Best Stuff on the Net: Does Twitch Plays Pokemon Give You Hope for Humanity?

Idea Channel is easily one of my favorite thing that PBS has turned out in a long time, always topical, clever, and opinionated, it's a great place to go for, well, ideas.  This week they tackle some of the greater implications of Twitch beating Pokemon Red.  There's some lofty ideas that are pretty interesting born from a bunch of people on the internet collaboratively playing a portable video game from the 1990's.

If you enjoy this kind of format, you'll probably get a kick out of the rest of Idea Channel's random thoughts.

Best Stuff on the Net: JP Kellams from PlatinumGames speaks at IEA

Polygon had this linked at the bottom of an article talking about the potential of moving Bayonetta 2 from the WiiU to other consoles, and how it's exclusivity came to be.  That's all nice and dandy for a headline, but this hour and a half presentation by JP Kellams, a creative producer at Platinum Games, has lots of really cool info.  If you've got any desire to see what it's like for a foreigner over in the Japanese game industry, advice on how to break in yourself, or just how the sausage is made, this is absolutely worth a view / listen.

Presentation starts at 10:21

Twitch Plays Pokemon: The Final Battle

If you've been listening to the show, then you know I've been covering the phenomena that is Twitch Plays Pokemon for the past two weeks. Finally, early in the morning on March 1st, 2014 Blue was defeated, and Red was finally freed from the thousands of voices in his head telling him what to do. It was a wild ride, and I'll be posting a more in depth analysis later. For now, enjoy the show.

http://www.reddit.com/r/twitchplayspokemon/

http://www.twitch.tv/twitchplayspokemon/

Titanfall Beta Commentary

With the Titanfall beta opening to everyone for a short time this past week, I decided to record a few matches on my last day of play, along with a bit of commentary associated with each.  The main highlight for these videos is the new "Burn Cards" feature that was rolled out for this test.  They end up adding just enough spice to a typical match to be interesting, but not downright broken.  If you want to see more videos from the beta, including a look at the Stryder Titan, make sure to check out the beta playlist:

Titanfall Beta Playlist

VGR Episode 303

So it's longtime friend of the show Mike, along with newcomer Wil, talking about a ton of news from the week, as well as Hearthstone, the 3DS, and a bunch of other stuff.

For fans who like to listen live, our new time slot is now Friday at 11pm to Saturday at 1am, so feel free to listen in at WUAG.net

-=Download VGR 3.03=-

VGR 302

For episode 2 of season 3, we have special guest Helen on while we talk about what's going on in the World of Warcraft, a review of Warframe (as of 11.5), and what exactly is Bit Brigade.

For fans who like to listen live, our new time slot is now Friday at 11pm to Saturday at 1am, so feel free to listen in at WUAG.net

-=Download VGR 3.02=-

VGR 301

Hey hey! A much belated happy new year to you all.  As usual, I've been swamped with work and slacking on keeping the blog updated with the latest radio shows.  Gonna see if I can remedy that this week by catching up on some of our January shows.

For fans who like to listen live, our new time slot is now Friday at 11pm to Saturday at 1am, so feel free to listen in at WUAG.net

-=Download VGR 3.01=-

Fallout: New Vegas Documentary Part 04

With classes finally over and a little bit of free time, I've managed to finish editing part four of my much belated in-depth look of Fallout: New Vegas.  Hopefully I'll be able to do a few more parts over the holidays, but no promises.  Make sure to like and subscribe, maybe leave a few comments to the youtube channel.  Every bit of support helps!

On the battlefield, you can't rely on just your eyes.

Greetings Kiddies!

Before I get going, I'd like to throw in another gg for Blood Bath and Beyond for their stellar performance Tuesday night. 

Anyway in case you couldn't tell I wanted to discuss League and some of the changes that will be coming up in the pre-season. Probably the most discussed issue as of late has been the topic of wards. As many of you know wards play an intricate part of securing your teams victory by making sure as much of the map is revealed as possible to track the enemy team. This allows for counter play and denials of dragon and baron buff. However, the support players are generally tasked with shouldering this responsibility and since they make the least amount of income of everyone else on the team, it basically forces the support to get nothing but wards. Never fear, the trinket system is here! Trinkets are a free upgrade in their own seperate item slot to ensure that each player is given 1 of 3 abilities. A free ward, the clairvoyance spell and a spell to detect and disable wards and traps. All three trinkets will level up when you hit level 9 and can be upgraded again for a prince to increase the effectiveness. All the details about the new warding system, trinket system, masteries and support items can be found here. 

http://www.newsoflegends.com/index.php/massive-pbe-update-supports-reworked-new-items-trinkets-changes-to-wards-old-items-the-jungle-summoner-spells-and-game-flow-preview-of-runes-and-masteries-in-s4-and-the-latest-sale-13775/

You can also check out Pawnce's youtube channel. He has a PBE account and is usually on top of reporting new changes on the PBE asap. Here's his trinket preview. 

Best Stuff on the Net: The Press, The Players, The Publishers and The Games

I always look forward to Giant Bomb's "Worth Reading" column posted by Patrick Klepek (or 'Scoops' if your feeling fancy), partly for showing me around parts of the net that I miss during the week, partly because his summarizing of articles saves me some time.  This week he's managed to link a really cool video that deals with a general history of the gaming press, and some of the problems that still continue today with games writing.  It's a long video, essentially a classroom lecture, but I highly recommended it to anybody who has aspirations of becoming a game's journalist.

The video itself has a lot of interesting points put forth that I couldn't help but think about:

-It's fascinating to think that the gaming press at large is partially responsible for holding back the medium itself as being taken seriously as art.  If writing were to reflect less on a product review and more on what experiences it invokes, how would gaming and the press look today?

-It's quite daunting to think about what a vicious cycle the modern day gaming press currently resides in: tens of thousands amateur writers (such as myself and this site for example) ready to replace the old guard from magazines and websites.  At the same time, this kind of enthusiasm has paved the way for many novel independent content creators all over the net.

-It may be a false dichotomy, but in my mind, fanboy-ish and narrow optimism such as Nintendo Power and cynical snark such as Seanbaby exist on a spectrum.  Each have their advantages and flaws.  While in the end I do believe that being informative trumps most other goals when it comes to journalism, where does the balance lie between the two?  Should journalist continue to be hopeful and optimistic of unreleased products or should we be critical of everything around us for the sake of humor or even improvement in the industry as a whole?

I find it an interesting issue even today with some games.  Take a look here at polygon's recent interview with Eidos Montreal for their new Thief game.  Apparently Chris Plante was originally scheduled to do the interview but was flat-out denied by Eidos due to a negative profile he compiled from an earlier look at the game.  Brian Crecente instead conducted the interview, albeit without the questions being changed.  To me this stands as an incredible example of the relation between game manufacturers as the press, being born much out of press that was perhaps to speculative and favorable in the past (and still continuing into today.  Colonial Marines anybody?)

Make sure to check out Giant Bomb's Worth Reading column every Friday