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Episode 52 - Dare to Dream and Neil Cicierega
0 Playsin 4 hours
A very sleepy Matt and a very inspired PushingUpRoses welcome an incredible guest onto the show to talk about one of the weirder games we've ever played. Musician, video producer and hella talented dude Neil Cicierega is on the show to talk about playing adventure games as 90's kid -- your dad bringing home shareware adventure games to install on your Windows 3.1 PC and the entire family puzzling over it over weeks, months, and years -- and how to pass that experience on to your kids.
We also do a surprisingly DEEP dive into a bizarre 1993 game Cliff Bleszinski designed in Visual Basic when he was 17, called Dare to Dream. It goes... places. Like literal Hell.
Email us! mattandroses@gmail.com
Games Mentioned:
- King Quest VI
- Icon Architect 1.0
- Dare to Dream
- Hugo’s House of Horrors
- Freddy Pharkas Frontier Pharmacist
- There Is No Game
- Unforeseen Incidents
- Day of the Tentacle
- The Dig
- Wanderstop
- Blue Prince
- Palace of Deceit
- Jazz Jackrabbit
- Curse of Monkey Island
- Monster Breeder
Recommended
Transcript
Sleep Study Experience
00:00:00
Speaker
I spent the first, uh, what, uh, 16 hours of today alone in a room with wires strapped to my head, all over my head, ah where a a lady would come in every, like, two hours and make me nap.
00:00:18
Speaker
And then she would come in 20 minutes later and wake me up. and that is a horrible ah situation to try nap in, first of all. Second of all,
00:00:29
Speaker
ah that much napping you start to like lose the ability to tell like to to to build fine lines between asleep and awake so there were these periods of time where i'd be awake for the two hours and then back in bed and i'm like i did get i was up right like i was like were you trying to enter the dream world Oh my god. Yeah, I did. And I played one chapter of the game we'll be talking about today.
00:00:59
Speaker
During this. Wait, you did? Yeah, so it was a... In case anybody's confused, it was a sleep study. I had a sleep study done. ah Because I'm a sleepy, sleepy boy and they want to find out why.
00:01:09
Speaker
You're too sleepy. I'm too sleepy. This guy's too sleepy. Get him to a doctor. ah And yeah, it's just... It is such a weird scenario...
00:01:23
Speaker
To just, to have an adult determine when you're napping. I mean, I'm an adult, but she was older than me. have Determine when you're taking your naps.
00:01:35
Speaker
this like awake asleep thing. i just, yeah, it set my day on a weird, a into into a weird plane of reality.
00:01:47
Speaker
This is so strange because we're going to be talking about something related to sleeping. Did you that on purpose? Did you get a sleep study on purpose? so of think i like I got to be a gonzo journalist. about I got to I got to really dig in there. Can anybody send me to hell?
00:02:08
Speaker
Have you guys played King's Quest 7?
00:02:12
Speaker
What is that answer? Why does everyone judge me? they're Okay, there's a part in King's Quest 7 where you go to sleep in a coffin and you enter the dream world. And that is what I imagined that you did today, Matt.
00:02:27
Speaker
Yeah, just with a bunch of wires strapped to my head and they wouldn't let me drink water. but Really? Well, they would, but they just i had to ask permission. like I had to ask them to go get my water, so of course I wasn't going to do that.
00:02:38
Speaker
So I spent the whole day very thirsty. So do do you have a, is there a conclusion to this story? ah No.
00:02:50
Speaker
Is Freddy Krueger real? Is he real? Well, that's what they were monitoring me for. And I guess they'll tell me a week or so. All right. Good. Yeah. Yeah. You tested positive for Freddy.
Podcast Introduction
00:03:24
Speaker
everyone, welcome back to Save Your Game. i am one of your co-hosts, Pushing Up Roses, with me as always, the tea-caffeinated special strong boy, Matt Aukamp. Hi Matt!
00:03:36
Speaker
I can't drink caffeine. But tea is loaded with caffeine. Yeah, I drink decaf tea. I drink decaf tea or herbal tea because no i'm might my brain's a little too weak for the caffeine. If I drink caffeine, I go absolutely insane.
00:03:53
Speaker
Wow. So you were both extremely sleepy and you can't have caffeine. Life is a nightmare. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But anyway, hey, hey, Rosas. Hi.
00:04:05
Speaker
Welcome back, Matt. ah With us, a very, very special guest, a content a content creator, songwriter, filmmaker, and lover of adventure games, which we love, Neil Cicerega. Neil, thank you so much for joining us.
00:04:21
Speaker
Hello, and thank you for having me on. Of course. Hell yes. Neil, how are you doing? I'm doing pretty good. yeah. What have you been working on, Neil?
Neil Cicerega's Projects
00:04:32
Speaker
ah Tell us. I'm always working on music and stuff. um I have a ah podcast or live stream or i don't know what you call it. A video game related show that me and my friends do semi-regularly.
00:04:46
Speaker
Not regularly, I guess is the word. laughter
00:04:51
Speaker
Irregularly. Irregularly. We try to get one out like once a month or so. um It's called the video game police. and
00:05:03
Speaker
right You're already laughing. And we we usually we pick a we pick a theme and try to like blast through as many games from a certain era on that theme. And so I'm gearing up for our next episode. We're going to film on Sunday. It's about extreme sports.
00:05:20
Speaker
And we're going play everything except for um for um Tony Hawk's pro-skill. Yeah. We're going to like not mention it whatsoever, but we're going to play oh no Disney Extreme Skating. We're going to play Rocket Power, like all this crap. and um So I've been kind of like trying to compile a lot of games on that theme.
00:05:40
Speaker
How do you like what what amount of time do you try to cram all these games into? Under three hours. Okay, that's awesome. I've been I was also sitting here trying to think Avgab Avgab.
00:05:52
Speaker
yeah but avkaga Av-ca-cab? Av- S- S- Fuck! That's embarrassing! A-V-G-C-A-B, Av-ca-cab. See, these police, you can't you can't speak out against us You can't do it! There's no good afternoon.
00:06:11
Speaker
like So we usually have, you know, four of us dressed as a cop sitting on couch playing video games. And one of us is dressed as a judge and we apprehend and sentence video games.
00:06:25
Speaker
From that, have you found any games that are are just like, you would not have expected, but you're like, this game rules. ah Usually like the the winners are are um they're like old coin eater like arcade games.
00:06:43
Speaker
Just like old Konami yeah arcade games. Because they're a you could play them like with four people and there's a bunch of us sitting on the couch. and like It's just fun as hell. And when you're emulating, you can just put in virtual quarters infinitely.
00:06:56
Speaker
Yep, I'm very Oh, yeah, it's nice and smooth. Yeah. The big question is, will you do the police quest games on your series? Because they need to be arrested.
00:07:11
Speaker
It's tough. I mean, i don't know if you have you ever tried playing an adventure game with like five people?
00:07:19
Speaker
No, but I'm really curious about it. And I think we need to get this done. Yeah, we played a little bit of Return to Zork one time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You mentioned that. For like half an hour.
00:07:30
Speaker
And it was interesting. But at some point, we're just like, i don't know if this working. Here's the pitch. you assign You assign everybody a certain number of verbs, right? Like, okay, the person controlling the game gets walked to, obviously.
00:07:46
Speaker
And then somebody else gets like pick up and push. And somebody else gets talked to and turn on. What, right? And then they are... You're only allowed to speak up if you think your verb but is the active one for the moment.
00:08:01
Speaker
That's a good idea. I don't know if it works for your game, but for your series, but the roses, they don't use it, me and you. really yeah, we'll use it. It's like a three-legged race. it's yeah but I mean, who's going to be the poor, the poor person who gets like taste and smell from like, but from space question. Remember you had those options of like sniff and taste or lick or something.
00:08:26
Speaker
And they would always have to put something in the game to use that. Yeah, they stopped doing that. Yeah, I wonder why. Neil, what is your experience with adventure games?
00:08:39
Speaker
I grew up loving them, like to the point where they're my favorite genre, and I dreamed of making my own adventure games. When I was little, me and my sister used to play, I would like design an adventure game on paper and cut out characters, cut out little...
00:08:59
Speaker
objects and stuff and I would design a game on paper and I would you know like sit down and like have my sister play the game by commanding the character. and you know Oh! Oh my god! I was obsessed with the form of adventure games.
00:09:15
Speaker
And, um ah you know, I probably the first like big ones that I can really remember playing like around when they came out was Day of the Tentacle and Sam and Max at the Road.
00:09:27
Speaker
yeah And I think when we got our first CD-ROM drive, it came with King's Quest VI. Oh, heck yeah. I know. Yeah.
00:09:40
Speaker
We all know. um But yeah, like then ah I tried making my own adventure games for years in like ah multimedia fusion and adventure game studio. And yeah. Yeah.
00:09:53
Speaker
um I was still trying. I have like a quarter of a full length adventure game finished that I'm probably never going to finish, but um it's called Icon Architect 1.0. If you want to look up, there's there's screen caps and stuff. Oh, yeah.
00:10:10
Speaker
know you knew that about me, but ah in my thirst and my hunger for new adventure games, I would sometimes get the, um you know, those discs of like 100 free adventure games or whatever. oh yeah The shovelware stuff. And, um you know, sometimes my dad would come home from his work with ah like the first episode of some video game shareware, you know, part one that he got. And he would tell me got it off a bulletin board.
00:10:37
Speaker
Wow. I always thought, yeah, like a cork board. Somebody put a disc on it. Cork board at work. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. ah I believe that is how I first played Dare to Dream, which we're going talking about tonight. but Oh, my gosh, yeah.
00:10:53
Speaker
That is interesting because it it reminds me like so heavily. I had this game. My my viewers viewers on YouTube will know this. It's called CD called Game Empire.
00:11:05
Speaker
and it had like 250 games on it and one of the and it was ah divided into sections. So you could go into your action game section, which I didn't because they had an adventure game section.
00:11:18
Speaker
And all of the games really looked like this. They looked like the game we're going to be discussing, Dare to Dream. And of course it had the Hugo, you know, Hugo's House of Horrors. was going to bring that Hugo, yeah. Oh man. Sorry, Matt. I know that those games make you irrationally angry. I have a fondness for them.
00:11:37
Speaker
You just put me through so much in this little life of mine. Sorry. Those games are torment. they They're really bad.
00:11:48
Speaker
it's it yeah I mean, they're not called House of Horrors for nothing. yeah um i Something I like to do, Neil, to my co-host, is make him play infuriating games and then laugh at him while we talk about it online. So what have I made you play? Dagger of Amon Ra?
00:12:08
Speaker
Sanitarium, Hugo's House of Horrors. Well, ah Meredith Graham got you back in the last episode. She sure did. yeah ah Good old Meredith.
00:12:18
Speaker
Yeah, we just played it in the last episode. And and man, is that game and racist. I know. i I saw you were playing it. I looked up like a playthrough on YouTube. And I just skipped around. And I got to the end where the Indian, who's the wrong kind of Indian, is revealed to be Italian.
00:12:39
Speaker
Oh, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. that Al Lowe really, he thinks that people of non-Aryan races are hilarious. He sure does. Anybody who is not white American or Englishman the funniest thing in world.
00:12:58
Speaker
or ah english man is the funniest thing in the world He seems like the kind of guy who would, you know if you call them out, he'd say like, well, they find us funny too, you know? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. um So, Neil, have you been playing any adventure game or not? Have you been playing any cool games lately?
00:13:20
Speaker
ah Not really
Adventure Games with Family
00:13:21
Speaker
lately. I'm playing a little bit of all these games that I'm compiling for video game police. yeah um My daughter, who just turned seven. um oh That's adorable.
00:13:33
Speaker
Yeah, I've played a bunch of adventure games and stuff with her. And she recently started replaying ah There Is No Game on her tablet. Oh, nice. Yes.
00:13:46
Speaker
Which ah is awesome. I love that game. And I was proud when she like chose it to like jump back into because that like sometimes it's a little hard to get her to like focus on an adventure game.
00:13:58
Speaker
Sure. Especially like if she's going playing just by herself, you know, because it's so easy for her to just tab out and do something else if she gets. oh sure. But something about that game like is a appealing to even like a little kid.
00:14:11
Speaker
That's amazing. Yeah. i see that I mean, you have the guy talking directly to you, right? And he's got this, this overblown silly voice and he's, you know, reacting to the things you do on screen. I could see that being. I feel like we all have kind of our first experience with like something that breaks the fourth wall and where you realize like, oh, games can just make fun of themselves. Right.
00:14:35
Speaker
Call out their own, you know, problems. And don't know. It's just that that's a cute one for her to be playing. um She also randomly brought up Neverwhere recently because i I tried playing that with her months ago and she was into it for like 10 minutes and then she was like really put off by it.
00:14:54
Speaker
Oh, huh. And she still remembered like the name, and she's like, that game was creepy. oh i relate. i was that Honestly, i was scared of everything as a kid. That's just so interesting, because when I was young, going to start sounding very old and like Old Man yelling a cloud in like two seconds.
00:15:15
Speaker
I two games that I grew up on, and one was King's Quest III, and the other was Space Quest one And I just can't see any child like wanting to willingly play those games these days, especially with the parser. I think ah and think indie games, especially on a tablet or something more accessible for kids, is pretty brilliant, honestly. Well, because games are good now.
00:15:39
Speaker
right Why would you spend time and playing these old games that were when people were still trying to figure out what games were ah when there's so many so many other options? my My son, i also like could never get him to focus on adventure games. I always wanted to, but you know and he was he showed interest in Monkey Island. he showed interest in a couple things.
00:16:01
Speaker
Never beat them. I remember one day i came downstairs... ah And he was sitting on the computer and just out of, and this was when he was ah in his mid teens. He's 19 now.
00:16:14
Speaker
um And he was just playing that, do you know the game Unforeseen Incidents? that a point and click from a few years ago he was just sitting there playing that and played the whole thing through in like two days I was like why that of all things like it's a great game but that's just such a weird ah game to just pick and be like oh I'm gonna I've never played a point clicking game I'm gonna sit and play unforeseen incidents beginning to end maybe it was ah just advertised to him on steam or something and it caught you know it's caught his eye
00:16:47
Speaker
Sometimes a kid has to discover something themselves. They can't. Yeah. It's like, you know, the parent tries to push it on you. It's not cool. But they pick it out personally from Blockbuster or whatever, you know, like. Yeah.
00:16:59
Speaker
um I've ah with my daughter. I started playing adventure games like with her. as you know like a bonding experience um pretty young i forget how old she was but like as soon as she could kind of understand how they worked i did you know i i popped her in front of i remember day of the tentacle she like couldn't read yet but she learned where all the verbs were and was really easy to play on like a touch screen yeah yeah And so we have gone through day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max.
00:17:31
Speaker
um I think we did all three of the first Monkey Islands. She actually got through Loom with me. oh wow. That's mature one. Yeah, she was pretty captivated by And the dig, too. We did the dig together.
00:17:44
Speaker
No way! Yeah, that's such a slow kind of burn of the game. It's so pretty, though. And I think i think um the the key was ah I made it like a tradition when we go down to Grandpa's house.
00:17:59
Speaker
He has a computer there that he doesn't really use, and I installed ScumVM on it, and I got a bunch of games. So when we're at Grandpa's house and we don't have the normal TV and tablet and all her toys...
00:18:11
Speaker
All there really is to do is play on this computer and we'll be spending the weekend down there and we'll just focus on a game when you know we're not socializing with family.
00:18:23
Speaker
That's so sweet. So adorable. Yeah, I feel like that kind of gives her the bored nothing to do but play a game experience, which you really really need. and like That is how you motivate yourself to get through ah game of this vintage.
00:18:40
Speaker
Yeah. yeah ah that That very much reminds me of when I was Wii Roses. um i didn't have any i do have siblings. They're way older than me, so I didn't really have them around growing up. So I did have my computer, though.
00:18:55
Speaker
And yeah, when there wasn't something on TV, I would, you know, sit in front of King's Quest 3 for a little bit and flounder until I got anything at all, you know? um Speaking of roses.
00:19:08
Speaker
thought you were going to say, speaking of floundering. Speaking of floundering, roses have you sat in front of your computer and floundered over any games this week? No. Okay. As if I am the time for that. I mean...
00:19:23
Speaker
um i have been uh revisiting wander stop a little bit ah because i think i might i might do like a little video on that because i felt like so inspired by it sure um but you know i've beaten it i've already i've already played it so now i'm just in the revisiting taking notes thing of course i i played the game that we're going to be talking about today Yeah, Wanderstop is still, it's fascinating. I can't sit and just dig through it the way you have, but I pick it up every couple days and spend, you know, an hour or so in it. And it's still a really beautiful game and it still gives you a lot to think about.
00:20:01
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, and i'm very I'm extremely introspective to a pretentious degree, to be frank. ah So I can't wait to ah do my little philosophical video on it.
00:20:15
Speaker
Well, before we dive into what we're talking about today, there is one game I want to touch on that I've been playing, and I don't know if I can talk too much
Unique Game Mechanics
00:20:22
Speaker
about it. um I'm just going to talk about it on the the with the minimal amount of details. I've been playing, ah Rose, as you remember this, we played the demo for it.
00:20:32
Speaker
Blue Prince? Yes. Holy cow, this game is fascinating. Neil, have you seen ah the game Blue Prince? Is it, no, is it spelled like bru blue prince or a blue royal prince? It is spelled like a royal prince, but it is meant to, the the pun is on purpose.
00:20:57
Speaker
um And it is this wild um mesh of genres where you start out in a, we've we've described it on the show before, so I'll just.
00:21:07
Speaker
Yeah. poorly flyby you start in the uh foyer i guess of this house and there's three doors and every time you go to open a door it gives you choices of what that next room is going to be and um each room you know some rooms will have things like keys to help you open future rooms. Some rooms will have ah gems to help you unlock special rooms.
00:21:42
Speaker
Some rooms will ah give you like special bonuses to the amount of steps you can take per day. And every time you enter a room, you spend a step and you have 50 steps per day. This is so hard to explain. i know. is this I don't know. Neil, does this make any sense at all to you? Sounds bad to me.
00:21:59
Speaker
your Your goal is to get through this blank um this blank map, filling it up with rooms as you go, to get to the secret 46th room of this game. And so it's like, there's like an escape room element to it. There's like a, and it resets every day. Like you can get yourself all, you know, spun around and then have to restart.
00:22:24
Speaker
um There's, an adventure game element to it there's escape room element to it there's like a deck builder element to it there's like a uh i guess roguelite element to it because you know every day you start fresh it is it is a fascinating fascinating game and i've just been i've been loving it i've been so absorbed into it it's kind of like it it's kind of hitting me the way maybe like um animal well did last year where just out of nowhere this incredibly thoughtful incredibly unique uh mind-blowing game just pops up and you're like what the fuck is this thing and yeah blueprints everybody look out for it it's looking at it right now it's uh is it like cel-shaded
00:23:14
Speaker
Yes, yeah. yeah It's fairly detailed cel-shaded 3D, but yeah, that is that is how, that is the art style. Looks cool. It is very cool.
00:23:26
Speaker
I highly suggest everyone check it out. I feel like this is going to be a game that people are going to be talking about a lot. Or maybe I just will. yeah weous you I just know I'm going to be bad at this game.
00:23:39
Speaker
First of all, all games that are in first person scare the shit out of me. Even Myst. So i already i was terrified even boot it up.
00:23:50
Speaker
And then there's logic puzzles. And then, I don't know, my brain has been wired by King's Quest. If I'm not putting the cheese in the wand machine, then I don't know what I'm doing. like That's true. I like um illogic puzzles. Yeah. ah I haven't opened a room with a ah a cheese or a wand machine yet, but that doesn't mean that it's not in the mansion, Roses.
00:24:14
Speaker
ok It could be there. There could be cheese. Have you guys noticed there's a lot of cheese in adventure games? like I feel like I always have cheese in my inventory. you see cheese in adventure games, you know, like, oh I got to get that cheese. Yeah, you got to get it. Yeah.
00:24:30
Speaker
Human remains? Man, if you don't have human remains in your inventory, i don't know what we're doing here. ah heroic theme should play when you find, you know, like a piece of trash.
00:24:44
Speaker
Which I feel like we find a lot of game we're talking about. like when Luke gets his lightsaber back, you know? Yeah. As adventure game fans, as as people grew up with adventure games, did you guys, as kids, just pick up a bunch of garbage on the ground? yes Yeah, same.
00:25:01
Speaker
I had a little box. I had a box full of treasures. I didn't keep many of them. But yeah, just like little pieces of pens, like discarded broken jewelry. Just like anything that I found on the ground was just like in the pocket immediately. I might need it later. Yeah. Yeah.
00:25:20
Speaker
Okay, there's something wrong with both of you. I never did that. Probably because I was too afraid to do it. Seriously, I was afraid of everything. I did collect rocks and paint them, though.
00:25:32
Speaker
Because, Neil, I don't know if you know this, but I'm an artist. Okay, do you want to move on to this? I realized I hadn't told Neil that I'm an artist yet, and I had to get it in.
00:25:44
Speaker
yeah if you don't, then... I like your art. Thank you. Oh. but you You guys never heard the episode. There's one episode where ah Roses didn't tell the guest she was an artist and they hung up on us and hacked our computers and deleted their audio file.
00:26:04
Speaker
um bad It was a bad day. I can't so can't even believe that. yeah So before we we take a break and talk about the game, ah Neil, do you just want to tell everybody what game we're playing today?
Exploring 'Dare to Dream'
00:26:15
Speaker
We're playing the 1993 Epic Mega Games adventure game, Dare to Dream, ah written and drawn and programmed by Cliff Blazinski.
00:26:30
Speaker
yeah it's Incredible. I cannot wait. It's wild ride. So, Rosas, you want to play some Lancy Bincarino and we'll talk about Dare to Dream.
00:26:58
Speaker
Hey everybody, welcome back to Save Your Game. I'm Matt Allcamp, that's Pushing Up Roses. Hey. And that's Neil Cicerega. Hello.
00:27:09
Speaker
And guys, we have a treat for you today. We're going to be talking about a series of three games, as as Neil said called Dare to Dream.
00:27:22
Speaker
Neil, how did you find these games? They found me, man.
00:27:30
Speaker
Wow. ah i think what must have happened was, well, my dad was a ah programmer all my life. He um would sometimes bring home shareware.
00:27:44
Speaker
yes uh you know free entertainment for the kids uh because we had computers pretty early uh early adopters of stuff like windows 3.1 so i do have a lot of early memories of just messing around in paint when it could do dithering you know like yeah that era i spent hours in paint oh yeah it's Character map? What's this? Oh. yeah
00:28:13
Speaker
So um at some point, when i don't I don't think we had a lot of games at this point, but Dare to Dream was installed probably just the first part because I don't think we would have bought the whole series sight unseen. But I think after I got super into part one, we picked up the other games at some point.
00:28:33
Speaker
And, ah you know, i I don't remember being terrified by them, but like, you know, as you'll see, there's some pretty not kid friendly art later in the games. Yeah, it goes places.
00:28:48
Speaker
Yeah, it goes to hell. yeah Literally does. this game captivated you as a kid. You were you were like... Well, can you imagine like that context of just Windows 3.1, which is the most sterile... you know It's just like office.
00:29:05
Speaker
It's like a calculator. It's a calendar. And then there's this dream game where you're wandering around this strange, lonely city. And it was, you know, I don't think I had a walkthrough.
00:29:17
Speaker
So it was just kind of really puzzling. And I remember other members of my family kind of also being aware of the game and like what the current like challenge was of the game and like, oh, we haven't got past this part yet.
00:29:31
Speaker
And then on some random day i would figure like oh you can lube the grate and then you can go down to the sewer and like that was a huge breakthrough so yeah a little bit of a little bit of context for for the listener this is cliff blizinski's second game uh after you suggested this game neil and i i want to make it clear that you know we let our guests pick the games that we're going to talk about neil chose this game and i went down a rabbit hole of looking up stuff yeah i didn't a i didn't realize cliff blizinski made any adventure games uh let alone two adventure games uh his first one was palace of deceit yeah which i i played for the first time last week oh okay how did you like it
00:30:18
Speaker
I dug it too. I think I would have also been into it. It's got a lot of similar, it's like the same engine. It's like, um how do I describe this? ah The engine that this game runs in is like three separate Windows Windows, you know, like yeah minimize, you know?
00:30:36
Speaker
Yeah, literally the windows from Windows 3.1. Yep. Exactly. There's a status box on the bottom on the bottom. There's like the game area where you can click on stuff. And then there's like all the buttons and inventory button and selector that selected item. and All that stuff is on the left.
00:30:51
Speaker
um So his his first game, Palace of Deceit, was kind of like the trial run for Dare to Dream. And you play a cool dragon who's trying to escape from a dungeon. And yeah, you're just kind of going around finding secret hotspots and picking up items. And you can die and that one.
00:31:11
Speaker
OK. I was wondering if you could die. and Obviously, I was using a walkthrough to to play Dare to Dream. Is there no way to die in that game? No, I don't think so. Yeah, as far as I could tell, there's no way to die. I tried to play this without a walkthrough. i tried to play each game without a walkthrough, and every time I got to, like...
00:31:29
Speaker
sort of a new set of scenarios I would try. and man, I just do not know how you could have possibly done that. So you need weeks. It needs to sit on your hard drive with a save game that you just load up every once in a while and you just fart around because, yep yeah because you can't die and you can't get stuck.
00:31:48
Speaker
It feels a little more safe to, to do that, you know, to, Just try everything and don't worry about any time, know, restraints. Because what are you going to do? You know, like, you don't have your... How old was I? Like, eight or something when I played this? Yeah. Right.
00:32:05
Speaker
So, um yeah. The interface is like, if anybody's ever played the ICOM simulations game, games like Deja Vu oh yeah Uninvited or Shadowgate, it's kind of like that. Yeah, where you have a series of...
00:32:19
Speaker
like you said windows windows um and i feel like those had to be an inspiration for that's what i've heard don't know he himself said it but i i think he must have uh been inspired by those i kind of wish there were more games like this because most adventure games were on dos they could have a lot more colors uh i i really dig the color palette of this game it's all just like the stock windows 16 colors Oh, I love it.
00:32:50
Speaker
ah it It's very rudimentary, but I mean, I think it's a feat. ah Cliff, you know, Cliff Blasinski, he had an interesting career. He went on to be a game designer on Jazz Jackrabbit and then War. Which means lot to me. same. same Yeah. Aw.
00:33:07
Speaker
ah But Gears of War and Unreal, not so much. In Unreal, yeah. Yeah, I'm in the same boat. I played so much Jackrabbit as a kid. I've never played a second of Gears of War.
00:33:18
Speaker
I'm yeah sure there's people like screaming at the podcast right now. like that is No, Cliff Wazinski is like legit... Between those two games that we haven't played, he's one of the most successful game developers ever.
00:33:32
Speaker
Yeah. so Just on that on the hugeness of those games. And from what I can under so from what i can tell, i think people just don't like him. I think he's not a popular character. i think Not so much. hes he's Listen, he's had some old man yells at cloud moments, and I think he can get a little abrasive.
00:33:52
Speaker
abrasive and I think he also really represents that like cringy penny arcade era of game bro grossness yeah um I can see that for sure but this But this game he made, i think he was 17. Yeah, he was very young. yep Extremely young. Even younger with Palace of Deceit. like It's so fun to play a game made by a 16-year-old. I don't know. ah A game that like manages to be as playable as that, um but still has like the aesthetics and like, this is going so cool. Girls are going to like me after they see
00:34:29
Speaker
It's so cool. Oh, you sweet summer child. yeah No, and I, I, yeah, he was very young. And even though he, he is an abrasive character, i actually think it's worth playing this game and reading his book called Control Freak.
00:34:50
Speaker
ah And we' we'll get it. We'll get into it. We'll get into it. But yeah, I, I also picked up the book and read just the relevant part. I haven't gotten deeper into this. Yeah. Yeah. the later years, but like learning the, like just how personal this game is.
00:35:06
Speaker
Yeah. um Blew my mind. Yeah. The real Cliff Blazinski as a kid went into a sewer and met a crocodile with a, with a sombrero on and, you know,
00:35:19
Speaker
yeah really, really personal stuff. No, I think it's, I really think it's something really great. ah I can't recall a lot of games that have an indie developer expressing trauma in an adventure game. You see that now.
00:35:38
Speaker
I think you see a lot of that now in indie games. um But this was pretty dark for the time, for 1993. Yeah, this auteur-ish in a way that, um like, maybe some text adventures might have been, but I write yeah i have no idea. i don't really know that world.
00:35:57
Speaker
um But, oh I mean, like, yeah, text adventures were definitely auteur creations. They would usually have a single um author. Yeah. But I don't know if they got as personal as this does. I mean, like, playing it through like and revisiting it over the years, I've come to think of it as, like, oh, this is, like, such
00:36:24
Speaker
But, like, now understanding that, like, oh, there actually is, like, some personal trauma being worked out in this game, yeah i can kind of like see the whole package and I really appreciate what it is despite its flaws.
00:36:38
Speaker
Yeah. And it, it, it, it does have flaws. It is nutty in those first, those first couple chapters. So ah Neil, how would you describe the plot of this game?
00:36:50
Speaker
If there in fact is a plot we go to this game? Chapter by chapter. Should we say chapter by chapter? one Yeah. Yeah. because there he The tonal whiplash is important to these games. It is.
00:37:02
Speaker
um Chapter one is just a cityscape. It's like very blue and gray. And there's this kind of like, you guys have the music, right? Like the music playing.
00:37:13
Speaker
Man, the music is so good. ah Same composer who did jazz jackrabbits. So I was like dancing it out. thought the music was fantastic. I feel like i should fade up some of the music like here in that edit.
00:37:26
Speaker
Oh yeah, get the sound blaster. yeah.
00:37:38
Speaker
His first game, Palace of Deceit, had no music. And apparently, lonely apparently, like, I think he's submitted that to Tim Sweeney, who was running epic mega games out of his garage and really just publishing in indeed indie guys and, like, ah you know, ah organizing and putting people together.
00:37:57
Speaker
Like, they didn't have an office or anything, but he basically just like, hey, I know a guy who can write MIDI files for your game because that's the one thing you can't do. Yeah. So this is a two person game as far as I can tell.
00:38:10
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So the music is cool. I do like the music. I wish there was more of it. Like there's a lot of repeated tunes. There are, yeah. um But it's fine. And yeah, you're just wandering around a dirty, gross... And I think you you know you're in a dream.
00:38:26
Speaker
I think you do. Yeah. Yeah, the narrator will comment and say like, oh, what what's this doing in my head? like Stuff like that, which is already a cool idea for an adventure game to be like consciously...
00:38:40
Speaker
aware that you are in your own subconscious and like this is what i'm doing why am i doing this what does it all mean I think the characters, they they just flat out tell you.
00:38:51
Speaker
Like, yeah, you're just dreaming this. And if you don't get if you don't get a grip, it's going to go bad. you know It's going to turn into a nightmare or something. yeah Well, right. we shade like that Even in the story so far, like there's a story so far button, which is interesting. I never read that as a kid. There's no paragraphs.
00:39:09
Speaker
Just dove right into it. like yeah Yeah, it's in the... In the story so far, you find out that you're a kid named Tyler Norris. And, like, it's it's from the perspective of, I guess, a psychologist?
00:39:24
Speaker
Yeah, it's all, like, you know, case study. Norris, Tyler, you know. A patient has been exhibiting. you know it's Which I think I do remember thinking, like, wow, that's so mature. That's, like, this is such serious stuff.
00:39:40
Speaker
That's so deep. Yeah. And so in this in the the the introduction, and yeah it talks about how, you know, this kid Tyler is mumbling in his sleep.
00:39:51
Speaker
Yeah. sleep um Does it say like, it says like, oh, he hasn't been the same since the death of his father. Yes. And it it goes hard in the in the writing and description of that. You know, it's something I clocked right away. is like the the death of his father has been gnawing at him. It was really, like, really trying to, you know, express that pain almost immediately.
00:40:16
Speaker
The prose in general is pretty great in this game. it's there's you know There's like misspellings and misuses of words yeah in a way that 17-year-old who thinks they're deep would write. yeah yeah Which is every 17-year-old. I thought I was extremely deep when I was 17. It is the writing of a 17-year-old, but a 17-year-old who is a fairly good writer.
00:40:41
Speaker
Yeah. yeah um But yeah, then the narrative explains how you are. You're in a, you know, you're in a dream and you're trying to understand your own thoughts I think that's honestly really ah mature concept for a 17-year-old, trying to understand your own thoughts. I don't know, man. That that like hits me in a... It in ah makes me feel some kind of way.
00:41:08
Speaker
are either of you able to like articulate a plot, though, after the game starts? From the moment you wake up in the alley to the moment you... step through the gate like and what would you guys say <unk> no there's no plot so i i kind of i kind of suspect that he started with just the backgrounds and didn't have the idea for the game yet i feel like maybe he designed like the realm and maybe came up with like some puzzles or just kind of grafted them onto it and then like maybe figured it out from there because it's not necessarily i think it's just i think it's just like he he wanted
00:41:45
Speaker
to make a game set at night or something like that. you know Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It bounces around very rapidly. You know, you will find an item that you use 17 screens back and then that will unlock another item that will you will use 18 screens forward. Like you'll just, you just really bounce back and forth ah among, among a bunch of different like,
00:42:11
Speaker
a a ship and a sewer and ah a room full of radioactive waste. and Oh yeah, there was that. for But let listen, the shining setting here, the one that shined to me is Boof's bar and auto repair.
00:42:28
Speaker
Why, yes, there's a bar and an auto repair in one. Now, hang on a second. i never I never realized how odd that is. the auto repair is upstairs yeah to the bar you upstairs in the bar and you're in an auto repair shop and i love a minute i love the character of boof he because quote he has an attitude problem that's like the character description when you click on him this is boof he has an attitude problem not a bad attitude an attitude problem yeah but hey we solved that
00:43:03
Speaker
Yeah, we do. We do shoot him in the face with a shotgun.
00:43:09
Speaker
I don't think he died. And I think, I mean, I think that he, I think that maybe Cliff was really trying to seal it in that this is a dream and everything's weird. And that like, give it, you know, that gives him freedom to be very strange with maybe some of these puzzles. Cause like, it's a dream.
00:43:25
Speaker
It's supposed to be weird. yeah yeah It would make sense that there's dream logic. What are you expecting? You know, You don't expect a detective game, you know, not taking notes or anything. You're just finding random symbols. Like it even, it even calls a fish a phallic symbol in one of the item descriptions. Yeah, that's right. that So strange. I didn't even notice that.
00:43:47
Speaker
Yeah. yeah Yeah. I love it though. But yeah, I love that. Boof is my favorite character of all time and I'm going to be drawing some fan art of him. and Please, you would be the first.
00:43:59
Speaker
first and only person to draw fan art of Booth from Dare to Dream. ah It's also funny because he writes on all this he writes on all this stuff, right? Like when you get any item from... And Booth just has a bunch of random items that you need.
00:44:16
Speaker
And you... You'll end up either threatening him with something or giving him something that he never told you he needs. but like You just do it and then he gives you an item. And every time you look at an item that belongs to Boof, it's like it has Boof written on the side of it.
00:44:33
Speaker
There's something very cute about that, about the way he wrote this game. ah Speaking of cute, like all of the other, all the other characters are just animals, just talking animals. That's true. Yeah. I guess in a, in the second part, you kind of go a little Alice in Wonderland a little bit. Things are very fantastical in the second part.
00:44:57
Speaker
Also, I confused myself early on because for some reason i thought our name was Terry and And at the end of chapter one, you meet your best friend, whose name is Terry. And I was having a crisis. I'm like, is this game more symbolic than I thought?
00:45:15
Speaker
Are we both Terry? And then I found out her name was Tyler. I was very, very confused for a short amount of time. I don't want to spoil the ending, but ah you're closer than you think. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:45:29
Speaker
I don't know if either of you guys ever... There's a... There's a difficulty setting at the beginning getting of this game, which is interesting. And not knowing what sort of game I was in for, i did click the easy difficulty because I had to get it. oh I knew it was an older game. i knew I had to get it done for this. but And I was assuming that if there was a difficulty setting, you'd be able to, you you could die or there was some sort of combat in it or something.
00:45:57
Speaker
No, it just deletes some of the puzzles. So I was following a walkthrough. ah Like I said, I tried to solve it on my own. Just nothing. um But I was following a walkthrough and it was like, I was like, I don't, what do you mean use brick on ship and get the, get the fish? i I'm not getting any fish.
00:46:20
Speaker
But then it was like, then use the fish to get the key or whatever. And was like, I already have the key. Oh, interesting. Why their game with is there already underwear on the toxic waste? That doesn't seem right. but Someone's been here already.
00:46:39
Speaker
Uh, yeah, there's this thing that goes throughout the game, and I don't really know what it is. It's called the Key of Enigami, right?
00:46:50
Speaker
i always Yeah, that's mentioned a couple times. I always just called it the Unicorn Key. yeah Yes, it is just a key with a unicorn on it, and it has, it does all sorts of magical things.
00:47:01
Speaker
Very few of them are opening, yeah
00:47:05
Speaker
true you use it to poke stuff you use it to summon wind to get a newspaper summon a zephyr yeah as a kid i was um obsessed with the unicorn key i i don't i don't think i even knew it was i didn't like pick up that it was called the key of enigami but i always thought like i wish i could find the unicorn key in real life because i would love to just open a door and like go into the imagination world and stuff like yeah and i remember like because of this game i really got into um the idea of lucid dreaming when i find out that that was like a technique people used and i was never able to do it but like it legit like this game got me interested in
00:47:50
Speaker
um Like I remember like reading ah Things You Never Knew Existed catalogs and seeing like a lucid dream eye mask that like will trigger your lucid dreams. I'm like, I gotta get that.
00:48:02
Speaker
and
00:48:05
Speaker
Please tell me that was like an infomercial that you saw that on. no it was like a catalog, like a magazine we used to get. yeah look away and Like the way in comic books they used to advertise x-ray goggles.
00:48:17
Speaker
It was basically that, yeah. um There's also some weird, a weird moment of Christian messaging in this game that I don't think ever comes up again.
00:48:30
Speaker
Well, the the main villain's name is Christian. Yeah. Yes. And you we do end up in hell. But in this... Yeah, I guess this game, when you click, when you use the cross on the...
00:48:45
Speaker
on the cross on the ground it does take you to a scary place so maybe yeah maybe he is trying to make some sort of comment about think i mean i dont yeah i don't know his religious upbringing um but i do think it like wouldn't be 90s horror without like shoehorned christian stuff in it right Right.
00:49:09
Speaker
Yeah, I couldn't, I guess i I don't know if this is, if there's subtle Christian messaging in this game or if there's subtle, well, or if there's not so subtle ah anti-Christian messaging in it. I really don't know what he's going for. But yeah, the big villain's named Christian and at some point you go through a portal on the floor that is a glowing crucifix by using a crucifix on it.
00:49:35
Speaker
Well, do you want to know why the villain's name is Christian? ah Please. Oh, please. ah Cliff Blazinski's brother, his full name is Tyler Christian Blazinski.
00:49:46
Speaker
Whoa. Oh, God. So there you have it. Well, that. Now we know. That there there's a lot to unpack there. ah I'm going to be doing a lot of research after this after this podcast.
00:50:00
Speaker
So do we want to move on to chapter two? Oh, sorry. No, yeah, yeah. I i want to I was actually going to bring up something from chapter two. Please. That I thought was strangely creative choice in terms of puzzle solving.
00:50:13
Speaker
There is a shrinking mechanic. Yeah. Again, like very Alice in Wonderland. Yeah. But do you guys understand the shrinking mechanic? Because I don't.
00:50:25
Speaker
No, i just know you find shrinking pills. Yes. And it's just a prescription bottle. And if you want to go into, say, a patch of grass, you just select the the shrinking pills. You double click on the grass.
00:50:38
Speaker
And then a Windows alert box pops up and says, you pop in a pill and you shrink.
00:50:44
Speaker
ah But like, so you shrink, but then if you change screens, I guess you're back to your normal size. I guess you never have to. Yeah, you don't unshrink, but you can shrink again. There's a shrink within a shrink at one point.
00:50:58
Speaker
Yes. I mean, so yeah, once you've shrunk once, once you've solved the you need to shrink to get here puzzle, then you just transform back and forth at will. But it is funny that there is some shrink. Yeah, you're right. Like, I forget what section it is, but there is.
00:51:16
Speaker
You go into a can, right? You go into like a ah dented soda can. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Right down to it. Yeah. While you're also while you're already in the mouth of a living tree.
00:51:29
Speaker
Part two has. OK, so part two, after you have escaped from part one by finding the unicorn key going through and waking up and and all this part two starts off in supposedly in real life, you're in a clubhouse with your friend Terry.
00:51:46
Speaker
And Terry tells you, hey, I found that key in real life. It's in the basement. And so you get it. You open the door. You're able to go into your imagination without going to sleep. And then you come out in this like super cartoony, like happy.
00:52:04
Speaker
It's like, you know, when they go to Toontown in Roger Rabbit, like, you know, everything is has a face. There's cat and dog fighting each other. talking Yeah, talking animals. theres There's a caterpillar, I think, named Dinks, if I'm pronouncing Dinks.
00:52:20
Speaker
hi there yeah I love Dinks. um
00:52:26
Speaker
ah There is some... there's some artwork here that is reminiscent of other like later commander keens right like you could you could totally see that weird tree with a face being something yeah background of like one of the later commander keens or even even the rock and bonehead and cement head are rocking a bone who don't want you to go to hell i guess you know who they reminded me of This is going to be a very Rose's answer.
00:52:57
Speaker
Yeah, there are two characters in this game that don't want you to go to hell, and their names are Cementhead and Bonehead. And they very much reminded me of ah Bump on a Log and Stick in the Mud.
00:53:09
Speaker
Yes, knew were going to say that. Yeah!
00:53:13
Speaker
And but yeah I just kind of wondered if if there was any inspiration there from those characters. ah Yeah. Possibly. i wonder. I do love the faces on the trees. There's like what limited animation there is in this game. The trees will change expressions every like four seconds. Yeah, that's true. And they're all dumb faces. Just like cross eyes. Yeah.
00:53:36
Speaker
um they're really charming and then if Cliff Positsky wanted us to learn one thing from this game it's that trees are fucking dumb love it's really good and then in part three you see like the evil versions of those trees it's pretty cool but yeah part two is all fun lighthearted it's supposed to represent like here's this here's like the pure hearted child like inner child yeah that you're exploring that you have to get through to get to the the darker suppressed emotions.
00:54:10
Speaker
Yeah, even the ah the cat and dog that you mentioned, they're in this kind of standoff, almost this cartoony, you know, Tom and Jerry standoff where one has a gun pointed at the dog and the dog has like um an anvil over the cat and they don't do anything. I think the whole time they're just in this standoff and I'm like, that's very cartoony. It's interesting.
00:54:32
Speaker
I think this was the most creative and maybe best chapter. this is This is the chapter where they actually give kind of clues as to what you're supposed to do next.
00:54:43
Speaker
Like, I think you could play this chapter without a walkthrough. Maybe. Maybe. And... maybe without ah um and ah It's there's some parts of it that are kind of coherent. Like there's some characters that have motivations and yeah have feelings about the other characters in the game. i kind of like this middle chapter quite a bit.
00:55:09
Speaker
like it too. it's There's definitely more characters in this part. um It feels like... um and I feel like this is my least favorite one just because like the graphics and tone are annoying.
00:55:25
Speaker
miss Booth. I mean, I miss Booth. Well, Booth has a cameo. Oh, that's true. There's this one weird part of the game where you go into the woods, you solve a flower puzzle, and then you traverse through. i counted it. There's seven screens all just to get a crowbar.
00:55:46
Speaker
It's very King's Quest 1 with its backtracking. I'll give it that. Half the data of this game is just like you going to get a crowbar. ah it's just It's just like a, it's a very weirdly um lopsided part of the game where there's just a lot of screens to traverse through and a lot of interesting and art.
00:56:04
Speaker
And it feels like he didn't fill it with puzzles. There's like, there's parts you can click on where it says like, it looks like the stone is loose here. And then you never pick it up. Like you can never loosen that stone. Right. But that's actually something I like about this game is there's a lot of kind of leading statements when you look at stuff.
00:56:19
Speaker
It'll say like, oh, there's nothing in there, dot, dot, dot, for now.
00:56:24
Speaker
And it really makes you want to like backtrack and like figure out what you missed and come back to stuff. And whether or not it like it holds its cards tight to its chest ah where the unfair pixel hunt is going to be.
00:56:40
Speaker
Yeah. Well, one thing about this game that drove me nuts is there's so many times where like you need a rock and there's so many rocks all around you.
00:56:51
Speaker
There's only one rock you can pick Sometimes you can even click on the other rocks and he'll just say, oh, it's a rock. It's like, I need a rock, though. Yeah.
00:57:02
Speaker
ah usually there is adventure game there will be um the special hot spots will have a uh a special cursor that pops up and it's only a magnifying glass oh yeah i always love the inside of the magnifying glass will show you the like control i inverted picture oh nice don't know if noticed that it's like It's something that only like Windows 3.1 used to do with certain cursors.
00:57:26
Speaker
yeah It would just like invert the colors. um And I always thought that was cool. It is cool. was used to like playing with that on like loading screens. i don't i don't I can't think of like a good example of when that was fun, but I remember doing it a lot.
00:57:41
Speaker
I think you can still do it if you go into like accessibility settings and make like the high contrast cursor or something. like They still have the feature. Ooh. ah What was everybody's least favorite character? i bet it's the same for all of us.
00:57:56
Speaker
Let me look. Is it Lissa, the sexy princess? Yes, it's Lissa, the... ah in but You click on her, it says, an extremely cute girl. What's she doing here? And she's so weird. And all that she does is she sits in a couch. You can get to her at the very beginning of the game and she has, she you do nothing with her until the very end. I think you give her a ring and and then she tells you, andt know, some hint.
00:58:26
Speaker
And that's all that she's there for. It's clearly just like ah Cliff wanted to draw what he thought was an extremely cute girl. if he had a crush.
00:58:37
Speaker
It might be a crush. I think he says that like he made these games for his crush or something in his book. ah um I mean, that would work on me. Well, 17-year-old me. It would not work on me today. Are you sure, This guy gives you a game, and it devolves into this bloody hell scape. I made this for you.
00:58:59
Speaker
Actually, that would make it a lot better for me personally, as, you know, a witchy lady of the darkness. So no, that actually would work. She has this very big-eyed style that made me wonder if, like, was he, like, watching anime back in 1983?
00:59:15
Speaker
I was wondering that, too. Yeah, like, she's the one character in this game who it's like, I could see, ah and you know, a 17-year-old boy just sitting down and drawing that, um as opposed to lot of them.
00:59:26
Speaker
He has an obsessive sort of... Did you guys ever watch the R. Crumb documentary? No. ah No, but i maybe I did, actually. I don't know. There's a scene in it where his his brother is ah suffering from mental illness and also draws comic books.
00:59:45
Speaker
And Arcrumb is flipping through his brother's comics and and saying, like, ah he's like, as you see, this he just, like, goes way overboard with...
00:59:59
Speaker
he'll like show a piece of clothing and it'll be all wrinkles. It'll be like this, it this piece of clothing must've taken his brother days and days to draw because he drew every possible wrinkle on the shirt, right?
01:00:13
Speaker
Cliff Blitzinski does a bit of that here where there's like a stone path and he draws each stone on the path in three dimensions. Or there's a bird and he draws like every feather yeah on the bird in full detail. There's parts where I noticed like there's a pile of skulls and he copied and pasted some of this. Yeah, sure. yeah But, you know, that there's there's so many things where it's just like, you know, three or four pixels could have let us know this was like a dirt road. But he's like, he wanted to really show us every piece of dirt.
01:00:53
Speaker
Okay, but can somebody explain the flower to the bat puzzle to me? Oh, in james chapter one. Yeah, was that chapter one? Yeah. Sorry, we're kind of skipping, but i have it in i note I have it in my notes that you cut a flower.
01:01:11
Speaker
It's a red flower. And you hold it up to a bat, as in the animal, and he turns to stone. Am I missing something? what's What's confusing?
01:01:22
Speaker
it's biblical Wait, is it? Don't trick me. Don't you guys trick me because I'll probably believe it. I believe there is a verse that says, ah yeah, if you hold a flower to a bat. And blow the the savior held the flower to the bat and the bat turned to, does it turn to stone or ice? turns stone. Stone, yeah But I think that that is like, it does kind of get you ready for part three, which is like really loaded with like symbolic gestures like that. yes Yeah. I don't know if it makes for a good gameplay, but it's cool.
01:02:04
Speaker
Yeah. Should we dive into a part three, which is its own thing? Oh my goodness. ah Part three is where it's at for me. I think part three is incredible. Yeah, that's when I was really just fascinated by the whole thing.
01:02:20
Speaker
yeah so you Yeah, so part two ends with you um passing by Bonehead. Cementhead but cement head and men had a Bonehead. And Bonehead, yep. And Bonehead, you pass by them. The classic characters.
01:02:35
Speaker
ah And suddenly you're in fucking real hell. but you no You pass through a skull a giant skull gate. You have to put the unicorn key into its nostril.
01:02:47
Speaker
Yeah. It's like one more booger joke just for the road and then we're off to hell. It's good get all that lowbrow stuff out of the way and now we're in the thick of it.
01:02:58
Speaker
you got to be classy in hell.
01:03:02
Speaker
It is classy. What I love about part three is it's like it looks like a horror game. There's like all sorts of horrific stuff. But the actual writing and tone of it is just sad. Like it's very sad.
01:03:15
Speaker
Yeah. um Mournful. And like one of the first things you you see is a bunch of um like gravestones. And if you read them in order, it's like a poem. Yeah.
01:03:26
Speaker
Which I will read right now. Yes, please. In the middle of the night, there is crying, but no child. In the middle of the night, there is screaming, but no face.
01:03:39
Speaker
In the middle of the night, there is love, but no one is there. In the middle of the night, there is pain, but no feeling. In the middle of the night, there is fear, dot, dot, dot, but nothing to be afraid of.
01:03:54
Speaker
Oh. Wow. ah yeah That sounds like it came out of my fifth grade diary, to me to be honest. Fifth grade. No, I was a very deep ah goth child.
01:04:10
Speaker
i know, but I mean, like, 17-year-old Cliffy B would... fifth i' i'm I'll have you know, I'm... yeah
01:04:21
Speaker
Yeah, this chapter... i I was telling friend of the show, friend of mine, ah Lazy Game Reviews, also known as LGR. Who believe owns a physical copy of this game. I'm sure he does. And the original hardware and all the other games that, you know, he's a big Jazz Jackrabbit fan, too.
01:04:41
Speaker
um And he had read ah Cliff's book, which is a memoir. And I was, told he never got to the third part. So I'm texting him. I'm like, it gets really dark. Like, you got to look this up. This is, this is wild.
01:04:56
Speaker
And he texted back and he's like, you know, that makes sense. Cause he lost his dad at a kind of unexpectedly at a young age. And then he went on to document that he had been assaulted by a man he met online age 15. So this, this,
01:05:12
Speaker
so this kid really went through a lot of trauma. And then that changed my whole perspective on the third chapter. I realized that it was kind of ah an expression of of trauma.
01:05:25
Speaker
And so many of the puzzles you do, I have it kind of written down here. The puzzles are doing things that act as relief, right? So there's like a ah a bloody stump, another talking tree, except this one is in in hell.
01:05:40
Speaker
Yeah, the character's name is Bloody Stump. Oh, is that his name? It shows you up in the title bar of the battle of the character's names. That was just a description. but right ah Bloody stump.
01:05:53
Speaker
ah you know Somebody left a dagger in his quote back and you you know relieve him of that pain. You take the dagger. um And there's other characters you do this with too. They're all like symbolic of release and release of pain.
01:06:08
Speaker
There's a boy floating in a river and he's just like, my father is further down the river. and oh God, it's so sad. It's so sad. And you have to cut him loose so he can float downstream to be with his father.
01:06:19
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, it's it really is sad, you know, knowing the context. And it gets gory. this swear ah Unexpectedly, I'm like, oh, there's some gore in this game.
01:06:31
Speaker
There's like a bit of dripping blood here and there. Up until you get to the the really gory... It's really just one scene. Yeah, it's one scene. The artist. The artist, Solomon.
01:06:42
Speaker
You go... you like go through like you go into like legit hell where there's like a river of lava and you go through into like a torture chamber of some sort and there's just like flayed skinned man. Yeah. um Basically ah um Frank from Hellraiser.
01:07:03
Speaker
Yes. Yep. And my cat is using the litter box right now. ah sorry I'm sorry. A moment of privacy, please, for the cat. Thank you. Everybody stop listening.
01:07:15
Speaker
don't know if you can hear that. Yeah. Yeah. They have the flayed artist who I guess Christian was jealous of his artistic abilities or of his imagination, rather. Oh, yeah. The line is like, he hates imagination. Yeah.
01:07:31
Speaker
All the characters are talking about Christian. Whenever Christian's not on screen, everyone should be talking about saying, where's Christian? It's like that Simpsons. Never mind. it And Christian is you meet him at the end of the game. But like up until this point, he's just a character that people talk about.
01:07:49
Speaker
And he's always torturing people and sticking daggers and stumps and.
01:07:55
Speaker
Monster. He's a monster. And yeah, he's he's just like, he represents the repressed anger and frustration and sadness in ty in Cliff. I mean, Tyler. And you...
01:08:10
Speaker
and and you um You like help Solomon, the skinned guy. um it's so disgusting. I would have to describe the screen. There's like big pile of blood. There's like intestines on the side of the screen. There's a foot and arm. Yeah. It's like a severe or severed there's arm. I'm like, what is happening? You see all this stuff. And then you walk to the right and then there he is. There's just like a guy with no skin laying on the floor with one little twitching hand.
01:08:36
Speaker
Oh dear. It's gross. And you can't talk to him because he's in so much pain. um But you have to go get a Polaroid picture. And I found out that Cliff's father was an engineer at Polaroid.
01:08:54
Speaker
Wow. Yeah. Oh, chris goodness. Yeah. So, like, really personal symbology just, like, mixed into this game. There's probably stuff we don't even realize. Oh, I'm sure. i mean, the last image is something.
01:09:06
Speaker
but There's, like, shattered glasses and ah some sort of flower and a teddy bear. Well, a teddy bunny, I guess. and sure It's a little early design for Jazz Jackrabbit.
01:09:21
Speaker
I don't think we know what any of those three things are, right? Yeah, they're just kind of displayed in an altar. yeah We don't know what they symbolize, but I mean, he wouldn't you wouldn't put them there if they didn't have a symbolism.
01:09:38
Speaker
Sure. One of them is a rose, which can ah mean whatever. Right? It can mean beauty. Yeah. yeah The Windows icon for this game is a rose on a pile of blood.
01:09:50
Speaker
Yeah. Wow. and you know, like, when I see, like, when I see teddy bears, I always just equate that to, childhood you know, lost innocence, childhood. Yeah. Yeah.
01:10:02
Speaker
um but the clicking on the teddy bear is the last thing you do in the game because if you click on it it triggers the final cut scene right and where he's like looking at the teddy bear he's like there's something wrong with it and then like the eyes start to glow and then like you you meet christian who i love this picture of the demon who's this skeleton with a bowler hat and he's got kind of a ripped up cape on he's and he's doing jazz hands he's got his hands out like he's a real showman this uh this christian and we we could see that by how he decorates his kingdom
01:10:39
Speaker
and his line is i knew you would come to me tell me tyler who do i remind you of do i frighten you come with me tyler i will give you pain beyond any you have ever felt like god god I got shivers.
01:10:52
Speaker
We should voice this game. This game would be great with some voice. Really? Honestly. But it has to be like really bit-crushed era-appropriate... Yeah, it needs to sound like we're recording in a tin can, you know, like King's Quest V, where everything is yeah insane.
01:11:09
Speaker
Well, I wonder why Christian is trying to seduce Tyler into hell with the plan, with the promises of giving him pain beyond any he's ever felt. Like, he almost gives into it.
01:11:27
Speaker
until terry appears and tells him don't do it like he says don't do it tyler think he wants you in hell for eternity you must fight it oh okay oh god yeah he almost got the pain i was into but hell best i think it's just a centibite thing i think it's was gonna say that's very hellraiser yeah yeah but it even just Even just like, I don't know, that I'm going to speak as as a troubled, I was a very troubled child. I also lost my dad when I was very young.
01:12:01
Speaker
um And there is this kind of thing where you're going through a lot of chaos. You kind of, that's what you yearn for is more chaos. And you can be easily swayed into just living your life in hell, you know, not in literal hell, but. Right. You know, you know what I mean? So I kind of wonder if some of it was that as well. And him just trying to fight these feelings of ah of hopelessness, you know? Yeah. The feeling that you deserve to suffer.
01:12:29
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's sort of, I guess what, i yeah, I mean, I think that's what I got out of it as well. I think ah it's just, it was just an interesting scene. i mean, and that's this whole game, right? It's like, there's a lot being said that is very personal and that it's very...
01:12:47
Speaker
um clearly meaningful and you can extract you don't even have to work that hard to extract meaning out of it because it is a it is a boy like laying his soul bare um but you experience it all through the most ridiculous things you've ever seen um and yeah Hey, don't call Bloody Stump ridiculous. He played an important role.
01:13:15
Speaker
Can we talk about the key using the key on the paper and summoning the wind? What is that? That was not summoning the wind. I think he was just trying to reach the newspaper with the key and then suddenly dust of wind blows.
01:13:31
Speaker
That is not how I interpret it. Me neither. Yeah, me and Rose has talked about that puzzle for a second before recording, and both of us got the same idea that, oh, the key summoned some wind, but it and went awry. The key.
01:13:46
Speaker
Yeah.
01:13:49
Speaker
God, we have like a smart person on here to be like, guys, no, that's not. Well, because it keeps happening. It happens like multiple times. yeah yeah The newspaper will blow and then you'll see it in a different screen in a random spot in the game.
01:14:01
Speaker
And you try to pick it up and the wind blows again. And it just kind of like keeps eluding you until you finally find it like caught on some thorns. Yeah. Yep. But ah here's, I think, a thing that's different about playing, you know, a game like this with a walkthrough and playing it with...
01:14:19
Speaker
you know playing it as you did, Neil, over time. i think at some point I also got a walkthrough, so don't worry about it. Oh, okay. Well, I was just going to say, I was thinking, like i I imagined... you probably did have to would have had to thought think through those moments.
01:14:35
Speaker
Like, maybe I can reach it with the dust. No, maybe I can reach with the cockroach. No, maybe can reach with the key. Oh, it did it.
01:14:45
Speaker
um Yeah, I feel like you can get through this game like that since there is very few you know inventory items. You start clicking everything on everything, honestly. Yeah, there's really not a ton of hotspots. And, you know, there's there's really just like one action button to do stuff. And you're going to yeah look at everything. You're going to use everything. you're goingnna If you get stuck, then you might try different inventory items. But I think mostly you would probably get stuck missing little hotspots. Like the in the first screen, there's some dust up in the corner. Right, right. Unbelievable.
01:15:19
Speaker
Did you find that on your own or did you... No. No but way Same with the cockroach in the pile of skulls because ah there's you have to click on a specific part of the pile of skulls, right?
01:15:33
Speaker
ah And you can click You have the look cursor, the interact you know indicator on the entire pile of skulls, but you have to click in the lower left hand corner to find a cockroach.
01:15:47
Speaker
At least the cursor changes because, you know, Ciara didn't always clue you in that you were hovering over something you could click. You really had to just use your eyes. Yeah. Dare to dream is a little kinder.
01:15:59
Speaker
It made a valiant effort, honestly. And i I was pretty impressed by the... I mean, I'm i'm inspired. I want to make a game like this with the Windows. I want to make this game.
01:16:10
Speaker
So you need to load up Visual Basic 1.0, which is what this game is made in No. Which is not for games. It's for applications. Yeah.
01:16:22
Speaker
No, I did i didn't read that he programmed his first game, Palace of Deceit, in Visual Basic, which... That's a choice. That is a choice.
01:16:32
Speaker
When it's all you got, you got to make do. I used to try to make games in Visual Basic.
01:16:39
Speaker
I don't know if I ever have attempted. I tried to make a game in Ruby once, which if anyone knows what that is, a programming language. All I know is that it's on rails.
01:16:51
Speaker
Yes, Ruby on rails. um And I tried to make a game and it didn't work and I gave up. And that that was my experience with trying to make a game. i I also, like Neil, I have one of those like,
01:17:05
Speaker
Probably not 25% completed, but some percentage completed AGS games sitting on a hard drive somewhere. oh sure. Mm-hmm. I have a Twine game sitting around somewhere that is not even worth it. But so someday, someday I'm going to make my dream, which is going to be a murder mystery adventure ah thing.
01:17:29
Speaker
Extravaganza. Set in the universe of Dare to Dream. Look, I bring Booth back. Booth. He's an attitude problem. I'm going to call it now Booth was the killer.
01:17:42
Speaker
Sorry, Rezis. You spoiled it. I know. I think Boof was probably the killer, right? like well Yeah, but it was a revenge killing. He killed Tyler.
01:17:56
Speaker
Thanks a lot, guys. The guy shot him in in the in the face with a shotgun. You can't blame him. For a fishing rod. But he lived. He did. He's fine.
01:18:09
Speaker
he's fine Maybe it changed his attitude. Maybe he needed that. I think Booth does say, like, in the first game, Booth does say, like, if you're not careful, all these characters are going to come out of your mind into the real world. He does say that, yes. Yeah, he says something like that. They don't really... Because you you ask him if if if he's real, and he's like, no, but... No, just casually.
01:18:31
Speaker
My ah favorite line from the third game is at the end where ah in the final cut scene when you've just defeated, when you and Terry have just defeated Christian and he yells, Christian yells, my destiny!
01:18:48
Speaker
yeah
01:18:52
Speaker
you You hit him right in the destiny. Wow. He got his destiny. there's a but I have a bunch of screenshots of this game I want to post. like the The whole end um animatic is is very... It's all on black, so there's like very little art to do, but they're bigger sprites, and the characters are all drawn bigger.
01:19:10
Speaker
yeah And it's just told in a very cool, limited way with just like text and a picture. it's just a little graphic novel, basically. And it's all like eyes floating in darkness and stuff like that.
01:19:24
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's it's cool that he decided, you know, when he finally had to show tyler He would just show a pair of eyes in the darkness. I think that was really... Yeah. Single tear.
01:19:35
Speaker
Single tear. Oh, man. And he and he like gets out of bed. He wakes up and he goes to visit his grandfather's grave. and And it shows um like the real like ah death date of Cliff's actual father on the gravestone. man.
01:19:57
Speaker
It's very sad. And it says, dad, I destroyed the evil within. i love you, dad. And I miss you so terribly. i will never forget you, father. That is sweet and sad. I know. And then it goes back to like the ah like the final wrap up from the, I guess the psychologist talking about how, well, Tyler's much happier now. like you know he ah And yeah.
01:20:21
Speaker
And it says ah that rumors abound that he still keeps that key somewhere just in case he ever has to journey into his mind again in case he has to dare to dream once more. Oh, he said the thing. he did.
01:20:35
Speaker
Did either of you get the fact that it was two warring personalities before that final text box? I didn't even pick up until recently that Terry is just in his mind. I always thought, yeah, Terry is his real life friend.
01:20:50
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So did I. I i didn't quite. i didn't get that either. Terry and Christian are the two sides of him. Right. Yes. Right. Tyler. Yeah. ah Yeah, I mean, i think there is something really interesting that he's saying there is that this idea of if you let...
01:21:10
Speaker
ah trauma and pain. ah If you live in that, if you obsess over it, if you let yourself ah fall into that, it's a hell from which, you know, you will have trouble escaping from like You will cause others pain. You will become a purveyor of trauma yourself.
01:21:32
Speaker
And then, you know, this other side, which is this happy-go-lucky innocent side where you're trying to pretend like none of it exists. And, know, that Tyler kind of finds this middle way between the two.
01:21:45
Speaker
Yeah. Admittedly, a lot more on the Terry side, but still. Sure, sure.
Cliff Blazinski's Journey
01:21:52
Speaker
No, I thought it was such a great effort from young person, you know, a lot. Like a legit high schooler.
01:21:59
Speaker
Yeah. who was contacted by a like a ah guy who was, Tim Sweeney was like 22 or something, and just like hanging out on bulletin boards. And I think he saw like the demo or something for a Palace of Deceit and got in touch with Cliff ah specifically to say, like I would like to publish your next game. I think i think you have what it takes.
01:22:23
Speaker
Wow. And for a high schooler to like get something like this personal, out into like the world of games like there's only so many games being published per year yeah 1993 um it's like kind of unheard of like i can't think of another game like this from back then right no i can't either it's it's it's really incredible and And then he made Jazz Jackrabbit. And then he made Jazz Jackrabbit. I think in the book, he just says, like, I needed to do something, like, completely different, so I just ripped off Sonic the Hedgehog.
01:22:56
Speaker
Oh, well. to To also, like, have that sort of guts, right, where ah major video game producer reaches out to you and is like, hey, I'll produce your next game.
01:23:08
Speaker
And then to make the decision, right, oh, I'm going to do something incredibly personal. Yeah. That's a really bold thing. I think that takes sort of the arrogance of a 17-year-old.
01:23:21
Speaker
Sure. to Totally. To do that. I think what happened was he was like selling um Palace of Deceit on his own. um And it was actually like pretty successful in those early BBS days.
01:23:36
Speaker
Mm-hmm. um Like for ah for a kid, you know, in 1991 or two or whatever, to be selling stuff out of your house. Like, I think that gave him a ah ton of confidence.
01:23:47
Speaker
And then Dare Dream got published on that basis. And apparently it was a big flop. Like, it didn't sell well. Yeah. Right. No, it Yeah, read that. But Tim Sweeney still believed in him and let him make Jazz Jackrabbit and like set him up with, like here's a real programmer who can do high-level DOS stuff.
Jazz Jackrabbit's Legacy
01:24:04
Speaker
Yeah. and And Jazz Jackrabbit, awesome game. um Big part of my childhood. I played Jazz Jackrabbit 2 a ton.
01:24:16
Speaker
did not read the second one. I played 1. 2 was the one where it zoom it was kind of zoomed out, right? Where Jazz Jackrabbit... It was zoomed out, but it had an online... 1998 is when it came out, and it had an online scene. like You could create your own tile sets, your own levels. Wow. Oh, cool.
01:24:34
Speaker
Yeah, it was cool. It was like a very customizable 2D platformer game that just like played really nice, that had like great battle modes and stuff. And I think Cliffy was still the design lead on that game, too. So he wasn't...
01:24:48
Speaker
just doing unreal at that time like he was still like a part of my childhood like gaming experience for a pretty long time Oh, yeah. I think, ah yeah, I played Jazz Jackrabbit 2 a little bit later, and i it didn't hook me because it does have a slightly different aesthetic and yeah different ah feel.
01:25:08
Speaker
i don't know if it holds up, but the soundtrack, if you do have some time, just listen to the Jazz Jackrabbit 2 soundtrack. Okay. That's some good shit right there. It is good, yeah. All the music from Jazz Jackrabbit games is so good.
01:25:22
Speaker
And I looked up that composer because I thought I had, I think his name is Robert A. Allen, I think. um I looked him up because I think there's another composer who did Sierra whose name was also but like very similar.
01:25:36
Speaker
and I'm like, that can't be. like They cannot be sharing composers. And that they were not. Jazz Jackrabbit has like a big um demo scene aesthetic to it. um i don't know if you know demo scene, but it's like a lot of like Amiga...
01:25:51
Speaker
like programmers and and musicians, they'd make like tracker music and they would just release basically like graphical tricks to like run on a computer. And it was like ah competition kind of like who can like make the prettiest, like 3D spinning cube in the least amount of code. Oh, cool.
01:26:07
Speaker
I like that. um And I think like the programmer for the Jazz Jackrabbit games was like a Dutch guy who did that. And the music is also very similar to like the old Amiga music that people would release on bulletin boards.
01:26:21
Speaker
Just ah just like a very just like um ah very different aesthetic to that game than what like Sierra and LucasArts were doing. Yeah, for sure. Absolutely.
01:26:32
Speaker
But we're pretty off topic now. but yeah No, no, no. no and no i think i think Do you guys have any final thoughts about ah Dare to Dream? I liked it.
01:26:45
Speaker
I am glad I played it And I feel inspired. i really, yeah. I'm glad you liked it. When I pitched it to you, I said like, I have two options. Here's the crazy option.
01:26:56
Speaker
Yeah. And I was really pleased that you had never heard of it too. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's a great thing to discover, honestly, and to kind of, to kind of look into.
01:27:07
Speaker
And yeah do you want to share your other option that you had given me? I didn't look at your episode list closely enough and I said, Sam and Max hit the road. I know that game back and forth. Great game. Would have loved to talk about it.
01:27:21
Speaker
If you ever want to recover it. Just do it again. yeah We do another episode sometime. I also, you know, I played the hell out of Curse of Monkey Island back then. Oh, sure.
01:27:33
Speaker
um But Dare to Dream always held a special spot in my and my heart because it was, i think, like part one was one of my first adventure games. Yeah. And um yeah, and it always perplexed and like just held a almost mythical, spiritual place in my in my heart. Yeah.
01:27:53
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. That's amazing. Yeah. I mean, i think maybe we will have to have you back for Curse of Monkey Island because that is I think we're saving that sort of for I don't know if you feel this way, Roses, but I feel like we're saving that for some sort of special
Adventure Games Critique
01:28:09
Speaker
occasion. Right. Yeah, like I think so.
01:28:11
Speaker
in episode 100 or something where it's like so special it's never gonna happen we just never cover yeah is it not special enough no not special not 100 maybe when we get to a thousand but it's it's you know i think an incredibly important game for the two of us yeah me too i i'll have to tell you though if you do have me on for that episode uh i might be kind of hard on that game whoa we like a challenge I mean, i think there's something, I think that's interesting because so many, you know, it is so beloved.
01:28:47
Speaker
Yeah, it's very beloved. You very rarely hear say, criticize it. So now I'm intrigued. That's a great idea. No, that's a great idea. Neil, you're coming back. You're coming back for Curse of Monkey Island. For our episode.
01:29:02
Speaker
ah I mean, I like it. I still love it, but I think ah the older I've gotten, the more I like the first game, Secret Monkey Island. And I think Curse of Monkey Island, because Escape from Monkey Island was so bad, think it has kind of benefited Sure.
01:29:21
Speaker
It's not bad at all. like i'm I'm just not going to say anything because I like that game. I did a whole defensive video on it. I think it's miserable. i tried to play it again ah well a couple years ago and holy cow, that game...
01:29:36
Speaker
Oh, I have not returned to the world of whatever island that took place. It took place on a bunch of islands. It did, yeah. Yeah, and it had like ah had like a Starbucks joke.
01:29:47
Speaker
Like, anyway. i Also, I want to say we haven't... We haven't covered Grim Fandango yet either. And that, I mean, that's a very special game to me. That's my favorite game of all time.
01:29:59
Speaker
ah So I don't know. yeah it's Yeah, it's incredible. Neil, did you know I have a Grim Fandango tattoo? um Maybe. it's im Somehow I'm not surprised, but I i can't recall if I've seen it. I'll show you after the show. But it's yeah, that's how much I love Grim Fandango is that I've gotten a permanent reference on my body because I like it that much.
01:30:25
Speaker
That's a good one. I mean, i i have a ton of swag. I have Grim Fandango coffee mug. i have Nice. um My wife commissioned ah some original art of Manny and Glottis.
01:30:39
Speaker
Oh, Glottis. I love Glottis. Glottis is great. um But, well, Matt, what's your final Dare to Dream opinion? Oh, my goodness. ah You know, I actually, I'm glad we had this conversation because I think I closed that game going just thinking,
01:30:55
Speaker
ah I think I felt very negatively about it, right? Like it's I thought it was charming in that way of um
01:31:05
Speaker
old sort of underdeveloped adventure games. um yeah But i I hadn't, I didn't know the story of Cliff Bleszinski's childhood yet.
01:31:16
Speaker
And um talking about it, um I was realizing like, it's really just solving the puzzles that That is the only thing about that that that game that I feel negatively about. Everything else I kind of really enjoyed. um but So i don't know. i I wouldn't suggest people play it without a walkthrough. But I people like ah just people play it.
01:31:42
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. i was I was looking for like... I was i wish that there was a UHS file for it or something. Because... um it is a game that benefits if you get stuck and if you really need hint you should get a hint instead of just getting instructions because you could just get like a little clue and you might figure it out because there's really not that much you can do in the game like it's not that complicated um it's just like you probably have better things to be doing with your life
01:32:14
Speaker
and and and they don't make like the things that you're doing there's not a lot of options but the things that you end up doing don't make sense it's hard to make them make sense even in retrospect so and i think that's why the game has been mostly forgotten um and doesn't really have much cult status.
01:32:34
Speaker
Right. Also because it's it's a Windows 3.1 game and people weren't booting up Windows 3.1 to play games aside from Ski Free and Chip's
Playing Retro Games Today
01:32:44
Speaker
Challenge. Yeah.
01:32:46
Speaker
One thing we haven't said so far, it is on archive.org. You can just go on archive.org. You can play it in browser. Yes. it's hooked It's hooked up through DOSBox in browser and you just play the whole game. It gets a little quirky if you're tabbing between that and a walkthrough. I had to restart chapter three several times.
01:33:06
Speaker
I also had a weird internet connection at the time. So maybe it was that. Is that how you played it, Rose's? Yeah, I played it in browser. um I, at you know, I do.
01:33:17
Speaker
I'm a big emulation person. I have some original hardware. I don't fuck with Windows 3.1. I think it's difficult to emulate a lot of the time. So I was happy to just play it in browser, to be honest. That is nice. I gotta say that i legit, like, installed Windows 98 in DOSBox.
01:33:36
Speaker
Wow. In RetroArch. Wow. So just so I could play it on my big screen with like a nice CRT filter over it. yeah so I set up the virtual processor to like just the right speed so that the cut scenes moved correctly.
01:33:54
Speaker
And I just played it like in the dark at night and it it kind of rules. ah so I'm like drooling over here. That sounds amazing. i always i almost never take the time to do things like that, like playing retro games in the style that they were originally.
01:34:13
Speaker
and think it's a little tough. So is is that is that something you do often, Neil, when you play older games? Sometimes, well, for video game police, sometimes we'll do, um you know, mid-90s Windows games that might not work correctly. And even if you have like VirtualBox, Windows XP, like there can be problems.
01:34:33
Speaker
Absolutely. For like obscure shovelware stuff. And so I do sometimes like put in the the effort and and try to give myself a virtual machine that I can install something properly.
01:34:46
Speaker
And even then, it doesn't always work. it's you know It's true. We had that span, and that the those years where it was really hard to run some of these games. And i'm i'm still i'm I call them like the mid-Windows years. Windows 3.1 was kind of tough, too. But there's this game called the Black Dahlia. It's a murder mystery FMV game.
01:35:10
Speaker
and i still can't get that shit to run it is like eight cds and i had ah a compact i had a windows 98 machine and it barely ran so
01:35:22
Speaker
well yeah it's tough yeah it's tough it's tough to run those games uh yeah a lot of the time i i look up advice and people just say like yeah you need to build like you need to get the parts for a 90s computer and just build one and run it on that Yeah, because i we all have time for that.
01:35:41
Speaker
um Well, Neil, it's been a real pleasure having you on Save Your Game.
Neil on Adventure Games
01:35:47
Speaker
Thank you for thank you for coming. Thank you. Yeah, i think I think, Neil, I think you've been um like the most enthusiastic about adventure games that we've had, where I know that I can say, you know, LSL2, and you'll know what I'm talking about.
01:36:05
Speaker
Oh, yeah, that pervert.
01:36:09
Speaker
That is the correct response, yes. there's Yeah, well, a lot of times we have developers on, and they're fucking sick of these things. They're so of adventure games at this point. Yeah.
01:36:21
Speaker
Well, i because I spent... All right, so I was working on Icon Architect like from... 2010, like over 10 years from when I started tinkering around in Adventure Game Studio and like trying to customize the engine to when I had a partially, you know, complete first act of the game and kind of petered out.
01:36:44
Speaker
um And during that time, I like spent so much time thinking about um Adventure Game design and what is what I like about retro style adventure games and what I like about the genre in general.
01:36:57
Speaker
um ah that i I've become more opinionated about adventure games over the years because I was developing one. And ah that actually makes it hard to go back to a lot of games because I i i get more frustrated with um with their quirks of modern games and old games.
01:37:17
Speaker
Yeah. So I feel like I am a harsher critic now, but I'm also willing to just enjoy how goofy they can be. Oh, yeah, absolutely.
01:37:29
Speaker
um Is there anything that, ah before we go for the dismount, is there anything that you ah have been, is there anything
Promotions and New Projects
01:37:41
Speaker
you want to promote? Is there anything you got coming up that you want people to keep an eye out for?
01:37:45
Speaker
ah Not coming up. Video Game Police, of course, is on. um it's If you Google it, it'll just show you games with video video games with police in them. But if you go to...
01:37:59
Speaker
We're not good at SEO, but if you go to the YouTube channel, if you go to the YouTube channel, guaranteed video, yeah um they they upload there. We do live premieres if they're not actually live.
01:38:11
Speaker
And I also want to promote a game. The one game I successfully made and published, which is called Monster Breeder. And it's monsterbreeder.com. You play it in browser.
01:38:23
Speaker
um And that's kind of a simulation. It's got some um sort of RPG exploration elements. um And that's a game where you collect real monsters um from folklore and pop culture.
01:38:38
Speaker
You bring them back to your ranch and then you mate them together to create bad puns. LAUGHTER And then you sell them to perspective brought to prospect prospective buyers based on my experience ah with my family breeding cats back in the 2000s. Oh, shit. Wow.
01:38:59
Speaker
I think I played that back in the day. That's ah several years old now, right? Yeah, I think it was 2018 when I yeah finished it, something like that. But um I'm still proud of it. I do little updates here and there every now and then.
01:39:11
Speaker
um But it's a pretty playable game that I think adventure game fans would enjoy just because it's ah comedic and um feels like something you'd play in the dark on an old computer.
01:39:23
Speaker
For sure. Matt, do you have anything to plug? Actually, as a matter of fact, I know I'm leading you right to it. Thank you. ah Me and my friend Pat Reber just launched a new podcast called Mutant Menace, where we dissect and riff on the...
01:39:50
Speaker
original issues of the x-men uh we do it a couple issues per episode uh episode one should be out right now where we talk about all the weird shit that happens in x-men one through six and oh way back in 1963 and then um wow starting i think next episode will uh release tomorrow ah the day after this is released so uh april 3rd and you know we'll be talking about the next six uh seven through 12 um it's a fun little project that's a great idea ah comics were so wild back then and great i love the x-men dearly all eras of it but there's a lot to there's a lot to talk about a lot to make fun of
01:40:40
Speaker
Was it the X-Men we know and love back then, or was it like a completely different cast? Well, so some some would be the same. So there was Cyclops Iceman, Jean Grey, who was called Marvel Girl at the time, and Beast, but Beast wasn't wasn't blue and furry. it was just a guy with big hands and feet.
01:41:00
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Wonderful. In the first couple first couple issues, he's not even particularly smart. Like, Stan Lee makes a kind of a throwaway gag in one of the issues where...
01:41:12
Speaker
ah Beast is going through some difficult training routine and he says, you gave this to me because I'm the smartest one, right? It's clearly ah joke. And then suddenly the next issue, he's doing trigonometry with his feet. It's like Stanley was probably just kind of like skimming the previous issue. Like, okay, what was the deal with this guy? Oh, smart. Okay. Uh...
01:41:37
Speaker
um so you know there's still it's it's wild how much stan lee and jack kirby set up in the first you know their first 19 issue run but it's so you know it's still so different things are there's so much that's being that they're they're building the what's what's the phrase building the plane while it's in the air um so what really fascinating um
01:42:06
Speaker
I've never heard of that the No?
Creative Process and Political Action
01:42:08
Speaker
Is it building the car while it's driving? I don't... Hey, you you get the... Sure. You get the metaphor, though. um So, yeah, edit check it out. It's Mutant Menace.
01:42:19
Speaker
You find it any any podcast place. ah Roses, do you have anything you want to talk about? I feel like go to my channel and watch my stuff. Hell yeah. I do. I am working on something kind of fascinating. ah and don't know if you...
01:42:36
Speaker
ah fine men are a fan of the monkeys but I am and I will be covering one of the monkeys split off in the 80s and did his own visual record called Elephant Parts it won the first Grammy for the category of music video in 1982 I think that is fascinating I think that nobody knows that and I'm going to be doing a video on that so you can look out for that in the future That sounds really awesome. um i
01:43:07
Speaker
At this point here, I usually promote some of the economic blackout dates that people have been, um you know, a little bit of political action that we can promote. i At this point, though, um I think there's some more important things going on than just ah protesting the companies that, ah you know, ah supported Donald Trump, I think, and and demolished their DEI programs and stuff.
01:43:36
Speaker
I don't know what the effect of political action is right now, but I think the two things that I am paying the most attention to at the moment are the deportations. There was a um in Massachusetts just today.
01:43:51
Speaker
There was a student who was, you know, ah arrested at school on campus, on the campus of... What's that? Tufts. On the campus of Tufts. There was a national protest day happening across the country on April Go to to your local action
01:44:21
Speaker
if not, um you know, donating to civil rights ah groups um that are challenging these things in court. And um the other big concerning thing right now is the pressure that the Department of Education is putting on universities, like Columbia University just folded a lot of its, um just changed a lot of its curriculum. And, you know, um I think,
01:44:50
Speaker
So the other thing that could use your money and your energy right now are ah writing to universities that haven't caved and showing your support and ah donating to, you know, universities that if you're an alumni, alumni of a certain university, they could probably use your financial support because, you know, things are rough out there. So yeah that's what I'm going to promote this episode.
01:45:17
Speaker
And hey, everybody stay safe. and Stay sane. Yeah, that's becoming ah more and more difficult. As it gets scarier, I just, yeah, I feel like we do have to, every episode mentions something you can do because I know how, i yeah, I just know how terrifying it's getting out there.
Closing Reflections on Art
01:45:35
Speaker
Anyway! yeah
01:45:37
Speaker
Neil, again, thank you for being on the show. It was a lot of fun. We will see you again on the episode where we cover Curse of Monkey Island. We're going to do Palace of Deceit.
01:45:50
Speaker
Oh, yes! And ah yeah, check us out. Save Your Game Podcast at Instagram. I've promoted enough stuff. Roses.
01:46:03
Speaker
You know what I was thinking about today while I was sleeping and waking up and sleeping and waking up and sleeping and waking up? I was thinking to myself, you know, podcasts is art.
01:46:14
Speaker
Yeah. And art is suffer.