Episode 191: Castle Crashers - Oh, Word

[00:00:12] Together, a cooperative podcast. Each pod we play through a cooperative experience and relate to you, the listener. If this is the creme de la creme of co-op or something better off playing solo, keep that envelope. I'm your host, Dave, and I have my co-op partner here with me this week. It's Nomad from the Retro Wildlands. How are you doing? Doing pretty damn good, my friend. How the heck are you tonight? We're doing great. I mean, I don't know how you're doing so good because you've been robbed twice in our... For the Superpod network, we've been doing our own little Metacritic

[00:00:42] draft. We're drafting a bunch of games and stuff. There's this cool video that we made and Nomad and me are both participating and man, what happened? You were at the top. Man, I was looking at my game selection. I'll look at every once in a while and I'll just sit back in my chair and I'll be like, I got this. I mean, all these picks make sense. And out of nowhere, I'm starting to get sniped. And then Civilization... What are we at now? Seven? Seven, yeah.

[00:01:08] Oh, I was sorely disappointed with that Metacritic score. Now, granted, I've not played a single one of these games. Can't speak to a damn thing about any of them. But Sid Meier, you bastard, you let me down.

[00:01:21] It's insane because I thought that was a for sure safe 85 minimum. You know what I mean? Because all of the games are like 87s, 88s. So I don't know what happened. But the other thing was that Tommy got his first game, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. And I was like, that's probably like an 80, right?

[00:01:39] And then it's reversed. It's 87 on him and then 81 for Civilization. And I'm like, I don't know what to think. Because Tommy's also got Monster Hunter Wild. So now I'm really scared of Tommy because I didn't expect this. No, I'm still solid in my picks. I don't think I would want to change anything. I'm committed. But I was blown away by Deliverance 2. Like the first one, I think scored like a 76. It was good. It had great intentions.

[00:02:08] I think it was kind of buggy. But I'm just thinking it'll be slightly better. But damn, I was not expecting that. But I will say on the other hand, why I'm in such a good mood. Here's how my brain operates. I'm trying to look at the good here in that we've got a damn good video game out there that hopefully people will enjoy. There is that. But deep in the recesses of my reptile brain, I am pissed.

[00:02:33] But I thought you were gonna say it's gonna make me winning feel that much better that I beat the stiff competition that is Kingdom Come. Oh, we'll get there. I'm still feeling pretty good about this draft, my friend. So don't count me out yet. Let everybody else celebrate. I'm just gonna sit in the shadows. I've got to wait a whole nother month just to get my first game. So I'm gonna be in last place for a long time. I'm just watching you guys have fun.

[00:02:58] That's honestly what I think is gonna happen too is is if nothing else, I'm glad I got points on the board because I worry there's gonna be so many games that are gonna get pushed the next year. So we'll see. We'll see. Well, Nomad, we talked about your show Retro Wildlands, but why don't you plug yourself? Why don't you tell the listeners what because this is the first time you've been on the show. So why don't you tell us listeners what's going on over there?

[00:03:21] Happy to do it. Peddling my wares is one of the things that brings me joy. But thank you all for listening and checking me out. My show is called the Retro Wildlands. And my whole thing is, I go back and play older retro games, most of them I missed out on when I was a kid. So a lot of them I'm playing for the first time.

[00:03:39] I'm sharing my thoughts. I'm sharing my opinions. But the big thing about my show is I really want to bring you into the gaming experience. And I do that with some game music and sound effects from the games themselves. It's kind of like you and I, listener. Yes, you pointing at you through your car speakers. We're sitting down and we're playing a game together and we get to experience it together.

[00:04:01] So if you've never played a game before, it's a great way to figure out what a game is all about. And if you've played that game in the past, you get a healthy dose of nostalgia while you go. Or at least that's the goal for my show. But Retro Wildlands is all on all the major pod catchers, all the platforms out there, or at least I think I got them all out there. Maybe I missed one, but you'll find us. Just search Retro Wildlands or go to our link tree, linktr.ee forward slash retro wildlands. I'm all over the place. I just spread my seed everywhere.

[00:04:31] The most important thing besides the seed spreading is the question, is Castle Crashers retro? Is this retro now? Came out in 2008. It's funny. This is a big topic of debate amongst a couple circles that I'm a part of. In my mind, I have always considered retro anything PlayStation 2, GameCube on back. Whereas Castle Crashers came out Xbox 360, PS3 era.

[00:05:00] I think it was an Xbox Live game for a little bit, wasn't it? Yeah, I think it was exclusive for a little while. So I think officially, well, unofficially, this is Nomad's consideration here. I don't think it's quite retro yet, but it's a game that I would absolutely, after playing this game, talk about on my show. So I might make an exception for this one, going against my own rule set. It does have that arcade-y feel.

[00:05:25] I think what I usually tell people, and this does grind the gears of retro enthusiasts, which I'm almost surrounded by in the Super Pod Network. Like every time I'm around all of you guys, you guys start talking about the Sega Saturn or something, and my eyes just glaze over. I'm like, oh no. I never feel more of a tourist when I'm around all of you guys. But I always tell people that if you can put the CD in and it plays, you don't have to download anything, then that's usually what I consider retro, which just means Xbox 360.

[00:05:55] It's a more complicated way to say Xbox 360 and back. Hey, that's a good way to put it too, man. I mean, we grew up, or at least a lot of us, in an era where software updates didn't exist, DLC was nonexistent because it all came on the cartridge or the CD or what have you. Now we live in a world where unlocking characters doesn't take skill and commitment, it takes your mother's credit card number. So I could draw that parallel pretty easy.

[00:06:22] And don't worry about glazing over either when it comes to the Sega Saturn and stuff like that. I'm learning retro as I go, but it's kind of the same thing. I'll see people get up in those conversations. Oh, well, the graphical capacity of thing. It's like, no, I can't quite get there yet. But I'm getting there. Maybe. Yeah, the 32-bit boys. I barely even know what a bit is, I'm going to be honest with you. I'm just playing these video games. Whatever's on sale, that's what I'm playing.

[00:06:49] Anyway, we are not a sales podcast. We are a gaming podcast. But since you're new to the show, we have a co-op. I almost skipped right over it. I was jumping into the games we were playing. But since you're new to the show, we have the – how do you say this? I wrote it weird. All right. So we like to talk about our best memories with our friends and family. We also like to talk to our first-time guests about a recent co-op memory or a seminal co-op memory that they'd like to share.

[00:07:19] It could be like a whole game or you could talk about something that crazy that happened when you're playing zombies with your friends. Anything like that. Do you have any seminal memories that jump out to you? Oh, I've got two that jumped into my mind right away. When I was younger, I'm an only child. But my cousins would come and visit a ton. Like anytime I'd go over to my grandmother's house, we had like the original Nintendo growing up. And then as we got older, we eventually got a Super Nintendo, then a PlayStation, that whole thing.

[00:07:46] But I had so much fun on our Super Nintendo playing Mario Kart, Super Mario Kart with my cousin Eric. And I want to call that out specifically because I know he's going to find the show and listen to it. So Eric, love your brother. Playing Super Mario Kart with you is awesome. I don't know if you've ever played it before, man. But they have like the battle mode where it's you and somebody else split screen. You got the three little balloons around you and you're just driving around this enclosed course, grabbing power ups.

[00:08:15] And the goal is to hit your friend or in my case, my cousin, three times and watch the balloons explode. And that would be that. But we played that so much. And Eric, you sucked so bad at this game. But I had so many good memories just playing that with my cousin and just playing Mario Kart with him. Another game on the PlayStation we played together. Have you ever heard of a game from Squaresoft called Airguys?

[00:08:44] No. I was like, I've got this. No, never mind. I don't got it. Look this up. I won't go on about it. But it's basically a fighting game that Squaresoft developed. And the way that they sold it is they put Final Fantasy VII characters in there as unlockable characters. So you could play as Cloud, Tifa. I don't know how to spell it. I can hear you're looking it up. I don't know how to spell it, guys. Oh, man, I don't know how to spell it either. I'm trying.

[00:09:12] But that's another game that my cousin and I would play together where we would pick all these no-name characters and just mess around. It was kind of a 3D arena style fighter in a sense. It kind of made me think of, what am I thinking of here? Powerstone. Where you're walking around the arena, you can jump up and down to different levels. There's power ups and stuff.

[00:09:31] But any time I would just want to just lay the beating down on him, I would pick Cloud from Final Fantasy VII and just destroy him with the Buster Sword. It was so fun. Oh, my God. I submitted. I was like, I'm just going to type in fighting game Squaresoft. And then I got a list of them. It's E-H-R-G-E-I-Z. I would have never in a million years. Yeah. Never in a million years would have spelled this correctly.

[00:10:00] Air Guys, I think it's pronounced. I used to own it. I ended up selling it off to make some extra scratch. But again, I had a lot of hours spent in that game just playing matches with my cousin, just beating the crap out of each other. It was really fun. But my one core co-op memory is really unique because it had to do with a game that was not inherently co-op.

[00:10:29] I've told this story before on my own podcast, but my stepdad one day brought home the original Resident Evil on the PlayStation. Oh, man. And the whole thing was like he came home and he had it like tucked underneath his arm and I saw him walking past me. And I'm like, well, what do you got there? And he goes, shows me the jewel case. And it's this dude on the front with this expression on his face like he just stepped on a Lego or something.

[00:10:55] And he's like, this game is called Resident Evil and you are not allowed to play it. This game is called Resident Evil. Yeah. The Thunderstruck. Dude, the exact same thing happened to me except it was Resident Evil 0. No, it was the GameCube remake of the first one. Oh, yeah. I think my dad eventually bought 0 as well. But I was like, I'm a big boy. I could play this.

[00:11:19] And so he put it in his fucking alcohol cabinet and I waited till because it was like locked. And so I waited until he just got drunk and he left it open one day. And instead of going for the alcohol like most kids probably would, I went for the video game that was in there. And it scared the shit out of me. I got to the point where the dude goes, oh, it turns around. And I was like, I can't play this. This is too much. That's awesome. Yeah, I probably would have done the same thing.

[00:11:47] I mean, hey, if your dad's going to hide something where the liquor is, it's got to be that good. Right. But same thing with us, though. But he wouldn't let me play it because he was like, oh, this thing is like super violent and gory. I mean, thinking back to the PlayStation 1, I mean, come on. But no, I mean, he was adamant. So he would always play downstairs where we had this big stereo system set up. And then my bedroom was just off the living room downstairs. So like he would throw me in my room like a prisoner and just be like, stay in here until I'm done. And I'm like, OK, yeah.

[00:12:17] So eventually I'd open the door and watch him through the crack. And then there was a point where I crawled out behind the couch and was watching him. And then when he got to that part where the zombie turns his head around, even though it was the original PlayStation 1 graphics, I saw it. And then like I did like a little boy gasp like, oh, what is this? So then he spins around. He's like, what the hell are you doing out here? He turns around exactly like the zombie does. It felt that way. I mean, it was much quicker, but the look in his eye, like I thought I was going to die that day.

[00:12:48] But eventually, but eventually he slowly allowed me to watch him play it. And then to a point where we traded the controller off because he got to a point where maybe a puzzle got him stuck or he was having a hard time getting passed apart. I would play it, but I'd get stuck and then he'd play it. So Resident Evil wasn't really a co-op game, but that was one of my favorite co-op memories with my stepdad. Like him and I went through this game together and I love the series because of that.

[00:13:16] So, yeah, that's top of my list for co-op memories with non-co-op games. Yeah. I mean, those are a lot of good games. Yeah. I think I've talked about the Super Mario Kart before, too. That's like one of my earliest memories in general, like on the earth, is playing Super Mario Kart with my uncle and just beating dog shit. I just dog shit at that game. I don't know how you're supposed to play that.

[00:13:41] Even as an adult, I just don't when I'm looking at the screen because it's the fake 3D, right? It's like on a plane. Oh, I don't understand. Yeah. That mode seven graphical whatever the hell it's doing with it. It's awful to look at today. Not to say the game's not bad or anything today, but I played the game so much by myself. I started to memorize different patterns of how the drivers would kind of go. Like after a while, you start to notice how some of them move the same ways. Like, oh, this gap.

[00:14:11] The guy in first place is going to jump over it. Oh, there he goes. So I exploited the hell out of that. But I had crap tons of time when I was a kid. So there is that. That reminds me of like I used to play Pac-Man with my mom and she's like amazing at it. And she was teaching me like the ghosts act differently. She was like, if you're the pink ones there, just run right at it. And I'm just like, no, I don't want to run at it. I don't want to die. What are you talking about? Yeah. Something like that. Yeah.

[00:14:40] Hell, that's even another. We'll call it a bonus co-op memory that I have. There was a pizza place near my house that had a Pac-Man like tabletop kind of an arcade machine where you actually have to sit and look down and play it. And speaking of your mom, my mom and I, when we go pick up pizza every other Friday, we'd sit and play Pac-Man together. Now, we weren't like that. And we weren't that intuitive. I did notice one of them.

[00:15:04] I think it was the orange one was I think was one that would always like run away from you no matter what he was doing. I did notice that guy. But yeah, we would just we would just play until we ran out of quarters and just wait on our pizza. So anytime I smell just like good pizza, I think of Pac-Man with mom. Oh, yeah, man. Pizza places need to have their arcades. Like we we need to we need to do something about this where all the arcades vanished. What are we doing? What are we doing out here?

[00:15:33] Yeah, we're making terrible decisions is what we're doing a lot of those. But what's not a terrible decision is talking about all the games we have been playing lately. Nomad. I see some games that I see a game that I really want to hear about right here. This very first one. Ah, so so it's funny. I actually completed a few games already this month. So I'm only really playing one. But this one that caught your attention, I assume Mario and Luigi Brothership. I finished it.

[00:16:03] I finished it a couple weeks ago. I put about 65 hours into this game, about 20 more than I was anticipating. It's it is a solid role playing game. It is a solid entry into the Mario and Luigi stratosphere of games. Right. I liked it a lot. I think if I were to give it a score, I'd give it like a solid seven out of ten.

[00:16:29] Have you played any of the other Mario and Luigi games like on the Game Boy Advance or anything like that? I am an insane fan of Superstar Saga, which is how I ran into Aaron the first time because obvious for obvious reasons. But yeah, I haven't played any of the other ones. Besides, I played a little bit of Inside Story at a friend's house. Fair enough. And I was like, I didn't even know there were more. So I was like, this is amazing. This is great. But I never played it.

[00:16:52] Yeah, I started to play Superstar Saga, if nothing else for Aaron's benefit, because it's like, well, I mean, obviously he likes it. It's got to be good. So I played a little bit of it and I really liked it, but I never went back to it. So I got to get on it. But as soon as they announced Mario and Luigi Brothership for the Switch, it was like a day one purchase for me. Like my local retro gaming store does preorders on new games now. So I'm like, yeah, I'll get it through you. It's awesome. So I liked it a lot, but I had some complaints.

[00:17:21] And I think it's just me being, I don't know, a 40-year-old guy with nothing to do but complain. But like, it's a solid game. The battle system is what you would expect out of a Mario and Luigi game. It's Mario and Luigi doing what they do best, which is knock Goombas together over the head together as brothers. There's moves you can use called, they call them bro moves. They use the term bro a ton in this game, and it makes me smile every time.

[00:17:50] But you've got these moves you can use together. And they also introduced this new system. I don't think there was anything like it in other iterations of the series, but they have these things called battle plugs. And you plug these little plugs into this little makeshift, I don't know, power outlet. Like, the whole game is themed around power and power outlets and stuff. It's kind of weird. But you plug these things in, and they'll give you temporary buffs.

[00:18:20] Like, you can attack one more time per turn, or you can be immune to a certain status effect, or auto mushroom. If you take damage, Mario will automatically use a mushroom to heal himself. Like, it's really cool. You can take these things in and out throughout the battle and customize your experience that way. Or if you're going up against a specific type of enemy and you've got a battle plug that'll give you the edge, you can switch those out and everything. It's really, really cool.

[00:18:49] And it made battle fun. It's got the timed button presses, all that kind of stuff. But my only reservations with the game, though, is I couldn't really care less for the story. Like, it took... I know, it's a Mario game. But, like, it was one of those, like, it actually started off really cool. Like, they're transported to this magical land, and the whole world's been divided into islands, and you've got to gather these islands up. Like, it sounds really cool.

[00:19:16] But, like, 20 hours in, I had no idea why I was doing what I was doing. I'm like, alright, I'm being a nice guy. Is there, like, a bad guy anywhere? But, again, it's a Mario game, so I'm being overly critical. But then, I will say, about 45 hours in, I was starting to get just kind of tired of it. Like, I'm kind of ready for this to end. Yeah. The JRPG fatigue. That's exactly what it was.

[00:19:41] But my problem is, when you've got side quests that need doing, you've got to do the side quests. If Janine over in the one village needs you to go check up on her son on another island, and you get some experience because of it, I'm going to go check on her son and see if he's okay. Oh, my God, dude. I guess we're going to ping pong. We never really do this.

[00:20:04] But I have that exact experience right now with Indiana Jones where this game has so many, like, side quests, like, random things. They're called field work. And then there's mysteries. And if you hold these things, you dangle these carrots in front of me, I'm like, I want to do it. But I know I'm burning out. And I know I've got, like, if I keep continuing on this path of doing all of these little things, then it's going to take me another 15 hours to beat this game.

[00:20:31] Or I could just do the story and be done in, like, two and a half hours. And, oh, man. So I'm done with all of it now. I'm literally at the very end of this game now. But that's the rub right there, my friend. Because as soon as you make the decision to, like, bypass these quests, like, okay, I'm going to streamline to the end and finish this and be done. But then, like, this pit starts to open up in your chest. And it's like, what if there was some story content I could have had or a better piece of equipment or something?

[00:21:01] And it's just, yeah, I can't do it. Can't do it. Yeah, dude. It's like, oh, but at the end, it gave you a book. And that little book gave you one notch extra stamina. So now you can run a little bit longer. And I'm just like, oh, that's the good stuff. But I would really appreciate if this game was over. Yeah, that's how Mario and Luigi was. And I will say some of the side quests weren't – they expanded on some of the characters a little bit, like gave you a little side story or whatever.

[00:21:27] But sometimes the items you would get would be, like, an extra mushroom, which is, like, the equivalent of a potion. And it's like, that's my reward for this 15-minute side quest I just did. So, like, half the time the rewards weren't even worth it. But, again, minor gripes. Overall, the game was very fun. I'm very glad that I played it. But now that I finished it, I probably won't go back to it again. But still, solid. If you like that series, you'll like this game, I think. That's the curse of the JRPG. It's like, how do I go back to you?

[00:21:56] So instead of doing that, I always just listen to video essays about JRPGs I like. And that's, like, basically the same thing. I basically replayed you. So what is this next one? I like two capital letters next to each other. I like that in the title. Yes. So I love the PlayStation Vita. It's, like, the coolest little handheld. I keep it close at all times. Whisper sweet nothings into its little speakers.

[00:22:22] But every once in a while, I'll try to find a game on it that I can just cart around with me to kill time. And I came across this twin stick shooter called Riddled Corpses EX. Those are your capital letters. EX. EX. So this game was developed by a company called Diabolical Mind and published by Cow Cat Games. I've never heard of either. But this game is really fun for a twin stick shooter.

[00:22:52] It's kind of got, like, an outward anime sort of appearance. Like, the title screen has these two voluptuous anime girls looking at you. Oh, I've seen this. Yeah, you probably have. Like, there's a history to this game. Like, I think the EX is, like, a... I don't know if it's a remaster or an expanded version in some capacity. I'm not really sure what the story is. But it came highly recommended from someone I know that's a huge Vita lover.

[00:23:20] And in the game itself, it's got, like, a really heavy 8, 16-bit sort of aesthetic going on. The soundtrack is really good. It's got a retro and a sort of modern soundtrack to it as well. But it's quite simply pick a character, go into a level, destroy stuff, gather gold, upgrade your character, and repeat. And... Oh, yeah. And there's six... Oh, it's...

[00:23:47] This game is almost a little too grindy for my taste. And I love grindy games. But it's really fun. And then when you do level up your characters, it's very, very noticeable. Which is great. It gives you a sense that you're actually progressing. But it's been fun for the most part. But I'm now to a point where now I'm just grinding for the sake of leveling up characters that I don't use. Just to say I completed the game. So...

[00:24:15] And it's a fairly simple platinum trophy on the PlayStation 2. So... But... It's a solid game. If you like twin-stick shooters or you're just looking for a game to just shut your brain off and just shoot something multiple times. This is a good fit. I'm almost positive I have this on my wish list. I am an avid wish list user. I know... I don't think they have... Does the PlayStation have wish lists yet? Yeah. I think that was recently, right? Yep. Yeah.

[00:24:43] Xbox has had it for like six or seven years. And my wish list has like 300 games on it. So every... And it's crazy because every time there's sales, you get notifications. It's like seven of your games are on your wish list or on sale. And there's a whole tab in the store. Like these are the games on your wish list that are on sale. And so I'm constantly looking at them. So I wonder if this game just doesn't go on sale that often. Because this seems like it's probably not that expensive. So... Yeah. I didn't have this one on my wish list.

[00:25:11] But when I did look through a sale that PlayStation was running, I just happened to catch it. It was like maybe two, three months ago. But it was the only time I've ever seen this game on sale. So it's probably very few and far between. Yeah. Because I am always... You see the whole section in my notes where I talk about these games. I have completely fallen off the wagon the last three weeks, unfortunately. After like two months of sobriety, I've gone crazy.

[00:25:40] But before we get to that, I'll wrap up what I was talking about. I almost beat Indiana Jones, as I said before. I'm on the very last area in the middle of a cutscene. And Phillip, for our next step... We have our next game that we're going to be doing next week. And so Phillip got online in a rare moment where we're both online at the same time. And as soon as he sent me a party invite, I was like, oh shit. I gotta do this. And so I just paused in the middle of the cutscene. Hopefully quick resume keeps its word.

[00:26:09] And I can pull back into the middle of that part that I'm in. But I was planning on beating it today after I came home from work. And I was like, I'm gonna get on Final Fantasy XIV and just do a couple levels. Do a couple, I mean, mish quests, whatever. And unfortunately, three hours passed by. And I didn't even have the notes done. So we were 20 minutes late to doing the episode, dear listener. Because I was doing the notes. Because Final Fantasy XIV is crack. Even though I was talking to Nomad,

[00:26:39] the game in the corner, top right corner of the screen above the map, it has the time. Like your real life time. So that... I bet that's a legal thing. You know what I mean? I bet they did that for liability reasons. You know what I mean? It has to be. It's just like, oh, you just keeled over and started seizing for no reason? What's your playtime look like? Yeah, man. Oh, man. But, I mean, yeah. So I'm still grinding away a little bit at Final Fantasy XIV. Nothing really to report there.

[00:27:07] I mean, it's an MMO. And Pico Park 2. This is the game that me and Phillip are gonna be playing next week. Phillip bought it. I am almost done. But I went back to the beginning for Phillip. And then we rushed to, like... We're, like, over halfway done with the game already. I'm not sure if he's gonna pick up where we left off and he's going to just do all of his stuff on his own. Or with his family. Because it sounded like Jana wanted to play. Because his wife was watching over his shoulder. And she can hear...

[00:27:34] I'm so loud that she can hear me screaming in Phillip's headset. So she's like, what is Dave screaming about? And he's like, yeah, this red guy won't stop killing himself and restarting the level. And it is... I am also very annoyed. It's like... It is a very silly game. Are you looking at it right now? I am, yeah. And as soon as I saw images of it, I think I've seen my kids play this or something similar to it.

[00:28:01] Like, I go over to my sister-in-law's house for dinner every Sunday. And every once in a while we'll go in. And the kids that are there have games up on the big screen or whatever. And like, I know I've seen this before. And part of me is kind of like, I want to play this. But I also don't trust anyone in my family to play it seriously. Yeah. And if you don't trust your family, then you have to trust random strangers that you can't communicate with. So it's like, man, so many levels are like 10 seconds long.

[00:28:30] But one guy just can't keep it together every run. And it's like, it's so infuriating sometimes. But I don't know. Yeah, that's the thing. It's like, that's why I don't play games like Helldivers 2, for instance. Like, I play them, but not often. Like, I don't want to be that guy that can't do the thing. Like... Dude, yeah. It's me sometimes. I feel real bad every time it happens. I'm like, oh no. Right. Like, I fall off a ledge or in Helldivers,

[00:28:57] like someone needs to respawn me or refill my equipment or whatever. Like, I feel like I'm the clutch. Or the crutch, rather. And it's just like, I don't want to do this. This gives me sad. Yeah. But Pico Part 2 is incredible. For people who are, like, decent at 2D-style platformy games, this is a very entertaining game. You have to play it in co-op. You have to have at least one other person there. And you can't do the thing where you just have a second controller sitting there. So it is...

[00:29:26] But it is definitely worth it. It is extremely creative. It is basically WarioWare, but really hard. Is how I would explain it. WarioWare with fail states. But there are so many interesting, like, fun, different, like, mini games that you do. Each level has this different, like, shtick that you're trying to figure out. Each level is only, like, a couple seconds long. Like, sometimes you're playing basketball. Sometimes you're walking a tightrope.

[00:29:52] Sometimes you're in a shoot-em-up game, like, flying planes around. It's really good. I mean, that kind of stuff is really awesome, I think. Because I love games like that where, even though the levels are short, if you fail, you're right back in the action right away. Like Celeste or Super Meat Boy or whatever. You know what I mean? Just, like, just go, go, go. Keep going. So, yeah. I can see that getting addicting, too. The best part is that as soon as someone dies, everyone always turns around.

[00:30:21] And the characters have these dead pixel eyes. Like, these soulless eyes. So, like, if you die and everyone turns around and looks where you died, it is, like, so embarrassing. Like, it feels so bad. You can feel everyone go, really? Really, purple? Okay. Yep. I don't want to be that guy. All right. So, that's everything that we've been playing. We're going to move on to the news and updates, starting with what did Nave buy? What did I buy? What haven't I bought?

[00:30:50] So, I'm starting with this. Like, I put screenshots for the listeners that aren't familiar with this section. I try to put screenshots indicative of what the game is like underneath each of these. But I saw that Nomad, you saw this very first one, and we're intrigued. What do you see on Google Images? Oh, my God. So, all I see is, I don't know, we're looking at a blood-red skyscape with some green, maybe some seaweed-style foliage.

[00:31:19] And we see a man in the bottom right-hand side of the screen with a shaved head and a Hitler mustache? What? I hope not. I hope it's just a shadow. I can't tell. What the hell is this game? It's called A Time Traveler's Guide to Past Delicacies. And I know about as much as you do, listener. I don't know what this is. It looks like some form of adventure game.

[00:31:48] There are multiple different art styles that it switches between. So, if you go on Google Images and look this up, there's a sock puppet TV show. There's an alchemy lab and stuff going on. I truly don't know what is happening. It looks like it's really in this, like, indie, weird, quirky kind of space. This is very intriguing. And I think I might pick this up just purely just for the sake of wanting to know what the hell this is.

[00:32:17] But, like, allow me to read a short excerpt I found online here really quick. A short game about a fictional time traveler raiding the past to steal recipes. Follow a sock puppet into the dark bowels of time and learn new recipes. Meet your long-dead ancestors. Exploit them to further your cooking skills. Take some pictures of dinosaurs. Appropriate what you can. Appropriate. $4.99, everybody.

[00:32:45] Go check out A Time Traveler's Guide to Past Delicacies. I am now interested. I don't know why. This next game, Sword of the Vagrant. I'm not sure what this is. It's like a 2D. It kind of reminded me of Marumasa or Marumana. I can't remember. The game on the Vita. That is like a hack-and-slash 2D metroidvania-ish kind of game. Yeah, I could be wrong. I think it's Miramasa Rebirth or something like that? Yeah, yeah. It's definitely got Rebirth as the second word.

[00:33:15] Yeah. This game kind of looks like a Vanilla Ware game, but that's all I really know. I like to buy games and not know what they are because sometimes I get really surprised. That's how it was with mouthwashing. I really had no idea what mouthwashing was. Nice. Same. I have it. I just need to jump into that one. But I do know a little bit about Sword of the Vagrant. It's not Vanilla Ware, but it sure as hell looks like a Vanilla Ware game.

[00:33:41] But it's a side-scrolling hack-and-slash kind of akin to the game we're going to talk about later. But your main character levels up and gets equipment as you go. It's your kind of standard fare. But I guess what makes it unique is there's like cut scenes in between each level. Like they're mostly text-based and stuff like that. But like the art style is really eye-catching. And I don't know about you, man, but I love a good side-scrolling hack-and-slash game with mild RPG elements. So I think you'll like this one.

[00:34:11] I haven't played it myself, but it's on my wish list. My weakness is 2D games. I'm very bad at them. So I always try to go out of my way to like – like last year I really forced myself to beat Hollow Knight. Is Hollow Knight the bug game where you're a bug? Uh, maybe? I'm probably going to get ousted by somebody. But I have not played Hollow Knight. I can just picture it in my head, but that's it. I mean his face kind of looks like a bug. Sort of.

[00:34:41] Yeah, this is it. Okay. I was afraid I was getting it mixed up with Shovel Knight. Which is like the same game, but it looks completely different. But yeah, so I forced myself to play that. That was very hard and stressful for me. And so a lot of people made fun of me because I suffered so hard. But yeah, this game looks pretty cool. And I love Vanilla Wear art style. Like I really enjoyed Unicorn Overlord. So I'm hoping that – or not Unicorn Overlord. What is that other game? What is the Vanilla Wear game that just came out? Oh, geez.

[00:35:10] We're playing the game of what game – what a game is this? For me, it did just come out. But the art style reminded me of Dragon's Crown. But that's an oldie. Oh, Vanilla Wear did make Muromasa and Unicorn Overlord. I'm tripping. Okay. I don't know why – okay. Now that I'm looking at Unicorn Overlord, this is definitely – it's because there's

[00:35:39] two different art styles. There's like the pixel art and then there's the anime art. That's what got me all lost in the sauce. I gotcha. Anyway, enough doubting myself and enough of the Sword of the Vagrant. We're going to talk about Vampire Hunters. We were talking about crack before. This just looked – apparently this is first-person shooter vampire survivors. So, like, Serious Sam with vampire survivors mechanics. That just sounds like it's going to hurt me deeply in my body.

[00:36:07] And it's taken me a lot to not just download this and start playing it immediately. I need to at least beat Indiana Jones because if I start playing this, I'm afraid I'm never going to pick Indy up again. And I'm right at the end. Oh, yeah. This one's been on my radar for a little while, too, for the exact same reason. But I try my best to stay away from these games until, like, my gaming – whatever I'm working on is, like, done so I can commit to it. Because it's like when you go to a fast food restaurant or go get ice cream or whatever. It's like you know it's bad for you.

[00:36:36] You know you're going to eat a crap ton of it. So you try to make the conscious decision to go eat, quote-unquote, healthy. But, oh, man, this game looks awesome. The screenshot I have in the notes here, like, this guy has, like, 11 guns, like, all around the screen. Like, there's some on the top of the screen. Like, oh, God. It looks tough. I mean, honestly, it looks perfect for what it wants to be, which is vampire survivors first person.

[00:37:06] Like, that's the only way it's going to happen. So I am all in. All right, so the next game, Tiny Ken. A lot of people have been recommending this game to me, and I was like, maybe on the sale. And it is on sale. And it was apparently at a price that I thought it was good enough. So I picked up Tiny Ken. This game is like Pikmin, I think. I'm pretty sure. I could see that. I actually have never heard of this one, but I'm looking it up now. And the art style, at the very least, reminds me of Pikmin right off the rip.

[00:37:35] Yeah. Yeah. This game was on Game Pass for a while, like maybe two years ago, like close to when it first came out. And I just never got around to it. But here I am, not getting around to it still because it's in my backlog now. Lost amongst a thousand games. There you go. And the first thing people also ask on Google is, is Toykin a ripoff of Pikmin? Apparently it's pretty damn close, but it doesn't have the combat.

[00:38:03] It has a hell of a lot more puzzles, and there's more verticality, I guess, going up and down. I don't know. I hate to say it, but I haven't played a Pikmin game in my life. So they look cool, I guess. Yeah. I've only played what Philip showed me one time in high school. And then I was like, can we please play Rock Band? I'm tired. Okay. Speaking of Rock Band, weird segue, on accident, Rhythm Sprout, which is this man who is an onion. I don't know what's going on in this game.

[00:38:33] This looks like shovelware. But it's a rhythm game where you're jumping on little platforms to attack and dodge and do other things. It looks kind of like subway surfers a little bit. I don't know how else to describe it. Yeah. It's very colorful. There is that. And yeah, I hate to say it. I'm sure the people that made this game put their heart and soul into it, but that was my first thought too. This looks like shovelware. But I don't know.

[00:39:03] I have started to slowly gain an appreciation for rhythm games. They're still not my favorite genre by any stretch, but I got an appreciation for them. So I don't know. Little knight who is an onion jumping on top of platforms. I'm assuming to the rhythm. Yeah, I hope so. At least I hope. Dude, rhythm games. This is my bread and butter besides first versus shooters.

[00:39:27] I will literally stand in front of the TV shaking with sweat on my hands, like just staring. My eyes are dilated. I get so locked in playing rhythm games. It's crazy. Oh, yeah. So the last game, and then we're moving on. Happy's Humble Burger Farm, which I'm not sure what this is at all.

[00:39:52] I bought this site unseen because I'm still on my like kind of horror game indie kick. It's another one of those PlayStation 1 graphic horror games that I love so much. I don't think it's by the same people that I've been buying these horror games from. I can't remember the studio that made, what is it, Blood Wash? What is this studio? Or maybe it's the publisher. I got it right here.

[00:40:24] Ooh. Did you hear that? My dog's fucking making a weird ass sound. Puppet combo. Puppet combo. These are the games that I've been. This is not a puppet combo game. Yeah. This looks a lot different. Looks like some weird. Oh, God. I don't know what this looks like. It looks awful. Yeah. This looks like it wants to be a PlayStation 1 version of Five Nights at Freddy's. Kind of. It looks like you're working in a restaurant and doing restaurant things.

[00:40:54] And right off the rip, the one tagline I'm pulling offline is, congratulations, you've been hired to work the night shift. I don't know anything about FNAF, but I know that you're a security guard there in some of the games. So, I don't know. But I think that the Five Nights at Freddy's games, you are like, look, you don't move in those games. You like are stuck. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. It looks like you walk around in this game. Maybe. Or maybe these screenshots are misleading. I'm not really sure. Yeah. I mean, but it's probably one of those. Color me curious.

[00:41:23] Like, I'm kind of in the same boat. Like, I love horror games. Like, they're by far my guilty pleasure. And I especially love the more indie style ones because I feel like they take more chances, more creative liberties, that kind of thing. So, I don't think this one would be very high on my list. But if someone handed me this game and said, hey, play it. You're going to like it. I'd probably play it. Oh, yeah. Make no mistake. I probably bought this for like $1.50. Nice. The price was correct for whatever this was.

[00:41:53] This was not on my wish list. I just saw this randomly and I was like, hey, fuck it. Let's round it out to $25. Whatever. All right. Well, that's all the games. We don't have any new pod updates, I don't think. Let me go check and make sure Philip hasn't messaged me something. And no. No, he has not. Okay. So, no new pod updates. That means we're going on the Patreon section. Here at Gaming Together, we work hard to provide excellent call of content for you, the listener. If you have the means, please consider supporting us on Patreon. The link is in the description down below.

[00:42:21] Also, go support Retro Wildlands and go check out Super Pod Network. We're all working really hard to give you all this glorious video game related content. This is the list of our current subscribers, supporters, patrons. I don't remember. Jose Martinez. Fuck. Berserker this. Mr. Kong, Insane Cracker 04 and Nikolai at Night. Thank you so much for your support. If you can't support us monetarily, go give us five stars on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts. Go like our YouTube videos or whatnot.

[00:42:50] Go do that to our friends over at Retro Wildlands as well. We're going to take a break. We're going to start talking about assholes. Everyone's favorite. And the music plays. Do you need to use the bathroom? I'm going to grab another beer. I can still hear you though. Yeah, no, I'm good for the time being. I'm perusing the asshole list and see what kind of sticks out here. Toilet paper sheet. Nice.

[00:43:19] Unless you had one that you know of on top of your head that you want to talk about. I'm not particularly partial. I'm good with doing whatever you want to do first. Also, I'm assuming you're okay with this, but do you want to read it, the one that you find? Yeah, I don't mind. Let's see here. Original poster messages a girl on Xbox and his girlfriend is not happy. You know what? I have had similar situations in my own life. This might be fun.

[00:43:50] Which one is? Oh, 30 right here? I see you. Yeah. I see you click there. Let me gray this out. Oh, wow. Okay, so the account is suspended. Their name is Finger Lickin' Good Pussy. I wonder what they got suspended for. Interesting. Incredible. I didn't know you could have a name like that on Reddit. But then again, there's porn on Reddit, right?

[00:44:20] I'm pretty sure. I don't know why I'm acting like I don't know. There is porn on Reddit. I know that. Nice. It's funny. I was hot and heavy into Reddit for a little while, but I just kept getting sucked into these wastelands of just nonsense, and I had to pry myself away. So this is probably the first time I've been on Reddit in probably a good six months. Yeah, Phillip brought me here. I didn't ever really use Reddit until Phillip started doing the same on the asshole section, and then I just found more and more of these types of subreddits.

[00:44:49] Man, I love drama. I just love it. Anyway, you want to read the title? Yeah, so we're going to read the whole thing. Okay, got it. All right. Get some popcorn, listener. I like that. All right, here we go. So am I the asshole for messaging a girl? Oh, word on Xbox. Poster says, I'm 26 and my girlfriend is 23 and we've been together three years. All right. Hold on pause already.

[00:45:18] I already know where this is going. It's all the context I need. Exactly. But all right. So the other day she was on my Xbox trying to find Netflix and ended up pulling up the chat menu, which another slight pause purposefully or accidentally, I wonder. That's so far away. Like you have to know where the messages are. I don't know how you accidentally get to the messages. Yeah, exactly. But in any case, she was checking out some of my old messages, most of them shitting on noobs. Oh, yeah.

[00:45:48] Exactly. When she came across this chat that I had with a player from a year ago, I play Battlefield and this player had been a stellar medic and squad mates. And as a highly ranked player and squad leader, I like to command and thank people who play the game how it's supposed to be played. This player stayed with me for five or six rounds and didn't snipe or get into an airplane once and revived me on several occasions. So I decided to message him. Hold on.

[00:46:18] That is an amazing. That is an immaculate teammate. Like, by the way, I probably would have messaged this person as well. I'd be like, you're the man. Seriously. Friend request. Here you go. Yeah, that's that's I haven't played a ton of Battlefield myself, but it's easy to identify that this person absolutely needs some praise here. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. So the entire message says, GG's, man. Thanks for sticking with me. The reply was, I'm a girl. LOL. But GG's.

[00:46:47] And then the response was, oh, word. That's all I said, says the poster. And my girlfriend is freaking the fuck out about this. She's saying I was making moves on this girl and I wasn't. I was just showing appreciation for a girl who games so well, I thought she was one of the boys. My girlfriend insists that I was inviting the girl to flirt and would have flirted back if that's not true. But that's not true. Also, this was from a year ago.

[00:47:16] So the question on the table is, am I the asshole? Do you hear my dog? What are you doing? Do you see my dog? Oh, my God. She's the pedigree dog food bag. She's like going into it. And I'm trying to get her out of it. But the more I try to get her out of it, the less she wants to. I don't know. I feel like if I had a gigantic bag of food at my disposal, I would crawl into it too.

[00:47:46] All right. Anyways. So this is, I feel like this one's cutting. Whoa, this is labeled asshole. I know. And that's why I picked this one, because I really want to discuss this. Like, are we missing something? I don't think so. Oh, the very top comment is, I was going to say not the asshole, but then I saw she caught you on Tinder too. Oops. Whoa. I don't know.

[00:48:17] That kind of null and voids like half the arguments I was about to pull out there. But I've been in situations before where I've dated some girls where like if I so much as like breathe in a general direction of a female, it's just not a good thing. But no, I would have done, just like you said, I would have done exactly the same thing if I had someone on my team that was behaving saintly like this and just be like,

[00:48:46] hey, good game. Period. Point blank. There's nothing wrong with that. And then if you find out that they just happen to be a chick and you happen to be attracted to that side of the human race there, great. And his answer was perfect. Oh, word. All right. Cool. But yeah, my tune now changes that he's on Tinder. Jesus Christ, dude. Yeah, I'm trying to find where he said that. So I'm assuming there's a bot. Everyone at... So hold on.

[00:49:16] See, there's this one that says, you're the asshole. You're so much the asshole, it's not even funny. First, you describe your girlfriend as if she's so clueless, trying to find networks and finding the chat menu. You clearly have an attitude about girl... Something, something. Okay, so yada, yada. You're the asshole for having a Tinder account no matter what the reason is. An ex of mine had a Tinder account. Where is this Tinder account? It's got to be long gone, right? I mean, I don't know. Interesting. I mean, yeah.

[00:49:46] Just the basic premise. I think dude's in the clear, but at the same time, you don't have a leg to stand on if people are calling out Tinder profiles and shit like that. Oh, word. It probably meant something completely different. Yeah, he was looking for something. Here's the auto mod. Nope, nothing. It's just telling him not to be mean. So maybe there's another mod. This is the auto mod for keeping the thing. Yeah, see, I have no idea

[00:50:15] where they're getting this Tinder profile from. Maybe he made another post because the account is suspended. So usually before we start reading, we look at the account and see what kind of posts they've been making and stuff. Because usually on throwaways, there might be another post or you'll see all their comments there too. So it's easy to find it. But yeah, so I guess they were on Tinder. We're just going to take everyone's word for it. Interesting. You know what? That makes this less fun to debate. But at the same time, but at the same time too, I'm glad they found whatever the hell they found with this guy.

[00:50:45] So I don't know. I guess you're kind of an asshole, dude. So fuck off. One of the things that people are saying, the one thing that's a bunch of people pointing out that it flew past me, probably because my dog was burrowing into a back of dog food, is that it says, I was just showing appreciation for a girl who gave so well, I thought she was one of the boys. Do you think this is real? Well, because another thing that stands out to me

[00:51:15] is earlier, it was like, she went through my messages, most of them shitting on noobs, which is just, it's just so stupid. That's kind of like, hey guys, I'm one of you all because I shit on the newbie. Like, yeah, that's, the more I read this, I feel like he's just, he's kind of setting her up too. Like I, I have had girls that I've dated that have found their way into things that there's no way that they're just going to accidentally slip into. Totally fine. But then you can make the counter argument,

[00:51:45] are you giving her a reason to go look at your chat history or is she just that type of person? So, I can go either way. Yeah. Oh, I'm flipping through. I can't, okay, since he's suspended and not deleted, you can see his comments. Hold on. So, let me see. Because one of his comments, someone was talking about the, the Tinder thing and he says, I only got like two matches and didn't even message him. I, it was just supposed to be a confidence boost. Ha! All right. We got a,

[00:52:14] we got, we got one here. Nice. We got a fucking bastard over here. Uh, yeah, it's not letting me search this thing because probably because he's suspended. Oh, well, yeah, this guy's probably the asshole. If it was just this, I would, I think even this, I probably would have been like, what, did you do something? It's hard now to go retroactively because now that I know all, everything, but it's like, I probably would have been like, this seems like an overstretch of your boundaries, but usually this is because you've given them a reason

[00:52:44] to not trust you. Right. That's a lot of times. Yeah. I hate to say it. Like it's, it's easy to look at somebody male or female in a relationship and they're finding things that they shouldn't find or whatever. But like, that's maybe it was the way I was raised, but my default thought is if, if my girlfriends or even my wife today, if she feels the need to go search through my chat history or look at my emails or what have you, what is, what reason did I give her to feel that she needs to do that?

[00:53:14] Like, what am I doing wrong? Like you gotta be okay enough with yourself to be able to just go, okay, she's, she's, she thinks something's amiss. Check yourself first. Now, if, now if you're a, I don't know if you're, if your shit's clean as it were, and, and she's going a little off the rails, I'll say maybe there's something else to it, but yeah, gal's not going to go look at your chat messages because she's bored. It's because you done, done something. And then I guess this case you're out there on fumble, Twitter, twin,

[00:53:44] all the things, whatever the hell, I don't, he's out there looking for love on the battlefield, man. Apparently, no kidding. It's like, you can be my medic anytime. Yeah. He had to go on his, his alt account to message her. All right. Well, this person's an asshole due to extenuating evidence, extenuating circumstances. I don't know. Philip knows all of these terms. The one that I want to do is number nine. Wait, how long we on? Okay. No, we're good. You see number nine here?

[00:54:14] I can link it to you if you want. Nope. I got it. It's kind of long. Let's see here. And it looks like a throwaway right off the bat. Oh, yeah. The poster artistic work 92 90. And do they have any comments? Nope. So they posted and ghosted my favorite. That means we have no, we have no, uh, context whatsoever. Interesting. All right. Uh, am I the asshole for calling my girlfriend dramatic? All right.

[00:54:44] Already we're playing with a live grenade, but all right. Yeah. This hot potato. All right. My girlfriend, 21 female. Let's call her Jill. And I, 22 female. Oh, okay. Uh, so 22 female. Know each other. Hold on. My girlfriend and I know each other since elementary school. Okay. We got, we got a good grammar, good grammar person here too. We always had a common hobby gaming. At first we played many video games together, but it turned out that

[00:55:13] she's really bad at video games. So I stopped playing games with her except final fantasy 14, because she is able to do a casual amount of content with one of her easier classes. So in final fantasy 14, we are in an FC, the equivalent of a guild and other MMOs called a free company, uh, together with a few, let me just flex my final fantasy 14 knowledge, uh, together with a few of my end game friends, we want to recruit more members. So we decided to advertise our FC on the final fantasy

[00:55:42] 14 website for that. We wanted to make a picture with all of our members. There is currently a summer event in final fantasy 14, which also allows a tower that is a jump puzzle, which also involves a tower that is a jump puzzle. I suggested to do the picture on top of the tower and everyone thought it was a very good idea for Jill. Uh, she's, uh, she says she hates jump puzzles, but since everyone else wanted to do the picture on the tower, we decided to do it. So we started to climb the tower.

[00:56:11] It's not easy, but it's definitely possible. It took most of us like 30 minutes to get up there. Holy shit. So, okay, well, nevermind. We'll hold it to the end. However, Jill had problems to get to the top. When all of us except her were on the top, she said to do the picture without her because she didn't think that she would make it. But we wanted everyone to be in the picture. So we continued waiting after three hours. A few of us became a bit impatient

[00:56:40] and told her to hurry. I don't think I could have made it three hours. Okay. I don't know either, man. Let's just take it on the beach. Come on. Uh, after 30 more minutes, Jill almost made it, but then jumped past a platform and landed at the bottom of the tower. It's like getting over it. Oh, Oh, one of our FC members, Alex lost it and told her that she's a fucking failure. Ooh, I didn't say anything

[00:57:09] because he's not wrong. Whoa. No, I would never tell her that because I don't want to hurt her feelings and she already thinks so little of herself. Oh, because she isn't good at. Oh, Oh my God. Because she isn't good in anything. Like I said, she isn't good at video gaming and that does apply to all her other hobbies.

[00:57:40] She loves writing, but she's bad at it. She likes horse riding, but she's bad at it and she's bad at her job. Dude, this guy is putting her on blast. No shit. Tell us how you really feel. After Alex said that, she immediately left the Discord voice chat and logged out of the game so we ended up doing the picture without her after we waited almost four hours. That's not a good look. After we finished, I texted her and asked what was wrong. She texted me back

[00:58:09] that Alex and the others really hurt her for being impatient and deciding to do the picture on the top even though they know she's bad at jump puzzles. I told her she's being dramatic and that the others were right because she wasted everyone's time and that she acted like a child. She's ghosting me since then. I kind of feel like an asshole. Kind of feel like an asshole. But my friends say that I'm not and that Jill should get a thicker skin.

[00:58:39] So am I the asshole. Oh man. We got live ones today, dude. Alright. In my opinion, I think the question is how big a diameter asshole this guy is. I'm sorry, gal is. Alright. Let's unpack this here. So, okay. Sounds fun getting everyone together for a picture. Problem number one is you allowed yourself to wait, what was it, three hours at the top? What were you doing during this time

[00:59:08] while your gal was trying to get up there? Were you coaching her, encouraging her, trying to get her, you know, to be part of the team? What was everybody else doing? And then to allow somebody else to call her a failure? Whether you agree with it or not is inconsequential. That gal should have stepped in immediately and was just like, hey, it's a game and it's your fault for waiting three fucking hours to take this photograph. No. I would have

[00:59:39] actually left the situation myself and be like, you take your own fucking photograph. But no, all jokes aside, it's like, okay, she's already struggling doing something you know she doesn't do well at even though the poster is just trying to really hammer that home. It's like, okay, we get it. She's not good at stuff. It's fine. But you're not giving her the chance to succeed. When someone steps in and downplays her, you don't defend her in any capacity. Like, I, someone's going to have to convince me

[01:00:09] that this person is not the asshole with some sort of evidence otherwise because all I think of is like, like, shout out to my wife who's probably never going to listen to this, but like, she's not great at video games either and she knows it. But it's like when we're playing games together, like moving out, if you've ever played that one, removal crap and oh my God, like, I'm not the greatest at that game either, but it's one of those like when we're struggling or she's struggling to get the damn couch into the freaking moving van, I'm not going to call her, I'm not going to call her a failure or even think

[01:00:38] that she's a failure. I would think, yeah, you're not great at this, but I'm having fun. I'm glad to be interacting with you, right? and I don't know, who is it? Jill? Yeah, let's call her Jill. Jill is here trying to have fun with you guys and you make her jump on this damn puzzle for three hours. Like, ugh. It's wild. So I assume they don't live together because I would have just went in there and just did it for her. Yes. You know what I mean? I've done that before. Like, whenever we reviewed,

[01:01:09] what was the game? The Warhammer Space Marine 2. There you go. And my ex was on that episode and I, she couldn't do a random jetpack jump. She hadn't, because she didn't understand it. And I was like, just let me go do it. Like, I'll explain, because there's something, I don't know, because she, the way she's explaining it and my brain doesn't work very good. So I'm like, I don't understand what she's, what the malfunction is. I'll go in there. I'll just do it. And then you can see me do it and be like, oh, I get it. I get how the jetpack works now.

[01:01:39] Yeah. Any of that. Let's go do it for her. Yeah. Any of that could have helped. But it's like, I don't even know where it's at. I think it was near the end. It's like, oh, she's got low self-esteem. I wonder why she has low self-esteem. You're like, she's right. But, like, no, wait, one minute. You gotta be a little supportive of your partner, right? Like, be a little bit nicer to them. Right. surely she's good at something, man. But otherwise, why would you be, why would you be dating her? Right, exactly. Like, like,

[01:02:07] did you just need to have a girlfriend or someone with you just to say it did? But it's just, it's one of those, like, yeah, there's, there's nothing redeeming about this story. I don't know. I don't know who you are, Jill, but if you somehow are listening to this show, I am so sorry that you had to endure that. Like, I, I don't know. Find, find better. You deserve better. It makes me wonder if the, the poster has maybe some kind of like social disability. Because that's, that's insane.

[01:02:37] Like being even, it's like, I get like, you don't want tension between your guild members that you play the game with all the time. I don't know anything about guilds. I literally only play with Casey on Final Fantasy. So I don't know what this is like, but I assume you don't want tension between your guild members that you're doing dungeon raids with and stuff. But, this person that called her a fucking failure knows that's your girlfriend, right? Like, you're not keeping that a secret from them. So like, there, there were multiple boundaries crossed. Like,

[01:03:07] if you're waiting an hour to do this thing, maybe go take a picture somewhere else. You know? Like, I don't know. Think of another plan. Like, I was starting to think maybe that the guild didn't know the relationship between those two, which prompted them to say, you're a fucking failure. But then, but then if that's the case, it's like, okay, original poster, you're not even proud enough to say that this is my significant other on top of all the non self-esteem things that you clearly already do. Yeah.

[01:03:37] It's. This is wild. This is clearly fucking wild on a lot of levels. I got, I got to tell you, Nave, my brother, I came here to talk video games with you. Now I just want to go find a random stranger and throat punch them for Jill. I got to avenge Jill. Like, who is this mystery person? Jill needs some redemption. God damn. Yeah, man. Hopefully she,

[01:04:03] hopefully she got a better guild or maybe a better girlfriend. I don't know. Something's got to change. This is crazy. You can't just be like, oh yeah, my girlfriend's a failure at everything she's ever done. Like, you would be surprised. There are a couple, am I the assholes that are like this? Like in the same vein. And it's, I don't think that they truly believe it. I think that they're just mad at them for something else. And this is like the outlet that they're punishing them through. You know,

[01:04:32] like this is where they have control. Like I, I am the better final fantasy 14 player. So I can bully you here. Uh, maybe they, maybe they just don't wear the pants in the relationship or something. I don't know. It's crazy. Maybe not, but either way, Jill, if you're out there, Dave and nomad feel for you. Yeah. Hopefully this message gets out to Jill. Somebody go find her. You don't be hilarious. You're,

[01:04:59] you're playing final fantasy 14 and some character comes up to you and it's just like, I'm Jill. Yeah. I was Jill. I was Jill. And she gives me a mount. And I, now I have a cool motorcycle that flies. Guys. Oh my God. That would be the day. Yes. Full circle. All right. That was double assholes on that one. Uh, didn't, uh, absolute asshole. There you this time around. Not often. We get to see that happen. We're going to go on break again and go pee pee potty time.

[01:05:29] And then we're going to talk about poop, who, deer do do whatever's going on in castle crashing. Goodbye. Or I mean, for a moment. Music. Uh, I'm going to take, I'm going to take you up on a piss break. I'll be right back. Gotcha. All right. There was, there was a point where I was playing footsie with my, um, my search protector down here and I unplugged my lights and I went dark for a minute. I don't know if you caught that. I was wondering,

[01:05:57] I have to like lock in when I'm reading. I don't know if you could tell, but like, I have a hard time reading for some reason, like out loud. No, all good. All good. We got, all right. When we're back, I think, are we back Phillip? I'm not sure. Uh, castle crashers hack. Uh, so from the steam grab, we've got hack slash and smash your way to victory in this award-winning 2d arcade adventure from the behemoth overwhelmingly positive, uh, released on September 26, 2012 on steam on Xbox 360.

[01:06:27] It originally released on August 27th, 2008. But the way that we're going to be playing it is on the remaster that released on September 9th, 2015. My birthday. Ooh. Happy birthday to me. What was I doing in 2015? How, how old was I? Oh, that was 10 years ago. I just took fucking psychic damage. Oh, does, does your back hurt? Yeah. It feels terrible. It's got an 83 on Metacritic. It's looking great. Uh, how did you hear about this game?

[01:06:57] Our history or preconceptions? Did you know behemoth before this? Did you know their games before and what led you into playing the glorious castle crasher? I never heard of this developer in any capacity when, when I was playing the three 60 back in the day, like I knew nothing of them, but somehow castle crashers, at least during, during its Xbox live arcade days, really made the rounds in my friend circles. Like people were telling me just, you've got to play this game.

[01:07:27] It's, it's, it's so good. And there's a deer that shits itself. It's like, yeah, that's great. I, I would love to play this game, but, but honestly, I, I played it a little bit, but I kept getting distracted by other games. But originally when I play this on Xbox live arcade, I immediately saw what made this game. Brilliant. Like, uh, co-op games. I, I feel like weren't really all that much. I mean, call of duty and stuff like that. Sure. But like, I,

[01:07:57] I wasn't really playing a lot of co-op games with people. And I, I played this a little bit by myself and I'm like, yeah, yeah, I can see it. But then I, I largely left it behind with all the intent in the world to go back to this thing. And I never did, but it wasn't until it was released on the PlayStation four as, as a remastered version that I finally decide to give this thing a go. And it's kind of one of those, like I immediately slapped myself on the forehead. Like, why the hell did I wait?

[01:08:25] However many years it's been since this game came out to really give it a chance. Like it's, it's so good. Yeah, it is incredible. As for me, I, I knew about the behemoth. I was a new grounds kid. I was deep in the guts of what is the, the, the skull kid and all that edgy shit. We were playing that in our high school. This was the perfect time. The new grounds website was the perfect time for me. Cause I was just, I was a middle school edgy teen.

[01:08:55] And I was, I was loving it. But, and the game before this was alien hominid, which has references in this game. I don't know if that's the game directly before this, but before this game was alien hominid, that's how, that's what I played first. Yeah. I immediately recognized that like art style. I haven't played alien hominid. I can't speak to it myself, but I, that was another game that I've heard nothing but great things about. And then that art style was very, very close to each other. So again,

[01:09:24] it put itself on my radar pretty, pretty early on though. Whenever I first started this game, not only did the alien hominid new ground stuff, that was the perfect time for me. This game also came out in the perfect time for me to play an Xbox 360 game. Cause this is after I had met my co-host Phillip that I do the show with. He is the one that really pulled me into games. Like I didn't re I wasn't ever really actively a gamer at any point.

[01:09:53] Until I met Phillip and got an Xbox 360 and just started diving into all these different games that kind of, like he was really exposing me to. And, and castle crashes was one of them. I don't remember if I showed him that or, or if it was the other way around, but the game that we ended up playing all the time was a game called heavy weapon, which is a pop cap game, which is kind of similar to this in like a weird way. But like, uh, we were all over this, like flies on shit. Whenever we saw castle crash was coming out.

[01:10:22] Like we knew this was exactly the kind of thing that we were going to play for, for days. Yeah. Games like these, whether you know anything about them or not, like I, I, I feel like hack and slash games like this appeal to a rather large audience. Like, I don't know very many people that don't care for this particular type of game because it's, it doesn't really require a lot of skill not to dismerge the game or anything. There's certainly a lot, certainly a lot that goes into it. But like,

[01:10:50] if you want to pick up a hack and slash and all you want to do is smash that square button, castle crashes as you covered. And that in and of itself is something that really drives people to it. I think it's, it's the simplicity and, and that art style too. Like that really stuck with me. Like I, I love this art style. And as you play the game more and you see different characters and, and different enemies that you're going to face, like there's a charm to this game that helped it be as unique as it is. Yeah.

[01:11:18] There is this like dung beetle that you fight in the desert and it's like, so it's big and it's like so pissed off. And then when you kill it, it looks so pathetic and it pulls out like a little white flag and it sinks into the sand. And I did not remember. There's so much about this game. I haven't played this game in so long listener. And there's just so much. I just never, I never committed to long-term memory. And so I was basically experiencing it all for the first time blind and it was great. Yeah. Those little touches are fantastic. Every single enemy has like its own design and,

[01:11:48] and graphic or animation that plays when it dies. And yeah, I think that dung beetle was one of my favorites too. A little, little white flag and you can almost kind of feel bad for it. I definitely felt bad. I wanted it to be my pet. I would go that far, but okay. Yeah. My dogs would probably eat it. Unfortunately, that's exactly what I was thinking about my boy DD. He would absolutely put that thing in his mouth, which is no bad dog. Bad dog. All right. So we got a bunch of steam reviews here. Six, I think.

[01:12:18] And, uh, so we were doing our funny steam review time, funny steam review corner. We're starting it off with maple 24 hours on record. And it says it's like Skyrim, but with sandwiches, 10 out of 10. This is one of the top comments. And I was like, Hmm, okay. This is the, this is the humor that we're going into this time. So a lot of games have their own genre of humor in the reviews. This is, I become a connoisseur of steam reviews. Yeah, I, I'm the same.

[01:12:45] I look at different games just to see what people have to say about them, because there's a lot of good comedians out there, but this, this comment here is, is perfect. And I don't know about you when you first played it, when I first got the sandwich in the game, I had no idea what the hell it was for, but yeah, now that I figured out what to, how to use it and what it's supposed to do. Oh, it's my favorite item in the entire game. And I kind of wish Skyrim had something similar.

[01:13:14] Whenever you first get it, you have, you have to immediately use it and open. Like there are these doors that you have to break down with that being Hulk mode. I was playing with Casey and I was like, eat that sandwich. And she was like, no, I have full health. And I was like, no, eat the sandwich. And she's like, I'm not going to do it. And I'm like, I'm not going to waste it. I'm like, I don't want to tell you what it does, but eat the sandwich. Eat it. Yeah. We might be getting a little too ahead of ourselves, but I got to say the same thing. Like when I picked that up, I thought it was a health item.

[01:13:43] So then I kept killing other enemies that kept coming into the area and they kept dropping sandwiches. Every single one of them. I'm like the game is dropping this for me on purpose. Why? Yeah. Something neuron activate. Right. And then I look at the door that I have to break through and I'm like, it's in the shape of a sandwich. So I'm not a, I'm not a math major or anything, but sandwich plus sandwich door equals. I should probably use this thing. We in the business call that environmental storytelling.

[01:14:13] There you go. Or something. I don't know, but I don't know if you thought the same thing too, but when I looked at the icon for the sandwich, it almost looked a little, I don't know, green kind of had a green tint to it. So part of it is kind of like, yeah, it's just like, do I want to eat this thing? But either way, spoiler alert, eat the damn sandwich. When you come across it, it's either old or it's really healthy. I don't know which one I don't like more. Do you want to read this next one from, Oh God. Be you reigned my way.

[01:14:43] What did I just say? No idea, but I'll happily read that comment. Uh, they say a game that allows you to mash the buttons like an angry kid. This is something that you were channeling before whenever we're talking about our history. Yep, exactly. This, this game is awesome in that there is a pretty, I don't want to say extensive, but there's a pretty robust ish combo system in this game where you can mix, uh, light heavy attacks. You can jump,

[01:15:11] you can do some juggling if you're really good, but you don't really have to. The game lets you button mash and you're not going to get super far just by button mashing, but you're, you're going to, you're going to progress fairly well. And I appreciated the fact that after a while, I'm just like, you know what? I don't want to juggle this guy. I don't want to have to try to use magic in conjunction with, I just want to beat the shit out of you right now with my hammer. And it really plays to button mashing in kind of a positive way. If you just wanted to devolve, I guess, into that style.

[01:15:40] But I will say I play a lot of this game. I'm using my PlayStation portal. I was taking it around with me portably for a while, which it played really well, but like for as much as I was smashing my square button on my PlayStation portal, like I started to think to myself, am I going to break this thing? Like I would be afraid. Yeah. Like there was a lot of button mashing in this game. I specifically do not ever buy hard, stressful games on my switch. Cause I know I'm going to break one of my joy cons, like just stress squeezing.

[01:16:10] You know what I mean? Like I'm not going to play Elden ring on my fucking Nintendo switch. This is kind of a little off the cuff, but I, we're talking about rhythm games before there's a final fantasy rhythm game called the, the, the, the rhythm, final bar line. Don't know how the hell to pronounce the first word, but final fantasy rhythm, feet, feet, rhythm, final bar line, uh, rhythm game, final fantasy music. If you're any, any type of final fantasy fan, you'll, you'll like this game. It's, it's really, really fun.

[01:16:40] But speaking of the switch, I played it on the switch and it was to a point where I was hitting like my a button. So much, I started thinking to myself, am I going to wear out my a button on my joy con? So I would move to the Y button. And then after a while I'd move to the B button. Like, Oh my God. No. Did I just, yeah, this is, this is going to be a problem. Oh, oops. Yeah. There,

[01:17:07] I could just kind of saw a total tonal shift in my face. Like, as I'm like looking at this game and I'm like, Oh no, I need to buy this. Nice. Unfortunately. Well, I will say if you ever do buy it, you talk about it on the gaming together podcast. There is some co-op elements to it. Oh, is there? Oh no. Don't give me more reasons to buy this game. I'm done buying. I can't keep buying games. You're giving an alcoholic alcohol right now. Oh, that's so bad, but you'll like it. I promise. I probably will like it. I played the whole,

[01:17:37] the, I thought you were talking about the kingdom hearts rhythm game. And then you said something completely different. I was like, Oh wait. Yeah. Kingdom hearts isn't final fantasy for one, but also, okay. Anyway, we got to do these reviews. My bad. Sorry, listener. Amy writes in with 0.2 hours on record. It says it's fun. If you have friends refunded, since I don't have friends, LOL. And at the top, it says product refunded. Oh my God. That's awesome. Like I,

[01:18:05] I feel like I would want to buy a game to be able to refund it and make a funny comment. Like that's the question. Did they do that just to be funny or do they actually mean that? Like they were playing this game, realized it was bad without friends and then just threw it back. I think they probably already knew because this review is a 2020. So I assume they've, I assume they've probably already played castle crashes at some point. And they're like, Oh, I can get some updates here. They, they, they had to, I will say, I didn't get a chance to play this with anybody, but myself.

[01:18:35] It's, it's good either way, but with friends, undoubtedly, this game is so much better. You want to get this next one here? My King Terry, the terrible. Yeah. King Terry, the terrible says no princess kisses. And do I have to turn my head completely upside down to see the image that they've made here? You know, it's ass. It's the, it's ass key art of mega mind. The no bitches. Do you know that? Oh shit. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:19:04] It's mega mind doing his eyebrow thing. No princess kisses. Oh my God. I put, okay. Princess kisses. Let's talk about those for a minute. The probably my top three favorite reward in a video game. Not like, like, like you're, you're going through the levels. You're trying to save the princesses. And when you finally save one, they just full on make out with you. Like it's nothing you see on screen really, but it's fairly well implied. And it's just kind of one of those, you know what? Yeah.

[01:19:34] I gained some experience. Yeah. I gained some coin, but have you ever, have you ever done that in co-op? Like got the princess kiss? Not in co-op now. Oh my God. You fight each other for it. Only one person can get it. That's right. You're right. I heard, I did hear about that, dude. So I played it with Casey and she did not see it coming. And so I just fucking brutally killed her. And she just, she didn't even, she didn't even move.

[01:20:02] She didn't know what was happening. She thought it was just hitting her for no reason. Right. And, and she's not, cause you, you can't hurt. There's no friendly fire in this game. It's not like the streets of rage, right? Is that a game that has friendly fire? I can't remember. I can't remember. Yeah. I think so. It's not like that. But, when you get to these princess parts, which we're going to talk about, you will, you have to fight in, when you were in multiplayer and it is, that is my favorite part. The part where, like,

[01:20:32] because you go into the fight with the health that you had. So it is like, I will stop fighting the boss so that I, so that I'll have a leg up on the princess fight. That's peak gameplay right there. When you know the reward is coming and you got to save yourself for it too. Like, and if you're playing with other people that know it's coming too, they probably hone in on your bullshit too. It's like, Hey, get your ass back in here. Hey, what are you doing over there? Why are you hiding in the corner suddenly? What's going on? What do you know?

[01:21:02] All right. There's the next one here for you. All right. You get to read this one. I don't know why I gave you all the really hard to read names. Let's see here. Mere salt. Mere salt. Yeah, sure. Sounds great. They say an accurate depiction of the third crusade. Well, I am playing Indiana Jones, so I would have to agree with this person. I think probably this is about crusades, right? About Indiana Jones. I don't know. I don't know. I've never watched a movie.

[01:21:32] I don't know. I, my mind immediately went to something biblical and I could see some of the nights you play as look like the nights of the Templar. I don't know. I, I'm just pulling this out of my ass, I think. So I'm just going to say, yes, I agree with you. Commenter. Like the orange night is in Dante's Inferno somewhere. There you go. Yep. That's the one. We got the last one here. That's weird. I made you read two in a row. I think it doesn't matter from ants. Ant recommends this game.

[01:22:02] It says only enjoyable if you hate castles and want to crash them. There it is. The obligatory joke about the title, which made me laugh. This is the only one that made me laugh actually. Yeah. I think it was like a low chuckle for me. Just, just kind of like a, all right, you did the name thing. Well, here's the whole thing is that I had to scroll past like 180 reviews to get to that one. Like I had to work for this, for the, for the, for the crashing castles joke.

[01:22:32] Everyone else is like, no, one's going to, no, one's going to read this. So I'm gay. And I'm like, okay, that's the millionth time I've seen that. Then someone's like, here's the ingredients for a birthday cake. And I'm like, thank you. And then I scroll past that really long review. Jesus. So, you know, I do so much for you listener. It's what I'm trying to say. I'm trying to beg you for money. Go subscribe to Patreon. All right. We're going to be talking about the, the story quotes,

[01:23:01] what's going on in this game. We're really going to just be talking about our vibes going in. I've got some screenshots so that I found from Google and Wikipedia from a bunch of different parts of the game that I remember playing through. But first things first, we have to talk about the characters and we have to talk about who are we maining. Did you even know there were this many characters in the game? I knew there were a lot of characters. I didn't know there were this many until I saw the sheet. Oh my God. Part of me is like,

[01:23:28] I'm going to continue playing this game even after we're done with this podcast. Like I absolutely just want to keep grinding out and unlocking characters, but I had no idea there were so many. Yeah. Well, the good thing is, is that they're not unlocked like in an order. It's like specific characters unlock other specific characters. So it's like, if you want the, I don't know, the stove face, I think you just got to beat the game with somebody else and then you unlock him. So,

[01:23:58] and you can just go on the wiki and see all that information there. A lot of these people are unlocked right away. So who are you playing before the play? The, just to go over it really quickly, the people who are unlocked right away are the original four, which is the green poison night, the red electric night, the blue ice night, and the orange fire night. And on the remaster version, you also get the pink. And the gray nights. I know for sure.

[01:24:28] Well, no, you have to unlock the gray night, but he's, he's early on. I'm pretty sure. Maybe that's what it did. Cause I, I ended up, I ended up starting. I'm getting ahead of myself, but I ended up starting as the red night. I, I stopped playing for a little bit, came back, saw the gray night, I guess when I was cycling through characters and I played for, with him for a little while, but I'm getting a little too far ahead, but yeah, continue. Well, that's really, so the only person left is the purple night, which it says blacksmith in the,

[01:24:59] in the wiki. And if you have played battle block theater on steam, you get Hattie Haddington, who is like the narrator, bad guy, dude. I don't even know if he's the narrator, but he's the bad guy in a battle block theater. So those are all the normal, like kind of dudes that you can play. I played as the purple night. Cause I like purple. That's really it. Yeah. Going into this, I like, I knew each character was unique, but I didn't really do any research.

[01:25:28] I just went in completely blind. I started off as the red nights. I didn't get very far. Then I quit and came back and I saw the gray night was in there. I got to maybe level 15 with the gray night, but I could not stand their magic type attack. It's not elemental. And I think non-elemental is probably the way to go just because some enemies later get resistances to certain elements I've noticed, but like, but the, but the gray night, all it does is,

[01:25:56] is they have like this volley of arrows that come in front of it and you can upgrade your magic meter or your stats or whatever. And more arrows are come by, but like, I couldn't get this thing to do what I wanted. And I felt like I was hamstrung to just melee attacks. So I eventually went back and I played most of my game as the red night. Like I, I love the red night. I love their electricity power. And it was to a point where I purposely started just boosting their

[01:26:24] magic to make their electricity longer and just last longer too. Like there was just, there was just something, dare I say, therapeutic. About knocking an enemy back, blasting them with like, I don't know, two, three seconds of continuous electricity and watching them fry into a crisp. Oh, oh my God. What is it? 8.21 gigawatts or whatever. Something like that. References to movies. I can't remember. I also play, whenever I originally played this game, I was a red night main.

[01:26:54] Yeah. Cause the blacksmith didn't exist back then. Yeah. So when I, I replayed this game with my friend, Victor, who was on like, like two years ago episode for league of legends, I think he was on, uh, where we played and I played the pink night. Cause the pink night existed back then. And the pink night is cool. Cause you get like this rainbow attack. And whenever you upgrade it, it gets like multiple rainbows. It gets really long. It's fucking sick. Yeah. the blacksmith throws like hammers.

[01:27:22] He throws hammers that are fire. And I didn't realize they were fire, uh, magic until I got to the like dragon enemies and they're resistant to fire. And I was like, Oh, and I was literally maining magic. So I was maxing magic verse. And so I did ass damage with everything else. And suddenly I was doing like 11 damage as opposed to like 120 damage. I'm like, Oh my God. No, like I can't do anything.

[01:27:50] I can't fight these guys because my attacks are puny. Yeah, that's, I can't remember what enemy I came across to, but there was some lesser enemy. I think that was immune or only took like one or two damage to electricity as well. And I was doing the same thing because I found out, and maybe we're skipping a little too far ahead here, but I found out the way this game does experience is not by the enemies you kill, but how many hits you land. So I purposefully kept my strength,

[01:28:20] the little lower. So I would do more hits to get more experience. And then I would just level up my electricity because then my electricity is like doing tons of hits one after the other. But then I was in the same boat. I came across this lesser little enemy that took no damage to my electricity and their nimble as fuck. And it's just like, Oh, I've nerfed. I've nerfed myself inadvertently. And part of me is part. I don't know. I do want to ask your opinion. Is that bad game design? Or did we just make terrible character decisions?

[01:28:51] I think it's a little bit of, well, I mean, I don't know if it's bad game design because this game is designed to be played with multiple people. And since it's so, it's almost impossible, especially on the first run, it's literally impossible to like have the same elements together. Like if, even if you only have two people, like it's really hard to have like two fire guys. Cause you can't pick the same night. Like you can't both be the orange night. Right. Yeah. So that makes sense when you put it that way. So it's now that I think back to it, it would,

[01:29:20] it would have been a non-factor if I had some friends. Well, maybe you should have refunded the game. Like Amy did. Yeah. No kidding. So we're going to talk a little bit about the story. Uh, we'll go through like, I don't think there's no, not really a story. It's really just like streets of rage where you're just, you go into a place, you go through the, the waves of enemies and then you're done. But, uh, the general story is that there is an evil wizard who is named drum roll,

[01:29:50] please. Evil wizard. Okay. I think that's his name. I don't know if it's because it literally says that in the wiki. Um, he steals a crystal from the King and you, the castle crashers are tasked to go crash that guy's castle. Uh, so the game starts in the home castle when, where the, all of that has happened. Um, you can, you can just kind of fight your way through. And this is just kind of the tutorial. Basically. It's just slowly introducing you to the enemies. It's slowly introducing you to,

[01:30:20] it shows you where the shop is. You get, there's like a random shop in the middle of the first mission or the second mission. And it's not much to write home about, but it's your first experience with the game. Do you remember those first moments? Oh, I do. Like it was yesterday. It was, it was a really good starter level too. You start off and you're like in this back room where everyone, for, for whatever reason, all the other nights of this castle are just, are just sitting at benches and you, you've got the devil horns out and you're just banging your head.

[01:30:50] And there's some music that's going on. I mean, forget the fact that there's a war probably going on outside your castle walls. There must be. Right. But like, it starts off with this really cool chill vibe. And then through the door, this other night just gets thrown down the stairs and immediately dies. And it's like, Oh, party's over. It's time to go figure this thing out. And you get control. And through that area, you can talk to some NPCs and they'll give you kind of the basics, teach you like your basic light attack, heavy attack, jump, that sort of thing.

[01:31:20] But it was the perfect setup level to figure out how combat works. The enemies weren't really too hard, but what I remember more than anything about this first level dude was the music, the music in this game. Just, I don't know. What are the kids saying nowadays slaps? Is that still a good one? Oh yeah. It does slap on ironically, but that's, that was the big thing that I remembered. Like I, I, I tried my best to, to,

[01:31:48] to try and learn and use the different techniques like light attack, heavy attack. You could block in this game, which is something that I had to force myself to do because I'm just like, it's a hack and slash. I'm just going to hack and slash, but you got to learn to be a little bit more nimble than that. And that, and this first level was really good for that. And it set the stage for what was to come. Like soon as this level was over, like it wasn't even, I was playing this again, just to be on the show with you, man. I'm just like this, I'm committed. This game knows what it wants to be.

[01:32:18] And I want to be in it. Giggity. It is wild because I was going to, I, I, I was going to play this with Casey anyways, and she had bought it. And we just have like five or six games that we're like about to play or, or, or in the middle of playing like King, like killing floor two, we're playing final fantasy 14. And this was a game that was like literally imminent. And then you, I showed you the list and you're like castle crashers. And I'm like, dude, that's serendipitous because I'm literally about to play this game right now. Like within the next few days,

[01:32:48] this game is just such a comfort food, especially the very beginning. We'll get to a point in the story where I am like, this is the point where I always fall off, where there is a moment where I'm like, I don't remember anything past this point. It's because I always stop at this point. Yeah. Yeah. To me, the story is inconsequential. And then when I, when the quote unquote evil wizard comes and steals that giant crystal, my, it's not really a relation, but my first thought was, Oh, it's a final fantasy game. Someone stole or did something with a crystal.

[01:33:18] And now I have to go either get it back or destroy it. But either way, it's enough to keep the plot moving forward. It's fine. This game is basically final fantasy three. I think, I don't know. I haven't played fun. I'm a C three. I have the same plot though. I'm confident. Yep. I haven't either, but it sounds about right. So chapter one, all these chapters are relatively short. There's only like two, like some chapters are one level long, apparently. And I'm going all by the wiki, but like some chap, uh,

[01:33:48] and the longest ones are like four, maybe five levels long. Uh, so these first two chapters are what encapsulate the actual demo of the game. Whenever you played it on the Xbox 360, you remember demos. Oh my God. Demos demos made the world go round. I remember playing this game's demo. And I, I, I just, man, I just remember being a poor gamer. That's probably why I have my own section in my podcast of me mindlessly spending my money on,

[01:34:17] on, on shovelware. I'm never going to play. It's because I remember playing games like this, the demo over and over and over again, because I remember the feeding frenzy demo. Oh my God. Feeding frenzy. Holy shit. I am about that life, the demo life, but, this is where the demo would end whenever you go through the barbarian war and then fight the barbarian boss who, this is the screen right here. It's, it's, it's really nostalgic looking at this. You know what I mean?

[01:34:47] I, I liked how this boss introduced himself to like you, you get into this arena where there's a bunch of other enemies just around and the princesses are tied up on poles in the back. And then this like littler barbarian at the end of the screen on the right is like, Oh, this is the boss I'm going to fight. Yeah. And then, and then as soon as, as soon as you get closer, this gigantic door just flies open. And then this big, what we're seeing on screen, the big hulking, the real barbarian comes out and it's just like, ah,

[01:35:17] okay. I'm pretty sure he slams his shield down and kills that. The barbarian was going to fight us originally. Yes. Another thing I want to point out here is in this like free trial of the thing. So all you can see all the princesses that are tied up here. This is the first time you get to save a princess. Um, but I mean, spoiler alert for this 17 year old game, I guess, but the, the purple haired princess always has her face covered up.

[01:35:45] And every moment you ever see her like there, there's a moment later in the game where you see all the princesses getting taken away and she is getting dragged and she's face down on the ground, getting dragged behind everyone. And it is so funny when you know that, that she's a clown, you know what I mean? It took me, it took me forever to actually see that. I thought it was just like a comedic moment that they were just dragging her by her face, but it's just like, Oh, there's something else going on here. That's, that's what's so beautiful about it.

[01:36:14] Cause it is a comedic moment for people who don't know. And for people who do know, like it is funny on the second playthrough simply because it's, it's so simple, but it's, but it's perfect. Oh yeah. Um, I, one other thing before we move, move off of this, I don't know if you ever found this strange or not, but maybe it was part of the humor. Once you do beat the barbarian and you open up the giant treasure chest with all the treasure and cut the princess down or what have you. I noticed that as you're going through the boss fight one by one,

[01:36:43] they're taking the princesses away because they're like, Oh my God, you're turning the tide of battle. He might actually win. We got to get the hell out of here. But all the other enemies just stay in the arena and don't do anything and watch you rescue the princess. Yeah. They just chill. I don't know. I don't know why that stood out to me. Do you, there's a YouTube channel called any Austin. Have you ever heard of this? No. Oh, you would love him because he literally, he makes videos about that where like he, like there's this one video that I love of his, where he plays halo combat evolved,

[01:37:13] but he doesn't move on. So like, he'll go to random play. Like he'll be playing the game and then he'll just stop and just look at shit. And like, he makes the video about like the very first level, the pillar of autumn. He's like, the sirens are going off and the government's attack covenant's attacking, but you can drop down at the very beginning of this and like stand here and just chill. It's like really weird. Like it's, it's such a weird vibe. He does it for Assassin's Creed. He does it for grand theft auto. Like, like he's like, these are,

[01:37:42] look at this backyard. Some developer put a, a mattress here and like, you know, and that was their mark. You know, it's, that was the whole backyard. It's like, I don't know. I love stuff like that, but that's what you were, that reminded me of whatever you were just saying. Nice. I'll, I'll check that out. I did that specifically in Indiana Jones. There's this like part where no spoilers, but like you're escaping a tomb. Thing as Indiana does. And it is falling apart as tombs do when you find the treasure. And the, the,

[01:38:12] the tomb is filling with water and he's like, Oh my God, I got to get out of here. And like the screen keeps shaking and like rocks are falling, but I stopped moving because of any Austin, like literally because of him, I stopped moving and I watched the water and it kept rising to a point. And then it stopped. And then the screen kept shaking, but the water never rose. And I was like, Oh, this is that spot that this is the, the, what is it? The magic hour or whatever, the witching hour for video games.

[01:38:42] I'm like in the veil right now. It's where I'm breaking it. It's funny. You, you, you will get back on task in a second, but now I gotta, I gotta share one of my own. And there's a story reason this happens if you really want to get into it. But I, the one time I came across one of these on my own was on the original PlayStation metal gear solid. Uh, I try not to spoil it, but at the very end of the game, there's a countdown sequence, right? And you have 10 minutes to get out or bad things will happen.

[01:39:10] If you do nothing and let the timer expire, nothing happens. The timer just says zero. What? The timer just says zero. And you can just keep playing the game. Like it was one of those, like, Oh, this is a video game. Yeah. I mean, if you, if you go through, if you go through that segment, the way you're supposed to, you've got like seven minutes to spare. Like there's no way you're running out of time. Oh, it's like that part in final minutes, seven where like the, the countdown's happening for the make a reactor, right? Or is that, is it?

[01:39:40] I don't know. We're, we're, we're spiraling. Now, cause now we're talking about timers and video games. That's a whole nother podcast. Exactly. Are they real or fiction? Yeah. Subscribe to the page here on, where we talk about timers and video games. Oh my God. All right. You beat the barbarian boss. You rescue a princess. You open the treasure chest. You get the dope ass treasure music. The do, tick it, tick it, tick it, tick it, tick it. And I just like fucking, Oh,

[01:40:09] like it's great because the first time you ever do it, like the treasure is busting out of it, but it's like, Oh cool. Congratulations. But then the treasure starts actually falling down. And you're like, wait a minute. I could get the treasure. So like, it's fucking awesome. Yeah. Scramble. I mean, the game itself already had a vibe, but it doubled down when that treasure was flowing out. I, I will say though, I call BS on the treasure a little bit. I don't think it all fell down to the ground. That was a lot of treasure. It's like when you shoot a bullet in the air and like,

[01:40:39] it goes really far away. I think a lot of the treasure went to the woods. Like it went to some peasants hut. And like, he's going to go get a couple of new cows. Yes. Somebody is happy. Thanks to us. So we go into this forest. I don't remember anything about the forest, but there we, when you go into the thieves area, this is where you fight like the giant, like there's this giant black fuzzy thing. And there's a bunch of smaller ones,

[01:41:09] but you fight a really big one. The thing I particularly want to talk about though, is like the music in this area. Yeah. Music in this area was just, I need to find it online and put it on my phone or something. Like it, it belongs in my rotation of music. Like it is that good. I, I have, I don't know if you can hear that. It's so loud. No, I muted it. Uh, it says this castle crashes, OST thieves forest. I hope this is a, cause it has a name.

[01:41:40] Oh my God. This is it. All right. Real quick, Philip, you don't have to edit this in, but if you want to, if you want to edit it in, it's so upbeat. You know what I mean? Yeah. I mean, a lot of music and a lot of games like this are traditionally upbeat, but there's, this music's just on another level. Like it's, it's one of those, it's one of those pieces of music that, yeah,

[01:42:10] it gives you the motivation to keep doing what you're doing, but it fits in this world that they're trying to make. So perfectly, like I, there's not enough people to talk about this game already. There is certainly not enough people to talk about this game. Soundtrack. This is definitely, if we have a ring listening together back, this is going to be something that's on the docket somewhere. And I will say, I was telling you before we jumped on this evening that I ended up going back

[01:42:38] and replaying levels to like level grind and get coins and stuff like this. This was a level that I would consistently go back to. The boss is one that you can grind on pretty easy, but I came back for the music, man. The music was just perfect, but it's great. Yeah. But I, I will say we got, we got to backpedal a little bit before we get to this, this particular boss encounter and, and, and where we're at in this level. This is where we met this, this baby deer. Do you remember the deer?

[01:43:08] Yeah. This is the beginning of there is a running joke in this whole chapter. If you want to explain it. Yeah. So there's, there's, there's something in the woods. I assuming it's the, it's the boss that we faded face at the end, but animals that you come across are scared of something. Scared to the point where they're just shitting themselves in terror. Now, listener, you probably think that's a metaphor. No, nay, nay, not a metaphor, actual shitting themselves.

[01:43:38] Right? Come, what do we come across first? An owl, I think, right? Yeah. It's terrific because the owl is right next to a bush. And if you go behind that, but like you can literally go behind the bush and it doesn't immediately start shitting itself. So I have observed so many, I play this with so many people, especially like for the first time, this is a game that I love to show people and they, no joke every single time this moment comes because it doesn't let you walk past this owl.

[01:44:07] So there's shaking and stuff. The owls obviously frightened and it starts shaking. They always go to that bush and they stand directly under it. And then the owl starts shitting himself with perfect comedic timing every single time. Like they, they found the psychology to get somebody to get underneath that owl. You know what I mean? Yeah. And I found out later too, you, I don't think we've talked about them, but you can come across like different animal companions. I think they call them animal orbs. There's,

[01:44:35] there's one animal that you can come across that'll find like hidden items and stuff. There is, and there is a hidden item in that bush that the owl shits on. I think it's a weapon or something like that. So, Oh shit. The more, you know, no pun intended. Exactly. But so, so you come across the owl. There's even, there's even like a big bear that you come across at some point to same thing. Like you think it's the bear making all the noise. No, it's the bear shitting himself,

[01:45:01] but it's this baby deer that you come across and it's, it's so well animated. The art style here is perfect. It's got those perfect beady doe eyes or what have you. And when you walk up, yeah. And then when you walk up to it, its eyes kind of get wide, its face kind of goes into a frown and all of a sudden it starts farting and then just shits itself so hard that it literally pushes itself off to the left hand side of the screen.

[01:45:29] Like it's asshole is some sort of a rocket projectile of some sort. Like, yeah, it's to a point where you should obviously play this game if for no other reason than to experience that. But if you can't or don't want to YouTube it, like stop this podcast right now. It's not my show, but I give you permission. Go. How dare you go. Go look at this thing. Like deer is iconic. Yeah, but, but all, all jokes aside for the most part,

[01:45:59] I mean, again, this, this helps set up what this game is in terms of theme. Like it doesn't take itself seriously all the time. And I love that about this game. Like I just saw a deer shit himself so hard that he flew off screen. This is what we're dealing with. I love it. This is definitely a video game. How, what is that? The three stooges is video game version of that. Yeah, it's really well done. And then, and then, yeah, that, that final boss,

[01:46:28] it's, it's like what a giant charred marshmallow looking thing. I don't even know what the hell it is. I don't know, but it's, it's, it's a, it's not the funniest thing is like you, cause you said about the bear. It's like, Oh, that bears are clearly making everyone shit themselves. No. Well, you fight this thing and you're like, Oh, it's clearly this thing. It's making everything shit themselves. No, well, no, that you get to the next level, the abandoned mill. And you see, it is just a bigger version of that, a giant scarier version of that, that chases you and you don't even fight it.

[01:46:58] You run away from it. It's too big. And the way that you run away from it is you get trapped in this giant bridge thing. It's hard. It's hard to describe. And there's four deer in there, four deer, four players. Oh, one of the deer though, is the, is the little deer child that is shitting himself. Yeah. The, the, the poo projectile deer. So if, if whether you're lucky enough to get on top of it or not,

[01:47:28] he's running along with the pack and he's not using his legs at all. He is just relying purely on his projectile power. And I mean, again, I'm no experts in things that are, I don't know, sciencey or anything, but the, the, the rate that, that deer expels, expels whatever the hell is in him, how it gets it to the end of the level is beyond me, but it's inspiring. I'll tell you that. It definitely died of dehydration. I'll tell you that. I've,

[01:47:56] I played enough plague ink to know that that's what happens when you have diarrhea. You die of dehydration. Big time. But this, this, this, this little level it's, it's your classic, like chasing, you're scrolling from, from left to right. And sometimes you have to jump over a log. If you, if you pay enough attention to the deer, you'll watch them go up and down and stay with them because they're going to try to run through doorways and stuff like that. But this, but this creature, correct me if I'm wrong, man. I, I, it's a giant cat, right? Or something.

[01:48:25] I don't know what this thing is. Like the chupacabra, probably. I don't know. Something, but like it reaches out to try to grab you and you can actually back your way up into it. Pretty, pretty close without taking any damage, which is good. You want to do that. So you have more time to jump and stuff like that. But like, he's got like these cat, like paws that come out. It looks like, like, I don't know what the hell this thing is, but I, I, it looked like a cat to me. And I remember looking at my wife going, this is why we have dogs. Cause to warn us, right?

[01:48:55] I don't know what the hell this is, but it ain't coming in my house. So after that, we, after this little abandoned mill area, we dropped down into this river where we have to, this part sucks. I'm going to be honest. This, this part's not fun. This is the first nail in like my replay coffin where I'm like, Oh yeah, it's this part. This is the part I always forget about. Water sucks in all video games.

[01:49:18] I was complaining in my group chat about Indiana Jones because the last area in the last hub world you go to is all water based. You're driving a boat around. It's like, Oh God, I hate this. Water just sucks in every video game. So in this little area, you're swimming and you have to jump on top of little pieces of like, uh, debris that, or like maybe animals, like sometimes like a dead person. You can jump like floating in the river and you use them as a little raft.

[01:49:48] That way you could fight, uh, normally and move fast. But, um, yeah. Yeah. I gotta say, and maybe it was just my own ignorance, but when I first played this level for the, for the, for the first time, I didn't put two and two together and realize that the stuff floating was stuff that I could jump on. I just thought that I had to like swim, jump out of the water and do some, do some aerial attacks and fall back in the water. Like, cause I kept coming across like, yeah, fish. I don't, I don't know that I need to jump on the fish, the kind of thing. So it was, it was,

[01:50:18] it was really hard for me the first time, but even then, once you get on them, yeah, you've got your freedom of movement and stuff like that, but all it takes is one good hit. Then you get thrown off and the game, I think this is true from what I noticed, but the game has to wait for the object that you just fell off of to go off screen before it sends another item in from the right hand side of the screen. So you're probably in the drink for maybe a good 20, 30 seconds. If you fall off, that really does feel that way.

[01:50:47] That's probably true. It feels that way for sure. Cause when you, when you fall off, there's hardly ever a moment where you're immediately getting back on. Yeah, no, I, I love the fact that whether you're on land or in water, if you do like a jump attack with your, whether it's light attack or heavy attack, I don't think it matters. Your character stays in the air for a good amount of time, which is nice, but yeah, jumping out and get another attack off. Like you can do a couple of them.

[01:51:14] What the thing is that I think at this point in the level or in the level, in the game, you have already unlocked the double a or double X attack where like you double, you do it as a jump. And then you hit the jump button in the air and you'll do a tornado spin. And I really liked that attack. And so I'm pretty sure that's how I realized that you could land on stuff is that I just accidentally landed on something because I'm just mashing the A button the whole time. I'm just trying to hit people that way. Yeah, it was, it was, this,

[01:51:43] this was not my favorite level. Although I think the boss at the end of this level was probably one that almost made me rage quit this game or at least step away for a minute. Yeah. Yeah. There is a way to fight him. It's not explicit, but, um, if you're like looking at what's happening on the screen at all times, you'll realize that there's like a pattern that you could fall into and then make the fight easier, easier on yourself. Damn, these Budweiser's are getting to me. But, um, yeah.

[01:52:14] So you, you fight the catfish, which is just a cat fish. Get it. And so, but the King shows up with the boat and he's got dudes, he's loading up cannons and stuff. What you want to do is eventually the, the catfish will start shooting out hell shitting. It'll start spitting out hair balls. Um, and whenever you break them, it'll start chasing after you. You want to make sure the catfish is in front of the boat because one of the gray knights will come out and start putting a,

[01:52:43] of a thing. What is it? A cannon ball inside of the cannon. And then it'll fire and hit the cat in the face. I think the first one happens like no matter what you do, just to show you that that's possible. And then it'll stun it and you can get a lot of hits in. But then after that, you always have to set it up. Like you always have to make sure the cat stays there in front. Um, whenever I played this the last time, uh, it, I was unsung, I was successful in ever getting that cannon to hit the cat again. But I was, like I said,

[01:53:13] I don't know if I said this before we started recording, but I was like 14 levels over leveled. Cause I had already played a little bit of the game with the character. I was using this run through. And so I just kind of brute force my way through it. Like I just kind of beat the shit out of it and it died, which is the thing you can do in this game. Yeah, exactly. My experience was the same. I had a hard time lining up that initial cannonball blast, but once I figured out really the, the trick to it and kind of where I needed to put the cat and all that sort of stuff, I, I started getting hits more often than not,

[01:53:42] but I also like to, one of its attacks, it will start to swim in the river left to right, left to right. But if you can bait it in front of the boat and then move out of the way at the last second, it'll smack itself into the boat, take a little bit of damage and then it'll be stunned for a second. Like it's, it's kind of a dumb little gimmick, but at the end of the day, while this fight frustrated me, because once the cat gets on top of you and just starts pawing you, he, he does not let up.

[01:54:10] But once you learn how to use the cannon, once you learn how to bait him in front of the boat, I kind of liked this boss fight. Like I like boss fights that they're not just a toe to toe contest. You kind of got to use your noodle a little bit. So kudos where kudos is due. Yeah. If only it wasn't in water. Anything else. Jello would even have been better. That's fine. Or a tall grass field, which happens to be the next level. Chapter four is the beginning.

[01:54:38] The beginning of it is I don't remember these bees. This, there are multiple moments where I play this game and I was like, was this added in the remaster? I'm pretty sure nothing is like really added in the remaster besides a, a game mode, which we'll talk about at the very end. But yeah, so I saw these bees and I was like, what in the fuck? I did no idea what I was looking at. I did. I don't remember this part at all. Yeah. It's very short. I think you fight these bees three different times in the very beginning here,

[01:55:07] but there's also like five or six other gray nights with you too. And they'll attack the enemies. And I think it was to a point where I didn't really do anything. And the bees just kind of got themselves killed. So I think at the end of this part, or maybe it's a part after no, I think it's the end of this part is the part where you do the catapult. Oh yeah. And like, uh, there's an achievement for that. So we've gone past a couple of optional achievements, but there's an achievement for max catapulting yourself over there,

[01:55:36] which I couldn't get to save my life. And like, I will say I am a, I am a big proponent of the PlayStation portal as a streaming device. That thing is amazing. But I think that just like milliseconds of input lag, I could not make this thing hit that top of the bar to save my life. Dude. I believe it. Absolutely. I believe it. Cause I, I stream on game as every now and then, and even if it, even it's a quadrillion dollar Microsoft company, it's like, sometimes I'm like, I don't know if I,

[01:56:05] if I actually failed here, I'll never trust the stream. Yeah. But, uh, so you go to this cave, the cave is cool. There's like little slime dudes. And this is where you fight the giant bat, which is like shitting everywhere. I don't, I don't know why I didn't get a picture of this bat that's shitting everywhere, but the, the cool thing though, is that whenever you kill everyone, you get the, you get a little orb. That is the bat, but you have to wait for everything to clear out. And then another bat will fly in and just chill there in the middle of the

[01:56:34] screen. Yeah. I, it's funny when this, when this big bat came on screen and it, and one of its major attacks was just shitting all over the place. That's when I had reached my shit threshold or, I'm sorry. Let me take that back. Not threshold, but like level of acceptance. Like this is what this game is now. It's just, there's, there's going to be poop everywhere, but it was tactfully done. And like in classic RPG fashion, you get hit with one of these things. You're taking some poison damage. I believe. Yeah. You are,

[01:57:04] you, you now have. Guano poisoning. I think that guano is batshit, right? Yes. Thank you. Ace Ventura. Yeah. That was literally, I'm channeling fucking Jim Carrey right now. Like guano. Guano. Oh man. But yeah, that, that fight was fine. I will say of, of all the enemies in the game, there's some that I don't particularly care for. War, those slimes can go F themselves.

[01:57:33] Like it's hard to hit them. They don't really react to your hits all that much, but whatever. They jump on your head and you have one of the few enemies where you have to like shake them off. And I'm just like, Oh my God, no. Yeah. That was a, that was another thing with the PlayStation portal. Like I felt like I was going to break my directional button because I was smashing it too hard to get that. No, whatever. It's fine. It's a chapter five, a flowery field. Again, I don't have any pictures, but then we have the wedding crash and this part rules.

[01:58:02] This part fucks. Even I might even go as far as to say this fight where you fight this guy who's at the Oregon and all the Oregon keys are connected to cannons and, and they're shooting all over the place as he's playing and you have to dodge them. Like, I don't know. There's something about the spectacle of this, how stupid it is that it is just like, I love it so much. Yeah. It's, it's really well done. Although at least the first time for me, it was hard because this, this boss,

[01:58:32] he does not let up. Like he'll, he'll, he'll go two different phases. He'll, he'll melee you and try to go toe to toe with you. And if you're good enough and you can start hitting him, you'll disrupt his attack pattern pretty easily. And you can wail on him. But then he goes over to the Oregon and you can't attack him because he's got some sort of, I don't know, magical bullshit force field around him. But the cannons, when he fires them, like they're so quick. And it was really easy to see that this game was firing at like 60 plus frames a second. Like it was so smooth,

[01:59:02] but like, I don't know. Part, part of me was like, I'm, I'm dodging him trying to figure out how to get to him or wait until he comes out. And then my, my first reaction was, Oh, the princess, she's up near the top of the screen. I'll stand by her. No way. He's going to fire cannonballs at her. I was wrong. You know, he don't care. He do not care. But yeah, this was, this was a fun fight. This was another one too, where the music was just really, really good. Like I'm, I'm nodding my head, getting my ass beat going. Yes. All right.

[01:59:31] So the very next area is also a really awesome area. It's kind of annoying. If you have already played it once before, but the first time we play, this is incredible. Like, so you're going through this like wedding parade ceremony thing. Obviously the wedding hasn't happened. The funny joke is that you think that the dude you're fighting is the dude. Who's doing the wedding. Is he doing the wedding or is like he, the, I couldn't figure that out.

[02:00:02] I couldn't figure that out to save my life, man. I have no idea. This is, this is where it was just kind of off the rails. Like, all right, we're on top of a carriage. There's confetti and stuff just flying around. I'm just trying to stay alive. Yeah. I don't know. I think he's either the groom or he is not, he might be the groom. So the thing is, I thought it was funny is I, in my head cannon, he is just the dude that plays the organ and the dude that comes out. The Cyclops is the groom is what I thought. And so he takes the,

[02:00:31] he takes the princess and runs off when you kill the groom. That's the whole thing. He cries. He's like, Oh, no. He comes. It's literally the whole thing. The whole boss fight. There is a bathroom in the background. And like, it doesn't look like a background, but like when you see outhouse doors, they usually have like this moon or something. I don't know what it's about, but like, I was like, Oh, it's a bathroom. He comes out of the bathroom, sees you've killed this friend. And he's like, no.

[02:00:58] And he grabs the princess and runs off. And so you're on top of this carriage as he's trying to get away with the princess. And it's like, there's confetti and shit because it's supposed to be after the wedding. But like, you killed the guy. It's like, you're fighting all these dudes. It's just so funny. You know, I don't know what it is. Yeah. It's, it's really, it's really fun. I even like when you start the level and he flies out of the window and like this superhero sort of tumble and land.

[02:01:27] And again, this is another great level where the developers are like, we know what we want to be and we're just going to own it. And it was, it was really fun. But I will say from a gameplay standpoint, fuck confetti, because I had a hard time seeing what the hell I was doing. But at the same time, I also liked the fact that if you do knock somebody off the carriage, they're dead. So you don't have to go toe to toe with anybody. But yeah, it was, it was a pretty fun level. I liked it. Um, and I think the big dude that chased you in the poop level,

[02:01:56] like the poop deer level, when you're, uh, running away from him, I think he chases you here as well. I don't remember. Uh, it doesn't matter too, but, uh, so you go through a couple of levels, creatively named Cyclops Cave, Cyclops Gate, and Cyclops Fortress. Uh, at the very end of Cyclops Fortress, you fight. Who do you think you fight in the Cyclops Fortress? I'm going to guess Cyclops. Oh, there you do.

[02:02:26] Do you fight the Cyclops for another princess? You get another kiss here. Uh, this is a cool fight. Uh, he chases you around. He tries to slam you with stuff. You knock them into some lava. Very dramatic. And then he does the Terminator reference, which, okay. I love me a good pop culture reference, but I felt like this one was probably the one time that they just forced it. Like, okay, I get it. I guess. I definitely believe that they, they already had, they're like,

[02:02:54] we're going to knock them into lava because it's in the lava area. And then someone was standing over their shoulder. It was like, Hey, make him do a thumbs up. And the guy was like, and then he, then he just did it. Yeah. I mean, I can't be mad at it, but I will admit I rolled my eyes. I'm like, okay, I get it. But it's still any pop culture references is an a okay one by me. I got to ask you too. What'd you think of this boss fight in general? Was this, was this an easy one for you?

[02:03:23] Or did you have a hard time with this one? I was still in the realm of I'm OP at this point. Gotcha. And so I, I, I was just standing in the back shooting fireballs and like doing actual, like noticeable chunks of damage on his body. Nice. I mean, his health bar, his body too, I guess. Yeah. This, this was the fight that finally taught me that I need to be a little bit more

[02:03:50] strategic because I was fairly button mashy up to this point and you can't be button mashy against this guy. He will level you with the, what's he got? Two daggers and he brings them down a hammer style. Like I had a hard time with this at first until like I stepped back and realized, Oh, you have a block button. I should probably use that. Or I have legs. I should probably move around, but it was a good fight and it ended on a good, on a good pop culture reference note. So I like it. So after this, we got chapter six,

[02:04:20] lava world shrug. Like there's lava shooting from the ground. That's this whole level. Yeah. And then this one was just like the stereotypical needs to be in the video game. Like, Oh, it's lava. Have the lava spouts and the fire. And this, this was probably the most video gamey level. I know we're playing a video game, but someone understands what I mean. Oh my God. I almost forgot. I don't, I can't believe I didn't put this picture in here. I must've literally forgotten, but, um,

[02:04:49] there is a sign. There's a sign in the middle of this level that is like, Oh, there's this fucking resort resort over here. You know, it's not a live volcano. And then you get literally five steps later. There's a bunch of dudes in ash from the obviously active book. You know, I forgot about that. That was a very fucking funny joke. Yes. I remember that. I remember laughing out loud because I, I,

[02:05:19] it was the same thing. Like they come on screen, they're on fire. It's just like, ha active my ass. Yeah. That's a really good joke. The next level is also just one level long or the next chapter. It's industrial castle. This one, um, I think you have to get the sandwich to go into, right? This is the first part. Yeah. I was just about to say, you, you can come across this castle before you get the sandwich or, or even know what it is. And I don't know. I've heard people call him like Lord Farquaad is,

[02:05:48] is holding a princess hostage up at the top of the precipice or whatever. And it's just like, you're not beefy enough to take down this door or whatever. But then when you come back, you can finally rip it off its hinges and go inside. Yeah. That's the one. And then you fight this robot thing who has a lot of like different spots that you can damage. He has this like arm that he can, he like literally walks. It's like an arm hand. He walks across like his fingers. Yeah. Which this thing, when it goes off the screen, you can just hurt it.

[02:06:18] Like I, so I was, I was shooting fireballs at it. And my last fireball was he, his arm was off the screen and I expected it to not take damage anymore. And then I saw the health bar go down a little bit. I was like, wait a minute. And I just kept throwing out fireballs until it broke. Cause the whole point of this boss is to break the different parts of his body. Oh, nice. Yeah. I was using red night at this point. So my electricity, while it had some range, didn't have that kind of range. So that's, that's slick. Yeah.

[02:06:46] So that was just some weird dumb tech that I accidentally stumbled upon. Of course, when his arm breaks it, it doesn't matter anymore. But, um, so the next area you go to at this point, no memory. I didn't, I have no memory of literally any, anything else happening. I knew the alien hominid character was somebody you could play as. I didn't remember how you unlocked them or what. I didn't know you fought them later on. I didn't know any of that. And so, all locked away for a later,

[02:07:15] a later date when I need it the most. So you go on this doc, the doc is literally the whole point of the level is just, Oh, I've got the Triforce basically. And because that level is literally at the very beginning of the game, but you can't progress because you need the compass and some other shit, the spyglass. Yeah. It wasn't one of the items like in the very beginning, like in, in like the armory, like it's not even in a level that you have to fight for. Like I, yeah,

[02:07:43] I played through a bunch of these levels and it's just like, I've got two out of three of these things and I have nowhere to go. What the hell? And then I went to the armory just because I didn't realize it was even there. And there's your third item. It's just like, you son of a bitch. Yeah. I needed to go back. Cause I accidentally switched my, my animal and I didn't realize I had switched it. And I was like, where the hell did my draft go? And so I had to go back and grab that guy. Um, so after that you go and fight a pirate ship,

[02:08:13] uh, which is occupied by ninjas, obviously. Yes. I mean, that's exactly what I expected to see on this ship. Yes. This is a very 2008, the pirates, ninjas, like weird, like, I don't know why they were correlated so much back then. There were a whole lot of deadliest warrior episodes about this kind of thing, but, uh, I don't know. Pirate ninjas.

[02:08:38] They do the like substitution substitution jutsu whenever you attack them. I, which I, which I thought was a pain in the ass fighting, but he, okay, here we go. I have a complaint about this game. My one and possibly only. So you can play as the ninja, right? Like I, I, I'm pretty positive. He's an unlockable character. Like I was trying to research some before we got here. Correct me if I'm wrong. Hmm. Yeah. You can play as him. There we go.

[02:09:08] So I, I was looking at different characters and stuff and it's like, when you actually play as the ninja, if you unlock the ninja, I, I would fully expect the, the substitution ninjutsu type of special magic attack for this thing. That is not what the ninja has. When you play as him, I think he just throws his side forward or something kind of mundane like that. So I, that's really sad. Yeah. So, so now I haven't played as the ninja, so I can't exactly speak to it. So I might be talking out my ass here, but based on what I saw,

[02:09:37] I'm disappointed because not only did we not get fucking pirates on a pirate ship, the ninja that you play as is like a nerfed version of a ninja would be. So yeah, that's my one complaint. This game now has a 9.9 out of 10. Take that guy. Who was that guy that I'm not scrolling all the way up. The very first stream review we read. Take that. Yeah. So maple maple, the, the next level,

[02:10:07] the desert. We talked about this at the very beginning when I brought up that dung beetle enemy. I think that's the only real notable part about this, except there are also these like spider things that come over like centipede things that come out of the center of the quicksand area things. But, or maybe I'm getting confused with desert chase. You basically play this level twice. Yes. So you, the next level after this is the alien ship where you fight the alien hominids, which is real fun for me.

[02:10:35] The best part about this is when you get to this control panel, my favorite part of the whole level is at the very top. You can see in the screenshot, there's one of those little air freshener trees. Yes. So they're hygienic. That was fun. I kind of liked the aesthetic here, although it was, I don't know. I felt like that message that's on the windshield, you can't read it, but I felt like it just may as well have said, okay, all aliens report to the control panel to be slaughtered. Cause that's all it was,

[02:11:05] was just an alien bloodbath at that point. It was fun, but God damn, there were so many of them. This has got to be the most enemies on the screen at one time in the whole game. I'm pretty sure. Yeah. I, I'd venture to say so. Like they weren't overly hard or anything. Like I, I think, what is it? Six. I feel like was the most I saw at one point. And when you're playing by yourself, some enemies are really good about either flanking you or constantly trying to hit you with a projectile and you got to like constantly block or whatever.

[02:11:33] I felt like the aliens were dumber in boxes of rocks. Like this wasn't bad at all. It was like dynasty warriors. It was tragic. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. All right. So you do the desert chase. This is where you get to ride like an alpaca or something. I don't know what the, you would expect it to be like a camel or something, but it's like a, it looks like the thing that, uh, Han Solo cut into. Ooh, the top, the tauntaun. Yeah. And I thought they smelled bad.

[02:12:02] And I thought they smelled bad on the outside. A lot of, uh, Heath Ledger. Is that that actor? I don't know. Harrison Ford. Harrison Ford. I knew it started with an H. Heath Ledger. What the fuck? I was halfway there. Uh, so we go to the sandcastle interior. This is just another castle. We get to crash. And there's a boss right at the end of this castle. And the boss fight is a volleyball match.

[02:12:31] With the residents of the castle, you just murdered all their friends. And at the very top, they're like, Hey, volleyball. And I thought this was probably the most appropriate of boss fights at this point. I mean, the other boss fights that you come across here, they're pretty well designed. They got their gimmicks, but at this point, like I wasn't laughing. I wasn't like, you know, coming out of my seat because this was so unique. This was just another example of, this is what this game is. And I accept it. And I have to defeat them at beach volleyball.

[02:13:01] Let's go. The whole thing is that I've beaten this game at least four times. And I don't remember this. Like how, how, what? I don't know. For me, this is something I'll never forget. Although I will say lining up the volleyball is kind of a pain in the ass, but you kind of got to do that. That typical, like if you watch the, the shadow on the ground and line up the shadow, you can kind of get yourself in the right position, but, but, but I was struggling.

[02:13:31] I was struggling because I thought I could jump in the air and hit it, but you can't really do that unless you're on the same plane. And again, like you said, you have to be looking at the shadow. So if I'm in the middle and the shadows on the bottom, but if I jump and it looks like I'm right next to it and I try to hit it, it doesn't hit. And I'm like, I don't understand. Yeah. I was trying to do some like wicked spike maneuvers and stuff like that too, but no, you got, you got to play it safe. You got to play it practical, but yeah. Castle, castle crashes, everybody. Beach volleyball. Is that like a dead or alive kind of a spinoff?

[02:14:01] It is. Yeah. Extreme beach volleyball. I love it. All right. So chapter nine, uh, you, you fight a corn. I don't remember any of this. Like, this is insane to me. This is super easy boss fight, by the way, this boss literally heals you. Yes. Like with the corns that come off of it, which is funny because the whole time you do heal from eating. So it just makes sense. But yeah, I don't have any colorful commentary for this one because this one was kind of in and out,

[02:14:30] but I will say quite literally, this made me hungry enough to go pop popcorn for what that's worth. I mean, that corn looks delicious. Honestly, it very much does. Again, this game continues to impress. All right. So the next area we go to, uh, we fight Medusa who is combing her, her snake hair. I don't know. The, the best part about this is that she has one singular boot. Yes. Which this is a running joke in league of legends. Like, I don't know if you play league of legends.

[02:15:00] No. One of the primary items that you build in that game, it's a MOBA. So you're like the whole time you're get collecting money and building items. And one of the primary items you build is boots. You, you get the boots of speed or lightning greaves, like whatever, like it doesn't matter all, all these different boots that do different kinds of things, but primarily it makes you faster, which makes you more capable and combat. There's a character named Cassiopia who is a snake lady. And so the whole joke is that she gets one boot.

[02:15:28] And so that's what I, that was my joke for Phillip who is editing. Hi, Phillip. Hello. Played league of legends. One boot. Very funny. I don't remember much about this fight because I, we, I just beat the dog. I was too strong. Yeah. She, she'll like spit out or, or deploy like snakes on the battlefield. And I found them to be more of an annoyance than anything. Like to me, this particular fight wasn't all that memorable.

[02:15:58] Although I got to say, I do like the design of Medusa, the one boots and the, and her combing her shits. When you come in, like, I don't know what it was. Like, I love the designs of some of the bosses and Medusa's up there. Oh, the funny thing is that she's looking at herself in the mirror and the mirror is broken. There's no glass. Yes. Yes. Terrific. The next level, we got a returning guest here. The,

[02:16:23] the first level of chapter 11 full moon is the dude. Do you see that guy there in that screenshot in front of the moon? Oh my God. That's so perfect. Yeah. So the deer makes an appearance. It's like the mortal combat Easter egg. When you're trying to fight reptile and you need Santa to go in front of the moon, this is the, the deer shooting himself. Guaranteed. You're going to take some hits from the enemy because I would stop everything that I'm doing to watch that deer.

[02:16:54] But other, other than that, not anything particularly. You go through the snow world and then you get to the ice castle, which you fight. I imagine his name is the ice King. I forget. Um, but, uh, this boss fight was hard. Objective. I died. We, I lost a couple of times on this one. I didn't know what changed. Yeah. It's, it's one of those where I feel like a lot of games like this kind of have this, but like it's, it's an obvious,

[02:17:23] uh, development wall for the character. Like, like I feel like the game wants you to kind of slow your role. Go back, level up and get different abilities or what have you, because yeah. Right. If you're just cruising through the game, normal pace, unless you're really, really good at this game, you're getting your ass beat here. And yeah, you have to go in level. I feel like. Yeah. This dude is fast. He like teleports around and it's like, Oh geez. It's really hard to,

[02:17:52] I think a primary problem I had was that I was magic based. And so I was like, I would shoot one and maybe hit him, but like, I'm not hitting him with more than one attack before he does disappears and does something else. It's very frustrating. Yeah. I, I, I very much dislike bosses like that in general. Like I, I get it. It's, it's kind of a way to force you to do something different with your skillset. But in games like this, when you're like level loading a particular skillset. And now that skillset is useless.

[02:18:20] That's agitating to say the least. Well, speaking of the opposite of agitating, we got this next level, the chapter 12 beginning, the wizard castle takeoff, which is like this complete game play change where you're just going up and down rather than left and right. And you're like flying around in these rocks. There is like no chance you loot. You die here because I hit almost every rock on accident.

[02:18:48] Like you have no chance to dodge them. Like you just, it just, whoever is on the right quadrant of the screen, you're getting it. Like it doesn't matter. And, and as a player, you need a level like this, especially after the last boss. I felt like this was the developer kind of congratulating you going, Hey, you did a really good thing. Now go, go have some fun, go have some fun. It's fine. Look at this cool animation we made. Right? Like, and I like games that do that too.

[02:19:18] Like they'll just pull something completely out of left field and, and change up the gameplay a little bit. And it's low risk too. So you don't have to learn a new skill or anything. So I, I like this level a lot. Yeah. And it's a complete dramatic change going into the very next level, the interior of the castle, which has like a checkpoint system. This level is heinous and they could have did something evil.

[02:19:47] They could have made you have to redo the whole level. Like, like, like, like Contra style, you know, like they could have made you do everything over again. But whenever you beat a boss, there's three bosses in this one level, whatever you, uh, and the problem is that most of the mobs are weak to, aren't, are, uh, resistant to fire, which is really bad for me because my character was a fire guy. So it's like, uh, it was, it's a very tough,

[02:20:16] it's a very tough situation. And they could have made it to where you had to fight all the bosses again. If you died, that would have been terrible. But luckily if you beat a boss, you don't have to beat them again. The first boss being the painter, which is somebody who I remembered randomly. Like as soon as I got in here, I was like, I just had memories suddenly again. So it's like, I've definitely been here. Uh, I've definitely seen this fight before. I know how to do this fight, but all the other fights, I didn't remember the ice king. I didn't remember, you know what I mean?

[02:20:45] So it's really weird how your memories work. Yeah. I, I'd be interested to really dive into your brain and figure out why this one particularly stands out. But I mean, the, the character design in and of itself is pretty unique. And I think there's even a, maybe I'm thinking of it wrong, but there's a loading screen animation, I think where the pink night is throwing like her lollipop into this dude's dome. Like I remember something like that. Like, but yeah, very unique. Yeah. This guy's cool. He paints a bunch of like, uh,

[02:21:14] adult swim looking characters and they start Rick and Morty all over the place. I don't know what's going on. Uh, but they are it's, there's a snail with a nose and this weird red, a pig rectangle. I don't know. But, uh, this is a really cool fight. They, all they really do is kind of wander around. So you just have to avoid them. And then you just keep blasting this dude with magic. Like, like this guy's doing the screenshot. That's what I was doing. Yeah. Terribly hard. Yeah.

[02:21:42] It's easy to get distracted by the enemies he creates, but no, just, just ignore them. They're low threat. Stay on task. And you're fine. You get to the next area and this is where you fight the Cyclops again. And he's carrying the coffin that contains the groom. I love, I love how morbid that whole thing is. I don't know why, but just something about him coming out of the lava and then bringing the dead body of his, assuming his best friend or whatever for vengeance.

[02:22:11] Like, you know what? I almost wanted him to win for as cool as that looks. Yeah. You deserve this buddy. But, uh, this fight was annoying because like he starts Pogoing around on the coffin and then it's just like dodge for a while. And I'm like, ah, come on. I want to be able to hurt you. Yeah. Why are you hiding? Yeah. Flying enemies in a side scrolling, beat them up or hack and slash is already bad enough. But when you have an enemy that, that continually kind of just does that throughout the fight, that's yeah. That annoyed the hell out of me,

[02:22:42] even though he's still got some wicked points for being cool as hell. I want to mention here. Uh, I'm going to talk about it a lot in the final battle, but there, the character I was playing, the purple night, the blacksmith apparently. So, uh, everyone has three different magic spells. You have the X spell, the Y spell, the A spell, which I think everyone has a jumping spell basically. Uh, but the black knight has this like springboard and he goes really high up and then you can like kind of spin attack while you're up there.

[02:23:10] And this was something that I, I think we lost the first time we played this cause I was continuously trying to hit him and I kept taking a bunch of damage, like jumping into him and swinging and then not being able to hit him. So very weird that they turned his hitbox off, but oh well probably just to stop speed runners or something. Yeah, maybe I could, I could, I would not put that past the developer. The next area is, was so hard. Like this is the necromancer fight. He brings up like four way,

[02:23:40] three or four ways of enemies and they are just every enemy from like the entire game. And this was just so hard for some reason. Like, I don't know what the hell was going on because it's not the low power. Like the people you fought when you were level three are here, but, but they are not level three. Like they are like level 30 or whatever you're supposed to be at this point. Yeah. They're over, over leveled or at least evenly leveled.

[02:24:04] But I think what made it hard is there will be times where there'll be enemies on screen together that were not together when you're going through the game normally. So depending on what attacks they had, they would almost kind of be able to cheese you in a lot of ways because you don't put one enemy that can use projectiles alongside someone maybe who can't or what have you. But yeah, I, I noticed when they mixed characters from different levels, that's when it got real difficult. Yeah. Also the whole battle arena like is littered.

[02:24:33] The whole floor of the arena is just a bunch of enemy bodies. So it's like, there's also that kind of like your brain is just overloaded. You're just seeing, it's like a, like the, the, the Tesla cars, the capture, you know, it's like, where's the bicycle, but there's like a bunch of shit in the fucking way. Yeah. It was, it was very easy to kind of get yourself lost or at least if you knock your enemy down and you blink, then you lose them. And that's hot. That's tough. All right. So we're at the very end of the game. And again, dude,

[02:25:03] this was hard. This sucked. It was difficult. This took me like five tries. What, what level were you when you finally went to the final battle? Do you remember? Oh man, I think I was like 36 or 37. So I was, I was definitely way past the point where I was only getting one point every time I leveled up. Yeah. But yeah, it's, and the way I was, the way I distributed it, I, I maxed out my magic and I was like a third of the way through on melee damage, but then I was starting to max out my defense just to glass,

[02:25:33] because I wasn't a glass cannon anymore. Uh, I was tired of dying so much, but yeah, I was not doing enough damage because the way you fought this, this final boss, uh, you, I basically had to melee him to death, which took extra long because I neglected that. So. Yeah. The electricity from the red night was awesome up until this point. Cause I, I couldn't use it consistently either. So yeah,

[02:26:02] it was just a matter of falling back on melee attacks, which was fine. There's plenty of ways to do it, but yeah, I mean, it's hard because it's a final boss. What are you going to expect? Right? Yeah. So there's like eight fucking phases. It just goes on and on. And this isn't even my final phase. Like you said that four phases ago. Yeah, but it's not, it's not anything huge. Just, uh, you just got to figure out the patterns and stuff. Yeah. I will say though, and maybe it's just me. I,

[02:26:32] I didn't really care for like the design of the final boss. Like I, I don't know what I was expecting, but I was expecting something different, but I, I don't know. It was, it was a fine final battle. Yeah. I think, I think cause a lot, most of the phases are him in this tiny little form that you see at the very beginning of the game. I think it's just like, whenever he does his next form, it's like, Oh, he's going to be crazy now. And then he's just still his dude is normal size. I'm like, Oh, okay. No, right. Yeah, exactly. All right. So that's the fucking campaign.

[02:27:01] We got a couple of different like things that you could do. You could do the arenas. We skipped over those. You run, you run into all these different kinds of arenas and those are all like wave based kind of thing going on. You can also fight multiplayer arenas where you fight each other. And there's a bunch of different like game modes. I couldn't find these on the wiki for some reason. So I'm just going off of memory, but one of them is just normal. The other one is only ranged attacks, like with your bow and arrow.

[02:27:30] And I think it equalizes all your stats. So everyone's like, it's like a Pokemon like stadium, how it makes everyone level 50. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so then there's another one where everyone is hulked out mode. And then I think the last one is treasure mode where you're digging up treasure, but what, so you could steal each other's treasure, but what always ends up happening is you can hit each other with the shovels. And so like you, you just fight with the shovels again, like it just becomes a fight over the shovels.

[02:28:00] Yeah. I didn't spend too much time in the arenas themselves really, but it's a fantastic addition. And I love that they put some different modes in it and, and trying to change things up. I mean, this was again, this was a 2008 Xbox live arcade game. And the depth of this game just continues to astound me. It is great. Uh, there was another game mode that you could play called all you can quaff, which doesn't exist anymore. Listeners. So if you go try to play it,

[02:28:29] it's not there unless maybe if you play the backwards compatible 360 version, I don't know if it got patched out or not, but, uh, this thing is basically you're just mashing buttons until you eat something. And then you press another button. I think it was a, to ring a bell and get somebody to bring you more food. And then you mash the buttons again. Uh, so this is from the wiki right here. Uh, no, Matt, do you want to read this? Like for the wiki? Oh, here we go. Yeah. So the player repeatedly alternates between pressing the X and Y buttons to

[02:28:58] eat whatever food is in front of him slash her. Then the player would press the a button to ring a bell, which would summon a new plate of food. A flag is shown behind each player to mark how many plates of food have been eaten. The further the flag is up, the closer the player is to winning. Yeah, I did. I don't remember this probably because I'd never played it more than once. Okay. Yeah. I had no idea. This was a thing, but honestly,

[02:29:26] this sounds like Thanksgiving at my folks place. This is kind of what we do. It sounds like a, I brought a Pokemon stadium earlier, but this sounds like a Pokemon stadium mini game. Yeah, exactly. So did you play back off barbarian? I did not. I did not get to this, although I kind of looked it up to see what it was and, and you, you got in our notes here. It's kind of like DDR sort of. So fill in those gaps. What the hell is this thing? So it's a,

[02:29:52] there's a grid map and you have your four directions and, you know, when you're playing on your console of choice, you have the, the buttons are colored. I don't know how this works on switch or the steam or steam for that matter. But on Xbox, it's like up, like the Y button is yellow, you know, and the B button is red. A is green. X is blue. And so whenever you go in there, it's like a, what is it? A stroke test or whatever.

[02:30:20] So you have the four cardinal directions. Those are the only directions you can go in. And then the Y button is up on your controller, but the color for yellow, which is the Y button is down. So if you press yellow, the Y button, the yellow button, you'll go down instead of up. So you're,

[02:30:39] you're fighting with your brain of like the directions of the buttons that you're pushing with the colors that are on the screen that are telling you what direction you'll go in. And the whole game is that you want to survive as long as possible as more enemies get introduced. And the enemies are trying to corner you and stomp on top of you. So it sounds like you have to make these decisions like in real time while you're being chased. Is that right? Yes. Yeah, it is stressful.

[02:31:08] And there's an achievement from doing it for two minutes and 30 seconds. And I would get consistently to like one minute 40 and I would just get cornered and killed instantly. I don't know how, I don't know how, it's not a rhythm game. It's, I say it's like DDR, but really it's just, it's hard to explain. It's not like DDR that much, but it sounds fun. I mean, I kind of like games like that. Like it's, it's, it's like a gigantic quick time event that kind of makes you, I don't know, think twice about what you're inputting, but yeah,

[02:31:37] I don't know. I'm going to have to give it a try and let you know what I think about it. I mean, it's, it sounds fun. Like I, I like being put in stressful situations like that. Like I feel like I do better, but I don't know. Maybe I'll get my ass handed to me. We'll have to see. I it's, it's addicting to, in a, to a degree, but it was like, Oh, I could just could not, there was a wall that I just couldn't get past. Every time I would get close to it. I don't know if I was panicking out of like fear or like what, but like, I would always fail at like the same time. And I'm just like,

[02:32:07] I don't know how to get better at this. Like there's something happens that the, I don't know. Cause they're definitely getting more. The AI gets more aggressive. They get faster. It's like, there's something happening, but I don't know. Nice. But that's castle crashes, everybody. So we're going into our final words. If we're going to recommend this game and all of that stuff, I'm definitely going to give this a huge, gigantic recommendation. I think it's insane that it took us years to get to this game.

[02:32:36] I can't believe this game fell through the cracks. It's just, there's so many co-op games out there. You would be absolutely shocked. Even like when we first did this podcast, I was like, how are we going to, this is going to be like a five month long podcast. So then we're gonna have no other fucking games to talk about. We're going to talk about halo, the gears and then rock band. Then what, what else is there? But there's so many games that castle crashes falls through the cracks. Um, and this is one of the best co-op games that you could, it's one of the most accessible co-op games. Uh, and the,

[02:33:05] it's one of the most silly things that you could play with somebody who doesn't even really play video games. I think this is a great game. I think people should all experience it. And I think most people probably have experienced it already. What about you? Yeah. Yeah. I mirror a lot of what you're saying too. It's, it is very surprising to me that I remember hearing about this game back when it first came out and then it just kind of evaporated and it just kind of, kind of faded away, but it is a fantastic game. And, and the nice thing about it though,

[02:33:35] and I, I can vouch for this personally. I did not get a chance to play this with anybody else really. And it's nice sharing my experience with you here, Nave and kind of going back and forth on what we experienced, but you don't really have to play this game with somebody. It is very playable on its own by yourself, but you got to play this with somebody else because it's kind of like you were saying, like the way the game works, it's got a great sense of humor.

[02:34:04] It's got great gameplay. That's easy to pick up and run into and playing with somebody else and having up to four people with you would be a hell of a good time. I can see that even not having experienced it myself, this game absolutely holds up. I don't know why I took this long to play it myself either, but it's, it's easy to get ahold of now it's on the switch. It's on PlayStation four where we played it. If you got an old Xbox three 60 lying around with, it's still installed or whatever, go boot that son of a bitch up. I mean, this is a fantastic game.

[02:34:34] Like go, go play it. Like, why are you still listening to us? Go play this game. What happened to you to make you this way? Right. All right. I want to thank you so much. No, Matt, for coming out here. This was, this episode is a little bit longer than I was expecting it to be, but that's okay. I want to, I want you to go direct everyone to your podcast. What are you doing? What do you want to shout out? Yeah, definitely. So once again, I have a podcast called the retro wild lands. You can find that podcast on all the major podcast networks.

[02:35:04] Just search the retro wild lands. We're also on social media. I do the social media thing. You can find all of that at our link tree. Link, tr. E E forward slash retro wild lands. I put out episodes more or less whenever I have the time, but we've got a great back catalog of over 65 episodes, some old school retro games, some ones that are kind of modern ish. And I got a couple of top 10 lists in there to sweeten the pot as well.

[02:35:29] So I would love for you to come hang out with us as we take our expedition into the gaming wild lands. Oh, and if you need more of an incentive, it's led. My expedition is led by my dog and he's a cutie. So come hang out. If anyone knows anything about anything, listening to the show, it's a podcast being led by a dog. I don't know if you've seen our thumbnails, but that's the running gag is the, is the Molly dog. It's really awkward because I have two dogs now. So it's like,

[02:35:59] when do I introduce Luna to the podcast? Like thumbnail, if ever. I, I, I hate to say it and I'm sure, I'm sure my other dog is going to hear this one day and be pissed at me. But my, my, my second dog, his name is Dexter. He's, he's just our old man Chihuahua. And I definitely have a favorite of the two dogs. DD is my favorite. So I put DD on my low. I put DD on my logo too, but I mentioned both of them on the show every once in a while. And they have speaking parts on the show every once in a while too.

[02:36:29] Not everyone, but some. So if you want to hear my dog talk about what he's up to, come on over. It's a good time. Oh yeah. Well, uh, that was castle crashers next week. We're going to be talking about Pico park too. I still don't know how to end these episodes. So, uh, goodbye. Let's go castle crash. Someone say goodbye. Goodbye.