Like all Blizzard games, the recently-released StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm is swarming with easter aggs and pop culture references. Here are some of the best ones we've found so far.
While doing the first misson on planet Kaldir (Harvest of Screams), you can see the Lich King's armor frozen on the side of a cliff. This is probably the closest you can get to Warcraft IV right now. [found by Redditor Aunvilgod]
In the first roach evolution mission, there's a hidden locked room where you can see a captured miniature Murlock Marine and a Mini Diablo in stasis cells. Unfortunately, you can't interact with them.
In the second roach evolution mission, if you move a bit to the left, you can find a hidden area—as this YouTube video shows—filled with colored crystals and a girl named Maye with two dogs: Onyx and Diamond. We're not sure what this is referring to. A future Blizzard project? Pokémon? Rebecca Mayes' video about StarCraft addiction?
During the mission Enemy Within on the Protoss ship, you can access the Protoss Kitchen (not designed for Stalkers and Sentries) after blowing up the warp drive. There you can find two easter eggs: some funny references to the Wings of Liberty arcade game Aiur Chef and an item named Pylon Poweraid with the following text: "eSports is what you make of it."
Tasteless and Artosis, the English casters of GSL, the Korean StarCraft II tournament series, get a tribute in the form of two critters—Artosilope and Tastelope, roaming around on several maps. [found by Redditor Dauneth]
Making their return from Wings of Liberty, the five Voltron-like cats make an appearance in the mission Infested. They're on one of the northern platforms.
The HotS intro has been out for a while now, but in case you missed it, you can get a quick glimpse of some Blizzard developers if you look closely.
This isn't technically an easter egg, but the satellite from the title screen of Brood War makes a return here. [found by Redditor Battlecop]
On the second Char mission there is a hidden outhouse that you can reach if you equip Kerrigan's jumping skill. It's called Terran Biomass, and the description says "Something stinks."
Found any other easter eggs? Show them to us below.
The wonderful zombie film Shaun of the Dead starts out with a running gag where it's clear that a zombie apocalypse is going on, but the heroes don't notice. As they walk down the street, we can see obscured scenes of undead carnage in the background, but Shaun is too wrapped up in his girlfriend-troubles to see.
Sometimes, a bad video game can feel a bit like that. You're playing, preoccupied with tutorials and introductory cinematic sequences, not yet fully aware of the jankiness that lurks in the shadows. Eventually, the game hits its stride and its crappiness gets right up to your face, groaning and snapping its teeth.
Terminal Reality's new game The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct does not indulge in such ambiguity. Both the zombie apocalypse and the game's utter badness are readily apparent within the first five minutes.
I spent last night playing through the first couple of hours of the first-person survival horror game, which came out yesterday for PC, Xbox 360 and PS3. Survival Instinct begins with a weird, cordoned-in tutorial that first sends you in pursuit of a false objective, then puts you into an unwinnable fight against a bunch of zombies, or "walkers" in The Walking Dead parlance. You die. Then comes the big reveal—spoiler alert?—that you were in control of the father of well-known characters Daryl and Merle Dixon, and your terrible shooting and running skills got him killed. It's a crap tutorial even among other crap tutorials, and a precursor to all the crap to come.
But first! Comes the credits sequence. Which, if you're a fan of the popular AMC Walking Dead TV show, will feel mighty familiar. Bear McCreary's six-note violin motif and string-section dive-bombs push through an evocative collection of rural imagery accompanied by the names of the actors who appear in the game. It's almost like you're watching a TV show!
And then, back to the game, which is very clearly not a TV show. You take control of Daryl Dixon, the man you'll command for the rest of the game. Side-note on Daryl—it's interesting that the most popular character on the TV show is this guy who has no counterpart in the comics. I like Daryl on the show, too. His low-drama badassery stands in welcome contrast to the whining and carrying on of the majority of the cast, and Norman Reedus manages to inhabit the role with a sharp, morally ambiguous intelligence. And he does seem like the most obvious character on the show to base a video game around, what with his signature crossbow and mysterious backstory.
But even if Daryl deserves to star in his own video game, it shouldn't be this one. I've spent two hours playing Survival Instinct, and those two hours were filled with frustration, boredom, and that peculiar form of bleak hopelessness that accompanies the worst games.
Of course, it's not a huge surprise that Survival Instinct is bad. Its promotional campaign has been festooned with warning signs—in particular the fact that they've been cagey about actually showing the game. The introductory trailers made a far bigger deal about the fact that the game stars Reedus as Daryl and Michael Rooker as his brother, Merle (Wow! Real actors from a TV show! In a video game!) than anything related to the game itself. We were unable to secure an early copy of the game for review, which is never a good sign. And early footage that hit the web was… well, it wasn't promising.
So, yes, the game is a steaming pile and an utter waste of time and money. On the off-chance that this is all new to you, allow me to demonstrate a few of the ways it comes up short.
It's very ugly.
Survival Instinct looks and moves like an Xbox 360 launch title, with inconsistent performance and flat colors and textures. On PC, it offers the following advanced graphical options:
Here's what the game looks like without light shafts:
And here's what it looks like with them:
Okay then!
Combat is a drag.
Combat in the game is a disaster, plain and simple. In the early stages, you'll have a couple of guns and a knife. One of the guns uses a scope and is essentially useless, as the zombies are never far away enough to require you to use it. The shotgun is more useful, but is so loud that it attracts far more zombies than you could ever kill with your limited ammunition. That leaves you with the knife, which lets you get into a kind of hilarious slap-fight with a zombie until you kill it. As seen here:
Or, you could sneak up behind the biter and stab it in the brain. You will do this a lot. In fact, the ol' "Punch the zombie in the face to stun it, then run around it and stab it in the brain" trick was just about the only trick I used. Well, unless I got caught in...
The endless zombie group-hug.
One of the weirdest elements of Survival Instinct is the "grapple" move, which happens when a zombie gets too close to you. Daryl starts to wrestle with the zombie, and you jam the right trigger and, if you can get the cursor over the zombie's head, Daryl will stab it in the brain. It's kind of a neat idea? Except it fails in execution. The levels I've played usually end with me making a run through a pack of walkers. And if I get even remotely close to one of them, I get sucked into an unending zombie scrum, stabbing zombie after zombie after zombie, almost always until I die.
Here's a video:
Sweat. Everywhere.
Survival Instinct also features a lot of sweat. Sweat? Yes, sweat. Normally in games like this, when you "sprint" for a while, you'll run out of breath. Maybe, if you're playing Far Cry 2, your vision will swim a bit. In Survival Instinct, you'll start to see a weird water effect run down the side of the screen. That is, I have to assume, supposed to be Daryl's sweat, pouring down the camera lens. Weird! And kinda gross!
(It's a little hard to see in this video, but it's at the corners. Anyway, it's strange.)
Video Game B.S.
Survival Instinct is loaded with all kinds of shoddy video-game bullshit. The levels are very hemmed in and the world never feels reactive or real, and as a result the whole thing feels cheap and unfair. You'll carry around sports drinks that replenish your health, but equipping and using them is a nuisance. Checkpointing is a bummer and there's no quicksave option, and at least once the game crashed to desktop and forced me to restart an entire level. The heads-up display is laughably fug, a giant oblong compass in the corner of the screen that points, surprisingly unhelpfully, to your next objective.
Level design is awful—I'd run into a room and more often than not would get cornered and die. Doors are inconsistent—some will open, but most are glued shut. And there are invisible walls everywhere.
Check out this doozy from the end of another early mission:
I'm standing on the car, the dude I'm supposed to get to is right there, and yet I have to run into the glowing green area to end the mission. Man.
Slightly interesting ideas, poorly implemented.
When you travel from level to level in the game, you'll have to make some decisions about which route you take. You can take backroads, regular streets, or the highway. Each one uses a certain amount of gas, and each one brings with it a chance of a breakdown. If you run out of gas or break down, you'll have to explore a small side-mission area to find more gas or locate whatever part from your car needs to be replaced.
It's an interesting risk/reward idea that falls flat because no matter what happens, you're going to have to do the same thing: Enter an area, dodge some zombies, grab a thing, and run back to the glowing green square. Basically, these side missions give you more game to play. Because the game is terrible, they feel more like a punishment than a bonus.
You can also manage the survivors in your crew, which is another odd idea that doesn't work but could've maybe been interesting in another game. You can give your companions weapons and even send them out on errands to get gas or food. You can also just tell them to "stay at the car," which, if you follow the TV show, is kind of funny, albeit unintentionally so.
But really, this whole aspect of the game is a mess, and just adds some unclear, unfun micromanaging to deal with in between unfun action missions. I'd love to play a post-apocalyptic resource management/travel game like Oregon Trail, but this ain't it.
There's certainly no opportunity to get attached to your friends, and their deaths are treated about as ignobly as could be. Check out the end of this mission (more spoilers, if you care):
So not only does the cutscene trigger before I touch the green box, it ends with a hilariously anticlimactic death scene. Bang! End-of-mission screen! Ha.
Basically, everything else.
The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct is a slipshod, uninspired mess. I have to feel for the developers at Terminal Reality—whatever rushed production schedule or other behind-the-scenes shenanigans must have gone down, no professional game-maker could be happy with this final product.
There are so many superior alternatives: If you've got a hankering to kill some zombies in a southern setting, play Left 4 Dead 2. If you love The Walking Dead and want to spend more time in that world, play Telltale's wonderful adventure game from last year. And if you want to play a tense, terrifying first-person zombie game that relies on smarts and sneaking as much as on firepower (and you own a Wii U), play ZombiU.
I can think of no compelling reason why anyone should play this game. Ugly, flat, boring, aggravating and often broken, The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct is the purest form of video game garbage. It's utterly unworthy of your time and money.
Everyone likes to talk about Game of Thrones. And everyone likes to talk about SimCity. So combining the two seems only logical, right?
Check out this sweet video. And remember, in the Game of SimCity, you win or you [Alert: Unable to create your city at this time. Please claim a city again.]
(Thanks, Schiller!)
UPDATE: As some commenters have pointed out, the above video was ripped from the German show Game One, which may explain why it was pulled. Head over to Game One to see it for yourself. (It's the intro to the second video.)
Valve has just launched Steam Early Access, a new program designed to let Steam users play games while they're still in development.
Here's the full press release:
Steam Early Access titles allow the community to get involved early and play select titles during their development. The goal of Early Access is to provide gamers with the chance to "go behind the scenes" and experience the development cycle firsthand and, more importantly, have a chance to interact with the developers by providing them feedback while the title is still being created.
To support the interaction between Early Access players and developers, Steam offers easy and automatic updating of games, letting developers iterate quickly to respond directly to bug reports and feedback from customers. And, like all Steam games, Early Access players will be able to interact with other players, making it easy to create and share screenshots, tips, and in-depth guides.
"A lot of games are already operating as ongoing services that grow and evolve with the involvement of customers and the community," said Sean Pollman of Badland Studio. "Greenlight helped us raise awareness for Kinetic Void, and now Steam Early Access will let us continue the development of our game while gathering crucial feedback, input and support from the steam Community."
The first titles coming to Steam Early Access are:
1... 2... 3... KICK IT! (Drop That Beat Like an Ugly Baby)
Think back to when you made mixtapes or burned a specific selection of songs to CD for somebody. What were you trying to do?
You were trying to get across the awesomeness of a set of feelings through a bunch of really cool tracks. There might be some uptempo stuff, really affecting acoustic numbers or maybe it was just unending compilations of Miami booty bass for weeks on end.
This new trailer for Gone Home features killer tunes from Heavens to Betsy and Bratmobile, who'll be making up part of the original soundtrack for the Fullbright Company's upcoming exploration game. I really like this clip a lot because it transports me back to a very specific moment in time from my own life, despite the fact that I didn't have quite the same experiences.
Now, I'm thinking that Gone Home will be a sort of an emotional mixtape, giving you a series of spaces and interactions to walk through. One thing's for sure: when Gone Home comes out for PC, Mac and Linux later this year, it'll have some pretty music inside of it.
What happens when you turn Pokémon Snap into a dramatic movie full of hardship, triumph and betrayal? This video by GrittyReboots happens—and, as ridiculous as the concept sounds, they manage to make it work.
I'd say I want to go play Pokémon Snap now, but it wouldn't hit the same notes as this movie now would it?
The man who revolutionized computer role-playing games with the Ultima series doesn't think much of the talent currently working in the medium when it comes to game design. Who's good at it? He is. Maybe a few others.
In an interview with PC Gamer, Lord British says that there just isn't that much status-quo changing talent—like his—in video games right now:
"…other than a few exceptions, like Chris Roberts, I've met virtually no one in our industry who I think is close to as good a game designer as I am. I'm not saying that because I think I'm so brilliant. What I'm saying is, I think most game designers really just suck, and I think there's a reason why."
"... we're leaning on a lot of designers who get that job because they're not qualified for the other jobs, rather than that they are really strongly qualified as a designer. It's really hard to go to school to be a good designer."
Garriott goes on to call a lot of other designers "lazy" and says that they make only incremental changes to templates for other games that already exist. When I interviewed Garriott two weeks ago, he said that he's more of a dabbler when it comes to big, AAA PC and console games these days, since he hasn't been making those kinds of games for a long, long time. He's managed to sample a handful of AAA games a year and finish a smaller chunk of the ones that hold his interest. The multimillionaire plays mobile games on his tablet more than anything else, he said, which is a key reason he wants Shroud of the Avatar—the new game being built by Garriott's Portalarium dev outfit to be cross-platform.
There's no denying the impact that Garriott has had on video games, and in the role-playing genre in general. Shroud of the Avatar—the new game being built by Garriott's Portalarium dev outfit—just secured a million dollars of Kickstarter funding a few weeks after being announced. And his past accomplishments are what make the potential of his new game so exciting.
However, Garriott's name is also attached to Tabula Rasa, a game viewed as a colossal failure by many. His points about other game designers aren't all that different than what lots of disgruntled players say about poorly executed experiences. But wrapping those observations in insults makes him sound self-centered and out-of-touch. Good thing Shroud of the Avatar hit its goal already. Next move is all yours, Lord British.
Designer Dave Delisle did a really great job recreating the Washington DC Metro Line as a Super Mario Bros 3 world map. With its 86 stations as separate levels, Washington's Metro would be an extremely long Mario game (and a damn good one, with names like The Pentagon).
If you know where to look, you can see the moment Adam Sessler knew he was about to be fired.
It was April, 2012. The longtime TV host had been hearing rumors about his own departure for months. And while taping what would be his last episode of X-Play on G4TV, Sessler saw executives looming in the corner.
The cameras caught it. The snap of his eyes. The sudden turn of his neck.
Minutes later, Adam Sessler left the G4 studio. He never came back.
***
If you pay any attention to the world of video games, it's hard not to find yourself drawn to the shaven head of Adam Sessler. Famous for his gravelly voice and outspoken views, Sessler has been one of gaming's most public figures since he first appeared on television in 1998. Over the past decade and a half, he's been talking about video games on various channels—ZDTV, then Tech TV, then G4TV—with brutal honesty that has endeared him to tons of gamers.
Last April, G4TV fired Sessler. A few months later, he announced that he had taken a job at Revision3, a company that produces web shows and calls itself "the television network for the Internet generation." His journey has been fascinating and unusual.
In February, when Sessler was in New York for the big PlayStation 4 event, I invited him to stop by Kotaku's offices. Decked out in a brown fedora, a pink scarf, and the traditional garb of all video game professionals—a t-shirt, a blazer, and jeans—the magnanimous TV host sat with me for a couple of hours to talk about his life, his career, and the strange, confusing circumstances behind his departure from G4.
He still doesn't know why they fired him.
***
Adam Sessler was born on August 29, 1973—the same day of the year as Michael Jackson, he likes to point out—in El Cerrito, California, just outside of Berkeley. He went to private school until he turned 13, and then his parents sent him to El Cerrito High School, which was a bit of cultural shock.
"I grew up with a lot of people who didn't look like me," Sessler said. "I was definitely the scrawny white kid."
People would bully and harass him. One guy, Sessler recalls, used to wear a ring with a Cadillac logo. "They thought it was really funny when they'd punch me in the shoulder just to see what the imprint would look like afterwards," he said. (It looked like a Cadillac logo.)
"I'd just make up stories to try to convince everybody I was crazy, and then try to become more and more of a comedian, 'cause that was a really quick way to not get hit."
So, following the high school path of many nerds and future stand-up comics, Sessler decided to take the route of class clown.
"I'd just make up stories to try to convince everybody I was crazy, and then try to become more and more of a comedian," he said. "‘Cause that was a really quick way to not get hit."
It worked. And Sessler stuck with it: in 1991, he entered UCLA hoping to major in theater and acting. "Then I met the other people in the program," he said, "and I'm like, yeah, I'm gonna go do English."
Sessler went on to study literature. He wrote a lot of papers. And he played... not a lot of video games. "When I was in college, I didn't play as many games, because I was too busy working on the novel I never wrote," Sessler said, although he does recall one semester when his dorm neighbor got a Super Nintendo, along with Super Mario World and Super Street Fighter. For that single semester, Sessler's grades plummeted. (He stayed away from games for the rest of his college years.)
"Games were part of my life," Sessler said. "But I never even considered that there was some sort of career that could happen with that."
In 1995, when Sessler graduated from UCLA, Los Angeles had just suffered a recession, and jobs were scarse. Unable to find work, he flew home to San Francisco. When a friend of a friend called and offered him a job at a local branch of a giant bank, Sessler took it. He had no other options—and money had become a serious problem.
"I'm hired in the credit department, and I have no credit," Sessler said, laughing. At work he'd get calls from Bank of America agents trying to get him to pay off his debts.
"I answered the phone, ‘Credit department, this is Adam,'" he said. "I could tell that they were coming after me to pay my bills, because there'd be this pause of confusion, because they were the credit department."
It was a miserable two-and-a-half years for Sessler, who spent a ton of time worrying that he'd be stuck on the finance career track for life. "When you're young and in your 20s and you have that job, you don't have enough life behind you to understand how much is ahead of you," he now says. He started freaking out, worrying that becoming a banker was his destiny. Even as his co-workers warned him not to stick with a job he hated so much, he thought about giving up. He considered taking accounting classes.
Meanwhile, Sessler moonlighted as an actor on a San Francisco public access show called Chip Weigh Magnet Down. He found out about a new job through the kind of indirect happenstance that is behind so many big breaks. One of his colleagues had a boyfriend, who had a friend who told Sessler about GameSpot. GameSpot—then owned by media conglomerate Ziff Davis—was looking for a host for the video game show they planned to start on the new channel ZDTV.
Sessler was interested, although he hadn't kept up with gaming—"I was young, it was the 90s, I was in San Francisco," he told me. "There's more than enough things to do that don't involve video games." So he brushed up on a bit of history, and decided to memorize two names: Resident Evil 2 and Final Fantasy VII.
Turns out if you haven't played Final Fantasy VII, it's kind of a tough name to remember. At the audition, when the casting director asked Sessler what games he played, he answered: Resident Evil 2, and...
"I said something that was so not Final Fantasy VII," Sessler laughed. "Everybody's just like ‘Uh...'"
But in what Sessler calls "probably the best coincidence in the world," it turned out the main audition director was also the woman who ran the public access station, and she loved his show. She'd found one sketch, in which Sessler does his best impresion of Irish dancer Michael Flatley, and she thought it was hilarious.
Sessler was standing there, thinking he had no chance after a gaffe like that. One of the directors looks at him and says "Um... they would like you to do the riverdance."
"So I did it," Sessler told me. "That's how I got the job. It pains me, 'cause one of the most common questions I get from young kids is, ‘How do I get a job like yours?' I don't know! This should not have happened."
***
Sessler's first show aired on July 4, 1998. He and his co-host, Lauren Fielder, would produce and air 30 minutes of television every week. They'd preview games, review games, and bring on GameSpot editors like Jeff Gerstmann (now head of the gaming website Giant Bomb) and Greg Kasavin (now a writer at Bastion creator SuperGiant Games) to talk about what they were doing on the site. It was GameSpot TV, after all.
The setup was strange, Sessler recalls. The hosts spoke in front of a silhouette of a chained link fence, flanked by TV screens full of flames—"It gave the sense that we were giving reviews at a back alley with burning trash cans," Sessler says—and most of what they did just echoed GameSpot's editorial coverage. In the first few years, Sessler guesses they were only reaching something like 10,000 people per episode.
"I got death threats. I remember one: someone saying if I got raped and murdered in a New York alley, justice would be done."
But Sessler started to learn how to produce good television, and he started building up his video game chops with the likes of Banjo Kazooie and Spyro. They snagged some pretty solid guests, too.
"We got this interview with this guy named Gabe Newell," Sessler said, "about this game called Half-Life that we were all excited about, having no idea... It was almost a naive point in time. The big game that we thought was going to be big that year was Sin."
Then there was Columbine.
On April 20, 1999, when two students shot up Columbine High School and murdered 13 people, the country immediately looked for some sort of explanation. For many, the scapegoat was video games: both shooters were fans of games like Doom and Wolfenstein. And it changed the way Sessler and his team approached gaming.
"I got death threats," Sessler said. "I remember one: someone saying if I got raped and murdered in a New York alley, justice would be done. I remember I was eating a burger when I saw that comment—and how that burger just changed its flavor. It's like, ‘Oh, I'm a little more visible than I thought I was.'"
Word came from up high that they couldn't show people shooting people in games anymore—not an easy task if you want to put on a TV show about video games. They could barely cover Grand Theft Auto III, for example. They had to find clever ways to talk about games without talking about one of the biggest elements of gaming.
In late 1999, an entrepreneur named Paul Allen purchased ZDTV. A year later, he gave it a new name: TechTV. Best known as the co-founder of Microsoft, Allen had a new vision for the shows on this network: nine hours of live technology broadcasting, every single day.
GameSpot TV became Extended Play, and there was a ton of turnover as the team tried to master live television. "It was fun, but it cost a lot of money and it really wasn't generating revenue," Sessler said.
Extended Play stuck around until 2003, when, in an attempt to figure out how to make money off shows about video games, TechTV hired a new executive to head up programming, Greg Brannan. Brannan, a friend and mentor of Sessler's who passed away last month, decided to give the show a total makeover. They brought in a new co-host, Morgan Webb. They moved it to a later timeslot. They renamed it X-Play. The goal: cut out the kiddie stuff, and make it feel like a late-night talk show about video games, along the lines of Conan or Leno.
"Now, the ‘people shooting at people' thing, not a problem," Sessler said. "Now we're using language we've never used before, almost trying to hype up the naughtier aspects of games. It wasn't as... ‘Hey kids, games!' It was now"—and he deepened his voice here—"'Hey kids, games!'"
But at this point, Sessler thought the show would be a disaster. They hadn't renewed his contract and he was working on a month by month basis, so every day he worried that he might suddenly lose his job.
"We do the first show—I hated it," Sessler told me. "I just didn't like what we were doing. I thought we were making fools of ourselves."
Then he got a call from one of the producers. "The ratings came in. We blew up. We had blown out almost anything that had happened on the network before," Sessler said. "The best way I can describe it is: we'd get these ratings sheets with certain colors made to describe each range. They had to come up with a new color for us."
Sessler looks fondly back at this era of X-Play, when it felt like they could do no wrong. Even when they got complaints from fans who didn't like their sketches, people were watching the show. They had room to be creative.
But the bliss didn't last very long.
"We're at E3 2003," Sessler said. "Happy days. And then word gets to us that Paul Allen has put TechTV on the block. He doesn't want it anymore: he's losing money. It's like, we're finally doing what we want to do, and that lasts about a year."
By the same time the following year, Sessler and his team knew G4 was taking over. And when G4 took over, they gutted X-Play and laid off a ton of staff.
"It was... I wouldn't say handled well," Sessler said. "Unfortunately, it did not endear us to our new employers at the outset. I think that's something that, had it been handled better, a lot of things may have been different."
X-Play fans weren't too pleased, either. And because the show's set lights had burned into the LCD monitors, imprinting a slight outline of a TechTV logo that you could see when they ran game footage, fans thought the X-Play team was subtly crying for help. (They weren't.)
G4 wanted them to relocate to Los Angeles, too. In late 2004, not long after Sessler met the woman who would go on to become his wife, he had to move down to southern California. She stayed in San Francisco. On weekends, he'd fly out to be with her, then fly back to L.A. on Sundays—or, Mondays, really, because he'd wake up on Sundays and decide that he wanted to sleep in, so he'd reschedule his flight to Monday morning at 6am.
"It was just this kind of anxiety-ridden affair," Sessler said. "I think that's what's made me hate travel."
But Sessler thinks X-Play did their best work during those first couple of years in Los Angeles. "We were kind of not wanting to become G4, so it really fostered a ridiculous amount of creativity."
Then there was the musical. The most lavish production they ever put together, X-Play's musical episode cost over $1 million to shoot—and nobody watched it, Sessler said.
"That's when things start to shift," he said. "We were not failing by any means, but at this point, G4 just can't seem to grow."
"I had never heard people talk about Britney Spears concerts in earnest, and they had never heard people talk about Spider-Man trailers in earnest."
They were then moved out of their Santa Monica studio and dumped in the Comcast building, home of the company's other channels, like the pop culture junkies at E!. The groups were interspersed throughout the same office, and the people at E! did not get along very well with the people at G4. Sessler and his team were very loud, for example.
"If you wanna see something cruel, you put a bunch of G4 employees amongst E!," Sessler said. "I had never heard people talk about Britney Spears concerts in earnest, and they had never heard people talk about Spider-Man trailers in earnest."
Suddenly, things felt different. There was more tension. More drama. "It was just the sense that things had gone from whimsical to something a little more serious," Sessler said. "We felt the financial aspect, that this was a business. There was much more at stake now than there had been before."
On top of that, streaming video had just become a thing: services like YouTube were making it possible for anyone to dump trailers or run video reviews at any time. No TV, no networks, no ratings. It felt like something was shifting.
The disadvantages of television became ever-so-clear during E3 of 2006, when X-Play arranged to cover Microsoft's press conference and broadcast it live. There were... issues.
"It didn't occur to me—I don't think it occurred to anybody—that the press conference is gonna keep going into the ad time, and the ad time just had to happen," Sessler told me. "It's suddenly dawning on us as they're showing the Mass Effect trailer, and in the middle of it, commercial. Fans are furious."
To make a bad problem significantly worse, Microsoft's conference was running late, and G4's taping was tied to the East Coast. FCC regulations called for a station identification break at midnight Eastern time, no matter what. They'd have to cut off their broadcast even if it meant cutting off the end of Microsoft's press conference.
The end of Microsoft's 2006 press conference happened to be the reveal trailer for Halo 3.
"And so I'm there watching, and I hear, ‘Adam, you need to send us to break in the middle of this," Sessler said. "I'm like, ‘I'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna be the person responsible for denying people exactly what they came here to see.' I start getting really angry. Somebody caught this and it went up on YouTube the next day. You can hear me screaming. It was a disaster."
Over the next few years, X-Play's ratings just got softer and softer. Sessler and his team had to fight very hard for exclusive content—always an unreliable process—and they found it increasingly difficult to get audiences to wait until evening for what they could see online any time for free.
They tried going five days a week. It didn't work. The show became less funny, less interesting. And when some sort of content—say, an exclusive trailer, or a big preview—didn't work for whatever reason, Sessler would freak out.
"That's the thing—that's what's tricky about television, which is very different from the Internet," he said. "You can only have half an hour, and you have to have half an hour. So when someone says, ‘Hey, we can't do this,' that cost to a website is nominal cause nobody's gonna know the difference. The cost to the show is, we have an empty three minutes."
It would take another few years, but the end of G4 seemed inevitable.
***
On April 19, 2012, Kotaku got a tip from an anonymous source that G4 had no plans to renew Adam Sessler's contract. They were letting him go.
We couldn't verify the news, so we didn't run it. On April 25, we heard the same thing from a second source. We prepared a story and reached out to Sessler's people for confirmation. That afternoon, Sessler's agent sent out a note:
Television personality Adam Sessler and TV network G4 are parting ways, with Adam's last episode as host of G4's "X-Play" airing on the network today, Wednesday, April 25. Adam has been hosting the show since it first aired as ZDTV's "Gamespot TV" in July 1998 and he also served as Editor In Chief of games content at G4. His current projects include starring as himself in the Summer 2012 movie "noobz" and consulting with a film production company on theatrical feature adaptations of video games. Adam intends to stay in front of the camera and continue as a key voice within the games industry. He also sings and is available for weddings and bar mitzvahs.
What Sessler didn't say at the time is that he had been hearing rumors of his own departure for almost three months before that. Since the beginning of 2012, he'd be approached by friends and colleagues at G4 and even other companies. "Be careful," they'd tell him. "Something's going around saying you'll be out by April."
"That was really jarring," Sessler told me. "I've been around the block—I like to think that I have thick skin. But that is not something you like to hear—especially ‘cause it was me. I always thought the show would end, and I would end with the show. But now it's just me."
He flew out to the DICE summit in Vegas that February, then found out G4 didn't want him to do anything there. He then found out that they didn't want him to cover GDC that March.
"I was going into work every day and it was like, ‘Is today the day?'" Sessler said. "I confronted people who were saying, ‘We don't know anything.'"
At this point, Sessler was ready to leave—he wasn't happy at G4 anymore, he told me—but he thought the show would end with him. He wanted to leave with dignity, not get ousted from the ship he helped build. He felt like they owed him more than this.
Back to April. Sessler was on set, taping a show. Just a few minutes before it ended, the head of talent told Sessler that she and the vice president of production were coming downstairs to meet in his dressing room, Sessler told me. And suddenly he knew what was about to happen.
His eyes snapped. His head turned.
Some savvy fans noticed it. They realized something strange had happened. But they had no idea they were looking at the moment Adam Sessler knew he was about to be fired.
"I asked [the execs] how it was that this rumor had been going on for months," Sessler said. "I just thought it was disrespectful that they couldn't maintain the professionalism to just keep this thing—you know, it was just humiliating. And then it occurred to me that it was only me, and I was going to be gone. And I walked out of that building and I never returned."
Even today, Sessler doesn't know how the rumors started, or why G4 got rid of him, as he pointed out in one amusing tweet last month.
I reached out to a few different G4 representatives for an explanation, but I never heard back. Maybe it was inevitable—later in 2012, Esquire announced that they had partnered with G4 parent company NBCUniversal to rebrand G4TV as the Esquire Channel. No more video game coverage.
"Jobs end," Sessler said, "but the way it was handled after all the years I put in, and that sense of public humiliation... It's sad, because I have so many fun memories of all the things I did there. But it's such a bitter taste at the very end of it."
Things are better now. Sessler was approached by a few different outlets, but he eventually decided on Revision3, where he got a swanky "executive producer" title and the freedom to talk, and interview, and rant without having to worry about ratings, or air time, or meddling TV executives.
I asked Adam Sessler to send over some photos, and he sent me this GIF, created by a Rev3 staffer. It's... hypnotizing.
And like the rest of the media world, Sessler is starting to adapt to the future.
"I didn't know the Internet that well," he said. "Now I've started to learn about it."
"What sort of things have you started to learn?" I asked.
"I can just be more personable," he said. "When I'm conducting an interview, I don't have that thing in the back of my head that this is gonna be cut down to three minutes. I like asking the questions that aren't about the game—more about the philosophy of the game, the challenges in trying to make the game the way it was. I can just feel like, getting excited, doing these interviews. It's how I want it to be—not having that time restriction."
More importantly, the Internet gives Sessler and the rest of the crew at Revision3—a talented group of personalities including Max Scoville and Tara Long—the creative freedom to fail. To make stupid decisions.
"Failure's an easy thing on the Internet," Sessler said. "If you put something up and it sucks, you just don't do it again. On TV, you spend so much money, so much resources, you're kinda called to the carpet about that."
For Sessler, it's liberating. He worked in television for 14 years, constrained by that medium's inherent limitations. Even the one big advantage of television—exposure to a national audience—is getting less relevant: Sessler's videos on Rev3 regularly net 60, 80, and even 100 thousand views.
"When you're working in TV, trying to change things is like trying to get an 18-wheeler to do a U-turn on the freeway," Sessler said. "Here, it's like, we can be reactive, and we can be quick."
On April 22, G4 will be no more. But Sessler's still around. And he's ready for whatever's next.
The ability to transfer save files across Wii U and 3DS versions of the new Monster Hunter series failed to go live on the game's North American launch day yesterday, despite being featured in the main trailer for the game.
Gamers in North America can merrily play through the Nintendo console and portable versions of Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate, but the ability to move save files from one machine to the next is dependent on a free, downloadable 3DS app that has yet to appear on the system's online store. Until it does, the Wii U version's save-transfer menu option is but a tease.
"The Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate Packet Relay Tools and the Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate Data Transfer Program are not yet live on the Nintendo eShop," a Capcom rep confirmed to Kotaku over e-mail late last night. "Capcom is working closely with Nintendo to make these available for download as soon as possible and apologize for the delay."
Monster Hunter is one of the most popular game series in Japan, a phenomenon of Call of Duty or Pokémon proportions. It kept Sony's PSP popular in that country even as the system fell into the shadows elsewhere.
The Monster Hunter games are fantasy-themed adventures that let up to four players arm heroes with outlandish swords, bows and other weapons as they hunt a menagerie of otherworldly beasts.
The new Wii U and 3DS games, which are sold separately, update the 2009/2010 Wii release of Monster Hunter Tri with up-razzed graphics and added content. While players can solo through the game, they can play online with others on Wii U or with fellow 3DS owners locally.
Once the app goes live players will be able to move their progress across machines so they can play on their TV or away from it. We'll update this post when it is available.
UPDATE 3/20 9:48PM ET: A Capcom rep now says: "As you know, the Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate Packet Relay Tools and the Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate Data Transfer Program are not yet live on the Nintendo eShop. Nintendo is working very closely with us to get these live as soon as possible and we anticipate that they will both be available on the Nintendo eShop by Friday, March 22. We sincerely apologize for the delay and appreciate that eager fans are looking forward to the feature set offered by the two apps."
The wonderful zombie film Shaun of the Dead starts out with a running gag where it's clear that a zombie apocalypse is going on, but the heroes don't notice. As they walk down the street, we can see obscured scenes of undead carnage in the background, but Shaun is too wrapped up in his girlfriend-troubles to see.
Valve has just launched Steam Early Access, a new program designed to let Steam users play games while they're still in development.
![The New Monster Hunter Is Out, But One Of Its Biggest Features Isn't [UPDATE: Friday, Perhaps?]](http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18i2q4gtx7f82jpg/original.jpg "The New Monster Hunter Is Out, But One Of Its Biggest Features Isn't [UPDATE: Friday, Perhaps?]")