Conference Call

GWJ Conference Call Episode 102

Warhammer Online, Crysis Warhead, NHL09, STALKER Clear Sky, Force Unleashed iPod, Peggle Nights, Special Guest Shawn "Going To 2K Boston" Elliott, Your Emails and more!

This week we're very pleased to welcome Shawn Elliott for his first guest appearance on the show! We go deep on a whole bunch of new titles, the PC gaming industry, release schedules, game design, funny stories and more! He may very well be our best guest since Jeff Green!

To contact us, email [email protected]! Send us your thoughts on the show, pressing issues you want to talk about or whatever else is on your mind. You can even send a 30 second audio question or comment (MP3 format please) if you're so inclined.

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Show credits

Music credits: 

Intro/Outro Music - Ian Dorsch, Willowtree Audioworks

"Anxious Tedium" - Ouranos OST (Tom Quinn) - www.citadel-studios.com - 0:55:02
"The Way Your Journey Ends" Tom Quinn - www.citadel-studios.com - 1:43:49

Comments

Awesome. Glad you guys got him on the show. I'll be doing my Wednesday morning ritual of eating breakfast, browsing around, and listening to the podcast here in about 4 hours.

So you do Ken Levine, follow it up with Jeff Green then throw in Shawn Elliott right after just because you can? I f*cking love you guys, keep it up!

Swearing! f*ck yeah!

Alright! Sam Elliott!

Dr_Awkward wrote:

Alright! Sam Elliott!

Who?
You mean Sam Andrich? Or was that Sam Sands?

Sorry, being mean.. Also looks like I killed the Euro GWJ contingent thread - sorry about that.

Somehow this CC seemed REALLY short.. but then I noticed it really had almost been 2 hours. I guess time does fly when you're having fun.
Well done guys!

I'm just gonna go ahead and change my name to "Cheaun", because that seems to be the preferred phoneme for GWJ.

anyprophet wrote:

Swearing! f*ck yeah!

I haven't started listening yet, and I'm already entertained.

RE: Rabbit's comments on CivRev. I agree wholeheartedly on the 360 version, they've done a great job of creating a console port of Civ and I am very impressed with it. But given the choice between that and playing Civ IV: BTS on my PC which is 10 feet away? I'll take CIV IV thanks.

Which is WHY I picked up CivRev for the DS. I can thoroughly recommend this and frankly it feels like a more natural platform for a cutdown Civ release than the 360 version.

Oh, I forgot, Rabbit doesn't carry his DS anymore

Oh well, until they bring out an iPhone version...

Is CivRev basically the same as the original Civilization in terms of complexity? From the demo it looked like the only real difference was that roads automatically link cities so you don't have to micro-manage an army of road-building settlers. A tweaked, streamlined version of the original Civ is about perfect for me, Civs II-IV never appealed.

Zelos wrote:

Is CivRev basically the same as the original Civilization in terms of complexity? From the demo it looked like the only real difference was that roads automatically link cities so you don't have to micro-manage an army of road-building settlers. A tweaked, streamlined version of the original Civ is about perfect for me, Civs II-IV never appealed.

That's probably not too far off the mark, certainly trade is handled the same as in Civ I/II (caravans rarther than trade networks). There are no worker units and (unless I'm being dumb) settlers can't upgrade tiles, it's just build a city and you get stuff from the tiles without upgrading the surroundings.

Shawn Elliott was great but it's just not the same without a story involving something illegal or dangerous he did in his teens.
GFW Radio, come back.

I have to say: Rob wins this podcast... he kicks so much ass that he even reaches round and kicks his own ass!

Great podcast guys!

[edit]
Also, is it me, or is Elysium becoming 'The Man''s Female Doggo? Or maybe i'm misremembering something early on in the podcast. I'll go back and listen to it after i finish.

[edit2] Ah, no. Turns out i misheard him over the Civ 4 discussion with Rabbit.

The podcast needs more Shawns. You guys know any more?

Warhammer Online, Crysis Warhead, NHL09, STALKER Clear Sky, Force Unleashed iPod, Peggle

Barely... You could have spent more time on other things besides "if you want an advanced character design system SPORE is more your game..."

Rob, aren't you the producer? Do producer's normally get told to STFU?

Interesting note on the iPhone XPlane game: it was done in about 10 days.

http://tinyurl.com/iPhoneXplane

booty wrote:

Interesting note on the iPhone XPlane game: it was done in about 10 days.

http://tinyurl.com/iPhoneXplane

That's a bit misleading, considering XPlane (not the iPhone port) has been around and in development for a long time.
It would be a bit like saying Spore Creatures for DS was made in a couple of weeks while completely disregarding the multi-year development that went into Spore.

As a side note, it was good hearing S[e|h]a[w]n.

duckilama wrote:
booty wrote:

Interesting note on the iPhone XPlane game: it was done in about 10 days.

http://tinyurl.com/iPhoneXplane

That's a bit misleading, considering XPlane (not the iPhone port) has been around and in development for a long time.
It would be a bit like saying Spore Creatures for DS was made in a couple of weeks while completely disregarding the multi-year development that went into Spore.

As a side note, it was good hearing S[e|h]a[w]n.

True, sorry if that was misleading. Also, it was done during 16 hours days, and most of the time was spent ripping code out. I still thought it was impressive.

Barely... You could have spent more time on other things besides "if you want an advanced character design system SPORE is more your game..."

I really wanted to spend a lot more time talking about that game. I agree we had way too much content on things that don't matter at all. I plan to exert my influence talking about that game more next time.

duckilama wrote:
booty wrote:

Interesting note on the iPhone XPlane game: it was done in about 10 days.

http://tinyurl.com/iPhoneXplane

That's a bit misleading, considering XPlane (not the iPhone port) has been around and in development for a long time.
It would be a bit like saying Spore Creatures for DS was made in a couple of weeks while completely disregarding the multi-year development that went into Spore.

Porting a complex, large footprint program like that to a completely unfamiliar mobile platform in 10 days is still very impressive. Although I'm sure being able to ask Apple developers questions instead of having to trawl the docs made a big difference.

I'm not saying it's not impressive, but the fact that they had years behind the basic engine, the flight physics models, the plane physics, the controls and so much more means that there was an awful lot of code they did NOT need to write in that 160 hours. Yes, a port in 160 hours, even with help from Apple's own devs, is impressive, but they did not "make" the game in 160 hours.

duckilama wrote:

I'm not saying it's not impressive, but the fact that they had years behind the basic engine, the flight physics models, the plane physics, the controls and so much more means that there was an awful lot of code they did NOT need to write in that 160 hours.

I doubt that they had much that they didn't have to rewrite. Unless they were able to get a direct port of their code from the PC version to the iPhone(doubtful), they would have to rewrite considerable sections of the code. And by direct port, I mean that they took the existing code, and literally copied and pasted it into their framework. Due to the much smaller RAM footprint and CPU power, a lot of the heavy physics calculations that the PC X-Plane does(basically, it simluates the entire plane's airflow and such) simply aren't possible on the iPhone.

While they wouldn't have had to rewrite their code on the highest level, they probably had to do quite a bit to get it working on the iPhone. The one saving grace for them was probably the fact that the iPhone runs OpenGL, which would've meant that the majority of their visual engine code would've worked out of the box.

Dr_Awkward wrote:

Alright! Sam Elliott!

What do I look like? The f*cking weatherman?

I find it interesting that at the moment you read the word "goodness" in that one email, that I had reached the disgust threshold with that word right along with you.

Spaz wrote:

I'm just gonna go ahead and change my name to "Cheaun", because that seems to be the preferred phoneme for GWJ.

Like Chone Figgins?

KingMob wrote:

Shawn Elliott was great but it's just not the same without a story involving something illegal or dangerous he did in his teens.
GFW Radio, come back.

A thousand times this. They said that people complained when Shawn went off topic (back on GFW) but that was the whole reason I tuned in!

Otherwise good show as usual, guys.

Seriously, coming from Oklahoma, if a story doesn't have tweakers, its not worth telling.

During the GWJ love-in, Pandora started playing REO's "Keep on Loving You."

Billy Mitchell from Voodoo Extreme? Were you referring to Billy "Wicked" Wilson? There's a name I haven't heard in years... In 2001, Voodoo Extreme was a daily stop for me; and after you mentioned it, I did some research and was surprised to find that indeed, he is no longer with us. Rest in peace, sir.

Nijhazer wrote:

Billy Mitchell from Voodoo Extreme? Were you referring to Billy "Wicked" Wilson? There's a name I haven't heard in years... In 2001, Voodoo Extreme was a daily stop for me; and after you mentioned it, I did some research and was surprised to find that indeed, he is no longer with us. Rest in peace, sir.

Damn, you're totally right. Fun fact, I used to write for the RPG sister site, Altered Worlds, back in the day.

Billy Mitchell is the guy from King of Kong