In our inaugural episode of the Giant Bombcast, Ryan and Jeff discuss delicious WoW-inspired energy drinks, the hidden depth in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the brilliant filmography of Mark Dacascos, and much more. Send any and all questions/drink recommendations/death threats to bombcast at giant bomb dot com!
Today is the soft launch for Giant Bomb (dot com), which is the totally awesome new video-game website that Jeff Gerstmann, myself, and some other highly excellent dudes have been working on in secret. I think Jeff does a good job of introducing Giant Bomb on the site itself, and I urge you to roll over and give it a look. Please keep in mind that this is just the beginning. We have some grand plans for this venture.
On a related note, the Arrow Pointing Down Podcast will be transitioning into the Giant Bomb Podcast over the course of the next week or so. We’ll have a new name, and probably some new theme music, but fear not, it’ll still be the same sidebar-heavy discussions about video games, milkshakes, and the Sylvester Stallone film Cobra.
Your new favorite podcast that is sometimes, tangentially about video games is back! This week beverage enthusiast Jeff Gerstmann, freelance gigolo Alex Navarro, and I bask in the afterglow of GDC, guzzle horrible energy drinks, contemplate legal action against McDonald’s, declare Cobra a 2008 Oscar winner, and so very much more! Join us, won’t you? Afterwards, be sure to check out Will Wright’s talk at GDC 2008.
Got a question for the Arrow Pointing Down podcast posse? Drop us a line at podcast at arrowpointingdown dot com!
UPDATE: The initial syncing issues have been fixed, mostly, kinda! It’s all a learning experience for us here, folks!
Welcome, and thank you for participating in the soft launch of the Arrow Pointing Down Podcast! There’s no explicit format yet, and it probably should’ve been encoded it at a lower bit rate, but hey! Fuck it!
This week, Ryan and Jeff ramble pointlessly over Skype about Gatorade, HD-DVD, GDC, and more!
Next week, there’s apparently going to be another show! And maybe another guest! And prizes?
If you have a question for the Arrow Pointing Down Podcast, send it to podcast@arrowpointingdown.com, and you might get it read on the air!
By listening to this podcast, you may be eligible to win hundreds of millions of gold krugerrand. This is a lie!
Even before my day gets a chance to become interesting on its own, I get this post by Introversion lead programmer Chris Delay dropped in my lap, courtesy of Kotaku. While not everyone will find the technical info about rendering structural details in virtual skyscrapers fascinating (I do!), I’m simply excited at the prospect of a new game by Introversion. If you haven’t heard of them, Introversion is an extremely independent developer that specializes in minimalist, high-concept games. Its two significant releases, Darwinia and Defcon (both available on Steam if you haven’t checked them out already), are both visually severe games with very specific and unique gameplay philosophies.
These are what games would look like if you were to give the technology of today to video game designers in the early 1980s.
I found Defcon to be particularly evocative, and not just because I love WarGames (I do!) but also because of how much it does with so little. It’s basically a thermonuclear warfare simulator, and its tagline of “Everybody Dies”, along with a gameplay model where “winning” is a matter of losing less of your population to the thermonuclear holocaust than your opponents, give you good sense of its grim tone. That’s fascinating enough on its own, but then another layer is added with the stark launch-terminal visuals and the quiet hum of technology in the background, which subtly suggest that, within the reality of the game, what you’re seeing is more than just a simulation. I rarely call something “chilling!” unless I’m being quoted on the back of a Dean Koontz novel, but Defcon definitely merits it.
Bought Resolution High Definition (Rez HD to industry insiders) off Xbox Live Marketplace yesterday, almost compulsively. I feel completely comfortable calling this the definitive version or Rez, despite the occasional blurry texture, and I think that 800 points (10 dolla) is the perfect price for this game.
I was a little late to the party on Mass Effect, as I only started playing it a month ago, and I haven’t touched it in a good week, but it’s still a game I think about pretty regularly, if only because of what a compellingly imperfect product it is. After 15 hours of play I’m completely sick of the combat, exploring these vast, featurless planets, the wicked load times, and basically everything that’s not dialog. Everything that is dialog, though, is what makes that game worth playing. I’m consistently impressed with the quality of the writing and the voice-acting, though it’s the little details that really make it, like the consistency of how the camera frames the speakers or the timing between responses. It really makes me wish that game was strictly people standing around, chatting. How’s that for a vision of video-game excitement?
As a quick thought unrelated to games, Netflix has been bumming me out pretty hard lately. My queue is mostly filled with blu-ray and hd-dvd movies, but if it’s a new release or even just a movie that’s well-regarded, they never ever have it in stock in HD. What’s worse, the last two movies they sent me (Stargate and The Devil Wears Prada, because THAT’S ALL THEY HAVE) arrived with slight cracks in the discs that made them unplayable. So to summarize, they don’t send me the movies that I actually want, and the ones they do send are showing up broken. I realize this isn’t 100% Netflix’s fault, but it’s a confluence of misfortune that have left me pretty dissatisfied with the service as of late. At least their turnaround time is still consistently quick (I’m looking in your direction, GameFly.)
Oh yeah, and I guess welcome to the arrow pointing down blog! It still doesn’t have any meaningful direction, and those holding their breath hoping it will are gonna go out like Michael Hutchence. Between you and me, this blog was born out of a frothy tincture of laziness and a need to fit in–my hosting service had a one-click install option for wordpress, and all my unemployed friends have been doin’ it. Since this is the first substantial post here, I wanted to get down a few fleeting thoughts.
Video games:
Been playing Advance Wars: Days of Ruin. The gameplay is unsurprisingly good, but Nintendo dropped the ball by changing the tone of the series from fun-time anime war-stuff to final-fantasy-serious war-stuff. The writing just isn’t insightful enough to address the horrors of war in a serious manner without coming off as pretentious, cheesy, and shallow. War is bad, we get it. Also, you’ll hear the same half-rock/half-military theme music for almost the entire duration of the game, and the only way to get it out is with a bullet.
Also been playing Burnout Paradise, though not nearly as much as Jeff or Rich. I like it the more I play it, but I can’t yet say that I love it. It’s got the hallmarks of a great Burnout game, with an incredible sense of speed and car crashes that verge on pornographic, and the open-world format-shift was entirely necessary, but I still feel like I have to make too many excuses and apologies for it. I guess some of my issues with Paradise come from my own expectations of what a Burnout game should be, and in some regards, I think it doesn’t quite deliver. For the record, Burnout 3: Takedown is still the best game in the series.
Not video games:
Brad Shoemaker pointed me towards ConjugalHarmony.com on Friday, and it has haunted my every waking moment since. I’m afraid I might be stepping into doofycrap territory here, but it’s fascinating to me how wildly one’s priorities can change once you’ve been locked up. These women cannot afford to be anything less than totally honest about themselves and their situations, which leads to some terrifyingly casual comments like this:
Convictions: I beat up this bitch cop with my bare knuckles and she died so I’m done for life. Lets chat!
Movies:
Went to a drive-in double-feature last night, my second in the past month or so. My girlfriend lives just a few miles from one of only maybe six drive-in theaters still in operation in California, and I’m grateful for it. I have fond memories of drive-ins from when I was very, very young, and even though it’s terribly run-down and it attracts a kind of sketchy crowd and is on the verge of being shut down, it’s still a novel experience.
The movies were Rambo and National Treasure: Book of Secrets. Rambo is an almost startlingly straightforward rescue flick that is really boring whenever someone isn’t being murdered in a horribly graphic way. National Treasure: Book of Secrets was probably better than the first National Treasure, but I’m finding Nic Cage’s hairline increasingly hard to look at, I feel embarrassed for Jon Voight running around like he’s Action Grandpa, and the conceit of the series–that all of America’s historical artifacts exist solely as elaborate clues for Nic Cage’s treasure hunt–is so ridiculous and stupid that it’s distracting.
So that’s all for now. Expect fitful and often meaningless posts from here on out.
DUMBDATE: Yeah, so ConjugalHarmony is probably fake, which only diminishes its awesomeness, but it does not eliminate it.
10. Rambo
9. The Specialist
8. Assassins
7. Driven
6. Rocky IV
5. Tango & Cash
4. Demolition Man
3. Cobra
2. Over the Top
1. Judge Dredd
