Danielle is back in the hizzy for this week’s episode of Jumping the Shark, and it’s a darn good thing given our topic segment is devoted to the goings on at PAX East and she’s the only one of us to go to the big show. This week also takes Brandon off the leash to talk about what he’s been playing (Bulletstorm and Homefront), I chime in with some further refined thoughts on Dragon Age 2 (I’ll be posting more on it this week), and Bill analyzes Shogun 2 and why the Oda clan can’t seem to stay alive.
iTunes Link
I’ve written before in this space about the importance of redundancy in recording. This week turned out to be a perfect example of why since my audio, as recorded in Audacity, flaked completely out about 45 minutes in. It was very strange. I was editing the show as I always do, moving right along, when out of nowhere every time I spoke it sounded like a half second of noise and then nothing. The next 30 minutes were all dead silence, only returning to normal with about ten minutes left in the show.
My first thought was to panic that something had happened to my mic and all of my audio lost. Of course, since everybody else could hear me throughout that couldn’t have been it. I clicked to unmute the recorded Skype track, which I keep synched with the individual tracks while editing, and sure enough my audio there was intact, making it possible for me to switch to the Skype track for the second half of the show. Crisis averted. That said, if you notice a change in audio quality after the first break, that’s why.
I’ve no idea what happened to my Audacity recording, but as it has in the past, the backup recording was there to save the day and our year+ streak of not losing a show to technical difficulties continues for another week. Whew!
Todd: the speed chess analogy is excellent. MMO raiding is a bit like speed chess crossed with choreography 😉 I still don’t think that’s new to the Dragon Age series – DA:O always played like that when you pushed the combat engine hard. But DA:O didn’t really teach players to act that way, and only Harvester was really hard enough to force the issue, so the disconnect is understandable.
I had a similar experience with FFXIII – I loved it because its battle system felt like a raid leader’s fantasy (obedient players who could shift roles instantly – heaven!). Once again though there was only a limited number of encounters that really put the system through its paces.
Encounter design may be the new (cheaper) level design for a lot of RPGs, but they still have a long way to go to catch Blizzard.
I enjoyed the show – PAX sounds like a lot of fun between lines. If NHS takes off you might be obliged to do a live podcast yourselves next year 😉
We will be podcasting from e3, technically for GShark but we’ll post it here too