D-Sub9 Presents: Beergaming - Pilotwings (Practice/Pilot Episode)

Oh hey, we posted something! A culmination of a few months of trial, error, frustration, tears, and alcohol!

This is Beergaming, a new monthly (ha ha) feature we're going to try out here on D-Sub9 and the D-Sub9 Youtube Channel. Hopefully this will take off as well as Mike (holding SNES controller) can't!

Blizzard: Most people play Diablo 3 solo. Still doesn't reconsider offline play.

Maybe I'm just being touchy, but it truly irks me when a gaming company admits it was wrong all along about a particular decision, yet doesn't recant its proud proclamations that it'll keep doing that wrong thing as if everything was OK in the world. I believe that may be called hubris... or bullshit... or some other term directing my nerd rage directly at the heart of Blizzard-Activision.

Dan Stapleton over at GameSpy has a fantastic digest of the latest Diablo 3 blog post over at Blizzard. Specifically, Senior Technical Game Designer Wyatt Cheng drops a little info-bomb on the fanbase:

"At the moment though playing solo is the clear choice, even for those who would prefer co-op with some of their friends."

OK, so all you gamers who proclaimed your love for single-player hacking 'n' slashing have been officially validated by the powers-that-be. That should mean that gameplay (and connectivity, dammit) should be re-addressed to cater to your needs. Say... offline play allowing on-demand soloing whether or not your Internet (or Blizzard's for that matter) is working properly? Well, Cheng mentions nothing about taking care of the demand of the fans, but Stapleton reminds us all of Blizzard's stance that online-only is the way the game is designed to play and you should go play something else if you don't like it... or can't play at all.

Well, at least this squelches the Blizzard apologists who shout that Diablo 3 is purely a multiplayer game and that's how the majority of gamers will play, right? Fat lot of good that will do.

Come on, Blizzard. You've clearly slain the piracy boogeyman while simultaneously invalidating your "Online-only is the most secure method" claims, reducing online-only to just another way to keep gamers from owning the games they bought. How about giving gamers a little latitude in playing your games the way they want to?

I guess not. That money isn't going to print itself, you know.

The Byte Cellar is the Coolest Retro PC Room in History

That's an incredible amount of radiation flowing through that tiny room.

Blake Patterson clearly has a taste for the old-school, as his museum of PC technology clearly shows. The man is a curator of everything from the Apple IIc to the Tandy 1000TL to the Compaq iPaq! There's so much nostalgia going on in that basement I'm not sure which game I want to spin up first. Rise of the Triad? No, Tandy Lemmings! No, wait... Castle Wolfenstein!

• The Byte Cellar
• As covered on Lifehacker

D-Sub9 Podcast #3

Download Podcast (34 minutes, MP3)

Oh hey it's another (late) episode of the D-Sub9 Podcast! Blame Ryan. That slacker.

The redoubtable trio of Bob, Keith and Ryan return to sing the tales of indie developer woe and hope with Microsoft's $40,000 bill on everything and the OUYA's marvelous escape plan. Also, robots... and zombies... and abortions. BE OFFENDED.

The D-Sub9 Podcast features adults using adult language.

Intro/Outro Music: Sonic Mayhem - Quad Machine 

Podcast index:

• Keith dooms himself to death by dysentery. (0:04)
• Fez and how Microsoft hates indie developers. (0:47)
• The OUYA (OH YEAH) makes Ryan all tingly (8:30)
• We're making our own Kickstarter! We know nothing about fraud law. (12:50)
• Heck, why not beat up on CERTAIN BASEBALL STARS while we're at it? (13:15)
• Bob on Alan Wake's American Nightmare (16:22)
• Keith bailed on Amnesia. Ryan accuses Keith of hereticism (18:15)
• ... and Keith calls Ryan out on being a gaming leper. (18:38)
• Keith is on the letter "A" in his Steam collection (20:15)
• Nobody likes Braid. Just throwing that out there. (24:10)
• Never trust Ryan in a survival situation. (26:28)
• But RETRO 16-BIT ROBOTS. Yeah, you're in Ryan's wheelhouse. (31:26)

On Being a Cheapskate, and Why the OUYA May Kill Me

In a certain previous podcast, I outed myself as a complete and total cheapskate. As a rule of thumb I've refused to purchase a video game more than forty dollars, with the rare exceptions rearing their glorious heads from time to time. I usually buy used instead of new. I pay nearly bottom-dollar for any Humble Bundle that rolls around. I ignore the other, lesser bundles that have mandatory minimum prices. Heck, I've resorted to the underworld of retro gaming by burning "backup" copies of Dreamcast titles and diving headlong into ROM sites for cartridge-based systems. If any game developer made a dollar off of me in recent memory, they should laminate it, frame it, and nail it to a wall in their lobby in veneration for all time because it's a rare thing to see from me.

By all respects, I'm a horrible gamer, and should be ashamed of myself for not giving into the worship of the white elephant that is video games.

This is why I have such high hopes for - and an utter fear of - the OUYA.

D-Sub9 Podcast #2

Download Podcast (50 minutes, MP3)

Keith, Bob and Ryan are cheap gamers who wouldn't know a good game if it slapped them in the face... or a good thousand games as Keith would have you believe.

The D-Sub9 Podcast features adults using adult language.

Intro/Outro Music: Ducktales - The Moon, by Year 200X

Podcast index:

• Keith demonstrates his Model-M keyboard. (0:04)
• Free-to-Play vs. Pay-to-Play (1:00)
• The Secret World, and why we won't try it. We're cheap. (1:40)
• Free-to-Play is the new Shareware (3:15)
• The only way WoW clones can compete (5:00)
• Oh crap, they let Ryan talk about World of Tanks... (9:05)
• Game enhancing Pay-to-Play (Super Monday Night Combat) (16:15)
• Great, now Ryan's breaking NDAs and he still won't shut up (Mechwarrior Online) (20:43)
• Bob receives a call... of nature... (22:25)
• Runes of Magic and Allods Online (23:28)
• Bob talks about Prototype and softly weeps into his beer (25:15)
• NICE WORK, AGENT (29:43)
• The art of Craigslist negotiations (33:26)
• Ryan embarks on his retro collection project (35:03)
• Haha Game Gear battery jokes (42:00)
• What are we playing this week? (43:55)
• Keith has a feast of games... yet he starves. Pity him. (45:30)

Box Art is Horrible: The Atari 2600

Gaming historians everywhere believed that people who played games before the mighty 8-Bit era were accustomed to utilizing a truckload of imagination to maintain their suspension of disbelief upon the great pillars of entertainment emanating from the venerable (and wood-laminated) Atari 2600. These video game warriors of yore allowed their minds to be churned into a pasty adhesive that attached the moving squares and balls on screen with the clearly-unrelated-to-actual-game artwork that was plastered on the boxes and cartridges. Sometimes, this effort in marketing actually worked.

Sometimes, it didn't.

Join RJ and Ryan as they survey a generation of gaming that they probably don't ever want to visit again.

D-Sub9 Podcast #1

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Behold as Ryan, Keith and Bob ramble incessantly about things... things with D-Pads and control mechanisms that are almost analog in nature.

Things we talk about (so you can follow along... like one of those choose your adventure novels that I never once cheated on):

Intro/Outro Music: StarTropics II: Zoda's Revenge - Main Dungeon Theme

• Reggie Fils-Aime complains about insatiable gamers (1:00)
• Syndicate Developer Head: We were screwed no matter what. Thanks, fans. (4:20)
• Tekken Producer to Fans: Stop Whining (7:37)
• Lack of gaming activism, Diablo 3, Ryan feels justified (and nobody cares) (10:00)
• Bob and Ryan love Michael Ironside with many <3s PS don't buy the new Splinter Cell (11:52)
• Bob waxes poetic (or is it nostalgic?) on the PSP (14:34)
• Keith talks about Wreck It Ralph, is a better critic than Ebert (18:00)
• We talk about video game rehab (20:20)
• The Sonic the Hedgehog franchise gives Keith gas and other low-hanging fruit (22:27)
• Jet Set Radio - Nobody likes it but Ryan (24:23)
• Box Art - The only part you want to hear about (25:40)
• Keith talks about the day he almost wasn't a gamer and stayed a redneck (26:20)
• The new Mass Effect 3 endings came out (and we never played it because bleh) (29:00)

Box Art is Horrible: The NES

It's always important to remember our roots in gaming. Remember that the 1080p multi-gigabyte AAA titles of today were the 10x10 pixelated sprites of 1985... and marketing wasn't quite as easy then. So difficult, in fact, that artists had to take a few liberties with the source material to get our greedy little eyes fixed on the packaging of an otherwise completely unrelated product.

These are the lower echelons of box art. Let Ryan and RJ guide you on this safari of insanity...

Gamestop Needs to Be Useful and Go Retro

With rumors rampant that the latest and greatest from Sony & Microsoft won't support GameStop's cash cow that is used games, it isn't hard to fathom that the $2.5 billion (with a b) company isn't utterly shaking in its boots about the future. There is hope for GameStop, however. It just needs to do two things: sell themselves as a service, and (oh please, oh please) leverage their retail locations and store-to-store distribution network to bring out-of-circulation "retro" gaming back to the masses.

On DRM, Pre-orders, and Torchlight II

The developers at Runic Games have me in a quandary, and their motherland of origin hasn't done much to help the situation, here.

As the Diablo III hype was whipped into a malevolent storm of excitement, anticipation, and unbridled gamer fury, I had elected to sit on the sidelines and observe the Internet maelstrom while taking a trip into the last decade and dusting off my old - old - copies of Diablo II. After spending several hours of classic hacking and slashing, I came to two conclusions:

1. Diablo II is still fun.
2. Diablo II is not as fun as I had hoped it would be.

Hell... for the hundredth time.

It was with a shallow pit in my stomach that I put my D2 discs aside and sat there yearning for the ever-niggling requirement for "more." The problem wasn't that beating the hero-goblin Rakanishu upside the head for the umpteenth time wasn't as smooth, fluid, and altogether rewarding as it was twelve (ugh) years ago. The problem was that after reaching the double-digit mark for brutally beating ol' Rak like a piñata doll filled with hundred dollar bills, you start to wonder if or when he'll go on strike for better working conditions... maybe even a little vacation time and bonus incentives to go with his meager salary as a ne'er-do-well. The point is, Diablo II just felt stale.

Mods notwithstanding, it was clear that I needed to move on from Throw the Devil A Beatin' 2.0, and get onto other, more recent things. But, when it came to Action RPGs, my initial gut reaction was that there was just no beating the King that is Blizzard. Diablo III had to be the way to go, and that just soured my stomach.