From 8-Bit to 4K Episode 30: The Mod Squad

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign. Hello and welcome to episode 30 of from 8bit to 4k. I'm your host this week. I'm Jack Sohman and I've got with me Mike of many names. [00:00:20] Speaker B: Hello everyone. [00:00:21] Speaker A: And we've got Pillow Pet. [00:00:23] Speaker C: I'm your Mower Guy and I'm here. [00:00:27] Speaker A: Just give it a few weeks, guys. He'll literally rename his name to Mower guy. [00:00:30] Speaker C: Mower therapy TM. [00:00:34] Speaker A: There you go, guys. We're part of the 4 wards podcast network. We have a Discord. Come join the Discord. [00:00:40] Speaker C: Come hang out. [00:00:40] Speaker A: Come talk games with us. It's a good time. Link is in the episode description. We also need to give a shout out to our patrons who support the podcast network. Shout out to Codex, Ninja, Pillow Pet, Labana, Uncle ChrisCo and Skippius Esquire. Now if you want to support the podcast, head on over to our podcast network's patreon patreon.com the Four Wards podcast. $1 a month just tells us that you love us. $5 a month gets you an exclusive feed of some behind the scenes audio of our prep work before each show. And $10 a month gets you that same exclusive feed. And we'll shout your name out during the intro of every episode. And all of those benefits do extend to our League of Legends podcast, the main Four Wards podcast as well, of course. So, guys, we spent some time before the show talking about our topic. Tonight we're gonna talk to you listeners about modding games. The inspiration for this is I've been spending a lot of time on Nexus mods lately for some of the games I've been playing. So I wanted to talk about game modding and then we just kind of went from there. So I want to kick it off with, I guess the part that I'm the most knowledgeable about, which I want to explain some of the history of modding because game modding has been around a lot longer than most people probably realize. The earliest example I know of of an in this case officially licensed mod is a mod from 1994 for Wolfenstein 3D that was made by a company called WisdomTree. This game is called Super Noah's Ark 3D and I say officially licensed. They licensed Wolfenstein from id Software and modified it. They did not secure a license from Nintendo for releasing it as a Super Nintendo game. So this is one of those weird Super Nintendo games that requires you to plug a real Super Nintendo game into the top of it to pass through the like DRM bypass chip, which is a whole thing. Early games were weird. But they took Wolfenstein 3D, a game about exploring a castle, shooting Nazis, and made it so you're instead Noah running around the ark, putting animals to sleep with food in a slingshot. That's Super Noah's Ark 3D. That's literally all there is to it. It's weird that it exists. [00:03:02] Speaker B: I feel like a lot of these very, very early mod official licensed things are going to be companies hiring out something because they want it cheap and quick and easy and not terribly caring about what the consequences for that might be. [00:03:18] Speaker A: Kind of the distinction being like they licensed Wolfenstein and made a Wolfenstein mod instead of just making an original game. And they did also make a lot of original games and they're fucking terrible. If you want to laugh. Angry Video Game Nerd literally made a pair of videos about Bible games where you can watch him play and pick apart how bad the other games they've made in that time period were. But here's the funny part, because the next game in the history of modding that I want to talk about is also an officially licensed mod of an id software title. Because way back in 1997, General Mills licensed Doom and made a total conversion of Doom known as Chex Quest. This was literally Doom, but you play as some sort of Chex man, the Chex Warrior, because of course it's a serial tie in. And you run around with like sci fi sporks and spoons and try to fight these like green goo enemies who are trying to destroy cereal or something like that. It's weird. It's weird that this exists, that they took Doom, a hyper violent for the time, first person shooter that got like congressional attention for the level of violence that it had in it. And they were like, you know what? This is the perfect game for us to promote our children's cereal with. [00:04:54] Speaker B: I also feel like I don't understand the 90s. Let's take the thing that we hate most because it's General Mills doing it, owned by some of the most conservative weird people around. So they were probably like, yes, we're going to take this license and turn it into something we can talk about our Bible games. That feels very in what they would do. [00:05:13] Speaker A: I agree with Noah's Ark, but I don't understand it for Chex Quest. It's just weird. [00:05:19] Speaker B: Well, the 7up guy had a good game, so. [00:05:21] Speaker A: Right. There are a bunch of other licensed games from this time, but the distinction is the other ones were they just made a bad video game and Chex Quest and Noah's Ark 3D are explicitly. They took an existing property, contacted the people who made it, got the license to make their own thing with their existing game as the base they were using, which had never really happened before. [00:05:45] Speaker B: I think the theory behind the original and the secondary ones afterwards was they saw how little they had to put into making the development. They got to purchase a license, take it and mess with it, reset some assets, hire like four people. Go. [00:06:01] Speaker A: Yep. So the next one that I want to highlight for the history of modding though is one of the most famous video games ever. Half Life was Valve, a new company at the time, founded by Gabe newell, making a first person shooter. They licensed the Quake 2 engine from ID Software. Yes, again, ID Software. By the way, that just tells you how insanely influential Doom was. ID Software is literally the source of the first three mod games I want to talk about. And then Valve heavily modified what they had licensed from id. Gabe Newell estimated that by the time Half Life released, only about 25% of it was the original ID code anymore. But Half Life started its life as a mod of Quake 2. And we all know Half Life, obviously, like we have Steam now, like Half Life is one of the most important games historically ever. It won a shitload of Game of the year awards in 1998. But half life itself also was the source of a ton of mods. There was a game called Day of Defeat that was made out of Half Life that was quite good. Team Fortress was a Half Life mod. And easily the most famous game to this day that started its life as a mod is Counter Strike. Counter Strike was a Half Life mod. They made a game that was inspired by the Rainbow Six novel by Tom Clancy. By the way, there was no SDK for Half Life at the time. They couldn't license the engine, it wasn't a thing. So they just modified it. And Counter Strike hit such a like cultural zeitgeist and was such a high quality mod that Valve hired them. Valve was just like cool, you guys made something amazing out of our product. You want to come work for us and just become part of Valve. That had never happened before. That's literally the first time I know of ever that amateur game devs making a game based on an existing game. Instead of getting a cease and desist, which was the usual reaction at the time, instead got a job. [00:08:35] Speaker B: I know for a fact one other instance of that happening and that is the guy that made Sonic Mania. [00:08:41] Speaker A: That was much later. [00:08:42] Speaker B: That is much later. [00:08:43] Speaker A: But that is, there's been other examples of that Much more recently. But this was in like 1999. [00:08:51] Speaker B: Yeah, this is early. And then you've noticed that ID was the source of multiples of those. Oddly enough, each of those is a slightly separate engine because they did not keep the same engine for each of those early games. Obviously it had to have evolved between Doom and Quake, but even Wolfenstein was not using the exact same engine they used to make Doom. [00:09:13] Speaker A: Yep. [00:09:14] Speaker B: So these guys are people who are like kings at engine development. And then Valve sort of took what ID desired, that spark of creativity and built it into such a point where like now the source engine, which is, I believe, what it's called. [00:09:33] Speaker A: Yes. [00:09:33] Speaker B: Is the most like Freeform, have fun modding mod like engine that I know of because it is used to make so many more things than you are aware of. [00:09:47] Speaker A: Yep. [00:09:47] Speaker C: So I got a question for you. Maybe. So when a mod completely changes the original game, is it a mod or would you consider it its own game at that point? [00:09:59] Speaker A: So there's a term for this. It's called a total conversion mod. And what distinguishes it between a mod and its own game is purely business. Counter Strike started as a mod. It was a total conversion of Half Life. When Valve bought it and made it into its own standalone product that was for sale and no longer required Half Life owned in order to play it. It ceased to be a mod at that point. [00:10:28] Speaker B: So technically, under this license of areas that we're talking about, Warcraft 3's maps that may come other games like Dota are like League, basically like League, essentially are total conversion mods. Because icefrog did not work for Blizzard, he ended up being hired by Valve to make Dota too. But these sort of things are. [00:10:50] Speaker C: The cool thing about like Half Life is not only the first Half Life created a game, the Second Half Life 2, Gary's mod, unless you guys already mentioned that. [00:11:01] Speaker B: No, no, that's. [00:11:02] Speaker A: That's the second progression of the source engine. [00:11:06] Speaker C: It's funny, if, like a modder makes a game better than the original developers, should the developers, like hire these guys or at least pay royalties? Like it's. [00:11:16] Speaker B: No, that would one. [00:11:18] Speaker C: I know they're never going to pay royalties. They like, they leave their games open for modding for this exact reason. It's a huge industry now. It's like its own separate industry. Most of these modders are better developers than the actual developers and the developers a lot of the time understand that. And that's why they let modding like they support it, like, hey, yeah, mod my game. And it gives them Ideas that. [00:11:42] Speaker A: But also literally there's been so many instances over the years of people making something cool out of the software dev tools provided for modding in a game, basically being their resume to then get hired and make. [00:11:57] Speaker B: That is. That is one of those things. What is. [00:11:59] Speaker A: Even if their mod itself is not actually a product that gets purchased by a company and becomes a retail product for. [00:12:05] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean like I could. Okay, I was going to say like we're going to get to it later. But you get MMOs. Well, you know, say like World of Warcraft where you got like the add ons. Some of these add ons were so influential that they're now just part of the game. And I'm one of like a lot of times I wonder, like, I never looked into it did they hire any of these people or like call them in. So I'll probably be. [00:12:35] Speaker B: I'll jump in on that one. And that is certain. Like we talked about initially, very few times does someone make something new and the developers go, we like that a lot. Instead of, no, you can't come here and join us. That's relatively rare. However, people who have. And this is very common, especially through the like early 2000s and 2000s, game developers do not give a shit about grades. They do not give a shit about anything else. They care about what you can do. And so one of the things, when I was going through schools, one of my teachers was a former game dev. Actually several of them were. And his response was when we were hiring, the thing that I was told was, I do not care if you walk in with needles hanging out of your arms. As long as you can get your work done to a good enough quality on time, you're fucking hired. That's how little they cared about anything else besides quality. And the easiest way to show quality is to make mods. [00:13:32] Speaker A: It's the same as like if you're trying to get a job as an artist, your resume is your portfolio of previous art you've made. If you're trying to get a job in game design and game development, being able to show, hey, I made this mod for this game that was played by this many people is a huge like way to get yourself in the door. And Half Life historically is the most like because of the source engine that Half Life 2 created, Half Life as a franchise is the most like got people's foot in the door game that has ever been. It is also until like Minecraft and Roblox in recent years, essentially. [00:14:14] Speaker B: Yeah, it is also like the Source of other games that they have made. So we've talked about the difference between other just games and mods. We need to make that distinction because things like Portal are technically mods but made by the same company. Portal was originally made as a tech demo for the new source engine before I think it was The Half Life 2 set was going out and it was just a this is what we can do. And they had so much fun playing it that they almost did not get their work in. And then they had to cite it in. And this was included in the orange box because of that. The reason it's not another mod is because the developers made it while we're [00:14:55] Speaker C: on like the history and like starting of modding. You know, modding has been pretty. It's almost historically always going to be PC. Recently Bethesda themselves, I know for sure they added like console versions. There's even earlier console versions to modding, in my opinion. Would you consider like game Genie, GameShark, all of those cartridges, would you consider that modding or cheating? [00:15:24] Speaker A: So I like that you bring this up because. No, no, no. There is no depends. This is actually like legal precedent. There is a legal case, Galoob Toys versus Nintendo of America. You can look it up on Wikipedia. Because of the Game Genie. Because Galoob won a court case against Nintendo. Game modification is legal. Prior to that it was completely just. There was no legal standard for it whatsoever. And in the US at least, it was just the Wild West. They didn't know if you would be able to modify games and it be legal or if the company that made the game could be like, no, fuck you, we're suing you for this. [00:16:15] Speaker B: So I say it depends on one specific thing and that is you have this distinction of the game Genie, the Gameshark, etc. As things that allow you to do cheats and exploits and things like that. But also as a way to just modify games. There is that portion and then there is essentially going into the files in the code and changing those files outside of something like a Game Genie or Game Genie. [00:16:41] Speaker A: But here's the thing. That's all the Game Genie ever did, all the Game Genie was all those codes that you put in from the code books on a Game Genie. They're just instructions on parts of memory to rewrite. [00:16:54] Speaker B: Essentially. [00:16:54] Speaker A: Yes, that's it. That's all they do is it just tells the Game Genie which parts of memory to rewrite. [00:17:01] Speaker B: So I'm calling this a. [00:17:03] Speaker A: In doing so, it then bypasses like for example, if you used an infinite live code. It's just rewriting the algorithm that handles lives to be infinite. [00:17:13] Speaker B: So why I'm saying depends is what we're talking about is the distinction between actually modding these things ourselves and. And putting in a cheat code. And there is. This is a device that allows you to do that, which. Hey, yeah, that's definitely just fucking modding. And there is. I'm using this to give myself infinite life. You're not really modding. You're just taking something and inputting a code in. I'm not modding when I play a modded game. [00:17:35] Speaker C: I feel like the difference is like cheat codes were intended. Those were added to the game. Up, down, up, down, left, right, you know, square, circle, square. [00:17:44] Speaker A: That's why cheat codes are different than something like the game Genie. [00:17:47] Speaker B: Yes. [00:17:48] Speaker C: Whereas the game Genie has that option [00:17:50] Speaker A: of cheat codes that were built into the game in any way, shape or form. [00:17:53] Speaker B: Yes. That is, that is, you wouldn't be able to just use the game Genie and it would do something from a cheat code. You would input a code and the Game Genie would interpret that code and make the same modifications. [00:18:06] Speaker C: I think that's another good topic idea for the future cheat codes. So we're gonna mark that one down. At least I'm gonna keep that one in the back of my head because that's interesting. [00:18:15] Speaker B: Mark it down for the future. [00:18:16] Speaker A: Write it down. We have a channel for storing our item. We will absolutely visit the idea of cheat codes at some time because it's definitely something that I feel like has fallen by the wayside in modern gaming. [00:18:27] Speaker B: Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, va select. [00:18:29] Speaker A: Well, like, I remember 64 days where you had DK mode and I remember, [00:18:36] Speaker B: I remember half the codes for Starcraft. Power, overwhelming, Black Sheep Wall, all that fun stuff. There is no cow level, et cetera. Yeah. [00:18:44] Speaker C: Oh, yeah. [00:18:45] Speaker A: We talked about total conversion mods and we kind of started talking transitioning because you brought up Dota. The next part of modding I want to talk about is quote, unquote, intended creations. And by that I mean things like Dota, where Dota. They didn't Modify any Warcraft 3 code to make Dota. They used the map creation tools provided by Blizzard to make a custom map and write scripts for the characters on their custom map to make things happen in a way that obviously Blizzard never imagined someone using the Warcraft 3 tools to do that specifically. But they built the Warcraft 3 tools with the intent that people would write scripts and create new games out of their tools. They just could have never envisioned Dota. [00:19:33] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, there's. I mean, this is. It is not the birth of Tower Defenses, but this is my start in Tower Defenses was through these mods. And they are really like. I will call them mods. They're custom games, but they're custom games made using another engine in a game. I call that a mod. [00:19:51] Speaker C: Yep. [00:19:52] Speaker A: So I would also include then things like Mario Maker where people have made all sorts of crazy shit. Mario Maker was, hey, you can make your own Mario levels. And the community looked at that and was like, cool, we're gonna make our own Mario levels. But also, what if we made puzzles and we made music? [00:20:11] Speaker B: Yeah. I was like, what if we made [00:20:13] Speaker A: music with it and they do all sorts of crazy shit? That clearly was not ever really what Nintendo envisioned when they made Mario Maker. But the tools are there and they made it work somehow. The contraptions people have invented in Mario Maker to make things happen in weird ways are insane. I don't even begin to understand it. [00:20:33] Speaker C: It's so cool seeing people that are way smarter than I'll ever be, like spending the time and digging into these tools. Like we talk with Warcraft 3 and learning out how to do like triggers and doing all this and making cool things like cutscenes and games and auto run levels and Mario and getting the physics of the game figured out and just creating all these cool things. Like, I mean, we're. I'm going to bring up Minecraft. We talked about it in the past. People created computers in Minecraft. Now I wouldn't call that modding by any means. It's playing the game as intended. But it was not the games. It was not the developer's intention for someone to put a game in the game by using what's available in the game. [00:21:21] Speaker A: I don't think the creators of Minecraft envisioned Redstone being used for anything more than simple on off switches. [00:21:28] Speaker C: Yeah, it's nuts what people come up with and the creativity that's out there. [00:21:35] Speaker A: Minecraft just one dude originally, by the time Redstone was added, it was not. And that one dude is a piece of shit, by the way. Fuck Notch. Minecraft is great. I love Minecraft, but fuck Notch. [00:21:46] Speaker C: So while we're on like the whole, like, I want to dig into like ROM hacks a little bit because I think this is the one that's like. Comes to my point, if it makes it a whole new game, is it a different game? [00:21:58] Speaker A: Like I would say ROM hacks span the gamut of a mod to a total conversion it depends on the ROM hack. I would say Randomizers are in the same boat, by the way. Some of them are more like a total conversion of a game. Especially like the multi game randomizers that exist, which is insane. [00:22:20] Speaker C: Archipelago. [00:22:21] Speaker A: Archipelago. But I was also thinking like Quadrando and SMZ3 which are, hey, we mashed up two to four video games from different franchises and made it one game. Which by the way, to make Quad Rando, which is Metroid 1, Zelda 1, link to the past and Super Metroid in a Randomizer. Multi World Randomizer. The developers of that had to port Zelda 1 and Metroid 1 to the Super Nintendo because they're not running in an NES emulator. They're running on live Super Nintendo hardware. You can play Quadrendo on a real Super Nintendo, which is insane. [00:22:56] Speaker C: What got me thinking about this is we were talking about like you brought up Mario Maker and it instantly made me think of like the Kaizo Mario and how that at the base is. Obviously it's just Super Mario World, but someone made it hard and that's why a lot of people create these Kaizo worlds now in Mario Maker. And it's so cool to watch. [00:23:21] Speaker A: And that's kind of where I'm like, it blurs the line because some Kaizo ROM hacks are very much like it's still a Mario experience but like hard and technical and requires you to learn these weird Kaizo specific tricks like shell jumping and whatever. And some. Some ROM hacks that are included in like the Kaizo community are very much their own thing, using Super Mario World just as a shell. I want to highlight a specific batch of Super Mario ROM hacks in this context because you may have heard of this little video game called Celeste. [00:23:59] Speaker B: Yeah, that basically is just a Mario thing. [00:24:03] Speaker A: No, it's more direct than you realize. So in 2015, Matty Thorson released a Super Mario World ROM hack called Super Mario World Remix. She then made Celeste Classic, which is the 8 bit version of Celeste. That was basically the like Game Jam version of the game that they. That was the initial premise and then from that made Celeste, but she made a Mario ROM hack. And after Celeste she's made three more Mario ROM hacks where you play as Sonic. For some reason. I don't know why Maddie's a silly person, but the creator of Celeste makes some of the best Super Mario World ROM hacks that have ever been made. By the way, these are really good ones. [00:24:55] Speaker C: I. We've all we've talked about in the past. I'm a I'm a Zelda randomizer guy. I love watching the ROM hacks for Zelda. So I wanted to ask, do you think when someone remakes a classic. So I'm going to talk Oot, since it's coming out soon, the remake, do you think the guy building and remaking Oot and Unreal is what pushed Nintendo to get this remake out? Or do you think that was inevitable and it was coming anyway? [00:25:32] Speaker B: I can give you an answer from a different franchise because there is a very similar scenario that happened almost exactly. [00:25:41] Speaker A: Are you talking about a Square Enix franchise? [00:25:43] Speaker B: No, I'm talking about. [00:25:44] Speaker A: Okay, then I have a different one [00:25:46] Speaker B: which is AM2R and Samus 2. Samus returns. [00:25:49] Speaker A: Okay. [00:25:50] Speaker B: Somebody decided to completely remake Metroid 2 as essentially a super Nintendo game in the style of Super Metroid. And they made the whole thing and more and they wanted to make it for the games. Exact. I think it was 20th anniversary, maybe it was 25th. And they, they released it around that time and it was very quickly given a cease and desist because one, you cannot sell those. You are. You are infringing on an IP when you do something like that and then release it for that. But two, they were very insistent on this because at the same time they were in development with Samus Returns, which is their own remake of Metroid 2. And it would essentially be the basis on which Metroid Dread was built on this sort of game style is how they made Metroid Dread. Not necessarily the exact same engine because it doesn't work for a Game Boy. It wasn't a ds and then the Switch. So there is a lot of times very circumstantial things. But also in recent memory from like 08 beyond, we've been seeing more remasters, remakes, reimagines, bringing up older games into more modern things. The first game that I can think of that does this is Metroid Zero Mission. [00:27:14] Speaker A: Yep. [00:27:15] Speaker B: But it's not probably the first of this in this instance. I'm sure there are others that came before it, but that's the first one I can think of. [00:27:23] Speaker A: So Zero Mission absolutely is like an early remake. I cannot think of an earlier actual straight up remake of a game by the original company. But I was gonna say, like you brought up AM2R, the fan game. What about like that 3D Chrono Trigger remake that was in early development by fans before Square Enix shut it down. And then it was going to incorporate like content from Radical Dreamers and then we finally got Radical Dreamers officially Released available again when they remastered Chrono Cross. [00:27:59] Speaker B: So. And. And I'm going to bounce off of this a little bit. I know we've talked about companies hiring some of these guys because, wow, you've done something awesome. Come on and join us. Japan has very, very, very different copyright laws and they're very draconian about keeping them. [00:28:15] Speaker A: Yep. [00:28:16] Speaker B: Because if they are not, they lose them. So if you're going to do these sort of game masters, try not to do them on those games because you will get cease and desists from them. [00:28:28] Speaker C: So not to steer us off from a like this, but I got a question for Mike because I think he'll be a little bit more opinion on it. And Jax, I think, you know, you'll be able to pipe it too. I want to talk. Wow. What do you think of wow. Private Servers? Would you consider that a modded version [00:28:45] Speaker B: of the game that is not really a modded version. That is an instance of a code lock and they've taken that and gone, we want this here. Now there are. There are versions of those servers that then go, all right, we want to add in these functionalities that we thought existed. Now you are modding what is actually originally done. So private servers are also. [00:29:07] Speaker C: In my. In my head, I'm thinking. In my head, I'm thinking, Turtle, wow got shut down and then wow forever came out. [00:29:16] Speaker A: I don't know the original. I think the distinction is that private servers are also literally piracy in the more like direct sense. [00:29:25] Speaker B: They are straight illegal. [00:29:26] Speaker A: Then, like, AM2R was not pirate content in any way. It was simply a remake that was gonna infringe on a remake Nintendo was already developing. [00:29:36] Speaker B: So the major difference between them is AM2R is a thing that was developed in the style. They did not take Super Metroid, rejig it, and then make a new game with it. Wow. Private servers. [00:29:49] Speaker A: On that note, on that note, there is a ROM hack of Super Metroid that is zero Mission. Someone remade Zero Mission in Super Metroid. [00:29:57] Speaker B: Amazing. Wow. Private servers were. We found the direct code for this part of the game. We're taking this and we're keeping it over here on a server. And that is, if you read any of the terms of service, very illegal. Especially charging people for it. [00:30:12] Speaker A: Yep. [00:30:13] Speaker C: I do agree with the charging part. I would say if they kept it free, I don't know. [00:30:19] Speaker A: It's still piracy. You're still providing. [00:30:22] Speaker C: It is piracy for a paid service. It is piracy. I'm. [00:30:26] Speaker A: And it's piracy for an ongoing live service game. As Opposed to piracy of like an old Dead game that's no longer being [00:30:33] Speaker B: monetized because of the popularity of these things. That is why WOW has so many different classic versions. They have their classic, they have their BC classic. They have their rotating classic. They were forced, essentially forced to do this because private servers were getting so much traction. There is a version of which you are correct, where sometimes there is so much traction on a thing. Yes, we will give it to you. It's very hard to do that instead of just get a bunch of cease and desists. [00:31:02] Speaker C: And then I think that's where I'm coming at is do you think a lot of the times on these games that's what is back to like what I said about O.T. you think that's like, oh my gosh, this is so popular. [00:31:15] Speaker B: That's what the impetus. [00:31:16] Speaker C: This is what is kind of forcing some of these games. Because a lot of these games, like a lot of prequels, sequels for games. I mean, OOT has a million of them. I mean, you name one and there's someone digging into the timeline a little bit with fan made. [00:31:34] Speaker A: So I think that's some of it. But unfortunately, I think the biggest part of what's driving that is just that our generation has disposable income and our generation is nostalgic for those games. [00:31:45] Speaker B: We have voiced how nostalgic we are for our old favorite games. And with a couple of recent titles that went back did remasters and saw how popular they were, more and more companies are going to which one can we dig into now? And some are finding out that you have to do more than just a remaster because some remasters are not well supported. They're just throwaway fund make a thing. And we have our. We have our discussion on that one in a previous episode on where those games fall on that line. Some are good, some are bad, some are excellent. [00:32:19] Speaker A: All right, so I think we've wrapped up like talking about historical modding. Our remaining categories are more talking about modern game modding. So let's start with the simplest, most straightforward type of modern game mods. This is most of what I've been doing, by the way, because my main impetus for modding Final Fantasy 7 Remake Rebirth in this case was not wanting to make fundamental changes to the game. Matter of fact, I have deliberately avoided those mods. They exist, there's plenty of them. I'm not interested. I want a vanilla gameplay experience. What I've been doing is cosmetic mods. I found a mod that upscales all of the like Sign textures so that they're not blurry shit unless you're standing right in front of them. I found mods for tons of different costumes for all of the characters, some of which are fully original, most of which honestly are ripped from other Square Enix games where those characters have appeared. But I wanted my game to look pretty, so I got a lot of cosmetic mods for it. Similarly, I still haven't finished Cyberpunk 2077, but I've played a lot of Cyberpunk 2077. Most of the mods I installed there were to do things like replace some of the ads in the game with anime memes, to add radio stations, to add like cosmetic content to the game. [00:33:49] Speaker B: So we're gonna bring this game back in a minute because it's the most modded game pretty much, period. But one of the most famous mods that I can remember thinking of when you started talking about this comes from Skyrim. And it's replacing all the dragons with stretched out things of Macho Man, Randy Savage. [00:34:08] Speaker A: Yes. [00:34:08] Speaker C: I was thinking Thomas the Tank, Thomas the Tank Engine, Train Engine or whatever [00:34:15] Speaker A: all of those cosmetic mods are. I want my game to play the same, but I want it to look different. They're the easiest type of mod to make. Like, you do not need to be a master programmer to make those. You just need to learn the file structure and how to replace the model or texture or whatever it is. It's. Yeah, it's. It's skins in League of Legends, but instead of paying real money for it, you download them from Nexus mods or [00:34:41] Speaker B: you make them yourself if you're good enough. Yes, it is not easy to make high quality skins. [00:34:47] Speaker C: Would you say, Jack, in the slightest that cosmetic mods improve your immersion or do you think it would ruin it Kind of ruins the developers like original artistic vision. [00:34:58] Speaker A: It can do both. And it depends on what kind of mods you choose and on the game you're playing. My example. Yes. And what game you're playing. In my example of Cyberpunk 2077, the AD replacers that I chose were specifically intended to be like, styled like they would belong in the world of Cyberpunk 2077. There are other mods that do the same thing, but aren't as lore friendly. That's the term modders use when they're doing things that are intended to look like they belong in the vanilla game. I deliberately chose Lore friendly visual modifications so I could have my version of Cyberpunk be a little more anime, but still feel like Cyberpunk 2077 kind of [00:35:43] Speaker C: catering it to your personal. Like what you want. [00:35:46] Speaker A: Yes. If I wanted, I could have changed my cyberpunk to have all sorts of crazy mods that completely changed the look and feel of the game. I could have used Reshade and made it more cel shaded. If I wanted, I could have replaced all the ads with things that aren't lore friendly and made it just wacky. I wasn't interested in that. And in a similar vein, even though I've installed a whole bunch of wackier costumes in Final Fantasy VII Remastered remade, I haven't made any changes that really detract from the game. Like the worst is my character looks a little silly in cutscenes and really detract from the game. [00:36:23] Speaker B: On this note, I want to put out not an advertisement, but an advertisement essentially. We've talked about Warframe before. One of the things that Warframe does, and this is very awesome. [00:36:35] Speaker A: Tennogen. [00:36:36] Speaker B: Tennogen. If you are skilled enough, if you meet the minimum standard quality that they require of it, you can make a skin and sell it. You can only do this through their Steam version because they have their own independent version, its own client. But you are allowed to make money making skins for that game. [00:36:56] Speaker A: And that is a live service game. So that's more like if you could make skins in wow. And sell them. [00:37:01] Speaker B: Exactly. Or skins in league, etc. This is something that is super fucking cool. [00:37:05] Speaker C: I was gonna say. I think that's awesome. And more games should incorporate that. [00:37:09] Speaker B: It's very rare to see anybody give up that free money that. [00:37:13] Speaker A: But also it's. It takes a special kind of game to have it to where they're able to find that balance of actually being able to curate that minimum quality level, which is important for something like that, without it being the developers of the game picking the winning and losing mods, which is what Bethesda's attempts to make monetized Skyrim mods have been, essentially. [00:37:36] Speaker C: What would you. How would your opinion be of like your eyes only cosmetic changes? So we've talked about League. There's some goofy cosmetic changes out there. And then there was cosmetic changes where it just changed the map and what it looks like. [00:37:54] Speaker A: We had Kaylaer on last week and she talked about Deadlock. She uses cosmetic mods in Deadlock that just change what characters look like on her end and do not affect what other people see at all. [00:38:06] Speaker B: Technically speaking, in any competitive game in which you go and intentionally change things, that is considered a bannable offense because you can do things with the visuals to give yourself competitive advantages. That was not happy with that. Now if you like theoretically, if you could prove that your thing isn't doing it, you could submit a thing to get an exception. But most highly competitive games do not want you doing that client side because of that reason and they have a blanket ban on most of them for that reason. They don't want you doing it. However, 90% of the time they can't really tell if you're doing that. [00:38:49] Speaker C: Yeah, I got one more cosmetic game I want to mention. I mentioned it earlier. Minecraft. Minecraft is another game that gets huge cosmetic upgrades with mods. Like from going from your blocky textures to 100% just realistic world textures. And they do so good. [00:39:10] Speaker A: And also one of the easiest for someone to like get started modding themselves if they want to just make their own texture pack for Minecraft. The technical bar to do that is really low making. [00:39:23] Speaker C: And I think you can sell them, [00:39:25] Speaker A: I believe so it's another game you [00:39:27] Speaker C: could sell the texture cuts, the bedrock [00:39:29] Speaker A: version, the Java version, not so much. So the next step up from cosmetic mods. Cosmetic mods are like changing how your game looks. There's a whole category of mods that change how your game feels without actually changing like the gameplay part of it. [00:39:47] Speaker B: Your instruments are the same. [00:39:48] Speaker A: UI mods. Yes, yes, exactly. So these are UI mods And I think WoW and Skyrim are like the poster childs of UI mods. [00:39:57] Speaker B: Pretty much, yeah. [00:39:59] Speaker A: And I want to start with you Mike, because you said you use very few mods in WoW and that blows my mind. What is your experience with WOW add ons? [00:40:08] Speaker B: So I am, for the most part I am a mod purist. I do not like using mods in most games. I like to experience games as they're originally created. And most of the time I don't continuously go back to games often enough to actually give a shit about modded games. I don't play them multiple times to do modded versions of them, etc. There are a couple games I continue to play on and off, but most of the time I don't end up going back to do things. I don't use many WOW mods in comparison to most people who play wow. And I did not use any WOW mods until I was forced to use them when I joined a raiding guild for Wrath. That means that while I was raiding in the previous two expansions, I did not use them. That is not common. That is very not common. Now I am going to talk about two separate eras of WOW here. Because there is the previous era and there is the current era. [00:41:03] Speaker A: Okay. [00:41:04] Speaker B: Because what you could do with UI mods has changed drastically in their code, explicitly. [00:41:12] Speaker A: Because they've changed the rules so many times, often because people broke the game with mods that were too powerful. [00:41:21] Speaker B: People started making ways around the mechanics that you were facing in bosses with mods. Famously, famously with the final boss of Warlords, when you were facing Archimonde. [00:41:35] Speaker A: Oh, it happened way sooner than that and way worse than what you're facing. [00:41:38] Speaker B: Yes, there were other ones that did that, but that is the one that really got the most spotlight for an immediate change that they had to make to the game code to never allow it to happen again. [00:41:50] Speaker A: I'm wanting you to explain what you mean, because the example I have is from Wrath of the Lich King and is much more extreme than I think what you're about to describe. [00:41:58] Speaker B: I'm trying to remember which one you're talking about. [00:42:01] Speaker A: All right, I'll start then. In Wrath of the Lich King, Add on developers figured out ways to use the APIs to draw on the screen. To draw in the actual 3D environment, they made an add on that would draw on the floor where the danger zone was going to be on your screen in a way that Blizzard decided trivialized the game to the point where they disabled the API entirely. They just said this add on is not allowed to exist. Addons like it are not allowed to exist. However, if you played WoW back then and then continued playing WoW afterwards, you may have noticed that the telegraphing of boss abilities got a lot better after Wrath. Because Blizzard realized that if they didn't make the visual language of their game more clear, people would find another way to do this. [00:43:01] Speaker B: I had forgotten about that actually. Just straight up forgotten about that. [00:43:05] Speaker A: I figured because that is the most extreme example I think has ever been in wow. [00:43:10] Speaker B: Because the other one with Archimonde was the game always knows positions. Position A, position B, position C, etc. Etc. With that game and that mod, you could perfectly coordinate, perfectly coordinate a set of groups of 20 people to perfectly dodge a mechanic every time, no matter what. And it was, no, we can't let you have absolute positioning because knowing absolute positioning means anything that requires you to move in a certain way, in, out, dodge, etc. Becomes trivialized by your add on saying left, left, left, left, left, stop. [00:43:50] Speaker A: So I remember an earlier version of that where it basically created like a. A top down overlay map of your raid with circles around the people that Needed to get apart from each other or get together so that you could more easily like make sure you were far enough away from people. I remember that there's still, I want [00:44:11] Speaker C: to say during Cataclysm there still is. And I can't speak for reason. I haven't played much this expansion. There are like range finders that have since been disabled. There's add ons like weak auras. There was weakauras, deadly boss mods, all those, they will put like markers on your raid's head. It's like this guy is positive, this guy's negative, you know, charging. I'm thinking like Thaddeus from Naxramas and they're like, you go to this side. Speaking of like to backpack off of the wrath, making more things like just telegraphed and easier. They've done doubled down on that in this current expansion from my understanding. And I can't, you know, go off experience. That's what Mike's here for. They've recently like went like. What's the word I'm looking for? They've really put the hammer down on add ons and gameplay assist add ons like deadly boss mods, weak auras, all of those. They implemented their own in the game. Now there's their own damage meters, their own boss mods because. And due to that, I'm sorry. And due to that they have made the fights so much more simple. Like they, they got games got. Or like the raids got so complicated with their mechanics that it was almost. You had to have weak auras. It had to go on to the Wago site and get the weak aura, install it and run all of this to even have a chance at like completing a boss fight. Because like it was just so complicated. [00:46:03] Speaker B: The highest tier of rating, the very first progression. So some of the race to World first, that stuff that is actually like an industry in its own. Those people who were in those races in previous years, not necessarily as much in the last two or three, but in like four or five years ago, many of the races came down to who has a better add on squad, who can make a better string of things that will help us figure out these, these bosses faster. And because of that, Blizzard continuously had to go, all right, well we know you're going to have this technology available to you. So we need to be able to up this way and then we need to bring it up to this scale. And bosses got getting more and more complex and difficult because they were trying to make challenges for people. Because this Race to World first was an industry and people's livelihoods depended upon it. Multiple sets of things were there for it. And it is actually really fucking cool to watch Medic again, someone we've talked about several times. Medic is one of the commentators for it and it's really interesting to watch. But within this last set of an expansion in the last year and a half or so, they've gone. You know what, the amount of add ons that the base level person is required to have now because of these things is insane. We should not be requiring people to take outside interference to play the game. So these functionalities that you saw in many of these things, there are base versions of that. We're bringing them into the game because we feel you should not need to leave the game to download other software to get this base functionality. Certain things, extended boss mods, visual mods, in a lot of cases they're still good with that. Take them, do them. Things that read game script are nos. Anytime people figure out how to do that, a lot of the times those race to world first people, they will poke the developers and go, hey, we found out we can do this and the developers will give a yeah, okay, we left that open for you. Or a no, don't do that, that's a bug. And that's a really hefty thing for them because they really want you to be able to play the game. [00:48:11] Speaker C: World of Warcraft is like the king of UI mods. Like if you think UI mods, it's World of Warcraft all the way through to everything. Which, you know, it comes down to telling you like if you really have to depend on an outside person creating a mod to make your game better. Like you should be ashamed that you like let this go for 10 years and had people require on this UI mod and you didn't just fix it and make it standalone in your game, which they started to do a little bit. [00:48:44] Speaker B: Certain things were considered required and certain things were. We don't think that's a requirement. People are doing this because they like how it looks more and some of them totally needed to be brought in way earlier. [00:48:55] Speaker C: Well, things like I think about like bartender, bartender, add on where it came in edit mode. Now you can actually finally move your bars and edit them and place them how you want and you don't require an add on for it. Like why did it take them so long to let people customize their game a little bit? [00:49:14] Speaker B: That was actually a functionality a little while ago. Like they put small bits and pieces of this in much earlier but people didn't bother to do it because they already had Bartender or other things. So things like the bar move thing that's been available for six, seven years because they wanted you to. [00:49:30] Speaker C: I'm talking about the most, most recent like edit mode where you can move your charact icons, you can move your. Where your cast bar goes. That should have already been implemented really [00:49:43] Speaker B: is the big thing. The move anything mod essentially is what they decided to add in there because most of the time people want to change things up. Bartender is one of the big things is how people see their game. I was always a very purist on this. Like I use regularly 7 mods because most of those mods are required of me. I think I have two mods that I use for my own system. One because I like how it does stuff with my post and one because it has a direct number of how long I have played the game. And I find that funny. [00:50:15] Speaker A: Okay. [00:50:16] Speaker B: It's multiple years by the way. Multiple years. [00:50:19] Speaker C: Auctionator. We got Auctionator or tsm. [00:50:23] Speaker B: It's called Account Played. All it does is give me the. [00:50:25] Speaker C: No, I'm talking for your. Do you have anything for the auction house? [00:50:28] Speaker B: Not a bit. [00:50:29] Speaker A: That's insane. [00:50:30] Speaker C: Yeah, I have to have Auctionator or tsm but I like doing flips on the auction house. [00:50:36] Speaker A: I'm how you play wow at like a raider level and have so few [00:50:43] Speaker B: add ons in a mythic level. I have never once used a bartender add on. I like the base system now. [00:50:51] Speaker C: I'm with you on that. I was always a purist for like. I like the classic look how it looked as far as like. I like where the bars were. [00:50:59] Speaker A: No. I have a question for you, Mike. [00:51:02] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:51:03] Speaker A: What role do you play in your raids? [00:51:05] Speaker B: Yes, I standardly play as a DPS now. I have been main tank during the high day of adds of add ons and I was a healer in my beginning of add on phase in Wrath and Cata. [00:51:22] Speaker A: I. I refuse to believe that you were ever an effective healer in a raid without some sort of raid UI add on. Because the stock raid UI especially back then was so fucking bad back then. [00:51:40] Speaker B: When I very first joined, I didn't start doing healing until Wrath and Kata. [00:51:47] Speaker A: The stock Raid UI in Wrath and Cata I did not utilize it. It was so bad. [00:51:53] Speaker B: Every time I loaded into a healer I had a very specific thing that popped up only during dungeons and raids that allowed me to do healing. So I had healed bot. [00:52:02] Speaker A: Okay, okay. That, that. I feel a lot better then because I was like There is no way you played a healer in that era of WOW at any kind of raid level. Not even like high end raid, just being in a raid and didn't use some sort of addon that default was. [00:52:19] Speaker B: That was my first time, my first time learning that was going oh, this is insane, I don't want to do this. And I was playing the most simple healer you can play which was Shaman Chain Heal forever. [00:52:29] Speaker A: Yes. [00:52:32] Speaker B: But a lot of that functionality was brought in almost first out of any of these major add on things because they realized oh wow, touch to click on a lot of things. People are either writing macros or getting an add on for this. We need to bring this into the game where you can click to cast. And so that is actually I think the first thing that Blizzard implemented was click to cast. [00:52:55] Speaker A: And honestly I'm explain what click to cast means. [00:52:57] Speaker B: So as opposed to normally when you do games work with here you press your button and either you are targeted on something so it automatically casts or you click it and then you click on a target to do it. Click to cast means I only use my mouse and based on which buttons I'm holding while I'm casting and I click. Whether that be the right click, the left click mouse button 5 or if I'm holding shift during all of these different spells will cast when I click on a character's UI bubble essentially and it will automatically target them with whatever spell I have assigned it to that [00:53:35] Speaker C: dot that is click oh mouseover. Like mouse over mouse over macrons. Yes, yeah, yeah. That's required as a healer. You got to be able to do mouse over macros. [00:53:44] Speaker A: There's no way to play it without [00:53:46] Speaker B: it is just too bad it is so complicated and you do not have the time to consistently be clicking through people and pressing buttons. You do not have the thought bandwidth and the speed. [00:53:59] Speaker A: It is the difference between trying to use multiple skills in Diablo 2 and trying to use multiple skills in Path of Exile. [00:54:07] Speaker C: I tried healing as a druid once. [00:54:09] Speaker B: Very complicated. [00:54:10] Speaker C: I'm not doing it. I am not doing that. [00:54:12] Speaker A: Not touching that with with a good RAID ui. Resto Druid was a lot of fun. I had more fun with that than I did with Resto Shaman. [00:54:19] Speaker B: Oh, Resto Shaman. His son's become much more fun. But yeah, Resto Druid is incredibly fun to play. Did that in Legion. [00:54:25] Speaker C: I think that's when I played it for. I did Disc Priest in Legion. [00:54:30] Speaker A: I think we've Talked plenty about WoW mods at this point. Pretty much we're kind of going on a tangent. [00:54:35] Speaker B: Yes, we've. We've. We've pretty much covered the entire gamut of UI mods with just talking about. Wow. [00:54:39] Speaker A: Right. So before we move on from UI mods, I wanted to touch on. So I still have yet to really start Skyrim. However, I've got a set of Skyrim mods installed waiting for me to start playing the game. And when I've talked to multiple different people who play Skyrim a lot and love Skyrim, the one consistent answer I got from all of them was, you have to install Quickloot. Quickloot is a mod that makes it so the UI for looting corpses is a lot better. That's all it does. It's just a mod to make the UI not suck. [00:55:20] Speaker B: Now you've got me curious. [00:55:22] Speaker A: Skyrim is kind of a weird one. I think we're going to talk a lot more about Skyrim in our next category. But I think it's funny that Blizzard has gone so far to, like, incorporate a lot of elements of popular UI mods over the years. Bethesda did that once when they made Skyrim Special Edition. They incorporated some of mods that existed into their main game. And then I've just kind of been like, yeah, so, like, have at it. We're not doing shit. Despite the fact that they keep releasing new versions of Skyrim to this day. [00:55:56] Speaker B: Despite that fact. [00:55:57] Speaker A: Yeah, that's the key is it's not like they were like, oh, this game's done, we're moving on. No, they literally released a new version of Skyrim last year. [00:56:06] Speaker B: I. As much as it is, I think [00:56:08] Speaker C: we talked about it. [00:56:09] Speaker B: Wow. Yeah. That. You think I didn't do mods. I have zero mods in Skyrim. Never installed a single one over 100 hours in that game. [00:56:15] Speaker A: That's crazy. [00:56:16] Speaker C: I do my normal vanilla playthrough and then I can mess with mods like on Skyrim, like the unlimited weight, like carrying capacity, the cool survivor, like, ones. [00:56:27] Speaker B: I've. I've never beaten that game. I don't think I've gotten halfway through the story. That game. You get sidetracked so easily on. [00:56:35] Speaker C: But as far as, like, UI mods, I would definitely say I did the upgraded graphics before they did it themselves. This thing to make the game look more polished, you got, you know, the better shadows, better ray tracing, you know, just full. Just updating the game's graphics was the biggest mods for me. [00:57:00] Speaker A: So one of the mods I have installed is literally just an HDR mod to make Skyrim HDR Aware and try to color grade the entirety of Skyrim for hdr because Skyrim is old enough. HDR didn't exist yet, but I have a nice OLED monitor and I'd like to enjoy hdr. [00:57:17] Speaker B: I'm surprised the most recent version didn't have it. Either that or it does and you just haven't bothered to pay for it again because why would you pay for it again? [00:57:25] Speaker A: So I did not buy the Anniversary Edition or whatever the most recent release is. I have Skyrim Special Edition because Skyrim Special Edition is the one that all the mods are for. It is the version you should buy if you're looking to play Skyrim on PC. [00:57:38] Speaker B: Also, if you try and get the original version, it likes to break very badly. [00:57:42] Speaker A: Yeah, that too. Special Edition has a lot of just straight up bug fix improvements. [00:57:47] Speaker B: That does not mean it is bug free. You will still find some of the funniest bugs in the world. [00:57:51] Speaker A: Yes, but so let's talk about our last category of mods so we can wrap this up. I want to talk about content mods. These can range from adding a small piece to a game. Like for example, in Cyberpunk 2077 there is a character that is modeled after and voiced by YouTuber Jesse Cox. He is known in the game as Flaming Crotch Man. Yes, Jesse Cox went to CD Projekt Red voiced his character. He's talked about it on his YouTube before, but the character is very clearly modeled after him. Jesse Cox has a romance Mod in Cyberpunk 2077. He did not make this. However, he made some wisecrack about it on like his podcast or something and someone else then went and made a mod that makes Jesse Cox's character a romanceable character within Cyberpunk 2077. The same way that like Judy or River are. Which I think is hilarious and awesome that someone just made this extra content like that didn't exist in the original game. It's new content. It's also just really small and completely irrelevant. It's just funny. And that's just a small example of the kind of shit that people have made as like content expansion modifications. In games. Content mods run the gamut from romancing a character type mods to adding new quests to games to adding new boss fights, to adding whole new regions to explore. Mike the one game you mod heavily, you're mostly doing content mods on. You want to talk about Terraria modding? [00:59:52] Speaker B: The most heavily modded one that I can think of is a Terraria mod. It is the thing that I really enjoy because I finished the Relatura and wanted more and someone went, we got you fucking covered, baby. There is a full set of mods. You need a separate loader to do it because Terraria does not natively support mods. You need a separate mod thing. It works. You can get it through Steam. It's perfectly fine. Tmodloader. And then there is multiple versions of the game that are not just rewrites of most of it, but massive expansions to the game. You will be able to do everything you do in the base game and then some. And then some. The most extensive of these, the one that has raised the bar a lot, has the most difficult content in it, has the most. The most extra content in it is called Calamity. And Calamity more than quadruples the amount of content they have in the game. They add in five or six biomes at the minimum. They add in at least 40 bosses. They add in multiple separate extra tiers of content that we have been talking about. When you talk about tiers of content going through the levels of ores to go up, those are essentially the tiers of content. Multiple sets of extra tiers, multiple serious difficulty ramps, multiple separate weapon types that they've added into the game that didn't exist. If you can think of it, that has been modded, it has been done there. Revamping how you do storage on things. They have a new system for that, they have a bunch more crafting options, etc. Etc. This is my favorite mod. It is my favorite modding community as well. Because I really love Terraria. We've mentioned that a couple times. I'm by far the most experienced in Terraria. I have as much time in Calamity as I do in Terraria. Partially because a run through Calamity takes five or six times as much time. [01:01:51] Speaker A: Yep. So other than just being more, what do these mods add to your Terraria experience? [01:02:00] Speaker B: The few things. So like obviously there's creature comfort or quality of life things. So things like I want to do ore mining faster. Things like if I click the first thing of ore, the entirety of the rest of the ore will get mined. Things like easy grid building where things are locked into very specific grids and you can build in much faster scenarios to things like this is part that's built into this game, which is man Running through 5 billion chests is kind of annoying, isn't it? You forget where things are. Let's make a new storage system that is scalable as you get more and more stuff you can add into the storage system. So it's all in one place and you can do search for it. Easy search mods. Very easy vision things. The things that affect how you see. Especially when you deal with things like going deep underwater and you get darker and darker and darker to environmental hazard mods. They run the gambit. If you think it it has been done there. People can also put in straight UI mods to make things look different. That is a relatively common thing. Skins are basic character model things. There's not really. The one thing I don't think it has is quality. Like high definition versions. No one has made a 32 bit version of this since as opposed to where it is because that sort of defeats the point of the game. But outside of that, I think pretty much every other mod is if not built into Calamity, then very easily accessed through the rest of the mods to add in to your experience in it. [01:03:37] Speaker A: Fair enough. And I kind of want to take this full circle a bit. We're going to go back to Skyrim for a moment. Skyrim has been home to multiple different total conversion mods, many of which were then the thing that caused the developer of these mods to get hired by the company or by a company. It was their resume. There is a mod for Skyrim that is called Enderal, the Shards of Order that is a sequel to a mod for Oblivion that is a full total conversion of Skyrim to do its own story that people apparently like. There is a team making a new the Masquerade game as a mod to Skyrim. I am not kidding by the way. It's not out yet, but they are making a mod for Skyrim that they reached out to the rights holders for Paradox Interactive granted them the rights to use the the Masquerade ip. They wanted to remake Vampire the Masquerade Redemption but Activision would not let them do that. So they're making an officially licensed the Masquerade total conversion mod that is inspired by the Masquerade Redemption. [01:05:02] Speaker B: Fuck. I'm going to have to download a Skyrim mod and I'm not going to be a purist anymore. [01:05:06] Speaker C: Right? [01:05:07] Speaker A: Which is. That's fucking crazy. There's also projects to remake Morrowind and Oblivion within Skyrim, which is insane. [01:05:18] Speaker C: That would be awesome. [01:05:20] Speaker A: They're both in development. No idea when they'll ever actually come out. [01:05:26] Speaker C: And you can definitely count on when they do come out. There would have already been an updated re released version of Skyrim at some point near then. [01:05:35] Speaker A: So here's the other thing that I think is important. Oblivion Remastered happened last year. It was released in 2025. Bethesda explicitly said that they have no intentions to do anything about skyblivion, which is the Skyrim remake of Oblivion mod that is in development. As a matter of fact, Bethesda gave their entire mod team free keys to Oblivion Remastered. So kudos to Bethesda for not doing what Nintendo did with AM2R and instead going, this does compete with our product, but we are okay with you anyway. Which is crazy. And regardless of how you feel about Bethesda otherwise, you have to respect that. [01:06:24] Speaker B: And yeah, but as much as I think that is phenomenal, do not forget they are not in the same country as their base thing. So their laws are different. [01:06:34] Speaker A: Yes, but then also there has been a whole bunch of content mods for Skyrim that are not total conversions, but are things that are huge. Like expansion DLC type things. Yeah, essentially there's. There's one from 2012 that had. Terry Pratchett wrote some stuff for it called Dilja. I am not kidding. There's one from 2013 that has 26 new quests on a new continent and the creator got hired by Bungie in 2015 based on this. [01:07:06] Speaker B: That might be one of the last things Turk Pratchett wrote. He died not long after that, I think. [01:07:11] Speaker A: So there's a standalone adventure that eventually got made into a standalone game later, but it was a mod first for Skyrim. There's all sorts of crazy stuff people have made that are tons of new content for the game. Like actually straight up DLCs for the game. Skyrim isn't even the only game that's gotten this. There's been fan DLCs for all sorts of games. Heroes of might and Magic 3 has a fan DLC. I see Mike making a face. You didn't know that, did you? [01:07:46] Speaker B: I didn't know about it, but I don't think I would have gotten it even if I did. [01:07:51] Speaker A: I mean, that's fair. But yeah. So you're aware there is something called Horn of the Abyss which is a fan made expansion pack for Heroes of Might and Magic 3. It has new towns, new campaigns and scenarios, quality of life changes, all sorts of shit. It is a full blown expansion pack that fans made for Heroes of Might and Magic three, which is insane. I love content mods. They're some of the most creative shit that anyone on the Internet has ever made. [01:08:26] Speaker C: And I usually do it for free. [01:08:28] Speaker A: Almost always. [01:08:29] Speaker B: Almost all of them are required to do it for free. Otherwise they are competing in license. [01:08:35] Speaker C: True. [01:08:38] Speaker A: It's a labor of love and also very much a resume to become hired as a game dev. [01:08:43] Speaker B: Yeah, a lot of these people are trying to become developers and this is how they're doing their resume with them. Or they're just that passionate about this one thing, they want to show more. [01:08:55] Speaker A: The key is if you make an indie game just from the ground up, A, that's really hard, but B, most likely your game's never going to get noticed. No one's going to have played it. A game that no one has played is not an effective foot in the door to get a job. So the path very much is you either become so successful that you're the next Stardew Valley guy and you're independently wealthy now, or no one notices you. So how are you going to use it to market yourself? If it's a game that 30 people [01:09:30] Speaker B: played, there is, there is another portion of that and that is a lot of people aren't capable at every faction of game design. And modding allows you to circumvent certain other aspects of design. You're not great at art. Cool. All the assets are already in there. You're not great at bit to bit programming. Cool. You can just do dev tools to create something within the systems and not have to go in and code every bit. [01:09:53] Speaker C: Yeah. Tying in Jax's indie game comment. Your indie game might not get noticed, but your content mod that gets three and a half million downloads and is praised, that will get highly noticed very quickly. [01:10:09] Speaker A: That that's the key is if you make a mod for a game that is popular to mod, the pool of people you're competing with for eyeballs is a lot smaller. And those people who are potentially looking at your thing are a lot more interested. The people who mod Skyrim for additional content are ravenous for additional content in Skyrim. They want all sorts of new shit they want. Those people often have multiple installs of Skyrim for different sets of mods. So it's really easy to get into that audience and get your game seen by 10,000 people or enough to where you can then go to a game dev when you apply to work for them and be like, I made this thing that 10,000 people have played. Cool. That's a great foot in the door. [01:10:57] Speaker B: One of my teachers when we were doing game dev in school, he was a personal developer. He had made a game as well that was on Steam at the time, back when Steam was not big. So being on Steam was A big thing, even if your game was not massive. His response was, hey, cool, I have a thing here. If you beat it, talk to me. I'm not going to make anyone download this. If you want to download it and I see you beat it, I'll give you your money back. It was a $5 game. None of us ever beat it. But he had so little traction that he wanted people to see the game. And he is already a developer. He is in the door. [01:11:34] Speaker A: Yep. [01:11:35] Speaker B: Making your own game from a not easy. [01:11:38] Speaker A: That's the same reason people become YouTubers or podcasters. Sometimes you just want to create something and put it out into the world and you want to experience that thing you created. Modding is a great way to do that, to actually get more eyeballs on your thing you made than if you make something original where it's very much feast or famine. There's a million games coming out every day nowadays. It's really hard to get noticed. [01:12:01] Speaker C: And Steve does a pretty good job at putting stuff on the front, like giving you options and like making certain games that normally wouldn't be seen pop up on a front page. Maybe not every time, but whenever you refresh your page, it might be like, hey, check out this game that just came out. It's as you said, though. [01:12:20] Speaker B: I had to go back and look. I found the game that he played. I'm not gonna advertise it because I don't feel like I should, but I found that he has also since made four more games. Did not know that. Haven't heard of any single one of them. [01:12:32] Speaker A: So fair enough. [01:12:33] Speaker B: It is not. This is a person who knows multiple individual games to their title. I've heard of none of them. It is not easy to see any of them. I've never even seen them on like a page or anything else. This is, mmm, definitely not easy to see your foot in the door. [01:12:49] Speaker A: I mean, even if we just want to go back to what I was talking about earlier. Have you ever heard of Towerfall? [01:12:55] Speaker B: Yes. [01:12:56] Speaker A: Do you know what Towerfall is? [01:12:58] Speaker C: Not me. [01:12:59] Speaker B: It has been so long since I've heard. I know the name. I do not know anything about it. [01:13:03] Speaker A: Towerfall is an earlier game made by Matty Thorson. That was her first commercial release. [01:13:08] Speaker B: That is how I know it. You've talked about it before. I know, I've heard. [01:13:13] Speaker A: Didn't get really any traction. It got traction in game developer circles, but no one really played it. Most of the sales of Towerfall that have happened happened after Celeste came out and Maddie became very Famous. It is what it is. So speaking of it is what it is, let's talk about what the fuck we've been up to this past couple weeks. Cuz it's been wild for some of us apparently. Pillow, you've been quiet. You don't have a lot on your list, but I'm hoping you can bounce off Vars a little bit. Well, last episode we talked about something that you didn't get to participate in. So you want to share yours now? [01:13:51] Speaker B: Oh my word, yes. [01:13:52] Speaker C: Yeah, so I picked my nine games. It was very easy. Starting from the top I put I got Ocarina of Time and I mean I think I've talked about it enough on here that I don't need to re explain it but that that game is my childhood and then the sequel right after that, Majora's Mask. I got that on my list just because those two games, if I went [01:14:23] Speaker A: back and was a strong word, I would call that a spin off alternate. [01:14:29] Speaker B: It is technically a direct sequel. [01:14:31] Speaker C: Yeah it is technically a one of the timeline splits. Direct sequel on the timeline, but that's on there. If I was to go back in time when these games were pretty popular or just came out, you could almost guarantee I'd be sitting playing one of these games. And then I get into the Blizzard arc. I got World of Warcraft. Talked about it plenty of times. Even when I put in World of Warcraft in my nine games. Seeing the original cover art brought back so much nostalgia. It's. I've met several great people on there, continue to meet great people on there, continue to talk, people I've met there. I've met up with people from across the country on there and hung out with them. It's been just a great tool of just expanding my social life to other than just my local hometown and just learning more about people or like other other places. Next I got Starcraft. It was one of my first RTS games that I just fell in love with and I think we know Starcraft is one of the best RTS games out there. Then in there I got Diablo. [01:15:49] Speaker A: Interesting. You and I both had original Starcraft on our list, but I chose Brood War and you chose Starcraft. I was that intentional or did you think about Brood War? [01:16:01] Speaker C: I kind of just tied them in all together. [01:16:03] Speaker A: Okay. [01:16:03] Speaker C: Myself. [01:16:04] Speaker A: When you say Starcraft, you mean like the Starcraft battle chest as a whole? [01:16:08] Speaker B: Kind of. [01:16:08] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. And I mean when I get to Warcraft 3, I'll go ahead and talking next. You know the. For me the battle passes in there or the battle chest is in there. All of them. From Reign of Chaos up to the Frozen Throne and even now the current new one. I love that one as well. Warcraft 3 was another RTS that I just absolute fell in love with. It was just so much fun as a child to play that and it just let my imagination just run wild. An RTS did especially in like the Starcraft. And back to cheat codes a little bit. You could have fun with cheat codes in these games for sure. Next game, Diablo 2. And I'm including all the expansions when I talk about it because they were all just great additions to the game. It was so much fun. This is one of the first, I guess you would kind of call it mmo, but not really. It was an MMO in its own right. [01:17:11] Speaker A: It had MMO elements because there was a whole like community if you wanted to engage with it, of people who would like create instances that with people they met on battle.net to go and do trades or go farm bosses and that kind of stuff. This is the beginning of proto mmo. [01:17:27] Speaker C: It's. Yeah, it's like right in there. I think it was like limited to what like 10 people a map or something? 8. You do like cow runs and tryst runs and you meet people and back then the Internet wasn't as talk successful like it is today. It was a pretty really good community and if it was a talk successful I never ran into it. [01:17:49] Speaker B: Well, those people were very quickly not allowed in a lot of other things. So you didn't go back. [01:17:54] Speaker A: Yeah, this was the era before matchmaking. If you ruined your reputation, you just couldn't find servers to play on anymore. [01:18:01] Speaker C: Yeah, you'd get immediately kicked, you'd get blacklisted. So Diablo 2 was great. It was one of the first games that I can remember sitting down like online and playing with my friends and enjoying leveling up at learning the game without guides and just playing the game as intended. Before the Internet ruined Internet games in my opinion. Next I go into Perfect Dark. It was just one of those childhood games I just loved playing. I love doing like the custom matches and going around and playing against computers and doing all the missions and finding all the hidden secrets. And on this next on my list I got Conquerors Bad Fur Day. I've talked about it in the past. It's just. It was just an awesome game. An awesome game. It felt illegal to play it as a kid because it probably should have been. It was just an awesome, just an amazingly comedic game that had jokes That I didn't understand. All I understood was the sunflower had big boobs. And I will remember that forever. And then the last on my list, I have Pokemon Crystal. Specifically Pokemon Crystal version Gen 2 was my favorite Pokemon game. And I can't explain why. I think I like the cartridge the way it looked, to be honest. [01:19:31] Speaker B: It was cool as shit. [01:19:32] Speaker C: It was a cool cartridge from the [01:19:34] Speaker A: peak era of like semi transparent plastic for games and game boys and all sorts of. Okay. Did you play Pokemon Crystal on a Play It Loud Game Boy? [01:19:46] Speaker C: What's a Play It Loud Game Boy? [01:19:48] Speaker A: The ones that had the like colorful transparent plastic. [01:19:51] Speaker C: No, I played it on a advance. [01:19:54] Speaker A: Some of the game had that too. [01:19:56] Speaker B: I doubt you had one. They didn't show up in the early ones. [01:19:59] Speaker C: Yeah, I don't. I don't remember exactly. I wish I remembered what my advance. But I do remember I had a red sp and that was fun. I played it on my SP as well. Gen 2 Pokemon is my favorite Pokemon. Just hands down. That's when the first day of night cycles came in. You know, I specifically remember the. This is where you could get in the lottery and get like another Master ball. You weren't tied to just one master ball in a game. You could lottery yourself in a second. You had to come in and get on your games at certain times to be able to do certain things. Like the bug contest, the radio station, you know, the lottery on the radio station. It was all at certain times and it went based off of the time. Whatever you put into your Game Boy, it just ran off of that. It was just so much more fun and more involved. You got to go back to Gen 1 area. It was just this is my favorite generation Crystal, specifically. I mean Suakin or however you pronounce it is a great Pokemon. [01:21:03] Speaker B: Anyway, you talking about your games immediately makes me realize like, fuck, I definitely forgot something that should have been on that list. But I don't know what I would have replaced. [01:21:13] Speaker A: So I think it's funny Mike and I picked games that ran a pretty wide range of like time frames for what's influenced us, ranging from early childhood to games that influenced us in adulthood. Every single one of the games on your list is from the timeframe of 1997 through 2004. [01:21:34] Speaker C: Yeah, I'm a nostalgia game player. Like I don't get into a whole lot of new games and I mean, I think, you know, I don't play a lot of like the new games you talk about. I have never played Half Life. None of those games I've never played any of those games. I've never played, like, BioShock. [01:21:50] Speaker A: Okay. [01:21:50] Speaker C: My. My games are very much based off [01:21:53] Speaker B: when I was a kid, that era. [01:21:56] Speaker C: But I'm saying, like, I didn't have, like, I had a Nintendo 64. I had a Nintendo D or advance and the SP and all that, like Game Boy. I was a Nintendo guy. Then I moved into Xbox eventually, and that's when I fell in love with like, the Bethesda games and Halo. And then I was Microsoft all the way up to Xbox One. And then I finally bought a PlayStation 4 at some point and a Switch. You know, I've always been a Nintendo player at heart, and those games are my nostalgia. I don't play modern games. I just. I enjoy the nostalgia in my old games. [01:22:36] Speaker B: That's my safe place was the orange box for Xbox. I remember it as PC. [01:22:42] Speaker A: It definitely had an Xbox release. Yes. [01:22:44] Speaker B: So it's probably a later thing, but like, it was definitely 360 era at that point. [01:22:49] Speaker C: You know, it's. It's definitely a game that I would have probably enjoyed. But, you know, a lot of these times I had to spend my own money on these games. So I went with the sure thing that I knew that I was gonna like and that was gonna be right in that alley of those games that I trusted from being a kid. [01:23:07] Speaker B: I'm betting you didn't have as many intense gamer friends as Jax and I did. [01:23:13] Speaker C: No. [01:23:13] Speaker B: That you immerse yourself in the game life. Yeah. [01:23:16] Speaker C: I was a action role player type of game. I really liked the adventure games. That's. That's where I went from for. [01:23:24] Speaker B: There are still some things that I'm astounded you have never played. But like, you. You play so many little mobile things, and I'm like, wow, man, you have so much potential to find things. [01:23:34] Speaker A: I think it's salty that I'm learning that you never played the original Half Life. Now, as the sale has just ended, [01:23:42] Speaker C: I will put them up. I have so many. I have so many games in my Steam level. [01:23:47] Speaker A: I am buying you the original Half Life and making you at least play [01:23:50] Speaker C: it for a little bit. I. I need to. In life is so crazy for me right now. And when we get back to me, I'll explain a little bit more. But the main reason, like, life has gotten so busy for me is, and it's gonna hopefully slow down here in the next month or so is I am at this point, hopefully by the next time we record or the next time the recording comes out, I'M moved into my new house. Like, I am that close. I'm within two, two weeks, two, three weeks of this house being done and me being in. And I'll probably be AWOL from podcasts for a few weeks. Probably not this one because it's bi weekly. But I My life has just been so busy lately. [01:24:31] Speaker B: There's a definite possibility that because of your current hectic life, you will not be around for the next couple sets of podcasts. If we have time problems, [01:24:43] Speaker A: it's okay. It's not like I got a shortage of friends to invite on as guests. However, you're not allowed to miss the episode where we talk about wow, Forever. [01:24:50] Speaker C: No, I'm. I'm anticipating that one. And that was. [01:24:54] Speaker A: That'll be in like two episodes from now. [01:24:56] Speaker B: It's. [01:24:57] Speaker C: It's gonna be. [01:24:59] Speaker B: Because while forever comes out November 4th, we're definitely going to be playing it on and oot. [01:25:04] Speaker C: We can't. We can't. That is going to be a big episode. [01:25:07] Speaker A: Yep. So that's going to be fun. That's going to be in about a month from now. But in the meantime, Mike, what have you been up to? [01:25:16] Speaker B: So am I going to go through everything, or am I going through just one at a time? [01:25:20] Speaker A: Go for your. Go through your things. [01:25:22] Speaker B: All right, the short one. I've been starting to play a lot more Borderlands 4. It's still incredible, still really fun. I've been starting to do a multiplayer run with one of our listeners, Matthias. He and I have been having a blast doing a multiplayer thing. I started talking about playing again. He's like, damn, I want to try that again. He started playing again. We started a new set of characters together so that we wouldn't have massive disparity. And it's been real fun playing together. It's got the feel of playing with someone from Borderlands 2 that I was searching for. Not quite the comedy hit that Borderlands 2 was. This game is a little bit more serious on some things. It's got a lot more. It's got a lot more interesting of a story, but it doesn't have the same punch that Borderlands 2 did, as I'm playing more and more of it. So I think this might be my second favorite of the Borderlands games. Huge stun. Real, real fun. Happy to play with some other people if they want to join us, too. The other game that I picked up on that massive sale, I wanted to get one of the large games that I've been trying to play, and I'd mentioned Early on that I was doing Metro, I thought Metro was the other game franchise that I was looking for, which was Stalker. And that is the game that. They're both very similar things. We're talking about Russia era stuff going down. Stalker is post Chernobyl stuff and then people going back into that zone for other reasons. Whereas Metro is post apocalypse. Something happened, but you just so happen to be in Russia. Stalker is really fun. Really fun. It is significantly harder than Metro in the sense that Stalker has very, very tight gameplay. Notice things so like you can, you can modify how easy and hard things are. You can do a more story driven one. Stalker is a little bit. Stalker two is a little more story driven than the original one is, but it is very open world to choose your own thing plus quest that's going on. And it's, it's real fun. I'm having a blast. I'm not far in. I'm two hours, three hours in. [01:27:31] Speaker C: Is this online? [01:27:33] Speaker B: No, no. This is not a multiplayer. This is not a multiplayer game. [01:27:36] Speaker C: Okay. Because I was reading like, because it's. It said open world kind of like survival shooter as a description. I'm like, ah, horror game. Sign me up. That's right up my alley. [01:27:47] Speaker B: You may enjoy this. This is a single player game though, so you're gonna find a lot of the experience you'd find in post apocalypse world. Very open world, very survival esque. You have a lot of like. Man, the radiation in this zone is getting to me. I need to take my anti rad pills. [01:28:02] Speaker C: So explain this review to me so I can understand what they're talking about. Skip, skip warn. The economy is absolutely broken. It doesn't take much to become a 1 percenter in the game. Items are distributed random without a thought. You'll find 20 time bread and vodka in a single village. What's the 1 percenter in a game mean? [01:28:23] Speaker B: He's talking about how rich you are. [01:28:25] Speaker A: It's. [01:28:25] Speaker B: You're the one too easy to become [01:28:26] Speaker A: rich in that guy's opinion. [01:28:28] Speaker C: Okay, so this person has. It's not like an online marketplace. [01:28:32] Speaker B: No, no, no, no. He is talking about how he has found so many things and gone back and paid for everything and gotten all the wealth on his own. He is the 1%. He has all the money. This is someone who has intentionally sought out money. It is not. [01:28:46] Speaker C: Gotcha. [01:28:47] Speaker B: Depending on the difficulty you choose, bullets become incredibly scarce. This person probably played a much easier difficulty, so things were more plentiful. I'm playing on the base difficulty, not the easy difficulty. Just the standard one. [01:29:01] Speaker C: Because I'm just glad there's not a marketplace. Because like immediately when I read that review, I was like, oh man, this is just Escape from Target. Markov. [01:29:09] Speaker B: No, no, I haven't actually found. As I said, I'm not terribly far into that. I started doing a bunch of side quests before I continued the beginning quest, which is sort of impressive because the beginning quest, you can start in like 20 minutes and I'm like two hours in and I only just got to the town, so I am yet to actually be able to sell anything. So I don't know if people have limited funds and you can run them out of money like you can in Star Skyrim. People have limited quantities of money. But that may also be what he's talking about. I have bought all of your shit. You have no more money. Give me your stuff. I am the 1%. Haha. [01:29:50] Speaker C: Yeah. When this game goes on sale, I think I'll definitely pick it up. This seems like a game right up my alley. I love single player games. [01:29:57] Speaker A: Fair enough. [01:29:58] Speaker B: And that's me. That's pretty much what I've been doing. [01:30:01] Speaker A: Speaking of single player games, that's most of what I've been up to the last couple weeks. So I'm still playing Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. It's a lot of fun. I did hit the point where I added so many costume mods to the game that something broke and then I had to go through and disable mods until I figured out where the conflict was in order to fix it. For whatever reason, something about one of the mods I installed caused a different costume mod to have half of Aerith's body not have a texture, so she just looks like she was petrified on like one side of her body. I don't know what the fuck I broke, but eventually I found the offending mod, uninstalled it, and everything works again. That was a. That was an adventure. But I'm currently in chapter 10 of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. I'm having a blast. I loving the way they've expanded on the original game in so many different directions simultaneously. The Gold Saucer is awesome, which is a big moment in the original game. I'm not gonna spoil anything, but I'm having a lot of fun and I'm gonna keep playing it. And I'm probably just gonna mention that I played it. I also am still gonna be playing a lot of Super Metroid. Matter of fact, if you tune in to Twitch tv Jacksoman, most of what I'm probably gonna be streaming in the next few weeks is gonna be Super Metroid Map Rando. Because I've entered into a Map Rando tournament and I need to get a little better so I can have a chance of at least winning a round or two in that tournament. That's the goal. We're gonna be starting the actual tournament itself, I think at the end of this month, but it's gonna be fun. I love Super Metroid Map Rando. It's a blast. But holy shit, people are so good at that game and I'm so not. So I need to play more. Speaking of Super Nintendo games though, I also decided to replay one of my childhood faves. It's a niche little game that most people probably have never heard of called Un Squadron. Un Squadron is a typical early 90s side scrolling shoot em up game with a couple of twists. Instead of being like space and aliens, it's like real world ish. You're fighting like airplanes and helicopters and tanks and submarines and stuff like that. And Un Squadron has two systems that make it unique. One is the way life works. In Un Squadron you have a health bar. When you take a hit, you go into danger mode for several seconds depending on the severity of the hit. While you are in danger mode, if you are hit again, you die instantly, regardless of what your remaining health was when Danger mode has expired. So it's like the reverse iframes, although there are also iframes immediately when you get hit, so you can't just get double tapped. When Danger mode expires, your health bar is reduced by however much damage you took. When your health bar runs out, you are in permanent danger mode and the next hit just kills you. I love this. In a shoot em up, it means that the game is massively less punishing of minor mistakes than most shoot em ups are, where it's usually just one hit kills, but also doesn't allow you to just face tank the entire game because you eventually will just hit that danger mode forever because you ran out of health. I think it strikes a really good balance. The other thing Un Squadron does that's really cool is you get money for every enemy you kill for every mission you complete that you can then spend on getting new planes to pilot with different abilities and different weapons that are available to them that you can buy to take on your missions. So the default starting plane has this cluster weapon that just aoes around you. You get three uses of it. Later. Planes get things like you can shoot lightning out, you can shoot homing missiles, you can drop napalm, all sorts of crazy stuff and the game strikes this balance of you want to avoid buying any of these things because they cost your money and you want to save up to get the better plane. But also if you don't buy any of the things, you're making the level harder and you might die, in which case you just will eventually. Game over. UN Squadron is really forgiving for a shoot em up of the era, but in ways that make it interesting and fun. I played through the whole game. I beat it again. I love this game. It might be my favorite SNES era shoot em up period. Like, no qualifiers. It's just that good. It's so good. The other game I have been playing is a Metroidvania that I picked up and I don't know if either of these guys know what the hell this game is, but I picked up a Metroidvania called Flipwitch Forbidden Sex Hex. [01:34:53] Speaker B: I was about to say I definitely saw you playing it. [01:34:57] Speaker A: Yes. Yeah, it's a porn game. But to be fair, it is also a proper Metroidvania with a map to explore, quests to complete, power ups to improve your movement. All of the above. Everything you think about when you think about Metroidvanias with the premise of you're a witch who's trying to defeat an evil witch that's taken over the world and you can swap between being male and female at will, which causes different characters to interact with you differently so you can complete quests or infiltrate cults or whatever it might be. It's fun. It's definitely a porn game, but I gotta respect porn games that are actual video games and not just a visual novel with pornography in it, which is what most of them are. [01:35:44] Speaker B: Every so often one of them will be quite a good visual novel. That's a rarity. [01:35:47] Speaker A: Yeah, and that's fine. I got nothing against those. But I wanted something that was more game and less porn while still being titties. And there are some very fine goblin titties in this game. Yeah, that's what I've been up to. And I think that's gonna be it for this podcast for this week. So guys, join the Discord. Come tell us how stupid we are for not having picked some other game from our childhood. On our nine games. We actually have all of our nine game graphics posted in the Other Games channel if you want to go look at them. Including our special guest from last episode, K Lair. [01:36:22] Speaker B: I'm still getting more fucking ideas from people as they're talking I found another one that I wanted to do as Pillow was talking, and it pisses me off. [01:36:30] Speaker C: Just. [01:36:30] Speaker A: Just ping Mike with games. You think should have been on his nine games so it'll drive him insane. It's funny. [01:36:36] Speaker B: Nine is too small. [01:36:37] Speaker A: But that's the point. Narrowing it down is how you make it interesting. If you just could pick all of your favorite games from your childhood, like, cool, here's 50 games. That doesn't mean anything. Having to narrow it down is what makes it interesting and important. Anyway, guys, we've been from 8 bit to 4k. I've been Jack Zolman, he's Micah. Many names. And he's Pillow Pet. Have a great night, guys. [01:36:59] Speaker C: Good night. [01:37:00] Speaker B: Good night, everybody.