Hey all, I wasn't going to post episode 18 here since we had so many problems with Google Hangouts, but I figured what the hell, let's just throw up what we got, so we can move onto 19!
So after a brief bought with the plague, I was able to come back this week and record a show. Greg and I hung out last night and added a few more stories to the list we had and came up with another show about what's going on in gaming and what we've been playing now. Check out the video below and look for the audio to be up shortly.
Hey everyone, here is the weekly What I'm Playing Now podcast that we recorded Monday evening. We discuss people leaving different companies and more layoffs in the gaming industry. We also discuss all the good stuff that Microsoft gives you with your Xbox Live Gold subscription as well as the new Xbox One update. Of course Greg shares another picture with us and we also talk about what we played this week, (cough cough, South Park!!!!), and what we are looking forward to playing.
So with the return of Greg this week, we actually get into quite a few discussions. I talk about Asheron's Call getting its, pretty much, final update after a fourteen year run by the Turbine developers. We chat about Nintendo and a doubling of Day-Z developers, as well as all the game we played this week!! Check it out below, and be sure to leave comments.
So here is this weeks episode that I recorded Monday night. This is just the video portion and just me, Joe. Greg was having trouble with his internet connection so I had the opportunity to fly solo. I talked about some of the news stories from the past week and what I have been playing. Some of the games I discussed was the Titanfall beta, as well as the FFXIV beta on the PS4 as well as others! Check it out and leave us some comments!!!! If you are interested keep an eye out for the audio podcast as Greg may record some stuff of what he did and include it in there.
Last night we recorded episode 13 of the podcast! Check it out here. We discuss Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, The Last of Us, Final Fantasy XIII - Lightning Returns, The Pathfinder Adventure Card game and more!
Over the weekend I had a chance to sit down and play through the game Jazzpunk. The game was developed by Necrophone Games out of Canada, a small development studio of basically just a couple of guys. The game was published by none other than Adult Swim Games and this should pretty much sum up what type of game this is going to be, AWESOME!
The game is set as a 50's style spy thriller where you are the one that needs to save the day. But there is a small twist to this of course being published by Adult Swim Games and that would be the comedy that is vibrantly rich throughout the game. From the video trailer that was put out before the game was sold, I knew this game would be quite different than most of the others I was currently playing and boy did Jazzpunk live up to that trailer.
The game is divided up into different chapters and each chapter has you exploring and discovering a world that has a unique and interesting look to it as well as enough laughs to make even the harshest critic crack a smile. I myself cannot remember a game where I literally laughed and chuckled my way through it from beginning to end. I noticed right from the beginning that this would be a game where you would definitely want to interact with pretty much every NPC in the game, so as you didn't miss a thing. Each chapter you came across was set in a different locale and each little comedy bit I found, felt like a small morsel to a huge dinner that was being served. There aren't much to the controls of the game, which makes it that much easier to just want to explore and interact with the colorful and funny world before you.
I don't want to go too much into the game itself and spoil anything as the game is not one of extreme length. But if you are fan of anything on Adult Swim, or if you love a good laugh from pop culture, then this game will definitely be worth the price of admission. From fart jokes to movie references to the many geek tributes that are paid throughout the game, all gamers will not be able to avoid the laughter that this game will provide. Some of the art style even brought me back to my days of watching Ren and Stimpy which to this day holds a special place in my heart.
The game can be found on Steam, or directly through the developers website. It is currently on sale but only for a little bit longer and it is definitely a game that you do not want to pass up. I can completely say that this game should be on your list of what you want to play now!
Here's our latest podcast video that we just recorded. We discuss some new stories as well as what we played this past week.
Check it out!!!!!!
On the previous episode of the podcast we covered a story about King, the publishers behind the oh-so-great Candy Crush Saga, and how they're basically taking the award for Douchiest Gaming Publisher of 2014, already. During that conversation, I became very, very ranty and possibly didn't make my point as clear as I wanted to. This probably isn't going to be any different but I'll try. I really got angry while talking about this. So I wanted to waste some digital space and try to elaborate a little more on my point. To appease the parents, this will contain foul language so if your virgin ears can't handle it, mute the screen now.
There is a basic understanding in the creative realm that when you make something and publish it to the world, someone somewhere is going to eventually copy what you did in some form. There's a degree of tact to how this copying is accomplished however. You can copy on the basis of education so that you can help yourself or others understand how something works which is 100% okay (this is personal opinion here). You can copy as a derived work where you either take inspiration or some minor part of a work and make something of your own with it; this is not a legit copy of the original work though! Or you can be a total dick and just straight up copy something that exists, slap minor rebranding on it to try and make it look different, and publish and promote it as if you had the original idea.
This whole concept of copying works and derived works is extremely prevalent in software development (a.k.a. “writing computer games”). Not only are there an inenumerable number of licenses that are geared toward these ends but as it turns out, digital works are usually pretty easy to subvert despite the various attempts to lock it down. Most of the time, when something is locked down via DRM or anything Apple shits out on iTunes, people get pissed off over it. But then other times you don't really think about it as much for some reason or another. For example, while playing Candy Crush Saga, it's almost moot to think that DRM or Apple Shit would cover the code for the game. In fact, the code for the game is the last thing on your mind.
It's not the last thing on the minds of the developers though. The code is the soul of the game. Someone spent hours upon hours upon weeks upon months and maybe even upon years writing the code and tweaking it in so many ways to make it a viable cohesive thing that you can touch and play with. Even with the advent of “game development tools”, making a good game isn't an easy thing to do especially if you're an independent developer like I am. It requires that you train yourself in multiple disciplines that you may not have the aptitude for. It requires that you stop having friends. Flush your social life down the toilet, get ready for instant Carpal Tunnel, buy a copy of P-90X because you're gonna get fat, learn how to grow your own coffee beans because you'll need all of it you can get, and hope that maybe when it's all done that you're not going to get shit kicked in your face from ignorant five year olds who just look for something to bitch about. After all, it's not like you poured your blood, sweat and tears into it. By they way, just because you make a game doesn't mean you deserve mountains of platitudes. But you can't discount the level of work it takes to make one, let alone a good one.
This being the case, in the eyes of the machine, the code is the product and it's what needs protected. If the code were compromised in any way, the product is moot. Someone could and would take the code, make clones of it, publish in third-world countries where these things go unhindered and rampant and make just as much, if not more, money than the original developers made. Enter DRM and Apple Shit. Or, as is quite common in the US because people who do this are all fucks, we litigate. How do we prepare for this? We attempt to copyright words in the English language for starters. I mean, of course King introduced the words “Candy” and “Saga” into the English language. Who didn't know that? And don't even think about using those words together in public around a King employee because they'll sue your ass for everything you own. I bet the makers of Candy Land are shitting bricks right now. I guarantee you this year we're going to see Candy Land rebranded as “Junk Food Land” or “Source of Rotting Teeth Land”. We see shit like this all the time. A recent example was when Mojang, publishers of Minecraft, got in a spat with Bethesda over their upcoming title called “Scrolls”. Depsite it being a card game, no one would be able to tell the difference between “Srcolls” and “The Elder Scrolls” because we're all fucking idiots. It's not like anyone refers to the TES games by TES anyway as we always refer to them by their subtitles: Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, Bloodmoon, etc... A great example of this can be found on the podcast! I'm pretty famous for having a ridiculous number of hours on Skyrim and not once will you hear us saying “The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim” when joking about it. You don't even play cards in TES games! You read countless books, kill assholes, cheat weapons and armor, and do stupid shit that makes you laugh for hours on end.
The next thing we do is in league with what I like to call the “Steve Jobs Syndrome”. This self-proclaimed description stems from a quote Jobs used at one point which stemmed from 4,000 other people in the history of mankind: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” I suppose you could say that it's the “4,000 Other People in the History of Mankind Syndrome” instead. Regardless of the context it was used in, he said it and that's the most dickish thing ever. Despite the fact that it's 100% true, it's how you define someone I call a fuck. My rephrasing would be “Good artists create, great artists help create more.”
I digress. King recently got a little pissed that a small developer was originally looking to publish a game though them. However, before anything concrete had been laid with King, another publisher approached the developer with a far better offer and they opted to go with them instead of King. King, being the lot of five-year olds they are, hired some douchebags for, I'm sure, a few thousand dollars to sit in a basement for a few weeks and pump out a clone of the game that they didn't get. It wasn't just a minor rebranding either. It was basically the same fucking game with different graphical assets (and a name that I'm surprised didn't attract the attention of Atari's legal department).
There's a few things going on there. First of all, let's get the elementary school mentality out of the way. So what if the developer didn't publish with you. Go find something else to do than cry in the spilt milk. Make another fucking game. I mean you already own two words in the English language, put those to good use and make another ridiculous Candy Crush Saga game that more idiots on Facebook will play. Find someone else who's looking to publish something. Don't undermine someone just because you feel like being a shithead. Second, if you're really concerned that this game is going to compete with your games on a legitimate level, it's okay to make a competitor but that competitor had better not be the same fucking game with different sprites. And this is where my “Steve Jobs Syndrome” comes into play at. Let's just steal all of the ideas out there and make it look like it was something totally new and never before seen.
But then there's the periphery which may get ignored here. Let's talk about the dudes/dudettes who got paid to make the clone. You can't tell me that they didn't know before starting the project that King wanted an exact copy of the game with different sprites. If you're creating a game in a vaccum, you don't crank that fucker out in a week or two (save pro devs who take part in 48-hour challenges). This was well known from the start. So these people knew they were straight copying a competing product. Sell out much? These people just didn't give a shit. At some point, you'd think that something would click in their heads and one of them would just go “Hey man. Doesn't this seem a little, you know, WRONG to you?” Now I'd like to have a few thousand dollars plopped on my lap for writing code but I'd like it for legit code, not blatantly copying someone else's work. I'm also fine with derived works where credit for the original work is given (one of the cores of the open-source mentality).
The whole thing just stinks hardcore. The point to take away from all of this is that King is an ethically horrible publisher. If you play Candy Crush Saga, I highly recommend you stop playing this game, or any other title that King has or will publish.
With all this excitement surrounding the recent releases of the Playstation 4 and Xbox One, I felt like I should take some time to talk about why people such as myself stay interested in the older consoles and, more importantly, why we don't jump on the early adopter bandwagon.
To preface, I am very much an early adopter when it comes to technology. I was one of the few people who jumped on the SSD high-horse during their infancy phase (remember when a 60GB was near $300?) and I bought five of them to run in RAID. I'm always running the latest and greatest versions of Linux and Fedora thus stability on my computers is not a guaranteed thing. It's chaos but it's functional chaos.
However I'm the exact polar opposite when it comes to gaming. Even to this day, I'm more than content to pull out my Super Nintendo and fire up some Chrono Trigger (yes I own a physical cartridge) or Donkey Kong Country 2 (which quite possibly has one of the greatest soundtracks for any game ever made). When I first heard news about the Playstation 4 and Xbox One, I really wasn't all that excited about the two. And it wasn't for the obvious reason of simply propagating the flagship Sony and Microsoft consumer products into a new generation. It wasn't because the tech loaded into these devices made my nerd senses go on uber-overdrive. And it certainly wasn't because I didn't and still don't want either one of them.
I really feel like it's because there's no real way to truly appreciate a console until it's aged. The maturity of the software released for it will ripen (for the most part) not to mention that there will always be games that are released that will get sucked into the wake of triple-A titles. Frankly Sony's consoles are notorious for this which is why I love my PSP. If I feel like I haven't truly fulfilled my experience with a console, I won't move on from it.
But we don't ever really move on from a console, do we? After all, Joe is still toting a C64 in his studio and fires it up occasionally. These consoles endure as we do. A lot of us that really appreciate gaming and its history come to appreciate these older consoles as a wine connoisseur appreciates legacy vintages. We know what ages well about these things and what doesn't but are still able to appreciate everything they have to offer with an unparalleled respect.
This call out goes more to our younger generation of gamers. Don't be afraid to reach out and try to discover the roots of gaming to see for yourself where this all started at. It won't look as pretty as 1080P and it won't respond as well as an analog thumbstick and it certainly won't be as easy to setup and keep running as simply plugging in two cables and popping a disc into your console, but it will help you appreciate more what it is you play today and why us "gaming greybeards" act the way we do.
What I'm Playing Now is a website based around board and video games that we have recently played.
