Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:10] Speaker B: Hello and welcome back to from 8bit to 4k show where we talk about all games from 8bit to 4k and all the shows in between.
Tonight I am with Jack Sohman once again.
Hello, I'm Jack Sohlman and Mike of many names.
[00:00:29] Speaker A: I'm here like usual.
[00:00:31] Speaker B: So tonight we got lots of topics and lots of stuff to talk about. But first let's go over our patrons that are keeping the lights on for us. Shout out to Codex, Ninja, Skippius, Esquire, Labana and Uncle Chrisco for supporting us at the shout out tier.
[00:00:47] Speaker A: Shout yourself out pillow, Shout yourself out.
[00:00:49] Speaker B: And myself why not?
So we have a Patreon and that's we have several tiers on the Patreon $1 tier 5 that just tells us that you love us. $5 that gets exclusive feed from behind the scenes audio for prep work.
Like today you get to hear almost the whole thing is actual prep work which is kind of rare for us.
[00:01:12] Speaker C: Sometimes prep work and then the tangents that created yes and that created and.
[00:01:19] Speaker B: $10 a month will give you the everything from $1 and up plus you get the shout out during the episode.
We have a discord and we are part of the four words network.
A description for the discord or a link for the Discord will be in the network.
I'm sorry, the podcast description.
So tonight we got several topics but first, Jax, what have you been up to?
[00:01:49] Speaker C: Kind of the same as last time of I'm still playing a lot of Hades 2. I've romanced three of the four possible romance characters at this point and the only reason I haven't romanced the fourth is the game won't give me the fucking romance options available. They're still locked and I don't know what I'm not doing to advance them.
I've cleared most of the like oh make the game progressively harder to get rewarded challenges. So I'm like almost done with that.
Hades 2 is really good guys. Like really freaking good. Highly recommend. Like if you haven't picked up Hades 2 whether or not you like or are good at roguelikes, it has an easy mode if you need it to be easier. If you like your games hard, the default is pretty damn hard but forgiving. It's got a great learning curve.
Strongly recommend. Hades2 is so freaking good and it runs great on the original switch. If you don't have a gaming PC to play the Steam version it runs great on original switch. You don't need a Switch 2. I'm playing it on the switch one.
[00:02:54] Speaker A: Yeah. I've been doing PC. It's been beautiful there. Well, I was doing PC.
Still aren't doing that right now. Yeah, I'm still sidelined. I will be for another probably a full episode. So two more weeks, probably before I'm even able to play a bunch of other games.
[00:03:09] Speaker C: But so realistically, about four weeks from when the listeners hear this before you, you'll actually have games you can talk about that are twitchy games.
[00:03:17] Speaker A: Again, yeah. Realistically, it'll be late November before you hear anything from me that's real. Other games, besides things that we'll be talking about, there are some games that I've been playing.
[00:03:30] Speaker C: Well, before we get to that, let me finish mine. The other thing I've been playing is Path of Exile one got a new league launch that just came out this past weekend. As we're recording this, they reworked a previous league mechanic called Breach. It's a lot of fun. My character summons a tornado that shoots projectiles from his wand in every direction and explodes the entire screen. And it's great. Path of exile 1 is a very silly game, but it's a lot of fun.
[00:03:59] Speaker B: Do they constantly come up with new spells or create new spells for this?
[00:04:05] Speaker C: Yes, pretty much every major update, which we get about once every four months, there's a handful of new skill gems which are the, like, abilities you as the player actually use.
And then. And then sometimes there's other new powers as well. Like this league is very, like, fleshy body horror kind of themed. And you literally graft, like, enchanted hands onto your back that cast spells for you and that. These spells do their own thing. Like, I have one right now that summons a, like, copy of myself, but made out of lightning that walks towards enemies and then explodes when it reaches an enemy.
And there's this little hand on my back that just does that every few seconds.
[00:04:51] Speaker B: Sounds creative, fun and good. Time sync.
[00:04:55] Speaker C: Oh, yeah. Path of Exile. They're called grinding gear games for a reason. They make grindy games. It is a grindy game, but it's a lot of fun. I enjoy it. It's very like, I can play it between.
Between worlds matches. I can, like, have something on in the background while I play. It's a very chill game.
[00:05:15] Speaker B: Those are always good. All right, Mike, you mentioned it. You can't do a whole lot. So what have you been doing to keep yourself entertained and keep yourself from going insane?
[00:05:24] Speaker A: So you talked about it a little bit last week. I expanded upon it. I've been doing a little bit more Poke Rogue because it's easy and I can play it. And I'm. It's. It's fun. Pokemon Madness.
I don't need to go back into what it is or how it works. It's. It's the same as it was. They haven't. They haven't added in the Za stuff yet. I think they're going too soon because they. They grab and grab like the Evolutions and the new mechanics that are released by things. So like Blood Moon, Ursaluna from Scarlet and Violet is in there. They have a bunch of the Hisuian forms. So it's only a matter of time before they grab the shit from Za and put it in. Hasn't quite happened yet. And then I decided to enter a genre I don't usually enter, mostly because I can't do much and I have a lot of free time. So I started checking out some visual novels.
[00:06:17] Speaker C: Like finally on his degenerate route.
[00:06:19] Speaker A: Well, I started with Vampire the Masquerade. So different kind of degeneracy.
It's. It's definitely got that feel that Vampire the Masquerade sort of has, where it's. It's not like a grim dark. Like 40k is grim dark, but it's this noticeably different environment than most other games. Like, if you've ever played anything that has Vampire the Masquerade, I'm not sure how to properly describe the genre that that is. It's not like Frostbunk, it's not Postmunk. It's.
It's unique in what it is because it is both modern and historical, because of how vampires work as a thing. When you have people who are being embraced, as they call it in modern society by people who are 900 years old. So obviously there's huge variances in culture and history and things like that. And so this is like. It's a political survival, as far as I'm aware, is what I'm going to call it. Because you have this deep political chain, because you are the lowest totem pole you can get. Freshly embraced vampire. Moving into the depths of the politics of the Camarilla. Or one of them is the Camarilla, another one is not the vampire factions. Ignore that for now. That's. That's vampire masquerade lore. We don't need to go there.
But it's. It's got this really intense thought thing because if you've ever played any game like that, there's the slow descent from humanity. Are you willing? What are you willing to do? What are you allowed to do? And a lot of people are going to go, well, I'm going to go deep beginning. And sometimes you go that. And sometimes you go, well, I want to try and maintain. Like, what would I try and do? Even though you're not given the full breadth of options that you would be capable of, you try and go with the most human possible. And that's been sort of. My, My current fixation is trying to actually, like, thread that line of, okay, but do I want to give in there?
Kind of feel like giving in there. That seems like it'd be really fun. Damn. I accidentally murdered that child.
Whoopsies.
[00:08:24] Speaker C: That sounds like the vampire masquerade. I know.
[00:08:27] Speaker A: Yeah. And. And then there's, well, now you've murdered that child. How are you gonna hide that fact? Politics time. You're on the low totem pole. You just fed in someone else's turf shit.
So it becomes this, it becomes political very, very quickly. And it's really interesting. But also because GOG gave a bunch of free games.
We were talking about it like three months ago when they were like, for the whatever anti thing, we're giving away all the porn games for free. I went, all right, fuck it, I'll see what I've got. Downloaded by Goggles. And I think I messed with. It's called Treasure of Nadia. And Yep, immediate porn. Very immediate.
And like, the story is terrible. It's really bad mechanically.
Pretty fucking simple kind of terrible.
But it's. It's mostly dating sim, except with less options because they just want you to be able to get into the port right away and not have to accidentally fuck yourself over.
So like, there's. These are. These are cheap shit to get people to whack off, basically. And it's not well written. It's not. It's not good.
It's not even good.
[00:09:45] Speaker B: Most people aren't watching porn for the story.
[00:09:47] Speaker C: They don't even.
[00:09:49] Speaker A: Good porn. It's also not even good porn. But ignoring that, like, I want to find the visual novel dating sim porn game that's good. And it's not there yet.
[00:10:03] Speaker C: Okay. I will say for those who don't know, this site is still available. If you want these games for free, we're not really saying any of them are very good. Although honeypop is in the list and it is pretty decent. Go to FreedomtoBuy Games.
You can literally get a bunch of these for free.
[00:10:22] Speaker A: Yeah, this was, this was like their protesting one of the Supreme Court decisions. And so they were giving away a bunch of. Or something like that.
[00:10:29] Speaker C: They're protesting Visa, MasterCard, PayPal. And that was them.
I don't remember Stripe exerting their control over online marketing.
The ability to give money to people online, to censor Steam and other platforms, forcing games to be taken off those platforms. Itch IO is one that was affected not because the content is illegal, but because the payment processor doesn't like it.
[00:11:01] Speaker B: I didn't know they could decide what you could buy and not buy.
[00:11:05] Speaker C: They sure can. And that's the problem.
[00:11:08] Speaker A: I'm surprised they give a fuck that they're losing money. But ignoring that, it was one of those. And it was, well, we got a bunch for free. And I went, well, I've got them here and I've got. Literally this is the only time I'll ever have to try it. May as well see.
Wasn't good. Hooniepop.
That's one of the matching games that might actually be like a good entertainment of time.
[00:11:29] Speaker C: It's a decent puzzle game that is very funny written and it's mostly a visual novel but with action puzzle y elements kind of like bejeweled.
[00:11:38] Speaker A: You know what?
I'm going to dedicate it now. I will test out Honeypop as of before the next episode so I will get to talk about it because I've got literally nothing better to do.
So let's go. Gonna try it.
[00:11:52] Speaker C: It's better than the other games in that list. Like I'm looking at the list of games on there and most of them are genuinely bad. Honeypop is a good game. It's just pornographic.
[00:12:00] Speaker B: Right on. Well, myself, I've been continuing to play Pokemon Za I would say I'm like a little over probably 25 hours into it, maybe halfway through the story. I don't know where I'm at. I. I haven't been following. I've just been playing it the way I want to. Is how you should play a Pokemon game. It's a role playing game and that's how you should play it. So I've just been going around doing like the side quests and completing the. The wild zones, trying to fill out my Pokedex like everybody else, you know, wants to usually do.
I've just been enjoying it like it's brought some joy to the Pokemon back to me. I like the collecting feeling on there.
Like how, I mean, yeah, I can Google where to find certain Pokemon. I don't like to do that. I'm just kind of exploring the city and finding where stuff is organically on the day and night cycle. And if it's Sunny or if it's rainy. It's really nice that different Pokemon show up in different spots, even outside of the wild Zone.
But that's really the only really big mention for what I games I've been playing. Since our last recording, I have been starting to watch some more shows on TV with my wife and we've been digging into Lost.
She's never seen it. I don't know if any of you guys have seen it.
So Lost is a series where a group of survivors crash lands on an island and there's some mysterious force on this island. And you know, I can't really get into it too much because it'd be spoiler, but it's awesome. It's back in the with shows would do like 25, 26 episode seasons.
So we're sitting here watching and she's like, are we still in season one? I'm like, yes, we're still in season one. And it just drags on and drags on and drags on forever.
[00:13:59] Speaker C: All I know about Lost is that apparently it gets divisive at some point. Kind of like how a lot of other popular shows, like people start going like, oh, it did this thing I don't like. So I hate it now.
[00:14:12] Speaker B: Oh yeah.
[00:14:13] Speaker C: But like some people also still love it. So like I'm sure it's good. I was gonna say I miss when we had seasons of shows that had filler episodes when you just watch the Star Trek crew just go off to some weird planet and meet weird aliens and have a completely one off adventure that has nothing to do with their attempt to get back home.
[00:14:37] Speaker A: I have to mention with this one because I need to mention my. One of my favorite sci fi. Actually it's my favorite sci fi of all time. I need to get in Babylon 5 here because I fucking love it.
[00:14:45] Speaker C: Babylon 5 does a lot of that.
[00:14:47] Speaker A: One of the best episodes ever is not following any of the main characters. It's just an episode following two repairmen in the station as a red alert is happening. So you're like, what's going on with regular people while the heroes are doing the thing? And occasionally they'll cross paths and they'll see people or they'll have to be like, go into the bridge and help fix a thing.
And it's one of the best episodes in that season because you get to see such a down to earth view. It's so interesting. It has no story relevance whatsoever, but it's, it's like heartwarming.
[00:15:27] Speaker C: So is Lost kind of like that where like there's so many episodes that you get a lot of just one off. Here's what is going on this week and it doesn't need to advance a bigger narrative.
[00:15:37] Speaker B: Oh yeah, like another show that I was going to talk about that I've just started watching again. It's probably. I've probably rewatched it a dozen times at this point as I'm back into Supernatural because it's just a great show and they do the tons of filler episodes. I mean, if you were to condense the show down to just like main episodes, I'm sure it would hit the probably six to eight episodes per season. Now they do 20 to 25 per season. Even all the way up to its last season in 2020 was a 20 season episode. But like, yeah, one of my favorite episodes of the Supernatural was a one off episode. It was the Scooby Doo episode. If you've ever watched it.
[00:16:17] Speaker A: It was great.
[00:16:18] Speaker B: It was one of my favorite parts of that whole show. Just the singing at the end was great.
I don't know, it was just awesome.
What else? Witcher came out.
The new season of Witcher. And I am a big Witcher fan.
I love project CD Red. Oh yeah, Am I saying that right?
[00:16:39] Speaker C: CD Projekt CD Projekt Red CD Projekt Red, by the way, are also the owners of good old games and.
[00:16:47] Speaker A: Okay, I have a slight complaint with them. They need to make a better fucking UI for their goddamn thing.
[00:16:52] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:16:54] Speaker A: It's shit. It's. It's shit.
Yep, I like them. I'm happy with Gog for a lot of reasons. There's no reason for the UI for your store to be this terrible.
[00:17:07] Speaker C: So here's my question for you, Pillow. Have you started watching the new Witcher season yet?
[00:17:11] Speaker B: I have not.
[00:17:13] Speaker C: Where are you at? Because I watched seasons one and two and have not even bothered watching season three yet.
[00:17:18] Speaker B: Oh, I'm caught up. Like, I'm caught up, like I'm ready to start four.
[00:17:24] Speaker C: Four is the one where they changed the actor for Geralt, right?
[00:17:28] Speaker B: Yes. Yes.
It's no longer Henry Cavill. Henry. Yeah. So I don't, I don't remember what the.
The reason was.
[00:17:38] Speaker A: Well, he was mad at them for not essentially. He was really mad that they kept breaking how character flow would work because he's a really big fan and they would either no longer follow story beats or just not be true to who the characters are consistently.
[00:17:53] Speaker C: For those who don't know, Henry Cavill is a gigantic nerd. Like to the point where he literally got himself involved with Warhammer because he liked Warhammer so much and he was a celebrity. So he was like, I'm just gonna Badger Games workshop until they let me do Warhammer stuff.
[00:18:09] Speaker A: Yeah. He is the current, like, the lead for the writing.
He is. He's potentially one of the leads for acting for the current big project that Amazon is going to be doing. Don't be mad because it's Amazon. Amazon has done some terrible stuff. They've done some fantastic stuff. For every Rings of Power, there's the boys.
[00:18:31] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:18:32] Speaker A: So this is someone who's passionate about it, who's heading the development, who gets to be the person to go, no, you're wrong. This needs to be this way because it's right.
[00:18:43] Speaker C: And Netflix was not able to deal with that anymore and parted ways with him for the Witcher.
[00:18:49] Speaker B: So unfortunately, like, CD Projekt Red doesn't have anything to do with the Witcher show. I just love their game so much. Like, I mean, even Cyberpunk was great after, you know, after they fixed it. After they fixed it, they just create great games that have, like, that you're going to be talking about forever.
So I sucks that Netflix was like, no, we're not doing it your way. And like you said with Henry apparently wanting to do it the right way, and they're like, no.
So we'll see how season four is if they step away from the series or not.
But I will come back.
Probably not our next episode, but the episode after with a full report on how I feel. Give people time to watch it if they want to watch it.
All right, Anything else you guys have been up to or we want to move on.
[00:19:42] Speaker C: Let's move on to our next topic.
[00:19:44] Speaker B: All right, so our topic for tonight, our first topic for tonight is one that I wanted to talk about a little bit because I had a run in with it recently and it's just frustrating. Overused game genres.
What I mean by overused game genres? And I'm just going to go ahead and throw mine out there for an example.
Battle royales. Battle Royales are fun, don't get me wrong. If they were done the right way, they were great.
The first one that I played was pubg, and I think that was probably the first one that, like, truly came out as a battle royale that I could remember or think of. And it was awesome. I loved it. It was like, felt like groundbreaking. Recently I got into Battlefield 6 and, you know, with EA and Battlefield games and their style of shooter games, there's no.
No stranger to battle Passes. Right? They have battle passes. You, you buy your battle pass, you unlock cosmetics or whatever have you.
Now they're making it almost impossible to get through your battle pass because some of your progression is forced onto their battle royale, not just their battlefield for six or Battlefield six Online.
Like you have to go play in their battle royale.
And that's frustrating. And I mean that's just EA with a bait and switch. Like, here's this great game and don't get me wrong, Battlefield 6 is fantastic. Like it's bringing back the battlefield, it feels like, but they're like, yeah, but you got to go play our battle royale if you really want to progress on this. Like you can progress naturally, organically, but like the quests and stuff and progression for the battle pass are forced onto their battle royale. Which I haven't tried it because I didn't want to play battle Royale. I wanted to play Battlefield 6. So battle royales are mine. Like, it's frustrating and I'm over it.
[00:21:43] Speaker C: I'm over RPG mechanics in games that aren't literally RPGs.
I'm playing a story driven shooter or an action adventure game or, or a platformer or whatever. I don't need to gain experience as I kill enemies and level up and gain new powers because I killed enough enemies. Why does every game fucking need this? It doesn't add anything 99% of the time other than like they can just.
[00:22:12] Speaker B: Give you, like they could just give you the skills up front or level.
[00:22:16] Speaker C: Up the skills by completing quests from the quest givers that are in the game or have you find power ups that give you new skills by completing like a platforming challenge or any other number of ways to give you new powers. Instead, everything is. You gain experience from everything you defeat. And when you get enough experience, you level up, which gives you a skill point to assign in a skill tree. I'm so fucking sick of that in every fucking. It works in some games, don't get me wrong. But I'm so sick of that being in every game in so many games that just don't need it. It doesn't add anything to so many games.
Like, I'm gonna use an example. You remember the game Control?
[00:23:01] Speaker A: Yes. I was playing it about a month before I broke my hand.
[00:23:05] Speaker C: Spooky, sci fi, alternate reality, supernatural occurrence, government, cover up game. It's phenomenal. It's a fun shooter. It's a third person shooter with physics elements.
Why the fuck does it have a level up system and skill tree? It adds nothing to the game, it just makes shit frustrating.
[00:23:29] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:23:31] Speaker C: That is like the most recent example I can think of.
That is the most recent example I can think of where it is actively a detriment to the game because I just don't play a lot of games that do this anymore because they frustrate me so much.
[00:23:44] Speaker A: A reason for why it's there because it's a bad reason and you need to not use this reason. It's artificial length.
[00:23:51] Speaker C: Yep. That's longer.
[00:23:54] Speaker A: You have to play longer so that that's how that works. One of the best versions of this hidden in a game is in the original. Well, not the original in Doom 2016 because it's not XP, it's challenge based. You have all of these hidden trees and everything that like are the RPG elements that are not hidden behind. Kill 400 people for more XP. So you can put a skill point here or there. No, you have a challenge that you do on your one thing. You get your skill point, you find it, go put it in a point. That's if you want to do artificial creativity like, like lengthening of an artificial thing. Find mechanics within the game that work around it. One of the things with Doom is you got to go find power ups hidden in little corners or kill a specific enemy in a certain way to get a certain thing.
Those are ways to give yourself artificial length because you're going to be forced to go do things again and again or go searching through levels.
That's how you do it.
[00:24:53] Speaker B: Makes sense to me. I don't like Dying Light does it too for I'm guessing the length of it. And I mean it can make sense to me. Be like, hey, you know you're be way too strong if you have all these powers. But I like, can I just do the mission to earn it? And like instead of me having to go out and kill 800,000 zombies or whatever that I have to do, like just let me earn it. The old, like, I don't. Who cares what level I am. I'm jumping from building to building and I should just. If I want to learn to grapple or jump higher, I shouldn't just kill zombies and learn it. Like have someone teach it to me in a quest or something.
[00:25:33] Speaker C: Or have you find a new grappling hook that has longer rope than the old one.
[00:25:39] Speaker A: So my one is open world games. There's a broad variety of these. There's the open world sandbox games. There's the open world survival games. There's so many games that don't need to be open world that are made open world because it sells better.
[00:25:57] Speaker C: Cough, cough. Mario Kart is open world now, by the way. Cough, cough.
[00:26:03] Speaker A: I've not seen anybody who's played that, so I'm not gonna talk about that one. I've heard people like the game. I don't know if it has anything to do with the open world.
[00:26:12] Speaker C: No one likes the open world. Everyone just likes the racing, the. The regular aspect.
[00:26:17] Speaker A: Okay, why is it overworld? It doesn't need to be.
There's plenty of stuff like in that genre that is. Why is this now open world? We had a very set system for how we're doing things that was working fantastically and you made it open world. One of my examples is I do not remember which Assassin's Creed game originally started.
[00:26:39] Speaker B: This is the Viking one.
[00:26:41] Speaker A: Probably one of the points of Assassin's Creed was the chain of assassination missions you had. The level is constrained so that you have more than shit ways to do things.
Because the more constrained you make it, the more you have to think about things.
One of the best assassination games in the genre is Hitman. It's not truly open world. It's level by level by level. Each one of them is a large level, but they're levels which are designed to allow you to do a lot of different things to make it interesting so you don't have to have such simplistic animations or easy to do things.
Takes away from the experience of a game where it's not necessary. That was one of the most like feared things when Elden Ring came out. It was, it's going to be an open world souls game. Souls games are so very structured for how you move around the world and things.
One of the few that did it correctly because they used the world as the world and made you experience the world.
[00:27:47] Speaker C: And I think that's the same reason that I think open world works for something like Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom, Horizon Zero Dawn. Those kinds of games where it is an rpg, it's a story driven game. But giving you more freedom allows you to tell the story your way more. As opposed to a lot of open world games where it's just here's a map with a bunch of tasks, go complete the checklist.
[00:28:12] Speaker A: Which. Which also like this thought brings me on to this next point which is just publishers bandwagon and games.
Yeah, this. This genre made a billion dollars last year. We need our own version of this. Completely ignoring the fact that the reason that this one's making money is because it did something that was novel and good. How many games have been second or third to the genre that have been better than the one that made it popular?
[00:28:37] Speaker C: Fortnite? It's the only one I can think of.
[00:28:39] Speaker A: It's the only one you can think of because that was what, after pubg.
[00:28:42] Speaker C: It was after Pubg. It was after.
I forget what the name of the one that was. That came before Pubg. It was basically the third major battle royale.
[00:28:52] Speaker A: Yeah. And that one innovated on the system and their innovation made things, I don't know, better because I have not played Fortnite because I don't like the system of game. But it did more to make it more interesting as opposed to just copying what was before.
[00:29:09] Speaker C: Yeah.
I was going to say before we move on from open World, I'm really worried about Metroid Prime 4, guys. It comes out in a month and they showed in a trailer a sequence where Samus has a motorcycle and rides a motorcycle across an open world desert. Oh, why does a Metroid game need open world?
[00:29:30] Speaker A: So their worlds feel open, much like Dark Souls games feel open.
[00:29:37] Speaker C: Yeah. So if.
[00:29:38] Speaker A: If they do the same thing that Elden Ring did with. With Dark Souls genre games with Metroid Prime 4, this could be the best Metroid game of all time.
However.
[00:29:51] Speaker C: However, I'm sorry, Super Metroid exists. You're not gonna get me to sign on to that. But it could be the best Metroid prime game.
[00:29:59] Speaker A: We'll rephrase that to the best 3D Metro game.
[00:30:01] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:30:02] Speaker A: Your sake.
I still like prime better, actually. Also zero mission.
[00:30:07] Speaker C: I just. I want Metroid Prime 4 to be great. To be clear, like, I am not saying, oh, doom and gloom, they showed this weird desert bike sequence. I'm saying it feels very much after what they did with Mario Kart. Like Nintendo is now doing this bandwagon onto Open World and it's like we're.
[00:30:26] Speaker A: We're.
[00:30:27] Speaker C: Open world isn't even the current trend. Why are you doing this now? Nintendo?
[00:30:31] Speaker A: The only reason that I can think that I can give a little bit more faith behind it is because, remember they announced prime for the original switch early on.
[00:30:43] Speaker C: I know it's been a development for a long time.
[00:30:45] Speaker A: We fucked up. We're giving it back to the people who made Prime.
[00:30:50] Speaker C: Yep.
[00:30:51] Speaker A: And that is the only reason I still have some faith in it.
[00:30:53] Speaker C: Which we will be talking about that kind of topic in a little bit.
That's some slow.
[00:30:58] Speaker B: Continue it on the open world because this is a good one. Like I want to complain about too. Like Even though I've been playing them. Pokemon games don't need to be open world all the time. I miss starting at the beginning route where everything's easy and just going very linear through the game.
I mean, to today I was thinking today when I was playing Pokemon Za, I was like, wow, this is like. I feel like this is what the game was.
You always expected it to be coming from like the anime. Like you're just attacking and attacking. Like there's no. It's not actually turn based and like. I get it, I get it. But I miss.
Because you can make a game open world doesn't mean you should like, okay.
[00:31:44] Speaker C: I'm going to push back on that one a little bit. Because Pokemon was always open world. It's an RPG where you can go anywhere. Once you've gotten through the initial progression.
Pokemon, the original red and blue, opens up about halfway through and you have several places you can go. And then it closes back up to go to the elite four at the end. It's a Game Boy game. Like, it's an original Game Boy game. It's not open world in the same like, oh, you completed the tutorial, now go literally anywhere. But there were elements there that were always present and progression. Pokemon could be good as an open world. The problem is that Nintendo is not making good open world Pokemon. They're making empty open world Pokemon.
[00:32:26] Speaker A: The best of their worlds is not an open world game because it's zone by zone. It's Legends. And Legends is fantastic, but it's not technically an open world. You can't just walk through everything to get to places.
[00:32:42] Speaker C: You mean Legends, Arceus.
[00:32:44] Speaker A: Legends. Arceus, Right. I have to. I have to specify now because the.
[00:32:47] Speaker C: New one is also Legends.
[00:32:48] Speaker A: Legends, yeah, Legends, Arceus. It's gated. But because it's gated, the Pokemon company's natural inclinations to make things worse is stem because they're forced to use smaller areas.
[00:33:02] Speaker B: I didn't like. I never really expected Arceus to be.
Didn't really ever consider it. Open world, open world, pseudo. Maybe it's not.
It feels. It feels open world, but like you said, it's just like it's route gated. Like you're constantly going up a route.
That one felt really good to me. The new. Which. What's the new one?
Before Za. Before Za.
Violet, Scarlet and Violet. That was not good open world, in my opinion.
I didn't like it. It felt too open and it got too confusing and I didn't like.
I don't. I get it.
[00:33:40] Speaker A: Places need to be gated off in true open worlds.
[00:33:43] Speaker C: And before that we had Sword and Shield with the wild area. That was the worst part of Sword and Shield.
[00:33:48] Speaker B: Yeah, that one. Gosh, it's been so long since I played that I don't really remember it. I do remember the wild area doing.
[00:33:56] Speaker A: Like the raids and stuff were fantastic. Both of the DLCs did quote unquote wild areas. Fantastic.
[00:34:02] Speaker C: They were big enough with enough stuff going on inside them.
[00:34:06] Speaker A: Yeah. But they were also where most of the world star.
[00:34:09] Speaker B: They shouldn't have DLC either.
Against that, there was one more I wanted to push back, Jax on yours with talking about Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild. And it hurts my soul to say it. I just. I don't like open world Zelda games.
Like, I get it.
[00:34:27] Speaker C: I agree.
But also, I think they're great games.
[00:34:31] Speaker B: If that makes great game, it's a great game. But it took away from the identity.
[00:34:36] Speaker A: Most Zelda games are open game, open world games. Not the 3D ones.
[00:34:41] Speaker C: Even. Even the 3D ones to some degree.
[00:34:43] Speaker A: Because they're all of the original Zelda games except for two are.
Are the classic open world.
That is the. You have a broad movement of systems and then you open up mechanics to move forward in the world. That is what open world started as.
[00:34:59] Speaker C: Yeah. The original Zelda is an open world game on the NES Link to the past is semi open at the start once you get through the tutorial zone. And then once you get access to the Dark World, you have to do palace one and two and then you can go literally anywhere. And you can skip two for a while and do like four before two if you want.
[00:35:20] Speaker B: But like I'll push back like six or I'll. I'll rephrase. Like 3D Zelda. Yeah. So Ocarina of Time while feels open world, you can go anywhere. Like right off the rip. Like you can go anywhere, but you can't. But like if you. If you don't have bombs, you can't go here. If you don't have a hook shot, you can't go there. But it lets you feel like you get there and it's just like, oh man, maybe one day I'll be able to get there. It's kind of like pushes you.
[00:35:45] Speaker C: It's the illusion of a big world instead of actually being a big world.
[00:35:49] Speaker B: I'd say the biggest open world part of that is like you can do Shadow Temple or Spirit Temple. It doesn't matter which one you do because you don't have to have Spirits, you know, that's. You don't have to have the hover boots to do spirit temple and you don't have to have any of the items to do either. You can do. I think intendedly it was supposed to be shadow last, but everybody always does spirit last.
[00:36:15] Speaker C: I did spirit last on my recent playthrough which I should probably finish. I'm literally at Ganon's castle ready to just beat the game.
[00:36:21] Speaker B: Oh yeah. Good fight. Frustrating.
The game's so you get the big or on sword.
[00:36:27] Speaker C: It's aged so poorly. Yes, I do have big ore on sword.
[00:36:31] Speaker B: There's a. I think there's texture packs out there now that make it like 60fps.
[00:36:36] Speaker C: Oh probably. But I'm playing it on the Switch Nintendo Switch Online so I can play it on the TV.
[00:36:42] Speaker A: I was gonna say I remember the 3ds version actually being pretty good.
[00:36:46] Speaker B: Ocarina of time. 3ds was good.
[00:36:49] Speaker C: Is okay.
[00:36:50] Speaker A: Wait, aren't you a Wind Waker fan?
[00:36:52] Speaker B: Me?
[00:36:52] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:36:53] Speaker B: Oh, I love Wind Waker. It is open world to like if you want to count it that it's open island.
[00:37:00] Speaker C: But you can in the same sense that Ocarina of Time is open world. You can try to go anywhere but the game won't actually let you go anywhere except the places that you've unlocked in the linear progression.
[00:37:13] Speaker B: Like that's.
You have to have a certain item or in like Pokemon's case and. Hm. But we're derailing ourselves here.
We could have a whole specifics of shopping.
So our next topic.
Game franchises. Franchises that were ruined by a change of developer and publisher.
Mike, you kicked this one off.
[00:37:36] Speaker A: All right. I alluded to it and Jax alluded to it.
This game almost ruined my franchise forever. One of my. My favorite game sometimes it bounces between three games. My favorite game is Metroid prime most of the time. Sometimes it's Elden Ring, sometimes it's bloodborne, sometimes it's Metroid Prime.
And they were great games.
And then oh man, we're gonna have a story driven Metroid game. It's going to be 3D. They're going to do some new stuff with it. Other M came out and I got special edition at midnight on its release. I've never been more disappointed in my life. When a game it was so terrible they basically killed the franchise. Until very recently they had one rework of a game for an anniversary because the game as a franchise was turning either 20 or 25. When Samus returns was re released and that was A good game.
[00:38:37] Speaker C: The franchise had just turned 30.
[00:38:40] Speaker A: 30. Jeez.
[00:38:41] Speaker C: Metroid 2 had just turned 25. And that's what Samus Returns is a remake of.
[00:38:46] Speaker A: Yeah. And it was also the least accessible game possible for the Metroid franchise.
And then it was gone again. The other game was this weird. It almost felt like a sports game. You had the Federation Force or something.
[00:39:01] Speaker C: Federation Force is a, like, co op shooter on the 3DS. For some reason.
[00:39:07] Speaker A: Who plays any Metroid game to play the Federation to plays anybody but Samus.
The only game that I've ever played that is a Metroid game as other characters that was great was Metroid Prime Hunters. And that was only because the multiplayer on that was weird and fun.
[00:39:26] Speaker C: Hunters wasn't good either, to be fair.
[00:39:29] Speaker A: It was not good, but it was really, really fun. Wasn't good, but it was fun.
[00:39:35] Speaker C: That is a fun bad video game. Whereas Other M is just a bad video game. Other M is so bad, I didn't even buy it. I've never played Other M because it was so infamously bad. Unreleased. This was a Wii title that you played with a Wii Remote sideways and it has fucking waggle bullshit in it. And I just looked at that and I'm like, no. And then it came out and we learned that Team Ninja was misogynistic as fuck with how they wrote Samus.
And the story is shit and the gameplay is even worse than I thought it would be.
[00:40:12] Speaker A: Like, even, even. Even if they'd had the story be as it was.
If any single person in that, like, cared at all, you could. The voice acting was the most dead thing in the universe. It was terrible. No one wanted to be a part of that.
And this is the game that made me stop just getting a game. Because I love the franchise and actually pay attention to at least a little bit of the information coming out. Because I explicitly avoided all information about new games because I wanted to experience them fresh. This ruined that for me. This ruined that for me.
[00:40:50] Speaker C: Yeah. And to be clear, I'm not disparaging Team Ninja themselves. I think Tomonobu Itagaki was a fucking legend. He's the creator of Dead or Alive and the revival of Ninja Gaiden. He's also in charge of. He's basically the head of Team Ninja until this year when he passed away.
[00:41:09] Speaker A: No, that's right. That was recent.
[00:41:11] Speaker C: No, he was. He stopped being the head before Other M. I was wrong. But he was the head during their best games, basically.
And Other M just is everything that's bad about Their games with none of the redeeming shit.
It's jank for jank's sake. It's bad. And because other M sucked so much, it came out in 2010, we got a remake of Samus of Metroid 2 and Samus Returns, and then Metroid Dread is the next Metroid title that's worth.
[00:41:41] Speaker A: A damn, which came out three years.
[00:41:43] Speaker C: Ago, two years ago, four years ago, 2021. It's four years old now. Eleven years passed between Other M and Metroid Dread.
Eleven years to kiss Point.
[00:41:57] Speaker A: This is one of Nintendo's mainline headline franchise names.
There is Mario, there is Zelda, there is Star Fox, which is also dead. There is Metroid.
[00:42:12] Speaker C: And for a long time Metroid was literally in the like Nintendo cares more about Pikmin than they care about Metroid tier, which tells you everything you need to know about how they treated Metroid. And it's because Other M bombed so bad. And Nintendo has always historically not known what to do with Metroid.
[00:42:30] Speaker A: Which is a weird shame because almost every single game they release for it is great.
[00:42:35] Speaker C: But here's the thing, here's what you gotta the best Metroid games were never made by Nintendo. Original NES Metroid was made by Nintendo. Metroid 2 was made by Nintendo. Super Metroid was made by the company that then became Intelligent Systems, AKA the creators of Fire Emblem and Advance Wars.
[00:42:58] Speaker A: Big genre shift.
[00:43:00] Speaker C: Yes, it was made by Gunpei Yokoi, the creator of the Game Boy. Like different people were involved than the first two Metroid games. In addition to some of them, Metroid Fusion was Nintendo. But then Metroid prime was made by Retro Studios in Texas. And Metroid prime is to this day still possibly the greatest first person adventure game ever made, period.
[00:43:24] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:43:25] Speaker C: Like I personally put it second in the franchise behind Super Metroid, but I'm putting it second in a franchise that has titles I love like Zero Mission and Metroid Fusion and Metroid Dread. And I think Prime's better than any of them. Yeah, Nintendo doesn't know how to make good Metroid games.
Gunpei Yokoi did. Fortunately he's not with us anymore. But Nintendo doesn't. And that's why they farmed out Metroid to other companies, why they had Retro in Texas make Metroid prime, why they tried to have Team Ninja make a Metroid in Other M. Why they had Mercury Steam, a Spanish studio, like as in Spain, not as in like Mexico, made Metroid Samus Returns and Metroid Dread.
[00:44:08] Speaker A: And also why Prime 4 was delayed twice. And then they went, we're not doing this. We're not happy with it. We're giving it back to Retro.
[00:44:19] Speaker C: Yup. Because Nintendo doesn't know how to make it good.
At least they finally, after all these years, seem to have figured out we don't know how to make good Metroid. Let's give Metroid to people who give a shit. And we'll make good Metroid. Because Dread is phenomenal. Mercury's team loves the Metroid franchise.
[00:44:39] Speaker A: Dread's great. I love Dread. Samus Returns was great.
[00:44:42] Speaker C: Yeah.
Hopefully we get more of that from Metroid in the future. And we never get another Other M because Jesus fucking Christ. Other M was bad.
[00:44:52] Speaker B: One of these days I'll get into Metroid. Just never, never played it. Other than the only taste of Metroid I ever had was on Super Smash Brothers.
[00:45:01] Speaker C: Someday I will make you play Super Metroid. It is the greatest game on the Super Smash, bro.
[00:45:06] Speaker A: I played Metroid prime and beat it in two days during finals on my first year in college because I got so absorbed by that game.
[00:45:13] Speaker B: All right, Mike, your next game. What do you got going on here?
[00:45:16] Speaker A: I can also do this one.
This is a franchise that has actually been ruined by a full publisher change. Not almost completely destroyed. Yeah.
[00:45:26] Speaker C: We'll see if they ever recover.
[00:45:28] Speaker A: It's not talked about this. Yeah, we've talked about this. As a franchise that has done some fantastic things in the past, has been one of the most seminal games ever released. Halo.
So many things have gone downhill since Halo 3. Realistically.
[00:45:46] Speaker B: But say Halo 3 was the last good one that I can think of.
[00:45:49] Speaker A: A lot of people liked.
[00:45:51] Speaker C: Reach was the last one that was still in Bungie's hands.
[00:45:55] Speaker A: Yeah. And then it left Bungie's hands. And Metroid or not Metroid. I'm sorry. Halo 4 was disappointing in so many ways, but still had some good parts to it. They understood some good things about it. And then we hit five and half the game you don't play as Master Chief.
Now, okay, that may have been an advertising problem.
[00:46:19] Speaker C: I want to pause. I'm going to point out half the game you don't play is Master chief in Halo 2. And nobody is going to call Halo 2 a bad game.
[00:46:27] Speaker A: You're right. But also this was probably an advertising problem because that one out of nowhere, you got to play as an elite.
Come on. That's so weird and interesting.
[00:46:38] Speaker C: And they did in a way where suddenly they were fleshing out the alien race. They used Halo 2 as a vehicle to build their world and make the covenant. Not just dumb, bad Guy aliens going.
[00:46:51] Speaker A: From that to five where sometimes you're not playing Master Chief, you're playing one of the lesser Spartan Fives who never had to go through anything the Spartan did. I don't even think you're one of the people from that is an actual ODST from odst. I remember one of the characters is like one of the odsts that survived and was given Halo 5 armor.
[00:47:13] Speaker B: I wanna.
Whatever it is while we're on the top of Halo before it escapes us. We talked about, I think last episode Halo and how it had such great, like Halo 1 Combat Evolved was such a great game with the way like the spookiness of it and like the flood.
[00:47:29] Speaker A: The atmosphere. Yeah.
[00:47:29] Speaker B: I think it's hilarious after we talked about that that they're remaking the game.
[00:47:36] Speaker A: Oh yeah.
[00:47:36] Speaker B: Like right after we talked about. Since that talk.
Since we talked about that. Yeah. They are completely remaking the game. Not remastering it, not just polishing it. They are remaking the whole game and I'm stoked for it.
[00:47:50] Speaker A: They're re recording voice lines, they're. They're remapping things. I think it's called Campaign Evolved. So they can keep the CE in there.
[00:47:59] Speaker B: I think it's going to be open world too. You can fly everywhere.
No, I'm just kidding. I'm kidding, I'm kidding.
[00:48:05] Speaker A: Don't you ruin this for me.
[00:48:07] Speaker C: I hope the Halo remake is good. I don't expect it to be. And that's kind of the point we're making here.
[00:48:14] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:48:15] Speaker B: Because I'm worried like it's already perfect.
[00:48:18] Speaker A: We've already said this. This is the team that did that. And now we go back to Halo studios. Now they have renamed themselves who gave us Halo 6 Infinite.
[00:48:28] Speaker B: I'm hoping like the game's already a masterpiece. I'm hoping they don't ruin it. They like just, just update it. Just make it pretty.
[00:48:35] Speaker A: If they can make us modern, original and just updated into graphics, that's great. If they can't do that, if they decide they need to tweak things too much.
Too much can be a huge problem.
Too much can be a huge problem.
[00:48:50] Speaker B: Don't give us open world.
Don't give us a battle royale with us. Don't give us a battle royale with it and don't give us level up experience.
[00:48:59] Speaker A: Give. Give us modern versions of those original maps for multiplayer.
[00:49:04] Speaker B: Oh yeah.
[00:49:05] Speaker A: That may be enough to just save the game. Even if the campaign is just okay. Because Halo was like the popularization even more. I think than Quake of Multiplayer Shooter.
[00:49:18] Speaker B: I wouldn't be mad if they're like, okay, so this universe has been fleshed out a little more and they kind of explain things or go a little deeper with the story from one. But don't like take away from the original. Just maybe add a few spices in, give it a little bit more flavor.
[00:49:38] Speaker C: And maybe make the rooms not be copy pastes of each other over and over.
[00:49:41] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. If they can update it so that the visual has if not repeating patterns, then at least like a motif that continues that it's not all the exact same texture. You have the money to do that? Do it.
I'm still real mad about about where a lot of things have been going. I'm still real mad that how they did Halo Infinite. Still real mad about that. They need to pull their hat out of their ass.
[00:50:10] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I'm hoping new Halo will be enough to revive it.
So on my list I got Blizzard as a whole got ruined by Activision and that that might be.
I don't think I'm wrong in this. When Activision joined Blizzard, everything started to go downhill. Everything started way downhill. It went about money. It started to be about money and not about their player base and all their games. Like there's so much heart in all of their games. Before Activision and now it was just. It just felt like it became a money grab. And I'm hoping that like Blizzard or can turn it around with World Warcraft, that's their biggest moneymaker. So I'm hoping that they can.
[00:51:00] Speaker A: But they had real bad years there.
[00:51:03] Speaker B: Yes.
I mean it started with what. When did Activision join?
[00:51:09] Speaker A: They joined in cataclysm.
[00:51:11] Speaker B: Was it cataclysm?
[00:51:12] Speaker A: And originally like it was just we're going to give you money. And then they went, we're going to start making decisions. And then every single upper level person who was one of the Blizzard like people left slowly and then very quickly. And then the entire atmosphere changed. And then what the game became about changed when Mike Morhaime left. The entire game, like the entire company. Completely different. Because you can talk. You remember there's the huge scandal about the misogyny that was going on and things that were happening. None of that was ever really a thing when Mike Boreham was there.
Maybe it was just he was keeping people in check.
Maybe it was just people who had better values. But well, Activision maintained control over Blizzard. They were in a terrible spot.
[00:52:05] Speaker B: And luckily it has seemed they have been getting better with their recent release of Legion Remix, which has had great reviews. A lot of people talk very highly of that. If you haven't played that because it is retail but you do have an active subscription. Whether you do classic or hardcore or however you play your game. I would go try it out. It's really good. If you liked Legion, you'll really enjoy it.
I don't want to dig dive too deep into why Activision is a shitty company as a whole because we're already running a little short on time and I want to give Jax a good chance to go in on his.
[00:52:41] Speaker A: That one doesn't require too much. It's squarely from the top.
[00:52:45] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:52:46] Speaker C: Activision's leadership is straight up evil.
[00:52:49] Speaker A: I. I forgot his name.
[00:52:51] Speaker C: Bobby Kotick.
[00:52:52] Speaker A: That's it. Bobby Kotick. Evil person.
[00:52:54] Speaker C: He is one of the worst human beings in all of video games. I am confident saying that he is genuinely an awful human being. And I'm gonna point out there are video games that are made by literal rapists.
He sucks.
[00:53:10] Speaker B: Activision no good.
Alright Jax, what do you got?
[00:53:14] Speaker C: Alright. So I couldn't pick a specific franchise. I instead picked a developer that was ruined by a change of ownership because they have so many different franchises that never were the same afterwards. I'm talking about Rare.
Rare was a British game developer that before the 90s and early 90s was completely on their own. They made some really good games.
There's some NES games that are genuinely good games, but they're NES games and I don't necessarily recommend them anymore. Like rc Pro Am and Snake Rattle and Roll. They made Battletoads which is a great game. It's unfairly hard, but it's a great game.
[00:54:01] Speaker A: Wonderful meme.
[00:54:03] Speaker C: Battletoads rules and then they developed some tech to make more CG looking things in games in the early 90s and presented it to Nintendo and Nintendo was so impressed that Nintendo bought a stake in Rare, making Rare a second party developer for Nintendo and gave Rare access to their catalog of characters. And Rare made Donkey Kong Country.
Donkey Kong country, by the way, is the third best. It is the third best selling game on the Super Nintendo period.
On the Super Nintendo. And number one is cheating because that's Super Mario World and it came with the system.
[00:54:44] Speaker A: What? It's Super Mario World and then is it a link to the past?
[00:54:48] Speaker C: I don't remember.
[00:54:49] Speaker A: I think it's probably a link to the past.
[00:54:51] Speaker C: Wouldn't surprise me.
So like mega, mega success. Donkey Kong Country 2 and 3 are phenomenal games and Rare made them. They made Killer Instinct which is frankly better than Mortal Kombat at the time. Like it's just a better game. You can't convince.
[00:55:09] Speaker A: Conkers.
[00:55:10] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Say Conker's Bad Fur Day. Like it was great. And I mean Microsoft did have a thing to do with the Live and Reloaded. Luckily they didn't ruin the game. They just kind of made it look better.
[00:55:21] Speaker C: I'm getting there. We're going to get to what Microsoft did to all of their franchises because then they made Rare, made goldeneye.
They literally made the game that made people realize first person shooters could work on consoles. They made Banjo Kazooie and basically invented the 3D collectathon platformer genre. They made a game that you've probably never played called Jet Force Gemini. That is a really good N64 game and I highly recommend.
[00:55:51] Speaker B: Talked about it.
[00:55:52] Speaker C: Yeah, I know about it. That's why I'm not going into it.
In 2002, I think Microsoft bought Nintendo's share in Rare, making Rare become a second party studio for Microsoft instead of for Nintendo.
And not only has Rare never been the same ever since because they went from putting out banger after banger after banger to putting out Grabbed by the Ghoulies and Cameo Elements of Power and Viva Pinata.
And probably the best game.
[00:56:26] Speaker A: That may be the only one I've heard that's actually. I think I've heard Viva Pinata is actually good.
[00:56:31] Speaker C: People like Viva Pinata. I'm not gonna say it's a bad game. It's definitely much lower tier than the stuff they made prior to the Microsoft ownership fair. It's definitely not at like goldeneye Perfect Dark Banjo Kazooie tier. No, at best it's maybe at Blast Core tier, which Blast Core is an underrated fucking game.
And then they made Sea of Thieves is the most recent game that they actually properly developed that anyone cares about. Sea of Thieves is fine.
It's not a bad game. But again, it's definitely not what they used to make. Rare is a shadow of their former selves.
And the franchises that they were so pivotal in making good are a shadow of their former selves.
Donkey Kong country has had two mainline sequels since Rare stopped working on it. And Donkey Kong Country Returns and Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze are adequate games, but they're not best in class platformers like the original trilogy were there.
[00:57:39] Speaker A: We'll see where the new one comes.
[00:57:41] Speaker C: Donkey Kong Bonanza.
I don't know. I haven't played it. I've heard it's good, people like it.
[00:57:47] Speaker B: But it reminds me of Mario Odyssey. Seems pretty Good.
[00:57:50] Speaker C: But it's not a Donkey Kong country game.
[00:57:53] Speaker A: It's true. It's not the same kind of game.
[00:57:56] Speaker C: Banjo Kazooie. I think they made one afterwards, and it sucked.
[00:58:01] Speaker B: Banjo.
[00:58:02] Speaker A: There's Banjo. There was Banjo Tui, and then there was Banjo Kazooie. Nuts and Bolts.
[00:58:07] Speaker B: No, it was Grunty's Revenge came out in 2003, and then nuts and bolts came out 2008.
[00:58:12] Speaker A: Yeah. I think Grundy's Revenge is Banjo Tooie.
[00:58:15] Speaker B: No, Banjo Tooie and Grunty's Revenge is a separate game.
[00:58:18] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:58:18] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:58:19] Speaker C: And was Nuts and Bolts any good?
[00:58:21] Speaker A: No.
[00:58:21] Speaker B: No, it was garbage.
Banjo Tooie was the last good game.
[00:58:27] Speaker A: Very good.
[00:58:28] Speaker C: And they. They were involved in a newer Killer Instinct game in the. In the 2010s.
That kind of just.
Yeah, it came out in 2013. That. That's kind of my point. It came and went. It was bad. Every one of their good franchises kind of just bombed out and sucked after the act.
[00:58:48] Speaker A: Has anyone heard of any Conker game at all since? I've played a game that wasn't Conker's.
[00:58:55] Speaker C: Bad Fur Day, Conker Live and reloaded in 2005, and it sucked.
It was literally like, what if Conker? But Call of Duty, it's bad.
[00:59:06] Speaker B: Conker's Bad for a day. Always hold a special place in my heart. And I'm sure we're gonna talk about it a dozen hundred other times.
[00:59:13] Speaker C: And that's kind of the key, is the best way to see how egregious this difference is is rare Replay. Rare Replay is a good product. I am not disparaging rare replay. If you have access to it. If you have a Xbox One or Xbox Series X, you should pick up rare Replay. It's got a lot of great titles on there, including basically everything they made except Donkey Kong country, because they don't have the rights to that.
There's a lot of good stuff. All of that good stuff stops after 2001. Unless you really like Viva Pinata. I guess.
[00:59:52] Speaker B: Viva Pinata was fun, but it was.
It got boring. I mean, it was just a breeder game.
[00:59:59] Speaker C: It just frustrates me so much that this studio went from literally just banger after banger after banger after banger. Like, literally, they put out a game every year that was top of the class for, like, half a decade to literally not a good game in 20 years.
[01:00:17] Speaker B: A couple of fine games ruined by rich companies that have more money than synths. I mean, that seems to be the theme here.
[01:00:27] Speaker C: Yeah. Because one of the keys of Nintendo's ownership of Rare is they provided help when Rare needed it and were otherwise pretty hands off. They did not tell Rare what to do or how to make games.
They just said, cool, we own. The percentage varied over the years. You can use our characters. We get access to use your characters, make games for us. That was, that was the ownership agreement. And Microsoft clearly did not maintain the same stance at all.
[01:00:58] Speaker B: Going back to Banjo Kazooie, while we're on the topic, they still just like on.
Just like with Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask, like those genres, they still. People still make ROM hacks to these games. That's how loved those games are. Like, there's a ROM hack out and I can't remember the exact name of it, but I was watching somebody play it. It is a ROM hack where you play as Banjo Kazooie and you go into all these other Nintendo 64 game worlds. There's a double oh seven one you go into and you got to collect the jiggies and you know it's a collectathon of course, but you get to go into like. It's such a good ROM hack. I cannot remember the name of it.
[01:01:38] Speaker C: But speaking of Banjo Kazooie, did you realize that Banjo Kazooie is not actually the first game that Banjo appears in?
[01:01:46] Speaker B: I remember something like he was in.
[01:01:48] Speaker A: He's in like Diddy Kong Racing, isn't he?
[01:01:50] Speaker C: Diddy Kong Racing was made by Conker.
[01:01:54] Speaker A: Also one of the best racing games of all time.
[01:01:56] Speaker B: It's the.
[01:01:57] Speaker C: The first appearance of both Banjo and Conker and it is the best kart racer not called Mario Kart in my opinion. It's a better kart racer than Mario Kart 64.
[01:02:07] Speaker B: I think I would agree with that. It's. It is a lot about it.
[01:02:11] Speaker A: That's great.
[01:02:11] Speaker C: I think, I think the, the subsequent Mario Kart games are better than it. So I'm not gonna say it's the best kart racer ever. It's a better kart racer than Mario Kart 64.
[01:02:21] Speaker A: 64 portion where you like had the big map and you could like fight with people. And I think that's what made 64 better than, than this one because it was just kart racing. But the cart racing itself was better.
[01:02:33] Speaker B: There's a battle mode in.
[01:02:34] Speaker C: Yeah, it had a battle mode. It had planes. It had a more of like hoverboats. It had the hoverboats. It had a Mario 64 esque like story progression kind of thing.
[01:02:48] Speaker B: It was a great game. They did the open world. Ish. To where you drove to all your different, you know, races and everything for the story world. Kind of what I guess the new Mario Kart should have done is just like Diddy Kong racing.
Yeah.
So we're getting towards the end of running out of time here.
Do you guys have any last minute topics you want to bring up? Something that you want to get off your chest?
[01:03:19] Speaker A: I just want people to remember, especially developers. No developer is going to be listening to us, but to developers, publishers especially.
Let people make the game they want to make. The more you fuck with it, the less people like it.
I don't know any major like publisher decision that has improved a game and stop rushing them.
[01:03:47] Speaker B: Like let them get it done when they get it done.
[01:03:49] Speaker A: I understand there's a, there's an immediate loss of money. I understand there's, there's problems with things. Rushing games out almost always kills games.
[01:03:57] Speaker C: Yep.
[01:03:58] Speaker B: And stop the battle passes. Stop the open world. Just give us games. Bring us back to the early 2000s in early and late 90s. Give us good games back.
Well, that's it for tonight. Thanks for joining.
For Jack Soman, Mike of many names and myself, Pillow Pet. Have a good night.
[01:04:18] Speaker C: Bye Bye.
[01:04:19] Speaker A: Good night everybody.
