From 8-Bit to 4K 2: Finding Good Video Game Movies - Harder than Backlog Challenge?

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to 8bit to 4k. This is episode 2 and I am your current host for the day. I'm Mike of many names. My fellow co hosts, Jack Zoman. [00:00:11] Speaker B: Hello. [00:00:13] Speaker A: And Pillow Pet. [00:00:16] Speaker C: Good evening or morning wherever you are. [00:00:19] Speaker A: And we're here to just talk about games and gaming in general. We have some shout outs to do because this is a side portion of a different podcast we have. [00:00:32] Speaker B: We're part of the four Wards Podcast network. [00:00:36] Speaker A: Podcast network, yeah, we'll go with that. So we have a couple of Patreons who deserve some shout outs here. We have Codex Ninja, our own Pillow pet, Robogon, Skypius, Esquire and Lebana Albania. Either or. Which one? You'll tell us. [00:00:55] Speaker B: We're not sure. Please correct us if we pronounce it wrong. [00:00:59] Speaker A: Thank you all very much. You can support us at the four words [email protected] patreon.com the forwards podcast. That's the correct way to do it. $1 a month just tells us that you love us. $5 gets you an exclusive feed. Some behind the scenes audio gives you a little bit of insight into what we do each time when we do the prep work for the shows and sometimes you'll hear some fun stories and $10 a month gives you this exclusive fee and everything else. And we're going to shout you out at beginning of every episode, at least as long as. As long as there's a couple of you will be shouting you out as. [00:01:33] Speaker B: Long as you maintain the subscription. [00:01:35] Speaker A: Basically, yes, we have a discord. [00:01:42] Speaker B: The forward is in the episode description. [00:01:44] Speaker A: The link is in the episode description. Uh, it's mostly based around the four Words podcast, but we've started talking about a bunch of other stuff. Hopefully there's, there's links for anything you could possibly want to talk about and if there isn't one, tell us. We'll make one. [00:02:00] Speaker B: Yep. [00:02:00] Speaker A: Head up our own channel. And to start us off, we had a backlog challenge and well, how has that gone for both of you so far? [00:02:15] Speaker C: I failed miserably myself. So not that I have no interest. My game was Baldur's Gate 3, but I don't feel like the time that I had available to me was enough to put respect to the game. I feel like I needed more time and a block to sit down and just play this game and dive into it. That doesn't mean I gave up on it, but. But I did become very interested and I'm going to change my game for simplicity is I'm going to change it to Kingdom Hearts. I've never played the game before. It's a very, very old game. But they have remastered versions of it with 1.5 and 2.5 and I will be getting 3 as well. And I will be playing through all of those. Not all at once, but I will be happy to report back of my awesome findings for one of the most highly rated games out there. [00:03:12] Speaker A: We'll be looking forward to hopefully seeing you do that on stream. Possibly. I did forget to mention that most all three of us actually do stream. You can find me at. Not get many names. Jacks at Jackson and Pillow Pet at Pillow Pet all on Twitch. [00:03:30] Speaker C: It will be hard for me to. Sorry, go ahead. [00:03:32] Speaker A: No, don't go. Graduation. [00:03:33] Speaker C: Honestly, it's gonna be hard to stream them because it's. It's gonna be a comfy couch situation. I might try to figure out how to set up like a capture card or something like that and casually stream. [00:03:46] Speaker B: It if you're playing it on a PS4 or 5 or on the Xbox series. I'm not sure about the Xbox One. I think they do have native Twitch streaming built in nowadays. [00:03:57] Speaker C: Okay. So I might be able to. There we go. Stay tuned. [00:04:00] Speaker B: I'm looking to how to do that. I do not know how to set it up. I just know that they have it. [00:04:04] Speaker C: Yeah, I look forward into checking it out. [00:04:09] Speaker B: So I tried to complete my backlog challenge. My game of choice was New Vegas because it's supposed to be an amazing game. I've heard nothing but praise about this. Specifically people who like but don't love Fallout 3 or 4 love Fallout New Vegas. Like it is the one that everyone holds up as the best of the franchise. So I tried to play it and I immediately ran into a Showstopper problem. I have a 4K monitor. New Vegas is a game from 2010, but it does not support borderless full screen mode. This is a mode that has been common in games since about 2006 or so on PC where you get full screen but it doesn't actually give exclusive full screen control to your game. Which means you can still have like Discord on your second monitor or a stream on another monitor or in my case obs for my stream so I can see my chat and that kind of stuff. Yeah, if I wanted to actually use my whole primary monitor, it let me choose 4K as a primary monitor resolution if I was in full screen. But then I couldn't stream it because it was an exclusive full screen and I couldn't access my chat or anything while it was doing that. And if I tried to put it in windowed mode, windowed mode capped out at 1080p, which meant it was a quarter of my monitor. Then it gets worse. There is a model on Nexus mods that, among other features, adds borderless full screen mode. So I installed the Vortex Mod Manager, the current Nexus mods mod manager utility. I installed what this mod said its prerequisite mods were, and then I installed this mod and then I launched Fallout New Vegas. And for whatever reason, this mod would not initialize, it would not load its settings into the ini file so that I could then and set it to borderless fullscreen and fill my damn monitor. So I decided instead of playing in a fucking postage stamp in the corner of my monitor, I'm not gonna play this game. Because Bethesda did the laziest fucking Xbox360 console port. They absolutely fucking could. The menus controlled like a fucking console game. I had to unplug my controller to get mouse and keyboard controls in the menu because as long as my controller was plugged in, I could only navigate the menu with Wased and the spacebar. As soon as I unplugged my controller and rebooted the game, I could click on things because it's a lazy fucking console port. Bethesda, you should be fucking ashamed of having the PC version of Fallout New Vegas be this poorly architected for modern computers. This was not acceptable in 2010 when this game came out. [00:07:32] Speaker A: This is well known for optimization, shall we say? [00:07:38] Speaker B: Okay, but I wasn't like upset on how well it did or didn't run or if there was bugs. [00:07:43] Speaker A: Yeah, that's true. You didn't even start it. [00:07:45] Speaker B: I didn't get that far. I literally did not get to character creation. I didn't get to experience the game because this game, released in 2010 didn't have borderless full screen and exclusive full screen breaks. Shit. [00:08:01] Speaker A: This is about the beginning of when Steam really is starting, so. The beginning of really when? Okay, but PC gaming is starting to massively go off into more broad categories. [00:08:15] Speaker B: Okay, but hear me out. The orange box was in 2007. [00:08:20] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. [00:08:21] Speaker B: All of those games in 2007 supported borderless full screen. Left 4 Dead was in 2008 and Left 4 Dead 2 was in 2009. [00:08:31] Speaker A: But Valve there, which is the company who's Great, I realize. [00:08:36] Speaker B: Starcraft 2 was in 2010 and supported borderless full screen in 2010. Contemporaries of Fallout New Vegas and Fallout was a PC franchise, to be clear. Fallout 1 and 2 are PC games. Fallout New Vegas not supporting basic functionality that its contemporaries supported at the time is shameful. That is shameful. That is my issue with it. If this was a game from 1999, before borderless full Screen was available at all or widespread at all, I'd be much more willing to excuse this. And I might have spent more time figuring out mods. The fact that this game came out at the end of the Xbox 360 lifecycle in 2010. I'm so frustrated that this was the experience I had with Fallout New Vegas. I may at some point try again to play it, but I was so frustrated with trying to make the mods work that it's not gonna happen for a while. [00:09:47] Speaker A: So, like Pillow, do you have a spare game thought of? [00:09:51] Speaker B: Not yet. [00:09:51] Speaker A: To sort of switch your administration to. Alright, we'll get back to people on that one. [00:09:54] Speaker B: I have so many games in my backlog, I. I don't know what to put there realistically. I probably pick something I own on Switch to play because that'll get played. [00:10:11] Speaker A: All right. Well, I actually did get to play a bit of my backlog game. I played three, four hours at least of Ghost of Tsushima starting with Holy shit. I'm so happy I picked it up and I'm so happy I started playing it. It is a game that I need a long chunk to play at a time. I can't play this in one hour chunks like Pillow was talking about. I need three, four hours at least. This is what people have been like this. This feels like the first game to properly get. This feels like a movie while playing a game. Unlike say, oh, Snake Metal. Metal Gear Solid Metal Gear Solid metal gear solid 4 with its 45 minute cutscene to start the game off, or the 10 plus hours of cutscenes going on like it's not a movie that is also a game. It is cinematic in a way that makes it feel like a movie. It's breathtakingly beautiful. The color palette is phenomenal, the gameplay is very good. I understand why this game got the acclaim that it did, and I have been meaning to play some more, but my time has been eaten up by a bunch of other things. So I'm going to hopefully set aside some more time this weekend to get a large chunk of Ghost of Tsushima played out again. But this. This is everything I wanted and more. I did not expect how much I would like the characterization so quickly. Characters became very likable very quickly. It's very believable in how people are acting. It's not poorly written, it's very well written. There's emotion very quickly on that that really invests you to the characters that not only you are playing, but you're interacting with. So everything that I have faced so far has been done well and I can't wait to do more. [00:12:44] Speaker B: Nice. [00:12:48] Speaker A: So branching from that. Each of us has been sort of thinking about a game for a while now and let's. Let's talk about something that's been on your mind. Pillow, what game has been on your mind? [00:13:06] Speaker C: So recently I've been thinking about Battlefield 6 at the time of this recording. We have a weekend beta access coming up and I am really excited about it. Me and I have a group of friends that I've been playing with since early college years, even before college, that we've always played these games together. And I messaged them all today and I was like, hey, are we running it back? And I sent them the notification for Battlefield 6 and that's coming out and we're all getting together this weekend and meeting up in our virtual chat rooms and playing this on Battlefield and going in. I'm super excited for it. Battlefield's always to me been a great game. They did run into that annoying. Like they were releasing a new game every other year. Every year, just depending. With a bazillion DLCs in between in the middle. They're doing that again, it kind of seems like. So I was just recently looking at the timeline. So Battlefield 2042, which was the most recent before Battlefield 6 came out in 2021 and they've released since then. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 DLCs in a four year span. All these are paid DLCs unless you buy the Battle Pass or whatever they're doing. These games are doing these nowadays to get you more money out of you other than the, you know, $70 base price game, which I'm never happy about. But Battlefield has a special place in my heart because I just love the. It might just be nostalgia from when I was younger playing with my friends, but I'm really excited about it. Can't wait to dive into it and getting back on the battlefield with my buddies and doing a squad chat and capturing points. So I look forward to it. [00:15:18] Speaker A: Okay. I kind of miss when that and Call of Duty used to be World War II games. [00:15:23] Speaker C: Oh yeah, like Medal of Honor. Was that original? Like Call of Duty before Call of Duty became Kill. Call of Duty. [00:15:32] Speaker A: It's been so long since we've had a game like that. That I really hope someone brings it back. Battlefield 1 was a breath of fresh air. [00:15:41] Speaker C: Yeah. Battlefield 1 was great. The old. So this is going to be a little side tangent. There is a. I'm trying to remember the game that's out. Is it for Honor? Maybe. [00:15:53] Speaker A: Yep. [00:15:54] Speaker C: Where it is just World War II. It's just World War II. [00:15:58] Speaker A: I'll take a look. [00:16:00] Speaker C: I think it might be for Honor. [00:16:01] Speaker A: I don't think it's for Honor. [00:16:03] Speaker B: Is the like medieval fighting game. [00:16:05] Speaker A: It's the. It's the one where you face a knight, a Viking and a Japanese. [00:16:09] Speaker C: There is a strictly World War II game. And it's like hundred versus a hundred people. And it's like it was free at some point on Xbox. Game pass. I can't remember what's happened. Look it up. [00:16:26] Speaker B: The last Battlefield I played was Battlefield 1942. Literally the original game in the franchise. And the last Call of Duty I played was four. [00:16:36] Speaker A: So a good one to end on Call of Duty. [00:16:40] Speaker B: Okay. I do not have any interest in most of the Call of Duty franchise. They're. Dude bro. Jingoistic military shooter games. Call of Duty four is that. But also it's really fucking good. [00:16:56] Speaker A: It's more than just that. There's a story with a purpose behind it. That is fantastic. [00:17:03] Speaker C: Cut in real quick. [00:17:03] Speaker B: But it's not just that. [00:17:06] Speaker C: It was hell let loose. Hell Let Loose is the game I was looking for. [00:17:10] Speaker B: Never heard. [00:17:11] Speaker A: Okay. [00:17:14] Speaker C: That's. That's it. Not to interrupt. But before I forgot again. [00:17:19] Speaker B: That's okay. You're just excited for Battlefield 6. [00:17:26] Speaker C: I am. I'm ready to. I'm not much of a shooter games. Never really been in a Call of Duty except for Black Ops. I played them like for the story. I love the story. And Battlefield used to have a great story mode with it. You know Call of Duty used to have the great story mode with it and then they just stopped and just mainly focused on multiplayer. I think the last time I was able to play a Battlefield single player game was like hardline when that came out. And that was great. And it was a fun online. It was cops versus Robbers. I mean it was. It was a good time robbing banks and doing all that. But just a lot of times you just want to dive into a good single player experience without some of the toxicity of online games. [00:18:13] Speaker A: Yeah. I. I haven't enjoyed one of those games pretty much since they got rid of their single player. I loved their single player games and not. Not a huge fan. If I'm going to do multiplayer and Shooting. I'd rather have some wacky fun in space. Jax, what have you wanted to talk about? [00:18:39] Speaker B: Okay, so let me explain why first. So way back in January, Analogue, the company that makes like modern FPGA retro consoles, announced the Nintendo 64 version of that. And 8bitdo announced a controller to go with it. And I ordered one. It was like 40 bucks. It has a N64 button layout for the buttons, but you get a modern stick that still has the N64 octagon gate, which is important. And it feels like a modern regular controller in your hand. So, like, it's nice. It finally arrived. It was delayed. It arrived literally like week and a half ago. Yeah, week and a half ago. And I had promised my wife when I got this, I would finally replay the Legend of Ocarina of Time. For context. The last time I played Ocarina of Time was on the gamecube on the Master Quest version that was released as like a pre order bonus. If you pre ordered Twilight Princess or whatever it was. It might not have even been Twilight Princess. I don't fucking remember. It's a bonus disc on GameCube. It's fairly rare because of that. But that was the last time I played Ocarina of Time. I've played Majora's Mask several times since then. I love Majora's Mask, but I haven't actually gone and played Ocarina at a time again. And it's one of my wife's favorite video games. [00:20:25] Speaker A: One of the best games of all time. [00:20:27] Speaker B: It is widely considered one of the best video games of all time. Yes. So I decided to. It's time. I'm going to replay it now for context on how far I've gotten. So far I've made it through Dodongo's Cavern, so I've done the first two dungeons and the Overworld involved therein. So I'm not super far yet. But first of all, I want to grumble about Nintendo. Nintendo Switch Online's Nintendo 64 emulation is fucking awful. There is so much input latency because their emulator is dog shit. It's horrible. Nintendo should be fucking ashamed of themselves for having these classic games in such a laggy fucking state because their emulator is garbage now. I tried to set up an emulator on my computer. I have Retroarch installed. And I was like, hey, since I last used it, there's a new CRT shader for high refresh rate monitors that instead of doing black frame insertion for trying to make LCDs look good in old video games in motion, it does a scanline filter. It's hard to explain, but basically it draws part of the frame, each frame and part of it's left black, which makes games look amazing in motion. And I have a 240Hz monitor which is like perfect case for this technology. And RetroArch is such a confusing, unintuitive mess of menus clearly made by different people. I could never figure out how to get it working, which is why I'm playing the Nintendo Switch Online version in the first place. I've got the nice controller, the button layout is the original button layout. I'm playing with an actual. I have C buttons on my controller, like an N64 controller. Like it feels right in the hand. But outside of the Nintendo induced input lag, I have other gripes about Ocarina of Time. The dungeon. The dungeons in Ocarina of Time are genuinely good. I am not going to disparage that at all. But you know what's not good? The amount of time this game wastes. It is fucking stupid to have to sit there and mash through 20 or more text boxes in a row where you can't just press B to fast forward them all, you have to mash through them one by one. It is fucking stupid to have to wait for time to pass so that the chicken egg hatches so you can wake Talon up. Even though you managed to dodge past the guards the first fucking time. And you literally just get to sit there for two minutes until the game allows you to progress. There are so many of these, just little, hey, we don't respect your time. Sit here for a minute because fuck you. Elements in this game that in 1997 were much more tolerable than they are now. I don't have the patience for that bullshit. That bullshit is annoying as fuck. And it mostly doesn't exist in the same sense in Majora's Mask, the text box one does. [00:24:02] Speaker A: I think that's pretty common across the era that time. [00:24:05] Speaker B: Yes, but Majora's Mask works on a global cycle and it's a game mechanic instead of oh well, the day night cycle is going and you haven't learned the song that lets you switch day and night yet. So sit there and wait. Which is fucking horrible. Like that shit sucks. Majora's Mask immediately gives you the tools and is built around a cycle to where that kind of time waste doesn't exist in Majora's Mask. It's either oh, you made it to the thing on time or you Missed it. Try again next time. Which I'm much more on board with. [00:24:43] Speaker C: I'm gonna push back on Majoras. And one exception is it make you waste time. And that is the initial cycle, the three day cycle where all you got to do is get the moon's tear. And other than that, you're waiting. But it does let you talk to the scarecrow to skip time. [00:24:58] Speaker B: Yes, it does have about six in game hours of time you have to just sit through. There is no way around it if you did everything else fast. [00:25:09] Speaker C: But I know what you're talking about with the text box. And the very initial one that everybody always runs into past is the owl. [00:25:19] Speaker B: Yep. [00:25:20] Speaker C: Do you want to hear all this again? And it defaults to yes. [00:25:25] Speaker B: It's worse than that. The biggest troll, it's worse than that. It sometimes defaults to yes. And sometimes he asks, do you understand? And it defaults to yes. [00:25:38] Speaker C: And you can't, you can't just press B to skip through it all to expect to like, just be no. Because sometimes like, yeah, it tricks you. Like, do you not, not really not understand this? And you're like, what? And you're like, oh, yeah, I understand. And it's like, oh, here, I'll say it again. Yeah. [00:25:56] Speaker B: On top of all of that, and this is a criticism that also applies to Majora's Mask. The camera in these games is fucking awful. [00:26:06] Speaker A: This is Proto camera. Yep. [00:26:09] Speaker B: Yes. So some of this I can excuse because this is a Nintendo 64 game and they were still figuring out how to do 3D cameras. My issue is not, oh well, you need to Z target to refocus the camera in front of you. That's fine. I can deal with that. I have control over it. My issue is that the camera just kind of wanders around wherever the fuck it wants the rest of the time. And it's super fucking annoying. I got to the part in Goron City where you can throw a bomb flower into the pot for a puzzle and I couldn't get the camera to cooperate. I kept falling off the fucking ledge you're supposed to stand on to throw the bomb because the camera kept rotating in random fucking directions for no goddamn reason. [00:26:53] Speaker A: Hey, the problems with single stick. [00:26:57] Speaker B: Yeah. And so to be clear, I'm not saying Ocarina of Time is a bad game, but playing it almost 30 years after it came out, God damn, is it annoying? [00:27:12] Speaker A: At times it shows its age. There's a lot about, there's a lot about that game that still holds up. And there's a lot about that game that is very noticeably 30 years old. [00:27:26] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:27:26] Speaker C: As a frequent flyer of like Ocarina of Time randomizers myself, you take for granted how like these developers of the. The randomizers themselves. And you could play bass vanilla on there, but how they put in cutscene skips, dialogue skips. You take for granted that these quality of life these developers are adding into their projects. So yeah, I could. I went back to play Vanilla Ocarina of Time just on the 1.0 ROM and it is insufferable. Like you said with. I will agree with you on the time wasting. Yeah, sure. As a kid, I was just like, oh, this is the coolest thing ever. I don't even know how to read. [00:28:12] Speaker A: So it's your game for like four months plus. [00:28:18] Speaker B: And using my talent thing as an example, when you're a kid and you're terrible at video games, it takes you so many tries to sneak past the guards to get to Zelda's castle that the chicken has woken up by the time you do it. I got there on the first try without actually getting the chicken yet, because I didn't remember that you have to get caught once for Malon to spawn in order to give you the goddamn chicken. I got to Talon and was like, wait, I don't have the thing to wake him up. Where the fuck do I. Oh, I think I have to get caught. Don't. I went and got caught, got the chicken egg, ran it again perfectly because I had already done it once and then had to sit there and wait. It's a lot of the structure of that game assumes you're kind of an idiot who doesn't know how games like this work. Because when it came out, nothing. [00:29:10] Speaker A: There was nothing like it like it. [00:29:13] Speaker C: Not to mention how long it takes to push crates. [00:29:15] Speaker A: It is. [00:29:16] Speaker B: Pushing crates is insufferably slow. And again, I'm not necessarily blaming the control scheme for this, because Majora's Mask's camera behaves a lot better than Ocarina of Times does. The game itself respects your time more, and that's on the same platform. The only difference between Majora's Mask and Ocarina of Time at a technical level is I think Majora's Mask required the expansion Pak on the N64. [00:29:44] Speaker A: You did the big thing. Yeah. [00:29:48] Speaker B: So yeah, it's a good game. Oh, also the. The combat feels like fucking shit, at least early on because your sword is tiny and short and half the time you go to do your jump slash and it decides to jump to the side instead because it's just unintuitive. [00:30:04] Speaker C: You got to use the sticks, man. Sticks do the damage of the master sword. Broken stick glitch. [00:30:13] Speaker B: I'm aware, but I don't know how to do it and I don't care to look up how to do it. I'm just trying to have a casual playthrough of this classic video game that my wife loves. Like, she's having so much fun just hearing the music as I play. [00:30:30] Speaker C: Oh, the music. [00:30:31] Speaker A: Oh, I can hear it now. Yeah. [00:30:34] Speaker C: The soundtrack when you open the game. And I mean, we're getting way off track, but this is what this podcast is about. [00:30:40] Speaker A: This game is the prototype for Ambiance and it is basically one of the world's first open world games. [00:30:50] Speaker B: Yeah. But based on this experience of replaying it, my impression so far is it is not gonna be dethroning Link to the Past as my favorite Zelda anytime soon. And it's not gonna be dethroning. It's not gonna be dethroning. Majora's Mask is my favorite 3D Zelda. There's no chance, like there's too many. [00:31:13] Speaker C: Frustrations I can get behind that. It is a frustrating game, but it will always have a super special place in my heart. So I always say it's the best game ever. [00:31:23] Speaker B: I. I will say at least this one doesn't make you farm 4,000 rupees and wander the world looking for eight pieces of Triforce. [00:31:33] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:31:34] Speaker C: But like, yeah. When wake. [00:31:35] Speaker A: You're also so early on that the parts that make this game so phenomenal in people's minds is story and level design of which you've barely gotten through maybe maybe a third. [00:31:49] Speaker B: And I have some vague memories of some of the temples and the dungeons have been great. Like Deku Tree is really basic and simple. I remember the Deku Tree pretty well. So I'm not really saying much about that either way. Dodongo's Cavern was great. It's a simple dungeon with good layout. The puzzles are good. I had no issue. Like the dungeons are the strongest point of Ocarina at time. I actually think it has better dungeons than Majora's Mask does. [00:32:19] Speaker C: I do have an issue with Dodongo's Cavern and it is the fire Bats, the fire keys, they can. And I'm not just talking when the first one that surprises you when you first play the game and you lose your Deku shield and it's the ones at the very end when you're pushing the block and it always hits you. [00:32:37] Speaker B: And you also can't get the Z targeting to actually lock onto them, just slingshot them for no apparent reason because Navi just sometimes just decides she doesn't want to do her fucking job. [00:32:51] Speaker C: Or with the Z target, this is just way derailing. Or when the Z targeting, when you Z target and it hits the Z target goes away and then snaps right back. That's a. That's. I hate that one. But yeah, I'm derailing us. [00:33:06] Speaker B: Okay, Mike, what game do you want to talk about this week? [00:33:10] Speaker A: So I've. I've put in a works week worth of time in Night Rain in the past week after work. I. I fucking love this game. So Elden Ring Night Rain is for. For those of you who don't know quite what it is, it is not a sequel to Elden Ring. It's sort of a side game and it is a mix between a battle royale and a. In the sense that there is the ever shrinking zone and it's a fully co op dungeon run. Essentially when, when you start the game you are given access to six classes. You'll get access to eight by the end of it. Each of them is slightly better at wielding some portion of the weaponry that comes directly from the base. Elden Ring. So if you've played Elden Ring to start with, you are way ahead of the game if you have not because you understand what the items are, what they're good at, where their roughly power strengths are, what goes with what class. Because each of them is based on certain stat. We obviously things, things that are very obvious, strength decks, hint, etc. And then there's some not so obvious ones, arcane faith, some weird ones. And then you get into the design of it and it's just there is this map where the map itself is a pretty standard. Like you hit the map and it is the world and what is in the map shifts, but the map itself is static. So the absolute world layout is the same but where things are in the world shifts. So every time you go in it's a slightly different, different run. And you go fast. And that is the first thing about this game that you need to learn. It is fast pace and you do not have time to learn. And if you stop and try and link things, you fail very quickly. So the first four or five times you do a run you're not going anywhere because you don't know the speed that you need to move. And so you're sitting there, you're looking through things and suddenly you're way behind where you will be five. Ten more runs later when you have a good idea of what you need to start with. And then you progress. Day one passes as the the ring starts to close in and closes you off. You lose access to half the map and then it closes in and you have a boss battle. And this boss can be anything from any of the previous three soul skins. I've seen things from Dark Souls 3, Dark Souls 2, Dark Souls 1. There's been Elden Ring bosses. There's nothing yet from Bloodborne or Sekiro and I don't think they'll bring them in because those have fundamentally different control schemes. But I'm hoping they bring in something with Demon's souls and they've saved their unique. Like these are things we've built around the game. Those are the you final bosses per run and those are experiences. But day one happens, you finish that out and then the world re expands and you have access to the entire map again. And so now you hit some more difficult places, try and upgrade your stuff. And some more difficult bosses from around the world have spawned and it gives you an idea on what to do with there. And the day progresses very much the same. Shrinks again. Shrinks again. Face another boss. This one a more potent boss than the previous one because they're usually. You'll get an early game boss and a late game boss. The late game bosses are nutty good. There's some. There's some bangers from. From games gone by. Shout out to the Nameless King. Fantastic boss. And then you get to day three in which you go to its unique boss arena. This is just the world boss arena for every one of the final bosses. And these are unique boss fights that are designed around three people facing them. And so the very first boss you fight is a Cerberus that can split into three separate dogs randomly to fight each of you. And your first couple runs you're gonna get smacked around by this thing. And it's so fun. And they've recently maybe maybe two, three weeks ago from what I remember doing this. They have something they. They've done which is called Everdark bosses which is now that everyone's played the game, people are pretty regularly facing the bosses. They're doing things well. So they've expanded to hard mode versions of each of these bosses where your boss starts in phase two. And we've added a new phase Go. It's been so much fun. Every run's been different. [00:38:36] Speaker B: I've. [00:38:37] Speaker A: I've been spamming the hell out of it. Oh God. [00:38:48] Speaker C: I never got into a whole lot of that game. So I. It sounds really fun. I'm always been a fan of games that every playthrough is different. I love games that have endless amounts of replayability. [00:39:07] Speaker A: There's really where you get 190 weapons so every time you play through you're gonna find something slightly different and stat weights are different and what bosses are where are different. So things very frequently go off the rails where oh no, I can't face this, run away. [00:39:32] Speaker C: And I think I've talked about it before. Like I put some hours into it, just not enough to really like appreciate. I mean I was able to appreciate the game itself for the world, but I never got to explore it. But like that's another one of those games I got back there that I really want to play and it's hard to. There's just way too many games like that that require way too many hours to get into it and I just don't even know where to begin. Yes. [00:40:01] Speaker A: Like just even that one, just that one, you can do an hour at a time. You're okay doing that. It doesn't need six, seven hours. As a long playthrough, it can consume that much time very quickly. But like I'm 412 hours deep into Elden Ring. [00:40:20] Speaker C: I would say I suffer from a problem and I'm pretty sure a lot of people will have the same issue is I'll play a game, I'll get really into it and then it's like, okay, I got, I got a really weird workload and I'm going to be really busy for a week, work for that week, come back and I'm like, don't pick up the game ever again until I think about it two or three months later. And I'm like, oh yeah, I need to go pick that up. And then I got to restart the game to remember where I'm at because I don't remember what I was doing last. And then I'm like, ah, do I really want to restart it? And then I just forget about the game again until we talk, someone talks about it and I'm like, oh yeah, like I really want to go back to that. Like that's what happened to me originally with Baldur's Gate. Got a few hours into it. It's really loving it. Got busy in life and never picked it up again. Not because it's a bad game, not because I hated it, but like just time constraints and I think there's a lot of people that suffer from that. And that's where like I'll start watching like let's place to like kind of. I can always continue off where I left off with a let's play like watch it right before bed or anything like that. But I really, really like. It's the only Souls game that I've enjoyed itself is Elden Ring. So I really want to get back into it. [00:41:43] Speaker A: That's. That's the common consensus. I've heard from a lot of people who cannot stand Souls games. For whatever reason, they have a problem with them. Elden Ring seems to be the game that people will play. I have a friend who would not touch any of them and he smashed through Elden Ring with me. [00:42:01] Speaker C: That's not impossible game. It's like not. They don't make it to where it's brutally like, you're not gonna hate your life. They give you avenues like all Souls games do. But they make it to where it's like, okay, you're not ready for this. Go back over to the training wheels area. [00:42:16] Speaker A: Your own fixation really depends on how far you're gonna be going in there. No, I refuse to let this fucker stop me. Is the big layout with a lot of people. [00:42:32] Speaker C: We got a lot more to still talk about. [00:42:34] Speaker A: Yeah, we do. We've covered what we've gonna talk about. We've got caught up with where we've been in our backlogs. But we have an interesting topic that we want to go over and it's movie game adaptations, both backwards and forwards. Games that have been made into movies and movies that have been made into games. Each of us has has a couple, at least one of each that we want to discuss. So Jax, which would you like to start with? [00:43:07] Speaker B: I'll kick it off with the one that most people probably don't even know what the fuck I'm talking about. And I'll save the hot take for when you come back around. To me, when I was a kid, one of my favorite NES games was this brutally hard platformer called Little Nemo, the Dream Master. This was an NES game that released in 1990. Made by Capcom. It is a genuinely great video game for the time, but it's obnoxiously hard. This is a platformer where you are wandering levels looking for all of the keys to unlock the door at the end of the level so you can continue on to the next level. It has tons of one hit kill traps. And if you've ever played this game, all I need to say is the train level for you to start having PTSD flashbacks because the train level is an autoscroller where spikes from the ceiling fucking come down and crash down and squish you and kill you. And it's horrible. It's so hard. This game is brutally difficult. And for years and years and years and years and years, that was all I knew about it. It was just this NES game I remembered that I fondly remembered, despite how fucking difficult it was. And then I learned it's based on a movie. So the movie is actually an adaptation of a French comic from like, a hundred years ago. The comic strip is literally from like 1905. It's over 100 years old. So the movie adaptation is an anime. Actually, it's an anime movie, but I didn't know this at the time. And it's from 1989. And it is about Nemo. And it's a very Alice in Wonderland movie where he. His bed, like, comes to life and walks around the city and flies through the air. There's fantastical creatures. It's a fun kids movie. Like, it's a genuinely fun movie. [00:45:24] Speaker A: This isn't like Captain Nemo as a kid, is it? [00:45:27] Speaker B: No. Unrelated. [00:45:28] Speaker A: Okay. [00:45:32] Speaker B: But it's. It's a fun movie. If you've ever seen the English dub, you'll know that the magic words are like, jazama, Pajama. J. Pajama. Jazama. It's very stupid, but, like, it's a fun movie. But apparently it was a box office bomb when it came out, which is disappointing. I had no idea for most of my life that this video game I fondly remembered was based on a movie I always like as a kid. I was always like, every mov. Every video game based on a movie is terrible. GoldenEye is like, the one exception, and we'll get there. But that was the mindset I had for like, 20 years of my life, not realizing that this fond childhood game of mine is a video game based on a movie. And having seen the movie, the video game follows the movie pretty faithfully. Like, it is clearly based on the movie in many regards. So, yeah, highly recommend. If you like NES hard games. Little Nemo on NES is actually a good game. And if you like kids movies, it's a fun kids movie. I think it's on crunchyroll nowadays. [00:46:44] Speaker A: Okay. 80s kids movies are usually, like, surprisingly amazing. So that might be something to go back and see. [00:46:54] Speaker B: It's. It's one of those kids movies that has some, like, Eldritch body horror vibes at parts like it gets dark and Fucked up in ways that only 80s kids movies can. [00:47:08] Speaker A: Like Dark Crystal. [00:47:11] Speaker B: I mean it think like a 80s anime aesthetic. But yeah, there's some dark shit. [00:47:17] Speaker A: Okay. [00:47:18] Speaker B: There's some genuinely gross stuff in that movie. [00:47:23] Speaker C: This. [00:47:24] Speaker B: I love it. And I just wanted to share. Like, hey, this game and this movie that you've probably never heard of, they're both good. [00:47:33] Speaker C: We forgot when we were coming up with a topic and discussing and this just popped in my head. The worst video game adaptation of a movie that almost killed video gaming as we know it today. ET it just popped in my head. We're not gonna. I'm not gonna stay on it long, but it just. That is gotta be the worst rated one. Would everybody. [00:48:01] Speaker A: Superman 64. [00:48:03] Speaker C: Oh, yeah. That was another bad one. [00:48:05] Speaker B: Not a direct adaptation of a movie. So I think it gets a pass on this specific topic. [00:48:09] Speaker A: But. [00:48:10] Speaker B: But it's an atrocious video game. I will say. I think ET for the Atari was a symptom of the video game crash and not the cause of the video game crash. [00:48:22] Speaker C: I think it was almost the straw that broke the camel's back. [00:48:25] Speaker B: Exactly. The video game crash of 1983 that almost killed this hobby we all love. For good, if not for Nintendo. Literally making Rob the Robot to trick toy stores into carrying the nes. Because that's a true story. That's why Rob the Robot is a thing. If you've ever wondered why this stupid robot is in Mario Kart or Smash Bros. It was a toy that Nintendo made to trick Toys R Us and other western toy retailers to carry video games again after Atari screwed the pooch so bad. And Atari just. They pumped out a ton of shovelware releases like E.T. e.T. Is the most infamous example. But there were just tons of just unplayably bad, rushed video games that caused the crash of 1983, where people were just like, this isn't worth spending real money on. These games are 50, 60 bucks in 1983 money. And they just. That's when you buy a game that looks exciting and you play it and it's shit. And you spent literally like the price of a console nowadays for that one game. [00:49:45] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:49:46] Speaker B: You give up on the hobby real quick after getting burned once or twice. [00:49:51] Speaker A: Happens consistently enough. [00:49:53] Speaker C: So due to inflation. I just looked this up real quick. $50 spent back then on a video game like ET if you've ever seen gameplay footage of it would be like you going and spend $161 on a video game today. [00:50:08] Speaker B: Yep. [00:50:11] Speaker C: So just imagine how that would hurt. [00:50:14] Speaker A: And there's a Very good reason that prices have not followed inflation properly. But that's a topic for another time. That's actually probably going to be an entire, entire episode topic about video game. [00:50:27] Speaker B: Pricing and why it is the way. [00:50:28] Speaker A: It is, why it's the way it is, where it should be, where it could be, things, everything around the design on that. We can go on that definitely another time. But pillow which one? [00:50:42] Speaker C: Sorry. I was in nostalgia mode. So my movie to game is Star wars. And that's a very broad topic with the amount of games that they have. The first game that comes to my mind when I think Star wars games. And again, this is always nostalgia for me. Video games, I could talk about them all day because they were a huge part of my childhood. Battlefront 2. Star Wars. Battlefront 2. And not this modern monstrosity that they gave us in 2017. I'm talking the 2002, I think, release. I didn't even look it up, but I think it was 2002, early 2000s. [00:51:22] Speaker A: Because I was two. [00:51:24] Speaker C: 2005, sorry, 2005 release of Battlefront 2. Because like it was to me, it felt like a open space game. Like there had this. They had this mode on it. And I'm sure this is the mode everybody thinks about when I bring this game up. It had galactic conquest on it and it was you versus a computer player. And it was like, what's the. Oh, what's that game? Board game where you're constantly fighting over risk. Risk, right. Risk, yeah. So it's. It's space risk where you are facing an opponent, an AI opponent, fighting constantly for control of planets. And you're trying to control all the planets, whether it be for the droids, the rebels, the Republic, the whole. Everybody in there. And they brought in space battles. And the space battles were so much fun. Like you got to go out on your. In your little fighter and you would fly over to the enemy brigade or forget or whatever it was, I can't remember. And you would have to shoot down the shields and then you could dock your ship in their ship and you get out and you blow up some engine or some core, I can't remember. But just digging deep like it was awesome. And then they would bring in worlds like, I think it's Genesis. Is that the right. Am I. Am I saying that right? Genosis. Genosis, the desert planet. And they would. Not only would you be fighting your AI opponent, which was usually the droids on this world, Droids and the rebels. I think they also had a third party hostile race of Bugs that were, like, trying to kill you. The flying creatures. I don't remember what they're called. I was not huge Star Wars. Yeah. Okay, so, like, I wasn't like a huge Star wars guy. Like, I couldn't tell you everything about it, but I just remember this game, to me as a kid, was just awesome. You're constantly running around, and as a kid, you know, your imagination's always going. You're in this war. You think you're this huge, important, like, person in this army, and then you get the heroes when you save up enough points or however that worked. I don't remember. You could summon your Jedi and you could be. I can't remember if General Grievous was in this one or not. I don't remember. But you got your force powers, you got a lightsaber, and you're just dashing around while it's on a timer and you're just killing everything, killing all your enemies, and you're taking over the points and getting new spawn points and unlocking new classes why you do it. It was great. I could talk about it all day. [00:54:13] Speaker B: I do want to mention, because I think this is important, if hearing Pillow rave about Star Wars Battlefront 22005 has gotten you interested in this game, for the love of God, do not waste your money on the Star Wars Battlefront Classic collection that was released in 2024. [00:54:37] Speaker A: Oh, that is garbage. [00:54:39] Speaker B: It is one of the worst remasters that has ever been made for anything. They ruined this game that he loves so much. Never touched it because it has 7,000 user reviews on Steam, mostly negative. The original release of the game from 2005 is available to buy on Steam. Just buy that instead. You'll need to mod it to get it running properly, but it'll still be a better experience than the remaster. [00:55:19] Speaker A: And also, don't. Don't get the modern Battlefront 2. It's not the same. It's not as good. They gave a lot of stuff on it. This is a game with a lot of modern problems that were not a thing inserted into it. Loot boxes were a problem. [00:55:37] Speaker B: And yep. [00:55:39] Speaker C: So, yeah, I called it a monstrosity. And that's because it took my childhood as I remembered it and turned it into. As much as I was praising the game earlier, Battlefield, it turned it into Star Wars Battlefield. And that's not what I signed up for when I got the game. Like, that's okay. Label it as that. But don't try to market the game as everybody's favorite Battlefront. Game. [00:56:07] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:56:08] Speaker C: Like, that is just not how you go about it. And I had a negative. It reflected negative negatively to me. Just on. That might have been a great game. I mean, I'm sure I heard a lot of good things about it, but the same people that were in, like, the same shoes that I was was like, this wasn't the game that I grew up playing. Like, what's going on here? They modernized it and put it in the name of where everybody would be. Like, oh, I'm buying this. And like, if they were like me, I bought it and I played 20 minutes of it and said, nope, not what I remembered and put it away. But they still got my money. [00:56:45] Speaker B: You didn't refund it during your two weeks that you could? [00:56:48] Speaker C: No, because it was a console. [00:56:50] Speaker B: Oh. [00:56:54] Speaker A: Does GameStop still exist by you? Can you recoup some of it? [00:56:58] Speaker C: I think this is, like, you weren't able to refund the GameStop. [00:57:02] Speaker A: Is this digital? [00:57:03] Speaker C: There's only a few games that I've known of in the past for GameStop to take full refunds. And that there was. Was. Was Cyberpunk one of those? [00:57:11] Speaker B: Yes, the Specific four version. [00:57:16] Speaker A: Yeah. The developer explicitly did that. [00:57:18] Speaker B: Yes. [00:57:19] Speaker C: But like, yeah, I forget who made the Battlefront to Modern, but they're about that. Yeah, they. EA is. I don't want to talk about them. They're another episode. [00:57:38] Speaker B: About EA and bad developers. [00:57:41] Speaker C: Greedy, greedy, greedy, greedy, greedy, greedy. [00:57:44] Speaker B: But yeah, and to be clear, like, Battlefront 2 was always battlefield, but Star Wars. But the original had a soul. [00:57:53] Speaker A: The original was a different game for what it was. It is a prototype game before a bunch of the other Battlefields became this big thing. It's. It's something so great. I remember playing this in another friend's basement, and they were the Star wars nerds that could not shut up about it. And I learned so much random shit about Star wars because of them. But I had such a blast playing with those twins. [00:58:24] Speaker B: So, Mike, you gonna talk about a game turned into a movie or movie turned into a game? [00:58:29] Speaker A: We'll keep going with Movie turned into a game. We'll. We'll talk about what you mentioned a little bit earlier. We're gonna talk about GoldenEye. The. The thing that may have popularized modern FPSs. [00:58:48] Speaker B: This. This was most console gamers first, first person shooter, most on PC. We had Doom. We talked about Doom last episode. Doom is the actual granddaddy of FPS. Goldeneye was the. Let's bring FPS to the masses. [00:59:08] Speaker A: Goldeneye is your cool cousin, and Goldeneye was kind of great. I was 67 when Goldeneye came out, so I had never seen the movie, but I knew it was based on a movie because obviously you know what it is. [00:59:29] Speaker B: Yep. [00:59:30] Speaker A: 007 is an obvious franchise there. And they did a really surprisingly great job taking that movie, turning those levels into really, like, at the time, difficult strategic games where you couldn't just run through gun. [00:59:49] Speaker B: Difficult and interesting. This was an era when FPSs were find the blue key, now the blue doors can be opened. [00:59:57] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:59:58] Speaker B: Find the yellow key. Now the yellow doors can be opened. And that was about as complicated as FPS got at the time. And they're like, okay, but what if we had objectives like destroy the fuel tanks or sabotage interrogate airfield. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it had actual objectives. And the difficulty levels did not just alter enemy health and accuracy and damage, but also added more objectives in the levels you had to do. [01:00:26] Speaker A: It was. It was such a great adaptation that this is. This is possibly the origin point for why FPS is blew up. [01:00:38] Speaker B: Yep. [01:00:39] Speaker A: And it was also pretty much the first instance of multiplayer FPS we had. There's a couple people. I mean, Quake is still a thing. We've been talking about that a little bit too. But GoldenEye brought this to the masses as well. And everyone my age, phenomenal. [01:00:58] Speaker B: Everyone my age has memories of the kid who actually owned four N64 controllers. And we had parties at his house, shooting each other in the face. The people who were too stupid to change their control scheme complaining about oddjob being OP while the rest of us laughed as we shot him in the face. [01:01:15] Speaker A: Or conversely, everyone, no awjab. You can't use oddjab. We're gonna play something else. Golden Guns only. Oh, there were so many great moments for this. [01:01:25] Speaker B: It had so many fun, silly modes to play. It wasn't just Team Deathmatch or King of the Hill. You could play Slappers only. And you're just running around slapping people in the face and it's fucking hilarious. [01:01:42] Speaker A: This is. This is the possibly my favorite video game adaptation of all time. Because it is surprising, like, going back having seen that movie. Surprisingly faithful to the movie. [01:01:53] Speaker B: Yep. [01:01:53] Speaker A: But whilst also doing its own thing and having a cohesive story that makes sense. Obviously the graphics are real hard to get around today's day and age, but it's. It played fantastically for the time. It's a little jank now, but it was a one stick shooter. [01:02:14] Speaker B: So if you must play the N64 release, do yourself a favor and get either the Nintendo Switch Online N64 controller or the 8bitdo N64 controller that I mentioned before and use the 1.2 control scheme, which. What that does is it maps your movement forward, back and sliding left and right to the C buttons and then you aim with the analog stick. It's close to a modern twin stick setup in terms of functionally how it is. It will take you time to get used to because it's. You're using the opposite thumbs from how modern games work. With the modern twin stick, you're moving with your right thumb and aiming with your left instead of vice versa. But once you adjust, you'll be able to have fun with the game. If you play with the default controls, you are going to be frustrated constantly. Things like trying to aim up or down require you to go and use the C buttons and try to like finesse aiming up and down with a on off button as opposed to analog aiming. It's miserable. Don't do that to yourself. But I believe there was actually like a remaster of it not that long ago. [01:03:30] Speaker A: Yeah. I believe there's also a GameCube version, which GameCube version is significantly nice entirely that they made another one that's just. [01:03:41] Speaker B: A different 007 game seven tomorrow never. [01:03:46] Speaker A: Died then or something. [01:03:47] Speaker B: Yeah. Or the World Is Not Enough or something like that. There's. There's a few. [01:03:51] Speaker A: It was still Pierce Brosnan. [01:03:53] Speaker B: Yeah. Which was also still Pierce Brosnan. [01:03:55] Speaker A: Pierce Brosnan. Surprisingly good in 8 bit, 64 bit. What? [01:04:02] Speaker C: I unfortunately wasn't a GoldenEye kid, but I did play its twin Perfect Dark, which, I mean, plays identical to it, just a different story altogether. So I can share in like the nostalgia of that type of game with the slap only or Big Head mode, things like that. [01:04:20] Speaker A: Yeah, like, that's the great thing about it. It is a game that took itself seriously whilst also going, we can have some silly fun because we've got our serious mode, we've got our fun mode and I think there's a cheat section that you could like pull some of that stuff into the base game. [01:04:41] Speaker C: And yeah, it wasn't like you had to enter cheat codes either. It was like, I think if, if, if I can remember, if it's anything like Perfect Dark woods, which they're like twins of each other. Like I said, you could unlock the game like the cheats in the game and they would store them in a menu in like a hub. Like Perfect Dark had a hub when you started the game. Like it had its own little world and you went to Some like computer to start the game and you could go unlock the different cheats and select them. Whether it be all big head mode, unlimited ammo. You could get the super overpowered like alien weapon at the start of the game. But yeah, it like changed game cheats. It wasn't left down upright. A B, A B. It was like. [01:05:28] Speaker A: I think this was. I believe this is true. Either it's beat the game or beat the level and you're allowed to go back and put cheats in. [01:05:35] Speaker B: There were different things you could do in levels for some of the cheats too. Not all of them were just beat the game or beat the level cheats. [01:05:41] Speaker A: This may be though, the start of skulls where you find a thing in the. In the basically where the world and then that's your cheat code. [01:05:49] Speaker B: Because a lot of. I'd say more like skulls in that they're more like mutators that just change an aspect of the game than actual like infinite ammo type cheats. [01:05:58] Speaker C: I'd say along with being the OG skulls, it's like the OG achievements like do this to earn this. And like. [01:06:03] Speaker A: Also true. [01:06:06] Speaker B: I did. Look, the remastered version was in 2022 and you have to play it on Xbox if you want the modern remastered version of the game one Fuck. [01:06:17] Speaker A: Really? [01:06:18] Speaker B: Yes, because Microsoft owns Rare, who made the game. If you owned Rare Replay on Xbox digitally, you got this for free, otherwise you need to buy it. And this was at the same time that they dropped the goldeneye Nintendo Switch Online Classics version as well. It was part of the same deal. Because this game was in license hell for decades. Yeah, because different companies own the rights to the James Bond music, the James Bond IP itself. The game IP license for the 007 game that Rare developed, it was in IP hell. [01:07:00] Speaker A: Well, there's also actor rights things because there are direct responses to certain actors. Sean Bean and Pierce Brosnan. [01:07:09] Speaker B: Exactly. Also because you mentioned Perfect Dark as like the. The spiritual successor to it. Because again, there was rights hell, they couldn't make a GoldenEye 2 video game. Perfect Dark is fucking awesome. I think it's a better game in every regard except frame rate on the Nintendo 64. But the best way to play Perfect Dark is actually the Xbox 360 version of the game, which is available in Rare Replay, which runs at 60fps and with modern controls and HD upscaling. So it looks crisp. Perfect Dark on Xbox is fucking awesome in ways that the N64 version never could be. I highly recommend. [01:07:53] Speaker C: Didn't they bring on like online, like online mode to that too. [01:07:58] Speaker B: I believe so. And also you can actually play both the N64 and I think the. The Xbox versions that are available now. [01:08:09] Speaker C: Because I remember Perfect Dark Zero, I think that's the name of it came out, you know, as a successor to. [01:08:18] Speaker A: I think that was trash. [01:08:23] Speaker B: It's a Perfect Dark. It's fine. It's not a bad game. But it's not nearly as good as. [01:08:30] Speaker C: The original to say it's not what made the original iconic. [01:08:35] Speaker B: And the key is just you can play the original Perfect dark at 60 frames per second locked like it does not slow down. Even in the situations that bogged the original game down to hell and where it actually looks good on HD displays, on rare replay. Perfect Dark is worth playing. It's great. Don't bother with the Switch Online Nintendo Classics version because that's the horrible N64 version. [01:09:02] Speaker C: I don't think I could ever. [01:09:04] Speaker B: Perfect Dark was too ambitious for the N64. It could not handle it. [01:09:09] Speaker C: I don't think there's a world where I'd be able to enjoy Perfect Dark online matchmaking because I know someone's gonna get that alien sniper that sees through wall walls and kills me and I'm gonna be so mad. The whole game. Like I already know, probably. [01:09:23] Speaker B: But it shares the great campaign that GoldenEye has because they used the same design of let's make interesting levels and give you actual objectives to do. It's fun. Yeah, It's a good game. [01:09:39] Speaker A: So I think I've talked enough about. But goldeneyes is a great adaptation. I'm gonna go with a little bit of a poor adaptation real quick. There have been quite a few really, really bad Lord of the Rings adaptations. There's one decent one and there's some actual non adaptations. They're just universe uses that are good. In Shadow of War and Shadow of Mordor. Two Towers was terrible. Like there's. They're not consistent in what they are between the games. They're not like as. As a whole going from Fellowship to Two Towers to Return of the King. They're not even the same genre of game. There's an RPG into a hero Fighter into sort of slash. It's almost like it is. It's a hack and slash. Like. [01:10:42] Speaker C: Like Hyrule warriors. [01:10:44] Speaker A: Yes. [01:10:44] Speaker C: Or like what's the. Yeah, I know which one you talk about. Like build up combo. Build up combo. Build up combo. [01:10:50] Speaker A: That's exactly that. That can. I can't think. Lubu God. Dinosaur warriors. [01:10:57] Speaker C: Right. [01:10:59] Speaker A: It's. It goes from one to the Next. It's not consistent. They're not. It's just such a poorly done one. And then they had the like mix between sometimes it's book and sometimes it's movie and they're never gonna tell you which one's which. And so it sort of builds between them. And these had terrible frame rate problems. So, like this, this is a series of games where I loved the world, the universe, and they kinda ruined it for me multiple different times. [01:11:36] Speaker C: I can't disagree with that. [01:11:39] Speaker B: It's. I looked up a list of every Lord of the Rings based video game. Literally every single one of these is trash, trash, trash, trash, trash, trash, trash, Tolerable trash, trash, trash, trash, trash. Shadow of War, Shadow of Mortar. [01:11:56] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:11:57] Speaker C: What about the recent one? I haven't played it. It's. It's something to the Shire or something like that. [01:12:06] Speaker B: It's not out yet. We don't know. [01:12:08] Speaker C: Oh, is it not? I've been seeing gameplay of it. [01:12:10] Speaker A: There's another, there's another one like World north that. [01:12:15] Speaker B: Okay, it is out. It came out literally a week ago as we're recording this. I have no fucking clue if it's any good or not. [01:12:22] Speaker C: I don't either. I just was seeing gameplay looks fun. [01:12:27] Speaker B: It's. It's a life sim game, so it's gonna appeal to very different people than like Shadow of War and Mordor. [01:12:32] Speaker A: But that's fine. [01:12:34] Speaker C: Yeah, it is, it's. [01:12:37] Speaker B: It's Hobbit. Animal Crossing is what it looks like. [01:12:40] Speaker C: That's exactly what it is. [01:12:41] Speaker A: That sounds good. [01:12:43] Speaker B: I hope. According to Metacritic, it's mixed or average. [01:12:50] Speaker A: Okay. I mean that, that may be still. [01:12:52] Speaker B: Better than most Lord of the Rings games. [01:12:55] Speaker A: Yeah, the, the best one of these is the Dinosaur warriors game and that one had massive frame rate problems. [01:13:04] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. [01:13:10] Speaker A: So like, do yourself a favor and if you're gonna go back and play a bunch of old games or hear about an adaptation for a movie game, don't rush to it, take a look, because it's not always worth it. [01:13:28] Speaker B: Yeah. There's a reason I said at the start of this, like, my impression for over 20 years of my life was video game adaptations of movies are universally bad. [01:13:38] Speaker A: Pretty much like they're not universally bad. [01:13:42] Speaker B: But 90 to 95% of them are. [01:13:44] Speaker A: Bad because as, as it may point out, this is, this is a big thing. These are cash grabs. A lot of them are cash grabs. And this is how I got most of them was a family member knew I loved this and knew I played this system. So they bought me this game. And I played it because it was the only thing I had and it wasn't good. [01:14:07] Speaker B: Or if you're a true child of the 80s and 90s, a family member knows you like this franchise, so they bought you the game, but they don't realize you own a Super Nintendo. You don't own a Sega Genesis or vice versa, and they bought you the wrong version of the game and you literally can't play it. [01:14:23] Speaker A: Well, it was convenient for me because I only had a Game Boy. [01:14:28] Speaker B: Which means you exclusively had the bad adaptations. There were no good Game Boy movie adaptations. I'm sorry at me if you think there is one. Tell me about it because I don't think there's a single one on Game Boy. [01:14:40] Speaker A: The best one is the RPG for a Fellowship of the Ring one. And that's not great. [01:14:49] Speaker B: I'm just saying Game Boy was where Shovelware thrived in that time. [01:14:53] Speaker A: Yep. [01:14:55] Speaker C: So I'll give you one right now. That about Game Boy. That's probably one of the best adaptations from a TV show movie. [01:15:03] Speaker B: Okay. [01:15:04] Speaker C: And I mean, this might be a segue, but Pokemon. [01:15:11] Speaker B: Pokemon was a game first. [01:15:13] Speaker C: Was it? [01:15:14] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. [01:15:15] Speaker B: The. The games in Japan were out in like 1996 or something. [01:15:20] Speaker A: 97. 97. [01:15:21] Speaker C: When did that. When did the show come out? Am I just messed up very badly? [01:15:27] Speaker A: The show came out like, it became so popular so fast. We got it in 98, it came out in 97. I started playing in 98. The show came out in 98 or 99. And then Pokemon movie 2000 was a big deal. [01:15:49] Speaker B: Yep. [01:15:52] Speaker A: But that's not the Pokemon movie. So if we're gonna go discuss that one, do you want to put that one on hold for later that we'll talk about or we want to get right to it? [01:16:00] Speaker B: Let's do it. [01:16:02] Speaker A: All right. [01:16:02] Speaker B: You segued already. Just segued. [01:16:04] Speaker A: There. There is one really good adaptation from game to movie that is. That is Pokemon related. And it's Detective Pikachu. When did this come out to be so fantastic? Where did this come from? Who was the genius who went, this is how we're going to do it. [01:16:25] Speaker B: We first need to start. For those who don't know, Detective Pikachu was a video game first. This is not like. This is not like, oh, Pokemon is a big franchise. Let's make a movie. This was a. There is a video game, Detective Pikachu. Let's make that into a movie. [01:16:43] Speaker A: Yeah. There are plenty of spin off Pokemon games. Mystery Dungeon, there's the Ranger one, but Detective Pikachu was another one of the popular spin off games because it was sort of. It was a detective game. Well, you had. Pikachu is the most popular character that comes out of Pokemon. So obviously Pikachu was the character they were going to go with. And it's a very well received game as well. Detective Pikachu's are a good game. And this was the one. They went live adaptation. And all of us went, the fuck are you doing? What? You're making a live action Pokemon game out of Detective Pikachu. This is where you're starting with. And then it came out and it was astoundingly good. Not just for a video game movie. It was a good movie. [01:17:38] Speaker C: I must admit. I never watched or played it, much. [01:17:44] Speaker A: Less people have played it. [01:17:46] Speaker C: Yeah, like, I'm really surprised that I never watched it because, like, I'm a huge Pokemon fan. But yeah, I just never, I never really even watched much past like the original, I think three or four seasons of like the poke or the Pokemon shows, because that's fine. It like got to a point where I'm just like, ah, this isn't my OG crew here. [01:18:15] Speaker A: I got halfway through Johto when I stopped watching the show. I'm still playing the games because I still enjoy Pokemon. But Detective, Detective Pikachu had an interesting cast decisions. And you're like, Ryan Reynolds is Pikachu. What the fuck are we talking about here? What's going on? And, and that's not the person I would have expected to try and leave this. And they do such a good job. [01:18:44] Speaker B: Yes. And I, I do want to just touch base of if you've never played the video game. It is actually roughly the same plot that they adapted to a movie. They actually adapted the actual story of the video game, not just the premise to the movie, like verbatim, but it's mostly the same major story elements. It is wild that this movie exists, let alone being as good as it is. It's so good. Like, I don't even want to spoil anything about Ryan Reynolds. Like, they managed to make it so that. And this is part that is changed from the game. They managed to make it so that there is a reason that Ryan Reynolds is voicing Pikachu in this movie. [01:19:39] Speaker A: And it's, it's exceptionally well done in the. The balance between Ryan Reynolds as a character and Pikachu. [01:19:51] Speaker B: Yep. [01:19:51] Speaker A: Which is astounding. It's. There's a little bit of Uncanny Valley here and there because they're making live action Pokemon and I don't know if you've ever seen Lickitung, but. [01:20:04] Speaker B: But they also lean into that a bit and go for the live action Pokemon would be kind of horrifying vibe. [01:20:11] Speaker A: Yeah, they do. [01:20:12] Speaker B: And that's why it works so well. Like, this is a movie that would not have been good if they had done it as an anime movie in the Pokemon TV show. Anime style succeeds and is better because they did it as a live action movie with CG Pokemon. I think it actually benefits from that, which is wild when we're dealing with an era of so many shitty live action CG fest movie adaptations of cash grab things. [01:20:42] Speaker A: The acting is fantastic throughout it. The characters, the actors that they have, they put on performances that are great. There's a couple people you'll recognize and a couple. You'll be like, I know you from somewhere and I'm not 100% sure why. [01:20:57] Speaker B: Yep. It's. It's so good. [01:21:02] Speaker A: It's. It's good. Way better than Go watch. You have given it credit. Go watch it. [01:21:09] Speaker B: The game. Like, if you're interested. It's a 3ds game. Good luck finding it. It's fine. But like, watch the damn movie. It's so good. It's actually just legit. A good movie. No qualifier. All right, Mike, you want to talk about your bad adaptation you put in here too? [01:21:31] Speaker A: Yeah, let's finish this out. And we have. We have my least favorite adaptation and the most recent adaptations of things, and this is how to not do an adaptation is the Halo franchise. The. The show that Paramount made doesn't fundamentally understand its own characters. And that is the single most important thing that you need to take away. It has some cool stuff, but they have no idea who they're making. I. I am willing to bet you if they had decided this is going to be a Mass Effect show instead of Halo, everything would have been fine. Because what they want was a drama. Halo isn't Dajraba. That's not what it is. Fundamentally, the characters aren't the same. They don't do the same sort of things that you want out of it. There's. There's no space opera here. This is a world in conflict. This should have been a war show. [01:22:37] Speaker B: If they wanted to do what they did, they should have adapted Halo Reach. [01:22:44] Speaker A: If they're gonna do it, they needed to probably do something that doesn't focus on Master Chief as a character. [01:22:51] Speaker B: That's why I say they needed to do Halo Reach. Because Halo Reach is a character drama with a bunch of different characters and Master Chief isn't a part of it. [01:23:04] Speaker A: The biggest problem is what they wanted to sell a Master Chief. Yeah, but I like it feels fundamentally like they were writing for a different show. The. The plots don't make sense. The characters don't act like any of them should. There are deep characterizations on who these people are over multiple books and many, many games. We know who they are. None of that's present. They've taken away a lot of the just straight up intelligence of the characters. They've decided to add in love. That doesn't need to be there. These are. These are super soldiers in war. This is a fundamentally just what they wanted wasn't Halo or frankly they wanted the name Halo and they made something random with it. If you're going to use the franchise, you have to respect the material you're given because then you get really good responses. There's a reason that the Fallout show is so well received. There's a reason that Last of Us is so well received. They respected the characters, they respected the series, they respected the emotion of it. None of that is true in Halo. I don't even know if visually it's that old, all that great, but that's probably the best thing it has going for it. So mad about that show. Someone talk about something that's much better than that show. [01:25:01] Speaker C: Well, I got one more and I'll make it quick because I think we're running out of time here. [01:25:05] Speaker B: It's also not better than that. [01:25:06] Speaker C: So I won't say most people it was not received well. I think it was a timing thing myself when it came out. A game to a movie adaptation that I personally thoroughly enjoyed because I enjoy everything about this universe was the World of Warcraft movie that came out that kind of bridged the gap and explained before the Warlords of Draynor expansion came out. Kind of explained what led to the plot of this movie or why it kind of tied the two together. I enjoyed it. I mean I don't have really anything bad to say about it. Only memories I have of it were good and I know it hyped me up. Maybe want to play World Warcraft that. [01:25:58] Speaker A: Were like I, I, I had the fun and the campiness in this movie is great. The the best part about this movie by far. The orc CG is phenomenal. A lot of the character acting for the orcs is actually really well done. The humans are oddly enough the worst thing in the movie. The orcs visual animation is beautiful. It's filled with little cameo things that You're. If you're a wow player, you'll immediately go, oh, the thing. The thing. Like the random little Murlocs running by. And you hear the Murloc sound. That's just little nostalgia. But I also decided to just say, yeah, that story that we were doing it. Rewrite the whole story. [01:26:51] Speaker C: It did receive a meta score of 32. Not very great. But the user score on it was an 8.2. So, I mean, what is that? Is that a 5.5? We'll say average between the two, so I'll give it a win in my book. It is a. If you haven't watched it and you're a World of Warcraft fan, like, I know me and Mike are. Go watch it. It does some fun little nods to, like, the lore. I'm a lore nerd when it comes to World of Warcraft. I strictly usually play now for the lore itself. It's really good. It's humans versus orcs. I mean, you'll enjoy it. It's the opening of the dark portal, that whole war. It's. It's really nice. Go check it out. I don't. I don't know. I liked it. [01:27:44] Speaker B: All right. Speaking of having about a 30% on rotten tomatoes. [01:27:50] Speaker A: Good segue. [01:27:52] Speaker B: I want to defend the 1993 Super Mario Brothers movie. Yes, you heard me right. Defend. Do I think this is a good adaptation? Oh, hell no. It's a terrible adaptation. [01:28:09] Speaker A: A monkey. [01:28:11] Speaker B: It's a famously bad adaptation. However, if you're not aware of what this movie is, let me set the stage for you. Bob Hoskins. Yes, that's right. The detective from who Framed Roger Rabbit and John Leguziamo in, like, literally his, like, breakout role. This is how most people learned who the fuck he was. Play Mario and Luigi plumbers from Brooklyn who get sucked into the Mushroom Kingdom and defeat President Koopa instead of King Koopa and save the princess. Broad Strokes. That's roughly the Mario franchise. Right? [01:29:00] Speaker A: So apart from the world being. Yeah, Mario's from there, but, yeah, we'll go with it. [01:29:06] Speaker B: Yes. So this movie tries to do a lot, and some of the stuff it does is really clever and fun, and some of it's just fucking stupid. Mario World was the New Mario at the time. So they went with a dinosaur theme and made it so that the Koopas and the entire, like, Mushroom Kingdom are like an alternate reality if the meteorite never killed off the dinosaurs, essentially, is the premise. And they do some smart shit for the world building in this. In the Mushroom Kingdom, where Dinosaurs never died out. There are no fossil fuels. All of the cars are electric cars with those like wires that go up to power lines, run along the top of the roads. Like how trolleys work. The real world. That's a cool little bit of world building. They never say any of that. That's just there in the movie. That's fucking cool. The aesthetic is a cool like punk dystopia aesthetic. It's very grungy, it's gross. And it like, this is 1993. We didn't have CG yet. It's all practical effects. Visually. It's not a terrible movie for the time. It's not stunning or anything. I mean, this is no, the thing. But it's fine. Where it falls flat is the supporting cast. The princess is a one dimensional character. I think Dennis Hopper is great as Koopa. He's creepy and unsettling. [01:30:59] Speaker A: He hams it the fuck up. [01:31:01] Speaker B: He's so corny and so goofy in this, but he's. He's gross in a way that you want your villain to be like, this is. This is back when the theme of Mario was, oh, Bowser's kidnapping Princess Peach and we don't know what the fuck he's gonna do with it. This was before Jack Black would serenade her. So choosing to adapt it as. No, he's a creep. Yeah, he was kind of a creep at that point. He wasn't charming yet. The dinosaurs haven't played tennis yet. Yes, the dinosaurs. And specifically like Yoshi looks really bad. This was the same year that Jurassic park came out. And I think that really hurt it because we had gotten a good dinosaur movie around the same time. [01:31:59] Speaker A: Yeah. Having never seen practical dinosaurs basically until Jurassic park and then having Jurassic park have dinosaurs and then to go from that to the things that are in this movie. [01:32:14] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:32:14] Speaker A: The Koopas are horrifying. [01:32:18] Speaker B: The Koopas. I don't understand why they chose to make them like 8ft tall idiots. [01:32:24] Speaker A: Like, they're literally tall things with really tiny little heads. [01:32:27] Speaker B: It's weird. There's a lot of weird decisions. But frankly, if you can just turn your brain off, it's fine fun. There's a lot of like, little details and. And this is where I'm going with this. You can watch this for free on the Internet archive with deleted footage. Because this movie was released cut down with a lot of like, context for some of the scenes missing. There's 20 minutes of footage that was discovered few years ago. I don't remember exactly when I want to say, like 2020. 2021. Yeah, 2021. There was a VHS workprint version of the film that these scenes hadn't been cut from yet. And it has been restored as best they could from this 30 year old VHS tape. If you can overlook, you know, some. Some visual anomalies for the restored footage, suddenly a lot of the scenes make a lot more sense. Instead of just randomly cutting to the aftermath of a thing, you actually see why the fuck it happened. I'm still not gonna say it's a good movie, but it's fun. And you should watch Super Mario Brothers. I will put a link to the Internet. [01:33:53] Speaker A: I won't say the wow movie is good either, but it's a fun time. Sometimes bad things are just fun. I will put a movie doom. [01:34:09] Speaker B: Set aside a couple hours and watch the 1993 Super Mario Brothers. It's fun. It's stupid. And I think Bob Hoskins is great. John Leguziamo is great. They're funny together. It's an enjoyable film. [01:34:30] Speaker A: All right, well, that pretty much covers all the topics that we had on hand. Thank you very much. [01:34:40] Speaker B: Join the discord. Tell us what movie or video game adaptation of a movie we overlooked that we should have talked about instead of the ones we did. [01:34:50] Speaker A: Yes, we know about Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. Those were too easy to talk about. We wanted. We wanted a little bit deeper of a cut there. [01:34:59] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:35:00] Speaker A: All right, thank you very much, everyone. Hopefully we'll be able to get this going soon. We'll see if Jax has a new backlog game to go through soon. If he does, we'll give you an update. [01:35:14] Speaker B: Otherwise, I'll go through my Switch library and pick something that I've been meaning to play. Because if it's on my switch, I'll actually wind up playing it. Even if it may or may not wind up being on stream. [01:35:26] Speaker A: This has been 8bit to 4k. Have a great night, everybody. [01:35:31] Speaker B: Bye bye. [01:35:32] Speaker C: Good night.