Giant Bombcast 04-26-2011

Hey, everyone, It's Tuesday, April twenty six, twenty eleven, and you were listening to the Giant BombCast on Ryan Davis joining me, Viney Caravella, I ain't no cheese eater. What does that even mean? I don't need cheese, Patrick Kleppick, I'm a rat eight cheese and bread shoe acre cheese stands alone as previously established. Indeed, thank you, Omar. Little Jeff Gershman out on assignment. Guy's news hat on, He's got his Newsy

news hat. Really, he's down in La shooting some bonus round with Jeff Healey, says Michael Pater Pater anyway, Y Caravella, Yeah, man, how was your Easter weekend? Buddy's great? I didn't I almost forgot it was Eastern Yeah, get on, Scarbrough here, I look at you. Your cousin's here here. Oh man, it's Easter, isn't it? Happy Easter? Gosh? Hiding the eggs the sky pole before you realize what you're actually talking, What are you doing? Why are we? Why are you

eating fish? Why are I skyping with really white dresses on? Everyone? Why are you skyping in church? How do you have a Wi Fi connection in church, it's like you're here. Uh yeah, so it was. It was kind of you do anything, that's right. I asked you earlier if you did anything easter ish or pass over ish and yeah, and you said that you ate an egga bagel on Saturday. But yeah, that's We've got him both one shot bam. I thought was really really funny. I

wanted to repeat that joke for other people to hear it. It still plays, I think, so yeah, I'm happy with it. So yeah, that was. That was kind of And talk to my folks about Easter and you know what it means to us. And then then I played through Mortal Kombat. Mortal Kombat I resurrected Brad Shoemaker. You might want to take note here. Yes, he's gonna spoil the end of Mortal Combat for you. You really care. I'm guessing that I could probably figure out how it ends.

This is what you don't know. What you get for being off the grid for five days. It was worth it. I feel like I'm making my way through I don't know, season two this year or video game, so i'd be portal too, and Mortal Kombat didn't be so calm. Wait what was the season finale of season one. I'm trying to the dragon age. Really. Yeah, I don't know what else came out earlier this year. It's not a great cliffhanger. Is that space it was? It was

that was real early. I feel like this all came out in big chunk and now kind of through. You're talking about like last week's two major releases. Yeah, I gotta get them behind me and move on. Last week was so action packed for all involved, Brad, even though you were not here for the fucking end of the goddamn world, sitting here waiting preview of the no Internet apocalypse. Yeah, yeah, you didn't even get to seat any of the site down for days upon days upon days. I was in

a place with no internet period. Yeah. I don't believe that, dude. It was exist. It's no zero internet, no Internet portal too. You can actually you could go to the lobby and get a real bad Wi Fi connection. Really, I didn't even bother you were in Maico. Cool. What part of Mexico Colt Island of the Gulf Side has the cheese? Well, judging by by Brad's magnificent brown suit, I would say the cheese was you saw the suit. I saw it was a fact. You know,

it looked great. I thought, I thought he weren't really well. I had to get sized up on that suit. Yeah, a suit, and by the time it came in, they had to order another suit I got. I got a lot of gem time ahead of me, especially after that. Oh my god. Have you ever been to an inclusive resort? Uh? No, Oh my god. Yeah, they're like eight open bars all over the place. Yeah, there's like a buffet open twenty hours a day. Did you have an open bar in the pool? There were?

Every pool had every in the center of the pool, every pool a bar in the Pooloat over to it and get drink. Orders drink in the pool, Yeah, I mean the hands drink. There's a bar in the middle of that. Literally they're over There are stools underneath the water and you can sit on So you're in the pool, sitting at the bar and they're serving up I mean, okay, So why would you leave When I was really, really young and I figured out what I'm says, I pretty much never

left. Yeah, they may dump their drink in the pool, I hope, So no, you do, hope? So well, you know, it's Mexico. They're probably keeping that ship highly chlorinated anyway. Yeah right, I got out unscathed on this trip, and several people were taken down real but not local bugs. I think I had drank enough to uh eradicate un But yeah, I thought it was It was a goofy suit on the on the groom's men. But I hope he doesn't listen to this. But Jason

warttwell, yeah that's good. No, no, no, that's that's the and that's the only one. That's the only one that matters. That's the whole why. That's why you should actually have kind of shitty like bridesmaids look great. Yeah, you want the main players to look awesome. It's a fun looking couple like you want as many comments about he's just christ The brides Mays also actually looked lovely but excellence. Well, I hope he had fun. That we were here flying by the seat of our goddamn pants, just

trying to make anything up that we possibly could. Patrick over here was posting links to Google docs. Yeah, just writing up stories like I got a O where to put these I got there's no website to make them highlight of my career. Getting other other websites to link to my Google docs but crediting it two giant bombs. Good. It's a good way to end my first week. I feel like I feel like everyone pitched in and uh and made

last week work in light of very meta meta media coverage. Indeed, like, how do you how do you provide coverage when you have no website to provide coverage with quick looks of quick looks, we figured out a way. That's right. We were sitting there providing you didn't even see any of this show when he walked in. Was morning here it was. I had idea

about it even down zero, Absolutely it was. It was insane. We were sitting there doing live streams of quick looks we had recorded the day previous, talking over those quick looks and commenting on what happened as we were recording those quick looks. It got real bad that quick. It's funny. I

was looking at the analytics stuff today and that's just sad. When you see the traffic graph just bottom out, literally cruising, cruising, cruising, it just looks like it looks like there's a cup sitting in the middle of your your traffic graf, just like empty vessel, just like, wow, really, nobody, nobody got it. We had we had zero zero. Well at least there was like an inverse bell going on. At least it went back up on the other side. At least didn't bought them out and stay

there. I haven't never really checked. It's only been up for like twenty four hours at this point, right, a little longer than that. What a Saturday night? Didn't it was it Saturday? It was Friday? No, it was Saturday. It was it was down all day Saturday or day Friday. I'm really said that I missed this. It was Dave did like you know, forty eight hour telephone. Yeah, radio calls today. We did that end on Friday night. He was doing it on Saturday as well,

only for a little bit on Saturday. Yeah, he picked it back and he was like keep going. Yeah. So yeah, I tried calling you guys on Friday on Friday and on Friday Friday evening. Yeah, I was on for a minute and then I couldn't get through him, And no, I call it like twice us and just just rang and rang and rang, and then wow, we figure out how to have like a voicemail or something on that line. You know, there are a lot of callers. It would be a full mailbox. That computer would crash even more. I

don't know if that stuff stored locally or it probably it doesn't. No, it's probably all on that somewhere. Yeah, it's easy cloud. Yea, hopefully on Amazons. Yeah, so we fucking the fucking cloud told you guys, you did maybe because you told us and they were just like check it out. Maybe it was us, Maybe we broke the cloud. We were the last, like sight on the inde, the last last, Like they're like, all right, we got all this others like tested was up screened.

Was just like you gotta get to the core of the infection, right, You're peeling back layers like okay, wasn't this damage? Okay, well we have getting down to it, like what the fuck? And then it's just hateful black little core at the middle of this machine that won't die. It is a bomb exactly, it was, and it was dropped by Amazon. So uh, you know, I think I think as everybody in the tech world here, like our engineers have set Amazon's done well by us previously,

and we're gonna stick around with them. But yeah, well and the reason that you saw so many sites using them is because they are extremely cheap and other than you know, this one instance, they have been pretty extremely reliable. And I guess it's not like other huge sites weren't using them. Reddit was down, for Ye down, four Scars down, cors down, there was. Yeah, there was a huge number of sites that that were affected by this whole thing. We just end up getting affected a little bit

longer. It's a good learning experience, certainly, And I feel like we still, you know, did our good God damned us to continue providing something to our users even when we didn't have a website. So that tournament, Man, how much fun was that? How much goddamn fun happen again? And that was you know that was supposed to happen during T and T and right that whole thing exploded, that's right, And yeah, it was it.

We got to the point where, like you started having more meltdowns and here was like, yeah, whatever I find and not even not even related, it's not even unrelated. Don't oh staplers broken up, can't staple anymore? Every yeah, yeah in the cloud. Yeah, So we had a really exhausting kind of end of the week. Well, That's the thing is

like when I would to bring it back around. You know, Portal two and Mortal Kombat came out last week, but after all of last week's insanity, that felt like a lifetime ago, Like it was like a month ago, right that Portal two and Mortal Kombat came out, and Brad still hasn't finished it. Well, uh, we we got a lot of Moral Kombat in last week, just all around the board. So I jumped into it again this weekend. Yeah, and uh and finished Moral Kombat the story?

Did you bub done it? Easy? No? You finished it? I did finish. Get my asswhipped on these two v ones if they are pretty rough, killing me, killing me, and they're killing my resolve, because I'll keep on getting it because you need, like you need to win four rounds. Yeah, essentially in a row. Even the early ones are tough. Yeah, even the early ones are aren't real slouches. I'm still in the first Like I'm on the Luke Kang stage of the first tournament, which

I think is probably the end of MK one' sill. I'm still I'm definitely still in MK one. Uh. But they can be rough, but it's

just what's just you have to be so defensive. It kills me resolve because I'll get down to like I'll have one guy is out and I've got another guy that's down to just a little bit of a live bar, and he still beats me out, and I feel like I just expended all of this energy like really fighting these like I'm really fucking fighting these guys, and and you know, pulling out as many of the you know, scrubby bullshit moves as I know how to do with whatever character they have to be tossing me

in with. Well, that's also kind of the problem too, is that when you get stuck on those matches that you can't just like swap over to your go to guy, you know what I mean, Like if you're still with the character you don't like, yeah, like you're just you're just kind of stuck. But I did kind of like that, especially when I got to the very very end of the game. And uh, I don't think this will be a spoiler for anyone, but you fight, you fight some

certain dudes. People have been probably bitching about the boss m Yeah, so when you're finding Shao Khan, it was really hard and so but you can look it up because everybody has to fight him with the same guy, right, so at least you can hit the internet and be like, dudes, what did you do? Like I know you had. Anybody who beat this game had to beat it with a certain guy. I heard Cohn kind of falls back to Mortal Kombat's Super Cheap AI. It isn't nearly as cheap in

this one. I feel like it's fun to fight against, but I heard Cohn is literally just fuck you. It wouldn't be a Mortal Kombat game if you didn't have to cheese the last boss to beat him. Yes, So I just wound up cheesing shoulder thing. He does, the shoulder thing, he does, the kind of like glowy invincibility thing where you were like, for no reason, this time you hit him, he just shrugs it off,

and it's like, what'd you do? Uh? So, yeah, I kind of wound up cheezing him a bit and then beat him and put the controller down. But then I picked it back up immediately and started with the Challenge Tower stuff and some of the other stuff in there. Try playing against the Gary and Will and Jeff online doing like the King of the Hill stuff with the connections were a little weird to cut messing up, so it

didn't spend for ever. The net code is little well, so I wonder, like, uh, I wonder if it is like just the net code is the issue, because it's definitely something that catches blame. But there's no PSN right now. Yeah, still as of this recording and probably will not be for several days. It seems like that's going to continue to be the case. Maybe, which again that you know this that was happening while all this other ship was going sideways like down unrelated, but also all this Amazon

EC two stuff is down. Warcraft Warcraft went down for a couple of hours. It did Warcraft actually go down or just the word this warcraft off went down? Okay, So like servis, I think maybe if like you were already in you could keep going. I think log in stuff. Oh yeah, yeah, alright, fine, I'm never taking another vacation again. And like what you did, tripped over the plug on tequila and the internet. Yeah, it takes a nose dive, good lord, yeah, a lot

of yea. So so I just I wonder if, like if if Xbox Live is getting handred more because there is there is no direct alternative. Yeah, granted, I mean you know you're you're you're talking about how many people have both at their disposal or went out and got the other one. And they also I think they made this past weekend free because psnrown, So if you are still hears or you could jump on. I wonder if that was pre planned or if that was just strictly they issued whole statements about PSN.

I'm sure it was just part of a okay, because I didn't I didn't really I didn't realize when that announcement got made, so I wasn't sure. It was a little after ps and initially went down. So with PSN down, yes, but I know, whatever made money get paid, it's surprised to see Microsoft move that quickly. Gotta get your cheese as an organization, my impression of them was not that they were nimble to be able to do

that. Yeah, try and get one over on those cheese eaters, right, Yeah, freak cheddar smokers, cheddars that you can't see that in San Francisco. That's not cool. We're talking about can't eat cheese, don't Google eat cheese. Safe search on apparently search down with some good Lingo dictionary. Also, yeah, if you want to find some some see what was it uncomfortable situation, you got to keep safe search on if you're going to do

an image search for that term. Yeah, I'm just saying. I'm saying, for for the most for as inoculus as uncomfortable situations sounds, you will find some great clip arts, some some great stock photos of uncomfortable situations, of uncomfortable situations if you keep the safe search on. So with PSN down, yes, can you log in and play portal? No, so that that's actually the thing that seems to be the hook up is that you can.

If you try to log into Netflix, for example, it asks you for your log in information, but if you let it fail a couple of times, it will just bypass the log in. You know what, It worked because it's not tied to your account. It's just asking you to log into PlayStation network as go into this Internet SCE. All you need for Netflix on a PS three is APS three on the Netflix count. It's like there's no disc serviced. They're just doing the log in because that's just what you

do for Oh yeah, it's not. It's not like with Xbox live where it's like the only gold members as. Once the log and fails, it just lets you go through. You can get game updates, and that little news stream if you have it still turned on, is getting stuff. So it sounds like it is all tied to whichever authenticating the accounts, which is actually a fair least scarier prospect. I only had it fail, Like I tried out the Netflix thing, I only had it fail once before. It

just kicked me straight into the app. So that's good because I like the Netflix. On the p S three, it's good. You can still play Portal offline, right, but you couldn't. You couldn't cash it in if you the code. All right, but but you if you have a PS three disc, you can play the psc yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah absolutely absolutely yeah. I did that this weekend, so no, i'd portal and then they finished it and now here's what they ending to port too

is. But then you can't log into your Steam stuff right PS three because it's to get to the team. So I when I finished it on PC, do I if I when I can log back in on the PSN, will I get those trophies? No? I think it's the only the other way, right, So I guess well, I'll find out because I played through it with PSN down, and then I'll find out if that will sink over and give me all this stuff on Steam. I think it happens.

Well, but it wouldn't have been connected. Well not you, not in your case, but but because we played it, we did co up on the little Tuesday shein dig we did last week. Remember you were playing You're playing on Jeff's account on the p S three, right, that's right. I see, I'm pretty sure I remember, like your trophies were popping on the TV, but on my side and Steam, I could see you Chef's

account. But I'm also getting those steams. Wondering if when it clicks back on, will it take all You don't think I get trophies from playing on Steam? No? No, highly definitely not to play through again. Yeah that's it. Yeah, it's commentary. Yeah I tried, and they were like, man, those things are so long games play. Yeah, okay, okay, okay, are they still Are they still doing their commentaries where they're just like little in the World you have to go up and activate.

Yeah, I kind of wish they were. Those were just tied to I mean, I love the concept, but I wish they were maybe just tied to like floor Suggars, just kind of as you're walking along, So I just stuff would just pop in maybe a little more naturally. Yeah, sometimes, but there there's like so specifically trying to get you to look at a

thing for them to comment on, right like this door here. Yeah, although I have definitely like I haven't gone all the way through and all of the dev commentary in two, but in the first one, like you could miss rights. Well. Also, maybe I might be remembering it incorrectly, but weren't the audio sources like positional within the world, Like if you walked away from it, didn't it fade out? I don't remember that. I haven't gotten that. I don't needed to go back when I replayed it.

I didn't put on the dev commentary because I was stupid. But that's a fun game portal two. Yes, I agree really, as it also made me realize that Half Life is the only like video game fiction I actually really like give a shit about, Like I actually really really like that world and want to know you want to read a Half Life book? I probably would. That's probably the only one I can think of it, I would actually go and read outside sources. I I think Portal is why I care about

the half Live fiction at this point. I think I think the color that aperture science brings to the yang of Remember the first moment you saw that blackboard in Portal one and you saw like the bar graph with black mesa under it, and you're just like, oh shit, this guy's know what black mesa is. They're in that uni Like, yeah, like that made me, Yeah, that totally made me care more about half life. But yeah, I feel like now I feel like I understand your pain of wanting to talk

about stuff but you can't really say anything. Yeah, each it is. It is still way too soon. Everyone, this play can go fucking that one part? Yeah right, Yeah, that's it's fun. It's definitely. It's good. It's yeah tight. It's a nice length too. It doesn't really overstay. It's welcome, but it's much you know, it's a good it's a good length. Yeah, it feels a long game and it's varied, which is nice. The girth is that I'm not waited too long and just like, yeah, you always do, Brad, you always do.

And then I pushed on, think about baseball. I pushed on through Dragon hits too. You're not done with that yet? No, don't, don't our account our accounts. I don't know yet. I don't. You have to stop talking about Dragon. I don't even run the show, but you have, so every every time you sound more and more depressed and Dragon, Are you just doing it just to finish it? Now? No, Like I gues said, I'm still interesting. I think I must think it was

an unconvincing argument. Well, it's it's just, uh, it just seems to keep going. You have I'm getting the stunt, so you just have to finish what you started. No, I like, like, I'm you think realistically you could just put it down. I could for sure. Yeah, well well, I mean I beat two other games in the meantime, so like I put it down, spent my weekend playing more. But you knew you'd come back. Yeah. I've put too much hour, too much time, and I think I think I'm close. So you can't just put

You can't walk away from lying. I could. I would give you stop whatever I want. I would give you one hundred dollars to not finish Dragon Age two really ever ever, ever. Ever, you can never finish Dragon I'll pitch money into that, all right, So what if there's like I've got backers, what if there's like awesome st gosh, I don't know. You can never play it and find out. Why would you want to do that to me? I want to see if you could played it on three

seasons. No, you can never play Dragon Age two. I could do it. You could never play Dragon Age two? Can I watch somebody else? I kind of read a wiki. You can read a wiki. I think I got the best sword in the game. Think of all those unfinished done, Just think of all those samey unfinished. Remember what if there's one more dungeon that you haven't seen yet? If there's the content hear the end, you're actually an hour from the end of the game. Oh there's this

great fight and all this cool original assets comes together. That's true at all? They just stopped. I shouldn't have to pay you. Well, like the stories, all right? Like I said, it's okay, one hundred dollars next time next that's that's in USDs. It's American. How many folds? Nah? You know I wouldn't take it because you can't. I could, no, you couldn't. I got I got some paces that sweetened deal. How many paces you talk? Yea thousand? Fuck man, that's some

cheddar. That's some cheese. You can eat that cheese. Uh. I feel like I played something else, But I can't think speaking of my games, I haven't finished it. Maybe Brad, you finished on a plane? Have you been late? And yet no unund future even crack my DS open on this trip? Did you bring in three ds? I didn't look at a screen wow with any kind except the screen door out onto the beach. That that was right. Yeah, that's a piece of business, thank you.

Uh yea, I played more Clash of Titan heroes magic magicians heroes you mean might and magic clash of heroes. Yes, really still enjoying that. Yeah. Uh we're able to get over the like fuck you achievement hump. Actually a lot of people trying to do in saying that you can select your campaign after the fact. Yeah, back, and there's like a dungeon you can grind. The world has like one place where you get random. But is that after the whole thing? No? No, like anytime specifically speaking

to the achievements, I guess you can go back and stuff. Okay, you have to exit out of your game pick, but that works in PERP too, right, you can always go back to whatever. So like, I don't understand. I haven't tried it, but I guess you can go back in there, fight your way and grind it out a bit and then save it and then exit and be able to pick up where you were last time, because you're basically re entering a completed job, different with a different

character, right, with an an independent level. I don't know. I haven't tried it. May i'll try it. I don't there there's enough people that said there's a way to do it. Yeah cool, so yeah, then want to check that out again. But man, of the achievements are still rough. But I don't care that the gameplay is fun. Yeah that game is a hell of a value. Yeah that's like that's gotta be. I mean, granted it has retail roots on the DS, you know, sold in a box. Have you seen the DS graphics? But yeah,

I saw comparison to check it out. Oh yeah, it's it's crazy. It was in the Neo Gap thread last week, like they win and like redid everything in that game. It's it's impressive. It's not up as it's like that explains the gap because that game came out in what like nine on the DS, like a long long time year and a half year and a half at least. Yeah, that has to be wise. So it's not even like, oh, we had these high raised art assets that we were

working from completely. Characters are in different poses and everything. Oh wow, crazy. The units look they're way more cartoony and like, you know, the bears look like little little baby bears. Yeah, it's kind of bananas. So yeah, that it cames just long, it'll take you a while, it's sure, sure does. Yeah, it's I mean I think I'm in like twelve hours or nine nine, ten hours? Oh wait, And and in Portal two, you only did the single player. You haven't touched

the cooperative play yet. No going to though. It's kind of waiting to get through that single player before. And I wasn't sure how the narrative stuff worked, so I wouldn't sure if stuff would I will spoil this, Yeah, I don't think it does, right, Uh, you might as well wait though, Yeah, although I Steven Tatillo from Kataku has been talking about how he's recommending folks play the co op first, and I was, yeah, which is which people have been I think understandably yell at at him about

it like you are crazy, and I tend to agree with him. I mean, is it positioned chronologically as like a prequel or something. Don't talk about it, yeah, I just don't say anything. Just mouth shot too early. Yea, I shouldn't fair enough. If you want to know, go listen to the Portatoo spoiler cast. I just go play the game. And that was I think that was pretty much it from listen that spoiler cast. If I'm gonna go listen to the spoiler cast, you can listen to

the spoiler cast. There's spiders Spider Man in here. Damn it, Brads point spiders. It's gonna fall on my hair. I biter and my hair once. How could you find it? Who says he still in the family. I shook it out. It turns out. It turns out Patrick's actually bald. What are you doing this thing? He's gonna man, He's gonna try and this is unprecedented. He's just gonna kill this little leather bound note.

You know, I couldn't find moleskins anymore, and people people like stopped carrying them because oh well, I guess I always buy them at Borders, which are frequently going out of business. Oh yeahs anymore. I just went to a Borders that was I was trying to buy a movie, so fuck you Borders. People said something like they're totally environmentally devastating or something. Yeah like that. They they cure the leather and like one vat and then dump

that vat into like the seat or something like that. I don't something crazy, only bikes. I like the size. I like him. I like a good mole skin to wrap my cheese around it. Note Padstad call it like a marble mole skin. I believe. No, I know it's a it's a it's a brand, but like, what is it about the brand that like other Nope, it's elitist. Hemingway uses him. Oh yeah, he used he uses him. He's dead. What's he got bit by a

spider? Bill Hemingway, Yes, Jimmy Hemingway. Yeah. Forward for there looking up at that spider body the rest podcast, because I just think it's gonna fall in. Uh, let's move on because I'm done now. Marked this white room, the blood of the spider, this pristine room, I'd say it was pristine, just white. That's all you played, star, I think, so all right? Moving on Patrick Kleff, Well, I wish I could play Portal two kop but PSN is down. But I guess,

well it's got split screen, yeah on this PS three one. It does on the three sixties, so I would imagine I would have it on the play Stage three as well. That is the best console version, so says Valve. I wonder, I wonder if girlfriend friendly and I believe it, Yeah, I mean Gabe said that, yeah, like at a Sony first conference. Yeah, in credible place. But I saw some screenshot comparisons online that made it look The p S three version looks strikingly better. I

mean it looks nice. I mean, yeah, I played that little bit of the p S three version. We were like last Tuesday, but I spend do you want to see it on a PC? Now? So good? It does look really nice of PC. It doesn't feel like I did it the right way beat on the PS three And then I'll go and play it on someone's PC just to see what I missed. Right then, feeling sad when I like, oh now all right, we can't talk about portal. No, uh oh, I got. I bought a crapload of games

because there were the Eastern iOS sale. That's on my iPad. Well about that space, Yeah, that's good. I bought the iPad port of Max and the Magic Marker, which is a we wear game from like a year ago. It's like your play us a little dou and use the Wimo to draw objects to like mess around with the physics and the environment. But every time I played it on the Wii, it made more sense if I could

touch it. So now it's on the iPad and it was a buck, but now it's probably like five bucks, which really is not that much money. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was a little wonky because it's fun to draw the objects, but you still have to press, you know, touch buttons on the screen to move left to right and to jump, and that stuff doesn't work really well when you have to press buttons. Nothing. I'm just making clandestine messaging with people. That's all I'm doing. Work over

here, that's all. Ooze. I bought Uzu this weekend for no good reason. Crazy Visualize you have a good reason, said something about cats. Oh yeah, I was at a house where there are cats and I wanted to make the cats freak out. It does ten finger multi touch, so like you do this and you can actually change the like the color palette when you move your hands around. It's great thing to talk about on a podcast. Is this visualize so you can see it's making like the lines fatter of

thin are gonna vet super thin? Is something, isn't it? If he used to, you can just like make them going to the little balloo ball around and yeah, it's I mean it's a toy, but it's such. It's a fun toy. No like your screen saver. Thank you. Yeah, let's see. I then I played, I put like three hours of Monster Tail, that game from the Henry Hatsworth guy. Yeah we quick look at that. Yeah, look, I looked really awesome. It look pretty. I understand in fact that it looks awesome. Dot dot dot awesome.

It has it has an unfortunately terribly generic title, but it's it's us. It's like Henry Hatsworth. It uses like a really interesting use of the two screens, like very very few games on the DS actually use the second screen for like any anything interesting. Giant button. Also, it was like a cross between something and cave storys totally. It's like Metro with Pokemon. Yeah, because like you're you you like, yeah, you've got your little creature

on the second screen and you're Pizza. Yeah. You're using these items to level them up and give them do abilities, and then you're kind of going through a skill tree based on that, and on the top screen you're doing like, you know, a really beautiful looking like two D action platform or

just like Henry Hatsworth. I think I liked Henry hats Worth more because I just liked playing it was like a variation of Tetris attack on the second screen, which was which was Henry Hatsworth. Did all of you play Henry Hatsworth did? Not? Really? Unfortunate my favorite, like my favorite game from two thousand nins. Just I kept hearing that it got so abusive as you went on, But that's like the four hours in the game. It's worth playing. It gets it does, Yeah, it does get shitty. There's

specifically adding it's the third level boss. It's like the underwater one. Yes, some fat lady, Yes, Yeah, I persevere and I beat that. Uh well, I mean it's only gets more difficult after that. I felt like that game like I'd love all of the ideas, but the actual

it's very overwhelming. Well it's actual back and forth between mean the like platforming stuff and then going into the puzzle game stuff, like I felt like it never had it can never find any momentum because there there was this like very intrinsic start, stop to the to the two types of action which is the opposite and monster tail because they kind of get rid of you having to actually do anything on the second Like it's there, but all you have to do

is when you've you've got your items, you're collecting, is you're running around and all I have to do is use your I was using your thumbs. You don't actually have to like put your hand down and grab the stylus and just direct your monster over to the items, rather than having to go participate in a whole second game on the second screen, which kind of disrupts.

And that's like your platforming flow, and that's super tough when you have a game where the two mechanics are one of them is all right, run around with the dpad and buttons and then all right, stop and now go to stylus. So that's you know, you're never entirely comfortable in one or the other. It doesn't work one hundred percent because that screen is just not responsive enough, Like it's just a finger for a finger, Like it's it's not

like an iPhone or I pad where it's gonna respond to every touch. You kind of got to, like the film att it a couple of times. But it's a lot of fun. I kind of I kind of had that problem with with a commie den on the on the DS, so you were trying to touch it rather than getting your stylist. This thing had to add the stylist out, so it was like, Okay, I'm running around the world using regular controls and then you know, switch over to the other way.

I just I want you to commit. I want I want this either to be a styliss game or a not styliss game. Yeah, you know, anything else here? What was the name of the game again? Monster Tail? Monster Tail? Dream riffed you play on? What had I had it shoved in my DS light because I had forgotten like, yeah, well I've forgotten my my power chord somewhere, but I it's in my three DS now because I just play it like when I'm competing for like the twenty minutes

on the on the bart. Uh. But yeah, that my three DS battery seems to be getting worse and worse. I can't tell that's just like actually happening or I'm just noticing it more because I just don't open it and then it just dies on me like two days later. It doesn't. That game scales pretty well, like it's got pixel art, So the pixel art

looks a little bit better than some of the three D stuff. Is that kind of where where people have seen the shake out where it's like the the I think it's game to games judgment was the opposite, but I tried all of two games, so I think it really just depends. Some of the art styles look fine, some of them look kind of shitty. I hope maybe in a software update they could just like provide you with more options for how it's interpret present the game and and sort of tweak it. So,

well, let's let's walk before we can run. Just let's get the shop going first. Yeah, let's get the website so you can download your Mega Man Legends prototype version. Let's let's get the fundamental functionality. There are like three items on the main interface where it's like touches like, yeah, it doesn't work yet, just give us a minute. No, hold, just just hold on, okay, just late late May. We'll get we'll get you. We got you. But it's in three D. Yeah, not

down here though. You gotta look up there and it's a three D. It's that looking down. Yeah, I gotta go lay down. Can't touch the three D. Just stop trying. Maybe you'll forget about this other stuff. And Brad didn't play anything. He don't know I did. I did some paintball in the jungle, really like a hundred degrees jungle. It was pretty rough. You want do you want to know about donkey show? Ye?

What else? No? Yeah, no show. We didn't actually go, but there was I didn't think even existed there, but there was definitely a moment where some ill business was getting gotten up to. Certainly, please tell me witness when we got in a taxi cab and someone said, suddenly things seemed to be looking up, but it didn't actually turn out. I would say that things are spiraling wildly out of control. Roll out of there. You're like, no, fuck you guys, No, they're only eight

people in that cabin. We were only about half of them knew what was actually going on. Nobody could quite seem to decide or maybe admit if they were actually excited about the prospect. It's a bunch of Oh you don't want to admit if you are, it's a hell of a story. Yeah yeah I could. Yeah, no, no, no, maybe we're just under strict orders as long as we didn't disfigure the groom's face. You know, I don't think it was pretty much fair game. Uh, you're just caving

away in Mexico for for other Americanos to head down there. Very possible, very possibly. There's a list of people heading back down to Mexico. Johnny V's down there this week. Oh no, really he's talking about I read it. I read it off Adams Twitter, and oh that's right, Johnny found out. I'm not going to that. Yeah, where are they going? Uh yeah, let's not. Let's not divulge that. You could build, you could bleep them. It's not gonna say where they're going. I

don't know. I don't know where they're going. Somewhere in Mexico, alright, moving on some sort of resort towny type thing somewhere. I'm sure it's what you're doing. That's right, nice old resort. Wherever there are pools with bars, that's right. And then I'm sure there will be pools with bars. And actually they were talking about like a house nearby or something. So I mean, at some point you can't tell somebody to please just bear

with me. Get on this plane. Stop asking questions. Where we Adam, where are we going? Just just trust me? No, no, no, And it was at that point you have to see, I got this ticket from Mexico, Adam, what's going on? I specifically blew someone else's bachelor party surprise, because I thought that person knew that it was happening already, and so I was all like, hey, man, have fun in Tahoe, and he like turned to his friends, we're going to and I was like, oh god, damn it, I was. I was,

you know what, I was surprised because it was Craiku Yava. It was Craiku Yava's bachelor party that I blew in front of Adam, and so I thought, like, you know, eves were coming forthwith with because I thought it was just gonna get burgered to death for that one. But that didn't happen, so thank god. Well, Hopefully I'll check with you after this podcast, but I think Cat's out of the bag. No, No, you're right. I think you're right. I think you're right. I

think you're right. So good best of luxA, Johnny V. Yeah, and uh call up Brad if you haven't any want to know where some good action is down to be. No, No, they're in a different they're deffinitely. I know you're just being funny. What's that? You're just being funny? But they're still a farwer A way out of Mexico is a small place I've never been. You've never been to Mexico. I've never been to Canada, not even Niagara Falls. Why would I go to Niagara, California.

I've never been to China. I've been to Chinatown, Yeah, close enough in New York. No, I haven't been. I haven't been to New York City since I was. There's a Chinatown. There's Chinatown like Ohio. No, you don't and nowhere in the well, I mean I don't. I don't think there is a town called Chinatown, you know, I don't think you go to Chinatown Chintown, USA. You go to Google maps and I bet you get San Franco. I bet it's location basically get San

Francisco. Yeah, I don't know who knows the mystery forever who has the better Chinatown. I know you're gonna say New York. No, you know, I think San Francisco Chinatown. Really yeah, it's like, is that's kind of definitive chinatowntown. I frankly think that Clement Street is more Chinatown than Chinatown. Oh yeah, I mean Chinatown in a way is not China's little

novelty Chinatown. It's like tourist Chinatown. It kind of is like but if it's and I don't know, Clement Streets where you can just go haggle over like ducks, roasted ducks hanging in the window. I think you could do that. You can do that China. That's all you do out there. Yan Francisco is a pretty big Chinatown. Like this is a huge Chinese population in all of San Francisco. So I mean that's just I mean, that's

that's China. Burbs is really what street is Like, Yeah, there's a density of of you know, of Chinatown, but you'll get just more China you go out to the burbs, so it's more spread out. You know, let's less souvenirs and stuff more just like every day. Sure, there are still plenty of bullshit shops every street. If you need random Chinese goods, quite right, it's a bag of random change. Here's twenty bucks.

If you need, you need like plastic backpacks and folding chairs and a couple of waving cats, and boxes of pins, and mop and a mop and a sword and this this or a plastic sword, both a real sword and a plastic sword. Yeah. If you need some cleaning supplies, you say, giants kimono, giants apparel, you need a Yeah, you need some giants apparel. You need an alarm clock, set of ornamental teacups, and is this all in my twenty gift bag? That's probably like five so far.

Keep going. You need like very tiny shoes, you mean, like like like novelty, like like like baby shoes, like baby shoes they have. Yeah, there's They're just the shops where it's like fucking anything and everything that you could possibly imagine, whatever we could get our hands on. We're a bunch of trucks tipped over exactly this stuff in a store. Toilet paper, Yeah, a bunch of blouses, some some questionably stuff kids toys like

full of that, like beaty you might, but you're not misspelled. Coloring books off brand, spider Man comics and stuff, spider Man, you know, spader Man, video games, everyone's favorite video games. Gosh, I played some video games. I play oh Portal two like three times, like two and a half. Yeah, like like two and a half times. We just played a little bit of the next big thing. We did, just play a little bit cool thing. Yeah. It seems like a very

traditional point and quick Yeah, yeah, I think so. I believe they're French from what I saw. It's really runaway guys, right, Yeah, are the Eastern European. No, they're either French or Spanish. Oh wait, maybe they're Spanish. It might be Spanish. Non American. Yeah,

some sort of European, but some decent dialogues. Still snappy, yes, despite the non nativeness of it. But very very very traditional in the like you're got a pixel hunt, like not in that way, but in the like going to go through a lot of like just not like the streamline, kick back and relax and but I mean it's it's sort of you're right, it's not a streamline, but there's something to be said for like, all right, dude, just chill the funk out for a second and enjoy the

conversation. Well, and and I feel like they were really, at least in the early going in that game, they're really bring a lot of information about the setting in the context because it's a setup. So it's kind of like a Golden Age of Hollywood where monster movies are extremely popular, except that monsters are real. This sounds awesome, So they're like, it's all happened. It all starts at this, but yeah, so it's like the yeah,

you know, the monsters are the stars pretty much. They're trying to get well, they have certain amounts, so there's some monsterism and so there's some monsters that's happening, and you're playing as this reporter who might be a little crazy but kind of how that is coming a little bit off, Like it's just kind of a lot of personality. Yeah, sometimes we didn't get very far, but but it's the kind of thing where it's like you're like, that was weird. That's kind of random, but it happens again.

You're like, Okay, you're you're building something here, and like I like that. I like it when it when it doesn't just like here's everything that's happening right up front, Like it was kind of teasing out some stuff like we're gonna keep calling back to this one Joe over and over again, and you know, stuff is gonna eventually make some more sense. So I found I found it initially intrigued for sure, what else play? It's just so much MK. Yeah, it just it's kind of tired after the tournament and

hearing the game all day. I kind of needed like a like a break. That was what the weekend was for. Yeah, that was your no m K zone, okay zone. But now I'm ready to get back into it that. I just want to say again that that tournament was so much goddamn fun to participate in. It was good match. Have to throw that funt against Gary to get back in the control room. Yeah, you know

we I may have when I initially made those brackets. You know, I didn't think about the implications of both you and myself and Drew and Drew All being in it when we were going to it was fun. He beat me fair and square televise it that way. What would I have done if I had been here? You wouldn't have been in the scrub lag you would have placed out, you would have down commentary with Jeff probably yeah, okay, Yeah, for Jeff, he just had to sit there and not play.

I think he well, he wound up playing the winner of this one, which is a smoke on smoke metal where you had no idea what was going on. I don't know how they knew, yeah what was and I was and I was like loan commentator at that point. I'm like, I'm just gonna put the mic because I really can't tell. And the mass came down to like a sliver of life between the two close alexis you Yeah, Brad, you played a little bit against him earlier. He's got a little bit

of skill. Yeah, he knows what he's doing. If I learned anything from that, that term is that if you know how to use those teleporting guys, yeah, that will get and you don't you don't and you don't know how to there's a lot if you don't use. There isn't abnormally high number of teleports in the New Mortal Kombat. There is a lot of characters. Notice the Ninjas, not even just the Ninjas, though there's a lot.

There's a lot of teleports, especially if you count like teleports that sort of make you come in from another part of the screen, not just like disappear reappear, but like says Malinas, drop kick or whatever, like dude character and all those prey upon if you don't use block, Like, if you aren't using block, they're gonna get you everything because if you if you block those, that's a significant window to to take advantage. But if you're

not learning block, then screwed. But it was fun just having everyone in the office super excited about about playing some MK and I guess it wasn't really happened since Street Fighter four. Getting the this is this was way bigger. This was way bigger because there are way more people accessible, We're interested in it, uh from at least you know, within the office here of non

fighting game fans uh. And then getting the you know, the the betting brackets, the betting pool up and getting people invested in that sum I thought was fun. And an initial upset where I took out Alex, everyone was very it was nothing but upsets. The entiretia, the entire bracket, just like I knocked Coots out and everyone was sure Coots was gonna take it. He was the Odds on the Far Away and he was. He was practicing that Katana all day and I was scared because Katana is it's a It's a

tough one if you aren't using your blocks. But music come out. That was fun. That was damn fun. Ye get used the mic and all that other dumb stuff that we did. Did you play anything else? Oh god, I'm trying to say I played some h Did you actually play dead Space? You just download it? I just do it was a dollar Keep playing words with friends, I don't know. Keep buying games on my iPad and not playing, not really not really playing them. That's the problem with

dollar things. Oh yeah, yeah, I hear, that's good enough. Yeah, I throw a dollar at dead Space whatever. Never mind, I still have dead Space at dead Space to fucking motion. That is funny that you bought dead Space, I guess. So. Yeah, that's a little weird. I've bought Metro twenty thirty three this morning. Yeah, that woke up. I love that game. I need to go check it out. Ghost Train, I say, I don't know what that means. I want

to bullets for money. One of my favorite moments from that year. Yeah, so I'm excited. Maybe next week here a little bit of that about that. Yeah, don't don't don't put that game. Don't put that game on hard or anything. Rageted down. I should finish fall Out before I finish that anyway. Veto short isn't You didn't finished New Vegas? No, I never did. That's a good finish too, I know it's all I can factor that. Games like fucking all about the finish. See what happens

when you cheat? Yeah, you're yourself. Yeah, oh I forgot You cheated? What I forgot that? You cheated your way through? What did you do? I didn't finish it, so I didn't choot my way through. I opened up the console. I gave myself some stuff. Don't shake your head whatever, I didn't finish the game. You should do that in Dragon Age open up the console. Yeah you really do. Yeah, but you gotta you gotta which we call you gotta do like a separate you know,

short cut to enable the console. That's too much work for me. I don't want to do that. Instead, you'll just played sixty five hours of the game and hate yourself. Whatever, Dragon Age, I don't let up Dragon age, have the dog's eyes on the side of its head, or I'm not clipping into a mountain. There's other problems. There's no mountain that came from that. That's right, it did. It totally did. Because you'd rather have like polished mediocrity than flood brilliance. Yes, no,

I'm not saying one is better than the other. I'm saying I was able to tune and fall out to compensate for that. There's no there's no adding content to There's no there's no drop down command for make more dungeons. This was a new wallpaper on this dungeons. Some of these textures just take the fallow textures. Bred you finished Fallow up Vegas. I didn't really start it, fired it up on the PC. You just see what it looked like. Okay, I finished that. He really felt like going to the DLC

though, deal he's terrible. Was it only dead money? So it was? It was really bad at ghosts in it? Right? Yes, basically basically yeah, I'll wait for the new DEALC. When I was done, I was like unlike followed three, where I was like, I'm I'm in. I want to play another thirty hours Like New Vegas. I was just I'm done with these combat mechanics. Well, so I mean I had to my again, like I had very little in the way of glitches, and I had my game tuned in such a way that I didn't have to do

that much fighting. Like that's what I mean. Like I enjoyed it, but as like I like, I shouldn't be enjoying the other parts of this game more if like these mechanics were part of like an actual sequel rather than just like a story expansion. Yeah, I mean I thought this, but I thought the story was really good. Next weekend and you went through and

got all the different endings of that, because did you. Yeah, I had I had a Yeah, it doesn't lock you in like pretty early on, no, not like not like I mean, I had to roll back a couple of hours. But it's not too bad. But it's not the same way as like Fallout three was, as far as you can put off those choices to like way way way later. That's also and then you just save and then you've got like three hours you have to go through again.

Yeah, only only like probably half hour if you just pump everything up, probably give yourself all the best guns and warps to the place you gotta go. But this's the thing, is like that game, it isn't hard. It's not like I was like, once you've got all the dialogue. It's just kind of like I said, I don't have to combat or I'll die with those two side guys. Yeah, you just walk through the game you got. When you've got your two homies with you and they're you know,

well rested and well armed, you barely have to fight. The only thing, the only thing I'd use the console for it, in all honesty, was lockpicking, putting on my lockpick skull because I hate I hate when shit's locked and I can't get in. Don't like your three points off. Yeah, it's like, well like you never, you're never gonna go back.

Never, You're not gonna go back. And and then I did use it for a couple of times, just warp around like a goddamn fucking mountain because I was like, I can't I don't know what They did have a count's in New Vegas where I just didn't know how to get to the location, and I spent twenty minutes just like traversing mountain climbing. Basic three was way worse about that. I never had a problem with that and fall, So it's kind of one when you're just like no clip both inside those mountains.

Uh, that's where they hide all the rest of the glitches. It's a it's fucking talent there. You don't want to start people with heads on upside. It's just another realms whipping people and like people with arms on their heads. It's crazy and I love I still every time Scorpion comes into or exits a room in Mortal Kombats in the main story is so fucking funny to me. I'm so glad I got all that backstory filled in now, at least

in the new one, I feel like I'm up to date. I don't know, I don't know if backstory is the right word for that mythology, mythological basis foundation. None of it was written back then, though, like they contrived so much stuff for the story mode. They just like characters are in places they shouldn't because they didn't exist at that point and like a bunch of weird But even then they kind of like when they introduced like Kung Lao, they don't justify it, but they almost imply that, yeah, that

guy was there, You just didn't get to some of those games. Yeah, they're like you roll into the first tournament like Quanji is just hanging out. Yeah like that. I think it's it's close enough, not accurate, but they've but they've been rich. There's no timeline, and they've also been rewriting that timeline every time they fucking make a new game. I guess we need a new reason for a tournament. Yet it's made it the last one. We're gonna make more. There's new Elder Gods, Elder gods too.

They're from there, but they're from the Elder God realm. So inside where the Elder gods are from, why they made war gods, there's another realm. I mean, they do a pretty good job making that stuff seem Yeah. Yeah, I'm not saying that it's not a coherent storyline. It's just horribly inaccurate. It's the rich tapestry of Mortal Kombat fiction. You say, you're saying it's not historically accurate. It is exactly. This is an interpretation

of the story. So you don't think fucking based on reimagining. I think sub Zero and Scorpion are super fucking old. Sure, there's like three sub zeros in that and the yeah, that's always been the Oh really, there's always a zillion sub series. I didn't know Nube was a sub zero that. I think that happened way later. That happened after that, dude, that's like three games old. But yeah, happened. It happened way after I checked out. But they have stated that in the past after three it

was No, it was way later than that. It was like somewhere on the PS two Xbox. I think. I think most of that stuff is drawn from let's just let's use Brad's where it's the tapestry, right, the threads of the moral comment, you know, like Jeff was saying last week, all that story stuff previously was three lines at the bottom of an unattract screen on Arcade Cabinet, Like it's just justification to have a character not necessarily storyline, right right. It is kind of funny though, at the end

of of MK nine, I guess it leads, right. I only know this from what you guys were doing with the other Moratal Kombat games in the lead up, like the really bad ones. I guess the deception and yeah, I guess it picks up right at the end of three. I guess when you what were we doing on Wednesday? What game were we playing? Remember Wednesday week? Yeah, it was a Shallon Monks. No, that was on Fridriday was Salon Monks Man. It still looks shell remarkably good game.

I think that game not on XBLA and PSN midway doesn't exist. Time against you man, find a way, find a way, all rights, good fun. I also played some dusted off some Assassin's Creed Brotherhood Man for the Da Vinci stuff. Yeah, for the Da Vinci stuff. I still need to get me good. The delC were the first It's is not this is better than that, It's it's it's bigger and has more kind of story

hooks to it. Visit like worth, but I keep I'm definitely running into more of like one of the things that I felt like they did a really good job of kind of tamping down in Brotherhood that that was more annoying and Assassis. Creed and Assassi created two which were like hard past fail conditions for

the missions that you're on. Like I felt like in Brotherhood it was all about the gradation, like you're okay, yeah, yeah, you're your hundred percenting these missions rather than like past fails like Okay, you got you know, geting get all this, someone saw the mission, but you still got

through it, so that's enough, but you won't get the exactly. I'm finding way more missions within this set that are like nope, you got seeing game over, and it's very unsatisfying when when that happens, they checkpoint you, Okay, do they give you at least like you don't have to redo the whole mission? Right? Sometimes sometimes I remember, even just from that quick look running into that problem. Yeah, it was more of that stuff.

Yeah, we did that quick look at the da VICI stuff and I went back to it and yeah, that that same problem kind of persists some. But if you're still planning Brotherhood online that introduced there, Pete, did you more math? There's still people I didn't throw in, but I wouldn't be surprised. I mean, that game's like pretty singular as far as multiplayer experience. We go back to that for another TNT at some point. That

was a fun Maybe we've ever done it twice? Did we do? We've we've maybe not for a full TNT, but we've totally played that on MULTILEA. I think we did the beta once at some point, I remember, I don't know. I know we've yeah, I don't I remember the context, but we've done at least two of those. Maybe we do like the greatest hits at some point. Maybe maybe maybe World's full of Maybes. Yeah.

To make sure that my my PlayStation three would correctly play MK shellon Monks and MK special Forces, last week, I booted up a little Tony Hawks pro Skater three for the PlayStation two and totally went online and made a server and it fucking totally worked, and it blew my goddamn mind. Didn't you play with people too? Yeah? But yeah, how did you do you start a server? A? Yeah? But did you did you tell people one on Twitter and said I'm playing? Maybe oculously there were other people just

waiting waiting for someone to create a server. So like this like basically like the central server, like the master servers Coast East Coast is dead. So like when you first say, like, hey, let's get a game going, it's like searches search as searches times out, it's like, all right, no, there's no master server. But then it still brings up that main list of like East one West one, and you can go into there and you can just start a service. All right, well I'm the server

now. I was just amazed that because that game has crazy network options because it came out before the PS two network adapter came out, so they supported all sorts of weird like third party network adapters. You go buy like a weird little smc ethernet adapter and plug it in through USB to the front of your PS two and it would make that shit work, and it works just with the PS three. Yeah, So I just I just you know,

I want to. I was curiously like, what happens if I put this into my pstwe I didn't even think and try and go and it was totally able to just map all that shit to the regular network in your face on the p S three, which is pretty that's actually kind of amazing, kind of amazing, kind of amazing considering kind of the layers of emulation that you're going through with a PS three playing PS two games. Uh, I was. I was a little bit impressed, and that game is still fucking dope.

So for T ANDT this week, we're playing Tony Ox first Gator three Ready, right, either get out of PS two or hope you have a backwards capatable PS three, because yeah, Xbox Live is down, so there's no fucking way we could play the Xbox version. Xbox Live is dawn. Yeah, no, we didn't really sweep well, you know, I heard about it later on a couple days later we heard that it was taken down. I think even like currently, I was like, what the fuck is

going on? Xbox Live to go down? I've got something in my head, lets me know whenever Xbox Live goes down, partner God, damn. That's right. That was That was the heart, That was the harbinger. That was it, that was where it started. Yeah, it was all downhill or sort of. It was a hill, a weird series of coincidences. It was. It was absolutely that, but we went through it all right. That's talk about news. Patrick Kleppick. Yeah, the ship is

going on in news other than everything's breaking. We're gonna be playing a new Nintendo console at E three. Holy crap. So Nintendo has gone out and confirmed the I guess what started off as a game informer informed leak. Yes, or they're like, we know a guy and we trust this guy, and he says there's gonna be a new Nintendo because the guy in the streets in Minnesota and they found him, they found Prince. I wish that was a Prince. I know the internet's dead, but what about the we And

he's like, no, there's gonna be a new one of those. Yeah, it's gonna be playable at E three, like we're gonna get and like they like Nintendo even clarify that it's not just there will be playable demos up on a stage, like people will be playing it. They're not just gonna tie it to a bunch of women. I wouldn't not count that. Maybe they'll drap a whole TV. Yeah, and a console. Real women,

it's a real is a bunch of dudes, giant dudes. Just check it out to HD, like I think you check it out at the d Do you think do you think they hurriedly cobbled together a more significant presence for this thing based on all the stuff leaking? Do you think the additional play was for this thing to be out there and this playable at this early stage.

Uh? Maybe maybe. I mean they rushed things together for the three DS two, but I expect that was to be announced at E three last year anyway, but they announced it because they knew that financial papers in Japan, we're going to disclose that it existed because they were looking at like the production lines. Uh, this is a pretty much the exact same scenario. Yeah, it's similar scenario subdued like paragraph of text just was like oh yeah,

yeah, yeah. I mean they did at least disclose that. The reason they don't have any sales projections like in their financial data is because it will not come out until after next April at least, so the original rumors or that it might come out next fall. If it's coming out after April, that does maybe not next fall, but at least we're not going to see it till next summer holiday twelve. You think they would show it to two

E three's before we bought be able to buy one? Yeah, because I think because it seems like an I love to see a good summer console launch. That would be neat. I think because for a while, because I think, what your launched, Oh that's surprise right after three go buy it? What? That's maybe a good this maybe a good reason for people to

not try to go after a summer line. I can handle a surprise launch of something a little more elegantly perhaps, I mean they're probably like by announcing it this early, showing it this early, they leave themselves a whole lot

of options. But what they could do, you know, if it proves to be really maybe they do they push it up to summer and one of the territories and they just roll it out like they but be like, there is no there's no way that they're going to have any competition for another two years at least, Like there's no Sony and like stuff, no interest and meeting them to compete with that like and know pretty much has the field to themselves for the next couple of years. And I feel like they're no stranger

to announcing hardware that we don't see again for like two years. Like they like they can show they have no problem showing something different than like a vitality sensory should but they should the we, they should the we. Like two years before where it came out they did it was like I don't think so. I think they were talking about it. It was called the Revolution then at TGS, so that would have been September or October. They showed them,

they showed the controller for the first time. Then it was playable at E three, and then it rolled out in November, so it was about a year in change, so about announced in October, So it could be

the same cycle here announced in Yeah, I guess you're right. Yeah, if it if it's possible that next three three would all be all the launch titles, if there's going to be a summer I mean, if if they're gonna have anything to show at E three here for for as you know, tightlipped as they've been, and if this is going to be you know, post April twelve, as soon as I expect like tech demos here, I obviously I expect working title, working title, working title on absolutely everything.

There's no way exists fucking Pokemon HD working title, Mario HD working title. I expect totally Mario Galaxy HD, that's the big reveal. Yeah, yeah, Well, I don't think they'll do another Galaxy thirty to two. You don't think the charge you for they'll charge you for the one we're talking about the same game in HD, Well, they'll they'll do one and two as as like an HD bundle. Well, if we're lucky, this thing will

just play old Wei games. Who knows, we'll see because if you look at those emulators the same assets the way Nintendo design them for the Wei. Because of the resolution, if there's a way they can just upresive, it's certainly possibly to render those games at higher resolution because people are doing it. You know, would be better if Nintenna could just charge you for them again, because that really makes a lot more sense. But it's sticking with it

with some sort of like electronic shop. Maybe possibly what if there's an unlock code to like you put your old one in and then you have to buy like a five dollars HD unlock code to play it. Give me on the get ready on the phone. I gotta go. They have a phone on that iPad. So no, So this isn't that. I mean the three DS got basically announced in the same fashion of just very It was a press

release, just kind of put out there. Yeah, And in that case, they got ahead of Yeah, they got ahead of the rumors getting out. They just said, all of a sudden, we're making a three D hand I don't think anybody had actually they knew that there. They were already getting ramping up to produce the handheld for the test units, so they knew that people were going to see a three D display and so they just got ahead of it. Yeah, they kind of did the same thing here.

They Nintendo has one more press conference, I think it's next week in Japan to talk about stuff, so it's possible they'll be a little more about it before. But they haven't said anything about what it is except that it won't be three D most of them because they can't. They can't control the display like they did. They mentioned anything about the controller, NA, nothing, No, but it will be It sounds like all we know is it'll have buttons, a sensor, and a touch panel of some sort or at least

a display. But I'd be surprised if it wasn't a touch panel. And it will be HD. That's confirmed, the system will not. I wouldn't say confirmed, it's impossible. What's actually what's actually more what we don't know. It'll definitely be HD, but it's whether they choose to. You know, right now, three sixty MPs three level hardware, you'll be making money

day one, which is what Nintendo does with all their consoles. Do they choose to go with that hardware and make money day one or to go with or not a stick a loss you can get you could get hardware it's more

powerful now, and you would you'd still be making money. But they're making more money if they're using hardware from five years ago, and they're still going to be able to get ports of those HD games for the next two or three years that Sony and Microsoft are waiting to see what they do with their consoles. So so I think we mentioned this last podcast. I think it

was a really good point. Do you think that they took a lesson from having such a unique control scheme and this time they're going to move towards being able to port stuff from the their systems more easily, not have to redesign. And my theory is this is going to be the hardcore console that people kind of want it because they tapped out eighty million we units and so they

took the casual as far as they could go. But the casuals that they found out they're only going to buy maybe one other game afterwards, Like they didn't find a success as big as WE Sports other than we Fit, and so they could not get the casuals to buy the software, But the hardcore

will buy the software. So if they're if they're acknowledged the Microsoft and Sony filed them down the motion path with this one, if they take it back and match, they know if they play to the hardcore, doesn't matter how much the hardcore Nintendo fans bitched and moaned about the last five years. They

will come right back if they make the games that they want. And I think they're in a position where they could play to the hardcore for the next two years, get some good will back, see what Sony, Microsoft decide to do. And then they just throw another curveball, like they just played to their bass for the next couple of years, and they make a red one, yes that's right, or blue it's like three years. I don't want to get I don't I don't want to speculate what color, What color

is the new Nintendo's platform? But no, no comment. Base color. That's the hardest thing. Base color, that's the hardest base color. Silver. I didn't like those three silver Silver GameCube was silver. No purple, not not at launch, purple purple an ugly purple. Silver didn't come out for a while. I still have my custom painted game cube. Your Panastanic DVD game cue, whatever, that thing was calm. Oh no, I didn't get the all the Gods a queue. Yes, that thing was fucking

sick. What thing was crazy? I really wanted to get one of those at the time. What did the black GameCube come out? Uh? That was a launched thing, wasn't it was? It? Was? It? Sure launched? Purple? Yeah, the silver one came out a while afterward. Silver one was ugly too. Yeah, all the game? Can you get a different color? Way? That red? Red? Black? Yes? Okay? Black ones took a while, though, I think they if they did a like New Super Mario Brothers we Bundle, that's a red one.

I think maybe there was at least a red box. I know for New Super Mario. We we use are not to be seen. We used to be tucked into the odd corner of your entertainment center and then occasionally wake you up at night with the blinding blue glow. I'm just curious to see what it'll look like like. Nintendo console designs are so weird. I'm gonna say the official new color is clear. Oh not see the hard way I used to have. I used to have one of those phones that you could

see thee There would be like a small neon coil. Yes, the dopest the topic consumer electronics Industrial boss right against my gifts Spencer Gifts. Clear plastic is so much worse than like rush metal or wood paneling or anything else you can come up with wood paneling. It's hard to think of it's not white. At this point. It's also just weird to imagine we're playing a new console like it's been a long time. I'm ready, I've been ready ready.

Yeah, I mean just kicks it off officially, But however this plays out determines what you know the pace of when you see the other consoles and ugliest Nintendo console U N sixty four really purple game cube that I really like. It was cool like a little pand I do. I like the little

disc. I think the colors were were less than great. I'll about the Pikachu N sixty four, Yeah, that's pretty things but at least built, at least it was smaller than the original and sixty four it was it was they shrugged sixty four from them, Yeah, they shrug it down for those weird Pikachu and sixty fours. It's just that weird hump on the N sixty four and like it has had these little feet out in front like it was presenting to you. It was just I think the fat DS is the untent.

Yeah, okay, well well if we're talking hand let's let's let's talk consoles, because that's what we're talking. I think the Super Fam Colm is the prettiest Intendo console. Red and gold, that's the famm. Oh yeah, super Fam colms got nice curves. Forget what's super super com is super rounded? Right yeah? Yeah, take a super as but sleek purple buttons on it too in America, So why does Nintendo like purple? Nintendo does

go crazy for purple. This nest doesn't age well nothing like more depressed optimizing plastic notwithstanding, Like it just doesn't. It was never a nice looking ness. Yeah, it was the Japanese one. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. The Super Fam Colm looks completely different. Well, what's what's the color

schemes. It's like all gray basically, but it had like a it had like a coble with colors like blue, green, red, and yellow motif and like the buttons on the face, buttons on the controller were all four of those colors instead of just purple. Uh. And that with like the logo had that on the console, and it just it was It was a nice sleek curve design. I used to ogle that thing in the ninto No

Power so much. I liked that the GameCube had a handle. I liked the lunchbox aesthetic on that just because Yeah, I mean, you do it just because it's so stupid. I like it because it because it stores nicely. Now, like once it's off your shelf, it's store is very neat and like the closet. But you're never gonna like skip down the hall like swinging your arms. All it has to do is evoke that like that's the only point of that handle. It's not that you're actually gonna pick it up

by the handle and take it everywhere with. Yeah, I've used the handle like functionally, like to bring it places, like when we have to we just have to bring it to the studio and stuff. I would use the handle. It's okay, it's fair. Yeah, it was clean, clean and sharp, but I appreciate that. Yeah, I missed the day. I missed the days of non slot loading. Uh this drives as well. Yeah, I want to put something on a spindle. Have you ever put

a GameCube game into your Wii. God know where to put it. I've never done it. I've never done it because terrified of it. I'm terrified of I'm like, I'm looking, I'm like, I'm just never gonna get this disc back right, Like, I'm gonna try and put this in and it's gonna imagine if how would you get it out here? I'll hear that drive noise, that click, did you hear some motors? Some serve like nope, hold on? Did my We just laugh. It's stuck. It's

it's eating my cap. I don't think. I don't think I've ever played I've like put a GameCube disc in there, but I don't know if I've ever played a GameCube game on my Yes, that's a scary proposition to me, a GameCube game would I want to go back and play? So how far back do you do you expect intended to go for you know, for backwards? Gud, Let's just let's just make full blown speculation one of the reports so that it wouldn't maintain GameCube and functionality. What I'm actually, what

I'm cused about is what stored unit they go with? Is it gonna be a blue rap thing or did they go with something else. I can't imagine them going making you know what if we're gonna if we're gonna say, you know, if they're but they're they're they're a courting third parties. They gotta have a high definition Nintendo has along aboard the slow loading disc format, So if they can do anything to get away from that, I think they will,

Like they load times are like an athema tooth and Nintendo experience. You know, I'm just gonna throw it out of here. Yeah, exactly if it's the fucking nineties again, not carts carts, but like the thing they're doing with the MGP, you know, yeah, see something along those lines, some kind of proprietary like flash format or something. I mean, but you know, effectively solid solid state media, not ROMs per se. But I think it'll have an Ethernet port on it. Probably probably not. I

mean they'll cross that bridge already, right, cut it off. There's not one on the weed, right, that's the thing. A couple of USB three point zero ports on it. No, that'd be cool. You can do some cool stuff if that ever gets ratified as a standard completely wireless controllers.

No charging, Probably not actually it was. Chris Cohler wrote a story on Wireless Week making a good argument why the touch screen makes the most sense because Nintendo has a history of presenting an idea and then pulling back and or canceling projects because they want to wait for the next one to differentiate, like how they canceled star Fox two after it was done because they didn't want to promote polygonal games on the snest because they wanted that to be part of an

n sixty fourth thing. And then they made a big deal about connectivity between the WE and the DS early in the Wee's life and then dropped it. No, they were gonna do it for Remember, you were gonna be able to download like DS games through your WE. Those games were going to talk to each other. The only game that used was sorry and GameCube. They did. They dropped that quick, but they were the reason it was going to work better with WE and DS is it's all wireless. The whole problem

with the GBA stuff was there there was one There was one game. It was a Pokemon Battle game where you could pick the moves on the DS. But the Cohler's argument was that they dropped that because the motion stuff was cool enough if they wanted to do connectivity, save it for the next console so that it makes makes it like an actual tangible difference in what you're doing with

the gameplay. It adds a little credence to the idea that you would use your DS as control for three DS is a prerequisite for using this console, or if it's not a precause, if it's optional, like what if you say what you say, you can go buy your art? What if you

could go buy a console use your DS as the controller. But if you want, like the HD control, like maybe to have a nicer touch display, maybe it now like there isn't there there is an opportunity where you that could be your controller, but that you could just buy a nicer one, like you could play your game at home with your nice controller and then take that experience on the go with your DS and it's all connected day one. They just need to make some fucking games, doll like, that's what happens

a Skyward Sword, we swan song. I guess if they're not going to push it till Fault has to be out this year. It was supposed to be out last year. They can't keep holding that. I've heard this before. I think I think it was during the last selling. It would be completely fucking insane if that game didn't come out this year. But you gotta give them something else, like you gotta give the people that bought like the

hardcore Player, because there's nothing else. They have to launch something to put out a ten pole this year at this point, at this point, you give them Skyward Sword, and then you just dump the Wii as a machine and everything just goes into WE two for next year ninety nine. Buck the wee you do, and I bet, I bet that pushes him over one hundred million eventually, if you could buy your family at seventy nine dollars we

Sports Machine. I just don't. I just don't know how Nintendo gearshifts from the five years of super casual Nintendo kind of back into the you know, they basically need to come come back into you know, sness era, hit making, third party and those developers never went anywhere though, Like people are lifers and Nintendo so all those guys, but they haven't been there, but

the output hasn't been you know. I agree that actually getting back into that could be like kid Icarus is an interesting experiment in getting some of that together, right, Like, maybe they're getting maybe you'll see some of those designers doing that stuff on three DS first as they're sort of like getting back into the mode of making But yeah, like but even just like that third tray, traditional action games have changed a lot since Nintendo is making more than just

like Mario Gala Mario game every couple of years and there, and they are going to need that, you know, they're gonna need that third party support that they have not really had the same level of since the nineties. And if they want third party support and they're making an HD console, that means that the controller has to have comparable buttons to everything. It's gotta it's gotta be port friendly. Does that mean dual analog sticks on whatever you got?

Maybe? I mean at least or at least or an analog stick and a touch screen so you can kind of mimic another shop on the screen in the middle. That's what it's gonna be. Well, it's gonna be like a three DS basically. Yeah, we just one screen. Yeah, that's it. I'm totally I think I'm down with this. Three can I can imagine that and I can imagine the three DS. It's gonna be a game Boy with the new system. Yeah, so they'll they'll include a game Boy with

the new system. Basically, well not have an analytic game Boy Advance with because it's a micro Jam, a Ness Max and an sp together. My prediction, here's my one prediction for this thing. Can't we can't really nail that anything. Oh no, no, this is this is here's my one prediction. Proprietary HDMI port on it. So you can't just plug a regular HDMI cable. You're gonna have to plug the video you're talking. You're gonna have to plug some kind of Nintendo proprietary port that has a regular AHMA on

the back end. But on then it'll be it'll be the same plug that they've used since this nest. They'll keep using that same plug. Is it? Is it just an hd machine with composite cables bundle in the box. Used to say they'll support hm I at all, They might just stick It's funny, but like that's what the PS three did, right, Yeah, yeah, yeah, because I was buying off the shelf HTMI cable and stick it in your PS three, right, But they still come with composite cable

what you're talking about is a proprietary connector that goes into the console. That's what I'm guessing, inquiring you to buy a cable from. Or it'll be like mini Hdmi, which is might as well just come up with a connector maybe it'll be hd based he because they just don't like making it easy, and it'll it'll do four ADP and they'll say HDM HD motherfucker, check it out. It's just an HDMI cable. It's not actually I a resolution.

That's not I tell me about it. It's eed enhanced dysfunction. Too young for that. What what's going on at Activision? Patrick? Sounds like all sorts of crazy shits. Oh yeah, I published to some experts from a couple of memos that I'd gotten a couple of months back. There was nothing totally like revelatory in them. But the call of duty stuff was kind of interesting about how pretty much after the Infinity Ward stuff happened, everyone kind of

asked themselves. It was a common question of you know, you know, isn't call of duty essentially becoming like what Katarga was like, has a real big spike, Yeah kind of, and we're ringing it for everything, ringing it for it and then and then you just you know, sort of rang it for all it's worth. And so in this activision memo there was actually like it's it was laid out as a question and answer, and there was actually a question that said, you know, aren't we doing to call of

duty what we've you know, which is great that those questions conclusions. Yeah, and like it's it's it's in this it's in this memo that's presented by an executive who's you know, memo speak is very bizarre because they're trying to be more honest than they are and their public statements. But also they're still doing pr to their thousands of employees, so well they also have to know that shit's going to get out at some points. Yeah, but it is. It is good. Yeah, it is good to see that they were

asking. But but yeah, essentially their logic was, uh, what hasn't happened yet? And that's in summary the memo hasn't happened yet, they I mean, which seems to be to not be too much of a dick the kind of activision way it is there. To their credit, they said, the one differentiating factor is that it's a shooter, and the first person games we know that, but we know it's a shooter. That game that was

not a shooter. I think I'm pretty sure I have. I have piles of research on my desk that heavily suggests that Guitar Hero was not in that confirmed suggested. My assistant tells me this game is clearly she's got young kids a shooter. Yeah, brought in Timmy. Timmy said it is not. It was not, probably probably not. She was definitely probably not. It all faired us, though it was was the leading edge of a very short

lived bubble, and I don't think he yeah. I mean, rhythm games in general had clearly looking back, you know, hindsight, being twenty twenty, they had a pretty short shelf life. But first person shooters have been around, and they will continue to be around, or even modern military will be around forever. But at least they have some reason to think that, you know, no doubt the style of game will be perpetuity. I don't think we're the only ones feeling a little fatigue right now. Yes, especially

Yeah, it kills Ze, bullet Storm christis too. I was just I need to play something else, and even just playing portal to the first person but wildly, Yeah, I didn't feel the fatigue that I've felt with It's not a first verson shooter, I know, but the first person game, I guess, I guess. My My point is that I'm tired of the first person shooters being made. I'm not tired of the first person respective in

any respect. I'm just well, I mean, part of the problem, and this is probably something that that you know very likely wouldn't make it into, would not its way into an activision executive perspective is how many other games that are coming out that are making Call of Duty feel older just by existing? How many? How many games are taking notes from Call of Duties so directly that it's making you more tired of Call of Duty without there even being

more. Yeah, Call of Duty might not be getting lesser on quality necessarily, but because you're seeing all that stuff scattering everything else by virtue of that, at that time next quality comes around, it's like, yeah, they can't just like we have a new story setting in the Call of Duty universe with the same mechanics, Like damn if they announced Modern War for three, which is all the same tropes like that, How like, I don't see

how that's it'll sell. It'll sell, but I don't know. I could see, I could see the beginning of the end, and especially since they have such so much to fucking prove right now with you know, the new and improved Infinity Ward. Yeah, and I just, yeah, this is the make or break year for that franchise. Yeah, But I guess the question is even if even if Call Day starts to go on a you know, sort of a downhill slant, like, what replaces it? Like,

I don't know what's what's responding to. I don't know, Like I mean, because fundamentally, what made Modern Warfare is such a you know, I hate the term game changer, but it was because the multiplayer was so different. At this point, no one since Modern Warfare has even attempted to do anything other than just ape what Modern Warfare did. Like, I keep waiting for someone to come in and just be brave enough to rather than say, well, it's easier just to do modern Warfare, like, let's let's do

multiplayer. Well, I feel like we're still going through the process of Hey, this was you know, a pretty revolutionary thing that that got implemented in the persistent, the perk and the persistence rpging like the multiplayer, and I think we're still in the phase of seeing that applied to non FPS genre multiplayer. We're still seeing that sort of persistence and there's value in that. There's they're absolutely it absolutely does you know, extend the life of a player experience

and give you some greater sense of investment in it. And you're doing that in you know, racing games, And yeah, I don't think we'll turn around from that. I think there's no but but but I'm now it's the standards. So it's not what I'm saying is I don't think it's quite the standard. It's because it's it's we were definitely reaching the point where if you see it in FPS, you go or whatever. But if you see it in a non FPS, it's still like, oh that's kind of cool,

that'll make this more fun to keep going blah blah blah. Like it still hasn't become just industry wide standard. Pretty close get getting there, but I think that's like still like a year off. I read some interesting quotes from game Noble, and I am heavily heavily paraphrasing here is well no, no, this although it is not on your list because dude, we can talk about it, totally talk about that. But uh, it was something to the effect of that that our the role playing is no longer like like to

use like a food analogy. It's no longer a meal. It's basically a sauce that you add to other kinds of meals, you know, like the I think you're specifically talking about like Bywaar and stuff like this is gonna break Vinny's heart, you know, but is basically saying that, like that style of sweeping epic role playing game is done like purely for I guess like financial

reasons. You know, they're so expensive to make and the returns are diminishing, so like those elements are better sprinkled on like quicker and more accessible sources of experiences where they can enrich shooters like genres, that more people are more willing to play Borderlands, right right. I mean, I think that there's one thing that we can all take away from this, having you know,

all been doing it for years, is nothing's ever done. Everything comes in a cycle, in a wave, and he's just when you see what is that thing? I'm curious if it's if if the rumors, if you assumed the rumors of Bungees working on sort of an online MMO is shooter thing, and that Blizzards Tightened project is also something like that, it kind of seems like maybe the space is moving from the lesson from modern warfare is persistence is

important? How can we make persistence a larger part of the entire experience? And if online like MMO shooters should be cool, like Planet's Side was a cool idea, and if the game didn't work that well, and I think you have stuff like a need for speed, like uh, kind of blending that online offline experience into kind of something. And I think you'll see to see more and more of that. But you know, everybody gets bored of

something. Eventually, I think we'll see the grand epic role playing game come back. Uh, it'll it'll start. I mean, look, we're playing adventure games. We're playing, we're playing you can't count to John Row. You just gotta find someone to make them. Yeah, it's got to be cheaper and fastest games. They found a better way, right, And I think you'll see that happen across the board. And you know, I think first person shooters will do the same thing. They'll we'll all get tired of

it. Somebody will will turn the switch a little bit to something else, and we'll keep doing it. Uh. But you know, gamers are like the most fickle crowding things come in and out of fashion very quickly. You're not about that, yeah, frankly, you know, speaking about adventure games, they've been back longer than they were gone at this point. There there was the heyday in the late nineties and then you know, early odds everything

bottomed out. But then it was only a couple of years after that that Telltale was you know, up in operation and cranking out their episodic adventure games. And it's even that whole time Lucas Arts was trying to reboot Sam Max like two or three times, but in non adventure game formats, like they

were doing it badly. Yeah. The thing I'm kind of curious about is like StarCraft obviously doing pretty well, right, and so okay, arts games didn't really start flooding the market, didn't really see I mean, some some different kinds of tower defense stuff have come out, Like that seems to be the angle people are going with, like we want again with that persistence of like you know, uh there's online stuff and uh stuff like, but just

that that old school late nineties like base building art style not so much more like Trench and the other things we're seeing where it's like, well, you know, like the relic stuff started moving towards like a hero model without a lot. Yeah, building an economy more base strategic RPG than I don't know StarCraft was we case because they built that as like intentionally as an inaccessible,

highly highly competitive I don't sport like activity. Yeah. I mean, like like StarCraft doesn't even represent a genre it represents Yeah, unless unless you happen to be the license holder of StarCraft. I don't think you can really cash in on StarCraft, even if you're a commanding conquer. Apparently, even if you're a commanding conquer. Although I guess there's the smoke out there that they're working on something. It's so weird. I feel like like the ashes of

the studio like ignited and there's something smoldering somewhere. You know, it's like from the ruins there's entirely dead. Yeah, threw a lip butt into a trash like a breeze came by, right, and it's just like just enough, I think we could do this again. But it hasn't even been dead that long. No game came out. What four came out last year? Yeah, let's not talk about that. Was it really twenty ten year? Yeah? So you're so you're takeaway from this whole Activision thing was it's the

first person shooter. First person shooters are popular. Yeah, they're popular. This one's still popular. And when this one isn't popular, hopefully we got something else. Matt mentioned in the memo is like they went through like their things that they're looking towards, you after, like a big one was Bungee's next thing, Like I think I think they're looking possibly is that to be their transition even though that's not their IP. Yeah, who's gonna say what

their business terms are? They're going to position that as you know, I'm sure that I'm sure the terms are very favored toward them, even if even if they don't own the IP. But I that's something they can move over towards, even if they don't have something wholly owned to go to yet.

I wonder if sometimes like they just big companies like that like the EAS and Activision, big publishers are are when things start getting stale, are looking for people to break a genre, even if they have no interest in it at all, even if it's like a competing company to be like, great, you just opened up a new market like rhythm games or something like that, Like we can get into that, we can start making new games in that channel. Uh, even if like, even if they're not making money from

it initially. I wonder if it's just something like like kind of sweat on the brow, like we weren't really sure where we're gonna go, but this whole modern military thing looks good. We can make a lot of money for that for five years. Like, thank you guys for kind of paving the way on there. I mean, nobody knows, you know, nobody's got a crystal ball. I mean, if if we in this room could tell you what, you know, the next big thing, do it, we

wouldn't be here right now. It would be rolling in piles of money. Piles of money. Next big thing. I've heard that those are always those are always big. Actually, it turns out French money. That might be a good segue into the valve stuff. Yeah, I think gave Newell apparently

knows what the next big thing is knives. Yes, yeah that. Jeff Kiley launched an iPad app last week final hours of of Portal two, and there's a lot of nuggets about sort of what Valve was thinking about going forward, and one of them was that uh he again paraphrase and but basically said that Portal two could very well be Valve's last single player uh solitary experience.

I wasn't really expanded on what that means, but it sounds like they are very much thinking that in some capacity you will always be connected to other players. But what that means exactly, I don't think that necessarily. I don't think that the logical conclusions that well, all their games are co op or even all of their games have a I think they're thinking a couple of levels

above that. They just want players to influence your experience. They're thinking about the top level, you know, that is hats that is right up there on the top, very top, very tops the hats. Can't wear hats. I can't wear hats either. I bought a straw hut. Did you was the kind that is like the like edges on it? So no, it was a little cleaner than that. I think they called them sombreros. Did We did talk them down a little bit, though, Oh you gotta

have talk down a hat. And you guys they gave us, They gave us because they gave us a beautiful deal. In their words, they will always give you the white man's price. When the first show up, they're like, no, get out of my face with that. Yep, yep. Less than that, that's too much straw hats the future, get what you can. So you're you're basically saying half life mmo, great, Yeah,

it's the headline breaking breaking, you know what. I think they could release half Life branded line of farts and people would be so excited about some new goddamn half life content yea of any kind. It was. It was. It was weird because like all the all the Portal stuff, like they're people like super sad about Portal, but people like, okay, but the half life stuff. We'll play this until we get into their half half life

in here. What about episode three, about halfway three, the minute that people found that little image of the Gmail and on the Portal two countdown polls, they forgot the Portal two was coming out, and they were just like oh my god, just like yeah, yeah, yeah, just complete meltdown, complete refocus, like I will trade in this entire new game for like two sentences about what you're doing with this other thing, anything, anything at

all. And they finally dropped that bomb, like it's just gonna and it's weird because it again, it has now been longer since the first Weight, since the weight from Half Life to Half Life two episode episode two. Okay, maybe maybe not to the episodes, but to the game to Half Life two kind of have to you kind of have to consider the episodes, given it that was supposed to be Half Life three one, two, and three and then that kind of went off the rails. Yeah, it's only been

three years and changed since since episodes. They playable product called half Life was out fair enough, but so the other thing. I don't know if you got this or not, but didn't. He also mention that they were working on some like super top secret, top level skunk works project of his own. No, I read that that was like sort of the last that was before Portal. That was like he aboarded Portal too or whatever. Yeah, like I read a brilliant gameplay mechanic that they won't talk about, but it

is not in Portal too. M. I read that, Man, there's a lot of stuff about parenting, a bunch of stuff I read on I didn't see this an actual news story accurate it is, but I saw, like message board chatter was that there was like a repeatable time mechanic like Braid

style, like sort of creating multiple instances of yourself. And but I thought I also read that he has like some crazy, like five year project going on that like wouldn't I wouldn't I didn't get would not be surprised, I mean just by the app, I guess if you want to know more so

here in spout. I mean there was there was some quote from now like a year ago that said, over the next couple of years, we will announce things that you would not have been predicted at the compoint, and we haven't gotten to that point, like Portal two, you were gonna make that like whatever. Now, I'm curious, like Doda, Doda, I didn't exactly expect, but I'll be curious to see what comes what comes after that.

They're not just sitting there and counting steam money like they've been. They they've been so low key for the last couple of years post Orange Box, like I mean there was left for dead, but that those were like that was was that turtle Box or whatever into like whatever Valve Proper has been working on, like they've been doing more than Portal Too. And I think it's possible. But hopefully we're at a point where like we'll see a lot.

I'm just being I think we're turning a corner on I mean, I just I just want to say that because I hope it's true. I actually have no evidence or I would just love to be a E three And there was two Valive projects anounced that I'd be real nice. This is a big Valve booth. One of those projects is Steam too. Damn it. We've created the sequel to Steam you guys, episode one not backwards compatible. All right, you lose all your right, that's right. We're gonna need you to

upgrade your account to Steam two. You're gonna lose all your ship for Steam one, but you can rebuy all the stuff FIRSTEAM one is available in Steam too, just the corkage fee and we'll bring it over for we were stuff going to transfer between the Nintendo machine. Probably not. I'm still I'm still waiting for them to make good on DSiWare, transfer it over. I'm still made in front of make good on DSiWare. Boom good finger gun. Yeah,

oh what else is going on there? So canceling handhelds, Yes, there's there's a there's D word that DS light Yeah, DS light Uh. Apparently well on Nintendo's statement to me, it was more just like, well, you'll be able to buy them, uh, and you know, steady quantities going forward. They're not going to run out, which is basically them saying, yes, we've ended production, but they're playing out there. Not a lot of people are buying d S lights, so we got a ton

of those nights. It's not like they're going anywhere if you want it, because it's already I mean you're talking like because there's a light that's three revisions L three D. So at this point, if you want a d S light, it's and and this is and this is anecdotal entirely, but I was in a number of electronic stores over the weekend, and three ds is are out there. You don't you don't need to go too far to find

yourself. Then they undersold, Yeah, they didn't hit their four million projection didn't they They got to three point six one million, which they said they layed partially in the earthquake. They said that people were just kind of that happened around that time, and then people just sort of decided, we don't want to buy things or three DS is or not what we need to spend our money on right now. Yeah, I could see in Japan that well,

well whatever it was out for. Yeah, yeah, you're saying that people outside of Japan were bummed about the earthquake and didn't want to buy three DSS. That's maybe stretching, and that's maybe a little bit of a stretch Nintendo. And then yeah, the PSP go canceled in Japan, but not in North America. What Yeah, they're still producing them for North America, but not for not for but in Japan. One would assume, yes,

that is that is the case. You know, it's possible with that is completely off base speculation, but it's that if they're only going to release the NGP in one territory this year, yeah, that that you would close down production, you would let the PSP goes go out of stock in Japan because you're gonna be releasing the MNGP in Japan this year. You'll close down PSP GO production for America later because it's not going to launch later this year in

America. But people say that would be my interpret but people still aren't buying the PSP GO, So nope, no go. You should just no go PSP go. Nicely done. You're you're finding your pace here really quickly, matric. I'm pretty impressed. And that was I wrote that down in my note that one really joke comes up. Even the other notes these are all just bad wait for applause. Yeah, okay, we don't have an we don't have a soundboard in here. Applause break, applause break, not yet,

knock on wood and off. That means you want one or don't. Yeah, you're getting such a bad place. So the psyche goes down for a whole week. Then we got to resort to it some sound iPad Apple sounds. I bet, oh god, we were almost there. Anything else happened with the news came close. Were already we already kind of did PlayStation

network. That's down, all right, What you want to talk a little bit about the why or the yeah, I guess run through the speculation on so ps ps N went down last week, Yes, right around this actually, I think the on Thursday was that's when we realized we weren't gonna be able to do Mortal Kombat. Yeah, right for TNT. And then at that at that point, PlayStation Europe and put up a short statement saying that they blamed it on outside interference because as a result of geo hot. That's

the hacker's name, right, the the guy George Hot. Yeah, the guy who hacked the Blue So much love that I found out that geo hot is just short for George Hots. I thought it was some bullshit, no, because I heard people are geo hot because it sounds like zero cool or yeah, definitely sounds like like like internet nonsense, something from an IRC channel in the nineties. Yes, geo hot sounds like someone's fucking BBS handle.

For sure. I gotta collect the geo hot traded geo hot. The first article that I read that said geo hot real name George Hots, I'm like, what really, that's awesome. Yeah, that makes me love the name geo Hot. Yeah. I don't even have to quote that in stories because you've already said geo hot by the time you said George. Yeah, so anyway, because so because of that lawsuit, which ended up getting settled amicably

between the two, Anonymous sort of declared, we're gonna hack Sony. Yeah, so they the initial response at least Sony kind of was like kind of nudging, Yo, those guys did it. An Anonymous quickly said, no, no, we didn't. They they're just Sony's bad and like they're just

their servers are terrible. So then we pretty much have heard nothing about it since, you know, the it's been down all weekend long, so it almost usually takes full credit, like when they bust shit up, right, Yeah, I mean it's hard to take the you know, yeah, the credibility of a hacker group, but usually if they were, they want to take credit for something like that. I mean, it's pretty big to take it down for at this point, four or five days, possibly longer.

Yeah, so it doesn't sound like it's that. And then pretty much Tony's been just on lockdown mode ever since. They you can access Netflix because that doesn't go to the log in, and we talked about the other stuff earlier that doesn't use the log in sort of infrastructure, but it kind of seems

like there's something tied to that log in and your account information. But the scary thing is that today there was a someone It was a PC World asked to Sony Japan's folkstrees and like, so it was my credit card stuff safe? And they were like, we don't know yet, which is not a great answer. That we'll get back to you on your credit card information getting compromised because we're not sure. Didn't run. You just put your stuff back

in, didn't you. It wasn't an offer a bit or is that just that new PS three We had to enter your your credit card we had to buy something recently and it wasn't stored up. Oh no, that's just because I had to. I had de authorized all of the because I had hit my max like five PS three's authorized to use my PSN account stuff. Yeah, just from yeah, so I just I was able to get Sony to I guess they won't normally do this, but they weren't able to wink wink,

yeah a little bit of that. So you so you're saying you took down this was week this weeks and weeks ago. Back up. Everything's back up and fresh for the picking. Damn it. That was me I did that. Sorry, guys, No, I want to be able to again. I'm a PlayStation Plus member, motherfucker's I want that ship working went up time, I went up time. And I also want some sort of recompense for this crazy downtime. Yeah, well that's assuming that it had like comes

up anytime soon, like when you're ready recompense. Yeah, you want, you want? That was that word out, that's right, the dictionary dot com over the day the day recompense. I was waiting for that when they come up episcope end. Uh. Actually, I'm just I'm not gonna lie to you. I'm staring at a great big picture of fatality on my iPad right now. See can tell because it's his fatality next to it. That's some speakers or some per referral that he's sponsored. He's wearing a shirt.

It's crazy, that's not fatal. Yeah, some photoshop job, yeah, they clearly. Well it is a picture of Bill Gate's face. I was just thinking about Home the other day, about how long it's been since you had logged into home, about is that home was home still around? I did? I did at G four. The stories would have been like a year and a half old now, but I did, Like I never used home, didn't give a shit, And it's like who uses it? Because

I know it makes a lot of money. Really yes, yes, successful somehow so so so the basic way it's successful is that it has a core user base that goes in all the time and buys everything. So it doesn't have a real widespread appeal, but the people that are in it's kind of second lifefish, and that the people that are in there, they are everything. They are engaged as hell. Yes, yeah, that's crazy. I've

never thought the answers to bring up that questions. It's only very valuable to marketers, like it's seen as as a very viable because they don't need They haven't really needed to do any more work on it because as as it stands, like the people that have passed judgment on it aren't going to go in, Like, there's nothing you can do to make that place like real interesting to anyone that doesn't already think that the idea of going into this virtual world

with ugly avatars and dancing. But I spent I spent. I did a whole month where I tried to spend I would spend an entire evening just wandering around Home, just asking people why are you here? I win everything, and they have real customized I mean, they just it's a place for them, like they have a friend group. It's essentially their IRC channel, or it's just their message board, and it's free. You know, it's obviously a huge selling point for unless you want to pay like fourteen ninety nine for

a couch. I added up all the iteism in there one night when I was in. It's just ridiculous how much stuff is on there, but people buy it. So I've gone to GDC sessions where they're like, we know, the perception is that Home is a giant, failed piece of crap, but it's actually actually it's incredibly I always heard it's just a marketing testing ground. I had always heard like that. Marketers and advertisers freaking love Home. I'd always heard that end of it to be true. And if you think

about it, you know you're in a way. All of the Avatar customization bullshit that they sell on the three sixty is no better, in fact, is way worse than the Home stuff, because at least Home there is a place to run around with your dude with all the stuff that you just a dashboard. Yeah, on the three sixty, it's like I can go down my friends list and see what my friends look like at that point, but you can't really like that stuff doesn't even show up most of the tight Yeah

exactly. Even then, there's like there's no there's nowhere to go and do stuff with your avatar. These as a number of places that anybody that's not you can see the stuff the avatar is wearing is very limited. On three six Yeah, I never really noticed that. Uh well, like Home just seemed like it was just a secreted away thing that like nobody ever clicked it.

It's it's it's because it's because they just have this you know, this audience that just loves it and they just it's also never gone out of beta. It's one of those like I should go back. It's been a year and a half since I did that series again check come back to Home. So that's down obviously, right, that must be maybe that's on a separate server. I want to see what's up at home. I want to go and go do it do a new home quick look? Can you imagine just

the pe check out. I'll go back, all right, the folks can make a video series out of this, the folks having like Home withdrawals like I can't fucking get into Home. I don't know what my friends are doing. I always thought Home would be cool if they just went the whole matrix route of like letting you make gigantic rooms that never end and like, you know, just like, yeah, well maybe just give one random person at home, just like Debug as well, let's have a dragon, you know,

just like all sorts of crazy stuff. I mean, I checked back into Home like last year at some point, and the thing that really struck me is that it felt just as small and limited and like Beta Testy it did when it first launched. But it's again, go boot up Second Life like not any different. Really, It's just isn't it is? But it's the same, you know, it's a smaller version of that. It's just it doesn't matter that it's JANKI and that it doesn't work. That's why.

Actually, like it's endearing to those people. They like that it's janky and weird, and they like that nobody comes there because they don't have to deal with other people weird. It's weird. Yeah, Anyway, we just talked about PlayStation for twenty minutes we're talking about Yeah, I don't know what it's

gonna be back up. It could be weeks, like if they're if they have if they have to rebuild a log infrastructure, weeks, depending on how paranoid they are about you can't they want to remember this is Japan, and can people play so Calm. That's that's ludicrous. You can't play So Calm. You can't do portal co op, you can't do h combat like a bunch of on last If just came out like Sipper got screwed, mag didn't work out that well, and all of a sudden, still count four launches

and then PSM goes down. Socom three had a similarly sit launched too, So last two So Calm games not all this confrontation. I'm sorry, that's right, thank you. Silcom three was a ps two that was a Plant six joint. It's a different developer. But the last two, last two three series is yeah, yeah, yeah, that is a real shame. Yeah. Can you imagine being like, you're not really looks like and they

just lost their lead designer to that happened today. We just put out an online focused game and then the platform that we are exclusively available on lost its online. All three all three of the major releases last week, we're billed as best on PlayStation. Yeah, more combat got extra content pointed out all the Steam stuff. Yeah, I didn't even I didn't even think about it. Like all those games are like mar keps three releases and should have been

a kick ass weeks. So Calm all right, I mean at least MK and Portal they could sell units on other platforms and like, so Calm is like no, no, no, this is but this is yeah, this is why it's extra bad for Sony. Yeah, well like kind of like, yeah, obviously a bummer for everyone involved. Like, hey, you know we release Scambling your platform and your platforms all fucked up. That's good. I mean, they gave you very compelling reasons to buy those games on

their platform. This is this is it made us still come as a campaign. But you're not it's not where you're not. You're down there. You're just hoping the campaign's a fun distraction, like you're there, right. It seemed more fully fleshed out than what they've done in past, So Calm games of just like bots or whatever. But that's what I like when you say weeks and you just imagine you you are throwing every resource you can to get this. Yeah, I mean being irobolic. But the fact that they're not

giving any any any date or timeline. Yeah, there's there's no reason to think that it couldn't be. I wouldn't. I wouldn't think that Amazon web hosting would go down for days at hours. Yeah, so you know what, fucking now, anything is possible. You know, literally anything can happen now. You know what, the best servers that's right for Amazon is the one that just went down, because there's no way that shit's going down.

You're saying that the server we're on right now is probably the most clean to that one, because we are good. Everything's new, all fail safes are put in. They're checking that one every day. You're just looking at it all the time. It's waiting for it. Just blank. Did that not blink? Shit? Write write it down your moleskin every time you think it didn't blink blank. That sounds like a test. Yeah, this is this sony thing is bizarre. It's crazy. Well, and it's it's crazy.

The you know the lack of information for you know, being like you have to wonder if that's what we're getting, what are like how much information or developers getting. You know, guys, you know people, you know, people like Insomniac working. You know, if you look at what's happening is

something like a SOCLM. If you're Insomniac and you're looking at you know, well, we're making as for exclusive game too, and thinking like the non enthusiasts like player base going on going online to find out what the hell is going on. It's just down the people who are who aren't wired into like fucking Twitter accounts and you know, nowhere to look for information like that. It's like, I want to try on my p S three and play some

fucking Call of Duty. You turn that on and you're like, why can't I fucking play Call of Duty on my PlayStation three? Or ISPs getting phone calls of like it's not connected. We don't know, sir, it works

from here. Oh yeah, I'm sure there is this weird ripple effect of like customer service in all these other weird tangential areas know all about the fact that PlayStation network is down right, there's already like pat answers in India somewhere the dude that knows, like, are you trying to get on the PlayStation network? Yeah, that shit isn't isn't working right now. That's not us. That's not us. That's not your ISP's Please call Sony customer service at

one and exactly. That's that's not your ISP, that's not your router manufacturer. That's not your computer manufacturer, your neighbor stealing your internet. No, that's not Comcast. Your computer doesn't have a virus. No, no, be sure it's not Dell. Well it could, but that's not this unrelated your your kid did not fuck up your internet? Or did he? Or did he? He also touched your tools? Compete the shit out of him. He's been touching my tools. He also hid the clicker. Goddamn kids

touching my fucking tools. Uh, he's gonna turn into a therapy session in about two minutes. Did you touch the tools, Vinny, Oh god, don't touch never touched you. Never touched the tools. Two things you don't touch. He touched them once. Never. Lesson learned, I'm touching the tools. Don't touch the tools, and don't touch the fucking remote. Right man, I gotta find that fucking clicker, click the clicker. God damn it. Anyway, let's keep going. I like this. I had something

else. I had one more thing. Oh yeah, so EA announced what they're No, it was a survey. But before we move on from Peter announced what they're online pass was going to be for Alice Madness Returns. Oh that, Oh that was kind of cool. Yeah. I thought I was heading off at the eas EA Sports subscription thing that. Oh no, No, that's the more recent thing. This is the older things. Yeah, sometimes I just work. Yeah, this one's weird. So's it's the online

passford Alice Madness Returns for the p s three and three six sixty. But in order to download the original Alice, which they're porting, you have to have the online pass to download it through an in game menu in the game. So like, so you're going to pre order get a code to download it for free from the Xbox Life marketplace, like you if you were going to buy Madness Returns. You cannot get the XBLAPSN version, at least probably

till a later date. Well, they're even saying like if you get a copy of Madness Returns and you don't have the pass for it, within Madness returns. You can still pay ten bucks to get this port of the original. The menu it's not going to be accessible. It still strikes me as like a really compelling way to handle this, this whole online pass, you know, kind of the project that they're going for, because that game is

fucking impossible to find in in reasonable means on the PC. Like, that's a that's a weirdly rare ass game that got a box copy factor sealed. You still that fur hundred fifty bucks without breaking a swip? Somebody hit me up. It's not a very good game. Get the fuck out. Have you played it? Come on? Some people love it. It's the day. It's interesting because it's a very polarizing game. I would be willing to. I mean, it was a third person game made in the Quake three

engine, which is not designed for the Quack three engine. Yeah, I played a recently. I don't think you were here when we talked about playing it. I booted it up not more than like two or three weeks ago. It doesn't hold up. The cut scenes and stuff are still cool. The atmosphere, yeah, but man, it's it's maybe one of the worst. Like it just looks so jank. It's bad. It's bad. I'm sorry, Brad because I had better memories too, and I was like,

I'm gonna play it through Alice. I remember this being awesome. Wait where did you get it? I had it installed still, yeah, yeah, just on my I couldn't even find the disc anymore. I was like, crap, I don't even know if this will I can't find my other copy of it. I lost the disc for that, but of coase have the sealed one, but I don't want to open it just to know. You should make I don't know what the copy of protection stuff is, but I can like maybe zip it and give it to if you want to try it.

Uh. But yeah, man, it's it's kind of the worst. Yeah, it doesn't. It doesn't hold up at all. Yeah, I see if they do any sort of cleaning up in this port, Like, well, it never came out on consoles right now, this is the first time it's gonna appear. They were porting it and then canceled it. So kind of the weird emission of all this is that the PC version, which is coming day and date with the PS three and three sixty versions of Madness

returns. Uh. They just said, they haven't said what they're gonna do with it. I don't think they're saying you're not. They didn't say no, but all they said yes to for this was the console versions, which is I don't know, interesting. I guess it would be amazing if they went back and at least tightened some of the three. That is doubtful. I mean, that is doubtful. It's just adapting the movement and camera to anallyog sticks would probably go a long way. Yeah, yeah, it's it's

yeah. I mean, it's still gonna be a ten year old game no matter how you how you cut it. But it's it's interesting and I feel like it's it's it's a good way. It is. It is a value adding way to approach this idea of we want to sell new copies of I get better than locking uh content, you would they would typically be there or something like that, like this is a value added to the product, absolutely, and then they'll probably just a month later, let you buy it on

Xbox Live. It's like it'll already be there. They'll just unlock it. It's no longer an incentive to buy the game first month. And so we're talking about the good will. Let's talk about this EA Sports subscription model. Yeah, so it's part of a survey. Yeah, so there was a survey that I got picked up by a bunch of sights. It was basically just they're looking to do a value add for the sports games. That would

I don't have all the details in front of me. Like, one of the more compelling arguments was that by subscribing to it, you would get at you would be able to download the games ahead of the retail release, and that upon the retail release, it would you'd have to go buy the disc. So if you were paying like say thirty bucks a year for access to all of the E sports games five days ahead of release, but then upon release, those digital versions don't work anymore. You have to buy the disk.

But all your stuff, your saves, your achievements, will carry over into that disc verse. You're paying for a bunch of demos. That's not the only thing. I'm just giving you an example of, Like that's one, right, but you don't get any you don't get any progress out of demos. No, but and it's also like potentially the full version of the game. Those also don't force you to buy the I don't know, it's

a weird there was. Some of the other ones were like more regular for if you think about it, like this is for someone who was playing full seasons of Madden. Sure, this is for someone for whom five days with the game is not enough to like, quote you finish a campaign that's not the kind of sports game. Aren't really like that. But you didn't like ten bucks off the retail copy or anything, right, defful So you basically

just paying for a time limited period of early access. Yeah. Like some of the other stuff was you know, getting uh, you know, more access to roster updates, ensuring that you know DLC will carry over to the next product rather than you having to repurchase that DLC. Again, I don't have all this stuff in front of me, but the stuff it's not cheap like they were the different price and models we're going up to like twenty nine

ninety nine. But again, it's not just for a specific game. It's that, you know, if you're buying all these A sports games every year anyway, what's another thirty dollars to The argument against that is that why can't you they just make these value inside of stuff anyway, rather than making you pay thirty bucks on top of it. I'd be curious to see, like if if they are talking about this as a full on EA Sports package, like what's the crossover from game to game? Like? Yeah, where where?

Like? What games do they see the most amount of crossover between there? And the people are going to buy all of them? Like are the soccer fans all so buying Madden? Like what is the like if if there is crossover, what is the other EA Sports game that the tiger crowd is buying? Like, you know, what where are they attaching they have? I imagine that probably Madden is the lowest common denominator of all of those. Yeah, so it's it's gonna be Madden. And but I'm where's NHL I

think is more than Madden at this point? I'm sure I mean go worldwide, absolutely for sure. But those those titles don't do use sales anyway, Right, nobody's buying last year's Madden like those those things always seem to die at the used game sales. Well, I mean yeah, yes, and that's also because they shut down those servers every year because oh yeah, and the roster updates and not not just a year out like they let it go a couple of years. But it's part of the reason that EA has all

of their own like the EA games Net stuff. Why you have to have that separate fucking log info your games is because they're running their own servers. They're not just doing it a peer to peer. Well I thought they just did that one time. Know, they shut They EA puts out like shutdown notices on their games for servers, for all their stuff, not just the sports stuff. Was the last one that shutdown? Like NBA Live pretty regular Oh they shut down NBA Live O seven or now you can't get any of

those achievements. Yeah, there's that one achievement, remember that. Yeah, so that's so yeah, last year that game shut down. And but I thought that was I thought that was like one sweeping thing. I didn't realize that they do that. They do well. They do those sweeps regularly. They'll come out and say, all right, here's a handful of EA games that we're taking the servers offline for. It's a little gnarly A little bit,

yeah, a little bit. I mean especially it's it's more gnarly for stuff that's but I imagine it's it's also like these are games that literally no one is online. And also these games come out annually, like they're the model is built on. Sure, the annualized stuff, I don't I don't mind so much because if you are into Madden, you're there for the truth, not like dedicated to Madden No. Seven. Well, you're true to the like you like you want the full football experience, you want the see

the roster and all that other ship. That's where I feel like they should go with the subscription stuff is like here, you know what, guarantee me ten years of Madden and give me like a hundred bucks off or something like that, and I guarante I will prepay. I think that's what people kind of want out of it, is that these games shouldn't be sixty dollars every

year, considering how similar, like how incremental the upgrades. Yeah, but if like if you maybe pre pay ahead of time for a subscription, you know, get a discount one, give me something for being a valued customer who's gonna buy them every year anyway. So it just once you give me a little little something here. I mean, not not to sell them, sure, I mean they do go into the change mechanics, you know,

and stuff like that. But they do find like the releasing it early is sort of like EA's way, like it is the way if those if those games locked before you have to buy the disc. But they're also sort of implementing the technology now just to give a big ef detail, like they're already getting their users lined up, getting used to it, and then one of them once they can make, you know, turn the switch. You know, they're ahead of other publishers on on doing that. So four or five

years and they're not on Xbox there is already doing it. Yeah, whatever, he has got their e A store. You're terrible things about it. I bought one. I bought Spore from them once never again. Oh yeah, that's right. That was a nightmare experience, wasn't. It charged me

like an extra five bucks for doing it too. Don't oh to be able to download it in perpetuity through the future, because it was one of those like the weird stuff where when you first download when when you first buy it, like for the fifty or sixty bucks, you get it this one time or like ninety days or something to download the you know, install file. After that it's gone. I don't know that ship was weird anyway. Yeah, uh, let's move on from news. Let's uh, it's nothing.

What's going on? What I was gonna say about the PSN is a ten weeks. Do you think Sony will acknowledge it during an E three press conference? Think Jack Trenton's gonna make some joke about PlayStation Network going down? Depends on how long it's down, Okay, I think that's my guess. Is my guess is given how severe with the breach teams or at least the implication that they will not want to make light. Yeah, this is not the

joking matter. Yeah, I don't. I feel like Sody's been okay in the last two years of Yeah, yeah, totally, Like but that's like early leagues of shit. That's different from, like you kind of clismic failure, like something that a team worked out for the last three years of their lives, Like like, this is a major blow to a publicly held company.

Know, they're not going to go in there and joke. That's put that out there, just kind of thinking, thinking ahead of another another an E three prediction, Yeah, well, I don't know, I don't know. I'm not so sure on that one. See through we two No, that wasn't me. No, No, I'm saying proprietary hdmi pora. How hard is Jack threatened punching someone right now? Just just punching them into ghosts? Questions? How many people is he punching simultaneously? I just imagined he's

got to line them up and just punching through them every appendage. I suppose he's got a Swiss playing like knife hands, like kneeing a guy in the gut. That's right, yeah, justut And then he's put your hand on the table. Maybe maybe hired Lance Henderson and come do it with him, because you and hire that gouty to do anything. He's like making a point each time he does a finger, you know, he's like, what do we say when we started this? We never have down stability, network stabilities,

like right through the top of the get my surfs up. I mean, all all the real calamity is going on in Japan right Like that's where all the infrastructure and that's what's going on. What's going on. He's got three sleeves rolled up right now, Damn rolled up a pant leg. He's like, shit, he's gonna he's gonna buy home. He's wearing sandals. He's living death row. Fuck? Are there any new games this week? Yeah? Dark Spore is out this week. That exists. I hear good

things about that. Do you like? Yeah? If you like? Yeah, Dungeon Crawlers set somehow in the Spore that's got the sport Creature Creator Creature Creator? Is that? Is that retail? Is that box copy or that everything? Can I get that on this PlayStation three? Nope, that's a that's a PC only, is it? Okay? P's the only product that's kind of the only box thing worth talking about that's out this week. UTA is putting Outland out. That game looks real good. Yeah, I've played

a little more of it. Uh does it play as good as it looks? I don't think I could talk about that just yet. It does look really nice. I do really want to I want to play it though, Okay, acknowledge, I just want to put that out there fair enough. But yeah, not not a lot of retail release system riding hot off last week. Keep playing Portal in Mortal Combat. That should keep you happy, at least for a little while. Let's take a look at some older stuff.

I think this week. Maybe it's so if we had some stuff last week and the last week. Yeah, we we missed some stuff last week. I now know that Sega is in fact sending over a copy of the conduit too, so we can check that out, braffluent under the radar. Yes, dude, if you if you were not holy crap MK or portal last week, you stealths that on shelves though that was on shelves last week. Okay, yeah, man, of course I'm supposed to know this stuff

according to people, according to organizations that sell those things. All right, let's talk about some emails. Oh man, every week, all this pressure. I don't even I didn't even look at even Viny I always Vinny always just eyeballs you so hard to low outs. I like that BombCast at giant bomb dot com. First email comes in from Jacob in Austin, Texas. Dear BombCast with the wee success for with the Weee's successor reportedly coming out about

this time next year. Do you think this will force Microsoft or Sony to move early into a new set of hardware despite their recent statements that they believe they have ten year machines, Can we throw out the whole like ten year cycle fallacy? Already. Like, I don't think it's well, it wasn't true during the PS two and it's not true in the set of the p S three. It's just a thing they say. Well, I think when they say that, they're not saying we're not going to put out another piece

of hardware for ten years. It's this thing will have a like irrespective of anything else we put out afterwards, this thing will will maintain for ten years, which which has been true for the PlayStation and the PlayStation two only has been very good about supporting their hardware even after they've moved on totally. There doesn't mean there won't be a PlayStation four for ten years after the PS three, PlayStation two games came out last year, came out this year, the

sing Star games I thinks still come out. Yeah. PS two games still get produced. So like, that's that's what they're really talking about now now, But let's let's get to the actual question here. Oh I thought that was the question. No, no, no, I mean the real the real question is this, does this force their hand on the next system. I mean, it's less about continuing supporting the old system and rushing out the next one. We talked about it before, but I don't. I don't

think so. I think they have. They have R and D going, have had probably had R and D going for about two years now on their next system, So I think I think they're probably I would have. I think I think a most because everything I've been reading and I have heard about is that they're projecting twenty fourteen for like their their next stuff. My guess is they but they won't give or they shouldn't give Nintendo two Christmases. But

I think Nintendo gets twenty and twelve all of themselves. But I think it's pretty realistic to expect maybe Microsoft m pull the trigger by thirteen. I always thought twenty twelve announcement twenty thirteen. I mean, you don't think that this like if they give them enough time that this could be like the nasty Dreamcast window of too late to one party to relate to the to the next. For Nintendo. Yeah, yeah, it could be. I mean, grant,

I don't think they care. They're not in the same position that Sega was in. I just Nintendo. Nintendo has much more goodwill with their franchises, and their franchises sell much more than Sega's ever did, and do you think do you think the pandering to the base in the way that the base wants is enough to sustain Nintendo for two years? Sure? Like they don't. They don't need more like than a couple of years out of this hardware.

Then they'll find a way to change it up again. And keep in mind, even though the wee has not been selling great recently, Nintendo is still liquid as fuck. Sure, well, it's also sets. But they've hit a ceiling. Sure, I see they have eighty millions. I mean that market had well from software wise, that market turned out to have a much lower ceiling on it than they would have hoped. Yeah, but they make their profit on every console, right Nintendo does, Yes, but not

as much profit as zillions of copies of games. So it's certainly desirable to make money on hardware. But like you really want to sell a whole bunch of licensing feats, you don't have to do anything for that. Yeah, but they didn't pushing out schlock on the shelves. And that's why, I mean, it's it's it seems pretty direct causing a fucking fact there. Yeah, so so we think you know moreready? Three? I mean, and so we like it's is it is it gonna if it they managed to make

another phenomenon like We two, which seems unlikely. But if they're able to produce another thing that makes everyone freak out the the same way that we did, then I think you'll see stuff get pushed up. That's all, you know. But it's just really hard to know. It's we're talking twenty fourteen. That's that's a distance. But I also just feel like we are.

We are in the goddamn wilderness of of this industry as far as the cycle is broken, Like the cycle that we've been in for the last like fifteen, yeah, twenty years, like doesn't exist anymore. It's it's they you know, they did just do big pushes for Connected Move, but I don't know that that means they're not ready to just go on to the next thing already. I can't. I can't tell. No, it's kind of terrifying.

It seems like these systems are still making a lot of money, so it does game or I mean that's the thing that we wasn't able to do, is that people buy lots of software for their three six season few threees. They don't do that on we and I think they tend to want some of that. I still keep fucking buying DLC for Harmonics games for reasons I can't even justify it byself. I wouldn't bought the goddamn Xbox three sixty keyboard over the weekend. Was I thinking, I don't know the key tar?

The yeah about that? Now? The game stop bought at a store, So that was that was? That wasn't even like a drunk Amazon purchase. No, that was I went to several stores. I went. I went to a best Buy and they didn't have any And I'm like, all right, what were you thinking after the first time life told you you don't need to buy this? Well, I was really pissed at. Let me say

a thing or two about about best Buy. All right, there's customer service is important, at least at least to me, Like if I'm gonna if I'm gonna bother going into your physical location and not just buy it from a robot on the internet and have it show up in my house a couple days later, like I kind of want some sort of customer service and watching two people who don't know the products, like at best Buy, it's the worst because all of their like in store computers, for the for people to use

for for like their employees like look up products on it's just their fucking website, and watching other people poorly use their own website and in me, I'm sitting here like I know your website better than you do. I know how to get the sole search results that you're looking for. That should not be the case here. You should have some sort of cool text only screen where you're like only hitting in like three letter abbreviations and you're like like, oh,

yeah, that's you know, that's it's been ID number us. You know three six, five nine four or five six seven eight. Yeah, we've got three of those in stock gets in the back. Look at one of those four. You're like, I want like that sort of raw data. But they're just like typing in rock band as one word and me standing,

no, it takes two of these people. And then when when when you guys says typing rock band two words, and it's like just walk bad yeah, and like the first page come up and it's just the games doesn't even go on to the next page goes no, we don't have it must be discontinued. Are these teenagers no, these are these are grown men, and just I was just infuriated by like, so your assumption is from from you badly using your own company's website is oh that thing must be discontinued because

I couldn't find it on the first page. Yes, as far as walk, I'm like, I wasn't even gonna fight the issue. I was like, okay, you don't want to sell anything, great, I'm yeah, I'm like, yeah, I'm done. I'm not. You didn't even point it out. No, that's awesome. No, I'm like, yeah, okay, No, I didn't need anything from you today. Wow. So then I went to the game stop, where where I found the keyboard was even ten dollars cheaper than I could have gotten it at Amazon. How much

forty it was? It was sixty nine on Amazon and it was fifty nine at the game stop. So the copy just the keyboard. So I'm like, fucking bonus getting a cheaper in store. Let's do this. And then the dude recognized me and was super cool about it. So it was just like this is Wow, that's a it's a win uh winning winning play winning hand by a game stop in that case. Yeah, just like we had it cheaper. Dude knew who I was. Wow. And I didn't even

go into that game Stop after them. So yeah, mark mark on the board for fucking game Stop. I know I shot on them and the retail experience that I get from them pretty often. Wow. But I'm man enough to give one to games So I will say they had it cheaper. They had it, although I would have I would have I would have torn that store apart if they didn't have it. Should you should have asked the guy to use his website just to test the skills if they hadn't. That's the

thing that's I think. That's thing is I think they have like real computers back there. I think they can actually look shit up and not just google themselves gonna go to best Buy's website. Sometimes, you know, you don't take any kind of solace in the fact that you were witnessing the death of

brick and mortar stores. Well just kind of maybe realized. Because I was also over the weekend, I also wanted to to watch all of the screen movies to get ready for four, which I then also went so I had, I know, so I had to Screams one and three borrowed from from Matt Rory, but they had Netflix the second disc, so I'm like, shit, i gotta figure out how to get trying to find a DVD copy

of Scream two. It's not streaming, Uh no it is, which ended up being what I ended up doing was going through my Xbox and just streaming it. But I was sort of thinking, like I realized, like if it's not a new release, like where do you buy a DVD's there's there's no place to go, yeah, like game Stock or you know, best Buy has a pretty meager DVD section at this tower. There's no tower that

tear that doesn't exist, Like there's you go. You go to Amazon if you want an old DVD because it's the only place that fucking still has them, which the for best Buy. It makes me using that kind of crazy of like if you're gonna bother having a physical place to get a thing, then you should have the things to get Like it's almost like it's almost like they're like, oh, well, no one's buying this older stuff from us, because they're buying all from Amazon, so we don't even need to stock.

It's like they they are agents in their own demise. It's like Blockbuster. Yeah, exactly, just pretending that the model isn't eroding their previous model and they don't have to change. But but it's a completely different culture as well. This is a big old tangent, right, but like it's I think it's different when we grew up in an age where you're like, shit, this store in like New York has copies of Scream one on like DVD.

I'm gonna buy this right now that that doesn't exist anymore, or like it has a copy of like you know, uh, Super Mario Brothers, like sealed in a box. Like that's crazy because there is no eBay, there is no Amazon. Uh, you have to find something physically, and like once you find that like crazy little store in your neighborhood or something. But those crazy little stores existed, existed the things, but they don't anymore,

like the good Will. But but it got to the point where it's like if I need something now, I literally can't go to a store and get it. They're all out of business. I was seeing the thing like, Okay, I hit the best Buy, they didn't have it. I tried going to the Borders, which is in the process of going out of business, and they didn't have it, So I'm like, Okay, where else do I go in this area? I'm just like, well, there's no all the video rental stores have closed down like that. It's it's a

it's a weird. It's like, as media rich as everything seems to be right now, actually trying to go and buy physical media is fucking kind of hard unless you're just doing it through a robot. I don't know why you buy physical and media when in this case is because he's just streamed it. In the end, Yeah, eventually I was like, all right, everyone, it's probably a lot cheaper. I'm gonna three bucks. It was like three bucks for the stream rental it was in you know, t APHD.

You won, that wouldn't have gotten any of that. And again, like I'm struggling. I'm trying to support this brick and mortar system and they're like, no, ditch it, no we're not. And I was actually kind of blown away also, like I feel like maybe this is another weird failing, kind of blown away that there was no reissue of those movies with screen coming out. Well, it's it's a tip. It's a typical thing. You put out a new movie you do, like you know, DVD and

Blu ray reissues of the old movies. Well, it seems like it's shame like because you couldn't get those movies on demand either, Like I thought at least i'd be able to do that and they didn't exist. Yeah, it seems like maybe a little bit they think that you want to get it after the fact. But they are available on like xboxes with the Zoom store, on I stream three through Amazon on that Roku. So so like that solution exists. Scrammed you know, that doesn't take up big box retailers, physical

stores, brick and mortar, and we just solve that mystery. The only thing good about brick and mortar places and big box retailers is they're usually next to like an Applebee's or maybe like a Burger King or something like that. And you're in a car already, So like that's that's that's not a good thing. That's pretty pretty much the only thing they got going for him. Like, you're out there, you're spending too much money already, might as

well just go to friday Is and get some yourself. Yeah, the teenagers just treating me like a piece of shit. Sticks my face. Split this blooming onion with myself. That's right, there's a right except now they put except now they put the caloric content on the menu on everything, So no, I know how much blooming onion they'll put it on any sort of major change thing, right, restaurant, Yeah, they've got to put like color. Go into a Go into a fast food place sometime. Go look up

at like the fucking value menu. I don't want to see you won't eat food ever again. Over time, it was empirically shown to make no difference, though they tested it in some markets and some fast food places on zero change in the buying patterns. Really, that's super interesting. I mean I was thinking about it talking to Jesse. We should, like she and I, we should make a site that charges food by calories of food and see if that, like a whopper would be like seventy blooming onion would be across

the men. Yeah, I think it's the worst. So like not necessarily dollar per calorie, but like, you know, how much how much does this cost you to feed you this many calories? I don't wonder if that would change, but I will say that that, like, even if it doesn't change buying patterns, it does increase overall shame. Yeah, you like it anyway. I can't believe I just bought like two thousand calories worth of saying, oh my god, prettier. A prettier word is awareness. But

yeah, well like I feel. But though it's it's both my shamplebees, it's it's shame speaking buy more. At that point, though, are like, well fuck it, I'm in anyway, pig. Just go ahead, get a second one, do it, Just keep piloting it in whatever. It's gotta be a human cap right, can only like just four thousand calories? Man, I tried to discover it this weekend. That's why you just never found it. Slick the lining of your body so you just can't actually

saturate anymore. Sidebar really enjoyed Scream four great, yep, because went and saw in a movie theater. Much better than two Dame three Nope, you know what, much better than two and three? And I was also a little prosdent. It was three. We turned that corner. Then Craven. So you want to hear something crazy. I don't know who in this room knows this. Wes Craven is seventy one. That's about right, it's not

that crazy. It's in the seventies. I mean, you know the first the first Nightmare on Elm Street, which was not his first horror movie, is like eighty three. Yeah. Yeahs that you just imagine as timeless, you know, like what's Craven's never going anywhere. He's just making bad somebody somebody. At some point, someone will just buy his name and keep putting out the movies. He has a son. His son's making bad movies too. His son. Did I saw a Craven name show up in the last

he did? He did the remake or did the sequel to the remake of The Hills Have Eyes? Oh? I heard the remake was pretty good. The remake was fantastic. Yeah, but that's ah right aha? Did Prana three D? Yeah? And Mirrors, which is not very good? Yeah, I heard that also, but The Hills and Eyes is a good remake. Should read more emails? Okay, email, I feel bad, We're like way past time and one email retail tangent yea or yeah, it's it's

it's relevant. It's we had some Grandma's cookies at the start of this podcast, and we know that they're expired. Uh, Michael m in Brooklyn, Hey, BombCast. I was looking at the cover of Portal two and couldn't find a published insignia anywhere. I know EA published their previous console releases. Is Valve self publishing all their physical media? Uh? Completely accurate. I think it was more of a distribution deal for the last couple, because it

is it. It's not part of the A partners. I don't know that for sure. When Valve first got involved with them, like for the Orange Box stuff, it was pre partners. Partners didn't exist. Well, actually, partners has been around for I think the modern incarnate and like the public

facing Carnation. That's what I mean that when they were acquiring like Bullfrog and dismantling those studios, like A partners existed, it just was wildly more like an internal I mean, I guess, you know, I guess their relationship with Criterion early on was probably a partner's type thing because they did not own

that. I don't I don't think. I don't think Valve's ever taken advantage of the full extent of the partner's experience, like the marketing or anything like that, which is I mean all I mean all partners is to its fullest extent, is basically a like developer publisher relationship where they don't acquire the developer or the ipsarily I mean maybe sometimes the IP. But I think what is the point is like Hea, he loves to buy studios on own everything.

Well, and that's why like MTV game Is partnered for rock Band, was because there was no reason for them, as an essentially small publisher, to acquire a distribution network. Right. So that's what I was going to say, that the rock Band thing was just like he was helping them distribute that stuff, but like MTV Games was technically the publisher, yes, of the rock Band stuff, And I want to say the Valve stuff is more like

probably pretty similar. Valve is handling much more of the operation itself. Yeah, yeah, is helping you just put stuff out anyway. I noticed that when Portal three sixty came in here. Yeah, there's no EA logo on that box anywhere, but nor when you start the game up. Yeah, but dude, I don't know. That's a good question. Good question. I know that I know that we were contacted by e APR at least once about that game. So they were they were, Yeah, they were a

very very like backseat kind of role. It seemed like they also did a lot of like the pr for Left for Dead. Yeah, they definitely definitely helped out with Left for Dead one and two quite a bit. So maybe just as Valve chooses to exercise it's right to use them right, Well, I mean they're they're clearly like airing further and further into making steam beyond everything,

And they made their own that portal TV add. Valve was gonna give it to someone else, so they decided to make it in house because they can make changes faster. They've built that TV add themselves. Really, Yeah, they knew that if they gave it to someone else in order to get changes to the you know, the company that would make that stuff, they would take too long to make the actual like real time changes that a company like that was. They just made the TV add themselves, all right.

Nextino comes in from Matt c Hey bomb Cast, my good friend and bomb Cast listeners. Sam got shot in the leg with a shotgun while wearing a Spider Man costume yesterday. Oh I'm so sorry. I understand. His prognosis is good, but he will have to undergo a bit of surgery and have some kind of recovery process. It would definitely lift his spirits. Snow that you're all aware of a situation and are pulling for him sincerest, thanks, So yeah, I don't think pulling for him is the prop is the best

line there, Paul. Oh God, and he sent me a link to a new story concerning us. I'm sorry. His name is Sam Sam, So Sam, assuming assuming this is non hoax. Uh, goddamn Sam, get better soon. Sorry that sounds real bad. I hope he's just like called a little stray buck or something that it wasn't like a the story. Yeah, the story here coming from and it's a bad and it's a backstory and NBC four I dot com so this is I believe the local NBC station

for somewhere. This is a new story about this is a new story about this event. So maybe we can find out why he was in a spider mans. No, it's it lays it out very plainly. A man is shot while Colombs, Ohio. A man is shot while filming a superhero movie in a Clintonville home yesterday Sunday evening. Sam Vesti, twenty three was wounded while a gun discharged Vesti costume to Spider Man was with two friends who frequently

make amateur superhero movies. Authority said medics responding to a home on the four hundred block bla blah blah blah. All right, so they were they were making that didn't know it was loaded? All right? That's I had to say, Sam, you're an idiot, but get better soon. Yeah, I'm gonna have to go with you. Don't fuck around with the loaded Casey may Age unknown was examining a shotgun that was being used as a prop the Three Fun The shotgun was not loaded. Maybe you should look in the chamber

and actually see. Yeah, that's that's a rough mistake to make. Ask someone that knows how to use a gun. Well, well, I'm sure these guys have been around guns. It sounds like if they're whipping them out. But like I'm gonna saying, after one y'all gets shot in the leg, I bet that they scale back the amount of gun play one would hope like in their project. That's real lucky Sam, I counter blessings on that one. He just got dinged in the leg, because no doubt, damn,

that's a checking out. No Spider Man movies worth that one. But there was a Paul hanging over each and every Spider Man production. Yea, spider Man, there's the curse spider Man. Spider Man, that's spider I mean, I've looked a couple of times. That's better to make sure it hasn't Spider Man on Broadway post spider Man two man, that new movie. Man. Have there been e worts from the new year first of the Spider Man get well and Sam? Yeah, watch those guns look him up.

Either way, don't play with that shit. It sell props. You just saw that orange tip off or something. I don't do that either. It just don't just don't Spider Man don't need guns. Bad guys don't need guns. Look around with guns. Come on? Yeah, in general, good idea. Play some video games for Christ's sakes for once. All right, that's it for the show. We've gone way too long, I call it. Patrick. Thank you for coming and joining us once again as always a

pleasure. Yeah, and uh hope the site stays up for your second week here news lose news is tough to do without a side, but you know it would always Google docs to the rescue. It was exciting today to look at the site and be like there's a bunch of new news shit on here because he was actually able to post it, yeah, instead of just like right up and then I guess the docs save the file and then that'll be so yeah. And uh, Brandon Vinny, Yeah, don't sell your orange

tip off Ryan. You're right, that's probably illegal. Yeah, I bet that it is very legal. Yeah, don't do anything that he says. Don't eat cheese unless you're around, don't be a cheese eater, don't take care of all Right, the show is over. Thank you guys for let's say We're back next Tuesday with the other dishes of the jad Bob