Jake and Mike Videogame Show

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Back in the saddle and I’m the sheriff! And Jake is also the sheriff! We’re both the sheriffs!! And you’re being thrown in the slammer, partner!

That was what I’d say if I was a cowboy that ran a podcast, but I’m not so here is the real stuff. POW WHAM BAM! We are back with another great podcast for your ear holes to fill themselves with. The fanbase seems to have grown a bit to welcome to all the new listeners! Have a seat, get comfy and settle in for a sexy little podcast journey!

We hungered for more Mass Effect 2 talk so you get a bunch for of that, as well as my review of No More Heroes 2, some info on the new DVD Halo Legends and our awesome experience with the Bad Company 2 demo.

Feel like that’s enough audio sex to bang your eardrums dry? Oh, you’ll feel it! and you’ll love it. So enjoy!!

-(MS)Mike out.

Batman: Arkham Asylum, Gunstar Heroes, Mega Man X, Bayonetta, Devil May Cry, The Legend of Zelda. Under any other circumstance, You would probably assume I was listing off some of my favorite games of all time, and you might have been right. In this case though, I’m telling you some offenders of a dirty little secret that just won’t die.

No game is complete without boss battles. Whether it’s the final confrontation with the main villain you’ve been chasing the whole time, or a run in with that pesky minion that just won’t stop showing up at the last second to ruin your hard work. Over the years, whether it is a game released 20 years ago or a game that came out just last week (Bayonetta, I’m lookin at you!) it seems that developers cannot shake the need to make you face the same foe three, four and sometimes more times throughout the entire span of the game.

Now sometimes, this is done to further a plot line, or convince you to feel an emotional response when the same villain shows up several times to thwart your hard work time and again. Oddly enough, RPG’s commit this crime the most, but in the RIGHT way, and other games could learn a lot from the way they do it. Rather than throwing the same thing at you over and over and making it become derivative, they allow you to feel the same way about a returning enemy or villain and use it more or less as a template but with completely new talents and abilities (not EVERY rpg does this, some are just as guilty of the “same guy new color” problem I talk about here, so no need to mention that here). What I’m talking about is when a game feels the need to throw a boss you fought in the first 4th of the game at you in the final half but with a a few copies along side to mix things up. Perhaps take an enemy you’ve been fighting the whole time comes back as a boss but just a bit bigger and with more life, or if you’re Devil May Cry, a giant flaming spider feels the need to continually come back for more just one more time.

Now don’t get me wrong, this simple problem rarely ruins a game and Batman: Arkham Asylum is a great example of this. The game was considered by many one of the best games of the year, even though it was one of the larger executors of this type of boss battle scheme, but not ruining a game doesn’t mean that it didn’t dilute some of the fun that could be had.Heck, the last boss and the first boss are almost identical, not somthing that ruined the game, but a missed opportunity in many ways.

Now to play devil’s advocate, I can’t say that I could make a better game than a lot of these very talented studios or even that being creative and coming up with unique experiences is something that is easily attainable. I understand the type of work that goes into these games and the sort of entertainment these people are selling us. I’m just saying that I think developers should pride themselves on the unique content they’re able to bring to the table with their video games and not fall into the trap of just reusing something from the beginning of there game and throwing it at you a few more times.

-(MS)Mike out.

Heroes has had its ups and its down, but I’ve stuck by it because I’ve been pretty into the show since the beginning and I didn’t wanna ditch it just because of a few stilted plotlines. Season 2 and 3 suffered a bit from the writers strike forcing a rather long winded series of changes to be made that are only now really getting resolved and getting the show back to where it’s as good as it was in the beginning. But what is really gonna make season 4 go down as awesome for me so far is a surprisingly brief, but completely awesome nod to Chrono Trigger in last night’s episode.

They even spelled “Crono” right. Someone on the Heroes writing staff definitely knows their SNES rpg’s.

-(MS)Mike out.

I sent back Phantom Brave: We Meet Again and Real Heroes: Firefighter yesterday. I was not hooked by Phantom Brave for the few hours I played it and I didn’t even put Real Heroes into my Wii. I used to feel bad about doing this and by this I mean not giving games a fair chance. This has been something I used to think was pretty important, giving every game a fair shot and a good amount of time to really see if it is something I enjoy. I don’t really think that anymore. If a game can’t hook me in the first 3 hours or so I don’t want to keep playing. I don’t see a reason anymore, every week there is the next “big” game that comes out, not that Phantom Brave or Real Heroes were considered “big” games, but I think you get the point. There are so many games that come out now that I don’t really care if a mediocre game slips through the cracks. If a game does not hook me, forget it.

So I won’t have anything more to say about Real Heroes or Phantom Brave then what I said on the podcast this week. I just started playing a little Wolfestein… we will see how that works out. I will talk about it on the next podcast.

-jake

I’m serious… Like, why on earth am I interested in this game, let alone actually EXCITED about it? It’s something I don’t know the answer too, but I can’t help but gawk at the pictures and watch the videos that are on IGN longingly and dream of the fun I will have saving people from rooftops and breaking windows to ventilate a flaming building.

I mean, looking at the videos, it doesn’t seem to be like, blowing me away with the visuals or teasing me with all sorts of revolutionary game mechanics…It’s just a first person game where you play as a firefighter. But god, it just looks like so much fun to me! Maybe it’s the fact that I was such a huge fan of The Firemen on then SNES and I’m hoping to vicariously find some of the same fun feelings I got playing that way back when.

Either way, there is no rational reason that this should be a game I’m excited about when you have so many games out in the near future that are being touted as triple A titles, but I’m putting this at the top of my excited list and the top of my gamefly Que. If you have a few minutes you should go watch the vids they got here.

Maybe if someone out there agrees, I’ll feel a little less crazy.

-(MS)Mike out.