yeah its been a month. we’re busy at work and none of us have had a huge desire to talk about games. plus i’m tired of the show’s current form. so with a couple of quick hits – shadow complex and batman: arkham asylum are both fantastic and Game Of The Year contenders in my book, star wars: the clone wars: republic heroes is weak, and a remake of the gameboy classic castlevania adventure is coming.

okay. we’re taking a break for a while. i’ve been wanting to redesign the site, re-record our intro music, and try new formats for the show, so here’s the opportunity. if you have feedback on what you’d like to see, feel free to leave a comment, but i think i have some good ideas on where to take the show.

anyway. we’ll see you later.

sony’s come a long way in this particular console generation. everyone thought they were completely unhinged when they priced the PS3 at $500 for a 20GB and $600 for a 60GB. for me it felt like Neo Geo money – remember back when you had to be hood rich to get one of those since they were essentially scaled-down arcade boards? i figured, no one’s gonna buy that thing, it’s just too expensive. (side note, i got one when they dropped to $400 a year later).

well here we are, close to three years later, and sony finally has a $300 model. not only is the existing hardware cheaper, but the worst kept secret in the industry, the PS3 slim, is real, and it’s spectacular. seems that $300 is the sweet spot, and while their install base has suffered due to the high price and they’re lagging pretty far behind the 360 and wii, they finally have an opportunity to get in the proverbial game.

although i will agree with the sentiment that it makes the PSP Go!’s price look even more unreasonable. maybe we’ll see it drop to $200 by next year, since their strategy appears to inflate the intial price like crazy to get more dough out of early adopters, and then drop it late in the game in the hopes of attracting the stragglers. in any case, mad props to sony for what is a pretty compelling PR move.

this week nick, tony and justin sit down to talk the classics in episode 28. justin reminisces about C=64 legends jumpman and montezuma’s revenge, tony brings the atari 2600 love (apparently he loves strawberry shortcake), and nick categorically highlights our favorites from the 8-bit and earlier era. we also touch on the TMNT: Turtles in Time remake and the new Gears of War 2 All Fronts pack.

btw, we mentioned this jumpman remake for the PC – worth checking out. break music is Subterranean Kamikaze, a Turtles In Time remix from OCRemix.org.

bonus video: tony found the best MK ripoff of all time, Ultra Vortek for the Jaguar. did that guy just turn into a hummingbird and decapitate his opponent? was that just poop?

before i get to this post, let me first offer a bit of helpful advice. never, never, never google image search for “fat princess”. also, did you know that “fat women eating cake” is one of google’s top suggestions for “fat”? don’t ever search for that either.

okay, so fat princess shows up this past week. it was announced last year, and the premise had me drooling. a multiplayer isometric action/strategy game, the idea is that you and your teammates attempt to kidnap your opponents’ princess from their castle while defending your own. you and your opponents can feed your respective princesses delicious cake to plump them up and make them tougher to move.

and Titan, the devs, got the mechanics right for the most part. graphically it’s nice looking, and the controls just work. there’s plenty of strategic depth, too. you can pick one of five character classes – the soldier has powerful, short range attacks and has lots of health; the priest can heal their teammates; the wizard can cast fire and ice spells; the archer has long-range attacks; and the worker can harvest resources and upgrade the different classes and their team’s defenses. there are a few other play modes besides Capture The Fatty, but none have the raw appeal or fit as well with the game’s mechanics.

so the formula is solid – mix gauntlet/zelda with team fortress 2, throw in some animated gore and fat jokes, you’ve got a guaranteed winner, right?

somehow the game’s falling flat for me. the single player, which really just serves to train you on the different classes and game modes, relies on awful AI and as a result you’re doing all the heavy lifting yourself. which wouldn’t be a big deal, since it’s a much better online multiplayer game, except that right now, finding a game you can connect to is near impossible. i’ve played one that works in a few days of trying, and that only had about eight dudes out of a 32-player max. larger games are apparently super laggy and random disconnects occur often.

i was most disappointed, though, with the length of the matches – they go a little too long. the online match i played was alright, but in the single player there isn’t a lot that really forces the match forward. you’ll see occasional skirmishes, do some resource mining and fight for control over outposts, but after ten or fifteen minutes you don’t see a ton of progress. granted, that’s probably a good thing for a lot of people – but i personally don’t really want to invest 30-45 minutes in one match.

the multiplayer does seem like it’d work really well with a group of friends. it’d be perfect for a LAN party, too, so let’s hope a PC version is forthcoming, since it could run easily on most low-end systems.
the game’s got a ton of potential, and it’s only $15. the learning curve is easy, too – the combat isn’t too challenging and the classes are simple to learn. while teams/clans might get pretty tight in terms of working together and strategy, it’s not deep enough to preclude a beginner from showing up and holding their own. once sony/titan get the online issues worked out, i’m looking forward to getting into it more.

since i’m hoping the next show will be 100% classic games, i wanted to throw a quick shout to splosion man, an XBLA title released yesterday. made by twistel pixel of the maw fame, it’s a cartoony sidescrolling platformer where you play a science experiment gone wrong – a walking ball of fire whose only power is blowing himself up, which is how you jump, attack, interact w/the environment, etc.

so there’s the dry, factual description for an incredibly entertaining experience. the demo had me hooked after only three levels. your character is goofy and funny – his roger-rabbit-esque antics had me chuckling constantly. the platforming is flawless, in the grand style of some of the best platformers in history – there’re a lot of mega man x and super metroid influences throughout. there’s clever enemies and environmental puzzles, hidden items to find (there’s a cake hidden in every level, which your avatar devours passionately), and fifty levels, and an additional fifty that are local or online co-op only.

i seriously can’t think of anything bad to say about this game. it’s simultaneously original and classic, silly but not obnoxious, and super cheap – $10 is an absolute steal for this much content. go boot up your 360 and grab the demo right now. NOW. (btw i love that i can “order” a game off XBLA’s website and it queues up to download next time i fire up my 360. sony, pay attention here.)

You play too much 1 vs 100.

well i wasn’t at all planning to do a show today, but our crew is awesome and after devouring some delicious pizza we deliver episode 27. special guest int0×80 from dual core joins us to talk about their new album Next Level and the influences of his gaming experience on his music. the rest of us schmoes – justin, ryan, tony, mcmillions and nick – touch on ghostbusters, 1 vs 100, fight night round 4, and fallout 3, and then ramble for a bit about the blending of the shooter and RPG genres, the lack of originality in some genres, and end with some reminiscing about RTS classics.

break music is Natural 20’s from Next Level.

our good friends dual core are clearly more productive than we are. while we haven’t recorded a podcast in about a decade, they play a ton of shows, including recent nerd music fest nerdapalooza, where they debuted Next Level, their fourth album.

for two dudes that self-produce all their material, int 80 (vocals) and c64 (beats) have always avoided the fuzzy, cheap, amateur sound that plagues most basement hip-hop. Next Level keeps that tradition alive with production that’s just as professional, clean, and perfectly mixed as anything from the recording industry. the duo’s more in-your-face, confident and brazen than ever – c64’s tracks are all over the map, from the thoughtful (Forever) to the head-nodders (Kick Back), and 80’s rhymes bounce between smirking (Here To Help) and serious (Letter to C64).

there’s a ton to offer all species of nerd – gamers of the tabletop scene will dig Natural 20’s, while Gears fans rejoice in The Hollow as 80 tells the game’s story better than CliffyB did. nerdcore hip hop fans will recognize genre superstars in I Remember and Magnificent Seven. and leet hax0rs will appreciate Kick Back and Life’s Work (which name-drops a couple prominent script kiddies).

you can pick up Next Level for $10 here. thanks for listening, we now return to not making podcasts.

Don’t you love it when a simple comic captures your essence quickly and succinctly? Today’s xkcd has done that…at least how it pertains to gaming.

*note: I did actually buy Ghostbusters: The Video Game this past weekend. Review incoming as I continue to have fun playing it…er gather more emperical data for you, dear reader.

so we haven’t recorded a new show because everyone’s either busy or out of town or just hasn’t played anything new. you’ll notice the server hosting the site got a nice upgrade in the meantime – should load a little faster now.

in lieu of a podcast, i submit to you:

- nick found this post on the etymology of names and other words in many classic gaming franchises. it is simultaneously fascinating and terrifyingly detailed and painstakingly researched.

- i’m playing a lot of rock band unplugged. this game is getting zero media coverage, which is a surprise because it’s a rarity: a worthy music / rhythm action game that doesn’t require $200 in plastic instruments; and a PSP game that is almost worth its price tag ($40 is about $10 too high though). basically it’s rock band’s stunted love child with frequency. great for pick up and play, soundtrack is a skimming of rock band/rb2’s greatest hits. only big gripe: you can buy new tracks, but sony or harmonix should give you the Unplugged version of the tracks you’ve already bought for free or at a discount. i’m not going to drop an extra $2 no matter how much i love the songs.

- i finally got into the uncharted 2 beta, but i’ve only had time to play one round each of deathmatch and co-op. DM is fun, a pretty standard third-person shooter with a competent cover system and some decent weapons. i love the grenades – some say they’re overpowered but i think they’re spot on, and the physics are some of the best i’ve ever seen in a shooter. the best part of uncharted is the exploration, though, not the combat. the levels are big enough to allow some wandering off, but there’s usually enough people in a given game that you won’t last very long if you’re just climbing and jumping around. the co-op has me really excited about the full release, but i also found if you’re playing with someone who doesn’t match your skill level it can really sabotage your game. gears does it right with varying difficulty between co-op players – uncharted needs that badly. otherwise, it’s gorgeous, has perfect controls, and sounds great.

- the dudes at gamejunkie are throwing another gaming fest: their summer gamecation is here in cinci in a few weeks. hope i get a chance to pop down and check it out.