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Nerds Without Pants   

Nerds Without Pants Episode 10: Halloween Havoc

Clearly, Julian is Kevin Nash, Rob is Scott Hall, and Patrick is Sting...

Welcome to the Halloween spectacular of Nerds Without Pants! Fear not boys and ghouls, the Pantsless Ones always hand out full sized candy bars. We’ve got tons of podcasting goodness to fill your sacks with as well, so have a listen, won’t you?

We kick things off with what we’ve been playing, including Happy Wars, 007 Legends, and XCOM: Enemy Unknown. We also have a moment of silence and pour one out for Patrick’s dearly departed PS3. Hopefully he doesn’t bury it in an ancient Native American burial ground…we know how that ends.

After that, Rob guides the crew as we discuss our deepest and darkest fears. Look into our souls as we talk about irrational fears of sea monsters (that damn giant eel in Mario 64!), feelings of hopelessness, abandonment, and failing to amount to anything in life. It’s an oddly deep episode, but we keep things light as we weave video games into our personal fears, running the gamut from Super Metroid to Silent Hill 3 to Closure.

We had a lot of fun with this one, and enjoy all of the spooky music, as well as a guest appearance from a clown that enjoys Dancing Mad, if you know what I mean. Let us know your biggest fears and what games invoke them in the comments below, or at our Facebook fan page. Stay safe out there, and if you’re going to TP a house, make sure it’s two ply.

Featured Music:

John Carpenter- Theme from Halloween

Nobuo Uematsu- Cry in Sorrow

Bobby “Boris” Pickett- Monster Mash

Wednesday 13- I Walked With a Zombie

Mike Oldfield- Tubular Bells

Nobuo Uematsu- Dark World

Koh Ohtani- Demise of the Ritual

Mao Mamamoto- Corpse Party Chapter 5 BGM

Nightwish- Scaretale

 


 

Comments

Michael117

10/29/2012 at 05:54 PM

Hearing Nightwish close out the episode was much excellent. Great choice of the musics, Julian. I like how personal things can get on NWP. Other podcasts I listen to don't manage to cover their topics, stay funny, but also get deep the way NWP does. I can relate to Julian's fear of letting his mother down. Both of my parents are very loving and they are relatively accomplished in life. My mom and dad each came from large poor families, and my parents both went to college, got 4.0 GPAs, and went on to secure careers and a middle-class life for themselves. I feel a very inherent competitive urge to not only live up to that standard, but I actually want to be better than them. It's one of the reasons I'm so hard on myself, and why I shoot high when setting career goals in level design. I love my parents, but I crave to be better than them and improve on any of their weaknesses that I find. I want to get more education than they did, and I want to be a legitimate evolution in the history of the family. When my parents die one day I want to be able say that I am a legit successor to their family name, that evolution didn't go backwards, and that I didn't stagnate.

In video games one situation that scares me is when I'm dealing with immortals or ghosts. This may be weird and I don't know if I've heard anybody else bring up the concept before, but I'm quite afraid of the concept of immortality. The longer a creature lives, the less you can relate to it, I believe. In video game lore, when you encounter ancient species that have thrived for millions of years (like the Reapers) they are often removed from any morality or social conditioning that would affect a short lived species and the fight for survival.

At the beginning of XCOM: EU they have the quote by Arthur Clarke saying, "Two possibilities exist, either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Either option is equally terrifying." I fully believe in that when it comes not only to aliens but extending out to deities and gods of myth from any religion. I'm an atheist and have no proof yet or reason to believe aliens or gods exist, but if ancient texts and myths actually have any truth to them,  I believe the universe will be much more terrifying. If we can actually discover all-powerful immortal beings my first instincts won't be to bow to worship them, my first instinct will be to run silent and deep, and prepare for war if it came to it. I would end up dying. I would rebel because the gods in ancient texts from Christianity, Greek myth, Egyptian myth, Myan, etc, aren't very peaceful creatures. Well, they are peaceful as long as you stay in your caste, and worship as told. If you don't, you get fire and brimstone, genocide, planet flooding, disease, war, etc. I have no desire to live forever, and I am skeptical of the people who have the nerve to seek it out and crave it whether it be for nefarious purposes or peaceful "heaven/paradise" purposes. Believing in immortality at best is wishful thinking, and at worst it's plainly greedy and dangerous. If you were an immortal species, you would have no connection to humans or the understanding of our struggles. You would have no understanding as to why life is precious, because your life would never be under threat. Human beings have no empathy or understanding of the struggles of something as little as an ant or house fly. See where I'm going? If you were immortal would you really be "alive"? Discuss.

So that's one of the things that scares me in real life. In video games I get really scared when I come across enemies who don't die. Like the floating ghosts in Silent Hill 4, or Alma Wade in the FEAR games. It's a surreal and terrifying moment for me when I'm playing an action-packed shooter and suddenly I come across a terrifying little ghost girl, and all the ammunition and karate chops in the world can't stop her, but she can melt people with her thoughts. I'm completely desensitized to monsters. All the hell knights and chainsaw zombies in the world don't scare me, but one little ghost girl can give me nightmares. I actually had a nightmare about Alma once, it's the only nightmare I've had about a video game villain, and that's when I figured out that my fear of her is the real deal. What makes my fear of Alma Wade even more layered is the fact that I'm empathetic towards her and I feel sorry for all the horrible things her dad did to her, and what her childhood was like being a forcibly impregnated test-subject. That game is fucked up, nothing good can come from the narrative in those games. It's bad any way you look at it, and there's really no good and evil, it's just chaos and survival. The people she kills deserve to suffer, but Alma doesn't stop, she is just pure chaos and even if you feel sorry for her, you have to fight back at least for your own survival's sake.

Anonymous

10/30/2012 at 08:07 PM

So glad that I am Sting, Julian. Thanks for the props.

Patrick Kijek Contributing Writer

10/30/2012 at 08:07 PM

Wait, I am not anonymous!

Angelo Grant Staff Writer

10/31/2012 at 11:45 AM

Nobody had any experiences with Out of this World? / Another World? Everything about that game was unnerving and tense. That was probably my first experience with a game stirring up those kinds of feelings. There's no real jump scares in it, but the whole world is really out to kill you, and you really felt powerless and alone. It was also the first game that was that cinematic, which really added to my immersion level.

Also, I used to play Doom with the music off. That game gets a lot more terrifying when there's not pseudo-Metallica midi metal screaming "you're a badass" in your ear the entire time. Yeah, it's all jump scares and monster closets, but those weren't even labeled things back then, and it worked for me.

Julian Titus Senior Editor

11/01/2012 at 09:38 AM

I never played Out of This World. The art style bugged me even when it was new. I was a Flashback guy.

I really only remember the rock music in Doom in the first level and between levels. The majority of the game was very foreboding and creepy, and it was responsible for my first gaming related nightmare. But if you want a really scary Doom experience, play Doom 64. The soundtrack is all atmospheric and crying babies.

Rob Ottone Staff Alumnus

10/31/2012 at 03:05 PM

Thanks, Michael, Julian and I tag-teamed the music on this one, Nash/Hall style.

Michael117

10/31/2012 at 04:23 PM

Nash and Hall for the win! I didn't know you both tag teamed up on the music, sorry I left you out of that. Great job all around Rob, not just the music but the hosting and the discussion as well. Another great episode in the bag for NWP.

Julian Titus Senior Editor

10/31/2012 at 05:18 PM

Actually, Rob took point on the music this episode. It was his baby, I just edited it.

But the Final Fantasy funeral music...that was all me, kids.

Patrick Kijek Contributing Writer

11/01/2012 at 12:38 AM

That monster mash was cliché dough ;P

Great ep, guys. It almost felt like I was in it.

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