WARNING! A Huge Podcast is Approaching Fast!
A podcast covering the world of Japanese gaming, brought to you by ex-GameFan and ex-Play stars Nick Rox, Casey Loe, and shidoshi.
//Stage 005
//Main Topic: Deadly Premonition
//Interview: SWERY
//Now Playing: Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker, Ys: Oath at Felghana, Mamotte Knight
//Subtopics: WAHP has new cover art, reworking the audio for previous episodes, PhyreEngine powering unannounced games, will a Demon’s Souls sequel exist, Kazunori Yamauchi personally beats Forza 3, Hiroshi Yamauchi founds cancer hospital, Nick Rox swears he sees import titles on US Xbox Marketplace, recent announcements of games coming to North America, Twitter Watch, upcoming releases, listener mail, and our super-sizes special on Deadly Premonition, featuring an exclusive interview with the game’s director, SWEARY, with answers read by Franics York Morgan himself (aka voice acting megastar Jeff Kramer).
//Feedback: wahp@morningproject.com
//Site: radio.morningproject.com
//Twitter: shidoshi (@pikoeri), Nick Rox (@NickRoxNRX)
//Special Thanks: SWERY (@Swery65 on Twitter), Jeff Kramer, Greg Weber (WebTone), Horipu-
black
June 1, 2010 — 06:57
any other great podcast like this?
Yo
June 1, 2010 — 07:36
Sweet Interview!! What a blast. I don’t care much for DP, but i loved Kramer’s voicework Brilliant, and fortunate to get him to speak as SWERY!! Bravo!
Chris Taran
June 1, 2010 — 14:25
Mind-blowingly great interview with Swery; made all the more perfect by having Kramer voice it.
Had never heard of your podcast before this, but will certainly pay attention to it from now on!
Trans-sat
June 6, 2010 — 17:50
Great show, especially loved the entire Deadly Premonition section.
One issue, two of the three hosts clearly love the game, the third CLAIMs to be a fan but had nothing but one more progressively miniscule gripe after another.
Those oddities you hate are what we love about the game’s originality and character.
Odd in that many of his ‘plaints are attributable to Japanese culture and mindset.
How can you be so Japan focused on the podcast and so oblivious to this?
Very odd.
Chris Moody
June 7, 2010 — 01:00
The love for Deadly Premonition really undermines your credibility as game journalists. A game with bad gameplay is a bad game. There is no need to equivocate here. It doesn’t matter how good the non-interactive story is. If the story is great but the game is terrible, then it should just be a movie. Its a terrible trend to see people laud games that play terribly simply because they are cinematic, as though the greatest pinnacle a videogame can achieve is to awkwardly ape cinema.
shidoshi
June 11, 2010 — 17:31
I don’t want to speak for my two co-hosts, but I’ve never considered myself a “journalist”. Fan of games, review of games, writer of gaming topics? Sure. But whatever I do, I just say how I feel about something and that’s that.
DP’s gameplay mechanics aren’t great, but they also aren’t terrible. Could they be better? Absolutely, but they could also be worse. Just as I said on the podcast, the game’s gameplay issues never once had a serious negative impact on my enjoyment of the rest of what DP had to offer. I thought the controls were kind of terrible, I got used to them, I played the game.
I’m also going to guess that I’m the target of Trans-sat’s post. *heh* My complaints aren’t directed toward Japanese culture and mindset, but more the “tradition” too much of the Japanese gaming industry seems to have found itself in, where stupid and common mistakes in the creation of games still runs rampant. Western developers seem very keen at listening to player feeding, taking a look at other games and genres around them, and then making their next game a market improvement over the previous iteration.
For example, when one game comes out and shows a direct improvement or quality idea for a genre, other games from other developers in that same genre will pick up and run with that idea. The Western development community seems to, as a whole, work towards higher levels of gameplay. On the other hand, in Japan, many developers are proud of the fact that they don’t play or pay attention to other games, and seem to often miss out on mistakes or solutions that already game up in other games years ago.
Jack Bauer
June 19, 2010 — 17:34
Good episode.
Also, @Chris Moody, there are no game “journalists”. There aren’t even regular “journalists” anymore. I believe the people you’re referring to are “reporters”, and not even good ones at that.
Jason
June 23, 2010 — 18:59
Hello!
I just wanted to let you know I love the podcast, and that interview with Swery was amazing. Keep up the great work!
aspro
June 24, 2010 — 18:05
Loving the show guys, when is the next one?
darkpen
October 21, 2010 — 05:20
that was super awesome to listen to XD oh man, agent york!
Thomas W
March 26, 2015 — 19:54
Ok, I know that I have written to you in all in various forms over the past couple of months with such rapidity that you could probably compile them all into a tome of sizable girth, but I had to drop a thought after finishing Deadly Premonition for myself, and then coming back to this Stage to finish listening to your interview with Swery.
Oh, and I doubt this need be said, but regardless ***!!!***SPOILER CITY***!!!*** Population: TONS
Ok, so I know how all of you have a problem with the whole part at the end with George, and I’ll be honest, at first, I wasn’t too thrilled with it, either. However, after giving it some thought, I came to realize that it is just as brilliant as (if not more so than) the final confrontation with Kaysen.
I can already taste the disbelief and incredulity; here, lemme lay down this beat and see if you pick it up:
We know that most of the battles in DP take place in the Otherworld, and the spirits that York faces are manifestations of the townsfolk who perished in 1956…a sort of psychic assault from the remnants of the purple fog. With his own psychic senses enhanced by his dual personality with Zach (or vice versa, depending), York is WAY more receptive to the presence of the Otherworld. In fact, there is only one other person in Greenvale who shares related traumas that could suggest that, he, too has a similar grasp of the Otherworld, and an ability to move through it seemingly at will: George.
It’s no accident that, while in the Otherworld, George’s strength is enhanced to such a degree; he has created a fiction for himself that “comes to life” when he is there…namely his “divinity” and “immortality.” In the real world, he is still very much a victim of his mother’s abuse, but in the Otherworld, under Kaysen’s guidance, he came to see himself as something more. All he needed was some prodding and encouragement, and that encouragement took two forms: the pendant, and a placebo in the form of the red seeds.
I say placebo because, in the real world, it did seem to have hallucinogenic properties, but we know now that those seeds are really there to propagate the existence of the Red Tree. Sure, there was a ritual involving those seeds, but the root of that ritual was Kaysen, who all but says that the whole thing was a load of crap.
So, at the end of the game, you have two people with a psychic connection to the Otherworld battling it out, and George seems to become this weird mutant because of the red seeds and the fulfillment of the ritual. But did he actually transform into anything? I don’t think that he did. I think that it was his connection to the Otherworld that allowed for him to project that image onto himself and to others, a form of psychic armor, if you will. He saw himself as a god, and like the ghost of the townsfolk and their accumulated misery and anguish, that godhood was manifest in a battle that took place entirely in the mind.
So no, I don’t think that George actually mutated into anything; I think that what we saw, what York fought was actually a psychic representation of the extreme form of his madness and delusions, and that his delusions were so strong that such a psychic battle would have, indeed, taken the form of a giant beast. He was able to strengthen himself (ie convince himself) that he WAS becoming this thing because of the placebo effect of consuming the red seeds themselves. Defeating the beast isn’t a battle over brawn; it is shredding George’s delusions until he succumbs to his own powerlessness and inner turmoil.
So…yeah. Sorry for the lengthy ramble, but I just thought I would share.
Tess
August 25, 2015 — 08:30
This doesn’t work for me. I know it is an old podcast but could you re-upload it? I’d really like to hear the SWERY interview. Thanks so much!
Ven
August 27, 2015 — 02:52
Just got back into the game, and would love to hear the interview! I tried downloading via link, and checking the podcast in iTunes, but no-go; would it be possible to re-upload this episode?
Arale
September 13, 2015 — 21:14
As with the two below me, this really needs to be reuploaded somewhere, even by a fan, because I can’t find this anywhere and I neeeeed to hear more York