This week, we recorded a first analysis of what we thought about the Xbox One reveal on Tuesday. A very unhappy Holy Goalie is joined by Nick Dinicola and Edie Sellers as they talk about how much they, quite honestly, hated so much about what they heard about the new Xbox console in the last 24 hours.

Then, just moments after ending the show, they got a call from the GameHounds social manager, Steve “Pissboy” Ortegon, who also weighs in and does a very thorough comparison of the Xbox One and the Playstation 4.

Enjoy both shows. It’s a lot of content, but there was a lot going on this week.

It’s not easy to find a rebroadcast you can watch on-demand, but fortunately business icon Forbes.com has it available for you.

Check it out here.

We are.

Tomorrow, May 21 at 10 a.m., Microsoft will reveal its new console—the 720, the Durango, whatever it’s called— at its Xbox campus. It’s the media event of the season, as it were.

We’ll be watching. You’ll be watching. Let’s watch it together!

Want to join us while we see what all the hubub is all about? It’s easy. For the record, we don’t have the video feed—you’ll have to go to Xbox for that—but we will be offering our commentary as it happens live. Just join our Spreaker feed. We’ll have a host of characters to pipe in on what we think as we think it.

On tap to join us:

• Dave “Holy Goalie” Gardner, Nick Dinicola, and Edie Sellers (of course);
• Mrs. Lefty Brown from the Married Gamers;
• And introducing our community manager, Steve “PissBoy” Ortegon (he’s the guy who posts the news stories to our Facebook page);

And there’s you in our chat room to chime in on what you’re thinking as well. You lucky person.

Here’s what you need to do in the next few hours to be ready for the big event:

1. Go to Xbox.com and sign in. Then bookmark the Xbox live video feed page.
2. Go to Spreaker.com and sign in. If you don’t have a Spreaker account, get one now. It takes just a moment.
3. Go to the GameHounds Spreaker page and favorite us.
4. Before 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET on May 21, pull up the Xbox live video feed page you bookmarked in a browser window and open a second window to the GameHounds Spreaker page.
5. When the GameHounds Spreaker feed goes live with our commentary at 10 a.m., start playing our audio. Then click the window that has the Xbox.com video feed so it moves on top of our Spreaker page window. That way you’ll see and hear Microsoft and hear us at the same time.
6. You can adjust the volume of the GameHounds commentary feed via the Spreaker page to balance the audio.
7. You will also be able to join our chat line and we will reply to you about what you’ve written—because you’re part of the experience!

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We’re going to leave you with that. And the image of Nick Dinicola in a gold bikini.

While Nick is joined by Holy Goalie and Edie Sellers as they attempt to make each other throw up in their mouths, the GameHounds team also brings a steaming pile of reviews and news for your podcasting enjoyment.

Topics include:

• Reviews of Sniper Ghost Warrior 2, Monaco, Assassin’s Creed III‘s Tyranny of King Washington DLC, Mass Effect 3‘s multiplayer (again).
• Rovio announces it will offer user accounts so you can play your Angry Birds game across all your devices.
• Electronic Arts will no longer license the representations of guns from the gun manufacturers. Lawsuit pending.
• EA’s financial report show that SimCity was a success, but Dead Space 3 and Crysis 3 didn’t.
• In more EA news, it secured an exclusive contract to develop future Star Wars games, but don’t expect them until 2014. And the Wii U? Fergeddaboutit.
• How much does Assassin’s Creed former creative director Patrice Desilets hate Ubisoft right now? Let’s just call it the white-hot heat of 1,000 suns.
• Sanctum 2 is out and in the world. You might want to check it out.
• Don’t update your Dragon’s Dogma or Dark Arisen. That would be bad.

NOTE: The delay in the release of this show is due to the fact that there was no show recorded this week, so we spaced it out a bit so you wouldn’t be left for a week without a show.

ANOTHER NOTE: We will be Spreaker-casting live the Microsoft console announcement on Tuesday, May 21 at 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET on our Spreaker page. Watch it with us and interact in our chat room as we find out what the new concole has in store.

See, Happy Endings is supposed to run a half hour. You know. Thirty minutes of post-podcast banter with some live input from listeners.

You are coming to the show, right? You can get it on your iPhone, Android device, or iPad.

Aaaaanyway, this show is almost two hours. Yeah, we end up laughing ourselves silly for two hours. We also go into more detail about our reviews, but then someone brings up genital mutilation and porn. And it all goes sideways.

Here is the recording for your enjoyment.

If you had visited our Spreaker page, though, you would have seen this more than a week ago. So, don’t wait for this stuff to appear here. If you can’t be there for the live broadcast, go to our page anytime to listen to all these shows immediately as they are finished recording.

If you have any issues with listening to people be sick and get progressively sicker over the course of an hour, this is not the show for you.

GamerEdie and her amazing inflating nose is joined by Holy Goalie and Nick Dinicola to chat up games and gaming news of the day. Topics include:

• Reviews of summer hay fever, more Bioshock Infinite, Angelica Weaver: Catch Me When You Can, Dead Island Riptide, Mass Effect 3 multiplayer, Sanctum 2, Don’t Starve, Antichamber, Monaco,
• There are only 50 layers left in the Curiosity cube. What’s in your wallet… er, cube?
• Greenheart Games release two versions of Game Dev Tycoon, one for paying customers and one for pirates. Guess what the pirated version has? PIRATES!
• Microsoft officially confirms that the May 21 shindig will be the official announcement of the new console.
• Buck or Chuck: Aliens vs. Romans, Marshmallow Duel.

Enjoy.

This is one of these moments.

Scene: Dave finishes Bioshock Infinite, looks at wife, wife shrugs, Dave calls Edie.

And we pick up from there, where Dave is, well, pretty pissed off by the game’s ending. We discuss what it all means, how it works and doesn’t work, and how to reconcile spending that much time on a end that made you feel like a dog shown a card trick.

WARNING: This episode is completely SPOILERIFIC about Bioshock Infinite. You have been advised.

Sanctum 2

Sanctum 2 is a tower-defense first-person shooter. Note the order of those genres; Sanctum 2 has a lot of shooting in it, but it’s not about the shooting. You can play with guns and lasers and rockets, but that’s not the point of the game; all these things are just various means to the same end: Protecting the core (your tower).

To that end, the controls are satisfactory and never strive to be anything more. I played with a gamepad on the PC, and Sanctum 2 follows the standard button layout for shooters: Left trigger zooms in, right trigger shoots, A jumps, X reloads, and Y switches weapons. The rest of the buttons are used for tower-defense stuff.

Enemies have weak spots, but those only really matter on the big guys. Killing enemies isn’t hard, you don’t have to worry about bullet drop or any of the other things normal shooters add to combat to make their shooting mechanics interesting. Taken on its own, the shooting in Sanctum 2 feels good, not great, but the great part is how the shooting supplements the tower-defense action.

There are two general types of tower-defense games: Ones where you make a maze for the horde while dropping towers, and one where you just drop towers. Sanctum 2 falls into the first category, which means you’ll be doing a lot of construction work between waves. Thankfully, the construction controls are easily mapped to a gamepad, making for a surprisingly intuitive game all around—save for one moment where the game tells you to “press” when you really need to “hold.”

You can add and remove turrets and walls on a whim; rearranging your entire maze is as easy as holding the B button, so you’re never dedicated to a single layout. In fact, the game encourages you to rearrange things every wave. It tells you what enemies will be coming from what direction, and this is important information. Put the rapid-fire guns near the hole where tons of weak monsters will spawn; put the heavy lasers near the hole where the big, lumbering, metal spider walkers will spawn. No tower is permanent; the battlefield should be constantly changing, moving, and growing.

This is where Sanctum 2 excels as a pure tower defense game: You never stop thinking tactics, you never stop planning, and you never get complacent with your maze.

While Sanctum 2 is a tower-defense game, there's no rest when it comes to active defense of your map.

You never get complacent with the shooting, either, thanks to the simplistic-but-just-complex-enough-to-be-exciting enemy AI. The monsters aren’t smart, but they don’t need to be. They run at the core when they can, or they run at you when they can. That latter bit is the part that makes combat exciting.

In most cases—save for some of the big guys—enemies will attack you over the core. This adds a rich tactical layer to combat since you’re constantly using yourself as live bait to keep the beasties away from the core. The game takes advantage of the fact that you’re playing as a being on the battlefield, not as an ethereal specter hovering above everything. The first-person perspective isn’t a gimmick just to make Sanctum 2 stand out from the tower-defense crowd—it’s a genuine on-the-ground tactic. If an alien gets through your maze, you can grab his attention and actually get him to turn around back into the maze, but doing so puts you in danger since you’re running into a gauntlet of other aliens that are now trained on you as well.

In short: You can’t relax. If you’re chillin’, you’re losing. The shooting may be simple, but since you’re encouraged to put yourself in harm’s way the combat is still consistently intense.

Everything is expendable in Sanctum 2. This is driven home when the first boss shows up and starts rampaging through your maze, making a point to stop and destroy every turret in his way. The solution: Put more turrets in his way. Set them up to be sacrificed. Set yourself up to be sacrificed; after all, every hit you take is hit not going to the core, which is all that matters.

These are the fundamentals that Sanctum 2 gets so right: It knows how to balance the shooting with the tower defending to create a game that’s intensely satisfying.

Even if everything outside the gameplay was awful, this would still be a fun game. Thankfully, everything outside the gameplay is not awful; I couldn’t find any online games pre-release, but the menus were slick, readable, and intuitive with a controller, and that certainly bodes well for the future of Sanctum 2.
Sanctum 2
Developer: Coffee Stain Studios
Publisher: Reverb Games
Release Date: Summer 2013 for PC, Xbox 360, and PS3