The Pork Is Meat Episode

[fishbang]

Decide for yourself what we really meant by visiting this link (http://ingamechat.net/audio/IGC20090721.mp3).

We begin this evening with the not-unfamiliar sound of a last minute interview at IGC; in this case with Josh Bear, President and CCO of Twisted Pixel, purveyors of The Maw and ‘Splosion Man, TP’s newest brand of XBox Live genius, and one which involves meat to hilarious effect.

These are typically the sorts of things Scott knows to be a possibility ahead of time, but which only appear as a fact a few moments before we walk in the door. For this reason, he’s often the only one prepared with any sort of material, and why one or more of us is left in the lobby cramming on news. Yes, or talking about Warcraft.

As for everything else, it’s surprising how easy it can be to stretch a thin blanket of news across several hours of programming. It’s no trouble at all, in fact, when the twitter-mailing-posting subset of our listener base is so astute. Keep the information stream active, folks. There’s no telling what we’d resort to without you.

[kyrieee]

Joint Direct Attack Munition, not a missile but an all weather GPS guidance kit you fit onto dumb bombs. They're so accurate that LGBs have switched from using lasers as their primary guidance to GPS (maybe not for moving targets?). But yeah...

Meat jokes = kinda tasteless, but I <3 you guys anyway

[Hawggy]

Blame the 'Splosions!

[Wayward_Son]

"If the game industry died today" blahblahblah "would you have enough games to play for life?"

That got me to thinking. If that WERE to happen, I think we'd see one hell of a surge in the modding community, especially amongst cult classic games. I have a feeling we'd also see a plethora of homebrew systems, or rather "PC emulators", to play some of the larger projects that grew into standalones a la Counter-Strike. In the process, the gaming industry would inevitably revive itself, so I can't imagine it ever dying completely.

My thoughts went immediately to mods because I know of several VAST projects online that keep certain kickass games kickass even in the face of the shiny graphics of today's games. Deus Ex and Half-Life come to mind but God knows there's a mod or patch for damn near any game that is even mildly popular; I still run into a new (to me) Postal 2 mod, or Uplink mod occasionally, it's amazing how dedicated some of our more motivated species' members can be.

Take for instance Fallout 3. It was even mentioned on the show how there's a great many mods and patches for it. Fallout needs no help by itself to remain playable for a very long period of time, but add end-user improvements and that period grows exponentially.

Long answer to a short question :)

****Oh yeah, same more or less goes for MMOs. Akin to the open source cult, I have no doubt that a group of WoW fanboys would either volunteer as server hosts, as many console games host themselves locally already, or perhaps some genius might find a way to build a P2P structure in which the game can play (random idea, use it on the show someday). You're safe, James. Don't expect them to know any better about red flags though!

[Iron Past]

Why does no one know what Game Crazy is? Well, it's because it's much smaller than GameStop, but still. They're just the same, only owned by Hollywood Entertainment, who also own Hollywood Video, which is why they're usually in a part of the same building. I still like shopping at GameStop, though; they have better exclusives (preorder bonuses and even hardware) and treat their employees better. GC goes on a quarterly purge where if you fall in the 20th percentile or lower in sales rankings (based on how many preorders, insurance add-ons, amount per transaction, etc) you're let go. I know you can do the math and see that having that much turn around for employees is beyond stupid, and I'm not even taking into account the weekly rankings that can get you fired, too.

I really wanted to say my piece on Bioshock 2, though. I'm not psyched for it because of what the first did for me. Not in terms of gameplay, which while fun wasn't so revolutionary in my mind, but everything else. The story, setting, characters, everything about that game really legitimized games as a story telling medium (except the stupid ending). Yes, I know other games have done it before, but maybe this was just when I was at a point to really appreciate it. The phrase "Would you kindly" will always be a video game milestone for me, from the way it just made everything click to the subtle nod and wink to objective based gameplay (or was I the only one who thought that?). I'll pick up the second barring some really awful reviews and impressions (it does seem to be better gameplay-wise), but I just can't think that lightning will strike twice, especially with a different studio.

Also, I think I contact you guys too much; I have an email, a couple tweets and this too-long post this week alone. I still have a couple email ideas for the future that involve topics like handhelds, but they're too long to write right now. :o

[Doogie2K]

I'm not yet through the first hour, but I did want to mention, as CoG's resident Wolfenstein fanboy, that what James is thinking of with that is if you get the "One of Many" achievement/trophy in Wolf3D for XBLA/PSN (finish a level on any difficulty) and keep your Wolf3D save on your 360/PS3, you get $1,000 of in-game currency for the new Wolfenstein game. Dunno how much that really is, but it might be a good chunk for the early game.

Also, regarding the Warcraft movie, I predict that Bruce Campbell's cameo will come when it's revealed that the true source of the Lordaeron Plague is actually Ash's severed hand from Evil Dead 2. Hail to the King, baby.

[Psykoboy2]

Hey...look at that (http://www.twistedpixelgames.com/). A JDAM.