Here’s what I learned from CheckPoint S3E10.

  • A black butterfly, if we’re honest.
  • GAGTAA Day a success! Great!
  • DuckTales Remastered’s marketing campaign of retro issuing a NES cartridge might win over some retro gamers, but the limited quantities of the gold-pained carts suggest that it’s for hardcore collectors only. And even then, what is the price of something like a re-issued gold-color painted NES cart? I dunno, but it probably belongs in a museum.
  • A game that could be cool for the mobile platform juggernaut iOS is now completely worthless thanks to a prominent sponsorship with Coca-Cola. And it’s a Temple Run ripoff to boot? Well, in that case, I hope the promising future suggested by whichever development studio thought this up to sell to Coca-Cola dies in a fire.
  • Oh, Kathleen. Sell that Ocean’s 75 spot. AND PAUL GETS AIRTIME ON A SHOW? MORE PAUL, PLEASE. And Graham gets to take a crack at it too. I know this is a funny bit, but the Sony studio that created God of War making news for weird internal structuring should be news, right? Changing the formula every once in a while, especially if it’s from the Sony side of things, should be a welcome story, right?
  • The big news: the Xbox One doesn’t need the Kinect to operate as previously stipulated. “We have reached peak sass” indeed, text crawler. Of course, MSFT had to have invested in some market research, but they were trying to channel other companies that just get to change things around in a given industry simply for the sake of making metric asstonnes of money. That didn’t work out, and so instead, they have fixed the Xbox One. And I’ll probably be buying one, as I had already planned to do. Because I am a bad, bad person. Slightly less bad now that this particular announcement has been made.
  • I’ve always thought that the Zombie mode for Call of Duty titles was a broken, dumb, stupid, tasteless Left 4 Dead-esque ripoff made for the generic Call of Duty player. This has been confirmed for the OVER 9000th time by the upcoming DLC that has something to do with dieselpunk zombies in World War 1. Or something like that. It’s dumb. And it’s stupid. If you think that it’s cool, I’ll let you have that the Zombie mode that was quirky enough to be cool was the edition included in Black Ops, especially with the cast of Castro, Kennedy, McNamara and Nixon imitators. When Treyarch started developing the game modes around easter egg like discoveries, instead of simply adding an easter egg to the level, then the mode got pretty shit.
  • Fudge? Whoa, TMI, Kathleen.
  • MechWarrior Online players bought enough 10 USD special edition mechs to raise 100k CAD for the Canadian Cancer Society? Pretty cool.

Here’s what I learned from CheckPoint S3E2.

  • Graham is totally Canadian. That’s not the worst thing ever, but it’s apparent in the opening splash.
  • Kathleen’s takedown of EA Sports’ Ignite engine missing the PC market is pretty well summed up. EA, of course, is oblivious to the sports titles that fall under the genre of simulations rather than sports titles such as Football Manager. Also, the FIFA franchise was a PC title as well, right?
  • DayZ ripoff couldn’t secure a trademark for its horrible, horrible game so they’ve renamed it? Why not just throw in the towel at the same time? Graham realizes the truth: that this was the whole point of the game and they should really give up at the same time. JUST STOP.
  • An iPad game that skirts past the censor as a ‘spiritual’ orgasm simulator. Seriously. I felt bad hearing that sentence Kathleen.
  • Prey 2 absent from E3. Bethesda has barred it from releasing any news because it’s just not ‘up to snuff’ according to Graham. I wish it were. There are a lot of folks that I know of who would be purchasing a Prey 2 day-one sight-unseen because of the experience they had with the first title.
  • Vlambeer is sick of getting their games ripped off in a medium where games are ripped off on a normal basis, so they’re livestreaming development of the title. You can watch over a guy code over his shoulder so you can have the satisfaction that the mobile development company thought of a game first before it was ripped off. But when they make higher quality games than their competitors, aren’t they going to win anyway? Kathleen seems about as excited about it as I am.
  • Don Mattrick is a moron, but he did announce the Xbox 180, where the Xbox One’s ‘groundbreaking’ DRM and feature set were being removed in favor of retaining the current model of disc-based games. Graham points out that MSFT’s lack of communication is what started the whole mess and that going back on its word hasn’t changed the fact that MSFT’s communication, led by Don Morontrick, is still not as clear as it should be.
  • Kathleen brings up Sony’s ruined, pending and probably already shot viral video campaign that basically demeans the Xbox One’s DRM restrictions as a reason to consider a PlayStation 4. But with a required bundled Kinect, there’s still the sticking point that will drive some consumers to the PS4 over the Xbox One. And the price, too.
  • Free-to-play fighting game with premium character selection sounds like the worst thing ever. I wish the Killer Instinct reboot wouldn’t exist if I had to pay multiples of dollars for a character like Riptor. (Seriously, though: Fulgore it where it’s at.)