Who else?
Nate Liles ensures that the podcast doesn’t go off without a hitch as the panel welcomes Eric J for the first time and Johnny Pipes as special guest. Ginia and Lusi barely manage a word in edgewise between Nate’s flatulent outbursts. It’s terribad!
Lusipurr
Bup
Ginia
Lane
Eric J
2009.11.16 at 00:42
- This episode is just one of the many reasons why NATE LILES is awesome, and he should be in charge of writing the podcast itinerary from now on.
- If Ad-hoc party operates on a system level with the PSP, it should allow any PSP games with ad-hoc to enable PSN support. If it’s not system-level, then I think it would have to be implemented on a per-game basis, at which point why not just implement infrastructure networking in the game and skip the PS3 entirely? No idea how it’s actually being handled, just my $0.02.
- I know I’m in the minority here, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with DLC being available for a game at launch.
- I’ve played Modern Warfare 2 for about 1/2 an hour with my brother, and I’m of the same opinion of Lusipurr and Ethos.
- I pronounce my handle like “turkey giblets,” but really it’s a nickname I made up for my hamster, so pronounce it however you want :D.
- I love you too, Ethos!
- I can vouch for NATE LILES account of what happened while playing TF2, everything from ranking above Lusipurr to receiving blowjobs over the internet. It was tons of fun until he refused to turn off the skype chat during said blowjobs. Things got a bit awkward.
- I’ve decided I want NATE LILES following me around narrating my life through song.
- Eric J. is awesome.
- Great podcast as always. I was cracking up throughout the whole thing!
2009.11.16 at 05:08
Man, this podcast was so damn awesome. Listened to it twice so far, makes grinding much more enjoyable.
2009.11.16 at 12:02
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with DLC being available for a game at launch.
I’m with you on this one. From a development cycle standpoint, it makes sense to have things not pertinent to the main quest to be worked on in tandem with the main game and offered at release. If they wanted it on the disc, that could potentially delay a title’s release window and could fiscally mess up the publishers schedule.
Also, I love you.
2009.11.16 at 12:05
LOVE CONNECTION! ERIJ AND DARTHG!
And was this podcast really that good?! I have to listen to it again. I’m always confused when a podcast that I’m on gets praise.
2009.11.16 at 12:30
I wasn’t there for that video at the end, but I imagine the impressions are better than actually watching the video. Those outtakes were AMAZING.
2009.11.16 at 13:24
The podcast was better than I felt like it was going to be!
Such a glowing endorsement!
The outtakes are pretty great.
2009.11.16 at 13:34
I’m not entirely dissatisfied with this one.
2009.11.16 at 13:42
Oh yeah, the video in question from the outtakes.
2009.11.16 at 15:29
“I’m not entirely dissatisfied with this one.” – This is the highest praise I’ve ever heard from Shawn Cooper in the almost 2 years that I’ve known him.
2009.11.16 at 16:13
Bootech is legendary among youtube.
2009.11.16 at 16:21
Best. Podcast. Ever.
2009.11.16 at 17:08
Everything is wrong about day one DLC.
2009.11.16 at 17:14
Just FYI: the song I played to make the podcast better was “Du Hast” by Raamstein.
2009.11.16 at 19:22
Y’know, if nothing else, the Christmas Video HAS produced that amazing Nate Liles still.
2009.11.16 at 19:29
- I agree with Epyon. This podcast was quite excellent, even by MAP standards. It seems like the more frustrated Lusipurr sounds while recording, the better the episode becomes.
- At the risk of sounding like an old man, the people in that video need to learn how to wear pants properly.
@Oyashiro: If the options are that a set of content be day one DLC or not available at all, I’d much rather have the option of buying it. Obviously, it would still need to be worth the money, though. This makes the assumption that the content wouldn’t be available otherwise, but that’s just as likely as the content being included for free on the disc in pre-DLC times.
@Bup: Man, I haven’t heard Du Hast in forever. Gotta love European metal!
2009.11.16 at 19:36
@Ethos: And the excellent trailer.
Now we just need to record Lusipurr’s Christmas Spectacular 2009.
2009.11.16 at 19:42
9 times out of 10, day 1 dlc is purposely withheld from the disc release so that they can sell it to you separately. And the other time its developed alongside the game with the purpose of selling close to release.
Its like buying a car without a radio only to find out that the dealer took it out before hand to sell it to you after you paid for the car. or in the case of Capcom, selling you the radio knobs to access the radio you already paid for.
2009.11.16 at 19:50
Yeah, but sticking with the car analogy, if I were looking at a car and found out it didn’t come with a radio (or similar “standard” feature), I’d immediately look at other cars. I’d do the same thing with any game lacking essential features. It’s not like what’s DLC and what’s included with the game is a secret when you go to buy the game. When looking at a game, I try to decide if whatever content I’m getting is worth the price. If it’s not, then I’ll buy something else. Great thing about the game market is there’s lots of competition.
2009.11.16 at 20:21
@Darth: What you’re saying is written in the naive presumption that other companies won’t see the profits and follow suit–a presumption that has been proven false, after all, as this sort thing becomes more and more common.
How long until just about every game has material that should be on the disc for an extra cost as DLC at launch?
And talking about ‘competition’ in the realm of games is just so much hot air. There is no competition between established franchises. No one is going to refuse to buy Final Fantasy if they suddenly have DLC-at-launch–even if that DLC is integral to the story. The fact of the matter is that if you follow a series, you’ll pay up, though you may grind your teeth and begrudge the extra expense.
Companies know they can milk their fans. Whilst that may be ‘the way of the market’, carnivorous capitalism is not some sort of high-minded ideal and should not be used as justification for sticking it to gamers to line the pockets of corporations.
2009.11.16 at 20:48
“Now we just need to record Lusipurr’s Christmas Spectacular 2009.”
Bah-ha ha, exactly! So that I can produce another trailer and promises of other things that won’t materialize.
2009.11.16 at 21:13
Man, I just watched that trailer for the first time in a while. It truly is my greatest work.
2009.11.16 at 21:26
@Ethos: Yep, it’s all downhill from here.
2009.11.16 at 21:27
This is fast becomming last weeks CatFancyCast forum discussion (the one where MC got himself banned). Lusipurr and Oyashiro are of course right, DLC more often than not is designed to gouge the very same consumers who act as sycophantic apologists for the companies that screw them. The defence of DLC mantra is very much an accademic arguement, as the concrete reality is that there’s nothing standing in the way of developers removing elements frome their games, charging full price for an incomplete game, and then skimming the cream from what they omitted. That is the path of least resistence for generating fat profits, and the path of least resistence is ALWAYS most widely used, devs are just figuring out what their audience will tolerate atm, expect more incidents like the RE5 deathmatch …
2009.11.16 at 21:50
@Lusipurr – and don’t I know it!
2009.11.16 at 22:00
@SN: Exactly, and of course the more this goes on, the more people defend it, the more people become used to it, and the more it is tolerated, the more it happens–and the cycle repeats.
Anyone who thinks this isn’t a slippery slope must have no memory whatsoever. I remember a time–only a few years ago–when this sort of action would have been unconscionable. Then came a time when it was unusual. Now it is common. How long until it can be expected?
2009.11.16 at 23:11
@Lusipurr/SN: Just to clarify my position, I’m not defending anybody. I’m just saying if a game has $60 worth of content, I don’t mind paying $60 for it regardless of any DLC that may or may not be available at the time. I totally expect companies to milk DLC for anything they can get out of it. Companies are designed to find the general populace’s breaking point, then charge $0.01 less.
As far as no competition between franchises goes, you can label me part of the problem on that :F. If SE decided to put out FFXIII for $80 or $90, I’d still buy it if I thought I’d get that much money worth of enjoyment out of it (and, based on past FF games, I would). What I more meant by “competition” is that most of the time, if I want to get a game, there are plenty of options to choose from (assuming there’s no big game I’ve specifically been looking forward to).
In general, I’d agree that it seems like the amount of content you get with a game had been on the decline as of late due to DLC and various other factors, which is regrettable. I think the only real option to us as consumers, though, is to make sure we’re getting our money’s worth when we plop down cash for games.
2009.11.17 at 00:29
@DG- I don’t see how a game could remove content and still have $60 of content.
-I’m particularly sensitive to this nonsense having to pay anything from $90-120 for new games …
2009.11.17 at 01:09
- Well, taking Dragon Age for an example, it seems like there’s still $60 worth of content in it, despite having whatever sidequests are DLC not included in the retail game (or not on used copies or however they’re handling it). Like I said, the “value” of a game will be different for everybody. There are plenty of times I’ve bought a game for full price and gotten more than my money’s worth out of it.
- I’m by no means saying that’s what SHOULD happen, I was just using myself to prove Lusipurr’s point that people will have fanatical devotion to a particular series. Again, that’s the value I’d put on the game, which will be different from the value he’d put on it or the value you’d put on it, and none of us are right, it’s all an opinion.
Although, if I’m reading the amazon.jp site correctly, the game will be 7,979 yen (89.52438 USD according to google), but I think that’s just how the game market goes in Japan. There’s a much wider range of new game prices, it’s not just everything is $60 (also, my Japanese is god-awful, especially with kanji, so it’s entirely possible that I’m just plain wrong on that price, or there’s other bonuses I’m missing).
I just want to say that all my little rants in this thread (completely didn’t mean to derail it this bad, sorry everybody else) are just my personal microeconomic view of how I determine if I should buy a game. Everybody’s got a system, and this is just mine, no better or worse than anybody else’s :D.
2009.11.17 at 02:32
Well if a FULL game is worth $60, then I have to figure that an incomplete game is worth something less than that …
2009.11.17 at 03:39
I like games!
2009.11.17 at 04:10
@Darth: The idea that people will not buy a game because it has by degrees less content than they previously got for the same price is ludicrous. As evidence, people are now paying $60 for less content than they got just a few years ago for $50. Are you trying to tell me that less is more? I’m not buying that for a moment. Many of the games I played in the past are capable of beating the more recent stuff clean. Yet this has no impact on the price–and neither does it have on me buying it, or on you, or on anyone else really. After all, what alternative do you have? Where are all the $50 games with more content? So much for the illusion of competition. When everyone is running the same rigged game, it doesn’t matter who you play with.
These things are not done in an instant, by leaps and bounds, but bitwise. The changes are gradual, and people work hard to convince themselves that they aren’t chumps who are getting shafted a little more each year. But delude yourself as you may–you’re a chump, and so am I, and so are all of us. But again, what choice have you? “You can give up games entirely if you don’t like it.” Really, that’s not much of a choice, is it? So withold your sale, and see what good it does–because the reality is that (most!) other people will still buy it and the enlarged profits will more than make up for the loss of a few silly people who think their one-man boycott will change the world.
Let’s square it away: if you are paying $60 for a game today that has less content than a game you would have bought for $50 three years ago, then you may well comfort yourself by saying that you still think there is $60 of value there–but what does that say about your previous purchase? Was it overvalued? I’m not about to smile and say that paying $50 for PS2/GC games was a generous gift from benevolent Sonytendo just to avoid the possibility of cognitive dissonance.
The reality is that you can’t have it both ways. Either you are paying too much now, or you weren’t paying enough in the past. Personally, I think I was paying enough in the past. Will you tell me otherwise? Were you running about five years ago cheering about how awesome a deal it was to be getting games for $50 a pop plus tax?
Let us take your theory to the logical extreme. If the value of a game is purely set on the basis of the individual consumer, at what point will they stop? 70? 80? 90? How much would you pay for a Final Fantasy game regardless of the content? I know if they priced FFXIII at $100, I’d pay up. I’d probably pay up if it was $125. I bet a lot of other people would too. Are we to be told that gouging people is right just because they’ll grudgingly pay up?
Exploitative capitalism and rightness are clean different things. If you want to try and restore the balance, you can stop defending these practices and instead hold them up to the acrimony they richly deserve–and would have received if undertaken just a few years ago. That is the job of the media–indeed it is the responsibility of the media. More visible outlets have divested themselves of their responsibility to consumers of late, but that does not make the actions of corporations any more right. Neither does it free us, at this media outlet, of our obligation to resist to the ultimate limit attempts to condition consumers into believing that being shafted is ‘okay’ because somehow, getting less for more is still ‘getting your money’s worth’.
The fact is that if a year ago I got a hamburger for a dollar, and now I only get three-quarters of a hamburger for a dollar and a half, it does me no real good to say “well it is still tasty.” The fact is that I have less, I paid more, and I can expect that in future this trend will continue as long as people ardently defend it by saying “it’s so tasty that you should be GLAD you are getting as much as 3/4 of a burger! How generous the burgermeister is!”
2009.11.17 at 05:10
Great, now I’m hungry…
2009.11.17 at 06:29
“@Bup: Man, I haven’t heard Du Hast in forever. Gotta love European metal!”
Ramnstein aren’t Metal …
2009.11.17 at 14:32
Didn’t Rammstein do the Otherworld piece from the Zanarkand FMV in the start of Final Fantasy X?
2009.11.17 at 17:06
Certainly not! That was written by Uematsu, performed with the help of people from the Black Mages (I think?) and sang by Bill Muir.
2009.11.17 at 17:34
This seemed appropriate. Expect more of this with DLC.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/11/6/
2009.11.17 at 17:37
“We spent quite a bit of time trying to determine how we felt about the Dragon Age situation described in today’s comic – a character appears in your camp who offers a questline that is only available in downloadable content. The character is literally a salesman.”
2009.11.17 at 17:38
-And so it begins …
2009.11.17 at 19:32
@Lusipurr: It’s not that I want to thank our generous burgermeister overlords (which would be an excellent name for a European metal band, btw), more that I just can’t get angry any more about companies screwing customers over. Like you pointed out, if it wasn’t DLC, there would be something else decreasing the content/price ratio. You guys go ahead and fight the power, though, and I wish you the best of luck :D.
RE: Ramstein – I’ve always considered them metal, but maybe my definition of “metal” is off. Just chock that up in the “stupid crap I’ve said this week” category :F.
RE: Otherworld – This is one of the few Uematsu pieces where I prefer the original to the Black Mages version.
2009.11.17 at 22:15
I just ran into that guy in my game, and it wasn’t that bad. Just one of the speech options said something about buying the content, but you could easily just say no.
2009.11.17 at 22:42
You’re missing the point NATE, games have now begun advertising their lack of content within the game world …
How long until you have to pay extra for the ending?
2009.11.17 at 22:44
Didn’t that already happen with Tomb Raider Underworld?
2009.11.17 at 22:50
I don’t know … It’s a Tomb Raider game … I didn’t play it.
2009.11.17 at 23:18
Seriously, who plays Tomb Raider? I haven’t ever played ANY of them.
2009.11.17 at 23:35
I’ve never met anyone who has …
2009.11.17 at 23:53
Maybe the entire Tomb Raider franchise is actually an elaborate hoax perpetrated by NATE LILES.
2009.11.18 at 03:40
@Darth: NOW we know!
2009.11.18 at 21:20
I’m strongly with Lusipurr, Oyashiro, and SN on this one. DLC is the slipperiest of slopes, and it’s going to get much worse as developers test and extend the limits of how much the consumer will accept. I unfortunately and unwisely purchased the latest Madden and was disgusted with how far they have gone. You are given the option of paying real money over and above the 68 dollar price for things such as alternate uniforms and the ability to manipulate your players stats and other such cheats. Unfortunately, there is no easy solution to halting all this. Any single person’s boycott will be useless – somehow we need to get a critical mass of consumers to not take part in these “microtransactions”, and be actively angry when a game company crosses the line.
2009.11.18 at 23:37
Nate! You stole that still of you off of my Facebook! I believe some reparations are in order…
But anyway, this was probably one of the funniest shows you guys have ever done. I’ve never been so embarrassed to bust out laughing on the bus back to my dorm. And by the way, I’ve been getting the show through iTunes perfectly since day 1… maybe it’s because I’m already subscribed?
2009.11.19 at 01:05
@CameronS: Yeah, I’m still using iTunes to download MAP, I assumed the problems would be for new subscribers and the like, since it no longer shows up under the iTunes store. I think since we subscribed before it was pulled, iTunes already knows the feed URL and can handle things from there (same as following the Advanced->Subscribe to Podcast method), but somebody correct me if I’m wrong. Regardless of the technical details, though, I do agree, it was an excellent episode :D.
2009.11.19 at 16:28
@Darth/Cameron: Correct. If you are already subscribed to the podcast, then you won’t have any problems. The issue exists for people who are trying to find us on the iTunes store to add us for the first time.
I rec’v'd an e-mail from iTunes today though that asks me to change the feed listing and relist it–then to change it back. This may result in your current iTunes subscription failing.
Bear with us (Apple, really) as we try to sort out what is wrong with their system from our end.
2009.11.19 at 16:34
UPDATE: We have resubmitted the podcast to iTunes. For this to work, we were required to change the Link and Title fields of the podcast. They will be changed back once the podcast is approved.
If you begin to experience difficulties accessing the Megaphones Ahoy! Podcast in the next week or so as a result of these changes, please use the method described above to resubscribe manually.
Hopefully this process will result in our being relisted on the iTunes store soon. Thanks for understanding!
2009.11.21 at 07:37
It was genius. I consumed it with my ears.