Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Richard Wierz at 7528. Woo, as I was a host of Baker and as always, I'm joined by Bible human Chris Saturn. Hi, Justin. Hi, I said.
So make it. Yes, second show of the night, it's 10.43 PM as we begin this journey. And I only have to be up at 7 AM. So this is going to be great.
And we're going to have to be up at 7 AM today. And we were playing Final Fantasy 11 until midnight. That's true. Yeah, that's true.
Which dovetails into my week, which is much, much more Final Fantasy 11. I played with you. You did play with me? You made a character, and we played.
And you guys level up a little bit. And you got, we made it up through Valgrim Dunes. And then logged you out in Selpina. So that you're all queued up to teleport back home and get your trust quest done.
I'm in, what is it called? I think it might be something dark, something tower, dark bin tower or something like that. Trying to hit my level 40 stuff. Because the guide recommends hitting level 40 before you move on to the next quest stuff.
So I'm just grinding mobs there. And I think I've gotten pretty good at handling groups of four and five and six mobs with just a full team of trusts, which is its own specific seal. Because the trusts are really nice. But they will not attack an enemy unless you melee attack it, at least once.
Magic attacks don't count. None of that counts. You have to hit it with, in my case, my stick, because I'm a black mage. And so figuring out how to wrangle your trusts and get them aggro down to the right things is difficult.
And also Final Fantasy 11 being a really old game with the server ticks. It lines up kind of weird with the melee sometimes. And so I'm still doing a lot of that. And it's still good.
It's still enjoyable. They added the Final Fantasy 11 themed raids into 14. And that was when I finally learned that it is not, in fact, Ron Faroo. Oh, what is it?
It's Ron Fauer or something. Because it's RA and FAU-RE. I think I've always pronounced it Ron Far. I always called it Ron Faroo because I thought it was Ron Faroo.
It's not. But you and the R are in different positions. There's a lot of stuff. In Final Fantasy 11 that I realized I pronounced weird because I was watching, I listened to a few videos of just beginner tips and shit.
Yeah. While I was doing dishes or whatever. And people were pronouncing stuff all over the place like, I've always called Juno Juno. And I listened to a 40 minute video over the guy called it JUino the whole time.
No, it's Juno. Because that's also in 14 now. And they pronounced it Juno. That when I was pretty confident Juno was the correct pronunciation.
Although it is spelled J-E-U-N-O. But that's still why JUino. Yeah, but he called it JUino the whole time. Yeah, he's wrong.
And then there's a couple other ones where I realized I was wrong on them. But 11 does have very hard to pronounce places. There's some weird zone names. But still enjoying it.
I've macroed my wave and I wave at every person I run by. And all of the time. And everyone ignores me almost 100% of the time. Yeah.
But still very much enjoying it. If you play 11 or want to turn 11, come play with me. Please, I want people to play with it. It's a fun game and it's more fun with people.
So, I can play as I slowly worm my way to level 99 with Blackmash and then probably do a different job. Because I don't know. I'm in a link shell and I watch people do in-game stuff. And it's just in-game MMO content does not interest me.
It's that that journey to in-game is cool. And if I ever get there, I'll do in-game for a little bit to experience it and have fun with it. But I kind of get the feeling that some of these people, it's just like, no, we've just been grinding the same in-game content for years now. Right.
And that doesn't sound super incredible to me. And I don't think there's been any new content in 11 in at least 10 years. They do pretty regularly. Like they have a little seasonal stuff.
Yeah, they do seasonal stuff and they change around like a witch and these are in different zones and stuff a little bit. But yeah, they... The same thing with every question I was doing every quest. The in-game was like, all right, you do raids and I was a cleric and they're like, all right, well, if you're a healer in a raid, you basically just stand in a long chain of healers and you'll be like fifth healer.
And every 10 minutes you'll heal three times and then sit down. And that's end-game content for you. And I was like, yeah, I don't really want to do that. That sounds like doing a job and I'm just here to kind of chill and hang out.
So we'll see. Or coming around, maybe I'll be in content in 11 is fucking fantastic. It's super fun. I have no idea what it is because I watch people in my link shell talk and they're speaking a different language.
That kind of like we've been playing the same MMO for two decades kind of language where you're like, I don't even know what you're saying. Right. Like at all. Even two decades ago, I didn't understand my friends that were talking about the game when they were in the game and I was like, Oh yeah.
I remember my first Valcrum Dunes party. I was a Black Mage and I kept getting, I kept pulling aggro. And I remember someone had to finally message me and be like, stop getting aggro. And I was like, what is aggro?
And they're like, well, the monster's supposed to attack the tank. And I was like, what is a tank? And they're like, it's that guy. And now me now as an adult would have been like, be a better tank.
But back then I got really self-conscious and just logged out in the middle of my party because I was like, I don't know what it is, what they're telling me to do. I don't understand. I had a nearly identical experience. Only I was playing as a white mage at the time and I had no idea what the hell I was doing.
And they're like, don't heal me until after I've established aggro. And I was like, I don't know what any of that means. Yeah. They're like, you have no help.
I tell you. I tell you. They're like, well, just wait until my health is lower. Yeah.
Also went on a bit of an ARPG kick. A Titan Quest 2 hit early access. I picked that up for people curious. It is good.
It's a little light on content, but I'll say that compared to Path of Exile 2 and Diablo 4, it is a breath of fresh tropical breeze. It's very nice and fun and streamlined and simple. The thing I didn't like about D4 and Path of Exile was they're extremely complex. Like it feels like the trees are these huge branching things.
And it's really complicated. And I just kind of I'm not after that in my action RPGs. Yeah. I want to pretty what I want is to pretty quickly understand the skill tree, understand the build I want to go for and then get to hitting pinatas that are goblins that swords burst out of.
Right. Most of the game I want to be just comparing swords to other swords. That's the real game is looking for the biggest numbers on the swords and then hitting more pinatas. And so in that regard, it's it's good.
Visually, it's great. It chugs a little bit. Like I have an I9 with a 4080, which is pretty beefy computer. Yeah.
That's a high machine. I'm clocking 60 to 80 FPS, which for something like an ARPG really should be getting more. So we'll say the requirement is single Steve, but it's steep, but it's still early access. It does not refer to five.
I don't know what it is, to be honest. I'm not sure runs like shit on Steam Deck. I would call it unplayable. I think someone more tolerant than me could probably put up with it, but just really choppy even all the way on low.
But then I was wanting to play on Steam Deck. So I went back to Titan Quest one and played a bunch of that. And then for this episode's topic, I was pushed into playing some Diablo two. So I got a repack of Diablo two, which has built in like widescreen and stuff.
And I added in some mods that kind of improved the single player experience. And I was playing some D two and man, still a really good game. I played up through act two. So I guess a fourth of the game and tried to wrangle other people to play with me.
And it didn't happen in maybe I can wrangle people again, but have been greatly enjoying sorceress in D two, which I've never done sorceress because too squishy. I always play barbarian and it's hard to go from whirlwind barbarian to squishy blizzard sorceress. I'm trying to stop times. Never like with the D two.
Yeah, I mean, I don't think it'd be your vibe. I don't see it being your vibe at all. Yeah, man, I really, really loved you too. I think like a lot of it is nostalgia.
I can look at the design and understand that like, hey, even compared to not that much later games like Titan Quest, which are like five or six years later, things have improved immensely. And even more modern airPG is like Victor Vran and Grim Don and stuff and torch light to greatly improved on the systems and D two. But D two is still such a watershed moment in airPG like I feel like it really codified a huge amount of that sub genre. Yeah.
And so yeah, still very good. Anyway, we've been playing. So I like you mentioned I was playing some Final Fantasy 11. Like I learned exactly how frustrating it is to install.
And it's an ordeal. Yeah, for fun. I did try to install from my original disc to see if it's even still possible. Why would you say for fun?
But that doesn't sound fun. It is not, by the way, Windows 11 will absolutely not install those original discs. Granted, I was trying to go off my beta version discs, which are probably even less compatible because they're designed for Windows 98. But no, it did not take that.
So I just downloaded it like you're supposed to. And then it was fine. Well, it was kind of fine. Eventually, once I tweaked the shit out of it, yeah, playing on a 4k monitor is hilarious.
Just on the vanilla game because the text is all too. Yeah. It does not make the game look any better, though. I probably spent two or three hours getting it installed and tweaked correctly so that it worked good, looked good, ran good enough.
Well, I would say that my actual engagement with the tweaking and everything was probably about 45 minutes to an hour, but the actual install process still took six hours. Oh, yeah. Just to download. You also happen to install the game the day after maintenance when the service were randomly getting as slammed as 11 servers get right.
Yeah. But it's like I started playing this game worship, which I had gotten on Kickstarter. I had kickstarted it like four years ago or something, four or five years ago, and they finally released it in early access. And it had been so long since they announced it and I backed it and it released that I completely forgot what genre or anything it was.
I just remembered it being a cute, cold themed thing. And that was vaguely strategy. That's as much as I remember going in. It's Pikmin.
It's adorable, cold themed Pikmin. What I want this. Oh, look at this up. So it's it's basically like like the vibes to it are very cold to the lamb looking as far as like the.
I love called Cutesy. Cutesy dark worshipy thing. White. Yeah, it is very bright.
That's my biggest problem with it. But it's very cute and it plays basically like Pikmin. It's great. It's still early access.
It's still pretty early in development, which is a shame because again, I kick started it like four or five years ago. But I'm enjoying it so far. It is cute. And I think if they keep going the path, they're going to be a pretty neat little game.
Yeah. Yeah. Keep an eye on that one. Let's do the news.
OK. L.R.G.'s reissue of the PS4 Yakuza game. So the exact same version of the software as was on the original greatest hits discs years ago. And I don't really understand why they're re-issuing any of these discs.
They're still available. So apparently somebody within L.R.G. who wished to remain anonymous claimed that the reason was that they wanted to publish the Xbox version because it never got a physical release. And the stipulation was if they did, they also had to reissue the PS4 version.
I mean, when I'm not in the years five years ago or whatever, I bought Yakuza Kawami one and two and then three, four, five, six, three, mastered in a bundle for like 90 bucks. Like they're not. Yeah. Makes a sense.
Yeah. Whereas L.R.G. was on I think for 30 or 40 each. Oof.
Yeah. Well, and it's just the exact same as what was on the original disc. Whereas the Xbox and Switch versions that L.R.G. sold or the newest version as of printing.
Yeah. This is so weird. Darn. System Shot 2's Aliens Finkeder Doors were made with photos from a devs colonoscopy.
Here's the thing. I don't need a picture of a butthole to know how to make a butthole door in a game. So I don't really know why you needed to show up with these photos. Maybe it's because you're not an artist just maybe.
You know what? Maybe. Maybe. I just, you know, I got to really mentally get in that butthole space to draw the butthole doors.
Mentally get in that butthole just. I feel like you wouldn't need to be like, let me watch your whole colonoscopy before I can draw one wrinkled sphincter door. I just can't. I'm not inspired right now.
I need you to help inspire me. Yeah. PS3 store went down for almost a week. Is it back up?
It came back up. Yes. Let me remind people that there are still some games trapped on the PS3 store. If you insist on playing your games legally, you can still go pay for and download them there.
And it seems like the store is on its last legs and has been for a while. I think so. I tried to shut it down a little while. And then in the right.
But the other two consoles of that generation are already shut down. So it is the last one of that era. If you want anything from that era that is only available digitally, get it while you can. Yeah, for sure.
Really hack your PS3 because we can't own your games. But also I still have a hack mine. I need to. I should have it.
My problem is I just already own basically everything on PS3 I would want and it's already downloaded. So I just don't have any physical games left for it. I got a bunch of physical games. You can have your hard drive.
What's the point in having them all on my shelf? Exactly. And then I got to put them in a box and sit in a box and feel bad that they're in a box and they're going to get disbrought and they're going to die. If they're going to get disbrought and die eventually anyway, shouldn't you have that.
I don't know. I guess I should. Retrooid, which is still a bad name for company makes think of hemorrhoids every time. I got the retroids.
You have weird hang ups on certain words and names. What? I don't. What else?
What's the other one? Yeah, that one kind of grosses me out. Yeah. Bloodsink grosses.
Retroids. I got the retroids. I think Android. I don't think hemorrhoid.
No, every time. Do you think hemorrhoids when you think of Android too? No. No, for whatever reason.
Very weird. All this is strange. As I announced the Mega Drive theme retroid classic six with six buttons. Which was on my Christmas wish list on that show a couple years ago.
Last year or sometime. Yeah, I was like, I want more six button layouts. I remember that. That was the thing I wanted.
They're doing it. It looks pretty good. I'm excited about it. Nintendo has registered patents showing a hand crank attachment for a Joy-Con.
Fuck you, play date. Right. So cool. I'm patenting it now.
First of all, Nintendo patents weird shit all the time and then does fucking nothing with it. Sometimes they release hardware and then do fucking nothing with it. Also true. Or especially peripherals or accessories that they release and then do fucking nothing with it.
They make one game for it and then never touch it again. You know, how many games worked with the Labo VR headset? That's Labo. Is it Labo?
That's a short laboratory. Makes me think of hemorrhoids. So cool, but I don't know. I don't care.
I don't want a crank gun. My reaction to this is the same as my reaction to motion controls. That's really neat. Can I still use regular buttons?
I don't want a crank. I already got enough stuff to crank. What if it's explicitly for a Sega bass version? You know what?
No, I don't want to push a button. I don't want to do a crank. I don't want to. Sorry, and Microsoft have released Heritech Plus Hexen remaster.
I downloaded it. I played a bunch of it. I forgot to put that in my weeks. But it's good.
It's very good. It's very much along the same lines as the Doom 1 plus 2 remaster they did recently. Have you played any of the new levels yet? No, I played regular Hexen of three or four or five levels and then I played a good amount.
Heritech I never played. I thought Heritech was just a straight sequel to Hexen and it's not. No, Heritech is the first game. It's oh, well, either way.
I thought they were just a game in the sequel. Hexen is like just fantasy Doom and then Heritech is like no, what if we made this kind of an RPG sort of thing with classes. I think he has them backwards. Heritech is fantasy Doom.
Do I have them backwards? Heritech is the first one. Hexen is the second one. All right.
Hexen is the one with why would they not make the names more different? Which one has the classes where you pick like Warrior Cleric or Wizard? That's Hexen. That's Hexen.
Are you sure? I'm pretty sure. It's Heritech came first. I know that.
All right. I know that Hexen was more advanced. Great. I'm not a huge FPS person.
I could be wrong. Yeah, I think everything works. Yeah, Hexen is Heritech Plus Hexen. Heritech is fantasy Doom.
She's got a skin. Hexen is very much like, no, no, this is a new game, a new idea. Yeah, I'm more in-depth system. Doom, engine.
Which is cool. They're both very cool games, but I never played much Hexen, I guess. I played Heritech. And they're really good.
If you're interested in them, they're good. It's like $15 for the bundle. They're on guard. It's true they didn't put Hexen too in there too though.
Yeah. They did include some kind of like extra bonus level stuff and different. Yeah, they got the deals or not DLC, the expansion packs and some new levels for each game. Yeah, so that's cool.
Yeah, it does not have Hexen too. Yeah. Anyway, Nintendo announced a kid's centric line of Mario products called my Mario. Which is cool.
Yeah, it's not. Super surprising Nintendo releases Mario products for kids all the time, but now they're branded. So there you go. I guess your kid's brand loyal from a young age.
Change.org has removed the petition to overturn collective shouts of meddling in digital market places. Did they give a reason why? I don't believe so. At least last I checked the head now.
Fuck us, I guess. It's stupid. It's all stupid. Yeah.
Google is killing Steam support on Chromebooks, much to the Sigrin of every K-12 student in America because all of the schools got duped into buying Chromebooks. My daughter uses Chromebook at school every day. So I didn't even realize there was a version of Steam for Chromebooks. What would it even play?
I don't know. I don't know how functional it is or what. I mean, now it's not functional at all. Right.
Yeah, that's it. And I know we talk a lot about like Steam being kind of one of the marketplaces that we trust a little more than other ones as far as like renting our games, which is kind of what you're doing. But seeing this kind of thing, there's someone out there that bought a Chromebook to play their Steam games. It was a bad idea, clearly, but they're not getting their games taken away from them.
Look at it. As long as it's an official Chromebook, and after a market Chromebook, you can install Linux apps on it. So then you can just install the Linux version of Steam and keep going. I suspect the person that bought the Chromebook to play Steam games probably got an off-brand one.
I think it's probably a series of bad decisions. It'll anything that is Google certified that has Google Chrome OS and not Chromium OS or Chrome, what is the one you can just install? I've never used any of them. I've no idea.
As long as it came pre-installed and it is Google Chrome OS, you can run Linux apps on it and Android apps on it. I feel like the Venn diagram of Chrome users that would be comfortable installing Linux is more separate than even the Linux Windows Venn diagram. Right. Because the whole point of Chrome was that it was simple.
You don't have to install anything. Yeah, simple, nothing installs, nothing. You know, own anything, nothing on your computer. Now nothing works.
Ruby Spears' Mega Man cartoon is coming to Blu-ray so it can be inflicted upon a new generation of children. And you too can see Mega Man just looking fucking weird all the time. Yeah. Very weird game.
In a different way than he did on Captain An. Right. He's never looked not weird. Yeah.
So there you go. That's a... I don't... You know, I told myself I wouldn't buy it.
But I also might buy it, man. I don't know. I will not. I won't do it.
I could barely stand watching it back in the day. Like, I really wanted to enjoy it because Mega Man. And then I watched it. I was like, no.
Ruby Spears is a nice the same thing. Atari and Namco are releasing a special Pac-Man theme Atari 2600. The whole thing is like neon yellow. I love it.
Yeah, but it's only got the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man on it. Yeah. That's bad. I thought it was a different version.
But I... Is it? I wanted to say they look like the 70-100 version on the cartridge. Oh, it might be a little better.
Yeah, the 70-100 version. Because I was going to make the same joke as I was going to play Atari 2600 Pac-Man, which is fucking terrible. But I have to scroll back up through. But I think it was a better version.
Yeah. I mean, Donald's Japan's Pokemon promotion is ending early because everyone was throwing away the food, just keeping the Pokemon cards. I don't know. I don't know why companies keep needing to learn this lesson.
Like at one museum, they got fucking like rushed by a mob of people for Pikachu cards. Why do we keep having to learn this lesson? Quit putting Pokemon shit in things and being like, oh, just kids will care about it. No, no, no, no, no.
38-year-old adult men are going to freak the fuck out about it. Just trust me. They're just going to know it's going to happen. Maybe if they're Pokemon toys didn't have the big-titty Pikachu in there.
Right, quit putting big tits on the Pikachu's. Like as an adult man who... I want some Pokemon cards. Like I tell you, you're going to get some additional interest.
I'm not going to be prepared for it. Anyway, sad, sad story. It's just kind of one of those things that's sort of gross top to bottom. A recompiled part of Mario Kart 64 on Dreamcast has been shown off because the Dreamcast can do anything that the N64 can do, don't you know?
Dreamcast was such a giant leap from N64. Oh, yeah. For being less than two years away, graphically, that is a massive leap. A lot of people forget how close those two systems were to each other.
I think what we have is a lot of people forget how bad N64 looked. That's true. It did look pretty good. Yeah, yeah.
But this is cool. I think the first guy that killed... You know, we're making fun of the Space Invaders movie for being dumb. And then we're talking about how great this movie based on a 60s trading card was.
A series of trading cards. There were themselves, I think, a spinoff of trading cards that were dinosaurs killing people. Possibly. Either way, Mars I've no hope for the Space Invaders film.
No, me either. Chibi Robo, Attitude, Nintendo Switch Online, Plus, Plus Switch 2. So there you go. You can be a Chibi Robo.
Yes. Microsoft has banned spam bundles from the Xbox Store, so you have to get your hand to meet elsewhere, not get it on the Xbox Store anymore. They're not selling it. Now, these companies were releasing like 30 different bundles of the same game and it would just be like, you get the Xbox version and the Xbox version, or you get the Xbox version and the Xbox version and the Xbox version.
And that way it would flood the store, so it would look like this game was everywhere when it was just the one release. Yeah. Now, Microsoft has banned that, which is good. They should have done that a long time ago.
It's frustrating when these things happen, not because they happen. It's good things, they happen, but it's frustrating because when it happens, you have to stop and think, so they could have done this the whole time. Right. And they're waiting until right now.
It doesn't seem like it was even that hard. Yeah. It's annoying. But the new game was in Mars attacks.
Was he? Was he the dad? I think so. Oh, anyway, sorry.
We need to watch Mars attacks is what I decided. Got it on the Flex. A new game emulator for Playdate can run games that, near full speed. Well, the previous emulator was nowhere near full speed.
So I'm glad that they are good for the playdate. Almost completely full speed. Like I heard like on most games it is full speed. It seems like a great screen for original game.
Right. That's good. Yeah. Which brings us to our topic at hand.
Yeah, which is the title. Oh, that's my fault. That's my bad. It's Knox.
We are talking Knox synopsis, Diablo's Dumber cousin, which I put in as a joke. And by the end of this, think you'll see why it is not a joke. This released in North America, February 16th in the year 2000 in European territory, February 25th, 2000 first encounters literally never heard of this one when it was a thing didn't know it existed. I've just seen it casually thrown around in the ARPG discussion, you know, online, the discourse as kind of a forgotten gym in the action RPG genre.
I really didn't know about Westwood. They shut down when I was like 12 or 13. And a lot of their games are kind of, you know, that mid teenager, older sort of crowd. And so I've Westwood passed me by, Knox passed me by, Command and Conquer Pause passed me by, you know, my first Command and Conquer was three, which was not them.
I don't think. Yeah. I think that was after they had already shut down. Yeah.
I think that was a really good game. They made on Super Nintendo. I had the Game Gear Lion King. Did they make that one too?
No, I did not make the game. No, I didn't have a Super Nintendo one. So yeah, I didn't know about it. I literally picked it up on GOG a few weeks ago, just because like I've seen the name and it was like a dollar for an action RPG.
I'll try it. Sure. Well, I think we saw it in read-along this last week or this last time. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think that's part of what inspired you. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think we might have seen a review of it.
Yeah. It's amazing that we do all this hours of recording and we don't fucking remember anything that we say or do on the show. You will not remember something the moment we stop recording. It's great because people will reference something that we said on the show in the chat and I'll have no idea what they're talking about.
Even if it was the most recent episode. It was the day before and they'll be like, ahh yeah, that was funny and I'm like, I'm just talking about it. Yeah, no, I need to give us context or we will not know what you were talking about. Give me timestamps.
I'll go. Don't give me timestamps. Tell me what I said so that I can respond to it. I won't listen to it.
I'm convinced it's some form of performance anxiety. You know how like when you have to like give a speech in front of a crowd, you don't fucking remember, even doing anything because you're so nervous going out there. It's like performance anxiety. Yeah, so I'm like, really good.
I mean, I really just have everything anxiety, but that's fair. You know, I was sad or not. My first encounter would have been when I worked at E.B. and I think I started working there, I won.
And it was still on our shelf, because it was still relatively recently at that point. And it quickly became the game that never sold. It would sit right there next to Oni on the shelf. That's on my job.
Is the game that never sold? Yeah, basically. So is that an Oni? And I can't remember the other one, but there was one with this freaky source lady on the cover.
And those three just sat on our PC shelf long enough that I couldn't front-face them anymore. That didn't make sense. I'd just put them sideways so that their spine would choke. And they just never sold.
They lived there until I stopped working there. They were our last few big bucks PC games. I, they, when I started GameStop in 05, they didn't sell PC games at all. Yeah, I think we might have had like a tiny little shelf somewhere like shit that just hadn't been pinning out yet.
Warcraft, yeah, basically. Yeah, GameStop had stopped way before E.B. We still sold PC games, but I remember people coming from GameStop because they're like, those guys don't even sell PC games anymore. And also we took them in trade for the longest time and GameStop refused ever to take PC games on trade.
Honestly, I don't blame them. And, but we would take them, but we wouldn't take MMOs or anything like that. And we were supposed to check to make sure that the activation key was included. And some people wouldn't.
And we would get shipments from other stores of used PC games they couldn't sell. And I'd have to go through it and be like, this doesn't have an activation key. This doesn't have an activation key. And all those just get thrown away because they were useless at that point.
Yeah. Development. So Mike Booth started working on the game 1995 and at one point Virgin Interactive was on to publish the game according to CGW, but they dropped it and it was put on hiatus. This is not important to find anywhere outside of CGW.
Was it also not on the Wikipedia page for the game? I'm guessing because Westwood was owned by Virgin at the time. That's probably how Westwood ended up getting involved with all that. Oh, yeah.
That might be my... I was reading the Knox review in CGW and they were like, after Virgin dropped it and nothing else even mentions Virgin, so that must be the corporate chain of events then. Anyway, eventually Westwood's John Hite saw a demo of Knox and Westwood acquired the game and Booth's team to presumably publish Knox. Yeah, which is probably how he ended up doing some work on the Kwan and Kankar series and all that.
Yeah. Hite said in an idener view, which is where most of the simple comes from, that the game was originally just a multiplayer wizard dual game, which I think is an idea they should have kind of got too much more interesting. Then the game it turned into, but we'll talk about it. I could just do the wizard dual from one to switch.
Yeah, there you go, perfect. He also said that as far as comparisons to Diablo go, Knox has a much richer storyline, which is not true. Not true. A lot of the interview kind of couches the game as competition for Quakin Unreal, which makes sense in the context of the game's original vision, which was an online multiplayer dual game, but it feels kind of strange because it turned into a full-blown story-driven RPG, so it's like, oh, Unreal Tournament versus this full story-driven action RPG just feels kind of like a strange comparison to be made.
It's like a very different genre, but at the time it was just like video game versus video game. Yeah, well, also like anything online, you have to be able to get Quakin Unreal too. True. Yeah.
Also anything on PC. Yeah, yeah, on PC and online, you're getting Quakin Unreal comparisons. Right. In a different interview with GameSpy, Booth mentions that the game was originally thought of as a follow-up to gauntlet, but that his time binging Mortal Kombat and Magic the Gathering pushed him into spell combat-focused gameplay.
And at one point, the spells themselves were apparently supposed to be executed by complex button presses inspired by Mortal Kombat. I'm glad they didn't do that. I'm glad they didn't either, but you can kind of see it. So in the game, you cast spell, little hand symbols pop up above your guy and he says well, spell words.
That's right. And it almost seems like they wanted to have this sort of phonetic button pressing thing to put spells together. Instead, it just makes him sound like an idiot all the time. He just goes, bro, bro, bro.
There was a, I do want to also apologize. We've ever put all of the fucking conjecture into the Wikipedia article and then just through citation needed on it, trying to talk about how awesome and radical the game was because I deleted all your stupid bullshit out of this week's article because it was conjecture. You have no cited sources. That was stupid and sorry that I did that to you.
So the Knox Wikipedia article is no longer a advertisement for the game. I apologize to anyone upset by that presentation wise. This is kind of a realistic, isometric style. I don't even really want to say Diablo S because Diablo kind of has its own sort of like dark Gothic style.
This is sort of just generic fantasy, I guess. Yeah, it feels kind of generic fantasy. It does have a few, I think a total of four fully voiced cut scenes, but there's a lot of in game voice work with a relatively notable cast. So we're going to go through the cast in the story here.
I think I should probably start with the cast. I'm going to scoot down a little bit. So Sean Williams Scott is Jack Moer, our protagonist. Bizarre.
He's Sean Williams Scott. Who I love. I love that guy. He's great.
Joanna Cassidy is heckuba. Alan Oppenheimer is jandoor, the airship captain that you run into. Mark Ralston is warlord horrendous. Warren Burton is Aldwyn the Conjurer.
Ian Abercrombie is Horvath the wizard also features Mike Booth, Lee Perry and Susan Chesler. So weirdly star studded cast. I mean, I guess it was kind of Westwood, you know, they kind of had some clout out. They were sort of known for this.
I mean, they were already getting some relatively decent talent for Commander Conker as well. Sure. As far as the story. So quick notes.
Most of this is told via loading screens. And as far as I've been able to find the game, I actually has four cut scenes. And I found myself pretty intensely bored by the goings on of the game's plot because it was all either descriptive voice over of some guy just being like, the village of Gar has been attacked by Orcs across the Tralmar Bridge. We must go southwest across the land of blah, blah, blah.
And it's just, that's how every Western fantasy game sounds to me. Yeah, it's like a, when you see those videos or whatever, it's like how such and such sounds to people who aren't fans, it feels like that. Yeah. But it's just too dense.
The jargon is too dense, you know. It's either that or loading screen and it's just, it's delivered poorly. It's too much information. Nothing is ever really repeated in a way that makes anything stick or it lets you grab onto anything to be interested in.
And the game seems a little obsessed with creating this deep lore in world building, but it doesn't seem to understand what makes lore in world building engaging. It just seems to think having a fantasy list of fantasy words that's 300 words long is engaging in that's world building. I knew a lot of guys in high school who felt the same way. I know grown adults that think that just having to have a glossary makes it world building.
It's like, no, that just makes it jargon, you know. So long as all the names are made up of mostly continents, multiple syllables. So I quit the story long before finishing for reasons that will become clear pretty soon. So most of the story I just kind of read, which apparently since it's all on loading screens, I would have had to read some of that.
Back story, Necromancer's tried to take over Knox, which is the name of the land, and they were stopped by Jandor and his staff of oblivion, everything's also really generically named. They traveled to Necromancer's souls in an orb and had his buddy Horvath's in the orb to another dimension and then kept one of their babies because, you know, when you decimated people, you keep one of the babies. Yeah. And he planned it later.
And so then he had this baby and was like, I don't fucking know what to do with this. So he left it with a village of ogres. Right now. And they took his legendary staff that banished the orb and he broke it into pieces and he gave it to a bunch of different settlements.
Okay. And that baby grew up to be our big bad, the, the, the baby that was raised by ogres. Yeah, the, the, the baby of Necromancer's raised by ogres who had all of your bad work. And so, yeah, she grew up to be Hecuba, which is basically just a lady in full bondage gear.
Yeah. Well, yeah, that's, that's what bad guys were, but, but who would have thought it was such a great job. I know, I know, you know, you raise the nature versus nurture. So she finds her roots and is now calling yourself a Necromancer queen and wants to take over the knocks and bring the Necromancer's back because I guess Necromancer's is like a race of people and not just a job in this world.
I guess. It's, it's bizarre. Yeah. So the game opens with Hecuba summoning Jack Moer to the land of knocks.
So the opening cutscene is Sean William Scott as Jack Moer watching TV while his comically high pitched girlfriend Tina like rattles on about something. Yeah. In the trailer. Yes.
Yeah. In the little trailer home and he's sucked Captain in style through the TV, but then I don't know why it's such a problem with this. He gets sucked through the TV, but the TV comes with him. Yeah.
It's stuck in on itself. That doesn't make any fucking sense. None of it. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that doesn't make sense Justin.
Ok, people could get sucked into TVs as a portal to another world, but once you create a portal to another world, it doesn't take a portal with it, doesn't makes sense. Time machine takes its time machine with bots. Time machines aren't possible. So well, neither is getting sucked through a TV.
Ok. We just don't have the science yet. We don't know. Anyway, you can only get sucked through plasma smack, captureach draftingrible Captain in reboot movie win.
Yeah right you gotta do it. Anyway, Jack becomes hero via slowly working his way through the various crises that have been tangentially caused by Hecuba throughout the land. Stuff happens eventually you meet, you defeat Heckuba, and you're given of three endings depending on your class, because it's three different paths that you take. So if you're a warrior, you defeat her and you're teleported back to Tina.
Okay. I don't know how, because the TV came with you. Maybe she might be just went back through the TV. But it doesn't, it can't, it can't.
Yeah, the Conderer, does he ever get the TV back from that dude on the air? No, they seem to really be into the TV, because there's a whole bit in the opening cinematic about our television, you know, like is this gonna be some kind of plot? No, it's just, it's just, it's just. Yeah, one moment.
The Conderer class kills Haki Bunn, traps her soul in the orb. You know, kind of predictable path. Okay, yeah. And then the wizard like blasts her with magic energy and she turns from a lady in black lipstick and black bondage gear to a lady in white bondage gear and is a good version of herself.
And it kind of implies that maybe they bang. It's like a light necromancer? I don't know, diet necromancer. She's like, she's in all this black bondage gear.
Then she's like zapped and all of a sudden she's blonde and in white bondage gear. And necromancer zero sugar. And she's like, who are you? And he's like, I'm Jack Mo, it's just stupid.
It's just a weird, he's married. No, he's got a girlfriend. He's got a girlfriend. Yeah, I mean, nothing happens.
It's only vaguely like, hey, you know. Not a porn win. Never, please don't ever do that. No one, no one do that.
So the endings are weird. Yeah. Like mini, I don't know. It's just bizarre.
I don't know how. I was charming though. I will say that that opening cut scene is dumb and as bad as it is. Yes.
It's that era of dumb, charming, bad writing, mediocre voice acting, which makes it especially surprising that they actually got, you know, talented there. Cause it's bad acting. The voice acting is bad. They must have bad direction or something.