Pause The Game

We Are Back....

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Smith) — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 08:02:00 +0000

Well some of us are that is. So for unknown reasons things fell apart with the podcast some of us thought it was going well but perhaps others didn't feel the same way so with no explanation the podcast recording just stopped. I'm not going to dwell on it though it is what it is and while I do miss recording with the guys it's time to move on which brings me back here.

The fact is I still play games and I still have things to say about them so here we are again back where it all started. I can't promise much except for one day I might inspire you to pick up a game and the next I might inspire you to pick up a brick and hunt me down and face me in a bloody duel to the death.

So sit back watch and wait for my first editorial. It's coming and it's going to cause you to hate me. (If you're one of those moronic idiots who like to refer to himself as a Hardcore Gamer).

P.S. I suppose to be politically correct I should have said him or herself as both sexes are equally apt at being moronic idiots. Especially if you refer to yourself as a hardcore gamer.

We are moving

noreply@blogger.com (Raymond Morse) — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 16:24:00 +0000

We have a new home, we are still moving in. But from this point forward all things PTG related will be at pause-the-game.com.

Stop in don't mind the mess, I am working on it all the time. The podcast will NOT be posted here next week but on the new site. Adjust anything you might need to. Also if you are subscribing to our blog feed update that as well to use the new one. It can be found on the new page.

Some come over enjoy the new smell, and I promise more will be added soon.

Raymond & The PTG Team

Blizz Con - Wish I was there.

noreply@blogger.com (Raymond Morse) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 04:03:00 +0000

Between me and Jason we make a really hardcore duo on WoW. With tomorrow being Blizz Con expect Jason to be posting something about our impressions over on CFD!. I might post some of my own here or just tag onto what ever he does.

Make sure you are around it's going to be a wild ride the next couple days if you happen to be a fan of anything Blizzard related.

On that note if you play WoW at all look me up on Area 52 at - Discdrive (Alliance) or Rikon (Horde) I play both back and forth. And once I get the ability to do the faction change Disc is going horde all the way.

It's About Damn Time

noreply@blogger.com (Raymond Morse) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 17:45:00 +0000

Now I have made no secret of the fact that I am a Sony fan. But even I was starting to wonder if they would ever make the price drop needed to push more units. Well that time has come starting tomorrow the new price is $299.

And by Sept. 1st the PS3 Slim will be in stores everywhere.

Really Sony it's about time. I have been on the PS3 bandwagon since day 1 and I don't regret paying the $600 price tag. But really the system was out of reach of most people.

Now if I could just have a word with you about getting God of War III out sooner ...

Pause The Game Episode 2 - Delay Of Game

noreply@blogger.com (Raymond Morse) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 03:53:00 +0000

I have nothing witty to say tonight, my head hurts. So with very little fan fare and ZERO delay here it is Episode 2 of Pause The Game. Where this week we talk about all things delay related and a bit more.

Episode 2 - Delay of Game

Pause The Game

New site is still in the works. The change over will be soon I promise. I just have a few more bugs to work out, or maybe more if my art critics will stop asking for changes every 5 mins.

The Guild - Do You Wanna Date My Avatar

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Smith) — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 19:43:00 +0000

So the good folks over at The Guild have chosen today to release the video for "Do You Wanna Date My Avatar" and well I wanted to share it with you so you can know what has crushed my productivity for the day. So here it is.

PTG Plays: The Secret of Monkey Island Special Edition

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Smith) — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 14:30:00 +0000

The adventurous souls here at PTG are going to brave the cursed waters of the Caribbean as we attempt to follow in the footsteps of the Dread Pirate Guybrush Threepwood. Come along with us if you dare. Arghh!!!!! ..... "wait he's not really a dread pirate you say?", "and the waters of the Caribbean aren't really cursed?" eh. Well come along with us anyway as PTG plays through The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition. It's a classic, it looks incredible, it's funny, and most of all it's only $9.99 on Steam. I mean how can you pass up a deal like that?

Speaking of deals here's the deal with PTG Plays. Over the next several weeks we will be playing through and discussing The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition. If you want to join in with us pick it up from Steam and drop us a line on Twitter, Facebook, or just leave a comment in this post and be ready to play through Chapter 1 since that is what we are covering this week.

Research and Development

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Andrews) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 02:33:00 +0000

It speaks volumes to the quality and composition of a game, or anything really, when it's possible to indentify and isolate a small part of a multilayered body of work, and then mold that into something that maintains the same level of quality on its own. No easy task, to be sure. Especially when the piece of content being dissected is Half-Life. Not just the original Half-Life, a game globally praised and perpetually imitated because of the clean balance it struck between in-game storytelling and immersive first-person interactivity, but also the sequel, and the entire Half-Life formula for that matter.

Since its inception in 1998, the franchise has never drastically altered its standard formula. The controllable character, protagonist or otherwise, is placed in an environment where they must deal with the repercussions of events out of their control. Through a combination of exploration, physical puzzlery and the occasional combat situation, a story slowly unravels, culminating in a final climactic scene.

If you were to peel back some of the layers from that traditional Valve recipe, if you wanted to taper that experience into something that felt genuine but diverted from the norm, you might wind up with something that resembles Research and Development, a brilliant little slice of creativity available in a mod for Half-Life 2.

R+D starts out in typical Half-Life fashion, with a few hazy glimpses of something gone awry in a large scientific complex. But there's no deep story to be found, because the driving force behind the mod is its heavy emphasis on non-combative, puzzle-based progression. The puzzles themselves are usually confined to a room or two, and while that might seem like a hindrance, it keeps things from being overly complex while still being satisfying to solve, and a wide variety ensures that no two are the same. They range from using pheromones to guide an Antlion through a maze, to interacting with keypads and computers, to finding new uses for the good 'ol Gravity Gun.

One of the best things I can say about Research and Development is that it feels like some sort of wonderful offspring of Half-Life 2 and Portal, combining great presentation and pacing with genuinely fun original gameplay. Definitely not one to miss.

You can download Research and Development here

I think I broke it

noreply@blogger.com (Raymond Morse) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 07:39:00 +0000

Somewhere I might have broken something in the feed. I think I might have fixed it, but stick with me while I figure it out.

I think I found a home for the blog away from Blogger.com will do some more looking tomorrow.

Changes, I love changes

noreply@blogger.com (Raymond Morse) — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 18:17:00 +0000

I am working at trying to make this place better. But I am running into tons of issues with Blogger that I just don't like.Thinking about moving away from Blogger and into our own site, but I am not quite ready for that jump. For now I merged our feeds into one Feedburner feed. Go ahead and use the new subscribe button over there on the right somewhere.

Share us where you can. Spread the word on any and all places you feel like it. And as normal stop in and say hi to our friends at Crush! Frag! Destroy!

The Cynic in me

noreply@blogger.com (Raymond Morse) — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 02:30:00 +0000

Cynic
–noun
1. a person who believes that only selfishness motivates human actions and who disbelieves in or minimizes selfless acts or disinterested points of view.

2. (initial capital letter) one of a sect of Greek philosophers, 4th century b.c., who advocated the doctrines that virtue is the only good, that the essence of virtue is self-control, and that surrender to any external influence is beneath human dignity.

3. a person who shows or expresses a bitterly or sneeringly cynical attitude.

That is how the dictionary defines it. And I for sure fall into the third definition. But how does this relate to PTG at all you ask? Simple I am an overly cynical gamer. I tend to not believe that anything is going to be any good, and I have been told many many times that I don't like fun. So this is an odd look inside my head, and might explain certain takes you might have heard from me in the podcasts.

Now I am not saying I do not enjoy gaming, more that I have been so crushed by some games at one point in time or another that I have taken a really harsh outlook on games as a whole these days.

Exhibit 1:

Too Human was a game I was just super pumped for. Jason and myself spent hours talking about the game for a long time before we even really started getting game footage. To us it sounded like a steroid infused version of Phantasy Star Online a game we both hold very near and dear to our hearts. The idea of getting online again and just grinding out levels looking for that next loot drop sounded great.

Then the demo came along, which I really enjoyed I wrote off the issues I saw as a byproduct of it being a demo. Fact of the matter was this was the game I had gone out and bought a 360 for. I was in this pretty deep. Hell I talked many customers into pre-ordering a copy of the game based off my own excitement. Even the removal of four player online play was not a big deal at first. I figured hey that's two less idiots I have to play with. I used to solo the hardest levels of PSO back in the day so it should all work out.

The game launches at long last (I am not even going to touch on the delay part that's for this weekends podcast), I got my copy,but I had to work and was just dying to get home and sit down for a long night of endless grinding with Jason. Got it home, booted it up made my first character and was off. And that is where the fun ended, turns out that the cut of the four player mode was a huge deal. They forgot in the cutting of four player to re-balance the classes. Out of the five classes only one was truly playable, the other four were just not set up to work in a game that was started as a four player and then cut to only two. To add to that the amount of mobs spawned in a two player game still seemed to be set for four as well.

There are even more issues I can talk about, but suffice to say this game more then any other in my time as a game crushed my desire to play games. I went from being beyond words excited about it to returning it after only five hours of playing. Sure you can try and say I did not play it long enough. But trust me that was more time then I wish I had spent. It made me hate games for awhile, I did not trust any hype anymore, and it had the long term effect of making me doubt even games I might not ever doubt. To top it off I point to it as the reason my 360 has never red ringed, I just don't use it since then. It was the system I bought just to play this one game and it turned out so badly that it left a black mark on the system as a whole for me.

So in turn I swallowed the bitter bile that rose from playing that game and moved on. I went pretty hardcore picky on things. I did a ton of rent before buying to the point where I was about 6 months late on playing Uncharted because I just could not believe the hype that surrounded that game. I had very few games I was playing but one that I would go back to was Resistance. I loved that game, the levels, the weapon design, everything. It was a great freshman effort from Insomniac on the PS3. I started to get excited for Resistance 2, which leads into...

Exhibit 2:

I felt that the first Resistance game was amazing so I had high hopes for the second one, turns out I got ahead of myself there. They added much un-needed stuff to it. And taking out the ability to play co-op through story mode was just silly. Sure we had an online co-op but it sucked, and the multi-player modes were lacking in over all structure which made them almost unplayable at the best of times. The removal of the weapon wheel from the first game was stupid, giving us only two choices at any given time was wrong. To me it felt more like a Halo game after it was all said and done. And don't get me started on why I hate Halo, lets just say that being compared to it was a bad thing.

The game had great ideas which all could have been great but it turned into a nightmare of a product. And it had the added benefit of making me even more skeptical about future releases from Insomniac. Case in point I was talking with Jason just this morning how I am now really worried about the new Ratchet & Clank game this fall. I have loved the series minus Deadlocked, and what has always been great about it is the banter that takes place between the two main characters. So far I have seen nothing that shows that Ratchet and Clank are brought together early in the story. And if it ends up taking say 5+ hours of gameplay before that happens I am likely not to get very far in the game.

There are other examples I could use here, but it all seems to boil down to game designers trying to hard to add that extra feature, or meet a deadline. Something gets cut or added that is just not needed in the over all scope of the experience. All these things appear in most games on the market now in one form or another. And it's an amazing game that manages to work put any issues it might have to not ruin the over all enjoyment the player gets out of it.

I am still looking forward to a few games this year, but I am holding my breath on all of them. Worried that as normal something will not fit right, or feel right, or just out right be broken. And if that happens well I won't be shocked but I will be saddened that my cynicism will have been well placed.

Just remember this is just how I feel, and I could be wrong. But I challange you to look at games you really enjoy, I bet you can find faults, but they are ones you overlook due to the overall experience. Then look at a game you could not play and no matter how good one part of it was there must have been something broken.

Enough from me for now. Remember PTG: Episode Two is being recorded Saturday. Watch this space for updates. And please go visit our friends at CFD.

PTG Tackles Delays

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Smith) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 08:09:00 +0000

The PTG crew will be getting together this Saturday to record Epic Episode Number Two wherein we tackle the subject of delays and how they effect the game and public's perception of it, and make a special announcement regarding a future segment. Be sure to download the next episode from the site or iTunes and keep an eye out for details regarding the next PTG & CFD game night.

Fat Princess with PTG and CFD!

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Andrews) — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 18:55:00 +0000

The members of Pause the Game (minus Raymond) and Crush! Frag! Destroy! get together with the community to play Fat Princess.

Stop - Go Read This

noreply@blogger.com (Raymond Morse) — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 20:39:00 +0000

Scott just posted amazing article on gaming over at CFD. Stop what you are doing and click HERE now!

This has been a PSA from PTG.

Eat Cake with PTG

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Smith) — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 01:24:00 +0000

This Thursday August 6th the four of us will be logging into Fat Princess for some cake feeding fun. We'll be logging in at 6pm PST so add Rukland or Mr.Dingy and join the PTG crew.

Pause The Game: Episode One

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Smith) — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 08:18:00 +0000

We managed to catch Raymond on a day when his router resided in America and his internet provider wasn't conspiring against him and wrangled him into a discussion regarding the current state of DLC and Downloadable titles. Listen in as we discuss where digital downloads have been and where they are going, and we list some of our favorite downloadable titles.

Episode One - DLC

Pause The Game

Visit here to download.

It should be up on iTunes shortly as well and if you subscribed anywhere it's been pushed out.

New Episode Tomorrow?

noreply@blogger.com (Raymond Morse) — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 04:28:00 +0000

My internet willing Episode One of Pause The Game will go up tomorrow. They are sending a tech out to my house to see whats going on. So lets see my router moved to France, my internet provider sucks, and oh yeah I still can't pay them for a speed faster then 3megs down.

I hope the tech can do something tomorrow, if not I start looking for some one new as soon as he leaves. This is stupid I am paying for a service that works only when it feels like it. If I did that at work I would be out of a job.

But hey on the upside .... hmm never mind I can think of nothing positive about this.

So watch for the episode tomorrow. I can't put a set time on when it will hit, but I will post here and other places when it does. I also plan to get a twitter account set up for us. So I can use that to reach out as well. So much to do and all of it relies on me having a stable internet connection. Wish me luck.

My router lives in France

noreply@blogger.com (Raymond Morse) — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 08:01:00 +0000

So god only knows how but my router ended up with a firmware that was for use in France or somewhere but North America. Needless to say that threw a wrench into things. We had set out to record the first episode of the podcast yesterday afternoon. No such luck due to my wonderful tech issues. But fear not we are trying again later today. I know you can't wait much longer but I promise it will be worth the wait. If not well heck at least tell us it sucked so we know someone is out there listening to us talk.

Raymond

Quick Update

noreply@blogger.com (Raymond Morse) — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 23:06:00 +0000

The podcast is now on iTunes for those who want or feel the need to subscribe to it there.

Here is that link.

Tell your friends, tell your family, hell tell people you don't like. Just spread the word.

Pause The Game Podcast Episode Zero

noreply@blogger.com (Raymond Morse) — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 17:17:00 +0000

We are back, well everyone else is, I just managed to fall victim to my crappy internet and drop out right before we started the show. Consider this episode a warm up to the big time full out relaunch of the Name Forthcoming show. Sit back enjoy and remember anything that is wrong has to be Jason's fault.

And for those that want to download it click here.

Also should be up on iTunes pending there review. Or you can use this RSS feed if you hate all things Apple like me. OMG WTF RSS FEED

Or if you really care at all here is the link to it's page on podOmatic

Who We Are

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Smith) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 07:09:00 +0000

A few months ago when I started this blog I also started recording a podcast with a few guys that turned into the Name Forthcoming podcast. After a few months of recording and talking about the future the podcast has been renamed Pause The Game we will be putting new episodes up here in the future. In addition the rest of the crew Scott Thompson, Raymond Morse, and Nate Andrews can post stuff here so you can look forward to some stuff from them.

DSi

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Smith) — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 18:27:00 +0000

I just picked this up this morning along with Rhythm Heaven and a 2GB SD card. It's charging now but soon it will do my dark bidding.

Name Forthcoming Podcast Episode 5 Is Live!

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Smith) — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 01:08:00 +0000

Not only do I write but sometimes I speak and you can hear me here. Take a listen and leave me some feedback and yes I know that my audio sounds like shit.

Name Forthcoming Episode 5

CO-OP and RE5 Impressions

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Smith) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 09:24:00 +0000

The new episode of CO-OP is up and if you haven't done so already you should do yourself a favor and watch it and then subscribe to the show. This episode features some footage of inFamous and Fat Princess both of which look amazing and will be day one purchases for me.

I tried to like Resident Evil 5 and about 2 hours into the game I did actually find myself enjoying it for about 20 minutes, but then things took a turn for the worse and now I'm not sure if I can bring myself to actually finishing it. You see I like to feel like I'm a badass when I play a game, you know I want to be the guy that does the things that nobody else can do and look good doing it but I'm just not getting that feel from RE5. It probably has a lot to do with the controls and I'm going to agree with Pete Wanat when he said that if any other game other than a Resident Evil game had shipped with these controls the game would be shredded by the media and gamers alike. I believe this to be true and while I do want to see where the story goes and experience the later levels in the game I just wish it would control the way I wanted it to.

GTA: Chinatown Wars

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Smith) — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 11:50:00 +0000

When news first broke about the GTA franchise coming to the DS I was skeptical as I'm sure most of us were as to how Rockstar could deliver the GTA experience on the DS. Not just the technical limitations that the handheld presented them they also had to deliver the gangs, guns, and drugs that define the GTA series on a platform thats not known for seeing M rated games. I had low expectations of Chinatown Wars and was fearful that the game would be a shallow collection of touchscreen games in a smaller blander version of Liberty City. I'm happy to say that I was horribly wrong and Chinatown Wars might just be one of the most enjoyable entries into the GTA franchise.

Well I think that now but my first impression of Chinatown Wars was quite the opposite. Since it's on the DS it make use of both screen with the action taking place on the top screen and the bottom screen being used for numerous things like the map and setting GPS coordinates. Using the map and setting those coordinates is a snap but navigating through the narrow city streets while looking down to the bottom screen to see where your going and where you need to go caused me to have more than a few accidents that led to unwanted wanted levels. It was only after reading this review from Stephen Totilo that I learned of an option to turn on a top screen GPS indicator where the game really connected with me. I'm about 20% through it now and as soon as I complete it you can expect a full review when I'm done.