Retronauts - 648: The First Games That Scared Us

Episode Date: November 4, 2024

For Halloween, Nadia Oxford, Ash Paulsen, and Victor Hunter talk about retro games outside the horror genre that scared them. Boo! Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

This episode of Retronauts is brought to you by fine literature. This week on Retronauts, does anybody really need more than eight bits of horror? Welcome to Retronauts. I am your host for this week, Nadia Oxford. Actually, I'm Nadia Axford. This is a spooky Halloween episode, you know, however the kids say it these days. So I'm in the mood to talk about horror and video games, in retro games in particular. Not necessarily horror games specifically, but those moments of shock and unease from games that you least expect. And here to talk to me about our digital nightmares, our two very well-known Retronauters, which I just invented that. term, I'm sorry. We have Victor Hunter and Ash Paulson. I want you guys to say hi, starting with Victor Hunter. I believe you mean Specter Hunter. We actually had a talk. Victor was on the Acts of the Blood God RPG podcast yesterday, and we're talking about how your name is perfect for a vampire hunter line. Sure, Victor Hunter, vampire hunter. Monster Hunter. Monster Hunter. Yeah, soon we'll be haunting monsters again in the winter.

time. Oh, that's so good. Victor, Victor von Frankenstein. Also, Victor van Helsing. Also, who's, who's Victor in, isn't there Victor in Darkstalkers?

Isn't there Victor in? I think there is. There's a Victor in Castlevania. Is it Laura Raptor? Who's, uh, who's, uh, his name is Victor. I don't remember. Yeah, yeah.

There's, uh, Victor's a scary name. It's, it's, it's frightening. Victor also rhymes with Richter, so there's also that. There you go. Right? There you go. There was a Victor, Belmont. Is there?

Yeah. Somewhere. I don't recall there being a Victor Belmont. We're going to have to look up the family tree, but first. As you introduce yourself, and I'm going to find out if I have a Belmont. Ash, do you like have any sort of vampire hunting blood in? Unfortunately, I mean, there's, of course, the, you know, Ash from Evil Dead, but otherwise, I don't really have any cool, like, there's like, you know, I guess, match Paulson.

Monster Match. Yeah, Mass. Paulson is pretty good. I like that. I guess Axe Paulson, but I don't want to steal. I don't want to crib, you know, your style. I was going to say axed or hunter, too.

So we can't all be axed. Okay, we can't all do that. So I guess Mash Paulson, rash palson, you know, scary rashes, I don't know. Rashes can be very scary if you don't know what they're coming from. Yeah. I guess I'll stick with Mash Paulson.

But yes, I am Mash Paulson from Good Vibes gaming. It is lovely to be here again. Thank you, as always, the invite and just having me on the show. I love being here. Oh, no problem. I'm glad to have both you here. As for my own background, I can say that my paternal grandfather is from the Carpathian Mountains. So I definitely have that blood in me. And I always love Gothic Castlevania, you know, stuff like that. And I just, I'd love to go to visit the mountains someday. But for now, I am stuck in Canada in Toronto talking about basically, like I said, the, the,

These games that kind of creeped you out for reasons that were maybe purposeful or not purposeful. Hold on. Everyone chill out for a second. Victor Belmont from Castlevania Resurrection, the canceled Dreamcast game. I knew. I knew. I knew it. I knew it. Nice. Nice. I knew it. You're a ghost. He's got art and everything. He's, yeah. He's got art. He was almost alive, people. He was almost alive. He was almost there. It wasn't enough just to just to rhyme with Richter. You had to have Richter and Victor Belmont. I'm a very special boy.

I get these sorts of things. That's true. Fair enough. I've been very good. So first of all, how do you guys celebrate Halloween? Like, Victor, I know you're on the road right now, but like, say you're at home. Do you, like, kind of dress up and go out and flaunt your stuff? Or do you just, like, stay home and hand out scary things to children? I'm, I'm, there was a time, yes.

As an artist, I'm a bit of a perfectionist. And when it comes to Halloween, that becomes a debilitating. paralysis where I think there's a costume. I used to do a bit of cosplay and I used to go all out for Halloweens. And then I always wanted to like one up myself. And then as I became an adult, I realized I don't have time to keep one-upping myself. So rather than make a costume that I am not proud of, I will sit alone in my apartment and play Fatal Frame with my cat. It's all or nothing. My wife is a, a cosplayer extraordinaire and makes costumes and makeup effects and and like monster suits for

film and TV. Oh my God. I wanted her to make me a suit. I want to have a suit. I want to have a tiny monster suit. Well, for a mere several thousand dollars, one can be yours. That's going on the back burner. But she goes all out for Halloween.

She always looks amazing. So, yeah, we'll see. I haven't quite figured out what this year is going to be. but I would like to do something. I am definitely considering, like, if the weather's nice, which it's supposed to be, I might go do something. Like, when I was at OdeCon, I was a bookseller, Honda Chan. I don't know if you know that, like, manga slash anime, but I'm guessing you do,

because it's such a simple costume, and it actually went over quite well because it's just, like, the manga slash anime is about a skeleton guy who sells books. And I absolutely adore the series because it gives you an insight into what it's like to work retail in Japan. And you don't get to me manga like that. and it's really interesting. But Ash, yourself, are you doing anything Halloweeny? So Halloween is actually my wife's favorite holiday,

so we always try to go, you know, celebrate the whole month of October, really. And so we've really been watching like horror shorts on YouTube every day for one thing, which has been a lot of fun. And then I, myself personally, as well as with my wife, have been playing through the recent remake of Silent Hill 2, which was perfectly timed. And I'm a master of Silent Hill. fan, which I'll be bringing that series up, definitely during this discussion.

But I'm a huge Silent Hill fan. And so, yeah, I've been playing through that myself. And then also my wife has never experienced a Silent Hill game. So I've been doing a separate play through with her, which has been a lot of fun. Maybe she'll have a revelation like Santana did when he watched, what's his name from Smashmouth, Rob Thompson play Silent Hill. Apparently, that's why he came out with, or he named his album, what was it, like, superstition or something like that.

My dad's a huge Santana fan. He'd kill me to hear me talking like this. Santana watched Rob Thomas play Silent Hill. Thomas, that's it. Yes. And freaked him out. Why would it not? I mean, yeah.

How couldn't it? But yeah, that's basically kind of, so we might go to a haunted house. Sometimes we'll go to a haunted house on the day of or a haunted hay ride or something like that. So I'm not sure if we're going to go out this year, but either way, we celebrate the entire month of October and try to watch at least one spooky thing every day, whether it's a horror short on YouTube.

We're also watching Agatha all along right now, which is been a lot of fun. That's obviously horror-coded. So, yeah. Sorry, I have to assume that Santana and Rob Thomas would have been hanging out while collaborating on the hit song, Smooth. Yes, absolutely, which is a great song. I just... So they were playing Silent Hill while they were recording smooth? That's how it goes in the 90s.

Wow. Coincidence after the 90s were a special time, for sure. They were. And actually, I don't want to start talking about these games right away, but I'm so eager to just kind of point out how Stephen King's The Mist was such a huge influence on games around the time of Silent Hill and Half-Life, because no draw distance, what do you do? Well, you put monsters in the mist, which is like an iconic short story. So I just find that extremely interesting. And yeah, I'm sure we'll bring that up. But what we're talking about today is that I think we can agree developers know how

to put scares in games, even if, like, you know, they aren't necessarily horror games. Sometimes they don't do it on purpose. And sometimes our own, like, psychology and psyche can turn a goblin into an ogre. One thing I just want to point out, like, for example, I was scared shitless of, like, when the NES would just kind of freeze up and make a scary sound and just, like, you know, not necessarily a blinking screen, but, like, just, I'd be playing a game when my NES was kind of on his last legs. and it was just kind of like freeze and crash and like kind of scream at you. And I kind of hear that sound of my nightmare sometimes. I don't know about you guys. Maybe it's just me.

Are we getting into it? We're getting into it, Victor. Okay. This is entirely what I love, I love J-horror. It's like, you know, 90s, early 2000s, J-horror. And the technological anxiety that comes with that. Yes. And a bunch of.

my picks are games not it's not necessarily designed elements but like you say things like when when technology goes awry or it doesn't work as functioned and yes uh even putting a cartridge in wrong as a kid or um you know just seeing a screen full of of the wrong tiles in the wrong places yeah that was that's weird it's off putting it's it's it's the ghost in the machine you know it's it's something uh beyond because we are especially as kids so removed from what makes the console run or our technology run as soon as it goes wrong and weird we know we don't know how to fix it or do anything about it and all of a sudden we have this thing that's out of control so that's sort of why i think i think my top pick and i'm

I'm getting to it a little early. That's fine. I'm fine with doing this because I think it sparks some interesting conversation is missing no. Yes. Oh, yeah. That's a great one. Oh, okay. First of all, brief trivia drop.

I don't know if you know this, Victor, but the Ontario Art College or College of Art, however, you pronounce it. It has that really stupid looking table thing above it. And it looks like a jumble of pixels. And apparently the nickname for it is missing no. So we have a missing no in the middle of Toronto. That rules. I feel like I remember that somewhere in the corner of my brain. It has that ugly-ass pencil, like, columns holding it up.

It's the stupidest thing I've seen in my life. Even stupid E-Ristol ROM, like, is just disgusting. But I know exactly what you mean. That is a good pick right there. Yeah. I'm freaking missing note. Like, he could screw up your game. It was the beast.

If you tame the beast, you could have everything. But if it went wrong, you are dead. Yeah. If it went wrong, your save file was corrupted or, you know, you're, I remember going into my Hall of Fame afterwards and it was all wrong. The wrong stuff was in there. Missing No had reached into my past and rewritten my own experience of playing the game. It's a, it's a horrifying thing. I agree. I love it. I think that's one of those things. And then once you, once you grasp those things and understand why they work or why they're there and that it's not something malicious that someone

put in the game. It's a byproduct of how these things work. It becomes, I mean, it's the origin of like all tech-based creepy pasta. It's all, whatever, it's been drowned. It's, it's all of these things that. Millennials are particularly afraid of the PlayStation 2 error screen. Like, you will find YouTube videos of people freaking out. I was trying to play Rugrats in a legal disc and it screamed at me. Like that kind of thing. The red, the red glowing screen and the disc read error and it's right that's weird good that the PS2 like red disc error screen always creep me out totally and yeah yeah that's actually kind of ties into something that oh i'm sorry ash go ahead oh sorry i was i was just going to say like piracy games and er piracy screens

and older games i was going to bring that up like you know um there were some really scary things out there like first of all some of those uh traps that were put into games for piracy reasons were really devious like earthbound would throw an unending stream of enemies at you and of course spoiler alert oh no i played an earthbound rom and i just like this i'm just like this game sucks because i just can't get anywhere but then i played an actual clean rom quote unquote and i was okay but uh there were things like for example the sega cd uh sorry sonic cd um screen yeah that totally that one had the japanese writing on it that as far as anyone know said i'm going to kill you and your mother but all it said was like fun is

Infinite with Sega. It was actually very, by Japanese standards, very inoculous and fun and funny. And North America's like, oh, God, Sodom's going to kill me. What is this? Well, it didn't help it. It had like the super creepy boss theme. Yeah. That is an interesting that cursed art of Sonic

looking like, I don't even know what he looks like. But of course, there's a bunch of fan art out there of that messed up version of Sonic. But it all came together to just feel like something really otherworldly and something you almost weren't supposed to see. which is, again, the origin of so many great game-based creepypastas, right?

It's very, like, part of a pair with the Game Boy Camera screens when you'd exit the screen and you'd get the portraits that had been drawn all over. And then there's the text that says, who are you running from? Oh, my God. What the hell? Oh, yeah. Here, I'm going to talk amongst yourselves. I'll put a picture of it in chat. Is this like an official thing or is this something that's just like, Nintendo's weird. It's a possibility to come up whenever you leave a particular menu.

Who are you running from? The diseases inside of you. That is absolutely. That's so good. It actually reminds me for some amazing because Nintendo does weird stuff like this. Like in Animal Crossing, if you kind of screw up and turn off while visiting a town and you're merged, this is the GameCube version, you have like the, the face of a, what is it, the gyroid, which is just like two gaping eyes and a gaping mouth. And it's just, Nintendo, that's really creepy.

And it's like, Nintendo sending you a message, well, like, talk to a gyroid because you're going to lose all your stuff otherwise. And you pay attention. Don't get me wrong. And Animal Crossing was not afraid to break the fourth wall and inform you, you as a person, had done something morally wrong, and you were going to be reprimanded for it. That's Mr. Resetti's entire function is to say you, you are bad and bad things happen to bad people. Victor, this picture is absolutely horrifying.

You can't see it, dear listeners, but it's like just someone manipulated like a picture of, I suppose, a gentleman and just like made his eyes really like creepy looking and gave him like these forehead wrinkles and this gaping smile. And it says, who are you running from? And this is Nintendo, huh? Yeah. Knocked some teeth out to... There's a few variations of that, and it's also accompanied by a sting. Like, it's a sound sting that is deeply unpleasant. Why would they make it, please?

Come on. Gunpei Yokoi was doing... Or this would have been... Who was the main programmer? I want to say it was hip Tanaka. He was one of the lead designers of the Game Boy camera. Was that R&D? I can't remember which R&D that was, but they were, they thought differently.

They were a funny group of people. I like them very much. Available for pre-order now and shipping next fall is my next book, The NES era, Volume 2, NES and the Console Revolution. This oversized, large-format coffee table book covers every console game released in the U.S. from the NES' New York test run in October 1985 through the end of 1987. That's not just the NES games, though. In fact, the NES library from this period comprises less than a third of the games covered in this book.

The rest is all Atari, Sega, and even in television. There's a strong tendency in recounting the history of video games to act like there was a hard cutoff between the Atari crash and the NES launch. But that wasn't the case at all. The consoles of the early 80s continued to thrive in the decade's latter half, even as Nintendo and Sega pushed their next generation systems. And then, Atari launched a new system, followed by another, new Atari system. It was kind of a mess. But if you were there at the time, it was exciting and a little confusing. I've tried to capture the energy and the true breadth of the early NES and master system era here in photographs and text. The experience of shopping for games, as the U.S. console industry

experienced a massive rebirth. It's a wild book about a wild time, and it's available for pre-order now at limited rungames.com through December 1st. So don't miss it. Something that happened, it was very interesting was, see, one of the things that freaks me out most is when a game takes control from you, Undertale, does that several thousand times, does it really well. I was actually going to say, if you haven't played Undertail yet, play it on the PC, because the way it plays with your Seifals and stuff is so much more effective on the PC. But with the Nintendo, something that freaked me right the hell out was in drag, I've mentioned this a thousand times, but Dragon Warrior, if you make the trek to the Dragon Warrior, which is very hard, and he gives. gives you the offer, do you want to join me for half the world? And if you say yes, he crashes your game. Like, he turns the screen red as if you died and he says, like, you know, take a long, long rest. Ha, ha, ha. And the thing that freaks me out about this encounter is

that when you die, um, in regular Dragon Quest terms, like, you know, you lose your, you can see like your hit points go down and everything. It says, thou art dead. It looks like a normal death. But when the Dragon Lord, quote, unquote, kills you, you keep all your HP. you keep your level it's your experience and your gold that go down to zero why is that why do you your gold and your experience but left you alive while crashing the game and it's like the music when you get to the dragon lord uh when you get when you play dragon warrior and you get deeper and deeper into any dungeon the music slows down it's a very simple tune that's like not long at all but the loop is extremely effective when it slows down and so that music that slow droning music is

playing while the game has crashed. Everything's red. Now, the S&ES remake Wuss is out by just making it, you wake up, oh, it was a dream. It was a nightmare. And it's like, come on. I love the fact that it takes that power out of your hand to like reset and to start again, to go back to the king. Very effective, very effective, a little bit of horror. We touched on this earlier, but I also like, I really liked it when games, and still do when games break the fourth wall, especially, when you don't remember how they did it in the first place and it really takes you off guard. And so I'm thinking of games like Earthbound

where at one point, you as the player and put your name into the game. But if for some reason you forget you did that. And then the game suddenly calls the player by name, whatever name you put in there, it's so freaky. And we could have a whole episode on Earthbound alone and it's horror overdogs.

I did include Earthbound because there are. Same, yeah. But also I'm thinking of, and this actually happened to me because I had completely forgotten. So quick anecdote, Final Fantasy 8, of course, the whole griever thing. And I had to restart my playthrough initially because my friend at the time accidentally overwrote my save file,

which was really unfortunate. And he was like, well, just, you know, played my file, where we were at the same part of the game, into disc once. But it's not yours. But he had named his squall Antonio. And I'm like, uh-uh. No, no. that is that is a that is a capital punishment right there Antonio Banderas yeah like I never I never really renamed the main characters ever in an RBG but especially on the first play through

Squall is going to be squall and that's it there's no no other name he can be but so it took me extra long to finish because I you know restarted the game and I had completely forgotten about the player input element of so when I got to the final battle eventually eventually eventually eventually I had this moment where I genuinely could not remember why or how the game had ever recorded anything that I could myself. And it creeped me out so much. It was great. That's psychomantus level stuff right there. Yeah, exactly.

Which I'm sure, Victor, you being a huge Metal Gear fan, like that must have made you pee your pants or something. Oh, yeah. Oh, I mean, Metal Gear is absolutely the game that introduced me to, you know, you know, you you know, meta contextual stuff in the first place. Yeah, yeah. And, and there's, I mean, whatever, the sorrow fight is, is off putting and depressing and is like, it condenses the entire thesis of like spec ops the line into one single boss fight and, and kind of does it effectively. and in a in a spooky way um but like yeah i don't know metal gears got some moments like that well

you brought up naming your character and and mGS5 has that part where at the beginning you name a create a character and then chances are you forgot you ever did that and you're wondering why did i why did i go through a weird like character creation screen at the beginning of this game and it's it's it's it's very fun but uh there's there's stuff like um yeah obviously psychomantis fight and the the switching of the channel to the hideo screen which is a visual gag that people won't even get anymore because tv screens don't do that um oh right oh man but but then of course that is like part of a pair with with things like eternal darkness's sanity effects and things like that.

And again, fourth wall breaking stuff that, you know, I'm not a, I don't want to hop on the dokey Doki Doki Literature Club hate train because I think that game is perfectly fine. Well, there's a, there was sort of

a counter reaction because I think Dokey Doki Literature Club is a perfectly good game. And then there was a lot of people going, actually it sucks and is boring, and a million games did this before. And yes, a million games have done these sorts of things before doesn't mean dokey-doki-doki literature club isn't a perfectly fine example of some of these things. But, you know, that's whatever.

You know, just because you brought up Metal Gear, I would be remiss if we didn't mention MGS2's in-game with the Patriots and their AI suddenly kind of replacing the kernel and rose and everybody in how you don't really see that coming. I remember when I played through MGS2 the first time when I was playing that part. It was the middle of the night, and I was, like, playing with the lights off. So it really, really got under my skin with the, you know, with the, the, the colonel and Rose and everyone getting replaced with these AIs and their voices getting all scratchy and digitized and messed up. And you can see the skull, like the skull effect in their faces. That's a really good three in the morning thing to happen to you.

Right. Something similar happened to me with Final Fantasy 6. I had no idea if you had a shadow on your party. You could get those random dreams. And I'm like, I'm going to do. just finish at the inn, go to bed, and this horrible sound comes up, like, alongside this tiny sprite that you don't recognize sitting in the blackness. And then, like, another sprite pops up with this really disquiet. This is really eerie sound. And so it's like, find me. You know, because it wasn't, it wasn't even translated properly, which makes it even worse. Because like, you have this mystery man saying, find me. What have you done? And it's instead of like what he's supposed to say. And it's just like, okay, well, speaking of things that aren't supposed to happen, that just happened, that just happened, that will keep me up on night. Thank you, Square. That was good. Because that felt like something you weren't supposed to see as well.

Like some weird thing that just happened by accident. You just had no idea how it connected. Like you had no idea. It belonged to Shadow until you got more dreams. And it's like, oh shit, shadow is this guy. And also the father of Rome. Isn't that cool? So this is actually the perfect time for me to bring up like probably my number one scariest older gaming memory that like when you, when you asked me about, you know, being on this episode, Nadia. This is like the number one thing that came to my mind. It's usually the first thing that comes to my mind.

And so since you mentioned FF6, that just perfectly segues into Chrono Trigger. And for me, I mean, Chrono Trigger is already a pretty dark game. It can be very dark. It can be very dark. It gets very dark, you know, especially when you think about kind of the consequences of some things and what's really going on behind the scenes, especially in the antiquity part of the game. But there's a particular side quest, which I probably already know where I'm going with the Fiona's forest side quest with Luca and her mom. and everything that happens there. That's dark, yeah.

But not just what happens there, but specifically the red time gate. Yes. Because, you know, she wakes up in the middle of the night, and there's this red time gate that comes with all, it's like the regular time gate sound effect, but with all these sorts of added creepy, like sounds on top of it. Kind of like ghostly sounds. Yeah, they're like ghostly sounds. It's in the middle of the night.

It's something that only Luca is seeing, and it's the only time you see a red time gate. And it's like, what's going on here? This shouldn't be happening. Something about this isn't right. And then, of course, you marry that with all the messed up sound effects. And then you go into the time gate and you see what's actually going on. And you see that this is a recreation or Luca reliving her trauma. Yeah.

And especially if you fail what you're supposed to do with Luca's mom, the scream. The scream. So that was something else that I also played late at night by myself. And I wasn't ready for it. Because Corona Trigger is dark, but it's not necessarily. all that scary. It doesn't come at you like very suddenly. If you go to the future, you know, I'm going to see some screwed up stuff. If you go to like antiquity. If you're going to see or hear lava, so you know that's happening. But this, this personal moment for Luca happens out of nowhere

in the middle of the night and it's something that only happens to her. And it's so trauma-based in the red time game. If I recall, the, the sound that you hear is not just like the wushing. It works up to a fever pitch. Yeah, it does. It repeats. And it's a very, eerie sound and you're absolutely right and i remember when i got the scene i don't remember for i was expecting it i was probably following a walkthrough because magazines had that at the time but yeah i remember being struck by how not just the red portal but luca was alone and nobody was waking up like right they had they were just unresponsive and i'm like hey guys there's something really weird going on but you can't do anything they're dead to the world one or the other so that's a good

pick absolutely i love it's just that one always that that's really stood out to me and stayed with me over the years it's just a moment that really influenced me Yeah. Let's, hey, we're just going to piggyback off of each other. Hey, this is a free, this is just free-flowing conversation. That's how I know. Bring up Chrono Trigger. And if you're listening to this, hey, go listen to the sister episode Nadia and I did on Acts of the Blood God.

That's right. About sort of a similar thing, but specifically RPGs. But in that, I sort of talk about like bad ends. Mm-hmm. And the power of canonizing bad endings, there's like, you can treat these things a lot of different ways. And Chrono Trigger is an interesting example of it because there's obviously a bunch of different endings. But for a lot of games like this at that time period, you were getting bad endings but in pursuit of the true ending, which is usually people sort of refer to it as, the golden route, which is the like, it's where things go right and you get the ending that

was intended. And I think, you know, there's a lot of Chunsoft games that are, that play with this idea, things like this Somnium files and going back to, you know, 999, stuff like that. Right. I played that. Great game. But I think there's, uh, there's, there's a lot of power in acknowledging bad endings as true endings and in the Acts of the Blood God episode I talk about Dracongard

leading into Neer with a literal bad ending a sad, terrible like awful ending. Yeah, but sort of tied to this is an experience I have had as a kid, as a teenager, that I guess revealed a lot of the artifice to me or something

awakened in me about how I perceive and consume media. And it may surprise you, but I'm talking about the poster that you could get for Resident Evil 4 of Leon getting chainsawed to death. Yes. Oh, that's the best. I want that. Because that, I think that was the first time I ever saw a piece of, like, when you think of key promotional art for a game, or even screenshots that get released of a game, you think of the character, like, you think of optimized play. You think of them showing off you being victorious or the characters at their best.

And this was a piece of promotional material that showed the main guy that we all love being brutally murdered. But I've never forgot it. It's imprinted in my head forever. Yeah. It's awful. It makes me feel gross and weird and sad and bad. And then I was able to take a step back and be like, well, that's interesting. Why do I feel weird about this?

Because this is Leon dying, let's face it, is a gameplay state you are probably going to experience several times. And Leon infamously is made of string cheese in that game too. so everything is just yeah totally I've actually seen that image be used as a meme where it says like you know you may have like a bunch of guns and whatever but this guy just cut your head off of the fucking chainsaw yeah yeah it's it's just like it's a weird I mean talk about like fourth wall breaking but actually the fourth wall them them pulling you through the fourth wall and then hitting you over the head with it like it's it's a weird promotional material being used to like In your perception, canonize the death of your main dude is so strange. And I don't think, I don't know, outside of maybe something like mortal combat promotional material, I don't think there's ever been anything that I can recall that is like, look at how bad your dude can die.

It's not something I've seen used very often, which is funny because, as I said, it was extremely effective. I love Leon. Like, I think he's hot as hell. But seeing him get cut up with a chainsaw, it's like, oh, no, Leon. What have you done? I don't think they would do that now. I think I think Leon is sacred to Capcom and I can't imagine them ever doing something like this again.

He's very drunk most of the time. You know, another interesting Capcom example of this sort of that comes up to mind and really shocked me when I first saw it is, and I know you'll know exactly what I'm talking about when I mentioned the game, Nadia, but Maverick Hunter X, if you play through the vile route toward the end of the game, you get a cut scene where Vial,

where vial just brutalizes X and Zero. And it's like shocking just how much he messes them up. And I remember like an X is my favorite character of all time. And I know Zero is huge for you, Nadia. So seeing that, seeing Vile just absolutely brutalize X and Zero really bothered me. Like it got a visceral reaction at me. I'm like, I don't want to see X and Zero get messed up like that, even though horrible things happen to them throughout their lives for stories.

reasons. Nothing quite like that ever happens other than I guess at the end of X-5 and Sigma shoots. And that was hard to watch too. But something about the personally brutal nature of Vyroval. He was very brutal about it. Like vile hates X and Xero and you can really sense it there.

It's like watching a Newgrounds video of someone like, what if Mario, but with blood everywhere. And you're like, yeah, but I don't want that. Exactly. Yeah. There is, I'm going to use this opportunity to bring up Shadow the Hedgehog. Oh, yeah, nice.

There's a bunch of endings where Shadow kills Robotnik. Oh, that's right. It shows it. It's so, that whole game is just absurd, and I love it for that reason. I do, too. We should have a Shadow the Hedgehog episode sometime. We really should. I might put that down for my next episode, to be honest with you, because that'd be really great.

I'll talk Shadow anytime. I wonder if Stewart would, would want to talk shadow. Oh, I'm sure he would. Earnestly. Does he like Shadow? Because I know he hates tails. I don't know what he likes. Wait, who could hate tails?

What? He despises tails. I can never be on a discussion with it. I love tails. What has to be wrong with your heart to hate tales? He's a fox. I love foxes. It's tails, man.

He hasn't do anything. He just hangs out. This is the scariest thing I've heard all discussion, is someone being able to hate tails. Just imagine it being said in a British accent and then all of a sudden it kind of makes sense. It really does. We love you, Stuart. quickly is uh sometimes just the primitive nature of a game and you're and if you're a young un like it can really scare you when i was a kid uh i don't know if you've seen donkey con from the Atari's

2600 but it's a real weird looking sprite yeah and that kind of like scared me as a kid because first of all donkey Kong on the Atari just looks wrong we also had a clique ovision and we had donkey Kong on that and it was that looked like donkey Kong but i was also terrified of that because Donkey Kong on the Kliu Vision looks very mean. He just has a very angry face. And unlike Donkey Kong and like the arcade or even the Nintendo, he hasn't like, you know, go ook, ook and dance around and be stupid and silly. He's just staring at you.

And he doesn't move except to like throw barrels like he has like two frames of animation. And if he touch him, you die. And on the Atari, he just looks so much more unsettling because you could tell the Atari was trying too hard. And they just kind of threw in Donkey Kong as an advertiser. we kind of just squirms up in the corner like a gutted fish. It was just depressingly terrifying. Depressingly terrifying.

Yeah. Well, and speaking of, you know, kind of games that use limited technology to express their visuals, there's something that, and I think a lot of people, I've noticed, I've been noticing that the early 3D era of like PS1 and N64 style visuals has been in vogue lately in the indie scene. Absolutely. games like crow country and such. And I mentioned this one T before we recorded Nadia,

but those low poly models of the early N64 and PS1 days were so often unintentionally creepy. And I was thinking about how absolutely terrified I was of the Wampas and Star Wars Shadows of the Empire because they just look so primitive and they just don't look right in a way. They don't move right. They don't move right. They don't look right. I just never, I never wanted to see them.

They always, I would go out of my way to not have them within my camera's field of view. They were also silent, as I wrote. Like, I would just be minding my own business. I turn around and there was, there's two kinds of wampas. There was a stowa wampa, but you find on Hoff. And there was like a cliff level that you did that they were like, I don't know, earth wampas that were there. But either way, they both sucked.

They were very difficult, very tough. And as I said, they could sneak up on you. And when they did that, like, if they were like, three steps away from you. It was like being stuck up on by a creeper in Minecraft. It was pretty bad. So creepy. And that would always get me.

And just so many of those early PS1 and N64 air games, of course, everyone's going to mention, anyone would mention the eel from Super Mario 64. That thing is so, I hated that thing. And of course, that you're also dealing with the idea of diving into a deep pool of water, which back then, you know, we take that, we take 3D gaming for granted these days, But back then, that was still kind of a novel concept. It had a very, it had very good physics, too, as I recall. It did.

And, like, and, of course, the idea of drowning in any game is scary. And that goes back to, like, you know, Sonic, where, you know, the drowning theme happens. But, yeah. But, you know, when it's a 3D game and you're diving into this really deep pool of water. And then, so not only are you dealing with the fear of, like, drowning and sea creatures, but then this giant, primitive-looking eel is just lurches out at you. It's so terrifying. It roars, too.

And it roars, yeah. Yeah. And can we talk about how disturbingly realistic Mario's drowning animation is in Mario 64? I know. I know. It's kind of twisted. Yeah. That one, I think Laura Croft's drowning animation is also awful and upsetting. Yeah. Yeah, a lot of those early 3D drowning things. I mean, we could do an episode on drowning in video games. Yay. Yeah. Scary water. Water, that is not 10 out of 10. But, yeah, that was something they really put a lot of love into. Good job, Nintendo.

You know, speaking of, since we're on the subject of N64 and, like, water areas, I do have to shout out Clanker's Cavern from Banja, Guzui. Because not only, like, not only is the whole area, it's dirty. You can tell it's dirty and it's nasty. They're swimming in this gross, trashy water. But, like, there's also a genuine sense of depth. When you go to unplug or unclogged Planker himself, you have to dive really, deep and there isn't a lot of air down there

and there's very little music, the ambiance is creepy, it feels like you're really in the belly of the beast literally and it's really suffocating and creepy. One thing we actually have to give props to for the N64 is being able to load music on the fly like that and really kind of

get that ambient. They did that too with Mario 64 where if you were on land and a water level, you kind of get that extra percussion and it was really nice. So they use that to a really great effect. Rare did where you're swimming down, down, and the music gets quieter and quieter, which is something they still do in modern games today.

It's a very effective kind of tactic because it really does me. I love to swim. I adore swimming, but I know not to eff around with water. And so stuff like that still makes me very nervous. Well, and speaking of Rare, actually, and this is to speak to something you mentioned earlier, Victor, rare was really good at canonizing bad endings. Or like, even when you didn't do anything. wrong. Even if you didn't necessarily actually get a game over, they were, they had this really

twisted thing they do where even if you just quit out of a game and say, I'm going to go to bed. Okay, save and quit. Then they, like in Banjo, Guzui, they play this messed up extended game over sequence where Gruntilda wins, transformed Tootie. And it's like, but I didn't do anything. I didn't lose. I just quit the game for now. But then they make you watch this horrific drawn out bad ending. And they did that in DK64. They did that in Banjo. It was so messed up. You know, Who else did that? Sorry, go on, Victor. Well, I want to bring up the Donkey Kong country

ending that implies they killed Sonic and Earthworm Jim. Oh, they did, that's right. Stole his shoes and his gun. Or also in the Banjo-Kazooey world. Let's just say that one of the bad endings I found

very, very, oh, so scary. Please don't turn into a hot lady. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, not Victor's weakness. Also, a game that is really messed up. And actually I wrote an article about this that's coming out in a book soon. Kirby 64, Crystal Stars, there are some messed up moments in that, man.

Like, if you get the bad ending in that, I think if you don't get all the dark charts, then you get this ending where who gets, I can't remember, it's the fairy queen or someone who gets possessed. Adeline, right? Well, she gets possessed in another instance, which is also terrifying. But at the end of the game, what's the name of the dark, like dark matter, I think is his name. What's his name? Dark Matter in O2 is the final, final boss. Right.

Okay. So it's Dark Matter takes over the fairy queen. And you don't know it because like everyone says, oh, job is done. Bye, Kirby. Bye friends. And you get this flash of the queen looking at you with these terrifying eyes. And it doesn't linger. They turn that shit off right away.

And you say to yourself, did I see that? Am I getting gas late? And I can't remember the name of the Kirby's artist, forgive me, but he's huge into, like, drawing Eldridge horror, like, H.R. Greiger stuff. So they just kind of put that horror into Kirby because it's so effective that one glance, it's just, like, put shutters, like, down my spine. And that's a reiterated game, people. This is Kirby. And that's to say nothing of the actual Eldridge horrors that Kirby fights on screen as the last boss in so many of his games. Like, I mean, even in that same game, O2 is literally like this angel monster crying blood.

He's a 13th angel from Evangelion. Yeah. It's like there. But, you know, Kirby, that's what he faces Eldrous horrors on his days off. Like, he's, he does. Because it's like, oh my God, he made me drop my cake. I am not putting up with this. Yeah.

But there was a great tweet that Eric did, Eric Van Allen of Acts of the Blood God, where he was watching a speed run of the Kirby and the Lost. What's the new one? Kirby and. Uh, forgotten land. Forgotten land. Yeah. So he's watching, they started a speed run of Kirby on the Switch.

And he's like, oh, what a fun looking game. Let's look so cute. And like an hour later, he's like, why is Kirby fighting the 13th Angel? That's exactly what the experience of Kirby is. One of the many reasons I, Kirby is like my favorite Nintendo character for many reasons, that being one of them. And I just love that you, I mean, Kirby, I mean, you could have a whole video on unintentional slash intentional horror in Kirby games, which is the last place,

ever expect to find a horror in any Nintendo property. That's what makes it so much fun. Yeah. Do you know, you like Simon's Quest, Castlevania, too? Yes. Oh, yeah. I like it. I don't love it, but I, but I appreciate it for how weird and quirky it is. It has a great end game. It's one of the most atmospheric games on the NES.

It's part of the reason I fell in love with it as a kid. But as you get closer to Dracula's castle in, because don't forget, Castle 2 actually starts off on a very sour note where Simon has been cursed from the previous game. Like, he fought, but he bore the scars from that. that fight in the second game. And that doesn't happen very often in Nintendo games. I kind of like downgrade. So as he like approaches Castlevania to, you know, free himself of this curse, as he gets closer and closer, the towns get more and more hostile towards Simon. Like they will say to Simon, you know, don't screw around with Dracula. Get out of here. You know, leave us

alone because they're suffering already. Like there's some monsters everywhere. And as you leave those towns, you start to notice that graveyards are more and more frequent. enemies are more and more of the undead variety. And Castlevania itself, Dracula's Castle, you don't really hang out in it very much, but it's empty. And there's this very creepy, slow song playing in the background. And you can like, if you play Castlevania, you can actually recognize some of the stuff that you passed by

when you were in the first game. So I just really love that atmospheric storytelling. Like, that is really, really good. Your love of Simon's Quest, Nadia, Vexes me so, because I agree with you. And it makes me wonder why you don't still have a threshold for bullshit. I'm too old for bullshit now. I guess so.

But it's one of those games where I'm like, have Nadia likes that. She's got to like this other bad game. Partially, I will admit, nostalgia. Like, I've always been, the first thing I was interested in when I was a kid in video games was the story. I wanted to know what was going on, who I was fighting, why I was fighting. And Castlevania, too, just had a very interesting narrative structure. It was the perfect game where you could wander around and find clues about where you're supposed to go. And then, of course, get the worst ending because you took too long and finished the game and Simon dies.

I forget what happens in the bad ending. I think everything got reversed somehow. It was a bug. But, yeah, I think I first played it at, like, a birthday party. I was just like, wow, I could just kind of do anything in this game. And another thing that was very important is that I was not good at Nintendo games. And Castlevania 2 is a very forgiving game. If you mess up, you can continue right on the spot.

And there's just like that kind of thing was extremely valuable to me as a kid. And I was surprised to let you do it, given how they were up against the rental market at the time. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of NES2s that really creeped me out, and Simon's Quest is a great one. Zelda 2, opposite from Simon's Quest, is not a forgiving game. It's one of the least forgiving games of all time.

So you are absolutely, yeah, and you are absolutely going to see that game over screen. And what a game over screen it is, because if you, well, and not only just the screen itself, but if you, you know, back of those days, the instruction manuals had so much story exposition that you don't get in the game. Yeah. And the whole thing is that Gannon's followers are trying to sprinkle linked blood on Gannon's That's so metal. That's so metal, right?

And so you get game over return of Gannon, but if you've read the manual, you know that they took Link's body and like, you know, did whatever and sprinkled his blood over Gannon's ashes and he's returned. And that's a really dark way for that story to go, especially after Link was successful in Zelda 1. And we know it's the same right in this case. So it's really messed up that that can happen. And it stayed with me. It's kind of the same idea where that hero. even though he fought, he doesn't get rest. It's kind of very token-esque way to approach an adventure.

I like it. There's something about game over screens. And this is something that I think kind of happens more in RPGs, especially of a certain era. But there's something to a quote that you only get when you die to a certain boss. The world will change. I feel like the Tales games are really good for this. But there are some story fights.

where you die to a particular boss and they really like drive at home with a quote that you could only see if you died to them and that's again along with like the RE4 and the end of Zelda or Game Over in Zelda 2 there's like these unique instances that feel like this was meant

to happen in some play through like this is given an infinite universe there is an ending where this happens and the heroes do not succeed and the boss gets to like absolutely roast them once they kill them and and like say something biting and personal and it's it's always like yeah it's always a very a very personal dig at them a couple of games that are really good at doing this in just the most brutal way possible are megaman zero three and zero four and by extension x and x advent but every single boss has some messed up quote they have when they beat zero and it's it's always

really personal like you know you were never meant to be part of this new world or stay in the dust of history where you belong especially in zero four with dr vile zero three and four in particular are incredibly dark games and dr vile is like a really messed up villain and the things he says if he went it makes you feel really bad for losing yeah yeah god zero three and four are maybe perfect. They might be perfect video games. Yeah. I love Zero Forks.

I love the, I actually reading some of the lore the other day about how Titania had a partner, Oberon, like named after the whole like, you know, Midsummer. Midsummer Night's Dream. Thank you, yes.

So I love the fact that they follow that anthology. And actually, I think if the Minotaur beats you, he says like, oh man, I didn't expect to do that. Like he's just like, because he's really surprised. Yeah. He's like, oh shit, I killed zero. Well, what do you know? Yeah.

Actually, going back to Zelda, too, for a moment, because I actually put it on my list because in the Great Palace, a giant slime falls on you and destroys your confidence and everything you've ever done in your life. It just terrified me. It had these really awful-looking eyes. And if you hit it, it bursts into like 10 slimes or something ridiculous. And that's right before the Thunderbird,

who was like still a legendary hard fight. I'd use the game. Do you need to get past that? Spoiler. You know, actually, you reminded me of something I was going to mention far earlier, but Game Genie with certain games, it would mess up the audio and it would make

the music sound all warped and messed up kind of like that ghost and machine type feeling where... He had no idea how it worked, yeah. And you didn't even know what... You didn't necessarily know that it was Game Genie. All that you know is if you use certain codes, it would mess up. And Mega Man 2 was notorious for this. It would make

the music all high pitched and weird and messed up and you never really knew why as a kid. And it just was so creepy. I actually had kind of of a weird scare, like a funny scare almost, because of Game Genie and Mario 3. I had no idea that the king, if you rescue the king while you're wearing one of the suits, you get an extra quote.

So I used the Game Genie. I was with my friend. She brought it over. And we was like, hey, let's play Mario 3 with the hammer suit, you know, infinite hammer suit. So we beat whichever airship it was, we got the wand and we go back to the king. And the king says, you know, hey, buddy, can I borrow your clothes? No, what a drag. And that was the funniest thing I'd ever seen, but at the same time, I'm like, wow, why am I seeing this?

I didn't make the association between the hair suit and the quote. I thought that the game genie was giving me some kind of secret quote. But no, it was just the fact that I actually managed to finish with the hammer suit, which is hard to do. That's a great one. I wonder what he said in Japan. I got to look that up. If you have the Tanuki, he says like, you know, oh, thank you, you're asking me, nice raccoon. And like, if you're a frog, he's like, oh, no, should I use my wife?

on to turn you back. So there are quotes for each king, but they're hard to see. But speaking of Mario 3 very briefly, what is with those hands in Darkland that pull you down into those levels? Yep. In Dark World, there's like a bridge of like fire. And Mario can kind of, you know, he travels the map the way he normally does, one step at a time. And randomly, if you hit this bridge, like a hand will just reach up and grab you and pull you down and force you to do this level, which is used like a short, like, you know, level. But it's random. You don't know when you're going to get hit.

I don't know whose hand that is. Well, it's funny. The truly terrifying thing about those hands is I'm a big fan of the YouTube channel summoning salt, which is all about like the history of speed runs of certain games. And they did an episode on Mario 3. And I don't remember the exact percentage, but I think it's like a 25% chance that Mario can get grabbed by each hand. But those hands for the top level speed runners are run ending.

but it's the end of the game. So you get all the way to the end, and then something completely out of your control happens, you get grabbed by the hand, run over. It's done. You didn't do anything. You got to reset. That's truly terrifying right there.

That's RNG being not on your side. that's um i'm just gonna piggy back off of that and and talk about um speaking of like ends of games and the sort of the the the i guess the the risk reward or the anxiety that comes from being at the end of a game and just generally and especially in RPGs but that you get to that point where it no longer lets you save yeah yeah um you know shit's about to go down and this is this is fallen out of favor. This is definitely from a particular era of RPGs. But I'm going to pull one specifically for this crowd. When you are unable to save and you know you're going to have to do whatever, the final dungeon or the final boss and all three of his forms, whatever. But especially

when it's like diagetic and weird. And I'm specifically thinking of battle network because you get to a point at the end of a battle network game and I think the one from two really resonates with me because I think the end game of Battle Network 2 is actually like beautiful and haunting and gross and creepy

and weird. You go to a Kodabuki town which is this neighborhood that is the border between the digital and the real is getting a little muddied and servers are literally growing out

of things. It's like, it, it has become this self-replicating thing. And all the people in the neighborhood can't walk straight and they can't speak properly. And it's like, the neighborhood's messed up. And then at the end, right before you're about to do the last boss and the final section, Lan will, will mention that the radiation is so powerful that you can no longer even save your game. Oh, yeah. I think that's, like, talk about, like, a beautiful, spooky, fourth wall breaking moment where he acknowledges, hey, you can't do anything.

This is so powerful. It's affecting the fact that you can save, whether you can save or not. Sometimes it's creepy when you just have that one acknowledgement, like, and you say to yourself, did he just speak to me, but it's gone, the moment is gone. Yeah. Battle Edward II is extremely dark in general. It is a weird game, isn't it? It's a weird-ass game, man. It's incredible.

It's a good weird. Yeah. I still don't know how that game got the rating it did. How did that localization sneak by the SRB like that? The Snake Man EXE's operator has an orgasm in front of land. It's really weird. The whole thing's very weird. Speaking of a haunting game.

Battle number two is a great one. Yeah, I love that. I actually meant to mention it's almost the same tier for me. but when you have the wampas in Shadows of the Empire, that weird lurch, that silent approach is what scared the crap out of me when I saw my first mire lurk in Fallout. I hate horseshoe crabs. I know they're important for the environment.

I know they're harmless. And I would flip one over if it was in trouble. And I know we use them for medical science. Like, you know, they're extremely important because they have copper-based blood. But dear God, they're terrifying. These 400 million-year-old stings that have been existing, haven't changed at all. Everyone's like, we're going to evolve.

And horseshoe crabs like, nah. And I know those things on the back don't sting, but they're absolutely terrifying. So not only does this my alert have like a horseshoe crab for a head, but I'm just mind of my own business, like, you know, trying to, you know, shoot rats for food or whatever. And this thing's running up to me silently. Like, I want to talk about crab Jesus for a moment, but you know he doesn't want to talk about crab Jesus. He wants to eat your head.

So I actually freaked down. out and I ran towards a merchant who had like a Brahmin and he shot the thing and I thought that was a really interesting bit of like that was one of the most interesting interactions I'd had in a video game to that point. It really made the the world seem alive like oh shit you you take care of that thing that's about to kill me and he does because like I wanted to hurt my merchandise or my cow so yeah that was really neat but screw my old arcs I absolutely hate them. Yeah on that note I have a real problem with first person games that have enemies that like are face suckers because they're just suddenly on your screen.

And so on that note, I'm thinking of games like Duke Nukum 3D or Turok 2, where they both have these like alien face sucker enemies that just, you can see them scurry along the ground, then suddenly they're on your face. And I hate the same thing with like, and this is obviously not as a kid, but Metroid Prime, for example.

Yeah, I can't. I morph ball through every area that I can that has Metroid's in it, because I'd rather see them latch on to Samis in Morphball mode. than just on her face. I can't stand that. It's terrifying to have a Metroid latch on you in 2D. So in 3D, it's absolutely like, oh, God. Metroid 2 was a very, very unsettling game.

I didn't finish it. But those Metroid's in the depths and the music that was more ambient than, you know, actual music. Yeah, it was kind of scary. And, you know, Earthbound actually like that in a way. And the fact that it doesn't use music so much that use ambient sounds. If you go into a cave, you kind of hear things roaring in the background or you hear weird alien sounds and there's an extremely, extremely unsettling sound effect that you get at the very beginning of the game and you're checking out the meteor and just you hear the crickets and they don't sound quite right. It's used extremely effectively several times in the game. I find threed to actually be one of the creepiest settings in an RPG.

where even though it's kind of funny like ha ha let's catch the zombies with flypaper you are actually you do feel trapped in that tent because those zombies do not f around and you do have to go out but going out is dangerous because you're still early in the game

you only have Paula you have to find Jeff I think in the queue and you have to get into the graveyard basically also you're tricked by monsters and you're put into a cage and you have to call out and that's when Jeff kind of takes over the game. It's a really interesting

little sequence. But Threed until you save it is it just unsells the crap on me. Same with happy, happy village and all the people who want to sacrifice Paula and Charles. I know. And they eventually get trapped in a grave in Threed, which is where Jeff has to rescue them from. That's why he's a grave.

And there are so many parts of Earthbound that are just a master class into horror. And Threat is a great one. Moonside is brilliant. Moonside's creepy as hell. The department store. when it all goes dark, the light, the power goes out,

and they kidnap Paula, and you have to, like, get to the department store spook, and suddenly these enemies are incredibly strong, like what is going on here? The Sea of Eden and the Moni Moni statue, like so much of Earthbound is so scary, but not necessarily in a way that it's in your face.

It's more like something just getting under your skin, and it's just making you feel deeply uncomfortable. And especially the final battle. Like, oh, my God, Guy, Geigis. That's going to say. Oh, geez. The sounds.

There's something very strange to me about the fact you leave your body for that fight. You have to put your soul in a robot. Yeah. So you might not get back. It's a... Yeah. That's horrifying. Yeah.

And you see, and of course, when you're in one phase of the Geigis fight, it's just this blown up sprite of Ness's face and this weird alien, pulsating thing. It's so good. God, I love Earthbound so much. and then like you learn the reason like I had read it before I played earthbound so I said okay I know exactly where this is coming from but they did a really good job of kind of capturing the deadlights and the idea of you cannot comprehend what you are seeing this is something a human being cannot comprehend yeah and that's actually that was very that was frightening for me yeah extremely effective I'm going to bring up a simple one that I think is, you know, it's pretty universal for our crowd, our age range. I would say, I think the listener base of Retronauts will understand this one. This is going to be my most normy one, okay.

But just going to the dark world for the first time in a link to the past. Oh, yeah. I think there's something very powerful about seeing the familiar but twisted. And it comes up again. I know Majora's mask is also on this list. But even just the reuse of assets, but being in a different darker, sadder context is something that Zelda just does really well in general. And I think Link to the

Past and Okrean of Times Time Skip and Castletown and Majora's Mask's Tome. Link Between Worlds? Does a really good job. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One thing I actually loved that Limb Between Worlds is that it showed you how the Hyalians lived in the Dark World, like Lowrull, and how they kind of used that parallel

where in the Golden Land of Link to the Past, monsters are twisted by magic. That's why they look the way they do. But in link between worlds they wear monster masks to scare away the monsters like i think that was a really neat little bit of cultural uh you know cross communication there uh Zelda the thing that got me and still gets me to this day is link alone as a bunny on death mountain yeah like it's still quite early in the game you have you can't do anything so you're a bun bun and you see ganon's tower

there's a glimpse of it and it's flashing like it looks and menacing as hell there's thunder there's lightning. Death Mountain you're kind of familiar with, but again, this is twisted, as Victor said, and you go where there's usually like clouds and rivers, and you just see lava flowing, like, through a dark kind of environment. And the thing

I remember most about seeing this when I was a kid is that they have that little cave where you can find the cane of whatever the hell it was called, or some, like, very late game treasure. And it's just like... All the spikes. Yeah. It's just a bunch of spikes. You can't get on them because there's this weird barrier. And like, what is

this. What does this mean? And you find out, of course. But until you get there, it's just letting you know, you cannot do anything right now because you do not have access. You don't have the moon pearl. So just that moment of helplessness. And the only thing you can find on that mountain is the fairy for some reason. Yeah. Yeah. That's still one of my favorite moments in the game. The way it takes away your agency as a player is really, like not only does everything look and sound alien to what you've experienced thus far, but it completely takes away your agency. agency as a player because you can't attack. You're defenseless. You can't even move the bushes. Yeah. You can't even pick up the bushes. Yeah. And it's really, it's very suffocating feeling.

I remember, I remember thinking the first time I did that, I thought I'd like softlocked my guy. I thought I'd gone somewhere I wasn't supposed to go. Did I mess up the game somehow or the game? What's going on here? It definitely creep me out. Yeah. And the music is a very kind of panicked flute tunes called the silly pink bunny or something like that. Yeah. It's, uh, it's very creepy. I like that it, you know, games, games will still do this now. They'll put you in, in positions of disempowerment, whatever. But this, into the past, especially, like, it doesn't beat you over the head with it. It just places, it takes you and puts you in a slightly different familiar but unfamiliar

context and gets rid of a bunch of your verbs. And that's just, I don't know, that's really good. I, you know, games like Metroid Prime do that as well. But I think the lack of cinematic, like, there's nothing theatrical about it. It is very simple. And, you know, part of that is because it's on the Super Nintendo, whatever, the sort of style that these top-down Zelda's go for at the time. But like, I imagine this, if this moment were done now in a AAA game, you'd, you'd see all the power being ripped from him in a transformation. into something and and like the camera panning across this desolate land that you thought you knew and it's

just like no just put us there let us figure it out as we wander around and just just simply remove some verbs and i think it's it's a beautiful use of of the hardware and it's a really clever way like to get around cartridge limitations yeah this just doesn't really get done anymore or when it does it's it's too full of pomp and circumstance and beating you over the head with the fact that you are now disempowered. There is power and limitations when your creator.

Like, it does. Like, look at how the world ruin in Final Fantasy 6 and Celeste just being put there alone with no idea what's going on, where your friends are. These monsters are unfamiliar. They're all in dead and dying.

So that's a very, very lonely, scary feeling. You have to sort of put together where you are by looking at your new map, your new world map that's familiar but still not quite right. And you have to explore and recalibrate yourself to the dark version of your world. And it's like the first time you get, the first town you get to is Celeste, I think is Albrook. And that's where you find out a lot of what's gone on. And I remember one villager saying the serpent trench is now surfaced. I love that. The thing that was underwater and he kind of like scrambled over

because you have no idea where you're going. Now it's a piece of land, like a very important continent in the game. That's really, really cool. One thing that's extremely good at recontextualizing what you think you know, and we were talking about Zelda, so I'm going back to Zelda for a second.

Are you piggybacking off of an idea? A little bit, a little bit. We did mention Majores Mask already, so I'm going to skip over that for now. but Link's Awakening, especially taken as a sequel to a Link to the past. If you play the original on Game Boy, you're encountering these things that Link encountered in a Link to the past, but in this weird, unfamiliar dream world where everything isn't quite right.

Everything's just a little bit off-kilter, and Link's Awakening did what Major's Mask did in 2D before Major's Mask did it. And we were also talking about the power of technical limitations, ironically, the power of technical limitations. And maybe this is just me being, you know, an old, an oldie, like all of us here. But Victor, you were talking about the pomp and the circumstance. You don't really get that just that simplicity these days as much. And that's a huge reason why I feel as though Link's Awakening's remake does,

across the board, unilaterally does not hit the same highs and the same tone as the original Game Boy version. The chip tune soundtrack was creepier and it made Cahollant. creepier and feel more otherworldly and dreamlike and scary than the fully orchestrated soundtrack in the remake the the pixelated two-d art style was to me just more expressive of what that game of the atmosphere that game was going for than the toy look and the remake and i don't think i hate the toy look but it's just links awakening it hits different the original hits different and i think the remake loses everything about the creepy factor that Eric Van Allen, actually, he agrees with you on that one.

He said something about, and, you know, part of it is personal, like, memory. But he remembers how it was kind of like something about the way the screen scrolled in Link's Awakening to him was very somehow just added an atmosphere that was gone with the remake. And I love the remake for Link's Awakening. In fact, I would recommend playing that version just because you don't swap out the buttons and go crazy. That's true. That's definitely a gameplay quality of life feature that I. Yeah, but if Nintendo ever wants to kind of like give us a version of the game that gives us that little fix, I'd probably refer a Link's Awakening on the Game Boy, too, because something about the aesthetic just really hit with the story. And I actually have to admit, Echoes of Wisdom does give me a bit of that creepy vibe from Link's Awakening in that it's everything's kind of happy and friendly, but at the same time, it's not quite right.

The decoos are just sitting there eating spiderwebs. And I'm thinking, oh, maybe it's part of the curse, maybe, you know, but no, they're just eating spiderwebs because they're chaotic. little beasts. That's cool. I love that part of the game. Yeah. I like that. And it's like stuff like that that's just like, well, yeah, but they don't act like this in

other Zelda games. Yeah, sure. Spider webs. So just weird stuff like that. Or maybe they do and we just never saw it. They were little monsters in Manjara's mask. They tortured a monkey in front of me. Yeah.

Like, what is your problem? You little bastards. I love Decoo, actually. I think they're some of the funniest. characters in Zelda. Oh, Deco Scrubs are great. And I mean, and Zelda in general is just so good at that kind of creepy without being overtly creepy, unless it wants to be like an Aquarium of Time, the bottom of the well. Then we just go full-on horror and you're not expecting it. And I think what's really good about that example is that the bottom of the well is specifically a dungeon that

you have to play through as a young link. But this is, but this is a dungeon that you've, you have to go back to as after you've already been adult link and you felt empowered all those time. You've done two or three temples. You feel more powerful. And then you have to go back to the vulnerability of being a child and explore, in my opinion, what is the scariest part of the game, even more than the forest temple, even more than the shadow temple. The bottom of the well is the texture on the walls. It's skeletons and skulls. Skeletons and blood. Like it's actually quite dead hand. The boss. That thing is terrifying. Yeah. And the 3DS remake makes them less creepy. It's not as creepy.

But the N-64 version, that's scary shit. And you have to go back to playing as child link. It's so good. I think even just calling it the bottom of the well is awesome. That's such a great name for a kid's ass. Actually, waking up for the first time, an

Aquarium of time, that's a big shock because you go outside. Castle Town is in ruins, and this is a place you know very well. And you talk to people as a kid. And then you hear these screams and you don't know where the screams are coming from. because it's kind of a fixed camera angle and that's your first time meeting rededs

and so I'm since it's a fixed camera angle you don't know where you're going either so you have these things swarming you slowly screaming and I'm just like what is going on something has gone terribly bad You know, I had a draft of my picks for this episode that leaned a bit darker, but I'm going to bring this one up just because I feel like I had set up some

pairings, if you will, of like, yes, things that were creepy playing as a kid and then contrasted with like genuine horror, right? And I had picked the dark world. world from a link to the past as like, you know, seeing the normal world through a distorted lens. And I'm going to let my freak flag fly a bit here because my contrasting piece, which is a genuine horrifying game, was Sayanouta, the song of Saya, which is a very famous visual novel that is actually a visual novel, not a Japanese or something.

adventure game or dating sim a visual novel people going to die on this hill but it is it is a story about a man who experiences an accident and all of a sudden his perception of the world around him is grotesque and and Nadia you brought up hey really geiger earlier but everything he sees is like Geiger-esque and lovecraftian and horrifying, except this one girl that he sees named Saya. And the implication is that he is seeing an actual Eldrich horror, but he perceives her as a beautiful young woman. And okay, this is, this is a Japanese visual novel of a certain era. This is a guy in F-14 who wrote the stuff about going to the and wanting to have sex with the mind slayer.

My Gredani and Goldsmith, my dude, my actual dude. But anyway, the game goes horrible, awful, terrible places, and there is truly no good ending. It is all bad and dark and of an era of visual novel that is all about some pretty shocking imagery and stuff going on. But I wanted to bring it up because I feel like this is a side of video game history that doesn't get brought up very often, especially when it comes to horror and our perception of the arc of horror games. I think I read a Junji Ito story like that. Oh, yeah, probably, yeah.

Very familiar. So I'm guessing nothing good happens when you date Cthulu. Well, nothing good happens to anyone in this story. In fact, some of the worst things that can happen to people, happen to everyone, basically. Basically what the elder gods promised when they arrive, which is absolute terrible horror. The other is one other one that I wanted to bring up also in the visual novel realm. And this is one that starts out nice, but ends poorly. And it was, you know, just being on the internet at a certain point in history meant that,

you probably encountered this, but school days. Oh, no. Nice boat. Nice boat. Nice boat. I haven't. I actually have, sorry, go ahead, Ash. Oh, so no, no, no, go ahead.

This is going to lead into a larger point. Go ahead. There, um, I actually didn't know about that meme until I was, uh, I had my 3DS and street pass and, uh, I was actually at Yorkdale Mall, Victor, you know that. And I got a bunch of street passes. And one of the street passes said, nice boat. And I'm like, what does that mean? Oh, man.

David was with me and he laughed his ass off and told me all about the boat. It was a nice boat. I got a street pass once from someone who looked like the link, the creepy link statue from Jorra's mask. And the quote was Ben drowned. And I got chills down my spine. I was like, and I was like out and about doing something. It was a sunny day. There was nothing creepy going on.

But then you just see that and I see Ben drowned. And I see him like, ugh. I just got, yeah. I love that that figure, that smiling figure of Link is real. It's just like Nintendo being, hey, everyone, this is funny. No, it's not as horrible. Yeah. So I haven't played Song of Sia or School Days.

They both sound like something I would love. But, oh, into the larger point of adventure games and not, these aren't graphic novels or they're more like narrative adventures. But I've recently, thanks to a patron of Good Vives Gaming, we have one of our Patreon, on, like, subscription levels is private gaming sessions each month. And so one of our awesome patrons has been taking the chance to kind of play through or have me play through, and they watch the Suda 51 trilogy of the Silvercase, flower, sudden rain, and the 25th Ward. And so you know exactly where I'm going with this.

Yeah. Let's fucking go! So these games, I never would have played them otherwise, probably, and they absolutely rule. The atmosphere, so we haven't started the 25th Ward yet, that's where we're at. So I just finished Flower Sun and Rain. The atmosphere and Flower Sun and Rain is absolutely goddamn perfect and impeccable and amazing. And everything just, it's not a horror game at all, but it might as well be because the way everything is just slightly off. Nothing about this, nothing about Lost Pass Island makes sense.

All the characters are weird. They speak in this weird gibberish. that's like Banja Zui, but creepy. And, like, it's, everything is just slightly off and you never feel fully comfortable with what is going on. And then the closer to the end of the game you get, the more off the rails things go. And, man, just the atmosphere, I was always so unsettled in flower, sun, and rain. And I loved it.

The ending is incredible. The loop of how every day works is incredible. The fact that, I'm assuming you were playing the DS version. Yeah. Because the original PS2 version comes with the, like, lost pass island travel guide. Oh, that's so cool, does? Oh, okay. Yeah.

All of the solutions that you are supposed to find for the puzzles are by reading the physical guide. Yes, this era of Grasshopper is a keynote. It's just the best. Everything is off and weird. And they were always doing, even with Killer 7, they were doing this. thing of like the mundane, daily, there's internal rhyme to it all that I think is beautiful. And that even extends into no more heroes. Every chapter starts with your character waking up and doing normal daily things that are

always just a little bit off. Yeah. You know, Travis gets weird phone messages. Garcia gets weird phone messages. Every day of flower, sun, and rain is like a weird, I know people compared it to Groundhog Day, but I think there's something, I think there's something more interesting to it than that. I agree. And I love how Sumio, like you, the player, through Sumio, are constantly getting gaslit by all these weird-ass characters.

There's nothing really wrong going on here. What are you talking about? What's just, yeah. Talk about Simon's Quest. You're just getting bad information from people. ball. Right. It's great. It's actually, oh, gosh. And just some of the, and then going back to

the first game, the silver case, just the atmosphere in that. It's not quite as weird, but there's just so much you don't, almost like Omari, where you don't know when something's scary is going to happen because it's just these weird sounds. Oh, Marry so good. Freaky images will flash

on the screen without warning, and it's like really scary, or the text will go crazy and be all gibberish, and you're not expecting it. It's, So good. Amory, the scene where you're running for your anxieties near the start of the game. That's like one of the most accurate depictions I've seen of like running from your fear. It's absolutely terrible.

Yeah. Such a great game. Made me cry like hell, though. Yeah. Gaslighting is something that really gets to me sometimes in the right context. Like, this is what I mentioned before on, on acts of the blood God, but Breath of Fire 2 by Capcom. The start of the game, when you are with your, you're at home, you're in a church, your dad, a preacher and you have a sister and you're all there's a dragon that lives in the back of the

town and that legend is the dragon protected the town from a disaster long long ago now it's kind of sleeping and blocking off the source of this disaster so you your father and your sister go to say hi to the dragon you don't know it then but it's your mother they kind of hinted it right then and there uh so you decide i'm just going to take a nap here and uh your father and sister go ahead of you and you go to sleep you dream of a deep you dream of a deep Demon, first of all, you see this horrible eyeball pop up for a second, not even a sound. Then it disappears. Thank you Capcom. And then you wake up. The music is gone. It had like Nice Town music before. You go out of the forest and nobody knows who you are. And you talk to them. They're like, who are you? Are you an orphan? And what's more is you have the dragon tier, which is a little icon that sits in your text box. And if it, it can kind of let you know what the mood is of the person you're talking to. And if it's like, glowing rainbow the person likes you if it's like blue the person likes you but if it's black or red the person hates you and so every time we talk to someone and like who are you what are you doing here

you get a black dragon's tear and finally like you're asking like you know where's my father where's my sister like we never heard these people we don't know who you are and you like you go into your church where you live and the pastor who is a monster you don't know it then but he's like oh yeah we'll take you in you know we take an orphan so you're an orphan so you're an orphan in your own home, in your own town, and no one knows who you are. And personally, that's the kind of thing I see a lot in my nightmares. Just alone and everyone you know is gone and nobody knows who you are. So Calcom did that extremely effectively. And also in the same game, you, this is a very, very twisted game when you come right down to a breath of fire is about like one of the

most evil gods you can imagine disguised as the Catholic Church very badly. But there is an instance where you infiltrate the town where St. Eva, which is the name of the God, you infiltrate the town where his believers, his best, his top believers are allowed to migrate to. And you go into the town and it's all happy and everyone's like, yay,

St. Eva cured me of my disease. St. Eva made me walk in. I can see again. And it seems all right. And you try to leave the town. You can't. It puts you right back where you were. And you get this horrible sting of music.

That's really terrible, just like creepy as hell. And again, now you talk to the people. and he got the black dragon tear and they're like, ha ha, you're going to die here, ha, ha, St. Evan's going to kill the world.

It's extremely effective. And this is like kind of a, you know, just a 16-bit RPG and not a horror game. It's great stuff. That's, that's really good. That's really good. Your first example of Breath of Fire 2 reminds me of another game that does exactly what you mentioned very well. and that's Chrono Cross, which ostensibly is not a horror game.

But the very beginning of Chrono Cross, your surge is pulled into an alternate dimension where he died years ago. And nobody knows who he is. You can go back to his house in the parallel dimension. It's not his house. His mom's nowhere to be found. No one knows who he is. His girlfriend has no idea who he is.

And they all just say, oh, Sergio, he was a little kid that died years ago. But everything else is the same except for the music, which is sadder. little scarier. It's just, you know something's not right and you try to put yourself in Serge's head and you're like, imagine getting pulled into a parallel dimension. You have no idea how to get back. You know your memories are real, but nobody else knows who you are. And like that, the idea of that scares me so much. And then this is more of an atmospheric thing like in terms of the context of the story, but later in the game, the whole Dead Sea sequence is just, it's perfect. Hell yeah. It's especially if you are coming from Chrono

trigger and you're viewing it as a sequel to Chrono Cross, it's, or as a sequel to trigger, it's perfect. It's so good. Dead Sea is just absolutely the music, because I find in Chrono Trigger, there's actually a very, very sad story what happened to,

I can't remember which Sage was pulled into the future once the accident happened with Lavos, but basically he went insane from loneliness. Because he was pulled into the bad world where everything's dying, and he just wants to go home more than anything else,

but he can't because he's trapped. So one of the saddest things that happens in this game is like when he finally get the wings of time. Like he has already installed his thoughts into this little creature called New. So he's still living in a way so that you can get the wings of time. And he says like, you know, once he gives you the wings, he says, just can do one more thing for me.

Turn off this creature. Yeah. It's really, it's done its work. It's labor is finished. Please turn this creature out. And it says like this creature, this creature sleeps beyond the flow of time. It's so good.

And the Keepers Dome is the song that plays. It's a very, very melancholy song. And they play it. They have a remix of it in the Dead Sea, except it has like a lower, like a bassoon or something. It's just absolutely nuts, but extremely effective, I have to say. I didn't like everything Chrono Trigger,

Chrono Cross did a Chrono Trigger story, but it did do it with conviction. I'll say that much. Yeah, that it did. Yeah. Chrono cross is kind of a perfect video game, whatever. I, you know what? I love Chrono Cross.

I love Chrono Cross so much, yep. Chrono Cross, haters, you can step off. I'm not here for that. Hell yeah. You should talk to Jeremy Parrish who, like, wrote the guide for the game way back in the day. Hell yeah. Oh, right. A guide I'm sure I read plenty of.

Same. Same. We didn't bring this up on the Blood God version of this episode. But Nadia, we should have talked about Shadowbringers. Um, test lean. We didn't talk about, yeah. Uh, there, I mean, look, there's a ton of stuff in shadowbringers that is great and off-putting and creepy. Yeah.

But, but it opens with a, a banger of a mission that, uh, showcases the, the, the stakes. Horror of, yeah, the stakes that the people you are trying to help are living in. Um, and I don't even, I don't even want to go into it because Ash, you're going to play 14 with us. Real soon, probably. Yeah, of course. I bet. I just do want to say the in at Journey's head that disturbs me. I can't even go back to Amarang, sorry, which map is it?

Yeah, that's Ammering. Ammering, yeah. I can't go back to it. It just, like, reminds me too much for personal trauma. And that was the scenario that made me just love Alizee because, oh, sure, yeah. What she did and what she stands up against. And she takes one of the hardest jobs in this horrible. horrible world where people are being light

poisoned. I actually adore it when they say, oh, it's not dark, didn't take over, light took over. Oh, it's always the best. That's why the Dragon Lance Legends is the best trilogy ever written. Oh, sure. Speaking of, and this is just more of a recommendation to anyone

out there who loves horror and loves JRP's. There is a perfect fusion of the two. And the reason I'm bringing this up now is because he said, shadow. And this game also has shadow in the title, Shadow Hearts. Shadow Hearts and Shadow Hearts Covenant.

If you want to play a macabre as hell horror-themed GRPG, you've got to play Shadow Hearts 1 and 2. These games are absolutely so good. I was going to bring up the first town in Shadow Hearts 1 where, you know, typically when you start an RPG, you're in a starting town. Yeah. It's pretty, pretty chill, pretty low stakes. The first place you end up in Shadow Hearts, you already know things are wrong and off

and terrible. And sure enough, as soon as you step in, everyone's telling you about the feast that's coming up or, you know, whatever. And then, of course, five minutes in, you discover that you are in a cursed town and they have trapped you here and you will be feasted upon. And it's great. It's just great. And it also kind of harks back to what you were mentioning earlier, too, about, you know, how messed up and creepy can be when a game canonizes or what a sequel canonizes a bad ending. And essentially, Shadow Hearts 2 proceeds on from the first game's bad ending. The bad ending in Shadow Hearts 1 is canon.

And when you play 2 and you realize that, it's like, wait, no, this is what we didn't get the happy ending in Shadow Hearts 1. This is what happened. It's actually Dragon Quest Builders does the same thing. I mentioned agreeing with the Dragon Lord. Dragon Quest Builders is set in that world. It's so incredible. I love that. Same with Dragon Quest Builders 2.

where um it's not the shock isn't quite as cool but it's still really awesome like why are you paired with marloth this is the bad guy why is he here if you find out but uh you do get that really creepy moment where you realize like you have entered into the bad ending of dragon quest two where the uh marloth tried to fool the hero into staying this perfect town that's here is an herb and you get a pile of grass instead and so you have to break out of the dream basically that's good oh man that's cool also also relevant to acts of the blood god listeners and and going off of the like canonizing bad ends or bad futures things like that uh ff 11 has an entire i mean it's got it's got a bunch of weird little timeline hoppy stuff but there is an entire quest line called abysia and it is about a a version um imagine 14 players if you will if you got to play through the 8th umberal calamity. Oh, damn, I'd kill myself.

I can't handle that. Abysia is after everything has gone to shit, and you are playing an alternate version where you are encountering all the NPCs you've come to know and love, but they don't know you, and they are telling you all about how they failed, and they are all miserable,

and they're just trying to survive. And it's not like shadow bringers with the Cristerium, where there's a beacon of hope and cultures are rallying. There's tiny little camps of people just trying their best. And you slowly learn about who you know from the main timeline who has survived and who hasn't and what they're going to do to try to help fix that. Yeah.

I actually think the eighth um, world calamity in FFs is one of the saddest, most heartbreaking things. Like you have the story about Little Omega who's living in that. future and it just destroyed me and even just seeing the intro for for shadow bringers and like oh can't handle it can't even handle the twinning where you read uh is it bigs or wedge one of them left behind notes about time travel it's big bigs the third bigs that's there oh god tataru once you don't have to taro the world's gone gravity just falls apart you can't deal without tataro

I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be. I'm going to be. Anyway, this has been a quite a long episode, but I want to bring up one quick thing before we depart. Dragon, Mega Man 2. Go to hell. I hope you go to hell. Ooh, scary. It is a jump scare.

It is probably the Mega Man equivalent of a jump scare for sure. The first time, when you don't know it's coming, like, obviously now it's like, okay, the dragon. But when you don't know it's coming, and it's right after the screen has started automatically scrolling and you're on these tiny ass platforms. So you're already a little anxious. And then I'll just ape it-ass dragon behind you. Um, well, one thing I do have to mention because it's a horror themed episode, I would be remiss if I didn't mention, uh, Silent Hill just in general. I know I mentioned I'm playing through the remake of Silent Hill, too. But in my opinion, the secret best and scariest Silent Hill game is actually three. And I'll allow it. I'll allow it. I love them all. Uh, Silent Hill one in particular, uh, Silent Hill one's Alchamela hospital, especially once he gets to the other side of it. It's so suffocating and scary. But the greatest thing about it is if you played Silent Hill 1 and you like you know one and three are three is a sequel to one it's like the second part of one story and you go to Alchamel Hospital in both games so if you play Silent

Hill 1 you know how messed up this place is you know how scary it is you've been through this you're like I got this I'm an old pro at this I can do this and so Silent Hill 3's version at first there is no other world you go in it's pretty straightforward pretty like okay I'm going to get in and get out of here it's not going to be a big deal it's all good but then the game makes you examine a door that shouldn't be there before you can leave. There's a door that wasn't there before and you can't leave and it directs you to examine this door that

literally should not exist. And then shit falls apart and it's so I'm thinking about the mirror room and I know exactly what I'm talking about I think Victor and it's just when you see her reflection, Heather's reflection and her the model is it's just perfect. It's incredible. You can't get out of the room and she gets bloodier

and suddenly you can get out of the room. The game is just fucking with you on all cylinders. And it's so scary. I love it. Yeah. Incredible. That's probably my favorite horror, like outwardly horror related anything in a game.

You know, I haven't played like silent. I haven't played Silent Hill games, believe it or not. You should. I need to. Yeah. Because I already said like they're the best.

Don't play the HD collection versions though. Like you got to play them on their, on their native console. Not two. Two play the remake. If it's the only way you can play them go for it, But I would say, if you can get PS2 versions either emulated or running on original. I know that, like, Silent Hill 3, I do love its soundtrack.

Like, you have the vocal soundtracks. Like, Konami just had something going in that era. They did. That they lost that I'm sad. Even the quote unquote bad Silent Hills still have amazing soundtracks. I think even Origins has some great vocal tracks, shattered memories, which I unironically think is an incredible game, has some great stuff. But no, definitely, if you can, Nottie, play one, two, and at the very least, play one, two, and three. They're so masterclasses in horror.

For sure. Also, I think downpour is a pretty good game. You know, I never played downpour. It was just kind of never got around to it. I didn't hear great things. I think one of my friends worked on that. Okay, okay. I'm good friends with Tom Hewlett, and I think that's when it worked on.

He sure did. And shattered memories, too. Yeah, yeah. Well, this has been a very horrible, horrific, fantastic. discussion. Can I do one more? Yes, you can for the road. Encore. One more for the road. This is for my mixed media freaks out there.

I want to talk about the land of the living from Grim Fandango. Because up to this point the game has been in a particular art style. I think everybody is pretty familiar with how Grim Fandango looks. Its whole deal. You then cross over to the

land of the living and it is this cool like magazine clipping sort of like post-war America, things are, things are going good. It's good. It's going to last. Yeah. Everyone has like a pasted, uh, photo realistic smile on their photo realistic face that is all disjointed with what their body is doing.

It's just an incredible mixed media art style that I think hits really, really, really good in grim fan. I like it when you have that change in aesthetics. That can be really jarring at the right, at the right time. Yeah. Oh, definitely. Yeah. And a tiny little one, I want to mention Imakuni in Pokemon, the trading card game for Game Boy Color. Imakuni, which one's that? He's just a guy. His card is a photorealistic man in a body suit. Oh, that's cool. And his description is that he wants to be a Pokemon. Oh, my God.

And he's just, he's just a guy. And he does not fit in the Pokemon world. He does not fit this graphic style, but he's there. And he's going to try to convince you he's a Pokemon. That's, this is the card game? Yes. Wow, the card game works on a fire on cylinders I wasn't aware of. Yeah.

I'm a freak. He's a weird pervert. I guess that's why Eric likes the game so much. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not going to encourage that kind of behavior. I think actually, I don't know. don't know if Eric plays, but he does love crack and packs. So, uh, yeah, as do all millennials, I suppose. But, uh, yeah, for now, uh, this has been really fantastic. Thank you so much for joining me. Um, I've been your host, Nadia Axford. If you like what we do here

on the show, uh, please visit our Patreon at patreon.com for slash Retronauts or just go to richardauts.com. If you subscribe at the $3 level, you get our week of the episodes a week early and ad free. Subscribe at the $5 level to get that plus an extra episode. every month. If you subscribe at Nintendo $64, you get the chance to set the topic of retronauts once every six months. Only one space open at the time

of this recording, so snap it up. And don't forget, you also get Retronauts Discord access when you pledge at any $5 or above level. Victor, why don't you tell us what you're all about these days? Hey, I'll do the Blood God Pod plugs. Oh, thank you.

Nadia and I are also active over on the Axe of the Blood God podcast, along with Eric Van Allen and Kat Bailey. Incredible weekly podcast, all about RPGs. Hey, head on over to patreon.com slash blood god pod. At the $1 level, you get Discord access. $5 level gets you tons of bonus episodes and things. $10 level gets you the pantheon of the blood god,

where we talk about the very best RPGs of all time and some other ones. And then there's the $25 stars of destiny level, which is the bread and butter. Those are the fans we actually like. But we love you all. Also over there right now, in the build up to the release of the Echoes of Van Adelaideal Raid series in Final Fantasy 14, I am running a community playthrough of Final Fantasy 11. So if it's a game that you swore you'd never play or you think is,

too hard to get into. We're running it as a community over the next couple months. It's not too late to hop in and join us. Just to give you an idea of how it's going, we got through the base game of FF11 in about 25 hours. So maybe two hours of that was grinding for levels. So it's a totally approachable game. Don't be one of the people who says you've played every final fantasy, but then put a big asterisk next to 11 for whatever reason, for whatever our arbitrary justification you've come up with. It's an incredibly important game to the history of Final Fantasy and RPGs in general. It's beautiful.

We're having a lot of fun. We have a great community. We're all working together, and it's been a joy. So come do that. Well, thank you for that pitch, Victor. That was very good. Yeah, that was great. What about you, Ash?

Why don't tell us all about yours? So I am Ash, the creator and co-founder and partner over at Good Vives Gaming. me and my crew, we were founded upon the pillars of inclusivity and kindness and pushing back against all the crappy bullying and toxicity that we all know exists in the gaming space. And yeah, we do a bunch of cool content on our YouTube channel. Again, good vibes gaming, features, news, reviews, previews, all sorts of fun stuff. We also have a Patreon, patreon.com slash gb gaming where you can support us at various tiers. And even supporting us at the $1 tier gets you into our Discord server, which I swear to God is that. the nicest, most amazing, kindest community of gamers on the internet.

And they're so reflective of our own values. And I'm very proud of what we've built. But yeah, just in general, that's who we are, good vibes gaming. You can also just find me on Twitter. And I just post about games and dogs and food and all, you know, the best things in life, games, dogs, and food, right? So, yeah, if you follow me over on Twitter at my name, Ash Paulson, ASH-P-A-U-L-S-E-N. but otherwise you can find me on GVG

and in the credits of various Udon video game arc books if you have any of those. You'll probably find my name in the credits of those too. I have a couple of credits myself. Yeah, exactly. We've worked on some of the same books together. We have. You worked on the Maverick Hunter Field Guide, right?

Yeah. And the Mega Man Robot Master Field Guide. We worked on both, yeah. Which are both available for purchase on Amazon. So you should do that. Yeah, but that's me. So thank you, as always, for having me on. It's been a pleasure.

I love doing this with you guys. So, you know, anytime you need a guest, I'm happy to be here. Oh, excellent. Yeah, because you're an excellent guest. We love having it here. We love having victory here. You can find me on social media at Nadia Oxford on most things. I'm posting more to Blue Sky these days.

I think my Twitter is pretty much is there, but I'm not really touching it because it's gross and feel with disease now. But I don't really want to delete it because it has a lot of cool stuff on it. So I'll just kind of suffer. Yeah, so that's what I do. I suffer for your sins. And until next time, don't. Don't pull the cartridge out of the NES while it's still on. That's how you summon Satan.

Thank you. Thank you.