Half-Life projects, Comic-Con program guide, Playstation Factory & Esports Mental Toughness

First, Dev-i-boy found a list of Valve games that never came out. These games were created in the dark times before Half Life: Alyx was announced, and include some interesting looks at what Half Life 3 could have been.

You can't go to Comic-Con this year, but you can watch it online. There's a great program with tons of shows including comics, television and gaming news. It's also probably the most accessible Comic-Con ever, since you don't need to leave your house and the shows are free.

First the robots came for the car factory jobs, and I said nothing. Then they came for the Playstation 4 assembly jobs, and I said "Cool, that's some nice tech". Sony has almost fully automated their assembly line and only use four people on the ends of a single assembly line that makes one console every 30 seconds. It's awesome.

Esports are stressful, and high skill players show the same signs of stress as their analogue counterparts. This doesn't surprise the Nerds at all, but it's an interesting study.

This week, Professor played a chaotic real time dice rolling game, DJ kept the peace in Agents of Mayhem and Dev-i-boy got distracted by job applications. Wish him luck.

Read More

Error, Atari VCS, My Friend Pedro & Dead neurons

Flash is dead. Long live Flash. Kongregate has decided to shut their doors to new releases. This is truly the end of an error. Let's move on to something more secure now. After decades of trying to get around the web filter at school to play weird indie games, kids will have to find something else to do.

The Atari VCS is due to come out soon, and it's a horribly overpriced set top box. The hardware sounds hackable, but if you're buying it to play VCS games you're wasting your money. Seriously, you can get original Ataris much cheaper.

My Friend Pedro is coming back to haunt the nightmares of evil gangsters everywhere in a TV series from the creator of John Wick. This series will only be worth watching if they manage to pull off the wild stunts and action of the game, but they've got a pedigree.

The first video footage of a dying neuron shows the way your brain breaks down. The footage clearly shows a hit being carried out by the Glial Cell gang, famous for killing any brain cell that gets in their way. Check it out, this could lead to some cool medicine.

Read More

Bionic Eye, Miquela & Manchester United

Congratulations SpaceX for their sucessful manned Crew Dragon mission to the ISS.

Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. It's not as great as Steve Austin's bionic eye from the Six Million Dollar Man, but it's pretty cool. Scientists have made a bionic eyeball inspired by the actual working of the human eye. This cool tech isn't ready to go in a human head yet, but when it is we can only hope it's cheaper than Steve's eye.

Robots are here, and they're coming for your jobs. Now even actors don't have job security. Miquela is a CGI replacement for advertising models is now leaving Instagram and breaking into acting. Which raises a concerning question. How long until they replace the podcasters?

Football manager is one of the most popular management simulators. Recently they've come under fire from Manchester United for copyright issues. Despite letting it slide for almost 30 years, Man U have decided it's time to sue.

This week in gaming DJ jumps at shadows in Alan Wake and Professor goes full Groundhog Day in Into the Breach.

Read More

Nintendo Lawyers, Home Gardening & Comic-Con At Home featuring Shaun from Comics2Movies

This week we invite our special guest Shaun Keenan, creator of Xtreme Champion Tournament (in which mythical and legendary heroes face off) to share his thoughts on some news from San Diego Comic Con.

Kicking things off, the Nerds discuss Nintendo's itchy DMCA trigger finger, they’ve taken down the tragically short-lived DirectX 12 Super Mario 64 Port. This was a fan work based on the Mario 64 decompilation project, reformed into a gorgeous 4k Ultra-Widescreen rendition of everyone's favourite plumber. And they also lost 2TB of data including user account details, which are now being used to hack people. Oops.

There's now one less reason to leave the house, since gardening provides a boost to your emotional well-being that is as powerful as going out for dinner or taking a run. Grow chickens and you have an excuse for a dinner and a run as well. So, is gardening the ultimate weapon against millennial depression memes?

Lastly, Shaun chips in to talk about SDCC's move to being an online only event. Pros: Better food. Better chairs. No lines. Cons: No costumes. No crowd excitement. It's a tough sell for some of us, but the rest of us are perfectly happy to stay at home.

This week, Professor broke his brain in HyperRogue and DJ confronted his fear of the dark in Alan Wake.

Come back next week, we miss you.

Read More

Virtual meetings, Wonder Woman, WarriOrb & Autism Studies

Welcome, to the World of TOMOROOOW!

What does listening to a podcast have to do with listening to your boss? Science is now showing benefits to virtual meetings. Which means one day, even your boss might be replaced by a voice over the wire. This still doesn't mean you can get out of wearing pants.

Wonder Woman's director thinks DC shouldn't follow the tried and true MCU formula. Sure, it worked for them, but can it be pulled off twice? Let us know if you have a good argument for there being room for two comic cinematic universes.

WarriOrb is a new game that's just been released on Steam. But following a highly popular demo, WarriOrb's initial sales have been disappointingly low. The devs have posted their own analysis on Reddit, and they're understandably confused.

Wrapping up, we have a discussion about scientific studies involving Autistic people.

We played Crysis and Legends of Runeterra this week. Professor's computer didn't melt playing Crysis, and DJ isn't any better at counting cards.

Wait around to hear from us next week with another great episode.

Read More