Our secret recipe is available at the following link.

Dragon Age has, for me, become the sort of gift that won’t stop giving, though I’d sure as hell like it to.  There’s a conversation somewhere in which that line is a back-handed compliment, but you won’t find it in this week’s show.  My thoughts and feelings are well documented, and haven’t changed overmuch since the end of the campaign, despite a broad failure of imagination during the game’s final hours.  But the Awakenings expansion pack demands my attention, the flow of DLC continues unabated, and I’m awfully tired of my own comings and goings now.  I can’t bear to walk away when I’m so close to the end (again), but I want nothing more than to plant this story in the ground and forget about it until the sequel.

I’ve begged for larger portions in the past, sure, but this thing has become a bit “Ole 96er” for me, and I’m not sure it’s worth it for the t-shirts.

 

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Oh my God is that a blue letter at the following link?

We’ve used the stored energy extracted from last week’s show thread to power our way through this week’s recording.  We’ve approached the topic of pc re-uptake more directly this time, but have done so without unnecessary value judgments directed toward the kludgey, overpriced, and unlovable set-top boxes that are so popular with the kids these days.  Diplomacy was the watch-word of our youth, after all; the ethos of our tender years.

We mangle other topics, of course – for the most part according to the whims of our inboxes.  But we hope to have avoided pulling a Molyneux by over-topping the threshold of believability, or making like a bunch of Schafers and fig-leafing a useful barb.

 

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Take a deep breath at the following link.

We’re not prepared to accept the decline of the console empire just yet, but don’t hold it against us if we sing paeans to PC gaming over the next little while.  The particulars of this generation notwithstanding, this is roughly the time when we could have expected to see the first information about successor hardware for the consoles.  It’s also the point at which the performance lead of the desktop becomes clear to even the meanest understanding, and the PC begins to reclaim lapsed users and lost mind share.

In the absence of exotic new game systems, we can expect the raw power of the PC and the siren song of Steam (and mods, for guys like Scott) to claim an increasing number of curious gamers’ souls.  Nothing wrong with that, though.  Maybe this time they’ll stay put.

 

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We’ve only got one setting at the following link.

In all fairness to our inner children, it should have taken something really special to stoke our love of stompy, shooty, pre-historic robots, but War For Cybertron manages this in spite of itself.  The game isn’t a hateful thing by any measure, but there’s plenty more they could have done to commit themselves to the license.  The gunplay might only be serviceable, the environment an occasional disappointment, and the palette a low-contrast mess, but the voices, the characters, and their literal machinations are enough to put it over the top for even a casual fan and player.

They didn’t give us the world here, clearly, but we’d be lucky to be even this happy with our games on a regular basis.  I suppose the whole thing may have been fair after all.

 

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Two in the bush are worth less than you’d imagine at the following link.

The content of this episode is nothing more than our breathless and shellshocked analysis of E3 – an analysis I’ve come to believe makes as little sense as the expo’s press conferences and show floor.  It is inevitable that we spend several long hours once a year detailing our reactions to the industry’s largest collection of lies, misdirection, marketeering and swank gameplay videos.  Unfortunately, our senses are crippled in the aftermath, and our opinions aren’t worth half what they might be in the weeks and months to come, when statements have been clarified and timelines made firm.  In the meantime, we offer a record of our own imperfect understanding of the event in question.

 

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The money shot was out of our reach at the following link.

For this episode we’ve been forced out of our usual studio space and into a backlot trailer.  The sound quality is an embarrassment, but only if you make the mistake of comparing it to any show we’ve produced in a proper environment.  If, instead, you pretend that you’re listening to a wiretap or some other kind of covert recording, you might forgive the dead echo, the drone of the air system and the rattle of ancient vinyl siding.  What you won’t forgive is the mindless banter – that shit seems to happen no matter where we record.

 

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There’s no chance of encountering porn at the following link.

Our crack podcast staff reveals (and revels in) its true age during a short analysis and retrospective of Captain Power in the early moments of this episode.  We first started talking about it in the after-show of two weeks back, but I don’t remember why.  It was a short-run program in the “V” and “Otherworld” band of the sci-fi spectrum, but it was evidently formative for us in the way that only a toy/television cross-marketing animal can be.

It hit most of the standard 80s geek g-spots, but excelled by teaching us lessons about interactivity before we had the words to describe what we were doing.  Toy spaceships that were guns and could blow each other up, and a television show that could blow up that toy?  Love it!  None of us would dispute how truly awful this cheese was, or how badly it has aged, but those things don’t matter to the children we used to be.  I’m sure when we cry jaded tears about the games and fiction of today,  the Captain and his bitchin’ toy spaceships are working against us.

 

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There’s no room for dessert at the following link.

Our new protocol for directing the show has prevented us, again, from suffering any train-wreck moments that need an explanation in the show post.  We’re still adjusting to the idea of a 2-hour performance that isn’t driven (entirely) by rage or personal drama.  It’s yet to be seen whether this makes for better show in the long-run, but it sure as hell makes it easier to wind down after a session.  The cash bar down the hall from the studio helps somewhat as well.

 

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We’re all quite gruff at the following link.

I’d like to say we’ve come back from our break invigorated and flush with tales of the games we played while on hiatus. The fact is we needed a break more than any of us knew, and not just a break from the studio. There’s been no strenuous gaming activity, and a few of us have avoided even a casual sit-down in front of the consoles. We’ve always worked hard to play as many games as possible between episodes, and even harder to make sure that we’re all on the same page. This is a ridiculous pace to maintain for anyone with a full-time job who isn’t payed to play. Honestly, it’s done us a bit of damage.

We really are happy to be recording again, though you might not think so from the first hour or more of this show. For a moment, in fact, I swear we all genuinely hated gaming. We hadn’t aimed to be so maudlin, but we were just then realizing we shared the same feelings about our past habits, and that we should come up with something a little different. I think we shed our funk by the end of the program, but we intend to adjust ourselves away from the inevitable burnout pattern in the future.

 

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Are we guilty or inn-o-cent at the following link?

Heavy Rain is in the bag, finally, and for the good of everyone concerned we’ve spilled our guts all over this episode.  The “good” not only being that we can move beyond a very contentious subject that has dominated the discussion for weeks, but that our final thoughts were surprisingly positive.  I don’t want to misdirect – we’ve still got a lot of awful things to say about how the game unfolded – but the shocking number of variations we discovered among each of our endgames, and the earnest gameplay experiment (something I’m always decrying the lack of) force us to admit that it was time well spent.  I’ll be hard pressed to look back in anger, and that’s something I’m usually quite good at.

Show note: we’re taking time off for spring break.  Scott’s going north, I think, and Jeremy, spawn in tow, will be heading south to the Magic Kingdom.    We plan to record again in two weeks, at which point we may well have played a game or three to completion – or maybe we’ll still be chasing class unlocks in BC2.

 

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Mea maxima culpa for the content at the following link.

We’re honestly going to buckle under the weight of too many truly playable games before this season is over.  We haven’t got what it takes (unemployment?  time machine?) to play as much as we’d like of everything we could wish.  We’re either ignoring one piece of work to favor another or, as is true in my case, we’re wading deep into the stream, playing through everything simultaneously and failing to appreciate each to its fullest.  I believe this second approach was a mistake.

We were invigorated to a pretty great degree this week not only by an unseasonable deluge of news, but also by the strength of debate and feedback from our listeners.  It’s amazing the change a cross-grained perspective can bring, and a timely query or opinionated rebuttal is like unto a fresh spring breeze.  Or something.  Keep ‘em coming.

 

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Our show can be found in its entirety at the following link.

I simply don’t care for Heavy Rain – for the admittedly very small portion I’ve played so far.  I’m just putting it right out front that, despite how critical we are as a group, I may be the only one who takes an active dislike to the game.  Collectively, we may have focused too little on the forest and too much on the trees, but man…the size of those trees.  Of course, now that our first impressions are a matter of record, we’ll probably reverse ourselves and undermine whatever value our opinions may have had.  They are, after all, a full week behind the opinions and experiences of the real world.

 

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Scott has no opinion about the following link.

To look at it, you wouldn’t think this episode had been curtailed, but I can promise that we generated a lot of footage for the eventual director’s cut.  We haven’t been in the habit of making large edits to our program, but it’s become a necessary part of our new situation.  Of course, familiarity breeds contempt, so for every cut I make to cover a gaff, I grow more comfortable with revising the events in the studio.  The upshot is that we really do have a vault of (priceless?) artifacts planned for release at some point in the future.  Paid DLC, perhaps?

 

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There’s no excuse for our behavior at the following link.

Superfast show for you this week – superfast in IGC time, at least.  The bald spot in our news readers and the inevitable spread separating one host’s Mass Effect progress from another’s contributed to the hard cap on our run time.  There were also conflicts with More Important People who wanted our recording space.   There’s stuff in here we figure’s worth listening to, but I can tell you now that we’re saving our breath for next week’s show.  For tonight, alls we got is the hour-forty-five in front of you.

Regarding this week’s studio: having been turned away from each of our previous spaces for one reason or another we decided, reluctantly, to schlep out to the trailer farm behind our theater.  There, at the perimeter of a moss-choked wood, sits a disused telemarketing building.  It’s an evil place, but we really had no where else to set up shop.  I’m sure you’ll hear the keening spirits of former call-center workers and at one point, the howling of a werewolf.  So yeah…last minute change of venue makes the show sound like shit.  Sorry.

 

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We are not having the lifespan talk at the following link.

It may not have been quite what we were expecting, but there’s no sense in pretending Mass Effect 2 is less than phenomenal.  We cocked an eyebrow at some of the changes, sure, but it’s hard not to fall in love.  As you’re no doubt aware, we like to bake and broil whichever game owns our attention in any given week, despite how much we may love it in private, so please excuse any hair-pulling and rough-teasing displays of affection.

We’ve been revising runtimes steadily upwards over the years, to the point where discomfort sets in at or near the 4-hour mark now, instead of the previous 3.  We can’t figure how this happens in weeks with a single strong release, other than to accept that we’re some seriously talky assholes with an inflated opinion of our own…opinions, I guess.  Hope you don’t mind.

 

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