We continue building seasonal momentum and fling ourselves over Valve territory, as the JRT Show puts Portal 2 and the masterful tricksters who made it to the test.

Featuring science, potatoes and backhanded compliments.

I don’t know why but, before Portal 2 came out, I foolishly thought the episode covering it would be a little over ten minutes long. In truth, we have almost 20 minutes of JRT and I’m still left with quite a few things left to say.

Most were cut in fear of spoilers, others due to lack of time, and the ones I’m actually going to write about now, both concern the multiplayer.

So, I really love how there is a central hub that connects the five different stages together. It’s like an extra level just for the sake of dressing up the, usually routine, task of level selection. It is also a relic from a bygone era, when titles like these weren’t released by super-efficient teams of faceless automatons, but by a couple of nerdy coders that were always looking for neat ways to present mundane things.

In the episode, I really wanted to work in a quip about how the hub reminds me of the different entrances in Quake, that represented the different difficulty levels. Ah, those were the days.

These were also the simple, care-free days when you did all your communicating through the business end of your shotgun. Now that co-op gameplay is all the rage, what’s the etiquette for when you’ve played the game before and know exactly what’s coming up, but your partner hasn’t? I suppose it’d be similar to standard “movie theater” etiquette for action games like Resident Evil 5, but it should be much more complicated for puzzle games like Portal.

You see, the first time through the multiplayer levels in Portal 2, I simply spouted my theories as soon as they were formed in my head and was enthusiastically springing to action all over the place. But, now that I’ve actually cleared them, I immediately know what to do, and just handing out the solution right away would only be depriving the other player of the experience.

So, do I let ‘em figure it out on their own for a while, then ask if they want me to explain how it really works? How condescending would that be? Just thinking about acting like that, makes me want to punch myself in the face for excess douchebaggery-ness, but what other options do I have?

Anyway, I hope the video is enjoyable, I know it’s been a while since the last “proper” JRT. I’ll try to have another one up by the end of the month and, in the meantime, we’ll definitely be experiencing some more temporal shenanigans!

Season 2 of the JRT Show builds up to full flux capacity, as we take a look at Back to the Future: The Game: Episodes 1 through 3 and Telltale Games in general.

A review featuring hoverboards, gigawatts and branching timelines.

This video comes as a surprise to me as well, as it seems to somehow include additional commentary on Episodes 2 & 3. I don’t know if I am sleepwalking/acting/editing, but I don’t remember shooting a lot of these scenes and I think there are a couple of edits I asked Adobe Premiere to do differently. I guess they magically came out better? Strange.

Anyway, the review has footage from Episode 2 and my thoughts on it, even though I don’t recall actually playing it, and even from Episode 3, which isn’t even out yet! This doesn’t seem physically possible, but I also have this gut feeling telling me that it is somehow legit.

Even with all that extra content, there is still one thing I manage not to mention: I’ve always dreamed of making a Back to the Future videogame.

I’ve thought long about the genre it would actually belong in, and I feel “Point & Click Adventure” is a pretty good call. It plays to most of the franchise’s and, in this case, Telltale’s, strengths, and the fact that it has to completely ignore a few of the films’ trademarks just means that I can still dream of someday making the definitive adaptation.

In other news, it appears that watching too much Sir Ron Lionheart has affected my “R”s; oh, wait, there is no such thing as too much Sir Ron Lionheart. In your faces everybody!

Update: 08/04/2011

So, I got a weird email today, apparently sent by myself, containing the version of the review that I actually remember asking Premiere to compile back in February. Congrats, Adobe, this has to be the strangest bug I’ve ever seen.

Anyway, this one is quite bit shorter as it doesn’t have the mysterious extra footage the version above has, which covered Episodes 2 & 3. There are also some other changes, feel free to compare and contrast:

By the way, I’ve been short on time lately, so I haven’t played “Citizen Brown” yet. I will do so as soon as possible though, as I am curious to find if my predictions were terribly wrong or beautifully right.

Update: 17/05/2011

Guess what gang: I got hit up with another weird version of the review! This one comes off as some sort of in-between version of the two found above, not mentioning any gameplay from Episode 3 but still containing more material than I actually remember capturing three months ago.

I guess it only covers Episodes 1 & 2? This is starting to look less like a glitch and more like an elaborate prank. Judge for yourselves:

Hm… There’s something odd about the gallery too:

It’s that time again, when we get the slightly remixed transcript of the latest episode submitted to Ciao. It’s the Kinect Sports text review and it includes some fresh remarks, such as the one you may find after the break:

It’s a little known, but well spread, disease in games journalism that launch titles get artificially inflated scores. This has inevitably happened with the Kinect‘s first crop of games, but it’s thankfully nowhere near as pronounced as say, the Xbox 360‘s. I’m not about to start analyzing this right now, I just want to point out and marvel at the fact that Perfect Dark Zero, one of the worst and most disappointing games of all time, currently has a Metacritic score of 81.

Fantastic.

We continue our analysis of Kinect launch titles and get on location to check the enjoyability, as well as the authenticity, of Rare’s Kinect Sports.

Featuring strikes, spikes & shocking swerves.

Just under 20 minutes, this review might seem needlessly lengthy, especially for a casual game, but there is a lot to be said about the Kinect, Rare and sports simulations in general. I hope we’ve managed to keep a refreshing pace throughout.

Taking a cue from Red Letter Media, I’ve also added background music pretty much everywhere and I think it worked out great. The narration sounds remarkably clean too, so, as far as the audio department is concerned, this just might be the best episode yet.

It is definitely the official season finalé, since we shot it in early December only to post-it mid-January, and I figure it kinda fits the erratic scheduling we had for season 1. Stay tuned for season 2, featuring a more traditional timetable, but starting with a more fourth dimensional episode!

It’s time to finally decipher what I was trying to say in my fast-talking Dance Central video review, with the text review version, alternatively titled “Dance Central Gets You Dancing“.

It’s mostly a remix of the video’s script, with some new insights thrown in, as you can see in the passage after the break:

There is a slight difference in tone between my text reviews and video scripts and I’ll admit this one reads more like the latter. It’s definitely easier for me to write the review properly then whip up the script, but thinking of the script first is much more fun! I’ll probably switch up the order a few times in 2011, for variety, but the next review is again script-first and should be up before Christmas.

One issue the title alludes to but I didn’t manage to explicitly address in either of the reviews, is that it kinda bothers me that Harmonix knew Dance Central was going to be one of the top selling Kinect titles, no matter what. It allowed them to nonchalantly cut features when, had this been a Wii title, it would have resulted in a certain critical & commercial failure.

Now, it is entirely plausible that had Harmonix gone for those extra features, they would have spread themselves too thin and the gameplay would have suffered. At the same time, it’s not that outlandish a possibly that they would have pulled through successfully, and deliver a clearly superior game, pretty much what we’ll inevitably get with Dance Central 2.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, pulling punches and playing it safe was the smart move, but I always liked the credo “no guts, no glory”.

We take on Harmonix‘s Dance Central, easily the hottest title for the newly-launched Kinect, and try to resist the urge to drop it like its hot.

Featuring robots, dance-offs and pirouettes.

There is certainly some sort of magic at work when it comes to Harmonix-made games and, like the best forms of magic, it only works when you believe in it. And, while most everyone wants to be a rock star, the question that will determine Dance Central’s commercial success is “What’s the percentage of people that want to be dancers?”.

Just Dance showed us that it’s probably quite big and Microsoft will certainly hope so since this is Kinect’s only hope for a passable first impression. Every single Kinect title so far had to cut corners, but Dance Central is the only one to do it cleverly enough to remain presentable. It’s certainly not the title that will make everyone instantly love the peripheral, but it might well be the only one that doesn’t instill a feeling of terrible disappointment.

In case you couldn’t get enough of my Metroid: Other M video review, or I was talking way too fast for your poor human ears, there’s a slightly remixed version of the transcript available over at Ciao.

It’s pretty much what you’d hear in the video, but it does contain some different takes and brand new comments, such as:

Some further comments:

• Writing the text review after the script is much weirder than the other way around.
• Despite having about six thousand words between them, I still didn’t manage to talk about how Other M actually raised my opinion of the Prime Trilogy and even Metal Gear Solid 4! I find that Other M and MGS4 fail for a lot of the same reasons, but even Hideo Kojima knew enough about story structure to resolve his plot-lines, albeit haphazardly, and get the hero to confront the villains, even if the showdowns sometimes were anticlimactic. And, he even makes most of his cutscenes skippable!
• Rewatching the video always cracks me up, if only because I find my efforts to talk slowly as hilarious as they are ineffective.

Metroid switches development houses once again, as Team Ninja tries to provide some insight on Samus’ past and we wonder if they could have failed more epically.

Featuring monologues, monotones and many destruction sequences.

I really need to work on my ridiculously slow editing speed, not only because I’d like to get my opinions out to you guys faster, but also because I force myself into a media blackout until I get the review done. This, in turn, is bad, not only because I do enjoy my Zero Punctuations but also because I end up feeling guilty anyway if I make the same joke as someone else. And, it turns out, Yahtzee opens up with the same crack as I. Sorry!

Of course, by the time I get to that opening joke, Yahtzee’s review is already over, so maybe I also need to work on making these videos shorter?

Nah, I know you guys come here for the most impossibly detailed reviews this side of Alpha Centauri.

Speaking of games with Sid Meier‘s name in them, will I get to Civilization 5 before November? Time will tell!

Much like Mass Effect‘s Commander Shepard, we return to action completely rejuvenated and analyse BioWare‘s most ambitious release yet.

Making this review was ridiculously time-consuming not just on account of my shoulder injury, but also because Mass Effect 2 has so much notable content! Of course, it’s not always the good kind of notable, but even when it fails, it fails spectacularly. I’ve really surprised myself by keeping the video under twenty minutes, as I could have easily done a Let’s Play of the whole thing.

As such, a lot of scenes were canned but, hey, maybe they’ll find their way into Mass Effect 3…

Special thanks to DM of the Rings and Darths & Droids, two genius webcomics that helped me illustrate a point in the review!

It’s been a long time coming, but the video version is finally up: Join the JRT Show as I critique one of the holiday season’s heaviest hitters, Nintendo‘s return to its oldest franchise, New Super Mario Bros. Wii for the Nintendo Wii! Featuring dragons, mushrooms and pillow-fights.

This episode has been at 95% since early December, so there exist a couple of dated comments, but NSMB Wii is still going strong in the charts; I figure the review can still be helpful. The sound should be clearer than usual, but there are a couple of instances near the end where it fluctuates out of its own volition. You’d think it’d be easy to fix, but it only appears at the final encode and not while editing, so I suspect metaphysical shenanigans. Probably one of those damn Boos.

Next review will be of a much fresher release and it will be up… soon!