Conference Call

GWJ Conference Call Episode 331

Fire Emblem Awakening, Neverwinter Online Beta, A Toddler on Proteus, Antichamber, A New Reading From Graham Rowat, Emails and Even More of Your Emails and ... more!

This week Allen and Shawn are joined by Charlie Hall to celebrate his new gig at Polygon. We also get caught up on some emails!

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.

Chairman_Mao's Timestamps
00.01.36 Neverwinter Online Beta
00.06.19 Path of Exile and concerns about the rise of microtransactions
00.12.59 Fire Emblem Awakening
00.18.24 Antichamber
00.22.06 Pyroman's MAME cabinet
00.25.23 Proteus
00.28.19 Farcry 3
00.30.49 The Witcher 2
00.35.09 This week's sponsor: Choremonster!
00.36.04 Graham Rowat reads Double Teaming the Dead
00.43.54 Your emails

Double Teaming The Dead
Neverwinter Online
Fire Emblem
Proteus
Antichamber

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Show credits

Music credits: 

Waking Up - Dexter Britain -http://freemusicarchive.org/music/De... - 36:06

Intro/Outtro Music - Ian Dorsch, Willowtree Audioworks

Comments

Hearing Charlie talk about his daughter playing Proteus was the most serene thing I've heard all year.

TheWanderer wrote:
Certis wrote:
HockeyJohnston wrote:

Charlie Hall is a troll.

?

Hahaha. Come here and gimme a hug.

This must be my payback for calling someone a bully here many moons ago. Glad we got that out of the way.

Shut up, TROLL!

Created an account just to post about this podcast. I've listened for ~3 years? You've never made me more mad than in this podcast.

GOG and Steam game. Same price. And you are too lazy to buy from GOG? Are you kidding me? Steam is DRM. Steam is run by an extremely secretive and pretty weird company. Steam has *enough* control over the market as-is. Steam has a horrible, horrible store UI.

Too lazy? I'm not really sure what the advantage of steam is, honestly. Build a new machine, either way you're going to have to DL all your games. Either that or save them to a separate HD. I mean what's the difference?

I'm just blown away by the love of steam: it's irrational, anti-competitive, and very very lemming like. I know kids like anyone that gives them free candy, and that's what steam has done with it's sales. Time to grow up children: daddy Gabe doesn't wuv you.

snuggles wrote:

GOG and Steam game. Same price. And you are too lazy to buy from GOG? Are you kidding me? Steam is DRM.

Almost all of the old games on Steam don't have any DRM. You can just run them directly from the install location.

Daddy Gabe sure lurves our monies though.

I prefer Steam over GOG because of the client I have installed. With GOG, I have to visit the site and download things. With Steam, I open my client and click to play. And then all my friends are already there. And see what I'm playing. And I can download the game to wherever I want to play it. And achievements.

DRM really only sucks when it gets in the way of wanting to play a game. If DRM, in the pursuit of its duties, also adds to my experience (like Steam does), then it's less of an inconvenience.

I'm totally for the principle of "I paid for it so it should be mine", but so far Steam hasn't taken away any games that I've paid for and activated.

Steam has a horrible, horrible store UI.

That's where I disagree. While the wireframe for the store itself is not great (and I've yet to see any online games store that so much as matches Amazon's slickness, even if Amazon presents a very busy page), Steam saves me an enormous hassle when I'm moving from my desktop to my laptop, upgrading my computer's storage, or moving to a new computer. On top of that, I was able to grab some DLC yesterday (Paradox stuff was on sale) from my phone, and it was all downloaded and ready for me when I got home. Very, very few vendors can reach that level of convenience.

snuggles wrote:

Created an account just to post about this podcast. I've listened for ~3 years? You've never made me more mad than in this podcast.

GOG and Steam game. Same price. And you are too lazy to buy from GOG? Are you kidding me? Steam is DRM. Steam is run by an extremely secretive and pretty weird company. Steam has *enough* control over the market as-is. Steam has a horrible, horrible store UI.

Too lazy? I'm not really sure what the advantage of steam is, honestly. Build a new machine, either way you're going to have to DL all your games. Either that or save them to a separate HD. I mean what's the difference?

I'm just blown away by the love of steam: it's irrational, anti-competitive, and very very lemming like. I know kids like anyone that gives them free candy, and that's what steam has done with it's sales. Time to grow up children: daddy Gabe doesn't wuv you.

First, thanks for registering. Sorry you did it in anger, but at least you're here now.

Can't speak for the others, but one thing I like about Steam that I don't get from GOG is the community aspect. I can see what friends are playing, easily hop into a game with them, track how much time they (and I) have put into a game, or even find wiki-like content for making the game work or getting past tough sections.

GOG is great, and has a library that you really can't find anywhere else. But it doesn't tie into community as much as other options.

Are we Steam-centric on the podcast? Yes. We were the same way with Xbox Live over PSN, too, though many more of us are using PS+ and my personal XBL Gold subscription has long since lapsed. That's just how we are right now.

Out of curiosity, how do you feel about Origin or uPlay?

Anywho, thanks for listening.

Look at Cory with that sensible response. Doesn't he know this is the internet?

I do want to point out having a backup (on a local hard drive) of all digital games is just a good idea. The best argument for that can be made in the reaction to gog.com's own faked closing (mentioned on the podcast even).

Demiurge wrote:

First, thanks for registering. Sorry you did it in anger, but at least you're here now.

Moving forward, I strongly recommend GWJ pursue an "Angry Members" growth strategy. We've got plenty of wit and humor, but seriously lacking in anger, vindictiveness and/or rage. Huge market potential there.

Don't let the microtransactions put you off Path of Exile. All of the stuff you buy is PURELY cosmetic or has a simple utility use like extra stash tabs. The game already gives you four whole shared stash pages and lots of character slots.

I haven't put a cent into the game and I don't feel restricted at all.

Tamren wrote:

Don't let the microtransactions put you off Path of Exile. All of the stuff you buy is PURELY cosmetic or has a simple utility use like extra stash tabs. The game already gives you four whole shared stash pages and lots of character slots.

I haven't put a cent into the game and I don't feel restricted at all.

Didn't Shawn pretty much say that? That he didn't like the foregrounding of the store, but liked the way they restrained themselves on the store's offerings?

Pretty much. I never even noticed the store button to be honest, but I checked out what was in the store prior to booting up the game for the first time. YMMV I guess.