Here’s what I learned from CheckPoint S3E22.

  • Another iOS game that’s ruining the sacred history of a certain comic book hero failing miserably at getting reinvented? What a tease.
  • Well, the intro doesn’t really need spicing, but I wonder if Loading Ready Run have heard about Hot Pepper Game Reviews. That sounds like it could be a kick-ass way of making the intro spicier.
  • 1197 vehicles in the latest Gran Turismo game? Sweet. Looks like Graham is sold on the Lunar Rover being included in the game. That’s fine, but I’m sure that the break-neck speeds of 10 miles per hour will really make it a viable choice in the various races the game provides.
  • A Japanese game developer in the mid-90s overvaluing art over gameplay? I’m sure Street Fighter 2 wasn’t the first game released where that was the case, but I can’t say that I’m terribly surprised that it is.
  • Sports games hit a plateau this past year with the iterations released in the final months of the present generation of consoles. Sure the graphics could always be improved, but the performance and the control that players had over athletes in these simulations have it a high point. With many of these titles borrowing multiplayer game cues from buying packs of trading cards to build out a roster in the fairest way possible, it really is something where increasing the number of unique models in the audience has become a tentpole issue for the various franchises of sports titles. Realistic crowds were more of a selling point than multiple players contesting a ball in mid-air in the FIFA ’14 trailer. Do sports game fans really care about the simulated audience?
  • Mobile gaming embracing pay-to-win isn’t a new phenomenon, but it being new to DC Comics characters and universes seem to be. Injustice: Gods Among Us features in-game purchases that allow you to unlock late-game characters early, making the whole game a bit more of an exercise in patience more than skill. The other titles have in-game purchases that are locked to game progress, and suffer for the lack of exploitability. It’s a shame that these games are just money sinks instead of decently fun titles in their own right.
  • The Ellen Page Simulator just seems to be more of a derivation of Heavy Rain for the sake of the game developer doing something that’s weird and paradigm shifting instead of a game that actually seems unique enough to warrant praise. The actors are actors and they do their jobs pretty well, but as Graham points out, the limits that the game presents to the player on relatively simplistic sequences, such as walking down a hallway, break the whole point of the game as the developer sees it. Beyond: Two Souls was supposed to have so many decision trees and capacity for variance that it was supposed to blow most other games out of the water. Instead, it barely holds up thanks to the performance of the actors involved.
  • Desert Bus time this weekend? Desert Bus time this weekend.
  • COD: Ghosts runs at 720p on the Xbox One while it runs at 1080p on the Playstation 4. It’s still a bad game because fake Infinity Ward made it. No need to have a discussion about which system is better using COD as the framework.

Here’s what I learned from CheckPoint S3E5.

  • Graham is trying to make EVE sound cool. This should be interesting.
  • More Canada jokes!
  • Vivendi is going to attempt to strong-arm ActiBlizzvisionard into helping them out financially by using its newly-found power to force the company to take loans to sure up their own financial problems. It helps to understand the situation that Vivendi is a publisher and the entire industry has shifted from the publisher-developer model to a self-publisher model thanks to venues like Steam. They’re a bit more desperate than we thought if they’re employing tactics like these to get paid.
  • World of Warcraft getting an in-game store? It’s about time. World of Warcraft becoming pay-to-win ON TOP OF A SUBSCRIPTION? It’s about time. Maybe Blizzard will lose enough hardcore players that it’ll seriously reevaluate all of its bad decisions its made since Diablo 3 lost features in its beta.
  • Real reporting bit: an ingenious way to tool a game for children by making the controller larger to recreate how a child might hold the PS4 controller. The first Xbox controller burn aside, I was wondering what I was looking at when I saw pictures of the controller pop up around the internets.
  • Kathleen actually wraps up the entire Pandemic Legion supercarrier whelp within about a minute and fifteen seconds. And does a great job at it. The quip about feeling like a war correspondent doesn’t seem entirely like a joke. I wonder if she’s ever tried to sit down and play the game…
  • Graham reporting on the FFX remake makes me upset that I don’t own a Vita. If I get a PS4, I might as well pick up a Vita too, but until then… I’ll stick with my PS2 copy of the game, thankyouverymuch.
  • BRB, making an ‘assnbutts’ feat. Kath-dog remix.
  • If Battleship isn’t an AR game of immense proportions, fuck Google Glass.