In-Game Chat

We’re trying to take the moral high ground at the following link.

Is Spider-Man classified as an open-world game? I mean, I’m sure it qualifies for a lot of different types of games, but is open-world one of them?

If I thought so before playing Red Dead Redemption 2, I don’t feel that way anymore. Open world games now have a set bar and RDR2 is it. I can throw out all the cliches of open world gaming and the feeling of a living, breathing world, and it all easily applies to what RDR2 is doing, but…there’s an ecosystem here. Both literally and figuratively.

It was dark in the town of Valentine and I was on my horse about to ride back to my camp when a drunk guy was stumbling around asking for help. All I did was give him direction to where he said his home was. I got honor points for it and he walked off. I didn’t expect anymore than that. Eventually, I didn’t go back to my camp. I wandered through some back alleys and back yards in Valentine and happened to bump into the drunk guy again. This time he was at his house (exactly where he’d vaguely told me it would be) yelling at his wife to let him in. She didn’t. He threw up on the porch and laid down outside his door.

I feel like any other game, that drunk guy would have walked away after I helped him and then vanished. Deed done. Interaction complete. Removed from the map. But not in RDR2. It lives. It breathes. And it does so with or without you having anything to do it. Makes me wonder what would have happened to the guy if I’d just ignored him or gave him the wrong directions.

Now I need to try Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.

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We’re trying to take the moral high ground at the following link.

How many games can you play at one time? I don’t mean at the same time, obviously, but how many games can you play and still keep that controller memory in your head?

I think two is about it for me. If you throw in a third and I’ve got to get a feel for the controls, I think it gets in the way of me having that memory for one of the other games unless I continue to put some time in with it every once in a while. I’m currently juggling Spider-Man and Red Dead Redemption 2. Along with Destiny, but I don’t really count that too much since it’s a whole different control scheme for the PC. But, in the coming weeks should I pick up something like Assassin’s Creed, then I may have issues.

It’s the same with TV shows on streaming services. I don’t try to have too many going at once so I can keep track of everything going on as I watch.

Am I the only one who does this?

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Someone’s having trouble breathing at the following link.

Wasn’t feeling all that great during the show. And now, the day after, it’s only gone downhill from there. So, here’s our show.

We talked about video games.

I’m going back to bed.

Or Destiny. Maybe both.

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The music’s a little too somber for the month we’re celebrating at the following link.

The waiting is the hardest part. Especially when you’re a fan or you have the money so why wait and then the fact other people are talking about it or you’re reading about it and you wanna be in on it too. So that whole thing from last week about waiting for sales – it really only applies whenever you want it to. And one of us couldn’t wait. BUT…it was his birthday so we’ll let him slide with that one. It’s also Assassin’s Creed and he REALLY enjoys the new direction they’ve taken the series since Origins. We’ll get more of his word on that next week.

And maybe a bit of mine as well if I can remember that I got into the beta for Google’s Project Stream. I have a free copy of the new Assassin’s Creed game so long as I play it within my Chrome browser. It’s kind of fascinating to think about and Curt calls in to tell us of his time with it, while I lament about how I totally forgot I got in all week long. Even writing this I’m reminding myself to check it out as soon as I post this….

The odds are not in my favor.

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We know the month but we’re still not sure of the day at the following link.

So it’s finally October. That means a few things. It means all of our music cuts for the entire month will be from scary/horror/spooky games, and it means we’re that much closer to November.

Here’s what I’m getting at with the November part. We’re totally down with you buying games. Go for it. And, honestly, buy them whenever you want. HOWEVER, if you can hold off, it might serve you well to do so. Let’s take the new Assassin’s Creed for example. Game came out this week – a good full month before November. Ubisoft is like clockwork when it comes to Black Friday discounts and you can bet anything that game will see a drop come the final Friday in November. So for game purchases and TV’s and even console systems slow up a bit on the purchases cause they will drop in price and pretty soon at that. If you haven’t yet bought Spider-Man, there’s a good chance you’ll get it for $20 cheaper. As much as I want Matt and RJ back into Destiny 2 with Forsaken, I’ve told them to hold off cause it will almost surely see a discount. As for Red Dead 2, its release comes a little too close to the end for me to think it’ll see any kind of a drop, but there’s no harm in waiting if you can.

Yeah, I’m not waiting on that one either.

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We keep forgetting a new Tomb Raider came out at the following link.

Ended, the cross play wars have?

It’s odd. I keep an offline document so I can write these while the PC is busy doing other things. I don’t use it all the time, but when I opened it up, the last time I had used it was back when I wrote about the whole fuss of Sony blocking cross play with Fortnite. And now, here we are, and Sony has allowed it. Further stating that it will look into other third-party cross play options.

I was all for this and I still am. I don’t play a lick of Fortnite, but if it gets Sony closer to allowing, at the very least, cross SAVES with Destiny or anything else really, then I’m all for it. Giving freedoms to the consumer is always a good thing to me, even though I can remember a time when it was unheard of – and not because of anything else other than NO ONE was doing it. It wasn’t some sense that big corporations are bad or anything, but that simply no one was doing that and we never thought they would. Microsoft opened the door slightly but it made sense. Play on your Xbox and play on your PC…excuse me, WINDOWS PC. It just went together and seemed very seamless that they would do that. Then other games and companies came on board and, while it wasn’t expected, it was no longer the surprise it once was or the revolution we’d thought it would be.

This is pretty big though. And maybe the first step to closing that gap of further deciding on which system to get a game on based on where your friends are playing.

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We’re making it so at the following link.

In trying to catch up, we just got further behind. Still, there was no way we were getting out of this show without bringing up TellTale.

What the hell happened?

For me, personally, the writing wasn’t on the wall for this. I remember hearing somewhat about horror stories for working there but nothing clearly and enough for me to think it wasn’t just a disgruntled employee. But there’s plenty of places with horrible working conditions that still operate. TellTale’s closing just feels so very out of the blue. Usually something like this might come in between projects or even during a project that just hasn’t released yet, but this was a company that had just gotten the license for a “Stranger Things” game, not to mention they’d already produced games based on “Minecraft”, “Borderlands”, “Game Of Thrones”, “Guardians Of The Galaxy”, “Back To The Future”, “Jurassic Park”, “Batman”, and “The Walking EFFING Dead”! How does this go wrong?

Our sincere best wishes to those now who are suddenly out of a job. Those who put in the very long hours and overtime with next to nothing to show for it. We thank you for all of that hard work on games a lot of us on the show enjoyed tremendously and we hope very much you land on your feet with something so much better than where you were.

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We’re catching up for lost time at the following link.

We’re two weeks behind where we should be in this episode so while it should be a lot about what we’ve played and all those things announced for Switch and everything else from this past week, we’re jumping back as though I just got back from PAX West.

And there’s a whole lot to say about what I saw at PAX West. Plenty of games to cover like GRIS, My Friend Pedro, Bloodroots, Soundfall, Shift Quantum, Bee Simulator, Hong Kong Massacre, The Gardens Between, Streets Of Rage 4, Windjammers 2, We The Revolution, and so much more that I’m leaving out at the moment.

It’s a whole PAX-Filled episode crammed into 2 hours and hopefully next week, after some more catching up, we’ll be back on track.

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Somehow we talk about Bloody Mary’s at the end of this link.

We remind you in the show, but I’ll do it again here: there’s no NEW show next week. We will play an old show – a really, really old show – next week.

Before that though, I’ll talk about some of the games I’m scheduled to see while in Seattle next weekend as well as some of the other things I’ll be doing there. Which, I think, is how we kind of got off topic there at the end of the show.

Also, RJ has started building his PC.

Time for me to fly, miss out on the first day of the new Destiny expansion, and arrive back only to split my time between Destiny and Spider-Man.

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We’re listening to the echoes of dead MMO’s at the following link.

When I had a Nintendo Gamecube the only games I really got for the system were Nintendo exclusives. Any kind of multi-platform title would just be bought on one of the more powerful systems and, usually, where everyone else was also playing the game. Same thing happened when I had a Wii for all of a few months, maybe – that console never caught on for me. Still, here I am with a Nintendo Switch and the library is mainly exclusives. But I don’t see it staying that way.

It used to be that any multi-platform title would be purchased on the more powerful system or where all my friends would be playing it. And it really still is that way, honestly. But the Switch throws a wrench into that plan the makes the idea of double-dipping almost worthwhile.

Portability. We’ve talked about it before, but the handheld aspect of the Switch doesn’t give it an edge over anything else. I mean, all things being equal (mostly) it’s very likely I still wouldn’t get a game for just the Switch if it were available on other consoles, but the portability almost makes a game with picking up a second time just to be able to carry it around with me on trips.

Diablo 3 looks to be the game that proves the point and starts the trend.

And yes, I know for a lot of you that already started with Skyrim.

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We want you off our lawn at the following link.

I feel like I may have approached this subject before and at the risk of sounding old-manny and out of touch, I can’t understand the appeal of YouTube gaming people. Well, I guess I can when I see it in a broad spectrum – the entertainment aspect, but I can’t go much further from there. And I suppose I don’t have to, actually.

And I’m not talking about walkthroughs or the kind that show you a different strategy to a game or help you find a path when you’re stuck. I understand why that’s there and why people watch it. I’m talking about the big YouTube gaming people who just play random nonsense and provide absolutely no educational value to whatever they are playing. Entertainment value, sure, but nothing there beyond that. And I guess there doesn’t need to be. To each their own, right?

And I say this in the show and I’ll say it here…I’m not saying someone is wrong for what they like in this regard. It’s more a sense of me trying to understand it. And yeah, I know about the South Park episode. When I walk by the massive line at conventions to meet one of these people, I realize what they do isn’t for me – it’s for them. The ones in line.

And I just keep walking.

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We’re pretty sure Matt loves his voice packs at the following link.

Not sure how I was able to squeeze in more pinball talk, but here we are.

Destiny 2 is back on the topic of discussion, at least a little bit. It’s dominating my game time and maybe not in the best way. It’s a grind-fest at the moment. A whole lot of things to do before the whole event is over with at the end of the month. And don’t underestimate what I mean by a whole lot of things. It’s the end of the first year of the game and I actually have a spreadsheet of things to do in it before the month is out. I’ve never been involved in something like this before. Destiny has done stuff like this before but never on the level it’s on right now. It’s tedious and time consuming and demanding, and…lucky too, probably. There’s certain requirements that took me weeks to knock out way back when and if you didn’t do those things, you’ve got a hell of a hill to climb.

I’m the kind of person who doesn’t like extra things on his plate to do and all of this they’ve added for me just feels like something I need to knock out so I can get back to what I was doing. I know that doesn’t REALLY make much sense, but understand that I’m not complaining about any of what they’ve offered me to do. I accept the challenge and push through it. And sometimes I have fun when I do.

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We’re making every shot count at the following link.

Gonna warn you up front, there’s about thirty minutes of pinball talk here on a specific table and a visual aid if you happen to see this on YouTube. I had a hell of a run on a table the other night and I always get asked about my high scores. So, I wanted to see how well I could explain it since the idiot that I am didn’t record the session even though I have the ability to. I promise, next time I do this, I will totally record it so I can show the actual session happen. Even then, it might be a little confusing to figure out what’s happening and why.

Pinball is a game of points and those just don’t happen by knocking the ball around the table. Think of it maybe like cooking a meal. A few (or a lot of) things have to be done to get the meal ready. Same in pinball. Steps have to be taken to open up the playfield to bigger points. Lock balls (usually 3) start a multi-ball which opens up the chance at jackpots. Jackpots are where the majority of big point scores in pinball come from. But in order to lock the ball you usually have to trigger something on the table. It’s all about repetition to trigger events to make other events happen.

This is a really horrible explanation but one I hope I did better on the show.

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We’re way too thrilled for JULY FOURTEENTH at the following link.

I can’t really remember the last time I spent money on what’s called a “micro-transaction”. That’s a fun marketing word to get people to think they are only spending a tiny bit of money on something. You’ll find it in a LOT of games – mostly mobile games, but they show up in regular games as well.

“Fortnight” is a game that costs nothing to play. It’s free. Play all you want. There’s things in the game you can spend actual money on and that’s how they make money off the game. Apparently, there’s enough need of whatever is actually for sale in that game that people have spent over a billion dollars on it. That kinda blows my mind. Takes me back to the phone/tablet days of when you’d hear of parents getting massive bills cause their kids kept buying things because the app made it easy (or tricky). I don’t know if we’re there yet with a game like “Fortnight”. It’s on pretty much every available platform, but when a game that cost nothing to play pulls in that kind of money, it makes you wonder. It also turns on just about that many lightbulbs in the minds of executives who want to hop on that gravy train.

As much as I’d hoped this whole battle royale mechanic of gaming was going to stay in it’s own circle, this tells me otherwise. Unfortunately, it’s just getting started.

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We’re way too thrilled for JULY FOURTEENTH at the following link.

In gaming, whenever you find something new (it’s actually not very new at all) and it’s a lot of fun you really want to tell people about it. Especially when it seems like no one else knows anything about it. That’s where I am right now with DropMix.

It’s also tickling the collector side of me. A side I didn’t think I had given my experience with other collectible card games. Yet, here I am looking at checklist spreadsheets, promo cards that have long since become easily available and looking for ways to complete a collection. It was easy enough to get started what with the base game having a huge 70 percent discount, but stores don’t put things on clearance for no reason. The community seems to think this game has legs enough for a new round of cards coming soon, but in stores it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like it’s dying. Some card packs were exclusive to Toys R Us and that isn’t really helping the feeling of things just going south with this game.

The game also has to contend with the fact that I just found out about it and I really like it. I have a history of jumping on things at their dying breath. TV Shows, electronics/gadgets, and yeah, even video games.

Good luck with that curse, Harmonix.

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