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Road Rash with Alex Faciane!
21 Plays2 months ago
We welcome Alex Faciane from Beard Bros and the Chilluminati podcast to discuss Road Rash! Which might be one of the worst stories we've ever read somehow.
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Transcript
California Bureaucracy and Freedom Fantasies
00:00:00
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there's all this extra horse shit that we all have to do because we're like the biggest state where there's so much going on.
00:00:06
Speaker
Like we have all this money.
00:00:08
Speaker
We're trying to like do all these things.
00:00:10
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And the way that our giant school system works, the way that our giant cops work and the way that our giant traffic system works is that they have to have something to do.
00:00:19
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And it just sucks.
00:00:21
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There's no, you know, the utopia, the Jetsons.
00:00:24
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Yeah.
00:00:24
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Oh yeah.
00:00:25
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What it would be like if, you know.
00:00:29
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Right.
00:00:30
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Nelson Mandela never died in jail or whatever.
00:00:35
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Like, I just feel like we're never going to get there because of the same reason I have to wait in line to go to the doctor.
00:00:42
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It's just like bureaucracy.
00:00:44
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That's exactly it.
00:00:46
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It's the Warhammer 40K of it all in Los Angeles.
00:00:50
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It's 100,000 D6s and you've got to count each one individually.
00:00:57
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Sometimes I just want to
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save up thousands of dollars and spend two to three years driving across America on a motorcycle.
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You know what I mean?
00:01:08
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Yeah.
00:01:08
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Oh, yes.
00:01:08
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Yeah.
00:01:09
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You know who else wants to drive across the country on a motorcycle?
00:01:14
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Yeah.
00:01:15
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Who's that?
00:01:15
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My namesake.
00:01:18
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Hey there, everybody.
00:01:19
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Welcome back to Pixel.
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My name
Introduction to Pixel Podcast and Guest Alex Fasciane
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is Kevin.
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With me, as always, Phil.
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And on today's show, we got a special guest, Alex Fasciane.
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From the Chiluminati podcast.
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He is here.
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Hi.
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For reasons that are evident in the title of the podcast episode.
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We're talking road rash.
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To learn that sometimes things just go exactly how you want and nothing ever really gets in your way.
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Nothing gets you in any way.
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You just sometimes you don't, you, you never have to overcome.
00:01:46
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Yeah.
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A happy life, happy ending.
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The girl
Exploring 'Road Rash' Mechanics and Life Parallels
00:01:50
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that you, that you love falls straight into your lap and you get out before one last big job.
00:01:57
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You really don't have to have a personality of any kind to attract her, by the way.
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Do you want to know why this guy's name is Alex Player, by the way?
00:02:07
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The character from Road Rash, the game?
00:02:09
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I was assuming it's because like a player one, player two kind of thing.
00:02:14
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That's where my head was at.
00:02:15
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It's literally in the game, you're player A and player B. So you're A player, Alex Player.
00:02:20
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Jesus Christ.
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Oh my God.
00:02:23
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Yeah.
00:02:24
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See, because you guys were talking before the show started about having played.
00:02:28
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I never played Road Rash.
00:02:30
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I know nothing.
00:02:31
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I have a mystery game.
00:02:32
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I have a mystery right here.
00:02:33
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I literally booted up.
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I played through.
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Literally, the game works like this.
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There are the courses.
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There's the Sierra Nevada course.
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There's the Palm Desert course.
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There's the...
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The Pacific Coast course.
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They're all there.
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They're 5.5 miles.
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If you get fourth place on all of them, and you get a little money, you can buy bikes by name, right?
00:02:54
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And then you go to the next one, and it's exactly that.
00:02:57
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It's 7.5 miles, all of them.
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And then you beat all those.
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And then it's whatever it is, 15 miles or whatever it is.
00:03:02
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And...
Sega vs. Nintendo: Cultural Game Differences
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It's just that.
00:03:04
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That's the game.
00:03:05
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Vipers in the game.
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Natasha's in the game.
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Slater's in the game.
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O'Leary's in the game.
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O'Shea's in the game.
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Everyone's in the game.
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The bar is in the game.
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Last Chance.
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Pops.
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The whole thing.
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Everything.
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The dialogue in the game.
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The only dialogue that's spoken aloud in the game almost is all written and exists in the game Road Rash.
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Like Natasha, I remember the thing she said about like
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Oh, you know, I forget what the she said, some badass quote.
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And it's like I literally the first time you see her and everybody in the game, by the way, like he says, it's the most beautiful woman he's ever seen.
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Everybody looks like Phineas and Ferb in the game.
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Everybody's like.
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You know when like Disney makes a Pixar movie and it's like this precious, beautiful, evocative thing.
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And then when DreamWorks makes a movie, it's like an animal looking at the camera like he blew up a factory full of children.
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Nuts, the movie from Dreamworks.
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Yeah.
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Nuts.
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Suck on them.
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That's how all the portraits look in Road Rash of all the characters, but it's literally everyone.
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This has made me the worst book I've ever read in my life.
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It's and here's the thing, and I will tell you something.
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We have read a lot of bad books on the show and including World of Power books, which is the better known Nintendo Entertainment System collection
Old Video Game Novelizations and Their Charm
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version.
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Yeah.
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But and it's really funny because we before the show started, we were talking about being Sega kids as opposed to like, you know, Nintendo and that sort of thing.
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You can actually tell the difference in the culture of Sega versus Nintendo from these books.
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Oh, yeah.
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This one's just a little darker.
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It's a little rougher.
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It came from the system that brought you Altered Beast.
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You know what I mean?
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It's that kind of shit.
00:05:01
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Yes.
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It came from the Sonic world.
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It has dude.
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She fucking says he says shit.
00:05:07
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Can I cuss on the show?
00:05:09
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I'm sorry.
00:05:09
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Oh, of course.
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Yeah.
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Sonic, the thing that was crazy about this book for me, right, is that I was like, I bought, you sent me like some, I forget what the website is, but there's a great website out there that allows you to read all these old retro books.
00:05:25
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Oh, is that back up, Kevin?
00:05:27
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I don't think retro reading time might be back up.
00:05:30
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I'm not sure.
00:05:30
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Okay.
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Whatever it is.
00:05:31
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Retro reading time is the thing that it was.
00:05:33
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But this thing, I ingested it into my Kindle through my third-party Kindle app.
Influential Childhood Authors and Storytelling Passion
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And you calibrate the EPUB file to fit on the Kindle.
00:05:49
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And when you're reading a book that you don't particularly like or that you're doing for research, which, good Lord, do I read a lot of books that I don't want to read.
00:05:57
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But yeah.
00:05:58
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You look at the number in the corner and you go, okay, like there's like a thousand positions in this book or however many pages it is.
00:06:05
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And then you go down and I was like, okay, so there's like a thousand.
00:06:07
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And I was like, I'm kind of, I'm kind of zooming through this.
00:06:11
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Like I was like, this is a, this is an easy book to read.
00:06:14
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And then, yeah.
00:06:16
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And then I get to the, to the 80, the 80% mark on my Kindle.
00:06:20
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And it's like the end.
00:06:22
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And I was like, what?
00:06:28
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And then it was like, here's the review.
00:06:30
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Yeah, here's the review and some other stuff.
00:06:32
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And that's when I realized, ah, Sega Power is the name of a magazine.
00:06:36
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I remember this magazine.
00:06:37
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It's a UK magazine.
00:06:39
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And that's why it says, Roses, all over the book.
00:06:43
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And it was a bit quiff.
00:06:46
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And like, there's a part.
00:06:49
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There's three things in the glossary.
00:06:51
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One of them is, I think it's Rosers.
00:06:53
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One of them is quiff, which just means like by a hair.
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And like, you know, a quiff, like Superman has one.
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And then the last one was like a specific guy's name.
00:07:02
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And I Googled this man because I didn't realize that there was going to be a glossary.
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And it turns out he's like the Turkey Baron of the fucking UK.
00:07:10
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And that he's like, I'm no chicken.
00:07:12
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And if you saw Matthew B.
00:07:14
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Bellamy or whatever the fuck his name was like that.
00:07:16
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You know, I didn't run like I wasn't some chicken who would run at the name Matthew Bellamy.
00:07:20
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And it turns out that guy is killed.
00:07:22
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He's responsible for the death of two hundred and fifty thousand turkeys.
00:07:27
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He brought lunch meat to the UK, baby.
00:07:30
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This guy is the uncle penny bags of cold cuts.
00:07:34
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And he gets a name drop in a book that's set in the Sierra Nevada in California.
00:07:40
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Hypothetically, California.
00:07:43
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Yeah, so Phil, did you look up the author, Phil?
00:07:49
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I did.
00:07:51
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Who wrote this book and why?
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This is Neil West, who is, as best as I can tell, a YA author, or was at least at some point,
00:08:05
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had some success over in the UK.
00:08:07
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Yeah, my hint was when, I think it was the first or second page, referring to money as Dosh.
00:08:15
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Oh yeah, Dosh, that was the other word, yeah.
00:08:17
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A whole lot of Dosh, and I was like, oh, oh, okay.
00:08:21
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But yeah, he's written several YA novels.
00:08:25
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Possibly the greatest title that I've ever seen by him was called Holly the Freak.
00:08:31
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Oh, shit.
00:08:32
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Okay.
00:08:32
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Most of my information on him, because he is very much not online, most of my information on him comes from a primary school's Weebly blog from
00:08:46
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And they invited Mr. West to their school to talk about being an author.
00:08:54
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It was like a show and tell of being an author.
Inviting Game Authors to the Podcast
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And this page has comments.
00:09:02
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I'm,
00:09:03
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assuming requirement comments like you did to get a passing mark.
00:09:08
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You got to you got to make sure you leave a comment or something like that.
00:09:12
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And so we've got these we've got it starts with Neil West is a famous author.
00:09:16
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He's published many different books.
00:09:18
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One of those books that we are focusing on is called Holly the Freak.
00:09:21
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And, you know, it goes into a little bit more into his full time author.
00:09:26
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Some of the questions I will ask him include, will you explain the difficulties of being an author?
00:09:30
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Tell me about the decisions you have to make on being an author, et cetera.
00:09:34
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It's fine.
00:09:34
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It's fine because you get down eight or nine more.
00:09:38
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And one of the comments is simply, Neil West is the author of Holly the Freak.
00:09:43
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That's it, it's over.
00:09:44
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That's like- Hell yeah.
00:09:45
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Hell yeah.
00:09:46
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There's not much to say.
00:09:47
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D plus.
00:09:48
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He looks just like me.
00:09:50
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There's nothing remarkable about his outfit or anything else that he's done.
00:09:53
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I just know that he wrote Holly the Freak, my favorite book of all time.
00:09:56
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Holly the Freak.
00:09:57
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Holly the Freak.
00:09:58
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We got a lot of people assuming he's a famous author.
00:10:02
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I'm not so sure.
00:10:04
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And mostly because he came to your primary school.
00:10:08
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So I'm not, I'm not making, I do the same thing.
00:10:12
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There's like, there's like 10 authors that don't come to your primary school though.
00:10:16
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Like real talk, especially in the UK.
00:10:18
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Let me be real.
00:10:18
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Let me be real.
00:10:19
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Like,
00:10:20
Speaker
You guys have been doing a podcast for a while now, right?
00:10:22
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Yeah.
00:10:22
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Like getting guests and whatnot.
00:10:24
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Yeah.
00:10:25
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Any comic book writer besides like four,
Challenging Media Content and Creativity
00:10:29
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right?
00:10:31
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Current ones that are writing X-Men and Batman and things like that.
00:10:35
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Fucking Tom King, fucking Grant Morrison will come on your podcast because they don't got that much going on.
00:10:42
Speaker
Like if you're the guy who wrote Sega Powers Road Rash.
00:10:47
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Yeah, this is there.
00:10:49
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That is a good point because we have had we got we had William C. Dietz, Bill Dietz, who wrote the first Halo novelization.
00:10:59
Speaker
Oh, man.
00:10:59
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What a what a hero to so many children.
00:11:04
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We got the guy who was FX9.
00:11:08
Speaker
What's his name?
00:11:10
Speaker
Seth Godin.
00:11:11
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Seth Godin.
00:11:12
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The freaking millionaire.
00:11:14
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He's like the original tech blogger.
00:11:17
Speaker
But before that, he started the Worlds of Power stuff.
00:11:20
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So yeah, we actually have, that's a good point.
00:11:23
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Authors tend to say yes because they don't have much else to do.
00:11:26
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They're not celebrities.
00:11:27
Speaker
Books are dying.
00:11:28
Speaker
Nobody can fucking read.
00:11:30
Speaker
We were talking about how my episodes are up their own ass on Chiluminati earlier.
00:11:34
Speaker
Honestly, the idea of creating something challenging for your reader, which like, you know, I don't want to get too into the weeds here, but like if you talk to, if you look at like BBC does something kind of like, uh,
00:11:48
Speaker
uh lynda.com or whatever that's called now where you like the courses the great courses plus yeah yeah where you can like subscribe and learn things from great minds oh yeah yeah yeah and so there was one with alan moore and he was talking about how like words are like magic and like you can like depending on like what words you say you can like like flower up your language and like and make it more interesting and more
00:12:12
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structured and complicated and it actually opens the brain.
00:12:16
Speaker
It actually makes you more receptive to language.
00:12:19
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It makes you more receptive to thinking in different ways and new ideas.
00:12:22
Speaker
And I feel like
00:12:25
Speaker
I feel like the average person today by losing the ability to read difficult things is kind of like choosing to go back in the matrix.
00:12:36
Speaker
I feel like a little bit, you know what I mean?
00:12:37
Speaker
Like at this point, it's very much that.
00:12:39
Speaker
Yeah.
00:12:39
Speaker
Yeah.
00:12:40
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It's, it's that.
00:12:41
Speaker
Yeah.
00:12:41
Speaker
The dude, the dude.
00:12:42
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Yeah.
00:12:43
Speaker
The steak.
00:12:43
Speaker
Exactly.
00:12:43
Speaker
It's the steak.
00:12:44
Speaker
It's delicious.
00:12:45
Speaker
Yeah.
00:12:47
Speaker
And the most uncomfortable steak eating I've ever seen in my life.
00:12:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:12:51
Speaker
And I was, and I was, I was, I was thinking about that because I, people are like,
00:12:56
Speaker
your episodes are weird.
00:12:57
Speaker
Like what's going on?
00:12:58
Speaker
And I'm like, open your fucking eye.
00:13:01
Speaker
Open your third eye.
00:13:01
Speaker
Like what am I trying to say?
00:13:03
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There must be some reason I'm choosing to be strange.
00:13:05
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Maybe I have some sort of intent.
00:13:07
Speaker
Maybe I'm trying to say something.
00:13:08
Speaker
Like I feel like, I feel like that.
00:13:12
Speaker
element is gone and so right though i feel like authors are so influential on us like i feel like when you're a kid you know you'll remember that first time you read a book that like blew your dick off you know what i mean like like right opened your brain right up and you realize like yeah i want to be a writer or whatever and like i just feel like that's uh
00:13:32
Speaker
you know, something so valuable, but we, you know, it's like teachers where we just like shit on them all day and like throw our piss at them or whatever we do.
In-depth Analysis of 'Road Rash' Book
00:13:41
Speaker
But I did want to, I did want to point out that Neil West in his dedication for this book said, this book was done for Oscar, but I'd like to thank a few people.
00:13:52
Speaker
Firstly, Jason, who taught me to know suffering.
00:13:56
Speaker
And I'm like, well, that earlier, I shared that in a discord.
00:14:01
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I was like, what, what is this?
00:14:02
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What is that?
00:14:04
Speaker
Why the guy in the book just doesn't struggle at all?
00:14:07
Speaker
Is that what's up?
00:14:08
Speaker
Like, yeah, we don't want suffering.
00:14:10
Speaker
I know suffering and I don't want my characters to feel like, you know, I don't know what I, obviously I've seen your guys's show art.
00:14:19
Speaker
So I got to imagine there's some beard bros love going on somewhere.
00:14:22
Speaker
Oh yeah.
00:14:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:14:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:14:24
Speaker
Jetpack's a, we love jetpack.
00:14:26
Speaker
But if you don't know, I'm from a show called Super Beard Brothers on YouTube.
00:14:30
Speaker
That is, if you're listening to this, that is one of the old, I would say, other than like the Game Grumps and Super Best Friends play.
00:14:38
Speaker
Yeah, you guys have been doing it for a long time.
00:14:39
Speaker
That's old school shit.
00:14:40
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:14:41
Speaker
I feel like we're one of the only ones that's still around.
00:14:43
Speaker
But before there were video Let's Plays, there was this guy, Slow Beef, who's still around and still like does streaming and stuff.
00:14:51
Speaker
He's still around.
00:14:52
Speaker
But back in the day, he invented my job.
00:14:57
Speaker
of let's player by and this was before you could capture video footage and stuff and edit video and upload it to youtube because youtube didn't exist i don't think at the time but he did it in this way where you could you kind of like it's like a travel blog
00:15:15
Speaker
your experience playing the game and and people would kind of like get creative with it uh right like put screenshots and there was like that's where the nuzlocke came from the popular like style of playing pokemon yeah yeah yeah where like if you get one you have to keep it you only get one per area and if it dies it's dead it's dead forever and if you lose you lose like right and it adds drama and it adds this thing and like
00:15:40
Speaker
In video games, right, you always win because it's like a fucking game.
00:15:44
Speaker
Like it's like a story that you do.
00:15:47
Speaker
And so the game like to win is just you're gonna have success, right?
00:15:50
Speaker
And so- Yeah, given enough time, yeah.
00:15:52
Speaker
I feel like this book Road Rash is just kind of like a let's play.
00:15:56
Speaker
Like it's like a player's, it's dead ass, it's a player's guide.
00:16:00
Speaker
There's a chapter that when we get to the chapter by chapter, there's a literal chapter that's like fucking like, here's a tip for combat.
00:16:08
Speaker
And it's just like, this is just a strategy guide.
00:16:11
Speaker
But even what he does, even what he does, like the bikes, like if you've never played Road Rash, literally the game is you get money when you do races.
00:16:20
Speaker
You can race as much as you want.
00:16:22
Speaker
And then you're like race, like prestigious.
00:16:26
Speaker
Everybody's outfit changes.
Patreon Promotion and Listener Interaction
00:16:27
Speaker
They all get the same new bike and you got to beat them again.
00:16:30
Speaker
Right.
00:16:31
Speaker
And that's the game.
00:16:32
Speaker
And that's literally exactly what happens.
00:16:34
Speaker
And he even gives you the tip that you start on the Shuriken 400, but then you want to go not to the not to the Kamikaze 750, but you want to go to the the Banzai or whatever it was called.
00:16:45
Speaker
The other one, the other.
00:16:46
Speaker
Because you need the better handling.
00:16:48
Speaker
Right.
00:16:48
Speaker
Because the fast bikes can't even go all over the road.
00:16:51
Speaker
And it's like,
00:16:53
Speaker
Are you like, I was like, what the fuck?
00:16:54
Speaker
Are you just telling me how to fucking?
00:16:56
Speaker
Are you just telling me how to beat the game?
00:16:57
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:58
Speaker
And then, and then I'm like, what are these?
00:17:00
Speaker
Cause he talks about the, the HUD of the game also.
00:17:03
Speaker
Right.
00:17:03
Speaker
The HUD of the game is on, on the crossbar of the bike.
00:17:07
Speaker
It's on the bar of the motorcycle.
00:17:08
Speaker
He's got like speed racer technology, but,
00:17:12
Speaker
Then at the beginning of each chapter, because I was in the mountains and you guys sent me this EPUB and then like much more recently you sent me a PDF of it.
00:17:21
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:17:22
Speaker
And I was like, oh, you know, I already ingested it.
00:17:26
Speaker
And I don't know if you read the EPUB or the PDF, but...
00:17:29
Speaker
Sometimes when you digitize EPUBs or whatever, like some of the words.
00:17:34
Speaker
And so I thought there was some sort of like fucked up thing happening.
00:17:38
Speaker
But literally every time he goes up in chapter, he gives you a password.
00:17:42
Speaker
It's a password to get to the next level.
00:17:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:17:44
Speaker
And it's just, it's not even.
00:17:46
Speaker
It's wild.
00:17:46
Speaker
He even says, I want to read the line before we get into this.
00:17:50
Speaker
He says something like, just to use my codes or something.
00:17:55
Speaker
Sure, sure.
00:17:55
Speaker
Yeah, just use my codes.
00:17:57
Speaker
I'm giving you the codes.
00:17:59
Speaker
It's the last paragraph of the book.
00:18:01
Speaker
He says, you still have your doubts.
00:18:02
Speaker
Put your money where your mouth is.
00:18:04
Speaker
You take on the 15 miles series five races.
00:18:06
Speaker
See how you manage.
00:18:08
Speaker
My money says you don't even make it to the finish line.
00:18:10
Speaker
You've got my password, so use it.
00:18:12
Speaker
I did.
00:18:13
Speaker
Use it.
00:18:14
Speaker
Buy Road Rash today.
00:18:16
Speaker
The next page has the actual price of Road Rash for Mega Drive, which is another giveaway.
00:18:21
Speaker
And then it literally says at the end of everything, 93%, which I thought was the...
00:18:27
Speaker
the score of the game, like in the magazine, but also could have been like how far through the EPUB file I was when the book ended.
00:18:34
Speaker
So yeah, I don't know.
00:18:35
Speaker
I don't know.
00:18:37
Speaker
Oh God.
00:18:39
Speaker
You know, you know who does know though is a wonderful website called patreon.com slash pixelate pod.
00:18:44
Speaker
Oh, wow.
00:18:46
Speaker
you can go yeah yeah it's a wonderful website and there you can go you can follow us for free you can follow us for free you can get into our discord for free it's a free discord free discord we got three tiers $1 $5 and $10 $1 gets you the ad free episode $5 gets you the bonus episode actually no gets you the fuck I forgot our tears hold on I've never forgotten our tears I have you have you have Phil has never done the pitch laughter
00:19:17
Speaker
I just think you do such a good job.
00:19:19
Speaker
$5 gets you the bonus episode before every episode.
00:19:25
Speaker
And $10 gets your name shouted out in every episode.
00:19:29
Speaker
And to that end, I want to thank Jesus Loves You, Kyle Seaman, Ruthless Mudder, Middle of Things, Sigma Sal, Jet, Beaks, Dummy Thick, and Friendly Friend.
00:19:37
Speaker
Thank you so much for being a friend.
00:19:38
Speaker
Your first two guys are Jesus Loves You.
00:19:40
Speaker
And what was the next one?
00:19:41
Speaker
Kyle Seaman.
00:19:43
Speaker
Kyle Seaman and Jesus Loves You.
00:19:44
Speaker
Hey, Jesus.
00:19:46
Speaker
Have you met my friend Kyle Seaman?
00:19:48
Speaker
There used to be a guy that his Patreon username was something like Kevin's dad nuts in him.
00:19:58
Speaker
Right.
00:19:58
Speaker
Yeah.
00:19:59
Speaker
And I was like, our fans are awesome.
00:20:01
Speaker
Some people just like to burn $10.
00:20:03
Speaker
You know, it was only on there for Mathis who just talked about that.
Further Critique of 'Road Rash' Book
00:20:08
Speaker
Mathis was on the show a couple, like a month or so ago.
00:20:13
Speaker
Might be the most cancelable episode of our show.
00:20:18
Speaker
What did you guys read?
00:20:20
Speaker
We read Master Blaster.
00:20:23
Speaker
Oh, boy.
00:20:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:20:24
Speaker
That's already, you're already fucked with Mathis right there.
00:20:26
Speaker
And it's aliens.
00:20:28
Speaker
It's about aliens.
00:20:30
Speaker
I love the game Master Blaster.
00:20:32
Speaker
Yeah, great game.
00:20:33
Speaker
Or Blaster Master.
00:20:34
Speaker
Blaster Master.
00:20:35
Speaker
Blaster Master?
00:20:36
Speaker
Whatever.
00:20:37
Speaker
Master Blaster was the one on the third match movie.
00:20:40
Speaker
The one where you're a car and then you're a man, right?
00:20:43
Speaker
Yeah, you're a car and a man.
00:20:45
Speaker
Car and a man, there's the top down and the side-strolling car stuff.
00:20:48
Speaker
Just because I'm this guy, if you guys like...
00:20:51
Speaker
video games into creates the people that made the zero games for Mega Man.
00:20:56
Speaker
They have been continuing to make Blaster Master games.
00:20:59
Speaker
They've made about three of them.
00:21:00
Speaker
Oh, oh yeah.
00:21:01
Speaker
Nintendo switch.
00:21:02
Speaker
You are stupid.
00:21:03
Speaker
If you haven't played those games, you are.
00:21:05
Speaker
They are dumbass.
00:21:06
Speaker
If you haven't bought.
00:21:07
Speaker
They are great.
00:21:08
Speaker
And it's amazing that they actually included stuff from the worlds of power.
00:21:14
Speaker
Novelization.
00:21:15
Speaker
in those games.
00:21:19
Speaker
It's the first time we've ever read a book that the novelization influenced the future games.
00:21:26
Speaker
It's just never happened with anything we've covered before.
00:21:29
Speaker
I'm interested in how that continues.
00:21:32
Speaker
I think this is a good idea for a podcast as somebody who also does a separate podcast that's all about reading books.
00:21:41
Speaker
Yeah.
00:21:42
Speaker
This is a very particularly good one because I kind of have a, I'm like a book junkie.
00:21:46
Speaker
Like, I don't know if you can tell.
00:21:47
Speaker
I have like a lot of books.
00:21:48
Speaker
Yeah, you got books back there, man.
00:21:50
Speaker
I'm a crazy, I'm a crazy asshole when it comes to books.
00:21:52
Speaker
Like I can read books.
00:21:53
Speaker
I was an English major in school, so I can read faster than a page a minute.
00:21:57
Speaker
I went through this Road Rash book in like, I don't know, an hour and 15 minutes maybe max.
00:22:02
Speaker
Yeah.
00:22:04
Speaker
I love reading these pulpy video game books because the thing about pulp, you know, and this is, I think like going along with what I was saying about plugging yourself into the matrix.
00:22:18
Speaker
Right.
00:22:18
Speaker
Is like, there's like art that is like, sort of like people care what it's like.
00:22:24
Speaker
Like when you, when you go to a family party, right.
00:22:27
Speaker
And you play music, there's like lots of opinions because music should be a certain way.
00:22:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:22:33
Speaker
But when you trod into the realm of like books based on video games that nobody even fucking knows the story.
00:22:41
Speaker
Like this, I invite you actually, if you have a sec, if you have a sec, you should open the player's guide or the manual.
00:22:50
Speaker
The instruction manual, yeah.
00:22:51
Speaker
To Road Rash.
00:22:52
Speaker
Because...
00:22:53
Speaker
Holy shit.
00:22:55
Speaker
Like this book sucks.
00:22:56
Speaker
First of all, I just want to say this book sucks.
00:22:58
Speaker
It's not a good book.
00:22:59
Speaker
The writing is very bad.
00:23:00
Speaker
There's this weird like vibe where he like somehow
00:23:05
Speaker
like to the reader, he's like painting us with this brush that we don't believe what the fuck he's talking about for some reason all the time.
00:23:11
Speaker
Yeah.
00:23:12
Speaker
Yeah.
00:23:13
Speaker
And we're always at odds with the, with the protagonist.
00:23:16
Speaker
Very antagonist.
00:23:17
Speaker
Yeah.
00:23:17
Speaker
And he can't like see where he is.
00:23:19
Speaker
Like his perception is like, he's looking through like the, he's like, I looked around for my bike and eventually my vision was covered in Brown.
00:23:28
Speaker
And I realized that was in front of a tree.
00:23:30
Speaker
I'm like,
00:23:31
Speaker
What the fuck are you talking about?
00:23:32
Speaker
Do you have brain damage?
00:23:34
Speaker
Look at the tree.
00:23:35
Speaker
What the fuck are you talking about?
00:23:37
Speaker
But pulp books are so interesting because that said...
00:23:45
Speaker
As a piece of fan service, as a book entrenched in the world of Road Rash, this shit is almost obsessive.
00:23:56
Speaker
I'm not a guess.
00:23:57
Speaker
Like, if you had spent your life playing Road Rash, if you played like a year, you know, back in the day, you get started with a game for four months.
00:24:04
Speaker
Yeah, the one game.
00:24:05
Speaker
Yeah.
00:24:05
Speaker
If you did that, if you like...
00:24:07
Speaker
rode this gauntlet and like learned how to be that good at the game and stuff.
00:24:13
Speaker
I feel like you'd like this book.
00:24:14
Speaker
I feel like by the end you're like, this is exactly what happened.
00:24:17
Speaker
And yes, I do want to fuck Natasha.
00:24:18
Speaker
This is me.
00:24:18
Speaker
This is my story.
00:24:19
Speaker
I've been looking at that one profile pic for a good long time.
00:24:21
Speaker
Yeah.
00:24:25
Speaker
The guy that I was most surprised by how he looks in the game compared to the book is Ikiru, Ikira.
00:24:31
Speaker
Yeah.
00:24:32
Speaker
The brother to Shiva.
00:24:33
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:24:35
Speaker
I never saw Shiva's face in the game, but I saw Akiru's and he's like one of those Japanese guys who like dresses like a greaser.
00:24:44
Speaker
Like who has the like, I forgot what they're called.
00:24:47
Speaker
The subculture's called.
00:24:48
Speaker
They have the like pompadour hair.
00:24:51
Speaker
Sure.
00:24:51
Speaker
They put their cigarettes right here.
00:24:53
Speaker
Yeah, it's like all the dudes from River City Ransom, basically.
00:24:56
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:24:57
Speaker
Basically, yeah.
00:24:58
Speaker
Like Yokohama street racing, mid-90s vibes, but like with that like little greaser flair.
00:25:07
Speaker
And it's just so interesting that
00:25:11
Speaker
Like, it feels like I did this.
00:25:14
Speaker
It feels like I did this for fun one night while I was fucking around and I like took a big hit of my fucking joint and I was like, you know what?
00:25:23
Speaker
There could be like a Fast and the Furious type situation here.
00:25:28
Speaker
No, I swear to God, I was like, this absolutely predicted the Fast and the Furious on so many levels.
Gameplay vs. Book Narrative in 'Road Rash'
00:25:35
Speaker
Dude, but the story of Fang and Polygon is lore.
00:25:38
Speaker
That's part of the game.
00:25:39
Speaker
That's not from this book.
00:25:40
Speaker
That's from the game.
00:25:42
Speaker
There's backstory to this.
00:25:45
Speaker
that is that is amazing uh that that that is because i i didn't look into the game that much uh i mean other than like oh yeah the fucking road rash i know what it is uh so sometimes uh sometimes i'll dive deep into a game like oh no yeah this is an addition in the book or or what have you but yeah the fact that the whole fang and polygon thing is is real lore uh you
00:26:10
Speaker
You can't believe it.
00:26:10
Speaker
It's literally like, let me just pull it up really quick.
00:26:12
Speaker
Hold on.
00:26:13
Speaker
I've got it right here.
00:26:14
Speaker
I got the manual right here.
00:26:17
Speaker
Why does this look different?
00:26:19
Speaker
Oh, here they are.
00:26:19
Speaker
Here they are.
00:26:21
Speaker
Oh, it is.
00:26:22
Speaker
This is a different version of the manual.
00:26:25
Speaker
Oh, this is the wrong game.
00:26:26
Speaker
This is for Road Rash 2.
00:26:26
Speaker
The fuck?
00:26:27
Speaker
Oh, shit.
00:26:29
Speaker
Don't fuck with me.
00:26:30
Speaker
Road Rash 2, by the way, if you've ever played it, looks exactly like Road Rash 1.
00:26:36
Speaker
The first three Mega Drive Genesis Road Rashes are basically the same.
00:26:43
Speaker
And then there's, because it's weird, they did Road Rash 1, Road Rash 2, Road Rash CD, and then, because they needed to do a CD version, but then there was like a third Genesis 1 after that.
00:26:56
Speaker
There's a 64 one.
00:26:57
Speaker
There's a PlayStation Road Rash 3D, which is the PlayStation PC one.
00:27:03
Speaker
But check this out.
00:27:04
Speaker
Check out this.
00:27:05
Speaker
I sent you the link.
00:27:06
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:07
Speaker
The language is like
00:27:12
Speaker
Sonic, it's like poochy language.
00:27:15
Speaker
Like, okay, look at page four of the manual.
00:27:18
Speaker
It says, history of the rash.
00:27:20
Speaker
The first fucking sentence is, no, the road rash didn't start in a galaxy far, far away, but it did start a long time ago.
00:27:28
Speaker
And then it goes into straight up the whole story of Fang and Polygon and everything.
00:27:32
Speaker
With Natasha.
00:27:33
Speaker
Yeah, it's all here.
00:27:35
Speaker
Yeah, it's all here.
00:27:36
Speaker
Natasha's in the game.
00:27:37
Speaker
This is word for word.
00:27:39
Speaker
Yeah, like no joke.
00:27:41
Speaker
It's all here.
00:27:43
Speaker
All the bikes are the right names, like the Shuriken 400.
00:27:46
Speaker
It literally is like the Bonsai 750, known for its tight handling and power at high revs.
00:27:51
Speaker
Kamikaze 750 has looser steering, but a lot more power.
00:27:55
Speaker
All the names of the things.
00:27:57
Speaker
And then go down to the Rashers and stuff, page 20.
00:28:01
Speaker
Oh, my God.
00:28:02
Speaker
You can see they're all here.
00:28:04
Speaker
Every single person mentioned in the game.
00:28:07
Speaker
Even the chick cop, they're all Irish, which is hilarious.
00:28:12
Speaker
It's O'Leary, O'Shea, O'Connor, and Officer Rourke, and Officer Flynn.
00:28:17
Speaker
Even though they barely even look like police.
00:28:22
Speaker
Officer Rourke looks like he's about to order a hit in a mafioso.
00:28:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:28:29
Speaker
Or sing Scatman, one of the other.
00:28:31
Speaker
Yeah, one of the two.
00:28:34
Speaker
So, yeah, let's dive into the chapter by chapter.
00:28:37
Speaker
Phil, you want to put the body in the marsh?
00:28:39
Speaker
Let's put the body in the marsh.
00:28:41
Speaker
When I tell you to dump a body in the marsh, you dump them.
00:28:48
Speaker
In the mind.
00:28:49
Speaker
All right.
00:28:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:28:50
Speaker
So the book Road Rash, we start with chapter one, begins with our main character, Player.
00:28:58
Speaker
His name is literally Player.
00:28:59
Speaker
Beefing it hardcore on a Shuriken 400 motorbike, he's recently quit his job and cashed out his savings to cruise the open road when he gets distracted by a hot girl on a faster bike.
00:29:09
Speaker
And then a mean dude wielding a club.
00:29:12
Speaker
He crashed his bike going head first in a tree, which makes me think that the entire story that follows at this point is just the last synapses of a dying brain.
00:29:20
Speaker
Yes, because they keep they keep fucking slamming into trees and the sides of wall.
00:29:27
Speaker
They're made out of rubber.
00:29:29
Speaker
So that's the only thing that makes sense.
00:29:32
Speaker
He leaves dents in the trees with his head.
00:29:33
Speaker
And he's like, I guess it's time to start looking where you're riding, player.
00:29:40
Speaker
What?
00:29:41
Speaker
What the fuck are you talking about?
00:29:43
Speaker
Start looking where you're driving.
00:29:46
Speaker
How are you alive?
00:29:47
Speaker
Meanwhile, in the real world.
00:29:49
Speaker
Yeah, he's gone.
00:29:51
Speaker
He's gone.
00:29:52
Speaker
He's gone.
00:29:52
Speaker
He's gone.
00:29:53
Speaker
Yeah, that brain is that's the brain is stopped.
00:29:57
Speaker
The suddenly there's a cop there and arrests him for being a rasher, takes him down to the station where he meets a cellmate named Slater.
00:30:04
Speaker
And Slater, that's just a coolest name ever.
00:30:06
Speaker
Right.
00:30:07
Speaker
That's like that was like that was literally the coolest name in the early 90s.
00:30:10
Speaker
Slater.
00:30:11
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:11
Speaker
Because A.C.
00:30:12
Speaker
Slater, who then Mario Lopez.
00:30:15
Speaker
AC Slater, Mark McGrath, Mark McGrath, Sugar Ray, full circle.
00:30:20
Speaker
We're all there.
00:30:21
Speaker
And we're all back.
00:30:22
Speaker
And Christian Slater was also Mr. Robot.
00:30:25
Speaker
Mr. Robot himself.
00:30:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:29
Speaker
So Slater realizes that he that this guy ain't no rasher and then proceeds to start telling him what a rasher is.
00:30:36
Speaker
And it's a story that will change players life forever.
00:30:40
Speaker
Oh, by the way, we have to say the Shuriken 400 racing bike.
00:30:44
Speaker
He says, costing a whacking $4,000 of hard-earned Dosh, I might add.
00:30:50
Speaker
Yeah, there it is.
00:30:51
Speaker
There it is.
00:30:51
Speaker
A whacking $4,000.
00:30:56
Speaker
Harder and Dosh.
00:30:57
Speaker
That should say GBP.
00:30:58
Speaker
Let's be honest.
00:31:00
Speaker
GBP.
00:31:01
Speaker
There's also like this weird, and I forget, I forgot, I didn't put it down which chapter it was in, but he talks about how he's like, the name Sierra Nevada, that sounds familiar.
00:31:12
Speaker
I don't know what that means.
00:31:13
Speaker
Like he says that multiple times.
00:31:16
Speaker
He's like, it's fucking California.
00:31:18
Speaker
All of it's California, bro.
00:31:19
Speaker
It's a pretty well-known part of California.
00:31:21
Speaker
The whole game is California.
00:31:23
Speaker
But at one point, it's like, we went across the country.
00:31:26
Speaker
And we're like, no, you never left California.
00:31:27
Speaker
And it's like, dude, in Road Riding 2, you literally do go across the country.
00:31:32
Speaker
So just chill.
00:31:33
Speaker
Maybe this one's just set in the coast of California.
00:31:35
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:36
Speaker
Need for Speed Most Wanted.
00:31:38
Speaker
Yeah, you're riding up and down the PCH.
00:31:40
Speaker
It's fine.
00:31:41
Speaker
We're cool.
00:31:42
Speaker
You know, that's plenty of games can take place in California.
00:31:45
Speaker
Yeah, we hear the story.
00:31:48
Speaker
This is the story that we got from in Chapter two about Fang and Polygon.
00:31:52
Speaker
They grew up together, stealing bikes and riding them as fast and hard as possible.
00:31:56
Speaker
Then one day they meet an old mechanic who shows them the art of motorcycle maintenance.
00:32:00
Speaker
which to me means that the author just like saw saw the title Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance and was like, this is a good reference.
00:32:10
Speaker
Also, I want to point out chapter two literally does start out with it all started a long, long time ago.
00:32:16
Speaker
So you know this motherfucker read these instructions and just straight up copied them.
00:32:22
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:22
Speaker
No, well, that's it though.
00:32:25
Speaker
When he tells the story of the background, this is word for word from the instruction book because it struck me because one of the things that when they're like, all right, you're going to meet me the Pacific coast at noon tomorrow and bring a doctor.
00:32:40
Speaker
And I remember being like, oh yeah, that's the 80sest shit I've ever heard in my life.
00:32:44
Speaker
And then Fang brought his doctor.
00:32:46
Speaker
But it was more like, wait, what?
00:32:47
Speaker
You actually brought a fucking doctor?
00:32:50
Speaker
Yeah, that's the tag for the whole fucking game.
00:32:53
Speaker
After you read the history of the rash, it's like punching, kicking, and clubbing at 150 miles an hour are the norm for rashers.
00:33:00
Speaker
Dot, dot, dot.
00:33:01
Speaker
Enter, enter, dot, dot, dot.
00:33:03
Speaker
But there are no doctors present.
00:33:06
Speaker
Right.
00:33:09
Speaker
so uh they spang and polygon spent all their time focusing on racing not even getting drunk or nothing uh the old man yeah they're too cool for that stuff uh the old man tries to impart one final lesson on them learning some control which they ignore uh the old man dies in his sleep and
00:33:30
Speaker
And leaves them his garage, which was worthless, but then also his prized motorcycle, which is faster than anything ever.
00:33:37
Speaker
They decide they're going to have a race between themselves to see who gets it.
00:33:41
Speaker
Chapter three is the night of the race.
00:33:43
Speaker
Things have become acrimonious between Polygon and Fang.
00:33:47
Speaker
They're not talking anymore.
00:33:48
Speaker
And Polygon decides to play a little dirty in order to win the bike.
00:33:52
Speaker
So when Fang was distracted by another racer named O'Shea, Polygon and his gal Natasha sneak into Fang's garage and cut his brake lines.
00:34:01
Speaker
Natasha, by the way, will only stay with Polygon as long as he's winning.
00:34:05
Speaker
She doesn't dig on losers.
00:34:07
Speaker
And this like character trait of Natasha's is like never really expanded upon.
00:34:13
Speaker
Because he wins every fucking race in the entire story.
00:34:15
Speaker
Yeah, because also O'Shea in the instructions is a cop is a cop.
00:34:22
Speaker
And he looks like fucking cop.
00:34:24
Speaker
If you look at his picture, he looks like a guy from Streets of Rage.
00:34:28
Speaker
Like he looks like a. Yeah, he looks like he killed the cop and put on his on his shirt and is like, yeah, he looks like the worst kind of cop, which would have been really interesting, actually.
00:34:42
Speaker
That could have been a really interesting detail.
00:34:44
Speaker
In the addition to the story, he looks like... If you can call it a story.
00:34:47
Speaker
Yeah, if you can call it a story.
00:34:48
Speaker
He looks like he's going to show up in another chapter wearing a palette swap, and he's just a little bit more difficult to take down.
00:34:56
Speaker
Big time.
00:34:56
Speaker
Big time.
00:34:58
Speaker
And it's going to be his name is going to be like, oh, Shaw.
00:35:01
Speaker
His name is going to be just now it's going to be evil cop instead.
00:35:06
Speaker
Evil cop one.
00:35:07
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:07
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:10
Speaker
So chapter four, back in the jail cell, player demands to know what happened next because it's a cliffhanger.
00:35:16
Speaker
And then it's like the story like kind of peters out.
00:35:19
Speaker
So Slater's like, yeah, they raised Fang crashed and Polygon was banned from the racing circuit.
00:35:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:27
Speaker
And it's just like, yeah.
00:35:28
Speaker
And then Natasha didn't like him anymore because he's a loser.
00:35:30
Speaker
Goodbye.
00:35:32
Speaker
Goodbye.
00:35:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:33
Speaker
And that's never.
00:35:34
Speaker
And yeah, as you said, that's never expanded on the the that maybe being with a woman who will leave you with a moment that you are down and out.
00:35:43
Speaker
That's never examined as a negative because, of course, our hero is the special boy who will continue to be special boy and it won't matter.
00:35:51
Speaker
So special boy winner.
00:35:54
Speaker
They they have another race.
00:35:56
Speaker
It's the first road rash.
00:35:59
Speaker
Fang ends up crashing and breaking both of his legs, never to race again.
00:36:03
Speaker
And Polygon would die a few years later in a separate accident.
00:36:07
Speaker
But it set the stage for road rashes, which became huge betting events.
00:36:11
Speaker
Slater then explains the bureaucracy that oversees the road rash, the rules, what they do when rashers are arrested, how the best racer out there right now is this Japanese guy named Shiva.
00:36:23
Speaker
And apparently his cousin Ikiru might be even faster.
00:36:27
Speaker
Do you want to know something about Ikiru?
00:36:29
Speaker
Just because I got it here because I went deep on this because I was so charmed.
00:36:33
Speaker
His name is Ikira.
00:36:34
Speaker
And it says, he's the coolest export from Japan since the Sega.
00:36:39
Speaker
He's into the American scene, which happens to include unnecessary violence.
00:36:43
Speaker
Well...
00:36:46
Speaker
I mean, kind of.
00:36:49
Speaker
He's in the right place.
00:36:51
Speaker
He'll do real well here.
00:36:53
Speaker
Just a nice, it's a good, it's a nice damning indictment of Sega does what Nintendo don't.
00:37:03
Speaker
Slater reveals that the guy who knocked Player off his bike is a dude named Viper.
00:37:07
Speaker
And the girl he saw was the same Natasha from the story.
00:37:10
Speaker
And like every time we get a mention of Natasha from Player's point of view, it's basically the Dreamweaver scene from Wayne's World.
00:37:20
Speaker
Yeah, literally.
00:37:22
Speaker
Like literally.
00:37:24
Speaker
Except she actually looks like a fucking...
00:37:27
Speaker
What's her name from the Revlon commercials or whatever it is?
00:37:31
Speaker
This lady from Legally Blonde and all those.
00:37:35
Speaker
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:37:39
Speaker
Fucking.
00:37:39
Speaker
What's her name?
00:37:40
Speaker
Oh, she was in the Minecraft movie.
00:37:42
Speaker
Yes, she was.
00:37:43
Speaker
Recently.
00:37:45
Speaker
Yes, she was.
00:37:46
Speaker
Jennifer Coolidge, guys.
00:37:47
Speaker
Jennifer Coolidge.
00:37:49
Speaker
Jennifer Coolidge.
00:37:50
Speaker
That's what Natasha looks like.
00:37:52
Speaker
I'm Natasha.
00:37:53
Speaker
The amount of like, like blush and stuff that she uses in her profile pic to, to like highlight her cheekbones.
00:38:03
Speaker
Oh yeah.
00:38:03
Speaker
It looks like, it looks like Mike Tyson, like put a face tattoo on.
00:38:08
Speaker
Like it's like the makeup.
00:38:09
Speaker
If you look at, if you look at her, she's on page 21 of the book.
00:38:13
Speaker
The, the, the makeup goes like into her mouth.
00:38:16
Speaker
Like, yeah.
00:38:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:38:18
Speaker
It's contouring without the blending.
00:38:21
Speaker
It's like the old ladies who would get the permanent makeup.
00:38:25
Speaker
Basically, it was like literally a tattoo.
00:38:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:38:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:38:28
Speaker
Literally.
00:38:28
Speaker
You mentioned you mentioned Phineas and Ferb before.
00:38:31
Speaker
And now I can't unsee it.
00:38:32
Speaker
Yeah, it's absolutely.
00:38:33
Speaker
Yeah.
00:38:35
Speaker
That nose, especially.
00:38:36
Speaker
That's it.
00:38:37
Speaker
That's the one.
00:38:39
Speaker
Wow.
00:38:41
Speaker
Pointy folk.
00:38:43
Speaker
Her and Slater actually, if you told me Natasha and Slater were the same person, I would completely believe you.
00:38:48
Speaker
I believe that.
00:38:49
Speaker
Based on this.
00:38:50
Speaker
Yeah, sure.
00:38:51
Speaker
Slater always gets his backwards hat mentioned, which he wears in his profile pic, which is very on the nose for Slater.
00:38:57
Speaker
Slater wears his hat the wrong way around.
00:39:00
Speaker
That's how you can tell he's crazy.
00:39:02
Speaker
Watch this unpredictable dude.
00:39:06
Speaker
He saw over the top and he decided to make that his entire personality.
00:39:10
Speaker
Slater was a skate rat, but he got bored of doing damage at only 20 miles an hour.
00:39:15
Speaker
So he bought a bike.
00:39:16
Speaker
He bought a bike.
00:39:17
Speaker
That's how it is.
00:39:19
Speaker
He does look like a skate or die character.
00:39:22
Speaker
He looks like a poser.
00:39:24
Speaker
Yeah, he looks like he took a hit on the ground real bad.
00:39:27
Speaker
Real bad.
00:39:29
Speaker
So she mentions he is friend.
00:39:32
Speaker
Slater mentions he's friend with Natasha and then notices how down bad the player is.
00:39:38
Speaker
Player then asks if there's a way you can join the Rashers.
00:39:41
Speaker
Chapter five.
00:39:42
Speaker
We're like 40% through the book.
00:39:45
Speaker
Is this when he starts talking about Natasha and he's like,
00:39:49
Speaker
Yeah, you know, I, yeah, she's just cool.
00:39:52
Speaker
We're just cool.
00:39:52
Speaker
We just want to talk.
00:39:53
Speaker
And then he like, asides to us, like, as if that was true.
00:40:00
Speaker
That's exactly what he was like.
00:40:02
Speaker
Am I right, people?
00:40:04
Speaker
Am I right?
00:40:04
Speaker
She's real hot.
00:40:05
Speaker
You know, I just want to plug this girl.
00:40:07
Speaker
Come on.
00:40:07
Speaker
Come on.
00:40:08
Speaker
It's fine.
00:40:09
Speaker
I'm pretending like I want to talk to her, but really, I'm just, uh, I'm really good.
00:40:14
Speaker
Yeah.
00:40:15
Speaker
I'm really good at Natasha.
00:40:16
Speaker
And he's like, I'm really good at racing.
00:40:17
Speaker
And, and, and, and like, I'm, I'm really good at it.
00:40:22
Speaker
I'm talking about racing, not Natasha.
00:40:24
Speaker
And I'm like, what were you good at?
00:40:26
Speaker
What the fuck are you talking about?
00:40:27
Speaker
Sex?
00:40:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:40:28
Speaker
That's it.
00:40:29
Speaker
You would say it.
00:40:29
Speaker
Speaking of Natasha.
00:40:31
Speaker
I would be sexing her real, real good.
00:40:35
Speaker
When I'm in love with someone, I like to replace their name.
00:40:38
Speaker
I like to take sex.
00:40:39
Speaker
Take it out of my vocabulary.
00:40:41
Speaker
Sure.
00:40:41
Speaker
Take the word sex out of my vocabulary.
00:40:43
Speaker
I replace it with the name of the person that I'm in love with.
00:40:45
Speaker
And I say, I'm good at that too.
00:40:48
Speaker
I'm good at Natasha too.
00:40:49
Speaker
I'm good at Natasha too.
00:40:51
Speaker
Oh, here it is.
00:40:52
Speaker
It's in chapter five.
00:40:53
Speaker
He says,
00:40:54
Speaker
The name Sierra Nevada had been bugging me.
00:40:57
Speaker
As I said, I knew I'd heard it before.
00:41:00
Speaker
And sitting by the campfire, staring into the flames, I remembered where.
00:41:06
Speaker
It was a story in a newspaper years ago.
00:41:09
Speaker
It had caught my eye because the story was about high-speed illegal motorbike races.
00:41:14
Speaker
All of a sudden, everything clicked into place.
00:41:16
Speaker
This motherfucker was already here riding an illegal motorcycle before he heard about it.
00:41:22
Speaker
He went there.
00:41:24
Speaker
How did he get...
00:41:25
Speaker
What happened?
00:41:27
Speaker
We just got to really make sure that that we just got to hammer home that he knows about this.
00:41:32
Speaker
And Sierra Nevada, I mean, fucking huge.
00:41:35
Speaker
How do you not know that you're there?
00:41:38
Speaker
I mean, I imagine that there's signs like that.
00:41:44
Speaker
The fact that.
00:41:45
Speaker
How the fuck did he get there?
00:41:47
Speaker
It's like he was born whole cloth in that in that motorcycle accident.
00:41:51
Speaker
He did before then.
00:41:53
Speaker
It was like it was like a K-Pax.
00:41:55
Speaker
He just yeah.
00:41:56
Speaker
Oh my God.
00:41:58
Speaker
Starman.
00:41:59
Speaker
I can't believe you fucking referenced K-Pax.
00:42:02
Speaker
Oh my God.
00:42:03
Speaker
I'm here.
00:42:04
Speaker
I love you.
00:42:05
Speaker
Holy shit.
00:42:06
Speaker
Blockbuster video.
00:42:07
Speaker
Seven years.
00:42:08
Speaker
I know, right?
00:42:09
Speaker
Not at all.
00:42:11
Speaker
Oh, Jesus.
00:42:12
Speaker
God.
00:42:13
Speaker
Slater and player to no one.
00:42:15
Speaker
Hold on to no one.
00:42:15
Speaker
The narrator says, oh, this is in prose.
00:42:19
Speaker
This is not like in dialogue.
00:42:20
Speaker
There's no quotes around this.
00:42:22
Speaker
Oh, and about Natasha.
00:42:23
Speaker
Yeah, I guess you're right.
00:42:25
Speaker
I was way out of my league.
00:42:27
Speaker
I'm like, I didn't say that.
00:42:28
Speaker
I've never seen that.
00:42:29
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:31
Speaker
Who are you talking to?
00:42:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:32
Speaker
Where are you?
00:42:33
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:33
Speaker
At the end, he goes off into the sunset and speaks to nobody ever again.
00:42:38
Speaker
I don't know.
00:42:39
Speaker
And he's getting mad at nobody.
00:42:42
Speaker
It gets really challenging.
00:42:44
Speaker
And like, yeah, I think you're, I think he is.
00:42:46
Speaker
I think he's brain damaged at this point.
00:42:47
Speaker
I think he is dying.
00:42:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:50
Speaker
Dying on the side of the road.
00:42:51
Speaker
Uh,
00:42:52
Speaker
Slater and player get out of jail and driver to where the rashers organization is camped out along the way.
00:42:57
Speaker
Slater tells player about avoiding cops, how they have slow bikes.
00:43:01
Speaker
This is more strategy guide stuff.
00:43:02
Speaker
And you just got to get back on yours after wiping out to avoid them catching up to you.
00:43:06
Speaker
They get to the check in for the rashers and there's an open slot in the race because one of the racers from New York had crashed and was arrested by the NYPD and the organized in New York.
00:43:17
Speaker
So he's dead.
00:43:19
Speaker
So he's dead.
00:43:20
Speaker
Yeah, they talk about how it's like, ah, the cops around here are chill and like the cops back in New York.
00:43:25
Speaker
I mean, they beat him to death.
00:43:26
Speaker
So that's yeah, he's not alive anymore.
00:43:29
Speaker
He's not alive anymore.
Cultural Impact and Legacy of 'Road Rash'
00:43:31
Speaker
The organizers then say, oh, yeah, we always hold the races in the same five areas because the cops are chill to the rashers and won't rough them up too much if they're caught.
00:43:40
Speaker
Player goes to bed thinking about Natasha.
00:43:42
Speaker
Who he describes as.
00:43:45
Speaker
Mouthwateringly gorgeous.
00:43:46
Speaker
Mouthwateringly gorgeous.
00:43:48
Speaker
There's a lot to unpack with that.
00:43:50
Speaker
So nasty.
00:43:52
Speaker
This is.
00:43:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:43:53
Speaker
This is real like proto.
00:43:57
Speaker
It's like this is this is a dude before he becomes an incel.
00:44:00
Speaker
Like this is.
00:44:02
Speaker
Well, he doesn't.
00:44:02
Speaker
Luckily, this guy lives the perfect life and in the end becomes like the fucking sex god of the beach or something.
00:44:12
Speaker
He's in a threesome with Slater and Natasha.
00:44:16
Speaker
Yeah, he's the Natasha god.
00:44:18
Speaker
He's good at Natasha.
00:44:20
Speaker
He's good at Natasha.
00:44:21
Speaker
Real good at Natasha.
00:44:23
Speaker
It's his religion.
00:44:25
Speaker
It's his job.
00:44:25
Speaker
Mouthwateringly gorgeous.
00:44:28
Speaker
His mouthwateringly gorgeous.
00:44:30
Speaker
My god.
00:44:32
Speaker
That's a day of the race in Chapter six and player gets the chance to actually meet Natasha.
00:44:37
Speaker
My man is down so bad.
00:44:38
Speaker
The race starts and player tries his best to keep up with the pack of racers.
00:44:42
Speaker
And as he's riding, he realizes that the other racers aren't necessarily good at taking corners in the most efficient way possible.
00:44:49
Speaker
something that player was familiar with from his time doing circuit races.
00:44:53
Speaker
He moves from 15th to 14th and then passes another dude named Gunther for 13th briefly when he realizes that he's on the wrong side of the road and he hits a car and he or almost hits a car, spins out and crashes into a tree again.
00:45:06
Speaker
He thought the road was closed.
00:45:07
Speaker
It wasn't.
00:45:08
Speaker
He vows not to finish the race, his first race in last place.
00:45:13
Speaker
So just an important safety tip there, guys.
00:45:15
Speaker
Important safety tip, Egon.
00:45:17
Speaker
The road is not closed.
00:45:19
Speaker
Insane.
00:45:20
Speaker
I also want to point out the sentence in chapter six.
00:45:23
Speaker
It's a couple sentences.
00:45:24
Speaker
If the rasher won a race, then so did the sponsor in the series of bets and trade-offs that accompanied this illegal sport.
00:45:31
Speaker
That's if he won or she.
00:45:34
Speaker
Or she.
00:45:34
Speaker
Or she.
00:45:35
Speaker
He says, hey, don't think I was preoccupied with women or anything.
00:45:39
Speaker
I'm a pro.
00:45:40
Speaker
I kept my mind on the racing and the racing only.
00:45:43
Speaker
And pigs do fly.
00:45:47
Speaker
Am I right?
00:45:48
Speaker
Who are you lying to?
00:45:49
Speaker
Like, what are you?
00:45:50
Speaker
Like, are you?
00:45:51
Speaker
Am I here?
00:45:51
Speaker
Am I in this stale?
00:45:53
Speaker
Am I?
00:45:54
Speaker
Are you talking in the mirror to me?
00:45:56
Speaker
Are you?
00:45:56
Speaker
Am I the player?
00:45:58
Speaker
It's just like there's a nurse at a trauma ward somewhere.
00:46:02
Speaker
The camera pulls back a little bit.
00:46:03
Speaker
It's like, yeah, the doctor's telling the nurse, be like, yeah, you just have to sit there and listen to him.
00:46:09
Speaker
You know, it's real good.
00:46:10
Speaker
Yes.
00:46:16
Speaker
My Ludwig van.
00:46:18
Speaker
Yeah.
00:46:21
Speaker
The player gets back on the road.
00:46:22
Speaker
This is chapter seven now.
00:46:24
Speaker
Passes Gunther again for 14th place and then suddenly ends up in 12th when two other rashers end up on the pavement.
00:46:31
Speaker
They beef it hard.
00:46:33
Speaker
The player continues pushing forward.
00:46:35
Speaker
Somebody says that you're a beef burger at some point.
00:46:38
Speaker
Beef burger.
00:46:39
Speaker
Somebody says, I forget, it might be earlier in the book.
00:46:42
Speaker
Somebody's like, hey, you lump of beef burger.
00:46:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:46:45
Speaker
Yes.
00:46:46
Speaker
He said, oh, he says it to, he says it to a cow.
00:46:48
Speaker
He says it to the cow.
00:46:49
Speaker
Oh yeah.
00:46:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:46:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:46:51
Speaker
Is that a British thing?
00:46:53
Speaker
Beef burger.
00:46:54
Speaker
I don't know.
00:46:55
Speaker
One word beef burger.
00:46:56
Speaker
I'm, I'm sure somebody will, will a fan will reach out to us and say, uh, no, please stop calling me.
00:47:03
Speaker
Please stop.
00:47:04
Speaker
Oh yeah.
00:47:05
Speaker
Please leave me alone.
00:47:08
Speaker
He waits for for there's two guys.
00:47:10
Speaker
He comes up on two rashers fighting each other on bikes.
00:47:13
Speaker
He waits for one of them to eat it and then sees the one left standing is Viper.
00:47:17
Speaker
The guy who knocked him out the start of the book or before the start of the book, to be honest, they have a bit of a showdown player getting the upper hand and then making a mistake of letting Viper back into it.
00:47:26
Speaker
They go back and forth some more before a player pushes Viper into ramming the back of a car and he goes flying off.
00:47:32
Speaker
Fucking dead.
00:47:34
Speaker
Dead.
00:47:34
Speaker
Like that guy should be dead.
00:47:37
Speaker
150 miles an hour to the back of a car.
00:47:39
Speaker
He's dead.
00:47:40
Speaker
He's dead.
00:47:43
Speaker
Player has an existential moment about nearly killing Viper and how much you like the taste of blood, but then finishes the race happy to be in 10th.
00:47:51
Speaker
And Slater won some sort of cash prize, apparently.
00:47:55
Speaker
Good job, Slater.
00:47:56
Speaker
Good job.
00:47:56
Speaker
He also says in this chapter, in this chapter, he says, an Alex player doesn't make the same mistake twice at some point in this chapter.
00:48:05
Speaker
Good job, Alex player.
00:48:08
Speaker
Thanks, man.
00:48:09
Speaker
Chapter eight, round the campfire later.
00:48:11
Speaker
Player listens to how important the rashes are to the local population as well as the racers.
00:48:16
Speaker
And the first race of the season is like the 4th of July.
00:48:18
Speaker
A racer named Lester asked player about knocking out Viper and players like, yeah, I did it.
00:48:24
Speaker
Lester's like, I'm getting you a drink.
00:48:26
Speaker
And all the other racers are like, yeah, Viper's had it coming for a long time.
00:48:31
Speaker
He's a fucking club that he beats you with.
00:48:34
Speaker
He beats you with a club.
00:48:35
Speaker
Okay.
00:48:36
Speaker
In Road Rash, just so you know, Viper does have a club.
00:48:40
Speaker
He's the only guy who has one.
00:48:42
Speaker
And you can get it.
00:48:43
Speaker
You can like, you can be riding next to Viper and be like, and then like, and like beat Viper to death in one hit.
00:48:51
Speaker
And the club, that's amazing.
00:48:52
Speaker
The club hurts every, the club kills everyone.
00:48:54
Speaker
The club is like the, the, the hammer from smash bros.
00:48:57
Speaker
The club rips.
00:48:59
Speaker
That's awesome.
00:49:02
Speaker
You know, I was just thinking that I think there's I think there's room in the gaming and gaming environment for a road rash like game to come back.
00:49:11
Speaker
There was one.
00:49:12
Speaker
There was one called like.
00:49:15
Speaker
Road of Rage or some shit like that.
00:49:17
Speaker
There was like one or two ones that have come out that are like not the Sega game road rash.
00:49:23
Speaker
I guess Sega has Hang On.
00:49:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:26
Speaker
Which is like this without hitting.
00:49:29
Speaker
Yeah, but I just feel like
00:49:31
Speaker
you know, just treat it like a Tony Hawk style.
00:49:34
Speaker
Like, cause I feel like, I feel like this kind of with the, with the actual bands being in the soundtrack, right?
00:49:40
Speaker
You got Sugar Ray, but you also had some other bands that were legitimate.
00:49:44
Speaker
Well, not on Genesis.
00:49:45
Speaker
In Genesis, it was not on Genesis.
00:49:46
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:48
Speaker
The sound chip.
00:49:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:50
Speaker
But on the, on the, on the PlayStation version, some licensed music, some, some actual licensed music.
00:49:56
Speaker
Little open world action.
00:49:58
Speaker
You could like do the you could like have little shops on the road that you could go to.
00:50:02
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:02
Speaker
Buy and upgrade your weapons at the shop stand at the honesty shop stand.
00:50:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:10
Speaker
The honor the honor system.
00:50:12
Speaker
You can do like you get like getting like carton eggs on the side of the road.
00:50:17
Speaker
Eat it.
00:50:17
Speaker
Eat it all.
00:50:18
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:18
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:20
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:20
Speaker
Jam those eggs down your mouth.
00:50:23
Speaker
You enjoy those just like fucking what's his name?
00:50:27
Speaker
Oh, the the the.
00:50:29
Speaker
Why am I blanking out his name?
00:50:31
Speaker
The guy with the eggs, the eggs.
00:50:33
Speaker
That's because nobody knows the name of the guy from Smash Mouth.
00:50:36
Speaker
They only know that he looks exactly like Guy Fieri.
00:50:39
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:40
Speaker
This is a different hard boiled.
00:50:41
Speaker
This is a different egg reference.
00:50:42
Speaker
Different eggs.
00:50:44
Speaker
The jail movie with what's his name?
00:50:46
Speaker
We're talking about Daniel Craig in Logan Lucky when he eats low sodium salt, hard boiled eggs like this, right?
00:50:55
Speaker
No.
00:50:56
Speaker
God damn.
00:50:56
Speaker
There's too many egg.
00:50:58
Speaker
There's too many egg references.
00:50:59
Speaker
I immediately thought of the one guy in Who Framed Roger Rabbit who got beaten up by Eddie Valiant and had his hard boiled eggs stuffed into his mouth.
00:51:07
Speaker
That's where my head went.
00:51:08
Speaker
We got a lot of egg eaters out of that.
00:51:10
Speaker
A lot of eggs.
00:51:10
Speaker
A lot of egg eaters.
00:51:12
Speaker
Cool hand Luke.
00:51:13
Speaker
God damn it.
00:51:13
Speaker
There we go.
00:51:14
Speaker
Oh, man.
00:51:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:16
Speaker
The real one.
00:51:17
Speaker
The actual real reference.
00:51:19
Speaker
Yes.
00:51:20
Speaker
An actual.
00:51:20
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:22
Speaker
A real movie star like Paul Newman.
00:51:24
Speaker
Paul Newman.
00:51:25
Speaker
There we go.
00:51:26
Speaker
Paul Newman.
00:51:26
Speaker
We're out here.
00:51:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:28
Speaker
Paul Newman eating eggs.
00:51:30
Speaker
What fuck was I talking about?
00:51:32
Speaker
Chapter nine.
00:51:33
Speaker
We flash forward a few months.
00:51:34
Speaker
A wonderful chapter.
00:51:36
Speaker
Great chapter.
00:51:37
Speaker
We go through a few months as the rash towards the country.
00:51:39
Speaker
This is the Bernard Matthews reference that blew my mind.
00:51:44
Speaker
Bernard Matthews.
00:51:45
Speaker
It's like it's like if it was really in the US, it would be like Colonel Sanders or fucking Jim Perdue.
00:51:50
Speaker
If they had any idea of the casualty rate, they'd have closed in on us faster than a chicken runs after someone has shouted Bernard Matthews in its ear.
00:52:00
Speaker
That doesn't need to be in this book.
00:52:02
Speaker
That doesn't need to be in this book.
00:52:04
Speaker
That is a hard reference to me.
00:52:05
Speaker
We needed some level of localization needed to happen.
00:52:09
Speaker
The UK readers were sweating because they felt like they were lost in a country they didn't understand.
00:52:13
Speaker
But then when someone said Bernard Matthews.
00:52:17
Speaker
Oh, plummeting back down to earth.
00:52:19
Speaker
Yeah.
00:52:19
Speaker
Got it.
00:52:19
Speaker
Thank you.
00:52:20
Speaker
And they say that they went around the country because California is like five times the size of the UK or something like that.
00:52:27
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:52:28
Speaker
It makes sense.
00:52:29
Speaker
Yeah.
00:52:30
Speaker
It's a big place.
00:52:32
Speaker
It's a big place.
00:52:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:52:34
Speaker
It's a long, thick state.
00:52:36
Speaker
I love when people from other countries come to America and they're like,
00:52:39
Speaker
Yeah, I'm going to go to Los Angeles.
00:52:40
Speaker
I'm going to drive to Dallas.
00:52:41
Speaker
Then I'm going to drive to Miami.
00:52:43
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:52:44
Speaker
Oh, just how long are you here?
00:52:46
Speaker
Yeah, it is.
00:52:49
Speaker
That is not an easy.
00:52:51
Speaker
That's not easy.
00:52:52
Speaker
Itinerary.
Critique of the Dark Souls Novel
00:52:53
Speaker
They picture like Indiana Jones, like the little line.
00:52:55
Speaker
Yeah, the little dots.
00:52:56
Speaker
Yeah.
00:52:59
Speaker
So they don't stay in one place for very long.
00:53:01
Speaker
Player finally flirts a little bit with Natasha and we get some recaps of all night parties that they have where Slater at some point uses the pickup line.
00:53:10
Speaker
Hi, I'm Slater.
00:53:12
Speaker
Fly me.
00:53:15
Speaker
Then player then recounts the story of during the race where Slater fell off his bike and a car ran over it and dragged his bike for nearly a mile.
00:53:24
Speaker
Player spends more and more time with Natasha over the next three races where he finishes 10th, 8th, and 6th, respectively.
00:53:30
Speaker
He also says, even I don't hit women.
00:53:32
Speaker
Yeah, even I don't hit women.
00:53:36
Speaker
And I've got that shit in my blood.
00:53:39
Speaker
I mean, come on.
00:53:40
Speaker
And I've hit my face against a tree several times in this tale.
00:53:44
Speaker
I have and I have full Chris Benoit CTE.
00:53:47
Speaker
Yeah, this is the rosters with a thousand dollars of dosh in my pockets, mates.
00:53:53
Speaker
I don't know what country I'm in.
00:53:55
Speaker
It's this is this is where it's amazing.
00:53:58
Speaker
The fact that I'm not that I'm not choking you out right now is a fucking miracle.
00:54:02
Speaker
And that's just all there is to it.
00:54:05
Speaker
The final course is at Grass Valley, which fun fact for other people who do video production.
00:54:12
Speaker
That's also the where the company Grass Valley is from the video company that they make the cameras for sporting events.
00:54:19
Speaker
Grass Valley is from Grass Valley.
00:54:21
Speaker
Grass Valley is from Grass Valley, California.
00:54:23
Speaker
So there it is right in there.
00:54:27
Speaker
Anyway, we skipped the race for the most part.
00:54:29
Speaker
Player mentions that he came in second place behind Shiva and had avoided Viper during the race.
00:54:35
Speaker
And then we have what seems to be a strategy guide for playing Road Rash, which is interesting.
00:54:40
Speaker
This chapter ends by saying, you want to know what happened?
00:54:44
Speaker
Then read on.
00:54:46
Speaker
Which I don't think chapters need to do.
00:54:48
Speaker
Like I understand how the book works.
00:54:51
Speaker
It's like, I was, you know what?
00:54:52
Speaker
I was going to put it down.
00:54:53
Speaker
I was, you know, I'm about 80% of the way through.
00:54:55
Speaker
And I thought, you know, this is good enough.
00:54:58
Speaker
Oh, but the gentleman said I should read on.
00:55:00
Speaker
He begged, he enticed me to read on.
00:55:04
Speaker
You know what?
00:55:05
Speaker
I will turn the page.
00:55:06
Speaker
Go on, you damn brown writing bastard.
00:55:09
Speaker
Come on.
00:55:11
Speaker
The circuit starts all over again back in Sierra Nevada.
00:55:14
Speaker
Player comes in third and then finishes in the top five and all the following racers races.
00:55:19
Speaker
He then suddenly the race organizers decide to mix things up.
00:55:23
Speaker
The races will be longer.
00:55:24
Speaker
There'll be other rules to make them bloodier.
00:55:26
Speaker
Bunch of racers quit, but player and others stay on.
00:55:29
Speaker
And he says, but maybe we should have known better.
00:55:33
Speaker
And chapter 10, the changes had been brought about by greed in the organization who had started videotaping the rashes and selling them for money.
00:55:43
Speaker
Capitalism.
00:55:44
Speaker
That's what ruined the road.
00:55:45
Speaker
These guys were dying to make jackass videos and skate.
00:55:52
Speaker
I really only like the camp.
00:55:54
Speaker
Kill yourself videos when they were doing it for the love of the game.
00:55:57
Speaker
You know, that's what it feels like.
00:55:58
Speaker
That's what this feels like.
00:56:00
Speaker
That's exactly what Kevin texted me earlier this evening and was like, this is a weird book and I just wrote back in all caps.
00:56:07
Speaker
It's for the love of the game, bro!
00:56:09
Speaker
It's for the love of the game!
00:56:11
Speaker
It was so out!
00:56:13
Speaker
Remember that Brandon DiCamillo made it to Jackass and then they were like,
00:56:17
Speaker
Hey, we're going to do a movie.
00:56:18
Speaker
Not you though, Brandon.
00:56:19
Speaker
You get out of this.
00:56:22
Speaker
You're too fucked up.
00:56:22
Speaker
We actually think you might have got some CTE.
00:56:25
Speaker
We got to get you out of here.
00:56:26
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:56:26
Speaker
We got to get you out of here.
00:56:27
Speaker
You stay over there.
00:56:28
Speaker
You stay over there.
00:56:29
Speaker
You're fine.
00:56:29
Speaker
We love the fat fuck sketch, but you got to get out of the movie.
00:56:31
Speaker
You can't be in it.
00:56:32
Speaker
You're too whacked out.
00:56:34
Speaker
You two whacked out.
00:56:36
Speaker
I love the fact that they're all retiring, right?
00:56:40
Speaker
They're done.
00:56:41
Speaker
The Jackass boys?
00:56:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:56:45
Speaker
I feel like Johnny Knoxville, after that last stunt in the last one, I was like, he almost died there.
00:56:51
Speaker
That was actual.
00:56:54
Speaker
I feel like there's a type of stuntman type person who, especially something like Jackass, he might just do it forever.
00:57:02
Speaker
Yeah.
00:57:03
Speaker
A lot of those guys are already like addict types and maybe they just love to get their asses beat.
00:57:09
Speaker
But, you know, thinking about that, like, I forget what movie it was.
00:57:14
Speaker
Maybe it was the third one.
00:57:16
Speaker
Dave England jumps off like a small...
00:57:19
Speaker
building like a tiny right outhouse size building yeah and he has he's holding one of those um like spine yeah he fucked himself up on that stunt more than like any jackass stunt ever so like that's the thing that sucks about jackass and stuff like that is that like it's never like the sick ones
00:57:38
Speaker
Right.
00:57:38
Speaker
That take you out and you might just think, oh yeah, I'll just like, I'll just do one of these little baby ones.
00:57:42
Speaker
And then you're like fucking dead.
00:57:44
Speaker
You know what I mean?
00:57:44
Speaker
Right.
00:57:45
Speaker
Right.
00:57:45
Speaker
Which is, which is what's scary.
00:57:47
Speaker
It's like that girl at a, is it like fucking Twitch con or something like that?
00:57:51
Speaker
Oh, when she jumped in the ball pit.
00:57:53
Speaker
Oh,
00:57:54
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:57:54
Speaker
That was on them, though.
00:57:55
Speaker
They fucked up.
00:57:56
Speaker
They fucked that up.
00:57:59
Speaker
She had every right to jump into a giant foam pit.
00:58:03
Speaker
It's a foam pit.
00:58:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:58:04
Speaker
And she jumps in and it's like, there's like both her legs and her back.
00:58:09
Speaker
Like there's only a thin layer of foam here.
00:58:11
Speaker
And somehow the floor is harder than any other floor ever laid at this place.
00:58:20
Speaker
And just so you guys know, like as these races are like going up and up and up, right?
00:58:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:58:25
Speaker
This dude has like, he's made like 10 G's only.
00:58:29
Speaker
Yeah.
00:58:29
Speaker
He's like, I'm kicking ass.
00:58:32
Speaker
He's made $10,000.
00:58:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:58:34
Speaker
He is.
00:58:34
Speaker
He is not made a lot of money that he could have done.
00:58:39
Speaker
He literally could have done just about anything at this point.
00:58:43
Speaker
And but guys, he assures us that he's been putting it all away, not touching it.
00:58:47
Speaker
And that and that that makes it valuable because it's he's he's collecting interest.
00:58:53
Speaker
That's nice.
00:58:53
Speaker
He's collecting interest.
00:58:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:58:56
Speaker
Yeah.
00:58:56
Speaker
Minimum wage was the same in 1992 as it is.
00:58:58
Speaker
Yeah.
00:58:58
Speaker
Minimum wage was I mean, it was 725 back then and it's 725 now.
00:59:00
Speaker
So.
00:59:04
Speaker
Fuck it.
00:59:05
Speaker
We ball.
00:59:07
Speaker
Hammer, Gunther, Grubb, Sid and Rude Boy all quit.
00:59:10
Speaker
And Sid basically said it was no longer for the love of the game.
00:59:15
Speaker
New racers join, including Ikita, Shiva's cousin.
00:59:19
Speaker
Broom Helga.
00:59:20
Speaker
Don't forget.
00:59:20
Speaker
Broom Helga.
00:59:22
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:59:22
Speaker
So how could we forget?
00:59:24
Speaker
And they organized just relax the rules on the bikes that could be used.
00:59:27
Speaker
Additionally, one more change was that payouts would be kept on a computer and everybody would get readouts and race statistics.
00:59:34
Speaker
I was like, what the fuck are you talking about?
00:59:36
Speaker
Just I don't need any of this.
00:59:37
Speaker
There's like there's a statistics card that they give you so people can.
00:59:42
Speaker
You can have mine when I die if you want, I guess.
00:59:45
Speaker
Yeah.
00:59:46
Speaker
It would make a rad diary.
00:59:48
Speaker
What the fuck are you talking about, man?
00:59:50
Speaker
A rad diary of greed and bloodshed.
00:59:53
Speaker
Do we know each other, sir?
00:59:56
Speaker
Sir, this is a Wendy's.
00:59:57
Speaker
I picked this up.
00:59:58
Speaker
I got a copy of Sega Power in my mailbox and this was attached.
01:00:04
Speaker
It was stapled to the front.
01:00:06
Speaker
Yeah.
01:00:07
Speaker
Help me.
01:00:08
Speaker
And you're standing across the street watching me read it.
01:00:11
Speaker
Help me understand.
01:00:11
Speaker
Yeah.
01:00:13
Speaker
Yeah.
01:00:15
Speaker
The new riders, Chapter 11, aren't very talkative and the races seem to be getting more dangerous somehow.
01:00:21
Speaker
At one point, the cop O'Leary stopped by the camp before a race to plead with player to be careful because the winds were a changing.
01:00:28
Speaker
Player and Natasha talk about how O'Leary had expressed concern to her as well after she had crashed into a telephone pole.
01:00:36
Speaker
And that's why she had to get the tattoos on her face.
01:00:40
Speaker
Player ended season three, the season with three wins, talking about how he handled each race and how you would only hit people that hit him first.
01:00:48
Speaker
He also talks about the bike he bought, which was a Banzai 750, which had more handling than the Kamikaze 750s that everyone else was racing.
01:00:55
Speaker
He's like, just buy the Banzai, you idiot.
01:00:57
Speaker
Don't fucking fuck around.
01:00:59
Speaker
Just go straight to it.
01:01:01
Speaker
Just yeah.
01:01:02
Speaker
Don't don't fool yourself.
01:01:04
Speaker
He also says he lost to Ikira by by a quiff, by the way, by a quiff.
01:01:08
Speaker
Yeah, which is funny if you look at a picture of Ikira because he is one of those Japanese greasers who actually does have a quiff.
01:01:15
Speaker
So it all... It's fan service, baby.
01:01:19
Speaker
It's a good book.
01:01:21
Speaker
It's for the love of the game.
01:01:21
Speaker
You really think about it.
01:01:23
Speaker
For the love of the game.
01:01:24
Speaker
Legit.
01:01:25
Speaker
After a series of five races, the bikes were going to go bigger and the races longer again.
01:01:29
Speaker
With that, more of the older riders called it quit, but player knew he could count on Slater and Natasha.
01:01:36
Speaker
My notes start getting more sparse here.
01:01:38
Speaker
There's not much.
01:01:39
Speaker
Otis, Spike, Zippy, Chip, and a guy called Sergio show up?
01:01:43
Speaker
Yeah.
01:01:44
Speaker
Yeah.
01:01:44
Speaker
What else?
01:01:45
Speaker
What else?
01:01:46
Speaker
More races.
01:01:47
Speaker
They do it again.
01:01:48
Speaker
He loses his bike advantage because they make everybody take the same bikes.
01:01:52
Speaker
Players getting caught more often by the cops.
01:01:54
Speaker
He won a bunch of races and he makes more money.
01:01:57
Speaker
That's important.
01:01:58
Speaker
He works some deal where he doesn't have to conform because he's like us.
01:02:03
Speaker
He's like the player in the game.
01:02:04
Speaker
He is the player.
01:02:05
Speaker
The player in the game can buy bikes as they go, but all the other... Everybody else... Yeah.
01:02:09
Speaker
They all have the same bike.
01:02:10
Speaker
So he actually like...
01:02:12
Speaker
is like, I can only use my winnings to buy bikes and pay off the corrupt police.
01:02:17
Speaker
But that's a deal that I made with the racing league.
01:02:20
Speaker
Yeah.
01:02:21
Speaker
Yep.
01:02:22
Speaker
Anyway.
01:02:24
Speaker
Anyway.
01:02:24
Speaker
Yeah.
01:02:26
Speaker
They do it again.
01:02:27
Speaker
And the organization's like...
01:02:29
Speaker
We're fucking making it more dangerous.
01:02:31
Speaker
And then Slater's like, I quit.
01:02:33
Speaker
Here's the password.
01:02:34
Speaker
Here's the password if you want to get in.
01:02:35
Speaker
Slater quits.
01:02:38
Speaker
He goes off to star in Mr. Robot at the end of the chapter.
01:02:42
Speaker
Actually, at this point, he would be starring in Robin Hood.
01:02:44
Speaker
Yeah, he was in Executive Decision around this time.
01:02:47
Speaker
Yeah.
01:02:48
Speaker
He was probably.
01:02:48
Speaker
Broken Arrow, maybe.
01:02:49
Speaker
Yeah.
01:02:50
Speaker
Yeah.
01:02:53
Speaker
Yeah, Broken Arrow.
01:02:54
Speaker
I can't remember which one is the one with Christian Slater.
01:02:56
Speaker
It's one of those.
01:02:57
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:02:58
Speaker
Broken Arrow is a definite Christian Slater flick when he was- Yeah, the one with Travolta, right?
01:03:05
Speaker
Yep.
01:03:06
Speaker
Yeah.
01:03:06
Speaker
Okay.
01:03:07
Speaker
Yeah.
01:03:08
Speaker
Oh, if this was- Well, what year did the book come out?
01:03:11
Speaker
That's a great question.
01:03:12
Speaker
It might be too early.
01:03:14
Speaker
I think it's 92.
01:03:14
Speaker
92?
01:03:14
Speaker
Man, he was-
01:03:18
Speaker
Okay, so the true romance.
01:03:20
Speaker
It's between Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves as Will Scarlet and true romance.
01:03:24
Speaker
Yeah, there you go.
01:03:26
Speaker
Yeah, there it is.
01:03:28
Speaker
Good job.
01:03:29
Speaker
And he was in Vern Gully.
01:03:32
Speaker
Oh, I mean, that plays Pips.
01:03:34
Speaker
What?
01:03:36
Speaker
What?
01:03:37
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
01:03:39
Speaker
Doing his Jack Nicholson Jr. impression.
01:03:42
Speaker
Oh, mobsters.
01:03:43
Speaker
How could I ever forget that movie that it that that poster was in the video store I went to as a kid.
01:03:52
Speaker
The mobsters poster.
01:03:54
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
01:03:55
Speaker
Yeah.
01:03:55
Speaker
Because you got you got Christian Slater.
01:03:58
Speaker
You got.
01:03:59
Speaker
Patrick Dempsey, you got Richard Grieco, you got Costas.
01:04:03
Speaker
Oh, oh, the dude who is eventually the bad guy in the Saw movies.
01:04:07
Speaker
What's his name?
01:04:08
Speaker
Costas Mandalore.
01:04:10
Speaker
Jigsaw?
01:04:11
Speaker
Yeah, he's the he's the corrupt.
01:04:14
Speaker
He's like the corrupt cop who takes over for Jigsaw after in mobsters.
01:04:21
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
01:04:22
Speaker
Costas Mandalore.
01:04:24
Speaker
Costas Mandalore?
01:04:26
Speaker
His name is Costas Mandalore.
01:04:27
Speaker
Yeah, like it's like Mandalore, like fucking Mandalorian Mandalore.
01:04:31
Speaker
It's mind blowing.
01:04:33
Speaker
It is.
01:04:34
Speaker
It is like.
01:04:34
Speaker
Yeah, he's in like Flynn.
01:04:39
Speaker
Okay.
01:04:39
Speaker
All right.
01:04:39
Speaker
Yeah.
01:04:41
Speaker
Wow.
01:04:41
Speaker
And that guy is the guy with the backwards hat in Road Rash.
01:04:44
Speaker
That guy's the Patrick's.
01:04:45
Speaker
Yeah.
01:04:47
Speaker
Christian Slater.
01:04:49
Speaker
But, you know, Slater quits, but Natasha kisses player.
01:04:53
Speaker
And then in chapter 13, the same thing happens.
01:04:56
Speaker
Natasha kisses player, dude.
01:04:57
Speaker
natasha kisses player because players good natasha player dude a player a player uh in the final chapter uh shit happens again player quits because the races are getting too much him and tasha join slater on the coast and the book comes to an end and we get treated to a review of my e-pub my e-pub says 73 on the page that only says the end of
01:05:25
Speaker
My EPUB says 73%.
01:05:26
Speaker
That's so much less than 93%.
01:05:29
Speaker
That's insane.
01:05:30
Speaker
So much of it.
01:05:33
Speaker
Where are we ranking this book, boys?
01:05:37
Speaker
On the video game books that you have read, where are we putting this?
01:05:44
Speaker
What percentile?
01:05:45
Speaker
As a book?
01:05:46
Speaker
It's ass.
01:05:47
Speaker
It's ass.
01:05:50
Speaker
As a game book adaptation?
01:05:54
Speaker
Yeah.
01:05:55
Speaker
It's like a 10 out of 10.
01:05:56
Speaker
It's like amazing.
01:05:59
Speaker
Master.
01:06:00
Speaker
Go back and play road rash and tell me this doesn't exactly capture the experience.
01:06:06
Speaker
That's that is true.
01:06:07
Speaker
That is something that the worst piece of prose literature that I ever read for pleasure.
01:06:14
Speaker
Yeah.
01:06:15
Speaker
So I don't know what that number is.
01:06:17
Speaker
I don't know what number that is.
01:06:18
Speaker
Yeah.
01:06:19
Speaker
Between a zero and a 10.
01:06:21
Speaker
It is.
01:06:23
Speaker
It is not worse than.
01:06:27
Speaker
Right.
01:06:27
Speaker
It might be one of the worst we've ever read.
01:06:31
Speaker
I feel like just for its egregious length, dead space is still worse somehow.
01:06:37
Speaker
Because it's a chunky boy.
01:06:39
Speaker
It's a chunky boy and it's bad.
01:06:42
Speaker
It's so bad.
01:06:44
Speaker
You talk about how this kind of encapsulates the spirit, let's say.
01:06:51
Speaker
The spirit of the game, at least.
01:06:53
Speaker
It really does.
01:06:54
Speaker
Yeah.
01:06:55
Speaker
I would say that I'd say that the sorry, Dead Space and the Dark Souls novel are still worse.
01:07:04
Speaker
I didn't know there was a Dark Souls novel.
01:07:05
Speaker
That sounds like a bad idea.
01:07:07
Speaker
Oh, and it's a bad idea for a lot of reasons.
01:07:10
Speaker
It's written by, who was it written by?
01:07:12
Speaker
Was it J. Michael Straczynski or?
01:07:15
Speaker
No, no, no.
01:07:16
Speaker
It was written by one of the old.
01:07:19
Speaker
No.
01:07:19
Speaker
Oh, Michael Stackpole.
01:07:20
Speaker
Michael Stackpole.
01:07:21
Speaker
Michael Stackpole.
01:07:22
Speaker
Dark Souls.
01:07:24
Speaker
Yeah.
01:07:25
Speaker
Yeah.
01:07:26
Speaker
And here's the thing.
01:07:26
Speaker
The rope squadron guy.
01:07:28
Speaker
Yeah.
01:07:29
Speaker
Yeah.
01:07:29
Speaker
And here's the thing.
01:07:31
Speaker
The whole book is.
01:07:33
Speaker
is barely, has barely anything to do with Dark Souls.
01:07:38
Speaker
It is, what it clearly is, is a fantasy novel that he had already read
01:07:48
Speaker
got underway that he barely was able to throw in some references.
01:07:53
Speaker
What is the subtitle there?
01:07:55
Speaker
Dark Souls what?
01:07:57
Speaker
Mask of Vindication.
01:07:59
Speaker
Oh my Lord.
01:08:00
Speaker
And it's, and it's, and the funny thing is, is it's a very old school fantasy kind of a book and it has nothing, no, in no way resembling Dark Souls at all.
01:08:11
Speaker
Some kind of like old, like R.A.
01:08:13
Speaker
Salvatore type, like older.
01:08:15
Speaker
Yeah.
01:08:16
Speaker
Like, yeah, but sort of Shannara type, whatever.
01:08:19
Speaker
Right.
01:08:20
Speaker
Yeah.
01:08:20
Speaker
Like 80s.
01:08:21
Speaker
You can see the cover right now.
01:08:22
Speaker
Guy wears like a green tunic with like a ripped triangle at the bottom by his crotch and a belt.
01:08:27
Speaker
Yeah.
01:08:28
Speaker
Right.
01:08:28
Speaker
That's exactly it.
01:08:29
Speaker
It was sandals.
01:08:30
Speaker
It's bleak.
01:08:31
Speaker
It really felt like it felt like Stackpole was basically they were like, hey, we'll give you some money if you write a Dark Souls book.
01:08:40
Speaker
And he like had a half finished draft of a fantasy novel.
01:08:44
Speaker
He's like, here you go.
01:08:47
Speaker
that's it god bless you know what get your money michael stackpole i got somebody who has to hustle every day of his goddamn life get your money michael stack you know as a guy as somebody who loved the rogue squadron books uh that they were a big part of my personality as a child shout out kevin j anderson shout out michael stackpole yeah shout out those guys the old school the old guard oh yeah
01:09:11
Speaker
The old guard.
01:09:12
Speaker
Do you guys have you read one that you think rips?
01:09:16
Speaker
Yeah.
01:09:16
Speaker
Yeah.
01:09:17
Speaker
So a lot of the recent Halo books absolutely rip anything anything written by Kelly Gay.
01:09:24
Speaker
Kelly Gay is is fucking.
01:09:26
Speaker
But then now we're now we're playing in a in a book universe that's been created right with these.
01:09:31
Speaker
Yeah.
01:09:31
Speaker
Now that's a yes.
01:09:33
Speaker
That is a book.
01:09:34
Speaker
They're independent.
01:09:35
Speaker
Yeah.
01:09:35
Speaker
Broader.
01:09:36
Speaker
The Bioshock book was really good.
01:09:39
Speaker
And also.
01:09:41
Speaker
Weirdly enough, we read the Five Nights at Freddy's trilogy.
01:09:46
Speaker
We read the eyes, the silver eyes.
01:09:49
Speaker
Yes, we read the first one, and it was awful.
01:09:53
Speaker
And the second one, we were like, oh, this is...
01:09:57
Speaker
better and the third one was actually pretty good.
01:10:00
Speaker
Okay.
01:10:01
Speaker
It was surreal how bad the first one was and overwritten and it was garbage and something happened because it's the same author and she like basically cut the page count in half for the second and third one.
01:10:16
Speaker
That's probably like a cost issue.
01:10:19
Speaker
Yeah.
01:10:19
Speaker
Well, that probably too, but it actually held together.
01:10:22
Speaker
They were actually pretty good.
01:10:25
Speaker
That's impressive.
01:10:26
Speaker
That's impressive.
01:10:27
Speaker
Yeah, they got better as they went, which you never see in a trilogy.
01:10:30
Speaker
I recommend for various different reasons.
01:10:33
Speaker
I think a good guy to follow into the video game novelization world is Hideo Kojima.
01:10:39
Speaker
Yeah.
01:10:40
Speaker
Because man, dude cares.
01:10:42
Speaker
And the first two books that he did were commissioned.
01:10:45
Speaker
Yeah.
01:10:47
Speaker
And he got, I forget his name, but it's the guy who like carried on James Bond.
01:10:52
Speaker
It's like the guy who like kept writing the James Bond books.
01:10:55
Speaker
For the first Metal Gear.
01:10:56
Speaker
For the first two.
01:10:58
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
01:10:58
Speaker
He wrote like- Yeah, we read the first Metal Gear.
01:11:01
Speaker
And I think we're probably on the list to, we're probably going to do some more of that.
01:11:07
Speaker
There's also the Death Stranding novels.
01:11:09
Speaker
I was just going to say the Death Stranding novels.
01:11:11
Speaker
The first two Metal Gear solids are like-
01:11:13
Speaker
Decent American adaptations of Metal Gear Solid and makes them kind of James Bondy.
01:11:19
Speaker
Metal Gear Solid 4.
01:11:21
Speaker
There's the book for 3 and the book for Peace Walker and the Japanese book for 1 and 2, which are very recent.
01:11:29
Speaker
All are not in English.
01:11:31
Speaker
But Four is in English, and it's by another guy.
01:11:37
Speaker
I forget his name.
01:11:38
Speaker
His name is really bizarre.
01:11:40
Speaker
I forget what his name is, but he died of cancer.
01:11:43
Speaker
He was young, and he was writing this book.
01:11:45
Speaker
And he brought that...
01:11:47
Speaker
to the idea of being Old Snake and played back and forth with the narrative of the book and brought characters in.
01:11:58
Speaker
And the Japanese version of Metal Gear Solid 1 and 2 are written by a journalist after the fact and is largely about the journalist.
01:12:06
Speaker
And like really cool.
01:12:07
Speaker
That's interesting.
01:12:08
Speaker
That's cool.
01:12:09
Speaker
But the Metal Gear Solid 4 book is actually pretty good.
01:12:12
Speaker
And then the Death Stranding duology is the first game in two books by somebody called Nojima, Hitori Nojima, which is hilarious.
01:12:20
Speaker
Yeah.
01:12:21
Speaker
Because it's Nojima and Kojima.
01:12:22
Speaker
But those books are also like...
01:12:26
Speaker
pretty good like they're the nojima guy is the person who does all the other kojima books right so if you're interested in some actual books that are like approved by the guy who makes the guys yeah you know what i mean there's very few of those and i feel like those those kojima ones are good oh
01:12:46
Speaker
Oh, the eco novelization was pretty good.
'Sacred and Terrible Air' and Disco Elysium
01:12:50
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
01:12:50
Speaker
Yeah, that's real.
01:12:51
Speaker
I liked that.
01:12:52
Speaker
I've always heard that's good.
01:12:53
Speaker
I've never had a chance to read that.
01:12:54
Speaker
I bet that's awesome.
01:12:55
Speaker
They did.
01:12:55
Speaker
The author, she apparently is a big deal in Japan and did a really good job with it.
01:13:01
Speaker
Yeah, that's that's I feel like that's the secret.
01:13:04
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like the secret is like the Japanese like book scene is still very like.
01:13:11
Speaker
prestigious in 2025 and I feel like there's a little bit more especially when coming from video games where I think they definitely take video game as an artistry more seriously than we still have fucking blue sky discourse yesterday of like our video games art and we're like it's disco Elysium is that a good game for sure and it's like shut the fuck up if all movies are art
01:13:40
Speaker
Yeah.
01:13:40
Speaker
Then all games are.
01:13:41
Speaker
We can say games are art.
01:13:43
Speaker
By the way, one of the best books we've read on the show, which is it's like pushing the limit, but was Sacred and Terrible Air.
01:13:52
Speaker
Yes.
01:13:52
Speaker
Which is the book that was written by the guy who wrote Disco Elysium.
01:13:58
Speaker
And it's set in the same universe.
01:14:00
Speaker
It's set like.
01:14:02
Speaker
That sounds like it's probably just a good book that has nothing to do with Disco Elysium.
01:14:06
Speaker
It's it's said the same universe, nothing to do with the story.
01:14:09
Speaker
It's set 50 years after Disco Elysium takes place.
01:14:13
Speaker
It is an absolute Eastern European bummer of a book.
01:14:17
Speaker
But, you know, see if you could get yourself a copy of it.
01:14:20
Speaker
Disco Elysium is kind of an Eastern European bummer of a game, too, though.
01:14:23
Speaker
Yeah, I know this.
01:14:24
Speaker
The book in the book does finds ways to, like, turn that up to 11.
01:14:29
Speaker
Wait, it's from 2013.
01:14:31
Speaker
Yeah.
01:14:31
Speaker
Yeah.
01:14:32
Speaker
Predates the game.
01:14:33
Speaker
Oh, so it's like.
01:14:33
Speaker
He wrote it and it didn't do well.
01:14:35
Speaker
He wrote it and it didn't do well.
01:14:37
Speaker
The guy, one of his friends is like, you know, this universe would probably work better as a game.
01:14:42
Speaker
And then they turned it into a game.
01:14:44
Speaker
Interesting.
01:14:45
Speaker
Novelist video game designer.
01:14:47
Speaker
Yeah.
01:14:48
Speaker
And he's one of the ones who's caught up in all this nonsense now, huh?
01:14:51
Speaker
Yeah, with the lawsuits and all that stuff with.
01:14:54
Speaker
Yeah.
01:14:57
Speaker
Well, we we try to end every episode with one question and I'll start with Phil.
01:15:04
Speaker
Phil, what are you playing?
01:15:07
Speaker
Oh, uh, I, I played a couple of demos.
01:15:10
Speaker
I'm doing my usual shit.
01:15:12
Speaker
I'm still playing, um, uh, rogue trader and, and, and that kind of thing.
01:15:16
Speaker
Um, but I played a couple of demos.
01:15:18
Speaker
Uh, the first one was, uh, uh, the heartworm demo,
Exploring 'Heartworm' and Other Nostalgic Games
01:15:22
Speaker
uh, uh, uh, recommended, uh, by friend of the pod Sputnik, uh, uh, and it was, um,
01:15:29
Speaker
It's a very, very old school Resident Evil kind of adventure, survival horror kind of thing.
01:15:38
Speaker
It really wears its influences on its sleeve.
01:15:40
Speaker
Like Alicia or something like that?
01:15:41
Speaker
Like one of those PS4-esque?
01:15:42
Speaker
Kind of, yeah.
01:15:44
Speaker
Yeah, to the point that you're like, oh, you're just copying this shit.
01:15:48
Speaker
But in a loving way.
01:15:49
Speaker
Yeah, sometimes that's right.
01:15:53
Speaker
Yeah.
01:15:54
Speaker
Yeah.
01:15:54
Speaker
Yeah.
01:15:55
Speaker
And it's it's it does remind you sometimes that there are some old school features that can be left in the past.
01:16:02
Speaker
You you don't have to play with tank controls, thank God.
01:16:07
Speaker
But they also have the setup where everything you can interact with is blended into the background.
01:16:16
Speaker
So you just find yourself running against walls and hitting the button to see if anything is there that you can use.
01:16:21
Speaker
Makes me happy.
01:16:22
Speaker
That makes me happy in an aesthetic way.
01:16:26
Speaker
Yeah, check it out.
01:16:27
Speaker
It even lets you play in a more pixelated kind of way that it would have looked on an old TV.
01:16:33
Speaker
Oh, they like low resit if you want?
01:16:36
Speaker
Yeah.
01:16:36
Speaker
Yeah.
01:16:36
Speaker
That's cool.
01:16:37
Speaker
Did you ever play Resident Evil a lot?
01:16:40
Speaker
Oh, I love it.
01:16:40
Speaker
Yeah.
01:16:41
Speaker
Have you ever played the Daymare games?
01:16:45
Speaker
No, but I think I know what you're talking about.
01:16:47
Speaker
I played Daymare.
01:16:49
Speaker
Yeah.
01:16:50
Speaker
Yeah.
01:16:51
Speaker
I'm trying to remember which one I played.
01:16:52
Speaker
Yeah.
01:16:53
Speaker
They basically like made a Resident Evil 2 game remake.
01:16:56
Speaker
And then Capcom was like, guys, we're making one.
01:17:00
Speaker
You can't do that.
01:17:01
Speaker
Like, we're going to sue you if you do it.
01:17:03
Speaker
But...
01:17:04
Speaker
This is cool.
01:17:05
Speaker
Let us help you finish this game.
01:17:07
Speaker
And they like changed it into a different game.
01:17:10
Speaker
And it's like a Resident Evil like from like the it's like a Resident Evil remake.
01:17:14
Speaker
Like, yes.
01:17:16
Speaker
And you know what's fascinating is it does something with with ammo that doesn't happen often in shooters.
01:17:27
Speaker
where like if you have
Indie Game 'Becoming Saint' and Switch Nostalgia
01:17:29
Speaker
like five shots left in your clip and you take it out and put a new one in, you lost those five shots because they were fucking in the they were still in the right.
01:17:37
Speaker
You actually.
01:17:38
Speaker
Oh, that's the magazines.
01:17:39
Speaker
The magazines are actually items that you have to manage.
01:17:43
Speaker
So when you take it out, you still have it in your inventory, but you got to like deal with it or reload your magazines.
01:17:50
Speaker
I mean, like that is an interesting that's a it's a level of inventory management that has never.
01:17:55
Speaker
It's very really been done.
01:17:57
Speaker
It's very survival horror.
01:17:59
Speaker
Yeah, I like I'm definitely going to check that out.
01:18:01
Speaker
I've got that on my wish list now.
01:18:04
Speaker
After that, I played a game called Becoming Saint.
01:18:09
Speaker
This is another really interesting one.
01:18:12
Speaker
This is kind of like the whole idea is it takes place in late medieval Italy, and you are a person who wants to become a saint.
01:18:23
Speaker
So you are it's like a it's like a strategy religion simulator, but there are a lot of really interesting little things.
01:18:30
Speaker
bits to it.
01:18:31
Speaker
First off, you have to go to region to start in Assisi and then you're going and you can go to different.
01:18:36
Speaker
Yeah.
01:18:37
Speaker
And you go from different regions and they have different influences there.
01:18:42
Speaker
And as you build up your reputation, you you you start attracting certain kinds of followers.
01:18:51
Speaker
My first kinds of followers were naked fanatics and monks with books specifically.
01:18:57
Speaker
Which is very apt for you.
01:18:59
Speaker
Yeah.
01:19:00
Speaker
I'm wild with that.
01:19:01
Speaker
Yeah.
01:19:02
Speaker
Hey.
01:19:02
Speaker
And you're developing the religion over time.
01:19:05
Speaker
So you answer every few cycles, you answer some more questions and you're given opportunities to develop it further.
01:19:16
Speaker
And what kind of a religious kind of group is
01:19:22
Speaker
you are putting together, it depends on how you act with it.
01:19:25
Speaker
So you can you can have an anarchist group.
01:19:29
Speaker
You can have a capitalistic group.
01:19:32
Speaker
I ended up having a good old fashioned cult, which, you know, the highly charismatic leader.
01:19:38
Speaker
Yeah, it's yeah.
01:19:40
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
01:19:40
Speaker
And and then you and then we would go.
01:19:42
Speaker
I go into this new region with my naked fanatics and my monks with books, and I would pit them against
01:19:50
Speaker
whoever they had.
01:19:52
Speaker
So you've got this combat, quote unquote, where my monks are throwing knowledge at them, and the fanatics are throwing bread and trying to get everyone hopped up on like, we're feeding you.
01:20:08
Speaker
That's what it feels like to be Elon Musk, I think.
01:20:10
Speaker
I think so, yeah.
01:20:12
Speaker
Meanwhile, I'm playing against merchants who are throwing money at me.
01:20:16
Speaker
And it's got an auto-battler thing, which I took.
01:20:20
Speaker
And it's the first game I've ever played where you have your reputation meters.
01:20:29
Speaker
You have a reputation with the Pope, with the Emperor.
01:20:34
Speaker
It's got a mechanic for begging for food.
01:20:38
Speaker
It's weird as hell.
01:20:39
Speaker
And I really enjoyed it.
01:20:42
Speaker
It's got something really special there.
01:20:45
Speaker
It's very indie.
01:20:48
Speaker
I don't think it's out yet, but it's a new one.
01:20:52
Speaker
That's something I haven't seen before.
01:20:54
Speaker
It came out last month.
01:20:56
Speaker
No shit.
01:20:56
Speaker
Okay.
01:20:58
Speaker
I see one friend wants this game.
01:21:01
Speaker
Take a guess who wants it.
01:21:04
Speaker
Is it?
01:21:05
Speaker
It's Jesse Garasha.
01:21:06
Speaker
Jesse Garasha.
01:21:08
Speaker
Jesse Gratia always ends up like on these on these lists.
01:21:14
Speaker
Friend of the pod, Jesse.
01:21:17
Speaker
It's it's it is a very, very interesting game.
01:21:20
Speaker
It's got some of that indie jank to it.
01:21:22
Speaker
But.
01:21:24
Speaker
It's different.
01:21:26
Speaker
If you genuinely want something that is trying to go a different angle.
01:21:31
Speaker
Yeah, it sounds fresh and fun in a way.
01:21:33
Speaker
Exactly.
01:21:35
Speaker
I'd highly recommend taking a look at it.
01:21:36
Speaker
Surprising way, yeah.
01:21:38
Speaker
Right, right.
01:21:39
Speaker
It's very, very interesting.
01:21:40
Speaker
So that's what I've been playing.
01:21:42
Speaker
So, Alex, what are you playing?
01:21:45
Speaker
Well, everything is the short answer.
01:21:48
Speaker
I play a lot of video games, you guys.
01:21:50
Speaker
Lately, I have been fucking around on the Switch 2 a little bit because number one, I got like, I went like, I had COVID like really recently and I was like home and I couldn't do anything, but I could turn the brightness way down on my Switch 2 and like sit in the dark and play video games for like 20 minutes at a time.
01:22:10
Speaker
So when I was doing that, I played the weapon master mode of Soul Calibur 2 on my Switch 2.
01:22:15
Speaker
Nice.
01:22:17
Speaker
Guys,
01:22:18
Speaker
That game still rips.
01:22:20
Speaker
That game is still very good.
01:22:23
Speaker
I believe it.
01:22:23
Speaker
Zilkabber 2 was fucking everything.
01:22:27
Speaker
I love games that are like with the Dynasty Warriors style or like Budokai style progression where you just like...
01:22:35
Speaker
do challenges forever and get shit.
01:22:37
Speaker
And that game's really good like that.
01:22:39
Speaker
Um, yeah.
01:22:40
Speaker
I also want to say that I played all the way to Bowser's castle on super Mario world yesterday out of nowhere by accident.
01:22:48
Speaker
And then, uh, there's this thing that I've been doing where like, I have a lot of physical games cause I'm a psycho, but the switch to like just runs switch games on better hardware.
01:23:02
Speaker
And it actually emulates them rather than runs them in native hardware.
01:23:05
Speaker
So a lot of the things that limit Switch games when the game has an unlocked frame rate or something like that, like translate the performance.
01:23:16
Speaker
So like a lot of games that aren't updated
01:23:19
Speaker
for the Switch 2 particularly still benefit greatly from the improved performance.
01:23:26
Speaker
So I'm going to jump on the bandwagon and sort of pimp a game out that I played last year called Bakeru.
01:23:35
Speaker
that is unbelievable.
01:23:37
Speaker
It's being published by Spike Chunsoft.
01:23:39
Speaker
It came out, I think there's a physical version now even in the West, but it's Sukawaki-san and Ibisu-san who are like the two guys that did the Gambari Goemon games that are like amazing, like Mystical Ninja Goemon.
01:23:52
Speaker
And so this game is like basically that.
01:23:55
Speaker
I think he's like a little Tanuki boy.
01:23:58
Speaker
But he looks like Goemon kind of.
01:23:59
Speaker
Yeah, he looks adorable.
01:24:01
Speaker
He has, what is those, the taiko drums?
01:24:04
Speaker
He's a taiko drum guy.
01:24:05
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:24:06
Speaker
He uses the sticks to do things.
01:24:08
Speaker
And if you just look at this game for like two seconds, you're going to be like, oh shit, this game looks like it fucking slaps ass.
01:24:14
Speaker
Yeah.
01:24:15
Speaker
And then...
01:24:16
Speaker
I, I, I'm obsessed with, uh, I love shmups.
01:24:19
Speaker
I play them all the time.
01:24:20
Speaker
I am obsessed with, uh, Darius Gaiden right now.
01:24:23
Speaker
I think that might be my favorite shmup of all time, but I like recently, you can kind of see it in my, I don't know if I'm on camera right now or not for real, but yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:24:31
Speaker
There's a, um, I got to see our TTV, uh, when I was at SoCal retro, it's very small.
01:24:37
Speaker
It's like nine inches or something like that.
01:24:39
Speaker
It's a Trinitron.
01:24:41
Speaker
And I I finally like connected my mister to a actual CRT.
01:24:49
Speaker
And it's like turned all my games that I loved from my childhood back online to like, there's like no barrier between me recapturing the magic anymore.
01:24:59
Speaker
It's just like here.
01:25:00
Speaker
That's awesome.
01:25:00
Speaker
And Darius Gaiden, if you have never played it, it's like the funnest, most chill Darius game because I think the original Darius games are like...
01:25:11
Speaker
long boys.
01:25:12
Speaker
I don't know if you've ever seen one in an arcade, but they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:25:16
Speaker
Three monitors long and they're like, you're really small and that's kind of what's fun about them.
01:25:19
Speaker
Right.
01:25:19
Speaker
It's the one, it's the one with the fish.
01:25:21
Speaker
If you guys, if you guys know your shmups.
01:25:22
Speaker
Yeah.
01:25:23
Speaker
Yeah.
01:25:23
Speaker
Yeah.
01:25:24
Speaker
But Darius Gaiden was like,
01:25:27
Speaker
The game was huge, big name thing, and then they wanted to make the game kind of more for the Neo Geo type crowd, where it's a smaller area that it takes up in the room.
01:25:40
Speaker
And Darius Gaiden is a one screen game like this.
01:25:43
Speaker
I played on Sega Saturn.
01:25:44
Speaker
I love...
01:25:46
Speaker
I love that game.
01:25:47
Speaker
And then what else?
01:25:49
Speaker
What else am I fucking playing?
01:25:51
Speaker
I'm trying to think what RPG I'm playing.
01:25:53
Speaker
Oh, I played like half of Flying Fairy HD, the Bravely Default remake.
01:25:59
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
01:26:00
Speaker
I like it.
01:26:01
Speaker
I like that game a lot.
01:26:03
Speaker
I'm not a complainer.
01:26:05
Speaker
I understand that you play the game through several times.
01:26:07
Speaker
That's not the part of the game that bothers me.
01:26:09
Speaker
I think that's a stupid thing to take issue with.
01:26:11
Speaker
But the game is not... The thing I'm finding about the game is that certain... And this is something that I'm obsessed with right now.
01:26:21
Speaker
I spend a lot of time thinking about video games, of course.
01:26:23
Speaker
Sure.
01:26:25
Speaker
Context matters a lot with game design, more than you'd think.
01:26:30
Speaker
And I just finished, or I haven't finished it yet, but I've been streaming it.
01:26:34
Speaker
Flower, Sun and Rain.
01:26:36
Speaker
It's a Suda51 game that's like the sequel to Silver Case and the prequel to Killer7 kind of, that's on DS.
01:26:43
Speaker
And it's really good, but it's really weird because in Japan it was a PS2 game.
01:26:47
Speaker
and it got translated to DS.
01:26:49
Speaker
And so watching something translated in that direction, it's really- That's weird.
01:26:54
Speaker
It's really hideous.
01:26:55
Speaker
It's like a horrible gameplay experience.
01:26:59
Speaker
But I mean, it's Suda, so the style comes through, the writing comes through, the music comes through.
01:27:04
Speaker
But it's really hampered by that.
01:27:06
Speaker
And I feel like the opposite is true of Flying Fairy HD, where like Flying Fairy HD is a beautiful game.
01:27:12
Speaker
I mean, Bravely Default for DS was a beautiful game.
01:27:15
Speaker
And playing it over and over and like the way the battle system works.
01:27:18
Speaker
I don't know if you remember, it's very similar to how Octopath Traveler works now, where the brave and the defaulting, it's like you can like take four actions at once or you can like bank an action by taking a break.
01:27:29
Speaker
And that's like a fun thing to do.
01:27:32
Speaker
when you're holding it in your hand on a bus and you're playing for 20 minutes to program and then you watch it all play out.
01:27:38
Speaker
Right.
01:27:39
Speaker
On a television in 4K,
01:27:43
Speaker
It's just not a, it's a weird experience.
01:27:45
Speaker
It's a weird experience.
01:27:46
Speaker
It's really chunky.
01:27:48
Speaker
It looks really good.
01:27:49
Speaker
And the frame rate's really good.
01:27:50
Speaker
And the refresh rate's really good on the little Switch 2 screen.
01:27:53
Speaker
But like the big giant environments that are like smoothed over look kind of weird.
01:27:57
Speaker
And there's, it's like fully voice acted.
01:27:59
Speaker
And it's mostly just like listening to people talk.
01:28:03
Speaker
And
01:28:03
Speaker
I don't know.
01:28:04
Speaker
It's just not a multimedia experience that was created for such a big stage.
01:28:08
Speaker
And I think that's the type of thing that people don't think about that much.
01:28:11
Speaker
Like today, people kind of just like,
01:28:15
Speaker
try to bend reality to their own desires and play whatever games they want wherever and they ignore latency and stuff like that.
01:28:23
Speaker
Like, oh, I can play GameCube games portably on my like weird Mibu droid piece of shit thing that I bought for $50.
01:28:31
Speaker
Like, you know, I feel like
01:28:36
Speaker
there's a lot of games that should be played in their original format.
01:28:39
Speaker
And going along with that, I want to make a recommendation just because I kind of didn't recommend Flying Fairy HD.
01:28:45
Speaker
If you have a chance to play the Game Boy Advance version of Riviera,
01:28:50
Speaker
by Atlas.
01:28:52
Speaker
That is a neat little RPG that plays differently than most RPGs and is perfect for portable gaming.
01:29:00
Speaker
It's almost like a VN that's an RPG.
01:29:03
Speaker
I don't know how to describe it better than that, but it's kind of one more degree of reality obscured in terms of being on a board and just kind of advancing.
01:29:14
Speaker
There's a remake of it on Switch and stuff, but if you can go play it in your hands,
01:29:20
Speaker
on a small screen, I recommend that you do so.
01:29:24
Speaker
I have an analog pocket and I think that thing is the reason I like the analog pocket in the mystery is because they let you they let you get your context back with games.
01:29:36
Speaker
Right.
01:29:37
Speaker
Right.
01:29:37
Speaker
Yeah.
01:29:38
Speaker
And I think that's really if I short of recommending any specific game, get your context back.
Celebrating Game Authenticity and Original Formats
01:29:45
Speaker
Yeah, I and I think I what's funny is I it that's almost like the those it reminds me of those commercials where it's like you wouldn't like don't watch movies on a phone or whatever.
01:29:58
Speaker
Like don't say they're like the David.
01:30:00
Speaker
Yeah, like your fucking iPhone.
01:30:02
Speaker
You're not.
01:30:02
Speaker
You think you watch the movie, but you didn't watch the movie.
01:30:04
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
01:30:06
Speaker
Yeah, try.
01:30:07
Speaker
Try to rest his soul.
01:30:09
Speaker
God rest his soul.
01:30:10
Speaker
That was a that was a tough day.
01:30:13
Speaker
But yeah, try to get it within the context that it was in because otherwise it's sort of like the fucking, you know what it makes me think of also is the X-Men arcade game.
01:30:25
Speaker
Oh, yes.
01:30:25
Speaker
Where you, sure there was like single screen versions of it, but it wasn't really the true version unless you had the big ass six boy version of it.
01:30:40
Speaker
But yeah.
01:30:40
Speaker
Available now on Mr. By the way.
01:30:42
Speaker
Available now.
01:30:43
Speaker
The X-Men core, the X-Men Konami core dropped.
01:30:46
Speaker
It is so sick.
01:30:47
Speaker
The classic.
01:30:49
Speaker
That one sound that you can hear across every arcade.
01:30:52
Speaker
That's a part of my fucking childhood.
01:30:53
Speaker
That game.
01:30:54
Speaker
Jesus.
01:30:55
Speaker
Welcome to Dime.
01:30:56
Speaker
Nothing can move the barb.
01:30:57
Speaker
Yeah.
01:31:02
Speaker
But yeah, I think do yourself a favor.
01:31:05
Speaker
Here's what I'm going to say.
01:31:07
Speaker
You bootleggers, right?
01:31:09
Speaker
I love you, right?
01:31:09
Speaker
You're punk.
01:31:10
Speaker
You're the right.
01:31:11
Speaker
You're good.
01:31:12
Speaker
Never has there been a worse time to pay money for video games than right now.
01:31:16
Speaker
But I will tell you this.
01:31:17
Speaker
You're fucking lazy if you stop playing.
01:31:20
Speaker
at i have it and i can technically play it like yeah fuck all of you losers if you're bootlegging your comics read them the size of a comic i don't care how you do it put on your monitor do whatever you need to do read at the right size don't skip how they do in those stupid apps where you can like page through the different boxes on the paper you tap double tap to go into the text or whatever imagine there's a comic book artist alive who loves that
01:31:45
Speaker
You know, and when you're, yeah, when you're, when you're playing your fucking little Game Boy games, try and get them on a screen that you can fit in your hand because Game Boy games aren't games so much as they are little beepy, wonderful crystals that you hold in your hand when you're in the back of your car.
01:32:00
Speaker
And if you're not playing it in that context, you might not like Mole Mania as much as I did when I was a kid.
01:32:05
Speaker
You know what I mean?
01:32:06
Speaker
You might not enjoy Riviera, the promised land as much if you're trying to play it in your living room.
01:32:11
Speaker
Maybe you will.
01:32:11
Speaker
Maybe you can make that stretch in your mind, you know, like how we watch black and white movies that have been ruined by Ted Turner on Turner.
01:32:18
Speaker
Ted Turner just couldn't deal with it, you know?
01:32:22
Speaker
Yeah, but you can do the work yourself, but I think.
01:32:27
Speaker
Yeah, no, I agree.
01:32:28
Speaker
As a burgeoning techno wizard of my own, I feel like you're lazy if you're not putting in the work for fidelity.
01:32:37
Speaker
Yeah.
01:32:39
Speaker
I love it.
Warhammer 40K Rogue Trader Updates
01:32:42
Speaker
uh so um do i ask you what you're playing now yeah you could kevin what are you playing what are you playing oh well i didn't i didn't know you were gonna ask me um all right so probably the thing i put into the most time this this past week is is warhammer 40k rogue trader uh because both of you guys on that
01:33:04
Speaker
Yeah, the DLC is... The second DLC is out, and I was like, all right, I'm back into it.
01:33:10
Speaker
And I'm halfway through Act 2, I want to say, of five acts.
01:33:13
Speaker
It's not Game Pass.
01:33:19
Speaker
I don't know if it's on Game Pass.
01:33:21
Speaker
It is.
01:33:22
Speaker
It is?
01:33:22
Speaker
Okay.
01:33:23
Speaker
I kind of want to check this out.
01:33:25
Speaker
It's on Game Pass.
01:33:26
Speaker
I feel like it's Destiny that you guys both are like, yeah, I'm playing Rogue Trader.
01:33:30
Speaker
Yeah.
01:33:32
Speaker
I take pride in the fact that 40K is like a disease I have that I slowly but surely gave to Kevin.
01:33:38
Speaker
That's how I felt when I gave my wife COVID.
01:33:41
Speaker
Yeah.
01:33:44
Speaker
Similar.
01:33:44
Speaker
Similar.
01:33:45
Speaker
It's very similar.
01:33:47
Speaker
Grandpa Nurgle would be proud.
01:33:48
Speaker
Oh, yes.
01:33:50
Speaker
But yeah, so I'm a bit into it.
01:33:54
Speaker
I think I have mostly finished a big part of the Adeptus Astartes new quest line.
01:34:03
Speaker
Basically in the second DLC you get this dude who's like just Judge Dredd.
01:34:08
Speaker
He's literally Judge Dredd.
01:34:10
Speaker
I love that guy.
01:34:12
Speaker
He's an arbiter and he's got a dog.
01:34:15
Speaker
He's got a robot dog.
01:34:16
Speaker
I empathize with this guy now.
01:34:17
Speaker
He's just like me.
01:34:18
Speaker
A cyber dog called Glado.
01:34:23
Speaker
And you can ask to pet the dog when you talk to him on the bridge of the ship.
01:34:27
Speaker
You're like, I'm going to pet the dog.
01:34:29
Speaker
And he's like...
01:34:30
Speaker
you shouldn't pet the dog.
01:34:32
Speaker
And like there's options where it's like, I'm going to pet him anyway.
01:34:36
Speaker
I didn't do it today.
01:34:37
Speaker
I was going to click.
01:34:38
Speaker
I'm going to pet him anyway.
01:34:39
Speaker
I was like, no, I'll keep my fingers.
01:34:42
Speaker
This is a game where it would be like, well, now you have a permanent debuff of like not having fingers.
01:34:47
Speaker
That's how the Warhammer universe works.
01:34:49
Speaker
There's no value placed on human life in any way.
01:34:54
Speaker
None whatsoever.
01:34:55
Speaker
There's nothing.
01:34:56
Speaker
Yeah.
01:34:57
Speaker
There's a moment early on in Rogue Trader where you're talking to a guy and you're getting information out of him and you're like, oh man, I promise I'm going to like, yeah, you're fine, dude.
01:35:07
Speaker
You just tell me what the governor is up to.
01:35:10
Speaker
And he's like, oh shit, okay, here, I'll tell you what the governor is up to.
01:35:13
Speaker
And then you have like two dialogue choices after that and it's like one of it is you're free to go and the other one is I'm going to maim you anyway for spilling secrets.
01:35:23
Speaker
Yeah.
01:35:24
Speaker
You gave me what I want and it was the wrong decision.
01:35:28
Speaker
I reached up to pull my tie down off the fan in Disco Elysium.
01:35:31
Speaker
Yeah, and you died.
01:35:33
Speaker
Yeah, I had a heart attack and died.
01:35:37
Speaker
So yeah, Rogue Trader, check-in, still riding along on that.
01:35:41
Speaker
It's like Pathfinder, those Pathfinder games.
01:35:43
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
01:35:44
Speaker
Same company, Alcat.
01:35:45
Speaker
That's some good shit.
01:35:47
Speaker
And they're using the Rogue Trader system, which is based on like a bunch of Warhammer 40k tabletop RPG games.
01:35:55
Speaker
The Fantasy Flight ones.
01:35:57
Speaker
Yeah.
01:35:57
Speaker
Yeah.
01:35:58
Speaker
The Rogue Trader, Only War, things like that.
01:36:02
Speaker
Great idea for like PC type.
01:36:04
Speaker
Yeah, it's a perfect.
01:36:06
Speaker
You have to play it on the PC there.
01:36:08
Speaker
I know people play it with like kind of like on their console or whatever.
01:36:13
Speaker
But like, no, this is this is a game.
01:36:15
Speaker
You got to have a mouse.
01:36:16
Speaker
You got to be clicking on shit.
01:36:18
Speaker
It's a it's a CRP.
01:36:20
Speaker
Any any game like like fucking Baldur's Gate, like Baldur's Gate.
01:36:23
Speaker
Yeah.
01:36:24
Speaker
Yeah.
01:36:24
Speaker
Like God bless him.
01:36:26
Speaker
they the therian has made the best video game maybe like they did something amazing or larian what are they called larian yeah uh they fucking nailed it the console controls are even good but let's talk about context again i want to just take you back to context and yeah you can play it in a dumb way but you can play in a way that they were clearly planning if you play it
01:36:49
Speaker
Which is a mouse and keyboard, buddy.
01:36:51
Speaker
You got a mouse and keyboard that.
01:36:53
Speaker
Speaking of a game that's... Yeah, that's not about access.
01:36:56
Speaker
That's about you just taking the time.
01:36:59
Speaker
Take the time out of your day.
01:37:00
Speaker
Yeah, to do something beyond your own little, like, don't play video games like you're looking up porn on your phone.
01:37:08
Speaker
Like, fucking respect the game a little bit.
01:37:10
Speaker
Respect your life.
01:37:11
Speaker
Like, you know, take some pride in your hobby, you fuckers.
Ninja Gaiden Ragebound and Unique Demos
01:37:16
Speaker
You fuckers.
01:37:17
Speaker
Fuckers.
01:37:19
Speaker
The other game I've been playing, which is perfect, actually a perfect Steam Deck game, is Ninja Gaiden Ragebound, which is... I've been looking at that.
01:37:30
Speaker
Yeah, it's made by... Well, it's made by the Game Kitchen, which made Blasphemous 1 and 2.
01:37:36
Speaker
Love those guys.
01:37:37
Speaker
And Blasphemous 1 and 2 are, you know, some of my... I love them.
01:37:40
Speaker
They're amazing.
01:37:42
Speaker
I stream those.
01:37:44
Speaker
When you grow up Catholic...
01:37:47
Speaker
When you grew up Catholic.
01:37:47
Speaker
You see that big bloody face every day when you go to church.
01:37:50
Speaker
Yeah.
01:37:50
Speaker
You see that big bloody face every day.
01:37:52
Speaker
You have a certain connection to the blasphemous games.
01:37:54
Speaker
You're like, I get it.
01:37:56
Speaker
When you walk to church and it's Jesus and he's like.
01:38:00
Speaker
He's like all up there on the cross and he's dying and bloody.
01:38:03
Speaker
It's like, yeah, fucking 10 PA died.
01:38:06
Speaker
I grew up Catholic as well.
01:38:08
Speaker
Yeah.
01:38:09
Speaker
I get you.
01:38:09
Speaker
Yeah.
01:38:12
Speaker
Yeah.
01:38:13
Speaker
So Ninja Guy and Ragebound.
01:38:14
Speaker
Great game.
01:38:15
Speaker
Feels good to play.
01:38:17
Speaker
I said I pitched it in the dumbest way possible.
01:38:20
Speaker
It's like it's like a Metroidvania, but they took the Metroid out and just left thevania.
01:38:23
Speaker
There's no.
01:38:26
Speaker
There's no.
01:38:28
Speaker
There's no open worldness.
01:38:30
Speaker
It's an old Ninja Gaiden game.
01:38:33
Speaker
But I say it's like a Metroidvania.
01:38:36
Speaker
It's like because you have abilities, it's just you have them all already.
01:38:42
Speaker
There's no getting your powers back or anything like that.
01:38:45
Speaker
Interesting.
01:38:45
Speaker
I'm into that.
01:38:47
Speaker
Yeah.
01:38:49
Speaker
I love the TurboGrafx version of Ninja Gaiden 1.
01:38:52
Speaker
You have a chance to play that.
01:38:54
Speaker
I feel like that's kind of because everybody's kind of hot for the other one.
01:38:57
Speaker
Right.
01:38:58
Speaker
Shinobi.
01:38:59
Speaker
Right.
01:38:59
Speaker
The new Shinobi.
01:39:00
Speaker
But that Ninja Gaiden game, I was like, are you fucking hard as shit and like really serious?
01:39:05
Speaker
Because you seem like you are.
01:39:06
Speaker
And I want to play that.
01:39:07
Speaker
Yeah.
01:39:08
Speaker
Yeah.
01:39:09
Speaker
Ragebound is great.
01:39:11
Speaker
It takes place at the same time as the first Ninja Gaiden.
01:39:15
Speaker
It's a parallel story.
01:39:17
Speaker
The first NES one?
01:39:19
Speaker
I think the first NES one.
01:39:22
Speaker
Because it starts out with the death of Ryu's father, which is like the opening cutscene, I think, of the original Ninja Gaiden.
01:39:33
Speaker
So you are one of his students, basically.
01:39:37
Speaker
on a separate mission involving like getting doing something and the CIA gets involved and you think they're good guys.
01:39:47
Speaker
But wait, it's the CIA.
01:39:48
Speaker
They're not.
01:39:50
Speaker
The CIA is like the KGB, but worse.
01:39:52
Speaker
They're scary.
01:39:53
Speaker
Yeah.
01:39:53
Speaker
Yeah, they're scary, man.
01:39:56
Speaker
So yeah, Ninja Gaiden Rage Band.
01:39:58
Speaker
And the only other thing I played this week was the demo of No, I'm Not a Human.
01:40:04
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
01:40:04
Speaker
What'd you think?
01:40:06
Speaker
Oh, this game, it was bothering me.
01:40:09
Speaker
Yeah.
01:40:11
Speaker
So basically, this is scary game squad material, Alex.
01:40:16
Speaker
No, I'm not a human.
01:40:17
Speaker
Wait, wait a minute.
01:40:19
Speaker
Is this that, like, really good?
01:40:22
Speaker
Oh, no, this is a first person one.
01:40:24
Speaker
Yeah.
01:40:25
Speaker
So basically you're a dude.
01:40:29
Speaker
It's it's you.
01:40:32
Speaker
Something is happening outside.
01:40:33
Speaker
So like the backstory, Phil brought it up to me because it's similar to a game that we were playing earlier, which is just an RPG maker game called Look Outside, which is fucking phenomenal.
01:40:46
Speaker
Excellent.
01:40:47
Speaker
Everybody go play Look
Star Wars Book Club and Alan Dean Foster's Work
01:40:49
Speaker
Outside.
01:40:49
Speaker
It's like if Undertale and Fear and Hunger had a child would be the game Look Outside.
01:40:58
Speaker
So no, I'm not a human is a similar setting where it's like there's something wrong with the sun and it's mutating people.
01:41:05
Speaker
So you got to stay inside.
01:41:06
Speaker
And during the night, people will come knocking on your door and they're like, let me in.
01:41:11
Speaker
I can give you things.
01:41:12
Speaker
And you just have to like get like I'll let you in.
01:41:17
Speaker
But then I got to test you.
01:41:18
Speaker
And every day.
01:41:20
Speaker
Yes.
01:41:21
Speaker
Yes.
01:41:22
Speaker
And every day there will be news reports about how you can test people that are visitors that are not humans.
01:41:28
Speaker
And it's like, do they have perfect teeth?
01:41:31
Speaker
Do they have dirt under their nails?
01:41:32
Speaker
Oh, I played a game similar to this on Scary Game Squad where you are the super, you're like the security guard of a- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:41:41
Speaker
It's similar to, it's like, because that game is like- It's like fun.
01:41:46
Speaker
It's like a kid game.
01:41:46
Speaker
It's like fun, kind of lighthearted.
01:41:49
Speaker
This is like the not lighthearted version of that.
01:41:52
Speaker
This is like the the real bummer version of it.
01:41:55
Speaker
Sounds great to me.
01:41:58
Speaker
To be honest, I'm into that.
01:41:59
Speaker
It's a really, really solid demo.
01:42:02
Speaker
It's yeah.
01:42:03
Speaker
Yeah.
01:42:04
Speaker
So I would at least check out the demo.
01:42:07
Speaker
There was a there was a is it is it from an anthology?
01:42:14
Speaker
I'm not sure.
01:42:15
Speaker
I feel like it came out in like a, like the demo came out or maybe it wasn't a demo, but I think it came out like in one of those dread X collection type.
01:42:24
Speaker
It's the same publisher as Buckshot roulette.
01:42:27
Speaker
A great game that you should play.
01:42:29
Speaker
A great game.
01:42:30
Speaker
Great game.
01:42:30
Speaker
Buckshot roulette are Arctic eggs, mouthwashing and thresholds.
01:42:35
Speaker
Mouthwashing was very good also.
01:42:37
Speaker
Mouthwashing is a tremendous game or all, all published by the same company that's publishing.
01:42:41
Speaker
No, I'm not a human.
01:42:43
Speaker
Well, that makes a hell of a lot of sense, to be completely honest.
01:42:47
Speaker
Yeah.
01:42:47
Speaker
Wow.
01:42:49
Speaker
Shout out, Malfoy.
01:42:49
Speaker
I've played all of those but Threshold.
01:42:51
Speaker
Yeah.
01:42:52
Speaker
Shout out mouthwashing.
01:42:54
Speaker
Shout out mouthwashing.
01:42:55
Speaker
And what's the fear and hunger element?
01:42:58
Speaker
It's like, oh, yeah, that was for the other game I was talking about.
01:43:02
Speaker
That was for Look Outside, which is basically Undertale and Fear and Hunger mixed together.
01:43:07
Speaker
Fear and Hunger is kind of Undertale and Fear and Hunger mixed together in a way.
01:43:12
Speaker
Shit.
01:43:13
Speaker
That's true.
01:43:14
Speaker
Yeah.
01:43:16
Speaker
Yeah.
01:43:16
Speaker
God, fear and hunger.
01:43:18
Speaker
I got to get back into that.
01:43:19
Speaker
I've only gotten one.
01:43:20
Speaker
Only if you hate yourself.
01:43:21
Speaker
He kind of does.
01:43:25
Speaker
Somebody's going to watch you play it or you're never going to speak to anybody and you're going to read it like Dostoevsky.
01:43:30
Speaker
Then, yeah, it's good.
01:43:32
Speaker
Just sit there and get really bummed out.
01:43:36
Speaker
Kevin punishes himself with this guy.
01:43:39
Speaker
The former Catholic thing.
01:43:40
Speaker
It's the former Catholic thing.
01:43:43
Speaker
It's like hot sauce where you play games, right?
01:43:46
Speaker
And then you ruin yourself.
01:43:49
Speaker
Once you get that type of pain, once you've Dante must died once, right?
01:43:54
Speaker
Yeah.
01:43:54
Speaker
Then that's what's fun.
01:43:56
Speaker
That's what's fun.
01:43:57
Speaker
You've raised the bar to a point that's unsustainable.
01:44:03
Speaker
Yeah.
01:44:05
Speaker
But yeah, that's it.
01:44:07
Speaker
That's what I've been playing.
01:44:09
Speaker
Alex, why don't you go ahead and plug your stuff.
01:44:14
Speaker
Well, I will.
01:44:15
Speaker
Please come watch my YouTube Let's Play show, Super Beard Bros, where I play video games every day for...
01:44:23
Speaker
fucking 15 years or some 15 years now yeah let's say insane long amount of time uh if you like that type of thing uh if you like like conspiracies and aliens and ghosts and murder check out my podcast cheluminati a great podcast patreon.com slash cheluminati pod
01:44:44
Speaker
And if you are into books and nerdy shit, me and Jesse Cox and Davis from the Warp Zone have been quietly reading in order from the beginning in a chronological, almost like sociological way.
01:45:00
Speaker
way we have been re-experiencing the old Star Wars canon.
01:45:05
Speaker
All the books, all the movies, all the TV shows, all the comic books, we're reading them in exact chronological order that they were released.
01:45:13
Speaker
It's amazing.
01:45:14
Speaker
Kind of discussing them.
01:45:15
Speaker
And it's been a really, it's been a really interesting time kind of like seeing Star Wars like
01:45:24
Speaker
in this lens and seeing it grow and evolve.
01:45:29
Speaker
And that's kind of like a big passion project for us.
01:45:32
Speaker
So if you really want some deep dives, those are some big, chunky, that's the most talking, the most in-depth talking you will ever hear about Star Wars in your goddamn life.
01:45:41
Speaker
So go check out the Star Wars Old Canon Book Club, SWOCBC everywhere.
01:45:47
Speaker
So I remember you guys.
01:45:49
Speaker
So when you when you launched that and you were talking about Splinter of a Mind's Eye, we actually interviewed Alan Dean Foster for this show for this.
01:45:59
Speaker
Yeah.
01:46:00
Speaker
What did he write?
01:46:01
Speaker
He wrote he was the he wrote the very first video game novelization.
01:46:06
Speaker
Which was, what was the fuck was the name of that one?
01:46:10
Speaker
It's like a PC RPG from like 1983 or something like that.
01:46:16
Speaker
Amazing.
01:46:16
Speaker
But yeah, we actually talked to him about Splinter of Mind's Eye a little bit.
01:46:20
Speaker
And he's like, yeah, that was an interesting project.
01:46:23
Speaker
Basically, George wanted me to write what would be the sequel to Star Wars.
01:46:29
Speaker
if Star Wars didn't make any money.
01:46:31
Speaker
Yeah.
01:46:32
Speaker
And it's like, he's like, I actually had a much longer manuscript.
01:46:35
Speaker
I had like actual starfighter fights in there and stuff.
01:46:38
Speaker
And like George came by and he's like, yeah, cut all that.
01:46:41
Speaker
We're not going to be able to afford it.
01:46:43
Speaker
And even though it's like a book.
01:46:45
Speaker
So I thought that was fascinating where he's like, you can keep it in the book, George, but.
01:46:52
Speaker
Yeah.
01:46:53
Speaker
I feel like, I feel like,
01:46:56
Speaker
It's weird to think about Star Wars in that way because the book was already a hit.
01:47:04
Speaker
Yeah.
01:47:05
Speaker
It's weird to think about, like, if you were into this, if you were, like, an OG, you bought the book sight unseen because you just saw it on the shelf and you thought it was cool.
01:47:14
Speaker
It sold, like, half a million copies or something.
01:47:16
Speaker
Yeah.
01:47:17
Speaker
And I'm sure the trailer...
01:47:19
Speaker
like did a lot for it but it it was before that and it was like a bestseller so of course and ghost written by by alan yeah he wrote it yeah he wrote it off the screenplay too so you have like all these weird things that aren't in the final movie and then yeah and then you get to see his version of episode two or whatever and
01:47:39
Speaker
And then he has a treatment for episode nine that was floating around also that he was that he was he was messing with.
01:47:47
Speaker
So if you ever have a chance, go check out Alan Dean Foster's treatment for what became Rise of Skywalker because it's out there.
01:47:54
Speaker
It involves people being robots and shit.
01:47:57
Speaker
It's crazy.
01:47:58
Speaker
Nice.
01:48:00
Speaker
Just an old sci fi writer.
01:48:01
Speaker
He's the coolest.
01:48:03
Speaker
He's a cool dude.
01:48:05
Speaker
But yeah, so thank you all so much for listening.
01:48:08
Speaker
Go check out Alex's shows.
01:48:09
Speaker
You can find us on the various social media platforms, Blue Sky, Instagram, not Facebook, and not the old Twitter site.
01:48:23
Speaker
We left there.
01:48:24
Speaker
I'm there, but I don't answer my messages.
01:48:28
Speaker
Come find me on anywhere else.
01:48:30
Speaker
At Fossiani A, by the way, if you want to find me.
01:48:33
Speaker
Yeah, get on there.
01:48:34
Speaker
Get on there and get involved.
01:48:38
Speaker
Phil, I do have one question before we go.
01:48:43
Speaker
So I think...
01:48:49
Speaker
I think the grass in my front yard is plotting against me.
01:48:55
Speaker
What should I do to... Should I reach out to them or do I need to confirm that there is a plot against me?
01:49:04
Speaker
What's going on there?
01:49:06
Speaker
It's all about intimidation.
01:49:08
Speaker
It's really what you need to do is if you don't even need to have gas in the mower, if you just bring the mower out, lean against it meaningfully and look at each individual blade of grass and repeat these words.