I'll cover these two podcasts together because they both cover games and both have the same hosts.

I've been watching Good Game for a couple of years now.  I originally was looking for podcasts about Cricket from an Aussie perspective, but I browsed around and found this podcast, which is actually a regular show on Australian TV.

I look forward every week to the reviews of new games, gamer news, and other geeky fun that come out of putting two passionate people in a room and letting them review games.

This week, GG reviewed some 3DS launch titles.  I'm skeptical of the 3DS (partly because I can't see manufactured 3D well), but I do enjoy the reviews of the launch games.

Anyway, this show/podcast has lots to love.  Games, geekiness, very cool hosts, and twitter interaction, what more could you want?  Really.

I love the way the hosts review the games, but they don't seem to let personal biases come into play (and if they do, they will warn you that they don't like that genre of game).  The balance is there, and clearly the hosts Bajo and Hex not only love games but understand them as well.

Good Game Spawn Point is "for younger gamers by gamers" and they clearly hit that with the games they review, but they don't talk down to their audience.  This is the key, because so many shows for kids and games for kids really dumb things down.  Kids aren't stupid; they may need something slightly simpler, but that's no excuse for shipping a crappy game for younger gamers.  (It's no excuse for crappy books for kids either, but that's a rant for another day.)

I picked up watching this show because I was hoping they'd cover some different stuff than the adult show, and they do.  I was hoping for more DS stuff, and for the most part, it has lots of DS stuff.  Bajo and Hex cover plenty of games that I'd never have heard of if I didn't start watching either of the two shows.

My favorite spot on both shows is the "Ask Good Game" feature.  I really like the questions they get and the way they're answered.  Lots of fun, especially when they accuse DARREN of being a NOOB.

If you like video games, I highly recommend both of these podcasts.

Note: This is going to be a rambling, navel-gazy post talking about games I've been playing and the systems I play them on.  Feel free to skip, if you so desire.  Cut for obvious reasons.

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I subscribe to the IndieGameMagazine RSS feed, and the other day, an offer came through for a free copy of Wytches Brew.  It looked pretty cool, so I gave it a download.

I was on Ubuntu at the time and it’s a Windows game.  I saved it to my Windows partition, and just got around to installing it.  Imagine my surprise when the game gave me an error about a .dll being missing!  The .dll in question was MSVCR71.dll.  It’s related to the fact that I’m on Windows 7 64-bit and the company doesn’t test on my configuration. 

They’re small, and that’s cool, especially since I got an email back from them a half hour after I sent my email with the issue.  They said that they were really sorry that the game didn’t work.  They suggested I put the .dll I downloaded into the game folder (C:/Program Files (x86)/Notsoft/WytchesBrew) and see if that worked.  It did!

I did a google search and found the .dll here at dll-files.com.  There are plenty of warnings associated with this, but the good news is that you don’t need to go and mess with your C:/Windows folder.

Grab the .dll, extract it, and then copy it over to your game folder.  Start the game, and the error is gone!

Amazing.  I’m really glad it worked.

I’m planning on doing a review of this game when I’ve had a chance to play it, but I wanted to get this little hack out there for others who are on Windows 7.

Enjoy it!

Has anyone played this for Wii? If you have, I'm sorry. Whilst this could be an awesome game, it seems to fall hard on its face. Let's start at the beginning, shall we? ~~~~SPOILERS~~~~ You start out in the Sudan and it goes into a tutorial mode.  This is fine for someone without any experience with the Wii, but if you've had the Wii for more than 10 minutes, you'll have played Wii Sports, so this is kind of a moot point.  (Note: I prefer to not be hand-held in a game. I can figure it out, thanks!)  The action is great, till you get killed because you didn't see you needed to hit the "A" button and get blasted by a cannon.  Or a bullet.  Or run over by a boulder.  Then, you get to start the whole sequence over again... This is especially infuriating in the first "carnival-style" shooting sequence in San Fransisco.  I couldn't get the aiming feature just right, and couldn't seem to shoot anything.  Therefore, I kept getting shot up.  Then, I'd have to restart the whole thing.  Again. You go up against a bunch of Nazis; not much different from most other Indy games.  There are a couple different ones; the lacky and the thug.  The lacky is easy to whip, drag and kick into submission; the thug, not so much.  You have to use an object (rake, trash can lid, stick, broom, piece of armor, whatever) to smack him down.  It takes a couple of hits for you to dispatch the thug.  In the meantime, do watch out.  If you don't time things well, you will get smacked and there's no way to get away from some of them.  Again, very frustrating! In San-Fran, there's a car shooting sequence, and if you don't get the timing right, you'll end up getting killed by the Nazis.  Again. The best battle was in Panama when you battle a fire-eater.  It's timing, but this time, you have control of Indy and can move around quite a bit (except for the ring of fire that surrounds the arena) so it's not so bad.  I prefer to have control over my character.  (Note: I'm in Panama right now.  This review isn't complete on the whole game, but I've experienced enough gameplay to give it a once-over.) ~~~~END SPOILERS~~~~ I think the issue with this game is the fact that it doesn't allow you to have control of Indy for the whole thing.  There's a limited set of motions he can do at certain times, and I'd like to be able to do more with the game.  The motion controls are killer (I pulled my right arm muscle from playing too much yesterday).  It's neat to use the Wii-mote to whip enemies and such, but you can't steal the weapon from their hands, just knock it to the ground.  You can whip their neck, middle or foot (I seem to get their feet most often) and drag them to you and dispatch them that way.  You can't use your gun to dispatch enemies from afar, except when the game allows you. The story is awesome, as is the voice acting and pacing.  It's much like being in a movie.  I wish I could skip cut-scenes, since after getting mowed down in a spray of bullets, the last thing you want to do is to have to watch the cut scene.  Again. If there was a different control scheme (or a better one) I'd give this game a higher rating.  I'll break it into two scores: Gameplay: 1/5.  Almost the worst I've seen.  I like the idea of using the Wiimote and nunchuck, but it needs to be revised. Story: 5/5.  If you realize the cheese is supposed to be there, then the story is good.  It's standard Indy stuff, but I love it. If LucasArts releases another Wii Indy title, I think they should review the motion-control and allow the player to move Indy around more.