The Gameslave Podcast - Episode 152

I am survived E3 and the following week of catch up at work. We had a large group for this podcast as guests RockiesMagicNumber, AngiChan, and Hummingbird were all present and putting in their two cents. As a result I apologize for the sound issues on this one.

Sparse notes can be found on this page.

Doorknobs don't kill people, I kill people! Here, have a Deadpool game review, and a taco.

Em here! I picked up the new Deadpool game today, thought I would give you guys a tid-bits while I am at the halfway point.

As of now, If you know Deadpool you can expect lots of sweet weapons, dirty jokes, funny phrases, silly actions, and "fourth-wall" breaking. So to put it simply, if you like Deadpool (and how could you not?), you'll probably dig this game. To be honest even if you're not much of a gamer/comic reader, you'll still find it entertaining.

Starting with the good stuff, there are a fair amount of cool weapons and upgrades that don't take too long to afford(in Deadpool points that is). You're literally battling enemies 90% of the time so this keeps things from getting too old too fast. From the upgrade menu you can choose from a few guns and there are also a variety of melee weapons and gadgets to use as well.Besides that, Deadpool's regenerative healing is nice, if you just step away from the action for a bit, he will gain his health back pretty quickly as well as his suit; this saves some stress trying to find some health. Also teleporting to avoid enemies and travel short distances comes in handy too, it's pretty similar to "Blinking" in Bethesda's Dishonored. Anyway, I think the cut scenes are my favorite part thus far, there was also a super cool 8 bit portion too that I was pretty fond of.

On the flip side, there really isn't any sort of story line to this game. It's pretty much all non-strategic killing and I guess we all assumed it would be. This is totally fine though, I didn't expect this game to be super deep and intricate, but with the minimal story line, and small range of enemy types you may get a little weary of repetitiveness. All in all, I think it's the funny jokes and random actions that make this game worth while in itself, but the replay value is pretty low. If you're a huge Deadpool fan I'd say go ahead and drop the $60 bucks for it, if you're not, you may be better off just borrowing it from a friend or playing it used.

Xbox One 180°s on DRM

Yes, I know the pun in the title is now way over used, but how can I not take the opportunity? Today Don Mattrick, President of Interactive Entertainment Business for Microsoft posted that there will be a day one patch that will remove the requirement for the Xbox One to force a check of your internet connection so you can play your games. There will be no  problems with you wanting to trade / sell / loan a disc based game. In fact, all playing of games will work exactly as it does today; no network no problem.  As long as we're assuming you are doing single player, but that part is kind of self explanatory.

There are two downsides to this whole thing. We have now lost the ability to install games to an Xbox One and not need a disc and we lost the family share plan. Overall, I think the gamers came out ahead.

E3 2013 Pictures

Finally I have the pictures that I felt came out decent. The full gallery can be found here.

Batman: Arkham Origins

"Batman: Arkham Origins" is a prequel to the Arkham game series. It is set relatively early on in Batman's career. How early? So early he has yet to even meet all of his rouges' gallery. It is set during Christmas Eve and Black Mask has placed a bounty of $50,000,000 on Batman with the condition that the job must be done tonight. This brings all sorts of scum, such as Deathstroke and Deadshot, to Gotham in hopes of making the big payday. But why does Black Mask need Batman out if the picture so badly?

Now this Batman game is not being done by developer Rocksteady. Instead it is being done internally by Warner Brothers Montreal. This honestly had me worried as I was not sure that the new team could maintain the quality we have come to expect from an Arkham game. Well based on the demo we saw at E3, there is nothing to fear.

The locomotion through the city and combat appears to be intact. They also showed off a new detective vision by using a helicopter that crashed in front of Batman to recreate the crime scene and figure out what happened. Two new thug type enemies made their debut in the demo as well. The first being a large armored bruiser that you have to stun to take down and the second a martial artist that can counter your counters forcing you to counter the counter-counter. The demo shortly moved to a predator room where we got to see a new toy, the remote claw. With it you can pick two targets and fire, causing the claw to hit target one, then target two and then pull them together. This was used effectively to crash two thugs together, a thug and a gas barrel and finally between two gargoyles to create a tight rope. It looks like a very fun tool. Once the room was empty Batman gets in an elevator (really?) and heads to the floor Blackskull should be on. Here Batman discovers he is not as clever as he thinks when Bane welcomes an empty elevator, and then reaches through the ceiling and rips Batman down. Bane throws Bats into a room with the pinnacle of Batman villians, Joker. The demo ends with Joker blowing up a construction site and threatening the rest of Gotham. Definitely looking forward to this in October.