Conference Call

GWJ Conference Call Episode 110

Wrath of The Witchlysium, Resistance 2, End War, Mirror's Edge, Gears of War 2, An Interview With Bethesda's Pete Hines, Your Emails and more!

This week Julian Murdoch and Michael Zenke lob softballs across the plate for Pete Hines to knock out of the park. We also cover a crazy amount of games, your emails and some new listener submitted audio bits.

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 Music - Ian Dorsch, Willowtree Audioworks

"The Way Your Journey Ends" Tom Quinn - http://www.citadel-studios.com - 0:36:42
"Long Midnight" (Benoit Casey) - http://outtobrunch.blogspot.com - 1:11:03
"Coldstream the Greatest" (Duoae) - www.eggmen.co.uk - 1:42:53

Comments

Jayhawker wrote:

I'm not sure why this is so hard. They do a great job of introducing each person at the beginning of each show, and their voices are really unique from one another. Again, I come from a long history of talk radio, so I have already gotten used to putting pictures in my head to voices. But they refer to each other by name throughout the show, as well.

I think it woudl be a whole lot easier if I had actual faces to put to the names. Without that, I'm lost. It's like any other voice only group. Until I see the faces a bit, I'm lost. The only way I identify who says what is by going back to the intros and matching something to who speaks when introduced. Although, I think I am slowly catching onto who is who just by voice, but I also have to be intentional about figuring it out.

Really? I mean really?

Merriam-Webster wrote:

Orthogonal

1 a: intersecting or lying at right angles b: having perpendicular slopes or tangents at the point of intersection
2: having a sum of products or an integral that is zero or sometimes one under specified conditions: as a) of real-valued functions : having the integral of the product of each pair of functions over a specific interval equal to zero b) of vectors : having the scalar product equal to zero cof a square matrix : having the sum of products of corresponding elements in any two rows or any two columns equal to one if the rows or columns are the same and equal to zero otherwise : having a transpose with which the product equals the identity matrix
3: (of a linear transformation) having a matrix that is orthogonal : preserving length and distance
4: composed of mutually orthogonal elements
5: statistically independent

Outside of the world of mathematics, it's essentially a synonym for perpendicular. A word beloved by engineers the world over as a fancy way of shutting down a technical discussion that has gone on a tangent they don't like, as in, "your complaints about our framework are completely orthogonal to the problems the graphic designers are having with IE 7 compatibility."

I think it woudl be a whole lot easier if I had actual faces to put to the names.

Just use our Avatar Images. They rarely if ever change, and apart from rabbit are very close to what we actually look like.

I think there is a pic of Certis in a thread 'round here. As for the other hosts/guests I haven't seen any to my knowledge.

Tetnis wrote:

I think there is a pic of Certis in a thread 'round here. As for the other hosts/guests I haven't seen any to my knowledge.

There's that one of him sleeping his way to the top with other Goodjer Executives.

I don't like where this is going...

Great show. Must admit I could never get into Oblivion (Shock Horror). I tried as I love RPG's but the terrible menu system and combat put me off. I could sense that there was a great story but the gameplay wasn't fun enough for me to persist. I am enjoying Fallout 3 though, I do think that unless you are going to provide a decent 3-person view then don't put it in, watching my character slide over the terrain even briefly is dissapointing.

I would love you guys to do a section in which you speculate on games/gameplay in the near or even distant future. In my last post I suggested dialog trees could quickly be done away with by being able to talk to the NPC's through speech recognition software. Obviously the ultimate game experience would be the holodeck, a fully emersive 3-D environment (though the thought of running around a holodeck after a hard days work dosen't appeal to me, I love my couch). So rather than far future I am more intersted in what you guys think could be done in the 10 to 20 years. For example I think sound could be more pink floydian. If games had 4-way sound scapes you could hear footstep from behind or dark muttering circling the room. Perhaps this has already been done and I am not aware of it.

I agree with two of you presenters who a couple of shows ago said the most important quality of a good game is story. I am going back and playing the Final Fantasy's I missed in preparation for FF XIII. I am playing Final Fantasy IX which came out for the PS one and having a ball the story is terrific,funny and downright weird. You compare it with Final Fantasy XII which had lifeless characters, no sense humour, the lamest badguy ever wapped around a crap plot. On top of that the game play was terrible. That game was agony to play through.

I would like to see more established authors brought in to script games, or games based in existing author created universes. I'd love to see a game basd in an Iain Bank's or Dan Simmons Sci Fi than another boring Star Wars game (The Force Unleashed was also crap in my opinion). What excites me are story lines that break from the standard formula, a great game twists and turns and reinvents itself just as you are starting to get comfortable. I thought Prey was good example of this.

Anyway time to rush of work

once again Great show

P.S. littleBigplanet is great game for 5-year old as long as you help them and focus on the experience rather the mastering the gameplay. My 5 year old daughter has been laughing and squealing all the way through it.

PPS. Zero Gravity has been done before Deadspace, Once of the half decent early Starwars games had it.

PPSS. Can you review Valkyrie Chronicle for the PS3 it look like a great game.

Nice song, Dvowels.

Also, this is an orthogonal. Duh.

IMAGE(http://www.aero.iitb.ac.in/home/zephyr/images/workshops/ornithopter.jpg)

Proper visualization of most members of the GWJ Podcast Overlords requires nothing more than imagining one face with varying amounts of beard.

And Julian/Rabbit is Jack Lelanne.

Edit: I remember seeing BeardyPrime in a photo regarding his new son's birth. Can't find the thread quick enough though.

Elysium wrote:

I don't like where this is going...

The pillow won't save you this time.

zeroKFE wrote:
Elysium wrote:

I don't like where this is going...

The pillow won't save you this time.

That wasn't a pillow!

Great song! The Internet is my brassiere too!

Wow, now I'm terribly curious what that word was.

Mordiceius wrote:

Wow, now I'm terribly curious what that word was.

Someone has already posted a link, in this thread, to a home theater system that uses the word as a name.

It took a couple of dozen episodes before I would place the voices.

The main thing that usually takes a game down a notch is stupid Boss battles. I've never enjoyed one.

Mordiceius wrote:

Wow, now I'm terribly curious what that word was.

Well, it's worth about $.20.

Wow thanks for the compliments guys..... but it really is bad. It's just one of those things. You do something and think, eh, it's okay and then come back to it and realise just how crap it really is. Though i suppose it is supposed to be jokey (that's not normally the way i sing or play)

Sway wrote:

Great song! The Internet is my brassiere too!

I did toy with using that word but i figured it made even less sense so i made it brazier (as in a torch type thing - symbolism for him 'spreading the light').

The words and chords are over on Coldstream's idea link but i'll repost them:

There was a time when we were mute,
Our songs and rants became dilute,
And any time we were wantin'
The dialog tree was found lacking.

Oh, he came from far and he came from near,
The internet was his brazier,
And though he came to us that day,
The legend that he gave us did pave the way.

Cold he was but that's okay,
For his heart shone with bravery,
And as he wrote those words that day,
He banished to hell olden way.

Oh, he came from far and he came from near,
The internet did strain to hear,
The deed that he did wrought that day,
In the legend of the making that he did say.

And thus did we all bow our heads,
In shame for our short-sightedness,
When he did stand and step and spring,
The hero of the legend of conversing.

Oh, he came from far and he came from near,
The internet did quake in fear,
The name that people sang that day,
Was ColdStream the greatest! Hip Hooray!

On Orthogonal: the word as I think I meant to use it was in the sense of orthogonal unit differentiation, which, in game design, basically means things (classes, units, weapons, armor, etc.) each have distinguishing characteristics. Orthogonal game designs make for cool strategies: Magic: The Gathering and the RockPaperScissors nature of most real-time strategy games are the most classic examples.

Rabbit, you can only post that clarification to such a big word if you are wearing a tweed jacket and holding a polished mahogany pipe; please obey the law.

I'm afraid that the word forbidden by Rob is nothing compared to some of the words found in this list. Just so you don't think I'm above it all, I promise that I use some of the words in that list - much to my chagrin (that word has yet to make the list).

Also, I gotta say that I loved the song, too. If you close your eyes and wish hard enough, you will open them and find that you are holding a leather mug with homebrewed "mead" at a ren-fest.

Tip: AT first the voices are all similar, but as you level up your voice recognition abilities will increase.

I think the Activision model only makes money in the short run.

And it seems that the most profitable videogame companies are companies, like Blizzard or Nintendo or Valve, that learn how to make good games instead of learning how to take short term advantage of having a hot property because they bought out a studio.

In engineering, one uses the word orthogonal to refer to aspects of a design or system that are independent of one another.

One also sees it used to describe features that work the same way no matter how they are applied. So in the 1980s making computer instruction sets "orothogonal" was thought to be a big deal... it turned out not to be the case and Intel won even though their instruction set is very irregular.

In mathematics the same sorts of definitions apply in the context of linear algebra ... for example, the X Y and Z axes in a 3-d space are orthogonal to each other not only because they are perpendicular, but also because it turns out that they define the three independent values that you need to describe any location in space.

See how simple?

Remind me not to hang out with engineers.

Besides, they often turn out to be spies.

Half of my family are engineers.

None of them are spies though, they frown on the practice of spying.

Blight?

Phew. No problems with the language filter here.

Edit: Holy sh*t, duoae.

Rat Boy wrote:

Blight?

Phew. No problems with the language filter here.

Edit: Holy sh*t, duoae. :shock:

What did i do? o_O

Irongut wrote:
Tetnis wrote:

I think there is a pic of Certis in a thread 'round here. As for the other hosts/guests I haven't seen any to my knowledge.

There's that one of him sleeping his way to the top with other Goodjer Executives.

IMAGE(http://www.gamerswithjobs.com/files/images/special_place.preview.jpg)

Glass ceiling indeed.

[edit] Come to think of it, my avatar looks a little bit like Elysium taking a corkscrew to Certis's head. Go figure...

1) The Gambien commercial was wonderful.

2) As the author of the question about when to consider bringing a console in for my family, now having a 3 1/3 yr old as my oldest child, Rabbit was pretty right on: I do want to indoctrinate them, I do want to engage them with games, but I also want to see how to sneak a console in past the wife filter. Related to this, Peggle is a great game for a 3 ½ yr old. He’s cool with me lining up the shots, if he misses okay, if it does something majestic then he’s enthusiastic. That's one great thing about Peggle-- success is majestic.

Gaald wrote:
Mordiceius wrote:

Wow, now I'm terribly curious what that word was.

Someone has already posted a link, in this thread, to a home theater system that uses the word as a name.

I'm almost tempted to write a letter WITH ANNOTATIONS detailing the appropriate modern use of that word. Someone get me some beer, there is pandering to be done.

Regarding the sequels thing, it's simply necessary. Making original IP is very hard, costly and risky, making sequels is less risky. I imagine that EA would have known they would see their sales go down initially but expect some gems (new franchises) to rise from what they're doing currently and reap the benefits in the future. Still, it is depressing to see them take such a hit for embracing new games.

In a sense, I get Activision's direction here. It's not like they're looking down on original IP, but rather that they want it to be expandable. It does strike me as weird that Ghostbusters wouldn't be ripe for expansion, though.

mrtomaytohead wrote:
Mordiceius wrote:

Wow, now I'm terribly curious what that word was.

Well, it's worth about $.20.

As a tshirt I once saw, said, "Brother, can you para...."