It was announced in January that Hellgate: London, the futuristic sequel to Diablo, would offer up some kind of hybrid pay model for its online experience. The word is out, now, and there isn't much consensus on whether their "Elite/Free Play" tiers represent a reasonable value. At this point, I don't know if we as potential consumers know enough about the base, boxed experience to discern if it's enough content. It seems like every post, now, we must discuss the transformation of gaming from product into service.

Welcome to the show notes for Downloadable Content 05/09/2007, "The Dangers of Exposure." The episode is available for direct download at this link, or feel free to subscribe to our iTunes compatible feed here. This guide will help you navigate our frequently insane and often rambling conversation.

I’ve got the show notes for Downloadable Content 05/07/2007. The episode is available for direct download at this link, or feel free to subscribe to our iTunes compatible feed here. It’s only about fifteen minutes long and it’s just our initial rambling in the morning. Listening to these back is really weird. I’m sort of surprised that we every actually write anything.

Gabriel took Spider-Man 3 home over the weekend, in the hopes that further digestion would reveal the title's hidden nutrition. You have to understand how strange this is: you don't get a second chance from him, ever. I know that if I fail him even once, I'll be replaced by some other writer - one whose love for commas is, perhaps, insufficient.

We picked up Spider-Man 3 on Friday - for the Playstation 3, as it features some unique Sixaxis content - and immediately had cause to regret the purchase. The long initial install preceded a game that was too much unchanged from its predecessor, in addition to often being ugly and running poorly. Like Star Wars: Battlefront and Enter the Matrix before it, well timed "brand synergy" products aimed to pierce the market, there will be no great reckoning for its grave sins. In fact, the result will be quite the opposite.

Welcome to the show notes for Downloadable Content 05/04/2007, "The Broodax Imperiate." The episode is available for direct download at this link, or feel free to subscribe to our iTunes compatible feed here. This guide will help you navigate our frequently insane and often rambling conversation.

Even those who are not big into table gaming have often heard of Settlers of Catan. With over twelve million copies of the game sold worldwide, it's often used by crafty tabletop proponents to lure non-gamers with its colorful tiles and straightforward, intensely social systems.  The digital version, developed by staunch devotees over at Big Huge Games and delivered via Live Marketplace, is a deeply reverent execution of the original.   

Welcome to the show notes for Downloadable Content 05/02/2007, "The Lidless Eye." The episode is available for direct download at this link, or feel free to subscribe to our iTunes compatible feed here. This guide will help you navigate our frequently insane and often rambling conversation.

PAX 2007 is creeping up on us and I’ve got another batch of info about this year’s show to share with you.

Eye of Judgement - Sony's unbearably compelling CCG, played with the upcoming Playstation Eye peripheral - may be the most niche product ever conceived. A constructible deck card game that requires a custom camera and a six hundred dollar gaming console to interpret it, "niche" may be insufficient to describe the tight, sunless, deep sea crevice such a product might reside in. Not that it matters to me, of course: I am the pale white lobster that makes such cracks his home.

Re-instituting a serious play schedule is going to take a couple days, but already our forays have proven useful: behold! We met a crazy person! After making these statements, he assured us that he was (in fact) "Stable." It's funny how asserting one's stability tends to create the opposite impression.

I'm certain that people expected me to post these links, and those expectations compel me with a terrible power.

One:  Aquarian Age Alternative, this arcade/CCG/thing from Japan, is beyond language.  At least, it's beyond the English language.  There may be some ancient language yet spoken that still holds the power to contain it.

Two:  Eye of Judgment, a realspace card game that uses the recently announced Playstation Eye, IS FUCKING UNBELIEVABLE

I feel as though a great weight has been lifted.

(CW)TB
 

With the new maps and modes out, we're getting back in.  That restaurant level is hot - and I don't just mean the kitchen.

The trouble is that much of our friends list has moved on to other games (Gears and Guitar Hero mostly), so we're doing a little housecleaning on the roster and trying to get new people in there.  Are you still playing R6?  Send an invite to either Gabe or Tycho - optimally one or the other, to make the most of the limited size of the friends list. 

Team Inferno is waiting.

(CW)TB

Gametrailers.com just added a bunch of Odin Sphere videos. I’ve spent a lot of time with this game over the past couple days and it continues to impress. I hit an especially hard level yesterday in the Winterhorn Mountain zone. This is a snowy mountain full of yetis and angry ice monsters. Just to give you an idea of how deep this “brawler” is let me tell you the strategy I ended up using to get through this level.

I understand that Eric Nylund drops Halo fiction much sharper than one might expect, but after a youth singed by Forgotten Realms product I retain a healthy fear of the tie-in novel. Command & Conquer is the next franchise to receive the treatment, this time from Keith R. A. DeCandido - the strange force known as KRAD. I'm not familiar with the man's work, but there is rather a lot of it, and much of it tasked with distilling an existing brand into explosive paperback fiction.