Hey everyone, it is Tuesday, September the fourteenth, twenty ten, and you are listening to the Giant bodcast Always Free All the Time. I am your host, Ryan Davis. I am joined by Vinnie Caravella. I was never not free, He's never not free. He's a free man. I don't even know what you guys were talking about, running around in a BioSuit with a crowbar. That's true. C. Seventeen. Jeff Christmans here as well. Hey, what's up. I'm back from my month long vacation.
How's it been. Jeff was commenting on the right end this morning that it just dawned on me just this morning that you're shaving off your mustache in the middle of the Big Live Live Show Live wasn't just a gag? And that you still don't have a mustache. I continue to continue I have. I've not shaved since then, though, So if I were to wait the month, it would be back, you know, to to that I miss it, state, I miss it. I still don't recognize myself when I look
in the mirror. Sometimes that's awesome. It' isn't that weird? Isn't that like that? That's strange? Like if I were to shave. Now, I don't know that I or any of us could deal with that. Yeah I could, I could deal with it. I don't know. It's weird. Yeah, it's weird. I don't like my upper lip anymore. I like uh, I like having shaved. Yeah, it was the right moved. This is way better. Oh I'm hot. You did? You stripped off of air already? Only one more to go? That's right? Just
video are you doing? Uh? Still recovering? Man, it's a last coup range new world we are in where it is I have to find something that gets stressed over. We got rid of the thing that you've been stressing over. Yeah, we did most part. Yeah, we did it so well. The primary let's say, yeah, big live, live show, live in the can happened last thursday. Yep. We did the whole show in the bathroom in a well. I never I never got up. You don't know what was going on underneath that. As soon as you got up,
we all knew a huge secret. I had said that I wanted a hole cut in it, and I assumed that that had happened. But pooped the chair. I pooped the chair. It's okay, that's that's what your membership is buying us. Is why we were like steam cleaning for that chair. Do you want to get up and take Nope, no, no, don't want to get it up. I'm gonna be right here. I'm good right here here. Someone bring me a small glass of water. Not much
more prudes. Also, the dried fruit spread was incredible during the big live live show just apricots and I didn't see goes. I saw a table with like a devastated kind of post apocalyptus spread. I saw that too about halfway through the day, but I was I was amped up so much, like I don't eating now, it's not gonna help me. I did grab a half sandwich at some point in the middle of that. Yeah, Joey made
me yea, I have a sandwich, and that was good. It was enough to make me realize that I should probably eat somewhere, not enough to actually do anything meaning meaningful. Forteaded shirt. Everyone was well prepared when the drinking started. Yeah. Yeah, in retrospect, maybe should have tried to lay down some sort of base that day, but living off of coffee and adrenaline. It was funny setting up that camera because I went from really like, no, this would be a fun idea. Upstairs came yeah, and
it'll be a fun idea to checking in on. About an hour later, be like I need I think I need to turn the saw. You should probably go get that. This is for me. I kept looking over at it to make sure it was still there. Yeah, wait is there. There were a couple of things that on paper turned out differently in practice, Like there was that T shirt tent was supposed to be inside with the camera.
On paper, there was a T shirt bench or something, and yeah, there was supposed to be somebody manning the camera, like sitting down next to it, like I think one of our one of the people kind of doing the party stuff, one of our employees. We're supposed to kind of be handing out T shirts and stuff. Yeah yeah, yeah, so so yeah some of them and then you know, people inside the office was not
supposed to happen like that. As I slowly turned around as it was picking up cables and dude taking pictures of our computers and like weird stuff going on, like yeah, like what who there was a bunch of people upstairs at the block party, But then I don't there were a bunch of people that somehow got downstairs. Everyone while hearing like banging on the door like somebody's trapped in to stairwell again, probably putt a note on there. Yeah. Well,
at a certain point, too many moving parts. At a certain point, no one could keep track of everything that was happening at once. It was there was a cluster fucking the bathroom just like dudes like all hanging out. And I've never seen that bathroom so packed really. Oh yeah, like just trying to sorting drugs back there with the hell're just waiting to go to the bathroom, like right here, just a bunch of bunch of a bunch of people in the bar. Crazy. I'm just a dot com guy looking
to do some bumps. Come on, man. But it looked like everybody was having a fun time, So I was excited for that. And watching really drunk girls like running around with like the tinkler. Is that what's called tinking? I don't know. Yeah, I guess that's talking about talking about putting on their boobs and stuff. And that's you know, follow that cable all the way to its end. Somebody threw up on the front step. Yeah that And meanwhile you're down here like rolling up like like why ending up
tables? I felt. I felt real bad because it was a rat's nest of cables. And then suddenly there were like fifty people and they were all gonna trip over them and die, and it all trip over them and die or just turn around. Somebody's just being wrapped up like kind of like with cables, and you know, it's one of those things where these cables are just running all around the office. At this point, there's a bunch of the bar, there's a bunch of in the back, but they're all connected
to something. So when you have like a you know, like a two hundred and fifty pound dude trip over a cable and connected to a fifty pound piece of equipment, like the first thing that's gonna go is that fifty pound piece of equipment's gonna hit the floor before he does. So it's like people are just gonna get more drunk as this goes on. Later on, Yeah, I should just get all this so worry. I felt pretty good about
not really drinking that night. I had like one drink because Adams showed up with that rum and all that there was to mix it with was sprite sorry, sprite and rum at the close of the show with the rest of your get up was very it was it was in line, yeah, it's in line with the doctor track shoot persona that was being trotted out that track suit will drink himself a spright and rum. But then that was pretty I like that and like abber and then that was it. So it was it was
interesting standing around just like like kind of deliriously tired. But that's about it, the watching everything happen around me, just going like what, I didn't drink anything, but I felt wasted. I just felt like totally exhausted.
Yeah. Yeah, I went up street side and ended up having drinks with a bunch of the Giant Bomb users that came out to the to the block party to represent and that was that was very cool just to get to, you know, meet like we've we've gotten to do a lot of that over the past two weeks between the block party and packs, so it was it
was cool to do some of that on our home turf. Yeah. A lot of fun and then also fun to drink in the street, right, I'm not gonna lie that walking into Grumpies and ordering some whiskey and then being like can I just take this and like yeah, just take it out to the street, just you know, try to make sure it comes back. Like the glass. Yeah, the glass. That wasn't part. I was like I'm just going out with like yeah, this right, you know, a glass, not just a card where we were like a class yeah,
like proper bar glass. So that was those were highlights. Apparently we drank the bar dry down here too, like I do remember coming in. I was it was near the start of it, looking at all the cables and stuff, being like all right, I need to clean this up, and somebody being like man, we got like seventeen bottles of bullet and like, you know, one hundred and fifty bottles of this, and I was like, oh, wow, good, we're stopped. And then coming back at
the end of the night like where's that. I'm gonna get a drink. That stuff was all we're done, We're all out, and then looking at the shelf just like wow, explains a lot. I get it now. There were a bunch of people down here, like because rock Band three was still set up down here too, people were playing that and I was like, man, someone's gonna like steal that or like something like something terrible is gonna happen. Like I'm just looking at all this stuff and you're like winding
up cables. I'm like, that's probably the best. Okay, that's good. Like should I pack up rock bands go find Drake and like we gotta but I think he's he said that he just put Norm in charge it, so yeah, I said, normal, fine, it's fine. Norman was looking for a guitar. That was he was looking for a guitar, and I think I told you this story right. He came over and I was still wrapping up, So okay, if I come, if I borrow one
of your office guitars for the back over there. I was like that, it's perfectly fine, Norman, and that's you know, just we'll just say that, you know, when it comes back end of the night, if it's broken or missing, like Norman chanbard the guitar, it's his responsibility forget it, no deal. Yeah, what he weighed the odds like he's coming. He tried to get onto the ask me, ask guitar for this.
But as far as I know, nothing has gone missing. There's some stuff that I can't find, but I think it's some of the stuff we couldn't find before, the supplies and just odd things that would walk away, like oh, I'm pirate power supply for a MacBook like that that doesn't really seem Yeah, maybe cheap again though we were missing the before the Big Live Live No, we had it. But it could be anyone who knows. It could be in my desk, right, it could be under the stack of
clothes that are accumulated at my desk at this point. It could be in the top of the toilet tank. You just told it. Yeah, there is like a technical upper decker, an e decker. Yeah, I'm no surprised. I don't want to talk too much about the Big Live Live show Live for too longs. No longer because we did it. We did it, and you can just go to the Justin No. This is our post mortem. What could have gone better? What? Well? I'm just I'm
surprised to stress. I'm really happy to stream set up for eleven hours like it didn't cut out, didn't. Yeah, we have you know, we have it set up so that we get automatic reports whenever a stream ends from Justin TV. So like Jeff, when you were down at Black Ops. Yeah, and your thing was constantly going out. I had about five hundreds.
Yeah. I would hit the button and it would go for like a second and it's like nope, died, okay, okay for this point five seconds you had three people watching like, yeah, great, so promps to that happened too, man. I just yeah, uh oh yeah that was for me. It was we were taking the boat in this morning, and I think it might be the first time we took the boat in in about
two weeks, at least two weeks. Yeah, And it's like the last couple of weeks felt like like at that moment felt like none of it had ever happened, Like none of it felt real anymore. It was like, here I am back on the boat wearing pants. We did all that stuff. Run my businessmen back, just back to back to the schedule. I had a real bummer this morning. I woke up. I could have sworn was Friday. I was like, I was just making through today. I'll have the weekend ago and I was like, oh, wait, no,
that's all right. Wait it's the opposite. Yeah, that's day's Monday, isn't it. Oh. I went to bed at nine thirty last night. That is fucked I woke up, I woke up and hurt everywhere. Man, this was I needed this, but man it's bad. Uh. But here we are, got a budge of new toys and have hot new ship that we can do crazy videos with no pressure, no diamonds. That's right,
no pressure, no diamonds. Yeah. Awesome that we made it through it, and awesome that we got the five thousand members that that we had set and oh yeah, I'm really excited about that. I'm glad, I'm glad we're where we are right now. Absolutely absolutely, it's very exciting. And we thank all of you for for supporting us and uh and you know, helping make this happen. So yeah, So in lieu of the of doing the podcast stuff, there's a couple of things we're gonna do, ye
eh podcast this is in high five for those surround sound five. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna lie to you guys like I've wanted to do like a stereo separated like high bit rate for it, because you know, we put this out at like sixty four K because you know, so let's do it in five point one and we each get a channel. I will totally I will totally want We're left, were left, you know you're gonna be here right were center center. I'm gonna put my channel. I'm just gonna be
the point one. I'm just gonna be all subs solo. Is that the connection they those guys are awesome. Didn't when the guys die over the weekend? Yeah? That was awesome? Timely? Oh that's right, topic left? Uh so yeah, okay, So aside from that stupid idea, which I think it's great. Oh, we'll see. But Jeff, Jeff, what what new features are? We're gonna be setting up some private game servers
for PC players. Will and I started talking about that this morning, thinking like like we'd probably set up like a t F two server like West Coast, East Coast and Europe or something like that, cool, and then figure out what we want to do. They announced the black Ops server stuff today, So when that launches, I imagine we'd probably do something like that and we'll just be like password protected and we'll have to rotate the pasword pretty often.
Uh and and and that sort of stuff. And also uh, no ETA on it. But we are going to do RSS feeds for video downloads. So one of the one of the membership features you get is downloadable HD videos or you know, and we offer the videos and like, I guess, was it four different formats now now we offer it, yes, four different formats. So, uh, we're gonna do RSS feeds for those of you that just want everything, as well as another feed for those of you
that want everything except for trailers. So if you just want the stuff we're doing and not not video game trailers, uh, you'll be able to get that Giant Bomb original contests, Giant Bomb originals or or originals plus trailers basically or Whiskey Media, right yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah that way. If you have a watch folder setup that you know, your PS three can see or something like that, your theoretically build watch stuff on your TV. That's cool. How do I get that? Uh? That's that's in the
works. That is literally that is like Spitta is this morning. That was me on Friday, go, hey we should if we're going to do this, we should do this, and it's like okay, well yeah, if we're not going to put work into developing the technology to have password protected podcast stuff anymore, instead we will develop password protected video download stuff. I like
it. So uh that's that's the that's the idea. It'll take a little while for that to happen, you know, Koons, I think just started looking at that stuff today, So we will, we would get that together and I think we'll probably do it. So you can pick which format you want. So if you want the low for your PSP or something like that, or your telephone or something like that, subscribe to that. Subscribe to that and it'll dump it all in a folder and you can sink it or
do whatever it is you want to do with that. I'm working on a member handshake. It's coming. I haven't worked all the kinks out yet, but it does sound but your member hand handshake does sound you a little kinky. Yeah, So it's pretty cool and it's involved. So the next time you see me at packs or something, should should be ready. But you see Vinie Packs shake his member like, what do you what? God? I can't have been the only one think that's that's a that's our lifetime subscribers.
I'm sure as we think of stuff, I mean, that's kind of that's kind of the thing is. So we've we've rolled out here with our membership stuff kind of here's the here are the baseline features that we have, and we're thinking all the time. Yeah and yeah, it's we're thinking of cool new ship that we want to add to the main thing that we wanted to do out of the gate. The main thing I mean like two years ago is just like just no ads and I'm like, no, it needs
to have like actual like it needs to have something meaningful to it. So we have been talking back and forth about doing you know, membership stuff for for kind of a long time now, and it was really just a matter
of making sure that people are actually getting value. I think that's you know, like one of the reasons that led us to starting to think about the podcast is all right, you know, just just looking at like we like we said, you know that like a lot of time goes out the window when we do this stuff, and it's you know, we all enjoy doing it, but there's no there's there's not really any meaning for return on it
anymore that we wouldn't get out of a one hour one as well. Indeed, like like the video stuff we can track that we can we know a lot about the videos that you watch, and that's something that we know what you're wearing when you watch them. Yeah. Oh yeah, like that that camera goes both ways. Yeah. But yeah, so on the podcast stuff, it's just it's impossible to track, it's impossible to to sell to leverage
in some meaningful ways. And just to justify I mean, yeah, it's the hearts and minds thing, and like the thing that I got, like, I'm happy that we're at where we're at with with the podcast with you know, having to be free for everyone. But like after we threw that out there, I got a lot of responses from other podcast producers. Yeah, we're like fuck, yes, yeah, and and it's it's yeah, exactly, guys for taking this gamble because like we are losing a ton of
money in time producing this thing. It's you know, this is not something that we do. And I hope that, you know, even though we're not gonna end up going that route after all, I hope that a lot of people out there really do think about the content that they consume and how they get it and how the people that are making it are you know, are producing it and what they're going through to produce it. Because he's like, yeah, it's the podcast format from like a business perspective is like fucking
dead. Yeah, it's it doesn't produce anything for a business. Yeah, as if it's the only thing you produce, you know. And and a lot of people were like, oh, well, Leo Laporte totally does it. It's like yeah, but he also live streams all that stuff. He doesn't have like a ton of packs video to go, cut a review to wright, doesn't do anything else. Yeah, he's also like the core of his business. He also got like three decades of broadcast experience, leverage and
all that stuff. But he is also, like the example, it's a very different like the business he is running is very different than just about any other business. And how many people does he have to support? I mean maybe I don't really I don't. I don't really know. Fifteen I've I mean it can't be a thousand. I mean yeah, we can't. I would actually be the twit cottage holds a thousand people. Here all right, online, Leo, how are you doing? Hey? If it is first
off, ca, I can't hear you. Sorry, turn it up here. Sorry Skype crashed. We'll forget again too. Gents. Let's talk about video games, all right? How do you feel about that video? What gams legs, video legs, gams, let me see them games. I'm sure like most of you finally played some goddamn games this weekend. I feel like again between packs and running up for the show, like not not necessarily a lot of time for that. So Vinny, yes, where are you
playing this weekend? Out of the big list of things I could have played, which included A Dark Void, Final Fantasy thirteen, Salmon Max, Dead Riseing Keys zero, a whole bunch of stuff that depend just a stack of start I have, I reached for the yep. Uh huh. I played Reach get a Halo now I get Yeah. I went in for some Halo Reach because I thought that would probably there's a toss up between that and dark Wood, but I figured Halo should be the most timely, maybe a little
more top Yeah. Uh and uh so here are my Halo Reach, Halo Reach single player. It was like, okay, so the single player. Yeah. I started off on Haruic and figured that would be the smart choice. I think that's what I played the rest of them on. And it's got that little texture and another says, this is how Halo is meant to be, Like they just write a front that guilt you into it. I'm like, all right, I want to play Halo how it's meant to be
played. It ain't no, you know, non Halo playing Halo player. Uh. And I think I think I hated it. I think I hated that part I was in it. I was in kind of a rough mood when I was playing it. I kind of had a kind of recovery weekend there. I just want to relax and play something, and uh, playing it on that difficulty with that level of patients at that point, right, was one of the most frustrating things I could I could have put myself through
at that point. You have played Halo before, Yeah, I played all three of them beat expect I'm pretty sure I beat all three of them on Legendary at some point. Uh, but that was like the Legendary Expert. Like when you go onto Legendary, I feel like you have to take it
like this is gonna be this is gonna be messed up. Yeah, this is gonna be super hard, And like there were things in Reach on Heroic that were happening that I felt were outside of my control like that, like, well, there's no way any player of any ability could have avoided this, couldn't could have turned this corner and knew that a fuel rod like was going to explode as soon as you turn this corner and kill you in one shot. Like that's there's nothing that you could have done about that. Uh.
And so I did not turn that corner. Yeah, never turned that corner. I just a uh. I found myself getting really frustrated and kind of wished that I had started on Normal. But now I can't do that. I just gotta it's gotta go through on Heroic. Man, could not, can't. Can't You could, but you can't. Pretty much it was done with it. I think there's ten missions. Yeah, it seems like it's not the longest campaign ever. I think it seems like it is totally
the exact Halo length. Really. Yeah, it's same as Halo three. Yeah, I don't know. I'm about halfway through it. I paged it like seven to twelve hours in the review, kind of adjusting for you know, people playing on Heroic or Normal and sucking or not sucking. Yeah, I've been sucking, So I've been. I probably played it a good seven
or eight hours yesterday. And yeah, man, so you're playing on Heroic brin, Yeah, and you're not finding it like frustrating leg There's definitely been a couple of points here and there where you hit that wall yeah, and you respond, you know, ten twelve times on one part. But I mean that's just like part and parcel with the Halo experience, at least on a heroic and legendary right. I don't know. I don't even come to the game looking for that, or like playing through ODST and Halo three on
Heroic. There's definitely parts where you're just like, this part is fucked. Yeah, Compared to other parts of the game, it's always ability seems really uneven in that sense where you're just like here's and maybe it'll be different for different players, but there's always gonna be like this. This one checkpoint is
especially messed up. But that's not by any means new and Reach, right, But I think I think the thing I think that it's, if anything, Reach seems a little more even handed in that there more of it is fucked right. Uh, Well, it seemed like there are parts in Reach where I felt this more than another Hilo and maybe I misremembering, like it's been a while since, like, oh, I kind of don't count ODST
because it was a slightly different experience. But it's been a while since I I didn't play the multiplayer in Halo games a lot, but it felt to me in the single player that if you didn't have the right weapon with you could really be in a pickle, Like if you're if you're when the Elites came through and you didn't have something that could penetrate shields or get through shields.
You can empty a full clip from your like even almost two full clips and never knocked through shields down because they're constantly generating, and you know, yeah, And I felt like you're sitting there with like a DMR or something like that, like I'm gonna head shot this guy's shield until the clip is
empty, and then it won't work. So like, if you find yourself in a situation where you don't have something that can get through those shields, you're in a real bind until you do, until you kill, until you look around for some grunts or something, or find a plasma rifle or something like that. And I don't remember that being such a big deal, and
I think it's probably because there are a lot more guys. It seemed like attacking you at once and reach than in one, two, and three, So I can't just get up and melee them because by the time I get close to them, I'm dead. Well, keep mind that, like Halo three was also like mostly brutes and stuff. Yeah, didn't have shields, And I actually really enjoyed fighting the brutes. I was telling Brad this earlier, where it's like, actually, every time in the brutes part, the
brute part comes up the brutes. Every time I'm fighting the brutes, I'm like, oh, this is fun. Like I'm enjoying this, like I can go through. Does this have just kind of a blend of all Covenant It definitely. There are sections where you're fighting like certain types of guys. Then it's like, oh, you're here are some brutes for a little while. Then it's back to you know, dudes with shields. But the elites are the elites are pretty freaking hard. They're like there's like eight different kinds
of elites. There's like with the Crazy Helmets those guys, and there's elites with swords. There's like the Golden Ones, there's the Zelots and they take like three or four melee hits, like like I can go up to on a pop them and uh they are elite. Yeah. No, I mean it makes it probably makes sense in the story and the fiction and everything, like these guys are really hard, like this is and they're steam rolling this plan. Yeah, this is why. Yeah. But like at some point
they steam rolled me and I was like, take the damn planet. I'm done. I know where this story is going. I'll be back and like a year or so with master Chief when we'll figure out man loading loading Halo to your point about getting stuck at a given checkpoint, like that's kind of one of the things Halo is always excelled at is encouraging you to do things differently when you're stuck right, Like, that's to me, that's kind of
what it has. It's always been just bashing my head against it. Really make it through for me, it's I know what you mean, Like I think they they I totally see why you would play it that way, Jeff, But I feel like there's something about the battlefield layout in a Halo game, but they have them broad It seems like very rarely are you in the super tight chord, but it's something that Halo has over like the Critical Path school of like design where it's like one corridor you can run through, like
Halo gives you multiple paths outside of like Halo one, almost like a library. Yeah sure, but but even Halo one had plenty of wide open space. Yeah right, But it's also but it's also the way is that the enemy AI will tackle the terrain that it's given and like the distribution of the weapons, like there's always some other option you can you can employ against. For me, that option and it ends up being an option that I took, like later on in Reach was just like I'm just gonna go yeah and
just not stop. Yeah, you talked about some points, You're just like, I don't need to kill everybody. I'm not getting experienced for these dudes, and if I can get around them commendations. I mean, there are a lot of like meta activities in the game that you're contributing toward as you play the game. Yeah, but if I run past twenty of them, I mean, I'll just go play a bunch of firefight later or some co op or something. You know. It's it's it's not the end of the
world. So what happened to me in that game. I think that this is This is a really great campaign as far as Halo games go. Story wise, the story is really interesting. I mean, obviously you know the whole like, hey, you know how it ends from the beginning, you know, like that's all true, but only on a grand scale. You
know. You get that kind of micro level view of the events through this game from characters you don't necessarily know a lot about, and uh and it you know ties in really well and that stuff's all well done, but the pacing of the actual action I felt didn't match up with the pacing of the story. So like in the final act, you get to this point where you you know, like the story has kind of laid itself out, you
know where it goes from here. You see the hooks, you see where they're going to hang Halo onto those hooks, and you go like, all right, great. But then there's like two more missions of like and here's a mountain that you're running up and there's like two Shade turrets and like eighteen thousing dudes, aren't you Just like I just got to a point where it's just the basic combat of Halo. At that point, just it was no longer fun, Like I was just I was I was done with it.
So I had gotten to a point where I was just straight up running past So like for the last two missions of the game and right up until the end of the game, I was just running past as many fights as possible, Like I was giving myself like three or four lives or you know, three or four attempts to just run past before I was like, okay, I can't. I can't get past it. I'll probably just stop and kill some of these guys first. That's the same point I got it was,
you know, can I make it? I ended up being like disappointed with with because you know, that wasn't something that happened in ODST too much, and it definitely wasn't something that happened in Halo three. I mean you could play that way, but I felt compelled to finish the fight and and all that stuff in in Halo three and and also an ODST this one, Like by the end of it, I was like, dude, I get it.
It's Halo. Let's go, like I know exactly how the story ends from this point forward, like there's going to be like the way you're going to do it, well, well, there's actually a really nice surprise kind of near near the very end that I thought was pretty cool. But yeah, dude, I just I got to a point where I was straight up
done with that game, but there was still like two hours left. But did it not did it not have kind of like the crazy set piece stuff that That's the thing about kind of the end of of you know, the main Halo games for the most part is is they kind of culminate in Yeah, you're doing some some regular Halo kind of you know, first person shooting, but then also they'll throw in a crazy vehicle sequencer like, oh,
the planet's falling apart, you gotta get off of it. Yeah. I mean I'm only halfway through and I can even say, yeah, it's definitely got that stuff. It definitely has that stuff earlier in the game. Okay, yeah, oh wait, and there's stuff that happens at the end of the game that is different than stuff that has happened before. I want, I don't want specific should talk around it, for sure, but there's a
lot of Halo and that is stuff too. In a game that has a lot of Halo leading up to that point, you get to a point where you're like, all right, I've right, I have seen the standard Halo for too many hours. Now, Yeah, I mean, I don't know, I don't know how much more of it. Like at some point the game doesn't benefit from being as long as it is even Yeah, you know, like if they had tightened up the back third of the game, I think it would have been a better game, like pacing wise. I'm sorry,
go ahead, I was just gonna say. I mean, I still think they make some of the best first person shooter combat in the business. But but maybe, but maybe it does collapse under its own way. I mean, this is eventually you get to a point where you're like, I know how these weapons work, i know How'm gonna fight these fights, and I'm just gonna pump round some of these guys and and move my way forward like you thought those enemies. It's not like it's introducing new guys to you
at that point. It's it's just the same scenario that they've kind of been doing for for the last several hours. And basically, like the loop stops being fun, or at least it stopped being fun for me. Combat puzzle, Yes, you already solved it. Yeah, So it's just like I'm all right, I don't want to solve that puzzle anymore. I'm tired of that puzzle. I mean, I'm gonna run around these guys to the right
and do what I can to fight. I wonder if it's a bigger issue in the general sense that this is what the fifth Halo game in a decade. Yeah, it has essentially done the same thing, like it was kind of an offshoot, but this feels very much like an extension of him. Mean, it's it's kind of why I said in the review, like this is a great stopping point for Bungee both both because like, like on the multiplayer side, it's never been better, it's never had more options. They've
They've done some amazing stuff there. Uh there. I think they're the best in the world when it comes to multiplayer depth and options and that sort of stuff, and that everyone else could stand to learn a little more from them than they even have so far. But yeah, like you know how those weapons fire, You know what it does to the enemies that you've been fighting all along, Like, definitely you get it. So here's my question.
Do we feel like the new abilities stuff, the armor lock, the sprint, like has that changed how Halo feels that much in the single player and the multi either, like in your experience, like ended up being a really great facilitator for running past those fish. So it ended up almost encouraging that stuff like I get. So as a result, I ended up keeping sprint
for almost the entire game. There's some points where you need jet pack and some other stuff where you know you want to use like the stealth and some of the other options, but I never used armor lock through that entire I haven't figured out a way too effectively use over lock. There's there's a point in the campaign Jeff and I, Yeah, there is a point where, especially on Heroic and this is this is why this is a pid. This
pickup is right here. Typically it's not long enough for you to recharge your shields, but the guys, the enemies are not dumb enough to stand right next to you until it explodes. So you just you shield yourself for about five seconds. They're just standing there waiting for you stand their waiting for you
to unshield. And there are a couple of points later on in the campaign where I was a lot of it was me hiding behind a corner, cowering, and then like popping out and uh, but then they chuck grenades behind that corner, like while I was sitting there carrowing, So I would I would use it for those like random grenades who didn't have to run out of my cover and just let those grenades pop off and then sit there and wait
pretty much trying to you know, cheese the AI. So they would come out and then I would hit him with my ax or whatever I had, Uh turn the blacks. You know, they're awesome, you know that big, that brute. So I basically just wait for them they go and then come around the corner and problem. But they're pretty smart and they'll just lob grenades back there until you know, you stick your head out trying to flush
out there. There have been a couple of cool situations where like I used the sprint to flank guys more effectively for the hologram that I hated that part on the Night Mission that you were like raging about earlier with the two shade turrets on the hill, and now the part I'm talking about is like I'm sure there are more, guess what, there are more shade turrets. Shade turrets terrible. So I was using for that was there. I didn't even
see stuff on them. Yeah, I used stuff that whole mission on the night lovel and the turrets don't pick you up. That would have been nice, But but the hologram was effective there for like you know, you shoot a hologram out front, the Tato turrets will shoot at that, and you can kind of flank and snipe the guy in the holograms, the sort of thing that's really funny in multiplayer for about an hour, but then everyone figures
out, like so basically like holograms don't have names over their heads. So once you figure that out, and you're like, I'm never gonna shoot at a dude that doesn't they also just run a straight line, right yeah, yeah, but or they stand still or something like that. So but week one, Week one, it's there's the one map. It's like three stories
and and you know it's all kind of balconies overlooking the center area. So you end up just going up to level three then jumping and hitting Hologram, which gets him over the lip and so he falls down and runs and then you know, I was it was all sniper rifles in the match I was playing, and you just see the sniper shots. Just look and see where the shots are coming. Everyone just go pop pop pop, and just mow dudes down. But like by the end of that match, no one was
fucking falling for that. And it's like people already like, oh right, hologram. I want to start seeing like like hologram race meta games being played of like I'm just i'ma throw out my hologram and then see how long I can stay alive. Well, they did codify the race mode in this game, like it was something that people came up with as like a offshoot of
VIP before. Now it's a straight up separate game type. So they have the void the guy going chet boyd wow or actually says checkpoint reached, which I thought was unnecessary flagrant on your behalf bungee. So I didn't touch any of the multiplayer stuff yet, but that stuff, like Jeff said, I think looks it is the pro guitar of the Halo series at this point. You know, it is like everything the kitchen sink. It's like we can't
do anymore. I at least I don't know. It seems like all the others, So I think it's that's it's a perfect stopping point in multiple senses of the word. Like I feel like as far as campaign stuff goes, like they've they've maxed out, someone else needs to take a crack at it to kind of freshen it up or whatever. Well it's weird because they in
a sense did that a year ago. Yeah, Like I definitely kind of found myself missing some of those things that they tweaked last year, you know, the little hubworld and like the kind of the feeling of desolation and emptiness in the I think that worked for that game. Yeah, I mean, like really deplicate, like what the world of ODST was. It really was just linking together standard Halo missions, right, but at least it felt like
the story. The story was told in a unique way. I really enjoyed getting the audiologs audiogol like that game, and just like the way the custod the Custodian is that what it was? The main computer thing? Yeah, yeah, the way that the billboards were changing and stuff like that, just like all that really subtle stuff that was amazing. Like I like the Smoky Chair, Yeah, I mean it, but it like like it had a totally different Yeah, it felt like a different game. It didn't feel entirely
Halo, Like this feels like another campaign. Yeah, like this is that. This is yeah, this is the actual successor to Halo three, right for better for us, you know, but and then you know they've gone so off the deep end with multiplayer stuff in so many stuff like that stuff like for for somebody, I don't play that stuff really at all, and and as and as a result, like you're not gonna you're probably not gonna like it. But it even looking at that, I can see like,
do yeah, this looks awesome. Yeah, like all the tweaks and if anyone out there, like who likes Halo multiplayer, this is gonna be totally amazing for them. I think even the hold on a second here, guys, breaking news news. Dave Snyder, Hey, Dave Snyder, what's going on? Hey? Hi, what's what's what you? I've seen a lot of running back and forth and gesticulating outside the studio, what's going on? What's what's that? Guys know Mike Tatum by now he's he's the guy who
makes like random crazy calls the last minute. Huh. So I was just showing him I saw randomly on the final levels of Twitter account. Uh, There was a retweet of his that said, hey, you know, somebody asked him basically, would you show up on you know, John Palm if they asked you? And he actually responds to that, of course, why not? That's all right? There you go, so I iced, he confirmed, all right, let's get the broadcast. Thank you, Dave Snyder.
Of me talking to ice tea seven hours, I could speak for seven hours, but he could like a sprinkler. Indeed, you can catch that one in Jess, which is the Johnny V and Icy behind the screen, and we'll play a game of Johnny B or ice T feed them line all
right. You know, I don't think that game doesn't sound especially hard, except except that we give ice T the direction if we want you to sound like much like this impression of Johnny Johnny V as you possibly can, or his impression and also just and also just you know, lie a lots no, that was Johnny V. Sorry, right, well, I'm glad we interrupted. Whatever. What were we talking about? Multiplayer? It's pretty good,
I have, Jeff. I am envious of you because you are having the Halo multiplayer experience that I want, which is the pre release Halo. You well for what it's worth. Like when we got our disks here in the office on Friday, like the second game I got into like someone was shouting the the racial epithets you would expect online. Yeah, like I went and you did that guy and uh and I was playing with the guy today who had a gamer tag that should not be allowed. Yeah. Yeah,
I mean there are undertones there for sure. So it's already. But so they have this new thing and they're called psych Profile, and it's like you can you can go set it and you kind of set what you're looking for and you can pick whether you want players that are rowdy or polite, quiet or chatty. Like it's four different settings like lone wolf or team player. But are you saying this for yourself or like other people? You're setting those
for preferences like what who you would like? Right? But then like how are those how are those metrics being determined on a player by player? Am I saying? Like yeah, I think you're saying what you walk here? And then it's trying to Ma'm just gonna like mind to say that I'm quiet and polite, And then I thought be in the most racist asshole I know, Like that's so that's we'll see how it ends up. I feel I
feel like that those are troll tools. Yeah, but don't you want to just but maybe with like chatty or quiet, it'll actually determine how often you speak. But I would always just want to play with rowdy people because that's that's the online experience I associate with that game. So if oh, it's whether you you want to have fun or you want to win, that's the other one you hear the party, I'm here to have fun. I'm not sure. I'm not here to make friends or I am here. That's a
hilarious distinction to me. You can't have fun by winning, you know, considering the tone of voice Shelby's crazy faces outside, I don't know. Yeah, but considering the tone of voice you hear out of people who really care about winning, Yeah, those people don't sound like they're having any fun of all that garbled voice of getting mad at you because you're yeah, like the
guy who was swearing, you know, back on Friday. It was because people were picking safe havens instead of like Slayer pro or something like that. So we were all in words apparently for for not wanting to play. Yeah, we were all Naughty Dog. We were all uncharted, uncharted two in
stores now talking talking about the pre release experience. Yeah, I played a little bit of matchmaking with a couple of Bungee dudes that I know yesterday and even they swear yes they just too in one offensive term another but also watching you shoebox in the closet, right, So I played, We played like a couple of matches of like head hundred pro and one flag CTF that we're fairly strenuous, and then what a couple of the other Bungee guys joined the
party, and the one Bungee dude was already like he was just like they're already getting pretty good, like we gotta we have like a week left. Even they were acknowledging that as soon as the games out, like there goes they're fun. You know, Like that's just like we can't play this game and we can't play our own game after people have had it for about a week. I think that's that's the common like reviewer like our experience too.
I mean, there's definitely some people that are more into Halo and kind of stick with it, but basically I played, I played about two weeks of Halo a year, right, you know, when when coming out, right at the time's coming out, and then a week or so after it's out, and then it's like, okay, there's it's September, so there's like a bunch of other games I need to review and maybe I'll get back to
this next time they put out maps. But by then everyone has gotten has gotten so sharp and I've gotten so unsharp that it's just not fun anymore. So, I mean, the idea, it's unfortunate. The matchmaking for the coop is great, and then the firefights, like anything that's cooperative, I think I'm still in for, but the competitive firefights so good this time around too. Like ODST, it was like a neat idea that didn't work out, or like it wasn't fully fleshed yet. It wasn't fully fleshed out.
Now that you have all those crazy trait options and stuff that you had in Halo three multiplayer applied to Firefight, and you can go through matt though you can't play those custom games with match making. That's you have to find friends if you want to play. You're weird, Okay, your own sense,
which is kind of like the one like Final Frontier for them. I feel with with the way multiplayer is now is you know, they've got all these tools for people to make their own map variants and make their own game variants, you have to play them with friends. You have to invite people to
your games to get that stuff going. There's no like, hey, come play my game, which you know you wouldn't necessarily want to because people jumping into a random game, Oh you made it so you know, the blue team's invincible and the red team's not, and you always pick blue team. Nice way to go. But you know, if there was some way to get that going that didn't have to for they didn't force you to go to a message board or have friends, well they have. They have like a
map rotation or something like their own stuff. And I think that you know, along the way, as if people do end up creating popular game variants, I mean, they could very easily grab those and pull them into matchmaking, and at that point they'd be able to like say like we deemed this to be fair, we deemed this to be fun, uh, and and
go from there. But I guess it's it's it's a pity because there's a lot of stuff that I would, you know, like I would spend more time in Forge mode and and messing around with game variants and stuff if I knew that anyone would ever play it. But I know that everyone on my friends list who plays Halo has about four more days before they're like onto another game. So I don't want to be clear. This is these are not
real people problems whatever talking about. These are also like not like specified just to Halo. Sure, ye all multiplayer. It's just that the Halo bass is is larger and more passionate and fucking way better at Halo than most other you know, online multiplayer audiences. Well, you're right, but I feel like the pacing of Halo isn't duplicated across a lot of other shooters. That's
true. Like Modern Warfare two, it's it's it's a lot easier to be better at that game, I think, because it is it is less strategic and more I just have to be really good at pointing the gun at dudes and pulling this super reaction area. It's just like who can It's like, and you kill a guy who can pull what trigger and then right trigger faster than the other game. It's super twitch. So with that in mind, I mean your super twitch skills cross game a lot more easily than you know.
There there is a level of strategy to Halo, you know, the level of like I don't have the right weapon for this encounter. I need to switch weapons because this guy's a certain range. There's a lot more comboing weapons like this, Yeah, this weapon set with this one. But again it goes back to like when you're butting your head against a checkpoint, right, Like try a couple other different weapons and go left instead of right.
You know. Yeah, like when I when I started the campaign in this, I jacked the sensitivity way up because that's what I was used to from other stuff. Oh yeah, yeah. I ran to the very first engagement. I saw enemies and I pulled the left trigger and wasted a grenade immediately. It was like trying to aim at these guys. Yea, And as soon as I remember it, I was like, oh, yeah, you can't aim in this. And then I like scooted way forward on the couch
and got my face like the TV. That's I switched exactly that too. I didn't raise the sensitivity, yup. I didn't bumped it up like two notches or something like that. But it's just it's weird how every other shooter in the world has fallen into this other mold of what call of duty is doing. Like you know, you guys, you don't play a boxer. You don't put the melee on the left trigger, just go with Oh really,
I don't know what's crazy. I played a bunch of ODST or not a bunch, but I ended up playing couple of ODST firefights while I was writing the review for Reach, because I just wanted to just double check and make sure that, yeah, that firefight was not as good as this firefight, and and yeah, like the buttons by default are different. Melee is on a different button. Even by default between FUN and ODST is turned on is to turn on your edge enhancement and all that other stuff instead of like
left on the dpath like it is in Reach. Right, Oh that's interesting. Yeah, so it's like even that's like kind of different. So it was it was all weird. I mean your place boxer, right, Yeah, he and I both I had boxers. I don't know, it's a little less useful now because I want to say he was playing bumper jumper, you know, he might be South Paw. I don't know. No, I'm pretty sure he plays boxer and also but then yeah, sure I had I had to get on the going back to packs. I was on the
the Duke Nukeham Forever station that we all shared after Vinnie and Drew. After you inverted in, he kept playing, and then I got on. I'm like, ah, after you sprayed your filth all over it. It is the one option that you can change in the pause menu for that thing. It's true too, uninvert that they included that it's true looking for the you know, the white and black button on that three sixty controller to launch Mi
grainades. Those were gone. But it was weird. After like an hour of the campaign, I bumped these sensitivity back down to the default and I started getting a lot more methodical about the way I was playing, And it was almost like refreshing in a weird backwards kind of way, like after this many years of Halo, but all the other shooters are the other kind, right to go back to Halo. It was It's interesting that Halo has managed
to maintain these very specific qualities over the years, and it makes me wonder, like, beyond just the fiction, like uh, you know with kind of the passing of the torch with the Halo franchise, like what what is it that they can change? Like what's game at this point if you're talking about a Halo first person shooters had a sprint, could be like what like like what but at a certain point, like what what defines that game?
It seems is what it's not like the fact that it is. Yeah, you're right, and it's It's definitely made me think about kind of the origins of Halo and kind of where you know, I mean it feels the way that it feels like I think about make it for a concert? Right, So yeah, exactly, you go all the way back to Halo one. You think about like they're making this game for a dual joy like a dual
analog controller. That game had such weird beginnings. It It's like first it was an RTS that it was like a tribe style like like by the time they were tuning it for Xbox, let's say, right, but I was actually read about this some last night. Like the period of time between the Bungee acquisition and the release of that game was not enormous, like they pushed that out. It was originally coming to maxim it was. Yeah, it was like a sort of Tribes style, like large scale battlefield kind of stuff.
And then they got then I got bought, and then they poured it, and then they turned it into the first person shooter in like sixteen eighteen months, so like who knows for the console no less, which at that point, like console first person shooters were ship almost not existing. Golden. Golden was like the best example, right, yeah, yeah, I and
that was one of th things. There had been shooters since then, you know, prior to them, but like I feel like Halo was the first one that like really legitimized it for the modern Yeah, they said like here's how you can play a first person shooter on a console with these analog sticks, at least in terms of I mean, like like Golden I was probably the first one that said, like, you know, here's here's us taking advantage of console hard but that specifically, but Halo was the one that like
modernized it. And we're still working off gold and I was just sort of like like let's figure out how to make this work on this crazy controller, and it's like it's crazy and awesome that it works. Whereas Halo's like we are setting some standards, which here is a great like, here's how to give you a manageable number of weapons that you can juggle on a controller right
with with a button? Yeah, stuff like the two weapon thing. That's I have to assume that's because they were on a console and they could not have a row of buttons, you know, number keys for you to hit to get to each of your inven tory items. So it's like keep it simple, swap between two. Done. I have to wonder, like how much of that stuff is really born from from those mandates specifically of having and
it worked out on terrifically for them. Yeah, you know, they ended up making a game that I you know, you still had some PC purists, so that you know, you still do have some PC bursts that don't want to give up their mouse and keyboard. But go to the twenty first century, Gary Witta exactly. Uh, I'm not saying PC's are bad,
but adaptability is key. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know the Marquis, the Marquis Shooters are being primarily developed and sold for the three sixty at this point, Like it's just it's the way of things it's not ideal. No, no, I mean they're also making them for the PS three, but that's not an awe, that's a business reality. Wow. Like kill Zone's not terrible, no, it kills it's not terrible, but it's also
one game anyway. It's just weird to think back to the to Halo's roots and think about those decisions that they made back then and how they're still So you gotta figure like the pace of the game had to come out of some of that stuff, your movement speed, the drum and speed exactly, like even the feel of the aiming. Yeah, and it's only like it's only really relatively recently, you know, like like ODST and and now Reach that
have been like these games are slow. You know. It took First Call of Duty four, Yeah, you know, yeah, totally like those Modern Warfare that did it hold ass in those games? Yeah you do. Yeah, it's and you know, I don't know, for for my money, I think I'd still probably rather play Modern Warfare to multiplayer than than Reach, even even though I appreciate like all the options and stuff like that, like that twitch style, that faster style is definitely I don't know, I find
I find the Halo combat is a lot more dynamic like it. I like the goofy vehicles too, Like, yeah, the vehicles are cool. Like then I mean, I mean like the art style and stuff, but I mean just different stuff happen, way different stuff happens. But I'm also way better at more. But it's nothing but waiting for guys to pop up, pop their heads up and take a shot at you so you can shoot them
first. Yeah, but instead this is like everyone always just picks Slayer DMRs or Slayer Pro and you both start shooting at the exact same time and whoops you. Like, there's been multiple cases in Reach already and I've been playing it for three days where we are both killing each other simultaneous, sure, me and the other guy, because we're both just sitting there hammering the trigger kind of moving back and forth, and no one's missing because it's not that
hard to hit. You. You're talking about multiplayer, I'm talking about campaign, Okay, yeah, yeah, I'm not even talking about to have fun. That's that's entirely I mean super short, Like it's crazy, like the Halo campaign and the the Call of Duty campaign are like could not be more opposite. A totally totalist point. But like, for my money, I think Halo is way more replayable because I totally is guaranteed to happen very differently on Plus, like all the way they integrate the co op stuff, like
the Halo campaign is is far and away superior. Right, I'll probably end up going through Reach like three times. Yeah, crazy, you're gonna go through it through on legendary by yourself. I don't know. She started trying to do that over the weekend, Like I wasn't really having fun playing heroic by myself. The achievement in question is finish the whole game on a legendary by yourself. Oh well, yeah, thank you. Yeah yeah. After doing most of that heroic stuff, it'll be a while before I go back
and try a legendary try with co op. Yeah, like legendary co op, Like that's that's kind of The three of us are kind of into it, Like maybe we should just find it fourth and do it, like I don't like to see the scaling on it too, and see if it is that bat shit and sane. I think that's the ideal campaign path for Halo is go through by yourself on heroic and then get through other people and play
Legendary. Yeah, it's it's unfortunate that they have the achievement for play Legendary alone, because it's gonna inspire a lot of people to do something that's no fun and also probably does skip four player co op on Legendary because yeah, is it four players and assume that the checkpoint is the same where like if three people die, the one person just has to clear out the zone and then everybody just well there's a skull that you can turn on that'll make it
like if an if as soon as one person dies, you check when you go back. Oh no, really, I thought I thought it was time. I thought it was time to respond. I played two players on Legendary yesterday. Yea, yeah, maybe you're right. I think you're just spawing on top of the other players. Oh that's that, But I think the other player has to have cleared out the area, like if there are enemies nearby, you won't spawn right Otherwise it seems too I swear I was just
really stagger the deaths. You can just plow your right through just kind of. I might be wrong. I'm pretty sure that's going boom anything else. Vinny was reached. Your weekend reach was my weekend didn't get around the reach. You know what I'm saying. I do read between the lines on that one. Yeah, that was it. Uh so none of the didn't get to finish up Salmon Max. No. I was bummed because, dude, there's I know how this happened, but there's a stack of stuff. I
thought it went from like zero to like five games. Oh no, I have to have zero. I really need to finish that. That game comes out mid September. Yeah, I know, I guess, so, I guess we're in. We're in it. It's kind of crazy that Halo was like kicking off that season this time. I think Madden kind of kicked it off again this year. I mean it's always like Spider Man came out, like the stuff's been coming out. It's always the stuff that we haven't necessarily
been super hot on. Uh yeah, I mean, Madden's always kind of the start of the season. But this is this is the first kind of really the first make game. Fantasy Star Portable Comes two comes out this week, so that's really the marks the return of the game. I resentd my earlier comments then and then the Dead Rising two is when the month, like next week or week after the two weeks from today. Jeff Gerstman, Hello, So you obviously from our our runtime on this, you've played some Halo
Reached recently. Yes, you played a little bit of O Dust as well. Yeah, how did that? How did that compare? Were playing like just multiplayerity did? I just played some firefights and messed around a little bit, and and the thing I noticed is like it's subtle, I guess if you haven't been playing it recently, but it's really is remarkable how much better Halo Reach looks than the past couple of Halo games, even though you see ods like the faces in that game look greats, just like what the hell
is going on? Like there's that campaign part early on in Reach where you find a woman and you know, like and these spartans are taking their helmets off, like all the damn times you're seeing their faces and stuff, like they put some work into making faces look good, but definitely they did not
do. Uh you look back and just like the I'm looking at like the character select screen for firefight and looking at like Nathan Phillion's character, and it's just like this blurries is like what the fuck, Like, what is that? Dude? It looks messed, just looks like pieces of meat. They were they were not good. It's it's amazing that there's only a year separating those those two games, because it looks like a lot more than that. Well, who knows. It's not to say that Odios looks bad. It's
just like, well there's a texture quality issue. Halo has had issue with faces for a long time. Yeah, I mean that's nothing new. Cinematics in general have never been their strongest department, that's true. Yeah, and still even in Reach, the frame rate is not optimized for cinematics, even though I feel like Reach has some of the best cinematics. There's that part
real early on where you're going in where you get to the building. It's like mission I guess probably like the second mission or something like that, where you're you're going into uh, like the Elite comes out of that. It's the Yeah, it's like, oh yeah, that was really weird. Thing was bad as it comes down to like a first person perspective and then you're just in it and go yeah, the gun and kind of like if that's
what this game is, then bring it all. Yeah, like like there's there's other cinematic stuff in that game that I feel super well done, but like the frame rate is jacked when they do that stuff, and then it has and then flash the white or black up like they always and they always hang on the white just a little longer than they should have. Yeh have to. It's so close to just being like just rolling right into it, and there's like it just kind of breaks the momentum just a little bit.
You start moving and you realize, now I'm still moving at Halo speed. So gonna cut scene in which master Chief is running, followed by gameplay in which master Chief and not run. Come on. Yeah. So I ended up writing that review Saturday afternoon, put it up Saturday night, and then played more of that multiplayer, played a bunch of single player Firefight score Attack Mode. Sure, I had to get that silver a commodation achievement. So
I've already up the same thing. Four hundred headshots in in firefight alone. Not's not counting campaign, it's not counting like actual matchmaking. The commendations are static, right, they do not get updated or they don't remove them at least, right. Yeah, the the challenges, the challenges are challenge. There's so much in there to do. The challenges to me seem a lot
like how Rock Band two had those challenge those like separate leaderboards. It basically seems like that where they'll they'll be able to dynamically update daily challenges and weekly challenges, and it'll be like, get seventy five kills in multiplayer matchmaking today, and so you'll just you'll get like a you'll get a credits bonus which you can then used to you know, so everything you do when the game gets you credits which you use to buy your armor pieces and it's all cosmetics,
just like strangely, it's strangely considering it does nothing for your game, right and in fact, it's the first person game you never see except for on menu screens. You almost never see your guy. Do you see him in the cut scenes of the single player and so it updates there. That's probably but that's probably the saddest part because you're probably gonna play through the campaign as soon as you get it when you have no credits to buy anything. Yeah, yeah, all right, fine, it sucks, yeah, but
it's really like the system. It's also if you're doing call up or whatever then like you'll see all this stuff on and all that stuff. I bought my silver visor color last night. Sounds expensive. It was thirty five. Yeah. I was thinking about saving up for blue, but blue is fifty thousand, and I was like, you know, not the two million for the like electricity thing whatever. Yeah. So those uh, some of those Bungee guys had unlocks that it's not possible to get at the really. Yeah,
they have one that's uh, there's no visor there. It's just a skull inside the helmet and the skulls on fire. Oh really, it's like a blue fire. It's crazy a ghost rider. Yeah. Basically, if you buy a Legendary you get a you get like a flaming recon helmet, which is what all the all the Bungee guys had in Halo three flame like on fire yeah yeah, actively burning. Wow. Yeah. So I believe
now everyone can get that if they buy the Legendary edition. Okay, I believe you unlock some stuff just for having you like played or maybe finished some previous Halo games too, Like within Reach you can see like what you've done in Halo three. Yeah you see, so there's like the hooks can you see what you've done in marathon? Uh No, if you go to their website, so they've they've been doing this for the past few games or whatever.
You can go to their website or they did for a Halo three anyway, you can turn on little icons that appear next to your name on scoreboards and stuff. This one has like ten of them. Like before, it's been like you can put the Bungee logo next to your name to say that you use our website, or you can put the little septic whatever the seven
thing here to show that you're down. But this one, it's like you can put if you've played Halo two on your Xbox Live account, you can put a little Halo two logo or Halo three, put Halo three logodst if you've played Halo one for the PC, this is where that comes in. There's a spot on their site to enter your CD key, and then you can use a little Halo one logo next to there, which I'm using because it seems like the rarest of them all. You know, if you've played
Marathon on Xbox Live Arcade, you can unlock one that way. Is there anything for having all of it? There's the one. There's one that you get for like a little helmet that you can get for having played like I believe four I'm sorry, I guess three of the previous Halo games. There's like the ones you can unlock if you if you have X number of them available, there's a solid can pick. Yeah icon No Halo Wars stuff,
really nothing, No Halo Wars, no Halo two PC. It's basically I mean they I believe they took in Halo one PC because Bungee themselves like worked on it or something. And also there's no way to track Halo one Xbox right one stuff. There was no no, no way that they could do pretty selective crew like basically we don't consider we didn't make it whatever. It's like, Halo Wars is the Sonic CD of the Halo, which you make
it the rarest of except for the part where Sonic CD is awesome. I was gonna say, you're talking about more just saying in that fucking the people that actually made the ship never want to acknowledge getting a real getting real Bungee five Vibe from Reach. Yeah, exc it's yes, exactly five. You get to play anything non Halo related played Spider Man. Oh, Spider Man
sat Shattered Dimensions. I don't like that game at all. Okay, that's fair, but well it's not entirely fair because I played it for about forty
five minutes total. But I went through the tutorial and really enjoyed the noir stuff that was in the tutorial and the rest of it seemed kind of And then went through the first level, which is a jungle level where you're kind of chasing Craven the whole time encountered like three different scripting bugs that stopped the action completely intoused it dudes clipping through stuff like, oh, just lack of
polish, like Jane. And on top of that, like it just maybe it's because I was coming off a game that is fairly cinematic, like played a bunch of Reach and then played a bunch of Spider Man. But it's
just like hittery bad. You know. It's like you're you're moving the camera with the right stick and the whole thing, like Spider Man never moves in a fluid fashion when you're just running and stopping and stuff like, it's all the animation looks very just look very stuttery and just kind of jacked up and none of the combat was fun. Swinging was kind of okay. But poor
Spider Man that game when he get his Batman on? Yeah, when does Spider Man get his arkhamis like there's been a million spider when they when they realized that the only thing people liked about this game was the noir stuff, and make a Spider Man noir game because that's basically a ghetto art asylum. Like the detective vision. Yeah, it has like basically has detective vision and basically has like pushed above a guy like or like hanging him upside down from
stuff and surrounded by Yeah, totally has all that stuff. Like it's they've made that, but not but not just yeah, just the overall the character treatment, because you know, there have there have been a lot of very exceptionally bad Batman games as well. Yeah, yeah, And I just you know, like I reached a point after I was playing it where I had to stop and go, like, do I just hate Spider Man the character because it's so so the opening the opening dimension is amazing Spider Man, and
it's Neil Patrick Harris doing the voice. It's stock spider Man, and every line out of his mouth is just some kind of smart alcay comment that is not particularly well done. At one point, uh, he says, CEO wouldn't want to be Wow. I was like, when is this like a Super Nintendo game? Because that's or And then I had to stop stop and thinking like is that a key defining characteristic of Spider Man now that he makes
like dated, dumb comments like that? Is that part of it? And then after that he was like there was something he said like I'm hitting you in the face, yo, like a very deliberately like drawn out way, as if to let you know that he knows that you know that it's hokey. And I'm like that, yeah, but uh it's so yeah. It's like, yes, it is the the the the smart even not the smarm, but the banter, right, That's that's key. There's some good banter.
Like there's one part where he comments that like, oh, Craven probably put a bunch of traps here in the jungle, I should probably be careful. And there's a trap right there that's just like a bunch of ropes going across and I walked right through it and explode it. And he just went, what did I just say? I thought, well, that was pretty well done. I mean, it's it's literally every other line it was just me just going, oh god, it's you know, it's it is defining,
I think. But it's also, I think a hard thing to pull off. I think a lot of Yeah. I think it's one of those things that reads better in a comic when he's like contorted in some weird position and punching eight dudes to face at once and letting off some little pithy thing like okay and that and that, it works. But when you actually have to hear him, right, and it's just like the whole tutorial is him
talking to Madame Webb. Is that a real character idea? It's some lady with a spider logo honor that can see through time or something, and he seems to know who she is, all right. Anyway, they go back and she's wearing a blindfold. I guess I should point out you didn't need
to anyway. So she's basically taking you through the two oriole and talking about although the tablet of order and chaos has been shattered over all that shit's made up, all right, Okay, well that's not real, okay, right, But every single thing that he says back to her makes me want to
just rip my ears off, like ah. And then so they go from like Him to Ultimate Spider Man, which is just black suit Spider Man, same voice, same everything, and it's like great, So two of the Spider Men in this game are unlistenable fantastic, and then at least like Spider Man twenty ninety nine, Spider Man Noir are like like totally and thematically totally differently like like yeah, well mechanically yeah, like a little bit, like
a little like different enough, like Noir is definitely the departure, uh, but the rest of them, like twenty ninety nine seems like it'll maybe a little more combat focused, and I guess, you know, I understand you'll be able to like fall through the fifth element, more skydiving stuff, that's
for sure. He was more aerobatic, Yeah, aerodynamic, aerodynamic, but just you know is it was one of those games that I was immediately thankful that I was not in the process of reviewing, because it meant that I got to stop playing it like I could just awesome. I'm totally gonna put this back in its box and then bring it to work and leave it there. I bought it with my own money. But you know what, I'm good, So we should do a quick look at that. But yeah,
I've been by that. I mean, you should do it and I'll sit there if you want. Yeah, well, I was saying, hand hand over the copy. I'll yeah, I'll take a look. But I thought Web of Shadows. I thought they were close with that one, like that that was a game that that had some great spiders, like the black red switch off that Yeah, that was wonder you could switch off on the fly.
Yeah. Yeah, I thought they did some cool stuff mechanically with I thought that was the one where they got like the city swinging the best. That was the last one shop which no longer. This one is different developer, Yeah, but they clearly also this one's beanox so like you know, Level two is just like a guitar Hero note Chark flying just spreadsheet from sticking
to our strengths. Next one's just a licensing contract. Yeah, like Web of Shadows had its still had its issues, but I felt like that was the closest that they got. I was man instead of just scrapping it all and making an entirely new game, because I feel like they keep doing that with Spider Man. Also, I feel like they don't they don't ever think to iterate. It's like they did Friend or Foe. You're a friend or foe. Yeah, I've got a saved game in the last level of that
game. I think that. I think that was the one I got the full thousand. Yeah, it's an easy full thousand. I've got like three hundred points locked up in like the last ninety minutes of that game. Yeah, just never finished. You bang that out, you'll get it. And
it's like that game was enjoyable enough. That's a dumb brawler. But then they did that and then that was it, and then they went on to Web of Shadows, and I'm like, okay, cool, and I thought, like this has this has potential, really you could you could do this again and you know, iterate on some of the stuff and make it better. But then it seems like they just ripped the fucking guts out and like left some of the combat system from Web of Shadow in uh in Shattered Dimensions.
But still it's weird because like those over it was a tray Arc game, right, which one wasn't was the last one? Or was Spider Man? But Tar did the movie Ones, okay, yeah, and friend or foe was someone else? All right anyway? And Shaba did a Web of Shadows. They are working their way down the Tony Hawks slash Guitar Hero U B teams with They are now the the Tony Hawks Slash Guitar Hero slash Spider Man B teams. I'm sure someone of Vicarious Visions is sweating right now.
It's like they're gonna call us up. I know I do not own right the activision Bacarious. I think, I think, I think that's about to expand into the Tony Hawks slash Guitar Hero slash Spider Man slash Call of Duty B teams of Guess what you guys are making a Call of Duty game now, be ready about two weeks. We want we want concept in six weeks. So let's do this. Shoot shoot guys, great done, greenlit. It's a war. It's a war, guys. You guys have nine months
you play us, three different guys. One dies, ship it. Somebody somebody reach did say that one of the background dudes did say center Mass when I a dude, Yeah, I did hear that. Do you know if they've got I guess some more fairly recognizable actors doing like like nameless roles again, but I'm not sure who elite. Asha Tyler does a voice every one. I think, I think is she in a past one? I don't think. I don't know. I did not hear David Cross. Oh yeah,
who's the David Cross at this game? There's there's no one. Yeah. At a couple of points, you are kind of recruiting regular marines to follow you around, and this time they list their names on the screen, and a lot of them. It's just like Ell Smith. He was like, okay, yeah, all right, bungee dudes are following me around. I appreciate, you know, I appreciate that they didn't just go and like let's get big lead named actors for all of the members of like the course,
like the Noble guys. Yeah, them are well, I can see. None of them are recognizable as like famous actors, but also be they don't seem like great. I think the voice acting is totally is really solid, really game. Yeah, there's not a ton of it from Noble team. Yeah, the lead like Noble one, it's not doesn't sound as nails, leaders accents or he's better than Nathan Phillion, Like, so I like I hated voice, I hated his character, everything about him, totally forget.
I don't even remember. Yeah, I think cat Cat is pretty good. Yeah, she's pretty good, U George. But that's that's even if it's like actually, like really those are the two that matter, like like they're the two that that they flesh out. I would say, especially because they have such small amounts of dialogue, that it would be easy for them to go and get some big name actor like half a day Bruce Willis is the leader, Scott Cohn is like, who do we know famous Halo Ludicrous
Scott con Ludicrous City. There you go, all right, No, I would that would actually be that would be too much of a get branch you maker house. How is your StarCraft two game? You're wearing your StarCraft two? Uh? Did your pre order shirts? Were supposed to bring that up? Your game stop Game stop StarCraft t shirt? Like to point out it says nuclear launch detected on the back. I would like to point out that on the right arm it says game stop. You can't see game I know
because it came to this office from Game Stops through my hand. They sent it to us. It's laundry week. Okay, all right, there's a week that's an acceptable reason. I'm pretty close hitting bottom toil, Like after packs wardrobe changes for the live show. That's when you start dipping into the game. Shirt's pretty hard. After a horrific losing streak in the early part of last week, I am in the upper half of my division of diamond
or still diamonds. He didn't slip back to platinum forty eighth place I was. I was hovering around seventieth. Uh last week. So have we figured out how many you are in a bracket? It's one hundred. Well, so, I mean leagues are Diamond, platinum, Gold is a league, and then there are divisions. There's divisions of each league that I'm sure that's why I meant I said bracket, I meant division. Yeah, so there's only there's only a hundred players per division. But you get mashed against anybody,
sure, any any division or league. But it's just weird because that that just means if they just go create new divisions for tears as needed, it makes all that stuff seem totally meaningless. Well I wouldn't say totally meaningless, but there is the theory that divisions created earlier are like more hardcore than or recent ones. I mean, I get it that you just need some sort of just like wedge of data to localize and provide some sort of like
small scale context for where you're at. Like try to crunch that those numbers for a like definitive global or even just you know, regional regional league like that. I can you can you resent it? Can you opt to like bop out into a different division or something, lose a whole bunch of times
and then just kind of place back in. Yeah, you'll I mean you'll eventually fall down the ladder yet, right, So once you're out of that division, that that group of one hundred dudes, if you pop into another one and then work your way back up, you might be a totally probably yeah, presumable you'd be placed into a different different division. Yeah, when
you just get sick of those guys. If it's a hundred dudes and you're playing a that's that's it's purely a data filtering mechanism where if you look at your ladder standing, here are the hundred people that you are, the ninety nine people that you are playing. And so if you're the top player in
your diamond division. Where do you go from there nowhere? Right at the moment nowhere, which is kind of limitation of actually go pro yes, exactly what you do, So that just seems yeah, I don't know, well, actually all that stuff just seems Centauri comes down in actually not even not even being at the top of time and qualifies you for that, Like still, I wouldn't remember that. I wanted to. I wanted to bring it up during news. But an exploit has been found. Heard, I heard
you watching a video. Yeah, you saw me over there. You're watching that jaw dropped? Yeah, so is it we assume it's it's a patch. So the debate, we can't wait for news. We had to talk about this now this is this is finally you are starting to see this. Is this a post rebalance things to post? That patch hasn't come out yet. That was really weird because usually they will drop the patch ye the notes at the same time. It was done, just still not out yet.
But I think there was enough unrest in the community that they were like, all right, we should we should message this a little bit. So what is this exploit? So this well, so that's the debate that's raging right now, at least was when I came in. Here was it is? Is this an exploit? Yeah? Like is this an exploit? Or is it just an unintended consequence of the mechanics? Is totally fair game. So basically, when your workers are mining minerals, okay, wants to watch them.
So I'm still with you, a probe, probe sev or drove just got no, just let everybody fall off the first one. I'll see, let's go. So I'm already thinking about ice tea. So your workers are mining minerals. If you watch the way they animate, like they will, there's the like mining animation as they're extracting the mineral, and then once they get it in their hands, there's like a half second pause before they turn
around and go back to your town hall. So if you hold shift so that you're command queuing, like okay, select a worker whole shift, Yeah yeah, right click the mineral patch. But then there's another worker function called like return, carry resources back or whatever. If you hold shift and command que alternate right click see right click see like as fast as you can, like a hundred times, it will queue all of those up and when you
issue that return command, there's not the half second pause. So like people have exploit and people have already crunched the numbers and you get about a seven percent boost to your economy by doing this. So are you saying the half second thing is like it it trying to do math and it's sad. What's in my next move or something? And if you just command it knows whatever reason, when you issue that return command, that doesn't have that pause.
It's just straight back. It doesn't have to calculate where it needs to do, which it knows. Yeah, which I'm sure they never discovered in their play. Say not an exploit, I don't think so. I think the level of because there's account. If you add up all the half seconds that you had to sit there and actually command queue it up, does it does
it break even like if you're sitting there taking time to something up. Well, part of the problem is that in the very early game and the first like ninety seconds, you're sitting there twiddling your thumbs making workers because there's nothing else to do. So you have to sit there queue and all those workers. And you know the argument is that it's going to throw off the balance of different factions because resources are used differently by the different factions early in the
game like that, So you're saying it doesn't work. It's not the same with like if you need, as say anything, they disappear into a gas structure to because I was gonna say, I don't know. That just seems like a level of micromanagement that is like I think you need to It's it's not like actual micromanagement. It's just you hammering on buttons for a while to like tell it what to do for those hundred moves or however many times you hit it, as opposed to letting it do what it does naturally. What
is the cue? Do you know? Like how many moves come? There is one. I've hit it before, but I'm not sure what it is. I never counted. It seems like it's something that you have to patch out just because it it creates this weird little like almost fucking ritualistic ceremony thing that you have to do just to stay competitive. That isn't that doesn't really add to the strategy in that game better, Like it's something anybody can learn to do, but it just it detracts kind of from the phone of the
game. But I just wonder if I wonder how hard that is, Like I wonder if that half second thing is actually like a logic step that doesn't always just take the same amount of time every time, or like can you isolate and then add that into the command Q stuff to be like I don't. We we average it out and it usually takes the drone a quarter of a second to figure out what it needs to do and then go on.
So now we've manually inserted that into the command Q stuff to like make it pause, because I feel like they can't get rid of it on the other end, on the automated end, if yeah, without having to rebalance everything for priests, or even if it's like literally like a logic step in the line of code that that thing I gather, Yeah, where's my nearest command
center? Like that's that's the half second or something. And then like, given the amount of play testing they do that it could very well be intentional. Yeah, who no, I have no idea, but man, but I mean, you guys are crazy, totally. I am. Yes, everybody's crazy. But again, it does it does throw off the faction balance because, like I said, certain factions will benefit more than others from this, So I think, yeah, I think they have to fix it.
But a lot of people I think it's great that out I I'm not that great. I could totally see somebody who has played, like even a moderate. There are endless YouTube videos out there of people who have just made sand Box maps and the editor just to test out like weird unibalance things like like how how do you x number of centuries fair? And why mutialisks when Guardian Shield is up? And all this stuff. It's just it's crazy. That's
awesome. Crazy. I mean you're you're basically counting frames like when you're like, I need to eliminate this turnaround animation. Yea, workers that's that's fucked up crazy, It's fucked up. That's why you know, I'm not really getting competitive and StarCraft two until this stuff has worked out, because I want to change my game to them, you know, I don't. Yeah, that's why I stopped playing Street Fighter until you know I can play as Union
Yang. Uh so there's like DLC characters they've eventually that's the the idea, but they're testing the Arcade version right now. Oh and they are in the current location test and there'll be more characters comments supposedly as many. I've heard as many as six. I don't know, or I don't know. I don't hopefully good one. I don't know. At some point that game stops benefiting from you just adding more characters. It's kind of got the good ones, right, Uh? You know, like, who else do you really
need in Street Fighter street Fighter? Who's in? Who's not in Street Fighter that you would like? Who's not in a game called Street Fighter that you would like to have? Any street Jared made a really good point that it's already really hard to practice for every single Like if you're trying to play seriously and want to practice every single matchup, it's hard to learn every single character and know how to play against them as it is. Yeah, and adding
more dudes to it only exacerbates that that much further. Who's the basketball kid, Sean? Yeah, one's in. Then I consider it ready to ship. Then that game is ready. I'm not concerning that game ready until they go out and do figure out whatever Lawyer and they need to do to put School de Mania in that the X games, if they own all those characters, because one of the other e X characters appeared in some other fighting game that Arica developed. Yeah, God, I love this about d Dark exactly
Dark c Jack. This is just make a versus game that is every other street Fighter character versus e X characters. That's like, dude, yes, street Fighter versus e X. Yeah, we are a separate thing and we're gonna hold down against lu pull them versus. That was the Persian Princess. Yeah right, yeah, I'm trying to trying to pull my e x X two plus alpha up in this. It's crazy spiky spin thing. I am scoll him any though, still Scolo dream dude, Ellis move and street Fighter
history. He was. He was pretty unique anything else, Brad, Yeah, yeah, who business Guns coming out? I played some of The Professor Layton and The Underwhelmed Future. That's the third US raised A Latent game out this past Sunday, number three hundred and seventy five in Japan. Yeah, coming over, they are going in order, right, Yeah, the Japanese release order is the We're just behind. Oh yeah, we're dramatically behind. I think they're almost on number five over there. All those games make me
realize is that they should call me Professor Latent. I know what that means, I don't know, more like Professor Lamington match sticks was the dog. So how is it? They must have been real proud of that first game they made, because they're still making that game. Well the second one, I'm not. I mean it sounded like the biggest shoe. I didn't didn't touch any of the second one, but it sounded like. The feedback that I heard about the second about Diabolical Box was that the you didn't have the
great memorable setting. The first one. Story was aimless in that game, like if you're on a train for a couple hours and then you're in the spread out this weird like underworld fantasy town, and like, yeah, it didn't seem to quite know what it was doing. But this one, the story seems a lot more focused than this one. It's all about time travel. You might have you might have, Oh, I thought it was about Needle Point all that too. That's really already a little bit of Macroma in
there. None of that time, No no Doc Brown, no cars. Although it's weird. I found myself finally, like three games into the series, I finally started questioning exactly what time period this series is supposed to be said in and what's he a doctor of anyways? And who's this little boy? Uh so I've decided it's basically Award. It's like this weird sort of stylized continental version of the present day. What I think, Well, they
do have automobile waiting. It takes place in the same place that like that is that is Japanese Europe. Yeah, basically Chronicles, Yeah kind of. That's that's because because they think, yeah, they think it's still World War two in Europe and also right, it's still weirdly jaws moving asshole like yeah, yeah, it's like any any number of popular anime that I can't think the names of, but you know, yeah, no, Drigging ball Z
Yeah, absolutely, that's one. Everyone's always screaming and their hairs on fire and the cars pop out of little capsules. That happens there, right, yeah, ta and crumpets and supersion. But Japanese you're calling it. But this one, like thirty minutes in the game, like thirty minutes into the game, like like a time machine has exploded and the Prime Minister is missing and you are in like like perplexing future London and trying to figure out what's
going on. So like Einstein tried to go machine in a coffee shop. Unfortunately, although I can't tell you that Granny Riddleton has gone on permanent vacation. Whoa, she's the one who stores the old riddles, right, she's on tour with Aerosmith. Yes, great dance she's dancing for yes, vacation. Does that mean she's dead? Oh? She like? You see her there, she's like, she's like, I'm done with this, that she was dead. You find the shack that she's always in and she's like,
I'm sick of this riddle collecting business. I'm gonna here this work, This will work without me. I'll see you later. I'm going on I'm going on a trip. Oh okay, he'll put it on that permanent vacation. No, she's just pieces gonna call out for you, delicious. But they did change the puzzle solving music this time, finally, because it just barely changed in the second one. But it's actually different this time. Cool. Do you think Layton still holds up? You think like that still good,
still charming, as long as the story is still good. But this seems to be so far. Yeah, and no match sticks that I've seen is is it. What's the kid's name? Luke is Luke's still trying to prove his worth the Layton and Layton still just throwing him like the Lamo puzzles, like stir a little more on equal footing now a little a little bit. See, I want to I want the game. I want the adolescent turn of Luke where I mean the game rebels starts out of people, professor,
how many bodies? Professor? How to kill them all without you knowing? Like where Luke student becomes the teacher. But Luke at the end of the game is the bad guy and he's like I did it off. Like the game starts out with you getting a letter from future grown up Luke and he's like, he's out there somewhere. Don't you gotta see your kids? They're they're they're horrible Marty something like that. Uh. For you, it's good.
Laton game good. If you like Laton, you want more Latan, you should play this Laton people do laden with late mid That's way better than Jeff. That's I think that's what you were trying to go for earlier. No, well you should have. Yeah, you're not. Do they do? They tie in the previous stuff like, is it, Oh, it's pretty standalone. I just like the last one, forget everything that happened. The last one was a little more connected. I mean again, I'm not
like ninety minutes into this one or something. But the last one had the girl from the first game showed up. Okay, so far this one seems like totally standalone kind of story. So Phoenix writing it forget it out cool? Anything else? Brad played the Dead Space too multiplayer. Yeah you did it? Oh? Hey? Also pac Man God, Jeff shit up and talking about fucking pac Man ex man. I should put that out there. What about me? Is pac Man bow? She doesn't have to do the
way she was addressed she was asking for. But the bow? What were we talking about? Talking about? Erata side? That game has bombs in it. I've seen a little. You guys played some. We saw it with they brought it by, we checked it out. I yeah, holy So it's pac Man Championship Edition d X Deluxe. Yes, but but I mean for all intensive purposes that is Japanese deluxe. This is this is like Championship Edition two, right, Yeah, but fucking crazier, Yeah, somehow
crazier. You know, in the first game, it was mostly just you know, you'd get some ghost combos and stuff. It's fast. Uh, this one maze is changing on the fly. So this one they put ghosts in the maze that are just static and like asleep, and when you go near them, they wake up and get pissed and chase you. And they directly chase you. They don't stop chasing you. They're not like, they don't go off and wander, they're not patterned. Once they're on you,
they're on you. They're like heat seekers. So also you've mentioned that there's like fifty of them, so that's the other thing is that they keep reappearing and you end up with this train of ghosts chasing you, and more ghosts are coming out of the ghost pen on top of that, and if they see you, they get angry and they fall in line with the rest of these ghosts chasing you. And then you pick up a power pellet and then turn around to eat like eighty fucking ghosts and it like boo, it just
like speeds up. You're just like railing through these ghosts. That sounds it is even you just you're just describing it is directly hitting the pleasure centers in. There's something intoxicating about that moment it starts speeding up, just like the eating just gets faster and faster and faster, and it rais point and also it raises the pitch on the ways that it's making every sympathetic buzz off of
it. Just thinking about it sounds fucking awesome. And also like, so when the ghosts get really close to you, the game slows down, it zooms in a little bit. Yeah, so it's like, you know, you gotta quickly dodge to avoid it, and you can drop a bomb and blow all the ghosts up. By the way, you have bombs. Who gave the pac Man bombs? Smartest person in the world. So if you end up in a situation where there's no escape and it zooms in, then you're like, well, I'm screwed. You hit the bomb, it blows
all the ghosts arounds you back into the box. The game speed like cuts in half and you lose a bunch of bonus. So you don't want, you know, you don't want to use the bombs. Yeah, but it's a good like emergency escape. So like watching it being played by someone who really know what they're doing. It almost seems like dying would be kind of hard, Like it seems like it could be really easy to stay alive. Well you'll run out of bombs, yeah, some some mode would give you
like infinite bombs or something. But it seems like even build up bombs pretty quickly. But even with like the first Championship edition, it it kind of wasn't about it didn't take along at least for me to not die. Yeah, it was like like how what sort of scores that? That's my point. I mean, these levels are all timed like that game was I think like five minutes was the max or something, just like a ten minute okay, but it's but it's yeah, ultimately it's not going to be like how
long can you live? Like last in the level, it's how many ghosts can you eat? What high scores can you can you post against your friends or whatever? It is. It's not defensive, it's offensive, and there's like there's a bunch of new mazes and stuff in it. Well there's like like a visual styles and like one pac Mania, so you can just change them like on the fly. One of them is like this weird sort of pointalism looking like kind of quasi pixel art having thing made out like everything's made
out dots. It's and there's crazy. I only heard some of the music in that that was really it's pretty good good and it's all like super like super overbright neon looking geometry wars kind of like out. You still have sparks from you know, when you're turning when I'm grinding, Yeah, when you're grinding. Uh. And I can't remember if we can say this, but aren't they saying ten bucks for that? Or they're they don't know. I think they're parting. I think they have not figured out first one was ten
bucks. The first one was ten bucks. Hopefully this one will be too, But I would pay fifteen dollars. Yeah, a shame. I'm just I know, I know, I'm just saying I want it real bad. Yeah, it's a dude, I think we can. It's out this year. They okay, radical, I think we can officially put our stamp of endorsements on that game. So yeah, dude, it looks so cool pac Man. Yeah yeah, getting all pumped up about pac Man. Yeah. So that led us to think about all the other like the the giant stable
of unused like artiade like where's dig Dug Champions? Where is like Mappy Where's Mappy X? Yeah, so that was it's like, yeah, where's where's Mappy CE? Where you're opening the microwave door or like the door that sends out the beam and like eating like a billion cats. You know, they've they've had pretty good luck with with the pac Man stuff, and uh, I guess you know, Tito's had some good luck with the we've been publishing
the title stuff here. It's just been Title Square bought title a while back, right, okay, but yeah, so like the Extreme and the Infinity Infinity Jean stuff, it seems like they've had good luck there. Yeah, that's Space Invaders, Yeah especially, I mean it was even was crap, but that was kind of like the one, yeah, the one misfire there, but like Infinity Gene was Infinity Gene was cool on iPhone and that's coming out this week way cooler on consoles. Oh yeah, yeah, well good.
I wasn't sure if that was gonna be one that would I've I've never played it, only they've retooled it just enough to to work better with that stuff. So pac Man, pac Man ce d X, don't forget to pac Man. Always be pac Man. Good luck half pac Man. Yes, happily, happily. I'm sorry, Brad. Before I derailed that train into pac Man town, we were you were about to talk about dead space to multi multiplayer. It has multiplayer, fantastic ghosts. I don't think we
can really follow anything after that. I also want to know about Man you guys. Do you guys played some move stuff on the Big Live show. I haven't seen I haven't seen any of that. I watched watched the demo, but first impressions that stuff seems fine. I've really only played Sports Champions. Still, at this point we have that and kung Fu Rider and very misleading name I pet. I think it's the start the party. He's the kung Fu that I don't like in that well, but it's not. It's
not. For one thing, it's Japanese. Should be karate writer if we're gonna be like like culturally accurate. So they're saying the games are racist, I'm saying that it's out of touch. I don't know that Slider was much better, though Slylider was the original title, not necessarily evocative on its own, but at least not misleading. Like, I feel like kung Fu writers. I thought it's hamburgers and it was not. I thought it was a
picture. I'm gonna say it's more about hamburgers than it is about kung fu. Kick stuff. While you're on there, you kick us. It's like you're a Japanese salary man or secretary yet anything like I don't know for for for whatever, it sounds like the sort of like new name they would come up within the PS one era of we need to sell this to people. It's called something in crazy Japanese over here, so we clearly need to come up with a real name for it. Yoki dokiki, panic time excellent.
Uh, no one wants to translate your racist gibberish ung kung Fu Yeah, kung Fu Rider. I think that game looks neat, but I just I
take it shoot the names anyway. Yeah. So I've really only played Sports Champions so far, and that just seems like I need to, like it's further, I need to get my home office set up because as it is right now, so basically they straight up say when you're booting it up, like you need eight feet of space, and that led to me standing on my bed Uh, playing ping pong bumping the move controllers into my ceiling. Uh, not an ideal experience at least at least they are soft. I
was not damaging anything other than scraping the crap off my ceiling. Yeah, it's the fidelity on that stuff I think is is is great. Uh when you compare it to like the Motion plus and that sort of stuff, the movement you just it feels like you're doing it. Yeah, it feels better. So you would say that it's still it feels better even then motion plus stuff. Yes, Okay, yeah I would, uh because because I mean the sports Champion thing is is like a pretty obvious that's the one that's like
most direct. It's like a ping pong paddle, and it's it's twisting with it. You know, it doesn't fall out of calibration like the Motion plus stuff seems to well also call automatically calibrating it. But I mean we sports resort, Yeah, yes, did that. That's true pretty similarly too, That's true a lot of that there archery. You know, it's like felt pretty good with two of the things. You're holding one up and drawing the
other one back. And yeah, I mean it's all really simple stuff like none of it, none of it so far is super mind blowing, but the tech works like that's that's I guess that the best thing to say about it is the first wave of I think for for both this end connect, it's got to just be kind of proof of concept stuff. Yeah. I think it's concerning that there isn't uh the killer abb the Yeah, the so called killer. Yeah, it's definitely like you're looking at the move stuff and
going like, why is anyone getting this? Like it's cool but it's not and there's good potential down the line. Yeah, there's, but there's nothing out of the gate. Well, actually you want you want some potential, you want something to realize some potential immediately use the XMB with it. Oh
really? Yeah? Is that cool? It's go, It's cool thought faster really, So basically like you're whenever you hold down the trigger on it, you are in control of moving menus, soger any kind of like video playback controls or anything like the I did not try actually playing video with it, so I can't say for sure, but that stuff seemed pretty good put into it. That's that's maybe the most SING want to try. I want to try Tumble. Also, I guess a demo for that is up on the
PlayStation store right now. It says block fault like objects fall and loganize them. I don't, I don't know. I don't try it, but it was something that looked it looked almost like trash panic or something, but Jenga or I don't know. I don't know. So while while I'm my gut and like this is totally uninformed, but I feel like the move over the connect stuff for fidelity of gameplay and stuff like that maybe might be more for
me. The connect at least you don't have to reach for another controller to take advantage of if you have a camera, you know, that could be the bummer, Like if you just want to navigate the XMB with that controller, I have to dig it out of a drawer because I never play motion games anymore. And like the connect stuff at least it will be there. But the stuff I've seen with the menu with the connect stuff doesn't seem like
it's super responsive. Yeah, maybe it doesn't seem like the way my future my one big bet right, like yeah, we really fun in the menus. Get that stuff to work, guys, because that is The other thing I think that people will eventually run into with the move stuff, is charging all that shit up. Is it a USB as well? Yeah, so it's the same type deal. So PS three's are now down to two USB ports. Yeah, so you'll have your dual Shock three at least one,
if not more. You'll have your wireless official USB headset theoretically, and you will have no more fun. Let's say, to move related things to plug in, whether they're two lawns or one in a sub controller, do they daisy chain together or there's a sub need a charge. Subs completely separate, it's all wireless. It's all wireless, okay, Like it doesn't connect to
the move control. So I already have a problem where uh, I don't like my PlayStation three controller is freably dead or close to it because when it's on, I'm playing it and I'm far away from the TV, and when I'm not playing it, it is all turned off and it's not charging. Keep I keep a separate and like my second controller is just plugged in. But also if you see, I have my camera and my headset plugged into
those two ports. So it's obviously the other thing. The other thing that you also have if you if you're going to do the move is the camera, so you have one free. There's no rear port, right, No, okay, if you have that Launch model, it's got four ports. Yes, I'm swimming in ports. I got that thing. But otherwise you're buying a hub or station. Plug it in your laptop or something. Yeah, yes, exactly like you that, like Microsoft, Sony is not a
bunch of jerks and let you charge on anything. You can charge three sixty controllers. You have not been able to do that. I totally. I have plugged my three sixty controller into the PS three into my laptop and all this stuff, and then light doesn't go. The only thing I could get a charge on besides the Xbox was my PC running Windows. That was what I plugged it into. So I don't know exactly I put it in my MacBook, No, dice put it in the so it needs to recognize the
device. Yes, I don't know, and but I but I have charged three sixty NPS three controllers on a three sixty simultaneously. The same was not three on charge off of anything USB, which is like we're good, which is the way it should be. Yeah, anyway, I'm sorry crossing the streams and bucks over about time someone took people to task for what you can
charge? What happens if you get a USB passed through cable then plug your three sixty into the p S three mm hmmm versus games with controllers hard to say, blow up and Mario shows up in second level of song to Hedgehog two, Will Norman here a little test jump on him and then like a million rings fall out of him. I bet you do bad things putting out their five volts. It's new you got noudalities. It's like people get you make you make Jack's get naked totally see Larcroft Boobs done. I need to
go. That's another game I need to finish. Is that Guardian? Yeah? Oh so seriously, like on with the dead Space multiplayer stuff, all right, because I actually kind of forgot everything already. Humans fighting necromorphs, right, Yes, that's what it is. So you play his neck remorphs, Yes, you do. It's four and four. There are five maps and to class based not on the human side so much. It was hard to tell because it was a very limited like we didn't get to pick load
outs or any of that. Stuff. We were just like sat down in front of stations and just played. But yeah, on the on the necromorps side, it is more class based. It's like Left for Dead, where there are very different kinds of necromorphs like this one can jump and grapple and do like melee. I was gonna say that seems like the point of reference for that game totally where it should be. It's probably like Left for Decoter just straight out of the gate. It was like, oh hey, it's
Left for Dead space Singularity. Is that the name of that game? It is that? That is the name of a video games They did that too. Yeah, yeah, was very very much crazy like but yeah, like the humans versus monster antagonists from the campaign thing is becoming like a pretty established concept. Also, we didn't knock it out of the park scooter. Yeah, good job. Yeah, always always a pleasure. Yeah, good to hear credit given where credits to do. I didn't want to take credit for
you what that's a good bit of business. No, No, I've good he's giving him. I'm giving him genuine props and I appreciate you giving credit. So yeah, on the necromar side, there's like there's that the crazy like a baby with the tentacles that can flaid on the whales. Is one of them. I can't remember the names. There's like a crazy as a lurker. One of them is a smoker. The smoker. There's no tape
which there is there is the equivalent of a steady oh man vermillion. They were only showing three of them, like one of them aid one of them climbs, walls and head. Did you get the shoot off to get the shoot off the limbs as the as a human, Yeah, like fighting a necromor and as a necromoft you continue to control it after a limb has been shot off. That's a good question. I couldn't really tell. I mean pretty much once you got a limb off, you're done anyway, Like that's
pretty much it. But flail flail around. It's a baby with a one claw something like that. Yeah. So the maps are all objective based. So the four humans are always trying to get to a place and do a thing. They alluring to bring back to your base. What is what is the flag in this game for a necromorph? Isn't it just like be a monster? Yeah, you're humans have objectives. The course they're just trying to
kill you. Okay, okay, okay. One of the one of the maps was you're like stuck in a mining facility and they're trying to kill you, so you need to like get this bomb to blow the entrance open so you can get out. So they're like there's a context of this, there's and the other one. The other one, you're on a ship that's been
overrun and you're trying to get to like the escape pods. Are they setting this and that like an actual story part of then, like here's what happened between dead Space one Dead Space to all this crazy they're just there, Okay, it's just like, yeah, it's not definitely not Yeah, the maps are not from either campaign. They're just made for multiplayers. Everybody playing as
an engineer are you just isaacs? They all look like isaacs. I don't know if there are different kinds of arm or you can get like that.
Again, I don't know if there are a glasses on the human side, but I mean there is progression like Call of Duty style, but you only have so in a match, you play humans and you play necromors every round at flip ups, right, so you're always playing both, but you only have one experience level, so as you rank up, you get new things for both sides per level, so there's not it's not like two experience levels
to manage or whatever. But is that all they were showing or is there like human on human that's it as far as I know, that's that's those objective maps are all there is, you know, So probably the most interesting thing I saw was that the necromorp spawn out of like specific like ventilation ducks or like little like access hatches. Like when you're when you're spawning, you're just got like a free camera that you fly around, and like these hatches
actually glow. It's like you got this like super orangey yeah, and like these little hatches like glows. You just point at one and hit the button and next thing, you know, like your thing is like crawling out of that hatch into the action. Do you get like monster vision? Is it? Is it anyway like once you're in the game, you're just good questions?
Yeah, No, it's it's to totally be like Walley. Yeah, yeah, like when you're spawling, it kind of does look like that, but like as you're playing, like but it's a third person's third person, so it wouldn't really make much sense to But I just thought it was cool that you can, like you kind of see where the action is localized and look for like a great hatch near their hatch, like closer there, and
you can just kind of like pop right off on top of them. So that was kind of cool cool, But I don't, you know, I don't know. I don't know how much it'll add to the longevity of the game. It looked like it would be fun for a couple of weeks maybe, But guys pac Man, Yeah, that's pretty cools bombs. But the ghosts are asleep. But then you blast by him. They're like, huh what, I'm gonna come get you. I'm ghost. I'm just off ghosts. Are they like, are they like off colored ghosts? They do?
They like differentiate those ghosts from like core ghosts things they do? Do we have it has like the ghost family expanded. Yeah, Mesmron has been working over time creating new types of ghosts. Oh yes, packan Championship Edition cartoons, cannon to those awful cartoons. Oh, they made that one episode of the pac Man cartoon free on Xbox Live. I still have it. Also, it's an full HDP. It's like a two gig file or something completely
stupid. I love the ghosts had to like change your clue and it's man, I love that. It is so bracingly bad. It is. It is no but I just just like flagrant quality control issues. Sure, it's hard to keep track all those different ghost colors, Okay, I was like, yeah, like all the ghosts are the same color in the scene or something. I'm just like, no one gave a ship, no one gave
half a ship. I was just like, make everything pack, make it eleven minutes and get through it. Korea, we need you to do this quickly. It worked for the Smurfs. Make this animation fast. It makes the Smurfs look incredible. It makes it makes the new Smurfs Live Action movie look incredible. Action. Yeah, you don't want to go looking out for who's playing Smurf at that's a c g I thing. Yeah, but you know what that means. What it means that there will be a pawn spin
a porn spinoff of Smurf Live Action movie. I think they're just like taking the Avatar porn spinoff. You're just titling it. Fine, yeah, it looks like but it's it's there's there's a trailer. Yeah, don't do not seek out this trailers. It's set in the city. It's records scratch and then like a bust a move starts playing or or wild things. All right, some late of the old medina you hold, Yes, could have been necessarily late nineties, but I get what I'm slate eighties is what I meant.
But yes, third eyeblines, seminal hits, semi charmed Life starts playing, and then the Smurfs are there, and then All Star by smash Mouths playing, and then Surf there and they're doing like a booty dance or something to it, and you're just like the Who Let the Dogs Out plays and then a dog is chasing Asriel up a tree and there's no like then record scratch, like eight record scratches, and then at some point the phrase smurf you, and then there's some get smurf, some hot dog vendor talking to
a Smurf with a misunderstanding. Yep, yep, we ain't gotten no smurf. Yeah you know what I'm I feel like we just wrote a really good Smurf moving. They don't show any of this in the trailer. I'm just saying, like, as far as the it's it's like the sound of a thousand record scratches playing over fucking Cole Medina. That's That's what they're trying to make, is it? And who's the who's the who's the live action guy? That's it? It's the only that's all the only one that I think
has been shown or they've talked. Piper Parabow is the girl. Who's like, who's the who's not? But I'm just saying I got all excited, dude, sick. I love the guy who played the human and Alvin and the Chipmunks who played Jason Lee. Yeah, so who's the Jason Lee of this? I don't know. Question. You know, you have to go find who wasn't to play the guy in the Garfield movies played John was there? Yeah? I think it was. Yeah, I think it was who
played the man in the Yeah Curious George movie. Every movie needs this, dude, Yeah, you're right, every man or girl. It could be a girl. Usually it's a guy and the Smurfs have to help him get the girl. So where is where's this? And then jokey, what are you doing jokey? They'll give him this CG gift that'll explode. I hate that I had anything to do with this conversation happening. Really bummed out about that. Now you go, fuckft Shifty Smurf helping the guy fix his car.
That's right, without him knowing. You have the power to stop this. We can save Manhattan because I spent my weekend getting my my DLC on and then the eats them. Oh man, I don't know. I thought you were gonna say something really dirty. Glad you didn't spend my weekend getting my I'm like, oh me, DLC downloadab downloadable? What did John tent? So? Yeah, I was just looking to realize, Like shit, I bought the signal for Alan Wake like a month ago and I haven't touched
that yet. And then all this talk about all this mass Effect two stuff, I'm like, I want to don't talk about I'm gonna go download some stuff and knock out some of this this DLC. So the first thing was fucking first and just busted through, uh or first got the last of my candles two in. I'm now done with candles two so just in time for the time for the past. They put on the patch that fixes the thing in the review. Oh yeah, although that stuff, I was never experiencing
any of that stuff. And multiplayer that was it seemed like it happened to me, and multiplayer didn't you're here and there, it was more frequent and single player. But yeah, I mean once it started happening for me, like it started becoming super noticeable. And the single player but I just don't know a weird problem. But hey, it's they've fixed. They fixed it, now you can, so it's everything else is still the same. Yep, so now it's it's it's it's yeah, it's the same. What else
did you play? Anyways? The signal which is that first DLC for did you blow through? Because it's kind of like it is pretty sure time there was one sitting pretty hard though, So it is, and that's not what Alan Wake DLC should be. It should not be as combat focused as that
was. They have atmosphere and story and the stuff. You're not wrong, But it also made me realize that I don't there's a lot about Allen Wake I really don't like, specifically the playing at part, Like I like looking at it, and I like the world that they've created, and I think the fiction in the tone uh is all a lot of fun, but just the like underlying combat and then like basically kind of just ginning up weird gameplay scenarios for you to go through with this combat. It more than anything in
the main game, the Signal felt like a game. It felt like, here are contrivances for a video games, a series of combat challenges. Basically, yeah, like they just threw a billion enemies at you. Yeah, and uh, and I didn't. I didn't love that. I will say that I appreciate it. At the beginning of it, they do their little like previously on Allen Wake explaining the end of the game to me, which is, ok yeah, now I get it. But then by the end of it, I'm like, Okay, I fucking again have no idea what's
going on. So so my copy of Allan Wake is still sealed. That's just passed me by dude, go PLAYEMP first touched that, but I played a bunch of that, or I played some of that and kind of didn't want to play anymore of it, and still kind of don't. I feel like you can you can find out what Allan Wake is in the first hour and if you like it, if you play the first hour, you might as well play the remaining seven. But like, the gameplay won't change.
I just know if you like it, or my time is valuable. How much do you value achievement points? Yeah, there's quite a few of those. Yeah, and most of them are pretty easy dangerous. Ever since I broke a hundred K, I don't value them like I used to. I'm just allan wake. Yeah, the signal and then they're little like cheek he fucking like Verizon thing that was in there. Fuck them. They did not
earn it, that's you know. They they were really really flagrant with the product placement throughout the full game, and then to like try and have a little like, oh, you know product placement, it's like, no, you you you do not have the right to do. That doesn't make it okay. Yeah. I was like, oh, well that's okay. That there was Energizer and Verizon bullshit all over the first game, and it's still even pretty flagrant in the DLC. It's like can you hear me? Now?
Fuck you? Fuck you that. Yeah. That that did not help. But after that things got so much better because I went and played the mass effect to DLC and Layer of I won't hear. So I played first. I played through Overlord, the older DLC pack. It's okay, you know, I kind of just like whatever combat scenarios, cool end, cool end, But I don't like the hover car stuff or whatever. It's no,
it's not as short as I wish that it was. Well, the problem is that it's not a huge It's not a huge piece of DLC already, and that ship felt like padding. It was like, oh, I spend you know, fifteen minutes here or that's you just have to get from like ten minutes here outpost the outpost, right, you just gotta you have to like hunt around for stuff in certain parts, and there's almost like platforming with the however vehicle, the other one fire walker or whatever. No,
oh there was you're right, there was more of that in that. Maybe maybe that's what I was thinking of, was the Kasumi. The problem is that I downloaded all this stuff at once, so I wasn't entirely clear like what DLC was responsible for which missions, because all when you get into the game, so I was just like, you got all these emails, you can go do this, this, this or this now and I'm like emails, I'm like, which no, although we are running boast dot com.
Yeah, anyways, Consuming I thought was okay, mostly because I think that she is a good character addition to that game, and they they do fun interesting Brad. I don't know if you played it, Yeah, play through the Consuming stuff. Like, I think she's interesting as a character. They have a like the voice actress for her. She's really it's really good. It's a shame. It's a shame they don't integrate those DALC characters more and
back into the main game. I mean, I guess you can't expect that much, but they like they have very limited plus with when they're releasing, like you already played the game, like would you really want to? But even like when you go visit them on the ship and they want to bone them, no, I mean like they all get their own little like all right, I want to bone them. She is pretty, she's yeah, and there's and there's playing as Lady Shepherd. There's some some good, uh
sideways glances. So I mean that's my whole thing. Like when you find people on the on your ship who are from the main game, they're like whole dialogue trees that you can go through just like get more of their character. But like these DLC characters like no dialect, tree, no Engagement's just like it's just like Zaide or whatever. Yeah, he just hangs out like you will whip once in a while. But they talk about the items that are around them. Yeah, but there's this thing in your cabin that is
you're going to briefly tell me something about. Yeah, so much of that game is sing out the characters and establishing a universe. But her mission was actually like other than the hover boat stuff, which I didn't care for, there's none of that in her mission. That's not her Oh okay, is the heist? What's the she's the statue of Liberty Head? Where does where does that other hover mission come from? Is that part of Overlord? Lord has some of it stuff we gotta climb the you gotta go over the lava
stream or whatever. That's I think that's some Overlord And then fire Walker is that what it is? That was the free service works? Okay, okay, okay, So that that just like showed up, and so I wasn't sure. I thought, like, is this part of this or the other thing which is weird because I played that out of sequence, and that was that they were supposed to be like the introduction of the hover vehicle. But I've already gone through Overlord anyways, consuming the mission I thought was rad.
Also, well again with the museum is pretty cool, will you like, let's go through that guy's gallery? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that stuff was cool. And uh also just you know, mixing up kind of the the genres that they're pulling the structure from, like I did that James Bondy. Yeah, a little bit of a little secret agent shit. I thought that was cool. And then uh yeah, Shadow Broker is just fucking great. Like if you want to, if you like mass effects, to
go and buy Layer of the Shadow. I read the comic books, and I hear if you've read the comic books, it's even better, I bet, because that's all about the Shadow. Dude. It's it's good. It's good good stuff, Like great locations, Like they make a bunch of new, very expensive looking locations that are just crazy and cool. They have this whole like like kind of almost film noir detective story kind of vibe. For
part of it. There's some great chase sequences. There's just some some neat set pieces, and it's like bitchy Learra in it, like the New Heart edge and yeah, and and Lear's in it to confirm that she you use her. She's in your party. She is in your party's I just want to know if she is also in your party after this. You know, I'm gonna say no, she does not show up as like a selectable. Ever, she is in your party because the story of the DLC demands that
she be in your party. Said, she does come and hang out on your ship afterwards, right, just like you know, I would I would rather not talk too much about after this game. I'm just talking about, like from a value proposition, like what this adds to the game. It's it's a value in the quality of the sure, sure, But I mean there's some stuff. Okay, So there's some stuff that you get to learn about all of the characters after this is over that is worth the price of
missions. That that you get little little bits of information about everyone that is some of like you know, there's all that that huge amount of Codex information they have and in mass effect too, like the like the absolute best of any of that stuff, like some some material like that on all of your crew that is fucking so well done. Again, I don't want to I don't want to talk too much about the specifics because I think it's a cool
ride that's worth taking. And yeah, like those by way of guys fucking killed it on on that specific Dlcolah, I've been looking at that game with a skeptical eye for the last couple of weeks. Yeah, I think Vinnie
knows what I'm talking about. There's a theory advanced on another podcast in the light of the PS three news that the whole reason that the roster was wiped clean and you have a whole new cast of characters here is because a they knew that they would never be able to put the first game out on the p S three and be what better way to get new people into it than to just start over with all that stuff. I think half of that is conspiracy theory. Yeah, I mean it's a little bit like kind of stuff.
I mean like if you yes, if you're gonna make a if you're gonna make another game, uh that relies on new dudes. I mean, yeah, it is a great way to get new people into it. But like, I don't know about the console specific, there's still way too much like, yeah, you get a new team of dudes, but there's still
like way too much referencing there. Yeah, this is the first game, and there's a decent none of the Yeah, like the continuity is so sewn up in that game, where like that the first game, and I still had to spend like an hour reading fucking codex before I really got into the two. Yeah, so like just be like, all right, what is the like who like what's up with the council and who are these guys and
what's the British? Remember that, just remember like all of the like, okay, the Quarreans created the death and then the Silarians created the geno phage that the Krogan is. Just like I have to remember a lot of stupid They already did the leg work in case you didn't play the first game to put hooks in there that are like, well, you know, tell me again about the war that happened, And they are adding some stuff to the
p S three version to even further set that stuff up. I'm not saying I fully buy into that theory, but you know, it's kind of something and the fact that like Rex can either be there or not. It's like that's some that's some work. You know. There's like options in there for people that are like, you know, I don't really know what happened in the first one. Sure, I don't know about all that. I think there are their attempts to you know, take your choices from the first game
and carry them forward. We're largely successful. Those were great. Yeah, so to tout you put forth the notion that they were trying to deliberately sever it or something for for a new offensive, And if they were going to do that, they would have crant it all out at once. Whatever other podcasts you're listening to. It's fucking crazy, straight because e A, you know, it wasn't even a Microsoft published game with the second one was that shit, So if they wanted to, they could have just put it all
out at once. And I'm just gonna put this out there now. I bet there'll be new characters in the third one. Yeah, it would be a real bummer if there weren't, especially since like your party could have died or I guess one hundred percent of your party could have died in two So like, I don't think you can take one of those saves over the Yeah, the no Shepherd save. I don't think you would be awesome though, if you did and you just pop in that disk and it's like, here's
what happened last time, You're done. You just bought this game and this just yeah, there was like some nhilistic end apocalyptic like yeah, because there was no Shepherd, like this happens. I'll just play you this kind of along like five minutes CG movie that's like, look at you, Money's whereas now? Like do you want to start over? Like play for real?
I mean conspiracy theories aside, they did sort of aggressively distance themselves from the lineup of the first game, I don't think a little more forcefully than I thought, like was natural. I liked it. I think that it was. I think it benefited the game, like regardless of I mean, we can sit here and speculate on intention all fucking day, but like the end result I thought was, you know, it gave that game its own tone, sure, which you need because that is a much more raw dog game.
I think it ends up working out to its benefit too, because anytime you do encounter someone from the first game, you're like, oh, dude, yeah, you get really and like it's such an I really really like that game, and I really liked the story of the narrative in that game, and like, you know, I went through all the books and the comic books or whatever, and like for them to not leave those loopholes of like, well, how come this character is super gimped in this play through
and super powerful powerful in the first one when everybody's kind of explained that Garrits is the only holdover, but he had a rough transition, you know, between the first one and second one. Your character has been wiped clean, like they explain, they think they're time to explain a lot of that stuff, and like you don't have the huge roster that you had in the first one, I'll suddenly have to be kind of you know, wiped clean and started out for no reason, you know. So I don't know, like
your level comes in, like all that stuff came in with me. So I don't know. I thought they did a good job. I don't think they went out of their way to think that far ahead on the aside from the reasons that are just like make a really enjoyable game too introduce character. Yeah, I think that the ways that they go about that stuff end up like benefiting the game in the long run. Yeah, it's just entertainment regardless. Yeah, Layer of the Shadow Broker, it's ten bucks. I highly
highly recommended. It's some fun combat, some good stories, some good atmosphere. Yeah, they just yeah, they didn't really forgot about it. Yea. It is up there with like one of my favorite, like as one of my favorite mass effects experiences was in that DLC. So oh, I came away pretty pretty happy about that. It's exciting. Played some Plants Versus Zombies on Xbox Live Arcade. Y'all play that on any other platforms. I think, I think it's unavoidable, right, Like, I've never played it,
what really I think? And I had also I have it on PC. I had never played it at right there, I guess it's okay. It's a little slow in the beginning. I mean, I think the problem is it's is that it is very slow to kind of reveal itself, and by the time it kind of was starting to get up to speed, I felt like, I don't want to play this anymore. Like I've I've kind of had my fill of of zombies lumbering across this yard and kind of my my build order as it were. It seems like you got way into it.
I played third of the way into it, maybe half. I don't think it's too slow. I think it's too dense. There are too many cards, like too many things, too many someone at a time. So they do but it but it never stops. I'm gonna say it's both.
I'm gonna say it's an issue of like, yeah, there's way too many cards and it's but at the same time, they're only introducing them one at a time, so like I'm only seeing a fraction of what that game has to offer because it is so slow to reveal itself to me, that early game could be a little rough, I guess. I mean, but they're also rolling out the zombie types at the same pace to to show you what to do with each plant and everything. But it just like it never stopped.
By the time I trailed off playing it, they were still showing any new like new weapons to use. I mean, there's yeah, there's forty nine that is insane, Like you can only have like like I got up to the point where I could have seven. That's the problem. You can't take that many in at one time, So what's the point of even having them many? It's crazy? Well, so you just stop using the cards. Are like the turrets the turret equivalence that you can place down. Yeah,
the turret's basically double slowers. Yeah, yeah, they're they're the seat packets is the idea you can like, like before you go into a mission, you can equip x number of them depending on how far a you are and not not to ride off stuff without playing it. But as soon as someone said yeah, it's tower defense, I was like, I'm cool. I mean, it's not exactly defense, but it's close. Yeah, it's more like they're just heading directly at you, not ense like they already made
the lanes for you. Just gotta Yeah, yeah, there are five lanes. You have to defend them. You have to drop stuff on the lanes, drop stuff on. Sometimes you're playing at night, it sometimes there's water. Yeah, I got to I got to the at night part and I was about halfway through that stuff, and because I'm like I kind of don't that part changes up a lot and you're like, oh, I had my
whole system down now, But then it was just collect sunlight. Well then it was just like Okay, for the first part of it, I will put down the sun producing mushrooms and then I will go back to my regular build order because by that point I have enough sunlight coming in on the hidy mushrooms and those are pretty good the way. So how do you collect sunlight on the console? Because on the PC, it's falling from the sky and you have to click it with your mouse curs just move your cursor there.
And it's not like too fast to make that a pain. Yeah no, no, no, not at all. And they sit like they fall down and they hit the field, so you don't even have to get them immediately as they're falling. But you know, I don't know. The falling sun stuff seems like it is extremely like it's important early on in a match, but like it becomes extremely secondary to the stuff you're producing with the sunflowers and whatever sun producing plants you have. They got rid of zombie Michael Jackson in
that version. Yeah, they're placed them with the disco in this one though, and then all of them and then and then didn't they patch him back? Like someone figured out a way to patch it back in. I thought that might have been an official thing. Guys, you will not believe how long this podcast has run. Today. It was shopping half or something at this point, like that was gonna be able to digest this, So yeah,
shop in half. I also played some some Dead Rising two cases zero uh, kind of finishing out my my game intensive weekend, and I still can't decide if I like, uh, Dead Rising just kind of in general? Could you you don't remember how you felt about the first one. I kind of never liked the first one. I kind of never got I don't know it. I didn't I never clicked with me up and it's it's for
me. It's an issue of the feeling of the combat. I guess that that throws it off for me, Like I'm willing to accept a certain amount of jank, and you know, I love the tone and the feel of those of like the worlds that they create. But yeah, like fighting zombies in Dead Rising case heerro would just it wasn't a ton of fun for me. Wait a minute, how can you sit there, yeah and say that you strapped two chainsaws to a kayak paddle and didn't have fun killing zaw?
That should be shouldn't that be like the best experience ever, shouldn't shouldn't I be able to like buy Laws of fucking Science, sit here and say that. So I think that says a lot that I am able to sit here and say that, Like, you know, I thought it was pretty good. Yeah, I mean Dead Rising the first Head Rising is divisive, sure, absolutely and reasonably so. Yeah. Like the game's messed up, like it's messed up in a way that modern games weren't charming way. Yeah,
I think it's it's it's up this modern game thing. The games were never messed up like this, though the games were messed dude, any s games were fucking messed up. But this game is like this seems like hard the design that fell out of a you know, time capsule or something in some cases. But it's yeah, you can it's not even once and you have to save these real specific spots and the clock's always running and it's like Majora's
mask. But good, it's a man, it's ah. Like the restart thing is the thing that just throws me for a loop of like this is just this isn't like an old school convention. This is just crazy. This is just weird and gaming in a way that I really wish that I could pull the name of a game that that did that before. Don't pretty sure they do not doubt that a game has done that before. But it's not like that's some like widely accepted convention. Oh yeah, I don't think.
I don't think the things that Dead Rising are widely accepted by like that that game, I think is going to be most loved by that That first Dead Rising is most loved by people who have played a lot of video games. Yeah, like people that came up when games were all over the place quality wise and convention wise, ye are are going to be able to adapt to and thrive in an environment such as Dead Rising because it is so crazy compared
to modern games. And in some sense, like you know, like when they started talking about Dead Rising too, you were like, oh, well, they're clearly going to strip out all of that fucked up bullshit. But I totally didn't. I totally would have expected the two and you're right they didn't. And it's still key to like the Dead Rising. The problem is there is too much bullshit overhead on having to learn and adapt. Brad making a fight face. Let me explain what my experience with Dead Rising two kase
zero was I. Uh, so I get out there. It's like, okay, you gotta go find some Zombrex for Katie. Find the zombrex from the from the ambulance. Get I'm like, okay, locked in, let's go save some survivors. Get a couple of groups or get like one couple out of the bar. The bar, and then I go to find the girls in the bowling alley and they say, we won't go without our friend. Go find the friend. She says, I won't come unless you give me the Zombrex. So I said, okay, give her the Zombrex.
In the process of getting her back to the gas station, she dies, so she's out. Did you carry her? No, okay, you have to carry her. Okay, can't follow you. Okay. That was never efficiently or reasonably explained to me. I did not know I could carry her because I just let her walk. So that's probably a good part of why she died. On the way it was all on your first time through the
game. Yes, that's like, okay, we're getting to the part of the bullshit overhead, so now I have to So I got through to to like the eight o'clock time point, I managed to save the other two girls from the bowling alley. So I kept playing, kept doing stuff. But it gets to eight o'clock. I don't have any zombres for Katie. My bike isn't together, Like the whole thing is fucked. It's like, okay,
you're over restart. So to make up for the mistakes that I made the first time, to even have a chance to rectify that stuff, I had played through everything I already did again and and that is bullshit overhead if you see me. If you skip the cut scenes, though, it takes about five minutes to get back into where you're just playing it again and your folly was trying to do everything in one play through, because that's just not
how that game is built. But the game doesn't necessarily explain like the first one time, and that game is weird, Like there is a totally totally I mean, I hated the first game for about three to five hours until I started over to higher level. I probably hated it for about three to five days, and then like it finally all clicked into place and I was like, man, I was on tion yeah, and I just sat there and played it instead of doing like doing anything else. I just sat there
and played Dead Rising obsessively. I mean, I respect the way that Dead Rising carries itself entirely, but like I don't necessarily enjoy it. It's not a game for everyone. Like, like, I don't think Dead Rising two is going to change anybody's mind on a lot of that stuff either, because you know, like as enticing as a lot of that stuff is and drilled bucket goes a long way. Yeah, uh, there's there's going to be a lot of people that want to love that game but are not able to
deal with how messed up it is. I wouldn't call it bullshit overhead. That's maybe a little stream, but that's because I like it. You kind of have to give yourself over to the Dead Risings way of doing things. Yeah, it's like you have to accept a level of James. You have to accept a level of Japan. Yeah, there's there's a there's a Japanness flowing out of that. But like you don't get out of a lot of
games anymore. But that's Japanese Canada. Yeah, exactly. Japanese Canada is the deadliest of all Canada, making tentacles flying out of this can at Tim Horton's coffee. Oh God, look outs, Yeah, schoolgirl hockey players. That game is crazy, and the first one was crazy, and the whole
concept, just the way they built that game is insane. The most important lesson I had to learn playing the first game in order to enjoy it was to give up my obsessive tendency is like, then he knows what I'm talking about here of trying to do every goddamn thing there is to do in one play through, I believe that a bunch of times, like the first couple were fun, and then it was a guide like going through so I got to a point where I had never like to the point where a guy got
to the point where it's like, okay, to do any better, I'm gonna he's a guide. I was like, Okay, cool, I'm done. I need this is a legitimate way to play it. I like I had the guide on one piece of paper that the food check off list on like another one like all the did I drink that already? I can't remember? You know, I'm just gonna start over and do this all again.
This I'm gonna check them off like all the like fifty achievements, all twenty points that it's just like and then you get those last two where they're just like those to twenty that should have been five hundred, Like there was. There were whole the playthroughs in that game that I just devoted to driving back and forth in the underground parking garage. Yea, so now there's another one
that's double that number. It's it's weird because that makes you're really excited, like not really, but yeah really yeah yeah, I think I don't know, I it's that game should really communicate that it is a fat sticker on the box that says this is fucked up. I mean, it even just needs to communicate that, like like, listen, this looks like a modern game, but you're gonna have to play through this like a couple of fucking
times. But playing through it, it's not like playing every through every other game. It's not the same thing. But but it it needs to be like, hey, look, we know this looks like an open world game with zombies in it, where you're gonna run around, have fun side missions and all this stuff. Look it's I mean, it is old school in that way. I think I think that is accurate of that To get good
at it. You're gonna have to go through these first five levels over and over again, you know, in a nest nest era of like I only made it to the fifth level before I ran out of lives, so I had to start over again. But I had already played all that stuff, so I was, you know, able to get better at it and kind of stream like in that regard, it is very old school, but nothing else about it, like you know, kind of conveys that old schoolness to
the player. It's like you just kind of have to find out on your own. I think that if they said, like if they just let you know, took you aside a little bit, said hey, you're probably gonna this is You're not gonna get through this in your first time, but don't sweat it. Like everyone no one makes the first jump, you know. I mean, it's it's a weird slow burn. And when all the reviews for Dead Rising two come out, they're all gonna say, if you didn't
like that first game, don't play this. Like that's very evident from Casey
breaking three Days survivor stuff like who does that? That is probably the craziest thing about Yeah, and that's that's some Dead rising craziness like like that and just like the Frank the Pimp stuff and all that's just like, yeah, I just got to a point where I was like I don't want those achievements, like I'm I'm the only I'm missing on those the two day and three day one because you just have to leave your three sixty going for hours,
like it's like eight it's some crazy amount of time where but you have to be you can't sit there because your health continually goes down, so you have to get out. You get orange juice, but you have to like survive for all three days of game time or something like that. Like you can like save and turn off right, No, I don't think you have to leave it on think like one session. Yeah, I should look it up.
I remember it being crazy, you know what that game. I remember there being a thing it was like it would pause, like the controller would go to sleep, so it would pause the game right about the time that like you need to drink an orange juice. I remember reading stuff that was
like, oh, so you can leave. You can sit on the filing cabinet and leave it and the game will automatically pause when the when the controller goes to sleep and then you can come back and be like okay, I'm pause it, drinking orange juice, and then set the controller back down and like go out again. Like that's some crazy stuff like that is that's not that's used to be a game. I know. That's like when I left my Xbox on overnight running like a graw two server to get the played for
eight hours. Oh man, you're crazy. Uh. It's kind of ironic though, Like in a sense, Case Zero is a better vehicle for Dead Rising than a full Dead Rising game because because that is the way that the way that it does demand multiple playthroughs, it's much easier, like it does not seem like I'm I'm going to play through that at least one more time. I am going to see the end of that's the thing. You have
to to see all the stuff you want to see. But like when the entire game is about ninety minutes long, it's much more accommodating to do that. Whereas you know, like it like was it viny or maybe his will? Somebody was saying they should have just made the entirety of Dead Rising too, like this episodic thing where they kept putting out like Case zeros one after the other. I didn't say that at all, which almost would have been more agreeable in a way, because if you had played through each one of
those, it's not about being agreeable, it's about a game disagreeable. It's about creating this disruptive that just sure. What I mean is that by being like this bite size short experience case zero kind of softens the blow for people who don't like that stuff as rush. But but also if it's if it's anything like that, rising you you go through it on like another play through, and you're able to now since you have more health and and more weaponry
or whatever else, you're able to hit those objectives a lot faster. And you know, I can get further in this than I ever come to pick and choose, because when you have stuff like Frank the Pimp, like you have to focus on that to get that done. Play through number four, you just gotta see that's the thing. Eventually it's like a twelve hour game
or whatever. At some point you have to stop it through it. But that stuff like Frank the Pimp and like that stuff, when you when you know exactly what you're doing, it's actually really like you were saying you can get through it really quickly, right, but you can. You can get through it in like a couple of hours. But while you're focusing on that stuff, other things will pass your by. Yeah, you definitely need to
break it up. Which is really funny. That game is one of the best guide games I've seen because it's like you just see a list of like, all right, here's a guy, here's the ultimate guy. You can't do everything, but if I've worked it out so you can get most of the stuff done in this Uh, that was it. That was insane game.
I'm really looking forward to the other I think at least if nothing else gives, Zero definitely will remind people and say like, hey, before two comes out, this is yeah, yeah, here, here's what you're going
to be in for. I almost feel bad though, if people didn't play the first Dead Rising like that case, Zero, by being ninety minutes and being more manageable, might lead people to make some incorrect assumptions about what Dead Rising two is gonna end up. I think a lot of people are going to do that because that was a hot selling piece of content for Xbox Line. Man, that sounds like some news to me. We don't have time
for news, though it does have a piece of broke records. They sold a lot of Dead Rising two case zero fastest to one million was at the milestone it was, Yeah, I think it was the story fastest xplains when they won hard I was, you know, you put out something like that that looks like a full on, proper disc based game for five bucks. Not not at all surprising that that cleaned up the way it did. Expect to see more of that from every other company ever. Wasn't from here on
out? Wasn't the first Dead Rising the like the headline maker where they were saying, like, we put this m out and then pre orders jumped like some insane percentage. I believe so pretty sure they were, Like pre orders went up thirty percent after that does sound familiar. But that you mentioned and everybody was like, O, god beta for a little big Planet two coming to us soon. And dude to my friends list has been playing that for a while. He's either Norway or something, and uh, maybe the three
DS is going to come out in November in Japan, twentieth. November twentieth, Yeah, that's a date in November. Yeah. I stand by my original statement that is literally more time than we have for Okay, we should point out that that that rumor about the release date is so crazy, like from was it coming from? So it makes it a dead rising achievement.
Yeah, there's a There was a Twitter post from a guy who claimed to work for a Japanese peripheral manufacturer called keys Factory, okay uh, saying that, oh, the eleven of these three DS peripherals that I worked on are all coming out of the twentieth right alongside the system. This is all in Japanese and I'm paraphrasing because I don't read that stuff. That Twitter account. Not only is that message gone, that account is gone. It was just
like white gone history. Is it possible for an account holder to delete the account or does like somebody, Yes, an account holder can delete It's not like nintended the account who knows? Who knows? It's let's not speculate on that stuff. But anyway, all that stuff is gone. But Keys Factory has gone on to say that that guy was an employee, like he was a contractor or something like that that was working for them at some point, not currently, not even before that message, like it was just a you
know, temporary work dude or something. Yeah, but they also said like, but also, we don't know when the three DS is coming out, so we don't know how he would say this because we honestly don't know which sounds like something they would say, you know what I mean. Uh. Nintendo has said that they're announcing the price and release date on the twenty ninth
of this month, so that's not we'll find out soon enough. Yeah, it seems like a reasonable date for Japan anyway, Remember twentieth there's our DS is ever region free. Yeah, it's just the card that don't have to worry about any kind of locking in all being in Japanese. Yeah that in the online stores were all regions specific, so you couldn't enter US credit cards into your Japanese DS to buy Japanese stuff. You Again, that's like forever
for the life of that. Yep, gotcha. Somebody in the comments on the story you posted referenced our interview with Cammy Dunaway. Yeah, three in which you pre no that year this year. This is like like two months
ago I conducted that interview. I don't remember this, but apparently she said in an interview we should go back and check that they would not forget any of the like quote major territories in the initial launch, which this commenter took to mean the worldwide US will also yeah, like US, you're Japan all in the same day. I mean we should check that interview and see. I honestly think it would be a big stretch for them to launch in the
US this year. Uh yeah, specially yeah because the Exile just came out this year. Yeah, and I don't like software doesn't necessarily seem ready. We'll know more coming out of TGS, I think depending on later this week, Like if there are a ton of finished looking three DS games on display there that like from third parties, that might be a pretty indicator that it's on. But I want to speculate some more go ahead. I don't know,
because that's not great speculation. I think there'll be a fishing game and one where you're a snake. There's a Magen game we're sharing US three D when where we fly on like a jet or something would be cool. The one faces one where you're a face Space harrier. Three D Face Harrier was playing the Adventures of a three D world Runner yesterday with three D glasses that came out of a skateboarding magazine and it didn't work. It's all pissed off.
I wed the poor man space area. That's the very poor man space harrier garbage can on fire with your hands over it, fingerless glove, bendle show aluminum cans versus carpet bag and accessories slung over your back. Do you want to buy a street sheet from me? Space? What? He's just being reason specific? All right? So so maybe the three days to come out this year we know, we'll find out later this week, find out later this year by virtue of it coming out or not. We'll find out
by November twentieth if we go to stores and it's out. Fifty fifth chance that's right, yes, yes or no? Have a coming out or it's not. In between. On this one, very deep. It's pretty black and white. Yeah, oh the code on colors awesome. First I want a white one racists. All right, let's talk about new releases for this week. Cabella's North American Adventure Hell Yeah two for the Nintendo we Xbox three,
sixty, PlayStation three, PlayStation two, and the PlayStation portable. There hitting Hod Fancy Nancy tea Party time for the Nintendo ds I put this one. There's a lot of these. I wan't tell you know, there's a lot of these that I skip every week for these new releases that are like, Okay, clearly our listeners aren't going to care about this, But fancy Nancy tea party time. Are you sure that's not a dsiwear game. Nope, that's a that's going into stores. That's a retail product. Who's putting
that out t HQ. Al Right, fancy Nancy, straight out of the toy headquarters and into your minds. Fancy Legend of Guardians Owls Gohol owls, the owls of Gohol. Okay, it just says owls Gohol on the a Batman villain. It's that yo, it's that owls movie that the three hundred guys doing what there's an owl the three hundred guys doing a movie about owls. They're but they're like magic owls. It's true, like Harry Potter, but like they I don't know, they talk. They're magic Australian owls.
So it's like, oh, e else not in the final movie apparently, Oh, but they originated as like the author's Australia well, anyways, that shia that shit's coming out for three sixty, WE, PS three and DS from Warner Home Video Games. Truth or Lies for the WE three sixty and p S three Lord of the Rings, Eric Gorn's Quest for the PSP PlayStation two again, two new PS two releases this week, so you can tell that the holiday season's coming up. Yeah, no doubt, WE and DS.
Actually, it's just those are coming No, I'm sorry, I was wrong. Scooby Doo and the Spooky Swamp. Viney, I want you to guess what platform Scooby Doo and the Spooky Swamp are coming out for. I'm gonna say DS and WE. Oh you're so close and two boom, that's your trifecta. Casual ass No PSP Weird Spooky Swamp that's what it is, and the Spooky Swamp it's scooty. New exclamation point. We should get all those PS two games, and we should do a PS two Game of the
Year based on those three games. Racket Sports for the PlayStation three. This is I believe a move game that ubisaus putting out. Yes, so this is so one of those launched titles. Patrician four could not make a game that sounds less like a game I want to play than something called Patrician four. I think. I think even in theory legend of Guardians, the Owls
of Ghool sounds more more compelling potentially than Patrician. It's how about Patricia for Yeah, yes, I would rather, so close, I would rather but or how about Pediatrician four? Yeah, okay, that sounds better too,
But Patrician four sounds like work. That just sounds like, well, at least we got Patrician four point oh coming out pretty soon, and that's gonna have the text text entry stuff is so much, so many bugs and Patrician three that they've ironed all that stuff out this time, and it's the next generation system because of it's Patrician four point zero. Is the business needs it, We can't. We are too tied up. System. You'll find no
better. We have a Patrician server already up and running, so at least we're good on that. But forever are you Patrician certified? Yeah, I'm a I'm a PTO. Uh, but this and then this couldn't sound more like an awesome game, but I know I'll never actually play it. Swords based off the book it's called it's called Swords put up by Majesco. Somebody
gets the best selling book Swords subs Swords for the game. You know, I really liked the book, but so I was really disappointed by the game, Like there were so many swords in the in the book, but they didn't even like talk. I didn't even address the backstory of the Halberd and crazy. What's it about fast swords? It's about swords. I'm about swords. Then you this game should hook up? Of course ended this week. The PlayStation move stuff, all the hardware bundles, sounds like some of that
stuff straight up getting sold right now. Someone checkers one of the best buy I bought one will ordered stuff from Amazon and they said they'd have it here by Wednesday. So so like seventeenth Friday is the official day, official date. It's like software is already out. Hardware stuff are supposed to out Friday. So what's my what's my bundle? Starter cup? Don't I don't have
a camera. It is it is hundred bones for one move wand a camera and a copy of Sports Champions none whatever, No navigator, navigator, I don't. I don't know that the Navigator is coming out for launch. I don't know that any of the games use it or not. I think there's a spare camera. Is there a bigger one than has two ones there? And and the camera maybe they they came up with a bunch of different ways.
And there's also there's even like a different stuff. There's there's weird well, there's also weird stuff like they're straight up like I think Sony is making charging stations for Move controllers. They obviously at some point someone tried to charge all that shit off. The fucking worst I need. I have two rock band hubs hooked up to this thing. But history's gonna catch on fire. It's a little strange that the Move does not sit flatly on a table without
rolling. Notice that. Yeah, so I call it the move baby, that's right. Yeah, yeah, a good docking station. I think, you know, not the worst idea in the world for that stuff. Uh. And also there are crazy sleeves and dumb shit like that. You'll build through that. You don't want any of that stuff. The ball on it soft, you can push it into dude's faces. It's not gonna like cause
too much for bubble. No, No, it's I think it's meant mostly just for grippiness on the I don't think you need any of that stuff. Don't waste your money. I hope the ball changes color when it charges. Have you tried that yet? At the ball lights up when games are telling it to up, And I just so, I just can't wait for people to rig that thing up to PCs with bluetooth and start like programming that programming the balls do all kinds of crazy stuff. Yeah. Also, Hitler reaches
out this week. Okay, yeah, it happens Xbox Live Arcade this week. Is my understanding that we have Sonic Adventure that's correct coming out this week. Oh sweet game Room releases. Yes, that's right, this is your game Room release for the week. Jeff, you know it's not a piece of crap selling it as an Xbox Live Arcade game. They told he told us that there would be Dreamcast games. We have that that man was writing checks that he could not cash that I don't think he can cash now.
They just bounce. I think those checks would bounce now if you drive the game Room, checks will be Oh you didn't deposit those already? I tried, but they were all postdated for twenty twenty uh in Space Infaders. Space Invaders called me the Space Infader. Oh, I feel like I've been the Space Infader for like the past two weeks. Space Invaders Infinity Gen uh coming
into Xbox Labricade as well as PlayStation Network. Also out on PlayStation Network, Worms to Armageddon and My Aquarium. At this point, I will throw it over to Jeff for the World of Nintendo. Did Infinity Gene was coming on Xbox Labricade as well? As I did say that I knew it was coming for PS three, but I did not see the date for I had to kind of dig for both of those because Major Nelson didn't put out his update.
Yeah usually he's he's my go to guys. They put out a thing like a several weeks ago saying what was coming out this week, and Sonic Adventure was on that list. Okay, but that was the only thing on the list, So I don't I don't know, Okay, my information may be incorrect than on Space Invaders, but I saw saying that Space Invaders was this week, so on p S three at least, so I have much the p S three stuff I've got. Umluck it's the three sixty stuff this
week that I'm a little fuzzy on. But tell me what's real in the world of Nintendo. It doesn't get much more real we wear than the world of Uh they're starting with Nintendo DSi wear this week. We can't do that? That is that is you can? You can. That's how they did it. Page two as the we wear a game, Well, this is how we're doing We're doing it how they wrote it. That's how they intended. Is the way Halo was supposed to be played. Castle Conqueror from Circle
Entertainment Circle. In all cases, this is DS, this is DS. We cut this part. I'm saying, I'm just gonna I'm just gonna put the we wear section first, despite this conversation, and people will hear this conversation and know that I did that. I'm gonna kill you please. Castle Conqueror is a real time straw did your game for casual gamers. You play as a commander who must resist the empire and say the lives of the people. Lead your soldiers into battle, sees the enemy's castle, and gain victories
until you destroy the empire on the mainland. The rules are simple. Use the stylus on the touch screen to select the player's castle and send your army to storm the enemy's castle in real time, capture the castle and destroy your enemy's turn gold. It can be used to upgrade your commander's abilities and to buy items that will help you win more battles. Select commanders and different cards to upgrade your army or castle. If you manage to occupy the enemy's castle
by the end of a battle, you win the game. What prevents you from doing that? I was just thinking about iced tea that entire time. Sorry, that whole thing. Good, keep going. What's next? Crazy Pinball? Whoa from DTP Entertainment all lowercase? I think that's a Ludacrous's company. Fun Fun Pinball Actually just like Acade five task tables and plenty of the US your awesome variety. Go hunting for points with the Safari Flipper, or
zoom from one goal to the next with the incredible Deep Sea Flipper. Set records that will blow your friends away. Crazy Pinball is the Ultimate Portable Pinball Experience Ultimate and the third and final DSi ware release for this week. I already know where this is going, so hey, Vinny and Brady, you gonna want to strap in for this. My notebook Tan Man trademark trademark Tan from No Points. He already did everyone's sing along with this old favorite.
My notebook allows you to take notes wherever you are. Just pop open your Nintendo DSi trademark says them and jot down your thoughts, make a list and cross it off, or even play your favorite pen and pencil games. Games not included. You can personalize your notebook by drawing on the cover or changing the paper type, or by changing the paper type with twenty four unlockable squared in lined paper styles, use the pen and pencil to make notes or doodles,
and then erase the bits you don't like. With five in colors, you'll always be able to make your notes and doodles look stylish. My notebook also includes one hundred and twenty eight pages to write, unplus the ability to exploit your pages to the Nintendo d SI photo album. At some point of these things, there's just a front. Somebody's laundering money through the my notebooks. I think they're just fucking with us. Make Nintendo and the no people.
Who was the company that made that bubble Pop game for we wear it wasn't it? Yeah, pop, Yeah, yeah, we met one of the guys from note I have his card somewhere. We should write them and go say do you what would you come on? What do you what? The gift codes for the entire my note B series? How'd be expensive? I'm waiting from my notebook farm on my exhaust notebook. I'm just I'm just glad they're expanding into the marketing to the Asian demographic. Yeah. You start
with a blue notebook and that's and pennies. That's it. We wear wewear. Adventure on Lost Dash Island in all caps, Yeah, got it? Hidden Object Game? Wait is that part of the title, Yes, Adventure on Lost Island Dash Hidden Object Game. You don't need to read the description and we are that they've informative titling. It's from a team incorporated like just some dudes. Maybe it's a team, but it's not. There's no height,
it's not it's not hyphenated. It's capital as all one word. A team, a team, a team, a TM one of four players, five hour week points m Discover Hidden Object fund for kids and adults. Quickly find items in every stage to complete this adventure. Work together or compete in each stage to find items and help the game's hero find a way home. From cshells to sparkling jewels, do your best to find all of the hidden objects as fast as you can. During this adventure, you will also confront
ghosts and a dragon in action stages. Each stage can be played by up to four players for great gaming fun. And those are your new releases for this week. Thank you, Jeff. Let's take it to emails. What would you look at me? Expectingly? Like? I wasn't looking at you at all. I'm looking at dot com. First email comes in Emails Elwood in Columbia. Subscribe money going? What's all four? Talk? Everybody? Keep going? So I'm trying to I'm trying to your emails so we can
end this podcast. We're almost at three hours. You're almost at three hours, Emails dot Com, Elwood, Columbia, South Carolina. What's the whole fried chickens and a when you start? When people sometimes talk about multiplayer game experiences, they say to only play online with real friends. However, my wife and I have moved around a ton in the last few years and I have no friends. Suggestions it makes them online friends. Those yeah, they
they're with you wherever you go. Yeah, get on IRC. Yes, so you can see, like, how what is the twenty ten what's the what's the safe? Insane way to make Internet friends? The giant bomb dot com message boards. Here you go from also like minded individuals such as yourself. The people there like to play games. At least they claim to make a thread about religion, and then you know, yeah, exactly, you'll meet a lot of nice people. Just start a thread marked, I have
a good idea for the next endurance run. And then in their rights, Hey, anyone want to be friends? And I think it'll go find from them. Do you just need to find a user on the Size His name is Bith mc bump. Again. He will he will show you is wrecked out of his mind on the Free Pain just he just likes to know who he's playing with. So if you send him a nice headshot of yourself and to see you're big fan of green Screen. Yet, what was that this
cartoon? Maybe the poopsies could be could be that, Yes, I was reading the pooplings. I was reading a Biff's story of tonsil removal and still have delotted abuse I've ever had. I wonder if I'll have trouble with them at something. I got tontils and wisdom teeth. I got wisdom that I think having tonsils removed just fairly weird. I think it's only if you have tonsil stones. Well, they used to take them out. They used to be like you get too many sore throats. Yeah it, Yes, tonsil
stones was a new one to me. I had never heard of that. And now like you're really brave or something. Apparently you can have tonsils. Dude, I don't know. They're like weird sacks of what dot? I don't know. Yeah. Also, here's this is not really question, just a cool sidebar from Nick in Massachusetts. So we had the big live live
show live last week Nick Thursday, No, we did. Nick watched it, but apparently he was on Amazon because he was going to go buy Solace, which is the CD from our our good friend Jean Bodine, our eleventh string bassist friend. And when he went to that page, Amazon said, people who looked at this, we're also interested in Denizon, would you like
to buy this? So our show managed to influence the recommendation system on Amazon in the worst worst way, although I guess if you are going to look for his CD, chances are you probably heard about him on the Big Live Live show, so you probably do have to get around. So again, yeah, props to thanks to both both both j Steele and to Jean for for coming through on a great show. Absolutely I need to buy that dude
CD. Matthew Potter Saint Charles Missouri, on an early episode of the BombCast mentioned Jeff mentioned how he was against the idea of developers brain reviewers in house to play their games, with the exception of multiplayer focused titles. I was curious how this applies now Hof new companies invite the press in these days and this jump bombs still avoid these scenarios or are they fine as long as do you leave you with a copy of the game enough embargo time to play.
Do you want to talk about how how stuff's been? Yeah, I mean typically we're not going into their offices. Uh, Halo Reach was a hotel based event. I think it's been I want to say years since somebody had to go to a developer. But though didn't some people go in for peace Walker that was offsite? Was it was not their offices here? Okay, all right, all right? You mean the boot I do. Yeah, that was like a hotel. Okay, well whatever, Yeah, we didn't
got any of that stuff. Yeah, more often, I know, I know Valve has had people up to Valve, and I know like companies like print magazines typically end up going. But that's kind of situations like that. There's Pines went too Bungee to play Reach and I'll swear to play other games. Yeah, it's uh, it's it's not ideal. For the most part, it's kind of nice because you have a lot of people there that all they're really doing for a couple of days is playing a game, which for
a multiplayer focus game can be useful. Yeah. And in the case I heal a Reach, like, we got that game on Friday and the review didn't run until Saturday, so it ended up leaving me. I mean I already had you know, a working knowledge of what that campaign was, and plenty of time to play the whole thing again if I wanted to, which I ended up playing a significant amount of it over again, and then a bunch of bunch of real multiplayer with matchmaking and stuff and not you know,
just system link stuff. So it ended up giving me a pretty full picture of the game. I think if we hadn't gotten that copy of the game, I might not have run the review until we got one. I mean, And that's like the reason that, to be clear, the reason that we bristle at this stuff is that we want to have as close to the experience that someone buying the game would have. And that's not going to be you know, in a hotel with a bunch of other people. It's gonna
be you're gonna be at your house. So I mean, to be fair, like the the hotel conference room with a bunch of other people is worse than the home consumer experience. Uh. People shouldn't get the impression that this is like some big cushy like you know who's going and well, it's like
it's it's it's for me. It's it's more of the control and more of the access to the people behind the game or you know, like a pr person, right, And it's like, okay, So if I questions about anything I saw, I could turn and ask I didn't didn't do that. I don't really need to hail to reach pretty self explained tory when all is said and done. But also I think at the end of the day. You want to make sure running off a retail disc is going to be a
good experience. Sometimes they you know, they don't tell, they give you the distall it. And in the case of Reach, they were retail copies of the game, so to make sure funny business. It did not appear to be any funny business. But it was nice to get the game ahead of time and still be able to check that out and still provide a timely review. That's uh yeah, I mean it's it's it's a weird situation, but it's kind of become the accepted standard, uh by which a lot of
this stuff is done. So you kind of have to go in to that situation knowing that it's you know, it could be a little funky, especially as games, you know, the player account goes up and up and up, Like I feel like it's a lot harder to get everybody in a pre release session or something like that to get Yeah, the typical thing that companies do otherwise is, yeah, they just host multiplayer sessions ahead of times,
like Everyone's show over three and and and it's pain ass. I mean actually, even the Halo Reached stuff was was a little tricky at times too. Because you had some people that were still playing the campaign, and then there were some people that wanted to play Firefight and some people that wanted to play regular multiplayer. So you ended up with these situations where there's seven people that
want to play regular multiplayer and you have unbalanced teams and it's jacked. So it's like, oh, I'm on the shorthanded team, so I'm gonna lose for the next hour. Great, So it's not an ideal situation for anyone, and that, you know, like Halo reaches especially weird if you really think about it, because like the kind of not necessarily stated but understood reason for holding stuff like this is disk security and to put a lid onto piracy.
That game leaked well before any of that stuff happened, so it's I don't know, I can also get behind it for stuff with perk systems, where like it would come in, you can play for a while, we'll switch you over to a guy who's like level fifty or something. You could see some of the later game perks or something like that. That are events that you would never be able to get to, you know, even reviewing the game and playing it for weeks. Yeah, see some of those late
game perks, which are you know interesting. Yeah, it's less than ideal, but you know it's we We always go into stuff like that with the knowledge that, like, if anything's funky, like we're not gonna review it. You know, it'll be like like if if I had gone to that Halo Reach thing, it would be like, Okay, we got one Xbox here that has the multiplayer on it, and here's another one that has the single player on it, and just switch them and you know it'll it'll all
be on one disk at the end. You know, if it ever been anything messed up like that, like I just would have like messed around with it for a day or something and like written a preview or something and left and then when the disc came in, like I would have given it to one of you guys and had one of you review it or something. But
uh, it was fine. So I think as long as you go into those situations knowing that you might get absolutely nothing out of it and are prepared to totally call it a wash and delay your review to make sure that you've got it right. Uh, that's that's that's enough for us, I think, all right, moving on next email comes in from Sean more Halo questions. I'm sure you'd be surprised the needler. All right, there we go.
What that answers it for you? Yeah, just watching the Halo reach quick look on the site, and I'm wondering how useful the team AI is. I've had some frustrating experiences with Friendly to AI where it seemed like the friendlies just took up space and rarely I've ever hit anything. Uh, thoughts about sort of the impression I get they never see them get in my way. Yeah, yeah, they don't hinder you. A couple of times on
Heroic I've seen them kill enemies really like delivery killing shot. I mean that you know at now you use that gun right given a minute. It's a shame that you can't swap guns with spartans. You said it was just the like the regular human military guys. Yeah, that's a shame. Thank you
your achievement. Yeah, there's that, but I mean, you know a lot of the time the other spartans are rolling with some pretty pretty pretty George run but you know it's all like that's that's where people got the idea that the game was class based, because those guys always have those weapons, so it's like, here's your sniper, here's your heavy weapons. Dude, you're a smart lady. So Noble Team is largely for show than at least in the single player. Yeah, well it seems like they pair you off.
Yeah, there are missions where you're just rolling with one of them, and it helps because I mean it's while from a gameplay perspective, it's not all that different from what they've done in the past with AI troops fighting alongside you. Yeah, but it's at least the same people, so you do kind
of help. It helps. You kind of grows some sort of connection to these guys, and like the missions where they pay you off, like you're paired with the sniper, like you're probably gonna do a little bit and you'll do some sniping stuff and it's like, oh, you're the heavy gunner guy, probably gonna take on a turret or something like that. Like, you know, it makes a little a little bit of sense. But I didn't really find them helping me too much. But they never got my way,
like I never got they never shot. I mean, I can see them being more useful, just as like depending on how level design is of just kind of guides of like, hey, this is where you need to be now, because that's where you your buddy super fo were a couple of cases where I got so far ahead of them that they teleported up. Okay, it's just like in yeah, they seem to follow you more than you follow
them. Must There's a lot of there's a lot of lines of dialogue record like six you take point, Like all right, because some way back here, I'll catch up. Give me a second. Who next? Emo comes in from Shiloh. Hey there, bomb cast. I noticed something strange on Sunday afternoon looking through the Sunday ads, I see the hailo Reach is coming out this week, the weirdest strange he's and he also even in parenthesis after
that says, duh. The weirdness comes in that it has a twenty dollars gift card attached to it at best Buy and a twenty five dollars gift card at Toys r US and I heard from a friend that he was buy it from Amazon because they were doing the twenty dollars gift card as well. My question for you is why Reach is sure to sell Gangbusters. My theory is that the whole exclusive game Spot, Game Stop, DLC Armor made everyone go with them, so Best Buy, Amazon and Toys r us head to retaliate.
Do you guys have any thoughts? It seems like a reasonable theory that the pre order armor might have had something to do with it. I think they like because it is such a guaranteed seller. Because it's a Halo on it, you need to figure out some way to make it more attractive at your Yeah, there are your billion places to buy Halo, so it's like, just why would have buy it from you? Best by? Well, because I've got twenty five dollars. I think the only place you're not going
to be able to buy Halo reach is at A seven eleven. Weirdly, are they done and they don't do that? They've been done for a bit. I think they've been done since they tried to put out Halo three. So it'll go back there. God damn it. Yeah, when you go back to that Pedaluma seven eleven, talk about dude, I was just talking about I was just talking to somebody about that too. Yeah, about Mike's the bar experience, about your time in Pedaluma. It's just about time to
go back and Yeah, what's going. It's about the same. It's about the same, except I'm in there so much more frequently now that if I was in there with a camera, people wouldn't immediately want to jump both of us. So now you would be the one yelling at me. Yeah exactly, I was coming here with a camerage, just getting rolled up. Tom Shannon in Sheffield, England. He's basically just I'm gonna paraphrase his whole thing. U saw the quick look for Halo Reach is stoked, hasn't ever played
a Halo game, wants to know like like order of approach. What do you guys think, like which games to play? Yeah, if you want to If like he's he's interested in Reached, should he just go feed first into Reach? I think I think you totally could go feed first into Reach. I'd say start on. I'd say playing normal at this point, you know, just it is so different from other shooters that let's play it and have a good time. Are one and two? Those are both games on
demand right or like quietly originals whatever they're called. I know the first one is I'm about I don't know about you either. About two third, I would say, uh yeah, I would say just you could play Reach. You know, like the story stuff is not going to hit as hard for you, but you know, you could read a history of the Halo franchise
page. I think part of his question is kind of hinged on just the the delineation of the chronology of the series that has happened here, this kind of being out of time with everything else, and like should you lead up?
Should you just play everything chronologically or is the style like no, I mean you should put them in the order that they were released in, just because the stuff that happens and Reach is really only of supreme relevance if you have played Halo one, yeah, uh, at minimum, you know that's ideally you've played the whole trilogy. But then if you play the whole trilogy, you start to see stuff like, well, wait, why is this here if it's not in one or two? Just why are the engineers in
this game? But why do they have Armora abilities? Next Emo comes in from Kevin in Wisconsin. What's better totally call a RoboCop? Viny Caravella call tough one called RoboCop? Brad Shreemaker probably go with I enjoy a total recall More total recall Rubbocop saw darker RoboCop scared I saw, Yeah, I saw Robocopt way too young age and it never Yeah see, I saw a total recall it way too young in age, and I think that's why I like it more. Melty Guy. I think I've only seen Total Recall probably like
three or four times. Really like RoboCop, I've probably seen I've probably seen RoboCop maybe maybe three times. The scene at the beginning of Rubbocop when he's getting shot up, that was the worst. Yeah, yeah, like a horror like yeah. Yeah. I thought that was when I realized I haven't overdeveloped sense of empathy watch shit like that. And then Melty Guy getting hit by the cars ran that was just kind of a cartoonish, I don't know.
It was toxic avenger type stuff right there with the splattered dude gets his arms ripped off on the elevator. Yeah, that's that's pretty hard, and see it at the party. But also guy as an asshole, yeah, head inside, Yeah, I wish I had every hands. There's some gnarly death in that game in that movie as well. We are so beyond out of time for anything that we're just gonna stop I'm just going to stop now
because we have to weir By brad Uh. That's that's it for this week's Take a Break, Break Giant Podcast, coming back with another three hours. You're no no no no no no no no no no, we have to leave emails. We're done. Thanks for listening, Thanks to all the members, thanks for helping us keep it free and be sure thank you to tune back in next week for another edition of the Giant Podcast