 a couple different games to talk about. We've got Far Cry 3. Far Cry 3, that's right. We've got a whole bunch of footage from that that is actually me playing the game. What else? We've got Path of Exile. And that one is? Basically it's like Diablo 2. Oh, like the Diablo 2, okay. And we also have the unfinished swan. That's another PS3 game. It's on the PSN network. It's a short sort of playable storybook game, but it's a little more than that. We'll talk about that one. And what else are we going to take? We're going to show a trailer, right? I'm going to be showing the trailer for Planet Side 2. Planet Side 2. And then if we have time, maybe we'll sneak in something about mobile gaming, but we had a pretty packed show today. So the first game we'll talk about is Far Cry 3. So I went out and got this game probably a month after it came out or so. And I like it a lot. It's an open world sandbox game. And as you'll be able to see here in the footage we've got, you can even switch to our, we even have a camera that's like built into the screen here, which you might not look like it, but if you switch to it, we'll put some video in there. So this game is pretty cool. It's a sandbox game, a sandbox shooter. So it's a first person. And you are with your college buddies and your skydiving in the South Pacific for some whatever adventure. And you wind up skydiving into the wrong place. This is what happens. And you get kidnapped by pirates. And there's all kinds of crazy stuff going on on this island and different factions of pirates running around. And you need to rescue all your friends who have also been abducted by various bands of pirates on the island. It could all be one band. I don't know. I just shoot anybody that looks like a pirate. It's what it boils down to. But you can grab vehicles and drive around. And as you'll see, you'll see me here driving around all over the place. And you can see that the world is really huge. It just goes on and on and on. I think I got in a vehicle and I drove around for 20 minutes and didn't even cover part of one little section of the island that I was on. You can also get into hang gliders. So you'll see here that I am gliding around and you can fly all over. There was some mention in the challenges or something that if I wingsuited over to somewhere, I would get some sort of bonus. I haven't seen a wingsuit, but I assume that there is one somewhere. There you can see, here I am on the top of a ridge of a mountain. And I am getting ready to plunge down and take out some bad guys. So you'll see I'm coming over here and there's one of the gliders up ahead that I've been referring to. And I'm going to get in this glider and I'm going to go down there. And you can see there's wildlife. So there's birds flying around all over the place. Now I've got my, this is a silenced machine gun. So that area out there in the distance, that's actually places you can get to. And now I'm checking the map. So right here where it's red in the middle, that's an outpost of pirates. And every outpost of pirates you clean out becomes like a little base for you, where you can buy and sell weapons, all sorts of things that you gather. And most of the things that you gather in this game are actually pretty functional. I don't know if I got in there, but anyway, if we got it, we'll edit it in showing me going to make stuff out of like, you kill people and you get the leather, or not people, but you kill animals and you can use the leather to create harnesses and stuff for your weapons. So you can see this world is enormous. There I am scrolling all around on the map and huge as Jeff says. And now when you zoom in, you see more details. So I am on this little tiny spot. I'm going to be going down in there. A lot of this footage is really long, so we'll just skip ahead here to a part where I am actually shooting and killing some guys. I think this entire video that I took is like an hour. So you can imagine that just in one hour, I was able to do tons of different things. So I'll back it up a little bit and from here we'll play. If you don't have any kind of fast scrub on this, oops, now I switched to the videos completely. I'm actually looking at this on my iPhone as you're watching it at home doing it. So it's a different kind of control scheme. Well, we'll edit this part out. All right, so now I'm picking up the glider. Here's the part we want. And now I'm going to come down there and you, I mean, see how the distance is just enormous. And I'll go down and we can cut back. We are here in the studio. So there's the base below me. You can see in the distance, there's other smoke stacks, smoke columns or whatever. Each of those designates a pirate base. So when you start the game, you'll see stuff in the distance all over. There are also radio towers in this game. And if you climb up the radio tower and disable the jamming devices, it will reveal a section of the map. So all together in the first part of the game, there's 18 radio towers. It mentions that there's about 32 pirate bases. There's tons of little sort of artifacts you can collect. And the more you collect things, the more recipes that you can unlock, which you can use then to make syringes. So there are all kinds of different power-ups that you can create. So you see me there plunging a health vial into my arm because I kind of fell out of the glider a little too early. There's skills that you can improve. So as you gain experience, you can learn how to take down guys from below and silently kill them. You can run further. You can get more health out of each thing that you squirt into your arm. There's all kinds of tactical situations. You can stealth kill. So if you manage to stealth kill everyone in a base, you'll get far more experience than if you just run in with guns ablazing. You can do power slides up to people. You can sneak through the bushes and stealth kill people. There's all kinds of civilians on the island that if you help them out and do little quests with them, you'll go on little adventures and experience. There's cave networks all over the place. You know, you can go swimming in the water all over, but it's full of sharks. Maybe we'll show some footage of the sharks. There's crocodiles, which I didn't even know about. So one day I was in this river swimming along and all of a sudden this crocodile grabs me and we have this big old tussle. And of course I pull out my little Wakazari katana thing or whatever. Bam, take the crock out. But you have to do kind of a quick time events, a hit buttons to do that. Anyway, and then there's the story. You know, obviously there's the story missions in this game. So I've been playing this game for a long time in the weekend. I sat down relaxed with it for a few hours and it's like Skyrim but with guns. And in a lot of some ways it's better than Skyrim because it feels, well, I don't know, that's I guess an objective opinion because I like action stuff. But Skyrim after a while, the environments kind of started to feel the same. The dungeons you went in and stuff kind of started looking. But in this game, maybe because it's a more realistic environment, it seems like there's a lot of variety. The radio towers are not all cookie cutters, although they're the same. How you climb up each one is totally different. They've weathered them differently, put different junk. Every little town is slightly different layouts. The caves are all different. So it's pretty amazing and I don't even, I think I'm not even halfway through the game yet. And I've been playing for, I don't know, probably like at least 30 hours into the game, 40 hours into the game. So Far Cry 3, there's also multiplayer online. I haven't even touched that. There is co-op that you can play with other people. And I think they have some downloadable content already as well. The game has monkeys, as leopards, tigers, which you don't want to run into, even with a machine gun, because for some reason these are very, very tough tigers. So the first time you get, you hear that growl in the bushes run. That's my advice. So anyway, Far Cry 3, I definitely recommend it if you are into shooters or into any kind of sandbox. So I would say a game that's similar to this, if you, if you have played them, the mercenaries games, just cause games. I'm not sure what other ones that are out there, but imagine infamous with guns or something like that or prototype with guns as opposed to superpowers. But Far Cry 3, I think is definitely a very well done game. And the graphics are very nice. You have sunsets, tropical, beautiful tropical sunsets, probably cut one of those in. The original crisis was on an island. The original crisis was on an island. And you know, it's got physics and everything. So like you blow up barrels and you've got rocket launchers, bodies go flying. In the day I blew up a pack of dogs for some mission. These were rabid bad dogs, not the nice puppy kind. And just one of them goes flying, flying through the air. It was hilarious. So it's pretty cool. I like it. Although the one thing I don't like, the main character that you play, like, he's kind of a wuss. Like he gets tougher and you know, he gets tattoos on him. But if you see the graphics on him for a moment, maybe it's just the ps3, kind of looks, you know, like, I didn't feel like I was empathizing with him. Sure, the situation, his older brother was more of a dude's dude. This guy's kind of like, I don't want to say any bad language, but whatever. He could use some toughening up in a new hairstyle. That's all I got to say. Maybe I shouldn't talk, but I'm growing this here for a good cause. All right, so let's take a little break. We'll see a little bit of Planet Side 2. And then when we come back, Bryce will tell you about Path of Exile. That was pretty awesome, Bryce. That was Planet Side 2. Yeah. Pretty sick looking. I'm hoping. Pretty good, yeah. Wish I could play it. Now, you heard the rumor that, like, this thing was so advanced, right? It couldn't run on any computer at full quality currently. I still don't think they fixed that. Well, you know, they got their new ps4 coming out soon. We just heard that announcement not too long ago that ps4 will probably be launching this fall. And their idea of a reasonable price, the rumor is now like 500 or 400 something, which to me is still too much money, but they're claiming they saved a lot of money by not building factories for all the chips this time around because they're going with an AMD 8-core processor. Just good that they're going with AMD. Yeah, I think they can get at a decent price and everything. So we'll see. It's actually, 8 cores is about the same as what they have with the cell, except that each of these cores is actually a full-on CPU core and not a limited stream processor. I think the cell things are SIMD maybe. Anyway, won't get into that. So that's Planet Side 2. So maybe it'll look super awesome when it comes out on the ps4. Do they have any plan to port it? I think so. In fact, I think that they've been actually working on the ps4 a lot longer in terms of software. So to me, it sounds like they're planning on having a very strong launch lineup compared to the previous launches of say the PS1 through the PS3 where they would launch and they'd have like one maybe good game flagship game and then the other games were really weak and you had to wait like six months or a year for a good game to come out as people got used to programming it. But it sounds like this time around they've planned far in advance and they're going to have a lot of high quality games right when they launch, which would be, I'd say if they had six quality games when they launch, that'd probably be the strongest launch of any console ever. Most consoles when they launch usually only have one or two good games and then they have a bunch of guys who are jumping on the bandwagon earlier. I got to remember that our audience is up in the camera lens. They're hidden in that camera and not down on that. I'm going to turn this off down here so we don't get too distracted by that. All right, we can edit that part out. Should we? I don't know. All right, so Bryce, you checked out this game called Path of Exile. Path of Exile. So why don't you tell us a little bit about Path of Exile? Okay, so Path of Exile is a game that's, oh my god, let me cut it to me. Path of Exile is a game, it's pretty much, it's a lot like Diablo or I guess Diablo II and it's in the way that it's played. It's an action RPG. You play as a character. You can cast spells and the character that I'm playing is an archer right now. So that's really nice. I like bow characters. Oh yeah, that's what I did in Skyrim. I ran around with the bow and all these stealth enhancements and basically you like some kind of medieval sniper. I've got like a split arrow thing where I can split three arrows and they go off into it. It's like a shotgun bow. So the arrows actually target different people? Well, you can't like target them but it's like you shoot three arrows at once and they spray. Nice spray. Yeah. Kind of interesting that sounds like something you'd see in a crazy manga. Yeah and then the nice thing about this game is that they're about, it's got a nice skill tree with about 1500 skills or so. Wait a minute 1500? Yeah maybe it's like 1100 but it's somewhere. So how long would, I mean is this a game that's meant to be played like a Skyrim where you're playing for like 100 or 200 hours or so it's a really deep game. It's a pretty, it's in beta right now so. Oh it's not even. Not even out. More than the time I was playing it. It wasn't, I don't know, I haven't been on the computer. That's right because my PC is broken right now guys. I've been playing games. Well I actually, in the time since we did the first segment in Farc right there, I finished it. Definitely worth picking up. I did enjoy it. So Path of Exile, so that's available on Steam? No it's available on their website. Oh so this is an indie game? Would you say? Yeah it's a very indie game. And now, and it's a first person? No it's a top, oh top down. Exactly like Diablo style game. Oh that's right. Or Torchlight. Torchlight or the old, the old D&D like Neverwinner and Planescape and stuff like that. Although those were sort of Tile 2D type games. I think all kinds of games are probably going to be making a comeback because pretty much they've done everything they can as far as engines go. So what else are we going to talk about today? So Path of Exile we know is definitely worth checking out if you're into RPGs. So the other game we're going to talk about today is the Unfinished Swan. This is available on PSN for the PS3. It is a sort of an, I wouldn't say it's an indie game because it's Santa Monica Studios which is sort of the indie division of Sony. Sony's gaming companies. Man I can't even remember what they're called. But anyway Sony Computer Entertainment I guess is what it is and it's their sort of indie division. And so Santa Monica is the studio that kind of oversees and helps supervise the production of games like Journey and Flow and sort of the more unusual creative artsy games that you'll see on PSN. So the Unfinished Swan is sort of like a little storybook and you're an orphan and your mom has passed away and so you've been sent off to the orphanage. You've never really known who your father was and she's left you this little silver paintbrush. And one day you wake up in the middle of the night and you see a swan in your room and you're like okay what's up with that? Why is there a swan in my room? So you follow the swan through a magic door that appears in the wall and you grab your little paintbrush because you don't want to leave the only thing your mother ever left you behind. And you wind up in this world that is completely white. And now I'm back on it. You wind up in this world that's completely white and by taking your paintbrush and splattering black ink all over or paint, depends it looks like ink, suddenly it hits the walls and various objects that are there but they're all white and you couldn't see them before. So it's like you're making the world appear before you by painting it. And so you start exploring and you come across a little pond and you find a castle and you're like well you better invest to get the castle and all along you're following these yellow footprints that are kind of paint splatters like this shape that the swan has left behind. See I haven't even got my my hands in the correct there. So it's really kind of cool. And as you can see here you know in the footage that it's like it's a really neat effect. And as the game progresses you can now start doing other things besides ink so at a certain point it'll start splattering water all over the place. When you splatter water it'll make say there's a plant all of a sudden a plant if you splatter water it'll grow. It'll follow where you're going with the water and I don't want to say too much more than that because as the game goes on more and more it gets revealed. And you kind of discover about your history and your mother's history and all these different things that are going on all the while trying to you know figure out where is this unfinished swan trying to lead me. The whole game only takes maybe an afternoon to play and then you can go back and you can try and get all kind of like the little bonus things like getting the balloons that you see around and stuff like that. But I found it very entertaining. The game I think anticipates your reactions pretty well because there were definitely times where I was like just like wow and then all of a sudden the character in the game would go wow like right at that moment too and I'm like wow they knew. They knew I would say wow. Yeah and then the character said wow you said wow and it was just like an endless cycle of wow's. No but you know I mean so it's it's very interesting that they they were trying to go for these emotional moments and in fact it worked because and that happened more than once and it wasn't just me saying oh if I say wow now is he gonna say wow it just it was very natural. Yeah because the graphics were really even though they're very simple they're very impressive. So I liked it a lot. There were sort of like little vague reminders of and I'm not saying these are sort of what do you call them downsides. They're not Easter eggs or attributes too but like I was sort of reminded a little bit of psycho knots and moments in there and some other games that were platformers. I wouldn't say this is a platformer more like maybe a little bit of a puzzler. Very enjoyable and a really unique look and you know the game is on PSN it's not that expensive so I would say the unfinished one is definitely worth checking out if you are looking for an afternoon of entertainment and it's totally you know appropriate for all ages. So I would think anybody that you sat down in front of that would probably get a kick out of it. It is a motion enabled game and we might even have a little bit here of me trying to calibrate the the the motion sensor which was not very instinctual. I would say it was easy enough to do but there wasn't a button that said okay I'm done so I would line it all up and then somehow I would wind up resetting it and having to do it again because there was no obvious like okay I'm ready to go into the game. That was the only flaw in the game was I think the motion calibration could have been clarified a little bit. Well once you had that motion controller clarified you could throw with a paint like this and that and you would throw the paint out. It's very cool and it works with a regular controller if you don't have the motion. So that's the unfinished lawn and I think we have that's that's the show yeah that's the show. All right so that wraps up episode we're we're thinking that was number six and we will be back much quicker with another episode because game developers conference is going on right now and man there's a lot of stuff coming out. Oh yeah announcements everywhere plus there's new games we've been playing.