] Which is not going to fill the entirety of the space.

[15] I saw that movie.

[16] I read that slash fiction.

[17] It was based on the slash fiction.

[18] The movie.

[19] Yeah.

[20] Ew.

[21] Alex, how's it going?

[22] It's going all right.

[23] How are you doing, man?

[24] I'm well.

[25] We just came off of a pretty kick -ass three -day weekend.

[26] You are good.

[27] A kick -ass Star Trek -filled weekend.

[28] Yeah, yeah.

[29] A lot of Star Trek happened this weekend.

[30] Oh, man. We had a marathon on Monday to celebrate MLK Day, Martin Luther King.

[31] You know, racial harmony and all that.

[32] Although I think our takeaway was that...

[33] It's just everything is space racist in Star Trek.

[34] Kind of, yeah.

[35] Speciesist.

[36] Yeah, even when they're trying to be good about it, they're being pretty bad about it.

[37] But there are so many lessons in understanding, and that's a thing that we can certainly get behind.

[38] They at least throw the lessons in understanding out there.

[39] So you're saying that in the future, space is separate but equal?

[40] Yeah.

[41] I mean, that's why they have the neutral zone.

[42] Think about it.

[43] Yeah, I guess so.

[44] Dyson Spheres.

[45] Man, that's disgusting.

[46] Humans and Romulans cannot drink at the same water fountain.

[47] When will we get past this petty?

[48] We watched a whole shitload of Star Trek, and we had cellular peptide cake with mint frosting and Romulan ale.

[49] What?

[50] Yeah, no, Gary Witta totally made a cellular peptide cake with mint frosting.

[51] I don't even know what that means.

[52] So there's an episode where Data has dreams, and they're weird.

[53] Okay.

[54] And in one of them, Counselor Troy is made out of cake, and they talk about what kind of cake it is, and it's cellular peptide.

[55] We're not frosting, as Worf says, with a mouthful of Counselor Troy.

[56] So a cake was made to look like Counselor Troy's torso, and we ate that.

[57] And we totally ate it.

[58] Check it out.

[59] There it is.

[60] And it had mint frosting.

[61] Oh, man. Because everybody at home can see what I'm showing you right now.

[62] Well, it's on the internet.

[63] It was super impressive.

[64] We've interneted it several times.

[65] Freaking science cakes.

[66] Yeah, it was good.

[67] I mean, it was just a regular cake.

[68] Yeah.

[69] We called it cellular peptide cake.

[70] You can't actually make cellular peptides or like the things that keep.

[71] cells together.

[72] Yeah.

[73] I don't think you can make a cake out of them.

[74] Okay.

[75] Have you tried?

[76] But then also Will Smith brought dry ice so all of our drinks were smoky and bubbly.

[77] Oh, great.

[78] Like even the most benign stuff we were drinking.

[79] And also I think blue food coloring was also brought so just all drinks were blue and smoky.

[80] Yeah.

[81] Nobody actually tried putting blue food coloring in the beer, did they?

[82] We didn't have any beer.

[83] We didn't really drink much beer.

[84] I was putting the blue into my Red Bulls.

[85] There was question about what blue food coloring would actually do to beer.

[86] A lot of people thought it would turn green.

[87] I don't know.

[88] Green is another color of drink that is allowed in the Star Trek canon.

[89] That's probably true.

[90] Also on St. Patrick's Day.

[91] Yes.

[92] So it's a Star Trek holiday as well.

[93] It's a Star Trek.

[94] It's a Romulan drinking holiday.

[95] Irish people are, in fact, aliens.

[96] Chase the Klingons out of Ireland.

[97] I like to crash the St. Patrick's Day parade in my Star Trek uniform.

[98] It was a great deal of fun.

[99] Delightful.

[100] Just sit around with a whole bunch of nerds and watch a bunch of Star Trek.

[101] It was good.

[102] The home of Norman Chan.

[103] Yeah, I got to see Norman Chan's place.

[104] Test .com's Norman Chan.

[105] The Bat Chan cave, as he likes to call it.

[106] Nice place.

[107] Nicely done.

[108] Alex Navarro.

[109] Yes.

[110] Did you get anything else over the weekend?

[111] Actually, yeah.

[112] I spent basically Saturday and Sunday doing absolutely nothing.

[113] I did not leave the house at all on Saturday and barely left on Sunday.

[114] Great.

[115] Amid that, I was playing some games here and there.

[116] I've been playing Rascals.

[117] A little bit of Rascals.

[118] Oh, Rascals.

[119] Rascals.

[120] Yeah.

[121] No, I've been playing a little bit of that.

[122] Rascals.

[123] I like it.

[124] It's good.

[125] It's a neat little...

[126] Did you finish it yet?

[127] No, I haven't finished it yet.

[128] I've only been playing in little fits and starts, but I've been enjoying the humor and the race puzzles of that game, I think, are kind of neat.

[129] I like that they vary the nature of the levels, but it's a pretty short game.

[130] Yeah, it's super short.

[131] And I kind of felt like I had...

[132] I had gotten everything that I needed out of it by the time I was done.

[133] Well, it's super short if you critical path it.

[134] But what I'm saying is I didn't really feel...

[135] Yeah, that's valid.

[136] I've started skipping the bonus levels to do the bonus stuff.

[137] I think it's so hard.

[138] They really do.

[139] Some of them are like meat boy hard.

[140] Yeah.

[141] So I've been playing some of that.

[142] As we discussed, that game does not have Meat Boy controls.

[143] No. No, no, no, no, no. So I've been playing some of that.

[144] I downloaded Isla Milo.

[145] I've been playing a little bit of that, too.

[146] Haven't gotten as far into that one.

[147] It seems cute, but I also feel like I definitely need a partner to play that game with because by yourself.

[148] No, you don't.

[149] No, I don't.

[150] The multiplayer, I mean, it might be beneficial to have someone sitting there looking at it also.

[151] Yes, it is.

[152] But the multiplayer is not good.

[153] It's just frustrating because it is exactly the same as the single player, except when you switch.

[154] off someone else controls that person.

[155] It's not simultaneous.

[156] And then you just get super frustrated with that person because you're just like, spin the camera that way and then go over there and pick that up and they're not doing what you tell them to.

[157] Yeah, I don't want that then.

[158] Yeah, I don't know.

[159] I mean, that game seems cute and fun, but I can also see those puzzles getting really tedious and difficult after a while.

[160] It sounds like a game that would destroy a relationship.

[161] Yeah.

[162] It could strain it.

[163] Yeah.

[164] Definitely.

[165] But other than that, you know, usual stuff.

[166] Rock Band and various other XBLA games I've been playing for the last five years.

[167] More Catan.

[168] Yeah.

[169] Great.

[170] Yeah.

[171] I'm predictable.

[172] Do you run into the same people playing Catan?

[173] Almost never.

[174] Wow.

[175] Weird.

[176] Almost never.

[177] Do you ever have a hard time getting a game?

[178] More so these days.

[179] But yeah, there's usually some people online.

[180] Well, if you're down for some other types of...

[181] German board gaming.

[182] I think we might be playing some Ticket to Ride.

[183] I've never played Ticket to Ride.

[184] Live.

[185] Like an actual.

[186] Like a board game on TNT this week.

[187] Like an actual board game.

[188] Yes.

[189] I don't.

[190] Like a real.

[191] I don't know how to deal with that.

[192] Meet space.

[193] I don't know how to deal with things that are...

[194] Don't say that.

[195] I really enjoy meat space.

[196] Well, what do you hate more?

[197] Meat space or when people refer to paper or magazines or anything as dead trees?

[198] I've never heard that.

[199] The dead trees edition of your magazine.

[200] Both of those are terrible.

[201] I've also never met anyone that actually talks that way.

[202] You're hanging out with the wrong people.

[203] If they're saying dead trees and going all the time.

[204] Well, see, that's how I hear meatspace.

[205] Oh.

[206] It's the same.

[207] I think those are the same thing.

[208] Okay.

[209] So let's just say, I don't know, tabletop.

[210] I don't know.

[211] I bought a Kindle, so no more Dead Trees editions of anything for me. Get the fuck out of here.

[212] Terrestrial radio?

[213] Yeah.

[214] What?

[215] You know, not satellite radio.

[216] Terrestrial radio.

[217] Oh, okay.

[218] Terrestrial radio.

[219] Yeah.

[220] Does that make a difference?

[221] I don't know anyone who listens to any kind of radio.

[222] What if it's shortwave?

[223] Because then the signal originates on the ground, but then bounces off of the sky and comes back.

[224] That's extraterrestrial.

[225] But not extra out of.

[226] Because the aliens run the number stations.

[227] That's the part that they haven't revealed yet.

[228] Do you do anything non -game related, Alex Navarro?

[229] I watched some movies, you know.

[230] I kind of moped around the apartment.

[231] I'm writing a thing for Screened on a pair of LARPing documentaries.

[232] Oh, yes.

[233] Darkon in there.

[234] Darkon is one I actually watched over the holiday break, but I watched Monster Camp over this past weekend, and that one is...

[235] Those two movies could not be more different in tone and tenor and, like, humor.

[236] Like, Monster Camp is, like, these sort of, fun, look, look at these nerds.

[237] They're hanging out, and they're just doing their LARPing thing.

[238] And Darkon is, like, deathly serious with...

[239] helicopter shots of landscapes and dudes screaming in battle dress and shit.

[240] It is unbelievable.

[241] I have wanted to see Darkon for years.

[242] It's on Netflix streaming.

[243] You should totally watch it.

[244] It's great.

[245] It's great and tragic.

[246] It is so tragic.

[247] So is it like the filmmakers are taking it super serious or the people that are doing it?

[248] In both cases, the people who are doing it are taking it fairly seriously.

[249] But Monster Camp is a much lighter and sort of like just, you know, kind of look at these nerds.

[250] They're doing funny stuff.

[251] They're weird.

[252] Look at the weirdos.

[253] Darkon, like, it treats it with...

[254] Like, it sort of has the same understanding that they are, in fact, nerds and dorky, and this is kind of fun to, like, watch and sort of laugh at from a distance.

[255] But then, like, there are all these scenes that they stage, like, from the Darkon role -playing that are done in this, like, very Lord of the Rings -ish sort of, like, cinematic presentation with, like, helicopter shots of the Maryland landscape.

[256] Like, it's really intense.

[257] Like, 100 guys running across it with padded swords.

[258] Like, maybe 50.

[259] But, yeah, that's, you know, it's definitely...

[260] There is a seriousness to it that is hysterical.

[261] Those people basically live that game, right?

[262] Yeah, and you see what the rest of their life is like.

[263] That's where the tragedy comes in.

[264] I was going to say, I could totally see the deep diving on the personal lives and that being pretty...

[265] There's a guy in Monster Camp who...

[266] Follow any of us home, I'm sure that'd be real.

[267] Good material to put on camera as well.

[268] Yeah, there's a dude in Monster Camp who lives with his roommate who works at Fred Meyer.

[269] He does not have a job.

[270] Okay.

[271] He spends his entire day playing JRPGs in World of Warcraft.

[272] He does not cut his fingernails, and he has been a high school senior for four years.

[273] All right.

[274] So that's the level of folk you're dealing with here.

[275] So it's like an American movie, but padded swords?

[276] Yeah, kind of.

[277] Yeah.

[278] Terrific.

[279] Tragedy all around.

[280] But yeah, that was my weekend in a nutshell.

[281] Tragedy all around.

[282] And then some Star Trek.

[283] And then some Star Trek.

[284] Fantastic.

[285] Jeff Gerstmann.

[286] My weekend was similarly tragedy all around because I spent large portions of it playing DC Universe Online.

[287] Oh, yes.

[288] The PlayStation 3 version, no less.

[289] Yeah.

[290] Of DCUO.

[291] Tell me about your dude.

[292] My dude is powered by ice.

[293] Okay.

[294] What's his name?

[295] I'm not going to say his name.

[296] Ah, okay.

[297] Because I don't want to be harassed.

[298] Got it.

[299] By other people playing the game.

[300] Don't want to ruin your DC Universe online experience?

[301] Yeah.

[302] Don't want to out your secret identity.

[303] I'm not quite done playing it.

[304] Okay.

[305] So until I'm done playing it, nothing.

[306] Ice man. He is powered by ice.

[307] Oh, you figured it out.

[308] No, wait.

[309] By that, do you mean methamphetamines or do you actually just mean ice ice?

[310] Ice.

[311] Okay.

[312] Who's your mentor?

[313] I picked Superman for my main guy.

[314] Though that stuff, I don't know.

[315] That game, when we did the quick look and saw an hour of it and Vinny played an hour of it, I was like, man, why would anyone want to play this game?

[316] And now that I've played about 15 hours of it or something like that, that feeling has completely intensified.

[317] It's just – there's just such – there's nothing to it as a game.

[318] It's like the character creator is still kind of the best part of it.

[319] They do a really shoddy job with kind of putting you in touch with the real DC heroes.

[320] Most of them just like pop up in like tiny circles like, oh, here's Batman's face talking to me about how we need to go fight the Joker.

[321] It's Batman remotely, right?

[322] Like he's not even there.

[323] Yeah.

[324] Yeah.

[325] And then you get into these instances where you do encounter kind of the real guys.

[326] Like last night I protected the Riddler who was being attacked by Deathstroke.

[327] And that was like a boss fight basically at the end of this instance.

[328] That happened.

[329] I don't know.

[330] Yeah.

[331] It's just – basically, yeah, you fight your way through all the instances to get to an encounter that includes dudes you might actually care about.

[332] But then those aren't especially well done.

[333] You fight Poison Ivy.

[334] Well, actually, you don't even fight Poison Ivy.

[335] You fight a bunch of tree dudes and you fight Robin who is under her control.

[336] I don't know.

[337] The game does a really bad job of making any of these named superheroes and villains seem powerful at all.

[338] Like the very intro of the game, which you guys saw, you fight alongside Superman, or if you're a villain, Lex Luthor, fighting all these brainiac robots, and you're just whipping these robots' asses.

[339] You're tearing them apart.

[340] And if you stop and actually look at Superman, he is not.

[341] And any time you fight alongside guys, like you fight alongside the Titans, I guess.

[342] The Teen Titans?

[343] They just call them the Titans.

[344] Okay.

[345] You know, it's like four of them or something like that or three of them.

[346] And you have to beat up all of them.

[347] They're all under mind control one at a time.

[348] And you just work them.

[349] You know, you beat the crap out of Robin.

[350] Granted, you know, they can kind of say, oh, he's being controlled by somebody.

[351] So he's not as awesome as he would.

[352] But, like, you're totally outclassing, like, Deathstroke and these, you know, kind of named meaningful guys while you're, you know, I'm a level 22.

[353] Ice guy.

[354] And it does a really bad job of making any of these guys seem formidable, basically.

[355] It also seems like most of the time they're just fucking store guys or quest givers.

[356] Well, there's a lot of that, too.

[357] Some guys actually dual role in the game.

[358] Like Aquaman is always up on the watchtower on the space station selling stuff.

[359] But then there's a whole separate quest chain where you've got to, I think...

[360] Pretty sure you fight a mind -controlled Aquaman because the Atlanteans are coming to surface and taking people hostage or something like that.

[361] I don't know.

[362] They do all these kind of arcs, which are just lines of quests that end in an instance that end in a kind of cool little video sequence, which is really the only neat thing about or one of the few neat things about the game is those are kind of well done.

[363] But it is monotonous.

[364] It is, you know, for a game that they kind of say themselves like, there's no grinding in this game.

[365] It's like, no, you actually just made the entire game one long kind of meaningless grind.

[366] You're just not grinding for equipment because you don't care about equipment.

[367] It's, yeah, it just seems really ill -conceived.

[368] You know, I haven't hit the max level, but I don't know that I'm going to.

[369] What is it?

[370] 30.

[371] I'm 24 right now.

[372] And from the sounds of things, I don't know, like seeing what the level 30 guys on my server are doing, it sounds like they are sitting around doing nothing and waiting for like the PVP zones to reset or waiting for their subscriptions to run out.

[373] It doesn't really seem like there's – there is a bunch of stuff that unlocks at level 30.

[374] You can go on raids, which are basically just eight -player instances, which – with my experience with getting the four -player instances to work, means that all these level 30 players are just sitting around waiting for something to happen, like waiting for their turn to come up in the queue.

[375] So 30 is the cap?

[376] Yeah.

[377] And what are you at?

[378] 24.

[379] And that's like a fucking weekend, basically.

[380] You've played fairly casually.

[381] And the game was down all day Sunday.

[382] It seems crazy that you can hit cap.

[383] What is it?

[384] A week ago today, right?

[385] Yeah.

[386] That it came out.

[387] It seems crazy that that many people are already at the cap.

[388] Or that you're that close to the cap.

[389] Yeah, and I haven't been playing especially seriously, and I have not been like – I've been soloing everything for the most part, kind of talking to people here and there.

[390] But other than when you get thrown into these – so there's instances that are part of quest lines, and those you can do alone.

[391] But then there's just that separate area where you sign up for like PVP arenas, and there are also instances there where it would be like, go to Gorilla Island and fight all these monkeys.

[392] When you fight gorillas.

[393] No, they're all monkeys.

[394] No, they're totally gorillas.

[395] They are gorillas.

[396] Be ironic to go to Gorilla Island.

[397] Fight parents.

[398] That would be really cool.

[399] That would be way cooler.

[400] But you are playing this game on the PlayStation.

[401] You are playing an MMO on the PS3.

[402] Yeah, that stuff, the MMO aspects of it work.

[403] There are login queues and confusing error screens like you would expect from the MMO experience.

[404] Just what I always wanted.

[405] No, I mean, it's kind of cool that stuff works, but the game really feels like they built it for the PC and then went like, oh, God, this has to be on consoles also.

[406] Let's throw in some other stuff, which I guess that doesn't necessarily apply to the core action because it is more action -oriented than even like World of Warcraft or kind of the traditional MMO where you are hitting buttons to do combos and stuff like that.

[407] But the downfall of that is that you never feel connected to your movements.

[408] It's an MMO, the movement, and the combat all feels really latent for an action game, basically.

[409] Do you think there's still a lot of dice rolls going on?

[410] I think there is for certainly how much damage is being done.

[411] But no – I mean like if you're blocking at the time of an attack coming in, it is blocked.

[412] So it is – You're not like arbitrarily missing attacks just because – No, you don't miss. At least it doesn't seem like you miss. But it's just – you have to bash out these combos pretty quick and then you sit there and kind of watch the animation for a while.

[413] Sure.

[414] And that's – Yeah, you just feel really disconnected.

[415] If you compare it to a real action game, a real offline action game, or a four -player online action game or something like that, you don't feel like you're hitting these dudes.

[416] You feel like you're hitting buttons and watching dudes get hit.

[417] Sure.

[418] And that's unfortunate because it just means that they built a bad action game.

[419] And right now there's basically the two.

[420] There's Metropolis and Gotham City.

[421] Yep.

[422] That's mostly the extent of it.

[423] Batman runs Gotham and Superman and Wonder Woman kind of both hang out in Metropolis.

[424] I want a t -shirt that says Batman runs Gotham.

[425] Yeah.

[426] And then Wonder Woman works out of the Chinatown police station.

[427] I don't know.

[428] I don't keep up with Wonder Woman, so I don't know if that's canonical or not.

[429] Arbitrary.

[430] Yeah, like they had to have someone whose origin was magic to be a mentor.

[431] Because, like, Batman runs the tech guys.

[432] Yeah.

[433] Superman runs the metahuman guys.

[434] And then they're like, magic, who do we...

[435] Wonder Woman?

[436] Isn't there a guy who is actually a magician in the DC universe?

[437] There's Zatanna, who's a female magician.

[438] Yeah, you do some work with her when you work with Wonder Woman.

[439] She's not high level enough, though.

[440] Yeah, fair enough.

[441] You need a...

[442] A top dude.

[443] Didn't they just kill the Wonder Woman movie again?

[444] The TV show.

[445] The TV show, yeah.

[446] Is that what it was?

[447] I think David Kelly was working on a TV series that they decided to not make.

[448] Was it a courtroom drama?

[449] No. Probably at some point.

[450] Oh, man. That would be great.

[451] The old TV show, she worked for what?

[452] The Air Force.

[453] Wonder Woman, attorney at law.

[454] Wonder Woman, JAG.

[455] All right.

[456] NCIS, Wonder Woman.

[457] Yeah.

[458] Mark Harmon.

[459] Wonder Woman, San Diego.

[460] Yes.

[461] But yeah, performance -wise, the game has a lot of issues.

[462] The frame rate gets really bad.

[463] On the PS3.

[464] On the PS3, yeah.

[465] It also runs in 720, which kind of the traditional PC console split there of the console version doesn't look nearly as good.

[466] But then on top of that, to be saddled with a lot of really bad frame rate issues is also kind of troubling.

[467] But the big problem is that the menus are not built for a gamepad, and the game doesn't have mouse support for that stuff as far as I can tell.

[468] I plugged in the mouse.

[469] It didn't do anything, which is funny because when you first log into the PS3 version, it actually shows the reticle that the PC version has and then quickly fades out.

[470] Like it's the same game, but no, no, no, no, no. You can't have that.

[471] Yeah, exactly.

[472] But you got like the keyboard stuff to work?

[473] Yeah, so the keyboard works and you can use those as shortcuts to get specific menus open.

[474] You can hit I for inventory and J for your quest log, which is journal.

[475] P for your powers and stuff like that.

[476] And you can also use the 1 through 6 keys to trigger your hotbar stuff if you want to, but the shortcuts on the gamepad are usually pretty good.

[477] But you don't get any mouse support.

[478] And the menus – so you're just kind of left fumbling around the innards of these menus with the gamepad and kind of like, okay, so I hit the R1 and L1 to shift between tabs in this specific thing.

[479] And now I'm in the social menu.

[480] And how do I – I need to pick a power, but it's not always easy to get the cursor over the power that I'm trying to select on this menu.

[481] Like the menus just aren't built for a console.

[482] Sure.

[483] They're meant to be moused over and clicked on and all that stuff.

[484] And there's stuff like tool tips that I assume you would get by hovering over your hotbar on the PC that are painfully missing.

[485] Because at least with the ice power tree, a lot of the icons for powers as you're getting them look...

[486] kind of the same like here's a silhouette of a dude and then waves coming out and then it's all kind of bluey whitey ice color these ice things are sideways but in this one yeah exactly so you're kind of you can only have six powers equipped on this bar right so you kind of have to go into loadouts and all this stuff which is also kind of annoying um and you get to a point where you're not 100 sure what any of them do also because even if you did get those tooltips the descriptions of the powers are really bad it's like Hurdles shards of ice at your enemies.

[487] No numbers about how much damage it does or anything like that.

[488] It creates a storm of ice that swirls around you.

[489] The other one is like, throw a snowball at a guy, maybe knocking him down, which is like the one piece of useful info.

[490] This one might have knockdown effects.

[491] They just don't have a raw, like, here's what this does.

[492] And here's why you want to use it as opposed to this thing.

[493] They don't list like the power cost on these screens or anything like that.

[494] You're like, so what percentage of my bar is used?

[495] F off.

[496] That's how much.

[497] But they do all have kind of a vague thing where it will say like increases damage.

[498] by X percent until the hit counter resets.

[499] So I guess when you hit with these powers, you can then do a combo afterwards and do additional damage.

[500] That stuff is really poorly implemented in terms of just kind of telling the player what that stuff does and how hard it hits and all that.

[501] But it almost doesn't matter because you just kind of pick the ones you like and all of them are relatively effective because you are kind of leveling up.

[502] As you level up, you're not putting points into your character per se as you'd get like a skill point or a power point and go like say like, well, okay, now I want to have – I want ice better.

[503] Yeah, I want better ice or – Or, you know, I'm going to go put further points into the combo system, which unlocks this combo, which that stuff I thought was a lot better done than any of the other stuff, even though that doesn't necessarily tell you how much damage you're doing.

[504] Like your weapons come with a DPS rating, and that's a number.

[505] But it's not like you're just holding down the attack button on a guy.

[506] You're actually wailing out combos, some of which are more effective than others.

[507] So it's like, well, what does that number really...

[508] Is that just the basic?

[509] Yeah, like what is the actual effect that this weapon is having on my damage?

[510] Yeah.

[511] So it's kind of – it doesn't do a good job of kind of telling you what all that stuff does.

[512] And that's unfortunate.

[513] But ultimately it's kind of a minor point.

[514] The flow of the game and the quest design and all that stuff is just so bland and so uninteresting that even if – The power system was amazing and the combat felt a little better.

[515] It would still be like, all right, I'm tired of killing 25 of everything.

[516] I'm tired of going to this other zone, waiting 15 seconds or so for everything to spawn around me, which meanwhile invisible enemies are hitting me while I'm waiting for the system to catch up with where I am.

[517] and all that stuff.

[518] So they didn't do a very good job.

[519] They did not do a very good job.

[520] It's not a very good game.

[521] It is not a very good game.

[522] Was this internal SOE?

[523] I believe so, yeah.

[524] It's incredibly shallow, and the technical issues and stuff are unfortunate.

[525] But ultimately, I think even if that game was working perfectly, you'd be like...

[526] There's just not enough content.

[527] I'm just shocked that it's so short.

[528] For how long it was involved.

[529] All those raids and all that stuff doesn't open up until you hit max level.

[530] So there's like duo instances for teams of two, and there's the eight -player raids, and then there's other PvP arenas that open up as you level up.

[531] Not to take an overly reductive perspective here, but what is the incentive as a player to do that stuff once you hit the level cap?

[532] I imagine there's gear to get.

[533] But you said you don't care about gear, right?

[534] Not really.

[535] The one thing that is nice about gear, and it's probably the smartest thing they could have done with the way the character design works, is...

[536] any piece of gear will have a style associated to it.

[537] So some of it will be like, this is fourth world gear, and that doesn't necessarily confer any additional bonuses.

[538] It's just like the look of the item.

[539] So it'll be like, here's biker shirt.

[540] It'll have a better name for it and stats and stuff like that, and you will encounter additional biker shirts along the way.

[541] But once you equip any item of that style, you can go into your style tab and go to chest and turn on any of the previous styles you've.

[542] For cosmetic purposes.

[543] Your equipped gear is still the stuff it's using for the numbers.

[544] But if you want to keep your guy looking the way he looked when you created him, you can lock all your styles there.

[545] You can adjust your style.

[546] So there's kind of this like collect them all nature of like, well, I want a complete, you know, anti -freeze set.

[547] And it's not the best stat -wise.

[548] It's not going to be the best set in the game or anything crazy like that.

[549] But if you want your guy to look like that, you can totally do that.

[550] Brad, that seems to specifically address your vanity clothes issue in WoW.

[551] Yeah.

[552] Often running around in clothes that are not the best ones.

[553] It's like, man, these boots are pink, but they have better stats.

[554] What the hell?

[555] Exactly.

[556] So it solves that problem.

[557] You can kind of change your color scheme on the fly also.

[558] So they actually handle that stuff really well.

[559] It kind of creates the other problem of...

[560] You can look at someone and have no idea if they're tough or not.

[561] And without the ability to kind of hover over and con someone.

[562] You can't inspect.

[563] You can lock onto someone.

[564] And I imagine there's probably some keyboard command for inspecting or some menu you could dig through to do it.

[565] But all you really see is their level.

[566] You can't see, like, oh, they're wearing the sickest gear in the game.

[567] I don't want to fight them or something like that.

[568] But that's a minor point.

[569] At least there is something good to be taken from it, though.

[570] Yeah, that stuff is really nicely done.

[571] One feature for...

[572] Character creation and character customization I thought was nice.

[573] One feature for Blizzard to pluck from that and add to their own.

[574] Yeah.

[575] I wonder if they could...

[576] Just making WoW more and more unkillable.

[577] I wonder if they could roll that back in, though.

[578] There's so much gear in there at this point.

[579] Yeah, yeah.

[580] I wonder if they have a list somewhere of every piece of gear you've ever equipped.

[581] So if they were to go back and say, like, this is part of this style, this is part of this style.

[582] If they could retroactively unlock all that.

[583] You're right.

[584] There is so many more parts and so much more content.

[585] And, wow, that would be more of a challenge.

[586] They would probably just start fresh just because all the people that are crazy about that sort of thing would go buy all that low -level gear anyway, and it wouldn't cost them that much.

[587] This also has color coordinating, right?

[588] Like everything can be the same color?

[589] Yeah.

[590] Like there's no set color to each piece of gear.

[591] Right.

[592] Exactly.

[593] Yeah.

[594] You don't go buy dye.

[595] Right.

[596] You have three separate colors you can apply to each piece of gear, and you do so.

[597] And that's pretty easy.

[598] Well, the menu for that could be a lot better.

[599] But, you know, in the grand scheme of things, it's not tough.

[600] But it's crazy to think about two factions.

[601] It sounds like, what, three or four hero types or classes, I guess you'd call it, for what you got, like, metahuman.

[602] Yeah, there's basically three races.

[603] Yeah.

[604] And that's determined by your mentor.

[605] And then, I guess, six classes.

[606] But those really boil down to three different roles.

[607] So what they did is there's no pure DPS class.

[608] Like every class kind of does that.

[609] And then at level 10 you unlock the ability to – it's like a stance.

[610] So like if you have ice or fire, that's a defensive stance.

[611] So your alternate role becomes tank at level 10.

[612] So you kind of swap into that and it will swap your hotbar out.

[613] But there don't seem to be a lot of – A traditional tanking ability would be to get aggro off of other guys, right?

[614] The shouts and that sort of stuff, the warrior kind of traditional stuff.

[615] There's none of that in there.

[616] None of the ice powers ever say anything about aggro or anything about pulling dudes away.

[617] It just says, when you are a tank, you will do less damage and take less damage, which sounds kind of like a zero -sum game to me. Yeah.

[618] It seems like if I live longer but it takes longer to kill stuff.

[619] Right.

[620] So theoretically you would be – they would be on you while the other players are doing stuff to guys.

[621] I don't know.

[622] The group dynamic seems a little messy in that game.

[623] But it's nice to have a healer around.

[624] So there's that.

[625] There's also – yeah.

[626] So there's a controller role which is kind of the – you do buffs and stuff like that and there's the healer role.

[627] This doesn't sound like a game I want to play.

[628] I totally agree.

[629] So I wrote up something that actually you guys should read.

[630] It reads a whole lot like a review of that game.

[631] The only reason I'm hesitant to put it up as a review is this whole, like, how much of an MMO did you play before you wrote the review?

[632] And I feel like I have played more than I wanted to see, and I've kind of messed around with the character creator.

[633] We could invoke Wolpaw's Law here.

[634] Yeah, there's definitely a, yeah.

[635] When did you want to stop playing this game?

[636] Yeah, about level 11 or 12 or something like that.

[637] But I figured, well, I should just keep playing it because we didn't have LittleBigPlanet 2 at the time.

[638] Well, I don't have anything else to be working on.

[639] Might as well just slave away at this thing and see how far I get and write up something about it.

[640] I mean, it sounds kind of like a low -impact experience, if nothing else.

[641] It doesn't sound like it's...

[642] Yeah, it's definitely a game that you could pick up and play for the first 30 days or the first seven days.

[643] Just kind of is what it is.

[644] Bang against it and not really worry too much about dying or anything like that.

[645] Is there any way to get it and play it besides buying a $60 box?

[646] You could get it on the PC and get a $50 box.

[647] But it is buy the game at retail price and play it for 30 days.

[648] And there's no download via the internet option.

[649] No weird non -traditional.

[650] There's Steam on the PC.

[651] And as I understand it, the PC version does have gamepad support.

[652] So with that in mind, if you could do mouse, keyboard, and gamepad, so you can mouse for the menus, gamepad for playing it, and keyboard for the chat stuff and social aspects and all that, that would be the best way to play this game.

[653] Really?

[654] Yeah.

[655] I don't know.

[656] It seems to me that having to move your hands between multiple input devices is never the best way.

[657] There's got to be a way to purify and condense these things.

[658] But considering what you give up by not having a mouse on the PS3 and how clunky the menus are, it would be worth having that mouse there.

[659] What's the benefit of the controller?

[660] Like the combat stuff?

[661] Yeah, the combat is better on a gamepad than it is on the mouse.

[662] This thing just sounds all over the place.

[663] Yeah.

[664] Because it's a two -button combo system.

[665] It's like light heavy or melee and ranged, if you will.

[666] And I'm double baffled by the lack of PS3 PC crossover.

[667] It's got voice chat.

[668] on ps3 i don't know if it does on pc or not but it only works when you're in groups and stuff like that like crossover between the two platforms yeah those are separate right yeah they are totally separate and you would not want to if you were if you were a pc mmo playing kind of guy sure you would fucking lose your mind playing on the ps3 servers just because the way people play it is the level of competence it is the just everything is a shout every single piece of chat is a shout for that whole zone because it's it's the only way anyone can talk to each other okay um And it's just this endless scroll of just like, please.

[669] Have you played a video game?

[670] Not even an MMO before, but what are you talking about?

[671] That seems like it could be kind of an interesting social experiment.

[672] Like take someone that has played a lot of PC MMOs and then plunk them down in front of the PS3 version of this game and just see how long it takes for them to completely lose their shit.

[673] Yeah.

[674] Yeah.

[675] I mean, you don't really need to communicate with people to really play that game.

[676] And it seems like they really built it to be soloable to the point where I don't even know why you would group up for anything but the forced grouped instances.

[677] Do you know if this is included in the station pass?

[678] I don't believe it is.

[679] There's no station stuff on the PS3 version at all.

[680] So I know the station launcher is on the PC version of the game.

[681] But I have to imagine, no, I don't think they put new games in there.

[682] Right out of the gate, I thought that was something they added after a year or something like that.

[683] I don't know anything.

[684] I totally don't.

[685] The Matrix Online was the last time I launched the Station Pass thing.

[686] We all saw how that went.

[687] Yeah.

[688] I no longer have the Station Pass thing installed.

[689] Yeah, so I don't think I would recommend the game either way, but if you were dead set on playing this thing, you should get the PC version.

[690] I think even if you weren't playing with a gamepad, I think the hassle of the menus and stuff like that on the PS3 and the lower resolution and that sort of stuff and the frame rate stuff is bad enough that it would be worth playing it on the PC.

[691] Jeff, did you play any games that you didn't hate?

[692] Nope.

[693] Brad Shoemaker.

[694] Brad Shoemaker.

[695] Oh, you know, I played Super Stardust HD.

[696] So I took my other PS3, my launch PS3, and finally updated the firmware on it and hooked it up to my 3D TV and played some Super Stardust HD in 3D.

[697] Which is the same game, right?

[698] It is, yeah.

[699] You don't have to buy a separate 3D version or anything like that.

[700] It updates.

[701] Every time I tried to update it.

[702] It was just resetting the console, so I had to actually delete the game and redownload the whole thing.

[703] Weird.

[704] It would come up and say, you need an update.

[705] Then I'll hit the button, and then it would reboot the system.

[706] I'm like, okay.

[707] That's all right.

[708] You still need an update.

[709] Yeah, basically.

[710] PS3 is a weird system.

[711] There's this awesome endless loop.

[712] Everything about the back end of that thing.

[713] It's a mystery.

[714] My trophies have not been syncing properly.

[715] It just keeps giving me an error over and over for the last couple days.

[716] Weird.

[717] I thought they fixed that.

[718] That was going on for everybody for a while.

[719] Really?

[720] This was last night.

[721] Oh, crazy.

[722] I just kept erroring out at, like, 30 % trying to sync the trophies, and then, like, one time it went through, but then I went into the thing, and the new trophies were not there.

[723] Weird.

[724] And I backed out, and then it started erroring out again.

[725] Guys, causality loop.

[726] Oh, shit.

[727] You think there is a Mobius effect going on here?

[728] Yeah, clearly.

[729] We have to figure out.

[730] If you start seeing instances of the number three.

[731] Yeah, figure out how to tell ourselves the number three.

[732] Yeah.

[733] We've got to send ourselves a message.

[734] Back in time.

[735] Into Brad's.

[736] Positronic brain.

[737] So how does the 3D experience alter Super Stardust HD?

[738] Makes it way harder.

[739] It looks really nice.

[740] I was impressed with the way it looked, but as someone who was pretty good at the game in 2D, I play like fucking garbage in 3D.

[741] It led me to focus on a tighter area of the screen around the ship and stuff like that.

[742] In a game where you kind of need to see...

[743] Everything at all times.

[744] You need that peripheral vision and the 3D seems to take a lot of that away.

[745] I don't know if it's something that you would eventually adjust to and it wouldn't be a problem.

[746] I feel like that's kind of true of all the 3D media I have consumed is that you can't take in all of the full screen 3D -ness.

[747] At once.

[748] Like you do kind of have to focus on a section of the screen.

[749] It has to do with the size of the screen, like your proximity to it probably.

[750] I've also found that the 3D looked a lot better when I got further away from the TV.

[751] Yeah, there's probably a pretty specific sweet spot for that kind of stuff.

[752] But yeah, I did significantly worse at that game playing it in 3D.

[753] Would DC Universe Online be better in 3D?

[754] It wouldn't matter.

[755] I don't think it would make the game tougher or anything like that.

[756] Sure.

[757] That game could use a lower frame rate.

[758] It would make it tougher.

[759] There was already one spot where the frame rate had gotten down to about three or four frames per second.

[760] What?

[761] It got to that point where you could start counting them.

[762] What?

[763] You're like, what is going on?

[764] Because I'm flying over the city, and it's just big gray blocks.

[765] There's a statue of Superman sitting in one of the parks or something like that.

[766] I was getting way closer to it than they probably ever intended.

[767] So it was like the low detail version of it, which is just like this big block with like a texture of that side of the statue on it.

[768] Right.

[769] It's like big black blocks.

[770] It just like looks like the dumbest thing ever.

[771] And finally it snaps in and like, okay, all right, fine.

[772] But yeah, there's a lot of low frame rates.

[773] It's a game where you start flying over the whole city and then come crashing down to earth and land.

[774] And, you know, for it to – it just can't keep up.

[775] It just can't keep up with the way you move in that game.

[776] Anyway.

[777] Brad Shoemaker, turn the throne upside down.

[778] What's going on, Brad?

[779] Doing all right.

[780] How was your weekend?

[781] Pretty good.

[782] Watched some Star Trek.

[783] Yeah.

[784] Checked out Norm Chan's sweet pad.

[785] He does have a pretty sweet pad.

[786] Dude, he wired every room for Ethernet.

[787] I know.

[788] That's what you do.

[789] Oh, man. You're going to do something like that.

[790] I'm so jealous.

[791] I mean, if you have the drywall off, it's kind of inconsequential to lay down another piece of cable.

[792] Just run some drops, yeah.

[793] Oh, man. I want to live in a place with wired Ethernet.

[794] Video games.

[795] Did you do like I did and after our Friday episode deliberations, did you go and watch a bunch of the episodes that you wanted to watch that got cut?

[796] No, I don't have that series in an easily watchable format at the moment.

[797] Neither do I. They do have that DVD set that's very expensive.

[798] Yeah, but it's not the $750 that it used to be if you bought all the box sets.

[799] Is that the one that would have brought?

[800] Yeah, that green case, weird -looking metal frame.

[801] I thought it was like Xbox games.

[802] Yeah, it's kind of an ugly case.

[803] It's kind of hideous.

[804] It is pretty gross, but it's the whole series.

[805] But contained within is Star Trek.

[806] Yeah, so that's good.

[807] All of it.

[808] Including the episodes you don't want.

[809] But now I would be afraid to buy that because Blu -ray, probably, at some point.

[810] Do they even shoot that at a high enough resolution for it to matter?

[811] Well, it doesn't matter.

[812] Anything shot on film can be transferred to...

[813] The 2 HD, like 1080p was derived specifically to emulate the level of detail in 35mm film.

[814] I watched Bullet on Blu -ray over the weekend, and that movie is from 1968, and that transfer looks really, really good.

[815] Any 35mm film and up can be scanned in at 1080p perfectly.

[816] So I don't think they shot Next Generation in 16x9, which is unfortunate.

[817] I don't believe that's true.

[818] Anyway.

[819] Games.

[820] What were we talking about?

[821] Games.

[822] Star Trek games.

[823] Favorite Star Trek.

[824] I didn't play a ton of stuff.

[825] I played a little bit of Starcraft by day and a whole bunch of Dead Space 2 by night.

[826] Ah, yes, that game.

[827] Still can't say anything about it.

[828] Yeah, still pretty heavily embargoed on Dead Space 2.

[829] I don't think EA will mind too much if I say that game is really, really good.

[830] I doubt it.

[831] Real quick question.

[832] What does your mom think of it?

[833] I didn't show it to her yet.

[834] Okay.

[835] Apparently a bunch of EA moms are not thrilled with it.

[836] I asked her and she hated it.

[837] Oh, okay.

[838] It's an ad campaign.

[839] Yeah.

[840] No, we know.

[841] But were those moms all from the development team?

[842] Because I thought I saw Dino saying like – Well, I know Dino did that to his mom, but I don't know if that was tied into it or not.

[843] I think he just saw the campaign and thought – Oh, he did it himself?

[844] He had his niece do it.

[845] Oh, I assumed that...

[846] So he had his niece show his mom some footage from Dead Space 2.

[847] Okay, I just saw what he said on Twitter.

[848] I didn't actually look at the video.

[849] So his mom is not in the actual ad campaign.

[850] I don't know, either way.

[851] Okay, anyway.

[852] Interesting ad campaign for that one.

[853] There's some messed up stuff in that game.

[854] There's some really messed up stuff in that game.

[855] But is it good, creatively messed up?

[856] Because that was my problem with Dante's Inferno.

[857] I wish I could tell you.

[858] Well, you can say yes or no. The specifics of the embargo are chapters 2 and 3, so...

[859] All I can say specifically about anything has to come from those chapters.

[860] Okay.

[861] And most of the craziest stuff is not in those chapters.

[862] Is it better than fucking Demon Babies?

[863] Oh, man. I think you could qualify that with a yes or no. You don't have to get into detail.

[864] I don't know if I can talk around the embargo enough to answer that question.

[865] Tune in next week.

[866] I guess, yeah.

[867] We'll talk at length.

[868] You're playing it.

[869] You like it.

[870] You recall the infant -like enemies in the first game?

[871] No. You don't?

[872] I didn't play that much.

[873] Somebody played.

[874] I played like an hour.

[875] I played some.

[876] There were baby necromorphs in the first game.

[877] There are different kinds of baby necromorphs in this.

[878] It's pretty messed up.

[879] Probably the, I think maybe the biggest strength of that game is that the first game was all on that ship.

[880] Yeah.

[881] And it was just all one industrial environment after another because it was just an industrial mining ship.

[882] Right.

[883] Like this is a city.

[884] Right.

[885] It's a space station, but it's a city.

[886] Right.

[887] Like they have civilians.

[888] There are significant like civilian residential areas and all the things that you would expect to go along with like families living on a space station, right?

[889] Right, so it's Aliens now meets the Event Horizon aesthetic of the first game.

[890] Yeah, kind of.

[891] Because you're in that space station that's inhabited by families and stuff.

[892] There's some definite Event Horizon kind of stuff going on.

[893] Well, there was in the first game, for sure.

[894] Weird space supernatural stuff.

[895] Yeah, it's all an extension of that.

[896] But anyway, in that setting, they take you to a much greater range of places to fight these awful things.

[897] That's cool.

[898] So how is Sam Neill?

[899] He's pretty good.

[900] He's fantastic.

[901] She's so beautiful.

[902] It would be great if he was in there.

[903] I want to just go home and keep playing that.

[904] Fair enough.

[905] I want to go home and watch Event Horizon.

[906] I want to go home and play Dead Space 1.

[907] You should play Dead Space 1.

[908] Finish it.

[909] I think I'm going to go back and play Dead Space 1 after this.

[910] It creeped me out too much.

[911] I honestly couldn't play through it.

[912] You can play that game at night.

[913] Yeah, me too.

[914] People are weird.

[915] I would have finished Dead Space 2 by now if I weren't only playing it at night.

[916] Yeah.

[917] Like you got sun glaring through the window and stuff.

[918] Like you can't play that game.

[919] It's like everything is so dark on the TV.

[920] You'll get some blackout curtains.

[921] Yeah.

[922] Well, you have some, don't you?

[923] In my bedroom, not where the TV is in the living room.

[924] Oh, I don't know.

[925] I think Dead Space 2 is a game meant to be played in the bedroom.

[926] Ew.

[927] That's gross.

[928] Yeah.

[929] What are you saying?

[930] You know what I'm saying.

[931] Yes, it is very...

[932] I know where you're coming from.

[933] I had to stop last night for a little bit and walk.

[934] I have that with horror games.

[935] I just can't do it.

[936] With what?

[937] Horror games.

[938] With games that intense, I just can't deal with it.

[939] Horror movies, I'm fine.

[940] I don't mind sitting through the most goriest, nastiest, jump -scary heavy shit ever.

[941] It is super startle -heavy jump scares.

[942] Yeah, but with games, the fact that I'm engaging that stuff and I'm actually the one walking through it and making things happen, I don't want to do it.

[943] I don't want to go anywhere.

[944] I'm going to watch her walk down this hall and something.

[945] is going to jump out.

[946] It's like, fuck, I have to walk down this hall myself to make the thing jump out.

[947] I don't want to do it.

[948] Yeah, exactly.

[949] I can say because they're in chapters two and three plenty.

[950] Yeah.

[951] A lot of monster closets.

[952] Yeah.

[953] Like...

[954] Straight up Doom 3 style, like, you go and look at where the monster came from, and it's, like, a tiny little box just big enough to hold the monster.

[955] I understand you like Dead Space 2 so far, but when you can describe any part of it as Doom 3 -like...

[956] That's not a good sign.

[957] It doesn't...

[958] If you don't scrutinize...

[959] The only reason I scrutinize that stuff is because I'm reviewing it, right?

[960] Like, if you're just playing through it and taking all of the scripted stuff for what it is, like, it's very effective.

[961] Cool.

[962] So monster design, better or worse than Doom 3?

[963] Very similar.

[964] You know what?

[965] I thought the monsters in the first Dead Space were kind of cheesy.

[966] Those designs, a lot of the designs, some of them are good, some of them are kind of adolescent.

[967] Right.

[968] Some of it is like Metalhead's sketchbook.

[969] Yeah, totally.

[970] Like a lot of human faces just slapped onto these awful things.

[971] Is it John Romero's face?

[972] Oh, man. I bet it's hidden in there somewhere.

[973] I know, but it is Dino Ignacio's.

[974] I bet John Romero loves Dead Space.

[975] Great.

[976] I didn't play a ton of games.

[977] Your mom might not like it, but John Romero is going to make Dead Space 2 his bitch.

[978] Ew.

[979] But my mom loves John Romero.

[980] Think about it.

[981] John Romero's totally playing that game in the bedroom.

[982] Is your mom a young Romanian woman?

[983] No. Sadly, for both my mom and John Romero.

[984] My mom is not looking for a passport.

[985] Okay.

[986] I didn't get to play a ton of games over the weekend.

[987] Well, did you not get to or did you just choose not to?

[988] I was just doing other stuff.

[989] Yeah.

[990] It was good.

[991] That was kind of my thing, too.

[992] I was just doing other stuff.

[993] Fucking went, like, food shopping, which I hadn't done in, like, two months.

[994] So my house was just awful, barren.

[995] You're down to eating bakos at this point?

[996] Yeah, I was just like, here's some...

[997] Down to?

[998] Start with?

[999] Like, here's some year -old cans of soup that I think I could probably still eat.

[1000] I don't know.

[1001] Soup is for fallout shelters.

[1002] Of course it's still good.

[1003] I've got this jar of peanuts.

[1004] And this baking soda.

[1005] Man, that big tin of peanuts that Shelby sent.

[1006] I cracked that thing open when I ran out of food in my house.

[1007] Fantastic peanuts.

[1008] Fucking amazing peanuts.

[1009] Send him a thank you card.

[1010] Those are probably the best peanuts I've ever had.

[1011] Send a thank you card to the state of Virginia.

[1012] Much love to the Bonnie clan.

[1013] Christmas gift.

[1014] It's funny because it's not a fancy package.

[1015] It's like, here's a big old fucking can of peanuts.

[1016] Hell yeah.

[1017] All right, sure.

[1018] I like peanuts.

[1019] And you start getting into it.

[1020] These are...

[1021] How do you argue with that?

[1022] These are fantastic peanuts.

[1023] These are fantastic peanuts.

[1024] My girlfriend made a bunch of Kung Pao chicken with those peanuts last year.

[1025] Oh, my God, yes.

[1026] So good.

[1027] I might see about making some peanut brittle with those peanuts.

[1028] Oh, man. It'd probably be pretty good, too.

[1029] I'm just going to eat those peanuts.

[1030] That's just what I'm – I have no interest in food craft.

[1031] I just want to eat these peanuts.

[1032] But those peanuts saved my ass over the Christmas break.

[1033] Yeah.

[1034] That was how little food I had.

[1035] I was like, oh, thank God, there's peanuts.

[1036] So that was good.

[1037] Oil change, haircut, just all sorts of – Taking care of business.

[1038] So a functional weekend.

[1039] Yeah.

[1040] A high -functioning weekend.

[1041] I went and visited my mom.

[1042] All sorts of shit like that.

[1043] And then, you know, Star Trek.

[1044] So your weekend was the polar opposite of my weekend where I literally – I didn't even put on pants until Monday when I had to go to Northern Chance House.

[1045] Friday night I went out food shopping then.

[1046] Up Saturday morning nice and early.

[1047] Yeah, I did all sorts of stuff.

[1048] Unbelievable.

[1049] I did find just a little bit of time to play some Fallout New Vegas Dead Money, which is the DLC.

[1050] I really don't care for it.

[1051] They really – and it sucks because I kind of like – so I played through New Vegas and then I rolled back to an earlier save to kind of do my splinter endings thing.

[1052] But then after I did all that stuff, I'm like, okay, I want to go back and I kind of have like what I consider my core playthrough.

[1053] So I want to use that to then go and do the DLC and whatever other stuff they put out.

[1054] So now I'm fucking trapped in the Dead Money DLC because it's a lot like a lot of the Fallout 3 DLC.

[1055] Like the pit?

[1056] Yeah, where it takes you to – well, it's even more like Operation Anchorage where it's like you're going to a different place, stripping you of all of your equipment, stripping you of all of your teammates and all the other shit that you have.

[1057] How do they justify that?

[1058] They do with story.

[1059] How?

[1060] I'm not going to tell you to play it.

[1061] There's no way I'll ever play that.

[1062] No time.

[1063] And you're fine because it's a real bummer.

[1064] But anyway, so now my save is there.

[1065] It's like I pretty much have to play through that before I can get back to any of the New Vegas stuff.

[1066] And it's combat heavy with a focus on like stealth and traps.

[1067] So it's like your favorite parts of the Fallout experience.

[1068] Exactly.

[1069] It's like combat is already not what I like about Fallout.

[1070] And to make this that focused and then you have these enemies that are ghost people that are very difficult to kill.

[1071] But you have super limited ammo and it's mostly melee stuff.

[1072] And so it's like melee and stealth and traps are three specific things.

[1073] Wait, wait, wait.

[1074] Are they ghost traps?

[1075] That I never put.

[1076] No. They're like bear traps.

[1077] Like people traps.

[1078] Those are like three things that I very specifically never put a single point into playing New Vegas.

[1079] So like it's just this fucking slog.

[1080] to grind through all this stuff.

[1081] I felt like they learned zero lessons from how the DLC should go from Fallout 3.

[1082] Yeah, that's a shame.

[1083] It is.

[1084] There's some decent character stuff in there, too, and there's, like, promise in the setting, but they didn't do a good job.

[1085] I mean, you know, the third DLC for this could very well, you know, extend the ending again.

[1086] Open it back up.

[1087] But it's not even that.

[1088] It's not even the, like, I still think that it would be better if they let you, eh.

[1089] New Vegas is different enough, whatever to that part.

[1090] But it's more of learning the lesson of make this story and character focused, not super combat focused.

[1091] Part of what makes New Vegas, for me, more fun to play is it's easier to get a full team of dudes running around with you, and they're a lot more effective.

[1092] So I barely fought playing New Vegas.

[1093] I did not participate in a lot of combat because my guys would take care of it for me because they were so fucking effective.

[1094] I wonder if it's easier from a production angle to do a combat -focused thing.

[1095] Probably.

[1096] As opposed to, you know, you don't need a whole bunch of new writing.

[1097] You don't have to get a whole bunch of new voice actors together.

[1098] I mean, a lot of that stuff is still in there for Dead Money.

[1099] It's just that they also parrot.

[1100] They make you slog through a bunch of unappealing combat scenarios.

[1101] So there's that, and I played a little bit of DJ Hero 2.

[1102] It struck me of like, hey, DJ Hero 2.

[1103] I liked that game a lot.

[1104] I played some more of that.

[1105] You guys, having played so much Fallout, do you feel like you can go back to Elder Scrolls when Skyrim comes out?

[1106] Yeah, certainly.

[1107] The news that there's no speed trees, maybe.

[1108] It's kind of a bummer.

[1109] Like you can do without the guns, though, and all that stuff?

[1110] Spells are like guns for your mind.

[1111] I guess I mine guns.

[1112] I use a lot of vats, so not having that.

[1113] We'll make it a different experience.

[1114] They should just put vats.

[1115] I mean, I'm wondering.

[1116] I'm almost wondering if they'll end up doing that.

[1117] You know what?

[1118] I don't even need there to be like a in -fiction justification for that.

[1119] It's just like this is how you do turn -based.

[1120] Magic time.

[1121] Yeah.

[1122] Yeah.

[1123] Vats.

[1124] I mean, they are rolling a bunch of other stuff.

[1125] Just call it vats.

[1126] It's going to have perks and stuff like that.

[1127] Like setting change, I don't think I'll have much.

[1128] I thought you were going to say go back to Elder Scrolls 4.

[1129] No fucking way.

[1130] You mean Oblivion?

[1131] Yeah.

[1132] Oh, no, no. I just meant fantasy in general.

[1133] Can you go back to a fantasy -style game with these kinds of mechanics?

[1134] Sure.

[1135] It's good.

[1136] I mean, Oblivion was awesome.

[1137] Again, it's the storytelling in the characters.

[1138] This one's got Vikings.

[1139] That's more interesting for me. This one's got Max von Sydow.

[1140] Great.

[1141] I liked it when it had Patrick Stewart in it.

[1142] That was pretty good.

[1143] I like everything with Patrick Stewart in it.

[1144] I like those national rental car commercials.

[1145] Did you like Castlevania?

[1146] I liked him in Castlevania.

[1147] I didn't.

[1148] Captain Picard tells you to kill a man. I'll do it.

[1149] Time and place.

[1150] I'll be there.

[1151] What if it's Jonathan Frakes?

[1152] You know what?

[1153] That assumes that you could kill Jonathan Frakes.

[1154] Which is a pretty big assumption to make.

[1155] All that dude has to do is shoulder charge you and you are dead.

[1156] That's a good point.

[1157] He's a good tank.

[1158] Soaks it up, man. In my Star Trek RPG, Jonathan Frakes is the tank.

[1159] In my Star Trek RPG...

[1160] Oh, right.

[1161] They already made that.

[1162] Has any of your DC Universe online time, Jeff, inspired you to check back in on Star Trek?

[1163] Not really.

[1164] If anything, it's inspired me to download Champions Online since that went free -to -play right around the same time.

[1165] Did you start that?

[1166] No, no, hell no. Just downloaded it.

[1167] No, I didn't even do that.

[1168] I thought, oh, maybe I should play Champions.

[1169] I went, wait, maybe I shouldn't.

[1170] Then you went.

[1171] Yeah.

[1172] Then I kind of made like loose air noises from my mouth for a while and then thought, man, can't wait till LittleBigPlanet 2 gets here.

[1173] And now it's here.

[1174] So saving my life.

[1175] All right.

[1176] You guys want to talk about other stuff?

[1177] Okay.

[1178] Yeah.

[1179] I like other things.

[1180] Jeff.

[1181] What is this?

[1182] You need a consensus here?

[1183] What is this?

[1184] Democracy?

[1185] I just want to make sure everyone's in before we move on.

[1186] I played a little Big Planet 2 for like 20 minutes, and it's awesome.

[1187] Is that awesome?

[1188] It's awesome.

[1189] Is that still good?

[1190] It's awesome.

[1191] Did you do any weird user -generated stuff?

[1192] I played Justin Calvert's Lunar Lander level.

[1193] How is it?

[1194] A little tough.

[1195] Lunar Lander's pretty tough.

[1196] Yeah.

[1197] You adapt it to the...

[1198] Little Big Planet physics.

[1199] Yeah, it probably helps.

[1200] I actually think that Lunar Lander physics are probably pretty comparable to the Little Big Planet physics, aren't they?

[1201] That's what I thought, and then no. Okay.

[1202] They're not.

[1203] They're differently floaty?

[1204] Yeah.

[1205] Okay.

[1206] You've got to be so slow when you touch down.

[1207] Touching down is not the difficult part of this.

[1208] Oh, okay.

[1209] Staying up is.

[1210] Getting up.

[1211] I spent a good chunk of the weekend looking.

[1212] trying to decide if I wanted to play Getting Up.

[1213] We talked about that in the car last week.

[1214] What was it that inspired the Getting Up?

[1215] We started talking about the collective.

[1216] What would you play Getting Up on at this point?

[1217] I was looking to see if I had the PC version or if it was available for sale from any sort of digital retailer, but it seems like it is not the case.

[1218] Is that on one of those Xbox downloads?

[1219] I don't think it's a download.

[1220] No. I mean, I have the disc for Xbox.

[1221] But I don't think it runs on the 360.

[1222] Yeah.

[1223] So I would have to hook up an actual Xbox.

[1224] I've got an actual Xbox.

[1225] I've got like three actual Xboxes.

[1226] I don't know that any of them work.

[1227] I've got an actual working Xbox.

[1228] Just putting that out there.

[1229] All right.

[1230] Let's move on to a little spot of news, gentlemen.

[1231] Spot, man. There's been some stuff.

[1232] I hear there is some.

[1233] Heard a few things about some stuff.

[1234] Wait, what have you been hearing?

[1235] No, I got it.

[1236] What is he saying?

[1237] He's saying Final Fantasy XIII -2.

[1238] That's true.

[1239] That is my top story that I have here.

[1240] Breaking news.

[1241] Final Fantasy XIII -2 is coming next winter from Square Enix.

[1242] Yeah, it was like last week or something, some site trademark, like URL registrations got out.

[1243] Next winter as in...

[1244] Probably like end of this year or end of next year?

[1245] It's this year in Japan.

[1246] Okay.

[1247] I think I saw it next year.

[1248] It's probably like January, February for the next year for that here.

[1249] Are they all in a J -pop group this time when the game starts?

[1250] I don't know.

[1251] I know.

[1252] This lady's got a sword and there's feathers.

[1253] Oh, good.

[1254] Is it Phoenix Down?

[1255] I bet it is.

[1256] Probably is.

[1257] I don't know how I feel about that because paradoxically the combat was my favorite thing about 13, which is...

[1258] It's strange because I have been bored of JRPG combat for about a decade.

[1259] But the combat was great in XIII.

[1260] It was really well designed and pretty unique.

[1261] So you don't want them to change it?

[1262] I don't know.

[1263] I wouldn't say that.

[1264] But I hope they don't monkey with it too much.

[1265] But you're saying that there are other things that could use addressing more so than the combat system.

[1266] Now, I know precious little about Final Fantasy XIII, which is to say I know.

[1267] I know Precious Little about Final Fantasy.

[1268] Chocobos.

[1269] What I know is that a lot of people did not really like it that much.

[1270] With some people being very vocal about how much they did like it, but I've seen a lot of people rolling their eyes in unison at this announcement.

[1271] It has strong points.

[1272] I feel like we've kind of kicked that horse to death at this point.

[1273] Everybody knows sort of...

[1274] Well, I'm asking for my own reference.

[1275] It was too long -winded.

[1276] It just took too long to get going and let you actually have fun playing the game.

[1277] Okay.

[1278] And now they're making another one.

[1279] Does this seem like a case of they spent a lot of money generating assets and they're going to fucking get as much out of it?

[1280] That game sold well, didn't it?

[1281] But not great.

[1282] I don't know what the final tally was.

[1283] I'm sure it did fine.

[1284] I know the budget for that game was supremely overblown compared to what most other RPGs ever are.

[1285] It was a long development cycle.

[1286] Yes, absolutely.

[1287] It seems like they are trying to capitalize on the work that has already been done.

[1288] Yeah.

[1289] Sensible.

[1290] But at the same time, there's a lot of room for improvement.

[1291] And I think, like Alex said, people were pretty vocal about what they didn't like about it.

[1292] And I think they actually saw somewhere in a story.

[1293] Yeah, they are saying, like, we are looking at feedback and improving it.

[1294] Fair enough.

[1295] If it's like 30 hours and there's more exploration and stuff, like, cool.

[1296] I'm on board.

[1297] What does this do to, what was it, Versus?

[1298] So there's a whole new trailer or a bunch of new footage of Versus 13 out there also.

[1299] Which has actual gameplay in it.

[1300] Yeah.

[1301] As far as I know, maybe I'm wrong.

[1302] It's the first time I have seen what that game looks like.

[1303] It looks kind of amazing.

[1304] You think so?

[1305] quality of CGI perspective and just the way the in -game stuff looked.

[1306] I thought it looked like really unique for that type of game.

[1307] But also, yeah, I thought it looked like it could actually be fun as, you know, like this kind of character action game with some RPG trappings around it.

[1308] I looked at it and I was just like, oh, you're making Devil May Cry.

[1309] But then if you look at the bottom, there's like a party kind of readout with like two other character portraits.

[1310] I love fighting and magic.

[1311] Flea.

[1312] He's the greatest bass player of all time.

[1313] He was great in The Chase.

[1314] Also the greatest boss in Corona Trigger.

[1315] He's pretty good in The Chase.

[1316] I watched The Chase.

[1317] Because you watched The Chase, I was talking to someone about Christy Swanson and Ray Weiss.

[1318] Rarely been hotter in that movie.

[1319] The Chase is an incredible movie.

[1320] It's really good.

[1321] Henry Rollins was absolutely born to play a cop.

[1322] Like a really aggro cop.

[1323] Yeah.

[1324] It's perfect.

[1325] Yeah, just total asshole, jarhead cop.

[1326] Like power tripping.

[1327] I had forgotten what a sort of, I mean, very blunt, but at the same time amusing commentary that movie was on TV news.

[1328] Yeah.

[1329] I think I had sort of willfully ignored that as a kid because I just was like, Joey Sheen car chased.

[1330] Funny.

[1331] Anthony Kiedis.

[1332] But yeah, no. Shockingly.

[1333] Shockingly well done, that movie.

[1334] Ray Waugh is incredible.

[1335] Oh, yeah.

[1336] I don't even mean that movie.

[1337] I just mean Ray Wise is incredible.

[1338] He is incredible.

[1339] But in The Chase, he is also incredible.

[1340] I love Ray Wise.

[1341] He shines.

[1342] I would love to see him in, was it Christopher McDonald?

[1343] Yes.

[1344] I would love to see them play brothers in a movie.

[1345] Evil brothers.

[1346] Isn't there also a 13 Agito?

[1347] Yeah, they just renamed that to something.

[1348] Okay.

[1349] Oh, I can't remember.

[1350] So that's still happening?

[1351] That's still a separate thing?

[1352] It is.

[1353] They made all the initial 13 announcements like a decade ago.

[1354] Was that even one of them though?

[1355] Yeah, it was like that whole like Fabula Nova Crystallis is like this.

[1356] I remember the synergized kind of binding universe thing.

[1357] Like we're putting out 13 in a million different ways.

[1358] But now I'm really confused because I thought Versus 13 was supposed to take place in the same world, but that footage is in this kind of realistic modern setting, like in this urban area.

[1359] It looks like Tokyo or something.

[1360] This is just exhausting.

[1361] That could just as easily be some other part of...

[1362] And also that's a small subset of that game.

[1363] Who knows where else it goes.

[1364] But I thought there were people in tuxedos and stuff.

[1365] They don't have tuxedos in the future.

[1366] I don't know.

[1367] Japanese, fruity, space future.

[1368] Yeah, I mean 13 proper has a pretty specific aesthetic to it.

[1369] It doesn't look like that stuff would fit into.

[1370] And then Agito or whatever.

[1371] Yeah.

[1372] I think it started as a mobile game, right?

[1373] That sounds right.

[1374] I think it was a phone game to begin with in Japan, and then it transitioned also to PSP, I believe.

[1375] And now it has been renamed.

[1376] I don't think 13 actually appears in the title anymore.

[1377] Okay.

[1378] I think it's got a zero in the title now.

[1379] Oh, is that that Duodecum?

[1380] No, that's Dissidia 2.

[1381] Okay.

[1382] We're making another Dissidia?

[1383] Yeah.

[1384] I guess Decidio was pretty popular.

[1385] I guess that one, yeah.

[1386] I guess I could see that one selling pretty well.

[1387] It's like virtual on, but with Sephiroth.

[1388] I don't want to say that.

[1389] Agito is like Final Fantasy Phase Zero.

[1390] That appeals deeply to a very specific segment.

[1391] Two things I kind of dislike mashed together.

[1392] Awesome.

[1393] Not necessarily for you.

[1394] Yeah.

[1395] But the only real new thing here right now is Final Fantasy XIII 2 has been announced.

[1396] And, you know, if they fix what was wrong.

[1397] Busted on it.

[1398] That could be kind of cool.

[1399] Although, obviously, they did not take our advice and take a fucking break.

[1400] It just makes it even crazier.

[1401] They took the time to announce all these Final Fantasy XIII games, and then that wasn't enough.

[1402] We need one more.

[1403] No, we need one more.

[1404] And they still haven't put out most of them.

[1405] Yeah, exactly.

[1406] And they did those announcements a long time ago.

[1407] And also, Final Fantasy XIV is still technically out.

[1408] So when is Final Fantasy XIV 2 coming?

[1409] That'll be the PS3 version to find it.

[1410] Technically, that came out when they fired all the original staff.

[1411] Yeah, it's being worked on right now.

[1412] Do they fire them, or do they just take them off the project?

[1413] I think it was a lot of stepping down and resignations and the honor of my family kind of shit.

[1414] Falling on this sword somewhere.

[1415] Japan.

[1416] Right.

[1417] Oh, man. When do they announce a 15?

[1418] Didn't they already?

[1419] Yeah, I don't know.

[1420] Do they?

[1421] Can you go that high?

[1422] XV, man. That's a powerful -looking, good, clean number.

[1423] I guess you have to.

[1424] You went this far.

[1425] The Final Fantasy.

[1426] They'll exclusively on the Xbox.

[1427] Right.

[1428] At that point, why not?

[1429] I don't know.

[1430] Wonderswan.

[1431] Brad, do you think you can ever get Final Fantasy back to where Final Fantasy was?

[1432] I don't know.

[1433] Like, was, like, when, though?

[1434] Like, what part of Final Fantasy do you want to get back to?

[1435] It feels like the three eras are going to be your SNES era, your PS1 era, and your PS2.

[1436] Do you want four, seven, or ten?

[1437] I'm just relevant.

[1438] Those were the three times when I feel like it was relevant to more than just the...

[1439] I'm not just saying, like, oh, I want more spiky hair, or I like knights and red mages.

[1440] I'm just saying...

[1441] Those were times when Final Fantasy was at the forefront, one of the most popular, influential, and important fucking franchises out there in video games.

[1442] It hasn't been that way since X. The last one I loved unconditionally was VI.

[1443] So I don't know if I'm the best person to answer that question.

[1444] What were your conditions on VII?

[1445] Just because I know how everyone reveres that game, which I've never played.

[1446] I seem to remember it being a little clunky.

[1447] I mean, it was their first try at a 3D game.

[1448] And all that CG and stuff.

[1449] Like, there was a lot of kind of weirdly put together aspects of that game.

[1450] Sure.

[1451] It was weird fixed camera angles, pre -rendered backgrounds.

[1452] Yeah, all that stuff.

[1453] Snowboarding.

[1454] Yes.

[1455] Yes.

[1456] But even, like, down to, like, the aesthetics of the CG.

[1457] Like, some of the CG had realistic -looking characters.

[1458] Other CG had, like, the little chibi -dudes with no mouths.

[1459] Yeah, yeah.

[1460] And, like, the little, like, ball hands and stuff.

[1461] Sure.

[1462] Like, just super inconsistent.

[1463] Didn't think the story was great.

[1464] Fair enough.

[1465] I don't know.

[1466] Mako reactors, dude.

[1467] The planet.

[1468] The Spirits Within?

[1469] Yeah, Spirits Within.

[1470] God, I wonder what that company would be like if they had never made a movie.

[1471] Can you imagine?

[1472] Probably about the same, actually.

[1473] I mean, just be based on The Spirits Within.

[1474] Yeah, the retelling.

[1475] Yeah, those ideas would have just been made into a game.

[1476] The Spirits Within 2.

[1477] Well, I mean, financially, if we're just...

[1478] Regarding the fate of the company, I think that the merger with Enix was essentially a result of their difficulties post -movie, right?

[1479] They spent a lot of money on that movie.

[1480] Maybe I'm mistaken.

[1481] That was my impression at the time.

[1482] I mean, I don't know.

[1483] I do remember hearing that it was going really poorly for them after that stuff.

[1484] Didn't Sony hitch their wagon to that movie in a big way also, money -wise?

[1485] Possibly.

[1486] I can't remember.

[1487] Wouldn't make some sense.

[1488] Yeah, you know, because it was a Paramount production, and Paramount is Sony.

[1489] No, Paramount's Viacom.

[1490] Paramount's Viacom, you're right.

[1491] Columbia is Sony.

[1492] I forget.

[1493] Maybe.

[1494] Anyways, Final Fantasy XIII 2.

[1495] It'll have dress orbs.

[1496] Sweet.

[1497] J -pop.

[1498] That'd be the best thing they could do.

[1499] J -pop's cool.

[1500] Is make it, yeah.

[1501] Some interesting news concerning Portal 2 has been announced specifically with the PS3 Steam stuff.

[1502] I don't understand it, though.

[1503] Does anyone else here understand it?

[1504] Dude, cross -platform play.

[1505] Yeah.

[1506] But then there's this other thing about...

[1507] All right, so there's cross -platform play.

[1508] Yes.

[1509] That part I get.

[1510] Yeah.

[1511] So what's the rest of it?

[1512] You will take your Steam credentials and put them into the PS3 version of the game.

[1513] Okay.

[1514] which will then just pull in your Steam friends list as a separate list on the PS3 or on the PS3 version of Portal 2 more likely.

[1515] So it's not going to show up on your cross -media.

[1516] No, it's like you'll put in the game and all that stuff.

[1517] So you can then chat with those people in...

[1518] inside of Portal 2.

[1519] Strangely enough, it actually spells that out in the press release.

[1520] The wording is very clear.

[1521] Within the game, you will put in your Steam stuff.

[1522] It's not like a separate Steam client.

[1523] You're not installing Steam on your PS3 or anything weird like that.

[1524] Basically, anyone who goes through all the stuff of linking their PlayStation Network account to their Steam account will receive Portal 2 on the PC for free.

[1525] And Mac.

[1526] And Mac, yeah.

[1527] They will get access to the other two versions of Portal 2, which means you should buy the PS3 version of Portal 2 when it comes time to buy Portal 2.

[1528] If you're going to get one, you might as well.

[1529] Unless it's way cheaper on Steam and you just have no interest in the PS3 version.

[1530] Right.

[1531] Which is actually distinctly possible that it would be cheaper on Steam.

[1532] I guess it probably would be $10 cheaper.

[1533] That's kind of the standard.

[1534] I don't know if that constitutes way cheaper, really.

[1535] It's probably worth the extra $10.

[1536] I agree.

[1537] I would definitely.

[1538] It's wild.

[1539] It's weird.

[1540] That game's coming to 360 also, right?

[1541] Yes.

[1542] Yeah.

[1543] As far as I know.

[1544] I feel like, yeah, it just makes me think that this is Valve just really putting the screws to Microsoft of like...

[1545] Come play by our rules or we are just going to completely shut you out.

[1546] Like, yeah, technically we're going to make a 360 version, but we are going to make it so enticing to play either the PC or PS3 versions.

[1547] Because they'll get the updates that – Yeah, post -release.

[1548] That the 360 one will have to jump through all those hoops to get and all that sort of stuff.

[1549] And probably pay for it.

[1550] Right.

[1551] Well, for patches and stuff.

[1552] I'm saying for content.

[1553] Yeah.

[1554] But even for patches, like PS3, we'll get them day -in -day presumably with PC.

[1555] Whereas the Xbox patches have to go through cert and all that stuff.

[1556] I see myself just getting the PC version.

[1557] I enjoyed playing Portal on the 360, but I will probably just get the PC version.

[1558] Valve games are made to be played on the PC as far as I'm concerned, so I'm with you on that.

[1559] I really like the 360 version of Orange Box.

[1560] I enjoyed playing all those games on that.

[1561] I didn't have a problem playing them like that, but it was better.

[1562] There's just the issue of the way Valve's post -release support.

[1563] Yeah.

[1564] And I can understand it being tricky.

[1565] I can understand those happen to be like very slow -going negotiations of Valve coming in and saying, hey, we want you to give up a great deal of the control you have over your platform to us.

[1566] Right.

[1567] So that we can push out updates whenever we want and not have to go through your quality assurance process and bypass all of the stuff you put in place to make sure everything works.

[1568] Also as holders of a competing platform.

[1569] Yeah, as people that, yeah, exactly.

[1570] I mean, it's essentially like them walking into the room and just saying, hey, we want to be treated specially.

[1571] Yeah.

[1572] Which I guess arguably they have the clout to do at this point.

[1573] That's the funny thing is that this is them.

[1574] Like not on consoles, though.

[1575] It's kind of weird that, you know.

[1576] And this move doesn't like all of a sudden make them huge on the PS3.

[1577] If anything, all this really does is get them a lot more customers on Steam.

[1578] If someone buys the PS3 version of the game and then they get that for free, why wouldn't they go like, oh, I guess I'll go sign up for a Steam account so I can tie into all these PS3 people.

[1579] So it gets them a bigger database of users.

[1580] It makes Steam bigger.

[1581] That, to me, seems like they play.

[1582] That's why they're giving out free copies of these versions of Portal 2.

[1583] Which is the same reason they gave away Portal for free on Steam last year.

[1584] Get people to sign up.

[1585] It's just another awesome and insane thing Valve is doing because they can.

[1586] However, given the recent developments in PS3 security, if Valve gets back working well on the PS3, that could be key.

[1587] That could be a significant developer.

[1588] If third parties, it seems like, are going to be in need of some better...

[1589] protection from cheats and hacks and that sort of stuff.

[1590] I don't know if you saw this stuff, but Modern Warfare 2, it's actually, I guess it's been a mess for a while.

[1591] Yeah.

[1592] But the recent news of the PlayStation platform being kind of cracked wide open or in the process of getting cracked wide open is certainly not helping.

[1593] Like the headlines that were going around about Modern Warfare 2 yesterday were...

[1594] Well, it was because Robert Bolling was on Twitter saying, we are not updating the game because of this, which is...

[1595] I get where they're coming from.

[1596] Right.

[1597] But at the same time, they should just say, that's an old game.

[1598] We're working on something else.

[1599] Like, come on, don't be crazy.

[1600] But I mean, you know, anytime you throw around the word unplayable like that.

[1601] Yeah.

[1602] Like it's kind of like a sky is falling element.

[1603] The thing is, is that also happens on the 360.

[1604] It's just a harder process because people have to have hardware modified 360s to do that stuff.

[1605] And it's not, it is not the easy process.

[1606] I also get where they're coming from where they say like, look, we.

[1607] Yes, we are aware there are all these other issues that predate the security.

[1608] And they could fix those, but at this point with the security and the state that it is, it would be relatively trivial for someone else to find a new way to rip that game open again.

[1609] So it's probably not worth their time to go and fix it.

[1610] Also probably a third of three in their platforms for volume of players.

[1611] Yep.

[1612] Yeah, for sure, certainly.

[1613] That's definite.

[1614] I mean, you could see Sony being super willing to be flexible with them purely because of the way they got the shaft on the orange box.

[1615] Like, they're probably going to bend over backwards at this point to get the next Valve game on their system.

[1616] Like in a really great...

[1617] In non -shitty form.

[1618] Was it the orange box they got and it was really bad and then they just didn't get left for dead at all?

[1619] It was a third -party port.

[1620] Valve had nothing to do with the PS3 version.

[1621] But to Jeff's point, I don't know that Valve still carries that much fucking water on the PS3.

[1622] I think they have to do stuff like, say, you'll get this PC version and all this other crazy shit if you buy it on the PS3.

[1623] They have to incentivize it with the clout that they have on the PC, which...

[1624] makes the PC -PS3 connection seem less crazy.

[1625] That's why they're doing it, in part.

[1626] And again, more users signing up only helps Steam.

[1627] But with the state of the PlayStation 3...

[1628] Clever fuckers, those guys at Valve.

[1629] They're diabolical, goddammit.

[1630] With the state of the PlayStation 3 security being what it is, if they could get VAC running and actually create that as a good middleware platform for...

[1631] other developers that want to secure their PlayStation 3 games from this ongoing menace.

[1632] There's probably money to be made in the anti -cheat middleware.

[1633] Valve now provides all PS3 security support.

[1634] That seems like a possible future.

[1635] Maybe not all, but at least one workable solution.

[1636] Not that VAC is perfect, but...

[1637] Suddenly you have a bunch of PS3 games that aren't produced by Valve that feature Steam for the VAC.

[1638] I think that's possible.

[1639] If it came down to either license that or invest a bunch of your own resources into anti -cheating measures, then you could see it happening.

[1640] Jeff, what is the state of PS3 security?

[1641] Do you want to talk about this at all?

[1642] We did talk about some of it last week.

[1643] Has the state changed any?

[1644] They are advancing.

[1645] The stuff that was originally released was done so...

[1646] without the ability to easily pirate stuff, but that just seems like kind of a facade to me, and that stuff is kind of rapidly falling, the level two security or whatever it is.

[1647] You know, the stuff has been released that is actually breaking PlayStation 3s, so if you're out there thinking about, like, hey, I want to run this custom firmware and do, you know, even just to play SNES games or something like that, like, it's...

[1648] It's not all safe.

[1649] Because it doesn't work right or because they're maliciously disguising these attacks?

[1650] No, no, because it doesn't work right is the case.

[1651] I don't think anyone's out there bricking PS3s on purpose, but who can say?

[1652] That could just as easily be the case, but I don't think that's the case.

[1653] I'm going to be interested in kind of talking to developers over the next few weeks here.

[1654] We're going to get a chance to talk to a grip of them.

[1655] Yeah.

[1656] see kind of what their take is on this stuff because it seems like something where Sony has the ability or the potential to regain control of at least the online environment and prevent people with modified systems from getting online and ruining online games.

[1657] We don't know that for sure, and I think that's going to be kind of game by game for now until Sony does do something about it.

[1658] They've been saying, hey, we are aware, we have a fix in the works, but because it's related to security, we cannot give details because that would just be playing into their hands and giving them info about what we're changing.

[1659] But I think...

[1660] And this at least creates a similar environment to what you saw on the PSP where there were people just releasing custom firmwares and then updating those.

[1661] So Sony would release an update to the official firmware, and you need that to get on the store, and you need that to get online.

[1662] So it kind of shuts out all the people with the older hacked firmware from getting online at all, and then you would see updated custom firmwares based on these new revisions coming out to enable.

[1663] hackers and pirates and stuff like that to potentially get back online on the PSP.

[1664] So I think that is likely to happen in the future.

[1665] I think what needs to happen is Sony needs to be able to detect modified systems, period.

[1666] Like even if they're running firmware that gets past the initial check and can connect to the PlayStation network, they need to be able to look at a PS3 and say, that's not legit, get off.

[1667] and ban systems.

[1668] Basically, like Microsoft does, they need to be able to ban at the hardware level, which I'm fairly certain they can do.

[1669] It's just a matter of implementing it and stuff.

[1670] Is that preferable to banning at the account level?

[1671] Yeah, because the accounts are free to create on the PS3.

[1672] So there's nothing holding people back.

[1673] I think you have to ban both.

[1674] You have to ban the box and the account.

[1675] Why take chances?

[1676] I guess the only counterargument is maybe that person...

[1677] Learns their lesson, goes out and buys another PS3 and actually wants to play nice.

[1678] Then they can sign up for another account and go from there.

[1679] You take all of your PlayStation Network purchases into...

[1680] You put them all at risk when you do that sort of stuff.

[1681] What changed?

[1682] Because it seemed like people had kind of been kind of casually poking at the PS3 for a while.

[1683] But then these codes got out here, like these security keys got out.

[1684] Yeah.

[1685] I think what changed, to hear them tell it, what changed is that Sony removed the other OS support from the firmware.

[1686] I think that was when it went to more than casual.

[1687] Then it was like, well, if they're going to do that to us, let's see if we can re -add it or let's take a look at this thing so that we can do weird stuff with the PlayStation 3.

[1688] Yeah, to hear them tell it, to hear some of the people responsible for the kind of initial load of information tell it, it is specifically why they went and took a look at it.

[1689] Like they were getting their needs met with the basic other OS support.

[1690] With like, okay, we can run Linux on it and do some weird stuff and kind of hack around with it and that's fun.

[1691] They took that out.

[1692] But they took it out because of a security issue.

[1693] So, yeah.

[1694] They didn't just remove it kind of out of nowhere.

[1695] Sure.

[1696] Is that confirmed?

[1697] Yeah, there was some kind of...

[1698] Was that...

[1699] Yeah, people...

[1700] That wasn't just an excuse?

[1701] It was that kind of initial thing where it's like, okay, if you put a paperclip across this bit here, or some kind of initial way to get it to boot into some weird stuff, and it was through the other OS.

[1702] I wish I...

[1703] And that, I think, is what eventually led to the creation of some weird USB key that you could use for piracy.

[1704] I wish I had read up more on this.

[1705] I saw Ethereum put forth somewhere that they had plans to monetize the other OS feature that they failed to realize.

[1706] But I don't even know what...

[1707] Yeah, I don't know if that business model would have been, if they would have licensed OSs to appear on there.

[1708] I feel like there are a lot of things on the PS3 that perhaps were intended to be monetized at one time or another that simply did not come to fruition.

[1709] So, you know, that would not surprise me. But an ongoing story.

[1710] Yeah, yeah, an ongoing story.

[1711] I do think that Sony will regain control, but at this point, with it open at this state, it seems like it'll be in that state where if people want to...

[1712] Live this life of only installing hacked firmware and only updating to hacked firmware and staying off the PlayStation Network.

[1713] Or, you know, provided that they do lock that down.

[1714] Right.

[1715] That there will always now be a method for piracy on the PS3, that they're always going to be able to hack those keys out and do, you know.

[1716] on the PS3 without any kind of hardware modification.

[1717] That seems like the big difference is the no hardware mod because that makes it a lot easier for it to be casual.

[1718] It's a big thing that people point to with the PSP when it comes to not putting their games on PSP.

[1719] kind of being indifferent about the state of PSP development.

[1720] You know, there are developers out there that say like, well, you know, yeah, when I'm number seven on the top 10 digital downloads list and I know that I've only sold a few hundred copies, that's no good.

[1721] And then if I put it out into retail stores, it just gets hacked apart and pirated all over the place because that's so easy.

[1722] You know, it's like the Dreamcast was where it's just like it just kind of works.

[1723] And that's bad.

[1724] I don't think the PS3 is there quite yet, but who knows?

[1725] By the time this goes live.

[1726] Could be.

[1727] Well, it sounds like they may be announcing a PSP2 sometime soon.

[1728] Yeah.

[1729] Or acknowledging that the PSP2 exists.

[1730] They already did.

[1731] Well, there was an interview in the New York Times or something where it was like, if a PSP2 were to exist.

[1732] Do you think that'll be a separate thing from all this PlayStation phone?

[1733] If I were to kill my wife.

[1734] Because those were also similar rumors.

[1735] That's a separate thing.

[1736] PlayStation phone is like a Sony Ericsson thing.

[1737] Right.

[1738] Presumably.

[1739] Oh, right.

[1740] That's right.

[1741] I forgot all that.

[1742] It's a separate brand line.

[1743] Is it Expedia?

[1744] No. There's some...

[1745] Xperia, I think, is the brand line of Sony Ericsson phones.

[1746] I thought that was the new size of Starbucks drinks.

[1747] It's also that, yeah.

[1748] So that's supposedly, that phone is supposedly like an Android -based phone that has basic PlayStation controls under a PSP Go -like slider.

[1749] Well, PSP Go -like, under a slider.

[1750] Under the screen, basically.

[1751] But the PSP 2 sounds like it's going to be way more powerful than any kind of Android device.

[1752] I think the rumored specs of the PlayStation phone were less than the PSP 1, if I'm not mistaken.

[1753] I think.

[1754] Yeah.

[1755] So it's just something to confuse the market with.

[1756] Basically.

[1757] Very good.

[1758] Yeah.

[1759] If it exists.

[1760] I mean, that sounds like something where Sony Ericsson has probably been like bugging Sony Computer Entertainment for a really long time saying, let us leverage the PlayStation brand.

[1761] And they said, no, get your filthy ass phone mitts off of our brand.

[1762] Yeah.

[1763] And then at some point someone said, all right, fine.

[1764] Stay away from me, Scandinavia.

[1765] Fine.

[1766] You can muddy up the PlayStation brand with your stupid phone.

[1767] Yeah, I don't know.

[1768] People are saying the 27th for PSP2 info.

[1769] Some sort of announcement.

[1770] It's the day after the Japanese launch of the 3DS.

[1771] Wait.

[1772] I thought 3DS was in February.

[1773] Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

[1774] February 26th.

[1775] Not January 27th.

[1776] Oh, I thought the announcement was supposed to be this morning.

[1777] I'm pretty sure.

[1778] Okay, so a month before then.

[1779] That would make some good marketing sense.

[1780] Oh, that's the rumor anyway.

[1781] Right, right, right, right.

[1782] From anonymous sources.

[1783] Yeah.

[1784] I don't know what those sources are.

[1785] They're anonymous.

[1786] Yeah.

[1787] We'll see.

[1788] Yeah, and PSP2 supposedly has touchscreen on the front and touch -sensitive grips on the back and two cameras and all kinds of fucking crazy shit.

[1789] If all that turns out to be true, that thing could be bananas.

[1790] Didn't I see somewhere people were saying, like, oh, this is as powerful as PS3?

[1791] Yeah, that's kind of what they're saying.

[1792] That seems a touch ludicrous.

[1793] That maybe seems a little – I think you maybe have – because of the smaller screen and that sort of stuff, maybe you could have games that if you looked at them for a couple of seconds, you went like, that looks like a PS3 game.

[1794] Yeah, sure.

[1795] But if you stare at them longer, you go, but it's not.

[1796] I'm a little disappointed in you, Brad.

[1797] Why?

[1798] I feel like we have all gone through enough hardware launches.

[1799] To know better than to even acknowledge whenever someone says, like, this is like a Pixar movie or it's as powerful as a thing.

[1800] That's different.

[1801] That's qualitative versus quantitative specifications.

[1802] Like, if you say this is almost as powerful as a PS3 and you can look at, like, clock speed and amount of memory and, like, I don't know.

[1803] I don't think people are doing that based off the specs.

[1804] I think people are saying, like, we can make the games look good.

[1805] I don't know that it's necessarily specs related.

[1806] I just feel like there's enough of that bullshit gets out there every time that's like, you know what, I'll go see it myself and then I'll fucking decide if it looks good or not.

[1807] And that'll be enough.

[1808] I think that thing could be awesome.

[1809] If all the rumors about what it supposedly is turn out to be true...

[1810] It at least solves the problem of just being a portable console thing if they start to do different stuff and take advantage of the kind of control schemes and camera stuff.

[1811] It's kind of a crazy fucking time to put out a new handheld, though.

[1812] But I mean I guess Sony kind of has to at a certain point.

[1813] Yeah, I mean Nintendo is putting one out and the PSP is – Yeah, the PSP is a non -factor.

[1814] But just it's – I feel like the chunks that phones have been taking out of that portable handheld market, it's made that market weirder than it's ever been.

[1815] It's weird because I actually found myself – for as much as I don't really like the games that have appeared on it.

[1816] Windows Phone 7 is the most sensible, portable strategy of any of the console manufacturers in a way.

[1817] It at least plays to the strengths of the realities of the market of like smartphones are blowing up.

[1818] Some of those games are making a lot of money and Microsoft is the only one there in a meaningful way from the console manufacturers.

[1819] That thing is second to the iPhone.

[1820] Maybe if that.

[1821] Yeah.

[1822] Well, from messing around with that phone for a good long time, I would say I would prefer it to Android.

[1823] But it does not replace my phone at all.

[1824] No. Second to it in terms of, like, your preference?

[1825] Yeah.

[1826] Okay.

[1827] Yeah.

[1828] And, you know, I think the interface stuff.

[1829] I don't know.

[1830] I just think it's an easier to use thing.

[1831] And, you know, they do a good job with the game stuff.

[1832] Yeah.

[1833] So I think it's interesting that they're kind of.

[1834] the only ones kind of playing to where that market's going, whereas Nintendo and presumably, assumingly Sony, are chasing after the let's make it crazy, let's make it 3D without glasses, or let's make it so you touch it.

[1835] Well, let's make it crazy has been like Nintendo's winning formula for a better part of a decade now.

[1836] It's the first half of it.

[1837] The second half has to be like you have to deliver on software that takes advantage of that stuff.

[1838] Yeah.

[1839] And they're clearly not going to be the people to make a good phone.

[1840] No. You wouldn't buy a Nintendo phone?

[1841] No. You'd have to punch in people's friend codes to call them?

[1842] Your phone number is unique to this phone.

[1843] Yeah.

[1844] All right.

[1845] What else is going on?

[1846] A lot, actually.

[1847] Those are kind of the big things.

[1848] Gears of War triple pack announced.

[1849] Which is the worst name.

[1850] I'm only mentioning this specifically because I think it's pretty profoundly misleading what they're saying.

[1851] $30, Gears of War triple pack.

[1852] Three separate and equal things in this thing.

[1853] You get Gears of War, Gears of War 2, and Gears of War all fronts pack.

[1854] Does that come on a disc?

[1855] Is there three discs in the pack?

[1856] That's the only thing I think they can...

[1857] Because they did the Halo triple pack of 1, 2, and the 2 map pack back in the day.

[1858] There is some sort of precedent for them doing this.

[1859] But at least you could look at the box and go, there are three discs there.

[1860] And that made some sort of sense.

[1861] But selling DLC, that's the part where I'm like, what is it?

[1862] Did they ever sell that thing on a disc?

[1863] I think they did.

[1864] Well, I know they put out, like, a Game of the Year edition or whatever of Gears 2 that had all the DLC with it.

[1865] I don't know if it was a disc.

[1866] Could have just been a code for the download.

[1867] Yeah.

[1868] I don't know if they put it all on the disc or, yeah, if you had to download that DLC.

[1869] All fronts is the one with the little single -player episode kind of thing.

[1870] Yeah, where you put on the stupid costume.

[1871] Dude, what?

[1872] Wasn't that thing like $10 to begin with?

[1873] Something like that, yeah.

[1874] But this is $30 for every Gears related.

[1875] Oh, yeah, yeah.

[1876] I'm just going back to the name again.

[1877] Like, this originally $10 piece of DLC is somehow the third pillar of this triple pack.

[1878] Well, I think it kind of represents, because they put, like, all of the Gears 2 DLC on there.

[1879] Yeah, but other than that, it's just map packs, right?

[1880] Yeah.

[1881] Like, 19 maps.

[1882] It's pretty good.

[1883] It's not an insubstantial amount.

[1884] Here's the thing.

[1885] I don't think it's a bad value at all.

[1886] $30 for what you're getting is great.

[1887] I think the naming is stupid and misleading.

[1888] It's just the name.

[1889] Yeah, the name is terrible.

[1890] But I'm trying to figure out why it was less terrible when they did the Halo thing.

[1891] I think it's because there was three discs there.

[1892] If they put this out and there are three discs there, then maybe it will seem less crazy.

[1893] But I don't know.

[1894] I don't know how they plan to offer it.

[1895] Brad, any opinions on the most recent StarCraft II patch?

[1896] How is that rocking your world?

[1897] Chat rooms are kind of cool.

[1898] The 1 .2?

[1899] Yeah, 1 .2.

[1900] There is a sometimes thriving Giant Bomb channel going.

[1901] So like regular -ass, not game -related chat room chats?

[1902] Yeah, it's just kind of like an IRC channel, really.

[1903] Taking it back to original StarCraft style.

[1904] Not exactly, because old StarCraft, when you signed into Battle .net, you were immediately in just, like, this awful general chat full of people spamming and, like, trying to get you to join their big game hunters game and stuff like that.

[1905] But there's no core embedded chat room in this.

[1906] There are pre -made, like, Blizzard channels that you can join, but you can also make your own.

[1907] But they exist as just little pop -up chat windows, just like the kind of instant messaging stuff before.

[1908] Okay.

[1909] It's kind of less...

[1910] Less intrusive, I guess.

[1911] Does it work cross -game?

[1912] That's a good question.

[1913] I don't know.

[1914] I wonder if that stuff works on WoW.

[1915] I don't know.

[1916] I doubt it.

[1917] I doubt it.

[1918] I think the coolest thing about it is that it makes you auto -rejoin channels you were in when you quit last time.

[1919] So you can't have that constant social thing that you didn't have before.

[1920] Yeah, yeah.

[1921] Like when I signed into the game now, it just popped me right into the Jive on channel.

[1922] And it was crazy that there were...

[1923] Saturday afternoon I got in there, and there were some pretty big name pros in the Jibomb channel.

[1924] Nice.

[1925] Machine was in there.

[1926] InControl, who's probably the best -known EG guy.

[1927] Okay.

[1928] Short of Hydra.

[1929] Whatever.

[1930] It's a bunch of names you guys won't care about.

[1931] But it was weird.

[1932] There were a bunch of actual recognizable pros in the Jibomb channel, and they all quit.

[1933] Because they saw you join.

[1934] Well, no, actually, then somebody in there was telling me there's an issue with chat.

[1935] system at the moment where if you send somebody an invite and they don't decline it, it auto -joins them to the jail.

[1936] Somebody has just invited all those guys.

[1937] Wow.

[1938] That was my understanding.

[1939] Sorry, guys.

[1940] So they'll never come back ever, I'm sure.

[1941] Sorry to machine and crackerjack.

[1942] Silly putty.

[1943] Sleep.

[1944] Slinky 99.

[1945] Cunk.

[1946] Stab the bishop.

[1947] Staircase jam.

[1948] Death rattle.

[1949] You know what?

[1950] My new favorite player ID, and this guy's been around for a while, so it's nothing new, but his name is The Best.

[1951] Like, I just thought about it.

[1952] I was watching one of his matches over the weekend, and I thought about it for a minute.

[1953] I thought about it for a minute, and I was just like, fuck, yeah.

[1954] Like, right there, to the point.

[1955] Actually, there's another guy whose ID is MVP.

[1956] You should change your account name to The Best Junior.

[1957] Or The Best Two.

[1958] The Besterest.

[1959] Missed the best.

[1960] The weirdest part is that the team he is on is called Foyu.

[1961] So his name, when they spell the whole thing out and say it, is The Best Foyu.

[1962] Great.

[1963] I was saying the best is great until, you know, whenever he loses a match.

[1964] Yeah, he's kind of a middle tier player, I guess.

[1965] Then it's the worst.

[1966] You kind of backed yourself into a corner there.

[1967] Yeah, if you can't play to those levels, it's going to be a problem.

[1968] But anything that hasn't thrown off your balance?

[1969] It has.

[1970] I've actually been losing a lot because I've been trying to exploit the changes that they made.

[1971] That's your fault.

[1972] I'm just messing around and seeing what I can do with certain units got cheaper or faster to make, so I've been trying some stuff with those and it hasn't been paying off.

[1973] How's the Master?

[1974] Because I'm not good at that stuff.

[1975] Master, ladder, Master League.

[1976] My only experience with it is that I viewed the profile of all those guys that were in the channel, and they're all in the Master League.

[1977] I got to see what that icon looks like on your profile.

[1978] Word.

[1979] But that's about it.

[1980] Cool.

[1981] I have a piece of news that I'd like to throw out here real quick.

[1982] Oh, no. Something that is breaking that Jeff will be very excited about.

[1983] All right.

[1984] What's happening?

[1985] Macho Man Randy Savage.

[1986] Okay.

[1987] Coming to WWE All -Stars.

[1988] Okay, great.

[1989] Which I assume that you...

[1990] This is only relevant in the sense that Macho Man Randy Savage...

[1991] hates the WWE.

[1992] I was going to say, does this represent the end of a decades -long feud?

[1993] It seems that way, because him and Vince McMahon hate each other.

[1994] And for years, that's why he never appeared in the SmackDown games or anything else.

[1995] Yeah, yeah.

[1996] Or the Legends of...

[1997] Yeah, and now he's in.

[1998] And in this video that has appeared on the internet, he is looking an awful lot like Biker Santa Claus these days.

[1999] It is kind of messed up.

[2000] What?

[2001] Turn that around.

[2002] I don't want to see that.

[2003] I've seen some recent photos.

[2004] I don't want to see that.

[2005] I do like seeing that.

[2006] It's kind of messed up.

[2007] His beard is white.

[2008] That's a good beard.

[2009] His beard is also huge.

[2010] I like that.

[2011] When he was independent pre -WWF, he had a huge, crazy fucking beard.

[2012] Yeah, but it wasn't white.

[2013] It was also like 35 years ago.

[2014] I can't accept him being that old.

[2015] It seems like not that long ago he was rapping.

[2016] But I can't imagine a dude that looks like that rapping now.

[2017] But I feel like he was old.

[2018] I don't know.

[2019] I felt like he was always old.

[2020] Who does the best macho man here?

[2021] I don't know.

[2022] Probably.

[2023] I don't do it.

[2024] I do a pretty good bad.

[2025] Ooh, yeah.

[2026] Like that?

[2027] Yeah.

[2028] Nailed it.

[2029] Yeah, that was it.

[2030] I'm not even going to try.

[2031] I've got the best worst.

[2032] That's basically what I was looking for.

[2033] Snap into a Slim Jim.

[2034] I did it.

[2035] Oh, yeah.

[2036] Ed Boone's all teasing DLC characters for Mortal Kombat on Twitter.

[2037] Yeah, he was asking people which guy they'd like to see.

[2038] Then listing like Rain and Shinnok.

[2039] Shinnok.

[2040] RoboSmoke was one of them.

[2041] Yeah, RobotSmoke.

[2042] Huey.

[2043] That's, no. Huey was not one of them.

[2044] There are no helicopters.

[2045] There was like five of them.

[2046] He's a robot helicopter.

[2047] Huey.

[2048] I hate you.

[2049] Most of the people that were in my feed that also follow Ed Boon were saying Rain.

[2050] Yeah, I think Rain's the good one.

[2051] I don't know.

[2052] Do you need another ninja?

[2053] Well, Rain was weird.

[2054] When they did make Rain playable in the home versions of Ultimate or something like that, it was...

[2055] He was the one that had the weird control orb or something where you'd hit a guy with it and then you could move him over towards you.

[2056] That just seemed...

[2057] He was a very lazy character.

[2058] That seemed like a character that they were like, well, what can we...

[2059] What can we do?

[2060] What else is there to do?

[2061] Let's do this almost game -breaking thing.

[2062] It's really just hacked in.

[2063] I guess to be fair, since the era of the palette swap, they've differentiated the ninjas a lot better from each other.

[2064] So I guess that could be cool.

[2065] And Shinnok just kind of morphed without morphing into guys.

[2066] So it's not...

[2067] Robot smoke.

[2068] They've got Shang Tsung.

[2069] Robot smoke blows up the world.

[2070] Yeah, I think robot smoke.

[2071] Robot smoke would be a good one.

[2072] When you say smoke these days, are we talking robot?

[2073] Well, he specifically said robot smoke.

[2074] I think human smoke is probably in the game already or something.

[2075] So robo smoke would be a specifically different character.

[2076] Blow up the world.

[2077] Again.

[2078] I believe only in...

[2079] It was a trilogy that you could play regular Smoke versus RoboSmoke.

[2080] No, no, no. Human Smoke was in Ultimate.

[2081] That's right.

[2082] It was a code.

[2083] You had to hold weird directions on the controller to do it, but yeah, you could do it.

[2084] And Human Smoke, fucking savage in that game.

[2085] Yeah.

[2086] Just insane.

[2087] I remember that.

[2088] Insane.

[2089] You get online on the Xbox.

[2090] It's like everyone's just picking Human Smoke, and they are raw, and I don't want to play it anymore.

[2091] Yeah.

[2092] Also, there are people that bought that game a long time ago.

[2093] Right.

[2094] Well -balanced game.

[2095] Raw.

[2096] They are raw.

[2097] That game is out in like three months, guys.

[2098] The game is out in April.

[2099] The Mortal Kombat.

[2100] The Mortal Kombat.

[2101] Dude, there's a lot of games coming out in the next three to four months.

[2102] I don't know if you noticed.

[2103] Wait, which Mortal Kombat?

[2104] The.

[2105] The?

[2106] Yeah.

[2107] Mortal Kombat.

[2108] The Mortal Kombat.

[2109] Oh, that's news.

[2110] That's out in April.

[2111] That's short from last year.

[2112] It got picked up.

[2113] I didn't see that stuff.

[2114] It's now a web series.

[2115] So they are going to continue making those.

[2116] They're going to make 10 of them or something as part of a web series.

[2117] Fantastic.

[2118] And it's going to focus on Michael Jai White as Jax.

[2119] Great.

[2120] Good.

[2121] Give that thing a life.

[2122] Because last time they focused on Jax, it went so well.

[2123] I just wonder to what end.

[2124] Are they building up to a movie?

[2125] I think it was just like they realized that thing was awesome and people would watch it.

[2126] I don't know.

[2127] Continue getting the Mortal Kombat name in people's fucking mouths right now.

[2128] Even if it isn't directly connected to how they're doing the game.

[2129] That's helpful.

[2130] You know what they should do?

[2131] They should release updated remakes of the first three Mortal Kombat games.

[2132] That'll never happen.

[2133] But this is great because ultimately I guess no one really wants I don't want what that Mortal Kombat short was in a video game.

[2134] No. I just want more of that in that format.

[2135] Yeah.

[2136] So, yeah, just make another, you know, make a string of those things in a web video format.

[2137] That would be great.

[2138] Can web series be profitable unto themselves these days?

[2139] Yeah, you release them on DVD after the fact.

[2140] Yeah, that's true.

[2141] Yeah, I think that's pretty much how the, was it the Guild has made its bank.

[2142] Yeah, the Guild and like the Doctor Horrible whatever.

[2143] Yeah.

[2144] Stuff like that.

[2145] Yeah, you could do that.

[2146] You just put it out on DVD.

[2147] So it doesn't necessarily have to be in promotion for something else is what I mean.

[2148] No, no. This could just be its own thing.

[2149] Yeah.

[2150] Okay.

[2151] Internet video.

[2152] So I should not expect a movie at the end of this.

[2153] Probably not.

[2154] No, and yeah, I don't know.

[2155] I wouldn't want to go see that movie necessarily.

[2156] I wouldn't be surprised if talks are continuing to be ongoing about what they're going to do with another movie because they're still.

[2157] But I think that shit's still so tied up in lawsuits with the producers of the original two movies that are assholes.

[2158] Whatever.

[2159] So this is probably actually a good end around of like, well, we're going to do something that's a web series, and that was never part of the contract before, so you have no say over what we do with this stuff.

[2160] Yeah.

[2161] Ugh.

[2162] I forgot all about that lawsuit and the basis of it.

[2163] What a terrible thing.

[2164] I know.

[2165] What a terrible, terrible thing.

[2166] It's like the guy didn't even see Annihilation.

[2167] And he claims to have made it.

[2168] He's claiming that he made more Mortal Kombat stuff than Midway did, and his evidence is Mortal Kombat Annihilation.

[2169] Shame on you.

[2170] Case fucking closed.

[2171] Go home, asshole.

[2172] Like, what the fuck?

[2173] Shame on you.

[2174] Please.

[2175] What you're doing.

[2176] You're trying to do.

[2177] Please.

[2178] Nightmarish.

[2179] You guys, any other news?

[2180] You know, Nightwolf is working on that game with Macho Man Randy Savage in it.

[2181] Sal.

[2182] Yeah, Sal.

[2183] Really?

[2184] Yeah.

[2185] There you go.

[2186] This is how we're tying everything together today.

[2187] I was supposed to meet him last week.

[2188] It didn't happen.

[2189] I guess.

[2190] I assume he was going to be there.

[2191] All right.

[2192] Can I talk about new releases a quick like?

[2193] I thought it was dope when you did that combo and then the arrow came out faster when you did it in the air.

[2194] I thought that was sick.

[2195] So what about this wrestling game?

[2196] A little bit of Planet 2 for the PlayStation 3.

[2197] Jeff, you got the special collector's edition.

[2198] Yeah.

[2199] What'd that come with?

[2200] I went out and that came with some bookends for games.

[2201] Basically, they're like, game ends, I think is what they call them because that's silly.

[2202] It comes with a tiny, relatively small little sack boy that is encased in plastic that I have not opened up yet.

[2203] He's suffocating in there.

[2204] I think it is fabric -y, yeah.

[2205] And like 11 costumes for the game.

[2206] Was that a lot of brand new original stuff, or it seems like that was stuff that might have been released in DLC?

[2207] I think some of it is DLC stuff.

[2208] It's like Muppets, so you get Gonzo.

[2209] Yeah, I think they released that.

[2210] Glue from the Tron pack.

[2211] Yeah.

[2212] There are a couple that are only in that pack.

[2213] I guess Jack and Daxter are only in that pack.

[2214] These are costume, not character.

[2215] Right.

[2216] Yeah, they still look sack -ish.

[2217] So it's like Sackboy is wearing the skin of Jack and Daxter.

[2218] So it's like Sackster.

[2219] Yeah.

[2220] Fuck you.

[2221] Yeah, that's the right response.

[2222] That's the last time I invite you to this podcast.

[2223] By all means.

[2224] And I only played through the first level of that, and then Justin's level, and five stars.

[2225] And you love it already.

[2226] Yeah, basically.

[2227] That game is real good.

[2228] I'm impressed that Medium Molecule was able to bust that out.

[2229] Yeah.

[2230] you know, a little more than a year.

[2231] I'm very excited to see how the level of creation tools have changed.

[2232] No, it's been 2008.

[2233] It was end of 08, wasn't it?

[2234] That was over two years.

[2235] Was it over two?

[2236] Okay.

[2237] It's been a while.

[2238] Yeah.

[2239] Whatever.

[2240] But, you know, they had a lot of assets to work with already, so.

[2241] Fair enough.

[2242] Yeah, exactly.

[2243] It took a sweet fucking time.

[2244] Yeah.

[2245] With a drag ass, UK.

[2246] There's a lot of backwards compatible stuff in there.

[2247] Like all the levels from the first game work, but also the first thing it does is like, do you want to import your profile from the first game?

[2248] So as soon as I hit that, I had my zebra head back on and all this other stuff.

[2249] Like all your crazy shit.

[2250] Yeah.

[2251] Great.

[2252] And then you can import all the stickers and stuff that you've unlocked.

[2253] Is your little house the same patterns?

[2254] I didn't decorate my house, so yes, but I don't know.

[2255] Wait, did it store?

[2256] I think it's from a local save, so I might have just had a little big planet one save on that PS3.

[2257] Okay.

[2258] So when I get home.

[2259] and do that process again.

[2260] How much was that special collector's edition?

[2261] It's $80, which I don't know that...

[2262] It's $20 premium.

[2263] I don't know that I would recommend that people buy it because the bookends don't look all that great.

[2264] If you want a Sackboy, that's great.

[2265] If you're into the costumes, that's great.

[2266] But the regular edition seems...

[2267] That at least feels justified.

[2268] It is a large box.

[2269] I don't think you can ever go into collector's edition saying, like, that's a good value because it never is.

[2270] It's just a matter of, like, is there enough stuff in here to potentially justify that price?

[2271] I felt good about buying it this morning when we went and bought it this morning.

[2272] Good to know.

[2273] Minejack for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

[2274] It's a Square Enix Mines.

[2275] Psychic gorillas.

[2276] Psychic gorillas.

[2277] Cyber psychic gorillas.

[2278] Oh, no. Are they not even real?

[2279] When they brought my jack by, did they actually show you any of the cyber gorillas, or was it all...

[2280] Yeah, it's in the footage.

[2281] Maybe I should say cyborg gorillas.

[2282] Okay.

[2283] Like they have robotic...

[2284] When you said cyber gorillas, I thought you meant like they're digital.

[2285] Sorry, no. Cyborg gorillas is more accurate.

[2286] These are analog gorillas.

[2287] Okay.

[2288] Yes.

[2289] Don't worry.

[2290] They're meat gorillas with robotic implants.

[2291] Very good.

[2292] Plants versus zombies for the Nintendo DS.

[2293] What?

[2294] Just check that off for another platform.

[2295] We now have all platforms.

[2296] I guess I'll have to go get that.

[2297] You really don't have to do that.

[2298] That's not a thing that you have to...

[2299] I own it on PC and I own it on the Xbox.

[2300] I'm pretty sure I have it on my iPhone as well.

[2301] It's not yet available on Windows Phone 7.

[2302] Yeah.

[2303] So, coming soon.

[2304] All those people with Windows Phone 7s.

[2305] You don't have to keep buying Plants vs. Zombies.

[2306] The most arrogant, horrible thing about Windows Phone 7 is that there are multiple games that have achievements based on you having people on your friends list that also have a Windows Phone 7.

[2307] And you're like, oh, I don't have any friends.

[2308] One of them is just straight up view the leaderboard when ten of your friends are on it.

[2309] I'm like, come on.

[2310] Come on.

[2311] That's never going to happen.

[2312] That's never, ever going to happen.

[2313] Well, maybe that will inspire you to say to your friends, hey, guys, you should get Windows Phone 7.

[2314] We're to only befriend people that have Windows Phone 7.

[2315] I'm going to clear out my friends list and I'm seeking out.

[2316] So, you know, like the people that are achievement crazy for that stuff have been doing exactly that.

[2317] Yeah.

[2318] Did you see somebody hit over 500 ,000 points?

[2319] Is it that Stallion dude?

[2320] He's the guy that's...

[2321] Might be.

[2322] He's the guy that's been in the lead for the longest.

[2323] Yeah, I think it was the guy.

[2324] He's the guy that is on the quest for a million.

[2325] Oh, is that...

[2326] He's got like millionscore .com.

[2327] Is there even space on blog?

[2328] Is there even space on the gamer card for that many digits?

[2329] Only one way to find out.

[2330] I suspect he'll be the one to hit it unless he completely loses his mind.

[2331] That's possible.

[2332] That has to be such a...

[2333] Unless you count people that are hacking their scores, in which case I've seen scores over 800 ,000 already.

[2334] Those people will get banned eventually, right?

[2335] Yeah, but they're all doing it from 48 -hour gold accounts or sometimes silver accounts, so it kind of doesn't matter.

[2336] Well, but they're all transient then, at least.

[2337] None of them are ever going to hang around.

[2338] The guy who has the million will last.

[2339] They're messing up leaderboards on community sites, basically, is the extent of their damage, I think.

[2340] Mass Effect 2 for the PlayStation 3.

[2341] I've played some of that.

[2342] I have not seen the new comic bit yet.

[2343] Yeah, I want to see that.

[2344] As someone who's already played it, that sounds like the interesting part.

[2345] It's like the one new thing.

[2346] And that's supposed to basically recreate all the Mass Effect 1 stuff, basically.

[2347] In like a minute.

[2348] In like 15 minutes, I think.

[2349] I played the first hour and a half of the game.

[2350] It seems...

[2351] Hey, do you like Mass Effect 2?

[2352] I did like Mass Effect 2.

[2353] Pretty good.

[2354] It is great on the PlayStation 3 as well, from what I've seen so far.

[2355] Do you know if...

[2356] I have to imagine it is this way.

[2357] All the DLC is just on the disc.

[2358] Yeah, it is.

[2359] It's just integrated into the game.

[2360] The serverless network is still there, and it still requires that code for access to serverless network stuff.

[2361] But as far as Overlord, Shadow Broker...

[2362] Overlord, Kasumi, and Shadow Broker are all on the disc.

[2363] Those are the three you get.

[2364] Those are the three they're advertising.

[2365] There's still free armor up for download on the PlayStation Network, and all of the...

[2366] Additional costume packs and stuff still cost money on PlayStation Network.

[2367] For something like Overlord or Kasumi, is it Fallout style where as soon as you get to the point where you can pick up missions, it's like, hey, you have these missions.

[2368] I basically stopped when I got on the bridge of the ship, and it says, hey, you should talk to this Kasumi chick.

[2369] Weird.

[2370] Same for Shadow Broker?

[2371] The other two do not pop up.

[2372] I think you probably have to go talk to Liara first before Shadow Broker pops.

[2373] And I don't know when Overlord would pop.

[2374] But I mean, I imagine that's probably pretty much the same behavior you'd get if you...

[2375] If you downloaded all that stuff and started a new game on PC or 360.

[2376] Like playing Fallout 3 for the first time with all of the DLC installed is so weird.

[2377] Yeah.

[2378] Because the second you step out of the vault, literally, it's literally one message after another after another.

[2379] Actually, I downloaded the Game of the Year version of Oblivion from Steam.

[2380] Started up a new thing of that.

[2381] It's fucking crazy.

[2382] Like how much stuff they added?

[2383] There are like...

[2384] It must be, like, a dozen things.

[2385] Actually, it was a save.

[2386] It was a save I had from when I had the PC version originally.

[2387] I loaded it, and it was just, yeah, it was, like, one thing after another, like, 12 times.

[2388] Like, you should go to this tower, and, oh, this thing needs doing, and it's just, like, dude, too much.

[2389] So much stuff.

[2390] Too much.

[2391] Like, parcel that stuff out along with the story or something.

[2392] Yeah.

[2393] It seems like they do do some of that, but, yeah, Kasumi definitely says, hey, as soon as that stuff starts.

[2394] I feel like I'd kind of prefer that to them holding it back, especially if it was like, I just want to do this thing.

[2395] Yeah.

[2396] And if it doesn't have any relevance to kind of the flow of the overall game, then it's like, well, just let me go and choose to do this right now and I can choose the other thing later and pay for it.

[2397] Let me do it.

[2398] Sure.

[2399] Spare Parts is available this week on Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network.

[2400] That's $10 or $10.

[2401] You mean $10 or $9 .99?

[2402] I guess you mean $9 .99 or $9 .99.

[2403] I believe it's $9 .99 for 800 points.

[2404] Is it?

[2405] Oh, yeah.

[2406] I guess they do say that, don't they?

[2407] Yeah.

[2408] We've achieved true pricing parity.

[2409] Great.

[2410] Finally.

[2411] I guess we've kind of had it.

[2412] It's just it's easier to say whatever counts that way.

[2413] Hey, it's $10.

[2414] I don't know much about this game.

[2415] So describe to me this world you live in in which inaccuracy is better than accuracy.

[2416] The one word I don't care so much about, a penny.

[2417] Simon Pegg does voice work in this game, cooperative robot puzzle solving made by EA.

[2418] Did that fall out of game dev story?

[2419] Cooperative robot puzzle solving.

[2420] It would have gotten five stars.

[2421] If it had.

[2422] Game of the year.

[2423] Indeed.

[2424] Let's see here.

[2425] I think that's kind of it.

[2426] That's kind of it.

[2427] That's kind of it.

[2428] How are you guys doing?

[2429] What's coming out for Nintendo platforms?

[2430] I can tell you.

[2431] Some stuff.

[2432] Why don't you tell me in great detail?

[2433] I'm looking forward to this.

[2434] No. I'm with him.

[2435] I get angry.

[2436] No. Messages from people saying, how did you let these fuckers remove it from the show?

[2437] Aren't you the boss?

[2438] That's what you get for leaving for a week.

[2439] And then I realized, wait a minute, I totally am.

[2440] So start reading these.

[2441] I don't have the paperwork.

[2442] Sorry, boss.

[2443] But I want you to have these for me when the podcast starts.

[2444] Oh, I have them.

[2445] It's right here.

[2446] Great.

[2447] If you can get me that.

[2448] How are we doing with those reports?

[2449] I see your Doc Clock, the toasted sandwich of time.

[2450] Urbanics.

[2451] BitTrip Beat.

[2452] No, wait, that's just the demo version of that.

[2453] Those first two games sound like bangers.

[2454] They sound like the sort of things we should be reading.

[2455] Let me put it to you this way.

[2456] If you didn't read them, then we could get a real sandwich faster.

[2457] Now, how do you feel?

[2458] He kind of has you there.

[2459] DSI where it's Glory Days Tactical Defense and Animal Boxing and The Cellar.

[2460] Animal Boxing?

[2461] And Alien Puzzle Adventure.

[2462] All right, emails.

[2463] Alien puzzle adventure?

[2464] Emails.

[2465] And that does nothing for you.

[2466] You know what?

[2467] The name is good enough.

[2468] From hell's heart, Ryan Davis stabs at me. I'm saying we're at an hour 50.

[2469] If we don't want two hour and 30 minute podcasts every single week, we cut this.

[2470] Who says that?

[2471] No one.

[2472] Except Ryan Davis.

[2473] The reality of animal boxing can never live up to what you imagine in your mind.

[2474] So just let it go.

[2475] Maybe I'll start reading these a week behind, but instead I'll just take the titles and write my own descriptions of what I think the games are.

[2476] You start doing your own separate podcast of the DSiWare, WiiWare readings.

[2477] It's the Nintendo Download Minute.

[2478] Indeed.

[2479] All right.

[2480] First email comes in from Madeline Henry in Bemiji.

[2481] How specialized and insane would that be?

[2482] Just like here's a podcast in which someone tells you what is out for download on Nintendo platforms.

[2483] After that they've already been posted.

[2484] After they've already been posted in text form.

[2485] But if you don't like to read.

[2486] Or even posted on the system.

[2487] You could just go to the system and look at it and say here's what they are.

[2488] Actually, one of the people that wrote in and said that they missed this feature said it was actually useful because the stores are so poorly designed.

[2489] It's true.

[2490] The stores are horribly laid out.

[2491] But I think the thing that we've realized over the year plus of doing this is that most of the content is complete garbage.

[2492] I could have told you that a year ago when we started.

[2493] You get about two cave stories a year and you just go by it.

[2494] Yeah, the charm of that, the having to sift through.

[2495] Fair enough.

[2496] No, no. I agree with you in spirit that, yes, the time to move on is upon us.

[2497] We just need to replace it with something.

[2498] It's just the overhead is the issue.

[2499] If we could pluck out good ones and not read them all.

[2500] There are no good ones.

[2501] That's the sad reality.

[2502] You know, entertaining ones.

[2503] Brad, hit me. With?

[2504] With an e -mails.

[2505] E -mails!

[2506] Thank you, sir.

[2507] Broadcast at giantbomb .com.

[2508] Madeline Henry.

[2509] Tyrants.

[2510] Bemiji, Minnesota.

[2511] As Ms. Pac -Man is regarded by many as superior to Pac -Man, and Ms. Splosion Man will likely be better than Splosion Man. Adding Ms. to any video game seems to enhance it significantly.

[2512] In my opinion, this is an important revelation that hasn't been taken advantage of yet.

[2513] I'll be shopping this concept around to numerous game publishers, but until I hear back from them, I ask you, what games do you suspect would most be enhanced by a Ms. iteration?

[2514] Ms. DC Universe Online.

[2515] Ms. Halo.

[2516] Ms. Gears of War.

[2517] Ladies, ladies, Halo.

[2518] Brad Shoemaker.

[2519] Ms. God of War would be alone.

[2520] Put a little bow on Dom's head.

[2521] Ms. Gears of War.

[2522] Ms. Bayonetta.

[2523] Ms. Oh, that's no, you mean like Ms. Bayonetta game.

[2524] Yeah.

[2525] Mizaguchi's Bayonetta.

[2526] Yeah, I was going to say Ms. Rez.

[2527] Somebody get Ms. on the phone.

[2528] I don't know.

[2529] I think Ms. Ms. Pac -Man would be pretty good.

[2530] It's pretty good.

[2531] It's a dude.

[2532] It's a dude with twice as many mazes.

[2533] It's a dude with a bow in his hair.

[2534] Is that it?

[2535] No, it's Ms. Pac -Man but with stubble.

[2536] It's a drag queen version of Ms. Pac -Man.

[2537] It's not even like a good drag queen.

[2538] It's like one of those kind of street walkie drag queens.

[2539] Those are the good drag queens.

[2540] Tristan from New Market, Ontario.

[2541] Hey, guys.

[2542] I hit a deer while listening to last week's Bombcast.

[2543] Just thought you should know.

[2544] Keep up the good work.

[2545] You keep up the good work.

[2546] Did he kill it?

[2547] It's terrible.

[2548] I want more information.

[2549] Well, then you should hit, I'll give you Tristan's email and you can ask him.

[2550] No, you should just write in next week and give us more details.

[2551] Usually I think they die and also the car.

[2552] That's not always true.

[2553] It's not always true.

[2554] You don't always die.

[2555] I hit a deer with a friend in a pickup truck once and it did not die.

[2556] Dick.

[2557] Immediately.

[2558] No, here's the messed up thing.

[2559] So we hit it.

[2560] And we thought it was dead because it had fallen in the street and it looked like it was dead.

[2561] But it was kind of breathing.

[2562] So my friend busted out his hunting knife and was going to go cut its throat.

[2563] And then it popped up and ran away into the field.

[2564] And we were like, okay, we should go.

[2565] Yikes.

[2566] Haunting.

[2567] Jamie in the UK.

[2568] Hey, Bombcast.

[2569] Last Friday, I was the one quick and or lucky enough to get to play Kija with you guys live in the background of your show.

[2570] I am from the UK and so we're playing from overseas as well.

[2571] I don't know if this is affected.

[2572] Awesome.

[2573] We're going to add even more.

[2574] Yeah.

[2575] But the experience of playing a game on a screen with a phone as the controller got me thinking, do you guys think there's any room or potential for this sort of setup to expand?

[2576] Do you think someone could create a bigger game for this format of using the phone as the controller remotely?

[2577] Maybe something that's not browser -based but application -based, say a Steam downloadable game or some such.

[2578] Yeah, I think there is potential for that.

[2579] When you remove the screen as a display device and turn it into strictly a controller.

[2580] You know, it's like flying that helicopter, flying the AR drone.

[2581] The lack of tactile feedback can be an issue.

[2582] Yeah.

[2583] But what's interesting is that you can use, like, all of the tilt sensors.

[2584] Oh, sure, yeah.

[2585] Actually, that's a good point.

[2586] There's a lot of other feedback that still works.

[2587] I mean, the hard part about trying to make something, I think, like, significant with this is that you still have a pretty small – well, not small, but non -standard install base for, like – If you're going to make the iPhone or whatever it is integral enough to the experience, then you need your players to have that, which it's not necessarily – you expect someone to have a mouse and keyboard on a mouse on a PC.

[2588] You expect someone to have a DualShock on a PS3.

[2589] The expectation of – and you have an iPhone and you're going to play this PC game with it.

[2590] I think you have to kind of aim low.

[2591] That's kind of specific.

[2592] Yeah.

[2593] Yeah.

[2594] Yeah, not saying that not a lot of people have PCs and iPhones, but it is a specific crossover.

[2595] But, Jeff, you seem to enjoy at least some of the promise of what Kija...

[2596] Yeah, it's neat.

[2597] But that's kind of all it is.

[2598] It's not a good game.

[2599] No, it didn't look too good.

[2600] But I guess they say they are expanding on it, and maybe they'll get some additional stuff in there.

[2601] But I like its style, and I thought it controlled surprisingly well for something that's transmitting over a network.

[2602] That sort of stuff.

[2603] I have been discovering the wild world of using my iPhone to control my laptop.

[2604] That's to what end?

[2605] If you were to say hook your laptop up to your TV to watch YouTube stuff and things, you can use the iPhone to control that.

[2606] There's actually like half a dozen different apps for the iPhone that let it act as a touchpad for a MacBook.

[2607] It's really weird.

[2608] That's where my issue with the lack of feedback comes from because if you're looking at one screen and using another screen to control it and there's like areas of the touchpad that are buttons and stuff like you hit all kinds of crazy stuff you don't mean to it's what makes key jaws specifically like a good use of that because there's just two big buttons and tilt and if there's tilt that's cool yeah and tilt but yeah but the fact that it's like basically hit the left side of the screen you're going to hit the button hit the right side of the screen you're going to hit the button i think if i was making a like a mouse like something that duplicates the functionality of a mouse on an iphone i would make it tilt and just the screen is your two mouse buttons that's not a bad idea yeah um yeah something like that jakeson in the professor latent title generator have you have you seen that It's pretty good.

[2609] Yeah, I saw you playing with it.

[2610] We looked at this one last week.

[2611] It was all right.

[2612] Professor Layton and the socially awkward tea party.

[2613] Professor Layton and the foolhardy end of the world.

[2614] That's actually.

[2615] Yeah.

[2616] Some of these are good parodies.

[2617] Some of these are just.

[2618] Just good.

[2619] Professor Layton and the very tasteful wet nurse.

[2620] When it comes to a wet nurse, I'm not looking for taste.

[2621] I know.

[2622] Well.

[2623] Not tasteful.

[2624] Right.

[2625] Professor Layton and the recently deceased Muppet.

[2626] Professor Layton and the superfluous expansion pack.

[2627] All right.

[2628] It makes me laugh.

[2629] Professor Layton and the lame green fluid.

[2630] Professor Layton and the seriously freaking depressing decathlon.

[2631] Professor Layton.

[2632] These don't sound like Professor Layton game titles anymore.

[2633] Professor Layton and the Bodacious Children.

[2634] All right.

[2635] Back on board.

[2636] I would see that band.

[2637] So, Jake, I think we saw this last week, but thanks for reminding us.

[2638] It's pretty good.

[2639] Luke, want to know about revisiting Star Trek online?

[2640] Nope.

[2641] Fucking Kurt Larson got back to us from Information Society.

[2642] Yeah.

[2643] So we talked a whole bunch about Information Society on the podcast last week.

[2644] And then I guess he works at Nihilistic now up in Marin, formerly worked at Crystal Dynamics, as we've mentioned.

[2645] And I guess one of his coworkers sent him the podcast and then he emailed us.

[2646] So I guess he did a solo album kind of after Information Society.

[2647] And so this is the email from Kurt.

[2648] I'm just going to read this directly.

[2649] I did a much cooler modem track on the next album, Don't Be Afraid.

[2650] That message stated that the 10th song on the album was hidden around the internet.

[2651] I RAR'd the WAV file into 16 chunks and put one chunk on each of 16 free .us domains I registered.

[2652] On each site was a link to the next site, a chunk of the RAR, and a clue to the password to the next site.

[2653] clues were stupid questions like what was the population of such and such town in 1990 and to send me an essay describing how and why the world is different now from 500 years ago and so on i was surprised by how many people actually did it and got the song once people got the song the final message gave the finder permission to copy and even sell the song as much as they wanted uh which i still there's still something great and cyber core about the modem message yeah but this But that's also fantastic.

[2654] That is a terrific follow -up.

[2655] Yeah.

[2656] Awesome.

[2657] Ridiculous internet shenanigans out there.

[2658] So thanks, Kurt Larson.

[2659] Thanks for writing in.

[2660] And also thanks for that song, Pure Energy.

[2661] Did you ever see that VH1 show where they were trying to band reunite it or whatever?

[2662] I remember when they were doing that.

[2663] Did they do that for Information Sight?

[2664] They did that for Information Sight, and he was the one who didn't want to do it.

[2665] They went to him, and he was like, nope, nope, don't really want to do it.

[2666] And was that the end of that segment?

[2667] That was the end of that segment.

[2668] That was the end of the episode.

[2669] I was like, no. Weird.

[2670] No. Yeah, I don't know.

[2671] It's just odd to me that they would air that.

[2672] Well, no, the failure episodes were arguably better than the reunion episodes because there was usually some sort of hot drama going around those guys that were just like, nope, don't want to do this because I hate everyone.

[2673] Kyle from Baton Rouge.

[2674] He probably did all the work anyway.

[2675] Yeah.

[2676] Kyle from Baton Rouge.

[2677] Do you think that whenever Mr. Perfect swatted his gum with his hand into the crowd, it sometimes landed in the mouth of a screaming wrestling fan?

[2678] I understood half of that.

[2679] Do you think Mr. Perfect's gum ended up in someone's mouth when he would swat it into the crowd?

[2680] I've never really stopped to think about where that gum went.

[2681] Where does it go?

[2682] Where does the gum go?

[2683] What do you think?

[2684] Lands in someone's hair?

[2685] Yeah, it's got to be a hair at some point.

[2686] Just bounce off.

[2687] Oh, it's terrible.

[2688] I mean, is he hitting it hard enough for it to reach the crowd?

[2689] Like, that's the thing.

[2690] Or does it end up at ringside?

[2691] It seems like he is.

[2692] It seems like he is.

[2693] Here's my thing.

[2694] So here's my question.

[2695] What's worth more on eBay?

[2696] The myriad shitty sunglasses that Bret Hart gave out to kids that are probably, you know, some people are still holding on to?

[2697] Or that gum?

[2698] Because that gum has his DNA on it.

[2699] You could clone Mr. Perfect using that DNA.

[2700] That's...

[2701] Man. Serpentor, step aside.

[2702] I guess...

[2703] An army of perfect human beings.

[2704] Dude, I know.

[2705] Serpentors holding their way into the White House.

[2706] I guess technically...

[2707] Doing a lot of drugs in between.

[2708] Technically easier to confirm...

[2709] That it was his gum than to confirm the sunglasses thing, although that's assuming that you have access to Mr. Perfect's DNA.

[2710] I would guess that some of Bret Hart's DNA would end up on those glasses.

[2711] Probably.

[2712] So what about John Morrison's sunglasses that he does now?

[2713] He gives those out to kids.

[2714] Or Rey Mysterio masks or something.

[2715] Or Rey Mysterio head -butting kids in the crowd.

[2716] I don't really want to talk about John Morrison.

[2717] Yeah, I don't know.

[2718] Or modern day Rey Mysterio very much either.

[2719] I don't know what that is.

[2720] John Morrison is like Jim Morrison, but a wrestler.

[2721] Really?

[2722] That's a shtick.

[2723] That's kind of a shtick.

[2724] Yeah, he's sort of a...

[2725] They've kind of moved away from that, but yeah.

[2726] He was very psychedelic early on.

[2727] Let's not talk about wrestling anymore.

[2728] And we're not going to talk about emails anymore either because we're done with emails.

[2729] Okay.

[2730] Thanks everyone who wrote in.

[2731] Once again, that email address is bombcast at giantbomb .com.

[2732] Just tell me about Animal Puzzle Adventure.

[2733] Which one was it?

[2734] Which one did you want?

[2735] Animal Puzzle Adventure.

[2736] I thought it was Animal Boxing.

[2737] There was Animal Boxing and then there was – what was the other one?

[2738] There's Alien Puzzle Adventure.

[2739] There's Animal Everything.

[2740] And Animal Boxing.

[2741] Tell me about Alien Puzzle Adventure.

[2742] All right, before we go, we're going to close it out here.

[2743] Alien Puzzle Adventure from Mastertronic.

[2744] One player, E for everyone.

[2745] 500 DSI points.

[2746] Description.

[2747] Alien Puzzle Adventure is a fast -paced, colorful, and cartoonish puzzle game that combines match -three gameplay with a humorous and quirky storyline.

[2748] The player sets out to save the world from a mysterious chemical attack.

[2749] Armed with Professor Weinstein's pseudo -quark generator gun, the player must neutralize packs of different colored quarks over the course of 30 years.

[2750] five stages by matching three quarks of the same color.

[2751] Can you help stem the tide and save the world?

[2752] Your adventure starts today.

[2753] It's a fucking match three game.

[2754] Are you happy now?

[2755] Tell me about Professor Weinstein.

[2756] That's going to do it for this week's episode.

[2757] Tell me about the chemical attack.

[2758] The Giant Bombcast.

[2759] Alex Navarro, thank you for sitting in with us this week.

[2760] Enjoy the Behind the Screen Door podcast.

[2761] Which I'm doing immediately following this.

[2762] You're just going to swap seats with me and you're going to come and make that podcast happen.

[2763] So say hi to Rory for me. Oh, I will.

[2764] Thank you for having me. And congratulate Norman on his victorious win in the box office challenge this past weekend.

[2765] Nah, I don't think I'll be doing that.

[2766] All right.

[2767] I'll do that then.

[2768] But that's it for this week's Giant Bombcast.

[2769] Thanks for listening.

[2770] And we'll be back next week.