PixlBit

These are all really pretty. I think Celes is my favorite.

It's good to hear you back! It perhaps goes without saying, but my body is ready

I started playing Peace Walker and I was really into the story and the simplified MGS3-esk gameplay for the regular missions, but the boss fights made me quit the game. The first one is an APC that you fight in an area that has pretty decent cover via a warehouse you can run into. That battle wasn't great but it was totally manageable. The second boss fight where you fight a tank was infuriating and I quit the game.

I really thought I was going to love Peace Walker, because I hear Greg Miller say it's his favorite MGS game of them all, but I had no idea it was this different compared to the others. I ended up just going onto the wiki and reading about what happens in the rest of Peace Walker's story. The saddest thing about it is that there's good stuff in there that I wish I could see for myself!

I was eventually able to come back to Arkham City, finish it, and really enjoy it. I don't think that'll happen with Peace Walker.

I'll keep this brief... just kidding.

This was really well put together! I can't imagine a better anniversary than the duo of episode 75 and the best of NWP show that went up before this. I think new listeners will get a lot from these two most recent shows.

Hearing Rob again had me smiling the entire time. It's good to know he's doing well & I wish him the best of luck in everything he's doing. The fact that he was getting a blow job while recording one of the old episodes has painted all his old shows in a new light. It's now an NWP lore mystery that we will probably never solve. I feel like we have to pull the old episodes out and shine a black light on them.

I'm excited that Patrick has headed off to vacation in Europe because anytime he goes overseas he comes back with pretty interesting stories about it. Julian bringing up the Natural history museum in Denver reminded me of all the times I went there as a kid. I love that place.

It's great Angelo has all the Metal Gears and brought up a good discussion on them.  You should play them all, Angelo. That's what I've been doing this summer. I played MGS1 as a kid and quit, then finished the remake on Gamecube years later. As an adult I wanted to finally get around to finishing the series so I bought the HD collection this summer and loved every bit of it.

Play all of them, don't skip any unless you have to. The stealth gameplay alone isn't necessarily good enough to pull a person through a given Metal Gear, but when you couple it with the unique subject matter, the wide array of mechanics they give you, and the attention to detail on the weirdest things, it's extremely compelling as an experience. I skipped MGS4 because I don't have a PS3, and Portable Ops because I don't care about it, but I used the Wiki and Youtube to catch up on what happened in those two games.

MGS2 is pretty satisfying as a stealth game and the story is ludicrous, but it shouldn't be missed. Once you've played it you'll realize it was worth it.

MGS3 is my favorite, but it's a significantly different type of stealth, especially if you're playing the HD remaster because it has the option to use the 3rd person camera and switch back and forth between the old camera and the new one on the fly. MGS3 doesn't have cones of vision anymore, the enemies see much farther, and they look up and down. And it all makes sense once you take into context that the new stealth system is based around camouflage and player movement. I spent most of MGS3 flat on my stomach camouflaged with the ground, crawling around like a snake, and finding the right time to make a big move. And it was some of the best stealth gameplay I've ever experienced. Also with the HD remasters it's 60fps, and yes it definitely benefits the feel of the game.

I recently finished Arkham City after having quit last year in frustration. City has plenty of problems, and it's not a good open world game, the reasons for which Julian pointed out and I agree with. But that main story is really worthwhile and the Catwoman stuff is fantastic. On rare occasions I had fun in the open world doing whatever fluff and filler they contrived, but the actual levels where story stuff takes place are pretty great. I also did the Harley Quinn dlc and it was really satisfying as well. Despite its numerous and nagging problems, overall that little world in Arkham City is still quite fun to be in.

Hmm, what's this nerds without pants thing? I might just have to start tuning in. Lol.

This was a great highlight reel. There are a lot of Rob's moments I've started to forget over time, so it's fun to be hearing them again for the first time in a way. I loved that one time Rob explicitly described a fantasy he had about some man he admires, I forget if it was an actor, a writer, or whathaveyou, but Rob enthusiastically articulated a picture of the man taking him from behind all night long lol. I appreciated when Rob would cross the line & lay into it like that. It was a big emphatic icebreaker that always made Julian & Patrick laugh, & seemed like it got them to open up more than they may have otherwise.

When Angelo joined it seemed like it took a while for him to start getting comfortable, & the highlight you put it was definitely one of the episodes you started getting him out of his shell. My favorite Angelo moments are usually in the outtakes, because that's when he seems the loosest & Julian & Patrick are able to get him to laugh & say silly things the most.

Video games, comic books (because of Patrick & Julian), pinball (a big part of the show's culture now because of Angelo), and general nerd culture are probably the original kernels that bring everyone together for the podcast, but I believe it's both the humor & the willingness to spill your guts about embarrassing or deeply personal issues that humanizes you guys & makes it so we can bond with you as listeners.

Everyone on the cast seems pretty introverted. I'm introverted, & there's probably some other listeners out there like that, so that humor & honesty can be cathartic & help people break out of their shells. Back when I first started listening & leaving walls of text in the comments I was very much in a shell & I took myself too seriously. This podcast came into my life at the perfect time, & you guys have been there for me through 3 years that were rough. During that long rut I was in I always knew I could count on NWP either every week or bi-weekly to be a great couple hours to look forward to. I've been able to grow along with the show over the past few years in my own way, & everyone on the cast including Rob have always been supportive & kind. And if everything goes to plan, next fall shortly after your 4th anniversary I'll probably be coding a 2D engine for the first time & starting to build my first game lol. After all this time, talking about how I'm going to do it, now I can finally put ...my code where my mouth is? That's not a phrase. I'll find some place useful to put the code.

I loved the look of that pirate game Rare is making. It has a stylish look to it but the gameplay seems like it's pulling the best parts out of Black Flag. I actually played Black Flag all the way to completion, but it was mostly for the boat stuff and I just had to put up with the things about AC that I don't like. This game looks like it's bringing the parts of Black Flag I like but finally not having it in an AC game.

About the XCOM 2 news, I think I remember the developers talking to the Giant Bomb guys and they said the reason they are making it on PC was because they want to make the systems a little deeper and present more information to the player on screen, like you would in other PC strategy games or RPGs. When they make a game for console they have to assume everyone is on the couch sitting across from a tv, so UI design always dictates that things have to be huge and simple. The XCOM they're making seems like it'll be a little more harcore than the previous game, maybe. They never said that specifically but that's what I got from it.

I bough and played a lot of Ground Zeroes because it was on sale on XBL last month. I really didn't like it at first. I played the main mission 3 times and messed around with the mechanics and the feel of the game and was iffy on it all. But I played one of the side missions where you have to blow up 3 anti-air guns during a daytime mission and for some reason that mission hit the sweet spot for me and got me to understand the gameplay in a new way.

I'm totally going to get Phantom Pain and I'll probably enjoy it, but I can already tell it's not my ideal MGS. I much prefer the feel of MGS 3 in the HD collection. When you hop into Ground Zeroes you can immediatly tell it's not at 60fps like the games in the HD collection are, and it hurts the experience of Ground Zeroes for sure. I also like the CQB in MGS3 better and I loved the ability to crawl, and the ability to press the d-pad and creep your way up to enemies silently. The shooter mechanics certainly feel much better in Ground Zeroes across the board, but the fact that left and right trigger are no longer "equipment" and "weapon" menus bugs me. Even though it's super dum, unintuitive, and goofy as hell I would still rather have the triggers be menu buttons instead of "aim" and "shoot", and be left with the terrible first person aiming in MGS2 and MGS3.

I'm torn, I really like the way the shooting feels, but I don't want to have to use it. In MGS games I try to play stealthy and only take out the people that are the most likely to discover me and set off alarms. I also don't like Hayter not being the voice, I can't get use to it now, especially after playing so much MGS back to back and falling in love with that voice. Sutherland doesn't sound bad, he just doesn't sound like Snake. He'll never be Snake.

I'm gaga for Fallout so that'll be my main game this fall. I can't wait to see more of Horizon, we still don't know what that game really is. I think Colin Moriearty said it's an open world action RPG after he got some time to see it, but I might be remembering wrong. Hopefully it's single player and it's not a big multiplayer H1Z1 Rust type of survial game, or a Monster Hunter type of multiplayer where you really need a team in order to play the game right.

No Mans Sky was incredible. I was super skeptical, rightfully, about that game last year. But now that he showed actual gameplay I'm on board. All puns intended.

Holy crap this sounds really good. Historically Patrick's end has always sounded the worst of anyone in the cast and in this even Patrick's sound is crystal clear. This is a significant leap foward in sound quality overall

Does Nick have a super nice mic or something? His voice was extra clear and smooth.

When I saw Horizon the first thing I though was Assassins Creed, I'm super surprised more people didn't make that comparison first. The first thing you see in the demo is the player sneaking into bushes, so clearly stealth will be a signigicant part of the gameplay design and levels, and it'll be more like the AC style of stealth where you hop into foliage all the time. People seem to only remember the battle with the big robot but since I'm a big stealth person the most significant thing I saw was the sneaking around, and that's the first thing you see in the gameplay. It seems like it could be an interesting mix between Assassin's Creed, the bow action of the newest Tomb Raider, and some Monster Hunter.

I don't play Final Fantasy, but if they remake FF7 and it ends up looking cool, and actually comes out someday I might look into it. At this point that project is clearly just a short trailer and a device to temporarily spark up a lot of good will with fans. Once that thing is an actual game with stuff to show I wonder what it'll be like and how people will react.

It's really nice to see Microsoft pulling punches and making a comeback, best of all it's awesome to see that the people who are in positions of the most power are listening to fans and correcting the course of XB1 so quickly. That console is night and day from where it was suppose to be when it was announced initially. It's insane to see such a large corporation fundamentally change things so quickly and be out there hungry to earn good will and compete. PSN is clearly still king but XBL is doing the same thing PSN originally did and it's slowly getting better and increasing its value over time. I agree with Julian in the previous episode that the tables have clearly turned this gen in an interesting way, and XB1 is getting on track much faster than PS3 did before it became great.

I want to save up money for a PS4 so that I can buy it this fall and grab MGS V and Fallout 4. Those are the only two games I really need this fall. I'm surprised there weren't any MGS or Fallout console bundles announced at E3, I was really hoping for that.

Now that we have the NX reveal to look forward to next year I'm super excited to see what Nintendo does next, and sadly enough, even though WiiU has a few games I'd want to play, I'm at the point where I'd rather wait to see what the next console is all about. Who knows, Zelda might end up being a cross-gen game like Twilight Princess was. I kind of doubt it, but I'd rather wait to see NX still.

I want to get an XB1 eventually, like how Julian eventually got a PS3, because XB1 looks like it's totally worth having. And the backwards compatibility will ensure that the majority of my 360 library won't go to waste if my 360 ever dies. This is the kind of generation where it hasn't been beneficial to side with one company over another. They're all doing some great stuff. And you guys are practically there already, the only console Julian and Angelo are missing is an XB1 so the stance we had at the very beginning of the generation where we were only going to buy one and focus on it is all but out the window already.

I'm still planning to build a pc for when I leave for college so that I can code on it, so the majority of my gaming in the next few years will probably be on PC. I want to buy the PS4, XB1, and maybe the NX if it's cool, but even as awesome as they all are they'll all be collecting dust to an extent.

That Rare compilation of games is actually only $30 so it's a dollar per game.

The new Mirror's Edge they said is an open world game this time, so I'll be interested to see how they handle the level design (world design at that point since it's open world). There were a lot of parts in the first game where you were on the ground level and inside plenty of building, so maybe they're trying to pull all three environments into one design philosophy this time. Now they can have rooftop gameplay, ground level, and interior places altogether. The first game had some of my favorite level design and platforming in any game so I wonder if it'll be similar this time around. That first game definitely wasn't short when you think about the actual game you're playing. They tapped out every mechanic to its full potential by the finish of the game. If you play through the game and consciously think about the areas you're in, how quickly you blaze through them, and the fact that it goes on for 8 hours, you'll realize there's an insane amount of intricate level design and production work in that game. It's ridiculous that Mirror's Edge 1 exists at all and that it had slick mechanical execution, let alone the fact that it has a giant campaign and it was super good and a gorgeous art style. Such a weird awesome piece of game design history. When I started getting interested in game design a couple years ago the thing I wanted to design most were Mirror's Edge 2 levels or work on a new Portal. I'm so ready for new Mirror's Edge.

I'm going to play the new Star Ocean for sure. I haven't finished the previous game because it's so huge (I'm still on disc 1 of 3 and I've done dozens of hours of crap), but I really like the combat and music. The characters are awful and the writing sucks, but you only deal with that stuff once in a long while between huge amounts of exploration and fighting. By all rights I shouldn't play these games, I somehow got pulled into the niche last gen with The Last Hope and I think it's pretty cool. The brief gameplay demo they showed of the combat looked like exactly what I want from a new one.

That caterpillar and its moth form both look kinda beautiful in their own way. The irritation from the hairs sounds awful though, I have pretty sensitive skin and have had really nasty rashes in the past. In the information on the caterpillar it also says that inhaling the hairs can lead to serious respiratory probelms for some folks which is scary. The skin problems would be bad enough but if you enhaled some of the hairs and couldn't breath as well, that sounds like a nightmare! Not that the two would happen simultaneously, I imagine the respiratory issue would be almost immediate, and a rash might happen later if you had contact with it and were sensitive to it.

I loved hearing Julian's first rock concert story. I actually forgot I was the one that introduced him to Nightwish years ago, so that makes me super happy to remember that now. I never heard Delain before but I love Nightwish and Sabaton. Sabaton really had to grow on me for a while, I thought their music was super silly for a long time, but I kept listening to more songs from different albums and eventually fell in love with the overblown epic sound of it all. I always loved power metal and melodic choruses for years but it took a while for me to understand Sabaton's brand of it.

You should definitely listen to the Sabaton songs called "The Lion of the North", "The Carolean's Prayer", "40:1", and "Resist & Bite", those are probably my favorites. The song 40:1 is all about the fight the Polish army put up against Hitler at the border when he invaded. The Polish soldiers were outnumbered 40:1 and held the line for 3 days against the staggeringly more powerful blitzkrieg. It was the closest thing we have to a modern day Thermopylae not unlike the last stand of the 300 spartans and it's one of the many small stories of World War 2 that nobody learns about. In general Sabaton sing a lot of factual history based songs about the lesser known heroes and tragedies of modern warfare and the cost it tolls on the soldiers and civilians. In some ways they're kind of the Hideo Kojima of power metal lol. It seems ridiculous, macho, and simple at the surface level but when you dig in it's full of soul and intent.

Sabaton is a metal band that has led me to literally go online to libraries and study more history as crazy as that sounds. The entire album Carolus Rex is about the real life King Charles the 12th of Sweden who was a teenage boy that ascended the throne and had a giant alliance of surrounding nations inclding Russia rise up to destroy the Swedish empire because they thought the new boy-king would be a pushover and therefore the perfect time to take lands from his empire. It turns out the kid was a math whiz, military genius, he was famous for being abstained from women and alchohol, and he defeated every enemy he had and became the last warrior-king the Swedes ever had. There's a lot of tragedy, hubris, and religious fanaticism that the songs describe, so it isn't all gung-ho nationalist nonsense. By the end of the album you hear about the conspiracy fueled death of the boy-king and the epic fall of the Swedish empire. It's fascinating and tragic, and somehow hearing it through a concept metal album is pretty effective.

If you're thinking about giving Sabaton a listen, THE album to check out is Carolus Rex. Good song writing, great melodies, and interesting subject matter.

This is already a wall of text because of how neat I think Sabaton is, but I still need to talk about Metal Gear so this will only get longer! Last episode I told Julian I was going to buy the Metal Gear HD collection and start playing Solid's 2 and 3 for the first times, and boy have I. The second the game arrived I installed them on the harddrive and marathoned Solid 2 and 3 back to back.

I've stated in the past that stealth games are my favorite genre historically and even contemporarily. I love Deus Ex, Thief, Dishonored, and I've been a Splinter Cell nerd since day one and I own every SC game including the different versions for different platforms. But it's hard to call yourself a stealth connoisseure if you've only played MGS1, so this year I promised myself I would play all the Metal Gears I could get my hands on, especially considering the fact that I'm planning to transfer from my community college computer science program over to Digipen next year to finally study honest to God game design, programming, and mathematics. When I get to design school I plan on trying to evangelize stealth gameplay a great deal and make stealth game projects in 2D and eventually 3D once we get that far that we start programming our own 3D engines from scratch (seems like that happens Sophmore year).

Anyway, after playing Snake Eater and Sons of Liberty I totally get where people are coming from when they praise Kojima finally. I didn't think the level design was particularly great in either game but the robust design of the mechanics and the agency the player has to do clever things goes a long way to create a pretty revelatory experience. I especially fell in love with the feel and look of Snake Eater. I love the camoflauge system, love the CQB, and the diving, rolling, the feel of dropping to your belly and crawling like a snake in order to make Snake sneakier lol. The mechanical feel, the gameplay design, and the third person camera are all fantastic (the HD collection has the Substance and Subsistence versions of the games I think they're called, and Subsistence has the new camera option for MGS3).

I have a huge man-crush on Big Boss now, he's probably the sexiest raddest dude in video games. He's like my video game Jason Statham. The cutscene during Virtuous Mission where Big Boss meets Ocelot for the first time and he's surrounded by Ocelot squad, but proceeds to non-lethally disarm and knock-out ALL of the squad including Ocelot himself using CQB was the moment I fell in love with Snake and it's definitely one of the best cutscenes I've seen in a game, even though from an action sense it's very subdued and brief. In that scene you learn everything you need to about Big Boss at the time. It feels weird to be so on-board with a dude who's eventually the main villian of the first two original Metal Gear 2D games. Once I started playing Peacewalker I started having a slight falling-out with Big Boss once he began recruiting what are essentially child-soliders in Cuba, but part of me still knows that there's a man deep inside Big Boss that's redeemable, similar to Darth Vader. I love him but I'm watching him go down a deep rabbit hole full of tragedy with each prequel that comes out.

I've spent way too much time on the wiki as well brushing up on lore and trying to keep the plot twists straight. Confession hour. Last weekend I spent Saturday and Sunday watching all 9 hours of cutscenes from Guns of the Patriots in HD on youtube so that I could see how Solid Snakes story arc ended (since I don't have a PS3 to play it). I watched 5 hours Saturday, the last 4 hours Sunday. And I kind of loved it all. Is something wrong, what is even happening anymore? It was really well done, this dude cut all the scenes together into a giant movie and included gameplay when it was appropriate to tell the story that way (like the during the Metal Gear Rex battle with Metal Gear Ray for example).

Now that I've played MGS1, MGS2, and have watched the whole story of MGS4 I'm all caught-up on the Solid Snake story arc. MGS3 and Peacewalker are out of the way so I only need Phantom Pain in order to see how Big Boss' prequel ends. I'm in WAY too deep to stop now, I don't even remember what life was like before I dropped into the Metal Gear rabbit hole anymore. I still have the 2D Metal Gears I can play since they're included in the HD collection, so I'll do those soon and see Solid Snake back in action again, but this time at the very beginning of his story.

Metal Gear is pretty good.