Three Nerds in a Basement We wanted a shot at internet fame, so here we are!

Anthony Fallucco
Twitter: @Killroycantkill

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Microsoft kicks off E3 this year with their conference. Going in I was hoping for a ton of Xbox One content and they delivered. I’m not going to go through the whole conference but I am going to run through some of the portions I thought were really cool to me.

Metal Gear 5: The Phantom Pain

They made a great decision by showing Metal Gear in the beginning, it really threw me. Actually, a lot about this trailer threw me for a loop; open world Metal Gear is really exciting, and it’s something I didn’t expect.

Also needless to say these games look amazing since they’re on next gen consoles, but the real time weather changing and night day cycle looks like it can heavily play into the stealth. I just wonder if they’re going to have some sort of camouflage index or if it’s going to go back to Metal Gear 2 where it’s all lines of sight.

But anyways, this game will be great based on the villains name alone, Skull Face.

Dead Rising 3

So, I haven’t seen so many AI characters on screen since a Dynasty Warriors game. Given zombies aren’t the most complicated AI’s, but holy crap are those numbers impressive. The game seems to have taken a grittier tone than the light hearted nature of the previous games. Also for as simple as the Smart Glass usage is, it’s still really cool that I can call in airstrikes and I assume other things with it. Furthermore real time crafting is the most exciting thing to me since having to find benches all the time was a pain in the ass.

Project Spark

Project Spark had one of the most underwhelming beginnings in the whole conference. Showing all the level creation stuff with Kinect didn’t interest me at all. But once they starting bringing everything together it became one of my favourite demos of the whole conference. It’s one of the games, where I can’t wait to see what the dedicated audience does with the tools provided to them.

This is also another game where I would love to use Smart Glass for the creation features. Everything looks to be at the swipe of a finger and really easy to use. Moreover, how can’t you love Tarzan sliding across terrain you’re making on the fly.

Overall Thoughts

Microsoft came out strong with this conference; I am more inclined to get an Xbox One more than ever now. Thought a $499 price point is still a scary purchase for me.

High Point: Smart Glass and Xbox Live Upgrades
Low Point: Driveatar

It's that time of year again, EVO is once again coming to your computers and showing you the best that fighting games have to offer. If you've paid attention to the podcast you would know that I am a huge fan of fighting games and EVO is my Super Bowl of this year. You'll be able to see players like Justin Wong, Filipino Champ, Yipes, Japanese players like Daigo, Tokido, and Mago fight for the biggest prize money pot in fighting games.

This year the games that will be played are:

• Super Street Fighter 4 Arcade Edition 2012

• Mortal Kombat 9

• Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3

• King of Fighters XIII

• Street Fighter x Tekken

• Soul Calibur 5

Also there is going to be over $100,000 in total prize money across all the games. With the biggest pot of $25,000 in the pool for Super Street Fighter 4.

The streams are as follows:

• Main Stage

• Stream 2

• Panels & Interviews

I hope you guys are excited for EVO like I am and watch the streams. Also everyone remember to GET HYPE!

Hey guys and gals. Anthony here with a quick update letting you know that the long awaited Diablo 3 is in an open beta this weekend. For those of you that don't know Diablo 3 is a sequel to the long running loot whoring franchise by Blizzard (The people who made you Starcraft and World of Warcraft). So if you have a PC that can run the beta check out the offical site HERE and start downloading the demo. Have fun!

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If you’ve been listening to the podcast you know that I have been playing Disgaea 4 like a mofo. I have not always been a huge Disgaea fan in fact I only got into the game during Disgaea 3 when I saw my friend playing it and saw that it was a ton of fun, but what I didn’t know was by the time I saw him playing he already had 100+ hours in the game. So I decided with 4 I am going to try to get to that point, find the amazing post game content that Disgaea is known for, and hopefully not go crazy in the process.

Extra Maps

These maps right here are your first step into the post game of Disgaea 4. I was feeling like a badass just coming off beating the final boss but little did I know the horrors ahead. First off with these extra maps they’re not just given to you, you have to unlock them by passing a bill which costs a resource call Mana. The other hurdle to get these is that eventually some of the bills will start having a max success rate of 20% which pretty much means you have to level up your guys to persuade by force. Also the level leap in each extra map is kind of insane, since I would say my best character can hit for about 300k worth of damage and the boss of the current extra map has over 40 million health points.

But the great thing about these maps is that when you beat them they give you great new characters to play with all with unique skills and they’re introduced with that special type of Disgaea humor. Take Asagi for example; she is from a canceled Nippon Ichi software game but they use her as a joke character by putting her as a SD sprite while everyone is still in HD. Great little touches like these really make you want to see the next character and how awesome of funny they could be.

Grinding

If you have ever heard about the Disgaea game the chances are you have heard that the characters max level is 9999. Getting there will be no easy task and it requires a lot of grinding, but that isn’t as bad as one would think. There are plenty of areas in the game that allow for easy and fast grinding, so fast that is seems the developers were like “Here have a little treat”.

There is also a bill you can pass in the council that makes for stronger enemies, and strong enemies means more experience! I thought that I would go nuts even trying to get past level 100, but after the main story leveling is sped up exponentially and once you get to those grinding maps it only takes about 5 minutes to gain a good 700 levels. The one you should be aiming for is Mt. of Ordeals 4 which with 1 special attack you can take out all the enemies that are standing on 100% bonus experience panels.

Grinding for me was the thing I worried most about because if done wrong a game with a lot of needed grinding will just suck the life out of my fun. But Disgaea manages to hit all the points I want which are quick ways to grind repeatedly and constant progression. There's nothing worse than grinding for hours only to gain 10 levels.

Item World

Now this I feel is something you should get into even before the post games, but the item world has much more meaning when you’re finally past the story. As you’ll be taught early on the Item World is a place where you can take the items you find and power them up by going through randomly generated dungeons inside your weapon. But once you get past the postgame you start finding items will 100 levels and that’s where you start finding interesting stuff.

You can find these people called Pirates that will appear during your time in your items but the most powerful pirates only show in the higher levels. And sometimes defeating a certain Pirate crew is mandatory for getting even farther into the post game, like the Meowkin’s Pirates and only appear on floors 91 and above.

At first for me the pirates were something I avoided because they were all so strong, but now thanks to the extra maps and easy grinding levels I welcome them to be slaughtered by my overpowered characters.

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What I’ve learned is that as daunting as the postgame sounds for Disgaea games the developers do a lot of things to help you beat these insanely high level monsters, but they make you work to get to these areas. It offers a good sense of reward and punishment that keep me engaged with the game even 80 hours in. This is also only the tip of the iceberg for postgame Disgaea; I haven’t even touched upon Pirating, Reverse Pirating, Land of Carnage, Dimensions-X…. oh god what have I got myself into….

Just like Nintendo yesterday Sony is now having its own press conference. Check the link below for the Nico Nico live stream.

Edit:

Now that the conference is over, in case you missed it below are some bullet points of the show.

Show notes:

· First time showing the PSV interface. Lots of touch screen functionality.

· Showed some prices for 3G plans in Japan. Don’t think that information will be relevant to North America though.

· Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 on PSV, able to play online and use the touch screen.

· Ono showing off some sort of stats screen. Don’t know what it is all about though.

· Toro and Kuro exclusive PSV characters for Street Fighter x Tekken.

· Final Fantasy XIII-2 is going to be released in December for Japan.

· Final Fantasy X might be coming out for the Vita from what I could gather from the talk.

· Kojima came out on stage with the thickest black rimmed glasses I’ve ever seen.

· More talking about Transfarring.

· Sweet Zone of the Enders HD teaser, coming out 2012 for the Vita. Most likely it will be for both PSV and PS3 and you can Transfar the save between systems.

· Nico Nico Video on PSV. Japan only most likely.

· According to this giant boring chart PSV will have over 100 games!

· And…. The whole conference was pretty boring….

Right now the Nintendo TGS Conference is going on. Look forward to more of the same from Zelda, some 3DS News and possible WiiU announcements.

Edit:

Stream is now over, the highlights of the show were:

• Zelda being hella Zelda. OMG HOOKSHOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!11!1!!11
• Monster Hunter 4 being announced and also being a platformer or something.
• Some crazy video with Ono and Harada fighting eachother and Harada jump through a window.

Hopefully Sony's conference tomorrow will be more exciting.