Tag Archives: Atlas

Here’s what I learned from CheckPoint S3E15.

A later than usual post. Hadn’t gotten around to actually watching CheckPoint until my lunch break, today. Another post coming this evening regarding some esports business news.

  • Of course all we’ll be talking about is GTA V. This is expected.
  • That opening is excellent, Graham. Kathleen’s troll is effective, though.
  • Wii U game? PASS.
  • Man, the Ouya news is something I could just care less about. Sure, they’re pretty new at the whole Android-based console world thing, but at least they’ve fixed the mistake and it only took three bad eggs to spoil what could’ve been a massively abused loophole in indie-game funding. Even so, I still can’t bring myself to spend any more time on an Android console than I already do. It’s called my Nexus 4. It also doubles as a phone. It’s pretty damn impressive, if I’m honest.
  • I’ve used the iFruit app on my iPad at home and I have to say, it’s definitely a fun little toy. It’s also nice to have cars ordered for you that are already upgraded and appear without the whole difficulty of finding a decent car to steal and spending time and money liberating it and upgrading it in the game. Once you’ve done it for each character, however, that part of the functionality ceases to be useful. Chop makes up for this shortfall, even though the minigames you play with the dog to increase his skill are a bit hectic and not very smooth.
  • Atlas is bailed out by Sega. I’m with Kathleen on this one: Sega’s history points towards destroying most franchises it absorbs by mashing them up with each other. I hope they let Atlas keep making RPGs.
  • “Madden games: I may not play you, but I respect you.” It’s too bad all of that attention to detail couldn’t be put towards other EA titles.
  • Kathleen and knives? It’s Paul’s fault. I can accept that.
  • SimCity is still trying rip players off? Oh Maxis. How far you have fallen.

Here’s what I learned from CheckPoint S3E14.

  • Critiquing the Ouya’s revenue generation scheme? Sounds good.
  • Kathleen singing. Silliness.
  • Grand Theft Auto V’s playable area is so large that it apparently covers the combined entire playable areas of GTA: San Andreas (which I thought was pretty big for its time), GTA 4 (which seems smaller than it is), and Red Dead Redemption (which was didn’t seem as big as it seemed slow to traverse). That factoid just makes it more likely that I’ll enjoy the game when I pick it up tomorrow.
  • Atlas is publishing a new Tex Murphy adventure? How kickass is that going to be?
  • Ubisoft is missing the point with mobile iterations of already successful intellectual property. The point of these games are to utilize the full functionality of the touch display technology while staying as true to the context of its bigger brother products. An Assassin’s Creed game without stealth just sounds wrong, doesn’t it?
  • Disney needs some of the advice that I just gave to Ubisoft above regarding developing entertaining experiences for mobile devices.
  • More Ouya issues? #standard
  • I would play CheckPoint Host Creed. I would pay for it, too.
  • Another practical solution from Sony, taking a page out of Apple’s problem solving ‘make a product to solve a single problem’ technique.