Great episode as always.

Headgold (n): Knowledge; currency of the streets.

Lindy, you need to finish GoW2 or you're going to be lost as to GoW3.

Chains of Olympus actually takes place BEFORE the events of GoW1. GoW2 and GoW3 are tied together, much as Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revoluations are. Knowledge of the events of GoW2 are necessary to understand what's going on in GoW3.

Great podcast so far. Obviously, I've only gotten this far in it.

What was the name of the lousy golf game James reviewed? Ace of Holes or some such thing?

King of Clubs

Crusher of Souls

Thank God RetroActive is over. When you guys talk about RPG's like this it's just not fun to listen too.  A little too much inside baseball and unless you have played the game before you have barely have a clue what's going on. Adventure games, action games even FPS games are easier to talk about and why you don't like or like it.

outside of that boring last piece everything is great. Spam of the week was excellent, mario discussion was awesome.

I'm excited to hear this show! I tried listening today on my friend's MP3 player, but it wouldn't play the AAC file, so I listened to a couple of other podcasts instead. I'll probably catch up with RFN on the plane back to America.

Great podcast as always, gents. Just finished it. I like the new minifeature--shout-outs to games that are so bad they're good, which resulted in a classic James rant.

Jonny was clearly trying to not wake someone up during the "Now Playing" segment this week.

I know I yelled at Mystery Dungeon a bit, but I don't know of any other rants.

Mystery Dungeon wasn't that horrible...

But the dungeon crawl genre is hard to get right. And can be boring/frustrating.

You're entitled to your opinion, but I believe Mystery Dungeon games to be horrible.

Dungeon crawl games are ok when the dungeons weren't made by Satan/a computer.

The Cyber-Devil.

I always love getting mentioned on the show! Great one as always!

It's been a year and a half... can't we please give the Mystery Dungeon stuff a rest?  We get it, you don't like them.

Why is TYP attributed with writing the NSMB Wii review when Pap wrote it?

Because we have more than one NSMB Wii review, and Pap's had not yet been written at the time of recording.

TYP's review: http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/reviewArt.cfm?artid=20368

I see. I only read the one I saw today on my iGoogle NWR RSS feed and got confused.

Random generation works as long as it's a good system, Diablo did it well (and so did Torchlight and to some extend Hellgate) and I believe the Roguelikes don't get many complaints either, it's just the japanese games that are terrible in that department.

Somebody has to be here to warn the next generation of the perils of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon.  On this front we shall be forever vigilant.

Mystery Dungeon came up because it was thought to pertain to the conversation. It isn't as if we had in the shownotes to take a dig at the games. RFN is a free-flowing conversation.

And I have one correction, it isn't that we don't like them it is that they are at their very core flawed. There is no unique challenge, rather you are simply asked to do the same thing an obscene number of times in order to simulate what a challenge should feel like. It isn't that we don't like them; it is that they are not objectively fun.

It is that reason that they are not valid for either the discussion of challenge or the "so bad its good" construct.

There is no valid expression of challenge, much of the outcome is determined by how lucky you were when the floor was generated. Any designed difficulty is merely a product of you being on floor fifty-three out of seventy. Attrition can be a valid way of creating difficulty, but there needs to be mechanisms in place to allow me to mitigate its effects via my own skill.

And they aren't outwardly terrible games, they are mind-numbingly and soul crushing repetitive. There is nothing you could point to, while playing, and say that it is comical. At best you can take an outward view of the experience and find  some situational humor.

I think the question was specifically about bad gameplay. I mean, we all know translations and such that are funny but few games are actually fun because their gameplay is so terribly broken.

This is an absurd statement to make about any game.  Obviously there are people who have fun playing Mystery Dungeon games, myself included.  I have no problem with you disliking them (though I am pretty tired of hearing about it at this point), but I do have a problem with the implication that I'm somehow objectively wrong for deriving enjoyment from them despite the fact that fun is an inherently subjective concept.

You are objectively wrong.  Next question.

Oh, good point!

By the way, I was being sarcastic.

Sure! Why haven't you acknowledged that NWR is the home of buttered camels yet? It's been a year and even google confirmed it.

Great show as always guys. Even though Crimm's review games have seemed to be all horrible, it always makes a great segment. I listen to the show every week, even if I don't visit the site or the forums that often anymore.

I enjoyed the reenactment of the forum discussion between Jonny and me.  ;)

Regarding AI-controlled Peter and his movement:  His level of aggressiveness isn't random as was speculated on the show.  I actually touched on this a bit in the discussion thread.

It's the same way with the enemy characters, which is why each battle is composed of several skirmishes instead of one giant battle.  For the most part enemies won't enter your attack range unless they can attack you first.  They'll hang back on the battle field until you wander within their movement range.  Since there's no incentive to beat battles in a limited number of turns it's possible to game the system by moving all your characters just outside of their range and then luring them to slaughter with one strong character.