We’ve got a guest this week!  Joe, the Brother, joins us to talk about Mass Effect 3 and some other stuff.

Games this week:

Jonathan has played Street Fighter X Tekken, and has nothing to say about it.  He got some more comments about Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, and he’s spent a bit of time with Mario Party 9.  That’s right!  The Wii makes an appearance!

Alex does inappropriate things with his Kinect and Tiger Woods 13.  He’s also got much (more) love for Armored Core V’s multiplayer, and no love for the single-player.  And then he and Sam rip into Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City.

Other than RE:ORC, Sam has been playing more Binary Domain, though he’s not sure why.  Perhaps it’s the scintillating conversation.  He also talks Mass Effect 3, but mostly as a lead-in to Joe.

Joe’s finished ME3, and has plenty to say about it.  He’s got (non-spoilery) thoughts on the game play, the universe, and (of course) the ending.  Then we wrap up the discussion with speculation about the “clarifying” DLC Bioware has promised.

Since teasing future topics hasn’t worked too well lately, I’m not going to make any promises about next week’s show, other than that it will be here.

‘Til then, have a great week!

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Triple Ones! Oh yeah!

We enjoyed the quick-hit headlines bit we did last week, so we’re making it a regular feature.  This week, the uncomfortably expensive collector’s edition of Steel Battalion, and Free-to-Play makes its first appearance on a portable console.  Can home consoles be far behind?

Alex has gotten his grubby hands on Armored Core V early, and he’s in for the multiplayer but has reservations recommending it as a single-player experience.  Draw Something also invades the podcast via Alex, though OMGPOP hadn’t been bought by Zynga when this episode was recorded, if that’s of any importance to you.  Finally, Assassin’s Creed Recollection has sunk its hidden blades deep into Alex’s psyche, and it doesn’t look to let go anytime soon.

Sam’s been playing more Binary Domain and more Mass Effect 2.  Along those lines, he also inflicts upon us an audio-unboxing worse than any that has come before it.  And, assuming he can ever break himself free from Mass Effect 3, Shadows of the Damned and Kingdoms of Amalur may make a moose-like appearance in a future episode.

Jonathan only has one game this week, thatgamecompany’s Journey, but it’s a doozy of a game.  In fact, in just one short week alone with the game, Journey has set itself up as the expression of everything that video games are capable of as an artistic medium.  Yeah, it’s like that.

We close out the episode with a topic which we touched on briefly in Episode 109: Would gaming benefit by separating multiplayer and single-player into standalone products?  The hosts all have fairly different takes on what that would mean.

Next week: is Metacritic a valid method of handing out bonuses?

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Another week, another podcast, standing in a lake, moss hanging from its antlers.

Alex sneaks in a couple of news tidbits before letting the guys launch into game talk.  First off, PvP is apparently all that’s really holding up Diablo 3′s launch, so Blizzard has decided to just patch it in later so that everybody else can get their ARPG on.  Perhaps launching Diablo will help pick up the games’ industry as a whole, as NPD Group reported that February game sales were down 20% from last year.

Jonathan has pretty much forgotten everything he did last week.  However, over the weekend he picked up a couple of XBLA games, I Am Alive and Crystal Quest.  He’s only put a couple hours into I Am Alive, and it’s got some interesting concepts that might be awesome or might wear thin pretty quickly.  Crystal Quest has seen dozens of hours of play from Jonathan… fifteen years ago.  It’s a pick made purely for nostalgia’s sake.

Alex tells more stories from Shogun: Total War 2, complete with daring ninja attacks and dead in-laws.  Jonathan tries to compare Shogun stories to Civ stories, but fails as researching pottery never comes into play.  Alex has also put some time into Assassin’s Creed: Recollections, an iOS collectible card game.  Anyone who’s listened to the show for a while should immediately be able to guess what his opinion of the game is.

Sam this week tries to get ragey about Amazon’s shipping policies.  Unfortunately for him, Jonathan is well versed in said policies and knows Sam should have just been paying better attention.  Moreover, as both Jonathan and Alex both have retail experience, neither gives him much sympathy.  Sam’s lack of Mass Effect 3, though, has provided him an opportunity to play through Mass Effect 2 again, and also put some time into Binary Domain, and neither of those makes him ragey.

Speaking of ragey, Jonathan brings a topic this week that’s been driving up his blood pressure lately.  Gamer Entitlement:  Is it a real problem?  Is it something worth fighting?  Can we fight it?  And how?  The guys don’t really come up with any answers, but they try to get the conversation rolling.

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