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Some Other Podcast, Episode 39: Merry Effing X-Mas

Leah — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 12:52:41 +0000

During this most wonderful time of the year, we bring to you this podcast. It’s a gift! For you! ….you don’t have one already, do you? I didn’t keep the receipt…. Anyway, pull up a nice warm blankie and a glass of eggnog while we talk to you about more delayed games, the possibility of another money-grab from Sony, and Persona! Persona, Persona, Persona….

Persona 4

PixelJunk Shooter

Torchlight

Lumines

Persona 4 team to reunite in 2010 to work on “an even bigger title”

Split Second dated for May 2010

FFXIII launch day sales in Japan exceed 1 million

Brutal Legend “Hammer of Infinite Fate” DLC on XBL and PSN

PSN premium subscription possibly coming; possible features include cloud storage and cross-game chat

Trials HD DLC 12/23 for 400 MS points

LBP accessory bundle references PSP 4000; ad company claims it’s a mistake

Crackdown 2 coming “first half of 2010″

Blizzard to return to console development “at some point”

MS files patent for user health-generated avatars

Capcom delays several titles to April 2010 or later

Assassin’s Creed 2 DLC originally slated to be in the game, but was cut

1 vs. 100 available to Live Silver from 12/24 9AM PST to 12/28 9AM PST in many areas

Music games getting specific music stores on XBL

We love listener mail! Please to be sending more of it to podcast@someothercastle.com.

Some Other Podcast, Episode 36: Trypto-cast 2009!

Leah — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 01:16:57 +0000

So, uh… yeah. We ate a lot of turkey before recording this episode. Like, a LOT. So if we sound exhausted, it’s because all that hard work of digesting is getting to us and we are mere steps away from comas. Not to be deterred, we tough it out to give you a holiday show filled with awesomeness! Wake up from your own turkey haze and join us to chat about the many uses of XBox Live, men marrying video game characters, and why stabbing people is awesome.

Linkberry sauce!

Call of Duty 4

Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box

New Super Mario Bros. Wii

Microsoft distributing codes to give your avatar a Chocobo

Dead Space 2 to be “officially announced” on 12/22

Uncharted 2 getting free DLC and update this Friday

Rock Band 2 officially has over 1000 songs available

XBox Live working on an emergency alert system, only in New York for now

DSi LL sells 103k units in 2 days in Japan

Japanese man marries his virtual girlfriend in real life

Super Mario Kart available on Virtual Console

Ubisoft not publishing No More Heroes sequel for 360 and PS3 in the US; as of now, Japan only

British intelligence agency GCHQ attempting to recruit through XBox Live

SSFIV scans in Famitsu featuring characters Cody, Adon, Guy, and Ibuki

You know you want to send us mail! Do so at podcast@someothercastle.com if you want to live!

Some Other Podcast, Episode 33: DO YOU HAVE STAIRS IN YOUR HOUSE?

Leah — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 03:19:12 +0000

We’re getting all nostalgic up in here as we recall basically every internet meme known to man. News is actually starting to get interesting again, and we’ve been playing a ridiculously wide span of games between the two of us, so there’s plenty to keep you entertained! Listen up as we chat about clothes made of hair, lawyers who apparently can’t read, and Borderlands! Lots about Borderlands…

Links, yo.

Batman: Arkham Asylum

Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box

Bayonetta gets a 1/8 release date

Borderlands patch fixes a bunch of stuff that was broken

God of War III gets an Ultimate Edition with lots of cool stuff

Patches incoming for King of Fighters XII and Tekken 6

Modded 360s being banned from Live

PSP Go hasn’t sold all that well in Japan

Eric Neustadter of Microsoft badmouths Facebook on DS, looks like an ass

No Doubt suing Activision because they can’t read contracts

SMT Strange Journey getting a US release Spring 2010

Gran Turismo 5 costing 60 million dollars to make

Infinity Ward pulls CoD MW2 video campaigning for “Fighting Against Grenade Spam”… come on, guys…

Some Other Podcast, Episode 30: High Five!

Leah — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 02:01:15 +0000

It’s our thirtieth episode, and you know what that means: cake! We’re completely on a sugar high from all the frosting we inhaled beforehand, so you’re going to have to excuse the tangents. You know, like you usually do. In between tangents, we do find time to talk about demos (for good and evil), the scariness of hard games, and just what the proper use of those Modern Warfare 2 goggles might be…

LINKFACE!

Mario and Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story

Katamari Forever

Wet

Shin Megami Tensei: Persona PSP

Demon’s Souls

Uncharted 2

Sony confirms 250 gig PS3 for $350 to drop November 3

Bayonetta demo available on Japanese PSN

God of War 3 demo coming out in Japan for purchasers of inFamous

Left 4 Dead 2 demo 10/27 for preorder customers, 11/3 for everyone else

Facebook and Twitter coming to XBL in November

WoW film to be written by Saving Private Ryan guy

Daily Star says MW2 goggles will be used for pervy stuff

Black Wii remote and nunchuck coming 11/16

GameStop director drops 2.3 million shares of stock

Magic the Gathering getting expansion 10/21 on XBLA, will cost 400 MS points

Avatar Halloween costumes coming to XBL

Band Hero demo on XBLA

We still love the listener mail! Send it to podcast@someothercastle.com

Some Other Podcast, Episode 25: Professor Layton and the Sack of Oranges

Leah — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 11:44:51 +0000

That Layton character is not to be trusted. Something is definitely hidden in his gigantic hat. This is pure, uncut Some Other Castle goodness down to its very core; if you are offended by diversions into completely unrelated territory, well…. you probably aren’t listening to us anyway, so I probably don’t have to warn you. Anyway, this week covers everything from price drops to zombie clowns to Mortal Kombat drinking games, so tune in!

Links o’ goodness!

Dissidia Final Fantasy

Halo 3

World of Warcraft

Persona 3

Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box

Batman: Arkham Asylum

Mortal Kombat: The Movie

360 price drops in effect now; Pro being phased out

Water being added to Little Big Planet; beta testing now

New WoW expansion coming in 2010

Monk class announced for Diablo 3; NOT coming in 2010

No new content coming for Battlefield 1943

Pinnacle Station: new Mass Effect DLC

Wii Sports Resort sells 1 million copies in the US alone…. IN ONE MONTH

Peggle Nights coming to XBLA

Left 4 Dead 2 playable at PAX; Elaine attempting to make friends with Valve

We heart listener mail! Send it to podcast@someothercastle.com! Please? Pretty please?

Some Other Podcast, Episode 24: Pants Deficiency

Leah — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 11:45:14 +0000

For the record, I did keep my pants on for the entire episode…. no matter how tempting it may have been. This week, our very own Sam and Jenn, of World of Workout and Geek Culture fame respectively, join us for an hour of fun ramblings! Tune in as we chat about Sony’s dumbness (yeah, it’s a running theme), happy place games, and pouring one out for our Chromehounds homies. You should probably also be prepared for a *liiiiiiitle* bit of WoW talk…

Links get!

Shatter

World of Warcraft

Animal Crossing: City Folk

Batman: Arkham Asylum

Final Fantasy XIII (demo)

Trials HD

Earthbound

July NPDs

Slim PS3 confirmed, and soon!

Fable 3 announced for 2010

Interplay classics coming to Steam

360 Elite console now shipping with new packaging and without HD cables

Persona 3 PSP coming to Japan November 1

Little Big Planet GOTY edition dated Sept 8

Brutal Legend demo coming in September

Loco Roco Carnival coming to Japan, will be download only

Little Big Planet PSP has no multiplayer

Gran Turismo 5 finally incorporates car damage

Chromehounds servers shutting down

Want to send us stuff? Well, that’s great! Here’s where you do it: podcast@someothercastle.com.

Some Other Podcast, Episode 23: Midnight Junk Pictures

Leah — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 11:41:15 +0000

What wonders does the DSi Facebook app hold? We’re not really sure… but it’s quite possible they lead to divorce. (!) When we’re not pondering that particular brand of mischief, we also find time to answer a veritable avalanche of listener mail, weigh the merits and dangers of World of Warcraft, and gush about the most awesome, nerdiest hobby ever. We put off watching Mortal Kombat: The Movie this week, opting instead to discuss Second Skin, a documentary about MMO players. No commentary track this week, but don’t worry, it will return!

Links everywhere! They’re in my racoon wounds!

Turtles in Time: Reshelled

Splosion Man

Second Skin

Assassin’s Creed 2 CE priced at $80

Persona PSP releasing simultaneously on UMD and PSN

New dashboard update has ridiculously priced things

Starcraft 2 officially delayed until 2010

500,000 Wii Sports Resorts sold in US alone

Brutal Legend lawsuit settled

Best Buy testing price matching for GameStop’s used games

50 Cent to be in CoDMW2 (BBQOMG)

GRIN closing offices

Doom 2 coming to XBLA

Digital Cowboys are now part of Platform Nation!

We love hugs! Keep sending ‘em to podcast@someothercastle.com. Oh, and questions, too.

Some Other Podcast, Episode 21: Put Your Cake In My Princess

Leah — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 14:37:16 +0000

We struggled with the title to this week’s episode; it was either this or “Ten Pounds of Ball,” but given that it’s our twenty-first, we thought that the cake should in fact be prominently featured. Sadly, we did fail to procure a Fudgie yet again, but the quest will continue! In the meantime, listen in as we lament more delayed games, marvel over Nintendo’s sales numbers of doom, and begin creating our characters for the upcoming Twilight MMO.

Freshly picked links!

DSi update 1.4 brings Facebook to the system in Japan

Red Steel 2, Splinter Cell Conviction, and Dark Void all delayed to 2010

Trine for PSN delayed again due to bug

Microsoft says Facebook and Twitter will be on the Dashboard before Christmas

Buy all Summer of Arcade XBLA titles and get 800 MS points back

Dead Space, Infamous, and WoW all getting movies

Castle Crashers coming to PS3

GTA IV “Ballad of Gay Tony” dated for October 29

Twilight MMO in development?

Nintendo releases ridiculous lifetime sales numbers for DS and Wii

Plants vs. Zombies coming to XBLA

World of Workout

Send us things! Hugs are appreciated at podcast@someothercastle.com.

Some Other Random Old Games, Part 1: Ikaruga (XBLA), Gradius V (PS2), Unreal Tournament (PC)

Marcus — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 18:37:15 +0000

Over the last few days, inspired by Ikaruga’s temporary half-pricedness thanks to Xbox Live’s often maligned Deal of the Week (this was how to do it right, Microsoft; more please), I’ve been revisiting a few old favorites from the last decade or so of gaming. And they all involve shooting things!

Let’s start with Ikaruga itself. It’s a top-down scrolling shoot-’em-up of the very old school variety, as one would expect from developer Treasure, but with a couple of twists. After twenty-something years of learning to avoid all enemy fire in games of this ilk, Ikaruga actually expects you to unlearn this extremely base impulse. At the press of a button, you can change your ship from white to black and back again, and you’ll immediately notice that every enemy is based on one of these colors also – and their shots will match their color. The trick is that enemy fire the opposite color to you is lethal, but the same color is actually beneficial, charging up your only power-up weapon as you collect the energy of these shots. Also, you deal double damage to enemies the opposite color to you. The first couple of minutes of the game introduces this unique mechanic simply enough, but it’s not long before the game bombards you with both black and white at the same time; and after the first level it will demand of you very accurate and fast color-switching just to survive. In HD on the Xbox 360 the game’s visuals – 3D despite its 2D gameplay – look absolutely incredible, and it was pretty enough to begin with in its older incarnations in arcades and on the Dreamcast in Japan, and latterly on the Gamecube worldwide. It’s a savagely hard but extremely satisfying game that really puts an interesting spin on one of gaming’s oldest styles of gameplay.

Gradius V, on the PlayStation 2, is another example of an old-style 2D shoot-’em-up with 3D graphics, this time a side-scroller and part of one of the most storied and venerable franchises in that genre. Coincidentally, like Ikaruga, it was also developed by Treasure. Mechanically, though, it’s far more traditional – anyone who’s played any of the older Gradius games will be instantly at home with the game’s classic power-up system, where you get to pick and choose what to get as you go along with a mere button-press at the right time. Gradius V also is slightly more forgiving than its predecessors, allowing you to re-collect your Multiples (glowing indestructible orbs that follow your ship’s movement and mimic your shots for extra firepower) when you die. The Multiples – called Options in the Japanese release and older games in the series – also have an extra use determined by your choice of power-up array when you start the game or use a continue: they can be held in place, rotate their shots, be assigned a fixed formation, and more. The genius level design, which takes a lot of cues from its predecessors, makes all these variants useful if you keep a clear head, especially since your ship is always facing to the right but threats can come at you from any direction in some places. Gradius V is, again, an extremely hard game, but it plays fair; you initially start with three continues, and every hour you play, it unlocks another continue for you to use when you’re out of lives. When it hits 15, it unlocks free play, so you have unlimited continues. The level design is also so good that you never feel like the game’s actually being unfairly hard; you know that when you died, it’s because you screwed up, and you know how you could make it through next time; and make it through you will, progressing further and further into its ever more challenging levels. It’s a PS2-exclusive game so far, but hopefully it will come to one or more of the modern consoles’ download services eventually – its already beautiful graphics would look fantastic in HD. It also sports a phenomenal soundtrack that complements the action perfectly.

Unreal Tournament is a name known to most gamers with even a passing knowledge of first-person shooters. Originally a spin-off from Unreal, and released in late 1999 to compete with Quake III Arena, UT ditched the story mode completely and focused entirely on multiplayer. Okay, that’s not strictly true – it does have a rudimentary campaign that involves playing a series of matches with and against AI bots, but it’s totally optional since the only unlock is the character model of the final boss character. The bots, essentially NPCs or AI players, are actually one of UT’s standout features. Whereas many similar games – Quake III included – only ever seemed to ramp up the bots’ accuracy with guns as you turned their skill up, UT’s bots actually get smarter; varying their tactics, defending themselves more carefully, running different paths around the levels but never quite being infallible. Not far off human opponents, at least by the genre’s standards. And make no mistake, this is a game about sheer, unadulterated carnage. Throw out your tactical plans and cover mechanics, and warm up that twitch instinct. Looking back on UT, it’s amazing how well it’s aged. The first incarnation of the now-ubiquitous Unreal Engine, upgraded from the first Unreal game, is not only extremely efficient in its use of power (a 200MHz Pentium with no 3D acceleration at all can actually run the game quite playably, albeit in a low resolution, so rest assured it will run on almost literally anything – good news for netbook owners wanting to shoot stuff), but also scales well to look pretty decent even now, happily playing with any graphics hardware you can find at any resolution or aspect ratio with nary a hiccup. You won’t mistake it for Crysis, say, but it looks good; much credit is due to both its art style – the best Epic have ever had, in my opinion – and its pioneering use of translucent detail textures (enable them by delving into the hidden preferences menu, accessed by hitting the tilde key and typing “preferences” into the console) that can still put some modern games to shame. The action is perfectly tuned and absolutely relentless, the weapon selection is spectacular, the vast number of maps are also consistently brilliant (as seen by how often many have been revisited in subsequent UT games), the game modes are all great fun and can be heavily tweaked by a huge array of “mutators”, control is spot-on and there are a ton of mods and new maps to be had for free online that the game makes a snap to install. Whether you play it alone (with bots) or as it was truly intended with up to fifteen other people online or over a LAN, the original UT – on PC, not one of the watered-down console ports – still holds up as one of the greatest first-person shooters ever made, and still for me it remains Epic’s finest game.

Quick Impressions: Banjo-Tooie XBLA

Samuel — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 02:53:09 +0000

After having a ton of fun with Banjo Kazooie, and going so far as to name Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts my personal Game of the Year for 2008, I can’t explain why I waited so long to finally start Tooie (hereafter referred to as BK2, because my spellcheck already hates this sentence). I bought it early on Saturday morning from XBLA, and spent (in-game clock) no less than seventeen hours playing it over the weekend. I think I only took breaks to shower, eat, play Dungeons and Dragons, and attend a birthday party, but all I remember is collecting shiny golden jigsaw pieces and birds, bears, witches, sentient ice cubes….

The Nintendo 64 put out some stellar titles, including several in Metacritic’s all-time high for best games. BK and BK2 rank 92 and 90, respectively. Having never touched the games back when they were on that system, I have to say that they have really aged well. I’ve often heard reviewers and gamers calling Rare out for including so many shiny objects to collect, but I have to say that it really soothes the consumer whore in me for a game’s sole purpose to be hording baubles. The naysayers have used the term “collectathon,” and it’s no less apt here, but I don’t use it pejoratively.

The second game in the series includes something that I’ve never seen in a game before. When starting, the Bird and Bear team retain ALL of their moves earned during the first game. The sequel introduces lots of new moves to keep it fresh, all while keeping the controls simple enough to still be enjoyable. New things include new types of ammo (ice, fire, explosive, homing and remote-controlled), new footwear (wall-climbing, super-mega-ultra-hyper jumping), and transformations (washing-machine, armored car, two sizes of T-Rex, submarine) and still keeps up with all of the fourth-wall breaking jokes.

I haven’t yet finished the game, so I’ll hold off on scores or anything else (in case there is a totally bullshit end boss like in the first one), but if you ever enjoyed Mario 64, you owe it to yourself to try out a game that beats Mario at his own game.