Giant Bombcast 04-05-2011

Everyone. It's Tuesday, April the fifth, twenty eleven. It's the bomb Cast, all right, Davis Viney Caravella. That's me. Stop Brad Shoemaker. What's happening? Why welcome back, Brad Shoemaker, back in the fold. Oh man, you spend a week sitting around in your underwear and playing StarCraft. J dude, I know this for a fact, stack of Xbox games did not get touched. Oh no, I did not get touched. So so can I just do Hey, what you've been playing? You could say StarCraft and read on. Uh? I played? Uh? I did spend the whole week on the computer for whatever reason. I mean I went to your house Monday morning and you were already clearly oh yeah, in it was it Monday night that Alex show. When did Alex come get that three DS? That was like Monday night, Tuesday morning something like that. Okay, that's right. It was Tuesday morning. Was when I came by and you were Tuesday morning is when you came Yes, that's right, Okay, I had showered at that point. Okay when Alex Alex came by Monday night kind of unannounced, like he texted me. But I wasn't paying attention. Yeah, and I had been playing about three hours of I was playing two v two StarCraft with JP over at the MLG. He was boning up for their Dallas event, but had about showered in a while. Uh, looking pretty disheveled, had a good funk going. She just shows up at the door or banging on the door, like right as we are engaging in the climactic moment of the match we were in. So yeah, I had to tap out then and then be really embarrassed that somebody had come to my house in the middle of this awful Let's not talking about this degeneration. Let's not talk about StarCraft all the time. I played a decent amount of the Warhammer un War two. Oh fantastic. The first one was the Retribution. Yeah, well they've done a Retribution. They also did Chaos Rising. It was cold. Yeah, yeah, what did you think? It's good? I mean, you know, you know how it is. You played a bunch of it. It feels like the logical progression of company heroes and all that stuff feels exactly the same. I'm just I'm so used to StarCraft now that like clicking to make a guy do something and then watching him sort of like fiddle around and go through some animations before he actually goes over and does it. I'm just like, do it, like I told you what to do, Just go over there and shoot that guy. So it was adjustments in it. It's very kind of Rocket Hammer small scale, you know, you get there's like four or four or five dudes, four dudes out of Yeah, I like sweep cover tactics, indeed, suppressing fire. I've played ninety three minutes of that game. That's not according to your Steam staffs. I love when Steam can tell me sh yes, Steam corrected me, and I was only twenty hours into dragon Age, not thirty good. Yeah you got you got a lot of people were bewildered. So now thirty hours now you're thirty hours, like twenty five or something. You didn't play much shows dragon Age too. This Uh you know, I played like five or six hours. That's a fair amount. Yeah, anything else, Yes, what's going on? I did slam that Zoe Juchi jesus, well, because I want to speak with authority. Well, the only the only way to do it, Zo Geruchi in your hand, that's this, This has to stop. This is now. I don't have to have roommates. This is great, This is great for me. Gotta cut me in on this. Oh yeah, what stop? Still still nice and hot? What am I gonna do with seventeen ounces of liquid? But it's hot or it's the perfect amount for what it's ideal? Is nothing useful for cold beverage? Absolutely? Again, seventeen ounces I've been told. I've been told it's not great for uh, I mean, it cannot maintain carbonation of carbonated beverages, but hot or cold. There are smaller ones. Yeah, no, that's that's fine, and they have they have more colors available for the smaller ones than they do for for these air quote big ones. How would you know? Have you been shopping for Zojarushi products recently? I looked on the internet to see exactly what you guys were getting up to and to explore the line of the brand, and they do look very nice. But if I can't carry around at least thirty two ounces, at least a trade deuce, you should buy two and then ten. That's still a totally reasonable solution. I guess if I cared at all about coffee, maybe that would matter, because more than seventeen ounces of coffee. Seems like it might be a little, but it's good. It's a good amount of coffee, A viable way to make tea in that thing in it like steep it, Yeah you can. You can probably step it. I mean, I mean this thing is yeah, I mean the string would keep over the edge or you just dump that whole motherfucker in there. All right. I drink almost no hot beverages ever. So it's good for water. But so is a large, just regular plastic travel bottle that holds thirty two So it's like an empty taco bell cup. You just go start using those. There you go, dude, hobo man, that's pretty good too. I gets some nice plasm lexandla. You know, it's not gonna like get all chemical e or whatever and freeze container of got so, So I spent the weekend drinking water. I have an old gas can and let me tell you that'll keep it cold. Yeah. I don't remember anything about no, like, not about the weekend, anything anything anything? Where am I are you people? For a while, I forgot how to breathe. But they say that that returns normally as the kind of effect wears off. But any carabout mass Effect, the back back to oh to the arrival, the arrival aspect to the arrival the new dlcut last week. That's a that's a short piece of content. I heard I heard some middling things about that, yeah, with like what middle middle thing did you hear middle finger? Yeah? Actually I saw a lot of middle fingers being extended at that thing. Short buggy and just kind of I don't know about the buggy, but it kind of goes against everything that you really enjoy about mass effect too, and which is you're solo, okay pretty much the entire time. So there's no party banter, not issuing a lot of commands, no, so you're just you know, you yourself the entire time. Uh. It's extremely short and combat focused, and it would be even shorter if you didn't try. And like basically there's around wave based combat situation in which you could die in the first gun shot and then move on with the story and be like, oh man, you didn't make it. That sucks, or you can do like all three or four waves or five waves and get the achievement for making through all the waves. And that's like the longest piece of that content. But does that like other than like dinging for the achievement. Does that actually do anything for the story because you like it kind of like wooze out the same way, like and then you get woken up and you're like, yeah, hold on, and then the end of it is like guess what. I guess who's coming up dinner? They're like Shepherd, No, he was already there. He's hosting the dinner party party. There's maybe one piece of story or of narrative that they they add in there that maybe taken to mass effect three that would be like okay, now I see how that was set up. But even that's I don't know. I'll have to wait and see how that's addressed. The mass affect. When you say short, like how short? Because not the other pieces haven't been I think you if you really would say, like what would you say, shadow broken like on the outside, like three hours tops tops. I think you can cruise through this in like an hour. Jeez, I've heard I've heard multiple people say under an hour. Yeah, I think you can really burn through this, especially if you're not looking it. I'll probably play it, which is a shame because you know mass effect. Mass effect too is fantastic. That's a great game, and all the DLC or most of the DLC up to this point, has been really up to snuff. Overlord was also fantastic and it was good. Yeah, it's kind of a shame to see this kind of yeah, like why I just don't leave this one up, especially because like those those other their packs came pretty tightly bundled, like pretty close to the games. Well, I mean within the year of the game's release and within like a month or two of each other, and there was a pretty big break. Yeah, and now we have this, although imagine that probably has something to do with getting it on PS three as well. So yes, which they which they now have to consider. It's nice to see him go back this this long after the fact. I think it's cool to revisit it. Well yeah, I mean, like in theory, it's cool that somebody would go back of this long after and do this. I wonder if it's a shame, it's some grand experiment to say, like I wonder how long we can keep people caring about this stuff, and if this is an effective way to set up a sequel, Well, it sounds like it does not provide that, like momentous narrative bridge in the best Efact three that we were expecting. Yeah, And I guess it's just kind of maybe it's a victim of the way it has to be set up where you don't even have to have a clear game or you don't have to have beating the game to see this stuff. So I have to fit into the narrative no matter where you are. Did you get any sense of how that would affect things? Because they were saying when they were here or the it would vary, but based on where you're at in the storyline. So like I'm trying to finish the game again and get the better ending. There were some wondering if I go do it now, like what there are a couple of dialogue options that kind of like we're like, oh, you know, you had stopped the collectors or whatever like that, so I suspect those would be gone. But you know, again, like you're by yourself, and so like there's you know, all the party stuff is stripped out and that's that's a shame. Uh. And there's no new weapons or anything like that. I think I got one upgrade for like my heavy weapons stuff, but I don't know. I just I don't know I don't know what to say. That didn't not not with a bang. But yeah, there's mass effect too. That's a shame. There's some other stuff on the Servers network that is better. That's what I would say. So very combat focused. Not a lot of good dialogue stuff, No, no, not at all. Very a couple of like a twist here or there, but like, ain't gonna knock your trousers off. So yeah, I was back in the dragon Age kind of about my short pants they might rise a little bit, but okay, yeah, like it your ankles wet, come prepared. Yeah, So then more Dragon Age and I think everything I said about that still holding true. And that was the week according to me. Great did you not start in on Back to the Future Episode three? Oh? Finish that? Okay, don't tell me I would. I have not opened it up. That's a good one. I know. It ends And then you're like, ah, I heard a lot of people saying like, all right, new environments, like we yeah, jump over the issue of that episode two had, But then in the episode four you're like, oh, it's gonna be more of that one. It didn't get me as excited for episode three at the end at the end of two going in three. Yeah, yeah, you're like all right, yes, at the end of three fours like, all right, well, I'll come by by this time next week I will have finished that and we can talk about Yeah, that's okay. It's probably the best stepisode so far, aside from the first one where you're like, yeah, the future, but that's I don't think you can necessarily even like verify the quality of the first episode. You just like the future. I'm an idiot, like you hear that, like, yeah, no, that's one's cool. You know the first episode of that is free for all. No, yeah, it happened last week. I did not. You can just go to get that Telltale Games dot Com slash BTTG I believe, and uh go get that b t t G yeah t G, b t t F TG No. I just think it's just BTTF. But the game that's barely sure. That's like a four four hour thing, three hour things. That's like a three hours for episode three, any of the whole thing, any of them. Okay, yeah, they're each one three per I mean that's pretty good. If they're doing like five or six total, that's shouldn't played those If I kind of burned out on Sama Max. Do you like Back to the Future much? Yeah, okay. Do you like the tell tale style of games? Yeah, it's I mean that's the thing. Like I have a stack of other Like I never finished the Tales of Monkey alllet I never finished the last two seasons of Salmon Max. Right, And I bought season three of Salmon Max and didn't play any of it because I never I never never finished season two. I never finished. Yeah. Actually, I think the first season of Salmon Max and there was another one. It's something that doesn't count, know, I think I've I think I've actually finished two seasons. Yeah, I think it's you know, I'm at this point now where I love that they're making that stuff, but I'm not for you know. I mean they sure they do take their time kind of getting that stuff together and put it out, but I still feel like it's it's it's more than I need. It's more adventure game than I'm looking for. Yeah, you're you're not wrong, Like, I definitely I find myself Like the reason I stopped playing it is like I'm like I kind of know what this next episode, Like I want I want to see the story stuff, because that's usually pretty good. Max Is all is like the awesome yeah moments in it and stuff like that. But I definitely reached a point where it was like, I'm just not well. I stopped staying current with Salmon Maxon. Didn't necessarily feel bad about myself for doing so. I was like, Okay, No, these are very funny, and I really appreciate that they're being made, but I'm I'm okay with appreciating them from a distance now. Yeah, like only only you know, like tapping out of the three hour mark is probably a good thing because if they went any longer, because you can bust through one of these, like it's an easy single sitting and just like you know, afternoon on the weekend, the puzzles aren't very hard, Like the most annoying parts are kind of like backtracking and be like, oh I gotta go talk. In fact, like if anything like that kind of makes maybe the Back to the Future a little more appealing for for someone like you, because because they're really softball in the puzzles, like it's it's not it's not as demanding in that regard, so you can kind of cruise through them. Yeah, there was nothing demanding about most of their other stuff. I'd say, curious to see what happens with Trassic Park, because there's a lot of ways to die in that, Like they're emphasizing death. That's gonna I mean, that's gonna not be a telltale game from everything that I've seen about. If you push Jeff Goldbloom's hamster in the microwave and then show it to him, he'll kill you. Yeah. They themselves use the phrase like heavy rain, yeah when they were showing it off. So yeah, curious to see how people receive that. I think I've you know, I have definitely been perceiving, even outside of this room, a fair amount of of telltale burnout of people being like yeah, it's great that they're doing this, but kind of worn out for now, like I don't I don't need this volume. It's weird. It's it's like we've it's like we've totally relived the history of adventure games, but on a much tighter scale of like, these are the greatest games anyone is making right now. It's just like it's great that I'm still making it. Not for me, it's just like, you know, six months from now, is everyone gonna be totally done with it again, but really not that much tighter of a time scale, like when did they first make that for bone? Game? Like, but that wasn't That wasn't what did it for them though, dude, way way longer ago than six, Like i'd say three. No, no, the internet definitely not to the internet. Stop. If you start bringing fact checking into this podcast, you're going to ruin the whole thing. I'm saying, oh five or six somewhere around there. But that wasn't there. That wasn't their big stride any Oh No, that was the first thing they did was shot across the back call uh. Salmon Max was the thing. Yeah, right, that's what really took off for you know, there's there's this bad stuff, but I mean that was their was like bone. They did Bone first and then they got the Salmon Max stuff and that was kind of where they got their toe hold or I mean like the one and two stuff, the Biel's abub not the latest latest stuff like the first season saying like what like how tail caught on? Right, Yeah, that was the thing. Everybody was like, oh wow, okay, yeah, well I see I like it because you know it's it's like one season at a time for me, and it's like, oh, once a month, spent three hours playing playing a little adventure game, and that's totally. Yeah, that's great. I don't have to like sit down and like invest twenty hours of clicking around to finish something, so I enjoy that part of it. Also, don't have to spend like sixty bucks a month on the hint line. Yeah, I totally also like the spread out timeline of that, Like you don't feel compelled, like, fuck, I have to finish this twenty hour game. Yeah. Now, it's like I can finish the twenty hour game over the course of six months, except now that I'm behind. Yeah, now I'm sitting there with all of Sea well like half a season two and all season three, I would feel compelled to. I'm just gonna go through all these right now. It's but I'm already kind of burned out on that stuff. So yeah, I mean that's I've got. I think I'm just gonna let it sit and then they'll be just someday they'll be like, oh, now's the time, and I'll go back and probably I start restart season two, uh and and catch up that way or something. But Yep, that's that's reasonable. I feel you though, I feel you. I definitely like once you start slipping and getting behind, I think it was like I think it was was Hails of Monkey Island that once I got like two episodes behind on that, I was like, I can't that was a good one. I can't catch up. I skipped most of those because I was already kind of burnt a little bit, burnt a little bit, and I was never the hugest Monkey Allen fan to begain with. So I think I like those more of them. I like lit Chuck, but but Sam Max Hit the Road. It was probably my favorite non Maniac Mansion adventure game. Does that not take place in the Maniac in the Mansion of Verse? Yes? I think it does take place in the Scum of Verse, Yes, the scum of Verse. Zach McCracken on Mars, Where where's my episode of Zach McCracken game? That would probably the thing that would get me to try it all out again. They have not yet gotten all of the lists told LucasArts games. But yeah, if someone said, like, yo, we're doing another Zach McCracken, I would be like, cool, make sure it ships with a crazy newspaper. But at the pace they're going, they'll have that like next year, so look to that. And then I just wonder if anyone and then don't and then don't play it. It didn't feel really bad about it. I'll buy it. That's enough, right, Ye pay for it. That's fine. Yeah, you did your part, so video other than the full episode of a game that you forgot that you played. Yeah, I think I think that what you say is really good. It's pretty good way to sell it. Yeah, it's it's it's I mean, like like we just said, if you're invested in it, yeah go check it out. Why not? But if you're invested, you are, right. H But but like Jeff said, there's a difference between buying something and then actually having intent of playing it. Yeah, that's an episodic Fletch series, like get into something that matters. Jeff Gersman, how was how was your Fletch Larp event this weekend? Uh? It went okay. Uh. We couldn't get the dog to jump on the car, right, and I kind of screwed a lot of stuff up. That sucks. Yeah, I mean we hired like an animal handler, like a pro like a pro like a real Yeah, you put peanut butter on the It's just it's just at a I was an interested about, right, I don't know it's you guys went to Denny's afterwards, so you know, yeah, I had a good time. Yeah, that was cool. And you know, they've got a bunch of great food items named after awesome bands, so that was pretty cool. What's the Grand Slam named after the Hooters? Weird? Yeah, I don't get the refer putting it together, I get the reference had come back, all right, No, yeah, I'm assuming I'm assuming it's me. I'll google it later. Jeff Gerson, What you've been playing? Uh w w E All Stars? Yeah? Have you actually been still be playing that since a little bit A little bit okay, yeah, kind of been sticking with that and I'm gonna play it. Yeah, it's it's it's a lot of fun. But yeah, no, since that, I haven't really played anything. Did you do this weekend? I got my taxes ready to be done, and I've already spent like all of my tax money y'all waiting this last minute. I just I just got I kept forgetting. I don't even start. Yeah, I just you know, mine are not difficult to do. I have not told, but I have not even made the necessary IRA contribution that I need to make before I can even start the process. Isn't that over? Isn't that oh? You can do that like red until the fourteen until jeez, I got a notice saying, hey, you can still do this if you want to. I'm like, I already did my taxes. I don't care. I've been fiddling around with a few things here and there, like it was it Stranya one of the last weeks something something stran It's like Stranya, Colin something. Yeah, one or the other. It's a but it was originally just Stranya. Yeah, it's a. It's a shooter. You shoot things. You can arm three different types of weapons, and then two of them are activated at any given time, so that sets up, you know, some weapon combo type stuff. For alright, one laser and one spread gun out and then I picked up another spread gun and I used the right part of my body to collect it, so it's powering up the spread gun instead of replacing the laser with another spread a gun and a spread gun spread gun. I don't know. Would you would you call it booth hell? No, I don't know it. Maybe it gets a little hellish later on, but it's it's it didn't seem incredibly tough. But I also played it for about seven minutes, played some Russian Attack Expatriot, primarily for the quick look. That game's not great. Uh, but you know, let's a quick look at that up. I there's a front page promotional item there is. I saw you slide down the ladder into a pit of acid. Yeah, that was pretty sweet, said no, but I just I've been you know, we did a lot of quick looks last week, so I I played stuff for those, but haven't touched anything else outside of that. Really. I played some track Mania over the weekend. Yeah. I actually spent some time figuring out I have to rm a some RAM shod you did you run him test eighty six? No, I just that's your problem right there. That's problem is the beginning and end of diagnosing problems with RAM. Now. Instead, I pulled out RAM, swapped at the different slots, did all this other stuff. Oh and uh eventually knocked it down to it's got to be this one because it's not the motherboard, because the problem still happens if I moved put it in the other memory slots and blah blah blah. Anyway, so you downloaded the CD image or I guess at this point it's probably just a go stick. Yeah, I think I did start looking into memory testing. It run overnight, and if it says that there are more than zero errors, I don't understand why up in the morning you have a bad and it even tells you which one is bad. I don't understand why it takes so long still to run that. I don't know, hours and hours to test. Instead, that memory got big. I guess you had to do it overnight when it was eat megs, and now you have to do it when it's eight gigs, and I mean it's testing like every single bit, right, And instead I was just like running Call of Duty black Ops because that in Crisis too. Yeah, in a lot, that was exactly what I was doing, taxing, taxing the machine was, yeah, well, just just running something like Crisis two would last for a while before it would crash. Black Ops apparently must hog more ram, get up into the bad bits or whatever the hell it does, because it would just hard blue like Crisis two crashed gracefully to desktop. Black Ops just blue screens. Really, it's just like fuck this zero zero x. Yeah, that's a shame. Whatever. I don't know. I hate santis. I'm lazy. So yeah, so now it's like, am I gonna RMA this ram? Or am I gonna I think what I'm gonna do is is both because I want sixteen gigs in that machine for for what I'm doing with it. Oh wait, you do like audio you need to load a bunch of patches or yeah, yeah, yeah stuff. Yeah, this is not this is not just for games. You can do all sorts of shit. So it's you know, right now, because one of those sticks is bad, it's got four in it, so I might just buy two sticks put slap one of them in there now. So I go to eight, then RMA the bad one, and when I get that back then I'll put in the other eight. I don't know. Yeah PCs, Yeah, I don't know. I did that, and yeah, like I said, as a part of that, I played a little bit of Black Ops, which you know is still that uh and played some Crisis to which uh they get the multiplayer working in the I hear it is full of people hacking. Yeah, I heard, like even like the single player trainers would work in multiplayers. I heard that. Yeah, there were all kinds of people doing bad stuff that I loaded into a game and no one was visible. It was a bunch of floating guns running around. Uh, and that would look cool but made it very hard to see people. Did you like us the heat signature affect the entire time? Oh, maybe that would have worked. I don't know. That sucks, but it was just floating guns, yeah, which was was really silly that if you can get into a game at all, right, because that's still problematic, that's not a problem anymore. It seems like they've at least figured that run Away better since it didn't have to a bunch of models. It already runs pretty much perfectly. It's not gonna run more perfect than than perfect. So I'm working on hires texture pack for Crisis to Christ to complete perfect Moud. That's right, Well, I played some games, did you I did well. I left my Xbox three sixty memory stake here over the weekends. Oh, in my computer in your computer from Friday, so I didn't have what are you hacking achievements? So I didn't have I used it for the we Dare video on Friday. Ah, anyway, do you have so basically no Xbox this weekend? So I just recover your prof What why didn't you just recover your profile? My profile was gotten big, y'all. It's and it's getting big, prohibitively big. You can't recover it? No, Like it takes hours to recover Yeah what yeah, dude, that's yeah, Like mine is like seventy megs. Well, I mean yeah, if it was just transferring at speed, but it takes longer than that. I don't know why it wants to test your memory. Let's complain at Microsoft instead of me. The guy who had to wait several hours for his will Smith said his profile was like one hundred and fifty meg now and he still has recovered it. Oh no, I mean I went and I went and started that process took well, the first time I did it, it took a really long time and then actually aired out. But so, so, my profile was appearing on the system, but I couldn't connect to Xbox Live. That's like cool, So I'm like that's no good. Uh. Like every time I would try and go and hit the connect to Xbox Live, for like a split second, I would see like an error message, but then that would get covered up by the connecting to Xbox Live message and it would just sit there and spin. So that tried recovery again and it was taken forever. So I'm like, all right, PC games, it's good. Told it to sit and spin. Yeah, so uh rocks, Yeah, I told kick rocks, motherfucker. So what did you play in a PC? I played a little Dirt two, Little Code Masters Dirt too, Colin McCray. That gives pretty good y'all think about trying then. I you know, like two years of people saying, yeah, Dirt two is pretty good, I wouldn't played it. And it's pretty good. It's a fun racing game. Uh here it looks nice. Yeah, it looks fucking great on the PC. Yeah, like my my PC is pretty old at this point. But the video card's pretty kicking. But and yeah, ran nicely. Kind of card you got in there is that is Zoji Rusci God damn it? What No, it's the What's what's the day? Four sixties f sixties sixty? Good? Yeah, I have one of those. Uh yeah, so with that card it it seems to run pretty nicely, and it's uh yeah, a fun little rally racing game. Good, good looking models, good looking water, the Cardinal run Crisis I can attest because I play some Crisis. I don't really want to playing Crisis like the original. Yeah, the original actually uninstalled Crisis this weekend. Yeah, well I was, I was making around, I was making room the disks. I haven't played Crisis too yet because in addition to all the like cheating and multiplayer issues. Yeah, you heard about this nano catalyst bug on the PC. No, that's like the currency right, that's isn't that what you used to buy up? Yeah, apparently that'll just zero out randomly on That's cool and awesome, Like nothing you can do about it because of the way it handles saves. You know, you can't do a bunch of quick saves or whatever, so just like you'll lose all of your your money. Basically great. So I haven't touched Crisis too. That's pretty sweet. But when my PC started crashing randomly last week, I also fired up Crisis to try to stress it. Yeah, did you check them? And then found myself playing a bunch of Crisis after that? No, I resolved my issue. Anyway, What else did you play on the PC that was actually it, because that took up a fair amount of my time. I went through all like the first level challenges, the races and whatnot that they have in there, and although I reached a weird spot, so you know, it's it's the game's kind of split up into the three different like brackets or whatever, and three different leagues. So I finished up all the first league stuff, and then like, once you get to the second league, it's like, hey, to to make any of the cars that you've purchased previously like up to spec for this league, you gotta pay us like seventy five thousand dollars per car to upgrade them, which is not out of line for like the price of stuff in that game. But I had just previously spent a bunch of money on another vehicle. So I got to that point and it's like, I have seventy thousand, you want me to have seventy five thousand, But I've already kind of done all the races and this previous I think I could redo races, so I don't think I'm actually stuck. It was definitely like the well, I don't really want to go and redo an event already, so I gonna take a break and take a little break here and play some Ninten Dogs and Cats on a three DS. What's up you guys want to know about Yorkie's they're not very good at playing at at fetching frisbees? Is that the Yorkie edition? No, it's the it's they it's the French bulldog edition. How they catching? I don't have one of those yet? I only have one dog. How do you get them? You go to the kennel and buy them? Are there and their money? Yeah? How do you get money by competing in competitions? Okay, yeah, yeah, you go. There's pit fighting for your dogs. No, there's a there's three different kinds of competition. There's the uh, the the disc catch competition, frisbee competition, there's the lure chase competition that I think so, I actually did a little bit of comparison to the original Inten Dogs and was a little bit surprised at how much that is exactly that fucking game like tech is noticeably better, Like I was. Actually I totally forgot that the original Ninten Dogs didn't render the entire room at once like a like there was basically just like I don't know, let's call it a five to six foot kind of like or space. No, well, there's just this space around the dog, and wherever the dog would go, that space would follow him. So like you could see like occasionally like oh there's a wall near here him because he's standing near the wall in this room. And yeah, and it made me much more appreciative of what Okami didn accomplish, Like, well, the kamy Den is able to do like an actual fucking full on three D world here. So it's a ninten dogs and cats and room. Yeah, plus you get a full room. That's pretty good. Crazy, what kind of room did you get? The bathroom one? I just got the modern room. I haven't upgraded to. You can buy new rooms, can you really buy any room? But I don't think you can attach them to that room. You buy furniture for your room. Place the furniture in different spots. I got a dog bed, it's chilling the corner by a couch. My Yorkie Sarge lacks kicking it on his dog bed. I'm sorry her dog bed and a lady jerky. I don't care about your rooms, you don't care about your furniture. I want to hear about your cats. I have no cats yet. I want to buy a tabby, but they're like eight hundred bucks. So you don't just get a cat like you get a dog. What kind of precedent is that setting for a little kids. Yeah, they don't give you a cat right out of the game. You gotta learn with the dog. Well my understanding, it's like the mechanics with cat are completely different, and you can't go to the pound and just pick up like a cat that's gonna be put to sleep because of overcrowding or something. You gotta buy, gotta go buy a designer is that designer Petter cat farms? It's also not a real dog or cat? Can you also keep? So? Really, really, it's the best of any possible worlds. Can you give up your cat once it gets too old because it's not cute anymore? I believe there was a Well for one thing, my dog has not aged any I don't believe that they do. It is a designer dog. I actually don't grow up. No, they're puppies. Wow, that's that's pretty much ideal. Forever alright, forever puppies. Yeah? Because no, yeah, because I busted out Ninten Dogs, and I had an old save on that and where the fuck where have you been? Was hoping with fleas? Uh yeah, yeah, this is this is like pretty much everything that you could do in Ninten Dogs, you can do in Ninten Dogs and cats. I was just a little disappointed. So there's you know, you could take your dog for a walk, and in the original Inten Dogs you had to like draw the route for your for the walks through the neighborhood. And dogs are stamina, and there's like, oh there's yeah, there's a dog here, and you can run the past fields. Like if I go buy that dog and sniff his butt, I recover five stamina and then I can make it to the fire hydrant. But the whole like you know, pooping on the street, like all that stuff is the same in the walk, but but they took out so they took out the routing stuff. But now it's played from behind the back, so it's actually like full like full three D. You see down the street, so you'll see stuff coming up and you don't have to try and like guide your dog towards like oh there's a present and you could pick that up and get stuff or there's that dog, or there will be like alternate rats like Okay, you're on like main Street, but if you go right here, then you'll go downtown. If you go left here, you'll go into the mountains. Uh do you actually go? So there's yeah, yeah, you have to pick up dog shit. Yeah, with like a plastic bag or something, paper bag. You touch it, you touch it with the stylist, and then a little paper bag shows up and then the poop falls into that's that's not good. That's you're trying to be more fundamentally fling the bag at someone's house on fire. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's all with that's all part of the the other mini game. That's the other mini game. Yeah, I'm curious how they handle all the display of what's going on, because I mean, the first one it's actually it actually works for the while. You're right to wonder about that. It's a very tactile game. So like you know, the original and Sundogs was all about like literally kind of rubbing the dog with the style and you do like you do all the same like trick training stuff. In fact, it seems like it has exactly the same like set of tricks, right, the only difference being that the good screen is not the touch screen. Right, So what they do is they put a silhouette for all objects that you will interact with on the lower screen, So silhouette for the dogs, silhoutte for if like whatever they're holding in their mouth. Uh and then that's mirrored on the top screen in three day. So like and you know, like the first time you touch anything that a little like hand appears on the upper screen to kind of show like this is where you're touching. So like, other than initial contact, you don't even need to look at the lower screen because then you can just kind of like intuitively like all right, if if it's here, I move it a little bit this way, then it's gonna run over here or whatever you need it to do. So uh so, yeah, it's it works. It works relatively well for that stuff. Does it recognize you that there's some like facial recognition stuff they've talked about when I saw it a while ago, No, you can. The voice stuff works a lot better. Like the voice stuff in the originally Ten Dogs was like tap and it will be listening for this amount of time. Then you say a command or like the dog's name into it and then it registers and then it comes to you very like deliberate specific process this. You can just like shout at the dogs and uh and get it to do stuff. Sorry, Or if you don't want to do that, if you are, you know, on the US and you don't want to sound like a fucking lunatic yelling at your computer dog, you can just like tap on the screen on them to get them to come to you. Yeah, it is a pet simulator. Yeah, but it's also like it's I don't know, it's superlimited. There's there's just not a lot to that game like there and especially the way it's it's measured out. Like so there's three competitions you can do. There's the two that I said, and then there's also an obedience competition which actually uses the AR cards, so you bust out the AR cards and like in the at least in the first level of it, which I just finished up, you're actually like shouting commands at at the dog and looking at them standing on your AR card. That's cute while you do it. Yeah, the air card stuff is neat. Yeah, that's that's novel. Is there any street pass stuff? I think there is I had I turned something on? I haven't. I haven't seen any fruits of that yet, so I'm not sure what it does other than make me weird about my three DS. Carry it everywhere, run the battery down constantly. Well, I'm not really concerned with running the battery down constantly because I'm no longer playing games on the three DS. I'm merely carrying it around to see if anyone else has one, fishing for other people to have treds. Yeah kind of. No, I'm left with no desire to play any of those games that are out. What's that noise? Sorry? Is that the pets? Is that the Nintendo Dog? And I just keep street passing with Ryan and Brad? Who the three DS has been sitting on my desk in the charge. You've been getting like a token three pass every day? Yeah, I'm getting two every day. Yea from you guys, And that's it. But I keep getting randoms? Do you really where? I don't know? You know? So? Does? It doesn't give you any kind of geographical data? Tell I'll tell you when you got it right? So you get people's names? Well, what time are you getting it? Do you know? Can you deduce by that, like, I would have to go back and look at town you were in when it's happening, I would have to drive by the same spot. Let me, let me, let me back out of here and see if I can I can deduce uh, because I'm wondering where I got racor Girl from. I'm wondering if maybe having this in the same pocket as my phone is somehow causing interference that is reducing it's range or something like that, or if you're just getting it when you're going from your house to mine, which is one of the few parts of the day where I'm not sitting next to you in a car while we were going somewhere. It doesn't look like it keeps that data. Dude, I don't know. Racer Girl sounds like a plant to me. I got a guy AJ he was from Utah AJ. I'll believe. I'll buy that. It looked a lot like Jeff. Actually, damn it, which is so so I asked Jeff. I'm like, did you change you make it? Do me try to game the system because this one looks an awful lot like you. Yeah, it looks like it doesn't keep that that data. That long said, Well, I have no way of knowing unfortunately, But yeah, the street street pass shit is awesome. It is ridiculous it it Yeah, you know, I will see how long the spell lasts. But it's only awesome because it's so rare. It's very clever, it's it's Uh. I think you would like it less if it happened more often. Well, it wouldn't be such an event. Yeah, I wouldn't care. Be random some more random meat also, but you also don't care because it's not happening enough. Yeah, what's what's the sweet spot? But I want to have it happened once and then I'll be done. He hasn't He hasn't had any of the experience yet. I was thinking about wonder Con was in San Francisco this last weekend, and I knew that that would be a fucking true of fucking street pass. Think of all the puzzle pieces ghosts right by wonder Con. I wish I had had a three DS with me. Savor from Packs. Just go to the bean bag room. Just stick your three DS in a bean bag at packs and walk away. Yeah, I'm gonna duct tape this to the underside of this desk. If they were smart, they would have street pass lockers at packs, and you just go and rent a locker and put your three DS in it, and then everyone else puts their three DS in it, and then they just hang out street pass for the whole day, trade ridge race or ghosts or whatever the hell people are into. See. But I think you'd get more just just like throw it in your pocket and hoofing it around all day. I don't know. Maybe if you stayed in one spot, everybody would pass by you instead of It's like when you're lost, you're supposed to stay in one spot and they'll find you. Keep moving around. You might see the same person twice. It's an experiment, we'll see. I know I want to do some experimenting with this because I want to know if it's possible that I'm getting these on the road, like in a car, in a car, if like on the freeway, if the if both the well, because there's two factors, right, there's a distance and there's so there's proximity, and there's time, like how frequently does it pulled, how often does it reach out looking for three ds is right? And how close do you need to be for it to register? And how long do you need to be there for it to work. So what's the penetration through a car in your pocket and it's your phone mess right, Like how much how much does that stuff affecting? Like, well, first test is obviously a line of sight, like you just do oh an intend of voodoo. I don't know, you guys, it's not magic. It's just technology. We're gonna figure it out and know exactly well, because then I'll know if I'm wasting my time by having it on in the car or whatever. Benna, get like one of those things for your window, like I'll still have to see and then then but then they got hooks for everything because they got those fucking the coins, the currency. It's like it's so easy to get your ten coins a day though that it's like if you like sit there and deliberately shake it. No, I'm just I keep minding my pocket in your pocket. I could keep it on in my backpack and probably get most of them on a daily basis, even though my backpack is not moving for most of the day. I mean, well, my, my, my greater point is that you keep it on, like if you don't want to keep for you to sure. But also there's nothing good to spend those coins on anymore, or yet you get bumper stickers for your car and like street pass me. Yeah right, if you can read this, you should be street passing. She just gonna change my license plate and just gonna get a vanity plate. Street pass, street pass me ands t R T P S S ye. I can't wait until somebody held up a DSD some stranger in a car. It's like, H're like, yeah, oh, Jeff, Jeff and I have taken to waving them around in the air in the car like you just don't care, Like no, like we do care? Oh he really care? Yeah what we really want to start firing them into the air. I might get one when everything actually comes when games come here, you know what, when games come out for it, I recommend one. I filled out the survey on Club Nintendo that you get after after entering your serial number for the three DS, and it asked you, you know, what features are you most excited about with three DS? What feature led to you getting a three DS? So I just checked the shop for both and nothing else. Did you say, did you were Did you change your like favorite game to E shop? No? I think I changed my like friends list motto to E shop Okay, okay, I saw yeah, I saw E shop somewhere I associated with your name and it it shows up in a way that made it look like you were in the shop. I was like, wait, what give contact advanced access to the shop, had access to the shop? Call me? Come on man selling sunglasses E shopping. You know, it's like zvious like you've never seen before in three D No for the game gear okay uh yeah so uh and not impressed or necessarily disappointed with ten dogs and cats like there are ways that it is technologically a clear improvement on the original, but it you can only do each of those competitions twice a day, like they put a hard throttle on pretty much just like how much stuff you can do, So you can only realistically like most days maybe you spend a half hour with it wow and and have it be and have it be like and have it be like fruitful. You can only teach three three tricks to your pet per day each of those competitions twice, like you could go on a walk fucking a million times if you wanted to, But then you're just like farming for stuff, which how's your three D eyes on that thing the first night that I was playing it, when I was like, you know, spending a lot more like spending maybe ninety minutes with a couple of you know, a couple of hours with it because I was just being introduced all the systems and mechanics and you know, adopting my pet and whatnot. After looking at that for maybe nine minutes and then looking up at my computer monitor, uh, like the world around me it was fine, but my computer monitor looked weird. Totally experience same with the phone, Like looking at your phone after you play that thing. Yeah, I don't know, it's weird. I'm definitely like I although it's although it's really weird, like it's it's not like there's it's not like a full three D in that game is uncomfortable for me, like as a rule, but I will totally like while I'm playing, it's just like, as the mood strikes me, as like this is two three D, I need to jump this down or have it be completely flat sometimes or just have a little bit on it like I I have. I have not definitively decided like, Okay, this is how much three D I can tolerate in the interface of this, how much I can do for these games. It's like I'm still just it's very situation. Every game is different. Yeah, well, I mean even within one game it's it's it's like like, okay, you're gonna switch perspectives on me, all right, this looks too weird. The only tie that I have with a three D is that it creates like like an additional layer of aliasing. Yeah, which, like when when it's displaying really like big objects, it's not a problem, but like when it's trying to do stuff off in the distance, like the little tiny things, Like there are definitely times where an object is almost defined by the fact that, okay, I can see this big jaggy edge along the side of it or or through it. I guess art art games inherently lower resolution when they're in three D, though, Like, isn't not how that works? Yeah? I think so, don't. Like doesn't each each field or whatever only get like half the lines and the screen? And it feels like it like you could you could feel the difference when you switch from two D to full three D like that. Uh yeah, it's all I have to say about. Yes, good, Uh So I played take it back around the table here too. I'm not Dragon Age two. There's something else I can't remember. Oh yeah, so I played through it all. Back to the Future third episode. It's a good one. It's a good one. Do you guys play adventure games? Great? More fantastic. Let's move on to news, Gentlemen, Episode three. Back to the Future out now, and that's it for news. Anything happened last week? Yeah, all sorts of shit happen. You want to hear about it? Yes, Because I was doing my best not to pay attention to rock Star tweeted out some Max Paint three screenshots like that's a game, Like they're gonna put it out they can stores and boxes. That's not a game. One of them, Max Paint, has all his hair. The other one he's bald and he's wearing the Hawaiian shirt kind of like you saw him before and earlier. Max Pain three is there talking like that game is gonna come out this year. Still, I thought that was Yeah, the last earnings call thing they said was something about this year, But who knows. I'm sure they'll they'll probably start talking about it directly after La Noir Ships A good call. Very seems very very probable. Uh, what's this that I hear about Microsoft testing out a new Xbox three sixty disc formats. Yeah, they started looking for people to sign up for a new preview program, which filled up pretty quickly because they were offering people free copies of Halo Reach as a result. And all they've really said is that they're testing out a new disc format, and they haven't really come forward and officially said what that means. But there's been some stuff out online and you know, some some rumors about it what it is, and so I don't know if you know this, but the current Xbox three sixty discs I knew this, but please they devote something like a gig or some significant portion of it to a DVD video partition where they store Firmer updates and a lot of security stuff for anti piracy. It's more than that, because the max size is six point eight. If you ever install ye six, I'll never get one with a bigger install than six point again, right, Yeah, So you know there's a chuck of space devoted to it's a lot of the yeah, devoted to this this other stuff. So the thinking is then that they're reducing that size to give more space to developers so that they can hold more on the discs for games, and that they're not not necessarily trying to do some sort of fucking crazy gene rom business or anything here, just like optimizing their system level stuff. Well, I guess as a part of this by changing the format. Uh, the other theory out there would and again it's it's unofficial, so it's kind of hard to know for sure. But the other theory is that these discs would also be unburnable on consumer grade hardware, interesting because they would hold more than they're supposed to hold, more data than than theoretically would be possible to burn with a consumer grade drive. Again that I don't I don't don't know anything about how that stuff works for now, so it's hard to really say, but yeah, it sounds like that they are scrapping their current anti piracy stuff and upgrading it with some new ideas and some new concepts there, and simultaneously games will be able to hold more or game discs will have more more room for data on them rather and that makes sense when you consider they're actually giving out a game disc along with this, would make sense that they would send out something to kind of test that, Yeah, you'll probably get some weird version of Reach Mastered with a new process or whatever. Do you think that this is like a step into the future for the three six? Do you think like thinking next generation for for Microsoft? I really don't like this. This is when I first heard about this, I thought like this would be a little more manificant. But somehow kids winding up, they cannot, they cannot not have Blu Ray next time around. I had had a long talk with Will Smith about this, Yeah, and he made a pretty convincing argument for Welcome to Earth HD DVD. Yeah, because it sounded crazy to me until he reminded me that you can actually make those things in existing DVD plants, right, and that sounds a lot less crazy when you understand that fact. Yeah, Okay, so they will not go to the next generation without coming out with a disc that can hold a whole hell of a lot more than the one gig or whatever. The you know, twelve percent that they're going to add in this new is what you're saying. Yeah, I think Blu Ray makes a lot of sense if they want to keep going down this entertainment road, even with their streaming video dreams. Like you gotta. You gotta have support for for everything. I think you gotta suck it up and pay the rights. You gotta pay the licensing fee. I agree with you, but it seems like they could see it as a pretty bitter pill swallow that that is Sony's format. I totally agree, But like I think, I think it would be crazy for them to not be there, Like they just need Blu Ray is enough of a thing now, Yeah, like they just need to bite the bullet and they need they need the storage space. I mean, the HDDVD would probably do it, but why not just go all all the way out and get better cut scenes into games. If you look at it cut scenes and Xbox games sometimes they look like total trash compared to their PS three counterparts cartridges. There you go, that's the future. Uh, just shipping SSD with games with games already installed in it for everything and you just plug it right in. Yeah whatever thumb drives, it's cheap. I'm beginning to be of the mind that if the next generation of consoles doesn't have an SSD built in, that that's that they're fucking up. I don't think. I don't think they think. I think that's gonna be a real bottle thack. I think the SSD is is the storage solution for the consoles. After next you think, yeah, it's too soon, there's too expensive, add too much to the manufacturing cost, Like they're still charging way too much for the regular hard I think you need you need volume at this, yeah, more than you need that access speed. I do think a game on a thumb drive is awesome. Let's do this. I mean the drives and current store. It's like, here's a thumb drive, it's got Halo on it. Fantastic those drives and current consoles. Right, so even going to and like say it's a terabyte drive or something like, that's way more appealing in cheaper than than an SSD. I guess man. But you know, if you start getting into you know, obviously games are streaming more and more into the environment as you play, and if you just look at the bottlenecks that the hard drive or even just reading off the disc like art assets and everything are going to be much bigger. Right, So just in terms of like getting that stuff onto the screen as quickly as possible, likes the best way to do that. You know, it's just a matter of like whether they're willing to spend that money or not. Like some flash memory in there that's just built in, that's you know, a couple of gigs that they can bounce stuff to like RAM almost like you know, it's got maybe the because that's that's how a lot of people use their SSDs. It's it's you know, it's not their storage device. It's like a small handful of data is kept there for quick access, like there's all your system files and your swap file and then and then everything else is off site. So maybe you have like a small SSD for for that purpose, like just internally, not even something a user can be concerned with. Yeah, I mean, it's just it's just it's it's another layer of RAM in a way. You know. Yeah. I just think that they obviously need to get to a point where they're not selling systems that have no storage in them. Absolutely, they need to unify that because that's that's that's one of the things that is now kind of holding back the three sixty. Uh, this notion of like yeah you gotta yeah, well I wonder if that would ever work, Like you know, instance, streaming looks all right, it's not perfect, but it's better than some of the compressed ass cut scenes I've seen coming off of disks. Yeah, for sure, I wonder, you know, if the bandwidth costs of doing that are are a little too crazy where it's just like you need to be connected to the internet if you want to see the good cuts scenes. We've got crappy ones on the disk and those are the ones we could fit. But hey, I see these these HD fucking I watched Dune this weekend on Blu ray. That's a weird movie. Uh No, like it's that's that movie is so goddamn weird since I'd seen that movie and I'd forgotten how just just everything top to bottom is absolutely nuts. But you know, most modern blue rays have that beady live ship built into them where they're streaming to you like current trailers for shit right, uh that they're just grabbing off of the Internet somewhere, and that's all crisp super high res. You know. Again, obviously they're using some sort of crazy compression algorithms, but as long as you're not Canadian or I guess Australian, you know, go nuts. And then they can just change the cutscene whenever they want and they can play it again in a year, and it's totally exactly that's how all the mms will be done. Yeah, you know they'll just in fact, you'll just be connecting to streaming servers for all the voice work too, so they can, you know, if they have to change of quest someone constantly in a booth. I'm doing this live, everybody? How you doing this? Just Chris Cashman doing voices for every game. Send me a Jedi finally? Is that good? Is that good? Take? You're live? Hey? All right? Five holocrons. You've made a finish him. You brought me these? How did you find this? I've been looking for these, thank you? No, see that way he could actually know what the thing was like. One of my what am I saying? Gem crests? Ah, my gem crests. I've been looking for you guys. Hey, y'all remember MegaMan Universe, that crazy I'm already trying to forget. Well, Calcom's making it easier by canceling it and saying that they're not going to put it out, so you don't have to worry about that MegaMan game anymore. M mus Although here's no we're talking about Resident Evil. Last week yea, and there's that Street Fighter thing. Yeah, so I think it's just like what else does fucking cap coright, right? And I think that's it street Fighter versus TECND the Arcade Edition stuff. Yeah, that stuff's announced, the two three DS Resident Evil games, that Resident Evil Slant six game, right, is that the Raccoon City? Yeah? Did that happen? Also that happened okay, uh, yeah, that had happened on last week's yea, but then Universe unhappened. Yeah. Yeah, they're back down to Like I wonder, you know, you gotta have others if you go back and watch the trailer for Universe that we put up on the side of the very first one, like infun is in it describing the game, and he's gone. Yeah, he's been gone for a few months. I wonder if it has I wonder how much this has to do with the quality of that game. That's his game, and he's not here and we don't care. He could just spiraled into a bolivion after he left. Imagine imagine one could easily lead to the other. Yeah. Also, it's like, all right, I just inherited this stupid project from this other idiot. I don't care, so I want I would rather work on this other thing. So a couple of months it turns into ship. That was such a weird project anyway. Yeah, I feel like they never did a great job of explaining what exactly it was. Well they they Yeah, I thought they were always being very deliberately kind of cagy about like what this game is supposed to be? But it sounded it sounded like it had potential at least, but it also seems like that sort of thing that could just as easily not come together in any meaningful way. And like, oh God, I gotta get rid of this thing because we we're not sure what it is either. But I don't know. Well now you'll never know. Yeah, no one will know. Yeah, some Capcom probably knows. Uh. Sony Online Entertainment cuts a bunch of people and finally cancels the agent last week. No, even after the agency. I've been saved for a long time. Hey did they cancel the agency? Yeah? I believe. I was not here the day they announced the cancelation of the agent, because I yes, I believed in Like when I saw the agency, I like, this seems fun. This is a crazy thing for an MMO. This is doing something interesting with the format, and uh so I was like yeah, into it, and then shot d DC Universe next to you, and then like a booth or something. Cut to a year later, and you'd see DC Universe online and like the agency. Yeah, they cut two a year later you can see free Realms and DC Universe online and the agency are You wouldn't see the agency. You would see like some vague like art for the agency as part of the booth, like agency, Oh yeah, that's still we're still making that. Yeah, And then cut to a year later, Well, DC Universe is here, and what happened to the agency? They been talking about the as recently as last E three They were swearing that the agency was a game. When would come out? So that's gone. I've seen it play yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah, we watched were years ago. It was playable. It was playable at E three last year in the se booth. M I agree. It looked kind of fun. It was like not really MMO, but it was an assistant heavily instanced. Yeah, and but like very like you know, action game looking missions, some some cool looking shit. How how hard decision is that to make? As the executive or the suit who decides to can that game in the years. And they laid off two hundred people with this, so two oh five announced positions lost. So that's that's all related to that game. This was a company like a cross Ball, wasn't like the entire team, just like three studios Seattle, Denver, and Tucson. And it was primarily coming out of Sea Seattle game. Also, all those studios are outshattered. Really yeah, so they fired two hundred free people, close three studios, turn to five people. They also said that the Planet Side sequel is still on for some time this year, which I guess it'd previously have been like early this year or the first half of this year or something like that. But they haven't even given that a name yet. And if you look at our page for it, it's like, here's a picture of a tank. So I don't know, man, it seems like kind of rough times for Seed. I will be first one, well, I will be among the first. I will be in the line. You will be carelessly waving a fistful of money somewhere saying like let's play some Planet Side too, upgrading your PC again because it's no longer fast enough to run Planet Side at full speed. No, it's coming out the end of this year. Yeah, you'll you're still gonna need a new wee. Oh come on. Also, it's not coming out this year. Yeah, it's planet Side is gonna come out. Like that's that's the Maybe the bigger question is do you think Planet Side Next will ever become a real product. But what they're actually calling it, that's not with their official name, but that's they refer to it as. Yeah, they're even using the phrase it all. Yeah, that's great to those people. Yeah, one out for those out of jobs, especially just to put that much work, for that many years into that project. I can't even imagine. Can you even imagine, Like do you think the people in that position year see it coming where they're like, man, we've been kind of spinning our wheels on this project for a really long time. I bet there are a lot of meetings that you think is the last meeting, and then it's not, and then yea get together. There's probably like a small upper level group that has that feeling. I imagine when you're in it like that, it's kind of hard to like if you're an artist or a modeler or you know, programmer or whatever you've got, you know, a stack of to do things on your on your desk. You know, I don't know foot high. I think it's like you get together and they lay off a group or like a couple of people, like we're doing some cutbacks and like, you know, we're still going strong and whenever we're like, oh man, that sucked, and then like by the fourth one, you just you know, it's kind of potency. I don't know, like if they're like, have there been significant layoffs I can't remember, maybe or maybe just people rolling out of there on their own. Yeah, it's like, all right, guys, I got this other job making free, free to play Chinese MMOs somewhere. They hired me to go work on the Old Republic, so a wheel across town. Here, go work at one of the other nineteen Austin based MMO developers. Do you ever think like instead of canceling that, you just like maybe they recycle some of that stuff. It's just like put it up for like two bucks, like it kind of barely works. It's like a couple of levels you could play, but like maybe we'll make some money back on I think if if it's something it makes something like an MMO that that requires a server and all, but there's administration and upkeep and like just like customer support and start. Not even just releasing the proprietary means to run an MMO server, probably, but not the best of it. I don't know. It just seems like such a shame that, like all that well, se clearly needs to try something else, although I guess, I guess DC Universe is doing okay for him so far. Maybe they're gonna put those people, they're gonna rehire them on Galaxies, and they're gonna get ready and they're gonna sneak attack with a new gal the day before Old Republic comes out. One totally reinvents the game again to be Old Republic. We made our game their game. Here here, here's a fifty gigabyte patch containing voice files for every quest in the game. Star Wars Old Galaxies. We gave Mark Hamill one hundred dollars in a hot meal. He did all the voices for all the characters. He was an accomplished voice actor. Indeed, he's way more than a hot meal. Yeah, he's at least like himself. Hot Meal, warm bed and unculation shot a glossy. I would love that. I would I would love to see ESO like they have to have some sort of counterprogramming shit planned for for around the launch. Well it's weird because are they direct competitors or they probably aart of the family or they're all like, yeah, it's kind of a weird, but they're like, you know, they don't make a nick I don't think they're gonna make mikel off of any Old Republic stuff. So I just wonder how many nickels they're pulling in off Galaxies at this point. I wonder at what point do they shut that down right, Like how much that has just been like, Okay, we made the game, well whatever we will, we will check in with the Galaxy servers. Yeah, you know, honestly, all this all this Old Republic talk of late it makes me more interested in Galaxies than it doesn't make me interested in playing Old Republic. Yep uh. And I know that Galaxies is a bad game, so yeah, expectations already properly set, like we're launching the MMO of a generation that's the best game. I just want to be around on a Galaxy server when Old Republic launches, Like some weird holdout crew that's on there. Okay, open ship, all right, I want to know your thoughts. So from day before too, we have to we have to come out and say that we're doing this now before so that we have said that we are doing it so that someone else doesn't actually go do it. All. Yeah, we're gonna be a going to live stream Galaxies the day before Old Republic comes out. Yeah, I think we should have a dueling live stream the day of Well, I want to be well, okay, so it's going to be also be a very long live stream because because I kind of want to live stream during the launch, we are going to watch the population drop. But that's my question. If it does, do you think it drops or do you think it goes up? Do you think people thinking about Star Wars MMOs go Well, that's the thing is. Does it go up in the weeks in the week before and then immediately go to zero as soon as the tour servers go up? Or does it or does it drop thirty days after it starts going up? Or do you influence people playing Galaxies by doing a live stream of Galaxies? Everybody who like a free account. It's just going to join. You say, we're throwing off the math and this just by talking about it here. Ye damn, it's fucking science. Cannot interact with an object without affecting it. Can stage a protest in Galaxies or something like that, can even like make signs. I don't know, but I need one of you to start playing Galaxies so we have a high level character because I do believe that that one of us is named Pasqual. Yeah yeah, I wonder, yeah, I wonder like if if that will if that would potentially uptick, Like I could totally see like just around launch, Like it's clearly not a long term benefit for them, but you know there's one. There's enough people who are like, oh, I used to have fucking Galaxies account. I wonder what that even looks like right now, imagine somebody like an SOOE office, like almost like a city office, just kind of sitting there, just kind of read a book, glasses on, just like suddenly, yep, people connect to the server. Get in here right now. What dude, there's at least five people jumping on the server right now. The held out number us. We're screwed. You're not gonna believe what I'm seeing here. Burying the needle, give me the president anyway that we're gonna have a press conference. When does that happen? What's the data on the launch? Oh showers? Deal Republics available in stores? Okay, we'll be there. Look for it? Is that multiplayer fully voiced fully by Aware? There you go buy Aware Austin, by Aware, Austin by Aware, I mean, didn't most of the people who work on galaxies go work on Old Republic anyway? Yeah? By Aware Austin is basically former SOE employees, all right. Plus I imagine that's probably about to be a bunch more former employees. And he's off down there too. Yeah, they just I think they just swap him around down there. I think it's just like you just moved from one MMO developed town. Yeah, most barbecue, that's what they get. You get south you get south By, you get MMOs, and you get amazing brisket. You get some brisket. That sounds all right, some brisket. The briskets sounding like the most exciting part of this whole thing. We could go get some brisket, all right. I know a place what got brisket? All right? A lot more of a pork ribs. I'll go. Do you feel about some pulled pork? Great? I just I just like when it comes to barbecue, I tend to go pork over beef. Yeah. Are you gonna have a barbue? You show a barbecue in your place? Remember you had that barbecue in the old place. Yeah? That was fun. Yeah, barbecue. I have a new grill, do it. So so I have two grills. Now we'll bring this. It's a way bigger. Let's bring the streaming GARL will do some galaxies from the barbecue. Barbecue pit would be our Star Wars summer jam. And it's gonna be dope. Takes a Star Wars stomach sham. Get a line now calling ninety seven. Ah. So, last, so, as I mentioned earlier, Wonder Con, kind of a sister to the San Diego Comic Con, organized by the same governing party, happened in San Francisco. Our sisters site, Comic Vine was there killing it and they they had a crazy party here at the two crazy parties? Oh did they did? They do multiple nights? There was a Saturday Jesus So it sounded like the Friday night party was the party to be at if you like getting way too drunk and then being kicked out of parties. I love that, you know, it's you know, we we work in an industry that knows a thing or two about open bars. Yeah, I don't think that really happens in the comic book industry. You don't, so they don't. I don't think they know how to like approach, like to the right way to sidle up to an open bar, which I think everyone has to make that mistake sometime in their life. I think it's a it's a hard lesson to learn, but I think it's like remember hart is the only way to learn it, because you will remember it. But yeah, I definitely talking to some folks afterwards, talking to one of the bartenders in fact, afterwards, and she was like like, yeah, we could kind of tell that that these kids didn't know what they were doing at an open bar, so we were, you know, pouring them very standard, if not lighter, Yeah, just to make sure that they're not. I feel like an open bar mistake is going for shots like oh yeah, yeah, that like that is like open bar mistakes, especially later one. That's always when you make that mistake, that's theater of the first one. Yeah, that's that's your first lesson is yeah, shots like no, no, don't do shots. I don't care how sweet they, I don't care how much you can't taste the liquor. Don't do them, just like seventeen shots. I'll just drink yours. You have to learn out by the end of college, right, like how to say no to a shot. I probably learned that it really first or second. Job. Can't really jump out into the adult world first or second. This company just went out of business. Job. You're talking about video games and COQ books. I don't think we're really talking about the adult world. Sure, uh yeah, but yeah, the shots because they'll stack up. Yeah, but I heard, you know, the all the names of the comic book industry. Where at the Comic Vine party? Oh well I heard. I heard it was packed and some joke asta like editor in chief at Marvel was was here. So that's kind of big deal. I think I left when somebody's trying to think or something even crazier. I was like, I don't want to watch something. I heard people. I heard people like getting excited about the NBA jam too. There was a little competition going on. Yeah, anyway, during Wonder con Uh, somebody defeated our bathroom wall. I heard about really too. Yeah, so it has the seal been broken? There? Can we all just start like drawing on the walls now? No, I don't think they're very happy. Let's just pretty pissed in the new the new bathroom. There was a suggestion at one point that because the walls were all just white, like featureless white walls, and they're like people were saying, oh, everybody will just like, you know, come and write their names on the wall. I think we talked about that. Yeah, I don't do that. Someone someone tested out the theory. Turns out that's not what we're gonna do. They write their name, I forgot. I don't know. They got up, that's right, but you had to go down to get up. Actually was announced to new Spider Man game. A lot of build up. That's what was build up for what. Yeah, that's what was written on the wall. Yeah, spider Man, that's cool. They called Spider Man spider Man Edge of Time. You'll plays two Spider Man and you'll go jump back and forth between times. That is half the Spider Man you played in the last Spider Man game. Sell me on this, Yeah, but one of those Spider Man was like the same only yeah yeah, really I was three Spider Man. Okay, that's still more Spider Man. Who's working on that be anox again? Okay, still there they are now the Spider Team yea, now the Spider Man team because they have all the Spider Man at Art assets. This is another like off year, no movie year, sort of one yeah, yeah, one off kind of self contained projects. Yep. Sounds like Sonic CD. Yeah, I mean it's it's basically that of like you know, you'll do something in one time period and it'll affect the other uh, like you know, it's it's amazing and it's twenty ninety nine, I'm Amazing Spider Man in twenty ninety nine Spider Spider Man twenty nine nine or the two versions that are in the game, and uh, you know you'll play as amazing and I guess you'll I guess it's like like picture and picture style. Uh. Tony from Colic of Fine actually saw it during one d con and said that, yeah, it's like like, Okay, there's this giant robot in the future that that Spider Man twenty ninety nine has to fight. But then in the past, amazing Spider Man goes and fucks it up and you know, like stops production of this giant robot. So the giant robot doesn't exist, but instead that company made a bunch of tiny robots Spider Man. That still seems like, I mean, when does amazing take place now? So it's like you're telling me that in the eighty in the lots of decades passing like that robot is still the thing in twenty ninety nine, they haven't replaced it with something even more devastating like that. I'm not I don't think anyone's saying that, but I think you're saying that robot can still last that long. But why would someone be using it for evil that far in the future. It's probably still pretty good for evil uses. Break it out in the airline, you know, it's twenty thirty million dollars in one of those things. I don't see the roof fly off of that that plane. Yeah, we don't ask. Yeah, you know, keep that thing around for a while. Get fighters. They've been using the same designs for those for a while, right, And yeah, maybe it's with Jeff on this one. Maybe it's still Maybe it's someone's antique. Yeah. I think the bigger question is what the hell Spider Man doing ninety nine years. It's a totally different dude. Yeah, oh really, sim Peter Parker, No, no, no, Spider twenty nine comple different character, different guy, different everything. He got Spider powers kind of, they're different. He's he's a lot more acrobatic. It's he's a different dude. Yeah. Yeah. Part of the whole twenty ninety nine initiative from the early nineties back when you know, twenty ninety nine sounded way more futuristic, and they made a bunch of just really bad fucking comic books out of it too, Like there hasn't been a dedicated Spider Man twenty ninety nine comic book in like ten years. Spider Man twenty ninety nine like the one that was good and that's why they keep going back to it, or it was like the one that was recognizable because they did like they did like a Doom twenty ninety nine, So like Doctor Doom, it did, like a Hulk twenty ninety nine. Is it's just taking place over a really long year. I mean, time doesn't pass in the Marveling Universe, so it's always twenty ninety nine. Uh yeah, I mean it's yeah, Peter Parker got married and stuff, didn't he like, Yeah, I think in this game Peter Parker dies at the open or something, and it is somehow that's that's how they are somehow doing this whole you were talking to both times. It's some kind of weird dead before your time magic, something's magic millennium, Madam Webb getting back into it. There's Madam Webb in this one too. I don't know. Maybe I'm just I'm guessing spitballing here, comic book bullshit happened. And then there's two Spider Man. What I would rather see see what they should have done for the last one has had all four of those guys swap times. I honestly like. I but what what I played of the Lab of Shattered Dimensions. I wish that they had that they had pursued more of the noir Spider Man stuff, because that was that was the one that seemed kind of cool. It was the most interesting to me. It was the you know, the least Spider manny, I guess, uh Spider manny bass player Spider Man, Well, yeah, uh spider maybe. Oh, let's Sarah. There was uh yeah, there's there was a ghost Rider twenty ninety nine, the whole twenty ninety nine, Punisher twenty ninety nine, twenty ninety nine version of the X Men, and this is Punisher twenty ninety nine. Just punish her. But he's got laser guns. I don't know. Jake Gallows was the dude's name. Yeah, he's he's Punisher, but he's got lasers, right, and a very stupid looking costume. Right, God, I forgot how dumb this stuff was. Ninety three man, early nineties not a great time for comic books. Yeah, some will argue with me on that, but they're wrong. Spawn came out, Yeah okay, Yeah, Image started in the early nineties, which is like Vertigo as well. People Image, you know, I think it has his his kind of People loved it at the time, and then you realized, wait, this is destroying comic books as we know it. But then I think they've ended up redeeming themselves by doing because they do a lot of non hero fair now, like they still have a lot of like Spawn is still a thing, and they still have you know, really really basic yeah, basic hero books, but they do a lot of other there's new spawn material being generated constantly. That is kind of disgusting. You know, they keep making Spider Man comic books. Spider Man seems timeless, where Spawn seems like something that couldn't survive outside of the early nineties. Very well, apparently it keeps cracking, and I imagine they probably still sell a shitloaded action figures and stuff too. Right now, someone's gotta buy a lot of Yeah, all right, someone's out there buying a statue of the Crow right now too. So I guess it makes sense. And they keep trying to make you new crow shit too. So Spider Man Edge of Time Benox is making it plays to Spider Man, look for it probably this holiday season. If I had to guess, Avalanche Studios developers have just caused to announced Renegade OPS. What's that downloadable vehicular combat game using just cause to technology, I guess co publishing or publishing along with Sega Regate OPS. Not a very good name, not very descriptive. Yeah, yeah, I would not. I would not have guests that car combats. It's one step up from putting the word storm in your title bandit storm Renegade Storm, Renegade OPS, Storm Storm OPS gate ops Colin Storm Dark Storm Reckoning reloaded. Uh so this is downloadable. Yeah, it's gonna be get downloadle And did I understand the dual joystick? That was what I was led to believe. Cars good strange transition, cars going too stunt position on themselves. I mean, there's definitely some some great technology in that engine, like stuff blowing up. This car is going to like bump and jump style land on this other car, and then you're gonna edge your car to the edge of that car to jump over to another car. Okay, and grappling hook and shot off. Pretty awesome, so they tell me it's like that. They specifically reference oddly Shadow Complex as being a big inspiration in the idea of trying to take you know, yeah old idea and make it new, not necessarily in that you know, yo, you're gonna go back to previous arenas and curl up, curl your car up into a ball or this car that has to make it through this complex by sneaking around and shooting dudes dark. Also, if you can get a gold grappling hook dark Shadow Complex, I love it. Oh yeah, I'm with you. Bred It seems like an odd application of the tech. Yeah, I mean just cause two was pretty well refined in a lot of ways and I thought it did pretty well. Yeah, but it doesn't mean they're not gonna do maybe maybe doing maybe they're doing this and you know not instead of yeah, everyone likes downloadable games. Yeah, I got no problem with it. I just hope the thirds you know, another just cause somewhere Yeah. Yeah, in concept, I don't think this includes any of that for sure. Speaking of downloadable games, you guys, is that out in summer, we're not talking about We're not talking about that right now. That sounds like summer don't have platforms yet. We're thinking about seven about summer. It's available later this year. Oh okay, it's the other. It's the other. Right, it's either yeah, there are three times that you could put out a game. You put out in summer, uh huh, you put it out holiday, okay, or you can put it out later this year. Great, that's it, because the three times no one says their games coming out early in a year, it just ends up getting delayed out of a right later this year, yeah, exactly. All right, moving on, we're pushing it past holiday. You were saying something else about downloadable games. I was Majestico. Who Majestico, Come on, Majesco. We're talking about PS two and Xbox games now wherever. When they made all of those game Boy videos, SpongeBob Square, that was how they made all of their money. They made a ship ton of money making like kids TV shows available on GBA carts. What was the last game they published that was like a third person shooter? Majesco, Well, they've they've they've ed. Evan Rising was was like one of it's like Event Rising. And sorry to say it, but Psychonauts were like kind of like, all right, we're gonna we're rolling it up game. We're taking all this all this GBA money that we've got. We're gonna become a respectable ass game publisher and it's gonna be awesome, and we're gonna put real money into everything. And we've got Orson Scott Card making crazy mormonistic sci fi stories for our games. Those those are Donald Buster joint yep, oh it was it was. It was. I forget what their old company was called. They got this ex LucasArts game. Yeah, T shaves. We pick this up after Microsoft couldn't fire out what to do with it, and we're gonna seem all talented. We're gonna do this thing. Okay, what else did they make back then and then it all went bad? What was the other thing that they was there? Other the third pillar of Majesticos, The third pillar of the Majestico Tower of power would be blood Rain, the sexy female vampire who fights Nazis and makes that is a very short pillar and makes Uve Bowl money. Oh so they're gonna make a new blood Rain game and it's gonna be downloadable. Three. We'll call this the third one. Yeah, well it's just they called the third one, but it's it's not. The title is not blood Rain. Three, blood Rain, betrayal, blood Rain, Storm, betrayal Storm. It's a storm of betrayal, dark betrayal, storm rain right in her name. She knows the thing about. Two are about storms, sexy storms storm. And there were two Blood Rain movies, right, there were two. There was no there were three blood one apparently one came out recently, Blood Rain Reckoning direct video Wall of really know the first one. The first one was theatrical. So the first one, let me tell you a little story about the first Blood Rain movie. Let's hear it. They actually shift out prints of that movie to theaters that did not request it so that they could tell people that this movie was showing in thousands of theaters across the nation. Was that was that part of the German tax loophole with which the movie was made? I don't. I think it was just part of the batshit crazy distributor that they bowl had rigged up with for the release of this film. I know this because ex girlfriend worked at a theater and had this delivered and eventually it got sent back. But I came, i will say, dangerously close to stealing that print scenes from it, just like spool it out and just snip in the middle and tape it back together. It's hard to movies prints were huge, It's a lengthy processing and there it looks like it would just be a big pain in the ass to move that thing around. So yeah, you have to build it up on a platter and cut it there. God, And and you know it was at the tiber On Playhouse, so they don't have like a lot of space there. It's a pretty small projection room. Well, so, so I will say the silver lining and this whole story is Way Forward is working on this game, okay, yeah, which is they made The Boy and His Blob. Yeah, remake that you love so damn much, Vinnie. They made hopefully is blood Rain will be push up to Hug and then they made Contra right yeah Seante oh yeah yeah yeah. People love some shan un ironically people love I haven't seen it or played it, but before you think they're just making fun, I've seen it and it looks like Imember. At the time it looked really it was like, wow, this is amazingly animated and a pretty sharp platformer. So this is still Majesco. This is still Majestico, still kicking around, oh uh and bringing back the world titles. So who knows, maybe the second chapter of the uh what was it called again, Advent Rising? Yes, then get back to that million dollars giveaway or whatever that was that game wasn't I think so? Yeah, But that was supposed to be just the first chapter at a Trilogy's true. That was that was the early heady days of pre built trilogies. That's way Shadow Complex wasn't really just you know, it's not advertising to man, it's definitely a lot of like design aesthetics as far as characters go shared between Advent Rising and uh yeah, I believe so very loosely. Yeah, whatever, it's it's it's it's set in that universe that all those books are. There's like there's only one book and also not really, I mean I get that. He's like, like the goings on in that facility are in that complex are very shadowy. Whatever. Reckoning Storm reloaded and finally game stop buying some shits, specifically stardocks. Uh Impulse their a digital distribution platform. Yeah. I brought it to him and they said they only wanted to give me like forty five bucks for that said it was all used. Come on, said like the best I could do is like sixty for credit. Like that's and you're like, is it open card? Come on? He put it on an edge card for you, put you on an edge card. And Spawn Labs, which I had never heard of before reading it on the page today, and I guess they make an on live style service. Wow, so on live that you haven't heard of? It's not even guy Ki Compelling. What is that? That's the other on live ever heard of? David Perry oh is affiliated with Yeah, alright, Steve Perry. Yeah, yeah, I mean I hope they don't give Steve Perry, the singer of Journey. Yeah, working on sweet News streaming. Yeah, that's that's the story. They're they're buying up a some digital yeah yeah, several different digitally oriented platforms, kind of kind of you know, at least acknowledging in a way that hey, they gotta get their toe into everything. These these these physical stores aren't necessarily that's good business. Get you get your get your feet wet out there, diversified, figure out what's going on. But you got a little something something that's right. I'm just blows up. I never bought anything through Impulse. You've got to, yeah, because liquidate your motherfucking revenels. That would suck. Having a deal with game Stop, well, I mean previously you're dealing with Star dook Yeah, which is fun, a little indie publisher, you know, a maker of niche titles that win a lot of hearts and mindy. Wait, well then who is it that makes the security software that everyone hates? Possibly is it star Forced Yeah, game names star dook as because I always I get I always get those confused. I always thought that oh, like tiny feel good game publisher was also the ones that make no that game game copy software that everyone fucking hates so bad. Starduck does make a lot of like weird Windows customization and like productivity stuff. Okay, they make uh what's that they make? Object doc? Is that sound? They might? But no, make some stud game copy protection. They're not. No, they're not window blinds or I don't know if they are. They make a lot of weird stuff like that. Yeah, and they even use Impulse to distribute it or did no? Uh, and they make stuff like you know, Elemental and oh yeah, I wonder what God, I wonder if you could start tying this back to like the launch of Demigod and how all that stuff happened to them having to sell Impulse or if they just the money, like dam God had zero copy protection. That that was the whole thing. Yeah, yeah, starducks games don't have any yahing like that. They launch them on trust. Well that's the completely different things. It's like a DRM package yet yeah secure, I don't know. Elemental obviously was the most calamitous event I would I would think in their history. Yeah, I wonder, I wonder if really trouble I wonder if you started like tracing lines back and and and all that, if you could tie this to that somehow, or there's game stop just like we want to get in this space, and we have a whole bunch of money, let's do this. Well, there's a there's a brad Wardell quote in there about Impulse being like the greatest revenue stream for the company or something to that effect, and like, uh, if I read that correctly, it made it. He made it sound like he didn't really want to be in that business, like he didn't want to be in the distribution business. He wanted to be in the making games business cool, so he decided to That's what I got out of it. Yeah, what's the game? What's the star dock? Start something game? Star stor Box space station and Storm Range space Station, Silicon Valley doc Storm dot com it No, no, let's puzzle this out come on, we can it. I thought it was like star Topia star Topia, yeah, Startopia, Yeah, okay for the mess was it star Tropic star Tropicstopia, Startpia is something? Yeah? It's a game? Is it? Is it? It's like a PC game? Yeah? Yeah? Thanks, like for personal computers. Sure, yeah, it's spreadsheet, but startark, I don't know, I don't think that's true. Well, that starting it must be the same. Good point. Star Topia got a really right you're right, fact checking is gonna end of this podcast, or you're typing star Topia. They have already typed start There's not a game called start something. It's like something else. It's like a star Topia. Try that start No, Startopia is a game. Yeah, it's got a really bad cover. It does have a really bad cover. I remember this game from Fucking the Earthly Dots YEP, June nineteenth, two thousand and one. Star Topia from IDAs. Uh. It kind of looks like Spore before Spore rely like a lot of it's really bad cover. Must have a mukey foot Oh okay, Yeah, they've got a dark Spore beat up and on team. Yeah. I kind of want to check that out. It's a good thing. It's been up and running for a while, and I've been hearing people saying that they don't hate it, that it sounds extremely the oblo esque, which could be worse. Yeah, it always kind of looked like but then also people were saying something about hats, as though there's maybe a definitely two there's I mean there's a significant, in fact, a central loot component as I understand it. Yeah, but I mean like theyre may be like hats for TF two and people, oh, yeah, you T two hats, You straight up get a an exclusive TF two hat for play playing this beta. Yeah, and then I think that's been the basis for everyone loving this beta. I wonder how much Valve makes on those deals, the hat deals, Yeah, the please attach a TF two hat to our product so people play our product. I wonder how they decide it. I wonder if it's like an internal initiative or if they just like they did this like potato sack deal right with a bunch of indie games, and then they added potatoes to all these games that didn't have them previously, Like Super Meat Boy had a Super Potato Boy Care. They had a potato hat for t F two if you bought it also, even though that wasn't part of the deal, but it was like thirteen indie games for forty bucks or something. Oh Valve. I always imagine it's like two guys working there. It's like, I don't know, we just kind of make weird deals and pretend that we're making a game. Once in a while, it's just Gabe and then Eric and Chet just going like, I don't know what does he want? Said that pressurely to him. Half Live three's coming. He said he wanted a potato hat, Like all right, duglan party just doesn't even exist. It's not even he does not Red. That's just an email address all that is. He's not a man, he's an idea. He has finally transcended it and become fully email based. He lives in the close Outlook, God, you just killed dog. You fiend. The way that they the way that they were getting the word out on this thing. I didn't observe this directly. This is the secondhand message board. But apparently the Beato is just like showing up in your list of games and it's owned, and they've they've done that on free weekends and stuff. Before I got I mean, I got a press release or a message from PR saying, hey, we're doing this beta and it's just going to show up in your like the yeah, a bunch of stuff had like, but also when you log into Steam, it was always the first thing that was coming at you, like, hey, the beta is now available and you can buy a four pack of it for I think right now it's even still doing. But like, uh tf two betas and Counterstrike betas have totally shown up in my list, the little promotional bonuses. Like the only thing they used to do for us as people who are looking at the data that they put out is they used to add to games to your game list even if you haven't hadn't played them before if they did a free weekend for them. So they did, like here's data feat source free weekend, and all of a sudden, every one of the profiles on our site that is linked to Steam would suddenly have that game show up with no achievements U And they corrected that even like retroactively I think, wrapping up our data. Yeah, surprising. It seems Valve is pretty vigilant about their data. It's just one of those things that you know, they probably yeah, it didn't didn't think, you know, I don't think it was malicious when they fixed after the facts, So good on them. Yeah, all hails and all hail Steam, All hails Valve. Right, I don't think we're allowed to say otherwise. Orse they will actually keep us from covering PC games. They will actually shut us down. They will, actually, they will stop sending the hats. They will cut off the hats. We need hats, they will cut off the hats. Just don't make them cut off the hats. Do what they want. The hard drive on Douglin Bardy's spinning up right now. You see a shot of a keyboard and the keys to start clicking themselves at deactivation protocol activate. No, we need the hats. They turn off our old hats too. No hats at all, damn it. What about my vintage weapons that I got the whold the hard way. No, there's a gun too. O hats. No weapons. That's it for news, y'all talk about some new reallys for this week. Uh, it's April. There are no new releases. Yeah, that's not sure. There are a couple of new releases Carnival. Well not really it though. But it's April. You can't say it's April. You can say it's early April, because April's gonna have something. You can say it's the first week. You can say it's the first week of the second quarter, all right. I just I didn't want to get all inside baseball immediately. But yes, the quarters just ended, which is why last week we posted eleven quick looks because everyone has to rush out their games before the end of the quarter to make their numbers. But that means at the beginning of the quarter there are no new games worth really mentioning or talking about. Uh. Carnival Games, Monkey See Monkey Do for Xbox three, sixty Connect Carnival Game more Connect Bangers, bringing you shiftless half hearted mini game collections since two thousand and six, a lot of radio friendly unit shifters, and and basically that you put this other game into the exact same bucket as Carnival Games. What You See, What You Do? Karaoke Glee Volume two for the Nintendo we Volume two, Volume two. I was I didn't even realize the volume one ships. They are on like volume six of the like CD compilations from that fucking show that they put out there. All I know is that it's always like number one and two on the iTunes charts. It's the new Now that's what I call music, basically, except it's a new kids bop, except except that yeah, yeah, it's say except that they actually have people re sing it. It's the new Hot Dance ninety eight. It is the new hot dance ninety eight. I should bring that in some time. Blow your guests minds some real musical music. It's real shit. Best version of block rocking Beats you may ever hear, I'm sorry, the only version. Yeah, block rock beat, the Chemical who I'm unfamiliar with them? What is it? Hot Dance ninety eight? Shitty like current hits pop hits? Uh? You know comp that I bought at a Walmart for like a dollar in nine in nineteen ninety eight. License, but licenses covers, so they're not paying performance to royalties. Yeah, and you know songs that are easy to cover, like the Chemical Brothers block rocking Beats, which is like, you know, all of it sounds fine, all of it sounds like maybe it was generated by like a Gravis Ultras, like a gust Max. But then the part where it gets to the vocals is where it breaks because it's just like they can't they can't, they can't use that example. So they got to like do it them. They got to report themselves. So you just have this guy going block rocket bits and it and it fell out of the car. You did you fell out of my car, fell out of his car, and the Walmart parking a lot listening to that. He actually he is weird. This is not for the effect of the story. He was laughing. Yeah, this is in ninety eight. He was laughing so goddamn hard he fell out of the car. Uh it was. Yeah, it's something magic. I don't have to play that for you guys sometimes. Anyway, Glee Volume two available now for Nintendo out of your fratbox. Librick. This week you got Dishwasher Vampire Smile. We got a quick look of that up on the site. Also come out this week. Uh, first, DLC. I assume first it is first, but I assume there will be more to follow. First you'll see for stacking double fans stacking. I think it's first and only. Is it first and only one the previous stuff? Yeah? Question, only the one that's true. But that was you know that was Yeah, I mean there could be more costs, Yeah, probably, but it also hasn't been like a good holiday since then, and you kind of need that for costs. True. Fourth fourth of July. Yeah, I would totally play for July pack. They got more down little games to make. Dude, if if you're armed with fired with fireworks, Oh, I'm not disputing the entertainment value. Uncle Sam of the fourth of July Giant will team up with Giant Robot Abe Lincoln and Uncle Sam who was also Godzilla. I mean they had the front, they had the French fry spider. They need to integrate hot dogs and some caterpillar done. I went to a bar over the weekend. Yeah, that had not just free popcorn, but free hot dog. What where is it? Full on roller? The address of this place? Nobody in there and like full fixings like a whole little bar onions and Sauer kraut and jalapenos mustard and ketchup. Don't say just say it out loud, just slit me a note. I'll tell you later. It's not it's here. It's not even that far from here. It's here. It's in this in this city. Yes, full on popcorn machine, but also like real rollers. Yes, you walk right up and just you don't even have to ask something around the ton No, it's just sitting there. Grab the tongs. I mean, I I think it would be a good form if you were to buy a drink at the bar before you ate a hot dog. But I can I can do that. I like, you know, if you if you will please of water? Were we're in there drinking beer anyway? Wow? Then hey, hot dogs almost as good as not better, and they were big, like jumbo size. Free. I don't know you got a bar, you got a place yet? I want to I want to open a notcho bars. We got the steam tray for for that. True. We need more, We need more pots though, Yeah what what there are three pots? Yeah? No, I want like a full fledge, not your barn. I don't want just like you know, your bass seas and cheese. Yeah, because there's just say we had three pots full of cheese. How many more do you want? No? Not just more cheese. I'm saying, like different stuff, one of those, yes, Chilian, one of those. Maybe you want a different couple of different kinds of chili. Maybe you want a couple different kinds of cheese, be able to mix it up, Chili with beans, chili without beans. Yeah, some people don't like beans. They're jerked post painting someone coming out on PlayStation Network this week Star Drone. That's not the game here, that's that's the DRM, right, Yeah, start your own his name of the DRM. Okay, No, this is a PlayStation ruins stalls a root kid on your PlayStation three and ruins the drive, don't. It's a It's a PlayStation move based game that involves physics and pinball like action. I saw some shots of this and thought it was kind of ne we we have it. We'll be taking a look at it later this week right. Also out this week, Red Faction battle Grounds. This is the downloadable kind of prea week pre so uh PlayStations listing it. I have not heard one way or the other if it is making it to Xbox Live Arcade this week, though it seems like usually these things they is that the pre order bonus yeah, okay, where you can just buy it right or you can just straight up buy it? M Is that like that's basic ignition style some other kind of game or is it? Uh? Yeah, it's not the top down Red Faction Battlegrounds is a fast paced, multiplayer focused vehicular combat. So it's not a Dead Rising case zero style like tiny slice of the real game. No. Unfortunately, after we saw Armageddon, I am with you on being pumped to get at some of that stuff. Just put me in a featureless room with those weapons. No, you need a room, some stuff to break covered and ship then blow up. But I mean you could you could shove a tech demo out the door based on that game that like that, that would sell it. That one level that we saw that we have the quick look exit that basically was a tech demo, Yeah, sell sell that as a pre ordered bonus or you know, for five bucks as a downloadable thing. Stop giving the ideas. I would know. I would give them five bucks for it because it would be good, dude, because the case zero was great. Yeah yeah, like arguably better than the rest of the Dead experience. But that model, even like the way they the way they implemented that was very respectable. Like you can feel you can feel good about paying five dollars for that game. Yeah, yeah, you're right. It was new new content. Did something like that again, then that would be really cool. Uh So yeah, I'm going to make an educated guest here that that will be coming to Xbox I Arcade this week as well. But I do not have confirmation either way because there's no good, reasonable, reliable way to find out information game. Oh God, thinking, what's up? I was gonna say it. There was just a thing about it being the pre order bonus. I wonder if It's said in there, like, if it's available now, would you preorder it? No? But it was a press release or something. I might go preorder it. If that's the bonus, I'm gonna check it out. I'm probably gonna buy that game anyway. It looks all right, looks pretty cool. Where are you going, dude? Uh? Yeah, that's new releases. Let's talk emails. Let's let's talk turkey. But who wants to talk emails about? What emails bad gast about? I'm on a cop. First email comes in from Edgar in Sandiago, California. Hello, giant bomb Castrati Brad was saying that when you hold these select button on the three DS before launching a DS game, it will be displayed with a one to one resolution and the bottom screen becomes too small to use with a stylus. I tried this in the screen does indeed become smaller, but I did not feel it was unusable as he had mentioned. Could it be different games display at different resolutions? I was playing puzzle Quest, yes, the first puzzle Quest. I didn't say it was unusable. I just said it was a reduced surface area with which I'm pretty sure you threw out the word. I'm quite sure I did not. I forget everything that happens in this room immediately as we finish it. So I think this was during the live show. Okay, No, I don't think that. I don't. I don't believe in either venue I used any such absolution. Well, either way, that's gonna be something that's going to be different for different people. Different, and I mean honestly for me, Like there is that option to shrink the screen. But I find in all of the games that I've played on and all of the DS games that I've played on the three DS, I have found the like interpolation stuff completely inoffensive. It's not terrible, it's I mean, it's you can see it well, if you hold one up to the other, you can totally see it. But I never felt like any assets were being overly obscured. I could always read the text, you know, cla like all things considered doesn't look quite as nice? No, no, not if you have a ds I that's you know, but but not good enough that if I have a three DS, I'm going to continue carrying around a d SI. Yeah, Like I'm not going to double my DS payload with me for four screens. Dude, I gotta go. Uh so, there you go? Is your your email? I'm gonna read that one. I'm not gonna read. Should I read an email about clay fighter? Which one? Is it from a clay fighter sixty three? And a third it is from a guy named Get named Clay? Is he a fighter? Has this nothing to do with clay fighters? Is that it happens that be that his name is ClayFighter? No, his name is Nick. Something he's from somewhere in Indiana was unpronounceable words. It's gracious, Dear, bodcast recently dug out my old sneests and played some good old fashioned clay Fighter. I gravitated towards my usual characters, a blob and blue suede goo while we're living this a trocious game, but had a good time just messing around for a few hours. So my question is, what are some not good fighters or even games from that era that you hold dear, even though they may not have been good games? Firepower two thousand? What's that shooter would be? Like a tank or a jeep? Often? He said fighting games? Right? Fighting? Or just anything from that end from from the old sniest days. I don't know. A lot of people seem to like that teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Tournament Fighters, but I never really thought it was a very good game. ClayFighter was kind of crappy, but Ikey Bob Clay was all right? The names really really or what? What kind of stick in your mind? I used to I know a woman who worked on the California I think she masterminded the California raisins ad campaign from the eighties. Creepy and it's the same like animation studio that did all the Clay Fighters stuff. So she was telling me about crazy Clay Fighter ship before they came out. What are what are our feelings on Black Sorn? Dude? I love game? Okay Blackthorn? Oh yeah yeah game dude? You could shoot the shotgun backwards? Yeah? I was looking all right? How good was that? Is that? Your entry? Apparently it's not bad. No, it's not bad, so it can't be my entry seventh saga? Do you guys are it's bad? It's kind of yeah. It's a sort of second cut rate ORPG. Right. It was a terrible game, but I always thought it was pretty neat and time killers that you could cut off limbs before the end of the match. Yeah, I was like, dude, that was that was a really good bullet point for a really terrible game. That like Bloodstorm, which is kind of like the sequel or like from the same dudes, Strata that was really good video game names. Yeah. It had like it was like in the full height of Mortal Kombat ripping often. So it had like nine thousand fatalities or someth stupid. I was like, any button combo you could hit would do something dumb. That was the game that Johnny Cage or the Daniel dam Passina didn't adds for two of them. I that's that era represents like one of my significant blind spots. I was not playing a ton of games, uh in the late nineties or in the mid nineties, I guess, particularly that kind of that chunk there, So I don't know. Terminal Velocity for the PC it's pretty good. I love that game. I remember thinking people who were playing Descent were crazy. Don't even the cents awesome. It's so confusing. Sent sent two was less confusing. They got better, and Decent three was everybody. You got to Decent three. They just like a little orb that'd be like, Yeah, here's where you need to go. On, come this way, come come over here. I'm gonna shoot just flare at this door because you need to come up with her and do this with your real guns. Yeah, exactly. Next email comes from Adam in Aurora, Colorado. Hey, guys, I know this has probably been answering before, but I was just wondering, Well, the rise of DLC and games and downloadbal games become a more mainstream thing, do you I'm sorry, with the rise of DLC and game and downloadbal games becoming a more mainstream thing, do you think that we will be able to transfer all that content to new consoles whenever they are released. Uh? I know we've this, this concept has been discussed, but I feel like, you know, kind of the three DS, this is the first wave of that, Like this is potentially setting a tone maybe, I mean, because this is this is the first time that we've had that that cross generational thing where DLC was significant. You're right, but there was some DLC on the original Xbox. Backwards compatibility has been a key trait of Nintendo's handheld strategy, though, whereas it's much more technically challenging to implement on a console than on a handheld of that caliber. Yeah, I don't. I don't think it's necessarily guaranteed that the next PlayStation of the next Xbox will significantly run. I bet it will happen the same way it happened this time, where early generate early generation. Yeah, it'll be either select titles or it'll be something they mentioned as a bullet point, because there'll be people making that transition that need to hear that. They go, oh, I don't know. I mean like parents to go like, oh oh, those damn games I bought don't work anymore. I don't know. Xbox two three sixty was weird because they went from nvidiat ATI right. PS two to three was weird because I think PS two was basically all custom hardware, right, and they went to an Nvidio slash like crazy cell architecture. But like sixty, to the next Xbox, if they stick with ATI, it's true, it's similar like power PC architecture. They're still doing X like they still got that API layer there. You could maybe see it happening. I don't know. All that said, I bet Microsoft would or could argue convincingly that they have no responsibility to let you play any of that stuff on their next console. Yep, they could. They could very easily just say, you know what, if you fulfill the transaction, like you're not you're not wrong, like like on a legal level. But if Microsoft, or if if Nintendo does it now and does it very nicely, that like, even if it's fucking harder and more expensive on a console, it creates an expectation, right, oh yeah, and if and if suddenly you're like a right at the box, you are not meeting expectations like that's a that's that's not the best thing, and you're you're probably both right about like by the time that shit comes out, that sort of backwards compatibility won't be such a big deal. But you know, I have a lot of money has been tied up into various downloadable games. Forget about download games. I mean I've got actual retail games that don't run on my PlayStation three. This is true, you know, like, like, what's what's different, Like, yeah, it'd be nice, But I don't think there's any expectation that stuff. I think I think part of it is the creation of the persistence that Microsoft has built into everything with achievements, and I think all that stuff, all the profile level stuff will carry over, but the ability to play those games like that would be great. They should do it. I would go as far as to say it's the right thing to do. Yeah, it would be the right You would do right by your customer base by allowing them to do that. But they would have done right by their their customer base by making the Xbox compatibility better on Xbox three sixty. But they eventually got to that point where they they probably ran the numbers and said, like, you know what, no one actually cares, but well, they cared about specific games until that point. You're you're probably right, Like, if you support rock band, I'll probably be happy because I've spent way too much fucking money on on rock band songs, so I want that stuff to keep going on this next system. But I think that's also something that could be up to especially in the case of something like rock band, would be up to the individual. Yeah, I mean developers. That's a great point. When does a rock band for the next Yeah, that that's that is tricky. I guess the licensing could be could be weird. But but then also like you'd think it's it's going to be to everyone's benefit. If day one of new Xbox, there is a store full of stuff that even if we don't have a bunch of new ship for you to go and download. Right if they're saying like we're launching with titles, yeah, exactly, like you have, like we have all this DLC content that we built up, you know, this library of stuff that we built up for the last system. Bam, slot it right into the new one. Yeah. I mean it's it's a really powerful selling point. But if it's also the sort of thing that can hold back the cave of you know, if they're like hamstringing the platform to make sure that they can tie it back into the old stuff. Like you know, I would rather sacrifice the old stuff in favor of brand new technology and crazy business, favor of more connect. Yes, connect built into the console itself, and it's just wherever you put it. He finds you've got we got rid of the controllers. Who are the controller? That's right, we've now And also, you know, do you really want them to spend all their time making all these controller based games play without a controller, no emulating the Xbox three sixty controller on connect two? What do you guys, think of the form an X with your body to push the X button. The Blizzard and the Blizzard April fools. You know, I didn't actually even see it. I mean I heard about what it was connect. Yeah. I was just kind of like the same as the Gmail joke, right, It was just like we made a gesture bass, I didn't. I didn't see though. Yeah it was Gmail motions. So someone lied and then said April fools. I thought, well, you'd have to watch the video. I know, I don't think it's funny, because that's a serious problem. Conceptually, it's oh, I agree with you, I agree with you. Is it problem? It's going to be really sad when those next consoles all come with cameras packed in. StarCraft is actually god damn. This was a joke at one point. Actually, their other joke was they just put out fake patch notes for StarCraft two that were actually really fucking funny. Oh cool. There was a lot of really good stuff in there, such as like fixed a bug where terrans were able to lose a game, or someone was saying something about there being a supermyre brothers like hot fixed patch gag out there. The idea of the minus worlds being patched out. Yeah, Aper fools, next Tame what Comes In? From Johnny in Manchester, England, Hey Bomb Squad, And last week's moomcast, you guys were talking about how a piece of Need for Speed music was featured in Mass Effect too. I mainly just wanted to point out that w w E All Stars uses the Red Alert three hell March music track as menu music for the Path of Champions. That is a if that is a way weirder crossover with Cross Publisher. At that point, we'd have to like go listen to that one to one and make sure, because I I did listen to that, and it does sound vaguely hell Marching in but I did not do a one to one on it. Yeah, but I did. I did hear that that sounds too crazy to to even believe, but I don't remember what it sounded like Red Alert. But also, like my first thought was like, well, it's Cross Publisher. That couldn't happen in I thought, oh wait, these are probably just like we were talking about, you know, Libraries of Animations is probably libraries. But I always thought that the whole hell March thing was something that they like came up with. For Command of Conquer and was a signature theme of Command of Conquer and not something that they just pulled out of some library. I would have to agree with that. Yeah, I wonder if it's just something that's like really stylistic. Allow me to refer you to Command Conquer four. Well that's you know that. But I'm pretty sure they selled that soundtrack like they couldn't. They couldn't. Could be at some point they could. They could license at first ale if they wanted to. That'd be a weird license. Resell royalty free music, maybe a little word the right price, anything as possible, it's true. Uh, next team comes in from ed in, North Sydney, Australia. I'd like to hear what you guys have to say about the start screen. I think this aging fossil needs to be admitted to I can't even say that word, uh to elder care. What I don't like is having I changed it. I don't care. What I don't like is having to actually press start at any as any key should suffice. I've actually been seeing that more lately and last week No several games where it says push start and he's like, I want to push a yeah, like no push start, Oh okay, you actually want me. They want to make sure you're paying attention. They want to make sure you're on. Like I don't know why Dragon Age two has a flashing push any key to get into the menu, and maybe it's a console thing or something, but like on the PC, it goes through its logo thing and then just hits a screen that says push any key. Crisis too, doesn't he? Also he also, you know, complains here what's going on in the background having to watch you know, have in eight other middleware software things. But all of these things are are not to answer your question. These are not necessarily the you know, demands or the desires of the developers or the publishers and stuff that you know, console owners are like Microsoft and Sony are saying, yeah, no, you need to have a start screen. It's one of the standard features you need to have. Well, we had the squall, Yeah, we had this question while back, and then Dale rode in and what was that? Who was Yeah? And that basically told us all, like all the set up stuff you can get, you need to have, like you know, who is logged in, like it like it has to adjust as to. That has to be the screen where it determines like what accounts are signed in, what says it's going to load, and all that stuff. You need to be able to back out to that neutral state. Uh. Uh and and uh. Daniel Warren writes in to say that mix Amo is apparently the name of a motion capture library based in San Francisco. That's exactly the thing that we were talking about. Put on ball suits. You go mix Amo dot com. I guess there's applying tell Tale. Did they do the DoD They do the motion captured data from Maximo. That's where they came up with the name. Man that's the studio in which the Mighty Blow was first formed. I guess they're working on the Jurassic Park game as you mentioned there, or providing providing, providing mo cap data. I don't know. I don't know that necessarily working on counts here Miximo MHM. Next team comes in from Adam Lukowski where he's coming from. Adam Lukowski rides in and says, hey, bomb cast. Uh. Last week we were talking a bunch about old Mario games and how breads for you and how Super Mario Sunshine is now an old Mario game, So keep up, hey ball kiss. No, it's fact. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It's not our it's we can't do anything about it. Yeah, I'm not denying, but it is now someone's first Mario. It's not someone's favorite. I thought you meant go play Mario. Oh no, no, no, no, that's what I was saying no to, finally shaking my head here, I would never say that. I would never say that I never played. I would never say that, as it's a great game. I respect you too much. Never say it. All right, I did buy it, never played it. Oh wait, it's good, all right. I know this comes in from Adam Lukowski in Manitoba. You said, uh, you said you would be sad the day that someone said remember old school Mario and showed you a copy of Super Mario Sunshine, claiming it was part of their childhood funny story. When Sunshine came out, I was about nine, so it was one favorite game back when I was a kid. I had both ASSN sixty four and played a lot of Mario games, so it was not my first Mario game. With that said, I personally still enjoy Mario Sunshine even today, as I have played it recently, So my question is why they hate for Super Mario Sunshine where it is not I am aware that it is not as good as the others, but there's no reason to hate a game. Yes it is. It not being good is exactly why. Uh, that game is not bad. It has some messed up levels where the camera becomes incredibly annoying. That game does not have the the fit and finish the level of high playability that like all of the Mario games on either side of it really had. Yeah, Like it was like, this is a three D platformer and if you remember, like the game before that was here is the idea of three D platformers, and then like the one to follow that is it's an okay one, you know, like that's that's a hard hard drop. You know, it looked really nice. Yeah, you're you're right, You're you're right. At the time, it was still pretty cool. Even though that was the game I had to play with my office door shut because of all the swearing. That was a really singularly damning way to to some some of that game like to like to call it a Mario game, just a platformer. Yeah, is like like that's all I need to hear like if you're if you're telling me it is just another run of the mill three D plat former of that. You had the water pack, I mean, had mechanics in it that weren't necessarily super run of the mill. It did, but also weren't I'm talking about quality. Yeah, you're right, they were not like you're making just sound like it was a thank you. Yeah, I feel good about that. I caught that. Yeah. Actually, for me personally, that was a big, big part of what turned me off to Sunshine was the fact that like, okay, like the backpack, the flood thing is kind of cool, but like this game isn't recognizable to me really as Mario. I don't. I don't think Mario is not like uh, pizza or sex, and that even when it's bad, it's still you know, yep, you know what I mean. I can hear like bad Mario is just bad. Yeah, like what some other bad Mario. So Mario I mean like let's let's discount Mario is missing, is missing? Damn it? I was fu that's not Mario against Luigi game, like saying Luigi's mansion, so Luigi's mansion also also luis Mansion. For whatever reason, I actually remember in an oddly fondly way. Weird. Do you count any of his sports stuff as Mario games or is he just it's got a pity the bills. Yeah, I guess those counts. Sure. I mean the Mario Party games then all those pretty pretty awful too, all the Mario Party games, all of the Mario sports. Wasn't one of the Super Mario Lands not so good. It was like five minutes. First one was great, though. I love the first one. I got that airplane in it. Yeah. The third one was when Warrio got into it. That's that. Second one was six golden coins. That was really good. Okay, no that then that one was. The second one was the Warrio one. Then that one was really The third one was when you played his Warrio, wasn't it? Yeah, like Mario Land three colon Yo as Warrio Yo, Mario my apostrophe m storm something like that, wasn't it. I'm not gonna look it up. Come on, I'm not gonna look it up. Fact check. No, no fact checking. Maybe who could say? Someone will email us and we'll find out next week. Uh, next email and what's up? Nothing? Next email? And last email comes in from Scott Lumsden. Dear bomb Cast crew, My name is Scott Lumsden from Calamazoo, Missouri, and I have a question concerning deals on video games steals. How about some steals steals and some deal steals and deals? What? Then? Amazon just recently had a deal for Dragon Age Too Need for Speed, Hot Pursuit and Dead Space to all for thirty nine ninety nine, which means a piece each brand spanking new. However, I was while, However, while I immediately took advantage of these amazing discounts, I felt guilty when I received them in the mail. My guilt stand from my feeling that they had somehow taken money away from the hard working men and women at these game studios and publishing companies. I have two questions I posed to you. One, should I feel guilty for having received these games at discounted rate? Too? Who ultimately lost money in this transaction? Amazon, publishers some other third party Thanks again and keep up the fantastic sex. No, I think the publishers are getting the same amount of money regardless. I believe this is a promotional deal happening through Amazon. Because you never see this like you see this constantly on Amazon. Yeah, but you don't see this like across like Best Buys and suddenly selling all these games for forty bucks and Amazon isn't exactly doing it for long periods of time. It's usually like a day, a couple of days, sometimes a couple of hours. Yeah yeah, sometimes even shorter than that. But yeah, Amazon knows that. Like they could sell you one game and then be like, oh, you need like five more bucks to get chipping, or you know, you scroll down a few pixels and it's customers who viewed this item also bought yeah, these six other games. Sometimes guess what one of the suggested items for Zojarushi Coffee Mug buyers is what pre order for Duke Nukem Forever? What does Duke? We did that? Vinny, we did that? We did that. We did that. It was us. That's our faults, gross, right in let us know. I don't want to know. You don't know. He's sipping out of his guil folds it full of hot rice, if you know what I mean you because I think I do. Yeah. Yeah, So so Amazon taking the hit on the promotional front end for these games. So sometimes it is across the board, like the Hot Pursuit stuff that was that was like a cross. Every set was selling that thing forty nine. I don't think it retail it went down the fast. I think on like best buying stuff it did go down because I remember being like, I think, you go to a best Buy right now, you're gonna pay sixty bucks for that game. Maybe. So that's the thing is that these are not permanent. It's not like, oh god, we're not moving copies of these games. We need to drop the price immediately. I bet that it is partially fueled by that, though well yeah, I mean it's probably like it's probably it seems like it's a it's a very calculated, carefully crafted thing where it's like, I don't think it's I don't think it's that panic, right, It's my point. It's probably more that they kind of have a good trajectory. They know how the line works for sales in the second a week and third week, Like they can look at like first week sales of a game and figure out what it's going to do after that, Right, we still have all these crates of this game, and then they can look at the warehouse and go like, oh dude, we got too many of these. It's going to take us a year to clear these out of these with a deal clear up. Some Room Enslaved was the best current ish example of that phenomenon, because it's game. It's a game that we knew didn't sell very well and that we observed to be falling in price. Yeah, and I bet that this also partially reflects that there is some misinformation or something going on in like the retail buyer publisher relationship, that that retailers are ending up buying more copies than they should or something like that, and that seems problematic, that there's like too much stuff entering into the channel that is never going to make it out unless they blow it out. Right, But those were those are all three of those were EA games, right, you said? And then the need for Speed was also Yeah, So maybe it seems like it's been happening a stuff Street Brotherhood exact same thing. So stop titles are not immune to it either. Yeah, maybe it was just the EAA was shipping a bunch of stuff in. If you're Amazon, you're also buying copies of these games in such crazy bulk that I imagine selling forty dollars copies for a day is not. You're still making money on those forty dollars copies if I had to, if I had to get didn't they get the bulk rate or something. They're not paying fifty nine ninety nine for those copies of Mane for speed and or maybe they make it up, you know, a lost Leader style as well. We got people buying stuff from Amazon and this man this, many more people signed up for Prime as a result of other promotional stuff and this. Many people bought something else that maybe they wouldn't have bought otherwise. Those Amazon guys are smart. They got a lot of math. I envisioned that there is just cold fucking math behind all of this, and that that's probably working out pretty well for them. Buy Bucks. When I buy a portal two or something from the right, they're like, it takes some money. Oh okay, there's like nine trust you. There's like bucks for the streaming video stuff. I don't Then here's here's five gigs of free space. I don't know where do you try and in the cloud or whatever or just whatever in the cloud? Yeah, whatever you got. I was simultaneously watching The Golden Child on my Amazon account while uploading a bunch of music to the cloud, making full use. Man, you're in the cloud. I'm fucking all up in the cloud, right, I got like two gigs of stuff up in the cloud in an Amazon cloud. Yeah, look out from when the storm comes. I can't wait. But yeah, I love that they're being flagrant towards the RIA and being like, well, we don't have to license anything. Fuck you. Yeah, who cares? Dropbox does it? Everyone doesn't. Yeah, this is clearly not a thing, but they But they've gone so far as to make a player for it. Right, so you can like put your music up in the cloud and then stream it. Yeah. I could go to a web browser on the Amazon website and all my music that's on there s five gigs to start, and then you buy. If you buy music that expands. Wait is this part of primes of Amazon? You don't even this happened while you were out all it's not getting related but I didn't bring it up, but yeah, this happened. So they So all Amazon accounts have a cloud cloud drive, I would drive attached to it. You can upload whatever to it, not just music, no, whatever, you're like host images. You can sideload music, m P three's that you buy from their store to your your cloud drive. Yes, you're not even downloading it and re uploading. It's just going over there. Amazon is all sorts of crazy. We use Amazon like, there's all sorts of where's it? Where is this server bank in like underground everything. It's everywhere, but every every abandoned missile silo, right, because in the middle with hard drives, Like, but it's gotta be somewhere. No, it's it's all sorts of somewheres. I am uploading terror bytes of information to Amazon daily. Yeah, where's it going? They're building? They're building. Is there like a little bit on your computer? A little bit on my computer as well? On all Amazon isn't all of us. It's amazing. I don't because I look at my desk and I see thirty two hard drives sitting under anything. I'm like, man, that's a lot of space. And then I upload all that to Amazon somewhere they have all that, and then everybody else's stuff not that, but it's redundant. They held that if you started uploading all those backups, are we're gonna get rid of our on site backups as a result half of it? Right, because I'm still gonna back it up because I don't trust the cloud. I don't. I don't want sky pirates. We pay them money so we can trust the integrity of the data kind of. So why do you still need hard drives? Well, because if you have to download all that stuff, it's not worth my trust. I'll tell you this, because we offer it burns down so we don't have to keep buying more hard drives. He's gonna keep looping through the hard drives that right, So so basically I have one half. So basically, right now, I dupe every hard drive in case one hard drive fails. So if one hard drive fails, now I can re download that hard drives. I mean, I'm saying I trust Amazon more than I trust fucking Western Digital. Serious, but we're like downloading that we'll take a week, right, So plugging a hard drive into a dock it is still way faster. I should. I should get rid of all the old stuff. People want the persona orange Durst running HD and it's gonna happen someday ridiculously, but we could. I'm cutting this, I'm cutting this part out as to remove that expectation. Why no, it'll happen. No, yeah, there will be new files for those if people want to know. Light's taking soon to get the back catalog and HD because it takes like almost a month to all the terror by of information to Amazon. There was an other option of like mail them the hard drives, but then what if those hard drives. You know, I trust Western Digital and Amazon more than I trust the VPS or any like some dude sitting there loading stuff onto the clouds. Yeah, fly it up to the clouds like he's eating FreeDOS as he's doing it, and just freedo dust is getting in the hard drive. This one doesn't read, is broken. What do you think Vinish is doing? It's corn chips fritos. It's like a tostito. It's like a tortilla kind of corn stone chips. Guns. Yeah, it's not dusted chili cheese dust. Well you didn't. You didn't tapto dust. Have you seen? Then they got tapato chips. Now you didn't specify that they were dusted. Yeah, there' tappato fritos bought. No, they're doritos also fritos. Really yeah, yeah, very very disappointing. Really, they were just hot. Doria back to me when there is a cholula Friedo. I want somebody to take a picture of the cloud. If you're listening right now, do it, send it right now. You will see what EC two looks like. Yes, I hope it's one place. It's not like I happen to. I happen to know personally that there's all sorts of clouds, the clouds all over the place. I want Amazon to build a space element ever you know that too. Store all must be you know that specifically because we can't edit files because of that propagates. But all those places must be huge hard drives. Yeah, they have as many as the other one's. Really they would have to if they're gonna be mirrors. I don't know how this all works. There's there's different there's the mirror stuff, like the edge stuff, that's the mirrord stuff. But then there's the okay, so not necessarily all how many terabytes youth or petobites? Would you say, like one station is all of them? All the pedodtes. Somebody who works at the data center right in and I want to hear we want to hear all this stuff. It must be just yeah, I bet it's noisy but also super quiet to hear. But it's just just the loudest white noise you've ever heard. I think they're just hard drives, like too terabyte hards. Would you rack mounted everything. Yeah, it's just it's just like warehouse full of rats. Yeah, but they're platters. It's like pizzas. Yeah, that's kept super cold. Yeah, but it's like they're they're writing. They've got laser disc burners working over holographic storage. Of course. I love. It's just one giant platter spinning under it actually spins at about forty rpm it because it's so big. But data debts. He's great on it. It's great. Yeah, I just I don't. Sometimes I jogged on it, like when I need the exercise stuff. So if your website's coming up a little slow, they just tell you it's unlimited. But it can't be. That doesn't exist, not really. It's got to be physical somewhere. You say there has to be unlimited in that they are adding to it constantly. There's there's someone going in there and unwrapping fucking hard drives and plugging them into some right, Like all right, well we know that we need just constant day in dath. That's all his job is. It's just plug two is full. We need to spin up. Like he's just staying ahead here. Here's like on my left. Yeah, it's like half a mile down the row from him that they're actually up to. But it's like he's just I know I gotta stay ahead. I know I gotta stay ahead. If I don't keep up with this, we are fucked. And like hard drive to my counterpart in Houston's doing the same thing. Because that hard drives filing over there and you don't replace it. We just let him die. Just keep going, and he's gonna loop back around and start replacing hard drive one through ten, they're all in segue. Is just rolling new hard drives out to the broken ones. It's crazy. It must be crazy. We'll go. We'll go visit an Amazon data center sometimes it'll be a fun. We're gonna find our hard drive. Yeah, that's fine. It's like that's us. That's where Giant Bob lives. Don't touch it. That's it for emails, thinks everyone wrote in bobcast at Giant Bob dot com. That's gonna do it for ours show this week. Thank you, gentlemen. Brag good to have you back. I don't feel good. I think I'm allergic to work. We gonna bring Jared back in. Everyone loved him last week. Congratulations to him and everyone on Fight for Relief. It sounds like it was a slamming, smashing success. Yeah. I heard like five grand in cash at the event and like thirty k like some crazy, crazy numbers. That's not like. The handoff between the two locations went well. So the tech worked out too. Yeah, crazy live stream handoff from Union City to Irvine excellent. I thought you meant the cash handoff, I met. I meant like the handoff like when we handed off from San Francisco to Boston and back again during packs. Yes, yes, but yeah, I understand it was. It was a huge turnout as far as the contributions goes. So I hope that maybe we funneled a couple of folks over there and uh yeah, graduations to all of them and to Japan. I guess right. Yeah, it's gonna do it. For this week's episode of The Giant Podcast, thanks for listening. We'll be back next Tuesday with another edition of The Giant Back