Matoyak

Tegan, I have a curious: What do you think of Pokemon Omicron / Zeta ? (For those who don't exactly know what I'm talking about, they're pretty massive standalone fan-made Pokemon games [well, in the same way that Red and Blue are "different" games], created using RPG Maker XP. Click Here for more info, and you can get to where you can grab the games from there. The Reddit is [bizarrly, IMO] more up-to-date than their official website). I don't own any Nintendo products (haven't since the N64), much less a Nintendo handheld (handhelds just don't fit into my life: I walk half a mile to work, and drive 40 minutes to school...honestly, I barely even ever use my smartphone at all...), so I haven't had a chance to play any Pokemon game since...well, the GBC games, with the one exception of when I borrowed a friend's 3DS to play X for a day (side-note: really REALLY did NOT like the 3D art of X. When did they change away from sprites? :[ ) ANYways, point being that I picked up Zeta and am enjoying it a lot, and reading through the first half of this thread, you seem like a person who knows themselves some Poket Monsters, and am curious of your thoughts.

So... am I the only person who remembers that at the end of the first bit of footage we were shown of Watch_Dogs (at the same E3 as the orginal Trailer) that they blew up a car, pulled out some kind of submachinegun, and shot a whole bunch of people from behind cover? Then had a cutscene where the main character stood over a guy who was bleeding on the pavement, talked all big and bad, then shot him as he was begging for his life? This was E3 2012, and both of the following videos released on the same day...and if I'm remembering correctly, I believe the gameplay one was actually first at their press conference, (a memory supported by wikipedia, as the official trailer was only "released that same day" according to it): http://youtu.be/1U8KsQPIrY0 and I'm really confused at to where people got the idea this would be anything other than an open-world crime game with some hacker flavor. People only seem to remember the first, which is a cool video...but for example, Homefront had a similarly stylistic trailer. Not defending the game, haven't played it. Likely won't, isn't my cup o' tea. But when the very first gameplay demo shows you blow shit up and shoot guys to death with a machinegun...why, uh...why would you think it wouldn't be that? Did everyone get selective amnesia about that latter third of the gameplay demo?

OK, so I feel like a crazy person, because in the past few days not a single person on any of the many gaming podcasts I listen to has talked about that documentary Microsoft is creating without claiming (implicitely or explicitly) that it is a movie about the ET game. Unless I'm completely crazy and making shit up in my memories, It isn't. The documentary is about the video game crash, and what was going on during that era...and ET coincidentally is a Thing That Happened that also happens to be a visible part of all that shit that went down, and therefore is also in the documentary. Am I crazy? ... I might be crazy. EDIT: Also, apparently Firefox refuses to spellcheck on these forums. Dunno why. It spellchecks everywhere else, including another forum I was posting on maybe 5 minutes ago, tops. Odd.

Just feel the need to mention that Jeff did not call it a non-game: he called it a bad game. Also: Nick threw out more conspiracy theories than Vinny and Brad, and came across as more willing to believe in them than either.

I would argue that there was zero ambiguity about what Banner Saga was, but I'd be disproven by the fact that Chris somehow managed to not know about what the game was, so eh. I suspect DA:O worked for them not because it does anything inherently better than Banner Saga, but instead because of the time period it came out in. It had a pause-n-play mechanic that hadn't been seen in a while, and the gameplay was whatever the user chose it to be - for instance, I play it as a pseudo turn-based strategy game in which I pause every 5 seconds or so to issue another order. The main chunk of the lore is also hidden away in the Codex. But around that time, there were very few turn or pause-n-play based strategy games, and DA:O filled that niche for some people. 4-6 years later and there have been tons and tons of great tactical strategy games, and ones that aren't focused in genre fiction (something I didn't quite realize until now was a thing the Thumbs seem to rather dislike - it explains a lot about what they tend to like, though, and why I so often disagree with them). Had DA:O released this year, I suspect it would be met with similar feelings from the Thumbs to what Banner Saga raised.

Oh man, the stereo mix makes this a pain to listen to. Thanks for doing the podcast though. Really enjoyable in content Highly looking forward to more!

Man, that last segment of the podcast really casually talked down to those of us who do focus mostly on campaigns in strategy games over multiplayer. Wasn't intentionally insulting, but maaan was it casual in its backhandedness.