Papers, Please with James Adomian

This is a head gun podcast.

Hello, checkpoint open for business.

Glory to Strotska.

Please step up to the window and present your papers, please.

Oh, yeah, here g here you go.

Thank you very much.

All right.

Uh why are you traveling to the country?

Uh just

little s staycation, you know.

Okay.

And uh have you any work or business here?

No, like I said, purely leisure.

Okay.

And it says here you have three children.

Why are they not with you?

I had to

get away.

Okay.

Rejected, rejected.

Please go to the back of the line.

Yes, papers, please.

Papers, please.

Yeah, hi.

I'm actually a citizen of Arstotska, a naturalized citizen, so I'm just returning back to my job as an engineer.

All right, do you have your

passport?

Oh, yeah, here's my passport.

All right, it says here's my ID card.

It says here, you are 14 years old.

Is that true?

Uh, yeah.

I don't believe you for a second.

Reject it.

Go back to the bank.

I'm 14.

Papers, please.

Papers, please.

Oh, yeah, here you go.

All right.

What is the purpose of your visit?

I have a meeting at the embassy.

Oh, a meeting at the embassy.

That's right.

Who are you meeting with?

I'm meeting with the Prime Minister.

You mean the great Prime Minister, I'm sure?

Reject it.

Go to the bank of the line.

Hey, how's it going?

Hello?

Papers, please?

Yeah, here, you use my passport.

All right, thank you.

And uh, what's the matter?

I'm a sex tourist.

I'm here to visit these Arstotskin prostitutes I've been hearing so much about.

Okay, I do not judge.

Hopefully, I can make one of them a bride.

You want to marry a citizen of Ostrotska and you are a foreigner?

The price is right.

All right, reject it.

Please go to the back of the line.

Oh, what the fuck?

Yes, papers, please.

Hello.

Hello.

Oh, hello.

Hello.

Hello.

Hello.

Hello.

Glory to Ostrotska.

Glory to Ostrotska.

Here's my papers.

All right.

And your passport?

Here you go.

Very nice.

Okay.

What is the purpose of your visit?

Just going home.

You're going home.

And what home is that?

Ostrotska.

I'm sorry.

It's glory to Ostrotska.

Rejected.

Go to the back of the line.

Yeah, let me through.

Let me through here.

Press.

I am from the United Federation.

I am from the free press.

I am here to blow the lid off the totalitarian Narstotsky government.

All right.

Let me through.

Do you have your passport?

Yeah, right here.

Okay.

Well, your name is Steve Big Dix.

Yeah, Steve Big Dix.

Steve Big Dix is your professional name.

Steve Big Dix.

I work for the Washington Post.

Do you want to see my byline?

I do not want to see it.

Here is the banner headline from yesterday.

Okay, well,

what is the purpose of your visit?

Well, I'm here to

investigate.

I'm here to

expose Ostotska to the West.

All right, to expose Ostrotska.

And

are you planning on...

Why are you smiling at me?

What?

I'm not smiling.

Yes, you are.

You're smiling.

I ain't been really Steve Big Diggs.

All right, Rejected.

Get to the back of the line.

Sir, papers, please?

I don't have any papers.

You thought you're.

Then give me your hand.

I'm looking for a specific type of papers, actually.

What kind of papers is it?

Perhaps the papers in a comic book.

Can you show me your hand, please?

Can you show me your hand?

Here's my hand.

I'm stamping your hand.

I'm stamping your hand.

Go to the back of the line.

I'm telling Jolly about this.

Go to the back of the light, Joel Wheeler.

Hello, I am Colonel from Orstotskyan Army.

Oh, hello, Colonel.

I understand you have been turning everyone away from this checkpoint.

This is correct, Colonel.

Glory to Ostrodka.

I wanted to give you this commendation.

Thank you.

Signed by me.

Thank you very much.

Steve Big Dick.

Oh, yeah, that's you again.

We accept bribes and choose between food and medicine as we discuss Lucas Polk's indie classic Border Guard Sim papers please this week on Get Played.

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

It's time to get played.

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

That's me, Nick Weiger, and I'm here with our third host, Matt Abadaka.

Hello, everyone.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Premier Video Game Podcast, where I am so excited about today's episode.

And I know that often when I say things like that, I'm being cynical or a liar, but today, I am telling the truth.

I'm also excited about today's episode.

We have a lot to discuss, and we have a great guest to discuss it with.

I do want to give a couple quick notes.

First up, Ranch is out this week, but our guest engineer, Sam Rogic, is back.

Hi, Sam.

Hey, there, thanks.

Good to have you.

You've played this week's game.

I have.

Okay, all right.

We'll get you in there.

The other thing I want to shout out is that we are recording a week in advance for this episode.

So we have seen all the rapturous reviews for Astro Bot.

People are saying it's a presumptive game of the year, but it's not out yet as of our recording.

So we won't have impressions until next week's episode.

So, you know, just so you know.

Oh, that's really presumptuous.

You think you're just sure I'm going to play it?

I'll be fucking playing it.

Okay.

He said we.

Yeah, but are you going to act like you weren't texting about it?

How excited we were to play it?

Like I wasn't texting every 10 out of 10 review to your eyes.

You were basically like, I can't wait to play a masterpiece.

That was at 7 a.m.

this morning.

All right, all right.

I woke up to it.

Our guest today, one of the funniest people around, a comedian and actor, his new special, Path of Most Resistance, is on YouTube September 19th from 800 Pound Gorilla.

James Adomian is here.

Hi, James.

Hi, Nick.

How are you?

I'm doing great.

Thank you so much for being here.

This is fantastic.

It's great to be here at studio.

Can I tell you some of the...

Heather, let me tell you about some of the life-changing benefits of the Path of Most Resistance.

Okay, okay.

Now, Matt, you wouldn't believe some of the applications that come to mind after you've given up on The Path of Most Resistance.

I'm listening.

It's a comedy album from 800-pound gorilla and comedian James Adomian.

It's good to be here.

Yeah, what a treat.

God damn it.

I listen to the pods sometimes when I'm cooking.

Wow, how do you know?

It's a high honor.

You're up there with like a Napoleon Bonaparte podcast.

Wait, wait, wait.

Would you know something about ancient Greece?

Which Napoleon podcast?

I don't know.

There's like 10 of them.

I don't know which one it is.

I was cycling through a bunch after it.

Was it the Ridley Scott movie or was it just general interest?

No, it wasn't that.

I listened to this Napoleon podcast.

It's just hanging with steam.

I listened to a Napoleon podcast, but it's about Napoleon dynamite.

Matt.

What?

It's true.

How many episodes are they on?

Just one.

And it's just the movie.

All right.

James,

I want to hear about like your

gaming background in general and a few things you talked about

as possible things we could we could get into including this week's game but one of them you mentioned is a game that I am like oddly fascinated with but I never really got into myself Qbert were you a Qbert kid yes as a young child my I remember my dad would tell like whenever I saw a Qbert machine because my dad introduced it to me at a dairy queen or something sure and I liked this and I liked it because it's it's a cute idea

it's visually interesting yes it's funny and it's really hard it is hard but big surprise later as an an adult, I fell into the sand trap that is Cuphead.

It's the same fucking

beautiful, terrible movie.

A video game.

And in fact, when I was losing at Cuphead, I finally gave up.

I got halfway into the game.

While I was losing at Cuphead, I would get so angry that I would have to come down off of the angry high by playing levels of Qbert just to like clean up.

Wow.

And I would play retro Qbert too on the Xbox.

And Qbert sucks, let's be honest.

It's a bad, I mean, it's a bad game.

Yeah, yeah.

It's at least, if you don't want to be that critical, it's at least a simple game.

It's very straightforward.

I mean, when I say it sucks, I mean, I love it.

I would play it.

If it was here right now, I would be playing it instead of talking to you.

When something bad happens to him, he swears.

Yeah, a little gibberish.

Yes, and it mimics like you, like some teenager or dad playing it and going like, God damn it.

And he does the same thing.

But here's the, there's a lot of logic flaws in Qbert.

It's, he has to jump down these like,

onto these like platform squares and change the colors and so forth and avoid snakes and so forth.

And he jumped

one at a time.

And he's in space.

Gravity is essential to it.

And I don't believe that the mass of one like section of like, it's got what, at most like twelve rows going up I don't believe that that has enough mass to attract you know to have like actual like earth like gravity yeah I guess you have to assume it's like a little prince like reality where you're just a tiny little thing sphere could be a planet or maybe it's like very dense material yeah it's extreme it's like

I I read once that like the s the a teaspoon of the the interior of the sun weighed more than earth or something like that.

Okay, in that case, he should be like, rip it, flip it, rip, get,

and then he's vaporized painfully.

It was instantaneous, but also more painful than a much longer death.

Now, James, are you familiar at all with the comedy film Pixels starring Adam Sandler, Josh Gadd?

No, so it sounds like something.

So Qbert factors into this movie.

Qubert Lorenz Lore and Qubert there.

Josh Gadd.

Qbert is transformed into like a sexy lady at one point.

Oh, shit.

But at the end of the movie, Josh Gad

fucks Qbert, and they have babies.

In the nose?

In the nose?

We don't know.

He felt like he fucks Qbert in lady form.

She turns into this sexy lady from this pinball game, or I don't remember what it was.

You know, like someone who would be on the side of a cabinet.

Now, when you play Qbert, in the new ones, you get to do different avatars that are pointless.

You can make him like a truck driver cubert or like a pretty lady, but it's all it's just the smurfette rules of making a character.

It's like same guy with blonde wig.

No, this is a human woman that we can only assume has the internal organs of a cubert.

Yes, because what happens

when they conceive a litter of children in the mid-credit sequence of a litter.

It's like it's it's not just one kid, just several kids.

Yeah, implying that there's not like they're not mammals.

When they come hopping out, I guess mammals have a lot of money.

It's like half Qbert, half man abominations.

That's what's in the crib.

Great.

I'm glad I don't know this.

I need you to know so that you can maybe avoid it, so you can just keep the memory of Qbert alive for you.

Memory of Dairy Queen Blizzards and the orange fuck.

Also,

he, uh,

Qbert, I think he's in that

the Sarah Silverman cartoon video game.

Oh, yeah,

Wreck-It Ralph.

Wreck-It-Ralph.

I think he has like a cameo there.

I believe he is in there, yeah.

Again, gettable IP.

Yeah, it doesn't bode well for the Qbert IP if he's in two separate non-Qbert movies.

Pixels did all right for itself because it also had Pac-Man and Donkey Kong.

Those are some heavy hitters, but yeah, Qbert is definitely.

That's the Sandler.

They're going to say yes to Sandler.

Yeah.

I would love a Qbert like dark reboot where he's like, where you're like, are you prepared for the squares?

a dystopian future the year

3042 that was like every like every IP trailer for a while just had like a point in the trailer where it'd be like a war is coming it's like what's going on right this is the this is the shoots and ladders movie what's right what the hell the fragile peace treaty has fallen apart

the coiled purple snakes have risen up against their

q species masters okay so remains.

So you got into Cuphead.

You played that for because that's one of my favorite games.

I love Cuphead.

It's beautiful.

Yeah, it is gorgeous.

It's hilarious, and it's too hard.

It's very challenging.

It's like someone fell asleep on the Make It Too Hard lever, and then they were like, oh, shit, that was the release date.

It's not, and it's not fair.

And I stopped playing it because I was like, I don't want to do this to myself.

I don't want to be this angry anymore.

Yeah, I get that.

One of my main assets as a gamer beyond anything is just patience.

And so

I will persist.

And so I just kind of like, you know, like accept like, okay, I'm going to lose over and over again.

And I somehow don't really rage out all that much.

But

you have an internal rage.

It's an internal rage.

It's going to bubble up.

I was going to say it was an external and internal silence.

Like just like inside nothing, outside nothing.

Yeah, one day we're going to see Weiger on the news because he's.

reenacting falling down.

But I do kind of wish that game, because it's so pretty.

Video game podcast host Nick Weiger

attempted to press reset on the headquarters offices of Nintendo.

I'm blowing dust on the cartridge.

To your point, because the game is so gorgeous and it does have, I feel like, appeal to a lot of people.

It's like, oh, wow, I want to play this thing that looks like an old, you know,

an old cartoon.

I do kind of wish it that it was a little bit more approachable from a difficulty standpoint.

Like, I understand their logic of like, hey, if this is a fictional game from this time period, arcade games games used to be super hard this would be super hard but i don't know i i i kind of wish it was a little bit easier yeah you know like like an authentic uh nickel operated xbox game yeah

sure

um yeah that game was so i got so angry at that and even if i wasn't like raising my voice which i did at times

which i did and i was surprised there were no complaints not from my immediate neighbors i'm surprised there were no complaints from the rest of the block about what happened sometimes at 2 a.m.

with me and Cuphead.

He,

I got, when you would beat a villain sometimes, one of the little, uh, the little, the characters you have to beat for whatever, you know, whatever you call them, bosses.

When you would beat, when I would beat some of them after like a goddamn five or 10 days trying it, sometimes I would hear myself saying things like, I'm glad you're dead.

I'm glad you're fucking dead.

Like the one, there's the

the fucking dancing gumball head guy.

Oh, yeah.

I'm glad he's dead.

I'm glad I killed him.

No, Nick.

If I could, I would put a bullet in every single gumball in his

fucking stupid machine of a head with his dumb fucking tap dancing.

Get, oh, my God.

Now, Nick finds one of the characters of Cuphead attractive.

Yeah.

Do you find any of the characters of Cuphead attractive?

Also, the speed with which he said, yeah.

I was going to ask this specifically because so the Cuphead DLC, the delicious last course, I'm not sure if you played that.

I love long given up on the whole game before then.

It is.

I'd love to watch someone play it.

It is good.

And one thing it has, it has the lovely Miss Chalice as a new playable character.

Sure.

And Ms.

Chalice also is like, like in like Funky Kong in Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze has like Funky Moe, which makes the game a little bit easier.

Ms.

Chalice is a little bit more like powerful and has a little bit more survivability.

So

Oh, they fuck.

They were like, oh, a bunch of people have given up on this fucking game.

This is Nick's Little Crush.

I saw it and I loved it.

The soundtrack is so good.

I think, I don't know.

I bought it on.

I think I bought the soundtrack on vinyl because it seems

so good.

It's so good.

It's great.

It's a great score.

Cuphead and his palm man.

I don't know if you watched the cartoon at all, but the cartoon is like interesting.

I think it's well done, but it does make the choice of the characters have to speak.

I did not because I auditioned for it.

I usually don't watch things that I audition for and don't get, which means I have an intake mostly of Bloomberg news and European cinema.

The thing about the TV show is that it's way easier than playing the game.

You just have to watch it.

That would be those psychos over there.

What is it?

Studio, forgot their name of their company.

Oh, right, right, right.

I forget their name.

Those are called Psychos over there.

What if they made the fucking kids cartoon hard?

It's hard to watch.

It seems hard.

Your TV died.

Yeah, it's like a Studio MDHR.

Yes, Studio MDHR.

Yeah, I like followed them.

I was so into the game.

I got an Xbox in order to play it because it looked so cute.

And I love that kind of animation.

Yeah.

I'm a cartoon nerd before other things.

and so i love the the reference to fleischer and popeye and betty boop and all that stuff and even some of the obscure uh uh uh cartoon characters and franchises of the time and it's it's it's utterly gorgeous and it

it sucked that something so beautiful uh you know could have hurt me

i will say the most fuckable character uh in the whole thing for me is definitely i mean what does this say sure

Oh, of course.

The devil.

The devil.

He's a tuxedo.

Yeah.

He's in a like a, but like a dirty showbiz tuxedo.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I feel like I've seen people say that he's like a horny kind of character.

Yeah, I've done shows with the devil before.

Something happened.

Yeah, I know the devil, yeah.

I mean, it's a character.

And he also has the

mustache, the thin mustache.

I mean, irresistible.

Well, yeah, because there's Mr.

King Dice, and then there's also the devil himself.

I might be thinking of King Dice.

Mr.

King Dice, yeah.

I think of, well, I take everything back.

Cut that, please.

I'm talking about King Dice with a tuxedo, right?

Yeah.

It still works.

They're the two antagonists.

Yes, he's the one.

Oh, oh, yeah.

He's like the adjutant.

He's like the lieutenant devil guy.

And his boss fight is so hard because it is like you have to, there's a game board, and then you roll for where you're going to go on the game board.

And then you have to beat like as many as nine different bosses in a boss attack mode.

And then you have to beat King Dice in sequence.

I heard that.

And that was like the final straw.

Like I was already like, well, I don't know.

I'm going to take some time away.

And then I read that somewhere.

Someone complaining about it.

And I was like, oh, I'll never pick this game up again.

Because I don't, also, and this, I realized.

I am not interested in proving the athletic ability of moving my fingers in a certain way to get past a certain level.

Yeah, fair.

And

I've had a hard day doing a bunch of bullshit.

And like

I've been, you know, I've been basically screaming for a living.

Right.

Doing cartoons.

People don't understand this.

All cartoon performances involve screaming.

You think, no, that was Betty Boop.

To accomplish a whisper into a microphone and like, okay,

it's just a weird, quiet scream.

Yes.

So I basically scream for a living.

So I'm exhausted.

And I don't, I just realize I don't need this.

I don't need to be like, what, you really, to really get past the

world three levels, you've got to have like a foot pedal.

To help

a foot pedal on a piano.

Fuck, fuck you.

Fuck you.

Gumball machine rules.

Ow.

So I gravitate more towards like,

This is how bad of a dumb gamer I am.

Yeah.

Where it's like, only occasionally two, usually in the wintertime.

But it's like,

I want to jump and I want to move.

I want to decide and I want to flip.

I don't want like a lot of like combo moves.

Right.

Unless it's mash the buttons at an arcade where you also have a beer.

Like the old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game, The Simpsons, which is the same game, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like a one-to-one.

Yeah, it's not just Konami beat him up.

There's nothing I like more than you're like walking by a warehouse and then wham, warehouse door.

Watch out for the wham, Foot Clan

also behind this warehouse door.

I was listening to Jeff Gerstmann's podcast, which I really enjoy, and he pointed out something about those kinds of beat-em-ups, which I had never really clocked.

But for like people of our generation, Matt's a little younger, like for a lot of us, it was like that was our first exposure to co-op gameplay.

That was the first time we could play alongside somebody on the same team.

Because you don't just lose.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You infinitely suck the quarters out of dad's pocket.

Right.

Yeah.

And waiting for the screening of the Lion King or whatever.

Dad, we're winning.

Yeah, but you can be playing.

Like you and your dad can be playing together, and like at a home console, there's not, there wasn't really the equivalent at a time, or like you and your friends can all be playing four-player.

I remember that with that X-Men arcade game of just like we can all be a different X-Man.

What an experience that was like to all team up.

And it was just this is this is, I could do this kind of dexterity finger work in a game.

Go, go, go.

Keep hitting it.

That's where I am at.

That's where I'm at.

No,

I don't need any piano player moves where the fingers are crossing each other.

I think your mic actually might have.

Oh, did I break it?

Okay, I'm sorry I broke it.

I was actually drumming on the.

It's not a percussion instrument, is it?

It's a vocal amplification.

It's a fragile piece of

uninsured.

Wait.

It's a fragile piece of uh uh microphone technology somewhere at head gum headquarters head gum quarter

insulted the gumbo

did you have a favorite one of those like was it was it at all tied to your the like the ip like where you're like oh i like the ninja turtles game i like the simpsons game or were they all kind of the same i think the ninja turtles one came out first am i wrong i believe so i believe so yeah uh and that's the it was like eyes wide open like what what it was very fun yeah and it was fun because it was like your brothers your cousins and like, or

like a friend or something.

And you weren't just watching some other kid play something.

You're all doing it at the same time.

Yeah.

I remember that I was, I was a, I was suckered into Ninja Turtles completely, utterly.

For sure.

I remember the experience of like seeing that.

Like, it was just like, it was so, it's so weird to think back on you would discover something like in physical reality.

So I remember being at a pizza parlor.

It's always, it was Shaky's pizza.

Yeah, yeah.

We're at a pizza parlor.

It was probably a shaky's for a shaky's knockoff for my friend's birthday party.

and I saw a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cabinet, like an arcade game for a show that I watched.

I was like, what the fuck is this?

And then I'm watching like the Ninja Turtles fight the Shredder, and my mind is absolutely blown by this possibility.

Yeah, it was just so, and it wasn't like I read about it in a magazine, certainly didn't like watch a YouTube video about it.

I just stumbled upon it.

It's so strange.

If you have...

Any of the modern consoles or even the Netflix app, there's a new Ninja Turtles game that is in the style of those games called Ninja Turtles Shredder's.

Shredders Revenge, yeah.

And And it's an absolute blast.

It is so good.

I will say this, though.

I've never seen a home console that can withstand the kind of hand pounding that you would give to

an arcade console, like meant to be played thousands of times.

Yes.

Hammering it at the full 10-year-old strength that you have in your fists.

Yeah, I'm going to maybe then recommend not doing it on your phone.

You don't knock the batteries out of the machine and shake his pizza.

I love also there's something very rewarding and comforting that it took me a long time to realize an adult was not a facet of real life.

Is that the bad guy would start flashing red and white when you were starting to beat him?

Like, I mean, I mean, the closest I saw it was like during Occupy Wall Street.

I think Mayor Michael Bloomberg in New York City actually started flashing red and white, and we almost beat that boss level, but we didn't.

i saw it i saw it we almost had him

a couple more quarters

and we would have won at least that level

which means they then would have had to open fire on our guy

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All right, one more question here, and this is for everybody.

The question is, what are you playing?

What are you playing?

hi it's me the resident evil merchant and i'm here to ask you the question of the week what are you playing

nick weiger what are you playing wow uh resident evil merchant thanks so much for for letting me leave things off you're welcome great to have you as always it's always good i love i love your work james

wow

Where

a huge fan.

Where do you experience?

Are you from another world or

I'm from the the world of resident evil floor but i've been living on the streets of los angeles for about

uh when did this show start four years ago when i crossed over in order to introduce a segment wow so you live in our world you're live you stuck our you're stuck in our world and live in it as well yes yes yeah holy i've seen some of your content on youtube and on television and i like it a lot it's really good work

Do you have a way of watching these things or do you experience media?

I have a phone!

I thought maybe you just experienced most media by looking through a window at a wall of TVs.

I wish they could have a comic book.

They don't do that anymore.

They really should.

They only do that in all superhero movies.

I feel like there was a window of time that I didn't get to experience when you walk by a electronic shop and they're all playing the news and you don't know what it is.

Right.

Now,

now you live in a, I live in Los Angeles and I have most of my life.

And now it's like less than once a year I see the local news in LA.

Yep.

Yep.

When would you ever be like,

KCAL 9 reporting live?

I don't even know how to watch it.

It is strange to see that because that device is still employed in modern movies because it's just so useful to be like, oh, there's this big, like, I think in the new quiet place, if I remember, if memory serves, they have like the little local news breaks that the quiet place is happening.

I'm just like, no one would like it this way.

They say, oh, they're like,

it's a quiet place now, so everyone piped down.

Oh, yeah.

Those aliens came into the studio and took them out, of course, because they were speaking.

Yeah, then that's always a trope in one in those two.

It's like, like, you know, the studio is collapsing.

Is the quiet place the M-Night Shyamalon movie?

No, no, no, no, the quiet place is the.

No, that's Trap.

Okay, sorry.

Jesus Christ.

Well, it could be a

number of things.

It could be, you know, a knock at the cabin.

It could be the lady in the water.

That's it.

Those are M.

Night Shyamalan.

But the one at the new one this year is Trap.

No, the Quiet Place is the John krasinski franchise oh that's a weird from the twisted mind of john krasinski

great sure our

our um

national hero yeah

um hey he's milk he milked that he milked that look to the camera so well

and now he decides movies kind of our warden beatty thespian and director that's true did did he direct dick tracy

he did direct

warren beatty did direct dick tracy and still holds the rights Everywhere I look, it's Tracy.

Tracy, Tracy.

To me,

that's the peak of both Al Pacino and Madonna.

God, so good.

Yeah, his performance is Big Boy.

Just like the best.

Oh, is that is that

what's his name?

Paul Sorvino?

No, Big Boy is the best.

Big Boy is Al Pacino's character.

Who's the

Lips Madness?

That's Paul Sorvino, who you're introduced to, sucking down platter after platter of oysters.

Yeah, just a nasty, nasty motherfucker.

I'm right, it's Paul Sorvino.

And then he gets buried alive in cement.

Not the bath, big boy.

Not the bath.

I'm watching this at like nine years old with a Dick Tracy hat.

Like, what the fuck?

What the fuck do you guys know all these lines from this movie?

There's a lot of lines you know.

I know I've seen that movie

so many times.

Well, because I think it kind of came on the heels of Batman.

And so for me, as like a kid, I like the Batman movie, and it's similar, sort of like, kind of had that Art Deco aesthetic.

So I just kind of respond and Phil's very comic booky.

So

they were like, these kids like this shit.

Let's show them.

Let's give them flat top

getting tagged up

like Bonnie and Clyde.

I just blasted with a minigun.

He was the coolest of all the sidekick villains.

Really cool, yeah.

And they fucking, they put holes in him.

Yeah.

The worst part of it is they all look like garbage pail kids.

The makeup was horrifying.

Right.

Like, you don't, like, Joker was kind of an attractive guy in Batman, but sure.

The guys in Dick Tracy were nightmare toilets.

Pruneface.

They were like toilet people.

That's a good way to put it.

Yeah.

Pruneface.

Yeah.

And then

Dustin Hoffman was mumbles.

It was mumbles.

A mumbles behind.

We were talking about papers, please.

We should have done the Dick Tracy movie.

Broken format.

Nick Wager, what are you playing?

Thank you, Heather.

I'm going to talk about.

Who the fuck is that?

Why would you call me Heather?

Oh, so

I was saying thank you to Heather for deferring her microphone to the Resident Evil Merchant so the Resident Evil Merchant can speak.

Very nice of you to do it.

If you want me to put on her skin, I can.

Please don't do that.

All right.

Please don't do that.

So since we're discussing Papers Please, which is an indie solo dev game, I thought I'd bring up another one that is recent.

The Crimson Diamond.

This came out in August of this year.

This is developed by Toronto-based Julia Minamata, and it began as a pixel art project, and it became this full-fledged text parser adventure game with EGA style retro graphics.

So EGA kind of,

console-wise, kind of akin to the NES Sega Master System generation, but it's like it's a higher res, it looks a little sharper than that.

Sharper and they're thus less popular.

So it was, you know, it was, it's, it's 16 color graphics and

It's very much an homage to like the classic Sierra LucasArts adventure games, but it it is based on text parsing.

So like you are typing in like, you know, look at cabinet, open cabinet, look inside cabinet, you know, pick up Tumblr.

You're typing commands.

So it has like a very like sort of retro feel to it from that reason, but it's super playable.

And a big part of what happens,

the reason why that is with Minamata's design is that it's got a bunch of quality of life things like it's click a move, you can use a mouse, it has a graphic inventory.

there's a really so like you know you can see all of your items you don't just see a list of your items there is a there is a map and then there is a notebook slash you can just type in review into the parser that will tell you like all of the things you need to do in her voice and it's a really elegant way of having the objectives and helping you keep all this stuff in front of you because you got enough to worry about with trying to figure out what the hell to type But it's it's set in like the early 20th century and you are Nancy Maple and she is a mineralogist who takes a train up to a lodge in rural Ontario to investigate a mysterious diamond.

And this is the kind of thing where I'm like, I'm all in on all of this.

Every aspect of this works for me.

Train ride back in the 1910s, great.

Looking for a diamond, why not?

But if you like, like, you know, any of those classic games, or if you're just curious about how text parser games work, I would really recommend it because it's really, really fun and the story goes in really interesting ways.

And the art is super duper appealing.

I'm just really impressed by this game and anytime something like this comes around from an individual developer, I believe this game was first, you know,

exhibited in like 2019.

So they've been working on it for a while.

Anytime something like this comes about, I'm just amazed by the art history.

So the Crimson Diamond, really like that.

How do you hear?

Because you'll come into this segment and you'll say a game that I've literally never heard about.

And I feel like I'm pretty...

in touch.

Like, where did you hear about this game?

So this game is pretty, I think this game has been fairly under the radar.

I actually will shout out Polygon for putting this, you know,

I saw a story about this, and let me see if I can find the author here.

It was Nicole Carpenter who wrote this game up, and so I checked it out, and I'm really glad I did.

So yeah, shout out to Nicole as well.

All right.

Cool.

But anyway, this is a Crimson Diamond.

Matt, what have you been playing?

Well, you know, I've been playing Star Wars Outlaws.

So

it's still really, really good.

I've gotten to a spot now, I'm not very far into the game, I will will say, but where I was calling it more like Red Dead

Redemption, you know, mixed with Star Wars.

I agree with that still to some degree, but it is more, it is more of a stealth game than I realized.

It is primarily a stealth game.

Okay.

Things can go south very, very fast.

Can you tell me what a stealth game is?

So instead of like in

like in other like action-adventure action-adventure type games where you could just be going and running around and shooting and stuff like that.

Like real life.

Yeah, in real life.

This game

requires that you hide and you're a little more discreet and things like that.

So like you can like maybe lure a stormtrooper by whistling and then take it out out of sight.

from people so that you don't want to attract attention because there is like there is like an implied law and order around you exactly yes so there's you're doing a lot of hiding you're doing a lot of like like quiet sneaking around type stuff.

But then when things go south, you have a blaster.

So you can start, you can start blasting.

But something that I didn't realize until it was too late a few times because I kept failing encounters.

And I was like, gosh, what am I missing here?

There's a mechanic I must be missing.

There's an icon that floats over some of the enemies' heads, and that's when they're maybe triggering an alarm.

If the alarm goes off, the whole thing's fucked.

You're fucked.

But if you shoot the people that are

taking the alarm off, is it like a cartoon, like exclamation point sort of Betty Boop that comes above their head?

It is sort of like a thing that's like, hey, you have, and it's like a time.

So it's like, you have this much time until the alarm goes off.

Woock, woke up, woke up.

What's going on here?

Wait, is the Metal Gear Solid exclamation point from Betty Boop?

Is that the

reference?

Kojima got it from Betty Boop for sure.

Yeah.

He's certainly a

horny enough of a guy to have seen it

Wow, but I I'm still really really enjoying it.

I'm on like a Starship destroyer like right now, and it's fucking awesome.

It is just really cool like I do think that if this game wasn't if this game wasn't a Star Wars game, there's almost a 50% chance I simply wouldn't be interested in it.

Yeah, sure.

But the

fact that it is like good Star Wars is really

like

not even really saving or covering for the stuff that I don't like because there's nothing really I dislike in it.

I'm just more, I'm just more invested in it because I'm doing Star Wars.

I'm going to hop on, Matt, to talk about this game also.

Because the thing that I,

get out of here,

that I'm also continuing to play Outlaws.

And what the placement it has hit in my brain is Dragon's Dogma 2.

It's like, this is never going to be my favorite game of all time, but it's extremely satisfying to just keep doing these missions.

My least favorite part is the stealth stuff.

In part because I don't quite understand the field of vision of the enemies.

Like, like there are times where I'm like, am I under the table enough that they can't see me?

Or am I like, is this not cover?

Like, I can't tell what it is that I'm supposed to be hiding behind.

Whereas like, I feel like Metal Gear or like Gears of War even have these like snap to cover mechanics or like a thing where you're like, this is a standardized height.

and I know that anywhere that this height is, I am hiding behind.

Yes, whereas, like, sometimes I'll be hiding behind something, and somebody will walk past me like a velociraptor in the kitchen, and I'll be like, How did that guy not see me?

Like, I thought that was it.

Um, but yeah, it's it's really fun to leisurely play, yes.

And I'm really glad that it is not a game that I was looking forward to, say, like

um

uh

like Shadow of the Earth Tree.

Like, if it wasn't like a destination game for me, and so I'm having a lot of fun, like the kind of movie that you see at a movie theater, sure, it wasn't your favorite movie of the year, but you really had a nice time.

Like the new quiet place,

kind of the same thing.

Uh, we all this talk of stealth is making me think of one thing I should have mentioned, the Crimson Diamond.

There's a big mechanic in it is you walk by like a door and you hear conversation, like they're talking about something in there.

And then you can, you can listen in, and Nancy Maple will do a thing where she'll like cup her hand to the door and like, or, or she'll just kind of be listening, like, like, kind of like a little scandalized.

Um, you'll have like a different, it'll cut to a different shot.

It's very, very satisfying.

Did you make this game?

Eavesdropping Sim.

Developer Nick Wager, designed by Nick Wiger.

I wish.

All right, James, what are you playing?

All right, I played.

bad video games.

I played dumb ones.

Currently on the mobile phone, because the Xbox that I had played on and off for a few years, the controllers aren't working, maybe because somebody threw them across the board.

Not even with Cuphead, with like just much easier with like Child of Light or something.

So the controllers, like, yeah, I put new batteries back in, but uh-oh-oh, there's a rattle in it.

So

now it's now it's to the phone.

And I do, uh, I do, if the phone does something wrong, I will slap it occasionally, but it's resilient.

And I'm talking like a stage.

This is not, this is like, you know, the Marx brothers or something.

Right.

So I play bad mobile games just to pass the time sometimes.

And I've eaten, sometimes it's like Angry Birds or whatever.

And I've played a lot of the dumb games where you control, like basic, it's just, you control an army of dudes.

And you're like marching around.

And however many you have, there's a number floating above you that says, like, and you can fuck up anything that's lower than that number.

And so then you see like a squad of skeleton soldiers, and they're like,

and it's a it, you, and your guy, your guy, you, you know, you, it says like 15, and they, and theirs says like seven times two, and you're like, we could barely get them.

And then you brawl at them.

But then the problem is, you're like, oh, I could do this for years.

And then the problem is you have like a squad of 15 guys marching around.

And then there's like a giant sea monster that's like,

And it says the square root of 400.

And you're like,

and then you hesitate and he slices you.

He assassinates all your guys and you become like toothpicks for him.

Wait, so these are like, because I've seen these advertised.

I've never actually played one of these.

Those are the games that we do.

Yes.

And here's the trick.

When you start playing one of those games,

there's like an alert on top of their head that's like an exclamation point, except it's like, we got a real sucker here, guys.

And so you start getting dumber and dumber games advertised to you.

And I'm not playing this, but I'm spending so much time watching it because they don't just let you humiliate yourself and play the dumb game again.

Right.

You have to sit through a commercial for an even dumber video game.

Because there's no way I'm paying.

I'm not, are you insane?

I'm not paying for this.

So you have to, and I always get the ads for Royal Match.

Okay.

And they're they're always like, oh, we got these morons playing this thing.

Let's see if we can get them hooked on this.

It's the next one dumber down in the file.

And it's all, it's the same, and I have never played it formally, but I know everything that happens.

There's a fat king.

He's stuck in his own castle alone.

And his royal power availeth him not.

Availeth him not of any advantage.

He's like, help!

Help me!

There's fire and water!

Who could possibly help me defeat the twin threats of fire and water?

And you're just like trying to wait it out, and they have a phantom finger come in and play it the wrong way.

Where it's like, oh, I know what you should do.

You should push these rocks over into an adjacent part of the screen that doesn't matter.

And you're like, that's not what you do.

But the moment you intervene, bam, they download everything and they could they know your mom's phone number

so you can't you just have to sit there and watch you just have to sit there and watch it and you then there's like a little x that appears in the corner and you think oh like the wick the agreed upon rules of computers you could click the x to close the window not anymore that's a social contract from the 90s

you can no longer click the x in a window to close it now if you do that bam they control every device in your house.

So I just watch him for hours.

This fat king stuck in a castle with the easiest problems.

He's like, a roof with a door and lava.

Hell!

If you help me, I'll give you the jewels that I've baked into the floor.

So you're playing a game, and in order to continue playing it and you don't want to put money into it, you're watching commercials embedded in the game.

For dumber, for dummer.

No, I wish it was in-game.

I wish there was that.

That would be, I've played, I've seen that before where it's like, hey, hey, there's a dumb game inside the game.

No, it's, there's like, this is a, this is a raw ad.

This is a commercial for you being a stupid person.

And you know, you know, whenever you see an ad for Royal Match, that you're doing something on the internet that you should stop.

You know, whatever, as soon as you see that king,

that's it.

That's the end.

There's nothing positive at the end of your internet journey tonight.

The version, and we talked about this on the podcast, I think, a little bit before, but like, I've seen versions of these ads that are like...

They're showing the game.

They're showing like a game you described.

Like you're scrolling up the screen and you've got a multiplier over your head and you've got an army that grows and contracts.

Um, but then it's someone playing that game telling you that, like, a lot of these games are fake, but this one's not fake.

This is real.

I was like, What the hell?

The layers of this.

A lot of these games are just thinly disguised ways to like grab your data and seal it for disreputable companies.

Not this one.

Click here.

And then if I look at the comments of the ad, all the comments are like, this game is, oh, this is bullshit.

This is a lie.

So, like, the ad that's saying that their game is not a lie is itself a lie.

Of course.

Yeah.

You wouldn't, if you were a classy, if you were a classy game, you wouldn't even recognize those things.

They would be beneath you.

What kind of person, you got some sham wow guy going like, hey, let me give you the lowdown of these like disreputable games.

I feel like

as the sole remaining person on Twitter in this group,

they still post those ads on Twitter, but now that there is the ability to moderate everybody else's content,

every single ad will just say underneath it, this is not the game.

This is an ad for something that doesn't exist.

Or like, this is not how you play the game.

This game cannot be interacted with this way.

These aren't the graphics.

Like every single ad has disclaimers at the bottom of it that are just saying, this is a lie.

Wow.

And yet those people are still buying ad content on Twitter.

So Twitter now, this is interesting.

It's like Fantasia from the the Neverending Story, a world collapsing into itself, except Elon Musk is, he is the nothing doing it to himself.

Yeah.

He's like, this world is being destroyed by the nothing.

Who could possibly have predicted this terrible force in the clouds?

Meanwhile, he's

blowing the evil clouds up into the sky.

There are people, you will find things like games like,

I don't know if if it's specifically Clash of Clans, but those kinds of games, those are German games.

Clash of Clans, you know exactly where I'm coming from.

You will find people, like, there will be people who will spend like tens of thousands of dollars on those games.

And I think it's just, I think it's either just like kids who get their parents' credit cards, or it's like the kind of old men who will sometimes type porn search terms just like as a post on Facebook.

It's like they're people who just like do not understand how the internet works.

You'd be surprised.

They're accomplished professionals who have gone down this whole there is a house

in the app store

they call the clash of clams

didn't ted cruise like say that he was playing diablo immortal or something he hit he like paid like uh

Some amount of money to get like the best gear and everybody was like, of course he did that.

He sucks.

We're playing Diablo.

Ted Cruz.

I was playing Diablo.

I got suited up with a shoulder pads.

By a helmet on top of a hockey mat.

Two six shooters, three five-shooters, and one big gun.

All right, let's talk about papers, please.

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I eventually got off that roof when the sun rose.

So papers please, and I think people know about this game.

I imagine if you listen to this podcast, you're aware of this.

This is like, I think, one of the, you know, kind of er games as art examples, one of the big indie games.

This is a narrative puzzle game where you play as an immigration's officer at a border crossing in the fictional country of Arstotska in 1984.

Arstotska.

Gameplay involves interviewing a series of individuals each day and verifying if their documents permit entry into the country.

And there's a narrative on top of that.

There's also a sim aspect of managing your finances as you try to keep your family alive on your poverty-level wages.

This was released in 2013 from Lucas Pope, who is a solo dev who has

gone on to make some other really notable games.

Lucas had previously worked at Naughty Dog on the Uncharted franchise and left to just kind of make his own thing.

So

you cannot think of two games more different than Papers Please and like Uncharted 2.

But it's like he worked on both of them.

And he became apparently interested in immigration.

His wife is from Japan, and so they would travel in and out of the country a lot.

And so he had a lot of experiences dealing with immigration officers, and that was the genesis of this idea.

Okay, sir, you'd make video games?

Is there a reason that we can't have a native-born American handling that?

You got papers to show what you're doing, sir?

Okay, okay, sure, sure, sure.

So, James,

this was a game that you pitched.

This was an idea

a game you possibly wanted to talk about.

What is your background with papers, please?

Well, occasionally I do play cool games.

i i i'm i'm a man for all seasons so i've played the dumbest and i i've played some of the most interesting ones too and this is one it's not mash button intensive no it's it's like you i guess you said narrative puzzle game which is a way of saying like you don't have to smash a controller that's how i inter

it's like it's like choices choices choices and there's very it's sudden things that happen and interesting things um but i remember i read about about it and then played it 10 years later.

I think I played it one or two years ago recently.

After having, I heard about it and was like, all right, I'm going to get around to that someday.

And I finally did.

And

I got nothing else.

It was, maybe it was like the tail end of the pandemic or something.

Like,

fine, sure.

Nothing else to going on.

And it was, it was, it was, it was very darkly funny in some ways.

Yeah.

It was like, like, it's this beaten down down kind of like Eastern European, like end of the Cold War, like there are some freedoms allowed.

And it's like spy games catnip to me, right?

There's an armed checkpoint.

There's occasionally things that blow up.

Yeah.

There's like, then the technology is like late Soviet technology where there's like a tele telefax teletype thing that you'll get commands on.

I love all, I love all that.

I love that world.

It's also deliberately looks like that kind of video game

graphic style from the 80s that you would see in like Tetris or something else from that time.

And

what I, I mean, I knew a little bit about it, but I didn't know the main thing about it when I went into it, which is that the game rules aren't explained to you and you're not supposed to obey the rules.

Right.

Which I

don't think, I mean, there's things that surprise you in a game sometimes where they're like, we need to make sure we don't tell everybody right off the bat that they should never trust something that's this, you know, shaped this way or whatever.

What am I,

what am I hiding?

Why am I being so vague?

Because I can't remember.

But it's things like you don't, you are each day, and part of this is like the creeping bureaucracy of this failed state is like each day you are given new orders and the new orders refer to like a new document you have to examine or a new criteria that someone has to meet or this person people coming from this country all must be searched because we have a trade war you know things like that there's always gonna be complications and they're this rival country that's their bitter enemy and then they have they actually don't have good relations with anybody no

all their neighboring countries like passports are like distrusted and they they're not they're also not good to their own people and okay so it's satirical yeah it's satirical and

like a great satire i see and i've seen seen this before in works of art where they're like criticizing something about a Soviet communist system where if you're a if you're like a level two thinker you're supposed to go oh is it not that much different from my own system of government

so but but that's what allows it to get made it's not like it's not like it's it's not like your fucking capitalist system sucks it's like this fictional communist system sucks what if we point out a bunch of things about it that are exactly like your capitalist police state that you live in?

Right.

And

the cool the most the coolest dystopian thing about it is that you're supposed to to quote unquote win the game.

You're supposed to win the unwinnable game by disobeying the orders, basically.

Right.

Like disobeying what the game tells you to do.

Yeah, so you can't, you can, there, there are 20 different endings in this game.

And yeah, one thing that happens is that this organization, this rebel organization that they call, the government calls a terrorist organization, EZIC, is trying to recruit you to like kind of like work as like a double agent to work for them.

So you can, but you have a choice to like follow them, or you can also sell them out and just be a good government worker and that has its own end game.

But we're going to say other.

I was going to say, no game I've ever played

has

has brought out, okay, that's not entirely true.

I guess, depending on the way you look at it, maybe

my playthrough of

what's the most recent big RPG?

Baldur's Gate 3.

I can't even remember it.

Maybe Baldur's Gate 3 brought out a bad side of me.

But immediately upon playing this game, I immediately wanted to be bad.

Like, I want, not break rules, but to follow.

You wanted to be the police station.

Immediately.

You feel like harsh, no.

Yeah, the thing that...

Maximum sentence.

The thing that I've always,

when you encounter, like, say, a parking garage attendant, right?

And

this is a working man.

We're all, we're all working.

It's, it's a hard life out there.

But when they assume like an enormous amount of thorium authority over you, you get really frustrated with them because it's like, come on, man, I don't know where my ticket is.

Can I just, and it's like, no, no, no, no.

And they get really angry and they get really authoritarian about how you parked in the parking garage or whatever.

And I've never understood that.

This is a Caruso property.

This is a Westfield Caruso property.

I've never understood the pull of that or the thrill of that until this game where I was like, get the fuck out of here with your bad papers.

Do not show these fucking papers to me.

Go to the back of the line.

That's the thing because the way the game works is you're basically paying

on a commission on how many people you can process.

So

you quickly, and this is part of why the design is so effective, it quickly engenders in you like a feeling of like, like you're frustrated with people who are taking up your time needlessly.

So someone comes up to you, they don't have their passport.

It's like, what are you doing here?

You're rejected or you're detained.

Get the fuck out of here I'm simple fun and it's like the first simple funny guy he's like a simple funny guy who comes along like me I'm simple funny guy making a little bad joke and then you're like get the fuck come on then you're like wait a minute

I like too there's an element to there it's it's obviously takes place on a mobile screen but there's an element

where you I think you physically have to palm over where the stamp is going to go down.

Yeah, yeah.

This kind of thing.

It's pretty kind of fun.

This is on all play.

plastic.

So you know, I have this on Steam, but I did, I did, I played through it again, but I also like.

I didn't play it on a mobile app.

I also played it on iPad.

This is this very iPad I'm holding.

And I will say that, like, did you play it on phone or iPad?

Maybe it was on a phone.

Maybe the phone version came out a few years after the Steam version.

It did come out later, but like it is, I will say that the, you know,

the interface is intentionally cluttered.

Like they give you not a lot of screen space to work with for all of your documents.

You have too many documents that you can fit on one screen at one time.

You have to flip it through the cross-reference notebooks.

Yeah.

You have to flip pages to look at

regulations and stuff.

It's super duper cumbersome.

So I found playing it on iPad was even more frantic.

I'm dragging shit around.

You have to drag the stamps over it and stamp

or accept or reject in the right spot.

And then there was certain points you get different stamps that you have to, it's just like, it's so much business that you have to do.

And that adds to kind of like the frenetic aspect of it.

Matt, what is your

history with this game?

So I was only playing through it for this episode.

I had not played it previously.

I played Oberdin when we covered that, and I had played his other game, Mars After Midnight, which is exclusive to the play date.

And it's a very similar concept where

aliens are trying to come into a

like an AA meeting of sorts.

And then based on the ailments of the aliens coming to the door, you can let them into the meeting or not.

But it's great.

Like space aliens?

Yeah, space aliens.

Space aliens, yes, yeah.

Like with, you know, multiple eyes, a bunch of of arms.

Two things like a meeting.

Yes, exactly.

Or it's different types of meetings.

There's like a meeting for aliens that

fart a lot.

It's dumb.

It's like a similar type of thing, but

it's great.

But with this,

I became very quickly concerned with how how fast I'm able to just follow orders for short while.

Like, okay, these are the rules.

I guess sorry about it.

Like, I don't, I don't know.

And I would feel bad.

I was like, oh,

this person's ticket is only a couple days expired.

Is this okay?

Or like, oh, they're actually, their tickets for another day in the future.

But it's not today.

You got to have to come back on the day that your ticket says.

Sorry about that.

And then just, and then just kind of go about my business.

It felt, I will say, it felt really, really bad.

It is.

And so we'll have points where like, you know, like, hey, my,

this will happen fairly, fairly early on.

We'll be like, hey, my wife is in line after me.

Please permit her.

The wife doesn't have the right documents, but you can separate the two of them and, like, you know, she'll like curse you.

And, you know, that things like that will happen.

It makes you think of the morality of following orders in a very interesting way.

And it made me think by contrast, it made me think all the way back to when I was a kid and we would play Contra on the Nintendo NES.

Oh, yeah.

And

I mean,

set in the late to mid-80s, Contra to me is now as an adult thinking back on it.

It's like, you're sent down to Central America

by Ronald Reagan, by video game Ronald Reagan

as a death squad.

And you're like, you're a kid and you're like, sure, do I get a bandana machine gun?

Got it.

And it's like,

and it, to me, the message of Contra is at the heart of what you're fighting as a Contra fighter is an alien monster.

That's what communism is.

Obey orders, get it, fucking tag it up.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then this.

They don't need to tell you.

It's not in the video game.

You you don't need to know that it was an elected government.

But like with this, you know, we're talking about, it's like there's a day cycle, so you go into work every single day, but at the end of your workday, when you get your money, you have to make concessions about your own livelihood, whether it's

you're going to spend money on heat for your family, food for your family, or medicine for your sick, you know, family.

Yep.

You have to balance.

And I think I I played it twice.

The first time I just crashed and burned, where everybody died.

And

I was obeying all the rules of the police state, and my family died.

You can kill your whole family if you're not careful because your pay gets docked if you make mistakes.

But that ties into the moral calculus of, well, shit, I can let this guy's wife through, or I can let

this woman's son through.

So you have to face out how many times you break the rules after a certain period.

Right.

Well, for me, so far I hadn't I didn't get to finish the game but so far that was zero times because I was like the first time I broke the rules a little bit it was a mistake and you get like a ticket that's like hey don't fucking do that again all right man and I was like oh my god I'm so sorry

I hate getting in joke

it is it in some ways it's not it doesn't fulfill the reason that some people play video games, which is like, I want to escape from this world.

Yeah.

I made a joke once, I thought, back maybe when in the days of Twitter, where I was like, how come there's not a video game?

Because I was recently frustrated about this, where I was like, how come there's not a video game about that simulates like navigating medical insurance rules and getting someone in and out of the hospital with a follow-up appointment?

And then someone replied to me and said they were simply like, because we want to escape from this world.

And so it doesn't accomplish that at all.

It's like, it's like, if anything, it's like, what do you not like about living in this world?

And it makes it worse.

but it's it's it's a it was a very interesting thought puzzle Yeah,

more a moral thought puzzle I think that's that's why some people like you know who do have the you know for thinking of this from a highfalutin standpoint like really like this game or again, you know use this example of games as art because like It's fundamentally not fun.

Like, it's not fun to play.

Like, it's pretty interesting.

The tasks are pretty miserable.

It's really, it's really monotonous.

And then

what you're doing is like you're either servicing a, you know, this, this totalitarian government or you're aiding this semi-doomed rebel cause.

It's like there's not like a great outcome here.

Heather just said what in a way that I know that if this was her real job, she would run that fucking booth like it was a Navy ship about to go to the bottom of the fucking wheelchair.

Yeah, absolutely.

You're both by the book.

You're both team dystopia.

I love, okay, what was the name of the country again?

It's

Arstotska.

Arshtotska.

Yeah.

I was also after I was like, I was in the middle of playing a second time, and I was thinking, I was like, oh my God,

Slavo Žižek is from Arstotska.

The young, the crumbling communist system of Arstotska.

We were presented with this daily ethical crisis, were we not?

To stamp the paper sword to call in the assassination of the victim.

Essentially, one can look at this from the capitalist perspective as well.

So, you like, I mean, I guess

there is an aspect of like the gameplay loop is satisfying.

I think I get what you're saying to some level.

Like, it is fun to some level.

It's also extremely fun, and I know it's a game world, and I'm beginning to get concerned about my own tendencies when presented with a game world.

Because if at any point there's now, I've known you for a while.

None of the surprises

but like it's really fun and funny to me like to stamp it reject it and throw the passport in their face that is the thing you do throw it you just you throw it flick it at their face sometimes they have remarks too where they're like fucking scum country

i wish that this was a vr game like i wish you had a cluttered desk you want to be there i want to be there like a cluttered desk that looks like the the stasi museum in east in old east germany And you have all the little devices and the stamps, and you're in a helmet, and you're doing the things so that you can like shuffle around the papers with your real hands and stamp with a real stamp, and then also be like very casually because, like,

you also have to hide things from things.

So you're like, hiding, like, sliding a passport underneath the window would be so funny.

Heather would go to like video game conventions as and cosplay as one of the like police station

enthusiastically

if you and if she was supposed to get her discretion either give you a free download or like reject and she would always be like sorry nothing free for you today

I do get what you're saying I do think this would be an interesting VR experience like just like you know like the same way that some of those like office simulators or whatever just be like okay just just just this uh this the this drudgery like actually being fully immersed in it and then actually yeah yeah having the the to be covert about things i i i watched like uh uh all the all 20 endings i watched a just a super cut of all of them and it's interesting because like some of them come about from just like doing really stupid things so like there's like you know uh agents from the government who come to investigate when this this terrorist group slash you know rebel group uh starts

uh working with you and you can just like hand them the secret decoder that they gave you and then the guy just like takes you away to prison you get executed

I didn't

that happen.

That's awesome.

But I like that, I like it.

I like that it just controls for like really

anytime it controls for like you mentioned Baldur's Gate 3, it's the best at this.

It controls for some dumb thing that the player could choose to do.

Like, I just, I really like that.

The other one is, so

these, the, the available avenues of protest always lead to an even stupider fatality.

So, the, so you get like at a certain point, if you choose to give your son, it's your son's birthday in the timeline of the game.

And so you can spend a lot of money to get him a set of crayons that he wants for his birthday.

And that results in the rest of the family dying.

Exactly, because the rest of the family,

it's like the cost of both rent and food, or supposed to cost

heat and food for a day.

So it's like a huge expense by your wages.

But if you choose to do that, he draws you a very sweet, like portrait that you can hang, like a crayon drawing that you can hang in your your office but then if you do that then the officer comes and he will he will say that's a violation he will dock your pay for it so you'll lose an additional ten dollars on top of that or ten credits for doing that but then after that this is another ending i saw if you put the picture back up and he comes back then you get arrested and send some hard labor

god damn

uh it's it's really i mean it's it's great it's a really fascinating experience i mean like when it once it starts to heighten to things, like you have the scanner feature, and this again changed what you were saying of like talking about it's it's so clearly about our own culture, so clearly about TSA security theater, because there is a scanner feature where you get a nude picture of whoever the person is who's applying for entry.

Yeah, that was fascinating because that's been a real controversy in actual America.

Right.

When one removes the layers of flat iron, let's be honest.

We're talking about the Southern board.

It's a real controversy where they had these perverts at the Department of Homeland Security were like, well, most of us have promised not to masturbate to the pigs.

That was basically what they said in the news.

So, so you get this, and but part of that is that you get this photo, and sometimes someone will be like smuggling drugs or smuggling a gun or something like that.

So, again, like if you're role-playing as the guard, you can talk yourself into like, well, this is a thing we need for this, the security of the great nation of Arstotska, you know?

And it's like, but it is the sort of thing of like, you're just seeing how dehumanizing this whole experience is for all parties.

Right.

It makes me, I've, this has made me consider.

While I was playing it, it occurred to me.

Now, of course, you're obviously going like, well, is this game banned in China or Russia?

But then I was like, well, okay, with our, with the way we're, with the way this particular matrix is programmed in this country,

is it on a list of banned games for Department of Homeland Security workers?

Or is it like, if someone

downloads on this phone, it's considered a level one flag

and they'll have to be questioned about it.

How did you play this game, officer?

I followed the rules.

I used the body scanner

judiciously.

Well, we're going to dock you 10 credits.

And if we see this on the next audit, you will be taken away life in prison.

You also at a certain point, so like this, this rebel faction or sometimes just refugees running across the border started to become a problem.

So you get at a certain point, you get a gun.

And then if you successfully gun someone down, you get a pay bonus.

That's right.

They arm you at something.

They arm you, yeah.

Because sometimes there's like a motorcycle guy that just tries to break through at a fast speed.

And also, I think there's some guys that are like, there's some people trying to penetrate the checkpoint that are just pure bad guys with nothing redeeming about them.

And then there's some guys, excuse me, there's some guys that are like, no, I'm trying to bring food to poor people.

Yeah, there is, it depends.

I mean, it's one of those things where it kind of depends on how you're role-playing it because there is the rebel org that is trying to blow up the checkpoint so that they can like let a bunch of people in and so they can kind of topple the government.

So there's that, but then yeah, there are also people who are just like trying to cause mayhem.

And then, yeah, they're just people just trying to cross.

Again, these events are closely mimicked in what happened in the Yugoslavia of my youth.

I feel like

I have to make a recommendation for you, James.

If you enjoyed this type of game, I kind of feel like we got to get James playing Disco Elysium.

Oh, yeah, God.

It has like I've heard, I want to, as soon as I can clean up the rattle in my controllers, I saw a preview of it somewhere.

It's like on, it's like, I have an old Xbox.

It'll work on that.

You should probably be able to.

Do you have like a MacBook or something?

Oh, it's like a you can play it on Steam.

Like you said download it on Steam or something.

Yeah.

Oh, I've heard about it and I saw like a preview of it and it looked cool.

It seems like it just might be right away.

It would be your favorite game of all time.

I've heard this.

Okay, all right.

Okay, so this is going to be my wintertime.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is this is this is after my my I'm done birthing this horrible baby of my stand-up special.

After this demonic creature is brought into the world, I'll take a little vacation and play disclosure.

I'm pretty sure you will text me in all caps multiple times while playing the game.

Right.

I've heard this, and I'm glad to hear it from you guys that I want to play it too.

You enjoyed it all, I guess.

I enjoy it all.

One of my favorite games.

But yeah, it's such a high level of writing, but a big part of it is like you can role-play the game.

And I played through it a few times, and

I role-played it as a communist because your politics is a big part of it.

Right.

I played it fun.

I played as a fascist, but by far the most unnerving was playing as like a down-the-line neoliberal.

It was just like, this is so upsetting, the kind of person I am.

Whoa,

they program it that way?

Yeah, yeah.

Like a guy with

the pale blue globe emoji in his social media.

One of the gross Pete Boudig

guys.

Yeah, you're going to love it.

You're going to love it.

Hello, think tank.

Yes.

Good guy.

I'm so curious.

Yeah.

No, you love it.

Okay, Sam, you have played Papers Please.

Briefly, yeah.

Wait, what was your experience?

And when did you mess around with it?

This was three months ago.

Oh, okay.

So fairly recently.

It was because a friend introduced it to me

after we had done like a 12-hour set build at his warehouse in Lancaster.

And he's usually like a first-person shooter, like battlefield kind of super intense war game style.

And so it was like a long day.

And he was like, I'm super addicted to this game.

And the first glance, I was like, this looks like a AUTS browser game that you would play like Kitten Cannon on or something.

Sure.

So, yeah, he's like, it's super exciting.

I'm waiting for the moment where Doom, like a Doom first-person shooter scene is going to happen.

And I was just confused that it was just all you're doing is stamping.

He explained it to me.

And I understand that the narrative was super interesting.

You can pivot to 20 different endings.

But yeah, so I played it for like an hour or two.

And I was like, I don't understand.

After 12 hours of building all day, it feels like a job when you're coming home to play this stage.

That was my experience.

And I was relating, I was thinking about when you were saying that earlier about it.

It's just like, why?

It feels like work.

It is not a way to blow off steam.

It is a way to engage

the necessary nature of the steam.

My goal, Eric, I claim.

Any other thoughts on that?

I mean, it's like, it's the thing.

It's like kind of...

It's both straightforward to talk about, but also too unwieldy to really talk about.

I think it is a game that if you're listening to this and you haven't experienced it, I mean, like, like, I think it's worth it, it plays quite well on mobile devices.

You know, it's obviously goes on

sale on Steam and other platforms all the time.

I do think it's a game that it's worth playing through all the way, but also I think you could mess around with this for an hour and get what it's doing, what it's trying to say.

So, I would encourage if anyone listening to this, I imagine a lot of you have played this, but if you haven't played this, I'd check it out because it is a classic for a reason.

And I'm

curious,

what was the, can you, do you you remember the outcome, Heather, when you played it from

the harsh, I'm going to follow the rules perspective?

I don't remember the ending, but it was just like, thank you.

It is.

It's just like, it's like, it's.

They were like, good job.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, because that's how I played it too.

And it's like, you do this whole thing.

Is your family healthy?

I think one, no, I want to.

You can't get enough money, right?

Yeah, no matter what, you can't get enough money.

Somebody died.

I don't remember who died or.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No,

you're, I mean, conceptually, you're miserable, but you have been told good job.

It's like the equivalent of getting a little gold sticker on your, on your shirt.

It's right.

It's basically just like showing how thankless this task is if executed properly, because basically what they say is, is, yeah, I'll see you back at work on January 1st.

It's like, that's it.

You know, you get any sort of combination or anything.

Most times I played it, there were like family members that died.

And maybe when I was more ethical, more of the family members died.

Yeah, well, because it's a sort of thing of like, again, the poverty, you know, level finances, the choosing of between wants and needs, like if you start to, once you start to figure out that, like, hey, I actually don't need to feed my family unless they're hungry.

I don't need to, you know, turn on the heat unless they're cold.

I don't need to give them medicine unless they're beyond sick, but very sick, which means they're near to.

So like you start making all these compromises and you realize the life you are giving to your family, you're supposed to provide for is completely miserable, but it's the only way you can survive.

I've been survived life in the late George H.W.

Bush administration in the United States when I was in the early 90s as a kid.

And it also reminds me of the late George W.

Bush administration in the mid-2000s when I was

living in the United States of America.

Yeah.

It's grim stuff, but I don't know.

It's so compelling and so effective.

I told Mary about this game because she was like, what are you guys playing this week?

And I was like, oh, it's this.

And I explained it to her.

And she's like, oh my God, that sounds like the best game of all time.

And I was like, yeah, it's pretty good.

She's like, oh,

and you have to make decisions about your family versus strangers.

And I'm like, yeah.

And she's like, oh, I love that kind of awful.

Oh, that's great.

So I can't wait to show it to her.

Someone you share your home with.

Hey, I got a segment here.

It's time for indie game.

or indie game.

I'll explain.

Papers please is a classic indie game.

I will give you a title and you tell me if it's an indie game, an independently developed video game, or an indie game, the subtitle for an Indiana Jones video game.

So you can say independent or Indiana.

Does everyone understand?

Are these real Indiana Jones?

These are all real.

Every single one of these is real.

Oh.

Okay.

And everyone can guess for each one.

First up, the first couple are gimme.

First up, The Great Circle.

Oh,

Matt, Indiana.

Heather?

Indiana.

James.

Okay, I got to do some variety here, so I'm going to just see what happens.

This is

an independent game.

No, I'm sorry.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is an upcoming action-adventure game published by Bethesda.

Fuck you.

Next up, Return of the Obradin.

Indy.

Indy.

Indiana.

James, I'm sorry.

Return of the Obradin is an independent shipwreck detective game from 2018.

Also by Lucas Pope, Lucas Pope's one of his other games.

All right, next up.

The fate of Atlantis.

Heather says Indiana.

I think I'm going to say Indiana as well.

I'm going to say

let's keep this trend up.

Let me, you know, I'm not opposed to a pose that's duopoly.

Well, you know, you should never relegate yourself

to the third party option, man.

What was the subtitle?

What was the subtitle again?

The Fate of Atlantis.

The Fate of Atlantis.

Well, I think my father's fate was much the fate of Atlantis.

True freak.

I think that's an independent game.

Fate of Atlantis.

No, Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis is a 1992 point-and-click adventure game by LucasArts.

All right, Matt has three, Heather has three.

James, you have to get on the board.

Next up.

So I've got three also.

These are

next up.

Call of the Sea.

Okay.

That's

they wouldn't, surely they wouldn't have both an Atlantis and Call of the Sea.

I'm calling that an independent game.

I'm also calling it an independent game.

Independent.

You are all correct.

Call of the Sea is an independent first-person adventure game released in 2020 by developer Out of the Blue.

The system is set up so that if you go along with the two-part system,

you're rewarded.

Looks much like a flesh and meat space version of papers, please.

What amazes me about RFK Jr.

is, first off, he was like, he like there has never been a more wide open lane before Biden dropped out for a third-party candidate.

And he's just such a nasty freak, he can't even take advantage of it.

But also, he has two depraved animal stories.

Well,

let's parse these simply here for a second.

You've got to separate, you've got to separate, as I like to say, the fur fur from the meat here.

What do you, I don't know what the problem is about having a third-party candidate who's, you know, got the name Kennedy.

And

you think, oh, just like Bobby, my father.

And then at every point that the plot progresses, you orient further and further to the right

to the point where by the end of the campaign, the only thing thing I was right about was that my father and my uncle were killed by a government conspiracy, which was simply the credit card for me to get in the door with most people.

And that's the only thing I was right about.

Now, as far as the bear and the dog, I mean, come on, you get hungry.

I mean, he's got a third.

The whale.

What was the whale thing?

He chainsawed off a whale's head and then strapped it to the roof of his car.

Are we not counting a worm as an animal?

Well,

he's got the brain worm in it.

He received worm.

Yeah, that's true.

He can do something to a worm.

Worm happened to him.

Yeah, worm.

All of the part that's missing from the mainstream coverage.

I gave a speech about this, but CNN cut away, and that is that it was Earthworm Jim.

I had Earthworm Jim stuck in my head for

35 years.

And every once in a while, I just hear, I hear the ray gun, and it goes, cool.

All right, next up.

Independent or Indiana, the case of the golden idol.

All right, Indiana Jones.

Indiana Jones.

That's Indy, baby.

Matt is correct.

This is an independent puzzle game from 2022, developed by Color Gray Games.

Next up.

I think they owe some money to him.

Here's a golden idol.

Great game.

The Forgotten City.

Oh, shit.

Independent game.

Indiana Jones.

I'm going to say independent on this one.

It is an independent game, a first-person time-loop adventure game released in 2021 by Modern Storyteller.

Fuck.

James has two.

Heather has four.

Matt has six.

Perfect so far.

Next up, The Staff of Kings.

Yeah, that's Indiana Jones.

I'm going to say Indiana Jones.

I'm going to say independent game.

Or it's a pornography.

Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings is a 2009 action-adventure game published by LucasArts, and the AV Club gave it an F.

Pretty harsh.

All right, next up, Crypt of the Necro Dancer.

Independent game.

Yeah, independent.

Crypt of the Necro Dancer.

Yeah, that's an independent game.

You are all correct.

That one is an independent game.

This was a roguelike rhythm game from 2015 by Brace Yourself.

All right, next up, Instruments of Chaos.

That's an independent game.

Indiana Jones and the Instruments of Chaos.

Instruments of Chaos, independent game.

Just to get, I'm going to say Indiana Jones.

I think that's too, it's too cyberpunk for Indiana Jones.

Instruments of Chaos, starring Young Indiana Jones, is a 1994 Sega Genesis game published by Sega.

You mean the River Phoenix young Indiana Jones?

I think it's the one from the TV show.

Remember they had the Young Indiana Jones TV show?

Yeah, the syndicated show?

Yeah.

Matt tried to throw a point there and still ended up hitting the game.

I didn't try to throw a point.

I just wanted to see.

I felt like I knew.

Matt's pitching a perfect game.

Let's take the final one.

Should I play a lottery after this?

Whenever you have any lots, always start playing a lottery.

Always.

All right, finally.

His desktop adventures.

Now, I have a question.

If it's not Indiana Jones, could it be the subtitle of another franchise or it's always the full title of an independent game?

It's a great question.

This is not a trick question.

This is one or the other.

It's all, okay, so it's either

a separate title or the subtitle of an Indiana.

Either independent game or an Indiana Jones subtitle.

So wait a minute.

You can't have.

You can't have.

a standalone game called his desktop adventures.

Whose?

I gotta say it's Indiana Jones.

I'm going independent game.

I'm going an independent game, and I'm gonna also say that it's possibly a hentai game.

Indiana Jones and his desktop adventures is a 1996 Windows procedurally generated adventure game from LucasArts.

Trent Ward of

GameSpot reviewed the game as having low quality visuals and audio, but possibly being useful for passing time.

Quite an endorsement.

Matt wins.

Well played, Matt.

Hell yeah.

Hell yeah.

Hey, that's this week's Get Played.

Thanks to Sam Rogich for guest engineering.

Sam, anything you want to plug?

My band Guck is playing the Observatory in October.

Wow, congrats.

Yeah, it's going to be a good show.

The Christmas Observatory?

You know, if it's on fire, yes, we'll play that.

I watched a Guck set

on YouTube.

Yeah, it's really an experience.

Thanks.

It was rad stuff.

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 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 our Patreon exclusive show, GetAnimaid.

Matt, we're watching Violet Evergarden.

We're watching Violet Evergarden.

And if I'm correct, these are the last ones

of the run.

And maybe we'll be watching something different next week.

It's going to be possibly up to you guys.

Or maybe we'll roll right into the movies.

Find that over at patreon.com slash get played.

James Adomian, Path of Most Resistance.

Congrats on the special.

Tell everyone about it, how they can watch it, and anything else you want to plug.

It's Path of Most Most Resistance.

It's the culmination of

a 20-year comedy career that's probably about to wrap up.

I mean, I'm really exhausted at this point.

Finally,

I got a comedy special, and by that, I mean I just decided to do it myself because no one was ever going to give me one.

So I fucking did it, and I did it with the right people.

I did it with 800-pound gorilla.

They know exactly what they did.

A great job, a really great job, with a low-budget effort that looks like a lot more money went into it.

And

I'm very proud of it.

We filmed it almost a year ago, but it still feels crisp.

And it's available now.

It's available.

You can pay what you want on 800poundgorillamedia.com.

And you could stream it on YouTube as of September 19th.

That's the big release.

And I'm very, I'm very, so you could download it, rent it, however you want to do it.

It's Path of Most Resistance.

And it is

my life's work and Swan song.

And

it's the culmination and the end.

And I'm done.

After this, it's

no, I'm

I've I had a lot of fun doing it, and I think it makes me laugh still to this day.

So I can't wait to watch it.

You're one of the funniest people in the world.

We've all been fans of yours for a long time.

Really awesome to have you on the show.

Congrats on the show.

On pure comedy terms, this is my favorite podcast I've done in a long time.

God bless you.

Thank you.

It's not just the video.

I mean, the video games are just merely an

excuse for them to be as funny as they are.

Heather doesn't even play.

She's just all cheap.

She just hangs with everybody.

I would honestly, I would not be shocked if that was just like a ruse Heather had been doing for the 20 years I've known her, been pretending to be a gamer and just lying her way through it.

True.

I know it's not true.

That's the final.

That's when you almost saw her flashing red and white.

And she just simply goes,

True!

That was a hit gum podcast.

I'm Tig Notaro.

I'm Mae Martin.

And I'm Fortune Feemster.

And together, we're handsome.

What is handsome?

Well, it's a state of mind.

It's how you feel.

It's whatever you want it to be.

Handsome is also a podcast hosted by us, three stand-up comedians you may have seen on your TV.

We swap stories, share life updates, and occasionally laugh until we cry.

Every episode, we answer a question from a celebrity friend, people like Sarah Silverman.

It's Stephen Colbert.

It's Reese Witherspoon.

My name is Mindy Kaling.

Hello Handsome Podcast.

It's Jen Aniston here.

You gorgeous W.

So if you're looking for a positive, joyful show guaranteed to make you giggle, check out Handsome.

Jump right in with whatever episode tiggles your fancy or start from the very first episode.

Listen to Handsome on your favorite podcast app or watch full video episodes on YouTube.

New episodes every Tuesday and Friday.

And don't forget, keep it.

keep it handsome.

You know how everything's a subscription now?

Music, movies, even socks.

I swear of it.

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