GWJ Conference Call Episode 535

The Last Guardian, Fallen London, Subnautica, Diablo Anniversary, Bose Headphones, Pony Island, Retropie, A Look back on 2016 Predictions, Bold Predictions 2017 and More!

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Join the GWJCC crew as they revisit their 2016 bold predictions and then offer new ones for 2017!

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.

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Show credits

Music credits: 

Day Bird - Broke for Free - http://brokeforfree.com/ - 39:01

Night Owl - Broke for Free - http://brokeforfree.com/ - 1:10:13

Comments

For retropie, if you ever feel like you have too much time on your hands i recommend retroachievements.org. Now you can friendly and calm brag about your retro gaming skills.

00:02:35 The Last Guardian
00:11:37 Fallen London
00:15:49 Diablo Anniversary
00:19:20 Bose Headphones
00:22:01 Subnautica
00:26:09 Pony Island
00:29:41 Glittermitten Grove
00:34:34 Retropie
00:39:01 A Look back on 2016 Predictions
01:10:13 Bold Predictions for 2017

If Japan hasn't already made a VR game where you take your waifu out on dates in real places then 2017 is the year it'll happen.

When I was a kid, my parents let me name a dog. I named it after an Alpha-Bits commercial that I enjoyed. I called it Yikes the Big Pig. They never let me do that again.

- Allen Cook, at 8:50. Laughed so hard I cried.

Maybe the Switch will be $299 US and $399 CA, so everyone is right!

Games that are part of the Play Anywhere initiative actually already do much of what you guys were discussing, including syncing saves via their cloud services. Not sure what happened when Rabbit tried, but I've used it for both Gears 4 and Forza Horizon 3 (extensively with the latter, actually). They also have just about every other nicety of the Xbox platform built in (including that DVR feature), and they support seamless cross platform play between Xbox and PC players, which is AWESOME.

Where the whole thing falls apart, though, is the store. Contrary to Rabbit's experience again, it is NOT in any way ready for prime time. It presents itself as the same kind of simplified, turnkey solution as the Xbox store, and when it works, it's satisfactory. But, it has problems frequently, and when anything goes wrong, good luck fixing it. When trying to preload Forza Horizon 3 something got corrupted (which also broke the Windows Store's ability to update anything else), and after a week of troubleshooting on my own (a thing I'm generally good at), I contacted support, got escalated up several levels, and the ultimate solution to fix the corrupted update files?

Reinstall Windows.

Yeah, no kidding.

Then with Gears 4, I had a similar but slightly less catastrophic experience with a title update where I ONLY had to redownload dozens of gigs of patches to get it working again. Not encouraging at all.

Oh, and while there is Xbox/PC cross platform play, many games that are being sold on the Windows store do not have the ability to connect with players of the same game purchased through other means (i.e., Steam, GoG, or any other store). For example, good luck finding people to play with if you bought this year's Call of Duty on the Windows store. Fun!

Oh, and the search and organization is terrible too, but that's small potatoes compared to the above.

So in summary: the Play Anywhere initiative is actually off to a great start (and I look forward to using it to play this year's Forza and Halo games on my PC), but the Windows Store is a giant flaming turd of a failure even in a world where excellent competitors like Steam, GoG, and Origin don't already exist.

UpToIsomorphism wrote:

Maybe the Switch will be $299 US and $399 CA, so everyone is right!

Two SKUs. Base package no one buys will be $299, and the one with the upgraded storage capacity and maybe a pack-in game or something will be $349 or $399.

I love these episodes so much.

Yay! It was good to hear some Last Guardian love.

I'm judging Waifu-Go already. It just feels (sounds?) really skeevy. And skeevy in public, no less. Maybe we can start small and work our way up to that. Like Hatoful Boyfriend Go, or something. Pigeons are hardly skeevy at all, right?

Zudz wrote:

I'm judging Waifu-Go already. It just feels (sounds?) really skeevy. And skeevy in public, no less. Maybe we can start small and work our way up to that. Like Hatoful Boyfriend Go, or something. Pigeons are hardly skeevy at all, right?

Hatoful Boyfriend is available on IOS. I have still not opened it, but I did buy it.

your description of Trico is why I can't stand cats.

blaize wrote:
When I was a kid, my parents let me name a dog. I named it after an Alpha-Bits commercial that I enjoyed. I called it Yikes the Big Pig. They never let me do that again.

- Allen Cook, at 8:50. Laughed so hard I cried.

I remember that commercial and also thought it was hilarious. I've heard worse names for dogs but none more creative I think.

ccesarano wrote:

If Japan hasn't already made a VR game where you take your waifu out on dates in real places then 2017 is the year it'll happen.

Don't worry, that pretty much already happened

UpToIsomorphism wrote:

Hatoful Boyfriend is available on IOS. I have still not opened it, but I did buy it.

Do EEET!!! DOOOO EEEEET.

Seriously, get through an hour.. You wont be sorry.

Really have to just stop listening every time you lot try to talk Xbox, either completely uninformed, completely wrong, or the extreme distaste for the platform you all come across as having is just too frustrating.

Cory, would you be willing to share a link to the NES Bluetooth controller you were talking about?

Infyrnos wrote:

Really have to just stop listening every time you lot try to talk Xbox, either completely uninformed, completely wrong, or the extreme distaste for the platform you all come across as having is just too frustrating.

To be fair, the same is generally true whenever Nintendo comes up

shoptroll wrote:
Infyrnos wrote:

Really have to just stop listening every time you lot try to talk Xbox, either completely uninformed, completely wrong, or the extreme distaste for the platform you all come across as having is just too frustrating.

To be fair, the same is generally true whenever Nintendo comes up :)

This is how I felt last gen, as a PS3 owner.

Actually, it's pretty much how I feel about everything, all the time, with all platforms, so maybe I'm just used to it.

Anyway, they've been very clear about this in the past. It's nothing personal, it's all about where their friends are playing, and this generation their friends are on PS4.

PS for Curtis Certis:

It's pronounced "HOOT-spa."

EDIT

Ps for Autocorrect:

It's spelled "Certis."

As someone who complained last year when there were no sound effects to denote past/present, thank you for adding that this year! It was a big help.

shoptroll wrote:
Infyrnos wrote:

Really have to just stop listening every time you lot try to talk Xbox, either completely uninformed, completely wrong, or the extreme distaste for the platform you all come across as having is just too frustrating.

To be fair, the same is generally true whenever Nintendo comes up :)

There was a time in my life when I was really immersed in the day to day of all the platforms. How they worked, latest news, etc. That time has quietly slipped away, so while I try to stay broadly informed my direct experience of consoles I don't fire up much (like the Xbox One & Wii U this gen) get short shrift.

Nothing personal. I know it can be painful to hear someone talk broadly about something you know in a detailed (dare I say loving) way. I don't really have any brand loyalty anymore, I just go where I get the best experience is for a given game.

Do we have a thread for community bold predictions or are we going to use this one?

Rykin wrote:

Do we have a thread for community bold predictions or are we going to use this one?

Here it is!

dejanzie wrote:

Cory, would you be willing to share a link to the NES Bluetooth controller you were talking about?

Here you go: http://www.8bitdo.com/nes30pro/

Certis wrote:
shoptroll wrote:
Infyrnos wrote:

Really have to just stop listening every time you lot try to talk Xbox, either completely uninformed, completely wrong, or the extreme distaste for the platform you all come across as having is just too frustrating.

To be fair, the same is generally true whenever Nintendo comes up :)

There was a time in my life when I was really immersed in the day to day of all the platforms. How they worked, latest news, etc. That time has quietly slipped away, so while I try to stay broadly informed my direct experience of consoles I don't fire up much (like the Xbox One & Wii U this gen) get short shrift.

Nothing personal. I know it can be painful to hear someone talk broadly about something you know in a detailed (dare I say loving) way. I don't really have any brand loyalty anymore, I just go where I get the best experience is for a given game.

Totally understandable! It's a lot harder to go deep into the weeds when you've got to stay current on everything else going on

Snorted with laughter in the middle of the library on Alan talking Star Citizen.

Also I think your blocking noises could use improvement, imo they're too short and the coming back one needs to me on a more similar frequency to normal human voices for my brain to not filter it out.

The Star Citizen discussion was hilarious, I'm sure there are people ready to lose their sh*t about it though.

Glad to hear some more Pony Island love. That game is awesome.

Certis saying 'turning into a coffee cup is pretty dope' is one of my favourite moments of 2017 so far. Don't know why I found it so hilarious.

It's fair that folks could be annoyed we're not up on their console of choice, and I also want to acknowledge this mostly comes from a place of privillege. Many of us on the podcast have the luxury of having a wide variety of platforms to choose from, but limited time. So yeah, a lot of us have Xbones, but we also have other consoles, and what we choose to focus on is based not on whats awesome on a single platform, but whatever catches our interest across a lot of platforms.

I'd point out that this has really shifted over time. We've had eras where ALL we talked about was Xbox games (at the height of the 360). We've gone through transitional times when we were all over the place. We've had deep PC-only phases. Right now, I'd say we're more PC/Ps4 focused, but I'm sure that'll shift soon enough.

I disagree on the Linux vs Windows 10 thing. Windows 8 and Windows 10 are the things that drove me away from windows completely. Mandatory updates, piles of preinstalled spyware, and all kinds of other similar headaches has made the inconvenience of some games not working easily a minor concern. Along with the fact that most indie games now either work natively in Linux, or work in Wine, and most games that don't work in Wine can be played on consoles instead.

I'm even considering a portable SteamOS system this year, if they release it as scheduled. (May 2017. https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/s... )

There's a very tiny number of games that I want to play on Windows that aren't on consoles, but only things like Galactic Civilizations 3. Those things that are mid-tier enough to not be on consoles, but whose developers try really hard to push the OS.

I now use Linux at work and at home as my main operating system, which is something that I couldn't say 3 years ago. I used to just use it for servers and the like.