Here is is! The debut episode of Sup Holmes, a combination video live stream talk show and audio podcast created for Destructoid, by Destructoid. I asked you to submit audio, video, and text questions to HolmesSupHolmes@gmail.com, and you did. I can't wait for the rest of you to see them! 

Our guest this week is Tyrone Rodriguez, CEO of Nicalis (Cave Story 3D, VVVVVV, Night Sky) and former writer fro Tips & Tricks magazine. Join us in the chat as we talk about to good, the bad, and the ugly of modern videogame journalism, something we've experienced from both the inside and outside of the field. 

Yeah man do this thing!

You look at a list of new PC releases. The list is populated by arcane words and you sense strong magic at work behind the somehow familiar titles. To your surprise, the list asks you in an inaudible voice, "Do you like tactical battles with large fantasy armies, but don't know The Art of War and The Book of Five Rings by heart?" Curious, you answer "Yes."

The strange list then asks you another question. "Do you like to go on text adventures while a single narrator reads the stories out loud, using different voices to mimic different characters?" Amused, you answer "Yes."

"Then come play with me, my Lord," the list beckons. You install King Arthur II - The Role-playing Wargame. More than 25 hours later, you leave your computer wondering if you've received a buff or a penalty.

King Arthur II - The Role-playing Wargame (PC)
Developer: NeoCore Games
Publisher: Paradox Interactive
Released: January 28, 2012
MSRP: $39.99
Rig: Intel E8400 Core 2 Duo @ 3.0GHz, 4GB RAM, ATI Radeon HD 4830 512MB, Windows 7 64-bit

Set some years after the first King Arthur, the lands of Britannia have been ravaged by magic and disaster. Something has happened to Arthur when he went to grab his Holy Grail for an occasion, critically injuring the once and future king with a wound that will not heal and shattering the Grail into many shards. As the King lies on his bed, permanently wounded but alive, hordes of the monstrous Fomorians are now laying waste to the population of Britannia and the land itself.

To make matters worse, the Knights of the Round Table have disbanded to fight the new evil wherever they can and the wizard Merlin has disappeared without a trace. As Arthur's son, William Pendragon, it is up to you to embark on numerous quests to restore the Grail, heal your father, heal the land, find Merlin, and slay thousands of fantasy troops in the process.

The mix of text adventure quests with multiple paths, Total War-esque tactical battles, and role-playing elements in the form of upgrading your heroes and troops makes a return in this sequel. For the most part, players of the first game will feel right at home as they recruit massive armies, walk around an overworld map, and dispatch of opposing armies while trying not to lose any soldiers if they can help it. Along the way, King Arthur II has made some drastic changes in a few aspects of its RPG/adventure/warfare mix, and not all of them are equally welcome.

For starters, the macro level of resource management of your provinces has been stripped bare. Provinces no longer supply food or gold through taxes, but now host a few locations that can be upgraded for different benefits. Castles allow you to swap units between your standing army and a pool of reserve units, villages can yield bonuses to damage or hit points for your different types of soldiers, Stonehenge-like stone circles can be upgraded to allow instantaneous travel to similar stone circles across the map, and various other buildings provide different benefits to things like magic, diplomatic relations, or allow for the crafting of artifacts.

You still need gold to buy new units or to reinforce troops who have incurred losses, which now only takes one turn regardless of how many individual soldiers need to be recruited. Every turn is still one season in a year, with the winter season dedicated to building and upgrading your provinces, conducting research in a somewhat convoluted tech tree that unlocks upgrades, while the winter snows prevent all armies on the overworld from moving. Because you no longer get gold on a periodic basis, however, you need to accumulate it by fighting enemy armies, at the risk of losing troops, or by completing text adventure quests to collect gold the easy way.

Although you still need to take great care with how many losses you incur per battle lest you are no longer able to keep your army at full strength for the next encounter, especially when you are at risk of running out of gold, the difficulty in King Arthur II does not spike as harshly as it did in the previous game. Part of it is due to the incredibly linear path the sequel offers. While this is initially welcome as a tutorial to get players acquainted with all the mechanics -- and it's still a rather complex game despite the new fashion of province management -- it also removes a lot of the freedom you expect in these types of games.

In many cases, progress is made by simply walking from battle to battle without really having any choice where you want to strike next. There are a few instances where a quest can be completed by taking over a few provinces in any order as long as you defeat the quest objective's army, but the overworld is largely reduced to a visual representation of getting from target to target for progression's sake. Many provinces are defended by "impossible" strength armies that have highly inflated stats, making them unbeatable until you've progressed through enough storyline quests to be permitted to fight them. When you do progress far enough, the game's "military advancement" tech tree automatically goes up by one level and all your units -- existing units included -- are upgraded to more a powerful class, while the impossible armies now suddenly have more manageable stats.

It also takes a couple of hours until you can even field a second army, and by the time you are allowed access to a third army, your main army is powerful enough to wipe out anything in sight. In a way, it can feel like you are facing invisible walls that restrict your experience in a genre of games that normally benefits greatly from having the freedom to approach world domination in your own way. This new form of linearity makes King Arthur II more accessible than its predecessor, but it makes you wonder if they haven't stripped down the management aspects too far. Any management on your side on the overworld can yield benefits for battle performance, but you're hard pressed to notice the results of your micromanaging efforts. On the upside, the text adventure and tactical encounters are as fun as you'd expect and better than before.

The new engine makes the large battles a joy to behold, if you have the rig capable of displaying the graphical prowess at a sustainable framerate. Heavy infantry hold the line, archers destroy everything from afar, spearmen skewer cavalry and large monsters, cavalry smash through archers, and the new flying units pester everything on the ground as long as they aren't shot down.

The victory locations from the first game make a return, but now simply provide access to spells, buffs, and other bonuses instead of acting as positions that can let you win or lose an entire battle depending on who controls them. They work in conjunction with the new magic system that protects you from losing half your army before it has even reached the enemy front lines. Both you and your opponent can have up to three heroes in your army, whose individual skills add up towards a global "magic shield." Every spell that isn't powerful enough to pierce the shield simply eats into the shield's defenses.

It's a clever system that lets you focus on the tactical warfare side of things if you want, although it is also very easily exploited. With three powerful and upgraded spellcasters in one army, you can hurl fireballs at random locations and cast long range damage-over-time poison spells at enemy troops until the enemy's magic shield is vaporized. Once it is gone, it's all too easy to completely decimate an entire army with just your heroes, while the AI never truly gets a chance to oppose you, or runs into a rain of archer fire if they attempt to approach your heroes with troops.

At the start of the game, you can tailor your own version of William Pendragon by answering some questions à la Mass Effect. My William was an evil Sage, a spellcaster, who could eventually cast a meteor spell that instantly destroyed all but the strongest troops within a huge area. It's fun to mess around with your über-strength wizardly trio of doom, but it can also reduce a lot of the battles in the second half of the campaign to a game of watching cooldowns tick and keeping your heroes at a safe distance, well-protected by your ranged units.

Of course, you don't have to exploit the system if you don't want to, but it's somewhat encouraged because this way you don't lose as many soldiers in melee combat, if any at all. Once you've been in a situation where you have two heavily crippled armies, no gold to combine them into a single army powerful enough to deal with an inescapible upcoming battle, and thus no way to gain more gold if you happen to have run out of quests that don't involve fighting, you're naturally inclined to do whatever you can to not lose a single soul -- if only so you don't have to revert to a savegame from over an hour ago. It's a bit like when you pull off a tactical masterstroke against an overwhelming force in Total War: SHOGUN 2, leaving you victorious with 70% of your troops instead of being decimated. Would you choose to win the same battle and keep 100% of your troops? Of course you would, but the process of doing so in King Arthur II is far less exhilirating.

Still, if you play King Arthur II in a more traditional Total War style, there is plenty of fun to be had. Units can hide in forests and gain a brief damage bonus when they ambush enemies in the open, the victory locations can shift a battle either way from time to time, and it's always fun to see hundreds of soldiers clashing steel upon steel. Your units also receive stat increases from provinces or from leveling up through battle experience, but there is a disconnect between the countless minutes you spend pouring your eyes over all the numbers and the actual perceived effect during any battle. Especially when your units' "military advancement" through quest progression can instantly give them dozens of levels worth of stat increases when they are upgraded to a new class, it sometimes makes you wonder why you bothered to spend all that time tailoring them in the first place. Likewise, you can switch a unit from any category (say, archers) to another sub-class to focus on offense or defense, but the effects aren't always very noticeable.

While the battles are as fun as you want them to be and the campaign is too linear for its own good, the text adventure quests are provide a much needed level of charm to the game. You are continuously subjected to the same male narrator who reads the text out loud, whether he's protraying a powerful knight, a wimpy priest, or a beautiful maiden. This guy just changes his voice to match the characters in question, which never fails to sound like the father figure who read you bedtime stories in a hilariously exaggerated manner. These text adventures also tell a story that isn't bad at all, and the decisions you make can affect your performance in upcoming battles, or your personal standing on the game's two-dimensional morality chart.

This morality system doesn't affect the gameplay all that much, but regardless you still allow yourself to believe that it does for the sake of role playing, simply because the text adventures slowly make you feel engrossed in the fantasy world. I was a massive Tyrant dick son of Arthur, and all the choices I made were worth it from a role playing standpoint; benefits or impairments be damned, peasant flesh had to be sacrificed.

King Arthur II is a massive game filled with all sorts of intertwining systems. You'll find text adventures, diplomatic relations, factions that can be hired to perform tasks in an almost hidden away screen, province construction and allocation, and a dozen ways to upgrade your army's strength. It all combines into an experience that takes you by the hand as you move from battle to battle and from quest to quest. Some players who want a more fantasy-oriented Total War experience might welcome the lowered barrier to entry and the change of scenery. Others, and fans of the original in particular, might find it too restrictive. Either way, the sheer amount of tools you have at your disposal to customize your heroes and armies would've been better served in a game that encourages different approaches and playthroughs in a more non-linear fashion.

Upon launch, it was also plagued by some game-crashing and progress-inhibiting bugs, but NeoCore has been quick to address most of these issues with patches over the first week. There is still some talk of performance issues on high-end rigs, which is something I can't confirm with my poor old rig. Suffice it to say that it is playable enough on an older PCs if you're not too picky about framerates in a strategy game, and it might take a while before it runs at more than 30 frames per second on any PC from the looks of it. It certainly seems to eat up more resources than it should -- even starting up the game immediately switches Windows 7 from Aero to Basic mode -- yet I found it to be playable enough even at the lower framerates.

Whether or not King Arthur II is one step forward, two steps back or the other way around is going to depend on what you expect from this sequel. The streamlined campaign may raise many an eyebrow while the text adventure quests will elicit more smiles than frowns, and any fan of this genre of strategy will still spend countless hours both on and off the battlefield. It's not quite the diamond in the rough that many have hoped for, perhaps, but you'll be hard pressed to keep yourself from playing just one more turn.

In an attempt to unify all independent Sony-centric networks, such as the PlayStation Network, the service previously known as Qriocity, and more, Sony has revealed that PlayStation Network accounts will be rebranded as SEN -- or Sony Entertainment Network -- accounts in order to bring more unity between services...

Back in December The Indie Gala threw their proverbial hat in the indie bundle ring. They're back again, but things are a bit different; rather than limit the bundle to a period of time, there's a limited supply of 50,000 copies.

There's even more change in the form of tiered pricing rather than the traditional pay-what-you-want model. For a donation in the $1-$5.51 range you'll get 3 games (Critical, Mass Fortix 2, and Bunch of Heroes) as well three albums. A $5.52-$9.64 purchase gets you that plus Roboblitz, Greed Corp, and three more albums. Finally, for $9.65+ you'll be the proud owner of all of that as well as the entirety of the first Indie Gala. 

With just over 40,000 copies still available for purchase, there's still plenty of time to jump in on this. You guys have room in your Steam backlog for yet another collection of indie games?

Indie game dev. David Williamson's newest project was officially released to the wilds recently, and I'm definitely digging it. Hack, Slash, Loot is a turn-based dungeon crawler with an objective that could not be more plain: hack, slash, and loot your way to the end. I just spent some quality time with the demo (available here) and I'm definitely a fan of the grid-based movement and combat.

As the title implies, there's loot aplenty with new equipment, weapons, or one-use items - scrolls, potions, and the like - waiting for you around every corner. Dungeons are generated randomly each time you start a quest so it's always a new experience and, much like Binding of Isaac, you can get lucky and things just might go your way or you'll get a particularly difficult draw. In the case of the latter, good luck. 

Take a peek at the trailer and screens, give the demo a try, and, if it's your cup o' tea, you can snag the game for $10 for PC, Mac, or Linux. 

This week, I'm not going to be talking about an older game. Rather, I'll be talking about something fairly new: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Now, the game looks great as it is, but we all know the PC can look far better than anything on consoles. With a little bit of tweaking, we can make Skyrim into an insanely hot-looking game.

I'm going to skip over all of the reasons of why you should play the game this week, since you'll find tons of people talking about why you should already own Skyrim. I'm just gonna jump right into teaching you how to turn Skyrim into the beautiful game that it truly is.

Time: 2-3 hours
Difficulty: Intermediate
What you need: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

1. We're going to start by downloading and installing the Nexus Mod Manager. This mod manager will let you easily install and remove mods. It will create a folder in your Skyrim install directory called "mods." You'll be able to drop mod archives (.zip, .rar, or .7z files) right into this folder and install them from the mod manager. All of the mods that I am going to show you today can be installed this way.

2. Download and install the Skyrim Script Extender . Copy all of the .exe and .dll files from this download into your Skyrim directory. To make this work properly, you have to launch Skyrim from the "skse_loader.exe" from now on. Make sure you get the newest version, and that your copy of Skyrim is up to date. If a new Skyrim patch comes out it might take a few days for this to be updated to match. It can be a little annoying, but it lets you install more powerful mods.

3. Download and install Skyboost. This helps to increase the game's framerate. Skyrim is a CPU hog, and these files relieve some of the stress on your CPU. Extract the downloaded zip folder, and copy both files from the "bin" folder to your Skyrim install directory.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Skyboost MUST match the version of Skyrim that you have installed. If Skyrim gets updated, you might need to delete "skyboost.asi" in order to get your game running again. Just keep checking for a new version of Skyboost if you want to keep using this mod. It's a bit of a pain, but the performance boost is worth it.

4. Download the ENB Series Skyrim Injector. This the mod that makes the game really pretty, and they are also the guys behind the insane Grand Theft Auto IV graphics mods. This is still a beta right now, so once you install this you should keep checking back for updates. Make sure you get the latest version of the injector. If you are running Vista or Windows 7 then you'll need to install DirectX 9 in order to make this run correctly.

If you are ambitious, you can edit the "enbseries.ini" yourself. You can find it in your Skyrim install folder. If you are like me and you want other people to do all of the hard work, you can find a ton of nice preset "enbseries.ini" files online. I am currently using Cinematic Lighting ENB. Just replace the existing .ini file with the new one that you download. It's worth trying out different ones because each one can drastically change the way the game looks.

5. Get some mods! This is the fun and easy part. All of the mods I list below can be used together, so you don't have to pick and choose which ones you want. If you want to add more, just be careful that they don't conflict with anything else you have installed. In other words, you can't have two water texture mods running at the same time. I suggest that you stick with this list if this is your first time modding an Elder Scrolls game. Once you have these successfully running, then you can browse around for other mods. Remember, just copy these to your Skyrim/mods/ folder, and then use the Nexus Mod Manager to install them. 

The mods:

A Quality World Map - With Roads
This adds high-quality map textures with roads. It makes navigating way easier and the map screen prettier.

Better Sorting
This renames items so they sort better in your inventory. Instead of Potion of Extreme Healing and Potion of Minor healing, you'll have Restore Health I and Restore Health V. It makes it so much easier to find things. 

Categorized Favorites Menu
I hate the way the favorites menu works. It's hard to scroll trough all of the unsorted crap to find the one thing you want. This fancy mod will give you a full-screen favorites menu that is sorted by category.

Detailed Bodies
This replaces the default skin textures with higher-resolution ones. No, it doesn't add penises or boobies.

Enhanced Blood Textures
Just some improved blood -- it looks less like strawberry jelly.

Enhanced Horse Skins
It makes your horses appear as if they actually have fur instead of low-quality plastic!

Enhanced Night Skyrim
Adds new HD sky textures, and you can pick from a few different styles.

Glowing Ore Veins
This makes it easier to find ore. I didn't even realize how much ore there was in the game until I installed this mod. 

Improved NPC Clothing
NPCs will now have nicer-looking clothing with high-resolution textures.

Intro Music Replacement by Malukah
This replaces the default main menu music with something a little more acoustic.

Nicer Snowflakes
This just gives the game better-looking snow flakes.

Real Ice
Tweaks the game's ice.

Realistic Water Textures
This one replaces all of the ugly water with some much nicer stuff. I recommend that you use the clear and reflective settings, personally.

Skyrim Flora Overhaul
This replaces all of the textures for trees and leaves. It makes forests look awesome.

Skyrim HD - 2k Textures
Still a work in progress, but what it does so far is amazing. It replaces tons of the normal low-resolution textures with much higher-quality ones.

SkyUI
This is my favorite Skyrim mod so far. It changes the game's user interface so it's easier to navigate using a mouse. It also makes the text smaller, so you can see more on the screen at once.

KenMOD - Time on Loading
This adds a clock to the loading screen. It's nothing fancy, but it is really nice to see what time is when you're playing. I think we all know how easy it is to spend way too many hours playing Skyrim.

5.  Open up "My Documents/My Games/Skyrim". There are two files in here that we are going to edit. The first one is "Skyrim.ini". Open it up with Notepad add "uGridstoLoad=7" at the end of the [display] section.

Now open up "Skyrimprefs.ini" and edit these values:

bMouseAcceleration=0
bDrawLandShadows=1
bTreesReceiveShadows=1
iShadowMapResolution=8192
iBlurDeferredShadowMask=32
fGrassStartFadeDistance=14000.0000

Make sure you save all of the changes that you make to these files.

Making all of these changes may take a little bit of time, and you'll probably have to do some tweaking to get it all running right for your setup, but the investment is worth it in the end. You'll have a version of Skyrim to show off to all of your friends and the console kiddies will be mad with jealousy.

_{[Revuhlooshun takes us to Titan Station and shows us why it's such a powerful videogame location. As always, remember to load your own bloggers wanted responses into the Community Blogs and tag them with the "Bloggers Wanted Essay Response" tag, and you may see your blog promoted to the front page. - Kauza]}

Probably the most important aspect about the original Resident Evil games, back in the 1990s, was their context. People sigh and groan whenever an old school fan laments about the early days, but there really is something to be said about just how radically things have changed over the years. People forget that you weren't originally some special agent rappelling off a helicopter or punching boulders – you were an ordinary cop trying to keep your head on. You were painfully human, and with that came all of its vulnerabilities. It was from that humanity that the fear and horror of those games originated from, only to be pushed along by a good closet scare every now and then. 

But in addition to that, the locations and their settings cemented that context: police departments, hospitals, parks, even a house up in the woods (protip: only madmen live in the woods). Not only were you human, but so was everyone else. Capcom created an image, an environment, that didn’t take much effort for a player to imagine in his every day. You weren’t in some bumfuck village halfway across the globe – Raccoon City could have been any other midsized American town, awkward and overemphasized vernacular aside. 

As the series went on, and these average cops turned into military commandos, that sense of familiarity, of playing upon that sort-of everyday American experience (as best as any Japanese developer could), was unfortunately kicked to the curb. And with each following game, the possibility of ever seeing those sorts of environments seemed slimmer and slimmer with each new run-and-gun. 

Then I stepped onto Titan Station. 

To me, Dead Space is what every old school Resident Evil fan has always wanted: one long survival game wrapped in a big ass puzzle and stuffed with a lot of cheap scares – and one which doesn’t require a two-week crash course in Tank School every time you want to fire it up. Dead Space is the spiritual successor to Resident Evil, whether you, I, Capcom, or EA wants it. 

But what struck me the most with Dead Space, and what really ensured that opinion, was the space station inDead Space 2. It's a very exotic, futuristic locale that not many people (read: nobody) can claim to really know firsthand. When you finally catch your first glimpse of what it looks like outside however, you realize you’re in a city. It’s a city that looks like any one you’ve been to, minus the floating-in-space part. This isn’t some far flung research base packed with a bunch of dry science types – ordinary people actually live here. 

And now they’re dying here. 



That reality is relentlessly enforced each step you take, the game driving it home every chance it gets, as you walk through shopping malls and apartment floors. What was so foreign and alien in my mind – an outer space colony now turned into a butcher shop – suddenly became much easier to relate to as I could see that the basic, fundamental realities of everyday life were still very well entrenched even way off into the future. Every now and then, between the plasma cutter shots and the people screaming for their lives, an advertisement could be heard somewhere overhead. Some sort of catchy melody enticing people to “Buy! Buy! Buy!” That world, inanimate but very human, still persisted through the carnage and bloodshed, reminding you that you weren’t alone in this. 

You weren't inside of a vacuum. You were in somebody’s home. And I could see myself living in it. 

It was the feeling I got playing Resident Evil for the first time, all the way back into the ‘90s. It was the feeling I got when I drained a bathtub only to find a human body inside. It was the feeling I got reading the journal of a guardsman as he chronicled his descent into madness and dementia. It was a feeling I sorely missed, having only newer Resident Evil titles to play which had largely abandoned that human element to them. WhereasResident Evil 4 had you combing your way through grand European castles, Dead Space 2 threw you into a grade school, gave you a flamethrower, and said, “Here, figure this shit out.” It was one of the most surreal times I’ve ever had in a game, though one which immediately bubbled to the surface when asked to write about this topic – and one which made a great impact upon the overall game itself. 



It was that human touch, those human details painted in the background for you to find, that propelled Dead Space 2 over its predecessor. Be they the family photos hanging along bedroom walls, or the toys of a child scattered about a classroom, everywhere inside the game you can find the living remains of the long deceased – the world is brought to life not by the people who lived there, but by the things they left behind. It's one thing to have a location filled with life – one which is very pretty, but also rather static – and quite another to have one that's actually alive (especially one that is full of death). 

The first Dead Space, as much as I love it, can feel boringly isolated at times. It just does not have those human shades to it. Hell, it barely has any humans! But, then again, you’re on an abandoned military cruiser – you shouldn’t be bumping into Larry David for a stop-and-chat. With that said: it still leads to an inferior setting when compared to its sequel. It's to be expected, given it's the first child – but boy is it a little less special after you've spent some time with the second one. 

It helped that Titan Station was indeed beautifully designed, and that the game allowed just enough of it to shine through the chaos. What sold it though – and what sold the game – were those splashes of the everyday, despite being 500 years into the future. It was the only way anybody could have ever expected the player to relate to the situation, and Visceral knocked it out of the park.

We've been covering the development of 2D fighter Skullgirls, currently being worked on by Autumn Games and Reverge Labs, ever since its debut trailer back in February of last year. Since then, we've showed you some delightful artwork, picked the brain of the game's creator and creative director Alex Ahad, given you some E3 assets to chew on and played an umbrella-wielding princess named Parasoul who's able to chuck balls of napalm at her foes.

Reverge Labs' Designer, Producer and Community Manager Peter Bartholow has shed some more light on what exactly the story in Skullgirls is all about with a new trailer, as well as revealing that the upcoming fighter will feature a tutorial, ranked and unranked online play, an arcade mode and several extra PS3-exclusive Trophies.

Peter Bartholow also teased the announcement of the 8th and final character, release date and price of Skullgirls so that'll be something to keep an eye out for.