Conference Call

GWJ Conference Call Episode 319

Wii U Impressions, ZombiU, New Super Mario U, Nintendo Land, The Old Republic Free to Play, Angry Birds Star Wars, Halo 4: Spartan Ops Episode 2, Our Deep Dark Gaming Confessions, Your Emails and more!

This week Cory, Julian, Allen and Shawn reveal their deep, dark gaming confessions. Shawn and Julian also dish on the Wii U!

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.

Jonathan Downin About.Me
Tweaked Audio (Use discount code GWJ)

Chairman_Mao's Timestamps
00.02.02 Halo 4: Spartan Ops, Episode 2
00.11.48 Assassin's Creed Liberation
00.16.07 Star Wars: The Old Republic, free to subscribe!
00.25.03 Star Wars: Angry Birds
00.27.28 Karateka
00.32.25 Games we will be playing soon
00.35.30 The Wii U!
01.06.41 This week's Topic: Gaming Confessions and Blasphemy!
01.26.41 Your emails!

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Comments

Just a note to Cory - the respawn counter isn't gone. You can hit X to respawn instantly and far away from your teammates, or you can wait, and the longer you do, the closer you'll spawn to them. Think it's a good balance.

I agree with Certis that touch based games will always be novelties. There seems to be something about the format that is inherently constraining. I dub this barrier "The Gorilla Glass Ceiling."

Mattt with 3 T's, thank you. Thank you. Thank you! I cannot wait to hear the non-Certis casters Female Doggo about Dark Souls

I too did not like the Thief games.

Correction: Yoshi's Island is the best Mario game.

Gravey wrote:

Correction: Yoshi's Island is the best Mario game.

The hell you say!

Gravey wrote:

Correction: Yoshi's Island is the best Mario game.

Someone give this man a medal.

Somehow I'm not surprised how EA are approaching free to play on Kotor. They seem to have an antagonistic attitude when offering content they feel you should buy. With NFS: Hot pursuit's multiplayer and Battlefield Premium they throw up a notification every time you go into the game as if to say, 'yeah we're going to keep doing this until you fold.' The should offer a 'don't show this again' button of some sort.

The 'gaming confessions and blasphemy' thread is fascinating. The title seems to give people carte blanche to verbalise brutal truths that could otherwise land them in hot water. It turns us all into court jesters. Some people have dismissed it as a trolling thread but I sense that people, like me, are getting things off their chest that they truly believe but have kept bottled up for an age. It's very cathartic.

'Fat p*nis' is from the Rebel fm podcast. The email may have been misdirected.

I really enjoyed your "Confessions & Blasphemy" segment. I'd seen the thread in the forums, but honestly, let's face it, I'd been too chicken to jump in. It was certainly liberating to hear some of you confess that you pirated a few years back. I'm in the same boat, in my early twenties, I was still in school, cash wasn't exactly overflowing, and I'll admit I pirated a few games. I'm proud to say that I now buy all my games through legal means, and then some (seriously, I buy more games than I have time to play them in, if that's not supporting the industry, I don't know what is).

As for SWTOR... I'd wanted to buy the game from launch, but my pre-order got canceled for some reason by Gamestation, and by the time release rolled around, I'd figured I'd bide my time. I still got a pre-order code, and since it went F2P, it considers me a "preferred" gamer, not a vanilla F2P. The reduced UI is a bit of a pain, but I still have sprint, and thank goodness for that, because you spend a lot of time walking. Seriously, I don't know what EA is thinking, this F2P is pretty awful, I don't see it as a reliable way to attract customers... They're definitely not going to get my subscription.

I, too, keep careful track of what games I've played in an Excel spreadsheet. My touch of OCD made me do it.

Also, I'm definitely looking forward to hear you all groan and gripe about Dark Souls.

I thought the Halo 4 Spartan Ops observations were pretty much dead on. Episode three seems to have partly addressed some points with the introduction of multiplayer maps, and at least a slightly different "kill named guy" objective. The AI seems to be a bit more aggressive as well.

As to the replay value comments, if you ever have David from 343 back on the show as you've mentioned, I'd like to hear the reasons 343 pulled some of the features out that were in Firefight in Halo Reach (since they've stated Spartan Ops is the replacement for Firefight). Firefight had medals, scoring, skull modifiers, and other customizable options such as randomization of enemy spawn and a definable limited life pool. I can understand taking those things out for the "story" play-through of an episode or chapter, but leaving those things in as player customizable options would have gone a long way toward maintaining the replay value of the missions.

Just thought I'd point out that a movie version of Portal has already been made. It's called Cube.

hey, hey ,hey, Certis link to your wii-u? My family only has a wii and my sister doesnt know where she can get my dad to pick up one for Christmas lol

Sorry, I returned it to the store!

PSH, NEVER LISTENING TO YOU GUYS AGAIN. lol no worries

I started Link to the Past last night. $60 in beau for a SNES and a few games.

I'm with rabbit in saying that iOS games will or have already become legitimately selling commodities selling more than just novelties. Angry Birds was cited as the definitive touch-based game, and Julian countered with Ticket to Ride and other touch board games.

Allow me to counter with something else - Plants vs. Zombies. To me, the definitive version of that game is the iPad one, and I have many other tower defense games in my library that really shouldn't be done on other platforms - losing the touch element would make those games clunkier. To the extent that tower defense games are actually simplified RTS games, these are the mainstream expression of that game genre.

Cut the Rope and Where's my Water also signify another genre that's rich on touch platforms - puzzle gaming. The touch interface makes these games much closer to tactile real-life puzzles and that means that they can pull in conventions and mechanics from both the virtual and the real world.

Yes, PvZ and Cut the Rope are great on iPad, but it really ticks me off how badly trying to play anything close to traditional games is. Twin-stick shooters fail because you need nubs, platformers fail because you need buttons, anything 3D fails because there aren't enough inputs (nice try, iPad Dead Space). About the only conventional games that play well on touchscreen are turn-based, which is why Kairosoft is now a major player despite porting 10-year-old games.

Bastion was pretty great on the iPad.

On the other hand, I thought of Orc: Vengeance when Certis mentioned he'd rather just be playing Diablo 3. Orc got great reviews from the mobile gaming press, but it's incredibly simplistic, poorly designed and not very interesting for anyone who's ever played any 'proper' Diablo clone.

It's Chris Roberts mfer!

I get what you guys (Shawn) were saying about Space sims but you are clearly WRONG!
And Allen's comments about Ico and SotC are wayyyyyyyyy outta line! And talking about stealth games, Isn't Allen the same guy who talked about playing DayZ for hours at a time where you do almost nothing for long stretches of time. I don't get it, isn't DayZ the antithesis of this? I actually get how games like this don't appeal to everyone but next to space sims (looking at you Shawn!) are my favorite type of games. [i]I have some seriously fond memories of riding around on the horse exploring in SotC.

Keithustus wrote:

Yes, PvZ and Cut the Rope are great on iPad, but it really ticks me off how badly trying to play anything close to traditional games is. Twin-stick shooters fail because you need nubs, platformers fail because you need buttons, anything 3D fails because there aren't enough inputs (nice try, iPad Dead Space). About the only conventional games that play well on touchscreen are turn-based, which is why Kairosoft is now a major player despite porting 10-year-old games.

Agree with everything but platformers. I have no problem playing platformers on my iPad, and there are some really good ones.

lostlobster wrote:

Agree with everything but platformers. I have no problem playing platformers on my iPad, and there are some really good ones.

Maybe because I've been platforming since Donkey Kong, Mario Bros., Super Mario Brothers, but I can't do platformers with virtual buttons. It doesn't feel right no matter how many I try, and not just because my fingers don't stay in the right places.

The excellent Galaxy on Fire 2 has been touted by our own Veloxi as an excellent space shooter. It doesn't really lose much in the transition to iPad, since it's not really a twitchy shooter to begin with. If anything, touch controls for evasive maneuvers feels more intuitive and immersive.

LarryC wrote:

The excellent Galaxy on Fire 2 has been touted by our own Veloxi as an excellent space shooter. It doesn't really lose much in the transition to iPad, since it's not really a twitchy shooter to begin with. If anything, touch controls for evasive maneuvers feels more intuitive and immersive.

It was utterly unplayable in the iPhone for me. I could not get past the tutorial to save my life.

Is Galaxy on Fire 2 much better or different from GoF 1? I played about an hour of 1 and got bored and quit. The missions were too scripted and the combat too simplistic.

You will not find much of that changed, I'm afraid. Combat strategy and tactics are still really simple, though what you should be doing varies depending on what ship you're riding. Trying to dogfight in a cargo scow is just asking to be hammered. What you can do, is load up the cargo hold with a billion missiles, buy a nice afterburner to zip around quickly, and missile boat everything to kingdom come.

Missions are still totally scripted, though there are a variety of missions types you can choose from.

Damn, I had been hoping for Privateer.

Demiurge wrote:
Gravey wrote:

Correction: Yoshi's Island is the best Mario game.

The hell you say!

Double Dash is the best Mario game, anyhow

SWTOR F2P sounds very much like the "free" version of a site my company did for a client. The whole point was to coerce people into paying by making the free version as limited as you possibly can. The limitations were very much a decision by the executives at our client, and I can't imagine BioWare's designers/developers had a ton of say in the matter.

I very much prefer the Kingdom of Loathing style where nothing is locked behind a paywall, players can freely trade pay-for items (and their derivatives), and donation "currency" is tradeable for regular game currency. While there's still some aspect of Pay To Win (donation items do make the game significantly easier and faster to complete), it's generally very pro-consumer and helped to foster a fairly good community. I'm not sure if any of the big F2P games echo this setup (TF2 is pretty close assuming you ignore keys/crates/Mann Up) but that seems to be a much better setup than what Cory described.

Tanglebones wrote:
Demiurge wrote:
Gravey wrote:

Correction: Yoshi's Island is the best Mario game.

The hell you say!

Double Dash is the best Mario game, anyhow

Mario Kart you say. Island is pretty freaking sweet, definitely one of my favorite Mario games. Would certainly put it over World. Yoshi's Island vs. Mario 3 is a different story though.

EDIT: Hah! They read Demyx's post from the confessions thread. That made my day

EDIT 2: Was Lost Vikings SNES before or after the PC version?

shoptroll wrote:

EDIT 2: Was Lost Vikings SNES before or after the PC version?

There's a PC version? Without looking it up, I nearly assure you that the SNES version had to have come first.

edit: maybe, maybe not (redundancy to avoid colloquial implications of being redundant)

LarryC wrote:

Cut the Rope and Where's my Water also signify another genre that's rich on touch platforms - puzzle gaming. The touch interface makes these games much closer to tactile real-life puzzles and that means that they can pull in conventions and mechanics from both the virtual and the real world.

The time management and hidden object genres are made for touch platforms. I'll never buy another one of these on the computer now that I have my iPad.

Menu-based gameplay also cries out for touch interfaces, but I think that works better on a DS (or the WiiU) with dual screens, so the menu is kept off the main screen.