No video I have ever made has created as much hate as the one positioned above this sentence.

So I thought, what if William Miller and I played a video game together, have a few laughs, record it, and put the funny stuff into a video?  Seems like a fine enough idea.  In fact, I still to this day believe there are some really funny parts of this video.

However, in a half-hearted attempt to promote our site, I posted this video on the forums of SomethingAwful.com .  That was not a wise decision.  After a several hour flame fest, featuring a wide variety of foul language and grotesque photoshops of my face, I realized that gaining listeners through forum promotion is about as useful as shooting yourself in the dick.

Below are a couple of my favorite photoshops from said flame fest:

Ah, the internet. I love and hate you.  All at the same time.

LINK:   YouTube   Quicktime

-BLAKEBUCK

Alcohol - A Family Tradition

“And I made a page on the intercom, asking, ‘Is this anybody’s lettuce?’ And I did it two times, and nobody answered so I threw the lettuce out. Well come two o’clock, Bill comes up and he says, ‘Why did you throw out Tony’s lettuce?’ And I told him ‘I made a page and lettuce costs all of 99 cents, Bill, and you can get some more’”

My mother’s self-righteous monologue to my Aunt Bonnie would likely continue for another 30 minutes or so. I felt sorry for Bonnie, so I made sure her sacrifice would not be in vain. I ducked into the kitchen and grabbed the orange juice out of the fridge. I might not be getting much in the way of presents from at the Buck Family Christmas this year, but I was sure getting my money’s worth in screwdrivers.

My extended family continued to “visit” in the living room as I searched the cabinets for my cousin’s “good vodka”. Soon, I bumped into my Uncle Jimbo, pouring himself a hearty glass of straight Ciroc, a glass that still had the remnants of some quite potent eggnog. “Now Blake, you never drank when you lived with me in Nashville”, Jimbo muttered as I snatched the bottle of vodka out of his hand. “Well you know. The economy and whatnot.”

But Jimbo didn’t seem to hear me, he just smiled and wandered into living room. Perhaps he had another racist joke on tap, one that came to him in a moment of lucidity. And that’s when I had a revalation. One that I could only now spot, thanks to a fews year of experience with alcohol. Jimbo wasn’t just having a quick drink. It wasn’t just a simple sip before dinner. Jimbo had been drinking all day. And not just Jimbo.

Almost everybody at the Buck Family Christmas was completely smashed. And had been since 10 o’ clock that morning.

I took some solace in this fact, making my own alcoholic misgivings seem like a minor setback. But of course, it all made since now. The only way any of us could have a good time at this family gathering was heavy “medication”, and things had been this way ever since I was a child. How else could they all deal with the embittered attitudes, the two dogs tearing everything up, and the roaming gang of 4-year-olds demanding we open presents now instead of after dinner?

I now saw the Buck Family Christmas in a brand new light. Is every family more or less like this? But we hadn’t even opened presents yet - there was still plenty of fun to be had at this year’s party...

-BLAKEBUCK

Ah, nothing beats the smell of dead Nazis in the morning. They should make that an incense, so I can enjoy it anytime. Anyway, here’s a video review I did of Call of Duty 2 for InsideMacGames.com waaaay back in the day. Though it feels a bit crude to me now, it’s got some solid jokes in it. So click that little play button already. Or don’t. Who do you think you are, buster?

LINK:   YouTube   Quicktime

-BLAKEBUCK

Segata Sanshiro is one of those things you happen upon the internet one day and you’re not really sure what it is, but you know it’s awesome. This short documentary traces the life and death of one of the greatest video game advertising icons ever.

By the end of 1997, the Sega Saturn had completely failed in the United States, and Japanese sales were in trouble as well. Sega knew it had to come up with a genius marketing plan to stay competitive. And there was only one man for the job: SEGATA SANSHIRO.

At the time I made this video, these clips were quite hard to come by, and I thought the only responsible thing to do would be to compile as many of them as I could and give some backstory.

LINK:   YouTube   Quicktime

-BLAKEBUCK

Miller and I went to a residential high school, where we had just enough free time to make some bad decisions. In this video, we recount a tale from our days in high school. Is it a glorious battle between two warriors, determined to seal their fate? Or two immature high school kids acting retarded

TWO MEN ENTER ONE MAN LEAVE.

LINK:   YouTube   Quicktime

Back in the early days of Best Damn Podcast Ever, we tried a few different things with our videos. Here, you’ll see a little behind the scenes of how we made the podcast, eat a little bit of cake, and see firsthand a culture of alcohol that led to my long-term struggle with substance abuse.

Ah, college!

LINK:   YouTube   Quicktime

Gran Turismo. Forza Motorsport. Project Gotham Racing. What do all these racing games have in common? THEY AREN’T COMPLETE ASS.

This video was produced as a preview for Ambrosia Software’s new racing game, Redline. It features crap footage of the game juxtaposed with quotes taken from the developer’s website. It was never released, after Ambrosia and IMG management deemed it, “Too Much”

LINK:   YouTube   Quicktime

Alright, this one is a classic. Before there was BIG HOT SHO, before there was Best Damn Podcast Ever, there was the Inside Mac Games Podcast. A podcast, about gaming, on the Mac. I know, right? Well hindsight is 20/20, but we still had a lot of fun. This video was a sort of promo for that show.

Here at BIG HOT SHO, we’re big fans of MANLY MEN. And at the time of this video, the most manly man I knew was THE COUGAR. He was the head electrician on a couple of film shoots I worked on. He was always telling us stories of drinking with John Woo when he worked on Hard Target and having sex with his Philippino wife he plucked out of some native village.

I snapped a photo of him with my camera phone one day and we soon figured, who better to defend Mac gamers from a sea of crap games?

LINK:   YouTube   Quicktime

Welcome to BIG HOT SHO - the new home of the most AWESOME CRAP on the internet.
In the coming weeks, we’ll be adding content from our back catalog and sister sites including:

• Best Damn Podcast Ever
• 92.1 The Morning Show
• Blake and Craig Videos
• Foursouth Films
• The Trust Hustlers

Awesome right? We’ll be getting some classic and some new YouTube clips up first, so stay tuned.

This article was written in October 2008, and is being posted here for a followup interview soon.

This week, we have an interview conducted by Kalex. He would not reveal how he got the interview, but rumor is that he used his updated forum pic in the negotiations.

For all you people hiding under the rock that is mainstream games, and haven't bothered to stick your head into the bottomless cesspool that is shareware, you may not have heard of Wolfire Software.

Wolfire was started by mad scientist and future prophet David Rosen. It started with David as an innocent young lad, entering into the iDev games contest. The first entrance made by David was in 2001 with GLFighters. Inspired by games like Marshmellow Duel, GLFighters featured two players in a variety of mazes trying to murder each other with a variety weapons: swords, lightsabers, laser guns, and a large collection of automatic weapons that would put the NRA to shame. While fun, it usually devolved into matches between siblings killing each other and tea-bagging their brother's corpse before they could respawn.

A year later, David submitted another freeware game by the name of Black Shades. In this you played a psychic bodyguard with the ability to slow down time and have an out-of-body experience, which the game Prey later ripped off. The point of Black Shades was to protect a VIP from armed assassins for a certain amount of time. The player would, at the last second shoot, him in the kneecaps, and laugh satanically as the pansy man in a white suit crumpled to the ground.

The last Wolfire game to be submitted to iDev was Lightning's Shadow in 2003. Lightning's Shadow was a Worms-style game in which you played a crazed monk out to kill other crazed monks in a contest to see who was the most mentally disturbed. Of course, the monks were all magic users, so to kill each other you had a few spells that fell into three categorys: ZAP, BURN, or FREEZE. Each round was only over when all but one of the monks had been suitably roasted, toasted, flayed, blown up, electrocuted, or heavily lobotomized due to chronic frostbite.

All of these games got critical acclaim in their respective years, so of course all the fame and fortune went to the creators head. The next project was a shareware game named Lugaru (pronounced Loo-GAR-oo), a freeform hand-to-hand combat game in which you played a bipedal bunny rabbit named Turner with superhuman martial arts skill and a surprisingly low IQ to match. After being tricked into leaving his village, Turner returns to find his friends and family slaughtered by the local raiders. So with nothing better to do, Turner swears vengeance on those who did this and sets out to find the raiders and brutally murder them in their dreamless sleep. Turner logically takes the next step down this road and commits regicide on the rabbit monarchy in order to save the island of Lugaru, as well as having to kill off a bunch of wolves who want to dine on the delicious inhabitants of the island.

The game did well for a shareware game, especially in Mac communities that thought it was the best thing since EV Nova. Now, David Rosen has started the end of days. By rallying together a group of talented people, he now sets out to take on the world with his new game, the sequel to Lugaru which now has an official name: Overgrowth. You will again play Turner, and when asked how the sequel will be different, Jeff Rosen of Wolfire Software said "Lugaru was kindergarten, Overgrowth will be grad school." Interesting, but how much of the Lugaru style violence will we get? "Overgrowth puts the DIE in indie!" Which better mean I'll be able to kill enough people to fill a small country.

Recently I had the chance to sit down and talk with John Graham, COO and QA Grunt of Wolfire Software. While much of Overgrowth is still under wraps, I managed to get some answers out of him. I would like to thank John, and by extension Wolfire, who took time out of the day to be kidnapped and tortured in a grizzly fashion at Best Damn Podcast Ever HQ.

Best Damn Podcast Ever: So what made you think of the name Overgrowth?

John Graham the QA Grunt: Phillip (Isola, Programmer) came up with the name Overgrowth I believe, while we were having trouble figuring out a name

BDPE: Really? Well tell Phillip to ask for a raise.

John: (Laughs) We discussed names for a while when we weren't busy working. We feel that it's at least a triple entendre but won't say why yet

BDPE: Is Turner's hair going to grow in real-time? When it grows long enough you get the Overgrowth bonus, complete with dandruff?

John: That's an interesting idea, I'll forward that to David and see what he thinks about it, I'm not sure Overgrowth will have hair care technology but we will have some kind of fur shader

BDPE: From what I've seen of the technology you guys are putting into this, so far I'm impressed.

John: We think we're doing a lot of things that other companies might not think of, all our developers are good at coming up with new ideas. We've noticed mainstream games tend to recycle the same old features a lot, it's part of their business model, but us indie guys can take some risks.

BDPE: What are your feelings though if Wolfire ever gets big? If Overgrowth turns into a breakout hit instead of a cult classic, what will happen?

John: Oh gosh, that's pretty far down the road. If we have the good fortune to be able to expand we want to do it slowly and carefully. The last thing we want is for wolfire [sic] to turn into another gamedev beaurocracy [sic].

BDPE: Final question. What are your words to people who think you should 'Get a real job'?

John: Two parts I guess. If you mean that start-ups aren't real jobs: It's surprisingly hard to work for yourself. Building a company out an amorphous blob of an idea is a very daunting task. However, I think Wolfire fortunately has great focus and an extremely experienced team. So we're optimistic and we're working harder than we did when we had "real jobs".

If you mean making video games isn't a real job: We think that video games are the up and coming entertainment industry. Technology is always improving and along with it so will the experience that can be created by game developers. I think in the long run the video game industry will be the major entertainment industry.

BDPE: Thank you for sitting down with us to answer our questions.

John: No problem, have a good one.

BDPE: You too.

Wolfire is now accepting pre-orders for Overgrowth, which allows for early beta-testing to the game, and a super-secret Bat Cave forum to discuss Overgrowth. So head over to their site at http://www.wolfire.com to pre-order or keep up with their blog, which they update often about graphics plateaus.

In closing, keep the wise words of Jeff in mind:

"Give us money," Wolfire, LLC