Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:10] Speaker B: Hello and welcome to 8bit to 4k. From 8bit to 4k.
I'm Mike of Many Names. Welcome my fellow hosts, Jack Soman.
[00:00:18] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jack Soman.
[00:00:20] Speaker B: Pillow Pet.
[00:00:21] Speaker C: Hello, I'm Pillow Pet and we have
[00:00:24] Speaker B: a guest again and it's, it's an old friend of ours from our other podcast who you may not have heard in a while. Welcome Freeshooter.
[00:00:31] Speaker D: Hello. Thank you for having me.
[00:00:33] Speaker A: If they listen to four Wards, they hear his voice every single episode. Because I have been using Freeshooter's 4 wards outro since before he left the podcast.
[00:00:43] Speaker D: Oh, that's funny.
[00:00:44] Speaker A: It's a tradition on four Words that the, the outro is someone who's no longer on the show. So since you left, it's always yours.
[00:00:52] Speaker D: I'll take it.
[00:00:53] Speaker B: It's good to have you on and talking again. Great to see you around some more. Hopefully we'll be able to get you on some more things.
So we, we have a patreon and we need to give some shout outs for that Patreon. Shout outs to Codex, Ninja, Pillow Pet, Scape, Esquire, Labana, Uncle Chrisco, and Eat the Dab for supporting us at the ten dollar shout out tier. Thank you guys very much. That Patreon is patreon.com the 4words podcast. You can support us for just $1 a month. Tell us you love us. $5 a month will give you that exclusive behind the scenes prep show that we do. And at $10 we give you a shout out and maybe give us some ideas and if there's anything else we might want to try and do with that because we want to, we want to try and expand for a little bit more, give you guys a little bit more if we can.
We also have a discord in the four words. Discord that's in the description below. But come and hang out. We mostly do League of Legends talk in there, but plenty of times we'll have streams come on. Or recently we've been as we've been talking about doing the Terraria streams.
Jax will do his stream, what, twice
[00:02:00] Speaker A: a week now for Metroid Randomizer, Super Metroid Map Randomizer. Twice a week. Unless I have something going on that day.
[00:02:08] Speaker B: Yeah, so that goes on relatively. Yeah, twice a week. And then we'll just talk games or talk with people who join up. Come in, hang out.
[00:02:15] Speaker A: We got all sorts of channels. Come talk to us about other games, talk to us about anime or music or books or whatever the hell else you want. It's A fun discord Come hang out.
[00:02:23] Speaker B: But now that we've got the introduction pleasantries out of the way, what do you got going on? Our lives. We're gonna. We're start with you, Jax. What do you got going on?
[00:02:32] Speaker A: So last episode, I talked about my experience playing classic NES Mega man and how they don't hold up as well as I remembered.
Well, I decided to graduate to the SNES and play the Mega Man X series.
So I played Mega Man X1. 4. 4 is a PlayStation game, admittedly, but I love Mega Man X4, so I had to play it as well. And these games do hold up. However, I did not remember how much worse Mechanically Mega Man X1 is than the later games.
Just little details. Like if you hold dash and jump off of a wall, you don't do a dash wall jump in x1, but you do in subsequent X games. You have to press dash and jump at the same time to do a dash wall jump in the first one. Just little stuff like that. That makes Mega Man X1 feel significantly more jank and unpolished compared to the later entries in the series.
But the Mega Man X games are still fun. They don't have the retro frustrations that I experienced going to classic Mega man, where, like, the level design is fine in the X games. Even X1, it's fine. Like, I didn't have any real beef, but it was really jarring to me how much better x3 and 4 are than 1 and 2 in every level. Like, x3 is so much more in depth of a game than one and two, despite also being a Super Nintendo game. You got more interesting boss patterns and more bosses. You got cooler powers. Cause that's a problem. The early Mega man and early X games have of. There's usually like two cool boss powers and the rest suck.
And then X4 was the first PlayStation one. I tried playing it in Japanese because the voice acting in English is infamously bad.
It's not better in the Japanese version. X4 just has bad voice acting no matter which language you play.
Oh my God.
So I played enough in Japanese to experience that and go, oh, this isn't any better. I just can't understand what they're saying anymore. And I switched it back to English because why would I play a language I can't understand when it's not a better experience?
[00:04:50] Speaker D: I've absolutely had that experience before of man. Like this one character. Like, their voice is just kind of grating to me. Switch languages. Ah, now it's grading. And I don't know what they're saying?
[00:05:02] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:05:03] Speaker D: This was the vision for this character, I guess. Cool.
[00:05:07] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:05:08] Speaker A: And this is just so. If you've ever played the English release of Mega Man X4, you know it is very quotable in very bad ways. It also is known for having bad audio levels and audio mixing. Like the Voice Acting in X4 is genuinely awful. That is true to the original. I cannot blame the.
I cannot blame the translation team for that. They could have done it better, but it's not worse.
It was also really weird. X4's really easy compared to the Super Nintendo trilogy.
I think the X Games in general are a lot easier than the Mega man franchise was.
Like classic Mega man is fucking hard. The X Games are not. They're like average difficulty for the era. X4's really easy. Like really easy. It's so much more forgiving because of the way it's designed. And I know that it's designed that way to allow for the shitty loading times on the original PlayStation where they had to load things off of a CD at a low spinning speed. Because that's how the original PlayStation worked.
But because of those choices, it's things like there's a halfway point in each level where it then has to load the second half of the stage. You get fully healed from those halfway points because the game doesn't keep track of your health between the halves. Which is just weird.
[00:06:33] Speaker B: Weird.
[00:06:34] Speaker A: They didn't need to do that. They could have had it. Just remember your health and continue like a normal Mega man game would. But that being said, Mega Man X1. Four are in the Mega Man Legacy. Mega Man X Legacy Collection one highly recommend picking that up when it's on sale. They're good games. They hold up pretty well visually. They're still appealing today. Like 16 and 32 bit sprite games just still look good if they were well done in the first place.
[00:07:02] Speaker B: Yeah, pretty much.
[00:07:03] Speaker A: And the Legacy Collection does them justice. It's got scanline options if you want them. It's got the ability to save. Even though X1 through 3 did not have a save functionality, they were password based saves.
The Legacy Collection lets you actually save it. Just saves the password for you and enters it for you.
[00:07:24] Speaker D: That's the good way to do quality of life on a lot of those like retro remakes is have the options there for those that want them and are used to them from like modern conveniences in games. But you don't make them mandatory for people who want the true retro experience.
[00:07:40] Speaker A: And by just reusing the Existing password system instead of being building a new save system. A, you get the authentic original experience of. It doesn't save things like how much your sub tanks are filled.
But B, it means if you still have passwords from your childhood written down somewhere, you can just load those passwords up. That system's still there to use.
[00:08:03] Speaker D: Okay. That's really cool.
[00:08:04] Speaker B: That is. Actually.
[00:08:06] Speaker A: I love Mega Man X. Like the classic Mega Man X trilogy. And then X4, specifically 5 and 6 are fine. X4 is so good despite the terrible voice acting. So yeah, that's. I love the Mega man games. I don't know what I'm gonna play next. Something else retro. Maybe I'll go back and finish Persona 3. Like I've been meaning to for forever. I'm like 90 hours into that game and haven't finished it. Persona 3 is long as fuck, y'.
[00:08:32] Speaker C: All.
[00:08:32] Speaker B: Oh God. Yeah, Most of the classic JRPD is like 100 plus hours.
[00:08:37] Speaker A: This is, this is like Dragon Quest 7 level long, which is long even by JRPG standards.
[00:08:45] Speaker B: I think that one's getting a rework very soon.
[00:08:47] Speaker A: Or if it has very, very soon, if it hasn't already.
I'm gonna look that up.
[00:08:53] Speaker B: All right, well, here looking that up. Hello. What have you been doing?
[00:08:56] Speaker C: So I, as everybody knows that listens, I love a simulator game and I've been wanting to get into a roguelikes, so I found a game that was kind of does both.
Dave the Diver. I don't know if you've ever heard of it.
It's a pretty fun game. It's.
Excuse me.
[00:09:18] Speaker B: You.
[00:09:20] Speaker C: You start off and you're just like fishing for this like restaurant and then you end up like serving sushi at this restaurant with the fish that you catch. And like the story is developed. I've only played it for like three or four hours because I just haven't had time. I just got it today that we're recording and it took my time up this morning, but I'm enjoying it. Like, I love the aspect going back. Like you can find super powerful weapons or harpoons or power ups while you're down on your dive, but as soon as you come out of the water, they get disintegrated and you get booted back to your crappy weapons. But the more of these empowered weapons that you find, you get the blueprints to be able to craft these powerful weapons. So after you found the same amount of weapon three, four, five times, like you get the blueprint to craft it. So it's pretty, it feels really good to go back and keep doing it.
I really like the. There's so much seems so far to explore. There's not a whole lot that I can really give you on it right now other than it's really fun.
How I found it actually is my stepmom plays it on the switch and she's been talking about it for months and I was just like, oh, you know, it just sounds like some fishing game. I was like, cool. And then it popped up on Steam today and I saw it and I was like, oh, wow, that's cool. And then I was like, all right, I got to give it a try. So I bought it, tried it, loving it so far.
It's got the aspects of a simulator. You know, you're running your restaurant and I know at some point you get into like a farming stuff simulator part of it where you're actually like growing ingredients and stuff.
So. Looks really fun. Excited to keep trying it, playing it.
[00:11:05] Speaker B: All right, nice.
[00:11:06] Speaker A: I did look. Dragon Quest 7 reimagined did come out in February.
[00:11:11] Speaker B: Okay. So last month.
[00:11:12] Speaker A: Yeah. And seems to be well received.
[00:11:15] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean it was already a well done game which has had some classic problems to it. That sounds like they've been pretty well taken care of.
So free, you want to do the second part on your list first? We'll save your other one for a minute later.
[00:11:29] Speaker D: Yeah. So one of the biggest things I've been doing over the past couple months is I've been doing a lot of archipelagos. And I don't know if you guys have talked about Archipelago at all before, but basically what it is is it's a multi world randomizer. It's not its own game.
It takes randomizers for existing games and with a little frankly, it feels like magic behind the scenes, shuffles items between all of the games and then you just play through and you're, you know, your bombs in oot might send Morph Ball to someone super Metroid. And it's basically just a big group of people all trying to be beat. All of their randomizers and it's a lot of it's done like you know, synchronous games, everyone playing at the same time. But I've been having a lot of fun on a couple servers. I'm in. We do just like month long like Async games where people just log on whenever they can and play games. And I love randomizers and it's such a way to help keep things fresh.
This month with one of my servers, I'm Playing, let's see, doing Jak and Daxter, which is fun. There's like move randomizer and that. So you at the start, you can only walk and do a single jump. And boy, there's a lot of stuff that's to do in that game when you can only walk in single jump.
There's.
I'm playing Factorio in it as well, so my whole tech tree is randomized.
[00:12:55] Speaker B: That sounds. Hell yeah.
[00:12:58] Speaker D: It sucks. Right now I have like, basically no way to defend my base because I haven't unlocked walls of turrets. So anytime I get attacked, I have to just run and start killing.
[00:13:08] Speaker A: I want to drive home. How ridiculous. The different variety of games you can play in Archipelago is.
This ranges from an Atari 2600 game called Adventure to Bomb Rush Cyberfunk to Celeste 64, multiple Legend of Zelda games.
The ancient cave from Lufia 2. There's Pokemon games, there's Super Metroid, there's Stardew Valley, there's Terraria. You can play VVVVB in this. Like, it is a ridiculous selection of games. And that's just what comes with Archipelago. There are custom worlds people have made where someone has gone and just made, oh, now you can play this game in Archipelago if you install this into your Archipelago server.
[00:13:57] Speaker D: Yep, it is. I think there's what, like, 79, like, quote unquote officially supported, which is like, merged into the main, like, GitHub project on the main branch.
All of it still requiring, like, your own copies of the games and all that, of course.
But I think there's like, over, like, an additional, like 400 that are in active development to like, try and get merged in. Like, I'm playing Final Fantasy 12 in it right now. Like, that game's not super stable, but it's really fun.
[00:14:26] Speaker A: I love that. Not only are Link to the Past and Super Metroid separately in Archipelago, but also the Super Metroid Link to the Past combo ROM and is also enabled in Archipelago. So you can play a weird, like, crossover of Super Metroid and Link to the Past within Archipelago instead of just playing the two separate games in Archipelago.
[00:14:47] Speaker D: Yeah, because a bunch of it is just like, individual developers. Like, some of those small, weird games that are in. There is like, one guy was like, hey, I want to play this. Went out and like, figured out what he needed to do to write it in, got all the changes approved and merged in, and now it just, like, helps upkeep it.
[00:15:03] Speaker C: I admittedly tried to install Archipelago and I didn't give it much time in trying to set up because I didn't have the setup time to try to get through it. But I did notice that there's a crap ton of games. And what reason I wanted to end up getting into it is because I watched a guy's let's Play. It was like 30 hours long of his compilation of his streams where he did every 3D Zelda game, played them himself.
Like, he could lock out he. Where he couldn't start a game because he had to find the game in the game to be able to play the game.
And, like, I just watched him play Ocarina of Time all the way through it stopped at Twilight Princess or Skyward.
[00:15:46] Speaker B: Too far on this. You want to tell people how they can get access to this, because this is very obviously not something you can get on Steam.
[00:15:53] Speaker D: No, it's just they have a website, Archipelago gg, and that's like, the starting point where there's a bunch of guides and stuff. But from there, I would suggest, like, their Discord is really the big repository for a bunch of stuff. That's where all the discussions are, like. And the community is super active.
Yeah, it's.
It's a great community. They host. Like, you can host your own sync games in there. I've done that a bunch too.
Yeah, it's. It's a awesome community of people.
[00:16:22] Speaker A: And you can also literally just play a solo archipelago if you don't want to play with other people. Like, you can use it to randomize items across three different games and then play those three games and switch yourself between them as you go.
[00:16:35] Speaker D: I'm planning to do that with the Dark Souls trilogy at some point. I'm probably gonna try and stream it because Dark Souls 3 is, like, officially supported, and 1 and 2 are both in, like, beta states, so.
[00:16:46] Speaker B: That sounds fantastically fun. Okay, well, it could.
[00:16:49] Speaker C: It could. It can fry your computer, from what I've heard. It gets very. It kind of. It's very intensive, very fast when you start loading up all these different games.
[00:16:57] Speaker D: So it depends on, like, what games you're doing, but for the most part, it's just like most of it is like you're running your own game locally with a randomizer, with, like, a separate client that's just kind of hooking into it. So.
[00:17:10] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:17:11] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:17:11] Speaker A: It's like running a server for something. Basically.
[00:17:14] Speaker D: Basically, yeah.
[00:17:15] Speaker B: The weaker your computer, the less likely it is. You should try this.
[00:17:18] Speaker A: Yeah.
Specifically, you need a moderately beefy CPU and enough RAM.
[00:17:24] Speaker D: Mm.
[00:17:25] Speaker B: If you have 16 gigs, you probably shouldn't. 32 is probably where we're talking here.
[00:17:29] Speaker D: Yeah, depends on again, if you just.
[00:17:30] Speaker A: If you're playing like Super Nintendo or older games, you'll be fine regardless.
[00:17:35] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:17:35] Speaker D: Like any of the Pokemon games.
[00:17:36] Speaker A: Yeah, like classic Doom, those kinds of things.
[00:17:39] Speaker D: Mm. But if it's like you're trying to play a modern game, if it's one where like, you know, a game where you're having to turn down a bunch of settings in order to get it to run at all, you're probably not even going to get a randomizer to run of that. But like, if it's one where you can have everything on Ultra, no problem, then it's not going to be that much more intensive.
[00:17:56] Speaker B: All right, well, I guess I'll get going with my first one and that I've started playing Last Epoch again and.
[00:18:03] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:18:03] Speaker B: Last Epoch is, as we've talked about maybe before, it's another action RPG arpg and it is currently my favorite of them. The new season started a couple days ago, so it's what brought me back into it. Because of course, much like a lot of the other ones, it's season based.
Sorry about that. It's five classes based on a bunch of advantage classes to it. Much like Path of Exile has its six classes with some Ascendancies, similar concept. The thing that I really love about Last Epoch, which has always been the thing that I has drawn me to it more than anything else, is Lazy Pack's skills. You're. You're set in what skills you get based on what class you're playing and what ascendancy you do, allows you to get extra skills. And you can grab multiple separate Ascendancies to grab skills from multiple different parts of your one main tree.
So there's a rogue class that can go into like a Battle Dancer and then a Ranger, and you can grab things from the Ranger and the Battle Dancer. But you have one specific line that is your like special mastery and that has a locked ability behind it, things like that. The thing that I really love is these skills each have their own tech tree, essentially their own skill tree within them, which allows you to customize what they do.
So one of my favorites that I've been doing a lot, there's a warlock who can throw down these fissures and you can cast these fissures. And within that skill tree, you can have them cast two separate spells so that it forcibly casts other spells when you're casting this. One of them is called Chaos Bolt and another one is called Decay, I believe. And you're casting multiple sets of spells at once. So it's a huge mana draw, but you only have to cast one spell as opposed to bouncing between three or four in how I play it. But some people will just have that as the debuff they throw down the wall and have it be a debuff and then they focus on doing neither decryptify or something else and the like. So the skill trees being like inside their own set skills gives you this really interesting flexibility of play that isn't in the others.
Because most of the time the functionality of a spell is the functionality of your spell and how you modify them is one of the coolest things about Last Epoch to me. And for a weirdly dumb and nerdy point, they have my favorite loot filter. In any game, it is. It is something that if you play an arpg, you start to understand like the bottomless pits of loot that you get and the capacity to completely update and modify what you want to see within the game really makes it feel unique. Plus its crafting system is like more things. I'm not going to go too deep into crafting because that'll get us here forever.
The systems that it has feel better for me than any of the other big ARPGs. Path of exile, it feels like is two system on system on system on system on system. Path of Exile 2 feels like it doesn't have enough content.
Diablo has who knows what right now. So last Last Epoch has hit my sweet spot right now.
[00:21:15] Speaker A: Fair enough. I've been playing POE as well. I just didn't feel the need to talk about it again.
[00:21:21] Speaker B: Yeah, I've gotten to the point where like Last Epoch has gotten to. They have been consistently reworking things that so if you haven't heard or played it, I may have talked about it earlier. I do not know if I have because it's been a while and we may have just discussed them, but it's been long enough that I wasn't 100% sure if I've talked about it, but it's my personal favorite of the rpg, so I really wanted to get in there and discuss it. But let's end that one off and go back to Jax. Jax, what's the next thing you add on your list?
[00:21:48] Speaker A: All right, so I had one other thing, which is I had a friend over yesterday and I made her play VR when she had never played VR before.
Quite literally. She knew this was the plan when she came over. This was one of the things we were going to do. I pull out the Headset. And she's like, what the hell is that? And I was like, this is the VR headset. We're going to play Beat Saber like we discussed.
So she wanted to see what the hell it was like. So I showed her by me putting it on and playing a song in Beat Saber first so she could see how it was. I had my view cast to my TV so she could see what I could see.
[00:22:24] Speaker D: Excellent first choice for a game, by the way.
[00:22:26] Speaker A: I know.
So I did a song on Beat Saber and then I was like, okay, it's your turn. Got her set up in the headset. And this woman is not a gamer.
She was immediately like, oh my God. I did not expect this to feel so intense before even starting the game. Just, just the sensation of wearing a headset, having it be your entire field of view, and having your controllers be things that are physically in your hands, that you can move around and see them move around on screen was enough to just overwhelm her. So she took a minute, got her bearings, got her balance because it was also making her a little dizzy. And then she finally played a song. And once she understood the rules of how to play Beat Saber, she was able to clear whatever song she picked. I can't remember on Easy. And she had a lot of fun. And then I showed her a couple other games in VR just as a. These are other VR games. They're fun. But it was, it was fun showing her something that she had no VR experience. She didn't know what to expect. I think she thought when she heard VR. I think even though she knew this wasn't the case, her brain filled in the like sci fi version where you lie down on a bed and fall asleep and you're like, there.
So seeing the real version was kind of jarring for her because she just, she didn't know what to expect. But it was, it was fun. I still love freaking love. Beat Saber.
[00:23:50] Speaker C: VR can be pretty overwhelming. So, like, it can be very. Make you sick very easily, especially if you're not attuned to screens.
[00:24:00] Speaker A: So my wife has played with my VR occasionally. She's never played VRChat in VR because usually when we're on VRChat, I'm in the VR and she's on her computer. One of the things that we showed my friend was there's a Super Monkey Ball game within VR chat called Super VR Ball. And my wife was the one in control at that point when we were playing. And my wife made herself motion sick because Super Monkey Ball type gameplay Plus VR can get you motion sick really easily if you're not very resistant to VR motion sickness.
[00:24:32] Speaker D: Mm.
[00:24:33] Speaker B: Here's a. Here's a good question for this section. Do people who are frequently regularly motion sick get motion sick with VR or is this more of a.
[00:24:40] Speaker A: Some of them. Do some people who get motion sick from regular stuff also get motion sick from VR? Yep. Some people who do don't get sick from VR and some people who don't get sick normally do get sick from VR. It's. It's just different.
[00:24:56] Speaker D: Yep. It fully depends on the game. For me, I haven't touched VR in a while, but back when I did, I remember I think it was a game called Boneworks came out which was supposed to be one of the like has super realistic physics in VR games and that game gave me motion sickness like no one's business. And I don't typically get it like just walking around and even in like VR chat or something or playing Half Life Alyx, I didn't get it. That game got me motion sick.
[00:25:23] Speaker C: Yep. Fully plan on when our house gets built to have like a VR spot. So I can not be within arm's reach of destroying $3,000 worth of equipment with one false move. So I'm pretty excited to finally be able to dive into my VR library and just fully stretch out.
[00:25:42] Speaker B: Yeah. VR is one of the things that I do not have any experience in. It's hard enough to justify getting a new system, let alone trying to get something that I maybe definitely want to do one to two things on. But I don't know if it. It's worth it.
[00:25:57] Speaker D: Yeah. My hours to dollars ratio in VR is still definitely skewed against it. But that's more of me thing of the like I just never set it back up when I moved and didn't want and didn't end up going through the effort to do so where I like I could be playing Beat Saber all the time. Like it's great for honestly just exercise, but I just didn't go through the hassle of getting it set up when I moved.
[00:26:22] Speaker B: Okay. Would you. Would you recommend it as another first thing or.
[00:26:26] Speaker D: No, it's a cost thing. Like if you're someone who.
[00:26:31] Speaker B: No, no. As an intention has the dis.
[00:26:33] Speaker A: Oh yeah.
[00:26:34] Speaker B: Yep. All right.
[00:26:36] Speaker A: VR is a good way to introduce a non gamer into games because the inputs feel more natural to someone who isn't used to joysticks and buttons.
[00:26:44] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:26:45] Speaker A: Just plain and simple.
[00:26:48] Speaker D: I put my mom in at the very start of Half Life. Alex. There's a part where there's just like a window with markers, and you can pick up the markers and write with them. And she was in there for an hour just like, writing on the board, basically, and she loved it.
[00:27:04] Speaker B: That's great. All right, Pillow, hit us up with your next thing.
[00:27:07] Speaker C: So I started another simulator as well. This one's called Retro Rewind.
And it is just. You own a old video store and you just rent out movies. You buy movies and you rent them out. You just own a video store. I mean, it's. It's right up my alley because, like I said, I love simulators.
But, I mean, it's. It's fun. It's, to me, like, it hits nostalgia. They got a Mourning Doves playing, like, in the audio in the back. So it just hits that childhood nostalgia for me of going to the video store and picking out a movie and being like, all right, this is what we're doing this weekend. Let's get four or five movies. And we're gonna watch these this weekend before Netflix and before your 950 other subscription streaming services.
This is how we had to do it. And it was awesome.
Just a fun little busy, keeps me busy kind of. I can play it while my kids are home and I can't get in on the computer and lets me watch them. And if I need to put it down, I can. It's really fun, though. There's a bunch of really cool movies in it.
Hundreds and thousands of movies. And what I really like most about what the developer did not use AI to create the movie titles and the.
The art. They drew up their own assets and bunch of names and these.
I don't know how they did it, but the names were attached to movies. For example, there's a clown asset, like drawn on the movie case and it could be the same clown would be on a kid's movie or on a science fiction movie or a horror movie.
And they'll throw in another picture an asset. And when those are combined, it'll create the movie title for it. So one of them is like the Jesters something. The Jesters Something Kingdom. And it's a fantasy movie. And it just combines all their assets that they have created and randomly gives it a name and a.
That fits for the genre.
I don't. It's really hard to explain, but I do appreciate how they didn't. They intentionally did not use AI to do this because they know how much people despise AI Art and AI Name generation.
So I can really appreciate that. So I got behind it. It's, it's fairly cheap.
It's in the wheelhouse. Let me look it up.
It's $19.90 right now.
So for less than $20, I mean I already got 30 some hours in it so I've already got my money's worth.
So definitely go check that out. If you're into simulators, you know, why
[00:30:07] Speaker B: don't you finish up what you've got going because then, then free and I'll talk about the last thing pretty heavily in the background.
[00:30:12] Speaker C: So speaking of discounts, the long Dark I've talked about that game several times. I think on this podcast it is a 3540 game. Is right now 90% off on Steam. You can pick this game up for $3.49 and you will get way more than your money's worth on this game. You will get Hunt. It's got hundreds and hundreds of hours worth on it. And like the $3.49 gets you the survival part of the game and get you the story based part of the game.
So the survival in itself, like it's got badges and different feats of strength that you can do which unlock other things for your future games. Like one of them is after you sprinted so so many kilometers or miles it gives you like now you lose less stamina when you sprint and or you get less tired when you sprint. So it's really fun. There's a lot of replayability in it, tons of different difficulties.
So you'll have way more than $3 and $0.50 worth of content. And the sale lasts till April 9th so you should still be able to have time to get it by the time this episode comes out. So go get that game if you haven't already.
And then last but not least, this is quick. I finally hit Twitch Affiliate. I have been streaming way more often, almost probably three or four times a week now. Just doing my best to get into it and thanks to the help of everybody I finally got it. Got some new followers that came and followed came through.
So yeah, come check us out.
[00:31:55] Speaker A: Heck yeah.
[00:31:55] Speaker C: Twitch TV pillow.
[00:31:57] Speaker D: Yeah, Heck yeah. I need to actually push forward too. I'm just missing the like concurrent viewers number.
[00:32:04] Speaker C: That's what was holding me back.
[00:32:06] Speaker B: I should work on that. But speaking of your Twitch and speaking of doing a stream free, why don't you talk about the stream you just did?
[00:32:15] Speaker D: Sure.
So this past week on Monday I was featured on a GDQ hotfix show called Game Masters playing Elden Ring.
So I was doing a four player boss rush Game mode, which something I helped a group of streamers come up with and perfect. And they just asked me to keep playing with them. So I did. And we eventually it was one of those things where so the idea was we randomize Elden Ring. We restrict where we can go in the game so it's only like the first couple areas up through like the capital area, which is about 134 bosses.
And we've been playing the game like randomized, doing some races at night. But we wanted a format that was like hey, we wanted like a time capped format. We want it to be two hours long.
And so we came up with this where we went through and pre assigned all the bosses a certain number of points, typically 1 through 10, and then made it a lockout style where when someone kills a boss in one spot, no one else can get points for that spot. And then it's you have two hours get as many points as possible. And from the first time we played it, we knew, oh, oh, we got something here. Like we had people like watching along, helping us track and they were like, that was a great viewing experience. Seeing like people being on the same boss, like it just makes for a really fun time.
And luckily some of the streamers that we were playing with were friends with Kiara who runs Game Master. So we were able to apply to be on that show. Get in and do it. And now we're hopefully applying to or we've submitted it to be an SGDQ as well. No guarantees it's going to be on there, but fingers crossed.
[00:34:10] Speaker A: As someone who does not play Elden Ring, I still had a blast watching it. It's a great format.
It helps that you know, you had Kiara and Spike Vegeta doing the commentary on it.
[00:34:23] Speaker B: Yeah, it was actually enjoy Zelden Ring. I also had a blast watching it.
[00:34:27] Speaker D: Yeah, it's. It was actually Spike's idea in the first place, but he had so much fun watching it. He was like, hey, I'll step out of being one of the four because I just want to watch and commentate.
[00:34:36] Speaker B: Yeah, it, it's a really interesting style of, of watching because it is a very competitive game mode almost all the way through. You were very close to taking first there for a moment.
[00:34:48] Speaker D: Yeah, it was, it was pretty close
[00:34:50] Speaker B: down to the absolute last thing because you don't know what all is going to spawn when you don't know how many points a bosses that you're going toward is going to be worth. And you don't do, you know, while you're Playing where you are in comparison to other players or is that completely blindsided? Deal.
[00:35:07] Speaker D: So we all we know is where, like, because when someone kills a boss, we call it out in the voice chat to each other. So it's like if you've ever watched any, like, Speedrun Bingo type stuff where the only info you get is when something gets marked. So if, like two people are fighting a boss at the same time, one person beats it, they call it out. Unless, like, someone says, oh, you beat me by a couple seconds, you have no idea. Like, it could be like, yeah, and yeah, it's a lot of fun. There's a couple of times. I mean, sometimes we'll like, say some things that like, give it away a little bit to each other, but no, yeah, it is.
It's very fun.
[00:35:46] Speaker A: Have you guys had in any of your runs of this situations where two people killed the same boss close enough to the same time that it's hard to say who actually did it first?
[00:35:56] Speaker D: Yes.
[00:35:57] Speaker A: How do you resolve those?
[00:35:59] Speaker D: So the way we do it is we have spectators who are watching to like, mark the sheet for us. We didn't do that the first couple times because we're just keeping track of the points in like a Google sheet.
But for the show, we wanted to have people doing that for us.
And every time it's happened, it's been when someone was spectating and they were able to see from our streams. Like, basically when the enemy fell, text pops up on screen first.
Who actually got the point there? I think there was only one time where it was like almost frame perfect and I just gave it to the other person because my boss died by a glitch and like, I was one of the two people. But yeah, no, it's usually like, I think only one or two times have we had to come down to one. Did the text pop up first?
[00:36:45] Speaker B: That's. It's. It's a really cool thing to watch. It's something that is so fun to interesting. Like, watch that. It's kind of interesting. I kind of want to almost play it. I'm not usually a speedrunner or someone who does the glitch games, but this looked really fun to try.
[00:37:01] Speaker D: Mm, yeah, it is.
Yeah, it's a ton of fun because, yeah, the whole thing with Elden Ring as a game in general, because it's so big in open world, there's any time you're doing any kind of like Speedrun or Challenge Run or anything like that, even if you try and come up with some kind of blitz Settings which we've been playing like it's still like can be up to like an hour before you even start fighting stuff sometimes.
The goal with this was what's something we can do where we just start fighting immediately and constantly. It's why we even built in that like out or that break at the hour mark. Like that wasn't something we did for the GDQ show. That's something we implemented on ourselves. When we play of like okay hand, we need to stop and just take a breather in the halfway point.
[00:37:47] Speaker A: Fair enough.
[00:37:48] Speaker B: From what it sounds like as we're realistic, this is one of the few times you guys have ever actually full cleared at the same time.
[00:37:55] Speaker D: I think it was our they said third four.
I think yeah we said third. I think it might have been our fourth. But I mean all of those were within the past week. Like we went from not really getting close to all of a sudden like kind of going for it. This it was almost our fastest full clear too but I think our fastest one. We had like 10 minutes to spare.
But yeah, 134 boss in two hours between all of us and the fact that it's not every boss in the game is interesting because there's some games where it's like, yeah, just like none of the hard bosses even or in the seed. So like the points ended up being a lot closer and we cleared faster because we didn't have to fight any of them.
[00:38:34] Speaker B: So like how modular can you get with this? How easily modifiable is this to be bigger, smaller, faster, longer.
[00:38:42] Speaker D: So we are kind of hitting the limits of what the randomizer program can do with this.
We have an idea for how we can do it with the like doing the full game where we unlock we have just like some extra like graces that we can warp to from the start in other areas.
But we're just gonna need to use like another third party tool to unlock those at the start of every run.
That's part of why I like, you know how we have it with like the weapon pool that we're drafting from. That's just like a baked in feature of the randomizer that was intended for like using the randomizer to go into the DLC with like a care package of base game stuff. So. So there's no DLC stuff in that. So we don't have a lot of DLC equipment at the start. That's just kind of a limitation of the randomizer because we're just trying to use it as like within its bounds.
[00:39:32] Speaker B: And yeah, as the randomizer gets better and has more things added into it, you will have more access to more things. Sounds like as well, if that stuff
[00:39:41] Speaker D: does get added in. Yeah, like, you know, the biggest thing we're hoping for is if there was an option to like plan do bosses or items in specific locations. Because there's not really a thing of like, hey, add these items to the player starting inventory. That's not a thing. It's easy enough to spawn them in with like, you know, there's some like speedrun practice tools that let you do that or like cheat engine tables or something. But yeah, nothing that's built in right now.
[00:40:07] Speaker B: And do you guys have like any working communication with the people who are doing that? Or is this all stuff you've developed yourself sort of with the randomizer engine?
[00:40:16] Speaker D: Nope, this is all stuff we developed ourselves. I made the map tracker that we use and even that was like pushing the limits of my ability to code. Like, I'm honestly shocked. Like it's at a weird link because I just googled free hosting sites and just put it up on there. I was praying it wouldn't crash during the GDQ show.
If we get into sgdq, I'm probably going to like move it to another site that I pay for posting for just so that doesn't happen. Because I.
[00:40:43] Speaker A: If it's for gdq, they'll probably want you to have it on an actual hardware that you bring because they usually don't let you do online stuff for the actual live events.
[00:40:53] Speaker D: That's true. Yeah, I just, yeah, for our tracker site because it is all just like web hooks into a Google sheet. I'm not sure how we do that because they did have it like pinned in the chat for people to click on. But yeah, yeah, that'd be something we'd have to figure out. But I mean, where I was going with that is like that pushed the limits of my coding ability. And like we've tried to reach out to a couple people to be like, hey, do you have any availability to like, maybe we commissioned you to make this better of like, you know, people can sign into the site and click on it, kind of like a lockout bingo type style. And so far the two people we reached out to were like, do you want it done this year? Because if so, no.
[00:41:31] Speaker C: So yikes.
[00:41:32] Speaker D: We might try finding someone with more like coding experience than me because boy, I'm shocked this thing works at all. I had to manually place the pins for everything on the map to get it to Work like it's.
[00:41:43] Speaker A: Yeah, you know, it worked fine for me to be able to see where you guys were on the map when I was watching the live stream.
[00:41:49] Speaker B: Like it from, from an outside perspective, none of that showed. It looks like it was fairly polished.
[00:41:54] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:41:54] Speaker D: And I guess one little fun fact behind the scenes for the show.
So we all had to do our like tech checks ahead of time just to make sure that like you know, our stream quality was good and all that.
I didn't realize no one else had their cameras on that they all just did their checks with just the game. And so for the entire stream it's just my face in the middle.
[00:42:16] Speaker B: Yes it is. It's very interesting to just, just have you as the cameraman.
[00:42:20] Speaker D: I had literally no idea until afterwards I asked like, oh yeah. I noticed at the end it was hanging on my camera a lot and everyone else was like, you had your camera on. That was not planned. I just was the only one that did it with my camera on. So they put my face on screen. The whole like two and a half hours show.
[00:42:35] Speaker B: Preferable to have the camera's going because it was preferable to see your expressions when things were going on. Like at the very, the very very end when you're in the like post game stuff you've already been and you're doing the stuff in the dlc, you fuck up somewhere and do the death and it's just your face goes.
[00:42:51] Speaker D: Yeah, it's just do like a face.
[00:42:54] Speaker A: I was very funny. They even. I asked about it in chat. I was like, why is Free the only one with his camera? And they're like, he's the only one who used his camera.
[00:43:02] Speaker D: Yep. And it's funny watching it back and seeing you ask that was like I was I. Because I didn't have chat up during the race of course. And so watching I was like, yeah, yeah.
[00:43:14] Speaker B: I think a camera. Camera is a better experience.
[00:43:17] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:43:17] Speaker A: Or vtuber if the person has a vtuber with tracking to where you can actually get reactions out of them.
[00:43:23] Speaker D: Yep. Which like I guess from a like a background perspective. Working with gdq, they were great to work with and like doing tech checkers like oh, are you going to be like using a camera or vtuber model? They have like support for that and
[00:43:35] Speaker A: well, I mean Kiara herself is a vtuber.
[00:43:38] Speaker D: Yeah, of course.
And yeah, there was like a whole question and answer stuff for tech and like they give you like a standalone OBS package so don't even have to like worry about messing up your own stream. Settings. You're just using a like standalone thing. You do all the settings, how they want it and then just close that program and don't open it again until the show. Like it's, it's very well done. Like the, the tech behind the scenes. There was someone else like from tech in the call with us that could talk to us if there was anything going on and give us countdowns and call outs that the stream can't hear.
It's a very well run production.
[00:44:12] Speaker A: Nice. And also shout out Kiara. Kiara's awesome.
[00:44:16] Speaker D: Kiara is awesome.
[00:44:17] Speaker A: She plays the map randos that I do sometimes and it's always fun whenever she's involved.
[00:44:23] Speaker B: Well, we hope to see some more of this. That was a, a fun thing to do. Maybe we'll see some more, we'll play some more. But now let's get into. We have another topic to talk about and this one's going to be, it's a little bit, I guess, dear to our hearts because we're talking about game franchises that we really want to have more entries into them. Things that have been abandoned and disappeared off the face of the earth that for whatever reason we never got any
[00:44:43] Speaker A: sequels to them or just haven't gotten a sequel in a long time.
[00:44:47] Speaker B: Yeah, they've just been gone for a good five, 10 years minimum. And I'm gonna start this one off this time and I'm gonna talk about a franchise that ruled my time for a very long time.
Golden sun was one of my absolute favorite Game Boy advance games. And the original game ends on a straight up cliffhanger halfway through the game. And you don't understand why initially, and that's because they cut it to be a two game instead of one because they ran out of time to release the original portion. And they went, okay, we need to ship something. Let's ship this first part of the game. And it's noticeably like where did the story just stops. You go nowhere with it. And then as you pick up the second game, which came out I think a year afterwards, you pick up with a completely separate start of the story, but at the exact same point. So you start with a set of characters that are going through this. And then Golden Suns sequel, I do not remember the title of that one. I think it's the Lost Age.
[00:45:48] Speaker D: The Lost Age, Yep.
[00:45:50] Speaker B: That one has a completely separate cast that was talked about and was mentioned in the first game as sort of people that were kidnapped or were part of a different group. And now you're playing as that group. And now you have A completely separate perspective on what was going on from that original game. And then you go through and this one feels significantly more complete. It's a longer game, you have more access to it, and eventually the stories sort of combine into a single point where both. Both teams combine and you have full access to everything you had from the first game. If you had it, you could code in extra things to get from the first game to the second. So that felt really good to play. And that sort of ends on a weird point because the very end of that game ends at a. You. You've unleashed this section back into the world and you've sort of quote unquote, saved the world, even though things have gotten a little weird and now you're not entirely sure where things are going. And then there is another game that picks up on the DS and that one also ends randomly in the middle of it, and then they don't continue. And that's the part that's really annoying because I've. The first two make a sort of complete game where there's. Yeah, there's a little bit of a cliffhanger you could figure out trying what's going on there. But that could be its own separate thing in the future that goes on. And when they try and complete that, you just get half of a game again, only they never finished it.
[00:47:09] Speaker D: I've only played the second game. I never played the first one and I never played the new one.
[00:47:14] Speaker B: Well, that's almost the best of them.
It has by far the best of the story. You miss sort of a couple of the twists and turns that are part of the first part. And not knowing if you only played the second one. You don't really realize initially that your main character is technically one of the villains from the first game.
[00:47:34] Speaker D: I was nine when this game. Actually, it came out, like three days before I turned nine. That's probably why my parents got it for me. I. I didn't understand a single thing that was going on with the story.
[00:47:44] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
The first half of that is a wild ride because you. You start up straight up in the middle of a game, essentially only back at level one. So it's very confusing if you're not entirely sure where things were going. And then you get this. This other experience that just ends out of nowhere again. And it's incredibly frustrating that they never finished it. Might be Dark Sun. A lot of DS games had DS in the names.
[00:48:12] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:48:12] Speaker D: Yup. Like Advance Wars, Dual Strike.
[00:48:15] Speaker A: It's kind of the same thing as how every N64 game was whatever. 64. Every Super Nintendo game was super whatever.
[00:48:23] Speaker D: Mm.
[00:48:25] Speaker A: Just the DS one was a lot more contrived.
[00:48:29] Speaker B: Dark Dawn. Oh, it actually was DD. Huh? 2001. 2002. 2010. Wow. And then it never goes anywhere from there. So this is a franchise that I think I will talk significantly more about what it is because this is one of my favorite Game Boy advance games. At another time, what we'll get into what it was, why I enjoyed it, what I love playing about it. But it. It has this. This charm to it that made it so resonant at the time. And I never get to get in again. It's just. It's disappeared, which is a huge shame.
All right, who else has got something good for us? Jax, Keep going. What do you got?
[00:49:05] Speaker A: All right, I want to talk about. I've talked about this franchise before, but I want to talk about. We need a real new Tribes game.
Tribes and like by association, the like Mech combat games that it originated from. The Earth Siege series was a like 90s and early 2000s series of games. Tribes is most known for being the capture the flag first person shooter with jetpacks. It was a lot of fun to play. A lot of fun to play. And then hi Rez got control of the Tribes franchise and they released Tribes Ascend. And Tribes Ascend was great. And then they proceeded not to support Tribes Ascend at all, even though it was a great game. And it crashed and burned and floundered and died. And I think stopped getting updates in 2016.
And since then there's only been one more attempt at a Tribes game. They tried to make Tribes 3. It came out in early access in 2024. It never hit 1000 peak players and died. So Tribes has been dead for a long time. Considering an early access flop is the only one we've gotten in the last decade. I would love a new Tribes game. This. If you want to get Jax playing first person shooters again, we need a new Tribes game. These were so much fun to play. The jetpack system was designed in such a way that you could like, they called it skiing, but you could use your jetpack to like hover over the ground in a way where you could accelerate and get use your momentum to move around really fast. And the movement was really, really fun and good. And this is a first person shooter that's not about Hitscan guns. It's not a sniper fest. It was.
Everyone used disc launchers or grenade launchers or rocket launchers and your projectiles had travel time and exploded. So it was about like predicting where people would have to land because you can only jetpack for so long before you do have to touch down and refill your your jetpack energy.
[00:51:06] Speaker B: So closer to Unreal Tournament, like a
[00:51:09] Speaker A: slower but more flighty Unreal Tournament and it's all about objective mode. So like Capture the Flag was the iconic one but also like King of the Hill modes and that kind of stuff and it was just a lot of fun and I really wish we would get a new one that would actually like care about being good and actually be a real thing and not an immediate early access flop.
I checked 890 was the all time peak when it hit early access.
It didn't even hit 1000 on tribes 3 which is painful because Tribes ascend, I want to say hit at like 100,000 at its peak. Like it was never the most popular game in the world but it was a lot of fun and I just want more like multiplayer shooters that aren't twitchy headshot simulators.
And also the Earth Siege games were like they were Mech Assaults type games like they were giant robots shooting missiles at each other and other silliness like that. I've talked about Mission for Cyberstorm that's in this franchise, an old turn based strategy game from the 90s like Hex Grid, like War game. I frickin love this franchise. So yeah, that's one of my entries is I want, I want Tribes back.
[00:52:32] Speaker B: Well we can only hope we'll get some more things of that nature. Pillow talk to us about something you want returned.
[00:52:38] Speaker C: Yeah, so I'm combining these two together because they're from the same makers and it's for the same reason.
So Warcraft and StarCraft specifically they're RTSs. So you got StarCraft 1 that has StarCraft and then Brood War and then StarCraft 2 that's got three different expansions to it that cover all the races.
Blizzard made amazing story driven rtss and I know why they're not making them. Don't get me wrong, RTS is pretty much. It's a. It's not a popular genre.
They. I don't think they would be able to get the money back that they spent to develop a new game.
But this is their best way of delivering stories for their universe that they've created in a compact way. And Starcraft 2 to this day is still regarded as the best RTS game currently available.
[00:53:39] Speaker B: It's still playing.
[00:53:40] Speaker C: It is such. It's still played like it is RTS games, real time strategy if you don't know it's where you're the top down.
Build an army, build a base, tell army to go to from point A to point B, attack enemies, destroy all their units and you win the game.
This is where you get like the terminology Zerg Rushing and all of that kind of stuff.
Warcraft specifically, they have remastered both of these and they were a little iffy coming out of the remaster specifically for Warcraft. Not a lot of people like the remaster on it, but I've recently went back and played both of these back when I was on Baby Leaf because it was a good sit down and play game.
I just, I miss rtss specifically Blizzard's RTSS because I love the storytelling aspect of an rts.
[00:54:38] Speaker B: They were the best at it. They've always been the best of the RTS genre. Warcraft and Warcraft.
[00:54:43] Speaker C: Yeah.
Like the Warcraft RTS is what got me into the Warcraft universe. You know, they've long since passed and changed their whole what's theme that's no longer orcs versus humans or alliance versus Horde.
So they would, it would be. I don't know how they would do it and I don't think they ever will. I just want them to specifically Starcraft because there is just not. Starcraft is such a good universe and there's no other way for me to explore that universe than go play the rts. Like I can't go get on World of Starcraft and go into the Starcraft universe. Like there's no possible way for me to explore this other than I think there might be a couple books for it.
But the best way is to just get into the RTS like and relive the story. Like I want so much more Starcraft and I'm never gonna get it. Which makes me sad because I don't think they'll ever go into that universe again. And so I think this one's dead. I want it to come back.
[00:55:51] Speaker B: There's some rumors that they're doing some Starcraft stuff. They've always been some rumors that they're working on Starcraft things.
Who knows?
[00:55:57] Speaker C: There was this been a project a long time ago. Yeah, yeah, they had. A long time ago they had a project Ghost which I think you were supposed to be a Terran Ghost and it was supposed to be like a first person shooter. Yeah, Nova, you're supposed to be a first person shooter and like cool. I would play that. But I want the story. Give me story. I want to explore the world of Starcraft.
[00:56:23] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree with you wholeheartedly.
[00:56:26] Speaker A: I want to touch on Starcraft and some the Tribes games I mentioned are actually freeware. Nowadays you can just go to Blizzard's website and download the original Starcraft with the Brood War expansion and play it legally for free. If you go on Wikipedia and go to the Tribes entry, there's a link to the Wayback Machine. When hi Rez made the entire Tribes franchise freeware, including the PS2 Tribe's aerial assault where they just give you a fucking PS2 ISO you can put into a PS2 emulator, they released it as freeware, it's legal and you can just go play these old games.
The original Starcraft does not hold up in a lot of ways. Like being able to only select 12 units at a time sucks, but it's a phenomenal game if you can get past some of the old game jank.
[00:57:16] Speaker B: If you are not, I will hold them to new RTs things. If you're trying to just get into RTS and you don't mind old graphics, it is great to start from the beginning and then move forward. The story is fantastic. If you don't know where it's going already, the gameplay is still good.
[00:57:31] Speaker C: Yep. The most infuriating thing for me when I went back to play Starcraft is not being able to press Escape to go to the menu. Yeah, that's the only thing that I just despise when I was playing that game. Like you have to press I think it's F10 or just the menu button but it that was the most I hated it and I couldn't map it like it wouldn't let me remap like the hotkey for menu and but it's a great especially the story is so good you'll fall in love like even to this day. Like the story is so good and it's not like the story is so long like World of Warcraft is or Warcraft is that there's decades of story now. Like this is just two games with some expansion packs. Like you can get through it in a weekend or a couple weekends and you can experience the entire story.
[00:58:20] Speaker B: Starcraft games is a full game in itself and Brood wars was the same size as Starcraft. So Starcraft and Starcraft Bird wars are essentially both full RTS games. They both have 30 missions to them, 10 of each of the races and
[00:58:33] Speaker A: then the I think wars 24 missions, eight for each race. But like they're full size ones whereas the original Starcraft the first couple missions were essentially tutorials.
[00:58:43] Speaker B: Yes. And then the entirety of like each of the StarCraft 2 games. Wings of Liberty, Hearth of Swarm and Legacy of the Void, all of them are 30 missions of that race. So that you get one concise play throughout the entirety of that one thing. And it's really, really fun of each of them. The stories are great if you get to. The cinematic portions are so, so well
[00:59:07] Speaker C: done because the research mechanic in the game is awesome.
[00:59:11] Speaker B: Yeah, I still, I still remember old cheat codes for Starcraft games because I just played them so much.
[00:59:18] Speaker A: Apparently Wings of Liberty is also available free.
[00:59:21] Speaker B: Wings of Liberty is fully free. Yes.
[00:59:23] Speaker A: You can just go play Starcraft 2 Wings of Liberty for free, as well as the entire original Starcraft. And if you're like me and you own Wings of Liberty, but not the subsequent games, apparently there was a way to claim Heart of the Swarm for free. I don't know if that's still offered, but I might check it out.
[00:59:40] Speaker B: You should. Heart of the Swarm is really, really good.
[00:59:43] Speaker C: Zerg is my favorite race in Starcraft.
[00:59:45] Speaker B: Protest has always been mine.
[00:59:47] Speaker C: Carrington is my girl.
[00:59:49] Speaker A: I'm. I'm showing the guys on the camera right now. I still have the USB drive from my Wings of Liberty collector's edition. I love Starcraft.
[00:59:57] Speaker B: It's over in my nice backpack. Yep.
[01:00:00] Speaker A: I have like a 2 gig USB. It's not useful anymore, but it's cool.
[01:00:05] Speaker B: It might have. If I remember correctly, it actually just has the download file for Starcraft and Brood Wars.
[01:00:11] Speaker A: I think so. I think that's what it originally had on it.
[01:00:13] Speaker B: Yeah. I 100% agree with you, Pillow. This is another one that I'm just dead in there with you. Free.
[01:00:19] Speaker C: Bring it back Free.
[01:00:20] Speaker B: Give us something that I have less nostalgia for.
[01:00:23] Speaker C: Wait one second. The digital collection collecting for Starcraft 2 and I think that comes with all the games right now. Is 20 bucks.
Nice, but sorry.
[01:00:34] Speaker B: There you go.
[01:00:34] Speaker D: Yeah. So mine, none of these are technically a series. I go with the one that's most a series.
I picked those old crappy double A Star wars games.
Give some examples when I say that.
So the ones that immediately come to mind are like the Clone wars, not the movie game, the one that's just called the Clone Wars. That was like a tank combat that game. Or like
[01:01:03] Speaker A: wasn't that a Rogue Squadron spin off?
[01:01:05] Speaker D: It might be.
Or like the Starf Fighter games which were before Rogue Squadron. I think like games like that that are just like kind of one off games. They're like fine.
They're not trying to really follow the plot. They're Just doing their own thing.
Like the Clone wars era was great for those. Like a lot of them are made by like Pandemic Studios. I think just like, I don't know that those games were like my childhood. Like those playing those on the PS2 to the point that the disc scratched and you couldn't play them anymore. Like bring back like B, like B tier double A games like that for like, you know, popular franchises there.
They were always a blast. And that's. Yeah, it's a franchise I can just turn my brain off for and enjoy anything that gets spit out.
[01:01:58] Speaker A: So basically your pick is let smaller studios use the Star wars license instead of it being hogged by ea.
[01:02:05] Speaker D: That's an excellent way to put that. And I don't think EA hasn't had exclusive rights for a while. But there's like Disney is still being picky and choosy with who they license it out to. Yeah, there are a couple good looking. Like there's a Star wars like Mass Effect style game that like just got a trailer that looks really cool but still like, I don't know, let weird studios make Star wars games.
[01:02:27] Speaker A: Where's the 2026 equivalent of Jedi Power Battles?
[01:02:31] Speaker D: Yes. I love that game. Oh, it's so.
[01:02:33] Speaker A: Game is so bad. Like that is one of the worst Star wars games. But that doesn't stop people from having nostalgia for it. It's genuinely a bad game.
[01:02:44] Speaker D: But it's full or Star Wars Demolition, which was like an arena combat game for the PS1 and vehicles. And one of the vehicles was just you're the rancor. Like that game is atrocious, but it was so much fun.
[01:02:58] Speaker A: Or there's the Dark Forces franchise. There was a whole bunch of Dark Forces games. Literally is just a Doom clone.
[01:03:05] Speaker D: Yep.
[01:03:06] Speaker A: And then they.
[01:03:06] Speaker D: That was the actual precursor. And that was the precursor to the Jedi Knight series.
[01:03:11] Speaker A: Yep.
Jedi Knight was Dark Forces two. Literally.
[01:03:15] Speaker D: Yep.
[01:03:16] Speaker A: Great stuff. I love the classic like lower budget Star wars stuff.
[01:03:21] Speaker B: Okay, Jax, tell us about this other. This other game on there.
[01:03:27] Speaker A: All right, so I'm gonna take you back about 24 years.
This franchise was created. It was always intended to be a franchise from the get go.
It's made by Bandai Namco. It's called DOT Hack. If you're old like me, you may have heard of DOT Hack, but odds are you didn't play it. Cause it kind of flopped. Despite the fact that it was a four PS2 game franchise and an MMO that failed, that was only released in Japan and a card game that failed and an anime and a miniseries and another anime miniseries.
It was a whole like they intended Hack to be like a major media empire. And DOT hack's big like conceit. The thing that made Doc Hack interesting is it's set inside of an mmorpg. And I don't mean like an isekai. I mean the characters are players of this MMO who exist in the real world and are trying to use this MMO as a vehicle to solve the mysteries of a friend's disappearance or stuff like that. Like there's various storylines throughout it. The games themselves were kind of jank and a little.
I mean these are, these are mid budget PS2 games. If you've played PS2 games, you know what the ones that weren't the AAA budget are like. But they were fun, they're unique. And that's the biggest thing is this franchise existed on the PS2 and in anime around the PS2 era and then just died. And it's been 20 years. And I would love a revival of Dot Hack because it's such a cool concept of having a fictional MMO within your game that you can then just play the game and interact with the world and all of the like meta storytelling and meta comedy and humor in some cases and all sorts of stuff that they do with that as the premise that allows them to do cool shit. Because they're not bound by the actual limits of an actual mmo. Because this is a single player rpg, but also because it is a fictional mmo, they get to do things that a single player RPG normally wouldn't get to get away with.
And it's just, it's cool.
And there's a remaster of these games I think for the PS4. But I should tell you how long ago it was when the remaster is a generation old.
I just want hack again because it's so cool. I love the like meta storytelling that these games and anime were able to do and I would love to see someone try this again. And the ambition to create this thing from scratch with the intention of it being four games from the get go is insane.
Like absolutely fucking insane. This is also part of why it flopped because it meant that at PlayStation 2 era game prices you needed to pay $200 to get the whole story.
[01:06:42] Speaker B: It was also incredibly ambitious. Like that hack sign, the anime.
Really interesting. One of the earliest isekais.
[01:06:49] Speaker A: Yep. I mean I don't know about one of the earliest isekais. Like we've had Isekai anime since the 80s.
[01:06:56] Speaker B: This was the, this Was the, like, first one that we can think of as knowing isekai. Like, I think this is where it may have been termed.
[01:07:04] Speaker A: Nah. Cuz like, isekai just means another world in Japanese.
That's all. That's all it means. But like, we had like, Digimon is an isekai. We had Magic Knights Rayearth.
[01:07:16] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:07:16] Speaker A: Yes, it is Magic Knights Rayearth exists. Like Isekai was a thing, but Hack was a lot of people's first exposure to it outside of Japan. I love hack. I love the concept. I love the ambition. It definitely did not land 100%. Like, I think partially literally just due to the fact that it was so expensive to play the whole game because it was four games, but they were all developed concurrently.
I think they had a way to like, transfer your save files from one game to another. Like the games were able to read the previous game save file to like load your play continuing through. Yeah, I just checked. There's a.
[01:08:00] Speaker B: It could.
[01:08:00] Speaker A: Because they were all on the PS2, they could read the previous game's save file on your memory card and transfer everything over to. To the next game in the series, which was super freaking cool. Like, this is years before Mass Effect did that. Years before Mass Effect did that.
I love Hack. I would love to see someone try to do the. That kind of meta storytelling again. So that's the one I picked.
[01:08:22] Speaker B: All right, Free Go. You're up here.
[01:08:26] Speaker D: Sure. My last ones are. I'll just do both. They're quick.
One technically isn't really a franchise because I think there's only one game. And then a remaster of that game, which is Bully. I love that game. It was the first Rockstar game I ever played. It was ton of fun. If you've never played it, check it out. I think it still mostly holds up. And then the other is probably the most recent game we've talked about is the Dishonored games. Just like great modern stealth games.
Man, I said that phrase out loud and then immediately thought of Splinter Cell. That's maybe a better choice here.
Either way, more modern stealth games just in general.
[01:09:03] Speaker A: Yes.
[01:09:04] Speaker B: Freeze. Going quickly because we may not have him towards the end of the night. So if we don't hear from you again, Free. Thank you for joining us. Feel free to. Feel free to bounce if you absolutely have to. Hello.
[01:09:13] Speaker C: I do want to say that Bully is such a Rockstar game. Like, I mean, it is such a Rock Star game. It is awesome. Definitely. Like, we. We are short on time, but go check that game out. If you've never played it, is hilarious and fun.
So next one is another quick one for me. We've talked about it before as Twisted Metal. I mean, we've talked about it several times again in the past.
I mean, it's a car combat game and they stopped. Same with Vigilante Vigilante eight. Same reason. Like, they just stopped making them. I want more car combat.
[01:09:51] Speaker A: It makes me so sad. I just googled Twisted Metal and the entry for the TV series shows up before the entry for the video game series.
[01:09:59] Speaker B: Apparently it's also a pretty good TV show, or at least the one character who you should think is good in Twisted Metal is like, just give me
[01:10:07] Speaker C: a modern Twisted Metal. I don't think the old games probably hold up at all.
I haven't played them, but I don't think I want to spoil my memory of them.
So go. Go make us a new one, please.
[01:10:20] Speaker A: Maybe the success of the TV series will inspire Sony to actually make a new Twisted Metal game.
[01:10:26] Speaker B: That'd be great.
[01:10:26] Speaker A: We can hope.
[01:10:27] Speaker B: It would be fantastic if they actually would.
[01:10:29] Speaker C: With online gameplay and microtransactions, please.
[01:10:33] Speaker A: Well, I mean, I could do without the microtransactions, but online, yes.
[01:10:37] Speaker B: All right.
So I. I also have an entry in this one. There's the final one, and that's going to be the Block Domin franchise, which if you do not know it by that name, you might know it by Legacy of Kane or you might know it by Soul Reaver, because all of those are the same franchise. So in that sort of franchise that we had going on there, it starts off way back. The original Legacy Cane game is old as can be. And then it gets a really weird and interesting reboot with Soul Reaver, which is a completely separate character, and it. It flips it up. These are. These are vampire games. You are. You are not a good person. You're. You are quite evil. And it is fun to play bad.
The Soul Reaver games are you. Your original character, Kane, is the villain. And then you are trying to best him and sort of throw him down from his seat. And then it goes back in time for Blood Omen 2, which is also a weird name because there was no original Blood Omen game. It was just Legacy of Kane. So there's a really weird naming convention for these things.
[01:11:44] Speaker A: To be fair, Legacy of Kain was Blood Omen. Legacy of Kain. I can see the box art from it.
[01:11:51] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:11:52] Speaker A: So it was Blood Omen. It was just. Everyone knew it as Legacy of Kain. No one knew it as Blood Omen.
[01:11:57] Speaker B: Yeah. So why is it called Blood Omen 2 as opposed to Legacy of Kain 2? Yeah, the phrasing is all over the place. And then Blood Omen 2 is a completely separate time frame from where you were at Legacy of Kane. And then you go back and there's a different Legacy of Kane, which is Defiance, which you're going back is in playing the. The main character from Soul Reaver, Raziel. So it's back and forth, the back and forth. And they never really finished the story for either of them. Blood Omen 2 ends on a complete. Just.
You don't know where you're going with that. And the Legacy of Kane, Soul Reaper stuff and Zonda will were trying to get to Kain portion. And it's such an interesting franchise because you are all dead set. Not good people doing terrible, terrible things, just in the struggle for power against each other.
And it's such a cool franchise that just doesn't end up finishing.
[01:12:51] Speaker A: Here's what's really weird. Soul Reaver 1 and 2 got a remaster in 2024. Blood Omen, Blood Omen 2 and Legacy of Defiance, which I guess is the last game in the this franchise do not have a remaster.
[01:13:06] Speaker B: Legacy of King Defiance is getting a remaster. No, it just got a remaster. It came out on the third.
But that's also just a remaster. There's nothing for Legacy for Blood Omen for either of the Blood Omens, which is weird. It's weird.
[01:13:21] Speaker A: They remastered three fifths of this franchise.
[01:13:24] Speaker B: Defiance is the Soul Reaver section. So the Soul Reaver part of this franchise is mostly done, but not entirely. And then you have a completely separate section which has never gotten anywhere from where we're talking about. So it's. It's. It's a disjointed franchise in which each of the parts of the disjointed franchise are all unfinished, but are all very good, and it's very hard to piece them together. Sometimes the Soul Reavers go direct sequel line. So you go 1, 2. And it's pretty easy.
[01:13:56] Speaker A: Okay, Mike, I'm about to blow your mind in two days from when we are recording and two days ago when you listeners are listening to this, There is a 2D platformer coming out in this franchise. Legacy of ascendance releases on March 31, 2026.
[01:14:14] Speaker B: No shit.
[01:14:15] Speaker A: It is a retro action platformer, apparently. I am not kidding.
[01:14:21] Speaker B: What?
[01:14:22] Speaker A: I'm so confused. Why is there a retroaction platformer in this franchise?
[01:14:27] Speaker B: That's not even what the franchise is.
Where is this coming from?
[01:14:31] Speaker A: No idea if it's gonna be any good. Like I said, it hasn't come out yet. As of when we're recording this sounds
[01:14:37] Speaker C: like a pitch to try to get sales based off a name. Hopefully it's pretty decent.
[01:14:41] Speaker B: It looks like it's a completely separate timeline to the other ones. Where is this supposed to be?
[01:14:51] Speaker A: I have no idea.
I don't understand at all why this exists.
[01:14:57] Speaker B: This is a Castlevania style.
[01:14:59] Speaker A: It looks like Metroidvania.
[01:15:00] Speaker B: Metroidvania.
[01:15:02] Speaker A: I. I don't know.
I don't know.
[01:15:06] Speaker B: I mean, it's going on my wish list now because I need to know what the fuck it's gonna be about. But this franchise is apparently continuing out of nowhere with a game that's not going to continue its original story, which
[01:15:18] Speaker A: just makes it even weirder.
[01:15:20] Speaker B: So I don't understand what's been going on.
[01:15:24] Speaker A: Maybe that brings hope that maybe there will be a continuation of Blood Omen at some point, or at least remasters so the Old Ones can be played.
[01:15:31] Speaker B: Yeah, because those Old Ones have serious, serious Xbox One syndrome. Well, actually, the Blood Omen 2 does. The original.
[01:15:40] Speaker A: Original Xbox syndrome, you mean?
[01:15:43] Speaker B: Yeah, the original Xbox syndrome. The original Blood Omen Legacy of Kain is an SNES game I think. Might be a second game.
[01:15:50] Speaker A: I think it's PS1.
[01:15:51] Speaker B: PS1. It's old, and it's also the only one of the franchise that isn't on Steam for reasons I don't know.
So that's where we're gonna end it, I think with Confused.
Confused. Confused. Confusion is where I'm going with this. Got nothing else.
We will hopefully by the next time we'll be talking about this. Have another Terraria episode for you, for the most part. We finally hit to a next section where we can start talking about where we're moving off to and what. What the game now has to offer. Pillow, now that it's opened up and he's starting to get the hang of it.
[01:16:30] Speaker C: Yep, Excited.
[01:16:32] Speaker B: So that's the next thing you can look forward to from us. So for myself, for Jackson, for Pillow Pet. Have a good night, everybody.
[01:16:40] Speaker D: Bye.
[01:16:40] Speaker A: Bye.
[01:16:41] Speaker C: Good night.
