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S2 Ep128: Shogo: Mobile Crysis Division
76 Plays5 years ago
FULL SPOILERS: Crysis
MINOR SPOILERS: Shogo: Mobile Armor Division
Join Dave and Jake as cover a double feature of FPS action in this week's episode!
Thoughts? Comments? Requests for new episodes? Feel free to email them in!
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
https://www.facebook.com/SoapstonePodcast/
MINOR SPOILERS: Shogo: Mobile Armor Division
Join Dave and Jake as cover a double feature of FPS action in this week's episode!
Thoughts? Comments? Requests for new episodes? Feel free to email them in!
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
https://www.facebook.com/SoapstonePodcast/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Halloween Vibes
00:00:24
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake. I'm joined by my co-host, as always, Dave. How's it going today, Dave? It's going okay. I am a little tired and a little hungover, but I'm excited because it's Halloween.
Dark Themes and Preferences
00:00:40
Speaker
Oh my God.
00:00:42
Speaker
Yeah. There's like a, there's a special discord call now. There's a little, a spoopy thing versus the. Yeah. Yeah. I had to restart the client to actually hear this because I thought Dave was just legitimately hallucinating, which is fair. Sometimes I do be talking some nonsense. Um, but no, I mean, they've, they've spiced it up a little bit. I also saw mentioned, I think, uh, yesterday that discord has like a secret super dark theme. That's darker than dark mode.
00:01:12
Speaker
So it has the same contrast in colors as like Pornhub comments or something like that. Obviously, I'm not the type of person to visit that site, but the comments get posted to Reddit sometimes.
00:01:28
Speaker
Just Jake's facial expression while saying this is great. Great in that it's completely believable. Yes, entirely. Yeah, it's cool to have these little seasonal perks.
00:01:43
Speaker
I don't care about necessarily darker. I just need dark themes in general. I wish I had it for other things. Like right now I'm looking at the notes on one panel, um, recording client on another and it's light themed. It's okay. Cause it's like 10 AM. But normally I want that dark theme. So if I was in a pitch black room, you wouldn't see like the glow on my face.
00:02:09
Speaker
Yeah, I could pretty much always go for dark theme. I got this, so I got a new monitor not too long ago. It's like a 27 inch big, but if it's like on the, if it shows like just my background, it's just like windows default blue. If I don't have the wallpaper engine up or whatever, and it's just,
00:02:30
Speaker
You know, like the IBM or like Apple, not IBM, the Apple commercial where they throw the hammer at the giant screen and like the fog as the screen explodes, like rushes over the audience and there's this blue light. It's supposed to be their new product. That's what my face looks like.
Tech Setup and Experimentation
00:02:48
Speaker
The blue light. Yeah, coming out of your face. OK, exactly. So I got this little this this light I can turn on on one of my cameras that's really flushing me out right now because it's too bright.
00:02:59
Speaker
Yeah, it looks like a very aggressive vampire filter. Yeah, right. It's adjustable, thankfully, but I thought it was between white, blue and like warm kind of orangish. Wait, can you can you try blue? Yeah, I literally only use the orange, but that's blue. So I could turn that up and just
00:03:20
Speaker
Oh, geez. Okay, for audio listeners, which is everybody, it doesn't show that drastically. You're not missing much. It's just Jake is squinting because he's being blinded by his own desktop appliances. It's very difficult. I can't remember where I was going with this, but
00:03:37
Speaker
Yeah. I could stand a dark theme in pretty much every application because there's no window in my computer room. If I'm ever like doing work things and somebody sharing their screen, but their code editor is a white background, I judge them so, so much.
00:03:56
Speaker
Yeah. I think VS code by default is dark theme. I believe so. I think it'll prompt you probably the first time you do it. I know Visual Studio also. Hey, we're going to set this to dark unless you're a sociopath and you're like, oh, the dark is fine. Thank you. I mean, like for some people, it is useful to have
00:04:18
Speaker
There was a controversy, a minor controversy, when Discord on April Fool's, I believe last year, they disabled the normal theme. It was just lights off. It's like we turned off light mode. And their Twitter post was just them flipping a light switch.
00:04:40
Speaker
Um, but a lot of people legitimately needed it for like accessibility reasons due to, you know, like eyesight and stuff like that. And so it didn't take them long to realize that they like screwed over a huge part of their user base. We're like, Oh, we shouldn't have done that for April fools. Probably. So I turned it back on. I mean, you live and learn hanging on the edge of tomorrow. That's true. Speaking of the edge tomorrow.
Gaming: Crysis and Shogo
00:05:07
Speaker
That's a movie with Tom Cruise. That is true. My time is going to be speaking of light versus dark. Today's episode is of two powerhouses in the FPS space. Yeah. Both really well known but polar opposites. That's definitely a take on it. So our two are hybrid.
00:05:35
Speaker
today is Crisis and Shogo. For some reason, I still don't know exactly what the corollary between the two are, but we're ready to try to make that connection if it doesn't exist. Yeah, we kind of felt like they're both two older shooters that we have some experience with, but they didn't necessarily merit an entire episode because
00:06:02
Speaker
I'll start off by saying I feel that crisis is bland. I feel like for when it came out, obviously very graphically intensive. We all know about the meme. Can it run crisis though? And it was very high tech for the time. Like when I tried to play it on my laptop, even just like the opening sequence where you jump out of a plane, look
00:06:27
Speaker
I don't think I ever landed the plane into the water to start the level. That's how bad the frame rate was. But it did a lot for when it came out. Yeah, I think it necessarily holds up as a game. But like the fact that it was experimenting with stuff in the first person shooter space helped open doors. Right. Not saying it's as impactful as Halo, but it deserves a mention.
00:06:56
Speaker
If you still care about crisis spoilers, I guess, weird on you. But, you know, when I'm going to spoil a crisis, I assume I'll spoil Shogo. But now that I've said that, so that was your disclaimer, the game does not hold up. That's that's my TLDR. This is the we'll go through the essay to end up there. But like.
00:07:19
Speaker
Holy crap, I was so frustrated with the game by the end of it. Yeah, and I only got to watch you play some of it for a couple of hours because it wouldn't run on my computer, not because it couldn't, but because it literally would not start. And I think I tried for like two hours to look through Steam comments and discussion boards and be like, how, how may game work? And they're like, uh,
00:07:45
Speaker
Yeah. And I think, I don't know, maybe someday would be interesting to have an episode about like games that have literally been lost just due to the fact they can't be run anymore. Yeah. I know Crisis has released a remaster. That's not what we're going to be talking about. I'm just talking about like the base game as it was released in 2007. And really how it holds up now. Again, spoilers, it really doesn't. But
00:08:12
Speaker
I did go back and I played a bit of Shogo for some of the background. I got a few hours into it. I know you are significantly more familiar with Shogo. You can't hear me just dabbing on can here, but I'm right.
00:08:30
Speaker
Yeah, I grew up on Shogo as like a CD that I got from Walmart when I was like 16 type of deal. Probably played through it three or four times. And then I think the first time I did any Twitch streaming, granted it's only happened like three times, I played through Shogo. I think the fun. Yeah.
00:08:51
Speaker
Because it's near and dear to my heart for some reason. I get bad. I get drunk. I mean, I also appreciate bad things. So not even arguing. I mean, it's 100% true, too. Like, I've played Stalker. I've played other games that were objectively bad or poor experiences or crashed constantly. And if I was the same individual, I would not have completed it.
00:09:16
Speaker
But yeah, it'll be interesting to see where we get interruptions on the crisis discussion and be like, actually, in Shogo. So I was going to ask you, because I did a poor job of planning this episode as you took most of the notes, do you want to start talking about crisis and then transition over into Shogo or do you want to like- Probably. Probably the easiest way. Yeah. But if there is something that stands out,
00:09:43
Speaker
Just throw that in there. Anyways, for the uninitiated, so the people who were good with spoilers and have not played Crysis, then Crysis was the PC's challenger to Halo, basically, is probably the most concise way to put it.
00:10:04
Speaker
It was graphically really, really impressive. It was like, hey, PCs can run this, consoles couldn't run this, can't look this good. If Crysis came out to consoles, I was too lazy to look it up. I'm sure it might have at some point. I know Crysis 2 did, but Crysis 1 for a long time was like, this is it, this is it. And nobody could run the game because it was so graphically intensive.
00:10:27
Speaker
You mentioned the drop sequence at the back of the plane at the beginning of the game. I feel like that's probably the number one point in games. I feel like I could make this claim where people went back, opened the menu and turned the graphics down.
00:10:47
Speaker
I feel like across gaming that could be number one sequence for turning the graphics down. And then maybe number two or something like that for actually just quitting the game after the turning the graphics down wasn't enough to make it playable.
00:11:05
Speaker
For something like in that, I'm going to keep saying space. You do have to consider the technology. It's very cool that it was a metric, and graphics like that could exist in the CryEngine space. Fuck, I keep saying space. Yeah. Space, space, space. I won't say it again. Space, space, space, space core. Dave is cosplay in the space core. You'll see.
00:11:31
Speaker
But there were so many people who, like you said, could not actually play it. A lot of computers will kind of auto detect your settings to say, hey, here's where it'd be optimal for me to run out without shitting the bed. Cool. Let's do that. And a lot of times with games, it will set it at a lower settings options for you.
00:11:53
Speaker
Even if it's not necessarily needed. Like I've gone back and games been like, Oh, it's missing like some shader details or shadows or like texture quality. Let me bump that up and it will still run fine. Um, it's just kind of covering you, but if your default setting for the game will not allow you to really play the game.
00:12:13
Speaker
It fucking sucks. Because back in the day, we didn't have as much of online help tools or forums to say, hey, how make work? You had game manuals. The game manual was like, put in the CD, click yes a couple of times.
00:12:28
Speaker
Yeah. So I wonder how many people were actually lost to the experience of Crysis initially because the technology disparity for what they had versus what it demanded. I might have been. It could have been my day one experience. I know I eventually got there. I think I had like an 8800 GT Nvidia car Geforce. This is back in the Geforce series.
00:12:49
Speaker
I realized that might not mean a lot of things to a lot of people, but anyways, it's an old card. I was able to play on like low or medium, I think back in the day. And it was a really cool experience. This came out like the year before Bioshock and it had really cool looking water, the face models.
00:13:07
Speaker
like we're really cool for the time. They've since been massively eclipsed. We recently played Horizon Zero Dawn, like a bit more revisited the game for that episode. And it's a lot better. Like these are back almost to the lower Croft block face.
00:13:24
Speaker
To draw a corollary to Shogo, one of the greatest games, it didn't really have any type of detail. So things like water, which is very dynamic to make it look, oh, it's a fluid and not a static texture that's just kind of blue, or to have facial mapping for people's expressions as you
00:13:45
Speaker
choke them out and use them as a meat shield. It wasn't there. The fact that Crysis did it, again, really helped to kind of set a bar for this is what we'd like to see more of in the future. Because I know there is definitely some, as games come out, there might be some lateral movement of, hey, not every game needs to adapt to that immediately. You have a couple of years.
00:14:11
Speaker
But if like three years after that, if you don't have water physics, you look bad. Yeah, no, it's it's legitimately true. I do think Bioshock, so Bioshock came out one year after crisis, and I think it probably one ups the water a little bit, but that was freaking Bioshock like it's there in the name, you know, I thought it was to what, seven out of 10.
00:14:32
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, that's also true. But Crysis is, to get to its core gameplay, it's a first-person shooter. You have a nanosuit. It switches between armor, strength, speed, and cloak modes. Each one drains energy. You can only have one up at a time. Armor actually doesn't drain energy in this one. Does it drain if you get shot? It does. It basically is the Halo overshield. So I was earlier comparing it to Halo. This is why.
00:15:00
Speaker
If you just aren't draining energy for a period of time, it'll start regenerating on its own, similar to the overshield. And strength lets you jump really high slash throw things far. Speed lets you run really fast or swim really fast. And then you passively move faster, even if you're not holding sprint. And cloak turns you invisible and is the most essential one, basically, I think.
00:15:27
Speaker
in conjunction with armor. But it drains faster the quicker you move. And that's it. That's the suit. We've basically full disclosed exactly how it works for the entirety of the game. So to kind of give you everything at the start, does it feel good to be running around in essentially like a superhero space?
00:15:47
Speaker
Um, I think it does. And that was pretty much like that was the experience crisis was really going for. Um, it's kind of a half. It's, I don't want to say it's an open world type game. Um, because it's, it's less linear than like a standard shooter for the time, at least. Right. Exactly. If your levels be like, Hey, you don't have to exactly go down this hallway, but your path is very set and you don't have options to go.
00:16:15
Speaker
up in the vents or do something else. It's roughly this way. Everyone, if you look at a heat map, will be on the same path. Exactly. The first part of the game after you land on the beach is pretty linear. They're doing the tutorial stuff. This is how you duck, whatever. Can you hit the controls? If so, you can pass this part. And then there's a couple enemies, but you're just going to encounter them, probably shoot them.
00:16:40
Speaker
And then there's this nice, the overlook point, which a lot of games do, like Legend of Zelda does this. It's big dick and on that vista. Yeah, exactly. Oblivion did this when he got out of the sewers. And you like come up this mountain and you look down and there's an enemy outpost and there's a boat out in the
Crysis Gameplay Mechanics
00:17:02
Speaker
bay. And it's just like, hey, you can tag enemies if you use your binoculars. That's how we reward you for
00:17:08
Speaker
being prepared, unless you're in the higher difficulties, then the tags don't really stick to the same extent. I thought it was going to be like, there's dirt on your binoculars, and I just kind of... Clean these off with a click. But here you go, have fun. And you can just shoot the guys, but the boat will be alerted. You can try to sneak down, take the guys out one at a time. But the boat will be alerted. But the boat might be alerted, yeah.
00:17:32
Speaker
Well, to use the expression you use in the past, it's stealth until it's not. This is very much a it's stealth until it's not encouraging game. So it's kind of similar to, I guess, our experience with Metal Gear Solid 5. You have an outpost.
00:17:48
Speaker
That was fairly an open space, yet it was a constrained world, not randomly generated or anything. But you kind of sneak up on a base, playing like, I got to take out this guard first, because he's only looking one direction, nobody's looking at him. Yeah. And then you kind of plan your sequence of attack, but then if you get spotted, you can technically run away and come back. Because it'd be like, I'm tired of not chasing that guy all the way. There's an intruder on the island somewhere.
00:18:17
Speaker
Or you just go through and kind of gun everybody down. Yeah, exactly. Did you find yourself doing a lot of stealth? It's really good. So one of the things I think Crisis actually does pretty well is it doesn't do a hard transition between like stealth and going loud.
00:18:37
Speaker
you can drop back into stealth pretty much any time you're not seen if you cloak and then just crouch walk away from your position like unless you get really close to enemies they can't see you while you're cloaked and they'll just fire or run to where your last position was um and so if at ever any point you're like i'm kind of overwhelmed you can usually back away from the situation a bit but
00:19:02
Speaker
They balance that because you can't move that far in cloak like you can't run and it won't last that long. But you're really cloaked, right? So other games might give you like partial.
00:19:17
Speaker
like Metal Gear Solid. Enemies will see you if they know you're there or around that spot. You can't just cloak and leave for the most part. But you could sneak away from your location. You can leave the area entirely. In Crysis, it's just like, crap, I'm stuck behind this wall. There's bullets flying at me. I can make it to that other wall near me. And then wait and try and do it again once it's recharged. Yeah, exactly.
00:19:43
Speaker
I think that helps balance it a little bit, but the cloak is really strong. And I did use it to reposition for some fights because the enemies do do. They do do a lot of damage.
00:19:57
Speaker
Okay, so you're still kind of given like a super shoulder status, but it might be more akin to Halo than I was thinking. So you get clipped or pinned down by like a couple of enemies. It's gonna wreck you. It's not like you're going down, smashing through a city, and each left click you're taking out 30 guys.
00:20:17
Speaker
Yeah, there's like there's some weapons that are just oppressive like a couple boss type characters or eventually fight enemies and nanosuits themselves will have like chain guns or sniper rifles and You can only take like a few shots and you're dead and the chain gun is like are you still out in the open? Because like that's that's death you're gonna die right like you can't fight them like mano a mano and
00:20:45
Speaker
So quick question, how do you feel about this sniper? Like in general, just in an FPS sense, didn't say it. Um, how do you feel about like the, the bead being drawn? And then if it's on you for like two seconds, you get shot type thing. That's been a staple of shooters for a very long time. I can actually relate this to Shogo in a second, which is funny, but the, um, uh,
00:21:09
Speaker
But I think it's necessary to have a little bit of the we're dialing in on you delay. Because the alternative is the punishment is just so high you get like destroyed or dissuaded from continuing to play the game. You've lost your kneecaps. What? Yeah, exactly. So Crisis will do a lot of, they can cover themselves a lot in that space because of Cloak.
00:21:35
Speaker
You can just like cloak pop out from your corner, figure out where the enemies are. Quickly, if you fire while you're in cloak, your cloak drain, your energy drains entirely. But if you quickly swap to like armor or something else, it's usually going to be armor.
00:21:48
Speaker
and then take your shot, then you retain all of that energy, that unspent energy, which is a nice little micro adjustment that makes it so... That's cool. Panic doesn't pay off. Attacking out of cloak means you have no energy for armor at all. If you take fire back, you might just die.
00:22:10
Speaker
So do you always have a power selectors or ever a default? The default is armor. So I think like number four on the keyboard for PC controls is switch back to armor.
00:22:24
Speaker
That was actually really convenient. So then it does in general kind of function like an overshield, but you have options to stealth up or speed up. Exactly. Or throw chickens. The resource conservation was one of the key parts of how you choose your approaches in Crysis. And that was part of their sandbox experience, like you mentioned.
00:22:45
Speaker
these open-world games go for. Oh, we all said that to Shogo. Sorry. I was going to just say, to relate that to Shogo, they don't always do that. That was probably my number one gripe when I was playing, was enemy reaction time seemed to be a little bit random. And I opened a door.
00:23:04
Speaker
And I instantly died to a shotgun. I was like, oh, OK, that's just the death door, I guess. But the second time I opened the door after I reloaded, it took the enemy a moment longer to fire on me. So I was able to hit stun him first.
00:23:20
Speaker
Yeah. We'll definitely probably talk about it more as is catchphrase that we use a lot. But the Shogo AI and damage is seemingly random. It is seemingly random the entire fucking game. There's something called a crit mechanic where you're familiar with crits. Yeah. But if you crit, it deals exceeding amounts of damage and then also heals you. Right.
00:23:45
Speaker
Like it's very confusing because the enemies have it as well. So when Jay was talking about that door, yeah, I'm sure he was hit by like a shotgun crit. And I don't know if there's really any type of stealth mechanic where you can sneak.
00:24:00
Speaker
Not that I noticed. It's just usually if line of sight is possible, they have the owl head swivel. They'll be like, that guy. But it's very polygonal as far as graphics. Yeah, I think these are both games of the enemies drawing lines to where you are or where they think you are. And Shogo, it's also just where you are. But in Crysis, it's also last known location. It was really hilarious.
00:24:28
Speaker
Like sneak out from behind cover and then like a helicopter is continuing to like fire rocket pods and the tanks like unloading this gun on this like This tree that you're behind, you know 20 seconds ago because that was the last known location They're just like no waste all of our ammunition on this tree
00:24:48
Speaker
Oh my god. I really am glad that other shooters have made smarter AI. It would be like, this is where he was. He's not currently there. Maybe he moved from here and they'll kind of look for you in the vicinity.
00:25:03
Speaker
Yeah. And to be completely fair to crisis, they also do that if they ever get to the point where they've checked, they exactly have checked your location and they know you're not there anymore. So if they look behind the tree, that has been sodomized by ammo. Right. That's the problem though, is they might take a long time to realize you're not behind the tree anymore. They're just like, no. All right, six hours of dedicated covering fire on this tree.
00:25:26
Speaker
And then we'll move forward from there. Timmy, you want to flank and just double check what's behind the tree quick? But so as it's high end, one thing that's really cool about crisis is it's all like the fire and explosions and bullshit going on. Terrain can be destructible.
00:25:44
Speaker
Not ground specifically, but structures. I saw Jake throw a guy through a support beam for a shack because you're on a small island and it just fucking destroyed the thing and it fell on top of somebody else and don't damage. That's an option where you can fuck up a building to kill people in it. Certain trees can be knocked down as well. I don't think it's all trees though.
00:26:12
Speaker
No, like the the more sturdy ones are just walls basically, but other things like if it's a banana plant or something, you can work your way through there. But yeah, it was definitely like one of the selling points of the game, I think was like the destructibility because it was the physics engine crisis was like to show off hardware. This is how good your graphics card is. This is how good we can make the physics like this is how
00:26:35
Speaker
Like that was really a lot of the selling point and it doesn't actually come into play too much on the moment to moment gameplay though. Just shooting people is usually more pragmatic than trying to like knock the roof down on them and other games have done more in the destructive space sense than like.
00:26:56
Speaker
a bad company too. We could like blow up a building if enemy snipers were using it. You're just like, what if there was no building? There is no high ground. I've leveled all other buildings so that I have the high ground. Or like Just Cause, which was just based around. That was another sandboxy type game.
00:27:21
Speaker
But in Crysis, I found myself not using those mechanics as much. It was just incidental. I could look after the battlefield and be like, oh, we devastated this village, which was kind of cool. I just didn't come to play that much.
00:27:33
Speaker
Yeah, it's nicer to like have the impact because I feel like in a shooter, everyone will try a couple of things. One is just how fast they can switch between weapons and jump. This is usually what people will do in lobbies before a game starts if provided the option. The other thing is they will shoot their name or a smiley face or a penis into a wall, seeing how long the bullets will remain there and just to see like what type of impact your weapons have on the environment. Yeah.
00:28:04
Speaker
So it's cool to shoot a wall, and then the wall's not there anymore because it took too much damage. And Crysis has cool weapons. They have a full customization system. So you can bring up a weapon, hit a key, and it's just like, oh, let me just switch out tactical attachments and flashlights and all that stuff on the fly that you've picked up through the course of the game, which is really cool. I like that.
00:28:30
Speaker
It doesn't have a massive impact on gameplay because you'll probably just throw this oppressor on everything you can, and a red dot site on everything you can, and a reflex site on everything except the sniper rifle and a scope on that. There you go, you've customized all your weapons. So a lot of guns are fairly samey for how they operate.
00:28:49
Speaker
Well, there's like, you've got your standard fair, you've got like the shotgun, which is probably never really necessary, but it's fun to use. Because of the physics engine. Yeah, exactly. And also just the effective range, like the other weapons kill enemies. So why do you want a weapon with limited range that kills enemies, right? Like if you round a corner and there's an enemy there,
00:29:14
Speaker
These are also two games where shotgun's probably bad. But we can come back to the shotgun and Shogo, I guess. Let me talk about their weapons. So shotgun, there was the automatics, where's like the Korean variant and the US Army variant, which was a scar. Also, you're only fighting Koreans, basically, for most of crisis, which is a little bit weird.
00:29:41
Speaker
And then just like special weapons, like rocket launchers and munitions and things like that. Pistols also, silenced pistol. The rocket launchers were just for taking out things like tanks and helicopters, right? Yeah, there's like an explosive. So they use like the slot system. So your pistols you always have kind of as your fallback, but they can run out of ammo. You can always punch with melee too, if you really needed to.
00:30:08
Speaker
Um, but you don't have, uh, the frigging doom power up. You don't have berserk. So like, uh, strength mode is as close as you get and it's not good enough. Um, but the pistols, and then there's the assault rifle slot, which is like the scar or shotgun, whatever standard munitions, and then your explosives. Uh, so you could have like C4, which you remote detonate or like rocket launcher. Um,
00:30:39
Speaker
And that was mostly it. There's some exotic alien weapon toward the end. But oh, also there's aliens in the game, I guess. There you go. There's the justified spoiler. I'm just looking for it. But yeah, I mean, like the last half of the game, you're dealing with aliens and they basically throw out most of the good things they had developed from the first part of the game.
00:31:08
Speaker
in favor of just falling back on pretty corridor like military shooters. It's real sad. So after like your experience reliving this, where do you think it falls?
Critique of Crysis
00:31:22
Speaker
I think like
00:31:25
Speaker
So there's, like I said, the second half of the game is significantly worse than the first. They should have focused more on the sandboxy elements and let people have fun with it. And, like, the CryEngine went on to be used for other things in that space. Like, there's a fan-made MechWarrior game, there was, like, some other stuff that was really cool. But as a first-person shooter, Crysis just doesn't really hold up.
00:31:51
Speaker
they got rid of like most of that how do you want to approach the situation sandbox decision making for the latter half of the game while you're dealing with aliens and the cold which i guess is where the cry part comes from i don't know and then they have a final this is this this is the kicker i have to mention this because this is where most of my frustration of the game stems from emotionally
00:32:13
Speaker
Final bosses in video games? What was wrong with old games and the inability to do final bosses, right?
00:32:22
Speaker
Um, basically the final boss is like an alien worship and you're given infinite rocket launcher replenishable ammo. And it's just like the suit doesn't matter. None of the toggles matter. The boss is always on this side of like the aircraft carrier, one side of it. It's like, um, Metroid prime type boss, which is fine for Metroid prime, but for crisis.
00:32:52
Speaker
You're using none of the tools you've established up to this point. You're like, oh, yeah, hit the weak points. It's like it's like Star Fox or you're like some nonsense. I enjoy that, but not in crisis. And man, I realize this is my dedicated rant. I'm going to shut up in a second here, but.
00:33:10
Speaker
You can die in crisis. If you go fast, you don't have armor on, and your impact speed with like a pebble deals damage to your character equal to your health pool. And that can happen in the final boss. You'll just die randomly if you don't have armor on. It's like the most frustrating nonsense. Anyways, the ending is worth skipping, and I wouldn't go back and play crisis. It's basically where all this is going.
00:33:40
Speaker
Hi, Dave. Hey, Jake. I just got back. Thanks for covering me. I was taking a piss. What did I miss? So Christ is a pretty good game. I think I recommend it to everybody. I understand your frustrations with that, though. I feel like all the games back then didn't. Even now, there are a lot of examples. Final bosses are almost put in as a staple, like they feel that they need to. Yeah. Like Remnant from the Ashes had a final boss. It was the thing.
00:34:09
Speaker
It's just like hey for a shooter we should have them
00:34:16
Speaker
be shot, but then like adding like some other mechanics. It just, it never feels right. Like if you're playing in an FPS, do you want to have somebody else who also like, do you want to have like a gunplay battle where it's like a 1v1 in cod? No, that feels kind of like weird and truncated for a grand finale to this game of put time into. Yeah. But just to have like a series of
00:34:43
Speaker
Hey, here's some new mechanics that you gotta do. It also feels weird. Yeah. So I don't know where final bosses need to be or even if they need to be in first person shooters. You really gotta like judge the pace of your game and figure out why people are playing it. Cause I don't think anyone was playing crisis to get an almost on rails sort of final boss.
00:35:06
Speaker
sequence or the literal on-rails sequences at all. Like those existed in turret sequences the game has. It had an identity crisis was probably the best way to put it. Was that not intentional? No. What was the reference? Can you explain the joke? Identity crisis.
00:35:26
Speaker
Oh, oh, that's good. Oh, geez. Oh, man. All right. Well, that was intentional. Now, please write in if you thought Jake's joke was good, whether or not. But yeah, it's kind of it falls back on mental generic military shooter stuff and.
00:35:42
Speaker
Although the game's still pretty, that's not enough to carry it anymore. And it's no challenger to Halo in retrospect. And I think the rest of the Crysis games kind of proved that. Like Crysis 2 came out, they sacrificed Sandbox. I never played Crysis 3. They didn't really do as well. And, you know, other games took over. So unfortunately not completely realized, but man, we had good graphics. Yeah, that was cool for the time.
00:36:12
Speaker
But just even watching Jake play for a little bit, the first hour was like, Oh, this is what the game is. Second hour I'm like, okay. The third hour is like, I think I'm done experiencing this because it never really changed from engagement to engagement. It all kind of felt very samey because of that generic military shooter feel. And it's worth noting that the pacing's weird for it too, because they kind of went for the sandboxy like approach. Sometimes you're just not really doing anything between you're like moving to the next area.
00:36:43
Speaker
in order to encounter more enemies. I don't know. There's legitimate grips with the game. There's other better games to play. Speaking of better games to play. Better games to play, yeah. Do you have a third game to talk about, Dave? These are cut and deep. But it is fun to joke about Shogo because I'll be the first to admit it is not a good game.
Exploring Shogo's Unique Features
00:37:06
Speaker
That being said, I'll just turn to the camera because nobody can see me. It is a fun game. Right.
00:37:12
Speaker
It is old as fuck. It came back out in 1998, but it is very polygonal for its graphics. It is a standard first-person shooter, but you have the option of for some levels you get to be on foot where it's more like a classic shooter and then other levels where you get to be in a mech, which is also cool because it's not like your mechs have
00:37:38
Speaker
one set weapon. You still have a range of weapons in mech. So you get to like mess around with fun things like the bulldog missile launcher. Holy shit. It fires out like four missiles in a spiral pattern. Yeah. So like it can be very like you're using. Hmm.
00:37:55
Speaker
I liked your phrasing on like, in some levels you get to be on foot, and in some levels you get to be on the mech. That's the most like diplomatic way to put it. You don't have a choice, right? Like the levels on the mech are on foot. You can't get out of your mech. Right. You're just like, all right, let's do this. Although apparently there was a bug where you could use mech weapons on foot if you like screwed up a cheap hit or something, which is funny.
00:38:22
Speaker
So one of the things about the game because it is like buggy and quirky and from what I heard from Jake recently from reading an article, it apparently was designed that way to be entertaining. There are some standard on foot enemies who have
00:38:38
Speaker
larger than life, like actual mech sized weapons in like the in-game cutscenes, which is still using the same graphics. Yeah. There was a mech that had a larger than life mech weapon. I wasn't sure if it was a bug when I saw it. So this one I encountered in a tunnel.
00:38:58
Speaker
And his weapon was so large, one, the resolution on it was visibly distorted compared to the other weapons. They just blew up the scale on this thing. But it also clipped through the wall of the tunnel that I was in at the time. I think that was oozial. That's probably true. I didn't make it far enough in the game to face it a second time. I defer to your lore knowledge about Shogo, Mobile Armor Division.
00:39:25
Speaker
All right, so let me try and sell it to people. Did you hear that intro at the beginning of the episode? Yeah, that's the fucking game. It starts out full anime. The voice acting is cool. The storyline's semi-interesting. And then the mechanics takes this. Yeah, there are some options where you can make choices along the way. This is pretty early in shooters.
00:39:54
Speaker
Like this fought up against Half-Life, which I would argue is probably the more influential game. You didn't have choices. It involved other actual physics components, interesting level design, speaking to Half-Life, not Shogo. But decision trees were definitely less common.
00:40:16
Speaker
I don't even know what to say about this fucking game, man. It is. I mean, I could talk about it a little bit based off my experiences. So I was playing a little bit earlier. And it's definitely a first-person shooter, both in a mech and not. It's really like a mecha, like more than a mech experience, like mech warrior, which is usually described as you're either a person or you're a tank. And in this case, you're a person, right? Like mechas are usually people more than. They have people controls more than tanks.
00:40:44
Speaker
And you can switch between weapons, like you were mentioning. There's the rocket launcher. They use the, or the multi rocket launcher, the cluster, which was awesome. They use the Doom-like inventory management, so Unlike Crisis, and Shogo, you have your whole arsenal at any time. If you have that weapon, you can swap to that weapon. Which I kind of just enjoy more, because
00:41:10
Speaker
I get like tactical decisions. You're like, all right, I'm going to take the enemy weapon. We'll leave the scar or we'll do whatever. But I don't think that adds to the experience unless you're playing like a survival game. Why not just have a backpack full of guns? Right. That's more fun.
00:41:26
Speaker
Yeah, it definitely makes it faster paced. Like if you have somebody who's doing espionage or it's very soldier realistic, it makes sense to be like, this is my primary weapon. I might have a secondary weapon, but realistically, I can't carry this knapsack full of guns. Right. Just the Santa Claus of firearms.
00:41:46
Speaker
In the Shogo Santa Claus version, it makes sense and it's fun because sometimes you need a sniper because there is something in the distance. It hasn't detected you yet, but if you get close, it will fuck you up because again, enemies are roughly on the same tier as you where if you get shot by them, it hurts like a motherfucker.
00:42:07
Speaker
Yeah. So it's cool to switch to the Spider-Man launcher to go around the corner, shoot out a Spider-Man, it kind of blips, it lands, and then essentially has a nuclear explosion at the site in this giant pillar of fire, and then you hear the death sounds stacking. You're like, I guess I got him.
00:42:31
Speaker
I really enjoyed the spider mine launcher because like if you missed on a distant enemy, you might still hit them because it latched on the ground and then just nearby. Yeah. Yeah. But it can also like grab onto enemies. So if you like shot their mech, the mind would attach to their mech. So I mean, same could happen to you. But I don't know, I'm a fan of the this is a variant of the
00:42:57
Speaker
sticky grenade sort of thing. But it's cooler when it's a mine, and it's a giant nuclear explosion, obviously. Yeah. Also for the mecco sections, you can still have pieces where they will have ground units, AKA USAT. AKA, that's like two inches tall in comparison. And you can just step on them. Yeah. Which every game should have, because if you are that gigantic and you collide with a very small thing, it dies. I think that should do. Yeah.
00:43:25
Speaker
Yeah, I want to compare this to Mech Warrior for a little bit, because that was the first that was how they did in Mech Warrior IV, which is like the first I played. That was their power trip. They dropped you like in water next to like a like enemy town, basically. And there's like one small mech maybe you can take out. And then there's just people in the town. They're running around. You're just like, I'm going to get you. Stop, stop, stop, because we're sociopaths at the end of the day.
00:43:54
Speaker
I mean, everybody played dinosaur as a kid. I don't want to hear that you didn't. No, it's it's tremendously fun. One of the big differences here is like, even though the mech, the mech has a lot more health, there was different models of mechs like MCAs. I think they're called in universe. And you could pick one for your mission and they kind of ranged on a scale of like most agile to most armored with weapons, I think.
00:44:22
Speaker
Yeah, but I mean, it didn't change your weapons. It was just, like you said, speed and armor. Yeah. So.
00:44:30
Speaker
I felt like I chose kind of like a mid-range one. Did you do the same? I definitely didn't try the lightest one. I have like a question about that. I did mid-range and then I did like the heaviest because I had a feeling that the heaviest was probably just the best. And I'm not sure if that's right or wrong. Like there's a vehicle mode that kind of doesn't matter. Oh, that makes you go fast. Doesn't matter later.
00:44:59
Speaker
It's not like it's required for any sequences in the game, but to say that the vehicle mode doesn't matter. I mean, I would have loved to have seen a transform animation. That's I get that they probably cut that. There is one. Oh, there is one. Yeah. It's just if you're in first person view, you're not going to see it. You're just going to hear the juju juju of the transformation. I don't think you could switch from first person view for most of the game. You can. You can. Is there a button?
00:45:26
Speaker
Yeah, I forget. The bindings in that game are fucking nonsense. I did change that. Just to go customize and find what it is. It was before WASD. So like arrow keys were the default and left and right were turned left and turn right. And I was like, nope. A and S, those are turned to strafe. W and D are forward and backwards. Also the mouse will fire the gun now.
00:45:50
Speaker
Yeah, this is before controls were standardized. And a lot of things that had first-person view, they're like, oh, they can look in all directions. We're like, oh, it's buying other shit to num keys. That seems to make sense before mouse controls are really standardizing a thing.
00:46:05
Speaker
But the vehicle mode was just fun to fuck around in. It's like, oh, I killed some guys here, press V, and then you take off in your fucking little car robot to go to the next section. But yeah, it's still complete fucking nonsense.
00:46:25
Speaker
Like, Jake was complaining a lot to me, rightly so, about being instagibbed by enemies as he was rounding corners, who just had precognition about his location. Right. I have a specific example. Please use that. Of the most, there's two. I mentioned the shotgun death door, which screwed me over the first time.
00:46:48
Speaker
There was another time after I completed an objective in the mission that enemy reinforcements came in, read this as we repopulated the level with enemies.
00:46:59
Speaker
And the enemy corpses kind of just stick around forever, which is cool. I like that. It just adds to the realism of what's going on. Unless you shoot them, in which case their bodies explode and blood flies everywhere. Right. It actually has a fair amount of violence. Some rooms got fairly decorated by the end of it, by the end of an encounter. There's body part physics. It's like, let's say there's three people standing in a room and you blow them up with a rocket launcher.
00:47:26
Speaker
Things are gonna bounce around and like blood spray will continue from the body part the whole time. Again, it's polygonal so it looks silly. Yeah. A lot of this just for context, like again, the song that we used in the intro that Dave referenced earlier.
00:47:43
Speaker
That plays while you're watching people get blown up with a rocket launcher at the beginning of the game. It's an interesting juxtaposition of feels and tone. But I was going to say, after this area is repopulated with enemies,
Challenges and Quirks in Shogo
00:48:06
Speaker
there was one little corner kind of off to the right. So you come through a door and there's literally just a corner enemy. I can describe it no other way. And this is just like at the edge of this little triangle, you've got your enemy standing in here because he lives here. And he like killed me the first time I encountered him.
00:48:25
Speaker
But then I was like, all right, the enemy's there. I'll pop around the corner, take him out. Went through, completed the objective, came back through. They put another enemy in the exact corridor, basically standing on the corpse of the first one. And that guy also killed me. And I'm like, screw you, game, right? Like, at this point, they're just...
00:48:47
Speaker
repopulating the gotcha corners of the game. It's really brutal in that regard. I think I was joking to you like you have to know what Quicksave is and kind of saves gun a little bit. There's a good old games review. Nasty. That mentioned that. It was like you should buy in Quicksave and Quikload to mouse one and mouse two. I'm like, I can see it.
00:49:14
Speaker
Yeah, I will say in the defense of the game though.
00:49:17
Speaker
that the actual mecha portions, I found the health pools to be much more reasonable. You could usually take out enemies in just a couple hits. But if you're just actively using WSD and strafing, you won't take that much damage usually. And the game provides plenty of repair drops. So that the mech part feels like the proper difficulty for normal, which is what I was playing on. And the human foot soldier part,
00:49:47
Speaker
Like instant death if you didn't see the enemy around it into a room like you would occasionally get worse health and armor pickups, but They were very scarce and it's really easy for one enemy to just give you Mm-hmm. Yeah
00:50:04
Speaker
And they have options around certain things. So if you don't have them, he's hiding around a corner. They do give you these energy weapons. One is kind of shoots out a blue ball and then it like a grenade launcher kind of has an impact and an AOE explosion. Yeah, like a plasma launcher. Yeah.
00:50:21
Speaker
there's another version of the plasma launcher that's yellow, not blue. This is the basis of portal, everybody. And it will essentially bounce and collide with things and then keep going until it expires or it hits human flesh, in which case it then has a giant explosion.
00:50:38
Speaker
Right. But again, you're not going to bring out the fucking bouncy energy grenade unless you know somebody's around the corner, which usually find out by first going around the corner being shot and killed. And you're like, OK, I'll try it again. Yeah, there was one thing the game will do is they'll have like enemy triggers as pretty much all first person shooters have.
00:51:01
Speaker
Um, but they, they screwed me over in Chogo because the enemy reaction time, where I'll be like heading down a hallway and then an enemy rounds the end of the hallway and shoots me. And because I expect I can peek into a room, check if there's enemies, react to them. I died to that almost every time because I'm not really used to it. Um, I don't know. Yeah. Something that I found the mech part of games have gotten a lot better with, I feel as time has gone on.
00:51:32
Speaker
But yeah, they experimented with a lot of things. But again, it's not a good game mechanically. The story is not the best. It's interesting. Yeah. I like the voice acting for this day and age. Holy shit. I still stand by it. Yeah. Like I don't give a fuck about Davis X's voice acting compared to this. This is top tier. Like the characters are believable to me. You have.
00:52:02
Speaker
Commander Sanjiro, is it? Is your main character? That could be right. Yeah, Sanjiro I think is the main character. These are all, so this is an English developed game. It was made by Monolith. We've covered a lot of their games before. But clearly in the style of the Japanese mecha. So like most people have Japanese like names. Yeah.
00:52:25
Speaker
Japanese names. Right. But like, well, there is a character called Hank. That's true. That's his only name. And he's like full on redneck, like low poly image up in the corner. It looks like he's from a math blaster game. It's really funny. But I mean, like the character of San Jiro is very
00:52:52
Speaker
He's like a passive hero. He doesn't want to have to do things, but he'll do it. And he's very snarky. You have Commander Akaraju, who is your boss, who's very gruff and militant and serious. Yeah. You then have your girlfriend and his daughter Catherine, who is a pretty normal, cool lady. You have... I got to mention with Catherine, this is the tie-in to the video game Catherine. So obviously part of the same universe. There's no escaping it.
00:53:25
Speaker
I don't have as much on that. I haven't played that series. All the voice acting is good and the characters feel believable for that space. It's obviously a bit hammed up at places.
00:53:42
Speaker
I love the protagonist. The protagonist, like everybody else has like a relatively, it's good voice acting, but they're like serious military professionals or like support Catherine military role, love interest type, type voice thing. And then the protagonist who is like this disassociated sort of like joke sarcastic regardless of the situation, joking attitude that I absolutely adore.
00:54:10
Speaker
The transport will drop you off near the southwest entrance to Avernus. According to our intelligence, it's the least defended access to the city. According to intelligence, A, well, in that case, I've got nothing to worry about. Aren't you forgetting your squad mates? Actually, I'm ignoring them. We've talked about, like, I mentioned in the past, the Dragon Age sarcasm option. Or like, you know, I think Dragon Age 2 introduced it, and Inquisition also had it.
00:54:38
Speaker
Um, we're just like, oh, you're logical, emotional. Here's your sarcastic option and how they should remove the other options from the game. Cause that's the best one. It's always best to be the sarcastic jokes, like jokester. Um, it's never not correct.
00:54:55
Speaker
Shogo got it right. Yeah. I think divinity two, because I have to mention that game again, learn from Shogo, because a lot of those snarky comments. Oh, so fucking good. You wouldn't think about it in this fantasy universe that has such like a depth of lore and everything, but it's good to be able to be the asshole. But this character is by default the asshole. Yes. Did you play as far as the cat mission?
00:55:26
Speaker
No, I did read about it, but I didn't play it. Do you remember watching me play it at all? I don't know if I was watching the stream. You should describe it for the people who didn't. Again, you kind of go between being on foot or being in a mecca depending where you are in the story and where you're going. At some point you're on foot and you have to get past this electric fence. Now there's this lady who can turn it off.
00:55:52
Speaker
She says, hey, I'll turn off for you, but like my cat's missing. Could you go find my cat? And so you're kind of just mudding your comms like what the fuck am I doing? So you go down over here, you go through one or two areas, kill a bunch of enemies, and you use this little toy that you squeeze
00:56:11
Speaker
And it goes, magic claw, magic claw. And you use it because the cat likes the toy. And then you retrieve the cat, you go back to the lady, you give her the cat, and she turns off the electric fence. And that is a part of the game. It's not a side mission. It is part of the game. And everyone's going, what the fuck? Yeah. And then there were a lot of people, myself included, who on another playthrough were like, fuck you, lady.
00:56:37
Speaker
kill the lady and her husband and you go in and manually turn off the fence and you've saved yourself 25 minutes. So it's a mandatory part of the game that you can entirely skip over. Yeah. And then there are like fucking parts of the game where you'll have vents. You know, you jump into like giant turbines to fly up in games. I'm not familiar with entry in video games.
00:57:05
Speaker
Are you more familiar with entering events and video game stage? I'm just more of an event guy. I mean, it's pretty sus. I mean, I was doing wires. Uh-huh. Yeah. I did like the, or I should take that back. There's parts of the air shaft level I liked. Yeah. And like at something that's again, for the time was pretty early, was not seen as much. So it was very cool. Yeah. Um,
00:57:34
Speaker
This has verticality in some ways that, uh, like it still has the elevators doom has. I think you could compare this in a lot of ways to doom, which came out many years previous, but you're talking like OG doom. Yeah. Like doom, doom two, not like, um, definitely not doom three, which came out, I think four or five years after this, maybe even more. Um,
00:57:56
Speaker
But yeah, like the verticality of, like having to aim, obviously, is one of those big things Half-Life 2, but... Which is just keeping a head level and turning. You're right, exactly. You're just like enemies above me, so I don't care about the vertical axis because the game doesn't actually track that, right? This is all visual trickery. Trigger actually tracks it, which is nice.
00:58:17
Speaker
I looked down and I shot an objective on one of the levels, which sounds like nothing now, but for some of those older games, like, you know, that's pretty cool compared to what was around at the time, right? So yeah.
00:58:33
Speaker
I was going to mention another bug. For the vent level, the air shaft thing, you're supposed to be able to drop down after modifying the airflow to a platform. And I couldn't figure out how to complete it because you'll just kind of bounce on the airflow if you get too low.
00:58:56
Speaker
And I couldn't land on the platform, like at all. And I had to reload, try again and get it on the first try. You had to be sliding right down to the platform on the first try or else the airflow would always stop you even if you were above the platform. So I was just stuck.
00:59:11
Speaker
I had to go look at a YouTube video and be like, is this right? It was just like one. You have to get the hitbox correct the first time. Yeah. And this is definitely a game soon. Again, I like the game. Game is fun. Game is not good.
00:59:30
Speaker
This is something that if we were talking about a newer game and it did this, this would be on a list of like, hey, I enjoyed playing the game, but here's like a major grievance, which is justified because nobody playing a game should have to go through. I have to look up a YouTube video to figure out how to progress for this thing that seems intuitive at the time, right? Yeah.
00:59:52
Speaker
Um, but I was gonna say, where do you think this falls in first person shooter compared to something like crisis? I mean, okay. I know they're very different. Yeah. But as far as what they introduced mechanically or storytelling wise, I will actually say based off of what I've read and seen what I saw of you playing through the game, Shogo probably has a better story than crisis.
01:00:21
Speaker
Crysis 1 literally leaves off on a cliffhanger of, we're going back. We're going to get him. We know how to fight them. And then they never revisited that. The expansion didn't revisit that. The follow-up games never revisited that. We have no idea what happened there because they never had you go back. It was the stupidest stuff.
01:00:41
Speaker
like shogo seems like it's more like about a traditional anime mecha like interpersonal relationships this is the funny thing about like japanese anime mecha shows is it's almost always about
Shogo's Story and Influences
01:00:54
Speaker
the people's relationships, not the giant robots as much. And Shogo is no exception to that. They clearly like actually invested a lot in that. And even though it was sort of like love triangle deal between like, well, not a love triangle because that wouldn't work, but
01:01:16
Speaker
The protagonist is dating the sister of his girlfriend who is presumed deceased. That's not a love triangle category. We say presumed because you like realize halfway into the game she's alive and she was on some secret mission and had to like fake her own death.
01:01:33
Speaker
Again, awkward. But yeah, it comes up in the game. It's not like they don't mention it. Like you hear them talking on comms from time to time. Like, I think your original girlfriend is Kura. And she said, like, I can't wait to debrief you, Commander. Again, being a suggestive phrase because briefs are also underwear. And then her sister Catherine starts calling her a whore.
01:02:02
Speaker
I think there's another one for a different ending where it's, I have like an undercover mission for you. Again, suggestive. It's just little stuff like that. It's like, what? It's just funny. It's funny. It's witty. It's got some personality and character that Crysis does not have. Now, if I were to pick my favorite gameplay from foot soldier sequences, I would go with Crysis.
01:02:31
Speaker
Uh, vehicle gameplay, I would go back to Shogo. Crisis has several vehicle segments. It's like a VTOL or a turret sequence, or like you're in a tank or something. No, Shogo was fun. I enjoyed, I enjoyed running around in Mecca. Get in the Mecca. So would you actually recommend any of these games for people like Pickle and Stephen go back to and check out? I mean, crisis definitely no. Um.
01:02:58
Speaker
Shogo, it's like maybe if you could cheat on the in-person sections to just like get through it. I feel like it has at least. There's enough in interesting things that happen in Shogo. Like I had fun. It has some of that doom like feel like in the actual gunplay, which is just like addictive and good. So I like would consider going back and like beating the game if I could like get through the foot sections.
01:03:28
Speaker
I don't think there's a reason really to go back to Crysis, legitimately. It's weird that I'm favoring Shogo here because I was telling you a day ago it might be the worst game I've ever played. But it grows on you. Right, yeah. It definitely wins more points from being endearing than anything else. Yeah, and Crysis doesn't have that.
01:03:50
Speaker
It kind of just feels mediocre. Yeah, it falls under the modern age. The triple A blanket for me, where it's it's going to be what you expect it would be from like a major publisher and the type of game that it is, but then kind of lacking that heart.
01:04:05
Speaker
Yeah. But overall- It doesn't have stain power 13 years later. No, definitely not. I feel that a lot of mistakes were made along the way in first person shooters. I still feel like there are probably some things we could maybe clean up or improve upon. Right. I haven't been into space too much. I'm not a CS guy so much, but- We played fear. Yeah. You know, obviously the paragon.
01:04:32
Speaker
Man, we're just crapping on monolith a little bit. Yeah, we are. It was the 90s or the early 2000s. I think you're still being experimented with.
01:04:45
Speaker
No. Anyways, don't play FPS. That's the takeaway, I think. Yeah. Get yourself a nice, hot JRPG instead. Which are our preferred game to cover. I think that we've covered as many JRPGs as we possibly can with our current willpower.
01:05:07
Speaker
Blank stares in the camera. Yes. No. Well, what about you? Do you have any final takeaway thoughts for Shogo? I know it's part of your childhood. I don't want to deprive you of closing thoughts on it.
01:05:22
Speaker
I feel like the game is never that expensive. It is definitely entertaining to go through. Definitely entertaining. So maybe pick it up if it's on the cheap, like five-ish bucks. Stream it, check it out, make fun of it. Treat it like a B-movie, if you would.
01:05:41
Speaker
Crisis, I feel like there are other games that feel that better, picky at the call of duty, a Halo, something else. Even the newer crisis games are better. Yeah, even the newer crisis, I think it's improved.
01:05:56
Speaker
But yeah, they're weird, older first person shooter staples that people have played through and know about. And it's fun to look back and crack jokes, but don't necessarily go back and play them for the sake of playing them. Yeah. Let us do that. The professionals, right? Don't try this at home. What's the nostalgia critics quote? It's like, I remember so you don't have to.
01:06:23
Speaker
Oh, that's good. All right. Well, we'll copyright that real quick. Obviously we can't.
01:06:30
Speaker
Hopefully you guys had a nice, safe, and fun Halloween and are continuing to stay safe through the year. And if you had any fun stories, let us know. Reach out. You can tell us about the stories you would not like to publicly share on our Gmail account.
Listener Engagement and Contact
01:06:51
Speaker
So if you want to podcast at gmail.com or the publicly appropriate ones that have content here, like maybe a little bit
01:06:58
Speaker
less explicit than what we ourselves ascribe to for our own podcast at facebook.com slash soapstone. Is this soapstone podcast? I think it's soap podcast. There's probably like some lady who has like an Etsy shop selling soap.
01:07:17
Speaker
That would be funny though, if we get some like, I'm not saying visit anyone else's page, obviously, but it would be funny for people who are requesting podcasts. I'll be like, I'll cover this game next. Maybe that's what we should do. Send our two fans who are willing to comment on stuff onto other soapstone related pages and just leave comments.
01:07:42
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's more effort than I'd be willing to put in. I count amongst the two fans, I hope. Yeah, I hope all is well with everybody. Happy Halloween to you and we'll catch you in the next one. Have a good night.
01:08:01
Speaker
Reporting for duty, sir. Good, you're here. I'll get to the point. Your mission is to find and eliminate Gabriel at all costs. If Gabriel is allowed to continue, the Fallen will destroy the CMC and gain control of Kronos. If this happens, the flow of Kato throughout our system will cease. This cannot and will not happen. I'll see to that myself if I have to. Yes, sir. I understand completely. Good luck, Commander. Sir, I presume Catherine is my primary contact for this mission?
01:08:29
Speaker
You mean Lieutenant Commander Akaraju? Yes, she is. That's what I meant to say, sir. You're dismissed. I'll see to that myself if I have to. Do you have something you wish to share with me, Commander? Yes, sir. You are my personal hero, sir. Hmm...