Game and Tell: 32X

This is a Head Gum podcast.

You buy a pair of socks, that's two socks.

You buy a pair of Bombus socks, that's four socks.

Because one purchased is one donated.

Socks are the number one most requested clothing item in homeless shelters.

So when you buy a pair of super comfortable Bombus socks, you're also donating a pair.

Bombus customers have powered over 150 million donations.

So Bombus would like to thank you 150 million times, but we only have like 30 seconds.

Go to bombus.com and use code AUDIO for 20% off your first purchase that's bombas.com and use code audio at checkout

audible's romance collection has something to satisfy every side of you when it comes to what kind of romance you're into you don't have to choose just one fancy a dallions with a duke or maybe a steamy billionaire you could find a book boyfriend in the city and another one tearing it up on the hockey field and if nothing on this earth satisfies you can always find love in another realm discover modern rom-coms from authors like lily chu and allie hazelwood Hazelwood.

The latest romanticy series from Sarah J.

Maas and Rebecca Yarros.

Plus, regency favorites like Bridgerton and Outlander.

And of course, all the really steamy stuff.

Your first great love story is free when you sign up for a free 30-day trial at audible.com/slash wondery.

That's audible.com/slash wondery.

Guys, guys, I am so excited.

This package arrived in the mail that I have been waiting for for so long.

Wow.

I love getting mail, so I understand why you're excited.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I didn't have time to open it before I came, but I kind of wanted to show you guys.

I'm going to become better.

You're going to get better?

Yeah, I'm going to get better.

Well, I'd say I think you're perfect just the way you are, but

self-improvement is a noble goal.

So, hey.

Thanks.

I met this guy online and he had this

sort of, I don't know, I wouldn't call it a device, but it's like

a system through which you can better yourself.

Now I'm worried.

Yeah, yeah.

At first we were just like, that sounds good, but you kind of lost me at, I met a guy online.

Well, no, but I mean, like, think about everything we do in life is systems.

That's true, yes.

I forgot that everything we do in life is systems.

No, you know, like, there are systems of learning, systems of health, systems of self-improvement.

This is just kind of like one of those.

Yeah, what is what is fitness besides following a prescribed system?

Exactly, exactly.

So I'm just going to open this package.

Okay, great.

I'm going to jam this thing in.

Jam it in.

No,

it's like a snap-on add-on device.

So I'm just going to...

Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

I'm better.

I'm better now.

What did you plug that into?

Yeah, it looks like it hurts.

I haven't plugged it in.

Hello, I got Punker in.

I'll go punk her.

Deliver outlet.

That's all that.

Heather, I'm going to bug it.

Are you okay?

Are you okay?

That looks extremely painful.

What do you think of five?

What do you do for five?

Better doing crazy.

What are you doing?

I'm going to count better than I ever counted before.

One, two, three, four, five.

Oh, you look like you're in extreme pain and you look like you're very hot.

But the seams by my mouth, my seams about my mouth are splitting.

But I think that's intentional.

The seams of your mouth?

I think you should take this device out.

I think it's pretty intense.

I'm barely questioned.

I'm barely questioned.

Ask you any question.

I'm an equivalent.

Who's the 31st president of the United States?

That's wrong.

It's like insanely wrong.

If it's wrong, why'd it hurt so much much to think it?

Because there's a fucking add-on device in your goddamn mouth, Heather, you idiot.

Why did you do that?

Hold on, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm getting mad.

You should do that.

You fucked up so bad.

This is so bad that you did this.

And I'm actually mad at you.

No, no, no, no.

I'm 32 times better than I was before.

Why only 32?

I'm in a new world.

If I did 54, I'd be in so much pain.

So you admit that you're in at least some discomfort.

I'm 32 times less comfortable, but I am 32 times better.

I guess I'll ask you another question.

See how you can prove your superiority.

One train is traveling from a city at a speed of 55 kilometers per hour.

Another train is traveling in the opposite direction at a speed of 80 kilometers per hour.

Show down, show down is too much of a chance.

Too much.

I'm overboring.

Which train will reach its destination first?

Oh my God, her hair's on fire.

Matt, get the fire extinguisher.

Jesus Christ.

What are you doing?

She just froze up.

What are you doing?

I'm not good at emerging.

Ridge, get the fire extinguisher.

We don't have one.

What the fuck kind of company is this?

Are you sure it's not hiding behind one of the dead light bulbs?

Great.

Well, this is a great time to start a fire in LA, Heather.

We enable 3D capabilities and fail as we discuss console expansion Sega 32X this week on Get Played.

Welcome to Get Played, your one-stop show for good games, bad games, and every game in between.

It's time to get played.

I'm your host, Heatheran Campbell, along with my fellow host, Nick Weiger.

That's me, Nick Weiger.

I'm here with our third host, Matt Apodaka.

Hello, everyone.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the premiere video game podcast, where this week we are finally doing

the long-awaited

once-in-a-lifetime

32X special.

Wow.

And if you don't know what 32X is,

it's a system.

I'm not just saying it's 32 times the normal episode, though it could be.

I'm saying we're doing the episode on the notorious Genesis add-on, the 32X.

Yes, it is a system.

It is a console in the way that DLC is a game.

It requires the Genesis slash mega drive.

It requires the base system in order to function.

It is the grandest attempt at an expansion to an existing console as a way to preserve its hardware's shelf life.

We will get into all that.

We will do our deep dive for 32x, which we have in front of us.

Yes.

We've been playing this some bitch, and we might play some more as we're recording.

It's in the air that we are breathing currently.

There's 32x in here.

That's right.

You know what else is in here?

Nick is wearing Gundam pants.

I am wearing Gundam pants.

They fucking roll.

Oh, God bless.

Thank you.

Where did you get those?

These are this is an official Levi's Collab.

What?

So I got these at the Levi's store.

Yeah.

Well, like, oh, a while back.

Yeah.

Oh, break my heart.

I mean, you might still be able to get them.

I doubt it.

With pants that good looking, those sold out day of.

I saw, I ran into someone, and I know, I, I know because I'd been in in there that it was, it's an employee at a dispensary, a marijuana worker.

Yes.

And I ran into this person as I was walking down the street and she said, those pants are hard, man.

Like kind of like, not really a compliment, just kind of like, because they're print, they're print and they've just got like, you know,

the headpiece of a Gundam all over the little, the legs.

Yeah.

I just have to, I feel like I have to circle back.

Yeah.

Saying that somebody who works at a dispensary is a marijuana worker is the most insane thing I've ever heard.

That's their field.

They're a marijuana worker.

What do you do for a living?

I'm a marijuana worker.

I'm a marijuana worker.

The thing about it is, it is exactly what they do.

You're not wrong, but for some reason, the words...

sounded like they don't make sense together.

If you work in an office, you don't call yourself a computer computer worker.

I might start doing it because it's pretty.

I think I am a computer worker.

I'm an audio, uh, an audio

medium worker.

Here you are, yeah.

But when you're working elsewhere, you're on computer worker.

I'm a words worker.

You're a marijuana worker.

Thank you to all the marijuana workers.

Thanks to all our marijuana workers.

Thanks for your service.

They don't get enough shout-outs, I feel like.

Yeah.

And, you know, hey, those of you who are working legally and those of you who are unfortunately who have to work extra legally, God bless all of you doing the Lord's work.

Yeah, and don't forget

to

pass him if you smoke him if you got him.

Puff, puff, pass.

I'm like a

fucking narc?

Is that what's going on here?

I'm like, I'm kind of like the opposite.

I'm actually like a really cool weed guy.

Got it.

Okay, got it.

Yeah, I'm a marijuana.

Enthusiast, as it were.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm a marijuana consumer.

Consumer.

A consumer, yeah, consumer.

I'm a marijuana consumer.

That's correct.

I'm a marijuana ingester.

I can't get enough of this stuff.

Ranch, you ever indulge in the sticky icky?

Yeah, I hate it.

Oh, you hate it.

You don't have a great reaction to it because I don't necessarily have a great reaction to it either.

I get a little anxious.

Oh, I get, I like want to die.

Yeah.

I don't have, I've never had a good time.

Yeah, I get the same way.

I don't, I don't like it.

Uh, I get also extremely depressed the next day.

Yes, yep.

Same.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Can't do it.

Even CBD, I get depressed.

Wow.

I do, uh,

I do fine, and I certainly enjoy perhaps a THC edible every now and then.

All right.

That's fine.

I mean, to each their own.

I think all drugs.

That actually makes me like a party guy.

I think almost all drugs should be legal.

Almost.

All the good ones.

Yeah, like I think mushrooms should be legal.

Sure.

Yeah.

Marijuana should be legal.

You know what?

Ecstasy, maybe?

Rails, even.

Let's get some freaking cocaine.

I'm just kidding.

Sure, why not?

I don't know.

Wheel of this isn't the Doug drug decriminalization podcast.

I just lost the presidential campaign of 2035.

Or maybe I won it.

Oh, I won it.

Yeah, who could say?

Maybe we'll swing completely the other way.

Yeah.

But yeah, we're not here to decriminalize drugs.

We're here to talk about video games.

Are we not, Nick?

We're here to talk about the 32X, but not yet.

Not yet.

Not yet.

Before we get into the 32X, we're going to stick firmly in the present and we're going to discuss from perhaps the recent past.

Some other video games we've been been playing.

The question is, what are you playing?

What are you playing?

Hi, it's me, the Resident Evil Merchant, and I'm here to ask you the question of the week.

What are you playing?

Uh, you're Resident Evil Merchant.

I feel like, you know, because

you're a vendor, you're selling professional,

your occupation is sales.

Yes.

I feel like you sometimes are selling things that are illicit.

I gotta ask, we were just talking drugs.

You ever sold any illegal substances?

Yeah, and I'm really happy that my guy's out of jail.

Your guy?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, my guy.

I had a huge,

huge storefront on the Silk Road.

So that's where

you're buying your goods to sell, and you're selling like your green herb, your red herb, your yellow herb.

You could get anything there.

A gold egg, perhaps.

Sure.

Gold egg.

I love gold egg.

But yeah, that's where I would get my supplies.

And for a while, I've been cut off.

I've had to counterfeit my drugs.

Oh, boy.

Counterfeit.

Yeah, you got to cut it.

Baking powder.

Baking soda.

I got baking soda.

I got baking soda?

Powdered sugar.

And then you sell it and you run as hard as you can.

Immediately letting them know that

you're bamboozled.

Yeah, because I got to say, like, this is explaining a lot.

I got a green herb and a red herb from you, and I combined them, and I ended up with an oatmeal cookie.

I think you were selling me baking ingredients.

Delicious.

It was good.

Who doesn't like an oatmeal cookie?

I'm so crazy.

What?

Because a similar thing happened to me, actually.

What was that?

I

bought from you

a yellow herb.

And a scope for my pistol.

Yeah.

Before I knew it, I was eating a flan.

Well, you're lucky it was flan or macaroni and cheese.

I wouldn't think to combine a yellow herb and a

scope.

I was holding on to the

body.

Got it.

Got it.

Okay.

I told the guy he has my scope, and I sold a mouthwash and ran.

That's kind of funny.

That's actually funny.

That's funny.

That's funny.

He yelled after me.

Not bad.

Yeah.

He was probably like, yeah, you know what?

Mouthwash is good.

I appreciate it.

I like it.

I can't use mouthwash.

No, it hurts your mouth.

I've got holes in all my teeth.

Mmm, yeah.

You should probably get those looked at.

Straight down into the root.

Oh, boy.

That's rough stuff.

I get

some new teeth or something.

Yeah, well, now that my boy's out of jail, maybe he'll be able to afford it.

Maybe you could get them in a normal way.

Yeah, get a new set of chompers.

No, I wanted my teeth off.

They're still crow.

Okay.

All right.

I guess if it's available and it's like fine for you to do, then by all means.

20, 30, 40 teeth.

I don't think you need that many.

No, yeah, you're going shark mode.

I'll go as many teeth as I want.

I don't think you need that many.

And for somebody who I know with your habits, the more teeth you have, the more crevices you have.

You're going to have some more issues.

I have to make it up for lost time.

I've been eating a lot of soup for years.

Don't get us started on soup, first of all.

Yeah, don't

is ranch dressing a soup?

Nick!

What are you playing?

I would say ranch dressing is not a soup.

That would be my verdict.

What if it's not questioned?

I mean, that just sounds like a putrid soup that I would not want to eat.

I don't want to eat just like a bowl of hot ranch dressing with a spoon.

Why don't we thin it with water?

Sounds even worse, honestly.

I know that we put up with a lot of this show.

This is the closest I've ever been to actually being mad at you.

Stop.

Hard stop.

Sometimes you got to make do with what you have.

A little ranch dressing soup, little parmesan,

and you got yourself a dinner.

I mean, that just feels like desperation time.

It's just like you're just out, you're completely out of food and that's all you have to eat.

Cause I, yeah, it's a dressing.

I love ranch dressing.

It's a, it's, that's an accompaniment.

That's not a main.

Agreed, agreed.

And I was getting a lot of my meats off the silk robe.

So

I've had to meet two.

But my boy is out of jail.

Well, I'm very happy for you, Resident Evil Merchant.

I'm actually going to defer because I think I'm worried I'm going to talk for a little while because I'm talking about Metaphor Refontasio.

So someone else talk.

Is that something you should be worried about?

Because I feel like I do it every week.

You're doing great.

All right.

ED is more common than you think and simpler to treat than ever.

Through HIMS, you can connect online with a licensed provider to access personalized treatment options discreetly on your terms.

Through HIMS, you can access personalized prescription treatment options for ED like hard mints and SexRX Plus climax control if prescribed.

HIMS offers access to ED treatment options ranging from hard mints to trusted generics that cost 95% less than the brand names if prescribed.

Now that's quite a savings.

You shouldn't have to go out of your way to feel like yourself.

HIMS brings expert care straight to you with 100% online access to personalized treatments that put your goals first.

This isn't a one-size-fits-all care that forgets you in the waiting room.

It's your health and goals put first, with real medical providers making sure you get what you need to get results.

Think of HIMS as your digital front door that gets you back to your old self with simple 100% online access to trusted treatments for ED and more, all in one place.

To get simple access to personalized affordable care for ED, hair loss, weight loss, and more, visit him.com/slash get played.

That's him.com/slash get played for your free online visit.

HIMS.com/slash get played.

Actual price will depend on product and subscription plan.

Featured products include compounded drug products, which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness, or quality.

Prescription required.

See website for details, restrictions, and important safety information.

Do you struggle with procrastination?

You know, when you put off doing something that could save you a ton?

I used to be a huge procrastisaver until I heard about Mint Mobile's best deal of the year that's ending soon, 50% off unlimited premium wireless for new customers.

Let me tell you how I procrastisaved.

I would reuse toilet paper.

Stop overspending with big wireless and cut your wireless bill to $15 a month when you switch.

All Mint Mobile plans come with high-speed data and unlimited talk and text on the nation's largest 5G network.

You can use your current phone and phone number on any Mint Mobile plan and bring along all your existing contacts.

Don't miss out on three months of unlimited premium wireless from Mint Mobile for 15 bucks a month.

But hurry because this deal ends September 22nd.

Look, cell phones are cell phones.

What are we talking about?

Your wireless carrier isn't, it's all the same, man.

Am I allowed to say f ⁇ during an ad?

Well, I just did.

And I told you I would reuse toilet paper to save money think about how much you could be saving with mint mobile quit stalling and start saving when you make the switch shop plans at mintmobile.com slash get played that's mintmobile.com slash get played upfront payment of $45 required equivalent to $15 a month limited time new customer offer for first three months only speeds may slow above 35 gigabytes on unlimited plan taxes and fees extra see Mint Mobile for details.

What are you playing?

So I've been playing Bellatro a lot still.

I can't stop playing it.

Every time my wife sees me playing it, I'm playing it on something else.

I'm playing it on Switch.

I'm playing it on my Steam Deck, playing it on my phone or the iPad.

The thing that I would love more than anything, and I know that it's a big big ask.

Yeah.

I wish there was some sort of cross-progression

between the

because like sometimes I'm like, okay, I'm playing Steam Deck.

I'm like, oh, you know what?

Steam Deck too heavy.

I wish I could pick up my run

on my iPad or the Switch or whatever and just kind of continue from there.

Boy, are there any roguelikes that do that that have like full cross-play?

Hades has cross-play between Switch and Steam.

I don't think that's a good thing.

But like even mid-run, you can resume a run on a platform.

I want to start.

Yeah, I do.

Maybe you can.

I don't know.

I think you can, actually.

Okay.

But I wish that you could just even, you know, at least have cross-progression.

You don't have to maybe pick it up in the same run.

Right, right.

But have the same unlocks.

That'd be really great.

But I understand that it would require you to make some sort of account or something.

And that's a big undertaking for, in particular, a solo dev.

So, but you know, hopefully it's something that we could see.

I also wish that

the phone version was in landscape.

Hmm.

Wait.

What's

in portrait?

I wish it was in portrait because it's in landscape currently.

You got to turn your phone.

Something about it being in portrait, very appealing to me for some reason.

I'm trying to think how you could do the play space.

It would be so tight.

I mean, like, like something like Marvel Snap, they did a very different game, but it's like, but also a card game.

But that's specifically designed for portrait mode, even though it's like those games tend to play a little bit more naturally in landscape.

Something about, I don't know, call me, call me a sicko, call me some kind of portrait freak or something but

I kind of want it I want to see it in portrait.

No, I think I'm with you.

I mean I think they're they reached a certain point where everyone just kind of got tired of turning their phones 90 degrees, you know going like that.

Yeah, it's just a little bit annoying.

Even watching a video sometimes, I'm like, I can't believe I'm watching this video in portrait mode.

This is so like this is a widescreen video that if I just turned my phone, it would like fill the screen.

Yeah.

But I'm refusing to do it.

I don't know what the psychology is.

It does bother me, though.

I think we would all use landscape mode more if there was an audible snapping sound that your phone made when you turned it sideways.

Like if you, if you were holding it in portrait mode and you could somehow rotate and snap it in place without letting go of the hold position,

like if the back cover was a grip and you could go snap, then I think we would all use portrait or landscape mode.

Well, yeah, I guess if people have, maybe people with pop sockets, maybe they're more likely to go to landscape.

But that's also not like you there's it's you don't want to hold something in your palm effectively and then have it rotate.

I'm talking like a trigger.

Yeah.

I'm not.

Don't.

I'm not like a

that wasn't me being a caricature of myself.

I'm saying

like if the back of your phone was like the the handle of a PlayStation customer.

All I wish it was that it was a wooden handle with a chain and a mace at the end of it.

God damn it.

Can you pull the trigger to answer the phone?

You have to put it in your mouth to answer it.

So

I'm playing that.

I'm still, I love it.

I actually just...

I've been trying.

I don't have like a main strategy for it or anything.

And I don't have any rhyme or reason for which decks I'm picking to start my runs in.

I'm just kind of getting far where I'm getting far.

And I'm on the, like, I'm not very far into any of them really.

I'm on a green chip run of the red deck right now,

which doesn't mean anything to anybody if you don't play the game.

But

I'm having a blast with it.

And then something I want to do,

something awoken me last week after

talking about the Switch 2, is that I realized that I have a pretty dense switch one backlog that I'm like, I could clean some of these up because some of these are certain percentages already done.

Oh, sure, right.

I mean, so I think think i can back clean up

so i've been going through quite a few of those i was like i could

donkey kong

tropical freeze is

hard this is a hard game it's got some challenging sections yeah uh

hey just move over to funk i think i gotta move over to funky mode because i'm getting my ass kicked over here uh doing that uh

i think i'm almost done with yoshi's crafted world which is a game that i bought at launch and loved and just never and it's a game for babies.

I should just watch it.

And I started a new save on Metroid Dread

because

my last save is at the very end of it, and I'm

trash at it now.

Yeah.

Can't do it.

So I started a new one, and I think I'm just going to try to see it all the way through from this new save.

But we'll see.

But that's what I'm doing.

Wow.

Love to hear it.

Love to hear it.

Heather, what are you playing?

I'll tell you right now.

Let me give you a little bit of a list.

I'm talking Star Wars Outlaws.

I'm talking Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.

Oh, wow.

I'm talking

Persona 5.

Oh, yeah.

I'm talking even Red Dead Redemption 2 are all games I have promised myself to play and haven't been playing because I've been playing Pokemon Pocket.

Games that I love, that I want to continue.

And what am I doing?

I'm playing the Mythical Island SP Emblem event on Pokemon TCG Pocket.

What is the win condition for

this newest Pokemon Pocket event, this tournament, if you will?

A tournament?

Like a tournament on the Fortnite Island?

No.

A tournament on my phone.

Oh, a phone tournament.

The win condition is five wins in a row.

So if you imagine,

that's a tricky bit of

Pokemon play.

Yeah.

One win, fine.

Two wins, not bad.

Three wins, you're on a roll, but every game that you play is not only up to the draw of your own deck, but also the deck that you're going up against.

Right.

Is it a hard counter to your build?

Yeah.

Like, are you going to be facing some meta that's designed specifically to take you down?

Yeah.

Let me tell you, the event launched at, I think it was noon two days ago, And by 12.20, I had beaten the tournament.

Wow.

You beat the tournament.

Yeah, I won the event immediately.

First five games I played, I won.

And it left me with a feeling of deep

longing and emptiness.

Because now I'm faced with the question.

Do I continue in the tournament as a spoiler for other people's runs?

Sounds awfully heather.

Or do I create a fun deck to inspire joy in people I play against who might happen to come across me?

And listener, I did the latter.

I made a fun deck with absolutely random cards that I chose because they were cute or funny.

For example, Slowpoke.

For example, Caterby.

I love Slowpoke.

And Catterby's only playable attack in the game currently is Find a Friend.

And it just pulls a different card out of your deck, but you can spam it at the other person and they'll just see on their screen over and over again the words, find a friend.

And you can lose on purpose and let other people continue their chain.

Who knows if they'll make it past whoever came after you, but you can aid and assist.

And I did that.

For two days before I got bored of it, and then I immediately started playing my main deck and ruining people's runs.

But I tried.

I really tried to be a giving, loving

community partner.

Forgive me, Lord, it's time to go back to the old main.

Yeah, it's the old main.

So yeah,

as long as the actor strike continues against certain video game companies, I won't talk about any of those games that I've been playing.

But I have been playing Pokemon Pocket TCG.

Pokemon TCG Pocket.

Makes me wish there were additional expansions that would let you make a 40-card deck instead of a a 20-card deck.

It is igniting a hunger in me to play the tangible game.

It's also making me excited to go to a certain fast food restaurant that is currently running a promotion where you can get a meal for children and get extra packs of cards sent to your phone.

Will I be doing that today?

In the break in between our records.

I mean, we have to get dinner.

Oh, man.

I didn't even think about that.

We could get that for dinner.

We could get that for dinner.

Yeah.

Or we could eat something moderately healthy.

Or we could be really, really bad.

We could be bad if we want.

Yeah, we could.

We're adults.

We don't have to tell.

We don't have to say it to anybody.

So that's what I've been playing.

Wow.

What a shame.

What a joy.

Nick.

What a thrill.

What have you been playing?

All right, let me follow up on our metaphor Refontasio.

We play you play from last year.

So

last week I said I was going to talk about the end game of this game.

Here's what happened.

I thought I was steps away from the final battle when we last recorded.

It turns out, and I should know this from the dozens of JRPGs I've played through over the years, that there is an additional act, that the final battle is not the final battle.

In fact, there is another act that is even longer than all the previous acts.

So that's what I'm deep into now.

I've not quite rolled credits on this Sumbitch.

I will hopefully have finished it by the time we're recording next week.

But what a fucking video game.

It's really, really awesome.

I like it the more I play it.

I like it more the more I play it.

The art direction is absolutely stunning in particular.

And we all experienced this when even playing through the first half and change of the game that we got through when we did our episode last year.

The character portrait art is so good.

It's some of my favorite character portrait art ever in a game, both in the artistry of the character designs and also just the quantity of facial expressions.

Like there's so many just specific different looks, particularly for the party members, the primary NPCs, and the player character,

just to convey different expressions.

And on that same note, in terms of the storytelling, the writing and localization are both just top-notch throughout, and the voice acting is on that same level.

It's just an excellent presentation from a story standpoint.

The one thing I will say about the story is that there are pacing issues because of the way that the cutscenes are loaded in.

And,

you know,

the way the game is structured, you basically have an act,

and that's the point at which you're preparing to go through

this big main dungeon.

You're doing a bunch of side quests to power up.

You're doing character quests to advance their plot lines.

And then when you complete the final dungeon, however much time you have left in the calendar for that particular stretch of time, you can continue to clean up other stuff.

Or if you do play the game, I think as it's supposed to be intended, you kind of save that towards the very end.

You save the main quest, you wrap that up, and then you move on to the next act.

But during that whole period, you're kind of just doing your own thing.

And then when you hit an act break, then you just get this barrage of story, like just so much lore, so much narrative.

Seriously, and it's like a Kojima level of like multiple hour cutscenes.

Like like, especially as the game progresses and you're getting into the late game, into the later acts, it's like, there was a certain point where I was like, I think it's, I think that this has been about three hours of gameplay and 90% of it has been cutscenes.

There are brief stretches where it's been interrupted where I'm like, hey, I've got a, I've got to, just like, honestly, like a trivial task.

Like, I, like, I take this character,

I take my player character and I walk them down to the end of a hallway to trigger a new cutscene.

Or I just am in

the inn where we're staying and I just walk, I talk to a few NBCs and then walk over and go to bed.

And then the next day, like, you know, another 45 minutes of cutscenes starts.

Shit like that.

And I have a big tolerance for those sorts of overlong cinematics, but even that just feels a little bit much.

And because it's all loaded in this barrage in between acts,

it's a little overwhelming.

But

the main story

just really pays off.

It doesn't play its coy.

It doesn't play it coy with its big reveals, with its big twists.

Some of the stuff we talked about is like, I wonder if that's going to pay off.

It does pay off, and Matt, I'll say this: some of these revelations, I was shocked.

You were shocked by some of these revelations.

I think what happens with the player character when they reveal,

I'll be very general about this.

When they reveal what's actually going on with the player character, what their identity is, I was like, this is, that is so earned, and that is so satisfying.

Like, what a great reveal.

Um, I, I think it's really, I think it's really rad.

And, and also, the most of the character quests where you're kind of getting the backstory of, you know, know,

Stroll and Holkenberg and Heismei, all your colleagues,

like they have moments of real humanity and pathos, and they're really, really engaging.

And I think they also just advance the overall story really, really effectively.

The it like it's it's it's not necessarily the most hyper-sophisticated or subtle stuff all the time, but it's like it's just cool to play a game that treats you like an adult from a writing standpoint.

You know, it's like I feel like this is this is

this is a fucking annoying term you hear sometimes in

creative output, but it's like, it's like, you know, writing to the top of your intelligence or playing to the top of your intelligence.

Like that's kind of what it feels like.

It's like, this is, this feels like it's respecting me as a player, as someone who's engaging with this.

Gameplay wise, the

archetype system, which is the job class system, I really, really like and I really like it the more that the game advanced.

I think this is like kind of an, and I think, you know, if we get a proper sequel to this game, and I expect we will, I think they will really figure out how to make this work a little bit better.

But in this early phase, in this first iteration, I think it's very, very effective.

I like it more, the persona system, because it feels more character-specific.

It's like you're changing this character's class as opposed to just affiliating them with some sort of a supernatural entity.

It is a little bit hard to know how to optimize.

Like I didn't look at any, I haven't looked at any guides or anything.

I'm just like playing this thing.

I'm just sort of freeballing it.

And not that it matters much because the difficulty level of the combat isn't that high, but it's not necessarily like you can intuit what classes are going to synergize.

In fact, from that standpoint,

it does feel possible to waste skill points or experience points rather, because you can't re-spec.

And it's not revealed until later in the game what the natural synergies are, like which class you need to get to get to the

adept and elite level classes of each individual.

You know, like, like, like, like, it that feels like

for instance like Stroll, who is the the warrior character is like his his inherit class, although you can respect anyone to anything.

At a certain point, you like an advance that to a new class.

I think it's knight and then samurai.

I think those are the next levels, but that's hidden from you until you unlock those.

And then the criteria for that

involves advancing the general class, which is the ADAP class of the commander class.

I'm rambling way too long about this and getting too granular detail.

It's, but like, that does not seem like a natural relation to that character.

It's like, oh, okay, I would not have figured that out on my own.

I might have done it by accident, but then it's just like, well, I invested these points in this other class that doesn't actually synergize with it.

It's not a huge deal, again, because it doesn't matter that much and there's enough experience, but it is the kind of thing where it's just like, I kind of wish this was just made transparent to you so you could plan your characters a little bit better so you could spec them without having to look at a guide.

I will say one more thing about the story, which is just

it all feels like hyper-contemporary.

I think this is a big part of why this game is resonating so much and why people were just like, holy shit, this really broke through.

This really came out of nowhere, and really

there was actual discourse about it.

You know, it's obviously like a big, the big thing it's talking about is prejudice, but it's also interrogating things like the anxiety epidemic.

Like, it's like, like, that's a huge part of it.

It goes into the impossibility of democracy coexisting with a state religion and how that oftentimes will just lead to theocracy.

Like, that's a big part of the story.

And it's just like, that's kind of a bold thing for a video game to be talking about.

And also, like, which I was surprised by is it gets into nepotism.

Like, later in the game, I was like, this is really interesting.

I was not expecting JRPG to like talk about this.

But I overall really love this game.

We'll see

how the plane finally lands when I finish it.

But it does have a few elements that do feel a little bit tedious.

And I didn't want to just gloss over those, which is why I highlighted kind of some of the issues with the pacing.

But overall, just an awesome experience.

I'm just shy of the 90-hour mark at this point.

So it's meaty.

It's a big boy.

Look what daddy did.

But it's a hell of a game.

Why did that make me upset while making me laugh?

I think there's still an air of

hot ranch dressing soup in the air.

Yeah, right.

We're all just thinking about that.

Truly putrid.

This is an absolutely true story.

One time I was in Japan and I had my cell phone with me, but I was

following somebody around in the city and having a good time.

And then they locked me on a roof of a skyscraper because they were a crazy person.

That's a true story.

And my cell phone didn't have wireless access.

So this next ad is specifically something that I could have used in the past.

Because if I'd had Wi-Fi, I could have called somebody.

But instead, I had no cell phone service.

trapped on a roof in Tokyo.

If you've ever been lost abroad or badly needed an internet connection with no Wi-Fi spot in sight, you'll understand what a difference a local SIM card can make.

An e-SIM provides an internet connection wherever you travel and saves you money on roaming fees.

That's where Saley comes in.

Saley is a new e-SIM service app brought to you by the creators of NordVPN.

Here you can choose from several affordable e-SIM plans in over 190 countries and eight regions.

With a Saley eSIM, you'll always have a connection when needed.

Download Saley once and you won't have to install a new e-SIM for each country.

You can avoid scammers selling fake SIM cards outside of train stations and airports.

No more wandering around looking for a public Wi-Fi spot.

With a Saley, you're always connected.

They provide 24-7 support, and you get a full refund if your device isn't e-SIM compatible.

Download the Saley app in your app store.

Use code GETPLAID at checkout to get 15% off your first purchase or go to saley.com/slash get played.

That's S-A-I-L-Y dot com slash get played.

I eventually got off that roof when the sun rose.

Guys, Guys, fall is here.

The beers are colder.

The football's back.

And the fits are getting layered.

But if you're still rocking old beat-up boxers under those flannels and jeans, we gotta talk.

It's time to upgrade to me undies.

These things are ridiculously soft.

Like, don't want to take them off soft, if you catch my drift.

They're made with micromodal fabric that feels like a cloud, but they still breathe when things heat up.

And just in time for spooky season, Me Undies limited edition Halloween line features festive prints including glow-in-the-dark underwear, so you can bring the spooky vibes underneath it all, because that's what you want.

Your underwear to be scary.

Me Undies has a cut for every butt with over 20 styles in 100 different colors and prints.

Me Undy's signature super soft micromodal fabric is breathable, stretchy, and unbelievably cozy, perfect for crisp mornings, chilly nights, and everything in between.

Whether you're layering up for a hike or lounging in flannel all day, Me Undies moves with you and keeps you comfy.

Want even more seasonal comfort?

Try the Breathe Line, designed for moisture-wicking and anti-odor tech to keep you fresh throughout fall workouts or just a long day of pumpkin picking.

I love it.

They use sustainably sourced materials and work with partners that care for their workers.

Not happy with your first pair of undies?

It's on me undies.

With more than 30 million pairs sold and 90,000 five-star reviews, me undies are an essential summer must-have for every drawer.

I've talked about the undies, okay?

I've talked about me undies.

And folks, the me stands for me, mine, me, I, Matt.

I got the undies.

And I loves them.

Cause guess what?

The old undies, I gone back to them one time in a moment of weakness, right?

Laundry Day, all my me undies are in the freaking wash.

And I put on an old pair of undies, and I'm just like, ow, ow, ah, I can't breathe.

Ah, it hurts.

Oh no, it stinks.

But with the meundies on, those are not my problem anymore.

Right now, as a listener to my show, you can get cozy and spooky for less with deals up to 50% off at meundies.com/slash get played and enter promo code get played.

That's meundies.com/slash get played.

Promo code get played for up to 50% off.

Me undies.

That's comfort made for all.

All right, here we go.

It's the game and tell for the Sega 32X.

Heather, take it away.

When I think back to the winter of 1994, I can practically smell the faint ozone from our TV and feel the cheap carpet under my knees.

There I was, a kid, sitting inches from the screen, Sega controller in hand, waiting for the future.

The magazines had rumors.

They're releasing a new add-on for the Genesis, they said.

It's called the 32X.

It'll make everything look like an arcade game.

Arcade?

That was the magic word back then.

If a console could just get close to that coin-operated sheen, it felt like a piece of the future.

I remember scanning the shelves of our local electronics boutique, head tilted sideways to read the spines of Genesis game boxes.

And there at the top in bright, proud packaging was the 32X, a bulgy, mushroom-shaped device that promised 32-bit graphics in a new era of gaming without having to wait for the brand new, already announced Sega Saturn system.

It was an awkward half step between the comfort of the Genesis and the uncharted promise of Sega's next console.

It felt cutting edge.

If you could run that cable between the 32X and your Genesis just right, put the special spacer in, and manage the spaghetti of wires without tangling yourself in knots, you would open a portal to the future, or so we were told.

Of course, in classic 90s fashion, nothing was as simple as the commercials made it seem.

The folks at Sega kept telling us, take your Genesis to the next level, but we were kids, stuck navigating whether we wanted to spend our allowance on a piece of plastic that might just might deliver better colors, 3D polygons, and Star Wars arcade in our living room.

It's almost funny now how we believed that an extra chunk of hardware could transport us into a brand new generation of gaming.

A generation that, if you squinted, sort of looked like the real arcade titles that you fed your quarters into on Saturday afternoons.

I got one for Christmas.

Now, surely, the void in my soul would be filled.

Now, finally, it would be okay.

Yes, I'm doing loop-de-loops and Knuckles Chaotix in what feels like next-gen 2D.

But soon the shine faded.

Something about the 32X library felt limited, like it was only half committing to the bit.

But for a solid six months or so, the 32X was my faithful friend.

We experienced the

mid-level joys of virtual racing deluxe, the thrills of Star Wars Arcade, and the close enough Port of Doom.

It was underwhelming by modern standards, but as a kid, it was enough.

Enough to believe that I was a part of something big, something advanced, even if Sega itself quickly abandoned me and moved on to bigger, more expensive hardware.

I never let go of games or hardware, and the truth is that save for a brief moment in adulthood when I thought I could hide them from everyone and be normal, my Genesis and 32X have sat patiently below my television set, gathering dust, getting cleaned, gathering dust again, small, overlooked, but not quite forgotten.

Then again, I do also still have my virtual boy set up, too.

So the 32X remains this small moment in gaming history, a promise of arcade-level performance jammed in a black plastic wedge that was plugged into your Genesis, a passing fling with 32-bit graphics that came and went so quickly.

Yet, if you talk to the kids who owned one, and I bet there's about five of us, there's a weird affection there, too, because for a year it felt like we were in on a secret that no one else quite understood.

A secret that had been passed on to us like a game of telephone with the addition of the Sega CD.

It was a transitional glimmer, awkward, messy, but undeniably ours.

And as a kid huddled in front of my TV, biting my lip, urging those extra bits to prove their worth, that I had spent my money for a good purpose, I came to appreciate the ambition.

After all, in the mid-90s, we didn't need perfection.

We just needed hope.

Even if it was shaped like this funny-looking top hat attachment on top of our beloved Genesis, we believed.

We believed in a future.

And for a while, the 32X looked like it just might be it.

It's funny, when we talk about the 32X now, it's often with a chuckle or a shrug, like we're recounting a short-lived high school fling.

At the time of its release, there was this sense that it was bridging the gap between our comfortable 16-bit world and the promise of a 32-bit generation.

But the truth is, it wasn't bridging anything.

If anything, the 32X was like a detour, a scenic route that led you back to the inevitable place you were going to anyway.

And that place was full-blown 32-bit consoles like the Sega Saturn and the Sony PlayStation.

Here's where the 32X found its successes, such as they were.

It delivered ports we couldn't get on the standard Genesis.

Virtual Racing Deluxe, for instance, looked and played more impressively than its 16-bit counterpart.

It had smoothish polygons, a sense of speed that felt futuristic.

Star Wars Arcade brought the classic coin-op to our living rooms with this unmistakable John Williams fanfares and the swirling TIE Fighters.

And for those of us who lived through it, Knuckles Chaotix was at least an interesting experiment.

Not the Sonic sequel we dreamed of.

And there were

many Sonic sequels,

but it did give the 32X a splash of color and style.

There was fun to be had, moments of awe even.

But the failures came from the device's very nature.

Sega's hardware strategy at the time was complicated.

The Genesis was still going strong in 1994, but looming on the horizon was the Sega Saturn, the company's actual next generation console.

The 32X was an add-on that the marketing folks championed, saying, Upgrade your Genesis now, don't wait.

But the Saturn was a completely separate beast in its own library, its own hardware quirks, and a higher price tag.

The 32X in that context became this middle child, neither fully embraced by Sega nor wholly integrated into the brand's future.

There were only 40 games released total for the 32X, and that includes the ones also released for the 32X CD, which required Sega CD, Genesis, 32X, and the disc.

The early to mid-90s were a time of massive transformation in gaming.

Suddenly, it wasn't just about faster processors and more colors, it was about making these crisp 3D polygons we saw in arcades and on high-end PCs.

Sony's PlayStation debuted with cinematic marketing and sleek design, showing us a vision of the future that made the 32X look like a holdover from the past.

And Nintendo, with its upcoming Ultra 64, later renamed the Nintendo 64, was also promising a next-gen 3D experience.

In that environment, the 320X simply couldn't compete.

It wasn't a next-gen console.

It was an accessory for a machine we'd already owned for more than five years.

And in gaming terms, in the 1990s, five years felt like an eternity.

It's the difference between being a five-year-old and a 10-year-old.

It's huge.

Looking back, it's not the 320X was a total failure in concept.

It was a glimpse of what could be done with an odd, add-on, lock-on technology.

The idea of modular upgrades isn't inherently bad.

It's popped up time and again in gaming's history.

The problem was timing, communication, and a lack of commitment from Sega.

A Sega that burned us with the 32X and I feel began its downward spiral across the world.

By the time the 32X hit store shelves, the buzz wasn't about making your old system better.

It was about which brand new console you would buy next.

And once Sega pivoted to the Saturn, the 32X started collecting dust in all the corners next to your empty soda cans and crumpled game receipts.

This

is Get Played's deconstruction of the Sega 32X.

Wow.

Guys,

yeah.

That was great, Heather.

What?

What?

That was great.

I want to say, look, we have a lot to talk about with our own experience, but I wanted to ask,

like, you know, beyond all the historical detail, what was your personal reaction to the 32X?

Like, you get it, you play it, you have it for a bit.

Like, at what point does the novelty wear off, or at what point do you see it for what it really is?

So I was and remain

a Sega C D evangelist.

Yes.

When I so you get the Genesis and you're like, wow, Sonic is so fucking good.

And then you get the Sega CD and you're like, holy shit.

I think if the 32X was released before the Sega CD, that the transition from Genesis to 32X would have seemed more remarkable.

Sure.

But instead, it felt like a bit of a downgrade.

Like, I was already playing games with huge orchestral scores.

Like, the idea that John Williams would be playing on a cartridge was not really that exciting when the game hook for Sega CD had the entire orchestral soundtrack playing the entire time.

Wow.

So you're playing like a game that has a full CD quality orchestral score, and then you step backwards to play Star Wars Arcade.

So it was a really confusing system to get because I didn't want to abandon my Genesis because it had given me so many good memories.

And I was super excited at the potential of the 32X CD games because I was like, okay,

once you get the 32X, it makes the Sega CD more powerful.

And that was what I was actually excited about.

And then they only came out with like four fucking games.

And I was like, but all of my most treasured memories of this era are the Sega CD.

So I felt, I felt betrayed.

Yeah, I will say that the

when I did, when I did just some real like, you know, kind of peripheral research, surface level research into 32x in advance of

coming into this episode, knowing you were going to provide a lot of additional context, what I was surprised by was

for A, how quickly the Saturn came out afterwards.

Yeah.

Like, it was basically like bang, bang.

It was like, it was, and, and in Japan, it was like it came out in North America the same month that the 30, the, sorry, the 32x came out in North America the same month that the Sega Saturn launched in Japan, November of 1994.

It was like right on top of each other.

So while you're reading the magazines,

which were the only way to get gaming information in the 90s,

you open up your 32X the same month you get the magazines that are giving you the first reviews of Sega Saturn games, and you're like,

I've been fucked over.

Yeah, I've been duped.

I've been, I'm an idiot.

Like,

as

good as virtual racing looked on the 32X, and I thought it looked really fucking good at the time.

It looks good now.

We were playing this beforehand.

I was immediately comparing it with screenshots from the Saturn version.

Sure.

And I was like, oh, this isn't the best it can be.

And I thought it was because that's the way it was being sold to us on television.

Like we were being told, this is going to be as powerful as the Saturn because it has two 32-bit processors.

It said

legitimate 32-bit machine snapped into your Genesis.

Yeah.

And it just wasn't.

It just wasn't strong enough.

It's the kind of, and I feel like there's so many decisions with Sega historically where you look at it and it's just, how did the company not internally decide not to do this?

Like, how, like, the 32X is just like, it's inexplicable because you've already carved up your market with the existence of the Sega CD.

You already had a big peripheral that came out for the Genesis to come out with

a second one, a second expansion that further splits your market.

Like, now it, now it's split into three or even four.

You know, I mean, like, depending on how many of these different components

a donor has.

And it's also like you're appealing to the enthusiasts, the people people who are early adopters at a time when they're anticipating a new console that's going to come out the very next year.

Like every part of it seems utterly baffling.

Here's what I think we can compare it to and have it be a little less

antagonistic to history, which is that the PS4 Pro comes out.

Right.

And yeah, you can trade in your PlayStation 4 and get a PS4 Pro, which is just a little bit better, but it isn't quite as strong as the PS5 is going to be.

And then there's sort of backwards compatibility over those generations and sort of a milky blurriness between PS4, PS4 Pro, and PS5, and now PS5 Pro.

Right.

So for basically the first year or two of the PlayStation 5's lifespan,

basically all those games, even the first party games, were also coming out for PlayStation 4.

I think that the ideal scenario, and probably the one they sold themselves internally, is not everybody is going to be able to afford what we already know is going to be an insanely expensive system.

Yes.

The Saturn launched, I think, at $499 in 1996 or 1995, 1995.

Okay, so in today's money, that's $11,000.

Yeah, it's so much money.

It's so much money.

So they were like, but maybe there is a way that we can soup up the Genesis to effectively release the Genesis Pro so that we can have games that we can develop internally that are sort of cross-platform.

Like you'll get virtual racing for the 32X or virtual racing for the Saturn, and you'll be able to play a game that is comparable, you know, like that that's that honestly, the 32X version is totally serviceable.

And if you're the kid waiting for your parents to be able to afford a Sega Saturn,

if the library had kept expanding, if the system had like met its potential, then I think that people would have been satisfied.

Or I think this is the thing that would have

was probably not possible from a hardware standpoint.

But if it had been a thing of if you own this, it enhances your, it enhances Genesis games that are compatible with it.

Like having a completely different library, a library, a completely different SKU where it's like, oh, wait, I'm not just,

I mean, that's just a thing of like, of just even a parent buying it for a kid for Christmas or for their birthday.

It's like, oh, I got you the Genesis version instead of the 32X version or vice versa, just creating creating that market confusion.

It's a whole thing.

But to your point, in terms of extending its lifespan and comparing it to PlayStation 4 Pro, which probably came out about the same time in the PlayStation 4's lifespan as the 32X, because

it was six full years since the release of the Sega Mega Drive, the Sega Genesis,

when the 32X comes out.

Like it was like that thing had been out since 1988, and it's 1944 when it's releasing.

I was like, sorry, 1988.

You're thinking of something else you experienced in your life.

1988 to 1994, it's like six years.

That's a long time.

And

it's just a big gulf to think about.

I was skeptical because so few of,

let's be honest, nobody I knew had a Sega CD.

And also, Sega knows internally that the Sega CD is not popular.

It does not sell as many systems as they thought it would.

I think in part it's because they didn't release until it was way too late a combined machine yeah sure i think that they should have released the the sega cd as an add-on or if you're a new parent coming into uh a a toys r us or whatever you can get the

we call it the sega cdx which i think is the the name they eventually go with and you can get the whole thing as one machine would have been i think a way to sell more sega cds but if you're a parent going in after the Sega CD is released in America and you're at the

electronic games section and you're like, I want a Genesis for my kid.

And they're like, oh, would you also like a Sega CD for your kid?

You're going to be like, fuck no.

They're just getting a Genesis.

Why do I have to add more stuff?

Yeah.

But if they'd been like, do you want the Genesis or the Genesis CD?

then people would have been like, oh, well, is that one better?

Then I'll get that for them.

Yeah, it being a, it's, it's, it's a, uh, it being an add-on to a new thing.

Like, like, like, like, it's

at that, in that sort of scenario, I totally get what you're saying.

Yeah, it's kind of like

I will say as a, we were a Nintendo family, I had a Super Nintendo, and at this point, you know, I kind of felt like, hey, Super Nintendo's got this incredible library.

I felt pretty confident of, of, when I was a little bit more tribalist about these things.

I'm platform neutral these days.

I was like, ah, hey, Nintendo kind of won the console war.

You know, they came from behind.

They, ended up like having like the better AAA games.

But I will say, I was looking at the Sega Genesis.

I was playing my friend Sega Genesis at his house and coveting it and specifically coveting the Sega CD because things like Lunar Eternal Blue or

Snatcher, which we covered in the podcast, like things that had like speech and video and like you were saying, orchestral scoring.

It's like, this feels like something, this, I know my console is incapable of this.

Like that felt like something completely different.

Whereas the 32X, I was just kind of like, what the fuck is this shit?

I was just like confused by it.

So I do think there was like

a real clear appeal to the Sega CD, even if it didn't, it wasn't reflected in it in its sales.

But the 32X was just a little bit muddy.

Matt, you were playing the 32X with us earlier.

Yes.

I mean, what were your impressions and like, what did you know about this console coming into the conversation?

So

what I knew, what I thought I knew,

we could take everything that I thought I knew and throw it out the window.

But I was, I mean, Nick, I was shocked by this.

Wow, you were shocked.

I was shocked by this because I guess I didn't realize that it wasn't,

it was and it wasn't its own thing.

Yeah.

It is, you, you need another thing for it to work in this.

iteration of it, I guess.

The thing that I'm thinking about with

all these parts, including the CD, because I'm looking at a photo with the tray that fits all of them, I guess, or I don't know if you could call it a tray, but it's.

Oh, yeah.

When you see the abomination that is all of these things Frankenstein together, it is like it is a legit site gag.

Because this

sucks to look at.

That's bad.

Genesis with a 32x jammed inside of it and the Sega CD to its side.

Yeah.

Which also, that was the second form factor of it, because originally it was Genesis Sega CD underneath it.

Yeah, 32x snapped on top, which was at the time called the Tower of Power.

Yeah.

This is the redesign, Genesis.

You're looking at it.

The fact that there are so many iterations of this and so many versions of it that are even possible, the thing that I'm thinking about in a modern context is

because the only there's not really hardware modulation

or you know hardware

They like they'll do they'll do a separate, you know a separate run of something like the the PS4 Pro or the PS5 Pro Yeah, the PS4 Pro was not a thing that plugged into your PlayStation 4 to make it more powerful And then they sold separate PlayStation 4 Pro games that you had to buy it's kind of a little bit like the difference between PlayStation and PlayStation VR.

You know, it's a thing that you have to like plug into your thing, which lets it do additional things.

Or in prior gens, like the you know, like the Xbox Kinect was kind of a thing, right?

It's like, but this is also in some ways, I was thinking, I don't know, I was thinking about this today.

Because of, I think, because in part because of the conversation we had last week where Nick was talking about building his PC and how like when you're building a PC, you can future-proof it to some degree with

the different components that are going to be a little more powerful.

Maybe not.

as or too much power for what you need currently, but

anticipating the power that's to come.

That's correct.

That's for sure.

You can't do that in consoles.

And that's why the console generations these days are are typically seven-year cycles for some reason until they do the separate SKU, which is the pro, you know, the pro models or the, you know,

Xbox's version of this is just

with more hard drive space or whatever it is.

It's all digital

Series X

is what they end up doing.

I could see a return to something like this where it's PlayStation 6 or the new Xbox or whatever, but it's just PlayStation, it's just Xbox, and then the individual inner components are proprietary and swappable,

where you could swap the,

you know, the graphics thing to make it more

instead of having to buy a complete new console for it.

This is,

I think, another case of Sega, and I'm tapping my computer screen like it's doing something, and it's not.

I'm just pushing the screen further further and further back.

You're tapping it like you're scolding it.

I'm mad at it.

I don't want to break your thing.

But I think this is a case of Sega once again being too early to the dance where they're sort of like, where Dreamcast was also

too...

In some ways, too late and too early.

It was not the right thing for the moment.

This is also incorrect, but they're on to, it's not a bad idea.

but the execution is bad.

Also, think about this timeline, right?

The Genesis comes out in 88.

Yeah, this thing comes out in 94.

95 is the Saturn, 99 is the Dreamcast.

They had exhausted their most loyal fans.

Because, like, if you're a Sega kid, you have purchased between 88 and 99, it's an 11-year cycle.

You've purchased the Genesis, the Sega CD, the 32X, the Saturn, the Nomad,

and then the Dreamcast.

And like, none of them were supported the way that the Genesis was.

And you just kept feeling more and more burned by the company that you love.

Heather, did you have a Nomad?

I did.

It was like such a cool thing in theory.

I've only messed around with it a few times, but like, it doesn't, was that a battery life issue?

Was that the whole thing?

Just doing those full-color Genesis games in a handheld mode?

It was, it was a battery life issue, and it also was, it came out late.

Too late, yeah.

Like, by the time you could play, the Nomad was a handheld Genesis, and it was like, wow, I can play full-resolution Sonic the Hedgehog in a handheld device.

One, the machine was so fucking big.

Like, it was like holding a loaf of bread.

Yeah, it's pretty bulky.

It sucked.

We're closer to a Steam Deck than a Game Boy.

Yeah, yeah.

And then additionally, by the time it came out, you were already onto a much, it was a different generation.

And it's not like when the Game Boy Advance came out, it was like, oh, there are games being made for the Game Boy Advance.

It is new stuff.

This was, hey, do you want to play your old games?

We're never going to release new games for the Nomad.

It's only your old games.

And we're going to be making new games for other systems.

It's another thing where it's also like, like, Sega, I mean, I get what you, I get how you landed on this.

And I think part of this was because of the, I'm trying to remember that the portable Turbo Graphic 16 slash PC PC Engine.

Was it the PC Engine Pocket?

Whatever it was.

That was like the first thing.

It was like a 16-bit console that was just miniaturized that had a full color screen.

You could just play the same games.

Like, I understand how they got to it, but it's like the whole genius of the Game Boy is that they could sell a whole different library.

Like, that was a whole, was in a situation where people would be willing to buy new games for a different piece of hardware.

Should we talk about the games?

Let's talk about the 32X games.

So

I think we should kind of maybe go in reverse order because the last thing we played before we started recording was Matt and I were given a hands-on demonstration of the difference between the Sega Genesis, the regular Sega Genesis, the base model Sega Genesis port of Virtua Fighter, if you can even call it a port, and then the 32X version of Virtua Fighter, which is a much better representation of the arcade game.

So the Sega Genesis Virtua Fighter, Virtua Fighter, it's Virtua Fighter 2, correct?

That's the version we played?

Yeah.

So Virtua Fighter was like effectively the first 3D fighter in the arcades, and it was a pretty influential game.

I'm sure people who are in the Fighting Game community remember it fondly and

have their favorite in the series.

It is a, but it had these aggressively polygonal figures.

Like, you know, you could see all of the,

you could basically just see all the polygons on there.

They weren't trying to sand off any of the rough edges.

It was represented very, very clearly as like a pretty rudimentary 3D model, and they were fighting in a 3D space.

The Genesis port was not able to do any of that 3D.

So it's effectively, it's weird to even call it a port because it's just a 2D fighter that's called Virtua Fighter.

Yeah, and this was at a time, the game was monumental because it was at a time when all of the fighting games were 2D.

They were all 2D and they would all basically follow the Street Fighter 2 template.

Or the Mortal kombat template and then post virtual fighter you get things like tukkin and soul calibur like all of the 3d fighters yes extend from the lineage of virtual fighter so it was a remarkable game to see in the arcade yeah it was i i mean i remember it being very cool and uh you know just kind of feeling like

I don't know,

that along with virtual racing, virtual racing or racer?

Was it racer?

Racing.

Racer.

Virtual racing.

Virtual racing.

Those two felt like

the promise of gaming that you'd see in Tron.

You know what I mean?

It was like,

this is like what sci-fi says gaming of the future is going to be like.

There were also games like Virtua Cop, Virtua Tennis.

Oh, yeah.

Virtua Cop was cool.

Yeah, Virtual Cop was really cool.

Yeah, that's

when I think about what I like about video games.

That's what I like about games.

If only I could be a virtual cop.

Every time I played that game in the arcade, I would immediately put the gun in my mouth and pull the trigger.

Very unsanitary.

Having not seen the

Genesis

Virtual Fighter, seeing it for the first time,

I would not have thought any differently.

Because

I didn't really have a frame of reference for Virtual Fighter.

I know it as a fighting game franchise, but

I didn't know it's.

You don't know necessarily the original games.

You've maybe seen like Virtual Fighter 3 and on, you know,

the Dreamcast port.

Yeah, the Virtua

Virtua Fighter on Genesis is just not even that.

It's not even Virtua Fighter.

It's just like a different, it just like feels like a 2D fighting game.

The characters are even downscaled to

not even be

the right size.

And I guess they're kind of vaguely polygonal, but

I don't know.

I mean, they kind of look like 3D objects in a 2D space, but it's just a 2D fighter.

So the original arcade version is fully 3D from the jump.

There's never 2D.

That's very amazing and very cool.

Because then, like, when we played

the 32X version, it did sort of click in where I was like, oh, yeah, this is like a million times better.

And somehow more fluid than I was expecting for it.

The animation is great.

I mean, it's like...

It's a cool game.

It's a cool time capsule.

It represents in the same way that like the, you know, the FX chip,

you see a game like Star Fox, and it's like, oh, okay, this is a game that the, yeah, the base Super Nintendo can't execute.

This feels like something different.

And it's hard to make these comparisons using modern metaphors because there isn't this like multi-stage stepladder that extends downward from an arcade.

It wasn't like now we don't have a game that's like, okay, here's Virtual Fighter on

the arcade machine.

Then there's Virtual Fighter 3DX, which is less

but still really good and then there's virtual fighter on the genesis which is barely respectable and kind of only winks at the ip and then there would be virtual fighter for the game gear which is like not an existing game but would be like like essentially playing a game on your watch like really bad yeah it's it's it's uh they're completely different things it's basically just kind of using the title almost as IP and just making something that that kind of resembles it.

But yeah, and it's also...

Oh, you know, actually, here's how you can think of it.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is the arcade version of Final Fantasy VII.

Final Fantasy VII for the PlayStation 1 is your 32X version of Final Fantasy VII.

Final Fantasy VII Mobile on your cell phone is the Genesis version.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, that makes sense to me.

So the other thing that's happened is with arcade games is like, it's been 20 years now since arcade cabinets were like the state-of-the-art in gaming.

It's been so long since they were just surpassed by a PC and then console hardware.

I mean like the you know the Naomi

board that

was functionally just a Dreamcast inside of an arcade cabinet.

Bally Midway was installing voodoo graphics cards just off the shelf like you know graphics cards into into cabinets you know in the early 2000s.

So it's been a long time since there was that gulf.

But yeah, the 32x version of Virtual Fighter is,

I thought it was a really impressive port.

I thought this, I was like, okay, I get this.

This is kind of like the promise of the premise.

Yeah, if you were watching a commercial, if you play Virtual Fighter in the arcade or at the 7-Eleven near your house, and somehow they have that gorgeous, that was also, by the way, the

Virtual Fighter machine that I played was at a

hero, like a

Chicago beef restaurant.

Nice.

So it's like all of the sandwiches.

Carmy and the gang are behind the counter, and they have an incredibly gorgeous, bright white virtual fighter machine in the front.

I'm like, how did, why is this here?

Like, even young, I was like, this looks expensive.

That is, you know, I mean,

the whole plot of the pilot of the bear is a, there's an arcade cabinet that's in there, and that they have like a fighting game tournament there to try to get like drum up business.

i wonder if that's at all i mean that would be crazy if that was like that's based on that italian beef shop that had a virtual fighter i feel like all the italian beef shops in chicago in the 90s had a video game contest

or i do think arcade machine more restaurants should have video game contests that's a good idea it is a good idea

but if you're if you're if you're playing that game in the arcade and then you see the commercial for the genesis version you're like oh i'm sad yeah but then you see the commercial for the 32x version you're like oh my god they did it they fucking did it.

And the truth is, if I'm remembering correctly, there was an awful loading time on the Sega Saturn version of Virtual Fighter that isn't present in the 32X version.

And so if you compare the ports side by side.

The 32X version might even be better than the Saturn version.

Yeah, I can't remember.

I think the,

do you remember what speed the

Saturn CD-ROM drive was?

Because I think

on the PlayStation 1, it was just a 2x speed.

It was like so, yeah, I mean, so slow.

And I remember playing one of the Mortal Kombat games

on

like

on my friend Saturn.

And yeah, the loading time between like, like when a new character would come into a match, it was like, it was like crazy.

Like, there's like loading time between rounds.

It was like.

On the Sega CD version of Mortal Kombat, there's loading time before a fatality.

That's

you enter it in, you'd hear, da, da, da, and then it would hear,

and then they would do the fatality.

The things you used to like, and that, like,

would have still been amazing to you at the time, right?

Like, if a game shipped like that now, you'd be like, this is broken, or my thing is broken.

This is bad.

But, like, the fact that that was even possible is so novel to think about.

You didn't even have a smartphone to check.

No.

You're just waiting.

You're sitting there.

Your ass is getting numb.

The okay.

So we also should talk about Knuckles Chaotix.

Wait, wait.

No, we played virtual racing.

Oh, that's right, virtual racing, yes.

I gotta say, I loved virtual racing, and yes, I was bad at it, but

I loved the presentation.

I loved the way it looked.

I loved how fast I seemed I was going.

Good frame rate on that Sumbus.

Yeah.

You know, again, it's just this, it's, it's just, uh, it's pretty rudimentary, and, and the, the wheel, the, the tires are effectively hexagons.

But, you know, the way the car animates looks pretty good.

Can I say what I said when we were playing?

Yeah.

Can you imagine if the tires were shaped like that for real?

Would not be very comfortable, would it?

Driving down the road.

That is what he said.

Yeah.

You didn't do the yellow act on it.

I acted it nicely.

I got a little confident afterwards.

But then we played, or you guys played, Knuckles Chaotix, which was a game I owned at the time of release,

back when the 32X came out.

And as a Sega kid, as a Sonic fan, I had now played Sonic 1, Sonic 2, Sonic sonic 3 and knuckles sonic cd and i was like oh my god if virtua fighter looks this good on the 32x i can't wait to see what they do with sonic god damn it that game fucking sucks it's really bad it's well yeah it's it's it's a little cumbersome to play so there's a there's a single player in a two-player mode it is a game where there are two player characters on screen and they synergize off of each other and heather you maybe could describe the way it works a little bit better, having spent more time with it.

But

it's like a lot of it involves how your characters are tethered next to each other.

And so to move to different spaces, you have to either pick up the other character or you have to do like do some sort of thing where you're where you're you slingshot the other player up onto a ledge.

I bet that the design document or the pitch for this game was somebody in the office took a rubber band and put it between or wrapped it around their first fingers on each hand.

And they were like, imagine a video game where if you want to like go really fast and then they would extend their finger in a direction and make the elastic band taut.

They'd be like, you would create tension between this energized rubber band between your characters and then you would release and slingshot yourself forward.

I think that that was probably the pitch.

And people were like, oh, wow, there hasn't been a game like this.

And then after Knuckles Chaotix, there never was again.

Yeah.

Because I mean, and this is not for me to fix, certainly.

But if they're going to do a Knuckles game, why isn't it just like a Sonic game, but with Knuckles?

Why isn't there a shadow game where it's just Sonic, but it's shadow, or Tails even?

Like, they could have just done that.

But I guess then the criticism would be, this is just Sonic, but with a jump.

It's just reskinned.

It's just a Palace Hopper.

You know, Knuckles has his own mechanics, his own movement.

You know, he can scale and he can kind of hover.

The thing I will say is I believe this game, I believe Knuckles and Knuckles Chaotix is responsible for introducing

a good number of Sonic shitty friends.

Mighty the Armadillo, Espio the Chameleon,

Vector the Crocodile, and Charmie B.

Charmie B, I think are all debut in Knuckles Chaotix, and they all kind of play a little bit differently.

I think this game is a

get what you're saying, Heather, and I would not be shocked if that's the kind of way that they were able to internally articulate what they were going for.

I have this, just the sense that they figured out about halfway through development where they were pot committed to this concept that it just wasn't working, but they just had to ship this game because it was going to be

a big exclusive for the 32X.

One thing I will say is this was another one where we played it, we messed around with Sonic 1 on the Genesis, the base model Genesis beforehand, just to like refresh ourselves in terms of how it actually played on original hardware.

Gorgeous game.

God, what's what wonderful art direction.

Yeah, Sonic 1.

Really, so fucking good.

You put on Knuckles Chaotix, which is a 2D game, and it has a more vibrant palette.

It has more colors accessible to it, I believe, right?

Like there's 64 colors on the Genesis.

This seems to have more, but

it looks

just because of the colorways of the characters and the environments, it actually looks a little dingy in comparison.

It looks a little less vibrant.

Yeah, it was like, wow, you know, we can't show this specific shade of purple on the Genesis.

So let's make an entire level out of it in Knuckles Chaotix.

Yeah, and also,

let's make freaking Espio purple too.

Well, SBO is like changing colors the entire time.

Yeah, that's really cool.

That's, I mean, it's got, it's got some of the, some of the art is really awesome.

They also have a power-up that makes Knuckles really, really, really big on your screen, which is my favorite part.

I loved big knuckles.

Yeah, I don't know if the, I don't think that Genesis could do like that sort of sprite scaling and rotation.

They do a lot of that with the 32X games.

Yeah.

So Knuckles Chaotix as a kid,

huge disappointment.

Real bummer.

Bummed out.

Sad.

Yeah, I mean, like, here's the thing.

I played through a lot of It Takes Two.

Uh, and

I like that game is a, it, it's a, you know, required, it mandates two players, two like human players.

And Knuckles Chaotix is going for something similarly.

Obviously, many, many years in the future, a completely different approach to design.

But it's like that game, you at least feel like you have like a modicum of independence as like player one and player two.

Like you're working towards the same end, but you can kind of do your own thing.

Here you are literally tethered together.

So you're so limited in what you can do.

And the other thing is like because Sonic games are so, what's so fun about them when they work, and you know, most of them don't, but when they work is they have that sense of fluidity and that sense of continuous forward motion.

Whereas this game, you're constantly coming to a dead stop just trying to figure out, okay, how do I get up to this next thing?

It would be one thing if you were tethered, but you still had sort of your own autonomy.

Yeah, sure.

Right.

Or like, because I'm thinking about even like the Mario games where like if you're playing couch co-op with somebody, you can't go further than where the where the screen is, right?

Because they're just you're all kind of in one plane.

And that's kind of the fundamental flaw because you want to be able to just go and do whatever you want or whatever at your own pace, but you're always going to, somebody's going to always be lagging behind to a certain degree.

The other thing is,

just speaking of Mario, the game that it did specifically remind me of is

the,

boy, now I can't remember the name of it, but it was the Wii U exclusive 2D Super Mario Bros.

game.

Was it Paper Super Mario?

No, not Paper Super Mario.

No, no, it was not Super Paper Mario.

It was a Super Mario's U, the Luigi one?

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Luigi U.

New Super Mario Bros.

Uh, you, and

then there was the Luigi one that came out later that was a little bit better, but it was just kind of like, yeah, this is a 2D Mario, but it's just kind of

there's nothing really distinct enough here to make this feel like a system seller.

Yeah, yeah.

Uh, we also uh messed around with the uh the amazing Spider-Man.

Well, before that,

because

we should touch on that one last.

Matt and you both played Doom.

Oh, that's right.

We played a little bit of the Doom port, which is pretty good port.

And it was my first time touching Doom.

Which is wild, though.

I've never played Doom ever.

His first time was the 32X port.

You might be one of the few people on planet Earth for whom that's true.

I know that you can play it on basically anything that has a screen.

You could play it on a microwave.

You could play it on, you know, whatever.

You could play it at a PDF.

In fact, in fact, I think I could probably say this with absolute certainty: in the year 2025,

you are the only person for whom it is true in this year that their first time playing Doom will be on the 32.

I think that's a that's enough

to make that true.

Yeah, I think so.

You know what?

That is, that's nobody else can even beat me on this, and I'm the only person that could have done it.

It's a, it's an odd, well, it is an odd game to play with a controller with a d-pad.

I, I I played this shit out of Doom as a kid on PC.

So to strafe, which is a key thing, obviously, in a first-person shooter, you have to hold a button and then move left or right, which is a little bit awkward.

But I do think it's a decent port.

The audio is decent with the Genesis chip.

I think I just came up with something for the show.

What?

You've heard of the phrase, June Gloom?

We've heard of this?

Can we confirm?

Oh, no.

Oh, no.

Can we confirm that we just heard?

At least I've heard of it.

Yeah, I've heard of June Doom.

Yeah, but I know what you're going to say next.

June Doom.

We do Doom.

June Doom is pretty good.

So we do the base game Doom.

We do.

The new one will, I think, have come out.

The new one will, and then I guess

a Doom Eternal.

What else?

You Doom 3, maybe?

I'm trying to figure out what the big one is.

We can sort it out later, but it's not a bad idea.

It's not a bad idea at all.

It's pretty good.

Yeah.

And I think we'd all be excited to do it.

And I do like killing a lot.

We've kind of undercovered the Dooms for a big franchise.

We did do the Doom the Rock movie on our old Patreon.

We've talked more about Dune than we have Doom.

We have talked a little bit more about Dune.

The Shylude, et cetera?

Yeah, Dune's a little bit more, I think, in the Zeitgeist in this in this.

I'm just trying to see how many things I could say that makes Heather mad.

I'm more like I've just had

a tablespoon of salt.

It's not mad.

I'm just waiting to be able to spit.

You don't even dislike it that much.

Salt's pretty good.

I think you do Doom, and maybe within that discussion, we talk about Doom 64, which is an interesting port.

Doom 3, yeah, I think is or

and or Doom, the 2016 Doom when they just rebooted it with the same name.

Yeah.

Maybe Doom Eternal is in there.

Doom the Dark Ages, for sure.

Okay,

there's some Dooms we could do for Doom.

I'm writing it down.

I'll just write it.

I'll write it down.

All right.

And also to everyone listening, we might not do it.

We might not do it.

Don't get your hopes up.

I'm writing it down, but we might not do it.

We'll probably end up doing

something else.

June Dune.

Hey, we'll talk about it.

Play all the Dune games.

Honestly, pretty good, too.

Worse.

There's some good Dune games.

Dune 2.

There's a new one coming out where Paul Atreides

does something else that he's not supposed to.

I don't know what he does.

I was just thinking of how you'd make that.

There's an alternate future one coming out.

I was trying to think about how you'd implement sandwalking if it was like a Ubisoft style, like kind of 3D open world game where you're walking around Arrakis.

Oh, it's for sure a QuickTime event, right?

Where you have to.

You think it's a QuickTime event?

Maybe a rhythm quick time.

I think there's enough enough sandwalking that i think it would maybe be like a uh it'd almost be like a toggle or like a press and hold like you'd almost like automatically go into sandwalking if you're like holding circle while you're walking over or if you're you're just actually not you're using the analog stick um you know like like like just a just a small like a slight press uh of the analog stick just a little tilt then you would automatically sandwalk as opposed to running you know the um playstation 3 controller had analog buttons oh yes yeah they weren't used used for fucking anything.

Yeah, they didn't really

feel right.

Yeah.

Because they felt like a binary on-off.

Right.

So you could do it with an analog button press.

Like you have to like gently tap each button to walk.

Sucks.

Anyway.

So the yeah, we

messed around with Doom

and we messed around with amazing Spider-Man.

We didn't get a chance to play the game that I was really excited

about, which was, what was it?

Shut up and jam with Scotty Scotty Pippen.

What the hell is it called?

Yeah, so there, so 32x CD games were enhanced versions of Sega CD games

that just allowed for a little bit higher bit rate on the video, a little bit more colors.

Didn't seem as washed out, but Nick made such a stink about not being able to play the 32x CD version of Shut Up and Jam with Scotty Pippin.

It's called Slam City, by the way.

Sorry, Slam City with Scotty Pippin.

Also very cool.

Slam City with Scotty Pippen that I'm here to surprise him with the Sega CD version of the same game.

Yeah, I did group tech Slam City with Scotty Pippin or We Riot.

You did say that.

Yeah.

Okay, here we go.

Heather is booting it up right now.

It should be noted that we are using the Terra Onion Mega SD, which is a Sega CD emulator and also allows you to play your entire library off of a single cartridge.

You know, you can just fucking steal from them.

I don't care.

Not Terra Onion.

Steal the games from the the defunct library from Sega.

All right, here we go.

FBI raids headgum.

All right.

Uh, so here is Slam City with Scotty Pippin for the Sega CD.

I'm going to hand the controller off to Nick, and he can launch with button A.

Scotty Pippen's son, also named Scotty Pippen, is now in the NBA.

No, go down to that bottom.

There you go.

Okay, this is the right ROM here.

Heather, as a Chicagoan,

what was your awareness of Scotty Pippen?

100% awareness.

I know, for some reason, I'm like very acutely familiar with who Scotty Pippin is, too, and I've never really watched basketball.

I mean, like, I think

he was one of the more famous players of the 1990s.

Was he in Space Jam?

Was Scottie Pippen in Space Jam?

I don't think he was.

He had an interesting relationship with Michael Jordan, the number two on that team, but Scottie Pippen would have been the number one on pretty much any other team.

They just ended up with two of the

top 10 players in the league on the same squad.

So this game has.

We're seeing full video here, and we're hearing.

I imagine this song is going to come onto

maybe in pieces onto the podcast episode.

All right, so here we go.

I have no idea what the gameplay is like.

Oh, okay, so this is like kind of a video experience?

You got

You have to move him back and forth to block shots.

This is not the game.

This is insane.

So, what this is, is over the shoulder of the player as I'm playing against an FMV opponent, a full motion video.

You gotta shoot.

Basketball player.

I'll guess the shot clock ran out.

Okay.

That woman was really mean.

I'm playing defense now.

So, again, I'm.

Oh, wow.

Okay, so this guy just got what passed me for a dunk.

I can't tell how to play this game.

What is going on?

There you go.

Oh.

Nick just took a shot and

he did not make the shot.

I just stole it from that guy, though.

Why didn't we do this game on our old format?

This game is insanely bad.

Shoot, shoot.

Oh, get the rebound.

Oh, no way.

I can't believe.

So, yeah, this is a.

We're speechless because of the

game.

Hey, I just stole the ball again.

Okay, here we go.

There we go.

I threw it down.

I've never seen a video game like this.

That was my life.

That was the least interactive feeling I could possibly have for stealing the ball and throwing down a slam dunk.

Ranch, you should come out from behind the desk so you can see what we're looking at.

This is like a one-button quick time event.

Yeah, I mean, so basically,

it is full-motion video that is largely window-boxed

into like effectively like a third of the screen.

TikTok, baby.

The crawl tones.

All right, so now I'm being taunted for the shot clock expiring.

By the way, a 10-second shot clock, something that does not exist in basketball.

Okay, my opponent just switched a jumper.

It is

a live-edited full-motion video sequence that you have very light control over.

And there is a graphics overlay over the front of the full motion video that is your player character and you are trying to play a video game on top of a movie.

The other thing is on Sega CD, this is something that would have a bunch of egregious loading times, right?

No, the loading times are emulated in this.

Oh, they are emulated.

Yeah.

Oh, bricked.

This

sucks.

There's a resp.

So

there are babes who are watching.

I like this part.

Yeah, and it sometimes cuts to them for reactions.

They seem pretty disinterested.

Maybe they will do better as my respect meter goes up, which is another thing that is at the bottom of the screen.

Nick, for all of us, start being better at the game.

Hey, I'm only behind by one basket.

I guess you're right.

Two now.

I'll remember all the little people I stepped off on the way up.

Damn it, don't taunt me like that, fingers.

Yeah, fingers really got yourself.

Losing respect to my guy, Ace.

Yeah, you're losing respect.

I assume that the final stage of this

is you going up against Scotty Pippen.

I would have to think Scotty Pippen is involved.

If they didn't capture any video of Scotty Pippen, what are we even doing?

But it's the kind of thing of like

they don't understand what the

fantasy of playing this kind of game is.

You want to be Scotty Pippen.

Yes.

This is one of the things that the Tony Hawk franchise really got for you.

Yeah, they nailed that.

Immediately.

All right.

Well, this sucks.

It looks like shit that's also stupid.

But

But I'm glad I got to experience it.

I'm glad I got to watch you do that.

Yeah.

That was insane.

My favorite part about watching that is

here's what I think it showcases is that games like this, these full motion games that came out for the Sega CD were totally different than what you could play otherwise.

Right.

So when you saw...

a movie that you could effectively interact with, it was like your mind was blown.

Whereas with the 32X, if you're playing Amazing Spider-Man, you're like, this is essentially just a video game.

Yeah, this is just a platformer.

And that's what Amazing Spider-Man was, and that's what our experience with it was.

It's just a kind of a tedious,

kind of gummy to control, not really responsive, but with some nice animation of Spider-Man.

And yeah, you have web slinging, but because it's 2D, your web slinging just consists of,

you know, swinging from the top of the screen, either to the left or to the right.

And like, I don't know.

I feel like the thing about early Spider-Man games is that, like, you end up doing stuff that, like, Spider-Man doesn't really kind of do that much.

Right.

Like, I mean, he spends a lot of time on roofs, but like, he's going inside buildings, too.

He's, like,

what I saw so far is that he's only punching like

creatures and robots.

I was like, it's not kind of really his main thing.

He, like, fights thugs a lot of the time, too.

Well, when I was watching Nick play, also, Spider-Man committed suicide over and over again.

I ran out of web.

It was making me laugh so hard.

The idea of watching Nick's version of Spider-Man.

It would be like, you see Spider-Man on a roof, he punches a guy, he effectively does that, then he sticks his foot into a fan,

then he just falls off a building.

Yeah, you know, if you know Spider-Man, if he stands on an air conditioner, he dies.

That game has some good ideas in it.

Like, I think the web swinging is like pretty good for what it is.

And, like,

having the web meter even is a good idea.

Like, it's an interesting tension builder there, but it is bad.

What?

Really bad.

I like the,

you know, hey, you could, you have a, you have the three Genesis buttons.

You can shoot a web.

You can,

wait, shoot a web.

What's the other one?

Punch.

Yeah, you can shoot a web, you can punch, and then you can jump.

And then

if you hit the jump button in the air again, like a double jump,

you swing a web.

So you can swing from the top of the screen.

Like that, like

those three things work well together.

It's just, I think the actual responsiveness is not particularly good, and the enemy design isn't really interesting.

It's a pretty inert platformer.

And it also doesn't look that much better than a base Genesis game.

No.

The game that I was really into of the games that we played was the Star Wars arcade version for the 32X.

Yeah.

That was awesome.

That was really, really cool.

You're just flying around as an X-Wing pilot, and

you're shooting the Empire

outer space, and it rules.

But that type of game is always going to be good.

Yeah.

That's like a home run.

It's a fancier version of Star Fox for, in terms of like, at the time, other games similar to it um or a really really shitty version of squadrons yes from today or or like you know kind of like a cruder more arcade-y version of of contemporary games like you know x-swing or tie fighter for for the pc yeah i mean like it's a uh I don't know, like

that looked, I didn't actually get my hands on that one, but that looked fun.

I do remember Star Wars, there was Star Wars Trilogy Arcade was the one, the Sega one that came after that later, right?

That's right.

Yeah.

I do remember that game.

I don't know.

This was fun, Heather.

I appreciate you.

So, so, in terms of what we, how we actually did this episode, Heather brought some hardware over to the studio and we set it up and we messed around for a while before we actually recorded and messed around for a little bit while we were recording.

And yeah, I appreciate you doing this, Heather.

I like this.

It was a lot of fun.

Also, before Matt got here, Nick played Afterburner Complete on 32X, and I watched him kill Maverick over and over again.

But I want to express:

all these games are kind of highlight games.

The Afterburner looked good, by the way.

Yeah,

these are all sort of highlight experiences of the 32X.

We sort of singled out like the

cream of a very small crop.

And how small that crop is, is I'm going to list all of the 32X games right here.

Afterburner, Spider-Man, BC Racers, Blackthorn, Brutal, Corpse Killer, which was a Sega CD game, Cosmic Carnage, Dark Side with an X, Doom Fahrenheit, FIFA, Golf Magazine, 36 Great Holes, starring Fred Couples,

which sounds like a happy Gilmore sketch.

Knuckles Chaotix, Colibri, Metalhead, Mortal Kombat 2, Motocross Championship, NBA Jam, NFL Quarterback, Night Trap, another Sega CD game.

Oh, yeah, I didn't know it was a 32X Night Trap.

Wait, was that a 32X night trap that required

it?

Yeah, yeah, I got Got it.

Pitfall, Primal Rage, RBI Baseball, Shadow Squadron, Slam City with Scotty Pippin, Space Harrier, Star Trek, Star Trek, Starfleet Academy, Starship Bridge, Simulator.

I think we're going to see the end of the list.

Star Wars Arcade, Supreme Warrior, Surgical Strike, Team Mech, Tempo, Toughman Contest, Virtual Fighter, Virtual Racing, World Series Baseball, WWF Raw, WWF WrestleMania the Arcade game, and Zaxon's Motherbase 2000.

Imagine a game system where you could list all of the games in, I bet that was under a minute and 30 seconds.

There's a video game called Tough Man Contest?

I guess so.

I didn't play it.

I wonder what the smallest boxing game it looks like.

I wonder what the smallest library is for a proper console.

Virtual Boy.

It has to be Virtual Boy.

Oh, yeah, I guess it's Virtual Boy.

Virtual Boy.

Oh, my God.

Tough Man Contest looks like like an amazing game.

Did you see the packaging?

No.

Here's the packaging, Matt.

Yeah, no, I'm in on Tough Man Contest.

So

it's a barrel-chested guy, bald guy, it looks like, with his boxing gloves

outstretched, and he's stepping on the neck of another man.

Very violent.

Sega 32X,

its code name was Project Mars.

And,

hey, you know what?

It didn't quite reach the stars, but certainly had its expectations

and a lasting legacy.

Are you okay?

We'll be right back.

He's crying.

I said it's sweating or something.

I don't know what's going on.

Any other thoughts on this?

Thank you, Heather, for bringing it and for bringing a CRT TV for us to play it on and a miscellaneous box of cable.

Really, really nice-looking Sony Trinitron, You know, a nine-incher, but a nice screen.

This was a gift from a listener.

That's right.

It's a lovely little nine-inch Trinitron, one that I coveted for a long time, and was presented to me by a listener who asked not to be named.

Wow.

Wow.

Thanks, Craig.

Isn't it weird that like you got a nine-inch TV and it's like, man, that thing is small, but you got a nine-inch hog, you got a fucking piece.

Nick, I was trying to figure out how to say something similar.

A guy was ever like, hey, come back to my apartment.

I'll show you my nine-incher.

Yeah.

Oh, okay.

Everything fucking sucks.

Come back watching the matrix and a tiny screen.

My angle is going to be like, it's so crazy that like a small TV.

I was going, the small way?

Uh-huh.

Like, small just means different things when you're talking about different things.

Yeah.

That's a small TV.

Yeah, nine inches.

But

nine inches something else.

That's not small.

Dude, all right.

I don't think that's nine inches.

Do we think that's nine inches?

I think that's smaller than nine inches.

Yeah, it's like really, but it's like big still, right?

But on the other hand, if you, if, if somebody said, hey, come back to my place, I've got an 85-incher, and you went home and it wasn't a television, you're upset enough to abomin it.

I watched a matrix talk about this guy's hog?

Look, I asked the genie for a bigger hog.

He ironically gave me.

genius.

I said I wanted the biggest dick in the world.

He was like, oh, you'll have it.

Here we are.

First, he gave me a giant robotic Richard Nixon.

I was like, that's not what I asked for.

Apparently, there is a kind of duck that has a very long penis.

So he was like, it's got to be the longest on earth, buddy.

And yeah, I quack now.

Meanwhile, the partner is just vomiting.

Hey, that was our Game Intel of the Sega 32X.

It's time for the question block.

All right, these are all from our Discord, discord.gg slash kept play.

Get in there if you're not in there.

It's a lot of fun.

People are having a nice time in there.

This first one is from Imaginary Colors.

Hi, Imaginary.

And they write, I know this is a video game podcast, but what were your favorite movies of 2024?

And why was Nick's Megalopolis?

You know what?

I will say that Megalopolis is both...

want to give it like a special jury prize for being like

so insane and not working, but also being such a huge swing that it's kind of glorious, you know?

Yeah.

Like certainly like there are there are movies I saw in 2024 that were absolute dog shit and they never want to watch again.

And I would not count Megalopolis among those.

And Megalopolis is interesting.

Like it has something it's trying to say.

It's the dylan.

succeeding.

It's the DeLorean of cars, of movies.

So, like,

yeah, a DeLorean's not very pleasurable to drive, but boy, oh, boy, is it interesting?

Yeah, 100%.

And it's the singular vision.

And I'm really glad that Coppola made it.

Let's see.

Favorite movies of the year.

Boy,

it's tough.

I mean, I don't think it was necessarily a great movie year, but there were some movies I really, really liked.

Look Back anime, definitely probably still my number one.

A Different Man, we were actually talking about a little bit earlier.

Off-pod, a different man's awesome movie.

I really enjoyed that.

Challengers, I really liked.

And Luca Guadalinho's other movie, Queer.

He came out with two bangers this year.

I like both of those quite a lot.

We're talking Dune, Dune Part 2 would probably be on my list.

The Substance, of course.

A couple more animated movies.

Mars Express, Awesome,

and

it's streaming now.

I would definitely check that out.

And then also one that will probably get Mars Express, I feel like, was under the radar a little bit.

It's like this French sci-fi movie that owes a lot to,

you know,

why can't I think of the movie right now?

Owes a lot to Blade Runner.

It's like a detective, you know, a detective noir future movie.

And it's really well executed and ends in a really unexpected place.

That and then Flo, great cat movie,

and I think, which I think was Latvian-made.

That was really awesome.

And then also, a smaller movie I really liked is called Good One.

And it's just basically about a woman, her father, and her friend, a young woman, her father and her friend, just taking a hike through the woods.

And it's really human.

And it's really,

it's really cool filmmaking.

I really liked Wicked.

And I'm going to pitch it to you as an anime that happens to be in live action and a musical.

Yeah.

And if you watch it that way, there's literally an anime opening sequence.

in like the first quarter of the film.

Yeah.

Like the girl is running through a field and jumping and the sky is blue and she's singing about her dreams.

If you cut that sequence out and put it at the beginning of the movie, it's a fucking anime.

I also really liked Anora.

I really liked Conclave and

beyond that, I guess, Dune part two of the films that were actually released in 2024.

Yeah, so I made a list of movies

maybe prematurely, because I've seen some 2024 releases this month that I would probably add to this list.

Dune, part two, number one, with a bullet for me early on.

Saw it twice in theaters,

loved it.

I loved Long Legs.

I know that not everybody liked Long Legs.

I loved it.

I thought this movie was like, I just loved how it looked.

I like Nicholas Cage of that movie.

He's great.

He's so, he's so, so great.

And I won't tolerate any slander.

I love him in movies.

You either loved this movie or

you either loved this movie or you hated it, I feel like.

I loved Nosferatu.

I loved it.

I have to see it.

I'm an egg hag.

I love all of Robert Edgar's movies.

You love Nosferatu.

Not like that, though.

I saw what happened.

It got that girl a bit of trouble, didn't it?

I loved the substance.

I loved Abigail.

Did anybody see Abigail?

I didn't see Abigail, no.

Abigail is an action horror comedy.

Oh, yeah.

Like a little girl vampire.

Yeah, I gotta watch it.

I hear it.

Sonic rules.

It's so good.

Obviously, I have to shout it out.

Sonic 3.

I loved Sonic 3.

We all like Sonic 3.

Sonic 3 rules.

Didn't you see Sonic 3?

You got to see Sonic 3.

That movie fucking rocks.

It is really good.

It's much better than Knuckles Chaotix.

Way better by a million degrees.

Speak No Evil, Anora, The Brutalist, and My Old Ass.

Speak No Evil was a 2024.

That was cool.

Speak No Evil was really, really great.

Wait, I'm sorry.

I cut you off a little bit.

What were the other ones?

Anora, The Brutalist, and My Old Ass.

Yeah, I really, really enjoyed it.

The Brutalists and Nickel Boys I'd put in the same category of maybe not on my top 10 list because they're both pretty, pretty...

I'd say unpleasant watches at times.

Like they are, they are endurance tests, but they are both like incredibly made films and seem like very personal vision.

So I'm really glad they exist.

Movies that came out in 2024 that I wish I had seen are All We Imagine As Light, which I've heard great things about.

I still haven't seen The Brutalist.

I haven't seen Nickel Boys.

I haven't seen Ryuchi Sakamoto's Opus, which I did want to see.

And there was one other.

Oh, I saw the TV Glow.

Oh, yeah, that was cool.

Were all movies that I haven't seen yet from 2024.

So if they aren't on my list, it's not because I didn't like them.

It's because I haven't seen them yet.

There's a lot of movies.

Movies are

back in some ways.

This next one's from so-called button.

Hi, so-called.

What's up, button?

Button writes, why will you all not play

Bloodborne from FromSoft's Magnum Opus and likely the greatest PS4 game of all?

So here's the thing.

As I've gotten more into FromSoft games,

I love the shit.

I love Sekiro so much.

My replay of Elden Ring and then playing all the way through the Shadow of the Earth Tree DLC.

I was like,

I fucking love that game.

That game is an absolute staggering masterpiece.

It is one of the greatest games ever made, and it's one of my favorite games of all time.

I want to play Bloodborne.

I'm sure I will love Bloodborne.

The key thing there, and you just cited in your question button, is PS4, because it's not on PC.

And not that I don't game on PlayStation, but I primarily game on PC.

I'm like, man, can we get a PC port of this summit?

Is this really going to be PlayStation exclusive indefinitely?

Or are we not going to get like a proper PS5 remaster?

I probably am just going to buckle down and play it at some point, but part of me is holding out for kind of like the Demon Souls kind of remake where they're going to, you know,

really kind of bring it up to the modern day.

But I don't know.

Maybe I'll just buckle down and play it this year.

I own Bloodborne on disc and played through, I don't know, the first hour of it before I had to stop playing for work or something.

Like,

it's not because I didn't like Bloodborne, it's because it just,

I literally have a list of my favorite games of all time that I haven't yet played.

Like, games that I know I'm going to love.

And Bloodborne is one of those games.

I haven't played Rebirth, and I have Cloud's Wig on my table.

Like, I have to make it happen.

You know what, button?

Challenge accepted.

Yeah.

I will play Bloodborne this year.

Shit.

I'll do it too.

Yeah.

But my answer for why I haven't yet is because I'm scared.

Zach writes, if you could only have one console for the next five years, be it PS5, Xbox, Steam Deck, Switch, Playdate, or other.

No one's picking Playdate.

Which would you pick?

I think I have my answer, and it might surprise you.

I guess I'll go first.

I'm assuming PC is off the table because it was not mentioned.

You could do PC.

It could be anything.

Well, then it would be PC, but that also feels like a bit of a cop-out.

So I would say, like I'm putting PC aside.

I have to pick something.

I think I might put my money on the Switch too.

I think it's going to be just powerful enough where I'll be able to play everything that I want to play.

I think it'll get all the ports of all the indie games.

It'll have Nintendo first-party exclusives.

I think it's kind of like getting a Switch in 2017.

It's like you'd be in pretty good shape for most of the next five years.

There'll be a point where the library kind of thins out a little bit and where the, you know, the

set-top box hardware, console hardware starts to outpace it a little bit where some of those games aren't coming over.

But I think for the most part, for the front end of it, you'll be in pretty good shape.

That's pretty good.

Yeah.

I didn't think about Switch 2 being on the table.

If Switch 2 is on the table, my answer is Switch 2.

If it's not,

I think my answer is Steam Deck.

Because

you get the PC library, you got that going for you.

It's portable.

You can take it places.

You also get PS5.

You get PlayStation exclusives on Steam now, don't we?

So I could still play God of War, Ragnarok.

I could still play Spider-Man, Miles Morales, and Spider-Man 2 on a Steam Deck on a portable piece of hardware,

not be tied down to a console or TV.

I can play those games anywhere I want.

Yeah, and you still have access to your vast library of hentai games.

Yeah, that's right.

Honeypop, HoneyPop 2.

I'm going with PlayStation 5.

I'm going with PlayStation 5, in part because there are plenty of games that I still need to play that are on the PlayStation 5 through PlayStation 4 backwards compatibility and the ability to stream larger libraries of PlayStation games.

I also think that as an accessory, because it is not a playable console on its own, the portal counts as a PlayStation 5 controller,

which also allows you to play the PlayStation 5, like if your wife is watching TV or if you're on an airplane, maybe, and it happens to have like fast internet.

Yeah, on this magic plane.

It's five years from now.

Five years from now.

Man, wives sure do love watching TV, don't they?

They love watching TV and giving me a hard time.

Like, I'm trying to play a game here.

Yeah.

Get me the TV

and an ice cold beer while we're at it.

I also have never played a video game while sitting next to my wife who's watching TV because I'm always watching when she's watching.

Yeah, we're always like spending time together.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I actually love my wife.

Yeah.

Here's the thing.

I love my wife.

That was like a joke we were doing there.

I would

have to way in which

I would push any of you listening in front of a moving train to hear anything my wife had to say.

It would be an instant.

I wouldn't even think about it.

Do we have any more questions or was it just three?

This last one's from

Polybius.

And Polybius, right?

Polybius.

Polybius.

Polybius?

Polybius sounds more correct.

Nintendo Switch game carts.

Snack or whack.

Also, do you think Switch 2 carts will taste the same?

I'm going to say whack to the carts because I do think they are designed on purpose to taste bad so little kids don't choke on them.

But I think that the Switch 2 carts are going to taste good.

I don't think the carts taste good.

And I don't think Switch 2 carts are going to taste good.

I think they might taste good.

I think that's going to be one of the new features we're going to learn about in the next

Nintendo Switch 2 Direct.

That the cartridges taste good now.

Do you think that Switch 2 is going to abandon the amiibos?

No, I don't think so.

They're so far.

Well, you can't even really see the sensor for it, but people are claiming there's not a sensor for it in the native hardware.

Wow.

Wow.

Well, who knows?

It's all rumors and speculation.

Throw me down a flight of stairs.

I don't mean my 12 amiibos.

I've got so many.

I know you probably.

I looked this up because I think they're going to taste great.

I looked this up because,

so snack.

I looked this up because the name sounded familiar.

Polybius or Polybius, P-O-L-Y-B-I-U-S, which I believe is the username there.

I'll just read this off of Wikipedia.

Polybius is a purported 1981 arcade game that features in an urban legend.

The legend describes the game as part of a government-run psychology experiment based in Portland.

Gameplay supposedly produced intense psychoactive and addictive effects in the player.

The few publicly staged arcade machines were said to have been visited periodically by men in black for the purpose of data mining the machines and analyzing these effects.

Supposedly, all of these Polybius arcade machines then just disappeared from the arcade market.

Isn't that wild?

And also, it's kind of like a little bit prescient about what games would ultimately become, like just things that were data mining its user base and monetizing that.

Wow, that

really scared me.

I love the CIA.

Any sort of government agency, I'm down.

That's cool, actually.

I like that.

If you get like three letters in your name, you're pretty cool.

Yeah, FBI, CIA, NSA, NSA, the rest.

If there are four letters in your name, you suck.

NASA, sorry.

You fucked up.

And that's it for the question block, guys.

Thank you so much for writing in.

And remember, I said that the Discord is discord.gg slash get played.

Get on in there.

Hey, that's this week's Get Played.

Our producer is Rochelle chen ranch yard underscore underscore sard our music is by benprunty benpruntymusic.com our art is by duck brigade design duckbrigade.com and hey check out our patreon patreon.com slash get played where you can find our entire pre-head gum back catalog plus ad-free main feed episodes and also our patreon exclusive show get animated matt what's getting animated this week we're talking dandadan still folks we're

dan dan to dan

we didn't plan that we're loving we're loving dandadan it's really great Check it out.

Patreon.com/slash get played.

And hey, you know what got played this week?

The 32X.

Yeah.

That was a hit gun podcast.

It's easy to be a superhero.

You don't need a cape or X-ray vision.

You just need to sign up for PowerSaver Rewards.

That way, when you save energy during a flex alert, you get a credit back on your energy bill.

Visit powersaverrewards.org and become a super power saver.