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S2 Ep113: Old CD-ROM Games
80 Plays5 years ago
Join Dave and Jake as they talk a walk down memory lane to back when we used "physical disks" for games! It was a different time.
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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/
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Transcript
Humorous Introduction: Jake's Quirky Habits
00:00:37
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, Dave?
00:00:46
Speaker
It's going good. Looks out at sun. What's funny is I said it automatically and I was like, this is a lie. You literally see the light coming in through my window. Yeah. Now, to be fair, in my defense, I can't tell if it's daytime or nighttime in my computer den. There are no windows.
00:01:10
Speaker
That's fair. You're right. That was bad. That was my bad. I shouldn't presume that upon you or having a clock. Yeah, I would have seen the daylight on the way here. I do have to wake up room that has windows or a window. I'm not going to be overly ostentatious or anything. Jake's been in his bunker. He didn't want to really divulge that information until now, but we're coming to terms with it.
00:01:39
Speaker
I just have an upright coffin in my coat closet over there. Just rise out of it and go record a podcast. Go back later. How does one rise out of an upright coffin? Magically. I assume there's some ascension sort of stuff going on.
Nostalgia for Claymation: Wallace and Gromit
00:01:58
Speaker
A hover effect.
00:01:59
Speaker
I like the old idea of the Wallace and Gromit bed where he's laying down like normal bed horizontally and then it kind of like leans him up and kind of just has him now standing. Oh my gosh, yeah. Oh man, that was a fun scene. We had to have an episode on Wallace and Gromit and by that I mean,
00:02:23
Speaker
I love Wallace and Gromit. That's not going to be much of a critique. And Freakin' Chicken Run, which was their actual large outbreak. Large outbreak is a really bad choice of words. Their breakout title for actual media. I'm trying to think of another studio who does claymation like that. Yeah.
00:02:47
Speaker
I don't know. I'm not going to be able to help. There were the little interims in Zaboomafu, triclamation. That's about all I remember though. Yeah. Yeah. I don't even, I don't even remember that. That's a while back. I've got like select old memories of certain things and then just massive gaps up to this week and this week, sometimes generous last three days. I don't know.
Evolution of Gaming Media: From Floppy Disks to CD-ROMs
00:03:17
Speaker
Well, speaking of some of those old memories, let's throw it back to the past with some old CD-ROM games. Oof, yeah. To set the scene, we're now past the age of floppy disks.
00:03:32
Speaker
which nobody knew what they were called until you opened one up and he saw a little limp disc. Pause for effect inside of a little shitty plastic sheath. But these are all hard discs, baby. Yeah. There was a...
00:03:51
Speaker
Uh, I know this is not about the limp discs, but, um, I remember one of the only, one of the few floppy disc games I had was a theme park and it was on 14 discs. If I remember correctly, it was, you got physical exercise installing that game. I will say about the floppy drive, it was satisfying to push the eject button. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Taxile feedback.
00:04:20
Speaker
Yeah, you actually had like pushing as like a spring mechanism versus the CD-ROM where you just kind of lightly press a button and it goes, oh, and then it goes to like an actual electrical slide table. Yeah. And we don't even have CD-ROM drives.
00:04:36
Speaker
anymore. At least I stopped putting them in my computer builds a decade ago. Still have one or might just be DVD only. But I've had venture time in there for like two years, but I've never put anything else in there.
00:04:53
Speaker
I guess it's still worth it to have an optical drive. DVD ROM drive should still run CD-ROMs. Do you remember? This is a side tangent off a side tangent.
Myst: The Game of Atmosphere and Intrigue
00:05:05
Speaker
Do you remember those tiny disks that were smaller than the standard CD-ROM disks? GameCube, yeah. Well, yeah. They were basically GameCube disks, but you could
00:05:15
Speaker
I was about to say you could put them in CD-ROM drives as well. That's not true. Yeah, it was a long part of the tray, right? Right. I think, like, the Chex Adventure game was in there. It was just this tiny little disc. And I remember as a kid, because you don't really get games in cereal boxes anymore, as far as I know.
00:05:38
Speaker
But there's this tiny little disk. I was like, this isn't going to work. I have fooled my parents into buying checks, and the payoff is nothing. They've shrunk the CD, and this isn't going to do anything. What I like to do is take normal CDs now and just kind of whittle them down to that size.
00:05:59
Speaker
The modern day car. I don't know where tracks one through six are but Yeah, that's the the key Skill is just maintaining the tracks that you actually care about Whittling from the inside of the outside. I guess inside would give you a donut This is less useful
00:06:21
Speaker
Uh-huh. But yeah, games. Guess when I woke up. So I see on your list, you're starting off pretty strong here. Because although I've never played this, I've heard things about Myst. All the time on Myst? Yeah, I think those games are usually good.
00:06:43
Speaker
Yeah, so they had a couple in the series, but obviously we talked about the first one because this just came out. And at least for what I remember at the time, there was nothing else like it. It was very atmospheric and it didn't tell you fucking anything. Yeah. It's like, hey, here's a brief plot synopsis. You're stuck on this island. You're like,
00:07:11
Speaker
What the fuck do I do? And then you slowly realize it's kind of, you have the player perspective and you kind of point and click around the map to go places and interact with items, objects, and you're essentially looking for puzzles to solve. But initially when you see everything, you don't know what you're supposed to do, what you're supposed to solve. So you kind of explore and click on things and you're like, oh, this moves this clock piece.
00:07:40
Speaker
does that do anything? And it's just some trial and error in experimentation, seeing what connects and clicks. That would have been like back in the age of knowledge, but deprivation and games. Oh, yeah. Like, it's not like I'm stuck on this thing. Let me Google this real quick. You're like, Oh, no, I'd have to go to the library or something. You know, I guess if you have a computer at this point, that's taken care of. But
00:08:07
Speaker
A lot of that information wasn't out there, or at least I couldn't find it. Definitely not. You had to like have a friend who had either played it or who was better at solving things or you just, you gave up. Yeah. But it was just really fucking cool at the time. I played it with my dad. Um, cause we were puzzle minded. Hmm.
00:08:32
Speaker
There's still a lot of, I never went back and beat it. Right. I still don't know half of what to do in that game. I eventually, I think watched the play through a couple of years ago. Yeah.
00:08:42
Speaker
I know there's bad ends and a good end or whatever. Multiple endings is the way you'd probably tout the feature. Yeah. Because basically, you are trapped on this island and then you find these books, which in the Myst universe are like portals into different worlds.
00:09:02
Speaker
So while you start out on this one island, you can read, take a look, it's in a book, and go to a different fucking universe. As the intro says. My father and his two sons have come there previously, but gotten trapped in their own universes. So this one son's like, hey, I need you to help me get out of this book. My brother's a fucking asshole. My brother's like, you need to help me get out of my book. That brother's a fucking asshole. There's a lot of vulgarity in the game, missed.
00:09:31
Speaker
Yeah, they went pretty hard. It was M rated. And then the father who's, I guess the secret book you can find is saying like, both my sons are actually a little bit power hungry. You should let me out of my universe. And that I think is the good ending. Yeah. But it's just, it was very cool to explore and figure things out.
00:09:57
Speaker
The other thing I remember about Myst, because actually I saw some screens of it back in the day, was they really used the, and older games did this a lot. They're like, we can't really
King's Quest 7: Humor and Frustration in Puzzle Mechanics
00:10:11
Speaker
render like high resolution graphics or sometimes normal resolution graphics or graphics, but we can use like a,
00:10:22
Speaker
well-designed kind of artistic backdrop and then have selective moving sprites or something on top of that. So they kind of cheated a little bit to give you that feeling of really cool graphics.
00:10:36
Speaker
Nothing cool about it is if you let's say move to this point on the map, you could essentially turn and have different perspectives. And then we keep other landmarks still there. So maybe you actually did need to go to the other side of something to see what was on the back of it. Oh, okay. That's cool. So just added to the exploration part of it.
00:10:59
Speaker
That is pretty legit. A lot of games, a lot of adventure games don't really give you multiple perspectives. It wasn't like this putt-putt shit where it's just, oh, I only have one fucking frame of reference for the view.
00:11:14
Speaker
Speaking of one frame of reference for the view, does anyone watch the view? No, I'm just kidding. I don't even know if that's the whole thing or not. King's Quest was the other thing on here, right? Yeah. I see this immediately after. I'm like, this is also an adventure game, but this one's the one I think of as I never played it again, but it's cartoony. Yeah, it's very cartoony, two dimensional.
00:11:43
Speaker
You had some items in your inventory, but it was very much a point and click adventure. That's the entirety of the game. So it's exploration, talking to people, trying to merge salami and keys to make something and hope for the best. Yeah, trial and error. Trial and error for sure.
00:12:05
Speaker
And also a lot of times if you fucked up, you died. Yeah. I mean, you go back to like wherever you were moments ago, but you talked to mermaid and they're like, Hey, do you want us to like swing you across the lake that you're trying to get across? And you're like, yeah, that seems really convenient. Thanks for solving that problem. And then they drown you. And then there's this whole animation where you essentially go into hell and you're in this line with other skeletons. They're like tickets, please.
00:12:35
Speaker
So you've heard of, you've heard that Grand Theft Auto is a murder simulator, but King's Quest is a dying simulator. Yeah. There are so many times where it's just your mistake gets you dead somehow. I wasn't, okay. Yep.
00:12:51
Speaker
I've never been super, super hot on adventure games, like point and click adventure games, but this was the one attribute that basically guaranteed I wasn't gonna play it as I don't like grinding out arbitrary puzzle solving sequences. Or sometimes you'll have like a really, again, I haven't played this, but oftentimes point and click adventure games have kind of absurd puzzle solutions where you're just like, ah, right.
00:13:20
Speaker
I basically could have only guessed this by RNG, right? Banana trout, got it. That was the solution I needed. So I will say there's, okay, so at least for reference, I'm talking about King's Quest 7. I haven't played the other ones. This was just a weird part of my childhood. There is a section where you have to get across this boiling swamp. How, you ask?
00:13:43
Speaker
Oh, some guy like 13 screens away gives you a frozen cabbage and you can actually bring it there. But if you don't do it fast enough, your cabbage will melt. Oh, OK. This is like the the Goron sword knockering of time. Yes. Your cabbage melts or for ifrog, I guess, in that case.
00:14:05
Speaker
Oh, it was, it was a weird old thing. Okay. I've already made a reference to putt putt something else in that space, which is a point and click. Do you remember spy Fox dry cereal? I do not. I remember lots of things with the word Fox and spy in it, but they're not spy Fox Foxy spy. I've got star Fox. That's it. All right. That's the only thing I have. Maybe something with spy.
00:14:34
Speaker
Well, Spy Fox was just another point and click adventure, aimed at kids, but kind of a homage to James Bond. Like instead of Money Penny, it was Monkey Penny and she was a monkey. Like spy kids. Yeah, pretty much. But everything was very lighthearted and punny. I remember enjoying that as well. Monkey Penny is pretty good.
00:15:01
Speaker
Yeah, I'm not familiar with this one at all, so I've got no comment on Spy Fox. All right, what's something else you remember from the old CD-ROM days?
Survival Strategies in Oregon Trail
00:15:11
Speaker
The old CD-ROM days? Should I steal stuff from your list or use mine?
00:15:16
Speaker
Doesn't matter. I think so. I tried to find my physical CD-ROMs for this, but I couldn't. Unfortunately, they may be gone. Lost to the ether. I guarantee your parents have them somewhere in a closet at the top shelf. Oh my gosh, that's possible.
00:15:33
Speaker
I saved it in case you ever wanted it again. All right. Just a bunch of CD-ROM games. So one of the ones, I wanted to start with Oregon Trail, particularly fourth edition by The Learning Company. The reason was that's the version I ended up with. This was like five CD-ROMs to actually install it. And I think as you moved
00:15:59
Speaker
across the Oregon Trail, leaving independence periodically would be like, insert the next CD. I'm not entirely sure why this was necessary because CD-ROMs had like 400 megabytes of storage, I think. But I don't know. They just didn't do it very optimized.
00:16:19
Speaker
But the reason I say it's the start is because when I was in in kindergarten, we had a rotation. This is my lifetime life story time, right? We had a rotation where some kids would be able to play with blocks. Some kids would get the Play-Doh. Yep. Some kids would get like desk activities or something. I don't know. It was so boring. I don't even remember what it was. And then like one kid would get the computer.
00:16:49
Speaker
I was like, this is it. This is it, man. This is it. I love computer. What did you do for living now? I love computers. So I guess we got to do like Math Blaster, Oregon Trail. Mm hmm. We had a version of Snake where you had to solve math problems. Oh, yeah. Not sure if that was a thing.
00:17:17
Speaker
I remember Math Blaster. I'm not 100% sure on The Snake, but Math Blaster was huge, and it's to my discredit that it didn't make it on this list. It's now mentally on the list. I remember liking it, but I couldn't tell you anything else beyond that. Yeah. I mean, they were... I don't think they were tremendously interactive as far as games went.
00:17:38
Speaker
I want to finish Oregon Trail real quick, not like actually beat the game because that takes forever. But I think everybody, maybe it's not true anymore. Maybe not everyone's played Oregon Trail in the same way we did 30 years ago.
00:17:54
Speaker
That's not true. Quite that young. But naming your friends, naming all of your party members after your friends or people in local proximity because you knew they were going to die a dysentery. To rehash an old story that I've at least my personal life said at least 15 times over the course of my life, I used to think it was dysentery.
00:18:21
Speaker
And that people were mad at me. There was like dissent amongst the group. And that's why I died. There was like a aggressive disagreement. Yeah. No, that can be pretty accurate. You could have depending on the version, I think the party could like turn against you depending on morale. Morale mattered. There's a bunch of iconic things like caulking the wagon, fording the river.
00:18:51
Speaker
The version I had, Oregon Trailforth Edition, had a little in-game booklet that was just a list of plants and whether they were edible or not. So anytime you went forward, Gene, it's like, here's a plant you find. And you're like, ah.
00:19:05
Speaker
Dandelions. Go check the book. Oh, Tato. Yeah. It's like Thanksgiving dinner. Check the book. But no, I appreciate that. And I do remember the strat I used pretty much every playthrough, which was exterminate all wildlife and sell their meat. Buy a bunch of salt.
00:19:33
Speaker
And then move the wagon at slowest possible speed. I crossed down to Oregon because you have too much meat. Yes, bullets. Yeah, I would trade for bullets and bacon and then just shoot buffalo for like an hour. Mm hmm.
00:19:53
Speaker
They're like, hey, what do you want to trade? I'm like, I got meat. What do you got that's not meat? That was literally it to you, like buying up pemmican and stuff like that so that your people don't hate you because the only thing you feed them is salted meat. You carry like two tons of salt with you on the way to Oregon.
00:20:15
Speaker
Just seasons are just passing in the background. It's like a summer, fall, winter, spring, and you're just making the slowest progress. The people who like started out at the beginning of your journey are growing old and dying. You've gone mad, Miles. Each one of them has their own chain of salted jerky.
00:20:38
Speaker
By the end of it, you're just like, all right, I think we're going to have to sit down here. And you're just like an outpost, like 50 miles from where you set off, which I think was Independence. Connecticut trail. Oh, my gosh. It was pretty hilarious, though.
00:20:58
Speaker
I respect the Buffalo and the profit they bring me. There you go. I respect them enough to not shoot them though. Right. Naturally. Did you ever play Descent? I did play Descent. You know I played Descent, but I don't think I had the exact same experiences as you did. It was relatively brief, but I might have had a demo or something. So this is actually,
Descent: Freedom and Combat in Gaming
00:21:23
Speaker
I guess there's still a CD game. I do remember having the CD, but this is something that we had to boot up in DOS. Do you remember that other thing that kind of exists on the computer? Like, I don't know what this is, but I hear beeps and boops. Yeah, that's DOS. We hear beeps and boops.
00:21:41
Speaker
That's a little bit of DOS left in the queue. Is it dial up or DOS? That'll be my new game show. But yeah, I think all the sound on it was kind of Commodore 64 era, maybe not even that old, but it was, it was very fun and cool, but it was,
00:22:01
Speaker
Essentially you're flying around in a ship. Yeah. Like you could move in any direction. You could strafe left and right. You could do barrel rolls. Six degrees of freedom. This is what they called it. Yeah. And the crazy thing is you could be going through the level.
00:22:16
Speaker
upside down. Or you'd have to reorient yourself or look at the minimap and then possibly adjust on the numpad. So you could love yourself out. You're like, okay, that's forward. Okay, now we're reoriented. Good. But there were all these enemy attacks, ships, drones, robots.
00:22:36
Speaker
Yeah, these mining robots that would attack you so you had like this whole arsenal of weapons to combat them The music was fucking awesome. Yeah
00:22:48
Speaker
the reactor sequences, where you're like, oh, I've killed all the rogue mining robots, and they'll destroy the reactor. And then you have 10 seconds before the facility explodes, your screen is shaking. And you're pressing F. F is flare. What was your thruster? Okay, I won't be able to remember that. I think it's probably like, space is rockets. It would probably controller shift.
00:23:10
Speaker
So you'd use this afterburner to kind of get rid of your energy at a faster rate for this extra speed boost as your ship is kind of digging off the wall as being like, I need to get to the exit. Yeah. No, it was freaking great. I guess the setting was like, it was like an asteroid with a mining complex built into it, I think, or something.
00:23:31
Speaker
Yeah, you were going to different mining facilities in like asteroid belts and some planets here and there. You had to like rescue miners that were just like sprites. That's how I could tell which way was up or down. I was like, the people are probably standing on the floor. They see you flying upside down. They're like, are you here to save us?
00:23:51
Speaker
But they're just like jumping. They're doing this little jump animation kind of way of get your attention. You had to fly through them, which is not great training for real life, actually. You don't save pedestrians by driving over them. But it worked in the game. Crazy taxi strats. Yeah. And then the thing that one of the things I loved about this was the
00:24:17
Speaker
I mean, the combat was good. It was all like resource management and stuff to a certain extent with like ammo and pickups and a lot of these things that don't power ups and things that don't really exist that much in modern games, except Doom. Thanks, Doom. But freaking shield orbs, just the animation for like energy crackling over this bluish sphere.
00:24:39
Speaker
just sticks with me in my head and to this day it's the Representation for descent when I was like trying to get to discord picture I actually really wanted an animated semi-transparent shield orb one, but I couldn't find a good good source for that
00:24:56
Speaker
So write in. It does sound pretty badass. It's freaking great. But I liked it. It threw me off when I played it though. Like I've been playing VR games recently and get motion sickness in those and descent like could give me motion sickness staring at a screen stationary.
00:25:24
Speaker
No, it was just good. Overall good. Yeah. Um, so I know this is one of those games where you can't really play anymore unless you go through a very nuanced emulator route, but there is a game that came out a couple of years ago. That's, uh, not a direct comparison, but a, that kind of draws a lot of parallels made in the same theme called overload.
00:25:53
Speaker
Ah, right, yeah. That is on Steam. It's probably like 15 or 20 bucks. But if you like Descent, I would say check that out. It hits a lot of those same boxes.
00:26:04
Speaker
I wonder how many people actually... It's apparently 30 bucks. Oof. Okay, it's gone up in price. Yeah, it'll be on sale at some point.
Army Men: Childhood Logic and Gameplay
00:26:16
Speaker
But yeah, it's tagged at 6 degrees of freedom. That's great. I'm curious how many people went back and played some of these games. I'm wondering what our overlap is.
00:26:30
Speaker
I'm not going to do that thing where I'm like, hey, community engagement. If you've played this game right in the comments, whatever. But I am actually curious. You know, how many people are back there playing Descent? There are other people our age.
00:26:49
Speaker
I feel there's probably a subreddit or some community. It's like, Hey, remember this cool old shit? Yeah. Yeah. Because the people who made the scent went on to make free space, which was a completely out in space dog fighter, but you still have the six degrees of freedom. Small space, free space. I remember liking that too, a little bit.
00:27:12
Speaker
Oh my gosh. Yeah. Free space probably has, um, a massive, I never, I never played free space, but if you look into space sentences, I have, I came in a little bit late. That one, uh, largely helps define the genre. Um, and there's literally like a free implementation, a remake of free space. That's just on like a get hub page somewhere. It's like moddable and all this other stuff. So if you, if you want to play free space, it's out there. It's, it's free.
00:27:42
Speaker
Yeah, in space. Where space is? The internet. No, it just sounds great, though. Speaking of great games, and by that, I mean, I thought they were great. So you added army men here. And I threw in a bunch of things, which were like actual subgames in the army men PC franchise. I got this, this series from Walmart.
00:28:11
Speaker
Because my I did. Did you also go to like the game section at Walmart and you're like, is there anything cool that I could try to convince my parents to buy me? Probably. I mean, that was kind of how we got our games, right? Because I feel like GameStop wasn't a huge thing yet because consoles are not as popular.
00:28:32
Speaker
So you go to the game section of Walmart for whatever they had, and you're going off of box art pretty much. Yep. Yep. They don't read a brief description. But army men seem like an action-packed fun thing. So I don't remember which one we got. I remember so little about it. Yeah. But every time someone says, oh, army men, I'm like, I played this. And I have a fond, very loose memory about it.
00:29:00
Speaker
Yeah, it's a little sometimes it's a little hard to pin down because there was console versions of some of them. Like some of the games are shared between console and PC. And other times there was just versions on consoles like PlayStation had Sarges Heroes.
00:29:16
Speaker
um but uh and i think nintendo 64 may have had an implementation man you never want the nintendo 64 copy of one of those cross-platform games um sorry uh but for uh for pc
00:29:32
Speaker
We got all four of these at once. It was like in a pack and it was $20. And the way I convinced my parents was like, this is army men one, two toys in space and air attack. Or it kind of could have been air taxi tactics. I can't remember. Um, for $20, that's $5 per game parents. Yeah. That's how you do. Like, Hey, look at all this value. I'm ever gonna ask for a game again, because it's five games in one.
00:29:59
Speaker
Man, I love fucking childhood logic for persuasion and deception. You're like, hey, I'll do all my chores. You found these bargaining chips to be like, I'll get out of your hair for a bit. And they're like, it'd be nice to have a night to ourselves.
00:30:18
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, you also mentioned GameStop. My parents justification, I think, for not for or at least my justification for not getting something from a game store is my parents would never have taken me to a game store. The only reason I could convince them of this is because we were already at Walmart. They weren't so much into that.
00:30:41
Speaker
But I had fond memories of these games. These were top-down, isometric-type games. These were tactics, correct? No, not really. But it was kind of like moving a squad around? Yeah. It was like squad management. Depending on the game, you've got your mortar units, your flamethrower guys, your riflemen, usually a hero-type unit named Sarge.
00:31:11
Speaker
I don't know. I have really fond memories of them. Toys in Space did not review well, apparently. And they had new space units where they were blue, I think. But the ladies they added had stun pistols. They just permised on things. That's all they did.
00:31:35
Speaker
completely negligible damage almost none but enemies couldn't react as long as they were being stunned which is fine until you consider they can use this against you you're like all right not playing the game it's not a valid way to play the game um and so in prep for this episode i went back and i checked what some of these review scores were and they're pretty bad they're actually like really bad
00:32:05
Speaker
I don't know how much it did overall for the time. I just remember being like a cool exploration into 3DO cutscenes and I don't know, it seemed like a fun thing for a kid my age at the time.
00:32:27
Speaker
Yeah, that's pretty much it, I think. I didn't know what a good game was and I didn't have a frame of reference. I was just like, holy crap, video games are great, you know? A game that is here on the computer, that's awesome. Anyways, that's Armiman. I had thoughts about Armiman, but in retrospect, I probably, I wouldn't go back and play them. I won't even say probably.
00:32:55
Speaker
I mean, you don't have to go back and play it to still appreciate what it was. A lot of those things, like you said, you didn't know what a bad game was, but it was something you grew up with and you're like, oh, cool. That helped define who I am today as far as my gaming experience. Right.
00:33:16
Speaker
I mean, I would have been much less likely to join the army, obviously, if I didn't play armymen. Oh, my reason is all the war crimes they committed in the game. Actually, so I was going to move on to the next game, but speaking of war crimes.
00:33:33
Speaker
Uh, the flamethrower animation and death scenes in army men is actually brutal. And they had like a scream associated with it when the enemy soldiers melted. Because they melt to puddles. Because they're plastic. They're plastic toys. I guess we never said they were plastic. These are plastic toys. We're not going to... Do you remember the army men from Toy Story? There you go. Yeah, it's the same thing. The only difference is they don't have their, um,
00:34:03
Speaker
feet molded at the bottom into a standard immovable like statue because that doesn't make it hard to move. Okay, another aside, I forgot about this, but in high school for Halloween, you were allowed to dress up on the day. So me and some high school buddies at the time planned for like a week to go as army men. We had like
00:34:31
Speaker
I'm going to roughly guess 10 of us, where we all met up at a friend's house before school at 6 AM, got all our finalized painting. We had the stands. And then in between classes, you have four minutes because you're in your next class. Or during certain lunch periods, we would just go find like, hey, who's going to be around here? And we would just stand together in a group. And that's it. That's awesome.
00:34:57
Speaker
certain people were riflemen, other people were like the grenadiers, somebody's probably like the commsat guy. There's just little things like that. I need to find a picture of it. It exists somewhere. Yeah. Oh, man. You're reminding me of all these types and weapons and things the games had. I had like flyswatter, which was this is a global call down, basically, or like magnifying glass. Magnifying glass, yeah.
00:35:24
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know how anyone thought it was fair to be able to like call in a kid as support to just melt the opposing the opposing army and the whole board. Oh, man. This is this is too much detail and we should move to the next thing. But I also remember what the different colors were. Green was allies. You're always like pretty much playing as green. Tan were the enemies, right? Blue were spies.
00:35:51
Speaker
for like either side. I don't know what their real world corollary is there. And nobody knew what gray was. They were mostly used to like our movement. I'm done. I'm done. I'm done. I'm off. I'm off. Speaking of warfare, worms. Yeah.
Worms: Strategy and Social Gaming
00:36:10
Speaker
Did you have plenty of worms? Creatures. Play with worms? No, they're groups.
00:36:16
Speaker
OK, well, I play with a lot a lot of worms. Yeah. It was one of the earlier games they had on PC. This is done by Team 17. And for anybody who's not familiar, it's kind of like tanks. But you have little worms and you have a bunch of different weapons and abilities. And then each team you have, you can personalize to have their own. Language or dialect, like with different accents you could set.
00:36:46
Speaker
So a lot of times I would go Afrikaans because I didn't know what that was at the time and I thought it sounded awesome. And yeah, it just becomes worms will have bazookas, grenades, do airstrikes, have magical weapons like holy hand grenades. And the main goal was to kill the worms or knock them off the stage into water where they would instantly die. Right. Naturally.
00:37:13
Speaker
as one does. Yeah. Yeah. This is one of those games that because I owned it and would play when I was at home, which is all the time, if I ever played with friends, I was that guy who was the try hard to be like, let me line this up. Oh, I've killed three of your guys in one with one baseball bat swings. I knocked this worm into the other worm into a mine, which is by a napalm canister. And I've knocked three of them off.
00:37:41
Speaker
So you had like actual physics simulations for knockback and stuff like that. Well, there's certain things where you can kind of use a little bit of angling and take some wind into effect. It wasn't crazy, but it was better to be used to it than not. Yeah.
00:38:01
Speaker
Yeah, my coil area, which I can't go into too much detail on because it was a DOS game. It wasn't a CD-ROM game. It was a scorched earth, the mother of all games, which had the same premise, but it was just wind. Things could fall. There's a bunch of items you could buy. Parachutes. They were actual tanks.
00:38:18
Speaker
And I understand why it worms succeeded and like went on to eventually have like worms are reloaded on steam. Whereas Scorched Earth didn't like stay up with the times. Like worms has a lot more personality based off everything I've seen about it. Yeah. Kind of like Rayman style of animated fun.
00:38:44
Speaker
It's a, it's good for a giggle with friends. I'm watching some Let's Plays right now of Oni cartoons, playing with some people and it's just dicking around in bullshit. Um, it's more so the personalities of the people playing than the game itself, but it's still a fun little game. Yeah. It's not really, um, I guess party games aren't super voc right now outside of like,
00:39:15
Speaker
playing locally, something like Mario Party or whatever. Yeah. A lot of those were meant for at the time, online play wasn't really a thing so much. But it's like, oh, I'm going to have some people over. We'll take turns at the keyboard mouse. Literally. And you judge the person who's going next. You're going to miss. You're going to fucking miss. Oh, my gosh. Turns at the keyboard. Yeah, that's not that's not really a thing anymore. Oh.
00:39:42
Speaker
Yeah, because we don't have to. I can be on my machine, you can be on yours.
00:39:49
Speaker
And we have, we both have computers. You're not like the one friend with the computer here or whatever. We'll go over and we have the games in the basement. Yeah. For, for good and bad. We have the internet. Mom, get off the phone. Yeah, that, that never ends well. Oh man. Um, so I had one here.
Age of Empires: Building an RTS Legacy
00:40:11
Speaker
Um, Age of Empires is a series. Some people had talked about it. Uh,
00:40:17
Speaker
That was one of the games in my CD case. Full disclaimer, a friend loaned me Age of Empires and I never gave it back because the friend stopped contacting me. I didn't stop contacting him. He stopped contacting me for the record. And then I kept the game.
00:40:39
Speaker
So were you trying to say like, hey, I'm trying to get this back to you or you just chat with them? They're like, I don't really want to chat. I mean, they just so he like visited like part of his family or whatever that was out there. He's just like, hey, you know, bar this game and then just like never came back. I don't know what happened to him, but I couldn't I couldn't actually return the game to him.
00:41:05
Speaker
Sounds like they lost their chance. It's now yours permanently. Yeah, which is great because Age of Empires, like this is the OG one. This wasn't even two where you're dealing with castles and stuff. This is just tribesmen in America or something. This is old school RTS, right?
00:41:23
Speaker
Yep, old-school RTS. I'm not going to get into the full Age of Empires franchise, but it was really fun to run around, build buildings, make a priest go. And then convert your guys. Yeah, we convert. Now, it was tremendous fun and probably one of the first
00:41:49
Speaker
first actual games on my list where I was like, this is gonna exist in the future as well. This isn't like a niche genre or something that'll fall off. I could see RTS lasting a long time and then it kind of did and it still sort of died off anyways. It's had a lot of variations in style. Yeah. The one big RTS I grew up with at the time was War Games. Yeah. Which was based off of the movie War Games.
00:42:19
Speaker
We're a kid hacks into a NORAD supercomputer called Whopper. And it's essentially a classical line. No, unfortunately. I forget actually what it stands for at this point. Yeah. Don't worry. I'll look it up for useless information.
00:42:38
Speaker
But the classic line of the movie was, do you want to play a game? Which is before Saw, shall we play a game? And it was thermonuclear war.
00:42:52
Speaker
So essentially, in the RTS version, Whopper are the robots. They're one faction. And then NORAD is the human faction. A lot more standard military, camo fatigues, et cetera. They all kind of had their comparable units.
00:43:12
Speaker
I preferred Whopper thematically. Right. And I also like you could take some of their walker units and just pass them over like the smaller grunt human units and you just squish them. Oh my gosh. I have a segue off that, but I don't know if you want to keep talking about war games. Also, Whopper apparently stood for war operation plan response. Oh.
00:43:35
Speaker
That might actually be a real thing, then. It sounds like it could be, at least. So I will say one other thing. The music in the game, I still go back and listen to. Very well done. I'm going to put the mission select music at some point in here for the edit. Nice. A lot of it is a throwback and nostalgia for me, but I think it's really solid. As far as an RTS, not the best, by any means. Just simple.
00:44:05
Speaker
Do you hack a building for quote unquote currency and then you spam just one resource to have units generated from whichever building? You just try and take control of the map or do an objective.
00:44:20
Speaker
Yeah, I think simple resource RTS is kind of one out in the end though. Like there was some older ones like Age of Empires was like gold, stone, wood, all this stuff. And for the most part, simple resources RTS where you focus on like micro and macro other than just a bunch of resources succeeded. And there's more of those around. Yeah. Um, you said it wasn't the best RTS though. What would you say is the best RTS?
00:44:48
Speaker
It's a lot of stuff that I've played. Probably Starcraft brood war. I spent a lot of time there and I never was good at Warcraft and I was real bad at it. It just wasn't as cool thematically also. Um, I just liked all the options for Starcraft playing on fastest maps, playing on custom maps. Like I said, a lot of time was really spent there. So it's going to influence my vote.
00:45:15
Speaker
yeah i didn't actually play brood war i played like starcraft old starcraft before brood war but didn't get the expansion this guy doesn't know about lurkers what a nerd i know what lurkers are they exist in starcraft too it's just not in um
00:45:31
Speaker
not in like actual competitive play between people. I think some of the custom heroes have them, but obviously swarm hosts are better. Let's be honest. Swarm hosts are awesome. What the fuck are they? Swarm hosts are actually great though. But anyways, that's a side argument. We'll have an episode on lurkers versus swarm hosts later. Yeah, great, great choice on Starcraft though. Now we're getting to like- That was also a CG ROM game.
00:45:59
Speaker
Yeah, sure. Because that was the era of battle chests. Granted, it was really only Blizzard who was doing battle chests. Yeah. Because it's Diablo 2. It had its own episode. It won't go into it. Starcraft and Warcraft.
00:46:12
Speaker
Yep. And I really, I never played Warcraft. I know it's on your list here with no follow-up bullet points. I never played the original Warcraft and I was really hoping the remaster would be reviewed well, at which point I would pick it up and play and experience it. Didn't happen. Just to clarify, this is Warcraft 3 we're talking about.
00:46:31
Speaker
Yes. I don't know anything about the original Warcraft. Actually, anytime I've heard Warcraft referenced, it's been Warcraft 3. I think the original was just orcs and humans. That was it. But Warcraft 3 has the whole plot with
00:46:50
Speaker
Arthas, frozen throne, burning crusade stuff. So it was really cool story-wise, cool characters and all that. I just sucked at the RTS stuff, but that was still a good time. Yeah.
00:47:08
Speaker
Oh my gosh, yeah. Because this is Blizzard and they never retire characters, I've experienced a lot of the flavor from Warcraft in recent games because they never go away.
00:47:23
Speaker
Oh yeah, we're still getting Lich King skins in Overwatch or whatever, right? It's a pretty big influence, at least in that company, definitely, industry-wide. Blizzard does what Nintendo does, where they said, oh, people like this thing? We'll never kill it. Yeah, the Mickey Mouse treatment.
00:47:46
Speaker
And then I'm going to I'm going to go back and I'm going to actually follow up on the segue.
MechWarrior 3: Bargain Bin Treasure
00:47:51
Speaker
I didn't make it the time, which was crushing people in your War Games RTS. Yeah. MechWarrior 3 is another bargain bin game. We were just like checking out at some store was probably like Target, I think. And there was just like.
00:48:06
Speaker
You guys know what we're talking about, but the box, the crate, essentially just full of miscellaneous games, the boxes are beat up like 95% trash. I'm just like, this robot on the front of this one looks pretty cool.
00:48:25
Speaker
And it was mech warrior three for five bucks, which was low enough that I could, again, same price as the army men games individually. I was like, all right, I can get my parents buy it on this. This looks cool. It's rated teen. I think I'm a teen.
00:48:44
Speaker
and it's freaking great. Unfortunately, the Micro E series has had some missteps recently, but this was all going back. You drop in, you could run people over, it was 3D, you had all of your guns, you could customize your mech, you could field salvage things. Was it actually 3D? Yes. Or was it 2D perspective 3D? This one was actually 3D. This was like Windows 98, I think, requirement, something like that.
00:49:11
Speaker
Oh, yeah. This was like, do you have a graphics card? You don't need one, but if you have one, it'll be slightly better. And I don't know, it was really fun. I had a bunch of mechanics I liked with like random salvage at the end of missions. You could kind of like play through the game and have different mechs the second time because it was all just you were based off of you were resupplying based off what you found in the field.
00:49:41
Speaker
Um, so I think I went back and couldn't find, couldn't get like a daishi Mac that I had the first time. Mac warrior is great. Um, uh, but, uh, also my most popular YouTube video of all time was a random Mac warrior clip got like 5,000 views.
00:50:01
Speaker
The audio bouncing was trash too. Just like I remember it. I literally halfway through this clip, which was just the first mission of Mechway, went in and turned the volume down. It's there in the recording, like me going into the menu and turning the volume down.
00:50:21
Speaker
Maybe that's what people relate to. Yeah, that's why I peaked. That was like YouTube launch. Sorry. I'm sorry. Speaking of robots, did you ever play Robot Arena? I did not.
00:50:37
Speaker
Uh, don't look it up. It's not as good as I remember at all. Yeah. But it was kind of off the time of robot wars where you could design your own robot. You had a couple of different chassis and different weapons and you were initially limited by money. You had to win certain matches to get more money.
00:50:56
Speaker
But my main strat was to have a rectangular body, kind of like a ramming spear in the front to kind of like push the enemy into something. It didn't really deal damage as much. But then I had four axes kind of on the top and side. And with a key binding, I could have those swing forward and it would cost fuel or energy or something.
00:51:25
Speaker
Yeah. So I'd push them into a wall and then just throw axes in all their shit. Hack those pieces. So they could have other armor and things to essentially damage my weapons and armor. So worst case scenario, if that failed, I had an exact mirror on the opposite side. So I would turn around and do it again.
00:51:49
Speaker
you just like strap strap guns to the front. What if they had us from behind strap guns to the back? It didn't have any projectile weapons. And it didn't have anything for flipping over at least in the first game. But
00:52:06
Speaker
I just remember enjoying it, putting spikes on a spinning robot and then just running at somebody. It was really bad. I'm kind of just imagining if you designed tanks with the same ideology, you just have like rather than the forward cannon, the barrel, you have like a continuous barrel that also goes out the back and then speed ammunition up. You're like, we can cover both sides.
00:52:28
Speaker
Put the shell in and you have like a like a button toggle for like which way it's going right don't get that wrong I mean, I don't know how guns normally work where usually there's kind of a charge on one side which then Launches the projectile out the other side, right? But yeah, that'll definitely work. Yeah We just play play with guns and video games. We don't know how they actually work. I
00:52:54
Speaker
That's their science there. I don't get it. That sounds cool, though. I've always liked the robot wars concept, but it's kind of been.
00:53:04
Speaker
I don't know, it's sort of held back to me due to some of the lack of action or like we're not actually going to completely destroy each other's creations and things. Or there's a lot of transitions between teams because there's not that much action and they have to build up to it. You can kind of get away with that in a game, though. I actually just have stuff wreck each other. It was more of like the the edgy destroying stuff.
00:53:34
Speaker
So you didn't use nets and things. You relied on edge weapons. No, I wasn't catching a monkey in the 1970s. Throw a Pokemon. Yeah, throw a Pokeball. You grabbed it in the net and you're like, you got a new robot. I know they had at least one other entry in the series, but I know in robot wars itself,
00:53:58
Speaker
A big strategy, at least early on, was a lot of the robots couldn't flip each other over because they didn't have a way to self right. They're upside down. They're like, well, wheels are on the bottom. Fuck.
00:54:10
Speaker
But then there were iterations where certain things were specifically designed to have an appendage shoot out to try and flip it over. And then certain mechs were designed specifically to flip over another robot so it would be fucked if it didn't have that. Yeah. I feel like the, what does the cooking implement? My brain is just saying- Spatula? Skillet tool. Yeah, like a spatula, exactly. Spatula is what I was looking for, thank you. I got you.
00:54:40
Speaker
That's the that always seems like if you could provide the right amount of leverage it would just be like an overpowered tool. And some of these conflicts. That's why I got her but I put a overcooked eggs on the bottom so you can never truly get it get me up.
00:55:00
Speaker
It's like and start and you stay stationary. Your strategy is the way for them to come for you either front or behind. Here's what you do. You glue yourself before the match to the floor and you wait for them to come to you. Yeah. Or if you want to go advanced, just have like a crazy glue or super glue or something and a deployable canister on the bottom of the robot.
00:55:22
Speaker
And then you hit a button, and you're just like, boom, from this point forward, I make my stand here. You just bunker up. Yeah, it's the siege, the one-way siege tank of robot wars.
00:55:39
Speaker
Honestly, if they had more appendages, because usually it's like mobility, a fairly simple chassis, and then here's my method of attack, it would be cool to have more bolas in there where it just kind of shoots out and then wraps up around a mechanical arm or something to impede its method of attack.
00:56:01
Speaker
Yeah. You know, for the one robot, that's like a fucking scorpion where it has like a tail that strikes. I don't know. I think I like. Yeah. Bull is a bull is a cool. They're a fun weapon. I think in real life for about boys, they eventually did limit what you could do with nets or maybe remove them entirely. Because as it turns out, having a bunch of moving parts doesn't work well against a fiber mesh net.
00:56:28
Speaker
How boring would it be after day one if they allowed projectile weapons in robot wars? It's just two sentry turrets just like shooting at each other with high velocity rounds. Spectators on both sides dying rapidly as the galleries shout out. I mean, they have like a layer of protective glass. I assume they'd want to double up on that at least. Could call, yeah.
00:56:52
Speaker
I'd imagine their V1 implementation of the projectiles though is just like a robot with a gun. A little gun arm. I just taped to it. Oh my gosh.
00:57:07
Speaker
All right. I found ways to renew my interest in Robot Wars. Make it happen. I know you guys are friends to the show. Just saying, room is the knives. You're still fairly entertaining. That's dangerous though. Oh my gosh. Okay. An entry as we're wrapping up on time. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention it.
Thief Series: Embracing Stealth Over Combat
00:57:27
Speaker
Thief. Yeah. I'm just gonna say Thief is a series, not a specific game at this point. Mm-hmm.
00:57:37
Speaker
One and two are kind of their games. Three, I think, improved on a whole lot. But it was just that early entry in stealth and not being able to, oh, fuck your way out of it. And by that, I really mean the elaboration on that one. So a lot of times when I talk about stealth games, I'm like, oh, I'll be stealthy until I get spotted and then I'll murder everybody in the vicinity and then go back to being stealthy.
00:58:04
Speaker
Whereas in this, your main method of taking out a guard would be a blackjack from behind. Right. Your dagger did no fucking damage because they were in actual armor and you were in a cloak. So if you got caught, it was really fucking dicey. Usually you would die because they had actual swords. Yeah, you weren't like a fighter. No, no, no. You were you were a thiefer. Definitely a thiefer.
00:58:35
Speaker
So I wonder like, uh, if you pirated thief, are you just, you know, getting a jumpstart on the game? You're just like, nah, no, we're going to start early.
00:58:48
Speaker
with the thievery. You just steal the game or like beat it? Beat it? Yeah, got it. I owe it no. Law of acquisition. Oh man. Yeah, I didn't. I didn't. I played thief. I think it's thief three gold or something like that. Thief gold is a remake or a full completion thing or something.
00:59:08
Speaker
One of those bundled packages. Thief 3 had the factions. Thief 2 Golden Age might be what you're thinking of. It could have been. I did not play long. The pacing was not up for me as a kid because I was a...
00:59:25
Speaker
Impatient, yeah. Yeah. And then I was sneaking around. I was like, all right, I think I got this. I think I got this. Also, it's not like an Elder Scrolls game, if I remember correctly, where it's like quick save load all the time. You can't just undo all your issues. I could have been wrong, but maybe I just didn't know what the keypad was. But anyways, a guard snuck up on me and assassinated me. I peed myself and stopped playing the game.
00:59:53
Speaker
One of those things didn't happen. You kept playing the game. I was like, I can't do this. And they just moved on. Unexpected horror game is one of my least favorite genres, I think. But yeah, I'll have to beat the new thief at some point. Thief 4 that came out in like 2016.
01:00:23
Speaker
Yeah. I remember that being good. I remember waiting for it to come out actually. Yeah. That was something I was excited for because I loosely followed the Thief series. Like, oh, they're making another one. It was good. It wasn't
01:00:38
Speaker
Crazy. Yeah, they just called it thief. Yes, they did. I don't know what this this thing is. This is very difficult for me to sort doom. Yeah, exactly. OK. 2016 thief 2014 or whatever. You know. It's cool, though, I think I'd probably have more patience for a thief like game now.
01:01:05
Speaker
Because I don't know, I'm getting old, slowing down. Mental faculties aren't what they used to be. I feel that. I just at the time, I think the main draw was being a badass, but also having different ways to solve a problem, which early on, a lot of games were very linear. So when I had the option to have water arrows to take out light sources,
01:01:30
Speaker
or shoot Moss arrows to kind of mask my sounds as I was walking around. I'm like, Oh, that's really cool. Yeah. A lot of games like, Oh, I just walk around and then I shoot something or attack somebody. So adding on these early mechanics at that point in time was kind of new and fascinating. Yeah. You get actual decision making. Yeah. So whenever a game is trying to do new stuff and does it well,
01:01:59
Speaker
I really do appreciate that. I can see this is like a precursor to like the immersive sim genre, basically. Even if it doesn't have all of those pieces, they don't give you like the full full suite of choices.
01:02:16
Speaker
having some of those basic choices rather than just here's the correct way to play a game. Do you execute that properly is really nice. I suppose like a platformer is like, well, you fucked up. Yeah, do it again. Yeah. Do it again. Dang right. Speaking of doing it again, we have done it again. You're welcome.
Conclusion and Call for Listener Interaction
01:02:37
Speaker
Yeah, that was our episode for today.
01:02:41
Speaker
the right
01:02:59
Speaker
Our recollections and ramblings and fake generated memories are evocative for you. If you think back to games that you played and you want to tell us about those, feel free to do so.
01:03:16
Speaker
if you send us emails, that would be more of a closed discussion. But you could do that at soapstonepodcast.gmail.com or if you want to have anybody comment on your stuff and or just press the like button and move on with your day. You can do that at facebook.com slash soapstonepodcast. And for the one lucky listener who can find the green text that I stole to copy everything that's in this episode verbatim,
01:03:41
Speaker
$100 Amazon gift card will be going to you, you lucky winner. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. Is the Amazon gift card also part of the green text like the giveaway at the end? It's this recursive nonsense. Have a good night. Have a great