Aw, shucks. You flatter me, sir.
Hitting Patrick up on twitter is probably the best way to reach him. I don't think he reads the comments unless I tell him he should.
Crazy Train will always be the song that is played whenever one of us says something so crazy that there are no words. So sayeth the editor!
I have a lot to say about Zelda, both positive and negative. We're definitely doing a spoilercast of the game once Angelo finishes it.
Curious, what is hard about the Souls games? I really want to know. I've played about 15 hours of Demon's Souls, about 25 of Bloodborne, and a few of Dark Souls 3, and I didn't find them hard. I found them to be challenging, but to me all I had to do was not try to run through areas and pay attention like I would in a survival horror game and I didn't have much trouble. Any time I die in those games it's because I wasn't paying attention, not because the enemies are too hard or too powerful. I do think the item descriptions and stats could be explained better.
When I say that Zelda needs to go in the Souls route for combat, I don't mean that the enemies need to be dishing out tons of damage. Actually, that's the ONLY thing Breath of the Wild takes from Souls, and it makes the game artificially difficult, because the combat controls aren't there. Enemies in Souls deal a lot of damage, but you have mobilty and defensive measures, plus you can knock enemies out of their attack patterns if you time your hits properly.
I'm not trying to put anyone down. I'm just wondering if people are confusing challenge with poor difficulty programming.
Even though Super Metroid is my favorite game of all time, I have to go Castlevania, because I think it is a stronger overall series. Castlevania 1 and 3 are some of my favorite NES games (especially 3), Super Castlevania is great, if a bit of a "look what we can do on the SNES" showcase, and the Koji Igarashi directed games are pure bliss. Yeah, it has issues when it goes into 3D, but I am also one of those crazy people that thought Lords of Shadow was solid.
Love me some Metroid, and without it the best games in the Castlevania franchise wouldn't exist, but I think they're all better than most of the Metroid games.
Except Super Metroid. That game is perfect.
The levels where you don't have the FLUUD are some of the worst controlling platforming levels I can remember playing, and were the final nail in the coffin for me.
Yeah, you and I are just never going to come to an agreement there. I loved Super Mario 64. It felt perfect. I liked Super Mario Sunshine, but it's the only mainline Mario game I put down without finishing and have no desire to go back to. Mario didn't feel right, I hated the FLUUD mechanic (which also removes the concept of power ups from the game and makes it less interesting to me), and thought the implementation of Yoshi was one of the most tedious things I had seen at that point. I remember being unimpressed with the levels, too. And I gave it plenty of chances. I played a good chunk of the Japanese import and half of the U.S. release before putting it down for good. Maybe part of the problem was that my tastes began to change between 1996 and 2002. There may also be something to the "feel" of Mario post-64, because I also don't like the way he moves in Galaxy, but I did love that game overall. I'd never say that Sunshine is a bad game. It's a Nintendo mainline Mario game after all, and they are 100% for quality there. It's just my least favorite Mario game.
Maybe you'd like some of the BioWare games? It sounds like you don't like turn based combat, which they don't really have. Not in the Final Fantasy sense, anyway. The characters are the highlight of the games, and you can just talk to the story NPCs if that's not up your alley. All of the BioWare games have bad inventory screens though, so if navigating menus is what's keeping you away then maybe just keep moving. I maintain that Mass Effect is one of the best universes in video games, and it remains my favorite piece of sci-fi.
I think in this example, history also comes into play. None of us are old enough to be able to appreciate Citizen Kane for how important it was to film at the time. I saw it a few years ago and thought it was fine. Since I've seen so many movies that built on what it did, it felt somewhat middling. I feel like we're getting there with video games, too. I'll shake my head when someone much younger doesn't appreciate, say, Symphony of the Night (coughcoughPatrickcoughcough), but so many games have done what that game did in the past 19 years that its impact is reduced.
If you liked this episode, we did a music special way back in 2014 for episode 61.
Also, if you do a search on the site for Digital Mystery Tour, you'll find the failed music podcast that we produced. You'll have to stream it from the site, but you might get a kick out of it.
Working on a track list now. If I was a sane editor, I would have used less music. This ended up being far more work than the music special we did in 2014.
I appreciate you even trying! The goal is to get us onto other platforms like Stitcher and stuff, but iTunes still seems to be the gold standard for podcast rankings (even though Apple doesn't give you the metrics for how many people are listening).
