I was sitting down to dinner the other night and mum said “You seen that Gaming Lives your brother writes for?”. “Err yeah”, I replied while thinking “Where the hell has she got that from?”… “I read all of the one where he talked about that duck game you had, it was ever so good. I read all his other ones too. does he get paid for that?” I chuckled a little “No mum, it’s just for something to do.  You know I post on there too?” “Do you?” she gasped “Yeah that’s where Adam got it from”… “Ohhhhhhh still, it was very good”

Not a lot of people know that Adam and I are brothers. We look alike, there’s the first clue, but I suppose you couldn’t tell on the internets. We practically grew up gaming and, with him now at uni in the south somewhere, Xbox live has proven one of the best ways to keep in touch – we can knock the crap out of each other without starting mum off, but he’s back home from the south this week so we’ll chat shit about games for a while and you can read it all here.

Lee:
What was your first gaming memory? Mine was when dad bought a Sega Mega Drive, it had altered beast in the box, I know in theory that should also be yours but I was just checking.

Adam:
I remember the Sega Mega Drive coming home, the size of the box and all of the polystyrene. I remember the game was just plain weird and didn’t make any sense at all (Why exactly were pigs carrying magical orbs of enhancement?) I remember Granddad getting one after that and being amazed that I was able to get a hole in one on PGA Golf – TPC Sawgrass, Hole 17. All I did was copy the screenshot on the back of the box of an instant replay where someone had sunk one from the drive. Same wind speed, same power, boom.

Lee:
We used to really knock the crap out of each other growing up. Which game caused the most fights between us?

Adam:
Possibly Sonic 2? With me always having to play as Tails and you always running off without me? That and Micro Machines on the Amiga, because it would get really competitive and we only had one Joystick that worked properly.

Lee:
I couldn’t help it – Sonic was fast, you did get to fly the plane though

Adam:
Yeah but then it got shot down and I had to sit the rest of the sodding game out!

Lee:
Remember that game called Bubsy the Bobcat?

Adam:
Yes. He could ‘Glide’ and when he died, funny things happened like an ambulance would come along and take you away. We only ever rented it the once though and it wasn’t a very easy game so we never got far on it. I preferred “Rolo to the Rescue”, that was great.

Lee:
ahaha Rolo the elephant that was ace they should remake that, James Pond 2 was good too – you could spell out the word cheat at the start by eating stuff off the roof and then you could cheat your ass off all the way to the top of the castle.

Adam:
Robocod was pretty cool, I liked the toy levels where you got to fly planes. The entire concept was pretty odd though, it must have been an experience to have been sat in the marketing room when they pitched the idea for that one.

Lee:
What do you think the most important innovation in gaming has been since we become gamers?  I think it’s the wireless Xbox pad, you imagine getting up to switch it on? I have to stand up walk round the coffee table, hit the button then go all the way back. If pads still had wires I’d still be sitting on the floor in front of the telly. I’m that lazy.

Adam:
It’s the internet, no question. Consoles could still have wired pads and affix a power button to them (you still have to actually get up to change discs so what’s the problem in having to get up to turn it on/off) but the Xbox without Live and the PC without the MMO? I think I’d have given up on gaming long ago without the promise of online games.

Lee:
Oh i didn’t think of that one.

Adam:
Well I took a three-four year head start on you with that one in how engrossed I became in PC gaming. I remember that we were probably one of the only households in Britain to have the PS2 modem which showed in that we were probably the only ones to ever get the damned thing working. Even when we switched to Xbox there wasn’t much going for Xbox Live really, save for Battlefront, Halo and Forza. Good thing we skipped the broadband adapter for the GameCube really.

Lee:
Do you think Mass Effect would make a better TV series or a film? I think TV. Sci-Fi on TV has been naff since Atlantis crashed into San Francisco. Every so often in a series they could have people press the red button to make the choices.

Adam:
Yeah but people are douche bags and they make bad choices. If it was ever made (and I’d be the first to say that it shouldn’t – as epic as it is, the game would always be better), it would have to be a movie. Serenity proved that you can take a fairly unknown story and re-work it into a couple of hours of the best cinema, I think Mass Effect would be capable of repeating that.

Lee:
Fine we’ll drop the red button but a TV series would be cool

Adam:
It would just be Battlestar Galactica again, except with Aliens.

Lee:
Who is your favourite game character of all time?

Adam:
Now that’s a tough one. It’s not often I come across a game where the characters are robust enough to actually like them. Alyx from Half-Life 2 and Peyj from Beyond Good and Evil are certainly some of the best designed characters I’ve come across in that they managed to really forge a bond with me. Kyle Katarn from the Jedi Knight Series and Master Chief are undoubtedly some of the cooler characters I’ve played, but that’s really more of what I do as them, than the characters themselves.

I suppose it could really only be Commander Shepard. I can forgive myself quite happily if anything were to happen to the other characters in both Mass Effects on my save file, but if something were to happen to Shepard? Well I just don’t know what I’d do with myself.

Lee:
I miss Kelly Chambers. Why Kelly! Why did you have to die!!??
Is your Kelly Chambers still alive? Mine died. I screamed at the TV so loud. I’ve got nobody to flirt with now and I have to check my own bloody messages just an empty console, I don’t even have a photo.

Adam:
I don’t know if she can be saved, mine died too, it made me angry and vengeful. The only way I can see to save her is if the second your given the option to hit the Omega Relay, you take it. There’s a bit of a hint in the dialogue when she dies that suggests “If only we’d got here sooner”. I’ll try it in my 3^rd playthrough.

Lee:
My mate SonicAlpha says she’s still there for him, I’ve still got half the crew and my full team. But Tomthum only had his team left and no crew, I mock him often for this because he read gamefaqs before he got to the end and still bollocksed it up.  Have you ever finished a Splinter Cell? I haven’t I always get stuck and pissed off.

Adam:
Nope, I didn’t play too much of the first two, but I really dug my heels in with Chaos Theory. I played it right up until the very last mission but I just, for some unknown reason, never actually finished the game. I’ll go back and do it one day, just for the acclaim, but once I’d gotten that far, I found myself playing more and more of the co-op missions and Spy vs. Merc.

Lee:
What’s the one game on your gamercard you wish wasn’t there? Mine is Avatar – why did I do it?

Adam:
Well once mine had been tainted with Avatar, there was no going back. There are a couple of nasty ones on there like the early sports games released for the 360, but there’s nothing I’m particularly embarrassed for. I still played the games, enjoyed them (to some extent) and beaten the challenges to earn the achievements. It’s probably Lost Planet though – I’ve never played a game that bad and it makes me sad that it exists, let alone on my card.

Lee:
When given the choice do you play as a chick or a dude? I play as a chick in the hope I’ll get to see boobies.

Adam:
I’ll play as a chick, given the chance, just because it’s the lesser played option. If you You Tube Mass Effect clips, it’s a pretty high majority of male created Shepard’s and it always made me think that there’s so much content that those gamers have missed out on for not having played a chick. In MMO games, I tend to roll a chick for any class that I’m not particularly good at. I’ve never once pretended to be a “Damsel in Distress” but just for another player to look over and see a female character that’s close to death seems to earn you their help for 5 minutes. It’s sexist, but it works.

Lee:
What’s the best weapon you ever had in a game? I liked that big blaster you got in Earthworm Jim 2 that when he fired it he winced away from it.

Adam:
The Knife in Counter-Strike. No weapon has ever really came close for putting a grin on my face than knowing I was good enough to get in close and get one over on another gamer. It’s a pretty humiliating thing to have done to you and it instantly earns you the praise of everyone on the server, whether they were watching in spectator mode (from either perspective) or if it simply got spotted in the top right corner. Although the Gravity Gun comes a close second. It lets you kill people with radiators, you can’t argue with a radiator.

Lee:
I got stuck on a big bridge in Half Life 2, it was a pig to play on the Xbox it was loading every two mins it drove me mad. The 360 version wasn’t much better.

Adam:

Yeah, I played some of the Orange Box on 360 but I got pretty fed up with it doing that so much. It does it in exactly the same places on the PC, for probably the same length of time –but it’s ok, you expect that. For the 360 you want the action to flow and when you’re taking Highway 17, it’s not so fun to be at top speed and have it stop all of a sudden.

Lee:
You were lying when you said you finished Quack Shot weren’t you? That game was longer than final fantasy 7!

Adam:
No I finished it a few times and the follow up: Mickey and Donald’s World of Illusion. It was Castle of Illusion I could never finish and Land of Illusion, which I had on the Game Gear was a pain in the ass to get finished up in one sitting, but I did that one too.

Lee:
I liked that Power Rangers you had on the game gear it was like Streets of Rage but with Power Rangers.

Adam:
The pink one was hot.

Lee:
What was your favourite bit in Final Fantasy 7?  I always liked the bit when you jack the Highwind

Adam:
I think the most memorable part of the game was just as you finish Midgar, you’re left standing on the edge of the city, about to enter the world map and you suddenly realise the sheer size of the world and the scale of the game. Replaying it, the Midgar section isn’t all that long and can easily be done in a matter of hours, but on that first play through, it was incomprehensible to think that this wasn’t even the end of disc one yet and there was still two more to go!

I did love the section in Junon harbour though, I think it was the music that did it but It really was fun.

Lee:
I’ve got that as a ring tone on my iPhone

Adam:
Man, why didn’t I think of that?

Lee:
If you could turn anything into a LEGO game what would it be?  I’d do LEGO Top Gear oven given it much thought these last few weeks.

Adam:
I think LEGO Metal Gear would work, I think that the designers could have a lot of fun with that and they could produce a good series of games with it. LEGO Dr. Who would work quite well, though it would need its own story creating for it.

I want to know why they’ve never made a LEGO RTS, they could do some really good stuff with that.

Lee:
What’s the worst gaming related lie you ever told?  I told people at school we were getting an N64 with Mario 64 and Kirby 64 I even made a fake receipt on our Amiga 600 to try prove it to the kids at school. Don’t look at me like that – we were poor and I wanted to be cool. I came unstuck though when they never actually made a Kirby 64.

Adam:
I probably told hundreds as a kid but I can’t remember any specific ones. I do remember arguing with a guy in secondary school who was bragging about how he picked up a hooker in GTA3, then parked up in an alley way, the car starts rockin’ and you gain a health bonus. I butted in and insisted that he was making it up, that it wasn’t in the game and that he was just trying to sound cool. I didn’t like the idea that someone knew something about a game that I didn’t and so made stuff up.  Yeah, I felt pretty stupid the next day.

Lee:
Remember when dad got us a printer for our Amiga 600? That was a shit Christmas.

Adam:
I don’t know, I did a great Year 4 project on that printer. Teacher had never received printed homework before. I got into the Friday Golden Book for that one.

Lee:
What’s your longest gaming session? I think mine was the whole first disc of Final Fantasy 7 about 12 hours.

Adam:
In one sitting? I went around to a friend’s house once and we were chatting about Murray in Monkey Island IV to which he wanted to show me the part from Monkey Island III where you first meet Murray. For some reason we just decided to keep going and spent the entire day playing it through to the end.

I also sat and ran Zelda: The Wind Waker with the same friend for about 13 hours on release day. As soon as we got back from School, we turned it on and just kept playing until we trapped ourselves in Hyrule Castle. We didn’t complete it, in fact we didn’t play it again for 3 months after that session. We weren’t even that far off the end of the game it turned out, we’d just played to the point of mind melt and couldn’t solve what turned out to be a pretty basic puzzle. We did spend a lot of time sailing though, especially once we’d connected the GBA up to it and got to use all the cool features that added.

Lee:
What was the funniest bit you ever experienced in a game? Mine was on Fallout 3 – I was up north somewhere near a farm full of bandits that started shooting the crap out of me, there was a lot of them – more than usual. Fawkes whips out a Fatman, fires one off and everything goes boom the place must have been mined or something the frame rate on the Xbox ground to a halt before slowly picking back up. Silence and then Fawkes screamed “I win again”

Adam:
There’s been thousands, the best of which was probably in a Battlefield 1942 session. I was playing a game of Capture the Flag with some friends of mine on a server entirely populated by one Gaming Clan. They didn’t seem to like it very much that we’d interrupted their little play session and so they all switched to the opposing team to beat on us until we gave up and left. They outnumbered us something silly like 3:1 but they couldn’t find us and couldn’t catch us when they did.

There were things you could do it Battlefield that was technically cheating but all we were really doing was making the most of bad mechanics. After a while of playing hide and seek with them, we thought we’d make a run for their flag. I agreed to go and grab it whilst one of my buddies flew a plane. The plan was for me to get the flag and run out into the open so that my friend could fly the plane low enough –bail out at the last second to allow me to take over control of the now empty plane and fly it back to our base to score.

What actually happened was he flew straight into me, impaled me on the plane and through a random act of video game bugs, managed to fly me with me trapped in the wing back to the base. It only got funnier when we realised that I truly was stuck and couldn’t get off the damned thing so he flew the plane square at our flag pole to score, killing us both in the process. Gigglesome.

Lee:
What pisses you off about gaming at the moment? I hate the Wii. Oh, and shit games I really hate shit games (yes I’m still on about Army of Two)

Adam:
I hate casual gaming. I can’t sit with it whether it’s on the Wii or Facebook. I don’t like that there’s now a massive pool of people that need to be catered for as it tends to mean that they have time spent addressing their wants which is less time spent focusing on the Core.

I’ve also started to develop a serious dislike for young gamers. I appreciate that I was one once but I feel that I earned my stripes and the rights to X, Y and Z. These kids just get it all on a plate these days and don’t seem to have much respect for the foundations of gaming.

Lee:
What’s your favourite console you ever had?

Adam:
It’s the 360, no question. The Mega Drive was essentially the SNES, the Game Gear was just the answer to the Game Boy, the Playstation admittedly stood out on it’s own for a while and it did set a standard for others to follow but it’s not really until the 360 does a console pick up the baton and just start running. Everything that the 360 does, Sony can’t successfully replicate and Nintendo can’t understand what they have to gain by doing so.

I’m a PC gamer at heart and I always will be, so maybe that’s part of why I value the 360 so much more over the competition.

Lee:
Oh I was going to say that

Lee:
If you could make a game what would you call it? I’d do an 8bit RPG called Big Lees Big Adventure

Adam:
Star Wars Jedi Knight: X-Wing Alliance 2. It would be the ultimate Nerdgasm having the flight simulation of Star Wars and then giving it the Battlefront treatment when you landed somewhere. Ok so what I’m essentially describing is the Battlefront 3 that Free Radical Design were working on before it got canned. I’m still angry about that one.

Lee:
What websites/podcasts to you like to check out for you gaming news fixes?

Adam:
I read through about 30-50 articles linked from GameTab.com everyday with no preference at all for any of the sites and the way they present their news. As far as Podcasts go, I love Invisible Walls, after you put me onto that – It’s very well structured and they produce a good solid hours worth of content that holds my attention. I also subscribe to the Destructoid Podcast –It’s pretty amateur stuff which is a shame as they have some great minds and opinions on the show, but it often degenerates into people shouting over the top of each other and the equivalent of ‘Yo Moma’ jokes. It doesn’t really have as much structure as you can tell some of the Destructoid staff would hope and the sessions often go well into the two hour mark, by which time you just stop caring. The HAWP Cast (Hey Ash Watcha Playing) with Antony and Ashley Burch is worth a listen. It’s just a two people chatting amongst themselves but it’s a lot of Gaming/Geekness and quite enjoyable. I probably just have a writers crush on Antony Burch though, so take my recommendation with a pinch of salt.

Lee:
Invisible Walls podcast is good, I only ever really look at Joystiq though to be honest, oh and Gametrailers I like that to, I don’t have to read much on there. Oh and Gaming Lives boy oh boy I love that site its teh best.

Lee:
Well thanks for taking the time Adam it’s been an emotional journey but before you go just one last question. Where’s my copy of Banjo Kazooie Nuts and Bolts? I bought that game and hardly played it before you jacked it out my drawer.

Adam:
I traded it in.

Lee:
what do you mean you traded it in? You owe me £45

Adam:
What? Shut up, no I don’t. How do you work that out?

Lee:
RRP £45

Adam:
It was pre-owned. You paid a fiver for it.

Lee:
No, give me £45

Adam:
No, piss off!  Ow get off me you fat fuc- omph

Mum:
What the bloody hell are you two doing?

Lee & Adam
Errr nuffin…..

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