Apex Legends. So this is battle royale? It’s my first time stepping into the world of this genre and I’m left wondering….why? The rewards here are purely cosmetic and serve no purpose to give you any kind of advantage on the field. At best your card gets to show others how well you’ve done, but that offers nothing of value once you’re in the arena. You are on the level with everyone else.

Unless I’m wrong and missing something? And I very well could be.

Still, saying all of that, I jump right back into it every match. Playing a round again and again and again. I wonder with each time if I’ll do better than the last round, but no…it never seems to get better. At best I can survive a very long time because I never see any enemies. Usually when I do see them, my game is over within seconds.

And then I start the next round.

Okay, campers, rise and shine, and don’t forget your booties at the following link.

I used to think playing a PC game on any other service besides Steam was annoying. I can’t remember why I felt that way. There was no benefit of using Steam. Sure, it was all there with the rest of my games, but it provided me nothing, really. This was about the time EA came along with Origin. And the Ubisoft with Uplay. Then GoG and so on and so forth.

I felt like it was this big deal having my games scattered across different services.

I grew out of that. I guess. Or just came to the conclusion nothing was ruining my experience of the games I played on whatever service I played it from. It was all still on my PC. That was it. Sure, there’s trophy hunters and what not. People who want to up their “score” on their profile of what they’ve done in games on that service, and maybe to those people I can see the issue.

But I really don’t care where a PC game shows up. I’m going to go where ever it’s offered at the best price or deal or bundle for me.

I pretty much do the same thing on consoles.

We’re making horrible hole jokes at the following link.

We love it when you call into the show. We like hearing what you’ve been playing and the types of games you enjoy or what system you’re currently spending time with or even if you have questions about games or systems or PC stuff – doesn’t matter. Point it, we love it when you call. So keep that up. Make it a regular thing. Call in, tell us a game your playing and give us a quick review on how you like it. We can’t play everything out there so that’s why we like hearing from other people playing other games.

Speaking of other games, I’ve put some time in with the demo for Anthem and I give a few of my thoughts on it during the show, but something I forgot to mention isn’t so much a complaint with it as it is just something no one else is able to do – the shooting. I remember having this issue before and it’s just something I’ve had to come to terms with. Bungie, with Destiny (and Halo before that), has completely spoiled me on the shooting mechanic in video games. They do it better than ANYTHING else in their game. It’s the reason I would still play it even with nothing else to do – the shooting is just too much fun. Anthem isn’t like that and it was never going to be. It’s just something, again, that I’ll have to come to terms with.

Not everyone can be Bungie. And that’s actually a really great thing. We’ll talk more about that in the next episode.

We’re not taking Matt’s suggestion of music anytime soon at the following link.

I barely touched any game all week long. And that’s not fun for me. Destiny pretty much provided me with nothing to do. But it was the game I went to a few times during the week. I logged in as I regularly do in order to make some advancements that took no time at all, but that was it. I spent a total of MAYBE 30 minutes in the game. For the whole week. I logged into Assassin’s Creed on Project Stream and made sure I had my hour of play time logged so I could be eligible for the free copy of the game two weeks from now. I spent maybe 5 minutes in the game.

That was it. I didn’t play anything else. It’s currently Sunday as I write this and once I’m done I’ll usually check some other sites and eventually fire up Destiny and that will be my Sunday. All day long all on Destiny. But that’s not going to happen today. I’m going to post this and then go play Spider-Man or Red Dead or Hitman or anything else.

Course, there’s also that saying of announcing your plans…

We totally landed on the moon at the following link.

First, an apology. There’s a phone call in this episode that went a little off the rails for us, and I didn’t feel it was handled as well as it could have been. It’s my job to do that, and it wasn’t done, so I apologize.

Second, here’s my quick take on the Bungie and Activision split: whatever. I play a TON of Destiny, but when I play it, when I think about it, when I talk about it, when I buy it – I’ve never considered Activision in the mix. My complaints with Destiny, my quibbles, my frustrations, my nitpicks – none of them lay at the feet of Activision. And for that matter, my praises of the games and the reasons I keep coming back – everything I know of this game is on Bungie. So it doesn’t matter to me that they now fully own and self-publish their game. It may speak a lot to the upcoming content, perhaps, but it’s still not gonna tighten up the graphics on level three. That’s a Bungie thing and nothing that Activision was keeping them from doing.

If the team at Bungie is happy to be free of that company, then I’m happy for them, sure, but do I feel like some wave of gaming improvement with Destiny is about to wash over us players? Not a bit. If anything, the machine will just keep going. They’ll make more game, and I’ll happily keep playing it.

The cycle continues.

We’re starting off our 13th year at the following link.

We’ve been away for two weeks and what did we miss? Apparently, a lot of people wanting to get money from Fortnite cause of dancing. Never an issue with it being in games for years and years since, but Fortnite has seemingly crossed that line.

Speaking of Fortnite, that game was a beast in 2018 when broken down in numbers. We do that in this episode and it’s just overwhelming how often it shows up in the top spot or close to it.

Even with all the numbers and press the game is getting, it still triggers nothing in me. I’ve heard other people talk about it, I’ve seen it, it’s a huge presence at conventions I attend, but still…nothing. It triggers not a single response in me to have any desire to play it. And that’s fine. I’m not saying it should or that it should have that same effect on everyone else. Not at all – when you find a game you love to play by all means play it and don’t worry what others say or think about it (side glance to Destiny), but for me, there’s nothing.

New Year New You and all of that, but I still won’t be playing that game in 2019.

We feel like something is missing at the following link.

We always like to wrap up the year here with what we call our Christmas episode but it’s really just an episode that contains video game Christmas themed music. That’s pretty much the extent of it. So that’s what we’re doing here. Along with trying to find out if you can copyright a dance move.

We’d like to take this time to remind you that there is no show next weekend due to the holidays and we’d also like to thank you as well for your continued support of our little show. It means more than the world to all of us that you take the time to listen and keep listening week after week.

There is no show without you. It would not exist to begin with were it not for you and it will continue on for as long as we can, so long as we have you there with us.

As always, thank you so much for listening and have a very Merry Christmas.

We’re talking about Hitman at the following link.

I’ve done a rant before about award shows where video games are concerned.

I like them. Especially where they are currently in how they’re done. But it could always be better. I’ve made the connection before that the large numbers of people watching are mostly doing it for the new reveals of games. So more of those and on a bigger scale of game brings in more viewership and that brings in more ad revenue. This is why in a near 3 hour show there’s only about 30 minutes of actually giving out awards. I’d love to see the numbers of a regular awards presentation with NO new games revealed.

That’s probably called the BAFTA’s.

We’ve got this one in the bag at the following link.

I want to say oh, how the mighty have fallen, but I don’t know that it really applies when talking about Bethesda and what they have with Fallout 76.

It feels like an outlier. Something in an alternate timeline, like the Elseworlds series from DC. Sort of a…what if, scenario. They experimented and it didn’t really work. I mean, it’s early, but I think it’s safe to say whatever they have done here did not work at all. And it isn’t helping matters with the whole canvas bag fiasco, either.

But still, I think they can and will wright the ship. Hell, they could easily get the heat off of them and drop more info on Elder Scrolls 6. Sure, there will be squinty eyes that question the motive, but they’ll have WAY more talk about what’s going on there than with Fallout 76.

The other way will be when they announce another Fallout game and get back to form. It would help as well to admit the experiment was a mistake, but I doubt they’ll ever do that.

We’re taking a week off after the following link.

Your move, E3.

When Nintendo dropped out of E3, they really didn’t. They dropped out of doing the press conference stuff we all love to watch PRIOR to the actual E3. It was a big deal, but no skin off E3’s back since Nintendo would still be on the show floor. And still paying a premium for that floor space (it’s a big space). However, it was still a move that made people wonder and think just how important is the whole E3 thing.

A few years after and the dominoes started falling. Activision, Disney, and a number of other companies were skipping the yearly event. This meant less money was coming into the ESA who put on E3 each year. Then EA backed out. They’d still do a press conference but they’d be absent on the show floor. Again, conferences are NOT a part of E3. So this was more money not coming into the ESA.

And now we have Sony. All of the other companies were big deals when they backed out, but not in comparison to the big 3 of Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony. The ESA will be fine and E3 will be fine…for now. How this will actually affect anything at all is hard to tell. We’ll have a better idea when Sony decides to tell us just what they plan on doing – not for E3, but how they plan to communicate with the public about new hardware and software.

We’ll also have a better idea of what to expect from E3’s to come if other companies decide to follow Sony’s lead, again, whatever that may be if anything.