Conference Call

GWJ Conference Call Episode 256

Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Madden 2012, Crimson Steam Pirates, Red Orchestra 2 beta, Overclocking, A Deus Ex Spoiler Section After The Credits, Your Emails and more!

This week Shawn, Elysium, Allen, Julian and Rob Zacny catch up on your emails and do a Deus Ex: Human Revolution spoiler section after the credits.

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.

Sponsor

Tech Thing Daily
Game Thing Daily
Good Old Games

Elysium's Deus Ex: HR Impressions
Deus Ex: Human Revolution Catch All
Duex Ex: Human Revolution Spoiler Thread
Madden 2012
Red Orchestra 2
Crimson Steam Pirates

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Show credits

Music credits: 

Intro/Outtro Music - Ian Dorsch, Willowtree Audioworks

Beautiful Women - Secret Mountain - http://www.sans-concept.com - 43:07

Deus Ex: Human Revolution Main Theme - http://deusex.com/ - 1:19:40

Comments

I've been waiting for a week for this spoiler section. Thanks.

edit: Wait, what, why am I first? I live in England. Impossible!

I bought Deus EX and I fear I will never get to play it. I received another game the day after it came out that sucked me in. I got Dead Island yesterday and I'm not putting this one down for a while. Then Gears. Followed by Skyrim, Diablo 3 and maybe TOR. I miss being a teenager with nothing to do.

Funny thing is...the same thing happened with the first Deus Ex. I bought it and never got around to playing it. I still have the box for that one also.

Red Orchestra was for UT2003/4 baby! Been playing this game for a loooooooong time now. Man, I still remember how hooked I was into that mod. One shot kills! Good stuff.

The beta has gotten better in terms of team play and whatnot. Those first few days were rough with a lot of people just hanging back and trying to snipe people. There's no k/d ratio in this game and only one or two snipers are allowed per team (and depending on the map), so once people moved past that it's been a more enjoyable beta.

Edit: Nvm, Rob covered it.

Overclocking. Thanks, I'm going to head home after work and give it a shot. My google-foo tells me I can get my Intel e5200 from 2.5ghz to 3.5ghz with stock cooling.

Nice.

El-Producto wrote:

Overclocking. Thanks, I'm going to head home after work and give it a shot. My google-foo tells me I can get my Intel e5200 from 2.5ghz to 3.5ghz with stock cooling.

Nice.

You sure about that? The stock coolers are almost always underpowered. I'd run a temperature check before you even start your clocking. You might find out that you actually need a more powerful fan on the CPU.

Once you know about the foot thing with Quentin Tarantino you do see it a lot. It's in Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown.

[Foot rub smiley goes here]

kazooka wrote:
El-Producto wrote:

Overclocking. Thanks, I'm going to head home after work and give it a shot. My google-foo tells me I can get my Intel e5200 from 2.5ghz to 3.5ghz with stock cooling.

Nice.

You sure about that? The stock coolers are almost always underpowered. I'd run a temperature check before you even start your clocking. You might find out that you actually need a more powerful fan on the CPU.

I'm just going by what the interwebs tell me.. apparantly that cpu is an overclocking monster.

Wait just a darn minute...(DX spoilers):

Spoiler:

You can choose to not get the biochip "upgrade?" Son of a Female Doggo!

Here's a link to the Board Game Geek iOS blog mentioned in the podcast:

http://boardgamegeek.com/blog/164/io...

It's also worth mentioning they have an Android correspondent, and don't cover only iOS.

Is anyone having trouble downloading the podcast with the URL http://www.gamerswithjobs.com/taxono...
?
I just changed devices from an Android to a Blackberry.
The feed shows up to show 255 but 256 won't appear.

I've deleted the channel from the stock podcast app and re-subscribed but the problem persists; this last show is not listed.

Hobbes2099 wrote:

Is anyone having trouble downloading the podcast with the URL http://www.gamerswithjobs.com/taxono...
?
I just changed devices from an Android to a Blackberry.
The feed shows up to show 255 but 256 won't appear.

I've deleted the channel from the stock podcast app and re-subscribed but the problem persists; this last show is not listed.

What app are you using? I'm using Pocket Cast and it works great.

Recognizable style? Nintendo first party stuff.

I found it interesting when the discussion turned to how compressed Detroit felt. I definitely noticed that in the original Deus Ex; especially in Hong Kong, where several important companies, people, and Tong headquarters are apparently all located within a 1/5 mile radius.

Impactful is so a word. It is the opposite of impactless.

Personally, I found the podcast very impactful.

Regarding XBox Live: I think when they raised the price, it made folks reconsider whether they were getting their money's worth out of the service. I personally wasn't getting $50/year worth out of it, but never really questioned that because I was already "in". But once the price raise announcement came out, it started me thinking and I decided to pull the plug. Sure, it's a less than $2/month difference, but once companies do something that causes their consumers to re-examine a value proposition, it seldom goes well for the company. See also: Netflix.

Impactful is a perfectly cromulent word -- in fact, I might even say that it embiggened the discussion on the podcast.

I missed the site Rabbit mentioned with Touch Arcade. Anyone know it off the top of their heads?

Thanks for the DonDonpachi recommendation! It's reduced my thumb to an arthritic claw, but it's an excellent shmup.

PyromanFO wrote:

What app are you using? I'm using Pocket Cast and it works great.

There's really not many options for Blackberry. I'm using the stock app that comes with the Blackberry and until now, seemed enough. I've looked for the app you mentioned and it seems a great app for Android.

I will keep looking...

I missed an entire email when I got distracted humming what I think a punk polka version of Beethoven's 9th would sound like. In a word: amazing.

Re: Gears of War 3

It's a week and a half before launch, and I haven't seen any commercials yet. Seriously, I saw Space Marine commercials all over the place last week, but nothing about GoW3.

It's really weird. Usually, Epic and MGS have a pretty decent cinematic trailer out a month or two before release.

Regarding the guy who doesn't like Steam because he likes to own his games;

I'd like a little clarification from the podcast crew on their response to this. It sounded an awful lot like the general consensus was

nutshell wrote:

It's okay that we don't own our games anymore, because they all ship broken or incomplete and if we don't own them it's not our problem.

Unless I misinterpreted something, this strikes me as a horrible, horrible, most horrible way to look at an industry. I realize people who are bad at math lease cars for this reason, but I am constantly dumbfounded not only by the gaming industry's habit of releasing broken crap, but also by the gaming consumer's willingness to bend over and accept that This Is How Things Are.

Maybe I'm just old fashioned. Maybe it's because I work in an industry where if a product my company makes fails in the field, it means somebody's wearing a toe-tag. I just can't wrap my head around the mentality that says just because a problem is "easy" to fix (with have an internet connection and an ISP that lets you download gigs of information in less than a week), then it's okay.

As my grandfather used to ruefully say of a certain kind of person: Never time to do it right, but always time to do it over. That this seems to be the software industry's motto is bad enough. Using it to justify draconian EULAs that basically say that the product you paid actual cash money for could be modified or downright taken from you at any time at the whim of the producers or distributors just doesn't sit well with me. That sounds like a broken industry, not something that needs to be justified because everybody wants to play the latest Deus Ex game without leaving the house.

Something I've noticed is that some gamers are prepared to put up with a lot of crap and like it. Within the last year there's been plenty of games with serious flaws, broken games that crash everywhere, and these often include projects from a studio that can afford the QA, that can afford the time to do it right.

The problem is that gamers roll over and fawn over the latest shiny thing regardless of whether it breaks in their hands. I can't help thinking of the old chain e-mail "if Ford made cars like Microsoft make windows", where the car crashes and you just start it up again like nothing has happened. Things might have got better, especially on PC/windows since the 90s when that e-mail started, but it should never be acceptable.

The sad thing is that we get the games we deserve, and if you go out and buy, often sight-unseen, games of dubious quality, gamers are sending a message to publishers and developers that they find poor quality acceptable, and they will continue to produce crap.

doubtingthomas396 wrote:

Regarding the guy who doesn't like Steam because he likes to own his games;

I'd like a little clarification from the podcast crew on their response to this. It sounded an awful lot like the general consensus was

nutshell wrote:

It's okay that we don't own our games anymore, because they all ship broken or incomplete and if we don't own them it's not our problem.

Unless I misinterpreted something, this strikes me as a horrible, horrible, most horrible way to look at an industry.

You are missing something. Even if you "own" a game via physical media, you technically still only own an access license.

Scratched wrote:

The problem is that gamers roll over and fawn over the latest shiny thing

A lot of this is from a recurring feedback loop between enthusiast press and gamers. With the exceptions of Sean and Julian, I think we do a pretty good job of not being a part of that problem.

The idea that you don't own a Steam game is a bit of a mistake isnt it? Even though I havent tried myself, my impression was that once its a part of your library, you can back it up for later local install/restore if you needed to right, even for offline play?

I'm not sure if you need to re-activate it at that point or not though. Maybe someone has experimented with this a bit?

Irongut wrote:

The idea that you don't own a Steam game is a bit of a mistake isnt it? I havent tried myself, but once its a part of your library, you can back it up for later local install if you needed to right, even for offline play?

Try restoring a steam backup if it's not on your account, the permissions are held on their end. I've made it a point now to do a non-steam backup (a.k.a. a compressed RAR) for games that don't have any special ties into steam, for example a single-player game that is also sold elsewhere.

(Note, if you make a steam backup of two games different in the same archive, the account doing the restoring needs to own both to restore just one. Something I found out a while ago)

Flying_Norseman wrote:

I missed the site Rabbit mentioned with Touch Arcade. Anyone know it off the top of their heads?

Hi Flying Norseman,

I am actually the co-founder of the iOS Board Game Blog on Board Game Geek which Rabbit mentioned.
I started listening to GWJ a month ago and then wow my blog gets mentioned. Very cool.

I just registered so I can't make these hyperlinks it seems, but you can reach our blog at:
http://boardgamegeek.com/blog/164/io...
www.iosboardgames.com

As someone said we also cover some android (though less often).

Thanks,
Brad

Jeez, you'd think reading this thread and the one following my article that every major label game that gets released is a travesty of human kind. In the past 3 weeks I've played 4 big budget games. I suppose each of them does at least one thing that is now apparently considered some form of sexual assault, given the hyperbole of the day, but the reality for me has been something very different.

The language of victimization is pretty thick these days. To sum up my recent statements, please pardon me if I have the audacity to spend my time in my hobby enjoying it instead of carping about the evils of the industry,