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More Games Need to Embrace the Weird | Windbreaker Podcast
7.5k Plays6 months ago
On this week’s episode of Windbreaker, Yahtzee, Frost, and Marty discuss the history of weird in games.
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Transcript
Introduction to Game Maker Engine
00:00:00
Speaker
This video is brought to you by Game Maker, the free, fast, and easy to use 2D game engine that helps power modern classics like Undertale, Hotline Miami, and Hyper Light Drifter. Starter templates, official asset bundles, and a wealth of tutorials are available to help bring your ideas to life. And you can export and share your game for free on all non-console platforms.
00:00:20
Speaker
But you don't have to take my word for it, I'm just some jerk. We have an actual bonafide game maker-er on hand. Oh shit, that's me. Yes, I've been using Game Maker for a long time. It's probably the most powerful and easiest to use engine for making 2D games out there. Suitable for both amateurs and hardcore coders and with all the Steam and console integration stuff for when you're ready to start monetizing your hobbies. I'm using it for my upcoming smash hit game, Starstruck Pack-a-Porn. Which I assume will be a smash hit because Game Maker's that bloody great.
The Role of Weirdness in Games
00:00:49
Speaker
Head on over to the Game Maker link in the description to begin your game development journey today.
00:01:20
Speaker
And fittingly, for a bunch of sick boys, we'll be talking about the weird in games. I guess we didn't really have much of a thesis beyond, hey, we all love weird games. I wish more games were weird. Do we? I feel like there's a balance with pretentiousness. You know, you risk being called pretentious if you like any game that strays off the beaten path. Sure.
00:01:45
Speaker
Well, it's a natural desire for people who are sick of the usual committee-designed slop that comes in from AAA games. And for my part, My Love of the Weird is hand-in-hand with my love for indie games, especially like the solo developed game. It's much easier for something to be weird if no one creating it has to explain it to anybody else on the development team.
00:02:08
Speaker
Once you have to start vocalizing your weirdness, you're like, oh, this is going to be hard to follow. Now I'm explaining it. I brought up this with regards to Undertale in an extra punctuation way back in the day. There's a lot of touches on Undertale that Toby Fox would probably have had trouble explaining to another creator had there been one.
00:02:30
Speaker
Yeah, when we get into it, that's why we see 99% of the games we talk about are probably going to be indie, and it's rare that you see AAA fully embrace the weird. You can have little sprinkles of weird, but it's rare that AAA goes fully weird.
00:02:48
Speaker
Especially not these days. There's plenty of weird, if you look at the PS2 era of third party games. There you go, there you go. It's like we're talking old school. Hear me out. I want a plumber and he's stomping the goombas and he's saving the princess.
00:03:04
Speaker
Yeah, he'd fight the chip every once in a while. Well, as is well known, a lot of the strange aspects of Mario were sort of necessities of the format. They gave him a moustache because the pixel resolution was so low, it was easier than bringing across the fact that he had a mouth.
00:03:20
Speaker
They gave him overalls because it was easier than bringing across any other sort of outfit with that low amount of pixels. I'd like to think the Amoto showed up in that outfit and it was just like, the pixels are rough, you know? Okay. Our mascot is a tradesman. I don't know where the stereotypical Italian thing came in. I guess that was just followed on from the moustache. Miyamoto is a big fan of a nice piping hot lasagna. That's why that's where it came from. Well, who is it? Oh,
00:03:50
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, Nintendo is one of, I would say, the few AAA companies that do still sort of embrace the weird and have been, you know, since the NES and SNES era.
Cultural Influences on Game Development
00:04:01
Speaker
I mean, you could say one of the most sort of important, quote unquote, weird games is EarthBound.
00:04:07
Speaker
I feel like that is a, the weirdness in that is throughout the entirety of the game, from its mechanics, to its visuals, to its sound, to its story, and that has trickled down and become sort of an urtext for a lot of weird indies. It's very much patient zero for a certain sub-genre of games in which we include Undertale, Lisa the Painful, Amori, and a bunch of other things.
00:04:35
Speaker
What was that? What was that? Mario? No. Was it Luigi? What was this? Nintendo Mario game. It was Luigi. That you played on stream recently.
00:04:46
Speaker
You're an elephant. Oh, Mario Wonder. Yeah, that was a day-cool-night-cool game. Dear God. Yeah. Even their big flagship tentpole games have weird shit about them. Mario and Zelda games are weird to their core. Majora's Mask is weird as shit. And again, we're out of necessity of what do we do? We need to turn this around in 18 months. What do we do with the assets we have?
00:05:12
Speaker
I have a theory that there's like two halves of Nintendo. There's the status quo Nintendo, the mundane Nintendo, who will just make the new Zelda that's just Zelda again, hitting all the bases and stuff. And then once something is established, then that team sort of goes away and gets working on the next Star Fox or whatever. And then the fucking, all right, let's see what we can get away with team moves in.
00:05:39
Speaker
We're making a game just with Tingle. We're going to see what's going on here. So they made Ocarina of Time, like the status quo conservative branch of Nintendo made Ocarina of Time. And then that was established. And they were like, OK, we've done the Link rescues Zelda from Ganondorf shit. Over to the weird guys. And then the weird guys make Majora's Mask.
00:06:00
Speaker
I think you can see a similar pattern with Paper Mario 2 and the games that followed Wind Waker in canon, like Phantom Hourglass.
00:06:11
Speaker
I mean, even like teams. What if it's the same team? I mean, that's I was formal and now I'm just smoking haters and drinking absinthe while I'm making up the follow up. That's Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. Breath of the Wild feels relatively normal to me, whereas Tears of the Kingdom, they're like, what if you can build a mech with a giant penis flamethrower? Yeah, yeah.
00:06:34
Speaker
Even in Breath of the Wild, what's with the weird tree guy who shakes his maracas? Oh my god, has to best do. Yeah. Who else, before we obviously are going to vote a ton of time to indies, who else in the sort of the AAA space would you say, like Kojima is obviously the next one that comes to mind in terms of, again, maybe that's part of it's the odd viewership, but being able to do more traditional games.
00:06:57
Speaker
If you can't get soloists, fucking auteurs is the next best thing. Kojima being the best example. An auteur who can somehow manage to work with a team, which is a rare skill. But take a look at the fucking thumbnail. Katamari Damacy. The guy who made that. Who went on to make Nobby Nobby Boy. And the various other things.
00:07:23
Speaker
Also, shout out to my boy Suda51 as well. Who are Yakuza? Don't know. Nagoshi-san. I feel like Yakuza has leaned into the weirdness in a way that Sonic, some of Sonic feels weird, but I don't know if they realize they're weird.
00:07:46
Speaker
Japanese weird is extra weird from our perspective because it's also from a foreign culture. But even considering that, the Japanese do like a bit of weird.
00:07:57
Speaker
The Yakuza games, especially the side quests and the tonal shifts, which feel like have gotten even more and more pronounced throughout the series. I think that's relating to the fact that Japanese development still has this culture of all tourism baked into it. There's always a director nominated.
00:08:18
Speaker
to apply their vision to the game, however true that might actually be. Whereas Western game development is still very much committee-driven in the AAA realms. It also feels like there's more of a free-flowing attitude to kind of experiment with tones. And you get that in anime and manga, the same thing. Whereas in a lot of sort of bigger Western stories, there's a fear to be to oscillate from sincere to completely
00:08:48
Speaker
Batshit Gonzo crazy. You don't see Naughty Dog games swing all the way. You don't see a Kim Levine game swing all the way, or a Bioware game. Well, it was pretty weird that Uncharted 3 spends all that time referencing Guybrush Threepwood. Or is it Thor? The one with pirates. Yeah, yeah.
00:09:08
Speaker
I think that's maybe an auteur being able to be like, hey, this was the thing that really inspired me as a storyteller, as a kid growing up. I'm just going to flex my creativity and put this in here. I wonder if it's like a cultural thing, because Japan creates a lot of weird media, partly because in daily life, it's all very straight laced and ordinary and buttoned down.
00:09:37
Speaker
I think you need to, otherwise you're oppressed as a society, so you need somewhere to really let your freak out. It's got to come out somewhere. I think British culture shows a lot of this as well. Your cynicism drips over everything. What do you mean? Well, British comedy can be very black and very weird and out there. As opposed to the people.
00:09:59
Speaker
Yeah, because the people are very sort of emotionally repressed and straight laced in like everyday life. That's, that's how you're expected to be. And so like, you know, the frustration builds and the weird stuff leaks out. The weird stuff leaks out. Um, I feel like I think of the, of the platform holders, Xbox is the least weird. I don't think Xbox does a lot of weird stuff. I think there's a rush. No, that was Bethesda.
00:10:27
Speaker
Yeah, but that was under the Xbox umbrella, but even that, like, felt familiar-weird. Yeah, and clearly Xbox have demonstrated they've seen no value in the uniqueness of HiFi Rush.
00:10:38
Speaker
Yeah. Like, I don't associate your Halos or your Gears of War or your Microsoft Flight Sims or even Bethesda, core Bethesda games, Skyrim or Fallout necessarily with weird. PlayStation, I feel like, had a weird era, especially that PS2 era going into the PS3 era where they were leaning on Japan studios with stuff like Tokyo Jungle and Puppeteer and Reign. There's also a much smaller gap between indies and triple A's in the PS2 era. There was a lot of third party development
00:11:07
Speaker
That's why there was a lot of weird third-party games and lots of shovelware on the PS2 as well. Yeah, I remember one of the standout things about the original Katamari Damacy was it was $20, which was kind of unheard of for just a new released game at the time. Obviously now with the Rise of Indie, you know, games are anywhere from free to, I guess now, $79.99 or whatever.
00:11:34
Speaker
Yeah, you mentioned Suda, Suda and Swery are two auteurs that kind of stand out to me as being able to embrace the weird. The weird in games, of course, has been a presence since the very beginning. I'm thinking now of the British bedroom programmer scene who made games with the Commodore 64 and the Spectrum around the time that the US was going through its difficult Atari period. Yeah.
00:12:01
Speaker
There was a lot of very weird concepts being realized by developers like Jeff Minter, who made games like Attack of the Mutant Camels on the Commodore 64, which was just a game where there are mutant camels being attacked. And then there was like interactive kind of documentary history about Jeff Minter. Have you seen that? No. Can't say I have, but I'm sure it was interesting stuff. Yeah.
00:12:28
Speaker
What is it when America not being able to take weird to public, right? I feel like most of the weird thing was flash games. But we all got quite into Animal Well recently. And when I first played Animal Well, my first thought was this really reminds me of the old Commodore 64-bedroom program era. This really feels like one of those room-by-room platform games where you just have to dodge really weird out there enemies, like just a boot.
00:12:54
Speaker
or a dog that's half in and a half out of a bucket running back and forth that you have to jump over. Games like Chucky Egg or Jet Set Willy would be full of that kind of thing. And it really feels like Animal Well calls back to that.
00:13:12
Speaker
It has to be so set into an aesthetic to really pop off, I think, here on the Western side. Like, weird game, I'm thinking Cuphead, but is it really weird? You know, it's a well-established rubber hose weird. Yeah, it's weird. They have a problem with the out there. You want to try to define what we mean by weird? Because it's hard, again, that's like that pornography thing. I know it when I see it. Why define it? Why not? What's your favorite kind of weird?
00:13:40
Speaker
My favourite kind of weird is the weird that feels like you're in another person's stream of consciousness. There we go, I like this. Okay, I like that. What are you feeling, uh... Suda5-1 stuff, like why is there just a random boss fight where it's based on how many times you shoot each other off and how much actual damage you do, and then the winner is crushed by a giant statue head falling from above. Why did that make sense to Suda5-1? What was going through his mind? That's the kind of thing I'm interested in.
00:14:08
Speaker
Yeah, I guess mine is kind of part and parcel with that is I feel like my kind of weirdness is the weirdness that like pushes up against the preconceived walls, I guess, of what we see in the medium and kind of expands the boundaries for what you could do to having a boss fight. We're like, Oh, I didn't know. I don't know. You could do that. Like, you know, the first time I played a game where you broke the fourth wall is like, Oh, I didn't know.
00:14:33
Speaker
I didn't know that was on the menu. I didn't know that was kosher. So that's why I'm very forgiving. By any game that does something new and takes a big swing, I'm able to be like, okay, I really appreciate this, even though X, Y, and Z did not work for me, which kind of indica was the game that we all played recently that, you know, one of the things that sparked this, but indica has a lot of problems with it. But to me, I'm like, this is a big swing and I appreciate a big swing.
00:15:01
Speaker
Oh, sorry. So you're in the stream of consciousness. You're in the same vein, but also like in from a fundamental and a mechanical. Yeah. You like the risk taking. Yeah, I do. Because that's basically what indie games are. They take the risks where the AAA are just doing what makes the money.
00:15:18
Speaker
Yeah, I like that. I like it somewhere in between the two, but I also like them to have sort of a conscious understanding of the culture that we're in. That's why Indica kind of fell flat to me because that ending is very like 2013 our atheist is popping off, you know, and like, OK, where did you go from there? Whereas it did have an interesting bit where they're walking her out and they're talking about the the father that became a serial killer because he's kind of gaming
00:15:45
Speaker
you know, Dogma in a way where it's like, it's almost justified to kill children. And I'm like, those are weird thoughts that I remember having like in high school where you're just high as hell and you're like, you know, there's a loophole here, but it's not a good one. And it's that sort of far out thinking, but it's like alongside keeping with the culture. It's sort of like that game that you told us about Marty, the Zelda one, but it's like Galaga and a little F1. Oh yeah, mini shoot adventures.
00:16:13
Speaker
Where I go, if you think about it, it's weird because you're a little, you're a little, um, pilot on a little ship and everything's a little ship and it's all organized in that way. But it's not far out from what we're experiencing right now. You know what I mean? So I do, I do like the mechanical. I like the like, what the hell was this person thinking? But I also wanted something that almost like hits back to the culture.
00:16:34
Speaker
Yeah, and I feel like we see that with a lot of the games that kind of blow up. It feels like you can almost draw a line between their success and something that kind of makes sense. Like going back to Nintendo, something like WarioWare feels like a game that was even ahead of its time.
00:16:50
Speaker
to the how we consume things now with people just scrolling through endless feeds of TikToks, or Instagram reels, or anything, or Twitter, Reddit. And Wariware, 10 years beforehand, really sort of understood that our attention span is tiny, and so we'll give you these kind of bite-sized micro doses of stimulus.
00:17:12
Speaker
Yeah, I was going to bring up WarioWare. That's definitely something from Nintendo's weird cupboard. It's related to another series called Rhythm Heaven, which has a similar sort of weird aesthetic. I think it's got creators in common.
00:17:33
Speaker
Yeah. And I mean, Nintendo is also leading into like the weirdness of input methods, right? Of what if we, what if we have a touch screen? You know, what if these aren't all wins, but what if we have motion controls? Like, what if we build the thing around that? And you're able to get some weird ideas out of that.
00:17:48
Speaker
Well, so often that the establishment starts out as the weird outlier creative risk take. And this disgusting WASD format everyone uses nowadays. WASD was once through people. And that's another thing to appreciate about the weird. It could be, as you say, with WarriorWare, it could be the next wave of the next big thing.
00:18:17
Speaker
That's all you'd never know, wouldn't you? You wouldn't know what the next big thing would be without experimentation. And that's why I say you kind of need to know, be aware of the culture that you're around, because when does weird just become the status quo? Exactly.
00:18:33
Speaker
There's probably a lot of weird things that we accept as the common practice in video games these days. That if we looked back on with a sort of Doug Stanhope, if this didn't exist, would you invent it sort of attitude? Yeah. Would probably make you pause for thought.
00:18:50
Speaker
like the whole live system in video games, which only existed in arcade games to like, build money out of people, and which just stuck around in home games for way too long until someone said, hey, wait a minute, do we actually need this? This seems weird. See, have you guys seen the new system, though? It's a live system, sure, but it only takes a life away if you take direct damage. Animal Well had this, that, um, shoot-em-up game I was talking to Morty about, that has that as
Innovative Features in Modern Games
00:19:14
Speaker
well. If you fall off, that's not taking a life away, it's only when you get hit.
00:19:17
Speaker
Yeah, Mario Wonder has a thing because I've been playing it with the girls. It has a thing where if you like get hit or lose a life, you turn into a ghost and rather than losing a life, you've got five seconds for another player to touch you and then you can come back to life without having to lose a life.
00:19:37
Speaker
So, you know, it's still a presence. It still means that green mushrooms have a purpose, as opposed to in Mario Odyssey. Yeah. Is there a weird that doesn't resonate with you guys? To me, low random humor? Rarely. Yes, yes.
00:19:57
Speaker
Yeah, I'm with you on that. Just something that feels like it's trying too hard. Yeah, I've like borderlands for it feels like it's trying too hard to be wacky. Well, we're here. Hi, though. No, it's wearing that t shirt with the tie graphic. Yeah. 2009. Because I'm fun at parties. All right, here's a here's a question. What would be your example of a triple A weird thing? Okay. Um,
00:20:31
Speaker
I think a lot of the NPCs and mechanics and way things are explained in FromSoft games, I would put in the weird column.
00:20:43
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, I'm sorry. He's my favorite weirdo. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Like Miyazaki. Miyazaki loves sprinkling, uh, sprinkling a couple of weird dudes across his game. Just weird mechanics that just feel like world tendency and stuff like that. And even the invasion system and the note system, uh, um, feel very strange, but now just feel a part of the DNA of those games.
00:21:04
Speaker
Is there anything from the land of AAA Western developed committee designed games that if that feels like a weird, an attempt at weird, because the only thing that comes to mind is Sunset Overdrive and you know how I feel about that. Todd Howard constantly selling Skyrim was kind of weird.
00:21:23
Speaker
I guess one of the one of the weirds I don't like that we see now more and more with especially these multiplayer games is I don't get the The tie-in like the appeal of look all my Gundam's coming to fucking Call of Duty
00:21:39
Speaker
Like what? Oh, you can ride a chocobo in Assassin's Creed or you could put a couple noodle head on your Final Fantasy character. It's just kind of like...
00:21:53
Speaker
When you talk about weird, I don't like the word magenta springs to mind. The whole approach of games like Fortnite to sort of present that sort of weird bohemian punk attitude, even though it's still underneath, it's still just a corporate design slop. I mean, the whole fact that you could dress up as literally anything from Darth Vader to a hot dog in Fortnite,
00:22:15
Speaker
is the kind of weirdness that just reflects to me a complete lack of artistic direction as opposed to a weird attempt to be expressed with the ideas. Because you're given templates. Whereas in VR chat, that took off because yes, you could be anything. So it would be weird to see like Ugandan knuckles. Like why is he in here screaming at people with such a thick accent? And like it's Vader, but he's dressed up in streetwear.
00:22:45
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, he's dabbing. He's flossing. Yeah, so like, but to have this like, you can be Vader, but you know, you're not allowed to mess with the integrity of my design in any sort of way. Like, that's not weird at all. Well, and at the same time, like, Fortnite tried to be very sincere with that. Do you remember that, like, Martin Luther King, the Civil Rights interactive museum they put in the game? No. What? Yeah. I love corporate- Jesus Christ, I didn't just make this up, did I? You sure did, right next to what, the Holocaust Museum?
00:23:30
Speaker
well intentioned and I would go as far to say well made, but when juxtaposed with the fact that like fucking Rick and Morty are running around with Captain America and that is just weird. That's very, that's very corporate. They do it intentionally, but yeah, it's, it's instances like that. Their tone deafness is just so weird and funny to me.
00:23:43
Speaker
Fortnite MLK event.
00:23:52
Speaker
So weird for me is hand in hand with artistry. I like the lone developer's single vision. I like the thing that only makes sense to one person and this is probably related to the fact that I am the sort of person who genuinely likes walking around a modern art museum. Looking at things and trying to understand what thought processes on the artist's part went into it.
00:24:13
Speaker
Yeah. I like that. Yeah. Except instead of a modern art museum, I like, you know, frequenting bars and you just kind of see one dude that's a little too out of it. And he just starts talking wise. Just cracking wisdom at you and all like, I'm going to hold that forever. I hope to be that man one day. In Vino Veritas, as they say. Yeah. Now I'm just trying to feel like what, like, can you think of any Western AAA dev that's like,
00:24:42
Speaker
doing weird and doing weird well.
00:25:04
Speaker
Not really. In terms of first party studios, Double Fine, I see someone in the chat mention. They still feel like they have kind of a unique thumbprint that they're able to put on their games. Yeah. That continues, but we'll see under Microsoft's reign. I mean, I don't feel like there's a single vision there anymore. I think they've got a bunch of different creative leads. Yeah. Making their stuff. Yeah.
00:25:29
Speaker
You mentioned earlier, Frost about sort of being tapped into the culture. And I see, I feel like someone who kind of rose through that and understood something before it became a thing was Bennett Foddy. And putting out a thing like QWOP, which felt kind of niche. And it was like, oh, we can use movement and struggle and physical comedy to have this really quick experience. And then moving on to getting up,
00:25:59
Speaker
I don't know if it was intentional or not, but there was something to be had in, oh, we can take that struggle and bottle it up and people will watch by the hundreds of thousands of people struggle. And there was that same game that came out recently where you just keep jumping high into the sky, like the 3D, it was almost like Gary's Mod, jump in the sky and you keep going.
00:26:21
Speaker
Yeah I think only up yeah and if you fall you just lose and there's like there's people who play for eight hours and they just fall and they lose. Yeah those are strange ones because those were always around either flash games or mods. So it's almost strange to see it's like walking into a back alley and you see the Mona Lisa.
00:26:40
Speaker
Or walking into the Louvre and you see like, you know, your friend's painting that he drew in sixth grade and you're like, oh, why is that in here? You know? Yeah. And why so many people can just like, it's just stream or bait. It's like, no, it's a very weird moment that we're sharing right now.
00:26:56
Speaker
altogether. Same with, like, Untitled Goose game. I know it come off as very gimmicky, meme-y novelty. To me, I like how it was just a reverse stealth game, where imagine if I was the exclamation mark that goes over the guard's head every time. Yeah. I think that was another game that had a very British sensibility to it. I mean, aside from... They had farmer's caps. It might have been. Yeah. Aside from the fact that one of the objectives was to make an old man fall on his bum.
00:27:23
Speaker
That had a very sort of Beano Comics sort of childish rejection of authority vibe to it that a lot of British media shares. Yeah, that's very Wodehouse, isn't it? Sometimes he writes those little stories about animals just trying to do their thing. Not knowing what they're going for. I'm still itching on that triple A, but I feel like I might just give up on it and get straight into the Indies.
00:27:52
Speaker
Yeah. The AA games. I'm, I'm forever tempted if it weren't for the fact that reviewing AAA games was always a big draw. No, that's not what I meant. I meant just for this conversation, not coming up on it as a career. Well, if it's, you know, if it were down to me.
00:28:12
Speaker
I mean, you gotta hope AAA will impress you sometime. I mean, Alan Wake 2. Alan Wake 2 had a lot of weird bits in it. I didn't want to say it, you know. I actually appreciated the music video bit. But it's the very case of where there actually is an actual autoface behind it. I mean, I did front of it because he casts himself in the game in multiple different roles. The statistical prick.
00:28:38
Speaker
I like that sort of like writer weird, I guess, a very Alice in Wonderland. Or isn't this odd, but it is very much a metaphor for other things and very much placed in logic. So I'll take it. It's about as creative as a weird can get while still not being too fabricated. I think it's a bit up itself in a very writerly sort of way, as you say.
00:29:01
Speaker
I mean, I think I said my review of Alan Wake too, that, uh, any work of fiction about a work of fiction that overrides reality is sort of inherently up itself and sort of sucking off creatives as a, as a, as a theme. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what was the last weird AAA game? My mind keeps going Far Cry 3. I would have said that on Wake. Oh, okay.
00:29:28
Speaker
Yeah, Alan Wake 2 feels like formally very strange, like it's mixed media usage. Yeah. Yeah, Far Cry 3, like just three vanilla, is weird to you. Yeah, well, it's as weird as they could get, because like, oh, he's high. Well, yeah, there's a lot of hallucinatory moments. Yeah. And Blood Dragon, I would say, leaned into that. Ubisoft feels like, I guess, Rabbids Aside feel
00:29:53
Speaker
surprisingly, un-weird. They feel very normal. SASS is creepy. The division, they all feel very normal. They used to have more of a creative spirit, like the whole PS2 era, Beyond Good and Evil, Pins and Pins and Pins of Time. Sure, yeah. Yeah. That's a rapids, as we say. Yeah. These days, they're a business. These days, they're just trying to make the money with the nice familiar themes.
00:30:22
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, David Cage. People mentioning in the chat. That's a AAA weirdness magnet. There you go. There you go. I think that just- He does dig big swings. I mean, his games do feel weird, but I think that's more down to the fact that he doesn't really get human relationships. Yeah. He's so me. Like weird and he's so me for real. He's best of me for real.
00:30:44
Speaker
Yeah, whereas a lot of these Japanese games feel very self-aware of their weirdness, he almost doesn't. He has like a Tommy Wiseau thing, which I guess you could argue maybe Tommy does understand it. He's like an incredible performance artist, but...
00:30:59
Speaker
No, I think David Cage buys it to his own hype, probably because he has a lot of enablers at Sony, saying, no, really, your game will be a big seller and we want you to make another exclusive for us. Yeah, those were those were tentpole games and now he's making a fucking Star Wars game. I mean, who knows if that'll ever come out.
00:31:16
Speaker
How the fuck did that happen? I guess Disney didn't do their due diligence on that one, I fear. Surely he knows, or he thinks too much on it. How is that tweet? David Cage, can a robot learn to be human? Yoko Taro, can a human cage what? Yoko Taro, can a human learn to be human? Cage, I don't get it. Yeah, near is another good example. Near gets weird.
00:31:43
Speaker
Near is not afraid to get weird. There's a lot of elements in Final Fantasy 7 that were weird. Final Fantasy 16 was very much not weird. Maybe they could have shared a little bit. 7 could have used a little bit, been a little more serious at times and 16 could have definitely loosened up a little bit. Almost fallen off since
00:32:08
Speaker
Since we lost mascots, I guess, you know, it was, it was easier to be weird back then. Now you almost have to be sensible. Um, this right now, League of Legends is kind of weird game. The hero shooter. Well, not just a hero hero shooter, but the concept of like, we don't have wars. We play a MOBA to decide the war. Yeah. It's our heroes. Yeah. What about Rockstar? Do we think Rockstar is weird?
00:32:35
Speaker
Or do they kitchen sink it so much that there is weirdness inside of their games? I can't see that either. Well, there's certainly a very strong element of satire in the Grand Theft Auto games. Especially five. It's very overtly like satire of modern society.
00:32:53
Speaker
Yeah. But as for weird, then I wouldn't say so. No, it's like specific mechanics. Like the fact that someone like took time to shrink horses, testicles, depending on the weather. Well, I just put that down to developers having too much time on their hands when they're waiting on your salary. Yeah. Yeah. Trying to look busy. Yeah.
00:33:22
Speaker
Yeah, we also had the era, which seems to be gone, or at least maybe it's just in mobile, of the bizarre licensed game of why did you even make a game out of this of, you know, Home Improvement or the Burger King games or Shaq Fu or... Well, that was a sort of, uh... The Metal game where you're just like, you know, Van Dam driving a dump truck. That was some weird element of that era of games that came from
00:33:49
Speaker
a lack of understanding of video games on the part of big IP holders? Yeah. Fun though, it was a lot of fun. Fun in a sort of, hey, look at that weird guy who's high and doing a dance on the street corner and doesn't know that everyone's taking the piss out of him. Sure, sure. David Cage again. That guy.
00:34:12
Speaker
Oh, David. On to the ice cream. We've had our veggies now, the indies. What are the weirdos, the freaks that just stand out? Well, the last one. Well, the last one that gave me that vibe was, of course, Children of the Sun. Yeah. That was a great one. I mean, just even recently. Buckshot Roulette. Oh, yes. Yes. Buckshot out here.
00:34:38
Speaker
I mean, it's almost it's almost feels like a lot of indie games are sort of turning against the weird or to vision. There's a lot of indie games who are trying to imitate the triple A attitudes. I don't know. Like for a moment that I felt indie was losing its spirit, so to say, where they you just see so many defeated developers going, I did the thing.
00:35:00
Speaker
put the roguelike elements in and the RPG elements in and the game elements in there and they didn't sell, what happened? Well, if I got one game in me before I go poor, I might as well just talk about playing with my peanuts and shooting some milk. It's so good. Even the more restrained ones like Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom, that was proper weirdo going on there. Yeah, I've played a lot of indie games and double A games that are just, you know,
00:35:29
Speaker
teal colored hair person in sci-fi world goes through standard sort of struggle. And I feel my eyes glazing over very quickly and playing that sort of thing. Oh, it's a cyberpunk traversal focused boomer shooter. Does, uh, is there like a saturation point where things just, uh, don't feel weird anymore? Like something is like we talked about the, uh, earthbound, uh,
00:35:56
Speaker
the Earthbound like where like Earthbound was unique because there was nothing else like it whereas now it feels like every few months there's a game inspired by Earthbound like it like just this weekend this game Athenian Raph City came out that was inspired by like Earthbound in Undertale and it's almost is there a certain point where weird becomes so common that it's just no longer weird well typically I'd say the point where
00:36:21
Speaker
To be honest, the point where the corporate committee design developer makes their version of something is the point where there's clearly too much or something. Once the brand account starts tweeting about the joke, the joke is dead. The brand has gotten this. It's time to move on. Yeah. Once you start thinking, I guess once you think the formula for weird is solved,
00:36:42
Speaker
that it starts to feel formulaic. And that's when it starts to feel like, okay, this is more of the same. Like, the survival trap genre was kind of very samey and now you got Power World and Enshrouded coming through where it's like, what if, you know, Pokemon and guns, Enshrouded, what if voxels again, you know?
00:36:57
Speaker
I mean, what we're really talking about here is just innovation. I mean, there's a point where innovation becomes old news and then it's time for a new innovation to come along and take the risk. You can even go to old stuff. It's just more so like, you know, we're just using the same thing. It's innovation as much as it is variety.
00:37:15
Speaker
And that's why I think you need some cultural awareness to go, okay, we're having too much of this kind of game. Let's give them like something new. Roguelikes, we're just feeling the same old, same old. And now you got dude who goes poker, but roguelike. So now you're starting to get these offshoots of like, all right, pool, but poker. And that'll eventually oversaturate too. But then we move on to the next thing.
00:37:35
Speaker
Yeah, Blattro Walsfield is at the point of deconstruction. Like, we've gone so far now we're just breaking it down to its most basic elements. Lonomiso, whatever it were, you know? Some are just deconstructions. The 20 Mazes. That's a little weirdo game. That's a weird game. I love it. Did you guys try Mullet Mad Jack? Not yet.
00:37:58
Speaker
That feels like the first person shooter broken down. It's literally just run from room to room, shoot one guy and run to the next. You've got like a 10 second timer, you get like three seconds extra time every time you shoot someone. And it's just like the first person shooter experience boiled down to like a sequence of moment to moment interactions. Okay, a little bit like Hotline Miami almost? Sort of a roguelike, so it's just, you know, the same room over and over again. Yeah.
00:38:29
Speaker
Yeah, we saw like over the past few years, you know, speaking of deconstructing things like Baba is you kind of deconstructing like the literal rules of a of a puzzle game. Neon White, I thought did a great job of like taking the idea of speed running and boiling it down while adding this sort of weird
00:38:54
Speaker
weird figure over it. And then sort of, yeah, sort of deconstructing the classic sort of movement shooter as well. Yeah. And then Hypnospace Outlaw is the other one that stood out to me, which is you're kind of a private eye on a alternate version of the 90s internet, like the web.
00:39:12
Speaker
and you navigate the internet trying to solve these kind of crimes, but you're navigating these fictional websites that feel like what the internet felt like to those of us old enough to remember it in its mid to late 90s. Now, that was a satire, wasn't it? Hypnospatial outlaw, very satirical. Oh, God, look at that. They're working on a sequel that's sort of taking place on a more mid-aughts, like early to mid-aughts internet, which I'm excited about.
00:39:40
Speaker
Perhaps it'll reference to something awful for us. Since it is as much innovation and variety, what's the kind of weird you guys are looking forward to? Or is there a weird that you're kind of getting tired of now? Well, getting pretty tired of magenta haircuts. Yeah.
00:40:00
Speaker
I'm still a sucker for put me in a weird space. Let me just walk around. I know this is my sense of place thing, but I'm like, I've talked about that Radiohead Kid Amnesia sort of art exhibit thing, games like Jazzpunk or 30 flights 11.
00:40:18
Speaker
Cosmo D's games. I like just like, put me in a weird space. You don't even need to fill up mechanics. Just let me sort of vibe out a little bit and wander around and see. I feel like that's the easiest way to like Yahtzee, what you were saying is like cracking open someone's ad and being like, what's going on in here? Let me see. Fucking pools. It's going on inside your... Yeah, pools got a number on you, didn't it? Yeah, pools absolutely did a number. You don't gotta do anything.
00:40:39
Speaker
You ain't got to do anything, I'll just walk around. See, I kind of, there's a little gameplay I would like, like, uh, Escorn, you know? There were puzzles here. Felt like just one big meaty biomechanical warehouse. Yeah. You could just, you could, at the very least, you could just throw in, like, a collectathon element if you want to make a game about exploring an environment. Just, uh, find all the Pac-Man pills or whatever. Yeah, the widgets, the Dudettes. Little trophy or something going on there. Yeah, I could say that. Keep it weird.
00:41:07
Speaker
Even with some weird things. Speaking of weird, let's go to the Super Chats. All the internet weirdos have to say. I saved a couple of games I wanted to talk about because I saw them get brought up in the Super Chats. I saved them for you, Chet. Fair enough. Dr. Pio gives $2 and says, what do you consider too weird? Like trying too hard. Hello, neighbour 2.
00:41:34
Speaker
What's that? Hello. Hello. Neighbor two. The first game was like little odd, little surreal, little, little dark and some lore hunting. The second one that's all like the puzzle didn't matter. He just said, let's just make it all as weird looking as possible. And there was absolutely no substance under that surface. And he's asking map pad like, Hey, don't you want to dissect this? Don't you and your community of lore finders want to find everything in here? Like, no, this, this is something I've said.
00:42:00
Speaker
I think I've said many times before, I love the kind of game that feels like it didn't give a shit. And which is a very different thing to actually not giving a shit. It's the Saints Row 4. Saints Row 4 feels like a game that doesn't give a shit in the way that I like. But they put an awful lot of work into feeling like it doesn't give a shit. And it can very easily, it can very easily feel like a game is trying too hard. Sunset Overdrive is a game that feels like it tries too hard for me.
00:42:29
Speaker
So there needs to be a sense of frivolity and lack of restraint that is also not trying to, that doesn't feel like it's trying to lean into it.
00:42:43
Speaker
I feel like I'm a hard mark for it's something familiar or wholesome, but now we're adding tits and swears and blood to it. The Power World never did anything for me because it was like, it's Pokemon, but they got guns and there's slavery. I'm like, okay. It feels a little kind of meme-y, edgelord-y.
00:43:08
Speaker
I don't know, that conquers Bad Fur Day also. As someone who was really a fan of those 3D platformers at the time, and who is a fan of really vulgar craft's humor, that being the focal point just didn't do it for me. Same thing like that Help Eye game. I'm like, why are we doing this?
00:43:27
Speaker
Help I is the absolute... I'm weird for the sake of being weird. There's no rhyme or reason to this. Outside of it, I just want to be weird. And it's kind of a bummer, because at its core, it was a pretty solid 3D character platformer. Yeah? But, yeah. Tell me. Then Dr. Thiug is another $5, says, what is a weird horror game? Because of the nature of the genre, it is naturally weird, but what is a particularly weird game that you know of?
00:43:52
Speaker
See, weirds and horror go together pretty well too. I've always felt like Japanese horror games feel better to me just because the fact that they come from a foreign culture adds an extra element of weird that sort of enhances the sense of unease one gets from horror. Silent Hill being a very prominent example. Fatal Frame. A weird horror game. Ooh! Ooh! Rule of Rose. Who remembers that? Oh yeah!
00:44:20
Speaker
I've never played it. I've only watched video essays on it. I love a horror game that you could never sum up in 10 words or less to another person. Silent Hill 4 would be another good one for me. Yeah, that might be the most recent weird one I've played. There's this game. It's free on itch.io. I'm putting it in the chat called Greener Grass Awaits.
00:44:44
Speaker
It is a first person golfing game and you're at a golf range and you have to kind of do everything. So you look down at your club, you have to look over at the hole, look down at your club, hit it. You have to take your bag with you that has your clubs. You have to move it from hole to hole. It's very like you're doing things
00:45:07
Speaker
It's like very meticulously and you play a couple holes the Sun starts to go down and the game Starts to become a little ominous and a little creepy and I don't want to give away exactly what it is But it takes that sort of workmanship Having to go through the rhythm of doing all this stuff and when it injects something ominous into it It's really fucking effective for a free just a free game pay what you want thing on itch.io Highly recommend it
00:45:35
Speaker
Greener grass awaits. I'm intrigued. Oh, yeah, shoot. I forgot what it was called. There has been a...
00:45:46
Speaker
A weird and a strange influx of weird horror because horror is a strange one. You can lean too far into like, okay, this is psychedelic. This is surreal. This is Aldrich, right? It's hard to go just straight up weird. Yeah, but there's a lot of horror games nowadays that they look on the surface like they're normal games and then they start, as Marty said, they get sinister, they get ominous and that's the stupid thing that plays with you. Some of them are even getting to the point like pools where they go, there's nothing here or is there? No, there's definitely nothing here.
00:46:14
Speaker
Did that start with Doki Doki Literature Club, do you think?
00:46:21
Speaker
shoot for it starts out as a maybe starts out as like a well Doki Doki Literature Club was very much trying to like pull a trick on the player fog factions I think was fairly openly surreal from the beginning Doki Doki was like it presents itself as a standard visual novel and then it turns sinister in a quite severe way halfway through yeah
00:46:47
Speaker
I don't know. It was for the time. I found Danganronpa even weirder because it was just so, like, this is a cereal, this is Saw, but weebies. Yeah, weebies Saw with a big teddy bear mascot. Yeah, it's just a big Saw that goes woop woop woop woop woop.
00:47:05
Speaker
There you go. Oh, that's the bunny graveyard. Overwhelmingly positive. I don't think it's completely done. It might be going off in chapters and it presents itself as like this cutesy point and click adventure game. You even get like a Mickey Mouse type glove hand that gets to do all these things and you're like, okay,
00:47:23
Speaker
play some basketball and old type of minigames but things aren't what they seem very almost M9 Shyamalan and that's what makes them weird not so much the actual horror elements but the why did you make this game as Yahtzee puts it like who makes these kind of games
00:47:40
Speaker
Well, got stuck on that topic for a while, didn't we? Alex Armstrong gave us five dollars and says, speaking of the iffy third party era of PS2 games,
00:48:00
Speaker
I just, I seen this one game called Demolition Girl that had just been out in like my local EB Games in the bargain bin for like two bucks for as long as I could remember. I thought, you know what? Fuck it. Let's give it a try. Maybe it's a hidden gem. And the premise was there's this giant bikini girl. It's a Japanese game, of course. A giant bikini girl walking around a city like Godzilla just stepping on things. And you're a helicopter pilot and you got to drive around her, fly around her and
00:48:30
Speaker
Your mission is to survey the threats caused by the demolition girl by taking strategic pictures of her. And at that point I realized, oh, this is someone's fetish. Oh, this is a game of someone's fetish that has some, for whatever reason, has been localized as in the West. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, I mean, we're talking about you like cracking someone's head open and seeing what's inside. That's... Vore. Sometimes you get some of that. Yeah. Sometimes you get vore.
00:48:59
Speaker
Oh no, that's sort of, you know, a step too far for me. Makes you feel a little bit, uh, icky. Yeah. When you realize someone made it specifically to jerk off to it. That's how I feel watching Quentin Tarantino's movies sometimes. Foot fetishists and all that. Like she poured a drink down her feet because a straw would have been okay.
00:49:26
Speaker
Uh, the Hjort87 gives 50 Danish kroner and says, I've always been fond of the absurd humor. For example, the old madness game and cartoons on new crowns. A simple 2D shooter, a man, a sheriff, and Jesus. Ah, new crowns. There was a time when that was... There was a time in like Web 1.0 days when I was just a big old graffiti wall for the internet to play with. Yeah, e-bombs world. I just never really got into them.
00:49:54
Speaker
Well, before YouTube was a thing, Flash Games was where we got our interactive entertainment. Yeah. I do like me absurd humor, as one feller who his whole game is like a kind of...
00:50:07
Speaker
a hidden object sort of thing, but you're in graffitied Renaissance paintings type thing. It's really weird to look at. It gives me a headache after a few minutes and I have to leave. And then there was that one game during the last Next Fest where you're a toaster and you're trying to get into a bathtub to assassinate people. Beautiful. Beautiful. That's a good deal. That's equal to I am bread.
00:50:31
Speaker
Yeah, I was just thinking I am bread, which was about being a piece of bread trying to get inside a toaster. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, games are also, I think, I think games can be shortened to the point and just have like a single punch line. Like that pineapple on pizza is a thing that has a punch line. And I feel like that's a thing like games that short that could just focus on one thing are able to do.
00:50:55
Speaker
I did love that, yeah. The game at the very moment would just go, oh. It's just long enough to where it doesn't overstay its welcome. Concept games. There's not a full game in it, but the world is richer for its presence. Yeah, exactly. JustExisting45 gives five Canadians and says, hey, guys, just want to say thank you for always being there. Makes you feel part of a community. Lots of love. Keep being awesome. Yahtzee is the goat.
00:51:25
Speaker
Hell, you don't just feel like part of a community. You are part of a community just existing 45. Welcome to the community. I can remember the community by purchasing Starstruck Vagabond available on Steam this Friday. Also Yahtzee's birthday. Get in on the conversation. Get in before it's the next big thing. Then you could say, Hey, uh, I was into this before it was cool. Honey, I joined a cult.
00:51:52
Speaker
Which is actually a game. I'll bet. Also the premise of Children of the Sun. There you go. Raphael Sampayo gave us five R dollars and says celebratory super chat for catching this live for once. I think you've graduated. Well done. And then he comes back with five dollars and says I missed the days of the PS2 era when weird games could get an actual budget. Shout out to Katamari Galaxy.
00:52:20
Speaker
Damacy, I think you meant to say there. Yeah. Let's yes. Even EA was in on the weird. Like there was a bit of weirdness to the Need for Speed era. The street sports. Oh my God. Oh yeah. The NBA street games, those kinds of things. Yeah. Even Tony Hawk. Tony Hawk had some weirdness to it. Mr. Mosquito. I feel like Mr. Mosquito was towing the line between someone's fetish and being a pretty cool game where you're a mosquito. Where is the sign for fetish?
00:52:47
Speaker
I think there was a publisher for a while that would just buy up a load of obscure Japanese games and localize them, and I think Mr. Mosquito was one of those. There's also an interesting development, like a tree you can run down that game Chulip is on, which is definitely a strange game where you get a little kissing simulator, a little kissing village like Animal Crossing, but you just gotta get as many kisses as you can in there. Yeah, it was definitely sort of a progenitor of the cozy game genre that exists in a weird place.
00:53:18
Speaker
Wesley Thomas gives two Canadian dollars and says, have any of you played LSD dream emulator?
00:53:23
Speaker
I know it by reputation, Wesley Thomas. Never played it myself. I've played it on emulator when, uh, when I was talking about games where you just get dropped in a weird little space to wander around, that might be like the first of those, probably not the first, but the earliest, I think back of those to where it's, you know, legally might not be a game, but, um, is like an interactive thing where you get to wander around and eat a neat little space. Jesus.
00:53:48
Speaker
So yeah, again, at what point is it weird and what point is it psychedelic? Yeah. Where's the fetish? There's a lot of blurred lines. I think you might have... Did you miss two? Alex Armstrong and Dr. Theo? Or am I insane? Those are the next ones. Cruelty Squad and the... Oh, did I just have mine out of order? Yeah. You might be, yeah. Okay. Apologies. Alex Armstrong gives $2. There's thoughts on psychedelic weird like Cruelty Squad.
00:54:15
Speaker
Psychedelic. Psychedelic. Interesting. I felt very... What was that? That, uh... Splatformer that just came out a little while ago. Remember, I showed you guys a trailer for it and I was like, this thing gives me a headache, but I like that it exists. Gross. Like pulsating one. I don't know. I don't know. Hmm. I mean, this with Cruelty Squad I think really goes into it of
00:54:41
Speaker
weird sometimes can be a reaction of the culture. Yeah. That's definitely what cruelty squad feels like. Yeah. Yeah. I appreciate that. Like I, I, again, that feels like a, like really, really going for the fence there. I think there's a point where it runs up against the problem of making things really hard to read. Sure.
00:55:08
Speaker
I mean, when you, when you've got like the fuzzy green text over a purple background, then we just flat out can't read the text and then the impact is lost. Yeah, but you know, that's an anti-establishment man reading. Well, I see exactly what you mean. Look at that. Wow. Yeah. At that point, you know, at what point is that sort of getting in the way of the intended message? Unless it is the intended message. I'm a game that's shit to play is to fight the man.
00:55:40
Speaker
Dr. Theo gives $5 and says, I've seen online why Japanese Americans find each other so fascinating is because we are so similar yet completely different at the same time. I find them fascinating because I'm Mexican and we're very similar and not different at all.
00:55:58
Speaker
to the point where we rip off each other's culture. In Japan, there is a Cholo culture. We steal their anime and they always try some cease and desist. It's a thing. I love it. I always think Japan and Britain have a sort of kinship that comes from both being island nations that eat a lot of fish and are populated by extremely straight-laced, humorless gits. I lost brothers.
00:56:27
Speaker
Japanese culture was quite big when Japan first opened up to the west. I mean, remember the Mikado? That was like a British light opera created because Japanese culture was infusing a lot of British high-class culture at the time. And then there's Japanese culture, like Hellsing, which is set in Britain.
00:56:54
Speaker
The anime Hellsing, you say? Oh, I guess it's Van Helsing, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The anime just called Hellsing in reference to Van Helsing and has a version of Dracula in it who's called himself Alucard because apparently it never ceases to be amusing to spell Dracula backwards. They do like that Dracula, don't they? Symphony of the Night, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, first chapter is Dracula.
00:57:22
Speaker
Yeah, I think Japan generally has a big thing for sort of European pulp literature. We do. That's why they really like, they really like Les Misérables.
00:57:35
Speaker
Uh, uh, Saint-Lupin. How's that? Yes. Yes. I was trying to remember the name. I'll Saint-Lupin, the French literature character. But anyway, uh, Ryan Betts, member for three months at Tiptra. Thank you very much. And then Eloise gives two pounds and says, classic weird skull monkeys. Skull monkeys was, was a weird one. That was by the Earthworm Jim guy, right? Well, yeah, Earthworm Jim is pretty weird in itself, but yes. Toe Jammin' Earl.
00:58:05
Speaker
Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. I kind of remember it being almost like odd world where it felt almost like a clean claymation like, Oh, it's a sequel to the neverhood. Interesting. I don't even know what the net road is. It was a claymation point. Click adventure. Well, there you go.
00:58:28
Speaker
Yes, Neurash25 gives 25 runs and says, one of the favorite weird spinoffs is Far Cry Blood Dragon. I wish there was more stuff like that. What game would you like to see in that style? Well, that was before sort of 80s neon wave stuff became sort of popular in indie games. I think you can see that in the shit like Cookie Cutter as well.
00:58:52
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That felt like I thought that was going to become a thing. Ubisoft started doing more and more kind of, um, in between annual releases, have something that, you know, like a Majora's mask is able to reuse assets, but do something strange with them, like really lean into, to something that might be, yeah. Yeah. I assumed they were going to do something like that, but then I didn't. Yeah.
00:59:19
Speaker
They did the Red Dead Zombies, remember? Yeah, Red Dead Zombies, that's another great example of that, yeah. Eric Wyckhart gives 50 arses and says, what about games that break your mind? Like the twist of 4D golf, where the final course is actually spoiler. Just the footage gives me a headache. 4D golf is great. Games that break your mind. I like those again, those are very...
00:59:43
Speaker
Shoot, I forgot the name. Non-Euclidean-type geometry. Very anti-chamber. Loaded to that stuff. Yeah. Yeah, I'm a cat. Even a little bit of that's super liminal. Yeah, the 40 golf is a game that the twist at the end is really good.
01:00:00
Speaker
It's really good. It's very hard to wrap your head around, but it's a very clever little twist. Oh, I love that. Sadly, this is a game you have to play with a mouse. You can play this game on Steam Deck. I just did my computer like a real adult with a real adult doing my 4D taxes. Yeah. Oh, that was tense.
01:00:23
Speaker
Alex Armstrong gives $5 and says, stream of consciousness only works if it's not car crash fascinating, Yahtzee. How does it make sense to Yuji Naka that the Fox turned into a cube? Don't know, Alan. Quite. I mean, that wasn't much fun, but it was interesting to talk about. I love Yuji. We talking about Balan? Yes. Balan Underpants or whatever it was. Oh, no. I wonder if we're ever going to get a sequel. Not till he's out of prison. Oh.
01:00:54
Speaker
Hicquari, a member of Six Months in the Green Gang, says, it's been half a year by now, time flies. Oh, it's been months? Six whole months. And then Bichango gives $10, says, being a kid begging to buy a used copy of Killer7 on the GameCube and having my dad exclaiming, what the fuck are you playing? Then slowly being enamored is why Suda is always the best weird to me. Yep. I gotta try his games. Still his Opus, if you ask me. It's on Steam now, you've got no excuse not to try out Killer7.
01:01:22
Speaker
Oh, aside from being lazy, it was the best excuse. But yeah, the last two weeks has been this giving very Sudafive 1. Who is this? I thought we were talking Sudafed. Sudafed! Yeah, this is what it's like to be OD'd on Sudafed and now it looks like this.
01:01:39
Speaker
I could use them, so if you had one about now, actually. Who made them? There was a beautiful show. I was about to say, that was Kamiya, right? Yes. But that whole era of platinum, the failed Platinum V, Resi IV side. The Capcom V, yes. Capcom V, yeah, not the Platinum V. But I feel like Resi aside, even though Resi, the merchant is a weird thing in a AAA game, and I guess Resi IV does have a lot of weird original one.
01:02:08
Speaker
like leads into the weird, but all of those games, whether they're beautiful Joe or a killer seven or piano three, all, all embrace the weird in good ways. Yeah. Uh, only three of them really took off, but still three out of five. It's that's a pretty good ratio. Yeah.
01:02:28
Speaker
Rose Delta gives side dollars and says, love weird, but a lot of indie games that fall into the weird camp strobe and flash that isolate out of their audience, including me. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's, uh, your skill diffing you. I think that's, uh, very crispy visuals. Definitely where the psychedelic, uh, comes into things. Yeah. I tend to think of as like the sort of persona five visual style as a psychedelic.
01:02:56
Speaker
Yeah. Like literally like, uh, uh, like, uh, uh, health, uh, health warning, uh, you know, like some cruelty spot or something with flashing lights, a seizure warning. Yellow taxi goes broom is very, uh, flashy.
01:03:13
Speaker
Yeah, even children of the Sun the way like the mission complete I can just yeah. Yeah, I should all over the screen Oh crimson was the name of that game. I was thinking of that. I Think I shared in a meeting with you guys. That's that 2d splat former set in hell that is just a fucking panic attack when you look at it and it's like not something I Want to spend a lot of time with crimson with a K but it's
01:03:40
Speaker
It's something where I'm like, well, that is a unique visual identity, even though I do have a headache after looking at it. Yeah. Some of them, it feels like that kind of is the identity. Hyperdemon. Dear God. Yeah. Oh Christ. I don't know if it's safe to show that, Eric, but Hyperdemon is like, oh man, an acid trip inside a mirror. Yeah. Yeah. Or a disco ball. Yeah. Devil daggers, um, umpire even. Yeah.
01:04:08
Speaker
Raziel, a member for 6 months in the Green Yang says, can I use this to wish you all a happy half birthday? Well, if you wait till Friday, Raziel, you can wish me a happy actual birthday. Oooooh. Because Starstruck Vagabonds is coming out on my birthday and on Friday and you could all buy it as a present to me. Mmm. FoxD in the volume of $5 and says, getting off the critical path in a Red Dead Redemption game is just asking for something weird to happen.
01:04:36
Speaker
I like that. I do like games where if you follow the main story, it's whatever, but you go off-roading. Oh, this is at your own risk. The witch was a little like that, not too far gone, but I did like that, that the tone seemed very different off the beaten path.
01:04:52
Speaker
I think Yakuza falls into that category as well. I always think the main plots of Yakuza games have gotten pretty samey for me over the years. Ooh, let's defend an innocent woman from some evil conspiracy we've gotten embroiled in to take over Japan and end it all with a shirtless fistfight on a roof. Sounds great, Yuri.
01:05:17
Speaker
Fungus Finder gives $2 a zest, at what point does weird become inaccessible? Well, as I was saying, you know, the point where you can't really tell what's going on and you're giving everyone epileptic seizures just for looking at it. Literally some of those games we just mentioned I think would fall under the category of, oh, this is impossible. Or if it's weird and it requires, like you sometimes see games at GDC that require like a very unique one of one setup. Like at that point it's kind of,
01:05:44
Speaker
You need to be there in order to play on their strange, oh, this thing is projecting on the side of a refrigerator, and you control it by opening the fridge. It can also be, there is such a thing as too niche, number one. And then if you get weird in the gameplay, so like inscription, a lot of people love it. But for a lot of people, just roguelike deck builders don't vibe with them, so they can't even get out of chapter one. Yeah, the meat of it, yeah.
01:06:14
Speaker
Sean Harriman, remember, for five months in the Green Gang says, is Scorn too weird? When is too weird a bad game? Scorn, I would describe as internally consistent at least. Yeah. Until they gave me the gun. Then I went, oh no.
01:06:32
Speaker
It was great. It left a good first impression on me in terms of being gross and grossing me out. And if I just want a game to leave me feeling something, I guess it was successful there. Ultimately, it felt kind of boring mechanically, but good first impression. Yeah. Kind of anticlimactic as well. Yeah. You ever feel numb? There you go. Yeah. Dr. Theo gives five dollars and says, off topic, but I feel like mascot horror is getting into its punk era with games like Finding Frankie, that is a parkour horror game.
01:07:03
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like mascot horror kind of left me behind a little bit. Because I was never into Five Nights at Freddy's. Yeah. That's the only one. I'm curious. I'm not so pretty. The other one and the other one. Bendy's Bendy and the Ink Machine? Yes. And what's that one with the weird blue thing with the spiky hair? Sonic. Goku? Never mind.
01:07:33
Speaker
Well, this looks interesting at least. Yeah, this one, this Finding Frankie, it seems like it's like parkour, like horror parkour. I like to hear something chasing me while I'm doing sick wall runs. Yeah, I know. This is very weird. Yeah. There's edge through a Chuck E. Cheese.
01:07:49
Speaker
Yeah. I can, I can, I do imagine we are going to get to a point to where the people who, uh, were younger or grew up playing these mascot horror games are going to get to an age where they make their own games. And I feel like they're going to make interesting things, uh, in the same way that we have an era of people who grew up in 3d platformers and are now making cool things like pseudo regalia and corn kids and hat and time and shit like that. What was the one with the horrifying train to two Charles? Yeah.
01:08:18
Speaker
Anyway, fungus finder gives two dollars and says, does weird have to also be funny to work? No, but that's my favorite. No, not necessarily. Yeah. I like funny weird. I find a lot of weird funny, but no, like weird funny and weird horrific are different things. But they're both equally valid, I'd say. Weird, you know, weird, sad, weird, anything. In the car that weird dark comedy going for it. Well, that's redundant in it. Weird ambivalence, weird, uh,
01:08:49
Speaker
I also think laughing can sometimes be a normal reaction to something that is so strange and alienating that, um, I think like once or twice during Indica, I laughed just because it was like, well, I don't even know what my reaction should be right now. So I'm just going to laugh at like, are you talking about, are you talking to high speed chase or are you getting shot at? Yeah. Shit like that. We're like, well, this is absurd, right? I'm supposed to like,
01:09:15
Speaker
Because his eyesight's so shit. Pajango, who signed all this and says, how about Oddworld? The first game opening FMV scared me as a child. I never got into them. There's something about that.
01:09:34
Speaker
I'm gonna I'm gonna lump a bunch of games together with that kind of rotoscoped feeling 2d platforming if you go back to the original Prince of Persia to Yeah, yeah flashback out of this world that stuff just never I don't know never never vibed on me
01:09:53
Speaker
For me Oddworld had like an interesting sort of alien atmosphere but then started to lean too much into shitty comedy. And that was where it sort of lost me. And borderlands it up. Kind of.
01:10:12
Speaker
But more in a sort of Jar Jar Binks sort of vein. George Lucas additions to the Star Wars special additions sort of vein of humor. Shout out to George Lucas in the chat. A wind potato. I remember for six months in the green gang says really appreciated Arctic eggs weirdness. Yeah.
01:10:38
Speaker
There we go. Arctic eggs. More egg cooking simulators. Any game where you can throw a couple heaters inside of a pan with eggs, easy, medium, hard difficulties are just the depth of the pan. So hard, it is just the flat pan. There's literally no edge to it. Whereas easy, it's like you're almost cooking on a walk. Let me tell you, Arctic eggs. Well, you could certainly get a gameplay challenge out of it. Making sure you take the egg off the heat at exactly the right moment.
01:11:03
Speaker
Enjoy it while it's here, because this will eventually be seen as pretentious avant-garde. And we'll go back to ties and tie in here. There you go. For a little bit. Tommy Deonoth's Archives gives to Canadian dollars. Remember when Ariana Grande was in Brave Exvius? My shoe's in a Final Fantasy mobile game. Oh. Yeah, that's what Brave Exvius is. Oh? Uh-huh. Whatcha know?
01:11:31
Speaker
Yeah, I don't have anything more to add to that other than I don't know. She was there. She was there. Fungus Finding is too delicious and says, Oh God, the baby so loud, my ears, my poor sweet ears. Excuse me. Did someone's baby make noise on the stream? Or is this just Fungus Finders newborn that's being loud? Yeah, that'll do. That's my weird game.
01:11:56
Speaker
Uh, Zul'Roe gives two euros and says, Swery games, deadly premonition, or the missing. Yeah, Swery feels like poor man Suda51 and, uh, who got married to poor man Sudyukajima and had a little, uh, stumpy baby. Oh, a little stumpy. Um, yeah, I've, uh, I never
01:12:18
Speaker
I didn't really get into Deadly Premonition mostly because I was like, I could just watch Twin Peaks. What if I just do that instead? And I like Twin Peaks and I like David Lynch, so I don't know. Whereas Suda feels like he does weird things that really lean into some of the strengths of the medium. Yeah. That's a weird game. Is what? Missed. Missed. Feels like a weird game to me.
01:12:40
Speaker
Well, it was weird in the sense of being one of the first of those sorts of games. It was stupidly popular though. It was like a real naughty game. Like my dad bought it. Just the composition, the layout and all that. I was like, how odd for a submarine to be over here with a piano, no less. That definitely felt like someone describing their dream. It was certainly a surrealist air to it.
01:13:09
Speaker
I know, it's for- yeah. Uh, Badango gives $10 and says, I encourage you to play the PS1 game Cyberdeck, a truly bizarre snowboarding game. One of the most bizarre games I've ever owned. Marty, buy a copy and play it. Cyberdeck? It's an order. It's an order? I will. I will. All right. If it's under $20, I'll buy it right now.
01:13:36
Speaker
It is $250, I am not buying it. But a $20 limit and I will download it off of Vimslayer.
01:13:50
Speaker
Uh, Blistered Soul gives 2 pounds and says Scott Cawthon games for 4th FNAF. Like Desolate Hope. Yeah, he always made weird games. They're just, uh, at one point he made a marketable one. That's interesting. And then he hit the big time. Sold out. Makes fucking children's books now. While counting his money.
01:14:10
Speaker
Uh, Robonop the Stob gives 15, you 69 euros and says the silver case games by Suda5-1 were great and even weirder than Killer7. Deadly Premonition is another favorite of mine. Shame it was broken. BTW, can you think of games that mixed weird with Sirius? Red, uh, Metal Gear Rising Revengeance. How about that? Oh, that's a really good one. Wow. Yeah.
Anthropomorphism and Surreal Elements in Games
01:14:32
Speaker
I was gonna say, uh, like the cartoony anthropomorphic ones tend to do that, Cult of the Lamb, um, another Krebs treasure.
01:14:40
Speaker
Yeah. What about Lorelei and the laser eyes? Where do you think that fits in? That fits in very well. It's also really good at throwing things that at first feel like strange non-sequiturs that as you get deeper in, you realize that everything is connected. Oh, no. The witness again. Oh, no. It's the witness again.
01:15:02
Speaker
But yeah, in terms of sort of oscillating tones, I think Majora's Mask does a good job. It has a little freak-like tingle scattered throughout the game, but then also these, like, really great little stories you can find of people kind of accepting death and trying to find love at the end of a dying world. Hmm. Fun. Mm-hmm.
01:15:24
Speaker
Uh, Robonop- Robonop the snob who gives five euros says, and if you have two hours to spare, Fatum Battella and milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk video game are mighty weird. Let me say, I once had a stream on my personal channel, uh, where I streamed a bunch of weird games and I played milk inside of a bag of milk inside of a bag of milk and chat rebelled against me. They were so adamantly against it. So anyone who was in that chat and who was against milk inside of a bag of milk,
01:15:52
Speaker
You're off the weird train. You don't get to be on the weird train anymore. A short story about what sort of challenges everyday little things can be. Help the girl buy milk be the first not to disappoint her. Then there's a sequel, Milk Outside of a Bag of Milk, Outside of a Bag of Milk. This is a Canadian game. Overwhelmingly positive reviews. Yeah, only 20,000. It's good, it's a nice little thing. In and out of your, in and out of your life. Well, there you are. A fungus finder gives two dollars and says, is Dr. Pond weird? I'd say so, in a good way.
01:16:23
Speaker
Well, yeah Marty, is it? I would say it's weird in that it feels at times like you're playing a game with house rules, like where the rules don't quite make sense. But once you've seen something the first time, it's not weird again. Like once the first time your character gets abducted by an alien you're like, what?
01:16:48
Speaker
But the next time it comes up, it's just a gameplay mechanic. So I feel like it gets less weird as it goes on, if that's possible. Yeah, that's how it works. We say that, but every time we get comfortable, like something new comes through. It's just always fun. So I bet second plate time will be all right. Yeah, there you go. It's just unfamiliar. Oh, yeah. Zulro gives two euros. It says point click game called Dropsy. Really like it.
01:17:14
Speaker
Think I know that one. Yeah, it was like a scary looking clown. I don't like scary clowns. Yeah, you don't like scary clowns. Well, I know I'm not like afraid of them. I just don't. I just feel like there's so many scary clowns and like that's between fucking it and the Rob Zombie movies and Terrifier. Like, I don't need any more scary clowns. Was that an adventure game studio game, Dropsy? I don't know. That wasn't the one that Ron Gilbert. No, that was Thumbleweed Park. Yeah.
01:17:46
Speaker
Oh, there you go. Blue McD's nuts gives $2. Let's have a stretch panic on the PS2 for your moon day. It's stretch panic. I held it up to the camera. I did like half an hour ago when that one came in, I rolled back a little bit to grab it.
01:18:08
Speaker
Look at that. What a game. Look at that. It's a game where you just stretch. Get you a good stretch on. We need more stretch marks. Like, like, Nobby Nobby boy. Yeah, that's a good stretch of them up. Absolutely a good stretch of them up. Fox D gives high dollars and says, trying to explain a mundane game to a non-gamer can be meta weird. You just drive a truck around. That's it. That'll get you looked at funny. Well.
01:18:34
Speaker
I still think the truck driving games, I'm like, I'm glad you like them and I just don't get it. You like driving? Yeah, but I like driving normal cars. It's like a regular old car. You like driving trucks though, so difference. Whenever I'm driving a truck, I've driven moving vans and they've been, and they were, they made me anxious. Right. Also, I apologize. It's just the loudest rain happening outside my window and I just don't know how to, I can't turn the rain off.
01:19:03
Speaker
No worries. It's a white noise is soothing. There you go. So now we do she gives $20 and then says nothing. Oh, thank you very much. What a chat. And then Joshua Walker gives $10 and says there is a game called Tomak save the arath story for ps2 in Japan, where you date ahead in a flower pot. Hell yeah.
01:19:29
Speaker
That's it. Hell yeah. How kooky. This seems great. See, I wonder, is that weird to them too? Or is it just weird to us culturally? Who the fuck knows? What, dating a head inside of a flowerpot? Yeah. I don't know. That's a good question. I'll ask. When I go to Japan later this fall, I'll ask. I'll see if I can spot any people dating flowerpots.
01:19:53
Speaker
Yoshikato Shi gives Saw 99 and says Silent Hill Book of Memories was weird. Dungeon Callers and Silent Hill don't go well together. That was bad. I guess that is pretty weird. That was just bad. That was like, what are you doing mixing these two things? Like a peanut butter and ham sandwich. What are we doing? Alex Armstrong gives $5 and says, the weird games I like most are Persona and Yakuza, where the serious stuff juxtaposes the silly and weird and yet it's fun. I see why you like them, Yart. That's because he's a weeb.
01:20:21
Speaker
Yeah, I like the juxtaposition. One might argue, weird only works with juxtaposition. The way you guys sell it is curious to me, because it's like, you're like, oh, the one thing gives you a break from the other thing. And so getting punched in the face is a nice break from getting punched in the nads. So I still have to carve out some time to experience this. No, no, no. But it's more of, you don't want to be the person who has the same lunch every day for a year straight.
01:20:49
Speaker
Right? So it's like oscillating between two meals you like so that you don't get sick of one. And the two meals compliment each other. The better you do at breakfast, the better your dinner tastes. I don't know how that works. Yeah. That classic saying. Yeah. Truth is in the void.
01:21:10
Speaker
Wizard of the Void gives $20 and says, devious bastard, kill myself button in consuming shadow, got me on good run. That is a genuine weirdness game. A few dollars for future games. What's your weirdest game, would you say? I don't know. My weirdest game. It's gotta be. Hotpocalypse now. I'd say possibly.
01:21:30
Speaker
maybe Hatfall. That was me deliberately trying to be one of those out there weird Frog Faction style games. I think the hog one was my favorite simply because again, you went, I was thinking of Equilibrium. Why not try out that gunkata and then the Texans having their problems with their pigs. That was such a fun one to see come through.
01:21:55
Speaker
But for sometimes good ideas can come if you just combine two seemingly unrelated things together.
01:22:04
Speaker
Sovereign gives five euros and says, wait a sec, does Danganronpa count as a magenta game due to all the characters bleeding the stuff? Same goes for that retro shooter, Sulaco, I guess. But what was it made? It might have preceded the magenta. Danganronpa was like a Vita game, that was pretty old. Yeah, it's pretty old. 15 years old. It's the Siddics and Kane of board games, enough.
01:22:26
Speaker
Well, when I say magenta as a genre, I'm not specifically referring to instances of the colour. It's just because the such games often employ magenta in specific contexts. Often in characters' haircuts for some reason. Yeah. They just add splashes of neon colour to emphasise the woo-wear-pint-punk-and-free-spirited sort of vibe. Sure. So the colourblind thing, I like, is one of the most easy to differentiate hairs?
01:22:55
Speaker
I don't know. It's often used as like the transparency color in a lot of like game engines and art engines. Was, uh, what was the danger operated? Like, was the reason for the purple, is it rated M? Oh, it is M. Nevermind. Of course. I was wondering, no, I was just wondering if they did the magenta blood. Cause if it was like a thing, Oh, we can skirt around an M rating by showing people get violently murdered, but the blood's purple. So you can't get mad. There you go.
01:23:25
Speaker
Uh, Laura gives ten dollars, and says, I remember a strange game on the GameCube called Gotcha Force, where you collect toys that are aliens and make them fight each other. That's just Pokemon. Yeah, that's just Pokemon, isn't it? GameCube had some goodies. Cubivore, that was a weird one. Chibi-Robo, Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg, speaking of our good friend Yuji Naka, a 3D platformer where you just roll a big egg.
01:23:47
Speaker
Oh yeah. I'm getting some, some sexual fetishes out there. Oh, you've gone too far. So what if Sisyphus put egg? No, he's, you do not as a big egg man. Well, we know that because he literally created a character named egg man. God, my voice hurts so much. Casey, I was literally going to mention you're the only other person I've heard bring up a catch a force case is the worst, worst defender. Right.
01:24:18
Speaker
Wesley Thomas goes five Canadian dollars and says, I find the pinball games are inherently weird because there's just enough control over events to make them not gambling. It's not even gambling because you can't make any money back from it, can you?
Game Editions and Recommendations
01:24:31
Speaker
Yeah, what are you gambling here? I can't lose my house playing pinball. I love pinball and I'm so goddamn terrible at it.
01:24:39
Speaker
I don't think it's possible to be bad at pinball. I think every now and again, the ball just goes right down the middle of the ball, board, and you can't do shit to stop it. You could have prevented that. If you could only see 50 steps ahead. If you could maybe shove the board with your hand as on them. Give it a big hit thrust. Maybe if the paddles were bigger. Uh, Alexander Strong gives $2 and says, Paranormal comedy equals weird. Deedah game one day.
01:25:06
Speaker
It's enough work writing books about this, Alex Armstrong. It would probably have to be like a point and click adventure game or something. What is that? That's my book series. The Department of Exodimensional Affairs. Oh, you have a whole name over it, okay. Yeah. Incorporating the books differently amorphous and existentially challenged.
01:25:39
Speaker
Yeah, that's great. That was a great treasure game for N64. I like that. That and Tomba. Two best platformers where you gotta grab, shake. Tomba. Tomba and Tomba's coming back this fall.
01:25:50
Speaker
Heyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy
01:26:14
Speaker
Dr. Zebra gives $1.99 and says, have a great day, you filthy animals. Aw, thanks Dr. Zebra. A new year. And then Beneath 1111 gives 100 Swedish Chrono and says, can we expect different editions of Starstruck Vagabond? Like a space trucker edition, pre-order edition, Walmart edition, or a collector's edition with a 25 centimeter statue of whole. Also let Marty read this. Oops, too late, sorry. Yeah, where is it? Yeah, I put that at the beginning of the message. Where's your nine inches of venom?
01:26:40
Speaker
No, I ain't doing fucking additions. I think we're going to be selling the soundtrack once I get the files in separately, and we're going to do like a deluxe edition that bundles the game with the soundtracks, which, you know, there you go. If that counts.
01:26:58
Speaker
frozen toxicity one game of the year edition just doesn't matter just make one call you need it I think honestly sake and I'd want to wait for at least one media outlets to declare it game of the year before I did that I'll give you mine but that's typically what you have to do get fucked animal well it's all about Star Trek Vagabond now
01:27:19
Speaker
FrozenSox231, your site owners are sorry, just tuned in. You guys better have talked about God Hand. Oh no, we didn't. We haven't talked about Shinji Mikami at all, generally. This thing I went to bring up, by the way, now's a good time. God Hand.
01:27:32
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. That's a fun game. That might have been the culmination of that PS2 era of like rampant weirdness that I love. That everything kind of led to that. Your Killer Sevens, your Katamaris. One of the bosses is just a gorilla in pants. Great. What's not to love.
01:27:52
Speaker
Geldon Yitich gives $10 and says, I tried out underspace the other day and I was impressed with the oddball aliens, cultural references, and Cthulhu and nebulous space complete with odd undersea fixtures.
01:28:04
Speaker
Yeah, I did that on Yahtzee Tries like way back. It might have still been with the Escapers. Yeah, that was us at that point. Those people were upset because Starfield sucked and they're like, this is like Freelancer. But I don't think we saw anything creepy, even though the dev kept trying to drive us to it. Yeah, that was supposed to be the big selling point. I was like, you need to like lead with the big monsters, guys.
01:28:29
Speaker
A superb owner, member for six months in tip jar. Thank you very much. And then gives $5 and says, here's your weekly week old out of context windbreaker quote. If every man was free balling, we'd all have a good time. Yeah, I see. And buy it. Although you wouldn't be able to run very much.
01:28:52
Speaker
Because everything would be slappin' around. No, slappin' around. But what a melody. Slappin' around. Uh, Goob Bomber gives side dollars. I want to mention Void Stranger. It isn't weird in the zany sense, but it gets increasingly wild as it goes on. Highly recommend.
01:29:10
Speaker
Yeah, it's intimidating seeing all the reviews and it's like it's amazing 400 hours played like yeah Yeah, it's one of those games that like you I feel like filters a lot of people out by the time the weird shit really comes Like not like a not like a you're bad at the game, but it's just like it demands a lot from you I'm a big fan of so cool. There's a big Sokoban coming out this week that I'm excited for that I've been playing called Isles of sea and sky I just put a link it's like a little open world Sokoban who we play just a little dude go to these different islands. It's great
01:29:40
Speaker
It's funny. I want all games to be like that where they're normal. Even the normal games present normally and then eventually they get comfortable enough with me to be like, all right, I'm going to take the socks off now. It just gets really weird.
01:29:54
Speaker
Oh, I developed a digital, it's doing a 15th anniversary sale. They got this whole graphic with like the Hotline Miami dude and the sheep from Cult of the Lamb sharing a bit of cake. Yeah, let's say Devolver and I think you already mentioned earlier, Annapurna, I feel like they're almost in the same way that if you see like there's an A24 movie coming out, you're like, ooh, this is going to have some weirdness in it. And I feel like both of those publishers have the same kind of pedigree.
01:30:23
Speaker
Oh, is this the Sokobon thing? I thought it was a Zelda type beat. I don't know what Sokobon is. It almost feels a little bit like Zelda because you're collecting keys and there's abilities and stuff, but ultimately what you do with Sokobon is pushing blocks. Cool. I love whenever I think, ah, this genre is solved. That's it. Just as far as it's ever going to get and somebody comes through, but here I come. Yeah, it's good stuff. I think it comes out Wednesday. We have another share in the comments. It's very neat.
01:30:54
Speaker
Anyway, Quincy Martin gives out a lesson says really been missing the beautiful Joe series of two games. He was so crazy on elegant. I think there was a DS game. I don't know if that counts.
01:31:07
Speaker
How much of a series? I have no one said Disco Elysium yet. Talk about a weird game. Yeah. Is that Eastern European weird I like? Yeah. Eastern European weird. That indigo. Needs to be pretty literate there. But kind of weird where it just gives you epileptic seizures all the time. Yeah. Alex Armstrong gives two dollars and says, Myomoto is tingle, if you think about it, Marty.
01:31:34
Speaker
Oh, no. Oh, and I missed Dr. Theo, who gave two dollars to say. Topic idea, what counts as horror themed games? That's pretty interesting. Bring that up next week, maybe. What, something a little spooky? Save for Halloween. Yeah, in five months. We're not going to remember that. I think you also missed Gildan's five dollar donut.
01:31:58
Speaker
Oh, so I did. Another good weird game was Vangers, which was auto-dual if everyone turned into post-apocalyptic bugs that spoke in word salads. Kay. Classic Vangers. A little Vangerbanger. Ooh. Time to get tired and hungry. That's a lot of rattle bees. But Jango gives high dollars, says if I knew Cyber Deck was worth $250 back then, I would have held on to that trash bizzare game. Honestly, one of the worst games I've ever played. So many, so many games I sold for fucking peanuts.
01:32:28
Speaker
Because I was like, if I put these 10 games in, I could get Jack 3 for free. And those games were just $1,000 now. I had shells full of boxed games that I didn't keep with me when I moved from Australia. I had a boxed copy of Shell Shop 2 on the PlayStation 3. It was really bad. What? There's a buy it now. $7. What are you guys talking about? $7 shipping.
01:32:53
Speaker
One people have this in their cart, though, so I'm probably running up the price. One people have this in the cart. Yeah, 1271. Y'all went to the worst seller on there and caved his demands. Yeah, I'll move on that one quick, kids. Chinmail gives five pounds and says, any of you guys familiar with Wizkid, the story of Wizball 2 for the Amiga? Bonkers, both visually and in gameplay. No. No, I don't know anything about Amiga.
01:33:23
Speaker
I'm blinded. I mean I had an Amiga and I don't know what the hell you're on about, Chidmouth. Oh, creepy looking green guy, alright. Well, yeah, that game looks like an Amiga game, certainly. SaberLily just won 99 and says Seaman was the weirdest game I've ever played. I had a feeling that might come up. Yeah.
01:33:47
Speaker
It was like having a little pet, but your pet was a fish with a man's face. And you needed to talk to him through a microphone that did not work well because this was 1999. Oh, I remember this thing. Yeah, the Dreamcast. Why'd you guys buy these things? It said C-Man. I thought I'd be able to get my rocks off. I was wrong. It's a different time. It's a different time.
01:34:11
Speaker
Uh, Gulpyrak gives $10 and says, Yati, what did you build Starstruck in? How much were you able to rely on built-in tools versus your coding knowledge? Excited for the game, not enough to use an exclamation point because I'm a dick. Well, since you asked Gulpyrak, why don't you go ahead and watch the beginning of this stream again, in which you will see an advert for the very program I made. Starstruck Raghabond in Game Maker.
01:34:32
Speaker
which is suitable for both newcomers and experienced developers because it's got a lot of built-in tools where you can sort of drag and drop your game or if you don't want to use that you can just get right into the code and get into the weeds as it were. Are you more confident in your coding now? I know you used to be self-conscious about that.
01:34:58
Speaker
Yes, I am slightly more confident, but not enough to want to let anyone else look at the code of Starstruck Vagabond at the moment. I mean, if I was making a new game for Scratch, I'm sure it would be much neater. Nah, don't make code just for people to look at. What was it? That Bellatro coding? Everyone was making fun of him. I didn't even understand what I was saying. I was like, well, this looks like one big list. Yeah, I mean, not supposed to make it look like that. There's a lot of code Nazis out there.
01:35:26
Speaker
Oh, you didn't even notice it. I'll piss off. And the blotcher guy's like, oh, sorry, I didn't hear you. I'm too busy counting my money. What's that? Yeah. Just keep hearing, ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching.
01:35:36
Speaker
If it works, then it's good code. That's my attitude. Exactly. John Foo gives two euros and says, yes, your favorite Monster Munch flavor. Pickled onion. Thanks for the question. Gay Bear Bro 2, member for six months in Tip Jar. Thank you very much. And then thank you to $10 to say first time catching a stream in months. Sorry for not donating more. Well, I guess I'll forgive you, Gay Bear Bro 2. Gay Bear Bro 2, thank you so much. What is Monster Munch? Cereal.
01:36:02
Speaker
No, it's a snack in the vein of a- It's a dill pickle. What? It can't be serious. Yeah. It's a maize snack in the vein of funyuns and such like- A lower line laser eye? Some maize? Mm-hmm. That was like- No, maize as in corn. It's a corn snack if we must use Old World terminology.
01:36:24
Speaker
Anyway, er, Eric Weighardt comes back with 50 arses and says, blood will tell by Sega of a PS2. You're a samurai who needs to recover 48 stolen organs. The game even starts you blind, but is black and white lol.
01:36:38
Speaker
Hey, that's great. I like that. That sounds pretty crazy. That was very bad, but never dead. Your body can explode and you can just be a head rolling around. Yeah, I always said that game's mistake was trying to make it a combat mechanic rather than a puzzling mechanic. Yes. Like, throw your head into a vent like it's Metroid Prime or something. Yeah. That would work.
01:37:01
Speaker
What was that maze hand game you liked, Marty? Handshakes! Yup, where you decapitate your own, de-handicate yourself. You gotta cut your own hand off in order to solve a couple puzzles. $5 from Gulperak, who says, Shadow Hearts PS2 2001 at the time was really weird for JRPG. Real world setting, World War I with mysticism, odd, bold sense of humor, more odd, I mean. Yeah, like Rasputin was in the game, so it was like JRPG where fucking Rasputin's just trolling around.
01:37:33
Speaker
Yeah. Uh, Vajango, good side dollars, and says, please put a quote on the Steam page with Marty just saying, fuck it, whatever. G-O-T-Y edition before a G-O-T-Y edition comes out.
01:37:46
Speaker
That's fine. You and Arctic, I already forgot what the name of the game was, Arctic Monkeys, Arctic Eggs. Arctic Eggs, yeah. Arctic Monkeys is a band. It's a band, yes. Ah, gives 199 says shout out to dipshit the clown. Hope you're doing okay. I haven't seen you in a while, dipshit the clown. I hope everything's good. Maybe he got a different job. Now he's dipshit the quantity severe.
01:38:10
Speaker
Ryan Betts gives $5 and says pop quiz for Barty. Without using Google, please define the no true Scotsman argument and use it in a sentence relating to this week's topic. Fuck. It's a logical fallacy where you move the goalposts. It's a logical fallacy where you move the goalposts. You keep saying, oh, well, well. I don't know. Well, use it in a sentence then.
01:38:41
Speaker
No true Scotsman would think that Yuji Naka wasn't a jail. Okay, I think we're all getting very tired. So let's wrap up these last few Super Chats so we can all go off and sleep. I was sick all weekend. Jeffrey Summerhays gives five Canadian dollars, says, how about Double Fine? I find them a bit hit and miss, but I always wonder how nuts the person was who came up with the idea.
01:39:07
Speaker
Yeah, they have those interesting kind of game jams, the Amnesia Fortnights, where you got things like stacking out of an Iron Brigade and headlander. Yeah, even if the games don't hit, I still like that they're built around an interesting mechanic, usually. Ramen gives $2 and says, late weird wreck where the water tastes like wine. I never played that. I remember it. I remember it was like an American folktale where you kind of
01:39:35
Speaker
Uh, wander across like a map of America and have these little, it's almost like a choose your own adventure and you have these little stories written by some people. Like, like heading out. That's a little bit like heading out, honestly. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah, that's interesting. Uh, Dr. Theogocidalis says, heard of the horror game Ill Blade. It's a super weird Dreamcast game that I want to see remaster for. Final Boss is literally Sonic the Hedgehog.
01:40:03
Speaker
Actually, that's the final boss is not Sonic the Hedgehog. Sonic the Hedgehog is the boss fight for one of the game's chapters. And yes, build lead is a game where has a new game plus mode where at the end of it, your main character has lost all her clothes. And that's part of the reason why the final boss comes out to fight you. Because we're naked.
01:40:27
Speaker
Well, they've got a little scrap of paper on both their nipples and on their hoo-ha, so they're not actually naked. Yeah, but you said that's why they fight us. Yeah, well, someone comes out because they wanted to hit on you because you're a naked lady. Ah, okay. We're fanning them off, I see. Ilbleed is another one of those games that is very expensive now. When I went on my Dreamcast spree, that game is like several hundred dollars. Although maybe people get the wrong stores, which might be very possible.
01:40:56
Speaker
Bit of a cult game now. Yep. Uh, FoxD, you decide all this is happy birthday to my cat, cat face, who celebrates two years of jumping up on my desk and running my characters off cliffs and trucks off the road tomorrow. Oh, what a cute cat face. Toffee's been known to walk across my keyboard when he wants my attention. And do a wine. Uh, it's in January, I think. Happy birthday, Toffee. Is it his birthday or his adoption day?
01:41:25
Speaker
Adoption day. We don't know his birthday because we got him from a shelter. No. Uh, fungus finder gives $2 and says, is there going to be a star truck discord channel? Maybe. Sure we can make a channel. You can get a whole discord. No, I'm sure none of us, the second one where folks are playing the game can talk about it. Well, actually we had, we had one for internal development purposes. Perhaps we could open it up.
01:41:54
Speaker
Oh, finally, that's the last super chat. Yeah. No, you missed one. And it's the most important super chat of them all right before. So I did. The poll gives nine eighty nine and says shout out to Frost and Marzi. That's so important to you. Try to suppress us. I can't believe. Yeah.
01:42:10
Speaker
How dare you? Well, thanks for enjoying this little odyssey of the weird games that we like. This was nice. Why not share your own favorite weird games in the comments and don't forget to like and subscribe while you're there. And if at any point during this
01:42:28
Speaker
Podcasts, we reminded you of a game you'd forgotten about. You have to go to the Patreon. That's the rule. You have to both like the video, you have to like the video, and then you have to go to the Patreon and consider subscribing. This is gonna backfire and they're gonna dislike it and rob us of the night. This is a technique known as the call to action, which is apparently approved successful in the past. Look at that. Science.
01:42:57
Speaker
I've been Jarti Grosjor and here's some other twats who will also be signing off now.
01:43:05
Speaker
You watch later today, Hidden Gems. They're going to be playing Dread Delusion. That's the game Jesse reviewed. That is like a real crunchy gothic slash early Elder Scrolls. Explore them up. So check that out and we'll have, yeah, great, great videos all week. Hachimachi. And if you're in the $5 column, check out Darren's excellent con running diary. He's already on part six. He's seen so many movies going to premieres, wearing a tuxedo. You probably learned French by now.
01:43:32
Speaker
Crazy. Yeah, what about you, Frost? New Cultek just came out talking about how I vote with my wallet because I don't like telling people what to do with their money. I'm like someone else here. And so I'll just lead by example and throw my money down. I am subscribed to the Patreon.
01:43:49
Speaker
I don't know if the rest of you. I have a dollar a sub, which is very dumb, just so I can see what's going on there. So I can be a voyeur. Invoice $12 at the end of the year. And then, we can invoice it. And then stream tomorrow, better with friends with Will. The plan is to go for X to find it. That doesn't work because the servers are not, we will do Fallout 76.
01:44:08
Speaker
Cause we're, um, yeah, we're just walking around chilling in these life service games. See what's up. What's the vibe? New hot times 7 PM central. Correct. Yep. Did we miss the super chair? Um, I read this one out, didn't I? What? Pretty sure I did. Which one? Just existing 45 gave $5 say, Hey guys, I want to say thank you for always being there. It makes you feel part of a community. Lots of love. Keep being all some Yahtzee's. Thank you so much. You said you are part of the community and I said, yeah, it's a cult. Yeah.
01:44:35
Speaker
Yes, exactly. Yes. Just watch it back, if you missed it. Yes, don't forget my fully romantic this week. It will be on the subject of a little game called Another Crab's Treasure that you might know.
01:44:49
Speaker
I'll also have a semi-ramblematic, fitting on Thursday. And I will be appearing on Friday's Dev Heads podcast to talk about my new game, Starstruck Vagabond, which is coming out on Friday and which you should all buy. And wishlist now, if you haven't.
01:45:08
Speaker
Well, you don't have to invoice the wishlisting, you can wishlist whatever you like. It's free, you hear that? Yes, it's free to wishlist. And we'll pump our numbers up for the algorithm. I mean, you know, under no obligation to actually buy it if you wishlist it. But it makes us feel better if we see a lot of wishlists just saying. Anyway, that'll be it from us. Catch you all next time. Bye, everyone. Thanks, Eric.
01:45:51
Speaker
you