Welcome to Winter Women's episode 547. As always, I'm your host, Justin Baker, and as always, I'm joined by Vibele Human Chris Saturn. Hi, Justin. Hi, Saturn.
We're also joined by our producer, Guy. Hi, Guy. Oh, so exciting. Oh, no, his track is in Español.
Oh, no. Let's see. Shit. We need to go back to the English language track.
It's OK. Close captioning is available. So please turn on the close-capping on your podcast device. No, it's captioning.
Oh, no. He turned off the captioning. This is our first episode of 2026. We are now in the future with you.
Yeah. If you were listening on the main feed, you've already been in the future. Now, we are also in 2026 with you. We've been dragged kicking and streaming along behind you, kicking and screaming, not streaming, also streaming.
Also streaming. First class of 26th episode, and it's bilingual. I've been getting over being sick, so I'm sorry, sinusy, and I'll be muting myself a lot during the show to cough and snort and wheeze. I'm just starting to be sick.
I've got a mild fever last night, so I have fun. I'll also be muting a lot. Yeah. So if we have any weird stilted pauses or anything, then it's probably just someone who's purring.
There's two and only shows of the year. We'll be dead in two weeks. Yeah. My week, I have been playing video games.
I accidentally cut a noticeable portion of my thumb off, and it took out a pretty good chunk of the nail with it. It's kind of at like a 45 degree angle, and just sort of sheared a whole section there. What were you doing? So we've been feeding the stray cats on my property, and they were getting real close, and there was a really cute one, and I was feeding her some little chicken breast, and I ran out of chicken breast, so I ran to cut more chicken breast, and I was trying to cut chicken breast as fast as possible to get back before she ran away.
Because I've been trying to get her to let me pet her for like weeks now. And so I went so fast that they also ended up eating a portion of my thumb. So, and I didn't get to pet them. So it's the worst case scenario.
So I'm gonna introduce you to a concept that they make pre-prepared cat food and a bag. I didn't have it ready. They have friskies out, but if you put the chicken down, they'll come even closer. My daughter named her Willow Pelt, and I really want to pet Willow Pelt, because she's got a weird shaped body.
Her head's too big and her legs are too short, and she's real chunky, and I just want to squeeze her and kiss her. But I can't get to her. She runs for me. I see.
And she was so close, and I was like, I got a chicken! And yeah, so I cut my finger off. And also Justin's super bougie, and he hand-makes his dog's food too. That's true.
I do make my dog. Well, I don't do it because I'm bougie. I do it because my dog's fucking allergic to everything. Anyway, so I brought the cardinal rule of using knives, which is don't cut your thumb off.
That's a good person. So I've been taking it easy on some of the video games lately, playing some less intense stuff, and things I can pause a little more. So I'm still playing some Hell-Divers too, with Andrew, and it's still a good time. Yeah.
Also, picked back up and have been playing Ratchet and Clank. The PS4 one that is, I believe, a remake of the first Ratchet and Clank, which is already kind of confusing, because the story kind of starts in media res, and I think that's how it was in the original one too. So I was like, is this the first? Anyway, it's really good.
It's real fun because I picked up Rift Apart on sale a while back, and I was like, I've never played a Ratchet and Clank. I thought that was based on the movie. I have no idea. I didn't know there was a fucking movie.
Yeah, it came to theaters. I have no idea. Anyway, I don't know any about Ratchet and Clank, but I'm playing it. And is that pretty darn fun, pretty on fun game?
Pretty enjoyable. Also, speaking of cats, I guess, three or four nights ago now, we were feeding our, those stray cats that live in our property. And there was a new one there. And I went outside and it didn't run for me.
And then I petted it and it liked it. And then I picked it up and it didn't panic or try to kill me. And so we were all excited. And then I sat him back down and my wife came to see him.
She opened the door and he came inside and he hasn't left. Nice. So it's been four days. He is adorable and very sweet.
Yeah, he's on a lot of medications right now. We had taken the vet and he got a bunch of shots and stuff. I'm still not convinced. He's not just gonna run off back to wherever he lives or where he came from.
But we were distributed a cat by the cat distribution system. He has since left and gone out and Tom catted around and did whatever they do and then came back. So I'm guessing this is his home base at least for now. My daughter is thrilled because she's been asking for a cat for a long time now and I've been saying no for a long time now.
Nice. But I have the right. No, no. I told her that he went out for a little while.
Now there's 80 more kittens out there. That's the concern is we have a lot of female cats that are gonna have property. But I don't want to take him to get him. We already spent $260 of the vet getting him vaccines and dewormer and all that other stuff.
And this is again a cat that might live next door. Might just run home. I have no idea. We posted it on all the neighborhood stuff like is anybody missing a cat and a couple people out there there it was his and they wasn't.
So I told her once we finished this five days of medication he has to be on for his like tapeworms and stuff and tummy troubles. Then if he's still here and still seems like he's gonna say then we take him to get him balls cut off. You think that if he was gonna be out there in the wild that that's when you would want his balls cut off. Not when he's going to home.
Well, my wife's got a friend who like captures neighborhood cats and gets them fixed and then re-releases them. Right. Well, it's just one of those things. Like I'm already out $260.
I don't want to be out $200. 500 bucks on a cat that like I never seen. Yeah, it's fair. But I'm sure like in a bigger city, it's just options.
Right, right. Yeah, yeah. I did with the thing about the low cost ones is they don't send you home with any pain meds. They just do it and then they send you home and then whatever they gave them when it wears off, which is fine.
But you know, I don't know. I feel like, I don't want to come home with something because I'm sure having your entire nuts cut off doesn't feel good. The vet said he's about six months old. And we've been calling him bug.
Like so that he got a caller today because he got him a rabies shot because again, he's gonna be around my kid and my dogs, he's got to have shots. And I'm like, he's got the tags. So now we got a caller. So he's got the tag.
At this point, I couldn't get rid of him if I wanted to. The first night I shut him out one night. Like after he was inside for a few minutes, he was just really cold outside. He was visibly shaking, which I've never seen a cat do from the cold.
And so we let him come in and warm up and I shut him back out. And he just went around to the back door and started meowing. And so I have no fence and I have a dog door. So if he's gonna come in, I can't stop him.
All I can do is make sure he's safe to be around. Right. But yeah, he doesn't seem to give a shit about dogs or a caller or a kid petting on him all day long. It's just, it's very weird.
He's very friendly cat, but it does not seem to understand humans and human behavior, but it's not bothered by them. What's weird is we took him to the vet and he was doing great. And then they said, all right, we're gonna take him in the back and draw some blood and get stuff like that. And the nurse hadn't seen him yet.
It was only the, what do you call them, the vet tech, the assistant person. And so the vet tech took her back and the doctor saw him back there. And that's where she first encountered him. And she came in and she was like, oh, he's very feral.
Oh. And I was like, oh, he is? And then she brought him in and they were like ready. Cause they had to give him like four or five shots.
Cause she said he was old enough to get him all at once. And they were like holding him down and everything. And she was like, trying to kill us back there. And who's back in the room with this?
He was fine. So I guess, man, I don't know. So yeah, now we have cat. I didn't want a cat.
I had a cat for 20 years. I don't want another one. But he's very sweet. And he seems to spend a lot of the day outside on the property probably banging all the lady cats.
But he's not in the house. That's nice. He's not banged any of the lady cats in the house yet. No, I can't get any of the lady cats to come in the house.
He did get in one catfight today. We heard him out there screaming at each other. He got he got in a fight with the one. My daughter has so my daughter is named every stray cat on a property.
You can consult. Oh, good. And they're all named after this after either after or similarly to cats from this book series called Warriors. Oh, yeah, make sure those.
Yeah, he got he got in a fight with a cat. She is named Dark Stripe. So they bug in Dark Stripe had a fight. And so I can stumble because, you know, I can come up with my own names.
I assume that that book is based off of the movie, The Warriors, right? Obviously, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
But with cat, you know, I got it. In some ways. It's my understanding that that book series, there's like a bajillion of them. And they're they're written by I think it's three people that use the same pen name.
Oh, I didn't know that. That's cool. There's also comics and stuff now. It's pretty big thing.
She never really got into them. She read like half a one and was like, man, I'm kind of bored of it. But now these cats are around. So she's been like, there's by the door is a chart.
And if you call them by the wrong name, she gets the chart and grabs you. And if you're like, oh, I saw a cat, she's like, what did it look like? And I'll be like, it was orange and white. She'd like to have a white ring around its neck.
And I'm like, I guess. And then she's like, all right, let me check the chart and she'll tell you what its name is. Anyway, so lots of new cat stuff and playing video games with her phone. Saturn, what have you been doing?
I did my what used to be a buy annual, but has now become an occasionally annual playthrough of the first Zelda game. And I figured I'd play it on Nintendo Switch online because apparently I'm still paying for it according to the email that I got the other day saying that it was renewed. Me too. Yeah.
And so I powered up my Switch 2 and grabbed my Switch 2 Pro controller and realized the D-pad is garbage. Just fucking awful. Just unusable for over two games. You had not been able to watch this?
I've not played any overhead 2D games with it. I don't like playing Mario Kart and stuff like that with it. And so now that I am playing a proper game, I was like, oh, this D-pad is unusable for this purpose. It is not fit for purpose.
I like that 2D overhead adventure game is a proper game. Yeah, yeah, a proper game. Oh, a proper game for a D-pad anyway. Like Mario Kart, it doesn't matter what your D-pad is like.
You can use it. As long as it does left and right. Right. Well, you don't even need a D-pad for Mario Kart.
Just going to be using the analog stick. Oh, yeah, right. The stick, yeah. I'm going to be using the Switch to only to learn that my older 8-bit dough controllers have all gotten firmware updates to work on the Switch.
So look at that. I just took the 8-bit doughs that I was using on my old Switch, updated the firmware, hooked them up to a new Switch, and now they're working fine. But I do what in intent won't. Right.
But yeah, by that point, I had already finished all that, because it's not a long game. It took me a couple hours to play through the game and 100% it. But it was so nice to go back and revisit the original. I was going to play through some of the Game Boy Mega Man games, because I got that hand-drawn Mega Man guidebook.
Oh, yeah. How is that? Because I kind of wanted to order it. But also, I don't really love the first Mega Man.
Yeah. Well, it also has the first Game Boy Mega Man in it. Oh, have fun. And it's neat.
It does, it made me realize that it is missing one thing that I enjoyed in the old magazines that would hand-draw the guides for the games, because those old video game magazines, anytime they had strategy for a game, they didn't have the original developer maps or anything, because that was expensive. So they would have just some hand-drawn maps, everything. But then they would interspersed pictures of the game. And sometimes it would be a high-quality screenshot.
Sometimes it would be somebody taking a fucking Polaroid of a television. But there would still be the occasional screenshot of the game. And this doesn't have any of that. And I realize I kind of missed that a little bit.
But other than that, it is incredibly charming, incredibly high-caliber. And of course, they have input from Capcom for all this stuff. So it has all the proper names for the enemies, instead of the fake made-up names that magazines would use back in the day. So it does feel like jarring in that way that it's got all the proper canon names for all the little minor enemies in the Mega Man game, right next to the super charming 80-style hand-drawn art.
It feels bootleg, but then it's not bootleg. Exactly, yeah. But it is neat. I'm enjoying that.
And I do plan on, at some point, whenever I can find free time again sitting down and playing Game Way Mega Man with it, just because I think that'll be a neat little experience. Yeah, I really hope they do more of those. I imagine they will, but I really hope they do. And of course, I kind of want to buy this one just to support it.
So cool. And of course, that guy has done several unofficial ones. Those weren't printed physically. You just have to download them.
Yeah, I've got his. He had a Patreon for a little while where it was just do like little two, three-page guys for a bunch of games. And I had several of those. So we'd do the Patreon presumably to work on this.
Right, I would assume. But yeah, so we're hand-drawn guys and set a little bit of a rocky trajectory, what with her? Seasoned to sis letters and stuff from certain shitty companies being shitty. Guy, what have you been doing?
Well, somebody was kind enough to write duh, hockey, her, duh. Yeah, was it you? No, it wasn't. So apparently I've been doing hockey, her, duh.
We'll never know who wrote it. That's weird. No, I've been playing StarCraft II. Getting ready for this episode is as put that RTS bug back in my ear.
So that's been fun. I've been playing arena because, and I'm sure I'll talk about this later, but StarCraft II is hard and takes a lot of manual dexterity. So my go-to big brain game is managing the gathering at this point because I just can't do StarCraft sometimes. My hands hurt.
That's fair. So that's fun. And it's winter season. They're doing cool shit on arena.
And it's the Avatar set, Avatar the last air bender set. It's been fun to play. Oh, yeah. So I've been playing NCAA football.
And I have to mention this because I caught the snippet of y'all while you were talking last time we were recording about making the computer playing itself or whatever. I don't remember what the context of that was, but you're making fun of it. That's what I do now. And I've run my simulations.
Yeah. So there's a load where you take over as a school, right? And then you recruit the players or whatever. And then the way that I had been playing is just sim the game and advance the next week.
It does a sim or whatever. And then it goes on. What I'm doing now is I'll go into the game and put it on slow mode and watch the computer play itself with the players that I picked or recruited or whatever. And so it takes like 45 minutes to get through a game.
So I'll watch the game. And I find myself cheering at my players or at them more often than not. But it's an experience and it's kind of fun. Yeah.
Yeah, that one is not that different than just watching on a TV, I imagine. Yeah. So it adds a little bit of context or something to you. What's that word you love?
For verusimilitude. Yeah, that's the one verusimilitude to the recruiting process and managing the school and students and kids. So it's fun. It's immersive.
Yeah. And then also I've been playing a little bit more Trails from Zero. I'm in Chapter 4. So getting towards the end.
I believe there's five chapters in a finale. I believe so. In that game. So getting there again, I got to before Justin gets the itch because he'll play through like five games real quick somehow.
Yeah. I'll do nothing for years and then slam a bunch of amount real fast. Yeah. But we're in Justin's off season.
So I'm trying to get in while I can. Right now my obsession is the X-Files. And as soon as I run out of X-Files, which I'm not far from doing, then I'm going to be back on the trails. Oh, yeah.
Did you get to the Bryan Cranston episode yet? No. I've been watching kind of out of order because I watch my TV when they're on and they've looped back to the beginning series. But then the other day yesterday they were showing the ninth and tenth seasons or the 10th and 11th, where the two were Bible seasons were.
Oh, yeah. And I was like, man, these are really good. I kind of got hooked on them, especially after the late Robert Patrick's self where you're like, this kind of sucks now. And so then I watched the entirety of the very last season.
Well, now I've got two episodes left. I'm like, I've got like two episodes left and I'm done with it. And then I got to go back and watch seasons like five and six, I think. It's all I'm doing it all out of order.
It was just very weird because I'll be like, watching something and be like, oh, but he was dead. I'm like, he died? No, I have no idea. But then they're like, oh, but he's back.
And I'm like, well, now I know he's back when he dies. So it's just very strange. He's doing it all wrong. But you know what?
If you love it, then great. I love the files. In my head, I'm doing it the way I would probably have seen it on TV anyway. Right.
That's how most people first experience X files, which is, you know, I saw it in sync to occasion, watched it religiously for a few weeks, forgot about it, miss some episodes, loop back around. You know, it's just kind of. Well, that's fucking things. Guy, did you get far for where you're at in zero?
Have you already met Kia? Yes. OK, cool. She comes in the intermission between three and four.
That sounds right. OK. Yeah. No, no, no, she comes at the very end of chapter three, because chapter three is the fair one.
Yeah. All right. Yeah. Yeah, that was a reveal.
Yeah. Let's do some news. OK. You just want to do that?
Fuck yes. Oh, all right. There's you. Well, now I got a first drink of drink.
Sure. Let's go. Drink as simulator, D. Mule, D.E.
Mule did. I'm not sure D.E Mule received its first update in seven years, including full support for the second hit car who arcade board. Which is nice to see. Yeah, it's really good.
Drink has a simulation is one of those things. It's like in a pretty good spot, but not like an amazing spot. So it's nice to see. You know, it's been close enough for so long that a lot of people have just been willing to put up with it.
Yeah. Yeah. Armstealer. Armstealer, Palmer Lucky and his company, Mod Retro, have released a new model of their game with color knockoff made out of actual attack drones for people who really want to feel the murder in their handheld gaming.
I'm just going to explain that a little more. So Mod Retro is a company owned and run by Palmer Lucky, who is the guy that created the Oculus, sold the shit off. And now he owns Endural, which is a pretty major arms dealer and autonomous killing machine company. Isn't he also like the King of Men or something?
What does that mean? What? You're thinking of King of Queens with Kevin James. No, from Lord of the Rings.
What? No, wait. Evermore. I'm not a rings person.
Look, I didn't get your joke. I'm sorry. Anyway, he made a company to make a biol accounts relatively decent like FPGA, Game Boy Color knockoff thing. But a lot of us don't want to buy one because it's run by a literal arms dealer who is funneling his profits back into his company that makes autonomous killing machines.
And just in case anybody thought he was separating the two. Now he's made one literally out of drone metal, just a hammer of the point home that if you buy one of his Game Boy it's just going to fund more killing machines. And it's, oh, Endural, the sword, Ergorn's sword. I thought you're making a joke on his name.
I was like, whose name in Lord of the Rings sounds like Palmer? Lucky I don't know. Anyway, so yeah, he just kind of is being an extra piece of shit about it now. And I've seen all the arguments up and down.
Some people do the whole thing. There's no ethical consent, some show under capitalism, just buy whatever you want. I'm not one of those. I'm like, yes, the money I spend on some things goes places I don't want.
But there's that. And then there's literally buying a thing made out of stuff that murdered people. Yeah, there's a difference. Just because it's all unethical in a way doesn't mean that there aren't shades of gray.
And we can't appreciate things that are less dark than other things. Anyway, he's a trash bag, continues to be. Exactly. Also, Time Extension announced that I'm no longer cover Mod Retro News.
I think a couple of other outlets kind of followed suit, which is nice to see the press taking a bit of a stan. I mean, look, we're going to stop talking about this shit, which is nice. Which is good. But also, I do think that people should be aware of what a giant piece of shit is.
So that if they do accidentally encounter news about him, now it is more likely that that news will only be positive about him because the only sources that are going to continue carrying news about him are sources that don't care about that. And so I worry that now people will encounter news about him and be like, oh, cool, a neat Game Boy thing. And not know these pieces of shit. Because until now, obviously, you go to the Mod Retro website and there's no mention.
You would never know. If you didn't look it up, you'd just be like, oh, this is a cool, like Game Boy Color thing. This is neat. I did that the first time that I encountered stuff.
Because he's reprinting a bunch of games and some of them are indie games, some of them are official reprints of, for some reason, common games. But on paper, it's really neat to have this new Game Boy Color and these new games. But in reality, it's funding murder devices. So that's concerning.
Yeah, and now being made out of murder devices. And now being made literally out of murder devices. That's nice. Metroid Prime 4 sold only 3,000 physical units in Japan in its first week.
That is a visible. Yeah, that is a not good number. Pretty low. I'm assuming that's a cross switch in switch too.
I assume they just want them together. OK. And they only make 3,000 or one. No.
Metroid is historically not terribly popular in Japan. And first person games are historically not terribly popular in Japan. But this is because you can't see their feet. Right.
Yeah. I haven't picked it up either, just because I am not particularly interested in first person games. In as much as I enjoy Metroid, I'm not in love with the Metroid Prime games. And some of the reviews I've seen of it are mixed.
So I'll probably pick it up when it's cheap. But I don't know if I'll ever get around to it, just because I still can't finish the first one because I find it dull. I would very much like to play it. But I'm presuming that the Switch 1 version doesn't run well.
I've heard it runs close to 60 FPS at 1080. Oh, really? Whereas the sequel runs 4K 120 solid. They're the Switch 2 version, either.
Yeah. I mean, I'll take 1080p 60 all day long. Yeah. I've been told that's pretty close to long to 60 on 1080p.
Valve is ending production on the original LCD model of the Steam Deck. This isn't shocking. They have a bunch of new hardware coming. And they've had the OLED model for a little while.
So it sucks. My hope is that they keep selling parts and stuff for the LCD for a long while. That's really my concern is keep those parts coming. Yeah.
But at the very least, the OLED model is still available. So it's not like the Steam Deck itself is going away. It's just that original model. McDonald's, Japan, and Square Enix had a Dragon Quest crossover event with a adorable marketing and questionable menu items.
Did you see the other menu items? Can I get a slime? I did not know. Oh, no.
One of them was a fish patty with some tartar sauce and some red chili sauce on it. Oh. Another was a burger that also had a chicken patty on it. So it was like beef and chicken and some other weird topping.
I think it might have been some like soy topping. Anyway, very questionable food items on this. It's not like appealing at all. When I first saw the fish one, I thought it was like a chicken parmesan sandwich.
And then somebody like translated the text. And it was a breaded fish patty with red chili sauce and tartar. None of it looks good here. I'll paste an image so that you can see this.
I don't want to see. I put it in the main general chat a week or two ago. I must have missed. But it's not a little.
I tried a bite of any of these. Yeah. I don't know. I see a lot of mayonnaise on one of them.
I'm OK with that. Which one? The bottom one. Oh, yeah.
That one's just like a general burger looks like. But they have to do with Dragon Quest Monster. Me either. Yeah, that top one, it's beef and chicken and some sort of barbecue soy sauce and some sort of pepper mayo sauce and some slab of bacon and sort of like crispy bacon.
I do know in Japan they have different bacon than we have bacon. Right. Because I had a friend that lived in Japan for a while. And he's like, I miss bacon so bad.
You know what's going to happen? He's like, they do, but it's different. No, for nothing. But the top one does kind of look like the monster with his tongue sticking out.
And the middle one does kind of look like a slime smiling. Guess. I don't think the middle one's supposed to be a slime smiling. What's the little silhouette next to it?
What is the great saber cat? That doesn't look like a saber cat to me. That is the great saber cat. That's what's the.
Also, they cut that chicken with the grain you're supposed to cut across the grain. That's not that one's supposed to be fish. That's fish supposedly that one is fish. Yeah.
Any game awards disqualified Claire Skier from awards due to use of generative AI. And they did follow up and say, hey, we're not going to do this anymore. So a reasonable response to generative AI being used in a reasonable response to people pulling over. I think this was all very reasonable.
And what they had used the generative AI for was background elements that they had already had their artists replace by the time the game had released. Just the first issue of the game was before that was patched in correctly. And by the time the award season came around, it had already been replaced for months. But because it had shipped with that in there, they did disqualify it, which is fair.
Totally. Yeah, I do think it's a little bit hard line. But I think with how hard corporations are pushing AI, you kind of have to be hard line. I can't blame them all.
You can't sneak it in everywhere. It sucks to have to be this way. And I'm a little more willing to forgive any devs for using generative AI. Especially to stuff like background textures, whatever, the ultra tedious ship.
But again, you can't give an inch or they'll take a mile. Exactly. That's what it is. LRG was sued over selling customer data to meta and opted to settle the class action to the $2.7 million any customers who watched a video or purchased a video game containing a cutscene from LRG can submit their claim by January 20.
I need to, if we have any lawyers listening, if you could please explain to me why specifically a video game containing a cutscene. I don't, I don't, I need to know why that specifically is important in this so that I know whether or not I can file a claim. Yeah, I don't. Maybe men just really want to know how much of their, I guess, audience watched a cutscene.
It's just very strange. Yeah, it's either a weird thing to ask for or we're being observed more than we thought, which is really saying something because I just assumed that everything I do. Well, my other question is maybe it's a legal distinction as far as they can only claim the damages based on video since the thing specifies watching a video or a buying a game with a cutscene in it. It's got to be some non interactive part, somehow legally applies to this more than the interactive part.
I don't know how though and I would like to know. So if anybody is fluent in legalese and is familiar with this, please let us know. Tommy Tallarico is now operating under the fake name Sami Salazar in back game and tournaments. Now I want to say this.
Tommy Tallarico has been a back game and tournaments for a long time now. Sure. But now he's going under a pseudonym. But now he's under a pseudonym, but it's very, very much him playing as Sami Salazar in its odd.
I have to back game and tournaments down in Florida. I think it was. Yeah, I have to ask. Is his mother less proud now that he's not even using his real name?
I don't know. I don't know. If someone didn't mention this, I don't know if it's true enough. Someone said these are paid-play tournaments too.
So it's not, you know, he showed up and paid the money to play. So it's under a fake name. Even kind of sadder. I think in a way.
Yeah. Decombulation of the GameCube Port of Twilight Princess as well as Harvest from 64 and Dr. Mario 64 reached 100%. I hope this continues to accelerate before Nintendo figures out how to stop it.
Granted, these are just decompleation. So really, they can only be recompiled right back into the same format. Somebody has to put in the effort to port it or whatever. If we want to play it on another platform.
But either way, I'm very excited specifically about Dr. Mario 64 because I hope that somebody carries the ball and moves on to Pokemon Puzzle League. That is one of the few N64 games that is trapped on N64 that I would like to play on other platforms. Vince Zampella, co-founder of Infinity Ward and developer of Call of Duty, tragically has died in a car accident at age 55.
That sucks. Yeah. Yeah. And unfortunately, a couple of publications in their headline on it specifically referred to it as a Ferrari accident, which is technically true.
But it does feel like it is diminishing any empathy. Yeah. Trying to demean in some way. Yeah.
Look, man, if I co-founded Infinity Ward, I'd be driving a fucking Ferrari, too. Seriously. And finally, the Final Fantasy 9 anime adaptation may be back in production with a French animation studio, which is all very exciting. Yeah, supposedly for release in 2028, which you might have played again for no reason.
You could have just watched the show. Right. You could have made it queen instead. I only finished the first disc, so you know.
You got plenty to look forward to then. There you go. Which brings us to our topic at hand, which is strategy bootcamp. Synopsis by the end of our bootcamp, you'll be ready to wage war.
Lives are in your hands. Any decisions you make are not the fault of our training. Oh, my God. This is our strategy bootcamp.
We're going to teach you strategy by the time we're done. Anything you do is not our responsibility. As far as scope, we are not hardcore strategy game people. I would say a guy who you're specifically here, because I would say hardcore at one of them, at least.
Yeah, that's fair. That's why you're here to talk to us. But for the most part, we are not as a group hardcore strategy game people. We are casual fans of the genre at best.
We won't be covering any hardcore historical stuff. You're up against for Salas, in-depth crusader kings, that kind of stuff. If you're playing those and you're into those, you don't need this bootcamp. You're already in the sea floating.
You're already at least in general. We can't help you. But so that's when the game was immediately lost. Yeah, that's outside of the scope.
This is for people that are like, hey, man, strategy games sound cool, but I'm having a hard time really kind of dividing a line between like, where's a good place to jump in? What's going on? What should I look at? Because it's one of those genres where people that are really into it are into the really hardcore shit.
Right. And it's easy to forget where you started and what the simple games were because for a lot of like really hardcore strategy nuts, the simpler games, they're not exciting anymore. They've graduated beyond that. And since none of us have ever graduated beyond that, and we've stayed in strategy game kindergarten, I think we are well poised to discuss the genre for other people that are interested in- Guys, at least in strategy game high school.
Okay, guys, you're in strategy game high school. Saturn, we might put you in first grade. You played a lot of Civ. I played a lot of Civ.
And a lot of CoA's strategy games on NES. That's true. And some advanced wars. I want to start with the genres we're going to be covering, the kind of the subgenres of strategy we're limiting ourselves to, which is mostly the RTS and Forex.
I'm brain strategies in this list too, but I don't think there's going to really be mentioning any of that, but it's technically encompassed. But this is mostly RTS and Forex stuff, which for me is kind of the bread and butter of the strategy, Osphere, as it were. I do want to mention other subgenres that are still strategy games, but we are not covering them here. City Builders, very much strategy games.
I was thinking of those more sim than strategy. It depends on them. It depends on the game. It's fair.
We're talking about tower defense is kind of strategy adjacent. Colony management games. We're not going to be covering Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld and stuff like that. MOBAs are very RTS adjacent.
Auto-battlers, squad tactics games like Mario Rabbids, XCOM, Valkyria Chronicles, and strategy RPGs like Tactics Ogre, Fonofancy Tactics, Unicorn, Overlord, these are all strategy games. You can argue your way into saying that almost any game is a strategy game. Almost all of the time, because words mean nothing. We're in the post-fact future where we can just say stuff.
I'm not going to mention that. Which category would Advance Wars lump into? I don't know. It's not an S-RPG.
It's not a squad game. It's not a real time, but it would lump in there with Fire Emblem too, which I'm not in. That we're genre of Fire Emblem Advance Wars likes, but also not including Fire Emblem almost leans into strategy RPG, but Advance Wars definitely does not. But their gameplay is very similar.
What about ActRazer or whatever? I did. I am excluding mixed genre games where there are strategy elements because that is going to include tens of thousands of people. ActRazer is more of an action sim than it is an action strategy, I would think.
I feel like most people when they dip into the strategy genre, and this has at least been my experience in Madea has been y'all's as well, but when you first dip into the genre, it is 4X and or RTS. That seems to be where most people kind of- Or Advance Wars. ... were ever that is.
Right. So before I get into kind of- I'm going to cover a little bit of history and then we're just going to talk about games. I didn't leave a section of the notes for it, but if we wanted to talk individually about where we started with strategy games, and I'll go first. For me, it was probably Pikmin dovetailing right into Warcraft 3.
So I was like 12-ish whenever it became a thing where I was like, hey, this is a thing, and I like this thing, and I want to play more of this thing, and I enjoy this thing. And it took me a long time to find the stuff that I liked. And also, strategy games and kind of all those games were kind of got a little bit older to understand a lot of them, especially by the time we were hitting the early aughts whenever I was becoming a teenager. And it kind of dovetailed right in the high school with relics games that they came out with, which I'll talk more about later.
And it's kind of my strategy game pedigree. You know, Saturn, what about you? For me, it was probably Genghis Khan and Romansa 3 Kingdoms on NES. And then from that into the Super NES, well, I tried the Super NES port of Populis and could not figure it out for the life of me.
Like, that was basically just a fucking Hellraiser box puzzle cube. Like, I could not figure out anything that was going on in this world. But then the Super NES port of Civilization got into that for a little bit, and then my neighbor got me hooked on Warcraft 2 when that came out. And then from there, I moved into more Warcraft, StarCraft, Civilization, and kind of stayed on that course.
Yeah. Guy. For me, first encounters was probably Age of Empires, I would think. Okay.
Like the first one? Yeah, the first one is back in 1997-ish. Nice, nice. Yeah, me and my buddies that lived down the street would play a lot of Age of Empires.
And I, you know, like, played through the campaign. I think there was a campaign in that. Yeah. Yeah.
And then we would play games against each other and stuff. And it was a lot of fun. Nice. Yeah, no, that's about it.
I was going to tell a whole story about how I thought a game was a different game and it doesn't exist. So, um, some history. Now, obviously this, this is going to discount a lot again because you could argue that, damn you really think it's a strategy game if you really want to be pedantic, you know, is Pokemon a strategy game? It feels like one, but also it's not.
There's strategy involved. There's also playing a role involved. There's also action involved. There is an adventure.
I guess technically you can say my first encounter was Battlesches on ADS. Right. Right. So, this, I'm discounting the obvious things like physical strategy games making their way to video game form because there's a lot of early chess checkers go, that kind of stuff.
Played on both Elo on 2600. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
a lot of the foundational elements of strategy games and the tabletop world too, is where a lot of it kind of grew out of. But in 1964, Mabel Addis created the Sumerian game for the IBM 7090 mainframe. And in it, players go through three reigns of three different Sumerian rulers and you're working to allocate resources and just like maintain a prosperous city. And there's all these, like, it seems like the main thing you're battling is weather.
Like weather is sweeping through and it's like a multiplayer game. So there'll be two different islands and you're just trying to kind of maintain the most prosperous island. So question for you, Justin. Yeah.
How many Sumerian rulers can you name? Out of respect, I will name zero. That's probably the right choice. Not a one.
I think I can name at least one. I think I can name at least one. Which one? Sargon?
It's almost like a question. It's almost like a movie. I think you might be. I think you might be.
I think you might be one. I think we're playing name that tune. It just looks like idiots now. It's Oscro Bonapal, Sumerian.
I don't remember. Ah, sure. That might have been Babylonia. I don't know.
Anyway, as far as I can tell, there's no real combat in the game. It's just kind of a real-time strategy, economic simulator thing. In 1972, Invasion was released with the Magamox Odyssey. It's a basic strategy game about players invading each other's kingdoms.
But it's also, it comes with a full board game, complete with cards and pieces. But you're resolving combat by what amounts to pong matches where players can curve the ball. Nice. So you're like, all right, we're playing the game.
Right, you and I are fighting. So we're gonna go up to the Magamox Odyssey and we got two paddles and there's an overlay that looks like a castle, looks like shit. And you send this pong ball, but you can curve it with your controller. Yeah.
That's how you resolve combat. That's pretty neat, honestly. It's a cool idea. It's a little involved.
It's just like roll two dice and be like, my dice is higher. But it's still a little cheesy too. It does, it does. It was touted as the first console strategy game, but honestly, it's kind of more of a video game assisted board game and the game part of it is not really a strategy game.
It's like a weird pong. But it's cool. It's a cool idea. It's a neat thing.