and do them and welcome to our episode 558. As always, I'm your host, Justin Baker, and as always, I'm joined by Bible human Chris Saturn. Hi, Justin. Hi, Saturn.
We made it here to 1130 at night on a Thursday on our second episode with no difficulties. Yeah, it's totally smooth, silent tonight. Nothing has been difficult. It's all very normal and good and awesome.
Everything is awesome. Everything is awesome. Yeah, everything in the world is just working on great. And it's great.
Things are fantastic. Perfect. We're not moments away from COVID too. Don't even put it in the world, Saturn.
Why would you do? Oh my God. Wrong with you. How's keeping?
We have a Matrix server. There's a link to all of our shit in the show description. You should know this. Join us in the Matrix.
I've taken to saying whenever someone says something, I'll be like, yeah, someone said in the Matrix said, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's my new, I like saying that. Nice. How about I say that?
Forever, I'm going to say it forever because I got to pay to host the server. I mean, how often does that come up in conversations? Oh, how often? How long do I have to say it?
Often? Pretty often because almost everyone I talk to is in Matrix. So I get to constantly be like, yes, my friend in the Matrix is telling me. I only talk to the people in the Matrix.
So there's never any situation where I have to reference the Matrix because I'm already there. Oh, no. It's usually to my wife. Oh, that's right.
Yeah, you live with people. I do live with people. There are other people in my house. My cat never asked me about what's going on in the Matrix server.
You tell her if you wanted. I could, but she's pretty dumb. This is an utter and complete tangent, but we have a kitty on my back porch that comes and hangs out with my kitty sometimes. And he's orange and white and really skittish.
And just because he's mostly orange every time I see him outside being skittish, I'm like, oh, you like Saturn's cat. Yeah. Oh, you orange skittish cats. Like that's a thing.
You're staring at me. I'll share. Um, he does let me pet him now. My cat is very afraid of people that she's very, very social with me.
Like if it's just me and her at home, she has to be near me in the room with me at all times when she is awake, except for when we record the show, then she gets scared and hides in the closet for something. So is he talking to right? Like I know it's your contacting other humans that she does not approve of this. Right.
She just right now. I can see her staring at me from the closet. Um, my week. I don't know if I talked about it.
I picked up and I've been playing a little more Ultra Kill. I'm still not totally sure how I feel about it. I feel like I mentioned it on the show. I could check.
Sounds right. Yeah. Um, it's a first person shooter, very like a movement based. I finally had to turn.
There are accessibility options. A bunch of them seem to turn on cheats and slow motion mode and stuff. I finally had to turn them on because it's got way too tough for me. Um, is it one of those that's classified as a boomer shooter?
And no, I think if you saw a screenshot, you would think that it is. That's probably where I got that impression. So like in without motion, you would definitely look at it and be like, yeah, that looks like a doom thing. Yeah.
But it's very much not. OK. Um, although it is very similar to Doom Eternal, which is not a boomer shooter. Uh, the lineage is weird.
It's a weird game. Yeah. Um, but I've been playing a little bit more of that. And then I forgot that it was coming out.
I've been so busy. But Slay the Spire 2 hit early access on Steam. So I bought it instantaneously. And I've been playing and very much enjoying Slay the Spire 2.
I have started Slay the Spire 2. I have not played as much as you have. I don't think I've only finished two runs now. OK.
I've unlocked. I think I'm missing one character still. I've probably done seven or eight runs. You know, I've made it to the end of Act 3 twice.
As far as I've made it also. I want to buy stuff. Yeah, I want to spoil it for anyone. But at first, my first bite, like I booted the game up, I played it and you're playing as Ironclad.
And you're like, oh, it's just like a spire again. And then you play a little more. And you're like, oh, no, there's so much more. Yeah.
It's all the like adjacent stuff that has been added to. Like the core gameplay feels mostly the same. But then like all the like question mark spaces and the bits in between stages or arenas, whatever they're called. All that is what feels different and new and enhanced.
And I, granted there's new characters, which are obviously making very different. And it does start you on Ironclad. So it's very similar first. So yeah, there's a lot of different stuff that it doesn't.
I like that it doesn't throw up at you all at once. I also, it's very much like I was playing it. I was like, man, we don't get sequels like this anymore. Where they're like, hey, the core of the game was good.
And we're keeping it. Here's just more stuff and new ways to use these tools that you already have. And so I very much appreciated it. And it's been very good so far.
It's kind of been a problem because I've been so busy lately with all my computer stuff and the server stuff. My kid was sick and all this shit going on. Also, she started playing volleyball. So it's like multiple nights a week.
I'm having a sit at volleyball games and practice and all this stuff. And so I'm just, I have no game time. And I was like, oh, let's slap this on top of everything else. I got all the trails games.
I got to play in the drag and quest sit on my shelf. And it's going to be fine. It's great. And it has an I was doing all the service stuff and it came up multiple times that it would have been really useful if I knew Python.
And I was like, well, I'll learn some Python. That'll be fun. And yeah, it has been. It's a really cool language.
It's really interesting coming from C anyway. You know, come from language made in the 70s to one that was made. I think Python was made in the late 90s. My high school programming class was HTML and then 4-tran and then C++.
Yeah, that would make me hate computers. Yeah, well HTML is pretty good. And I was like, well, I'm going to do that. And I'm going to do that.
And I'm going to do that. And I'm going to do that. And I'm going to do that. Yeah, that would make me hate computers.
Yeah, well HTML is pretty good at that one. But I also Java. He also made us do Java in the middle there between 4-tran and C++. So yeah, I did not enjoy any of those.
If you were designing a course load to torture me, it would be those things. Yeah. So I was talking to Andrew about it because I knew a while back he was learning Python. And I was like, hey, you know, if you were learning Python stuff, I'm kind of trying to learn it right now.
And he was like, well, I picked up this game to learn it. And I was like, oh, tell me more. And it's a game called the farmer was replaced. And in the game, the farmer is gone.
And the farm is now maintained by one single drone. Who you have to program? Now, I've seen programming games like this before. Zach Tronix has a couple of them or a couple dozen of them.
I think that's going to make all they make. But it's like literally you are writing Python, like actual real Python code to program this thing. Now, they have some custom libraries in there, some custom functions that are part of the game. But that's also kind of how Python works.
You know, whatever you're working in, you'll use a library for whatever that task is. And so I'd gone through some basic tutorials, but ended up spending, you know, a good 10 hours just learning Python in this game. And first of all, it was a great way to learn Python or, you know, get reacquainted with the basics and learn some new stuff. But also, it's just a really fun game.
Nice. And so I'll say this, if you don't even know the basics of programming, like I don't know what a variable is, I don't know what a loop is, then it might be a little bit of a struggle. But I think if someone literally spent like an hour doing like a YouTube video tutorial of like, this is what programming is, here is Python, then they could go straight from that into this game and learn a lot and have a really good time. Can you make it a little drone look cute?
You can as you play, you unlock different hats that you can put on your drone. And then also all the stuff you harvest goes into a floating piggy bank, which is also cute. So it has been, it has been really fun. Because it's just someone that wanted to learn Python for like basic tasks, stuff like, you know, I was talking about earlier on the pre-show, pre-show today.
Yeah, it was on the regular show. Right. Right. It's late.
And then that took me, I kind of got to, I didn't finish it, but I got to a point where I was like, I've kind of unlocked everything and I might come back to play the game part, but the Python learning part, I need to take elsewhere. Right. And so then I have been playing around with Pi Game, the Pi Game Library, which is just a game programming library and goofing around with like making sprites and collision and things that Taito invented back in the game. And it's been a good time.
Heard that time with it. It's been a lot of hours doing Python stuff and also just remembering how stupid I am because man programming makes you so fucking stupid. You get something wrong. Maybe I shouldn't say the royal you I will get something wrong.
Stare it for two hours and then be like, Oh, the thing is inside the loop that I'm trying to run. Of course, it's going to keep doing it over and over. Yeah. I had that issue when, because the last episode I was talking about asking Gemini about Linux from scratch and I was staring at it for hours and hours and Gemini was completely unhelpful.
And I finally realized there was a step that I skipped like eight pages ago. So yeah. Yeah. So I've been learning some Python and it's been a good time.
It's been a good time learning that stuff. I don't really have a task for it. This is my problem with programming. This is probably always run into is I'll learn how to do it and I'll be like, cool, I know how to do that now.
But if you it's it's like spelling or writing or something, if you don't do it regularly, you forget it pretty fast. But I don't have any tasks to perform. Yep. So I don't have anything to do with it.
That was that was where I was at. I had learned to program the very first time on my Commodore 64, which when you first turn on an old Commodore PC from back then, you don't get like a user prompt. Right. You get a compiler here thrown straight into Commodore basic.
Yeah. And so I just learned basic doing some stuff and we had a couple of books that were relatively straightforward that would show you how to do basic things in basic. And so I had learned some some programming in basic and as soon as I had learned how to do the things in the tutorial, I was like, I said, how do I do? Right.
You're like, how do I, you know, like what do I do there? And so when there is, yeah, you can take the tutorial and change the color of something or something around and you're like, all right now now. What do I, so yeah, that's part of the reason I'm doing pie games because I know games and I can come up with like, I don't know, it'd be cool to do, you know, that's Du Pong. I'm like a pong.
I mean, I'm not, but you know, I can come up with a task myself in terms of a very simple game. Well, I could make an electronic pong. I could, I could call it a little pong. No, today's great triumph was I made a little wizard sprite and I made him collide with that I made him collide with a square and he's where new it cool.
Yeah, I invented collision. Now it doesn't stop. He just runs right over it. It doesn't physically stop him, but they know they're touching.
Yes. Anyway, what are you playing? I also played the spire. Yes.
And my very first run of the new slave aspire. I found a bird friend. I did see that. I've not found the bird friend.
I immediately shared that. I was upset. Yeah. I was one of the question mark tiles.
I found a egg somewhere and if I ate it, I would immediately get some bonus and if I didn't eat it, something could happen. And I didn't eat it when I got to the next campsite. It gave me a third option of hatch egg and I hatched the egg and then I had a bird friend. I got the egg and then I think I died or so.
I didn't get to see the I didn't get to see my baby born. Yeah, as soon as all it does is one, it stands and actually, which is really worth it. That's all I needed. But also it gives you a card, which is a free attack zero energy cost that does like 14 damage to one enemy and it's just the bird runs over an attacks.
I see the chocobos on basically. Anyway, also the new Scott Pilgrim game. Scott Pilgrim EX. Yes, we were sent review copies of this and I felt very bad about it because they very kindly sent us review copies and I booted up twice and was too busy to play much.
I did play a little bit and it seemed first of all fun, but also way more involved in like more everything than like the original Scott Pilgrim game, which is. I didn't get far enough to get to any of the involved stuff. I played far enough to see that it's got a lot of the same kind of stuff that the person did. But it seems to throw it at you faster than the first one did.
Also, you get to play as the X's instead of as the hero characters from the first game. Yes, I thought that was fun. Yeah, so immediately was just playing as Roxy for a while. It seems fine.
I've never been a huge brawler person, so I don't know how far I'm going to stick with it, but it's fine. I did have her spend a lot of time playing many shoot adventures because it came out in consoles now. Yeah, you were like, I just played through many shoot adventures seven times. I might do it again.
Yeah, I've played through like three or four times in a row. It's so good. It's such a good game. First of all, for people who didn't play or didn't hear me rant about it last time, it's basically a 2D Zelda game, but the combat is bullet hell shooter.
Yeah. And the things that I love about it is that it respects your time because if you're not a big bullet hell shooter fan, it's got accessibility options. So you can set the speed down to half normal speed, or you can turn on invincibility or you can turn on infinite energy or different things to make the shooting easier for you. And if you're a big fan of bullet hell shooters but aren't very good at exploration Zelda style games, you can get items in the game that will show you where every dungeon and cave in the game is so you don't have to go hunting for them.
And it'll show you if you've collected all the items in each one of those caves. So it makes the game very, very accessible user friendly for people who don't have a shitload of time to devote to it. But also it's just super adorable and cute and charming. But most importantly, it's yeah, it is very cute.
That is the most important portion of it. It's just so cute. It's a adorable little game. I need to get back to it.
I started on Steam. I was enjoying it. I don't remember what happened. I was probably like, let's do 10 RPGs in a row.
That's what you do. Unfortunately, yeah, it kind of is. Yeah, but it's so good. I played because I picked it up on Xbox because I was on consoles and then I played through it and then I realized the only achievement I had.
And I didn't get in my one playthrough was to play the game on hard. So I guess I'm going to restart it on hard. And then I played through it on hard and then I went back to look at my Steam play and I had not finished on hard on that. I was like, well, I guess I have to replay it on Steam now.
You have to. I have to. The only complaints I have with it are one. There is no in-game map for the dungeons, which is annoying, but they're also not big enough to really be that big of an issue.
And to the post game trial challenge, go at arena thing is pretty tough. It's it's it's it's it's tougher than I would like, but you just turn on accessibility and that's fine. Yeah. So that's that's only real issues that I have the game.
Other than that, 10 out of 10, just fantastic. Worth worth getting. Let's do some news. Okay.
Microsoft officially confirmed Project Helix, their upcoming console that will also play PC games from other storefronts. So in other words, you're making a computer. Now, they did say that it will play the games from Steam and EGS. They specifically mentioned Steam and EGS and they will play them in both PC mode and in console mode.
I don't know what that means yet. I'm guessing it just has a big picture mode like Steam does. Yeah, I don't know. It makes me sad that we're at a stage where this isn't exciting news.
Yeah. Because 10 years ago, this would have been very exciting news. Well, that's because Valve beat him with a punch. Yeah, basically.
It's just too little too late. Now, if if they also were telling me that, hey, this will be back. I'm not sure that we're compatible with the same exact same Xbox disk based games that the current Xbox is. That is what they apply.
Have they implied that? They haven't said it, but they haven't said it. They haven't said it out right. They have said that it should have backwards compatible backwards compatibility with the same things that the current Xbox is back.
With they didn't explicitly say with physical media though. And that's where I'm worried. Yeah. If I can still put an original Xbox disk in it that is back.
It'll play and it'll play. And it's a PC that only does game stuff. Okay. I'm kind of on board with that.
That's a good idea. Yeah. My concern is most of my original Xbox games are already not backwards compatible with the current Xbox. Yeah.
So I would love to see the backwards compatibility program restarted and expanded, but I don't expect that. Yeah. Also, this is an Xbox campaign is dead presumably because everything in the universe became an Xbox, so there's no longer a need for it. We are all Xboxes.
My engages in Xbox. I can sign up to it. Yes. My play station is an Xbox.
Yeah. Well, that one is not Xbox. We can play Xbox games on it. This is true.
This is true. Former Sega Stafford Junichi Naori confirmed that the long-fabled Sega Saturn graphics accelerator was an actual in development attachment that could have allowed for Virtual Fighter 3 on the Saturn. That would have been amazing. I was pretty cool.
I was so excited about the idea of this back when I was first announced. I was like, oh, you could upgrade a console to play better games on the same console, granted they'd already done the 32x. But this felt different because you would use the same CD drive. And I was like, oh, this is amazing.
Then it never happened. Yeah. Well, it was real sad. They were making it for you.
And they took it from me. They took it from me. Nintendo has sued the United States government over tariffs collected on the Nintendo Switch to another hardware, demanding repayment interest in lawyers fees. I know this is a very serious issue, but the first thought in my head is it's like a final boss of litigation.
And I was like, we've sued everyone else. Now they only want to left the United States government. I know we try to avoid politics on the show for lots of good reasons, but everything is political. Some people, their lives are political, so they can't avoid it.
You can't avoid it all the time. But this man, on the one hand, you know, there's all these things that I want to say about this. On the one hand, I get that Nintendo did get kind of screwed by it. On the other hand, any money they'd win in the lawsuit is tax payer money.
It's a shitty situation. And I'm also reaching a point where I'm talking about it because I'm getting some discounting on it. It sucks into stupid and it sucks that this is... Yeah, it sucks that it had to happen.
Everything about it sucks. Also, the Pokemon company along with several other game companies separately pushed back against the copyright infringing tweets from the federal American government. Also shouldn't have happened. So I don't like any of that.
I'm this one. I'm glad to see. I'll leave it at that. They have not yet pushed forward any litigation about it.
They are simply talking out against it, which is step one, I guess. Yeah, that is the first step is to complain and then sue. Yeah, that is the American way. Valve briefly mentioned that they hope to release the new Steam hardware in 2026, though this was later walked back as a misstatement.
They misspoke about having hope. Man, we're really in 2026, aren't we? So they said that they didn't mean to imply that there was a chance that wouldn't be distributed in 2026. We're trying to not speak in definitive about a thing that hasn't happened yet.
They also put out a request for anyone who has a lead on where to get a bunch of ram and bulk. Oh, this is sad. Yeah, that one is implied to have been a joke, but also I don't think it's really a joke. What's frustrating is for a device like this, the window is so much more limited than a higher-end machine.
Because the Steam machine, I don't think it's a bad machine, but it's kind of mid-tier. It's kind of what it has to be. Yeah, it was all low-end of mid-tier. It's pushed back to the low-end of mid-tier and then it's a year later, a year and a half later.
Now your value proposition has gone through the floor and your cost to keep the project alive has skyrocketed. That doesn't bode well. No. I'm a little worried about the hardware.
NetEase has canceled funding for Gang of Dragon after Nogoshi Studio requested an additional 44 million in funding to finish the game. Nogoshi Studio is now reportedly facing closure. I'm very upset about this because Gang of Dragon looked awesome. Yeah, they look really good.
I was so excited for it. Yeah. This is a bummer. There's been a lot of talk about why did this many years in development, they need suddenly 44 more million dollars just to keep the doors open.
And there's some sort of- He spent all the previous money on sneakers. There's some concern that maybe it points to poor management or something going on. But at the end of the day, cool looking game isn't happening now and that's a thing. That's a bummer.
That's two for two of announcements this week from the Keeley Awards of things that were really hyped up at the Keeley Awards and then ended up falling flat on their face. What was the other thing? The one last thing announced when at the end of the show was a hero shooter called Highguard. Oh yeah, that like died.
It's already been canceled within a few weeks of its release and the studio is getting dissolved. Man, yeah. Tough time. Right.
8-bit mods, VMU Pro for Dreamcast can now play Game Boy games, multi-player by emulating a link cable using the VMU Connect feature. So adorable. It's so dumb and I love it. I love that it exists.
Yeah. It's fantastic. Yeah. EA has announced layoffs across the battlefield studios.
An answer question for me. Did Battlefield 6 do well? I don't know enough about Battlefield to answer this question, but I believe I heard it did alright. Yeah.
I believe that the game and the converment did extremely well. Oh, I see. Some would say revive to the franchise and interest in it. You should fire all the staff then.
That does seem like a smart thing to do, right? Well, you did replace it with Lightcode. Oh, God, please don't. They already struggle enough to push updates for that game.
My God. Maybe we could find a new AI that's trained on real life warfare and make it code battle for us. I want you to stop talking about potential things that are going to happen in the future immediately. Immediately to press myself.
As I started that sentence, I thought it was going to be a joke and the more I said that. You got sadder as it went on. on. SAG after has issued a do not work order on Mega Man, dual override after Capcom refused to pay union wages to prior Mega Man voice actors.
Fucking come on. Did anything co-habit? Is it just VMU's playing Game Boy games? Yeah, everything else is just shitty this week.
Oh. Yeah, I saw this one. It sucks. It sucks that voice actor who now doesn't get to do the role.
It sucks the project. It sucks that Capcom wouldn't pay the union wages. It just sucks. Yeah.
Yeah. Falcom announced a new Dragon Slayer game. That's a good one. That's a good anniversary event.
Yeah, also the final trails game will be announced in two. 2031, if we're still here. It's just a far way. Honestly.
With a planned release in 2032, I stand by my if we're still here statement. Yeah, I mean, it's five years. What could happen between now and then? But it's not as far away as it sounds when you say 2031.
Yeah. So what is this new Dragon Slayer? Because I didn't, I saw that they announced it, but I didn't see what it was. That's pretty much all they've said.
Oh, especially New Dragon Slayer. That could be fucking anything because the series went all over the place. Yeah. Because it had games that were nearly text adventures, it had 2D dungeon crawlers, it had action platformers, it had action RPGs and have RPGs.
So it could be falling block puzzle game. Yeah. Yeah, a driving dating sim. There you go.
Perfect. The developer of Chain Decos has finally ended their contract with first press games after they still haven't shipped switched one copies of the game after four years. Yeah. They will offer refunds and other options to kick starter backers.
So good on them for trying to make it right. That sucks that that happened to them. I still occasionally read posts on forums for for physical switch collectors and for collectors of those limited press game companies. Yeah.
And the recurring joke has been that whenever anybody asks when any game is going to release, the joke is, I don't know, some time before Chain Decos. Great. Yeah. Peggy is overhauling their rating system to address loot boxes as well.
They should as well. Absolutely should. Absolutely. It's silly that old Dragon Quest games would be rated Peggy 18 for an end game casino, but a game with an actual loot box casino.
It's totally fine. Right. And sold to children. Yes.
Video gamer was removed from Google results after pivoting to AI generated articles. What I don't get is why Google removed them and not the other tens of thousands of AI. Yeah. Yeah.
Other site. Well, like, like, I know that you know how to identify it because you make an AI. Not a good one. No, no, not a good one.
No. But you make one. So good that that happened, but also it's like, I want to know what the criteria is. B video gamer.
I don't get it. Like, like, just let us know how it got to this point so that we can then help find other culprits and report them to you. And finally, Lutris developer is hiding AI co-authorship from the software after backlash. I read this one and I'm a little torn on it.
Yeah. And I'm not a heartfelt post that was like, look, I've been a programmer for 30 years. I know what I'm doing. I did use AI to help me get through some backlogged features that I was behind on because I'd been sick in the last year.
But then on the end, he was kind of snarky about it too. He was kind of snarky. And so this is where I'm torn around. Like, look, I get that.
You are a programmer. You have enough experience at a big enough project that you could, you know, I don't this AI generator. Yeah, you could review it and know you're not just vibe coding this shit, right? Because I know, you know, a lot of work is tedium, you know, and have offsetting tedium on to an AI and then double checking it like, that's what it's what I don't I don't know that there's anything necessarily philosophically wrong with that.
Right. But then they ended it with, all right, I'm going to remove the the Claude co-authorship and then they put so good luck figuring out what's generated and what is not. Yeah, that feels like not the correct reaction. Oh, shitty at the end there.
But you know, yeah, I think we're going to see more of this and we're just going to need to figure out where we land on it. And you know, yeah, their use case didn't seem particularly offensive to me. Now, if I could decide that, hey, no one's going to use LLMs again, I'd probably decide that. But also they're kind of not going anywhere.
Yeah. I however refuse to accept the the argument they keep giving where people ask them about all the stolen data they used when they made their algorithms and their responses. Look, toothpaste out of the tube. It's already happened.
We already stole it. You can't un-steal it now. Like I don't. You can't un-steal it now, but you know, we're going to keep sending people letters for pirating movies and steal those movies.
We should hold that reaction for everybody. Be like, well, I guess you already stole it. It's yours now. It's mine.
I legally own it now. I took it. He already took that car. It's not like we can.
I took it and I made a computer that's going to pretend to be it and I'm going to sell it back to you for money. Yeah. Laundering art. Um, what brings us to our top game?
Laundering art. Which is retro game challenge. It is kind of laundering art the game. In a weird way.
I got to say, after the depressing news and after just kind of a rough month. Yeah. Going back to the election. The joy that is this.
I was about a man who was a breath of fresh air. Yeah. We have two synopsis. Synops I.
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Synops A. Synops A. Synops A. to be careful about putting dates into the notes in ISO format, because you'll just read them exactly as they put it in.
If it's on the teleprompter, I'm going to fucking read it. I've been over this. It's been Ron Burgany rules for a decade. Get on board, say.
I'm Ron Burgany. I put all my notes in ISO format at work, because our system will auto convert it to whatever format somebody wants to read it as, if you type it in that way. So I've just used to typing that. And I realized I shouldn't have when I'm doing notes for the show.
Yeah. First encounters. I rented this for my GameStop for people on the way. It used to be the case.
It might still be, I don't know. When you worked at GameStop, you could take home a brand new video game, open the game, take the game home, and then play it, and then come back, and put it back in the case and sell it like a new game. So I rented this for my GameStop when it was new and really enjoyed it. And then for one of the reasons I've returned it, I just didn't go back to it for a long time.
I never bought it. I think I just got distracted, I guess. I don't know. But I did rent it and played it a little bit and very much enjoyed it at the time.
Yeah. I had also kind of rented this in a way. I had just got my first DS flash cart. And just experienced this game somehow.
It just like appeared on there. And I said retro game and you're like, OK, it's just like, I knew what I was doing. I just thought I didn't pirate it. It was pirated and I played it.
You can't put it back in the tube, Justin. Right. So I played it on my flash cart and enjoyed it so much that I immediately hunted down a copy to purchase and bought the game and just really enjoyed it. And then didn't play it again until this episode and I went back and replayed it.
Man, it's just still so good. So good. Fantastic. I just finished it like this morning before I went to bed before recording the show.
So I just barely squeezed in the last game. I don't own it. And I remember a couple years ago, I was going to buy it and it was like 50 bucks. I was like $50 for a DS game.
And I looked at it today and it was like 62 or something like that. And I was like, yeah, because I played it on my DS Pico, which also to note is running great. Man, that thing's awesome. And this is a weird tangent.
But one of my favorite features of it is that whatever game you last loaded up, whenever you after you pick the DS Pico in the menu, as soon as it shows the DS Pico logo, if you hold the A button, it just boots you right back into that same game. So it saves you the time of having to go through the emulator menu shit. But I was like, I do kind of want to own this just for collectability's sake. And I was looking at the price of DS games.
What the fuck happened? They got silly. Oh my God. Chrono Trigger on DS, which was like fodder.
It was like 10 bucks. Nobody wanted it. It's like $150. Yeah.
And it was still sold new through the Square in a store until maybe 10 years ago. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I mean, it was a $20 new half that used game for the longest time. Yeah.
I was like, holy shit, man. Like what happened? DS games used to be like cheap. Nobody gave a shit.
Yeah. I mean, there was the weird ones like the Dragon Quest. I know that the entry in games got collectable pretty quick, but weren't really at the time. The game's got stupid on there.
They did. Yeah. Also as a port of Resident 1 on DS, it's crazy expensive now for some reason. I can't press the rating to me.
Let's talk development. It is based on Game Center CX, which we did an episode on 10 million years ago. A billion years ago, yeah. And you wrote loosely, definitely loosely based on the show.
Right. Yeah. It's not the exact same premise as the show. It doesn't play out like the show does.
But it is. Yeah. The show is about old games and arena playing them. And that's as much time as it really needs, really.
Although in this game, arena plays no games. True. He just comments on you playing games. There are some pretty blatant show references.
And then some smaller Easter eggs here and there are like little R&O announces Game on when you start a new game, which is kind of catchphrase. There are illusions to struggling with like holding controllers weird. There's a big, in one level of a rally king, there's a big CX spill out in oil slicks. Also on the lap gate that you drive through in a rally king, it says CX on it.
Yes, it does. And there's also one of the hidden characters in, I guess it's pronounced, I've never pronounced that loud, Gwadia Quest. Gwadia Quest. Yeah.
Because I called it Gwadia Quest for so long. There's no R. Yeah, I was calling it Gwadia, but Gwadia might also be correct. Yeah.
One of the Gwadias is that little robo R&O, which we'll talk about in a minute. So there's some of the fun references to the show here and there, but yeah, it doesn't really ever acknowledge that the show exists. Right. So take us into presentation here.
Well, yeah, this is one of the few episodes where we really want to talk about presentation, because that's really almost as important to the game as the gameplay itself here. Yeah. We both love a good framing device to begin with. Oh, yeah.
But yeah, it's basically you control a young Japanese child, either a boy or a girl you get to choose, who is tasked by Demon R&O to go back in times and go back in time and play games with young R&O. Yeah. Back to the 80s. And Demon R&O is rendered in such a way that he kind of looks like, what's the doctor's name at Brain Age?
Brain Age guy. Yeah. Doctor Kawashima, I think his name was? Yeah.
It kind of looks like that. And he just is supposed to be menacing, but it still looks like R&O. So he's not really menacing. Well, really, even then the tone of Demon R&O changes throughout the game, where like there are moments when he's just kind of encouraging and nice.
You know, the time for he's kind of self-effacing. Yeah. And so it's really interesting that he's never like the meanest he gets is like, ha ha ha, you have to play games. Right.
Yeah. Okay. It's goofy and fun. Yeah.
Yes. It's never like actually sinister. No, not at all. And then outside of the games you sit in R&O's home and you hang out, play video games and read magazines, and it's great.
I love everything. So the bottom screen is always R&O in presumably his bedroom. Yeah. And it's such a cute framing device.
It might be a family room, because I mean, it's not like they had TV in their bedroom at the time. True. But it's honestly evokes the feeling of being a kid and sitting around in Nintendo, popping random games in, like despite having a very Japan-forward aesthetic, like there's a Tommy Mass, and it's a Famicom. Like they're obviously in Japan.
But just that vibe of a couple kids sitting around playing Nintendo. It is a little jarring because it's got that very Japanese vibe to it, but it also has in the localization, he sounds like an American boy in his mid to late teens. I love this. I find this so funny.
It makes me think of old anime dubs where they slap like California Surfer Dude on some random character. Yeah. And some of the things he says, make no sense, especially when you're playing Guadi Quest since the game lasts so long. Like constantly comment.
If you stand still for even a second, he'll be like, are you done? Yeah, I'm talking to Knapp. You bored? Or he'll yawn at you?
One of the things he said, I didn't place exactly what I was, but it sounded like he's saying, are you single? He does. I was going to bring that one up. He asks if you're single all the time.
I'm like, yeah, dude, stop asking. Stop judging me. Yeah. Like, I love the commentary.
It does add to the game, but in Guadi Quest specifically, it does get a little weird, because like, I save the game all the time. Every time you save the game, you go to Homework to do, which first of all, in the Framing device doesn't make sense, because you aren't actually a little boy who has homework. But they don't really ever address the fact that in the course of the game, you live in Arno's bedroom for three years playing Famicom games, and nobody ages. And his mom doesn't seem to notice.
So loose Framing devices. Right. Loose. I do want to talk about his mom.
His mom will occasionally shout at you to stop playing so many games, or other TV mom-like nonsense. Well, first she's encouraging of you playing the game. Yeah. In the beginning.
Yeah. And then eventually she's like, stop playing so many games, and then you find out that she's sneaking in there to play games whenever you're not in there. Yep. You do get a lot of like, parents just don't understand kind of exchanges.
Yeah. I think he even says that outright at one point. Yeah. Yes.
Yes. But it's like all these exchanges and stuff add to the flavor of it. There's also a lot of you talking to little Arno, where he'll just in between games and you talking to Demon Arno and between challenges. So ask you questions.