Month: May 2022

Chapter Select: Season 3, Episode 1 – Banjo-Kazooie

Font by Oakland Elliff, designed by Max Roberts

Welcome to Season Three-ie of Chapter Select! Strap on your backpack, work on your rhyming schemes, and prepare to nab a lot of collectibles because this season revolves around Banjo-Kazooie. Max Roberts, Logan Moore, and special guest Michael Koczwara climb up Spiral Mountain to face the green witch and all her cronies. If Microsoft won’t give the Bear and the Bird a proper three-quel, we will (…talk about them).

Download (59MB) – Episode Transcript

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Banjo-Kazooie

Metacritic – 92/100 (77/100 for 360)

This episode was originally recorded on April 7 , 2022.

Max’s Twitter @MaxRoberts143

Logan’s Twitter @MooreMan12

Michael’s Twitter @SuperZambezi

Researcher, Editor, and Producer – Max Roberts

Hosted by Logan Moore & Max Roberts

Font by Oakland Elliff. Art designed by Max Roberts.

DF Retro: Dinosaur Planet – Digital Foundry

DF Retro: Dinosaur Planet – Inside Rare’s Lost N64 Game + Star Fox Adventures Comparisons! by John Linneman for Digital Foundry

Spending so much time with Banjo-Kazooie lately for Chapter Select reminded me of Rare’s Dinosaur Planet. I remember the build leaking last year and Digital Foundry publishing this analysis, but I never got around to watching it. Now in full blown Rare mode, I’ve finally come back to watch. A fascinating look at cross-generational development back in the early 2000s. We don’t get leaps like this between console generations anymore.

Starfield Delayed to 2023

Speaking of Xbox, Bethesda announced the delay of Starfield today on Twitter.

“We’ve made the decision to delay the launches of Redfall and Starfield to the first half of 2023.

Yours truly in my annual predictions:

I’m sorry to be so negative with Xbox. I just don’t believe that Starfield could have a date before Halo Infinite and them stick to said date, especially in these remote work times. Throw in the fact that Halo Infinite is incomplete, I just don’t see Starfield hitting their date and if they do, it being a buggy or incomplete mess. Mind you, I personally don’t think it will be a big delay, but a delay nonetheless.

Halo Infinite still does not have campaign co-op, just started season 2 of their free-to-play (but you’ll pay for the battlepass and armor) multiplayer.

There was no way Starfield was hitting this year. Wonder if we will see it at E3 (RIP) in 2023 as well. Late June is still the first half of 2023…

Xbox lost its digital-only battle, but still won the war – Digital Trends

Xbox lost its digital-only battle, but still won the war | Digital Trends by Tomas Franzese for Digital Trends

Tomas’s piece on how Microsoft still got the future they wanted through the lens of the major Xbox outage last weekend pulls back the Game Pass curtain. Last weekend, Microsoft was caught behind the curtain asking for no one to pay attention.

Microsoft’s servers are so intrinsic to the Xbox Series systems that server issues can lock players out of single-player digital games they bought with their own money. That implies there is hidden DRM for any digital game purchased or redeemed through Game Pass on Xbox, even if the game itself is a single-player adventure. Access is one of the biggest red flags in the age of digital ownership, and the temporary Xbox outage highlights why many people see it as a problem.

I am surprised locally downloaded, purchased games were not playable. This needs to be rectified by Microsoft immediately. It should also work with downloaded Game Pass games. The console should have the pertinent information/key about the users subscription. If my Nintendo Switch can let me play NSO games offline, my Xbox should too.

This is why I chose both new consoles with disc drives. I wonder if those worked over the weekend.

As a small bit of irony, I like how the complaints stemmed about being always online came from people online.

Obviously, this confrontational approach did not go over well with hardcore gaming fans, especially in 2013 when casual online gaming wasn’t as ubiquitous, and we didn’t necessarily connect every device we owned to the internet. Vocal gamers on the internet just weren’t interested in a platform that restricts what the player can do via an online connection…

A Touching Goodbye for iPod – Daring Fireball

Daring Fireball: A Touching Goodbye for iPod by John Gruber for Daring Fireball

Apple, today, announcing that the last remaining iPod model — the iPod Touch — is now discontinued and available only while supplies last…

The iPod was the first Apple product I owned. I suspect many folks share that experience. I remember using my friend’s first-generation iPod Nano to showcase why I should be allowed to get an iPod. I totally misunderstood what turning the playhead into a diamond meant. I figured it was a style choice rather than the UI design for scrubbing. 😬

Later I would get a blue second-generation iPod Nano that I rocked through high school, until I was given an iPod Classic for Christmas. I remember watching Avatar: The Last Airbender at driver’s ed and listening to a leaked rip of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories in the stock room of Kmart. Lately, I’ve missed having a device solely dedicated to music/media.

One more bit from John, before his own memories:

I suspect most people reading this news will experience two thoughts, simultaneously:

That’s a shame, I loved the iPod.

Wait, they were still selling the iPod Touch?

John’s suspicion was spot on when I told my dad that the iPod line was discontinued. He had no idea one was even for sale.

Chapter Select Season 3 is Banjo-Kazooie

Welcome to Chapter Select Season Three-ie!

Logan and I are thrilled to be exploring the Banjo-Kazooie series for the third season of Chapter Select. It’s been a long time coming, but it is still a shorter turn around than a proper Banjo-Tooie sequel.

Download (3MB)

RSS Feed – Overcast – Apple Podcasts – Spotify – YouTube

As for this season’s slate of episodes, here is the order we have for Season 3:

This season has the highest ratio of guests to episodes so far in the show’s history. While tied with Season 1 – Paper Mario with three guests, there’s more variety to go around this season. We are stoked for the voices you’ll hear alongside Logan’s and my own as we explore Banjo-Kazooie.

The art this season was a challenge for me. I’ll save the deep dive for the “look back” post when Season 3 wraps up, but I was heavily inspired by my own Wiki Stories and the recent emoji kick I have been on. It’s like I just discovered the variety emoji have. 👀 Finding the font designed by Oakland Elliff gave the art the final push it needed.

The teaser we released is one of my favorite ideas come to life. It would not have been possible without the technical prowess and knowhow of Michael Koczwara. I am eternally in his debt for bringing my whacky idea to life.

I hope you are as excited for Season 3: Banjo-Kazooie as I am. The first episode will be launching next Wednesday, with new episodes following in a fortnightly manner. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts! 

RSS Feed – Apple Podcasts – Spotify – YouTube – Overcast – Pocket Casts – Castro

Update (8/5/2022): I added the Conker’s Bad Fur Day episode. At the time of publication, this episode was a secret. We wanted to surprise listeners with a bonus episode.

Wiki Stories #10 – Just Cause 3

Not to get ahead of myself, but this letter has an all-time favorite wiki story of mine. Just Cause 3 was a quintessential game to end 2015 on. My first full year of wiki work sailed into the new year with grapple hooks and hang gliders. This project alone may have involved nearly 200 emails, but it wasn’t anything some bullets, explosives, and good vibes couldn’t liberate my spirits from. After nearly an entire year in the marshes of Witcher and unraveling the twisty tales of decision-based narrative games, I was cut loose into a sandbox of freedom.

Considering this project, I felt like this tenth letter would be a great entry to explore the tools I used to make guides. In my career (and in this series of newsletters), I’m nine guides in. My freshman learning curve was leveling out into a sophomore stride. My workflow is fairly well established at this point. Some tools and processes I still use to this day; Others I’ve tweaked or thrown out altogether. I was cruising along in 2015 though and this is a perfect guide to explore that pace…

Wiki Stories is a 25-week limited run newsletter where I’ll be sharing my stories from my five years as a video game guide writer. You can read today’s letter in full here. You can sign-up for free. If you prefer a good ol’ fashioned RSS feed, there’s a link for that too.