Categories
Episodes

Season 8, Episode 34

We’re spending too long on a topic we shouldn’t at the following link.

I suppose it’s my fault for opening the door to the conversation, but at the time I was very uninformed with the goings on of Phil Fish, Zoe Quinn, and that whole situation happening for the past week. What I realize now, after the fact, is that I, personally, have very little to say on the matter that hasn’t already been said. Someone on the CoG forums said it best, I think, “Just treat people like people.” Thinking back on the situation, it was a topic we shouldn’t have brought up. It didn’t go anywhere on the show and only led to us trying to get off the topic onto other things. It also makes writing a summary of the episode even more difficult. Even now I’m ready to move on to some other topic to tell you about from the show.

So, moving on, Firefall seems to come highly recommended by a regular listener of ours, even to the point of calling into the show to give it his praise. Speaking of praise, James returns to the show this episode and we give Wolfenstein: The New Order its due (by that we mean, hey…you should probably play this, it’s good). On the other side of that coin, his opinion of Destiny has changed since playing the beta but it opened the doors to our discussion of space combat games – something we seem to possibly seeing a revival of in the very near future.

Show Note: While I will be at PAX, the show will be LIVE this weekend!

Categories
Episodes

Season 8, Episode 33

There’s 30 minutes of more show for iTunes pre-orders at the following link.

We’ve done bonus content for our show before and if we ever did it again we’d never hide it behind a paywall or make it exclusive to iTunes or YouTube or something like that. We’d like everyone to be able to enjoy it with the least amount of hoops to jump through as possible. Which is why it sometimes comes as a head scratcher when a previous game becomes exclusive to a system. Even when DLC becomes exclusive to certain retailers. I mean, we know WHY it happens, we’re just not fans of it.

Money makes the world go round, as it were, and that seems to be the case for games as well with the recently revealed Rise Of The Tomb Raider being exclusive to Xbox consoles for “holiday 2015”. We know it’s a timed exclusive, but that doesn’t make it any better for us to come to terms with. Then again, it seems like something we should since there’s no sign of this ever stopping.

Money: now you’re playing with power.

Categories
Episodes Interviews

Season 8, Episode 32

We’re [text removed due to copyright claim] at the following link.

I suppose I could just do a running joke of having copyright claims throughout this post, but we’ve had enough of that on just this episode alone (if you watch it on Twitch). I’m honestly not opposed to it, personally. It’s something I know isn’t really ever going to go away, but I’m not very fond of how it’s being handled on Twitch. In fact, I’m not fond of a few things they’ve recently done over there. We’re trying out some streams on Hitbox for the time being and may actually move over completely at some point, but we’ll keep you posted on that.

It wasn’t a far stretch to figure this particular episode would get flagged for audio, both on Twitch and Youtube. That’s due to a request made from Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann on audio he’d like us to use for opening and closing the interview we had with him and Jason Gregory. They joined us (pre-recorded) to talk about The Last Of Us Remastered. It’s a more technical conversation than I was expecting and it really surprised me how interesting that actually was over just talking about the game itself.

And, by the way, it’s mentioned in the show during the beginning but the song choice was the one played during The Last Of Us: One Night Live, done exclusively for the live audience at the theatre.

Categories
Episodes Interviews

Season 8, Episode 31

The name of the game is the following link.

At least once in the show for the past two weeks I’ve been bringing up the fact that I was reading Console Wars – a new book by Blake J. Harris. Finally, Blake is able to join us live on the phone and we talk for a solid hour about growing up during the Nintendo Vs. Sega war of the early 90s. During the conversation we learn what sparked him to write such a book and set out on what must have felt like a daunting task to reach back into the past and pull out so many nuggets of information as to what went on in the houses that Mario and Sonic built.

It’s a fascinating story. Sometimes funny (the hell that was Super Mario Bros. The Movie) and a little sad (again, Super Mario Bros. The Movie), but always fun to follow the timeline of what I remembered doing way back then and see how the companies were…well, actually making me do those things.

I was their puppet, and I enjoyed every minute of it as a 13 year old.