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Making Failure Feel Good | Windbreaker Podcast
6.2k Plays2 months ago
On this week’s episode of Windbreaker, Yahtzee, Marty, and JM8 chat about how failure is used successfully (and unsuccessfully) in games, both narratively and mechanically.
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Transcript
Introduction and Listener Support
00:00:00
Speaker
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Holiday Blues and Independent Work
00:00:27
Speaker
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Wet Breakers podcast. We're all keeping the lights on here, because while everyone else is at PAX, having a fucking whale of a time, I'm sure. first Jesse's in the chat, though, so at least Jesse's contributing. while also be Jesse. Oh, bully for fucking Jesse. We're all alone here. It's like when you go to school after hours, and everything's dark. Yeah. It's horrible. All the teachers hiding under the desks. Also for holiday. We're at school on a holiday. It's an American holiday.
00:00:55
Speaker
What day is it for you? Labor day. That's like the unofficial end of summer. I don't know. It's like, let's sell it like the labors. Is that like the pre-giving birthday? Yeah, I don't get holidays. I've, I work for myself. Holidays are just days when I can't go shopping.
00:01:11
Speaker
I get that out of my, my, uh, all of my friends in England are like, Oh, Jay, it's a bank holiday today. Like you shouldn't be working. And I'm like, mate, one, I work on American time yeah time schedules and two, our jobs do not permit us stuff. like yes as yeah yeah You just don't have to do that work.
00:01:29
Speaker
mother made like this It's got to get done by Friday, man. Actually, that's a lie. I took today off to spend, I did work yesterday. I took today off to spend time with my mum working right now. Yeah, I know, but I've come back. You've got to remember it's nighttime for me now. Oh, that's true. My mum, guess what she wanted to do for her 50th? Play VR puzzle games. What a legend.
00:01:56
Speaker
but one out What a cool mum. What a cool, very antisocial mum, you must have. Yep. Great.
Embracing Failure in Game Design
00:02:03
Speaker
Anyway, ah this week's topic is how to make failure fun in video games, which just ah covers ah a few broad areas, I'd say. Would it be fair to say, Jay, as a game designer, as a fellow game designer, but failure the failure state is more or less a fundamental aspect of game design?
00:02:23
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's an argument to be made that if you don't have a failure state, it's not necessarily a game. oh you remember oh za again Counterpoint LucasArts adventure games, but nevermind. Yeah, um but it is integral, you know, to to all aspects of design. And if you fumble it, you can dramatically ah decrease how long you'll play spending your game. I mean, I just made an episode on this um on the one mechanic killing games before they start.
00:02:53
Speaker
But what are we talking about here, Marty, specifically? Like ah yeah when a game so doesn't necessarily want you to avoid failing? Yeah, so I've thought of this in sort of like two halves and one is mechanical failure. So games that maybe handle the idea of failing mechanically in an interesting way. Games that do something different about it, like what is it about the carrot on the end of the stick that makes you coming back as opposed to becoming frustrated? And then the other ah half I think of is narratively. um And that's why we have Red Dead in the
00:03:25
Speaker
In the image here is not because of how it mechanically handles death like regular death admissions because it's a rockstar game It doesn't do anything too unique there but in how I guess spoilers for Red Dead you reach a point near the end of the story that ah You come to a confrontation that you just can't survive and there is no success and you have to fail it and you have to deal with the consequences of that failure and Yes. The ending of Halo Reach, one can put in a similar category. absolutely Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And Red Dead 2, you know, like then Red Dead 2 to an extent. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. yeah they yeah They put you in the no win scenario, but you feel like this is like the intended ending of the game. Yeah. And that's a, you know, we you you get movies and books and TV shows that sort of have those kind of endings, but I feel like we're so, um, we're so,
00:04:17
Speaker
I just, like, our thoughts when playing games are so ingrained on success. I mean, I guess in the arcades, it was you play until you die. Like, that was, I guess, the original, like, everyone dies at the end because, or you put in another quarter. um But after that, it was always like, your character will make it to the end of the game and will succeed. And I feel like it's only been in the last 10, 15 years or so, like, in emails, in the chats, bringing up Crisis Core, games like, ah um, chat all the clauses, spec ops the line, you know.
00:04:44
Speaker
Sometimes when we say succeeding, I would say comes to the end of the natural arc. And in some cases that would involve a happy ending where we succeed. And in some cases, the only natural way a character can end is to die. I would say, back up the line is a plot that feels like it has to naturally end with the main character's death. And obviously,
00:05:08
Speaker
You can't do it any point up to the end because then the game will be over and you're dead. it's It's right after the point where you like all the reveals are made in the plot where it turns out, oh, turns out you've been the biggest cause of all the shit that's been going on this entire game. ah You should probably just pop yourself in the skull right now, you big twat.
00:05:31
Speaker
And there's also, there's an ending to where you can survive. You like gun down all the American soldiers who come for you to take you in. But you're still like emotionally dead at that point. are Yeah, o stasia exactly.
00:05:43
Speaker
Narrative failure is an interesting one, right? Because, and death, like, closing your your book and your final page on the ultimate full stop of your main character just dying can feel incredibly satisfying, like, with Redeem Redemption and even side to narrative characters that you care for so so deeply. For me, Ori and the Will of the Wisps.
00:06:04
Speaker
um And the ending of that game, um, super, super powerful ending with, um, you know, the, the side character and the main driving force of the first game, uh, dying. And it's really, really powerful. But like, at what point do you pass over that threshold to the point where it's satisfying and not just like.
00:06:23
Speaker
uh, cheap, you know, cause we fail a lot in games. Like the, one of the worst examples, um, I can't think of a specific game cause it's done so much. You know, when you win a boss fight, but you're losing the cutscene, like yeah that kind of forced narrative failure just feels really cheap. But when you build up to it, like in red dead and it's this, um, this a culmination of, you know, the, the 50 old hours you've been playing, is it the time investment that does it?
00:06:49
Speaker
Imagine if like the fight like Red Dead Redemption ended with you fighting a full on boss fight against like the evil FBI agent or whoever he was. And you get like a helm power and everything and you get it to the end. And just as you're about to kill him, then the posse arrives and shoots you dead. How would you have felt about the end of Red Dead Redemption then? Yeah, that would have been it's ah yeah, I think it's 100% how it's handled because there's some of those, some of those boss fights you can't win.
00:07:18
Speaker
some, I end up being like, okay, this is really cool once I get it. And then other ones I ended up being frustrated at when it's like you, if you can allow me to end up using a bunch of my, like, uh, uh, my items during a fight that I ostensibly can't win. And then I end up leaving that fight and I'm like, okay, narratively I had to lose this, but I ended up wasting a bunch of shit because I didn't realize that that's super frustrating.
00:07:39
Speaker
um Yeah, I hated that. There's a couple of games that come to mind. Resident Evil 60, they'd have like multi-stage boss fights where you're only supposed to hold out for a certain amount of time and then it would move on to the next arena, but they wouldn't tell you that. and it So I'd use up my like Magnum bullets on the thing in the first place. I hate it so much. yeah And I don't know how to handle that. Like, how do you, I don't want to be told, Oh, by the way, don't worry. Like, just don't worry about fighting this thing. Just survive for 90 seconds. And then a door will open. Like i don't want to be blame the bad for me, like, because as soon as you're not explicitly told and you either need to lose or you need to hold out for a specific amount of time, because the creatures too powerful, every boss you encounter,
Framing Failure in Storytelling
00:08:19
Speaker
if you hit any kind of difficulty spike, you, you go, am I meant to die here? It like,
00:08:24
Speaker
And you start questioning the mechanical legit legitimacy of that boss. And that, for me, at any point, if your character is is questioning how you've designed it and thinking how they should then respond, I think you've failed. Yeah. Silent Hill 2. Speaking of games where the main character dying feels like the most appropriate ending. Silent Hill 2 has like its first boss fight against Pyramid Head.
00:08:49
Speaker
where you can't kill him and your bullets just bounce off him. But, uh, all you do is like giving the run around for a little while. And then he just pisses off. Yeah. I think that doesn't tell you any of that though, right? Like it's, it's a combination I think of timing and, uh, visual effects.
00:09:09
Speaker
Like if you tried to shoot or attack pyramid head, he has no response whatsoever. Yeah. ah He doesn't flinch. He doesn't like stop advancing towards you. You just got to get out of the way. Yeah. And, um, after the boss fight goes on for a while, but not too long, uh, then the siren goes off and, uh, pyramid head just walks away from you. Doesn't he like walk into the goop? Isn't there like a, yeah like a pool of goop? He kind of just goes. Yeah. He just, he just wades into the goop where you can't follow him. give away Like, Hey,
00:09:39
Speaker
Come back here and say that asshole. That's a good boys. That's an interesting thought process, right? The animation, how you frame specific things of animations and, and sound yeah and reactions like going back to red dead. I think one of the things that makes that so powerful isn't necessarily the time investment. Um, it's also the shared understanding that both you and the character share of just you are fucked.
00:10:05
Speaker
And there is no way out of this, um even with all of your, you know, abilities. You're like, this is too many people. I'm dead. um yeah And having that realization, that calm and knowing that not only is his life, but the game is coming to a close. That's so powerful. And that's all done with like how you frame that fight, not necessarily what it is.
00:10:28
Speaker
Yeah. And I, and it's also when you know, like, Oh, they're not just going to kind of pull a, like pull a sleight of hand trick and then bring that person back. I mean, John comes back and read that too, but read that dude takes place you know earlier in his life. Yeah. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Um, like I still even found, uh,
00:10:46
Speaker
this is obviously on movies, but with the Avengers affinity war, which came out in 2019 or whenever that was. And the movie is the first part of a two parter and the movie ends with Thanos snapping and Spider-Man and Black Panther and all these people die. And it's like, I remember the theaters being like, Oh my God. And it's like, well, they've already announced the next Spider-Man movie. So like clearly they will fix this. Um, but it's so, it's like your, your animal brain is like, Oh my God, these people I enjoy are dead. And then you're like logical brain is like, well,
00:11:15
Speaker
But I know Tom Holland is going to be playing Spider-Man until he's 50 because money. Yeah. And especially when you do that with the main character, you're like, well, I'm not going to can I'm I know this game's 20 hours long and I'm eight hours in and this failure state is it's just going to push me to something. yeah I respect games and movies where they subvert that. Like I was watching Godzilla minus one.
00:11:36
Speaker
the other day, fantastic movie. And, um, the main character in that has such hardship and, um, then kind of faces off against Godzilla in his, in his plane. And I was like, I would respect this movie so much if they build up this character to to take on Godzilla. And then the moment he gets to it, Godzilla just fucking bats the plane out of the air and kills him. It's like, oh, my yeah, but it no matter how good of a pilot you are, you are not as good as Godzilla. Godzilla. Right. So, um, yeah, I'd love it. Yeah.
00:12:04
Speaker
Yeah, that's kind of what they did, what James Gunn did with the Suicide Squad, isn't it? Where he like plays up the huge cast and then like kills off 90% of them in the opening scene. yeah Yeah, which I thought was really effective. Yeah, um yeah the other, you know, a lot of these come off near the end of the obviously the suicide squad owners early. A lot of these come off at the end. Uh, the other, like my, my, my last narrative one that I think when I sort of came up with this idea was a couple months ago and I was replaying final fantasy games, but, um, halfway through final fantasy six, uh, you, you fight the big bad and you lose and he destroys the world. And then the back half of the game takes place in like the ruined world. Like it's just the world of ruined. Like the place is complete. You lost. Yeah. It makes me think of like, uh,
00:12:49
Speaker
ah Symphony of the Night's Inverted Castle, I suppose, in that it's yeah you suddenly there's this whole additional game as big as the previous game you didn't realize you had. yeah that's sort of right It's a powerful reveal. Yeah, absolutely.
00:13:03
Speaker
Although we're talking about like ah the carrot and stick, the sudden unexpected ah thing you wouldn't expect would happen. And what I immediately thought of was Call of Duty 4, Modern Warfare. Yeah, which like the moment where the main character dies in the hideous nuclear blast.
00:13:21
Speaker
And nothing they did up to that point affects that outcome. Like they even, they even like stopped to have a heroic moment where they rescue someone who'd like been shot down. And then they take off to escape from the nuke and none of it means anything because everyone dies in the nuclear blast. Yeah. It kind of feels like all you've been chasing that for the last. I know. ah and yes I mean, it felt like every Call of Duty game after that felt like it had to have the ah the token shocking moment. Like it was part of the fucking PowerPoint presentation they made like before the game's design documents. And they were kind of able to do it with Modern Warfare 2 with No Russian of like a moment that people would talk about, but then it just feels like everything since then has. um No Russian was a pretty good um escalation on the concept, but yeah, they couldn't reproduce the shocking moments after that. yeah
00:14:13
Speaker
Yeah, it was a but it was a good twist. No Russian good twist. The original like thing is ah everything's fucked. Yeah. And no Russian is more like ah you are fucked. Yeah. You are a pretty fucked up person to to be doing this, you know. Yeah.
00:14:31
Speaker
I think, um, how, how I like to see it is it be tied into, like you're talking about
Using Failure for Progression in Roguelikes
00:14:37
Speaker
final fantasy six. It being tied explicitly into the narrative and your actions and the actions of the enemies have consequences that affect the world. One of the things in my video about death and how it's, um, it can ruin a lot of experiences is if you repeatedly remind the player that they are.
00:14:56
Speaker
you know, um effectively in a loop and can infinitely try things and um all senses of stakes and difficulty and stuff like that tend to go out of the window um and frustration takes over. And when a consequence for dying in a boss fight is the game changing, I want to see more games do that in narrative choice instead of doing um Oh, which box are you going to select, select and and pick which path to go on? I want to be like, well, difficult game about boss fights losing to them. Does that change how the story plays out? you know Well, this is where we started creeping into the other half of things. The mechanical failure is the first game I think of when we talk about failure ah more as a encouragement to continue ah is Hades.
00:15:45
Speaker
And, uh, almost like roguelikes in general and, uh, time loop games in particular, I've sort of cemented this concept of death being a part of the, the, uh, process of progressing. yes And, particularly in Hades, because, uh, it's very good at softening the blow. It is like you go through like the, uh, as far as you can, you die, uh, your media reaction is frustration.
00:16:12
Speaker
But then, um, you wake up and you're in your home base and you're safe and everything's quiet. And there's some people around saying, Ooh, that was a bit of a nasty Nick, wasn't it? And you're saying, don't give me your fucking condescending sympathy asshole.
00:16:27
Speaker
um And then you just bug, you're free to just bugger about for a while, just giving everyone presents and having chats before you you try again. And I think that's a very effective way to sort of, uh, connect the gameplay loops having what am i of as well. You know, and yeah one of my observations, uh, when I was making Starstruck Vagabond in my research of games like Stardew Valley is that the gameplay loops feed into each other. You plant a crop.
00:16:54
Speaker
ah You water it, you grow it, you pick the crop, you immediately plant another crop. And that's what you want to do. You want to immediately let the player feel like they're moving on to the next job.
00:17:08
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. hitting a Hitting a wall is really dangerous. And I mean, I say this as one of the most popular games of the last decade. um You know, the soul series is all about hitting brick walls um a lot less than I think people realize there's always.
00:17:24
Speaker
ways to keep progressing and alternate bosses to go and seek out. And I i um contribute a lot of the success to games like Elden Ring, um you know, more of a mass appeal to the fact that you can hit a wall and turn around and go back into the open world and do.
00:17:41
Speaker
anything else um and just come back to it because you really want to avoid that ah hopeless head bashing into a brick wall because that's when people start asking themselves these questions like we were talking about earlier of, am I meant to die to this? like Is this meant to be this hard? Is this balanced correctly? Am I balanced correctly? And your player shouldn't be asking those questions, you know?
00:18:03
Speaker
I
Challenges with Boss Fights and Checkpointing
00:18:04
Speaker
don't know. i find I find repeatedly bashing my head against a boss fight for hours on end, strangely meditative. It's one of my favorite second screen activities, actually. Interesting. I've done a podcast and ah work at a boss fight because eventually you like you're going to pick up the muscle memory and start yeah instinctively learning how to dodge the attacks. Well, you don't like that, though. ah there Is that a universal rule for you? Or are there some games where you're like, I don't want to keep bashing my head into this. I want to move forward.
00:18:32
Speaker
Well, I mentioned this in my Souls Like Fatigue video, but the thing that always pisses me off these days is the unexpected second phase. Like you were like you bash against a boss fight and then get the hell far down. And then you're on the verge of having that wonderful high of realizing you've defeated them. And then then you suddenly me a cut scene starts and you're like, Oh fuck. Because the way souls like always do it is that you have to fight through the first phase again before you can get to the second phase. And you have to get to the second phase before you can start learning the new attacks and the new responses to the attacks.
00:19:06
Speaker
I think that's a really, I think that one is a really good point of it gets frustrating when it's a two or three stage, some of them boss fight and you're like, okay, I finally, after a long time, master the first phase. And now I feel like I have to go through the motions of that phase every time in order to just start to get an inkling for what the hell is he doing in the second phase?
00:19:24
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I hated a lot less if they check pointed year after the first phase, which might, some people might consider a cop out for the challenge focused game. Yeah. But you know, I dig it. and that how ah what What was it? Nine souls. Was that what you, you and Casey were playing recently that had like a crazy multi-phase boss near the end?
00:19:43
Speaker
Yeah. Like the final, like the game is mostly pretty good with that sort of thing. It's just towards the end. The boss fights start pulling out the multi, the unexpected multi phases and it me and the the final boss in particular is a very annoying. One of those, yeah the final boss in Sekiro, blue, wise, white, grand granddad. I hate him. He's the worst small phase boss. I hate it when you get to a boss that's my phase.
00:20:06
Speaker
at the end of the game because that's usually where I stop playing because i I most of the time go through games and try and do everything I can before I progress to the end because I want to be done um and feel like I've had a complete experience. So a lot of time in Souls games, be it in Sekiro or Shadow of the Urchery DLC, I had done everything, got to the last boss and they are extremely difficult multi-phase bosses, and I'm just mentally checked out. I'm just like, I'm done. I'm not going to spend 10 hours fighting this one dude to see a singular cutscene. I'm done. yeah Yeah. Yeah. That's when you go to YouTube for the cutscene instead. Thanks, YouTube. I would mind multi-phase boss fights a lot less if you could see their whole health bar at the start ah that constitutes the entire boss fight and not just the first phase of it. Okay.
00:21:00
Speaker
If you if you like you're down to a quarter of the health bar and the cutscene happened and they pulled out the new attacks, I'd be like, fair enough. because they hear it as a full health bar that you deplete and then they get it. Yeah. Yeah. I like a boss that when you get halfway down, you get a cut scene and then they go into like crazy mode and you have to fight the back half in crazy mode. But the, yeah, the trick cannery of like, I finally did it. And I go, no, I didn't. There's an entirely new health bar. Yeah. I mean, I feel like at that point it's basically lying to the player. I mean, we've gotten used to like the gooey elements, having a certain language to them.
00:21:35
Speaker
And one of those being, if you're out of health, you don't get to get up and get all your health back. That was always the case in fighting games. And it's always the case now. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's one of the things I find so beautiful about monster hunter, uh, which is the fact they don't use those, uh, health bars at all for the enemies and they have a multi, like two, sometimes free stage boss fights, um, that happen all across the map.
00:22:05
Speaker
And you have to visibly ah pay attention to what the boss is doing, how they're reacting to you, what they're doing. um And it really makes you feeling grossed and paying attention to what they're doing. And you become excited when they get into these new phases. You're like, I'm making progress. I'm whittling it down. like And usually a lot of the last phase is that kind of weakened state where they try to run from you.
00:22:30
Speaker
And they start limping and like trying to get back to their nests. And that is like so intoxicating and it's not happening from a transitionary period where we're seeing a cut scene and we see another health bar fill up. It's just this natural progression of like, I guess, simulating hunting a giant creature, right? I love that.
00:22:49
Speaker
yeah are we getting off are we getting off topic little man that's most most our most were about yeah that's no one thing i don't I don't mind failing in certain games if they have a cool game over screen. I feel like we've drifted away from the cool game over screen. yeah And I don't know what era it might be like.
00:23:06
Speaker
The 16-bit and the PS1 era had some some sick load ah failure screens. I remember, distinctly, ah ah Symphony of the Night cuts to that weird like CG render of a skeleton. Let us go out this evening for pleasure. The night is still young. What is, who is he talking to? like i asleep with stands just talk I assume it's the monsters talking to each other. They're like, Hey, well, I guess we defended the castle. Let's go. party lock out now I like Metal Gear Solid dying and then having a character yell your name, snake, snake, snake, or in Metal Gear Solid 3, if you kill someone you're not supposed to kill a time paradox coming up, that always makes me feel good. yeah
00:23:48
Speaker
And then if you die to the main boss in k Chrono Trigger, that thing that the a splash screen comes up that like the the future refused to change. And I'm like, that's cool. Like that makes dying feel cool. there's the I'm not sure if it's entirely scripted, um but there's that scene in ah when Kratos is fighting Thor in God of War Ragnarok, and if you die to him, he revives you with Mjolnir, and then he just brings you back up. That is one of the most metal things I've ever seen in my life. Yeah, like it goes to the Game Over screen, and then you hear Thor say, like, I'm not done with you yet, and he puts his hammer on your chest and, like, brings you back to life. Yeah, that was cool. I never saw that. I guess I'm too good at the game. not Yeah, it's it's if you die there, and, you know, such a beautiful thing.
00:24:37
Speaker
They do that in the symphony of the night prologue as well. Cause cause it's a prologue. You're not supposed to die. Yeah. Oh yeah. The girl comes out and says like, Rick, give him strength. Yeah. That was my little girl impression. I don't know. It was Maria. That was great. yeah yeah Um, I was thinking of other, uh, obviously like when we think, uh, when we talk about like, Oh, ways that games deal with death in interesting ways, like the person In my view, ah you should try to minimize ah the time the elapses between failure state and getting back into the action. Sure. And whatever form that might take. Yeah. and we talk about Meat Boy and Celeste is the great games of like, as soon as you die, you pick back up and try the challenge again. Hotline Miami as well. um yeah make Meat Boy is a good example of making failure fun because when you finally beat the level, you see that little
00:25:35
Speaker
rainstorm of previous versions of yourself showing you yeah that's all the attempts before you beat the beat the level. It's, it's important. Like how, again, how you frame everything, because I agree getting you back into the action is super important. But like I mentioned in my video about death,
00:25:52
Speaker
Little Nightmares 2, they're trying to frame it as
Balancing Tension and Horror in Games
00:25:55
Speaker
a horror game. And if you repeatedly just respawn the player ah two feet away from where they died, every challenge and everything that's meant to be scary completely loses its luster um and stops becoming scary. And um for me, just yeah it turns me off the experience.
00:26:11
Speaker
That was certainly my problem with Little Nightmares. i Certainly, I remember feeling that way in Little Nightmares too. yeah like The way it was, every new threat you ran into would usually just attack you so quickly you couldn't do anything to stop it. Unless you'd played through the scene multiple times and knew the timing. yeah So it stopped being scary pretty quickly, it just became annoying.
00:26:32
Speaker
yeah okay I've seen your scary face now and i i've I'm satisfied ah with the understanding that you will eat my face. Can I just get on with things now? That specific flavor of like cinematic platformers, I feel like even the ones I really like, like Inside, that happens a lot. um to where if you do manage to luck out and get through a scene the first time, it feels like you get this adrenaline rush. You're like, oh my God, that was incredible. But more likely than not, somebody's going to happen. You're not going to react quick enough. And then you're going to be like, all right, now we just have to learn the logic of this scene as opposed to experiencing it emotionally. It's a bouncing act. You know what I've liked is the scene of Resident Evil 8 in the doll's house with the baby.
00:27:13
Speaker
Oh, yeah, God, because because when I first played that I didn't die at all because I was playing very carefully to not run into this horrifying thing. and will It was a very effectively scary and I was very thing. But I've seen like footage of what happens if you do get caught by it. And I think the death with that sequence is so fucking horrifying.
00:27:36
Speaker
ah that although it won't happen if you're careful, yeah if it does happen, you fucking remember it. I have a thing with certain games in a scenario like that where it's this terrifying thing chasing me to where I'm like, if I know I have a save point nearby, I will just turn around and let it kill me just so I can like experience that death and that I'm no longer afraid of the unknown. re Yeah. Like I did that with the alien and isolation. I did that with like the the spookies and outlast. It's just like, let me tie your hands and then I'll figure out what to do. See, I wouldn't do that because I don't want to deflate the tension that I'm enjoying because that's yeah part of the experience. Do you enjoy tension though? A lot of people don't. the i I enjoy ah you know tense horror like that. I'm not' not a big fan of jump scares in situations where I know it's building up to a jump scare. yeah like I can't play Five Nights at Freddy's games. ah It makes me too anxious.
00:28:31
Speaker
I don't like the game that's because, oh, what jumpscare is going to happen at any second now. You'll never know. But if I'm, so if I'm genuinely surprised by jumpscare, like I had no idea what was about to happen, then I'll go, oh, well played game. You've got me. Yeah. Yeah. 100%. Uh, I liked, um,
00:28:51
Speaker
I feel like in in a post Souls world, a couple games handled that same idea of like, you need to trek back to your body to get your things. In some interesting ways that made and and that were like thematic with the worlds of those games. ah Like specifically, there's that zombie you game the yeah I think it was a Wii U launch game from Ubisoft. That was like a first person zombie survival game. And you had to like like scrounge around for for loot and for for yeah you know weapons and and stuff like that. And then if you died, you became another survivor, but you could get your stuff back, your bag back. But when you got back there, your old character was a zombie in that room.
00:29:32
Speaker
And so you would have to contend, you would be like, oh, I have to kill my previous character with an axe or run around them and steal my get my get my bag back. um Yeah, i do I do like a failure that sort of adds a bit more of another layer of gameplay onto the game. like and then Like i I was talking about how in half life I used to like accidentally hit the right mouse button and launch a contact grenade that blew off half my health. And I'd sort of almost relish when that happened. yeah yeah Like, okay, time to take aboard this new complication. I have to like really plug in and deal with this. And then ah the other one that deals with in a different way, but I thought was really neat was Sifu the other year, which the whole conceit is that you have that magical talisman that every time you die in combat, you age and then you can pop back up, but you're a little bit older, which means you can do certain things and maybe you're a little bit stronger, but as you get older and older, you might get a little bit slower and you can't do certain moves anymore.
00:30:31
Speaker
Yeah. There's, there's an argument to be made that we're talking about failure as a, as like a death state in a failure state, but momentarily, momentary failure is also an interesting um outcome to think about the call of duty ghosts, not ghosts. What's the infinite, what's the one that that they go to space with quick kit, infinite warfare, infinite warfare. If I believe on the hardest setting with that one,
00:30:55
Speaker
Um, your individual limbs and eyeballs will can get damaged and you will lose the ability to use them as you're fighting. So like your arm can get shot and you can no longer reload properly. And you one of your it's incredible.
00:31:11
Speaker
sort of Robinson's Requiem. Yeah. It's some of the most, and I think, I think there's a video in this because I think Call of Duty in a lot of their hardcore modes for their stories have been doing some really interesting things that people are just sleeping on. Um, cause they're just like, Oh, it's Call of Duty, you know? Um, but I played it with a friend cause he was like, no, seriously, you need to take a look at this. The design of it is so unique.
00:31:32
Speaker
Um, I'd never heard of it. So like those momentary failure moments of how your small failures through gameplay affect how you progress, uh, is super beautiful. Yeah. What was the, the I think reminded me of, I think it's in Metal Gear Solid 3, you big boss gets his, uh, eye.
00:31:51
Speaker
cut out or something. And then for the rest of the game, you only have the, if you go into like first person mode, you only see like you, there's like a blank spot here. So like my name and you kind of only have part of the screen left.
00:32:05
Speaker
it Sticking on Metal Gear, but going back, when we were talking earlier about ah games where you have to kind of deal with if you lost a boss fight or something, you have to deal with it. I always liked that Metal Gear Solid 1, there's that torture segment where you have to like jam on the button quick enough and you either survive the torture or you pass out. and ah Either way, the game progresses, but if you survive the torture, Meryl lives. And if you pass out, Meryl's dead. And like, the end of the game is different because it's like, well, forget about Meryl. Me and Otacon are buds. I know. I mean, obviously, the ending they want you to get is Meryl surviving, but Otacon is the character who comes back in later games as snakes like, like best friends. Yeah, yeah. He's at your hip in two. Yeah. So retrospectively, I think the Otacon ending was the better ending. yeah Metal Gear Solid.
00:32:57
Speaker
Hey, who else needs ladies? let's go Let's go adopt a little girl and become hetero gay dads in the sky. She'll make us eggs every day. It'll be great. Yeah, ah yeah i always I always appreciate that. And even like you know as as silly as the games are, I do like ah the the David Cage model of rolling with the punches. like If you fail a QTE, the game doesn't end. It's like, well, maybe that character dies or maybe that character trips over a banana stand in a grocery store or running after a serial killer. Like, Oh, maybe it doesn't fucking matter. Or maybe so most of the time, not, but I think like these things can encourage save scumming and save scumming. I don't think is necessarily the player's fault. I think it's how you frame your game and the consequences for failure. If they are.
00:33:45
Speaker
either too harsh or too lackluster, you're going to encourage people to, you know, save scum and just reset. But if there's something interesting that happens from those, there's this consequence as meaningful and engaging, people aren't going to want to do that. They want want to see what and how it progresses, you know. Yeah, I mean, my instinct is always in your games like Until Dawn and David Cage games is to win the QuickTime events. So And it turns out I'm pretty good at quick time events. Probably all those years playing guitar hero in my twenties. So I will never see the plot lines that emerge if you fail at some of those sequences. Um, you know, those sequences are going to inevitably feel like a failure because you failed something to get them. What about the kind of until Donny ones where it's like,
00:34:33
Speaker
you have to make a decision that isn't necessarily like a black and white choice. And some characters might not, might die and might not make it to the end of the game. Like it's a branch. It's a branch. Yeah. But if like in your mind you want a character to survive and you think you're making the decisions to have the character survive and then they don't,
00:34:58
Speaker
See, the problem with that is in ah such games, the game usually makes it very hard to predict what choices are going to save a character. Have you ever played any of those fucking dark pictures anthology games? I have got a fucking clue what decisions decide who survives at the end of like the second chapter of those. Because it seems to be completely arbitrary whether failing a QuickTime event as that character kills them or not.
00:35:24
Speaker
So how would you like, yeah how would you know what to do? If you had, even if you had like a preferred outcome in mind, how would you know what to do to steer towards it? I had the, I had this experience previewing a game. The the embargo is done so I can talk about it. Um, I was playing, uh, the kingdom come deliverance to, um, in Prague with the team. And, uh, I got, there's the only instance I got frustrated, uh, where,
00:35:48
Speaker
I failed ah like a voice check with a night where I had insulted him and I had insulted my company, um, by speaking out of turn. And, um, I really wanted to make it up to, you know, the, the noble that I was with. So I went to them was speaking to them and, um, they were like, I'm really upset with you and my dialogue options were between like, go fuck yourself. Um, I'm better than you. And effectively saying, I'm sorry.
00:36:13
Speaker
Um, and I picked the I'm sorry version and he basically said, well, it's your fault though, isn't it though? And I was like, that's not what I'm saying. Oh my God. And then, um, progress the plot in, in that direction. Um, I raised it with some of the devs, but, uh, it's sometimes really hard to actually understand what is going to be said unless they just verbatim right out and you text.
00:36:36
Speaker
Yeah, it is funny. Like in any, uh, medieval open world game where it's like, I try to steal something in like a Skyrim or something. You try to steal something and then someone's like, Hey, what are you doing there? And I was like, yeah I'm sorry. I didn't actually try to steal, ah steal all these apples from your house. Can I pay you money? Can you not call the cops? Yeah. Oh, funny. That's come up lately. Shall we go to see the giants? Yeah. Well, they've got a lot of things to bring up miracle.
00:37:04
Speaker
Alex Armstrong gives $2 and says, you lot got any Dark Souls moments that feel good. Um, yeah, cause it's a good game. I think two things in Dark Souls feel good. Overcoming a tough fight and then getting killed in a really funny way. I think whenever I get killed in a funny way, I'm like, hell yeah, Dark Souls.
00:37:26
Speaker
I like that mod you can get for Dark Souls that changes the you die text to thanks Obama. That makes me laugh. I've got one which is um from Bloodborne is the Sackmen. If you die to the Sackmen in the individual mode, they take you to the ah the the jail and respawning in that jail and being in a completely new area below my mind.
00:37:51
Speaker
It should, but because of the framing of the rest of the respawn system, that shift really left an impact on me. um and They did that in Dark Souls 1 when you fail the first boss fight against Seath the Scaleless and then wake up in his dungeon. Yeah, right. The Duke's Archives or whatever, like you end up in a little, yeah, the circular place. Yeah, which I think is like really cool of being like, oh, this is not what I thought was going to happen right now. um but What kind of wizard a dragon can actually reset my spawn point? Oh, I'm up here with something more powerful than I thought. Man, getting to see is such a pain in the ass. Like I used to know that path, but now I just like the last time when we were replaying for battle masters, I was like, I'll go a little bit further. And I got to that part of my house. Fuck, I'm going. but but How did I do this without a guide?
00:38:42
Speaker
Oh God. but The merchant of life gives five pounds and says the Nemesis system for Shadow of Wardor strokes Shadow of Mordor was great for making deaths feel rewarding. Yeah. Pity they fucking patented it, isn't it? And now we're the Wonder Woman game coming any day now. See, this is why licensed games kind of shit, because games take so long to make these days. You don't know if the property you're adapting is even going to be relevant by the time the game comes out. I mean, that's, that's a whole, whole other topic for another day. But yeah, seeing, uh, there's so many
00:39:17
Speaker
It's why there's so many fucking Star Wars games now, isn't there? Cause we were never seeing the back of that. That's forever relevant. Well, and even like Concord coming out, which was like clearly when into development, when overwatch became big and it's like, that's not, that was, that was seven years ago. That was eight years ago, however long ago. Like, Oh, that's not great. Um, yeah.
00:39:36
Speaker
buter
00:39:39
Speaker
Uh, Dr. Theo is $5 and says, we're familiar with great idea, bad game, potential future podcast topic. What is a game? That's a bad idea, but turned out to be a good game. I would say if you tried to i give the elevator pitch for papers, please, it probably wouldn't sound like a good game. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. yeah yeah but But then, you know, Lucas Pope moved us all wrong.
Innovative Game Ideas and Their Success
00:40:02
Speaker
Oh, that would be a question.
00:40:05
Speaker
I'm trying to look at a list of, of some of my favorite games of the past couple of years and which ones like in any, anything that's like a, so a SIM, any kind of SIM I'm just like, this is bad. Like if you try and say truck simulator, we all know it to be entertaining and you know, very popular to stream and stuff nowadays. But I think if you describe that 15 years ago, people would be like, what the fuck are you on about? That sounds grim.
00:40:32
Speaker
you pick up some stuff, you drive to a place, you drop off the stuff and listen to the radio. Yeah. Who would like a game like that yards? I know. I mean, they made desert bus and it was a joke. Yeah.
00:40:46
Speaker
Yeah. I'm thinking a lot of indie games that have like the short and sweet indie games, uh, unpacking. I'm like, really? I want to play a game, but where I'm just unpacking my house and then I play it for you. It's like a 90 minute game. You're like, Oh, this is actually, it was actually really good species. He says power wash, like power. wash sim Yeah. That's a great idea. I can see.
00:41:04
Speaker
If you describe that to me, I could tell you why that would be satisfying because power washing is inherently satisfying, like taking away the grime and layers and stuff. So I could see that trans translating into into a game quite well. I reviewed a crime scene cleaner recently, and that's got a power washer, but power washer kind of sucks. It's kind of better to stick to the mop and the scrub daddy. Which you wouldn't expect so much.
00:41:27
Speaker
I don't, there's something weirdly satisfying about having to mop the floors and deal with like a resource management thing where the water gradually gets bloodier and bloodier. We have to tip it out and change to a new bucket of water. Yeah. It was like, yes, this is me working nine to five ah in a very efficient way. Yeah. Yeah. Sort of adds to the verisimilitude. Oh yes. anyway the Uh, Jackson jewel member for nine months says, hopefully this makes me feel good. mortimer emoji and You're not a failure at all. Uh, Dale Mallows gives $2 and says, hang on. Got to take her. She, yeah which was apparently their 20th super. So, uh, Oh, that's one for go down in the annals of history.
00:42:20
Speaker
We're like the anal zone, right? He's the name again to tell us how it was. Box D gives five dollars and says failure to appreciate the failure state is why Sims four is dull as dishwater, but Sims two is an all time classic for emergent gameplay. Hmm. I remember Sims going sort of downhill from two onwards. Mostly yeah I put that, I was to put that down to EA trying to turn that into micro payment machines. And just like like a million different yeah ill add ons in expansions shit. Yeah. Yeah.
00:42:50
Speaker
Yeah, because in Sims 2, it was like all in there from the start. You could play as a normal people, or you could play as zombies, or you could play as aliens, or all kinds of things.
00:43:01
Speaker
And so i't yeah, I don't, I didn't continue. I played The Sims 1 and 2 quite a bit, but um didn't continue after that. So I don't know if what they're what they're sort of directly saying is like, as it went on, did it become kind of like more casual and less friction against failure? Whereas at the beginning it didn't feel like, oh, I need to actually pay attention to this or else my family will die.
00:43:22
Speaker
Yeah, I guess they were lot so a lot more easy going about people dying from house fires and drowning in their swimming pools after a while, I suppose. Yeah. People get attached. um Housebound spouses get attached to their Sims in their little doll house. Also college college students got attached to the Sims. That was me. Who needs to go to class when I got my Sims? Yeah. That's a successful game.
00:43:50
Speaker
but When I was younger, every now and again, I'd look at, I'd remember I had The Sims and think, I'm going to reinstall that and play it. And I'd play it like solidly for like two days till I'm like seeing stars and ah genuinely for a moment thinking that I've got a hunger meter of my own because I was feeling a bit hungry. And then like, I'd stop playing and then never touch it again.
00:44:11
Speaker
a um It's dangerous. There are games like Stardew's that I introduced previous partner of mine to Stardew and she played it for like 30 hours straight without sleeping and then put the switch down and said, I'm never touching that game again. It's dangerous. It was crazy to watch. It was insane.
00:44:34
Speaker
ah Faz gives $4.99 and says, thanks for your recommendation of Licorice Recoil, Marty. You've been binging it this weekend. Good quality. Love everyone's work as always. I never heard of that, Marty. Oh, it's ah it's an anime. Sorry. Oh, well, well that's that'll be why.
00:44:51
Speaker
It's about like a sort of like um ah ah somewhat modern day Tokyo that is relatively crime free because of this group of, almost like a group of assassins from the government that are these like high school girls who almost precog crime out of existence. and so They'll like assassinate a bad guy before he goes like rob a woman and she'll never know because they just walk up behind him and like shoot him. his like lely Is there any premise, is there any premise Jaffee's anime won't reframe through the filter of schoolgirls? Uh, no. so minor report but school girls Yeah. Well, a little bit. Yeah. But then it also feels slice of life because they kind of live and work at a cafe. It sounds, it's very nice. Yeah. Yeah. They always do that as well. and school Yeah. yeah so It's always fucking slice of life, schoolgirls, but through the filter or something else. Yeah.
00:45:43
Speaker
Oh my god, Japan. Why is it called licorice recoil? Why was that other anime called bubble gum crisis? Why is any anime called what it's called? It's lick it's not like licorice, it's lick L-Y-C-O-R-I-S, which um I don't know. like The licorice is the name of the group, maybe recoil because of a gun. I don't know why any anime are named anything, except Delicious and Dungeon, because they go into dungeons and they make delicious food. That one's an easy one. Well, that makes sense.
00:46:11
Speaker
Well, that's not the original or Japanese name, is it? The original name is something like dungeon meshy. Yeah. Genesis Evangelion. God knows. Great. Well, it's a, it's a neon ah version of Phil Collins's band that really wants you to hear about Jesus. I also, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. They are all Jojo's and the adventure is certainly bizarre, bizarre, but real strange adventure.
00:46:39
Speaker
Okay. Pony dungeon meshy just literally translates to delicious dungeon according to the chat or various other things. Uh, Tommy salty gives 10 PLNs and says, make failure feel good. My mom would love to know. No, no one's a failure here. That's a self-effacing thing. Or are you like talking shit about your mom, Tommy? Salty stop it. He can't see yourself.
00:47:08
Speaker
Alex Armstrong gives $2 and says, Cuphead's progress bar at every debt's kind of nice. that's just but That's just a health bar they don't show you till you die. Surely. No, that's like a level progress thing, right?
00:47:22
Speaker
Oh, I guess that is a health bar. yeah so if that's yeah Yeah. As much progress you made in the boss, be it yeah a platforming one or a boss health bar, they show you that that progression that they once you die. So yeah, I agree. We are just basically just like a hidden health bar that they show you at the end. But they keep tracking. Yeah, I think it's nice because on death, you're like, oh, I was close as opposed to you. Oh, I was not close at all. so Sometimes a health bar, if I get an enemy down to low health, I start wilding out.
00:47:50
Speaker
Like I start playing poorly. I speak about that in my outfit, yeah. Yeah, that's the classic mistake. You got greedy because they were low. You thought, I'll just finish this off quick and then smash, smash, smash, and you did. Yep. Yeah. Longshanks gives 10 pounds and says, Black Myth Wukong has no punishment upon death, which for a Soulslike was so unexpected to me, I spent five minutes trying to figure out what I had lost. I now feel more relaxed while playing. So if there's no punishment on death, it's not a Soulslike, right?
00:48:20
Speaker
Yeah, I noticed that. Although ah you do get an Estus Flask that refills the checkpoints and all the bosses and all the enemies respawn when you do that. So, you know, it's it's a quasi Soulslike maybe, if you like.
Defining Soulslike Games
00:48:33
Speaker
it's If it's like on the spectrum, it's not as much of a Soulslike as like ah Lords of the Fallen, but Yeah, I'm not convinced that having to run back to your previous self's bloodstain is like the characteristic of a souls like the way, you know, improving your character is what defines a role playing game. I don't know. Can you think of a console like where you don't do that? ah ah What Blackbeth Wukong?
00:49:00
Speaker
Well, that doesn't, that's the one where it's, it's undeniably a souls like though. Why isn't it just an action game? Second second row. You don't go back to your soul. Cause you've got a nest cause a you've got a nest as flask B the game is built around, you know, a sequence of the boss fights and see it just is eat my ass.
00:49:23
Speaker
Dark Souls did create the idea of a sequence of boss fights. Mega Man, my favorite souls. Like like man's got et tanks like man's the soul say my god You go into an environment, you explore the area, you fight a lot of standard enemies and after a while you find a boss door that leads into a boss fight. Super Metroid. Genres man, genres are just absolute horse shit. Alright fine whatever.
00:49:49
Speaker
FoxD goes $5 and says, you must fail battles only work if they don't feel cheap. Fallout 3's The Pit comes to mind. Grab the idiot ball and walk into an ambush because game. The idiot ball. Yeah, the idiot ball. That's a concept I've heard of. What is the idiot ball? Well, and in terms of of plot writing, the idiot ball is the ball you hold that magically turns you into an idiot for the sake of continuing the plot. Oh, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Really funny.
00:50:19
Speaker
I'd say, Oh, uh, I've accidentally forgot to do the killing blow on this boss. Now they got up and ran away and we have to fight them again. Nine more times. In that moment, the protagonist was holding the idiot ball.
00:50:34
Speaker
fucking See also family brain cell. Oh, I like that. It's a problem with dramatic irony as well. Like if, if the audience know things that the characters don't, you instantly start going, well, why aren't you doing this? Or like you should be doing this.
00:50:48
Speaker
Yeah. But it's like they don't have that information or they're holding the idiot ball, like you said. Margaret Selmon gives five dollars and says tales of Symphonia has a fight you're not supposed to win, but you can win it. If you do, the game treats it as though the character was holding back. That's old chestnut.
00:51:05
Speaker
I like how when I was, I used to like play a lot of Spider-Man two, uh, the movie game and they make a big thing in that game. Like, Oh, it's all right. Spider-Man's pulling his punches. So he doesn't obliterate the skulls of the standard humans he's fighting. And when I heard that, which I think was in like one of those Bruce Campbell voiced like, uh, extra tutorial dialogues, yeah I was like, right. I grabbed the nearest thug web swung up to the top of the empire state building and then just kicked them off into space. And I was like, pull that punch asshole.
00:51:34
Speaker
well Gravity's not going to pull that pull. If you watch carefully playing like the new Spider-Man sandbox games, if you do that, they'll like get webbed to the nearest wall. Yeah. Yeah. Although I think if you try hard enough, you can probably hurl someone on a fatal distance. That'll be the next battle masters. How quickly can you kill someone on Spider-Man? You need to explain how they're dead. but Actual murder. Yeah. You need a panel of judges for that one.
00:52:05
Speaker
That'd be great. ah ah tip a t m five five eight gives twenty dollars and says i always liked the suicide option in consuming shadow i liked the idea of your character slowly being driven mad against the cosmic force they're up against or that they just say fuck this right from the beginning Right. This is a plug for my games. so I need to explain this for people for the majority of people who didn't buy that game.
00:52:27
Speaker
That's like a Lovecraftian roguelike, and at the start of the game, you have the option to either press the button that says start the game, or press the button that says kill yourself. And if you press the kill yourself button, you're going to shoot themselves in the head. But as you proceed through the game, you have a sanity meter. And the sanity meter goes down as you fight enemies and do the standard stuff in the game. And once your sanity gets low enough, then while you're going through the standard menus in the game, occasionally the buttons you're about to click on just changes to kill yourself.
00:52:56
Speaker
And if you get really insane, like the buttons, just the kill yourself button is just flickering constantly through your buoys. So if it gets easier and easier to accidentally click it at the moment when it says kill yourself. Oh my God. I like that. Absolutely. love it Yeah. You have to do a play a little mini game where you have to like mash the the click button to like pull the gun away from your head. And the more times you have to do the mini game in a run, the harder it gets. That's incredible. That's good shit. Yeah.
00:53:22
Speaker
Yes. I've always, I've been thinking a long time about every remaking Consuming Shadow, because I like to think there's a lot of strong design choices in it. way Yeah, that's incredible. core Yeah. Even though it kind of looks like shit. When did you make that? Oh, that was like my big project before Starstruck Vagabond. So when did that come out? It would have been probably in the early 20 teens, nine years ago. Thank you, Eric. wiardt Eric's your, uh, your, your personal historian. Yeah. Or you could just, you know, look it up on steam. Yeah. Uh, I'm sending it for $1 these days. Cause you know, cause I can see it. It kind of looks like crap and you know, I wanted to get some goodwill under the belt for a starter of vagabond.
00:54:16
Speaker
yeah get a yeah Buy the consumer shadow for one dollar, and then pay full price for Star Trek Vagabond. It's good.
00:54:26
Speaker
Alex Armstrong gives two dollars, and says, games letting you skip levels if you fail too much. See, I hate when a game does that. I feel patronized. Yeah. I had that experience today. Yeah. but If you like fail enough times in a level in one of the new Mario Brothers, they'll do they just give you an invisibility star at the start of the level.
00:54:46
Speaker
I just feels like the game's like just sort of battered your hand away from the controls and said, come on, I'll do it. Yeah. Yeah. I had one today, which is playing the VR Lake.
00:54:59
Speaker
Uh, puzzle games with my mom and we're playing, um, the seventh guest, I think is it's called. Oh yeah. And, um, within that you have this like Ouija board and you can collect coins that allow you to get hints and then to a certain point skip entire puzzles.
00:55:15
Speaker
and i'd be like they try hints You take too many hints. The game just skips the puzzle. Yeah. My mom was like, I walked into the, uh, cause I was playing and I walked in, saw a puzzle and she was like, Oh yeah, I did this one. You should go to the Ouija board and skip it. And I'm like, no, I haven't even tried yet. And she's like, that's really funny Ouija board will just tell you what to do. And I'm like, mom, let me look at that.
00:55:37
Speaker
there was a classic design fuck up in the original release of the seventh guest, because there's a puzzle towards the end of the game. That's like a sort of chess like, uh, match against an AI, but the difficulty of the AI increases based on the processor power of your computer. So if you were playing it on a, if you were playing on a modern computer, like a few years down the line, it was basically a super computer playing against deep blue. That's incredible. I love that. i love but that's Really funny.
00:56:10
Speaker
If you're playing on Switch, the thing doesn't even understand. It's just checkers. it's the The exact reason they can't port Bloodborne to PC is because the ah the AI gets too strong. Just one shot too strong. yeah always You should never design things, gameplay elements based around processing power. like Sierra made that mistake a few times with some of their adventure games as well.
00:56:33
Speaker
There's a sequence in space quest four. You literally can't like, it goes by far too fast for you to beat if your computer's too good.
00:56:43
Speaker
Uh, ah, give us one 99 and says I heard FF six mentioned. I did. I did mention it. Uh, what a time. What a game. What are you? You could suplex the entire train in that game. remember What?
00:56:55
Speaker
Yeah, it's true. One of your, one of your characters has ah the ability to suplex the enemy. And for some reason, the, uh, designers neglected to remove that ability when you're fighting a giant train. Yeah. It's a ghost train and that the the ghosts of your loved ones, a ghost train. I need to go through and play the final fantasy games. It was on the, like the list of options when we did the last summer drought vote. I wish, I wish they'd gone through it. I would have liked to talk about final vanity six. actually you guys
00:57:27
Speaker
Okay, cool. Final Fantasy VI pin. Actually, yeah, There you go. Me dressed as the main female character in that game. yeah ah Or like a moogle. Oh, that'd be good. Fatty gives 20 chuffs. I don't think I've seen that currency before. Fatty gives us 20 chuffs. Yeah. Fatty gives us 20 chuffs.
00:57:53
Speaker
Swiss Franks. Oh, okay. I prefer chips. After listening for a couple of years, I finally caught you guys live, though I will listen to the whole thing later at work. Thanks keep for keeping me company on many a lonely night shift. Cheers, lads. You're welcome, boss. Thank you. Thank you for your chips.
00:58:13
Speaker
Alexander Strong gives $2 and says our second toc screen games same as cozy stroke chill out games. Ah, well, Often, not necessarily, I'd say.
00:58:27
Speaker
I mean, I consider like ah most cozy games that I play to be second screen games. I'm playing like Stardew Valley or ah Valley Peaks or something like that. I'll be having in like my video essay on in the other window. Yeah.
00:58:41
Speaker
Yeah. And I think certain elements of games can be second screen games, but the games themselves aren't always like, uh, if I'm replaying or or playing like an RPG, I'll grind a lot second screen. But when I'm doing story stuff, I'll be paying attention. But if I'm like, well, I just want to futz around this area and and grind, grind Mementos or something, I can do that while watching a basketball game or something. Yeah. I find games like Stanley Parable and Beginner's Guide to be pretty cozy, chill out experiences, but they're not second screen games because you have to pay attention to the to the dialogue. Yeah. Yeah. For me, it's like how in what degree do you define second screen? Because there are games like Stardew where I feel like I need to pay attention. I'm just that one of those people who needs to focus on the thing I'm currently playing, i' find it hard to you know listen to other things while I'm doing that.
00:59:29
Speaker
But there are also games like rusty rusty's retirement, which is a game that plays itself effectively like study Valley, but takes place at the bottom of your screen. So on the other screen where you don't need to pay your full attention to it. And I play that game sometimes when I'm scripting, just have it on the other one of the farming away while I'm typing. Yeah, it's just a nice thing to look at, too. Like the animations of that are just great. Yeah. Rusty's retirement is great. Yeah. Fantastic game.
00:59:57
Speaker
Would I like that? Because I'm not a fan of idle stroke clicker games. i might be able like do and There's lots of decision making, but it's one of those things where you can make your decisions, allow your harvest to to grow over a specific amount of time. Then like um Eric is showing in the video, go back to scripting, go back to you know doing um what you're doing and then come back um and you know maybe plant some more crops and stuff. there's There's lots to do. It's way less idle than I think people assume it is.
01:00:26
Speaker
<unk> also It's also strange because it's in the same, it's by the same developer and in the same world as that haiku the robot, which was, uh, just to take on, uh, Oh, that was just, yeah, it was just betwovenia. Wasn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Also the dev, the dev is a ah fan of our stuff. Yeah. to Oh, yeah. We were. Hello. If you're watching, come on dev head sometime. Hell yeah. Yeah.
01:00:50
Speaker
Uh, Connor Stillwell gave five pounds and says, Yahtzee's issues with souls like bosses is why I quit lives of pee after a while. I stopped thinking, yeah, and started thinking, finally. sorry It just wants to be like what point of your life you're at. Like if you're, if you've got a bunch of free time and you're like, fuck it, we're going to roll through some stuff. You might not care. Whereas if you only have a finite amount of hours to play games a week, then you might not want to spend it bashing your head against the wall. And is it the game's duty to to shift that design to suit more people or is it the players duty to just pick games that will suit their lifestyle, their place that on their time? that's a good I've more come to terms with the fact that I'm not going to finish.
01:01:32
Speaker
Most of the games I play for review these days, uh, besides trying to focus more on the, uh, vertical slice experience as a version. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I did finish Star Wars Outlaws. Surprisingly short for an open world game that one. How long was it? you take Um, stick into critical path. I would say you could probably knock it out in three afternoon sessions. I think that's what I did. Wow.
01:02:01
Speaker
But what if we want to spend hours having meals with her small friend, Nix? Is that his name? Nix? Well, uh, not wishing to spoil my upcoming review. Why would you want to do that? Cause he's cute and he needs a meal. Well, you can't just keep feeding him. He would explode. Oh no. What was the other guy's prime one? Feed him after midnight?
01:02:25
Speaker
HelpPMB gives £10 and says, I love spectacular failure. DF stroke rimworld death spirals or the farce in disco Elysium. Burnout turned the failure state of crashing in a racing game into the best part in a literally spectacular way. Ooh, that's a good, that, both of those are really good points. Yeah.
01:02:43
Speaker
all of the thing i loved about That's one of the things I loved about Driver San Francisco, in that you could have an incredibly ah destructive peel-out and failure, but then instantly get back in the driving seat with the weird possession powers. That's the one we can play as a ghost, right? Yes, yes. A player as a ghost who could possess any driver on the road. And I'm surprised no other game could play my mind.
01:03:02
Speaker
I think more games need to embrace that mechanic. Ghosts. Imagine but if you were playing something like Hitman, where if you'd like royally fucked up and the Cockup Cascade began, you could just go, well, crew screw with this, Popsicle Stand, and just possess someone else. Yeah, so I'm just saying, I think Hitman would be quite ruined if you could possess people.
Unique Gameplay Mechanics
01:03:21
Speaker
There's like getting the outfits and and navigating that if you could just become them I think the game what if that's what Elden Ring became was like I can't get past we're Dan so I'm just him now I'm gonna up um so i'm gonna just wait my festival ride ride my small horse around yeah more ghost games for sure. I agree. That was the the main mechanic in Messiah, wasn't it? You played a little cherub who could possess other players. Yeah. Like Geist, good ghost game there. Psyops just use your little brain powers. That was more like telekinesis, but still the ghost movie tie-in with Whoopi Goldberg. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. i regard Patrick Swayze. Yeah.
01:04:05
Speaker
FoxD gives $5 and says, imagine the Stanley Parable's narrator describing the uninstall your own CPU non-standard game over Nier Automosa. That would be the holy fail. Oh, God. Yeah. he'd hed He'd probably get very sarcastic at you. We got ah we got another one coming up about Nier, so i don't want to I don't want to jump on it yet, but Nier. Party Pirate, member for two months in the Green Gang. What about group failure like in Chains Together?
01:04:34
Speaker
Yeah, that was a feeling failure. Yeah. I love ah ah it. It was my favorite part. You say that, but it was, it was hard to pinpoint who was at fault anytime it happens. Yeah. I mean, Nick's not here. So maybe we just say it was Nick's fault. Yeah. All right. It was always Nick's fault. Everything's Nick's fault. But we had clear view of it being one of our faults. Definitely wasn't our fault. Never, never ever.
01:04:59
Speaker
um Alex Armstrong gives two dollars and says, uh, DDLCs suicide, docu docu literature club suicide felt like a fail even if scripted. Yeah. That's sort of a time loop game, isn't it? The game has to keep resetting itself and trying to fix itself every time something fucks up. That's the plot. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess those like, again, those are almost things where like the first loop of outer wilds,
01:05:28
Speaker
this is the sun going supernova is a terrifying prospect. Whereas it becomes less and less scary and you kind of come to terms with it. Um, I mean, yeah, it helps if you're actually looking at the sun where it goes supernova. I mean, Travis is a good, you probably just exploring a cavern somewhere and then you just go, Oh, I died some grumbling and I'm dead. Yeah. Yeah. The a hundred percent. I, yeah, I think it's,
01:05:53
Speaker
ah That's how you frame it. I can't think of Doki Doki. The last time I played it, I was doing a 24 hour charity stream. So it's like a fucking fever dream to me. ah That game doesn't exist in my mind. Yeah. It turns out the best way to play a game isn't by live streaming yourself, playing it through its entirety and then going through the entire video making process. Yeah. No, this year that's not okay. I won't be doing that again unless I have any fun to fund getting Ludo to America. Then I'll do it again.
01:06:18
Speaker
It's the only upper option. I feel like you need to pick a game you pay less attention to. yeah a little bit and less of a mind pu Yeah. Yeah. Less something you need to read. Yeah. Yeah. It was really good though. I loved it. Yeah. I want to go back. They like ah the special edition or something came out that added some stuff to it and everyone back and played that version. So. Oh yeah.
01:06:38
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I know the plot twists now. I can't imagine they would have added much. I know the plot twist, but it also came out like six or seven years ago. And I just, I don't remember a lot of the other stuff surrounding the plot twist. And so that's where one of those times we're having a bad memory comes in handy. Yeah.
01:06:56
Speaker
Yeah. I wish I could forget all the answers in return at the open. So I could get, have the fun. figuring again I feel like I kind of forgot. Like I remember some of the twists of like, Oh, this is the thing that happened. I didn't expect this on the ship, but I remember the first, I remember the first time you entered someone's death and there was a motherfucking kraken attacking the crew. yeah you question i I haven't finished that. I loved what I've played a bit, but I haven't finished it. I should, we should stream it. yeah We and stuff should stream.
01:07:24
Speaker
Yes. Let us vicariously live through you solving the puzzles. Yes. Sign me up. Mr. Sadface gives $2 and says a resi stroke from soft you died is better than Mario's too bad. I remember the most and the most frustrated I ever got as a kid playing video games was playing Mario Sunshine and trying to get through one of those fucking ah floodless levels.
01:07:49
Speaker
ah That feels like a Mario Galaxy level in retrospect. Yeah. And and I'd fade like the umpteenth time and then they played that fucking too bad animation with the little hilarious trumpet. And I like, I threw something at the wall because that fucking sound, because that fucking music. You need to do the Metal Gear thing where you just have a random character from the Mushroom Kingdom go, Mario, Mario, Mario!
01:08:12
Speaker
oh Ones that are designed to piss you off, i I know of a few, I'm trying to remember them, but there are some that are just like actively taking the piss. yeah I love that, I absolutely love it. Does the opposite for me, it gives me levity. Peace.
01:08:35
Speaker
gi ah thank yeah thank you thank you very much jerry that's the very one
01:08:40
Speaker
ah Errrr... So Nami Dusha gives $40 and says, making up for last week. Also, 40 bucks as I turn 40 years old. Salute. Have a good holiday, everyone. H.P. Day. So Nami Dusha. Man. I'm not far by. You're almost as old as me, so Nami Dusha. Oh my god. Maybe next year I'll be as old as you. Give him a little time. That's not how it works. Oh no. I'm 41.
The Frustration of No Autosave
01:09:07
Speaker
Oh my god. When did that happen?
01:09:10
Speaker
What about your birthday? Your most recent birthday? Yes, yes, that would be it. Thank you. I did wonder. Sovereign is 20 euros. And there's probably an obvious thing, but nothing makes failure feel bad worse than having to do a bunch of boring, repetitive things to get back to where I was. Like climbing long ladders every time I'm trying to get back to the boss, etc. Yes, that's why it sucks that not every game has an autosave even in this day and age.
01:09:34
Speaker
Yeah, what was that playing recently? I've been playing Subnautica Below Zero and for some reason it just doesn't have an autosave. So I'd like die and it was like suddenly it was like four hours ago. Oh yeah. I think that was when I was... ah almost all the games I'm replaying for the archive don't have auto saves. So I need to like retrain myself to be like, just constantly save, constantly save. Yeah. Yeah. orie Or you're in. one park Yeah. saying The original quake, just a map, quick save to the middle mouse button. doesn i and Yeah. Just constantly hitting it. Um, uh, Alex Armstrong gives $2 and says spec ops is loading messages felt like you are a failure.
01:10:15
Speaker
Yes. And then you shoot yourself in the end. At least you succeeded at one thing. Dumbass. What a game. I imagine if he shot, but like accidentally missed the vital part of his brain and was just crippled for life. Just in, uh, was that free club? He tries to like shoot himself in the head and shoots his dog. That would be a slow, that would be a slow cap situation. Yeah, that wouldn't be good at all.
01:10:41
Speaker
Jule Rowe gives three euros and says, just some money for your beautiful blokes. Mwah. Thanks, Jule. Thank you so much. And then Foxy gives five dollars and says, I explained to my boss that I'm taking vacation time to do the cruising Arkansas event for American Truck Simulator soon. And he just laughed and approved. Hell yeah. We'll party.
01:11:00
Speaker
I like cruising Arkansas. how that Just where i i remember how they had those like cruising USA and cruising the world games. I'm just like picturing a world where those kept coming out and just got more and more specific. And so it was a cruise in Arkansas, cruising Wisconsin. Yeah. Oh my God. Late every day. Marty, Marty, you're an American. Explain this to me. Arkansas pronounced Arkansas, Kansas pronounced Kansas. Yep. Over to you.
01:11:28
Speaker
Can't explain that at all. It is a genuinely, genuinely madness. The english American English is a terrible language, just like bad. It sure is. Did I mention I learned how to memorize each American state recently?
01:11:44
Speaker
Right. ah yes i made a look You've got a special way of doing it, don't you? Yes. I've i've ah but i like made a little like video that I'm not sure what we're going to do with at this point, in which I explained my whole methods. There's Snapchat, didn't you? I need to go watch that. Yeah, go have a look. A lot of it comes down to the fact that there's those middle states that look like a baker holding a tray. Oh, yeah.
01:12:10
Speaker
Yeah, oh come in I tend to separate it into the states to the left of the baker and the states to the right of the baker. I don't know why me opening it and seeing that it's eight and a half minutes long, just like tickled me. Well, I'm going to get info here. Well, it's 50 fucking states, man. It's a long, I can barely remember who I am. I feel like it's going to be good for you, Jay, because you're going to have to learn these states. I'm not going to have to remember anything from apart from where I am. I mean, I was about to say, if you want to be a real American, just learn your state and then like three states near it in California. We'll be fine. Yeah, I'll learn. I'll learn Massachusetts, Connecticut and whatever else is close. Rhode Island, New York. Those could be the confusing ones. Rhode Island, a state. Rhode Island's a state. Yeah. It's between Connecticut and Massachusetts. It's also the smallest space. It's not an island. It's not an island? No. Well, part of it is. That's just how many the fuck founded your country, but it was us, so. Yeah. I'll ask them the Spanish and the Dutch.
01:13:16
Speaker
Well, that's where it all went wrong. You know? Yeah. Out of the Dutch.
01:13:22
Speaker
ah but The book to here, the Dunkle Heights gives two euros. It says, what kind of super chat's your favorites? Well, mine are the deep red ones where we get lots of money. Yeah. I mean, the selfish answer is the deep red ones. Honestly, I kind of zone out while I'm reading them out. I don't give a shit where you're actually writing them.
01:13:41
Speaker
I like ones that contribute something to the topic that we hadn't already talked about, which can be hard because sometimes you send something and then a half an hour later we talk about it and then Yahtzee makes fun of you. I also like, I like ah ah a good goof, but I don't like a bad goof, so it needs to be a good goof. I also like the ones where there's no message and then Yahtzee says, nah, I like those.
01:14:02
Speaker
Just the one that they give, you know, give more more food for thought on a topic, especially when they're asking deep stuff that we can really sink our teeth into. I really, really enjoy that. Yeah. Fill my ass up, gives 50 Norwegian krona. And says Xcom as well. And says Xcom handles failure quite well with each dead soldier can just add to the story of the game if you decide to own it. Jay, did you ever play an old British game called Cannon Fodder? No.
01:14:32
Speaker
ah played that on the a mega it's like a topdown ah shooter where you can call a squat of four dudes fun and but every time you like Yeah. Every time like your dudes die, uh, you get a new squad with different names. And when you go to like the mission select screen, there's like four new gravestones have been added to the the hill in the background. Even just like simple, like yeah contextual things. It's just so, so good. Yeah. I love it. We need more of it. That kind of ties into that stuff last week where we talked about, uh, creating challenges for ourselves where like, I don't, permadeath always kind of worries
Character Attachment and Permadeath in XCOM
01:15:06
Speaker
me. Like I can't handle permadeath in like, uh,
01:15:09
Speaker
um And if I ramble the game, I kind of want any of my cool kids. You can handle it in the sense of you can have permadeath, but still keep progression and, um you know, the mechanical progress of the game by framing it with these people are dying, not necessarily you you mechanically and ah your progression through the story, but the soldiers or the team that you had are dead and ah you know, building that emotional attachment to them can create much more impactful and emotionally driven gameplay scenarios. Yeah, as we say, XCOM does that pretty well. Yeah. And through naming naming them yourself and, you know, giving them your own personalities rather than just being like, I just threw them too quickly. It doesn't, that's not much point in giving them names. That's why it's cannon fodder.
01:15:58
Speaker
yeah Uh, Connor Stillwell gives two pounds and says, the Sims is Yahtzee's sandwich toaster. Uh, yeah, I did the same thing with my sandwich toaster back in the day as well. Every now and again, I noticed it on a shelf and go, Ooh, I'd really like a toasted sandwich and then never touch it again for like eight months. That's probably, if when I put stuff like that in my basement, I'm like, I'm never going to use this again. Like it needs, if it's not in my kitchen, I'm going to forget it exists. That's a great analogy. Yeah. You're not in your butt, Toby. Same.
01:16:30
Speaker
What? Is this why you are like poo when you lick my face? Same. What? What are we talking about? Like you've never let your dog lick your face knowing full well you know i all time yeah knowing full well the dogs lit, not their butts on a regular basis in England, dogs on her butt. Yeah. I have to, I have to squeeze out of a tail like a, like a foot. Yeah.
01:16:57
Speaker
Oh, I guess you guys won't know what froubs are. Yeah. Two-faced. What's a froube? Froube is like ah ah eric fru du a picture of an English froube. They're like yogurt. I guess it's tubes that you, you like squirt. You know what it's called in America? Go-girt. Cause you take it on the go. Oh, okay. That's a better name. A little go-girt. Yeah.
01:17:18
Speaker
But it wouldn't work in British because the British say yoghurt rather than yoghurt. It'd be go-ur fourt go Gogurt. Give me a Sadarac1980 gives £2 and says, near automata. Fun to find ways to end game early.
01:17:41
Speaker
what Yeah, and that's one of those to where it has a bunch of ah goof endings to where you can like remove your ah operating system from a from a menu screen and your character to just dies. And the game gives you one of their 20th endings like that. One of the thrusts of the Sierra Adventure games as well is finding all the goofy deaths in those games. yeah And then um reallyarcast but sarcastic lines of text the game would present every time it happened.
01:18:05
Speaker
Yeah, I've got a relevant thing. I spoke about this in my episode on def as well. I e haven't experienced any of those cool things because how they manage def in their tutorial made me not want to play the game ah that you have to get through the entirety of the tutorial without.
01:18:18
Speaker
And if you die to the boss because you don't know how to play because it's the fucking tutorial, yeah you reset back to the beginning. And I'm like, I did that twice. And I was like, I'm going to go do anything else. Yeah, it's it's it's really bad. It's like shockingly bad. And I know it's a good game. I've heard it from many, many people. I just don't have the patience to get through that tutorial. I've got better shit to be doing like, you know, you've proven out dog poo. I've proven out the ludos.
01:18:46
Speaker
It seems Toffee's butt has been sufficiently notched. That's tough. Yeah, NieR's also one of those games that has the sort of the recursive element to where when you die, your robot's AI is sent back up to the mothership and it's just 3D printed a new body so you can go back to your old body to like get the shit that you lost.
01:19:07
Speaker
You know what game has a cool death mechanic that we
Death Stranding's Unique Death Mechanic
01:19:10
Speaker
didn't talk about? And I played it on easy, so I just didn't die a lot with death stranding. Cause when you die, you just, a fucking nuke goes off and there's just a giant crater there but in the world. And it's like, sometimes that crater appears in other people's games and the crater will like spawn harder enemies that will appear in other people's games as well. You guys, Kojima, he's gone. What is he doing? I mean, I don't expect it, but Let's just generally, what is he doing? and and so kajima What are we going to do with our, our death state off? I say, what should we do? And he's like, nuke. And he's like, just put a nuke away and nuke. Yeah. Kojima likes, Kojima likes nukes. What of it? He is obsessed with them. Hey man likes nukes.
01:19:56
Speaker
SVS Guru 2000 gives 11 euros 15 and says, should a multi-stage boss battle restart at the beginning or after the last stage you completed? Well, you know my position on that. SVS Guru 2000. I think there should at least, why maybe you could like learn something that helps you speed through the first phase. Quick smart. Or what about last stage with a punishment? Maybe you like lose some of your dash.
01:20:23
Speaker
Give the player ah the option, move in and say, if you remove half your health bar, we'll put the one second phase straight away. I don't know about that. That's like immediately putting them on the back foot after they've already failed once. Yeah. But given the option, then you can go through and not make any mistakes and get into second phase or just allow them to skip it entirely. Do any of it. Well, then let's just skip the whole game. Let's just check it in the bin and do something else. Fuck it.
01:20:51
Speaker
If you don't want to do two phases, the answer you fuck. Just put the controller down, mate. I got shit to do. Me too. Uh, Ember White gives $5, says Marty. Last week you mentioned Ulysses. Did you read it? If so, I'm so sorry. If not, do you have a favorite book you would recommend?
01:21:10
Speaker
Truly, A Man For All Sees is Between Licorice, Recoil, and Ulysses. ah No, I attempted to read it. um that and What was the other one? the um the The David Foster Wallace one, Infinite Jest, are two books that were too much for me.
01:21:24
Speaker
um yeah yeah I just don't think I'm smart and smart enough for those. ah do have ah a I don't have like a single favorite book. I really i really like everything by Cormac McCarthy and Haruki Murakami. Ooh, House of Leaves is a book that I recommend to a bunch of people. that's that's It's like a horror book where the actual book itself is a tangible object that you are rotating and text is getting smaller as a character is going down steps and everything. oh That's a really cool one. and there's ah House of Leaves. ah There you go. Jess just screamed House of fucking Leaves. So there you go. That's definitely a Jess Core book. And then a book. i One of my favorite books that I've never heard any human being talk about is called Flicker. And it's it's it's a kind of fictional account of sort of like the history of movies, but ah weaving in this sort of haunted movie and a secret society and all this cool shit. So good stuff. OK.
01:22:21
Speaker
Uh, I recommend the Grinch, how the Grinch stole Christmas. So now the user gives $10 and says, in Resident Evil Outbreak, when you died as a survivor, you came back as a zombie and have a chance to kill your previous teammates. In turn, those teammates can kill you and take your items. Pity nobody played Resident Evil Outbreak, isn't it? Yeah, I always heard this had really good ideas, but then like...
01:22:44
Speaker
I don't know, it was multiplayer, I'm not doing that. It was a multiplayer focused game on the PS2, I think, if memory serves. Yeah, yeah, which was crazy rare. Online multiplayer was not very well worked out in those days on the PS2. The old days. so wrong Alex Armstrong gives $2 and says, achievements earned by failing, good or worthless? I think they can be funny.
01:23:12
Speaker
like achievements as in ah like actual like pop up 10 gamer points achievements or yeah achievements. I like an absolute spaz 10 gamer points. Yeah. Yeah. I like, like you've done something so dumb that yeah like you thought enough outside the box for this to happen. Yeah. Pull the lever with the big sign over it saying do not, whatever you do, pull this lever. Yeah.
01:23:38
Speaker
Yes. to achieve added Following instructions achievement. Did you have any, uh, like, did you put any thoughts and into achievements in, in your game? Or do you like, I know you don't care about achievements, but did you put any thought into other people? In Starstruck's achievements, not particularly. I just, uh, came up, made a list of, you know, fairly basic milestones. And yeah because I don't think of the way this um People just sort of expect achievements these days. Yeah. They complain if you don't put them in. I'd love to see how many people actually engage with it though. Cause it's always such a small percentage of people that get like a hundred percent or platinum platinum things. Yeah. let's both them scream the lab like that Yeah.
01:24:32
Speaker
Cutie. Anyway, anyways but um order KingDead42 gives $2 and says, Battlemaster's most stylish murder in Spider-Man. Well, there you go. A stylish murder. Well, add it to our list of Battlemaster's ideas.
01:24:52
Speaker
yeah we don't find like i have to have a copy of Spider and we'd all have to have the means to record gameplay footage of ah of a PlayStation. It's on PC now. We can put in the steam account, I think. sure Is it? Yeah. just one is i don't know if the second one is um Second one isn't, but I believe Miles Morales is, but that's just glorified DLC. I'd like ah i'd like ah ah like a tourism episode of ah Uh, we have to like present the most impressive picture postcard screenshot. Yeah. We've talked about something like this. Yeah. racist ah had like That's more in like the eye of the beholder. Yeah. Was that a large, did you get a big honk outside? I got a massive honk. I went directly into my A canal. What the fuck?
01:25:39
Speaker
Obviously looking pretty precarious. I don't think he realizes that if he rolls off any further, he's kind of ruffled off this cushion. hello
01:25:50
Speaker
ah Sorry, Tov. Banin gives $5 and says, was Sifu's losing just makes you older mechanic mentioned? Yes, it was, Banin. As it's a cool piece of gameplay, is that even a failure state?
01:26:04
Speaker
You lost your health to a point where you failed at staying alive. You sacrificed your yeah youth for revenge. Was it worth it?
01:26:17
Speaker
Like you can say from tall Mario to short Mario is a failure state. Was it worth it before you seek revenge? Dig two graves. as they essential depth in a fairly state If you point one finger, you're pointing five back at you. No, that can't be it. That's too many fingers. yeah That's too many fingers. finger I was venturing on profound there.
01:26:39
Speaker
also like yeah toughly backwards um from back Well, three point back at me and one points to Jesus up in the sky. Oh my God. Who knew the hammer of the gun fingers is for pointing at Jesus. I do like Jess saying, if you dig a grave big enough, you can both get in it. Yeah. we go Yeah. Work smarter, not harder. Yeah.
01:27:03
Speaker
uh, County gives two euros. There's Arkham game over screens made failing fun. yeah I like those. Yeah. Very idiosyncratic as well. line one That's where like the villain who, the specific villain who killed you or their minion, uh, stands over your body. You get like a point of view shot of them and they say some kind of taunty line. Oh yeah. they Like step out of the darkness and they fucking kind of just roast you. Feels like a, like a busling pro I think my favorite one was, I think it was an Arkham Knight, where if you get killed by a Riddler challenge, the Riddler comes on and goes, oh my god, I actually did it. I mean, yes, of course, as expected. and
01:27:45
Speaker
ah Tinka gives $5 and says, what do you think about losing in an arcade where you really don't lose your progress, but real life money instead? Yeah. We mentioned at the top, but that was sort of the start of this all, which is how those games were designed. Um, which is funny to play some of those arcade games now on consoles and be like, Oh wow, this, this, uh, Simpsons or turtles beat them up was only like 35 minutes long because yeah they expect you to have to just keep plugging money in.
01:28:14
Speaker
oh Fox D gives $5 and says, a goof for Marty. Dermatologists are the most impulsive doctors because they're always making rash decisions. That's a good one. See, that's a good, that's a good chat. I want to balance this out. Fuck you. Wow. Okay.
01:28:37
Speaker
ah I to think if another joke along the same lines, but none's leaping to mind right now. No rash jokes for you. Except for ukraine except for that so for the one that goes, um, what's the best thing about having sex with 28 year olds? This is going to be 28 year olds. I don't want to finish this joke. Oh, you ruined it. You ruined it when you started it. You could have been like, what's, uh, why are proctologists? Uh, so impulsive because we're all up in your ass.
01:29:12
Speaker
Oh my god. yeah Is that impulsiveness though? No, it's probably a different the word I was looking for. Yeah, yeah. Probably never word.
Humor in Gaming Discussions
01:29:21
Speaker
I feel like there's something there about Proctologist being all up in your ass. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You could do a joke like, ah boy, yeah um that Proctologist's a real taskmaster. He's always getting up my ass.
01:29:32
Speaker
a
01:29:35
Speaker
People want to know the punchline to the joke, guys. No, they don't. You know the punchline. Marty basically said it. ah one's horse In between 20 and eight. Yeah. What's the best thing about having sex with 28 year olds? There's 20 of them. That's the joke.
01:29:52
Speaker
Shouldn't be laughing. Okay. Here's a good one. Why was Jesus popular with women? Why are we doing this? We're one super chat away from leaving.
01:30:04
Speaker
but Yeah, that's why I'm like killing time with jokes. Well, rewind. What was it? Why was Jesus popular with women? I don't know. Because he was hung like this. That's a good one. See, that's nice. That's a nice one.
01:30:21
Speaker
um
01:30:25
Speaker
Anyway, Alex, I'm strong. Alex Alstron gives $5 and says, how about a game concept super chat? An edutainment game using a mic to say RNG tongue twisters in wacky game shows to overcome fear of public speaking. Well, I've got one red flag on that. And that's a game that uses a mic. Yeah. Because they always suck and none of them work. Yeah. Except for Lifeline. you Remember Lifeline? No, it was really bad. That was the first name for the PS2 where you had to use a mic.
01:30:56
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. There has never been any mic based game that has worked. I love the idea. Argue with me on this. Okay.
01:31:08
Speaker
Apparently, the new Call of Duty, you can you can to take people hostage at gunpoint and then whisper into their ears. The proximity chat there is fantastic. Yeah. I was discussing that with Tina amiy and and they were like, that's a bad idea. That's a terrible idea. That is a generally terrible idea. No, it's great. boy when And I said this to Tina, when has Call of Duty ever been worried about what people are saying in their chat, ever?
01:31:32
Speaker
It's true. Great fun, like role-playing moments. I think it's fantastic. If you don't like it, mute proximity chat. You know? Uh, FoxD gives $10 and says, Jesus walks into a bar and the bartender says, Oscar, you're so down. And Jesus says, I was giving it to Mary Magdalene last night. She kept screaming out my dad's name. That's pretty funny. Pretty funny. That's pretty good.
01:31:59
Speaker
fuck the field You should have a joke stream where people just send jokes. No, we shouldn't. I'm so struggling. I'm struggling with that whole problem you get when ah someone says tell a joke. And even though you've heard thousands upon thousands of jokes in your life, you suddenly can't summon any to mind. I need parameters. Give me like a parameter. for a joke of Like, I don't like jokes. Aren't my preferred method of goof. I do reaction goofs.
01:32:29
Speaker
impulse goofs. tell me it yeah Tell me a joke about something. Ask me you'd like to tell a joke about something. and then say like okay no Tell a joke about all tortoises.
01:32:45
Speaker
Something else. I don't know any tortoise jokes. or i dog were by dogs and i joke by dot oh Okay. Um, um,
01:32:56
Speaker
Blow walks into a bar ah with a crocodile on a leash. And the bartender says, you can't bring a dangerous animal in here. And the bloke goes, no, it's easy, he's tame. Look, watch this. And he whips his dick out, puts it in the crocodile's mouth, and then smashes a beer bottle over its head, and it doesn't do a thing. And the guy next to them at the bar says, hey, that can I try that? The bloke goes, be my guest. So that dude whips his dick out, and puts his, puts it in the crocodile's mouth, and smashes it over the beer bottle's head. And then this delightful looking elderly gentleman comes up and says, excuse me, I'd like to have a go at that as well. And the bloke goes, be my guest. And he says, okay, just don't hit me with the beer bottle.
01:33:33
Speaker
That was nice. That was a nice job. Had a wholesome ending. I mean, wholesome, yeah. Tinga, I guess, as someone who grew up playing fighting games in arcades, seeing someone else lose would bring me immense joy because that meant it was my turn to play. Well, there you go. Dynamics change. Bloody arcades.
01:34:03
Speaker
Connor still well gives five pounds and says, what do you call a black person flying a plane? A pilot. Can we leave now? God, can we leave now? Oh, God. ah I feel like I'm being held hostage. You're being held hostage until I do the wrap-up. Maybe I'll decide to tell another dirty joke. Oh, here comes another one. Brigham Burdick is side dollars and says, what is a walrus, his favorite part of a boat? Or, or, or... That was a nice one.
01:34:34
Speaker
That was a very nice one. I made myself laugh making walrus noises. could you Your day is off to a good start. There you go. All right. Thanks for listening to the Web Breakers podcast where we were talking about how to make failure fun. And we certainly demonstrated failure pretty well in the last 10 minutes of this ah podcast.
01:34:55
Speaker
I was Yahtzee Croshaw, I was joined by Jay and Marty as always. yeah Don't forget, I've got a new fully Ramblamatic coming out this week on Wednesday. Guess what? It's a triple A game of at long fucking last. It's back with Wukong. We're going to get like 400,000 Chinese people coming in and talking shit about me.
01:35:17
Speaker
the thousand percent ah What else have we got? What if you really like it though? Who knows? Maybe it's your Godi. We don't know. Well, I've already made the review, so yeah.
01:35:30
Speaker
ah yeah ah Don't forget my Yachty Tries stream on Wednesday as well. ah That'll be about it from me, besides my usual appearance in Adventurous Night on Saturday. And I believe we've got an edited Yachty Tries video coming out this Sunday as well.
01:35:47
Speaker
ah That's my stuff.
Upcoming Content Announcements
01:35:49
Speaker
What else we got to plug? um They got a design delve this week on a game that I've been addicted to for 16 years and why that is and all the designs that go into that. um Those are also back in the store, right?
01:36:07
Speaker
This wouldn't be a game that happens to rhyme with smirled of smore craft, would it? Yeah, more like cruelled of my smile. Could you imagine ah how smirled of smore crafts? That'd be delicious. i eat the I'd eat the shit out of that. Yeah, that's me, designed of on on Friday, as usual every two weeks. Those are back on the store, the multiple and all of the adventures and I plushies are now back up, I believe. Yes. So go check those out, guys. Get a whole suite of them.
01:36:36
Speaker
You should buy me that it, that would not be a good idea. And I say that because I'm a huge liar. Um, but that, Oh, and today, um, hidden gems. I'm on hidden gems today because Jesse and, um, k yeahr so we in just to play a game. I can't just don't be mad of hubs Barrow, which takes place about 15 minutes drive ah away from my house.
01:37:06
Speaker
um yeah yeah That's a game studio game. Yes. So we're going to be checking that out. um So yes for that, I forgot to give it to you guys, but I'll send it, send it over shortly. thanks so much Yeah. So that'll be at the normal time. ah Yeah, and then in terms of other streams, we're actually, there's no, ah so we'll have that later today. There's going to be no streams tomorrow, including no rewind tomorrow. Darren is going to be out of screening and and the the Seattle crew is still in Seattle. ah So no rewind this week. ah We probably won't do a makeup of this episode, but we might try to organize like a cheeky little, little but just to hang out while playing a movie-based game. But we're going to figure that out once folks are back.
01:37:47
Speaker
Um, then yeah, Yahtzee tries and Firelink on Wednesday, Devil May Cry on Thursday, and we'll probably do something on Friday. Odds are we'll probably do something on Friday. It's all figured out. oh yeah All the content, all the time. A few more super chats came in in the last minute. Hug gave us $4.99 and says happy Labor Day y'all. Thanks Yachts for killing time with great jokes, so I could get this out.
01:38:08
Speaker
And then Zaratha gives five R dollars and says, his this morning, I saw a guy dragging a clam on a leash and I thought it must be hard to walk with a pulled muscle. da Alex Armstrong gives $2 and then says, granny died at a Nazi camp, fell off a guard tower. oh Yes, I heard that one. Granny. Grand grand, but in hindsight, you know, probably for the best. I just remembered, I just remembered my favorite joke.
01:38:39
Speaker
Oh, okay. Your all time favorite joke ever. Yes. Oh my God. Adam and Adam, a Dave, uh, let's in the garden of Eden and God says, Hey, do what you like, but if you commit anything you think might be a sin, come back and tell me about it straight away. Um,
01:38:56
Speaker
So the next day, Adam comes back to God and says, hey, God, we kind of ate those fruit on that big tree in that very obvious spot in the very middle of the garden. Were we not supposed to do that? And God says, well, it would have been pretty silly of me to make that a major sin, wouldn't it? Just as long as you're having fun, guys. And then Adam goes, oh, oh, um after we finished eating the fruit, we then had sex amid the roots of the tree. God says, hey, we're all grown ups here. I ain't no prude. You do what you like. I gave you willies for a reason.
01:39:25
Speaker
And then Adam says, oh great, well thanks for being chill. Oh, and one last thing, after we were finished, Eve went down and washed her snatch in the river. And then God goes, what? What? You don't know what you've done! Now all the fish will smell like that!
01:39:45
Speaker
It's the fucking length of these jokes that gets me, it's the build up. It's like... I think jokes are a mistake. I think jokes were a mistake. Jokes are bad. I think jokes are bad. ah Like your definition between goof and joke. You don't like it. Yeah, goofs are good. I think jokes are good too. And on that note, i bid your farewell. Tell your favourite jokes in the comments. Bye everyone.