[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to episode 4 of from 8bit to 4k. I'm your host this week. I'm Jack Sohlman and I've got with me two co hosts to talk to you about the world of video games.
We've got Mike of many names.
[00:00:13] Speaker B: How's it going everybody?
[00:00:14] Speaker A: And we've got Pillow Pat.
[00:00:16] Speaker C: Hello. Hello.
[00:00:17] Speaker A: All right guys. We are part of the Four Wards Podcast network. We have a discord. Come join the discord. The link is in the episode description.
We look forward to seeing you there. Talk about games with us. We also have to give a shout out to Codex Ninja Pillow Pet, Skippy as Esquire and Labana for supporting us on Patreon at the Shoutout tier. Thank you guys very much.
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All right guys, what the fuck have you been playing in the past couple weeks?
[00:01:07] Speaker B: Well, well, go, go ahead.
[00:01:11] Speaker C: I'll say I've been kind of busy at work the last couple weeks, but in the meantime while I was work, I found picked up an old mobile game that I started playing again and it's called Sneaky Sasquatch.
[00:01:27] Speaker A: Can you say that again? Because it sounded like Stinky Sasquatch.
[00:01:31] Speaker C: Sneaky Sasquatch.
[00:01:33] Speaker A: Okay, so my listeners can actually find it if this sounds interesting.
[00:01:37] Speaker C: The game starts.
It's an apple arcade. The game starts and you are a Sasquatch in a park and you have critters at your friend that are your friends and you're sneaking around the park trying not to get caught by the ranger who sends you all the way back to the start. When you get caught, you're sneaking around stealing food because food is your energy and there's quests in it. It's like a, it's like a legitimately decently graphic game too for mobile game. And you get quests and you can buy like outfits to blend in with the humans at the park.
And then you know, there's a quest that you save the park and then you get a ranger outfit so you no longer have to fear the rangers. And then you learn that there's a Whole other town that you go to that you become a police officer for or a firefighter or a doctor and earn money and buy an apartment and live in the city.
And then there's mountains where you can ski.
There's an island where you can.
Excuse me, fish.
There's just so much to do on this little, little game that's free with Apple Arcade.
And I. When I got back on it, I realized that I have like over a hundred hours on this mobile game between all my files. It's like a. It's like a life sim for Sasquatch. If you could.
[00:03:10] Speaker B: Okay. Life sim. I was about to ask what kind of a genre it was.
[00:03:13] Speaker C: It's not really even like a. Like, I wouldn't even call it like a life sim, but kind of is like you get job, you can earn money, you can steal, steal food, sell the food to a bear who buys the food. You go fishing.
It's just like a really good time sink. Like if you're looking for sitting in a doctor's office or somewhere where you just want to pull out your phone and there you go, you're playing the game and then next thing you know, two hours goes by.
[00:03:40] Speaker A: I'm. I'll be honest, I'm just disappointed that this is an Apple only mobile game.
[00:03:45] Speaker C: Yeah. I don't know if they've went past Apple, but I'll say, yeah, it's.
[00:03:50] Speaker A: It does.
[00:03:51] Speaker C: It's fun.
[00:03:52] Speaker A: I looked it up.
[00:03:52] Speaker C: I'm enjoying it.
[00:03:53] Speaker A: It sounds interesting, but I don't have hardware that can run it. Oh, well.
[00:03:58] Speaker B: Oh, well.
[00:03:59] Speaker C: Yeah. Yep. It's only Apple Arcade. Bummer.
[00:04:02] Speaker A: I'll be simple. I've been playing a lot of Silksong remains.
So good. This game is phenomenal. I'm in the last act of the game now and have found a lot of stuff. This map is fucking enormous.
[00:04:21] Speaker B: It keeps getting bigger.
[00:04:23] Speaker A: It keeps getting bigger. There's still at least one whole zone I have not been to. At 48 hours into the game, there's.
[00:04:31] Speaker B: Another zone we've missed. Fuck.
[00:04:33] Speaker A: I don't know if you've missed it. I haven't been there.
[00:04:37] Speaker B: That's plausible. I don't think. I think. Is it another, like named zone on the map?
[00:04:43] Speaker A: Another named zone on the map? Yes.
[00:04:45] Speaker B: I don't think I have been there then. I don't have any new ones.
[00:04:49] Speaker A: Yeah. That's how big silksong is. I'm 48 hours in. Mike is similar. And there's still places we haven't even been on the map in this Crazy freaking game.
[00:05:01] Speaker B: Steam says I have 77 hours.
[00:05:04] Speaker A: Yeah, this game is super frickin fun.
It feels so smooth to play. Like, I think that is the biggest improvement Silksong has over Hollow Knight. Hollow Knight is a very rigid, controlling game and Silksong feels buttery smooth control wise.
[00:05:23] Speaker B: The best part seems to be it doesn't matter which one of the combat styles you choose.
Each of them is smooth in a different way. They have just enough distinction between them that there's like it's wholly unique playing between them, but they still feel everybody's good to play between the next of them. The main reason I haven't switched off the same one I've been using for probably 50 hours is because I like how it does my movement and I've gotten used to that movement now that if I go away from it, I get fucked over.
Even though I like the attack style and a different one better.
[00:06:00] Speaker A: I need to find a couple more memory lockets so I can actually use one of the other ones that I haven't unlocked the slots for.
[00:06:08] Speaker B: I'm at the point where I have most of the memory lockets, but I know I can get more because I need like six more to unlock Another thing with a character.
[00:06:22] Speaker A: I have gotten that unlock.
[00:06:24] Speaker B: No, no, no. I got the three eyes on the Weaver one. There's another thing after that.
[00:06:30] Speaker A: No, the unlock in the Weave Nest for expanding your nature. I've gotten the last one of those.
I just.
I did not have the last crest and I used all my memory lockets to get the last one of those.
I then got the last crest and didn't have memory lockets to unlock the two slots that it has to unlock.
[00:06:53] Speaker B: Okay, so I'm like three slots away from that then. Dm. I need to find my memory crests.
[00:06:59] Speaker A: Yeah, but just. There's just so much to this game.
Mike and I both today beat a boss that was apparently designed by a fan of Hollow Knight who had cancer and got to go meet Team Cherry like five years ago and design a character that Team Cherry said.
[00:07:19] Speaker C: Cool.
[00:07:19] Speaker A: We're making this into a mandatory boss fight.
[00:07:22] Speaker B: I think you should just name the boss fight because it's named after him.
[00:07:26] Speaker A: Yes.
So the boss fight is shrine guardian Seth.
[00:07:31] Speaker B: It's just Seth. That's it. That's the name.
[00:07:34] Speaker A: It's a good boss. Like it's one of the bosses. So Silksong has two main kinds of bosses. Big motherfuckers who do shit that makes you have to dodge constantly and fast. Agile motherfuckers that are hard to keep up with. And Seth definitely falls into the latter camp.
[00:07:51] Speaker B: Mm.
Very tight. Very good boss. Gives you a lot of. Lot of options. Unlike a lot of other ones where it's very rigid in how you have to face them. He is a lot more optional, like in how you play against him. Really well done.
[00:08:04] Speaker A: You basically just have to learn his attack patterns and how to dodge each one and how to react to them in time, which is. Most of the bosses in the game is learn the attack patterns so that you can react to them correctly in time.
But I just. I love that they literally just invited this fan to their offices and had him design a character that they put into the game and then made it a story. Like progression required. Boss in the last act. It's not like he's a random hidden optional thing. No. You have to fight his character. It's great.
[00:08:41] Speaker B: I've heard a rumor and I don't want to spread it because it spoils things for how act four goes. Three. I said there. I do not believe there are four acts. That's going to be a sl. I don't think that was what it was. No, that's not what I think it is. No.
And if that rumor is true, that might not be the case.
[00:08:59] Speaker A: You are correct. It is technically optional in a very vague sense. The quest that both Mike and I are on is collect three things. But there are four things to collect and you can omit any one of the four.
[00:09:12] Speaker B: Except there's no way this doesn't tell.
[00:09:14] Speaker A: You about the fourth one.
[00:09:15] Speaker B: You have no idea if the fourth one exists initially. And I guess the fourth one is.
[00:09:19] Speaker A: The zone we haven't been to.
[00:09:21] Speaker B: Okay, that makes more sense. Which means I'm going to get all three things and I'm going to die trying to find this new zone.
[00:09:28] Speaker A: Oh, I'm gonna insist on getting all four as well. But that's the kind of game Silksong is. It's just there's so much. This game is $20 guys. And Mike's played it for 70 something hours. I'm near 50.
And neither of us is done yet. And this isn't like us trying to 100% it. We're just not done like with the actual just game itself.
[00:09:49] Speaker B: A lot of people beat the game in the. There are multiple ways to beat the game. What we will call the the worst ending because it's the easiest ending.
A lot of people just end there. Not knowing you can go farther.
[00:10:02] Speaker A: Yep. To be fair, the original Hollow Knight.
[00:10:05] Speaker B: Was that way too that was still 40 plus hours. I think I was at 44 game hours in that.
[00:10:10] Speaker A: Yeah, it's. It's so good. It's so good. All right, Mike, talk about your other game that you want to talk about.
[00:10:19] Speaker B: All right.
Outside of, of course. Wow. Which I play all the time and Hollow Knight. I have only been playing one other game. It's called None Shall Intrude and it's a fun little time waster game. I've been meaning to get a game that I can have going in one screen while I do something else on the other. Eat or something else. And this is sort of kind of like a deck builder game where there's a grid deck builder and then you sort of play the grid based on what the cards you get in the deck. You are a dragon and you are trying to amass a massive horde and conquer the world. And obviously people want to stop the dragon, the base. Like there. There was a.
A demo of the game that allowed you to just play as the one red dragon and that it lets you go up to like the very first sort of story boss. Pretty good.
It got me enough that I'm like, all right, I've played enough of this that I want to do the full game.
10 bucks, maybe 5 bucks on sale at the time when I got it.
And getting into the full game, you have four or five other dragons that you get to play as that change little bits and pieces. Although most of the same cards are the same.
There are like core mechanics to the. The grid world that you get to. To mess with that change terrain, which changes what you get to do with the world. There are little whelplings that you get to summon so you can cover the world and baby dragons. It's just a. It's been a fun little time sink.
[00:11:48] Speaker A: Fair enough.
[00:11:49] Speaker B: And it's really easy to accidentally spend four hours playing it.
[00:11:54] Speaker A: That's the sign that you know it's a good game. For a time sink is when you're accidentally four hours later without realizing it.
[00:12:01] Speaker B: All right.
It there. There has never been a time sink game that has gotten me quite like Terraria in which I played it. I looked out the corner, it was dark. I looked back and suddenly the sun was coming up.
[00:12:15] Speaker A: I've definitely done that one on Terraria specifically before.
[00:12:18] Speaker B: That was. I picked that game up and I did not realize that I had played through the night.
[00:12:25] Speaker C: Like, I know if I actually sat down to play that game, that's exactly what would happen to me. But I've just had such a Hard time just getting hooked by it because there's so many other games that I've like. I'm hooked by that one.
[00:12:40] Speaker B: I started like Baseline alone, but it was. It was my jam. But I think you would like Terraria a lot more if you played with another person.
[00:12:47] Speaker A: Yes. Terraria works best as a friend slop game. You get two to three to four other people together and you make a world and you explore it and do Terraria things as a group because it drastically reduces the amount of busy work that any one person has to do. Because you only need a town to be built once. You don't have to each build your own town.
[00:13:10] Speaker C: See, I didn't even know you built towns. I thought you built like a house.
[00:13:13] Speaker B: Well, you. You can sort of. You get like, NPCs that show up, that sort of give you access, and.
[00:13:18] Speaker A: You got to build houses for them.
[00:13:20] Speaker B: And so eventually you like build either a town or in some cases, you build a prison cell where they get to live there and they can't move.
[00:13:27] Speaker A: Yes, but it's. It's very much like that part of Terraria does not scale with number of people. So if you have more people, either whoever enjoys that part gets to do all of it and they're enjoying it, so it's good. Or you guys can share the load and spend more time doing the other parts of Terraria that are much better of the, like platforming, exploring, combat, all of the above.
[00:13:51] Speaker B: Yeah, this did that game scratched the urge of I don't like how Minecraft looks, but I really like what Minecraft does. And Terraria went, I want it.
[00:14:02] Speaker A: But Terrari scratched my urge of I want to like, exploring survival game with some building as opposed to Minecraft, where building is kind of the primary focus.
But yeah, that was just kind of an impromptu sidebar because we get sidetracked on this podcast. That's part of the fun. Let's talk about our actual next topic that we planned.
So we want to have a talk about difficulty in video games, because we're playing some. Some hard fucking video games. Silksong has reignited this discussion in the greater community, and we think it's a good thing to just, you know, have a conversation about. So I want to start it off. We're talking about hard video games. Specifically, when we say difficulty, I want to clarify the distinction between mechanical difficulty versus intellectual difficulty. Because, like I would say Dark Souls and Fire Emblem are both difficult games, but they are testing different aspects of the player. Very much so they are challenging different elements of you as a gamer. Mechanical difficulty to me is something like Silksong, something like Dark Souls. There may be individual elements that are hard to figure out, but the main challenge of the game is dexterity. It's learning patterns, recognizing patterns and reacting to patterns correctly and pressing the right buttons at the right time to win the fight and not die. As opposed to something like Fire Emblem or. An example of one of the hardest intellectual difficulty games I've ever played. Baba Is yous, which is a straight up puzzle game.
Doesn't matter how good you are at pressing buttons. Someone who has severe physical handicaps and maybe has to use their feet to control it or like press buttons with their nose can still play Fire Emblem or Baba Is yous just fine. They cannot play Silksong. As much as that sucks. I wish they could. We don't have brain interfaces to allow them to just think the controls they want to do yet.
[00:16:04] Speaker B: I've seen some crazy DDR pad controllers before, so anyone can do anything as long as they've got some power. But those people are pretty damn good.
[00:16:13] Speaker A: Those people are insane. We're all respect to what those people do.
Most people with physical disabilities just are locked out of mechanical difficulty type hard games.
Accessibility controllers only go so far.
So I think that's an important distinction because generally I don't know anyone who objects to games being intellectually difficult.
[00:16:38] Speaker B: I have not heard anywhere near as many things about being yelled at for that. Yeah, except for the point where a bunch of people are playing a game that they are enjoying and then they get stuck and can't figure out where the fuck to go.
[00:16:51] Speaker A: Especially when it's a game that isn't that kind of challenge prior to that point.
[00:16:56] Speaker B: Yeah, so. So that seems to be one of the like primary things that people get annoyed by is they're enjoying the base gameplay of a thing and maybe they haven't actually gotten to this stage of the game yet and it will become more of this and some of these puzzles or extra things will frustrate you and stop you completely. Or conversely it will be something like here's a puzzle. We haven't done something like this before. Now you have to get through this. That would be the time when I see people get mad about intellectual difficulty.
[00:17:27] Speaker A: That's like a perfect example for Baba Is yous. I want to explain this game briefly because I think it is the perfect example of intellectual difficulty. Baba Is yous is a game about rewriting the rules of the game.
So every level of Baba Is yous has these blocks you can push around, or you can cause other things to push around that say things like, Baba is you and whatever is you is the character you control.
So if you replace Baba with Kiki, suddenly you're now controlling Kiki instead of Baba.
And it creates these elaborate puzzles where you have to rewrite the rules of the game with these phrases to turn things into keys or turn things into rocks or delete things or make things spread. And it's. It's crazy. And the puzzles get stupid hard. I could not beat this game under my own power. I am not smart enough and clever enough for some of the puzzles.
There was, I think, 200 puzzles or so in the game. There was like 10 of them that I had to look up a hint for to be able to solve, period.
[00:18:40] Speaker B: There was a really popular DS game that was very similar to this in that it wasn't that you rewrote the rules, but it was that you would, like, write down things that it would create them for.
[00:18:54] Speaker A: Scribblenauts. Scribblenauts, yes. Scribblenauts is the same kind of game, but generally much easier.
[00:18:59] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[00:19:01] Speaker A: But why I bring up Baba Is yous is. I wanted to highlight games that are intellectually difficult, have ways to teach players what they need, or give hints. Baba is yous. If you go look up any specific puzzle on Baba Is yous on their wiki, it has the solution, but it also just has hints and you can get progressively more. We're giving away more of the puzzle hints until you get to the full solution. So you can go, I'm absolutely stumped. Please point me kind of sort of in the right direction and get a hint and then go try to figure it out from that hint. Which feels a lot better than, oh, you can't do it. Here's the solution.
[00:19:45] Speaker B: There is another game that came out earlier this year that is a great example of this difficulty that is, like, touted as potentially being one of the games of the Year. It's called Blueprints.
[00:19:55] Speaker A: I've heard good things about Blueprints.
[00:19:58] Speaker B: I have heard nothing but, like, this might be one of the four games up for Game of the Year right now. This is the puzzle version. Then there's, like, Claire Obscure, Silksong, and Hades is getting there.
[00:20:08] Speaker A: Fair enough. Yeah, there's. So I looked it up. They literally called the hint page for Baba Is yous. Baba is Hint, and it's a whole website designed to give you hints in the game without actually solving the puzzles for you. It's great.
That kind of Stuff does not exist for the most part in games that are mechanically difficult.
I can go look up a Silksong guide that tells me exactly where an item I want is if I was.
[00:20:36] Speaker B: So inclined, but it cannot always get you there.
[00:20:39] Speaker A: I still have to successfully progress the platforming to get there. Even if I watch someone else do it, I still have to be able to execute those same inputs. In Silksong, people have figured out ways to get Act 2 specific powers in Act 1 through clever use of game mechanics and extremely good platforming. I have watched a video demonstrating how to do it and I am certain that if you gave me five hours, I still would not successfully do it.
[00:21:08] Speaker B: Oh yeah, after five hours of trying. And there's really two major philosophies on this thing, which is, no, the game needs to be played this way, otherwise you are not getting the experience that is designed for you. Or what you were talking about with Celeste the other day, where there is something else here we want you to have and so we want to be able for you to experience this. Here is an easier version.
[00:21:32] Speaker A: Yes. And I think something that gets lost a lot in this discourse is for people who are less good at mechanical difficulty video games, an easy mode can still be quite difficult for them.
They are still getting the experience that like I am having in Silksong. If they play a version of Silksong where they have twice as much health and bosses do one damage instead of two so that they can get through it. If you. There are mods that let you do stuff like that for the Steam version of Silsong because the game does not have difficulty options built in at all.
[00:22:08] Speaker B: Yeah. So like.
[00:22:09] Speaker A: So if someone goes and uses those mods to have an easier experience so they can get through the game because they simply are not good enough to play the game as it is designed by Team Cherry, are they cheating themselves or are they getting to enjoy something that they otherwise couldn't enjoy?
[00:22:25] Speaker B: I think the real one for this 100% depends on what kind of difficulty we are talking about. If we're talking about like the combat difficulty of Dark Souls is mostly patience in 90% of fights, I would say anyone can do it. However, some of the platforming mechanical versions, those can get to a point where not everyone can do those. And I don't necessarily see a problem with getting an easier mode in something like that if the goal of the game is not purely mechanical.
If there is something else you're trying to do with the game, tell a story, give a, you know, a vision or something else, then I can see definitely trying to get a bit more inclusive in that area.
But if all you're trying to do is make a platform and that's it, I think that's where people.
[00:23:24] Speaker A: Here's another thought. Part of what makes something like Silksong or Dark Souls so difficult is the punishment for failure.
Another really hard video game that I've never heard anyone complain about the difficulty of is vvvvvv. This is a precision platformer in the same vein as Celeste or Super Meat Boy. It does not have difficulty options, but you also respawn literally instantly in whatever room you die in from. Well, from whatever checkpoint you last hit. But the checkpoints are extremely common, so that you are constantly retrying the same platforming challenge until you nail it, and then you never have to do it again because you've passed that point. Point. And that's why I think the mechanical difficulty of VVVV is a lot less frustrating to people than Silksong or Dark Souls, because Silksong and Dark Souls. Oh, you died at this boss. Now spend a minute running back dodging the enemies that respawned because you died so that you can get back to the boss so you can try again. Resetting and getting to another attempt simply takes longer and takes more out of you.
Instead of it literally being instant go again, you died a thousand times. Who cares? And I have.
I have a question for you too. If you're just thinking of, like, across all video games you've ever played, what is the hardest video game you can think of that you've played? Because I know the answer. For me, the hardest video game I've ever played is actually a fairly recent game. It's called Ghosts N Goblins Resurrection. It is a remake of Ghosts N Goblins, the old nes, Genesis and Super NES game. And it has difficulty options. You can play it on easier, normal, or hard. Or you can be a psychopath like me and play it on Legend difficulty. Legend difficulty on that game is some of the most hellish, unfair, incredibly difficult shit I've ever played.
And there's like two checkpoints per level.
So you go through.
You go through, like two minutes of level and then you die. And guess what? You get to do it all again. I died well over 2,000 times before I beat that game on Legend. Oh, and also because it's a Ghosts N Goblins game, you have to beat the game twice to actually beat the game.
[00:25:53] Speaker B: If all I'm thinking of is pure difficulty. Yeah. One of the Games that it's. It's been forever. So it may be that, like, I was just bad when I was playing it. But in Sniper Elite in the fourth game, there is a mode called True Sniper, if I'm not mistaken. I do not remember. It is. It is the like you are playing as if you are an actual sniper doing this. So you now have to account for wind resistance. You have to account for movement, sound carries.
So you have to properly set up kills so that nothing can be seen, nothing can be heard. You're actually dealing with wind resistance, with material resistance, etc. And then make sure that, oh, man, you killed someone there. Go clean it up before someone finds out or get out. That was painstakingly difficult. I think some of those levels, like individual levels, where all you're doing is killing one person would take four or five hours sometimes.
[00:26:53] Speaker A: Jesus Christ.
[00:26:55] Speaker C: This is hard for me. This one's really hard for me because, like, I don't play a whole lot of difficult games. And I'm the first person that'll admit when I'm playing like a story game or something. I'm just trying to enjoy. I'm lowering that difficulty all the way down for my first playthrough. So I don't.
But if I'm sitting, thinking back, sorry, go ahead.
[00:27:18] Speaker A: And that's totally fine. Like, where I want to go with this is I think it is important that games have difficulty options so that I can have my super hard experience that I enjoy and other people can enjoy other difficulties and be able to have an easy story mode where they could have just gone and watched a let's play, but they wanted to do it themselves. That's okay too.
[00:27:42] Speaker C: So, like media games that I think of where I'm like skipping and cheating. The difficulty is like the Elder Scrolls game. Like, my first playthrough, I'll do it just for like a chill story, immerse myself in it. And then when I go back and play later, I'm like, all right, I'm going to play this on all, like the hardest difficulty. I understand the game, but the hardest game that I can remember playing. And like Mike, it could be just, I was bad and I was young. It was a Nintendo 64 game called Jet Force Gemini.
[00:28:11] Speaker A: That game is.
[00:28:12] Speaker B: I remember that game. I remember that game and that game.
[00:28:15] Speaker C: I was so hard.
[00:28:16] Speaker A: It's fucking hard.
And not only, no, it's great. That game is great, but it also, it forces you to find all of the little teddy bears that you have.
[00:28:27] Speaker C: To find the Tribals Yeah.
[00:28:28] Speaker A: To be allowed to beat the game, you have to find all of them and they're hidden in weird corners. And sometimes they just get shot by the bad guys because bad luck. That game is really hard. I'm not joking. If you've beaten the Force Gemini, you.
[00:28:44] Speaker C: Have beat it hard.
[00:28:45] Speaker A: Goddamn game.
[00:28:46] Speaker C: I'd never beat it like, the other ones that I can think of, and I had to pull up a list for this one.
Glover, when I was a kid, was extremely hard. It's great. I beat it. You know, I finally beat it. It's a lot easier now as an adult, obviously, but I don't think I could confidently say I could go back to Jet Force Gemini and easily beat that game.
[00:29:06] Speaker A: No, it's hard.
[00:29:07] Speaker C: The controls are hard.
I mean.
[00:29:10] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:29:10] Speaker B: And 64 games controls are obscure.
[00:29:14] Speaker C: So, yeah, I would have to say, like, it's an old but gold Jet Force Gemini. If you haven't played it, try to find a way to play it. It's a pretty good game.
[00:29:23] Speaker A: It's legit. One of the best titles on the N64. And there's nothing quite like it.
[00:29:28] Speaker C: No.
[00:29:29] Speaker A: Which I think is an important variable for it.
I think.
[00:29:32] Speaker C: I can't remember.
[00:29:33] Speaker B: Like, a prototype of Pick.
[00:29:35] Speaker C: Doesn't it have, like, cut scenes, too?
[00:29:37] Speaker A: It does have cut scenes.
If you're looking to play it nowadays. I think it might be on Nintendo Switch Online. It is definitely in rare replay on Xbox One.
[00:29:49] Speaker C: Rare Made lots of bad games. Or like, hard games. Not bad games. Sorry. They made lots of hard games. Conker's Bad Fur Day was hard for me when I was a kid. Yeah.
[00:30:01] Speaker A: When you were a kid, you played Conker's Bad Fur Day and Video Game God.
[00:30:05] Speaker B: Oh, yes.
That was mostly because a friend of mine's parents had no idea or didn't give a shit about the rating system. And so they got anything and everything.
[00:30:15] Speaker A: Okay. I generally think a lot of ratings are a little bit off. That game absolutely deserved its fucking M rating. That game is foul.
[00:30:23] Speaker C: So, yeah, I think I got to play it for the same reason. Like, it's a cuddly squirrel who's gonna think anything. And I'll never forget this being, you know, an adult podcast, so. Well, we're. I will never forget the sunflower scene.
And with my parents walking in during the sunflower scene, that was probably the funniest thing that I could think back and remember.
[00:30:45] Speaker A: I don't actually know the sunflower scene.
[00:30:46] Speaker C: The sunflower had big old boobs.
And there was the king bee who was coming to Pollinate the flower.
And that was the whole quest there.
[00:30:58] Speaker A: That's pretty funny.
[00:30:59] Speaker C: It was funny.
[00:31:01] Speaker A: So I did want to touch on. I'm obviously an advocate for easy modes. There is a wrong way to do it. And Nintendo, I'm looking straight at you. In the recent Mario game, Mario Wonder, and I think in Donkey Kong Country, Tropical Freeze as well, Nintendo has an assist mode. This might be in other games they've released as well, but those are the ones that I've played that have it.
And what Nintendo calls assist mode basically amounts to, oh, you died like three to five times in a level. Let me offer you a power up that makes you literally invulnerable. It basically is just a giant middle finger to you saying, hey, you suck too much at this game. Let me beat it for you. It is the absolute worst way to implement an assist or easy mode in a video game because it is insulting to everyone who uses it and it robs all elements of the game that make the game what it is. Because you are invulnerable. So you don't have to interact with anything anymore. It sucks. Fuck you for this. Nintendo be better. You know how you implement an easy mode in those games?
Have a pitfall forgiveness system. This has existed in many games. In Mega man, for example, beat can pull you out of a fall and put you back on a safe platform. Put something like that in your game, Nintendo, and make it so Mario has a health bar and it takes two hits to knock him out of his powered up state instead of one. Stuff like that to let the game be easier for people who need it to be easier without literally calling them babies.
[00:32:43] Speaker C: I will say of all the games, while I agree with you, there definitely needs to be. I didn't enjoy the power up part because I will say Mario being one of the few platforming games that I am just like really good at.
And I only say that because there was a level and I don't remember which Mario this was. It was back on the. The Wii, maybe the Wii U, the final stage. You know how they always have like the final stage. You've 100% of the game. You open your bonus world, you've 100% of the bonus world. And the last stage.
[00:33:23] Speaker A: Doing that since Mario World, basically.
[00:33:25] Speaker C: And it's like impossible to be like. They try to make it possible be. I beat it. I was super happy about it and there's not a high amount of people and I just. It was the first. The one where the cat. The cat. The first one with the Cat.
[00:33:39] Speaker A: The cat would have been Mario 3D world.
[00:33:42] Speaker C: Yeah, that one.
[00:33:43] Speaker A: That game is phenomenal, by the way.
[00:33:45] Speaker C: Yes. And I beat that last world and I'm like, I'm happy. It's good. It was a good level and it was always fun because I played with my, my best friend, my stepmom and my dad. We all played this game together. So it was four of us in it. And I just always remember when you get too far ahead in that game, it puts everybody in bubbles. I forced all of them in bubbles and they just had to follow like in. Along in bubbles while I beat that level for.
[00:34:14] Speaker A: Yep. All right. We have any other thoughts about game difficulty?
[00:34:18] Speaker B: I think I probably have the. The most anti of this. Like, I believe truly there are games in which difficulty is a proper thing to put in and where making a. Making a game easy would cheat the experience that is trying to be done. And the experience is really what the game is about, not about anything else. And so in those scenarios, I don't see how you properly lower things to make it so that it is still the same experience across the board.
However, that's a personal thing I don't want to like. I'm never going to say you can't play a game because you're not good enough. I think most people can play most games.
A lot of people don't give themselves enough credit.
[00:35:08] Speaker A: I think a lot of people aren't willing to put the time in to learn what the game is asking of them. And for those people, if they just turn down the difficulty, instead they are robbing themselves of what their experience could be if they were willing to invest the time and allow themselves to fail. And that's the important variable is one of the values of a hard game is that you will lose a lot. And that's where some of the fun comes from is when you fail a challenge repeatedly and then finally beat it, it's really goddamn satisfying. And I do think a lot of people, especially people who tend to play on easier difficulties, rob themselves of that experience by playing at a difficulty easier than what they actually should be playing at.
If you are never failing in the game, you are on too easy of a difficulty. If you are dying like five times per boss fight, that's probably about the right difficulty. And if you're stuck in a boss for five to 10 hours and haven't progressed, you might be on too high of a difficulty.
[00:36:17] Speaker B: That is not to say that easy games cannot be fun. I don't lose at Pokemon games, but I love them.
[00:36:26] Speaker A: Yeah, Kirby games are super fucking fun. The hardest of them is still a cakewalk compared to basically anything else of its era. And that's a literal NES game and it's one of the easiest good NES games.
[00:36:40] Speaker C: So real quick, before we jump off the subject, I want to put in an honorable mention for I think a company that did making their game easier.
And this might be a hot take. It might be a hot take for Mike because it's a game that we talk about sometimes. Blizzard added in and implemented a single button rotation and we'll talk about it.
So I love the single button rotation. I don't need the single button rotation, but I love the single button rotation because it brings people in that have disabilities that you cannot be playing and sitting and hitting 100 buttons at once and being in a rating or environment, a PvE environment or even a PvP environment. This adds in where you can literally press one button and it will optimize your rotation for you at the cost of like I think 25 or 50%. 15 increases cooldown 15%.
I love how they did it.
I think it's been way too long.
I'm happy that there's now people out there that can raid and do the content that they want with other people instead of having to solo through the whole game and be lonely in an mmo. I think that's one good way that they did it to make the game easier. But you still have to dodge like mechanics and stuff like that. But they've made the game, what's the word I'm looking for? More accessible. Yeah, exactly.
[00:38:14] Speaker B: So I, as someone who does raid on the highest difficulty, I am nowhere near a world first raider. I. I cannot do the very tip of the top, but I can make breakpoints into like the top 5% of of difficulty encounters easily. And in the top 2% of like damage meters in some cases, like I can push in there. I think these are both. There are two versions of this. There's the optimization which just tells you what the next cooldown is. And that has the like it's. It's not an easy like it. It gives you a nice suggestion as to what the next spell should be. And it's never going to be perfectly optimal because you have to react to it. And then there's the one button cooldown rotation which is something that gives you a slightly less than optimal but still better than if you were doing nothing at all properly. It gives. And this is a good scenario for what I think is like the highest difficulty of the world. You will never break and beat someone who is perfect at the game, but you can get way farther than you ever could have otherwise. And that's a great way to do that. We have a couple of people in our raid team that are not good at their class who have to use that button, but they can now, like, we no longer have to sit them sometimes because they can still follow some directions. Now. They're not always great at the rest of the mechanics, so sometimes they still gotta set from there because we are raiding on mythics. But they have a chance. And it's now much easier for them to do two things because they're not trying to follow a rotation, plus pay attention to mechanics, plus listen to the ray lead, deal with anything that's going on extraneously. So when you have multiple layers of difficulty all at once, having something to tone down one of those while keeping the others intact, I think is one of the best ways to moderate difficulty. Which is also one of the reasons why, like, Elden Ring is wildly the most popular Souls game ever.
Because even though there's no difficulty meters on there, you can't go in and change how hard it is. There are things you can do that will make the game easier for you. You have infinite farming, you can go to a different area to learn other things. There are extra summons that allow you to gain other people to help you in encounters. All of these things are tools that are allowed to tweak the difficulty in your favor while preserving the challenge of the game.
[00:40:43] Speaker A: Fair enough. Perfect. All right, we have one last topic for tonight, which is let's talk about some games that we have misjudged and kind of stemming from this difficulty discussion. Mike, the game you've put in the document is Dark Souls. How did you misjudge Dark Souls? And what is your impression of it now that you've no longer misjudged it?
[00:41:05] Speaker B: So I was first introduced to Dark Souls when I went upstairs to a roommate's room and watched them face ornstein and smaug 90 times.
They couldn't do shit. It was. It was a cool fight, but, like, I didn't understand why you would continuously sit there and beat your face into a wall over and over and over again. And he would get frustrated and mad consistently. And so it was, why are you doing this to yourself? All you're doing is making yourself mad. I don't understand why you would play this. I can't get it. And during this time, I was going through game design school and so, like, this was One of those things where I had an opinion on game design in this scenario, which was very different to where it is now. And because of that, that training there, when the trailer for Dark Souls 2 first came out and when they first did the release on things, I looked at that and I went, okay, that's gorgeous. They have put in so much effort into this. I will play Dark Souls 2 and I will give it a shot. And it took more than 10 hours before I truly got the game. Like, I tried the first time and I couldn't. Couldn't figure it out. I couldn't go anywhere. I got really frustrated. I put the game away for like a month. And then a friend of mine who was living with me at the time came back and he went, what weapon were you using? Dude, try this. You might like it. You like that kind of shit more. And I played it a slightly different way with a new weapon type, and suddenly it clicked and I could play the game. And it didn't feel as exhausting to play the game because I was trying to do what I saw someone else do before. And suddenly, like, things that I had beaten my face into and couldn't do anywhere I could face now, and sometimes they were still challenging, but then I could progress to. And I got farther. I would win. And it felt great. That, that, that kick when. Oh, my God, I was beating my face into this for hours and I just whooped its ass.
Hell, yeah. This reminded me so much of a moment that we had when I was raiding way long ago, of an instant where, like, I put out a controller and screamed out how much. It was great when I finally first time beat that game. And it was so good. It's not like the catharsis that I need to, like, break down after a long day, but these are the sort of things where once you win in a challenging encounter like that, you feel like you can take on the fucking world problems that you didn't have. Just gone and I got it and I went back and I played the other one and I went back and I played the next one and Bloodborne came out and Elven. So Elden Ring. And I get them now, and they're some of my favorite games of all time. And I didn't give it a shot initially because of an impression I had from someone else.
[00:44:02] Speaker A: Fair enough. Pillow, you want to go next?
[00:44:05] Speaker C: Yeah, I'll. I'll make it kind of quick. So I.
I love survival games. I love survival craft games.
I'm thinking, you know, the forest, Sons of the Forest Green Hell, Subnautica. You know those games where you're resourcing, gathering resources, using the resources to build your base?
At some of the games, the base is your protection. Some of it is just your, Your, Your hub. They tend to have different uses. I picked up a game called the Long Dark and I wasn't really sure on it at first. I think I got it on sale.
I was in one of those moods where I was bored of everything I was playing and I was just like, ah, well, it's. Why not? It's on sale. I'll give it a shot. So the Long Dark is a survival game, but the difference is you don't get to build anything. You don't.
[00:45:02] Speaker B: You're.
[00:45:02] Speaker C: You're dropped in the middle of. I don't remember where it is.
I want to say it's in Canada, like northern Canada.
And you're dropped in. It's cold, there's wolves, there's bears, there's water, ice, wind, blizzards, and you have to survive. You're just dropped off in the middle of the wilderness. It does have a story mode now, which is awesome, awesome story mode.
But you're just dropped off in the middle of the wilderness with nothing barely on you. And you have to find shelter, you have to find wood, you have to build fires. You have to survive for as long as you can.
You're going to die, like, eventually you're going to lose unless you just get into some sweet spot. But you're going to get. Depending. And this is one of those games where there is difficulty levels Voyager, I think, being like the easiest, where none of the wildlife will come after you. And then like the hardest one is where the wildlife actively hunts you down. Like that's. This is one of those games I play on the hardest mode because it scares the crap out of me, especially if I'm out in the middle of like trying to hunt a deer or something like that. And then I hear a wolf howling behind me. I'm scared. Go ahead.
[00:46:21] Speaker A: I actually think you've just touched on something that we should have talked about in the difficulty discussion. Horror games are a perfect example, or games that are supposed to freak you out or startle you or give you that sense of fear and suspense that horror gives of where having an easy mode undermines the game itself.
And I think I am much more okay with that genre, not having an easy mode than most other genres.
Because if a horror game is easy, it's not scary, period.
[00:46:53] Speaker C: Oh yeah, I'd agree with that.
[00:46:55] Speaker A: Like.
[00:46:55] Speaker C: Like I'm huge into the horror genre.
[00:46:57] Speaker A: Where you don't run out of ammo and you can just kill. Everything is no longer a horror game. It is a different experience entirely. It fundamentally changes what you're doing in a way that is different than just difficulty.
[00:47:11] Speaker C: Oh, I'll agree 100% on that and I'll. I kind of want to touch in on that after this little side tangent. Not really even a tangent. Little sidebar. So with.
With Long Dark it is one of my top played games. I have 267 hours in it. A game that I picked up just to pass some time turned into a game that I frequently come back to and I'm just like, when it starts getting cold outside and I start feeling that. That, that cold air and I start hearing crows and the wind blowing through the window, I'm just like, ah, I gotta play the Long Dark. Because that's all the sounds that you hear and that is the wind on the windows. And it's an awesome game.
I don't remember where I was on it, but you, you get hunted by the wildlife and you just gotta survive for as long as you can. There's like now like eight or nine different areas locate, they're all connected together and you travel around and do different. Just you can find like the axes and the knives and you find a gun.
It's very hard to find them. But that changes to. Based on your difficulty, it might be easier to find a game. A horror game that has different difficulties that I'd like to bring up is phasmophobia. It is another one of my top played games.
So it has.
Well, we'll just call it I can't Adept all the way up to Nightmare mode in every mode. And I'm pretty decent at this game. Me and my wife like to play it. I'm pretty decent at this game. Just guessing the ghost just based off of how it's a game where you got to guess the ghost based off evidence that it's given to you or signs that it gives you.
And then you guess the ghost and you get out, you earn money, you buy stuff. If you haven't heard of it, check it out. It's great, great game.
Even the easiest mode, you can die very, very quickly because that doesn't make the ghost any different.
So the only thing that the easier modes do is like, okay, you'll lose sanity a little bit slower.
The ghosts are more apt to give you evidence or do an event.
I play on nightmare mode, I think is what it is where there's no evidence at all. And I have to guess the ghost based off of how the ghost acts with its personality.
But I like how they have their tier difficulties because the ghost is still that ghost. Like so a demon in this ghost is a ghost that can hunt you from the minute you walk into that house. It has a special ability where it can hunt you instantly.
Where the other ghosts have like sanity thresholds. This one can hunt you instantly and kill you. So you, even being the best ghost hunter in the world, could walk into a house and be in the wrong place at the wrong time on the easiest difficulty and die instantly. And I love how that game does that. But alright, sidebar over.
[00:50:10] Speaker A: Okay, I'll be quick. The game I've misjudged is really straightforward. It's a great game.
Everyone should play it. I didn't for a while. I played it because my wife told me I had to. It's Stardew Valley.
I want to be clear. I'm an advocate for games having easy modes. I do not enjoy easy games. I do not enjoy cozy games. I do not enjoy simulation games. I've never been a person who enjoyed the Sims. I hate Animal Crossing. I don't like Harvest Moon. I think they're boring as shit. They're not for me. It's great that they exist for other people. Clearly other people enjoy them. I fucking hate them. They're super not my kind of game. I begrudgingly, at my wife's insistence, decided to play Stardew Valley because I knew it had a dungeon crawl mode. There's the mine you can go to, you can go dungeon crawling, you can fight monsters. And I was like, that sounds more my jam. Fuck everything else. I'm gonna go mine. And I did that for a little while. But you know what? Everything else in Stardew Valley is really engaging too. It's well written, the characters are interesting. The farming, while simple, still has enough depth to it to where like you can optimize your farm that there's actual gameplay there. By the time I was done and I have not played Stardew Valley in ehh, almost a year at this point. I have played this game for almost 185 hours.
I completed the community center, which at the time that I had played it regularly was like the end goal. There wasn't much else to do past that. I understand there is now and haven't gone back and actually done it. But that includes things that I thought I would never do, like fishing. I've never found a game I like Fishing in Stardew Valley is no exception.
I did it anyway because I wanted to complete the goddamn community center because the rest of the game was so good and engaging that I was willing to slog through that part.
So I misjudged Stardew Valley. I've since I played Stardew Valley because like it's been a year since I last played. But the last time I played it seriously was more like five or six years ago. I've tried other games of its ilk, they don't grab me. I still don't like them. So it's not like Stardew Valley has awoken the cozy gamer in me or something. I've still do not play cozy games at all. Stardew Valley is an exception because it is a cozy game that is engaging even for someone like me who likes my brutally hard platformers.
[00:52:40] Speaker B: It's the wonders of a well written game when you make characters that are really, really believable and very interesting. People will stay for things they don't expect to stay for.
[00:52:52] Speaker A: Yes, also Maru, best girl. You can't convince me otherwise.
[00:52:56] Speaker C: I was getting ready to ask you who did you marry and why Was it Abigail? But I guess we're on different. I went for the edgy alternative.
[00:53:05] Speaker A: As appealing as that is at first. Maru is a science geek who literally builds a robot in a spaceship. How can you not be in love with this woman?
[00:53:13] Speaker C: I will say we've talked about Stardew two episodes in a row. So go find and play this game.
[00:53:20] Speaker B: Play two episodes in a row.
[00:53:22] Speaker A: Yeah, true.
[00:53:24] Speaker C: But like Stardew as the game is, we talked about it last time.
One developer go show him some love. If this is anywhere near a genre that you like, you will Love Stardew.
[00:53:36] Speaker A: It's $15. I'll buy it for you. It's a full price. Like it's literally a $15 game. Just go buy Stardew Valley on whatever platform it's on, everything and give it a try. Because I truly did not think I would like this game. I went into it expect expecting to play it for two hours to appease my wife and be like this game. And I put 185 hours into it and am singing its praises years later. Stardew Valley. I was wrong.
[00:54:03] Speaker C: Don't fall for the trap of marrying Haley. It's just not worth it. She's a.
[00:54:08] Speaker A: If it's.
[00:54:08] Speaker B: If it's a game that you like, you're hesitant about, maybe you're on the side that maybe you won't like it wait until it's on sale and then give it a try. We've given a lot. Like, this is a game that I know I won't play because I have other games that are like this that I would rather play because there are other things that have the same sort of story that I prefer. But I have been near enough to people who have done Stardew Valley that I know all of the content of Stardew Valley and that feels good. Understanding that, seeing it, hearing it, great. Well, it's a good game.
[00:54:42] Speaker A: Literally four of my friends are playing Stardew Valley right now as we record this part podcast. It's good. And I truly didn't think that would be the case before I played it. I thought I would hate it. I thought it would be the same as Animal Crossing or Harvest Moon for me, which are just. I've tried several different harvest moons. I've tried the original Animal Crossing and I think one of the DS ones I think my sister made me try at some point. I don't know which one. It's not for me. I do not like those games.
Harvest Moon, I tried the PlayStation 1, which is generally considered one of the best harvest moons. I've tried the Super Nintendo original. I've tried Harvest Moon 64 and I tried one of the GameCube ones that I can't remember the name of. Like I've given these games a fair shake, which is why I had such low expectations of Stardew Valley because I've played attempted to enjoy multiple other similar games. And even after being proved wrong on Stardew Valley, I've attempted to enjoy other similar games and didn't like them. So Stardew Valley just is. It's just that good. Alright, I think that's it for this week, guys. Come join the Discord. Talk to us about your favorite games that you misjudged.
That's what I want from this episode. Join the Discord. Go to the other games channel and tell us what games you misjudged that you thought would be bad and are actually awesome. What surprised you? Tell us about it in the Discord. I've been Jack Sohman for Mike and many names for Pillow Pat. Have a great night.
[00:56:19] Speaker C: Good night.
[00:56:20] Speaker B: Good night everybody.
