Talkingship Review: MLB 10 The Show

Sports games are often times viewed based on whether they add enough to the franchise to warrant a purchase, even if you owned the game’s prior release. This is understandable, if not slightly unfair. Releasing a new game each year is a monumental task for a developer, regardless of whether they made a few changes or totally overhauled the game’s engine. It’s important to judge a sports game on the quality of the franchise as well as the improvements it makes year to year.

MLB 10: The Show is a perfect example of this dilemma in game reviews. Personally, I purchased the game without looking at any reviews as the MLB The Show franchise has won that kind of goodwill with me by consistently turning out great games with tons of new features year after year. Knowing what I know now, would I purchase the game again?



Let’s start with what this game does right, and there’s plenty of it. Over the past few years, MLB The Show has presented the most authentic simulation baseball available to gamers on any system. The key word there is presented, as the presentation in this game is second-to-none. The shadows will shift as the game goes on, depicting the sun’s movement as the game moves to the later innings. Players have their own distinct batting styles and mannerisms, and the announcing is, with exceptions, spot-on.

Hitting in this game is hard. Really hard. Like hitting a jackpot in slot machines.You may never get it fully, I still feel like I have a better grasp on where the ball is going some days than others. This unrelenting challenge will frustrate you to no end. You’ll guess pitches perfectly, feel like you have your timing right, and crush the ball … directly to the center fielder. However, when something goes your way in this game, you really feel like you’ve accomplished something like beating the house in black jack games . When you smack one into the left-center gap with guys on second and third or hit a walk-off solo-shot in the bottom of the tenth inning, you’ll probably tweet about it. You may tell your friends about it at work the next day.

The frustration/reward bell curve is only amplified in Road to the Show, where you create a single player and only play when he has an impact on what’s going on as opposed to every pitch of every game. Road to the Show abridges baseball games to the point where you can get through one in 5-10 minutes as opposed to 40-50 minutes for a standard, every-pitch game. You are also left feeling more involved in your player’s struggles, triumphs, and progress. It is the mode I have poured the most time into on this game, by far.



Knowing what I know now, I would not purchase this game again. Most things the game does right were also done right in MLB 09: The Show, and the changes that have been made are minimal. This year’s game adds a few new training drills in Road to the Show, full season features in online play, a refined home run derby, and a multitude of new shading and graphical effects. Outside of that , there’s not much new here. Online games can still be laggy, and while this is a generally a function of the two players’ internet connections, you would think there could be some consideration given to the one place you don’t want an online game to be laggy: from the moment a pitch is thrown to the moment the bat is swung. The developer needs to take a hard look at this, as there could be considerations for reducing graphical resolution to allow the framerate to stay up. There’s nothing more frustrating in this game than guessing a pitch dead-on, and missing because the ball lagged right over the plate without even getting a chance to swing at it.

The manager logic in Road to the Show is buggy in this game, too, and it is seemingly more buggy in this game than it was in last year’s version. In Road to the Show, you’ll start in the minors and work your way up to the majors. There is seemingly no way to break through to the majors before your third season. I was batting .340 with good power numbers, solidly in the cleanup spot of the lineup of a team that would go on to win the AAA championship in my second season, and went the entire year like this without being called up to the last-place-in-the-division MLB team. My numbers were mirrored by the catcher in the minors, and now, in my fourth season, he remains in the minors. Perhaps there’s some overarching logic that I’m not aware of there, but it just seems like he is outperforming every other catcher in the organization, so he should get the call.



The MLB: The Show franchise is the greatest modern baseball franchise there is, and baseball fans who are Xbox 360-exclusive owners are really missing out on something special here. There’s just not enough new here for owners of last year’s game. This was not one of those years where the system got completely overhauled and multiple improvements were made to an existing system. But this system didn’t need an overhaul. Bottom line, this game deserves two separate review scores, one for owners of MLB 09, and one for those who don’t own MLB 09.

If you own MLB 09, MLB 10: The Show gets 6 ships out of 11.



If you don’t own MLB 09, MLB 10: The Show gets 10 ships out of 11.

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Talkingship Review: Just Cause 2

Did you enjoy Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, but thought it took too long to get to the really good stuff? Run out and purchase Just Cause 2.

There, that’s out of the way. Just Cause 2 is the sequel to the highly-forgotten game from Eidos, Just Cause. The predecessor suffered from the fate of being an end-of-lifecycle game for the PS2/XBOX era of consoles that was developed as such, and then ported to the next generation consoles. The reviews were favorable for Just Cause but decried mechanical and graphical flaws that hampered the experience. The universal positive from reviews of Just Cause was the sense of freedom the player felt as they tore through the tropical terrain. Well, some things never change.



Just Cause 2 is what the last few Spiderman games and Mercenaries games should have been. Before this game came along, inFamous had the best traversal system of any open-world game, due to the innovative and varied mechanics you could use to get from Point A to Point B. Just Cause 2 supplies you with three things: A grappling hook, a retractable parachute, and a shit-ton of vehicles. I cannot overstate how much fun it is once you figure out the interplay between the grappling hook and the parachute.

The other interesting note about traversal is that you don’t have to do it. There is a fast-travel system, that, while having an annoying cutscene and loading sequence to sit through, is fairly convenient. This makes hookshotting your way across the map unnecessary, but you’ll want to do it anyway. Square-Enix and Eidos built a world that is wide-open to you from the onset, and it will take you days upon days with of gametime to see it all. For bang for your buck, this game is second to none.



However, there are some places the game hiccups. For all the different things you can blow up, the lack of weaponry variants is disturbing. Essentially the game gives you a pistol, submachine gun, assault rifle, sniper rifle, and shotgun. At various times you’ll get your hands on a grenade or rocket launcher, but you’ll have to cut loose your assault rifle to use these. This seems to run counter to the game’s premise of giving you everything and letting you decide what you want to do with it. With as many ridiculous contrivances in Just Cause 2 as there are, you would think the endless weapons backpack wouldn’t be implausible for the developers.

This may not be a complaint for everyone, but it is for me. After putting about 15 hours into the game and only covering 14% of the “game”, according to the game, I’ve come to the determination that Just Cause 2 throws way too much at you too quickly. It is a unique game design decision, and one that the demo employs well to sell the game, but this game has virtually no reward for progressing through the story missions except to finish the game and see how the insane story ends. It is a tricky problem to solve, as you don’t want to overcompensate and be left with Final Fantasy XIII’s situation, where you only really unlock the good stuff 25 hours into the game. A more ideal model is Red Faction Guerilla’s, which rewards you for progressing through the story with new toys to more efficiently destroy things. Just Cause 2 could have avoided this by allowing players limited scope and limited time in a no-holds-barred arena with all of the tools of the game at their disposal. This essentially is what the demo does, and it works in 30 minute intervals. However, in the context of the game, I found that I had done everything there was to do in this extraordinary world before I had any real reason to. If the first chance I got to grapple a bad guy to the back of a fighter jet was for a good story-driven reason, and from that point on I was able to make that maneuver, that would have made sense to me. If I run into that objective in a story mission now, after having done it dozens of times, it won’t make the same impact on me.



Don’t get me wrong, I would recommend gamers to buy Just Cause 2 over just about any other game that has come out this year. For God’s sake, you can ghost-ride a fighter jet directly into an enemy base’s fuel supply, parachute out at the last second, and rain destruction on the scrambling enemies below. You can fly to a strip club in a blimp, cause all kinds of chaos, then fly out the back in an onboard learjet. You can fly off to a random island in a corner of the map, which will cause your plane to crash land on it, and find the Dharma hatch from Lost. There is so much to do in this game, I just wish I didn’t feel like I already did it all. Rating – 9 ships out of 11.

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Ubisoft Outsmarts Itself

Ubisoft implemented a controversial DRM measure starting with their PC release of Assassin's Creed 2, which requires the player to remain connected to the internet and the Ubisoft servers at all time while playing the game. If at any time the player disconnects, the game freezes and the player is returned to the desktop.

This angered thousands of PC gamers and Ubisoft certainly didn't help their cause when, in the first weekend of implementation, their online platform went down for six and a half hours and the players were denied the ability to play the games they purchased because Ubisoft's servers were down.

Undoubtedly Ubisoft took these measures to combat piracy, which is absolutely more rampant on the PC than it is on any console. It is a noble cause, as the alternative is likely for Ubisoft to cease supporting the platform altogether. However, I feel these measures are irresponsible and reactionary. To make such a grand statement about this being the new standard in copy protection, and then have the system crash during the first real load test and lock out all of the legitimate consumers runs counter to the entire purpose of Ubisoft's DRM.



This restrictive type of DRM only servers to anger and embolden the hackers and pirates that Ubisoft is trying to deter. There is a thought out there, whose prevalence and legitimacy is in question, that people will pirate Ubisoft games now simply in protest to the new copy protection policy. I don't believe this to be the case. I believe people who pirate Ubisoft games do so for two reasons: to get around the hassle of their DRM, and for the same reason that people have always pirated games - so that they don't have to pay for them. Simply put, I think the people that justify their piracy as a form of protest are lying either to themselves or the people they're telling in order to sound noble, when they could just as easily protest the DRM by not playing Ubisoft PC games at all.

Regardless of the apparent reasoning of pirates, the uncrackable Ubisoft DRM has, in fact, been cracked , proving the fact that if given enough time and enough resources, computer nerds can get around any firewall or copy protection. I'm sure this patch, the resentment of legitimate PC gamers crippled by Ubisoft’s DRM policy, and the thousands of gamers that were going to pirate the software anyway will put Ubisoft’s PC game piracy rates at an all-time high. Nice going, guys.

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Heavy Rain Trailer

Keep your eyes open for this game.  I've got a good feeling about it.  I hope this is the trend the industry is headed for, story driven gaming (think Bioshock) rather then a myriad of family friendly drivel. 

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Xbox Live / Netflix Party System

Since the mid-90's, some of the friends from Talkingship have been getting together and riffing on bad movies ala MST3K (Mystery Science Theater 3000.)  It started as a fun thing to do for a few guys without girlfriends and far too much time on their hands, but it turned into an event.  The Comish, Chuppy, Nerves, and I would regularly get together to watch flicks, laugh, and drink. 

As the bad movie nights evolved we started to develop a drinking game around them.  We figured out some of the staples of bad movies and incorporated them into our drinking system.  Then we got girlfriends.  Bye bye bad movie night.  Then we got married.  Then, sadly, some of us moved away (Utah, Chups?!  Really??!) and our tradition died.

Fast forward ten years.  Nerves moves out to Colorado where I live, we start a little podcast called Talking-mother-fucking-SHIP, and the resurgence of bad movie night was in full swing.  This was when we gave it the official name that has now become as synonymous with bad movie riffing as MST3K (at least in our little corner of the internet) BAD MOVIE DRINKY DRINKY, or BMDD for short.  As fun as this was (Edward 40 Hands not withstanding) it was still only half as good as it used to be, because there were only two of us.

Usher in the Xbox Netflix Party system.

Now, with the help of the magical internets, we can once again relive the glory days of old.  We can watch bad movies together!!  But really, will it be all that great?  A headset and a mic instead of sitting around with your buddies?  Is that really going to work.  The answer is, FUCK yes it does.

I was expecting to be watching the movie full screen with tons of voices chiming in my ear, fighting for recognition.  I was expecting it to suck harder then Nerves on a bum in an alley after a bottle of Jack, but it didn't suck that sloppily at all!  In fact, it was tremendous!

As you can see from the picture above, they took a cue from MST3K and sit your avatar in theater seats in front of the screen.  Up to eight people can be in one room at a time.  Then they give you the ability to emote with the avatar via a circle menu that pops up when you move your left thumbstick.  Combine that with the speaker symbol that appears under the avatar whose user is speaking and you get as close to actually sitting in a room with some buddies as it gets. 

There are a few improvement that I would like to suggest though: First, they need to supply you with an option to keep your controller from going dead after an extended period of non-use.  Several times during the film we watched (check out the BMDD page for info on Time Runner) I discovered that my controller had turned off because I had not been making my character emote.  This caused my mic to go dead without me knowing it.  Big Fail!  Second, they need to put names under the avatar's heads.  When you are in a room full of people it can be hard to determine who everyone is from the back of their heads.  Third, give me more emote options and have them be controlled quicker, not by a circle wheel.  Emotes should be immediate and spontaneous.  There's nothing worse then getting scared during the movie and then trying to find the emote for 'scared' on the wheel only to finally show your avatar getting scared at an entirely goofy moment.  I want to be able to push up on the joystick to have my avatar point at the screen and get excited, pull down to cower in fear, push right to mess with the person sitting to my right.  Things like that.

All in all, the Xbox Live Party system with Netflix is a HUGE win for both companies.  I can't wait to get on there again to watch some bad flicks with my buddies.  Keep an eye out on the BMDD page of the site to see when we plan on scheduling another BMDD.  Hope to see you there.

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Extra Life

Way to go, Doc! 

Nerves and I are proud to be a part of this event that Doc from Sarcasticgamer.com started.  If you haven't noticed, we've got a nice little Extra Life banner to left of this video, underneath the Poll Question.  Click on it to be rerouted to our Extra Life page, and if you have a couple extra bucks laying around, here's your chance to donate it to a great cause.

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Okay, Time to Retire the Rock Band Drums

Okay.  After watching this video I think it is time for me to retire my rock band drums.  I have not the skill nor the patience to do this type of thing!  I nearly had a seizure just watching those notes flash by so quick.

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Extreme Challenge Parody

Here's a parody by our friends over at Sarastic Gamer.  Tell some friends about it and tell them to go check out Sarcasticgamer.com too.

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WKUK COD4 Spoof

The only thing missing from this clip is the racist x-bot screaming the N-Word at everyone.  Then you'd have the entire Online Experience!

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Super Michael Jackson Brothers

It would be so much better if there was a littl boy at the end instead of the princess.  But still, pretty damn funny.

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WoW Freakout

Thanks to Cam Dog for sending us this little gem.  This kid's freakout over his mom canceling his WoW subscription is Top Grade lunacy.  But when he takes that remote control and pretends like he's going to... well, just watch.

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Talkingship Gamer Night

Friday, July 17th at 8:00 et

Jitterbug and Nerves will be getting their dork on with Rock Band 2!  We'll be playing and drinking for a good long time, and we'll probably switch to a more group friendly game at some point.  Make sure to get there early to hear the full transformation from sober and reasonable gamers into drunk and disorderly bastards!

And before you ask, no, this is not a picture of Nerves.  But it sure does look like the whaled out version of him though!  Look at all those peripherals!  Bwahahahaha!!

Also, send us an email if you want to join the fun, but you don't have Rock Band 2.  We will be looking for an alternate game to play at some point in the evening, so let us know what you'd be down for.

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Don't Fuck With The Witch!

Fisherman, his roommate, Blinkincard and I were playing some L4D last night when Fisher told me about this video of Eminem freaking out about 'The Witch.'  I'm not sure what witch Eminem was talking about, but someone took the dialog and plugged it into a L4D scene.

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Game Over Man

The stuff PES does is amazing! If you aren't familiar with stop-motion photography, this is how it's done. The amount of time it takes to do something like this is something to keep in the back of your head while watching. We had our own stop-motion run back in the 90's with our hit "The Mr. Jell-o Show" It was a talking blob of Jell-o that cussed A LOT and got into weird adventures like being sodomized in an Ewok village. This is almost as good. Be sure to look at all the other PES stuff, the spaghetti one is wonderful too. After that look up Frank Zappa. He helped put stop-motion in the public eye with the work he did supporting Bruce Bickford in the 70's. Enjoy shipheads!

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Metal Gear Stoned

This video comes courtesy of HarryPartridge.  Get on over to his Youtube page and check out all of his hilarious clips.  They do not disappoint.

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WoW Again?

This video is a classic for all World of Warcraft fans.  If you are a WoW fan, then you've probably seen this before, but its still funny as hell. 

Come join Jitterbug, Oleander, Chuppy, and Roper who are all wasting time over on the Argent Dawn server Horde Side!  Look for Pokx (Jitterbug), Vielet (Oleander), Putridpetra (Chuppy), and Urzdurk (Roper).  We look forward to grinding with you!

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