Bears In Games - Super Slash Greek Heroes

Rise of the Argonauts, Batman: Arkham Asylum, and Muscle March all get their chance to show off the biggest, burliest, and Greekiest of musclemen in this episode of Bears In Games!

First: Rise of the Argonauts! You think a game set in the Greek era with huge and muscular bearish guys would be easy to do an episode on. Hm. Nope. Mostly I just gripe about the terrible writing and pacing of the cutscenes. The game itself, when there is combat, actually plays nicely. Combat is fun, and the combos work well. Hercules is hot - really hot - but that doesn't save the game from being mostly mind numbing. That's too bad. Also: it breaks! Twice!

Then we have the Batman. Or is it just Batman? After a brief aside in which I mourn the loss of Siren: Blood Curse from my PS3 hard drive, I plow ahead to check out Rocksteady's Batman: Arkham Asylum. Yep, Batman's pretty beefy in this game. But that doesn't make Batman a bear, does it? We take a brief trip through Batman's history to see where and when he can be considered bearish. Other topics come up too, like: I would make a terrible superhero, Bane is sometimes super hot, and lobotomized musclebears, hot or not?

Finally, we close out with the straightest game of all time! After sitting on my Wii's SD card for nearly a month, I break out my copy of Muscle March and record - live - my first five minutes of playing it. It's quite something. The mechanics are quite simple, it just reads the up and down tilt sensors in the Wiimote. But! Muscle men! Thongs! Bears! Gaiety! An opening which looks like a weird mashup of Cho Aniki and Katamari Damacy!

Bears In Games Best Of 2009

You take the good, you take the bad, you talk about bears for a while, and there you have... the Bears In Games Best Of 2009 Awards! Featuring Our Fantastic Returning Guest Hosts Robbie, from Japan, and Max from Gamesters.ca!

The ground rules for this podcast was that we actually purchased and played the games which we bitch about. This narrows the playing field somewhat, except for Johnny, who has a very flexible idea of what is worth purchasing if it costs under $20. We start with the part that everyone loves... the Worst of 2009. What pissed us off? What annoyed us? What makes downright lazy game design? Contenders include Tomb Raider Underworld, Silent Hill: Homecoming, the original PlayStation Resident Evil, and more! We then move on to the Bear Awards, where we discuss the hottest bears to come out in 2009, as well as our most secret, shameful choices. There may be some Rufus discussed. And, as you can guess, Zangief makes a triumphant comeback. Finally, we talk about our choices for Game of the Year! You may be shocked! You may be stunned!

Bears In Games - Musclebear Smorgasbord Extraordinaire

Johnny takes a quick look at games that feature men of the muscular persuasion; first there's Pit-Fighter, Atari's arcade classic from 1990 which used the then-impressive digitized graphics of musclebears, beefcake models, biker bears, and men in tight gear aplenty in a bare-chested brawling. Could anything be more heterosexual? Then we move to Altered Beast, the Genesis launch title that devotes itself to getting your big muscleman as pumped as possible before donning his were-whatever fursuit. Then Johnny takes on reviewing a hard to find Japanese PC release, Ie, Tatemasu! by Underground Campaign. As you can tell from the screenshots, this is unlike anything he's looked at before: it's a hardcore construction simulator. Keeping in mind load bearing pillars, wood density, and Tokyo Building Code, you must create a house within a strict time limit, while maintaining very, very, very close relations to your coworkers. Very close. Things get sticky, and you're up against a wall against the mounting pressure of time limits and budget overflows, but still worth playing. Repeatedly. 30 seconds to five minutes at a time. To wrap it all up, there's Punch Out!!, a game Johnny's so incredibly bad at that words fail to describe it. Oh, yes, there's also big bears, musclemen, and a possible appearance of the hanky code on Bear Hugger.

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