PixlBit

I was confused by the storage situation after I read the announcement article, but the way Jason explained it in the episode makes sense. It's not such a big deal. I'm just baffled by the death threats you mentioned. Did somebody actually get upset enough to make a death threat because of the Bayonetta 2 exclusive announcement? Death threats in the online community seem to be disgustingly common. I remember hearing about people giving death threats when the new character design for Dante was revealed for the new DMC. It's sad that those individuals not only say things like that, but that their minds actually come up with that solution in the first place as if it's okay to do.

When you hear about Bayonetta 2 in its context it's really cool that Nintendo picked it up and took the risk on it. I wonder if Bungie's next game is going to be available on Wii U. It'll probably be a long time till any news like that comes out, because Bungie's next game is supposedly being announced around E3 2013, so it doesn't make sense for me to ask questions like that so early. But I'm just wondering about all the 3rd party support that will be coming to Wii U in addition to the great stuff they already have. There's some good 3rd party games coming for Wii U, it's a really nice thing to see. I just wonder what other good things will be coming in the next couple years. If Bungie games, Half Life 2 episode 3, Portal 3, or any games like that become available for Wii U, that would be neat.

It's EA's fault, they took the fun out of it. Ray and Greg use to be passionate about game design and now they say they will be passionate fans instead. Greg is more passionate about craft beer now than making great games. Craft beer is okay I guess, but when craft beer becomes more interesting than designing video games, I can see why it would be time for him to retire. Ray is talking all about freedom, entrepreneurship, and civil liberties, so maybe he wasn't getting those things under EA. The section in Ray's blog where he goes on to thank EA and it's big wigs seemed a little generic and forced, but maybe that's just my bias and the way I see it.

Anytime Ray mentioned Bioware it was always, "Bioware and EA" as if Bioware isn't even it's own thing anymore, it's own culture, or in control of anything. Bioware should get free from EA like Bungie got free from Microsoft.

I have faith in Bioware to make a really fun DA3. How long did they work on DA2 when they rushed it, wasn't it like 18 months? DA3's time in the oven is already going to be far longer than that. They are getting more time to make this game and they are plugged into their Dragon Age fanbase, so this game has a good chance to appease a lot of the fans who had problems with the second game. As long as the majority of the creative input and feedback is coming from the development team and from the DA community, and not EA, I'll be happy.

Using Frostbite 2 as their foundation and building onto it is an interesting choice that I'm intrigued by. I want to see how much they modify it and what they actually do with it. Will the overhead camera perspective change a bit? What about the collision detection? Will it be easier to open chests and interact with objects? Will there be more destructible objects? Will it influence the way they design dungeons, the flow in explorable areas, and the quests?

Financial Gambling - I rarely ever gamble with money in games. I'm a stingy Jew with my cash. I beat Mass Effect 1 again recently but with my new character, and before the game was even over I already had the maximum 9,999,999 credits. I bought all the best gear for my crew and I still couldn't get rid of all that money. Same thing happens with me in Fable 2. The first time I played the game I worked some jobs, bought up some real estate, and in no time at all I had 6 million gold pieces, all the best equipment, all the property in the world, and I felt completely disconnected from the world and grossly wealthy. I didn't have to be corrupt to do it either, I made sure nobody paid any rent, I let the stores sell for the lowest prices, I'd give the maximum allowance to my family, and I still couldn't make a dent in my loot. I ended up giving almost all of the 6 million to the church of light just to get rid of it and make myself feel like a real person again.

I don't even do the gambling mini games in Fable either. I tried some of them out but I got into debt one time and the game told me something like, "If you rack up enough debt and don't pay it, guards will hunt you down to punish you for the crime." I just stopped gambling after that because I'm not good at it, I don't want to rack up debt, and the last thing I want is to have johnny law hunting my character down for something that stupid. There's plenty enough to worry about in Fable between taking care of your family all the way to slaying giant monsters, so getting in gambling debt is a pointless risk.

Life gambling - In FPS games I always gamble with my character's life in combat, but when I play games where I'm in control of other unit's lives I think it's irresponsible to gamble with them. I'm extremely protective of my team mates in Gears of War and when somebody is crawling and needs to be revived, I start taking whatever risks are necessary to get to them and revive them, sometimes it only gets me killed, but the team mate is able to run away to find cover. In Halo I fully embrace the purpose and ideals of the Spartan II program, and I treat the success of the mission as top priority. When you're a Spartan you don't have children to worry about, a fish to feed, bills to pay, or any normal things to worry about, you just have to win battles and make the impossible happen. You were abducted as a child, indoctrinated by Halsey and Chief Mendez to believe that Earth and its colonies are counting on you to save them. You learned how to work as a team, cope with death, cope with killing others, sometimes kill other kids in training, sometimes kill your handlers in order to achieve the goal, bend the rules, create new tactics, and make the impossible happen with brutal teamwork and efficiency. In the Halo universe the only things Spartans know is how to be with their team mates and fight wars, separating them or putting them into non-combat situations makes them uncomfortable and awkward. The only time I'm afraid of dying in Halo is when the result of me dying means it would make it harder for my buddy. When I play co-op with my friend in Halo 3 or Reach we always go balls out and try to work independently to achieve the same goal.

My friend Justin is great with any weapon you give him and he just carpets the encounter-space in chaos and explosions. I'm more surgical because I will sneak off, flank enemies, assassinate people, use the DMR to get headshots (the thing I'm best at in Halo), and try to kill enemy forces from the inside out, starting with elite generals, hunters, and brute chieftains so that it puts the lesser Covenant troops into disarray. Justin and I work independently doing our best strategies, but we actually have a really sharp awareness of how the other is doing, and we will fight to get to each other if our individual strategies aren't working by themselves. We will come up with something new if the strategies aren't working.

I take a ton of risks in shooters where I'm not in command of anybody, but when I play a strategy game like Civilization Revolution, I never want to gamble with my units and I never go to war with anybody. I always use a Swiss strategy of "armed neutrality" where I build a strong military and only use them for defense, and I never get involved in other Civ's wars and disputes. I'm a terrible diplomat in Civilization because I don't give a shit what the other Civ's are doing. I don't let them intimidate me, I don't sell them technology, and I don't negotiate with anybody. I just focus on protecting my cities so that my science, economy, and culture can grow and get me a non-domination style victory. In Halo I gamble every second of my lifespan and I'm always on the offensive, but in Civilization I think war is a complete waste of lives, money, and time. I guess it has a lot to do with the context. I explained the context of what the purpose of a Spartan II is and how important they are to stopping the Covenant. In contrast, Civilization is like real life. War and "saving the world" isn't the point of Civilization. And just like in real life, peace is a lot cheaper. Sending armies out all over the world and trying to conquer/assimilate/liberate your neighboring Civs is a waste of everything. It's a quick way to bankrupt your Civ, weaken yourself, and open your capital up to invasion.

Permadeath - Permadeath doesn't work in combat games very well. It's better suited for adventure stories, Heavy Rain style games, or anything that doesn't have combat as the core gameplay. In combat games whether it be an FPS or an RPG the whole point is to fight, and an inescapable part of going into encounter spaces and fighting somebody is the possibility of loosing and dying. Players will loose, and they will die occasionally, and squad mates will die so there's no point in breaking the game or the pacing just to rub it in their face that they were in a room and some guy got a couple more bullets into you than you got into him, or that a dragon pinned you in a corner and used fire damage to take down the HP of you or a party member. I don't think it fits in very well in combat games.

When permadeath happens in combat games during a dialogue sequence or cut-scene, like the Kaiden-Ashley decision in Mass Effect 1, I'm not sure if it acquires the desired effect. For me it wasn't about loosing somebody I love, it's about loosing whoever is least important to the mission. It wasn't an emotional thing at all for me, it was utilitarian, it's a combat game. It's not a matter of ethics, in fact ethics are removed from the equation alltogether because you are forced to abandon somebody and kill them with a nuke either way. With ethics removed the only things to weigh into the equation are functionality and likeability. The game is progressed by combat and shooting/using magic to take down enemy health bars is the core gameplay, so it's a decision of function and likeability. Kaiden is a person I don't like and everybody else is much better at their roles than he is, so he dies because the game forces you to make a permadeath choice. If the game gave me a choice I would save them both and keep fighting on Virmire till everybody got out. That's a choice of ethics. You don't have that choice in Mass Effect, they just shove a "one or the other" permadeath choice down your throat. The permadeath choices you make during the suicide mission in Mass Effect 2 were done better than the permadeth choices in Mass Effect 1 though, so it did improve in my opinion.

Permadeath would be more useful in games that were completely story based, games that aren't progressed through combat, and that have branching narrative and options to accommodate the loss of characters. It makes a lot more sense that way.

Nothing too surprising. I'm neither impressed or disappointed. Price doesn't seem out of the ordinary, the backwards compatibility is good, the launch window looks pretty solid for the people who are interested in buying it. The only thing that doesn't make sense is the maximum of 32GB internal storage. Are we suppose to be impressed, are consumers getting a sweet deal? Does Nintendo plan on people storing very much on their consoles?

I'm not interested in buying the Wii U, investing in its life cycle, and building a Wii U collection over the next generation, but I think there will be some people who will be quite happy with it. I was pretty skeptical after E3 and now months later I plain don't care. I have dozens of games I still need to buy and play for 360, and I'll hold over just fine until the 720. But for the people who are interested in buying Wii U, it seems pretty okay. It's a decent setup, there's some pretty good games in the launch window, the price is standard fare, it's a Nintendo, and it's a shiny new thing.

I'll be really interested to see what consumers think and how it sells during the holiday season. I'm more interested in the data and the effect of the Wii U than actually playing on it.

a+b=c

a=M117, b= dishonored, c= happy times

This was a pleasure to read Angelo. Every game on the list is amazing. I'm happy simply seeing games like Dark Souls and Bioshock get talked about, but the greatest thing is that they all lead to Dishonored in the end and influence the designers. Dishonored is the greatest surprise to show up in a long time. During E3 and post E3 I was oblivious to this game's existence. When you and Mike started turning me onto the game and telling me about it, I was shocked at how this under-the-radar game just snuck out of nowhere and immediatly got me to fall in love with the ideas its selling.

I haven't been this excited for a new IP since I started getting hyped for the release of Mass Effect 1 back in 07'. Bioshock was unforgettable and it was the greatest out-of-nowhere surprise to show up that year for me, but this time around I'm far more excited about Dishonored than I was for Bioshock. The actual gameplay in Bioshock never did it for me. Rapture was great, the narrative twist was great, but Bioshock and the Rapture setting are honestly just a one-time flash in the pan experience that won't work anymore for me. I don't want to go back to Rapture ever again, and I don't want the same Bioshock gameplay at all. It's absurd how much I love that game and how much of an impact it had on me, yet I can't stand playing it anymore.

In Dishonored, not only does the environment and narrative seem like it should be really interesting to explore (like Bioshock), but the gameplay seems like it will be a blast. I'm very excited for the gameplay, I think it will be the best part of the game. In terms of combat and exploration, I believe that the sneaking, spying, and hunting will be incredible in Dishonored. It's adding flavor from so many of my favorite experiences and games, but it seems like as a total package it will be more fun than those individual influences. This probably isn't fair to say since Bioshock Infinite is looking to be very different than Bioshock 1, but my hype over Infinite has faded a lot since I got interested in Dishonored. For some reason I feel like Dishonored is scratching my Bioshock itch and doing it better than Bioshock ever could. I don't know what "itch" it is that I'm talking about and why it makes me less interested in Bioshock, but I noticed that Dishonored just seems like it's giving me exactly what I want from a first person adventure/shooter.

I study a lot of my games, and I'm always playing in a game saying things like, "I wish they would've done this other thing. I wish they would've added these other features. I wish this level would've been designed with..." Well when I look at the gameplay videos for Dishonored I don't find myself wishing for revisions and redesigns, I just get excited to use all the tools they already have. It's not very often that I shut the fuck up while playing a game and just bask in it. I'm always complaining and trying to find ways to make games more fun. Dishonored looks so well made and fun that I just want to enjoy it and see what they did.

More excited for this than Shark Week. I'm excited to see all the systems in the game and see how many things you can do. Anytime I see demos I keep expecting the game to break. Part of me keeps expecting to pop the game in, see a blue screen, red ring of death, and then the console begins shooting up into the atmosphere. In stark opposition of those expectations, from all the presentations I've seen, the real game seems to work so well and in fact doesn't cause a nuclear meltdown. There's so many gameplay systems and options for interaction and combat that it must be a real adventure playtesting it, finding ways to break it, and work out kinks. All that gameplay design and gameplay programming complexity affects the level design and requires you to build areas that accommodate the various choices a player would need to have available.

I'm not only super excited to play this because it looks like the most fun I could have all generation, but I'm also excited to simply study this game and see if they are able to take all these complex systems and make them easy to interact with mechanically. Using simple controls to interact with a complex world, in complex ways. Peter Molyneux said that.

Lol, good point. However, when you said in the original comment that you wanted to check out that band (singular), I just figured I'd throw a blanket over each song and assume you might be talking about one or the other and I'd kill both birds with one stone lol.

Thanks Jules. I missed everybody too, especially NWP. Tomorrow when the new one comes in I'm sure it'll make my day like it always does.

The first song I posted, by Sylosis, is very much progressive thrash metal with death style vocals. It starts out absolutely blistering, than around 2:45 it takes a very airy progressive route and is every bit as beautiful as the beginning of the song is savage.

The second song is just an awesome old folk-poppy kind of song from 1997. If you're looking for more goth rock and metal I actually have lots of stuff I can recommend and see if you've heard of before. There's so much awesome goth rock and metal out there, it's one of my favorite things in the world.

I love sci-fi, so it's nice to see more sci-fi games and settings come back. For a couple generations the only great sci-fi universe and series I could count on showing up regularly was Halo. I love Half Life too, but you never know when you'll get one of those. Everybody else has been going off in the gritty, earthy, blood, rape, and terrorism vibe whether its CoD, Tomb Raider, Last of Us, GTA, etc. With newer games like Deus Ex, Mass Effect, Watch Dogs, etc, it's nice to see that Halo isn't alone in holding the sci-fi and/or space opera flags. Sci-fi is great, but what I'm even more excited to see is how popular stealth-action has been becoming again. As well as all the acrobatic platforming we are seeing in games.

My favorite part of any combat based gameplay design is "the hunt", and the best hunts happen in stealth action games. Designing games in the stealth action fashion allows you to still make an action packed combat game, but in a different way that lets you get away from the square-room-to-square-room run and gun design of Doom. I love it when characters are programmed with tasks to keep them busy so that they aren't just waiting for you when you enter a room. I also love it when environments are built to give you a few ways to sneak around and observe an area and all the people in it. Being able to observe characters, learn about them, stalk them, and either kill them, knock them out, manipulate them, or avoid them, is good stealth action. Games like the Crysis series definitely understand that, and newer IPs like Dishonored, Watch Dogs, and Remember Me seem to understand how to make a good hunt.