In this episode, DJ attempts to play multiple games that we were assured he had played before but he still manages to be really bad at and all of our good ideas about entertaining game play go out of the window. We discuss the many, many superhero movies coming out in 2016, what we’re excited about and what we’re really worried about. Also covered are video games, Yasiin Bey, the Royal Rumble, and a lot of failed segues. 

 Hail to the King, Baby

Also discussed are some games we didn’t like, Steam’s lax quality control, Skyrim vs the Witcher, and modding games.

Here’s the Michelle Rodriguez eating pee mouse thing. At least I assume it is. Believe it or not I’m not going to watch this video because gross.

And here’s that Soul Pancake I despise. It’s all staged!

Join us this week for tales of contact lenses, Smash Bros 3DS (which gives you a good idea of how long ago this was recorded), a deleted scene from Bambi, annoying video game elements, Community, the horror of building a PC, and Starcraft cheats. Also Arby’s Horsey Sauce is the best sauce on the market.

Good news! The right laugh track makes the Big Bang Theory watchable!

To say Minecraft is the smash-hit video game of the decade would be hyperbolic of me but you can’t deny the impact that this little survival/construction game has had on our cultural zeitgeist and why shouldn’t it? It’s building block visuals have a charm to them and satisfy a primal urge in all of us, to build our own world and what better partnership to craft than with LEGO, the original world builders? Throughout 2013, LEGO released Micro Worlds, micro-scaled cubes that were Minecraft worlds condensed into themed blocks and that was awesome! Now, as of November 2014, LEGO is launching minifigure-scaled sets and I was very hesitant to the idea, something struck me as immensely wrong about it. Has that opinion changed? Read on and find out!

21113 The Cave is the entry point set of this theme, retailing for around £19.99, and you can tell right off the bat that this a Minecraft product. Even without the logo, the design elements LEGO have used are undeniably evocative of the video game and I kinda dig it. The minifigs are presented in inventory slots and the text is in the Minecraft font! Contents include the instruction manual and two bags.

This is where my main problem lies, the minifigures. That’s not to say they’re shoddy, the plastic quality is definitely up to LEGO’s high standards but it’s the execution. In this set, you get Steve, a Zombie and a brick-built Spider and I think the biggest problem is the head piece for the minifigs. A cube-shaped head on a LEGO minifig body just looks… Wrong. I’m sorry if I’m being vague but it’s just something I can’t help but feel. I don’t think it helps that Steve’s head is just a solid brown cube with a little face printed on it (and his trousers are the wrong colour in every set but I’ll freely admit that is the PETTIEST nitpick I have ever had as a toy reviewer and I’m not proud of it). The Zombie is wearing exactly the same clothes except for green pixels instead of flesh coloured. On a positive note, I do like how the design team adapted the pick-axe though, it looks super cool and the brick-built Spider looks amazing. The new head brick for the animals is a fantastic piece that could be used for all sorts of sets in the future. My personal gripes aside, I think Minecraft fans of any age will adore these minifigs.

Getting into the build proper and, surprising to myself, I had an absolute blast. While this may appear to be a very simple build for the most part, there’s a few interest design choices that I adored. The key feature of these Minecraft sets aren’t just the natural synergy between the brands, but the steps taken by LEGO to give the Minecraft experience without taking the entire set apart just for blocks. They ingeniously came up with a special Item Block design to have many of the world’s natural resources (such as gold and redstone ores, in this case) represented, customisable and given the ability to be easily placed on the world or each other. I could easily replaced those gold studs with blue and have a lapis lazuli ore block ready to go! That’s a brilliant choice and I applaud it.

The other design choice that I get a kick out of are the colour choices. Maybe it’s because I’m coming directly off a Hobbit review but the vibrant colours just pop out in my mind and, weirdly, made me excited to keep building. It didn’t feel like I had to do it for a review but that I wanted to do it for fun. The vibrant oranges, blues and greens must be appealing to my inner child or that the contrast against the subdued grey blocks makes the colours pop that much more.

Anyway, as a buildable diorama, The Cave is a nice little microcosm of the Minecraft world. The design elements as well as the iconic characters really build the illusion of this world and it works out fantastically. The two bags are split into the cave itself and the cave mouth that is leading to a field outside.

But if you thought we were done, you’d be wrong because another awesome thing LEGO opted for was the inclusion of “Rebuild Inspiration”, a small set of additional instructions to help younger builders with ideas on how to use this set to create an ever-expanding world. The instructions are very simple and the conversion time was barely five minutes. Thumbs up for that idea, LEGO!

They also give you a look at other sets and give you a website url where you can submit your very own LEGO Minecraft creations! That’s a great way to build a community using these sets and to encourage bigger and better builds!

Final thoughts are extremely positive! I admit that my own feelings about the minifigs aside, they were much better in hand than I imagined they would be and The Cave build itself was a wonderfully fun and pure LEGO experience for me so I definitely recommend this set to everyone, from Minecraft fans to LEGO fans in search of a new experience.

This week we talk about movies being forty years too late, dogging on Maleficent (for the fiftieth time), How to Train Your Dragon, more Walmart stories, Michael’s love of ranch, huffing keyboard cleaner, Dr. D’s inability to speak a coherent sentence, weird quotes from gaming, Octodad, Monaco, and Sharknado.

We have a Steam group! Join the super official Stratus steam group to play games with us!

Here’s the Warner Bros cartoon I brought up at the beginning of the episode. This is one of my favorite pieces of animation.

The legendary Pac-Man has made a triumphant return with a variety of cool figures, mini plush and even a transforming vehicle – just like in the Disney XD TV series. Set to be the talk of every playground, the brand new colorful range of toys from Bandai will enable kids to collect their favourite Pac-Man characters, or battle Pac with the baddies from the show.

I first saw this toy in a review by my buddy Bens Collectables and ever since I’ve been fascinated by this bizarre product so when I was offered the chance to review some product from this line, I jumped at the chance to get my hands on it.

Pac’s Pineapple Tank comes on a fantastic bubble card and surprisingly, doesn’t come with 18 languages on it so maybe this is an American box? I don’t know. I’m so used to European packaging coming with a bunch of different instructions on it that it’s nice that the packaging and images on the back are unobstructed by reams of text. Much like other Bandai toys at the moment, the Pac-Man toys have a code that can be used in the accompanying free app game, Pac-Man Dash. After my last attempt, I’m not going to try it out but I’ve seen it run and it looks pretty fun!

The Pac-Man himself is a rather simple figure but has articulation in his arms and his body/mouth opens up. Interestingly, his body parts and accesories can be removed quite easily if you like your Pac-Man closer to his 8-bit origins.

His regular bipedal form’s shoes and gloves are joined by some nifty tank commander goggles so ol’ Pac looks to be taking the ghost-hunting to a bizarre new level.

And now we come to the main attraction, the Pineapple Tank. Yes, it’s exactly as insane as it sounds. This transformable fruit armament features a rather simplistic conversion from delicious fruit to armoured death machine. It instantly brought to mind a mixture of the Food Fighters and M.A.S.K toys of my youth. It’s so silly that I instantly fell in love with it and I’ve been idly rolling it back and forth on my desk ever since.

Pac’s Pineapple Tank is an immensely goofy and stupid premise for a toy but if you appreciate the goofiness, you’ll enjoy this particular set like I did. Pac’s Pineapple Tank retails for £14.99 and there’s a lots more Pac-Man figures that you can check out on Bandai’s website!

See, according to my research, there is a cycle everyone goes through when playing Dark Souls. For the first three hours, it is the “Worst Game Ever.” It’s confusing and clunky, and leaves the player feeling like an abandoned child in a shopping mall- if everyone else in the mall had knives. However, after that three hour point, the player gets in sync with Dark Souls’ philosophies, and something clicks. Thus, an addiction of sorts is born.

Instead of spending several paragraphs explaining the obtuse combat and leveling systems, I’m going to take this opportunity to explain the mentality a new player should approach Dark Souls with. Coming at the game with the right mindset that develops good gameplay habits early on will lead to a smoother, more rewarding experience. Success in Dark Souls is not limited only to the player’s skill, but their willingness to play by the game’s rules.

These are the 5 things I feel every new player should approach the game knowing.

1: It isn’t as Hard as People as People Say.

Don’t get me wrong- Dark Souls is hard. But with the word-of-mouth way the game’s popularity spread, Dark Souls developed an almost mythical difficulty. Know that while things in Dark Souls are difficult, nothing is unbeatable. So if you come to an area that seems nearly impossible, it is somewhere you need to return to later when you are more powerful. Don’t waste time beating your head against a brick wall you’ll never break down- use that time to bash your head against a brick wall that will crumble eventually!

2: Slow and Steady Wins the Race!

Dark Souls is a slow game. It likes to take its time, and wants you to savor the moments for as long as possible. If you try to rush through it, it will take out your kneecaps with a sledgehammer, and fart on your face as a punishment. Try to move through areas slowly, fighting enemies one at a time if possible.  Take the time to prepare for every battle, and don’t hesitate to fall back to an earlier part of any area. Rash behavior will be met with swift death. You’ll either get surrounded quickly, fall off a cliff, or get an unmanageable horde of baddies coming for your tasty butt-meats. You don’t want that, do you? Take it slow, then.

3: Horror-ah the Explor-ah!

In Dark Souls, you need to be half Simon Belmont, half Indiana Jones. Exploring every area as well as you can is crucial to finding some of the best items in the game, making things easier in the long run. Rummage through every nook and cranny, delve into the darkest depths, and be rewarded. Don’t be afraid to explore, but be prepared for the dangers lurking in the shadows. It’ll make you feel like a badass when dodge traps, disable enemies, and collect loot. Make the entire the game into a longer, more satisfying experience, and explore!

4: Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems.

As you work your way through an area, you’ll accumulate a large amount of the game’s currency- Souls. Souls are used to do everything: from purchasing items, upgrading and repairing weapons, to leveling up, you’ll need to have Souls. However, when you die, you lose all your Souls. If you don’t reach the point where you were slain before, those Souls are gone forever. This will happen. Don’t fret over losing a large amount of Souls. If you panic trying to save yourself from spiritual bankruptcy, you’ll drive yourself toward death faster.

5: Death is Natural, Embrace it

You will die in Dark Souls. Don’t fight it. Use every pass through an area as a lesson. Use it as a chance to get more familiar with enemy patterns, and learn to memorize enemy spawns. Once you know how enemies will attack, and where they come from, the difficulty level of an area will plummet drastically. This philosophy applies doubly so to boss fights. Don’t bum-rush the boss in a frantic attempt to put it down. Take your time, and learn the boss’ patterns. If you die? So be it. Next time you fight it, you’ll have a better understanding of how to fight them. Rinse and repeat.

If you follow these tips, it will not only make Dark Souls easier to play, but they will make the game a more enjoyable experience overall.

I’m going to go play Dark Souls 2 now. Tell my family I love them.

We’re posting all three now because I kept forgetting and I’m dumb and also because we want to keep you on your toes

Part III

Part IV

Part V

DJ as Steven Stills because DJ

Kasey as Scott Pilgrim because jerkbutt

Joey as Ramona Flowers because regular butt

Mike as Kim Pine because also butts

We still just dick around and aren’t actually reviewing the game. We’re professionals.

I’ve struggled for a few days about how to approach this subject, and what I’ve settled on is something simple, I’ll start it with a question: When did we all become such hypocrites?

In a future column I’ll explore the dissociative way in which game reviewers pick and choose when to focus on narrative, and when to focus on core mechanics, but that’s not the point of what I hope will be a relatively focused piece today. All I want to discuss right now is the shallow delusions some gamers (particularly gamers with a mouthpiece) carry with them into mature games like Grand Theft Auto V.

From here on out I’ll be spoiling at least one major scene—though I imagine many of you have already either played this scene, or had it spoiled through social media. The scene I’m talking about is, as you might guess, the mission in GTA V when Trevor, and thus the player, is forced to torture a (very likely innocent) prisoner in order to get information for a corrupt government.

When I see a scene like that in a game, or to a lesser degree a film or TV show, I brace myself. The world is filled with what Bill Burr terms the “professionally outraged.” In other words, there are entire careers built on drumming up controversy, then yelling about it on TV or in print.

Now, I have a sociology background, and it’s been invaluable as a writer and a game designer. Not only did it prepare me for data entry and analysis, but also for knowing that every issue is hot button if you ask the right people the wrong questions.

That said, it took none of that training to predict the tweets, headlines and op-ed pieces generated by GTA V. And though I was unsurprised at all the criticism—I have been a little surprised with its origins (and its lack of irony).

Just read the title alone: “Grand. Theft. Auto. FIVE.”

It’s a semiotic petri dish. It tells even the layperson a dozen things about the game before they’ve managed to unwrap it from the plastic. If you understand nothing else about the game going in, you know two things specifically:

This game is about felony.

There have been at least four other games like it.

If, however, you’re a long-time gamer, you carry with you the symbolic awareness of the GTA franchise as a sort of poster-child for 1st amendment protection; an argument that adults have the right, and the sense, to choose which games they want to play. Then, once they’ve chosen, they’ll have the awareness to avoid or discard games that make them uncomfortable.

We gaming advocates just spent twenty years fighting courtroom battles that dragged us, and our hobby, directly into the path of congress and the Supreme Court. We fought those battles to prove that adults ought to be allowed to choose which art they consume; to prove that they didn’t need government protection—neither from artists nor from themselves. For the last decade, the Grand Theft Auto series was at the forefront of arguments for and against our medium.

So, it’s hard for me to understand the sudden outcry, especially from gamers, when a game called Grand Theft Auto demands players make morally unsavory choices in the process of the game’s narrative.

There are always complex ideas about ludonarrative dissonance in play in situations like these, but that’s far outside the focus of this discussion. What I will say is this: if any of the three characters in GTA V was going to torture someone, that character is Trevor.

Trevor is a sociopath, a psychopath, and a meth addict. If the players make it far enough into the game to reach the torture mission, then they’ve already held the controller while Trevor acted as their analogue during plenty of terrible acts. By then they’ve set off bombs, robbed people and places, gunned down entire buildings full of police—and possibly worse depending on the player’s decisions about Rampage Missions ( these are missions where Trevor gets angry about something petty, like being called Canadian, and then guns down everyone from hipsters to the military).

Most of the characters in GTA V are varying degrees of terrible, but Trevor is arguably the least relatable. If a player makes it far enough into the game to reach the faux-controversial torture scene, they’ve got far more to answer for on their virtual rap sheet than water-boarding.

Some have suggested that their only problem with the water-boarding/ torture scene is that they couldn’t switch away from the character—that they had to actively abuse the rights and the body of the virtual victim themselves. “It should’ve at least let me switch to another character while the act was taking place.”

I’ve already used the word hypocrite once, so I’ll say it softer this time.

I’ve read suggestions from respectable gaming media, and other game designers, telling me that the torture scene had no purpose. These complaints often claim that the moment pulled them from the narrative, that it was too abrasive, that it was exploitative.

But not the cop killing? Not the drive by shootings? Not the prostitution, drug use, or terrorism?

It takes a lot of balls—the bad kind—to complain that the bad guys are behaving too badly for your sensibilities. My first instinct is to tell you to put down the controller and find something that doesn’t make you feel uncomfortable.

In fact, I’d say that’s the point of the torture scene. It wasn’t meant to create controversy—certainly no more than real torture ought to create. It might’ve been included as a reminder that we Western cultures (especially me and my fellow Americans) are happy to let someone do the dirty work for us—but we squirm a little when we’re implicated personally.

Of course torture goes too far. Of course Trevor is a terrible human being with no quibbles about it. Of course you’re supposed to be uncomfortable. Then, if you proceed anyway, you’re supposed to ask yourself a set of difficult questions about your limits. People don’t really like to be challenged this way, so being forced to hold a mirror up to themselves is the last thing someone wants to do after they’ve electrocuted an innocent man—even a virtual one.

So, instead of these gamers admitting that they’re hypocritical—that they’ll gladly murder, rob and cheat without qualms—but they draw the line at water-boarding, they point the finger outward at the game designer. “How dare you cross that line? How dare you exploit those themes? How dare you force me into self-recrimination?”

That last one is the worst, by far. Because, as we admit that we’d be ok with it if Trevor did the torture off screen, and we only heard about it—we’re left to face the other fact: that’s exactly how Western culture has handled these kinds of tactics for the last hundred years. From the blind eye we turned as Jews were rounded up into concentration camps, to the wartime atrocities at Abu Ghraib, we just don’t care, as long as we feel safer.

We don’t really care about the torture, we don’t really care about how we treat the “other.” But we’d rather not see the photos. We want to be the heroes, and not have our complicit villainy laid out in front of us like mug-shots.

See, I understand the instinct to hide from our dark fears and what we’re willing to compromise. I’m even fairly understanding of the compromises themselves—death and fear of death can provoke some terrible things. But, what I cannot understand, is a monster standing over the dead screaming, “How dare you?”

If the murders in GTA V didn’t bother you, then I have to ask you: why did the torture? Then, I have to ask, if any of the gaps in morality bothered you so much that you were uncomfortable, why didn’t you walk away from the game?

It is not anyone’s right to be comfortable, but it is absolutely your right to choose which media you consume—especially when it’s an interactive media that requires your cooperation. Does it bother you that the game designers made you torture a man, or does it bother you that you let them?

It all began with Public Domain games. You browsed a catalogue of games you’d never heard of, threw a few quid at the most likely ones, then obsessively waited by the letterbox until a packet of 3.5″ floppy discs poked through and hit you smartly on the bridge of your nose. This was amateur night: indie games circa 1995 and while the technology has changed, this is still where the most exciting, creative or downright weird stuff seems to appear. With the bigger game studios acting all conservative, perhaps showing a little ankle once in a while, indie games are still unafraid to perform nude cartwheels, then discuss it with you afterwards – perhaps over a cup of tea.

The problem I have with modern mainstream video games is simply that – for the most part – they bore me stupid. In a virtual realm with infinite possibilities to create anything you want – even a 50ft, solid gold, eagle-winged kneecap – worlds are being created that are largely unimaginative. Board games are bursting with new ideas, even when a theme is well-worn (such as the ever present pop-geek trinity of space/fantasy/zombies) a game can surprise you with its ideas or the angle it’s coming from. There are games which de-construct how a game is supposed to work, redefining playing spaces, rules or goals. There are video games which are so dizzyingly great that they’ll blow my tiny mind. Games that work outside the formula and deliver something to really think about – like the black-humoured brain-bend of Portal – but they remain very much in the minority. In short, board games are to me what mainstream video games just aren’t any more; interesting, unusual and FUN.

You know, FUN? Like Audit: The Tax Game? Ok, bad example…

Board gaming for me is about that buzz of discovering something new and – even better – being able to then share it with a whole bunch of people, preferably in a pub. It’s about the interactions, be it physically moving the game bits around, or that satisfyingly tactile rattle of a dice roll. It’s about sharing time with friends in the same room, or even psychological interactions as you suss out your opponents, or successfully bluff your way to victory. Playing board games is creative; stories unwind, people laugh or curse their luck (or their fellow players) and people – friends or strangers – play together and that’s something priceless. Well, until someone loses and gets all sulky.