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S1 Ep22: Roguelikes
73 Plays7 years ago
Seems like we've been here before...but not here? Join Dave and Jake as they talk about roguelikes this week!
Outro music:
https://ashellinthepit.bandcamp.com/track/the-fish-and-the-whale
Review voice clips from Boomstick Gaming:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKF6xnvaCsE
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Transcript
A Surreal Descent into Roguelikes
00:00:00
Speaker
Descending through the dark hallway, the world around you shifts and shudders as reality reforms itself, and you find yourself as an at sign. You're surrounded by dots, and instinctively knowing that you can move through them, you step to the east. A monster, or symbol, moves towards you. Panicking, you run west, but the monster pursues, matching your pace. Finally exhausted, you stop to catch your breath. Only to find the monster itself has also stopped.
Introduction to Soapstone Podcast
00:00:31
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 tonight, Dave? Peachy. Peaches, yeah. That's good. Tonight, as some of you may have picked up from our intro, we are going to be talking about roguelike games. Rogue and roguelike accessories. Yes.
00:00:56
Speaker
Exactly that So we wanted to we wanted to open with the the granddaddy to kick them all off the original rogue Which I know I I probably played once online like a flash based version, but I doubt I've ever seen it other than that Yeah, I think I might have hit it up once accidentally in das days. Yeah like this came out a decade before I was born or so, so I
00:01:22
Speaker
Feel like I'm not too responsible. I'm not on the hook for that one No, and it's not something you really need to go back and play but it is interesting to see where other games have drawn inspiration from it where you have like the separate rooms and how things get redrawn as it as you move and
00:01:39
Speaker
Yeah, as you're kind of working your way through the world. Because that's the only way that you had to code it at the time. Just frame by frame. Just like a game of life type thing, right? You just redraw the whole world.
00:01:53
Speaker
So we're going to talk about some of the Roguelikes that we like to play, but the mechanics that they have all came from this original Rogue.
The Mechanics and Impact of Rogue
00:02:01
Speaker
Rogue was a dungeon delving game where you played as presumably an adventurer, but in reality an at sign. And every time you moved from space to space, the world would update. Monsters would get closer to you. You would see more of the map. You maybe like go through a door or something like that.
00:02:21
Speaker
and it had this kind of like classic RPG focus where you'd be like collecting gear. It was just text, right? It was just like have a journal or something. It was all text. Yes. It was the shittiest text-based thing, but it had a UI technically, which was... I don't know if it was revolutionary, but a big fucking change. Yeah. It was like ASCII text, kind of like a mud or something else from those times. But they had the classic dungeon-dumbing experience. You fight monsters, try not to die.
00:02:50
Speaker
Uh, get magical items, armor, weapons, scrolls, things like that. And, um, like, uh, the interesting premise here was they didn't necessarily, they didn't have save points. If you died, it was permadeath you had to start over. Um, so it was all how far you could get in one play through. Yeah. And that was the defining kind of characteristic of, of rogue for the it's time. And it's something that later games have played off of, right?
00:03:19
Speaker
Yeah, but at least thankfully, later games have learned the lesson of having some progression through death. So maybe the further you go, you can unlock some content. So for your next playthrough, you have access to it. Exactly. So you don't feel like you're just doing the same thing over and over and getting nothing out of it. Dota 2. That's fair. Yeah, that's one of the key modern elements is meta progression. The ability to feel like you're working towards something even if you didn't beat the game on the first pass.
00:03:48
Speaker
So a game like Rogue would have an ending, and modern roguelikes often have endings, but that would usually constitute completing a run now if you make it all the way through. Yeah. And certain things are kind of geared against you, where you specifically have to grind out and make enough progression to beat certain bosses or reach certain checkpoints. The game is designed to be played through multiple runs.
00:04:15
Speaker
Rogue was kind of like if you started out on your first run, technically you had all of the advantages you would have starting out on your 700th run, right? Like you had the same chance to make it all the way to the end. Modern roguelike games, since we all played Call of Duty and things like that and we won our perks, give you that meta progression so that you have a better chance of succeeding in your later runs, as well as the knowledge of how to actually play the game, which usually helps get you there.
00:04:44
Speaker
Essentially just appealing to the male power fantasy. Yeah. AKA Vidugues. Yeah, I think that's pretty accurate. Before you lies two pathways. One, a door encrusted with various gems, alabaster in you, and pristine as if untouched by time. A cold wind blows from beyond. The other, a portcullis, with a darkly robed figure standing to the side. Two Ruby Glench shine forth from beneath his hooded visage.
00:05:11
Speaker
I'm going to go through the Porsche Giraffe. The one on the right. You have chosen Rogue Legacy.
Exploring Rogue Legacy's Unique Features
00:05:19
Speaker
Yay, Rogue Legacy. I like that game. Yeah. I played a little bit of Rogue Legacy, not nearly as much as everyone I know, but I think it's a very different game from the original Rogue, from what I understand of it. Yeah.
00:05:36
Speaker
So the formats are really different in nature. It's more of a side-scrolling beat-em-up. You can essentially, you start out with the game, you just have like a sword and shield, you kind of go into the castle, and then you get killed by some stuff and die.
00:05:52
Speaker
But then you can choose from among your descendants who will succeed you. And each of them will have different traits. Certain things they're better at, certain things they're worse at. Maybe they'll have gigantism or blindness or some other effect. Or gay. I remember gay being one of them. It's not a bad thing though. No, no, no. That's actually the best trait.
00:06:14
Speaker
So you essentially go through and you get access to abilities you can use, but each time one of your descendants dies, you take your accrued money and you can use it to unlock upgrades for more health, damage, and other things. So you're getting money like looting throughout the whole shabang.
00:06:33
Speaker
And as you go, you can progress into harder areas of the castle. The castle itself is randomly generated rooms. Right. There's still like a kind of designated area to the north. Or sorry, just up, I guess, vertically up. Yeah. Vertically down and off to the right. But within each of those are still randomly generated rooms. And then eventually you'll find the boss room and you have to beat each of the bosses to then go and face the final boss.
00:07:02
Speaker
I think I died at the first boss that I encountered. How many bosses does the game actually have? I think in total it's just four. Yeah. But they start off at like a pretty steep difficulty curve. It's just kind of what we were talking about before where you can't first run, do it, unless you are truly god tier, in which case hats off to you. Not that I wear a hat. Right. Because of how impressed I am for you. Right. I just always have my hat in my hands. It is a functionally worthless hat.
00:07:31
Speaker
Just here for the token gesture. As we said, it's a very different game to the original Rogue, but it incorporates so many of those core principles of modern roguelikes.
00:07:47
Speaker
that constant progression, building, I think there's like a smithy or something else you can construct outside of the castle between your lives with your money. And kind of like upgrading each of your character classes from your descendants. You're like, oh, my mage is going to be more mage-y or whatever, have more health, something like that. And I think that one also benefits a lot from personal skill. I say this because I'm terrible at the game.
00:08:15
Speaker
But I've seen other people do well, so I'm going to assume the skill comes into play. A lot of it is just learning some mechanics because it's wazzed for your movement pretty much. Or if you're doing a controller, it's analog. But there are some platforming pieces, but usually it's more dodging enemy attacks and projectiles. So if you're kind of comfortable with platforming,
00:08:42
Speaker
But bad at other things, you can do what I do, where I just kind of go, again, the sword and board route, just straight hit them with a stick until they die. Yeah. And sometimes, because you can control how high you jump, and you can control yourself in midair, kind of like Mega Man. Okay, like hold the button there, joystick or whatever. Yeah.
00:09:03
Speaker
So you can use that to like make at range attacks that you want. Yeah. Without putting yourself in harm's way or maybe hitting people through the floor or other things. I got you like clipping through and stuff. Yeah. Okay. So control is very tightly, which is very nice. It's pretty much necessary if you have like a good platformer, right?
00:09:21
Speaker
yeah bad controls in the platformer makes a bad platformer as it turns out but we don't want to talk about mighty number nine right now next episode
00:09:34
Speaker
Another one of the cool things you can do in the game as, as you're progressing and exploring more of the areas you get access to, you can get these unlockables. So maybe you'll get boots where you can jump twice or you can get life steal on your weapon because typically you're starting out with just your base health pool and mana pool. And you don't really have a way to get that back so much, unless you find food or a mana potion, right? Which again, might be in a chest somewhere. You might get it from an enemy.
00:10:02
Speaker
You've got like a basic equipment. You're armed with a weapon of some sort. What's your weapon? It's a sword. What's it do? Sword things. One of the things I liked about the gigantism feature is it just made your character bigger. So you also have like a big ass sword. Yeah. Like interesting. So I'd use that extra range and just wail on enemies as best I could. We'll kind of like doing micro jumps to get out of bullet range.
00:10:29
Speaker
I think I actually had Gigantism on one of my characters and like your hitbox is bigger too. That was the trick, right? Yes. You're just like a walking wall for projectiles. There were some other traits in there too. There was like something messed with your vision. I don't recall exactly what it was. But I think another one like messed up with your controls as well. There's like a whole bunch of things that just could possibly make your choice poor.
00:10:57
Speaker
But the variety made it fun in a way. Yeah, so you weren't like this is my optimal build every time she like this my optimal build but I'm really slow. Yeah, you have to work around it, which is nice. You're like, maybe you only see in black and white But the character is gay so you can pick them anyway
00:11:20
Speaker
I still think my ideal thing was trying to get gear where if I killed an enemy I got health and mana back. So I could just fill that engine of sustain. And then if you can get some ability where you have a projectile to help out with things that are ranged. It's not one of the bosses that's flying.
00:11:41
Speaker
Fuck him. Yeah, I think life steal is my favorite effect in games. I think just any game that gives me a life steal weapon, that's basically it. Yeah. I will, for any type of RPG, build out passives before I build out actives. Yeah. Oh yeah.
00:12:00
Speaker
The music also really big in Rogue Legacy. It is so good It's got like your standard standard arrangement of exploration music kind of darker castle II themes things like that, but They're all keeping in theme with the game. Like it's this this pixel vertical You know side-scroller And it really just ties the whole thing together I don't know all of the songs because like I said, I'm terrible and I
00:12:27
Speaker
I've heard that there's like a jukebox or something you could get to to like play some music but I've never seen it because I'm terrible but but hey you at least have listened to the soundtrack and Spotify right or YouTube maybe actually I don't think so I don't think I've ever listened to the entire thing I'll go back and do that yeah we'll just put this we'll just put the OST in here yeah the rest of the podcast I'm just gonna be music from the game probably not though
00:12:55
Speaker
Before you lies another set of two doors. One, a hazy crimson beacon beneath a skull with goat horns and framed by two sinewy spinal columns. You feel the sadness of others who have crossed through. And the other door is wooden. I'll take the evil door. You have chosen Binding of Isaac.
Diving into Binding of Isaac
00:13:16
Speaker
The first game, after birth, rebirth, anti-birth? All of them. It's a lot of birth. It's kind of like the blanket.
00:13:25
Speaker
All I know is the game's about birth. Isaac. I'm so glad we timed that and we didn't actually work on that. Yeah, no, that was definitely not pretty planned. Let's keep bumping the table. Yeah, that's fine.
00:13:40
Speaker
It's fine. Keep hitting the same. Yeah. So Isaac is more to the original in a way. The original rogue. You got that top-down view. You can move in multiple directions, although it's not strictly up, down, left, or right. You've got more freedom of movement than that.
00:14:01
Speaker
Yeah, you don't have to strictly do cardinal direction. You can move around though. Usually you do have Wazzed as your control scheme. Yeah. Thematically though, I think the story is the same. I did not realize how much this game actually took inspiration from the original Legend of Zelda. Just the way they have certain enemies or mechanics in the game or other references they make.
00:14:25
Speaker
I could see that. And it's all very, it's all room based. Right. So you start out on a central room and it's always randomly generated, but you do have constant floors. You can unlock more the further you get, but you're just a kid who's crying and that is his projectile to hit enemies. Right. Yeah. That's not how I remember link, but it's been a while.
00:14:49
Speaker
It's interesting to go along and take these tears. So I took the tears from the old man. God damn it old man. No, it's Isaac is first time I saw Isaac is I was a little bit thrown off I think by the theming. I was like this seems like a rather
00:15:09
Speaker
macabre title of sorts also literally titled the binding of isaac which you know i mean i get the biblical implication obviously but it's not happy um i i think it wasn't until after i knew that you were playing it and you were talking about it i was like oh okay this is a video game and
00:15:28
Speaker
Yeah, back when I played it. Yeah, so long ago. This is... What was that? An hour? This is one of those games where the hours on it are insanely high, partially because I would just leave the game running, but also because I have sunk so much time into this game.
00:15:47
Speaker
because of how much you can do with it. And it's also a nice, I can watch something on monitor two and play this and monitor one because I've played it so fucking much from like the original to I think after birth plus. So I should go back to anti-birth. Like you mentioned, that is a nice version that somebody made.
00:16:06
Speaker
But I've just unlocked so much as I've gone on. And it's just really fun to play. And I got used to a lot of the mechanics. Right. You're acclimated to the game at this point. Yeah. But they still keep adding things to it, which is always impressive.
00:16:22
Speaker
Yeah, I was going to say, for how much you've played this game, I host D&D occasionally. I host board games and things. I know that you've rolled a D6 way more than I have. But I didn't realize they were still patching the game. That's actually kind of interesting. Yeah, I actually... Does Platinum God keep up with it?
00:16:43
Speaker
probably not as much as it should platinum god has a website where it has like hey hear all the items in the game and how they interact and what they do because in the game it doesn't have descriptions for things that you unlock you just kind of have to figure it out and you're like hey how does
00:16:59
Speaker
um this weapon type a interact with weapon type b you fucking try and find out yeah exactly because it has good guys at platinum god have uh logged everything yeah sorry i'm distracted by fireworks out the window this is right that's part of the podcast this is august what the hell i'm not sure if they're gonna come through or not
00:17:15
Speaker
Taking it back to the start here for what Binding of Isaac is, as you play as Isaac, who is this young boy as you mentioned, and go level by level, deeper and deeper and deeper into what is ostensibly his own personal torment or hell, heaven maybe if you get low enough, and collect items as you go. Usually start off with one like really early. And you were talking about the synergies, like a lot of these items can have.
00:17:45
Speaker
More than any other game, that's what I think of when I think of Binding of Isaac is the synergies to the items. Oh my god. Certain ones have become so innate to me, but the other certain things I find I'm like, I want to try this. I don't know what this is. Yeah. Even after all the time I played.
00:18:01
Speaker
Because as you go, you can get things which give you passive abilities. Maybe it's more health. Maybe your tears will be faster and deal more damage or have some other effect with them. But you can also get active items, which will charge over time per room that you clear. And you can use those abilities. The one that Jake mentioned is the D6.
00:18:22
Speaker
which allows you to reroll any pedestal items in a room. Right. And pedestal items you can get from treasure rooms, and it could be another active item, or it could be a passive item, but it'll let you essentially pray to RNGs and hope for a different one, and hopefully it's something good that you can use. Yeah.
00:18:41
Speaker
Now the pedestal items are some of the coolest things in the game because you completely could change the way that you're approaching the game. This is essentially like a north, south, east, west type game where you're moving from room to room, pathing out the dungeon and working toward the exit, which is like very, very much rogue. But the items can completely change up the way your character plays. Usually you shoot like tears, which is your projectile weapon,
00:19:06
Speaker
But maybe you got an item that instead makes a giant laser beam that fires out of your face. And that's now your projectile, right? And I remember one of my favorites was it gave me Stompy.
00:19:22
Speaker
which let me just break rocks early. They would usually block you and there was early levels where the RNG would try to like block off treasure and things with rocks and now you can just stomp through the rocks. Instead of having to use something like a bomb to break through. Exactly and then rocks a lot of times have like beneficial items in them.
00:19:40
Speaker
So I was a fan of anything that made my session easier. The game definitely has a lot of choices for how you can play it too, right? Like they have other characters other than Isaac you can play. Yeah, you can unlock up to... I'm gonna throw out a random number without researching. 15? Yeah, that sounds right. Oh cool, cool.
00:20:02
Speaker
But like one can fly. Seriously, updates Wikipedia articles to 15 characters. Maggie allows you to gain health. There's Blue Baby if you want more of a challenge who doesn't have any red hearts, which is usually what drops. And you can recharge those like any other health in a game.
00:20:21
Speaker
I think my favorite was Azazel. Is that his name? Azrael? Azazel. Azazel, yeah. There's a lot of like demon sounding AZ names. That's very common. Well, Azazel is actually a demon. Right, yes.
00:20:36
Speaker
And that was my favorite, because even though he only had black hearts, which did not regenerate over time, you couldn't pick up red hearts to refill your life. He could fly all the time, and he had that laser as his default weapon. Yeah. It wasn't a full range laser, but it was still insanely broken. It was super fun. And there's... I'm gonna pick another random number for the number of bosses.
00:21:02
Speaker
35 to 40 different bosses. 36. Yeah, 36 exactly. And again, you unlock things as you go. So you don't start off with access to all of the items. You start with a limited set. But then as you go and complete, technically, challenges in the game, which are kind of hidden behind things, like you wouldn't know going into it. Like an achievement or something. Yeah, it's like, oh, this will now appear in the dungeon. You're like, oh, OK. So you try and go hoping to find that thing. You're like, oh, what does this do?
00:21:30
Speaker
But as you go, you can unlock other bosses and they'll kind of shuffle the pool of bosses. So like floor one, I've had really difficult bosses on the first floor because it's like, Hey, you've progressed enough. You know what to do. Yeah. I was like, fuck.
00:21:45
Speaker
Yeah, this is taking it back for our listeners. This is taking us back to the concept of meta progression, which is one of the core features of modern roguelikes. Binding of Isaac does that entirely. Unlocking the items as you're progressing, completing challenges. I believe that the first time you clear the game, it actually won't take you to the true end, if I remember correctly.
00:22:04
Speaker
It just takes you far enough that you've unlocked future progress. So your next run, if you get to where you got in the first run, it'll actually continue and you can keep running through that way. On your first run, you can't get to like true Satan or whoever it is. Oh, no. Make it Satan. Your first one, I think you just have to beat mom. Yeah, I believe that's right. So for the plot of the game, essentially your mom hears something on a Christian broadcast saying like,
00:22:30
Speaker
your son is evil or she hears from the voice of god yeah that your son is evil and needs to like have his things taken away and he needs to be punished and essentially you need to become a sacrifice to god yes so you kind of hear this from the other room you're like fuck this you go under like a trap door and into the basement yes which is where Isaac's story starts
00:22:50
Speaker
and his story ends when you first beat mom. But after you beat mom, you can go levels further into facing mom's heart. And then after you do that, you can face yourself, or you can go into hell, you can go into heaven. You can face blue baby or delirium if you go into the void. And a lot of that was added like post, oh yeah, post-launch. They're talking about additional content they've been adding to the game.
00:23:14
Speaker
They've tried to add more challenge to the game as time has gone on because people get used to certain things like, oh, I need to do this. This is easy. Yeah. So they always try and up the ante. And a lot of times, like delirium is a bullet hell plus a lot of instant teleportation, which makes it really hard to dodge and just kind of a pain in the ass. But hopefully at that point of the game, you have enough broken synergies where you can just
00:23:41
Speaker
It's all about building your synergistic build that will get you through the entire game. That's the name of progression in Isaac. Which I think is super fun. The developers also understood that one of the core features of a roguelike is replayability.
00:23:58
Speaker
And I played like a little bit and eventually I found out that you can restart the game at any point by just holding R on PC, which is the reset button. So you're just like, if you walk into that first pedestal room and you don't like your item, you just restart, just restart. It's like, you're not going to have a better time than now. Pardon me. Might as well do it.
00:24:19
Speaker
that's it's got this whole speed running community everything built around it obviously if they're running speed runs they don't run rng they'll use like a pre-gen seed yeah and then they'll just have a speed run for that particular seed so all of the items will be the same the rooms will be the same things like that but
00:24:35
Speaker
It's just, it's really cool. Talking about Binding of Isaac kind of makes me want to play it. It's been a long time. But you should rejoin the community about that. You need to get stuff. No, it's very solid and is a true roguelike in all of the senses of the term. Another thing I appreciate about Binding of Isaac, which is different from a lot of other things,
00:24:59
Speaker
is you actually have a projectile. So you shoot out, but it also has momentum with it. So if you're strafing and shooting, your cheers will go at a bit of an angle. And that comes into play a lot of times if you're trying to hit things around a corner a little bit. Right. I think that was my favorite scene in Wanted when he shot his tear around the corner.
00:25:18
Speaker
Take out that guy. I mean you joke but that is an effect you can do. You can get like loop-de-loop tears. Yes. That was not one of my favorites. Oh man. I think that one of the most fun and terrifying things, praise beat RNGs is first off, is when you get an item like a d4, it allows you to re-roll all of your items into a separate set of items from those respective pools. Chaos mode. Exactly.
00:25:46
Speaker
So you might have something really good, and you're like, well, let's roll the dice and see what happens. And then you get something really shitty. And now you deal no damage, and you're like, fuck. Or if you pick up one item that just completely kneecaps your thing, because you thought it was going to work in a certain way, and it just fucked you over. You've got all of these damage modifiers on whatever your primary attack is, and then it changes it up into a knife or something, where nothing applies. There's a lot of fun ways to
00:26:16
Speaker
to go about Binding of Isaac and then that varied experience is really core to a successful roguelike and probably the reason I'd assume making assumptions about your character here, Dave, but I'd assume the reason you've sunk so much time into it is because each experience can have can play out vastly different ways. Oh yeah, I'll say I'm definitely I have an issue with
00:26:41
Speaker
It's the law of diminishing returns. So for me, if I see a movie, I typically don't want to rewatch the movie because I'm not going to get the same level of experience I had when I first watched it and got to experience it.
00:26:54
Speaker
So in the same way with games, I'll typically not replay a game unless I give it like a couple of years so I can nostalgically re-experience it. It's nice to be able to just pick up and get that fresh thing every time. And also, I can make it my way. And it's got that core refreshing kind of experience where the mechanics are solid enough that the way that the game builds it up
00:27:23
Speaker
designs the world, throws items at you, things like that. That experience itself is fun enough to carry
Dynamic Content Creation in Roguelikes
00:27:28
Speaker
the game. It is the game, so that's good that it's fun enough to carry it. I was thinking earlier that a programmer would love a roguelike title. They'd love to work on a roguelike title, because designing all of this writing and content and dialogue and all of this, that can make for a great narrative experience. Some of the best narrative games have been linear,
00:27:51
Speaker
But ideally what you could do is make a system that designs all that content for you and people are still gonna play it a ton and they're gonna have a lot of fun with it. And that's the core of this procedural generation that so many roguelikes use. That being said, I'm curious what's behind that other door, that wooden door. So I'm gonna go back over there. I'm gonna kick that thing down.
00:28:12
Speaker
as you use your mighty hooves to kick down the door. That was delicious. As you use your mighty hooves, your powerful feet with four toes on each foot to kick down the door, you stun any enemies behind the door up to 15 feet because that's how the game mechanic works. Which game mechanic? The game mechanic for dead cells. Transitions. Oh, we did it.
00:28:42
Speaker
I wasn't really sure we were going to be able to pull that one off, but I think everyone fell for it. Dead Cells is a different game though.
Dead Cells: A Roguelike with Style
00:28:50
Speaker
Dead Cells is more recent than some of these.
00:28:54
Speaker
That was probably only like a year or two ago that Dead Cells actually came out. Yeah, it's fairly recent, and it's been blowing up pretty big. On the net. Got it on beta, or something early, so it sounds like I'm a fucking hipster. Yeah, early access. Yeah. And they've changed the game since then, but it started out solid, and they've only really made it better ever since. It would have been funny if you took that in the other direction. It started off really great, and it's progressively become shit.
00:29:24
Speaker
project how would you describe dead cells dead cells takes a progression of a metroidvania and integrates it into this procedurally generated action roguelite that has you slowly chipping away at its steep difficulty i'm not disagreeing with you but i want to rephrase that slightly it takes the progression system of a metroidvania and transforms it into a procedurally generated action roguelite
00:29:48
Speaker
I think I like your description better. Dead Cells is a solid side-scroller with all of these roguelike mechanics where you're almost guaranteed to die fighting your way through it. But they have plenty of upgrades and the action is I will say full of action and like energetic.
00:30:11
Speaker
Would you say the action is packed? It is packed. It's frenetic, phonetic, and energetic. I'm just gonna keep staring at you. Dave, take the ball. Oh, thanks for that. But basically it's a lot faster paced than Rogue Legacy, which the other sidescroller we already mentioned. Yeah. It is very, very fast. It's like a fighting game, more than Rogue Legacy is.
00:30:39
Speaker
Yeah. And every monster will kind of have like a wind-up for an attack, but there can be multiple monsters on various different heights coming at you from all angles. Stark souls. Yeah. Speaking of, you actually can roll out of the way. You can jump, you can roll. If you're in the air, you can do a down jump to kind of like slam and deal damage and stun enemies. Down smash. Yeah. Goomba smash. Fuck you, Goomba. And you also have a variety of weapons.
00:31:08
Speaker
So you always have the option of like a primary and a secondary, which you can use both. So you might have a bow, might have a shield or a sword. The sword might have bleed stacks, might put oil on somebody and you can trigger fire damage. You have a lot of options and you also have other active abilities. You might shoot out a grenade or some other trap to go with everything else.
00:31:33
Speaker
Got a lot of options for how you approach combat, how you're going through this then. Yeah. What's the goal of Dead Cells? What are you trying to accomplish?
00:31:41
Speaker
There's an end boss eventually. Yeah. But you can essentially just go through each area. It starts off in the same one, but then you kind of have some branching paths for where you want to go. I remember those sewers at some point. Yeah. Which is always new if you go in. I think it's as far as I got. Again, I didn't play this one as much as literally everyone listening to this podcast.
00:32:07
Speaker
But at the end of each level or area, you essentially go to the sky and you hand in all the souls you've collected up until this point, and you can use them to unlock certain weapons or upgrades that you've gotten blueprints for throughout the level.
00:32:22
Speaker
or put more points in them to make them better. But you have to find the weapons and upgrades throughout the level itself. Gotcha. So you might start off with like, hey, you have the option of these three weapons. Choose what you want to go. But then you might find another weapon. You're like, well, I'll swap this out because this is more of an aggressive damage type that I want. Maybe pick a place a little more utility. Right. And you can also get upgrade for red, purple and green.
00:32:53
Speaker
I think there's the colors. Yeah, I'm not sure. Are those like resources? It's essentially item types. So red's gonna be more damage based. Purple will be kind of your split between damage and utility. Gotcha. And then whatever the fuck the other color is will be more of utility. So it might be more cooldown based.
00:33:16
Speaker
Alright, alright, I see. So certain weapons might be half red, half purple. So you'd be like, well I'm gonna upgrade my red stat. Yeah. That would...
00:33:25
Speaker
Ugh, help half of your weapon out essentially. Right. I'm not, so usually I'm guilty of asking like leading questions, getting you to say things and things. I just realized how much of this game has actually changed since I played it. Oh, it's decent. Back in early access. I'm just like, I'm not BSing. I literally don't know what you're talking about anymore. But that's actually, that sounds really cool though.
00:33:50
Speaker
It sounds like this has a lot more mid-game progression to it than something like Rogue Legacy, where Rogue Legacy kind of frontloads all of your meta progression, where you're buying upgrades right off the gate. It sounds like a lot of your progression's happening in the middle of the game, more like Binding of Isaac. Yeah.
00:34:08
Speaker
So you always start off with a naked guy when you get your... I know I do. It's okay to be gay, that's what I'm saying. Yes. That's straight. You take your two weapons and you just go, but your play style might change based on what you find. Right.
00:34:25
Speaker
So I know you have a shield where you can actually counter weapon attacks. Um, typically I like to go lightning whip because it's the best. Right. And you can kind of just spam it and it kind of like homes it on enemies. It doesn't do a lot of damage on its own, but if you can get something to boost the damage, it's really fun. Yeah. And they also have precision whip where if you hit somebody just the right distance, it crits and does a fuck ton of damage. Yeah.
00:34:52
Speaker
Naked guy with a lightning whip. Naked guy with precision whip. I don't know what they changed. I like how, as soon as I said naked guy, you had this grin on your face and you're like, I'm going to make a comment about this. Right. I was like, what's your favorite weapon though, Dave? I'm going to say the whip. I like my naked guy to have a whip.
00:35:10
Speaker
I like how you're just sitting on the naked guy. Oh, man. What are you going to title this podcast? This podcast is going places. I just don't know where. Oh, man. But it's another game I would definitely recommend you check out again, which is it's not a hard sell for me since I already own it. I don't have to pay any money. Yeah, just you probably have already downloaded the updates. It's probably true. Yeah, it's patched in the background. I could walk away from the podcast right now and check it out.
00:35:42
Speaker
I'm not going to do that. Oh man. Yeah. They keep upgrading it and changing things based off of like community feedback or like, Hey, we could probably improve this here. Oh yeah. And they've been really responsive with it. I know the community has been pretty involved and I would just, I've always enjoyed it. I usually pick it up for like a little bit at a time. It's another one of those nice, fun to pick up. You can go through a run.
00:36:09
Speaker
15, 20 minutes. It usually takes like a minute for me, but I have to start a new run because some people last longer than those. Yeah.
00:36:24
Speaker
But anyways, Dead Cells. Yeah, it seemed really solid when I played it. I'll have to go back and give it another pass. The art style also jumped out to me. I really like how flashy it is and how well animated. A lot of times with roguelikes, it goes hand in hand with just pixel art or kind of really basic things. And it's not to demean that. That can be perfectly fine and fun. Undertale was a good game. Yeah.
00:36:50
Speaker
Yeah, some would even say a good game. But no, it's it's clear that they put a lot of effort into this. And there's a lot of we've already had an episode on early access games. We know it can turn to absolute trash at a moment. I'll notice. Yeah, I'm glad that's not the the path that Dead Cells has taken.
00:37:10
Speaker
also to elaborate a little bit on the animation Jake was talking about. It is 2D side scrolling, but for the character animation and the enemy animations, I believe it's some type of
00:37:22
Speaker
3d modeled hmm things stuffed into 2d interesting it has a weird-looking feel to it But it's just really nice and the animations are all very smooth huh and again because you have some of that platforming the controls are Tight. Yes, cuz again if the controls are bad it would make the game bad as the black trolls aren't tight It just ain't right. Yeah, that's David Congress Yeah
00:37:49
Speaker
When Stanley came to a set of two open doors, he entered the door on his left. Slave Aspire. Different type of game, probably less of a direct fighting game. Yeah, there's no, there's no platforming, there's no... North, South, East, West, yeah. But there is some RNGZ.
00:38:11
Speaker
That's basically all the game is. It's just RNG. There's nothing else there. Yeah, I get fucking fucked up by RNG, and it's not skill-based at all. So I heard about this because my friends would just not stop circle-jerking about it. And essentially, this is one of those titles. And then I heard that it was a deck builder, which I didn't realize at all when I just saw it on Steam. I'm like, ah, I will purchase this product. And then I played it like twice. So again, going to rely on all of your experience.
00:38:41
Speaker
Wow, Jake, thanks for the upsell on that one. Yeah, no, it was actually, it was quite fun though. I like the premise quite a lot. You start off, you pick, I think when you start off, there was only two character classes available at the time. They've since added some, but you still unlock them, I believe, by completing O'Brien or challenges. But it's a deck builder. You start off with a basic deck.
00:39:05
Speaker
work your way through some encounters, beat some guys up, get some cards. That's the core of it. But it has a lot more than that, I think. Can I elaborate on that simple description quick? Yes. Is there anything you'd like to add to my full summary of what the game is? I got the mic now. So we just push this towards you and you have two classes which you can access at least from the base game after you've unlocked them.
00:39:31
Speaker
One is the Ironclad, and both characters start off with kind of simple attack and defense cards, deal six damage or protect the next five incoming damage, and you have action points, and each card will take a different number of action points. So once you've expended your action points, you pass your turn, then the enemy goes and does something.
00:39:55
Speaker
But as you beat enemies, you can choose cards to pick from, and you kind of add more cards to your deck.
Slay the Spire: Strategy and Growth
00:40:01
Speaker
So maybe you want something more aggressive, maybe you want something more defensive. Ironclad strategy is usually you want to build a lot of strength, which ups your damage per card.
00:40:13
Speaker
And then you just, you're pounding out these insanely, like single use, like, oh, that's 30 damage. Right. Insane things. Whereas the hidden, the silent. Yes. We should really research it before we talk about it. I call him poison bro. I see a check. I'm not actually sure.
00:40:33
Speaker
is a lot more combo based where you're doing like these dodges and building armor. We're also like throwing daggers. It also has a poison mechanic you can access. And you kind of, again, get to choose your way to play. But the cards you get access to from beating enemies are all random. But as you also kill enemies, you can accrue gold.
00:40:55
Speaker
and you can spend gold at shops to buy cards. Or possibly you have too many cards, you want to increase your draw probability for your good cards, so you can pay money to remove a card from your deck. Right. Is this a preview for the upcoming podcast where we talk about card games with the concept of deck thinning?
00:41:16
Speaker
Yes. Cool. I'm a fan of games like that where they have that layer of strategy. You can kind of be like, on second thought, all of these starter cards are garbage, so no. Yeah, that's one of the big things. Obviously, you need them when you start out. But if you get a card that now provides twice as much block, you don't want a simple shield card. That's not useful to you. Right. So if you can find ways to burn it, that's always nice.
00:41:44
Speaker
I basically apply this in my own life. Like when I'm receiving birthday cards, I'll get like the first batch and it's like my parents. Fuck you, grandma. You take the $20 out first and then you get rid of the card. Yes, exactly. I love all my family. They're good.
00:42:02
Speaker
But yeah, they have this progression system. I know that they also had consumables that you could get. Potions, yeah. Potions you can chug. So you know it's an RPG when you can quaff potions. That's the key verb. If you can say quaff, you're good. You know you're in. What were you doing? Quaffing. Oh. I think it was my favorite Pokémon though, Quaffing.
00:42:30
Speaker
Maybe that's a tangent. We might be a little far off track here. Slay the Spire though. You kind of are slowly working your way up this map, encounter by encounter. And it has some level of choice. A lot of roguelikes have you moving from room to room and you really have no idea what's going to be in the next room. Slay the Spire gives you all that knowledge up front, which I think is really cool. They balanced around that.
00:42:55
Speaker
like you could have a campfire where you could rest and you'll see exactly where that is on the map or you may have a combat encounter.
00:43:02
Speaker
What does resting do? So if I recall correctly, resting would regenerate some of your health. And there were some other options you could do with the campfire. So if you're like, hey, I'm already healthy enough, or I'm going to risk going through low health, you could do something that I believe got you a card. Close. You can actually upgrade one of your cards. That's what it was, yes. So each card has...
00:43:26
Speaker
a possible upgrade. So maybe that five protection shield card will now be eight protection, but you have to upgrade it, but now it's consistently better. Yeah.
00:43:39
Speaker
There are also cards you can get, which will, when you're in an instance, upgrade all of your cards for that instance. That seems pretty good. It is insanely good. Some of those upgrades were like legit awesome for cards too. Now that you mentioned it, I remember the mechanic. That's something that's harder to pull off in real life. Like when you're playing magic against someone and you're like, I upgrade all the cards in my deck and you go through and like take a sharpie and start writing on them. Yeah.
00:44:06
Speaker
One of the benefits of electronic card games in general is how much more you can play around with it. I know with Hearthstone you can modify your opponent's deck or modify your own deck. We've got to save this for the card games. We'll do a card game podcast. It's what the people want. Right people? People?
00:44:28
Speaker
Now anyways, I'd say that Slay the Spire is more deck building than your traditional constructed deck. Every time you start off with the same base deck, but you unlock more cards you can add to your pool. So that's your meta progression from a roguelike standpoint, right?
00:44:48
Speaker
Some of those bosses are also like a huge pain. Oh my god. Yeah, there's one that will change modes from like attack and defense. Yeah. And then just poop out a lot of damage. There's one that slows time and is a dick. There's another one that
00:45:05
Speaker
It's like some kind of ghost me where it like builds counters and when it reaches like the last one It's like I'm gonna hit you for 180 damage. Yeah, but I don't looks at help You'll never have that much help But it's cool because you typically your Opponent will show the next action. They're going to do how that's right. Yeah, so you can be like Oh, they're gonna do like a status effect on me, which will
00:45:31
Speaker
maybe lower your resistance or make you deal less damage. You always know kind of roughly what's coming next. You can plan around it. I kind of love that from a certain way because like from a game standpoint, mechanic standpoint, it's awesome that they flip the script and then they still manage to make an engaging game. Like how do people try to make things engaging or surprising? They hide information from you. You don't know what's in the next room. You don't know what the monster is going to do next. You don't know what he's charging up.
00:45:57
Speaker
Like, Slay the Spire gives you all of that information, and then just makes you more worried because of it, because you're like, am I making the right choice, given that I have perfect knowledge? And it's awesome. Another one of the things that can modify even that perfect knowledge is you can get access to certain items, where if you beat a boss, they're called relics. Right. Beat a boss or like a special type of enemy, you can get access to a relic, which will usually give you a beneficial effect.
00:46:27
Speaker
but some of them come at a cost. Like maybe, oh, you have permanent extra damage, but you no longer see enemy intentions. Or maybe you, you're capped at a certain number of cards you can play per turn. That is interesting. Or maybe you have an extra action per turn, but some other limitation. So they actually like, they, they take off the, uh, the training wheels, kind of make the game harder, but let you have some buffs.
00:46:53
Speaker
Similar to the constellations in Bastion or Pyre, reference to previous podcast, you can make things harder for yourself, but you also get an additional benefit. So you're balancing that risk reward at your own leisure.
00:47:13
Speaker
That is really cool. I like that it's also your choice to trade in. So I can keep my training wills and no enemy intentions. Thank you very much. But the good players can go off and win. I mean, if your deck's not good, you might not need it. But RNG will still fuck you over at times. Because every time you've played through all the cards in your deck, your discard pile gets shuffled.
00:47:38
Speaker
And then you get what you get. So maybe you're like, oh, he's going to attack me next time for a lot of damage. I hope I drew awesome. And that's all attack cards. You're like, fuck. Yeah. And they had a bunch of interesting effects on the cards, too. I obviously can't recall all of them, but some of them are single use. Some of them are guaranteed to be in your opening hand, I believe. So you could kind of prime your combo, which I love. I love that strategic manipulation, which is key to the Card Games podcast.
00:48:10
Speaker
Yeah, the whole setup was great. And the game also had a tremendous flow to it. Like to activate your cards, you're dragging them off to the enemy. And then it's kind of like almost a Yu-Gi-Oh, duelist type. Like you wish you could throw the cards at your friend while you're playing them. Now you can. You're just nicked with these various cardboard paper cuts. Yeah, I was playing card games with Jimmy. You can never see Jimmy again.
00:48:37
Speaker
And they also have a lot of animations for the characters themselves and a lot, if not all of the cards. And they've only upgraded it with time because I know initially it started out with like, that's some flash ass animation, but now things look way smoother. I like that that descriptor could be used in so many situations, but I know exactly what you mean.
00:48:59
Speaker
Oh no, no, the programming language for the internet. Flash. Flash. Yeah, no. Very solid though. It's one of those that I've wanted to go back and revisit now that a lot of progress has been made in development. And thankfully, much like Dead Cells, they seem to have gone down the right path and kind of wrapped it up. Because that one, the popularity for Slay the Spire are just like exponential once that ended up on Steam.
00:49:28
Speaker
Yeah, like day two was, hey, everybody's streaming this game. Why? Because it's good. I even streamed it for like two, like a week or something. Yeah. Because it's just, it's a really fun game. Oh yeah. Yeah. I know we're good friend. Mike was streaming that for awhile as well. And that's, that's awesome. Um, twitch.tv slash pseudo Mike coffee.
00:49:47
Speaker
yeah he's way better at that than i am though yeah i was watching him play and he's like cycling through his own deck at like lightning speed and i'm like he's not actually making choices his instincts now he's just winning uh which i don't know it's it's it's cool to see an expert at work so
00:50:04
Speaker
Slay the Spire. It's all the game. Yeah, check it out. It's on Steam. Not that expensive. 5 out of 10. And we have some other games here that we wanted to talk about a bit quicker. We've covered a lot of games to some level of depth, I think.
00:50:21
Speaker
But there's others here that we thought were worth mentioning. We just wanted to go over them Relatively quickly here one that I know that I have played a lot and Many of my friends have played is FTL Faster than light. Yeah, I think I've heard of that one
00:50:35
Speaker
Yeah, it was on Steam. It's been on sale plenty of times. From a roguelike perspective, that one actually has completely different combat. It's kind of like simulation ship versus ship combat. There's like boarding attacks, things like that. There's a bunch of really cool mechanics for how you can go about fighting. So instead of just destroying the ship outright, maybe you want to salvage their ship, get a bunch of money.
00:50:59
Speaker
So you start a bunch of fires and deoxygenate their cabin. Their crew dies after suffocating, and then you take their ship. Murder with variety. Which is one of my favorite ways to play the game. But yeah, maps were dynamically generated, so a key part of a rogue-like. And just the aesthetic's really fun. Music's great, too. So I recommend FTL.
00:51:26
Speaker
Okay, I'm actually gonna have to check that one out that actually sounds pretty fun. Yeah. No, it's it's actually really cool I can't believe actually haven't heard about this game before. Yeah, that's that's weird. Yeah, it probably sounds familiar but it's uh, you know, there's still people haven't picked it up so What else we got here we got uh, definitely want to hit on monolith Oh, yeah another fun game very similar to binding of isaac But you are a spaceship and you can kind of move around and shoot in any direction, right? um
00:51:54
Speaker
It's a lot more bullet-helly than Binding of Isaac, has a lot of other cool mechanics. It is super fast, it is super cute. You have a lot of different weapons that you'll cycle through, and the weapons can have modifications. Maybe you'll shoot a little laser and it'll go through a wall once. Maybe you'll have bouncing projectiles or rockets or other things.
00:52:14
Speaker
the bosses are all kind of nuts and fun and it's just it's a beautiful little game yeah i saw you playing this one actually i really like the kind of like 80s almost Atari aesthetic it's got going on there like a dark background it's just usually mostly black and white or uh
00:52:32
Speaker
very strong colors. It's not a rainbow of anything. It's a simple color palette, but these are the cool outlines of things. Exactly. I like it. It looks really cool. Another one we have here is Darkest Dungeon, which I know my friend Ian has played a lot.
00:52:49
Speaker
Darkest Dungeon is a more traditional dungeon delver that has a lot of Lovecraftian themes about the world. It's super oppressive and it's one where you feel like you're always a couple steps from losing and I've played it a bit and again it's on the list of games I got to go back and play more but it's a fun time.
00:53:10
Speaker
Yeah, that game has really good style and just beautiful narration. Oh my gosh, one of the key things I like about the game is the theming. The mechanics more so are less interesting to me, though it's still very enjoyable. Yeah. But it's just such a good feels game. Yeah, I was I was going to say I was probably done with the edits for this podcast, but I think it's worth throwing in one more. Women and men, soldiers and outlaws, fools and corpses.
00:53:40
Speaker
All will find their way to us now that the road is clear.
00:53:45
Speaker
Yeah, it's too good. Something around to the darkest dungeon is Enter the Gungeon. Haha, same game. It is actually. It's another fun run around, bullet hell, insanely cute because all of your enemies are different bullets. Yeah. But one thing I like about the theming is if you have like a shotgun shell, it's wielding a shotgun. If you're facing a sniper shell, it will try and snipe you. Right.
00:54:11
Speaker
And all the bosses are really coolly designed and have fun names. All the different guns you can get are very, very fucking silly. And they'll reference guns from across various media. I know there's like the moon and I blast. There is like a gun that shoots guns. There's guns that shoots the letters for bullets.
00:54:33
Speaker
you can shoot like a shipping crate yeah rocket launcher there's all tons of stuff it is really enjoyable and it also has a roll mechanic it has a setting up behind like you knock over a table and use a barricade it's a cover shooter it's a cover-based shooter so she's saying
00:54:55
Speaker
Maybe not quite. Yeah, I've heard a little bit about it, but mostly I've seen clips and things of it. It looks super frenetic and interesting.
Narrative and Combat in Hand of Fate & 20XX
00:55:04
Speaker
But next one up here we have is Hand of Fate, which is not Enter the Gungeon. It's very completely different. Also kind of a deck building game where you first pass through, you're up against... Basically there's a narrator who is Fate. He's providing these events for you.
00:55:23
Speaker
You in traditional roguelike style go room by room and the rooms are encounters. So one might be like, hey, you're at an inn and you see like a goblin. How do you encounter? Like, how do you respond to his inquiries, things like that. And then there's roles to see how successful you're going to be. So this is basically like a tabletop game.
00:55:42
Speaker
The trick is after you've gone through completed this, the combat is, I use a controller, but it's like third person fighting. So if you're good at the combat, it actually helps you in the game. It's very much a different style than everything else the game does.
00:55:57
Speaker
You go through, beat a final boss, and it's like, great, good job. We'll complete this deck. We'll move you on to the next challenge, and you'll unlock some cards that you can choose to shuffle into your deck. And those cards are encounters that you can roll when you go through your next playthrough. So you can choose to be like, I'm going to forgo all of the difficult encounters, but I won't be able to get the cards those would unlock if I completed them or something like that.
00:56:26
Speaker
But if you throw all the hard stuff in your deck, then you're gonna screw yourself over when you get like literally no healing items. And I really like that whole setup. I think it's an interesting approach to the roguelike genre.
00:56:42
Speaker
Might check that one out. That one's cool. And then the last one we have here is the true spiritual successor to Mega Man 20XX. It is Mega Man game, essentially. Not actually licensed by Capcom, but somebody made it and it's beautiful and it's platforming. You have a melee character similar to Zero and you have a ranged character similar to Mega Man.
00:57:09
Speaker
and you go through these different stages you can I think choose where you can start out and then where you branch off to and it has platforming and enemies and you can get upgrades and things and specials off of the bosses you beat. Like I said, true spiritual successor. But one thing I really like about it is the level generation is always random.
00:57:35
Speaker
But also as you progress further, each boss and area will get harder. Right. So let's say you're like, well, I can do the ice area now or I can do it later. If I can, I'll do it later. When you come back to it, because you passed it over and you're doing it like seventh instead of like first or second. Right.
00:57:52
Speaker
There's way more enemies. The area itself is much more challenging with more pitfalls and traps. And then the boss itself will have harder mechanics and be faster and shoot more. That's awesome. I know we were talking about this a little bit earlier and you said that the
00:58:09
Speaker
You were appreciative of the fact that they put that much effort into the bosses to actually have multiple difficulty levels all the way through these tiers, right? I think that that level of adaptation, kind of in this procedural roguelike programming, is legitimately awesome.
00:58:28
Speaker
Yeah, it's definitely a show of commitment, which Capcom did not have. Fuck you, Capcom. Yeah. Also, thank you for Monster Hunter. Also, also fuck you for Monster Hunter. Exactly. Exactly. The other boon of this is it does have multiplayer. Yeah. I was actually playing with Justin for a bit and that was a bang in time.
00:58:47
Speaker
Yeah, you actually played with me, too. I played at your apartment a bit. I played as Zero, who is a protagonist in a popular anime. And he also is a sword wielder, I guess, in Mega Man Universe.
00:59:04
Speaker
It was really cool. It's kind of fun that they threw that in there. I don't know, you could correct me, tell me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe previous Mega Man games really had a co-op type system to them, did it? No. You're just like, yes they all did. It's not known to me and it probably wasn't that great.
00:59:25
Speaker
So it's really cool when they go beyond and kind of complete the series round it out. It was legit. Yeah. And they also kept the tight controls of Mega Man, which I know is one of the... It's a platform. Yeah. The earliest things for it, even from the original Mega Man days. Also, they did keep the dash jumping from Mega Man X. Yeah. So what is dash jumping? Because that might have helped me not die.
00:59:49
Speaker
So you can either dash and jump off an edge to go further, or you can do a dash jump where you just press both buttons at the same time and go off. But that'll also allow you to clear more distance if you're essentially jumping vertically between things. And it helps for a really much faster gameplay. Interesting. Which is just rewarding when you can pull it off. Yeah, I probably shouldn't have done that without talking. That's all right.
01:00:16
Speaker
So yeah, I would say if Roguelikes are your thing, check out some of these titles. Yeah.
Concluding Thoughts and Listener Engagement
01:00:23
Speaker
They're all good. And we did not even mention all of them. Yeah. Most of these, we weren't even paid to mention. Yeah, most of them weren't. Yeah. Fuck you, Capcom. Yeah. But please keep giving us money. Yeah, we're not though. I'd like to thank everybody for joining us for another episode of Soapstone and we'll see you in the next one.
01:00:44
Speaker
Should we mention the Gmail or Facebook? Yeah, sure. Yeah, why not? We'll throw it in here too. If you want, you can like us on Facebook at facebook.com slash soapstonepodcast and send us your feedback. If you want to hear about a specific episode, a topic, something that's interesting to you, send it in to soapstonepodcast at gmail.com and we will read it even if we never respond.
01:01:07
Speaker
We'll probably respond too because we barely ever get emails. But yeah, also feel free to discuss this on Facebook. We sometimes have funny comments that, well Dave has funny comments, I just have comments when people discuss the podcast. We appreciate it. Yeah, I know some people out there have definitely played some of these games. We'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback. Oh yeah.
01:01:28
Speaker
We covered a lot of games, so like, we're spreading the net wide for this one. There better be one fucking comment, it's all the same. If no one posts a comment, I'm just gonna post my own comment. It'll be sad, so don't make me do that. Jake and I will post in the soapstone account back and forth to each other. Yeah. Anyways, we'll see you everybody. Bye.
01:02:25
Speaker
Oh.
01:03:00
Speaker
you