Did you miss us? We missed you. After a tearful reunion, Brad tells us about his trip to see Lost Planet 2, Mike offers his unique take on Final Fantasy XIII (finally!), and we examine the challenges faced by decades-old franchises. With Chi Kong Lui, Brad Gallaway, Mike Bracken, Tim Spaeth, and Tingle.
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Topics discussed:
- Lost Planet 2
- Final Fantasy XIII
- Dynasty Warriors: Strikeforce
- The Legend of Zelda
- Shin Megami Tensei
Please send feedback and mailbag questions to podcast (at) gamecritics (dot) com.
Cleveland native Tim Spaeth grew up in a happy household – a household with a father whose major client happened to be an Atari games distributor. This led directly to Tim's first nickname: "The kid who got Atari games before anyone else." Indeed, he knew Pac-Man and E.T. were colossal bombs weeks before the rest of the world, and the resulting celebrity brought him great pleasure.
Through the years every aspect of Tim's life has been touched by gaming. He mastered typing thanks to Space Quest, honed his poker skills on The Sierra Network, and learned to hate after a particularly traumatic game of Tecmo Super Bowl.
Today, Tim lives in Chicago with his three kids and strives to find that perfect balance between family, career, and Warcraft. He enjoys broadcasting, martial arts, rock and roll, growing and shaving his beard, singing show tunes to the homeless, and losing at Mario Kart to his lovely, talented, and amazing girlfriend.
In late 2008, Tim became the producer and host of the GameCritics.com Podcast, and he's thrilled to be bringing GameCritics' unique editorial voice to a brand new medium.
Through the years every aspect of Tim's life has been touched by gaming. He mastered typing thanks to Space Quest, honed his poker skills on The Sierra Network, and learned to hate after a particularly traumatic game of Tecmo Super Bowl.
Today, Tim lives in Chicago with his three kids and strives to find that perfect balance between family, career, and Warcraft. He enjoys broadcasting, martial arts, rock and roll, growing and shaving his beard, singing show tunes to the homeless, and losing at Mario Kart to his lovely, talented, and amazing girlfriend.
In late 2008, Tim became the producer and host of the GameCritics.com Podcast, and he's thrilled to be bringing GameCritics' unique editorial voice to a brand new medium.
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I’ve been wondering why Capcom hasn’t tried to evolve Monster Hunter at all, going as far keeping the series on underpowered systems like the PSP and Wii.
After hearing your description of Lost Planet 2, along with my own experiences of the original, I’m wondering if Lost Planet IS the evolved Monster Hunter. By making it into it’s own separate “unrelated” series allows them to keep milking the MH cashcow for all it’s worth.
I hadn’t read that about the towns (I tried to read very little about the game before playing it so as to not have my experience influenced by any preconceived notions).
That being said, I’m filing this under the “happy accident” category then. Hopefully technology remains too daunting for the inclusion of towns in HD RPGs from this point forward. 🙂
FF12 is a funny case for me–it’s definitely something of a departure from the norm, but at the same time, it’s very similar to FFXI in a lot of ways. I always think of 12 as the offline MMO first and regular Final Fantasy game second.
And even then, the changes in 12 from the normal formula still feel mostly cosmetic to me. The core mechanics of the RPG are still there. Interesting point though–and definitely a valid one.
Mike
One point I didn’t think of until after the show — has any game handled towns better than Fallout 3? Don’t want to deal with the town? BLOW IT UP, along with all the people and quests. So satisfying. All that stress just melts away in nuclear fire.
Great podcast but i think that square enix were given too much credit for not having towns when it was simply a budget and time issue, and not an innovation. As quoted from Square:
“The game’s linearity was just because depicting towns and so on like we did before was impossible to do on an “HD” console – it was too much work.”
I’d actually argue that FF12 was a much bigger departure from the traditional JRPG setup than FF13 is. FF12 had a lot of WRPG style combat and some of the similar kind of openness with the worlds.
Yet other HD jrpgs like Lost Odyssey have incorporated towns. Yeah, I’m one of those people that like towns in JRPGs. I also thought FFXII was a massive achievement in battle system and game worlds for RPGs whereas FFXIII was boring in comparison. Paradigms have a very superficial depth. I mastered that system very early on, and by the time I reached ma’hambra or whatever I felt there was nothing new to discover about the game and I proceeded to destroy everything in my path. As for post story hunts (my fav part of the game, yet still not as… Read more »
FF12 was garbage, MMO mechanics = fail. I am so pissed off that MMO mechanics are copied so heavily, give me something like Champions of norath or diablo over these auto-robot fests.
Most final fantasies have been slowly deflating anything good in them catering to the retard crowd. I’d really like to see a complete reboot of FF1 with all the old FF1 isms. I am so ticked they’ve traveled so far from a cool combat system. Time to return to it’s roots.
It’s a secret to everybody.
@TimSpaeth
Existentialism ftw
How do we know we are not error? What is error? Does error even exist?
I liked Zelda II a great deal, but it’s been 20 years. It has my favorite t-shirt quote ever: I AM ERROR.
Am I the only one that liked Zelda II?