From 8-Bit to 4K Episode 25: Adaptive Discussion

[00:00:10] Speaker A: Hello and welcome back to from 8bit to 4k. I'm your host this week, Mike of many names. With me you have my two other co hosts. We've got Jack Sohman. [00:00:19] Speaker B: Hello, I'm Jack Sohman and we have [00:00:21] Speaker C: Pillow Pet and I am Pillow Pet. [00:00:25] Speaker A: We are part of the Four Wards podcast network. You can find us on patreon.com the4wordspodcast. You can give us a dollar a month just to tell us that you love us. $5 a month which will give you some exclusive feed and some behind the scenes audio prep. This week's was a long one. You can see sort of how in depth we go into things and at $10 a month we get an exclusive feed like everything else. But we also gonna shout your name out like we will to CodexNinja, Pillow Pet, Labana and Uncle Chrisco. Thank you guys very much for supporting us at that tier. All these benefits and more are also part of our other podcast, our little podcast, the four Words podcast. And we have a Discord. Four Words Discord. You can find that in the description below. Please join us for that. We've got channels for anything you might want to be talking about. We've got games, we've got anime, we've got movies, we've got music, we've got a pretty heavy emphasis on League of Legends for a lot of the station there. But we've got plenty of other people talking about other things. So if you have any recommendations or desires, give us a head up. All right, I think that covers our intros. Let's bring ourselves into the actual meat of today's topic and the main topic for the day because we're not sure how long this is going to work as a main topic. We've got a main topic, a mini topic which I think you guys will find interesting. Main topic for us is games, adaptations from other media, the good and the bad. So I will kick us off with the beginning of something that I think all of us agree is a phenomenal adaptation. And I'm talking about the adaptation of goldeneye. [00:02:01] Speaker B: Yeah, for those who aren't aware, goldeneye is a movie. It was then adapted into a video game. It was a movie first. [00:02:09] Speaker A: It was a movie first and it is a great movie adapted to a great video game. This is outside of like Quake. This is the advent. This is the like main star of when split screen co op became a real thing. And especially split screen PvP, like the first person shooter genre would never be the same after GoldenEye came out. But also even Ignoring that multiplayer aspect to it. The storyline and the mission design and the level work that they made was outstanding. These missions are crunchy. They have objectives that aren't just go there and shoot people. [00:02:52] Speaker B: And remember this is in an era where Doom was still the gold standard of how an FPS was made. And Doom is literally run through a maze, find the keys to open the doors so you can make it to the exit. I'm not, I'm not disparaging Doom. I love Doom. [00:03:08] Speaker A: This is around the same time as Quake and Quake went into the full multiplayer aspect. And goldeneye is really like. If you take a look at the heart of a lot of what modern day FPSs are, they center around where GoldenEye really started things off. You have, unlike with Doom, you have reloaded ammo sections with things. You have pickups and you have health drops. You have your different guns but you can't hold a bunch of them. It's really like this. This it is the Norwegian point. [00:03:38] Speaker B: Yeah. It is important to note the movie came out two full years before the video game. So unlike most movie to video game adaptations, this was an actual. Hey, we want to make a video game based on this movie as opposed to hey, let's make a tie in video game for this movie release to merchandise on and it shows. Yeah, they weren't under the same kind of time crunch. They actually gave a shit. [00:04:07] Speaker A: They did a, you know, four 64 bit graphics that did a pretty good job of displaying who the people were. You can noticeably tell that it's supposed to be Pierce Brosnan and Sean Bean and these things. [00:04:20] Speaker B: Yeah, it looks like a lo fi Pierce Brosnan, which is fine. That's all they were capable of doing at the time. But it does demonstrably look like him. [00:04:28] Speaker C: You guys might chastise me for this, but I never played goldeneye. But I did play its other game clone, Perfect Dark, which is almost played identical to this. And just like so I my I. I've seen goldeneye played and when you're talking like it was more than just a run in and shoot, I'm thinking, you know, most of my experience with this style game is going to be Perfect Dark. But I know they play almost identically. The multiple objectives revisiting multiple like floors [00:05:06] Speaker B: in a level and and specifically the fact that the different difficulties were not just numbers tweaks but also added more objectives. So if you're trying to play a mission on the hardest difficulty, you had more crap you had to do in addition to enemies doing more damage and Taking less damage and all that kind of stuff. [00:05:25] Speaker C: And like, what was cool is when you did those difficulties on hard mode and you learned about like a secret room or secret area. If you played those levels again on easy, like, you could still visit this. Like those areas that were locked like an objective locked on hard mode. So you learn more about the map. [00:05:45] Speaker A: Usually there'd be something there that is like a beneficial piece to you. You'd either find a special weapon or some extra ammo or a health pack or something. Just denoting that this is an important location. Noticeably like goldeneye was three years before Perfect Dark. So Perfect Dark is really something that Rare took what they learned from goldeneye and went into another direction to bring forth more into the genre. But like Rare, Rare made something top notch here with. With a series that a lot was riding on. If you get this wrong, you have a franchise tie in that is incredibly popular on a system that is it's secured. N64 is not going anywhere. But really, it's the reason that video games about other media, especially movies, have any decent reputation. Before this, all you really had are some pretty notoriously terrible ones. Noticeably, Superman 64 is utterly garbage. You have the old ET things that are not worth talking about. Most movies adapted into video games, especially if you try and follow the storyline, which is what they were trying to do, deal with the missions and talk about like what you actually saw in the movie, you got to play in the game. This is one of the first ones to not only get it right, but get it into a feel that just worked in a video game, which a lot of other things fail to do. All right, with that, I think. Jax, talk to us about your good game. [00:07:23] Speaker B: All right. So in 2010, we got a movie that was an adaptation of a graphic novel itself that became kind of a sleeper hit. It actually was not a big success when it came out. But Scott Pilgrim versus the World actually a good movie. [00:07:40] Speaker A: Yes, it is like. [00:07:42] Speaker B: It is a genuinely charming good movie. Highly recommend. It got a video game adaptation tie in kind of. And they made Scott Pilgrim versus the World the game. And this came out, I believe, the same. Yep. Same year. So it's. This was a contemporary release actually literally same week. So this was released with the movie. However, they did not really adapt the movie. They adapted the graphic novel, which has a distinctly inspired by River City Ransom art style. So they maintained that art style in a pixel art style method and made basically a really good River City Ransom game. That's what Scott Pilgrim versus the World is. It is what River City Ransom would be if it wasn't constrained by the nes. And it's really good. It is a genuinely fun, genuinely interesting side scrolling co op beat em up game. You run around the city, you beat up the bad guys, you pick up money from defeating them that you can go and buy food with to raise your stats. Just like in River City Ransom. It's very much like River City Ransom, but it's such a well executed game to the point where it got a sequel. I haven't played the sequel, I can't comment on the sequel. But there's a sequel to this game that's not based on a movie. It's just a sequel to the successful video game. And the video game was literally a movie tie in. [00:09:12] Speaker A: The other reason that there's a sequel to it is in both cases, these were released before the original was finished. The graphic novel was not done when Spock, Pilgrim versus the World and the game came out. So they had to make their own ending that wasn't necessarily directly to the to the comic. But having it end roughly where the comic ends allows the game to do something else with its second path. [00:09:40] Speaker B: Yeah, to be clear, the comic finished its run like when these were late in production. So they obviously Brian o' Malley was involved. They knew what the ending of the comic would be. But it wasn't published yet. Like it wasn't available, it wasn't done. Brian Lee o' Malley was not done drawing and perfecting the writing of it. They got a early version to base the movie and the game on. [00:10:05] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think they're distinctly. They have noticeable, noticeable differences than the actual comic end specifically. So that it's not a spoiler to the comic. [00:10:15] Speaker B: Yes, because they came out literally like within two weeks of each other is when the comic dropped and the movie dropped. Yeah, pretty much really close. But yeah, I highly recommend this game. This game also is notorious because for a long time you could not buy it. Basically from 2014 through 2021, Scott Pilgrim versus the the game was just gone. It did not exist for seven years due to licensing issues with the music, I believe. [00:10:46] Speaker A: Sounds right. [00:10:47] Speaker B: It is available now. You can just go buy Scott Pilgrim versus the the game. It includes the dlc. It's been made available on all modern platforms. It's on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and backwards compatible to current consoles. It's available on the Switch. It's available on PC like all of the above. But it took years for that to happen. And it was for a long time like one of the Most tragic pieces of lost media in gaming. Like the only reason we didn't talk about it when we talked about lost media a little while back is because it did finally get re released in 2021. [00:11:24] Speaker A: It's pretty great that it did. [00:11:25] Speaker B: How good does a movie tie in game have to be for people to be like, oh my God, they re released this game, it's available again. Like that's how important Scott Pilgrim versus the world the game is. [00:11:39] Speaker A: The game has a larger following than the movie does, which is a little bit of a shame. But yeah, both are great. And honestly, each adaptation is great in its own right. Yeah. [00:11:49] Speaker B: And there's been other Scott Pilgrim adaptations since then. The sequel to the game is apparently based on the anime that Netflix did in 2023. Scott Pilgrim's fun despite the fact that Scott Pilgrim the character is a douchebag. [00:12:06] Speaker A: I mean he's designed to be that way. He's not supposed to be a likable hero. Which is why the end of the the movie is what it is. [00:12:14] Speaker B: Yeah. But really fun side scrolling beat em up game and really, really fun in co op. Get your friends together to play it. [00:12:21] Speaker A: Oh yeah, it's a great beat em up game. Which means that a co op game, it makes for a fantastic group. [00:12:28] Speaker B: It's genuinely one of the better examples of the entire genre. [00:12:31] Speaker A: All right. Pillow, you have a game that neither Jax nor I has any knowledge of. [00:12:39] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:12:39] Speaker B: What the is this thing? [00:12:41] Speaker C: So I'm going to talk about Yu Gi oh Forbidden memories on the PlayStation 1. There are other great adaptations and there are really bad adaptations for yuh. It was and is an oversaturated market continued to this day. But Yu Gi oh is. Is a dueling. A card dueling game. It started off as a show. If you haven't watched it, it's a really great anime to go enjoy. I would put it on Caliber with like not quite as good as Pokemon, but it's right up there in my opinion. So Yu Gi oh Forbidden Memories was a game that kind of told the story a little bit more of Yugi and Yu Gi oh Yami and the modern and the Egyptian version. So Yu Gi oh Forbidden Memories. You start off as Yami and you're in Egypt and it's telling that story of how he gets trapped and in the Egyptian artifacts. I forget the details. It's been a long time. What made this game fun to me is it's a. It was a very basic, basic version of the card game. There wasn't. No, there wasn't. Sacrificing. And there wasn't like Star summons or any of that. But like during the hype of everybody collecting Yu Gi oh cards, you could go and play with your cards. You could submit your cards. They had like a serial number on them that you could type in to the PlayStation. Buy these cards for star points that you earned in dueling outside of the story. If you weren't playing that, you could go to like certain battle arenas and play characters that you're familiar with that had all their cards. You could go against Joey and what's. I forget her name. I think it was like Mai or something like that. But it had a great story. It was just really fun to be able to play in the world of Yu Gi oh in a basic, very watered down version of the game to make it very simple. Like the rules of Yu Gi oh the card game are not super easy to learn, especially with sacrificing monsters for your star counts. Fusions. You know, if you didn't have the Fusion card, you could make the Fusion. This. This made it to where if you fuse like the one that pops in my head, like right up, you could do an undead monster with a fire monster and make like the. The flaming skeleton. Or you could do a flame with a soldier with a sword and it would make the flaming swordsman and so on, so forth. So you could get really cool fusions. It's really hard to explain the game other than it was just a really good adaptation of the show. [00:15:47] Speaker B: Okay, hear me out. This is. This is going to show my limited knowledge of Yu Gi oh. In my opinion, for it to be a good adaptation of Yu Gi oh, does it have convoluted weird death games where they have to play Yu Gi oh and the loser dies in a weird, like, yes, Rube Goldbergian way? [00:16:09] Speaker C: There are duels that you. If you lose, the game's over. [00:16:13] Speaker B: Okay, then I will accept this as a good adaptation because all I know is manga before the card game and the show got big, was much darker and more brutal than what got popular now. [00:16:26] Speaker C: I mean, I could just be misremembering. And I think you. I think you almost got a game over off almost any lost duel. But there are major duels where like you're playing for your life, especially when you go against the bad pharaoh at the end. And okay, like Pegasus is in there. [00:16:43] Speaker B: That's acceptable to me. [00:16:45] Speaker C: Then obviously it doesn't really. [00:16:48] Speaker B: The show was out by then. They probably had to tone it down from the original manga. But that's acceptable if it's is Seto [00:16:55] Speaker A: Kaiba the most extra person in the [00:16:58] Speaker C: game and his Egyptian version and his real life version? Yes. If one from what I remember everybody in the game that's in the modern world has an Egyptian version of themselves. [00:17:10] Speaker A: That does not surprise me. [00:17:12] Speaker B: That sounds like Yu Gi oh, fair enough. I know there's been a lot of terrible Yu Gi oh games so it's glad to. It's good to hear that at least one of them back in the day was actually good. [00:17:21] Speaker A: The, the coolest thing you have mentioned to me was that you could use your own cards. That is. [00:17:26] Speaker C: Yeah, it was really fun. [00:17:27] Speaker A: Ever seen before? That's so cool. [00:17:29] Speaker C: So like I remember getting like you know you could get the. And they were expensive. Like you're like blue eyes, white dragons and all that. They were super expensive to buy. Like I'm talking like 9,999 star points. When you're getting like I don't even remember. Maybe like 10 for an A or an S plus win. Like it would take forever but you got the option to grind it or you could use a game shark. [00:17:59] Speaker B: So what this reminds me of. Do you remember the Game Boy Advance E Reader? [00:18:04] Speaker C: Yes, yes. [00:18:06] Speaker B: So that was an accessory for the Game Boy advance that let you physically scan your cards so that physical cards you owned would unlock things. And for whatever reason Nintendo never used it for the Pokemon trading card game. [00:18:18] Speaker A: That was so good. [00:18:19] Speaker B: Wild to me. It sounds like years before that Yu Gi oh just said, you know what, you don't need to physically scan it. Just key in the fucking code and you can have your physical cards in your game. Which is awesome. [00:18:31] Speaker C: That's so when you, when you beat an opponent in this game they had a chance, depending on your rank, had a chance to drop like their prized card. Like you got a reward of a card somebody. So like yeah, if you, if you be Joey in I think I can't remember. It might have been both versions of him. He had a chance to drop. If you got like an S plus or however they were ranked the five star. You had a chance to get his red eyes black dragon as a reward. Very, very low if I remember. Very extremely low. You could I think get the Exodia cards but they didn't have an effect. None of the cards had their effects or anything. So it didn't really matter. But if you did happen to lay down all the Exodia pieces, I do believe you automatically won the match like you do in the game. Like it kept with that. [00:19:28] Speaker A: It seems to follow the more TV structure than the game structure which didn't follow the game's rules in the slightest and just made its own shit up all the time. So this is sounding more and more like a great anime to game adaptation. [00:19:42] Speaker C: It was. It's to me, I consider the Goat of Yu Gi oh games. But that's nostalgia speaking. Like, it's just, it was so much fun. Like I remember me and my buddies staying up so late when I would stay over at his house playing this game because he had a PlayStation. I didn't. We'd stay up all night playing this game. [00:20:02] Speaker A: Okay, I think, I think we're just gonna, we're gonna snake back pillow. Tell us your bad game. [00:20:10] Speaker C: So let me. This is going from books to TV show. So my adaptation is going from the Game of Thrones book to the TV show. Specifically the. What is it, eight seasons of Game of Thrones and why I say it's a bad adaptation. And I have talked about how Game of Thrones, the TV series is one of my yearly rewatches because I love the show. But the reason I say it's bad is because they take out so many details as many books to shows do. But you miss a lot of the good storytelling from the books. And like the best way I can explain it is so without. Gosh, it's such. It'd be so spoiler spoilerly if I told the story. There's a character that dies in the TV show and once they're dead, they're just dead and that kind of storyline over. But in the book there's whispers of this person staying alive or surviving or coming back to life as a spirit of some kind and like haunting and continuing to kind of like fight their fight. And it's, it's. It's very hard to. You miss a lot of like the tying stories that are there. So I say the show is a bad adaptation of the book because they cut back on so many good stories, then delivered us the atrocity of the final season whereas there's so much more story that they could have told. And like I, I know money. Money is, you know, when you're doing these kind of things though, like when you're taking such a huge series and a huge. [00:22:00] Speaker A: Yeah, but we know. I don't even know it was because of them trying to get. They were. They were going to be directing Star wars and then they cut things short and then that got leaked and then they got fired from Star Wars. [00:22:14] Speaker C: It just, it's really sad because there is no going back and retelling those stories. And that's what we're getting stuck with. When the book is so good. So good. It's one of my. Almost every other year I re listen to of all of them and I'm really scared of what they're doing gonna do with so far, House of Dragons, I haven't had any big complaints of that. So I'm really enjoying that. There's a lot of stories and stuff missing from that, but I could understand it. I'm just worried about coming into this last season what's going to happen because they change a lot. [00:22:51] Speaker A: Well, here's another point that I found out. The average episodes per season of the first six is ten episodes. Season seven drops to seven, Season eight drops to six. Yeah, they lost. And all the books are obviously from season I think six on, nothing is written. [00:23:13] Speaker C: He hasn't finished those books. [00:23:14] Speaker A: Yeah, you had to. You made everything up as they went along. So the drop in just amount of info even when they were already not cutting it close to where they should have been from book to show, that's a lot of content that they just didn't make. [00:23:34] Speaker B: It really is one of those like, man, what could have been if they had decided not to keep going and wait for books to come out. And then obviously also that would depend on George R.R. martin ever finishing. [00:23:46] Speaker A: Finishing books, the fucking thing. [00:23:48] Speaker B: Yeah, but we're never going to get a redo of seasons six through eight if those are the ones that didn't have a book they were directly based on. [00:23:56] Speaker A: Nope. [00:23:57] Speaker B: See, maybe in 20 or 30 years we'll get a redo of the whole thing, but who knows if it'll be any good? [00:24:03] Speaker A: Yeah, that is the option. In 20, 30 years, maybe we'll get a redo of the entire franchise. And this is something that I'm going to do. A quick complaint about. Why the fuck did seasons drop to being like 10 episodes a season? I talked about Babylon 5 before. It's also an hour long per episode. There's 23, 24 episodes per season. [00:24:24] Speaker B: Because seasons aren't constrained to broadcast TV anymore. They don't have to contend with Nielsen ratings anymore. [00:24:30] Speaker A: They don't, but they also get to drip feed them down the pipeline in the same way. So they get to do the same thing. [00:24:37] Speaker B: Right. But what I mean is they don't have to make filler episodes so they can have something new every week for an entire season anymore, which is what Babylon 5 has a lot of. Babylon 5 is straight up filler. [00:24:50] Speaker A: I don't know but it's designed to be. It's designed to be episode of the week though. So it's like, it's mostly not continuous story. [00:24:55] Speaker B: Episode of the week stories barely get made nowadays. Period. [00:25:00] Speaker A: Very true. That is, that is a different. That is a difference in what like the designs are. I'd have to figure out. [00:25:07] Speaker B: I love my story arc shows, but story arc shows are the dominant form of the art nowadays. [00:25:13] Speaker C: Well, like you bring up like the 20 episodes dropped down to 10. Like, so supernatural was a huge filler show. Like, I mean, we got like a Scooby Doo. [00:25:23] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:25:24] Speaker C: And like Supernatural, like don't get me wrong, one of my all time, probably top five TV shows, Walking Dead, same thing, bunch of filler episodes. [00:25:35] Speaker A: I think of those, Walking Dead is the one that is mostly sequential story with a couple of filler here and there. A lot of the other ones are mostly episode of the week that have a sort of background story that is sequentially being told at the same time that occasionally rises to the front, which is. It is very different than a book adaptation. [00:25:56] Speaker C: I would have loved 30 episode seasons of Game of Thrones. I wanted more story. And it's just sad after like reading the books that we don't get that. [00:26:04] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay, Jax, you need to defend this position because this is something that most people will not agree with you on. [00:26:14] Speaker B: I'm aware. So I'm gonna talk about. I think the 16 bit Aladdin and Lion King games are genuinely bad. And I think it's absurd that people have such worshiping nostalgia for these games. Now to be clear, I'm talking about specifically the Genesis and Super Nintendo versions of Aladdin and the Lion King. I. I realize Genesis Aladdin is better than Super Nintendo Aladdin. Super Nintendo Lion King is better than Genesis Lion King. So I'm going to talk about Genesis, Aladdin and Super Nintendo Lion King because those are the best versions of those games. Disregarding that in 1993 and 1994, side scrollers were the dominant genre. So of course they were side scrollers. They're movie adaptations, that's all. Whatever. My problem is these games are your typical movie adaptation schlock. The levels are just filled with nonsense for no apparent reason. The gameplay is not thought about. There's tons of copy paste. How many fucking wildebeests or whatever the hell does Simba have to jump on in a row? In some of those levels, the level design is awful. And on top of that, the hit detection in that level design is. Is awful because Simba will often fall right through the Fucking wildebeest. That's supposed to be your platform because it's terribly made. Because these are fucking cash in. These are the epitome of what we talk about when we're like, oh, movie games all suck. Like when I was a kid, that was the attitude is all movie games are bad. Goldeneye is what changed that attitude. And that was years after these came out. So I don't understand why these games have such a nostalgia goggles now. Like people were. They got remasters, they remastered these games in 2019. That's how much there's nostalgia for these things. And they're not really any better than like Home Improvement or you name it. Generic licensed platformer game from 1993 or 1994. They're all the same shit. And that's what these are. They are generic licensed platformer games. [00:28:28] Speaker A: You just made me think of the 7Up platformer. [00:28:30] Speaker B: Yeah, cool Spot. These are on par with Cool Spot. That's my pick, is I do not understand the glazing these games get. They don't fucking deserve it. There are genuinely good movie adaptation platformer games mostly there for movies that people don't remember, like Little Nemo. These ones I don't fucking know. People like them for some reason. I think they suck. I'd rather go play DuckTales. DuckTales is much better and that's also an adaptation but of a Disney property. And it's just a random fucking side scrolling platformer, but it plays a lot better. The problem with Disney's Aladdin and Disney's Lion King is they play like the shovelware slop they are. [00:29:13] Speaker A: So here is the potential that I have thought of. It has become a very popular thing in more recent years to chase difficulty. [00:29:23] Speaker B: They are hard. [00:29:24] Speaker A: These are very much considered to be some of the harder games of that cycle. [00:29:29] Speaker B: But as someone who loves hard games, these are the wrong kind of hard. They're hard because they're frustrating and jank and control like shit. You want a good hard game from this era for the Sega Genesis, Since Aladdin is usually the one people consider to be the better of these two. Go play Contra Hardcore. Contra Hardcore is incredibly difficult and also literally the best Contra game. Don't play fucking Aladdin and Lion King. These games suck. [00:29:57] Speaker A: So. So we've talked about it a little bit before and we're going to continue to talk about it and movie adaptations. Even though GoldenEye started a good trend, movie adaptations did not always continue from that point to be good. [00:30:11] Speaker B: It just stopped being so consistent that [00:30:13] Speaker A: they were bad yeah, mine is about three quarters of the Lord of the Rings adaptations because about three quarters of the Lord of the Rings adaptations are kind of terrible. [00:30:25] Speaker B: There's no. Kind of. About three quarters of the Lord of the Rings adaptations are some of the worst licensed video games of their generations. [00:30:34] Speaker A: The same game across multiple different platforms. They would release it in Xbox, PlayStation and even in like Game Boy. They would not play the same across those. Even though they'd be the same game released at the same time. They'd have different plays to them and none of them played particularly well except the Game Boy ones. But even then they weren't great. So out of all of those original games, the Game Boy versions are some of the best and they're at best average. Then you get to the like, there's a couple of them that are considered good, that are still kind of bad. In the Two Towers Return of the King versions that are almost like Dynasty warriors, you pick one of the characters and they wander through waves and waves of people and you. Those are the best of them. They're not exactly great adaptations, but they're fun to play. But they're not good. They're janky. They're very poorly optimized. Attempting to run them on medium to low settings is an exercise in horrid design. Like if your game cannot function below a certain threshold, don't let them play it. Have a baseline minimum that says, no, you don't meet the requirements. Stop this. I played a game that made it feel like for a brief period I was trying to play at 6fps or less. It chugged so hard at minimum settings. It was one of the worst experiences I've ever had in a video game. Trying to play this game because it let me play it at minimum settings, but I couldn't physically do it. My computer at the time did not have enough RAM or it didn't have enough graphic performance to it because it was my parents PC. Don't release slopware like that. That just goes across boundaries and doesn't have great optimism. Part of that is the optimization because it's not as if that computer was worse than a PS1 or a PS2. I'm sorry, a PS2. [00:32:49] Speaker B: I'm looking at the list of Lord of the Rings video games. Are there good ones other than Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War? [00:32:56] Speaker A: Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War are legitimately good games. There's one of the Return of the King games is legitimately fun. One of the original Lord of the Rings games is legitimately fun. But they're all named the same, so it's really hard to tell which one's which. [00:33:11] Speaker C: It's just can't remember which one that I played. I think it was the Two Towers. Maybe whichever one you had to go [00:33:19] Speaker B: and see Two Towers played on the PS2 and it sucked. [00:33:23] Speaker A: Yeah. Which two towers? [00:33:24] Speaker C: Whatever one you go in. Which. Whichever one you go into the spider cave. That's. That's the one that I remember playing. [00:33:30] Speaker B: That's probably all of them, but. [00:33:32] Speaker C: Yeah, true. [00:33:34] Speaker A: So, like, these games are not. They have potential in certain areas, even when they're written. Like, they're written. Okay. They're. They're taking dialogue and other things that are well established and well made, poorly acted because the voice acting in them is not even like an attempt to be as decent as what the movies or any audio drama is. It's not even in the ballpark. Yeah, it's. It's some of the worst voice acting for video game cash grabs I've ever heard. And on top of that, the. The like just performance, some of the worst gaming I've ever experienced. So that is. That is how bad a video game adaptation of a great property can be. And it. It hurts because I love Lord of the Rings a lot. Okay, so we mentioned that we had another little topic to begin with, and this is an interesting idea that I've thought up. Each of us is going to have the other two members pitch us video games that they think we will enjoy. So we're going to start. Jax, we're going to pitch you some games. [00:34:43] Speaker B: Okay. [00:34:44] Speaker A: Pillow, describe the game you want Jax to play. [00:34:47] Speaker C: All right, Jax, I've talked about this game before. It's called Dave the Diver. I know you like roguelikes. [00:34:54] Speaker B: I do. [00:34:55] Speaker C: So Dave the Diver is a roguelike. It's also a farming simulator and it's also a restaurant simulator. What? Now let me explain. You go out to this. This paradise, I'm gonna call it. You go out to this ocean hole. It's just this deep, endless pit of an ocean, basically is what you think it is. And you're just. You show up and it's like, hey, there's a sushi shop. And you are supplying. You're a partner in this sushi shop and you're supplying the fish. So you start off by just going out and catching fish with a spear, and you go back at night with your fish. You make sushi, you make money, and you buy upgrades. But then as you explore, you get a little bit story, a little bit of Story gets added to it. People come into your, your, your sushi shop with problems and it opens up the story a whole lot. And there's a. It's a really good story to the game. And then, I mean, that's what you just. Every day you wake up, you go catch fish, you explore the ocean, you find things. The story opens up and opens up wider. They just released a DLC for it, the Jungle dlc. It's a very highly sought after game. I can't really explain too much to it because it gets rid of the story. There's a farming aspect to it where you can start growing your own ingredients to make better sushi dishes. You upgrade the sushi or you upgrade your sushi dishes to make more money based off like trading in fish for that dish to research better dishes. It's. It's fun. It's a fun little quirky, I would say, you know, adult themed game. [00:36:54] Speaker B: This, this sounds to me like a more grounded in reality version of like Reset here or Moonlighter. [00:37:03] Speaker A: Yeah, you say that. [00:37:05] Speaker B: I mean those straight up fantasy. So. [00:37:08] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay. [00:37:09] Speaker C: And who actually, it's funny how I got turned onto this game because I kind of like ignored it forever. My stepmom, who's not a gamer like her and my dad will play like Mario Kart. They love Mario Kart to play like the Mario games. And. And I would always hear my stepmom talking about Dave the Diver. Dave the Diver. Dave the Diver. And I'd never even looked it up. And I was like, oh, that's great. I'm glad you love that game. It sounds fun, blah, blah, blah, you know, just talking. And then I looked it up and I was like, wow, this game actually looks pretty fun. If you go read the reviews. Great reviews. It is a fun roguelike to where you can. It's cozy. Like, the soundtrack is amazing. [00:37:54] Speaker B: I was gonna say it sounds like it'd be more up my wife Sally than mine, honestly. [00:37:58] Speaker C: It might be. It might be up her out. There's boss battles, which are pretty fun. They got. They have phases and special ways you got to beat them. It's. It is. It might be right up your wife's alley too. So maybe let her try it and then maybe you can try it. Maybe it's right up both your alleys. You might like it. [00:38:19] Speaker B: Apparently it's available on Switch. I might get it. [00:38:21] Speaker C: There it is. That's where I first learned of it. And I played it. I got it on PC because I didn't want to play my Switch. [00:38:29] Speaker B: Fair enough. Mike, what are you. What are you pitching to me? [00:38:34] Speaker A: I have also briefly pitched this game before when we were talking about genres. I think you would massively enjoy Mark of the Ninja. Mark of the Ninja is a side scrolling stealth action game in which you are a fast moving, highly potentially lethal stealth ninja whose you have missions that you move across the campaign. It's a side scrolling game. The movement is very fast. It's very precise. Something you are very key on. You have things you learn as you go along. You have the option to do things in a non lethal or lethal mode. It changes depending on. So you have reasons to play the game multiple times. It is, I want to call it one of the best stealth games ever made. If you like stealth action games, this is the single best 2D side scroller version of it. [00:39:25] Speaker B: Okay. [00:39:25] Speaker A: And even still across the genre, it is in my top three of stealth action games ever up there with like Thief and Dishonored, which are phenomenal. If you like. Did you play Dishonored? [00:39:36] Speaker B: I did not. I think I own it and haven't played it. [00:39:39] Speaker A: Yeah, it is. I also want to call it a better version of a 2D dishonored. [00:39:44] Speaker B: I do. Owner Dishonored. I apparently played it for 30 minutes, but I don't remember it at all. [00:39:51] Speaker A: Fuck. What is that? [00:39:51] Speaker B: It was literally 12 years ago. Jesus Christ. [00:39:55] Speaker A: There's an infamously hard, infamously hard ninja game. [00:40:00] Speaker B: Ninja Gaiden. [00:40:01] Speaker A: Ninja Gaiden. Take less combat in a Ninja Gaiden and go into the more stealth aspect of ninja in the old like 2D side scrolling ones. And that's more rare market than inches. You still have that. [00:40:12] Speaker B: That is the best way you've managed to sell me on this so far because I love NES Ninja Gaiden. Despite all of its NES bullshit. [00:40:19] Speaker A: It controls incredibly well. Which is one of the problems with old NES games is that they're not quite as fluid as modern games are. Mark of the Ninja has some of the most fluid movement. Okay. And it's. It's pretty quick on the movement. You. You sometimes obviously are. It's a stealth game, so sometimes you're just not moving to try and do things. Sound matters. [00:40:44] Speaker B: Looks like it has a remaster. Is it a good remaster? [00:40:48] Speaker A: I don't know. Mostly because I've never needed to get the remaster. I beat the game a long time ago. Nothing that I have seen like, of its remarkable amount of reviews, nothing has mentioned that the remaster is of poor quality or poor make. [00:41:07] Speaker B: Okay. Yeah. It looks like it's overwhelmingly positive. On Steam. [00:41:11] Speaker A: So like even its initial version, it's very stylized, artistic style. It looks beautiful in its old version. And I'm guessing that the remaster is just make it look even better with modern graphics. I'm not sure how much more control work they're going to give to this. [00:41:28] Speaker B: You've sold me. That sounds very interesting. I will probably pick it up on the next Steam sale or maybe on Switch. If it's on sale on Switch. [00:41:35] Speaker A: Does it have Switch one? [00:41:36] Speaker B: I think the remaster is. Yeah. [00:41:38] Speaker A: Hot damn. Yeah, I remember this game. [00:41:40] Speaker B: This game's a remaster. It is on Switch. I am literally adding it to my wish list right now. [00:41:44] Speaker A: I remember this game from 2010. This was a college game for us. [00:41:47] Speaker B: Fair enough. It's on my wish list now. Both of these are actually all right because they sound like games I would play on Switch over PC. [00:41:54] Speaker A: Yeah, probably. Okay, Pillow, I think it's time we try and get games for you. So Jack, since you haven't talked about anything left, I'm going to start with you. What do you have for pillow? [00:42:05] Speaker B: All right, Pillow. How do you feel about Super Mario 64? [00:42:09] Speaker C: I love Super Mario 64. [00:42:12] Speaker B: All right, so my recommendation for you is very much a love letter to the kind of game Super Mario 64 is. It's called A Hat In Time. It is very much a Super Mario 64 style platformer, but significantly more modern. You play as Hat Girl or Hat Kid, just a cute little girl in a top hat. And you go around various themed levels. There's like a movie set, train level. There's like the levels have crazy themes and there's a whole bunch of different objectives for you to do to collect the things, to be able to progress in exactly the way that Super Mario 64 is. It's extremely well made and well executed. I've. You've heard me say I don't like Mario 64. I like hat In Time. It doesn't have any of the things about Mario 64 that frustrate me while still having all of the things that are good about it. I highly recommend that In Time. [00:43:13] Speaker C: Once I looked this game up, I was like, oh, that's what it is. I remember this game. I watched very briefly gameplay of it and I was always thinking, oh, that seems really fun because I love like the, the Mario 64 Banjo Kazooie. You know, all those go into the world genuinely good. [00:43:32] Speaker B: And it's also not too long. It's only I played it for 11 hours and I beat the main story [00:43:39] Speaker C: guessing just Based off the game, it has the optional. You can 100% this if you want, of course, collect. [00:43:45] Speaker B: And I did not know that because that's not who I am. But it's. It's genuinely fun. There's a huge amount of level variety. [00:43:53] Speaker C: I'm going to add that to my wish list so I don't forget. But I'll probably end up getting it like you on the Switch. [00:43:59] Speaker B: Yeah. Highly recommend. It's available on Switch. It's good. It's just genuinely a good game. [00:44:07] Speaker C: Okay. I guess I probably don't even need to get in on a Switch because I have a Steam deck. [00:44:11] Speaker A: Oh, fair. All right. Hello. Do you enjoy puzzle games? [00:44:15] Speaker C: I do. [00:44:16] Speaker A: Do you enjoy platformers? [00:44:18] Speaker C: I do. [00:44:19] Speaker A: Let us combine the two and make them quirky and silly. This is the game. The misadventures of P.B. winterbottom. You are a time traveling pie thief. Yep. You've been unstuck in time and now your job is to try and steal as much pie as you possibly can. Using your weird quirky times to do side scrolling shenaniganry. To try and steal as much pie as possible. You can pause time, you can replicate yourself as you move through time and control both copies of Movement. It is an interesting and very weird and quirky side scrolling platformer that has such a, like, it's a charming concept. You're an old grouchy mustached man trying to steal pieces. And it has this classic. This has the aesthetic of the 1910 black and white movies. So this is fairly Charlie Chaplin esque in what its design looked like. It has this very essence of that in what it looks like. Music is very fun to it. It's quirky, it's silly, it's very cheap. Baseline, it's five bucks. I've seen it on sale for as cheap as a dollar. I think I've seen it on sale for less. [00:45:35] Speaker C: I got this game soundtrack, sounds amazing on it. [00:45:38] Speaker A: Yeah, it's. It's weird, it's quirky, it's fun. It's been a long time since I've played it but like it has some very interesting challenge to it. I just don't think it ever got a lot of reception because it's. It's a weird quirky little out there thing. [00:45:55] Speaker C: So it looks like a fun little. Like I have. I have 20 minutes. I'm gonna sit here and play this game for a minute. [00:46:00] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. You could do. Or you're at a doctor's office or less easy. So it's one of those things where you got a little bit of time. You want to run one level. Done. Let's play this. It's a very similar in concept to Braid without having the problems that Braid has in which it's not made by a terrible person. Even though Braid is a great guy. [00:46:19] Speaker C: Love that the developer is just called the odd gentleman. [00:46:23] Speaker A: Yeah. And it's. It has. I don't think like it. Unlike Brain, it doesn't really have a deep story to it. It's mostly this thing is on the tin. You're. You're a pie thief traveling through time. But it's. It's so quirky and I think looks like you're. [00:46:41] Speaker C: It's a good comical relief game. [00:46:43] Speaker A: Oh yeah. I think you would greatly enjoy it. [00:46:47] Speaker C: Well, I'm gonna add that to my Steam deck. [00:46:49] Speaker A: And if it's. If it usually is one of those, like if it's on sale during the steel sign, Steam sales can be a dollar or less. [00:46:57] Speaker C: Yeah, I'm gonna. I'm definitely adding that to my wish list. Love it. Okay, I think it's time that we recommend you some games. [00:47:06] Speaker A: Indeed. Tell me what would I enjoy? [00:47:09] Speaker C: I'm gonna kick it off with Papers Please and Papers Please like games, but I am going to try and sell you on Papers Please because I do believe you like puzzle games and because you just tried to sell one on me. So. Paper Please is a indie game. It's also a puzzle game. It's based. I needed some help, so I looked it up. It's based back in a fictional communist country, Arsto Tastesta. It's so hard to pronounce. World in 1986. Yeah, something like that. Your. Your job, what you're doing is you are working at a border checkpoint coming into this country and you're just checking people's papers. You said papers Please, and they hand you their. Their papers and you have to find the mistakes and let people in with the proper identification. The concept of the game is very simple. You find mistakes, you get paid for finding mistakes. You get paid for letting the right people in. You get fined for making mistakes and you're making money. That's the concept. The fun part of this game comes down to the management of how you're doing this. So you have a family to support during this. You're working to support your family. So you got to pay the rent, you know, your. Your heat bill, medicine. When things pop up, if your kid gets sick and buying the medicine or something happens, your wife, anything along those lines there. This game really makes you make moral Decisions. So you'll, you'll have someone try to come through the country that don't have necessarily the right paperwork. Maybe their IDs expired, but they're running from someone that's trying to kill them. Do you let them in or do you say, sorry, I got a job to do, and say I need the money. So you let these people die because you need to feed your family, but the only thing maybe wrong is that the date on their IDs invalid or on their papers. And it could be, you know, the rules change. So one day, what might be fine for one country to come in, the next day they're like, ah, no, you can't let them in. Or, you know, in. Maybe we don't, we don't like this country anymore. So you're not allowed to let anybody from this country in. But this person from this country is fine. Like, they're, they're good people, but you're gonna leave them out to die because you got to make money. And now you have to make the moral decision of what you think is wrong or what you think is right compared to do you want to make the money? And I. This game, Austin comes on sales. Well, it's got 20 different endings for the game. You can, or you can arrest, have people arrested. It's have people executed. It's. It's a very morally dilemma game. It's got a very deep story inside of this simple covered game. It's very fun. The game that made me think of this I play is called Contraband Police. Same concept. Someone's trying to come into your country, you check their papers, you check their cargo. Like it's more. This is 3D compared to where Papers Plea is not a 3D game. Contraband Police is a 3D game. They drive their car in, you're checking them. You can either arrest them or let them through or take their stuff away and then you get paid for the more people that you arrest and send to prison to make extra money or you let them through and you make less money. Games like Papers Please are so much fun because it, it has you. You have to make a certain, you have a quota. You have to make a certain amount of money to pay your bills or you get fired, which means you die, they kill you in these fictional countries. But Papers Please is definitely where I would start on these games because it's, it's doesn't require good hardware. It's a very simple game you can play with one hand. Doesn't require anything. You know, this would a Great game for you back in your one handed days. [00:51:41] Speaker A: That may have been a great time to discuss that. [00:51:43] Speaker C: Yeah, it's a good. Sit down and you can get some feelings felt, whether good or bad. Have your morality test tested. Play evil, play good. [00:51:53] Speaker A: This war of mine. [00:51:55] Speaker B: All right, I think it's my turn. [00:51:57] Speaker A: Yeah, go for it. [00:51:58] Speaker B: So this is actually a pitch to both of you, but I'm gonna start with aiming it at Mike. Mike, I know you like Metroidvanias. I know how much you love Silksong. And I know that Prince of Persia, while not the powerhouse franchise that it was in like the GameCube era, has a rich history and lore to it. And so my recommendation is the Prince of the Lost Crown. This is a recent Metroidvania from Ubisoft. Somehow that is genuinely just an actually good Metroidvania. The combat feels tight and responsive. The platforming feels good. The, the like progression that is the Metroidvania part of the formula. Feels good to use and feels thematic in this world. The world is super interesting. The whole thing is like. I mean it's Prince of Persia. It's like lots of sand, lots of desert, but also like jungles and other environments and it's crazy. And the story takes twists and turns. There's a fucking plot to this game that takes twists and turns and the combat is really good. And I'm saying that about a 2D side scrolling platformer that makes you control it with a goddamn analog stick, which is a cardinal sin. And I don't care. The game's still good despite that. That's how good this game is. You get melee combat, you have a bow and arrow, you have other powers you'll get later. It's a meaty game. This is not a short game. I think this was like a 10 or 12 hour playthrough for me, which is. I mean it's not silk song size, but it's a meaty game. It's not something you're gonna pick up and be done with real quick. There's tons of side challenges and stuff to do. I never even 100% it. There's. There's so much and it's. I played this on the original switch. It looks great and ran great even on the original switch, let alone if you're playing it on a gaming PC or a modern platform. Fantastic game. Highly recommend. Prince of Persia, the Lost Crown. Pick it up whenever it goes on sale. [00:54:10] Speaker A: Next on sale. [00:54:12] Speaker C: Right now. I need a, I need to get into. I never played Prince of Persia. [00:54:18] Speaker A: The first one's fantastic. The second and third one are. [00:54:20] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:54:20] Speaker B: Okay. Important to qualify. When you say the first one you mean the like Sands of Time PS2 Gamecube era. Sands of Time. That is not even close to the first one. [00:54:30] Speaker A: It is not the first one. You're right. There are plenty of ones that were done before that that are more akin to this side scrolling one. Yeah. [00:54:38] Speaker B: This video game franchise has literally been around since the 80s. The original game came out in 1989. But yeah, Prince of the Sands of Time is when most people became aware of the franchise because it was the first one that went mainstream. But yeah, Lost Crown is just. It's genuinely one of the best games in the entire franchise. I enjoyed it a lot more than I enjoyed Sands of Time. [00:55:00] Speaker A: That's impressive. Sands of Time is quite good. [00:55:03] Speaker B: It's obviously not directly comparable because Sands of Time is a 3D character action game and this is a 2D Metroidvania. But this has really good tight controls and good story and good voice acting. That's the other thing. This has actually good voice acting. [00:55:18] Speaker A: There's a roguelike Prince of Persia. [00:55:20] Speaker B: Yeah, it's the newest one. I don't know much about it so I'm not commenting on the rogue Prince of Persia because I just don't know it. But it's made by Evil Empire so it's probably good. [00:55:30] Speaker A: Yeah. The fact that this is a first party Ubisoft game and as widely positive as I've heard it to be is impressive considering how bad Ubisoft has been. [00:55:39] Speaker B: Exactly. That's the key is like Ubisoft sucks but Prince of Persia, Lost Crown genuinely good by all accounts. Apparently rogue Prince of Persia is too because it's made by the dead cells people or the people who are making the new Castlevania that's coming out in like two months. Which goddamn listeners. I can't wait for that game to come out so I can talk about it on this show. I am so excited for Castlevania. Belmont's Curse. [00:56:07] Speaker A: Yeah, anything. Anything done about the dead cells guys has a good but potential to it. [00:56:12] Speaker B: I haven't played Rogue Prince of Persia so I can't say it's good or bad. So that's not what I'm recommending. I'm recommending Prince of Persia the lost Crown. It is a great entry point to Prince of Persia if you just don't remember the story of the old ones. [00:56:25] Speaker A: It's self contained in comparison to Hollow Knight. Where's the difficulty at? [00:56:30] Speaker B: Definitely easier than Hollow Knight. Like no question. But it's not an easy game. [00:56:35] Speaker A: Yeah, this is a more intro into the Metroidvania style than Hollow Knight would be, even though Hollow Knight is probably a meteor game. [00:56:42] Speaker B: Yes, this Prince of the Lost Crown is not an easy game, at least on hard difficulty, but it's not Hollow Knight difficult. I played it on hard. I ran into a few bosses and a few other encounters that took me some trial and error to learn patterns and learn everything so I could beat them, which is exactly what I was looking for on hard. [00:57:04] Speaker A: Perfect. That's. That sounds like it is something that is up my alley that I will be looking into when I have more disposable income. Okay. I think all of us have pretty much pitched pretty good games all around. Everyone, most everyone went, yep, yep, yep, yep. That sounds good. Yep. [00:57:21] Speaker B: I think all of us added every one of them to a wish list somewhere. [00:57:25] Speaker A: Okay, so then let's, let's transition into our final piece. The thing we do every week. We're going to talk about what we've been doing this past week. We'll start with the the easiest one. Hey Pillow, what you been doing this week? [00:57:40] Speaker C: So in the free time that I've had since our last episode League Classic has came out, I'm not going to dive too deep into it because I know we are going to cover this deeper on our other podcast that is strictly League of Legends. But League of Legends being a video game, it does get some time and love on this podcast as well. League Classic came out and specifically I think this is what season three, season four era ish. It's with some work, it's got some twists. [00:58:12] Speaker B: It's a weird amalgam of like pre season one through season three, 4ish, whatever. Like the people making it felt the most nostalgia for unlike the classic versions [00:58:25] Speaker A: of like wow, this is not a patch cycle. This is where things are. They have taken bits and pieces from across mostly seasons one or beta through season three and they've taken those and they've mishmashed them together with mostly an original roster but not a complete roster. There will be more things coming out [00:58:43] Speaker C: with they got a Kali is on the PBE right now. [00:58:46] Speaker A: Yeah, a couple of modern day conveniences that are things that are definitely post season three that are really helpful to help the game move along because well, there's been a lot of development in the past 17 years. [00:59:03] Speaker B: Yep. [00:59:04] Speaker C: I think the funniest part to me is how many people I've seen post that riot. We really appreciate the State that Jungle's in on, on live. Thank you so much. Because jungle was the hardest, most nightmarish thing to do in an older league. I'm really enjoying the freedom of AP ad. So I've, I've ran both on multiple different, you know, Ape, AP Pantheon, AP Scion. I'm really enjoying having these old items and these builds. I played the classic ish mayhem and I had a lot of fun on that because I got the AOE death fires touch. [00:59:58] Speaker A: I adore that. [00:59:59] Speaker C: It was fun. I don't like not having the stat anvils, but that's okay there. It's, it's, it's really fun. And if you want more information on it, please come over, join our other podcast, give it a listen. When we have that episode up, it'll probably. [01:00:17] Speaker B: Hopefully we'll be talking about one comes out. [01:00:19] Speaker A: Yeah, there's likely to be an episode up before this is live, so we will be doing a more in depth talk about what all of this is over on our other podcast. [01:00:32] Speaker C: Please go check it out and we'll go show it a little more over there. But that's all I've really been up to. I mean, I've been playing some palworld. I'm not going to dive into that again. We gave that last time we talked about it. Other than that, I'm still in the process of having my house built and we are at the point now electricity is getting hooked up and water is getting hooked up to the house. So exciting. Moving along. Should be ready in a couple months. [01:01:01] Speaker A: So make sure you have someone you trust go through and do a full check once it is built. You do not know how many. [01:01:10] Speaker C: Oh, yeah. I mean, the, the city. The city inspector has to come through [01:01:14] Speaker A: and approve an independent contractor that goes through and does this independent of the city and everyone else. They will frequently find things that are. If you've had something that was improperly done before or maybe needs a little bit of tweaking, things like angles in the bathroom that don't drain properly. [01:01:31] Speaker C: Oh, I see what you're saying. [01:01:33] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:01:33] Speaker C: So I'm gonna go through and take [01:01:34] Speaker A: a look across the board probably. [01:01:37] Speaker C: Then before we close officially, I'll take an inspector out with me and have him walk the house with me and my wife. [01:01:44] Speaker B: I. I assume you've already lined it up, but you have a plan for how to get Internet to the new house, right? [01:01:49] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. I got to give them about a month's notice and they're gonna go hook it up. They've already got the Ethernet ran as Far as from the breaker box and all that to where it needs to go. They've already got, I make sure I have a network spots in my bedroom where I'm going to have like where I'm going to set up a mesh network. I'm going to have one of course downstairs so I can hook my computer up directly to the wall to the ethernet because our router and stuff's going to be upstairs so I'm going to have to set up some kind of mesh network and I already called my provider and they're gonna help me set that up. [01:02:34] Speaker B: I'm going to send you a link to what I use. I have a like prosumer slash small business grade wifi router access point setup from Ubiquiti that is leaps and bounds better than any mesh will ever be. [01:02:53] Speaker A: Ubiquiti is pretty well known too. They're pretty well trusted. [01:02:56] Speaker B: I, I, I will say the only issue that I've cause the cost isn't that high. [01:02:59] Speaker C: The only issue I run into with using like store bought or you know, systems is my Internet provider has a modem separate from the router. [01:03:11] Speaker B: Right. [01:03:12] Speaker C: So there's some weird like instead of it being built into the router I got to do some weird bypassing. So I might have to go with the they I'm going to talk to them about it because I know they probably have a mesh system as well. [01:03:26] Speaker B: Oh, they will want to sell you their shit and it's gonna suck compared to what an ubiquity setup would give you. [01:03:32] Speaker C: I, well my Internet provider, like I said, it's got a monopoly. I don't have another choice unless I decide to go with like Starlink or something like that. They will they charge after if you use an outside router or anything like that where that takes over for the Internet without using their main box, they will charge you for using the fucking crime. [01:04:00] Speaker B: Not legal like it is legal. [01:04:03] Speaker C: What I mean, what I mean by they charge you is if there's a problem with the Internet they now charge you a service like to come out and look instead of if I use their box they're like oh cool, yeah, we'll come out there for free. But now they charge if something goes wrong and I'm not hooked up to their box. It's stupid but I don't get the choice. [01:04:26] Speaker A: That sounds incredibly weird. Wow. [01:04:31] Speaker C: But being at where I'm at in the boonies, I don't have options. [01:04:35] Speaker A: Okay, well, looking forward to the house, not looking forward to the Internet problems. [01:04:39] Speaker C: Right. Hopefully it's not too bad. [01:04:41] Speaker A: Okay, Jax. [01:04:43] Speaker B: No, you go next, I'll go last. [01:04:46] Speaker A: Okay, I'll go next. Sort of as I'd alluded maybe in the beginning. Earlier today I had realized I had done nothing but what PI' Illo had done and play a lot of League Classic and more. Wow and more league and not much else. And that's not really anything to talk about. So I started opening up and going through, well, what haven't I touched that we've talked about? I have a Steam library full of games. I should be playing more things. What's on my list of things to play? You know, we've always glazed Metro. I need to play Metro. We've got it here. I'm gonna open it up. And I tried to start with Metro Exodus because it's the most recent game and I figured, well, let's start with Metro Exodus. Well, it is a story based game and it is continuous from the first to the last as the main same character. I found this out when 10 minutes in I went, you're talking a lot about stuff that I feel like I should know about and don't. Why are you talking about me like this? There was not something in the intro to truly discuss this. Are these all the same story? So a quick five minute Google Fu went, no, Yep, all these are the exact same character, exact same story. Gotta start from the beginning if you want the full story. Alright, so I went back and thankfully Metro 33's Redux is nine gigs, seven gigs, something like that. So it took a minute to download. So I downloaded Metro 2033 Redux and started playing that. There are great things and there are annoying things about this game. The atmosphere in this game is phenomenal. I did expect it to feel a little bit more like stalker. S D A L K E R I guess it is not. It is incredibly linear. The storyline goes chapter by chapter by chapter, place by place by place. One pathway. That pathway is very well crafted, but you don't have a lot of choice in how you're moving forward. So you're very railroaded in that sense. But what they've done in that crafted railroad experience has been very fun. Downside, some of the things that you think should be options in this game just aren't for. For no reason whatsoever. None of them, not even including Exodus, which is a 2019 game or something like that. None of these games support borderless windowed mode. There's nothing in their features that supports it, but they at least as far as the most recent one you can choose the level of DLSS you have going on. And like there's weird customization things with this where it's incredibly customizable in one location and almost not at all in another. We talked about access. Metro has multiple levels of access to the game. You can play it in a more storytelled in a more combat oriented mode. Each of those has then levels of difficulty after that so that you can be all right, you're familiar with this. This is a Metro style. If you don't play Metro games, you're not going to understand how this one goes. And then there are levels post that. So the granularity of difficulty, great lot of options. It's just very weird what they decided should be your options. So like that, that's a weird one to me. But continuing on, this is. This is a Metro game. If you haven't talked about it, this is like post nuclear war Russia. And it is Russia. You are in Moscow. The basics of the story is it's called Metro because everyone in Moscow, in across the world, as far as they know, you have gone underground to survive whatever post war has happened. Because the surface will get you killed. It is irradiated. There are mutants, there are monsters, there are raiders. And the. As far as we know, the only living people are living within the train stations. Underground, all across the Metro lines is the central hub, hence the name. And it starts off with you going, all right, let's do a mission in here and we're going to the surface because we need to get something. Because you can't permanently live underground in a situation like this. You have to go to the surface to figure out things. And that mission does not go great. And then it flashes back eight days earlier. So now I'm in a very interested state where I'm going. I don't know what all is going on. The story is very weird in a cool sort of weird. Like there are sequences in it that I am unsure what they're talking about. But part of that is I'm not incredibly familiar with the world. So they're making allocations that I'm not super familiar with yet, but that I'm assuming as the game goes on I will understand more because that's usually how it goes. They're making statements about these things going on. I don't know what the fuck that is. And you see them later as things go on. This is a difficult game even on the basic normal difficulty, because ammo matters a ton. Gas masks matter a lot. [01:10:03] Speaker B: Not only does ammo matter A ton. But if memory serves, the good ammo is also your money. [01:10:09] Speaker A: Literally there is a. As one of the things that we were talking about with a buddy of mine, I was, I was looking money ammo. That ammo is current day ammo that is just apparently better made than any other ammo. So if you find a gun that can use this ammo, you're spending your money to make really good shots because everything else is not great. I have a pistol that's not super great. A shotgun that is the only thing so far that really does damage a really bad smg. Like I feel like I'm using a full clip to kill one mutant monster and there are seven more following afterwards and I don't have that much ammo. [01:10:56] Speaker B: Think the difference of like Old west guns versus modern guns because the nuclear wasteland has rendered the tools they use to make modern guns like those factories are not hospitable. They can't get to them to make more. [01:11:11] Speaker A: Yeah. Which makes there is an air pressure gun. Like there's not enough bullet powder like straight up black powder around to continuously make bullets. So they designed and built a gun that is made from air pressure so that you can kill things from a distance even if it's not the best. So we've, we've got some very, very interesting guns. I'm not even done with it yet, so I know that, I know we're getting better stuff as the game goes forward because in that first level you get to use what looks like a modern gun and then immediately when you flash back into the other games, you are not using weapons anywhere near as good as that. So I know I'm going to be getting some better gear. I know I'm going to be getting some interesting stuff. It's. It's been an interesting road so far and we've talked about Metro and I can definitely say with as much as I have played, I recommend it. With the caveat that if you cannot play without borderless window mode, oops, sorry, there's nothing you can do about that. That I don't know how well this game supports mods. If you can mod it to have it, maybe it'll be good. But as of right now, I haven't done it. I haven't found anything that does. So it's a good experience so far and I, I'm looking forward to playing through the franchise and getting to Exodus because the little bit that I saw at the beginning of Exodus was really fun. And then I realized I had no fucking idea what was going on. So I'm looking forward to getting to Exodus. All right, Jax, you made me stop. Why? [01:12:48] Speaker B: All right, so I have two games I want to talk about. One, the new Path of Exile League came out. We've got Path of Exile, Curse of the All Flame. I've been playing the shit out of it. It's fun. You get to go underwater. And the NPC that is helping you for this underwater area drops bubbles of air for you to explore the ocean floor. And you explore the ocean floor and find sunken treasure. Because of course, in the world of Wraeclast, tons of ships have sunk and their treasure has gone overboard. Because it's a world with fucking monsters created by a cataclysm thousands of years ago. So it's dangerous as hell. So you're just, you know, wandering the seafloor, finding treasure. There's piles of gold, there's gear down there. There's all sorts of treasures. And also horrifying sea monsters like giant crabs that burrow underground and murder you, or starfish that spit rocks at you. It's great fun. New content. There's a whole pirate storyline about it. The aesthetic is great. Really good addition to the game. I'm having a blast with it. It's got kind of a, like, build your own adventure system. It's a lot of fun. Path of Exile is a lot of fun. I love Path of Exile, the other game I've been playing this past week. I'm betting neither of you have heard of. [01:14:16] Speaker A: No. Doesn't look like something I've heard of before. [01:14:19] Speaker B: I am playing a game called Starbreed, which is literally a Star Fox clone, but porny and monster girls. [01:14:29] Speaker A: Weirdly enough, I've heard of this game. [01:14:31] Speaker B: You've heard of it? [01:14:33] Speaker A: Yes. [01:14:33] Speaker B: Why have you heard of this? [01:14:35] Speaker A: Oh, a different friend was trying to talk me into looking into this. [01:14:39] Speaker B: Okay, so it is unabashedly a Star Fox clone. It's got a very lo fi 3D art style. It is a 3D rail shooter, flying through the levels on rails, killing the enemies. It's missing some of the things that make Star Fox 64 truly special. You don't get bonus points for taking out multiple enemies in a single shot. That's the biggest one by far. Like, not gonna lie. And it just. The controls are a little slower, a little less refined. It feels just a rougher around the edges in terms of the actual gameplay. However, it deserves to be noted because this is a straight up porn game that actually cared enough to have decent gameplay, usually with hentai games. The gameplay is an afterthought as a like barrier to access the porny scenes. This. No, the gameplay is clearly what they design. And then they're like, well, how do we differentiate ourselves from every other indie game? Let's make it porn. So it is a competent indie star fox, like where you travel around this star system helping girls who have a problem on their planet and then they join your crew and you fuck them because of course you do. But the actual gameplay is pretty fun. The level design ranges from really generic. Like I'm flying through a jungle and there's some ancient ruins here to like flying through a like cyberpunk city with like hologram porn ads popping up everywhere that are all made by the AI that's taken over the city who is the boss of the level. So like it runs the gamut of like actually creative level design and kind of crap level design. But hey, it has actual gameplay. I played it for an hour. It was fun. I might play more. [01:16:36] Speaker C: We'll see. [01:16:38] Speaker A: Okay. [01:16:40] Speaker B: Mostly I just thought it was funny that it was a hentai game that is more than just a visual novel. It has actual gameplay. [01:16:47] Speaker A: Yeah, Huniepop was surprisingly good gameplay. [01:16:49] Speaker B: Right. But it's basically a visual novel and a competent puzzle game. Yeah, this is like an actual video game. [01:16:57] Speaker A: I guess. I guess we must. Must we look for them? No, no, we don't need to. [01:17:02] Speaker B: What are we looking for? [01:17:03] Speaker A: Nevermind. Porn games with real game. [01:17:06] Speaker B: I will try to find where to download Sentimental shooting which is in my opinion still the king of that genre. [01:17:14] Speaker A: All right, well it's a like old. [01:17:17] Speaker B: I don't remember if it's DOS or like Windows 95 era. Shoot em up. Like straight up, top down, bullet hell type shoot em up. That's a well done one of those. But also you're shooting the clothes off anime girls at the same time as the actual like shooting aliens and spaceships and stuff. Why? I have no fucking clue. It's old. It's just funny. [01:17:40] Speaker A: All right, well I think, I think on that note our episode is coming to a close. Our episode is now coming to a close. And thank you for listening to from 8bit to 4k muck of many names Jackson and Pillow Pet. Good night everybody. [01:18:01] Speaker B: Bye bye. [01:18:02] Speaker C: Good night.