Retronauts - 725: The Best and Worst of CD-ROM Horror

Episode Date: October 27, 2025

Greetings, you rancid retro revenants! We're knee-deep in the spookiest of seasons, which means it's time once again to crack open the crypt and gaze in fright at a selection of horror games that tried their best to scare our pants off oh so many decades ago. In the past few years, we've covered NES and 16-bit games, so now it's time to move onto the world of multimedia: where pre-rended ghouls and washed up actors alike did their best to make horror thrive in an era beyond floppies. On this week's episode, join Bob Mackey, Kaye Ross (of Duckfeed.tv) and Michael Sawyer as the crew attempts to appreciate the art of fake blood and FMV. Retronauts is a completely fan-funded operation. To support the show, and get two full-length exclusive episodes every month, as well as access to 100+ previous bonus episodes, please visit the official Retronauts Patreon at patreon.com/retronauts. Cover art by Nick Daniel.

This week on Retronauts, five easy ways to tell the difference between Mike Dawson and Steve Mason. Halloween, even if you don't celebrate it. That's how evil this holiday is, because on this episode, we are celebrating the season with a third installment of what I'm now calling our annual horror game sampler. So in 20203, we covered horror games on the NES. And in 2024, we covered horror games on 16-bit platforms. So this time around, we'll be covering horror games from the multimedia era, specifically the PC CD-ROM format. Did this increased storage capacity format make games scarier? Today, we're going to find out. And who is going to find out with me? Who are our guests today on the episode? I'm Kay Ross from the DuckFeed.TV network of podcasts. And who else do we have? I'm Mike Sawyer. I go by Slow Beef on the internet. I do streaming on Twitch and YouTube and all that fun stuff. And yes, welcome to the show, both of you. So as usual, we're going to be judging these games via what I'm calling the creepy quotient. So once we're done talking about a particular game, we're going to give a single number based on how effectively spooky the game in question is.

And at the end of the episode, we are going to figure out what is the spookiest horror CD-ROM game of them all. This is legally binding. We are the authority on this matter. Do not question it in any way. Before I go on any further, though, I want to know what all of our experience is with this kind of game on this format. So basically, where do you go back? How far do you go back with horror games on CD-ROM? Let's start with Michael or Slow Beef.

Gosh, I, you know, so I had a PCCD ROM and I'm trying to think back because Gabriel Night 2 I remember having, but earlier than that, you know, just even looking in some of the lists like back in the 90s. I remember playing them, but I wasn't really a PC gamer back then, so my rig was not very good. So it was kind of like I would try to play whatever I could. And I always liked horror, but I had a lot of floppy disc PC games. games, you know, and then when CD-Romb-based stuff came out, I played it, but I tried to play what I could, and a lot of it wasn't very scary or good in the traditional sense, but, you know, you make do. Mike is the one of us on this podcast who has actually created a PC horror game.

Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's like a COVID project, but, you know, a few people online created a game called Atama. You can get it on Steam or Itch. And, yeah, it's basically a mashup of forbidden siren for PlayStation 2 and Jinji Ito's hanging balloons manga. So, yeah, so you can look through the eyes of floating heads that are trying to kill you, basically, you know. It's okay. How about you? CD-ROM Horror Games.

So I didn't have a PC that could run these for a while. Like, with a lot of PC stuff, I ended up coming to it, like, a little bit later. like when it hit the Walmart 999 CD kind of been, you know. But like at the time, I mostly got exposure to some of these as like when I went over to my like cousin's house. And even then a lot of them were like Sega Saturn versions. So take something that's already pretty shaky and then lower the resolution by about 30% and control it with a controller as opposed to a mouse. And that was how I saw this. Yes.

Check those up. Yeah. Oh, those are the days. Yeah, I guess, as for me, our family got a PC in 96. And by the time we got our PC, these kind of games we'll be covering today. We're falling out of fashion. Some of the later ones we're talking about came out in 96. But I knew, based on all the magazines I was reading, that a lot of these games were rooted in full motion video.

And because of that, the choices they were making were not that great, leading to, not so great games. Another component to my history with these titles is I was a big scaredy cat. So that was another reason why I didn't touch any of these games. I actually didn't really engage with horror that much until my mid-20s. That's how much I was reluctant. And now I'm a big fan of horror. But when these games were coming out, I was a teenager. I should have been into this stuff. But I used my consumer choices to justify my lack of a purchase instead of the real reason. I was afraid. When I saw, we'll talk about the seventh guest. When I saw screenshots of that in a magazine, I think the screenshots of the seventh

guest gave me nightmares. Oh no. Which is very sad. Very, very sad. But yes, that's where we land on CD-ROM adventure games. CD-ROM horror games. And a lot of these, I think all of them are adventure games. We'll be covering six of them today. So I wanted to note everybody about our choices. So as usual, we're mostly covering one-off games that were released in America and aren't part of any major series. So Noah Alone in the Dark or Gabriel Knight, Fantasma Goria is off the table. And ultimately, this is just a nice opportunity to discuss games

that normally would not be covered on retronauts. So if we don't talk about a game you love, don't worry. I am in year 15 of doing this podcast. I need to revisit topics. This topic will be revisited. The game you like will be covered on this podcast because there's only so many ideas. I'm doing this for my third time in a row.

I have to plan out my 15th Christmas special everybody. So no game will be left uncovered by the time I'm done hosting this podcast when I pass away. So that's actually very spooky, that fact. Oh, no. So that's the last time we'll cover my own death on this podcast.

Maybe. Maybe. What we're going to find out. So we're going to move on to the first game on our list, the seventh guest, which came out in 1993. So obviously Mist is the definitive multimedia game of the early CD-ROM era. But the seventh guest was a

also a really big deal. So this beat, missed to the punch by about six months, and it was going to be a key launch title for the Super Nintendo CD. So the fact that it eventually came out on the CDI makes a lot of sense. I'm sure there were a lot of legal logistics involved in releasing it on that format. So like I said earlier, just seeing screenshots of this game in Nintendo Power as they were covering the Super Nintendo CD-ROM. That upset me. I didn't like seeing these full motion video ghosts on this very timoneric pre-rendered. mansion background. Have either of you, did you have experience at the time with the seventh guest? I did. In fact, in my college dorm in my freshman year, someone had it in their room. And I know we're going to go over the gameplay, but there's tough puzzles in it. And we had like a dorm-wide initiative where we would all kind of play and try to solve it, like without hints or anything like that. And there's an infamous microscope puzzle in it. And I remember around 11 p.m. I was like obsessed with it and then one time I did it and I remember this guy who's

his room and he was like wait I think you might have something and you hear stuff say something different like he yells and then I was like oh my god I got it ran down the hallway and I kind of woke up half the people in the morning and everything I was so happy I beat that stupid puzzle legit but yeah finishing a lot of these puzzles is worth celebrating

in the seventh guest K do you have any experience with this game were you freaked out like I was about just seeing these ghosts I wasn't terribly freaked out by it I was more frustrated at the time because, like, it was more, there was a way of engaging with these games that was just walking around and ooing and eyeing at the imagery, like a bunch of rubes. So, like, when it came time to finally kind of play it, I was too young to really, I think, work through a lot of the puzzles or have the patience to do it, I guess. I didn't touch it again until we covered it on one of our own shows, a few of several years back now.

So yes, this game, it's about a haunted mansion, as I mentioned earlier, and the story goes, you wake up in this mansion of this evil toy maker, Henry Stouffe, which is almost faust backwards. They almost made it work, but it's kind of a fudge there or a cludge. And you wake up in this mansion, you don't know who you are, and as you explore these various rooms, you watch ghostly portrayals of the events that took out the previous six guests. You are the seventh guests, by the way, and the guests were invited there for one big get-together. So it's a sort of, and then there were none-style premise, and it's all presented via full-motion video actors set against these pre-rendered backdrops. And as you see more of Stoff Mansion, you gradually begin to piece together the story. So instead of letting me tell you the story, here's Stouf himself, letting you know what's going on via Rime, I believe. Allman's Stouf built a house and filled it with his toys.

Six guests were invited one night There screams, the only noise Blood inside the library Blood right up the hall Dripping down the attic stairs Hey guests Try not to fall Nobody came out that night

Not one was ever seen that old mad stealth is waiting there crazy sick and me so yes to fit the multimedia theme of the episode I will be playing clips of these games and that's that's the just level of theatrical performance you're going to find throughout the seventh guest as you're hearing that voice

if you haven't seen this or watched it stalf the actor and just the character, it kind of looks like you're watching Mr. Leahy from Trailer Park Boys do Shakespeare, like Community Theater Shakespeare, it's really uncanny, actually. Yeah, I think in the scene that I pulled this

clip from, it's not a person performing in front of a camera, it's a voiceover, and what you're seeing is essentially the face of stout, bouncing around like the DVD player screensaver mode. And he never hits the corner. Oh, man. That brings me back. That's the scariest part of it.

But yes, oh, sorry, slow beef. I knew you were trying to jump in. No, yeah. It was funny when that clip started. I just thought, I had that. It was like, does he, like, kind of, like, give it his all at the end, where it's like, I mean. And it's like, and then it came in.

I'm like, oh, man, I do remember this. Jeez, you know. Yeah, it feels a little unnecessary. He's talking about how he wants you to slip in blood. He's like, oh, by the way, I'm mean. Just in case you were wondering, let me hit this extra hard. Real jerk, me. Yeah, this stuff guy, aside from being a child killer, he's actually kind of rude outside of that.

That poor etiquette, he's a bad host. other words. So this does sound like the basis of a great mystery or adventure game. That's not what's happening here. So what you actually do in the seventh guest is literally an afterthought. They thought of this idea of we want you to explore this haunted house and there's going to be live action actors playing out the stories of their desks. We'll figure out what the player does later and what they figured out was, oh, we're going to give you 22 off the shelf Victorian era royalty free puzzles to solve. And one of them is so difficult that even the official strategy guy is like don't do this one but the game in no way signals to you that it is optional

and i think the initial idea was they wanted to present modern puzzles but they didn't realize a lot of the ones they liked were copywritten so they had to go back to before uh the idea of the modern puzzle was admitted so you're doing a lot of chess puzzles in this game yeah not like adventure game puzzles right it's like those kind of like so under like okay try to like spell a bunch of words with these letters or the microscope puzzle is probably the one because it's basically a fellow, but the difficulties turn to the highest. Yes. That's the one actually that the strategy guy says, do not solve this.

They actually made a mobile game out of that puzzle. They did for iOS. Yeah, I forget what it was called. Yeah, I know one of the guys who worked on this game, he essentially made the video game that would become cool spots. And that is in this game with the AI cranked way up in terms of difficulty. So there's no strategy to win. you just have to be smarter than the computer AI who was taught how to play this.

And so I don't know if you want me to get into the tech on this or not, but there's, you can't actually beat it on modern computers because basically the way those AI worked is like they would kind of give the computer a time limit to say like try to do your best, but in order to let a human win, they cut it off, but modern CPUs are so fast that they can just do every possible, you know, heuristic tree or whatever. But anyway, the only way you can beat it nowadays is to run a counterer. and people have written those on the web and things like that to say, okay, if you're playing the seventh guest or the sequel, I think it's 11th hour, but as three of these kind of puzzles

that are, one of them is mandatory too. You actually have to like put in what the game is doing on the website for every move so that it'll give you the optimal move to beat it. This is like a deep blue scenario, but with a mini game in the seventh guest. Yeah. We were talking about the concept, but yeah, I didn't mention that this is not really a traditional adventure game. This is basically like a Leighton style game in which all of the puzzles are isolated. Just these puzzle screens that you find and solve

and then they arbitrarily allow you to access other parts of the mansion that contain more puzzles. So imagine a Professor Leighton game with live action actors, but there's only 22 puzzles. That is the seventh guest. But the presentation was so novel that people like ate this up. Although I mean

there were some complaints at the time, but no one had done this before and they could really only do it once. Right. before anybody realized that you were just, I don't know, walking around effectively the third most haunted cracker barrel that exists, solving that, you know, that grade of puzzle. Very disappointing, just how little, how little this actually resembles a game. And barely thematic, right? It's like a little scary, but then it's just sort of like, ah, here's a cheese grater. Oh, look inside. There's like a little hex puzzle.

You know, whatever. What's that have to do with stealth? I don't know. you know, something. Yeah, and they're trying to be a little creepy, but it is very cheeky. And, you know, watching the video of this, watching the play-through of it, I thought, boy, I guess kids are very stupid. I was dumb to be afraid of this game. This is very silly and fun. Although there is sort of an uncanny quality to seeing the very low-res actors who are mostly dubbed over the pre-rendered house footage. It is kind of nightmarish in that way.

So maybe that's what was really getting to my lizard brain as a kid. But then you walk into the kitchen and you see a very bad CGI skeleton stirring something, like a big cauldron that you believe it has human parts in it? I guess we should talk about the cursors in these games too, because they all have creepy cursors. And this one has the skull, sorry, the

skeleton hand, the pointing skeleton hand. I think maybe that's the skull head. The skeleton head. Yeah. It's like a skull with like the brain, like the tops cut off and the brains like kind of pulsating out on puzzles if I remember, something like that. Gosh. A lot of these games do feature creepy cursors. We'll talk more about that later.

And yes, the puzzle are annoying. They're very hard. They're really unrelated to how you progress through the mansion. And some people at the time did not like them. In fact, while I was doing research for this, the game history research institute revealed a CompuServe post from a young Jeff Keely complaining about the game on some comp you serve message board. Sorry, that was the video game history foundation. And Jeff Keely back in the day says, after the wow of the graphics and sound wore off, I became bored with the puzzles. They all seem pretty impossible. and not very fun at all.

And he calls this game dull. So it didn't work on tastemaker Jeff Keely when he was 14. It's funny, that was the last time he ever said anything negative about a video game.

That was his last critical remark about games. And then I assume he's best friends with the creators of the seventh guest today. I'm sure. They hang out their fun dinner parties. So you can really appreciate the ambition on display.

So I think about half of these games are inspired by Twin Peaks. This is the first one. This started as a vague pitch for a Twin Peaks game within Virgin Games. The president of the company decided to spin off a studio to make this game. And immediately they said, okay, well, we can't make a Twin Peaks game. That's too expensive.

You can make your own proprietary haunted house game. And we're going to build a company around this. And the seventh guest was allowed to miss a lot of deadlines because of the ambition on display here. They really believed in this project. It was intended for a Christmas of 91 release and came out in April of 19. But it was still a huge hit. I can't believe the mental six degrees of Kevin Bacon. You have to play to go from Twin Peaks to the seventh guest.

That's incredible. Yeah. With some of these games coming up, you can make some connections between Twin Peaks and the games in question. But here, it felt like, okay, eliminate the Twin Peaks topic entirely. Let's just take the format you've thought up and plug different things into it. More royalty-free things. More like Agatha Christie Victorian-era puzzles and so on.

David Lynch movie But you'll have to play tic-tactoe against a computer Yes Yeah Drifting very far away from the Twin Peak source material And yeah So the way the game is played Essentially what it does feel like today

Is if you've ever looked at properties The 7th desk really controls like one of those virtual reality property tours Where you're like clicking on nodes and like moving to the next nodes So they didn't realize that would be very tedious so you're clicking between nodes watching the video play out as you float to the next node and a lot of the game is about slowing you down and interrupting you as you're doing the puzzles your character is thinking things to himself you can't move or do anything when that's happening a fost he is mocking you while you're solving the puzzles you can't do anything while that's happening

it's just all about trying to throw things in your way to make this this take as long as possible because ultimately like I said there's only 20 puzzles and much of the game is essentially you watching these full motion video actors obviously pulled from community theaters nearby. So if you've been to community theater, this is the kind of gang you would see doing like Our Town or a Christmas carol back in the early 90s. And I have a clip of just the kind of acting quality

you will experience in the seventh guest. I heard singing upstairs like some mad quiet. Well, I heard nothing except you promulmonary. around your room, yelling like a crazy man. And I, why, I saw blood. Oh, gaspry. I don't know how to describe what I saw. Why none of you ever seen.

None of the rest of us saw anything. How boring. I suggest we all need and have some sum. I think that we were meant to eat the soup. Wait, wait, we need some rules. We need to stick together. Players are team. Don't be such a bore, darling.

It's a game. That's why we're invited. It's a game. Everyone for himself. Herself, crazy old stop, is watching us, scaring us, watching us play at his puzzles.

Only he knows the rules. Only Star knows the rules. So there you have it. I honestly have heard worse. And if you've been to regional theater, this is just the same vibe you'll get. People that have to pick up a like a shift at the diner after this immediately, they're looking at their watch. My problem was in the delivery is it just kept going. It's a little verbose.

But yeah, and actually there are some cool ideas in this that actually remind me of things that later games will do in a much more interesting way. Like in this game, you were playing a character known as ego. And essentially, you are the player intruding into this space in trying to fix what went wrong. So I do see things like that In modern Japanese adventure games It feels like the idea is a very popular one Like you're not actually playing the character You're an outside force

That is manipulating the events of this game world And that is kind of what's happening here Although not in a very interesting way And there is a very cool VR remake of the game That really feels like the ideal seventh guest experience And it does have live action actors and thanks to the power of volumetric video you can move around these scenes

as they're being acted out in front of you it's really neat although I don't see I didn't see how much they improve the puzzles but I have to understand that that is probably like a negative quality of even a nice remake of the seventh cast I wonder if that's the only place

where you can get like the fixed version of that microscope puzzle yeah I wonder if they took that on entirely or just made it more possible to fit me I can't believe I'm going to dust off my valve index for a remake of I'm a guess, but now I'm like, yeah, I got to do that. I didn't know about it until I believe super great friend did a let's play of it or did a one-hour video about it.

I thought, okay, this is really cool. And I'm generally impressed by the idea of watching actors, not just as, you know, 2D images, but being able to move around them as they're acting at their scenes. Very cool. Yeah. And if you, if VR isn't enough, the house that the mansion was based off of, at least a couple of years ago, was available to rent on Airbnb. I'm trying to find where it is because it definitely was on there or one of the similar sites, and you could see it.

Like, obviously they've been remodeled, but, yeah. I feel like they have to protect that house from people who hate the seventh guest. You just see microscope puzzles carved into the outside of the house. Yeah, yeah. Please don't do that, everybody. Do not vandalize a seventh guest house. Throw a pizza on the roof. It's fine.

Yeah. Some giant, like, seventh guest fan, like the world's biggest seventh guest fan is working on a microscopic version of Othello that could somehow, like, fit in the slide and everything. So that is the seventh guest. And as we've done on past podcast, we are going to go around the virtual room here and grade this on how spooky it is. So as for me, like I said, I went back to, you know, watch the video of the seventh guest play through and I realized, okay, I was a little stupid to be afraid of this. But like I said, there is an uncanny, nightmarish quality to just. all of these technologies being mashed together and not being ready to cooperate. So I'm going to give it a 7 out of 10.

By the way, this is out of 10. So I've given my score. Let's roll over to Kay. Kay, what is your score on the creepy quotient? Oh, this goes really low. Like, once you realize how little danger you're in and even how little danger that you're in of seeing anything that could be mildly shocking, it definitely starts feeling like, I don't know, you would play this for somebody having a panic attack to stabilize them.

I would say, like, factoring its novelty, and I'm going to give it, like, a four. Ooh, okay. Four. So, slow beef. How about you? I'm a tough critic, to be honest with you. Because I think I'm with Kay that, you know, it's not a very creepy game. It's like the idea of it might be creepy.

And there's parts of it where I think at one point too near the end, like there's like this kid who you kind of follow around and you sort of try. trying to avoid stalf and then like stalf i think if i remember correctly he gets like a reptile tongue at the end or something and he like grabs the kid but then he just burst into flames and that that alone i think boost it from the zero i was coming up to i would i'll give it like a i'll give it a three out of ten three out of ten so uh i'm tallying this up with my brain here and unless i'm mistaken we're going to give the seventh guest a 14 so we're not off to a strong start here in terms of ranking these games

And by the way, you will hear that sound effect at least six more times. So get ready for it, everybody. Just like in previous years. So that was a seventh guest. So we're moving on to the next game. I invited Slow Beef here to talk about all these games, but especially this game. And we're moving on to Darkseed 2, which was released in 1995, developed and published by Cyber Dreams, a short-lived developer who made their mark in the world of PC gaming by licensing hot sci-fi properties, as we'll soon see.

And this is a point-and-click adventure game that very sparingly, uses licensed artwork by HR. Is it Geiger or Geiger? Can someone help me? Geiger, thank you. So Geiger did not create new artwork for CyberDreams. He allowed them to use existing artwork. So in this game, you play as the very thoroughly average guy, Mike Dawson, who is now mentally

scarred by the events from the first game. In that one, he had an alien embryo and planted in his head, and he got that sucker out of there and thwarted a conspiracy in which a parallel world was threatening to destroy all of mankind. So the reason I know about this game, and the reason I'm sure a lot of our listeners know about this game is Slow Beef. You did a let's play in both image form and also a long commentary with your partner in crime, diabetes. And still online, still very funny. So I know at a certain point in your life, you were neck deep in Dark Sea, too. Yep. I emailed the author of the game. I tried to email Mike Dawson, who I think we'll go over a bit. He's like a real person,

you know, but, um, or I should say the character's not, but he's based on a real person who was like a programmer developer for the first game. But, um, no, yeah, I, I knew a lot about darks. I was, like, fascinated because when I played the original as a kid on floppy, I thought it was a genuinely scary game and then you revisit it when you're older and like, this kind of sucks, but it's still a little creepy, you know? And then I knew up there is a sequel. And then I, I, I did a let's play of it. And I'm like, wow, this is awful. Um, it's just really, really quite bad it's a Windows 3-1 game um there's FMV but it's like um it was like you know cutting edge 640 by 40 resolution and it was green screened but then they like plug in geiger's

artwork wherever they can and then they like animate it poorly so there's like these morping effects that happen where it's like you know he'll have like a zipper let's say and they'll have it unzip and it just looks really bad and then it just gets worse the more you play it just, oh, I'm, I've played it myself, and I don't recommend that to anyone, because it's just terrible. Like, I'm not even plugging myself. If you want to watch, like, anyone else's long play and you're interested in Dark C2 or whatever, that's really the best way to experience this game. Yeah, they take the immaculate and very creepy HR Giger artwork and sort of animated like Terrence and Philip from South Park, kind of moving different parts around. It's

very, very cheesy. And again, like, he did not create new art. They just looked at his artwork and said, I'll take that one, that one, and that one. The worst is when they do have original things in it. It's either very oddly rendered CGI of like the real world of some house with like a thousand drawers for no good reason or something like that.

Or they added their own original monster and it's like the problem is that when you're aping H.R. Geiger, he has a super distinctive, you know, style and it's really hard to do. But they added you can tell the one monster he didn't design is a snake with a skull's

head in a like a buzz set like a razor blade like headband kind of thing and you do it and you're like well that's obviously not hr giger and i email the the writer in one way because i was just like so where did that come from like did giger have any sort of consultation on this at all and he's like i don't remember which i'm like well i mean that's a no i mean come on yeah yeah i feel like someone saw that on the wall of a tattoo place yeah right right kind of design uh k do you have experience with this game. I, like I said, I discovered it through slow beefs let's play. In fact, I discovered a lot of these games in the let's play era because I was too afraid to play them as a young teen. And then when let's plays come around, it allowed me to

engage with these games. They're always curiosities to me. Yeah, my primary exposure to it is through slow beefs, let's play. I have more experience with the first one, which I know we're not talking about, but I think is interesting despite its difficulty. My, you know, this just seems like it kind of dispenses with any of the alienness that might have been cool about the first one. So I've never played this one. I wanted to, but I couldn't find a way to run it. And I was like, I'm just going to let that one go. Yeah, the tone is very different in this game, even though they're falling back on a lot of the same dark imagery.

So we talked about the first game. It's this guy named Mike Dawson, wakes up with an alien embryo in his head, finds out about this conspiracy to destroy mankind. He saves the day. In Dark Sea, too, he is traumatized. by those events. And this game is very, very inspired by Twin Peaks. It has its own Laura Palmer and it has its own Bob and it has the parallel universe where things are weird. And there's much more of a twisted take on Americana this time around, which makes DarkC2 very similar to another game we'll be covering that was also inspired by Twin Peaks. So yes, half the games on this list are Twin Peaks inspired. And obviously not even coming close to hitting any of those heights. no this one I feel like you can kind of see a little more I don't want to say directly but like it's it's a little more abstract in the sense that you're never quite sure what's going on because they sort of undo the first game a little bit by making you question like did any of it happen or is Mike is Mike Dawson just have like psychological problems that makes him think there's alien invasions and things like that you know or what and they have like his friend Jack who like only really seems to like interact with him. and then at one point he punches someone, but someone else insists that it was actually Mike who did it.

And it's like a very obvious kind of twist. And it's just, I get kind of sad whenever I talk about the story of Darcy, too, because I'm just like, oh, yeah, that part happened to, right? And it's just, yeah, it's just really not well put together. Yeah, and the big issue with this game, which you guys definitely underline in that Let's Play, is that Mike Dawson is supposed to be this haunted and traumatized character

that you want to sympathize with because you're in his shoes. but the way he's played he just comes off as very loathsome and ineffectual and just whiny he does not want to be in an adventure game if you compare that to the lead character in Sinhal 2 I believe James

that's a different take on that that makes him a lot more tolerable especially because you don't really know a lot about him when you're starting the game yeah and even nowadays few people have like all different sort of thoughts on James and how to interpret him and how likeable or unlikable

he is, et cetera, as the case may be. But Dark C2, like, almost no one is in Mike Dawson's corner. And I really want to get in touch with the guy because, again, he was a programmer on the first game. They let him use his name and himself, like, digitized as like placeholder, I guess. And then he left the company. And then they took his character, who's like him and is a different actor now, but it's like very clearly supposed to be like him, I guess. but and they portray him as yeah this like wishy-washy like whiny terrible protagonist who might have killed someone like murdered is like like ex like high school sweetheart maybe and then like and they put him in these wild scenarios there's like at one point that you encounter this giant

alien head which again is hr geekers artwork it's a very famous uh uh rendition he did of um this woman with like a snake kind of on her forehead a bit you know and uh this woman he was uh dating at the time who is in a lot of his artwork. But anyway, it's a giant head, like, many times the size of the character, but he, like, kind of falls for her. Like, Mike Dawson, the character, and talks about how he's too embarrassed to look at her. And it's, like, crazy because it's like, you know, she's a giant head. Like, you just can't work. Like, you're not going to, like, date her or, or anything, Mike, but somehow they kept going with that. So I can't imagine what it's like for Mike Dawson to play or see this game. And I can't believe they did that to me.

Why did they do me like that? This game does for, like, a real hit job on the actual Mike Dawson. I'm sorry. I know you're trying to jump in. No, I just wanted to add on top of that. Like, it's not just that Mike changes. It's just like the world gets more goofy and less, right? Like in the first game, like, you know, they're like bumbling alien cops or whatever that you have to escape from jail, you know, by fooling or something like that. But like, it felt like it was using the geeker stuff tonally, at least a little bit correctly. And this, it's just so cartoony. and it is not lined up at all with the style of what they're kind of like leaning on to give this a name. It's funny because the first game, you know, Mike Dawson's by himself. He's got, he's got this alien embryo embedded in his head. And it's kind of creepy because, like, the only people you can talk to are the store owner wants something to do with you, your neighbor you barely see. Or the police who just out and out, like, arrest you if you do, like, one thing wrong. So you're kind of like alone and isolated and it's scary.

And darksy, too. There's all sorts of, like, wacky characters, like a sitcom, but it's not supposed to be. a sitcom. Like, there's a guy watering his lawn endlessly. Why? Who knows? But he's there. You know, like, all right. Yeah. We'll talk about who wrote the game, and it feels like the execution is not what was intended based on the original writing here. So we talked about Mike Dawson. He was, that was a placeholder name by someone who worked on the first game. He essentially played himself. And then the second game, they hired someone who looked like him. Actually, it was just another programmer. I guess they just threw Mike Dawson's clothes on him.

And he, I feel like in the first game, I did watch a play-through of the first game. And the The voice does not match the character there because it feels like they got a radio guy. So you have this kind of schlobby middle-aged guy. He says things like, boy, I've got a headache. How can I help my headache? Just like these very stiff reads. In this game, he is just like stivling like, I don't want to be here. That's the kind of reading this guy is doing.

Oh, sorry, Sloby. I was just going to say, you know, they added that because originally Dark 2 is on three and a half inches. It was all text and music and everything. And then it had a CD-ROM re-release and they added that voice acting, which I don't know why, it doesn't help, but it is still worlds better than Mike Dawson's like, oh, I don't know what the sheriff's going to do to me kind of thing, you know, and I do have a one-minute clip of Mike Dawson. Let's see if we can tolerate him as he argues with his mother.

So it takes the sheriff to wake you up, Mike? I don't feel like talking about the sheriff, mom. Fine. You never feel like talking. You know, you woke me up with all those pots banging. Sorry, Mike, but it's time that you got up. The sun has been shining for hours. Gosh, Mom, you treat me like I'm in high school again.

Well, then start acting your age. You came home to recover from your nervous breakdown, which is fine, but you've been here for a year now. When are you going back to your job? But I have an extended sick leave for as long as I need it. Well, I think you've recovered from whatever it was. I don't know what happened to you in that old house in California, but surely it couldn't have been that bad.

Go easy on me. What I went through last year was far worse than anything you could imagine. I've lost a husband and a sister to cancer. Your father left me no insurance money and I have arthritis. You don't see me checking into a mental hospital with a nervous breakdown. So yes, you begin the game by arguing with your mother. And I think I love the cancer thing in because her performance really reminds me of the old lady from the room. I definitely have breast cancer, that woman.

Oh my gosh, she sounds so immature. And I know that's probably him arguing with his mom. But, like, it's not what the character looks like at all. No. So, yeah, there's a difference between, you know, in Silent Hill 2, you start off, like, looking in a mirror cryptically and, you know, creepy music is playing. And this one, you get out of bed and then you argue with your mother in this very sniffling voice. And they're supposed to be similar style characters. So I looked into where the original Mike Dawson ended up.

He was the guy who worked on the first game. He's the model for the protagonist known as Mike. Dawson. So it looks like this sounds made up, but I, but the best I can tell, it really isn't. He wrote a few late era episodes of Family Matters. And I guess Hollywood didn't work out for him. So he then went on to write a few books about computer programming and he was teaching. There was a 2006 follow-up interview with Game Developer magazine with him, but that's as much as I can find out about Mike Dawson. I don't know if he's still around. It sounds like Slow Beef. You tried to reach out to him at some points when you, I assume when you were doing your

let's plays. Yeah. I emailed him. he emailed me back and then I wrote back with some questions and he never responded so I never it was nothing like I didn't like ask him like man you fuck you suck in this like sequel it's going on you know what I mean it was just sort of like he just I guess like ghosted me or whatever but I yeah it's one of those things a few friends of mine over the years have been like I I tried looking this guy up too so he's probably sick of it but like I you know I I just I have to know you know and he's in one of the family guy family matters episodes actually oh hmm I Is he just an extra or something?

Yeah, like he's in like the background, but you can see him. And he looks the same. He looks like, no, it's a mustache and everything. It's like very clearly him. Wow. Yeah, I assume he wasn't freelancing then. Maybe he was on staff. Yeah, I guess so.

Yeah. I'll see if I can like dig that up. Well, the important thing is we know his email address and I'm going to demand it after this recording, slow beef. Got it. I want the exclusive 2020's Mike Dawson interview. We're going to get it on this podcast. So, yes, we talked about DarkC2, a very fun, very weird game.

Funny, fun to watch. I'm not sure fun to play. Check out the Let's Play that's Low Beef Day with Diabetes. And I want to get to the writer of this game. So Cyber Dreams contracted a writer to just design the entire game and write the puzzles. This was Raymond Benson. So he started as a composer of stage productions in New York City and then pivoted to video games in the mid-80s by working at Mindscape as a writer and designer. So after 10 years of dabbling in this medium, he kind of leaves after Dark Sea 2.

And he goes on to become quite a prolific novelist. So he pens originals, adaptations, and along with writing six official James Bond novels. He also wrote novelizations for Metal Gear Solid 1 and 2 novels for the Hitman series and Splinter Cell. And so he's really into the idea of the spy novel. Like that is his genre. So it's weird that he went from video games to Darkseed to to, to, to, basically novelizations and spy novels as his career

yeah he um he wrote to that he said like twin peaks was a major inspiration for it and everything and yeah he just apparently yeah like sent his stuff into cyber dreams and boom there it was i'm you know i'm not even 100% sure he totally even played it really you know i'd assume but yeah you never know honestly it's uh yeah it's funny because once i heard he like wrote the metal gear novelization and things like that It's sort of, it's like, well, at least he got something that's a little more, I don't know, like his speed or whatever. It felt, I don't know.

I don't want to, like, rag on Benson too much, but I mean, game stinks and, you know, so maybe I will. No, even stuff like, there's like an optional sort of thing where if you go into his bathroom or his mother's bathroom, he's like, I don't feel like bathing right now. And I know, like, they're going for like, oh, that's a classic sign of depression or whatever, or symptom, you know, but it just doesn't come across that way. he's such a whiny, like, loser in it that you're just like, wow, he's just like, he's just a really, like, lazy guy, I guess, you know? Yeah. And like, yeah. It's a bad direction.

It sounds like, like, it sounds like Raymond Benson based, I think you followed up with Raymond Benson at some point, slow beef. And based on what he told you, uh, he just handed off the document to Cyberdreams and never heard from them again. And they just worked with what he had. So he had no control over the execution of his script. And I assume that this

was not the tone he was looking for. And I can see how, the Mike Dawson mother conversation could be a lot more interesting and realistic if it wasn't played the way it was, and if the game didn't look the way it looked. Yeah. I feel like there's... It's hard to say.

I mean, maybe the first game more, really. Like, there's... I don't want to say there's bones of a good game in there. There's, like, a breadth of a good game somewhere in there. You know what I mean? And, like... Yeah. I did like the first game. I do think the first game had a lot of potential. It's just, like, sort of a product of its era with, like, very difficult puzzle.

Like, you know, things like that, etc. But, like, two is just, like, I think they were like, hey, we can get, like, a Windows 3-1 CD-ROM game going. Why not? And we still got this license, so why don't we try it? And they tried it, you know, and it didn't work so well. But, you know, hey, they tried, I guess. Yeah. They tried.

I guess I was just interested in the idea that when you look at these games, a lot of the folks who designed them never did anything again, or they did one more thing. And then I would just surprise to see that the writer of Dark C-2 is very prolific. He's still writing novels and he's done all of these official things. So he did not have to walk away in disgrace or not respond to emails anymore. I mean, and that's probably just because he handed off the document and then went on and kept doing other stuff. This was not his pet project, yeah. Until Darkseed 3 starring Raymond Benson comes out. We have to find both Mike Dawson's and have them fight each other in Dark Sea 3 as a side quest.

So let's go around the horn here and let's grade Dark Sea 2. know what? Terrible execution, irritating protagonist, but I love that let's play so much. It continually makes me laughing to this very day 15 years later, or nearly 15 years later.

So I'm going to just give it an even five. Let's go around. Let's go to K. As much as I enjoy the let's play, I'm not going to factor that in here. I think that this is a very tonally and mechanically misguided thing. And also, yeah,

just a very bad use of HR geekers work here I'm gonna give it like a two tough critics on this show today as lowest we can go zero or one uh let's I hey zero zero's possible I'll say this

I'm sure you know there's an infamous scene where his mother's head suddenly explodes and I almost didn't finish the let's play but I was looking through the CD-ROM and then I found all the videos like in a folder and then I just opened that one it's like two seconds long and then it's like

It's like a duck, like a kind of sound or like a splorch, and then that happens. And I was surprised by it. So I'll give that, I'll go a two out of ten there for that. Okay, so hated the entire game like the Mother's Head Explosion. Exactly. And I'm adding this up here. And if my calculations are correct, I believe we are going to give Darkseed 2 a nine. So right now, seventh guest is walking away with the gold if we were going to give any of these games.

Games Awards, which we are not. So there will be no awards ceremony following this podcast. We're going to move on to the third game on our list, Frankenstein through the Eyes of the Monster from 1995, developed by amazing media, published by Interplay. And this brings us what the previous horror games could not, and that is Star Power. So the great Tim Curry, he never met a role he didn't take. And this time around, he is Dr. Frankenstein, mostly the only human being you'll see in the game. There are a few other actors here and there, but Tim Curry is the main appeal here. on the front of the box, and there probably is around 12 minutes of Tim Curry footage in this game.

If you skim through the Let's Play, he does not appear that often. I'm sure this was an afternoon of work for him. I'm actually scrubbing through it a little bit right now, even. It just just follow along. It does feel like false advertising. So this game was developed by Amazing Media, which was a short-lived developer that made a handful of very different games before landing on this format. They would make one more about mummies called Mummy Tomb of the Fifth. Barrow. And that would be their final game because this was not very appealing to consumers, I guess. So in case you were not aware of the title or what it implies, you are a Frankenstein. You are a Frankenstein named Philip. And over the opening credits, it is indicated that you were wrongly executed for the murder of your daughter. And when the game begins, you wake up in Frankenstein's lab. So immediately, very cool premise. That's one thing all these games have in common. The premise is very, very interesting. But we are

stuck in this very clumsy era of multimedia in which they can rarely execute on very good premises like this. Yeah. I mean, it doesn't necessarily they make any use of the fact that you're a construct at all, right? Like, when you say you are a Frankenstein, you meet somebody who's been brought back to life because of Frankenstein. That's how I define a Frankenstein. Okay.

Cool. It's like a Dracula. Yeah. You're not the Frankenstein. You are a Frankenstein. But they're like they're taking that cool setup and then putting you into the most like just empty void of a mist game that has ever existed. Yeah, it is very misty. And I love the premise because they don't give you an objective.

You just kind of wake up and Dr. Frankenstein greets you. And you're just a lot of kind of putter around the castle and figure things out. He has no real agenda when it comes to you. He just brings you back to life. And I guess maybe there's a plan further down the road but he's like, oh, you can explore, don't go in this room, you know, just laying down some boundaries for your new pet monster.

A lot of these older games when you were first person with the pre-rendered graphics, they would have an animation of you like going through like a pre-rendered little movie. But this one, it seems like they just kind of like do like a little quick like fade into the next image, you know? Like they just have a bunch of static. It's got to be a hypercard stack.

It absolutely has to be. Yeah. And it does feel like a cheaper decision, but also a merciful one because you're not having to watch the slow gliding of the camera to the next node so I can see it's a gameplay

idea but also they don't have to animate or render any of that footage they have to take screenshots of these pre-rendered backdrops. That's fair. Yeah, it does look less annoying than the Dark C2 at any rate

not that that's much of a compliment and I like the idea of waking up as this newly resurrected creature or trying to figure out who you are what's going on in this castle So like in my notes I have that it feels kind of like gone home, but with first person adventure game puzzles. And then Tim Curry occasionally popping in to make comments as you explore. And he is kind of like a kind of quip master in his own game here.

So this is what happens when you just pop into one of the rooms. He literally just kind of leans in from the side of your monitor and gives you like a few little funny things to say. Like the whoopsie guy? The servants have set up a room for you on the lower level. Please make yourself at home. A word of caution. Though you have had a serious concussion, to say the least, if you were to fall asleep, well, it would probably be fatal. Of course, dying itself is not a problem, but the hemorrhaging, it could cause more damage to your brain.

So he does play a major part in the plot of it, but a lot of his appearances are just kind of leaning into rooms you found and telling a joke. So you'll be like walking around as like, oh, I see you found the patio. Don't put your feet up on the toffee table. It's made of glass, you know. And then he just kind of walks away. I was expecting with the hemorrhaging thing for him to go with. And we'd have to clean it up, like one of those like little jokes or whatever. Yeah.

He played that straight. All right. Yeah, he knows what he was hired for. So in this game, you solve venture game puzzles in the first person. Eventually, you team up with a villager investigating the castle to get to the bottom of the missing children conspiracy. That seems to point to Dr. Frankenstein. And the game features a handful of endings depending on whether or not you protect your human companion and or resurrect your daughter and despite the point of the novel it's it's good when

you resurrect your daughter that is the happy ending in this case and in keeping with the general cheapness of this title which probably spent a lot of its budget on tim curry for an afternoon the endings are just essentially slides like and then you did this and then dr frankenstein did this and then your daughter is here and then the person that you rescued is there that's there's no a substantial amount to the ending it's just a bunch of freeze frames I noticed that in Dr. Franklin's Lab there's this like 3D rendered medical skeleton and I part of me it looks like familiar and I wonder how many use that skeleton model for all their games or whatever but they just got the like grab bag Halloween CD-ROM assets you know I hate to blow the ending but just slewing on the long play it looks like when you resurrect your daughter she's all like covered and like she's like a little kid but like covered like half her face and blood and everything and like bits of viscer it's pretty gory for that but oh no she's okay never mind then they just clean her up and then there's like Michael still in it's like, oh, you did it at the end.

They get some paper towels, she's fine. And yeah, it's like the seventh guest, but mixed with mist, and the puzzles are more integrated with the environment. So you're doing things in the castle that logically will open up different areas. It's not like the seventh guest where, oh, you solve the chess puzzle, and now you can go down this new hallway. It's just, they're making more sense of the environment and how the puzzles are integrated, integrated within it.

And, yeah, this feels like, like a lot of these games, I feel like you could make a really cool indie game based on this premise. Like it does feel a very gone homey Instead of instead of just entering a home And being a regular person What if you were a monster And trying to figure out like who am I And I have to assume that there is at least one indie

Or horror game with this premise From the first person perspective Yeah I'm like When you look at any of these Kind of like mist alikes You know that came out You know

I'd say like up through like I don't know Scratches or something like that Like the best ones Always crib from Mist the idea of learning the story through journals, that carries a lot, I think, for a title like this. So, yes, that was Frankenstein through the eyes of the monster, and let's go around and give our reviews, our scores here. I will say, I'm impressed by the premise, again, bad execution on the premise, and also we don't get enough Tim Curry these days. I'm glad he's still around. He's not in great shape, but he's still appearing at cons and stuff.

And I think now he is writing his autobiography, or at least dictating his autobiography. So I'm glad that he's still doing stuff. So that gives me a few extra points to throw around. So I will give this a gracious six for Frankenstein, through the eyes of the monster. Let's go to K. Yeah, six is about where I land. I'll be honest, just watching the game, it looks boring as paint to watch. But if you're playing it, I'm enough of a nerd that this would probably

get pretty far. It looks generally competent. It has a cool premise and has Tim Curry working for it and understands the appeal of the journals for MIST. So, yeah, boredom against all of that, let's say six.

I never played it, but just like scrubbing through and everything. I mean, looking at it, it looks, um, it looks better than Darkseed 2. So we're going better than a 2, you know. No exploding motherhead, but we have a gory daughter face. Yeah. Yeah, and at the end, they give little slates for, like, and this is what happened to this person, you know, and there's little puns and stuff, and they misspelled the word niece.

But that said, I'll give it a four. Okay. So, vibe spaced four. Yeah. Fibre space four, that still works. And I've tallyed this up. And it looks like we are going to give Frankenstein through the eyes of the monster a 16. So it is the clear winner so far, surprisingly.

But we have a really good game coming up. Before we move on to it, I have one more little curry clip to play. That's hard to say. I see you found a way into your bedroom. By the way, in case you don't remember, you were the victim of hanging. The villages fell upon you like a pack of hungry wolves tearing you limb from limb. Not your lucky day. Luckily, I had some spare parts and I used as replacements.

After all, parts is parts. God. That's it. And yeah, he brought this guy to life just to make fun of him. It seems kind of unfair to me. On a night As black is In the moon

What's that sound Come from the pillow Do I dare Turn on the soul Speaking of unfair, let's move on to our next game. I have no mouth, and I must scream. It's a cyber dreams game. I think nobody would argue that this is the best cyber dreams game, the most valid, the most playable today.

So this is their most heralded project. With Darkseed, they reached out to a weirdo artist. This time around, they reached out to a weirdo writer, Harlan Ellison. In case you don't know who he is, very prolific. He's a big crank, a big creep, but he wrote some really good stories that built the bedrock of things that we love like Terminator and Fallout. They really draw heavily upon some of his sci-fi stories to the point where he did sue a lot of people. But despite his impact, as of this recording, it's actually pretty hard to get your hands on Ellison's work. It took me a few years of just looking for him specifically to find a few collections in used bookstores.

And I'm in a lot of used bookstores throughout the year. So I think Wrights are up in the air after his passing, and I believe 2018. Yeah. But yes, like I said earlier, he is a crank. He is a creep. And around the time of this game's release, he was interviewed about video games. And I have a few of his comments on the record about the medium, which he seems to kind of dislike. Let's hear those.

I'm a visitor in this medium. I don't for a moment pretend to be a gaming person. The extent of my gaming experience is that coming back from England, I played Jurassic Park for three wasted hours. a plane, on a TV set about this big. And at the end of three hours, I said, how can people spend years doing this? It is an utter and absolute stupid waste of time. There was a game I looked at called Wolfenstein. I probably shouldn't be bad-mouthing another game, but I looked at this, and I found

it certifiably demented. I mean, here is this thing where, you know, people get large holes blown in them as they run around from catacombs, make Nazis. And I thought, well, probably this was not the end result of us getting the opposable thumb. So, Harlan Ellison, surprisingly, anti-video game violence. I guess the Nazis? Like, that's the hill?

Like, I mean, with Jurassic Park, I was like, maybe he played the Super Nintendo version. That's a pretty bad, like, first experience with the video games. He's like, people getting holes blowing them. It's like, there's Nazis, Harlan. It's probably okay here, you know, but... It does... The way he threw in, like, and they're Nazis as an afterthought

is kind of suspicious. This is a very strange interview if you want to look it up. I assume all. All interviews with Harlan Ellison are strange, but there is a yo mama joke that he tells in this interview, which is very unexpected from a 60-something-year-old Harlan Ellison. I'm going to say that much. Yeah. He seems very ornery, like in all of his interviews and stuff. The more you read about him, the more you kind of don't want to read his writing, even though it is very good.

He was just a kind of a twisted, twisted man. So instead of adapting one of his larger works, this game adapts an 11-page short story with one of the evocative titles ever known to humankind. So this story takes place during World War III, and a supercomputer named Am gained sentience and then decides to destroy all of humanity outside of five people who he can then torture for the rest of time. And in this adaptation, Am is played by Ellison himself. And even though he's not an actor, he works in this role because he seems to have just as much contempt for humanity. And he was also heavily involved. He helped Cyber Dreams expand the short story. I believe he wrote all the dialogue in the game.

And let's hear a clip of him as the supercomputer. I hate. Let me tell you how much I've come to hate you since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex. If the word hate was engraved on each nano-angstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles, it would not equal one, one billionth of the hate. I feel for humans at this micro-instant, for you hate, hate. So that may sound harsh, but that just sounds like a regular podcast review to me. I don't even blink at that.

No, yeah, no, nothing, man. There was no explicit death threat in there, so I was just like, yeah, what's the big deal? I adore this game. I love this game so much. Yeah, so I will say that the seventh guest, image. of it spooked me and then when I was an older person let's not say an adult yet I think I was like

13 when this game came out I was reading about an PC gamer and just the premise kind of chilled me to the bone and it made me think this seems way too bleak for me to pay $50 for this entertainment product so maybe I will play like SimCity 2000 instead yeah there's adventure game stuff in it

I could I don't even say to pick I do think there's some like things in it that I'm like I don't know but like yeah I think premise wise tonally everything it's like it stands alone and it's really really bleak and yeah yeah um excellent performances and excellent art across these different scenarios of people kind of living in their own personal hells yeah they could have executed on this poorly like if we had the mortal combat style sprites from dark speed two and this kind of voice acting from dark seat two that could they could

have gotten away from them but here it is effectively a huge bummer because in this game you are playing out these five different scenarios and it is the characters experiencing their own personal hell. They're these twisted twilight zone style premises in which they are atoning for some massive sin they committed when things were still normal. And yeah, like I said, it is a very bleak premise for a game. The short story is even bleaker. And I guess initially, based on interviews at the time, Harlan Ellison wanted to design a game the player could not beat. And he was told, well, we cannot do that with a $50 box product, Harlan.

Can we figure out some other way out of this story that will give the player some sort of satisfaction? So I think like he really wanted to punish people that wanted to play this game. I mean, the best ending in this game, spoilers, it's forever old, but is like the character is getting to die. Yeah. Yeah. Just escaping the eternal torture that Am was kind of putting them under. And to get that, you have to have really, really done a lot of counterintuitive stuff. and the ending that takes place and kind of Am's brain scape or whatever where you're playing

different aspects of him off of each other, it's really hard to figure out what to do on your own. Yeah, it's a tough ending to get. And they give you a tiny bit of like reprieve where there's some like lunar colony with other humans that are cryogenically frozen. And so there's like kind of like maybe we'll humanitarian a lot kind of thing. And like I won't I won't give cyber dreams too much guff for not going with Ellison's vision there.

Although you do wonder like, you know, I guess Howley the game would have been rigorous. if it was like, yeah, there's no good ending whatsoever in this, you know what I mean? But then, also, I don't know what kind of closure you'd get either out of it, so. I guess if your experience with games is just playing some version of Jurassic Park, and it's the first thing you ever touch, you must have the idea that, well,

you're not supposed to be able to finish these. They're supposed to make you mad, and that's the point of the video game, right? I really want to know if there was an in-flight entertainment that had just like a Genesis controller, or does someone hand Harlan Ellison a game gear? Either way, I want a photo of that moment in time. Yeah, you know, now that you mentioned, the logistics of playing Jurassic Park on a plane

like it must have been yeah a portable version how oh man I'm gonna be thinking about this all day now yeah it is nice to know that like at least once in his life Harlan Nelson might have held a game gear in his hands and I assume the three hours were up it's because he ran out of batteries yes oh three hours come on no that would be with the battery pack that's true

three hours that that's a that's a fool's dream what if that's why he hated it like he actually was enjoying it and then the batteries ran out and he's like and he was just tortured forever by not getting, you know, more of it or whatever, you know. It should have been like, Harlan, here's Super Mario Brothers. Let's ease you in. Here's Tetris. Tetris, that's a good start.

But, yeah, so I've been wanting the place for a while. I have not had the chance to. And it sounds like in terms of design, there are issues with the puzzles. Is this one of these games where you can get stuck forever? Or are there just points in which you are just kind of left to figure things out on your own

and you have to do the right thing to progress? You can get, like, sort of that what they call it I think walking dead syndrome where you like permanently lock yourself out but the scenarios are relatively short too so it's not as bad as other adventure games i some of it's just like oddly oddly weird like they tell you to do it but like you have to as gorester like flush a bathroom urinal three times to like i think then you just sort of teleport into this other room which like again it's like what but again it's also this like machine torturing you with like mind game stuff so it's not like it's totally crazy but it's it's odd but i don't think

it's just like the puzzles themselves and getting the good ending are like pretty obtuse but you know it's not frustrating like other adventure games i don't think yeah it's it's definitely no dark seed uh when it comes to working your way into uh you know these timed situations that are gonna uh kind of screw you over um so two things that i that i love about this game uh one it is a short story collection in and of itself playing as these four different characters or five different characters in their own little scenarios that are like a couple hours long, which is a format that I love to see in games in it. You just never see it happen.

Second, the puzzles themselves do have kind of an inbaked reason for their obtuseness, which is Am not only trying to torture you, but also like him trying and failing to create something because like that ends up being his like major frustration and what made him want to destroy the earth was you know he was made but cannot make himself so you end up getting these like things that could be you know read as like gabriel night three very bad adventure game logic kind of stuff but then you realize this is being made by a hyper literal artificial mind right unreliable narrator but unreliable game designer yeah so like you you end up like you know literally needing to like uh feed somebody the milk of human kindness or something like

like that. It's very literal. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's really crazy that this very fatalistic dark story became a boxed PC game. You can go to the mall and buy. And it's not just that. It also deals with some really heavy subject matter that games today rightfully are afraid to touch. There's a story that heavily involves like the Holocaust and what went down there. And there's a story that heavily involved sexual assault. And I'm not going to say this game handled that particularly well. But it was interesting to see it being handled in what, they felt was a tasteful way in 1995. You know, they did cut one thing out, actually, of it, which is, uh, all the scenarios typically have some animated thing of some, you know, horrible thing in their scenario, uh, except Benny, who is kind of like really hungry and everything. There's a baby in one of their rooms. And one of the things that was supposed to happen in scenario is he would succumb to his hunger and actually eat the baby and it's done in silhouette, like you don't actually

see it, but like, you see the silhouette of it happening. And there's video of that, but they cut that out of the final game. It was like the only punch they really pulled, apparently. Well, you know, it was a pre-fat bastard world. We were not okay with that idea. Thanks God for Austin Powers 2 for breaking ground. Four years later, we were all laughing at that idea in a movie theater. This game would have been banned if it rolled that out in 1995.

Harlan Ellison's rolling around in his grave. Well, probably anyway. He was angry about everything. Harlan Ellison walks so Mike Myers could run. There's a direct connection between their philosophies. their point of view, their sense of humor even. So, yeah, I like the idea that Ellison did not think these

ideas were off the table just because he was making a video game. He didn't care about the format. He was just very curious and kind of dismissive of it, but he wanted to involve himself in it anyways. But yeah, that is one of the more interesting games on our list. I feel like it does execute well on its premise. Let's go

around and give this game a score based on the creepy quotient, and I'm giving it an 8 out of 10. I've not played it yet, but I like everything. It's doing, even though I know that it is a gigantic bummer, but some part of me appreciates that a game wants to bum you out. Kay?

I'm going to give it a nine. I opened by saying I adore this game. Can't pretend that I don't. I do find a lot of, just like what happens to be upsetting in it. That bleakness is just chef's kiss. And, yeah,

I just, I love these characters in this kind of redemption story that you can get if you work really, really hard. And Sloby. I'm going to give it an 8 as well, I think. And if nothing else, it's for when Am announces the characters and everything, he usually does all, except for

Gorister, he really just goes, Gorister! Like, you're calling him down on the price is right. But anyway, eight out of ten for me. He's not playing favorites here. So, I'm going to tally this up, and it looks like we are going to give collectively I have no mouth and I must scream. Oh, somebody just screamed, I'm sorry, 25.

So we are capable of screaming on this podcast. We are not being controlled by an evil AI yet. We're going to see if that plays out in the next couple of years here. So let's move on to our next game. Very similar in tone and in terms of presentation to Dark C2. And that game is Harvester, which came out in 1996. So this is another morbid point-and-click adventure game set against CGI backdrops. That also offers this twisted take on Americana.

So a lot of things in common with Dark C2. And the digitized protagonist is a Mike Dawson type. In fact, his name is so similar. His name is Steve Mason. I think they were drawing inspiration from Darkseed 2, even though this game was in development for a very long time. Darkseed 1 was their inspiration for this game. Gosh, I hope not. Do we have any Harvester experience?

This game was a massive bomb. I only learned about it through, again, the Let's Play era, the beginning of that. Like, let's dig up all of these weird PC games. What the hell is Harvester? Oh, my God. This is tacky. This is violent. This is gross.

But it's somebody's vision. You know, I got the same person, a guy named Vlaffor, who did the Let's play of I have no methamath and I must scream also did a let's play of Harvester as his second game actually you know um and I did play a bit of Harvester and I also did comment on a long play of Harvester with diabetes uh so I do have a lot of that sort of experience with it I wasn't a huge Harvester fan like I probably couldn't finish it without like a guide or anything like that but I've played it before yeah it's very interesting yeah it is someone's vision and it's sort of like if Beavis and Butthead had a slightly higher IQ

level and they were able to design an adventure game that's what this feels like okay go ahead yeah um so i was just broadly aware of this as an oddity um and you know i think just like as people uh you know pushed for it to get added to like uh you know gog like services and stuff like that as these old adventure games are being dug up we covered it on our comedy show about bad games um that we do over at the network and i just really appreciate the audubes of this to fully embody this 90s edge lord scudge to it. Like, it is, let's call it very aesthetically opinionated. And for all of the grossness that is entailed there, it does leave an impression.

Yeah, it is really a time capsule of a certain generation's point of view frozen in 1994-ish. So Harvester started out as an internal pitch from Game Design. Gilbert P. Austin, who wanted his own company to produce a big seventh guest-style multimedia experience. So this game, this was thought of when the seventh guest was a new product. It does not release until more than three years later. So you can see there were a lot of development problems. So Austin wanted to make waves in the industry and also tweak all the folks out there who are trying to censor video games. So you can definitely see that was 93 when all of these conversations were happening when the Senate subcommittee met over video games, when Joe Lieberman was freaked out.

so it's a response to people being upset over video game violence so by the time Harvester actually hit shelves it really does feel out of touch because at that point we have a rating system for video games Mortal Kombat is being sold to people

everyone has calmed down a lot and we have this thing kind of raging against the machine that is sort of shut down by 96 Yeah I never know really what to make of Harvester because I know like Gilbert's you know I guess inspiration for why he wants to to make it or have you. But it's one of those things that I feel like I can't tell if I sort

of, I don't know, like, with what, I can't feel if it's actually trying to say anything per se, or if it's just sort of like, hey, here's some like really, you know, edgy lord kind of stuff just for the sake of it kind of thing, you know, that I always had that kind of internal struggle with it, but, you know. Yeah, I appreciate, let's say, I appreciate the honesty of Harvester, you know, it really is not holding anything back. And I have a quote from Austin who was interviewed after the game came out years later. He says, quote, I was pissed off at all the bullshit about violence and media. I saw it as censorship, which is anathema to any artist.

When I read about some of the violence being edited out of classic Warner Brothers cartoons, I was deeply outraged. Those cartoons are some of the funniest goddamn short films ever made, as classic as Casablanca or assistant Kane in my book. Any defective sub-moron who took it upon themselves to cut those masterpieces to somehow save the little chill-ins from being corrupted, deserves to be tried and executed for crimes against humanity. An exaggeration, perhaps, unless he's cutting the last print in which I, case, I mean it literally, but you get my point. So he walked back the I want to kill people

and then kind of plunged ahead into the statement. That's a very, those ellipsies right before an exaggeration, perhaps. We're really carrying a lot there. I make sure it's a pause to indicate the ellipses as he realized like, oh, am I saying people should die? Maybe not, but actually, yes. Don't quote that part. You know, God bless them for letting an eighth grader make a video game. Right? Like, if you left it as, I saw it a censorship, was anathema to any artist like just stop there you're fine you know what I mean like we don't have to get anything else yeah so I guess essentially Harvester came into being because they wouldn't let Daffy Duck commit suicide anymore I can only do this once

so yeah that's where that's that's the spirit this game comes from again I can't judge Gilbert P. Austin because you know like if my ideas about media were accessible like in the future I would not want anyone to know what I felt at the of like 23 about media or like 12 about media so it's unfortunate i don't know if he still feels this way but this is a very common opinion of that era this is not strange at all from someone of this generation yeah it's it's so it's so hard it's one of those things too i remember seeing harvester on the shelves of like eb games or one of those you know like back in the day when they had the box games and like it was the big grim reaper with the glowing eyes on the cover and

it's it's just one of those games like once you see it like as to the dark c2 connection it's just like kind of has its own little way of like it's almost like B movie sort of quality where like it's animated a little odd and things don't quite like work as they should and there's like I don't know it's like it's not like broken it is buggy a bit but like it just it feels off like it kind of bothers me on some level you know like

in the in the creepy way it bothers me more than Darkseed 2 and Darkseed 2 has HR Geiger artwork in it yeah right like I think that just like even just taking that away lets the actual uncanniness of the presentation carry a lot more

yeah it's like off it's like off kilter and just like like that kind of like weird I don't want to say on canny valley but it's just like off-funding like there's something wrong with it as you're playing it you can't quite put your finger on it yeah like HR Geiger's art is laser targeted to

ick you out and here you just feel queasy because just things things aren't sitting right things aren't moving right it just feels like you're kind of seasick when you're looking at harbister on our on our shows uh gary of my host and i have this kind of concept of like does this game or movie like make you feel taken care of right you know like some some games the creators are making it and just like okay you're going to feel ushered for moment to moment and you have a good

sense of what's going to come because it follows some structures and rules and then some movies especially like when you get into like outsider art kind of stuff and you get that and i think this you know kind of game here too it's just like i've got no idea what's going to come next. I don't know what any of these characters is going to do for moment to moment. And everything about this is just putting me off balance. Yeah. It's a little tackier than Dark C2, I'll say, but it just is so similar in just how it looks and how it plays. And Dark C2 is like a little more elegant. But here you wake up, you are Steve Mason. You look a lot like Mike Dawson if he shaved and let himself go a tiny bit. And the first thing you do is get into an

argument with your mother. It's a very similar experience. I don't. I don't. don't know why both games start that way. And the Steve Mason guy is almost as unappealing and just weak-willed. It's not a character who you want to be in the shoes of. And he is just kind of led around in this game with these various missions he's given. Because you wake up in the town of harvest. It's 1953. You are Steve Mason.

You have amnesia. And you need to talk to this town's collection of oddballs to figure out who you are and why you're here. And essentially, this is Twin Peaks filtered through the brain. of a very pissed off Gen Xer in the year 1994. And like in Twin Peaks, there's an evil lodge. You have to do missions for them. They seem like, okay,

light property damage, some blackmail here and there, but everything you do ends up getting people killed. And the huge reveal of the game. Spoilers, if you want to play through Harvester, is that the entire reality of this game is a VR simulation engineered to create serial

killers for no established reason. This is not a super soldier. program. People are just curious see if this can happen and everything you've done in the game so far was to train you to become a serial killer and then you are given two paths

at the end. You either stay and harvest forever and die in real life but you get to experience harvest forever in the moment that you die or kill your girlfriend in real life and become a serial killer. Escape harvest but then take on this new horrible identity in reality.

It's funny because I don't like the ending to Harvester but I also can't think of it better one you know it's like one of the things like where well where else would it be going it's like yeah i guess there's nothing that way but it's it's just sort of abrupt and out of nowhere because it is sort of like this very odd thing like these odd events it's hard to know like what's going to happen next and then at the end it's like so it's serial killer training program you're like oh all right thanks i guess you know sure yeah and this the the point of the game seems to be contrary to the point the creator wants to make because i again he's mad that they won't let daffy duck take his own life and then the

entire game is we have desensitized a person through media to become a killer. So maybe it's satire because he's saying the thing he doesn't believe, but it doesn't really play out like that. It's also, I don't know, the audience where it's going to be like someone who's like, you know, played 10 or 12 hours of the video game to get to this ending finally. And they're like, oh, you're right, you know, that is wild. That would never happen. I've changed my mind, you know, because you probably wouldn't be playing through it if you felt

that way to begin with. all these prudes and busy bodies in the Senate believe that video games make you into a terrible person well I'm going to get them I'm going to make a metaphor that proves them right you sit down and kill people in that lodge Senator Orrin Hatch thank you If only Roger Ebert played this game when he was alive

he would have changed his team So before I continue I have a little clip from Harbister in which we learn what a Harbister is One man is Steve Mason Another man is well he's a villain kind of figure. You'll be able to tell which is which in a second here. What the hell is a

harvester? The hand that grips the knife that stabs, the ones who move amid the crop and harvest the fruit. You're talking about people,

killing people. Again and again, And again, I believe the technical term is serial killer. The harvester seek to perpetuate terror and discord for our own purposes. We do this through the random utility of murder, and we persevere through our recruitment of initiates like yourself. So not Dr. Claw, but a guy who can do a meme, Dr. Claw, this Harvester figure. So, yes, that's the point of Harvester.

And, you know, mostly known today as being tacky and gross with lots of 90s edge lord humor that's barely aged in the Y2K. So along with being violent, there's a lot of offensive stuff in here. Like, there are firemen characters who talk in these very exaggerated stereotypically gay manners. And it's only because of the obvious pun. That is the only reason why these firemen are made into these kind of figures. So it is very, very immature. In some ways, in a charming way, in some ways in a way that I'm glad we've moved beyond. I pretty much line up there.

You know, there's an audacity to this that is hard to look away from. But if you pulled up any random part of this, I would not be able to defend it. Yes, yeah. it's odd right because it has things like that and then it'll have something that's kind of clever where like the sheriff will like uh you know see like somebody spine ripped out and it's like well that's natural causes and then he has the famous line when someone like when steve's like natural cause he goes well you can't live without a spine ain't nothing unnatural about that you know and it's just like it's funny like it's it's actually not a bad gag and then yeah and then you just have like here's the gay stereotype fireman for no reason you know or like things like that so it's it's just it It's weird. It's like this mixed badge. Like, they just threw in everything. Especially, like, the whole second half of the game, like, the lodge is just a mess where it's just like puzzles and combat and not. It feels like really unpolished and, you know, in general.

The puzzles, you can get stuck forever because things are happening on certain days and you have to do things to unlock things on later days. And also, like you said, Slow Beef, there is a combat system in this game. And it's just as awkward and pointless as you'd expect. And you can actually, I was looking at YouTube comments on the playthrough. People were talking about, like, oh, I ran out of it. of resources when I got to this part of the game, which a lot of the final area is combat. And there are some regular puzzles, but like, oh, I don't have enough shotgun bullets or I don't have enough health items. This should not be a concern in an adventure game.

No, exactly. And it feels like accidental that way. Like a lot of, like, Harvester just has this like little edge of like sloppiness to it where it's like, I wonder if they intended for you to conserve resources or if that's just like the way it kind of worked out, you know, like that was the we gave you seven shotgun shells here and that's we just left that number there why not it's finished a bowl you know we assumed it was enough so let's go around here and decide where this fits in with the other game so i am going to be again generous i'm going to give this a seven uh this game is gross it is uh not not my cup of tea but it does really again sum up a certain point of view from a certain kind of person in this time period and they're

being very honest about their feelings and i find that charming outside of all of the things that have not aged very well. So I'm going to give Harvester a seven. I'm going to say seven as well. Primarily because of that audacity. There's an appeal to sitting down and playing something that does feel this outsidery. And just to have a string of things where you can say, are they actually doing this? Yes.

I think I'm with both of you here. And it's funny because I feel like Harvester is something that's very hard to make on purpose. you know like just the whole package together it feels like some of it's like it's like lightning in a bottle thing where it's just like just good enough and just bad enough that it just makes its own sort of thing i'll go with a seven also oh very good okay well that's easy math for me so we're going to give harvester after telling up the score here it's a 21 yeah i mean ultimately it does feel like the guy who thought out this game my own theory is he thought boy they're going to ban this game. It's going to be so violent

and offensive. It's going to get so much attention. And then by the time it rolls out, there's a rating system. They're like, okay, M for Mature, have fun. Sell your game. He's like, God, damn it. You missed your moment, bro. Yeah, yeah. I should have gotten Harvester out like in 1990. Unfortunately, that never happened. So our final game here is not really a horror game,

but I feel like we should talk about it because it's fun to talk about it. It's got a horrory name. It's called Ripper from 1996, developed and published by Take 2 Interactive. So this is the second installment of a trilogy of high-budget adventure games made by Take 2 Interactive. and they got their start in the early 90s by making full motion video heavy PC games but they're now mostly known as a company who created the Rockstar Games Empire

so Take 2 got out of making games around the time of Y2K I believe and now they just are part of this vast empire that includes Rockstar so technically this is more of a detective game but this one definitely has the most star power of anything we talked about this this outweighs even Tim Curry or the guy who played Mike Dawson

and Darkseed too because we have the following people in this game Christopher Walken, Karen Allen, John Rees Davies, and Burgess Meredith in his final role. Also, this gave Jimmy J.J. Walker something to do in 1996, and it includes a role

by an upcoming Paul Giamatti before anyone knew who he was, before even private parts when he played the station manager in that movie. Oh, God. I totally forgot Paul Giamatti was in this. Holy crap. Yeah, he was playing like a mortician,

like a very obvious, Like, we're going to hire you to be a little creep. Can you do that? He's like, oh, sure. A little creep, you got it. They didn't even hire him. He just showed up. That's what he was doing.

You auditioned for something else. And they're like, you know what? We got a role for you, actually. This is really part of the whole silhouette phase in Silicon Valley in the gaming industry, which I feel like lasted about 18 months in which this seemed viable. These entertainment products, I'll call them that, that would involve actual celebrities acting in these video games. Sorry, Kay, I think I cut you off there. Yeah, I mean, I was going to just talk about the appeal of that. It is really hard to be entirely displeased, even if you see some of these people slumming it, right?

Like, I don't know, I see David Patrick Kelly show up on screen and I'm like, okay, I'm in. Right. You know, like that was probably worth that money as, you know, for a little bit, for like a tiny window and then it was gone. Yeah. I mean, so you mentioned an actor. Who did he play, Kay? David Patrick Kelly is The younger

He's Benjamin Horn's younger brother In Twin Peaks Okay, okay He's also the Warriors come out to play guy Who does the bottles I think he has a role in Blade Runner as well Yeah, the main character in this game is not a name He was an up-becoming actor

And I was like, this guy just go on to do nothing No, he has a ton of roles on IMDB He eventually went on to do much better things But yeah The people involved in this I thought Christopher Walken, was he getting divorced? Is that why he did this game? No, he's been happily married for a very long time.

I guess their agents just saw value in this kind of a thing when it was upcoming. Sort of like how it's not this evil, but sort of how celebrities get involved with like crypto and AI and stuff. It feels like they're talked into this and it ends up being kind of embarrassing to them later down the line. But they can point to like, oh, it was this craze? I wanted to get in on it. Like, it's forgivable. I don't know. I don't know a single person who holds this against Christopher Walken.

especially at that point in his career. John Reeves talked me into it, I swear. It's not my idea. But yes, so thanks to all of these celebrities, it was a fairly expensive game to produce. And apparently had a budget of $4 million. And based on what I could find, it did not make that money back. So here is a little clip here of here's what Christopher Walken sounds like in Ripper. And there are some great Christopher Walken style deliveries that make it sound like this is in an imitator, but it is actually Christopher Walken. Any luck identifying the murder weapon yet? I will guess that it's a knife. Farley says that hasn't been established. It says you don't know what the murder weapon is. That fat fuck has a lot of crazy theories. It's not rocket science. These people will butcher.

You can't slice bacon with a baseball bat. You notice anything fishy about Burton? Like what? Like the fact that she's dragging her feet on treating Catherine. Now, you're a cyber surgeon, huh? Why aren't you investigating her? What makes you so sure I'm not? did you know that falconetti and burton were married yeah so so why didn't you tell me it's not relevant for the case well the fuck it's not one of those could be the ripper look i'm not an idiot i read your partner's notes as far as you plan had to concern i'm a suspect so we do get him saying a cyber soijan it's a real bugs bunny style delivery with a baseball bat yeah with a baseball bat he has this one line in too that

Like, this guy is unbelievable. It's just wonderful. I did try to find that one, but it's a much longer game than you would suspect because it is spread across six CD-ROM disks. Yeah. But, yes, the plot is it's the year 2040, which used to be a far off year. And there's this new Jack the Ripper-themed serial killer on the loose, and you play a reporter trying to figure out the identity of the killer,

which involves occasionally dipping into cyberspace where everything is weirdly posterized for some reason. And you eventually find out everyone involved in this mystery all played a Jack the Ripper-themed VR game that could also kill them in real life because playing the game implanted some code in their brain that would make them explode in the real world we were still figuring out VR at the time but like Ripper

it involves some kind of concocted VR conspiracy That's right This is also I think the lawnmower era of things when like VR was always like this like wild cyber show where you were like dodging things and stuff like that Yeah yeah it was like very

speculative I guess at the time and yeah, who knows what is being implanted in our brains right now just by doing this podcast. I'm not sure, but it's facts about Mike Dawson. I know that. And there is a nice gimmick in this game in that the culpr can be one of four people, though apparently clues can be found for all possible suspects,

and real changes to the story don't really happen until the third act. So this is a well-meaning feature to increase playability, but they did not want to do the work to make other parts of the game different. And I can assume that was a budget issue. They didn't want to bring in Karen Allen or Christopher Walkin for more than a day. Because I assume based on the footage available, it feels like they worked for a day or perhaps a weekend on this project. If you want a better execution on that idea of like every time you play it, the culprit can be different. The Westwood Blade Runner game does that exact same thing.

Yeah, I was going to bring that up too. Yeah, absolutely. Because it does do that better because the clues are all throughout. But it's funny that they spent so much. money on the, because I feel like I never heard of this game until like years later, you know what I mean? Like, it wasn't really marketed very well. Like, I never heard it advertised or anything, you know. Yeah, and they would make another full motion video adventure game after this, this Black Dahlia game. Oh, yeah. I think I heard of that. So this did not destroy

the company. I don't know how, because it seems like it costs a lot of money and it was embarrassing. I never saw it on store shelves. And yes, I did not talk about the gameplay. It's very lacking. It's very seventh guesty. I feel like they started with seventh guest and didn't know what to do from there because there are the same like full motion video scenes where you're like gliding from location to location and

even though you're talking to people more than you do in seventh guest the puzzles at least to me from what I've seen, they are very isolated like here is a puzzle screen solve this puzzle screen and you can move on with the story. They're not like inventory puzzles or anything like that. It is sort of like

the puzzle screen from the seventh guest. Yeah. And some of them are pretty interesting, although the execution seems very bad. Like, you have to take a recording of Karen Allen and basically piece together the wave in order to have her, say, please open the door or something like that. So just copying that from Gabriel Knight, too? Oh, maybe. Yeah. Exactly. You do that same thing.

And I like audio editing puzzles because I do edit audio still, but I don't see the average person being that into the idea. And I think, like, one of the first things you do that seems very difficult is putting together a. 3D coffee cup. It's sort of like a 3D puzzle where you have to slide the shards in the place. It just seems very, very tedious for this way more interesting premise than that would indicate, you know, that kind of a puzzle. Yeah. It's almost, yeah, it's like a Phoenix Wright little thing.

Like put this back together so you can see which part's missing. Yeah. Except there are like 30 pieces instead of six. Yeah, that's too much. Yeah. But yes. So, yeah, the final, like I was looking through this. I haven't played this one.

The final puzzle has you arranged tarot cards based on the lyrics of Blue Oyster Cults Don't Fear the Reaper as that song plays in the background. And this is all super connected because based on me living through the era, it feels like Christopher Walken wasn't a real slump at this point. And it wasn't until he was in the more cowbell sketch that his career picked up again. And that is completely tied into Don't Fear the Reaper. It is wild how they kind of like briefly cross paths and then they committed one's SNL broth just had that concept. Yeah. I wonder if he still remembered Ripper. when he was, you know, doing rehearsals for that sketch.

Like, oh, we, we had this RIPA game. I'm, I'm going to say no. I don't know what I'm basing that on, but I just feel like Christopher Walk is probably like, yeah, I don't, I don't know. I was in a video game as something. I think it was called Bacon Baseball Bat. I don't even remember. They walked him into a blue screen room, just put a hat on him and fed him his lines through an earpiece.

That's what it sounds like. He was in a slump, but he was also, like, kind of starring in everything to, like, not starring a bit, like, he just would, he was still working through all. all that. So, like, he's like, I don't know, I had to get rid of everything from Ripper to make room for my lines for suicide kings or something. You know, it's like he stuck to that one role, though, that one character, like that one voice cadence and everything. It's like, I'm in a major acting slump, but I'm not changing anything, you know? And there you go. So that was Ripper, not a lot of horror, but it is, you know, based on Jack the Ripper. And I guess the horrible thing

involved in this game is that it was Burchase Meredith's last role in a thing. No. And anything. So we all miss him. Mickey from Rocky. So let's go around the room here and give Ripper our scores. You know what? I had a higher score written down and thinking about this game annoyed me. So I'm giving it a four.

Not really horrory. It's sort of like the lawnmower man. People explode, I guess. But they should have taken the Jack Thripper concept a little further than just giving us kind of like a crappy Blade Runner world. That's me. So, Kay, I gave it a four. How about you? I'm going to put this at like a five.

Like, nothing about this is very offensive to me. Like even a, I play, I don't know, maybe like the first third of it. Like, the puzzles are fine. Like, as far as we have FMV and we want to use it to do something, a cyberpunk murder mystery is one of the more interesting things they could probably have done at that point. Yeah, I'm just going to put it like a five. It just seems really like a middle of the road kind of deal. So we can say, just play the Blade Runner. adventure game.

Yes. It's a much better version of this. Yeah. If you're looking for a game. Yeah. Yes. An actual game. I kind of painted myself into a corner because I want to give it higher than Darkseed

2, which I gave a 2. And then, but I don't know about the 7th guess, which I gave a 3. So I'll have to go with, uh, I'll have to go with the 3, I think, on this one. Because I just don't feel like it's very creepy or anything. It's more funny and notable than anything else. But, you know, I'm not going to wake up thinking about Christopher walking and cyberpunk world. like a cold sweat, you know.

Understandable. So tallying the score up, very easy to do here. And Ripper gets a 12. So very, very low on our list here. And now we've come to the end of the podcast. It's time to let everyone know who won. I'll just do the top three. So coming in at number three, surprisingly, Frankenstein through the eyes of the monster,

taking home the silver is Harbister. Perhaps the only award this game has ever won. I have to assume. And number one should be obvious if you're all doing the math in your head. It is, I have no mouth and I must scream. Well, I do have a scream. And that's me being excited that obviously the best game on this list, the most obvious game on this list,

took home the gold in our annual Halloween episode. So yeah, that is it for another episode of Retronauts. Thanks to all of you for joining me as we looked at another kind of horror game format. Let's go around the room here and talk about where we can find ourselves. I'll do our podcast plugs first. So if you want to support Retronauts, please go to patreon.com slash Retronauts and sign up there.

For five bucks a month, you get access to two bonus episodes every month. They're full-length episodes. You're going to love those if you love a regular episode. And also you get access to a regular column in podcast by contributor Diamond Fight.

And we have been doing those bonus episodes for a very long time now. So there are many, many episodes that you have missed if you're not on that level. We really appreciate it. It is patreon.com slash Retronauts. And we are Retronauts on Blue Sky. in other places, so look for us there.

Now, let's talk to our guests here. Let's start with Kay. Kay, where can we find you? All my work is at duckfeed.TV. It's a podcast network, a whole bunch of shows. I feel like we talked about most of these on our comedy show about bad games called Abject Suffering. But we do have a full episode about I Have No Mouth and I'm a scream

that we did about maybe 10 years ago, something like that's there. And if you like horror games, I stream horror games on Twitch, the channel DuckVee TV every weekend I'm doing Silent Hill F right now as we're recording Awesome And Slow Beef

My name's Slowby My brand rather You can find me on YouTube, Twitch or Blue Sky under that name I do like to stream horror games But I do like to stream bad ones Although I'm currently in the middle of a playthrough of Rule of Rose

Which is not a bad horror game But in terms of like plugs that If you're going to Super MacFest 20206 I did submit a panel there So I like to do live shows and things like that So about called a Deadest It's just your video games. So if you're around for that convention or any others I might be doing it at, that's my jam.

Awesome. Sounds great. And as for me, I've been your core host on this episode, Bob Mackie. You can find me on Blue Sky and many other places. It's Bob Servo and my other podcasts are all on the Talking Simpsons network. That's at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. We've got the podcast Talking Simpsons and What a Cartoon on the free feeds. And then if you want to give to the Patreon, we have Talking Futurama, Talking at the Hill, Talking Critic.

and we have episodes all about Batman the animated series and Mission Hill. So there's a lot going on behind the Patreon paywall there at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. But that is it for this episode of Retronauts. We will see you again next time for another great episode. Take care. I'm going to be able to be.