 One of the other games we're talking about on today's show is Rosen Synapse. Rosen Synapse. What can you tell us about this, Bryce? It's a turn-based strategy game where you plan a move blindly against your opponent, and then they're planning the same at the same time, and then you both submit a turn. So it's online? Yeah. It's online. There's campaign modes and everything, PC, by the way, everybody. And the graphics, as we see over here, we can see on our screen, they're like kind of a vector virtual reality-type graphics. Yes. So, all right, let's explain here a little bit. We're going to look a little closer here up. All right, so as you can see, this start out with a planning phase where you can press, you click on the screen to make different military units move around, and you can aim the rocket launchers and grenade people. You can have them aim to a specific point, and then the gunmen, you just have them have their gun out, or not have their gun out, and you can have them aim, but you can't tell them when to fire, but with a rocket launcher guy, you can. Oh, okay. And then you submit the move. And you submit the move. The enemy plans their move, not knowing what your move is, and then you see how it turns out. And that's where we get outcome. Yeah. And as you can see, because I was messing around for this one, I lost the, that's rather badly. Well, yeah, I'm sure you get to play again. So this is a game you recommend. It's pretty cool. Yes. It's got a very nice soundtrack, too. Is it available? How's it available? Steam. Through Steam. All right. So, let's see. We'll look at a little bit more gameplay here of the game, and we'll be right back. Okay. So that's that time again, and of course, that time means zombie time. So here's a game called Zombie Gunship. So you can see it's got some pretty cool graphics. Let's get that glare out of there, and we'll move it back a little so you can see what's going on. Here in a giant C-130 SuperDuper loaded gunship ready to blast some zombies. And it's a pretty simple game. So we'll just start with the bunker area, Numero Uno, and we'll say Engage. And it's really pretty simple because you've got this viewfinder, and you're going to look around. You defend the bunker, and if I swivel my head around, there's the bunker entrance over there. So I'm gunning. So now what we need to do is look for some zombies. Now there's this wide view up here, and then there's also a zoom view. Now right now, I'm not seeing any zombies. It's pretty quiet out there in the front. And you can see it's like a night vision type thing. The plane is circling around the bunker. It's got to protect all those scientists inside. They're looking for a cure. There's this horrible zombie plague, and we go out, and at some point, some of these nasty zombies are going to come wandering in. Now I think there is a skip tutorial. All right, that's why. It was starting to give an explanation of everything. Oh, there he is. Little pesky zombies. Now the question is if I can remember how to fire. Any suggestions, Bryce? Oh, some zombies are actually getting close into that bunker. They're wandering in. As you can see, they show up on infrared even though they're dead. I'm not sure why that is. I wish I knew. I wish I could remember how to shoot. Pretty soon they're going to get in that bunker, and everyone's going to die. There they go. They're going into the bunker. This is what happens if you fail to fail. You don't make any money, and you get the money, and then you can upgrade stuff. Apparently, I killed a zombie. I don't know if you saw that, but somewhere in there, a zombie, maybe he tripped and fell and hit his head on a rock or something, because I think that happens to zombies every once in a while. Okay, pretty soon it's going to explain to me how to play. You must defend the bunker. The green dots point to the bunker, swipe to find it, top right to switch weapons modes. Ah, so now I'm actually on the cannon, and now you can see that there's a button. So go out here, and we'll try and find some zombies. So far, it's looking like around the entrance of the bunker, nobody's there. Just look around and see out, maybe at the edge of the woods or the desert, kind of looks like the desert. I've forgotten, keep forgetting that it's in the tutorial mode, and the zombies show up. We've got to get out of the tutorial mode. All right, so here we have some civilians coming in to get rescued. As you can see, they glow white on the infrared, because they're living, breathing creatures. There's a guy coming in way over here, people over there. Up, we see some zombies here, let's take care of those zombies. And of course, we have a very heavy caliber weapon. So if we get anywhere near these zombies, generally speaking, they're in big trouble. And you're going to have to lead them a little bit, because they're pesky. Let's go back out to the wide view. And we can see there's some humans over here. There's a couple of zombies, hot on their tail. You could be generous with your ammo or, or, or not, oh, oh, we got all kinds of trouble over here. So as you play, of course, it gets more and more challenging. It's a lot easier to play right side up than upside down. And you'll find that you get other kinds of weapons that you can purchase, and use these to get some of these pesky zombies that seem to know how to avoid bullets. Somebody got in there. And of course, there's all sorts of bonuses you can get for obliterating zombies. There's a couple zombies. See, danger zombie breach imminent. So if zombies get in the bunker, they have to close it off and they can't take any more survivors. So your level's going to end. So you need to be able to clear the zombies and survive. I got some coins there. If I get a lot more coins and different things, I can achieve basic goals and stuff. They've got all kinds of neat little things that they've, again, added on to this game since it first came out. Here you have some summary. It looks like I got 30 zombies. I saved seven humans. I didn't accidentally shoot any humans, which is a pretty good thing. Then I got a few field challenges coins. These are like your trophies and stuff like that. And then of course, there's all sorts of upgrade options. So this is a pretty neat little game also, as I recall, it's about a buck. So gunship, oh, look, they'll give you a thousand coins if you like them on Facebook. You can use those to buy some new cool stuff. So hopefully we've got some decent focus. So another little iPhone game we'd like to talk about is Gridly. Now I haven't actually had a chance to really play Gridly, but I did get it. And the reason I did get it, this little game right here, is because this is actually a fully functioning MAME emulator, M-A-M-E. And if you've ever heard of that, what that is is on the PC and other platforms. It's an emulator that lets you play old arcade games if you have what are known as ROMs, which is the little sort of program that used to create the old game. And so this Gridly game, you can actually load up ROMs that you download on the internet and play various games. It provides a basic control pad, a button over here. I'm not sure exactly how you play this game or what it is. It looks like there's a little cubirdish type character running around on a grid. And he shoots. So my guess is that like an old arcade game, see it says coin here. We'll do that. It means we put a coin in. So you can see now there's one credit, two credits, three credits. We'll get ourselves four credits. We'll start the game using the start button over here. Shoot opponents as they pass overhead and watch their shadows. Now this is going to be tough again because we're playing upside down. I'm not sure I'm controlling it. It looks like he's running around on his own. It's hard to tell. Oh, I haven't actually started it. OK, that would explain a lot. Press start. I don't know about you folks out there, but my fingers sometimes just don't seem to trigger the touchscreen. All right, press fire when ready. OK, this finger is controlling. All right, it's, again, playing upside down is kind of hard. Can you hear that? There's making noises. I don't think this game is playable upside down. When you're trying to look at a monitor over on the side to see what's going on, let's see. So I go that way, go this way. So the touch area is a little, you got to kind of really go to the edges of this touchpad to make it work. And what you're doing is you're trying to get underneath these little creatures where their shadows are. It looks like I actually got somebody there for a second. Yep, but I got squashed. So anyway, this is the game. It's pretty simple. However, my understanding is that you can go in, and I think you have to use iTunes, but you can find the app and you can actually load in other games that the MAME emulator can then play. So this one actually comes with Gridly, obviously. And then you can add in other games as you find them. But you'd have to check the website out. It's exactly the procedure for that. But I believe in iTunes there's a little file section for this, and then you drop them in there, and then it puts them on your iPhone, and you can play them. If they haven't disabled it by now, apparently Apple took down the last MAME emulator that went up. So you might want to get this game now if you like playing old arcade games, sort of Ms. Pac-Man, Asteroids, all the old, a lot of the games used to come out on the Japanese PC system, Metal Gear Solid, games like that, before they were on PlayStation. So that's Gridly. Interesting little game. I want to check it out. It's free, you're $0.99. I can't remember which. Deus Ex. Deus Ex, a game that came out in 2000. Yeah, around 2000 and 2001. 2001, yeah. That was a long time ago. Very long. Back, I believe that was Warren Spector and Harvey, which boy, Smith, maybe? Yeah, I think I've heard those names in this game. And the original game is the Unreal Engine on the PC, and then they ported it over to the PlayStation 2, an amazing feat. Obviously, it didn't look the same. And I think it was on Xbox as well, I believe. I think so. Just telling Bryce earlier, my cousin played both all the versions of the games multiple times and did speed runs, did every kind of thing he could imagine in that game. It was a game that offered lots of possibilities. All right, so why don't you tell us about it? OK, so the game was one of the first-person RPGs. Ever? I can't think of any before it. Yeah, no, I can't think of any. So yeah, it was a pretty innovative game when it came out. When I played it, it took about 40 hours to beat. Pretty good. I was not the greatest at it. And you just played, that was just for one run-through, right? Yeah. You could play and get multiple endings. I did a terrible job at it. I tried to go through stealthily, but it weren't very stealthy. I wasn't very stealthy because my favorite weapon was the rocket launcher. The stealth rocket build. Nice. So if anybody saw me. So you had a silencer on it, like size of a trash can? And so if anybody saw me and I got caught, I just rocketed. Rocketed the heck out of them? Yeah, until there was nobody left in the building. Because I think in the game, there's an advantage to going through the game and not killing anybody. Yeah. Yeah, in my understanding, there's all these different. You can do stealth. Go through it stealthily. You can go through tech, combination, shooting, all-out shooting. So stuff ends up worse going through it if you kill everybody. So you get like a bad ending type thing? Yeah. So that may just be for the new one. To consider you evil. The new one. Well, I have the new one, but I haven't played it yet. Human Revolution. And that one was done actually by a different studio. I guess after the second one, the game kind of went into what, hiatus, retirement for a while. Yeah, the second one. And then they switched developers. And who's it? Ubisoft, I think, took it over. And Ubisoft is an interesting developer because they have this, I think, fantastic art direction on all their games. I don't know if it was Ubisoft. I think it was it Edios? Oh, Edios. Or Square Enix took it over. Square Enix, right. But they used the Montreal studio, which is, that's why I get confused. They were Ubisoft. They're all in Montreal. So up in Montreal, let's just say that. They have fantastic art direction on all the games. I don't know what it is with those Canadians, but they really know how to create the worlds and the environments and do different styles. But the games sometimes are buggy. I remember that being an issue. I think with the Deus Ex, at least the original one, the Unreal Engine was really solid. And it's always been a very solid engine. You don't see too many bugs with that, unless it's heavily modded by a developer. Yeah. There were, I'm trying to think of, with Deus Ex, there are, I haven't noticed any bugs in it. Yeah, solid all the way. Yeah, it was pretty solid, especially for such an old game. But the one that, Human Revolution, was pretty buggy. Yeah, the second one. Yeah, I think that was where they were pushing everything a little, or is that, wait. That's the third one. Third one. That's good. You can't rely on me for accurate information. Yeah, well, I haven't played that one, so we'll see. Maybe I can play that through, and then we can do a little update on another episode. Issues with things disappearing. You mean, like, levels being see-through, so that it was just the sky box being visible? But did you mess around with it when that happened, or? Then it crashed. That happened once when I was playing The Naughty Dog. I think it was the second one. Something glitched, and you could see through the whole world and all this stuff. And it was crazy, because it was in the middle of a gunfight. And it was actually a lot of fun sneaking around and thing. But then when you're trapped outside the world, at some point you've got to just quit out, because, you know, that's it, you're stuck in the game. But sometimes bugs can be fun. But then sometimes they ruin the game. There was a game called 13, which was a heavily modded. That's what I was referring to earlier, Unreal Engine Game. And I think that was by Ubisoft. And that was like a comic book graphic novel game. And it was, I think, the first one that tried that style. And graphically, that game was amazing. But it was so buggy. I mean, you couldn't complete the game. And some people could, but I wasn't able to. And it was really disappointing, because it was just such a stylish game. And then later on, other games have come along and kind of adopted that sort of graphic novel look to their games. I think Max Payne did it in the bed. And the third one. And I think there have been a few others. And it had cell shading. And it had all kinds of cool features. But when they added all that to the engine, they broke everything. So Human Revolution, Deus Ex, will check out. I'll get some footage of that of me playing. And I'll give you my impressions. But the original Deus Ex, and even the second one, great game. I remember I think in the first one, it was one of those things you crawl in. You're in a building, and you're going by. And you see some guys sitting there on the couch watching TV. And I was like, hmm, I stopped and watched TV with them. And they had all these little television shows they had made. It was almost like a Grand Theft Auto or one of the Rockstar games, just real depth to the world. You could sit there and watch TV, watch cartoons, and stuff like these guys for 20 minutes. And it was always new stuff that you were watching. And that's just something that you passed by in one room in the game. So there's a lot of different things that you can do, ways to approach a situation. As we said, tackle the game in a lot of different ways. All right, so that's Deus Ex. And so here we have Gun Runner, which is a game for iOS. And this is sort of a little platforming game that reminds me of the Metal Gear or Metal Slug series, not Metal Gear. Jeez, I can never get anything right anymore. So you can buy weapons with the dollars you earn in the game. And we've got a game pause here. So we'll play along. You see you flying in a helicopter and you jump out. And what you do is you use your finger to tap on the screen. And you can jump and kind of direct your shots. And you'll see, well, I die a lot. Because it's kind of hard to demo a game and play it at the same time. But you get cash for collecting the coins, which then you can use to buy guns. Shoot more bullets or rockets or different things. You can see here you can buy extra hearts and health, supercharge your weapons. And of course, you can put your stats up on Game Center. So there we'll buy an extra life, since I'm about to lose a whole bunch here. And we'll go back in. The graphics are really nice. As I said, reminiscent of the Metal Slug games, but the enemies don't have that sort of faux Nazi look to them. They're just kind of regular soldiers. And you see I fall again because I'm terrible at the jumping part. And probably that's what most of this video is going to be, is me falling as I do the jumps improperly over and over again. The other nice thing about this game is the soundtrack, which you can't hear because this voiceover is being recorded because we forgot to turn on the mics when I did the original video. So maybe we'll figure out a way I can get some of the sound back in. But here I actually made it over the first jump. And you can see I drop once again. So maybe we'll just skip ahead to a part where I actually survive. And one of the things you might notice through all these play-throughs is the coin placements are random. So it's not just the same exact repetitive pattern over and over. You can see the gaps are different. The coin placement is different. There's a little bit of variation in the enemies. So it's actually a fun game to kind of play, but it can be challenging because rather than mastering one particular sort of platforming level, you kind of have to develop your skills a little bit more to adapt to the situation as it goes. And of course, you'll have helicopters coming and shooting at you, soldiers, vehicles, all sorts of stuff, most of which I'm too poor a player to show you in this review. But I do find it a fun little game to play. You can pull it out and play it for a little while. That's the thing with the iOS games. A lot of them are designed to quickly jump in and jump out of. See, if you look in the upper left here, you'll see that there's a disk. And if you follow that link, that takes you to the guy who did all the music. And you can actually get the album and download it. And he's got sort of this cool old school retro chic ethic. He's got a floppy disk logo, which is Sisyphus. You want to say Sisyphus after that, the man of the mythology, but it's not just Sisyphus. So I don't know. Maybe it's a reference to Syphilis, but for all you kids, don't look. So this game actually, when I checked the updates on the website, it does have some in-app purchasing where you can buy stuff with money. You can buy tons of money in the game using $10 of real money. So it does have some of that in the game. One of the things, though, that we did learn is that the game is currently broken on iOS 6. What will happen when you start it up is the title screen freezes a bit. And then you get into the game and it plays it, but it freezes. And you have to stop your iPhone, like shut it off completely, power it down, and reboot it. And then the game will play fine, even though it has the weird glitch at the beginning. It's kind of strange. The developer, ManUpStudio, says on their website that they've got a patch in with Apple that should come out whenever it gets approved.