Jurassic Hour #5: Pornography!
You know what's sad? When you start to stay away from your own website for fear that you might get a peek at it. Specifically, how nothing. Is. Happening. There.
Here's the skinny: the podcast as you two dozen people knew it got blowed up because we lost two people to perfectly defensible grown-up situations. For those keeping score at home, that's half of us.
And rather than pretend nothing had happened or would happen, Pat "Gameodactyl" Gann and I thought it might be time to change things up.
The result of all of that is in front of you. We're still Gameosaurus.com, and we still do the Jurassic Hour, but our bent is no longer strictly games. From now on, the show's focus is personalities and relationships, and the blog is a general-interest-whatever-the-hell sort of thing.
The first episode in the podcast's new format is wriggling around below these paragraphs. Our friend "Terra" joins the Gameodactyl and me for a sprawling discussion about our encounters with male and female strippers, how much porn is too much porn, when you should tell your boyfriend that you intentionally stopped using birth control to have his baby, and so much more!
Terra judged a "Male Entertainer of the Year" event in Baltimore last month, and we ask her plenty of questions about that. Listen in real-time as the Gameodactyl becomes completely scandalized.
And then Terra steps out, and Gann and I get down to the business of what we've been playing for the last month. Up for discussion: ALAN WAKE, BLUR, the sublime RED DEAD REDEMPTION, the not-s0-sublime RECORD OF AGAREST WAR and more.
The most important thing to note here, I think, is the fact that we're absolutely doing this for us and don't need validation from traffic stats and comments, though we certainly invite all of those things. We'll be trying another one of these in two weeks, and we may well solicit your participation. So if you get a plaintive e-mail or phone call from us begging for you to appear on the show, think seriously about it!
Okay, enough babbling. Let's overshare!
With music from Marilyn Manson, Sleigh Bells, Joe Budden and Chk! Chk! Chk!
(right-click to save, use theplayer below, or get the show on iTunes here)
Jurassic Hour #5: Pornography!
INTRO -- Marilyn Manson, "This is the New Shit"
01:16 - 33:42 -- Sabotage Yahoo! Answers
ACT BREAK -- Sleigh Bells, "Riot Rhythm"
36:00 - 52:15 -- Judging a male stripping contest in Baltimore
52:15 - 1:15:39 -- Pornography: great hobby or greatest hobby?
ACT BREAK -- Joe Budden, "Fire (Yes, Yes Y'all)"
1:19:55 - 1:56:45 -- What we've been playing
OUTRO -- Chk! Chk! Chk!, "King's Weed"
Interview: Telltale Games' Dave Grossman
Guybrush being heroic™, after his own manner.
Perhaps the best way to begin an anxiously anticipated interview is not to babble at your source about just how anxious you are and how much you can't wait to get home. But that's precisely what I did to Dave Grossman, who worked closely on THE SECRET OF MONKEY ISLAND at LucasArts way back when and is now design director at Telltale Games.
The company is almost halfway through TALES OF MONKEY ISLAND, the five-episode follow-up to SAM & MAX, STRONG BAD'S COOL GAME FOR ATTRACTIVE PEOPLE and WALLACE & GROMIT. Setting aside my exceptional professionalism for a moment, I'll say briefly that all of them are tremendous, often guffaw-inducing adventure games and that anybody with a mouse should play them.
I can't quite recommend the WiiWare versions (for technological handicaps detailed below), but the requirements for the PC versions are so modest that pretty much any computer with a video card should be able to run them smoothly.
Without further ado, here's my fully transcribed interview with Grossman from PAX on Friday.
GAMEOSAURUS: Did you get a chance to see Ron (Gilbert)'s keynote?
DAVE GROSSMAN: I did. I got a chance to look at it before he gave it. He actually sent it to me for comment a few weeks ago, I guess. I thought it was really good. It was a very charming look into Ron, you know?
When he got into the Grumpy Gamer persona, I guess in the second half, he was talking about Secret of Monkey Island, seven people, $135,000.
Yeah.
How many people are working on the Tales episodes?
You know, it's hard to say because the team kind of grows and shrinks as it needs to. At the maximum size, I think we probably got like 20-plus on it, because we're working extra fast. We're actually plucking people who ordinarily would be working on something else and dropping them on there when we need the backup. A typical size for one of our teams is probably between 15 and 20 people.
In orders of magnitude, how much bigger is this, now that you've got a 3-D engine and blocking and things like that to work out, versus the 1990 games.
(ed.: Dave presses me to make sense of my question. I fumble helplessly, and he eventually helps me settle on man hours as a metric.)
So let's see, Secret of Monkey Island, he said it was seven people? I'm not sure I actually believe that, but it seemed like that sometimes. There were a few artists actually on it. It took us about a year to make that. For a season, which is probably a comparable amount of gameplay and a similar amount of dialogue and all that, we usually use a varying team size. It starts out as only a couple of people, but then it kind of ramps up. We get into production, and it ramps up quickly to a team twice the size, but it only takes us about six months to get to the end of the season. So it's actually probably pretty comparable, now that I do all that math in my head. It's probably not that different in terms gameplay size or the amount of effort. Of course, everybody makes more money now, so dollar figures vary.