Video game narratives have so much potential. Through this interactive medium, we are often able to forge our own version of a story with the power of player choice. But despite so many games providing us with options, we are often left creating not the story we want, but the one that fits in line with predetermined binary extremes.

The moment a game rewards you with good or evil points, you start to decide which of the two moralities you want to base all future decisions on. This is because we have been trained to assume that there are far greater benefits from leaning to one side than finding a happy middle ground. Sadly, this assumption is usually correct.

This severely limits the variance between each player’s experience. We stop trying to roleplay a character and instead find ourselves exploiting each decision to reach a specific desired end (whether it be special powers or a literal ending).

"Do you want Paragon or Renegade points in Mass Effect 2?"

It also bases everything on a predetermined moral compass. This is problematic as roleplaying enthusiasts know there is a huge difference between a character who is “Lawful Good” and one who is “Chaotic Good”.  Yet, occasionally games will tell you that you’re evil for choosing one or the other.

Mass Effect 2 has often been praised for its array of dialogue options, but while it is a very good game, it still falls prey to a lot of these same problems. Often times dialogue is colored bright blue or bright red, essentially telling the player, “Click here for Paragon points or click there for Renegade points.” The game practically begs you to exploit it instead of encouraging you to choose what your version of Commander Shepard would actually do in that situation. Fortunately, there are a handful of more meaningful decisions as well, but they’re often in the minority.

Catherine was certainly on the right track, but it wasn’t perfect either. The text message approach to dialogue trees is genius. By allowing you to build a conversation from several blocks of text (each of which have their own array of multiple choice options) before sending it off, the triggers for the results you witness are far more obscured. Still, with a morality meter shown immediately after clicking the send button, I still found myself choosing what I thought the game wanted me to say to make the bar slant to one side or the other. Despite making it harder to game the system, they still directly encourage you to do so by showing your immediate results.

"This is four different dialogue decisions in Catherine queued up before hitting send."

The biggest mistake most developers make with player choice is limiting it to morality in the first place. Other characters within a game’s world shouldn’t respond to you based on some magical newsletter they received letting them know whether you’ve spent your time being a jerk or a nice guy. Instead, they should act based on whether or not they agree with how you handle the situations they are aware of.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a game full of choices, but you won’t ever see points fed into a red or blue bar. Because of this, I finally felt free to do what I wanted. If I decided to be a jerk to somebody, it wasn’t because I wanted to save enough jerk points to get me into the jerk club down the road. It was because I didn’t like the guy and I wanted him to know it.

You could argue that most of the major dialogue trees in Human Revolution are still a means to an end, and you’d be right. But they aren’t about being good or evil. They are about getting inside the head of the person you’re talking to and manipulating them into doing what you want. Most importantly, these dialogue trees are incredibly satisfying experiences that manage to make talking to somebody a game in itself. Who knew that talking could be so much fun?

"Which version of Cybil will you meet in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories?"

The art of subtlety is difficult to achieve, but Silent Hill: Shattered Memories managed to do so exceptionally well. You are constantly judged by your actions and you’re in a constant state of making decisions whether you realize it or not. Did you answer that phone call? Which room in this building did you enter first? How was your eye contact during that last conversation? Did you examine the clothing on that mannequin a little too closely? You will be judged on all of these things without ever being told.

Even the game’s therapy sequences play with your head by presenting you with tasks such as ranking people in a story in order of bloodguilt, or picking out which people in photos are sleeping and which are dead. The result of therapy and the subtle ways you interact with the game world determine not only your ending, but the way certain locations and characters look and act, your own dialogue during cutscenes (which you do not get to choose directly), and even your own personality profile after completing the game.

To successfully make a decision based game interesting, it is crucial to avoid black and white situations. Judge a player when they think the developer’s all seeing eye isn’t looking. Obscure which piece of chosen dialogue triggers different reactions. And most importantly, make players feel a sense of freedom instead of compulsion.

The music intensifies as all other sound becomes a damp whisper. A single gunshot is fired and a beloved character slowly falls to the ground while their comrades yell out in shock. What an emotional scene! Or at least, it would be if it weren’t for the fact that the character in question already received about a thousand bullet wounds earlier in a gameplay segment.

This is a problem that plagues many gaming narratives. Story is often governed by a very different set of rules than gameplay, resulting in some very awkward and even comical moments in what should be distressing scenes. Because of the interactive nature of games, it’s difficult to avoid these pitfalls. Yet, some games manage to handle it a cut above the rest.

Permanent character death by player action is one way to drive the point home. Of course, not all games can support this variable approach to storytelling, but the ones that do have proved quite effective.

Consider the suicide mission found in Mass Effect 2. Every party member’s life hangs in the balance. A single wrong decision on your part means you have to watch them die. To make things even more panic-inducing, that means you won’t just miss them in the final portion of the game, but also its save-importing sequel, Mass Effect 3. The fact that it can happen to anybody and that it’s your own fault gives it a sense of weight not commonly found in the medium.

But permanent death (or “permadeath“) is controversial. Even Fire Emblem, a series known for its consistent use of this idea for over 20 years finally added the option to turn it off for the first time ever in its Japan-only remake of the series’ Super Famicom debut last year. This decision was not made lightly, however, as an Iwata Asks column revealed it involved four months of heated debate between Nintendo and Intelligent Systems.

Giving the option to remove the feature may have made the game more accessible to beginners, but there’s a reason project manager Masahiro Higuchi stated, “…this would make the game cease to be Fire Emblem.” It’s about more than losing a playable character and a few lines of disposable dialogue.

My own experience in 2005′s Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance showed me that permadeath can change the entire tone of a mission. By keeping Jill (a defected soldier from the enemy side) alive, you’ll eventually come in contact with an enemy general named Shiharam who just so happens to be Jill’s father. Had Jill not been alive and kicking, I wouldn’t have witnessed her emotional turmoil at the situation or the danger of her father convincing her to rejoin the opposing army (yes, that can actually happen if you’re not careful). So the death of Jill, or any Fire Emblem character for that matter, carries not only the weight of losing their personality and strategic advantages, but also potentially missing out on a far more personal context to certain scenarios.

I’m not saying that scripted deaths are never the answer. In fact, the threat of character death by player action can actually enhance the effect of a scripted death. It may sound crazy, but stay with me.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt as down after a scripted death as I have after one featured in SEGA’s tactical gem, Valkyria Chronicles. Don’t worry, I won’t spoil the details. VC’s handling of death was so effective because of the way the game trained my brain beforehand through the aforementioned use of permadeath.

Much like Fire Emblem, every single one of your soldiers in Valkyria Chronicles is a unique character with their own personality, appearance, abilities, and backstory rather than the empty shells you’ll often find in games like Final Fantasy Tactics. As you use a character, their bio will gradually fill in allowing you to get to know them. And to really tug at your heart strings, the game makes excellent use of its visual style if a character dies. With their last breath they say their final words as the watercolor is removed from the scene, leaving only the pencil sketch of their now lifeless body behind.

It’s enough to make you want to save every last soldier in your squad. This teaches you two things: Death is a constant danger and by playing well you can keep all your troops from dying. But the latter is a total lie. At some point the game will remind you that this is a war and not everybody is coming home. This reminder comes in the form of a scripted death that turns your former feeling of control into a sense of powerlessness.

The fragile mortality of your soldiers up to this point makes the scripted event feel all to real. The only difference is that this time, like many things in life, it can’t be prevented. It was at this point I had to stop playing for the night. I needed some time.

Another powerful portrayal of death is found in letting the player control a character’s final moments. While probably not the first game to do it, the earliest example of this I can recall is Final Fantasy VII‘s PSP prequel, Crisis Core. By having the player actually interact with a completely hopeless situation, it portrayed death in a far more effective way than any cutscene could have hoped to. Since then, I’ve still only played a small handful of games that used this method including Naruto SUNS 2 and Halo: Reach (though neither executed it nearly as well).

Games have the ability to approach death in ways that simply aren’t possibly in other mediums. While the examples that take full advantage of this are few and far between, it’s my sincere hope that this will be something that helps set gaming’s narrative capabilities apart in the years to come.

By making a donation as low as $10, you can receive not one, but three full length Songs for the Cure albums in digital form. Bump your donation up to $15 or more and you’ll even get physical copies of all three albums.

You might be wondering what all this has to do with video games. As it turns out, the over 40 artists involved with the albums include a number of Indie Game composers, OverClocked ReMix veterans, and even some musicians from bigger titles.

Among the artists are C418 (Minecraft), Danny B (Super Meat Boy), Alexander Brandon (Deus Ex), Jake “virt” Kaufman (Contra 4), Souleye (VVVVVV), Wilbert Roget II (Monkey Island 2), Jimmy “Big Giant Circles” Hinson (Mass Effect 2) and Joshua Morse (Bad Dudes) to name a few. See for yourself at how insanely promising this list is.

100% of your donation goes to the American Cancer Society to help “victims, families, and researchers for the care, treatment, and abolishment of cancer.” You can preorder the album by donating now or order the albums at a slightly higher price from Bandcamp, iTunes, AmazonMP3, or CDBaby after they release on March 29th.

For more information and a sample of what you’ll hear, check out the video below.

Source: The American Cancer Society

The Barrel Roll crew returns this week with their hundred-and-third showstravaganza. The guys took a week off for the first time ever while Jonah and his wife were busy having a million babies.

This week, Jesse gives us the details on The Last Story (Japanese Import) and Goldeneye for the Wii. Adam fills us in on why he couldn’t get his head around Mass Effect 2 while Jonah weeps softly in the background. He also talks about Bionic Commando ReArmed 2, which picks us right back up again. Jonah fills us in on the wizard-filled Magicka and also reports his pile of shame progress in the original Assassin’s Creed.

In the news we discuss all the Final Fantasy related news that’s been coming out, NGP details and much more. All this plus new games this (and last) week on episode 103 of “Barrel Roll! A Video Game Podcast”.

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On a very special one-hundred-and-second episode of ‘Barrel Roll! A Video Game Podcast’, Jonah is still here with no babies to show us at all. Is he making the whole thing up? How long can he keep up this charade? You’ll have to listen to find out!

Oh, and I guess we also talk about video games. Square-Enix released a whole bunch of Final Fantasy stuff and Nintendo dropped a metric crap-ton of Nintendo 3DS details. Also, Wes returns with his take on Little Big Planet 2 and The Last Express, Jesse writes about himself in the third person while playing more Monster Hunter Portable 3rd and Dragon Quest IX, Jonah tries to convince us he’s having a baby while playing Assassin’s Creed and Mass Effect 2, and Adam… well… he just listens.

All this and more on our fantastical podtacular showstravaganza.

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2010 has come and gone. We’ve narrowly avoided drowning in the deep sea of game releases and now we’re here to tell you which games stood out among all the chaos. We polled our rag-tag group of writers on their top ten GOTY choices, then fed the results into a magical formula to decide what we collectively deem “the hottest of jams.”

The best of the best. The cream of the crop. Ten games to rule them all. Is the suspense killing you yet?

#10 Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies (DS)

All the pieces of Dragon Quest IX came together in a way that I couldn’t have imagined working this well. First off, they were changing it to a portable game. Then they said they were adding multiplayer. After the superb production values of Dragon Quest VIII, how could this compete?

Square Enix managed to keep the classic style and storytelling of the franchise in place while completely changing things up. All party members are customized characters that reflect the weapons and armor they are using. The stories are broken down into bite sized chunks, so hopping into your friend’s game to play with them works amazingly well. There are even randomly generated dungeons you can explore for better loot, which keeps you coming back.

It’s everything I like about classic JRPG’s with enough of a modern twist to keep things interesting. -Jonah Gregory (Editor-in-Chief)

#9 Civilization V (PC)

#8 Vanquish (Xbox 360, PS3) [Full Review]

At first glance, Vanquish looks like a run of the mill shooter starring yet another space marine. Under closer inspection, it’s a game that let’s you rocket boost your way to a killer robot, then backflip off of him as he explodes. Sure, the story might be uninteresting and the dialogue is downright laughable, but the actual gameplay of Vanquish left me in a constant state of awe.

In this cover based shooter, chest high walls transform into spiders that shoot lasers at you, panther-scorpion hybrids shoot turrets that shoot lasers at you, trains full of enemies ride the ceiling of a space station, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Vanquish constantly excites, and constantly murders you. It’s a game that will change the way you think about third person shooters from now on making you wonder, “Why can’t I rocket boost as Nathan Drake?” -Jesse Gregory (Managing Editor, Developer)

#7 Minecraft (PC) [Article]

Put simply, Minecraft gets under your skin, tapping into that feeling of pure, unadulterated play that we all experienced as children. This is due to the way that it offers players a blank world – utterly unique to you – and encourages exploration and creation against an endless horizon. And it’s all carefully timed to a relentless day and night cycle that adds a sense of gentle terror through an ever-increasing cast of enemies.

The most inspiring aspect of Minecraft and what sets it apart from the other games in this list is the fact that it continues to evolve (now in Beta) and will almost certainly be a completely different game in a year’s time; due in no small part to its independent background and endless creative potential. The last year has produced some remarkable fan-made creations, but watching where Minecraft will go next is an even greater proposition. -Michelle Baldwin (Contributing Editor)

#6 Super Meat Boy (XBLA, PC) [Full Review]

I’m not sure I can think of a better combination of challenge and addictive gameplay this year. Super Meat Boy is the indie game success story wherein the indie game actually focuses on being fun and having great mechanics, and people actually like playing it. Bringing the over the top challenge and strategy of 2D platformers to bite-size gauntlets, you’ll be coming back for more even when a stage seems impossible.

Super Meat Boy also features a lot of polish with its cartoonishly deranged story scenes, and absolutely killer soundtrack. It also has a number of visual styles, featuring a handful of retro throwbacks. But most of all, the game is fully loaded with content. Even if many of the stages can be beaten in seconds, the sheer amount of them, along with other secrets and unlockables, will keep you hard at work for a while. It’s an exceptional value at a budget price. -Adam Anania (Contributing Editor)

#5 Super Mario Galaxy 2 (Wii) [Full Review]

Miyamoto’s chubby little plumber definitely has some legs. Twenty-five years in, and the Italian is still just as relevant as the day his first cartridge was printed. Case in point, Super Mario Galaxy 2 is a gleeful, mind-bending romp through the new and improved star systems hand-crafted by Nintendo’s Tokyo Studio. Buried beneath its candy coated, nostalgia laden surface lays an unbelievably polished 3D platformer.

Nintendo EAD studio’s original goal for Super Mario Galaxy was to utilize the sights, sounds, and the collective consciousness surrounding Mario to guide us, the players, through a series of surreal Technicolor landscapes that tinkered and played with the 3D realm Mario familiarized us with back on the Nintendo 64, circa 1995. Super Mario Galaxy 2 takes its predecessors solid base, cuts out the inane hub world, the hammy story, and all the other little elements holding Galaxy back, polished the good ideas, and ratcheted the insane level design up to eleven. Honestly, is there more you could ask from a sequel? -Russ Walsh (Contributing Editor)

#4 Red Dead Redemption (Xbox 360, PS3)

To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much from Red Dead Redemption. I figured it would play out like a poor man’s version of Grand Theft Auto with horses. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Far more than just GTA in the old west, Red Dead is the complete package. Amazing graphics, an awesome soundtrack, and a classic western story come together like Voltron to form one of the best games of the year.

Packed with a memorable cast of characters and missions that went beyond simple fetch quests, Red Dead offered a tremendous sandbox you could spend hours exploring. You could get lost for days in this giant world hunting animals, shooting birds, or searching for treasure. There was enough content to keep people busy all summer. -Dave Corvin (Senior Editor)

#3 Monster Hunter Tri (Wii) [Article]

My personal GOTY, Monster Hunter Tri does what so many games have a problem with these days: making you feel awesome. No narrative, no hand-holding; just you, a weapon, and a huge dinosaur. It emphasizes skill and strategy, and the detailed monster behaviors will make every fight feel different, even as you battle them again and again.

On top of that, the online cooperative gameplay is where Tri really shines. There’s hardly a greater feeling than taking on a raging monster with a group of friends, and I’m certain this is how Monster Hunter is meant to be played.

Finally, the game is beautiful, and boasts great visuals and one of the year’s best game soundtracks. AND it’s fun. Many 3rd party developers have said the Wii isn’t a platform for top class games. Those developers need to take a look at Monster Hunter Tri and feel completely ashamed of themselves. -Adam Anania (Contributing Editor)

#2 Donkey Kong Country Returns (Wii) [Full Review]

While I have mixed feelings on Rare as a whole, I’ve always been quite fond of their work on the Donkey Kong Country games. When they parted ways with Nintendo, I assumed the series as we knew it was dead. And really, it is.

When Retro Studios took the helm of this revival, they didn’t stick to what “we knew.” Instead, they took the basic framework, modernized it, added interesting new gameplay mechanics, and created some of the greatest level design you could ask for. It evolves the series rather than trying to rigidly recreate it. A quick nostalgia cash grab this is not. No, what we have here is an incredibly satisfying and challenging experience; one that all developers of platformers should take note of. -Jesse Gregory (Managing Editor, Developer)

#1 Mass Effect 2 (Xbox 360, PC) [Full Review]

The best RPG of the year is also the WingDamage staff’s pick for the game of the year. We did not bestow this honor lightly. The internet was ablaze with GOTY talk even before it came out and Mass Effect 2 did not disappoint. Bioware took the already amazing formula from the original and refined it and distilled it into an experience that every gamer needs to play. The story rivals the best in sci-fi and the gameplay can stand toe to toe with any action game on the market.

The game did such a great job making you feel as though your choices and actions had consequences that many people (myself included) had to play it multiple times. I beat the game at 4:40 in the morning on a work night and immediately restarted.

To put it simply, you need to play Mass Effect 2. -Dave Corvin (Senior Editor)

On a very special eightieth episode of “Barrel Roll! A Video Game Podcast”, Jonah and Jesse come together with only one common goal: To not break the streak of having posted a new Barrel Roll episode every week since the show’s inception.

Crazy stuff has been going down in the real world, so the guys keep things on topic and as concise as possible this time around.

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"You furry little maniacs! You blew it up!"

On a very special seventy-eight episode of the podshow “Barrel Roll! A Video Game Podcast”, we learn the dark truth about this supposedly “new” planet we found ourselves on. Oh sure, all signs pointed to the defeat of The Empire thousands of years before, but a planet where humans evolved from Ewoks? Pure madness.

That is, until we found it. The last remaining vestige of a world now destroyed. The cursed statue that showed the world was not what we once thought it was. It was our beloved Endor the whole time.

This week we talk about Doctor Who Adventure Games, Uncharted 2, Mass Effect 2, Earth Defense Force 2017, Castlevania: Harmony of Despair, and Arc Rise Fantasia.

In the news we discuss the new modes of DJ Hero 2, Batman Arkham City, the announcement of Torchlight 2, and NBA Jam details among other things, and also talk about the games releasing this week.

All this and more on this, the 78th Barrel Roll Show.

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Outro Music – “Fortuna (Star Fox)” by The OneUps

Fund raiser marathon for Child’s Play “72 Hours Remain” http://www.72hoursremain.com/

Back in my younger days, I swore by genre definitions. I had a very clear idea in mind of what I thought classified a game into each genre. Any deviation from those rules outlined in my head required a subgenre. But as time marched on, I’ve come to realize how incredibly ridiculous all this is.

While genres are a nice way to quickly identify what to expect from a game, I’ve run into quite a few issues with the concept. For one, different people classify genres differently. There’s also the issue of the increasing trend of blending genres. And what about the literal names themselves? Some of them just don’t make sense any more.

Different strokes for different folks

There is no master list of what each genre means and what games they apply to. Because of this, everybody has different definitions of genres. For example, I’ve always considered The Legend of Zelda series to fall under Action/Adventure. Action is self-explanatory enough, and Adventure games (especially of the point and click variety) are known for their puzzle solving and interaction with NPCs.

Yet I’ve heard Zelda referred to as a Role Playing Game or “RPG” countless times by a wide range of people. I suppose you play the role of Link. But in that sense, it seems like every game with a main character would become an RPG. In Super Mario Bros., you play the role of Mario as you attempt to save the princess from Bowser’s castle, yet many years later Nintendo and Square released Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars. The title suggests, unsurprisingly, that previous Mario games were, in fact, not RPGs.

Where do these names come from and what do they mean?

In Super Mario RPG, you again play the role of Mario. So what makes it an RPG? The answer lies in the Role Playing Games of long ago. I refer to the pen and paper RPG. In a pen and paper RPG, you often create a character and develop their skills, usually fighting as a group or “party”. It’s also common to have a heavy focus on gathering new equipment and items. Finally, the combat relies on a lot of statistics and a bit of chance which is determined by dice rolls.

Similarly, Super Mario RPG features a party of heroes, skills that develop as you progress, equipment and items, and combat based on statistics and dice rolls (in the form of behind the scenes, randomized calculations rather than actual dice). But unlike the Pen & Paper RPGs of old, you don’t create your character (or role) and you don’t forge your own path through the story. Instead, you play a predetermined character in a linear story that you can’t change.

Most Japanese RPGs or “JRPGs” similarly follow a linear story with predetermined characters. Western RPGs or “WRPGS”, however, often feature character creators, branching dialogue and morality choices, as well as a generally less linear structure (to an extent). It’s for this reason that many gamers bother to make the distinction when discussing JRPGs and WRPGs instead of just RPGs.

For the record, this is not a discussion of quality, but of classification. I personally prefer the guided experiences often found in JRPGs. Also, I’m not saying there aren’t very linear WRPGs and very open JRPGs, I’m merely mentioning what’s seen most often in both subgenres.

We’re half-way there…

So it seems that JRPGs commonly fit only half of the definition pen and paper RPGs laid down. Lately, I’ve been putting a lot of time into a game that features the other half. That game is Mass Effect 2.

In Mass Effect 2, you start by creating your character or bringing over your created character from the first game. Aside from your appearance, you’ll also decide on one of several origins for your character and a class with it’s own unique set of skills to build up as you see fit. Throughout the game, you’re presented with countless dialogue trees that allow you to forge your own version of the story and main character, though the overarching narrative will always follow the same direction.

The combat, however, has more in common with a third-person shooter. Your shots aren’t based on digital dice rolls (as they were in the first game). Instead, you rely on the mechanics found in all cover based shooters, supplemented with your characters’ skills.

And yet, Mass Effect 2 and Super Mario RPG are both RPGs. If somebody who lived in a cave all their life, never hearing any of the names or applications of our genre labels, were told to group games together into the genres they came up with, I doubt the two games would be next to each other.

Will it blend?

It seems like every other game that comes out now has “RPG Elements”. It doesn’t matter if it’s a first-person shooter or a 2D platformer, they sneak these aspects in everywhere. What we’re left with is a lot of unique and satisfying combinations that, despite being a blast to play, are simply maddening to try to classify.

Take Valkyria Chronicles. The back of the box assures you it is a “Simulation RPG”. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen that genre before or after that game’s release. I don’t think that label caught on.

Since the words Simulation RPG mean nothing to anybody except for people who have already played Valkyria Chronicles specifically, I’m often left trying to explain it to people as a Strategy / RPG / Third-Person Shooter hybrid. Frankly, that just leaves people confused and with misconceptions of just how those existing genres are combined.

What are we going to do about it?

Nothing. There’s never going to be a master list of genre definitions and as games get more and more complex, they’re even more likely to combine existing genres and make new ones in the process. This is only going to make games even more difficult to classify.

But genre labels are still a nice crutch to have. While they may often fail to represent what a game really entails in detail, they at least give us a starting point that helps us find the games we’re looking for.

That being said, it’s not very useful to argue about which games fit into which genres. People are naturally going to think about different aspects of a game with different levels of importance which could alter which genre they feel they go in.

So the next time somebody tells you Game X fits into Genre A, politely discuss with them why you feel it might better fit in Genre B instead of telling them they are wrong. Because with the lines of genres as blurred as they currently are, it just isn’t worth it to argue.

On a very special seventy-fifth episode of Barrel Roll! A Video Game Podcast, the crew teams up with The Burger Kids King Club for a regal good time. It is up to them to defeat the evil forces of Team Edward Potter and the Vampire’s Werewolf in a battle royal for the ages. Will their secret combined power of the double rainbow be enough?

Also, video games. Also, hot jams. Possibly jellies.

"Super Secret Special Russ Walsh Wallpaper! Click to Enlarge!"

In what we’ve been playing, Jesse has kept on trucking with Mass Effect 2. He is finally starting to come around now that he stopped trying to be a regular old super soldier using Shepard Time (TM) to head-shot fools.

Jonah and Wes have both been playing Ron Gilbert’s new joint, Deathspank, and his old joint, Monkey Island 2: Lechuck’s Revenge (the special edition flavor). We also talk some Tales of Monkey Island, Pix’n Rush, and Borderlands.

In Let’s Play Together, Jonah and Jesse have been trying out the latest jam from Square-Enix, Dragon Quest IX. Playing for several hours on end has motivated Jonah to look into picking up a DSi XL.

All this and the news, on the seventy-fifth podshow recording of the Barrel Rolls!

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Outro Music – “Fortuna (Star Fox)” by The OneUps

Middle Song – “Good Show!” from Henry Hatsworth

Main Finger’s Videogame Jam a Day Blog

The 3 packages and prices of the Playstation Move

DJ Hero 2 artists list

Alien Swarm

Bionic Commando ReArmed 2 Remix Contest

Mega Man Doom Mod

Mega Man Universe Teaser

Double Rainbow