Emotive Pixels - All Podcasts

In a series of escalating buffoonery, we attempt to describe the plot of this beautiful game and merely end up nicking some of the concepts that make it so great. Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is another indie darling put on the level of Braid and Fez: a game you should definitely play. Here today to talk about it are Will, Brian, Nate, Alberto, Geoff, Tyson, and Tien-ju are all here.

Fundamentally, Brothers controls are reliant upon your twin sticks: the left stick controls one of the brothers, and the right controls the other. Only occasionally does this push coordination to the limit, but it does serve as ludonarrative reinforcement: this control scheme drives home how connected you two as siblings are, which is an idea the game conveys extremely well on many levels, and all without any speech whatsoever. Brothers is a wonderful platformer full of wonder, benches, and feelings, so sit down with the guys and let's hear it out!

In part 1, we discuss the plot and the mood, hydrophobia, and a lack of plot concretism; in part 2, it's mechanics and controls, potential improvements, pesky gears, cliffs and troll giants and general difficult bits (but mostly hippogriffs), all without missing putting the sheep on it; in part 3, it's into the darker sections of both the game and our lives, covering about the later 75% of the game plus our favvyfav moments; part 4 concludes with some additional thoughts and a recommendation or two.

This episode, our first as Emotive Pixels, shows us we have much to learn and much ahead of us. We gathered around the table today to discuss the 2001 Square classic Final Fantasy X, the 'tenth' Final Fantasy game released, the story of Yuna and her quest to take on Sin with the help of blond whiny/lovable Tidus (nominated as Nate's favorite female character). The crew on this first episode is Will, Brian, Alberto, Nate, Geoff, and Sy.

We begin with the Eternal Calm, its awkwardness, and how it ties FFX and FFX-2 - which we subsequently discuss in our "To Play or Not To Play?" section - and the accompanying realization that this universe has two separate ‘dream worlds’. And inevitably given the timeframe (early 2014), we compare it to FFXIII, that lovable mess.

Critical to scoring the platinum in this game is the totally-not-a-cheat Don Tonberry exploit, which Will regales and dazzles us with, and its path towards easy sphere hoarding. We discuss how the internet has changed playing this game from when many of us first laid hands on it in 2001: remember the serendipity of discovering game mechanics for yourself; of thinking of exploits rather than seeing 'em on Polygon or Twitch first? Also, what level of foot-in-mouth disease does Tidus have; is it over 9,000? "I'm tired of all these mother****ing Seymores on this mother****ing Plain!"

Alberto attempts to tell us about chocobos avoiding lightning 200x, and, somehow even more preposterously, about how Blitzball isn't the worst minigame of, well, ever.