PixlBit

Fellow childhood Revolution-X sufferer!  So much wheatgrass... so much wheatgrass... and hair.

I was planning on finishing the podcast tonight and making a real post but between not being able to make the time and internet trouble I just couldn't do it (though I only have about 20 minutes left). That said, just in case I make it under the wire:

Stage Select: I can't drink coffee anymore without saying, "Clear as a crisp spring morning!" My favorite game I've never played is Deadly Premonition, a weird Twin Peaks pseudo-free roaming... shooter mess that is one of the most bizarre games to get any sort of popularity imo. I've seen playthroughs of Deadly Premonition multiple times including both Giant Bomb versions one after the other and follow not one but two Twitter accounts that are beyond obsessed with the thing and constantly post indepth content (Welcome to Greenvale and Whitney). I think SWERY is a real auteur, I look forward to everything that guy releases.  They're all just flawed masterpieces.  So says Mr. Booky.

Official Top Three Games! Number three, horse racing: The Sport of Kings! Number two, duck racing: horse racing, parentheses, of the skies. Number one, Kino, the casino game with statistically the highest house edge. That means the worse odds (and you don't even have to rig it like duck racing!).

What? *Video* games? Of the 2010s? Uhhhh, MarioGalaxy2DishonoredFromSoftwareGameswhateverIguess. When's wrestling coming back you're costing me mon---I mean, always great to patronize the Nerds Without Pants Podcast! Thank you.

And what a special guest!

Next (and always) booked match: Julian vs podcast editing troubles.... who will win!?

Let's see... oh, I can talk about StarTropics!  Yeah, I'd say they're generally well liked, up until say the DS era it was common for people to clammor about a sequel (there were a couple games influenced by it but none any good).  The first one feels stiff but, I'll be honest, that's part of the charm of it and makes it feel a bit less like an action game and more of a puzzle/rhythm game (think like Punch Out, but not in the fighting genre, and generally more predictable).  And the tile-based facing system also works well so you don't blunder and mess up a crucial execution.  If you want to see a similar styled game where none of that works, check out the Famicom game Meikyuu Jiin Dababa.  StarTropic's sequel alleviates a lot of stiffness, battle limitations, and even adds more directions but honestly I think not only does it lose its charm but the changes makes it feel much more generic.

I also like Kid Icarus but it's definately shown its age.  It's more fun after you learn a ton about it but unfortunately it's very much styled as an arcadey game where it just throws you into everything right from the beginning.  Kinda neat as a weird proto-shooter that also feels a tad like the older Wonder Boy games.  The GB game is pretty decent (good pedigree) and much kinder so I'd say start from there.

Honestly, outside of some throat clearing it wasn't bad at all.  That must've taken some work!

Hello all, I'm back after a few fun weeks! Turns out "abetting" isn't what you might think it is!

STAGE SELECT: Have I talked about Zelda II yet? A side-scrolling highly melee combat-based platforming open adventure game of which mainly there were a couple good examples of (for the time, The Battle of Olympus and Castlevania II, and a couple decent Japanese-only ones) and certainly none of which set the world on fire and which Nintendo hasn't looked at since. I definitely have mentioned it before.

But I really wanted to talk about Alpha Protocol because (Mike, I think?) in the last episode mentioned not to build a Stealth character. Welp, guess what I did (and non-lethally, or as the game calls it, with zero Orphans Created)? And while it's not something I'd recommend it's actually pretty fun if you spec for it and get vaguely lucky with drops (like any RPG). The stealth actually isn't too bad considering it's even more of an RPG-shooter than Deus Ex is. Of course, really Alpha Protocol's strength is in its deep, branching narrative and story system but as long as you don't mind a weirdly gamey non-simulation shooting aspect (such as keeping track of hotkeyed skills or accepting aiming that's not instant for your character) it's a fun game. Or, I guess the point is, at least it was to me!

VIDEO GAME CAGE MATCH: I mean, the judge said I also couldn't take bets anymore but I mean video games aren't real themoneyisbutnevermindaboutthat so let's have some odds! Hmm... hmm... Fatal Frame 2, throw some money in and your wishes will surely come true. Do you want to throw money? Yes? You became happier by one step. For your reference, today you will have: Big trouble.

Personally? Well, I never played Silent Hill 3 (I'm familiar with its reception) but I did play Project Zero 2: Wii Edition. And, um, well, it's no Pokemon Snap. Give it to Silent Hill 3!

Oh, don't know if anyone got the same Zelda gif that I did, but it reminded me that the original Link's Awakening Japanese commercial (like you might have heard they brought back with the A Link Between Worlds Japanese commercial.  Even the US one was in a 90s/00s throwback style) continued the tradition.  Here's the original.  And, no, the Switch version isn't similar, although one of them does have a sung version of Ballad of the Wind Fish with new lyrics.

About Borderlands, loved the "Dollar Store Invader Zim" drop, it's just so true. And when you mentioned all those problems you had (driving, inventory, weird bullet sponginess and uneven difficulty especially for single player) it was like yet another Borderlands Bingo. It's a shame when a game in a series doesn't improve anything but still is wildly successful (especially from a company as scummy as Gearbox).

STAGE SELECT: There's a billion anime video game edgelords out there so I thought I'd go a different way with it (although somebody should submit Travis Touchdown). So I thought I'd bring up one of my favorite games again, Deus Ex. Now, I like JC Denton as a character, but when he wants to be a shit (especially when the player wants to be a shit), he can edgelord with the best of them imo. I'll give a few examples (mostly thanks to the JC Denton One-Liners video). JC Denton is a nano-augmented anti-terrorism agent in a world where mechanical-augmented agents are not unheard of. When Agent Navarre gives you a complement (and a backhanded one to your brother, Paul) about your battle-readiness, JC responds, "You mechs might have copper-wiring to re-route your fear of pain, but I've got nerves of steel." Later if you kill her a certain way, you may get a line where JC says, "Agent Navarre was out line. I had no choice." Your communications/handler/tech pal says, "They'll have you killed. They won't even blink an eye." JC goes, "Neither did I." There's the classic where if you get the hotel owner killed in a skirmish, even if you did it yourself, right there JC will go, "What a shame..." to his grieving daughter (in all fairness, he does follow it up with an awkward, "He was a good man... What a rotten way to die."). If you kill your boss, you tell your new one (who's more or less the ultimate antagonist's crony), "Well, since that makes you my new boss, take a long look at [my old boss's] dead body. Consider that my resignation, I don't have time to write a letter."
Here's a couple favorites of mine. Not once, but two different times, does JC Denton say he's "not into books" to stop a conversation, once because of a philosophical soliloquy that JC could've easily been guilty of himself. And if you meet the ultimate antagonist's crony at the end again the crony says, "You take another step forward, and here I am again, like your own reflection repeated in a hall of mirrors," JC responds with, "That makes me one ugly son-of-a-bitch."

VIDEO GAME CAGE MATCH: I don't care if you have to stop recording or go out of your way listener to open up a new tab or press your mobile phone buttons boo hoo, watch this video, ""I Am Impact" Mystical Ninja: starring Goemon. Impact! Music sequence": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WCnDhyHzZ8 . And that Impact Super Punch, (B, B, B, A), bunches of punches, can follow up with a satisfying drop-kick if you slam A repeatedly at the end. Also, you can scream lasers. I like Brave Fencer Musashi, it's arguably(?) the better, more even game as a whole, but Goemon has a tendency to just constantly deal out very weird, very awesome things. That may not matter anywhere else but it should matter in the cage.

I've been going a bit long on these recently, but I'm glad to see that at least lately I haven't had to!

STAGE SELECT: I thought I'd take this the other way and talk about achievements. Really, let me stress, I'm not very good at video games (for instance, despite playing my fair share of FPSes if you put me in a multiplayer competitive game or something I'll routinely be at the bottom of the list, over and over again), but I've done the difficult achievement now and then. I chalk it up to stubbornness. And while these aren't my favorite, I thought I'd share a couple that I think might go appreciated.  An appreciation to stubbornness.

The first one I wanted to share is recent. I know you guys played some Bloodstained, and I did too. I did a brand new (not New Game Plus) Nightmare Mode (aka Hard LVL 1 Max) run where I beat all the bosses without taking a hit, gaining a secret useless Medal item for each one. I even developed some strategies where I'm curious if people use similar ones. I don't know because I never looked up guides, I just developed them on my own. I'm particularly proud of my Alfred one because, wow, those time bubbles suck.  In all fairness, I've played *a lot* of Castlevania.

The second one, I definitely used a guide. Do you remember about a year or so before The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild came out, when the producer Eiji Aonuma said that a player could go directly to the final boss of the game from its opening moments if they wanted? I kind of became obsessed with that, and kind of promised myself I'd do it. Then I heard there was going to be a harder Master Mode, and figured, hey, why not? So after I had put who knows how many hours into completing Breath of the Wild, I went back, looked up speedrunning guides, and spent a little less than a week practicing for it (mainly because when you don't beat the bosses during the story there's a brutal boss gauntlet at the end that goes right into the Ganon fight). You think Thunderblight is bad in normal Zelda, hoo boy, try that with no stats and scrounged parts. You literally have just barely more than enough weapons picked up running there to do it. Most bosses require AI manipulation and almost 100% of parries have to be perfect parries. Bosses regain health in Master Mode to more than a fair bit if you don't kill them fast enough, and sometimes there's nothing you can do about it. You don't even have warm clothes so actually one of the hardest parts is at the beginning of the game on the Plateau where you have to manipulate and tumble down the mountain just right so you don't freeze to death fast enough. It's stupid. And I didn't even do it without saves, the world record is under 50 min and I think mine clocked in at over 4 hours. But, yeah, if you wanted to you could go directly to the final boss of the game from its opening moments, even in Master Mode. If you wanted to.

VIDEO GAME CAGE MATCH: When asked, "Do you prefer Ehrgeiz or Power Stone?" on the street, 2 out of every 4 people said Ehrgeiz, 1 out of every 4 said Power Stone, and the final 1 out of every 4 said, "Ehrgeiz? Power Stone? Oh my god, are you having a stroke right now? Don't swallow your tongue!" Having played neither, I'll give the slight edge to Power Stone, and that's just on recommendation. I've always been interested in Ehrgeiz's Quest (or dungeon crawler) mode, but the main game itself always reminded me of Tobal only you're supposed to care about it because there's Final Fantasy VII I guess. Power Stone always seemed a tiny bit more colorful and fun, a bit of a wacky party game. No hard lines drawn here!