Yes, yes indeed, it’s back. The RPS Electronic Wireless Show returns after an embarrassing amount of time. Jim and John get together to discuss the most important gaming news of the week, such as the opening of Half-Life, snowmen, and why you should give your children the MMR vaccine. However, we also manage to squeeze in discussions about Men Of War, Burnout Paradise, and EA’s slippery release schedule.
In a new and exciting twist, we also take quite a lot of our lead from Twitter. This is something we plan to do in future, and hopefully using RPS’ Twitter account. (However, just for the moment neither of us knows the password for that one, so we used mine. We’re a slick machine!)
Get the mp3 directly from this word here. Get it from the hosty site here. And find it on iTunes, and bring us back into the charts where we belong, here.
It’s a pretty quiet one. Our lovely new mic seems determined to be insanely quiet, no matter how loud it’s told to be. If anyone knows how to fix this, let us know. For now, I’ve boosted the volume considerably, and it’s still pretty low. And listen out for the special guest appearance of my creaky chair.
Useful links:
Bad Science. And specifically the Barnett incident.
Related Stories:
Sweet podcast bro.
If it’s a realtek device you might want to check this:
http://torley.com/how-to-boost-the-mic-volume-on-your-realtek-audio-codec
because their mic boost is really really really well hiden.
Great to see it return guys. Downloading now.
Dude – sadly not. The in-built mic records at a sensible volume after fiddling with that before, but this is a USB mic that remains unaffected.
What software are you using to record, out of interest?
I was thinking the other day that there hasn’t been an RPS EWS for a while.
I’ll listen when I’m done rediscovering my utter undying love for Neutral Milk Hotel.
Woo! I’m going to go upstairs and get my iPod just to put this on it.
Needs charging, too.
Thanks for the mention in the ‘cast guys. I’m firing on some details of what I went through buying GTA IV.
Audacity.
I shall listen on the train to London tomorrow – looking forward to it!
I get so aroused when I listen to RPS EWS or PCG Podcast.
Um.
As far as I know, a hill covered in snow is automatically a mountain.
Do we have pictures of John’s disgusting Calvin & Hobbes snowman homage?
http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net ? Are you just not able to crank it up enough in Audacity…?
It’s here, Pags:
http://botherer.cream.org/?p=1028
But my blog’s a bit dodgy atm.
It’s totally better than I expected it to be!
Just so you guys know (I’m not sure if they put it in the PC version, but I’m sure they did), Burnout Paradise does have a crash mode… you can trigger it anywhere and you just blow up as many cars as possible, much like in the other Burnout games.
No, sadly it’s not at all like in other Burnout games. It’s a laughably awful mode where you BOUNCE your car around the road, trying to hit passing vehicles, for as long as possible.
Bearing in mind I’ve only played Burnout Revenge previously, the crash mode I played on that had a lot of car bouncing after you landed the big jump. I guess you could set up a big jump in Paradise, but yeah, I know what you mean about it not being quite the same.
RSS?
http://rps.libsyn.com/rss
Burnout 3 Crash mode was by far the best Crash mode in Burnout. Were it not for the fact that you were hurling several tonnes of metal into a crowd of other, fast-moving pieces of metal, you could even say it was tactical.
Is there a more beautiful sound than a hushed “can we say that out loud?” from a journalist? I guess you could, which spoils it a bit.
Excellent as usual, and I thought the volume was fine, the sound quality was certainly better than previous RPS electronic wireless shows. Nice shout out to Goldacre by the way.
Sorry, but absolutely not. It was a shit puzzle game completely ruined by the addition of Win Medallions floating along the one and only path that could and would give you gold, if and only if you hit the 4x. Having not played Paradise yet, 3 is my overall favourite in the series but its Crash mode is a crime against the name. You appear to mean 2’s Crash mode, which could have stood on its own as a complete videogame.
awesome thanks guys, i even put a glowing review up on itunes in order to further your goal of taking over the internets… oh wait you have achieved that, gz.
On the joypad issue: I’ve got nothing against using joypads/xbox controllers/whatever on the PC — quite the contrary, PC gaming is all about using a plurality of devices.
On the other hand, I find extremely irritating the idiocy of companies that release PC games (usually ports) that require a controller. If you release a racing game, it should work with a steering wheel and pedals, not just an Xbox360 controller. Joysticks, and not just xbox controllers, need to be supported for games where they make sense. And there’s no excuse for not having proper keyboard support.
Let’s put it this way: if anybody looked at Evochron (and all its predecessors) for a second, they’d find that Starwraith gets far more sales from TrackIR support than the time it took to put that in, and only the tiniest percentage of the market has that thing. Yet there are companies that refuse to work on a decent mouse-and-keyboard implementation, even though A) it is quite feasible, and B) the overwhelming majority of PC owners don’t have controllers.
I’m not saying keyboard-and-mouse is always better than controllers, or that having a controller won’t be more rewarding, but if you say that last year’s Tomb Raider is unplayable without a 360 controller, don’t go wondering why PC sales stank. Most sane people agree Audiosurf is better with a controller, but it features both mouse and keyboard implementations that are quite respectable.
Brilliant as per usual. I love these podcasts, couldn’t ask for more than both funny and insightful, really.
The sound quality is terrible.
Is there an MMO vaccine yet?
Ah, it would appear I do. This isn’t the first time that sort of thing has happened to me though, I regularly get confused between various iterations of games. But yes, you’re right, I do mean 2 as 3 essentially just showed you the optimum path for destruction which kind of negates the point I was trying to make about Crash mode being a puzzle game.
the stuff about far cry 2 is the warren spector harvey smith interview of ‘as most gamers what they want they’ll say totally open’ and they’ll be wrong thing
I, too, got the hankering last week to fashion a Calvin and Hobbes snow-murderer tribute.
Some gamers want totally open some of the time.
And some of the time they are right.[\non-commital]
@Homunculus: Did you make a sad face with a zucchini?!
@Heliocentric
i was being vague and reallying it badly cause i’m still listening to the podcast dl and watch the video for the real point i think he said usually.
Oh, ignore me. I was just being a tit.
The Atari loading bee! God, that takes me back. We found our ST in a cupboard a few years ago, covered in soot and totally non-functional. It was a sad day.
@Homunculus:
I’m sorry to say at first glance I thought it was snowman sex.
http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~gutrot/Snow%20Murderer.JPG
Not as artistic as John’s, but mine’s bigger.
I dunkenly dropped my cheese on toast on the kitchen floor before listening to this. But I blew on it afterward. Is that OK??
Very enjoyable! Re. loudness. If you have run a compressor\auto-normaliser over it after recording you have got the attack\release settings wrong because I can hear it fading in and out. I’d suggest much, much faster a&r. It doesn’t sound like you are anywhere near clipping so don’t fear.
Funny stuff, looking forward to the next one.
That was a great podcast.
Also that snowman was[?] incredible.
I’m immune to MMOs already, so anyone concerned about exposure can come and rub up against me. If that’s a bit much I’m sure I’ve got some pus lying around somewhere that folks can variolate themselves with.
I totally roll everywhere, given the choice.
It’s an impossible task! Good people can’t play the darkside path; I had high hopes for ‘Lord D’Eath’, he would carve a bloody swath through the galaxy! After the first sob story he had given away all his credits and sworn to be a better person.
Hmm, when you said there was no crash mode in Burnout Paradise, there acctually is on the 360 version… I don’t understand why they’d take it out, What you had to do was start of a street and press the two bumber buttons then it activated the crash mode, and you just went and destroyed cars on the streets.