Games That Time Forgot

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Hey Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt, you're never going to believe this.

See, I learned this really cool thing about an old video game.

What?

Nick's dead.

Oh, my God.

Nick's fucking dead.

He died.

That's horrible, but

is related to what I was just about to tell you.

Campbell, this better be good.

It's really.

I know we did, but listen to me.

Do you remember that old game, Altered Beast?

that came out initially in arcades and then for the second Genesis and the second master system.

Yeah, yeah.

So that game begins begins with Zeus commanding over the corpse of a dead man,

that he rise from his grave and then he rises.

Right.

Well, what I learned this weekend on the internet is it turns out if you go to any grave and you say, rise from your grave, just like that,

the person will rise from their grave.

Heather, this is perfect.

Nick just died.

I know.

I know.

We can bring Nick back with this.

We're going to have to wait two weeks for the funeral, but then we'll just creep into the into the cemetery he guess we buried i mean i guess we could do it at the morgue do you know where he died or how let's wait till he gets buried yeah okay okay

two weeks later all right man don't shh i don't i think i don't see the security card i think we're okay no but we have to we have to be so quiet we gotta be so quiet because because cemeteries are like they'll shoot you on sight And they'll just put you in one of those holes.

They've got graves everywhere.

All right.

Oh, here it is.

Nick Weiger.

Beloved family man.

That's strange.

Huh?

But, okay.

I'm going to say it.

Not what I thought it would say.

Yeah, not what I thought.

I kind of thought it would just be blank.

Look, don't make jokes.

I'm sorry.

In two weeks, we can joke about our dead.

That's true.

That's true.

That's true.

All right.

I'm going to say it.

Here we go.

Rise from your grave.

Oh my god,

it's working!

Holy shit!

Oh my god!

Oh my god!

I was at peace!

Why?

I was finally in peace!

I had finally escaped my misery.

Why?

Why?

Why did you bring me back?

We missed you so much.

We were always enjoying eternal rest.

No, why?

No, Nick, we wanted you to come back and do the podcast with us.

I'm sorry.

Oh, my God.

Nick, I hate this.

I hate this torment.

I hate to say this, Nick.

You look like shit, dude.

I feel horrible.

Oh, my God.

No, Nick, Nick, Nick, just calm down.

Just calm down.

It's okay.

Imagine all of the people you left behind.

You could see them again.

My wife already remarried.

Let me be at peace.

Oh, God.

Oh, my God.

I had no idea.

I'm so sorry.

That was so fast.

This is maybe uncouth to ask.

You died in sort of...

Mysterious circumstances.

We were wondering you could enlighten us as to how you passed away.

I had a VR headset on my face and a belt around my neck, all right?

What more do you want from me?

Jesus, I was finally at peace.

Oh, no, no, no, put me back.

Put me back.

I don't know, but okay, okay.

Uh, go in your grave.

Go in your grave.

That didn't work.

No.

Sleep in your grave.

Oh, no, it's not working.

What?

I've always wanted to kill Nick.

Jesus Christ.

Do it, please.

It's what I want.

Okay, here's a gun.

Okay, I forgot.

You recently joined the NRA.

Is that correct?

Yeah.

It's correct.

Okay, here we go.

Nick.

See you in hell, brother.

Oh, my God.

It didn't work.

I think I'm indestructible now.

Oh, shit.

Oh, my God.

No.

Oh, my God.

Wait, maybe you have to die the way that you died originally.

Here, I'll give you a VR helmet and a pound.

You want me to do this here and we'll view

we'll turn around

okay we'll turn around a little privacy

are you done

can we turn around

it didn't work

we take a trip down memory card lane as we discuss our favorite games that time forgot this week on get played

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

It's time to get played.

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

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

Hello, everyone.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Premiere Video Game Podcast, where we've got something kind of neat teed up for this episode.

We're going to be talking about something from the past.

Yeah, so sit your ass down because we're actually going to talk about something interesting this time.

Yeah.

Wait, what?

This time.

I also don't know how interesting it's going to be.

This is going to be a very, very interesting one.

This one shoots right to the top top of the charts.

It's the number one best episode of Get Played Ever.

So I want to talk to you guys real quick about Ivermecton.

We should,

they feel like we need to bring up in here that I am still reeling from the casual revelation last week when we were talking about Fall of the Series.

And Matt tells us his full name is Matthew Kyle Apodaka because his mom

named him for Kyle Kyle McLaughlin.

It's really funny, right?

It's like it doesn't really inform that much about me, but it also kind of does.

Like, my mom's young, and like, yeah, sure.

I was born in December of 1990, and Twin Peaks had probably come on in,

what, did it start airing in 89 or something?

It was a very Zeitgeistie show at the time.

Everyone was talking about it.

Well, it was like a just thing where she was like, this handsome actor, I love this guy.

Wow.

And Kyle's a good name.

I had never thought about it.

And it just also somehow sort of like firmly plants me as

a Southern California kid because I feel like Kyle is a Kyle's a West Coast name.

Big time.

Yeah, there was definitely an era where Kyle was like the Brayden

that is today, you know.

Yeah.

Kind of a bro name.

There's a huge difference between if you were Matt Appodaka or Kyle Appadaka.

Kyle Abodaka's a different guy.

Kyle Apodaka lives in Venice Beach.

Like he's like

a beach bug.

He's got a podcast, but it's on barstool.

He's way more successful.

He's getting shredded.

We've got some, so we're into June now with our release, right?

This is our first June episode.

It's June.

We're here in June.

Oh, it's summertime.

Is June the one that goes gloom?

Is it June gloom?

They say there's June gloom.

Yeah, that's that's a thing.

I don't know how that's going to say June gloom, April, ugh,

the rest.

I don't know how July I Want to Die.

I don't know how universal June gloom is, but it's definitely a SoCal phenomenon.

Yeah.

Very gloomy.

That marine layer, folks.

Jake, no joke.

Man, I just love the weather and all that kind of crazy weather.

This is the kind of stuff we talk about on the podcast.

This is going to be a very interesting one.

But anyway, I feel like there's some big releases this month.

Am I wrong about that?

Uh, Shadow of the Year Tree

Tree is the big one, but I feel like there's also like the there's the shadow, the Kingdom Hearts remaster, or not remastered, Kingdom Hearts is coming to Steam.

Yeah, that's right.

Which is which is Kingdom Hearts.

I'm calling it.

Hey, Steamdom Hearts.

I love it.

Kingdom Steam.

That sounds like a really graphic sexual.

Yeah.

It's like you

we don't need to we don't have to figure out what it is.

I know what it is.

Look, we don't have to do it.

You're doing shit for two weeks.

You don't have to airdrop this into our brains just because you thought of it.

Yeah.

Medically unsafe.

You put on a crown.

Okay, I'm back on board.

It sounds fine.

Yeah, I didn't realize that there's props involved.

That's pretty good.

And while you're fucking, you just shit like a horse.

You're holding a staff.

Kingdom Steam.

Kingdom Steam.

Guys.

I'm glad we don't have a big fan art community.

Yeah, none of our, luckily, none of our listeners have the gumption.

They don't have the...

That's actually not true.

A lot of our listeners...

In the past, it's kind of died off, I'd say.

I wonder if these people still listen to the show.

There used to be some pretty good fan art.

I

occasionally, and I'd miss seeing it.

I don't think you can solicit fan art.

I think fan art happens when you have fans, and that's what we don't have.

That's why I'm concerned that they stopped listening.

We've got a community, an excellent community on discord.gg/slash get played,

but we don't have fans.

No, no, there's no one who likes the show.

No, that's the issue.

And none of them are patrons of the arts either.

They simply could never.

What?

None of them have any artistic merit either.

Patrons of the arts.

You mean like

executors of the arts.

Yes, they don't seek it out and

they don't make it.

Prove me wrong.

I guess maybe the vibes are strange because we're not hungry.

I'm usually starving at this point.

Speak for yourself.

Oh, you're super starving?

No, I actually ate a big lunch.

Yeah.

I don't feel the hungry vibes.

Normally we spend the first like 10 minutes of the vibes.

what?

Like hungry eyes.

Yeah.

But hungry vibes.

I got what he, I got what he's doing.

No, I know.

Do you know the song?

I know the song.

Are you wondering why I know it?

No.

I work in a grocery store.

Okay, fair.

That's the type of shit you hear in a grocery store.

Shadow of the Urge Tree comes out on June 21st.

So with our calendar, I'm not sure if we certainly would not be able to get have a you know we we do these we play you plays um sometimes at the final for the final episode of each month that would be

i i don't think we'd be able to just turn it around for the the monday afterwards which would be the final but we i think we will talk shadow of the urge tree at a certain point yeah we'll talk about it sometime in july i'm sure um

because i mean

i haven't done this yet But I kind of want to start a new character.

Wow.

It's fun.

I can't.

No, I'm reuniting with my character.

You're reuniting.

I want to

walk back into the closet and see my shit armored

beast lady.

I was hearing that maybe there are cutscenes that are added from the DLC that you might not see if you've beaten certain parts of the game.

Interesting.

By the time you go then to the

I'm not turning away from her.

She got me all the way through.

She she wore the she sat on the throne.

I'm just giving you the information that I have.

I'm letting her I'm letting her live.

All the all these approaches are valid, but it is kind of fun to start a new guy.

I can't wait to see her one eye.

She got that one eye.

Because I kind of

I had a like a sorcerer build before, and that didn't always serve me.

I kind of want to do like a more of a melee build, more of a

new guy.

So you're saying you're willing to commit probably 135 more hours into Elden Ring in order to be able to see a couple of cutscenes from the DLC?

I answer your question with another question.

What do you think I have going on?

Okay.

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That's on the horizon.

We do have a fun topic to talk about today.

But first,

the general topic we want to discuss is is what video games we're currently playing it's time for what are you playing what are you playing hi is me the resident evil merchant i just want to start with a plug i started a twitter account you can find me at resident merch how you boys doing is that real that that is what you said real that is real okay that is real okay thank you they actually i should have asked you i shouldn't have asked the merchant because i'm the

one to be the liaison okay great uh that is that is true.

Why do you think anything I talk about isn't real?

Everything I talk about has happened to me.

No, that's true.

That's your lived experience.

I should not be dismissing that.

But anyway,

I started a Twitter account.

I'm really excited.

I didn't know you could do that with a phone.

So,

so, yeah, just follow me at Resident Merch.

What are you

I'll go first.

I do want to say before I say,

I just have to mention this so it's clear space of my brain.

Nick, those are really cool socks.

Oh, thanks, buddy.

Excellent socks.

Oh, thanks, Resident Evil Merchant.

They got multiple colors.

They're sort of a tan color with multicolored rings around them.

Sort of like a yellow, a green, a row.

But they also have a logo that implies expensive.

Well, I don't know that they're not that expensive.

They got a logo.

Who puts a logo at like three quarters of your nigga?

I'd walk to your car with your keys between your fingers.

Those socks are coming off, dog.

No, these are stant socks.

They're not like a luxury brand, but they're nice.

They're good quality socks.

They're nice color.

Second and most important, they look comfortable.

Oh, yeah, they are comfy.

And this is not a bug.

I just wanted to point it out.

No, they're not a sponsor.

They're really good.

Promo code get plugged.

I also never.

I've never seen

clown shoes that classy before.

Well, I happen to be wearing red Adidas, so I would not characterize them as clown shoes.

Yeah, nice parachute pants, you fucking clown bitch.

Nice try.

You're not going to trick me with that little droopy flower you got there, dog.

I saw you pull up here in your tiny ass car.

Hold on, I need to grab a handkerchief.

No.

I'm back on my bullshit.

Wow.

What does that mean?

I'm back on my bullshit, Heather.

I'm glad you asked what that means.

I've had a little bit of a

reunion.

Yes.

With

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.

You know, reunion's like the thing that they're always seeing, those cloaked guys.

Yeah, sure.

Yeah.

Let me show you despair.

Yeah.

Let me reunion.

I think I've made a choice.

I haven't fully committed to this yet.

If you remember, it's been a few weeks since I talked about it, but previously I've logged about 80 hours in it and I'm not done.

Yep.

And so far, up until this point, I've done every side quest that has come up.

I think I'm done doing that

because it was not becoming that was, it was starting to feel like homework and not fun.

Okay.

And I just want to see the game.

Right.

I think I need to, if I, if I stumble across a side quest that seems interesting and I want to do it, perhaps I shall.

But a lot of the ones that are the same in every region, where it's like, get this tower, you know, unlock this thing, do this.

I might be out on that.

But if it's like a story side quest that seems worth my time, I probably will still do it.

But for now, I think I'm going to be following the blue quest markers, which are the main quest markers.

Because I'm in chapter 10.

I know I'm at the tail end of chapter 10.

I believe there's...

I won't say how many chapters there are in in case somebody doesn't want to be spoiled by how many there are.

I know how many there are.

I think I need to wrap this up because if I'm going to have time to

start a new Elden Ring character or at least reacquaint myself with the controls of Elden Ring, I need time to do that.

And I also,

I have a,

I have a...

Final Fantasy 16 DLC that I haven't gotten to yet.

Yeah.

One, one of the two that they've put out.

I did one of them.

There's another one.

It's like five hours.

I got to get back in there.

You got to get on it.

I get what you're saying, though, because I had the same thing when I was playing through Mass Effect Legendary Edition.

I was playing through those games of just like you reach a certain point and it's like, I've got so many side quests to wrap up.

Yeah.

I just need to be done with this fucking thing.

I'm just going to mainline this.

And you know what?

I'm leveled adequately.

I'm at a power level where I can get to the end game.

I'm just going to,

I don't need to complete all these things for completionist's sake.

But you're going to miss moments like, Cloud, how do I get a piece of paper from across town?

Can you help me find a piece of paper?

The one, can I tell you the ones that are actually killing me?

Yeah,

every area, every region has a this like big mushroom tree house that's where the moogles live.

And one, the moogles in this game are ugly, and I don't like them.

Oh, God's fired.

I don't like the moogles in rebirth,

and I don't remember if they're in remake.

The ones

in

like

in 16 are sort of like the ones that I think look the best.

Or that's what Moogles look like to me.

Sort of a classic Moogle look.

These look like wet teddy bears.

Oh, Jesus.

They look like teddy bears with sort of like almost human faces.

They look very upsetting to me.

I got a picture of one of them.

Yeah, I don't.

Oh my God.

The 16 is the ideal.

They are a little horrific.

Yeah, the 16 one, which is on this side of this frame, I'm showing this this two up.

We've got a Final Fantasy 16 Moogle, and then we've got the Rebirth Moogle.

The Rebirth Moogle looks like.

They have human teeth.

It looks like the Sonic the Hedgehog original...

It does.

Sonic Draft 1 from the films.

Which, by the way, the other day I was going through and culling a bunch of photos on my phone, and I found so many photos of original Sonic from the trailer drop.

It is insane that that.

I'm at a spot now in my life where I'm like, there's no way that they were going to go with that.

To me, there's no way.

I think it, this, I'm, I'm putting this theory out there first.

The controversy was manufactured.

Somebody should leak the actual Sonic movie.

The one with the teeth?

Yeah, the one with the teeth.

I'm going to say that the controversy was not manufactured because no one making movies is that smart.

Like, the executives making those decision making processes are not that like they're not these fucking geniuses.

And they are dumb enough to change how Sonic looks.

So that's.

I read this book on Sumner Redstone, who's just a real fucking piece of shit.

And, you know,

died miserable.

So

the good riddance to him.

Anyway, so he was.

This is what happened to me if you're not a piece of shit.

Exactly.

He built this whole, but

he built himself this gilded cage and he died inside of it.

Yeah.

Anyway.

It's got all this stuff about all these Hollywood insiders, all these Hollywood power brokers, and then there's this whole this extended thing on Les Moonviz, who was another guy who got, you know, me too and ended up being a huge piece of shit.

Yeah.

But like everyone's like, oh, Les Moonviz is like the genius of programming, he's like the wizard of uh, you know, of network television.

He's got he's got linear TV completely figured out.

And you read all this guy's decision, this guy's a fucking idiot.

He's just making wrong decisions repeatedly, saying the dumbest shit.

He has the dumbest logic behind everything.

Just all these guys are fucking dumb, and they accidentally occasionally stumble backwards into success.

That's that's it.

There's there's the myth of the like genius power broker executive is a myth.

It's exactly a it's a fraud.

You're here.

I wish Ari Gold was real.

Is he the guy from Entourage?

Yeah, he's dumb.

Okay.

But occasionally he says things that are really funny.

Yeah.

And he yells at Lloyd.

Poor Lloyd.

I know.

Poor Lloyd.

Always getting

the ass end of

his vitriol.

But so back to Final Fantasies.

I feel confident that I could wrap this up before Shadow of the Earth Tree comes out if I just keep my nose down.

I did start.

What I did was I had this decision.

I made this decision earlier today,

saved on a different file.

So I'm like, at least I'm up to this point where I have all the side quests done.

If I want to come back and do the side quests, there's not that much story left to do.

I could always go back to this save from this point and then go forward and do the other side quests that I'm maybe going to skip and then experience the story through that.

Through that, if I want to, but who knows if I ever want to.

A little

branch point.

Yeah.

But that, also, I re-downloaded the Mad Max game because Furiosa fucking ripped.

It fucking ruled.

And

I was surprised to see

a couple of characters from the game appear in the movie.

And I played it a little bit.

I think we could say at this point.

Scrodus is in the movie.

Scrodus is in the movie.

Chumbucket is in the movie.

And Chumbucket in the game is like the guy that you go to to like repair your vehicle and like mod your vehicle.

And in the movie, he presents Furiosa with the vehicle.

And I was like, and I knew immediately, I was like, that's Chumbucket.

And I was like, excited to see a guy from a video game.

And then I was like, just George Miller's insane.

I was like, that's so funny that he was like,

I don't like the video game that we made for this movie.

I'm putting Chumbucket in the movie.

I was like, that's great.

That's nuts.

I love it.

I love it.

And

I didn't finish this game when it came out, but I got it and was like, and I had never seen a Mad Max movie, but I was like, the game seems good.

I got a lot of good positive buzz for the game.

Fury Road had come out around the same time.

And I was like, I'll check this out.

And it's a good game.

It's from 2015.

And we're at a, you know,

we're nine years out.

Sure.

That's horrifying.

Games from 2015

don't necessarily look that good anymore.

Wow.

And that game was for PS4

and

whatever, the Xbox One.

It looks its age a little bit, which is interesting.

It's like an early to mid-gen, you know.

Yeah.

This, by the way, is my theory on why the 16-bit graphic style is so prevalent

because

it

tapped out.

Like, nobody was like making sprite-based games after a few releases on like Sega Saturn.

Right.

You know, like Castlevania,

Symphony of the Night, games like that.

Astel?

Is that a game?

I don't remember.

But, like, there's like

an era of games that look a certain way and then they are suddenly kneecapped by the invention of like 3D graphics and all that shit.

But

games from 2015 look often more shitty than games from 1993

because they're going after photorealism and not quite capable of hitting the mark.

I saw a tweet today.

Heather, by the way, you were right.

There is a game called Astol for the Sega Saturn that was a 2D game.

Oh, my nose is bleeding.

This art is pretty cool.

I like this palette a lot.

I saw a tweet today.

that was a it was quote tweeting another tweet

the tweet that it was quote tweeting wasn't from my account?

It was not from your account.

No.

Hey, I don't know how to quote tweet.

I haven't done that.

Your phone can do it.

You learn how to do it all.

All phones can do it.

Good to know.

But it was basically, it was four panels.

It was four different video games.

One was Horizon, Forbidden West.

Yes, I've seen this tweet.

Hellblade 2, God of War, Ragnarok, and The Last of Us Part 1.

And they're like, which of these has better graphics?

And then the quote tweet was, this is actually what's killing AAA development because they were focused in on like the eye and the like eyebrow, like just the corner of somebody's face.

And they all looked to me somebody who doesn't really care about

the highest graphical fidelity, the

attempts at photorealism.

Yeah, that type of stuff.

I was like, I don't really care about this.

They all look the same to me,

but people in the comments were arguing about it.

Right.

And I was just like, what?

This doesn't look better than,

I mean, they look good, but you know what also also looks good?

Kingsglave.

Kingsglave.

You know what's good?

You know what looks good?

The Paper Mario remake.

Yeah, well, how about Animal Well?

I mean, that's a game, and that goes back to what you're saying.

Obviously, we already talked about how that's both a next-gen game and also kind of like this low-flat, lo-fi retro game.

It's both at once, but like that's a look that's achievable by a solo developer, a very talented solo developer, and it looks distinct and it looks beautiful.

I just, I never want to hear anyone ever complain that Nintendo isn't up to snuff with graphics because I think they are doing something right by not trying to be in that space at all.

One of the highest-selling systems of all time.

They don't need it.

Like at this time, like just when you're like, oh, console's probably going to give way to PC or like, we'll all be gaming on our phones by this point.

Yeah.

The idea that in like, and also with an incredibly long life cycle, that the switch would be selling so many switches fucking good job nintendo you really came back from the virtual boy by the way speaking of which they've been in the hole since then i i got real grumpy about a a new york times crossword clue that was uh switch predecessor okay and i was like okay so this is either a clue about like flipping a light switch and so it's like dial or like a knob or whatever or they're saying the switch, but there weren't enough letters for we you to fit for the clue, right?

For this plural clue, it would have to be we use

fucking answer was wheeze, and I was like, okay,

technically, that is a predecessor to the switch, but if you're gonna like, if you're the New York Times, plural, wheeze, plural, switch predecessors, and it was wheeze,

not we, you.

That sucks, it sucks.

Why wouldn't it just be we?

Well, because they wanted, they had to fit the S in there.

Yeah, it had to be plural, but also, like, it was technically wrong.

It was, yeah, that's wrong.

That sucks.

That's the bail.

That's a bad thing.

It's a failing New York Times.

Unbelievable the stuff they put in this, this, this.

But it does speak to how the Wii U has been completely memory hold.

Yeah.

Like, it's just like a generation that does not exist.

Yeah.

I got like nostalgic for it.

I never had it.

I was like, should I just, should I I get this?

And the answer is no.

It's like not worth it.

It's like not worth having.

Well, here's why it's worth having.

Oh.

Because I have one and it is currently hooked up to my television.

Oh.

It allows you to play both Wii and Wii U games in HDMI on a flat screen.

That is true.

So you can just regular play a Wii game like Super Mario Galaxy on your flat screen with an HDMI and the regular Wii controller.

So if you're ever in like a, man, I want to play no more heroes with the original controller mood, you can do it.

I want to play.

Oh, that should have gone on my list for today.

Oh, well.

Well, there was that one Wii game that was like,

it was like one of the first ones that was like a.

It was like a samurai game.

It was like a samurai with like a gun.

I know what you're talking about.

It's a red blade.

Something like that.

Something like that.

Yes, I know what you're talking about.

But that was

kind of like I I didn't know what I talked about, but then it became kind of clear that I was right.

What the fuck was the name of that game?

Hold on, Wii Launch titles, and we'll look this up right now.

I just know, I just like for some reason, if you ask me what a Wii game is, that's like one of the first ones I think of.

But why was that your poll?

Because I feel like you had to do

you had to do weird stuff with the

Wii Mote.

That was a launch title, right?

I think so.

That's why I know about it too.

Red Blade.

What is it, Nick?

Nick's

steel.

Hey!

Steel.

Wow, I was close.

That's pretty good, Heather.

That's pretty good.

Better than I was doing.

Red Blade.

Red Blade.

Red Blade.

I remember thinking it looked cool, but I heard it was bad.

Oh, yeah, it did not play well.

No, no, it's not bad.

Nope, nope, nope.

That's all

those games they were trying to figure out what to do with the Wii Remote, it turns out.

You know what you can do with it?

Hit a home run.

That's about it.

It's fun, though.

Hit a home run, do Zumba, throw it through your TV.

It worked for bowling.

It worked for bowling and and it worked for tennis.

Wi Sports was great.

Wii Sports is awesome.

My mom sent me a photo recently of our family me's because

she pulled out the Wii and was playing Wi Sports with my stepdad.

And she was like, look, we're all here still.

It was very sweet.

That's cute.

Yeah.

Who wants to go next?

Heather, what are you playing?

Well, I'm here to announce

a pretty sad, a bleak day.

Oh, no.

The

newest chapter of Fortnite has dropped.

It is called Fortnite Wrecked.

It is heavily Mad Max-inspired.

Uh, they've got a desert biome, they have Mad Max Max style uh characters in the battle pass, and the combat has become very car-based.

This has been met with

extreme antagonism from the fan base, and

I will have to say, me personally.

Wow.

I have

it.

Also, I believe I read that it is the lowest

populated chapter launch in Fortnite's history.

In order to play Fortnite right now, you have to get into a car and you have to mod it.

You can still play on foot, but it is an extremely difficult game.

And I have not seen hardly any replays of other people playing where the end game isn't at least two cars and one person.

Wow.

Why is this a problem for Fortnite?

Well,

if you're playing ranked matches and you're playing solo,

the only way that you can fire the gun in a car is if you switch from the driver's seat to the passenger seat and then arm the turret.

So you stop driving, switch to the passenger seat and start firing the turret, right?

Yeah.

But if somebody else jumps in your car,

they can fire the turret non-stop.

And then you and this other passenger are technically both

like you can't get out of the car as the driver because they can mow you down with the gun.

They can't get out as the passenger because you can drive over them with the car.

So

there has become this

Also, if you're playing ranked and you team up with another player, that's a bannable offense because ranked is like their professional mode.

So you have created a version of the game which is unplayable if you're on foot, but also you cannot team up with other players.

And it has been, I think, one of the, like there's no,

there's no match that I've been in in solos where people aren't teaming up because it just happens.

Also, getting into a car is one of the only defenses against being driven at.

It sucks, guys.

And I was so bummed out by it that

I got depressed on Saturday.

Like I got depressed because I was like, I've spent the last few seasons of this game meeting up with friends, meeting up with listeners.

playing this foot-based shooter shooting cartoon game and that has sort of constantly like suddenly been taken from me.

And it was the way that I blew off steam and the way that I would like pass, like, like, if I finished a fucking project, I finished a script, I finished an outline, I'd sit down, I'd play a couple rounds of Fortnite and then be on to the next thing because it would give me that dopamine and adrenaline hit.

And instead, I've been fucking like sitting down, playing and being like, okay, is there something I'm not getting?

Is there something I don't understand?

And it just flat out fucking sucks.

The only time I've had fun is with a full squad of people in uncompetitive mode, unranked mode, because it's then it's just a social fuck around game.

But that hasn't been why or how I've been playing Fortnite since I really got into it.

Wow.

So, um,

I don't, I gotta, I gotta find a new game to fill that void in my heart and soul.

Have you considered Apex Legends?

I have considered Apex Legends.

I've also considered Call of Duty because there's a Gundam collaboration happening.

Oh, yes.

I did hear about this.

Yeah.

But neither of those things is

Fortnite.

That's not where any of my friends are.

Yeah.

So yeah, bummed out.

Jonesy, the banana, Peter Griffin, Ariana Grande, LeBron James, Eminem, Venom.

Incredible role, man.

Ranch, I know you like to, I produced a ranch.

I know you like to mess around with Fortnite.

Have you messed around with the new season at all?

Um, honestly, I've been out of town since the new chapter.

Oh, wow, okay.

But I did hop on

when I got back and was immediately overwhelmed by all the car shit.

Wow.

And there's like an arena where you're supposed to mod your cars.

Everything was very confusing.

So I kind of just fell back onto my fallout shelter.

It also sucks because Fortnite has a racing game.

They don't need to put cars in this game.

Yeah.

like

rocket racing.

It's just like

we already could race cars if we wanted to race cars.

And I don't know.

It feels, there's no real effective car counters right now.

I know that they're going to bring some into the game in upcoming updates, but like I shouldn't have to like wait around.

to be able to blow up a car.

And if you're listening to this and you're like, oh, get good, bitch.

well, fine.

Say that to our fucking face, dude.

I'll beat the shit out of you.

So mad, so mad at this guy.

There feels like there's like a whole learning curve to play the game now.

It's like, it feels like a different game.

And it's like, I don't want to take the time to do that.

Yeah.

That's a really interesting decision on their part.

Yeah.

Like, I don't mind it when these updates happen and it's like, okay, all of the mobility has changed.

All the weaponry has changed.

All the POIs have changed.

Like, all that stuff is fine.

But to like the make core, core gameplay is now so dependent on driving is just weird.

And how long is a season typically?

This one goes through the end of August.

The whole summer is driving.

Driving?

I feel like they also were leaning really hard on like, oh, Furiosa is going to make.

so much money.

Everybody's going to be talking about Furiosa.

Everybody's going to have Mad Max's brain.

And instead, it was like, oh, it's a receptive opening, but three podcasters saw it.

Well, I'm also like,

it's funny to me that the world is shocked that an R-rated movie about a desert apocalypse didn't do like

huge numbers at the box office.

Yeah, Fury Road was a big hit.

Yeah, but it's, it's just so, it's the, the Furiosa is so weird.

And I also feel like a lot of people didn't think of Fury Road as part of the Mad Max franchise, or that was their introduction to to the Mad Max franchise.

And it sounds like it was with your, with you.

And so they're just like, ah, whatever.

I saw that one and I liked it.

I don't need to see another one.

Everyone,

go see Fiji.

I've done a couple more Hades runs.

Fun.

I didn't,

I listened to what you guys said and I was like, okay, I'll play a little bit more Hades.

I'm thinking about going back to God of War Ragnarok.

I'm thinking about going back to Final Fantasy Reunion or whatever it's called.

Rebirth.

rebirth reunion

uh but yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna try and fill that uh fortnite void um i want you to actually beat ragnarok so then you can play the valhalla dlc so you could see how they did hades okay because it's it's it's it's great it's very very good okay uh nick what have you been playing

uh Heather, I've been playing a couple of games that are not going to fill that void, knowing your gaming tastes, but they're great for me.

The first one, I talked about this at length last week, uh, Paper Mario, the Thousand Year Door Remaster.

I won't monologue about this again, uh, but I am playing it.

I talked about this before the game came out, uh before the remaster came out.

Uh, I am playing it on the OLED Switch, and it is gorgeous.

It's just the power of good art direction, this GameCube game, um, 20 years old, uh, and you know, they've up-res all the assets, and it, it just, it just looks really, really pretty.

Uh, and uh, great to be back in Rogueport again and hear that, the, that, that theme.

Um, I kind of wish it wasn't $60, but you know, that's Nintendo for you, right?

But

I do wish they could have some of these,

you know,

this is the re-release this game deserves.

This is now accessible to this audience, to a new audience and to people who, you know, played it back in the day and want to play it on modern hardware and it looks better and it's got some quality of life improvements, but also it's not the cost of a full price game, but whatever.

That's just how these things work, I guess.

The other game I've been playing is Chance of Sinar, Chant spelled C-H-A-N-T-S, as I feel like everybody talks about this game out loud has to say, uh, because it is a weird title to vocalize.

Um, and I won't bother to spell senar because that's a made-up word.

Uh, I think S

I

N A R

yeah, very wrong, but

really, yeah,

uh, it was released in C

Nick, I think you have to spell it or C-Y-N.

It is

it does start with an S.

It's S-E-N-N-A-A-R.

Two N's, two A's.

Yeah, it was going to be my next.

I'll give it to you.

Points.

Points to the Resident Evil Merchant.

It was released in September of 2023, but it showed up on...

You already got it.

You already got the points.

I already got it.

All right.

It was released in September of 2023, but it showed up on Game Pass.

And so that's how I'm playing it.

It was developed by

a French developer, Rundisk, which consists of a two-person team, Julian Moya and Thomas Penuel.

I really, really like this game.

So basically what it is, is you're going around this

ancient alien-feeling landscape with these humanoid figures.

Everything is very spare.

It has this art direction that's really distinct and beautiful.

You know, it it uses like these simple, low-poly character models and environments, but just like long, clean lines and this vibrant palette with a lot of like, you know, yellows and oranges.

And I'm sure as the game progresses, we get into more colorways.

But you're walking around and you're exploring the environment and you're talking to characters and everyone there is a language you do not understand that you cannot parse.

And so what you're trying to do basically is decode a language in real time based on the commonalities of how it's used and on various signs and in terms of lines of dialogue and so forth.

And

so it's really cool in the sense that

it's just a fun way to solve puzzles.

I'm just like, I have these little bits of information, whatever.

It's the kind of thing you would do like in a workbook as a kid

in a collection of puzzles when you're killing time before the era of phones, of smartphones.

But like it implemented in this way in this game, it feels like you're discovering this larger world.

and also there's an awesome moment when it first expands and you realize you're not just decoding one language but you're decoding a number of languages and that characters are interacting who don't speak the same language oh and so that's like another and they've all got like different character sets that have like different aesthetics um that you know fit their fictional uh you know

uh civilization um and all that shit is really great and really well thought out and really well realized.

There is stealth in this game, which I was shocked by.

I was like this does not feel like what fundamentally point-and-click adventure to have this element feels pretty pretty uh you know out of left field but it it works and and i i think the overall concept is just so strong that it's it's a really really cool uh you know kind of puzzle-based design um one thing i will say why didn't you hear about this I've heard about this.

This one's, I think, ended up on some people's best of lists in 2023.

And then resurfacing on Game Pass, I was like, you know, I feel like you kind of try to find out people who have tastes similar to yours.

And maybe for our listeners, that's one of the three of us.

And I've heard some of those people talk about chance of Sonar.

I feel like I've heard it.

I think maybe Jason Schreier mentioned it on Transport.

Schreier definitely talked it out on TripleClick.

And yeah, that's someone I looked to.

But it's a

the one thing I will say is that it controls really well with a gamepad.

And it's interesting to me how the default control scheme for basically everything now, even on PC when I'm playing, it feels like I'm just, it's shifted so heavily towards gamepads.

That's where I'm using for everything.

I guess it's because it made me think everything's designed to be multi-platform now, but I do think it's great that

games like this that are made just for you come out.

Yeah.

That is, it's great.

Cause like Pentament is like a similar one that I'm like, that's like a 100% a wagger game.

The was the case of the golden idol.

Yeah.

I was glad that there's like a genre that's like just for you.

Whole bunch of reading, not much to do.

Yeah.

You fucking, you're the guy at school that's like, teacher, you forgot to sign us homework.

I want a worksheet designed as a video game.

I want an assignment.

But looking at the, I was pulling it up on my phone, and the art direction is very nice.

Yeah, it's really nice.

It looks really rich.

It looks like, is that Mobius?

Is that the guy?

Morbius.

Morbius?

That's who you're thinking of.

Michael Morbius.

Wait, isn't there like a French artist who

thought his name is?

The Mobius Strip.

I'm going to tell you right now, you're asking the wrong guys.

No, I know what a Mobius strip.

I know a Mobius Strip, but

I don't know the work.

I just know the term, the Mobius Strip, and I know what it is, but I don't know the artist behind it.

I'm blanking on the name, and I thought maybe it's adjacent.

Who knows?

Whatever.

There's somebody who's listening right now who's yelling it because I think I'm close enough.

Oh, yes, there is a Mobius who's an artist.

Is that the same guy as behind the Mobius Strip?

Ah, okay, great.

Yeah.

So it looks like.

John Giraude.

It looks like Mobius.

Yeah, it kind of does have that sort of look.

Okay, great.

I did it.

Which is the, again, these like lots of thin lines.

Wow.

Wow, really good.

Yeah.

Thank you.

I did it.

Yeah, it's a little more sparse than this, but it does kind of feel alien in the same sort of way.

It sounds cool.

I mean,

I don't have Game Pass currently.

But I've been thinking about re-upping my subscription.

And maybe I would check, maybe I would check that out.

It seems like it could be kind of cool.

I fully disconnected my Xbox and put it on a shelf.

You know what?

I ended up lending my Xbox to a friend.

I have an Xbox Series X, which is a nice piece of hardware, but I was not using it at all.

And I had a friend who's like, hey, we could get a video game system.

I was like, you can borrow mine.

You know what?

Don't miss it at all.

Nice piece of hardware, but I got my PlayStation.

I got a gaming PC as the main thing.

I have no reason for an Xbox

PC.

The exact, I mean, we don't have time to talk about Xbox completely fumbling their entire

ecosystem.

But the fact that there is PC Game Pass, and a lot of those games that come on PC, on Xbox Game Pass, are just ready to go on PC Game Pass as well.

It's like

their hardware doesn't matter.

They're selling a platform.

They're selling a subscription service.

Yeah.

Which I think probably over the long term will be less lucrative than selling hardware, but I don't know.

I don't fucking know.

I don't know.

Hey, I'm not,

I'm not, I'm not a CEO.

Yeah.

They've run the numbers.

They've figured it out.

They know what they're doing.

I didn't realize they ran the numbers.

I wasn't sure that they had done that or not.

They have a history of doing this, though, of just like they have like a foothold, and then the next gen, they just completely blow it.

Like the Xbox 360 was like such like a triumph, you know, and then the Xbox One never was like, what are you doing?

What the fuck is this thing?

Remember it came with Kinect?

Yeah,

remember it came with Kinect.

Was the Xbox 360?

No, the Xbox, the original Xbox was the PlayStation 2's contemporary.

Yes.

Because I was never jealous of the PlayStation, of the Xbox, because I had PlayStation 2.

Yeah.

But

I had PlayStation 2 for way long.

I got my first PS3 was the PS3 Slim, which was about halfway through its

life cycle.

Yeah.

And then even then, I was like, I don't really care about the 360.

I don't really care about the 360.

There's something very Coke Pepsi about comparing the PlayStation mainline, you know, home console naming conventions versus the Xbox line of equivalent of just like PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox.

Then we were at the Xbox

One X, and then we have the Xbox Series S and the Xbox Series X.

It's like so hard to track

what generation you're in.

They are dropping the new Call of of Duty Black Ops 6 day one on Game Pass, and Colin Powell and Bill Clinton are in it.

And I'm like, I am going to play this.

That'll be the first Call of Duty that I start playing from start to finish.

Hop on board, Colin.

I got my own plane.

My friend Jeffrey's driving.

Thank the plane.

Thank the pilot when you jump out.

I had heard a rumor that this Call of Duty features 9-11 as a playable level.

Jesus Christ.

What does that mean?

That you get to do it?

I mean, I don't know.

I don't think that you get to do it.

That would be...

There's no fucking...

We're not that far away.

No.

But I'd, I, because Saddam Hussein is apparently in the game.

Yes, I heard about this as well.

But I'd, and, and the same place where I read that

said that 9-11 was a level.

So you get Colin Powell

like the guy who like fraudulently led us into a war of opportunity with Iraq under the false pretenses that it was in some way connected to 9-11 and had weapons of mass destruction.

Bill played Daniel.

He ducked his hog back into his pants.

Oh, that's fucking awful.

Yeah, I can't wait to play it.

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I eventually got off that roof when the sun rose.

Hey,

let's get into this week's topic.

Okay.

We're talking.

I mean, Heather, you want to to tee this one up?

Well, I was talking about things that I wanted us to talk about.

And you pitched an excellent name for this segment.

And so, or segment, this kind of an episode.

And so I want to use that name.

Wait, you liked my name?

I thought we liked your name.

What?

Didn't we like Heather's name?

We could say both names.

We could say both names.

I have to point something out.

Yeah.

To, this is another one of these things that I'm like, if I don't say this, I'm going to be distracted.

Both of your shoes basically make Sonic.

That's true.

Heather has blue shoes, and I have red shoes.

But Heather's is like blue with a little bit of white.

And

Nick has red.

Nick has red.

Mine could just be Sonic's shoes.

Yeah.

And then the rest of Sonic's body could come from.

My shoes

have a Japanese release of Patrick sneakers, and they are Gundam sneakers.

Oh, sorry.

So they have the logo on the outside.

They're very, they're very cool.

Yeah.

So for me, looking at Nick's shoes, I saw his shoes as char shoes and my shoes as Gundam shoes.

I'm wearing Crocs.

And this is just, I just want to point this out for what it's like for the listener, how we record.

I've pointed out two things that are on the ground because I'm avoiding eye contact with everything.

So

the segment or the idea behind the episode is

the way I pitched it was Games That Time Forgot.

Games that Time Forgot.

Which Nick was like, I think it should be called rise from your rise from your grave.

Yeah, I did have the pitch that we do, like the altered beast thing, rise from your grave.

And honestly, I like

maybe it's both of the things.

Maybe it's games that time forgot.

Rise from your grave.

Yeah, or stay buried.

What?

Wait, so there's like an option.

The game

can either rise from its grave or it can be grave.

Or it stays buried.

Okay.

Well, that's.

Maybe we don't need to do that.

I don't.

I Stay in hell.

Stay in hell.

It's just an opportunity for us to talk about games that meant something to us

that

maybe

have not become long-term franchise IP, like that maybe we're one-offs or maybe we're two-offs.

And then they kind of disappeared.

They're not in the public consciousness anymore.

And I know that we've been gaming for a long time.

So I wanted to be able to talk about these older games.

No, I love it.

And I'm excited to hear what everyone has.

And I'm excited to share what I got on my side.

But it's like the, it's like,

yeah, it's so compressed and distorted.

It sounds like shit.

I saw a YouTube video

just last night.

There was a Nintendo data leak

a couple years ago or something.

And people have just been going through some of these files.

And one of the things in the leak was uncompressed Nintendo 64 Star Fox

voice recordings.

Whoa!

I'll have to find Incent because it was very weird to hear cocky little freak as clear as day.

It was very strange.

Do a barrel roll.

Yeah.

It sounds like Charlton Heston.

She's like,

but I just had to, I saw that last night on YouTube.

That's cool.

Wow.

I love YouTube.

I do love it too.

I love that

Galaxy Star Cruiser video.

I have to watch it.

I haven't seen it yet.

I know it's four hours long.

It's Picture 2024.

I pitched it to my wife.

I was like, there's this video everybody's watching, but I don't think you want to watch it, but everybody's talking about it.

So I thought I'd talk to you about it and see if you want to watch it.

And I tell her about it.

And I'm like, it's four hours long.

And she's like.

How many views does it have?

And I'm like, it's like four million in four days when we, when we, when I told her about it.

and she was like, I guess I'll give it a shot.

And so we sat down on the couch, turned it on, and watched two hours of it.

And I was like, I can't believe, she's like, I can't believe we're doing this.

And it was so entertaining.

Yeah, it's riveting.

Yeah.

Kenny Nicholson.

Yeah.

It's great work.

I will watch it.

I'm excited to see it as somebody who loves

theme parks.

Yeah, theme parks, disasters.

Yeah, I love all of it.

I guess I can kick us off.

Oh, please.

So

I don't know if I've talked about this game here on the show before, but there was a puzzle game that came out on sort of PS3

and not puzzle like

solve a puzzle.

Puzzle like Tetris.

Got it.

Okay, because I was ready.

I was.

No.

No, no, no.

It's never going to happen.

Never going to happen.

But this was like a digital release PS3 game

called Trash Panic.

And imagine Tetris, right?

Yeah.

You've got

your sort of cylinder on screen where parts are falling, pieces are falling from the ceiling.

Trash Panic was a physics-based puzzle game where you had to try and take these randomly assorted pieces of garbage and put them into the trash in such a way that it wouldn't overflow.

But the pieces, again, had physics.

So when you would smash them into the bottom of the screen like dropping a Tetris puzzle piece,

it would sometimes break shit underneath it and compress those lines.

Yeah.

But not in a way of like, oh, if you fit, if you fit puzzle pieces together, then they'll clear.

Right.

Like if I'm piling a bunch of wood on one side of the screen and then I get a refrigerator comes up, if I drop the refrigerator on the, on the wood, it'll crush all the wood.

Splinter the wood, yeah.

Right?

So you like would save heavier items for later in the game.

It also had a mechanic where you could set the trash on fire.

But if you if you set the trash on fire and you you burnt too much, it would ruin like the world would fill with with carbon and smoke and you couldn't play the rest of the level.

Um,

this game was my like full-blown addiction for like three months.

Wow, I loved Trash Panic so much.

Did you pull up images of it?

I did, yeah.

It's it's somewhere in between combat and puzzle because you were smashing shit at other shit,

but you also were trying to use your brain just enough to be like, okay,

tires, yeah, that's the game.

Wow.

So, like, tires would,

if they burned, would release more soot.

So, you'd be like, I can't burn right now because there's too many tires in my trash can.

In the image that I'm looking at right here, the thing that you're about to put in the trash is a playground slide.

That's great.

Well, also, it would scale up.

Like, it would start with, like, you know, you'd be playing, like, dropping toilet paper rolls and like desks would be the biggest thing, right?

But then later, you would be in a, like your, your screen would be a trash container the size of a street and you'd be like dropping cars and playground slides and like refrigerators and like parts of buildings.

It was

very, very unique.

Like there hasn't been anything like it afterwards.

And it didn't become a franchise.

And I think it's locked on PS3.

Like I don't know that it was released anywhere else.

Yeah.

I didn't do my research ahead of time, so I didn't look it up.

But it also had a pretty catchy soundtrack.

It's one of those games that, like, I feel like it's almost like an arcade game when you're a child that you tell people about by the time you get your friends to the arcade, the machine is gone.

And then you're like, I swear there was a game where you dug a you dig.

It's like dig, dug.

Right.

But nobody believes you.

It's very in line

with your taste as

the number one

Garbador

stan.

I'm going to read a little bit from the

Wikipedia here.

Trash Panic is a puzzle video game for the PlayStation 3, developed by the Japan studio of Sony Interactive Entertainment and directed by Taro Matsuda.

It was released in 2009 on the PlayStation Network Download service and has been compared to EA's Tetris on the PS3.

The object of the game is to compact items of garbage, not remove rows of blocks.

So yeah, it's locked on the PS3.

Like it never came out anywhere else.

And

that's it.

Like

a stream of

from Wikipedia.

A stream of garbage is carried via conveyor belt towards a garbage can in the middle of the street.

And the object of the game is to break down the garbage by strategically placing it into the can based on the items available before that fills to overflowing.

If three pieces of undamaged garbage fall out of the trash can, the game will end.

That was another funny part of the game.

So, like, let's say you're like trying to put like paper towel rolls at the top of your garbage can and the music's getting tense and that you can't burn anymore because there's going to be too much fire.

Like, a paper towel roll falls out of the trash can, the whole game would go into slow motion and push in on the paper towel roll

hits the ground and then like pull back out to like continue the antics.

Wow.

I wonder if I could still download it on PS3.

Maybe, I don't know.

It'd be interesting to

hook up my go through the trouble of hooking up my PS3

to download it.

I actually don't think the store is active anymore.

Probably not.

I don't remember if they shut it down.

That sounds awesome.

It was a super fun.

What a shout-out.

It was a super fun game.

So, my first game that Time forgot,

please rise from your grave.

Is Trash Panic.

I love that.

Matt, how about you?

Mine is, I feel like

mine's not as obscure as that.

Well, we don't need to out-obscure that.

We're just games that are personally meaningful.

Yeah, I had so much fun that summer playing fucking Trash Panic.

This is a game that

I really, really liked.

I don't even know that I finished it, but I own it on PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Switch.

And this was a game that I was like, this is, for some reason,

when I got that game,

I was like,

this is a game for this game's for grown-ups.

And I think I was an adult when I bought it.

But I was like, this is not your regular kind of game.

This is a little more...

This is a little more adult.

Rockstar Games is LA Noir.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

I was kind of like, this is gonna, they're gonna make a bunch of these.

Fuck, I forgot about a lot of them.

I was like, they'll do like Chicago noir.

They'll do New York noir.

They'll just do a bunch of this because this is, this is good shit.

You play as the guy from Mad Men.

I can't remember the actor's name, but I remember a very specific line that he said on Mad Men to pick up a woman.

He just goes, Ken Cosgrove, accounts.

And then they leave.

His name is Ken Cosgrove on the show.

Very good.

Very funny character, very good actor.

He's the star of this game, and you're a detective.

And there's like a really, like, I know people make fun of this because it wasn't perfect, but I think they were like really on to something with like the interrogation system and that cool.

It was a little janky and

abrupt at times.

Because

the performances are all performance captured.

So you have to really, really lock in on the characters' faces when you're interrogating them to see if they have a tick of some kind.

And sometimes you can't really tell.

So you guess a lot and

you could either fail or get lucky that you did it.

But I liked the setting.

I love LA, baby.

Yeah.

I love LA.

I love driving around.

Hey, that's the thing.

The things in that game that work are all the stuff that Rockstar just does well already, like traversal and making cities feel alive and things like that.

But like, their new angle was you're solving crimes.

Yeah.

And some of them were very, very grisly.

And this is around the time, too, I feel like true crime type stuff was becoming very popular.

Yeah.

Like just in the zeitgeist.

And I don't know.

I was, for some reason, was like.

They'll probably make one of these every five years.

They'll have a new noir game in this year.

And this one, like another one of their games, Bully, has just kind of fallen off

of their own radar because right after this, this game came out between

Grand Theft Auto 4, Grand Theft Auto V.

Grand Theft Auto V

was before Red Dead Redemption 2, I think.

Yes.

But once then...

Grand Theft Auto online becomes a thing.

There's no way that they'll ever make anything else until Granted Auto 6.

Uh, I'd be surprised if we ever got a Red Dead 3, for example, but there's no way in hell we're ever getting a new noir game because I don't, I don't think it was, I don't think it sold gangbusters either.

Um, but I felt like it was like pretty, pretty critically well received

for what it is.

I know that some of it's janky, it's probably like the solid B of a game, if if I'm being honest, but um, I really, I really enjoyed it.

I liked walking around and driving uh in you know, those old cars.

Well, also, there aren't a lot of like,

I feel like there aren't a lot of period games specific to that era, even though it's something that's explored a lot in like film and television.

It's like there aren't a lot.

I guess that the,

I never really played the mafia series, but the mafia games were also period games, right?

There's the same sort of era.

Yeah, same.

I recently, well, not recently, like in the last year and a half, had played a little bit of mafia definitive edition

and it did sort of scratch that itch i was like oh this is like yeah like 20s 30s era i was like this is pretty cool um but i would like i don't know i would like to see a little more

i like i like being a detective it's it's pretty it's pretty fun i like and i like detective stories so it was cool that there was a game that you get to do that the two things i remember about lay noir are one the cars were hard to drive which i found really satisfying yes because cars from that era are hard to drive sure Like it shouldn't be like cornering like a fucking 2024 sports car.

It should feel awful to drive that car.

The other thing is that even though it was not a one-to-one

Los Angeles accurate map, there were neighborhoods that were basically kind of the same.

Yes.

And at the time that that game came out, I was living up in Hollywood and I

drove and I knew my house was super old.

And I drove to basically that block and I was like, that's basically my house.

Wow.

That's that's basically my actual house.

There's a, I mean, they do that so well in, in, in those games.

There's a, there's a corner in, I mean, there's a lot of LA represented in Grand Theft Auto V, but there's a corner right by where I live.

Yeah.

That is in

Grand Theft Auto V that I've seen people make TikToks that don't live here that are like, that's the corner from Grand Theft Auto V.

And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no.

That's, that's, that's where I live.

It's from the, it's from real life.

The game copied it.

But my, my first entry for this is

the LA Noir franchise.

Even if they just like did it a couple.

What if, imagine LA Noir like 1970?

That'd be tight as hell.

I mean, oh, that's an interesting way to do it, but you did it in different time periods.

Yeah, it'd be you could do it in LA.

You could do different cities, different time periods.

I would love to see another one of them.

You could do the era of serial killers.

Yes.

Like, like classic 70s

fucking police story and like have dudes in like 1970s cars fucking trying to like solve crimes.

That would be great.

Yeah, yeah.

Really, really good.

Also, why aren't there any games set in like the madmen era?

Like, why aren't there 1950s games?

Because they didn't have them then.

I guess so.

They didn't have them, so they can't be in it.

Yeah, I agree.

i think i yeah i'm trying to think of like it'd probably be hard to sell a game

that i just i think probably the the the when mad max was at its apex of relevance you maybe could have sold something that probably would be hard they say mad max

um uh everyone's too mad calm down

go off

um do you guys know though i i think i think it's just it's like people publishers would be like reticent to be commit all the resources to a triple-a game that's like yeah who's a they want science fiction and fantasy.

That's what kids want.

They still think of these things as toys.

And after

saying that I thought it was like a game for adults, what I mean is I enjoyed the game, but I don't think it's fun.

It is not, I'm thinking it's funny,

make no mistake.

I think it is a good game.

It's not a fun video game, but it is like a, because like also some of the crimes are like very intense.

Yeah.

You're always like, Jesus Christ.

And then you're like, oh, that was like, I guess I did, I am in a new area or like I did a new thing.

I'm becoming a better detective.

But I would like to revisit it and, and which I can, it was on everything.

I don't think the switchboard is that good, but I got it for like $18 or something.

Oh, okay.

My memory is there would be things like, so like you'd be interrogating someone.

They'd be like, yeah, I've lived in this old house for 20 years.

And you'd be like, you son of a bitch, you're lying.

All right, I did punch my wife.

The developer, Team Bondi, I looked this up.

They were Australian-based, and they down under.

They were down under, but unfortunately, they went under.

They folded after one game.

Apparently, part of it was that they were shitty bosses and the workers were up.

Hey, you know what?

Workers rise up.

Fuck that.

More like L-A-R-NAR.

I got one.

I'm going to go way back in the Wayback Machine to 1984.

Holy cow.

Back before.

Go off, George Orwell.

You're in your thought police now.

Not that kind of 1984.

We won't be using any news speak here.

No, I'll be using the King's English to talk about Raid on Bungling Bay.

This was a top-down

helicopter schmuck that was released for the Commodore 64 and was published by Broderbund.

Where's it, Broderbund?

How do you say that?

I didn't realize I don't know how to say it aloud.

Anyway, it was later ported to the Famicom and the NES, but apparently was really successful in Japan on the Famicom and sold more than the Commodore 64 version.

But the Commodore 64 version is what I knew.

And this game is notable for me personally because it is the first video game I ever remember playing.

Whoa.

As a little boy.

Holy cow.

And also, I would learn this later.

It was Will Wright's first game design.

Will Wright made this game, and then it would inspire him to make Sim City, and I'll talk about why.

So it's got this helicopter that you move around and it's kind of free-roaming.

The animation is really simple, but it's pretty damn good for an 8-bit computer that was less powerful than the original NES.

And like I talked about the free-roaming, it is not a continuous strolling schmupp in the sense that you're always moving vertically or horizontally.

You have a whole map that you can just sort of move around and choose where you're going to go.

And what you're doing is you are, as this helicopter, you're taking off from an aircraft carrier and you are bombing targets on the ground as part of the war effort.

Apparently, it's like an, there's an, it's an alien civilization.

I never picked up on this.

I had never had any sense.

It looks like you're just on Earth, but

I guess it's an alien planet and you're trying to blow them up so that they don't invade Earth or some, that's the story or whatever.

I never knew any of this as a kid.

Anyway, as you progress, the enemy will get a more powerful arsenal and, you know, you're all on the same map, but they'll start having like, you know, jets and

attacking more aggressively.

And so there's some strategy.

Again, this is stuff I did not pick up on as a child, but I'd learn of later.

But like in the order in which you destroy buildings would affect things.

So like a big part of it is like you're taking out infrastructure.

So you can destroy like a missile battery to take out the weapons that are directly attacking you, but you also go after a factory that is like kind of that the

uh that there that is producing units.

And so that will like, you know, kind of overall slow things down and give you more time to accomplish your mission so you had those sorts of strategic considerations and apparently has different endings as well which i also never saw no um but it it was just like a really cool and you know very simple game because of the era but like had some like some real design consideration behind it And then as far as the SimCity side of it goes, where it ultimately leads there, this is from a Damiano Gurley.

I apologize, I don't know how to pronounce their name, on their blog, Genesis Temple.

I'll read a little bit of this.

Will Wright developed two tools to make the game, Cheddid, a character editor, and Wedded, a world-building editor that let one use the characters from the other.

It was Weddit that eventually evolved into Sim City when Wright started researching urban planning.

Thanks to a raid on Bungling Bay's good sales, he had enough economic independence to start working on such a daunting project.

So again, it's like this way back in the 80s, but it's like a solo dev like builds his own thing.

It's like, all right, hey, now I can make this other game.

Wright reportedly had more fun designing the buildings in the bay and the various ways in which the industries are connected rather than the shoot-'em-up part.

And it's also worth noting that the original C64 version of the Sim of SimCity graphically looks pretty close to Raid Unbungling Bay, which is true.

If you look at the original PC SimCity, it looks like a map from the game.

I actually should just bring up a still for you.

But it was a, yeah, it's a game that

I think about.

You know, a game my dad showed me, a game that made me be like, I like video games.

And then it's also a game that I feel like has kind of disappeared from the collective consciousness, except for the little bit of trivia that it was Will Wright's first game.

That's right on Bungling Bay.

I love this.

I just want to say this is great.

I'm enjoying this.

I'm enjoying listening to these things.

I'm enjoying, you know, in Matt's case, remembering the game, in your case, hearing about this game.

Like,

this is fun.

This is fun.

I liked hearing about yours, Heather.

Thank you, Matthew.

I like hearing about that too.

Are you going to show us?

I'm trying to bring up a decent image, yeah.

The problem is there's so low res because it was like a 320 by 200 screen so it's like you know but you can kind of get a sense of it there there's a little helicopter interesting there's like a factory you can blow up um but yeah it does like the the grid sort of grid based design and like kind of the uh you know not crude for its era but crude by modern standards uh you know sort of uh

all the all the streets and roads are connecting it ends up kind of looks like a proto sim city That's really cool.

It is interesting to see something like that because, yeah, it looks crude, but for the time, that was probably like pretty mind-blowing.

Yeah.

Like, there's even that perspective.

It looked amazing.

Yeah.

Wow.

SimCity has fallen off, hasn't it?

That's not on my list, but like, I feel like the last SimCity game was on iPad, and it was not a SimCity game.

Yeah, I think they, they, like, as EA is wont to do, they kind of, like, you know, just nuked one, nuked a franchise they acquired.

And then people got really into Cities Skyline.

And then, but I understand City Skyline 2 has now started doing some of the stuff that SimCity was doing, then that's pissing off their fans.

So it's, it's like, whatever, circle of life.

Well,

uh, yeah, do we, we got some more?

Yeah, I was gonna say, speaking of EA, whoa, uh,

they are behind the uh publication of the game I'm gonna bring up next, which, um, you know, I, I ragged on racing games inside of my combat game, sure, um, but that doesn't mean I don't like racing.

And in fact, some of my favorite video games of all time have been racing racing games, including the Burnout series.

Wow.

Now, Burnout was developed by Criterion Games and published initially by Acclaim and then by EA.

And there was a run of Burnout games in the early 2000s.

I'm talking Burnout, Burnout 2, Point of Impact, Burnout 3, Takedown, Burnout Revenge, Burnout Legends.

Burnout Dominator and Burnout Paradise, where like all of those games are published in between 2001 and 2008.

that is an enormous amount of burnout games

my favorite burnout game is burnout three i believe um yeah that's the one i remember which uh which was a racing game where if you wrecked an opponent's car they could fly off the the the the off the guardrails into the horizon and gameplay would slow down for just a moment while you watched them wreck and then you would fly back into your car and keep racing.

There was also an additional mode that was the most fun where you would see

an intersection with like traffic, like a semi, a couple of cars, maybe a gas station.

And your job was to do the most amount of financial damage to this intersection by racing a race car into that intersection.

And then once you had collided with enough cars and caused enough chaos, then you could detonate your car, blowing it up and like exploding the gas tanks of nearby cars to further wreck cars.

This was like at the time, it was graphically super impressive because often in a racing game, there were two states of a car.

There was

racing the car or it is gone.

Like it's exploded.

Like

if you're playing a game like,

what's the one that's got those really good beach vibes?

the uh the sega game uh

not cruise uh

daytona dayton i mean they tona uh daytona works sega rally sega rally uh there's there's a game on that looks like a sprite-based game that i pole position no sure pole position all these games are basically like if you go off the road your car just explodes yes um techno cop

Techno cop

what

why did we roar from the earth

You're not trying to hang on.

I'm trying to look through Sega Racing to outrun.

Outrun.

That's it.

That outruns the beachy vibe one.

Anyway,

though Burnout is available on Nintendo Switch, it's available on Xbox One, it's available on PlayStation 4, the only game that's been released in the modern era is 2018's Burnout Paradise Remastered.

So this is essentially a dead IP.

Yeah.

And it's a real shame because, like, racing games have an excellent, like, racing online is super fun.

Um, I don't know how burnout specifically would work with the, like, slowdown mechanic if you're racing against online opponents, but being able to race cars that can be completely wrecked or

setting up these like Rube Goldberg machine

explosions, like all of that could live in a higher graphic fidelity era, like PlayStation 5 or the, what's it called again?

Xbox One S?

Series X and S, I think we're on now.

Series S, Series X.

Series, Series X.

Good sign that

we don't know this.

Good sign for Microsoft.

It also had a fun soundtrack.

Like, the burnout games were they were a good fucking time.

But I feel feel like people don't think about nor talk about the burnout games anymore i know i know the the the the series is certainly i haven't thought about it in a while but i the series is certainly remembered fondly and i remember that burnout three being a big deal um the i wonder if it's a thing because i know this has happened with other racing games i haven't done an investigation on this this one but like

Since the thing that happens now is like they put these things online and then you're buying a bunch of downloadable cars, right?

Like and and that that's how they're they're monetizing these things.

I I know that some automakers are skittish about licensing their vehicles if they're going to be destroyed.

Yes.

So I wonder if that could be part of it.

Well, that maybe that is a part of it, but I don't remember the burnout games featuring realistic cars.

Yeah, but I more mean that like that, but they is part of the calculation of why, again, because everything sucks, but like why we're not making this game is like, is like, well, we want it to be a live service game where people can buy more vehicles.

And how are they going to buy more vehicles if if we can't sell them a McLaren, you know, or a Ferrari?

That does suck.

That depresses me just to think.

I don't know if that's what happens, but I just know that that's probably the, that's kind of calculus.

Nick just diagnosed the problem, and it sounds like it's, we're in hell.

That's what it is.

I see this type of TikTok a lot.

And I don't know if

I feel like this is going to be one of those things where.

I'm going to describe what this is.

And I feel like when anyone ever describes what their algorithm shows them, it kind of tells, it's like very personal.

Okay.

I see this type of TikTok a lot where Let me guess.

Can I guess?

You're walking down a street of Pompeii and they're like, Pompeii villas often featured mosaics in their lobby.

Let's look at one now.

And it's just like five minutes of like lengthy shots of a Pompeii mosaic.

Did I tell you this for anything?

All right, great.

It's

it's um it's from a video game.

I don't know what video game it is, or it's video game graphics at least.

It's usually like a ramp and like a wall, wall, a tall wall.

And they're like, let's see what car

can get over the wall.

It's like Track Mania or something.

Maybe.

I've seen those.

They do different types of cars.

Some cars make it, some cars don't.

And then it tells you the percentage of your chance of survival.

I've seen these exact.

We have an overlap in our algorithm right there.

God.

Because I watched this and I'm like,

there's something spicy going on in my brain about this.

There's something with this.

Have you seen the ones where it's like

a car is like in traffic behind a semi and another semi crashes into it?

And it's like, what are your chances of survival?

I see crash ones as well.

Yeah.

But it's a video game.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

But I bring it up because I'm always, I am, it'll stop me in my tracks.

I will just see what car is going to, what car is going to survive.

But I could see, you know, if in the case of burnout, if certain car companies are like, I don't want you crashing my cars in this damn thing, it would be bad, but they can't stop people making making content.

No, they can't.

Yes, okay.

So, speaking of EA, oh, wow, in a row,

EA used to do it.

EA used to be a market in the game.

It used to be a mark of like, not necessarily a mark of quality, but you kind of felt like they were like, I don't know, they were the big dogs at one point.

Like, they were making stuff and like that you were excited about at least.

EA

had an offshoot,

had a different studio as well called EA Sports.

Big.

Oh, I remember big, yeah.

My thing is actually not a game.

I want them to bring back EA Sports big.

This is the SSX franchise.

SSX in particular is the one that I want them to bring back, but they had NFL Blitz.

Right.

Or not NFL, NFL Street.

NFL Street.

They had NBA Street.

They had all these great action sports games.

In particular, SSX, which is the one I will highlight.

SSX, I mean, there are a lot of snowboarding games that are very similar to SSX.

I think 1080 on the...

Every snowboarding game that I think is worth a damn is basically you start at a...

at the top of a slope and you snowboard down a long slope.

That's it.

Well, I think think that's conceptually how the sport works.

That's how sport works too.

But I guess they're not, yeah, I guess you can't really go further than that, right?

You have to do it that way.

Fucking dude.

It's not like Tony Hawk where you can go around a school.

Unless there was like a snowy school, I wouldn't, but here's the thing.

If they made a game like that, I wouldn't ask that many questions.

I wouldn't be like, this doesn't make any sense.

You'd still also be on a slope to get some momentum going.

Yeah, I guess so.

Yeah.

You need to be on a slope.

So that's you start up and you end down.

That's how the game goes.

They're all basically like this.

They're all different degrees of fun.

Some of them are more

simi than, I guess not semi, they're all pretty,

I don't know, action sportsy, but they're not as cartoony as SSX got.

They're more

like an arcade experience.

Yes.

SSX

started off as fun, but kind of normal.

Then the second game in the franchise, SSX Tricky, they were like, relicensed?

It's tricky by run DMC.

You're going to hear this on a loop in every single level of this game.

And we have voice actors, some people that you know, David Arquette being one of them, and you can do the worm on your snowboard.

We used to have it all.

We used to, we used to, we really lost something

when they stopped making games like this.

Because an SSX3

is fun, is good,

is a little less cartoony than SSX Tricky,

has more of a soundtrack, like a Tony Hawks Pro Skater soundtrack type of thing.

And then I think they just lost the plot completely, and now nobody's making these snowboarding games.

Well, we've also talked, both of us have talked fondly about the NBA Street franchise, and that's one that's completely disappeared, but those games were really fun.

NBA Street, NBA Street, Volume 2, it was just called, right?

Yes, and they did, I think, a Volume 3 as well, and I didn't mess around with Volume 3.

But the thing about these games is, yeah, it's sure, it's fun to play Madden, it's probably fun to play

NBA 2K, NBA 2K,

the basketball portion, not the managing your career portion.

Um, but if there was a managing your career mode in as in um NBA Street, I would think it'd be kind of funny, it'd be kind of fun, yeah.

My Yeti Snowman having to go to a beats by Dre party, yeah, your entire team of shacks, yeah,

your team of three shacks.

That was my favorite thing about when you get it, you'd be able to level up in that game is that you could increase your height.

Like that's the thing that happens in a career.

It's like, oh, yeah.

Like you was six foot five, but now he's seven foot eight.

Ending the season at seven foot eight, Madam Badaka.

Not a single dunk all year.

But I liked those games, and I liked the arcade-y energy that they brought in into sports because I'm not like a huge sports guy.

I'll sit down and I'll watch us.

You know, I like baseball, but

they really cracked it with baseball with this because I think baseball is like too, there's already too much going on.

Yeah, I know some people like, was it Super Mega baseball, which I've never messed around with?

Yeah, I've never hearing it.

Yeah, but

I don't know how it plays firsthand.

But I want them to, I think

we should

rise from your grave.

EA Sports, big.

SSX was a PS2 launch title, right?

Am I remembering that?

Yeah.

That's right.

SSX, very good.

I've been

that they didn't even because i think ssx

was ssx 3 i think on ps3

i think it was for both playstation 2 and playstation 3 because i believe it sort of did push it it pushed the ps2 quite a bit because they they they made those snow physics look pretty good um i'm surprised they haven't just ported it or you know one of the later entries the last SSX game was for the Wii.

It was a Wii exclusive.

Wow.

What happened to us?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Don't remember remember what it was called.

One of the best snowboarding games that exists is on the N64, and it's called Snowboard Kit.

Oh, yeah.

And it's like, there's no business being that good.

Does this one?

You start at the top of a slope and then you go to the top and you go to the bottom.

Sometimes there are ramps on the slope.

I think that's what I was trying to do.

Yeah, they'd be part of it.

There's obstacles and things.

It's not just going up and down.

But you do tricks, you can do spins and stuff.

And I liked

the way it it felt.

It felt so good in those games.

It was like they found their own sort of

Tony Hawk pro skater.

Like the way that feels to play, that feels so good and so specific.

SSX had their own version of it that also felt very good.

And I just wish I would do anything.

I would do anything for a new SSX.

I love to hear this.

Wow.

I'm going to go back in the Wayback Machine again.

This guy's time.

This time lives back in time.

Back to 1992.

Wow.

Not that far back.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah.

I'll tell you something.

If it's a year that I don't remember, it was a long time ago.

So 1992, I'm playing a lot of PC RPGs.

This is the genre I've maybe like, you know, as I've gone from little kid to tween, I feel like I've maybe graduated to playing,

and I've certainly done some on console as well.

I've messed around with three three pubes.

Or Dragon Warrior, it was localized as in the U.S.

and Final Fantasy on the NES.

I'll ignore that.

And then on the PC side, I'm playing your wizardries and your Might and Magics.

But I was also playing this game called Darklands.

This was a microprose RPG that was set in 15th century medieval Germany.

Wow.

And it heavily draws on German history for its setting down to using old Germanic names for things, old Germanic currency.

You've always been like this.

I did not know what it was in for because I was just like, oh, cool, new PC RPG.

It got a good review in Computer Gaming World or whatever.

It's like, that looks cool.

I want to play that game.

I love the idea of like baby Nick reading.

Computer Gaming World magazine, probably at 7-Eleven or something, so that he didn't have to buy it.

Can I buy this magazine?

And he sees this thing and he's like, oh, wow, look at this German RPG.

It's adorable.

That is very sweet.

I'm in the same 7-Eleven playing Street Fighter on a milk crate.

About to kick his ass.

So there was a, there was an, I don't know if this acronym persists, but there was a thing you would run into in

PC gaming back in the day, RTFM, read the fucking manual.

And if you were on like a BBS or like a, like a news group, it was very rude or like an early message board and you're like, hey, how do I quick save?

Someone might reply RTFM because it was taken

as a given that you were going to read like oftentimes a hundred plus page manual prior to even playing the game.

There were no tutorials built into anything.

There were no tool tips.

There was nothing within the game that told you how to play the game.

This one was that like to the nth degree.

It was so fucking complicated.

It had so much going on, so many integrated systems.

And it was also super buggy in a way that you sometimes didn't know what was a bug and what was a feature.

It was a really disorienting experience, but it was so ambitious that it's a game that's become beloved by a lot of people and a game that I remember fondly.

There's still a community of people who play it today.

I was looking at the Steam store earlier today because it's on Steam, it's on GOG, and

there's still a very active community just telling people how to play this game that's completely inscrutable.

So they stopped telling people to read the fucking manual.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Now there's a much more helpful and much, it's weird that

that element of gaming fandom has become less toxic.

But I'm glad the internet isn't like that anymore.

Yeah, I know.

It has this incredible character creation engine that is still like so, so good.

And I feel like there, you know, you see elements of it certainly with the Elder Scrolls games, which were influenced specifically by this, but and some other role-playing systems.

There's parts, there's elements of this in Mass Effect.

But like your personal history and role-playing in terms of crafting your character is as important as your stats.

It's more focused on that than in terms of distributing skill points, points, although that is an element.

So for instance, like how you are born determines what occupations are available to you, whether you're born, you're the lowborn or born as a noble.

You decide at which age your character is going to begin their journey and you're making like a party of four.

And that determines what skills they're able to accrue over the course of their lifetimes.

So if you like you want, you can start them off at age 50.

So they've spent a whole lifetime like as like a hermit and then as a scholar and then they appear as a bandit where they were you know robbing people on the streets and they were accumulating all these different skills, but they're also old.

So they're like they're they're physically frail and and they're they're you know much much less likely to survive or you can begin at a younger age where you're much more uh vital, but uh you know again, you haven't spent as much time.

Maybe you spent five years in the military as a low-born soldier.

So you have skill at pole arms, but you don't have anything beyond that.

This game sounds like a fucking rule.

It's insane.

It's insane.

But there's things like, so there's an element of like being literate is a skill.

So you can have characters in your party that don't read or write.

And in fact, it's maybe

sometimes like a smart calculation to be like, you know what?

I'm going to have one guy who's a, who like was a, it was an apprentice priest or an apprentice nun.

And so like, you know, understands saints, which is a big element of

this game as well is just like knowing your saints.

But then also like, he's a character who can like read signs and can like read letters because we need someone, but not everyone needs to be able to do that.

Speaking Latin is a skill.

There's all that sort of shit that happens.

And then also it was the first ever

real-time with paws RPG combat system, which is a thing that the Balter's Gate games would later use.

Wow.

But things like that with the combat system, which wasn't great.

It was super duper janky.

But like if you got injured, it wasn't like, oh, okay, I got to take a healing potion.

It's like, okay, I got to go rest for weeks

to recover from my wounds.

And you know what?

I may be permanently damaged from this.

would be a thing like death, and death is just permanent.

Like if your character dies, they just die.

So you might be, you might be like attacked by wildlife.

And then, you know, like, one of them just eats one of your party members and they're just gone.

And that's it.

And you have to go get someone.

You have to recruit someone else.

I remember specifically this happening to me in my playthrough as a kid, one of my playthroughs as a kid, because this is a game I'd play again and again and make new characters because that was a part of the fun.

But my party was arrested.

They were tortured until they confessed, and then they were each executed at the gallows.

And it it was game over.

Insane.

But it's one of those things where it's just like, it's sheer ambition.

It doesn't quite land.

It doesn't quite come together.

They couldn't quite execute this in 1992 with their hardware and with their resources.

But just like what it aspired to be is so grand, and it's so awesome to appreciate and remember from that standpoint.

There's a rock, paper, shotgun piece I looked up, and I'll read just a little excerpt from this by Sin Vega.

Darklands Retrospective, what RPGs are supposed to be.

I'll just read the final couple paragraphs of this.

Darklands is great for more reasons than I can breathlessly enthuse about.

It's entirely open world with endless jobs and events and everything from Luxembourg to Marienburg open from day one.

I didn't even touch on how it's open world.

Your only goal is a heroic reputation, which is tracked globally and locally.

You can be a hero in Stuttgart, an outlaw in Rhymes, and completely unknown a dozen towns in between.

Even today, that's something few RPGs attempt.

There's also a long main quest that's completely optional after which you're free to play on indefinitely.

It is, in short, what games are supposed to be.

For all its flawed and frayed edges, it still shines with a love and ambition spelled out in its manual, and it richly deserves the follow-ups that sadly never came.

Wow.

Dark Land's a game that should rise from your grave.

I always forget that we're doing it, and then when it comes up, it makes me laugh.

It's funny.

We, I have a list of like 10 games to this.

Dude, I have 10 games.

I have 10 games.

We were talking about these, I feel like in such depth and with such passion that we're kind of, you know,

I think we're good to maybe just do another one of these someday.

Yeah, let's revisit this for the future.

Games that time forgot.

Games that time forgot and games we ran out of time to talk about.

Yeah.

No, I had fully 10 games and I was like, I'll choose three from this.

But like,

I loved hearing.

Yeah, I loved hearing it.

Even the games that I've, like, I've never heard of that fucking game, Nick.

Never.

But it sounds like something I want to go home and look up.

Yeah, it's really cool.

And you can still get it and play it?

It's playable on, yeah, it's one of those things where they've they've uh they've ported it or they've made it playable on on GOG and on on Steam at least.

Yeah.

You can find it on and run on a modern PC.

God God bless them.

Yeah, God bless them.

Uh, shall we do a segment?

Oh!

Surprise, bitch.

It's segment time.

What?

What?

Who's this guy?

It's just master.

Sit down, babe.

It's it's

sit down, cha-cha.

What's the segment?

Here's the segment.

I'll read a title, and you tell me if it's the title of an isekai anime, where a character gets sucked into a video game world, or a description I made up of an actual video game franchise.

So for people who are not as familiar with it, isekai is a genre where a character is transported into another reality.

It's pretty, it's become pretty common in anime, common trope, and very often it's a video game reality.

Solo leveling, kind of that, which we covered on GetAnimaid, not exactly.

But anyway, we talk about all kinds of anime on get animated, patreon.com slash get played.

This is kind of a marriage of the two.

So answer, the segment is isekai or is a guy?

Wait, okay, hold on.

First off, excellent title.

Yeah.

Secondly, I'm lost.

Okay, so I will read the title of it.

Hopefully the first couple will help serve as something of a tutorial.

I will read a title.

You tell me if the title is an actual isekai anime, the actual title of something you can find and watch streaming, or if it's something I made up.

So is a guy is a description of an existing video game.

Got it.

Okay.

Wait.

So the only options are it is an anime or it is a video game?

Yes.

What's the part you made up?

I made up the description that sounds like an isekai live.

It's a title, okay.

But it's actually the description of a video game.

Okay.

Okay, great.

Got it.

Okay, hopefully this will clarify things.

I explained it poorly.

Okay.

First up.

No, I think you explained it well.

I'm just dumb.

No.

First up, that time I got reincarnated as a slime.

Heather, bing, ding.

That's a real anime.

You are correct.

That is a real anime that is isekai.

Next up,

battling slimes to level up in a fantasy world.

Okay, Matt.

Yes.

That is a guy.

Sounds like it's maybe the Dragon Quest.

That's right.

That is a description I wrote of Dragon Quest.

All right, so we get what we're doing here.

Look, that makes sense.

Okay, nice.

This is good.

Okay, great.

All right, next up.

The world's finest assassin gets reincarnated in another world as an aristocrat.

Is Heather

is a guy?

What, did you say Isakai or is a guy?

Oh, see, now that's a problem right there.

I'm saying, is it's a video game.

No, that's the title of an Isekai anime.

Next up, the assassin's descendant gets reincarnated in another world as his ancestor.

Come on.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's Assassin's Creed.

That's Assassin's Creed.

That's right, Matt.

He's a guy.

All right, next up, In Another World with My Smartphone.

Heather.

Heather.

That's an anime.

That is correct.

That is an isekai anime.

Next up, I battle to stay alive with an AI trapped in my brain.

Matt.

Yeah.

I think this is a guy that sounds like it's Cyberpunk 2077.

That's correct.

All right, here we go.

Matt's leading.

Matt has three.

Matt has three.

Heather has two.

You're both doing great.

I lost one.

You're both doing great.

All right, number seven.

Cooking in the wild to enhance my health and stamina.

Cooking in the wild to enhance my health and stamina.

I'm going to let Matt take the bullet.

I'm going to say, huh.

I'm going to say this is a guy and that it's...

Legend of Zelda, Tears of the Kingdom.

I had Breath of the Wild, but same franchise, so I'll give it to you.

Wow.

All right.

I forgot.

I was the only one that actually played that game.

Number eight.

Well, played Tears of the Kingdom.

What are you talking about?

I finished it.

Yeah, I did.

I bounced off of it.

I finished Breath of the Wild.

So did I.

I finished both of them.

All right.

Put a fucking crown on you, King Shit.

King Steam.

Kingdom Steam.

Number eight.

Campfire Cooking in Another World with My Absurd Skill.

Heather.

Heather.

That's isakai anime.

That's correct.

Number nine.

There are a lot of these.

Yep.

A lot.

Reincarnated in the underworld, I fight to reunite my family.

One more time?

Reincarnated in the underworld, I'll fight to reunite my family.

Heather, that's an isokai anime.

No, that's my description of Hades.

Thank you.

I thought it was Hades.

Wow.

Next up, as a reincarnated aristocrat, I'll use my appraisal skill to rise in the world.

Can I go twice?

Yes.

Heather, that's an anime.

I know that one.

You are correct.

That is an anime.

So, wait, what the hell's going on in that show?

Appraising shit?

One, I want to watch it.

Two, an anime, the title of an anime can just be a sentence.

This is who I am, and this is what I'm doing.

A few more.

Collecting objects to impress my powerful king.

Is a guy Katamari Damasi.

Yes, you are correct.

Wow, nice.

Let's fucking go, dude.

I wish this was a game show.

I was winning money on TV.

Matt's got five.

Heather's got four.

It's very close.

Number 12.

The weakest tamer began a journey to pick up trash.

The weakest.

The weakest tamer began a journey to pick up trash.

Tamer?

Hamer?

Tamer.

T-A-M-E-R?

Correct.

I think I like...

I'm going to say

this is an anime.

Yes, this is an anime.

And I've cracked the code of the game, and I know how the game works.

Okay.

Okay.

I mean, it's pretty straightforward at this point.

I took, no, it took me 12.

Reincarnated as a sword.

I'm going to say that's an anime.

Yes, it is an anime.

Reborn as a vending machine.

That's an anime.

You are correct.

That is an anime.

Reborn as a washing machine.

I mean,

that has to be an anime.

No is a guy.

That's my description of Banjo Touhee from the Banjo-Kazooie franchise where Mumbo Jumbo transforms you into a washer.

Wow.

Heather, I think, is now taking away.

Banjo Tewi on my ass.

No, it's it's six all.

All right, we have two more, so this will decide it.

Trapped in a dating sim.

Sounds like being in L.A.

All right, Heather's going to win now.

Trapped in a dating sim?

Trapped in a dating sim.

Man, the problem is, is that that's definitely

the premise of a video game,

but

could also be the premise of an anime.

I'm gonna go with anime, Heather is correct.

Um,

last one

trapped in a dating sim

with Weiger.

What

that

is is a guy, yeah,

and

is the game Dream Daddy?

It's a tie.

Hey, it's a tie.

It's a tie.

Oh, it's a tie.

Perfect.

What a perfect outcome.

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.

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, animated Heather.

We're watching a new series.

Oh my God, we are watching the 8th MS team.

It's a Gundam show.

It wasn't my idea, but boy, oh boy, am I excited to be watching it with you guys.

We're covering two episodes per week.

Yeah.

It's a six episode run.

The boys are watching Gundam with me.

Yeah, very, very excited.

Enjoying myself so far.

I've only seen the two that we've seen.

I'm very excited to be watching Gundam.

Fuck yes.

I'm very excited to be watching.

What will Suit Gundam?

The eighth MS team.

It is on Hulu if you want to watch along, and you can subscribe at patreon.com/slash get played to hear our thoughts.

And you know what?

I got played.

What the what?

What?

All right, fair enough.

I'm a dumb bitch.

That was a head gum podcast.