• Barrens (1v1 Map): Difficult terrain channels units into killing zones. The side that controls the Forerunner artifacts will have the advantage.
• Blood River (1v1 Map): Secure base locations on nearby cliffs overlook this naturally red-tinged river. The soldiers that fought over its two narrow crossings gave the river its name, which has since taken on a greater meaning.
• Glacial Ravine (3v3 Map): A snow-topped mountain range forms a natural barrier that cuts this region in half. Control of the two energy walls at the narrow central pass often determines the outcome of the battle, though clever use of the Sentinel Factories may play a role as well.
• Memorial Basin (2v2 Map): The high ground in the middle offers good cover for infantry, while the generally open terrain transforms organized battle plans into bloodbaths.

We’ve got a full house plus one for this episode with our special guest Ryan, also known as Suave Peanut on the forums, rounding out the 6 of us. We go over all of what we played since the last episode and for one us in particular, they got a slightly used Wii console to try out, putting it to good use to give us his impressions of The Conduit. We’ve also got more impressions of Prototype from Jeremy. And we continue our discussion of adventure gaming in its prime.

We’re directed in our conversation once again by both Twitter and emails and the discussion is lead into Starcraft 2’s lack of LAN play and what that may mean for future Blizzard releases. And finally we go over our impressions of seeing Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen coming to a conclusion on it that you might not expect.

Enjoy the show. And thanks for listening.

Clearly you should have gotten another episode long before now, but the show’s infrastructure suffered a debilitating series of body-blows over the course of the last two weeks, and its personnel haven’t fared much better. We’re still intact, and everything is more-or-less as it should be for our operation, but the demands of meatspace have put us in a bind more than once lately, and on-time delivery is always the first thing to go.

With those reasons out of the way, we’re going to deliver this episode to you without the usual synopsis, and without even its usual bookends of hand-picked music. The content will have to stand on its own, we’re sad to say – squeaky chairs and all.

Our usual soft intro gives way to a refreshingly cold open in this episode. Feel free to cast an image of the Satellite of Love in your mind’s eye this week and enjoy the impromptu comic stylings of Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett – genius jokers and puppeteers, formerly of Mystery Science Theater 3000, now on the media trail for their new RiffTrax DVD release. They were kind enough to submit to an interview by us, and in return for their kindness we act like junkie fanboys. This may or may not have come across in the examination. Regardless, we promise not to tell anyone if you choose to act the same.

As for game coverage…who gives a shit? We talked to Tom Servo and Crooooow! In actuality, there was quite a bit of jibber-jabber goin ‘round this week. The news was an understandably weak tea following the E3 expo, but there’s been plenty of speculation to follow, as well as thoughtful counterpoint from within the studio as well as without. We’re short one certified, card-carrying cynic this week (sorry Jerm!) so our redactions have come from the eagle-ears of the listener base, instead. Good on ya, listeners!

We abandoned last week’s recording session in favor of sending Scott to the source of all our favorite noise, and so that the rest of us could be free to ingest all the televised, tweeted, forum-certified hype of the extravaganza without taking pause to discuss it. Having made that sacrifice, we take extra pause this week to make up for lost time. Here’s hoping you have four hours of your life you weren’t planning to use for anything else.

The depth of the information stream coming out of E3 makes it hard to discuss every meaningful aspect of the expo in one session, and just as unlikely that we can do more than hint at the podcast’s content in this summary. We’ve elected to discuss our recollections of the coverage as much as possible instead of relaying hard data or consulting accurate notes. We’re sure to have missed several somethings of importance, but the facts are clearly better gathered elsewhere, and this lets us preserve what may well have been our best reactions had we been together last week and heard the latest updates in unison.

Just off to the side of E3 is the important matter of what we’ve been playing while the industry tells us what we wish we were playing. For us – all but Scott, unfortunately – that time has been devoted to our fascination with inFamous. We intro the show with a half hour of cryptic double talk about the game, and end it with a second half hour on the other side of a spoiler threshold we really hope you can cross.

E3 is just a few short days away, and at the time of this recording, none of the early news items had been distributed through the usual channels, so we’re left with plenty of editorializing and very little solid information. Fortunately, our twitter and email correspondents have given us everything we need to fuel a second hour of the program. Apologies all around for the garbled responses or for any questions that weren’t directly answered. You’ll find yourselves at the top of the pile next week, we swear.

Scott’s LA itinerary is complete, the news tickers are filled with fresh tape, and we’ve all sheltered our own personal hopes for expo announcements even though we refuse to mention them on the air for fear of being horribly wrong. Once they hit the feeds, however, we’ll be glad to say we knew it all along. And, sadly, the one drawback to having a passenger on the hype-train is that we won’t be recording our program next week. Scott is sure to have plenty to say during the show and more when he returns, but his absence makes our usual get-together unlikely.

Much like the traditional preparation of beef tenderloin, this episode of In-Game Chat is both classy and succulent. In addition to your standard host assortment, we offer a side order of Matt and Dave – the very best the Air Force has to offer – and we invite you to join us in laughing at the antics of people you seriously don’t even know.

We’ve spent just enough time with this week’s terrible games to confirm their terrible gameplay, and just enough time looking into the bright-light future of E3 to believe that there’s real salvation to be found on the show floor next week. There are solid games from the recent past that still demand our attention, and the promise of some seriously polished gameplay in the near future, but we’ve always had a weakness for the sound and fury of E3, no matter how little it may actually signify.

We’d also like to note in this space, as we have in the episode itself, how much we enjoy it when the tweets drop during our recording. We’re quite good enough at going on for hours on our own, but it’s nice to have an unexpected course correction at or around the 45 minute mark to keep us keen. Much like the listener mail, this will become something we can’t live without.

The hosts, much like the subjects in any given Star Trek plot, often find themselves trapped deep in the past. For the trekkers there is often a desperate struggle to return themselves to their natural timeline and the space-time continuum to its natural shape. For us, however, the goal is more and more often to lament the past we’d like to live in. Or, more accurately, to paean for the future that damn well should have been. In both cases, at least, technology is entirely to blame.

Duke Nukem had long been a part of our past, and was forever going to be a part of our future, but the hope is almost certainly gone following the collapse of 3D Realms, and with it go the sad memes and tired punch-lines of a generation. If pending litigation happens to work in gamers’ favor, DN may well reappear in the future like a slain soap opera villain. In the mean time, we’ll exercise our ability to disagree on points regarding Duke which even the internet saw well enough to leave alone.

In this interview episode, we talk with Sandra Lew from Foundation 9, parent company of Backbone Entertainment, developers of “Space Invaders Extreme” for Xbox Live Arcade.

If you’re curious how an idea comes about to take a classic game like “Space Invaders” and do to it what Backbone did, you’ll want to take a listen. From the idea to integrate music into the attacks to what it takes when making the transition into High Definition. Not only that, but we find out how those collectible prints came about and what games we’d like to see get a revision (Hint: @!#?@!).

We’ve always been quick to nurture a preoccupation with licensed games and the terrible gulf in quality they display in comparison to the source material. Wolverine is very much at a distance from its big-screen counterpart, but has the wonderful distinction of being the superior product in almost every regard.

That a comic book movie could fail so spectacularly is no great shock, and that the game in question has done quite well by fans and critics is now a fairly old bit of news, but our surprise at this fantastic inversion is something we can’t quite repress.

We’ve finally had our Jeremy returned to us, and he’s made time after the welcome-backs to point out some terrible inaccuracies in our previous two recordings – at least the ones that pertain to him, which, given the tone of what had been said, I can’t blame him for doing.

At some time in the past, likely years ago at this point, the quality of the Lego Star Wars games led the hosts to suggest that the combination of Lego and any beloved series was a natural path to joy and success. Putting aside the fact that we were completely wrong, we’re tempted to repeat that claim where Mr T is concerned, and we’d do it based solely on the strength of a single, meme-tastic game announcement.

Once again we have to point out the sad lack of our Jeremy for this episode. He has a bountiful family, and those things come with birthdays and other wondrous obligations of kinship. What we have left here are the misers and hermits with no obligations and no ties that bind. We’re sure someone out there understands.