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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 Tiddles and laszlow such fans of the aforementioned games, I sat down to spend some time with them to discuss these ideas for today's CoNcast, the 20th. Download and enjoy!

Source: The CoNcast Subscription Feed, The CoNcast on iTunes

It's been a while since we saw a full-on CoNcast, especially with a full crew of folks, especially with three of the original casters! To pick up for the new year, Death Penalty, laszlow, Stiltzkin and I got together on the line to talk about what this year will mean for gaming and for what we're looking in the next twelve months.

While there are no brand-new systems coming this year, there certainly are a lot of triple-A games on deck for all the consoles and handhelds, and given the diversity of the group, we spend some time talking about a lot of them. If you're looking for more opinions on upcoming Squenix games, or even Nintendo, you're in the right place. For other stuff, there's some of that too, I guess!

Source: The CoNcast Subscription Feed, The CoNcast on iTunes

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 Tiddles and I 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.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all. Hope you enjoy the CoNcast and we'll see you again in the new year!

Source: The CoNcast Subscription Feed, The CoNcast on iTunes

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 (because Jav is a Canadian, and Tiddles and new-boy Stiltzkin are two thankless Englishmen) to give their own in-depth feelings about being forced to be thankful for an American holiday.

We cover some big name titles, as you might expect, from Bioshock Infinite to The Last of Us and even the latest Phoenix Wright. Of course, we've got a smidgen of time for Square Enix, too, because we can't give up on them fully. We're in the holiday spirit!

Source: The CoNcast Subscription Feed, The CoNcast on iTunes

Today's CoNcast addresses one of the questions about Square Enix that has been burning for the better part of a decade. That question has probably already leapt to some of your minds: when will there be a Final Fantasy VII remake added to the sea of other Squenix reduxes? 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, the impact of the 2013 re-release to PC on future work, and even whether we actually care ourselves. But, really, who doesn't care? Is it you? Let's talk about this a little bit - the CoNcast is not meant to be a one-way street.

Don't forget that you can also talk to us about the CoNcast in all the usual means, whether that's at the forums, via email, Facebook, Twitter, et cetera. We could be looking for people to suggest topics, tell us how wrong we are, or even possibly participate in a recording (especially for episodes where we'd be looking for a more female point of view). We need to hear from folks to know that we're on the right track!

Source: The CoNcast Subscription Feed, The CoNcast on iTunes

For all of gaming history, as technology has evolved, so has the capability to do things graphically in video games. The notion of virtually every game being a set of screens with sprites pasted on is long past, and is now mainly the domain of indie games. In the mainstream, 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 kind of art direction?

This week's CoNcast features Death Penalty, Tiddles, Neal, and laszlow talking about these issues and more, and also why Pokemon should be more like Tamagotchi. And you don't have to listen to me for the whole thing, so, wins all around.

Source: The CoNcast Subscription Feed, The CoNcast on iTunes