How To Murder Time

This week we are looking at the serious side of games: Who will preserve them for future generations?

Will it be Companies, Governments or Pirates, or some combination of the three? Between them all can we guarantee that future scholars will have anything left to study when servers are gone, hardware has died and copy protection no longer protects?

One last thing. Can somebody please prove that we’re wrong about who owns the rights for the Sinclair Spectrum?

This week we’re talking about what’re we’ve been playing, and it’s not pretty:

Morrowind Ornitocopter patch

Banished

Star Trek Online

Ryse: Son of Rome

Assassin’s Creed 3

Skylanders

Old Republicans

This week we’re looking at two more tabletop games.

The first is Malifaux 2nd Edition, which is a skirmish miniature game where two forces of around six models come together in a world of Gothic, Steampunk and Victorian Horror set on an alternate earth.

The second game is Android: Netrunner, a cyberpunk card game about massive corporations, their servers and the runners who hack them.

This week we’re looking at the last few weeks of games that we’ve been playing. See if you can guess which is the one that’s just to get content for the show.

Neverwinter

Forza 5

Dungeon Keeper

Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood

The Old Republic. Older republic? It is a long time ago in a galaxy far away after all.

Tomb Raider

Fable Anniversary

The Secret World. Mind The Cthulhu!

This week, a rapid-fire salvo of assumptions about the past, present and future of MMO billing.

With a typical MMO costing tens of millions to make, and rising, and the traditional subscription model becoming less of a standard way to recoup that, just how can a genre approaching its second decade expect to pay for it all? Who foots the bill, and how? Will subscriptions return in force, will free to play be the way, or will something else entirely come along?

Join us for an examination of the pros and con and ins and outs of the life support systems of so many of the games we know and love.

Relevant Links:

Kotaku: How Much Does It Cost To Make A Big Video Game?

HTMT on Steam: Research Needed: Cashshoppery!

Roberts Space Industries: The Stretch Goals

It’s time to catch up on which games we’ve been playing. This time out we even has both a real and a virtual card game. Warning: one may be better than the other.

Assassin’s Creed Liberation.

The Old Republic.

Machine of Death.

Terraria.

Journey.

Space Engine.

Hearthstone.

Planetside 2.

This week we’ve been busy playing real physical games so we can tell you what we thinks about them.

Lords of War

A card game where the location on the board that you play your card is just as important as having a good hand. (lords-of-war.com)

Star Trek: Attack Wing

Using the same game system as Star Wars, this time we’re in the Trek universe with iconic ships from all the usual suspects. Does the change in universe make the game any different? (http://wizkidsgames.com/startrek/star-trek-attack-wing/)

After a short unscheduled break of a few weeks due to it being extremely hard podcasting when you have lost your voice we return with the start of season 3 of the show! We start off catching up with the games we’ve been playing since the last show:

Legend of Grimrock

Don’t Starve

Star Wars Galaxies (!)

Gran Turismo 6

Assetto Corsa

The Secret World

Project Spark

Just Cause 2

Join us next week when we return to the exciting world of board games.

This week we’re back with what we’re playing:

Gran Turismo 6

The Secret World

Assassin’s Creed 4 and Liberation

Warhammer Offline

The Old Republic

Oh, and accidentally buying a PS4

This week we’re turning our untrained eyes on game reviews.

Are they still useful, what happened to magazines and why on earth do we even need Metacritic? What’s the future, and when was the last time you used a review to decide if you should buy a game?