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