Claim OwnershipThe CoNCast: A Caves of Narshe Podcast Kinda Gig
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The Caves of Narshe team produces the CoNcast to talk about Final Fantasy, video gaming and gaming news, random topics, awkward silences, and sometimes nuclear physics. Delivery has a standard level of 74.8 universal snark units. Find us at cavesofnarshe.com.
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Yeah, of course you heard, duh. And you probably heard also that there will be changes coming to the new version, and we're not yet sure what most of them are. So, the CoNcast Team jumped at the chance to do some supposition while we wait for something more visual or playable, and we recorded an episode with our thoughts. Listen now, to be sure you can point out all the ways in which we were wrong later. Also listen to more talk about Four Job Fiesta, as I played my FJF run and streamed it to Twitch as we recorded. It was a trainwreck.
Yeah, we know we just published a CoNcast on the topic of Final Fantasy V. So, the fact that we're doing another already might seem weird, right? Well, not really, because this one is very specifically about what is fast becoming a summer tradition in the Final Fantasy community - Four Job Fiesta.
Final Fantasy V is sometimes maligned among the canon of Final Fantasy games, but that's not really fair. There is a great deal of stuff in Final Fantasy V that is done exceedingly well, and we're here to point those things out to you as a public service to those who haven't played it in years or at all. That said, because the consensus around this game isn't as easy to get to than our previous games, you'll get more debate to enjoy this time around as well.
PAX East 2015 is nearly here, and CoN will be attending a day again this year. So, we got our group together to preview things that might be there, and things that we should try to seek out while there. This time around, there's some added stuff for CoN readers, as Square Enix will have both their standard booth and additionally will be running two panels on Saturday, March 7, the day I'll be there. We'll talk about all those things and more, and we'll have some entertaining anecdota that goes well off-topic.
For a long time, Square Enix treated the PC as a bit of a wasteland, at least in terms of the flagship Final Fantasy franchise, with no games released for Windows for many years; now, though, the company is experiencing a renaissance on the platform with the two rereleases of Final Fantasy VII followed closely on by iOS 3D ports and the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy. We discuss the history and future of playing the Final Fantasy series on PCs herein.
Last Christmas, we did a CoNcast of holiday memories and mairocrat wii. This year, mairocrat 8 is out, so here's another cast! It's full of us yelling at our Wiis and sharing the best parts of gaming at the holidays, like unwrapping games on Christmas morning or buying games we'll never play on Steamsale. It's also a nice, compact, exactly-forty-minutes that you can devour on the train or plane as you travel for the holidays.
We went the weird angle again, and Tiddles and I decided to blow a day and a CoNcast on Twitch-streaming a big chunk of the preeminent dating sim video game featuring birds, Hatoful Boyfriend.
This time around, our panel is reviewing the subjectivity of "retro" gaming, particularly as it relates to Final Fantasy. The idea of what makes a Final Fantasy game "retro" is something that can change based on your own experience or lack thereof with the series, and to address that, we talk not only about what makes particular games in the series retro to our minds, but also what we as gamers can do to communicate effectively about the series to those who have a different perspective.
We spend some time touching on what the big three will or won't have around for E3, and of course we take some time to talk about what Square Enix might bring for their big franchises like Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, Dragon Quest, Tomb Raider, and Deus Ex. Join Stiltzkin, Lasz, Tiddles and me for a (p)recap of the games you're going to be looking for soon.
A series like Final Fantasy - 25 years old, with twenty-plus games bearing the name - is sure to have an extremely diverse set of characters. Or, is it sure after all? Perhaps the series uses the same archetypes over and over again with slightly different twists. The CoNcast team spends 45 minutes dissecting the lead characters of the series and distilling them to work out the similarities and differences, as well as just the good from the bad.
Last year, we introduced the topic of Final Fantasy VI being awesome as we released new FF6 walkthrough content. The second game CoN added to the site, over a decade ago, was Final Fantasy IV. To stay in order, we now talk about the basics of why FF4 is awesome.
A minor controversy brewed up just before the Western release of Bravely Default, with some female characters becoming more clothed and more 'acceptably' aged. Naturally, the response to this news ran the gamut from those who found it pointless to those who seemed to have a much creepier viewpoint on the whole thing. Naturally, this got us thinking, so we spent some time talking about this newest game and some of the history of censorship in Final Fantasy games, whether forced by Nintendo or willfully taken on by Squenix localization teams.
For more than a few years, the notion of making a game's world be open and available for exploration and plot advancement at the gamer's whim has grown into a hot genre. Games from Rockstar and Bioware have long been considered to be among the cream of the crop, but it seems like perhaps the JRPG and Square Enix specifically have been behind the curve a bit. This podcast explores the allure of the open-world game and investigates what Squenix might be willing or capable to do to capitalize on this market that they've left largely untapped.
With 2014 underway, the CoNcast crew looks forward to the Square Enix games for the new year, as well as some other big titles on the way (especially Nintendo, as it turns out!). If you're not up to speed on what's coming next and enjoy folks who are in the same boat, download now.
It's Christmas day, folks! The holiday season is so hectic that it took me two weeks to record and get this CoNcast ready for publication. Also because of the holidays, there weren't many folks around to talk, so we just decided to blow a couple hours playing mairocrat and chatting about the holidays. It's funny, in the end we didn't really talk too much about the goings-on on our respective Wiis, or at least we left that all on the cutting-room floor. What we did talk about a lot is the holiday season, be it this one or good memories of the past. And, of course, with it being CoN, there are a number of semi-entertaining digressions and a fair bit of oversentimentality about the site itself.
This week is Thanksgiving, here in America, so what better time to talk about all the things that make us thankful for the year in gaming? To make it all the better, we invited three people who don't celebrate Thanksgiving in November (a Canadian and two Brits) to give their own in-depth feelings about being forced to be thankful for an American holiday. And we were even a bit thankful for Square Enix towards the end!
It's not "Fetch," and nobody on the CoNcast looks like a member of The Plastics. However, there is something that we've all tried to make happen over time and we haven't gotten anywhere: a remake of Final Fantasy VII. We talk about the history of false starts towards this game, the opinions expressed by Squenix employees over time, what it would take to make the fanbase happy, and even whether we actually care ourselves. But, really, who doesn't care?
For all of gaming history, as technology has evolved, so has the capability to do things graphically. We've reached the point where games can be nearly photorealistic, or they can go a very different route. Shall the twain ever meet? Is one objectively better than another? What games benefit from what art direction? All this and more in the CoNcast.
Inspired by a post at the CoN forums, the group takes a look at whether the quality of work available from Square Enix on portable devices is better than the current work on machines hooked up to TVs. It's a brawl between remakes and smaller, new IPs versus the Final Fantasy juggernaut - kinda. Who will come out ahead?
Sony and Nintendo have both been talking about new hardware recently, the former about both their upcoming console but also the new Vita TV. Nintendo, meanwhile, have an odd-looking handheld that is a 3DS sans 3D. Tokyo Game Show is coming this week, too! And for some reason we talk about fast food.
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