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 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.