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Episode 11 – E3 2016

Eclectic Gamers Podcast·podcast_episode·2h 53m·held·Aug 18, 2016
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.031

TL;DR

E3 2016 special episode covering tabletop, pinball tournament update, and extensive video game conference analysis.

Summary

Eclectic Gamers Podcast Episode 11 is an E3 2016 special episode hosted by Tony and Dennis with guest Mike, a console gaming expert. The hosts discuss E3 2016 conferences and show floor highlights, starting with brief coverage of tabletop games (Hero Realms Kickstarter) and pinball (1980s Pinball Machine Mania tournament Round 3 results), then pivoting to extensive video game coverage including Square Enix (Final Fantasy XV, Deus Ex, Hitman, JRPGs), EA (Titanfall 2, Madden, FIFA 17, Mass Effect Andromeda), and related titles. The episode showcases the hosts' diverse gaming backgrounds and their attempt to provide comprehensive E3 analysis.

Key Claims

  • Taxi beat Earthshaker (1-seed) with 72.2% of votes in Williams region upset; likely due to availability in Pinball Arcade

    high confidence · Dennis discussing tournament results: 'a lot of people know Taxi. It's been in Pinball Arcade for a long time, and so I think a lot of people who maybe only know virtual pinball would have favored Taxi.'

  • TX Sector beat Black Hole (2-seed) in Gottlieb region; TX Sector's recent Pinball Arcade release likely contributed to upset

    high confidence · Dennis: 'I know TX Sector just came out for Pinball Arcade on the computer and I believe the mobile version, so I don't think it's out on the console versions. So that may also help it out as well.'

  • Ion Setsuna combat is described as 'Chrono Trigger' style with team-up attacks

    medium confidence · Tony: 'I've heard the combat is described as Chrono Trigger. Not Chrono Trigger meets anything else, it's just the combat is Chrono Trigger.' Followed by Dennis confirming: 'Yeah, it's Chrono Trigger. It looks very much like Chrono Trigger.'

  • Star Ocean Integrity and Faithlessness will feature full party participation in battles simultaneously, addressing long-standing JRPG complaint about limited active party members

    medium confidence · Tony: 'The new one, from what I've seen of it, is finally dealing with one of the big problems I've always had with JRPGs is where you have this group of like seven, eight, nine people, but when you go into battle, you can only use three or four. This won all of your party fights at the same time.'

  • Titanfall 2 will feature single-player campaign with implied bond/symbiosis between Titans and pilots

    high confidence · Tony: 'there is a single-player campaign... there's some sort of bond perhaps between the Titans and their pilots in a way and I don't know if it's supposed to be fully sentient or it's just sort of a programming thing but anyway there's lore there'

  • Mass Effect Andromeda has shifted to Frostbite engine

    high confidence · Tony: 'They didn't show a lot. They did note that they've shifted over... they've shifted over to putting it in the Frostbite engine.'

Notable Quotes

  • “I'm pretty much done with Final Fantasy, I think. I don't know. It hasn't grabbed me.”

    Dennis @ mid-content — Expresses franchise fatigue with Final Fantasy series despite Square Enix's major push with FF XV at E3

  • “The slow blade pierces the shield.”

    Tony @ mid-content — References Dune lore explanation for why Star Ocean characters use medieval weapons despite advanced sci-fi setting; humor moment showing cross-media knowledge

  • “They can't make a good Star Fox game, but they know how to do action.”

    Dennis @ mid-content — Critique of Platinum Games' inconsistent quality across different franchises

  • “It's in the game.”

    Dennis @ EA section transition — Jokingly references EA's famous tagline before discussing their E3 lineup

  • “I think they've got a chance with Titanfall to do the exact same thing. F1 was almost more of a, this is what we need to get the kind of money we need.”

    Dennis @ Titanfall 2 discussion — Analyzes Titanfall 1 as financial stepping stone to enable more ambitious Titanfall 2 with single-player campaign

Entities

TonypersonDennispersonMikepersonSquare EnixcompanyFinal Fantasy XVgameDeus Ex: Mankind DividedgameHitmangameIon SetsunagameStar Ocean Integrity and FaithlessnessgameNier Automata

Signals

  • ?

    community_signal: 1980s Pinball Machine Mania tournament Round 4 matchups announced with voting mechanics and regional representation format

    high · Dennis provides detailed Round 3 results and announces upcoming Round 4 regional finals with voting timeline of 'just under two weeks' to determine manufacturer representatives

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Star Ocean Integrity and Faithlessness addressing long-standing JRPG design limitation by featuring full simultaneous party participation in battles

    medium · Tony highlights this as major design innovation: 'The new one, from what I've seen of it, is finally dealing with one of the big problems I've always had with JRPGs is where you have this group of like seven, eight, nine people, but when you go into battle, you can only use three or four'

  • $

    market_signal: Virtual pinball platform (Pinball Arcade) demonstrated influence on 1980s Pinball Machine Mania tournament voting patterns via expanded player accessibility

    high · Dennis identifies Taxi upset victory correlation with Pinball Arcade availability: 'a lot of people know Taxi. It's been in Pinball Arcade for a long time... TX Sector just came out for Pinball Arcade on the computer'

  • ?

    announcement: E3 2016 announcements of Titanfall 2 single-player campaign with Titan-pilot narrative bonding mechanics as response to Titanfall 1 criticism

    high · Tony and Dennis discuss EA's presentation of Titanfall 2 featuring significant additions including single-player campaign and implied emotional bond between pilot and Titan, positioning it as addressing franchise shortcomings

  • ~

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.521

0:00
Welcome to Collected Gamers, episode 11. Today is Sunday, June 19th. I'm Tony. And I'm Dennis. And we're going to change things up a little bit this time. This is going to be our E3 special episode. We're going to be pretty video game heavy, and we are joined by our special guest helping us out here with the video games. Yes, I want to go ahead and introduce Mike. Mike, welcome to the Eclectic Gamers Podcast. Hello, it's good to be here. Mike is a big-time console gamer. He's active on all the current generation consoles from Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft, and so we wanted to bring in someone who had outside expertise and video games, because as those of you who have been listening to us know, Tony is very PC-oriented. PC gamer master race. That's right, that's what he is. I'm a dirty, dirty peasant. And I'm in the middle, where I primarily play on Xbox, but I do also some lighter PC gaming. So with three minds into the brain trust, we're hoping that we'll actually be able to adequately summarize E3 and all of the excitement that it entails. But because of the order and the importance of video games, we've got the order change up. So we're going to actually hit tabletop first. Then we'll go into pinball. And then we're going to spend the bulk of our time talking about E3 for the video game segment. So, Tony, you want to kick us off onto the tabletop? I will. And as you may have noticed, we're actually doing this in person again. So if there's any weird echoes or weird sounds in the background, that's entirely the fault of us actually being together again. Yes, that's so much easier. It is a lot easier. For a great discussion. we're going to starting in tabletop I've only got one thing I want to hit in tabletop today so I'm going to keep it pretty short I've mentioned multiple times before I play a lot of Star Realms I play a lot of online Star Realms and I like to play it personal a lot well this company that creates Star Realms has a new Kickstarter out we'll include a link to it and it's called Hero Realms what it does is it takes the Star Realms play type the Star Realms general rule set and it's another card game, but it's got a fantasy setting. It's designed so you play against your friends head-to-head like you can in Star Realms or in groups. You can do, they're going to have custom starting decks you can get, so you have a deck that, oh, I'm going to play a cleric, so you have a deck that's specifically for a cleric, or for a fighter or a ranger, thief, wizard, dragon, all sorts of stuff. And then they've got campaign decks that they're putting together. And with the campaign decks, you can do cooperative adventures, where it's you and your friends playing against a primary goal or a boss. And adventuring, you gain skills and equipment, and it lets you play the light RPG using cards.

FIFA 17 is adding story mode where player starts as beginner in league

high confidence · Tony: 'the main thing is they're adding some sort of story mode where you're a starting player and starting out in the league.'

  • Platinum Games is developing multiple projects simultaneously for E3 2016

    high confidence · Dennis: 'Platinum Games, while Platinum does some really good stuff, they do some really bad stuff... They can't make a good Star Fox game, but they know how to do action.' Reference to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles being 'really short' and Nier Automata being made by Platinum Games.

    • game
    Platinum Gamescompany
    Bayonettagame
    Titanfall 2game
    Titanfallgame
    Mass Effect Andromedagame
    FIFA 17game
    Maddengame
    EAcompany
    Hero Realmsgame
    Pinball Arcadegame

    sentiment_shift: Widespread franchise fatigue with Final Fantasy series despite major E3 2016 FF XV push by Square Enix

    medium · Dennis states: 'I'm pretty much done with Final Fantasy, I think. I don't know. It hasn't grabbed me.' Tony also expresses lack of enthusiasm despite acknowledging visual quality.

  • ?

    technology_signal: Mass Effect Andromeda engine migration to Frostbite for improved development capabilities

    high · Tony notes: 'They did note that they've shifted over... they've shifted over to putting it in the Frostbite engine'

    • 3:07
    So for people who are very much into the more crunch-type games and the very hack-and-slash with less care about the RP, this is something that would probably work pretty well for them. I haven't actually played it yet I have back to Kickstarter because I love Star Realms so much that I want anything these guys do like I said we'll have the link to the thing and that's about all we're going to have for Tabletop this week alright well let's go ahead and shift into pinball and the only thing we're going to do in pinball is provide an update for the 1980's pinball machine mania tournament so Friday we wrapped up the end of round 3 and so we're getting ready for round 4 but let's go ahead and go over round three. In terms of the regions, there were upsets in every single region except the other region. In the other region, Sea Witch, which is a Stern game, did beat Nineball, which is also a Stern game, and Stargazer, which is Stern, beat out Robocop, which is Data East. And both of those victories were 75% margins, which is not surprising at all. Yeah, I expected that. Right. Given where they seed. So for the other regions, in Williams, there was an upset. Taxi, which is the three-seat title going in, beat Earthshaker, the number one seed, with 72.2% of the votes. That's a pretty hefty upset right there. It is, and I'd like to say it played exactly into my prognostication, which was that a lot of people know Taxi. It's been in Pinball Arcade for a long time, and so I think a lot of people who maybe only know virtual pinball would have favored Taxi. That said, I voted for Taxi as well. I voted for Taxi. I like it better. I like it better than the Nurse Shaker.
    4:55
    And so then, and not surprisingly, Pinbot did beat High Speed. I'm sad. But only a little bit. I really love both games. But I think Pinbot is better. I voted for Pinbot. I just, I like High Speed. Well, it only won by 55.6%. So it was close. It was close. Gottlieb Region. The upset was TX Sector, the number four speed, beat Black Hole, the number two seed, with 55.6% of the vote. I know TX Sector is a pretty popular game. I like Black Hole. I've played a fair amount of Black Hole. I voted for Black Hole. Black Hole was actually the Gottlieb. I kind of wanted to win the whole Gottlieb region, but obviously that's not going to happen. I know TX Sector just came out for Pinball Arcade on the computer and I believe the mobile version, so I don't think it's out on the console versions. So that may also help it out as well. Black Hole, though, has been in the arcade for a long time.
    5:49
    The other matchup in Gottlieb was Haunted House, which did finally put down the never-seeming-to-die Genesis.
    5:57
    So we don't have to talk about that weird, ugly back glass anymore. So there's no Genesis effect. No, no. You'd think that 14-seed game has finally been put down. It just took the number one seed to do it. Valley Region is the final region. The upset was 8-Ball Deluxe, which is the four-seed game. I mean, it did beat the two-seed Centaur with 52.9% of the vote. So it was very close. Yeah, that's a really tight. I'm kind of surprised. I mean, Centaur's a really good game. Yeah, they both have interesting layouts. Centaur's got better audio work, I think most people would say. That's the big downside to 8-Ball is the electronics sound awful. It looks great. Yeah, it looks good. It looks great, but the audio is really poor, but it is what it is. and Elvira and the Pottery Monsters unsurprisingly did beat Fathom it isn't so and I did think that maybe Fathom would have a chance Elvira had over 60% of the vote I did not call that one well so the round four matchups will be the ones that determine who will represent each manufacturing region so to speak so this will be the last of the regional breakups so with Williams we're going to have a three seed taxi it's going to go up against the five-seat Pinbot. Gottlieb will be the one-seat Hounded House against the four-seat TX Sector. Bally will be Elvira, which is the one-seat, against the four-seat Eight Ball Deluxe. The other region, which is now just CERN, will be Sea Witch, which is the one-seat, against Stargazer, which is the two-seat. So we'll have a link to this in the show notes. We'll get it announced as we normally do. Voting will be just under two weeks, and then we'll know who our final four machines will be representing these four manufacturers. So, with that said, we're ready to go to video games. All righty. We are going to open with the conferences. Obviously, they're the big things that start before the E3 itself opens up. So, we'll start by hitting the conferences, and then we'll just hit highlights of stuff we've seen from the show floor at the end. Yeah, so we're going to try and loosely follow chronology at first, and then we're going to go back and hit anything we want to really talk about that wasn't already yet mentioned. So because of that, let's go ahead and start with Square Enix, because they kind of got started before E3 was going. They did a bunch of multi-day streaming. They didn't really have a real press conference. So I think this will just be a good time to talk about anything that anyone saw, if they watched any of it. I didn't watch any of it live, but I did catch some of the trailers and stuff that were featured. So one of the things I think that we should mention, which is sort of the elephant in the room whenever it comes to Square Enix this year, is Final Fantasy XV. And I know it's going to crop up further on during our discussions because, and I want to talk about those presentations, the unique one, at least, when we get to the Microsoft section. They were both pretty special. Okay. So I guess, you know, we've mentioned Final Fantasy on a prior podcast. I played the demo.
    9:03
    What do you all think? My experience with the demo was it's pretty. It had new things like most Final Fantasies have, but I wasn't blown away by it. And for a 10-year life cycle, I still don't understand what the big deal is, but other than, I guess, yay that they're getting it out. But, I mean, anyone have any thoughts about, broad thoughts about Final Fantasy XV or anything they saw from the Square Enix presentation? I'm pretty much done with Final Fantasy, I think. I don't know. It hasn't grabbed me.
    9:32
    They haven't grabbed me in a while. I mean, 9 was my last reel, and I really liked it. 10 was okay. And, of course, I mean, 11. We all played a lot of 11. Yeah. But, I mean, that's a completely different beast. This one, the idea, there's interesting ideas behind it. The art looks nice, but every time I see it, I just don't really, it doesn't grab me like some of the other games that we're going to talk about here have. You go, well, I want that game. Final Fantasy is just not doing it for me this time. Well, Final Fantasy's never really been a big RPG for me. I never really got into it. I didn't play them on the NES. I didn't have a PlayStation, so I never played VII or any of those. My RPG of choice has been the Tales of series. So I look at XV, and it's just kind of, eh, I might play it when it goes on sale or something. But it just doesn't strike me as anything overly interesting. I like that they're finally going towards a more action RPG route, because that's the kind I like. but otherwise it's just kind of like, eh. So the combat hasn't won you over? Not from what I've seen of it, no. Because I wonder, because I know your historic gripe with Final Fantasy has been they stuck with their turn-based routes for far longer than they needed to. Yeah, well I look at this and it looks more just hack and slash than actual RPGs from what I've seen of it. So it's not really what I'm looking for in an RPG. Okay. It doesn't help that a lot of the actual play stuff that did get shown at the various conferences weren't good choices. It did not show the game off very well. I agree. We'll mention some of that a little bit more later.
    11:10
    Another big game that SE has been pushing really hard, more from the old Eidos line, would be Dux. Dux Mankind Divided is the biggie that they were showing off. but also I know they have a Dux Go which is a mobile game that's in the vein of Hitman Go I have not seen any of the footage for the new Dux, I haven't played any Dux I know there have been mixed opinions on some of the older ones, some people more polarizing than mixed, some people really love it, some people seem to just not like that sort of gameplay where you have an option to do stealth cybernetic sort of stuff could also allow you to be very offensive I don't know if anyone had any thoughts when I talked about Dux but it apparently mattered a lot Square Enix. I wanted to at least mention it. Well, it really is their big... Next to Final Fantasy, it's their big hit. It's something people have been looking forward to. It's a really popular series. I played the first one. I actually own all of them. I've played a couple of the others, but I haven't completed any of the others besides the first one. Because they're very generic. It's just how they feel. I mean, they've got a good premise. It just never feels like they finish on it. It's how like a lot of the games lately, you've seen this big trend towards everything's an over-the-shoulder game that all looks kind of the same. I mean, there's the... But it's like what they had that, but back when first-person games were coming out, and they had really interesting ideas, and some of them worked and some of them didn't. And I always felt like the other iterations just didn't pick up as well as the first one did. They were more samey. They didn't move forward better with the best parts and dial back the worst parts. It was just kind of like oh, this is the same game but with better graphics and some new perks. Mike, did you have any thoughts on Duex? I haven't played any of them so not really. Okay. Well, I mentioned Hitman Go when I was talking about Duex Go, so I should note that another game that they're getting ready to have come out is Hitman. I think it was just called Hitman this time.
    13:14
    I liked their last Go. Hitman, I shouldn't say Go because we were just talking about Hitman. Hitman Absolution. Some people didn't like the approach of Absolution. I thought it worked pretty well. I didn't do a lot of the multiplayer online stuff. You don't like Killer Latex Nuns? Yeah. It's... I don't know what that is.
    13:33
    Or was that not Absolution? Was that the Hitman before? Where you were attacked by the assassin nuns that were all in latex? I don't... Do you know? I think it was the one before. That was the last one I played. Wow. I blanked on that. Yeah, I missed it in the last one. No, no, absolutely. How do you blank on that? I don't know. Look. The trailer. I don't play Hitman. The trailer, when you played it, the first time they showed up, it was weird. That was back in the day where I didn't play Hitman appropriately. I gave him all the assault rifles, and he would just go with fully automatic weapons, and he would just play dressed up while he shot everyone. He wasn't really in disguise and sneaking. But I played Absolution more legitimately, and part of it is I think they made it even more approachable it's kind of like the they did have the splinter cell also which some people didn't really when it moved from its more stealth roots to a more action stealth I think Hitman's done that as well anyway this game's already on my wish list I did not watch any new presentation on it because I'm already interested is this the one they're doing the episodic where they're releasing the episodics I'm not I don't I'm not familiar with I thought that was already out that's what I was thinking too because I know Oh, I heard on a different podcast, I don't know which one, that just a new episode dropped just before you threw it in. The listing I saw was it's the full retail release for purchase. Okay, so this is a completely different one. I'm guessing so, versus a Resident Evil Revelations where they bundled, or at least Revelations 2 where they bundled episodic content and then released it as a retail, which is how I acquired that. So let's talk about some of the more Japanese-style oriented games. So they're not all JRPGs. Ion Setsuna. Did anyone see anything on Ion Setsuna? I did not. I didn't see anything of it during the show, but I have seen some stuff about it before, and it's something I'm very interested in. I think it's coming out next month, but it's very old school in its approach. I've heard the combat is described as Chrono Trigger. Not Chrono Trigger meets anything else, it's just the combat is Chrono Trigger. Well, that's not a bad thing. So that alone got me interested in it. I've seen a few videos of the combat, Yeah, it's Chrono Trigger. It looks very much like Chrono Trigger. You've got the team-up attacks and everything. Wow. It's not a lot of times that we've seen anything that was Chrono Trigger. Besides Chrono Trigger. They didn't release Chrono Triggers a couple years ago, didn't they? On a couple platforms. Yeah, I have it on DS or 3DS or one of those. Well, it's one of those that's maintained its love. I remember back in the start of the year at Awesome Games Done Quick, That was their big closeout game was playing Chrono Trigger, Steve running it. Okay, so I'm set enough. Chrono Trigger fans, take heed. Another game, another JRPG, Star Ocean Integrity and Faithlessness. Now, I did see some of the trailer footage for this. So let me open with a question that I'm hoping one of you two can answer. Where are the nostrils? The girls lost their nostrils. The guys seem to have nostrils. Girls? No nostrils. Very odd. Very odd artistic design choice. My response to that is because Japan.
    16:45
    I think that's the best answer right there. I don't know, but I played the last Star Ocean, which I guess was technically Star Ocean 4, but it was a prequel to all of them. I enjoyed it. I know Star Ocean fans didn't really like that one. Why? I'm not certain. I think some of it boils down to some of the characters. a lot of people really hated Limmel. You might know her as K-Girl, the girl who ended all of her sentences with K. Yeah.
    17:11
    She didn't really bother me much, but I really liked the combat in it. It's very, you know, it's all real time. You basically map all your special moves to a button plus a direction, and then you can do, like, combinations with that kind of stuff. The new one, from what I've seen of it, is finally dealing with one of the big problems I've always had with JRPGs is where you have this group of like seven, eight, nine people, but when you go into battle, you can only use three or four. This won all of your party fights at the same time. Oh, that'd be nice. Yeah, I saw all the little bars on the footage I was seeing and it was like, oh, wow. There's really no technological reasons we've not done this before now. And it never has made sense to me, especially in some games, including Final Fantasy, at least some of them, like 7, where if you didn't rotate the party, they started to fall behind in level.
    18:05
    And, you know, some games were trying to do weird compromises where you get partial XP, and then some would just go ahead and give in, and I was less griping about cases where you got full XP even if you didn't use them, but later on, for story reasons, a lot of times they'll force you to use certain party members, they'll have to break up the party and all that. It was just annoying because there were certain play styles I didn't like, but It honestly never made sense because, like, well, where's the rest of the crew? We were all traveling together. If the Marvules appear, where'd they go? Where were my friends? They're in the back cheering for emotional support. Yeah. I guess so. I always hate it when they force me to use Tifa. Oh, Tifa.
    18:48
    We don't need to dive into that. So, yeah, that caught my eye, and graphically it looked great. I thought it was shiny, shiny and cool. Yeah, well, Star Ocean has this weird mix of kind of looking medieval, but having spaceships. And very sci-fi stuff mixed in. Like, the last one I played, their reasoning for having your characters use, like, swords and bows and stuff like that was, like, for some reason the monsters you fought were immune to their laser guns or something like that. Which was kind of weird, because then you've got a party member later on who was basically just an android with guns that popped out everywhere on him, but... The slow blade pierces the shield. Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking. The rules in Dune and the explanation for why they didn't use, they had to use certain older tech sort of thing. Third Japanese game I wanted to bring up, not an RPG, but Nier Automata. That looks interesting to me. I played the original Nier, which from my understanding was kind of a weird quasi-sequel to the original, that was called Drakengard, but it was like a sequel to one of the bad endings. Interesting. Kind of weird. But I mean, it wasn't, since I hadn't played that, I knew nothing about it, but I was able to, the game was pretty much self-contained in how it went, but very weird mix of kind of, you know, just action RPG-ish, but the boss fights are where things got interesting because it's like the developer wanted to make a bullet hell game, but they told him to make an action game anyway, so he said, screw it, I'm just going to put in bullet hell bosses. So you're fighting bosses, and occasionally the candle will just pan up over top and you'll have this spray of fire going out everywhere that you have to avoid. And I've seen some footage from the new one, which is being made by Platinum Games. They're busy. They are busy this year. Yeah, they are putting their hands in everything. I was on board with Platinum when they made Bayonetta. I played that and I'm like, this is the best action game I've ever played. I love Bayonetta. The only reason I didn't play Bayonetta 2 is because it was on something that I don't have. It's on Wii U. Yeah, and I played it and it's just as good as the first. I mean, because Bayonetta was an amazing game. And that gave me, when I saw the footage trailer, it gave me a feel that it reminded me of Bayonetta in terms of, like, combo-oriented combat or something. Platinum games know how to do action very well. They can't make a good Star Fox game, but they know how to do action. And this one looks really cool. I watched the trailer for it, and I watched a few other videos of it. One of them showed one of the big boss fights. And, yeah, it looks insane because you have so much freedom of movement to avoid all of the stuff that's coming at you. All while attacking. I think they have, like, multiple different kinds of weapons. So you've got large swords. You've got, like, these giant fist weapons. Plus you have this little robot that follows you around that can shoot at things. And you've got, like, an AI partner that, I guess, is with you through parts of the game, but I guess in some other parts you actually play that character. But it sounds really cool. All right. Now, one quick thing is on Platinum Games, while Platinum does some really good stuff, they do some really bad stuff. Yeah. I heard their Legend of Korra game was apparently not very good. No, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was supposed to be really bad, and that just came out. I've heard its big problem is that it's really short. Really short and recycles a lot of environments. Kind of like what Transformers Devastation did, but at least that one game was a little bit longer. And I enjoyed that game, but yes, it was kind of short. I can see support for short games if they don't launch at a full price point. Yeah, at least we're launching at full price. Or at least we're like $50. But, I mean, obviously they've got so many games coming out that they're running multiple teams. Yeah. So that's definitely going to be. Once we get a Microsoft conference, we'll be talking about another game they're working on. That's right. Well, that was all I had to hit on that was exclusively focused on Square Enix. Did anyone have anything else that they wanted to mention from the SE presentations? No. I barely even touched the SE stuff. Okay. Let's move on to EA. It's in the game. Here we are. EA. Okay. Titanfall 2. let's start with, because that's what they started with. No shock, it looked a lot like Titanfall 1 to me. They definitely added a lot of new stuff to it. I know it seemed like they at least doubled the number of Titans. I got their new weapons. It looked like it's probably, they probably doubled just about everything, is my sense. The big news, which was known for months before E3, was that there is a single-player campaign. They gave a little taste of it during E3, during the press conference. where you got a sense sort of that it seems like there's some sort of bond perhaps between the Titans and their pilots in a way and I don't know if it's supposed to be fully sentient or it's just sort of a programming thing but anyway there's lore there or they want there to be lore there you could tell they wanted it in Titanfall 1 but now that it's now that Titanfall 2 will be out on multi-platform a lot of people will be able to play it and they're I think responding to the big criticism because I thought Titanfall 1 played great my problem is when I've gone to play other first person shooters I sometimes still think I can move like I could in Titanfall 1 like I had some parkour jetpacky and it worked really well it wasn't like Brink which was ambitious but it just didn't feel good it feels really natural it doesn't feel like oh I'm not really good I'm not good at platforming how can I play Titanfall it's not that bad, Titanfall is very friendly, it's very generous with the ability for you to move around It's still first-person shooter. Any thoughts on Titanfall 2? I think that I really like the single-player trailer. It gave me a lot more interest in the game. I mean, I already had some interest in the game, but that single-player trailer really grabbed it for me because the whole almost symbiosis between the type thing that they kind of implied and how the Titan looks to be an actual character and not just a vehicle to be disposed of at will seemed really interesting. to me. I wonder if this isn't going to be one of those titles that is like Assassin's Creed where Assassin's Creed started. Assassin's Creed 1 was a good game. It had some issues. It wasn't an amazing game. But when Assassin's Creed 2 dropped, they really polished all the stuff about it that made the first Assassin's Creed likable. But 2 is what really created that franchise or really pushed that franchise into what it is. And I think they've got a chance with Titanfall to do the exact same thing. F1 was almost more of a, this is what we need to get the kind of money we need. If this is successful as a multiplayer little thing, we'll get enough money and enough people looking at us that we can do what we really want to do. That's kind of the feel I get.
    25:20
    It was a, let's go with what we have and if it does good, we can do what we really want. I'm looking forward to the second one. I really enjoyed the first game. Like Dennis said, the freedom of movement, it's all very fluid. You can move around the battlefield so fast and who doesn't love jumping in a giant mech? Yeah, I mean, when it comes to vehicular, well, mech-specific combat, there's been a lot of games that have kind of flirted with it a little bit but don't always go all in. And Titanfall really, I mean, you and the mech are critical. And you don't always have to be in it. It can be automated, so there are a lot of strategic options you have while you play it. It's a really good game, and it wasn't ever on my radar. The sales were so extreme on it after it had been out for almost a year that I finally dived in. And I was glad I did. So I'm looking forward to this. It's on the wish list. Next thing that EA presented was Madden. So I should say I haven't played a Madden since the 90s, if I recall. As near as I could tell, this was just yet more incremental change. I saw them note nothing new or revolutionary about the series. I think, to me, it felt like they knew that, okay, well, Madden is their big sports franchise in the U.S. We have to mention it and show some footage of it, but we're just going to give you same old, same old, which I guess if you love Madden, you'll love that. That also means I have no interest because I didn't for the last 15 years. Yeah, I haven't cared. The only thing I find interesting is it's still Madden, and Madden's not even voicing in the game. Yeah, I guess the recognition, they just can't let it go at this point. It's its own brand. Yeah, I don't really play sports games that much, so there's not really anything I'm interested in. Well, then you'll love our next topic, because the next game was FIFA 17. Now, I will say that at least FIFA was getting some significant changes. So the main thing is they're adding some sort of story mode where you're a starting player and starting out in the league. And then I think that's an interesting idea because most sports games, at least all the ones, and I, like Mike, I don't play them much. But the ones I have played, they don't really have story mode where you're actually engaged in the campaign. You know, it's usually all about picking the players and running your season or league or whatnot. But so there was that. They also noted that they were adding managers, at least a few managers from, I guess, the Premier League or something. I mean, I don't know. I don't watch soccer.
    27:56
    And so I don't know why that was a big deal, but the crowd, at least the crowd in London, seemed excited. So I guess it was a big deal to them.
    28:06
    But, Tony, do you have any thoughts on FIFA? I think they might have succeeded in getting my vote for the worst guest appearance of the entire thing. Of all of E3? when the paper manager came on for the thing and was just kind of standing there it's like your son plays right? yeah the guy so obviously looked like well you gave me my check and told me to be here so I'm here what do you want from me I completely forgot about that I thought you meant the part where the guy the actor who played for the story mode he came out and started fesbiening it up chewing the scenery Oh, no, no, no. And I was like, he was the best actor of them all because he is an actor. And I was like, holy cow. No, no, no, no. Someone just got done watching Rathacon and was like, oh, oh, con. No, no, no, that's too subtle. Chop, chop, chop. Scenery. Okay. Yeah, that was a, that one was. That one was definitely awkward. Something less awkward and something I think we all probably have more positive thoughts on. would be Mass Effect Andromeda, which was the next game. They didn't show a lot. They did note that they've shifted over, and actually I think they're doing this for a few games now, but they've shifted over to putting it in the Frostbite engine. I know Mike and I are familiar with Frostbite because we've had that with Battlefield for a while. It's supposed to be very open-world style gameplay. Well, world's kind of weird. Open-universe style, galaxy style gameplay. But everything's open-world anymore. I mean, the whole linear game thing is to be very much on the low end anymore. Open world is the way everything's going. It is, and I'm assuming it's a fad, but some games lend themselves better than others. This sort of RPG style definitely has been falling in. The WRPG style has been really embracing the open world for quite a while, and I don't blame them, because those are the ones that have been the most successful. The Skyrims are what are selling big time. They are. This is also not a part of the original trilogy. It's set in the same game universe. I'm curious how they're going to tie it in with the original trilogy. I won't say much since I know someone hasn't completed it yet. Yeah, I haven't played three yet. Yeah, me neither. Yeah, see? Lots of people haven't.
    30:31
    Yeah, well. I was kind of disappointed with how little they showed it, because this was something I was very much looking forward to. But also, they talk about you're in a new galaxy, all these new races and stuff and throughout everything they showed all I saw was a human, a Krogan and a Nassari. Where are the new races? There's a big spider, crab thingy, monster thing. That's a race? I mean, that's a race! There are giant enemy crabs in every game.
    31:00
    You have to attack the weak spot for massive damage. They probably snuck in from Half-Life Universe. Just looking at all the games we're going to be talking about So we have talked about open world, giant crabs, and grappling hooks appear to be the theme of E3 this year. I mean, everything's got a grappling hook. Everything's got a grappling hook. I'm pretty certain I have a grappling hook now. I really do. Just from watching the conferences. We might have to grapplegate. Grapplegate? Yeah, grapplegate. All right. Well, okay. Here's a game. Next game up that did not have a grappling hook. At least as far as I could tell. Fae. Or is it fee? If the game looks indie.
    31:46
    It's part of the EA Originals program, which is a new effort, apparently, that EA has launched to promote indie games. I have seen a lot of news buzz about that because they did indicate during the conference that all of the profits actually go back to the indie developer, not to EA. Well, see, that's cool. I like that. So it's interesting, but as near as I could tell, as far as I could tell, when I watched this, I jotted down, Fee is an artsy game where you are a forest creature and all forest elements have a song.
    32:20
    And so, that's my synopsis of what I could tell about it. But I couldn't really get a feel for the gameplay elements. I mean, it looked, visually it was very unique. Very purple. It was very purple. It was very indie in its style. But it didn't look like, specifically, I couldn't say, oh, it looks like Limbo, but purple. I mean, it was its own thing. Limbo. Yeah.
    32:47
    Okay, so anyway, for those of you who like indie-looking games, check out FIFE. All right, next, broadly, Star Wars. Now, this, for me, was a mess. There are a lot of games that are upcoming being worked on by a lot of different groups, and they showed next to nothing about any of them. I could tell it was a mix of genres, which I assume is to try to appeal to every possible Star Wars fan out there, which I completely agree with. Except for the people that are still from another Rogue Squadron or an X-Wing or something like that. And they focused a bit on that they're doing some original stories, original game stories in the universe, which, I mean, that's happened before as well, so let's not be too exuberant about it. And there was a scene with someone who was using, I guess, the PlayStation VR and was inside an X-Wing. So I know that's speculation. Is it X-Wing versus TIE Fighter? It was a modded version of Battlefront. It is a VR experience. Like everybody else is kicking out VR experiences, which aren't really the game. It's just like, we've got a VR thing that has these popular character titles in it that you can do stuff. Yay! We'll probably have to hit on that a little bit. You know, it's like, yeah, there was definitely a feel of you'd go into a gaming universe now, and they're like, welcome to our game. Oh, here's your VR experience, and don't forget your grappling hook. Yeah, I mean, it's been... Mike, any thoughts on Star Wars in general? I mean, they just didn't show a lot. No, they didn't show a lot. And from what I've heard, at least two of the titles that are being worked on are referred to as, like, 3D action games. So it's like, well, what's going to be the difference? Is one of them going to be sort of Jedi-based? Is one of them going to be more of a shooter-type thing? I don't know. I was super disappointed. I mean, this was the section I was most looking forward to EA, was the Star Wars talk, and it opened up with a guy drawing and showed some little super short clips of stuff. And then they're like, okay, that was Star Wars, yay! And it's like... Yeah, I didn't go into EA with an expectation, so I wasn't most looking forward to Star Wars, but I did think they were going to do more than a civil reel. Yeah. It was just, it was like, for so many games being in simultaneous development, there wasn't anything that had more that you could give us. I mean, the most they talked about was the next Battlefront game. Yeah, and they didn't even talk about the upcoming DLC for Battlefront that's out now. No. and there's been hardly any that's come out for us so far there's supposed to be like another three or four packs coming out for it, I figured they would at least talk about that it was weird, weird, weird now here's one thing I wonder in I'm not sure, but are they holding back for like a celebration or something like that is there even going to be a celebration this year I don't remember I thought it already occurred they normally have one in September and one earlier in the year I thought they were running I don't remember, there's two big ones every year I thought Because I remember last year's celebration was in like September, because it was that big lead-up to Force Awakens. So I don't know. They're just not comfortable dropping anything yet. Nothing's close enough to ready to drop. And that is, I mean, that's possible. But anyway, it was disappointing. Yeah, it was almost like, why'd you even bother to show Star Wars at all? I guess then they would have been asked, why didn't you even show Star Wars? They didn't, so I didn't get it. Final game that was part of their presentation, Battlefield 1 and presentation I'm using really broadly because they did a presentation which was very sort of trailer focused but then right after that they segued into an actual live 64 player multiplayer match it was very awkward interviews it was really awkward interviews I think they were just killing time and they wanted to make it be like a red carpet Hollywood walk what do you think about tanks? Thanks. I mean, I tuned out. Who's going to win? Me?
    37:05
    Because I'm awesome? I mean, the celebrity guests made no sense for the most part. It was like, who's in town? It was. I mean, the only decent part of all this celebrity gasp was watching Snoop Dogg light up a joint while playing. My favorite part was before the play when they did the intro trailers for the two teams and the Battlefield Friends guy, Neves, his trailer was awesome. His team sucked, but his trailer was awesome. and so that was a lot of fun because if you haven't oh and any listeners I do recommend search out on YouTube for Battlefield Friends if you're at all familiar with the game Battlefield it is a lot of fun but anyway so some highlights that I noticed from Battlefield 1 dynamic weather and actually meaningful I mean I've always been impressed when ever since Super NES and Zelda had the rain that would come and I was like whoa this is cool but it didn't mean anything this was like you hate snipers just hope fuck you'll eventually roll in you know it's going to be the greatest thing ever that's right it's going to bayonet charges pretty cool awesome pretty cool and it was very neat to hear how they work and once you commit you can't immediately decommit you have to keep going like in one of the clips he bayonet charged the guy and then the guy like didn't even see him but he jumped over a wall and the guy just ran into the wall and stopped and got shot it was very sad destruction has always been a big part of Battlefield. Some games have pulled it off better than others. It seems, and we don't fully know yet, but it seems they've moved away from Battlefield 4's levolution concept where there was a big fixed structure that you had an option of dramatically changing the Battlefield landscape, and instead have moved towards things like, we have a giant zeppelin. It could come down anywhere on the Battlefield, and it makes a difference where it lands, because it leaves its steel skeletal frame, it destroys buildings there's fire I mean and so I thought that it was a really good use of destruction I also thought it was a really cool use of the Zeppelin was awesome where in Battlefield 4 there are points where people would be fighting for control of the point and that would give them like access to the AC-130 or whatever the big jet is but it's the winners who always have that it's the strong team that gets all the cool stuff and this is obviously a chance to try I called it when I saw it I immediately said rubber banding for breaking games. It's the rubber banding thing to try and give something to help out a team that's actually in trouble and trying to keep the games a little more competitive because even playing, other than an occasional good old time advantage point, I don't like playing Battlefield and being totally dominant because it just causes the other team to quit. They don't get enough players. It's unbalanced and then the new people come in and they're getting steamrolled and their own spawn points and it sucks. So I was glad to see that. And all the main Battlefield staples were still there where it matters. So you still got squads. You still have different classes. You still have lots of weapons to choose from. I'm sure you know you're still going to do all the unlockables and all that stuff to encourage play. The only thing is, I still can't tell if a single player is going to be any good. And Battlefield does not have a great track record, as I have said before on this podcast. It does not have a great track record when it comes to single player campaigns. I would like them to treat World War I with some reverence and some respect and not give it a terrible story campaign. I've heard some interesting ideas behind it. They have shown next to nothing other than it's got great visuals, but Battlefield has had great visuals for a long time. I hated the weapons. I hated them. It's too, like, too modern. I mean, when everybody was carrying weapons that were like, well, these were prototypes in a few small units, had them in 1918 in the last closing months of the war, and both teams have them. And everyone's running around with machine guns, even though practically all the soldiers were using bolt-action rifles. And the only bolt-action you saw in the entire thing was a sniper rifle. Everything and everything else, even though the primary weapons that everybody had were bolt-actions. You never saw anybody with them unless they were carrying a sniper rifle. Otherwise, everybody had some machine guns and machine guns and LMGs. And I briefly wondered if they were going to actually commit to saying, okay, well, these were the common weapons, and so that's what you need to use. I'm not surprised that they did that. I'm not surprised they didn't. Saying no automatic weapons because only a handful of people had them would just not have anything. It was my original concern from when the trailer dropped originally, was that, okay, everybody's going to have submachine guns and all these things that either didn't exist or were prototypes or barely deployed, and yet that's what it ended up being. Yeah, well, unfortunately, I think if you limit everyone to just bolt-action stuff, you risk alienating the people who are used to the more modern battlefields. Yeah, that's why I think they felt they would have to continue with, you know, there's just some people that say, I want to play assault. I want to have a machine gun. And you say, well, you know, most of the machine guns were nests, so you didn't get up and run around with a, you know, you didn't have any vaccines. that's why they went with the more prototypy style. Old, tiny-looking guns. And so I'm not surprised. I would have given them points for actually committing all the way. I think this is better for their sales. This will be better for their player base. I just don't like it from a philosophical standpoint. So anyway, that was the EA presentation. I thought the Battlefield 1 stuff was the most interesting of everything they provided, but of course that's easy to say when you have an extra hour worth of multiplayer to watch. Yeah, I enjoyed watching the stuff for Battlefield 1. I mean when they first announced it I was like, was this going to be as fun because we're not going to have all the modern gadgets and stuff like that? But watching it, no, I mean there was a lot of fun. You have all the little like machine gun nests you could get into Airplanes looks like they might actually be useful because the big problem with Battlefield 4 is you get in a jet and you fight other jets You might occasionally try and strace the ground but you're not going to be doing much of anything because you're moving so fast. But now since we've gotten all these old-time airplanes, biplanes and stuff might actually be able to be useful for them. And they still got all the little fun old-timey tanks. I mean, there was one that looked like you could get like five or six people into it. Yeah, you can get all the heavy tanks. It can take a whole lot of people. And there's medium tanks that can take three, and there's light tanks that's one guy. And they didn't showcase it, but they did note there will still be ships. Like, there's always been a naval component to the more recent battlefields. So, yeah, I'm looking forward to it. And on a general conference thoughts, one thing that I noticed here at EA as the start, and I know it's repeated by every single conference, is at some point somebody needs to realize that panning shots of a crowd who looks like they're about to fall asleep does not help your conference at all. When it's a panning shot and it's 40 people staring at their phones, no one looking at the screens, no one looking at the stage, no one cheering, no one yelling, that doesn't help your stuff. That doesn't help it at all. It doesn't. And I'm sympathetic to a cameraman who feels they need to do something and wants to do panning shots. And I'm okay with that, except please don't do the panning shots when you're showing the game trailers. Oh, Microsoft. Microsoft was... Oh. We're not to them yet, but it was really bad in the Microsoft conference. Sony's conference wasn't doing that. No. No one should have. No one should have done it. But we're actually not yet ready for Microsoft. We're going to hit Bethesda next, because Bethesda was actually next in the chronology. So, moving into Bethesda. First game they brought up was Quake Champions. So, Quake Champions. PC only. I guess it's a MOBA style. It seems that, unlike the original Quake, it's got different classes. It sounds like it's more of a hero shooter, more Overwatch-y than MOBA-y.
    45:32
    Overwatch clone. Well, that was inevitable. From some of the stuff. I mean, I don't know. I don't know if it's going to be as team-based. but what I've heard from other sources is it sounds a bit more they were all calling it a hero shooter instead of being an actual MOBA it's not like trying to do like what Battleborn did or Paragon did which are more first person MOBA type stuff but yeah I didn't think the announcement of a quake was surprising given the success of Doom I expected it what would you have seen Bethesda do in regards to some of these old titles I was surprised that it's not like the original Quake, doing the Overwatch approach. Actually, looking at my notes, it's just Quake Watch. Yeah.
    46:19
    So, I mean, probably since this was set to be PC only, they really, really stressed for tournament play. And the original Quake is still played in tournaments. I watched a tournament less than a year ago on Twitch that was doing the original Quake. It's still a popular multiplayer thing. Yeah, it's one of those multiplayers where, because you as the characters are all equal. It's not like Battlefield where you're doing the classes and all that and you level up the equipment. It's just that sort of pure vanilla sort of multiplayer. And this is not going that route because you have these different, you have the Overwatch competition. Yeah, that's a good analogy. So what they showed looked neat. It's not really on my radar, though. All right, let's go ahead and go over to the next game, which was Elder Scrolls Legends. Woo! I like your enthusiasm it was much higher than mine it was very obvious that the presenter's ball was in the crowd I actually read a comment I think it was on Kotaku of someone who said he sat in front of that woman and she was just really really hyped about anything Elvis girls I mean the people that were sitting there she was I guess like probably like 18 maybe younger he said the people that she was with They were all super excited about anything Elder Scrolls. They'd mention anything about it, and they'd be like, yeah. It's like, okay, calm down, people. Wow. I'm glad we got the mystery of the mom slash child crying out in Italy. My cry out was, another strategy card game? Which, incidentally, when you're grabbing your VR equipment and your grappling hook, you're also going to be getting your own strategy cards. Because, oh my, did everyone have strategy cards? All right. You've got to build off Hearthstone. I can't say. Hearthstone does a good job. You've got to do it. You've got to. So, I mean, I'm not familiar with a whole ton of strategy card games. I'll say that the dual column thing they have going on this one did seem unique compared to what else I've played. But I still don't want it. Nope. I don't care. Mike, are you going to buy it? I'm not really into card games, no. Okay. All right. So, so much for Elder Scrolls Legends. Now, something that we have all played Fallout 4. They mentioned some new upcoming DLC. I know Mike has been working on Fallout 4 DLC. I've not started any. I've not started the DLC, but I got the season pass back before they introduced the console. Far Harbor is excellent. I've heard that, but I just haven't started it yet because I've got caught up in this little thing called Overwatch.
    48:50
    So, given what we've all mentioned so far about all this, they did feature mods, because mods are coming to console. Well, mods are out. They're out on Xbox, and they should be out on PlayStation, I think, within the next six weeks.
    49:05
    So they showed off a lot of the cool ones, though incidentally for people, it does turn off the, I guess, achievements and trophies are disabled if you have enabled the use of mods, so be aware of that for those of you who'd like to gather those up. Otherwise, you can shut up Preston finally, which is the dream of every console.
    49:24
    Only real thing on the DLC thing that I noted was Nuka-Cola World is weird. Yeah. I hope that it's crazy silly like the Fallout 3 DLC. Have you ever played the one where you go and there are all the robots and you're helping little robots? Yeah. It's just really, really zany. That was my favorite DLC because it was so ridiculous. I liked Mothership Zeta because it was all the aliens. Yeah. And you go to the one room and you press a button and you just watch a laser shoot out and explode part of Texas and you just keep doing it. Maybe that was just me. I was trying to fix it. I noticed, like, it seems they put out a bunch of DLC that deals with your whole settlement building, which is useless to me because I haven't done any settlement building except for my one, the one, the Red Rocket settlement, which I created is my giant automated base where my companions stay. But otherwise, I haven't done, like, any settlement building. I spent quite a bit building up Sanctuary to the point where I don't think I can add anything into the game because it won't let me anymore. But I mean, I had fun with some aspects of it. Some of the new stuff, it looks like they're putting in like elevators and little conveyor belts and stuff. I'm sure people will build all sorts of weird Rube Goldberg-type machines with them. Yeah.
    50:47
    And I did like the DLC where you get to build your own vault. That could be fun, too. Where it looks like it's basically, you know what? People kind of like Fallout Shelter a little bit. Some people play it occasionally. So let's go ahead and make Fallout Shelter that you can play in Fallout 4. It depends on how it goes. It could be a lot of fun or it could be terrible. Yeah, it's probably a good idea to put in. I did try Fallout Shelter. It didn't resonate. Yeah, no, it wasn't good. I did enjoy it. And I saw they are also doing some updates on Fallout Shelter as well for anyone interested in terms of, I guess, I think it may already be out where they just expanded it to try and make it more interesting.
    51:25
    Yeah, no, I didn't really get into construction, so I did it. I built up Sanctuary a little bit, teeny bit. I did the red rocket place for my achievement to get perfect happiness, so I used that location separate. I kept my companions at Sanctuary. Anyway, so there's a lot of fallout for DLC as we knew the game was going to be well supported and it's done gangbusters for Bethesda, so this has just been reaffirming that they have not forgotten about you. Speaking of not being forgotten, the next game was Skyrim Remastered, which for me, gets a big resounding meh. I do not like remasterings of games that are new. And Skyrim is not an old game.
    52:10
    When I saw the footage, I got a little excited because at first I thought, oh my, they actually remastered Oblivion. Oh, see, that's what I would have thought. If they'd remastered Oblivion, Skyrim, I don't know. And I play on PC, so there's nothing that their remastered version of Skyrim can do as a PC player that I can't do with mods. It looked great, don't get me wrong. If you haven't played Skyrim, go ahead and play Skyrim Remastered. Skyrim's a fun game if you like WRPGs and the fantasy setting. But it's not that old. Oblivion was last console as well. It was early in last console. I mean, it's coming up on... must be around a decade old, that one would have made sense to me. And anything older would definitely make sense, but I don't like remastering. I think it's a cash-in of the worst kind when they're new. That's why I have the same skepticism for Resident Evils that somehow have to be remastered and put out on every console over and over instead of making a new good one sort of thing. But that's not Bethesda's fault.
    53:11
    That's Capcom. So, Prey. Now, that was the next game. I didn't know what we were looking at when they started showing the footage. Other than the alien theme, it doesn't seem anything like the original play. Prey. Did either of you play Prey? No. I've seen videos of it, but I never actually played. I did play Prey. And just as a summary, the original Prey is you are a Native American man. You're about to leave. You don't want to live on the reservation anymore. and aliens come and abduct your reservation, including you, up into their ship. The game had some interesting ideas, including the ability to walk on the ceilings and stuff in the ship. It had some kind of interesting ideas they wanted to do with physics. I'm using the word interesting a lot because the game stunk.
    53:59
    It's just not a good ship. It's an FPS, but it's not good. There's really nothing good about it other than you could say, well, it could have had potential. it was when was the last game you can think of that actually had a Native American protagonist so that was sort of unique but otherwise it's just it's so generic I knew I had heard that Bethesda had the Prey IP it's just I don't know why you'd ever want it why call it Prey at all I think they liked the name and they liked the general concept of somebody being hunted and I can see that I just don't even know why they paid for it but because from the sounds of it that's basically they took that someone being hunted and they're like you know Prey's a really good name for a game about somebody being hunted let's do that it is but I just maybe originally there's a bit of a story I believe behind the attempts to make a sequel and so I think maybe this is sort of salvaging what they acquired because there was supposed to be another Prey I think before the current generation of consoles even so it's just this looked interesting but we haven't seen gameplay without seeing that. I don't know how true that will be. But what I saw got me at least curious, so kudos on that.
    55:16
    Another game which was based off of an original game was Doom, which Doom's been out for a while. I've heard great things, but I've not played it. I've played the opening since they released the first level for free as a demo. Yeah, that's right. It's good. I mean, it definitely has kind of an old Doom feel, and it's a lot of fun. I haven't picked the game up. I'm glad that I got so much other stuff going on right now overwatch. But it was an enjoyable bit of demo that I actually played through a couple of times. Well, they just noted that there are some DLC packs coming up for it, and I just was going to throw that in as a notation for people who have Doom. There's more experience coming for those of you who have it. And by experience, you mean multiplayer DLC packs, which from everything I hear is terrible. Multiplayer is not supposed to be enjoyable. where the single player campaign, everyone I've talked to says the single player campaign is amazing and it's great and the multiplayer is crap. But it's worth getting for the single player. Right, right. And the single player is, I mean, that's why I would be interested in it. That's sort of what, I think a lot of people think about Wolfenstein and the New Order, which only have single player and is a really good single player campaign. And so, you know, I guess, but if you're curious about doing multiplayer, Yeah, there it is for you.
    56:35
    Okay, next thing they featured was Elder Scrolls Online Dark Brotherhood. Probably a chance to do another read. Bear Riders. That's the only thing I saw that I cared about. Bear Riders. Just the concept of Bear Riders is awesome to me. I want to see a cowboy charge on bears. Who doesn't?
    56:55
    It sounds like the game has finally found its footing. They were really restructuring how it was like MMO of the year and all that. I knew that it had a really rocky start when it launched. Because I was hearing people just sort of casually referencing it. They were like, Elder Scrolls Online, isn't that getting canceled? That sort of thing.
    57:13
    I don't know. I don't know anyone who plays it. One thing, when they said MMO of the Year, and it's just one of those things I always want to figure out, is I want to know who. Who'd she attract? If you say that, oh, it was rated blank of the year by what? I mean, I want to know who. because if Elder Scrolls Online was rated MMO of the Year by the Elder Scrolls Online fan club, that's a lot different than if it was rated that way by, you know, some other slightly more authoritative group. The only thing I noted was they mentioned their expansion, Dark Brotherhood. The only thing I can think of is I think I joined the Dark Brotherhood back when I played Oblivion in that single player game and it was a fun faction or clan to play with. So, hey, maybe it'll be entertaining in the online version? I don't know. I still, on occasion, find myself having to log into Neverwinter to continue to sustain that character. I don't want any more MMOs. I'm not interested in getting any more MMOs. So this is not on my radar, no matter how many obscure game of the years it wins. The next segment was Bethesda's VR stuff. Are you telling me a conference talked about VR this year? I know. See, it is true. It's amazing. The future must be now. I will say that for Bethesda, I thought that it was clever that they shouldn't be trying to carve out their initial niche in VR on FPS, which makes sense to me. Well, see how they handle that whole motion sickness, vomiting problem. I'm very much not sold on it as a gimmick. I think it's just the latest fad, just like five years ago, it was the Move and the Connect and the motion control stuff. And, yeah, as someone who can't read while being in a moving vehicle without having taken Dramamine, I'm not excited about VR. Well, see, and here's the thing. I think VR is, I don't think VR is going anywhere. I think VR is the future. I think that what we're seeing VR now is exactly what it is. It is the very earliest steps. These are the Model As. These are the tiniest of tinies. five or ten years from now, a lot of these problems will be ironed out and things will be better. For now, it's everybody just getting their toes wet, and I just don't think the hardware's quite... It's not there yet. I want to say one thing about them, though. At least their VR thing was that here's this little VR experience you can have that's quasi-related to this one game. That was... You can play Fallout 4 in VR. The whole game is very cool.
    59:48
    That is... Kudos to them on that. That's ambitious. It is. And people don't feel like they're getting some sort of, you know, oh, spin-off. Yeah. It's a real game. We already know it's a real game, a good game. The final game that the FETTA hit on was Dishonored 2. Not at all surprised. This has been known to be in the works for quite a while. It seemed to be, other than the occasional woo-hoo Elder Scrawlsian lady, seemed to be the highlight of the show to most of the people in attendance.
    60:20
    Game looked good. I did not like the character let me actually I should probably start off with have either of you played Dishonored 1? I have.
    60:32
    It's a stealth game in a lot of ways it reminds me of Hitman and that's the thing. I like Hitman I didn't love Dishonored I respected that you could go about solving the mission in a variety of ways but Hitman's been doing that for a while you go around with powers Dishonored 2 introduced a whole lot of new powers. So many that I'm looking at it and I'm like, and this was the case in the first game too, it's like, is the character overpowered? In fact, I heard an interview. At the beginning of Dishonored 2, you were offered powers. You can turn them down. The game can be played with no powers. Yes. Right. And the fact that that's an option, I think, says everything you need to know about how OP those powers are. I don't know what you're talking about. I can chain six guys together so whatever happens to one of them happens to all of them and then the champ and not. That was ridiculous. That bar is ridiculous. When you turn into a shadow creature and literally tear somebody limb to limb. it was cool to see but I was just sitting there thinking gosh, what, you know, back in the day you didn't have to code that in. You just had to start let the person check the casual box and then you could just run up and knife them all into their face and they couldn't hurt you.
    61:45
    So anyway, I thought graphically obviously it's a new generation. It looked better. I thought the character designs were better. It still got its unique style without looking off to me. The original design just kind of looked off to me. Not brink off, which looked terrible, but it just bugged me kind of aesthetically. I thought it looked really cool. And what really grabbed me was the time travel section was awesome looking. Having the little flower petal thing. Yeah, that was new for the summer, too. That looked awesome. I think that interested me more than anything else in the game. I thought that section just looks cool. And I'm wondering, will it happen a lot, or is that just the one section? The way it sounded to me, I think it's just that mansion, it's that one section. And, she's got a magic grappling hook. She does. But, you can also play as her dad again, or anyone, but then show any of his powers, so I don't know. I assume maybe they're the same as the original. Lots of rats. But anyway, Steampunk Catman, So if you want it, just on or two. Okay, well, let's go ahead now and transition over to the Microsoft conference, which we hit upon loosely, briefly, several times throughout this podcast already. But now, sequentially, we're ready for it. So let us begin. First thing was the announcement of hardware. The Xbox One S, 40% smaller, HDR gaming, a 2-terabyte hard drive as an option. They also have a half-terabyte still as a cheaper option. and the power supply is actually integrated into the unit itself. Any thoughts? Did they ever explain exactly what HDR gaming is? They did not in the conference. I have since heard that there are certain TVs that support this HDR, and I don't remember, unfortunately, what the acronym means, but what it does is it allows you to have better color range. So the blacks actually look blacker, and currently it's sort of more of a dark gray. So all the browns look browner because they're brown. Oh, here's a word. I love that. Trying to frown that up. So, anyway, so, yes, so there are certain TVs, and I don't know what percentage of the TV market does HDR, but so it gives you a better color spectrum is my understanding. Well, that makes sense. And the Xbox One S, I believe, will do 4K video. So it's a 4K Blu-ray player. It won't do true 4K for gaming, but it would be for videophiles who, I guess that's the big thing now with Blu-ray is to actually have that in 4K and people, that's not so common because of bandwidth reasons for streaming so much. But a lot of people would buy their movies on discs still that really weren't high quality. This would actually, my understanding is, currently be the, when it comes out, the cheapest 4K player on the market for Blu-ray discs. So if you've got the half terabytes. And the 40% smaller, I mean, that really brings the footprint down a lot. I mean, I was shocked. And it's got an integrated power block. That brick was huge. That, yeah. That brick I had hidden behind my TV, that thing is loud and huge. I mean, the whole thing is still less loud than the 360 ever was. Well, yeah. That was like having a jet engine or a vacuum cleaner running. Xbox One is big and ugly. That's not, we ain't kidding anyone.
    65:01
    But anyway, so it looks nice, but, and I mean, I'm not going to replace my existing unit, But anyone who wants to get in with one that has the current capabilities, by and large, you do need an adapter for the Kinect, though. I did read they don't have the old Kinect for it, which tells you exactly what they decided to do with Kinect.
    65:21
    So, anyway. That's an amazing flip, considering when the one released, it was all about the Kinect, and the Kinect was everything, and the Kinect was the future, and the Kinect was always on. Now they're like, the what now? Yeah. I've never heard of that. I don't know what you're talking about.
    65:38
    Microsoft, I think, and this is all old news to anyone who's followed the console wars, quote, unquote, but Microsoft completely bungled the messaging and the initial plans for their Xbox One.
    65:51
    They recovered before they came out, by and large, but a lot of people didn't forgive it. But now that Phil Spencer is back leading the Xbox division, And he takes gamers very seriously. And he's doing all the right things. It's just they sacrificed so much of the market to Sony from the get-go. What with the unit being $500 more because they insisted you had to have the Kinect. It being slightly less powerful for that price point. I mean, it's just, no, it's just, it's going to be, I mean, whether or not they can, I mean, it's weird to say recover because they're beating every milestone they had on the 360. It's not like the Xbox One is doing bad for Microsoft. It's just, Sony is doing so well, it's almost like the PS2 days. So it seems, because they're just doing gangbusters on that. Second time I've used that word during this podcast. Gangbusters! Right. It's like an old 40s, it's an old 40s cheerio. Gangbusters!
    66:52
    Next thing that they announced was Xbox Play Anywhere, which is, buy a game for the Xbox One, you get to play it on Windows PCs, no additional costs the saves cross share and also that cross play for all those titles is fully supported so that PC gamers and Xbox gamers can play together Gears of War 4 will be the first title to come out under the Xbox Play Anywhere banner what do you guys think? Well I did read that there's kind of a bit of a catch to that where if you buy it on the one it has to be the digital version as far as I know they have not said anything about what will happen if you buy a disc. Okay, so we don't know if the disc will not play anywhere, if it will include a code, if it will give you a digital version as well. Or is the disc going to be like there for a while the way PC gamers went? You went and bought the disc, you put the disc in your computer, and all the disc did was log you into Steam and download a thing from Steam. It was basically just a disc that had a code on it. Yeah.
    67:56
    Broadly, I think this is awesome. I know I have heard from people who have mentioned, and I'm not surprised, that there are some Xbox gamers who are angry about this because they think of it, yeah, they're shedding tears because they think that this is, and I try, I guess I can kind of understand it. I think the concern is that within doing this, Microsoft is either admitting defeat and or that this is the death of the Xbox because there's no longer any true exclusives to the console. People can just play it on PC. I think personally that this is a good thing I think it's a great thing I think that people like consoles because they plug in the living rooms and that's where you play I wanted to play games on PC all the time I would play games on PC all the time and I can if I want to and I just have both it's not a big deal in that regard but some people are mostly only going to play on PC some people are mostly only going to play on a console and if you can actually let those gamers play together I think it just makes things better for everyone. And I don't see it as a blow to the Xbox. Because I don't want to hook a PC up to my TV in the living room. I like consoles in the living room. It makes sense. Well, see, and I play at a computer desk. I sit at my computer desk. If I'm not playing a game, I still spend most of my time at my computer desk. I don't sit and watch TV in the living room or this or that. I mean, I do on occasion, but I spend most of my time at my computer desk working on stuff, writing, playing games, watching Netflix. I do all that stuff on the computer. I have, and that's what I've been for as long as I can remember. I've always been more centered around the computer than around the TV. So for me, being able to play these games, and especially play with my friends who are playing on Xbox and stuff, being able to actually play games with them without having to get an Xbox, I like it. I mean, this is something that would actually make me reactivate my live account that's been dead for years. And if they do it like how they did games for Windows Live back in the day, they dropped the need even for gold subscriptions, then you'd be able to sign in. Oh, and see that be even better? Yeah, they dropped that. At least with that architecture, they dropped it because they're like, oh, yeah. I mean, it was a mistake Microsoft made. They didn't realize that PC gamers won't pay for Internet access to their games. It's a different microcosm of the industry. So, no, I think this is good, but mostly because I would like to be able to play with PC gamers, and if Sony wants to stay by itself and not play with anyone else, that's fine. But I think this seems to fit very well with Microsoft's strategy, which is let's get our software content everywhere we can. We're the virus. Let's infect every device we can do, and this is a virus people want to get infected with. Yeah, and it's a great idea. And it helps with the console architecture being more PC-like than it was back in the day, and especially with Microsoft doing the Windows 10, what do they call it, the UMD, or not UMD, but they have a special name for it, but where Windows 10 and the Xbox stuff mixes together. It's using the same general background architecture type. It works really well, and it's really easy for them to do. And I think it's a plus. I think it's a major, major plus for them. Okay, so after that, they went in and got into the first game of their presentation, which was, as noted, the first title to be an Xbox Play Anywhere game that's coming out, which is Gears of War 4. So, Mike, do you have any thoughts on Gears of War 4 from what you saw? It looks like Gears of War, which isn't a bad thing.
    71:37
    I played all three of them. I never played Judgment. I heard it wasn't that great. it was different but I played the original trilogy of it and I enjoyed them I mean they're fun they're nothing the whole revolutionary aspect of a cover based shooter isn't really there anymore because not everybody does it I'd still say they're probably the gold standard of the cover based I've played they tend to feel the best actually when I saw that when I jotted my little notes down for this episode for Gears of War 4 I wrote war never changes because no It looks like a graphically impressive, tiny version of Gears of War 3. Maybe they've tweaked some of the controls a bit. It was sort of hard to tell on that. Now, I've only played the first Gears of War. I haven't played the others. But was the dialogue always so massively cheesy, or did they just embrace the camp fully from the first one? No, it has always been full camp. This has always been that. It has always been full camp. Because I played the first one, but I played the first one almost, I think I played nothing but multiplayer and co-op on it. I don't think I ever played the... Oh, through the single player? Through the single player. Yeah, no, I played Gears of War 1 on PC. It was one of my first games for Windows Live I played, actually. It was before I owned an Xbox. Then I played 2 and 3 and Judgment on the Xbox. And I did all their stories. I never got into the multiplayer on Gears.
    73:03
    Horde mode I thought was really cool, but not general multiplayer. And yeah, they had a big old ball of corn.
    73:11
    Yeah, they're a big old ball of corn. So anyway, this is not a priority buy for me for solo play. Gears, I really like Gears 3 in co-op, though. So it would be a co-op title. And hey, so maybe that'll be one that, you know, since it's going to be able to be played on PC as well, we'd actually be able to do and, you know, report back if we ever get it. So next thing we announced, Killer Instinct. Killer Instinct's been out for a while now. It was a launch title. But now General Rom, who was the chief bad guy in Gears of War 1, is a playable character.
    73:48
    It's Rom, though. You must not have played through. You didn't face General Rom. He may just be another character to just another fighting game. You don't play as you, Tony. But to me, I want to know, will he make control of his betrothed? I'm never going to live that down. Yes. And I didn't throw the controller. I just kind of dropped it in frustration. Well, of course. It's not a Nintendo controller. You could throw that on your Steamroller and it'd be fine. An Xbox controller, you'd break it. Now, Ron's already out. So has anyone tried it? He's out. He's currently... They, like, rotate a free character that you can play. He's currently the free character that you can play. So I went ahead and tried him. He sucks.
    74:31
    That was part of the fact that I don't like big characters. You don't like Zangief? but my biggest problem with him, as far as the way Killer Instinct works, you know, it's all very combo-driven, and all your characters have specific moves that they can start their combos with. He has one combo opener, and that's it. Which is atypical for Chaos. Yes, and he does have ways to... You can do, like, a normal attack and then combo into that, but it still feels very limiting. Okay. He felt clunky to me. Well, he'll just have to stay terrifying in his original title, Gears of War 1.
    75:10
    So, next game for Microsoft, which got a lot of hype from a lot of people who are fans of this, not so much for me, though, is Forza Horizon 3, which apparently was, I guess, one of the better kept secrets. That's maybe why there was such a reaction to it. I've not played a Horizon, pure Horizon game. I have played the Fast and the Furious game that came out on the Forza Horizon 2 platform. It was briefly free on Xbox. I did not get that. I played it at my brother-in-law's, though. Damn. Claim it's not yours. It's not. No, I wish I could have gotten it for free because as cheesy as it is, it was fun. I like the mechanics. It's more of an arcade-style racer, but only arcade-style in the sense that it's not Forza's realism. This is not burnout crazy or anything. It's just... I want another burn. It's easier to say, I don't like hyper-realistic racing games. Right. And this is not. Yeah, yeah. No, this is not from the looks of it. And I have to say, I was actually, when they first started and they were showing people playing, they had a guy playing, you know, in the gamer chair and, you know, people playing on Xbox and this and that. I was like, oh, okay, that's kind of cool, whatever. But when they showed, you know, joining a race and being airdropped in to race with your buddies in the middle of a race, it's like, okay, that's kind of cool. I remember a phrase they explicitly said is they described it as laid back. Yeah. Laid back. And it has stunts. You can do stunt jumps and stuff. Like I said, I'm not a big racing gamer, but this one, it was a little interesting. It was kind of cool. I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to keep an eye out for a sale maybe for Forza Horizon 2. It's been on sale a few times, but a decent, a big sale. And then maybe buy that and see if I like it. and then if so, I may lean towards this one, which is obviously more expansive in a lot of ways. Next game, ReCore. ReCore has been mentioned a few times for a while, but this is the 33 I've heard it brought up at. Maybe not. Maybe it was last year was the first one. I think it was just last year was when they first launched it. I'm probably thinking of... The Last Guardian? No, Scale Down. Oh, Scale Down. Which we'll get to later.
    77:26
    So, ReCore. They showed less than I had hoped, though I was able to find some actual gameplay stuff later on outside of this press conference.
    77:35
    But broadly, it's sort of a TPSS game-looking game. You have these robot types. What I found actually reading up on someone in press who was able to actually get some time on the game is the game's nonlinear, and you basically go to dungeons. There are various dungeons that you're going into to explore.
    77:57
    It has extensive platforming, so there's like aerial dash, double jump, that sort of character control to it. It's not a twitch shooter. The combat is more in the hack and slash vein of doing timing and movement, so there's a lot of auto-aiming and such. Cover-coded elemental damage, so you'll be like, oh, I need to switch to my fire because he's glowing red, and then I get double damage bonuses because I did that. It will have RPG mechanics. The main character's name is Jewel, and her robots all level. So you need to level them up and allocate that way. The game is going to be $40, not $60, and it will be one of the Play Anywhere titles. So it will be that cross-compatibility. So this one caught my eye last year when I saw it. There's been a lot of comparisons to Super Metroid, not surprising given who's making it.
    78:50
    I am interested in this. I wish I'd seen more, but I think this may be... I'm going to call it a hack and slash maybe a hack and slash that's up my alley I play them on occasion but not a whole lot but this one I just think is really interesting from what I've read when you're in combat and such the strategies when you're fighting the monsters they'll become sort of like switching elements they'll become weak at certain times different robots and you need to be constantly calling in the right one if you want to do appropriate damage and maximize your combat against those characters And so, anyway, it's one that's on my wish list. I like the art. I thought the concept sounded interesting. I'm not real big on the whole platforming section of all of it because I'm not a big platform gamer. But it looks okay. It's not something that's on my, you know what, I think it's on a, if I end up with it at some point or there's a good sale list, I don't know. It's just, I know a lot of people have been really excited for it, but it just didn't really grab me. Okay. Mike, any thoughts? I think it looks a little interesting. I need to see a little bit more of it first. But, I mean, the fact that I know a lot of people that worked on Metroid Prime are working on this. I loved Metroid Prime. And I should have said Metroid Prime, not Super Metroid. Yeah. But, I mean, it looks interesting. A game I'll keep an eye on. Okay. Well, next game is a game that you won't be keeping your eye on, and one we've already mentioned already. But Final Fantasy XV got to have time on Microsoft's conference with what perhaps we won't agree, but I would hope we could all agree was the worst gameplay demo of E3, where the guy who didn't know how to play his own game constantly got hit by a giant arm over and over and over. Yeah.
    80:44
    That bit did a very good job. If I had any interest in it, it would have probably died there. And if that didn't kill it, what we'll talk about later with the Final Fantasy XV VR experience would have finished it off. That's going to be fun to get to. All right, so this was for the E3 flow. This was the first time I actually got to see the active fighting system against an enemy, a large enemy. I've got a signal already. You've got to see the active fighting system as it pertains to you getting your ass beat. You've got to see what you've got to do. Command prompts coming up and then the guy failing to hit something. Yes. You've got to see what happens when you fail every quick time of that to the fact. Yes. And somehow I think they had no fail mode turned on because I swear at one point the entire party was wiped out and they just pulled out of that guy.
    81:37
    So it didn't leave a good impression on anyone? No. Okay. No, it did not mean either. Next game they hit on was Tom Clancy's The Division, which has already been out for a while. They just sent some footage for an upcoming DLC. I found it forgettable. I actually had The Division on my wish list, and I pulled it after watching E3. Yeah, The Division, when it was originally announced back, when it was looking to be a launch title for the consoles, looked awesome. And what it became turned into be not nearly. as cool as what it sounded. And everybody I've talked to who plays it, I've got like four or five friends who grabbed it and were talking about how great it was when they originally got it. And at this point, one of them plays it every once in a while, and that's it. None of them have any interest in it anymore. It's just, it's dropped off hard, and I don't see where the DLC is going to add anything to it. Yeah, I don't know. In a lot of ways, it seems like it's Ark. And in a way, even if it's gameplay to an extent, it kind of reminds me of what happened with Destiny. And hey, maybe they can have that thing, Destiny saved itself with this DLC, from what I understand.
    82:46
    The Taken King DLC brought Destiny back really hard. And then they decided they were going to trip and stumble and fall through everything after that. Oh, interesting. So they brought a bunch of people back, and then they shed most of them again. I get the demo for Destiny, and that convinced me not to get it. Yeah. All right. next thing was Battlefield 1 we've already talked extensively about it the only thing really was that they plugged the Xbox One with subscribers who took EA access which is not EA access isn't available on PlayStation so they didn't allow it so if you are an Xbox One member and a Gold member and you have EA access you get access to Battlefield 1 early that was basically all the news that there was about it they then transitioned over into some updates for the Xbox network itself, Xbox Live. So they're doing a variety of upgrades.
    83:45
    They're doing clubs, which is kind of a way you can join interested people. It's almost like chat forums. I don't know. It's kind of how it feels to me. I can see it on the web. I don't know how well it'll work, actually, like running it from the console. Of all those announcements, the only ones that really sounded interesting to me was the looking for group one. I thought that would be helpful. That would be helpful for all the things. It would be nice to be able to put up a flag, because there's certain games that I play that my friends don't play that I could use some help with on doing certain things. So, yeah, that one would be the one that was most interesting to me. I thought Arena was sort of neat in terms of, I thought it sounds like it could be a good way to do tournaments. Yes. But the game selection seemed pretty limited. And how many games are you going to really tournament anyway? Probably not a lot. Yeah. So, again, I didn't think it would be something I'd really use much. I thought I could see it being more useful than clubs. It would be useful for, like, fighting games. Right. The problem is, though, all the good fighting games are going PS4 only. Yeah, that's unfortunate. But, hey, maybe that'll change with this PC, Xbox, unified front sort of thing. I don't know. Capcom is a district for whoever will throw money at them. Yeah. Yep. All right. Next was Minecraft, the friendly update. It's basically them taking the console version of Minecraft and making it being able to do everything the PC Minecraft has done. Yeah. I'd say the major announcement that I caught was that they apparently have a very, very broad plan to try and make Minecraft super-duper cross-platform. Very much so. And so I'm sure that will be really exciting to Minecraft players. I don't play Minecraft. I don't care. I play a little bit. My eldest daughter loves it. She would play it a lot more if I let her. But, yeah, for the most part, eh. then they talked some about the Xbox design lab which is for the colorful controllers yeah they look neat but I don't see it being something I would use if I was going to put that kind of money on I'd add some extra money to it and get an elite controller exactly yeah because I think they were talking like 70 bucks for them 70 or 75 plus an extra 10 if you want your name or gamer tag why wouldn't you get your name or gamer tag you need your gamer tag on there you're going to get a custom controller there's got to a lot around here.
    86:03
    Okay, so that was that part. Then they went into their indie game stuff, which is ID at Xbox. Indie game things are getting huge everywhere. They are. I understand the push on it, because when the consoles were coming out, this was one of those things that was a near stumble for Microsoft. Sony really stressed their openness for indie games. On the PS3, they were known to be more open than getting on Xbox Live Arcade. And so ID at Xbox has been that opening of the floodgates. But, you know, there's also been the issue of the floodgates are open and we are getting a lot of crap now that used to just be for Steam. But anyway, so they, you know, they blurred through a whole lot of little itty bits of games But let see There was They focused on a game called Inside which is made by the people who did Limbo
    86:54
    No clues. Yeah, no clue. The only thing of note is Limbo is now free on Xbox One, so if you're a Gold member, go get your free Limbo game if you haven't played it on the 360, because it is a good game. They noted that there are currently over 1,000 games in development that will be coming out on ID at Xbox, so yeah, that's quite a bit of volume.
    87:14
    Let's see. Cuphead. I saw that in the... That was a good one. Remains awesome looking. Probably the most viscerally interesting one. But it's been that for a while. I don't want to see it anymore. It's time for it to come out.
    87:29
    Also thought that Everspace looked like it might be a decent space sim, but it was hard to tell with the pictures. Yeah, it was kind of cool from what little bit they showed. I also saw Bloodstained Ritual of the Night was in that, which is the guy that used to always make Castlevania. that's his Kickstarter one basically his Mighty O'Night except for it doesn't look like it's going to crash like Mighty O'Night is I did see a little bit of footage of that off camera that someone had put on YouTube later on and it looks Castlevania-ish and very much in that whole one thing with that Symphony of the Night vein the Metroid route basically it looks a lot like that not so bad so they noted that Ark Survival Evolved is going to be free on Windows 10 for anyone who already bought it on the Xbox One, so that's going over to PC.
    88:16
    Now, here's one that definitely caught my eye. We Happy Few. That was creepy. Creepy as hell. Yeah, dude. That's exactly what I have written down. That's exactly what I wrote.
    88:28
    It felt like, from what I saw, it was a mix of that movie equilibrium with a thought-esque world. So everyone's taking their happy drug to stay happy, but in reality, things make so happy. That is on my to-get list. I actually looked. It's in early access on Steam now, but it's the game I'm not going to touch in early access because I don't really do early access anymore. But it is... I wish-listed it. I mean, I literally wish-listed it on Steam because it's... I went to, but it's going to be digital only on Xbox. I haven't added it to my Amazon wish-list. I went to do it because this looks wonderfully horrific. I am a fan of horror genre in video games. I buy a lot of them, actually, when I look at my collection. And so, yeah. This, well, I think they showed a glimpse of it at last year's E3. I had no knowledge on it. I had no knowledge on it either. Now, this actually was the game that interested me and surprised me the most of the Microsoft stuff. Yeah. The first time I've ever seen or heard anything about this game was that little clip. And that clip left me sitting here going, that's awesome.
    89:38
    It was. Yeah, it grabbed me. And the final part of this section that they did was let's play a game of Gwent.
    89:48
    Okay. For those that don't know, but you should because we already told you what you had. You had your VR headset, you got your grappling hook, and you got your deck of cards. This is your deck of cards from Microsoft. Yet another strategy card game. This one comes out of Witcher 3. I've been playing Witcher 3 ongoing right now. I actually had to play a game of Gwent last night in the game. I lost like I always do. This is Gwent. It's fine. I mean, it's not like a poorly designed card game or anything, but to me, every time I play these, I'm like, I'll just pick Magic. I'll take Magic the Gathering. I don't need all this. So I'm not going to describe Gwent to anyone. Play Witcher 3 if you want to know, because Witcher 3 is a good game. And then, you know, you'll be forced to play some Gwent, and then you can figure out whether or not you ever want to buy a game. That's just it. But I was very unimpressedly spent any time making that game, much less talking about it. Okay, so that really ended the sort of ID at Xbox segment, as I had noted. And then they transitioned to, I thought, a pretty impressive video footage of Tekken 7. Now, important news, something people might not be used to, Tekken 7 is actually releasing with a full and complete story mode. that's to be fair it's only Street Fighter 5 that has been criticized about that well it is almost the end of June and where is that mode that was supposed to be here before June well I had to wonder it's the end of the month with the Tekken 7 the video footage was I forget the Tekken guy Mashima Hachi I'm drunk you're both drunk making me the winner so Mishima versus Akuma and so initially I thought this was the Tekken Cross Street Fighter that we talked about years ago but now I've decided that they were just like they probably called up Capcom and were like you guys are so slow we're going to put Akuma in our game so that you can no Capcom already put out their versus one it's Namco that hasn't done it right right no I meant so slow on the Street Fighter 5 updates sorry my joke didn't work very well my understanding is This is kind of helping them prototype tech and cross-strip fighting. Yeah.
    92:08
    I've watched a couple interviews or talks given by people who got a chance to play the demo on the floor. They say the story mode is good and it's interesting because it balances between being cinematic and your standard fighting and the back to cinematic stuff. And they say it actually flows well and it feels good. and they also said that you can tell when you play it's not like you're just playing Tekken with a character with a Tekken character who looks like Akuma he plays different he feels different he has different moves and he has stuff that the Tekken people don't have and they say it's interesting it's not like game breaking but it's interesting and it's different yeah the story mode transitions with the cinematics to gameplay. They showed a little bit of that during the press conference. I thought it looked neat. Yeah, yeah. And looked smooth. So anyway, I thought it was fairly impressive for what they showed. Yeah. I'm surprised it's next year, though, before it's coming out, because it's been out in Arcade in Japan for, like, a year now. Well, this is a different build. What is? Yeah, because they're re-releasing the arcades with this build, and their name is going to be Tekken 7 subtitles, some subtitles, I don't remember now. I want to think it's Dark Resurrection or something like that, but I might be thinking one of the previous Tekken ones, I don't remember. Yeah, but it's basically a new game, but the same game. Well, it's an update. Yeah. But I find it surprising because they're playing Tekken 7 Evo this year. That is going to be so massively Japanese player dominated because no one in the U.S. has gotten really much of a chance to play it except for like a few arcade locations that have actually imported the machine, which I think there's a couple in California. There's probably a few in New York. But everyone else across the country has not really had a chance to play Tekken 7 yet. So what you're saying is we need to start an arcade that started importing Japanese fighting games to our pin bar. I would have no problem with that. For option two, we talk about the crazy illogic structure that is the selection of games for Evo in a future podcast. Okay. I think there's a lot of criticism that can be levied at Evo for their game. There has to be a tournament for every single Smash Brothers ever released. Except Brawl. They hate Brawl. Except Brawl. Brawl is for scrubs. Don't get confused.
    94:41
    Okay, so, anyway, yeah, interesting Tekken 7. Oh, and Xbox Gold people listening, Tekken Tag Tournament 2 is now free for Gold members to download, so. Well, I think it's free for like a week or something like that. Well, those of you who are listening on time, like you should be, go check and download it. And if not, sorry, you were too slow. All right, next was some footage of Dead Rising 4. Again, not surprising. Looks to be as zany as Dead Rising 3 was. You're Frank West again, who was the original protagonist of the first Dead Rising. Has featured in a couple other Dead Risings in some capacity as well. Looks like you're back at a mall also. You're back in the original town. from what I've heard. Okay. So, weapons, zany as ever. Vehicles. I did read that, yeah, the vehicles. I wondered if they were going to do it in a mall to cut down on the vehicles, because I'd say the only criticism... I really like Dead Rising 3. A lot of people who were Dead Rising fans of the original did not like it. Because, I'd say, my summary of Dead Rising, I've played them all. I went back and checked. I've actually played them all. They have gotten progressively crazier. But the first Dead Rising designed, Japanese developers did that one, whereas Capcom controls Dead Rising, but the Canadians have been making it more recently. And that one, it was very brutal, very hard. It was still silly, but it wasn't until Dead Rising 2 that weapon crafting came into play. In Dead Rising 3, they made it even easier to go weapon crafting. But one of my criticisms of it is the vehicles were way overpowered. and you practically always wanted to be in a vehicle just because that was the only way to, no matter what, it was the easiest way to kill lots of zombies is make your motorcycle steamroller combo and just go, because they have flamethrowers, of course. Yeah, of course. And so, anyway, but I thought it was a lot of fun because they, it was sort of like Saints Row, which, Right, and that's my thought on Dead Rising. Right. Dead Rising is very Saints Row. Right, and you go and you embrace the, but, you know, different people have different limits. So, like, I know some people, I haven't played Saints Row 4. You're missing out. But some people think that Saints Row 4 went too far. Oh, I don't. Saints Row 3 is the proper amount of camp. Saints Row 4 is stupid. Saints Row 4 went very, very far. Oh, yeah. And it is great for it. Yeah. Saints Row 4 embraces its insanity and is better for it. Okay. So we are hoping that Dead Rising 4 embraces the insanity and is better for it. Yeah. All right. Next up was Scalebound. The 33 I have now seen Scalebound. Yeah, I think so. And hopefully the last. So this is Hipster Beats by Dre Dragon Game, right? Yes. Exactly. You remember. Good. Made by Platinum Games. Yes. Made by Platinum Games. They know action, and the action looks good. You just have to get around the annoying douchebag of a protagonist. I didn't think the action looked good. Maybe it was the people they had playing. Well, I've seen a lot of other footage from the game. Okay, because that's all the footage I've seen in the game is that, and it was terrible. And it's like, oh, there's me and my friends, and my friends are going to sit on dragons and spit fire, and I'm going to sit here, and I'm going to say stupid crap. And a lot of these games have done this whole thing. They have just the most BS talk back and forth between the players. Like, hey, man, you go do this, and I'll go do that. yip, yip, yip, yip, yip, yip. It's like, nobody talks that way. I mean, it's just, oh, no, this game made me want to vomit. Okay. I actually have this one on my wish list because I think that, and what I'm hoping is that it has what I would describe as epic co-op gameplay. It's reminding me of Lost Planet 2, which had a lot of flaws, but was a lot of fun in co-op. It was stupid. It had a lot of epic major boss battles and stuff going on, though, and it required good teamwork to properly score and take out those enemies. Well, well laid out and good co-op and stuff like that could do it. I just think this was a bad demonstration. It wasn't the worst demonstration of the night at all. I just thought it came off really bad. The character looked terrible.
    99:04
    Listen, you need to just get over your bias against Beats headphones. Because that's what you're saying. You don't like people walking around with headphones. You're an earbuds man. I get it. I made Lucio in Overwatch. That's as beast by grace you can get. But that just, oh, there was, I'm sorry, when he put the headphones on, I don't know, did it change a mode or it did what? I don't know. It was focused, like going up to a pendulum. I think it changed the music. It changed the music as well. It's like, it's skill-bound. It's like Iron Eagle. He's got to turn the music on so he can fly his jet fighter. But, oh, I don't know. Hey, the dong begins to rise. So you've got to expect it. I love those. I know. That's why I brought it up. Burn down your argument. Scale down. Controversial.
    99:53
    Next game, Rares, Sea of Thieves. We saw a little bit of it in 2015 E3. I guess I'd say it looked better this time than it did then. They did this weird thing, though, where they kind of opened with, you're apparently this pirate. And I guess you do various things. There's some parts where, like, the pirate was swimming, the pirate was walking around, and then, obviously, you do things on the ship. But then the actual gameplay was, apparently, a bunch of people playing who had never played or saw the tutorial. Which first sounded like they were reading from a script with a dialogue. but sounded very particular in their word choice, and were engaged in a naval battle, which, I mean, naval broadsides look cool. I'm thinking, you know, I bet there are a lot of people who like Sid Meier's Pirates who want this to be awesome, but I still don't really know what is going on with it, and it's not resonating with me. This game can either be really amazing, or it will crash and burn hard. And the whole doing this shit but you have to rely on other players is going to mess it up. Right in the trailer, they had a guy, I can't see where I'm going, do I need to turn? And everybody else was like, I'm getting drunk! Woo!
    101:15
    It's like, okay, I don't want to play a co-op game where I literally have to rely 100% on a bunch of, it is not a pubby game. It is not a game you would ever want to play with bubbies. But it's, I don't know. Now, some of the stuff was cool. The people trying to fix the holes where the ship had been holed under the waterline, it was leaking, that was cool. Me getting overly excited and making you pull the mic away, that is cool. I'm never watching the peaks on this audio read. I'm like, you guys!
    101:47
    Maybe a pop filter, like right here. No, they're not going to pop up away from the area you're flying in. We'll find out. I think this game has potential, but it has so much of a chance to crash and burn so hard and be terrible. Yeah, it's very unfortunate because I wish that there was more buzz. You know, it's been a while since we've seen Rare do something that wasn't Kinect. And I think a lot of people remember Rare from the heyday and they want to see that again. But Rare isn't bringing back the old franchises. Well, the big problem is most of the people that worked at Rare, back when Rare was big, back at the end of the Super NES into the N64 days, they've all moved on to other studios. Exactly, I know. That's why, I mean, the pedigree, it's the same as saying, oh, well, I love Call of Duty when it's made by Infinity Ward. It's like, well, the Infinity Ward, if you're thinking like Call of Duty 4, the Infinity Ward you know and love is Respawn now, doing Titanfall.
    102:50
    That's just the name now. It's the same with Rare. But I still, some people think that, you know, well, it's an English studio. They have a certain category. They want to see it restored to that. I would like to see that. But I, you know, whether or not this does it, I agree with Tony. I think that this could be a disaster for them. But it has the potential. I'm not seeing it yet. And so I kind of wish that they would have waited until they had more to present before even coming out at an E3 and showing anything to just maybe hook people better than what they are. But it is what it is. Next game that they featured, excuse me, was State of Decay 2. I never played the first one. This one looked pretty. I played the first one. What did you think of it? I enjoyed it. It had issues. It had big issues at launch that got fixed later on.
    103:43
    There's a DLC pack that fixed a bunch more. It's a good game. It's nothing super fancy. It's not getting any best game of the year type stuff. Right. But it was enjoyable.
    103:57
    And I think this one looks like it has the potential to be the same thing. It seems that, like a lot of the other stuff they pushed tonight, have a lot of co-op. And I think this is a game that would definitely be good from co-op. It was one of those games where you don't fall in love with your character because you're going to die. And when you die, you literally just become another survivor from your group. Okay. and keep going. I've gone, actually, and put the first one on my wish list to see about getting on the cheap to try it out, because genre-wise and play style-wise, this looks like my sort of game that I would enjoy sort of casually, and this looks like more of the same to me. Number two looks like more of the same, from what I could tell. Yep. That's what it looked to me. All right. Next was Halo Wars 2. Neither of you played Halo Wars. I did. I played Halo Wars. I own Halo Wars. on my 360. I think you got it for me for like birthday or Christmas. I mean, I've played it.
    104:56
    It's an RTS on console. As an RTS goes, I'd say it's fairly simplified. It needed to be for the console controls. And I thought it worked well with the console controls. Because it was built from the ground up with console and mouse. So this will be one where it's on sale.
    105:12
    It's more of the same as Nier Psychic Town. It's prettier. beta launched immediately so anyone who's really excited about Halo Wars can scoop up the beta and give that a try game's not actually supposed to come out until early 2017 did note that it is going to be a play it anywhere title so people can by and large I think RTS works better on PC this one obviously is designed for consoles so I don't think it really matters when it comes to Halo Wars but if you want to play RTS on PC and you want Halo, go ahead and grab it for that. I think the most interesting thing about this game to me is the trailer was amazing. The Halo people put out trailers that are really good. I mean, I'm not talking they're not like Blizzard-level trailers, but they put out trailers for games. Because I remember the cinematic trailer for Fall of Reach was awesome. And for Halo 4, I think. Yeah, I think you're right. Well, they were amazing. And this trailer was awesome. Well, it was done by Blur Studios. Was it? Yes. So that explains. That tells you right there. Yeah. Blur does amazing cinematic trailers for video games. Yeah, because that trailer was awesome. I mean, I didn't have any big interest in the game, but the trailer was just like, wow, that's a really awesome trailer. Okay, so finally, we're at the end of the Microsoft conference. last item was the announcement of what had already leaked which was Project Scorpio and I think that's the only reason this announcement happened I thought so as well I know others think that they were going to announce no matter what but I think the leak just because it's not it's a holiday 2017 release it's still I guess Xbox One architecture but unlike the S which is mostly just some refinements this is the incremental upgrade that we've been hearing about Sony's PlayStation Neo project, which also leaked, though. What hadn't leaked with Project Scorpio was the specs. We know the Neo specs. They leaked.
    107:22
    This one, spec-wise, is significant. It's significantly more powerful than the Neo is. It's going to be true 4K gaming.
    107:34
    Not upscale, true. High-fidelity VR will be supported, which the current Sony PlayStation 4 can support their VR sets. Microsoft's Xbox One cannot support the Oculus, which the assumption is not confirmed yet. The assumption is Microsoft and Oculus have been in talks for a long time. John Carmack was in the Minecraft section. John Carmack was one of the people in the Minecraft section doing VR stuff.
    108:00
    And Oculus is gone. Right. No, I mean, there's no other indication that Microsoft, There's no indications that Microsoft was developing in-house their own VR headset, and I've seen nothing saying they've been in talks with anyone else. They want Oculus. It's smarter than... I think going in-house would be an extra thing, especially when it's apparent they're pushing the software side so much harder than hardware now. Right. Phil Spencer was the one who came out and spoke on this, and he stressed that all the accessories and games are going to work on the original Xbox One, and the Xbox One S and the Project Scorpio. Though, I mean, if a VR thing's coming out, how can that work on the S and the original one? I mean, there must be some demarcation there. My thought is that the way they're setting it up is that everything will be backwards compatible, but not necessarily everything will be forwards compatible. So there will be things that require the Scorpios and all that. It will require the new stuff. You won't be able to play it on your One. Right, right. But the reason why I agree with you, Tony, on the announcement is, to me it doesn't make any sense to say, start your presentation and say, here's the Microsoft One S, and then say, but you really should wait a year and buy the good machine, the really good machine. I mean, the One S is a better machine than the One Vanilla. I mean, if you've got an HDR-compatible TV, at least, or you want a two-terabyte hard drive, or you want something that isn't massive with a huge power pick. So it's got lots of reasons why anyone who is in the market for an Xbox now to want to buy it. But it just seems so weird to me to say, but just wait until the following Christmas, and then you can have Scorpio. And here's what I think the big thing is going to be. Scorpio's price point is going to be high. Scorpio's price point is going to be really high.
    109:58
    Do you have a guess as to how high? You know, six wouldn't surprise me. I don't think they'll go over five. I don't think they think, I don't think Microsoft thinks they can get away with going over five. The only thing that makes me think that they might be lower than that is with so many of the production companies switching over to the new 14 nanometer chips and prices dropping out on so much of like the graphics cards as the, you can, Because there's new graphics cards coming out using the 14-animated chips that you can get that make the old Titans and this and that and all the $1,000 cards. They're like twice as powerful, and they're like $400 because of the new architecture and the new chips allow. It's the only thing I think that might keep the prices down. Yeah. But I don't know. I'm just guessing. I'm saying this from a marketing standpoint. From a marketing standpoint, I think you're right. I think that makes the most sense. I just think I don't see how they wouldn't be selling at losses.
    110:55
    That's true. But anyway, so you say six, I say five. Do you have any thoughts, Mike, on Scorpio or the price point on Scorpio? No, not a clue. I think their hand was pushed. I think between the leak and the NEO, they had to drop something.
    111:14
    And I think that's what happened. Yeah. Because otherwise, I mean, especially given Sony didn't talk about, or not to their conference yet, but they didn't talk about the Neo at their conference. And given that, the 1S would have been plenty of hardware news for Microsoft. Had there been no leaks whatsoever, because Sony wasn't going to say anything about hardware. No. Other than VR. And the 1S was the answer on the VR front, I think. Look, people want an affordable console, here you go. You can get one for $300. Yep.
    111:44
    Okay. Okay, so that concluded the Microsoft segment, which means we can finally move on. And next up is Ubisoft. Is it Ubisoft or Ubisoft? I always forget. It is the Aisha Tyler Power Hour. That's what it is. It was like two hours. Well, yeah, that's right. It was. That one, it felt long. And I like Aisha. She's my favorite host. I see why they bring her back. And I said, let me see the one who did this last year. and then by the end I'm like, I see why. Because she actually feels like a legitimate real gamer who's actually excited about this stuff. I mean, she's got a podcast that I listen to. I like her a lot. She's got a lot of cool stuff. What's her podcast? It's like, you should have something around it. Oh, okay, so I have a name in it? Yeah, yeah, her name's in it. It's literally, she only puts it out like once a month, and it's literally her talking to other famous people about stuff. Oh, okay. Yeah, it's... Okay, so the first game on Ubisoft was Ghost Recon Wildlands. That's a lie. It was? The first game was Just Dance 2017. The opening segment was all the furry things around. I was getting my drink when that was on. I forgot about that. The opening segment was a bunch of furries dancing on stage. I missed that whole thing because I was like, oh, here's the show. I can't get a drink. A whole bunch of furries dancing on stage, and in the corner it said, Just Dance 2017. That was literally the entire thing. Wow. And then I knew shit came out, and the furries left. And they had a moment of silence for the pole shooting. Okay. Well, Mike and Tony, since I guess you guys saw it, what were your thoughts on Just Dance, the 2017 furry edition? I have no thoughts. Furries dance. Other than that, I did read they're having a Hatsune Miku song on this one.
    113:35
    That's not a surprise. Her popularity is really shooting up. I've heard the concerts around the country have been selling out or being darn near sold out. They've been doing pretty good.
    113:46
    Okay. Well, after the furries left, then they went to the second game of the OV Top Conference, which was... Ghosts or Bad. Is it Ghosts or the Gone Wild? Is it? Yes. Okay. I'm checking. because who knows what I remember anymore. All right. I've played a lot of Ghost Recon games. This one is not really on my radar, though, but it seems quite plot-driven, which isn't an impression I got from the past ones. So kudos on that. I've always just liked Rainbow Six more than Ghost Recon. Ghost Recon's been more the open-world team Tom Clancy thing, and Rainbow Six is the let's break into a building until terrorists sort of thing. The action-adventure open-world approach to this sounds fun, but as we noted earlier, everything's open world now, so I guess they felt they had to do that here. They didn't have a card game in the final. That we saw. We might be there. Oh, my. Talk about the gameplay demo and the chatter.
    114:44
    Air quotes. Chatter. That was painful. My favorite was where one of the guys was like, I'm keeping it stealthy as he was gunning down guards. I actually saw on YouTube, I'm not saying the link, I'm not putting it in the show notes, I just glimpsed it and I was really tired, and it was a Ghost Recon Wildlands. It was doing a demo footage from that conference, and then my actual experience, and it was just like people crashing the bike into the fence, everything that always really happens. Not just a week, you know, going and doing a multi-prong approach and getting the terrorists with the little mini chopper flying in. No. That's not how those games work. No, it is not. There's always just lots of cussing, lots of just people trying to do their own thing. There's always the one guy who just wants to be a sniper. Okay, so, anyway, for people who want yet another open-world action-adventure game, but with helicopters and potential for chatter. And Tom Clancy's name on it. Ghost Recon Wildlands may be the game for you. Next up was South Park, the fractured butthole. I tried to space that out it's a sequel to South Park's The Stick of Truth which I have not played it yet it's going to be on the list now it was a lot of fun I really enjoyed it I've played through it a couple of times whereas that one was more fantasy oriented this one is going with the whole superhero theme combat is a turn based grid system RPG approach yeah it's a bit more positioning it's different than the combat in Stick of Truth. Stick of Truth was more old school RPG type where like the old Final Fantasy type where we're in a line, they're in a line, we choose our targets. Yeah, and this one seems to have a lot more classes because Stick of Truth only had like three classes, three or four classes. This one looks like it has like seven or more. Okay. So yeah, no, I actually thought it was a really good presentation. Actually, Stick of Truth is free for anyone who gets fractured buttholes. So I may just wait and get that and then get both with it. But anyway, it caught my eye because Stick of Truth I'd heard good things about. Never noticed the big sale on it, though, and so it's always just. I got it on a Steam sale. The last South Park game I played was a tower defense game, which it was all right. It was an enjoyable tower defense game. The last South Park game I played was South Park 64. Man, that game was bad.
    117:21
    And that's probably why you've not played any since. Okay, so after South Park, because they needed to use that to break things up, because then it was time to talk about more Tom Clancy. The expansions for The Division. I don't have anything else to say. We hit on The Division earlier. Yeah, this didn't change anything. Yeah, the mic? No. Okay. All right, so next up was a VR game for the Oculus. Well, they showed it on the Oculus, but it will be supported for other VR platforms, which is Eagle Flight. Ka-ka. They demoed a capture-the-flag 3 versus 3 eagle thing. visually it didn't I bet it could be very nauseating when you were actually the art was very the art was visually it didn't excite me but it looked like a fun simple game yeah it could be a fun little simple game I don't know I don't recall eagles having sonic blast yeah I thought that they should integrate it with Mike so you actually have to go caca and then you just have a room full of people caca caca it would be better to just walk into a room and there's like one person playing online and he's like, Ah!
    118:29
    Yeah, it's like when they integrated for Skyrim with Kinect, they allowed you to actually do the, say the dragon phrases and shoot the dragon powers. So everyone was like, I never actually played with that mode, but I was tempted.
    118:46
    But had it been Kaka, I would have done it. Then they transitioned to the next VR title that they wanted to showcase, which was Star Trek Bridge Crew. Now that is exactly what I think a lot of people have been looking for. I know there's a thing, Artemis, is a thing out there you can do with laptops and tablets that does the bridge crew thing.
    119:08
    But I think the addition of VR is going to make this really popular. To me, this was the sort of title that VR is built for. a sort of thing which I have trouble imagining working without VR properly. I mean, I can envision a game where you're a crew. That's not a big issue. I can't tell the gameplay would be fun from what they showed. But I think if you ever wanted to be, actually be on a starship, like you wanted to role-play a starship, and this is the closest thing you're going to get to not actually, without being on a set. See, my problem with this is it looks like this is the thing where you want to play with your friends as a group, as you've been around in this and that. Yeah. And who owns four Oculus's or four Fives? Right. Yeah, and so, because it seems like it'd be something you do in person. Like, you're actually, you're using that to build your set instead of actually being on a, you know, your own plywood set. Again, and it's stress teamwork. So even if there was an online component, you're not going to, you know, teamwork things like this, I'm just having trouble imagining a game with randoms. I don't see it working. You need to put up the shield. No, I want you to float on. Pew, pew. I don't know. But anyway, I thought it was a neat interview as well, because they got some Star Trek people to actually play the game. They showed that, and then Reading Rainbow God came. Lamar Burton. Thank you. Lamar Burton, Jerry Ryan, and Carl Urban. Yeah.
    120:35
    Anyway, interesting for those who are into the VR thing. Next up, I think this is a game that after last year's E3, Tony, you were interested in. Yes. For Honor. yeah it was one of the big games out of last year's E3 that interests me the most I still don't know what to think about this it looks like it could be fun sort of hack and slash different eras and regions famous warrior types they showed a little segment with a guy going out to do a boss fight and then they showed last year they showed like nothing but multiplayer and this year they showed a bunch of single player and the single player stuff to me was like this seems like a game that's more multiplayer needed The single player was like, oh, that's kind of interesting, but it wasn't anything huge to me. I think the biggest thing that came out of this thing is the guy doing the announcements is bloody awesome. They should have had him doing more stuff because he was just cool.
    121:32
    I think Ubisoft, more than anybody else, did a really good job of having presenters that were fun and comfortable and weren't like overly nervous and this and that. But occasionally weird. We'll get to that in a couple games. I know what you're talking about. But it didn't feel, they didn't feel as forced than reading from the teleprompter script as some of the others did. Do you have any thoughts, Mike, on For Honor? It looks kind of interesting, but it doesn't really stand out to me. Well, the next game didn't stand out to me, and that was Grow Up. which... Is that the robot one? Yes. It's the sequel to Grow Home. I don't know. It's like platform-esque. You're trying to get to the moon. Yeah, basically,
    122:25
    Grow Home was one of those games where you either fell completely and utterly in love with it, or you just didn't care. It wasn't even... You didn't even hate it. You just didn't care, is how it came off when it came out last year. And Grow Up looks the same. Yeah, I just... I saw that and was like, I don't care. Yeah, that was me. Okay, well, so much for Grow Up. All right, next was the one that we just briefly alluded to back on For Honor, which was Trials of the Blood Dragon, which had two presenters coming out in their finest early 90s attire. I think one of them said he was the king of Thin Wind or something. I could barely understand what they were saying.
    123:05
    I think there might be some sexual harassment lawsuits from the number of people whose heads got slapped and hair-tosseled while they were walking through the crowd. The crowd obviously did not know this was going to happen to them. So that's why I don't know if the waivers had all been signed or not. I don't think so. But really, really weird way to announce the game, which is a cross between Trials, like Trials HD, which was a platform bike kind of... It's all about sticking your landings and doing these jumps, and Blood Dragon, which was a Far Cry spin-off thing, which was, I thought, a lot of fun. It was awesome. It was 80s camp. This is not awesome. This is an abomination. I agree with you, Mike. Blood Dragon was great.
    123:53
    Trials is loved by some people as a sort of platformer. I play a lot of platformers. I didn't like Trials. In a way, it was too hard. Because it's not about sticking... I mean, because you have to stick the landing as a bike. It's not just like get up on the platform. So, whereas I could get into Super Meat Boy, I couldn't get into Trials. But this, the gameplay seems almost all Trials. It's just while you're doing stuff, you're like shooting weird crazy stuff in the background. So, I was just like, oh, I just want a Blood Dragon 2. And this is when you give me abomination. That's my salvation. I have no comment overall. It looked nuts. The entrance was weird. It looked nuts. And I just, I don't know. All right. Well, next game was Watch Dogs 2. Did they cover it? Watch Dogs failed hard. That's why I was so surprised this got a sequel. I played Watch Dogs. I got it as a gift. It was okay. It felt a lot like a last-gen game that just somehow got on the current gen of consoles. And there was a lot of unrealized potential because it's all about you being this elite hacker in the first one. But it's like... all it really was is it was ostensibly you do some mini games at various points to gain access to cameras and stuff. And then otherwise, when you're driving around, you would essentially be using your phone to hack certain parts of the road to knock out cars by blowing up steam pipes and stuff. But it was, I mean, it's all just like push and exit. I mean, it's not, it just wasn't good. It was okay. It just wasn't good. It was a pretty open world. but you're going to inevitably compare it to something like Grand Theft Auto, and it wasn't as good as Grand Theft Auto 4, much less, I haven't played 5, but a lot of people love it. I mean, it's just, again, yeah, it was very criticized. So I was really surprised Ubisoft bothered to greenlight the sequel to it. I've heard it pre-sold well and pre-sales got the greenlight. Okay. Well, I can tell it doesn't, from the footage they showed us, it's apparently not following the original protagonist. You were saying it just as well. Just as well at that, too. It's just, I don't know. It didn't look... I think it comes down to the hacking. If they can actually make the hacking meaningful and not just, like, the silly gimmick that's the theme of it, maybe it can be... But, again, it's another open-world game in a field crowded with open-world games. And they don't have a card game that we know of. But it's a controlled RC card game because somehow nobody noticed this RC car driving around an apartment. Or the drone that they used as well. Right. And the super stealthy hacker who's going to get in and hack everything and then just grabs a machine gun and starts gunning people down. I don't know. It didn't do it well. All of my hacker friends are like that.
    126:41
    That's how they all are. Well, the final game for Ubisoft was Steep, which is an extreme winter sports game, or as I call it, SXX 2.0. See, I really liked the last SXX. I did too. And if you like that, apparently that's in there. There's snowboarding in it. I saw it. This is online. I've seen this got a lot of buzz, that this was unique. It wasn't yet another shooter, but nothing about it attracted me. I was just like, maybe that's because I haven't been a big fan of, like, SSX and those style of games where you're doing all the stunts and racing. They really focused on the ability to go anywhere and then, like, do the whole lot of the rewind and all that and the replay. and it's like GoPro style stuff. It looks interesting to me as someone who's enjoyed SSX games but from what they showed I'm not sure what the game is. It's literally from my thoughts and from the looks of it and from the fact that you can join in groups and do stuff with friends and this and that I think it's literally just I'm going to snowboard or I'm going to wingsuit. I don't think there's any there's not a goal. I don't think there's a story. Well, it seemed like you could go to certain points, and then if anyone was nearby, multiplayer-wise, in general, they'd throw you into a race. Like, how does that work without there being lobbies? I mean, is it just like, am I racing one other person? There's one other person there? I don't know. It's just a lot of unanswered questions. It looked good. Visually, it looked great. Yeah. So, anyway, we'll have to wait and see.
    128:17
    Yeah. I mean, it looked okay. It looked kind of cool. but otherwise it was what it was. Well, let's go ahead and move on now from MovieSoft and transition to the Sony conference or the Game Trailer Extravaganza conference because I think Sony actually only had three different presenters really come out on stage. And when they presented, they didn't really, it wasn't like they did the interviews and the big talks or this or that. They still mainly just presented some trailers and did a couple other things. I mean, it wasn't terrible. No, no. I would say if you really only wanted to see it and learn about games and just really experience trailers in particular and not have explanations and stuff, that was probably your favorite conference. Right. But I think if you wanted that, they could have just dumped them on YouTube. Exactly. That was what I was. They did do the live orchestra, which was really cool. I think in person that would have been awesome. I didn't like that God of War intro with the chanting because I couldn't place it. It felt too raw. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I thought that it was awesome. Because we were chatting while it was on, and I called that was God of War. My thoughts were that either they're going to start with The Last Guardian, or this is going to be God of War. Because I had heard before that there were rumors of a new God of War that was supposed to be based on Norseman. I heard that rumor, too. I had not. But it made sense. And God of War is a huge franchise. So let's go ahead and start with that. It was God of War. That's what they opened with. For me, it looked good graphically. I didn't see if there was anything unique in the gameplay that was different from the old games. Everything looked different. At least to me, it looked different, because the old God of War seemed to be very hyper hack and slash, and this felt more like the more standard over-the-shoulder type games that have been more popular lately. Hand of War. Yeah. Which, my understanding from what I've read, the kid is with you the whole game. Is he? See I expected the kid to die during the game That what I thought too Yeah there apparently a button tied to the kid to have him do kid context section not context I wonder if this is going to be like Resident Evil 4, where you... Oh, well, no, this would be different, because in Resident Evil, you'd actually take control of the second character. Yeah, no, this is just like he's in a certain area doing stuff, and you press a button to have him do something. Yeah, I don't know. It's like, it's still jewel stuff. I'm trying, I'm stumbling over that word, but... I really thought he was going to die. Yeah, me too. That was God of War. Family dead, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's Death Wish. It's Death Wish with mythology. So I thought that's what was going to happen here. And it's not. I mean, the game looked good, but see, my actual thought was I thought it was Tomb Raider War.
    130:56
    Because it kind of felt like the Tomb Raider, the new Tomb Raiders and stuff. The art, the way it looked. Yeah, I can see that.
    131:05
    But Kratos is angry. Big Bang's guy. He's got a beard now. Yeah. He's Hipster Kratos. Did you say Dad of War? Is that what he was? Yeah, Dad of War. Okay. That's right. I've seen someone change the logo to that. Okay, so after that, they showed footage for Days Gone, which I thought was going to be the last of us at first, and I guess it's by the same glue. I thought it was the last of us until they installed the whatever. They're zombies. Yes. I hear they're not called zombies. They're called like freakers or something. Yeah, well. They're bloody zombies. Walking Dead never says zombies either. Yeah. It's the new thing to have zombies and not call them zombies. Yeah. Right. Yeah. It's almost grappling hook levels of commonality now. It was.
    131:53
    There were things that looked interesting. The zombie swarming mechanic was nuts. Yeah. It was. When they showed at the end of their conference, it showed some more, really highlighted that element to it. I still can't really tell what to make of it. Because the gameplay, when we were seeing that part at the end of the conference, it didn't feel like traditional survival horror. I mean, at least, he didn't seem to be running on bullets. No. And it didn't seem like it was requiring headshots to put them down, either. No, he didn't. Because he was just wailing full auto into a swarm, and it was just mowing them down. I am intrigued, because it seemed like maybe some survival-esque mechanics mixed with, yet again, more open world. I mean, that's what it seemed like to me. too early to tell but I mean if I owned a Playstation this one would have me color me intrigued on it would be one that would be on the list of watch some of the interviews from people who got to play and spend time with it on the floor said in that little lumber mill area there were other things you could do there were traps you could set up there were points where you were running and you could like gun down stuff and drop like large groups of logs to roll over the swarm and there was all sorts of environmental stuff you could do to help you out. So it sounds like there's a lot of ways to tie everything together so it's not just a shoot them up, but I don't know. Next game up was The Last Guardian. To me, the footage looks almost identical to what I vaguely remembered from last year's E3. And I'm really surprised that they didn't show more because it's almost out. They can't. They've burned the bridge. It's been a prime thing at E3 since 2012. Oh, every year, the last Guardian, they hit it hard, they hit it hard, they hit it hard. Well, last year was the first year they actually really showed it. But it's been a talking point. Well, it's been a talking point of, are they going to show the last Guardian? Right. And then they never did. And then last year they hit it hard. And then I looked at it and I'm like, this is what people are waiting for? Yeah. Anyway, I was wholly unimpressed. I was unimpressed last year. Oh, I was too, but I didn't know the crowd cheered so loud. I thought maybe this would be off. I guess it's nostalgia. It's the shadows of Colossus people. Yeah. That's why people want it. It's the shadows of Colossus people. Okay, well, nothing that I've ever seen about it shows me that it's a good game. No. I can't say that I've seen things that make me think it's a bad game. It's just I don't get why anyone gets this hype on something like this. I think it's purely based upon who's doing it. Okay. Well, maybe it'll live up to that expectation, but I'll tell you what they aren't. For those who don't know about that pedigree, it is not doing itself any favors. So, I mean, that is what it is. Next game up was Horizon Zero Dawn. Tomb Raider meets Robo Animals. That's what I've gone with. I really like Tomb Raider, and it looked interesting. I was very interested when I first saw this game last year. Before, I had a PS4, and now that I have one now, I mean, it's already on my Amazon wish list. I think it looks amazing. I loved the fact that it's basically, you know, a way in the future Earth, and all the animals are now robots. I guess they're aliens. It's like post-apocalypse. Yeah, I guess they came from space or something. But all these animals are robots, and then, like, they showed, you know, you could ride some of them. You could hack them. Yeah. Yeah, that looked interesting. I thought it looked fun. I saw they were doing, like, weakness exploits in combat. Unlike ReCore, this is more of the Twitch shooter realm, though, where you're actually aiming and trying to deal with all of that. Grappling. There was a grappling hook. And it was open world. The actual mechanic of grappling something to the ground and holding it in place was really cool. Yeah, that was cool. And the whole hacking thing. And from the reports from the floor, where she hacked that little robo bull cow thing to ride, there's other ones you can hack, and they run around with you as, you know, like swarms and attackers and little assistants. That's kind of cool. So there's a bunch of stuff you can do. And pretty much every report from the floor I've read or listened to, everybody loved it. Yeah, one of the things I heard about was, well, from what I understand, it wasn't implemented in the E3 demo, but one of those annoying things you always have in these kind of games where you have to, like, craft stuff, but you're like missing a key component apparently you can basically flag that and it will create a quest for you to actually go get that. So you don't have to figure out where to get it. A quest will move you in the right direction. That's cool.
    136:34
    Yeah. Okay. So everyone thought this was neat. I thought it looked great and I definitely wanted to keep an eye on for PlayStation owners. Next game was actually the highlight for me of the Sony conference and that was Detroit Become Human. Yeah. Me too. It just I really, it's like, choose your own adventure with hostage negotiation. Yeah. And it just, it seemed different, just so different. I'm just, of course, they were only showing one negotiation. I'm assuming there are more crimes later on. Hopefully. We're going to be doing that. And that's not just all one thing, but it seems so deep for one particular case as well. And depending upon how the branches are set together, it seems like something that can have a lot of replayability. Yeah. And it can have a lot of, I don't know. I, it looks, we'll see what actually happens, because I've seen a lot of games that look like this, and when they actually come out, it's like, meh. Yeah. But this, this, I don't know, I had a lot of, I think this was probably my favorite thing I saw in all of, yeah, this was my favorite thing I saw on Sony. Yeah, no, actually, I really, I really wish this was multi-platform. The, the only thing that I couldn't really tell, the Android aspect. Is it relevant? Maybe it's just for the plot. I don't know. What I'm seeing is the negotiator guy was an android and the other guy was an android. I think that's just what it is. What was... I just wondered why they didn't do it. Was that the TV show that got canceled or there was a cop with an android buddy? Yeah, I never saw it, though. I didn't see it because of the way everything was. I was like, this looks really interesting, but I'm not even going to try and get interested in a show like this unless it survives season one. And it didn't. It didn't. Well, it was on Fox, I believe. Yeah.
    138:13
    That was one of the reasons. I was like, nope, not unless it's from the first season. The next game was Resident Evil.
    138:21
    First person Resident Evil? I'm saying it weirdly because, Mike, you have some, you've played a little bit. I played the demo. They made it available on PS4, so I downloaded and played it the other day. From what I've read, they've said it isn't representative of what the main game is going to be like. I don't know if the main game is going to be first person. I think this is just kind of sort of an intro to get you into how it's going to, how the style of it is going to be. It didn't feel like Resident Evil to me. It just felt like you're in a creepy mansion. Is there any game that you know of that it reminded you of? I mean, I don't know. I haven't really played a lot of horror games. But, I mean, it's basically just you wake up. I guess you're not really sure what's going on. And your whole goal is to get out of the house. so you have to go around and find items to help you get out of the house which is kind of Resident Evil-ish in a way but it also had this weird mechanic where at one point you can find a VCR tape and you put that into a VCR and it kind of shows you I guess you were part of this crew that was doing some reality show or something where they were going to this old house to try and find out something about it I guess there had been some unsolved murder or something I don't remember what it was there was a Halloween movie that did that as its plot but the weird thing is you don't actually watch the tape you play the tape so you play through what was on the tape which you know you're with two other people and I guess you're this like cameraman they hired for it and at one point one of them disappears which I'm kind of I might have to go back and play it because I'm wondering if you keep an eye on him the whole time how it's going to do that but the way it plays out it kind of makes it so you want to try and focus on the other guy because he's doing something and next thing you know the other guy's disappeared and when you find him later with his head shoved into a pipe. Spoilers. Spoilers, yes. And then, like, you both get knocked out by someone.
    140:17
    And so then I guess after that, you know, you find out. That's basically where you had woken up from at the beginning of it. But during that part, you found out that there's, like, a secret lever in the fireplace that you can open up. And so you go in there, and that's where you end up finding the key to get out. Then, of course, like, as soon as you get out, it ends, because you don't actually get out. I don't know if the most interesting thing about it was how perfectly they did the logo the Resident Evil 7 logo that was nice and also apparently that works for in Japan where it's called Biohazard they just put the 7 and the Z and this is Resident Evil 7 Biohazard in Japan it's Biohazard 7 Resident Evil is what they played with it so I think they're kind of trying to pull everything together well the only thing I really thought was that stuff with the first person perspective made sense for the VR part that they're interested in for obvious reasons it was after that they really transitioned into the PlayStation VR segment of the show I was underwhelmed yeah it started with something impulse gear I don't even remember what that was it was a sci-fi first person shooter thing where you were like on a planet doing like a boy on an alien planet. No Man's Sky with guns and none of the death. I was just thinking, it was weird going through a Sony conference without seeing No Man's Sky again. That makes sense. There's no reason to put it in the conference. Because it's finally coming out. In a few months.
    141:55
    So after that was Star Wars Battlefront VR X-Wing demo. Which was, here's our VR experience. Yeah. So, I mean, yeah it was what it was Batman Arkham VR Batman I don't know it was like here's the mask of style well with the Joker talking I wonder what it would be there was nothing to see I think it's going to be another VR experience from what I've heard here's one that we should probably talk about a little bit because the next one was Final Fantasy 15 VR experience. Fire that team. Which was the worst VR experience of E3. Oh my. It was bad. I saw someone shooting a behemoth, moving out of the way, and shooting a behemoth some more. And from what I've heard, that is exactly what it is. It was so underwhelming would be generous. It was the definition of that what I fear that sort of shovelware for a new device that they thought it would actually be a good thing to showcase. I think I actually laughed when it came on. It came on. I was like, oh, more Final Fantasy. Oh, how is this even worse? I mean, it was... And that's what they closed out their re-op section with. It was like, wow, guys, come on, really? Yeah. All right, so after that, we moved on to more grappling hooks. I guess we didn't want to forget about those. And it had been a while since we had our little open-world robo-animals. This time it was through Call of Duty Infinite Warfare. This was the first time I actually got to see any decent amount of gameplay from this game. I saw elements of Titanfall, Halo, and Wing Commander. But what I didn't see was Call of Duty. Yeah. That was my reaction. I didn't think it looked bad or anything. It was just like, I mean, I'm guessing, obviously, it was single player. I'm seeing this guy owning everything with his anti-grab grenades. and his sliding to use cover, and his constant grappling and then killing people with neck breaks and helmet smashes. I don't know how you break the neck of the helmet. I don't know. I haven't played a Call of Duty campaign since 4. Nor I. But just because of the sci-fi aspect of this one, I'm kind of interested in playing it. I mean, I'm not paying 60 bucks for it. Yeah. I'll wait until I can get it for 15 or 20, but just to play the campaign, I might actually kind of like it. I'm probably going to be a hold for reviews of the campaign. And if the campaign reviews well, then get on 50% plus sale. I'd be willing to consider that. Because, I mean, yeah, I did really like Call of Duty 4's campaign. And I've heard good things about some of the others, as I've noted in past podcasts. Call of Duty doesn't have the same issue on the campaign front that Battlefield has had. But I'm not going to be doing Call of Duty multiplayer. their grunt-oriented, non-vehicular, non-squad stylings do not interest me. So, anyway, that was what it was. But I wasn't blown away, but it was very unique for Call of Duty. So, I mean, credit to them. I just don't know how much more into the future they're going to be able to move that franchise.
    145:16
    They'll move it so far into the future that they'll circle around on that. Oh, you know, I don't know. It's getting to the point where I feel like it's not a military shooter anymore. it's just that it's Halo-lite. Yeah. I don't know. That's my concern. It's like, don't encroach on Halo. You're not Halo. And you're just going to be seen as a copycat if you try and do it. Why not be what you've always been? The best, to a lot of people, the best military shooter. But not to me. Sorry. Dice won me over.
    145:46
    Next was Crash Bandicoot Remastered. As I noted with the remaster on Skyrim, remasters generally don't interest me. This one is an older remaster. It still isn't interesting. No, it's not. The most interesting thing about this was how Sony had the screen wrapped around, so it was on the floor and the wall and the back. And as he came out to present it, you could see Crash's shadow and footsteps. Yeah, that was cool. That was cool. I mean, it was a cool visual. Yeah, they had a cool shadow. They had an orchestra in there. I heard a lot of reviewers and other people talk about how excited they are for Crash Bandicoot and how much they love Crash Bandicoot. And by the time Crash Bandicoot came out, I was so far past that type of game that I was like, okay, I don't care. So for us, our childhood games were like Mario, the original Mario Mario and stuff like that. For the kids where Crash was their original game, I could see where this could be a big thing, and I just didn't care.
    146:47
    Next up was the Skylanders Imaginers. yeah never got the Skylanders I'll give them credit for injecting more creativity into the genre with what they're offering up here they're still in the system Disney pulled out yeah I heard about that Disney just found it I guess too expensive to make the toys because it was successful but the problem was Lego moved in with their Lego Dimensions but the number of people buying that type of game didn't change. Lego just stole a bunch of people from everybody else. And Disney's like, eh, it's not worth our time. One of the things I heard about too was they said, I guess for their original release they didn't make enough of the figures and then for the next one they made too many.
    147:39
    Yeah, and having purchased all that stock and not being able to sell it or having to sell it at a loss, that can be devastating. I mean, it was huge numbers, and it sounds like it was.
    147:51
    All right. Speaking of Lego, that was next. It was Lego Star Wars The Force Awakens. It's a Lego game. That's what I thought. Did you try the demo or something, Mike? I played the demo. They've thrown out a few new things to it. So credit on that, because it's been a while. I only try Lego games on occasion, and I've always enjoyed them, but it seems like incremental changes to the game with them. Well, I mean, this was pretty much that, too. I mean, they've done a few new things where, like, the whole thing where you, like, blow something up and then you build something with the pieces. Well, now you can build multiple different things with them. But a lot of it turned into, okay, you build this one thing. It does what you need it to do. Then you, you know, beat it up to break it apart. Then build the other thing to have it do what it needs to do.
    148:35
    They did, of course, introduce a new cover-based mechanic. There's one part where you're Finn and Rey, and you're behind cover shooting at stormtroopers. They finally let you invert the Y-axis in flying missions. Oh, that's nice. It's only been like 20 games now. Yeah. Of course, they didn't tell me while I was playing until I was halfway through the section. When I finally inverted, now I had to get used to it. They probably saw you were crashing so much. By the way. Yeah. It was a by the way tip. But, no, I mean, it was a layover game. Okay. I'll probably get it when it's really on sale. Well, the next game is one that I couldn't tell what it is, and that's Death Stranding. It's Kojima being Kojima in a Kojima production. Starring Daryl with an umbilical cord. I mean, it's like all pre-rendered cutscene-looking stuff. I have no concept, no one has any concept of what the gameplay is. Here's the thing, from what I've heard, Kojima was still looking at engines to build the game on like less than a month ago. And just a couple days ago, before the conference, he said, no, I'm not going to be there doing anything. But he was there and he's showing a video. I think this is literally just a pre-rendered thing that they got from like an idea session or a pitch session or something. And that's all they have. There's no way they've got anything else. And, you know, I don't. And there are a number of titles that were shown at Sony's conference, I know, that didn't have release dates. and things this early, I really don't like seeing that stuff at E3. I mean, okay, credit, I'm curious. It could be up my alley, but I have no idea. It could be horrific, but I have no idea. And given all of that and not knowing when it's going to come out, in two months, I'm not going to be talking about this. And in a year, I'm not going to care. And if they show me nothing more than yet another rendered cutscene at the next E3, because I don't think the game will be done, I'm going to be like, didn't I just see this already? It's kind of like what Scalebound ran into, where they've been showing hits of Scalebound for a while, and I'm just like, I kept it on the wish list, but I don't have the momentum anymore to want it the way I used to, because you showed it for three E3s. That's silly. Yeah, I think this boils down to Sony saying, hey, look, we have Kojima. You love him. Yes, and the crowd reaction was, because I thought that was, I mean, I thought it was awkward, really weird. And you have to really know Kojima to have cared. But a lot of people in the crowd did. Yeah. If it's about the live event, win the crowd and you win your freedom sort of approach, then, you know, bravo. Because it definitely got a good reaction, even though he did nothing. That was right. He couldn't even stay on his cover. He couldn't. He got ahead of his light bridge. You can't get ahead of your light bridge. There are rules. You've got to stay on mark, man. That's right. No, I don't know. I just think it's a... I think it was just that. It was, we've got Kojima. It was, you know, here's the trophy. We've got Kojima. Well, Sony's final game before they went back and did the Days Gone play stuff that we mentioned already was Spider-Man. Good Spider-Man game, maybe? I don't know. I've heard some buzz about it. I've never played a Spider-Man game. From what I hear... It looked alright. Yeah, it looks okay. I think for a Spider-Man game to be good, it requires you to have good web swinging and stuff and a good physics engine. And I've never played a Spider-Man game that has. I've heard there's one that does. Like Spider-Man 2? Like Spider-Man 2 is supposed to have one, but I never played that one. I'm not a big Spider-Man fan in the first place, so I don't hunt out, oh, a Spider-Man game. I don't. Yeah. Isn't this one, I want to think the developers behind it are the ones behind Infamous? I don't remember. I think that's who's making it. But my big thing when I was looking at it was, what is up with this costume? It's not based on any movies or anything, and it's not based directly on any comics, from what I hear. It is, it's completely... So it's based on nothing. I know, but I'm just saying, what's up with it? It looks weird for a Spider-Man costume. I don't know. Maybe they swing in the game. You just have to play it and find out. I'm not going to get it, so... Yeah, I'm not going to get it. Yeah, me neither. No, okay. Well, I guess we'll never know. I'm the only one here with a console to play. Yeah, but I could buy one at any time. They're not going to run out of places. I could get a Neo when it comes out. Alright, well that was it for the Sony press conference. So, this wasn't really an E3 press conference, but we need to hit Nintendo with its... With the brick. With its... With the treehouse, clubhouse. They did... Yeah, they have their Nintendo treehouse, which is... Nintendo of America's, like, in-house... I think it's like their testing facility, basically. But they brought a bunch of them people to just live stream all day. Right. But in terms of sort of the key elements, I guess, in their press portion, were really just two games, as I understand it, was Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild and Pokemon. Let's go ahead and just hit Pokemon first, because I think that was the last. Pokemon was Pokemon. And as much as they talked about all their new features and their new specials, it's Pokemon. And it's no different than any other Pokemon game, except for very, very, very minor iteration differences. Most of which come from the fact that they put Pokemon games out so fast they have multiple teams working on Pokemon games. It's the Call of Duty of Nintendo. The full-on Call of Duty of Nintendo. Soon there will be Pokeys in space. Yeah. With growling hooks.
    154:12
    Get over here, Squirtle. I've never really played Pokemon. I mean, I've tried them before, but I've never really, really played a Pokemon game. I thought that it could be neat to do the Battle Royale thing where the four trainers are going against each other at once, but I would have rather done a, to borrow a magic thing, a two-headed giant sort of thing too. I think Battle Royale stuff I never think works as well, other than in, like, fighting game Battle Royale, like Smash. I've never really seen Battle Royale work as well as team sort of coordinated. Because it always ends up everybody just picks one guy at a person at random and everybody drops one guy and drops one guy and drops one guy. I mean, I guess in shooters, sort of the pure deathmatch, lone wolf style. It's never been a format I've really favored. But other than in that area and then the Smash area, I've never seen one. But really, other than Battle Royale, nothing caught my eye as quote-unquote revolutionary about the Pokemon. Yeah, it's a new Pokemon game. I mean, I'm sure it'll be as enjoyable as the last ones, but... Okay, so let's move over into Zelda then, because that one is quite a bit different. Yes. Let's see. Lots of gameplay mechanics. I thought that there was crafting, there's Assassin's Creed-style climbing, there's stealth elements, there's object creation and summoning, like summoning platforms for you to climb on, massive area of effect attacks, and, of course, open world. And breaking weapons. And, oh yes, durability. And he gets a magical tablet that from the leaks looks a lot like the supposed NX controller.
    155:45
    Well, I did read all of those leaks were fake. Were they? so anyway all of these elements some of them have been in past Zelda games some of them have been popularized in more modern games what are the thoughts? well I think going an open world approach with it is I like that because Zelda's always had a bit of an open world rush to it but it was always well you have to get a certain item to go to this location then you get an item from there to go to another location whereas this they didn't actually show any real dungeons they showed what they were calling shrines which there's supposed to be like a hundred or so of them in the game or something. But they're basically short little dungeons you go into and you just get from the start to the end. There's different puzzles in it, but you can solve them different ways. Which is different for a Zelda because usually you go into a dungeon, you find your boomerang, all your puzzles are for your boomerang. You find your hookshot, all your puzzles are for your hookshot. This, they actually showed them, yes, grappling hook. They actually showed them, I mean, at certain times during the stream through the whole, like two days they were streaming, sometimes you saw the same areas over and over again, but they'd play through them different ways. So like one time you could see them solve a puzzle one way, and then the next day someone else would be playing it, and they're like, well, I like to do it this way. Because there were certain tools that they showed that he had, and I'm sure there's a lot of them in the game, but you had like a magnet you could use to move certain things around. You had an ability to basically stop time for certain objects. And so there would be puzzles where, how you solved them, you could either use the stop time mechanic, or you could use the magnet mechanic to move something across. It looked interesting to me, because I like that it's more open in how you can solve. From point A to point B. Yeah, I think going open world, obviously we've been somewhat critical in an amusing way, just in terms of the volume of open world stuff we're seeing come out of game developers lately. But Legend of Zelda has always at least flirted with wanting to create the illusion of open worldness, and they now have the opportunity to actually do it. It's always, I felt, been a game that tried to feel and be as epic as technology would allow them to pull off, and so I think this was a natural iteration for them. It looked enjoyable to me. It's the first Legend of Zelda that has interested me in a long time. I do find it interesting that they're doing this whole straddling console thing with Zelda again? Because didn't they do that between the Wii and the Wii U? Yeah, they did that with Twilight Princess. Yeah. My sense, and I know Mike do follow Nintendo a lot closer than I do since I haven't owned a Nintendo since the Super Nintendo, but my sense wasn't that they went into doing the development planning for that to be the case. I don't think Nintendo planned for the NX to come out this June. I think that is a running theme with all of these companies. I think something tipped their hands, and they're all rushing to get new hardware out. Right. And I think it's all for different reasons. Yeah, well, with Nintendo, it's...
    158:58
    They lost. Yeah, the Wii U has not done what the Wii did. Right. And a lot of that is their fault, because a lot of people, they saw this Wii U coming out, and they're like, oh, well, it's just an add-on. They didn't realize it's a whole new concept. Yeah, that was a naming issue. And the whole motion controls that were quaint in Wii didn't work as well in the Wii U. The giant controller video screen thing. It's mixed. In some games, it works very well. I mean, obviously, you couldn't have a game like Mario Maker without that. Because you build your levels with that touchscreen. but in other games it's not used at all it's basically just here's the game and the game is also on your controller some games it's basically well here's your Mac down here so you don't have to bring it up which is always kind of nice but yeah it's just it hasn't been selling remotely near what the Wii did and my sense has been which you know may not be accurate but I think Nintendo's kind of their two big blunders in moving into the new generation was the big one was the name, that you made it sound like it was a PlayStation Neo or an Xbox One S, like it's an incremental difference and not really a different machine, which confused a lot of casual people, which we have to remember, a lot of those sales on the original Wii were to casual people who did not normally acquire consoles. And I think the second thing that they should have been aware about if they tracked community discussion, gaming discussion, online discussion from gamers, but maybe didn't corporately pay attention to was that a lot of people who owned Wii's didn't play them a lot. The ongoing jokes about that they were for party games and then they just sat collecting dust and that everyone was playing their PS3 and their Xbox 360 instead. And so while they sold a whole bunch of units in the Wii generation when everyone was getting into their unique motion control stuff, that that market wasn't clamoring for new stuff because a lot of the products that weren't first-party Nintendo titles were kind of crappy. and so they didn't win themselves a lot of favors with the quality of game that was coming out on the machine. And they didn't make their new console be able to compete with the new ones that were coming out around the same time. Because the Wii, I mean, I played a lot of the Wii, I had a lot of games on it, but it was also the first generation where I bought a non-Nintendo console. Well, and I think there also have been hurt by the demographics. Nintendo has always viewed young for their player base. Those players now, they play tablets and smartphones. And that's a challenge, I think, that all of the people are coping with. In fact, I think that's where, so, well, Nintendo's got this set. I think this whole thing with the Neo and the Scorpio from Sony and Microsoft is driven by them looking at the life cycles of phones and thinking, maybe this will work for consoles if we do incremental upgrade life cycles like that coupled with the fact that we need to remember the last generation unusually long life cycles for this. It was. It was like double normal. Yeah. And I think a lot of them are, I think that is being seen rightly or wrongly. I think companies are seeing that as an abnormality, not the new norm. I know a lot of people were talking during the end of those life cycles, maybe this is the new norm and that the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One are going to go that long. They obviously don't want it to be that way. And I'm not surprised. And whether or not why the last gen was like that, if it had to do with the huge recession that everyone had, or just the weirdness with the Wii being, you know, three major manufacturers were having really good sales last gen. It was really weird. Normally, you know, before that, Xbox versus PS2, PS2 and what was it? GameCube. and PS2 just owned so much of the market share and last gen was much more equitable. You had Wii with the major sales, 360 and PS3 in the US were very similar and they had most of the game sales in the end because the Wii did what we mentioned before with the poor third party support. Okay, well that was the Nintendo segment but at this point, given their streaming and there were a lot of other things going on during E3, I wanted to take this time to sort of open it up and let's talk about anything else that caught any of your eyes during E3 that you wanted to bring up that you think people should know about The new Civ game looks better and better Civilization VI The changes look to make the game more dynamic and fun than normal not normal but than it has been I'm not going to go real deep into it I know there's a lot of new screenshots there's some video out there now you can find pretty easily but it looks the new way they're handling wonders and city buildings and empire growth and stuff looks like it's all good changes. I'm even more excited for it now than I was when the announcements happened originally. Cool. Mike, was there anything else as far as this E3 time period that's of interest that you wanted to bring up that we have not? Yeah, there was a few things. As someone who likes a lot of Japanese style games, on Nintendo's second day of streaming, they did show a little bit of the new game from Atlus coming out. It's Japanese release name was, I think, Shin Megami Tensei Crossfire Angle. I heard about that game. It's US release was called, like, Tokyo Mirage, says Shin's, or something like that. But they did show some footage of it. The combat looks very cool. It's more traditional turn-based, but... Could you describe that? I'm not familiar with this at all, so... Well, Atlas is known for, right now, the big thing, which I'll talk about in a bit, is they're known for Persona. Right. Which was a spin-off from the series called Shin Megami Tensei.
    164:58
    I've not played any of those, so I can't really tell you much about them. They're JRPGs. Okay. Fire Emblem is a Nintendo kind of strategy RPG. This game is kind of crossing over certain elements of them. It looks a little more Persona-based from what people have been commenting about it. But basically you have your teenagers in Tokyo, and I guess some of them are trying to be pop idols or something like that. But then they have the aspect of it that comes from Fire Emblem is they have these things called, I think they're performas. It's sort of like a persona, but... It sounds the same. Yeah. But their performas that they summon are based more on Fire Emblem characters. Okay. What little I saw of the combat, it was basically, you have like three people in your party, But certain attacks, when you attacked, your other characters would attack as well. That's cool. But you could also have your characters that weren't actually in the party fighting, but were, like, standby characters, they could come and, like, chain attacks off of that. And, I mean, there was one part I saw that was a chain of, like, seven or eight attacks. That's cool. Yeah, I mean, it looked kind of cool, but it's also got, you know, once you, like, complete certain things, you see the characters do their whole, like, pop idol type thing where they sing and dance and all that kind of stuff. it's very Japanese and it's out I think next week oh wow that's a yeah when is it coming out on Vita it's Wii U only yeah Wii U and then of course there's Persona 5 which looks amazing well it's a Persona game yes I mean that's it I mean Atlus is very good at they're stylized with the way things look and I mean the music is going to be awesome every Persona game I've seen just has had amazing music I mean, I was introduced with Persona with Persona 4 Arena, which was a fighting game spinoff. But the music in it was awesome. I played Persona Q on 3DS, which was a crossover between Persona 3 characters and Persona 4 characters. My understanding is it doesn't play like a Persona game. It's more of a first-person dungeon-crawling type thing. The characters are great. The music is great. And that's really what I like seeing with those kind of games is I think a lot of RPGs kind of live or die by their characters. Yeah, because if you don't care about the character, why would you play the game? Yeah. So, I mean, Persona games seem to be really good about that. And there's always kind of certain things about how you build your relationships with your party members.
    167:27
    And the trailer for it looked amazing. It's out. I think Japan's getting it on PS3 and PS4. but in the US I think it might only be PS4 I'm not certain and then I saw a few things XSeed which likes to bring over a lot of niche Japanese games they had they released a whole bunch of trailers for some of the stuff they were releasing a few of them that caught my eye was one of the games called Akiba's Beat which is kind of a spiritual successor to Akiba's Trip okay Akiba that sounds so familiar it's the Akiba's Trip was the one where you tore off the clothes yeah there's like the anti-vampire Yeah. Anti-vampire toys. You basically went around beating people up, and in order to defeat them, you had to strip them. Yes. I loved that game. It was so fun and campy. But this one is more, the similarities are, it takes place in Akihabara, which is, for those that don't know, it's basically, it's geek mecha in Japan, basically.
    168:23
    All of your game stores, your manga stores, anime stores, maid cafes, all that kind of stuff there. But this one is more, it looks to be more of just a normal RPG style game. so you have different party members and stuff and of course you know you've got all your geek type characters one of them of course is an idol and all that kind of stuff but it's something I'm going to keep an eye on because I like those kind of games and one of the other trailers they showed was for Fate Extella which is a kind of Dynasty Warrior style Fate spin-off nice I've never played a Dynasty Warrior I've seen some footage I've seen like the Gundam ones, for example. Yeah, I've played the Gundam ones. I've played some Dynasty Warrior. Oh, I don't even know which number it was. And I've played the Gundam one and some stuff. To me, Dynasty Warrior is pretty much the epitome of hack and slash for hack and slash reasons.
    169:18
    Where you just are thrown against tons of opponents who mostly just stand there and take your hand. Yeah.
    169:25
    But this one, it's characters from the whole Fate series, which started with Fate Stay Night. Yeah. Which was originally like a hentai game. Of course it was, because it's Japan. Yes. But it's spun off a lot since then. You know, there's been all the anime and lots of different games. This one is bringing in characters from all sorts of different games. So there's, I think, three different Saber characters. Wow. So you have Artoria Pendragon, who is a saber from the original Fate Stay Night, who was a gender-swapped King Arthur. You have another saber who pretty much looks exactly like her, but wears red, and is actually Nero, also a gender-swapped.
    170:11
    Well, your main character has to have a love interest, so. Yeah, well, I don't know, Japan. There was another Saber that I think was introduced in the most recent game, Fate Grand Order, I think it was called. There's Gilgamesh as an archer class. There's the normal archer that we know from original Fates Day and I. He's in it.
    170:35
    One of the casters is from, I don't know what game she's in, but she's basically like a fox girl. Of course she is. There's always a fox girl.
    170:45
    Who else were they throwing into it? they have like some Lancer character from a game I never heard of I mean it would probably be fun nice hack and slash type game can't go wrong with a good hack and slash well you can there's been some bad hack and slash yeah there's been some bad ones but well anything else not really I mean just a few other little things here and there I mean I saw a new trailer for King of Fighters 14 now that's out in August a lot of people are looking at that and saying hey Capcom why couldn't you do that because it's launching with 50 characters full story mode all of this stuff the Street Fighter 5 doesn't have the Street Fighter yeah Capcom I know Capcom's even admitted at this point they came out and said that they mishandled their launch Capcom's normally fairly silent I think well they bungled this one too bad well Capcom's had and I think rightly so gotten a lot of criticism for a lot of their gaming business practices of late and you know they were kind of it felt like they were kind of on top just a few years ago like around 2010 or so they were having a lot of really great things going on and now most of their franchises have stumbled and then they bungled this release. I don't know if it's because they're focusing so much on mobile gaming or what. And financially my understanding is their reports have indicated they're in a lot of trouble.
    172:01
    So, anyway. Maybe this is going to start making just nothing but Pachinko machines. You know, I think Konami has actually started to say we're going to try and focus back more into gaming because they were going big into Pachinko for a while.
    172:15
    Is it not working out for them? I don't know okay well I think we've probably covered enough for the for our longest episode ever Mike thank you very much for coming on to the podcast and helping us out and getting through all this E3 coverage I watched pretty much all of it luckily I'm off on Mondays so I caught like all of the things live as they were happening I tried to listen to some at work like I caught most of the Microsoft conference while I was at work but then it was I had to drive back and then so I saw all of Sony because they're at a really good time for me and I saw all of Ubisoft but it was hard to do EA and Microsoft because they're just during the day when I'm still working but I guess let's go ahead and wrap things up with the Facebook you want to reach us on Facebook it's facebook.com slash eclectic gamers podcast you can also email the show at gmail which would be eclectic gamers podcast at gmail.com we're available on twitter at eclectic underscore gamers and we will try and be back at two weeks like usual and it'll be shorter yes it should be shorter at least but hey I'm not going to say any promises we're setting new trailblazing ground here well yeah but it'll be shorter so anyway until next time I'm Dennis I'm Tony and goodbye everyone