Holiday Draft

This is a head gum podcast.

Okay, hope you kids are excited for your Christmas present because I think I got you

exactly

what you wanted.

Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, what is it?

Open it up, open it up, okay, okay, okay.

Nintendo 64!

Shut the body!

64!

What the hell are you, holy?

I don't know what you're doing!

I don't know what you're doing!

I'm losing my heart!

You're hurting me!

You're hurting me!

You're hurting me!

Why?

Why?

Why did you do this to your father?

I just wanted to make you happy.

I don't even.

Do you see any games?

There aren't any games for you.

There are no games for it?

You didn't get us any games?

You dumb asshole!

You stupid dad.

I thought there was a packet.

We make our lists and check them twice as we draft video game Christmases this week on Get Played.

Let's fucking go.

Welcome to to Get Played, your one-stop show.

The hell?

Keep going.

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, Heather Ann Campbell, along with my fellow host, Nick Weiger.

Let's fucking go, I guess.

I'm Nick Weiger, along with our third host, Matt Abadaka.

Let's fucking go.

Hello, everyone.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Premiere Video Game Podcast, where this week we we are talking Christmas time.

Ho ho ho!

Ho ho ho!

Santa!

Santa!

We love you, Santa!

Come on!

What do you want under your tree?

I like this Santa because

in the media's portrayal of Santa, he's more of a guy, right?

He's like a sort of, he seems like a guy.

He's a magical guy, but he's like a magical man.

This this Santa, our Santa, is creature-esque,

yeah, more of a cryptid.

It's uh, it's interesting.

I think the yeah, because like the portrayal of like Santa for so long was just like this like jolly, genteel, like, you know, fatherly figure.

And then we had like the, I feel like the phase where we kind of had like the Tim Allen Santa or the Paul Giamatti Santa or the Billy Bob Thornton Santa where it's kind of like like Santa's just like, oh, oh, he's just a dude, you know,

yeah.

And that's its own thing.

And we're going to have ripped Santa, J.K.

Simmons.

J.K.

Simmons is jacked.

If you ever seen him working out with a sleeveless shirt, he's got some guns.

It's kind of nasty.

It's too much for me.

I don't want that.

No.

I don't want that guy to be that jacked.

Yeah,

I'd add an A and a C to his name and an E D at the end.

Jacked Simmons is what I would call him.

He looks like if a pencil worked out.

Like he looks.

This guy's a buff pencil.

Like he's a buff.

Intense.

He's a number three.

Pencil.

Just an immediate pivot from the long road that Matt went down.

I forgot.

Something that kind of made sense.

It almost made sense.

Jacked Simmons.

I forgot.

I forgot.

I guess you fill in the J and the K with an A, C and an E, D.

I get what you're saying.

You fill out the initials.

I fucked up.

No, it's fine.

We don't need to dwell on it.

It's just like, what the hell are you talking about?

I just, I just thought you were right.

So I just went forward because I was like, oh, yeah, that sounds good to me.

I know that I made a mistake.

And all I can do is say I'm sorry.

Not in my eyes, you didn't.

Then this is rare.

But also, what you basically did was start a video game puzzle.

And I was like, I'm tuning out of this.

Okay, great.

And so when you were like Jack Simmons, I was like, okay, sounds good.

But then Nick was like,

excuse me, the A and the CK.

It doesn't matter.

Look, let's fucking go.

All right.

Let's fucking go.

Wow, Santa.

Santa, we have milk and cookies for you.

Enjoy.

Jesus Christ.

It's like a pig in a trough.

I hope that Santa...

Crumbs and milk all over the floor.

Look.

I just hope that Santa he's drinking lactate or he's doing

he's taking some sort of.

you think that Santa's allergic to milk?

He's a man of a certain age,

he absolutely is.

He's also just ingesting a lot of it if he's going from house to house, yeah, and drinking at every.

I mean, if you take how much milk is one sip at each house, you know, I mean, but he's the thing, he's drinking the whole fucking glass this guy when you would leave milk and cookies for Santa, and I don't know if everyone did this, yeah, um, but I we would always there would always be like a cookie with like a bite out of it.

Like the the implication was that Santa did not finish the cookie.

What did you get like a full plate of of crumbs?

What happened when you were in the middle of the day?

We put out like a few cookies and you know, we're eating some of those too.

Like they're Santa's cookies, but like we made them so we could also have some cookies.

Right, right.

And then we'd wake up and we'd be like, they're gone.

Somebody ate all the cookies.

Yeah.

I think the idea was like like I think that you know my dad or whatever was leaving like a smoking gun of like, look, there's a cookie with a bite out of it.

That means Santa came as opposed to the cookies are just absent.

Yeah.

I um I

have a story about Santa, which is that my dad, don't, don't put your hand over your face.

I just know that I'm just like mentally preparing myself for new Heather Ann Campbell lore.

I met Santa.

Santa worked with my dad.

No, my dad.

So my dad had, you know, a construction business and he had a shop full of like stuff, right?

And I was determined to find evidence of Santa.

So after the cookies and milk were laid out, before,

you know, breakfast or whatever, before the gifts are under the tree, I went out to the garage and I got a carpet tape.

And I took the plate and I put carpet tape, two-sided carpet tape on the plate because I was like, I'm going to catch one of his fucking beard hairs and I'm going to have proof that of Santa.

And I'm going to have it.

And the next day, of course, there's no hairs.

And I decide, like, on, I was just like, Santa doesn't exist.

And my parents were like, why?

What are you talking about?

And I'm like, because I set up a trap and there's no hairs.

Like his beard is so big, it had to shed hairs.

And they were like, oh,

okay, sweetie.

That's it.

They're like, oh, so you came to that conclusion the weirdest way.

I remember remembering, I remember the moment when I realized Santa wasn't real.

It was when I was old enough to recognize.

This is pretty early.

I never had a conversation about this.

As far as I know, my mom still thinks I believe in Santa Claus.

Oh, man.

She's never told me otherwise.

I just recognized that like my mom and Santa had the same handwriting and just like never said anything about it.

I was like, oh, my mom writes like Santa.

Wait a minute.

That's how I

found out, too.

This is my mom's handwriting.

Oh, wow.

Wait, so because a producer Xiao Chen Ranch, you grew up partly in Thailand.

Was this when you were in Thailand?

No, this was when I was still in the States.

You were still in the States.

Okay.

Do you have any

memories of

Christmases past?

Were you ever laying out milk and cookies for Santa?

I think there were milk and cookies one year.

Yeah.

But not like a common tradition necessarily in your house.

I think we had the Christmas tree and stuff like that, but also my mom's very Christian.

So

Santa isn't really supposed to exist.

He's not right.

He's not fully grown.

You celebrated the real reason of the season.

What you were saying about the,

and because this is a video game podcast, this actually ties in nicely.

uh what you're talking about of trying to trap uh santa's beard hair reminded me of uh an infamous puzzle in video game history you maybe heard about this this is the cat hair mustache puzzle from gabriel knight 3 um which the gabriel knight games were decently well-regarded adventure games uh the the the first and second one were better the third one is uh kind of a mess

Actually, this puzzle has its own Wikipedia page.

It is that infamous.

But I'll just read from the Wikipedia.

It has frequently been identified as one of the worst puzzles in the adventure game genre, with one writer going so far as to call it partly responsible for the decline in the overall popularity of the genre.

So here's

what the puzzle is.

So Gabriel Knight, the title character, has to impersonate a detective named Detective Mosley to take his motorcycle.

But he has to do that.

He has to create a fake mustache.

I'll just read this again from the Wikipedia.

One of the requirements of the puzzle is to create a fake mustache using cat hair.

The cat hair is acquired by first attaching a strip of masking tape to a small opening at the bottom of a shed door.

Then a water bottle sprayer is used to spray a cat, causing it to run through the shed door opening, leaving some of the cat's fur stuck to the tape, which Gabriel then retrieves.

Gabriel then uses a packet of maple syrup to attach the cat hair to his face, creating a fake mustache.

Gabriel must also steal Mosley's passport to use his ID.

Here's the thing: Mosley, the guy you're impersonating, doesn't have a mustache.

So you also have to steal his passport and then draw a mustache onto it.

To make a fake mustache out of cat hair stuck to your face with maple syrup to impersonate a man who does not have a mustache.

It's complete nonsense.

I need to bookmark that link so I have it at the ready when people ask me why do I hate that genre.

That sucks.

Yeah, real, real, real bad puzzle.

All right.

Hey, we're going to talk about some games that we played throughout the year since we are approaching the end of the year, since we are here in the Christmas season.

As far as catchphrases go, I got to say ho-ho-ho up there.

It's great.

It's really good.

It's an all-timer.

You instantly know what you're getting.

You're like, oh, Santa's coming.

Didn't Santa says...

Didn't say it says Feliz Navi Dale.

I remember what he said.

He said,

when you look up in the sky, remember that's where I'm trapped.

That was his first episode with us.

That's what he said.

I'm still trapped up here.

Perhaps he's paying for his past misdeeds.

We don't know exactly what's going on.

Yeah, who knows what happened to Santa.

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So since we're approaching the end of the year, we thought we'd look back on some games we enjoyed in 2024.

It's time for what were you playing?

What were you playing?

Hi, it's me, the Resident Evil Merchant, and I'm here to ask my friends about their year in review.

What were you playing?

I don't think it's possible the Resident Evil Merchant is Santa.

Hmm.

And also, that's the kind of thing neither of them might know that.

These might be just two different personalities.

Do you think that, like, on Christmas Eve, I lose consciousness and then ride us around in a sleigh?

I think it may be a Joker Joker-Folly-A-Doo situation.

I think you may have seen it.

I haven't seen it.

Oh, yeah, don't bother.

No, nobody, nobody saw it.

Is Joker Santa?

No, Joker is not Santa.

Well, then who is Santa?

Is Harley?

No, there's no Santa in the...

I confuse things by bringing it up.

Forget about that.

There's no real reference to Christmas inside the Joker season.

In the world of...

Which I have seen.

In the world of...

Just to go back to the Tim Allen Santa Claus, Santa is almost like an it-follos kind of.

It is.

Santa's a curse that you get.

Like you because you kill Santa, then you become the new Santa.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

What are the bonuses?

Like you're

boons?

Yeah, I guess you're kind of the beloved.

Like, what are your plus ones?

You're the beloved figure of, you know, the representative of Christmas.

I want it.

You have a bunch of elves who work for you.

You deliver the North Pole.

I want to do it.

Look, all you got to do is kill Santa, apparently.

If that's.

I'm going to fuck him up.

Oh, my God.

It's on site with that guy.

Oh my god.

I want to be Santa.

I would love to be Santa Claus.

You know what?

You are something of a Santa because you have a bunch of gifts that you are offered to the player underneath your transfer.

Wait, Santa sells gifts?

No, he gives them away, but it's the same sort of principle.

Those are two different things.

At your fair prices, it's practically like you are giving them away.

Well said.

Right, because I do buy.

Yeah, so it's almost like a bartering system.

Yeah.

I'll buy that for a high price.

I'll buy buy that for a high price.

He said it.

We said it exactly the same way.

I love it.

I love saying it.

We sounded the same way.

I love saying it so much.

Anyway, what do you, you know, it's been a big year for video games, and there's been a lot of hits here and there,

a lot of failures, a lot of flops.

There's a couple games that you can't even play.

And I don't know how often that happens.

That's true.

Things that were pulled from digital stores that are no longer available.

reverse sanded

so uh i want to know what it is that you guys were playing nick

what were you playing thanks so much for asking me uh resident evil merchant i was thinking back on this year in gaming and a game that we talked about in the early part and i think it's one of those games that

Like always happens, this is one of the things I love about this medium, is that sometimes a new game just comes out of nowhere and it's a brilliant design and

a bunch of people play it and play it for a long, long time.

It ends up having a long tail of influence.

This year, that was Bellatro.

Bellatro comes out on February 20th of 2024 of this past year for Windows and consoles.

It gets ported to mobile on September 26th.

It is actually included with Apple Arcade.

You can just buy it outright for like 10 bucks.

But this was designed by a solo dev, local thunk in Canada.

And it's a great game.

It's a life ruiner, but it's great.

It's a game that just sort of like takes over.

And, you know, I kind of had to create some distance

for myself from it, as I've said previously.

But now I do have it on my phone because I have Apple Arcade.

And you know what?

Plays pretty well on mobile.

I'm not going to have it on my phone forever.

Like, I didn't have Slay the Spire on my phone for very long because, again, it just takes over your life.

But it is just, it is such a cool game.

And, you know, it's kind of like Vampire Survivors in the sense that it's a new approach to a roguelite

that's just kind of like like scrambles what everyone can, you know, kind of think about it.

Here's specifically a deck builder.

There's something so brilliant about a deck builder that just uses cards that we know, standard playing cards, and gameplay mechanics we already know from poker.

In fact, the game I found it was originally titled Joker Poker, which makes sense because so much of the of what makes it compelling and what makes each run distinct is the gameplay altering Jokers, which change, you know,

change how the rule sets are and allow you to target individual hands over others.

So, is it called Santa Poker now?

No, it's not called Santa Poker.

It's called Bellatro.

Bellatro is the name.

Or Balatro.

I hear it called both ways, pronounced both ways.

I'm not sure if there's a canonical pronunciation.

Bellatro.

Yeah, I've been saying Bellatro.

People have been saying Bellatro.

I also heard that Joker Folly Ado was going to be called Joker Poker.

They thought about Joker Poker.

You know, Joker Poker might have performed better at at the box office.

That certainly sounds like a more compelling movie.

It also kind of clues you into the fact that Lady Gaga's in it and she has a song called Poker Face.

Matt, this is well argued.

Joker Poker Face.

Yeah, that's what he almost called it.

I heard it.

I read this.

I didn't make it up.

It is one of the best indie games of the year.

It's one of the best games period of the year.

It will be on my best of list.

It's another incredible solo dev release.

And you just like, well, for the year or for all time?

For the year.

I think so.

Yeah, okay, great.

Did I say best of games of all time?

No, you just said it's going to be on my best of all all of the time my best and best of the year list how much did you like my best of the year list i i it doesn't quite reach that that threshold for me personally but it does for some people um i i have friends that have put hundreds of hours into this game yeah wow and it's a game that people will play forever and i think it's really cool uh one thing i think that we should we should play real quick is just the uh for anyone hasn't experienced this game part of what's great about it is that it's got this great uh retro sort of feeling art that's kind of trippy as well.

And then it's got this this just driving music soundtrack behind it.

That's one composition

that's looping, but it's so good that you're playing this game for dozens of hours and you still want to keep the music playing.

Ranch, can we play a little bit of this song?

It's kind of like got like you know, it's it's kind of like the the Wii Shop music, but with some menace to it, you know It sounds like snatcher music to me.

It is very snatcher, yeah, very much like like Kojima's snatcher

It's a rad though, and it's again, it's just a big part of like every element of this package works and it's an awesome game.

All right.

I've heard enough about Balatro that I'm going to try it.

Yeah, I think you should.

That was my tipping point.

Was that moment?

I don't know if you'd respond to it just knowing your taste in games, but I don't know.

I love poker more than anything.

Oh, then you might be addicted to it.

Yeah.

I will say I've triple-dipped on this game.

I originally got it on my Steam Deck.

I then bought it on my Switch because the Switch is more portable than my Steam Steam Deck.

So I was like, I need this

on my Switch.

And now that it's on mobile, I did buy it on mobile.

And now I just have it with me at all times.

And it's just,

I have the ability to be able to stop.

I like will do a run and then just stop.

I'm not like a

start another run type of guy like immediately.

But like once I get a run done, I'm like, okay, that's.

Do I have time to do another one?

I can if I want, but it's easy for me to put down.

So I think it's, it's going to be firmly on my phone phone for some time.

Can I ask a question, being that I immediately looked it up on my phone?

So it comes free with Apple Arcade.

That's true.

But

there's two versions here.

Bellatro Plus, which is the one for Apple Arcade, and Bellatro.

Yes.

Are they the same game?

They're the same.

The Bellatro Plus is the official game.

So like, yeah, you can just download that.

You don't have to pay for the $10.

I'm doing it.

I'm downloading it right now.

Wow.

We're witnessing it in real time.

I can't wait.

Yeah.

Let us know what you think.

Heather doesn't talk the rest of the episode.

She gets obsessed with

watching off your phone.

I didn't step in.

It's okay.

I think Heather's here.

Yeah.

Matt, what were you playing?

Well, I keep a list

of games that I've beaten during this calendar year of 2024.

And I've been doing this now since

the year 2020 for no particular reason, I will say.

There was nothing going on in the world that made me keep a list of the things that I was doing at all times.

And I didn't and I didn't create a list to feel like I had some semblance of control of what was going on or anything like that.

Of course.

I just happened to make a list.

And now I keep doing it

because

I do like looking at the list.

It's good to look at a list.

It's an interesting list.

And this year...

I've got a list.

Oh, God.

Already taken to the role.

We're even secured.

No, no, no, no, no.

Wait, Oshana's got a list.

That's kind of his like.

Oh, you didn't know that.

It's one of his things.

One of his main things.

You just have a different list.

Yeah, I have a list.

Okay.

But I want to hear about your list.

How many times have you checked in that list?

The list?

Yeah.

Twice.

This is what Santa does.

Santa does do this.

Am I Santa Claus?

I mean, I don't know.

It might be a good idea.

Let me just show it for you.

Yeah, I like the way that felt.

You can work on that.

See, but like, this is then going back to the point: is Santa the Joker?

Because the Joker laughs.

Look, Santa, Joker, Resident Evil Merchant kind of represent a Trinity, if you will.

Yeah.

A Bermuda triangle.

Yeah.

A Triforce.

That's right.

A Triforce of WITH!

Ooh.

So.

I usually have like a, I'll have an end-of-year tally of how many games I've beaten this year.

The list is shorter this year, but the games I feel like were bigger.

There's some big boys.

There's some big boys, and there were some games that really took over my brain.

And this game

really took over my brain.

Animal Well, we did an episode about it.

Yep.

Animal Well is a solo dev game.

Another solo dev game.

You know what?

I don't know if this is the year of the solo dev, but it's certainly a year of the solo dev.

Like there are so many great solo dev games that came out this year.

And Animal Well came out in May of this year, 2024.

And, you know, you just play like a little blob guy, and it's a you, it's a Metroidvania where you explore this labyrinth filled with animals.

And it's just, it's a, it's a puzzle game where the mysteries aren't necessarily obvious to you, uh, and you kind of just go around trying to figure out what the hell's going on.

And there are multiple layers to it, so there's like a base level

of puzzles that you can solve that are, that's, and that's what most people would solve if they completed the game.

Then after you do that, there's, there's more to it, and then beyond that, there's, there's more than that, that, too.

And so, you start playing it, and if you're like me, it scratches this part of your brain that had been inactive.

That I would say was like the same thing that made me that that scratched this particular itch was like when I, when lost was on TV and I was watching lost and getting in chat rooms and like figuring out stuff as a community.

Wait, are you wearing a lost hat right now?

I am wearing a lost hat right now, actually.

Yeah, very on brain.

Dharma initiative, actually.

That's right.

The numbers are on the back of the hat.

Very good.

I got a Greg hat I like to wear.

What?

A great hat?

A Greg hat.

Greg.

Greg.

You know, go with your Dharma hat.

Darman Greg was a Chuck Laurie sitcom of the 90s.

No one remembers Darman Gregg?

I just want you to apologize to me about my J.K.

Simmons thing from earlier.

Five seasons, Thomas Gibson, Jenna Alfman.

I want you guys to apologize for years of the podcast.

119 episodes of Dharma and Greg.

Isn't that wild?

And where is it streaming?

Probably nowhere.

Probably nowhere.

Probably nowhere.

Gosh.

I stay incorrected.

It's on Prime Video.

Oh, good.

My favorite service.

I love that one.

Lost them all.

You were talking about lost.

Why is, why is,

and I don't want to lose future advertising or anything, but it feels like all of the streaming services are kind of welcoming, except Amazon, which feels slightly antagonistic.

It feels like, oh, it's like, oh, you want to watch TV?

Good fucking luck.

Yeah.

Try finding it through this UI.

It has the, it has, it has, it's a horrible interface.

It's awful.

I hate, I hate it.

Which is also wild

because Amazon.

Amazon created the click to buy.

Yes.

Which it's the idea that the internet existed before that, before somebody was like, click to buy is nuts.

It's really crazy.

How could they invent click to buy and also invent like the hardest television to use?

I heard a I heard a wild thing.

This is like a millennial slash Gen Xer divide with Zoomers, which is I guess apparently Zoomers, because this is the thing.

I still,

I'm very old, but

if I'm making like a major purchase, I do that through a computer.

I guess a Zoomer will just like buy a car like through their phone.

Isn't that wild?

Yeah, I guess like on Carvana or something.

Yeah.

I mean, I think the best way to buy a car is in person.

You got to get it in the car.

Yeah, right.

For sure.

Right.

But I sometimes.

But if I'm buying, even if I'm buying, like, like, oh, I'm going to buy, you know, I'm going to order the, the, the, make a major purchase.

Like when I buy like a new, a new flat panel TV or something like that.

That's the thing like I'm doing through a browser tab on my computer.

If you do that through your phone,

I do that through my phone.

Yeah.

I don't know if I would do that through my phone, but like I got like I got Oasis tickets on my phone.

Yeah.

Like I was on my phone and I did it.

I find the phone more reliable than the browser.

Interesting.

Because I feel like browsers have all of this other bullshit that slows them down.

And when, especially when you're trying to get like

a shoe drop or like any kind of a thing where it's like time sensitive, use the phone.

That's what I feel.

The phone is good.

I like, or I will say I like ordering food from apps more than I do like ordering it on a browser.

So I will definitely do that.

God, a good food app.

Yeah.

Man, I mean,

that's a different.

That's for something else.

Topic for another day.

Wait, wait.

Say it.

We went on a huge tangent that was needless because I talked about your Dharma hat.

I'm sorry.

This game scratched the same itch that Lost did when it was on, which was just the itch of what the hell is going on, like, what's going on?

Yeah.

And like, how do I, how do I solve it so I know?

right and this game i just i i i loved it so much and i just thought it was such so well designed so fun and uh just and just interesting i don't know like i feel like games come out and they're and they're often fun and they're they're good but i feel like few games are as interesting as animal well was to me yes uh when it when it came out um so that's what i was playing animal well awesome game um the uh you know uh the the the solo dev, Billy Basso,

you know, worked on it for many, many years, and it is just like a real labor of love.

And the other thing,

you know, another game that's one of my favorites of this year, but it's just like the, again, just incredible vibes.

And it's good, gorgeous aesthetics, and it's both retro and next-gen at once in terms of how it looks and feels.

It's really, really awesome.

I read something about Billy Basso that I don't think a lot of people know.

Oh, what's that?

That his dad was

big-mouthed Billy Bass.

And then he added the O later.

He added the O.

Yeah, just to create some separation.

Yeah.

Seemed like a Nepple baby.

Yeah, that baked me out of that tracks.

Oh.

I heard it.

Yeah, I mean, I'm glad to know that.

Oh, Nick, your Greg hat fell off.

It fell off.

Jesus Christ.

It's the kind of quirky behavior you would expect from Dharma, the free spirit.

Greg, the buttoned up guy, we'd think he would have his hat on.

So it's a little bit of a reversal.

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I eventually got off that roof when the sun rose.

Heather, what were you playing?

Wait, wait, wait.

I want to interrupt for a second.

Yeah, please.

I'm a fan.

What?

I was going to say, as far as interruptions go, that was a horrible one because you waited your turn.

No, I interrupted Heather.

Oh, I see.

I guess you're right.

You're right.

She's waiting her turn now.

Matt, I'm upset.

Uh-huh.

We heard about your list.

You never asked me what was on my list.

What was on your list?

I'll hand it to you.

Okay, uh, Resident Evil merchant handed their phone

to

okay.

Okay, so this list says

the list is titled Some Animals,

and the list includes six animals,

and here they are: fish,

dog,

bug,

giraffe Mr.

Bird

and Long One

out of the big six animals.

You got them.

Here's the thing I kind of know.

I kind of feel like those are the big ones.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Somebody called the giraffe's the long one, but you know, it could be any other.

That's one of my lists.

That's what's just one of the lists.

Yeah, that's one of the lists I keep.

Hopefully, you should keep using it as helpful for keeping track of stuff.

You know, it was weirdly on topic, Resident Evil Merchant, because there are a lot of animals in Animal Well.

That is a big part of a big part of the gameplay.

Unintended.

Can I go?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Go ahead.

So I guess one of the games that I was playing this year that I absolutely loved was Astrobot.

Yes.

I know we fucking covered it for the show, and it hasn't really been that long since we covered it, but

one of the warmest feelings I had all year round or all year long was,

and also I didn't go into Astrobot season thinking I'm going to pick up Astrobot.

It was only after the avalanche of positive reviews that I was like, should I try Astrobot?

And the moment you start playing that game, you're like, oh, it's so good.

It feels good.

It's...

It is lightly challenging most of the time.

And then like, there are a couple bumps of decent challenges and then one nightmarish course at the end.

Yeah.

Master challenge.

And it's like that's what a pleasant experience all the way through.

I also still play the music.

Great soundtrack.

I play that music on my home pods.

I'll play just that fucking title track and bop around my house singing I am Master Bot.

I loved it.

I fucking loved it.

Yeah, incredible game.

Really, really well, well done platformer.

And if we're talking about the games we were playing this year, just like Bull Outro was for you, I think this is one of my top, my best of the year games.

Yeah.

It was so fantastic, and I loved it so very much.

I wish, I know that

they've dropped a couple of DLCs, they've dropped some speedrun courses.

Like, I just, I wish there was more.

I would love theme packs of Astro Bot.

I would love Astro, Astro,

just right now.

I'm in an Astro bottleneck.

I think

I liked it.

That's good.

I think

we're going to be getting more Astro bots

down the line for sure, because as we talked about in our We Play, You Play of Astro Bot, Sony maybe has their guy.

Yeah.

This is the guy.

Sony's got their guy.

They got their guy.

This is.

This is Sony's guy.

There are not, there are a paltry number of PlayStation 5 exclusives, especially with so many of them coming to PC now.

But this is one of those ones that makes owning the console worthwhile, especially the way how it interfaces with the dual set.

It also fills a quadrant on their, like, you know, they've got that Marvel style opening on their games now where you see like all of their highlight characters, like Kratos and the Last of Us people.

Almost all of those people look photorealistic.

Yeah.

And it's a little weird to just have like humans like on there, like rotating

triangle and X and stuff, or cross.

And I feel like,

you know, you've got Jack and Dexter, right?

That's those that go.

Jack and Daxter.

Daxter.

You got those guys.

But for most of it, it's just humans.

And Astrobot feels like the final piece in that visual puzzle.

Is there Ratchet and Clank in that tableau?

I don't know.

I can't even, I cannot eat that.

Ratchet and Clank is probably now in the.

I mean, Jack and Daxter.

That's it.

Ratchet and Clank.

Yeah, whatever the fuck those are.

Ratchet and Clank are the ones that are still going.

Yeah.

And, you know, if there was going to be, because in the PS2 era, they had all those guys, Jack and Daxter, Ratchet and Clank, Sly Cooper, and his friends.

Yeah.

Bandicoot, crash.

Spider-Man still hanging around.

It's great that Ratchet and Clank is the one that

is carrying on because I felt like the gameplay in those games may be the strongest of all of them.

Oh, yeah.

Rift Apart is awesome.

And Rift Apart was like, hey, that's the 3D platformer on the PlayStation 5 until Astrobot, which is such a triumph.

The thing about Astrobot that's so great is that it's so good that it makes you wish there were five of them out immediately.

Yeah.

Like, you're like, oh, I can't believe I missed this.

I'm going to go back and check out all these other ones.

And of course, there's the VR one and the one that was packed in with the PS5.

But I will say,

you know, I didn't finish the pack-in PS5 one when it came out.

And

I wish I had because going back to it kind of feels like it's like a little less.

Well, it's like yeah, it's kind of a tutorial sort of feel to it.

That was an awesome experience.

It's not called Astro's Playroom.

That's the VR one, or is it called Astro's Program?

I think it is called Astro's Playroom.

What's the VR one?

Astrobot, Astrobot Rescue Mission.

Oh, okay.

Okay.

So yeah, Astro's Playroom.

It's yeah, it's a little, it's a cute little thing, but this is a full, a full, full-ass game.

Yeah, I loved it.

I think we're gonna get look, we have, we have divergent tastes.

That's part of what makes talking to

to to all to y'all interesting about video games, that we like different things but i feel like there's a lot of overlap so far because like all three of these games are somewhere on my my my year end top 10 list yeah well when a game is such high quality that it sort of transcends genre yeah like you don't have to love platformer like i'm not a platformer head right like i don't fucking go out and buy platformers and i do and i do too but these games are so good that they're like becoming universal they're transcended experiences which is why i'm i'm really excited to try Bellatro.

I think you're going to like Bellatro.

I'm excited about Bellatro.

And also, I need a phone game.

I don't have a phone game.

I was playing Bellatro on

an airplane

this year, and

my wife looked over and said, not that crazy poker game again.

I love it.

Love it.

And I was like, I think if I could just explain to you how to play, I was like, I think she could get on board with this because it's an easy enough game that I think, because all you have to have is a basic level of understanding of poker hands.

That's all you need to have.

And those are easy enough.

Yep.

And then once you get into the

like trying to build a deck around a certain suit or a certain

or a certain Joker that you can get, it becomes a completely different experience.

It's awesome.

Look, the part of the fun of having a non-gaming spouse is their dismissive descriptions of your passions.

It is always very funny.

Whenever I'm playing, if I happen to have been playing Kingdom Hearts, she does always think it's Hentai for some reason.

And I'm like, it's not that.

She's like, oh, great.

You're a jack off game.

I'm like, no, Jesus.

She roasts me.

That's why I love her.

I was playing Elden Ring.

Natalie was like trying to talk to me like what we were going to have for dinner or whatever.

And I was like, hold on one second.

I'm fighting a flower.

She's like, the fuck are you talking about?

You're fighting a flower.

And then, like, for like a week, she's like, did you kill the flower?

No, there's no response.

For all of us, we all have partners that are absolute savages.

Well,

my wife, my wife, while she can tear me down, is becoming a gamer.

This is true.

Like, she is, she is.

It can happen.

She's replaying Disco Elysium.

Oh.

She is, I mean, like, she

wants to replay through Last of Us Part 2.

Like, she's become a gamer.

And that's been kind of a, like, she had enough of a gaming experience in her youth.

Like, she cites Super Nintendo games that she loved.

Yeah.

So she's always, I think, been on

the Jupiter orbit.

to our Mercury, you know, like she's, she's, she's in the solar system.

She's not all the way out at Pluto, but she's, she's, you know, still orbiting the same sun.

Yeah.

Uh, Natalie actually did end up playing some Astrobot because she was, that was one of the games that she was watching me play.

And she, she's like, she does not really play.

She does play games, but, but, you know, she plays a lot of like puzzle games and, and, and stuff that are more, I think a lot of people would characterize as like kind of like distractions or, uh, you know, like full-fed-fledged games, you know.

Yeah.

Um, and, uh,

uh, she would, but no, like, she was, she was, she's, she was watching it and she was just like, oh, it's so charming and it's so cute.

And like, you know, loved all the little robots or whatever.

And was just like, it just looked fun to play.

And so she was messing around with it.

And yeah, having a good time.

What?

I was going to say when I was playing

Shadow of the Erd Tree and I was dying a bunch of times sitting on the couch next to me dying, dying, she goes, I bet you not can do it.

Let me try.

So I was like, you don't, I was like, you have no actual concept of like how to actually do this game.

I was like I'd I would like to it'd be funny to watch you do it so here give you the controller uh and then she does it and Jin just gets like killed immediately she was like this game is really really hard

Mary did the same thing for uh for not for Erdtree but the for the base game for Elden Ring and managed to score a hit on the tree sentinel oh wow uh while riding the while riding uh torrent around

the best part of it, though, was the moment she started playing and it looked at her, she just, in real life, started screaming at the top of her head.

So the experience of her, like, she was just like, ah, ah!

As she runs around and managed to score one hit on him.

And I was like, I can't believe you hit that fucking guy.

Yeah, the aggro in Souls games feel so different than the aggro and like other video games.

Like, even in like a God of War or something, like, it feels like, yeah, of course those enemies are gonna get you but like in in elden ring it feels like they're gonna get you for real like it feels like they're gonna kill you like they they like it's not like oh the the monsters are coming out of the haunted house this is like the girl in the ring's gonna come out of the television right

uh hey uh let's do this christmas draft shall we ho ho ho ho

so heather this was your idea i mean like i did do you wanna do you want to kind of set up what we're going to be doing exactly here?

I will.

I will.

I will.

So, here's the concept.

You get to choose a year from gaming history,

and you get to put underneath your conceptual Christmas tree five items.

Your budget is unlimited, but these five items have to be things that you could purchase at Toys R Us, Sears, GameStop, et cetera.

It's not a game of,

oh, it's the year 2024 and the Nintendo came out 40 years ago.

So, of course, I can buy Nintendo games.

That's not how Christmas works.

Your parents have to go to a store and they got to buy those games for you.

We're just going to imagine that we have the richest parents ever and they are going to go to a store and get us everything we want from a particular year.

You've been a good little boy or a good little girl, a good little kid, and so you're getting everything on your Christmas list.

And maybe

you're also not someone who is like liquid and super liquid and could have bought everything throughout the course of the year.

So maybe this is like, you know, hey, I'm finally getting all these things I've been craving.

And I think that it's important to say that there are a lot of years that sort of straddle two generations of games.

Like I'm not saying, oh, if you're buying Super Nintendo games, you can't buy NES games.

Right.

Because if you're if you're launch, if you're buying the launch year of Super Nintendo,

there's not going to be a ton of games for you to buy on the Super Nintendo that year.

So you might get a couple of greatest hits from the NES, but

you'll still have to buy the NES to have it underneath your tree.

So that's the way the game works.

It's called Christmas Draft.

And we're going to draft the best possible year and best possible gifts of Christmas for each of us.

Okay.

So I thought we were doing something a little bit different.

Oh, no.

No, no, no, no.

What I thought we were doing is that we were each drafting a roster of different years.

So we were drafting the best Christmas years from different years.

But if we're each picking our own individual year, then we are just like, we can just pick our own year and we don't have to worry about what anyone else is doing.

Yes.

Well, somebody could want the same year as you.

Yeah.

Right.

But the only draft, there's only one pick in this draft, which is the year.

Right, but then you defend your year.

But then you defend your year afterwards.

With how great your Christmas tree is or how personal it is.

You know, like maybe I want five VMUs.

So this is a pretty pivotal.

Horrible draft.

This is a pretty pivotal.

You can't play any games.

Enjoy the rest of your day.

Good luck.

Have fun looking at all that stuff.

So this one pick that we get is pretty pivotal.

Yeah.

So to determine the order, it's time for us to employ something that we have used behind the paywall over

at Get Animate.

RNG, the ranch number generator.

Rochelle, are you willing to able to help us out

by generating a number?

Okay.

Oh, my God.

Oh, wow.

Not only that,

Rochelle has put together a picker wheel with our faces on it.

That is a nightmare to look at.

I know.

This is like, I feel like the ranch has one of these on her dartboard at home.

This is terrifying.

So this will determine the order we go in, which will also determine the year that you get to bank

for your Christmas draft.

Okay, great.

Let's spin.

All right.

Maybe we should be inclusive and call it holidraft.

All right, holiday.

Holidraft is great.

Yeah.

So this is for first or third.

This is for

first.

This is for first.

Let's see who goes first.

All right.

We're spinning the nightmare wheel.

And the first

person who gets to go is Matt.

Matt's.

wow.

Matt goes first.

Hell yes.

So he'll get to pick the best, the best year, or hopefully none of us will have overlap.

We'll see.

I wonder.

I mean, there's certainly some big years that I thought of,

but we'll see.

Year three?

Year three.

All right.

It's down to me and Nick.

Who goes second?

All right.

It's spinning.

Ranch is spinning.

Laring is working.

Looks like it's headed towards Heather.

All right.

I have the third pick.

Ah, yes, let's fucking go.

Okay, so I'm going first.

And are we going to do this draft?

I guess we don't have, we can do it snake style, right, afterward.

Well, it doesn't matter because we're only getting one.

We're all getting, yeah, there's not going to be an overlap like that.

Okay,

so since I'm going first, I'm drafting the year 2001.

Wow.

Wow.

Quite a year.

Great year.

This is a great year.

And then should I make my first pick?

No, let's just do the years first and then we'll go back.

So, 2001 is your year.

It's Christmas 2001.

You're getting everything you want.

I love this fucking game.

I'm 10.

Wait, no, I'm 11.

Stop it.

Just fucking

do that.

I mean, I'm 11 years old.

Why would you do that?

You don't need to add that.

I'm 11.

We're all children in this concept.

We're all kids.

Yeah, we're all kids in this concept, but in 2001, I was 11 years old.

That's true.

Yeah.

That's horrible.

That's horrible.

I had a job job in the World Trade Center that year.

Jesus.

Okay, okay, okay.

That's not true.

But I could have.

All right.

I'm going to Renazizi yourself.

What?

I was 10 when that happened.

All right.

When the Renaissance scandal broke, lost his Buffalo Wild Wing sponsorship.

You are young.

I'm so young.

You're young.

My Christmas,

my dream Christmas is the year 2005.

Wow.

2005 is my dream Christmas.

That's pretty good.

Let's fucking go.

Who's on my list?

I was so scared you were going to choose it.

No,

I went with a one.

Yeah.

All right.

2001, 2005.

Here's the thing.

Oh, no.

This is a hypothetical, right?

I mean, no, you can never have another Christmas ever again in your life.

But I'm a a child in this exercise.

And so I, you know, it's, it's, this is like, I think part of this is, as opposed to looking back towards my actual youth, I can imagine a different reality where I'm a much younger person.

And

also, I think I wanted to get away from the early 2000s and from the 90s.

Because, you know, my instinct would have been 1998.

Great year in gaming.

It's maybe the best year in gaming history is 1998.

1998.

I mean, what do we have in 1998?

Half-Life 1, right?

We had

Ocarine of Time, was that that year?

It's just like it's some of the best games ever made.

It came out in 1998.

Yeah, it was

Banjo-Kazooie, Half-Life, Metal Gear Solid 1, Pokemon Red and Blue, Ocarine of Time,

among many others.

A lot of great games.

Oh, yeah, and StarCraft also came out that year.

So

a great year for video games, but I'm going to go towards the present.

We had a pretty awesome year in recent memory.

You're just going to be this year.

2022.

Whoa.

Whoa.

I'm taking 2022.

Nick is a child in 2022.

I'm a little baby.

I love to hear it.

That's his biggest dream.

My dipey's full.

He wants a full dipe.

Is there like a, oh my God.

Stop.

He wants one.

Stop it.

Stop it.

Is there like a...

Sounds like a change.

I don't want to hear it.

Is there like a license, a license-free Christmas sound bed we could put underneath this whole thing?

Like we're having hot cocoa and we're listening to some Christmas tunes.

We're unwrapping our presents.

Yeah, maybe for, maybe for, and, and fits and starts.

We can have a little bit of an ambiance.

That's nice.

I like that.

Certainly a fire crackling.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's a good time.

Right.

I love having that you log on, can I say?

Like on the TV?

Yeah.

Yeah, that's a lot of fun.

It is fun.

Yeah.

That's pretty good.

One of the great logs.

Yeah, I mean,

among our top logs.

What else is up there?

Captains?

I was going to say Captains.

I guess it's those two.

Lincoln?

Lincoln logs.

Those are good.

I think that's it.

I think it's those three.

What about shit?

Matt, you're up first.

What are you having?

The year is 2001.

What are you putting under your Christmas tree?

What are you putting on your Christmas list that's going to end up under?

And I also want to clarify a rule.

You can't just assume you have the system.

So you have to draft a console

if you want the game.

I think a corollary for that would be if it's a new system, let's say one of us had drafted 1999.

We can't just assume we have a Sega Dreamcast.

But if it's 2001, I think it's fair that maybe you have a Nintendo 64.

But I think that this is, I think that this is part of the fun, because you can't just assume that you have PlayStation N64 and the Saturn.

Like, that doesn't make sense.

Now, this is Christmas.

You have to get the system and the games you're going to play that day, which also forces you into some choices.

How many picks do we get?

Five.

We get five picks.

Five picks.

Five DS lights.

Okay, so you have a TV with hookups in the back.

And you have no hardware.

No hardware.

Yeah.

Okay, got it.

Okay.

So I think for my

and does if there's overlap

overlap in the in the

in the in the hardware in the years because ours are pretty close if i draft something that is hardware does that preclude you no

i don't think so okay i don't think so but it's christmas There's more than one PlayStation in the world.

Okay, I guess that's fair.

Then for my first draft, I'm going to

for my first pick, I'm going to draft

the PlayStation 2.

Nice, excellent, great.

Let's fucking go.

Heather, that it falls to you.

All right.

Remind us your year again?

Mine's 2005, and I'm

also unwrapping the presents.

I'm digging through.

What did I find?

I found a PlayStation 2 as well.

Hell yeah.

Wow.

I got mine first.

Now I want to know if I fucked up.

It's 2022.

The year is 2022.

I don't have to worry about a bunch of exclusives as much anymore because you know what?

A lot of great games come to every platform.

And so I'm going to pick my primary platform of choice.

I'm taking a gaming PC.

Give me a big super-powered gaming rig.

This is bullshit.

Give me all the horsepower you got, mom and dad.

I love it.

Load that some bitch up.

I fucking love it.

I love it.

This guy's asking for fucking Microsoft Word.

Well, no, I don't need that.

I don't need productivity.

I actually need like a spreadsheet.

No, I don't know.

No.

I want like a GeForce.

I don't know.

Oh, yeah.

Give me

the whole Adobe suite, please.

Thank you, mommy.

I don't need any of that.

Just gonna be gaming on this thing.

I love, I love that.

Strip out all that bloatware.

I love that you got a giant PC.

That makes me, that makes me really happy.

The loudest, hottest tower you can get.

Let's fucking go.

What do you think the price is on this dream computer?

Well, I mean, look,

this is the thing with gaming PCs is that the, is that there is no ceiling.

I will say I'm going to go for, I'm not going to say like I'm going to spend five figures on an insane liquid-cooled rig with just a, you know, like the absolute top of the line shit at a time where people were still mining crypto and so there was still a bit of a premium on on graphics cars.

I will say I will go for like like a a

a like a like a uh why don't i just say i'll spend two thousand dollars a lot of money on a nice pc a good quality gaming pc a a a towards the high end pc uh but not an absolute state-of-the-art machine

i love it okay

now we're at now we're at i have the hardware I kind of opened the big, I kind of opened my big present first.

Yep.

But that's okay.

I think we kind of have to do that, right?

Yeah, because

it'd be kind of like, oh man, I opened this and I don't even have the thing.

But then you open the big present last and you're just like, well, I got now I can play.

It's like when I worked at a video game store and the moms would come in and buy

a

ranch is cooking up.

Ranch has a degree in graphic design that I would just

didn't even know.

I'm not even aware of this.

So you're making a bit of a graphic in real time.

You've got each of our headshots there, each of our years, and then whatever hardware we have picked is underneath it, along with some really keen clip art of a Christmas tree in Santa.

That's a lot of fun.

I love the Santa, can I say?

That's a nice.

That's a classic Santa.

Yeah, go ahead and make that.

And big in the Santa, please.

Yeah, that's a state.

Look how happy the Santa is.

He's a happy man.

I mean, I guess he is, huh?

Jolly old St.

Nick, they call him.

So, my first pick of games that I can play now on my PlayStation 2.

Anything that came out from 2001 or earlier.

I'm going with

Grand Theft Auto 3.

Nicely done.

Because I'm a bad 11-year-old.

I'm not supposed to be playing that.

Yeah, that's a game for

a crazy game for me to be a bad animal.

That's great, though.

Imagine how exciting.

Like, this is also one of my favorite things about

being a kid and getting a gift is that you have the rest of the day to play with it.

I love it.

The best.

We did a thing in our house.

You'll get to open one at night, one Christmas Eve.

So, Christmas Eve into Christmas Day, you're already one gift up.

So, you're playing with a new gift.

Hopefully, it's not the best one.

That's a lot of fun.

It's pretty fun.

Yeah.

A little appetizer for the main course the next day.

I think just a reason to

get us to go away.

Get these fucking kids out of here.

So that's my pick.

Grand Theft Auto 3.

All right.

GTA 3.

Merry Christmas.

Incredible, a great, a great, great video game.

Heather, what's next on your list?

All right.

So on my list, the next thing I open is

the

Final Fantasy XI with hard drive single box.

Okay,

that's huge.

Yeah.

So I've got Final Fantasy XI with the pack-in hard drive, which I think was like a 40-gigabyte hard drive, so I can slam that motherfucker right into the back of my PS2.

And I can play a game that would ruin my life for years and years.

I haven't seen this box in a long time, and looking at it now, it is bringing back memories of

this was coveted I wanted this

just because of the size of the box you know what I mean an enormous it's an enormous box yeah it's got a ton of stuff in it and it also was the first uh

like perpetual Final Fantasy game so you could it's a Final Fantasy game that would I'd be able to play for the rest of the year man starting on Christmas in 2005.

So yeah, I'm getting that Final Fantasy XI with hard drive pack-in for the PS2.

Now, Nick might be thinking, thinking, why didn't she just get a top-of-the-line PC for the year 2005 and play Final Fantasy XI on that, uh, on that,

on, on a nice PC?

But that's not me because the rest of the things I want are exclusive to the PlayStation 2, but I want to get this one out of the way.

I unwrap this, and it's making me real happy here on Christmas morning.

Nick.

Look, what's the point of having this, you know, mid-to-hig high-A-range rig, but getting nothing to play on it, right?

What's the point?

I'm glad you're a child

in this Christmas, because I'm terrified of what you might find under your tree.

What?

No, I'm a good little boy.

Okay.

Do you think I'm on the nice list?

Are you one of these like

Gen Alpha kids that's like

watching like bad YouTube?

No, no, I get YouTube kids.

You have YouTube kids again.

So I'm watching AI-generated children's entertainment.

Four-hour videos.

Made in a bot farm.

Batman and Shrek.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Feeling wheels on the bus.

I gotta play some games on this son bitch.

I'm gonna get myself the best value in gaming.

PC Game Pass.

I'm getting Game Pass.

God damn it.

So, what a huge catalog I have available to me with the one-year subscription to Game Pass I got via a gift card.

How exciting is that?

The thing about this is, I feel like, of course, you were like this education.

Well, Dad, I'm just trying to get the most bang for my butt.

Huge library I have access to, including some 2022 releases I played on GameStop.

a fucking loophole.

Like, I was like, so you can't get an NES game.

This, you, you got like 30 years of gaming.

I have an endless catalog making me occupy.

You're explaining this to your parents, and they're just like picturing themselves with like a gun in their own mouth,

thinking, why did I have these kids?

This bums me out to see.

You might as well have gotten fucking word, you Dora.

I also like that Mick's fantasy of unwrapping presents is his second present is a card from like a gas station.

I'm thinking this would be the kind of thing where it'd be a misdirect where you get like a big box, right?

You're like, oh, what's in here?

And you're shaking it, and then you open it up.

It's just like a whole bunch of tissue paper.

And then you get like, wow, it's what I wanted.

A gift card for Xbox Game Pass.

I'm also irritated.

I'm irritated that listeners are siding with him.

They're like, oh, yeah, yeah.

Nick won.

Nick won Christmas already.

So, Ranch.

Ranch is.

It's not a contest.

Yes, it is.

Everything's a contest.

Ranch has put a big cardboard box on the thing, and I feel like knowing Nick and these choices so far, he'd be just as happy with this fucking box.

Game Pass is an incredible value.

He's like, oh, cool.

I can put the computer in the box and I can play in the box.

I can't believe.

I can't believe.

I can't believe this is.

Ranch made Game Pass small and put it in the box.

That's your gift.

Look at how badly that sucks.

I love that.

I'm thrilled.

Oh my god.

Are you kidding me?

This is the, I can't imagine.

I mean, like, possible, this is the most mad I've ever been.

Like, I was like, oh, you know, if I could have anything in the whole world, I could pick a system and like two or three very weird peripherals and have those waiting for me.

Like, how fun that would be.

And Nick's like.

Nick's ass is like, I'll wish for more wishes.

I want to maximize all questions.

Why do you try to game pass?

Why don't I I pick something else?

No, no, no, no.

You can absolutely have it.

You just need to know that

you're a sane choice.

You won Christmas.

Make it a savvy choice.

It is savvy.

It's savvy.

Yeah.

You know.

And probably something that a child in the year 2022 would want.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then, please, can I get Riz for Christmas?

Probably we're going to ask for next.

Probably Riz.

All right, Matt.

Back to 2001.

Okay.

What are you getting on your Christmas list?

I'm going to ask for

shares in IBM.

No, just kidding.

The hell.

All right.

I'm going to go for one of my favorite.

This is actually tough because

there's just so many great games from this year.

I'm going to ask for one that I did get for Christmas

and absolutely loved.

And it's probably not come up that much on the show for how much I love it.

SSX Tricky.

Oh, yeah.

The second entry in the snowboarding SSX franchise.

Wait, wait, wait.

I just saw the label for what this box is.

It's a double-wall gay lord box.

And I get to say it.

I get to say it as a gay.

I can say it as a pejorative.

48 by 40 by 48.

That is a huge box.

There's a man standing next to it for scale, and he could, I'll say, fit comfortably in the box.

Yeah, like you could fit like maybe two guys in that box.

All right, let's talk about this SSX Tricky.

So SSX Tricky is

in the tradition of, you know, like a Cool Borders or a Snowboard 1080 video game.

It's a downhill racer type game.

The sequel to SSX, which was

a launch title for the PlayStation 2, I believe.

Correct.

Which was like one of the only worthwhile PlayStation 2 launched games.

It's

a great game in its own right.

So SSX Tricky was like, what if we can make that game but make it

really cool?

Like make it really, really cool.

They licensed the Run DMC song, It's Tricky,

and that plays on a fucking loop in the entire game.

And it's a good song.

Yeah.

So it doesn't even really, you don't really get sick of it.

It's like the Blottro theme.

Yeah, it kind of is like that good.

Where you're sort of like, okay, you're just hearing this on a loop over and over again.

It's fantastic really great game um

i remember it being one of the first video games that i was like surprised that had um actors i knew in it like david arquette is one of the voice actors in one of the games and i was and you know at this time

he was like he was like sort of a more prominent uh actor yeah i mean you may maybe in grand theft auto 3 maybe you're you're too young to recognize like joe pentaliano or whatever exactly yeah i wouldn't have i wouldn't have clocked him for example

But, you know,

David Arquette had made movies I'd seen at this point in my life.

You know what?

I probably had seen

The Matrix

by this point.

I probably had seen it at least once by then.

Well, I gotta say,

this young Matt playing Grand Theft Auto 3, seeing The Matrix, he's downhill snowboarding and SSX tricky.

I'm worried you're gonna join a violence gang.

I might join one of these violence gangs that are like-you might be a bad kid.

Yeah, as opposed to one of the other

non-violence gangs.

Just one of those groups of friends, I guess you call it.

Yeah.

This SSX tricky is a lot of fun.

You do, you have like a

skill points

like meter for like when you

can do like special tricks and stuff like that.

You can do like the worm on your snowboard.

And seeing a character do the worm just at all, actually, is extremely fun.

Like the worm.

You know what?

If somebody did the worm in front of me in this year, I'd be like, this rocks.

This is really, really funny.

I should learn to do the worm.

It'd be really, you know what?

You are the funniest possible person to do the worm.

If you could do it in earnest and, like, do it extremely well, it would be the funniest fucking thing on earth.

He became in one time, like, hey, guys, want to see something I learned?

Dropped some cardboard down and did the worm.

I'd be like, Nick's the coolest guy alive.

This, this rocks.

Tiger did the worm.

Did you hear about this?

And he did it better than I've ever seen anyone do it before.

It's amazing.

You got to see Nick do the worm.

He also, he got so much elevation.

Yeah, he was going high up.

Like, he had insane core strength.

He was like three feet off the ground on the worm.

They handed him a trophy for highest worm.

So that's my pick.

SSX TB.

A great game.

A game that I covet.

I wished it was available to play on like the Switch or something.

I think it's a fantastic game.

I'm loving

your roster so far.

It's looking very, very solid.

Heather, falls to you.

2005.

i i just want to say i've i've realized something about next year yeah which he's a he's a child in 2022 right that's right yeah so the good thing for us

uh is uh like he yeah sure he got game passed man he got game passed yeah but he has so many he has so many emotional developmental issues from having been raised during covid that he is that he's not able to enjoy anything yeah yeah you're just like in

in roblox lob in Roblox lobbies, like saying stuff, like saying bad stuff,

being radicalized by Twitch streamers.

Yeah, yeah, we've got like a, if we're assuming we're all we're all 10 at this, I don't even know if we want to just like pick an age.

Yeah, but a 10-year-old in 2022 has had a rough go of it so far.

It's tough.

It's fucking tough as shit.

And at the same time, they know no other world, do they?

Doesn't remember the Obama presidency.

No.

You know what's a normal president to

Trump or Biden?

That's a person who leads the country to a 10-year-old.

God, I'm so sorry for you kids.

I really, I really wish you all the best.

All right, so my second game under the Christmas tree in 2005, I've got my fingers crossed.

I'm hoping I unwrap it.

And sure enough, I do.

It's Resident Evil 4 for the PlayStation 2.

Fuck.

And that game...

That fucking game is so good that one of the characters in it has maintained to join us on this podcast, you know, 20 years later.

Remains in the zeitgeist, remains a beloved NPC.

Yeah, yeah.

Iconic NPC.

That game's so fucking good.

Ranch has been playing it, you know, as she's talked about in recent episodes, but playing the remake, and an incredible remake.

But the base game was so revolutionary.

Yeah.

It's so great.

I owned the original version on my Switch, and like, I could just now play it whenever.

Yeah.

It's so good.

Now, my whole thing is I think of this as a GameCube game because there's the big thing though, Shinji Mikami was like, was like, I want this to be on GameCube, and that was the initial platform, but obviously it's ported to everything.

And so it, yeah, it's a very good thing.

I also think of it as a GameCube game,

but I was like, I can't, I can't have GameCube be my system, because

I only want to take up one of my slots with this system, right?

So I do, I don't, I, I think that Resident Evil 4 on the PlayStation 2 is just slightly inferior to the original release on the GameCube.

But if I'm maxing out my Christmas experience, I'm playing it on the PlayStation 2 in 2005 as a 10-year-old.

And I'm fucked up from it.

I'm ruined.

The first time I see that dude take a chainsaw to the neck, I'm having nightmares that night.

What a horrible time to be a child.

How wild it was to witness your character, the player character being decapitated.

It was just a thing that was just, you just did not see happen.

Yeah.

Okay, it's 2022.

I'm 10 years old.

And,

you know, I'll never know what winter is.

But I do have a lot of great games that I could pick from.

But I got a gaming PC.

And maybe I can assume that I'll get like a standard keyboard and mouse that comes packed in with this thing.

But if I actually want to play some console ports on this thing,

even games on Game Pass, I'm going to need myself a controller.

And I don't think we can assume it is a given that a gaming PC will come with a controller,

even a pre-build.

So I am going to pick an Xbox wireless controller, and I want the purple one.

Because that's the one I have for my computer at home.

You have a purple one for your computer.

I have a purple one, yeah.

I love the color purple.

The purple Xbox.

Purple Xbox Wireless Controller.

That's a nice purple.

That's cool looking, right?

Yeah.

That's a good looking...

That's a good looking.

Eat your heart out, Alice Walker.

I'm bummed out for you that you did have to waste one of these on a controller, but I'm also, I'm thinking about about you having to use a keyboard to play most of game pass yeah and i do think it's fair

i waited my turn i'd like to go back to something nick just said

if you don't mind heather yeah sure go ahead i think nick said eat your heart out alice walker

nick i have a question for you yeah what the fuck are you talking about the author of the great novel the color purple of course later adapted into two hit movies

What?

You didn't think of,

hey,

maybe it was 10 in 2022, but I'm getting a good education reading some of the classics.

No, you're not.

You were homeschooled for two years for sure.

Yeah.

Because you need to fucking be virtual.

Okay.

So pardon my

watch the movie in 40 parts on TikTok.

The Quibi version.

Yeah.

Gosh.

Okay, now I understand.

But you can't just say stuff.

I'll stop.

Okay, I'll stop saying stuff.

Matt, it's 2001.

You're 10 years old.

What's the next thing you're picking?

Okay, so this is where things get really tough for me because on the board right now, I have a PlayStation 2, Grand Theft Auto 3, and SSX Tricky.

Three of my five picks.

Yep.

Now, if I was a more

conservative drafter, I would stay in this lane.

I would stay

in

the PlayStation 2 library instead of drafting an additional piece of hardware.

Oh, shit!

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow, is he going to do it?

He goes under the tree.

He unwraps a present.

And that present is a motherfucking Game Boy Advance.

Holy shit.

Wow.

Wow.

A second system.

This is the best Christmas I've ever had.

Yeah, if you had a PS2 and a Game Boy Advance under your Christmas tree, you're doing pretty good.

Fucking spoiled little brat.

You know,

I think I could have

wasted all of the presents on Crystal Chronicles.

Because I would have had to have gotten the

GameCube, the multi, the, the,

a Game Boy Advance, another Game Boy Advance, another Game Boy Advance, and the game.

Except I I wouldn't have had any way to plug it in.

Oh my god.

That would have been tough.

Yeah,

you had to wait till next Christmas for your birthday.

I love this.

I love that you got a Game Boy fan.

And you know, this is tough.

I will say this would never have happened in my life

because I have three brothers.

Yeah.

So maybe we could have all gotten the PlayStation 2 as a group gift.

But this would have been an extremely fortunate Christmas.

And also, my birthday is in the same month as Christmas.

And all of my brother's birthdays actually are.

So it would have been, this would have been damn near impossible.

It's a good, I mean, like,

I've never received two consoles for Christmas.

I'm just making the Christmas that I want it.

Incredible.

Like, this would have been, like, this would have been the best day of my life.

Incredible.

Christmas 2001.

December 25th, 2001 could have potentially been the greatest day I've ever had.

So 2001 is the year the Game Boy Advance comes out.

So, you are just getting the base model.

I'm getting the base model.

I had, I'll say the one that I had was we had a silver one first that we all shared and fought over.

And then I bought, uh, with my own money that I saved, I think, from two Christmases,

possibly, maybe a Christmas and birthday

situation.

I got the Toys R Us exclusive black Game Boy Advance, and that's the one I still have.

Wow.

Wow.

Um, and I actually looked it up on eBay just moments ago

to see how much that one is going for.

And

in box, $500.

Woof.

Wow.

Used.

Open box.

Wow.

And it, well,

I'll save it for my next pick.

Okay.

Heather, on to you.

Heather, 2005.

It's 2005.

Under my tree, I've got that PS2.

I've got that Final Fantasy XI hard drive combo.

I've got Resident Evil 4.

The next game that I am getting when I unwrap my

Christmas is Katamari Damasi.

Wow.

So I've got role-playing covered.

I've got action covered.

Now I've got just pure gaming joy covered.

So those are the those are my first four presents of the five.

I only have one left.

It's 2005.

What am I going to get?

What am I going to get when I open my final present?

Oh no, I'm already having the best Christmas of my life.

That's pretty good.

Katamari Damasi, really a great game.

Katamari Damasi 2005 PS2.

Nick,

tell us about your Hornhub subscription.

I'm not getting it or whatever it is that you fucking.

Oh, so he's just getting it for free.

How bad?

I'm 10.

That's gross.

No, I'm going a different direction here.

So I got my controller.

And yeah, I got my Game Pass subscription.

There's plenty of stuff I can dig around with on there.

I'm getting an ergonomic chair.

I'm not getting an ergonomic chair.

Do I already have one of those?

I am getting one of the best games ever made that came out in 2022.

And I'm getting it for PC.

And I'm playing the shit out of it.

Elden Ring.

Nice.

Whoa.

A great pick.

A 10-year-old

playing Elden Ring.

That kid's going to grow up right.

Probably better than any of us.

Yeah, absolutely.

There was a kid when I did

the

gosh, what the fuck is it called?

The e-sim racing that I did earlier this year.

Oh, yeah.

Where you get in like an F1 rig,

that's like a PC hooked up to a monitor.

It feels like extremely real and made me very, very ill

when I did it.

There was a kid there, and I was like, this kid's going to be alright.

This kid is doing great, great work here.

And he was incredible on the track

i want to say that these

these

look like us i don't know how to explain it but like i thought you made the photographs and i was like that's no even the

even the color palette

the color palette of the thing like yeah you have like a a huge amount of orange blue and like purple in your in your Christmas presents just like visually and then like

I don't know I feel like the Katamari damasi and the and the final fantasy 11 box kind of look the same in some strange way they're like kind of minimalist yeah and i think

i could picture nick standing next to a big box like that pretty proudly on yeah for sure yeah

all right matt it's your it's your final christmas present you're you're probably sweating because it's been such a good christmas i'm like passed out you know what i mean like you know that video of the kid opening the present for the n64 and he get he's like screaming.

It's like a

huge video.

I'm like this

times

four so far.

Like this is great.

Yeah.

I'm out of energy.

Yeah.

I have one final pick

and

I think

I have to

Because now I have the Game Boy Advance, I need something to play.

I gotta get a piece of software.

I gotta get something.

So my final pick.

Possibly one of the greatest games of all time.

Certainly one of the great games you can play on the Game Boy Advance.

I'm talking Super Mario Advance 2 Super Mario World.

Wow.

Super Mario Advance 2, Super Mario World is out in 2001.

That's right.

Wow.

One of the highest-selling games of the year.

Wow.

I love this.

I fucking love this Christmas we're all having.

Super Mario Mario Advance was Super Mario USA, aka Super Mario Bros.

2.

So that was a launch title and this comes out shortly thereafter.

This was a pretty bang bang.

Yeah, I think

Super Mario Advance

1 is top of the year.

And I think this one launches

toward the end of the year.

In the holiday window.

Exactly.

Yeah.

It's a great...

Like, not only do you have games at home, but you have games on the go.

Yeah.

What a 10-year-old.

But I didn't get any batteries for Christmas.

Oh, no.

No.

Oh, no.

So those batteries are going to last me, you know, a couple days, maybe a week, perhaps.

Does it not have an AC adapter in the box, the Game Boy?

No, you can buy one.

But I remember the one that I had had to be plugged into the wall at all times.

Yep.

Woof.

But that's, this is...

I mean, here's the thing.

This is all stuff that I had, right?

So, like, this is...

That's a Christmas.

Yeah.

That's a nice Christmas.

Yeah.

Yeah, I love it.

I love it.

That's shitting pretty.

I've got

my final present that I'm opening here on Christmas Day, 2005.

And there's a lot of games in 2005 that I want.

But the one that I'm getting is Kingdom Hearts 2.

Wow.

That's fucking good.

Because

I loved Kingdom Hearts 2.

And I didn't didn't play it as a 10-year-old.

So the idea that I could have played it as a 10-year-old, I would have had the time of my fucking life with that game.

So this covers all of my bases.

I've got my hardcore action game.

I've got my bonkers, like, I wouldn't call it platformer, but like platform puzzle roll-up simulator.

Yeah.

I've got, I've got my, uh, my MMO where I'm probably going to make online friends.

And then I've got one of the best sort of like classic action role-playing games of all time in Kingdom Hearts 2.

And it will be

decades before I'm disappointed in its sequel.

So I'm having a really good Christmas day.

I probably won't even come downstairs for dinner.

You're going to want something to eat, though.

Yeah, you're going to want something.

You're going to be hungry.

Will you guys do like a Christmas ham?

No.

I think we get chicken a lot.

Oh, like a baked chicken?

Just like a chicken.

A regular chicken.

Sometimes I just do a turkey.

I feel like that's a very common.

Yeah.

Yeah.

In recent years, my family has been doing prime rib.

That's fun.

That's pretty fun.

We'd usually have a huge Christmas the night before with my extended family, and it was all Swedish food.

And so we wouldn't, like, there'd be a lot of leftovers.

And so I think a lot of the time on Christmas Day, we would have like a like a leftovers meal or a chicken.

That's pretty good.

Yeah.

Nick,

as the as the sort of the 10-year-old in the in the playground, yes, with some of the strangest gifts, what is your final Christmas present that you get in 2020?

A VPN.

Look, I got...

I'm trying to remember what was on Game Pass in 2022.

My memory is that a game I really enjoyed that year, Neon White, I played on Game Pass.

I could be wrong.

Maybe I did buy that on Steam.

So maybe I don't have that.

Norco, I remember playing on Game Pass.

I, you know,

Vampire Survivors, a game that came out that year that I really, really love and can play endlessly, was not yet on Game Pass.

That's free, isn't it?

No, Vampire Survivors cost money.

It did?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like $2.99.

And you can buy all the expansions.

Yeah, no, it's not just free.

It's like a straight-up.

It's not like a D, like a,

you know,

it's just a straight-up

retail game.

Yeah, you just, you just buy it and then you can buy DLC.

Anyway.

Some games I really loved came out that year.

You know, Case of the Golden Idol, I've talked about at length.

Citizen Sleeper, talked about at length.

Amazing games.

But I got to pick a port.

that came to PC

in 2022.

What's it going to be?

A game that I loved.

Is it stranding?

Now, it could be, it's possible that this game was already on Game Pass, but I don't remember it being.

And either way, I don't want to leave that to chance because this one, like Elden Ring, is going to give me hundreds of hours of entertainment in a different genre.

Very compelling.

A great story told in a very different way.

Persona 5 Royal.

Wow.

Wow.

Let's fucking go.

Wow.

I think it might have been on Game Pass already then, but I don't give a shit about it.

But you could buy something

on Game Pass.

I'm buying it.

I want to make sure I have it.

And because you have Game Pass, you can get it for a slight discount as well.

That's true.

I'm getting it just to make sure I have it.

That's the thing.

I was like, you know, some of these games may be, maybe I'm already getting neon wide on Game Pass.

I think I'm getting Cuphead the delicious last course as part of Game Pass, if memory serves.

But Persona 5 Royal, I don't want to leave it a chance.

I love this.

I love your Christmas, Nick, even though I gave it a lot of shit.

That is pretty good.

That's like extremely fun.

Yeah.

You're a very mature 10-year-old boy.

You picked it.

I sure am and I sure was.

I know.

You probably

reading the newspaper while you're installing this stuff.

Those look good.

You picked two games.

I mean, obviously you have the incredible library that's available to you on Game Pass, but the two games that you picked are games that you could conceivably play forever.

Me not having finished Persona 5.

I assume there is an end to it at some point.

Huge meaty games.

Yeah, Persona 5, I believe, took me 150 hours to play all the way through.

Persona 5 Royal, including

the extra season that's added

onto the end of the game.

Elden Ring, I didn't finish until this year.

And now I finished Elden Ring plus the DLC, which is obviously not in 2022.

But that's another game that took me over 100 hours.

And I could certainly put hundreds of more hours into replays of both.

So those will be my two big tent pole

narrative games, and then I'll have a bunch of other stuff I can mess around with on Game Pass.

Let's recap.

Matt, the year is 2001.

You've picked the PlayStation 2, Grand Theft Auto 3, SSX Tricky, Game Boy Advance, and Super Mario World for Game Boy Advance, aka Super Mario Advance 2.

Heather, it's 2005.

You've also picked a PlayStation 2.

You've picked Final Fantasy 11 with the included hard drive.

You have picked Resident Evil 4.

You have picked Katamari Damasi and Kingdom Hearts.

Two.

Oh, it's two.

Yeah, Kingdom Hearts.

Kingdom Hearts 2.

And then finally, me.

It's 2022, just a couple years ago.

And I've got myself a mid-to-high-range high-end gaming rig.

I've got myself mid-range to high-end gaming rig.

I've got myself a subscription to PC Game Pass for one year.

I have an Xbox wireless controller and then Elden Ring and Persona 5 Royal.

What fun we had.

What fun.

I loved doing that.

That was really fun to do.

I also feel like it's the kind of thing that people listening would probably be like, oh, you know what I would pick is this year and I'd pick this year.

And there was a big argument made for 1998 and it was almost my year of choice.

Yeah, 1998 is like a, look, that's a, that's a big one.

I think the other one I was thinking of was like, you know, 2004, I remember being a big year for games.

There are a lot of good options here.

I like that we all kind of went in different directions.

I also thought really hard about, like,

what if I just got weird shit?

Like, what if, because in no world would I have ever gotten the Game Boy sewing machine?

You know, like, that would have never been under my Christmas tree.

But, like, how crazy would it be if I had gotten the sewing machine?

I thought about, I honestly gave some thought until I decided to mix it up to doing 1999.

I mentioned 98 earlier, but 1999, of course, the year that the Dreamcast came out in the US and had a spectacular launch.

You know, that was like

very oftentimes console launches are pretty underwhelming, but that was great launch titles.

I think you could take a Dreamcast and four launch titles and be sitting pretty.

And of course, Ranch, we know that you would pick 2002, pick a GameCube and a Mary Kate and Ashley Sweet 16 license to drive.

Four copies.

I almost thought about drafting the Xbox and the first Halo for 2008.

Yeah, that'd keep you occupied.

But I was like, then I have to draft,

what, three controllers and three friends?

GameCube, multi-tap, Game Boy Advance, Game Boy Advance, and

the

Crystal Chronicles.

That's all five slots for one game.

That's pretty cool.

To play with one friend.

Yeah.

Not even playing it at full power.

Not even

full power.

Ranch, you're putting this together in Keynote.

Yeah.

Wow.

Pretty adept with Keynote.

It's an app I never think about.

Yeah, it's easy.

Easy app.

There you go.

I didn't even know it existed.

I think it's included as part of the suite of

Apple apps, right?

It's just like you just have it.

Do I have Keynote just on this computer?

You probably do.

I do.

Yeah.

That's nice.

Yeah.

great I'm next to start making little presentations yeah I would love it actually make me a little presentation I'd like to go back and draft keynote please

all right that was our Christmas draft it's time for the question block

All right, this first one is from and this is we say should say this is a special holiday question block

holiday slash like end of year question block.

This first one is from Captain Buzzerbeater.

Hey.

And Captain Buzzerbeater writes, what's a game you wish you played this year?

This is a great question.

I'm going back to

the start of the year.

And, you know, I just wanted to play like a dragon infinite wealth.

I mean, the other one that comes to mind is Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, but also like the scope of that is just so daunting.

And I also kind of felt like I got what I wanted out of the experience with Final Fantasy VII Remake, even though everyone, including Matt, you talked about how great Rebirth is.

So maybe I will, I do, I do want to play that at some point.

But like, I think it's like a dragon, infinite wealth.

I think that was the one I know I would absolutely love.

And I just have not gotten a chance to play.

My answer is Rebirth.

I know I played the first like 20 minutes or something, and then I was like, okay, I want to dedicate time to this.

I have to put it aside until I have time to play it.

I wish somehow I was able to

section off an extra time, external

layer of time

where I was able to play Rebirth to 100% completion.

I think I would have really loved it, but I just didn't have the hourage there.

And for me, so far, I mean, there's so many games that came out this year that I just

didn't get a chance to get to.

There's...

I'm sure there are games that I bought this year that I didn't play.

Oh, 100

that I just can't even think about right now.

But so the answer that's coming to me, though, is Dragon Dog, Dragon's Dogma 2, actually.

Oh, fuck.

Yeah.

It seemed like that, you know, I know that it had its issues at launch, but it kind of seems like I would have enjoyed it probably.

I wish I could have...

gotten in there, but it's just not a game that I had time for at all.

It was so pleasurable for that window of time when I was playing it.

Yeah.

And like, and there was a robust community playing it.

I feel like all that's died out now.

Yeah.

Um, but it was, it was charming, it was really charming.

It seemed cool.

Uh, maybe uh, if there's like an expansion released for it, uh, that's maybe that's when I'll jump in and see what's going on with that.

But right now, that's that was the first thing that came to mind.

Oh, I love it.

Uh, this next one

is from

Synchronic.

Sync Synchronic.

Uh, Synchronic writes, best game you ever received as a gift.

I have have an immediate answer to this.

I don't know.

Okay, I have two answers for this, actually.

Wow.

I remember the year Jack 2 came out being a sort of like bummer year

in my household for whatever reason.

I just remember opening Jack 2 on Christmas Day and being like, this just turned the whole year around.

This is so exciting.

Because also,

a lot of the games I was getting at that time for PlayStation 2 were

greatest hits.

So they were like, you know, at a discounted price, but I was playing them, you know, way later after all my friends.

Jack 2 had come out very close to the Christmas window.

So I got, that was, to me, like a brand new game.

And I was so excited to have.

You know,

you care about these things when you're a kid.

You don't care about them so much when you're an adult.

But I remember the idea of having a game at full price was such a rare concept to me that it was so cool that I had a game that came out before it was a greatest hit.

yeah so jack 2 was one of them and then i remember later on i can't remember if this was a birthday or a christmas but i'm counting it in christmas because it's so close um

i remember opening i really wanted guitar hero 2 and i wanted it i only had i had guitar hero 1 and i had a one controller for it but i was like i can't play this with anybody because i only have one controller guitar hero 2 comes with a controller i need this please And I remember opening a box and it was just the game, Guitar Hero 2.

And I was like, excited because I was like, oh, it's still a new game.

But, you know, you're always just a little bit disappointed when you don't get the full thing.

And then my mom goes,

you thought that was it, huh?

Or something.

And she pulls out a long box from behind the couch.

Wow.

And it's a raffle Guitar Hero 2 controller, which is very exciting and so fun.

And that was a really fun surprise.

And then I remember playing it all damn day.

Got to love it when a parent pulls out the prestige for the holidays.

It's a lot of fun.

We had a strong, we had a stern talk after that.

I was like, you never trick me.

You never trick me again.

This is all we have.

Heather, you have a memorable game gift you received?

My parents got me a Sega Saturn and Panzer Dragoon.

Wow.

And I thought it was transformative.

Yeah.

Like, I was like, I can't believe that I am looking at what I'm looking at on my television.

It had some of the best music I had ever heard in a video game.

Right.

And, like, it was also,

it was so far because the PlayStation doesn't come out for like a few more months.

So the thing that had happened previous to this was the genesis.

You know, so like to suddenly be flying on the back of a dragon with a full orchestral score and

like simulated reflections in the water.

Because the first level of that game is you're flying over water and you're seeing reflections for the first time in a video game.

Even though they're like, they look like shit.

At the time, they looked real.

And I was like, this is one of the greatest things that has ever been given to me by anybody.

Wow.

Wow.

I fucking loved.

Had the music for that.

Can we just, can we play just a snippet of the Panzer Dragoon level one

sound, the score.

Actually, I pulled it up here.

I can play it from my laptop real quick.

Nick.

What is this not it?

Nick!

Nick, you tricked me.

I thought you had it.

That wasn't it.

I was being a scamp.

Nick.

That ruined my life.

I've not played the Panzer Dragoon games, but I have heard this before.

It's a

lovely composition.

Extremely pleasant.

Like,

I mean, this, again, was a time when, unless you had a Sega CD,

the idea of this coming out of your television while you were playing a video game was crazy.

I remember Panzer Dragoon Saga was a really, the RPG was a really well-regarded game

that I think became extremely rare.

Yes, this is true.

And I don't have

the Panzer Dragoon RPG.

And it is one of the glaring omissions in my collection.

Kind of a white whale for a lot of collectors.

Yeah.

Best gaming gift I ever received.

I mean, look,

and I've mentioned it before, but I did get a surprise Super Nintendo for my birthday upon returning from summer camp.

And that was an amazing gift that my dad got for me.

Presented it again in a very surprising way.

Like, like, oh, there's something,

I think I forgot something on your bed.

He thought you were going to get like

a yellow drawer.

I thought, yeah, yeah, exactly.

That's what I wanted.

No, I think it was like, it was like

he'd forgotten a sweater on my bed or something like that.

And I went to retrieve it.

And it was like, oh, wait, no,

there's a Super Nintendo there.

It was like very, very, very, you know, again, again, the prestige.

But

the packing game that came with the Super Mario World was remains on my best games of all time list.

So I guess that has to be that for gifts overall.

But if we're talking specifically of the holidays,

I think about just, again,

how much work my dad had to do to get me and my brother Zelda 2, The Adventures of Link

for

the original Nintendo for the NES, because that game came out on December 1st of 1988.

So it was like this was the hot holiday gift at a time when the NES was like the dominant, you know, ubiquitous console, the one that every kid either had or coveted.

And this was the piece of hardware for it.

There was a chip or piece of software for it rather.

There was a chip shortage.

So this game was really rare and there was some price gouging that was going on.

And this is a pre-internet era where you're not just going to be able to find like an eBay listing or whatever, even if you want to pay through the nose.

You got to like go try to find it.

So I remember him saying that he ultimately when we ended up getting the gift, but you know, it was like when he talked about like how all the places he had to go to.

And I think that game also retailed for $70 in 1988, which I think if you do the math, that is like, you know, way too much money for a, you know.

Yeah, $170, right?

Yeah, it's $70 in 1988 is $186.57 today.

That's it.

So, you know, insane.

Maybe like a full day's worth of wages that my dad spent on a video game for the two of us.

Ended up being kind of an underwhelming game, but was it amazing to have?

You know what I mean?

Like to receive it.

It's just like, this is the game I want.

Holy shit.

It's the new Zelda game.

Loved Zelda one.

And, you know, it's a little bit different, but it still was an amazing gift.

Love it.

This next one's from Jackal, now more demon.

Parentheses, Eric.

Great.

Love that.

A lot going on there.

What holiday character, Santa, Frosty the Snowman?

Would you like to see star in a new video game?

Now,

I do think Santa should be in a game.

Yes, and a game is a no-brainer.

I mean, I think of Bad Mr.

Frosty from Clay Fighter.

That was the only, I think,

kind of Edgelord snowman we got.

But yeah, holiday.

I mean, what do we, what is the roster?

I'm going to have a snowballs, bitch.

I want, okay, I want a first-person shooter, but it's star Santa Claus.

And what you you do is you throw gifts at children as hard as you can.

So often they're knocked out, but it's not like they explode or anything.

But like the game is a speedrunner because you're Santa, so you've got to get a lot of gifts out.

Oh.

And you're just blazing past houses, launching gifts at kids paperboy style,

trying to hit as many of them as you can before you get to the end of the block.

That's a lot of fun.

I just think Santa is a good character.

I think he's fun.

Yeah, Santa's a good character.

I mean, I'm just thinking through the whole roster.

Like,

who else do we have in the holiday roster?

Rudolph.

Rudolph.

There's Santa.

There's Rudolph.

There's Mrs.

Claus.

There's

a gingerbread man, perhaps.

Yeah, Frosty, gingerbread man.

There's

who else?

The Nutcracker.

Yeah, Nutcracker.

Nutcracker is not bad because he's at least got a blade.

Yeah.

Well, you know,

the first thing you think of when you think of the nutcracker.

He's just cracks nuts.

He's a soldier.

He could go in there and he could fuck shit up in a toy world.

That could be fun.

That could be fun.

He could, I mean, it could be like Lies of P, but it's the Nutcracker.

Yep.

Did that come out this year?

Sure, did.

I think.

I think, yeah, start of the year.

Yeah.

You got Scrooge, of course.

Scrooge would be a great.

And then the ghosts.

Yeah, you got the ghost.

Yeah, that's pretty good.

What about Wonderful Life Man?

George Bailey?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't have your money.

It's Mr.

Potter.

I actually did it.

What about I've never seen the movie, but I know that he sounds like that.

But what I know about the movie is that he's like going to kill himself.

And it's just so crazy to me that he talks like that.

Yeah.

I ended my rope.

I'm going to end it all.

You know what might be a fun video game?

Something more like Seinfeld.

Is a Christmas vacation game.

That's fun.

Like Nasha Lampoon, Christmas Vacation.

National Lampoons, Christmas Vacation, the game.

I mean, I think I've actually got a pretty obvious answer looking through all of these characters here.

I'm going to play a game where I'm John McClain in the Christmas movie Die Hard.

Now I've got a machine gun.

Yeah.

There are two diehard games, maybe three.

There's diehard.

Was it diehard trilogy arcade?

Is that what it is?

Diehard Arcade, Die Hard Trilogy.

They're two separate games.

I conflated them.

Yeah.

Oh, well.

Hell yeah.

I guess being a Grinch would be okay.

Oh, yeah.

Grinch.

Grinch would be good.

Grinch is pretty fun.

Little dog.

I just want a Santa Metroidvania.

Yeah, Santa Metroidvania is pretty fun.

I don't know.

Well, you know, you're retrieving reindeer as you go through.

Maybe you get more reindeer.

You can access more of the map.

You just got various, you know, Santa skills that you can attain.

You can throw snowballs.

Throwing snowballs is a key mechanic for sure.

This next one is from

Juke 13.

And they write, I love when games can read the date and have custom events.

My favorite is the Animal Crossing New Year's countdown, even though I've never been online to see it.

Do you have a favorite game date event?

I can think of a couple.

In Simpsons Hidden Run, the Simpsons Grand Theft Auto-like,

if you play the game on christmas

you start off the game homer wearing santa hat pretty good that's pretty fun pretty good fun that's just and it's like you know i feel like other games do a similar type of thing uh that i think they wish you merry christmas in death stranding yes you play it on christmas or and and also if you sign on on your birthday um

Mads Mickelson says happy birthday to you and gives you like a little cake or something.

Yeah, that was going to be mine, Death Stranding birthday, just because it's like it's just a fun thing

that a fun bit of payoff and then you know a fun bit of kind of fourth wall breaking, which I always appreciate.

In Animal Crossing, by the way, on your birthday,

the residents of your island throw you a surprise party.

And I remember logging on to Animal Crossing the, you know, on my birthday, the year that this game came out.

And, you know, it was a tough time.

Yeah, sure.

When I saw all my friends in my little house wishing me happy birthday, I cried.

It was horrible.

It was just so sweet and so good, and needed.

No friends had been in my house in a long time at that point.

So it was wonderful to see Dom and all the Quilson was there, unfortunately.

You know what?

I did.

Yeah, sorry about Quilson.

Can't be rid of that guy.

I do think the, you know, I do think of my time and wow and just like kind of like the uh you know the sort of christmassy uh sort of vibes there the feast of winter veil all that's kind of fun like it the the whole especially in an mmo it feels particularly seasonal if you played christmas nights into dreams on christmas day

here are the changes that would happen in the game You'd get a brighter sun, a rain of purple gems, a full moon, a lunar eclipse, and a rain of stars were all randomized occurrences.

Christmas nights mode would activate, which would replace all the item boxes with Christmas presents.

All of the greenery would be replaced with snow and gumdrops.

All of the rings you would fly through would become Christmas wreaths, and

one of the characters would capture.

capture with Christmas trees instead of their normal beam.

All of the nitopians in the game would suddenly be wearing elf costumes, and the music itself would change to jingle bells and an a cappella version of the night's theme.

Oh my gosh.

All on Christmas Day.

What I love about that is how much work it is for something that a lot of people are just never going to see.

Yeah.

Something I always love in games.

Especially since Christmas Nights into Dreams was only available if you bought the Sega Saturn magazine because it came free with the magazine.

Right.

So it wasn't even like something you could go to the store and buy.

Yeah.

Like you would, and also, I mean, like, I didn't know anybody with a Saturn.

So I wasn't like, it wasn't, I couldn't even share like hey the variant on my game nights into dreams already i've lost them

the variant that came packed in with the sega saturn magazine which was christmas nights

now i've i've modified a thing they don't know yeah on christmas day does all of these changes i've double modified nobody cares yeah but i cared And it was really special to me.

Oh, I'm glad.

And finally,

from T-Mac.

What's up, T-Mac?

T-Mac.

T-Mac writes, what are your favorite winter or snow-themed levels from video games?

Whew, this is a great question and a loaded one.

And it's like it was the kind of thing where I feel like I'm going to forget things.

You know what I mean?

Like, like,

you're trying to think of

all the ice levels you've played.

And I was like, I feel like I'm going to forget some big ones.

But what immediately comes to mind, a lot of Diablo 4 is in ice, is in snow.

it's like you know one of the central biomes

in Diablo 2 the Lord of Destruction expansion comes out the DLC for that game before we called it DLC when you'd physically buy

an extra CD that had the additional content on it

When that came out, it added a fifth act and the fifth act was a snow realm and this was something that had not been explored in the rest of the game.

You had kind of like

your ruined sort of town and a grasslands/slash forest.

You had a desert,

you know, you had a jungle, and then you had the depths of hell itself.

And to have snow, it was like, oh, we went from fire to ice.

And it was also just an awesome map.

Just a really, really cool design

for the environment.

And some really like, you know, it's a procedurally generated game, but there are some dungeons that are completely set.

And those dungeons were

the ones that are fixed were really, really well designed um and just just the feeling of snow and the feeling of that environment is so omnipresent um and kind of defines uh you know the the the whole the whole uh look and feel of of that final act so i that that's what i that's what i think of the first thing that came to mind for me was the snow levels you play as ellie in the last of us those are really cool um and i guess the blizzard that you play as joel is also really cool so that those are my favorite snow levels.

Those are great.

I'm immediately thinking of God of War, Ragnarok.

A lot of it is in the snow.

Yeah, good answer.

But then, something I thought about too is that in a game that I don't think either of you guys have played, have either of you played Gears 5?

No.

No.

Gears 5 is fucking excellent.

It is a really, really great game.

And

it has

the

open world map

is in the snow.

And so you're just traversing snow until you get to the other parts of where you're supposed to go.

And I don't know what it was about traversing the snow, but I loved it.

You're on like a, you have like a sled type of thing that goes around and it becomes very snowy at times.

Dude, it's great.

And then sliding around in the ice is really fun.

Any game where like the ice physics are accounted for, I think, is good and fun.

Yeah, as long as they're not annoying.

Because we were talking about the Super Mario advances earlier.

Super Mario 2, the ice stuff, you're just so skiddy in that.

It feels like you can't, you lose complete control of your character.

It's like it's they went like a little too far with it.

Yeah.

But some of the other Mario level Mario games have much better ice physics.

You know, I got to mention,

first off, I do want to shout out Uncharted 2 as another game with just like a lot of great ice, a lot of great snow.

But a game we talked about when we did the remaster on the show, Metroid Prime.

Fendron's Drifts, of course, is just one of the

coolest snow levels ever.

man i love metroid prime and i hope that two and three eventually make it to the switch uh so i can play those in preparation for um

metroid prime beyond i believe it's called wow

uh and those are the the that's the question blog thank you guys so much for writing in of course those are sources from our discord discord.gg slash get played Hop on in.

Hop on in and be cool.

Yeah.

Spread some holiday cheer.

Ho ho ho.

Cheer to our fellow listeners.

That's this week's get play.

Jesus Christ.

That's this week's get play.

He's face down on the floor.

Yeah, that was pretty brutal.

Make sure he's okay.

That's this week's get played.

Our producer is Rochelle Chen.

Ranch, Yard underscore, underscore sard.

Our music is by Ben Prunty, BenPruntyMusic.com.

Our art is by DuckBrigade Design, DuckBrigade.com.

And while you're at it, if you want to check out our merch, go to kinshipgoods.com.

We got all sorts of things over there for you so you can get all nice and dressed up snazzy in all your favorite get played gear.

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 you know what else is over there?

Our Patreon exclusive show, Get Animate, here in December, Matt.

What are we watching?

Well, what we're watching is actually we're doing something a little different.

We're doing a little bit of a pilot program.

Heather, what did you call this thing?

This is called Pilot Presentation.

That's right.

And the way this works is that for the next few weeks, I'm going to show a show that I love to Matt and Nick and see if they love it too.

That's right.

And so we're kicking things off, you and I.

And you showed me Gurin Lagan.

And I watched the pilot episode of Gurren Logan.

And we talk about that.

So check that out.

And then watch it also.

I can tell you right now, it's pretty cool.

Yeah, you can watch Gurin Lagan on, I believe, on Crunchyroll and all the other anime streaming services of your choice.

We'll see if Matt liked it as I present pilot episodes of different anime to my boys.

I was going to say, it sounds like another good candidate for all the great logs, but it sounds like that's not the pronunciation.

So I know.

Remember the log thing?

Yeah.

Yule Log.

Yule Log.

Lincoln.

Lincoln log.

Captains.

Captain's log.

Yeah.

Log of shit.

Yeah.

But that's not how you say Gur and Lincoln.

No.

So I guess I got played.

What?

Ho, ho, ho to me.

That was a head gum podcast.