Player One Podcast

This week! Topics of conversation in tweets include the first/worst game we’ve imported, Modern Warfare 2 dedicated servers, internet anger, Dead Space Wii’s lackluster sales, paying extra to get games early, and which big-name game between now and March will be the biggest commercial failure. Then we get along to games of the week, which include Space Invaders Extreme 2, Dragon Ball: Revenge of King Piccolo, Beatles Rock Band (Abbey Road DLC), Guitar Hero: World Tour, DJ Hero, Rock Band iPhone, Borderlands, Lips Number One Hits, and Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction.

Also, we’re (still) running a contest for a new theme song. Deadline for entries is now Friday, October 30. Details can be found here. Follow us on twitter at twitter.com/p1podcast.

Thanks for listening! Don’t forget to visit our new web site at www.playeronepodcast.com. You can leave us a voicemail by calling 713-893-8069 or you can send a comment via MP3 to our email address, playeronepodcast@gmail.com. Don’t forget to join our forums if you haven’t already!

This week’s links:

CJ’s Best Buy blog post

The Yakyuken Special

Ranma 1/2 Battle Renaissance

Blue Seed Saturn

The Beatles Rock Band Maxwell’s Silver Hammer

cyberhadji’s etsy store

“Don’t Stop Believin’” by Kkrusty

Direct download: 10_26_09-Episode157.mp3

Chris Johnston Episodes

As listeners of the podcast already know, I’ve got problems with the Best Buy located most conveniently to where I live. They often won’t have games on release day (even those that say “AVAILABLE TUESDAY” in their weekly ad, I’ll have to track down an employee to get them to get me a game from the back, they had a busted up Beatles Rock Band demo setup, they only had 2 accessories for the PSP Go on launch day, they didn’t have Rhythm Heaven on the DSi launch day. I mean, there’s been quite a lot of disappointment with this Best Buy. So much that I’ve started just ordering games that have Release Day delivery on Amazon instead.

Yesterday I thought what the hell, I’ll give them a shot for Lips Number One Hits and Borderlands. They had a deal running in their Sunday ad where Lips comes with a code for a free Colbie Caillat song pack. My fiancee likes Colbie Caillat, I’m a sucker for saccharine pop songs, so I’ll get it at Best Buy, get the song pack there instead of ordering on Amazon (who had it cheaper than BB, but still).

I took no chances by ordering online for in-store pickup. And of course when I went to the typically crappy Best Buy that has left me disappointed so many times before, they had the game but…couldn’t find the song pack. So I wrote them a letter. And here it is, after the jump.

Read more…

Chris Johnston Miscellany best buy, letter

It’s been three years since we started this podcast and what better way to ring it in than to do exactly what we’ve been doing for most of those three years. Talk tweets, talk games, talk some behind the scenes. It’s over two hours of what has made us the second best video game podcast hosted by four ex-magazine editors over Skype. Games discussed include Uncharted 2, Brutal Legend, Ratchet & Clank Future Tools of Destruction, A Boy and His Blob, Giana Sisters DS and Pinball Pulse: The Ancients Beckon.

Also, we’re (still) running a contest for a new theme song. Deadline for entries is now Friday, October 30. Details can be found here. Follow us on twitter at twitter.com/p1podcast.

Thanks for listening! Don’t forget to visit our new web site at www.playeronepodcast.com. You can leave us a voicemail by calling 713-893-8069 or you can send a comment via MP3 to our email address, playeronepodcast@gmail.com. Don’t forget to join our forums if you haven’t already! Thank you everyone for listening and supporting the show for the three years we’ve been podcasting.

This week’s links:

Boy and His Blob Box art for DS

Direct download: 10_19_09-Episode156.mp3

Chris Johnston Episodes A Boy And His Blob, brutal legend, episode, Giana Sisters, Pinball Pulse, podcast, Ratchet & Clank, Uncharted 2

So how about that new Boy and His Blob game for the Wii? Did you know that the original NES game it’s based on was coded by none other than David “Pitfall” Crane? If you’re old enough to remember the actual game when it was released, I bet you did know that.

What does that have to do with A/X-101? Well, during my paltry bit of research into this Sega CD shooter, I found out that the publisher – Absolute Entertainment – was actually co-founded by the very same David Crane. The same David Crane that left Atari to help form Activision. Another cool tidbit – Absolute was named as such because it’s alphabetically ahead of Activision, which was in turn alphabetically ahead of Atari (somewhat of a naming convention among this crowd – see also: Accolade and Acclaim). I guess David and his Absolute pals won that confusing little war.

So yeah…A/X-101 has a bit of a pedigree, I guess.

Not that Crane or Absolute had anything to do with the actual coding of this full-motion video extravaganza. That was handled by Micronet, a Japanese game developer that you’ve probably never heard of. Its lineup of games is pretty mediocre, all-told, though the company apparently still exists. It hasn’t been in the games business since the Dreamcast era, though – it’s a 3D graphic development house now, according to Wikipedia.

The game? Oh! Well…it’s awful. This is one of a handful of full-motion video shooters that came out for the Sega CD, to mixed results. Similar games like Star Wars Rebel Assault and Silpheed were pretty playable and not all that un-good, while other stuff like A/X-101 and Microcosm were just a big, garbled mess of super-low-res full-motion, pre-rendered video playing backdrop to otherwise crappy, boring enemies to shoot in the foreground.

This game is probably more a product of the industry back then, and its desparate need to integrate Hollywood and Silicon Valley into everything. A/X-101 just grinds along, with no music, no excitement, and little to do in the actual game play department. And everything is bookended by some horrendously-acted cinema scenes that are literally comprised of pallette-swapped “pilots” going throgh a single animation over and over again. Brilliant stuff.

Yep…best system ever.

At some point I will cover a good game. I promise.

Greg Sewart Sega, Sega CD, WELCO METOT HENEX TLEVEL A/X-101, Absolute, Activision, David Crane, Micronet

Tonight I’ve been thinking about video game commercials. First off, there’s a thread on our messageboard where people are listing their favorite TV spots. And I highly recommend you check that out for a fun trip down memory lane (plus some great Japanese commercials too). But I also got to see the 30-second spot for Brutal Legend (which, btw, launched tomorrow…the same day as Uncharted 2). After watching it, I’m not sure what to think. Here–take a look:

Ya know what, I’m not sure what I expected…but it was not that. For a game that’s got such a great sense of humor, this ad is just…bland. It’s so plain. Excruciatingly so. No voice clips from the game, barely any violence, no blood, none of the inventive writing from the game, none of the licensed music from known bands, none of the metal personalities that make appearances in the game, and it has no Jack Black (well, except for the “Hell Yeah” quote). They bleep out a word that rhymes with “rock” but it doesn’t seem to make sense there (and in the TV version I saw it replaced that with “axe”). So what the heck happened here? What do you think of the ad? Did Activision or Bobby Kotick somehow buy the ad agency that produced this to intentionally sink it?

I’m not the only one that thinks it fails. Sorry Doublefine/Tim. :’(

And now, a funny video game commercial for a game that is not a comedy (unless you count the comedy of errors that the series has become in the years since this)…

Chris Johnston Video Games advertising, brutal legend, commercial

Sega’s arcade heritage is something they never used to have a hard time capitalizing on. The Genesis enjoyed loads of home versions of arcade hits – Hang On, Outrun, Space Harrier, the Shinobi series, and of course, After Burner. But all the technical  trickery employed by the programmers to make those games run on the under-powered Genesis still didn’t keep them from severely lacking in the visuals department. That’s where the Sega CD came in.

In the first wave of Sega CD games (back when they came in cardboard boxes and standard-size jewel cases) was After Burner III. Imagine the excitement! No more of the stuttering, redrawn sprites the Genesis used for 3D motion. The Sega CD could do that stuff on the fly! This was going to be the greatest home version of After Burner ever made!

Or not.

A lot of the first run Sega CD games were nothing but gussied up Genesis cartridges featuring great, redbook audio soundtracks, and After Burner III was no different. This sluggish mess actually seems to perform a bit worse than some of the later Genesis renditions of Yu Suzuki’s classic arcade games.

And, if you want to get all technical, apparently it really isn’t even an After Burner game in the first place. Rather, it’s a Sega CD port of Strike Fighter, an arcade game released exclusively in Japan. Though any real fan of After Burner could probably tell there was something fishy going on back in the day.

There’s actually a lot to love about this game when you take a look at the feature list – a few different game modes, two different viewing options (though the full plane view obscures way too much of the screen), day and night missions, ground targets, unlimited missiles, and a pretty rockin’ soundtrack.

But none of those great features ever comes together to create anything…well, fun. You just slog along firing at wave after endless wave of enemies, with almost none of the excitement you could find in the first two After Burner games.

I think the most frustrating part of the whole deal is how the game seems to take almost no advantage of the hardware it’s on. While most people would normally point out that any early game on new hardware tends to steer clear of more advanced bells and whistles, the fact that the superb Batman Returns (one of the most impressive bits of Sega CD programmery ever) came out around the same time as After Burner really left me scratching my head at the whole thing.

So yeah…another triumph for the Sega CD. I swear I’ll get to some good games sometime in the near future.

Greg Sewart After Burner, Sega CD

This week! It’s the episode before our three-year anniversary, so we do…well, pretty much what we normally do every week. That includes tweets, then game talk. Titles we discuss include Halo ODST, Katamari Forever, Arkedo Series 01 – JUMP, Critter Crunch, South Park Let’s Go Tower Defense Play, Need for Speed Shift, Mega Man 9, and more.

Also, we’re running a contest for a new theme song. Deadline for entries is Friday, October 16. Details can be found here. Follow us on twitter at twitter.com/p1podcast.

Thanks for listening! Don’t forget to visit our new web site at www.playeronepodcast.com. You can leave us a voicemail by calling 713-893-8069 or you can send a comment via MP3 to our email address, playeronepodcast@gmail.com. Don’t forget to join our forums if you haven’t already!

Running time: 1:53:14

This week’s links:

JK Wedding Entrance Dance

IGN’s Music Hub site

One Last Continue: IGN responds to MusicHub controversy

Giana Sisters remake thread (NeoGAF)

Arkedo Studios

Direct download: 10_12_09-Episode155.mp3

Chris Johnston Episodes arkedo, critter crunch, episode, Halo 3 ODST, ign, katamari, katamari forever, mega man 9, music hub, Need for Speed Shift, podcast, south park

This week! We discuss the PSPgo (CJ bought one), game review hyperbole, free hotel porn, vibrating beds, Super Street Fighter IV, and things we thought were innovations but were really non-innovations in driving games. Oh and we also talk about games, including UmJammer Lammy, Pixeljunk Monsters Deluxe, Fieldrunners, Motorstorm Arctic Edge, Beatles Rock Band, Pinball Hall of Fame The Williams Collection, Rock Band Unplugged Lite Edition, Halo 3 ODST, Need for Speed Shift, Madworld, Wii Sports Resort, Tales of Monkey Island Chapter 3 and Jumping Flash 2, among others.

Also, we’re running a contest for a new theme song. Deadline for entries is Friday, October 16. Details can be found here. Follow us on twitter at twitter.com/p1podcast.

Thanks for listening! Don’t forget to visit our new web site at www.playeronepodcast.com. You can leave us a voicemail by calling 713-893-8069 or you can send a comment via MP3 to our email address, playeronepodcast@gmail.com. Don’t forget to join our forums if you haven’t already!

Running time: 1:55:27

This week’s links:

CJ’s PSPgo blog post

ANNcast with CJ

Details on theme song contest

Direct download: 10_05_09-Episode154.mp3

Chris Johnston Episodes Beatles Rock Band, episode, Fieldrunners, Halo 3 ODST, hotel porn, hyperbole, Jumping Flash 2, Madworld, Motorstorm Arctic Edge, Need for Speed Shift, Pinball Hall of Fame The Williams Collection, Pixeljunk Monsters Deluxe, podcast, PSP, PSP go, Rock Band Unplugged Lite Edition, Super Street Fighter IV, Tales of Monkey Island, UmJammer Lammy, Wii Sports Resort

We’ve been doing this podcast for nearly (just about, almost, approaching) three years now, and each episode has opened with the same thing. A public domain piece of music that’s one of the default tunes in Apple’s Garageband and can often be found used elsewhere, like sports promos on XM Radio or a dance club in the CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother (Season 1, in case you’re curious). And though we like the theme song just fine, we picked it because it was the only one that 1UP wasn’t using in any of their podcasts.

So after three years it’s obvious this podcast thing isn’t a fluke and we’d like to, well, freshen things up a bit. That’s where you come into play. Make us a new theme song. Please? We’ll be your best friend and we’ll also give you a prize. Doesn’t have to be anything too crazy, but we need a new way to open the show.

The current tune is 35 seconds long, and we break into it at about the 15-second mark with our intro/banter.

The winner, chosen upon the whims of the hosts of the show, will receive a prize. Right now, we figure that is TWO games of your choice, each with an MSRP of below $70. Plus, fame and possible fortune as we mention how awesome you are on the show. We go out to about 4500 listeners a week so multi-thousands will know how much you rock. If you have a website or something you’d like to promote we could also make sure that gets airtime too.

Any genre. Chiptune, jazz band, human beatbox, accordian, flugelhorn, deathmetal…really anything you can think of.

You can post your submission in our forums. We’ve made a topic just for that purpose. Thank you and good luck! The NEW deadline for entries is Friday, October 30. Get cracking!

Chris Johnston Uncategorized contest, podcast, theme song

Despite the ribbing I got in the last episode about buying/not buying a PSPgo, I walked out of the local Best Buy (yes, the horribly crappy one that never gets anything on release day) with the system. I cashed in enough Reward Zone certificates to bring the price—along with the Black Tie Protection Plan just in case of a RRoD situation—to about $140. For the record, it was a couple years’ worth of Reward Zone certificates. I’d been building them up and the PSPgo seemed like a good opportunity to cash them in.

True to form, this Best Buy location had only two accessories: the PSPgo earbuds and a case. They didn’t have the dock or component video cables so I walked out with just the system. I thought the box would be larger than it was but I guess it doesn’t come with any of the accoutrements that launch systems sometimes do. No soft case, no wrist strap, no nuthin’. Ah the salad days of the original PSP launch.

I charged up the system while I was at work, and when it was finished turned it on. I expected the system to at least come pre-loaded with Rock Band Unplugged Lite Edition but no dice (that’s a code you have to redeem from the PSN store). The Go comes with just an interactive ESRB ratings guide and a Patapon 2 demo. That’s it. Considering the age of the PSP and the number of demos and breadth of free content available for it, that’s a bit of a disappointment. Another early disappointment came when the system powered on when I slid the screen up even when the power switch was in the Hold position. Luckily when I got home and finished performing a firmware update (yes, there’s already an update available) that went away.

My first two purchases on the new system were UmJammer Lammy PS1 (I only have the Japanese PS1 version and no longer have a Japanese PS1 to play it on) and Pixeljunk Monsters Deluxe. These two look amazing on the PSPgo’s exceedingly vibrant screen. While the screen is slightly smaller than that of the previous PSP models, it is easily the best looking. Lammy never looked better and makes me a bit sad that that detour in the PaRappa series never got a sequel. Pixeljunk Monsters is exactly as advertised—it’s a portable version of the PS3 game with extra content and online multiplayer. I was very happy to see that it supports Infrastructure play over the Internet. Co-op! Not many PSP games do these days. I’m lookin’ at your Phantasy Star Portable.

Rock Band Unplugged Lite is…well, it’s hardly worth it. It comes with five songs and that’s not enough to play through Career Mode and is barely enough to mess around with in Quick Play. It’s a fun game, what with it basically being a Frequency/Amplitude clone, but I would’ve rather had the option to buy the full game digitally for $5 off than keep this gimped version.

I also picked up Motorstorm Arctic Edge and Fieldrunners, both of which are pretty excellent. More on those in this week’s podcast.

I do have a couple more quick observations:

- L/R triggers are thinner than my index finger and because they’re right up against the slid-up screen it can be hard to get a good grip on the L/R. It was especially noticeable with UmJammer Lammy and Motorstorm.
- The analog nubbin is quite nice, if more out of the way than on the regular PSP.
- I really hate that you can’t organize games into folders and that D/L’d Rock Band songs go in a file that resides in the same list as your games.
- I like the positioning on the ancillary buttons like volume, home, display, etc. They’re much easier to use by touch in a dark room than they were on the regular PSP.
- I actually have kind of a hard time turning it off without pushing the other buttons that are strewn around the top. I wish that you could—like the PS3—hold the home button and select an option to turn the system off instead of using the switch.

We’ll have more on the PSP Go in Episode 154 of the Player One Podcast.

Chris Johnston Video Games PSP, PSP go