Please check the first episode of this LP for an FAQ and more info. In this episode, we got to Castlevania and make extremely good progress as we manage to kill one of the most annoying bosses in the game, Dracula. 99% luck, 1% skill. Next up, Mike Tyson. Hope he doesn’t bite off my ear. ... lets play wanna be the guy fun run impossible kayin platformer
NewGenGamers.com's Ray hopelessly tries to play 'I Wanna Be The Guy' for PC. The game is a ridiculously difficult, yet well designed game that is free to download and play. Ray's not THE Angry Video Game Nerd, but sometimes he is AN angry video game nerd, and he wants to be the guy. Download the game at http://kayin.pyoko.org/iwbtg
Do yourself a favor--don't provoke this guy.
The final boss in Ramparts is scheduled for a beat-down.. On Warcraft Episode “Ramparts. Vazruden and Nazan” Mark: Welcome back to On Warcraft on On Networks. I am Mark Major. Arwyn: I am Arwyn Wheats. Mark: And we are going to take you through the last part of the ramparts, part three with Vazruden the dragon rider and Nazou, naza… Arwyn: Nazan. Mark: Nazan. Arwyn: His little friend. Mark: His little ridden friend who he rides on, because he is a rider on the storm. Alright let’s kill some dragons. Arwyn: Alrighty. Mark: Alrighty. Arwyn: I’m ready. Mark: I’m ready, to get through this rampart. Arwyn: Cool, awesome. Well if you are ready then you have probably brought your fire resist gear. And this is the one for it. That’s right because the dragon itself spits fire. Mark: Shocker. Arwyn: Right, so there is a lot of fire damage in this fight. The first thing you need to know heading to him, is and mind you, you already killed the other bosses and trash, if not everything. You have two guys to kill at the beginning of the bridge. And then the next two guys at the bottom of the bridge directly below the dragon and its rider, they start the event. So make sure you know this going in, because otherwise when you start the event it is really a kind of shocker. Mark: That’s right don’t alert the little guys until you are ready to rock. Arwyn: That’s right, it’s the second guys. You can keep them sheathed, spirit regen or do anything else to get your mana and your health back up. And once their dead you have about 1.5 seconds to drink if you haven’t, if you have got someone who maybe killed a sheep to fast or something like that. You have got a really, really short window to drink. Mark: Yeah that’s not a lot of time. Arwyn: Not a lot of time but if your really on the ball you can do it. Mark: I know a guy who can put a pint down in a second so. Arwyn: 1.5 seconds flat? One second flat? Mark: One second flat, just open u the throat and bam down it goes. Arwyn: He could do another half then. Mark: He could. Arwyn: So uh once you are up to full health and mana and everything. This is where you are going to want to engage and the dragon. Now originally you have the dragon and the rider swooping around. He guy who comes down first is the rider. I guess he paratroops off or something. Mark: He jumps off. Arwyn: He just kind of comes down to kill you. I wish it were that combatic. It would really make the instance a lot more interesting. As it I he just kind of comes down and runs to you. Yeah it is not very showy at all, he is not very limber. So you want the tank to taunt him immediately. Because having killed the first two guys, no one is agro the boss yet. He is going to the healer, always. Everyone loves the healer. Who doesn’t? So you want to make sure he taunts off. You want to make sure that while the dragonling is circling around. Mark: Is this a real dragon or just a dragonling? Arwyn: He is a real dragon, he is bonafide, fire spitting, floating in the air, the whole nine yards. But while he is circling around he is spitting fire down on you. While your killing his rider. I guess he likes being ridden. So he is really attached to this guy, he is going to try to protect him. At about 20 percent the dragon will land and he will come try to beat you up himself. Mark: He is done calling in air strikes he is going to make it personal. Arwyn: Right. Now the thing about him, you still need to be killing, what is he, Vazruden? Mark: Vazruden. Arwyn: Vazruden the herald. You need to still kill the guy even while your tank immediately taunts the dragon, because he will go after the healer. Mark: He will rock your world. Arwyn: He likes bar b qued healer and he takes it raw or whatever. So make sure to taught him off your healer or whatever. And kill the guy. Start on the dragon, the dragon breaths fire. Mark: The guy should be pretty much dead. Arwyn: The guy should be that’s the point, if you have done anything in your job right. But if you re coming at a level 56, you might have a tougher time bringing them both down. But still just, you get the job done, so he breaths the fire of cone. The dragon does. Mark: Cone of fire? Arwyn: Fire of cone. Mark: Fire of cone. Wow that’s a new one. Arwyn: It’s kind of funky actually. Yeah he throws cones at you, they are pointy. Cone of fire, are you happy? Cone of fire, which means if you face the dragon stay from you party members, they don’t get hit with your fire. So you have got to have a tank that is kind of on the ball, knows how to position the bosses and things like that. If the tank does get in the fire, he can strafe. You know side to side running, strafing means side to side and shoot. Mark: I know I know that. Arwyn: So he can run out of the way of the fire cone, and he can also run in between the dragons legs to get out of fire. That is the same with other melee. Now if your melee DPS, you should not be in front of the dragon. Mark: No you want to be behind the dragon, away from the action end. Arwyn: Aim for the tail. Aim, well on your point of view I don’t know, but aim for the tail. Mark: That’s a different game. Arwyn: If you are melee just hit him in the butt basically. Everyone else should be ranged and vanishing themselves because especially on a lower level group like 56 going on forward. You are going to make sure that your healers are just healing your tank. It is a tough fight, if you are at that level. Mark: There is lots of hurting going around. Arwyn: Lots of hurting, so again, fire resist gear is going to be helpful. The other thing that is going on while the cone of fire is being spat upon and the guys are moving around. He is still going to be throwing out rings of fire that stick to individuals and it is like napalm. So if you get hit by one of those. It smells like defeat if you stay in it. Mark: Depends on your point of view I guess. Arwyn: Well for the dragon yeah, so run out of those fires and you should be fine. They do a lot of damage tick for tick; just run away have your DPS bandage yourself. If you are the healer obviously heal yourself. But keep your focus mainly on the tank, because they are going to be in a world of pain. Mark: Yes they are a world of pain. Arwyn: Get through the fight, a fiery world of pain. It kind of has a warm burn. It’s nice, it a good hurt. If something happens and you wipe on this fight, you can reset it. There is a big curly horn on the side of the ring. Mark: Ricolla. Arwyn: Right the problem is if you actually succeed, the box drops with the fat loot in it, and someone blows the horn, loot first. Because if that horn gets blown dragon is back in the sky and his box is gone. Mark: And your like what, what, oh oww it burns. Arwyn: So you got to do it again. Aw the pain, aw the atmosphere. So you have to do it again if you do blow the horn. So it’s a failsafe, but if you got four morons in your party, the same guys that forgot to loot the other two bosses. Mark: No well I didn’t, they are running around naked and they are blowing horns and pulling switches. Arwyn: You know the ones. G kick. So once you have got the guy down obviously loot, don’t blow the horn unless you mean it. Right and from there you are golden. This is the last guy. He drops the last quest item that you need, the other two that you have collected. And he also drops a new quest item. Mark: Right to start you off on a new path to glory. Arwyn: That’s right, hats going to lead you straight over to the blood furnace, which is the next instance in this hellfire citadel complex that you have been fighting in. So that is a pretty cool thing. Mark: That is very cool, so to wrap it up. Arwyn: Right o’ what we are going to do is head in there, fire resist gear. Mark: Fire resist that. Arwyn: The dragon is a fire spitter. He is a spitter. Mark: He is a fire starter. So make sure you are resisting that fire, you are staying out of the fire when he doe spit on you. Run away from it. And if you are the tank face him away from your party so you are the only one facing that fire. Let everyone else hit the butt. And then loot the box; it has got your fat loot in it. Don’t blow the horn until you need to. The horn resets. Mark: That is a good life principle I think. Arwyn: Don’t group with morons too. Mark: Alright so you have gone through the ramparts, hit the Omor, hit Gargamel, and hit the dragon rider dude, what comes next? Arwyn: Well with all those quest done you’re going to return back into your little town, which ever which on you are. And this quest is going to send you to the blood furnace. Mark: Awesome! Arwyn: Hellfire part 2. Mark: Hellfire. Arwyn: So another part of the citadel, more loot more xp, more reputation. It’s not easy to get too though. Mark: Yeah it is kind of a pain, you got to go around and over the. Arwyn: Over the river and through the woods, but grandma does not live here. So in the next episode we will tell you how to get to it because it is a little bit convoluted. Mark: So stay tuned for the next episode.
You won't believe the drama behind one of the best loved games of all-time. Play Value Episode “Tetris: Splitting the iron curtain” Dan: It is the summer of 1985 which in Moscow is still actually kind of cold, Alexey Pajitnov, a low level programmer is sitting around, and he puts together Tetris. The most simple puzzle game you can think of, stacking blocks, but there is something magical about it. Libe: So you know you can’t sell the game. This is communist Russia after all. So instead he gives it away to his friends. And then you know it spread all through Moscow. Jeff: You copied it from your friend. You copied it for his friend. You copied it for his friend, and soon it had spread al the way to the outer states. That’s what communism is, it means free Tetris. Dan: Now the game finally ends up in Hungary, in Budapest, in Croatia. Some Hungarian guys have made an Apple version of it. And this guy Robert Stein comes in and he is almost like an opportunist who travels around trying to by up stuff cheap and sell it more expensively some where else. And he see’s the game. And he says this game is great. I am not even going to buy this game. I am just going to steal it. Jeff: In Steins defense. What do you do? How do you break down that red curtain? You don’t get the rights to this game. Russia is a society, and they don’t even have private property, much less an abstract concept like intellectual property. How do you deal with that, you know? And it was probably easier to just steal it. Dan: So this guy takes the game back to the west and starts selling the rights to all these other companies, because they don’t know any better. They think that he has actually, legitimately gotten the rights from the guy who created the game back in Russia. Now people don’t really remember Robert Maxell these days, but back in the eighties he was a huge media mogul. He was like Rupert Murdoch. So then Stein sells it to Robert Maxwell’s video game company called Mirrorsoft. Josh: They are basically just creating fake contracts, fake deals with all sorts of companies from Mirrorsoft to Atari in the states, to Spectrum Holobyte. Basically he just went around selling it, trying to make as much cash as he could. Before the Soviets figured out he was selling their property. Jeff: It was just this whole mess, because Robert Stein is selling rights. The people he is selling rights to are selling there rights. And they are not real, but there is just this whole web of deceit and just laziness that no ones checking up on it. And it is all just going to come crashing down on it. Josh: Before anyone figured out who owned the rights. Tetris had already become the best selling PC game in the UK and America. Jeff: Robert Stein never thought it was going to be a big deal, you know? He just thought he would sell a few hundred thousand copies at best, make a quick buck. No one in communist Russia is going to find out about this. But the thing is Tetris is really good. It is really good, and it just becomes almost this world wide phenomenon. TJ: So the game gets so big that the Russian government takes notice. Now mind you, Russia at this time is Communist, so there is no owner in particular, other than mother Russia. Jeff: The Russians are Communist, but there not stupid. They see what’s going on. And they create Elorg, this company to manage the rights for Tetris. Before there was never anybody to officially organize the rights. Now that this organization exists there is just rampant land grab. Dan: You have got Maxwell, you have got Stein, and you have got Nintendo who are about to launch there Game Boy, all coming into Moscow at the same time, trying to snap up as many of the rights as they can for different platforms for this game. Jeff: And there are a lot of sticky issues here. This is just a society that works in a completely different way so it wasn’t exactly clear how it was going to shake out. Dan: Now Nintendo, they took the red eye and they got there first. When they got there they met with Russian officials, ad they say hey, we would love to get the rights for this kind of hand held version we are going to do. And we will show you how good job we did; we made a Nintendo cartridge, here check it out. Josh: They pull out a cartridge and the Russians freaked. We haven’t been paid for this; we didn’t even know this existed. Dan: And the Russians go, where did that come from, we didn’t give you the rights to that? Oh we bought the rights. No you didn’t. So the Nintendo guy says, I will tell you what, I will just right you a check for these rights too. We sold a bunch of these cartridges, just take this. Josh: The Russians, who hadn’t been paid at all for any of the versions that were best seller in the west, took that check and said, finally someone is actually taking care of us, and immediately granted the rights to Nintendo. Dan: Now the Stein guy, he has been selling this game left and right, it is the number one best selling computer game out there, and of course he has not paid the Russians a cent. So the Russia government is furious. But instead of giving Stein the old poison tipped umbrella in the middle of Trafalgar square, they say hey lets at least get some of this money. So they sign a contract with him to sell the computer version of the game. Jeff: Now Stein thinks he is buying the rights for computers, and he is thinking bout the broad definition of computers. He thinks he is going to sell it on calculators, on Game Boy, on watches, on Nintendo’s, I mean things will come in the future, everything. Shandi: So he figures nobody can say what is and what isn’t a computer. So I pretty much have everything I need to make money off of this. And the Russians realize this, so in the 11th hour they snuck something in to the contract, where they defined a computer as something with a keyboard and a monitor. TJ: That one little sentence basically blocked Stein from making money on any other distribution of Tetris. Which means he collets nothing from the Game Boy, he collects nothing from any arcade rights. He collects nothing from any home console rights. He got the rights to anything has a monitor, which is basically at this point a PC, and you know what Tetris was already a he success on the PC, so its over. So now Stein is stuck with nothing. Dan: Now Maxwell shows up later in the day, by the time he gets there all the good stuff is already gone, its like he was on the Russian bread line, you get to the front, and there is no bread left. TJ: And so we all know what happens, Russia sells the rights to handhelds and consoles to none other than Nintendo, and we know how that story ends. Dan: After all the dust settles, Nintendo releases the Game Boy with Tetris. And Tetris helps the Game Boy to go on to become a best seller. And the game boy helps Tetris to become the best selling game of all time. I think like 30 million Game Boy versions of that alone out on the marketplace. Josh: If someone got screwed and maybe didn’t deserve it. Under there other banner Tengen, I think Atari got unfairly screwed in the whole Tetris debacle. Atari had bought the imaginary rights to the game and they thought they were buying something real, but they weren’t. And they produced and advertised there version of Tetris. Which a lot of people think is superior. Dan: I mean Atari had actually made so many of these cartridges they couldn’t just throw them away. They actually had to put them out in the marketplace first, just to try and roll the dice. And then when they lost the case they had to recall them all. And that ended up costing them even more in the long run. Jeff: And at this point there is a lot of bad blood between Atari and Nintendo. So Nintendo is only two happy to stop Atari from selling what they thought was going to be a hit game. Dan: And of course back in Russia the Russian government made millions off of this, but Alexey Pajitnov, the programmer didn’t make any money at all, because of course the communist party system, you can’t make a lot of money. Shandi: If Pajitnov would have been born in a different country the whole twisted crazy stories about all these companies fighting for all the rights. Yeah, it wouldn’t even exist. Josh: It is kind of interesting actually; Tetris has probably appeared on more operating systems, consoles, handheld videogames, graphing calculators than probably any other game in history. The reason why Tetris is the number one selling game of all time is because it is not technology dependent. TJ: You could put that game anywhere and it plays just as good as anywhere else. You can put that game on a cell phone and it is going to play just as good as it is going to play on the Xbox 360. Basically it is the solitaire of the next millennium. Shandi: That is why it got so popular. And why Tetris spread so fast. Wherever you play it it’s the same feeling. TJ: And a hundred years from now, Tetris will still be here. Just like solitaire just like chess, and all these new games they will be no where to be found. Shandi: Yeah, Tetris is going to be around forever. It is going to outlive us all.
Sex and violence in video games is a potent issue and has been for quite some time. Play Value Episode “Controversy” Josh: Any time any kind of new artistic medium emerges there is always controversy, people thought that radios were rotting kid's minds, then it was comic books, then it was TV, then movies. There are people that thought the jitterbug was going to be the downfall of society. Everything brings controversy with it and videogames are certainly no exception. TJ: There has always been controversy in games and it all starts in the 30s and 40s with pinball. The way that you play pinball was there were no pads like you play now, you put a ball in and shook it around until it went in the right pocket and it paid out. So pinball was essentially a game of chance, gambling. Libi: So in order to other words take a hit at the Mafia, pinball became illegal. And then the New York mayor at the time LaGuardia went so far as to take pinball machines down to the river, slash them within ax and then shove them into the water. Jeff: In 1976 New York decriminalized pinball and almost immediately after, literally months later the first controversial video game comes out. Dan: No sooner was pinball legalized then video games took their place, the torch was passed and they aware now public enemy number one. Parents up in arms, legislators angry as hell, why is that? It is a game called Death Race. TJ: And the object of Death Race was you are driving around and running over Gremlins, well running over Gremlins kind of looks like running over people in the 70s because graphics were really bad. Josh: All you can see is a pixelated head, a pixelated body, pixelated legs, and pixelated arms, which do anyone looks like a person. So parents started to object. Libi: The woman who is at the forefront of emerging protest was Ronnie Lamb, a housewife, PTA member, and she led protest marches, went on Phil Donahue, was really active in getting arcades banned from malls. Dan: It wasn't really the videogames themselves that where the problem most of the time. No parents thought that Frogger was going to corrupt their kids it was the environment they were playing these games in. It was dark sweaty rooms full of machines, and kids standing in front of them. The creepy old guy with the crotch mounted coin changer and the leer in his eye that was the real problem. Josh: Kids would skip school to hang out at arcades; parents just viewed the institution of an arcade as a public menace. Get rid of them. Jeff: What is interesting here is that Nolan Bushnell, who started Atari, sees this and that is what inspires him to open Chuck E. Cheese, a place with safe games where people can bring their kids and they will have a good time. Dan: They are well lit, they are well supervised, you can bring the kids there and the parents can be there. In fact Nolan Bushnell made more money with Chuck E. cheese than he ever did from Atari. Jeff: And if death race is the first videogame controversy than the first controversy at home on the consoles is Custer's Revenge. Where General Custer dodge's arrows to go rape an Indian woman, but apparently some people thought that that was not OK. Josh: This game was retarded, and it was a slap in the face against everybody pretty much, from the people to take it in the game, to women, to people playing a game. You now, it was not even classy porn, they deserved a protest and a protest is what they got. Dan: Now after the big videogame crash of 1983 the issue kind of went away, because they were not a lot video games around. Occasionally one would pop up, like there was Commando Libya, where at the end of the level all the bad guys that you beat you lined them up and shot them against the wall. Josh: And then there was NARC which came out in the late eighties, which you were NARCS killing drug dealers, and you're blowing them up and body parts are being strewn all over the screen. Needles are being injected and thrown into your leg, and other words it was awesome. The way that Midway got around the ultra violence in it was positioning it as an anti-drug game. Jeff: And it's really, really very funny to me that they were preaching an anti-drug message with extreme, extreme amounts of violence. Dan: But for the most part things were nice and calm. Nintendo prided itself on being very family friendly and the industry largely policed itself. TJ: Sega then decides to give consumers the things that Nintendo does not, you know a violent, dirty, gritty type games. Then Mortal Kombat comes out. Dan: Incredibly gory, incredibly violent, and of course incredibly successful, now both Sega and Nintendo wanted to take the game and put it on home systems. Josh: Mortal Kombat looked better on the Super Nintendo I would argue, but it did not have blood. It did not have the decapitating moves. The Genesis had the full thing. Jeff: It is all about the blood, that is the trademark and the fact that everyone knows that it is in the Genesis version makes the Genesis version outsell the super Nintendo one 4 to 1. Dan: So it may seem like a win for Sega, but of course it came back and get them on the ass, because whenever you do something that Mom does not like you end up in front of a congressional committee and that is where the videogame industry ended up, and front out of Joe Lieberman and all these other congressmen. Jeff: Society at this point is still kind of wrapping their head and around the idea that it is not just children playing video games. Today it was pretty accepted that games come out that are clearly for 18 and over but it was not always that way. Libi: Congress called Sega to task for their ultra violence version of Mortal Kombat and another game called Night Trap which is almost really a B-movie it has got vampires chasing co-eds in pyjamas around at a slumber party. Jeff: And it is really no worse than you would see on USA up all night, but just the fact that it was on a Genesis and not a VCR made all the difference. Sen. Byron Dorgan: About two months ago I saw the video game Night Trap for the first time; it is a sick disgusting video game in my judgment. Dan: And the ultimate outcome of all of this is that they created the ESRB a ratings board for video games. Kind of like the MPAA for movies, it is voluntary but all of the games have these ratings. Jeff: One of the genres that probably attracted the most controversy was the first person shooter, a lot of people look at them as almost murder simulators and of course it does not help when Columbine happens and it comes out that the kids were playing Doom and into Doom. TJ: And so now there is a link being developed between these school shootings, which now to start to happen more regularly. It seems like more and more school shootings are happening. Jeff: And then of course Doom is followed by games like Duke Nukem, and Quake and all of these games have to try the top each other in violence. TJ: And that is kind of brings us up to today, they has never really been a resolution. Every few years a study is done that say a games causes kids to kill, games do not cause kids to kill. So I think that that is an ongoing battle that will continue for the history of gaming. Jeff: After Columbine the controversies there, but nothing really comes of it ages kind of spirals around. Until, one of the Grand Theft Auto spin-offs, San Andreas, when it turned out that somewhere deep, deep in a game there was a sex scene that was never completed but left on the final disk. Dan: Some hidden footage somewhere in the game with some fully clothed 3-D characters hopping up against each other in a bed. It was not anything worse than you would see on Adult Swim but parents and congressmen and politicians were outraged. Jeff: Hillary Clinton makes a huge deal out of this, she is threatening to shut the game companies down, she is threatening to do things that she does not even have the right to do but she is making a big stink. Dan: How did the videogame industry solve this problem? Well they held a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton's re-election campaign and mysteriously no further hearings were ever held. Hmm. TJ: And the one constant and all of this is that controversy in games means sales. Jeff: It is the same with films, and books and with music. It is just the best free publicity you can get. Libi: You know all the concerned parents and the governing boards might want to raise a fuss a little less often if they do not want their kids rushing to stores to buy these games. Jeff: The bottom line is that they can regulate and they can market these things all they want, but it is up to the parents to keep track of what their kids are playing. If parents did their job the government would not always have to step in.
