So here’s the scoop, kids: Elaine and I have been snowed under by a metric fuckton of personal business over the past couple of weeks, and a lot of it is very big and may take some time to resolve.  So, while we love you, we both need to bow out for a little while and get ourselves under control and to a place where we both feel a little less overwhelmed.

We will absolutely be back with liquid hot podcast goodness to pour into your earholes as soon as we can; we don’t have a solid date as to when that will happen yet, but we’re aiming for early August.  It’s not fair to you (or to us) to put out shows where we’re both all stressed out and weird, so we’re stepping back for a bit to make sure that when we do come back, it’s with the level of hilarity and ridiculousness you’ve come to expect.  We promise we’ll keep you updated as we figure out more exact schedules.

Thanks for sticking with us.

If everything works itself back out and no one else falls down stairs, or has something equally terrible happen, we should be back in business and delivering you audio awesome on July 8.  Sorry for the interruption to your regularly scheduled episodes.

Find out what else we think about games in general (and a bit about E3 specifically, but we promise it’s not too much), and be prepared for the return of PERSONA!  Yes, it’s that time again- that magical time of year when a young woman’s fancy turns to thoughts of shooting yourself in the head with an Evoker to unleash the mystical powers therein.  Odds are good that this will be a theme… again.

Fair warning: we do throw in some spoilery stuff about L.A. Noire in this episode, and I know a lot of people haven’t actually finished yet, so I actually bothered to get the timestamps from Elaine if you would like to skip story discussions!  Skip from 2:30 to 9:35 if you’re so inclined.  You’re welcome.

Link247:

L.A. Noire

Dirt 3

Persona 3 Portable

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

Sly 2: Band of Thieves

Skies of Arcadia: Legends

Final Fantasy III

Costume Quest

PS Vita priced at $250 for WiFi, $300 for 3G

Halo: Anniversary and Halo 4 coming to a console near you

Luigi’s Mansion 2 3DS looks fucking awesome

Arrests made in Spain for Sony hacks

Silent Hill Collection, PS3 exclusive this fall

Rayman: Origins also looks awesome

PS Vita’s FAQ says they are considering options for UMD upgrades

Cloud saves will link PS3 and Vita

PSP remastered games will be coming to the PS3

We don’t actually decide that on this episode, but we do talk about a lot of games.  And, you know, other stuff.  Like girth!  It’s what you might call a running theme.

If these ideas are intriguing to you, you should listen.  If not…. well, you should listen anyway.  Trust me on this one.  99% of ninjas in the murder of ninjas agree.

Murder!  I like that.

A murder of links:

Penny Arcade Adventures: On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness

Dissidia Final Fantasy Duodecim

Final Fantasy II

Skies of Arcadia: Legends

Mortal Kombat

LA Noire

Outland

Dishwasher: Vampire Smile

Mortal Kombat online pass requirement waived on PS3

DLC coming for LA Noire

Speaking of LA Noire, it may be overheating systems

Newest update for 360 includes PayPal connectivity

Buy a Windows 7 PC, get a free 360

Portal 2 soundtrack is free, and you should get up on that

Persona 2: Innocent Sin is coming to North America

Masters of Horror: Pro-Life

CONTACT!  We craves it, precious.  Plz to be sending us emails: podcast@someothercastle.com!

Well, except for that guy.  He smells funny.

As promised, this is the week we abandon the news, throw caution to the wind, and answer a whole mess of listener mail.  And you know what?  We love every minute of it.

Thanks for sticking it out with us for 50 episodes, and here’s to 50 more!

Links, if you care:

Bulletstorm

Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes

Skies of Arcadia: Legends

Sword & Sworcery

If we haven’t worn you out, we’d still love listener mail to be sent to podcast@someothercastle.com.  Thank you so much to everyone who wrote in this week!

Linkstache!

Portal 2

Okamiden

Skies of Arcadia: Legends

Mortal Kombat

The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile

Pokemon Black

PSN is having problems; perhaps you have heard

Wii’s successor confirmed to be playable at E3

3DS undersells according to Nintendo’s projections

DS Lite no longer in production

Hulu Plus now available for Live members; free trial

Alice: Madness returns will come with download of original Alice

Portal 2 on sale this weekend at GameStop and KMart

The Last Guardian and Ico/Shadow of the Colossus Collection both delayed indefinitely

PSP Go no longer in production in Japan

Portal 2 DLC available this summer

We want to do an all-listener mail episode next time, so please please please help us by sending it to podcast@someothercastle.com.  Please?

Amongst the abandoned, empty ruins of podcast-land, a new entity raises its head!  It’s a podcast!  We made it for you.  Don’t you feel special?  You should.

Listen while we regale you with our adventures of weeks past, and enjoy!

Linktasia!

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West

Bulletstorm

Pokemon Black and White

Street Fighter IV 3D

Pilotwings 3D

Final Fantasy I

Torchlight

Skies of Arcadia: Legends

Sly Collection

Jack Tretton is a dick

Zelda releases June 19th

Starfox 64 3D releases in Japan July 17th

DoA Dimensions releases May 24th

Game Informer says new Nintendo console will be announced at E3

Persona 4 anime announced on day that events of Persona 4 began

Be in a video for Catherine if you answer invasive questions about marriage

Marble Blast Ultra de-listed from XBLA

March NPD numbers

GIVE US LISTENER MAIL!  ……please?  podcast@someothercastle.com, yo!

The games I’m playing currently, Pokemon White and Nier, are ones that I think I’ll be sticking with for quite a while yet, so I think today I’d like to talk about a couple that I finished: Splatterhouse and Demon’s Souls.  Let’s get Splatterhouse out of the way first, because I’ve got a lot to say about the other one.

Splatterhouse isn’t exactly what I’d call a “good” game, but it isn’t a bad one, either.  Really, the title says it all… or at least, it does until about the last level.  I picked this game up on the cheap from Amazon, despite the protestations of my friends, because I really just wanted a game where I could more-or-less mindlessly rip the guts out of things and watch them explode.  Splatterhouse definitely delivers on that front; it pretty much revels in its over-the-top gore, which is exactly what you’d expect, and what I imagine most people who have any real desire to play the game are looking for anyway.  Oh, and your “side-mission” is to collect shreds of naked pictures of your girlfriend — she’s apparently left them lying around so that you can follow them and find her.  No joke.  That’s how they justify it.

Where I started having problems with Splatterhouse was when they left the house.  Um… has anyone checked the title of the game recently?  I have NO interest in a back-story.  If I want a story, I’ll play an RPG.  I just want to watch monsters go *squish,* and the only story I need for that goes something like this: 1. Bad guy took your girlfriend into this house!  2. There are monsters in the house!  3. Kill the monsters and save your girlfriend!  4. ???  5. Profit!  I don’t care why the bad guy took my girlfriend, or why there are monsters — that’s far too complicated for a game that has an achievement called “Barrels of Blood.”  I suppose some people might quibble over lack of a story (such as it is), though, and it’s really a minor gripe for me, so I can forgive it.

Also, there is Cthulhu.

The biggest gaming surprise I’ve had in a while came to me this month in the form of Demon’s Souls.  I was actually scared to start this game.  It’s been on my shelf forever, but I’d heard such terrifying tales of its brutal difficulty that I never quite got up the courage to begin.  I think what it came down to was that I doubted that I had the patience or the skill to get through it; I *should* like Demon’s Souls, right?  After all, even if Atlus didn’t develop it, they put their name on it, and that’s usually a pretty good guarantee as far as I’m concerned.  What really threw me, though, was that the other thing I’d heard, almost universally, was how good the game was.  If it was just a really hard game with no redeeming qualities, I could safely skip it and not feel bad about it in the slightest.  But that wasn’t the case; it showed up on Game of the Year lists for 2009 left and right, and the people I knew personally who had played it had given it glowing reviews (even if they personally hadn’t gotten very far).  If I didn’t — or worse yet, couldn’t — like Demon’s Souls, what would that say about me as a gamer?

What finally kicked me over the edge was peer pressure.  I’m easily swayed.  A friend basically bullied me into starting the game, and you know what?  It’s all true.  Yes, the game is brutally, unforgivingly difficult.  The other side of that, though, is that if you mess up and die, it’s because YOU messed up and died, not because the game arbitrarily killed you for some imagined transgression.  It’s a rare game that can require this kind of skill and still make me want to keep playing, because despite my initial misgivings, every death (and there were a great many of them) made me say to myself not “oh, that’s some bullshit,” but rather “oh, I know what I did wrong… I can fix that!”  …and then immediately rush back in to do better.  It’s not impossible, it just requires patience, attention, and a lot of pattern recognition.  Frankly, I can’t believe I made it all the way through.

Please note: I am not in any way suggesting that if you don’t like Demon’s Souls, or have no desire to play it due to its difficulty or to anything else about it, that it reflects on your ability as a gamer.  What I am saying is that if it appeals to you, don’t shy away from it for the same reasons I did.  It’s beautiful, and demanding, and I can’t remember the last time I felt as great a sense of accomplishment in completing a game as I did when I finally killed the last boss in Demon’s Souls.  I only hope that when Dark Souls comes out later this year, it will offer the same amazing experience as its sibling.

In progress: Nier (PS3); Pokemon White (DS); Phantasy Star Portable (PSP)

Completed: Dead Space 2 (360); Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack In Time (PS3); Golden Sun: Dark Dawn (DS); Demon’s Souls (PS3); Splatterhouse (360)

New: Brutal Legend (360); Radiant Historia (DS); Knights Contract (360); Pokemon White (DS); Okamiden (DS)

I knew I wanted to play through Extraction between Dead Space 1 and 2; it just so happened that I purchased a new TV in between these games, though, so it was kind of difficult to push through.  This wasn’t because Extraction is a bad game–quite the contrary.  I really enjoyed it, and even though some might disparage it for being “only” a rail shooter, I thought it served as a perfect example of how the Wii’s waggle controls can be implemented without feeling shoehorned-in.  Since movement is taken care of for you, the basic mechanic is more or less a light gun game (and in fact, I did use the Perfect Shot, which I’ll talk about in a minute).  Of course, since it’s Dead Space, you do have a few other options beyond shooting, such as grabbing things with your telekinesis and slowing enemies with stasis (which becomes an almost automatic action fairly quickly, even given that I barely used stasis at all in combat through the first game).  I think that what impressed me the most about this game was its fidelity to the series; the developers could easily have set events in a completely different area and kept it relatively unconnected so that continuity wasn’t an issue beyond broad, sweeping strokes, but instead, you spend a great amount of time in the Ishimura–and it IS the Ishimura.  Sure, it doesn’t look quite as pretty on the Wii as it did on the 360, but you will definitely recognize specific locations from Dead Space; I might not have noticed this in as much detail if I hadn’t played the original game so soon before, but I kind of wonder if the developers used the actual map here, because it matched up from what I remembered quite well.

Extraction isn’t perfect, of course.  I don’t know whether it was a function of my own slow reflexes or an honest problem with the gameplay (I tend to think a bit of both), but I was occasionally really frustrated by being able to see a pickup for only a second before it whizzed by, with no way for me to turn back and snag it.  Telekinesis is fairly forgiving in this regard (you don’t have to be pointing directly at something to grab it), but even still, I missed a lot of stuff, which wasn’t a huge issue most of the time, but if I’m in the middle of a big fight and about to die, would I really not even turn my head to grab the health pack I just left in the dust?  In a similar vein, there was one section where I died a couple of times to an enemy just out of my field of vision because a glitch blocked it from moving with a section of pipe, and I couldn’t move on until I killed it (impossible, because I couldn’t hit it) or it killed me (which apparently WAS possible).  Thankfully, this seemed only to be an issue in that one spot.

Coming off the high that was Extraction, I decided that I wanted to get as much of the Dead Space experience as I possibly could, and since I’d already seen the animated Dead Space:  Downfall (and Aftermath isn’t available on Netflix Instant Watch yet), that left Dead Space: Ignition, which I downloaded from XBLA and played in about an hour.  I kind of wish I hadn’t.  Ignition is presented as a motion comic within which are interspersed three different “hacking” minigames that, playing as a repair engineer on the ship, you must solve to keep the plot moving along.  As I mentioned, the whole thing is quite short, although you do have the option of replaying the missions to go along different paths, and it’s inexpensive, priced at 400 MS spacebucks, so I guess I don’t feel totally cheated, but I really could have done without this little side venture.  One of the minigames was insanely frustrating, one could be completely solved by the exact same method every time, and the third… well, the third was okay.  In comparison, at least.  There wasn’t even a great deal of story to be had, except for the connecting factor of your main character, whose name I have already forgotten, but who turns out to be the guy whose face falls off in the beginning of Dead Space 2.

Did I mention a dude’s FACE falls off at the beginning of Dead Space 2?  IT TOTALLY DOES!

Dead Space 2 is very scary.  It’s different than the way in which the first Dead Space was scary, though.  Dead Space 1 got into your head; there was no shortage of jump-scares, but they were laced through with a slowly growing sense of dread and paranoia that kept you inching around corners and shooting at dead bodies to make sure they weren’t getting back up.  In Dead Space 2, there are hordes of zombie children and raptors.  ZOMBIE RAPTORS.  It’s as horrifying as it sounds.  My first ten minutes of Dead Space 2 went something like this: after watching a dude’s face fall off a few inches from my own, I was let loose in a straitjacket with no weapon and the prompt that right bumper=RUN.  Then a bunch of necromorphs started trying to rip out my entrails.  By force of habit, I clicked my right thumbstick to find out which WAY I should run, only to find that there was no navigation beacon available yet.  I think this might have been the most terrifying thing of all.  This left me directionless in the creature-filled dark, with no arms.  I tried to run the way that seemed most logical, only to find myself in a corner with the nasties RIGHT BEHIND ME.  Well, I thought (as I watched Isaac’s limbs being sundered from his still-screaming torso), maybe I wasn’t supposed to survive that.  Could it have been a dream?  Nope.  I respawned in the same place as before, and again told to run.  I die a LOT more in Dead Space 2 than I did in 1.  It’s simply more in-your-face, and although I don’t think that’s a bad thing, it does require a different mindset; some might say that it’s not even a horror game anymore, but simply a straight action-shooter.  I don’t agree; I definitely think the horror elements are there, they’re just implemented differently, and I am still terrified.  We’ll see if this continues.

In progress: Dead Space 2 (360); Golden Sun: Dark Dawn (DS)

Completed: Trinity Universe (PS3); Dead Space: Extraction (Wii); Dead Space: Ignition (XBLA)

New: Hyperdimension Neptunia (PS3)

With that particular free-time-sucker taken care of, I actually made leaps and bounds of progress in other games this time around.  Who knew you could actually get things done when you’re not obsessively playing 70-hour JRPGs?  I certainly didn’t.

My first order of post-P3P play was getting back into Metroid Prime 2, a game that I had ostensibly been playing this entire time, but that in reality, I hadn’t touched since getting my ass back into Tartarus.  Going back to a game like this after a break tends to be a bit difficult for me; not only do I have to remember where I was and what I was doing, I also have to make sure that I don’t mess up the (to me, at least) freakishly complicated control scheme and end up shooting myself in the foot (so to speak).  I was, after all, coming from a game where pressing X was about the most complicated thing you ever had to do, so this was a bit of a leap.  Thankfully, the strategy guide that I kept glued to my lap throughout the course of the game made the whole navigation thing much easier, so all I really had to acclimate to was the controls, and after an embarrassing twenty minutes or so, that wasn’t so bad either.  I mentioned, when I was playing this before, that I didn’t particularly care for the whole light world/dark world mechanic, and while I never really got to like it, it does become less of an annoyance as the game goes on and you obtain more options that allow you to disregard the more annoying bits (like health-sapping).  If I hadn’t had the strategy guide for this game, I honestly think I would have lost patience with the portal-hopping that becomes more and more important and less and less intuitive as you get closer to the end; I’m sure Metroid purists would tell me that that’s just part of the exploration phase, but I’m just too impatient.  I don’t want to throw a controller, I just want to get the damn visor.  So I guess I’m a cheater.  Meh.

The next game I started after Metroid came to a close was Dead Space (yes, the original).  I picked up the collector’s edition of Dead Space 2 shortly after it came out, largely because I simply got hooked by the hype train (predictably), but I never actually finished the first game; in fact, I didn’t put much time into it at all.  So, in order to abide by my own rules, I started up a save from scratch and started scouring the Ishimura.  I love survival horror games when they’re done well, and Dead Space certainly is; however, I am also a giant baby when I play them.  I scream and drop controllers a lot, because I am extremely easily startled, and Dead Space does a lot of startling.  I got progressively more and more paranoid as I played, both in the game and out of it; while Isaac spent a lot of time shooting dead bodies before they could get up and staring unblinkingly at vents, I had a positively horrifying trip to my dark, cold storage unit where a falling box nearly gave me a heart attack.  It didn’t help that the lights in the hall were flickering, either.

Even though I don’t really “do” shooters, I’ve had one thing mercilessly programmed into me by both those I have played and by years of zombie movies: you gotta shoot ‘em in the head.  Unfortunately, abiding by that maxim in Dead Space will get you very dead very fast, and as bad as I am at shooting things in the head, limbs are worse.  Don’t get me wrong; I really like the mechanic, but it’s definitely more difficult to line up a shot that will take off a leg when it’s flailing around and (usually) running directly at you.  The sights on the plasma cutter helped with this, which is probably why I exclusively ended up using that and the Ripper in my travels.  With inventory management being a bit of an issue, I found that deciding on a minimal number of weapons and sticking with those eliminated the need to have a bunch of ammo for different things taking up space.  That, and I just like to cut things up with giant flying saw blades.

I think my favorite thing about Dead Space, though, is the fact that it takes pity on the directionally-challenged, like me, and actually implements a navigation system that WORKS.  Rather than simply putting a blip on your radar and expecting you to figure out what exactly is going on, you can, at any time, call up a beam of light that will run directly towards your next objective.  It even adjusts itself as you follow along, so it’s not leading you directly into walls or anything like that.  I really appreciated this; it might have felt too linear to some, but I get lost really easily, and this felt like an unobtrusive way to get that under control.

I believe I’m going to play Dead Space: Extraction for the Wii before I get into Dead Space 2, but before I do that, I decided I need a break, so I started up Trinity Universe for the PS3, a game about which I actually knew precious little, save that it’s a JRPG that has bright, flashy Japanese artwork on the box.  That’s usually enough for me.  Now… knowing my predilection towards Persona and others of that ilk, you should take me very seriously when I say that, as of now, I think I am prepared to name this the most Japanese game I have ever played.  I know, right?  Watch this trailer and tell me I’m wrong.  As far as I can tell, my current mission is to knock floating objects out of orbit by traversing the dungeons inside them and destroying their gravity cores; if I don’t, the protagonist (the Demon Dog/God King) has to be turned into a gem in order to protect the town.  There is a second storyline featuring a Valkyrie who has some as-of-now nebulous connection to my current character, but I don’t really know what her deal is yet.  The gameplay is pretty standard JRPG fare; it’s turn-based, with some additions such as the ability to execute attack chains and special moves depending on how you set up your basic attacks.  Dungeons are, for the most part, short and sweet, which I like; you do end up going back to the same places time after time, but the areas are small enough that it doesn’t feel tedious.  There are a bunch of features that I haven’t messed with yet (and may not at all), such as a monster colosseum and a crafting system that I’ve only given cursory attention to; really, there’s an almost overwhelming amount of stuff here, and my biggest problem with this game so far has been that I’m not really sure how to tell what’s important or significant and what’s not.  It’s definitely…. interesting, though.  If you play with the sound off.  Otherwise it’s a little annoying.

In progress: Trinity Universe (PS3); Golden Sun: Dark Dawn (DS)

Completed: Persona 3 Portable (PSP); Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (Wii); Dead Space (360)

New: Dead Space 2 (360); Lord of Arcana (PSP); Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes (DS)