 This is Game Chat, we're going to episode 136. Scionics Rockets Tours Epic Heights. Chat with Buona. Welcome to the show. Now, here's your host Buona McCall with all the gaming news of this week. By the way, that's me. Greetings, folks, and welcome to episode 136 of Game Chat. Buona, got a great show lined up for you, about four stories to talk about. It was kind of dry, kind of kind of dry news this week. There wasn't a whole lot to find in terms of meaty meaty stuff. We're coming up close to the summer and a lot of people looking forward to E3. That's going to have a lot of news. That's going to have a lot of news and stuff in it. And so it's just not too much going on. I mean, a couple announcements were made today in the virtual reality space, which I don't, you know, I follow, but I'm not a huge fan of it. So we're going to talk about some of those VR things and some of the some of the moves that were made with companies, Nintendo news and a little bit of Star Citizen stuff. So I'm not going to belabor the moment. Let's get right to it. If our first story, we're going to talk about Valve. Valve is officially made and rose into the VR headset realm. The Valve Index VR headset is going to officially cost a thousand dollars for the entire package. It comes by way of Diverge.com. And it's pretty, pretty substantial in terms of what the hardware offerings that Valve has offered in the past. We've seen stuff like the Steam Box and the Steam Controller. And not a whole lot of stuff beyond that that I can remember that was substantial. They did partner with HTC for a long time to create some steam compatible VR headsets. I think a lot of what they learned from that partnership is kind of what fueled the Valve Index. Now, the VR kit costs nine hundred and nine nine dollars is going to ship by June 28th, 2019. I want to apologize for my allergies in advance. I'm struggling to talk. Hello, Spring. How are you doing? It's going to include the headset, the Valve Index controllers and the Index Base Station, all of which you can buy separately. So if you just want the headset, you already have a compatible base station or headset. I'm sorry. If you already have a compatible controller or a base station, you can just buy the headset for four hundred nine nine dollars. Or if you buy the whole kit, it's going to run around a thousand dollars. It's going to be high fidelity. That's one of the big things they're going to be going for here. Fourteen forty by sixteen hundred resolution RGB LCDs. And that's going to be a hundred and twenty Hertz with an experimental one hundred and forty four Hertz. So much money and technology definitely targeting the enthusiast crowd. This is not someone. This is not for someone who just wants to ease into the VR market. I think this is for people who have tried oculus riffs or maybe even have a HTC Vive already, but don't want to get HTC Vive Pro. There are also some. There was also some spin off news that Valsys are going to be releasing a VR first person title. Soon, I don't think it's in this article, but that's kind of big news that Valve is going to attempt to make a game again after Artifact, which was a complete failure by their own words. So Valve is going to take another take another stab at making another game and it's going to be VR only. Like I said, I'm not a big fan of VR. I don't think VR personally, you know, this is an opinion thing. I don't think it's I don't think it's all that great. I don't. I think the technology has improved from what we've seen in the eighties and nineties and stuff, but I think the experiences are disjointed. I think it's in a very experimental tech demo format and a lot of games. Some exceptions come to mind. Elite Dangerous is probably the biggest exception. It seems like the game was even made for VR. But even with that, it has its own quirks and issues. So, yeah, this is a big deal. Big deal in VR news. Valve is entering the VR market. We now have a bunch of new players in this market. Hopefully the prices will drop. This one's a doozy. This one's a doozy, though. Nine hundred nine nine dollars is crazy. Check it out, guys, over in the verge.com. They got the details. The Valve Index VR is out on the news waves and will be shipping in June 2019. If our next story, we're going to talk about Psionics. Psionics, the makers of Rocket League, the car soccer game that everybody loves so much, has been a very successful title over the years. Today, Psionics announced that they're going to be joining Epic Games. Oh, boy. Whenever we bring up that name, people start to internally bleed and their eyes start to. Do things that are supposed to, I don't know. People just lose their minds. But Epic Games is going to be purchasing Psionics. Actually, it's already done. They're officially joining it. So in the post that I'm linking to in the description at rocketleague.com says, what does this mean for Rocket League and this community? We're happy to say that the answers are only positive. Rocket League has always been always be a community driven game. And now be and now that we have joined forces with Epic, we will be able to serve our community in even bigger and better ways. I think the biggest thing is that people are wondering what's going to happen to the steam version and Epic has said that in a nutshell, I'm going to try to summarize it as much as possible. So a lot of PR speak, the game is going to be on steam in terms of support forever. That's that's pretty much what's going down. So if you're worried about patches, updates and all kinds of stuff, that's always going to be on steam. What's not clear is that they have announced that this that the game will be coming to the Epic Game Store. And I think once that happens, it won't be available to purchase anymore on steam like much of the other titles that have moved to the Epic Game Store. But if you already have the game, you're fine. I don't know if that many people personally that are looking to buy Rocket League, like my inner circle and people that know online and even the groups of people that I talk to, most people who, excuse me, most people that I talk to, they either have tried the game on it, liked it. They've tried the game, don't like it on it and people who are not even going to try it and don't own it. So those potential new people that want to buy on steam, worst case scenario, going to have to buy on Epic Games Store, which to me is not a huge deal. Um, DLC support is going to remain on steam. Support, patch support is going to remain on steam. I don't see any, I don't see any of that changing. If it does change, I still don't see that being a big issue. Why? Well, if you've been listening to my podcast, you know, I don't care about the Epic Games Store. It's just another program, another launcher. All my games launch from shortcuts on my desktop anyway. So I don't really care. Um, that's a whole another can of worms, you know, the whole Epic Games Store versus steamed. I'm not going to rehash again because I have a whole episode, a tale of two rants where I go crazy on that topic. But this is good news for for Psionics. Psionics, yeah, make sure I'm pronouncing that right. It's a good news for them because they've been working with Epic for a long time on Unreal Engine. It's going to help them as developers. Probably be a lot of crossover events, a lot of Fortnite, a lot of Psionics Rocket League stuff. They love crossover stuff and might even see some Borderlands stuff in in Rocket League. You might see some other games from from the Epic Games Store that might make it into Rocket League now. First party stuff. So check it out, guys, over in Rocket League dot com. They got the details. Psionics is joining the Epic family. What does this mean for Rocket League? Not much is going to change if you already play the game. But I think that if you're going to be a new player, you're probably going to have to buy it from the Epic Games Store eventually when things go down. Check it out, guys. They got the details over there. And for next week, we're going to talk about the game called Forger. This is a game that I play in my live stream at Twitch.TV slash Buona Forger is a gathering game where you create, explore and unlock new things to do. So top down, very, very low fidelity game. Not a lot of great graphics, but it's colorful and easy on the eyes, and it's one of those busybee games where you have all these different tasks that you need to do to work towards unlocking other things, work towards unlocking other things. We've seen it in a lot of it's like one of the core principles of survival games and building games where you need to go through a progression tree. This is progression tree to game, but it is heavily inspired by Stardew Valley, according to this article. And I agree with that. This has a lot of features. Even it has the museum, it has like fishing mechanics. It has like market mechanics and a lot of gathering and foraging, hence the name Forger. But one of the things that I found that I didn't have, which I'm happy about, is didn't have all the interaction between characters or the romancing and marrying people and all that stuff that Stardew Valley had. And it also doesn't have the energy system of Stardew Valley. You don't have to go to sleep. Energy and Forger is managed by food. So as long as you eat, you can keep playing a game. And I felt that Stardew Valley's energy system was a deterrent for me. I didn't like that about the game. It seemed to always get in the way of my fun. As soon as I started having fun. Oh, you got to go to sleep. So that got annoying after a while. But this is a sandbox style game. According to this article on LaunchingParty.com, they got their own take on it. This is a sandbox game where you can do whatever you want, but there's optional progression paths. You don't have to do anything in a particular order, per se. But there is recommended upgrade paths like getting a better foraging tool. Eventually getting more speed, getting more attack speed, getting weapons, unlocking different buildings like forges, sewing machines and factories and oil pumps. And then working your way up to building even drones and robots. It's a great game in that sense. And it can just kill hours. It's one of those games where you just can delete in afternoon and not even know what happened, especially once you get to hang of it. And you'll be sitting there chopping down hundreds of trees. You're like, why in the world am I doing this? And then you unlock something called a mining rod, which will do it for you. You go, oh, that's why I'm doing it. Eventually, the game turns to what looks like an idle game. You know those idle games where you just sit and watch things happen and you manage progression. You get so much automation going and you get so many resources coming in that that you just it turns, it looks like an idle game. It looks like an idle game. It's just like all these things are automatically mining for you. The drones are picking up stuff and it's really fun, really fun. I like idle games. So it's you may not like idle in games, but I do. But even then, I think that sort of an exaggeration is not necessarily an idle game when you get that far. It's just a lot of things that more things get automated and you'll be working on other things. So don't don't think that you won't be doing anything. It just seems like the further you progress, the more the mundane things you did in the beginning are automated. I think that's a better way of stating it forger. It is really, really fun. I believe it's $20 early access. Let me double check the price on this article. I believe that's what it is. I had a lot of fun. We played it like three or four days on my live stream and had a great time, had a great time. Eventually people start to tune out, though. It just looks like it just looks like madness and mayhem. It just turns the madness and mayhem at some point. You just like, oh, my goodness, what's going on? It's just stuff flying everywhere. So if you don't play the game, it's not necessarily the easiest thing to watch. I'm pretty sure it's $20. I don't see it on here, but it's very cheap. It's on Steam. Check it out, guys. Forger, ForgerReviewLaunchParty.com has theirs. I gave you my thoughts on it. Really good game. If you're looking for something to kill the time on a lazy spring afternoon. And for our next story, we're going to talk about Star Citizen. The Star Citizen is having a free flight week yet again. So if you want to check out Star Citizen and don't want to pay the minimum like $45 for the base starter package, you can. You can have it at robertspaceindustries.com and check it out. One of the new things or two of the new things that you can check out in this update is that they've added a female model that you can play as, as well as there is a city planet, much like Curuscant on in Star Wars that you can fly through and check out all the dazzling lights and take the tram to different parts and walk around. And just make sure you have enough hardware to support this. I have 16 gigs of RAM and I got a RAM morning. When I launched the game, which kind of shocked me. If you don't know, I did stream this experience last weekend. I think it was a weekend before last. And I was being walked by some of my community members and they were teaching me the ropes, essentially of how to play this game. It's quite different in control scheme from what I'm used to with Elite Dangerous. I do know my way around the Space Sim, though. So that wasn't too hard. It was more about specifics of mechanics. But this is a great time to test your hardware, I think, because this game is like crisis on crack, like a hardware hardware benchmark game, especially when you go to the city planet that I mentioned. A lot of the stuff isn't interactable. So it's not like a planet full of buildings that you're going to walk in and out on your free will. But you can fly along the surface and, you know, fly through the buildings and look at all the advertisements. It looks like Blade Runner, like when I went through it. I was kind of pleasantly surprised how much it reminded me of Blade Runner more than anything. It had a Blade Runner Neo Tokyo vibe more than anything, which is good. I like that kind of sci-fi, that kind of Space Sim stuff that you would see. You know, it's even something like you would see in like Firefly or Serenity if you saw the movie. Very space cowboy-like stuff. So I like that kind of stuff. But it does tack your hardware. So be aware of that. It is buggy. I got to admit, like I was going to make a YouTube video about Star Citizen based on those experiences. And I was abruptly interrupted by a lot of crashes and bugs. I couldn't even capture enough footage. What shocked me, it surprised me. And I think it would come to that. So I couldn't even get enough footage to record a video. But, you know, it was a refreshing experience. I got to see how far Star Citizen has come. And it was a refresher to remind me how far Star Citizen needs to go. It has a long ways to go. It's nowhere near, excuse me. It's nowhere near finished. Nowhere near finished. And it's going to take some years of work to get it done. But they're doing some incredible stuff over there. Just needs a lot more time to bake. Check it out, guys. Over on RobertSpaceIndustries.com. Star Citizen has a free week. I believe it ends May 15th. No, that's that's too far away. It's like a week from, no, May 8th. May 8th, I want a week too far. May 1st through May 8th, you can play for free. Not put the link in the description where you can see how to get access. So check it out, guys. Star Citizen, free for a week. And for our final story, we're going to talk about Nintendo. There's no new plans to announce new hardware at E3 2019. According to this article, articleoverongamatsu.com, Nintendo says they're always developing internally. But there's not going to be any new hardware launches or new hardware announcements this coming E3. We do expect Sony to say something. I think we talked about that on the last episode. Maybe not. I think we did. My memory is starting to fade a little bit of that event. And Nintendo is not going to announce any new hardware, which is surprising because I thought they were going to come out with a new variant of the Switch or some kind of 3DS knockoff or 3DS spinoff. Knockoff is a terrible word. They tend to do that. They tend to release, you know, different variations of this same hardware more so than Sony and Microsoft do, I think, especially for their handheld stuff. But the Switch is kind of in a unique and weird position because it's a handheld and it's also a console, too. So I don't know what business model is going to apply here. Are they going to apply the 3DS business model or the Wii and Wii U business model? Remains to be seen. I'm sorry, excuse me. So not much to look forward to from Nintendo in terms of hardware. I'm trying to think of some kind of software other than Pokemon that I'm looking forward to. What are you guys looking forward to? Because we've already gotten Zelda. We've got Mario's. We've gotten Smash. Those are the big pillars right there that I can think of. And, you know, Pokemon. We've got Pokemon Go, Pokemon Let's Go, and the Pokemon RPG title, which is coming out soon. But I don't know. I don't know what Nintendo is going to do at E3. Usually they're tree houses or their Nintendo announcements are pretty much bigger than what they do at E3, if you ask me. And you didn't. So check it out, guys. Over on goodmoster.com, they've got the details. Nintendo has no plans to announce new hardware. I don't know what they're going to announce, but we're going to be watching that very closely. And that concludes episode 136 of Game Chat. When I apologize profusely, I am fighting sinuses. Man, it's hard for me to say three or four sentences before my throat completely closes up or my nasal passages just decide to do what they want to do. So I tried to pace myself accordingly. Took me a lot longer to record this than it normally does, but we got it out. I mean, I've been doing this for a lot of years and I'm way overdue to have an episode where my sinuses fight me, so, and allergies, especially in the springtime. And it's like 10 o'clock at night, so medicines are starting to wear off and that kind of stuff. So I apologize and I hope you all did enjoy the show. And we'll try to do better in the future. Click this follow button everywhere. One of that TV slash podcast. Twitch.tv slash buona. YouTube.com slash buona. Twitter.com slash buona. Instagram.com slash buona. Please follow all my stuff. We're going to be doing more BRANTS over on anchor.fm, I think, slash buona. I think that's what that podcast is. I'll be able to do some more BRANTS when I'm not coughing every two minutes. I got some fresh ones, man. Ooh, you guys see that Sonic trailer? Yeah, yeah, that's a BRANTS episode right there. That's a hot one. Thanks guys for listening. I'll see you all next week. Same time, same station. This is Game Chat Buona, episode 136. Have a great day. Bye bye.