Conference Call

GWJ Conference Call Episode 193

All Things E3 With Special Guest Chris Remo and more!

This week Cory, Shawn and special Guest Chris Remo talk about a ton of games they saw at E3 and the general experience of being at the big show. No bonus content this week, we're too tired and cranky. If you want to submit a question or comment call in to our voicemail line at (612) 284-4563.

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. You can also submit a question or comment call in to our voicemail line at (612) 284-4563!

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Show credits

Music credits: 

Intro/Outtro Music - Ian Dorsch, Willowtree Audioworks

Aurora - Shatter the Official Video Game Soundtrack - http://sidhe.bandcamp.com/ - 1:21:14

Comments

merrypetal wrote:

I am nervous of going online and being the dreaded drag-down in a game and don't know the protocols of going online, how to match up with people on my level, guess mostly don't want to make a fool of myself. That said I'm listening to you talk about Rage, and hope that has couch co-op, and even if it does not, it sounds very cool and added to my list. (my hands shake just thinking about going online lol) I know online is hugely popular and wish I could have that sort of chutzpah.

It's probably less of a bother and problem than you think it is / will be. I say, if Donut (Jinniee on the boards here) can do it, so can you. She never played video games (or was it just a few small games) before L4D2 came out and now she plays L4D2 regularly with Goodjers. I think it's also a real testament to how easy playing with GWJ people can make the experience, too. So if you do go online, make sure it's only with friends you know / people from the site.

Could we get some sort of visual cue like a thumbs up or thumbs down on the podcast post if Rabbit is going to be on or not? It saves us from the crushing depression we feel when the podcast starts up and he isn't on. Not that you other folks are bad by any means -- but just not Rabbit.

Maybe a Rabbit icon in red with an x through it when he is not on and a green shiny one when he is on? Just a thought.

Flying_Norseman wrote:

Could we get some sort of visual cue like a thumbs up or thumbs down on the podcast post if Rabbit is going to be on or not? It saves us from the crushing depression we feel when the podcast starts up and he isn't on. Not that you other folks are bad by any means -- but just not Rabbit.

Maybe a Rabbit icon in red with an x through it when he is not on and a green shiny one when he is on? Just a thought.

I'm pretty sure the following line, that's starts the Show Notes every week, does that in text format:

Show Notes wrote:

This week Cory, Shawn and special Guest Chris Remo talk about...

hbi2k wrote:

This is not solely directed at you, Cory, but am I the only one who thinks that it's high time that we-- by which I mean nerds in general-- get over Felicia Day? I mean, I get it, she's a pretty redhead who likes games and nerdy stuff. But some of the fan-gushing over her starts to get a tad stalkerish and creepy at times.

YES!

Also - please stop completely freaking out anytime there is a picture of a cute asian girl anywhere video game related.

It is super uncomfortable the way geeks freak out when they find out a girl likes video games. I would imagine that a lot more girls play video games than you expect - they just don't ever talk on vent/live because of the sex-deprived stalking they would be victimized with.

Let's turn to the latest ESA report to respond to some of these comments...

Certis wrote:

The couch coop thing was more a question of which mode has more players. A lot more people play online than with local friends at this point. Why not just do both?

64% of gamers play games with other gamers in person. Of the 20 best-selling console games of 2009, eight of them offered online play, and I don't think all of those offered online co-op. What you were complaining about on the podcast (games being released supporting local co-op only with online co-op being patched in later) sounds like a budgetary question, and, based on the numbers, if I were a developer of a console game, I'd cut online co-op before I cut local co-op.

SallyNasty wrote:

I would imagine that a lot more girls play video games than you expect - they just don't ever talk on vent/live because of the sex-deprived stalking they would be victimized with.

40% of gamers over-all are women, and 42% of gamers online are women. Granted, this includes casual games that none of us would sully our jaggy-less, bump-mapped hands with, but there's still a not insignificant number of women online. Anecdotally, I know plenty of women who hide their gender online or don't bother with online play at all because of the super-macho atmosphere (and the super-macho selection of games).

Just popped by this thread since my "cute Asian girls playing video games" alarm went off, but the only picture I saw was not that at all. Not at all.

Tagged in case pics show up later.

Edit: Well while I'm here, I'll add this:

Flying_Norseman wrote:

Could we get some sort of visual cue like a thumbs up or thumbs down on the podcast post if Rabbit is going to be on or not? It saves us from the crushing depression we feel when the podcast starts up and he isn't on. Not that you other folks are bad by any means -- but just not Rabbit.

Maybe a Rabbit icon in red with an x through it when he is not on and a green shiny one when he is on? Just a thought.

You can also listen to Three Moves Ahead for your supplementary Rabbit needs, even if you aren't into strategy games. Or can't stand Bruce Geryk. I know I do (on all three counts).

I think the guys hit the nail on the head when they surmised that the Big Three's latest moves (Epic Mickey for Wii/3DS unveiling, Move for PS3, Kinnect for the 360) is conceit by them that their target markets are all but tapped out at this point. Nintendo can't get any more casual gamers to buy Wiis just as Sony and Microsoft can't get any more people to buy their consoles, therefore they have to try to appeal to gamers who wouldn't ordinarily buy their stuff. I just think it's going to be a tough hill to climb for all three parties in that respect.

hbi2k wrote:

gibbering nonsense

SallyNasty wrote:

gibbering nonsense

You people are monsters.

Quintin_Stone wrote:
hbi2k wrote:

gibbering nonsense

SallyNasty wrote:

gibbering nonsense

You people are monsters.

I second this.

Really enjoyed this episode.

It's very cool that GWJ was able to have some people on-site for E3 and, even if some of my own requests in the "E3 Coverage Wishlist" thread didn't make it, it was cool to see some of the other more popular requests from the community (e.g. XCOM, Rage) get some attention.

Couple of other quick comments:

Warren Spector's "stamp" on Epic Mickey
This entire discussion reminded me of one of my favorite all-time IGN.com quotes, from the preview of Deus Ex 2:

pc.ign.com wrote:

"There's a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person," says Warren Spector, creator of Thief and Deus Ex.

Id Software Has Never Really Been About Good Art Direction
Does the original Quake qualify here? The game is certainly not attempting to render a lush, beautiful environment like an Okami or even a World of Warcraft, but it certainly has a grittier, more consistent tone than the Doom games that preceded it.

I always get slightly sad when I hear Chris Remo's voice and don't get to hear the words "horse bag". Just seems like such a damn waste.

You planted a seed, Demiurge. I demand Mickey & Donald: Dead Men.

Gravey wrote:

You planted a seed, Demiurge. I demand Mickey & Donald: Dead Men.

I'm thinking that would work better with Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck.

Certis wrote:

Pioneer might be a bit of a stretch ... it could be people who buy in early just have too much money. 3D with glasses is just such a crappy experience, especially when you consider the alternative of seeing it without having to stick a heavy pair of glasses over your normal ones. 3D will remain an exclusive, high end niche until the glasses are gone, there aren't major viewing angle issues and it's standard on TVs. By then people who only just dropped $800+ on their first HD sets ever this year might be ready for a new one.

It won't be anytime soon and I'm not fully convinced it will ever be the standard outside of theaters. It definitely won't be soon enough to have any real impact on the gaming scene for this round of consoles.

The point I am trying to make though is that the cost of entry won't be the defining factor of the success of 3D. Today it might be so but in 5 years every new TV will be 3D ready and probably come with glasses. Now one can debate that people don't want to wear glasses and I can buy that, but I don't buy the cost argument.

I also see companies making custom made 3D glasses that feel better then the crappy ones you get at the movies or that come with the TVs.

When I was at E3, I got to see a TV that doesn't require glasses. I think it is more then 5 years away from being an affordable option and it wasn't the greatest image but it is moving forward.

What Nintendo is doing is simple, and they explained it all very nicely and explicitly back when they were explaining what the Revolution was: disruption. I said that they would do this game lineup this year because the timing was about right for that, and they did.

As explained by Nintendo execs way back when, disruption strategy only starts by going after or creating new markets outside of the competition. It doesn't end that way. Once you establish that market, you move it upstream while also taking away marketshare from your enemies, using your new market to fund undercutting.

Nintendo has gone 4 years securing their marketbase. They are not ignoring that base. They're releasing Wii Party this year, and that constitutes the normal amount of expanded market content they usually release. Of course, Tiger Woods is also coming out, and Kirby is a bridge title.

However, they've gone on too long now without challenging Sony and MS. Super Mario Galaxy 2 was only the opening salvo. They're going to hit that market with everything they've got because they aren't counting on any third party support going their way.

So far, we've got

Kirby's Epic Yarn
Epic Mickey
Metroid Other M
Xenoblade
Last Story
Donkey Kong Country Returns
Sin and Punishment 2
Zelda Skyward Sword

That is not the lineup of a company that is not competing on the traditional gamer front. They're firing alright, and they brought the big guns.

Sony and Microsoft - they're feeling the pinch. Unlike Nintendo, their userbase is about late teens to early twenties predominantly - and aging. That market share is not growing. There are no new little kiddies lining up for Sony PS3 games.

As the kids grow up playing motion control gaming on Wii, they expect to be able to have that control scheme going forward.

"What? I can't even aim with this controller? Why am I buying this console again?"

I don't think either Sony or MS have any illusions about taking the expanded market away from Nintendo anytime soon. They're just playing a defensive game with that.

Kinect, though - that dance app is very interesting. It's an example of disrupting the disruptor. If MS can come up with something more compelling than that, and appealing to more people, then they have a chance of securing their own expanded markets.

The discussion of how 3D games/systems are going to be marketed in 2D media reminded me of some particularly lame Blu-Ray ads. The idea is that the ad shows you part of a movie clip at DVD resolution, then "switches" to Blu-Ray resolution, with a voiceover about seeing the difference. Except that you can only see the difference if you're already using a Blu-Ray player.

After that, I wouldn't be surprised if Sony runs ads for 3D Playstation games that completely forget that the ads themselves aren't in 3D.

Point taken, but that doesn't definitively rule out a Rabbit appearance.

mrtomaytohead wrote:
Flying_Norseman wrote:

Could we get some sort of visual cue like a thumbs up or thumbs down on the podcast post if Rabbit is going to be on or not? It saves us from the crushing depression we feel when the podcast starts up and he isn't on. Not that you other folks are bad by any means -- but just not Rabbit.

Maybe a Rabbit icon in red with an x through it when he is not on and a green shiny one when he is on? Just a thought.

I'm pretty sure the following line, that's starts the Show Notes every week, does that in text format:

Show Notes wrote:

This week Cory, Shawn and special Guest Chris Remo talk about...

misplacedbravado wrote:

The discussion of how 3D games/systems are going to be marketed in 2D media reminded me of some particularly lame Blu-Ray ads. The idea is that the ad shows you part of a movie clip at DVD resolution, then "switches" to Blu-Ray resolution, with a voiceover about seeing the difference. Except that you can only see the difference if you're already using a Blu-Ray player.

After that, I wouldn't be surprised if Sony runs ads for 3D Playstation games that completely forget that the ads themselves aren't in 3D.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEIj-wsUinc

Speedhuntr wrote:

The way I see it..I don't gush over her anymore than I do over my handful of other "celeb crushes" in the music/tv/movie world. Doesn't seem out of the ordinary to me. And for every Felicia Day forum post I see I can usually match one or two of my female friends who have a poster of johnny depp or the like above their bed.

To be fair, I think it's high time for women to get over Johnny Depp (or whoever the new Johnny Depp is-- I'm usually behind on these things so Depp himself is probably old news by now) too. But as I am not one of them, I feel less comfortable criticising. Vaguely creepy stalkerish fan-gushing is just that much more disturbing to me when I see it coming from groups I self-identify with.

That was actually kind of clever.

I loved Hunter: The Reckoning on the Original Xbox. What a fun game to do couch coop with.

my first actual NEW conference call to listen to in quite sometime, I have had to listen to older episodes while dealing with Corsair replacing the memory in PC after it went south.

Relly great episode and game discussion, enjoyed it a lot.

merrypetal wrote:

I am nervous of going online and being the dreaded drag-down in a game and don't know the protocols of going online, how to match up with people on my level, guess mostly don't want to make a fool of myself. That said I'm listening to you talk about Rage, and hope that has couch co-op, and even if it does not, it sounds very cool and added to my list. (my hands shake just thinking about going online lol) I know online is hugely popular and wish I could have that sort of chutzpah.

I'm the same way in regards to performance anxiety - I loathe the thought of being the deadweight, so I tend to limit my online play to GWJ folk and people I know until I get much, much better at the game. And then maybe, just maybe if I'm feeling awesome enough, I'll venture out into online multiplayer co-op : )

...with the headset off, of course. Some of the xbla pubbies can be rather abrasive to everyone around them. If you can't hear them, it's like they're not there judging you, calling you a f*g or a 12 year old boy.

If there are games you're interested in, keep tabs on them in the threads, and if you're on Xboxlive (I dunno if the PSN network has an equivalent) someone may make a GWJ clan for that game. When you look at the friends of the clan, you can find other GWJ folk to play with. This community is great for tolerant, encouraging, helpful, and friendly gaming experiences. As a woman burned by the rest of the gaming internets before discovering GWJ, I can't recommend this enough.

As a gamer with a gaming spouse, I too enjoy the value of couch co-op and wish it was given more consideration in game design. I suppose it's fortunate that my husband and I both had separate 360's before we married, but in the future I don't like the prospect of either having to get two consoles to play games together on other platforms, or fighting over who gets to play. I know I'm an outlier, so not a situation to be considered by game designers ...at this time. I hope that this is remedied in my lifetime.

Certis wrote:

The couch coop thing was more a question of which mode has more players. A lot more people play online than with local friends at this point. Why not just do both?

I wonder how much of this is a chicken-or-the-egg; I think the reason so many more people play online vs locally because the whole 360 system is set up to encourage separate people purchasing separate consoles and playing separate games - together. Although it's more convenient, it's not very conducive to same-room gaming outside of the Rockband phenomenon. Part of the magic of Rockband is having everyone in the room together working on a single goal. If rockband were online multiplayer only, it would have tanked compared to it's current success. I think part (and I want to emphasize part) of what really, really contributed to rockband's success was the vacancy in current console's repertoire of couch-co op that this game filled rather wonderfully.

I'm hoping that someday, with gaming becoming more mainstream, more integrated, and more normal, it becomes a part of an entire household's entertainment options aside from merely the single player. That the prospect of multiple ("hardcore") gamers in a single household isn't relegated to the option of either taking turns or having multiple systems with duplicate games in order to play popular games together.

I think at this time in gaming's development, the solo-gamer multiplaying online is the status quo (barring possibly the Wii), but I think it's merely a phase in gaming's history, and I hope we'll actually see a resurgence of couch-co op consideration when the demand for it increases with more widespread acceptance of gaming as normal activity.

Heads up: Canberra's pronounced CAN-ber-ra (or CAN'bra) not can-BER-ra

Flying_Norseman wrote:

Point taken, but that doesn't definitively rule out a Rabbit appearance.

mrtomaytohead wrote:
Flying_Norseman wrote:

Could we get some sort of visual cue like a thumbs up or thumbs down on the podcast post if Rabbit is going to be on or not? It saves us from the crushing depression we feel when the podcast starts up and he isn't on. Not that you other folks are bad by any means -- but just not Rabbit.

Maybe a Rabbit icon in red with an x through it when he is not on and a green shiny one when he is on? Just a thought.

I'm pretty sure the following line, that's starts the Show Notes every week, does that in text format:

Show Notes wrote:

This week Cory, Shawn and special Guest Chris Remo talk about...

Actually yeah, it kinda does rule out a Rabbit appearance by definition. Sorry

I'm trying to find the article, but I read recently that the Rage demo, while being played with a 360 controller, was actually running on a PC. This was not something that they intended to reveal, but became apparent when the machine that was running it crashed during a demo. I'll link the article if I can find it again.

Also, Corey, what is a 'Spiritual Successment'?

Amoebic wrote:

Great comments about local co-op.

Local co-op has contributed greatly to the success of the Wii, and I hope that Sony and Microsoft recognize that and encourage local multiplayer on their consoles in the future. Mario Kart and New Super Mario Bros. Wii are games that are popular in large part because they're geared toward local multiplayer. Even if the Wii had an online platform as easy-to-use as Xbox Live, I doubt it would have been nearly as successful if so many of its games hadn't have supported local gameplay.

FlamingPeasant wrote:

I'm trying to find the article, but I read recently that the Rage demo, while being played with a 360 controller, was actually running on a PC. This was not something that they intended to reveal, but became apparent when the machine that was running it crashed during a demo. I'll link the article if I can find it again.

I believe that was Crysis 2, but I'm also having trouble finding any articles about it.

There was a 360 on the desk and running for the Rage demo. If they weren't weren't using it, that would be pretty damn shady.

This 'cast earns the Paul Blart segue award for seamless transition without pointing out how awesome it was. Seriously some smooth stuff guys. Also Idle Thumbs FTW