From 8-Bit to 4K Episode 14: CRAFT THE WORLD

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign. [00:00:10] Speaker B: Hello and welcome back to 8 Fitbit to 4K where we talk about all things gaming and video game related. I'm Pillow Pet and I have with me two other hosts got Mike of many names. [00:00:26] Speaker A: Hello, hello, hello. [00:00:28] Speaker B: We got Jack Zoman. [00:00:30] Speaker C: It's me, I'm here. [00:00:32] Speaker B: You are here. First I'm going to do shout outs of the Patreons. I'm going to do a shout out to Codex Ninja, myself, Skippius Esquire, Labana, Uncle Chrisco and yeet the dab for giving for being Patreons on the shout out tier. Speaking of Patreon, we do have a Patreon. You can go to patreon.com the4words podcast to come support the podcast. $1 a month just tells you that you love us. $5 a month will get you an exclusive feed on some behind the scenes audio of our prep work before each show and $10 a month gets you an exclusive feed and we'll also shout out your name during the intro of each episode like we just did. And that does extend to our other podcast on the network where it's the four Wards podcast where we are talking League of Legends and helping players learn league and get better at league. We also have a discord that can do all the same things above getting you better at games Talk games, talk league. Everything you want to talk about. Link for that is in our description. And yeah, so what have you guys been up to? [00:01:45] Speaker C: Alright, I want to kick this off because I have a story to tell. So I love classic Mega Man. I'm talking NES Mega man and the Mega Man X franchise. I think Mega Man X1.4 are some of the best 2D platformers ever made. [00:02:00] Speaker A: Just period. [00:02:03] Speaker C: And while I was tooling around on the Switch online service, seeing what games were on there, I stumbled into something that I was unfamiliar with. Apparently back in the 90s, Capcom ported Mega Man 1 through 3 to the Sega Genesis in a title called the Wily wars, which was apparently never released here. Originally it was on some sort of like Sega Genesis satellite service, but it never had a physical cartridge in the us but it's on Switch online. So I was like, oh, Genesis ports of Mega Man 133. That sounds interesting. Let's load this up. Mega Man 2 and 3 are the ones I have the most nostalgia for and these are not good ports at all. Holy shit. The music is awful. The graphics are somehow worse than the NES game despite being quote unquote higher fidelity. Like these are bad ports of classic Mega Man. And then Also, the Switch online service is not a great emulator in the first place. There's a little bit of input lag. It's just generally not a great time. So I did not play these for very long. Instead, what I did at the time that this happened, Capcom had a sale going on on the switch eShop. So I bought Mega Man Legacy Collection for like 8 bucks so I could play classic Mega man immediately. Load up Mega Man 2. It looks and sounds like I remember. And I go to play it and I have a lot of nostalgia for Mega Man 2. It has a lot of iconic moments. Guys, Mega Man 2 kinda sucks. It's not a very good game, and I realize that's a hot take, but hear me out. Mega Man 2 has some severe problems. The metal blade is, for some reason, incredibly op. It can fire in every direction. It does tons of damage to tons of enemies, and it sips energy. But the problem is everything else is just awful. Half the other weapons in the game you basically can't use because you shoot them a couple times and you're out of ammo. So you have to only use them at the exact times you're supposed to, up to and including. There is a boss in that game that you cannot defeat on a single life unless you use a creative use of the various movement items in the game to bypass most of the walls that you would otherwise have to blow up because you don't have enough weapon ammo to be able to blow up the walls to get to the boss and be able to kill the boss who can only be hurt by this weapon. Mega Man 2 is bad, y'. [00:04:34] Speaker B: All. [00:04:35] Speaker C: That's not even getting into, like, the final. Final boss literally is just a dude who goes in a figure eight and shoots at you on a periodic cycle. There's no. There's nothing. That's the entire pattern. Like, it's literally he just flies in a figure eight and shoots at you periodically. It's so bland. It was really jarring. I have so much nostalgia for and fond memories of Mega Man 2, and replaying it kind of killed all that. That game's bad. So then I played Mega Man 3, and Mega Man 3 is a lot better. I'm not gonna say Mega Man 3 is bad, but Mega Man 3 still has some frustrations that the series figured out after that. Because, like, these aren't an issue, starting with Mega Man 4, of levels designed around you using certain powers. And they are just impossible, like, literally impossible if you die in a respawn, because you don't have enough weapon energy to get back through the the platforming segment with your Rush Jet or Rush Coil. And it's I'm so glad the series got better after that. But it's really weird going back to the two Mega man games I have the most nostalgia for and going, wow, these don't hold up when Mega Man 4, which I also have a fair bit of nostalgia for, does. And the Mega Man X franchise absolutely holds up. Those games are great. Mega Man 3 good but flawed, and Mega Man 2 kinda bad. And that was a weird. I was not expecting that to be my vibe because the last time I replayed NES Mega man, like 10 years ago, I had a blast. So clearly my tolerance for bullshit has lowered in the last, like, decade, because [00:06:17] Speaker B: that just comes with age bullshit. [00:06:20] Speaker C: Yeah, but a decade ago I was still 30. [00:06:23] Speaker B: Yeah, but now you're leaning closer to the Dang kids, get off my lawn. Patience is going to be zero. [00:06:29] Speaker C: I literally turned 40 in 10 days. [00:06:33] Speaker B: Over the hill. Yeah, mine's at the end of March. Very last day. [00:06:37] Speaker A: Okay, all three of us are surprisingly close. You and I are very close. [00:06:42] Speaker C: So I'm just gonna propose this on the podcast. You guys want to do like a group jackbox night for our birthdays? [00:06:49] Speaker A: That could be fun. We'd have to do. We should definitely do something total for all of us. [00:06:55] Speaker B: Yeah, that'd be fun. [00:06:57] Speaker C: We'll figure out a day, invite some listeners. Maybe the. The patrons who are subscribed get to come play jackbox with us. [00:07:05] Speaker A: Oh, that'd be great. [00:07:06] Speaker B: All right, Mike, let's. Let's talk about our next. Let's me and you both talk about this. [00:07:12] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:07:12] Speaker B: What have you been up to? [00:07:13] Speaker A: We have a lot to talk about with. As of last Thursday, they did a slightly early release and then as of Monday, the full open release of WoW's new expansion, Midnight Wow. They did a damn good job. This might be a hot take, but making it so that if you pre order and you get early access was a genius fucking decision for two reasons. One, this staggers server entrance and the problem that every other launch has had where servers are slammed and you can't play, just didn't happen. And two, it actually feels like a little reward for pre ordering, which pre ordering can sometimes feel like a scam because most of the time you don't actually get anything out of it. Being able to bypass a little bit of the early problems and go in, you don't get too much of a head start because the full end game hasn't Opened up until next week. [00:08:09] Speaker B: So there's a lot of other things they like made it to where you weren't allowed to do either. Like you couldn't get the new allied race or any of that stuff until full release. So they, they did lock a bunch of stuff so people weren't getting super far behind or felt like they were so far behind. So I feel like they did it really well. Like they capped out your gear. Like item level, there was no possible way to get above like a certain level. [00:08:33] Speaker A: There's no drops of epic level, etc and then they also staggered a couple of the features that usually come a little bit earlier with the early patch. So like new class spec with the devourer, the entire housing system, which is phenomenal. Those came a little bit earlier as well, so they had time to. To move things around. Overall, like feature wise, they've, they've kicked ass on this expansion so far. Story wise, they've kicked ass on this expansion so far. The, like, the. The main sort of character you are following is a likable character and the villain is actually reasonably understood. She's clever. Things. Things don't feel forced like they have before. [00:09:18] Speaker B: Like the villain Xalatath. She. She to me, like she's very clear cut. Like there's no room for negotiation that she is a villain in our eyes. But to her, like she feels like she is, you know, doing what's best for her. Like there is. It's. It's hard to explain but like you don't hate her as a villain. [00:09:43] Speaker A: Oh yeah, she. She has been around and played with long enough as a character. She's. She's technically been around since Legion when she was part of the Shadow Weaponry where she was just a whispering fuckhead and she was telling you to murder people. And then I do not remember how she got out of that when we, [00:10:07] Speaker B: when we sent all of our energy up to the sword. [00:10:11] Speaker A: Oh, she was just freed, I guess. [00:10:13] Speaker B: Well, I think she like stayed. I don't know. There's some weird like lore stuff there. But wow's very good at like doing something and then changing it years later also. [00:10:24] Speaker A: Yeah, so but like they've had a bad habit of doing good expansion. Bad expansion, good expansion, bad expansion. And that doesn't seem to be the trend currently. They've just been getting better and better and better the last several. [00:10:37] Speaker B: I didn't play a whole lot of War within, but when I what I did play, like I enjoyed it. My experience so far with Midnight has been pretty much the same. I'VE loved the story, like especially going back to Eversong and like finally being able to fully explore like Zuloman is awesome. Like back in tbc when Zuloman Raid first came out, you got this little taste of it and now that same area is there and it's changed a little bit because it's been like a long time. Like I don't even know, like 20, 30 years in game or even more [00:11:07] Speaker A: that that came out in 2010. So. [00:11:10] Speaker B: Well, I mean just like in game. I'm sorry, 2,000 years past. So a lot, a lot's changed there. Like some of the temples are gone, which to be expected. But the whole zone, like the area feels really familiar when you're in it. And then when it spreads out and you're in this whole like Troll zone, it felt really good. The other zone, Herondar something. Herondar I believe really like, like Avatar Ish. It's all right. I'd say it's a pretty good zone. It. I have frustrations with the Gathering throughout the last expansion. [00:11:42] Speaker A: So there was there the stuff with the Void. Very well done. They've done some great, great things with like skyboxes to make it like just wandering around the world. You see things, you go, holy. What the hell is that? And then you fly over and then you go, holy. This looks amazing. Or if you're a long time player like you and I, there are things that are obviously, oh hey look, we've got to go into Supper Moon and go back over here and there's no loading zone. I could just fly between those two things now. Oh, this is fucking amazing. [00:12:11] Speaker B: Yeah, that felt really cool. [00:12:12] Speaker A: Integrated into the world. [00:12:13] Speaker B: I noticed that they added like a Dalaran bubble, an old classic Dalaran bubble above Stratholme. I don't remember that being there, but it could have been a while since I've tried to explore it from above. But it was like this blood haze, which was kind of cool because it's an unfinished like pocket zone where like you can still. If you glitch through it, there's still like old Naxramas like Loading Zone in there from way back in the day. But anyway, so I want to real quick because we could probably talk about this all night, but we don't need to. I love the Hunt system. How do you feel about that? [00:12:47] Speaker A: I've done one of them so far, so I've got very little to talk about of it. [00:12:51] Speaker B: It to me, my initial vibe with it was I feel like the Witcher here, like going around gathering Clues, like, going around gathering clues for this. Like, just my first hunt. I'm like, okay, gathering clues, trying to figure out, you know, who this guy is and hunt him while he's hunting me. It seemed really cool. I. I'm not even max level yet, so it's hard for me, but I'm still able to do, like, world quests and stuff, so I'm getting that feel. [00:13:16] Speaker A: I, I sort of pushed it real, real hard to hit max level in between doing a bunch of other stuff, so I, I, I hit it. [00:13:24] Speaker B: I'm sure there'll be lots of talk of this going down the road between me and Mike, so we'll be happy to report in and tell you how it still feels, how holding up after a few weeks. [00:13:35] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:13:36] Speaker B: All right, Jax, what else you been up to? [00:13:38] Speaker C: So, speaking of, we'll report back in in a few weeks. As we're recording this, we are two days away from the new Path of Exile League launching. Path of Exile Mirage was announced, and it's looking fun and spicy. I am excited. Basically, they're going to just let us go into duplicates of the areas we're already in and get even more loot. And there's a new Chase belt. So in Path of Exile, the original chase belt was called Headhunter, which let you get the powers of the monsters you kill. It's incredible. It's so much fun. And they added a new one a few a while later called Mage Blood, where all of your flasks are just always in effect. These are supposed to be temporary buffs, and because they're always in effect, you can use things that make their uptime worse, but make them stronger because they're just always up. Your uptime's still 100% no matter what. So they're incredibly strong, and it makes you super tanky and super zoomy. It's. It's great. Well, they've added a new belt that just permanently gives you two shrines, which are usually temporary buffs that you can randomly find in your maps. So you can just permanently have a shrine that makes you super fast and a shrine that makes you regenerate a ton of health every second. [00:14:59] Speaker A: For example, am I mixing them in Diablo, or is there a shrine that gives you autocrit? [00:15:04] Speaker C: There is a shrine that gives you autocrit, and it is already confirmed to be one of the ones this belt can roll. And if you get that, your belt just means you have 100% crit. No matter what modifiers you have for crit, you don't have to invest in crit chance. Other than the belt, you can take items that normally have a penalty to your chance to crit in exchange for a powerful effect. [00:15:25] Speaker A: Cool. [00:15:25] Speaker C: You just don't have the penalty. You just get the powerful effect. It's crazy. So that's what this new league is bringing and I'm really excited to play it. I've got a off meta build planned that I think is going to be spicy and fun and also will use that new belt if I get one, which I eventually will because I always do eventually get my chase items. It just takes me a month [00:15:49] Speaker B: and [00:15:50] Speaker C: I'm looking forward to it. If. If you have arachnophobia, you may not want to tune into my Path of Exile streams because I'm going to be summoning a lot of lightning spiders. A lot, a lot, a lot of lightning spiders. Like a hundred of them a second. [00:16:06] Speaker A: Oh, that. That reminds me of a little thing that a friend of mine back in Diablo 3, he did not know what witch doctor could do with spider jars and so he dumped a spider jar and went, oh, and then threw 30 more of them and immediately crashed everyone's game. [00:16:26] Speaker C: Love it. But yeah, that wasn't hyperbole, by the way. I literally will be spawning like a hundred spiders a second. [00:16:33] Speaker B: Oh my gosh. [00:16:34] Speaker C: It's great. I love Path of Exile. It's a silly game. [00:16:36] Speaker B: Yeah, I really enjoyed it when I played it. I don't have a lot of time in it, but like the time I did put in it, I really enjoyed. All right, Mike, what else is going on? [00:16:46] Speaker A: I have a very similar game to the previous one in the sense that Fellowship is a game that I have talked about briefly before, but it got a new season that came out two weeks ago. Almost like right after we were talking about the previous one. Fellowship's new season came. They put in two new classes, a new tank, and a new healer. Fellowship is just if you know what Mythic plus is, it's Mythic plus the game. It's dungeon runs. As a four man group go, you do your dungeon runs, you have your tank, your heal, your two dps. And the new classes are really, really fun. They've done good balance to try and tone up some of the underperforming things from last time. So like, this is still a game that is technically early access. It is not full release and noticeably much like a lot of other people. Like if you play games that have mythic seasons or just seasonal games in general, you realize that new season comes around, everyone shows back up and Then it slowly tapers off over the next couple months as the season progresses and only the most hardcore continue playing, which is fantastic because the new season resets everyone back to base so you have a new chance to start fresh with everyone else. I got in it and the group that I was playing with, all of us are Guildies and wow. So we started playing Fellowship and we went, this is fucking fun as hell. Too bad Midnight comes out in a week because we don't have a ton of time to do Fellowship anymore because we're doing Mythic Plus. But this is a game that I will hop back on every couple months. I've got a couple friends who do not play WoW anymore. They only play Fellowship because WoW is a subscription and Fellowship is not. So it's a way for me to do the things that I used to do with them in a game that they can't afford to play anymore or just don't want to put the money in anymore. And that's a really compelling case if you like dungeon games that are like the classic RPG Heel Tank DPS sort of style in the not turn based sort, these sort of action RPGs that, that MMOs are in a sense, if you've played any of the MMOs, they have dungeons. All of them essentially do. And this is a great system because it has theoretically infinite scaling. It's not quite infinite, but you can go real deep. I've seen people go to level 200 plus so you can go real deep. You can get real granular and how intricate you decide to take each piece in point. The leaderboards are there so you can brag if you get real high on them. It's a fun game and they're not done with it. It's still early access and they've put a ton of effort into giving people the ability to just start playing. They added in a new little solo zone that you can play that allows you to. If you're not familiar with classes, you get to feel them out as you do sort of questing like. Like an MMO quest. Only it doesn't really give you too much. It starts you off down half of your. Your what is a giant reward tree. It gives you the ability to get all your abilities because you don't start with everything because any game can't give you everything right away. It's always over overwhelming. So it, it gives you the process to learn very easily or you can just ignore that and go right into dungeons and still learn that way and it's still really fun. [00:20:06] Speaker B: So I've heard a lot of good things about it. [00:20:08] Speaker A: Yeah. If anyone wants to have a chart on it, like, I will still play Fellowship with people. I've got it. There's no reason not to. I love it. It's still on sale, right? Oh, the sale may have just ended. I think the sale just ended. I'm going to take a quick look. [00:20:21] Speaker B: Well, while you look at that, I had a. I thought of something. [00:20:24] Speaker A: The sale just ended. [00:20:24] Speaker B: I wanted to ask you guys, do you read books? [00:20:27] Speaker A: I love books. [00:20:29] Speaker C: Not often. I mostly read manga when I'm reading Mike. [00:20:32] Speaker B: Then have you read Dungeon Crawler Carl? [00:20:35] Speaker A: I have not read Dungeon Crawler Carl. [00:20:38] Speaker C: You should read Dungeon Crawler Carl, Mike. It's really good. [00:20:41] Speaker B: It's a book that I'm wanting to get into. It's a. It's a RPG book pretty much. It's supposed to be really good. I just thought about it because I was. You were talking about like Fellowship and doing like the dungeons and it made me think Dungeon Crawler Carl. It's a book that I got on my list to get that I've had like recommended to me several times. [00:21:03] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm a big fan of books. I have a lot of hardcover books. There's a quite a large pile over to the left of me over there. There's more down there. I. I love the feel of a book. But like, even still, I love reading in general. I do a crap ton of reading because I'm really bored at work and so I will either have audiobook going so that I can continue to do handwork or I will have like a different book that I will read on break. Ebooks are a real easy way for me to just keep getting things. I'm a real big fan of a couple of different authors. This is a side note. Now. Jim Butcher is one of my favorite authors of all time. He has one of my favorite book series of all time called the Tristan Files. It's fantastic. He has two other series that I know of and one other that he is starting. The first one is done. It's a. It's an interesting series. It's sort of like, what if Pokemon meets the Roman Legions? Yeah, that's as weird as it sounds and it's real cool. [00:22:02] Speaker B: There's one memorable book to me that I've read other than like your Harry Potters and your Game of Thrones books. And there's one at all I always like, think about. It's like nostalgic, like a Pokemon game is to me or something. Is it's called the Firebringer. I don't know if you've ever heard of it or if you've ever read it. And just like, I'm not gonna get into it, but it's a deer. You're. It's. It's about a deer and it, like, goes through, like, rut. I don't. It's. It's. It's so weird, but it's. It's. It's like a magical book. Like, it. It makes you feel like there's magic and. It's been a while since I've read it, but it's a really good book. All right. Not to derail us. Jax. What's up? What do you got? What else you got? One more thing you want to talk about. [00:22:47] Speaker C: So I mentioned that I like to read manga. I also, as you may know, am an anime fan and I want to highlight two anime that have begun airing this winter that I think have flown under people's radar. And I'm enjoying the heck out of the first one. This is available both subbed and dubbed on Crunchyroll is called Kaya Chan Isn't Scary. And the premise of this is that this little girl is a kindergarten student and she's known as the troublemaker in this kindergarten. And her teacher discovers that the reason she is a troublemaker at this kindergarten is because she is killing ghosts that are tormenting her classmates that they can't see. And then the story goes places. Like that's episode one. That is the premise of this show. This story goes places. The ghosts are not scary, but there are definitely horror elements beyond just like style presentation of this. There is some creepy shit in this show, some truly unsettling, like psychological stuff, but also like, the show hasn't finished yet. I want to know what happens next. Like what's going to happen to Kya? It's really good. I'm impressed. I'm enjoying the hell out of it and I highly recommend it. If that sounds even vaguely interesting to you. I've deliberately avoided spoiling anything that isn't in the first episode. But yeah, it's way exceeded my expectations. The other one I want to highlight is one that unfortunately only has a sub so you have to watch with subtitles if you want to watch this. But it's called Champignon Witch and it is a story about a witch who grows poisonous mushrooms wherever she walks. Because she. Her body literally absorbs all of the like evil energy around her and outputs it as poisonous mushrooms. And it's about her living her life and townspeople thinking she's creepy and gross. And she literally can't touch anyone ever because she would kill them if she did. Because her body's constantly emitting poison. Because she's literally like an air filter for the world. I'm again being deliberately vague to avoid spoiling. But it's. It's. So far it is a very enjoyable, like kind of dark undertone slice of life like that. Definitely not as dark undertones as Kaya chan. [00:25:19] Speaker A: You have made me want to recommend two manga. [00:25:22] Speaker C: Okay. [00:25:23] Speaker A: One we both really enjoy. One you have never touched. I want to recommend Ruri Dragon. [00:25:31] Speaker C: Ruri Dragon is so good. [00:25:33] Speaker A: It's. It's the story of like a young teenage girl who did not know her father was a dragon. And suddenly she starts gaining dragonic traits. Like. [00:25:43] Speaker C: Like accidentally grows horns fire and grows horns, accidentally breathes fire and then it goes on from there. [00:25:49] Speaker A: It's. It's adorable. It's really fun. And the author is like not able to consistently do things. So any support for it is good because he has. He has serious health issues. Yeah. Can't always keep going when he's doing his writing. The other is a very, very like Japanese style thing because it's called Akane Banashi and it is all about rakugo. [00:26:15] Speaker C: Right? [00:26:15] Speaker A: It's rokugo. It's an obscure type of theater that is very Japanese and it's really interesting if you want to get into Japanese culture in a like truly obscure sense. Akane Banashi is really cool. It's really good. It's like 200 chapters almost. Still being updated. Got updated three days ago. It's one of those things that's on the like Shonen Jump app, even though it's not a Shonen. So you can watch or read the first three and the last three for free and then you can pay $2 to have access to every thing that is on there, period. Two bucks a month is not. It is not a small. It's not a large amount to pay for the amount of manga you get to read. It is absurd. [00:27:01] Speaker C: I'm guessing you weren't expecting me to know what Akane Banashe was. [00:27:04] Speaker A: I think I've talked about it to you. I don't think you've read any of it, but I've talked about it to you. [00:27:09] Speaker C: I think I tried watching the first episode and it just didn't grab me. [00:27:13] Speaker A: Didn't know it had an anime yet. [00:27:15] Speaker C: Unless I'm thinking of the wrong thing, [00:27:18] Speaker A: it may I. I just. I know who the translator is because it's the same translator that does one piece. [00:27:23] Speaker C: Yeah, it got. It has an anime series series scheduled. So I was thinking of something else, but it is getting an anime in April. [00:27:29] Speaker A: Okay. [00:27:30] Speaker C: There's a different rocket anime for some reason. [00:27:34] Speaker A: The only. The only recent manga anime that I can think of as Sakamoto is. [00:27:39] Speaker C: Fair enough. I'm just trying to think of what the hell is the rocket Go anime. I tried watching then. [00:27:44] Speaker A: I don't know. [00:27:46] Speaker B: Mike, while we got you, what else are you going to talk about? [00:27:48] Speaker A: Well, we're going to continue on with more not games because wow. And fellowship really sort of took over as well as what our topic is going to be. [00:27:58] Speaker C: I found what it was. My master has no tale is the Rockugo anime. I tried watching and it didn't grab me. [00:28:05] Speaker A: Okay. Don't know that at all. [00:28:07] Speaker C: Fair enough. [00:28:08] Speaker A: I've also been watching a show that is absolutely kick ass. If you have Amazon prime, you have access to it because it's one of the prime shows. This is one of those things that makes me go, all right, Amazon prime, you know how to make a show. Stop fucking with my properties. Because you can obviously do it correctly because this is a property and they've done it really well. I started watching Reacher season one again so that I could prep myself to watch season two because I only just realized it was out. Hell for everything you've ever seen for Jack Reacher before, any previous instances you've ever seen have always paled to what the books are about. I have not read the books, but I know about them and I know that this is a huge controversy around them. Reacher, the show that we're talking about now. No, no, no. This is exactly what people have been wanting a Jack Reacher show to be and it's absolutely fucking amazing. Reacher is essentially a retired military Special Forces detective, essentially, who would, hey, there is a military crime. You need to solve the military crime. And he just retired and decided to. I'm on a military pension. I'm going to just wander around and see what's going on because I enjoy not having anyone tell me what to do anymore. And so he wanders into a town and gets immediately arrested for murder, which all of us know he couldn't have done because he showed up 30 minutes before that. And it just gets more and more interesting from there. [00:29:43] Speaker B: If you just found out that there's a season two, I'm gonna blow your mind. There's also a season three. [00:29:49] Speaker A: I knew it was coming. I just hadn't seen it. [00:29:52] Speaker B: Yeah, it is out and finished. Out. Finished. [00:29:56] Speaker A: Well, I am going to be doing a lot of retro talking, apparently, because the first season is not just like. It has clever writing in that it. It goes places I do not expect it to go. They do not censor what a military man will do in the sense of trying to solve these things. And then it just gets really, really intense. It's some of the best. Like, if you are a fan of John Wick in that style of, like action, it gets to that level of intensity. [00:30:30] Speaker B: The acting. The actor for Reacher, I can't think of his name off the top of my head is never. Not the. Like, his personality is so good for it. He also, I believe, played Thaddeus back in Blue Mountain State. I don't know if you've ever seen that. And he was also Aquaman, I think. I think he was one of those. One of. He played some superhero somewhere also in something. I'd have to look it up and remember. I do believe he was maybe. Maybe not Aquaman, but one of those. I'm pretty sure. But anyways, his acting, he's just fantastic. No, maybe it was in Superman. Superman. The. What was the. Smallville. I think he was in Smallville. He's in a lot of. He's in a lot of Raphael from [00:31:19] Speaker A: the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies. [00:31:21] Speaker B: I have to. Well, you. Where you talk a little bit more about it. I kind of want to look. I forget now. [00:31:27] Speaker A: He's really like. He is an imposing figure for this. Like if you watched the old Jack Reacher movie, it was Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise is notoriously good at acting, but not exactly an imposing figure. He's kind of a short guy. Yeah. Alan Richardson is like 6, 4, 2, 40, entirely muscle. He is exactly the character that everyone is described as. [00:31:57] Speaker B: He is a monster of a man. [00:31:58] Speaker A: He's. He is a funny guy. If you. If you talk to any of the interviews or anything about him actually, like hilarious. And he gets this solemn, no nonsense, barely talks and it works so, so well. He. He can shift his personality on a dime and he's really intimidating and it's great. Like, I don't want to spoil any of the actual mystery of it, but it's. It's just a. It's such a good show. Yep. [00:32:30] Speaker B: Sorry. Figured out he was Aquaman in Smallville. He played it in Smallville with the same guy. I don't know. Do you. Have you ever watched Tracker? Tracker is another good TV show. Who also with the actor, also played Aquaman, but yeah. So anything else on Reacher? [00:32:52] Speaker A: I guess I'LL be talking about more reachers soon. [00:32:54] Speaker B: Well, I will expect season two next time. [00:32:56] Speaker A: I can't talk about too much because that's gonna spoil things. [00:33:00] Speaker B: I will say the writing doesn't get worse. So that is good. You will enjoy. Like, you'll. It does not go downhill at all. It season two is just as good as season one, which is just as good as season three. Like, it's awesome. He's just such a good actor. All right, well, speaking on the role, on the topic of TV shows, I also am going to talk about a TV show that's probably quite popular, Game of Thrones. It's popular for the for good and bad reasons. The good is it had an awesome first six seasons and then just fell way off for the last two. Not a lot of people were super happy with it. It was rushed. But the reason I want to talk about Game of Thrones and I've talked about it before, I got my wife to finally sit down and watch Game of Thrones and she's not a Game of Thrones enjoyer by any means. She couldn't catch on to it because it does start off very slow and they throw a lot of information at you and they do a lot of scene jumping, which can be very overwhelming. But she finally stuck to it, and it stuck. And the reason that she was so interested in finally sitting down and watching it and now she's addicted to it is I was watching the new A Night of the Seven Kingdoms spin off that talks about Sir Duncan the Tall and Aegon Targaryen. And she was watching that and she's like, oh, this is pretty cool. And so you know how a lot of times, like my wife, she'll watch some TV show, I'm like, I'm not interested in watching that. But I like, I'll be sitting on the couch and she'll be halfway through a season and I'll start asking her, what's this guy do? What's. What's wrong with him? And, you know, that's how it was with the Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. So she started getting into it and she really started enjoying it. So she gave Game of Thrones another try. And she is now in, I think, season five. So she's got through all of the tough parts, the good and the bad of some of her favorite actor or favorite characters dying and then some of them not dying. Like some of her, the evil characters dying. And a lot of people die in that show. So, yeah, talking about, like, my wife's new at this TV series and I've watched it 800 times since it came out. It's very hard for someone to sit there and know everything that's going to happen and not want to spoil it. Be like, oh, you know, like hey, make sure you know, this is pay attention. This is going to happen. I'm letting my wife watch it organically and only offering non spoilerly like information like because it's hard on your first play or playthrough your first watch of Game of Thrones to catch all the information. They're going to show it to like all the history and who's who and what's what. There's a lot of it. So I'm kind of like the, the background narrator of like oh yeah. So you probably aren't tying these two events together because you probably missed the one word and see or the one sentence in season one that's now reshowing up and two seasons later for one scene. So like I'll kind of like tie these scenes and stuff together and why it's important for the show in history and I will make sure that I do nudge her like if she's sitting around and be like, hey, pay attention to this because it'll be important later without giving her like what's going to happen. So I'm not ruining the show for her. So I'm making sure that she's able to not fall away or not lose information that way that when there's things that happen down the road, she's like, oh, okay. Or if something has happens and she's asking me like why'd they do that? And I'm like, well I mean you're gonna learn it like, like they're going to tell you. I was like, just be patient. I'm not going to tell you anything. When Joffrey finally bit the dust at his wedding, that was a great. She was so satisfied great. And it was so good. And then I'm excited for her to get to we got to make sure she's not listening. I'm excited for her to get to the. She's just gotten to the sparrow. Like the sparrow's finally showing up in the city and the so we know where that leads to the Walk of Shames and then Cersei getting booted into the dungeon. It's so good. It's so good. And I'm so excited for her to see because all this huge buildup and it's going to be great and there's going to be so much that happens and then it just. I'm excited to also see how she thinks of the last two seasons as someone who's like, not had to wait week after week after week after season after season to be like waiting several years to where she can just watch this in a few weeks. [00:38:17] Speaker A: I'm very interested to see what her take in season seven and eight is because there were a couple of good ideas in season seven and I. Not a lot great to say about season eight except for the choreography and a lot of the fights was real great. [00:38:32] Speaker B: There was a lot of good, like Game of Thrones. Was there like the Game of Thrones. HBO has been really good at doing like the battle scenes given if like we've talked about it before on here. How dark the final battle of Winterfell is. [00:38:50] Speaker A: That's very good. Yep. [00:38:51] Speaker B: And you know, the, the lighting and what I think it was. Jax, you mentioned like, it was perfect if you had like HDR or something, [00:39:01] Speaker C: but almost no one did when it first. [00:39:02] Speaker B: Yeah, nobody. Yeah. [00:39:05] Speaker C: Didn't have a set capable of displaying HDR and probably didn't have like the source in HDR to be able to enjoy it regardless. [00:39:14] Speaker A: Yeah, this was the show that got like when it started airing week to week. I would go to a friend's place and he had a high def projector that would just throw it on a wall and we would watch it almost like it was a theater. And we stopped getting together in season seven because we're like, it's not really worth it. [00:39:36] Speaker B: Have you guys watched any of the spin offs? [00:39:38] Speaker A: I've seen a couple of episodes of House of the Dragon and I know it's. I know it gets really good because. Well, one, a couple of the actors in there are phenomenal. I'm a huge fan of a couple of them. And I know the story is supposed to be absolutely incredible. It's got a lot more of the actual, like classic power, the Targaryen ages. So you get to see some. A lot of other things. I hope it ends how I want it to end, but I don't remember. [00:40:05] Speaker B: Let's see. There's only one ending for it. There's only one ending for it. And so far it's been pretty spot on to the books. So I'm hoping that they don't like you said, I hope they don't like molest the show or the story for these are. [00:40:23] Speaker A: We know what happened. [00:40:23] Speaker B: Yeah. Like this, this is history. Like this is written and that's like the books, which I know there's always. They've talked about it with especially of the Night of the Seven Kingdoms at Night of the Seven Kings. The book, it's really good, by the way. The. The book and the TV show. It's like 28 chapters, but it's like an inch thick. Like, it's very small. Not a lot of stories. And they're saying that, like, a lot of these histories might be wrong because it's passed down from, like, maesters and people from then that weren't actually there. Like, they're just telling their story that they heard so they could change some things up and make it make sense. As long as they change it up in the right way and not, like, completely disregard how the books are completely. I just hope they don't do that like they did with the first with Game of Thrones original. But anyways, that's probably. That's enough, I think, about Game of Thrones because we got a big topic to talk about. I know last week we hinted towards a project that we were going to be working on, and we have been working on that in the last couple weeks. We, as a three plus Jax's wife have gotten together for three times now to play through Terraria. [00:41:47] Speaker C: And so if you've been tuning into our streams, by the way, follow us on Twitch. Twitch tv. Jackson, Twitch tv. Micahmanynames, Twitch tv Pillow Pet. You've seen these playthroughs. We streamed them all. [00:41:59] Speaker B: Yeah. So, like, even if you go to those, you can, like, watch the vods. Like, they'll be on there. You could see all except for Mike on the last one. He didn't do it. He didn't stream. But you can, you can be there and hear him. [00:42:11] Speaker A: I'm still there playing. I just. I wasn't up to feeling like a stream. I'm still perpetually recovering from sickness. [00:42:18] Speaker B: So tonight's topic, we're gonna talk about Terraria and discuss our, I guess, our experiences with it. So I'll wait to do mine because I'm kind of wanting to hear from you old heads when it comes to Terraria because you've been playing it a lot more than I, and my experience is going to be 1000% different than your guys'. So I want to hear what we got talk about. Jax, you first. Tell us where you're coming from with Terraria. [00:42:54] Speaker C: So Terraria is one of my most played games on Steam. It's not the most played, but I have 200 hours on Terraria. It's. It's in the top six. It's like competing with Stardew. Valley. I've played through to like the end game at the time, before the current endgame was even added, way back in the day. And then like a year and a half, two, three years ago. I don't know when your old time is fuzzy. Several years ago I played through and beat all of the current endgame. So I've played Terraria a lot. But the common thread between both of my previous through the entire game runs is I played a ranged DPS character. I was magic in one of them, maybe two of them, because there might be another playthrough in there that I'm forgetting and guns in one of them. So I am deliberately playing something different this time to have a change of pace. So my goal is to be a summoner this time around. That's where I'm coming from with Terraria. [00:44:02] Speaker B: Mike, what about you? [00:44:03] Speaker A: My experience kind of exceeds both of theirs combined. I have over double Jax's time. If you include the modded version for tmodloader, I have over 410 hours. I fucking love Terraria. The day I got Terraria, the day it released, I played literally through the night, not understanding what time was until the sun rose and I went, what? Oh. Oh, fuck. And then I had to not go to work because I needed to sleep. Only I didn't because I played Mortaria. I have played during every single point of the updates in time. So every time they added something, I played during that. So I have played five or six different iterations of Terraria, not counting the minor things like when they added golf or every time there's any major content update. I have played Terraria. Not only that, I've also done the full super modded experience of the mod version known as Calamity, which is let's take what Terraria is and more game it, add more game, double, triple the amount of bosses minimum, add in huge spikes of difficulty, add in a couple more other things to keep going. And now you're starting to get into where it goes. The final boss of Terraria is like maybe the halfway point in Calamity. I love this game. It's. It is the game that I wanted everyone else at the time when I first started playing, it was huge into Minecraft. I could not stand how Minecraft looked. And then Terraria showed up and I went, it's. It's Minecraft for me. It looks great. I love the playstyle. I loved everything that people could do in Minecraft. Only I can sort of do the 2D version of it here and it's more gamey because it started off with you already had your four bosses. I. I remember playing in the initial section. I remember cheating into the dungeon and having the. The Skeletron chased me down through the dungeon as I attempted to raid it for I. I remember a lot of things from the early days of Terraria, and it's a completely separate game and they've done a bunch of updates relatively recently to smooth things out. And there's a lot of content here if you want to play. Like, as we've been playing together, I've done solo runs and I've done group runs. I've done everything this game has to offer. It's so fun seeing someone in Pillow's case who hasn't gotten to play and watching him be free to try and figure things out. Where Jax and I sort of are the edges of. Okay, here's an objective that we want to do because a lot of times this game can be incredibly daunting if you have no idea what you're doing and no concept of where you're going. And so we go, all right, well, if you're not going to know what you're going to do, sometimes people bounce off it. So let's. Hey, we. We know Pillow bounced off it a couple times. Let's. All right, here's the objective that we're going to be going for. We know this is the thing we need to get done because we've done it a million times. Hey, let's go explore the underground, because that's the base thing we can do. Hey, let's wander around the world so we can get a map out of the base of how the world looks. Hey, this is the bosses that are coming up. You want to start building yourself up to be a little bit stronger so that you don't get creamed in the first boss. Yep. [00:47:30] Speaker B: Yeah. So like Mike said, I came at this with, like, I had, like 20 minutes in it. Maybe an hour was not a lot of time. I've not played this game past, you know, maybe a few minutes into the intro, several times trying it, and I just couldn't get myself to want to sit down and play this game because it is a lot to learn because, like, it does not give you any information whatsoever, like. Like, as to what you can do, like you're to doing. There's still so much that I need to learn, like how Jack's wife Aqua, has built the tallest hotel that I've ever seen in the game. And I had no idea what was going on. And I learned that that's to get NPCs to join your village. [00:48:22] Speaker C: Yep. So for context, my wife absolutely adores, like cozy games and survival crafting games. I've bounced off of basically every single one of them except Terraria. Terraria is the only one that's managed to keep my interest. So she's really excited that we're playing Terraria. She immediately built a skyscraper hotel to house all of our NPCs. She's been gung ho on like organizing the chess. The stuff that I'm lazy about is the reason I don't usually enjoy the genre. She's doing as much of it as possible to take that busy work out of our experience so we can go spelunking in caves and mining and exploring and doing the fun parts. Because that's what she enjoys in the first place. [00:49:07] Speaker B: And it's much appreciated. That is much appreciated. Because that is like, to me like this, like you said, the worst part of these games is the microorganization. I just like to dive right on in. So that's. [00:49:18] Speaker A: Once you start the baseline of it, it's so easy to continue. But the initial creation of that is real hard. [00:49:27] Speaker B: Yeah. So that's something I gotta learn. Still on it. Like if I was to ever do a solo playthrough, like what any of that means, but I'd probably go through a wiki on that. So anyway, so I started off and we're gonna talk about like our thoughts and impressions later. So I'm gonna just give some initials here. It's funny because, like Mike and Jack said they have a lot of hours in this. They know what's going on, they know what to expect, they know what the first objective is. I didn't know nothing. So I was just like going trucking along, going in some holes like, oh, cool, I got some copper and I come up and I made like a sword out of cactus. And I thought that was really cool. And then by the time I did that, Jackson, Mike got these awesome weapons and Mike shooting, you know, has a magic wand and blowing stuff up. And here I am still dying to the earliest level slimes that you could get through through. And I'm just going into caves and dying and constantly dying and dying and dying. And I had a hundred GP all the way up past before we like, we beat the first boss. And I still had 100 hp. Didn't understand how to like, didn't know how to get them. And like then I finally like, oh, okay, these heart crystals, blah, blah, Blah. So I started finding it by the end of day three, I'm at almost like 3, 23, 40. Like I'm starting to get the hang of it. So there's obviously getting a little bit handheld most the way. But as far as learning the mechanics and stuff, I've been kind of doing that a lot of that on my own. And we actually just discovered one last night which was pretty cool. And we'll get into that a little bit more. We'll talk about that once we get through the rest of this. But I'm enjoying it. I don't know if I'm still would be motivated to go play on my own like in a solo run just because like there's other things that I want to play. But as far as playing with with friends, like, I think it's super fun in that regards. It's a very good co op multiplayer game. So I mean I am enjoying that part of it a lot. So speaking of not knowing anything about it, these world settings, I have no idea what's going on. So I'm going to leave this to you guys to discuss because I don't know anything about it. [00:51:46] Speaker C: All right, I'll explain since I'm the one who's created the world. So because Mike and I and my wife all have a significant amount of Terraria experience, we decided to play the game on expert mode, which makes everything much stronger, which is part of why Pillow's struggling a little bit at the outset. We've got you equipped now. I don't think you're struggling anymore. Right. [00:52:08] Speaker B: Just I'm shooting bees. [00:52:11] Speaker C: Yeah, we've. We killed the queen bee and got him the Bebo. We'll talk about that in a minute. But so we're playing on. On expert mode. So bosses have extra moves and are stronger. Enemies in general are tougher. We will eventually get all sorts of cool extra stuff because we're in expert mode, which is one of the reasons to do it. And also because we are playing in multiplayer, it means every boss we kill gives a loot bag and everyone gets loot instead of having to farm a boss over and over and over to get a little bit of loot, which is a huge boon. So that's something you probably don't realize. Pillow, you know how when we killed the bee boss, which. We'll talk about that experience in a minute, we all got a loot bag, we got a whole ton of beehives, I made a staff, you got your bow, we got a couple of swords for people like we Got a whole bunch of loot. On a normal mode world, we would have gotten one drop of one of the weapons she drops and enough of the like beehive material to make like one item. But because multiplayer and we get those treasure bags, we get a ton more loot overall and don't have to grind bosses as much. [00:53:23] Speaker B: That makes sense because like you're playing it. I don't know what the multiplier is of difficulty, but I know like the first Boss had like 12,000 health and I don't know what that's like on normal or easy. [00:53:36] Speaker C: Comparatively normal difficulty. Solo, it has like 2000. [00:53:39] Speaker B: Okay. [00:53:40] Speaker C: A normal difficulty with the group we have, it would have like 6 or 7,000. [00:53:45] Speaker B: So it's. It's doubled, literally doubled. So I mean it's nice that they're giving out the, the grab bags. It's, you know, helps out quite a bit. [00:53:54] Speaker C: Now that you're equipped a bit, I think it. The expert frustrations will subside and you'll start just plowing through the things you're supposed to plow through and getting blocked by the things that are supposed to block you instead of struggling with the basics. [00:54:09] Speaker B: I do feel like now if I was to go on a solo playthrough through like normal or easy or whatever the difficulties are, I would just be like, oh, wow, never mind. This is super easy. Instead of like last time when I tried to do it, I was like, oh, this is really like, like even easier normal. Like when I was trying to get into the game originally solo, I just couldn't do it. Like I just couldn't. Wasn't finding myself enjoying it, but now having a basic knowledge and the experience of playing it on Expert, I feel like that would make my normal like solo playthrough so much more enjoyable because I'm used to like having to sweat to do this stuff and now it's going to just be like a walk in the park. So it would be nice in that aspect. [00:54:56] Speaker A: So we are about halfway through the intro section of the game. The base game of normal. The settings that we have like going on, we have the largest size world you can make. These are. These are large worlds. We have the Crimson version versus the corrupted version. So there's a couple different options there of how like the. The evil zone works. [00:55:17] Speaker C: And to be clear, I left that on random. It randomed Crimson. [00:55:20] Speaker A: Yes, you can choose that there. In your startings there is a journeyman mode which is you. You can create items at will, you can move things around, you can take no damage in vulnerable modes. Fly around. The journeyman mode is explore, have fun, make whatever the fuck you want with the things that we have available. You don't need to worry about getting attacked in the blood moon or things like that. You can just. I want to build a penis tower. So you build your penis tower. That's journeyman mode, essentially. Normal mode is just. Let's play the game normally we have Expert. We're going. That's where you get a bunch of extra combat items. And then there is Master mode, which is a tier above that, which increases the difficulty about as much as it went up from Expert only. The only benefit to that is you get one more accessory slot. That's it. All the grab bags, the extra stuff you get from Master, those are like pets and cosmetics. You don't get any extra power apart from one extra accessory slot. That's why we didn't do Master. Yep. [00:56:27] Speaker B: Yeah. I don't think I would have enjoyed a 24,000hp. [00:56:32] Speaker A: You would not have enjoyed the blue slime having 120health when you have a copper shortsword. [00:56:38] Speaker C: Yeah. Master is very much only for people who are a group of experienced Terraria players who are looking to get their asses kicked, whereas Expert is like a regular hard mode for normal people to enjoy. [00:56:52] Speaker B: Yeah, see, like it's right in a comfort level that I'm. I'm happy with. So any. Anything else about these settings? Like, you can talk about one thing [00:57:04] Speaker A: that I'll just like throw out there. If you like what someone else has done with a world, you can import their world. You could copy a seed and import it, copy it, duplicate you. You see, someone has a God world that has every super item that spawned and you don't want to have to figure it out. Yeah, sure, you can import the. Or export the the code and generate the map of your world. It will tell you every single cavern that currently exists in your world. You have to do that every time you mess with it, because obviously as you go through and dig, you change what the cavern systems are, but you have the power to find out where everything is and look at what everything is if you want it. That is to say, you have to use a couple of external things to get there, but the options are available. However, we don't want to do any of that with this. We're hardly using the wiki and mostly just a man, I need to remember what the fuck this thing is. Because building this is annoying. [00:58:02] Speaker C: We're using one thing to refresh memory, not to like look up Everything. [00:58:06] Speaker B: The one thing that I used it for was trying to figure out how to grow diamonds because I really wanted to learn that. And then I also list looked it up to look at it like the loot table for bosses just to see what they drop because I have no idea. [00:58:24] Speaker C: I'm of the opinion you pillow as the least experienced of the four of us. You can look up whatever the fuck you want on the wiki. You should not feel bad or ashamed for that. We are going to try to limit our wiki use to just hey, I remember this thing, but I don't remember the details. Let me look it up. [00:58:41] Speaker A: Yeah, like potent creation is complicated. So like I'm gonna look up what I need to build the potion because I know how to do it. I've done it a thousand times. But the minutiae of remembering we need to not use this ore and turn it into bars so that I can create this potion is something that we didn't remember. And so we had to go find a bunch more ore because we turned it all into bars. [00:59:05] Speaker B: So yeah, I'm trying to limit my wick wiki use because I like to have like the most organic runs on games that I haven't played before. I don't want to spoil anything for myself and like I'm enjoying like I'm just figuring it out from you guys too. Like it's. You guys are my built in wiki and if you don't know, then I'm gonna be like, well, let me use common sense. So like with the, with the, the ore trees, the gym trees, like I was like, okay, I'm gonna make this, this gym acorn. Where can I plan it? Oh, maybe the dirt. No. Okay, maybe it needs to be on rock underground. So I went underground. I was like, oh, okay, that makes sense. And then like for some reason it just would never grow. And I couldn't figure out why I had to look that part up. And I asked in chat on Twitch and was told that you have to be in the cavern biome, which is very far down. And I went to the. Because we have a pit of doom and I. So I fell down the pit of doom until I got to the caverns and I planted some diamonds and I finally got them to grow and it was. It felt good. So for the most part I learned it on my own. Just had to figure out where to put it so it wasn't too bad. So speaking of, what have we been done? What have we done so far in this game? So we for you Guys, like, for me, it's. It's a. It's been a lot longer journey because you guys know where you're going. For me, I had no idea what's going on. And just hearing you guys talk like, oh, I found this and this, and I'm like, what in the world is a crimtane? You know? And I'm thinking, I got iron. And they're like, oh. Or I got copper. Oh, we don't even need copper anymore. I'm like, oh, okay. What about iron? No, we're back past that, too. I'm like, oh, okay. And then I'm like. So I'm like, what? What's the use of it? Then we find out that it's for potions, or I find out for potions what kind of potion needs iron ore, you know, And I don't know. So I'm finding shops, and I found gold was super hard to come by. And just because I was struggling, like, I didn't know what I was doing. [01:01:12] Speaker C: Oh, you mean gold is in currency, not gold is in ore? I was gonna say, so. [01:01:16] Speaker B: Sorry. [01:01:17] Speaker C: Something weird Terraria does is there are two versions of several ores, platinum and gold. One of them will spawn in your world, and one of them will not. Our world has platinum. So that's something that also that can be confusing, is if you've looked up, like, older terraria stuff, you may run into it telling you to use, like, a gold pickaxe or something. And our world doesn't have gold. We have platinum instead, and it's confusing. And there will be another set of that later in the game when we get to the hard mode of we'll get one of these two types of ores. Don't know which yet. [01:01:52] Speaker B: It's so amazing to me that there's, like. I feel like we've explored so much, but we've touched, like, 5% of what can be explored. [01:02:00] Speaker A: We've done. We've walked through the surface, we've explored some of a couple of cavern layers, and we've built a hellevator. And the elevator is just literally, you dig from where you are, and you go straight to hell. Yep. Because there's a hell. [01:02:16] Speaker B: I think for me, the first night we played, my favorite part of it was, like, here I am pretty much like, I got, like, this. This wooden sword, and I'm. I'm sporting. Like, I might as well be wearing paper as an armor. And, like, I teleport to Jax because I learned how a wormhole is, and he's got this Dr. Octopus, like, outfit going. He's got 17 grappling hooks, and he's just suspended from the sky going every direction he wants to go. [01:02:43] Speaker C: I found the web slinger in the very first, like, spider hole underground, and it was the first grappling hook any of us had. So that was Pillow's first experience with the grappling hook, was watching me just spider around with the web slinger. [01:02:56] Speaker B: It's just funny because here I am, I'm slowly building platforms down, and here I see Jax just split, slinging through these caves at Mach 10, just with arms going in 100 different directions, and I'm like, what is going on here? You know? And there was a little envy here as I'm slowly building down. But then I finally got a grappling hook, and I'm like, all right, this is cool. Well, it's not even a grappling hook. It's like. It's like the whip, the chain whip of sapphire, but it essentially acts like a grappling hook. Yeah. It didn't give me the achievement for grappling hook, which was weird. [01:03:31] Speaker A: I think it's because those ones are like, build it with iron and get a hook. I still haven't found, like, a baseline grappling hook. I haven't found that you could build it. So I was like, what the is this? I can't even build a basic grappling hook, and I've already got a sapphire or whatever the it is. [01:03:48] Speaker C: Yeah. But also, like, we. We're strong enough to go into the underground jungle now, so we should just be gathering spores there and making you an ivy whip hook. [01:03:56] Speaker B: Yeah. What he said, clearly, is what we should be doing. [01:03:59] Speaker A: So. So yeah, the. The difficulty of where we're at. Let's. Let's get a little point in this. The basic portion of the experience is just wandering the world, and then you sort of build up to facing your first of the evil three bosses, the Eye of Cthulhu. And we lost that the first time and then beat it the second once we got a little bit stronger. So we had a. We had a pretty good run with the Eye of Cthulhu, and then we. We hit the brain of Cthulhu up in the. The crimson biome. Once we build up a little bit more. Got our rocked. And then Pillow and I went on a mass hunt trying to find health, because both of US still had 100 health the first time we faced it. Yes. And so we. We did a, like, a giant tear through the underground looking for things. Got a Couple more pieces of gear, bought a couple things because I'm doing a magic build and Pillow's doing a range build and things like that. So I had garbage weaponry at the time. Beat the. The brain of Cthulhu on that second try pretty, pretty easily in comparison to the first one. I will say we hit our fun snag. [01:05:06] Speaker B: Like I feel like before, like to help with the brain, like during, before we beat the brain. This is also. We built our hellevator. So I got access to hellfire arrows, which felt really strong and very useful. But I don't know how much they did. They just do the splash damage, which helped with the eyes and those felt really cool. So I just found myself making frequent trips to hell and doing suicide runs for like arrows just for the basics. Because I'm not trying to spoil anything for myself down there. Because we're way. We're not even ready for that yet. [01:05:39] Speaker A: You know, we're getting there, but with [01:05:42] Speaker B: it, like at the point we were there, we shouldn't have been there. So I was just using it for resources, which is valid. Like that's. We're allowed to do that. If we weren't allowed to do that, then we would not have access to it. I risked it. [01:05:55] Speaker A: Let's face it, you haven't seen it yet. There is a. If you try and go through the dungeon before killing Skeleton, which we were doing, Skeletron will show up invulnerable and kill you. [01:06:05] Speaker C: He literally one hits you. No matter how tanky you are, you can be like a fully endgame geared, tricked out character and you'll just get one tapped. [01:06:14] Speaker A: If the game does not want you to go somewhere, it will kill you. [01:06:17] Speaker B: Yes. So I mentioned earlier, I found we've. I learned a new mechanic last night and I think we all kind of learned it. So me and. Me and Jax were exploring the jungle and we were. He was just looking for the hive for the queen bee. He found it and she was not happy about it. [01:06:37] Speaker C: Yeah. So the queen bee spawns when you break a larva. Unbeknownst to me, the larva was literally the block adjacent to the hive wall and got broken instantly when I broke through the hive wall. [01:06:49] Speaker B: So yeah, we found the bee or in the bee found us. So then ensued chaos. [01:06:56] Speaker A: We did a silently good run in the beginning. Like we jack, they're screaming that the bee is attacking them. So I have to go grab. Grab stuff and teleport in and we get her to like 50% or so. [01:07:08] Speaker B: 75%. [01:07:10] Speaker A: 75% somewhere in there. And then we just get wrecked. But other people are now alive. And the bee went shoot you and just flies through the world directly at [01:07:24] Speaker B: them at a literal beeline. [01:07:26] Speaker C: Yep. [01:07:27] Speaker B: Made a beeline straight for whoever was alive. Well, at some point, Jax and Mike were fighting, and I was just like, oh, cool. I got this magic mirror. I'm gonna go back, I'm gonna heal real quick in this wormhole to him. I take a magic mirror back and they both die, like, instantly. Right after that, I'm like, oh, okay, crap. And then I see on the map the bee just coming towards me. And I'm like, oh, no. I was like, oh, man. I was like, I'm doomed. But then I started thinking, like, if he's fallen, if she's following me. I was like, all right, Aqua's all the way down in hell. I was like, when the bee gets close, I'm gonna use a wormhole potion and go to Aqua and extend some time so Jax and Mike can get back to the jungle. So she's not enraged anymore because we tried to fight her. Enraged? It does not work like that. Thankfully, thankfully, honestly, thankfully, Aqua was nowhere near us to help us do this, like, because this would have never worked. And so they make it back to the biome and I am magic mirroring and wormholing back and forth between Aqua and our home base to keep the bee. Like, we've learned that the bee has an aggro and it does not change. Like, that bee will just keep chasing you no matter what and who you are, where you go. And, like, it will not change target even if someone else is closer. So I just kept bouncing back and forth until they got to the biome and then I had wormhole to them. And then we would keep fighting. Then when we would die, the bee would go to Aqua. And then we finally got asked her to do the same thing I was doing until they got to the biome. And then we all showed up to the biome and killed the bee. And it was really hilarious because we didn't have an arena or nothing set up and we killed the bee. It was great. [01:09:16] Speaker C: It was like 10 minutes of mayhem and many wormhole potions used for this bouncing back and forth strat to waste her time while we got back to the jungle so that we could fight the non enraged version of the bee. And it was great. [01:09:31] Speaker A: It's funny. As the first of us were dying, I was like, all right, well, we'll all die and she'll despawn. It'll be Fine. [01:09:37] Speaker C: And then pillow improvs this strat. [01:09:39] Speaker A: Oh, shit. [01:09:41] Speaker B: What was funny? [01:09:42] Speaker A: We just run back. Let's do it. [01:09:46] Speaker B: What's funny to me is the longer that it's the bee is alive chasing someone, it's just the faster the bee will get to you. So it was just funny watching the map and watching the bee just like all of a sudden it's. It's just going at a million miles an hour to where you. So like there was a point where I worked back to the base from Aqua and I didn't have any wormhole potions, so I had to get into the. The chest with the wormholes and I'm like, oh my gosh. It was stressful. The bee is flying straight up at me through our elevator. It was fun. That. That was a good time. I had a really good time with that. [01:10:21] Speaker C: Cool shit. I have a set of bee armor now and a summon weapon that summons bees to fight for me. You have a bee bow that lets you shoot bees instead of arrows. [01:10:33] Speaker A: I got a magic bee gun that summons small bees. [01:10:37] Speaker B: So yeah, I mean between the three of us, between the three of us, like we're just stinging people like left and right. But these bees were no match for Skeletor or Tron Skeletron Tour. And that's where we're at. [01:10:50] Speaker A: He kicked our ass. [01:10:52] Speaker B: We were. It was getting late. We didn't have a whole lot of time to set up a proper arena. [01:10:58] Speaker C: We kind of had a half assed arena that I threw together in the course of like two minutes. [01:11:04] Speaker B: So we. That's where we're at and you guys should come join us and watch us stream together this on Twitch, which leads us into our next point of topic. We are experience using stream together on Twitch. And Jax, you're more familiar with this, so please describe this a little bit. [01:11:24] Speaker C: So as the only person who had ever used it before of the three of us. Twitch has a function where you as a streamer can go to the other people you're playing with who are also streaming and combine your chats and stream together so that viewers who come in to any one of your streams will all be in one big pooled chat. Which frankly, for something like this, especially where like chat was literally giving advice when Pillow would say things or suggesting things, because Pillow is newer to the game and doesn't know what questions to ask sometimes, was a godsend because it meant we were all part of it instead of the way that I used to have to do it before this function where you would just have multiple chats up. That being said, holy fuck. Is stream together a pain in the ass to actually set up and use? I had. I could not figure out how to just invite people to the stream together. It has a function where it shows a list of all the people that you're following on Twitch who are streaming. I could see Pillow and Mike there, but clicking on their names didn't do anything in the add to stream together prompt on Twitch. Like, the UI is so bad and so broken. What I had to do was individually go to each of their streams and knock. Which for whatever reason is what Twitch calls it when you want to create a stream together and use that to combine all three of us into one chat so that we could actually stream together. If one of you streams and has used this function and knows a better way to do it where I can just. Because it should in theory just be like. Like that we want to stream together and invite the people we want to stream and go, that would be great. Because I could not figure out how to do it in an easy way. The way I had to do it was very clunky and a pain in the ass. But once I got it set up, Pillow's friends joining in the chat, we could see them. We could see whose chat each message came from. It was a good time. [01:13:18] Speaker B: All right. [01:13:19] Speaker A: It's. It's a good experience once it's going. Yes, the. The initial experience is an exercise of frustration. [01:13:28] Speaker C: And also for some reason, Twitch wants to be like a voice call, but I don't want to do a Twitch voice call in my browser. We have discord. [01:13:35] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. I don't know what's going on with that also, but like, I. It. It's a pain and I had to go through a bunch of settings to try and figure out how the fuck to accept it. Because you can't just immediately accept. You have to go through and find other things. Which then made Twitch mad because I had to change my name for a while so it didn't recognize the save password. It was pain in my ass. [01:13:56] Speaker B: So let's summarize a little bit. Let's go over our complete thoughts and impressions or briefly go over our thoughts of impressions. We're running a little late here, so let's. Let's go over. Jax, Mike, you guys been playing this game a while. I know you're happy to have like, especially having like a new player getting the experience. Re. Experience through my experience the first time in. In this game. How do you guys feel coming back to this game? This classic game of yours. [01:14:29] Speaker C: I, I would be having so much less fun if my wife wasn't doing so much of the busy work for us. [01:14:34] Speaker B: Oh gosh, you're telling me. [01:14:37] Speaker C: I'm glad she enjoys that stuff because I don't. And it's the reason I always bounce off this genre. [01:14:43] Speaker B: She has been an absolute. [01:14:44] Speaker A: I'm doing one aspect of the game that I enjoy and I haven't touched the other one. I do enjoy doing weird building experiences, but I like, I like making weird things when I do my weird buildings. So sometimes I'll just make the, the, the Hotel Dell location and make a bunch of people there and sometimes I'll give them prison cells that they can't escape from because they won't and they keep your wife. [01:15:11] Speaker B: Your wife's been a godsend on this. Like, not having to organize the chest has been an amazing experience. And I. [01:15:19] Speaker C: Okay, that's something that didn't exist the last time I played Terraria. Terraria has a quick drop into chess function now where you just open up your inventory, click one button, and every item that already exists in a chest will automatically just get dumped into the chest that there's already Some of. It's glorious now. [01:15:39] Speaker A: Like this has existed since I last played. [01:15:41] Speaker C: I've. [01:15:42] Speaker A: I've played with a couple of other things since then. There are a couple things that I'm betting you haven't done that are great. Like if you didn't notice, you can favorite items so that even if it does try and stack them, you get to keep it. So like I do that with certain sets of potions that I always have these on hand. [01:16:01] Speaker B: Nice to know so I can stop donating my spell lunking potions. [01:16:05] Speaker A: Yeah. The, the other thing that has been very noticeable is as much as I want to try and guide you into what you need to do next, I'm holding myself back from telling you exactly where to go. [01:16:19] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:16:19] Speaker A: Because I want you to be able to figure some things out yourself. And then once you have hit your frustration note, then I will go, hey, this is what I know you can do next. Or hey, we're preparing to do this. I know you were preparing to do this. This is what we need to do to prepare to do this. That you're not confused as to where you need to go next. Like, I was on my initial playthrough. My first run through the game took 70 plus hours and that was the first iteration of the game before 70% of the game existed. [01:16:51] Speaker B: I will say it is. I'm having a lot of fun. Like last, last night, our last stream, Jax was like mentioning a blizzard in a bottle and I was like, oh, what's that? He talked about the extra jump and I was like, I'm going to the ice place and I want to find that too. Like, so I, I, it's, it's fun like learning about these things and then, or just finding like a magic mirror within my first 20 minutes of playing the game for the first time and not having any idea what it does and then finding a second one like 10 minutes later. Like it's awesome finding like these rare items and then like, you know, go like three hours and not finding a single thing. So I, I'm very, I'm enjoying it. Not holding my hand and like giving me stuff. Like it makes me do the work to find this and it doesn't care whether it takes me 10 minutes or 7 hours to find an item. Like, you just got to hope that you decide to dig in the right direction or have the right item to point you in the right direction. [01:17:56] Speaker A: You reminded me of a thing. So as we were talking last night, Jax and I had mentioned like, hey, there's only so many sky islands per area. Cause there are sky islands in the world, man. There should have been this thing that dropped from the sky Islands, but it wasn't any of the chests. No, it's always there. It always spawns. Then we have more sky islands than there are supposed to be. Cause it's not in any of the chests. And I've explored every other sky island. So time to go spelunking in the sky. And then I go off and I find a bunch more and I, I ended up finding two of this. It's a, it's a special weapon called the Sky Fury. That is, It's a sword that drops stars on people so that if you're a melee character, you have access to ranged damage even if you don't get ranged benefits. Because like that is a type of damage is range damage. And having access to a long range attack without having range damage is huge for melee. [01:18:54] Speaker B: So I think, I think I'm going to wrap it up there because I know there's going to be a lot of more Terraria talk in the past or in the future. Did you guys have any closing thoughts on this that you want to mention or are we going to save that for the next time that we want [01:19:09] Speaker A: to talk about for you? This, this matters to where we're going. How far do you want to take this? [01:19:18] Speaker B: I Until haven't thought about it at the time because I guess until we all are organically just decide like meh, we're kind of over it because there [01:19:29] Speaker A: is a like static end where the, the content ends which we can, we can try and push towards. It'll be a lot of time, which means we'll have to do many sessions together. Well, happy to do that. But if we don't want to do that and we want to just end it early, perfectly happy to do that [01:19:45] Speaker B: too, I would say. I lose interest in these kind of games when I reach a point that I cannot progress any further strength wise. [01:19:54] Speaker C: Like if there becomes this is going to be the game that sticks with you then. Because we have barely scratched the surface of the like many tiers of power progression that this game has. And not all of them are like clear direct upgrades. Like you saw me with my, my mini shark that I have the like machine gun that I was using. [01:20:15] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:20:15] Speaker C: There is later a mega shark that is the exact same thing but much stronger. There's a gazillion other guns that are better in some ways and worse than others. Some of them are just straight better. There's tons of different bows. There's bows that do cool shit that may not be the strongest, but they do something cool. [01:20:36] Speaker B: Yeah, I do like a power progression. Like I mean even like when we're playing like World of Warcraft or something, if I get to the point where I'm just so strong that I'm just what what is there to do? Like the game feels beaten. You know what I mean? [01:20:49] Speaker A: There are super items, so super combo items that are like chase items. There is a super chase sword. There's a super chase like support item and there's a super chase buff item. And like those three are wildly different in strength. Like the sword is officially the strongest thing in the game. It's called the zenith. You need to have things from the beginning of the game to the end of the game to build this. [01:21:16] Speaker B: And I don't mind like if you're coming up at the end of the natural progression of the story that like that's when you get the strongest weapon in the game. Like that makes sense to me. Like there's games like they're at that like so you don't get bored right at the very end. Like, hey, you're at the final. Let's take Legend of Zelda Majora's Mask for example. You can't get Majora's mask until you get to the very end of the game. And you're ready to fight the last boss. Like the game would feel super easy if you could go through and just get that mask super early and use that to fight all your bosses. Like I I. So I'm happy that there is like, hey, you've made it to the end. Here's. If you've been collecting all these and keeping all of it. Here's your God item. I'm. That's cool with me as long as I'm not getting these God weapons early and gear. And like the last. I don't know, 25% of the game. I'm not feeling. [01:22:05] Speaker A: You physically can't start it yet. Yet. We're not even in the. We haven't hit halfway through the game. [01:22:11] Speaker C: Yeah. So when we defeat the boss of Hell, it will make fundamental permanent changes to the world which will change a lot of aspects and open up a ton more progression. [01:22:27] Speaker A: We will essentially be back in a. If is. It's essentially the same point as spawning in a new world. Only now it's bigger and more complex [01:22:37] Speaker C: and there's so many different things to farm and craft and fight and boss drops. Like there are just using bows as an example. There are two bows that are generally in contention for the best bow in the game. Which one is the best? I don't fucking know. They're pretty comparable. They come from wildly different sources. One is a boss drop from an endgame boss and one is crafted from materials you get near the end of the game. [01:23:04] Speaker B: I think that's a great way to do it. So I don't think I'll be losing interest in this. The hard part for all of us is scheduling. Going to get the scheduling throughout, like the month. Like when I get to my like week off, it's going to be very easy for us to make time. It's mostly my schedule working around because my schedule's got the weird hours and it. Your guys is have a little bit more flexibility. But as long as like, I don't think we're going to lose interest on this. So. Because I don't think I am. Because I'm always going to be able to find time as long as like, it would be hard for me to come and like pick it up solo. [01:23:41] Speaker A: So you haven't. You don't have your own world yet. You haven't even made your own. So you. I'm not going to redo a whole new world. If you wanted to try and do things solo. Because right now you don't even have a world to play in. [01:23:54] Speaker B: I'M not gonna do that, but I do. I like that's. This is a fact that I wanted to bring up before I wrap it up. I like that you can take your character into the other worlds. I do like that they have that. There are games that do that, like Valheim and other things where you take your character and your loot that you have with you so you can start off fresh in a whole fresh world, but still be, like, super strong if you want the. A fresh seed, which is nice. All right. Yeah, I'm going to close it there. Jax, did you have anything else? [01:24:25] Speaker C: I was going to say the other thing you may have noticed when you got your B bow, that some of the weapons simply do cool shit that may or may not make up for good or bad base damage. The game never stops doing that. There's so many guns that do cool shit or weapons that do cool shit. That may not be statistically the number one in terms of raw dps, but the cool shit they do makes up for it. And I think Terraria really excels in that in a way that almost every other game in the genre fails. [01:24:55] Speaker B: Well, I'm excited. [01:24:56] Speaker A: I'll say is I think our strategy for going forward is the next time we talk about this will probably be after we have completed that boss in Hell together. And then we'll do a pickup on how you feel on that first portion of the game. [01:25:13] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:25:14] Speaker A: And then we begin the conquest of the second half, which is colloquially called Hard mode. [01:25:22] Speaker B: I'm excited for it. But that being said, that's. I'm gonna call it for tonight for Jax, for Mike of many names. Guys, have a good night. [01:25:33] Speaker C: Bye. Bye. [01:25:34] Speaker A: Good night, everybody.