Other than being unusally long, it’s a GameHounds-record number of people on it.

Without Hawkes, Edie Sellers and Commander Tim decide to open up the Skype line to anyone who calls. The result is charming and sometimes hilarious.

In addition to meeting just a few of the GameHounds faithful, Tim and Edie discuss:

• VG247 says that Warner Brothers is on the verge of buying Codemasters.
• Could disk-activation technology be coming to game retailers near you?
• Mortal Kombat’s movie director files suit to make sure he gets a piece of the Midway fire-sale pie.
• id Software bought out by ZeniMax, John Romero reacts badly.
• Random stuff, thank yous, and guests, guests, guests.

Enjoy.

UPDATE: Sorry, we forgot to mention Alex the Deadite’s email address to send your $1 donation via Paypal. It’s alex.huneault@gmail.com.

Or ever heard us talking about the gaming news and thought: “Why didn’t they talk about the story that I thought was important?”

Well, tonight’s your chance.

Stuff happened this week, and we had to call off our scheduled guest. And rather that just give you the same stuff we always do, we’ve decided to do something fun.

Between 6 and 7 p.m. tonight Pacific Time, you can use your Skype to call us (Skype name: GameHounds) and bring your best news topic. Or you can weigh in on whatever Tim and Edie are talking about (no Hawkes this week). We’ll cycle through callers.

If you call and we don’t answer, it’s because we’re on another line with someone else, so just call back in a few mintues.

We’ve never done this before, and it may fail miserably, but no matter what, you’ll hear the success (or fail) on this week’s show.

Yes, yes, it has. But that didn’t keep the SportsHound, Maynard’s Minute, or the Digital Cowboys idle.

It’s the first Humpdate post-E3, so check in with them to find out what they’re thinking.

Enjoy.

But then again, this is the GameHounds. Unfortunately, it’s a GameHounds without Cooper Hawkes this week, but in his stead we have Mr. Maynard of the Unknown Gamers of STL and the Humpdate!

This week, Maynard, Commander Tim and Edie discuss:

• An Ubisoft forum manager swears that Splinter Cell Conviction will be a “true Microsoft exclusive title.”
• Bobby Kotick says that he’s disappointed in Sony and wants it to shape up or he’ll take his games and go home.
• Sony tells developers to expect its motion controller in Spring 2010 with a bunch of games.
• Forza 3 Limited Edition. Yeah “limited” really says it all.
• Random Shit: Ghostbusters-gate, Choplifter
• And an extra special message of universal love from Hawkes.

Enjoy.

He’s not the only person to believe so.

And who’s to blame him? The adventure game flourished in the days when only the PC could provide the graphics, interface and processing capacity to do the job. The whole genre was developed with the mouse in mind.

Today, it’s not only possible, but some consumers are practically demanding that classic adventure games come to the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and Wii. I would be one of them.

Enter Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures, Episode 1: Fright of the Bumblebees from Xbox Live Arcade, a pure classic-style adventure game starring Aardman Animation’s famous cheese-eating tinkerer and his sidekick dog.

In this first of four currently scheduled episodes for the Xbox Live Arcade, Wallace begins a honey business, only to find more orders than he can fill. In an attempt to supercharge his hive, he unintentionally creates giant bees that swarm the town. Of course, Gromit (the real brains of the duo) must save the day.

There’s a lot of good to say about Fright of the Bumblebees. It offers slick graphics and a great organic feel — thank goodness, since anyone even remotely familiar with Wallace & Gromit’s films will easily eye differences between the films and this game. The character modeling looks so dead on to Aardman’s claymation technique you can practically see irregularities in the clay.

And the animation is spot on. As you play alternately both Gromit and Wallace, camera changes as they move from room to room or indoors to outdoors flow easily with no hitching or glitching.

The movement has an almost liquid-feel in its ease and look, and surprisingly enough, I’ve yet to get stuck in a nook or on the edge of a door! No small feat for any open world game, much less one on the Xbox Live Arcade.

Equally flawless are the flow of cut scenes as you successfully progress through the game and the story. Not only do they look great, the voice talent is good enough and the script is well written and deep enough that I found myself tapping unnecessarily on certain characters just to hear what they had to say.

And the clever, well-told story lives up to the high standards of Aardman, which might have been the kiss of death given that the Oscar-winner animation studio made its fame with charmingly quirky shorts like Creature Comforts and feature films like Chicken Run. Flight of the Bumblebees does its pedigree justice.

Is it perfect? As a huge fan of Wallace and Gromit (see: My refrigerator covered in W&G magnets) I would love to say so. But, no. In the end, I have to somewhat agree with Commander Tim: Adventure games can be good on a console, but not great.
In the opening moments, you’re taken though a tutorial where you learn to control the characters and manipulate items in a room. Character movement is controlled with the right joystick, and item selection by the left joystick. Alternately, you can scroll through all items in the room by using the bumpers.

Almost immediately you’re struck by now difficult and time consuming it is to select items. The game identifies which item is currently selected with small white brackets around the target, which are sometimes nearly impossible to see. It’s clear this game was tested on a screen a few short feet from the viewer’s nose, not in real-life conditions where the television is across the living room.

Making matters worse, the joystick targeting control is infuriatingly sloppy. I found myself more times than not just using the bumper, which means every attempt to solve a particular puzzle takes that much longer as I scrolled through every item in the room to get to the one I needed.

The overall quality of the game drives you on, but for anyone but the most patient of gamer, this simple obstacle will drive you buggy.
And then there’s the sound. Oh, the sound!

About half way through the episode, you’ll notice loud crackles and ticks in the voice track. And in other spots, Wallace’s voice will fade in and out — artifacts of the dialogue editing process that should have been fixed in the mix but, oddly, weren’t.

Overall, Fright of the Bumblebees is a solid XBLA game, and neither Telltale Games nor Aardman should be embarrassed by it. However, the loosy-goosy targeting controls somewhat sabotage what would have been an superb game. At 800 MS Points, or $10, it’s a solid addition to Microsoft’s Summer of Arcade series if you have the patience to work with the game.

Very late.

Incredibly tired.

Show.

Listen.

Notes? Not.

Enjoy.

This is the first of several developer-focued podcasts recorded by the Platform Nation kids. In this episode, Steve519 of Platform Nation, Lefty Brown of the Married Gamers, and Edie discuss what Bethesda broght to the table.

Enjoy.

One of the first steps of growing up is realizing that he is really not any of those things because one of the tenets of life is: Nobody’s perfect.

It could be a bitter pill to swallow, but it is a necessary one, and if you’re lucky, you figure it out in your early teenage years rather than visiting your dying father in a hospital bed.

I’ve been gaming for nearly 30 years, my father is Ralph Baer. Unlike life, with gaming, you could wind up with a ton of stepdads, like Shigeru Miyamoto, Will Wright, Tim Schafer, Ken Levine, and of course, Bioware.

Bioware is the latest and to my mind greatest stepdad a gamer could ask for. Beautiful looking games, fun to play, well plotted, all around the greatest gaming developer ever created.

Until last night.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m still Bioware’s bitch, but I do think that giving yourself over to any game company puts you into fanboy territory. I have voiced my disdain for these types of individuals on more than one occasion, and I always found it funny that no one ever called me on my irrational love of Bioware.

Perhaps most people agreed. Perhaps I’ve demonstrated that I don’t completely give Bioware a pass. Either way, I’m here to deconstruct my stepdad a little bit, simply because I noticed something quite distressing while playing Mass Effect last night.

A plot hole.

The unfortunate thing is that Bioware prides itself on its plots, so it was a bit of a shock realizing that the central plot of Mass Effect is flawed. It is because of my love of Bioware that it took me two years to figure it out, even though it is glaring and obvious.

In case you’re wondering, that was your Mass Effect spoiler warning. FULL spoilers ahead.

I’m not kidding.

Really, this is your last chance.

Okay, this is your last chance.

You’ve been warned.

Let’s start with Presidium early in the game. Eden Prime has just been attacked, Saren assassinated Nilius with only one unreliable witness. Humanity has failed to find any solid evidence to support Saren is working with the Geth, so your first task is to find that evidence.

This leads you to Tali’Zorah nar Rayya, a Quarian whose race originally built the Geth long ago. She is attempting to barter information about Saren with the Shadow Broker and is picked up by Shepard when the deal goes bad. (The Shadow Broker is an information gatherer, we learn nothing more about it in Mass Effect other than he or she exists.)

Tali, as she likes to be called, then lets us listen to her surveillance tape of Saren and Lady Benezia, an Asari matriarch, and it went something like this:

Saren: Eden Prime was a major victory, we’re one step closer to the Conduit.

Benezia: And one step closer to the return of the Reapers.

This information was obtained from a disabled Geth whose memory unit hadn’t completely been destroyed; now let’s break this down, shall we?

Tali found a Geth whose memory unit hadn’t been destroyed. Said Geth’s destruction was recent enough that it occurred after the battle on Eden Prime and before the Normandy arrived on the Citadel. (Easily explained, Shepard had been unconscious for days, Tali could have found or personally disabled a Geth in that time.)

Tali finds the information and comes to the Citadel to try to broker the information. (We’re not made clear as to motivation, but I’m giving this a pass simply because it may payoff in her character later in the series. It is also possible she was seeking Saren as part of her pilgrimage.)

Because the Geth are part of a neural network, the disabled Geth didn’t have to actually witness the exchange.

As to the conversation itself, this is where the first fail occurs.

If this had been a recording of the characters speaking over subspace relay, the structure of the conversation could easily be explained, however it was established that shortly after Eden Prime Saren was on Sovereign when Benezia personally came to tell him that a human may have used the beacon before its destruction. This implies that Benezia was on Sovereign when the attack on Eden Prime occured — meaning the entire conversation is pointless.

Why would Saren have to say something to Benezia that she witnessed first hand? It’s a decent chink in the armor of the plot. It’s not a killer by any means, I’m sure someone can come up with an explanation that may fit, but right now I can’t find it.

You want my hunch? During the early days of Bioware showing off Mass Effect, there was a scene where Shepard manhandles a bartender at Flux, and this bartender sends him to an Asari who gives information about the Reapers. I can only assume that the investigation into Saren was originally supposed to take longer and due to time constraints had to be shortened.

In the gaming business that’s not too unreasonable an explanation. It’s a ham-fisted way of doing things, but a decent compromise to get the game shipped on time.

The problem of course is, once I saw one tiny flaw in my stepdad, I had to wonder if there were more.

Yes, there are, and it’s a big one.

Saren seeks the Prothean Conduit, which is assumed to be a weapon but is actually a miniature Mass Relay that, in this case, allows travel from Ilos to the Citadel. Saren wants to use the Conduit to infiltrate the Citadel and start the process that turns the Citadel into a Mass Relay to let the Reapers into this universe and begin the purge again.

However, at the start of the game, Saren is a Spectre who answers only to the council and gets carte blanche wherever he travels. He is also resourceful and cunning, yet his best idea to activate the Citadel is to go on a quest that could be discovered. This seems very out of character, and while you could argue that Saren’s partial indoctrination with Sovereign could have affected his judgment, that would only then serve to show that Reapers are idiots.

Consider the end of the game: Saren gets into the Citadel, makes it to the tower, meanwhile a Geth fleet, led by Sovereign, has begun an attack on the Citadel defense forces. Sovereign itself smashes through those defenses like a bear fighting gnats and makes it to the center of the Citadel to join with it when Saren hits the switch and closes the arms around it.

Considering that originally the Keepers did this, why did Saren need the Conduit?

He’s a Spectre, he could have just gone to the tower after hours on “Spectre business” and activated it while Sovereign and the Geth came into Citadel space. No one would have been the wiser until it was too late.

He didn’t need the Geth army to back him inside the Citadel, because again, he was going after hours when the guards are low, using his Spectre status to push his way in. The whole quest, and by that extension the whole game, is pointless.

You could argue that since Saren was trying to find ways of fighting indoctrination, he was also trying to delay the Reapers return. Hence the big ol’ quest, but that also fails because Sovereign should have easily seen through his explanation for the necessity of the Conduit.

Another argument could be made that he wanted to find the Conduit to destroy it so it couldn’t be used again, but this is something he could have done after the Reapers returned.

The only real argument you can make is that he didn’t know what the Conduit actually was and was looking into it to make sure it wouldn’t interfere with the Reapers return. This would be a rational and plausible explanation, but the game offers no real insight into it. There is no moment in the game that fully explains Saren’s motivation with finding the Conduit, instead Saren makes his task increasingly difficult in his quest to find it.

This diminishes both Saren’s character and the threat of the Reapers if they can so easily be distracted by something that, in the end, will have no bearing on the results they seek.

Maybe I’m missing an angle, or perhaps a bit of dialogue that would have explained away this rather large discrepancy, but as of right now this is what I see. I’m rather sad about this bit of knowledge, because it is a plot hole, and it invalidates the entire reason to play the game.

Perhaps I’m being too picky, and should just enjoy the big picture rather than point out when the headstones move, but plot is one of my favorite parts of gaming, and it is one of the reasons I gravitate toward Bioware.

Take that away, and what I’m left with is a fun but flawed game.

Of course I still love the game, the characters are really well fleshed out, as is the universe they inhabit. I love the combat and the missions, and I was genuinely crushed when one of my decisions led to a death, so of course I’m on board for Mass Effect 2

But this flaw is a good way of keeping me grounded, it’s also a good way of letting Bioware know that we’re watching them and we won’t be taken for fools.

A father, as I well know, just wants to be the best he can for his child. It’s something I never understood till I heard my son cry for the first time. I have no doubts Bioware wants to be the best, but, like a father, they are human and make mistakes. We as gamers need to hold them up to their mistakes so they don’t make it again, just as my son holds me up to mine.

I still love you very much, stepdad Bioware, but I’m a little bit skeptical about you.

Prove me wrong, please. Make it right this time.

Hawkes