Like a personal AI director, our audience demonstrates its incredible timing and a facility for sussing out our weaknesses.  Unlike other merciless overminds, however, we owe this one our most genuine thanks.  Without its pointed corrections and a deep stream of worthy questions, we’d never crawl out of our angry rut and every show would devolve into a slander against some undeserving thing or another.

In spite of the brain trust’s guidance we still have a tendency to act like ourselves, which means covering some old ground.  So forgive us our trespasses, or however that’s supposed to go, and bear with us through the inevitable dog pile on Matt, or some breathless tirade of mine that I have no right to foist upon you.  The inbox will be along shortly to put things right.

You’ll notice straight away how long it’s been since this show was recorded, and I can guarantee the delay is only somewhat related to laziness.  There’s less movement in the industry at this time of year, which means less pressing business for anyone obsessed with new releases and crowded news feeds.  It’s as good a time as any to ruminate on the backlog and reduce the pace of production, so we’ll be recording every other week until things pick up.  Which, if the past is any indication, won’t be long at all.

It would have been foolish to think StarCraft 2 could avoid the controversy and criticisms that met its release, but how those issues have been handled is of little consequence.  SC2 is a juggernaut if ever there was one, and manages adversity by running roughshod over it, heedless of any doubt.  It’s a sleepy-eyed brute of a game, but one with long training and excellent reflexes.  Whether enthralled or disengaged or something in-between, I think we should all respect both its reach and the force of its swing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We recorded this show on the cusp of E3, at a moment when most of our expectations for the show still seemed viable and only a few of the rumors were coalescing into fact.  It’s clear that our hand of expo-bingo was a loser, but we hadn’t expected to be so very wide of the mark.  Now that we’ve put the show behind us once again, it’s time to sit down in front of the mic to lay out our feelings.  Before we do, however, you ought to know just how optimistic we were a short week ago.

This isn’t the sort of guilt you’d feel over any of your typical worldly transgressions, no.  What we have (and have had for some time) is the perennial guilt that only a gamer, or maybe a bookworm, could feel.  It isn’t a revelation, and we’re far from alone, but that doesn’t make us regret our unplayed games any less.  It’s likely that the pain is especially sharp now because summer was the traditional season for eating through a backlog, and our minds still expect to weather the dry months of our youth.  We’ve been cursed with precisely what we asked for, and we were unprepared to accept the blessing.