Bombin' the A.M. With Scoops and the Wolf: 12/06/2013

Alex is right, I'm so into the idea of backwards compatibility that I'm holding out for the Steam Machine. If they can offer all these next gen. games with the entire history of PC gaming, that's a day one sale from me.

That's awesome to hear!

People will go to great lengths when it comes to microtransactions. One might say, they will often miss the lavish beautiful forest for the few microtransaction trees.

It makes me happier than it probably should that people remember Snowboard Kids lol

Sad how jaded they are sounding about Next Gen, and in a way I totally get it, it's about time they got to this point too, and start seeing more of what we see outside the press for the longest while. Funny thing tho, there's a console, and a company that still gives you a full featured, complete, and typically rock solid game for $60, and offer backwards compatibility and that's Nintendo & the Wii-U. But you know...

Hey I kinda liked Final Fantasy 13 guys.. uhh, I'll be going now.

Me not getting a PS4/XBone and not having a good enough PC to play Battlefield 4 onworked out great for me, since that game is a trainwreck right now.

@humanity: and don't ever come back!

Cara Ellisowns.

..it was pretty cool.

I agree esp. if these guys are saying 8?.. I'm still playing 13-2 which is good too but 'Lightning Returns' looks like the full realisation. Better late than never!

I've never played a FF game before and 13 was my first one of those that I played. Made it nearly 30 hours in or so and that was it. Fuck that game

It was the first FF I played in ages and I actually appreciated how streamlined it was because I wasn't ready to go full-bore into JRPG madness and grinding.

@humanity: Yeah it's not even as bad as Forza 4 or Horizon where they had all those preorder cars so you would have to buy like 5 copies of those games at 5 different stores to get all cars and some of those preorder cars were good stuff like the 370z in Horizon and Imprez in 4. With 5 they just did preorder liveries for gamestop that nobody cared about anyway. Forza 5 is easily the best launch game and the best Forza so far imo. 16 cars on track and drivatards make it so much more interesting and fun to play. Not to mention it's probably the best looking console game so far.

@patrick @alex Re: Backwards compatibility - The number I've seen quoted from either Sony or Microsoft was that ~1% of people actually used it last-gen. And the architecture for both systems changed dramatically. (Cell -> x86 and PowerPC -> x86) It would require either building basically the last-gen console inside of the current gen (How the fat-style PS3 worked, and iirc how the PS2 worked), brute-force emulating it (how emulators on PC work), or supporting it via software (how the 360 worked). The first would be, I'd imagine, night on prohibitively expensive, the middle is probably not an option (machines' CPUs/ALUs/whatever they've called 'em this time likely not powerful enough, though that's just a guess on my part), and the latter was apparently too much trouble/money to bother with when such a tiny percentage of people actually used it.

Haha! I dusted off my N64 and started playing WWF: No Mercy again!!

I can get why they won't brute force emulate the past generation of consoles (though I'm personally of the opinion that they should probably wait with launching a new generation of hardware until the new is powerful enough to emulate the previous), but PC's have been able to do decent PS2 and Xbox emulation for around as long as the past generation of consoles was around (and the PS3 got a limited selection of software emulated PS2 titles in the end, sold on the PSN store), and since Microsoft and Sony must have the hardware specifications for that era of consoles around, they should be able to do a better job with making emulators than a bunch of fans that are purely reverse engineering could.

@sfighter21: Yup.

@yummylee: I'm guessing that you're not counting gaiden games in the series, but Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest was definitely inflicted on us... Although I confess, I liked it as a young kid.

I haven't played Forza 5 and seen the extend of the microtransactions. Yet, statements from the publisher like that they are going to to "re-adjust the economy" is kind of worrying as a trend. It's a benign admission that the game's design and balance is indeed being affected by micro-transaction. You can still assume goodwill, and games are increasingly tuned up post launch, but if monetization is becoming an integral part of balancing a game it really makes me sad.

well technically not watch, but I do play this in background and listen to it.

Micro-transactions have turned from a "oh here's a cool hat for your character" or "want a golden gun with the same stats as the regular gun?" to now "You want a gun instead of a knife? [Click Here $0.99]." and "You want bullets for that gun? [Click Here $0.01 per bullet]"

@sfighter21: I think I've watched almost every single episode. I usually just kind of listen to it and have it up on my second screen while I do work. I bet you'd be surprised how many people watch/listen to it this way.

People tend to give VIII way more shit than it deserves (and I do agree that IX was better), but VIII actually had some truly amazing gameplay elements. Half the fun I had playing that game the second time was absolutely shattering that game wide open. Draw? What the fuck is this draw shit? I've got my Aura, Holy Wars and level 1 Squall with a Lionheart in disc 1.

There's a part of my brain (the part that give developers way too much credit) that thinks that draw was made to be intentionally awful to encourage players to figure out how they could avoid ever having to use that skill.

Because of this wonderful (read: terrible) acronym: 'ROI' or 'return on investment'. The cost of building, testing and supporting a feature that likely won't sell any extra consoles (anyone who really wants backwards compatibility is likely going to buy the console anyway and just wants it for convenience's sake) and I seriously doubt anyone would look to the PS4/XBone for as a PS3/360 console when you could just get a used one on ebay for 50 bucks.

Best articulation I've heard of why freemium stuff on full-price games SUCKS. I had an instant disdain for it, but couldn't put it into words as well as you guys did. Great podcast this week!