9 thoughts on “Benheck Podcast Episode 59”

  1. Welcome back! I enjoyed that immensely. The “recording” had me laughing my arse off!

  2. I loved the Paul WS Anderson recording. I suppose if we can’t get a new intro, stuff like this will do.

  3. Jones briefly touched on his annoyance with unlockable content in plastic guitar games. I hate when core game content is locked away, requiring many hours of play (work?) to access it. I’m not talking about shooters or adventure games where you need to play through one level to advance to the next, nor unlockable bonus content that’s incidental to the gameplay itself. I’m referring to games that ration off small portions of the promised feature set as some kind of ‘reward’ for jumping through hoops. “Congratulations, you’ve completed some arbitrary task! Here’s another tiny piece of the game that you paid good money for.” Racing games are the worst, but others, like the plastic guitar games, can be equally annoying in this regard.

    I’ve got a wife, two young kids, and a demanding job. I have time for maayyybe 30-45 minutes of gaming per week, but I’ll often go a month or more without playing anything. So let’s say Driving Game X promises 200 ultra-realistic cars in 80 cities. Without investing 10-12 hours of gameplay, all I get for my money is some lowly Fiat with a sketchy transmission tooling around downtown Prague.

    Perhaps if Microsoft and the others wanted to cater to casual gamers, they should skip the arm-waving contraptions and offer games that one can fully enjoy given only 30 minutes a week. But I could be off-base here; I’ll freely admit I’m well out of touch when it comes to modern video games.

  4. I think Microsofts conference was pretty good. Maybe I’m just looking forward to the new halo (that you didn’t mention) too much.

    Microsoft may have just needed to push the Natal so much to compete with the Wii vitality sensor. 🙂

  5. From 48:53 to 48:57, Ben sounds like Kermit the Frog.

    Just one of those random things I noticed.

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