In the Name of Game - a Gaming Podcast

No podcast episode this week (who'dve thought everyone would be busy?) but don't worry, we will be back next week! To whet your gaming appetites, we will be giving away some leftover E3 swag at the next podcast, so be sure to listen in to find out how to land a prize! We have a couple keychains and shirts, so we may end up doing this for a couple episodes, so be sure to subscribe and/or follow us!

Also, for easier viewing, we now have a better url! www.inthenameofgame.com ! Tell your friends! :D


'Til next time, enjoy a little quality time with Zeke and Cole:


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It's a full house this week as all 4 of our regulars (Eji, Colin, David and Adam) check in to talk about games!

This week's topics:
inFamous 2
in-depth discussion on good and evil choices in games
WiiU thoughts
...and more!

Crazy evil ending to Harvester:
http://youtu.be/t6Mzaimi0bY

LulzSec being anything but lulzy:
http://www.joystiq.com/2011/06/14/lulzsec-attacks-escapist-magazine-eve-online-and-minecraft/

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We're back from our summer vacation! Sorry for the absence ;)

Adam's swallowed up by the E3 monster and David's out this week, so Eji and Colin do a once-over of all the cool stuff at E3, and then serve you up a Spoiler Alert discussion of LA Noire (don't worry, it's after the credits for those of you that haven't finished it yet!).

This week's topics:
E3!!!  - Assassin's Creed, Uncharted, Aliens, oh my!
LA Noire spoilers after the show!
...and more!

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This time around, Colin, Eji and David talk about Rockstar's latest and greatest, and a lot more!

This week's topics:
LA Noire and its tech
"Welcome Back" says PSN (thanks to Greg for the info)
Videogames finally recognized as art!
Boxing games discussion

Mentioned in this show:
The incredible Ghibli Minecraft world!

EDIT: We will NOT be doing a show next week, even though we mentioned it in the episode... we will be back on June 2nd with more podcast goodness!


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This week Colin and David are incapacitated, so Eji and Adam have a short podcast chat.

This week's topics:
Soul Calibur V announced
PSN still down... til the end of the month D:
Infamous 2 pre-order grumblings
Brink thoughts and review
...and more random stuff!

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Happy Cinco de Mayo! Episode 3's here and ready for your listening ears.

This week's hosts:
Eji - Your host!  Videogame animator and vocal game debater
Colin - Co-host yet again!
Adam - Co-host and peanut gallery :D.

This week's topics:
Call of the Dead
Bioware delays
Wii2 speculations
FPS game discussion
...and more random stuff!

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Hey everyone!  Episode 2 hot and fresh for your enjoyment!  The gang gets a little goofier this time around and contemplates games and the universe...

This week's hosts:
Eji - Your host!  Videogame animator and vocal game debater
David - Co-host! Retro game enthusiast and overall game ponderer
Adam - Co-host and peanut gallery :D.

This week's topics:

PSN outages
Telltale games and adventure games of old
Mrs. Doubtfire... the adventure game?

that weird Back to the Future Youtube Poop that David references

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Hey everyone!  Today marks the start of our weekly podcast for In the Name of Game.

Obviously we'll be finding our way over the course of the episodes, but we hope you'll join us for the ride!  We'll be discussing games, their companies, the industry, and also getting a little retro here and there for some retrospective conversations.

This week's hosts:
Eji - Your host!  Videogame animator and vocal game debater
David - Co-host! Retro game enthusiast and overall game ponderer
Colin - ...Well Colin's just an angry gamer.  :D   And a co-host. 

This week's topics:
Valve and Portal 2
Bioware and Dragon Age 2 thoughts
Sonic Generation and Sonic over the years
Wii2 ruminations

We're a new podcast, so if you have any suggestions, questions or comments, please post them to this announcement!   I'll be making a podcast email soon for our in-podcast email segment later on.
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Let me start off with a disclaimer:  I have not played Dragon Age 1.  That said, I do think a good game should be able to stand solidly on its own two legs, at least for the most part; it's just unfortunate that Dragon Age 2 stumbles around the entire time. 




Dialogue, as in most Bioware games, shines like a brilliant jewel through the muck.   Excellent voice work, and well-thought out conversations are a pleasure to listen to.  The banter between party members while you traverse an area are particularly insightful and amusing.  Often, if I hear someone start up something with another party member, I will stop running or avoid reaching my checkpoint just so I can hear what their chat will be.  Isabela, Anders, and Varric are particularly fun to have in a party for this reason. 

It's also yet another advancement that even more people than usual in a Bioware game can be romanced, and that many of them can swing either way to suit your interests and character gender/orientation.  Depending on your Friendship/Rivalry with them, that also colors their relationship with you, which is an interesting twist, even though it isn't fleshed out as much as it would sound. 

The animation is yet another step in the right direction for Bioware.  Facial animation looks much less cut-and-paste than previous games and looks like it's based on what they're actually saying.  In general, there's a much wider variety of body animations for conversations as well, which is a welcome change, particularly after finishing a new playthrough of the Mass Effect games and viewing only a handful there.   

Hawke, while not as satisfyingly intimidating as Commander Shepard, has been given a little more leeway in how she/he handles situations.  I do enjoy the ability to be more of a wiseass when I want, or be threatening without out and out killing the person.  The demanding money choice is the only part that seems a little less desirable to bother with, but the fact that it's there as an additional option is welcome.     

Combat (minus some quirks, like sometimes being difficult to target enemies and the janky camera when pushed up against a corner) feels fast and furious, even when pausing to constantly enter in specific tactics.  The character ability customization/specialization is a nice touch, reminiscent to me of the Sphere grid from FFX.  It allows you some pretty good control over what you want your party members to excel at.



As nice as it is that there is a Friendship/Rivalry system (reminds me of Light/Dark side alignments, but without the altered point of view), it's pretty frustrating that the points aren't given out consistently.  Sometimes no points are awarded at all when in a situation or making a decision that I felt the character should have responded one way other the other to.  It also makes forming a party with your favorites rather difficult because they will most likely be opposed to each other, like Anders and Fenris, who I enjoy in a party but dread engaging in cutscenes with.  The nasty side effect to this is purposely going to a spot to change your party members and then entering a cutscene, which requires a lot of constant saving and reloading.


This Friendship/Rivalry element leads into another disappointment.  The party members you come across are amazingly stubborn in their views and beliefs.  Despite becoming more trusted by them as you advance in the game, they stick a little too strongly to their extreme-sided beliefs.  In Mass Effect for example, I appreciated the fact that you could persuade Kaiden that either aliens weren't all that bad, or that he was justified in being a total xenophobe.  Likewise here, it would've been very satisfying to be able to convince some of the characters that they didn't have to be completely gung-ho in siding with either mages or templars.  Instead, everyone holds too tight to whatever polarized view they have when you first meet them, and never develop their character in that regard.  It just doesn't make much sense that people with such drastically different opinions would so easily party with each other and protect one another. 

(As a side note, your brother character is a gigantic arrogant annoying ass half the time... I'm assuming the sister character is the same.)

The extreme sides brings me to another element of the game I dislike, namely how both the templars and the mages both SUCK.  I find it incredibly annoying that I am forced to side with one of these groups when I don't feel particularly sympathetic to either.  Every time I think that one of them isn't so bad, I end up doing a quest where a templar or a mage goes psycho and people are casualties.  It's very hard for me to care about anyone when everyone is so hypocritical and extremist.  It makes my Hawke look very wishy-washy when I have to purposely step around issues and support mages in one quest and then turn around and support templars in another.  Like the party members in this game, everyone and everything in DA2 is always stuck on the sidelines; very few characters bother traipsing around the middle.


Quests are also handled strangely.  Often when I go on one quest, I invariably pick up some random item that ends up completing a quest in town that I didn't even realize existed.  It's also not always obvious which quests are going to end up remotely linked to the main plot or just be side ones that go nowhere.  The story overall is nowhere near as epic as the previous one, and tries to make it look like they did that because it's trying to be more of an intimate experience, but it's so small that I'm not really sure if the majority (minus a couple obvious parts) of it would have any impact on the Dragon Age world at all.

Kirkwall feels very disjointed as a map structure, and the fact that you can teleport to particular sections ruins any feeling of being part of a large connected world to me.  Add to that the fact that each section isn't particularly large, especially compared to map sizes in Knights of the Old Republic and the Mass Effect titles, and you get a definite sense that they skimped on the content.  Even worse is something I'll mention in The Ugly... 



It's been a very long time since I've seen a game with maps this badly recycled.  It's so egregious that many places use THE SAME MAP for their quests, but simply close off access to areas that aren't used in that quest.  One stone door will open for one quest, and then never open in a separate quest with the same map.  It's so bad that I'm not even sure they have more than 10 re-used maps at the mos

         Graphic adventure games flourished in the 90’s, but quickly declined around the end of that decade. More recently, Telltale Games has resurrected the dead genre to a good degree of success by smartly basing their games off of popular cult classics (Sam and Max, Strong Bad, Back to the Future, etc), and other small independent devs have tried their hand at making a point-and-click (see The Whispered World from Daedalic Entertainment), but in general, the genre is no longer as prominent as it once was.

          Why is this the case? There’re a couple factors that may have lead to the death of the point-and-click era. For my purposes, I’m going to mostly mention Sierra On-line and early Lucasarts. Yes, I do realize Infocom was an important company for adventure games, as were the many Myst games that Cyan created, but to avoid this blog entry from getting even lengthier than it already is, let’s just focus on Sierra and Lucasarts for the most part.


          In the 80’s, the “early years” of graphic adventure games, almost everything was text-based, thanks to previous efforts by Infocom and On-line Systems (later to become Sierra On-line). Most famously, Zork and Adventure (originally called Colossal Cave Adventure) helped start things off. A desirable element of these early text based games was the player’s own imagination because these games didn’t have any images to speak of and relied on short descriptions to relay to the user what they were seeing and experiencing in that world. Subsequent text-based adventure games would have rudimentary graphics and artwork to better illustrate the game worlds. As time went on, these building blocks of adventure games (imagery, descriptions, exploring, inventory-collecting) were expanded upon, and as the look and feel of the games evolved, so did the interface, until Lucasarts and Sierra started developing point-and-click interfaces for their adventure games to better facilitate interaction.

         There were a lot of desirable elements to making a point-and-click adventure at the time. Considering this was long before 3D graphics, the painterly style of the more popular point-and-clicks was very visually engaging. Sierra On-line games often had digitized painted backgrounds. It really was a requirement for those games, though; it’s no fun having to click-explore through a boring looking landscape. Many game screens would have intricate details and animated elements to catch the player’s eye. The games were also a lot easier to program, since many of them shared the same engines. In Lucasarts’ case, they used the SCUMM engine for their point-and-clicks, and different games in their library would simply have different stories and art assets on top of the same programming foundation. Point-and-clicks also were usually whimsical or bizarre, and offered a lot more humor and random adventures for a gamer during that time than the more straightforward action games of that era, which were often little more than continuous gameplay. The point-and-clicks were the Thinking Man’s game.


          With the positives, there were an overwhelming amount of negatives. There were a lot of cases when the items you picked up and what you had to accomplish with those items wasn’t clear or obvious at all. A popular example is a pie obtainable in King’s Quest V. Could you eat it? Sure, but that would make your game Unwinnable (more on this below). Could you give it to a hungry vulture found later in the desert? Sure, but that wasn’t the desired intent. The real purpose of the pie was to throw in the face of a yeti much later in the game to cause him to fall off a cliff and let you progress. Sometimes bizarre objects would need to be combined to make a specific object to satisfy a challenge (In Sam and Max Hit the Road, a pompadour wig + a stiltwalker costume + wooly mammoth hair + tar = a Bigfoot costume…. The heck?) .

          There also wasn’t very much real-time action to speak of in point-and-click adventure games, which made for slow-paced experiences that turned some gamers off. A gamer looking for something fast-paced like Mario or Sonic or a high-speed racing game would be turned off by the slow methodical approach many point-and-clicks used for their puzzles and exploration. A few notable departures from this however were games like the Quest for Glory series that was one of the few adventure game series that incorporated a fighting system and real-time encounters… probably something that helped make it one of my favorite point-and-click games of all time. Other games like Maniac Mansion would keep you on your toes with dangerous characters sometimes wandering halls and certain rooms that had to be avoided at times.

          But the worst part about point-and-clicks was the dreaded unwinnable scenario. Unwinnable situations were when items vital to moving forward in the game were accidentally missed and then unobtainable after reaching a point of no return later in the game, or used where they weren’t supposed to be. The above King’s Quest V pie situation is a good example. Sierra games were particularly fraught with unintentional unwinnables, but many of Infocom’s early games like Zork intentionally created unwinnable situations to forcibly extend the playtime of the game (since a player would have to start all over again). Often these situations arose from eating or disposing of something edible that would be needed later on.


          The thing that made unwinnable situations so terrible was that it was never readily apparent that you’d just ruined your shot at finishing the game. Players would be locked into walking dead games; basically you were “dead” because you could never beat the game— you just might not realize it for a long time, or ever; very frustrating for both veteran point-and-click gamers and newcomers alike.

          As game technology thrived and evolved and games grew more complex, the point-and-click fast became an antiquated-feeling 2D genre for many gamers who were enamored with 3D polygons and flashier gameplay. Point-and-click games hadn’t changed enough with the times, and larger companies with titles that lived and died by their profit numbers started hacking away point-and-click adventure series like gangrenous limbs. Much of Lucasarts’ point-and-clicks disappeared over time, and many Sierra On-Line series only lived on in re-released collections. Sierra’s last attempts at making more action-oriented point-and-click games like Quest for Glory V: Dragonfire and King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity (which both utilized polygonal graphics to some degree and more action-based movement and fighting) tried their best, but ultimately were the ends of their respective series.

          But, in the past few years, point-and-click adventure games have had a revival of sorts, thanks in no small part to Telltale Games, a company originally comprised of many ex-Lucasarts employees from the 90’s point-and-click era. Why have their adventure titles done so well? In my opinion it’s a mixture of cult fandom and nostalgia, along with a healthy does of uncomplicated gameplay. They did well for starters by acquiring the rights to Sam and Max from Lucasarts as well as creator Steve Purcell’s approval and consultation. Their puzzles are also significantly easier to figure out compared to the old days of point-and-clicks. In older games, sometimes a game guide or cheat list would be needed to progress past some pretty unintu