Author: James

We finish with a counter-clockwise swirl at the following link.

Much of last week’s fury has now cooled into a smooth malaise.  We’re well aware of some lingering tension in the industry, since we’re foremost among the people who harbor it, but what we’d prefer at the moment is to get ahead of the news instead of living perpetually behind it.  Or, more specifically, to look forward from what we’re most upset about today to what we most hope to love in the immediate future.  I can’t say we’ve done an especially good job on that and, judging by what’s happened in the news since this recording, next week could easily be more of the same.

Whatever the season of our discontent, we’re still mighty happy about what we’ve got in our disk trays and hard drives.  Borderlands is an abiding pleasure, I’m enjoying my time as an apostle in the church of Torchlight, and Arjay has discovered the unexpected pleasures of Tekken 6.  With the exception of my powerful need for Dragon Age and Arjay’s refusal to act like a sonofabitch to people he doesn’t know, things couldn’t be better.

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We’re of two minds in this week’s episode.  Decide which is our right one at the following link.

In terms of content, this episode may seem a little behind the moment.  You might also notice an ebb in our pace where you’d normally expect the flow.  This recording took place immediately after our time with Naughty Dog – which was a lengthy piece, and intense.  This is the reason we chose to bring the interview to a close so soon, and the interview was the reason for this late posting – we thought it best to give each room to breathe.  We had planned to revisit Uncharted 2 here, but that seemed unnecessary somehow.

I was unusually excited for our PC-dedicated friends last week, so much of the news being relevant to them, and there being so many reasons to own a good computer right now.  Hell, Torchlight alone may be enough to justify the existence of the Windows platform. But I think we’d be lucky if the powerful good done by Runic balances even a portion of the shameless con being delivered in Modern Warfare 2.  I’m not sure who’s to blame for that, and I honestly can’t remember having been so angry, but I hope we made it worth your time to find out why.

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Our plot devices are locked and loaded behind the following link.

Uncharted the Second is said to be the best time you can have with your Playstation 3 this season, and it’s in running for best of the year.  I won’t dispute that in this space, and at the time of this recording, we were in no position to dispute it on the show, since each of the hosts is at a different point along the path to completion.  At the time of this writing, however, we’re prepared to modify a great many of those opinions.  Which way they go we’ll keep saved for another day.

A lot of listener mail and a little slow-motion back-and-forth with the forum-goers makes us weigh in on the heavy side this week.  Of course there’s more to be said now than we have time to say, and plenty more to be played than we have words to describe, so it’s going to take a firm hand to keep our rambling in check.  Any clue where we might come by one of those?

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Insert the pointless crank into the useless receptacle at the following link.

We’ve done more work than usual in preparing for this show, and more work as well inside the studio itself.  We’re short by two this week (Dennis was immune to the schedule change, and Jeremy is pacing the floor in a smoke-filled waiting room somewhere, handing out blue-banded cigars and getting back-slaps from other befuddled fathers-to-be), which means a lot more effort out of each of us, and none of our simple, gossipy handoffs for when we get tired.  We expected the result to be short, but the two-and-a-half-hour standard remains in place.

What we’ve played is our greatest concern, since we’re taking to heart all recent suggestions that we should move a little outside our comfort zone.  It’s not easy, or natural, but we’d rather not ignore the gap in coverage, so bear with the pace of change if you can.  We’ve also provided supportive remarks on what may prove to be unsupportable causes.  The PSP Go! and Randy Pitchford were clearly the devils most in need of advocates this week, and we’ve spent loads of time on the losing side of arguments, so we figured ourselves to be a natural fit.

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You can avoid the food prattle at the top of this show if you like, since there’s not much in it for the clean-living.

I may act like all sorts of snob from time to time – an English snob, a beer snob, a computer and video-games snob – but despite the guidance of a dedicated and patient foodie-girlfriend, I’ve never been able to develop myself as a food snob.  I wish like hell I had a palette that could distinguish paprika from allspice or some shit, but I’m the kind of person who sometimes mistakes pork for chicken.  So, given my ‘druthers, I’d just as soon have a pair of hot dogs wrapped in a dollar pizza.  Of course, I’d wash it all down with an artisan brew.

Somehow, Arjay had the balls to go and get his PS3 fixed in a way that makes no sense to the rest of us.  Hair dryers were involved somehow, and for reasons we couldn’t come to terms with, it worked.  We were hoping to wring some great drama out of him during what we were sure would be a difficult time.  We were also hoping he’d be motivated to buy that 360 we’ve been pressuring him into.  But Arjay has no patience for drama, and now, a week later, it’s as if nothing ever happened.  I suppose we’re gonna have to break his shit for real.

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A tale of woe and D-cup hardware fail is available at the following link.

It’s a real disappointment for the show that Arjay is repeatedly left out of the XBox Live camaraderie.  Despite our best efforts to change his ways he’s always been a one-console man and, for the moment, that console is the Playstation.  Peer-pressure may be chipping away at his will, but the greatest strides have come with the recent death of his PS3.  He’s not quite to the point of embracing the XBox, but with any luck his fallback strategy of last-gen gaming will buckle under the weight of exaggerated tales from ODST.

Regarding Halo, it was a real shock for us to learn how much fun could still be had with this series.  We were always fans of the game’s world , even when we were at odds with its gameplay.  It’s been nice to reconcile the one with the other after all this time.  With any luck, the reconciliation will continue into the foreseeable future.

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Or is it more of a death…hairball?  Prepare to evacuate soul at the following link.

The Pox remains among us, by which I mean that Scott will be hacking and coughing his way through this episode like Clint Eastwood in Honkytonk Man, without there being a Marty Robbins to jump behind the mic if he throws a lung.  Of course it’s not really that bad, and I see that we’ve had two movie references in as many sentences for a paragraph that should be about video games, so moving right along…

We were sad to have missed the Dreamcast’s 10th anniversary on the show, but each of us celebrated – or mourned, as the case may be – according to our own traditions.  After a decade it’s clear that this machine was forward thinking to the point of being prescient.  Who knows what sort of praise we’ll be heaping on it in another 10?

We’re happy, as always, to be joined by the occasional Dennis, who promises to be much less occasional from here on in.  He seems to have learned a lot in his time away, and will be held accountable for how he uses this knowledge.  He also seems to like the Wii a whole lot less, which makes it difficult for us to corner him for opinions on Nintendo games.  I guess we know what Matt’s job will be when he gets back from the sand.

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For the life of me I can’t remember what we were trying to articulate in this episode.

It’s been too long since our last show for us to bother with much of a preface.  Batman is discussed at length, which is no kind of surprise, though we can’t promise you’ll like everything we have to say.  We’re not all finished with it yet, so our final conclusions have yet to be drawn.  We can’t imagine that standing in your way.

Again, this week, we are beset with troubles and will not be recording on schedule.  Scott has been afflicted with PAX-plague, Jeremy’s having significant hardware problems, and I just can’t get my shit together.  Arjay’s cool, though.  That’s pretty much always the case.

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New IGC available here, for the low, low price of free.

And just like that, the PS3 is back in the game.  We don’t mean to suggest that Sony was ever really on the ropes – our studio’s PS3 to 360 ratio is 4 to 3, after all – but there wouldn’t have been any gap to close against their competition if no ground had been lost in the first place.  They’ve done well with the hearts and minds, now let’s hope that effort translates to some success in the market.

We’ve played things, of course, but it would happen that our backlog seems to spill out all over the place and make a nuisance of itself less than a week before we’ll be ignoring it for the sake of Batman.  We’re deep in the throes of the first pre-release nerd-tension of the season, and any game that hasn’t been digested fully come Tuesday will have to take a number and wait.

And while we’re at it, it seems the show will have to wait as well.  We’ll be recording on Thursday next week instead of Tuesday, for obvious reasons, so feel free to inundate us with opinions of and stories about your time in Arkham, if you like.

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This week’s episode can be found dangling from a gargoyle at the following link.

The Batman demo, as you’re sure to have heard by now, or discovered for yourselves, is quite the thing.  There’s bound to be some disagreement on the finer points, and there’s no telling what shape our opinions will take during the final moments of our final play-through, but right now we can’t imagine anything we’d rather do than pay good money to wade through a legion of our favorite psychopaths, sociopaths, and their attendant goons.

In the meantime, we’ll occupy ourselves by having special feelings toward whoever is responsible for the Borderlands box art, by gasping in awe at the beauty of the IL-2 Sturmovik flat-spin simulator, suffering the anguish of having spent real earth money on G.I. Joe, or by considering how much we already love our Worgen rogue in the as-yet-unconfirmed WoW expansion.

Yeah.  That last one’s all mine, I suppose.  Big surprise.

Also, some forewarning.  The Mark Hamill interview is forthcoming, and it’s not, like, short or anything.  Man knows how to bring the story-telling, and we figure it’s worth mentioning that it all adds up to more than 4 hours worth of shit for this week.

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No overt comparisons of manhood at the following link.

Phallic humor really isn’t our kind of thing, but that’s a tough idea to sell with an episode titled like the one above.  The offhand comments made in the studio are the ones that usually leave the barbs, and so we’re forced to deal with them when the time comes to name our creation.  Best practices are not always followed.  Feelings are often hurt.  Children are scarred.  But this is nothing to the shame heaped upon Altair by his formidable brucewaynian ancestor, Ezio.

(I’m reminded just now of a discussion about a “third blade”…maybe phallic humor really is our thing?  If so: dammit!)

We’ve raked a bit of television across the first few minutes of our recording tonight, and if you’re not the kind of person who digs on TV, then we apologize for a patchy crossover.  The hosts all like to take some time for idiot-boxing now and then, and we’re generally in good company for the kinds of things we like.  But how, why and where we watch our stories varies quite a bit from one to the other, and it’s the discrepancy that causes some of our unavoidable live conversations.  For tonight, the diversion is short, and once its done with games feature prominently.  Mostly old ones.

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Keep an eye out for green beams at the following link.

It’s not unusual for us to swap war stories of all kinds in the studio; stories that will always include a detailed account of how deft we are with some variety of deadly weapon, skill, or super-power.  It’s quite another thing to pass actual deadly weapons from host to host while the mics are hot.  While the details of the assault rifle in question are accurate down to the finest details as rendered in any modern war game you care to mention, it may as well have been a plate of lutefisk for all we knew what to do with it.  Except for Scott, that is.  He can turn on the layzer!

Now that there are no more games coming out this fall, we can talk about PC stuff.  (And machine guns)  Jeremy’s need to tinker with hardware has never really waned, but he’s kept himself limited to Millennium Falcon-esque multimedia living-room rigs for years, and has denied himself the pleasure of doing God’s real work of putting together a game machine.  He has corrected this now to some degree, and there’s a real chance further change may come in the future.  Now, Scott, Arjay….what’s the state of your hardware again?

Also, ‘splode ‘splode ‘splode.  ‘Splode!  ‘Splode, ‘splode.

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You can apply for enrollment at Moeversity here.

We’d like to start off this week by recognizing a tragic gap in our schedule.  Show content that should have been provided at the usual place and time more than a week ago simply wasn’t, and for once it wasn’t due to a real-world conflict or a disagreement with our server hosts.  As a matter of fact, we’re not entirely sure what happened, but we can divulge that somewhere between the recording of the episode and its transmission onto the internet, the contents were completely erased.

Scott and Jeremy made valiant efforts at forensic reconstruction, but in the end nothing could be done, and we opted to simply mourn the loss while waiting for the next recording session to come around.  For what it’s worth – and this is for the small contingent who seem to appreciate the show titles – it would have been The Underpillaged Episode, and I can assure you the content was above-average.

As for this week, in lieu of having Jeremy in his normal place due to work or family or something, we’ve decided to present you with our very favorite Moe of all time – he of walks in the park and Beef Wellington fame – long known and oft-referenced by the show hosts.  We’d also like to note that this is Matt’s last episode for a long minute as he has now flown out to the sand to make bombs on which CoGers may display greetings and words of wisdom for our nation’s enemies.

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