In-Game Chat

Our most not-exactly-recent episode can be found at the following link.

There’s a chance this week that our familiar pattern of procrastination will run headlong into a powerful urge to post relevant information.  This particular episode should have been available some time ago, and we’re likely to push another one on you before the holiday week, so we hope you’ve honed your apetite.

We’re operating at near-zero levels of Arjay in this episode, but have compensated with a saturated mixture of Dave.  Fresh from the time-lost glaciers of somedamnwhere, Dave is once again in our temporary embrace.  We’ll soon lose him to another frozen hell, at which point Matt will have returned from his sandy nightmare and can once more fill the post of resident Air-Force guy.

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There’s still hope for an indulgence at the following link.

Last week’s gap in coverage had almost nothing to do with the holiday season, but was instead the fault of a certain greedy co-host who, in his lust for consumer electronics, agreed to put on a second hat so he could take home a second paycheck.  That paycheck must now be poured back into a large, television shaped hole in the unnamed co-host’s savings account, with any leftovers to be applied generously around the insides of his PC.  I have it on good authority that it’s been time and money well spent.

What little time there was to spare between the working and the revelry and what-not was directed precisely where you’d expect it to be.  Assassin’s Creed 2 is the real star of this week’s show, and one we spent the lion’s share of our time discussing.  The evolution of Desmond’s tale has, as if by holy edict, moved beyond the perceived weaknesses of its predecessor, and claimed its rightful title of Damned Good Game.  The gameplay is refined, the mystery is elevated, the blades are doubled.  Clearly, they’ve gone about as fer as they can go…yessir!

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We interrupt your show at the following link.

We’ve gone on long enough about Modern Warfare 2 and we hope to put that topic to bed with one final installment as a few others on the show, myself included, finish the main campaign with a dip into the multiplayer.

On the other hand, we have Assassin’s Creed 2. A game we’re not likely to wrap up talking about for some time, and one during the recording of this episode that we’ve not even scratched the surface of.

And then there’s Left 4 Dead 2.

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We wanted to breathe smoke at the following link.

It’s a big round of musical assholes at the jump-off tonight; 3 of the 4 hosts arguing over which of us is the perennial asshole and which is just filling in.  I like to think I’m on the job full-time, but Scott makes a dash for the title, and I may have to concede the race.  Which is fine, of course.  Better that than to be at a loss for words.

There’s truly too much to be said about Modern Warfare 2.  I don’t know all the words a person would need to express himself fully after finishing this campaign, and light-stepping around the spoilers hasn’t made things any easier.  I’m pretty sure the game was just too awesome to be good, and I hope my fellows can lay down some of their own opinions when they finish it themselves.  Or IF they finish it…

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We aspire to feature parity at the following link.

Any ground Infinity Ward stood to lose to the enthusiast and idealist backlash in recent weeks has probably reached its maximum.  Modern Warfare 2 is alive and thrashing at retail, and there’s nothing left now but to count the player numbers online.  We may be acknowledged members of the disgruntled minority, and we’ve certainly never had trouble nursing a grudge, but we’d like to examine the game now on its own merits, without harboring any sort of rebuke for the men behind the scenes.  We make a last pass at discussing the peaks of the controversy in this episode, and hope to make room for a practical discussion in the weeks to come.

Despite the past successes of Bioware, or the songs of devotion sung by their many fans, a shamefully high percentage of players will never experience the world of Dragon Age.  It’s a magnificent game filled with magnificent flaws, and it’s unapproachable and impenetrable in any number of fantastic ways.  It has complicated sensibilities, and its roots are clearly showing, which is why it won’t be quite the thing for everyone.  For my money, however, I couldn’t be having a better time right now, and I couldn’t be happier that the experience seems to transcend the platform of choice.  A refreshing change from the divisiveness and bitter hard feelings of the recent past.

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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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