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Nerds Without Pants Special: Leaving Las Vana'diel

Random and Yamika talk about the final days of Final Fantasy XI.

Hey, all. Julian here with a short special to tide you over until our next big show. I'm joined by my best friend Shanna (who you may have heard in the special episode Love and the MMORPG) to talk about the last days of the Final Fantasy XI console servers. I've already written a piece about it which you can find here, but I still wanted to do some sort of special recording about this very important topic of mine.

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A Fond Farewell to Final Fantasy XI

With the console servers shutting down, Julian says goodbye to his first MMORPG.

Now that we are firmly entrenched in the 8^th console generation and PC gaming is back on the rise, you would be forgiven for not hearing about the server shut down of the final game from the 6^th generation: Final Fantasy XI. Even though the PC version released first and remains active to this day, the game began as an ambitious project for the PlayStation 2, and finally closed its PS2 and Xbox 360 doors on March 31, 2016. While it wasn’t the first massively multiplayer online role playing game to make its way to consoles (Everquest Adventures on the PS2 has that distinction), it was the entry point for many gamers into the world of the MMORPG. I was there for the final days of Final Fantasy XI on the console (I had been playing it on the Xbox 360 in recent years), and it was a bittersweet farewell, indeed.

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Nerds Without Pants Episode 82: Fighting Street

A Street Fighter veteran, pro, and rookie walk into a bar...

Welcome back to another edition of Nerds Without Pants! We are joined by JD this time to get into some deep talk about Street Fighter V, but we save that for the end of the show in case fighting games aren't your thing (like Angelo).

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Nerds Without Pants Episode 81: Significant Others

We share our love of gaming with our loved ones.

Welcome back to Nerds Without Pants! On this episode, Friend of the Show John Gholson joins us to discuss how gaming works with romantic relationships. Before that, we have some Consumption Junction fun.

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That Dragon, Cancer Review

Numinous Games presents us with a gut-wrenching experience that elevates the interactive medium.

"That Dragon, Cancer," is a game about hope -- its presence, and its absence. While forged in the anticipation of triumph, the end result is a meditation on failure and loss that is pretty hard to take, and without a doubt breaks new ground for the interactive medium. Created by Brian Green and his company, Numinous Games ("numinous" means "having a strong religious or spiritual quality"), this "game" (we have no other word for it that's adequate) is both gut-wrenching and an incredibly simple exploration of a young boy's four year battle with cancer. But while it takes on loss in a new way, it is also a commentary on games in general that is both surprising and profound. It is not without flaws, but the all-encompassing heart of it more than compensates for its failures.

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Nerds Without Pants Episode 78: State of the Generation 2015

Or: NWP rates the 8th generation.

Welcome to the last Nerds Without Pants of the year! Hopefully you are getting to listen to this on your way to some holiday destination, or as you set up your shiny new PS4, Xbox One, or Wii U. Enjoy as the Pantsless Ones talk candidly about their feelings on the current generation of consoles. Now that the crew has access to all three machines we can finally evaluate the generation as a whole. While Patrick is still super stoked about his PS4 the bloom has started to come off of the rose a bit for Julian and Angelo.