Road trip!
Following the Tokyo Games Show, Lusipurr fires everyone and releases scores of jitterbugs, resulting in a curious increase in productivity, Mel prepares himself for handheld Smash Bros., and SiliconNooB realises that there is no exploration in Metro.
BupThe Jitterbug phone is the best phone.
LusipurrIs that the phone which is sold on late-night television?
MelNever shall Smashers climb ice again, and it’s all the 3DS’s fault!
Some hold out hope for Wii U DLC whereas I just hold my laughter at the thought of MORE characters in this fucking game! The 3DS’s full roster sits at 49 (that’s forty and nine)! That’s 4 times as many as the first game’s 12.
It will be more apparent than ever that many in the roster are quite similar and I don’t just mean the “clone” characters like Dr. Mario and Dark Pit. There are only so many ways you can make a humanoid character perform a directional attack on the ground on in the air, and I think somewhere around the third dozen or so they kinda ran out.
LusipurrIt occurs to me that Nintendo may put the Ice Climbers in as D.L.C. for the new 3DS!
MelD.L.C.!
Yeah, it could happen. I think they’d be better off leaving that for the Wii U than partially supporting the game on the old 3DS, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Lusipurr@Mel: Well it’s clear they only care about uniform support sometimes, but not at other times. Who knows!?
DiceAdmiralInfo Blast behind the times.
WolfeLet it be known that I made the mistake of taking a long pull from my coffee mug when the topic of pants on head came up. I then laughed so hard that I snorted coffee into my nasal passage, which was most painful, but still couldn’t stop laughing.
Lusipurr
WolfeBest response ever.
Lusipurr@DiceCommodore: LATE AGAIN, eh eh eh?
And to think, I was going to promote you to DiceRearAdmiral this week. NOT ANYMORE!
SavanteWelcome back Steel Reason. Epic.
Another quality cast.
LusipurrIt’ssssss AUTUMN!
DiceAdmiralInfo Blast goes light on commentary
This week’s panel
Silicon Noob
Loudly Crunching Potato Chips Mel
Lusipurr
Not featuring:
Bup
Donators
Cumulative total record holder: Imitanis
Single Donation record holder: Imitanis
Donators eligible for drawing:
Greg H.
John V.
Matthew D.
John M.
Brett W.
Aram Z.
Peter V.
Billy B.
Les E.
Martin B.
Jeremy V.
Simon H.
Reading Raffle:
Donate $5+ and be entered to win one of the podcast-read books. One entry per $5 entered.
Since this is a running thing, I’ll stop posting it here after this week.
Fall Playthrough
Vagrant Story
Begins in October
Hiring Drive
It’s finally a feature!
Hype and Go Seek
“The story continue where it all began.”
Answer
Musical Interlude
Dropped from the podcast for time
Lusi V. Bup
No Longer a Podcast Feature
End Lusi V. Bup
Cricket
No news. Weren’t we promised game concept explanations on weeks like this?
Nomura off of FFXV, heading to KH3
7 Year anniversary of Voices of the Lifestream
No Ice Climbers in next Smash Bros.
New 3DS has interchangeable face plates, but not the new xl
Iterashi moving to mobile games
Pac-Man Championship Edition DX for iOs
Imitanis Literature Corner
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
It is pretty funny that he’s gesturing to get them to stop and each gesture makes things worse.
Dr. Discord sounds like the name of some terrible Silver Age super villain. Likewise The Awful Din.
The sound descriptions are fantastic. It reminds me of some of the nonsensical descriptions from Discworld.
“The but was trapped in his mouth” LOL, this book is amazing.
Imitanis Gaming Moment
None again this week. Interstate travel has kept me busy.
Lusipurr@DiceCommodore:
“Weren’t we promised game concept explanations on weeks like this?”
I mentioned the LVCC County Championships and the RL One-Day Cup! THAT IS SUFFICIENT
“Interstate travel has kept me busy.”
Game whilst driving! All that time between player turns provides AMPLE opportunity for navigation and hazard avoidance.
DiceAdmiralI think this is the first time that you’ve removed a cat picture that I used for you.
Lusipurr@DiceCommodore: It had a dog in it. So, I replaced it with another picture that also has a dog in it, but only literarily.
DiceAdmiral“Cat pounces dog while attack 4-year old”
How could you use an image with such terrible grammar? I understand headline shortening, but this is really strangely written.
LusipurrIt has the word DOG in it, but no actual dog is pictured.
That was sufficient.
Mel@DA: I was NOT loudly crunching potato chips, I’ll have you know they were saltines!
DiceAdmiralIt’s a subtle difference, but I can hear it in retrospect. It also sounds like the dirt digging sound in Minecraft.
DiceAdmiralAlso, Lusi forgot to officially announce the answer to the Hype and Go Seek again, good thing I’m posting it for you guys!
Lusipurr@DA: I’m simply going to ban SN from speaking. That’ll solve it.
WolfeHaving now gone back and listened to most of what I missed over the summer I’d like to comment on two things:
-I liked the classical music segment.
-The chat about the state of gaming journalism as a depraved, morally bankrupt PR machine over a month before GamerGate began was remarkably uncanny. I have since posted links to that show across several social media as a method of demonstrating that there was in fact a serious discussion about the questionable ethics surrounding this industry’s press before anyone had heard of any gate that didn’t begin with Water.
Lusipurr(I offer my apologies in advance for any typographical errors which slip through; my fingers are bandaged.)
@Wolfe: I liked the Classical Music Segment, too! We’ll shortly be requesting listener feedback as a sort of ‘survey’ to keep the podcast format tailored to the readership. I encourage you to think about submitting some of your thoughts (and, if it is not too much trouble, the rationale behind them) when we announce that next week.
One of the routinely curious (fortuitous? felicitious? serendipitous? prophetic?) things about this site is how we manage to put our finger on issues, topics, and news well in advance of those matters becoming the focus of large sections of the populace. As long-time readers will remember, one of the biggest things we ever broke was the Final Fantasy XV development change: where we announced–something like a year or more before the official announcement–that Versus XIII would be re-tooled and released instead as Final Fantasy XV. And, this was no joke. We maintained this position up until the news became official. When I repeated our claim on RPGcast, I was roundly mocked by their entire panel (and a large number of their listeners). I never tire of reminding Sabin, the Archdunce, of this–although he has yet to acknowledge or apologise for what must be one of the great moments of CatFancy blockheadedness. It’s up there with “There is no exploration in Metroid.”
Of course, we’ve done this loads of times, but it still amazes us when it happens. As a long-time listener, hopefully you’ve shared in our amusement and amazement when we find present a news story that corroborates something that we’ve been saying for months, or years.
Unfortunately, having our worst complaints about the industry confirmed (some of which, in reality, go back to the founding of the site) is hardly the sort of story we enjoy reporting. There’s a Cassandra-esque feeling that lingers: it doesn’t do much good warning people about the untoward things going on if no one does anything about it, and it doesn’t feel particuarly good to suddenly have a weight of evidence proving the untoward things because, after all, we love video games and we love the industry far more than we love being right about our cynical evaluations of the people who work in the industry. It’s a hollow victory, at least for the present.
But every cloud has a silver lining: greater awareness of the state of video game ‘journalism’ may mean that small, honest sites with integrity (of which this site is just one example) may finally get a little more attention from the disillusioned people who now realise that the ‘big’ news sites are actually more about ideologically manipulating their readership than they are about an attempt to objectively report events. And, if that actually happens–if people don’t just get ‘bored’ of this disgrace–it will mean a better-informed, better-served gamer populace, and a reduction in sway afforded to the forces of corruption and manipulation. And that, surely, is a worthwhile improvement!
WolfeI’ll be happy to put words to my support of the classical music section, however crude they may be (I’m not the most articulate sort as evidenced by my history of comments here).
And yes, I’ve most certainly noted how the site is ahead of the curb with fairly accurate observations and commentary on the direction of the industry. For example, your initial distrust of Kickstarter (something I am happy to say I’ve never tossed a single dollar at) which has proven to be a machine of failures and screwjobs. I certainly remember the Versus prediction, and it doesn’t really surprise me that the RPGCast (which I no longer listen to) mocked you for it. While I do like Sabin and his wife Paws, the site is very much an echo chamber, and I’m not fond of group think.
The revelations about the journo industry is honestly something we already knew as gamers. I think it was just sheer shock at the damn near conspiracy theory, men sitting around in a dark room with cigars plotting globalization nature of the whole affair that inspired such a backlash this time. I’ve mentioned a few times that I came here looking for a voice that wasn’t just a corporate speaking box, and to be precise, it was Giantbo-shill that got me fed up several years ago. The constant parading of developers they were all buddy buddy with and endorsing shamelessly was so transparent it that it was like being slapped in the face with a business card. And that’s been the way of the journo industry for years. Only now with a more antagonistic, hateful message for those of us who built this bloody industry in the first place (my personal gaming history begins with Pong and Atari. I’m not a young man). Without independent sites like this, gamers, -actual- gamers, don’t have anywhere to turn.
You are certainly right about the silver lining at least. In the past month I’ve found more than a few sites I’d never heard of, and they’ve since gained their share of small followers and supporters. I keep spamming this site to my friends and strangers who felt the same frustrations as me, but I’m not exactly a figure of note, so I can only do so much on that front.
I don’t think there’s any real showing of this frustration losing momentum. The opposition expected Destiny of all things, to kill the outrage. Then they expected time. Then fatigue. But gamers aren’t like other groups. We’re… whatever the hell we are. The one thing we all share is a deep love of our hobby, which is unique. Special. And we know what will happen if we let them take it from us. I think it’s pretty telling that a voice at EA actually takes the time to speak out and say something -reasonable- in the midst of all this. Something that would never have been expected prior to this. (This is the statement, just for clarity: http://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2hfx8s/ea_director_comments_on_gamergate/ )
Anyways, my apologies for rambling. If anything comes of all this beyond the reform we’re hoping for, it’s the hopes that smaller sites with authentic voices like this get more traffic. And a site that won’t run ads out of a refusal to compromise impartiality and personal ethics damn sure deserves some wider scale recognition. In some ways, this site is the PBS of the gaming commentary world (I mean that positively).
SiliconNooBI was already intimately aware of how thoroughly compromised the industry was with respect to the big publishers because of money, but what took me by surprise was the fact that the same was also true of indy developers because of the vast quantity of improper relationships that have been allowed to form. Add to that the fact that there is a secret mailing list where 150 game ‘journalists’ routinely collude on how best to spin stories, and you’ve got a situation that looks almost impossible to salvage.
SiliconNooB“The opposition expected Destiny of all things, to kill the outrage. Then they expected time. Then fatigue. But gamers aren’t like other groups. We’re… whatever the hell we are.”
I think Adam Baldwin put it best when he said that gamers are hardwired to win.
Wolfe“that the same was also true of indy developers”
Yeah, that surprised me too. In all honesty I’ve never been that interested in the indie scene. By and large it’s success has seemed (to me at least) to be rooted in nostalgia. Either way, the whole debacle has left me with a complete distrust of that entire scene now (not that it wasn’t already tainted by the likes of Richard Garriot and Tim Schaefer) in such a fashion that I can’t imagine ever going that route. I expect corporations to be money-grubbing, underhanded swines. But at least they are going for the wallet, not social/political propaganda.
The mailing list was astounding. And the smoking gun we needed. Up until that point they were all pointing and laughing with taunts of ‘tin foilers’. They aren’t laughing now.
“hardwired to win”
Definitely. I do have to wonder what winning will look like in this case. Reform seems to be the popular sentiment. But there are several key figures I feel personally need to be removed from the profession (and I use that term loosely) altogether for abuse of their position.
