There is only one bit of news worth discussing, and that is Carmageddon: Reincarnation‘s Kickstarter campaign.

Nothing…

Else…

Matters.

So, if you love us, if you have even once thought that we might not have our heads completely up our “butt-puckers,” as Mess Sergeant Gardner might say, then send any amount you can to this Kickstarter campaign. It’s half way there, but the donations are flagging. Don’t let this happen!

That’s what this week’s episode is about. Period. The end. Holy Goalie’s back with GamerEdie and Nick Dinicola. And we talk Carmageddon.

Enjoy

And, in this show, we pretty much die.

See, when you change your podcasting day, things sometimes get weird. And you forget you have a completely edited, ready-to-go podcast sitting on your hard drive. And then you record and edit a new show, and when you go to put that one up on the site, you find the old show you forgot to post.

So yeah, that’s what happened. And that’s why you’re going to get two shows in as many days. Gotta catch up, my friends.

This one comes without H0ly Goalie but with GamerEdie Sellers and Nick Dinicola, who go into great depths about the Skyrim MMO, Game of Thrones, and other purient interests.

Enjoy… For winter is coming.

But the bottom line is: Finally we have a new podcast up. And even better news, this will be the first of two podcasts this week.

This one’s a little late, and features Nick Dinicola, Holy Goalie, and Edie Sellers chatting about the news of last week. This week’s show will be up in a day or two, so you’ll be caught up very shortly.

Enjoy

It’s a two-player, mano-a-mano, fight to the death with a variety of weapons. Characters jump and run like action heroes, holding the guns forward while they run, diving when they jump, and these moves give combat a wonderful visual flair.

The 2.5D environment feels much bigger than it really is thanks to the great level design. The levels themselves are just an amalgamation of rooms that make for good action fights: Long hallways, elevators, a kitchen, a bar, a subway — stuff that doesn’t make sense when together except in the context of an action movie. There are two central buildings with multiple stories and an open space between them. The map is just as tall as it is wide. Despite all this room, you’ll rarely go more than a minute without meeting your opponent because the level draws you towards certain choke points. You can only go up stories at certain points: The elevators and one area with a glass ceiling. This means you’ll naturally run across your opponent while just moving about.

The weapons are incredibly varied. You start with a handgun, shotgun, and a rifle, but scattered around are a rocket launcher, a heavy machine gun, many other machine guns, and also items like pots, pans, whiskey bottles, knives, fire extinguishers, pool cues, and the like. In the final game you’ll be able to customize the weapons on each level, so those small items aren’t just there as a joke. But your weapon of choice doesn’t guarantee victory. It’s very easy to die, so if a guy with a pistol gets the jump on a guy with a rocket launcher, it’s a no-contest win for the former.

Matches restart almost instantly, Super Meat Boy–style, so it’s easy to just keep playing. Over and over again. In fact, Edie and I only stopped because we were kicked off so others could get a chance to play.

While the demo is just two players, the final game will support a total of eight at once. But the best upcoming feature is a “cheesy one liner” mechanic, that rewards you for saying a cheesy one liner (yes, there will be a button for that) before killing a guy.

I had no idea this game existed before coming to PAX. And if it’s this good this early, it’ll be a must-buy when it comes out.

We missed you, too.

It’s pretty obvious why we weren’t around to podcast. We were a little busy at PAX East in Boston. But we brought back presents!

And here’s the first one: A whole bunch of developer interviews. What’s in the bag, you ask? Well, nothing but good stuff, including:

• Sleeping Dogs
• Firefall
• War of the Roses
• Fable Heroes
• On-floor commentary between Nick Dinicola and Edie Sellers about a number of games on display, including Steel Battalion, Wreckateer, Showdown Effect, the new Rain Slicked Precipice of Darkness, independent games from Digipen, Witcher 2 for the Xbox, and Xcom Enemy Unknown.

We’ll be back with new stuff in another week, so don’t worry. We’ll be there.

Enjoy.

First the good: The game takes place in Dubai after a massive sandstorm has destroyed the city, or most of it. There’s sand everywhere, with huge dunes acting as bridges between skyscrapers. One moment you’ll be walking in sand, and the next you’ll be on a balcony overlooking a 100 foot drop. It’s an interesting setting that mixes something normally low to the ground, like sand, with something high in the sky, like buildings.

Second good thing; the tone. This is a rare shooter that acknowledges its own violence. Your squadmates banter back and forth between firefights, but it’s not the typical dude/bro, “Fuck yeah, let’s kick some ass” type of talk. There’s some of that, of course, but most of the time it’s them commenting on how messed up things are in Dubai. And when you start to run across dead bodies and violent survivors, their distress becomes palpable. It’s all thanks to good voice acting and good writing.

Third good thing; the plot. The excellent writing also extends to the plot, as least as far as set-up goes. Things could unravel as the game goes on, but the story revealed in the demo was intriguing enough to make me want to play more. It’s a twist on Heart of Darkness, with a group of three soldiers sent into the ruins of Dubai to find a colonel named Konrad who stayed behind with his men to protect civilians who couldn’t evacuate. He was thought dead, until a distress signal is picked up and the player is sent in to investigate.

This story has the potential to be both intense and critical; an action movie with a brain. It’s clear that the team behind The Line has big aspirations narrative-wise, and if the beginning portion of the game is any indication, the rest should be great. But if the gameplay is any indication, this will be a waste of a great idea.

The Line isn’t bad, but it isn’t good either. It just is. It’s a competent but completely uninspiring shooter. There’s potential here, as well. Some early trailers and one part in the demo suggest that sand could play a big part in firefights, both helpful and hurtful — specifically, shooting out glass and dumping sand on people, or having the ground beneath you suddenly give way because you’re actually walking on a pane of glass that shatters. It sounds great, but even in this very long demo there was only one instance of using sand in combat, and it was so telegraphed that it didn’t really provide any kind of new strategy.

The rest of the demo was generic cover-based, third-person shooter action: You enter a room and duck behind cover, bad guys enter the room and duck behind cover, you shoot each other, they die, more bad guys enter the room, et cetera. You can command your squad to focus fire on specific enemies, but this seemed entirely unnecessary since the baddies always died with a shot or two. It took longer to tell my squad to shoot them.

I want to see more of The Line, but I’d rather not play more of it if I don’t have to. Hopefully the combat varies some in later levels and takes advantage of the unique setting. The Line has been in development for a long time, and usually that’s not a good sign, but it doesn’t seem to have affected the story or writing. Whether the same can be said for the gameplay, we’ll only know when it comes out in June.

It certainly plays like Max Payne 2. You earn bullet time by killing guys, and you earn more for special goals like head shots.

You have a button that makes Max jump in bullet time, and one that just enters bullet time without jumping. The distinction is important: Jumping adds a slight delay, since Max has to get into the air before he can start shooting, but it also allow him to move faster in bullet time. You can shoot at any angle while in the air. Spin as much as you want, but Max never looks like a carnival contortionist, he always looks natural.

There is a cover system, However, that does not mean that this is, specifically, a third-person cover-based shooter. Rather it’s because this is 2012 and everyone expects third-person shooters to have a cover system. It’s nice to be able to hide, especially when you’re fighting multiple guys, but you won’t get anything done from behind a wall. And your enemies will not wait for you to pop out. They’ll come at you if you stay hidden too long.

The demo was genuinely challenging. There’s no regenerating health, so if you’re going to surprise a bunch of guys you better know what you’re doing. I died multiple times, but the good checkpointing ensured I always restarted at the beginning of the current fight.

Managing your bullet time is integral to surviving: Slowing down time gives you opportunity to react to what’s around you, and playing at normal speed means things can happen so fast they quickly get out of control. Bullet time is a means of staying in control, of staying aware of what’s around you.

When you do lose that last bit of health, you won’t die immediately if you have pain pills. If you’ve got a stash of them, you’ll instead fall to the ground and go into the “Last Man Standing” mode, giving you one last chance to kill the guy who got that final shot on you. If you succeed, you’ll be revived. If not, you’re done for. Because this uses up your pain pills, it’s not something you can rely on. It’s more of an automatic warning: “You have health but you didn’t use it, so we’ll use it for you.” It’s a nice addition of accessibility that doesn’t equal simplicity: The game’s not easier, it’s just fairer.

The killcam has been upgraded, as well. In previous games, you got a nice cinematic look at your final kill. In Max Payne 3, you remain in control during these cut scenes. The camera cuts away to focus on the bad guy as he dies, and if you hold down the trigger of a machine gun you’ll keep firing at him and watch the corpse get riddled with bullets like something out a Quentin Tarantino exploitation flick.

This is where Max Payne 3 diverges from its predecessors. Stylistically, it’s not so much classic noir as much as it is action noir. It’s very reminiscent of movies like Man on Fire. During some cut scenes important dialogue appears as text on screen. There’s no graphic novel cut scenes, but in some cases you’ll get to see the same scene from two different angles at the same time, like something out of 24 or … Man on Fire. As if to emphasize this tonal departure for the series, the story takes Max out of New York and drops him in Sao Paulo, Brazil. This change of setting doesn’t feel forced, as it makes sense that Max is tracking down a friend’s wife who was kidnapped. (Nice little detail: The bad guys in Sao Paulo speak Portuguese, and the subtitles aren’t translated to English. It’s a typical Rockstar touch — keeping that language barrier intact — and it makes the world feel more foreign and threatening.)

Max Payne 3 is a traditional Max Payne game, mechanically, but stylistically it’s very much its own thing.