My Take Radio

For those of you that have been fol­low­ing MTR on Twit­ter & Face­book, you know that Blog Talk Radio suf­fered some seri­ous issues on Thurs­day night/early Fri­day which resulted in the loss of episode 34. Blog Talk Radio rep­re­sen­ta­tives con­firmed that the show was lost, but sur­pris­ingly enough, some of it has been restored. You’ll be able to lis­ten to about 1hr and 15minutes of the episode. Here is the state­ment from Blog Talk acknowl­edg­ing the issue, as well as a response from me and the fol­low up email as well.

1st Email from BTR:

Hi there,

We are very sorry for any incon­ve­nience. The site did expe­ri­ence tech­ni­cal issues dur­ing your show. Our tech­ni­cians are work­ing dili­gently to ensure this does not hap­pen again. Thank you so much for your under­stand­ing. Please let us know if there is any­thing we can do to help.

Regards,
–S

My Response:

S,
I am very upset at the fact that this hap­pened. I went to great lengths to get these guests from the video game com­pany THQ. Get­ting them back on will be very dif­fi­cult. Not to men­tion that it makes my show look unpro­fes­sional. I am very dis­pleased with the out­come. What steps can I take on my end to pro­tect and/or back up my broad­casts going for­ward?
Rich

Sent via Black­Berry from T-Mobile

BTR 2nd Response:

S,

Again, we would like to apol­o­gize for this incon­ve­nience. There was noth­ing you could do to pre­vent this, it was a tech­ni­cal mal­func­tion that caused this issue. We know how hard hosts work to orga­nize their shows and we are so sorry that this happened.

Again, while unfor­tu­nate, at least some of it has been recov­ered. I will at least need another day or two before upload­ing to iTunes in the event the full episode is recovered.

This weeks episode was hin­dered by tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties on the Blog Talk Radio side. How­ever, the new mic & PC helped improve the over­all qual­ity of the show. In addi­tion to the sec­ond appear­ance of Haydn Dal­ton & Han Rand­hawa from Dark­siders, here are some of things that were dis­cussed on Episode 34:

MMA

• Upcom­ing UFC events were discussed
• Slice vs. Mitrione
• James Toney

I am sure I left some stuff out, but con­sid­er­ing it’s 2:30 am I am enti­tled to a mis­take or two. HAHAHA.

Wrestling

• Upcom­ing Raw Guest Hosts
• Mon­day Night War rants

Video Games

• Dark­siders
• GDC News
• Playsta­tion “Move”
• NPD sales data
• Final Fan­tasy 13 sales 
• Frog­ger on Facebook
• DJ Hero & Rock­band DLC
• Playsta­tion Home Update
• EA Sports MMA
• Hakan in SSF4

Movies

• Zack Efron as Spidey ?
• Mar­vel cast­ing news
• Chip­munks 3-D
• Corey Haim
• Katy Perry, Quentin Taran­tino & The Smurfs?
• Oscars talk

This week’s plugs:

• GirlGamer.com
• MMAValor.com
• MMAHotstuff.com
• Darksiders.com
• Haydndalton.wordpress.com
• VGNRadio.com
• ClevelandSportsRadio.net
• Bornstubbornradio.com
• OCRemix.org
• MMAJunkie.com
• 411mania.com
• Filmdrunk.com

Ever had a bad day? I mean a really bad day? Well War, the first Horse­man of the Apoc­a­lypse, doesn’t wanna hear you whine about the day you spilled cof­fee on your brand new, white silk suit. One hun­dred years ago, he had the mother of them all. All he wants now is to right the wrongs he com­mit­ted that day and find out who set him up, and then make them have one final, excru­ci­at­ingly bad day. Dark­siders puts you in con­trol of War and lets you unleash rage the likes of which have never been seen before. Even cer­tain Spar­tans would tell this guy to calm down, Unfor­tu­nately, anger man­age­ment is not in this guy’s vocabulary.

This folks, is your tutorial.

STORY

In the begin­ning there was only Heaven and hell. Mankind came to be amidst this eter­nal strug­gle for power and it is believed that man is the key to it all. A truce was called between the blessed and accursed forces; a pact sealed with seven signs which were not to be bro­ken until the time of the end­war. Quick check…yep, the seals are all still intact, so…why is the first Horse­man on Earth lay­ing waste to well, every­thing? Leave it to Vigil Games to give you a tuto­r­ial in the mid­dle of the actual apoc­a­lypse. You fight your way through human, demon and angel, killing indis­crim­i­nately until you come upon Abbadon, leader of the Angelic forces and Uriel, his lieu­tenant. Abbadon meets a swift end at the hands of Straga, leader of the cho­sen demons and one nasty indi­vid­ual. You face off with Straga and teach him that depth per­cep­tion is not for big nasty demons but before you can kill him you sud­denly lose all of your pow­ers and real­ize that you have bro­ken sacred law. Straga laughs as he takes advan­tage of this and crushes you to death. Here’s the funny part: one hun­dred years later your bosses, known as the Charred Coun­cil, revive you in order to carry out your pun­ish­ment – death. Accord­ing to them the seals were not bro­ken and War was not sum­moned. He swears that he received the call and begs the oppor­tu­nity to prove his loy­alty or die try­ing. They bind this scrag­gly lit­tle turd of a wraith to you called the Watcher to make sure you stay in line and send you back to (now) post-apocalyptic Earth. You have been stripped on roughly ninety-nine per­cent of your true power. Still, you are War and you are deter­mined to show who­ever is behind your betrayal why you are the one true her­ald of the end of all things. (con­tinue reading…)

A few months ago, I had the plea­sure of play­ing Dark­siders at the New York Comic Con. The game got my atten­tion due to the Joe Madureira art. When I apprached the booth, I was sur­prised that not too many peo­ple were play­ing. My first response was “ahh– it prob­a­bly isn’t that good”. When I finally played it, I was proven wrong imme­di­ately and was hooked. I par­tic­u­larly enjoyed the design and the huge bat­tles with mul­ti­ple attack­ers. After meet­ing Joe Madureira at the booth, I asked who could I con­tact to dis­cuss this game on the show. I was imme­di­ately referred to THQ which gladly let me inter­view Haydn Dal­ton & Han Rand­hawa to pro­mote this game.

I have included the inter­view below for those that missed it. Click play to check it out:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

After play­ing and com­plet­ing the game, I will say that to me it was a fun and engaing thrill ride. I am not going to do a typ­i­cal  review where I focus on indi­vid­ual aspects because it really doesn’t do this game jus­tice and I per­son­ally pre­fer a review on the over­all prod­uct. The syn­op­sis is pretty straight­for­ward. The main char­ac­ter War , the sec­ond of the Four Horse­men Of The Apoc­a­lypse, is falsely accused of start­ing the Apoc­olypse and is sen­tenced to death by the Charred Coun­cil, a third group that over­sees the bat­tle between Heaven & Hell. War sug­gests going forth to clear his name and if he dies, the sen­tenced can get car­ried out. The Charred Coun­cil agrees and they send him back to a post-apocalyptic Earth with a Watcher (voiced by the great Mark Hamill), who accom­pa­nies War with the intent of keep­ing him on a short leash. I don’t want to spoil the story for any­one that hasn’t played, so I’ll leave it at that. But I will share some game­play footage:

War begins his quest with the Chaoseater Sword and tho­rugh­out the game receives new weapons and upgrades as he fights the tower guardians. By the mid­dle of the game, War is no longer alone, as he is later accom­pa­nied by his trusty steed Ruin who proves quite use­ful in the com­ing battles.

Many review­ers com­pared this game to God Of War imme­di­ately, but while that is true, I think the puzzle-solving aspects og the game as well as the over­all pre­sen­ta­tion dif­fer­en­ti­ate it quite a bit and move it more towards a grown-up Leg­end Of Zelda. Dark­siders thrives on HD dis­plays with it’s vibrant col­ors and fan­tas­tic sound and should be played as such to fully enjoy it.

If you are a fan of hack & slash adven­ture games I rec­om­mend that you pick this game up and give it a shot. I am sure you’ll enjoy it. After sell­ing over one mil­lion copies, which out­sold it’s release com­peti­tor Bayonetta(which I am now play­ing ), and based on the end­ing, I can guar­an­tee you will be see­ing a lot more of War in the near future.

Great job Vigil & THQ

Rec­om­men­da­tion : Buy

This week I had the oppor­tu­nity to inter­view Haydn Dal­ton (Lead Designer) & Han Rand­hawa (Art Director) who worked on the upcom­ing Dark­siders game. I had the chance to play Dark­siders at Comic-Con a few months ago and from the 1st few min­utes of game­play I was hooked. Between the great art from Joe Madureira and the great game­play I knew this game was going to be special.

Haydn & Han gave lis­ten­ers a  look into the inner work­ings of game devel­op­ment as well as insight into mak­ing Darksiders.

Dark­siders will be released on 1/5/2010. Make sure you pick it up!!

If you would like to keep up to date with Dark­siders news and info head over to the fol­low­ing sites

Haydn Dal­ton–Haydn’s per­sonal site which has great Dark­siders art­work and news

Darksiders.com-The Offi­cial Game Website

Han Rand­hawa–Cur­rently under con­struc­tion but once com­pleted stop on by and show your support.

My Take Radio proudly sup­ports THQ & Darksiders.

Have a look at some of the great art and gameplay:

Comic Con Photos-Gameplay Footage