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Episode 29 - Nostalgia and Dani and Bill from Escape This Podcast
1.8k Plays3 months ago
We're not here to fuck spiders, we're here to talk about Adventure Games with our brilliant and charming friends Dani and Bill from Escape This Podcast and the upcoming Rise of the Golden Idol!
We talk about nostalgia and the way it colors – or does not color – our views of games, and just goof the hell around.
So, I guess we were here to fuck spiders, after all.
Find Escape This Podcast and Solve This Murder at https://www.consumethismedia.com/
The episode with Roses and Matt is here: https://www.escapethispodcast.com/e/big-top-trouble-ft-save-your-game/
Wishlist Rise of the Golden Idol on Steam https://store.steampowered.com/app/2716400/The_Rise_of_the_Golden_Idol/
And finally, email us! [email protected]
Games Mentioned:
- Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree
- Horizon Forbidden West
- Crusader Kings
- Tunic
- Death’s Door
- Animal Well
- Nancy Drew series
- Rise of the Golden Idol
- Case of the Golden Idol
- A Case of Mistrust
- Little Witch in the Woods
- Final Fantasy VIII, VI, VII, X
- Fields of Mistria
- Stardew Valley
- Myst
- Riven
- Grim Fandango
- Sam & Max Hit the Road
- Kings Quest VII
- The Realm Online
- Quest 64
- Quest for Glory I
- Granny’s Garden
- Tex Murphy: Mean Streets
- Pokemon Gold & Silver
- 7th Guest VR
- 11th Hour
- The 13th Doll
- Kessen II
- CLUE
- Murderous Muses
- Telling Lies
- The Infections Madness of Doctor Dekker
- Science Sleuths Vol. 1
- Déjà Vu
- Normality
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Unplanned Ending
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey everyone, quick programming note, we ended up having to end this recording session suddenly. Everyone is fine, don't worry! But that's why the ending of the podcast might seem a little abrupt. And also our hit new segments, Playdate with Matt, and ranking every adventure game ever. We'll return next week.
00:00:20
Speaker
Okay, bye.
The Toe Talk and Spiders as Friends
00:00:21
Speaker
Have you ever looked at the bottom of your toes? all right not i see I sit cross-legged and I'm just staring at the bottom of my toes and they're weird. Honestly, all the time, because I also sit like that. Can you yeah um just describe what's weird? There's a tendon or a muscle or something that I can only see on one toe and surely there must be muscles and tendons on all of them, but I can only see it on one. Maybe you have an extra one.
00:00:48
Speaker
That's the weird thing about toes is they're just sacks of jelly, but there's one tendon that pulls so tight, it moves them around. It's creepy. What? What I like so much about the bottom of toes is the little the little like balls of the toes, that there's like a little shelf there. like If you're hanging your feet down, it's straight down, you have a little shelf you could maybe like keep some tiny bottles on or something.
00:01:17
Speaker
i yeah You speak like you've done this before, Matt. i i don't I don't have bottles that small, but I've thought about buying some just to keep on but on my hanging toes. Oh, what are those you have there? Oh, those are my toe bottles. case I started an Onlyfans just for my toe bottles.
00:01:39
Speaker
I just day yeah dangle them down, put the bottles on, and people pay me $700 a month. Yeah, don't don't laugh, roses. This is how your podcast is funded.
00:02:10
Speaker
Hello, everybody, and welcome to Save Your Game. I am your host, Matt Aucamp. And with me, as always, are all these spiders that are crawling over my desk. Why is my desk full of spiders? Oh, I put them there. I thought you could use some friends. Yeah, I mean, like there's better ways to make friends, I'm sure. But I summoned them just for you. OK, you know, i I want to say I appreciate it.
00:02:40
Speaker
But I don't. I don't know why. Again, just as that intro was playing, as the intro music was playing, I just noticed like three spiders on my desk and now I'm fucking freaked. I'm so glad you got them. It's pushing up roses, everybody. Hi, it's me, pushing up roses. How you doing, roses? I talk to spiders. I'm hanging in there. How are you besides the spider situation?
00:03:05
Speaker
I'm just thinking about these spiders, to be honest. You know what, actually? I mean, did they leave already or are they still there? I blew one. I'm sorry, did she want to leave? I used the air from my lungs to propel one that was making a line between my work computer and my home computer. That's nice. By line, I mean web. There's words for these. Anyway, I'm excited, actually.
Meet Bill and Danny: The Mysterious Guests
00:03:30
Speaker
Roses. Please tell me why.
00:03:33
Speaker
Because on this episode, we have two very special guests. They are talented and smart and funny and charming as hell. Is it us? Is it me and you? It is Matt Aucamp and pushing up. No, it is the two hosts of the podcast, Escape This Podcast. We have Bill and Danny.
00:03:54
Speaker
Bill and Danny, do you guys use your full, should I say full names or just Bill and Danny? Okay. So for for years, for years on our show, we were just Bill and Danny and we didn't didn't even introduce ourselves. For the first year of our show, we never even said our first names because everyone was like, who is that who's hosting this show?
00:04:15
Speaker
Then we had years, we had years of, we never, so then we never really said our surnames, not out of any desire to be secretive, but just cause it just didn't come up. Um, and then people would, we, we got a lot of family. I mean, like, Hey, are you two siblings? Are you two friends? so Are you, are you, are you married? What's going on? yeah And, and, and to this day, nobody knows.
00:04:40
Speaker
hi
00:04:43
Speaker
oh But anyway, the real reason that we're here is that all Australians are spider experts, so we can help deal with this. All right, now these spiders are very tiny. Do you guys still know about these? Yeah, no, look, it really looks like you've got a bit of a Cinderella situation on your hands. Those three spiders are going around and trying to make everything nice and lovely for you while singing a little song.
00:05:05
Speaker
Okay, and I'm just abusing them. I'm just like, get the fuck out of here. I did send very polite spiders. I mean, you're acting, Matt, as though I sent you goblins or something. I sent you polite cleaning spiders. Okay, now, on I gusted this one away. I'm trying to find other words because i'm i so I got literally read after I said the thing that I said. um but i So I this one away, but I swear it was like, it had like a pink body and green legs. Is that possible? That's not anything. What? Yeah. It's like a 1970s punk rock spider. I am so i am so sorry to to bring this up and to say these words on ah on a recorded podcast, especially for people who listen to our shows and and we don't really swear on our shows, but it is odd, right? Because there is a ah phrase in Australia,
00:05:58
Speaker
hu which is we're not here to fuck spiders. Excuse me? It just means we're not here to, we're not going to mess about, let's get down to business. We're not here to fuck spiders. So, so there is something there. There is something about Australia, right? Like I don't know, I don't know how to finish, like I don't know how to continue that thought, but there is something about Australia that you're the only country who would say something like, we're not here to fuck spiders, as your way of saying, I'm not gonna miss about. I'm gonna use that all the time now, so thank you so much for that. But in America, if you say that to somebody like at the bar,
00:06:39
Speaker
You wouldn't say it that but because at the bar you are there to fuck spiders, I guess right like you are yeah that's that's what That's what you do but scene In you know that scene in a horror movie where someone is going about their business and then a drop of blood drips on them and then a second one and Then suddenly a whole
Spider Stories and Australian Humor
00:06:55
Speaker
bunch more. I have had that happen to me with baby spiders. Oh my Oh no, he's going to blow. I'm going to fall out of my chair. that is That is a little squeamish. He doesn't appreciate, quote, gross things. but I would say i I am at my most Australian when I see there's ah there's a a species of of spider in Australia called a Huntsman spider.
00:07:23
Speaker
It's just a big old spider and it lives in your house and it eats bugs and it doesn't create webs. And generally the advice is leave them alone. They're fine. They're better to be in your house than not.
00:07:35
Speaker
But the moment you see one, when it's not supposed to be, it's just like, mate, what are you doing? Mate, what are you, hey, come on. Mate, what are you doing here? Can you get, this is an actual interaction I've had with Spider on the kitchen floor. It's stood in the middle of my kitchen with its little front legs raised. Like, what are you going to do about it? And I went, this is not part of the deal.
00:07:56
Speaker
But you're the country that sometimes has spiders have spiders that are like the size of the wall of your house. Yeah. Sometimes I've once moved into a house and I thought it had an extra bedroom. It was that it was more living room. There was just a spider standing there looking like a wall.
00:08:15
Speaker
And it's like, oh, sorry, guys. Sorry. Should should we take a second to tell people what our what our podcast is? Please tell us about, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's put the finishing touches on the introduction.
00:08:28
Speaker
ah Yeah, do you guys, I mean, I could sing its praises voluminously, but do you guys want to say just like basic premise? Yeah, I can give it i can give us a small rundown. So we have we have two shows, really. We have our major show, is or our first show is called Escape This Podcast, where we design audio escape rooms. So it's ah it's a full escape room experience, but it's played ah in audio, sort of like a D and&D game or like playing through a text-based adventure.
00:08:57
Speaker
And we have guests come on and they play through the room, they solve all the puzzles, they get through the story. As you two well know. You two have been guests on a recent episode. I have no memory of what the room was. sucker always it a Circus. yeah It was a fun circus. And so so you know what it's like to play. ah We have a second show called Solve This Murder, where we do a similar sort of vibe, but for murder mysteries. We we design a sort of Agatha Christie style detective murder mystery.
00:09:27
Speaker
And then the other player has to be the detective and solve it. And it's a lot harder because in the escape room, it's like there are clues and puzzles and you solve them. Whereas the murder mystery is here's a dead body. Go. Who do I ask? I don't know. You're the detective. no that Imagine being a detective on the scene and being like, who
Detective Work and Podcast Introductions
00:09:48
Speaker
do I ask about this?
00:09:49
Speaker
sure that is an adult here That's like escape this podcast hard mode. and sounds oh yeah It's great fun though. We've had a bunch of fun murder mysteries. We swap off who writes them and host them. And we don't bring on guests for that one because it is too hard and I wouldn't know how to deal with it with another person as well. I have to pause every half hour to just like breathe and cry a little bit.
00:10:11
Speaker
it is we have We have occasionally had mysteries where we never spoke to the murderer. We solved the whole thing. We never wanted to. It was like on a, I had one where it was like on my list of interviewees, it was like, well, the seventh person on my list will be this guy. And I did the first six and went, wait a minute. I don't want to talk to that seventh guy anymore.
00:10:31
Speaker
because he murdered me. yeah yeah Escape This, I have not listened to Solve This Murder, but I will. I will be during work tomorrow. But ah Escape This podcast is just great fun. Listeners, you might be thinking, well, how how does it feel to listen to an escape room? Like that doesn't, I don't know that I would be able to follow. You can, it is.
00:10:54
Speaker
They do it really well. They have a really, these two have a really great sense of building a scene and a world. um it It's like listening to your, like ah an actual play D and&D podcast. yeah That was what we were hoping when we started it. Like initially, of course we weren't sure if it was going to work and just a little bit of playing around and went, oh my God, how has nobody done this before? Totally works. It absolutely works. And that's how I feel about it. I feel like it is,
00:11:24
Speaker
It should be mentioned, anybody who's gonna talk about um some of these top tier, anyone who's gonna talk about the Adventure Zone or what's Critical Role should be talking about Escape This Podcast in the same breath. It's- Hold on, hold on. Let's just clip that audio and we're going to put that in our ads. In fact, you guys have had the McElroy's on. Yeah. We haven't had Critical Role people. We've had Critical Role adjacent people. We had Abriya Iyengar on the show.
00:11:53
Speaker
Oh, that's amazing. And yeah, various, various people in that, in that field. But yeah, Macros have been on a few times. um And yeah, we've had a bunch of fun guests and silly guests. And they have definitely had a lot of crossover with the D and&D audio space. I'm going to say something kind of controversial here.
00:12:13
Speaker
I don't really like listening to D and&D games. I would rather listen to things that you do. I think I don't, I don't care about the combat really. Like even when I used to real time role play on AOL, like in the chat rooms. so And the chat room did have a dice mechanic, but the ones we played, it was all just real time writing an RPG. And that's kind of what I live for is role play that doesn't have combat. So.
00:12:40
Speaker
ah The few times I did play D and&D, I just wanted to like talk to everyone. As you guys noticed from our episode, I just wanted to talk to everybody. nothing well get stuff so yeah i We definitely have lots of things that we could say about combat in ah RPGs and things like that, and how to balance them out, and you know balancing the mechanics with story when you're turning it into a podcast. All sorts of things.
00:13:04
Speaker
yeah um I do think D and&D is a good, this is way off topic for our show, but I think D and&D is a good, ah and like I think there's a reason all these actual play podcasts have taken off.
00:13:17
Speaker
It is a podcast that got me to listen to D and&D. i was like I was like a young comedian, right? And I was looking, basically I was like working a boring desk job. And I was like, I'm gonna find something dumb to listen to during work. And it maybe has the dumbness of it will just inspire me ah comedically, right? Like that was literally my thought. And I found this podcast called Drunks and Dragons. That was just some people playing Dungeons and Dragons. You guys know that show?
00:13:44
Speaker
I, yeah, I'm sure it's on my list of playlists of ones that I've listened to at least some of the episodes of. Um, I got so fucking hooked. Like I love that show and I listened every, like I listened to the first like four episodes and was laughing to myself, but by the fifth episode, I was like, Oh my God, what's going to happen? And then I fell in love with that show and I listened to like the first, I don't know. I think they're on like 300 episodes. I think it stopped listening around like 150. or something, not because it was bad, just because life changed. Yeah, that's a lot. But it got me into D&D, and then I ended up hosting a live comedy Dungeons and Dragons show, because I was into that, into Dungeons and Dragons.
Gaming Experiences and Comparisons
00:14:26
Speaker
Oh, nice. But I don't know why I went off on that tangent, just we were talking about Dungeons and Dragons stuff. How about video games? Have you guys been playing? Oh, Ryan.
00:14:39
Speaker
ah Yeah, Bill and Danny, have you guys been playing anything interesting lately? We've been doing a lot of replaying because we recently bought you know Shadow of the Urd Tree and it's called Burning Shores, right? The DLCs for Elden Ring and Horizon Forbidden West. So it's been, okay, let's do a reset and play through every aspect of the original games again so that we can get to those bits.
00:15:01
Speaker
Yes. like put at the time Those are two games with that are very diff with difficult mechanics. So like you can't just jump into the DLC. Yeah. It's a lot of like, we of Oh, I get a roll again. Okay. Um, but that's not much of like, like these are not really adventure games. So the things in the same way, like I've been playing that same way Crusader Kings three, not quite an adventure game. There's a lot of, there's a lot of me bothering Danny and be like, Danny, I think I just found the bear that killed my father 15 years ago. He's making a fool of me.
00:15:31
Speaker
Um, not quite the same as invention, but- That's true. At one point it was just in the middle of doing absolutely nothing. I just hear, oh, my mother died.
00:15:41
Speaker
No, it was fine. That like my mother died. That was sad. Then then I died. And then my new character came over and he found out that his mother was the worst human being the world has ever seen. Um, not only did she, did I find out that I was an illegitimate child because she had been cheating on my father the entire time. Then she just started murdering people that caught for no reason. And I had to solve this murder. I found a note from my mother saying, it was me, you fool. And then she fled to France. I didn't know what to do about it.
00:16:12
Speaker
But you were the father. I was the father, then he died and I became my own son. The voice is bad. She was a bad wife, yeah then she was a bad mother, and then she was a murderer. That's not quite the same, other than that. Before that, we both not too long ago played through all of tunic, and then I started doing a comparison run by playing Death's Door.
00:16:38
Speaker
Yes, that's that was great, which I feel like fit a little bit more into the theme. Right. and I I've not played. Tell me about Death's Door. I've played Tunic. Death's Door is ah is in some ways similar. It's isometric, anthropomorphic animal, but barely anthropomorphic. You play a crow, and he is very crow-like. And it does involve going through different areas and fighting bad guys, fighting bosses in the same sort of way that Tunic does. It is less puzzle-y. There are still little hints of puzzle around, but it's far less focused on that, and it's more focused on the
00:17:14
Speaker
uh, cutesy, but a little bit grimmer than tunic, Dark Souls-esque fighting. yeah It is cute. I'm looking at screenshots and it, it, I'm typically, uh, and historically I have not liked isometric top-down. There's something about it that I don't know what it is. I must've had a traumatizing experience with an isometric adventure game.
00:17:37
Speaker
ah The only one I really like is Sanitarium, and nobody likes that game except me. um An isometric game, cheated on your father and began murdering people at court. Yeah, exactly. You know what? I've repressed it, but now that you've said it. Yeah, Death's Door is definitely a bit more unforgiving than Tunic, and I felt, I think, more rewarded by Tunic because I always feel rewarded by puzzles. And I love language-based things as well.
00:18:05
Speaker
I'm looking at Death's Door screenshots as well, and some of these could just be screenshots from Tunic with a different character placed in it. Yeah, I see that. um yeah Superficially, a lot of similarities, but it seems like when you go online and look for people's preferences,
00:18:20
Speaker
different people will prefer a different one, but everyone has a very clear preference for one over the other, just depending on what they value in a game. I loved Tunic. I thought Tunic was just an incredible incredible game. yeah Tunic was a lot of fun. and And Tunic was also nice in terms of like, there was a lot of puzzle stuff to do that got quite intensely puzzle-y.
00:18:39
Speaker
But if you didn't want to do the intensely puzzley stuff, you could just, you could just not, you could just not engage with it. Right. Sort of like and right as as it comes to the end, having this feeling of like, Hey, do you like puzzles? If not, just yeah just go and just go and stab someone. But if you, but if you, but if you love them, come over a here to the puzzle corner of the game. The puzzles were intense. The puzzles were like animal well level intensity.
00:19:02
Speaker
I haven't played Animal well yet. No, so we have this growing list. Like, for example, we we have played through and we'll probably talk about this late in the episode.
Rise of the Golden Idol: Sequel Insights
00:19:10
Speaker
We played through every single Nancy Drew game and there's a new Nancy Drew that's come out and we've been putting it off because we figured we'll probably let live stream it. Um, so in terms of like playing more, more puzzle, the adventure game style things, we haven't been doing a huge amount. And I think part of that is because the other video game thing that we've been doing lately, which again, we'll probably have some time to talk about later, uh, is we've been writing, uh,
00:19:31
Speaker
and designing for the sequel to Case of the Golden Idol. We've we've been writing ah Rise of the Golden Idol and working on that. And so sometimes sitting down to play a different adventure game at the moment is like, no, it just makes me think about all the work I have to do. I have to go back and finish this scenario. um So maybe that's also partly It doesn't make me feel like that, but it does make me feel like, man, these people are so good at their puzzles. really go this cool puzzle Well, that's maybe we should talk about that now. Cause I was, I was trying to think of a time that we would bring, like when we would discuss this, but fuck it. Um, so you guys, you, uh, both were hired to write on, you, you were not part of the case of the golden idol.
00:20:16
Speaker
No, no, no connection to the original. Which means we can talk about how great that game is all there and it's not weird. Were you fans of that game before you got hired to write on Rise of the Golden Idol? So the story of how we got into this is a friend of ours was a big fan of the first game and he was on their Discord and he noticed that they were putting out a call for writing stuff for the sequel because they had a quicker turnaround and they wanted to expand their team and get new voices onto the writing team.
00:20:46
Speaker
And he sent us ah a screenshot of like a discord post that, hey, you should you should apply for this. And all we knew at the time was, oh, people have been telling us to play Case of the Golden Idol. It's been mentioned as a thing that we should play.
00:20:59
Speaker
But we hadn't engaged with it at all. It was on our list of many, many things. you know We had just finished playing, like I think I had just finished playing Outer Wilds based on a recommendation and been like, oh my God, this game blew my mind. And I was like, okay, the same person had recommended I play Case of the Golden Idol, so we'll do that next. But we we hadn't.
00:21:19
Speaker
And, uh, and so they sent us this thing that said they're looking for people to hire. We went, well, I don't want to just apply for this because maybe the game's bad. Maybe I'll play it and be like, this is a dumb game and I don't like it. So we sat together and we played through the base, the original game and, uh, probably 24 hours or so. Yeah. We just sort of sat and just played and played and played and immediately just fell in love. It's such a cool game. Um, it's so good. It's so tight. It's so like, Hmm.
00:21:46
Speaker
The only, all the information is relevant. The only ah answers can be the answers, right? Like ah me and Rose has often used that as our ah reference point when we're talking about mystery games is sometimes a lot of mystery games involve guessing.
00:22:09
Speaker
And Case of the Golden Idol is a game where there is no guessing involved as long as you're paying attention. You do not need to guess at any solution. You guess as always. I don't mind like guessing as long as I'm doing with you know doing it with purpose. But um like the game i we had talked about last week, um A Case of Mistrust, I was telling Matt about. It's a very cool stylized murder mystery adventure game.
00:22:36
Speaker
But I noticed that in my evidence notebook, because you collect evidence in this notebook to be used later, everything I look at is now evidence. So I'm talking about now my lamp is in the evidence. So my evidence list is enormous. And I'm just guessing and I'm like, I don't, is it the lamp? Is it the lamp in my office? I've been thinking about that all week. I've been thinking about the idea of like everything that I look at in my house.
00:23:03
Speaker
Just like, um, clean up this dust on the floor. And it's like, now that adds to my evidence. If I go somewhere completely different to solve a murder. yeah yeah Um, so yeah. So we, so we played through the first game. We absolutely loved it fellow. We sort of fell in love with the, with the style of it. This at like, I also liked that. it's So such an easy thing to express where it's like, it's a detective game that uses Mad Libs.
00:23:26
Speaker
Right. It is the blank, blank, the blank in the blank. Then he blanks the blank. Like that's how you play the game. It's such an easy concept to get across. And so we played it. We, we, uh, applied straight away because we're like, that was amazing. I'd love to work on the sequel. Um, and, and yeah, we, we did some interviews, we chatted, we talked about escape this podcast and solve this murder and all this stuff that we had done in that space. And, uh, we were brought onto the writing team. It's a.
00:23:52
Speaker
It's like a seven person writing team, I think for the, for the new game. Uh, and it's one of the things where it was pitched as you will be writing for the game, but it's, but it's been a lot of like, we've been writing, but we also, because of how the the the game is, right? It's the scent.
00:24:08
Speaker
scenes, it means we're also basically doing level design. we're point We're saying where everything should go, what should be there, and how that and then we're inputting everything into the engine, and then we're creating the puzzles in engine, and we're doing and so we're doing a pretty holisticistic development been a lot of For people, anyone who's on the playtesting side of this will have seen huge amounts of my hand-drawn art, which looks horrendous.
00:24:30
Speaker
I was like, here's a little guy and he's ha hes but he's barely better than a stick figure. Like, do I'm a crime. And it's like, but that who's that? So yeah, doing art, doing doing a whole bunch of stuff. So it's been really interesting and it's just been a lot of fun.
00:24:48
Speaker
ah Now people out of that team I played the rise of the golden idol demo it was incredible. It was so good what So it's not that far away, right? I don't know it's coming out pretty soon What what news do you have for us in terms of release date?
00:25:07
Speaker
Uh, okay. So release date, I think, I think I can give like a, like a rough release date though. I don't think anybody can, can hold me to it. but im and i checked When you Google it just to see how much information is out there, it says 2024. Yeah. And that's definitely true. When it's the next day, I'm going to be banging on your door and be like, you said, yeah, the next time you can complain, I think is like early November.
00:25:37
Speaker
is the rough time, like that's the ideal. Unless of course, at some point, someone behind the scenes goes, oh, hey, we've discovered that everything's broken. Then who knows? But as of now, it's working pretty well. So I think i think everything should still be on track but for ah the start of November. Well, I've just emailed my boss asking for the entire month of November off. So you better be right, or I'm going to ah lose all my PTO for right absolutely no reason.
00:26:05
Speaker
um i've just out' but no it was but the the um so yeah the demo is great for people who want to check it out you can go you can play the demo now it's on steam um and yeah it it is a lot of fun you can see that like the the structure of it has changed a little bit in terms of how things solve and um and i remember that was like early meetings when we sat down part of it was like we're thinking of changing these things around or messing with this or we'd like I'm just trying to experiment with how to make like what can we add while still obviously making sure that it feels like Golden Idol? Because you don't want to change the spirit of what made the first one so great. Yeah, exactly. And I think it's it's done well at sort of achieving that goal.
00:26:43
Speaker
um it it is It's just been an odd experience it's been an odd experience as well from a writing point of view of like, we'll just like pitch a person. We'll like be writing a scene and be like, and then there's this guy's in the scene and his name's something dumb like this. boomobera bo but but And then like four months later they're like,
00:27:02
Speaker
Alright, so at this critical point where that guy with that stupid name does this incredibly important thing, you're like, what? How is this still in here? Why are we all agreeing that this guy's a major character? He's a dummy I made up. Your art is still based on the hand-drawn thing that I did on an eye. Like, that's not, alright, that's part of it. We're really making this. I don't know if you guys have ever heard of this, but do you guys know Ben and Dan from Size 5 Games? They did. No.
00:27:30
Speaker
um They did ah Lair of the Clockwork God and the ben and other Ben and Dan games. well Regardless, um they have a podcast where they talk about like the development process of their next game. And they they brought everybody in there like, hey, we're just going to write the game on this podcast. And at some point, once when we start developing it, we'll just stop doing this podcast probably. um But one thing that they do, and I think it's really smart is kind of like you're talking, they'll just throw out an idea and they'll say like, well, not this, but, right? Not this, but Hippo breaks in and crushes the main character. And then it's like, but but what they mean is something ridiculous happens that, you know, ah ah impedes the main character in that moment, but they just kind of throw out like the first thought in their head
00:28:24
Speaker
And I think that's just like a brilliant way to write. Just like, well, not this, but ah this like yeah this dumb character does this thing. Yeah. It feels like when I would do proper proper writing, yeah, that's what we call it. Like when I was doing actual like long form narrative writing and eventually you get stuck in a sentence and eventually you just have to say, well, I can't tell what word I want to go here. So I'm just going to write a different word, underline it and keep going. And that underline means do not use this. Oh my God, yeah, if if you look at anything I've written, there's just like red, ah but's so all over the thing, it is the worst writing you've ever seen. um Roses, ah is there any game that you've been playing lately? Yeah, slightly.
Little Witch in the Woods and Final Fantasy Debate
00:29:13
Speaker
I decided to pick up just randomly, ah possibly for my stream, I stream every now and then, I picked up Little Witch of the in the Woods.
00:29:21
Speaker
And I think I had had the idea that it was gonna be like a Stardew Valley-esque game, um but it's not, actually. It's more in line. I kept being reminded almost, what now? It's just Dark Souls. You're a little witch, killing monsters in the woods. Man, it went hard. I see what you mean from the look of it, of assuming it would be Stardew-like. Yeah, it was on my wish list for a long time for that reason, yeah.
00:29:49
Speaker
Yeah, I would actually I would actually compare it more to like the new like Link's Awakening or even Chrono Trigger. um it's It has some elements of that. It is not really a Stardew Valley type game, but it it you are crafting potions, but it's not like you're not farming. there's There's no farming. There's no real like management like that. um And what the other thing I found was it's very cute. And when I say cute, I mean, it's a little too young for for me.
00:30:26
Speaker
And now a few people in the stream said it was because it was Korean and it was translated in such a way that maybe it's not getting across the right tone. But that being said, you know, I'm i'm trying to read it and I'm playing all these very young, like very excitable characters. And it's not that as adults that we cannot play those kind of characters. It's just usually we go kind of Calvin and hop with it. and we make them A little more mature, a little more relatable. i'm not I'm not really relating to this character. She's so young. So it it feels ultimately a little too cute. But that being said, it's very charming. It is a very charming, witchy, cozy game ah that has amazing music that reminds me of Final Fantasy 8. Possibly the worst Final Fantasy. No, no, no, no. Don't you let them... say that about Final Fantasy 8, about, you know, about our great friends, Quistis and, uh. Quistis, uh, not, yeah, Squall. Squall. Quistis and the guy whose name starts with a Z. Yeah. He may have complained when the fake president turned into a monster on that train, but they were fools. That's a great fight.
00:31:41
Speaker
I love that. I really love that. It's a great game. Is that the one where you suplex a train? No, that's six. Oh, okay. Sorry. Six says you suplexing a train. It does have you fighting a big tank with a sword in the opening mission. Oh, okay.
00:31:55
Speaker
I've not gotten to eight yet. i have ah I've been playing the Final Fantasy. I made a declaration one time. I was like, I'm not gonna play any Final Fantasy game, so I'm 40. And then I'm gonna, I think I said 50. When I'm 50, I'm gonna sit and play every Final Fantasy game in a row. And then like three weeks after I like wrote that tweet or whatever, I was like, I think I'm gonna play Final Fantasy games. And I stalled at seven, but I'm excited for eight. Well, here's what you should do. Here's what you should do. You've stalled at seven. That's fine. You you you you skip eight and nine and you play 10, the objectively best Final Fantasy game. And then you play 10 over and over again for the rest of your life. Uh, hard to disagree. 10 is phenomenal. It's pretty bad. 10 is so good.
00:32:47
Speaker
The characters are great, the story is great, and it's the only one that's actually turn-based, so you can actually strategize during the fights, as opposed to just hitting A, because someone else's turn is coming up behind you. It's the greatest one. You know what? It's all about triple triad, though, in Final Fantasy VIII. It's all about that mini card game. I do love a mini card game. Hey, wait a second. No. Hold the hell.
00:33:10
Speaker
You're gonna say that you wanna play cards instead of Blitzball? You could play Blitzball for 40 hours and do nothing but you can get to the Blitzball portion of the Final Fantasy X and then just never finish it and play Blitzball forever. In my teens and twenties I tried to play Final Fantasy X many times and I couldn't get past various stages of intro. I just was not interested until one day I saw Billy playing Blitzball and I was determined to play for long enough to get up to the Blitzball and I love it so much. I don't care about the rest of the game. I made it practically to the end, but just for more Blitzball. Final Fantasy X is the one where you start as like a weird
00:33:52
Speaker
like a pop star looking guy in a big, big city, right? Yeah, where he has one pant leg that goes down to the knee and the other one that goes down just below his hip and then turns into fishnets that go down to the neck. What could be better? That means he's a drug dealer, right? I hate the voice acting in that game, you guys. That means he's holding. I just can't with that voice acting. That's more than fair. Yeah, I remember playing the intro to that. I had that for PlayStation 1 and 2. And I remember playing the intro and then stopping, and then one time later in my life playing the intro and then stopping. That was me. my but Talking about the voice acting, my brain still at any point has the lines, but a thousand years into the future? No way! And going over and over again in my head. ah It's a great game and it's the best part of fantasy, so sorry everybody. All right, let's cause some fights.
Fields of Mistria: A Cozy New Game
00:34:50
Speaker
um I have been playing Fields of Mystery, speaking of Stardew Valley like games. And this game, guys, it fucking rules. like i did not So many games claim to be the new Stardew Valley, right? like that that That's just a way to sell games these days. And most of them absolutely fall short. ah But Fields of Mystery,
00:35:17
Speaker
is incredible. I'm loving every second of it. It's still in early access, but it is it is very much like, okay, it's like Stardew Valley, but the ah developers also were big fans of Harvest Moon, played Stardew Valley, and thought, eh, this doesn't quite nail it.
00:35:40
Speaker
And so they put a lot of thought into what would what would define, say, the best version of Hardevist Moon. um Now, they don't, there's some parts that aren't as good as Stardew Valley, and that might be owed in part to the fact that it's early access. Like, you can only get to four hearts with various villagers. um You can only get to certain levels. You can only get to certain stages in the dungeons. um And... certain other things are missing, but like the coziness and the, ah the cleverness, the personality that exists in Stardew Valley is all there. The farming feels great. They've added ah features that are, that exist in other sort of farming games, ah like catching bugs and- Oh, nice.
00:36:36
Speaker
um Digging for artifacts, which kind of exists in Stardew Valley, but it's its own mechanic here, rather than just being an extension of towing. You could also jump and swim, which seem like silly little things, but like make a huge difference. um There's other just like little things, right? Like the shops never close.
00:36:56
Speaker
up he yeah the brain of sardu valley exactly closed on wednesdays exactly Yeah, and closed at a certain time of night. No, the shops are just always open. um You don't have to refill your watering can.
00:37:12
Speaker
um there's And the leveling system is a little bit more robust. um When you get to certain level markers, you can use this kind of currency that you find by just performing like any action in the world. We'll get you this essence.
00:37:30
Speaker
um And you use that essence to level up certain perks. And the perks are like legit, like, ah they will be like, um if you mine one rock, the rocks to the left and right of it, ah like,
00:37:45
Speaker
10% of the time will also explode. ah ah fun Or if you hit, you have a jump attack suddenly, you hit jump and attack and you will hit do like a area of a effect attack around you.
00:38:00
Speaker
um So unlike the sort of invisible experience and leveling system of Stardew Valley, Fields of Mystery ah puts it right out front. um And there's a bit more of a fantasy element to it. Like you do get spells um and there is like a clearly ah evolving narrative about humans and dragons and their relation through time. um So there's a little bit more of like a fantasy RPG element to it, but it does not interrupt the cozy farming sim in any way. so And the cows are adorable. Very important. it's It's incredible. It's a really, really good game. it i I discovered it, me and my lady friend ah on Friday. It is now what?
00:38:49
Speaker
ah Wednesday for us, Thursday for Bill and Danny. On Friday, ah me and my lady friend downloaded it. I have 22 hours in it already. Nice. That's how it's done. It has just, it has become my new Stardew. So fields of mystery, M-I-S-T-R-I-A. I highly, highly recommend for any Stardew fans.
00:39:11
Speaker
That's amazing. I'm so sorry that when you finally start playing Final Fantasy 10, you'll never play any other video game again. Oh my God. And you won't be able to play Fields of Mystery. I'm really sorry. It sounds like a lot of fun that you're missing out on. Because you'll be busy saving Spira. So that's, you know, that's what I've been playing is I've been to spend like way too much. ah There's some other stuff I've been playing, but we'll talk about it on future episodes. There's some really good adventure games that have come out recently.
00:39:37
Speaker
I guess I gotta play Fields of Mistria now, because I do crave that Stardew Valley itch. like There's not a lot of things that scratch that for me. Even things like Harvest Moon don't work yeah for me. So if you're saying that this is a pretty decent, if if they like share the same DNA, then I will pick it up.
00:39:57
Speaker
in in a really, really significant way and not in a way where you feel like, oh, this is just Stardew Valley again. You feel like you are um engaging in a new world. but um i I would be very surprised. I'm not saying you're definitely gonna love it, but I'd be very surprised if you didn't. Yeah. Would you say that it gives you a sense of nostalgia for Stardew Valley?
00:40:24
Speaker
I'm trying to segue here, just go with it. What if I say, I mean, it but I have to say no and then like, and then I'm gonna, I ruined the whole transition. You've ruined it. Look, just play Swanky Max and Nino and we'll talk about nostalgia.
Podcast Rituals and Desk Stories
00:41:15
Speaker
Welcome back to Save Your Game. I'm Matt Aucamp. This is PushingUpRoses. Sup. We've got Bill and Danny from Escape this podcast here. So how's everyone's break? That was good. Yeah, play Fall in Fantasy 10. Matt always asks that, whether we take a break or not. I had somebody tell me i like we didn't do it one episode. And I had somebody tell me, like oh, it it takes away that like personal.
00:41:40
Speaker
yeah aspect of the like, I really like when you guys say how was your break. So now we do every single episode, even if our break was our break was just us talking over the music. That's nice, though. I'm kind of I'm surprised that somebody like clocked that level of detail in our podcast, but hey, that's great. It brings intimacy into the into the show. It it helps support everybody's parasocial connections with us. I mean, if it helps this person also, I also sit here, I light candles, I get my water ready, I dim my lights, I have my cat next to me. like is that Is that intimate enough?
00:42:24
Speaker
I usually ah clear off my desk, except for i like low I put so many drinks on it. Like I'll put al ah'll put alcohol here in case I want it. I'll put like water here because I need it. And then oftentimes I will put like a hot drink and maybe like a juice in case I get in the mood for it. Like I just cover my fucking desk in drinks. This is too many drinks. It's a little bit of much. It's the worst, the worst is if I decide to like, if I'm like, oh, I'm only gonna have like a nip of something to drink, like an alcohol. And then I'm like, but in case I want more, I'll just bring the bottle. That's the worst because I'm not even thinking about it as I'm talking. Like I'm,
00:43:09
Speaker
I'm absolutely not drunk, right? And then I'll be talking, and then I'll just be like, oh, that was tasty. I'll just pour another little guy. And then I'll keep talking, and you don't quite realize. And by the end of the episode, I'm like, I'm fucking wasted. I really hope the listeners can't tell. Oh, good lord.
00:43:25
Speaker
oh and I don't drink, but I did make it through a family pack of Maltese's yesterday in much the same fashion. yeah i There's just a thing, you're recording and you're just like, you take a vacation on the rest the rest of your faculties.
Nostalgia in Adventure Games
00:43:40
Speaker
and um So you guys wanted to talk about what I think is an interesting topic. um we talk about We talk a lot on this show about nostalgia and how um sometimes Adventure games can be so linked to that concept, right? Absolutely. i mean my many My whole channel is is ah about that, is really about nostalgia and how we look back at it. And you can either like lean really heavily into it and gush about it,
00:44:12
Speaker
Or it can kind of, i think I think Matt, you mentioned this earlier, this will go into our topic, but the lack of nostalgia is even more interesting to me. ah Having no nostalgia and then trying to play something that it seems like everybody in the world has nostalgia for. it ah And how how we interpret that. As an example, I didn't grow up on the Princess Bride.
00:44:36
Speaker
And everybody loves that movie, everybody. But I was just like, it's fine. It's fine. It's just a good movie. I liked it. And people were like, but why don't you love it, though? I'm like, I don't know. I had the same experience. I didn't watch The Princess Bride until I was in my early 20s. And I was like, this is a good movie.
00:44:56
Speaker
But there's there's no part of me that's like, that yeah I don't think about it all the time. right I don't i don't ah compare it to everything. i don't like References to it don't pop up in my brain like as often as people who grew up on it do.
00:45:12
Speaker
um And yeah, I think the same thing happens with adventure games a lot because so many of the the these games were really popular in the early 90s or in the mid 90s, I guess. And that's where so many of us. Yeah, yeah. I think early 90s was really the peak because you're coming off of all the graphic, ah the text parsers in the mid to late 80s. And then early 90s comes along. You've got your point and clicks, man. You've got Kings Quest five and six. Gabriel Knight.
00:45:43
Speaker
I was just a and Laura Bow dagger of Amun-Ra. Yeah, it was a really good it was a really good time for adventure games. And then Doom killed it all, according to some people. Doom was my first video game when I was three. I had older brothers. Nice. I think like it's so ah so so many people played those games in the 90s, and that's like the bulk of the fan base now. And It's hard because people talk about it as if it's a genre that died. um But people have been making adventure games nonstop. And I think one of the things that holds the genre back, to be honest, is our slavish devotion to nostalgia. And people making games that are so many adventure games that are made these days are based around nostalgia. And I have much more of a fondness for the ones that break through that and do something new.
00:46:41
Speaker
I have a question that yeah that anybody can answer. when So because we have so many adventure games, because we've gone through so many art designs, right? if We have pixel inspired design. We have 2D cartoonish design. We have FMV and live acted.
00:46:59
Speaker
how Is there a way to make a game that doesn't give you nostalgia even on a base level for another game? Because most books have been written, let's be honest. it's It's not that we can't come up with something new, but most concepts are out there, I would say. So is there a way to dodge any sort of nostalgia when you're making an adventure game at this point?
00:47:26
Speaker
It's going to be tricky, and based ah the evidence that I have accrued in preparing for this episode would suggest to me that that would be extremely difficult. yeah yeah Essentially, what I realized is going through these things and trying to come up with a list of, oh, here were the adventure games that I did play as a child versus the ones I only played for the first time as a late teen or older.
00:47:48
Speaker
that It turned out there were a lot fewer than I expected in my past. I did not grow up with as many as I thought either that or I've forgotten all of them, which is horrifying. and so Apparently, a lot of these things that still strike the nostalgia chords in me are from general feel and thoughts about what the gaming era was like, rather than actual gaming experiences I might have had. Right. that That's why I think it's so interesting that no matter where we take an adventure game, you're going to get a little sense of nostalgia no matter what, just for the genre. I just heard the genre of being what it is.
00:48:23
Speaker
Although it's interesting because like I think the the thing that really spurred our thoughts for this, there were two things that we wanted to like that made us think about like nostalgia and and and coming at games and from from that point of view was ah both the fact that we live streamed as part of our sort of you know, cavalcade of products. We, we did, um, we played through every single Nancy Drew adventure game. Um, because we had never played any Nancy Drew stuff, nor had we ever read Nancy Drew as a character. oh Nancy Drew had no existence in our brains at all. It's very, to I think that's much more within, a I think that's much more within America. i I knew that the name Nancy Drew was some kind of.
00:49:09
Speaker
child detective possibly. That was it. I'd never read any Nancy Drew content. I'd never, I didn't know anything about the law. I didn't know about the setting. I didn't know, we I couldn't have told you. We were not Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. We were famous five in Secret Seven. We were all, we all had Enid Blyton in Australia um ah growing up. so So it just really was not a thing that we had any cultural context for. And then the fact that there were video games, we we had no context for those either. And so we started playing them from the beginning. We played through every single one, not quite from the beginning. mean We sort of picked the good ones early on. yeah That was a mistake. And played through them.
00:49:47
Speaker
and really, really loved them. like We had a lot of fun with it, even without having any connection to the characters. Or to be honest, like ah for people who have played them, the style of those games is not really the same as a lot of other adventure games. like i i like I grew up on text passes games and even like normal point and click adventures, which have a very different feel to the Nancy Drew games, which are almost just like, here is a series of like still images of places that you can, and you, and you move through it and you, there are literal just like puzzle puzzles to solve. It's just like, here, do a crossword, Nancy. It's weird to compare that to Myst, but to me, it's very Myst-ish. I understand fully, but again, the second game that we wanted to bring up is we never played Myst until we were- Just a couple of years ago. Like couple like a couple of years ago, we played Myst for the first time. And so like it felt like this entire genre of Myst-likes, because I would say Nancy Drew has a similar feel, but we had never played Myst either growing up. So we had no nostalgia for the gameplay either.
00:50:48
Speaker
like And we loved it. but like We played through all the Nancy Drews. They are ridiculous, but the characters are fun and the puzzles are either fun or the worst thing you've ever done in your life. oh Which feels appropriate.
00:51:01
Speaker
And yeah, we I did a video on, since you've played all of them, uh, do you guys play Blackmore, Blackmore Manor then? We played that one twice. Yeah, we did. Okay. Arguably one of the better entries. ah I would say it's so difficult. I found it is so hard. Well, clearly, so this is, we talk about this a lot when we talk about puzzle writing is that clearly Nancy Drew, like there are two levels for Nancy Drew. There's junior difficulty and the senior difficulty.
00:51:28
Speaker
Um, in, in every single game and they're clearly designed in my, maybe they're not, maybe someone's going to come out from the Nancy Drew team and tell me I'm wrong. But they very much seem like they are designed initially at the junior level and then made harder for senior rather than the other way around, which is to make them at a senior level and then made easier for junior, which often leads to the puzzles just being bad. Right. Because it's yeah really hard to like, like, or rather it's very easy to make a puzzle more difficult. You just make it worse.
00:51:57
Speaker
Right. The worse the puzzle is, the harder it is to solve. And so, and so some of them are there really like, it is surprisingly high level puzzle solving in some of those Nancy Drew games. Um, which which is really odd. So yeah, like Blackmore Manor is the puzzliest of the Nancy Drews. Uh, and it was the second one we played. Um, but because we are, we're coming at it from a puzzle perspective, we were writing puzzles, solving puzzles, we were doing like for us, it was like, Oh my God, these cool puzzles. But yeah, some of them are really tough.
00:52:25
Speaker
I think it helps also that they are more logic-y puzzles. I find that a lot of times in the point and clicks. Let's let's like you know consider the LucasArts games, like Grim Fandango, Sam and Max, Monkey Island. I think a lot of people are blinded by nostalgia in terms of difficulty level. And I am too. I once told somebody that Grim Fandango was pretty easy.
00:52:51
Speaker
No, that's that's not right. That's that's nostalgia talking, I think, because if you were to put that in front of a brand new player, I think that they would struggle with some of more of these moon moon puzzles. But at the same time, somebody told me that once that Sam and Max was a very easy game. And I had played that in adulthood.
00:53:11
Speaker
ah early adulthood, so I have some nostalgia for it. But I'm like, this game is hard. I don't know if nostalgia is just blinding us to difficulty level. Or if as kids, we were just sponges with imaginations that could aid us in these like very difficult adventure games. When you're a child, pretty much any game is a difficult puzzle game because children don't read and comprehend very well in general. right yeah ah like I remember that with Pokémon, just getting stuck in original Pokémon, because I didn't pay that much attention to what the characters were telling me.
00:53:45
Speaker
right yeah you just don't read what they say i had that problem in so much so many of the early lucas arts games i could like I did not see the clues because I just wasn't reading. When you're a little kid, you don't question that. Everything about being alive is hard. So of course this game is going to be hard. And once you get the answer, it makes just as much sense as anything else. Now it's easy.
00:54:11
Speaker
um So I played all the LucasArts games as a kid. Like those are the ones I have nostalgia for because those those are the ones that I was just so hooked on and drawn to. And I have that problem, right? Where to me, I just breeze through them. And and I'm like, oh yeah, Sam and Max is super easy, right? Because i just I've memorized all the puzzles. yeah um But watching other people play them,
00:54:37
Speaker
I'm like, oh, yeah, I guess there's no reason you would have thought to do this. For me, it's even worse because my nostalgia goes to the Sierra games and those are impossible. It's difficult to be like, yeah, I have such nostalgic for this game. You should play it. And then ah somebody having an enjoyable experience with, say, King's Quest 3, it doesn't so doesn't happen. yet tough to try to pick which old ones you go back and play because you know that some of them are going to be virtually unplayable. You hear all the terrible stories that if you do the wrong thing in the first minute, you'll play for 10 more hours and then just fail.
00:55:14
Speaker
Yeah, the and so i I played all the um Sierra games in, I like played a little bit of them as a kid, um but I really played through all of them in 2019, 2020. And I played through all of them. um And I did not have that nostalgia for them.
00:55:38
Speaker
But there was still this level of charm, and I don't know if it's the nostalgia for just the way old computers were. right Like, like i can't I can't tell. I can't really separate it. um Or again, just for the genre alone of these old pointings. Yeah. Like, even if you haven't played those games, it's like, it's like, Oh, I remember this style of play. right um I remember this. Like, I, like, I obviously, like, I could play any text passer game now and it would feel incredibly nostalgic, even though really growing up, it was just a quest for glory. It was just hero's quest. yeah the The first quest for glory game that I played thousands and thousands of hours in as a child. Like, but that generated so much nostalgia. As soon as I can type in, as soon as I can hit space bar and then type take
00:56:26
Speaker
rock rock will always be nostalgic, even if it's from games that I've never heard of or never played. and you know um So it's an interesting, like, that's why it was interesting, like, playing, like, Myst and other stuff was so different that I didn't have nostalgia for that style. So it was really interesting to play as an adult.
00:56:42
Speaker
I just hate nostalgia towards Myst. You ever just hate something so much and you're all so nostalgic? A lot of people seem to be that way with Myst. This is fascinating. As a puzzle game, Myst is great. Myst is a fantastic... We played through it with no nostalgia for it, never seen it. I didn't know anything about Myst. No guides, nothing. We didn't know what we were getting into. We just played Myst. And I think as an adult, it's like, no, no.
00:57:08
Speaker
All the stuff is there. It was solid. It held up good. Everything is workoutable and solvable, but we played Riven afterwards and people often really like Riven. And Riven, I will say, beautiful, like literally fit, like beautiful to look at. Much more interesting from a world perspective, much more interesting from a narrative perspective, puzzle-wise, the late game of Riven is bad. It's so hard. It is. You're talking about the marbles puzzle.
00:57:36
Speaker
always get much like going back to all the weird little like weird topography related things. yeah and just yeah When you go up and you change the the levels of ah of a map. It's a lot of very finicky clicking. And it's a lot of stuff where you go, this has been designed not just poorly, but but irritatingly. like it's like We just weren't happy for a lot of our play. you You try something and it's like, well, you have to see what the ramifications are. But to see what the ramifications are of what you try, it's like a two minute clicking journey from one thing to another thing. You're like, I don't want to have to do this eight times. So every time I get it wrong, I'm just getting irritated. Like the the the puzzle design in the latter third, like in the final act of Riven is, in my opinion,
00:58:17
Speaker
terrible but he's so remembered as I don't even think we posted that part of our stream of that because we were too angry and we felt too bad about ourselves. like the worst It just wasn't a good look.
00:58:29
Speaker
It's interesting, because so I played Myst in 2019 over, I started it on, I started it on my mobile phone over on a flight to the Dominican Republic. Because I was like, oh, I have like, ah whatever, six, eight hours or something. I'm just gonna i'm just go to sit and for the for but first time since I was a little kid, I'm gonna try to play Myst. And when I was a little kid, I got nowhere, right? Like I didn't even learn to rotate the tower. Like I was, I had nothing.
00:58:58
Speaker
um But then playing it again in 2019, I was like, this is awesome. I love this. i am Like you're saying, like it's so well designed. it is ah ah It's just like you're exploring a world where you don't know how anything works and you have to figure out how everything works. um And then,
00:59:20
Speaker
That leads to puzzles because like how then now that I know now that I figured out how this works, how does this achieve any sort of goal? And then you move on to that that next step. um Then I so I finished it during that vacation. There was one day where ah the person I went on vacation with, she got sick and we were stuck in the the the resort hotel room for a day. And I was like,
00:59:46
Speaker
So I was just playing Myst the entire day and I beat it. And I beat it with no hints and I was so fucking proud of myself. So then I went on to play Riven and I had never even touched Riven before. And I was still dedicated to this idea. Like I'm going to beat this without any hints. I'm going to do it by sheer force of will. But you're also powered by the fact that you can do that in Myst. Myst is completely insolvable. It's so nicely contained.
01:00:15
Speaker
And if I remember correctly, I might be wrong about this, because this was several years ago, but ah the entire latter half of mis that you are Riven that you're talking about is all in service of this fire marble, or this marble puzzle. And yeah even the topography stuff is to give you, you have to solve that to give you a clue about where you place the marbles on this one machine. and um And I remember I would just give it like one, I might be wrong, so you might remember it better than me. um But I remember giving it like, I'd be like, okay, I'm not gonna solve anything. I'm going to go in, I'm gonna play this for an hour, maybe two hours. I know I'm not gonna solve this puzzle today. And it's like, a and so I think the idea of playing it, you guys said you played on a stream?
01:01:07
Speaker
Yeah, we were live-stripping Riven the whole time. I think, yeah. Sort of gives you like this pressure, right? Like you have to continuously make progress. And like, like roses, like you were saying, there are people in the chat who remember playing Riven as a kid. They're like, what are you talking about? This is so easy. You just obviously just turn the the golden handle. You're like, there's not even a handle. Oh yeah, you can't see it. But if you click on the wall and the right place, the handle appears. Obviously it's clear. Obviously. How did you not figure this out?
01:01:36
Speaker
Riven was incredibly hard. And again, like I said, like I would play it go is like saying to myself, I'm just not going to make progress today. I'm noticing now that you are saying that, especially Matt, you're like dedication to solving these puzzles, right? I do find that these more first person logic based puzzles and we say logic based, we mean like,
01:02:01
Speaker
Puzzles like Sudoku or Slider puzzles or math-based puzzles will be considered logic puzzles. I find that you guys are not yeah neither hindered or enabled by nostalgia. ah You can kind of look at it objectively as a puzzle, as was like a logic puzzle that you're that you ah wanting to solve. Whereas a lot of people, I think it's harder to do that with, say, the King's Quest or even the LucasArts because even though you can't die in LucasArts, that doesn't mean they're easy games, you know?
01:02:32
Speaker
Well, because the Sierra puzzles are horrible. yeah So again, I played all these in 2019 and 2020 and they're all just really bad. And so without nostalgia, like I still found them incredibly charming because like we said, there might be a lot of nostalgia at work there. But it was more difficult for you to play than something like, let's say all the Myst games because you were like passionate about solving these puzzles.
01:02:59
Speaker
Right. The way I went through all the Sierra games is I would have a walkthrough and I would play by myself without using the walkthrough up to a point. And when I felt like I got to a new I don't know, like a new area, a new chapter, a new phase of the game, I would pull up the walkthrough and be like, OK, what the fuck did I miss? Because I don't want to go. I don't want to jump back five, five hours. Right. Well, yeah. yeah i Not that any Sierra game takes five hours, but like five hours of my lifetime of like a- Of play time, yeah. Play time moving around just trying to solve shit. So I would then pull up the walkthrough and then go back. I did not have, I would not have had the patience to go through them like some people describe as they did as kids, which is, yeah
01:03:49
Speaker
I would get to the end or I'd get to some point. I'd be like, oh, I can't progress. I should restart the whole game because I don't know what I missed. That is not something I have nostalgia for because I played the LucasArts games. That is something that I find infuriating. I find stupid like I don't even there's no part of me that's like.
01:04:08
Speaker
that I don't find that cute or clever or funny or cool. I just think that is horrible. There's some part of me and this is on point for our topic. There is some part of me that likes it. And I think it's nostalgia based because again, I grew up on Sierra. So my, I just thought when growing up that all games were like this that you can mess up. And if you mess up, you've got to like go back and start again. And that's just the way that There's no social bonding like bonding over a game bullying you. but yeah honestly That's thing that I think is great in those old games. like One of the things I sort of missed, and and in going back to look at old games, I think one of the things that that has changed a lot, and it's nice in modern adventure games, you still get this, but in gaming in general. like In the 90s, games were made, and you'd look at the credits and it'd be like,
01:05:00
Speaker
writer, this one person. You're like, all right. So when, and and because of that, when you play games, like there is something fun, almost about a connection to the game writer itself where he's going, hi, I'm John. And yeah, you got that wrong. Idiot. Nice one. Dummy. And it's like, I do miss the text parsers that had, uh, obstinate narrators talking back at you. yeah Every time you die, they'll be like, well, that was a silly decision, wasn't it? like It's like reading a goosebumps, give yourself goosebumps and you make a choice that he thinks is a bad choice. And R.L. Stein just comes in and starts crapping all over you.
01:05:37
Speaker
but right right But there's an element that I really like about those old games that it feels like there's a bit more of like, why doesn't this make sense? Because they didn't test it it with people. One guy wrote it all out and he said, here's my game. And you made sense guy i mean he's having fun. Yeah, exactly. And and there's something.
01:05:54
Speaker
That is, that is nostalgic, even just about that. So like, I sometimes get that by playing new games from single creators.
Playtesting and Design Reflections
01:06:03
Speaker
There's a sense of nostalgia to me for that, for when that was normal, for when like yeah games were one, like when something went wrong, it wasn't because, Oh, look at this studio. They've screwed up their game. It's like, Oh, I guess he didn't think about that. I guess the three people who designed this entire game from scratch, they weren't really thinking it's much more human. you know yeah i was um that's ah This is a big difference that i've sort of noticing between the way we do Escape This Podcast and doing Rise of the Golden Idol is playtesting to make sure that things work on a grand scale and will work for multiple people and not just ourselves. And for people who will never engage with us, everyone who plays in Escape This game Podcast engages with us directly to get to just play it. you know I'll say that about that's something that ah Jack Allen, my editor at ah Adventure Game Hotspot talks about a lot. is like
01:06:49
Speaker
Adventure games need a lot of play testing. And most of the time that an adventure game fails, it is because of a lack of play testing. Or you do play testing, but you don't watch people play your game and see who figures out what, how, and where, and who stalls what, how, and where. Yeah, for sure. I have a question.
01:07:16
Speaker
i like I have a fun i havem sorry i have fun question. Oh, good. Because I wasn't going to answer it otherwise. Thanks for apologizing for your fun question. That's a real boring question. ah I have a of a question. Is there, for all of us, this is for all of us, is there a game that a very specific game that you love you absolutely love it maybe because of nostalgia but maybe not but we'll see in our answers that nobody else understands like legitimately they don't understand your love of this game
01:07:49
Speaker
Do you have one? Well, my taste is perfect. Well, we all think, do you have one in mind? I do. I do. And it's. ah Yeah, it's highly hated by everyone. It's King's Quest seven. And I'm going to fully admit.
01:08:09
Speaker
that it's purely nostalgia-based for me, purely. like It's not that great of a game, although I think the quality of it is not bad. I will say that ah as an artist, I find it very beautiful looking. um It was a departure from the other King's Quest games. I would say it was even easier on the puzzles, but it kind of lost some of that charm. So not many people like it, but for me, it was I saw it.
01:08:38
Speaker
in a and an Omni, which if you're from the Midwest, if you're from Chicago, high five, that was a like grocery store in the Midwest. and they so For some reason, they sold games. I don't know why, but they had a little electronic section.
01:08:53
Speaker
And I saw King's Quest 7 and I was enamored with the 2D. I had never seen a 2D game like that. I hadn't seen Curse of Monkey Island yet. So this was something special to me. And it was the first game I saved up and and played and bought with my own money. So there's definitely and ah a great nostalgia for that game. And also again, finding it special because of that 2D element that I had never seen before.
01:09:20
Speaker
That game reminds me of a and one of the early massively multiplayer online role-playing games that i get that have played that I played as a kid, which I have a ton of nostalgia for. And I still go back, it's a bad game. And this isn't my answer, ah but because it's not an adventure game. But it's a bad it's a bad game. It's called The Realm Online. And it was free. Oh, I know The Realm. Yeah, it was made by Sierra in that era. And it's almost, the art style is almost identical.
01:09:50
Speaker
to um ah King's Quest 7. But it's you know like ah like an a roleplay a massively multiplayer role-playing game. like you And it's so numbers-based and so boring, but I absolutely love it. It's changing developers because people don't want to let it die, but it makes no money. so Now that's nostalgia right there when something's making zero money, but you just cannot let it go. I still go back. I like, I still find it and download it and play it for a few weeks, every couple, every couple months or maybe once a year.
01:10:31
Speaker
Okay. Do you guys have other, do you guys have answers to this? I mean, I have, from not quite an adventure game point of view, like what, but close, like one of my ones that I, I love, but I, but it's full nostalgia. Cause if someone's like, is it like written well about, and no, it's written terribly. Um, but I will always defend, uh, the, the, the combat was I love quest 64, which in, in Australia was called only magic century.
01:10:56
Speaker
Plus 64, man. That brings back memories. So really, all the cool kids call it Holy Magic Century, the real title for us. I didn't even know that. um And I loved, I played so much of that as a kid. And i look, I still think the the the combat and system in that, like the magic system kind of system was very unique and is really interesting to play.
01:11:18
Speaker
this idea of that you can like physically like run away from certain attacks and you start to memorize. I remember as a kid figuring out this like, oh, when they shoot like three beams of of air at you, if you take one half step forward, you dodge them all. Or when they shoot this thing, if you run in a circle, you'll it'll miss you. Or these guys, you've got to get close enough that they're firing over your head. like There's some really cool stuff, I think, in the combat system. It's like that Luigi always wins Mario Party thing. Yeah, such as I don't do. and But it's also like,
01:11:45
Speaker
Yeah, like it's ugly and it's dumb and the story doesn't make any sense. And even though I have so much nostalgia and I've played hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of that game, I've never gotten past like the second boss. So that's not a good time. But i love I love that game. I will never not enjoy playing Quest. I think that's a great answer. And I kind of do consider that a hybrid of an adventure game. In fact, I bought it for the N64 simply because it had the word Quest in it.
01:12:11
Speaker
And obviously, yeah, as a Sierra person, oh, Quest equals adventure. Adventure, yeah. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, I liked the atmosphere of that game. It's a cool game. Everyone played Holy Magic's entry. I think I also have like an anti-answer to this question, which is um which is Quest for Glory, which is like a hero's quest, which I think I played as so much as a kid, and I have so much nostalgia for it.
01:12:38
Speaker
And then I think I went through a period of thinking like, ah, I just have nostalgia for the game, but it's a bit silly. And now I go back and I look at it from ah from a game design lens. And I think, you know what? I think that's maybe the best adventure. I think that's one of the greatest games ever made. I think it's actually legitimately phenomenal. I think the design of it is fantastic. Like how what what games are you playing back then where you could import your character from one game to the next to save all the stats that you'd built up through gameplay?
01:13:06
Speaker
like it had a ah leveling up mechanic that made sense that nowadays people like wouldn't it be great if more games had mechanics like this like it's it's the same level up system that then got taken for like Elder Scrolls games later of like use a skill enough and then every time you use it the chance goes up and like I think and the storyline like when I went back I played I played as an adult and it's like story makes sense the characters make sense they're interesting people you can figure out what's going on based on the implications of conversations you hear and solve the whole thing I think going back to that it's like I'm i having to I'm having to take off my nostalgia glasses to appreciate how good that game is
01:13:46
Speaker
It's like, yeah no, it's not just nostalgia. That's a tightly designed game. And is one of the many things I put on my list of why 1989 may have been the best year for video games. Wow. ah i I agree with that. Because again, I played these much later. And it's funny. So I've met Lauren Corey Cole a couple of times now. And ah well, they never remember me, but they always ask because I always tell i tell them and when I meet them, like, oh, I played your games.
01:14:15
Speaker
when I was a bit older, you know, early 30s, as at my first time, so I didn't really have nostalgia for them, and they're like, oh, what is the, like, they they are very interested. Like, what is the experience of playing those games now? Like, how how do they hold up? what feel What do they feel like? And I'm like, great, they feel great. Like, they legitimately just really good. um The idea of sometimes,
01:14:42
Speaker
like having to climb a tree 70 times to level up your like there might maybe should have been a few more ways to practice. Yeah. Yeah. but But also like I was thinking about that yesterday. It's like it also sometimes as a kid, especially, but also as enjoy like it creates a sense of.
01:15:00
Speaker
of like earned existence within that world. Like why is my character good at throwing knives? Well, cause I went to that part of the forest where there's and a board set up where I could practice knife throwing. And I sat there for a long time going, ah throw knife, enter, throw knife, enter, throw knife, enter, get knives, enter, throw knife, enter. And I earned my knife throwing cause I was practicing in world. And nowadays I think it's maybe it's, it's tedious. Yeah.
01:15:28
Speaker
but I'm a grinding gamer. I'm into that. I think that's just sort of like games have decided to stop being tedious, but it's like the tedium, even like from from an artistic perspective, has a justification in universe. Like it should be tedious. You're doing something tedious to get better at it. Nowadays, games are like, don't know you shouldn't ever feel tedium. But I think if you accept it as a thing you're allowed to feel in video games, I think it's an incredibly good like implementation
Nostalgic Games and Childhood Memories
01:15:56
Speaker
of it. Why am I good at climbing trees? I didn't get the spell fetch and I needed to get the rig out of the bird's nest. And the only way was to climb the tree. And when I was finally rewarded with climbing the tree, I fell off the branch because my character was too tired. How you? I love it. Danny, do you do you have an answer to this question? I am really struggling with this one. Well, why don't you talk about Granny's garden?
01:16:20
Speaker
ae what's wrong with granny's gun i challenge you oh boy oh I don't know what this is. My primary school, this was the game that was inbuilt on all of the computers, along with the point and click edge mate sort of ones. Granny's Garden, a very prototype text parser, uh, it was sold that when we looked up what consoles it was on, it said originally Commodore 64 and something else that I'd never heard of. Oh yeah, I could not even tell you what it was like. The Britcom. That is like some some insane thing I've never heard
01:16:51
Speaker
And it's very standard, the story is, oh no, the six royal children have been kidnapped by a witch around the world. Let's go to the various locations and quote unquote solve puzzles to rescue them. And we downloaded it a few days ago so that Billy could experience it, so that he could have the nostalgia free experience with one of these things to see how it went.
01:17:17
Speaker
Now, the thing is, I didn't really have any nostalgia for, oh, what an amazing game, in that way. I'm not going to defend it, except for one puzzle. I remembered about two things from this game. Generally, the puzzles are barely puzzles, and it still has the very standard things of, oh, you make one wrong decision, that turns out the witch kills you, haha. Start all over again.
01:17:40
Speaker
But the one thing that was a puzzle, which involves but needing to deduce what foods certain dragons like when you have a limited number of food to foods to give them before the witch gets you. And you yeah, you just have to figure out the appropriate order to feed these dragons in order to accomplish your goal. I've got a little grid drawn up in my notebook that we use to figure it out. fun to solve And as soon as a grid gets involved, I feel like you've got a good puzzle.
01:18:12
Speaker
That's interesting. So I think my answer to this is is Mean Streets, the first Tex Murphy game. There's a lot bad about that game. Like there is a flight simulator in it that's horrible. There is side scrolling gun combat in that game that is terrible. But the mystery in that game is really really well done and it is the sort of mystery where you have to take paper notes um which is rare in that era um and like you would talk to somebody and using if I remember correctly I think there's a text parser
01:18:53
Speaker
but you would talk to people and you would have to remember who to ask about and who to ask like remember specific like characters and topics so that you could grill people about them and to me that's just really fun player dependent mystery solving ah that you wouldn't see again in games. Well, besides maybe like Sherlock Holmes' consulting detective, you'd like barely see that again in games for 20 some years. Yeah, I think the the concept of, but also I think the concept of like, hey, grab a notebook and keep your own notes has gone the way of TDM and video games. Like, no, no, one we' we're not allowed that anymore.
01:19:35
Speaker
No one's allowed, you can't expect a player to keep notes outside the game. Which is outrageous, because that's what we did with every Nancy Drew and Mist and everything, and that made it right for us. I loved it. But I think it's, yeah, I mean I think it's, there's a difference between like, I don't think anybody minded taking notes for like Lorelai and the Laser Eyes to use up on an example, but it would be anathema to take notes on say a point and click game or a casual game or or a non adventure like a non puzzle game but it yeah you know i i think um there's
01:20:12
Speaker
there's a certain type of puzzle that people still don't mind taking notes on. um And I just think that puzzle has to be designed in a way that it feels good to do it. um There's a little bit of like a ah throwing the baby out with a bathwater sort of scenario with that stuff. Oh, I've got an interesting example of a game that I think will fit this sort of category, but and said it might be a controversial one to say.
01:20:40
Speaker
o Pokemon Generation 2. A lot of nostalgia, but really it's not that good. Look, I love it. I loved everything about it when it came out. I still love it today. But at the very least, I can't remember who it was. There's a YouTube video out there where someone just goes through point by point says why Gen 2 is bad. And I watched it ready for some hate watching. And I went, no, this is amazing. I agree with all of this. Doesn't affect me in any way, but you're right, man. Yeah, it's a bad game.
01:21:08
Speaker
That's interesting. Yeah, because I played a lot of Gen 1 and then I got into Pokémon again, like kind of later. I loved the newer games, like I loved like the DS game and three ds games and 2 was rough.
01:21:27
Speaker
It's interesting, but because yeah that came out at peak nostalgia hitting time. What, we were 10 or something when that happened? yeah some that That was the absolute right time for a shiny new sequel to come out. it just Everything felt huge, everything felt exciting. And yet... It had that thing where you get to the end of the game, and And you're like, okay, beat the game. And then all of a sudden you get to go back to the first game. Couldn't have been a better idea for them to do. Were there things that they should have improved about that experience? For example, making these Kanto gym leaders a little bit higher level because you've already beaten an elite four. Why am I fighting level 40 people again?
01:22:13
Speaker
It could have worked a little harder. Right. I'm so much better than all of you now. A little bit. But anything that they changed about the original world, that was exciting. That was amazing. I had a I had another we we were thinking before we came on the the show, like trying to think about like, oh, what do we want
VR Remakes and Game Critiques
01:22:30
Speaker
to talk about? What do we have like nostalgia things for? And what are like what are sources of nostalgia that we didn't experience that we experienced late? And one of the ones we wanted to bring up as as a thing to talk about I think we may have mentioned this to you, ah possibly off recording when you came on our show. Was that we played through Seventh Guest for the first time. oh i'm racist well but we started We started with the remake on on the Oculus. We started with the VR ah remake of Seventh Guest.
01:22:59
Speaker
got it. and That's good. It was re-FMV'd with new actors doing all of the parts. They changed the story a tiny bit and all of the puzzles needed to be redesigned for there. They didn't just change the story a tiny bit, they also doled it out slowly throughout the game, rather than it being an unskippable 10-minute cutscene at the start of the game, which was So much better. The VR game is great. It was so much fun. It was a wonderful experience. It was beautiful. And so then we finished the VR game, which is a really, really, if people nowadays want to play like a seventh guest experience, play the VR game. It's an actual good, like good, good game.
01:23:41
Speaker
So then we went and we played the original version um we and we streamed that as well. We played that. um And it's just like we weirdly almost had like nostalgia for the remake that just came. Like we were working on the good memories of what we had just played to play the original and be like,
01:23:59
Speaker
Oh, well, I could skip this being terrible because I've seen it be good already. like right i don't like Obviously, this story is nonsense, but I've seen it improved on. And so, yeah, it feels cool. I get it. Hey, it's that guy I just met you know a month ago. Here he is in the in the old version.
01:24:16
Speaker
And the puzzles that were just tedious, like a big, the big maze, which I have an entire page of notebook okay trying to draw out that maze, not in the VR version. You do not have to do that. Like all that stuff's taken it out. The old game had like 18 different chess puzzles and they're all tedious and they're all impossible. And we just grinded our way through them. The maze was great. Cause there's a solution to the maze that you can find in another room. We didn't do that. We just saved the maze, which meant we had like, yeah two hours of us running into dead ends and having a voice go, feeling lonely. And then we did we literally had that like, we just, cause we just went, let's go left every time until we've solved the maze and did the entire thing. Um, it took us a very long time of feeling lonely, but it's not like,
01:25:05
Speaker
There's also parts that in the modern day are unplayable. I don't know if it made the episode that when you guys were on our show, but there's a puzzle now that was reliant on the fact that your computer had a slow processor.
01:25:24
Speaker
It's called attacks with an X. Yeah, a cool. Yeah, yeah so now playing the game against the computer's AI and it's just if you've got a slow processor, you can win because it doesn't make decisions very far ahead. But it turns out that if you play it in 2023, it's literally will always make the winning decision. There's no way unless you have your own AI running separately. Exactly. That is how I beat it. That is how I beat it. I found an AI online and you just fill in their moves. That person is a miracle of the internet. That's why the internet exists for that person. If you do that, there's like a 50-50 shot that you win, right? Because now both of you are making the perfect decision. And as a human, you cannot beat the game. So there was plenty of stuff.
01:26:09
Speaker
But it was so weird to be like to look at the nostalgic version and be like, oh, this is dumb. um There's so many problems with this. But to be carrying the goodwill that we got from playing a new version, it was a really odd experience of like anti nostalgia.
01:26:26
Speaker
Um, but it was very interesting to play and we want to play the sequel. We'll play the 11th hour or whatever it was. oh don't do that and Okay. I had this experience sort of without playing a good version with the 11th hour. The 11th hour is so bad. a lot of good I know a lot of people love it and it yeah I guarantee the only reason you would like that game is nostalgia.
01:26:51
Speaker
It is so bad, the puzzles are worse than in Seventh Guest. And the narrative, you mentioned having to sit through an incredibly long cutscene at the beginning of Seventh Guest. In 11th Hour, you have to sit through an incredibly long cutscene and then your reward for solving any puzzle is you get to watch another clip from that exact same cutscene. You watch a movie and then you re-watch bits of that movie. It is horrible. And they double down on the obnoxious guy mocking you every time you get something wrong. Stauff. Feeling stauffed. Yes, Stauff. What's his first name? I don't know if he has one. I don't remember. It's just the puppet man, Stauff.
01:27:37
Speaker
itself. This is going to sound like hyperbole for for this episode, but I have said this before and this I'm on the record. The 11th guest is the worst game I've ever played in my life.
01:27:49
Speaker
Awesome. Wow. So what you're saying is we should play it, but on stream, we can't, we just can't play it at home. No, I desperately don't want to stream it. I don't want to get that that rage onto the universe again. Yeah. No, I just, I, I, it is one of the, the only games that I, not only did I not finish, I said, I am not going to finish. I'm not going to put myself through. You called the creators. You said, you owe me money. and You have to give me money for playing your game. I feel like I remember there was like a fan made sequel or something like a semi unofficial. they're like something ah Something with dolls. Yes. That's fine. Yeah.
01:28:27
Speaker
Um, which would be interesting to see what that does. Yeah. Uh, but no, look for people play people follow along at home. If you do want to play seventh guess, there is a good version out there and it is the VR ah version. That is well worth a play. I don't think I really had any nostalgia for FMV whatsoever. I think that largely skipped me by FMV was not part of my childhood outside of the cut scenes of Kessin two. Um, do you not play Kessin? Kessin was a, was a military strategy version of dynasty warriors.
01:28:57
Speaker
wow The Dynasty Warriors, you're just playing as Lubu on the battlefield. But in Kessin, you controlled entire units and swapped between them and and did the battles that way. It was great. It was lovely. Romance of the Three Kingdoms, tactical stuff. Kessin 2 is really good. Kessin 3 is bad. Don't play it. um But it had it had a little bit of FMV in its cutscenes. But outside of that, I really don't think I had an exposure to FMV as a child at all.
01:29:20
Speaker
And I think Al first- It's so funny. It's such a huge part of my chat. Like huge. Yeah. And I'm talking about live acted FMV. Yes. Oh yeah. Like real proper. Yeah. Live acted games. Really early on, Clue had become one of my favorite things. And I call it things because I love the movie. I love the game. I love just everything Clue related, right?
01:29:42
Speaker
And um at some point in like the mid 90s, I want to say they came out with a clue FMV game Hasbro did it was licensed. So it was official. And I could never get it running very well. But I thought that live acted games were like the future. I'm a kid, by the way. But so just imagine small roses being like this is the future live acted.
01:30:05
Speaker
Video games and I just I really I'd never experienced anything like it. I thought it was so cool um And I was very disappointed that most FMV live-acted games were pretty trash i and right Well, I was gonna say we have no nostalgia for these I am fully on board with with making it the future of video games and love Because i hate because we I think honestly one of our first real FMV experiences was playing contradiction and um Yeah, that game's great. And that is fan fantastic. I loved it so much. yeah I fell in love with the detective. I loved his, just like every time you pick something, he'd be like, and what do you think about this? And he's suddenly holding the object. he And you're like, this is so, he was he's my one of my favorite fictional detectives now. I loved Contradiction so much. um but Modern FMV is so good. Like if you've played any of the Devecki studio games, like, um
01:31:00
Speaker
ah murderous muses or telling is telling lies one no I think that might be um ah the the other one that does the the other, it's in the same, it's like in the same vein. I think that's a Sam Barlow game, but. ah It is, yep, you're right. um But they they they did the Dark Knights with Poe and Monroe, which I don't love. but Oh, a shape-shifting detective, the infectious madness of Dr. Decker. um Yeah, Dr. Decker. They've just found some,
01:31:36
Speaker
developers have just found this way to ah use FMV to tell stories in like these really interesting ways, um rather than just like, oh, it's the same as any other point and click game, there's just actors, which is like the FMV of the 90s and early 2000s. It is like, okay, if we're going to use FMV, we have to change the entire structure of the game. and um So right you are a first first person, you're a therapist interviewing patients and trying to unravel a mystery while you do so. or
01:32:14
Speaker
you know, situations like that where it's like there's a reason it's FMV rather than just... Yeah, rather than it's just a fun way to... And I think early on it probably was just like graphically, what what you couldn't computer generate of anything that looked like a real person, but you could now have enough memory on your computer to put in a...
01:32:31
Speaker
image, like recorded things of a real person. I'm just looking at a YouTube video of an old game that I played, ah Science Sleuths, Volume 1, which is not one. And i'm looking I'm looking at it and it is clearly one of those games. The window that it is in looks like it's an Adobe style window. It doesn't look like its own proper game window. yeah But yeah, it had in the game, because you were playing a detective, sometimes you would interview people and it's just a video. Like, take a look at this, for just quickly press play to get a style of it. That is just, that is just like, like 90s TV newsreel, kind of just a person in the corner talking and on a balcony. That's just a woman. But do you see the game window as well? Yeah, the game window is fantastic. It's got like a save and an eyedropper icon and things. i dont The whole thing's open in pain. Yeah. It's amazing.
01:33:21
Speaker
But yeah, like, I don't know, it's, it was really lovely. And so yeah, like playing, playing um and seeing all the FMV and like seventh guest as an adult, ah I weirdly, again, I felt nostalgia for Contradiction, a game that came out like 20 years later.
Nostalgia's Influence on Game Design
01:33:37
Speaker
um And it's just funny that you can build these things up.
01:33:42
Speaker
i I say this a lot. like I really don't care when people talk about like things being dated. right people like All the controls are so dated now and this, that, and this. It's hard to play. I never get that. like To me, every single thing that I experience is new the moment I experience it. right like Music from 1972 is not old.
01:34:02
Speaker
because I didn't hear it in 1972. It's new because I heard it today. And so games are the same. like i'll build up nostalgia like I built nostalgia for a game from 1990, based on a game from 2016, because of course I did. I played the 2016 one first. like That's where I start to build that that bank of nostalgia. And then everything new that is similar, it's like, yeah, it all feeds back into that.
01:34:24
Speaker
It does start to become an interesting line. Where is the dividing line between nostalgia? And I miss that because that was better. Just because it's some those things are good and just fond thoughts. Where is nostalgia? I'll tell you what the line is. It's when you enjoy listening to the sound effects from a dot from DOS games that are just like... It's like, that I love every single DOS sound, which is amazing. Objectively, they're terrible. No one no one jumps on a box in his.
01:34:53
Speaker
So now it's like we only know that it's nostalgia if it's objectively bad. nostalgia. if i can If I had to write down what sound does a box make, that's not the sound a box makes. That's bad. Crossed out. I was just talking to someone the other day about like the memory of first getting speakers for a computer and up until then using all of the sounds that came generated out of the tower itself. so playing yeah And I was like, man, I remember that transition. Separate speakers? It isn't just a tiny chip in the middle of your full computer tower that just goes
01:35:31
Speaker
it Like that's what music is. um I remember getting Sound Blaster and I was just amazed. I was playing all these talky games because I grew up on these Tandy DOS games where it's really only the PC speaker and it is shrill and not fun.
01:35:49
Speaker
like ah just go ever anyone who's watching just go watch the intro video to like king's quest three just the intro to the game it's all pc speaker and it is tough to get through so just yeah getting a separate speakers and soundblaster and hearing people talk it was amazing yeah well we have uh i do you guys have does anybody else have If we're gonna get to our final insane segment, um we are going to have to to wrap this up. Does anyone else have any final thoughts on nostalgia and the way it colors ah positively or negatively your view of games?
01:36:31
Speaker
I don't know. i have i have a fun I have a fun tidbit that is vaguely related to nostalgia. If you've played the demo for Rise of the Golden Idol, you'll have seen the new implementation of how puzzle solving works in that game, that it has little windows, draggable puzzle windows, rather than a separate whole sheet of puzzles.
01:36:51
Speaker
um And I am sure that lots of people on the writing team will say, Oh yeah, that was that was my idea or my idea. But I remember early on we were thinking of different ways to implement puzzles and how to solve issues of like, people want to be able to look at the game and look at puzzles at the same time and they can't really do that in the original game.
01:37:08
Speaker
and And early on, my my my pitch, I was like, well, why don't we do them like little draggable windows? Like if you have it so it's there, and if it covers anything, that's fine. You just drag it somewhere else, you can you can see various things, and it's a separate window that drags around, which is sort of how it's been implemented in the end. So ah in my head, even though I'm sure in someone else's head it was their idea, my head was my idea. Just because I remember saying it.
01:37:32
Speaker
And I will say that I think when I examine that decision, the entire inspiration for that is the save menu for Morrowind. Not the save menu, like the pause menu of Morrowind. If anyone's played Morrowind, it had this weirdly unique thing where when you pause the game to see, like, to look at your inventory, it didn't have an inventory page. It had a tiny box in the corner that you could drag out or move to different places. That was your inventory. Another one was your stats and the map. And there were all these little draggable boxes you could move around.
01:38:01
Speaker
Uh, and I think that is at least where I got the idea, uh, to pitch, why don't we have little draggable puzzle windows? Um, nice now it may not have actually been my idea. It's early. It was a group suspicion, but in my head, that's what I was picturing the whole time. So there there's the nostalgia of Morrowind popping in. That's funny. because I rise to the goal. no It made me think of like, uh, deja vu and.
01:38:25
Speaker
Oh, iCom, yeah, iCom simulations, right, like that. okay Let me just make sure I'm not saying something. Yeah, Deja Vu iCom is a thing. but Yeah, yeah, Deja Vu, yeah, I was thinking of like the iCom games, like ah like Deja Vu, where it was just a bunch of menus that you would drag around your inventory and your, like, that's what sprung to mind when I played the Rise of the... and Before we know, that was what was in the mind of the people who actually implemented and suggested that that weren't me.
01:38:58
Speaker
Again, I am now watching a YouTube video of this and going, oh, have I played this before? I'm sure I haven't and yet it's hitting that anyway. It's giving you deja vu. I was entertaining Danny last night with videos of the 1996 game Normality, which I suddenly went, I think that's a terrible game, but I played so much of that as a kid. That's a great adventure game. You're correct. That is a terrible game. I think it's probably the worst game ever. I haven't played it since the nineties, but I loved it as a kid.
01:39:29
Speaker
yeah yeah But God, we were watching the opening cutscene and I was like, I said to Danny, i like I'm pretty sure he's one of these guys who's like classic like terrible nineties, like counterculture, but in just by being gross kind of a guy. And then we started watching the cutscene. He was like, welcome to my game. ah This is a story of how I did all this. And I was like, Oh my God. Yeah. I was ah pinned it straight away. This guy's wearing gum boots and shorts for no reason.
01:39:56
Speaker
Everyone go play normality. It's a great game. love That's the takeaway. That's the takeaway from this whole discussion. Go play normality. Well, all Bill and Danny, thank you guys so much for being on the show. Thank you. Yes. My apologies for talking way too much. Oh, no, no, no. That's what we love. ah you You guys are kindred spirits in that way with us. So is there anything you guys want to promote before we get out of here? I think you've probably heard it all. Why not?
01:40:24
Speaker
As a quick little summary, if you like if you like fun audio, adventure-y, escape room-y puzzles, check out Escape This Podcast. You can start with the episode that Matt and Roses were on. If you want to learn more mysteries, check out Solve This Murder. And if you want to get a fun, cool, new game,
01:40:40
Speaker
go and get the demo for Rise of the Golden Idol and wishlist it and buy it as soon as it comes out. It's really fun. We're really proud of it the game. um And we we did some work on it. And everyone else who worked on it made amazing things as well. And it's just come out really well. So definitely go and check it out.
01:40:56
Speaker
i I cannot wait for that game. Rose, is there anything you want to promote this week? Well, I got my video out on Strange Horticulture. So if you guys want to listen to me gush desperately about finding another game like Strange Horticulture, I did do a video on that. So you guys could just ah should go check that out. Just pushing up roses on YouTube. You know where to go.
01:41:19
Speaker
Awesome, so we're part of the Adventure Game Hotspot network. Check them out, adventuregamehotspot.com. There's all sorts of cool stuff there, and there's a bunch of other people on the network that you would love their content if you love ours. And, Bill and Danny, sorry we're not gonna get to that segment, but it's, but, we're all fine. Maybe we should have you guys on again sometime, because that was a lot of. Always have to, literally, anytime you want us back for anything, just let us know.
01:41:47
Speaker
That was a lot of fun. It was really fun talking to you guys. Yeah, I so love chatting with you guys. Yeah, it was wonderful. Yeah, and major, major congratulations on being able to write for an adventure game. That's so that's just the coolest thing in the world to me. It's been great. It really is, and it's just the coolest thing ever. Yeah. it's It's a really cool experience to have had. It is exciting. Until the game comes out and everyone hates it, and then it's the worst experience we've ever had right now. I didn't write that book. Don't worry, I'll do a video on it. And everybody else, we will be back next week. I think we're going to be talking about some of the game recommendations you sent us. So if you guys want to be ahead of us, and and and if you guys want to play these games before we talk about them, That's basically what I'm trying to say. I was trying to think of a fancy way to say that, but this there's no there's no reason for that. we're go I think Rose is gonna be playing Voodoo Detective, and there's no game wrong dimension. And I'm going to finally be playing Life is Strange, and the game The Journey Down. So ah nice if you guys wanna get ready for that, that'll be next week. And ah then that leaves only one thing left to say, huh?
01:42:58
Speaker
Always get enough roughage in your diet. I think, yeah, that's what we end every podcast with. you Always get enough roughage in your diet, everybody. And people still aren't getting enough roughage. Listen!
01:43:10
Speaker
i How many podcasts do we have to make for you guys to get your roughage? That's the only point. The only sponsor of this show is roughage as a concept. And you're still not getting it.
01:43:25
Speaker
Podcast is Art Artist Center.