Part One: The first hour of Prey

The week before Prey (2017) came out, I played a free downloadable Playstation 4 demo of the game with Zero Stars co-host and EIC, Bob. The demo takes you through the first hour and a half or so of the game. It’s a very good demo. I’m sure the developers at Arkane know that their game’s opening is strong - probably to a fault.

(And in fact, Prey itself is a good game, just to get that out there.)

 We ponder the demise of Nintendo's Miiverse and consider the possibility of an endless Super Meatboy. Matt's quest to find the Onion Knight in Dark Souls III continues, and we also discuss Uncharted: The Lost Legacy and Neo Turf Masters.

The Stars receive their first reader mail and respond by plunging deep into the MOBA depths with Heroes of the Storm. A quickfire News Hour still leaves time to talk about Uncharted: The Lost Legacy and a bit of Splatoon 2.

Supergiant Games, a video game development company, was founded in 2009. In 2011, Supergiant put out its first game, Bastion, an isometric action-RPG. In 2014, Supergiant published it’s second game, Transistor, an isometric strategy-action-RPG. Starting in September of 2015, Supergiant (probably) played a lot of NBA 2K16’s MyCareer mode, as directed by renowned filmmaker Spike Lee.

At this time, Supergiant thought to itself, “We are not Spike Lee. But we could do better than this.”

And they did. They made Pyre.

This week's episode forgoes the usual format in favor of a discussion about broken games we love. We talk about The World Is Not Enough, Final Fantasy VIII, Mirrors Edge and Alien: Isolation in an attempt to figure out what makes these games good, or at the very least, interesting.  

If Tacoma, the new game from Fullbright, had come out ten years ago, it would have engendered three hot takes on the Internet. As someone who lived through the past decade, I can enumerate these possible opinions with perfect accuracy.

1. Tacoma does not feature running, jumping, or shooting people/monsters in the face, and is about two hours long. Therefore, Tacoma is not a video game.
2. Tacoma does not feature running, jumping, or shooting people/monsters in the face, and is about two hours long. Therefore, Tacoma proves conclusively that games can be art.
3. Tacoma does not feature running, jumping, or shooting people/monsters in the face, and is about two hours long. Therefore, Tacoma is not worth its $20 price.

It's 2017, and I have played Tacoma. Here’s what we know:

1. Tacoma is a video game.
2. Tacoma is art.
3. Tacoma is too expensive.

Let's talk about it.

A lengthy discussion about why Valve is bumming us out segues into tales of Dark Souls betrayal and a big conversation about Supergiant's new game Pyre.

My 2013 MacBook Air can’t run much, but it can run Anatomy. If I had to choose one game for my Mac to run, it might be Anatomy. Anatomy contains so much in so little.

You know what’s fun? Walking. People don’t talk about how joyous simply moving around is, but you’d be a fool to deny it’s one of life’s greatest pleasures. You don’t think about inherent happiness in walking because it’s something that you do every day. As I write this, I am 29 years old. That means I’ve been walking for something like 28 years. That’s 10220 days. It’s practically impossible for something repetitive like walking to remain fresh for that long. Over time, the novelty of movement wears off and walking becomes something that just ‘happens’.

We figure out where Dave Matthews gets his ideas, forget that Jack Johnson is a person, and still find time to discuss Tacoma, Asemblance, Dark Souls III and Civilization IV.