GWJ Conference Call Episode 552

Prey, Expeditions Vikings, Nintendo Switch Thoughts, Horizon Zero Dawn, Special Guest Jeff Green, The Line Between Homage and Retread, Your Emails and More!

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This week Shawn, Sean and Julian are joined by gaming luminary Jeff Green!

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: 

XXV - Broke for Free - http://brokeforfree.com/ - 50:54

Add And - Broke for Free - http://brokeforfree.com/ - 1:10:45

Comments

00:02:35 Prey
00:23:30 Nintendo Switch
00:30:22 Zelda: Breath of the Wild
00:32:58 Horizon Zero Dawn
00:36:30 Expeditions: Viking
00:41:14 Factorio
00:44:54 Race for the Galaxy (mobile)
00:50:54 The Line Between Homage and Retread
01:10:45 Your Emails

A GIGA-Sands?! Are you mad?

Giga is 10^9. That makes a Giga-Sands 2,000 x 10^9 =2,000,000,000,000 hours! That's 2 TRILLION hours! Which is over 114 million years!

I don't have a punchline. I just did the math and needed to come used interrobangs and exclamation points.

I'm 30 millisands into Zelda Breath of the Wild.

VR sightseeing. I cludged my oculus rift to work in Lord of the rings online, and it's one of my top most memorable game experiences Not the playing of the game itself, that was rather difficult, but just walking around the Shire. Breathtaking.

Right, homage has one "m" in English whereas it has two "m"s in French. Huh.

Let it be established here and for all time that the Sands is equivalent to two thousand gaming hours and that it's metric.

I have so many worlds I want to travel to and do some VR sightseeing. Pretty much any Elder Scrolls game (Morrowind to Skyrim), definitely Guild Wars 2.
Great pick with Baldur's Gate (although BG2 trumps the first one for me, because I played it first and Athkatla is absolutely etched in my mind much as Shawn described).

Eleima wrote:

Pretty much any Elder Scrolls game (Morrowind to Skyrim),

If you have the gear, it's really easy to go VR sighseeing in either Oblivion or Skyrim (and I asume Morrowind although I have no first hand experience with that).

An Occulus, VorpX (probgram to cludge games not made to work in VR to work in VR), set yourself on God Mode, and you can walk around to your hearts content.

I did both Oblivion and Skyrim and both were a sight worth seeing. It was only when I started to try to play the game that I had (some) trouble because neither were really set up for VR-playing, I was just Brute Forcing my way into it.

The difference between Shawn and Sean. Shawn says he put in 100 hours in Persona 5, and describes it like it is a massive amount of time. Sean casually drops that he put in over a hundred hours into Factorio like it's no big deal.

EDIT: Whoops! I forgot the new metric!

The difference between Shawn and Sean. Shawn says he put in 50 millisands in Persona 5, and describes it like it is a massive amount of time. Sean casually drops that he put in over fifty millisands into Factorio like it's no big deal.

I am in a near constant state of delight since we discovered a new way to measure gaming time.

Is a millisand a rolling and ever increasing unit of measurement though? When Sand inevitably reaches 3000 hours in EU four, will a milisand increase to be three hours then?

I've put over 30 milliSands of gaming into Horizon Zero Dawn and I can confirm that it's an amazing game. But it's not an exploration-type sort of open world, nor is it survival oriented. It's combat. Glorious combat with robot dinosaurs, as far as the eye can see.

I'm with Sean on restarting games.

If I love a particular game I'll already be thinking about my next play through or play throughs as I finish the first. Rabbit often says, you should stop playing a game when you are no longer enjoying it. I've recently found myself doing that with games. It's incredibly liberating and has allowed me to spend more time with better, more enjoyable games but the converse is also true. If you are still enjoying a game and have reached the end of the singleplayer there is no mandate that says you must now put that game down and play something different. If you are loving your time with a game try the new game plus mode or a higher difficulty, if it's an RPG (or even a System Shock style game) try a play through with another class, another power set, another race and/or sex or a different moral code.

I also find tricks to establish if you are really interested in a piece of entertainment to be very useful. If you have ten, arthouse or classic movies sitting on your entertainment centre's hard drive that you've been meaning to watch for the last six months to a year, the best way to decide whether to watch them, or finally delete them, is to watch the first five minutes of each. Generally they will either capture your imagination in that time and you'll watch them or you'll realise they are of no interest and they can be safely deleted; removing their ability to silently admonish you as you scroll past them in the recordings list.

Yay, Jeff Green returns! I'm also nearing 100 hours in Persona 5, but I still feel like I have a good 15-20 hours left. I guess I'm slow.

I'm surprised none of you (especially Rabbit!) have talked about What Remains of Edith Finch yet. It's a fantastic "walking simulator" style experience that takes about 2 hours to complete. You should all give it a go.

Higgledy wrote:

I'm with Sean on restarting games.

If I love a particular game I'll already be thinking about my next play through or play throughs as I finish the first. Rabbit often says, you should stop playing a game when you are no longer enjoying it. I've recently found myself doing that with games. It's incredibly liberating and has allowed me to spend more time with better, more enjoyable games but the converse is also true. If you are still enjoying a game and have reached the end of the singleplayer there is no mandate that says you must now put that game down and play something different.

I'm with you both, though it is quite rare that I feel strongly enough about a game to replay it immediately. I will never ever do it for a story-based game unless I'm going after a vastly different ending (ala Nier or Undertale). All of the games I tend to replay have a very tight and satisfying gameplay loop with room for variability in both the combat encounters and character builds. The ones I can immediately recall from the last few years are Dead Space 1/2, Mass Effect 2, The Last of Us, and all five of the Souls games.

Just listened today. Thanks for your efforts in trying to resolve my post HZD pickle.

Bit of an update. I should have said that immediately after finishing the game my family and I spent a screen free week in a 50's Airstream on the Isle of Wight. On my return I sold Horizon as have set myself a tight games budget this year and I'm not one for playing through a game more than once, no matter how much I love it. Enjoy the time with a game and then move on to find something new, well that's what usually happens.

Thankfully since I wrote I think I've found what I'm looking for in Dragon Quest Builders. Yay and cheers.

I might be a little disappointed that Shawn isn't on some level where he can punch someone with compassion.

OMG, Race for the Galaxy on mobile! Thanks for calling this out. I don't think I've sought out and bought a premium mobile game so quickly. It's been ages since I played a round with Keldon's AI and even longer since cracking open my physical copy.

The tutorials are surprisingly clean and good.

The RftG implementation is effectively perfect.

60 hours in FTL is obsessive?

I've got about 1200 hours....

(Admittedly a lot of that is the game playing by itself when I'm out of the room... but still...)