Podcasts about arman aghbali

For Tapestry's penultimate episode, we peek behind the curtain. Tapestry producers Rosie Fernandez, Arman Aghbali, and McKenna Hadley-Burke take the hosting reins to share what the show has meant to them, alongside three stories on unexpected gifts and goodbyes.

Religion scholar Joseph Laycock has been playing Dungeons and Dragons for a long time. He says that even though D&D was once a source of a moral panic, there is nothing satanic about it. Instead, Laycock sees the game as its own kind of spiritual practice. He says the imagination has always occupied a strange place in spirituality - as though it's either a divine gift or some kind of curse. Cat Van Wert and Mike McPhaden both play D&D with their respective families. They share the moments when Dungeons and Dragons felt like more than a game. Tapestry producer Arman Aghbali brings us the story of one player's attempt to resurrect his character and the spiritual challenge that occurred along the way.

Arman Aghbali 2:43 PM (2 hours ago) to Network Despite the challenges we face in 2022 — declining environment included — Kevin Kelly, an author, futurist and founding editor of Wired magazine, says he still believes in a brighter tomorrow. To that end, every year, he provides a list of advice on how you can improve your own life. Tapestry host Mary Hynes asks Kelly about his most recent list, and why even 20 years on from some flopped predictions, he stays optimistic.

** In June 2018, Ben Esposito was on his way to a game conference when he received a email that said his game had been stolen. ** The idea he had been working on for six years was already for sale, by someone else. It might have been inevitable. We examine what happens when a bigger company sees an opportunity in your personal small game. We talk to creator of Donut County, Ben Esposito, the chief operating officer of Noodlecake Studios, Ryan Holowaty and many others about how a French media conglomerate operates and why there are so many mobile game clones. Music on this weeks episode were thanks to the Free Music Archive. We used "Self-Driving" and "Sentimental" by Sro, "The first person crossing the bridge since a century" by Komiku, "I Used to Need the Violence" and "Rewound" by Chris Zabriskie, "Bargains" by Steve Coombs, "fascinating earthbound objects" by free energy, and "CopperNickle" by UncleBibby. We're produced out of CJRU 1280 AM in downtown Toronto and made by Arman Aghbali and Daniel Rosen. Find out more at: https://builttoplay.ca

It's summer crossover time! Here's a special episode with CJRU 1280 AM's comic book show Radio Free Krypton! Justin Chandler joins us as Arman and Daniel about what makes a great Spider-Man story. How do you make an authentic Spider-Man New York? Just how important is that Parker luck? This episode was made possible thanks to donors to CJRU 1280 AM. Donate to our illustrious home base. Thanks to the Free Music Archive for the following songs: "BMX Hero" by Pierlo, "Shun-in" by Pleiades. Built to Play is a product of CJRU in the heart of downtown Toronto. It was produced by Arman Aghbali and Daniel Rosen. If you like the show please subscribe and rate us online. It helps more people find the show and gives us an idea how we're doing. Find out more at: https://builttoplay.ca

Radio Free Krypton and video game show Built to Play team up to take on the Spidered Man. To honour a commitment made during CJRU's last fund drive, Justin Chandler, Daniel Rosen and Arman Aghbali discuss what makes a great Spidey story and talk about the hero's PS4 adventure.RFK airs first on CJRU 1280 AM in Toronto. This episode was recorded in March 2019 and produced by Arman Aghbali.Like the show? Please consider supporting us on Patreon! 

E3 this year gave us a window into gaming's future. What's beyond it? Phoenix Simms joins us for a conversation about game streaming, political discourse and the raddest video games at this year's E3. You can find more of her work here: https://twitter.com/phoenixsimms Music on this weeks episode were from Broke for Free, "Heart Ache" and "Warm Up Suit." We found them on the Free Music Archive. We're produced out of CJRU 1280 AM in downtown Toronto and made by Arman Aghbali and Daniel Rosen. Find out more at: https://builttoplay.ca

Gaming's annual grand exhibition, the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) is only a few more days away. But why does it look like a shadow of its former self? Brian Crecente at Variety Gaming gives us a window into the organization behind the trade expo. His story at Variety: Inside the Disarray Facing the Video Game Organization Behind E3 Thanks to the Free Music Archive for the following songs: : "Air Hockey Saloon" by Chris Zabriske, "Southside" by Lee Rosevere, and "Kopeika" by et. Built to Play is a product of CJRU in the heart of downtown Toronto. It was produced by Arman Aghbali and Daniel Rosen. If you like the show please subscribe and rate us online. It helps more people find the show and gives us an idea how we're doing. Podcast art from Alex C on Flickr.

We're ranking every video game ever made, and we're clearing out as much of Kingdom Hearts as we can: The Uncle who Works for Nintendo - 2014 - Michael Lutz (Matt Ishii) World of Warcraft - 2004 - Blizzard (Holly Babaran) Bastion - 2011 - Supergiant (Lyle Scott) Venom/Spider-Man: Separation Anxiety - Software Creations - 1995 (Jon Ore) Bayonetta - 2009 - Platinum Games (Ibrahim Faruqui) Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories - 2004 - Jupiter (Vivian Ng) Super Metroid Shadow the Hedgehog. New additions: Kingdom Hearts 2 - 2005 Re:Coded - 2010 358/2 Days - 2009 Birth By Sleep - 2010 Dream Drop Distance - 2012 0.2 A Fragmentary Passage - 2017 Thanks to OCRemix for the following songs: "Protect Your Kingdom" by Smooth4Lyfe, "Respite (Kingdom Hearts)" by Emunator. Built to Play is a product of CJRU in the heart of downtown Toronto. It was produced by Arman Aghbali and Daniel Rosen. If you like the show please subscribe and rate us online. It helps more people find the show and gives us an idea how we're doing.

We've been fascinated by Kingdom Hearts since childhood. But is a series worth going back to? We investigate the value of a long derided series by talking to fans who grew up with the series, and adults who are trying to make sense of it today. Special thanks to Reid McCarter and Astrid Rose of Bullet Points' Blood of Friendship πx: Re: Podcast. Thanks to the Free Music Archive for the following songs: "Lake Eerie Wolves" by Fields of Ohio, "Focus" by A. A Aalto. Thanks to OCRemix for the following songs: "Protect Your Kingdom" by Smooth4Lyfe, "Respite (Kingdom Hearts)" by Emunator, and "Simply Be-groove-ed" by Tetrimino. Built to Play is a product of CJRU in the heart of downtown Toronto. It was produced by Arman Aghbali and Daniel Rosen. If you like the show please subscribe and rate us online. It helps more people find the show and gives us an idea how we're doing.

Ep 105-106 - For this year's CJRU fund drive, we partnered with the station's gaming show, "Built to Play," to bring you "Crisis of Toxic Nerds," a two-part documentary investigating where the toxicity in geek culture comes from, and what we can do about it. In this part, BTP hosts Arman Aghbali and Daniel Rosen focus on toxic masculinity in gaming specifically. They talk to talk to Laine "Superphrenic" Yuhas about Dota 2, sexism and her organisation, Desoladies. Later, researcher Emma Vossen, an expert on gaming and gender, gives them a run down on what it means to be a gamer, and why that sucks for everyone. This episode was originally broadcast on CJRU 1280 AM in Toronto. BTP-specific funding awards are available here!

Phoenix Sims of Third Person Space joins us to talk about spec work, women in games, and politics. Plus, everything we actually liked from this year's show. Here's the games we might recommend you check out following this year's E3: Bravery Network* Cyberpunk 2077 Ghosts of Tsushima Beyond Good and Evil 2 Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Wolfenstein: The Young Blood Tunic* *Both of these are Canadian productions! Part of Beyond Good and Evil 2 will likely be made in Canada, but it's Ubisoft. Everything is made everywhere. Thanks to the Free Music Archive for "My Sound" by Drum Kid and "Button" by Chad Crouch. Plus, OCRemix for "Incognito" by DjjD and "Smash and Burn" by WillRock. Built to Play is a product of CJRU in the heart of downtown Toronto. It was produced by Arman Aghbali and Daniel Rosen. If you like the show please subscribe and rate us online. It helps more people find the show and gives us an idea how we're doing.

By suing two media organizations, Quantic Dream has done something unprecedented. When it comes to their work environment though, it's distressingly average -- with sexual misconduct, shady contracts, and a disregard for the rules. We talk to journalists and a critic who have dove deep into what makes Detroit Become Human tick. Mediapart Canard PC Le Monde Mashable's Detroit Become Human review Thanks to the Free Music Archive for "silent eyes," "building stories," " and "unexplored corridor" by 2 Mello, and "Dream," by Chan Wai Fat, "Button" by Chad Crouch and "Sono Tranquile" by Obsibilo. Built to Play is a product of CJRU in the heart of downtown Toronto. It was produced by Arman Aghbali and Daniel Rosen. If you like the show please subscribe and rate us online. It helps more people find the show and gives us an idea how we're doing. Feel free to comment down below.

This episode contains the following segments: Our understanding of history can change how we depict it, and who gets to play the hero. We look at Kingdom Come: Deliverance as a case study. We talk to David Perry and Reid McCarter. Here's Reid's original article in Unwinnable, and Geraldine Heng's book on race in medieval Europe. Daniel Rosen gives us a look into Yakuza 6, the new adventure of the affable criminal Kazuma Kiryu, and why he's loved exploring its version of Japan. Thanks to the Free Music Archive for "If(you>us)" and "Snooze" by Yaul, and "What Does Anybody Know About Anything," and "Out of the Skies, Under the Earth," by Chris Zabriskie, and "Holy Enough" by Steve Coombs. Also "過去の思い出" by Mewmore. Built to Play is a product of CJRU in the heart of downtown Toronto. It was produced by Arman Aghbali and Daniel Rosen. If you like the show please subscribe and rate us online. It helps more people find the show and gives us an idea how we're doing.

Daniel Rosen and Arman Aghbali, hosts of video game podcast Built to Play, take over #RFK this week to talk about webcomics with author Matt D. Wilson. Listen to RFK host BtP too! Originally aired on CJRU 1280 AM.

Subscribe (iTunes)Subscribe (Stitcher) It's an episode in which we finally stop talking about virtual reality and move on to weeks of playing with pals. We start with the end  of Gamercamp. Movie buffs visit film festivals. Bibliophiles browse books fairs. But game players charge into the convention. It's a practice hailing back from the olden times of the Star Trek conventions, to tech meetups in the early Silicon Valley and the mighty heights of the San Diego Comic Con. For the avid fan, there's multiple Penny Arcade Expos in the United States, Gamescom in Germany, and the Tokyo Game Show in Japan. These days there's so many that if you take a look in your own backyard, you'll probably find one. Big game conventions can feel exhausting though. You're fighting tens of thousands of people in a hall. Massive companies push their way towards you to showcase their newest games. And what if you're looking for local products, games made in your hometown, maybe an experiment or two? Every hub for game design has at least one little event for enthusiasts, like a party a few friends put together for their community. In Toronto, we hadGamercamp. The final day at Gamercamp after a long trivia night Outside the Ocho Hotel on Sunday night, which has hosted Gamercamp for the last two years. Jaime Woo settles in Sunday night after the Gamercamp wraps up and the Ocho Hotel kitchen closes Co-founded by Jaime Woo, Gamercamp was a games festival created mostly for the founder's curiosity. They heard Torontonians were making games and getting attention for it, but couldn't see the games anywhere.  So they made their own event. Their first year, it was just a series of talks in a small theatre on one day, and despite a rocky start they kept at it. Six years later, Gamercamp was the biggest festival of its kind in the city, including an arcade and multiple parties in a single weekend. Compared to even a medium-sized convention like IndieCade, Gamercamp is tiny. Yet, by any measure, it's been a success. Which is why the decision to close up shop came as a surprise to some,and upset a few others. We brought Jaime into the studio to talk about those early years and why he's decided to end Gamercamp. Tune in a minute into our show for more from Jaime. Special thanks to Jon Remedios who was not in the credits this week but deserves to be there. And Thanks to everyone who ran Gamercamp the last six years. It's been a blast.  After diving through another round of death threats, we round off with a final bout of scepticism about the future of virtual reality.  We've done a lot of talking about the wonders of VR, but we've been sceptical throughout. In every interview we've explored the limitations and the unforeseen complications. Virtual reality could very well be the future of video games and much more, but for now it's unproven beyond a certain subset of players. So what are the reasons to be sceptical? Let's not think of specific technical details. VR, not matter how you cut it is going to be expensive, and if not expensive, then it's going to be limiting. Moving in a 3D world is challenging just from a control standpoint. You can't see the controller with a headset on, meaning that people need to be familiar with the controls and the controller before they start playing, which isn't inviting to new players. Plus, you need high end hardware to run two screens inside the VR headset, especially as games become more graphics intensive. One way to smoothen these out is adding more peripherals and sensors, like a camera or markers on the wall, but that adds to the price. It also needs a large space for all of this equipment and for you to be doing anything except sitting or standing. There's another thing that VR needs: presence. Presence is when you are so engrossed in a virtual environment you forget you're in your living room. That's what all the major virtual reality headset manufacturers are competing for, but have yet to master. And without it, Tadhg Kelly believes we're still a while away from VR being a mainstream phenomenon. He's a game design consultant and earlier this year he wrote a column about "the death of VR", and so we thought it would be a good idea to talk to him as we wrap up.  **Listen to Tadhg Kelly discuss the idea of a "perfect" VR, why it's hard to achieve, and why 2015 will be the Year of Virtual Reality anyway starting about 38:50. ** Thanks to the Free Music Archive for music this week: "OLPC" by Marco Raaphorst, "may light remix by etc" by SHOMMOSE, "So this is how it ends" by Earsmack, "Love Theme" by Dave Merson Hess, "As Colorful as Ever" by Broke for Free, and "summer breeze let it out (johnny_ripper remix)" by smoking fox. Our theme tune was "japanese prog" by Rushus. On Freesound we used "convention crowd noise" by awesoman. Built to Play is a product of the Scope at Ryerson radio station in the heart of downtown Toronto. It was produced and edited by Arman Aghbali and written by Daniel Rosen. If you like the show please subscribe and rate us online. It helps more people find the show and gives us an idea how we're doing. Feel free to comment down below.  

Subscribe (iTunes)Subscribe (Stitcher) Built to Play dives back into virtual reality through Samsung's Gear VR and by visiting Toronto's VR hub. Almost a month ago, Samsung announced theGear VR, a small virtual reality headset. The idea is Oculus already uses Samsung phone screens for its display. In fact their current display is the exact same as the Galaxy Note 4. So why not just use the phone as the virtual reality headset? Plug it into the Gear VR, and BOOM, virtual reality on the go.  Turns out there's a bunch of reasons why not. Unless the attachment comes with an AC adapter or an extra battery, that phone is going to die within the hour. Not to mention, phone CPUs may be more powerful than ever, but they still pale in comparison to a PC. And that's without getting into the lack of positional tracking. But don't listen to us. We're a bunch of downers. Listen to E McNeill, better known as E to his friends, the designer of Darknet. He's been working on his virtual reality hacking game since the 2013 VR Jam competition, and will be launching it on Gear VR. He explains the advantages of the platform and dos and don'ts for working on early virtual reality games. **You can hear from him 50 seconds into our show. ** Then we visit Toronto's VR Meetup to talk to games designers, programmers and startup heads about the potential of virtual reality.  Daniel and Arman visited the centre of all virtual reality conversation in Toronto, the almost monthly gathering of enthusiasts in the city's downtown. Usually they meet at a local bar, but this time they visited Verold, a startup making tools for interactive 3D projects on the web. We caught up with our guest from two shows ago, Stephan Tanguay, who manages it. This session was all about the Oculus Connect, a developer's conference held in downtown Los Angeles. Alternating between keynotes from experts and parties at a Malibu beach house,  Connect was a celebration of Oculus' success and its transition from Kickstarter project to Facebook buyout. John Carmack, co-creator of Doom and chief technology officer at Oculus, gave a speech on the power of the Gear VR, speaking for an hour and a half before being booted off the stage.  So we chatted with Blair Renaud, the designer of the cyberpunk adventure game, Technolust about his trip to LA. We also went over his history in the game industry, from his time as a technical director at Rockstar working on the original Grand Theft Auto and how he got back into game design.  Plus, we talk withBernie Roehl, a programmer and lab instructor at the University of Waterloowho's worked on VR since at least the 90s. He goes through the early challenges of the tech and how far it's progressed. And the CEO of Verold, Ross McKegeny, sat down with us to talk about the ways virtual reality could be used for marketing and education. **To hear from all of these guys, about the Oculus Connect, the Crescent Bay prototype and more, tune it at the 33:00 for the second half of the show. ** The music from this week's episode came from the Free Music Archive. Our opening theme was "Air Hockey Saloon" by Chris Zabriskie. We also used "Spring Solstice" and "Belfast" by Podington Bear, "Hallon" by Christian Bjoerklund, "Family" by Johnny_ripper, "Detective" by Krowne and our end theme was "State Shirt" by Computer.  Thanks to Leadndros-ntounis at Freesound for "Crowd in a bar." This episode was written and produced by Daniel Rosen and Arman Aghbali. It was edited by Arman Aghbali. If you like Built to Play, be sure to recommend it. Reviews help the show like peanut butter helps jam. Feel free to comment and let us know your thoughts below. 

Subscribe (iTunes)Subscribe (Stitcher) On Built to Play, we put on a headset, strap on a pair of headphones, and talk about virtual reality in all its forms. UPDATE: Arman uploaded an unfinished version of the episode. A clean, fixed version has now been uploaded. We apologize for the mistake. Some people just can't stop thinking about virtual reality. Last week Oculus chief technology officer John Carmack (and the creator of DOOM) got on stage at the VR conference, Oculus Connect, and improvised a speech about the technology for more than an hour.Oculus Connect is also where the Facebook-owned tech firm revealed their newest, and presumably last, Oculus Rift prototype, Crescent Bay. With 3D audio and better motion tracking, it looks like this prototype is the closest we've come to confusing reality with the virtual. But Arman and Daniel are not these people. They don't have time to keep up with these people and their "headsets." They're far too busy playing the new Smash Bros. So they called up a local VR game developer, Stephan Tanguay, to explain the ins and outs of modern virtual reality. Stephan has been a fan of VR since at least mid-'80s. He watched the great outpouring of shoddy, ugly and straight-up misguided VR attempts get laughed out of the room. So when the Oculus Rift came out in 2012 as a developer's kit, Stephan was one of the first to use it. He's been waiting for a while to see a form of virtual reality that's easy to create games for, is affordable, and can fully immerse you in another world. But we may not be there quite yet. Virtual reality isn't like the Matrix. You aren't going to jack in and forget the real world exists. It's a headset that shows you a new environment and, as of right now, has some serious limitations. So far, the games work best if you're sitting down. The resolution is low, and the headset can't use Plus, you're tethered to a computer, so it's not like you can go for a walk.  Courtesy Wikimedia Stephan's optimistic that all of these kinks can be fixed in the next five to ten years. Until then, he'll continue developing games for the Oculus Rift. It may not be out to the general public quite yet, but when is, you can bet Stephan will be in line to get one. You can hear about the power of virtual reality and its current limitations starting 1:00. **Virtual reality isn't technology alone. Game sound and music have been drawing us to new worlds for almost a hundred years. ** Victorian arcade machines (which are totally real) would often play music to disguise that they were for gambling. The second video game ever made had sound effects. Music didn't come until later. Early game consoles didn't have the space on the cartridge to have sophisticated soundtracks and relied on the internal sound cards. PC games had a great range of sound years before consoles, but by the time of the Nintendo Entertainment System, consoles were catching up. A lot of people are willing to stop there. The Sega Genesis/Mega Drive and Super Nintendo were still limited to an electronic sound, but these were catchy tunes. People remember the Super Mario theme to this day. Talk toKaren Collins, and she'll remind you that music has gone a long way since the late '80s. We have orchestral scores, sound effects that rival films', and a form of composition unique to video games.  Courtesy Beep/Karen Collins Karen is the Canada Research Chair for Game Sound at the University of Waterloo. She has a letter from Prime Minister Stephen Harper to prove it. She's also working on a documentary about game sound, called BEEP, tracing its history from the 1890s to modern day. It can be a difficult task. Early composers weren't credited, and old games don't produce the same sounds in an emulator as they did on a console. To hear more about the documentary and the history of game sound, tune in 32:40 By definition, game music is made specifically for an interactive medium, which changes the way its composed and the way we hear the final product.  Courtesy Winifred Phillips After talking to Karen Collins, there's one question that stuck the heads of our producers. Game music can be just as interactive as the medium for which it's created. When you switch from a combat scene to a conversation the music changes with it. It doesn't make sense to have a bombastic score during a quiet character moment. So, what does that mean for game soundtracks? Like a movie score, a game's score is meant to compile the most important background themes in the production. That's not possible in a game, at least if you think of themes as a singular piece of music. In games, music composition can look more like a flowchart, diving in and out of scenes when necessary, and looping back when a scene lasts longer than the track itself. There's also linear music, which is closer to a winding score, but is still distinct. Linear music is music without a real beginning or end. It's music meant to loop, though it can have highs and lows within it. To learn more about the world of music composition we talked to composer Winifred Phillips. She's an award winning composer who got her start on God of War, but has since worked on Assassin's Creed III: Liberation, Little Big Planet 2, and a few licensed games. She's also the author of the book A Composer's Guide to Game Music, which explores the various ways a composer can approach an interactive medium.  Ryan Roth/Courtesy Dualryan Another thing you're going to miss in a game soundtrack is the holistic sound design. When the actual actions in the game mix in with the music sometimes it can create, as Ryan Roth puts it, "harmonic stuff." Ryan Roth, also known as Dualryan online, is a composer who directed the sound and music in the indie game, Starseed Pilgrim. He's also worked on Electronic Super Joy and the Yawhg. Ryan often attempts this approach to sound design, as he believes it creates a positive feedback loop, teaching and encouraging the player through sound.  So if you're going to miss out on a game's fluidity or harmony, what's the value of a soundtrack? Ryan thinks he has an answer. To find out what it is, jump to 41:00. OH GOD THERE IS SO MUCH MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE. The following music came from the free music archive. Our opening theme was "Sun Bum" by Monster Rally. We also used Alex Gross' "4AM Party" and "Space Stage" by L'homme Manete. Our ending theme was "Moving Boulder" by L'homme Manete. Plus, "Luke, a True Gentleman Prefers a Touch of Light Jazz," by Proto Dome on OCRemix. We used "Aveline's Escape" and "Society Suite" in 4 Movements" from the Assassin's Creed III: Liberation soundtrack, composed by Winifred Phillips.  We also used "an evergreen is forever green - until it dies, of course," from the Yawhg soundtrack by Ryan Roth and Halina Heron, and "Companeros" from the Grim Fandangosoundtrack, composed by Peter McConnell. We used samples of sound from Asteroids, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Sonic the Hedgehog, Sokobond, Starseed Pilgrim, and some space virtual reality game no one recognizes.  This episode was written by Daniel Rosen, edited by Arman Aghbali and produced by both. If you liked this episode, feel free to comment and please recommend it.

Subscribe (iTunes)Subscribe (Stiticher) This time on Built to Play, Daniel visited Xbox Canada and Arman discusses Canadian games and the great outdoors. The Built to Play staff doesn't make it outside often. Sure we can see the outside from the windows in our studio, but we rarely experience it. Just kidding. Our studio doesn't have windows. Anyway, Daniel actually left the studio to talk to play some upcoming Xbox One games, while Arman talked to game designers about why they liked the outside. For Arman, it's baby steps. At X14, Daniel played Sunset Overdrive, Fable Legends, The Evil Within, Mortal Kombat X and Alien: Isolation. Here's a couple samples of what he found: Sunset Overdrive: The problem mostly comes in when your weapon variety starts to show up. I had a flaming  gential-themed shotgun, a disc gun that fired vinyl records, and a massive hand cannon called the Dirty Harry. None of these guns really favoured the high speed, far away combat style that the grind-rails encouraged. The shotgun worked great for enemies nearby, and the hand cannon was perfect when I slowed myself down and focused on enemies, but otherwise, the disc gun’s bouncing records was the only weapon that worked at the high speeds the game wanted me to move at. Fable Legends: It’s unbelievably fluid, and part of that may have had to do with the fact that it was running on five networked machines, but god damn if it wasn’t impressive. The game doesn’t currently have a five player local option, which could be a problem moving forward, but apparently Lionhead is looking into smartglass support for the villain player.  The Evil Within: At one point, I walked down a hallway, and triggered a rope that dragged me into a closet full of spinning blades. I tried shooting at the blades to jam them, but of course, the game didn’t exactly highlight the tiny blinking light I was meant to shoot at until after I died. And then I lost about 20 minutes of progress.  Mortal Kombat X: This is a game where the aforementioned Cassie Cage (...) can kneecap her opponents, shoot them through the head, pull out some gum, chew it, stick it over the bullet hole, and watch as a blood soaked bubble pops out.  Alien: Isolation:  The sound of it approaching was enough to get my knees shaking, and the subtle cutaway when it catches you is probably a thousand times spookier than any gore-shot could have been. The Xenomorph runs around unscripted too, doing whatever its AI feels like, so there’s no way to rely on rote memorization. It’s all about your skill at tracking, avoiding, and using the incredibly limited toolset available to you.  Tune in about 50 seconds into the show to hear us chat about these games and _Assassin's Creed: Unity. _Plus we hear from Nitai Bessette, the level design director, of AC: Unity and Matt Grandstaff, the global community lead at Bethesda Softworks. Daniel also met two designers from Lionhead on the Fable Legends team, the game's directorDavid Eckelberry and the villain's designer, Lewis Brundish. **Or read the whole article here. ** The Long Dark - Dawn The Long Dark - Sunset Kona - The Letter Kona - The Station Kris Krug - Roche Point, North Vancouver, British Columbia Northern Pix - Rankin Inlet, Nunavut, Canada For the staff at Built to Play, Canada is probably our favourite place to be. We have free healthcare, moose, and poutine. It's great, and a lot of game designers would agree with us. As we've repeated multiple times on the show, Canada is the third largest centre for game development in the world, right behind the United States and Japan. Which is why it feels odd when we can call so few of those games "Canadian." Games like Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Mass Effect, and Assassin's Creed are all games made in Canada, but you wouldn't know that from looking at it or playing it or talking to the developers. To be fair to the first two, Mass Effect and Deus Ex both have had levels set in Canada (Vancouver and Montreal respectively), but Assassin's Creed, even when Ubisoft Montreal leads development, never feels like it belongs here.  The weirdest game in the series has to be Assassin's Creed III. This open world assassination game set in the American Revolution was partially planned by Ubisoft, a French company, led by Ubisoft Montreal, a Canadian company, with parts built all over the world. It's clearly about the American Revolution, but it's not made by all that many Americans and while they doubtless did their research, the game feels culturally nomadic. It has very few traces of authorship. No one person built this game and there's no one vision guiding it. So it's not Canadian, but I'd argue it's not very American either. It's a multinational project undertaken by one of the largest game publishers in the world, Ubisoft.  The majority of development studios in Canada are owned by larger publishers, like EA, Square Enix, or Microsoft, none of which care very much about where these games are physically made so long as Americans buy them. So the majority of Canada's big budget games don't feel very Canadian.  Alexandre Fiset felt this weirdness while he was at Beenox, a studio based in Quebec City that's owned by Activision. Beenox makes games starring Spider-Man, sometimes based on the ongoing film series. Fiset wasn't satisfied working on a Marvel hero living in a fantasy New York, so he left the company to start Parabole Games. Parabole recently completed a kickstarter for the game Kona, an episodic series about a supernatural mystery in northern Quebec. Fiset wasn't alone in thinking about his game as a cultural product either. Raphael van Lierop, founder of Hinterland Studios and designer of the Long Dark, has been thinking about game design as a way to make something local. The Long Darktakes place near the mountains of British Columbia, far north of where van Lierop lives on Vancouver Island. It's a survival game based in the rough Canadian wilderness. That's a little odd in itself. Two designers wanted to put a bit of local flavour into their games, and both of them based their in the wild. The conception of Canada as this vast land of forest and tundra seems almost like a stereotype. But, as they'll both argue, Canada looks more like that stereotype than Canadians like to admit.  Fiset and van Lierop discuss Canada, the garrison mentality, and why cultural diversity is important for all games, not just Canadian ones. You can hear from them starting 38:45 The Long Dark's survival mode is now available on Steam Early Access. Kona's first episode will be released in April 2015. You can play the demo here. Once again thanks to the Free Music Archive for access to great bands like Podington Bear. In our Xbox One preview section, we used the following tracks from that band: "Nature Kid", "Moondots and Polkabeams", "Lake Victoria" and "Belfast". We also used "Hedge Schools" by Peter DiPhillips.  For the rest of the show we used the following songs from the Free Music Archive: "Wanna see my Spaceship" by Beatoven,"Run to Canada" by Min-Y-Lian, "Detective" by Krowne, "Photosphere" by Charles Atlas, and "Blind Eyes" by Everlone. We used sound effects from Destiny.  This episode was written by Daniel Rosen and edited by Arman Aghbali.  If you liked this episode leave us a comment, review or subscribe. Thanks for listening!  

Subscribe (iTunes)Subscribe (Stitcher) In what has to be the longest coherent rant they've ever put to audio, Dan and Arman discuss the ongoing harassment in the video game community.  One of the first pieces I ever wrote for Built to Play was the style guide. On the podcast, and in the articles, we should limit our  use of the word gamer. We agreed to that rule because it's not a word that makes a lot of sense.  Not everyone who plays video games is a gamer, just like not everyone who watches movies is a film buff. Now it's unusable, even in the strictest sense.  Since 'real gamers' began attacking Zoe Quinn for supposed ethical infractions or Anita Sarkeesian for inserting politics into innocent games, the term has become toxic. They've released pounds of personal information online, scared women out from their homes and riddled their social media with death threats. Let's not dance around it. These attacks have been misogynistic, largely targeted towards women who don't fixate on shooters and Nintendo nostalgia. Some people use Quinn's activities to say all games journalism is corrupt. HASHTAGGAMERGATE! But that fundamentally misunderstands what games writing is. Most articles on sites like Gamespot and Polygon commentate and criticise. Think game reviews or big convention coverage. On the few occasions where they engage in journalism, often it's redistributing content. Here's a trailer a publisher gave us. I found this neat thing on the Internet. That's not a fault of the websites, that's just the job. The games industry is insular and secretive, so there are few opportunities to do professional reporting. That's true with a lot of enthusiast press, like in comics, music or movies, but especially so in games. The old adage is that anyone can be a journalist. Just point a camera out your window. You have to call someone to be a reporter. When there's no one to call, however, there's not much you can do. Sites like Polygon, USGamer and Kill Screen still go out of their way to make great articles about game development and the video game community, although few people read them. That's true of all media by the way. The Washington Post's biggest story in 2013 wasn't the Edward Snowden scandal. It was a collection of pictures of a busted Sochi bathroom. All of this is to say that people who accuse games journalism of being corrupt are missing the point. I hesitate to call anything written on this site journalism. It's definitely not reporting. We're still honest when it comes to our opinions, as I expect most in the industry are. Enthusiast  writing serves a different purpose than conventional reporting. They disseminate product information and evaluate media.  That lack of diversity is why scaring away strong writers who go beyond that, like Jenn Frank and Mattie Brice, helps no one. They were among the few people who went beyond criticism to question the games they played and the people who made them. 'Real gamers' encourage bias in the industry by making the pool of commentators smaller and the voices less varied. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons I also challenge gamers on whether they are the equivalent of music, television or film enthusiasts. Outside of video games, enthusiasts seem to recognize that their medium of choice is a broad spectrum of content, made for many audiences. Some genres might be dismissed off-hand, like the romantic comedy or pop music, but even then good versions of these make it through to critical appeal. A lot of music fans acknowledged that 'Call Me Maybe' by Carly Rae Jepsen was fun and an enjoyable piece of music ephemera. Or that while 500 Days of Summer has its problems, the film tries to take the romantic comedy in a new direction. Being a fan of a medium entails a willingness to dive into its depths and explore all possible permutations of it. It doesn't mean tripping head first into the shallow end to wallow in its most obvious features. If you enjoy  big budget games, go ahead. No one can take that away from you. There are plenty of games made by big publishers that are genuinely great, but no game is perfect. Wolfenstein: The New Order has to be one of my favourite games of the year. It also has some groan-worthy dialogue and has terrible enemy artificial intelligence. Every game merits criticism, from indies to those old Nintendo titles. People who have such a narrow definition of games need grow up. More people have launched an Angry Bird than have made Mario jump. More adult women play games than teenage boys. Those blockbuster franchises won't vanish any time soon, but as video games become more popular, players have be more accommodating to more kinds of people and more kind of games. There is no sense in attacking people who are trying to make games like Depression Quest, because that's only going to become more prevalent, not less. So if gamers are people who like the most bland of the bland, and feel justified in ruining people's lives on behalf of a fool's errand, I don't want to be associated with them. Call me a game player. Call me an enthusiast. But please, I'm not a gamer. Gamers are about as self-absorbed as men's rights advocates, who can only conceive of the world in childish black and white dichotomies. I'm embarrassed to have needed to write this rant. Games are supposed to be enjoyable. Ideally, when coming away from a great game, we should feel enriched. A well-crafted game can engender joy, sadness, hope and occasionally fun.  All this does is make me feel disappointed in all of us. Games, and the people who play them, are capable of so much more. Thanks to writer and community manager Emma Woolley who talked to us about her article on the topic on the Globe and Mail.Note, she didn't play any part in this rant beyond what you hear in her interview. Take a listen for yourself starting 1:30. She comes off sounding far more optimistic than either Daniel or I feel right now. We used music from the Free Music Archive: "Photosphere" by Charles Atlas and "Lost Radio Station Sings Me Up the Tunnel" by Fields of Ohio. Our opening theme was "The Libra Lunologists" by Fields of Ohio.  **This episode was written by Daniel Rosen and produced by Arman Aghbali. ** IF YOU ENJOYED THIS EPISODE LEAVE US A COMMENT OR SUBSCRIBE. Think before you post, please.

Subscribe (iTunes)Subscribe (Stitcher) Built to Play explores new Nintendo games, the tricky world of Dota 2 and why we keep seeing the words "You Died" when we close our eyes. Daniel and Arman visited Nintendo of Canada to play upcoming titles like Mario Maker, Bayonetta 2 and Yoshi's Wooly World. But when it comes to Super Smash Bros. the two land on a bit of a competitive streak. Take a listen to hear more about the relative nudity of Pokemon, Toad's Batman voice, and genius robot design. If you want more in-depth coverage of these Nintendo games check out Daniel's write up from a few weeks back.  You can hear us squabble over whether Bayonetta 2 is better than Smash Bros and if Goku is the greatest fighter of all time starting 1:06. Daniel finishes his masterpiece in Mario Maker, the Mario platformer level designer coming to the Wii U. Mobile online battle arena games like League of Legends are easily the most popular games on the planet, so we decided take a look into the fast-growing esport. Also known as MOBAs, games like League of Legends and Dota 2 are becoming a force in esports. The fourth annual Dota 2 championships back in July crowd-funded a $10.6 million prize pool, a bigger prize than the Super Bowl. Twenty million people watched the tournament, with as many as two million watching at the same time. League of Legends is still the most popular game in the genre, filling the Staples Centre in Los Angeles during its last tournament, but Dota 2 outranks it for the sheer amount of money on the table. So it should be of no surprise that people are trying to start businesses around the two games. In Toronto you could find viewing parties at bars or in movie theatres. Shane Perron ofeSport Gaming Events hosted a viewing party  of the Dota 2 championships in one of the city's oldest theatres, the Regent. Entry was $15 for a full day of sports spectating. They host events like this for a lot of different games, including League, Dota and once upon a time Starcraft 2. According to Shane, viewing parties are a great alternative to building their own tournaments since they're expensive and take a lot of preparation. The International, Dota 2's world championships, viewing party held at the Regent. Courtesy eSports Gaming Events There's just two big problems. Many video game players don't like paying to watch an event they could watch on their laptops, and on top of that, MOBAs are complicated. They're daunting to approach, and the rules are arcane. It's hard to describe a given match of Dota to someone who's never played it. Our best attempt is a single character strategy game played with a team, like a chess team in a forest. That doesn't get into the grit of how the dozens of characters work, however, and their unique roles in these games. Shane says that hosting events like this can be sustainable, though it will take time. Hear him describe the viewing party they hosted at the Regent, why he's spent more than a 100 hours in Dota 2 and the challenges facing eSports Gaming Events starting 36:00. Meanwhile, a game's sounds can hang around long after we finish playing, according to a new study from Nottingham Trent University. Courtesy Cebula Means Onion Many players have made the mistake of playing games for too long. Say by accident you stayed up all night to beat a boss in Dark Souls, and wound up seeing the words "You Died" and hearing that evaporation sound over and over again. That's never happened to Daniel or Arman, considering they're absolute masters of that game, but for hypothetical sakes, let's all imagine. You turn off the game, head to bed, and right as you close your eyes, you hear the sound of your soul leaving your body.  This strange phenomenon of lingering game sounds has been studied by the International Gaming Unit at Nottingham Trent University. Everything from the bloop of a portal opening to the ding when you collect a coins can hang around after gameplay, usually after a considerably long playtime. Sometimes it's music. Sometimes it's bullets. It's hard to say what triggers these sounds but they can seem like they're coming from outside of the body, reasonably freaking some people out. Even more bizarre is that it's not just audio. Visuals can stick around as well, not to mention behaviours based on game logic. It's all part of a group of effects known as game transfer phenomena or GTP. Angelica Ortiz de Gortari is a psychologist and doctoral researcher studying GTP, who explains the sheer variety of lingering noises, images and behaviours.  You can hear her describe her own experience with GTP, why the effects are mostly harmless, and why regardless it's important to study starting 47:00. We used a ton of music this week from the Free Music Archive, so to everyone on this list, thanks for providing your music in creative commons. In our Nintendo segment, we used "Blanks," "Moondots and Polkabeams," and "Hundy Mil Tight" by Podington Bear. "Night Owl" by Broke for Free is our opening theme. "Hallon" by Christian Bjoerklund, "eeeoooww" by junior85, "Nana Veloz" by Crisopa, and "Sun Bum" by Monster Rally all play during our interviews. We used sound from various Nintendo games, the International 4 novice stream, the CBC, Super Mario Bros, Sonic the Hedgehog, Silent Hill 2, Resident Evil 5. Special thanks to Mark Asfar for filling in for the news on short notice. Daniel Rosen will be back next episode with a vengeance. This episode was written and edited by Arman Aghbali.  If you enjoyed this episode be sure to leave us a comment or subscribe!

Built to Play is amping up the disappointment, as we take on failure. That's a failure to play and a failure to learn, starting with why play video games in the first place.  From Takeshi's Challenge. We suck at video games, as a species. Yes, some of us are amazing at Street Fighter, and that Chinese team won five million dollars in Dota 2, but on average most of us lose more than we succeed. In Call of Duty, you likely failed more levels than you won. In Super Meat Boy, people come close to throwing their controllers across the room in frustration. Rage-quitting is a word most players recognize and have experienced. So why do we play? Download here. Subscribe on iTunes.Subscribe on Stitcher. Jesper Juul, author of the Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games, says that it comes down enjoying the game's basis, while being able to dismiss it. It's just a game after all. But that's not entirely true either. If people really didn't care about video games, he explains, they wouldn't groan when they lose, or throw the controller across the room after a bad run in Dark Souls. To some extent we want to know that we might lose in a game, if only to prove that we're better than it. It's a matter of how much failure we're willing to take. Jesper tells us all about being a sore loser in Starcraft, why the New York Post thinks soccer is a dumb sport, and how games rarely ask us to fail. Starts at 26:30. Courtesy Actual Sunlight We may lose a lot in video games, but video games rarely give us a good reason to fail.  Screwing up in a video game feels like a glitch in the process. Mario saves the princess, even if you jumped into that Goomba, or fell off the cliff. BJ Blazkowicz blows up Hitler in Wolfenstein, regardless if a Nazi shoots you five minutes into the game. The player messed up. The character saves the day. Sometimes, there are exceptions. In Shadow of the Colossus, the hero's victory turns out to be for nought, and he turns out to be the true monster. But pyrrhic victories are few and far between, and outright failures are awkward to create. When the player beats the bad guy, only to discover the world's still ending, it rarely feels right.  But that's not to say people haven't tried. _Actual Sunlight_is about Evan Winters, a 30-ish year old man working in communications. Evan has depression, and continually makes terrible choices. He can't help himself a lot of the time, and ends up stuck in a rut. In Actual Sunlight, you're forced to encounter his decisions, and then succumb to his inability to correct his own mistakes. Evan is in many ways, a failure. Actual Sunlight's designer, Will O'Neill, joins us to talk about how games treat characters who are stuck in their ways, and aren't world-saving heroes.  Will tells us about Actual Sunlight's expression of realism, his own experience with loss and depression, and why there's still hope underneath it all. Check in 40:20. **Actual Sunlight is available on Steam and on its website. ** Cardinal Rule restaurant in Parkdale, Toronto back in 2012. But the future isn't so dim, so long as you're not producer Arman Aghbali at Trivia Night. Our producer is terrible at trivia. He confuses Dirty Dancing with Footloose. He thought the West Wing was about a hospital. He knows David Bowie as the cool science guy from The Prestige. So he went to meet up with some experts, and watched them nearly lose the whole game. But some golden VHS tapes are just worth fighting for. Russel Harder hosts a feisty game of trivia at Toronto's Cardinal Rule every Wednesday night, and the Cunning Stunts were on a winning streak when Arman dropped in. **This short doc was made back in February for a Ryerson University documentary course. It's still fun and about games, so we thought we'd share it with you. Join in the trivia starting 52:00. ** his week we used music from the Free Music Archive, including "Spring Solstice" by Podington Bear, "Pause for a Side Change," by L'homme Manete, "Everything is Broken or Not" by Bleak House, "The Beach, The Beach" by Holy Ghost, "Detective" by Krowne, and "The Wrong Way" by Jahzzar. Our opening theme was "Halluzination" by Tozo. Games used: Super Meat Boy, Red Dead Redemption, Actual Sunlight, and Russel Harder's Authentic Trivia. Header Image fromBago Games, the "Atari: Game Over" Documentary Trailer. The show was written by Daniel Rosen and produced and edited by Arman Aghbali.  Special thanks to Jesper Juul, Will O'Neill, Russell Harder and the Cunning Stunts.  **If you have any comments, criticism or impressions, let us know.  We'd love to hear your opinions on the show, plus any reviews on iTunes or Stitcher or written in the sky by a biplane help more people find the show. **

Today on the Trivia Club podcast our host Russel Harder does a passable (to him, at least) impersonation of Ira Glass (with a lot of love and respect) to introduce a short radio doc courtesy of Arman Aghbali, a Ryerson journalism student who stopped by Trivia Club @ Cardinal Rule on January 29th, 2014. Enjoy a four-minute look inside of a two and a half hour long event at Trivia Club, sitting beside then 10x Golden VHS winners, The Cunning Stunts! Yes, the intro and outro may be tongue-in-cheek, but the journalism is very real. Keeping you up to date on Toronto's premiere trivia game show, the Trivia Club podcast is hosted by Russel Harder (not Ira Glass). Not only is Trivia Club a podcast that will tease the mind, it's also an interview podcast, a conversational podcast, a review podcast... and a life podcast.

Our last episode had no news because this episode has all of the news. Join us as we talk about the fates, fortunes and foibles of the everyone from the province of Quebec to Nintendo's shareholders.  First up,Majesco did a reverse stock split, raising their stock price back to $2.56 from between 0.50-0.60 during the last few months. Masjeco is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange which requires a minimum of a $1 value per share, and so the company needed a maneuver that would raise the price before they became a penny stock.   Download Here.Subscribe on iTunes.Subscribe on Stitcher. By using a reverse stock split, Majesco essentially reduced the total number of shares available, raising the market price, but lowering the number of potential investors. Despite all the good the company has been doing with the Midnight City publishing arm, it's been losing money for quite a while. So we explain why it might be smarter to leave the stock market entirely.* Then in Finland, we assume that Hearthstone is a full-contact competitive sport. Otherwise the recent ruling from the Finnish Assembly, which filters players into the International eSports Federation world championships, that women and men had to compete in separate tournaments would be complete nonsense and sexist. While most know Hearthstone as the Blizzard trading card game where you buy fake cards, slide them on a touchscreen or with a mouse, and take your time to contemplate your next Magic the Gathering cosplay, in Finland it must something entirely different. We're guessing it's like lacrosse but with more fire.  Meanwhile, the province of Quebec has lowered the amount of tax credits available to video game companies.In the June 4 budget, the Liberal government decided to cut the tax credits by 20 per cent. Major studios like WB and Ubisoft are safe until 2019 because of agreements made with prior governments. We talk about how that might impact future jobs and why moving to Toronto so we can be best friends is your best move. At the same time, Nintendo's having a crisis of its own, as its shareholders seem to fundamentally misunderstand the company's brand and structure. Thanks to an underperforming Wii U and three years without profit, Nintendo's stock has been shrinking. Which has unsurprisingly made a few shareholders angry, asking questions like: Can the 3DS be twice as big and focus on gambling? Can I have some free stuff? Why are we even talking about video games? Lastly we revisit the world of eSports. We speculate on how to watch the Dota 2 world championships, The International. On a computer is the main consensus. We also do some speculation about the outcome of Evo. What none of could have predicted is the series of come from behind victories that actually ensued. Louffy won the Ultra Street Fighter IV tournament, well ahead of our best bet, Diago. Justin Wong didn't win the Killer Instinct tournament like we expected, but instead beat Chris G in an amazing underdog victory to defeat the long raining champ. Mango won the Super Smash Bros Melee. tournament, which seems expected for a game about random characters punching each other with motorcycles.  We also talk about our crippling addiction toHashteroids, Sony'sPS Now rental prices, a mysterious rich patron on Twitch,  andMighty No. 9's new crowdfunding campaign. And more on this news only Built to Play.  Our opening this week was the usual one: "Big Change" by Slave to the Squarewave from the Ontario Independent Music Archive. The Header image on this page is from Shoryuken.com.Check out their coverage of Evo everyone. Built to Play was written by Daniel Rosen and edited by Arman Aghbali. If you enjoyed this two-parter, let us know! We're experimenting with the format so it's always good to get criticism. _*Built to Play is not an authorised stockbroker. Do not take any financial advice given to you by fans of Ryse, or other games that replace "i" with "y." _

Built to Play sacrifices the news for another day! We're talking to our guests about Phoenix Wright, ZZT, and the future of E3. If you played something Japanese in the 2000s, chances are Alexander O. Smith translated it. Alex has translated everything from the Final Fantasy series, the novel All You Need is Kill, and the Dr. Slump manga. But here at Built to Play, there's really only one game in his long portfolio that matters: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. The game is a visual novel from Capcom and stars Phoenix Wright, a down on his luck lawyer living in Los Angeles, who has to solve all of his cases in only three days. It's a charming and often funny game that relies on its stellar translation, which is far from literal. Download Here. Subscribe on iTunes. Subscribe on Stitcher Radio.  While the translation stays true to the tone and the overall plot, the dialogue can be completely different. And it kind of has to be. The names are Japanese puns and the dialogue is filled with references to Japanese society. The punchlines often don't make a lick of sense in English. So Alex had a lot of room to write his own jokes, and play with the characters.  Though by changing so much, you often run into issues down the line. Gyakuten Saiban, the japanese name of the series, is set in Tokyo, which causes the brunt of the inconsistencies. A hamburger shop mentioned in the early games has to reappear as a noodle stand later on. That's a small issue, but consider that the designers recently decided that the newest game would star Phoenix's direct ancestor, a samurai living in late 19th century Japan.  **You can hear more from Alexander O. Smith's translation process, the definition of a perfect localization and how Phoenix Wright was almost Roger Wright,  less than a minute into the episode. ** Back in good old North America, we talked to the author of the new book in the Boss Fight Series, ZZT. Anna Anthropy tells us about the history of an internet community and its diversity.  1991's ZZT is a weird game to talk about. It's an adventure game built from ANSI characters, all numbers, letters and symbols. It had a limited color palette, and even more limited story. But that's not that part of ZZT people remember the most. ZZT attracted a large community because it came with a level editor and a simple programming language that let you make your own games out of the ZZT engine. These games would then be shared online on message boards and forums, and covered a wide variety of genres and topics. People continue to make ZZT games to this day, and the most recent copy  of ZZT was ordered from its creator, Tim Sweeney, back in 2013. Anna Anthropy writes about that community and how it inspired her own growth as a designer and a writer. She met people who had the same concerns as her, and just like her, were trans. She says it's like a predecessor to the feminist-minded Twine community, which encourages everyone of every creed to make games.  But ZZT attracted all sorts of people, from teenagers trying to discover their own identity to trolls who attacked other creators. So talking about people who make ZZT game can get a little complicated.  Anna Anthropy tells us all about the history of ZZT, why it matters, and reasons why you should check out ZZT games today starting at 17:00. By the way, Anna gave us a couple recommendations that didn't make it into the episode, but here's a few: Ned the Knight, Kudzu, and Eli's House. For more, she has a whole list of great ZZT games to play onher website. You can pick up her book at Boss Fight Series page.  Last month, no one could stop talking about E3, but that's not necessarily a good thing. Many have questioned whether E3 is lessening in importance, or if its actually bad for the industry as a whole.  We've had 20 Electronic Entertainment Expos since its start, and whether they've been in Las Vegas, Santa Monica or Los Angeles, it's almost always been one of the most anticipated game-related events of the year. But its relevance seems to be changing as the years go by. Most publishers had nothing concrete to announce at E3. Electronic Arts barely had games to show beyond the concept level. The two big press conferences, Sony's and Microsoft's, were milquetoast, especially as they announced the big new games of two years from now. Meanwhile Nintendo didn't have a press conference. They broadcasted Robot Chicken jokes and two new franchises over the internet.  So to check its value, we checked in with Daniel Kaszor, the editor of the Post Arcade at one of Canada's largest newspapers, the National Post. According to him, E3 probably won't be going anywhere, but with fewer big budget games coming out each year, the demographics are shifting. E3 isn't even the biggest show of its kind anymore. That would be Gamescom in Germany, where the public days attract hundreds of thousands. The E3 of five years from now might look very different from how we know it today. Daniel tells us about the Post Arcade's coverage of E3, and whether E3 is even all that beneficial to big publications starting 32:40. You can find the Post Arcade here. We also ran a short rerun of our interview with Nadine Lessio and Kara Stone from the Vector Game Arts Festival back in March. The game they talked about, Sext Adventure, is now out and available to everyone who wants to try it. What did we think about it: "As part of the Feb Fatale game jam, a 48-hour race to finish a game, they created a text adventure based on sexy phone texts. You contact an anonymous android who attempts to satisfy humans sexually, but instead lapses into existential depression. Our sex-positive reporter, Daniel Rosen, dug deep into the jam game, and discussed with Stone and Lessio society's intimate relationship with technology, the eventual disharmony routed in cyborg theory and dildos."  The tomfoolery starts around 44:40.   This week's music comes from the Pheonix Wright: Ace Attorney soundtrack and the Free Music Archive. From the former, we used the song, "Pressing Pursuit -  Cornered Witness." From the Free Music Archive, we used "As Colorful as Ever" by Broke for Free, "Blue" by Podington Bear, "Hallon" by Christian Bjoerklund. **Special thanks to Josh Rosenberg who played Phoenix Wright, and Alexander O Smith who said Objection that one time. Capcom please don't sue us.  ** **As always, this weeks episode was produced and edited by Arman Aghbali and written by Daniel Rosen. **

We venture into the history of the beloved Super Nintendo role playing game, EarthBound and the whole Mother series in North America.  As part of our localization month, we're going to recount the history of EarthBound' release in North America. That means we're going to look at everything from EarthBound Zero to the fan translation of Mother 3. But first, what's an EarthBound? Download Here. Subscribe on iTunes. Subscribe on Stitcher. You play as a kid from the suburbs, Ness. Ness lives in Eagleland, and recently an alien crash landed near his house. At the crash site, a bee from the future tells Ness that ten years from now the world sucks, but Ness can change that. He can travel across Eagleland, to the big cities and defeat the evil alien Gygas. The world was definitely not our own, but the monsters were street punks, and to save you had to call your dad. Originally released in 1995, game designer Shigesato Itoi wrote the game to be a bit of an oddity. There were no empires to defeat, like in Final Fantasy. And there was no great wizard to find, like in Dragon Quest. You were just a kid with a bat who wanted to make a few friends and occasionally got homesick.  So you'd think the game would be this great success, like those games were. Well, not really. For that we talked to Jeff Benson.  Jeff is working on a documentary about EarthBound called EarthBound USA.Jeff grew up with the game. He played it alongside his father and his brother, and even made an embarrassing home movieabout it. But Jeff's family was only one of a few who picked that game up. According to Jeff, both the marketing and the price seemed to push people away. For instance, the tagline was "This game STINKS," and all the advertising was based around that one line.  Nintendo of America probably didn't think this one through. Throw 'em a bone. It was the 90s. EarthBound, at $60, was also a little expensive for the time. Nintendo included the strategy guide in the box, which made the box bigger, and $10 more than the average SNES game. It didn't help that they used scratch and sniff cards that reeked of gym socks to draw kids to stores.  That didn't stop the people who did pick it up from forming a community around it at Starmen.net. Jeff eventually became part of that community, and over time grew so fascinated he's working on a full length documentary all about it. He talks about the game, the marketing campaign, and why he made a terrible home movie about it starting 28:00. Before EarthBound there was one other game, Mother, also known as EarthBound Zero, that sat dormant for years.  A prototype cartridge of the original Earth Bound. Courtesy EarthBound Central EarthBound wasn't the first time Nintendo tried to bring over Shigesato Itoi's work from Japan. They'd tried before with Mother, the first game in the series. Mother was Itoi's first major RPG and was a minor sensation in Japan. Partially it's because Itoi wrote really catchy advertising copy. In the 80s, Japanese people quoted his ads like they would a pop song. It was also the first role playing game to not focus on swords and sorcery for the Famicom game console. But the game never made it over to North America, despite Nintendo having essentially finished localizing it. It would have been released on the Nintendo Entertainment System, but with the SNES less than a year away, they didn't have time to market it. So it sat in someone's drawer for four years. Steve Demeter, better known as Demiforce, is a fan translator who got his hands on a copy of a late prototype of Mother, then called Earth Bound (note the space in the middle). A few prototypes had escaped from Nintendo, and ended up in his lap. That version only needed a some light editing, so in 1998 he copied the game off the cartridge and fixed it up. Then it was just a matter of uploading it to the internet for people to see as EarthBound Zero. To hear more about how he found one of four known copies of Earth Bound, and why he dumped it online, tune in around 35:00. Games don't usually pop out of aether, fully translated, especially text heavy games like RPGs. Someone has to spend hours translating and editing together the dialogue.  For plain old EarthBound, Marcus Lindblom had that job. In 1995, Marcus was a software analyst in Nintendo's game group. Software analyst is a fancy name that meant he worked on the localization team for a couple games. These games didn't require much text outside of the menus. Games like Wario's Woods don't really provide much opportunity for creativity. So when they suggested he work on the localization of Mother 2, Marcus leaped at the chance. Here was a 10 hour long game that needed new jokes and new dialogue.  Marcus teamed up with an ex-Ape employee, Masayuki Miura. Miura translated the game line by line, then handed it over to Marcus who'd make each line more palatable to an English speaking audience. Together they created a memorable translation that referenced the Beatles and included lines like "Aiiiiiie, I screamed 'cause I didn't know what to do." Courtesy  KurkoBoltsi on DeviantArt But Marcus picked an awkward time to get into localization. There were no tools to make the translation process simpler. Miura would read out each line and Marcus would offer an edited version. Then Miura would copy that into the code. For a while, they didn't have a functional version of the game to see the context either. As for the length offering creativity, turns out 10 hour games take a long time to translate. By the time Marcus had the job, 10 per cent of the work was already done. Nintendo wanted the project done before June, however, and with most of the dialogue unfinished and items unnamed, he needed to work about 14 hours a day. Marcus took one day off in February for the birth of his daughter, and then worked for the next few weeks non-stop. When they wrapped it all up, Miura printed out the script for Marcus to read over. Page laid on top of page, it was about six inches high. And then in June, the game flopped. There was that misguided ad campaign, and EarthBound didn't review well. It was the 90s, and EarthBound's cheery tone didn't sit well with a lot of critics. In a few months the Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn would be in stores. Who wanted to play an rpg on their SNES with new consoles on the way? Marcus didn't really talk about EarthBound for the next 10 years. To hear what happened next, tune in around 38:45. Years passed before anyone heard about another EarthBound game coming to North America, but once a new game existed, people were ready to do anything to see more. For a long time, that seemed like it would be the end of the  Mother series. It didn't sell well. Nintendo cancelled Earthbound 64, the sequel for the Nintendo 64 Disk Drive. Fans had gathered on Starmen.net but there wasn't much to do. They petitioned Nintendo to continue on with the N64 game but the disk drive was another Nintendo peripheral that just didn't sell. Then in 2006, Mother 3 landed on the Game Boy Advance, Nintendo's handheld gaming platform. Fans cheered for it to be released across the pacific, but it was too late. Like EarthBound Zero (and EarthBound to a lesser extent) it came out at the end of the platform's life. The new system, the Nintendo DS, had been out for two years already. Who was going to buy a GBA game in 2006? Jeff Erbrecht would. Jeff, known online as JeffMan, found someone in a forum willing to share a copy of Mother 3. It was the day before that game was supposed to come out in Japan, but the ROM was real. Jeff immediately set out to translate the game and so that people could play it. The main problem was that he was in tenth grade in an Ontario high school, and didn't know much Japanese. So he teamed up with a few friends online who knew a little more, and became their main programmer.  Clyde Mandelin had the same idea, except he was a professional translator during his day job. He translated anime for Funimation, like Gunslinger Guns. Clyde loved EarthBound and helped to build the community around it on Starmen.net, where he was known as Tomato. He built his own group, bringing together a who's who of fan translators, like Steve Demeter. Jeff's group eventually fell apart due to some laziness and bad blood, so he joinedClyde's. He again settled in as the programmer, and every night, after he finished his homework, he'd work on bringing to life the last game in the Mother series. It took them three years to finish it, but along the way the Mother 3 translation brought in tons of new fans and a new respect for the series. Or you can hear them tell it starting 50:50. Courtesy the CAPS LORD. This week's music came from the OC Remix, the Free Music Archive, and the Earthbound OST. From OC Remix we used: "Twoson Hits the Road" by djpretzel, "The Great Blizzard of '9X" by halc and "Practicing Retrocognition" by sci. From the Free Music Archive we used: Luca La Morgia's "Money Talks," Charles Atlas' "Photosphere," and Candlegravity's "Always." From the EarthBound OST we used: "Sunrise & Onett Theme" and "Buzz Buzz Prophecy." Our opening theme was special! We used "Lonely Summer" by Super Flower from the Free Music Archive. As always, this episode was written by Arman Aghbali and Daniel Rosen, and edited by Arman.  You can find everything mentioned above at Starmen.net, and another incredibly valuable resource, EarthBound Central.  Our header image was from KurkoBoltsi on DeviantArt. His fan art about the Mother series is incredible. Everyone check it out. If you have any questions about the show, want to comment or critique us, comment below or send us an email to mail@builttoplay.ca. If you've heard your music used inappropriately on our show, be sure to send us an email. 

As we enter a new theme month, we're talking about translation. That's translating languages and translating mediums.  Colin Williamson joined us from Seattle to discuss the process of localization. Colin used to work for Square Enix as a localization expert back in the mid-2000s, and helped retranslate some of the oldest Final Fantasy games, even going back and correcting the work of industry legend, Ted Woolsey. Download Here. Subscribe on iTunes. Subscribe on Stitcher. Woolsey's work was flawed, though not for a lack of style. He did the translations largely on his own, couldn't communicate often with the design team, and had crazy deadlines to finish them. Colin meanwhile worked in a team, not too far from where the actual designers worked, and he started the translations while the game was still under development. Those circumstances also helped him codify all the language currently used in Final Fantasy games, like "Phoenix Down" over "Phoenix Feather." A lot has changed since Woolsey worked for Square, and Colin tells us all about it, starting 21:30. **Want to learn more about the history of Final Fantasy? Check out our 1, 2, 3 part history specials. ** Colin also gave us a couple games that are particularly great examples of localizations. For our own list, take a look at our primer.  On May 8 and 10 we visited the Bento Miso for Comics vs Games and the Bit Bazaar to talk 3D, VR, books and board games. Comics vs Games is a yearly event in Toronto where comic artists team up with game designers to create a video game. This year, the theme was 3D, leading to the virtual reality games Altar and Libraria. Altar, created by designer Daniele Hopkins and artist Gillian Blekkenhorst, allows you to briefly walk around the ruins of an alien civilization. While designer Kyle Dwyer and artist Adam Hines teamed up for the pop-up book adventure game, Libraria.  (All photos from Attract Mode's 3D gallery. Clay models were all done by Ventla are long forgotten Nintendo characters that we can't name. The two prints are meant to be 3D with red/blue glasses. If you have 'em, try 'em.) Each round of Comics vs Games is accompanied by a gallery curated by the fellows at Attract Mode, a video game art collective. This year they held a 3D gallery containing a selection of three dimensional 2D art, presented with old school red and blue glasses. We talked to Matt Hawkins, a long time member of Attract Mode about why they collect video game fanart, and some of beautiful renditions of Dark Souls and Year Walk, amongst numerous other games. You can hear from him, Gillian and Kyle starting 35:00. Then at the Bit Bazaar we checked in with Conor McCreery and Elizabeth Simins on the other ways one can turn a book into a game, or vice versa. Welcome to the Bit Bazaar at the Bento Miso on May 10. Mare Shepard shows off N++ right next to the entrance. Emily Carroll and Damian Sommer talk about their development process on the Yawhg, one of the first Comics vs Games projects. Vagabond Dog's Jake Reardon shows off Always Sometimes Monsters at his booth at the Bit Bazaar Some wares, images, zines, and postcards for sale at the Bit Bazaar. A volunteer from Snakes and Lattes shows off a version of the Machine of Death card game, based on Ryan North's anthology book of the same name.  There's not just games for sale at the Bit Bazaar. You can get rare chocolates, cider, and sometimes pies on the top floor of the Bento Miso. Conor McCreery was at the Bit Bazaar, a sort-of independent video game flee market, to show off the new prototype of the upcoming Kill Shakespeare board game. Conor is one of the creators of Kill Shakespeare, a comic where all of Shakespeare's works exist in the same universe. Imagine the Marvel comic book universe, but for Hamlet and Othello. With those sorts of mashups already on the table, their publisher,IDW, invited them to turn the three-volume comic into a board game. Conor tells us about how the game works, how they got involved, and why a Kickstarter does more than raise thousands of dollars. You can hear all about it, starting 51:30. The prototype version of the Kill Shakespeare board game at the Bit Bazaar.  Meanwhile, Elizabeth Simins talked about the power of video game zines at one of the panels at the Bit Bazaar. Elizabeth, an artist who occasionally does a comic for Kotaku with journalist Cara Ellison, told us about zine's appeal and their utility. For those who don't know, a zine is like a small handcrafted magazine made by only a few people. Elizabeth loves their physicality and so do the people who buy them from her, although she admits she probably won't get rich off a zine. Still, they enable her to discuss things like misogyny in games, like in "Ain't No Such Thing as Misogyny." If you'd like to hear more about video games zines, and a few of Simins projects, take a listen at 51:30. Elizabeth Simins's video game zine that collects her artwork and comics regarding misogyny in games. Courtesy Elizabeth Simins. We used music from the Free Music Archive and Soundcloud*. From the Free Music Archive, "japanese prog" by Rushus, "Sun Bum" by Monster Rally and "Touching" by Souvenir Driver. From Soundcloud, we found "Trance Transistor Radio" by Arai Akino on rachelroh's profile. We changed up our theme this week to "Daniel Kruis" by RoccoW.  Built to Play was made by producer Arman Aghbali and feature editor Daniel Rosen. If you liked what you heard be sure to leave us a comment or a review on iTunes or Stitcher. It helps more people find the show.  *This music was all taken under a creative commons license. If you feel your music was used inappropriately, be sure to send us an email.