Tonight in a very special episode of Press B To Cancel, SicJake tries to set us up with a cozy video game from his past. Enjoy a game of Mystery Date where we are all blind to a not so secret, but still surprising, love interest!

Special thanks to Arthur The Last Ancient on soundcloud for our podcast theme.

For updates and more episodes please visit our website www.pressbtocancel.com, or find us on Twitter @pressbtocancel and Instagram @pressbtocancel.

In this 'mini' spoilercast Wulff and Palsh give their love for Resident Evil 7. Renewing their passion for a franchise they'd grown distant from. From start to finish... and beyond with the DLC!

Special thanks to Arthur The Last Ancient on soundcloud for our podcast theme.

For updates and more episodes please visit our website www.pressbtocancel.com, or find us on Twitter @pressbtocancel and Instagram @pressbtocancel.

We've covered fugly games that are awesome, now lets flip it. PressB runs down some beautiful looking games, that might just be hot garbage.

Special thanks to Arthur The Last Ancient on soundcloud for our podcast theme.

For updates and more episodes please visit our website www.pressbtocancel.com, or find us on Twitter @pressbtocancel and Instagram @pressbtocancel.

Final Fantasy speed run! GP & Palsh enter a lightning round bursting with their high (and low) takes on FF 1-10!

Special thanks to Arthur The Last Ancient on soundcloud for our podcast theme.

For updates and more episodes please visit our website www.pressbtocancel.com, or find us on Twitter @pressbtocancel and Instagram @pressbtocancel.

What does 'Retro Gaming' mean to you? Whether it's NES pixel art or the first console you owned; we delve deep to find our personal definations of 'Retro'!

Special thanks to Arthur The Last Ancient on soundcloud for our podcast theme.

For updates and more episodes please visit our website www.pressbtocancel.com, or find us on Twitter @pressbtocancel and Instagram @pressbtocancel.

We've played a load of games this past year both modern and retro. Whether it's a fresh release or just new to us; we break down our 2019 games of the year.

Episode Transcription:
The below is a machine based transcription of this episode. Sorta like Skynet if it was 2 years old, and wanted a cookie. Take it with a grain of salt.

Jake 0:00
Welcome everybody to press be to cancel. Today's a special episode for us.

Palsh 0:06
Wait, what? Really?

Jake 0:07
Well yeah, I know we do have some special moments. tender loving, caring moments. Don't we Palsh?

Palsh 0:14
okay man.

Palsh 0:16
I love you.

Jake 0:17
Not on the podcast too soon to say

Wulff 0:21
it again.

Jake 0:42
We have a special episode today it's very special for us. We've been doing this for a couple of months now. And as is tradition for a lot of podcasts they have a game of the year episode and that's what we're going to do we're gonna start a tradition off right. I've had a few drinks says got back from work Christmas party. So this will be interesting. This is breastfeeding cancels, gave me the year edition. Now what's different for us? is we are we're not just a retro gaming podcast, but it's definitely a large component. So when I say this is our game of the year, we've selected two games, and they could be retro or modern. were easy.

Wulff 1:17
Okay? More so new to us.

Jake 1:20
Exactly new to us. So I am I am sick Jake. I'm this week's host. I'm not alone. Of course. I'm as always I'm joined by our usual crew. werewolf. How you doing?

Wulff 1:30
I'm okay. How you doing?

Jake 1:36
Was that? I'm sorry. Did

Wulff 1:38
you did you want me to go on longer? No,

Jake 1:40
we still Burt? Burt. You're yelling. And of course, we're also joined by the Miss Piggy the Kermit guy prime in the retro therapy. How you doing?

GP 1:50
I'm doing good. I've actually got two games picked out for every year since 1984. So I may have misunderstood the assignment. You're going to be late.

Jake 2:00
Yeah, but knowing you half those games are ones I think are bad. So it's okay.

GP 2:05
Yeah, 991 for 2003 hot garbage,

Jake 2:10
yet just completed the era of hot garbage. Mega Man one, honestly. And pulse. We're joined by Paul's one and nine. How are you sir? I'm kind of shy now because he said stuff I shouldn't have at the beginning of the. I'm good. Let's just keep going. I know we've buried our hearts to each other today on this podcast. And we'll flip it over to bearing our hearts for a couple games. So I guess we've all picked our personal you know, Game of the Year. new to us. That's great. But let me We'll start with our our secondaries are on honorable mentions, and kind of go around the table and get everybody's take on that game. So let's spin the wheel. Of course

Palsh 2:50
you can add to that at a later since you

Jake 2:53
GP you want to start what's your honorable mention for Game of the Year 2019.

GP 2:56
I hope this is allowable because it's it's Still in test phase like pre release kind of mode, but I have to mention savage the shard of gozen by our friend tober prime.

Jake 3:08
No

GP 3:10
Bionic Commando.

Jake 3:16
No Go for man savages. I mean toller prime is a fantastic dude, man and I love I only played five minutes of his game, but I've watched a lot of people play it. I've been saving it for myself personally, because it's early access. But if you love it, please tell us it's awesome.

GP 3:29
It is awesome. And knowing tober is cool. And having watched him the game be created is a big connection that I have to admit even without all of that just completely, objectively or subject whichever it is where it's just looking at it for what it is. It is truly a fun experience. A very well composed and thought out game. If I if I'm not playing it, I've thought about playing it pretty much every day since I've had access to it. I have a schedule of things I try to keep but I played a lot of my downtime

Wulff 3:58
outside of the stream is what I'm saying. So I want to jump in on this one since GP mentioned it. I also put a few hours into savage and this is a game I cannot wait to be finished, like yes, I really, really look forward to playing this in its final form. I kind of haven't gone back to it for that very reason like I bought it earlier I want I wanted to be a supporter of the game, it ended up being badass. I love what was there, but I didn't complete what was there because I want to save the game for when it's done. Like I'd like to go back and I'm sure it'll be quite different by that point. But it'll still be like different not mechanically but drop rates and maybe a couple of stats will affect the play differently. But other than that, I mean it'll be the same game that's it's the bones are there already

Jake 4:45
piles of both for those who haven't played it? What about this game? makes it so standout?

GP 4:50
I guess it's retro inspired. So it's definitely like a platform type. There's a lot of greats, kind of like quest and there's an overworld map and things like that. That's kind of me Innocent of dare I say like Final Fantasy six when it comes to the overworld The gameplay is fun the I don't say the RPG aspect because I that's that's a big thing to say. But you know you do go down to town you talk to a lot of the townspeople and there's multiple threads to pull on. from the get go like you've got the general idea the opening scenes are very well done. But then once you start, you have different paths that you can do so in that way, it's very choose your own adventure, and that's kind of the RPG aspect of it. But then just with with as werewolf mentioned, the stats, the different ways of lining up your inventory the way that you want to customize your playability. It just fires across a lot of different cylinders. And on top of that, it's a beautiful looking game. But yeah, so for me, that's what it is. It's great. It's kind of the old school retro style platformer with some RPG elements that just it delivers. And for as much as I've played it, I still feel like I've only scratched the surface. I think there's going to be a lot of replay value in The game whether or not you want to play lightly or really go deep, and try to try to get everything done.

Wulff 6:05
It's like Zelda two with I don't know, pick your favorite EGA vanja Yeah, and since those two smash together and you're good Symphony of the Night Aria sorrow or do you play any of them like, pick your favorite one and it'll probably it's like scratch that itch. But it's it's like that smash together with Zelda two and that but

GP 6:25
still completely original. Like that's the other part of it is for as much as it kind of harkens to some of these things. Because retro is a category you know that we think of it as it's hard not to reference things that it reminds us of, but it still is a very unique experience as well. Pulse Did you finish it? I think you finished the current build.

Palsh 6:46
Now I wish I'm doing the same thing as werewolf and kind of just I love it so much. And I actually I've gotten like the hunger to play it over and over again, but I'm holding back as much as I can because I want to but I just want to wait about it. Just mainly to support tober and I'll be frank with that it was like I don't like early access, but this game was so satisfying that I just wanted to keep going with it. But I'm forcing myself not to because I want to I want to do when it's complete. So I'm just I'm basically itching to beat the whole game I want to go and I don't want to have to be like, I need more.

Unknown Speaker 7:22
abstinence is fun.

Jake 7:25
I will say as well the the commercial tober made for for that game is is fantastic.

GP 7:31
Yeah, the guy gets it like he's, he understands kind of that that old school feeling of what is rad like you know the kind of heart of that that you know, talking about the commercial, but he gets a really good idea of what makes something fun or humorous or just truly like down to the balls awesome. If that makes sense.

Palsh 7:51
anything anybody who's listening to this, if you want to check out the website, or for buying it on Steam, we will link it here on our on our own website. If Listen, presby the canceled com

Jake 8:02
hashtag sponsored, sponsored.

Jake 8:07
All right, good. Um,

Wulff 8:09
quick question, are these honorable mentions outside of our two games?

Jake 8:13
No, I figured it'd be okay. week you're near number one and number two,

Jake 8:18
how many games you guys have? We have a lot of contingencies. I just, oh,

Jake 8:23
okay, Wolf, do you want to go next then?

Wulff 8:26
Okay, so, I guess my honorable mention, would really be Death Stranding, like The Walking concept because, yes, you know what a lot of people pick on this game. And like part of me really was like, kind of letting go of the idea of picking a 2019 game because I played like five of them. And the two big ones were this one man of Medan and I'm probably only 15 hours into Death Stranding at this point. But what I have played of that stranding it. It starts slow and That's no way to sell a game day. Anybody I will admit, for me a game has to have me within two hours for me to keep playing it and Death Stranding did that. Not necessarily with the gameplay, but the story, I found the gameplay. Interesting, but the story really pulled me in right away. So as I started playing further and further, like I wanted to see what this world was and as I got further into the game, digging into the story, the gameplay picked up to and honestly today, I guess a form of fast travel has opened up to me now and I'm like building freeways and shit. It's it's really bizarre. But I dig on it like it's it's, it's definitely a walking simulator or a driving simulator. Whatever your your your it's traveling. That's what this game is is traveling, picking your basically traveling, picking up garbage along the way and taking it to whoever dropped it. You

Palsh 9:56
basically sounded like you're making, you're talking about a futuristic world. Of The Rings and I'm kind of interested

Wulff 10:02
it I guess that's a good way to put it it

Palsh 10:05
just make them part of the walking simulator but

Jake 10:08
explaining with the the the when you walk away you have to do to keep keep balance. Please explain. Oh,

Wulff 10:12
yes, yes. Okay, so it's possible for your character, especially the more weight he's carrying to slip trip and fall. And so if he starts leaning, if his The, the the weight on his back or that what he's carrying starts leaning too far right, you have to hold the L to to get him to lean to the left and shift the weight back and vice versa. And if he does end up slipping, you've got about a second and a half to push the buttons. l&r both at the same time to keep him from wiping out because if he wipes out his cargo falls off, it takes

Palsh 10:48
damage, whatever, it's so bad.

Wulff 10:50
It's silly. I do agree. It's kind of silly, but it's it's something I don't think it's there for the purposes of like, look at this cool Gameplay loop. I think it's there to keep you engaged with the walking. Because if you were literally just running along from point to point, it would get boring. This is something that keeps you actively doing something in the game. But it's not high action high octane. It's like it's just keeping you it's keeping your attention without assaulting your senses. And I think that's kind of what the purpose was.

Jake 11:24
Like the Gameplay wise. I can't I can't stand it. But the story of the characters from the baby strapped in a jar in your on your chest to the guy you're talking to with a straight face. He's wearing a metal skull on his face, del Toro's in it Conan O'Brien's fucking in it. I mean, you have a canteen that collects rainwater and turns it not into drinkable water, but into Monster Energy into Monster

Wulff 11:52
Energy. I do think that's ridiculous. The your canteen converts rain or river water into my Monster Energy Drink,

Jake 12:01
what the hell you have to urinate and when you urinate there's a mushroom appears. And if other people see their mushroom in their instance, they can pee on it and it gets bigger.

Wulff 12:10
Yeah, and it spawns crypto by votes that lets you regain.

Jake 12:15
Like, this is the most amazing, fantastic game of the year that I will never ever want to play. I love I love watching it. It is so batshit and Shane, you can't help but love this game.

Wulff 12:26
I can completely understand people not wanting to jump into this game, I get it. But for me, I like weird shit. I'm a weird dude. I'm target audience. I think that

GP 12:38
there is some science to support if I remember the documentary correctly, the energy drink thing because you can use that as a tool to water your plants because from what I understand it has electrolytes in the energy drink. And that's what plants crave.

Wulff 12:58
Damn it.

Jake 12:58
So this comes out for the PC when this comes for the PC people going to mod it and I'm telling you the first person that replaces Monster Energy Drink with Canada's own bebas I will I will give them at least five bucks

GP 13:13
I think I need to email beaver buzz where they're going to try to get sponsored or we owe them money one of the two

Jake 13:19
they haven't tweeted tweeted like three years it's okay we're good.

GP 13:22
Okay, so maybe should we change it to jolt?

Palsh 13:27
No, it doesn't have that that lower behind it anymore.

Wulff 13:31
But yeah, this this game, it's it's definitely the more you do, the faster the gameplay loop gets. And I know that sounds kind of weird, but honestly, I played for a couple hours off stream today just because I wanted to like get some of the mundane stuff done. But not major story because I'm trying to save that for an audience you know

Palsh 13:51
what can be mundane in this game.

GP 13:55
If you can't even walk

Jake 13:56
right the the poop grenades explain the poop grenades. Please,

Wulff 14:00
oh my gosh, yes, there's so many weird things in this game. So you're the main character. The main character has some qualities to his blood and just his genetics in general. That make it to where his waist is even a viable weapon against what they call BTS or beach things that the ghosties of the game Yeah, mine too. You can you can basically hurl little grenades made out of either your pee, your poop or even your shower water. And I'm guessing they have varying degrees of effectiveness a go. I imagine none of them are as good as your blood grenades.

Jake 14:44
There are plus three to damage.

Wulff 14:47
And I realized that everything I'm saying about this game was probably just making people scratch their head like what the hell is this about?

Palsh 14:55
Now? I know he's still trying to figure that out. That's why

Wulff 14:58
I really am but i'm i'm just So into the story I'm so into the upgrade system like I've I've managed to actually upgrade my weapons today after stream get access to better upgrades for like carrying capacity and things like that by just running errands for people but it'll definitely speed up the pace of gameplay for later so

Palsh 15:21
if the last of us you get the spare parts at this word you get fiber

GP 15:27
for dinner grenades plus to

Wulff 15:32
sit down even like all all I've seen him eat those little bugs, the crypto buyouts that just look like what are they called? Water bears? Oh, tardigrades, tardigrades, yeah, they just look like giant float and I say giant because tardigrades are so damn small. They're like the size of a caterpillar. But they're just tardigrade looking flying grubs that you can pull out of water apparently land coral Beat. So, Jamie here, this game is weird. I'm really good at it. And I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes. So

GP 16:09
well, I will say this, my my son, I have a four year old son who who's somewhat coordinated but not at high speeds. So now whenever he starts tripping over himself, I'm just going to start yelling, L to L to

GP 16:25
have a second. I'm intrigued. I've watched you play some of this. And I remember scratching my head because of the words your bodily fluids pose no harm to him. And I remember thinking What is this? And now I know a little bit more. But I don't know anymore but I have more information

Wulff 16:42
and I'm very intrigued. This This game is very much like a David Lynch. experience on crack. It's just out there.

Jake 16:52
Yeah, Paul's any thoughts on destroying?

Palsh 16:54
I'm kind of with werewolf there. It's so out there that I just Want to pay attention more? Because it's like, I shake my head at everything that I've seen happen in this game, but at the same time, I don't want to look away I want to see what he's going to do next. It's like the Howard Stern effect kind of thing. You know, when he first came along, and everybody's like, you know the shock Jackie that's what is like, it's like a shock. shock, Jackie kind of thing, but for a video game. Is he really doing this because he wants to or is it just to keep people guessing? Because I'm constantly just questioning

Wulff 17:31
No, I think this is legit Hideo Kojima without being saddled by lore from Metal Gear. Yeah, right. He got to create a brand new existence a brand new universe and run with it.

Palsh 17:45
Yeah. And I mean Metal Gear as great as they are like they have so many like historical tie ins and stuff like that, especially with you know, history and, you know, war and stuff like that. But yeah, even then they've had some so many WTF And since those games and it's making those look realistic, like hyper realistic, I just Yeah, I just, I'll never play it but I am enjoying watching it. And I'll never play it just because I don't have a ps4. So

GP 18:14
is anybody checking in on Cosima to make sure that he's okay, I'm feeling like maybe there might be some red flags in the game about his. I just hope he's okay. Today Oh, if you're listening, we care. And thank you for your

Wulff 18:28
outright. I think he did outright respond to the negative reviews he was getting from the western press and said that Westerners don't get it or Americans don't get it or something like that. That's like, that's a little bit pretentious to say. It's like it's it's clearly not a game for everybody. Yeah, and that's fine. Not every game has to There you go. I love that. Thank you for saying that. But, but this is a game for me. I see it

Jake 18:53
and it's it's definitely good choice. Like there's comments the commentary in that game with the likes system and the roving mules and Former package delivery guys like there's things in that game that are weird but I can see where he's coming from as a commentary on on the way the world is today but to the extreme

Wulff 19:09
and where it's headed Yeah, all that kind of stuff so I mean it if you if you start like really thinking about the world that's built around what's like the weird circumstances in the world you start to kind of get an idea of where he's coming from on the social commentary side of things right but it's still got that weird like Silent Hill story going on out of left field that's constantly like what is happening?

Palsh 19:33
Yeah, it's it's definitely one of a kind will put it that way.

Wulff 19:38
Yes, I was. I was gonna say the last thing and it's something I said in GP stream earlier is that a lot of games active skills are reflexes, and memory. This game is active skills are patience and planning, and pool

Jake 19:56
which is planning and patient. I'm gonna

GP 19:59
eat this It's not for now, but for later.

Jake 20:04
I love it. Okay, Polish. How about you? What's your honorable mention for Game of the Year?

Palsh 20:09
It was tricky because I don't like playing favorites. Someone ever asked me what my favorite game is, I can give you a different answer depending on my mode or depending on what category so picking one was really tricky. So I'm going to go with one I'm still playing now and I've only been playing for last week, but that's how addicted I am for a runner up. That's what we're doing right runners up. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. So I'm going with Resident Evil to remake. I can easily say it's Game of the Year for me, but I've got I've got a reason behind that. I'll explain later. But this one is, it's hitting the nostalgia buttons on enough at the perfect intervals. Like it's just it's got me like, Resident Evil two is kind of where I've started falling in love with horror games and movies. I used to be terrified. Sleep with my parents. Every night because I was scared that zombies are going to kill us if I don't you know if I don't sleep with somebody and you know until I was like, you know 32 years old it's crazy can't sleep but uh so like resin evil two is always been my favorite. It's it's kind of the chrysalis that the catalyst sorry for me falling in love with an entire genre of games and it was part of my childhood so I knew this game better than most other games I've ever played. So I only get to play this recently like I only got about a week ago, I went in completely blind, all my friends were streaming it and as much as I wanted to support them, I couldn't watch I couldn't even leave a workout because I just wanted to watch it. I just I'm in love with it. It's the perfect amount of nods to the original and the perfect amount of updating. to not have it so dated. So they try to cover a lot of things that you know, the original You can't be because, you know this and that, like, why is the police station so convoluted in the stuff in this one, like they mentioned, it's, you know, built out of an old Art Museum of stuff. So they kind of take the, the original one and yeah, they, they kind of just try to put it in reality a little bit more and not just say, you know, hey, we're going to do this and this is how it is just because like, you know, we're going to make this fun. But it's not really realistic, you know, but the puzzles and stuff like that, they kind of fit in more and the gameplay is just great. It's satisfying. The graphics are beautiful. Every now and then, like, you're thrown for a loop because you you expected it to be like carbon copy with better graphics and new new engine. But like they change things up, but at the same time, they kept it so much the same that it feels like you're playing that game and it just blows my mind. I can't get enough of it. I can talk about it for hours and like I just want to talk about it with others. fans that are huge fans of it, because there's so many little nods, and I'm on my second play through it. And I'm catching on to stuff that I never caught the first time, I was nervous going through it, I didn't want to get scared, I didn't want to run out of ammo, I didn't want to die, you know. And after that, you start getting confidence and next thing you know, you get cocky. And the more thing you know, your first play through was like seven or eight hours the next time for and the next time after this two and a half like you get comfortable with it. And it's not that it gets boring. It's just you understand the system adapted itself the same way as me playing the original. So I think it's just so many levels of nostalgia for me that I can't get enough of it.

Jake 23:40
Did they change the 10 controls in this one? Do they get rid of that or

Wulff 23:43
doesn't it control more like Resident Evil for now?

Palsh 23:46
It's more like four Yeah, it's kind of somewhere in between seven and four for controls because you're doing third person over the shoulder but I mean, third person over the shoulder is like a much better tank control anyways, because Is this the same control scheme, but your view is different? Right? So the tank controls are necessary in the original ones because otherwise, every time the camera angle changed, you know, you'd go veer off course. So it's kind of integral to it. And that became part of the series. People complain about it and complain about it. And then when they took it out in resin evil six, all of a sudden, people were like, sucks, you know, and that's part of I think, the tank controls were part of the the immersion for me, you don't you can't jump around like you're Mario and, you know, pop off of different things and stuff. So the control kind of limits you and it kind of adds to the suspense because you can't have these amazing reflexes, you know, so you have to play any movements more.

Jake 24:42
Yeah, Resident Evil is as much about the controls in a style than anything else. I think that's why when they did move three recently coming out, people were kind of harping on it complaining about it because it's kind of dated in gameplay. But it's a Shenmue game, right or Shenmue. However you want to say it, and it feels like the game from what 13 years ago so they knew the style they're going for and the people who liked that series like it for that particular style I think resin evil the same way

Palsh 25:07
yeah and when they when they listened to enough people and changed it in resin evil six that's you know that's the worst game the franchise and and like it was like Final Fantasy 13 for me I never gave it a second try and I want to say

Wulff 25:21
to is a game I've yet to really do much with I have I haven't even done much looking into it because that's another one I've wanted to keep pretty much blind for myself just because too was my favorite of the Resident Evil series.

Palsh 25:34
Yeah, and that that's exactly why I stayed away from it. So if you were a fan of the original that I think you will thoroughly enjoy this one

Jake 25:42
cool yeah for me it was the third one Nemesis is when I played when I was younger and never really got chance to play to my uncle was huge into it though I it's one where I want to go back and play it now or at least play the remaining because everybody's been raving about it. Like this game is incredibly popular for cash. Come they've been killing it this past year. So I'm looking for to planet.

Palsh 26:04
I also felt a little guilty for my game of the year being from this actual year so

GP 26:10
backwards saying that is when we get to that point where we're like, I want to do gimme you the year but I don't know about doing it for this year. Yeah. Yeah, what a great year. That year was 1989 now and I'm with you guys Resident Evil two for me was my introduction to the series but it was it still has maintained as my favorite. I've seen some of the remake and it looks dope as hell, but kind of like polish. I eventually want to get to it but I haven't really sat down watched it yet. You know, cuz I want to play through it. But yeah, if it's as great as everybody says it is, which I believe it will be. I'm excited for it. I just don't know if I will get exiled for playing a 2019 game on a retro themed channel.

Jake 26:58
So I rebranded the Modern therapy. Yeah,

GP 27:01
I yeah,

Wulff 27:02
just make a second channel the modern pair.

GP 27:05
Maybe? Maybe

Wulff 27:09
the I just want to play it anyway there. Yeah,

Palsh 27:12
I'll just give you my stream key focus.

GP 27:17
Hi, everybody, this is possible. No nine. I have a cold. That's all I'm gonna say. I love Canada.

Wulff 27:26
Just give him just give him your little talking face and you're good to go.

Unknown Speaker 27:31
Alright, I guess let's meet now. So my honorable mention for me, Jake. Jake, what's your about mentioned it?

Jake 27:41
Well, I thank you for asking. I wasn't sure if he was going to say so for me, it's tough because I'm terrible with starting games and never finishing them. Like I'm really bad at it. And I always complain about companies that release games that are I won't say too long. Maybe it's more accurate to say that they don't respect the players time, right? I mean, I'm older. I I kids I work, I don't have a lot of time to play games. If I play one, it's got to be really good for you to finish it. And I don't want to spend 80 hours anymore on these things. I love JRPGs but they're too much of a time sink for me. So it's been very tough this past year to find a game that I can finish in and enjoy in a short timeframe. The longest game I played this year was probably fallen empires, not fallen empires, Fire Emblem. I've had a few. I'll say it again. But there is one game that was just the other week came out and it's Star Wars Jedi fallen order. And I was so done on Star Wars after less Jedi, and solo especially like I had zero interest the new movies coming out in a couple of weeks. My wife wanted to go see it. And I'm like, Do we have to? Can I just can we just like you know, watch on Netflix a year from now. And I was done. Between Mandalorian and Jedi fallen order the game. It's put me in such a mood. Like we went and got the fanciest frickin tickets. I spent $30 on movie tickets. I never do that. I am down for Star Wars now Disney is hooked me again the son of a bitches. So following order is it is honorable mention because there's nothing groundbreaking about it. They're taking the best elements or, or elements from various different games like the climbing reminds me Breath of the Wild a little bit or Uncharted. There's a checkpoint system that is very dark souls inspired. Combat reminds me when you swing the lightsaber around like you're Gerald from Witcher three, they took a lot of elements from various different games and smash it all together. You say took out with a really great soundtrack and a really good it's a good

Palsh 29:37
story adorable.

Jake 29:38
We also said sons of bitches. Some of the bitches Look, I get a little bit emotional when I've had a few different drink and I'm talking about my passion. Okay. Yeah, baby Yoda. It's amazing. What's wrong.

GP 29:50
I haven't watched it. I haven't watched it. I haven't watched it. All.

Jake 29:54
Spoilers. Okay. Wow. All right. Stop the pop.

Wulff 30:00
I'm not on the Star Wars hype train by any means, but I'm probably more into Star Wars now than I ever was growing up. So take that take that as you will. Getting back on track fallen order looks pretty cool. It does look good.

GP 30:13
And that's got that accurate right and the guys punchable punchable face

Wulff 30:18
Yeah, the not Joker Joker from Gotham. Yeah,

Jake 30:22
yeah or the kids are but his face wants me want to hit him and he's

GP 30:25
an amazing actor and I feel bad I can't think of his name because he I think it's Cameron Monaghan that sounds right.

Wulff 30:32
That sounds sounds about it.

Jake 30:35
challa him Monahan Let me

GP 30:36
check my Instagram because I

Wulff 30:38
actually following Oh, we're sorry if you ever actually hear this episodes here. I really liked

Jake 30:48
your fantastic Kim

GP 30:50
Monahan

Jake 30:51
Yeah, and what they did was really neat in this game with the graphics, the graphics are quite a bit, very high quality and they even run in my opinion Computer upstairs I'm really impressed. But what I like about the character models themselves, is they digitized very accurately the faces of the voice actors. So there's a comedian Deborah Wilson and an actress. She used to be on that TV. Very funny person. She's one of the characters in this play a very serious role and it's she nails it and it looks just like her. They did an amazing job. Wow. So like the characters in this game are very relatable. They're very well done. The overall story. It's Star Wars, right? Like it's, it's cheesy, little bit hokey, but it's Star Wars. And there's a lot of parallels to like Rogue One as the standalone movie. Because of the standalone. They had to solve their stories in that that one movie and it felt really tight. This game is the same thing. It's the Star Wars universe, but it's its own contained story is relevant to the whole lore I guess if you want to say that but it stands on its own so well. And I think it's just really great and then like mechanics, you can play like a dark souls. You can check the difficulty up if you like the soul style game. You can do that. Me personally, I don't have the patience for it. I tried. I died to this one frog three times and I threw the controller. And I said too easy. And then I played the story and the story was fantastic. You

Wulff 32:10
know what I can appreciate the single serving stories like that, though not every single experience out there needs to be like a 12 part saga. Sometimes you run a one and done kind of story, experience it have the good times, give it an ending. Don't leave it. Don't leave the audience hanging with every single entry.

GP 32:29
Every word you just said we're will sounds like a one night stand. Get out there and have your fun, give it an ending. Don't leave people hanging and be done with it. Don't take it to breakfast. Was that how

Palsh 32:40
that works? I've been doing a rock.

GP 32:42
That's because you're polite calls.

Jake 32:44
Right? You don't need her dad pregnant and going to the dark and just not

GP 32:48
get any but the actress that you were saying was from med TV. Your answer to this is going to depend it's going to determine whether or not I play this game. Is it the actress who played Stewart's mom? No It's Deborah Wilson.

Jake 33:02
I'm struggling to go character she played on that TV.

Wulff 33:06
Oh, she did the with Sullivan. I can't remember her first name the blonde woman. They did the

GP 33:12
know Nicole Sullivan. I remember because she was on.

Wulff 33:14
Yes. Okay. So Deborah Wilson, I believe, did a few skit sketches with Nicole Sullivan. As hairdressers.

GP 33:25
Oh, no, I sorry. I just Yeah, she's wonderful. Okay, I'll probably go Yeah, yeah, she was just gonna say if it's Stewart's Mom, I'm not gonna be able to play the game.

Jake 33:35
No, it's not okay. Yeah, but it's a really solid title. Like I said gameplay not revolutionary. No, but they took the best elements of various series and mash it together. It's great. It's also got one of the greatest intros, I think of a game in recent memory. It opens up with Mongolian folk throat singing, and I know that sounds fun. Just trust me. It's a great game for sure. All right. Moving along, I guess let's get to our now number ones our official game of the year. Games circle back around a GP. Thank you. I forgot who we started with.

GP 34:10
This is um,

Wulff 34:12
I'm helping hands.

GP 34:15
This is my game of the year. Okay, there's my official one. Then there's one I have to make mention of not the Honorable Mention but something I want to address, because it's important, but my game of the year is River City Ransom underground. And you guys know exactly why I'm going to say that because before the podcast existed before we were pressed me to cancel, we were four buddies playing that game together River City Ransom underground. And when we beat the game, not only was it fun, not only was it you know, a great call back to the river city, ransom the planet with you guys and all the updates and all the things that they did were so well executed, but by the time it was done, I was let down that it was done. I wanted there to be more and more and more And more. So much fun. And I remember the conversation after we beat it. The four of us was like, well, do we play it again? Or do we play something else? And then of course, the podcast idea came up. And of course, it was a great idea and it's been

Wulff 35:14
a lot of fun. But I the podcast idea came up like the second or third time we played. Oh, yeah, we just kind of were like, yeah, okay, but I mean, like pulling,

GP 35:24
pulling the trigger on it and say, No, let's do this. Because even though we can't say any of the stuff, we played, well, playing the game, we had enough chemistry or whatever to do this. So that was my favorite new gaming experience of the year. And a big part of it is because of you guys, but I mean, the game itself was tremendous, and it was so light hearted and fun, but absurd, like the absurd level of that game. Not quite as bizarre as the Cocina entry from earlier. But really, like just such a great continuation of what it was back then. And as And a bunch of new flair. And you can tell it was made by people who loved and cared about the original and I like that it came through and it was to me like I said, the best gaming experience I've had for a newer game. Nobody can get y'all are crying. And then the other thing I have to say real quick, and I'm just very briefly we don't have to have a discussion about it. I want to apologize to anybody who's ever encouraged me to play Super ghouls and ghosts, the retro therapy we've been doing a year of blind playthroughs and so my like fringe Game of the Year is super ghouls and ghosts played it in May for the first hour April as a blind run. never wanted to play it didn't look interesting. fucking love that game. I was way wrong. Game of the Year in my heart super goals and ghosts but for New Game of the Year, River City Ransom underground

Jake 36:49
for River City there's one just came at River City girls came out by bus different with studio and it's not the same and I was when I heard that title. Oh, another River City game. I was so hype for it and it's not a bad game there You seem okay on it but it doesn't play anything like the four player Co Op like just shit show River City underground is and I was like sad like actually sad that I couldn't play with you guys and it wasn't the same spark right so I think that's very telling what the original was really great fun and just absurd characters like isn't a principal a Bobo isn't it?

Wulff 37:25
Yeah a Bobo is principal a Bobo teach bad student lesson

GP 37:33
It was great humor

Palsh 37:35
was like cool like Kool Aid man just like a double dragon.

GP 37:39
It was It was great. It was a wonderful experience. I hope that you guys I sounds like 68 it but I hope you guys all enjoyed it as much.

Wulff 37:46
Oh, yeah, that game it. It hits so many notes it. It had random nods to just so many things like so many various beloved franchises of yesteryear and

GP 37:59
some deep Slight Oh, your headset? Yes, great.

Wulff 38:02
There was so many things, there was so many references that like one of us would catch that the others didn't. And it would be like, Oh, yeah, and I even I played through this game probably two full times. So once with you guys once with another friend of mine and probably another to halfway through, like once we just pause before we did the all four of us thing and then once just by myself that's how much I like this game is just satisfying because they

Palsh 38:33
they fixed. They like they took what was great about it and then just improved on it because it was just a labor of love kind of deal. And the music music is great. Just everything else. tons, tons of characters, tons

GP 38:45
of characters. Everybody had their own unique attacks,

Wulff 38:48
doesn't playable characters after you unlock everybody.

GP 38:51
Wow. Yeah.

Jake 38:53
One guy does a hadoo Glenn.

GP 38:55
Yeah. And then there's these, you know, well, there's you know, the Chad's You're like all just completely jacked and doing push ups with their chins to hit Yeah. And it's just, it's the right level of crazy and the the operating not the operating system but the, the way in which you have to accomplish stuff, or level up is is fantastic. You can go to saunas, you can go and eat beef jerky, I can't really describe it very well and do it justice, but you guys know, and if you've played it, then you get it. But if you haven't played it, get with it, act like you want it, download it, play it, find some friends, and make some connections because it's

Wulff 39:34
fun, like added to your wish list or something and keep an eye out for a deal on this game if you're hesitant, but I mean, it hits a deep sale a number of times a year. So this is highly recommended one to get your hands on.

Jake 39:47
And like the original river city ransom. I tried playing that after we play the new one, right? I don't like the original at all. But Underground's awesome I fantastic. I want to play it again like the original, just something but it didn't click, like this new one does. It's weird.

Palsh 40:05
It's kind of like Borderlands two. I can't go back to Borderlands the same because yeah, they just made the second one so much better. Yeah, and I hate it because I love that game.

Jake 40:17
All right. Well, how about you? What's your game of the year of 2019?

Wulff 40:20
Um, you know what the game that I first like that. Then another new game to me this year. And I mean, I'm keeping it relatively recent right now. Not on purpose. It just happened to be like, I've played a lot of older games, and I was playing a lot of games that were completely new to me this year catching up on stuff on my ps4. So, Dad of war. Yeah, God of War for the ps4, that that's the one that got me It did. But I mean, it's this story about credos and his son and the relationship they don't have. That becomes one by the end of the game. And just the overall game itself, the game players a lot of fun, the conference That was interesting and kept refreshing itself throughout the game because you got access to new new stuff, but it didn't feel like you were burdened by the combat or anything. You know. I don't know that the story between the father and son it got me right in the fields. And I mean, maybe that's because I have a five year old son of my own. I don't know, but I was like, man, and there were points where I was, I was, boy, there were points where I was mad at credos for being such as to his son, a trace and then there were points where I was mad at trace for being such a dick the dad so you know. It's almost like real life. I actually cared about all the characters in this game like there were there was the blacksmith's. They were interesting and fun. One of them is just this crass, dirty old uncle type of bastard and the other one is a total germaphobe neat freak can a guy they're both very interesting stories like the lore behind hind the world. It's, I mean, they make pretty deep cuts into the Norse mythology. And it's all super cool. It's pretty spot on as far as what they pulled and built off of a I This was my first god of war. I haven't played any of them prior to this.

Palsh 42:17
It might be a step down from here on in just fair warning.

Wulff 42:20
What do you mean? You started that? Uh, whoa, yes, yes. Yeah. But I had, I had no connection with the characters prior to this. So it's not like, you know, I knew a lot of people who played the old god of war games and they were like, oh, man, credos is so cool. And then I never got into it wasn't it wasn't the type of game I was looking for at the time. And this year, it it hit all the right notes for me, and I was so pleased to play through it.

Jake 42:46
The voice actor of creatives crisper judge, he's by to con Stargate and she is so good and that the voice acting overall and the game is really good, but you're right when he says boy, oh my god, it just hits all those notes. Indeed. And it's just like such a spectacle of a game. With the fights and whatnot, it just, uh, it is it's, it almost got me to buy a ps4. I made a commitment to the PC gaming this generation I told myself, I would not get another Xbox or ps4. And it's been so hard because Sony has been knocking them out those exclusives that are really fantastic. And God of War almost had me. I'm dying to play it.

Wulff 43:25
Yeah, I think I'm the only one here who's played that one. So we don't have to dwell on it too long. Basically, if you haven't played it, and you can do so please.

Jake 43:34
So Paul, shovel you What's your game of the year for 2019?

Palsh 43:38
My game of the year I was thinking hard and long about this and that in that order? No, not really. I couldn't decide for a while but I wanted to give this something. I couldn't decide between Resident Evil two which I've only been playing for last week and something else but I'm going with hollow night and the reason I gave this The edge over Resident Evil two was not because I enjoyed it better, because they're both I can't I can't compare him to two different games. They're both just so good. But uh, I like the fact that Hollywood I first half it's an indie game that hit it big, and for damn good reason because it's just an amazing game. It hits so many like, buttons again, I just like you know, if you liked Castlevania Symphony of the Night, which I loved, of course, and the economy is, this one is like a completely different storyline is the best Metroidvania I've played. That's not, you know, a Castlevania basically. And I just really thought that after I reading up on it, and discussing with people what they did when they developed this game and how they've worked with it. I didn't know this was a Kickstarter game until I was halfway through. And I'm really wary of Kickstarter games for the most part, but I mean, that's all because I tried to buy Something on Kickstarter wants and I got burned. So I just said Oh, it's all garbage. Garbage is bliss hot garbage. Yeah. But no, I really liked the fact that they destroyed their Kickstarter cool. And as a result, they added extra content they have free DLC, which is the only way to do DLC. Personally, I can't stand the concept of DLC. For me, it's just like, oh, why are you selling an incomplete game that's, you know, stretching it out and trying to make money in the meantime and try to keep the buzz going. Like I'm just very negative when it comes to DLC. And I like how they did it because first off, it was free second half. It was great. It wasn't just like a cheap extension of the game. There's just so many great ways that they did it and apparently that they're working on a spin off or sequel I don't know what to call it. But the people that that contributed to the original Kickstarter campaign for hollow night apparently get the new game for free.

Jake 45:57
Oh wow.

Palsh 45:58
That's so little Things like yeah, and so like these indie devs are I think they're doing everything right and that's I think Capcom made resin evil to remake and it is amazing and they know what they're doing. They've made many mistakes along the way but they're also one of the biggest names in the world. These guys are you know, I've never heard of them before. This is the game that they are famous war and that's pretty much the only game they got and they're killing it. And I just really wanted to serve my support to them because I think it's amazing. So I'm looking forward to anything else that they put it in the future and just want to do spread that spread that enthusiasm to anybody who hasn't played it. To definitely check it out because retro inspired first off and it is like I said one of a kind for a metro Metroidvania which is not an easy thing to do your your cartoon bugs and the story is really deep, considering how cartoony and how innocent it is. It can be an At the same time really Gothic and really morose but still makes you feel good makes you happy to play it.

Jake 47:08
It's definitely going to style man I like the whole role of the bugs and the grubs and the color palette is very very specific

Wulff 47:15
it to me it screams of like Tim Burton with bugs. Yes,

Palsh 47:21
yes, I like that that's that's that's a great analogy there.

Jake 47:25
It's one where I don't think I gave it a fair shake when it first came out and I have to go back and play it because I did try it but I found it a little bit of a difficult side or at least initially and I think I fell off it but I have to go back and try

Wulff 47:37
I can see how that happened. What platform Are you playing on? It was PC Okay, so you've got a nice big chunky controller is gonna say if you're playing on switch, those two icons are not going to do you any favors. It was like this you need to have a big controller where it's easy to get from button a button and maneuver the joypad your hands is not going to to easily cramp up this was the game that I probably first streamed. When I started really getting into streaming. I had a lot of fun with this game. But for me my biggest issue with the game is just how samey the color palettes are sometimes I legit could not see enemies on certain screen it can get tricky like that. And that's probably more in me issue than an issue with the game itself. So I don't it's not something I hold against the game that was just my issue with the game but the boss fights and a lot of the level design and everything the world building it was all so much cool. So much fun, so cool at the boss fights and it specifically I just, they were so much fun to learn and figure out and master save for like maybe one of them that just pissed me off to no end until I beat it after it doesn't attempt.

Palsh 48:54
The boss fights. Some of them were brutal and it came harking back to the days of NAS hard, where you stick through it, and you get Spidey and you want to beat it. And when you finally do, it's just such a satisfaction that you're just proud of yourself and you keep going. And I think the more bosses that you fight, and the more that you struggle with it, I think the makes it just, the more you want to play it.

Wulff 49:17
I also liked that this game sort of encouraged the player to be a little bit more mindful of where they traveled. It ate up one of your active charms slots, or maybe two or three of your active charm slots to First off, be able to see the map when you're running around. Or maybe see which room you're in or see your specific location, things like that. Yeah, otherwise, you didn't get that you just got to see the map. And I that might have been a charm tonight. I think about it. But I'm not sure

Palsh 49:48
you have you can look at the map anytime you want to but to see where you were in relation to everything, you had to use one of the terms so yeah, yeah. So that was always on for me.

Wulff 49:58
Me too. I was so Last the few times I elected to go without that thing I was I don't know what room I'm in. I have no idea. So I just started keeping it, it became a staple.

Palsh 50:07
You very much have to have that as far as I'm concerned it The world is God I want to say it is three times bigger than I expected. I'm not excited and like, you know, I was about a quarter of the way through the game and I thought I was half done. I thought I was like three quarters the way down. And my friend saw my map and he said, Oh, yeah, you're doing good. You You were about 30% and I'm like what? Wow. Yeah. And so it's it's it's a big game and it's challenging. It'll take you a while. But it is worth every penny. I think it's just great.

Wulff 50:46
And then there's the the challenge areas where like, the platforming oh my gosh, you I don't know if you did many of those are any of them but I did. I remember doing the one where everything is white and It's like a lot of clouds and stuff. And each you gotta jump on buzz saws and everything. It's a lot of platforming, a lot of perfectly timed attacks to things that'll hurt you to bounce up off of them and keep platforming. I had a lot of fun with it. It was very difficult but also it I felt very accomplished after completing it.

Palsh 51:19
Yeah, the controls for that. They're so tight in the best way. So if you die, you're like, that was my phone. Yeah, that was my fault. You never going to throw that throw the controller and you know, like the Castlevania mode. Like when you're playing the original Castlevania games and you get thrown off because something hits you made jump and stuff. Now it's nothing like that. It's just it's challenging and a whole different level.

Jake 51:42
Like Dark Souls combat was always difficult. But I always felt if I died, I felt a lot of time I died because of the slowdown of the animations. It wasn't it was fluid, but there wasn't as much control over your movements. Yeah. Whereas with hollow night, I mean, it's dead of it. There's obvious Dark Souls inspiration here. The combat is fast and like you said, controls very tight. And you are precise with your movements right you have full control your character and if you're right if you die, and I never did I say it's because the game has bad controls or gameplay. It's just it's just too hard for me. That was my fault. Yeah, exactly.

Palsh 52:19
So it's definitely it's just one of those games where I don't really have a complaint about it except for the fact that it's just, there's so much that I want to do. Yeah, it's there's so much to it and getting like 100% on everything it is. It is a big pill to swallow if you want to do that. So

Jake 52:37
Alright, awesome. I guess that leaves us Jake.

Wulff 52:40
Bring it home. Jake. Jake, what do you

Jake 52:42
know? Yeah, sorry. I just got back to GP laughing I my games my game when I mentioned what it was. So for me, my game of the year. It's not new to me. But I played it a whole lot this year. And I gotta start by saying, I don't like beat him ups. Everybody raves Mostly to rage, and final fight and all those games. I don't like them, I never really got into them. The only one that I really cared for and it came from when I was a kid, my friend had a Master System. And I had a lot of fun memories going to his place to play it. And the one game we played quite a bit was Double Dragon. My game of the year is double dragon for the Master System.

Palsh 53:21
See, I thought you were just building up how you're going to start talking about something more recent. So for the fact that I knew what you're going to say,

Wulff 53:30
Now, like, I've not played this game. I never really played much Double Dragon in general. What I did play was when I was younger, and I sucked at it, and it was on the ns like that's the one I played. Yeah, and I even cheesed my way through that game. I want to say last year, late last year with safe states because I finally got fed up with trying to do a full single setting of that game. I just couldn't do it. I'm hoping the Master System version is better. Otherwise, I'm calling shenanigans on your turn.

Jake 54:02
From once people are disagreeing with me, that never happens. So okay, you're right so the I've been trying to get into the Double Dragon because I know that's the most common one people have been playing. The problem I have with that part of the game is and we mentioned before in the podcast, Nintendo when they brought certain franchises over to the me as they kind of insisted that be something more unique or additions made to the game to separate it from the other versions. Because Double Dragon as an IP, or the first one is important to literally everything. If you want to a hot garbage time. It's the Skyrim Double Dragon for mid 80s. Yeah, we'll play the Atari 2600 version. It exists. It uses one button and a joystick. And if you play Double Dragon the NES you know that you've you really should have three buttons for that game. Right in order to jump you need to push a and b at the same time. It's terrible. The Atari only has one button.

Palsh 54:57
You have an automatic jump kick soon as you do Anything with it jumping So,

Jake 55:01
right but you have to unlock it in the NDS version. What's the message to them to get off don't not to get too far off track. They are different games. The ns has technical limitations with it. Right? The reason I like the Master System on I know never heard of that before a bit systems being crappy blunt. Like the Master System version was Co Op, you could play with a friend. In fact, it was meant to be played with a friend. Wow. It's on screen Co Op, as well. Yes version. I had a restriction of I want to say two enemies at once on screen. And they were almost I think they had to be the same sprite when they did it. So if you to Bobo's

Wulff 55:35
Miss,

Wulff 55:37
right?

Jake 55:39
Yeah. So the sprites looked a little bit better on the vs vs Master System, but you only had two enemies on the screen at one time. So I mean that and for whatever reason, Nintendo I guess, for that port had shoehorned in some platforming elements, which were terrible, right and it jumping in a game is bad and it's bad in the Master System as well. But nobody In the Master System version is there moving platforms or things you have to navigate the only jump that's really a pain in the butt is the division three you're in the jungle area or forest area and there's a bridge broken into jump across it that's the only real tricky jump jumping is optional. Yeah, but the NAS had so many other jumps that were just terrible. Yes, right. So my system has Co Op First off, I want to say three enemies max on screen if not for and you can have different enemies on screen at once. The first level the end boss is a red a Bobo and there's another guy on the screen or two Why don't you guys the screen and same time I believe, but it's great for that. I played a lot of double dragon in the arcades. When I was a kid. It was Double Dragon and it was a lot of rampage the original rampage nice and this is very true to the arcade. It does not look as nice. The sprites are designed quite different. But the stage layout and the music is almost spot on. Release. Nostalgia tells me it was very similar to the arcade game it's also easier as well more forgiving the enhanced version I say that there's no continuous I think in that one no wrong

Wulff 57:11
there are not

Jake 57:12
right and that's ass.

Palsh 57:15
Stupid okay.

Wulff 57:16
For no reason not agree more.

Jake 57:19
Right so Master System you have unlimited continues. For this first three missions is only four missions, you have a limit continues for the first three it's only at the fourth mission that whatever you had, you have to finish the fourth message force force. wow I've had a few. The fourth mission, you have to use your remaining lives and that's all you get. So if you finish mission three with one life you only have one life and no continuous permission for that's a bit annoying, but it let it prepares you the first three missions to kind of make your way through the game is definitely challenging some of the fights, but you have that cushion if you need it. The difficulty ramp up is pretty smooth first mission the enemies you face. And then once you the mission three it ramps up quite a bit and then for it gets a lot harder but it just a great professional way through. But I love it and Co Op because you just battling with a friend right and I get it now for beat him ups for people who play beat him ups. I could never get through the first few stages I just never understood. How can you get there with one life far How do you guys survive that but when you realize when you're playing these games, you got to find the certain moves and when them use them use them. It's very much a placement of your sprites. When you're playing Double Dragon the Master System, you want to bob and weave a bit to avoid getting jump kicked. But the enemies for example, you want to know that the way the AI moves, you can kind of predict the way that moves if you watch carefully enough and you can understand how the game works. Picking that game apart this past year to try and get my time down because I was trying to stream it for retro block party. And originally I played it took me an hour and 10 minutes to beat it just too long. So I want to get it down and I just played it over and over again and I just got such a groove learning the ins and outs of that game and I can do it now and 30 minutes no problem. Wow. It's got to a point where I love playing that game so much and I can just sit down and relax planet I've started speed running it in my off time I hate

Jake 59:07
I'm not a speed runner

Palsh 59:09
ever Who are you?

Jake 59:11
I know who am I it's like I'm not a Jake but it's actually one speed from this game like it's just there's no glitches while there's a couple but it's not like you're you know you're you're zips and weird screen tricks like some speed running games. Double Dragon is just a straight you got to play it and you got to play it well you need to know what moves to use and how to position yourself with the AI. It's just as true game as you can get. I love it. The End sequence is also especially noteworthy if you're playing Co Op. Well, I guess the spoilers, but Nintendo version, you know, a 30 year old game, the end of the Nintendo game, you beat the big ugly with the machine gun. You then face Your brother is his baby. I guess his name is he's the boss and he's super cheap. And the mass system version if you play Co Op after be the guy the machine gun you must beat your brother to death your co op becomes one on one and that's who wins the game.

Unknown Speaker 1:00:06
First time that happened,

Jake 1:00:07
my friend and I were dying laughing when one of us won the one died. It was just hilarious that you're playing Co Op for for missions. And you get to the end and you gotta beat on your partner it just hilarious is great. Like I don't think any other medium of game has done quite that. I thought that was pretty

Wulff 1:00:24
that's quite a twist ending for an any or you know for an eight bit game. Not Yeah, Master System. But still. That's, that's pretty cool.

Palsh 1:00:32
I want to play it now. Because when you take a platforming, like that sounds more appealing.

Wulff 1:00:37
I might go back visit this one.

Jake 1:00:41
Yeah. And you have all your moves from the beginning. You can do the elbows and drop kicks, all right from the gecko, and it's fine like Nintendo one is not a bad game. It's fine. I do like it but the Master System one for me just really has that nostalgia belt. It just rings it really clear. It reminds me the arcade game. The music is there. The gameplay is there. It's a fun Co Op game and I've played it so much this year that I've actually started speed running it. And I've never ever said that word with my name in a sense. So for me, it's declared Game of the Year for me just and how much I've enjoyed that retro title.

Palsh 1:01:13
I think the only thing I dislike about what I've seen of that game, that version is that the coffee mug fists aren't quite as prominent. That's it.

Jake 1:01:24
That's a big, pretty key criterion or a big games.

Palsh 1:01:28
It is for me that was the third video game I've ever played. It's high in my record.

Jake 1:01:35
Alright, well I think that will do it. That is of course the game of the year for us not just retro, modern two or anything between the new to us all of your titles for presby 2019. I think this is something we're going to get tradition. Maybe not has made drinks and Jake before he does it.

Jake 1:01:53
That's fantastic. Well, thank you, everybody who's here. Pulse where Can everybody find you?

Palsh 1:01:58
You can find me here. Every now and then I do stream on Twitch at twitch TV slash pulse. 109 says pa l as h 109.

Jake 1:02:08
And we're all working folks find you.

Wulff 1:02:10
They can find me and Twitch and twitter at werewolf w ar EWULF. f.

Jake 1:02:18
and GPS so stunned about my selection for my personal Game of the Year. He is speechless. You can find him at the retro therapy on Twitch TV, or search the retro therapy over on YouTube's. I think he's on Instagram and Twitter too. You'll see him around. He streams a lot. He's a good guy by Nick coughing, but we love and I'm sick Jake, you find me on Twitch mostly, mostly Twitter, just like everybody says just right here, here on presby to cancel. It's been a hell of a year. Here's to another year going forward. Thank you everybody.

Wulff 1:02:53
Thank you all for listening

Palsh 1:02:55
to speeds

Wulff 1:02:57
to an 818

Jake 1:03:03
Special thanks for music go to Arthur, the ancient found on Soundcloud or the last station on YouTube. For more episodes, please visit our website presby to cancel.com as well Feel free to like or subscribe at Apple iTunes, Google podcasts or anywhere else you'd like to listen to your favorite shows. As always, thank you.

Special thanks to Arthur The Last Ancient on soundcloud for our podcast theme.

For updates and more episodes please visit our website www.pressbtocancel.com, or find us on Twitter @pressbtocancel and Instagram @pressbtocancel.

Everyone knows them. Everyone loves them. Final Fantasy 6 & 7 each hold a dear place in many gamer hearts. This episode we examine what makes them so different, yet so similar.

Episode Transcript: The below is a machine based transcription of this episode. Sorta like Skynet if it was 2 years old, and wanted a cookie. Take it with a grain of salt.

Palsh 0:00
Tara or Tifa Eris or Eric Celeste or sell us today on Press B to Cancel. Mm hmm.

Palsh 0:14
Oh wait, I don't know how our actual song goes because I

Jake 0:18
already have a dream crowd

Jake 0:19
right now.

Palsh 0:43
So guys, welcome. I am post one and nine. Today we are going to talk about Final Fantasy six and Final Fantasy seven. With me I have the council as I like to call them and I'm trying to make it stick so hopefully it'll stick. I have

Jake 1:03
Sic Jake Hey, glad to be here. We have

Palsh 1:03
wereWulff Hay ho. And we have guy prime.

GP 1:06
I think I have to go with Rosa, Final Fantasy four. Thank you. Deal. Okay,

Palsh 1:11
so yeah, let's just switch that skill straight into Final Fantasy four instead. Let's talk about some Final Fantasy six and Final Fantasy seven day that I think we're all for the most part Final Fantasy fans in here in the council. Anybody want to argue against that? Or state against that?

GP 1:31
And hold it against you? Hi.

Wulff 1:33
Okay. I am but depends on the game. Yeah, that's fair. So

Palsh 1:38
let's just try to talk a little objectively between the differences between six and seven. There's been a lot of, you know, debate on what is the greatest Final Fantasy game and seven of course is at the top of most people's lists. For me, it's not my just for argument's sake, mine personal Favorite is for but I think the best game is six. Haven't you? GP?

GP 2:06
I'm with you Final Fantasy for actually my favorites. I Oh, yes I think I do have to give a bit of an edge to Final Fantasy six over seven

Palsh 2:17
edges in for about that six.

GP 2:20
Oh god that was good. Well done okay

Palsh 2:22
about Jake

Jake 2:25
you know like I've been as a kid I used to love the Final Fantasy games and I like to say that I still like them. But I tried playing seven recently and I tried playing for recently and I hit a wall on for why just just so dissatisfied with it. So I don't know if I'm still a fan of the series anymore.

Palsh 2:44
That's fair. I mean, I've I went through seven and I was kind of a little bit of a grind for me, but I rushed through so I'm you know, it could have been a whole lot worse when you were

Wulff 2:57
four is my favorite out of the

Wulff 3:00
franchise, but I know it's not objectively the best. And from the ones I've played, I gotta give that one to six over seven for sure.

Palsh 3:08
So I think we're pretty much on par with it here. Jake's kind of got the same feelings as me here for seven. But in my research now over the last couple of weeks, just trying to prepare for this podcast episode here, I kind of got a lot more respect for the things that seven is done. I mean, I had a lot of respect, but there's, it's kind of cemented now. So six is a lot of stuff. There's so many things about it that I can talk about for days and days. It's like it says, not my favorite, but it might as well be my favorite because there's so much great about it. Seven i think is great for different reasons. It became what made role playing games in North America, like socially acceptable. They added things into it that made a role playing games just not you know, turn based combat and nothing else. There was cool like bed and MB badass fmvs there was many games, you know, there's different systems and stuff that you could customize more and it was a little bit less glitchy then, you know, Final Fantasy six, at least as we saw s3 in North America was one of your earliest memories of either six or seven. I just want to see which ones pop out more. So what would you rather talk about really quickly? GP?

GP 4:27
Okay, okay, I'm going to talk about seven. Because I want to embarrass myself with a quick story. I got I got the game and my PlayStation one for Christmas 1997. I started off, did not know that I needed to have a memory card. So that was fun. We figured that out eventually. Fast forward. I'm addicted as I made that mistake to Final Fantasy seven. I get to the temple of the ancients. I don't realize that the clock. You have to use it as a bridge. So I'm trying every company

GP 5:00
nation of every fucking time and then going back through the rest of the temple trying to see if anything has changed, spent 65 hours alone in that temple and wreck the rest of the game as soon as I got out.

Palsh 5:15
Are you? Are you trolling with us again? That was That

GP 5:19
story is 100% true. The second time I played it, I went back and got all the materials, but by the time I got out, I'm like, fuck it. I just want to beat the game. But 65 hours in the temple of the ancients. Even today when I go back and replay it, I have to mute it because I cannot hear that music anymore. Yeah.

Palsh 5:40
Ouch. Well, dedication. I appreciate that. wereWulff. How about you? Which one stands out to you right now?

Wulff 5:47
I'm six. It's It's gotta be that opera.

Palsh 5:51
Oh, yeah. That's, I'm not gonna argue with that.

Wulff 5:55
If there's a standout moment in either of those games, it's the opera.

Palsh 6:00
You don't even need to talk about earlier because it's just like one of those. Like,

GP 6:05
I'm not going to be rude here because you guys just let me tell my story but not not the Kefka

Wulff 6:09
battle that's not what stood out. Know you the first time you're going through that game, especially back then, you know when Yeah. And and now when you're playing through it when you understand the limitations of the hardware at the time, the fact that they still managed to make an opera segment that actually felt kind of like it was like an actual opera that you're just watching in 16 bit. That is impressive as hell to me. Yeah. And the fact that all the lyrics fit with the, the sound and tempo of the music. Okay, yeah, it did such a good job and, you know, a little, I don't know, 1213 year old me I got actual chills when I was watching. I was like, This is awesome. Like, I totally nerd it out.

Palsh 6:56
I never realized until doing my research either that

Palsh 7:00
It's a metaphor for what's going on in the world too. I was like, oh, wow, so that kind of blew my mind. Yeah, at 35 years old.

Palsh 7:10
So, Jake, how about you?

Jake 7:13
Yeah, I mean, for me it was also found 96 I think I mean, I own the first game is one the first. Probably the first JRPG I played as a kid was the first Final Fantasy, and I borrow the second for my friend all the damn time. So when the third was coming out, I saved my pennies and I wanted to get it. But that car was expensive and that's my most vivid memory of that game.

Jake 7:35
Well, okay, so in Canada, I don't

Palsh 7:37
have enough pennies.

Jake 7:38
Amen. Canadian poor, but they're up here we had a store called consumers distributing which is an interesting store. And the way it works, you walked in it was like a like a warehouse type store and a small front area and he filled little index card with the number of the item you want. So I went in there as a kid, and then you know, put the number four Final Fantasy three in the on the paper and I hand it to him.

Jake 8:00
earrings it up $90. This is Canadian, but $90 for the 90s. It's an expensive cart. And then it comes out on this little conveyor belt and there's just flies down. And then they hand it to you as a very odd experience. That's how I bought video games and then nothing keys. And that vaguely reminds me of toys r us when I was a kid, or were they similar back then. Back then we would go into Toys R Us, at least for like big ticket items or expensive items that were small like video games, bikes, that sort of thing. You'd go over to where you wanted it, find the tag for it, pull out the paper, take it up front, ring it up, and they'd send it out on a conveyor belt conveyor belt after you purchased it. You'd have to take it over to the counter for getting your item come out of conveyor belt and you're on your way. It's such a weird contrast to today with Amazon where shit like that gets dropped to my doorstep.

Jake 8:57
Like but like you music and finally six is The absolute standout and for me, it was the various character themes, which I'm sure we'll talk about, but I love the music and film a six and it's so impactful. I mean, I like seven, two, but six was my standout memory.

Palsh 9:11
I like that. I'm going to go with seven just just for that I like six better I but I'm going to say that I haven't played six as much as I've played seven, but I like six better. That makes no sense to me. But I remember in high school, borrowing it from my friend and played it for hours and hours and hours. I mean, I had I think three or four master magic materias I had a double master summon, I had all of them except for I think was the yellow one because that was ridiculous to get. I played past the point of where the game actually registers how long you've been playing because it kind of resets itself after 100 hours. I think the number would change so it'd be like flashing yellow or something to show that you already went over 100 hours and then after You went over 200 I think is how it worked, they would just kind of just max out at like 9999 or whatever. And so I have no idea how many hours I actually killed just leveling everybody up to a level 100 So, for for a game that I loved in high school, I really I think I burnt myself out on it because I really felt the need to play it since. But I have in the last year and I played it on stream actually and I kind of did the quick way through. And I got through by the skin of my teeth. So, ya know, so there's a lot of things going on in both six and seven stories are just, there's so much different. They can have so many similar themes, but six I find resonates more for me. I don't know about you guys, but for me, it's just it feels like more of a personal story because, you know, the world is it seems like smaller, you know, all the towns that you go in are little, you know, little spots, you know, little villages kind of thing and, you know, there's a hardware limitation First off, but Know you supposed to be still a big world? And I think they did with the ps1, I think they were able to kind of give you a bigger scale, the futuristic, you know, the steampunk angle and stuff like that, and then you get outside of Midgar. And everything else is more classic Final Fantasy. I found like that was a big shift for me and it really threw me off a lot. So

Jake 11:23
were you disappointed after a big car because they spent so much time I mean practically the first disc on midcard and it's such a flushed out and it feels like a huge city. And then when you're done with that mid garriga on the world map, nothing quite compares that first city.

Palsh 11:39
I think I know what you're talking about there. But for me I was because I was spent so much time in there. I thought it was going to be like oh my god is everything going to be this intense. But uh, no, when we got out of it, finally I was I was kind of relieved because I was like, Okay, now this is where I want to be. I want to I want to kill stuff and ride chocobos and so it wasn't so big a deal, but I I think that's part of what made it so integral is how much time you actually spend in Midgar. So when you finally get out and realize there's a whole different world besides the city, then you know, it's kind of cool. It's just like, oh, wow, you know, what else is this game when I offer so

GP 12:14
it's kind of like the matrix. So once you get out of mid Gar, everything changes from those, like dark green and dirty kind of colors into the clear, you know, clean green of the grass, and then they finally introduce blue into the color palette. You know what I mean? Like you have the sky you have the ocean, and it feels cleaner. Like, you know, you understand it's a video game. Your characters are real, but you can breathe better. Now that you're out of mid Gar.

Wulff 12:45
Yeah, mid guard did a really good job of conveying that. This city is just so polluted and smogged up and corrupted, and it's a mess. Exactly.

Palsh 12:59
So It's I think they needed that, which was really cool. And they did such a great job like it's not a small feat for you to get at Midgar I mean, how many hours do you have plugged into the game? It starts a whole lot faster with Final Fantasy six you jump in, you don't know what's going on, you know, they they get your attention in similar ways you start out beginning of six controlling Tara and the magitek nights there and she's gone you know if you don't know what's going on and question yes how many questions and all of a sudden in seven this the same thing you're about to blow up a reactor kind of deal and you're like, what's, what's going on? So they start off very similar in the way that you know, you don't know what's going on and you're trying to piece it together as you go along.

Palsh 13:48
It's it's interesting because some of the things that made it so well received in seven are a lot of the things that spawned off of six you know materia system

Palsh 14:00
is a natural progression A lot of people say for coming from espers, you know, is lot more strategy involved. It was a lot more polished obviously. But they had so much in common with each other. I mean espers were basically permanent materia. You know, you could learn your spells, keep them, but materia required you to strategize more so like that's, that's something in its favor, or seven that I really never thought of before. metiria

Wulff 14:26
had strategy in, you know, material choices as well as material synergies.

Palsh 14:34
Exactly. So there's different ways you could play it like if you played through six, you know, this is probably the only complaint I have about six is that everybody becomes a major. You get everyone you know, you teach Stephen or seven as I always called him. You teach him Ultima and then never use it because you're too busy, you know, bomb trains. Yeah, exactly. It's weird because you It's a little bit more typical older style generation game for six, because you could still do that grind, you could still teach everybody, every spell you need to do. You can do that in seven to a degree, but it's a different way of doing it. Like you can pass it on to another character. So you can have another character instead of, you know, having to do the same thing over with each character. So it's, it's a different experience, but I thought it was, I don't want to say a better one. I think statistically, it might be but I mean, like, I'm just a naspers fan. I like to

Jake 15:36
see for me I when it came to the espers I didn't feel a need to Maximo. I mean, I played six a few times over the years and I never really felt the need to grind for spells for everybody or at least didn't feel like much of a grind. Whereas materials seven I felt especially toward the end game when you want to get certain material maxed out in order to duplicate that took that was a grindy I didn't like that at all. I felt as a little bit much leveling the materia I did not like it all, I felt that too grindy I guess is the way to sum it up. I also for the espers. But I also found metiria as a, as a gameplay mechanic was probably superior. And just like will set with synergies. The customization aspect was really interesting that I don't think they really kind of went all the way they should have whether they could have done more with it. The best example of Materia I think being done well, is a game called Path of Exile, which they do their skills similar to metiria, where you can take a Firebase skill and attach, you know, a sex another gem called split, suddenly that fireball splits into two. Or you can attach an ice effect to that fire spell. Suddenly, it's an ice fireball. Like that kind of mechanic and Path of Exile is something I really wish we had back in fontys seven, where you could do more with the materia

Palsh 16:54
Yeah, that's that sounds really cool actually.

Wulff 16:57
Another thing to consider with six is and

Wulff 17:00
The espers versus materia is metiria kind of took not just the espers, but also a lot of the relics from six and melded them into one function. Do you want to give an example here for anybody? Yeah. So what there was, I don't remember the names of the relics from six anymore. It's been so long, but you'd get a relic that would make it so you'd attack four times or something, right. So that Yeah, there you go. So you to equip that and then you do a big attack like that. And so stuff like that got turned into metiria. But then, so did the big spell chains like the big blood sagas and fire ragas and things like that. Those also got dumped into a metiria. So it sort of meshed two systems that were very broad strokes into one system with a finer brush, so I do think materia on the whole

Wulff 17:59
was a much more focused mechanic than espers. But then you also had a much smaller set of characters.

Palsh 18:11
Yeah, I like

Wulff 18:12
with that though it probably made the game that's that's probably what made the game at least if it wasn't less grindy seamless grindy because you were doing things, you weren't maxing out espers for every single character, you were, that the material could be transferred from character to character in the party, and it would still maintain its level that it had before.

Palsh 18:36
Right. And that's, that's the thing like it ended up becoming a point where you can pass it off to somebody so if somebody in your party died, still kind of pissed about that boiler, please. I'm not saying names okay. I'm just saying, but I mean, there's there's different points in the game where your characters leave like, you know, Eris is gone at one point, you know, maybe Forever maybe not, you know no cloud is the main character arguably of the entire game and you know you lose him Tifa leaves to go with cloud at one point you know, so characters leave in the party and you know what would happen if if I had if I had a group of just cloud Tifa and Eris or error then you know you'd be screwed but you can take their take their material put it on another character and go and it's not a like a game changer anymore. So you can you know, you have to learn you have to adjust to it but it's not going to like ruin your experience. It's kind of like you would lose characters in six as well my you know, especially when you have to get them all back in the world of ruined later on. But at the same time, it's a little bit different because you know, the way the leveling scaled you know, if you if you grind it ahead of time, everybody else that you get further down the line or kind of on par with who you already have It's a little bit isn't actually it's a lot more lenient, but it can be a lot more grinding depending on how you play.

GP 20:06
So I want to interject and just kind of make a point here about both Final Fantasy six and seven. I know we're contrasting them but in one way that they are the same. I think they are the two in my opinion of the kind of classic series will say up to like nine or 10 the grind deist of the games, but I find that the grind in both of the games is entertaining six for its own reasons, you know, you can just make every age

GP 20:33
but with the thing about seven The reason I like seven so much. With the end here we are halfway through the show, I'm considering changing my my camp and saying Final Fantasy seven because now I've got an urge to play it.

GP 20:47
But the thing about the materia system is if you know what you're doing and you know where to go and you know what to equip and how do we equip it. Grinding is not that bad. There are weapons and armor out there. That will give you

GP 21:00
twice and triple the, you know, AP or whatever they go toward that, or there are areas where you don't get experienced, but you get a buttload of AP. And, you know, there's likewise similarly again in six and seven parts of the game, where once you get to this, this part, you realize there's nothing that you have to do, you can just go and grind if you want to. And, to me, that's, that's brilliant, they leave you the open window, and they say you have access, you know, now to the entirety of the world. go explore find out how to do this, or spend, you know, 200 hours doing it, you know, or don't, it's completely up to you. But first grindy as both six and seven can be, I don't get bored with that part of the game. I get bored with other parts of the games, but never, never the grind. And I think that's part of the brilliant thing about the one thing with the grind for probably seven specifically is so

Jake 22:00
Specially toward the late game. You want to use the summons to nuke everything when you're doing fast battles, but it's not as bad as a seven those summons are really long. How did you find those? Wasn't

Wulff 22:15
Knights of the Round something like a minute and 30 seconds or something like that?

GP 22:19
Unless you do dual cast Quadro magic and then it's all afternoon. It's more time so No, you're right. They're very cinematic and they are breathtaking and for the time beautiful. But yeah, once you you spam them, you know four times in a row twice. They lose their charm. You're exactly right. Yeah, Bahamas

Jake 22:38
Can you please stop love the earth and give me a short, short one, please just just for your family.

GP 22:44
When you're 14 years old, and you have an opportunity to see Shiva, eight times you use that Oh, baby.

Palsh 22:51
Thank you. Thank you. All right, she's still my favorite this day. Now I'm gonna be thinking about Shiva for the rest of the episode. So thanks there. Okay, so What where to go from here?

Wulff 23:00
All right. Let me let me take it for a moment. I'd like to say that, you know, I, I know I ruffle a lot of feathers because a I talk a lot about how I'm not the biggest fan of seven when seven comes up. I for everything it gets, right. And it does, it gets a lot, right. The biggest and most important shortcoming for me with that game is it is a 90 hour pity party. I can't deal with that much. That don't get me wrong. First time I played through the game. I was enthralled. Everything was awesome. To me. It was a wonderful experience. It changed how our PGS were presented. And what was expected of JRPGs. Great, you know, but it's just 90 hours of constant sadness. know my story said no, my story said, and yeah, there's the little bits of quirky in there like you can make cloud and bear it go on a date at the gold saucer but I mean, there's there's never a moment that's like yes, this is awesome. You know? It's it's always just like God, everybody so sad

Jake 24:14
clouds whiny to just evoke whiny

GP 24:18
yeah I don't disagree with you except for one part I will say I think the weakest part of Final Fantasy seven is cloud and his story everybody else's stories make some sense and all that kind of stuff, but there's a lot of big question marks that aren't very cohesive with cloud and he's so angsty and not a great leader, but he's the protagonist. But the one thing I disagree with you the most on on what you just said, Well, as you said, you know, one of the weaknesses there compared to six is how sad everybody's story is. Final Fantasy six as the most heart wrenching, backstories, setser, cyan there has never been a more tragic story than science story if you ask me. I don't disagree with you. But you have points in that story where those characters are not constantly in a low you know there are there are a lot of points in six that are you know upbeat and not necessarily to ever seem happy

Wulff 25:14
not necessarily but upbeat you know, it's it's a moment that's not about the sadness there are points that are like, crap we got to get this done. This is you know, this is awesome. This is epic. This is amazing. You know, this is adventure. Seven never felt like adventure to me.

GP 25:35
I thought it was plenty adventure, but you're right, even going into the final battle. Cloud is like, Well, here we are. I guess we might mosey? Yeah. Let's mosey. Yeah. Yeah. He's not the most effective protagonist and I do find that to be one of the bigger weaknesses of seven.

Palsh 25:50
You brought up two good points there both of you actually. And one, I'm gonna I want to address one real quick because the quicker of the two but I want to say like, I think Six has a has an advantage, I'm being a lot more positive and upbeat considering the graphics and the you know the overall art. Because, you know, the it's pixel art, you know, it's it's cartoony it's it's limited, they're trying to go for something more serious with seven they're trying to make it more dark and gloomy. So I think you're totally right though like it everybody's always on a down note, you know, said I was a cantankerous old geezer because you never get to go to the moon. You know, Vincent was beating himself and braiding himself and locked himself in a coffin because he couldn't do it couldn't save the woman love, you know, all these everybody has this heart wrenching story and, you know, these are the reasons why they're fighting. But well, I mean, that's so much said but, but everybody has a reason to go against Shinra everybody has a reason to stick around in six because they all want to save the world from Kefka because, you know, everybody has a reason behind it. You know, cyan like I said, This is probably the most heart wrenching, and I never realized it until now. But yeah, that's, you know, he's, he's trying, he's trying to go for that. So all this stuff I think with the art is what I'm trying to get at is that, you know, the graphics of six, were there more chibi style, they're more cartoony they're more pixel as opposed to trying to go for something more serious with seven I think that in his favor there because it kind of makes the light hearted moments more light and then you kind of have to use your imagination more for when things get darker. Because I mean, when I was a kid, and I saw Kefka coming, I was like, this guy's a fucking asshole. And I didn't like I'm just like he's a

Jake 27:40
joker but he's bad.

Palsh 27:42
Yeah, but exactly, but like I didn't respect it as much as a kid but now that I look at it, I'm like, okay, you have that theater in your mind like GP says and you know, it makes you think about it and say, This guy is crazy. You know, he's not just like wearing a clown makeup and just kind of nuts. He's

Wulff 28:00
Pure villain you know with the art style you have to kind of fill in the blanks is what I'm trying to say. But see in seven you don't get the the quite so quirky relationships that you get in six. I mean you you get the you know they all have sad stories let's let's take Gao for example. I mean poor kid he grew up in the while he was basically raised by wolves. And, you know, never knew his parents speaks poorly. He barely speaks, but his relationship with cyan and saben it's it's not only heartwarming, it's also hilarious. Yeah, they took a sad character and made him not make you go God, this poor kid, this poor kid, this poor kid.

Wulff 28:51
I mean,

Jake 28:52
I don't think I was a sad story. I agree. You have this kid. He goes out in the wilderness. He's battling monsters. He's basically a Pokemon trainer. Everybody praises ash and bread and Pokemon is like this great character guy was ash

GP 29:06
here's here's exactly why Gao

GP 29:13
okay it's not the girl is fighting the monsters he's living amongst and learning their stuff and then once you feed him beef jerky that's all you have to do to get him to turn on them because then he will go and kill everybody he just ran with like he's a liability is all I'm saying you better hope nobody else has beef jerky or your whole crew is gone.

Palsh 29:33
I'm scared of Gavin now I love galax

GP 29:35
I love God. There's that there's that tragic thing about you know, being separated from his parents living in the wilderness. But he's never a character that feels bad for himself. Cloud feels bad for himself every moment of every second even when staring at diva he's like I'm sad that you're hot.

Wulff 29:52
And and if I'm my favorite character in seven is Barrett because as sad as he is and as sad as his story. He's always trying to find the silver lining. He's always trying to be upbeat. He's he's trying to raise marleen to not see the world as the piece of crap that it is, or at

GP 30:12
least identify the pieces of crap. Instead of saying everything sucks, being like, No, it's just Shinra.

Wulff 30:19
Everyone. I mean,

Jake 30:20
there's always angry though.

Wulff 30:22
He's angry because he feels the need to fight for his righteous anger. Even when I was a teenager playing this when it first came out. I saw that and I loved that about that character. But I think cloud is just like, how can you just not all the time?

Jake 30:41
like I do, but he's always so angry like cloud. Why don't you care? I'm so angry. You don't care. Marlene I'm so angry my glasses and I

Wulff 30:52
again, I suspect part of that is because of, I think some of it is just how much anime

Wulff 30:59
style, they rubbed on the story. But I also think part of it is translation.

GP 31:04
Well, but also think about this. They the characters didn't really have faces. They didn't have facial expressions because of the limitations. They had shape, but they didn't have faces. So you think about the script and then like the animations of Barrett whenever he gets mad, he shakes his fist and you can see him trembling. That gives it a little bit more drama because you can't see the anger on his face. You can read the words in the script and know that he's he's cussing and know that he's shaking. And yeah, you kind of take over that said, I do you guys know the extra Craig Robinson. I imagined he is Barrett. So even when he's angry, it still has that edge to it of, I'm going to try to make everything okay, but this sucks. You know, so, otherwise, I think everybody would just be crapping in their boxer briefs the entire time

Palsh 31:50
where it is that the guy from Hot Tub Time Machine is and

GP 31:54
he's not very

Wulff 31:55
good. I can see that. I think next time I try playing seven. I need to like pick it actor that kind of fits each character

GP 32:03
no you don't have

Wulff 32:05
one for Barry but I mean all the other characters I think need one too.

GP 32:09
Okay, then I will do that too, but I will think that Steve Carell is cloud that way I might like him a little bit more. I'm

Palsh 32:18
just gonna stick with Office actors. I'm gonna I'm gonna try to rein things in and pretend them the hosts still are just cuz we Oh no, no, it's great. No, because I just think that's hilarious because we all have such different stances on this and like, I swear to god this this episode could be six hours long if we kept going.

Palsh 32:35
But I was gonna say I just want to say for cloud for me, I think it's confusing. Thinking about him because he's he's a clone of Sephora spoilers. I should say spoilers first. Too bad.

Unknown Speaker 32:51
My emerge sorry, not sorry.

Palsh 32:52
ruin my immersion. Yeah, so, but he's a clown. He's a clown, a clone. And he doesn't even know who he is. He doesn't know he's a clone. And he was a failure before that. So when he died, like the real cloud, that's gone. Basically, he doesn't know who he is he failed it becoming someone in soldier. And so he was just a weakling, he was a coward. And then all of a sudden, he just has more power than he knows what to do with. So I think that's what they tried to do to balance them out a little bit is make him cowardly. Make him like, oh, like, you know, he's got that shitty attitude because he doesn't know who the fuck he is, you know? So, I mean, I think that's relatable for me. It's just like, he has no sense of self. And that causes him to just second guess everything. And I thought that's, that's the only thing that made him human to me is because he's the genetically modified super soldier. You know, he's he's Sephora in with different hair and All of a sudden, doesn't know who he is, you know, you go from Sephora off being just crazy and wants to take over the world or destroy the world so you can become powerful. Cloud just wants to fucking know where he is. So that's, that's, I like, like I said, I'm agreeing with everything you guys to say but I'm just that that's my stance on Cloud is is actually recently changed because I never thought about it this light is just he's he's lost

Jake 34:25
it just want to say like in terms of cloud as protagonists is every time squared tries to do the silent protagonist. I don't think he really works very well. I think their strongest stories have been told with an ensemble cast, everybody speaking like six or four. But clouds specifically the one of the reasons why I think he's just so sad all the time, is I think it was the producer of the game. At the time his mother died, yet he was going through a grieving period and he just didn't know how to express it. And when you take that, as the background, a look at Cloud, he's just calm Constantly depressing and, and sad and doesn't know how to deal with everything around me just numb impersonality when I think of the producers dead mother nice grieving that's kind of correlates to me and why he made cloud that way. Even though clouds his motivations are different ultimately, the feeling I get from the way he's in the game, kind of call us back to that for me.

GP 35:19
Sure, I think it would be easier to create and write a character like cloud from a point of despair. Speaking about the retribution, or like the redemption moments that are lacking so much, and seven, there is the same right before you battle Hojo in Midgar, at the end, where he refers to cloud again and says, Oh, yeah, you're the failure. Maybe I misjudged you recently, you know, because that if for no other reason is the one relatable part to cloud is, you know, you've been cast aside everybody at some point, even if you're the most successful person in the world has felt disenfranchised. So to kind of feel like you've been captured

GP 36:00
Decide, but you've accomplished something nobody else has accomplished, you know, in your ilk. I think that's the one universal truth from cloud that everybody could relate to. It just happens so late in the game, and it's somewhat predictable, that it falls a little bit flat. Would you say is predictable? Looking back at it, or was it predictable back then? Well, no. I mean, he's your main character. And I mean, you know, obviously, I'm gonna say,

GP 36:29
after Eris, what happened to Eris, everyone say, she's just waiting for guys to fall out of the sky. So after she's gone, you know that you're basically susceptible to losing anybody. We saw that also in Final Fantasy six. But with cloud, you are always given that idea of he is going to be your leader and your final, you know, you're never not going to have them and even if you lose them, which you know, you do, you'll get him back. So I think the redemption arc there in that way.

GP 37:00
Of course, was obvious he was always going to be that guy, because you don't have the option of removing them from your party, which is the difference between six, you know, in six, you can just take anybody out of your party, whatever the fuck you want, with few exceptions. But yeah, I do feel like the cloud stuff was predictable in that way. I know I'm kind of rambling here. There's a lot of unpredictable, unpredictable stuff about cloud story because it's nonsense. But the redemptive arc there yes, I do think that was predictable, if that makes sense. Yeah, I wouldn't have ever been like, oh, clearly he is, you know, taking over somebody else's memories. No, that's that's absurd. But the redemptive arc Yes.

Palsh 37:39
Well, I think that's part of what's making this game such a such a big deal for people to want to see a remake is because look at the conversation we're having over a single character, I mean, yes, protagonist of the game, but you can you can talk about other characters and other games just in much as much depth But there's so much more back and forth there's a lot more to consider so like you know he's not perfect and I like that sure he's got annoying tendencies and stuff like that but I didn't find it that bad personally. I mean you can look at all the characters like whatever happened with shadow and stuff like that like shadows backstory and you know everybody else's and egos like it's kind of crazy to think about it but I mean you have to go out of your way more with the with Final Fantasy sticks as opposed to seven sevens. So much more in depth. It feels like like the stories tighter but six I think because the ensemble cast, it has a lot more. What do you want to say open like just a little bit more you can take it at a glance if you want to. And I think that's part of the charm for me is because if you have favorite characters, you can pay more attention to what they say you know, when you have a party of three versus party of four It makes a big difference now. Three, I think the comment and stuff like that aside, I think that six for me has a better story just for the fact that there's a lot more going on. There's a lot more personal things like they're all on a vendetta against Shinra and six and seven, and six. They're all on a vendetta against Kefka. But it's like they all have different motivations, but six they're not all trying to save the planet. They're all trying to save each other for me, you know? I mean, they are trying to save the planet

Jake 39:30
you get a free the two villains I mean, it's it's Kefka is the one wearing the boxers and separatists boring these, you know, dainty silk briefs. They don't go pear Kefka is just a maniacal like Joker esque crazy son of a bitch who's actually destroys the world like he's scorch the earth and the latter half is in a desolate wasteland basically because of Kefka separ auth. Has mommy issues right? I'd like I'd never got the appeal separate the Only thing I like about Sephiroth is he's got a really catchy theme song which good for him? He's a rock star. Otherwise I have he's just not Kefka he has a good theme to has even better but he has the he has the the the actions to backup How crazy is he's a great villain. I love Mr. villain.

Palsh 40:18
Yeah, I think Kefka is probably the greatest villain in the Final Fantasy games to me. So that's the ones that I've played.

Jake 40:25
I think so he's up there. I

Wulff 40:26
agree with that.

GP 40:29
If we're talking about the series golden.

Palsh 40:32
Always rad Yeah, don't get me wrong.

GP 40:34
It's an amazing theme song that

Wulff 40:36
I have to disagree with that to the point for to the extent that it wasn't really golbez pulling the strings there.

GP 40:43
You know, but that's an interesting point. Let's let's look at this and not talking about four but talking about really a lot of these Final Fantasies. You start off thinking the bad guy is one thing or one person the Empire Shinra golbez. And there's always this big reveal where it transitions to you know, Xena says A wrongness or whatever, or the you know, Kefka

Wulff 41:03
I'm not saying Squaresoft is always nailed the transition to like, Who's the big bad? It was the actual big bad. Final Fantasy nine. Like you spend the whole game doing one thing, and then you get to the tail end and it's like, I am big crystal floating head. Okay.

GP 41:21
I'm saying I just never realized that, like, you know, who's a better villain here? Shinra or the Empire?

Wulff 41:28
Well, who cares? But even early on Kefka was manipulating the situation constantly. He was pretty regularly. The bad guy you dealt with he was part of the Empire. But he was the worst of the Empire. You know?

GP 41:45
Yeah, even the even the Empire

Jake 41:46
hated him stuff for I was just reading books and lifting weights. is cool.

GP 41:50
But Kefka I think Kefka I think polish. Nailed it. He is probably in my opinion, again, agreeing the the coolest and most interesting. Like the one I would want to see appear in more things. big bed. Yeah. And he sounds a lot like zoidberg.

Palsh 42:10
So, as you can see, there's, you know, we've only talked about a couple of things we talked about protagonist. And for for one game, basically because there is no single protagonist in the second one, even though people talk about, you know, Tara in the first half and Celeste and the second for Final Fantasy six, you know, there's so many different things we can go on. We can talk about either game for hours and hours. It's amazing to see how much of a difference between this game and then you know, I thought there was three in North America was what we got the six. So when Final Fantasy seven came out, I thought there was you know, Fallout four or five and six that came out in Japan or something that we never got because the difference between six and seven graphically I was like, Oh, wow. So you know, I was trying to find out and then I found it. Oh, wait. This is this was we never got we never missed them this time. So it's really cool to see, you know, how much of a change not just graphically I think they changed, you know, for better for worse they changed everything. You know, they they tried to make it more appealing for everyone I touched on it earlier, they added mini games, you know, they had little backstories and things that just stood apart that you didn't see in the other games that they couldn't have done without the hardware. So they tried to make up for you know, lack of hardware and I think they nailed it hasn't aged well. No, I think you know, sixes as well. But because you know it's 2d it has that advantage. It's always going to have that advantage. So you're always going to remember the sprites exactly as they are. I think when it comes to a 3d render of something, you're going to pitch your cloud in your head closer to what you see in the movies like an adventure hildren as opposed to the chibby style guy that you run around on the world map. So I think mentally, you're more predisposed to enjoying the 2d stuff personally for me in a way. I don't know about you guys,

Jake 44:09
I agree hundred percent like I forgot how bad the models of cloud and the party members are for most of the game. The in combat the battle models look fantastic, but the rest of them aren't random worldspace actually when you're zoomed in really close like the opening area when you go in the train there and he drops down his chibby style, right, but at least performance you stick to that it looks fine. But the low poly lack of textures. It's an ugly game. And nowadays because the rent is low and the backgrounds are all low rez it just naturally can't age well, because of that. I'm actually looking forward to the remake because of all that

Wulff 44:46
in defense of seven on that front as far as the characters presentation that the higher ups like the heads at square, they wanted more of the same in regards to What Final Fantasy looked like? So they really were like, let's let's keep the chibi characters let's keep the the cutesy look. And so that's why they all look doofy when you're running around everywhere, but the director, I was at Sakaguchi thing so yeah, here knows Sakaguchi Yeah, he he pushed for a better presentation where he could and that's why the models look so much better in combat. Because in combat he he was able to get away with that, since the characters kind of needed to be able to convey more information as it was. So he wanted the big characters that looked more detailed, like in eight Did you know, but square management wasn't having that they wanted chibi. They wanted what four, five and six had done. So on that front. I don't blame the project managers of Final Fantasy seven and the design and all that because That was that was management imposed limitations not so much a design choice.

Palsh 46:06
Right. So yeah, that's great points there. And I find when you're switching back and forth from the the world map sprites, to you know, the battle ones and seven, I think that kind of is the closest you're going to get for having the same experience as playing sticks where you're always in the, you know, the sprite mode. But when you fight, say, at my weapon, or Dullahan, where these crazy crazy detailed sprites are, and then you have these tiny little chippy guys there, you kind of think like, why is that more realistic? And then I kind of think, okay, so these are more like placeholders in my head. You know, the sprites are placeholders, you kind of try to immerse yourself put yourself in there he named them after your friends like I do in high school, junior high, you know, you do that kind of thing. If you had, like I said, use your imagination more and I think that's kind of the closest You could do with six with seven when it comes to having the cheesy world map versus the cool battle sprites. I think the cool battle sprites for kind of what I was doing mentally in six is like okay, this is what I pictured them fighting like you know, so I don't know it's

Jake 47:18
like finally six the what helped me because you're right the enemy sprites are very detailed and look awesome and they're kind of a contrast that up characters of the main characters but what helps me as we look at the profile screen or like the menu you get to see those detailed artwork headshots of all the characters. Yeah, and it's completely off the walls. Like, but it helps tie things together.

Palsh 47:42
Exactly. And I think that's part of what made me picture those in my head if if you guys haven't done that, try it sometime. Anybody who's listening, give it a shot like it's, it's more like, okay, you know the graphics are dated. Yeah, I don't care. It was made in 9493 this stuff was I think it's still ahead of its time you know crono trigger the same way you know, the art of these old games, they stand up and they're iconic because you know there's more to it than just like poorly drawn sprites for some games you know, sometimes they're everything they do is on purpose they all have a purpose and the one thing that helps found a seven started her up is found by seven has the benefit of emulation these days, right.

Jake 48:23
I want to go through it again, because I did start it but there's a large amount of mods for valancy seven on PC, including smoothing out the background environments, messing with the music, adding better polygons to the overworld map. Just a whole host of different mods you can install that make the game I mean it better against other games in this generation. I guess it makes it stand up a little bit better. Because some of the some of the stuff and finally the seven like for me, it was the lack of textures on some of the monsters. You got to remind yourself it's a PlayStation era game, and PlayStation one games are ugly. It was just the way it was right? demands help a lot. It was all brand new technology. Right? So I mean, they were still working. Probably they were still pushing the limits, I'd say back then even with the lack of textures, right, so because I mean, a polygon was like one color more than anything.

GP 49:13
I think if you're a fan of Final Fantasy one, for example, the the argument about how bad the graphics are in seven is kind of a moot point. And the reason I say that is Final Fantasy one was a pioneer for what it was, and it's the exact same thing with seven. If the gameplay is there, and I think it's retro video gamers can appreciate what I'm Beth say, if the gameplay is there, the graphics are secondary in their importance. And there's meet Final Fantasy seven is exactly that way. They nailed the gameplay. So the graphics while they haven't aged well, I think people who complain about that really the only league they have to stand on is all of the commercials for Final Fantasy seven showed us the FMV so we all thought that salmony in gameplay was going to look so when it came to Of course, you're disappointed, but the gameplay was there. So to me the shittiness of the graphics, of course, they matter, but it's not that big of a deal because we already played Final Fantasy one. And it was the same thing, great gameplay, but the graphics are, you know, old world. So, for me, if I had one complaint about six, it's probably the battle system for the fact that everyone becomes a major, if I had a complaint for seven, it was probably the controls just for the fact that, you know, if you play it, you can't use the analog so that's that's something and it was the way it's screwed up with the skewed on most angles like your control your directions are just weird. So it's kind of wonky. So that's like my biggest beef with the game which is a minor thing, especially saying this is you know, it's it's not a platformer, save us all if it was but

Palsh 50:52
but, so if you guys want to close it up here a little bit because otherwise we'll be talking about this for another hour and a half. So anything Any points you guys want to talk about before before we shut it down for the night.

GP 51:04
Gold saucer was brilliant Chocobo breeding was amazing.

Wulff 51:09
You know what the Chocobo part is still the only part that I'd be willing to go back and do and seven. And it's just because that was the part that was most fun to me.

Jake 51:19
Have you played the MMO?

GP 51:20
I a talking about 14?

Wulff 51:23
Yeah, I played it a little bit because they added the gold saucer and the Chocobo racing and that is actually loads of fun. They also have triple triad in that as well. I almost because they're subscribing to it just to play those I did. I did both of those things. But yeah, like Final Fantasy six versus seven. I gotta go with six myself. And that's like mechanically, I do think seven is superior in almost every way. But if I'm going to sit and play a game for 60 to 80 hours, it's it can't just be download after download after down No like, to me seven is just a constant downward spiral with quirks. Six is a roller coaster, there's down moments, but they're followed by, you know, let's kick some ass. Let's do something awesome. You know, let's, it didn't constantly keep you in a state of despair. I gotta say I agree. And that's what, that's what makes it more memorable to me. I mean, you have, you know this story about the airship race between sets are and Daryl and it was sad. But it was interesting. And it was a cool little story backstory for setser that the fact that I also kind of respect the fact that six you can make arguments for who the main character is. Most people will just be like, it's Tara, understandably so. But I've I myself, I kind of use Celeste as the main character.

Palsh 52:55
Well, that's the thing to like after the second bird when you get into the world or ruin. That's when I kind of takes over the rules less and so people argue that you know the first half is Tara second half slist both arguments valid like

Wulff 53:08
well, it's not just that it's that Celeste has the biggest standoff with Kefka Celeste is the one you have to beat the game with. You don't have to beat it with Tara. True.

Palsh 53:20
You can skip getting tear completely. So

Jake 53:22
wait, can you for the second half? I thought you had to get her.

Palsh 53:26
You can beat the game with test sets or Celeste and Edgar. As soon as you get sets or you get the airship and you can actually go take it. That's a challenge apparently amongst the runners and stuck I

Jake 53:39
will say that for probably seven. There was just always so many plot holes I guess in the overall story. I was still confused about cloud and soldier and who is a clone of I never got that I've watched all the movies and some of the other lore material but the game on its own standing on its own. The plot holes are too big six, I mean not Say that goes jgb there, but it's more forgiving because there's so many characters, and there's at least one or two sides story threads for each character. So you get enough of a plot to fill in details for that the character and it kind of doesn't matter that you don't have the whole story. But with seven being so cloud focused, it's those holes are really opening glaring, and that's why I like the story and six so much more. I do I do like seven but six is my clear favorite.

Palsh 54:26
I'm gonna agree with you there is seven, much more centric around the you know, three or four characters. You have optional characters in both games you have UEFI or euphy and Vincent and seven you have tomorrow and go go and six, there's more backstory that will come out of it, but it seems like is integral in seven, like with delphis character and stuff like that you need to have her for this net. It's just I don't know. I'm just going to basically be Back home that I just like six better so I'm just gonna shut up. I think this is great. I mean, play whichever one you want. If you haven't played either play them both.

Wulff 55:10
absolutely absolutely don't get don't sit here and listen to people in a podcast tell you don't play don't play six or don't play seven or don't play any game. Because we tell you it's a pile of garbage or we're not big fans of it or whatever. And that's not to say I'm saying seven is a pile of garbage. Like I said, I loved it the first time. The first time it was a great game, but subsequent attempts I can't do and I do recommend if you haven't played it and you like JRPGs absolutely do it.

Jake 55:37
And like the benefit from the Fast Forward option now in current emulation, having a hotkey for fast forwarding through those long grinding battles is amazing.

GP 55:46
No, we can't we can't talk about that right now. Jay.

GP 55:52
That's a whole other episode my man no brian ross.

GP 55:55
And yeah, can we can we get one of those randomizers like they do with Link to the Past and Metroidvania are super metroid. Can we get that with Final Fantasy? six and seven? Please? Isn't. Isn't there one for six already

Wulff 56:07
know he's talking about like, combine them?

GP 56:09
Yeah, you enter a door and all of a sudden you're in Final Fantasy six. And then you go back. Cloud is cross dressed. And yes, cloud I have modeled a lot of my drag looks after him.

Palsh 56:24
You lie. That's, that's the missus.

Wulff 56:27
I'll rip him off. Smash.

GP 56:30
Done choreo he's a pretty pretty princess.

Wulff 56:35
He's a pretty guys.

Palsh 56:38
Alright guys, I want to thank you again for this is probably the most heated discussion we've had yet. So it's first time we've been talking over each other since like the first episode so I like it. So I'm going to give that two plus 10 two energy. And it was so a ladies and gentlemen, thank you for hanging out here. This has been presby to cancel and Hope to catch you next time. And in the meantime, don't match that be we got more coming.

Jake 57:07
For sure. Well, we everybody listening, we hope you enjoyed the episode. And we all just want to come in and shout out our early supporters. I mean, we've been doing this now for, I think 12 episodes now. That's That's pretty good. But I mean, our listeners that have stayed with us from the beginning are much appreciated. And we've had a lot of love and support from quite a few people. There's a few, but we're just going to shut it a couple of right now. I'll start off with Blitz Brom, who's a notable streamer on Twitch, actually went ahead and added a command for podcast to advertise for us, which is great. Really appreciate that support, man.

Palsh 57:41
Yeah, I'd like to thank you got Marin. She's also been supporting us and retweeted four episodes. So thank you, Mary.

Wulff 57:49
I'd like to throw a thank you at sinica gaming, who is also added a command for us and constantly shouts out our podcasts in his his streams and others. Twitch streamer.

GP 58:01
Yeah. And then another streamer who has been a not only a big supporter, but the the composer of our theme music orther

Wulff 58:10
dang and theme music that

GP 58:12
manga. Yeah. But yeah, Arthur Arthur, the last ancient is is the man. And so thank you all for the love the support and the continued efforts at getting getting the word out about us. We appreciate you.

Wulff 58:26
Absolutely. Thank you so much.

GP 58:28
I want to ask you guys before we go, what does it feel like? Knowing all three of you were wrong today.

Palsh 58:38
This has been pressed me to cancel. Thank you very much.

GP 58:43
That was a lot of fun, guys.

Jake 58:45
Yeah, it was good episode. Yeah,

Wulff 58:46
that was a good one. Yeah.

GP 58:47
All right. I'm gonna go and hit stop and then that

Wulff 58:50
was a good one.

Jake 58:56
Special thanks for music go two hours of the ancient found on Sunday. cloud or the last station on YouTube. For more episodes, please visit our website presby to cancel.com. As well Feel free to like or subscribe at Apple, iTunes, Google podcasts or anywhere else you'd like to listen to your favorite shows. As always, thank you. This has been

Wulff 59:17
an ad again.

Special thanks to Arthur The Last Ancient on soundcloud for our podcast theme.

For updates and more episodes please visit our website www.pressbtocancel.com, or find us on Twitter @pressbtocancel and Instagram @pressbtocancel.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past. A game that has changed the world of gaming for many fans over the decades. Let's hear how it influenced the game world for the Press B crew!

Episode Transcription:
The below is a machine based transcription of this episode. Sorta like Skynet if it was 2 years old, and wanted a cookie. Take it with a grain of salt.

Jake 0:00
Episode 11 links to past today on path.

Jake 0:25
Welcome. Thank you for listening to presby to cancel I'm your host this week sick Jake. Today we're going to talk about my favorite Zelda game well, well maybe second favorite Zelda game. Anyway, I'm not here by myself. I'm joined by my fellow friends and co hosts starting with Polish polish. How are you today?

Palsh 0:42
Dude, this is a start to sound like your last time you had this, like I was word for word or using the same intro.

Jake 0:48
I like mad hockey. Honestly, to be honest with you, I kind of slacked off on the research. I just didn't last 30 minutes. So cross my fingers

Palsh 0:59
do you want to keep In the episode I kind of do sure

Jake 1:03
whatever there is research, research,

Palsh 1:05
research. Okay. Hi, I'm Paul swana nine.

Wulff 1:08
Great to see who needs research when you know what you do

Jake 1:12
not know we're doing I'm also joined by werewolf How you doing? What? Wait that was unintentional burn shit.

Wulff 1:20
What? What?

Wulff 1:23
Howdy, I'm werewolf.

Jake 1:25
Sorry, we're

Jake 1:27
What are we doing and to bring us back to sanity for the therapy coach GP How you doing?

GP 1:33
I'm doing fine. Thank you.

Jake 1:34
It's good to be here. That was more normal than I was expecting. That's great. Okay.

Palsh 1:39
Yeah, kind of disappointed.

GP 1:44
I had some really good dick and fart jokes, but I decided to try to bring us back to sanity.

Jake 1:49
Mission accomplished. All right. We're going to talk about Legend of Zelda Link to the Past. But before we kind of dive into it, I do want to kind of hear for everybody what you're expecting. ends with a Zelda as a franchise just briefly because we could talk for hours about this. Just your favorite movie favorite game for the series and what you like about the series or if you you're like me and you disagree with everything everybody says you hate it, that's cool too. Well, if you want to start

Wulff 2:14
Yeah, I Gosh, I would have to say that I used to split my favorites up between 2d and 3d entries. Whereas, you know, my favorite 2d game was linked to the past. And my favorite 3d game was windwaker for a very long time up until I played Breath of the Wild and then that one kind of supplanted it and I think it's safe to say now that overall experience like for a proper Zelda experience I think Breath of the Wild is my favorite but Link to the Past is still much more playable

Jake 2:54
Yeah, I think Breath of the Wild was great for the innovation right, taking the series A drastically new direction and I really I love it too. I'm almost thinking now that for me in the future, assuming they keep making games like breath wild, I have to split up into three, like classic 2d Zelda is your old school 3d Zelda, and then whatever the hell they're doing with Breath of the Wild now going forward, because I find that game so drastically different from the rest of the series.

Wulff 3:18
Everybody says that, but to me, it just seems like it took the 3d gameplay and shoved the format into it, you know, the original Zelda just have at the world. Good luck.

Jake 3:31
Actually, that's true. It does have that quote that elements and there's just not for me, it's the lack of items, I think is what kind of made it different for me. And just the gameplay being so rely on the physics. It's a great game. I love that one.

Wulff 3:42
Yeah, it was a very different entry. It was a lot more limited. There wasn't 40 different items to obtain in the game. It was simpler, in a lot of ways, but also a lot more complex

Jake 3:56
overall. Yeah, definitely solid title. Alright, GP How about yourself? What's your exposure to zelda?

GP 4:04
I personally I love Zelda to The Adventure of Link, not pluralized it's The Adventure of Link. And

Unknown Speaker 4:12
was he not allowed more than one?

GP 4:14
No, it was just a single solitary adventure.

Palsh 4:17
One is all you need, sometimes.

Wulff 4:20
So you think most people refer to that as Adventures of blank.

GP 4:23
But now I grew up playing, trying to figure out the first Zelda couldn't do it. And then the internet happened before everybody had a computer in their home. I live next door to the library. And so I would walk over to the library, spend an hour downloading maps for Zelda two, and fell in love with that game at that point in my life. So that one's got a very special place in my heart. I appreciate the newer ones Breath of the Wild is gorgeous. But it is one of those rare games where I prefer to watch other people play it, as opposed to playing it myself, but I love it. Also, aka Rena

Jake 4:58
Ashley. That's interesting. Make up your mind just so many zealots. I love how you mentioned Zelda two is your favorite though because that's also kind of a How do you say outlier from the series? Right? And we talked before about sequels being so different from the originals, but that side scrolling link game is just quite a bit different than the rest of franchise. That's pretty interesting.

GP 5:20
Yeah, I love it. But and one of my favorite things that real quick about the franchise as a whole is the music and how really the music is one of the most cohesive things to tie together all of the entries. I'm sure we'll get to that later on. But you asked about what our experiences and that's that's my two cents.

Unknown Speaker 5:39
Paul shovel you What's your what's your fascination with zelda?

Palsh 5:42
My favorite I'm not a big like Zelda fan. You monster. Like I'm a freak. I'm a freak. Yeah. And just to prove it. My favorite game is actually in the series in the whole franchise is actually truly

Jake 6:00
Yes the

Palsh 6:03
Zelda to The Adventure of Link

GP 6:06
we are now almost the majority Good job Paul thank you

Palsh 6:09
yeah and I and I'm not doing it just to make this cheeky against Jake but no that's it's literally literally my favorite Zelda game like the rest of them don't compare it to me I know and I understand why people often like rant and say they don't like it but I've never actually heard someone flat out say they don't like it except for a couple of friends that I make fun of for their choices anyway so doesn't matter everybody that whenever I was like playing it or something on stream or you know talking and another stream basically because this you know how I connected with people over games like this. It was always do this my favorite Zelda I'm like, holy crap, me too. So it's it's weird how it's the least favorite but at the same time, everybody I know it seems to be one of their favorites

GP 6:55
is this it's kind of it's that song that comes on the radio, where nobody wants to be like oh, The song so you all just sit there and listen to it and silently jam out. Nobody will change the radio station. Because you would think for a wild, widely, not like game. Everybody shows up when you stream it. Yeah,

Palsh 7:13
yeah, that's true.

Wulff 7:15
See, I don't know. I think it was a really solid game. People give it a lot of crap as a Zelda title based on the other side of Zelda titles. Yeah, it's a little weird. But as a game, it's really solid. And I think the only issues I have with it personally, are probably due to translation problems. There mirror. Well, no, not not even as simple as that. Like, there's a point where you have to like duck and stab at a table to get into a basement and one of the houses. That's how it's done in real life. Nobody in the game tells you that. And I'm sure in the Japanese version, there was probably dialogue somewhere that gave you the clue.

Palsh 7:53
Yeah, the closest you get is like, look under the table or someone says something but table that has no indication on you know which table which were the you know, duck and duck and smack it.

Wulff 8:06
Yeah, so it's it's really vague and cryptic about the few issues I have about it because it doesn't teach you these things. It barely even tells you about those things. And that's a problem but otherwise it's a really really good game. And I think that's just a translation issue, not a gameplay issue.

Jake 8:23
Well, I mean, if you look at if I were to be locked in a room,

GP 8:26
what do you think?

Jake 8:28
Thanks to up as you guys were gushing about this, you know, Zelda to being so fantastic. I was gonna just say that I know it gets a lot of hate wolves right. And you know, if I was locked in a room with Mega Man one and Castlevania another hot garbage along with Zelda two I'd probably play Zelda two as well.

Palsh 8:45
Take it back.

Jake 8:47
I'm only joking it's not a bad game. I actually I actually do like it a lot. For me personally with Zelda I've been a fan for every every game. The only games I haven't played are the crap ones on CBI like a lot of people But I mean, I played the original original NES Zelda on a black and white TV. Like we used to visit my cousin. That was a TV in his room. We used to play Zelda for hours. I love the hell of that game. And it wasn't till I was a teenager when I got a stats I got late. And my dad when he says my dad, he said Zelda and just, he'd want to go play catch outside. He want to go to the movies. me. No, no, I'm not talking you dead. You're not cool. I'm just here to play Zelda. I don't love you. I just love Zelda. I love things of the past. It's, I mean, we're talking about this and we're talking about Zelda and like the past for this episode, but it's funny as we're recording this Link's Awakening remake came out, I think last week or so. And it's playing that, again is reminding me that links awaken is probably my favorite this series, which is funny, but it's, it's mostly because it's a spin off of linked to the past. Like it's very much in that same vein just expanded and better. Right. And but it's the same idea, just something about linked to the past the story The items and helicarrier links awakening both fantastic. I love Breath of the Wild too. But as I said earlier, I almost, I almost think of it as a separate game. It's definitely Zelda. But I don't think it's like the 3d was like our Marina and Majoris mask personally.

Wulff 10:15
Well links awakening was very much a passion project, at least for a while it was developed after hours by people who were just screwing around with the Gameboy tech to see what they could make. And I I don't quote me on this because I don't remember who it was. But I want to say it was agio enuma, who actually started it all by himself just messing with it. Either that or he was like one of the first two people I'm pretty sure that jumped in on it. And then that guy was joined by someone else like what are you doing? I'm messing with this trying to make a Zelda game I'm trying to recreate Link to the Past on Gameboy. And they were into it. So they started doing this and it just eventually flow just Didn't do its own thing that pulled in elements from Zelda two and straight away from Link to the Past a little bit because one of the driving ideas behind the development was the ability to have two different like to change both buttons, you didn't always have to have a sword equipped. That was really the driving idea behind it initially. And it just blew up. But eventually it was like a dozen people working on it after hours before they finally took it upstairs and said we want to make this an actual thing. And then they got the Go ahead.

Jake 11:35
And see that's actually really cool. Because when I was looking into Link to the Past development, there's actually some parallels there. So I mean, I guess we'll just get right into it then. So then it's super nintendo. I mean, it was unveiled internally, Nintendo in 1989. Right. I mean, obviously the Nintendo was a massive success. Stats had to be better. And there's two game franchises they knew they had to launch very quickly with the system or close to it. And that was very world and then linked to the past. So they actually had development start on both games at the same time or approximately the same time. But from what I've been reading with an interview that mimoto did number years ago, he kind of explained that Nintendo doesn't like to throw whole teams at a game development early, rather just a few people to start with. And then they do what you just described for links awakening, they kind of just tinkering around play with it threw around some ideas. In this case, they're also evaluating the hardware, how far could they push the hardware and see what they could do with it. And after they kind of nail down some concepts of what they thought would be good for a new Zelda game, that's when they started adding in more staff, eventually flushing out staff and then releasing the final game. So that experimentation is kind of like a Nintendo's mo I think for back then.

Unknown Speaker 12:46
Raw speechless. That's all good. Okay.

Jake 12:51
I'm checking my notes. Hold on one sec, nerd. Okay. Yes, I'm totally a nerd. Okay. So, development link. The past was two names that are being very familiar to people who listened to us before and one of my favorite, it's headed by Shigeru Miyamoto producing and then test tech Ashi Tezuka. I will never say his name right now I'll try I feel bad. I feel like

GP 13:16
he was never say right desica

Jake 13:20
It's okay. I'm going to wake up the middle of night and Tesla will be over my bed for the copy of last levels. And he demand they played or I die. Like saw but Nintendo edition. Anyway, it says the cut Did you get for mispronouncing my name? forgiveness please, Jessica. I know he's the one who did last levels. He also had mario maker and that's why I know his name so late much lately as I love mirror maker. He's great director and both him yamoto are the heads of linked to the past. And so when it came to this game, I mean, they already knew that the original Zelda Nintendo was well received, but they want to have to do they have to kind of step it up, do something greater for the news. system, especially if this is going to be like a console seller or an early launch title. I mean, this game came out, I think was just after a year, the console launched. 91 is when Zelda came out was released. So they had to kind of do something new. The original Zelda was well known for its open world. The ability to purchase items from stores was pretty novel for the Nintendo, Nintendo. And the various usable items and you collect it through all these maze like dungeons. So they had to take on that expand it. So they looked in, kind of went back and said, Well, what could we do on Nintendo, that we can now with the stats, so it kind of that's when they kind of looked into things that could do like, more story and more plot better music, right? The idea of having two separate worlds the light world, The Dark World world is stuff that was not possible on the original Nintendo. So there's things like that they were looking at doing. One of the cool things I was reading about was they want to use more water right as an environmental effect. How would you say or gameplay affect the original Zelda there? One dungeon I think it was seven where you can get into the dungeon by basically drain the water on pond but it's Nintendo right there's only so much you can do so it just changed the color of the ground texture so from water to grounds and that's how they did it wasn't very good so when they saw that they want to expand on that link to the past and water and look to the past is all over the place right it's it's a theme in one that one or two dungeons at the very least pluses probably overwhelmed like the idea of swimming I don't think link pass a diving but the idea of swimming changing water lowering water all that's a major facet of like the the past so something to kind of want expand on.

Wulff 15:37
As I say I didn't have diving I think it just had ducking to hide under the water from projectiles

Jake 15:42
Was it because I don't just still pretty close awakening has diving moves the same ideas. Yeah, can I confuse the two so much.

Wulff 15:49
So linked to the past just had Ducky talking, but it was it was still a really cool idea of dodging projectile projectiles since you don't have your shield out. You can't just get out of the way so quick The water movement is a little bit

Unknown Speaker 16:03
sluggish.

Wulff 16:05
sluggish, sluggish. That's a good word for plus

Jake 16:07
they also they put the Zora monsters the mermaid monsters in the water and they're constantly popping up shooting fireballs at you and their pain on the ground nevermind we're in the water so it's glad there's some kind of defense against that. So I mean there's other things are looking at adding as well. One of them was the idea of fire the original game had the candle which you could burn Bush's right later I think you light up rooms with as well dark rooms that stuff they brought in to Link to the Past. They want to do bit more with it though originally the plan and developing it so that if you set a bush on fire, it would actually spread out to neighboring bushes and just fill the screen of fire wasn't able to do that on the Super Nintendo. They were even trying to just get it down one of the two that the big trees you could burn the big trees down, but they just couldn't get squeezed in there. In interviews memo to set up at six more months at DEF time, they probably could have figured it out. But it's kind of neat because that's the kind of mechanic that later came into Zelda for song. Which I'm not sure if you guys ever played Zelda for swords before anybody

Wulff 17:05
I love for swords.

Palsh 17:07
Yeah, me and my brother both had it but it was that Christmas time we both got it I think I got a copy of for him he got one for me I think he's have a work we are we we both agreed on getting one for each other and then we tried playing it and then he was gone the next day so I never actually got to experience it properly.

Wulff 17:24
Okay, so I'll say that I got to play the whole thing on gameboy advance it was in the Link to the Past initially for Gameboy Advance and that was a really cool adventure. I think it was I got to play it three player. But then there's also the the actual Four Swords adventure on gamecube which was such a cool idea. I loved it, it was think Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles if it were Zelda instead, but then you could also screw with the Players, which often resulted in a lot of salt, and not very long gameplay sessions, so you didn't really get a whole lot of the game done that way. Unfortunately, you just described Bomber Man I'm super nintendo for me. There was too much. There was too much competitive aspect to a game that was supposed to be so heavily cooperative. And I think that was the game's downfall. But I still love the concept. And I I want to beat that game so bad and I don't know if I'll ever get the chance.

Jake 18:30
There's gotta be a way we can do it online has to be because I played that as well with friends. I don't know if ever finished it though. But it's one of the reasons why I love couch Co Op games these days like you know, overcooked and, and whatnot because just that same feeling for me right for people on screen, messing with each other. You're supposed to be doing a co op game, but it never goes that way.

Unknown Speaker 18:51
But while we're on topic, actually real quick. So the game coke GameCube Four Swords is that different from the 3ds one I thought they were the same thing.

Wulff 19:00
3ds What are you talking about?

Jake 19:03
Man? Sorry?

Wulff 19:05
Oh no, they're very different games the game, the gamecube game is a fully fledged full fleshed out. It's its own adventure. You play it, if you're playing multiplayer, you got to play it with GB, right? That's what I had to do. And it was so cool because every time somebody goes into underground or something, you gotta switch and look at your GPA and play there. And then you go back to the overworld. And then everybody's on the same map again, and it it did a lot of really cool stuff that was way ahead of its time. And I would love to see a Zelda game do that sort of thing. Again, it's just maybe with more accessible control scheme.

Jake 19:47
Yeah, well, I mean, that's the thing, right? Nintendo loves. They just love their hardware, right? They're always trying to find new interesting ways to do the hardware. They'll cost a lot of money. That goes back to like the Wii as well right the Wii and the multiple remotes and Just power glad for the or the or the I saw somebody using the force cut months ago that was another trip just so many control options that are bad but it's a lot of fun though I what I played it was really great. I would love to play it again actually okay so I guess I just want to talk a little bit about Link to the Past itself right i mean this is topic the episode and like it's hard for me cuz I do love everything about this game right? I love how there's actually a story to it. I love how it's you know, the tale of evil wizard who is trying to break a seal to another dimension and bring it back Ganon right stealing sages and maidens I think it's fantastic story. I love the music. I love the graphics. So I love everything with this game. So it's kind of hard for me to like narrow it down. So I'm gonna let relined you guys tell me something about the game that you love. And a couple kind of go with it. GPG actually wants start because we're talking about music earlier.

GP 20:55
Well, yeah, I think the music is fantastic. Um, one of the things because For context, I just did my very first playthrough of this actually was more of a blind run earlier this year and like February of 2019. So I was brand new to the experience. And so many people have hyped up linked to the past I, I really felt bad for not loving it more until the end, I didn't realize how much I enjoyed it until you know, the credits for scrolling. And I'm like, Oh shit, there's no more I'm not ready to be done with it. But immediately the things that stood out to me, you know, the the more crystal clear, you know, expanded musical tones that they carried over from the older games, but also the clarity of the graphics and the smoothness more than anything. I think smoothness of gameplay is not something that you really associate with the original tues elders. And really see it kind of, I don't want to say perfected but you know, taken to a whole new level. It's such a smooth game and just beautiful There were a couple of things I still take issue with on that game. But on the whole what a What a fun experience. And I My only regret was that I waited 35 years to play it.

Jake 22:12
Yeah, it's such a great game. The music is just iconic. For me. It's like there's a handful of composers I think are just great for video games as a whole and Koji Kondo is one of them. He's the one who did like the past, but he's also well known for the merio series as well.

GP 22:27
Well, no, I just had his pissed off because the beeping will not stop I suck at the game so I heard I heard more than I heard music.

Jake 22:36
Yeah, yeah, that beeping sucks. And that's like an all of them too.

Wulff 22:41
Yeah, that's that's a sound that needs to start getting an option. Yeah,

Jake 22:46
well, so we'll get to it in a little bit. But the the idea of Zelda randomizers actually have that option. But anyway, before we go into that, the music Koji Kondo Are you kidding me?

Palsh 22:55
What? What?

Palsh 22:56
Yeah. Oh, why didn't you tell me the lab to play all You know, you have to play Yeah.

Palsh 23:02
Now we got to start over. I that is worth starting over for me. Okay, I'm just saying I'm that with the rent. Actually, no, I can't say anything. Yeah, the randomizer I was playing it as research for this. And actually, no, I shouldn't complain about it because the seed that I got for the randomizer I had, like, all but four hearts. I only ended up beating like one dungeon, I think it was.

Jake 23:27
Yeah, so it actually has an option to make the beep like quarter beep so it's less frequent. I think you can change it even less than that, or you just turned off entirely. But if you're used to playing the games, and you use that boop, boop, boop, and you're gonna die. When you turn it off, and you're playing with three hearts and you're fighting a boss. You don't even notice you're at one half health or whatever, and you die very easily.

Palsh 23:49
If that happens to me, I

GP 23:50
very easily no matter what.

Jake 23:53
Yeah, yeah, early on in Zelda games is always rough, right until you find that you know, the first few hard pieces to kind of even things out the beginnings are actually very tough. Do hard pieces give you more life. That's how bad the game I don't even know if you want to watch a stream or do a three heart run of any of this all the games, I've seen a few people do that actually. And it just I thought I was good at some of these but now these people are masters at it's insane.

Wulff 24:18
I think that would just make me sad.

Palsh 24:21
Just be like, no.

Jake 24:23
So I was

Wulff 24:24
never played Zelda again.

GP 24:27
I don't know. I The reason I people say that they're like, I don't like watching masters of games, because it makes me sad. And I think I'll watch ice skating, but I don't kick myself in the astronaut being a master ice skater. Well, you're doing it wrong. Come on. Well, it's mostly an issue with the costumes. I don't look that good in dresses. But

Palsh 24:46
yeah, this is true. I've seen you in dresses. So

Wulff 24:50
back to the can bring it back around. Jake's question from earlier. I guess I'll take the answer next. My favorite aspect of this was the fact that it had to overworld

Jake 25:01
Yes,

Wulff 25:01
darker light when I first played it back in, I think, did it come out in 9191? Yeah, I probably paid it in 92 because I don't think I had a Super Nintendo that first year, man that second overworld all of a sudden, just there's a whole nother world in the game. It just blew my mind. I was like, What is this? This is amazing. I was one of those kids who did spend most of his time indoors playing games. I had a TV in my bedroom. I had all sorts of stuff. So when it was that, like, that's not to say I didn't go out and ride my bike all the time and stuff like that, because I did that too. But it was cold or I didn't want to go outside. I could game my friends could come over and hang out with me and we could just play in my room. And this is a game I spent hours on I played the crap out of it. I beat it once I beat it twice. I probably beat it six or seven times in the first two years of owning it. And it was so much fun. This is a game that friends and I would sit Watch each other play and we're doing we're doing the twitch thing well before twitch was a twinkle in someone's eye

Jake 26:08
you're watching me through a window and

GP 26:11
would have been much better to be able to band people back then to get out of my out Larry go change your name and come back later

Wulff 26:20
go home john john. You're pissing

GP 26:21
me off you know john.

Wulff 26:25
I knew a few of them. I knew a few John's I knew a few Jimmy's. We all hung out. It was weird. And that's not a joke.

GP 26:36
Before I forget, I have to ask you werewolf. I have to ask you a question about everything you were just saying that you loved. Because earlier when you were talking all that mess on Zelda to Adventure of Link about the No one told you to look under a table. That was my main issue with Link to the Past. There's so many things that there is no indication that you should look under there or move that Like the bubble walls are the closest thing you get to hince other than that, you know, move this tombstone pick up this tree. Like how are you supposed to know that stuff? So I feel like your thing about that was Zelda two is a good point. But I want you to address how is that okay for Link to the Past? Because that's where all of myself that game came from.

Wulff 27:22
See, I don't know I just kind of knew that certain things could be moved, you know, you can move blocks, you start messing with stuff. I do think Sahasrara law might have had a lot of clues hidden on the walls and dungeons and around yes and whatnot. That might have explained it. I don't know. I it's been so long since I played the game proper. I can't guarantee that Sarah Sally said everything.

Jake 27:49
Sarasota was a sage or in some respect, please.

Wulff 27:55
Oh, I'm sorry sir Sarah Sally.

Palsh 28:00
So, I mean, there was also some stuff listed into the mag manual too, so

Wulff 28:07
that's true. And then if you really got stuck there was that little hint guide that came with the game too. I still Oh yeah.

Palsh 28:15
A little was like fold out the black and white folded.

Wulff 28:18
Yeah, little two by three fold out pamphlet.

GP 28:21
Yeah. Okay, well, that's fair. I guess. If you grew up with the game, and you had a tablet or something like that telling you what to do. That makes more sense. Thank you.

Wulff 28:31
That little booklet though. It was sealed when you got it and it made sure to let you know, you know, only open if you get really stuck.

Palsh 28:38
Yeah. And you opened it like the first or second dungeon because you didn't know what was going on. You know, you never forget it. But

GP 28:47
let's just like the table. Yeah. Now, you know, look under the table, right?

Jake 28:51
Yeah. That's like a Zelda Zelda is all about rewarding exploration. Right. And the idea bottle walls almost didn't make it into the game. So than the original Zelda, you could, you know, bomb walls but they weren't distinguished, I think then we could tell them the original was with the sound of the note that it made when you hit your sword against the wall. I think that's the thing. And they have that and Link to the Past. But Miyamoto experimented with, you know, having the ability to bomb walls because he found that was very rewarding to players if they actually took the time to explore dungeon and four secrets. But then he realized what the original, you know, the problem is, is too easy to miss, you know, some of the rooms that could be there. So if you didn't know to look for the rooms, you'd be kind of missing out on some of the content. So that's why he kind of stuck with the idea bominable cracked walls, so it makes a little more visible to what you're doing. But there's some stuff that like both mentioned, sometimes you just know you need to do something in a room. Like when you're playing a Zelda game and there's like five blocks standing on their own. You just know you're going to push one of them. It's just one of those things that kind of ingrained on you early on with the gameplay.

Wulff 29:50
Yeah, or if there's a key door in a room and there's just a bunch of enemies and nothing to do probably kill all the enemies in the Drop a key something like that

Jake 30:02
but like it's definitely a game it doesn't actually hold your hands or when your hands that's the thing anyway but you definitely a game where you have to explore I guess to kind of get the most out of it there's items you can miss I think in that game as well. You don't necessarily need all the items to finish the game which I think is amazing. Paul shovel you Yeah, well, yeah, there's the invisible cape is one of the item Oh, yeah,

Wulff 30:24
there's the cane the cane.

Jake 30:27
Okay, at least a few.

Palsh 30:28
Yeah, I found the magic cape. By mistake. I remember that. And I was really proud of myself because neither of my brothers did it. So you know when there's a 10 year gap between you and your older brothers, and you do something they did? It's bragging time

Wulff 30:42
I got a little that from my little brother from time to time was

Palsh 30:47
asking them do that still. No, I remember loving the game because Zelda to was probably one of my favorite games because it was one of the few I had like I remember When Super Nintendo came out we had probably half a dozen actual games we rented most of the games. So if I got a game is usually for birthday or Christmas gift and that was it and I mean, Christmas gift we're talking Sears wish book you know there's a lot of stuff besides video games you had to get your hands on so so there's a lot of rentals I got and so when I actually owned Zelda two on NAS I think I got it at a yard sale with a bunch of others like Simon's quest, pro wrestling and something else and it was it was instantly because I owned it is my favorite. And then I played it extra and I was like this is better than I remembered. You know there's only like two years that's probably like 11 years old or something. But because of that I was like instantly a fan of linked to the past and when I played it, this is good. This is good. This gets better. We're getting stuck and getting last and ripping open that cheat sheet. You know, that cheat sheet. Never basically fold it up again because it was always left out. There's no way to You stopped it. You needed it every time. And you wished it was like pages and pages longer. But it was just really fun because it felt like a Zelda game for some reason, even though the only one I actually had experience with was Zelda two never played the first one at this point, and then this one came out I played I was like, okay, cool, played links awakening and not long after it came out, just like, this is great. And I remember buying it for $25 because it was like, not a greatest hits version. It wasn't quite they didn't have the greatest hits kind of thing or the game of the year, whatever. They called it back then. But it was probably around. I'd say 9796 something like that. And I found a copy for could have been earlier than that actually. But I remember finding copy of Walmart for $25 and just begging my dad Can I can I can. I managed to get it and so then I fell in love with it again. So it was just held a fun place. My heart I don't care for it as much now, but back then it it just blew me away because it was just such a good game.

Jake 33:08
Yeah for me i think it's it's the influence its had on the rest of series is what I think draws me to liking it still even today like to go back to the music for a minute. Oh good.

Palsh 33:18
Oh no, I was going to agree. I mean that's that's I think what makes me feel so good about is how much of an influence it is on games in the future because there's not a lot of game like it's not in my top 10 anymore, which is saying something because this is still a damn good game. The influence of head on future gaming I think it's, it's crazy, like direct or indirect. It's there,

Jake 33:42
like the idea of the music even alone. I mean some of the themes that are famous throughout the franchise, things like Zelda lullaby or Gandalf theme, or Hyrule Castle, you hear bits and pieces of those themes in every Zelda game up to the Breath of the Wild even. So like that Music from this game is pretty much through through the entire series. And I mean the idea of the spin slash and then you know, various items and stuff. There's there's a boomerang, there's a hookshot and various sequels to the franchise. They're all kind of used in slightly different ways, especially in the 3d Zelda. But it all kind of comes back to like, the past has been the origin of a lot of that stuff. I mean, the original intent of Zelda. I like it's great. But I think it really just kind of cement the idea of an open world exploration and dungeons. But as links to the past that broke out into the idea of all these very unique items and Collectibles that really excited and exploring things. Right when we talk about Metro veiny is, I think, the past kind of belongs as part of the what we call the makeup or history of that kind of genre is part of like the past as well. It's very much like Metroid, right?

Palsh 34:50
Yeah, it's it's like more of a kind of top down version of it as opposed to just like straight up platform, right? But it has the same elements to it, which I think That's probably what appeals to me still is because it has that that certain path you have to take and there's shortcuts you can do their stuff. You can go for extras, but you know, there's a there's a set path and there's a reason behind it.

Jake 35:13
Well, and so like, I mean, it's not your top 10 for me, it's probably my top three. If you asked me what my top three favorite games are, it changes every month to be fair, but linked to the past like the past is always on top three. I really love that game quite a bit specially for the Super Nintendo. Again, I'm played as many of this NES games other people have but this one is great. I love this but I think mario world it's like an eight for me Link to the Past is like a two or three if not higher, it's

Palsh 35:42
great. And considering how much you like the Mario games that's that's

Jake 35:45
my boy loves me my merio

GP 35:50
think I'm culturally and in the history of gaming. The impact of Link to the Past is pretty undeniable. To the point that even if you don't like the game, You have to be able to say well yeah this is this is culturally significant in the gamer universe, right? So

Wulff 36:09
you know what that's that's actually I think my brother's position on the franchise is most Zelda games he's not into. But he he like understands why people are into him but they're not for him. Granted right now he's going through the new links awakening and loving it so I don't know maybe that'll rekindle something in him. But yeah, he's he's not been a Zelda fan for most of his

Jake 36:30
life. If he loves links awakening, then he'll he should like Link to the Past. I mean, I think links awakening is probably a better game is that remake is pretty good too. But links to the passes permission, same thing. But it's also for me, it's a it's a game I think is very timeless. We've mentioned before that's NES games or 16 bit era era for me will always look great, right? As nice as 3d graphics are, I can still sit down and play an old school 60 big game and love it. Sometimes Nintendo has that but For me, it's always been 16 bit. And Zelda game I still play today I play it quite often. But once you've kind of found all the secrets and you've, you know, you've mastered the route through the dungeons linked to the past, you know, it's not so fun to play anymore, at least in its current state. So, let's go back a couple years ago. I don't know if you guys fell for it. There's this huge fad of roguelike games. You know, raise your hand if you played it. roguelike right. Rogue Legacy was Oh, absolutely. Everybody's playing the

Wulff 37:30
legacy Binding of Isaac it The list goes on

Jake 37:33
bunny Isaac is very clearly influenced by Zelda, right? It's like smash TV by Zelda.

Palsh 37:37
Oh, yeah.

Jake 37:38
So read the idea of procedural games. It's really popular. And then the idea of ROM hacking or modding of old games has been around for a decade or more, right. And there's a lot of people who do amazing stuff with ROMs there's a few notable ROM hacks for like the past even there's one called parallel worlds. It might as well be the unofficial sequel to Link to the Past. It's It's a fantastic run. Mac, it's practically a brand new game. It's amazing. But what's really got me about a year and a half ago now is a group of folks had put together basically a randomizer. What they've done is they found a way to take the ROMs code and scramble various things to randomize it. I guess that's the name of why they call it randomizers. But they would take all the items in the game, and they would spread them around, right? So you wouldn't necessarily get a sword from your uncle and the first part of the, you know, castle dungeon, maybe you'll get a boomerang. Maybe you'll get you know, fuckton get five rupees, right, it was completely random. But the way that was ingenious about it is they would scramble the items. But they would put in logic to prevent you from getting screwed when you go into the dungeons because links to the past requires certain items in certain parts of the game. So they kind of adjusted the game's code and logic to account for that. So Link to the Past, and randomizers it's been a huge thing for me, last year and a half. It's one of my favorite things to do when I have free time is to play round of Zelda randomizer it's at the point now where I can use Beat one in under four hours, which I'm pretty proud of. Because it can be linked to the past fidella in usually two and a half if I'm feeling good. So the randomizer to me just brings this fresh of air to a game that I used to love as a kid. And now I love it even more now because I also love roguelikes I think they're great. The idea of procedural content in games has always been fascinating to me. Like I'm a big fan of Minecraft, but my issue with Minecraft was not of Zelda like influences in it right? You had sorts in Minecraft but you didn't have dungeons Really? I mean, you had kind of dungeons. You didn't really have fun combat but you had this great exploration element. I always wish that it had Zelda like elements. Zelda randomizer manaphy Minecraft but it has anything I want. So the rammers is great. So the recent additions actually they recently changed a bit so now you have boss shuffling so the bosses even change sometimes they can duplicate sums they won't I mean they added in power changes to the dungeons can look different now that have various characters appear to be as as a cosmetic thing. Probably important to polish they got rid of the heart beating Right. There's a lot of options built on the randomizer website that's just fantastic to check out. I asked you guys for the podcast and maybe just do a round or two of the round of the randomizer to see how it is. Pulse you want to start because I know you started a randomizer probably before I did actually,

Palsh 40:14
I was probably spending just as much time trying to get the ROM hacked work because I'm tech inept. But once I got it going, I was like, okay, you know, I'm gonna give this a shot. I've seen a lot of friends playing it before and I was like, Okay, cool. The games. Kind of getting old for me. I'm just kind of sick of it. I called it the Mega Man to center my first because it's just like, everybody was playing a randomizer I never sounded like the first time I played the game on stream. People were like, Oh, it's nice to see someone actually playing the vanilla version. I was like, cool. Okay, right now, welcome. But the only time I've ever seen people playing randomizers up until now was watching people race each other or, you know, do PBS and stuff like those speed runners basically and ones that were that knew the game inside and Which is amazing, but it's just not for me. So I just I guess because of that I kind of had this automatic bias towards and I'm like, okay, I don't don't like it. You know, it's not for me. But when I tried it, I mean, I like the original game. It's nothing wrong with it as it's a great game, but just trying and the excitement of actually trying to think your way through it because oh, I don't have a sword. I didn't have a sword for the first like, 4550 minutes. And I was like, I'm in trouble. And everybody in chat was watching me play it and they were like, Oh my God. Oh, you got a hammer. Thank God, you know, like so there was this kind of tension that that wasn't there since I first played the game. And that was kind of cool, because it was like playing the game. You had similar feelings of playing the game for the first time, but still being familiar enough with it that it? You know, it hit the nostalgia button for you. So I gotta say I was very, very impressed with how much fun it actually was when I finally dread

Jake 41:58
it. Yeah, like the highs and lows. are fantastic man playing that like you have 200 rupees you know you need to go to Kings or to get the flippers but in a randomizer you don't know what you're going to get. And I think every time I've played one I almost never get something useful from Zora it's almost always something stupid like arrows five rupees a cane something I don't want and it always curses name like every single time.

Palsh 42:21
Yeah, I looked it up because I get the flippers It was like one of the first three things I've gotten. And then so I was running around trying to kill things with pots. Yeah, because pots pots and bushes because I couldn't actually swing at them with anything and then I ran out of bombs. So I had bombs and something else I'm still in the same game. I'm still trying to get the damn lantern so I'm kind of stuck. So I think right now I have to just find my way in the dark and I'm kind of scared to.

Jake 42:47
I think wolf when I watched you play a little bit. I think you were stuck with the lamp as well trying to find one.

Wulff 42:51
Okay, so I played two randomizers this week. The first one was Just the Link to the Past randomizer and right up front it was given me awesome item after awesome item like I had the Master Sword before I even made it into a dungeon. It was that crazy. I had the hammer I had, I had all sorts of stuff. What I what the game just would not give me was that lantern. So it kept it keeps cutting me off from various paths within dungeons. So I can only do so much because I can't do anything without the lantern. I have no book I have no lantern. I'm hosed as far as getting into done

Palsh 43:44
it's just thinking of which he's not the Canadian one in here but

Wulff 43:47
but it's a pretty much off the table for me with that stuff. So today I decided to try for the first time the Super Metroid is linked to the past randomizer because both games I'm very familiar with It's been a long time for both of them, but I, I've played the crap out of them numerous times. Explain how they actually what they actually do. Like the randomizer for that. Yeah, so it puts items from both games in either game. And there are points within both the Zelda world and the Metroid world, where passing through a doorway will take you from one game to the other. You know, samas can find upgrades for Sammis or she can find upgrades for link or items for link or whatever. Same with link out in Hyrule, you can find items for Sammis and so it's, it can be frustrating, especially since with my experience, let's let's This one was less kind to me. Let's Let's start with that. I was super excited right off the bat. You know, it starts you in Metroid. It starts to in Super Metroid. So I jump into the game. Run around on Zabbix for about, I don't know, five minutes you can do anything. And then you just z

Palsh 45:10
was it z? No, I No, no no I just call it jeebs cuz was Elvis doesn't sound right to me still

Wulff 45:15
number one told us I want to say it was Eric. Someone told us how to pronounce it properly because of other pronounced it.

Palsh 45:22
Yeah. And I forget what it is.

Wulff 45:25
Yeah it was I went to go through a door and all of a sudden boom I walk out of a house in High Rollers link and I'm like, Okay, cool. So I'll start exploring all sorts of stuff here. I know this world I know there's a ton of treasure chests I can get even with nothing because you have no sword. You have no nothing when you start the game. I start running around. It probably took me about shut up Google. It took me about it probably took me about two hours. To even find the Morph Ball after getting to link so I was reaching for straws trying to look everywhere I could and I think I probably found the last chest I could obtain with the items I had that was finally they Morph Ball and then I could run over into play as Sam us again. Got to do a whole bunch of stuff there. ended up getting my way to norfair struggling my way to norfair let's be honest, because I didn't have a whole lot of help with her. I got no health upgrades for samas finally get to norfair went through a door boom I'm back in high role on Death Mountain. I was like yes, okay, I can do more stuff. And again, I'm still linked running around without a sword. I'm killing things with the hookshot or bombs. That's all I've got to kill things. And most things don't die from the hookshot they just get stuck so I it was a mess. After three and a half hours of gameplay, I finally found a sword for link

Palsh 47:00
Three Okay, I don't feel bad about my 15 minutes now.

Wulff 47:04
No, it was and then I had to call it for the day. But that was I will be going back to that one. Because now it's now it's like I have to it's a challenge that has been accepted.

Jake 47:19
yet. The first time I did that I've only been at like twice and it usually takes me around 1516 hours. It's, but I've also I love Super Metroid, but I don't know where all the hidden stuff is. Whereas Zelda I know very well. But the few things I'm probably missing in Zelda and Super Nintendo or Super Metroid is probably what screws me through those randomizers but it's really fun.

Wulff 47:40
But that randomizer playing it is really what has settled it in my mind that Yeah, Metroid and Zelda are a lot more alike than I think people realize.

Jake 47:51
So same with the metro videos as a genre, like the two games are very, very similar in that regard. It's great.

Palsh 47:58
Yeah, I never realized until Till recently actually have similar those games actually are so, but first I'm like What the hell are you getting on with you know, combining those two games that couldn't be more different now I'm like, okay, I dig it. I'm scared to play it. But I did.

Jake 48:15
I do love wolf how you got screwed but the two hardest to deal breaker game items in those games is the Morph Ball and the lamp. If you don't have those, those games become very difficult to get through.

Wulff 48:26
Speaking of which, I still have no lamp in that Super Metroid Zelda randomizer.

Jake 48:32
So they do let you do a few. I don't have a speed round tricks. There's a few glitches you can do to get through certain parts or even just tricks like for like the past. There are people who memorized the layers of the dark rooms so you can get through them. I'm not one of them. The game's coded so you don't need to do that. There's left somewhere. But I've seen people just skip it by going to the dark rooms. And then for Super Metroid. Lava diving is probably the big one, right? Because there's you The fire the various various suit virus suit where we say that the presses against that a lot of damage. Yeah, so that's you do need it in Super Metroid. But there's a couple of rooms where if you have enough health, you can still dip in the lava proceed and get what you want and come back out. And that can actually give you a bit of a shortcut and certain certain circumstances. Again the code it's you don't need to do that. But it's helpful if you kind of do those contracts.

Wulff 49:24
However, I feel like this can be a very dangerous slippery slope for me I think I'm going to start probably spending more time playing these randomizers and now I'm interested

Jake 49:35
Well, I made the mistake See how

Wulff 49:36
I feel after I beat one but right now I'm I'm totally enticed by the the idea

Jake 49:45
of doing a randomizer race and the two other guys I was racing against kicked my ass because they were doing the dark room dark rooms with lamp because they knew the layout because they're that good. And it was hilarious. But he also watched a few Zelda races randomly racers What do you think?

GP 50:01
Well, I, I watched them wanting to kind of do the homework as we say, or do the research before playing a randomizer because I know everybody else has played him this week to do the research. But again, having only played each game Link to the Past and Super Metroid once and earlier this year, I quickly realized I'm not going to be playing those randomizers because I don't really know either of the games well enough to be able to formulate strategy. So the first video that I watch, and that was the dual game randomizer. At first, I'm like, this is going to suck because the guys who were racing actually as a race, first thing they found were or God or Silver Arrows, so not being familiar with the game, or randomizer something. Oh, this is just a new way to cheese, these games, but it was almost like the commentator was directly talking to me and my psyche, because it goes that's a great item, but it's not worth shit if you don't have the bow and arrow and you can't do anything the sword or the morphable and I'm like oh my god I've completely underestimated what this is. And so I was between minutes five and six so I think in time I may try to go and learn the vanilla versions so that I could do a randomizer but I'm I feel like I'm still so far off because the guys playing you know as they're getting items in their mind you can just tell Okay, what can I go do now what can I cannot you know, what can't I go do now and the commentators as well are saying I think they're gonna go to lower norfair and I'm like, I don't even know which game that's from know your shit. I don't think I'm sitting here thinking is there a Mario randomizer is there you know is there a randomizer I can try first. So I'm there is dipping my toes into the shallow end of the randomizer pool I can tell you the one thing I wish they had already fast forward button Don't Don't get me started Don't get me started horrible joke and I don't mean that but like I said I completely underestimated how much I thought I would like it. It did give me an appreciation for how little I know about these games. But that did not make the experience of watching the races any less fun.

Jake 52:29
Yeah, a good color commentary makes all the difference for watching a speed runner race especially with the randomizers because if they know the ins and outs and explain things It's like watching a basketball game or for me a football game. I know jack about football. But if they commentator can explain what's going on in a click away it's it's all the difference.

GP 52:46
Oh yeah, if the if the video was on mute, I wouldn't have lasted 20 minutes but being pulled in and and watching how the two different guys because they're playing the same randomizer like all the locations are the same thing for each racer. But the way in which they strategize in their head ensures that they just route it differently even though they have, you know, I don't know where steps that but it was incredibly enthralling and entertaining. And like I said, I wish I'd had more experience with both those games. So I, you know, I would be able to do them,

Wulff 53:22
but we'll get there in time. I want to say it was summer of 2018 that I, when I was doing laundry, cleaning the house, whatever I would put on those selda races because they had a huge tournament that lasted a couple weeks. Oh, man, those were so cool to watch to just check in on them while I was doing stuff around the house, folding laundry, whatever. And, you know, I'm folding three different people's laundry while sorting them and all that so it's given me something to do while I'm just folding clothes, hanging them up, whatever. It is so cool to just see how they play so differently. I watched so many races, it's ridiculous. And these people were like, you'd hear the commentator like, well, this guy's made the choice to go here. And this guy's made the choice to go there. And that's a big gamble. But if it pays off, it'll be huge. And you know, you see him take that chance and all of a sudden, boom, he's way ahead of the first guy because he took that gamble. It's ridiculous just to see these strategies play out.

Jake 54:19
Yeah, it's almost like a competitive Sudoku. Right? It's or competitive crossword it's like a logic puzzle that people are figuring out as quickly as possible. But far more exciting, right?

Palsh 54:30
Yeah to terrible math to even do a regular Sudoku thing.

Jake 54:35
But you know, I was bad at randomizers and and being into it took me forever to beat my first plane Zelda one and the Zelda Metroid crossover one, I still struggle with half the time. But up you're saying that you didn't want to try the randomizers because, you know, you've only played each game once you don't know where everything is. On the one hand, though, that can be fun as well because that comes back to the thing that makes the series great which is exploration right. Playing the Zelda Metroid one especially, it's a whole double world out there of just exploring, right? Is he finished it or not, maybe. But it's fun just playing it, and trying to explore the various nooks and crannies for the items and see how they work together. I think it's great, even if you're not familiar with the base games, but

Wulff 55:16
there's also the different tiers, you can set the randomizer to where it's not throwing all the rupees around and everything. If it just swaps the items, you know, or something like that. You can you can make it less

GP 55:28
crazy. See, that's the thing I don't want to I don't want to go training wheels and I know that's 100% 100% ego warpless

Unknown Speaker 55:37
Right. Yeah.

GP 55:39
But I do like that's the thing is by the time I attempted I want to be knowledgeable and I get what you're saying subject and maybe maybe that's enough to change my mind and just dive in. Instead of like I said, Wade in the shallow waters, but pretty pretty much my only my only confidence with that that set of two games is that I could properly Identify, which I didn't goes in which world. And beyond that I really, it just seems like such a massive undertaking.

Jake 56:08
It's still, I still want my most favorite things in recent years. I've always loved retro games even, even now in the current next gen systems. I still like going back to the 16 bit era, but to see people so passionately about randomizers and like ROM hacking and just bring a new life to these games, I think is just fantastic. Well,

GP 56:24
and you kind of said something like that earlier, which is what gives me the field goods. And lets me know that retro will always be around and that is people are coming up with new ways to play the old games. And so long as we have things like that, I mean, retro. There's no reason for it to die out.

Unknown Speaker 56:44
That's a good final thought. Yes. All right. Well, I think we're hitting our time

GP 56:49
and like I said, I just, I picked and picked on air. T mo

Palsh 56:56
again. Do you wash your hands this time? Nope.

Unknown Speaker 57:01
I see no reason it's good time to end

Wulff 57:03
with a sentiment

GP 57:05
in fatik Nope. Why would I start now? I mean come on.

Jake 57:09
Alright folks. Well JP we'll start with you. Where can folks find you?

GP 57:13
Yeah, I'm right here other than presby to cancel I had to go from the peak of my my prowess with my thoughts to the lowest of the trough. So there we go. No other than press me to cancel you can find me on the retro therapy which is on Twitch Twitter. We got YouTube we got Instagram all the classics.

Palsh 57:36
Yeah, the retro therapy. And Paul shovel you Where can folks find you? On GP so my answer because I was seriously but saying you can find me right here. Now. Now I have nothing witty to say. So you can find me here and sometimes on Twitch.

GP 57:52
You can you can answer first it'll be fine.

Palsh 57:55
Now that's too much trouble now.

Jake 57:57
filming this episode need a lot editing. Sorry. Okay,

GP 58:01
mostly just because the discord I think discords

Jake 58:05
Yes, we'll just we'll just blame it all on Discord. We're will help people find you.

Wulff 58:12
I can be found again here. And on Twitter and Twitch at werewolf w ar e w ULFF

Palsh 58:22
sounds like a radio station who carry

Wulff 58:28
cartridge with a wolf like as a wolf

Jake 58:33
and we're commanded to live here on Radio presby to cancel you listening to us right here and my name is sick Jake you can find me on Twitter or sometimes on Twitch like polish. And you've been listening to presby to cancel. Special thanks for music go to Arthur the ancient found on Soundcloud or the last nation on YouTube. For more episodes, please visit our website presby kancil.com as well Feel free to like or subscribe at Apple, iTunes, Google podcasts or anywhere else you'd like to listen to your favorite shows. As always, thank you. This has been an ad again.

Special thanks to Arthur The Last Ancient on soundcloud for our podcast theme.

For updates and more episodes please visit our website www.pressbtocancel.com, or find us on Twitter @pressbtocancel and Instagram @pressbtocancel.

Remember that one game that despite how terrible it looked was one of your all time favs? How bout those games as beautiful as can be, yet somehow flaming trash heaps in gameplay. This episode we give our personal picks for best of the worst, and the worst of the best.

Episode Transcription:
The below is a machine based transcription of this episode. Sorta like Skynet if it was 2 years old, and wanted a cookie. Take it with a grain of salt.

Jake 0:01
Episode 10 the good, the bad, and the ugly Today on

Wulff 0:07
peski

GP 0:28
Hello and welcome everyone to press B to cancel. My name is Guy friend. And with me today we have our usual days of rapscallions to my left is where we'll say hello werewolf. Hello werewolf

GP 0:44
apt

GP 0:47
also with me today sick Jake

Jake 0:49
here buddy glad to be here

GP 0:52
and of course, Polish 109

Palsh 0:56
Whatever happened to polish runaway nevermind

Wulff 1:00
Yeah, we had to let him go.

Palsh 1:03
Yeah, a

GP 1:05
lot of turnover in the police departments, there can be only one. There can be only at pulse post is the equivalent title to Highlander if you're Canadian.

Jake 1:16
Alright, so that's a worldwide sensation. I'm sorry, everybody in every country loves Highlander.

GP 1:22
That's true. That's true. Okay. Alright, so today, we're going to be discussing kind of a variety. It's a little bit of a different show tonight. Typically, we just take one game or one series, and we discuss our experiences, our likes or dislikes. Tonight, we're going a little bit different. The title of the episode tentatively was called the good, the bad and the ugly. If you don't know what fugly means, have one of your ugly friends explain it to you. So essentially, the idea of this episode is that we can all acknowledge the great Games, they look good, they play good, the sound is great. And we can all acknowledge the crap games, they look horrible. They sound horrible. There are no redeeming qualities. So tonight we're discussing the ones the games in between games that either look gorgeous, but are otherwise devoid of anything meaningful. We will call those Travolta's or the ugly games that have a lot of heart. We're going to call those quasi motos. Okay, so those are the two categories today. I'm going to start us off and then we'll discuss and you know, go around the table as we always do, but we're going to start off with the ugly but great or quasi modo category. And I tell you what, guys, let's just go through different video game systems. We'll start with the eight minute video games. For me it's any s, which is going to be Bionic Commando. Okay, so I love this game. I played it on stream recently, and I'm always reminded about how much I love it but truly Fully the color palette is obnoxious. There's not the greatest animations between your character or the bad guys that you're trying to kill. And it's repetitive as hell. So that's kind of the idea here. Let's talk about Bionic Commando. And if you guys agree, let me know if you disagree. Let's have that conversation. werewolf. What do you think?

Wulff 3:20
You know, I've actually not played a lot of Bionic Commando. I think the last time I played it was, gosh, I was seven years old. So almost 30 years ago. Good grief. So I can't say much to it. But I can say that from what I've seen people play on Twitter recently. It's not a pretty game. But I do see a lot of people playing it on Twitter recently. So that must be some somewhat test some testament to its quality.

GP 3:51
Sure, yeah. Okay, so it's a popular enough game. It's not always the best to look. So if you're going to watch Bionic Commando

Unknown Speaker 4:00
A beer to first

GP 4:02
beer or do you first got

Jake 4:04
Yep. enhancer

GP 4:07
Okay, sick Jake. Paul What do you guys think about Bionic Commando?

Palsh 4:12
We go I'm sick regoing sick Paul shirt Jake 109 Who's going first?

Unknown Speaker 4:18
we merge together we are one

GP 4:21
yeah give us that sexy fusion voice yeah

Wulff 4:23
that trunks fusion voice

GP 4:31
Alright, so I guess we'll go with Jake first.

Jake 4:34
What do you think about Bionic Commando supplying commando? I played this quite a bit as a kid. I'm just trying to struggle how much variety was there in the enemy's

GP 4:45
will as far as the enemy sprite goes? All of your entry level guys are pretty much the same. They were maybe one or two like older throwers or you know rocket launcher guys, but otherwise Yeah, all the same.

Jake 4:56
Yeah, like none of them stand out to me. In hindsight when I kind of Going back to that game, I don't remember anything notable graphic wise, I remember that. I remember the back color palette like you mentioned, for sure. It's poor choice. They're all they really remember but graphics is the main character. As a kid, I thought he's got a doc rip off with that weird mechanical arm. That's all I got from the game graphic wise. Nothing memorable at all. I didn't care for Gameplay wise, it was actually quite fun. I mean, mechanics were solid.

GP 5:27
Right? Yeah. And I think that's exactly right. I think the biggest mechanic or the biggest saving grace of this game would be the mechanics, no jumping, just extendo arm. And also I to me, I love the sound. This is for me one of the rare games where the not just the soundtrack. But the the, the noises of the game. Were so perfect. And for me they invoke such a strong nostalgia, but I mean yeah, that's I think that's exactly kind of the heart of what the category is. So post, what do you think about commando

Palsh 6:01
I, it's pretty much the same as Jake is like, I don't remember a lot. But the things I do remember that kind of stuck in my brain like I remember not being able to jump and always wanting to swing like Spider Man basically, ever since now I was like, Yeah, I want to do this I remember playing the game and I think this is so cool. But I never thought it was amazingly good luck and I just thought that was the coolest idea. So I think sure yet looks was no, but you know, gameplay was I thought it was fun. So I agree with you.

GP 6:36
It's got that heart that addictive quality that after you leave the game, like if you haven't beaten it, you know you're wanting to go back and continue or you know, just pick up where you left off. Yeah. Now I'll say this. I don't have this for every category, but the eight bit ugly but great category. I have an alternate or an honorable mention. And I'll say this real quick, Final Fantasy the riginal a bit Final Fantasy not a pretty game, but damn it was amazing. I no no no you guys know I love Final Fantasy. And it was great for what it was and what it sparked. But going back it is it is dated.

Wulff 7:16
Yeah those those tiny backgrounds and battle with just four characters in a box and a little background and then the rest of its black

GP 7:27
it's it's a sexy older sister, I guess technically the sexy younger sister of Oregon Trail,

Jake 7:34
which,

Wulff 7:35
I mean, the game was based on d&d, so it was leaps and bounds from pen and paper numbers, but they still hadn't found their visual groove yet by any means.

Jake 7:51
Of course, but the enemy sprites and the boss sprites that game were extremely detailed and there's a lot of variety and the monsters you face because I thought about This game is well for my list. I didn't do it because of the variety of monsters on the graphics, the sprites.

GP 8:05
Yeah. Okay. See, I could definitely concede to that. But you know, to the point of it was inspired by or trying to invoke d&d as a great point because d&d requires a lot of good imagination to fill in the gaps visually and I think that is the point to Final Fantasy that I'm trying to make is there's some cool ideas there. But with the limited motion and animation you really have to use your you know, theater of the mind as it were to to fill in those those gaps.

Palsh 8:37
That's pixel or a nutshell for me, so I agree. But you can get some effing cool pixel art that said, Okay,

GP 8:45
I don't know No, no, that's good. Actually polish. Let's go to your what's your quasi modo game, the ugly

Palsh 8:52
but great game, this one stuck out to me and just because it I was felt like it looked like an entire game to me. Kind of That meant that made it with an any s game and it still had kind of elements of mostly Atari boys blob, because the graphics were really great. But the whole premise this game was hard, I still won't touch it because I'm just I don't have the fear of failure. But the fact that you could, you know, give them like 40 different jellybeans and have all these different things like you could turn your blog into a trampoline or a ladder or a friggin rocket you know, it's it's really cool but the graphics didn't keep up but I thought considering how ugly it was it still was pretty fun. And so that's that's just what stuck out for me.

GP 9:44
Yeah, I I own a boy and his blog and I have started a boy this blob but I think the graphics and I hate to say it this way because it makes me sound so shallow. But I think the graphics is prevented me from really getting into it. So I think that It's a bit of a home run for choice there. But I can't speak to the greatness of the game just to the just to the ugliness as far as the sprite quality. And you know the image quality in general. Yeah, everything is

Wulff 10:15
the design choices as far as the characters, they're very ugly. Yeah, there's not a lot of detail. However, they're really smoothly animated for how ugly they are, which I always found kind of odd.

Palsh 10:28
Yeah, and I think that's part of it, too, because they ended up it was so simplistic. I think they ended up getting a little bit more leeway when it came to animating them.

Wulff 10:37
Yeah, but yeah, that that game is definitely a favorite of mine. I had that growing up. I don't know what happened to my copy. I don't remember getting rid of it. But I don't know if it got lost in a movie or I did eventually trade it in or something. That is a game I put far too many hours into as a child. Oh my goodness. Like, I can probably still remember What most of the jelly beans do. That's how much I played it. Catch up a catch a pole.

Palsh 11:07
Yes.

Wulff 11:09
That is licorice ladder root beer rocket.

GP 11:13
I had a root beer rocket one

Jake 11:17
I think I agree with GP on the terms of the graphics is what probably turned me off in the game as well. I didn't really finish it. I spent I made it to the offworld section and that was interesting. But you spend majority of your time on the ground and there's such a limited palette of colors down there. It's all brown and black. I found it extremely dull.

Wulff 11:36
Yeah, they're their color choices definitely reflected what they went back to in the early 2000s just with less bloom. Right? Yeah.

GP 11:44
Well, Jake, what What game do you have for us? Ugly but lovable for the eight bit?

Jake 11:52
I mean, I mean, some guys know me. If I'm not complaining about a game on I don't like it. And they'll go on game I complain about all the time is our type for the master system this game is brutally hard for me. It took me forever to beat it and I had to use a continue code to do it. It's great The gameplay is classic to me the bosses are awesome. There's also mechanic where if you don't be the boss is fast enough to take away from you. There's you know, upgrades. It's a great game, poured it on literally everything. But the matches is the one is the one I played the most. But the thing that makes it ugly is there slow down constantly, there's flickering every other level. There's one level I want to say it's the third one where the background is this organic, pulsing like red color. But that's fine, but the enemy shots are also red. So because of the poor choice and colors of the background, the enemy bullets, you can't see where the bullets are half the time in addition to all the flickering. So like the graphics are just terrible, terrible. I've seen this game in arcades and it looks 10 times better. It's a shame because it's a fantastic game gameplay. It's plays well for me in any system. I know of the Master System and I love it there but the graphics on that system just can't keep up.

GP 13:06
Gotcha. Okay, so I hear you saying that you've only beaten it with the continue code. So what you mean is you've never beaten it. Little bit of shady games each other

GP 13:30
sick burger.

GP 13:33
Wolf, what do you got for us for ugly URL now? I'm sorry. Let's not do that yet. A portion where what do you guys think about our day?

Wulff 13:40
Um, I've never been a fan of shoot 'em ups and bullet hills. So our type was one I didn't really get into. They

Palsh 13:49
kind of blend together for me. Not that I'm saying it was a bad game or anything, but I can't tell the difference between archetype and Gradius. And anybody who's a shoot 'em up fan right? I was probably wanting to strangle me so I apologize but either way, honestly, you're not wrong. There are very few shooters that pull me in.

GP 14:09
Yeah, I'm with you. I think the only one that really stood out for me was like life force. And that's that's really the only one I paid attention to. I'm kinda like you guys with that so I will have to take sick Jake's word on this one. Yeah, but I believe especially I mean, yeah, I've never heard of anything like that where the bullets are the same color as the background. Obviously that is a horrible design

Wulff 14:35
that's that's a controllers are are right there.

GP 14:38
Yeah.

Palsh 14:39
It ends up being any s heard.

Jake 14:42
It belongs in any as hard but different system.

Palsh 14:44
Yeah. Gotcha. Master Cisco. doesn't have the same ring to it.

GP 14:49
doesn't roll off the tongue as much. Yeah.

Wulff 14:53
Alright, so what do you got for us on your quasi game, the game that everybody is familiar with. The Ninja for Master System but this game, the gameplay is an absolute blast. You're running around you're throwing jerkins at people you get upgrades to your stuff like movement upgrades, weapon upgrades, special attacks, all sorts of crap the enemies there's all sorts of enemy types they have different a eyes the levels get mixed up summer like a lot of them are just you know, go from the bottom scroll upward. Occasionally it's like scroll from right to left but they've got like the river level where you're trying to move from log to log and kill enemies before they get you stuff like that. They did a lot of creative things with the game, but boy did it not look good at all. There were a lot of sprites and they were a lot of ugly pixels. That the colors like they use really bright colors, their eye catching colors. But there's so much of one color that covers the screen at a time that it just it fries your eyeballs a little bit. That that bright neon green grass.

Palsh 16:11
Yeah, everything looks green afterwards. It's like you're wearing you must be wearing like some like tinted sunglasses afterwards

Wulff 16:19
Yeah, there's there's almost there's really very little detail on any of the locations in the game. You got to use your imagination a lot. But that game is so much fun. And it's it's a hard one. So it's one of those ones that's like punishing and you want to go back.

Palsh 16:38
I didn't even know that was for Master System. The first time I actually played was on like a bootleg 31 and one NAS card and I had no idea that this is bootleg up until like, a few years ago so I was like, This is amazing. Oh, nevermind.

Jake 16:53
Spiders in that you also picked a Master System game. Do you think it's something to do with that system and that just couldn't put out The solid graphic power to handle those games because there's a few other games that are also not that great graphic was

Wulff 17:05
no because there are some actually really pretty Master System games to the the Master System graphically had superior capabilities to the ns but you have to remember they were a lot more companies pumping games out on the IDS it's like it's it was the platform that was supported versus the platform that wasn't it doesn't matter how much power it has if people don't know how to make use of it.

Jake 17:30
Like I'm just thinking of the Sonic games, and some of them are really terrible. The slowdown is ridiculous lots of flickering like it is. It's disappointing because there aren't great games on the system is one of my favorite systems.

Wulff 17:41
Well the Master System. The Master System is just a Game Gear. It's it's a Game Gear Fit to TV resolution, or rather, at the Game Gear is a Master System fit to a smaller resolution. They're they're the exact same architecture. That's why all the emulators run both of them.

Jake 18:00
Interesting. Okay,

GP 18:01
okay, so that's our that's our time for a bit games. Let's move on to 16 bit if you guys are ready for that, is that good? Sure. Holy cow. Is that that claw?

Palsh 18:14
Yeah, we'll call the

Wulff 18:17
next bit

GP 18:22
is one of those rare occasions where I wish I had worn pants now? Well, I'll tell you what wolf blitzer with you 16 bit ugly but great. What do you think and start race effects?

Palsh 18:34
Yeah.

Wulff 18:36
Not absolutely good. It had a lot of character in the graphics, but it was not pretty at all. The, for whatever reason, I'm pretty sure those What is that? gas. That gas station with the chevron? Pretty sure those Ever on cars were inspired by this game.

GP 19:03
Or vice versa. But it's a good

Wulff 19:06
Yeah, I've I you know what, they dropped it on the switch this week. And I went back and played it. And I had so much fun with it. Oh my goodness. It was a lot of fun. And I used to play it a lot to player which I mean, you can play two player races against the AI as well. Which is pretty taxing on a Super Nintendo. Which I'm pretty sure that killed the frame rate big time, so it made it even uglier. It was still somehow playable. And it was a lot of fun. I really really enjoyed that one.

Jake 19:41
Yeah, I was gonna say the only time I saw framerate that bad post mariokart the switch was after watching stunt racer x like, it's like three FPS. It's

GP 19:52
you know, that brings up I mean, we'll have to see how the rest of the show plays out but I've had in the back of my mind like that. This big question mark of the two categories today, how many sports games or how many racing games ultimately are going to be referenced? So we're going to chuck that down as you know, the first one I suppose for, for racing, but that's, that's interesting to me. I think that's a good pic. Absolutely. But I'm glad you chose that because, well, that was on my short list of like five games. I was so hesitant to pull out as a racing game or a sport themed game. Because those really didn't hit their stride until you know much later. But I like that one pulse. What do you got for us

Palsh 20:34
on 16 bit mine is pretty much the 16 bit argument all over again from from a pit I've got a game that was hard that I loved, but the same kind of problem lemmings and I hate saying it because let me look terrible Lamine, but they're, you know, like they're like six pixels each. So you can't really complain too much, but the idea behind it again, was so cool like you could make one guy stop everybody else Another one would start digging and other woman started digging upwards and whatever. So game itself was just great. The music is probably one of the top five for like Super Nintendo for me for for soundtracks. But I just remember and it never bothered me about the graphics I'm just saying it's just that they don't look great.

GP 21:26
I tell you what I appreciate here is Forgive me for saying it this way. This shame in your voice when you said lemmings? It's almost like you know, it's 3am I've had a few drinks I'm lonely. I'm going to call lemmings and not tell anybody about it the next day, so I love that See, that's why I love this. This idea for the for the episode. You sneak that Kelly? Yeah, you got me good. No, I love that. I think that's a great choice. And I think we've all done that with either lemmings or a game like lemmings were like ah I just want to want to save my appetite but I'm not proud of it let's let's play lemmings

Wulff 22:05
yeah that's good. What do what do you guys think about lemmings? That's actually another game where despite the ugliness of the palette, and you know, the little tiny characters that you can barely make out, they were really smoothly animated and they can eat a lot of information with what 15 pixels.

Palsh 22:22
Yeah, that here but what they were doing

Unknown Speaker 22:26
that's pretty impressive.

Palsh 22:28
Yeah. So they, they definitely went for function over form. And they I think they succeeded. So I mean, that's that's saying, Oh,

GP 22:38
yeah, it's, it's a great game. It's that argument again, it's got a great personality.

Jake 22:45
Okay, all right. The backgrounds, okay, granted, not all the backgrounds are your hot redhead, okay? But a lot of them look fine to me. There's one I played on the Genesis so 16 bit and the one level or there's couple levels with the forest theme. I thought that looked amazing. And the fact that you could dig through the leaves of the tree and everything looks great to me.

Palsh 23:08
Yeah, I can see your point there.

Jake 23:10
Plus the intro was funny. I thought the intro was well animated.

Palsh 23:13
Yes, true.

Jake 23:14
I like six pixels. What are you going to do, right? There's only so much you can do with six weeks one character.

Palsh 23:19
And now you see why I feel guilty even saying it because it's like, there's so much charm to this game. And considering what they've done with it. So

GP 23:27
I think it's a great game that conveys exactly what it needed to but you're right. There's not much frill to it outside of like visually, it's not arresting in a positive way.

Wulff 23:39
Yeah, it's not something that ever made me stop and look when I saw it on a screen anywhere. But playing it I could not put it down.

GP 23:48
Yeah, it's a game you play in your own home. Like if you had gone to Walmart and got on the display, you'd be like not here lemmings. We can know each other but nobody can know I'm going to sound like a jerk

Palsh 24:04
Just you wait I'll get you back

GP 24:07
okay all right so polished one or nine with lemmings subject. What do you got for us? 16 bit

Jake 24:14
16 bit So you mentioned earlier about racing games and this is technically a racing game. It's unit racers for the snice Oh man, I

Palsh 24:21
forgot about that.

Jake 24:22
So I don't know if you guys have played this game before. cycles

Palsh 24:26
Yeah, I was like yeah, just cycles without right.

GP 24:29
Yeah, I remember

Jake 24:29
Yeah. It's the weirdest concept for a video game I've seen in a while. But I love the hell this game I got it at a US store for like 10 bucks. Graphic wise. Literally you do you guys said it. You're just a unicycle no writer. And the tracks are basically this candy stripe. You know line that loops around and goes left to right. There's not much going on graphic wise but Gameplay wise the tricks system in it. There's like a dozen different tricks you can do with your your bike. You know flips and cartwheels, all kinds of crazy stuff. And you need to do those tricks in order to build speed and momentum. And you kind of get tied up in the different modes. Like some of the modes are focused on doing the stunts, and the ones are about speed. Some are just like, you know, marathon and length. There's a lot of variety, and tracks in the game. The game plays outstanding. The only problem is, it's a lot of them with the same precursor to Tony Hawk's

Palsh 25:23
Pro Skater. And a lot of ways

Wulff 25:26
Yeah. Now that you mentioned it, yeah, that game did a ton of stuff for being a 2d side on racing game.

GP 25:34
Yeah, but I think when you can make the argument that if Marble Madness makes you look like a chump, then Okay, you know, yeah. Well, they might be but you can't tell because there's there's just no way no, no, I think that's a good and you're right, like, that's that's their kind of racing thing as well. So that's, that's interesting. I remember the game I don't remember much of playing it though, but I can see it in my mind. And yeah, I agree. I think that's a good good entry. What

Wulff 26:06
do you guys think? I would agree that that game was not a whole lot to look at, like it was cleanly animated. But there was a is literally, you know, the track is just a candy striped bar on the ground that moves around. And then you're a unicycle no character on the unicycle. You're just a unicycle doing stunts and tricks and jumps and bouncing around and zooming along. So it was it was a limited presentation type of game. I wouldn't say

GP 26:38
yeah, but werewolf the way that you just described it, like the you're a unicycle going around doing tricks and bumps and jumps. I if you said that to me, I would actually I would want to pick that up the way you just presented that actually had me interested. I'm like, Oh shit, maybe I should play this again. It was an absolute blast. It really was. I played the crap out of it. Good. I mean, that's, that's the heart and soul of this, this category, so that's good. I'll jump in now with my 16. But I was torn between two. So I'm going to pick the little, the one that's a little bit more controversial, just because it'll be a better discussion, but I was thinking about doing Starfox but I think we can all agree it did not age well it was not great, but it's a fun game. I know. Jake loves it. But what I'm gonna I'm gonna, what I'm what I'm gonna officially state is the original Mortal Kombat. Now I love most Mortal Kombat. It's, you know, in the series, but if you look at the first Mortal Kombat, and when I first played that I played it around the same time as Street Fighter two. So comparatively Street Fighter two, crisper cleaner, brighter, smoother. And to me Mortal Kombat, though I enjoy it. The first one was very clunky you hear how stressing

Palsh 27:56
though I enjoyed, you know, he's he Doing this right

GP 28:00
because I Well, there's there's points coming in later polish. Their Mortal Kombat will make other entries in the future. I you know, starting with Mortal Kombat two, great franchise. And if you look at this disparity between how poorly the first foot looks and plays, compared to MK two, that's kind of the crux of my argument for Mortal Kombat. If they ended the Mortal Kombat series with the first one, it wouldn't have made the list but out of all of it, yes, MK one. Not that great, in my opinion, fun to play, but just pretty ugly.

Palsh 28:38
You know, I can get beyond that. I thought it was really cool to see Street Fighter two, and had all the way smoother animations and stuff but I mean, they weren't taking, you know, real life models and trying to digitize them. So the the motions and the animations were so much more fluid because you're working with the cartoon versus real life. So it was fun. Don't get me wrong, but, you know, I thought it looked pretty bad.

GP 29:05
Yeah, it's the video game equivalent to spawn the live action movie. Yeah. Yeah, it didn't necessarily look that great. Also, some of the acting was hit or miss. But in the end, there's something about it that I still love. But yeah, well what do you think about that Mortal Kombat? Ugly but great or just a game? What do you think? I think

Wulff 29:25
it's just a game. I was never drawn into Mortal Kombat. Like all my friends were a I mean, I was in the initial rush of it. Yeah, it was like, Oh my gosh, they're just brutally bashing each other's skulls in and there's blood and Oh, man. But at the end of the day, I was still kind of like well, street fighters more fun and prettier. Pen over this. I granted my experience with it was a neighborhood full of kids who had the Genesis so it was even more limited than the Super Nintendo one. So I'm kind of colored by that memory. Everybody I knew had it for Genesis, because of course more blood.

GP 30:04
Right? Yeah. Okay. Okay. Jake, how about you?

Jake 30:09
I've been I hate disagreeing with you guys on every game. It's not that but Okay, look, you're right Street Fighter is definitely not

Palsh 30:16
garbage say it's a game.

Jake 30:18
It's not it's not lukewarm garbage at best. Okay? You microwave me on

Wulff 30:25
the garbage?

GP 30:27
If your argument against me here's it's not that bad. Okay

Unknown Speaker 30:33
then it's kind of that bad.

Jake 30:34
All right. The color palette is a bit limited, I give you that. But the digitized actors was revolutionary and they look pretty good. In fact, I wonder if you compare the frames of animation in Mortal Kombat vs. Street Fighter? I bet you they have the same frames. The only difference is not as colorful. And like you're right when you mentioned later entries, the series that kind of expand on that. Moral Kombat three is one of my favorite fighting games and the color Pelletier is amazing, but just watching Keno. That rapscallion thrusting his fist in somebody's chest and pulling out their beating heart. That looked great. I thought that was hilarious as it was good looking to me at the time. I like to look at the game I also love subzero team some zero I will be for life. I thought the sprites and the characters were well done. all agree Street Fighter looks better, but I think brutal combat is not as bad as you think it is. It's no clay fighter but that way. Okay,

Palsh 31:30
basically, Jake feels like Cora when he got punched in the nuts in the first movie.

Unknown Speaker 31:36
That's true.

GP 31:38
And the rest of us feel like Johnny K. Yeah.

Palsh 31:41
hundred dollar glasses, glasses. So

Jake 31:45
last all this before or after the discectomy I'm leaving that one.

GP 31:50
Yeah, glass, all for the wind. Okay, I like that. Okay, so um, next is going to be the 32 bit category. Let's start with Paul. Tell me Whoa, and let's, let's, let's clarify this. This tier is 3264 bit because we're

Wulff 32:05
Yeah, it's the same generation

Palsh 32:08
so we can switch it up. Okay. So I'm going to name a game. And I'm going to tell you guys what the game and I want you to tell me if you think that I think it's ugly but amazing, or if I think it's terrible, but beautiful.

Palsh 32:22
Okay. Okay.

Palsh 32:25
Castlevania Symphony of the Night.

Jake 32:31
Okay, if you don't think that's a pretty game, there's something wrong with you.

Palsh 32:33
Yeah, that was just trolling. I was hoping. For more.

Wulff 32:38
See, I was in on that one. Otherwise, I probably would have laid into pause What the fuck is wrong with you?

Palsh 32:46
Know, that one I can't say anything bad about so. That's the joke. So anyways, continue forward.

GP 32:54
No, now you have to give us a real game. Yeah, I believe a beautiful 32 or 64 Doom 64 Okay, okay, tell us about that. Why why why do you hate that game so much?

Palsh 33:06
It would look great. I remember seeing magazine ads, I remember playing it or not playing it wanting to play it. And then finally I went out on vacation, came back and had a copy of it my hand I was like it was this or Duke Nukem. 64 I was already playing Duke Nukem 64 I was like, okay, so I need something new for me, my friends. So we can just lay into this game. And I tried it. I was like, This looks so cool. And then I realized this, like, this game is crap. I was so disappointed with it. It moved well, like the graphics look great. But it other than that, it just felt like a little bit better version of doom to me like, and I can't play the original Doom anymore or give it headaches just from the motion. So it looked better. But I was disappointed because I thought it was, you know, the 64 and it just meant it was for 64 and I thought it was going to be the actual Doom with better ground. Fix. Now it was completely different. Like they made their own game and I was just I wasn't ready for that disappointment. You've you've given me a bit of a revelation here and agree or disagree but let me know. Would you say no?

GP 34:16
Okay, moving on. No. Would you say that video game commercials and box art and descriptions? Were the back in the day preteen equivalent to Tinder profiles.

Palsh 34:32
Never thought about it now.

GP 34:33
Yeah, they show up and you're so excited because their profile and then they show up and you realize this is not what I thought it was going to be

Palsh 34:40
at all. Man, sir.

Jake 34:43
Well, you are thirsty and hell.

GP 34:46
Oh, God, thirsty for that video game. Yeah.

Palsh 34:51
I didn't care about girls back then. I just cared about more video games. Just thinking about that power of

GP 34:57
the power of what was your favorite position back then? 64 cut that out.

Jake 35:05
Nope. Three hands on the stick.

Palsh 35:08
That's my joke on you need three hands to play an M 64 controller.

GP 35:13
Yeah, we saw that name then way nowhere. Okay, so Doom 64. werewolf. What do you what do you think? agree disagree?

Wulff 35:22
That's one I don't know much about unfortunately. I thought it was just gonna be Doom for in 64 so I didn't bother with it.

Palsh 35:34
PC Okay, shut up.

Wulff 35:36
No literally like I thought it was Doom like because I played it on. I think I played it at a friend's house on PC and then I had played it on Super Nintendo. So I was like, well, I played it on a couple of platforms. I don't want to play it again. So I didn't play it for in 64

Palsh 35:53
Yeah, well that's that's exactly why I bought it because they'll say Oh, man, like it's a better version. No.

GP 35:58
Wrong That's brilliant wrong. Was that Charlie Murphy? Wrong?

Wulff 36:05
Or the tigers in Wow, wrong? Yeah.

GP 36:10
Okay, but see like how great of a pic was that pulse bought the game because of two words. Doom 64 did not buy that game because of two words. Doom 64 I swipe left so

Wulff 36:26
hard.

Palsh 36:30
Man. I practically hit super like all right.

GP 36:35
I don't get that reference. I don't know super late.

Palsh 36:38
I'm very single. We'll put it that way.

GP 36:44
Okay, so, Jake, what do you do? I'm 64

Jake 36:49
I'm actually not a fan of doom. I actually don't like the series at all. Although the recent PC ones that came with the reboots, those are okay but the classic do my never really cared for and there's a series of games on the 60 That kind of tried to bring over to the PC stuff. There's Duke Nukem and hexen. And I think XM XM hex n. That's a word was the better of those type of games that 2d sprites in a 3d world? I didn't care for Doom 64 at all. I did rent it. I played a little bit. I couldn't care for it at all. It is ugly. I'll give you that. I just also think it's a bad game.

GP 37:23
Yeah, and I think Doom 64 was one of those games, where I watched my cousins play it. And I loved watching them like I could keep up with it. If I was watching somebody else, but the first time I tried playing it, it was like I completely forgotten what it was like to look at the game and could no longer keep up with it. So I played maybe 30 minutes of it and realize this is not for me to play. But it was entertaining to watch other people run and gun and blow up stuff. So I like it and the visuals are okay so long as I am not guiding the visuals. But that's that's just me say Take what do you ever is for this category? Ugly but great 32 or 64 bit? Okay.

Jake 38:07
Hear me you Final Fantasy seven. I love this game.

GP 38:11
I think that's a great choice Yeah,

Jake 38:13
everybody loves family seven or at least people who were in that generation love probably seven. Today it doesn't hold up for sure I mean the pre rendered backgrounds and in the CGI very pixelated very under rez for today's time but even back in high school I played this game originally, the sprites and the overworld and the exploration areas like cloud looks like some kind of peanuts character mutated into 3d polygon. And there's no textures anywhere to be found any of the enemies practically It is one of the ugliest first gen 3d games I've ever seen. Like I'm talking marrow 64 Meg's father's sevens cloud look like fucking the Mona Lisa. This game is the only reason people like this game. is because of the FMV The video is very cool. And I love that story. I love the music, and the gameplay is fun. But it's ugly as hell.

GP 39:09
No, I think I think that's, that may be one of the best because that's exactly right. And I think part of the reason Personally, I was so let down by the graphics is because the commercials that came out back in 97 for the games pretty much only showed the FMV it's the one so your hype for this and you're like, Oh my god, considering the last Final Fantasy with six leaps and bounds and you play it and you're like you said you're just playing to get to the next video. But somewhere somewhere in there you fall in love with it. That's probably like the earliest version of you know, people getting mad because of, you know, not showing gameplay, you know, because that wasn't the practice back then. You know, everybody just played the game because there weren't cutscenes like that. And now it's like the cutscenes look awesome, but let's see what the gameplay looks like you know, so you have gameplay trailers besides you Know the actual trailer? Well yeah, it's the video you ever been catfished by a video game? That's the idea right? The whole dating thing around again? Yeah, I think that's brilliant. I think that's a great observation and that is the cultural and historical significance of the Final Fantasy seven commercials. But if you go back and still because I did this recently if you YouTube the original Final Fantasy seven TV commercials I still get the same feels

Jake 40:28
Oh yeah, the atmosphere is amazing and and said jump from snez to PlayStation you just so hyped that the game is going to look amazing and that we all love family six I think of this podcast and just yeah the sprite work and there's great the bosses look I'm awesome. It's graph as graphics are amazing because 2d, so you just really hoping that for the jump to 3d would be something amazing. And what they show you the commercials. Looks great. But that's maybe about 10 minutes of FMV the entire game.

Palsh 40:56
Yeah

Wulff 40:58
that's true. Wolfie what do you what do you think? Final Fantasy seven okay I'm probably in the minority here to where I'm not a huge fan of Final Fantasy seven that's not to say I wasn't when it came out I played 200 hours probably in that first go through where I did just about everything I think except killing Ruby weapon I even made a second Knights of the Round so

GP 41:25
so I'm hearing you say you never beat Final Fantasy I'm playing I'm playing I'm playing

Wulff 41:33
now I I even made like I I enjoyed that game so much that time that I even made a friggin anime music video and I am V out of it back in the day with VHS like that was time consuming first I was dedication.

GP 41:49
Yeah,

Wulff 41:51
I still that's the only one I did. Oh no, that's not true. I did one with Resident Evil as well, but I really enjoyed that game the first time and then every time I've tried to play since I can't put more than like three hours into it before I'm just bored and walk away the game. Like even when I tried to play it a second time back then I was just like, man, I can't. So, to me the game, it hits some notes the first time other than that, I can't agree with that. It's an amazing game. I feel like it's just been overhyped so much. And I think it's also the fact that it wasn't my first Final Fantasy, a lot of people who love it, it was their first Final Fantasy, and that's often the case, but I will agree the game didn't look quite as good as I was hoping. But then I had spent all summer plans so he could n and Wild Arms and compared to Wild Arms. It was damn gorgeous.

Palsh 42:47
Wait, you mean it's not pronounced suikoden

Wulff 42:49
crap? No. But yeah,

GP 42:53
it's pronounced Wild Arms that

Wulff 42:57
that jump from sprites. It makes It with those backgrounds and everything it even though they weren't pretty polygons by any means for the characters, it was still an exciting change of presentation that let them tell the story in a different way.

GP 43:12
And I feel like with Final Fantasy seven they overcorrected the ship when they came out with Final Fantasy eight, with seven, the backgrounds looked more lush and detailed than the characters. And then they came out with eight. And the background was kind of put on the backburner, so they could focus on the sprites and the overworld for the main characters. So at least they paid attention and corrected a lot of people's biggest complaints. But yeah, I think that was a good good entry there. Were all four do you have for us in this category? 32 to 64 bit ugly but lovable Bushido blade? Yeah, we couldn't Bushido blade.

Wulff 43:53
I'm not gonna lie. I was kind of a square fanboy back in the PlayStation era. So I was getting all their stuff. Like it I had bought total number one nobody got total number one, but I got Bushido blade and it's it's not what I expected it to be and I had so much fun with it. And my friends and I we would just sit there and play Bushido blade for hours just because the combat it was so intricate for as limited as it was, I mean you injure your opponent, but if you got a killing stab that was it that that match was over with. There was no health bars, it was injury or death. And you can even mess up your opponent by like throwing sand in their fat face like a dirty rapscallion and then taking advantage of it. It it was it was so much fun and even just unlocking it. The the I think it had a couple of hidden characters. It was totally worth it. Just there was a lot of nuance to the game. Play that you don't see in a lot of fighting games.

GP 45:03
I'm sitting here I'm trying to remember exactly which one Bushido blade was. So it was it was a fighting game.

Wulff 45:09
Yeah, to a degree. It was a weapons fighting game. And I think you actually got to choose between a few weapons to if I remember correctly. Yeah, you're right. What the cover looks like I'm sorry, I'm trying to remember this one is black and white with I think a big big red splatter on it is like a black and white pencil drawing or ink drawing of somebody and then a big red blood splatter blade

GP 45:39
I'm also Yeah, I google image that endure. Yeah, I do remember now. I'm sorry. Thank you.

Wulff 45:44
But yeah, the the character models were not pretty that the locations are not very pretty. They weren't even very detailed. It was like one of them was a big courtyard of cherry blossom trees. And it looked like they just copy pasted the same square aware of the arena over and over and over and over the lawn from one end to the other until they got to the opposite wall.

Jake 46:05
There was a wonky camera and that came for sure used to zoom way out or like really get really close

Wulff 46:11
yeah cuz it let you run away from the your opponent pretty far right? Which of course just made the characters even more unreadable?

GP 46:21
Yeah, yeah more obscure. But yeah, I'll be honest that sounds like a piece of crap well done that's not a good entry sick Jake, what do you think about that one?

Jake 46:33
I love the game to me. We talked about this before the podcast procedure plays one of my favorite games of the PlayStation because it's not that many I played on that. The combat that one on one combat. I just love how most weapons strikes will like outright kill your opponent if they connect but there's all about the Perry system. And that's pretty unique for its time and there's not many games these days that have that same you know, do or die combat system. But I just love it when you thank you Nick's amazed leg that dropped to the ground. But they weren't dead. They still kept fighting while they're on the floor. I thought was hilarious. I love

Wulff 47:07
Yeah, they'll they'll like drag one leg while like trying to walk with the other leg with this horrible limp and it's great.

Jake 47:15
It's like Black Knight fight, right? Yeah,

Wulff 47:18
you break their arm and it just falls limp. They should have made the

GP 47:23
Black Knight like an unlockable character.

Jake 47:26
I'll know your polygons off. It's great. I love it.

Jake 47:31
The backgrounds I agree are bad. But there was a style to it though. Like the bamboo forest, the cherry blossoms it kind of felt like that martial arts, you know trope that's set up in a deserted field. A courtyard has been cleared away to warriors that battle. It had the style, but yeah, you're right. It did not have the graphic power and the textures to back it out.

GP 47:54
And then in the background, you see just the opening scene from Ninja Gaiden taking place.

Palsh 48:00
As long as that music from ninja guidance playing I'm down for it. I love that game.

GP 48:07
Okay, so Polish What was your? No You got us at the beginning. Sorry I got Castlevania joke. Yes. And the wolf goddess with Bushido blade. Jake What do you got?

Jake 48:21
We went seven man

GP 48:24
that's right that's how forgettable of a game that is.

Wulff 48:28
Bomb.

GP 48:30
I know I'm just I'm drinking drinking my haterade tonight No, I The reason I'm selling is because I've got so many honorable mentions for this category for 32 to 64 ultimately, I've settled on one but Metal Gear Solid has not aged well. This is not my These are my my honorable mentions. Such a great game, full of story and a lot of amazing twists and turns, but even playing that way came out. The graphics took me out of it. Mortal Kombat mythology sub zero. The fighting in that I don't know if you guys ever played that the graphics were bad. The fighting style was decent, but the platforming was abysmal, but it was still oddly charming because it's sub zero in an open world type setting. But ultimately, I think I have to settle for ugly but with a lot of heart, Nintendo 60 fours, GoldenEye. It was going to be that or Superman 64. And ultimately, I just don't care enough about Superman 64 so GoldenEye because I love that game. I don't know how much of the actual game or campaign I ever played through. I know I've watched it wire to wire with my older brother, but the four person you know, challenge mode was my entire experience pretty much with the 64 like that and Mario 64 and not much else. But he did great Yeah well but I mean even if you guys ever played like the giant head hack or you know code for golden it came on game was so yes DK mode so incredibly ugly but so much fun and it for me it was one of the first multiplayer you know games like that What do you guys think about golden I polished let's start with you know you summed it up

Palsh 50:23
I really can't add to it because it's just I want to say I loved it when it first came out but at the same like for graphics was but I think it was more just how you could shoot people in the crotch and they grab their crops and then fall over dead you know or it would tell you like give you the tally of headshots arm shots leg shots torso other you know other was always the crotch shot so right yeah, but I mean the graphics as much as I want to admit I thought they were amazing. I think it was more the gameplay itself so

GP 50:59
no slough Rizzoli. I'm still still playing that from an unfinished game that we started back then. That's impossible. Well, what do you think about GoldenEye? Ah,

Wulff 51:11
yeah, a, it didn't have a whole lot of texturing I think the majority of the the texture quality went to the characters faces, but not their models. So the game itself though, was an absolute blast. It wasn't a whole lot to look at, which is probably for the best because it I think it helped it run a little smoother. There were a lot and 64 first person games that made me gave me headaches or made me dizzy, something like that. Man, I spent so many hours in that game with friends after school. We just go to somebody's house and play for like two three hours that day and then do it all over again. The next day. It was crazy.

GP 51:54
Well, and it was just good enough of a game to make you want to hate your friends. Oh yeah, only for a short for short amount of time because like you said the next day, you're fine. Or if you were mad at somebody, you were only mad until you shot them in the crotch and then you were square

Wulff 52:10
that that Mario Kart 64 games that end your friendship for the day. Yep. And but it's fine tomorrow.

Palsh 52:18
Yeah. And then you started all over again with the next match.

GP 52:20
Yeah, we should we should set up a multi person. tournament or like cast of if we can figure out a way to do that either like Mario Kart or

GP 52:30
golden I think would be a blast. There's a PC version. I think actually, if GoldenEye

Wulff 52:34
And isn't it awful?

Jake 52:37
Okay, just like

GP 52:42
Okay, cool. So Jacob, what's your take on GoldenEye

Jake 52:45
wolf said I pretty much nail on the head with the low character Polly's or low Polly's link character models, the triangle shaped heads, it reminds me of that music video Dire Straits money for nothing. We're just Bismillahi low polygon models and it's just terrible plusses against 64. And hey, I love the system. I love Nintendo but they had the fog problem like the jungle level and the Russian level it just the design to get around the graphic failures. They brought in more fog, just more fog. And they do that all these games and it's just does not work for the game at all. But it's a fun game. I used to play multiplayer like everybody else. Proximity mines is my favorite weapon. I love that. Yeah, I love the game and I love playing it but you're right. It's it's ugly as dirt.

GP 53:31
Yeah. Do you know who I killed more with proximity mines than anybody else yourself? Yes, me. I find my short term memory man. I try.

Palsh 53:40
I tried to lure people into it without setting it off myself. And was very unsuccessful.

GP 53:46
Shit went to the to the point of the fog. And to kind of again, put this all in the same packaging as the Tinder and the dating things. They do the same thing in nightclubs. You know dim the lights a little bit and put into more fog, it'd be fine. So we've all fallen victim to that it's okay. Alright, so on to the other side of that coin. Let's now examine the beautiful games that are completely without any other merits. Next time, well maybe not next time but in the upcoming episodes on presby to cancel. Let's go around and restate our names a group of rapscallions and tell everybody where they can find us. Jake, you want to start us off?

Jake 54:33
Sure I'm sick Jake, you can find me on Twitch and Twitter. And I guess here

GP 54:39
Wonderful. Thank you

Palsh 54:41
push. You can find me here most of all, and I also stream very sparingly on Twitch as well under pulse 109 pls h 109.

Wulff 54:52
Okay, very good. And well. You can find me streaming on Twitch or here or occasionally posting on Twitter. werewolf w ar EWLFF

GP 55:04
awesome and I am guy prime. You can find me here on Twitch under the retro therapy or on YouTube, Instagram or Twitter as the retro therapy, everybody until next time, thank you so much for joining us.

Jake 55:21
Special thanks for music go to Arthur, the ancient found on Soundcloud or the last ancient on YouTube. For more episodes, please visit our website presby to cancel.com as well Feel free to like or subscribe at Apple iTunes, Google podcasts or anywhere else you'd like to listen to your favorite shows. As always, thank you. This has been

Wulff 55:42
a do again

Special thanks to Arthur The Last Ancient on soundcloud for our podcast theme.

For updates and more episodes please visit our website www.pressbtocancel.com, or find us on Twitter @pressbtocancel and Instagram @pressbtocancel.

Press B to Cancel... evolution! After 8 episodes we get all poetic about our earliest Pokemon memories, and discuss the inspiration for our podcast name.

Episode Transcription:
The below is a machine based transcription of this episode. Sorta like Skynet if it was 2 years old, and wanted a cookie. Take it with a grain of salt.

Wulff 0:00
This week on presby to cancel, we discussed the evolution of Pokemon Gotta catch them all. Again

Wulff 0:29
Hello everybody and welcome to presby to cancel I figured eight episodes deep might be time to jump into a topic reflecting the podcasts namesake presby to cancel so, with that in mind, we're going to be talking about Pokemon today to cancel that evolution. Wait what?

Palsh 0:48
Sorry, I just had to do that I was trying to think something

Wulff 0:50
witty, Ching goo Jayco magic keys make you feel all better?

Palsh 0:55
We ran. Okay, so here's our intro You may continue

Jake 1:03
or be very proud of. So

Wulff 1:06
today's episode, I know I normally do things a little bit more structured, but today I'm going in a little bit more freewheeling. So we're going to discuss things a little differently. But I'd like to start with Pokemon beginning in the West. So I remember seeing I had kind of gotten into import games and stuff like that shortly before Pokemon released in the West. And so I remember seeing Pocket Monsters merge at import stores and stuff there was a place I used to go called game cave in Southern California. I don't think it's around anymore, but I I'd go there once every month or two and I just see all this pocket monsters crap wall scrolls, stickers, cards, you name it was there and I was like, What the heck is this and they tried to explain it to me and I just didn't get it. Bought a year or two later, it finally released in the West. And I remember seeing a new story on TV about Topeka, Kansas, changing its name for a day to Topeka to Kansas. Nintendo, I'm guessing threw a big sack of money at Topeka, Kansas and said, Hey, we want to change the name just for a day have a big event there. Kick off the Pokemon North American events in Topeka and they were like, Yes, please. So they have people I'm pretty sure they had pretty sure they had people dressed in Pikachu outfits and they had the, the fleet of 10 Volkswagen beetles done up like Pikachu that said, gotta catch them all on the side. And from there, they just started sending those beetles out to everywhere in North America to do the events. Do any of you recall that at all?

Jake 2:55
No, but I just find out where they didn't do. Topeka, Kansas because took a piece of Cute little Pokemon.

Wulff 3:02
But I think topi was generation to

Jake 3:05
shows you the extent of my knowledge.

GP 3:08
Actually, I do remember this as somebody who lives about two hours south from I love that we're saying Topeka. Sorry, everybody in Kansas says just tipica like it's to a PK, but it's, it's spelt Topeka, but it's like Quebec or Quebec. It's to be here. But I love that you say, it's like saying Comanche instead of Comanche. Anyway, doesn't matter. Gotcha. No, I remember this and trying to figure out why the heck I should care about it. Because it got, you know, like you said, national coverage and all this stuff. It's a big deal. And I just remember, how do you wanna say it looked and seemed so bizarre? Yeah, it seemed like not just the people my age were getting into it. But it was these adults, you know, wondering are not wandering around but stomping around and, and these these thematic and brightly colored anime type shirts. And to that point, all I'd ever really seen of like anime and then that kind of stuff was Dragon Ball. So I'm like, why are we not having a Dragon Ball Z day? What the hell this picture? But yeah, so I remember the event from Topeka, but I just remember being, like, bewildered and confused.

Wulff 4:20
Yeah, I was just I was not into it at all when I had first heard about it and then I saw this new story. And I was like, and I lived in Vegas at the time, so it got that far at least. I was like, What the hell is Pokemon like, why is this such a big deal? And then I think I had Nintendo a Nintendo Power subscription at the time. So when my Nintendo Power came in, they started like really hamming it up with Pokemon and everything. And I was like, Hmm, okay, I can see. And then I got a little curious and I think because of the craze, my parents decided to get a copy for both me and my Brother interestingly enough, they got us both blue.

Palsh 5:04
I was about to ask do they get the same color each? Because that would be just

Wulff 5:08
yeah. So we yeah we had a we had a house without a few Pokemon but I remember I was so into that game at the time I played the crap out I was playing it on Super Gameboy mostly because I I lived in Vegas I had lived there for a short while didn't really have any friends so I wasn't wasn't playing it at school. I just played it at home so I didn't care. I got super into it. I I'm pretty sure I beat it. Within a couple weeks, like caught new to everything. Or maybe I missed my chance to catch me too. I think I wasted my master ball is what happened. Now what was I talking about?

GP 5:51
You had missed your chance to get to you? Oh, yes,

Wulff 5:54
I I had missed my chance to catch me too because I blew my master ball and I think zapped or something. And so I was kind of disappointed and I ended up starting my file over and played through the game a second time over the next few weeks to finally catch me to it. That's how into it I was I do need the master ball to collect to catch him. I don't think you needed it but I think it was such a slim chance to catch him without it that it was just a pain in the butt.

Palsh 6:23
Okay, that's fair.

Wulff 6:25
I probably tried 2530 times and failed every time as I now I'm done. Yeah,

Palsh 6:32
piece of

Jake 6:33
you every time I looked it up the guides always said just save your master ball from YouTube. You want them

Wulff 6:37
But see, they'd sold me on the birds being the legendary Pokemon. I kind of thought I needed the master ball for that.

Palsh 6:43
You know, I would have probably done the same. I was

Wulff 6:45
tricked. Anyway, moving on from that. That was my experience with Gen one. How about you guys?

Jake 6:52
So my Express Pokemon will see I was a pretty cool kid in high school. I know. I know. Hard to believe but all the cool kids used to play Magic the Gathering during recess and lunch. So all my friends play matches the game we played for years. And then I used to do the occasional tournament. He's one of those guys went to the local comic book store the coolest place on Earth, everybody knows. Anyway, after a while, I realized that a lot of adults stop playing magic and start playing this new game with colorful, weird, bizarre characters. And I didn't quite understand it. And one of the mentioned to me was Pokemon. And then pretty soon within a month, they stopped doing Magic the Gathering tournaments. They stopped doing Star Wars tournaments. They didn't do Star Trek anymore. They didn't do miniatures, all the all the grown men were playing Pokemon the card game, it sweeps my area. Like I've never seen anything. be such a fad before. for single lonely middle aged men in conference stores. I can't believe it.

Palsh 7:50
I just like to say that pokeyman is how Canadians say it just like how we say merio not Mario.

Jake 7:56
Exactly. It's the Pokemons so my experience was was here about the franchise from that. And then a friend of mine showed me an episode the cartoon and kind of went from there. And after the cartoon I've watched a few episodes cartoon, which we can talk about later. But from there I tried the video game and actually I quite hooked on the game, but I didn't play Pokemon until a couple years after the fad kind of hit. And I was probably considered too old for the franchise. I was not a kid but I played the first game. But for an RPG I've always been a fan of RPG and despite the you know, the aiming at a lower younger audience, the game is quite good. This is very solid game challenging and parts collectible hit all right, you know the edges for you. And it's great fun.

Palsh 8:37
See, I I'm like from nowhere in the middle of nowhere. So we were always late when it came to getting games like that. So I remember reading it and magazines Of course. And the show Actually, I caught first before I actually played the game and I was like, Okay, I'm not a big anime fan, but this one caught my attention. I was probably in grade eight going to grade nine. Maybe I was in grade nine, something like that. So just just catch my attention. I was like, this is kind of cool. And, of course, when I watched the show made no sense because it was never aired in order. So I remember seeing probably the end of the season first and then like, then I see ash start off, you know, so I get really confusing. But I remember one guy had the game and he had both of them. You had one game boy, he had two of the games, and he had the transfer cable, but he didn't have another game book. So he gave me I think, read the play. And so that was my first experience. And I was like, Okay, let's try it. And I was like, okay, where do I get Pikachu? You don't have pika choo. I was like, Oh, you know, and so you know, I chose Squirtle because I was like the water Pokemon Pokemons over the fire ones. And I just remember, it was really fun, and I wasn't expecting it to be. So I don't know what the word is like. So straightforward. Like it felt almost like a beginners RPG I thought my head at first, but then it had, like, very simple strategies and stuff, but it was easy for me to catch on to and it was just kind of addicting. Right, right from the get go. And it's just, I remember playing it, I don't know how far I got because I didn't own it. And then, you know, my friends like deleted my game so he could play it and I was like, but I just remember seeing a meme about 10 years later, and I'll it shows the intro screen like when you first start a new game. And it says, no matter what you do, you'll never be able to experience this the same as your first time. It was like rip from like, you know, it's supposed to be like your first time with a significant other, but they basically didn't, and they dressed it up to make it look like a Pokemon game and I thought that was hilarious and ever since then, like the intro to the very first game. I was thought was really cool because of that. It's just like a very Personal feel to it. And I'm not even that huge, a Pokemon fan, so I just thought that was really nice. I thought they had, they couldn't have nailed it better.

GP 11:10
I growing up had been into like tabletop type games like hero quest and like x men Mutant Chronicles and all those kind of ones. And I had it

GP 11:22
here, right.

GP 11:24
I was just slaying Poon, left and right. No, sorry, I shouldn't say that. I was 12. But I had a friend who had just a ton of Pokemon cards. And it's time I was living in Missouri. And he tried to show me the game and explain it to me. And I'd stayed the night over at his house one night, and I loved it. Not enough to go out and buy him. I didn't really see the need because my friend Adam. I loved you know, doing like the deck And you know it's back when you played with like the marbles or the bubbles or whatever they're called you know and not just all these things that I have is completely new and and awesome. And then he of course went out and he just had all the Pokemon stuff so he ended up getting the first two Gameboy games Forgive me for not remembering exactly which colors they were and I played one or both of them. I don't exactly remember which, but I loved them and then all of the generation to stuff started happening and I immediately lost interest. It was almost like Mega Man seven came out all over again. And I just to me, it was already this big well thought out thing. And now I've got more that I have to learn and I just, I honestly hardcore fell off after generation two and it was kind of the same with pokemon go if we end up talking about that later, Pogo came out and I loved it until like Gentoo came out. And then I'm like, Well, that's it for me. But I that's my memory of it. I loved it.

Palsh 13:06
Yeah, I gotta say I'm the same way. When I played the first one, I was like, I'm the kind of guy that wanted to go for all all of them. And I knew I couldn't because you know, there's multiple playthroughs I knew I'd have to do it all myself because there was nobody to trade with. I was like, I just couldn't do it. And then I found out you can do it all over again with the next next game. I'm like, No, no, no, sorry.

Jake 13:28
You mean I gotta walk bore man.

Wulff 13:32
See, I was I was actually excited about golden silver. When I when I first learned about it, I was I was on board. But then a friend of mine got both of them. And he played through one of them. And then while he was playing through one, he was like, you can borrow the other one for a while, if you will. And I was like, all right, so I bought it for about a week or two. I tried playing it for a little while, and I got so annoyed with the fact that not only was it across different versions, but now The Pokemon only spawned at certain times of day. And under certain weather conditions, I guess the game had weather. I don't remember if that's if that was implemented in that one yet. But even just the morning, daytime and nighttime, completely threw me I was like, dude, I have other things to do throughout the day, I can't be expected to play Pokemon to try and catch a specific one at a certain time. I'm not going to fire the game up at three different times in the day to try and catch a certain thing or see if something different appears like it was just outside of the realm of reality for me, being a high schooler. It's like Okay, first off, morning and afternoon. They're just not going to happen.

Jake 14:46
Yeah, I used to work night shifts. So try and catch Pokemon the daytime muscles be sleeping. No, thank you.

Palsh 14:51
I think that's one of those things that would be really good in theory more than execution. Like if they had like an end game clock. Maybe

Wulff 15:01
Yeah, I thought it was a great idea. But it was not practical

GP 15:05
but right. And the reason they would never do that, like with an in game clock, and we've kind of talked about this before Simon's quest, and so I'll leave that there.

Palsh 15:16
Now all of a sudden, we need Pokemon Gold and Silver redacted.

GP 15:19
Oh, yes, that'll play.

Jake 15:21
Well, okay, I got a question then. So if Pokemon were available during night and day time, Pokemon, generally is targeted children. Kids have to sleep at night. So does that kind of skew the game to either keeping kids out of bed or kind of doing a non to adult surveillance series? It's kinda interesting.

Wulff 15:41
I think Yeah, I'm not sure I believe the timing on it was from something like 5am to 11am was considered morning. And then 11 to six or seven was day and then after that was night Okay, was

Palsh 16:00
this like based on your console's timezone? Like, how does it work on

Wulff 16:04
your cartridge actually had an internal battery that maintained the time of day? Okay?

GP 16:10
Which one? Which game was the dinnertime Pokemon? Cuz that one would be okay.

Palsh 16:17
I just send it to my friends on the West Coast Hey, hook me up.

Wulff 16:21
So I I did get into the card game quite a bit as Jake touched on earlier, I had some friends who played magic but I didn't have any magic cards. And I had some other friends who liked magic, but they also didn't have magic cards. And we all kind of felt like well, it's a little late to jump on the magic train at this point. Everybody's got these badass decks, we can't really keep up. So let's try Pokemon. It's got one set out right now there's 150 cards won't be that hard to start getting into Fred right off the bat. So we did that. And I do believe at one point I actually collected the entire first set and then Pretty much the moment I did it, I was like all right, well now I don't want to have all of these anymore I'm going to start trading them to get the best deck I can make. So away my charas are away with my Venus or I started making other decks and I actually created a deck that was really overpowered that was just water type it was basically blast toys and gear it was to just own everything. We ended up spending so much time playing Pokemon and we had friends who wanted to join in to start playing with us that we altered the rule set at it at a point in time to where we figured out analogues for everything to where it could be played like magic.

Palsh 17:42
Oh, nice.

Wulff 17:46
That's That's how similar they were is that we figured out a way to wear anything like if the rule said one thing in Pokemon. You change it to match another rule in Magic the Gathering and you're set. See wipe off the zero On the HP and you've got it covered.

Palsh 18:02
I like that because I didn't touch the card game so I could have just went straight into that and played.

Wulff 18:07
Yeah, it was it was pretty wild that we did that. Some of our friends were like, Well why are you doing that? Or like, I don't know, we just we played so much Pokemon. Now we want to try it as magic.

Jake 18:17
You could just by magic, you know?

Wulff 18:21
Evil we already had the Pokemon cards.

Jake 18:23
damn kids

Palsh 18:26
get off my lawn.

Wulff 18:27
Plus that friend and I had art class together and we never did the actual assignments in that class. So

Palsh 18:35
we just blew all that time playing Pokemon or turning it into magic. Were you the kids that were making your own magic cards and Pokemon cards?

Wulff 18:43
No, no, no, that was another friend of mine.

Palsh 18:46
Oh man. I've never tried to no good with Photoshop now so I can't even do that to this day.

Wulff 18:51
Oh, no, no, he drew them.

Palsh 18:53
Oh, wow. Okay.

Wulff 18:56
Anyway, um, so yeah, from the Gen one that's kind of where that stood for me. I don't think I touched so I don't think I touched the franchise again until it hit GPA. And even then it wasn't the first generation that hit GPA was when they remade red and blue as Leaf Green and fire red. I was like I haven't been into it for a while I haven't been able to but since this is a remake, maybe it'll be able to recapture that that I have been missing with the previous games. And I jumped into it. It helped me for a while I think about 3540 hours and then it lost me again. I never beat it.

Palsh 19:35
That's good. That's the intro to like an Elder Scrolls game right there.

Wulff 19:39
All right. 3540 hours is nothing to sneeze at for holding you But yeah, pretty sure. I mean, I played through 80 hours of the original blue the first time and then probably another 40 hours to get to the everything the second time so

Palsh 19:53
respect, I played the Sapphire one on Gameboy Advance because my friend I'll never forget Get this this is what got me into it again because I didn't touch it again like after like after you said, you know just kind of dropped off like with GP you know, you got to do this all over again now. So I'm minding my own business working. I was working at a gas station I was probably 18 maybe 19 my friend came down just to visit me at work and like I'm working in the shack like it's literally smaller than a sheet of plywood is the shack that I was working in. And my friend came in so there's barely enough room for both of us stand up and he takes his pocket takes his thing and it was pocket and I thought it was like a makeup kit and I was like you bought makeup. He's like Nah, man. scam boy. I was like what so he had the Gameboy Advance SP and I never even heard of it. And what is it he goes game is the advanced is the Gameboy Advance SP. I was like, okay, and he opens up his I got Pokemon. I goes really? And he goes, Yeah, they made new one. So he had Ruby in there and he let me play it. He basically brought it down and immediately gave it to me and let me play And just like pick up and I was just collecting stuff for him and I was playing it for like 40 minutes at work, you know, I take a stop to run out and serve a customer and come back and I was playing the game. And I instantly was like, This is amazing. This is amazing. So, but I didn't have an sp right I just had the old school Gameboy that you need to be under a fluorescent light to play. And so he said, You know what, how about I get, I get the original one and you can get one and we'll play I was like, okay, cool, because you know, we could play together that way. And so we ended up ordering red for him because he had Ruby and I got blue. We're both playing it That was really mad because I had to play out in the basement in my house under fluorescent light while he was in my room, in like hanging down like in the couch that I had in my room. And so the first thing I did after I went on, I went to go to school, I went to Walmart bought an sp bought a carrying case, but Sapphire and started playing incessantly until Christmas. And then I came back and absolutely wrecked him because he stopped playing a month after I left. Wow. So I felt like a king and I still do to this day. So if you're listening thanks for we have an up buddy.

Wulff 22:13
So Jake and JP Did either of you touch anything else from Gameboy or gameboy advance?

GP 22:20
No, not so much I. Honestly, my exposure after that really has been from Twitch and from watching other streamers who have that deep rooted devotion to the franchise, which I do admire. But it's one of those franchises for me now, where I get a little bit of nostalgia for the old stuff. I enjoy watching the new stuff, but I don't know that I'll pick it up again.

Wulff 22:49
Yeah, I'm kind of on the fence about some of that. I don't think I touched it again until Diamond and Pearl for the DS. And that one held me even less than Leaf Green and fire red. So I kind of learned Lesson and I haven't bought another one since now, when go released Of course, it was free to play. I had a smartphone. My wife had a smartphone so we were like sure let's give it a shot. So we downloaded it and played the crap out of it for about two weeks. Were like our phones were just never ending we plugged in

Palsh 23:24
yeah I invested in those cigarette lighter chargers two weeks from now I'm a millionaire because of that.

Wulff 23:34
Oh invested it No we bought some that's what I mean by invested in chargers we we just bought it

Jake 23:41
I can retire on us cables and car chargers. I'd be rich by now. But for me, I I also work I worship the Gameboy Advance SP I love that system. It's one of my all time favorite system especially very handheld. I think it's King and what kind of sold me When I first saw the commercial and advertisements for fire read, and just that wave install Joe, you know, I had read, I put the hell into that game. Sure. And then you know when the game starts up, and you see ash first leaving town and that hero rock soundtrack kicks in. It just nails me it just hooks me right in. I love the hell it if I read, but then after that after I and I played that, I mean dozens if not hundreds of hours. But after that generation, I kind of fell off and I didn't touch it for years. And it really wasn't until which McCall it was new Gameboy called Gameboy 3ds

Palsh 24:36
the 3ds watch mycologist chocolate,

Jake 24:39
right, it's not a Gameboy. Hopefully, if you pretended really hard with the power of imagination, it could be the 3ds I end up getting 3ds and that of course every system has Pokemon games and I played Sun and Moon. I think I played the moon version. And I enjoyed it. I love how they took the game into 3d, a little bit of the models. They kind of I mean, they always alter the formula from generation to generation. But for sun and moon that kind of moved away from the idea of going to various gyms to battling Gym Leaders instead of this kind of weird Pacific Island you know quest fighting looking for these let these special Pokemon to learn from them. It was kind of a weird take on it. I didn't quite get into it. So I actually don't ever finish moon I got a couple hours into it and kind of give up.

GP 25:24
And at this point, it's not that it's saturated. But he really you guys talk about like, Pearl and Sapphire and, and I just, I don't know what the differences are anymore. I think I would be tempted if I ever got like a super Gameboy. I think I would be tempted to find the the original two and replan. But aside from that and Pokemon Go like you know werewolf was talking about earlier a bit night we put in so many miles with the kiddos just wandering around Wichita, and we even we would go and take over Jim's Like actually we had one in Topeka to bring things full circle there for a little while Topeka and so I really did love polka when it first came out and again it's just the the de generation to drop down like man do I hope they do what they did with wow classic World of Warcraft. Just bring back g one everything and I'll be happy I'll go back through it.

Jake 26:24
Well the fire fire red is is the perfect way to experience the first generation Pokemon again it's the same game just remastered it just looks better sounds better, but it's the same gameplay same story if you're into that there was there a story

Wulff 26:39
Yeah, I think it added an island that had Pokemon from other generations like selected Pokemon, but

GP 26:47
well that I can do pretty much it

Palsh 26:48
Yeah, I would check that out. Like I said, I love the game when it first came out on Gameboy but one thing now going back to it and watching somebody else play it or playing it myself is the audio and it's just because mainly because Because of the sound is you know, so limited on Gameboy but the low health warning. I remember one time it gave me a headache to the point where I got a migraine. So now I just cringe when I hear. So I if I ever play it again, I'm just going to go for five red or Leaf Green.

Wulff 27:17
Yeah, it's that sound kidding. Great. A. That is one thing video games have from any era, when they have that you're almost gonna die beep it just starts to get on your nerves. I don't know why that's a thing. Like I get it. If the game is really in your face with a lot of action and stuff. And it's like beeps delay, you know, Zelda is not that fast paced game. And they just throw those beeps at you until you get enough hearts. Pokemon is the same way you're in a turn based combat you all that's on screen is your Pokemon and health bars. You know you're dying.

Jake 28:00
The top 10 worst sounds and video games i'd agree that the Pokemon death sound is probably up there linked to the past is probably number one but Pokemon death is up there.

Palsh 28:10
I'll put it that number one it seriously it like wearable says it greats and it's just I think it's just because it's ingrained in my head now at this point where I had that one one experience I'm just like, oh no.

Jake 28:23
What about the Pokemon sound effects themselves? Do you find those charming or just annoying? I thought

Palsh 28:29
actually it was pretty impressive to go from watching the show, you know where they all basically say their own name was how the hell they make noises. But then when you actually play the Gameboy game, the original ones and you know Jigglypuff makes the same music that Do you know, it? They they kept true to that and I think even with the limited audio hardware they had, it was really impressive.

Wulff 28:58
At least with some Pokemon it didn't Seemed like the they were trying to make it almost sound like they they were at least inflecting their Japanese names because a lot of them didn't have the same name in the US like bigger two and right you pretty much it least from Gen one a lot of them had very different names aside from that.

Palsh 29:17
Anything noteworthy this

Wulff 29:21
I think Squirtle was zinna Gamay oh wow yeah rolls off the tongue.

GP 29:25
Yeah, I'm not hearing the difference my brother

Wulff 29:27
had a my brother had a toy that he picked up at some toy store in Florida at one point I guess it was an important because all he said was like he hit the button and he goes and Danny You know, he was saying his Japanese name he wasn't saying the western name.

Jake 29:44
My favorite Pokemon is trash bag. He balls to the trash fire.

Wulff 29:51
Some Pokemon are just horrifying, like drif Loon. I don't know if you guys know of drift or not. I don't remember what generation It came from but it's a Pokemon that looks like a balloon. And what it does is it hangs out near children to try and coax them into grabbing this like going and chasing it down because oh boy, cute, pretty balloon. I must have a balloon. I'm a small child, and it'll grab their arm and steal them away.

Palsh 30:20
Wow, that's like,

Wulff 30:21
it just takes the children away. It's like Billy's balloon from what is that guy's name? Don Hertzfeld with all the little balloons taking the kids up into the sky and dropping them.

GP 30:37
horror movies are you guys? Well, I'm sitting here thinking about penny. Well,

Wulff 30:40
dude, this is a cartoon. Okay. Little tangent here. If you guys remember the Pop Tarts commercials with the really weird people, like the weird looking handwriting people were they were like chasing the Pop Tarts duranium. Those were done Hertzfeld animations for pop tarts. So Billy's balloon was an independent piece he did years before that, where it didn't have to be market friendly. It just exists.

Palsh 31:11
Just exists.

GP 31:13
Well, I have to chime in real quick for two things. One because I just remembered, and two is a callback to a conversation a moment ago. I completely forgot about this until just now. Pokemon Snap. I love that game. Still love that game. That game is rad. You guys can find me. I don't know if that game is popular or if everybody hates it, but I fucking love it. That's a great game. Okay. Wait, what?

Wulff 31:37
It's think snap is pretty well received.

GP 31:40
Okay, cool. And the other one. The other comment I have to get in here was about the most hated beeping noise in video games. And I would like to point out the soundtrack to 1942 because that doesn't just be Pichu when you're about to die. That's just the soundtrack.

Jake 32:00
You know the real speed runs 1942 you have to blur the soundtrack otherwise cheating

Wulff 32:04
oh my god have real speed run is to beat it in 1941

GP 32:09
that is some some Marty McFly stuff that I'm not prepared for. That's okay, so yeah, that was my two cents. Pokemon Snap THUMBS UP 1942 shit soundtrack

Jake 32:23
when you guys mentioned like badly named Pokemon like Drake foon the one that stands out for me and ash, he's a favorite of mine in Pokemon moon. It's me muku. And it's let me just read the descriptions from Sun and Moon just so you have an appreciation for why like this one. Its actual appearance is unknown. A scholar who saw what was under its reg was overwhelmed by terror and died from the shock.

Palsh 32:46
What

Jake 32:46
after going through all the effort of disguising itself, its neck was broken. whatever is inside is probably unharmed, but it's still feeling sad. Wow. It's literally a Pikachu. It's a rag on a stick With a crudely drawn Pikachu face in ears it's hilarious Pokemon as you can tell if it's a description What is this thing called? Me Miku it's just it's just hilarious I it's sad and disturbed but I love the Pokemon origin stories are terrible like they're frightening for kids game.

Wulff 33:15
One Which one? The mimic you? Okay, my first

Jake 33:19
sudden moon by a Maven in an earlier game.

Wulff 33:22
Yeah That thing is nightmare fuel.

Jake 33:25
I love it though, because it can take a free hit and then it's disguised goes away, and it's basically invisible to ghost Pokemon, but it gets that free hit no matter what. So it's a fantastic Pokemon. It's my favorite.

GP 33:35
It looks like one of those yarn doll versions of a Pokemon from like little big world or whatever it was. Oh, sackboy Yeah, yeah.

Wulff 33:45
Little Big, Little Big Planet. Thank you. sackboy was the main character.

GP 33:49
Okay, I thought maybe it was a translation difference between the lower 48 in Canada.

Palsh 33:58
There's a metric equivalent in there somewhere. Yeah, sure, sure, sure.

GP 34:02
Yeah, so I at some point, I do feel like it's not that they haven't kept trying when it comes to the naming and designs of some of the late Gen Pokemons. But they have kind of become Forgive me for this the equivalent of like, Stephen King novel plots. It's like are you really trying right now? Is This Really? Is this really part of what you're What were you just joking? Like that's how that's where it's at. for me. It's like how, how many Pokemon are there as of September 2019. Something like 800 I'm sorry, I had a stroke. How many

GP 34:40
800 807

GP 34:45
I can barely keep up with 151 that's all I'm saying.

Palsh 34:49
Yeah, same

Jake 34:50
Okay, Pokemon wrap. Let's go 123 anybody?

Wulff 34:56
Okay, man, Pokemon GO

GP 34:59
ninja. Ninja rap. Yeah, I think

Wulff 35:05
I just couldn't remember the Pokemon rap. So that's where I went.

Palsh 35:08
Slow po YouTube dedeker route aerodactyl. That's

GP 35:13
right. We got we're going to have to pay some money. No polish.

Palsh 35:17
Yeah. Okay. Let's go make instead let's go make a toe mimic you instead of Topeka, choo. Oh,

Wulff 35:27
speaking of Topeka to you. They they actually did it again. Last year and 28th anniversary.

Jake 35:37
Oh God, they did it again. Same city.

Wulff 35:39
Yes. Same city for the 20 year anniversary of it. They did it again for a day. Okay. thought that was interesting, but

GP 35:48
that speaks a lot to the mentality of Kansas. Here's what I mean by that. Topeka has to be come to peek at you. There's a place here that is called Hutchinson better now. North of where I live, and that is widely considered as Smallville what Smallville from the Superman mythos would be if it were real. And so where I'm going with this is the idea the ideology for Kansas tourism is, Hey, come here and we'll pretend it's somewhere else.

Jake 36:22
It's like trying to bring back the rim sunglasses. They're terrible idea and tacky in the 80s to bring him back now in 2019 is just pathetic.

Jake 36:32
Is that a thing? I've seen some people were in I'm in my city. Every every 10 years yeah,

Palsh 36:37
that they Yes. You see a trend. Come back.

GP 36:40
You say that. But the matrix is coming back. So that's cool. So it's hit or miss.

Palsh 36:45
But yeah, never went away.

GP 36:47
Yeah, that's if you come into Kansas ever. The state line sign says, Welcome to Kansas. We're sorry.

Palsh 36:57
It's the Canada of the United States.

Wulff 37:01
So, moving back on to the Pokemon I did actually get to try let's go recently Oh yeah, my kid got it a while back my brother actually got him the, the the poker ball plus. So we started playing that a while back and he he loves it he has a blast with it because he gets to pretend he's a Pokemon trainer throwing the ball and catching the Pokemon. It's a blast, right? And when we fired it up, it said that there was a gift inside the poker ball. And when it told us that the poker ball made one of the sounds that you know one of the Gameboy Pokemon sounds from way back when and I didn't know what Pokemon It was. It was like I spent ages I don't know, I don't even think I knew which Pokemon made what sound back was back then. You know. So we played far enough to see about opening up this gift and seeing what was in it and then we opened it and it was a freaking new

Jake 38:00
Wow that's pretty awesome

Wulff 38:01
he's not even at the first gym yet and now he's got a mew is randomized or does everyone I don't know if everybody gets a mew or if it's kind of random for rare Pokemon in general and we just got really lucky or one

Jake 38:17
of us part of it didn't look into the only way you can get them you in that game is if you pay the 6070 bucks for the Pokeball accessory oh wow like in the original game that I think they gave me away there's usually had some kind of like public event and they let you get access Yeah,

Wulff 38:31
they did mall events all over the place. And you had to go wait in line and have your Gameboy and your cartridge just fired up trade get your me

Jake 38:44
wants to do that again recently with sun and moon or pokemon go one of the two there's a new one that is literally a bolt like a nut like a metal and steel not that's a Pokemon now I think his name is meltin and I want to say done locket. You had to go What was events?

Wulff 39:01
But I do have to say I kind of enjoy how let's go plays it feels less tedious since encounters with wild Pokemon or just throw balls at it and catch it move on. There's no beating it up to try and catch it there's just smashing the A button over and over to get it over with because every interaction if it's not a trainer battle, it's over in like 15 seconds. If that is you try using enjoy. So that was actually kind of nice. Um, no, we haven't played it with the joy con yet. He's just been playing with the poker ball play

Jake 39:33
with the joy con because you can play with two players kind of in that game. I play with my kids and we don't have the pokemon ball. But joy cons are hot garbage with it. And you spend 10 balls trying to hit a goddamn Pokemon. But it's all trade.

Wulff 39:46
Oh, he catches it every frickin time with the poker ball. Plus, it's ridiculous. The little tiny circle. He's getting excellent, amazing. Yeah, I don't know what it is. But he's also playing like five feet from a 42 inch TV. That At his eye level so

Jake 40:02
well clearly he's destiny a Pokemon master he just said him outside world with a baseball hat and a backpack and said Good luck.

Wulff 40:09
Yeah, well he's not 10 yet he's only five he's halfway there.

Palsh 40:13
Hell I'm 35 and I'm not ready for that

Wulff 40:18
Alright, so let's let's let's touch on the anime and the movies a little more. I'm going to openly admit and open myself up for mockery here. I saw a Pokemon the first movie Pokemon 2000 and Pokemon I don't know what it was called Pokemon three. I don't know if that's what it was called. Something else the one with MJ. I saw all three of those in theaters. I never saw a single one of them to be honest.

GP 40:43
I'm sorry. What was it? Hint hint? A No You said

Wulff 40:48
I it was some big orange dog thing that looked kind of like a growl either and

GP 40:54
it was bigger googling hint a right now and it's it's not popping up anything like what you're talking about?

Wulff 41:01
That's that was the last one I saw that I was kind of like and now my phone crashed but but when I when I saw the first one in theaters, I legit teared up. I don't know if you guys have seen that movie, but toward the end,

GP 41:17
I think the only one I saw was Pokemon 2000 and that was at a drive in theater. That was also showing Casper Do you guys remember that with Christina Ricci? That was like the double feature, and I think that's the only time I saw Pokemon 2000

Wulff 41:37
pretty sure that movie came well before Pokemon 2000

GP 41:40
Oh yeah, I'm not saying it was topical. I'm just saying that's what was playing.

Jake 41:44
It was a classic. For me it was the less the movies and more the cartoon the first season and Pokemon the anime that's like a guilty pleasure for me. I watched it with my kids not too long ago and every time Pikachu I know it's me fine. I know his will never die ever. But anytime he's in mortal peril and he's just beaten up, and he gives that little cry and clutches them tightly like a baby. I should have single tier every time. I don't care who hates me

Palsh 42:14
hates you. Everybody relates to you now.

GP 42:17
Yeah. Who would show hate? Like how dare you have feelings toward this cartoon? Yeah,

Wulff 42:22
it's it's funny how much more prevalent Pokemon is these days than it was when you know generation one released but with Gen one they had what two or three musical albums that released with the anime and it was ridiculous and I don't know what they they do that stuff anymore. I'm pretty sure it's just the games and plushies mostly at this point.

Jake 42:44
In terms of merchandise. Oh, there's all kinds of merchandise. Yeah.

Wulff 42:48
My my brother had one of the CDs that to be a master album. Attract microphone master. Turn off

Palsh 42:55
the tape right the ghetto blaster

Unknown Speaker 42:58
Exactly.

Palsh 43:00
That's That's some 41

Jake 43:01
but I went over overseas to Tokyo there. We actually went to other Pokemon centers, but we didn't even we didn't need to go to that store. There's Pokemon everywhere in Tokyo I guess that goes up saying but from cookies to juice, the vending machine to underwear, literally everything. And I still see a lot of that over here too. I still I still see the occasional Pokemon figurines and toys and stuff.

Wulff 43:21
We went to the mall a couple weeks ago here and I saw a little like one of those stands and it wasn't really a kiosk but it was like a standalone vending machine kind of thing. But it was called a Pokemon Center and it had a vending machine on one side with a bunch of Pokemon merge in it, and then it had a poker decks on another side where you could like look at the different Pokemon and it was kind of wild.

Jake 43:45
Well, I was just actually just at the CME in Toronto. It's basically a big fair exhibition in the UK carnival games, that kind of thing. And some of the prizes are obviously knockoff Pokemon merchandise, right? And I saw a family like with three kids and strollers One of the kids was clutching a I mean a gigantic Pikachu. Like it was probably two three feet long. It's huge. And this pair of guys and I mean, buff, gym looking dudes, six and a half, seven feet tall, just the toughest guys walking down the street or the the avenue and they see the kid with the giant Pikachu and they walk up, hands on hips like yo yo, would you get that Pikachu and the basketball game? Oh, thanks so much and then they just ran ran for the carnival game but the games to get their own tickets you know just to show you that the generation who love Gen one are all like you know 30 plus now for the most part and have that just love a peek into stuff.

Wulff 44:45
Oh yeah, Pikachu. I mean, they knew that was a gold mine from the get go. It they were in Topeka you there was friggin Pokemon Yellow. I think to this day, they still brand pretty much Every console with a Pikachu to some extent, even if it's a limited release, ridiculous. But yeah, I gotta say I'm I do like the older cartoons. There's probably only one line I still remember from the original movie. Or maybe it was the second movie I don't know is from one of the movies, there was a really bad line that I choose, you know? No, no, no nothing. And I'm pretty sure it was the second movie because it was a bunch of people on a yacht. I don't know, it might have been the first movie I really don't remember, but there's a bunch of people on a boat and you overhear them talking like there's people at different tables eating and talking and it passes by one table and you hear a guy go, and I said, No, I just had crab bees and everybody burst into laughter. I was like, Oh my god, that is not a kid friendly joke.

Jake 45:56
Even crabs is a Pokemon.

Jake 45:59
Gotta catch mall

GP 46:05
Okay, here's a question. Because I legit don't know, in the Pokemon universe, are there what we would consider normal animals? Like is there like a like a dog just a regular canine? Or is every single animal in that universe of Pokemon?

Wulff 46:27
I feel like generation one the way we were introduced to Pokemon made it sound like there were other animals that were not Pokemon. But the further we get into the franchise, if you like, the less, that seems to be the case. Right? Which is really bizarre because I'm pretty sure oak said that all the Pokemon shared a lot of common genes. Okay, and so that means they're like, all these Pokemon are just weird mutants and we're just living on their planet.

GP 47:00
Just how uneventful and underwhelming and potentially scary would it be to be like a dog? Or like a regular domestic house cat in the Pokemon world be horrifying, and you'd be let down to everybody

Jake 47:17
with your account Oh, you're sure the cow will eat you will grind you into burgers but you know mu tanks or whatever the cow pokeyman is? Yeah milk bank

Wulff 47:27
and

Jake 47:28
Toro him. He's a Pokemon special. Eat that goddamn cow, right

GP 47:38
Okay, there

Wulff 47:40
we go question can you carve up a milk and eat some of it leave it alive take it to a Pokemon Center and heal it

Jake 47:49
the question doesn't want you to think about

Unknown Speaker 47:52
right yeah.

Wulff 47:53
With the with the hard questions will be getting that cease and desist very soon.

GP 47:59
There's always He's that kid at school who runs up and you're like, oh, man, check it out. You know, I got this cool new thing that everybody has. And it's the offering thing that you know, you had to get from the dollar store that that was me growing up so I can make this year. But that kid shows up with a pokey ball. He's like, Can I just check it out? I got like a Meowth. And he opens it and it's just like a cat. Like, damn it, Randall. You know, go back to the corner. That's horrible. That's how bullying starts. And it's not funny.

Jake 48:34
Robots aren't real transformers. Back to eat and paste. I'm just picturing now somebody's taking a cat into Pokemon battle. just pulling in a cat carrier like the opponent's like charges are going from smokey ball. And then some guy with a cat carrier. Smell with go nuts.

Palsh 48:53
And it's like I said house can literally a house. Yeah. And it's like way more feral than the He has

GP 49:00
a Pokemon delivers takes down the gear dose, and it gets disqualified but like kinda

Palsh 49:07
like Karate Kid, you know wins with that illegal kick to the head.

GP 49:12
Yeah, but at that point everybody had already stormed the man. I'm sorry. Effective.

Palsh 49:20
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, the press beat cancel. This is how we normally talk. Yeah, I apologize. So

Wulff 49:28
I think it's almost time to hit be so let's go ahead and go around and see what everybody's favorite point in the series was. I think for me, it's pretty safe to say it was just Pokemon blue period. I that's I played the crap out of it. I played through it two or three times. I traded for every single Pokemon And that my friends and I figured out how to do the missing no nonsense and all that. It's blue holds a special place in my heart that no other entry in the game has in the French has been able to replicate.

GP 50:02
Cool, cool. I think for me, my favorite moments, or era of Pokemon is the day after I was introduced to Pokemon, because I got the idea of what it was. And my mind was like being expanded to see what the rules were for the card game and then gradually introduced to all this other stuff. And it was just this amazingly fun idea. And so to be at the front door, of all the stuff that you know, you're about to learn, it's going to be awesome. That was that was magic. That was absolute magic. So for me, that was my favorite part.

Jake 50:43
You know, for me, it's Pokemon. It's when's the spin off? That's the stuff I enjoy the most and actually quite like what they're doing today or nowadays with it. Detective Pikachu is probably good. Good spin on I believe there was a game on the 3ds for that. And I just love how to peek at you with a little character, and he's in he's in this combat situation or you think he's going to be with his friend there who has tried to peek at you. And he's like Pikachu use Thunderbolt. And detective Pikachu just looks at this guy and says use Thunderbolt. And to me, that's just like, the funniest thing in the planet, right? Like, humans order around animals do battle, and the animal turning to you and say, What the hell are you talking about? I love to pick at you that the recent movie, the CGI movie, I thought was actually really great. And I hope to do more crazy stuff like that. Like the mainline games are fun at all. But when they take Pokemon and put it into different situations that spin off, I love that kind of stuff.

Palsh 51:39
Yeah, that's, that's really cool. I like that. And I haven't even seen the movie yet. So now I really want to see it. But for me, it's definitely I want to say Sapphire because I was playing it so much like it was probably from like August to December. I didn't really play anything else. I'd be watching the movie gravity. We're watching a movie and I playing the game. But I think it's just that introduction to Sapphire, by playing Ruby is probably my fondest memory of the entire franchise just because my friend came down out of the blue. And it's just one of those things like we were both at a high school and I just remember that it was just is a memory that I'll always cherish and I don't know. It was just cool. It's It was like a new era of video games for me, so

Wulff 52:27
I think that's fair. Alright, so I think we can go ahead and wrap up

Palsh 52:34
this list of her favorite Pokemon real quick,

GP 52:37
Ryan Reynolds.

Wulff 52:38
Oh, I see. I can't talk today. debido Danny DeVito

Wulff 52:47
could you

GP 52:50
honestly, if I could have like a real life Pokemon. I'd want it to be a growl if they're so cool looking. Yeah, they are pretty cool. And I feel safe and cuddly? You can't cuddle a gear a dose

Wulff 53:04
I'm not even a cat person but I liked Persian don't know why

GP 53:10
I think that silence is a little bit

Wulff 53:13
it was a cat that could literally create money out of nothing so

Palsh 53:18
yeah

GP 53:18
yeah that's a great option only kept

Wulff 53:19
the least if you evolved it from mouth and Persian was way cooler than me out so

Palsh 53:24
that's true that's good solid logic I'll agree with you for there Matt that it's not gonna be my favorite but it's respectable. Jake What do you just like the one you actually

Jake 53:35
I like them we're actually gonna go with Ryan rattle on that goes right right I love rock Canadian Ryan Reynolds is a fantastic Pokemon But no, I like the one I don't even know his name. But it's basically a steel ring with keys attached and that's a Pokemon. I love that one. I'm not I'm not even kidding. I don't notice they marry

Wulff 53:53
you coming up with the jingling

Jake 53:54
key Pokemon is the best of all.

GP 53:58
The okay real quick, just to Bring this whole thing home. Sick Jay, did you play with Gobots I think somebody who's played a trick on you

Jake 54:08
know Gobots I had one Optimus Prime and I had my toy that was it

Palsh 54:13
turns out he's kept attacking YuGiOh or, or digium on all this time.

Wulff 54:19
This is Pocket Monsters not digital monsters.

GP 54:24
Also, I think if if you have a life that you know, you want to escape your life than the me the the Mewtwo sorry, is the Pokemon that you want. Because then if he's cool, he can just get in your mind and you can live whatever life you want. Yes,

Wulff 54:41
that's true,

GP 54:43
too, and introduce people like, Hey, this is my Pokemon. It's kind of a dick. Or you'd be like, Hey, I don't feel like doing anything today. Can you get in my head and making things that I'm on Jupiter.

Wulff 54:53
So you're wanting you to be your own personal Total Recall.

GP 54:58
That is exactly what I'm saying. That was perfectly stated where I was going to say he wanted a pet Dr. Manhattan

Palsh 55:03
but okay.

Jake 55:06
A pet What? Whoa, wait a minute 12 his penis and a Pokemon sounds good to me.

Wulff 55:11
I got that reference.

GP 55:17
Okay, first off, I have to point out stick Jake uses metric. I don't think he knows what bobbins means. Man I think Sorry guys, I'm sorry. I've loved this this episode, but I'm sorry that I've been the main reason we've gotten off track. I'm so sorry.

Palsh 55:44
I think it's fine. minds fit my favorite Squirtle By the way, dicks.

Wulff 55:52
Oh, yeah, there's a good question. What was your starters from Jen one Squirtle real

Palsh 55:57
quick. I always go with the Pokemon if given a chance,

Wulff 56:02
mine was Charmander

Palsh 56:03
sucka.

Wulff 56:05
Being original I named him Bernie.

Jake 56:08
I use I always wanted the fire type or the ones that look like a cat. I was a cat person and like half this team, and I usually named them stupid things like dog food, frozen peas, creamed corn, stuff like that. Don't ask me why, dude. My dude, no.

GP 56:26
Actually, I was watertight to I went with with Squirtle. And I kind of want to change my answer to my favorite being cubone because of how heartbreaking The story is that yes,

Palsh 56:36
I love the cubone Yeah, let's not bring it up here because I don't want to cry. But, uh, anybody who's listening, if you don't know the story of a cubone, you should check it out. Because it's Yeah, it is actually worth looking up. So

GP 56:49
just yeah, here's all you have to Google is whose skull is cubone wearing And if that's not the most emotion you've ever heard Yeah, I love it. Also, I mean but yeah, the key chain one is nice to J it's fine

Jake 57:05
I have look his name up

Wulff 57:09
anyway this has been presby to cancel I was your host this week thank you for having me for a second week now.

Palsh 57:14
Who are you a

Wulff 57:17
werewolf? You can find me on Twitch and Twitter

Palsh 57:21
w ar EWL ff

Wulff 57:25
I was going to leave it to the imagination this time but thank you

Palsh 57:28
all right Polish take it away Hi my name is sick Jake you can find me on Twitter as well as a weight not I'm post one on you find me on Twitch at pulse 109 pls H

Wulff 57:41
and GP

GP 57:43
know go for it. Go for it Jay.

Jake 57:47
Thanks GP. For the record. His name is Cliff key cholesky the key chain Pokemon it resembles a key ring with four keys aspherical head and a small pink oval on his forehead anyway That's that's his life story. That's pretty much it. It's also dark and jiggli My name is sick Jake you can find me sick Jake on Twitter or on Twitch. I'm a part time by annual never streamer

Wulff 58:10
and then our resident derailer Gp.

GP 58:14
Yeah, this is GP. Typical spelling. Sorry. And you can find me on the retro therapy, which is of course on Twitch. We're also on Twitter and Instagram, as the retro therapy.

Wulff 58:29
Alright, thank you everybody for tuning in. band EQ pq

Palsh 58:36
certain music here. Wait, that's not how the song goes.

Jake 58:45
Special thanks for music go to Arthur, the ancient found on Soundcloud or the last ancient on YouTube. The more episodes please visit our website presby to cancel.com as well Feel free to like or subscribe at Apple iTunes, Google podcasts or anything. Where else you'd like to listen to your favorite shows? As always, thank you. This has been

Wulff 59:06
a do again

Special thanks to Arthur The Last Ancient on soundcloud for our podcast theme.

For updates and more episodes please visit our website www.pressbtocancel.com, or find us on Twitter @pressbtocancel and Instagram @pressbtocancel.