In-Game Chat

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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To find out if you’re an adult, click here.

We’ve got a full house plus one for this episode with our special guest Ryan, also known as Suave Peanut on the forums, rounding out the 6 of us. We go over all of what we played since the last episode and for one us in particular, they got a slightly used Wii console to try out, putting it to good use to give us his impressions of The Conduit. We’ve also got more impressions of Prototype from Jeremy. And we continue our discussion of adventure gaming in its prime.

We’re directed in our conversation once again by both Twitter and emails and the discussion is lead into Starcraft 2’s lack of LAN play and what that may mean for future Blizzard releases. And finally we go over our impressions of seeing Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen coming to a conclusion on it that you might not expect.

Enjoy the show. And thanks for listening.

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You’re right – this episode here should have been available last week.

Clearly you should have gotten another episode long before now, but the show’s infrastructure suffered a debilitating series of body-blows over the course of the last two weeks, and its personnel haven’t fared much better.  We’re still intact, and everything is more-or-less as it should be for our operation, but the demands of meatspace have put us in a bind more than once lately, and on-time delivery is always the first thing to go.

With those reasons out of the way, we’re going to deliver this episode to you without the usual synopsis, and without even its usual bookends of hand-picked music.  The content will have to stand on its own, we’re sad to say – squeaky chairs and all.

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I have no clue why we used that name for this show, but the answer is bound to be somewhere behind this link.

E3 is just a few short days away, and at the time of this recording, none of the early news items had been distributed through the usual channels, so we’re left with plenty of editorializing and very little solid information.  Fortunately, our twitter and email correspondents have given us everything we need to fuel a second hour of the program.  Apologies all around for the garbled responses or for any questions that weren’t directly answered.  You’ll find yourselves at the top of the pile next week, we swear.

Scott’s LA itinerary is complete, the news tickers are filled with fresh tape, and we’ve all sheltered our own personal hopes for expo announcements even though we refuse to mention them on the air for fear of being horribly wrong.  Once they hit the feeds, however, we’ll be glad to say we knew it all along.  And, sadly, the one drawback to having a passenger on the hype-train is that we won’t be recording our program next week.  Scott is sure to have plenty to say during the show and more when he returns, but his absence makes our usual get-together unlikely.

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A full helping of IGC, somewhat late to the table, is available at this link.

Much like the traditional preparation of beef tenderloin, this episode of In-Game Chat is both classy and succulent. In addition to your standard host assortment, we offer a side order of Matt and Dave – the very best the Air Force has to offer – and we invite you to join us in laughing at the antics of people you seriously don’t even know.  

We’ve spent just enough time with this week’s terrible games to confirm their terrible gameplay, and just enough time looking into the bright-light future of E3 to believe that there’s real salvation to be found on the show floor next week.  There are solid games from the recent past that still demand our attention, and the promise of some seriously polished gameplay in the near future, but we’ve always had a weakness for the sound and fury of E3, no matter how little it may actually signify.

We’d also like to note in this space, as we have in the episode itself, how much we enjoy it when the tweets drop during our recording.  We’re quite good enough at going on for hours on our own, but it’s nice to have an unexpected course correction at or around the 45 minute mark to keep us keen.  Much like the listener mail, this will become something we can’t live without.

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