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S1 Ep3: 404 (Topic Not Found)
83 Plays8 years ago
Food, games, anime, movies, and more! Join us for an extra long topic-less podcast where anything goes.
Recorded on 04/04, title discovered afterwards.
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Transcript
Introductions & Jelly Talk
00:00:38
Speaker
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Saltcast, the podcast where we talk about games that we enjoy, don't enjoy. But not this episode. This episode, I'm joined by my co-host, as always, Dave. How you doing, Dave?
00:00:57
Speaker
Are we keeping this cut? No. What cut? This is the beginning of the podcast. Sorry, I'll avoid any meta talk. So I see you brought in these jellies today, Dave.
The World of Gummies
00:01:10
Speaker
Yeah, I got some as a gift in the mail from my lovely parents as like an early birthday present. Along with some other stuff, but this is edible and shareable, so. That's good. Your parents don't send you edibles. Like I said, I don't want to talk about the other stuff that gets in the mail. Yeah, they're a thicker type of gummy. It's fruit slices, fruit listeners.
00:01:36
Speaker
But they are insanely delicious. It looks like a slice out of an orange or a lemon. Or a cherry. Last one's a little bit hard. Yeah, it's a very large cherry. A cherry you could, like, confidently take a bite out of, I think. One I'd be...
Childhood Snack Nostalgia
00:01:53
Speaker
I'd stand back if it were about to pop. The blast radius would be significant. Yeah.
00:02:00
Speaker
So what are your favorite types of gummies? My favorite types of gummies? I don't think, I never really thought of that as a type. I think most of them. If I could break it down for you, since you've not already thought about this like I have. Okay. Sadly and definitely. There's the more chewy or rubbery type kinds. So you consider like gummy bears. Okay. Are those like the wax? Um, I know that there's, there's two types. I know that there's like some that are based off of, um, wax, like wax base and the other ones are like gelatin.
00:02:31
Speaker
I'll be honest, I don't know too much about gummies. One's more rubbery, and then one's more, like, chewy. You can, like, bite through it. But it's the thing that's gonna be in your teeth for a fucking eternity. Yeah, I think that's why. And that's where the jelly choices land on that scale, that spectrum. Gotcha. I do like wax more than gelatin. Gelatin's made of, like, animal bones or something like that, something weird that I know is perfectly natural and fine, but makes me uncomfortable when I think about eating it.
00:03:00
Speaker
but have you had jello or rather have you had uh what was it called finger jello i don't know what that is no oh all right i'm going into more weird shit so for a long time i honestly didn't know what finger jello was i just knew it was a
00:03:16
Speaker
better tasting variation of jello. Okay. Because typically you have jello at like a picnic and you have like a spoonful and you put on your plate. Yeah.
Guilty Pleasures & Umami
00:03:24
Speaker
But you have like hot meat on your plate or something else and the jello starts to like melt and it moves into the meat jello stuff. But you also can't really pick up jello with your hand, just kind of mushes. Right. It's a non-Newtonian fluid. That's not true. That's not true. Just backspace the comment you're writing right now, listening.
00:03:43
Speaker
So finger gel, all it actually is, you just make it with half as much water as the quotes recipe calls for. Okay. So it's more concentrated, it's thicker, more rubbery, but it's a lot easier to pick up. Right. And usually they'll come out of a mold and have like little animal shapes, dinosaurs, other shit.
00:04:01
Speaker
So is this like these Christmas fruitcakes? Is it like a fruitcake or not quite that? Is it more edible than a fruitcake? Everything's more edible than a fruitcake. But it's probably closer to it than standard Jell-O. What I will say though, next time you have Jell-O, which isn't common for an adult's diet, I understand.
00:04:20
Speaker
I'm not so much a fan of jello. I think you say I'm not so much an adult. But just having something that's light and sweet like that, if you mix it with a tortilla chip, again going back to the picnic, you have that salty crunchy with like the very soft sweet. So I'd make like a little chip jello sandwiches.
00:04:43
Speaker
I had a great diet as a kid, to be honest. Mine was pretty bad, too, for other reasons. We used to have a pantry back in Washington, and my parents, for some reason, would buy honey by the bucket, like large bucket, like 10 gallon bucket. The fact you said bucket, it's already large, too. It's not like a pail, though.
00:05:06
Speaker
like usually you get like less than a cup of honey yeah and like the little you get some some sort of bear or a beehive or something yeah so i didn't have actually sold it that size yeah i don't i to this day don't know how they got it actually but um i would go in with a spoon and just grab a spoonful of just raw essentially uh almost like beeswax honey oh okay and then just uh
00:05:31
Speaker
That changes the visual because I imagine you like going over the spoon and lifting it up. Just honey everywhere. But there's resistance from the other honey that's waiting it down and each other's long sticky strand pulled up. It's kind of like a- You kind of twirl it like pasta and then pop it in. No, it's not quite that bad, but a spoonful of it or like a spoonful of like jet puff marshmallow cream, whatever that is. Oh my god. That was amazing. Yeah.
00:06:00
Speaker
Like once you find it, you find something you like in a spreadable fashion, you're like, this changes everything. Because now other things you're gonna do, it's like, nope, it's a viable sandwich. Yeah, exactly. Just fucking spread it on. Throw some spread in there. There was a place in Bloomsburg. I forget the
Current Gaming Favorites
00:06:18
Speaker
name of it. It was a piece of shit place, honestly.
00:06:21
Speaker
But it's like a small burger joint, kind of like a light diner feel. Like you'd have like the red trays, the wax paper, like burger fries, a little bit. But they're trying to do a bit of their own thing. So they have a burger and have like some spicy sauce on top of it, like hot peppers, onions and other things. Yeah.
00:06:42
Speaker
But a part of their selling point was it also had like a decent smear of the jet puffed marshmallow. Because you have that sticky sweet of the marshmallow. I want to use the word juxtaposition in a sense. Juxtaposing the check that one off the list. The insane spiciness of the rest of the stuff. That part of the burger.
00:07:07
Speaker
I imagine Jet Puff Marshall is pretty good at diffusing spice. It was an interesting blend. I thought it tasted okay at the time, but it didn't sit right with me. And then I went to somebody's place later and I got a room all to myself.
00:07:25
Speaker
for a bit. That's a hotel, Dave. You're describing a hotel. But yeah, no, that actually sounds a little bit disgusting. More than a little bit. I guess sometimes you gotta watch out with that if it's too much of a contrast or you have something that's just like ridiculous. Well, I think it was fine. I have very weak insides. Like my brain's like... Not like your heart, but like... My heart is probably also weak. Anything inside my body is not the strongest.
00:07:55
Speaker
but it's a lot easier for me to like, Oh yeah, I love a good hot sauce or good and spicy something and eat that. And mentally I'm fine. Mouth wise, I'll get over that shortly. But then my insides are like, we don't practice for this. What is this? And it's like, just, just pass it through. I don't want it. I know. I'm definitely, uh, we tried a little bit of hot sauce, uh, recently, uh, based off scorpion pepper, right? And, uh,
00:08:22
Speaker
I started to think, I used to know that I wasn't really good with actually hot things. And then I just started to think over the years, I was doing okay. And then people that are way, way better with hot things tried that hot sauce and just didn't react at all. They're just like, oh yeah, this tastes good. I'm like, I didn't taste anything. That was fire.
00:08:48
Speaker
Yeah, but now it was it was it was good. I just couldn't taste it
00:08:54
Speaker
It's a little unfortunate. OK, so spice isn't really your thing. What's your go-to? I don't want to say guilty pleasure, but what's a meal? We're going to talk about vices tonight, dude. I don't want to go into that again. This is being publicly broadcast. But our listener is not going to be ready for that. Let me quantify this down to guilty vices as far as food that you're ingesting through your mouth for the purposes of consumption.
00:09:21
Speaker
Yeah. What's your go-to? Like, this is my favorite thing. This is my favorite thing or just something that's really... It doesn't need to be literally your favorite thing because that's always a pain in the dick to think about. There's a... I guess something that just springs to mind from, like, local. Something I could just, like, order in because, I mean...
00:09:38
Speaker
Don't make food Dave makes food But there's these teriyaki beef sticks It's a good sense and they are like spiced amazingly and they just taste super super great one Where are you getting the teriyaki beef sticks? There's a local Chinese place. Oh I know. I know I'm not making them. I don't find them anywhere magical. It's not like a
00:10:02
Speaker
wasn't sure if it kind of like was on the side the ground like oh actually some flowers oh like there's like a couple yeah herbology skill increased but now they're actually they're actually legit and I probably
00:10:20
Speaker
they come in kind of like a serving size of two i reliably get like at least
Co-op Gaming Fun
00:10:24
Speaker
four on top of whatever else i'm doing because they're just like it it's just teriyaki is a great flavor profile because it hits that umami perfectly it's savory it's sweet what does that mean
00:10:39
Speaker
Umami is, I think, the... That's not two words, right? Umami? Umami! No, it's another flavor profile, like salty, sweet, sour, bitter. Ah, interesting. They, I think, made it official a couple years back.
00:10:57
Speaker
Is there like a committee that decides these things? I don't know. They put it in a textbook, finally. It just hits that point where you crave more of it. Gotcha, yeah. I get that. Like umami is something that would make you drool, in a way.
00:11:14
Speaker
So you've got like a really savory piece of meat that you're looking forward to eating. Like kind of like what's the appetite? Gotcha. So it's kind of the drive to eat this specific thing. It's got a particularly strong, you've got a strong incentive to eat it beyond just eating for eating's sake and attaining calories to sustain your body.
00:11:35
Speaker
I wouldn't say an outright yes, but similar to. Yeah. I'm guilty of the second thing, which is sometimes calories. You know, drink some Soylent, you know, alternate meal thing, but it's to a certain extent liquid depression. I apologize for Soylent's sponsor. I realize we're not doing a really great job representing him, but
00:11:57
Speaker
I don't think it's bad, but... Also, we're not sponsored, but I swear. We're not related to them. But reach out to us. But if I'm having a meal outside of breakfast, which is kind of a... Just be patient until lunch, don't fucking eat everything. Because if I have a heavy breakfast sandwich, I'm not eating lunch until two, and then I might just have a deep breath or two.
00:12:22
Speaker
But if I'm having meals, it's limited in a day. I look forward to them, because I get to choose what I want to put into my body. And I want it to taste good. I don't want it to be like, well, lunch is here. 10 minutes just putting something in my face.
ARPGs and Engagement
00:12:37
Speaker
Never been mandated a meal. Do I like a meal? No, like a good bowl of oatmeal. Never turn it away.
00:12:46
Speaker
It's a way better way to start the day than I pretty much ever do. You gotta start in the day. So let's say it's the weekend.
00:12:57
Speaker
Already good, right? And you wake up at your normal 1 p.m. Your pj's, and you log on your computer. Yeah, I stumble outside my room, not outside. I was going to say, I was like, looking at Jake dead in the face, I'm like, that's a fucking lie. Collapse onto the ground. Wait for the sunlight to wake me up. The long preface was for, what are you playing currently? Game wise.
00:13:24
Speaker
I've been playing, I've been playing some, most recently actually I've been playing Neo Scavenger. What is that? So it's another kind of, it's a post-apocalyptic flash game that's on Steam, and it's not like
00:13:39
Speaker
First person shooter or third person shooter or something like that. Most of the game is moving around on hexes but the premise is you scavenge things fight opponents and Get like kind of randomly try to survive everything basically degrades over time. Mm-hmm And most of the world wants to kill you But there is there is like a story there as well It's just you'll probably not experience it first playthrough because it is permadeath and a roblox. Yeah
00:14:06
Speaker
It's got a pretty basic UI. There's a lot of just. I was wondering about the UI. Thank you. I was wondering. Most of the game is just clicking on things and then hitting Confirm. You're just like, oh, you're in this situation. What do you want to do? I'll hit the button that says Advance and then click Confirm. It's not inspired. It's not like that as far as the control.
00:14:33
Speaker
But it feels good. It feels fun to build stories, sort of. It's one of those kinds of games where everything has a lot of weight. You can feel like you're doing alright and then just get injured in a fight and it turns into an infection and you die. Because there's this whole medical system that you don't even have first-hand information about unless you pick medic as one of your starting perks, which costs points.
00:15:01
Speaker
Is there progression, though? Like, if you go back through, you can put more points in something? Not like a lot of other roguelikes like that. Like, if you start over, you start over with a new character. But you will know, like, more about the world. Certain things don't really move. Like, there's a major city you can find. Right. And if you find, like, a map, you
Character Motivations & Anti-Heroes
00:15:20
Speaker
can locate that major city, which will mark it kind of on your map. And then if you go there, it's pretty much there in all playthroughs. And that can make, like, a huge difference in your survival.
00:15:29
Speaker
So there's some persistence through playthroughs, but it's not burger stat based. It's more of like practice convenience in a way. Yeah. And you get more of the story. So like.
00:15:41
Speaker
you wake up in like a cryo facility and There's you your character doesn't this is you know the old trope for games your character has amnesia Like claps hands. All right, we've wrapped that up We now have synced our player to the in-game character and everything's gonna be fine But you can kind of like go out and figure out more about what's going on in the world and if you figure that out in one playthrough it's not like there's there might be a main story you can actually beat but
00:16:12
Speaker
a lot of the information you can just figure out on any playthrough. So it's you kind of piecing it together, which I enjoy. It's a lot of fun, but it's also like not a traditional game in the way that it's played. And like I said, it's really easy to just
00:16:28
Speaker
make a mistake and die like you can be camping out in the wild and you're like okay i have my campsite it's in like a cluster of trees so there's a little bit of reduced visibility and i'm gonna like put some noise traps around my camp so if i sleep here because i'm really tired if i sleep here and like regain my energy bar um
00:16:49
Speaker
If someone stumbles across my camp, hopefully they hit the trap and I'll be able to wake up, search the woods, try to identify who they are or run away and survive that encounter. But you neglect to do that one time. And if you're unlucky, you're just like, oh no, I didn't camp in a clump of trees. I camped in open plains and I lit a fire and then I stoked it as big as it could get. So there's absolute visibility where I'm at.
00:17:16
Speaker
and then i just like passed out on the ground and didn't do anything else you'll just you can sleep like that and then you'll get this like the credits literally and this little post-mortem of all of the rounds of combat that occurred while you were unconscious oh yeah and usually going unconscious they took a blow to the face
00:17:36
Speaker
Jake did not respond. It's literally like that, too. It's like an unknown assailant, like, hit you in the face with a hammer or something like that. And you're like, oh, jeez. Yeah. It's like you're now unconscious. You're dazed, whatever. But you get to do that for everybody else, too. So, like, combat's really deadly. And if you, like, sneak up on somebody at, like, nighttime, you can be like, oh, I'm going to, like, put this little, if you have, like, a certain skill, like, trapping or something.
00:18:04
Speaker
you can like set a little trap there and as they're approaching trying to like get to you they'll trigger the trap like take a bunch of damage fall down and you're just like well time to walk up and start stabbing something like that so it's uh it's pretty fun for that those are definitely the game strengths though what about uh that was quite a spiel we'll cut that off put it in its own episode what uh what have you been playing recently
00:18:31
Speaker
Uh, shit, I should've known this question was coming. Unprompted. I mean, some of the mainstays always go back to, as you know, Binding of Isaac. Yeah, classic. Another roleplay. Hey. I feel like a dual monitor setup of him watching something, but it's more absent-minded because it's
00:18:53
Speaker
almost wrote in the mechanics, because you get so used to it. Though I'm still not good at the game, let me squash that thought. How far are you off of 80% world record games for random maps? Never gonna plan it yet. Dota 2 also. Not a game I'm amazing at, but I'm better than a lot of people.
00:19:12
Speaker
And you just pray that you match up against those guys. Yeah. We play with a good group, a fun group. We're not always the best. Sometimes we get our shit kicked in. Sometimes we kick out people's shit in.
00:19:26
Speaker
good in that it's dynamic, it's never doing the exact same match each time. Right. Which is fun. You got a good social group for it too. Yeah. You enjoy being around the people that you're playing with, which is a great thing. No, that's the best. I did start playing Hollow Knight a little bit recently. Oh yeah. My friend got that for me. Shout out to you. America's favorite soup. Not that I'll ever listen. Yeah. We'll censor his last name.
00:19:52
Speaker
I have no idea. I don't think it'll matter. This whole section, all of this discussion about it being cut will just be reduced down to you just saying Ian and then cutting it with whatever you're about to say. America's favorite soup.
00:20:12
Speaker
Yeah, Hollow Knight is roguelike. It is a platformer in the same way like any metroidvain is in that genre. But you don't have any upgrades.
00:20:27
Speaker
You're just a guy and you have a directional attack. Your weapon's called like a nail. So I kind of like it in that it's very simplistic. You don't know much about the game world, but obviously the further you go and deeper down you get into the mines. I don't think so. I feel like your kick just like stumbled on this place. And you're like, I want to explore. Cool. And everybody run into, he's like, Oh, backstory about the things. Yeah.
00:20:54
Speaker
I don't want to spoil it, but I also don't remember parts of it because I've been playing it intermittently. That makes it really easy not to spoil that. If it would also be spoilers to you, it's difficult to spoil to other people.
00:21:08
Speaker
It's a really beautiful game. I like the soundtrack so far. Mechanically, it feels good. I finally got a mobility upgrade where I
Storytelling in Games
00:21:18
Speaker
can do an air dash, which isn't really awesome. Screw attack. Not that good, sadly. That was only in Castlevania. Anyway. Yeah, that's where that came from, right? Again, backspace your comments.
00:21:32
Speaker
But yeah, I actually played a little bit. I haven't come back to it. It was amazing for the amount of detail they actually put in that game. Sometimes you get like, I don't know exactly who developed it, but they seemed like an indie dev, but they just pump out ridiculous amounts of
00:21:51
Speaker
Quality into the game if you get the feeling that a game was just lovingly polished like Stardew Valley or something like that Which is like all right? This is now you know your magnum opus as a game developer and possibly a human being It's pretty impressive you Pete to kill yourself But
00:22:12
Speaker
you know people who invest themselves entirely into that one project it's always nice to see i've heard that that's the uh that that came out around when a lot of games were being labeled like uh souls likes right fuck that shit
00:22:27
Speaker
Honestly, I fucking hate that tag. Because it's Dark Souls, it's Bloodborne, and I'll give you Neo. Beyond that, shut the fuck up. Not even Demon's Souls. That much of a purist. It's already Miyazaki, it's already in that franchise. I consider that Dark Souls. Yeah. I think that it's kind of like... But I don't consider Hollow Knight an insanely difficult game.
00:22:50
Speaker
There's a skill base though, for sure. I mean, some of those bosses, I did encounter like a first boss. I've only done like, I think one or maybe three. Um, not the easiest in the world, but I didn't think that they were super bad. Yeah. And also you get your energy gauge or what it was called.
00:23:07
Speaker
gets filled up and you hit people, and then you can hold B and consume that energy to refill one of your health tanks. So if you can balance that. I do remember getting chunked by the first boss. I think he killed me in like two or three hits. I think that he was not to get hit, which is kind of like, I think that's why people equate it with him.
00:23:30
Speaker
Dark Souls, but I think that publications miss out. I mean, it's convenient and it is clickbaity, but I mean, difficult games existed before Dark Souls. You know, maybe like, hard game. Is it the next Dark Souls is not, you know, another link? I get that. It does look really good, though. Our style is crazy. Yeah.
00:23:51
Speaker
I feel like there's another game I picked up semi-recently. No, we've been playing some Dungeon Defenders again. That's true, yeah. Dungeon Defenders 1, because 2 is cartoony and weird. Yeah, we gave 2 like a little bit of it sampling. I think we also tried for like 2 hours. It's fine for a free game. It doesn't maintain my interest.
00:24:13
Speaker
Yeah, there's something satisfying about playing a full game and then getting invested in a full game enough to buy DLC packs and stuff like that. That was Dungeon Defenders 1. Payday 2, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And we're back to Payday 2.
00:24:29
Speaker
No, dungeon, dungeon defenders is actually super great. It's still very cartoony. It's slow moving. You have your typical goblins, ogres, orcs, and you're defending a giant fucking crystal. Yeah, those are my summons. The summoner, right? You get most of them. It's just, it's a fun group game. A group defense of something, one common objective.
00:24:58
Speaker
Yeah, it's different from Team FPS or something else. Yeah, it's refreshing, right? It's this nice little kind of sit-back, casually, deal with the waves. And eventually, as you get to the late game, which we're nowhere near right now, we made some new characters, the waves do start to kind of trail on. They get a little bit longer, and you're like, all right, well, are we going to clear this? You know what's going on.
00:25:24
Speaker
It's really fun, and I like the class design for the game. I mean, in some ways, the base classes were a little bit... well, they were literally samey.
00:25:33
Speaker
And that, uh, I think there's like two or three variants of like night. There's like the female, the male one, they have like slightly different stats, but they mostly, they build the same things and they do the same thing. Yeah. I think their structures are pretty similar. Like everybody has some form of wall, unless you're the huntress, fuck me, which is why I'm going straight DPS.
00:25:56
Speaker
But I think everybody has an anti-air defense to some degree. Yeah, probably. Like Ballista or Magic Ranged Tower. There's like exception classes. Some of the ones that they released is DLC, like I picked up. So I played a summoner, it's the main thing. They don't have traditional walls, but they do have some guys that are like a bit wide. So they're just going to incidentally block enemies. But like, uh,
00:26:23
Speaker
Yeah, the other one who doesn't really have traditional defenses. I guess there's the jester who she can summon, like put basically treasure boxes down.
00:26:38
Speaker
and they're cheaper than, possibly cheaper than whatever defenses they'll summon, but they summon in random defenses when the match starts. So you're just like, I'll put something here. It might be a wall. On top of that, that might be okay, because she has another ability that lets her reposition them. So you're just like, I'll just put everything down and then move it into place. That's a useful ability. The thing that's not a useful ability is the chance that her boxes contain ogres.
00:27:05
Speaker
Oh. But you cannot reposition. Sir, sir, when did you take a couple steps back and get back to the line? Yeah. And for our listeners, ogres are just basically giants in this game. They walk up, destroy almost everything, do tons of damage. And they're like walking meat shields.
00:27:21
Speaker
Yeah, tons of health. You don't want to spawn. That's your DPS check right there. Yeah. Shoot the fat guy. You don't want them to spawn behind your walls, for sure. No. Or where you're expecting a wall to be. So anyways, don't even use that part of that character. You just spin a roulette wheel that, for pretty cheap, can upgrade defenses at hefty discounts. So usually when you're upgrading something to a high level, it takes a bunch of mana, which you pick up off of enemies in the game or at a chest.
00:27:49
Speaker
But she has a skill where it's like she spins a wheel and it's skill based. You pick where each thing stops and there's a bunch of combinations for what the effects are based off of what it lands on. So if it's like three mana crystals or something like that, it'll just upgrade whatever the nearest defense is.
00:28:07
Speaker
And you only paid that spin cost, not whatever the upgrade cost is. So if the upgrade cost is like 900 mana, you pay a hundred and it updates. Um, so it's really cool. Like she's an interesting class, but you don't want to build anything with it really. Cause you might just lose. Yeah. That's interesting having that, um, degree of.
00:28:33
Speaker
Chaos or randomness to a character's design. Some of her spins are actually really, really bad too. Like it'll turn enemies to gold, which gives them like tons of health or vulnerability for a bit or something. The other one, like some of them are really
Anime's Narrative Depth
00:28:49
Speaker
interesting. One slows time for everyone.
00:28:52
Speaker
So it's actually obnoxious if everything's well in hand and you're just mowing down the enemies and your gesture's constantly slowing down and you're just like, nope, we're drawing this one out. She can also heal all allies on the map. I think heal all defenses on the map. She has some really, really powerful effects, but if you screw up, sometimes it's terrible because she has some bad things too. So you usually aren't fighting enemies while you're spinning this wheel or you're doing it someplace.
00:29:21
Speaker
The other character, I mentioned the Summoner. He doesn't make static defenses. He plays a game like an RTS, basically. He gets this top-down view.
00:29:28
Speaker
and can just summon in units basically wherever he wants and they're essentially just an army and he doesn't usually everybody else who's playing they have to like share defense units but he has his own specialized like a summoner defense unit so just don't count towards the psi limit if you will yeah so people don't care as much if you're throwing down guys instead of placing walls because they can still place walls so
00:29:52
Speaker
It is a fun game though. I really like the moment to moment gameplay, the payoff of getting loot. Of getting loot. Yeah, I always liked the progression of like, this is a better gear. Which is why I've always loved Diablo 2. Yeah, as I was going to say. And the children of Diablo 2 over the years. Except for Diablo 3.
00:30:12
Speaker
How many hours of Diablo Phoebe played there's a decent amount yeah, definitely more than I've played Not groomed on the other Path of Exile Path of Exile Yeah same here
00:30:26
Speaker
What was the other one, Titan Quest? Oh yeah, Titan Quest, yeah. Titan Quest we fucking sunk some time into. That was good too, yeah. I like the RPG aspect of it, I like the progression, I like the people's approaches to how we're gonna have like magic and uncanny beasts, etc. There's something about that that always draws me and catches me. I also like the customization, without getting like too deep in the game.
00:30:49
Speaker
I like that you can pick like two classes and then whatever your classes is the combination of those. And they all have names. It's like 42 unique names. But you can't go too crazy with it because I think if you go too far with that you become Path of Exile which
00:31:04
Speaker
Mad props to everybody who understands that skill system. I don't. I know how it works, but this OCD, I hope I'm not making wrong character decisions, destroys me for that game because I'm working down this path and then I realize that I'm not going to get some active ability that I want. I'm just like, ah, no. Time to roll up a new character. Although you can use the town
00:31:30
Speaker
The town teleports scrolls and identifies scrolls as money, so it's got that going for you. That's good. I'd prefer my Deckard cane and white piece of paper wrapped in a blue parchment. Having common money can be pretty useful. How's Deckard doing these days?
00:31:54
Speaker
He basically dies off screen then he's he's not dead. He's taught me Gotta be alive. It was not great Yeah, yeah as soon as they gave duck or came like family and shit. I'm like not even worried about
00:32:14
Speaker
His family is pretty well tied to the story though. Oh yeah, Grant is looped in. Yeah. I think like towards the end of the main story, Leah becomes less relevant to the plot. She starts to get phased out. That's roughly when Diablo comes in.
00:32:34
Speaker
Yeah, I guess other things we played recently, occasionally playing some Overwatch, Hearthstone, Blizzard stuff, but nothing too noteworthy there. That's kind of ad hoc, right? Yeah. That's not to say it's filler games. Please hire me, Blizzard. But those are kind of always there at the background, sort of. Yeah. It's good to have a bottom bitch of games, like a backup. That's not the term I would use.
Impactful Games
00:32:59
Speaker
Like, for a while, I would always go back to Skyrim as my
00:33:02
Speaker
Dave's just going to chill and unwind and play some cartoon. Maybe Minecraft is one that people can always go back to pretty easily. I played a couple games with you, it was alright. It was kind of an inside joke. Usually I quit games pretty early on, but I played that game casually just versus AI when I got home from work, round or two, clear dailies.
00:33:26
Speaker
And then they cancelled the freaking game. They got rid of it. I might have been the only player. It was just me and Boss. This isn't sustainable. It's just Jake and the Boss. He hasn't... Is he gonna make a purchase? No, he hasn't made a purchase. Maybe if he would spend like five dollars on his skin. I could have saved so many jobs.
00:33:45
Speaker
Yeah, it was an interesting idea for sure like I'd like some of the character designs in the game But as soon as you add verticality to it, yeah, it got weird Like it's weird to do a jumping attack or you can't get up to somebody because they have the high ground technically Yeah, and you don't have a relocate ability There's a lot of stuff that was waiting there for me. I think a big part of it was just I
00:34:12
Speaker
It was honestly just the dogs barking in the background. I think that's something that Russia created me most about the game. There's a way to turn that down just a little. Now it was...
00:34:21
Speaker
It wasn't always clear how far your abilities reached or like your hits would actually reach. Very true. And that hurts a lot because you can't really tell like a no reg on like an attack is terrible. You're just like, ah, I thought it went further than that. But yeah, I don't know. Deb game. Literally.
00:34:44
Speaker
Rest in pieces have not been playing that one recently, but I don't know a bunch of stuff coming out. I've been thinking about playing like trying to trying to play something that we played co-op kind of like in the past something like seven days to die or Minecraft or something like that Don't do not start with minecraft again. Yeah, because it's like every five or six months somebody myself included Everybody's to blame
00:35:12
Speaker
Like we'll play Minecraft, start up a server again, or restart somebody else's server. And we'll play for like a week.
00:35:20
Speaker
And then there's one day where like one person's on, other people aren't feeling it, maybe you have two people on tops. The next day, nobody's on. And it's literally dead right then. It's not a verbal communication that goes out. It's just like you play one night, like everybody's on for like six hours, and the next night three, and then two, and then none. It just, it phases off so quickly. It's almost like a cult stop, right? Like everyone's like doing their tasks and stuff. It's almost like a Truman show type thing.
00:35:49
Speaker
And then Truman goes offscreen and everybody just stops. You're just like, well, I don't care about this paper anymore. I'm just going to leave the frame. Yeah. I did enjoy seven days though. That's fun. Did you play that at all? Were you playing that with us? No, I think I was off being anti-social. And then I came back like two days later and you're like, hey, we're all doing this game. And I was. And it's great.
00:36:13
Speaker
It was already at the point where I'm like, Jake has like, what, three more days to play it before he loses interest. I only like it drop $30 on a, was it a fully released game or was it still on data? It is, early access. Yeah. So that was my second red flag. Yeah. And that's a huge red flag.
00:36:32
Speaker
I mean, I will say early access or early release. Rust was good for that because like we spent a decent amount of time on it. It's still actively undergoing changes if I really want to get back to it. I have no idea what that is. I mean, we initially played as our squad. Yeah. All the Old Spice days. Yeah, we had we had like a name. I can't remember exactly what it was for our group. The other guys.
00:37:00
Speaker
Yeah, we were the other guys. A lot of stories there. I don't want to necessarily wade down the podcast with them now. Maybe one or two. These are memorable times of my life. The highlights. I was born. There was that one time at Rust. Yeah, it was a zombie survival game. It did have a lot of actually really well-implemented survival mechanics.
00:37:28
Speaker
There's a lot of those. We made you an episode about a similar game at some point. I know UI and Dan played the forest at some point. Oh yeah, forest is funny.
00:37:42
Speaker
And the forest is kind of like more isolated, I'd say. Seven Days has more scavenging and whatnot. It goes back on sale. I might honestly just pick it up for you. Um, if I could get people to play it a bit, cause you could, you could get like a week or two, week or two of, uh, out of that for sure. Pretty good deal. I mean, I'm all for trying out things, especially if they're free. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna knock it for sure. Right. Okay. We're not talking about the vices, Dave. Oh, okay.
00:38:11
Speaker
I'm trying to think of other short-lived games that we... There's a lot of our games that we find on Steam, we're like, oh, this supports multiplayer, you can get a couple people to play and see how it goes. A lot of them tend to be shorter-lived. Risk-overing, I think we had like one successful session. We never fucking played that game together. There was some... No, we did not. We tried. I was gonna say there was technical difficulties. There was a lot of technical difficulties. But that's a good fucking game. I really like the soundtrack for it. Soundtrack's amazing.
00:38:41
Speaker
I didn't expect to enjoy it that much because it's just side scrolly. Shoot. Yeah, I was like, wow, that seems done. And then I played it. I think I had like a two hour run. Obviously, the longer you wait in the game, the harder everything gets as you progress. So I was at
00:39:01
Speaker
You don't have like a space station or something. I was trying to like find some keys to get again. The story's going to be shit. Cause I remember nothing about it.
Interactivity in Media
00:39:09
Speaker
I can't correct any of it. I had a lot of life steal. So I'd take a hit, get down to almost no health, shoot like crazy and run. But I do this constantly. And then we got to the boss. The final boss took like 15 minutes because of the same reasons. Yeah. Underleveled.
00:39:26
Speaker
So I just like hit him and ran because thankfully it didn't regenerate health. That was a good, that was a good thing. Yeah, that's definitely a game we haven't played in a long time. We're, we're kind of just going across. We're branching through the years and as far as the library is concerned at this point, you're playing Pokemon. No, I'm probably not going to pick up Forecry.
00:39:52
Speaker
at least not for a full price. That's probably fair. I've done enough open world stuff, done enough shooty stuff. I feel like it's not going to do enough to be like, oh, I really want to play it for this. Yeah. Have you ever bought a game just because it had to go up?
00:40:08
Speaker
It's not really a trick question, but it seems like a trick question. I'm trying to remember, like, where did I do this? It does apply to this just because the game has co-op in the form of, like, a mercenary joining whoever the main character is. And then, like, whatever skills you get in my character progression transfers back to your game. But you don't save progress other than that, from what I heard. Like, I played my MGS5, I played my...
00:40:32
Speaker
Marlowe breaks. I played that for 20 minutes. Yeah, I think we played it for 20 minutes, right? We had... Yeah, it was co-op, right? No. I'm thinking of a different one. I'm thinking of a different one. Definitely a different one. I bought it for like two quarters, I think, to get it today. Yeah, it was insanely cheap. You're like, hey, play this, and I'm like, fuck off, right? This is back when you had that foolish policy of you'll play any game that people buy for you.
00:41:00
Speaker
Don't tell people about the policy. I remember you also got me a. There was some anime game, but it was just, just dialogue. Oh yeah. Sorry. Just dialogue. It's like, uh, just dialogue. I appreciate that. I don't know if I would have, if you didn't make the previous mention, but that was a good double set up there.
00:41:26
Speaker
But I was drinking and you were watching me play through steam. I remember just getting frustrated and you could, I think we were also like on this where you could like hear me voice my frustrations about the game. I was just mashing through spacebar trying to get through the dialogue because I didn't care. It wasn't playing a game. It was just, yeah.
00:41:49
Speaker
through some shit. And after 40 minutes, I was finally free. Was that the game? Was it just a visual novel that we were playing? Yeah. And a one. Which I feel like it makes more sense to market it as like, oh, like a short little visual novel, but like, oh, it's a short video.
00:42:11
Speaker
Maybe you can click through as like a UI option for faster dialogue But they shouldn't market it as a game because you do fuck all
Ethical Dilemmas in Games
00:42:20
Speaker
Yeah, I guess that's probably, that's probably a topic of discussion. It's our visual novels and things like that games or how interactive does a piece of medium have to be before it's a game, right? Oh, I'm going to readjust my seed fit as I'm bumping everything. This will be this. Okay, we're adjusted. We're adjusted. This entire 40 minute section we're about to jump into will be next week's podcast. We're just recording at a time now.
00:42:46
Speaker
genius strats so obviously there's certain walking similar type games where it's story driven but you need to live through it as the protagonist or some other person related to the story and it makes more sense to be in the shoes of the character versus just seeing it from an outside perspective of like a little film
00:43:05
Speaker
Right. There's some games that immediately jump to mind that are kind of like that. Firewatch. I haven't played it. It was literally Firewatch yet. Firewatch is what everybody talks about. Games that have walking simulator on Steam. Non-ironically.
00:43:17
Speaker
There's a lot of ironic ones there. I would even argue things like, um, I almost want to put so many in that category because it's not really interactive except for like, I have to pick up a thing and move it to here. It's very minor puzzle elements. Yeah. It's all the minor elements. Yeah. It's very linear. You don't really have to do much. So it's hard to say this falls under what I consider to be a game.
00:43:40
Speaker
It's still good. I really like the story. It's interesting. There's another one like that Tacoma was the one I recently got Tacoma Yeah, it's made by the same people. I want to say who did soma or they did Something else. I don't think it was so it might have been the same people who'd gone home Okay, which again story driven walking simulator in a sense But it's supposed to be more of you're experiencing it as the character me
00:44:08
Speaker
So I think those are fine, but it's hard to consider them as games in the same sense you would as something like Overwatch Halo, something you're playing for the action and the interactivity. More user inputs. Yeah. What about a game like one of the Telltale games, like Telltale's Walking Dead, Wolf Among Us, something like that? Because those do have like a little bit of choice, but on average it doesn't matter that much. It just seems like it does.
00:44:38
Speaker
I would rate them a step higher as far as interactivity because your choices do affect the story. If you tell a guy to fuck off versus saying like, Hey, have a nice day. Right. That, like I said, like that person will remember and it persists through that episode and then entire episodes. Like there's some decisions I made in wolf among us.
00:45:01
Speaker
which I regretted later, because I didn't realize the full repercussions of my actions. And then the guy didn't have an arm later. And I was like, that was on me. You can take this back. I don't need this. But I think the Telltale games, out of the two I've played, do a really great job of balancing. These moments are tense. These moments are laid back. So I think the other one I played was
00:45:29
Speaker
the borderlands telltale into the borderlands. I figured it was cool. Yeah, I'm not sure exactly. Tales of the borderlands or tales around the borderlands. Yeah. Tales from outer space. Again, we're not sponsored by anybody. It doesn't fucking matter. Please sponsor us. But it was really good and interesting, the characters you all like. But even the characters who you dislike, you learn to like a bit. Because you get to see people from essentially all facets of their personality.
00:45:57
Speaker
So you see them in their good moments, you see them in their bad moments, but you see them as a rounded character and you understand where they're coming from. It's not just like, man, that Dwayne guy is kind of a dweeb.
Philosophical Themes in Anime
00:46:08
Speaker
It's like, well, here's why he does his actions and he has these mannerisms and other things. Like, okay, I can relate to that person more.
00:46:20
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of, um, there's a quote I really like, and I try to remember it when I'm working on D&D stuff and villains. And it's, um, uh, every villain is the hero of their own story. Yeah, it's a classic one. And it's, it's really important to keep in mind whenever you're thinking about like character development. Cause you don't want, unless you're making like a Saturday morning cartoon.
00:46:46
Speaker
you don't want characters who are just like bad for bad's sake, they're like, given two options, will you pick the evil option or the good option? You're like, well, the evil option because I am evil. Like good villains don't think that way. They're like, I might pick the evil option, but I have my reasons for doing it. And you may disagree or agree with my reasons, but if you understood my reasons,
00:47:14
Speaker
It gives you more of an appreciation for the character, whether you hate them or not. So right before I came over here, I was having my dinner and rewatching some Breaking Bad. Have you seen Breaking Bad? I know what happens in it and I've seen the ending of it. Oh my god, you can just say no and let me judge you immediately.
00:47:33
Speaker
So I won't spoil anything for you. Breaking bad spoilers, possibly incoming. Well, good breaking bad spoilers, thank you. So we have a character of Walter White who you start out seeing him as an average Joe, kind of likeable, moral good character, but then through his decisions and other circumstances, which he puts himself into.
00:47:58
Speaker
You see him Decorated throughout the seasons of the show and you see his character change. Yeah. Now is he a bad person? Technically, yes, buddy. And but he's still the protagonist and you still I mean maybe not for everybody, but you still want to see him
00:48:16
Speaker
succeed and be happy in the end. You know that what he's doing, at least he perceives, is just a means to an end, and he's hoping it's all worth it. It's kind of the double down of the character, something like Deluge from Code Geass. Yeah, I was thinking of that. I think that's really interesting. There's been entire character studies on Walter White, because he's like
00:48:43
Speaker
He starts off, one, you give weight, you give people the benefit of the doubt at the start of a piece of content. If you're just like, hey, there's a teacher at school, he's got cancer, people are already on board, right? You made him the underdog. Yeah, he's already charismatic, you've got that. Even if he's not actually charismatic in the show, you're going to be rooting for him.
00:49:03
Speaker
But I know that certain parts in the show, there was like, I remember particularly seeing that I watched, because I just watched clips on YouTube, where he was in, it was a storage unit, I think, with his wife, and there was just like a ton of money. It was all just like right there before them, and she was just like, how much is enough, right? And he couldn't answer, because he reached that threshold, right? There's the point where it's like,
00:49:30
Speaker
I'm no longer doing this because I want to provide for my family, like, a lot. It's like, I'm now doing this because I feel like I need this recognition. Like, I am, you know, Heisenberg or whatever it is.
00:49:48
Speaker
Like he would be diminished to like return to his normal lifestyle. And at that point, he becomes like an anti-hero. You could justify everything up to that, but then he's lost his moral ground, right? I really like Lu's story though. Code Geass spoilers. Such a good show.
00:50:16
Speaker
Yeah. I just want to preface, like everything I say could potentially be spoilers. I feel like, no, it's just important. I can't really blanket. Yeah. Don't watch this. If you don't want anything spoiled ever, you're listening to this. Yeah. I mean, as long as we get like some heads up, like we're still, we're talking about this and then we don't transition into spoilers within five seconds before they hit the pause button. I think we're okay. Okay. So let's say Code Geass spoilers blanket. Wait a couple of seconds.
00:50:49
Speaker
Are you still there? We can talk about whatever we want now. Oh, sweet. And we deviate from the script. So you see Lelouch, you see his character, you see how he's driven and that he wants to overturn Britannia instead of not going to the whole plot.
00:51:10
Speaker
But you see one of his plans backfire with the whole Euphemia thing, his sister. Oh yeah, he screws that up. Yeah, because he uses the command accidentally for her to go and kill all the 11s.
00:51:26
Speaker
So after that plan horribly backfires, he's like, no, we can use this and lean into it. But at that point, he kind of has to. He can salvage the situation. Yeah, he can spin it in a good way. But it's really hard for him at that point to just go back on everything and be like, a guy's a goof. I'm actually the good guy. Yeah, so he just keeps doubling down throughout the entire show.
00:51:55
Speaker
And his plans always get more and more destructive. And then at the end of the show, I can't really say sorry, the end of season two, he pins himself as like the ultimate villain and then they kill him or fake his death. Cause there's gonna be a season three. We'll see where the fuck that goes. Zero gets him. It was really rewarding to see the character progression and his resolve trying to meet
00:52:23
Speaker
I would argue good ends for the liberation of Japan. Yeah. Using unthinkable means. Yeah. He didn't want to be like an all powerful God. He just wanted to topple down what his father had set up, who he blamed for the murder of his mother and mistreating of Elevens and how he was kind of just fucking kicked out and treated like shit too. Yeah. Yeah.
00:52:51
Speaker
That kind of, that whole setup was just, it's kind of asking the viewer the question, like, do the ends justify the means? How about now? How about now? How about now? Like, and at what point does that change, right? What's your scope have to be?
00:53:07
Speaker
I want to throw in another spoiler warning. Okay. Fate zero, three, two, one. So at the end of fate zero, so when Karitsugu Emiya finally wins the holy grail war. Yeah, that's what it's called. The grail essentially asking him these questions. Like let's say there's two people. Jesus, two people. There's two boats. One has 400 people. The other one has 200 people and they're both going to crash. You can only save on a boat. Which one do you save? Right. Try a problem.
00:53:36
Speaker
Yeah. And so it gives him like a series of trolley problems, basically. And like the, the end result is he's saved X amount of people, but how many people have like died in the wake? So at what point does that become cost effective? Yeah, et cetera, et cetera. Cause everything he does. But it was interesting to see that in an anime, because traditionally
00:54:02
Speaker
Let me say like a lot of anime is just filler shit. Because they just, and like cartoons in general, a lot of them are just made to fill time or promote something. Get some viewers. Yeah. Which is fine. Yeah. But there are a lot of good animes that are thought provoking. Yeah. You should take something away. Yeah. From a good anime. I thought Fade Zero did a decent job of that. It wasn't the focus of the anime, but it was good. And I liked,
00:54:32
Speaker
that yeah i really like i like when a medium like that game we're gonna make or something like that they make um the protagonist has to make a sacrifice of some sort it's like they either sacrifice something close to them something that matters to them um or they sacrifice the very fact that they are good
00:54:53
Speaker
They sacrifice their worldview, they sacrifice some goal or something like that to accomplish their means in the end. And then hopefully at the end, they're still a hero and not an anti-hero. A lot of times, this pops up in anime a lot, in good anime. The difference between the hero and the villain is literally their perception of the world. And then everything that they do is just based off of that.
00:55:23
Speaker
You just take like, it is a trope basically, but a lot of times the villain had some particularly traumatic upbringing or something like that, right? But they just see the world slightly differently and then everything that they do that makes them evil is just a branch of that. I really like that.
00:55:40
Speaker
It's like a constant clashing of ideals, which is literally anime. Yeah. Because the protagonist and the antagonist will have such strong ideas on something or the release. It's like, fundamentally, I'm opposed to you. Not just side-wise. It's full-on. Yeah. There's a fundamental difference between me and you. Yeah, because you're not just fighting. You're also shouting out why you are correct. Yeah. And why the other person is doing is...
00:56:09
Speaker
evil and wrong. It's like a world cannot be sustained by what you believe. It's true. At times it's a little tropey. It's a little cheap. Yeah. But it can be done right a lot of times. So going back to phase zero, you have Kuritsugu Emiya, but you get to see the clashing of their ideas for what they want to happen with the holy grail war.
00:56:27
Speaker
I really, I really enjoy that. I think that makes the show a lot better. Or the even double tangent back to Code Geass, you have Suzaku, who's trying to fix the system from the inside. Yeah. And sees everything that Lelouch does as evil, because it is pretty
00:56:45
Speaker
pretty one-sidedly not great like you can give justification behind it but no one's gonna say it's good yeah no one's gonna go up and say like hey murder's okay like nobody's like oh yeah i love war it's the best it's like at most it's justifiable and that's like as far as it gets and a lot of people wouldn't go that far well in the movie
00:57:05
Speaker
That was a, it's enough destruction. Yeah. Millions of deaths. Yeah. To kind of like unify the rest of the people, but also less suffering, less mouths to feed. Yeah. It's pragmatic in a way.
00:57:20
Speaker
You can't have both. You can't have all just anime. You can't all have, like, Elphin Lied for, like, days. And you're just like, I'm depressed now. I don't remember a whole lot about this show, except it was sad. There was a lot of... That's the main theme. There's a lot of titties and violence. But key takeaway from Elphin Lied, the intro song...
00:57:45
Speaker
absolutely gorgeous yeah like it's four minutes of this amazing haunting opera singing yeah which i still listen to to this day this is a pretty long podcast we can just we can just add that to the start just the full song at the usual 30 seconds copyright straight call it a day i don't know if we can get it is good though please if you are listening that one listener yes please check it out it is good it's really good yeah
00:58:13
Speaker
So anime, anime was a mistake. That's the short of it in some way. I learned from another game that anime is actually real. And that one punch man is saving anime. I think that's enough perfectly timed quips to tag into our outro. Yeah. So Dave and I are looking forward to the Breaking Bad anime to tie this all together and the game spin off so we can have a podcast episode about that. Thank you, Listener.
00:58:41
Speaker
I hope that you have a good morning, good afternoon, or good night, based off of when you are. Also, to link this back to the Truman Show. Yeah, that's what he said. That was his thing. I haven't seen you in a while, but I believe you. In case I don't see you. Good afternoon, good evening, and good night. I wish I had a tie back to my food ranch from earlier, but I don't. That's a spicy podcast. God damn it, Jake.
00:59:31
Speaker
you