Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 258: 2009 (It's Retro Now)

Episode Date: November 11, 2019

Jeremy Parish, Benj Edwards, Chris Sims, and Ben Elgin wrap up some unfinished business by tackling the year that got away: 2009. Yeah, 2009 is retro now. Sorry, we don't make the rules. Actually, wait... we do.

This week in Retronauts, age is just a number, and it makes you dumber. Hi, everyone. Hi, everyone, welcome to this episode of Retronauts. I am Jeremy Parrish, hosting this episode of Retronauts with such cool people in the recording studio as... Ben Elgin. Ben Jedwidge. Chris Sims. And no pithy nicknames or anything this time.

Nope. We're just getting straight down to business. Yeah. And the business is talking about the year 2009. This is our, like, what, third attempt at finishing this series now that we're halfway through the year? No, okay. So earlier in the year, we did the... year in review, and, you know, went back through, like, 1989,

1969, 1979, 79, 99. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Lots of video games every 10 years, every decade. And we got to 2000, or to 1999 and said, okay, cool, we're done. But then everyone started thinking, you know, actually there was a lot of interesting stuff in 2009, and that was 10 years ago, which means that by our very arbitrary standard, that is retro now. So I thought, why not just get back together and just talk about 2009 in gaming?

Because, I don't know, like with 10 years of hindsight, you can see how 2009 was kind of transitional. Like, it was a very different place than gaming in 1999, but it was also pretty different than what we have now. Like, gaming has shifted and evolved a whole lot. I kind of feel like that period was sort of this interminable gray area of video gaming. I mean, I was working in the press and covering video games. is my living. But when I look back, I'm like, I don't know if I really want to revisit that.

But I don't know. Maybe that's just... No, no, no, no. It was a golden age. Was it? Compared to now, yes. Compared to now? Yes.

We were just talking earlier about how much great games... Socially, I think it was a good age. Socially, we were in the middle of a recession and everyone that I knew got laid out. No, I mean, like, video games weren't as extremely political and politicized as they are now. And 2009 was the beginning of...

of the new indie revolution, 2007 or so. Yeah, video games have always been political. I hate to tell you. Yeah, but I mean, that time, it was still, it was a good mixture of sort of like the old ways and the new ways. Things are, you know, people were,

I don't even want to get into it. Okay, let me see, like, I'm not, I'm not sure where you're going. Let's not, let's not. The old ways is like playing a game without talking about politics and enjoying it with your friends. No matter who you are

and what background you come from, that's video games to me. Yeah, that wasn't actually how it was back then. Maybe that was your experience. It was for me. Yeah. So you liked the state of video games that existed for you in 2009, not necessarily like the broader spectrum of video games.

I mean, there were issues and problems that were coming up and things were, I don't even want to talk about it. But, you know, it was a cool time. Did you ever play the Grand Theft Auto Games? Yeah. Okay. Did you play like Manhunt? Did you play civilization?

Which one? Biocococ. Like, all of these games had, had, you know, they had political themes, they approached social issues. Yeah, like, I think, I think you just have rose tinted glasses, but realistically, video games, you know, by the nature of what they are, they're political. Like, there's a perspective, there's a point of view, so. Yeah, there's the first game on this list that we have starts off with a disclaimer about how it was made by people of many different backgrounds. Yeah, the first game on this list. don't get mad at us because you just fight a poem. It's a sequel to a game where you play as a Muslim assassin, murdering Christian crusaders.

Yeah. That's, you know, that was a pretty big deal at the time. Yes, it was accurate. But it was also like in 2007 when that game came out, Assassin's Creed, that was, that was quite a stand to take. Like, especially, you know, the, the, the atmosphere of Islamophobia that was really prevalent in America at the time, you know, post 9-11, to have a character who was. was Muslim, that, that, you know, and not American and was just going around stabbing Christian crusaders in the back, that, that was a stand. That was a statement. And that's why Assassin's Creed, too, had the all creeds and ethnicities. Yeah, like, yeah, so, so yeah, I can't, I can't, I can't agree with you there, Ben. No, I'll put this out there. 2009 was pre-mainstreamed Twitter, okay? That's what I'm talking about. It's like, so it's about, it's about the channels is you're experiencing games. Yeah, well, I'm saying, like, the,

there's a different relationship between fans and creators at that time. There's a different relationship between the media and the creators at that time than there is now. There's a different relationship between readers and the media than there is now. I think it was, it was a transitional period. Yeah, transitional period. But it was neat. You know, blogs were sort of giving way to social media at that time, and it was, you know, And YouTube was rising in prominence.

Yeah, I think there's a lot of ways in which the online scene was transgression. And we had an online in this. And we had game facts and we had forums and blogs and stuff. We didn't have like sort of the immediate super of the moment discussion that we have on Twitter now. And it was also transitional just in terms of where the games come from. Like you had online game stores already by this time. But they weren't, I feel like they weren't as pervasive as they are now where you've got new stuff coming out just constantly downloadable. Um, yeah, I mean, the reason I say this was kind of an interminable gray period is because at the time, this was where, you know, like middle tier video games pretty much disappeared. And so you had blockbuster games and indie games were really struggling to just get started. So everything was dominated by big, big blockbuster games, everything that had to sell, you know, millions of dollars and kind of got us to the point where we are now where if a game, you know, sell, it's a bestselling game for months in a row, but somehow does it.

meets shareholder objectives, then it's still considered a failure and everyone loses their job. You didn't have the constant indie pipeline that we have now where you'll have these little indie games and then they start to catch on and then they end up being published on all the console stores and everyone gets them and they get really popular. Yeah, you didn't really have that so much. So this was kind of a transition where before you had, you had the big console games and then if a console was successful enough, you'd also get maybe some more experimental stuff published for it. But it still wasn't really indie. You had to be picked up by like some company that was going to do your console publishing

for you. When did the Xbox Live store open? 2008? It was before that, wasn't it? It was early. It was definitely opening this period. I mean, Xbox Live was available pretty much from the launch of the 360, which was 2005, because Geometry Wars was... No, it was a few years later.

I'm positive. So how were people playing Geometry Wars? I don't know. Maybe that was a mainstream release. How are they getting horse armor for Oblivion in 2006? My experience. I don't know, but I know it wasn't at the launch of the console. Oh, Xbox Live Arcade came out in 2008.

Okay, Arcade, sure, sure. That was like, that's why I'm talking about this era is a really exciting period of like the ascent of the Indies. And you've watched Indie Game, the movie that profiles certain high profile indie pioneers of that time. And that was that period of that stuff

going on with Fez and Super Meat Boy and, you know, and Minecraft, by the way, coming and revolutionizing everything in that year. and the next year as it followed, which is pretty exciting. So I think you've actually kind of touched on something maybe inadvertently that I wanted to talk about in this episode, which was, you know, so much of what we're going to talk about in this episode is going to be colored by subjectivity, by, you know, through the lens of how we saw the world at the time. I mean, you've already talked about the lack of mainstream Twitter, the fact that we didn't have a president who was like telling senators that they need to go back to Africa. Africa on Twitter.

No, I didn't. So my question then is, where were you in 2009? Chris, let's start with you. 2009 was actually a really big year for me, personally. I was transitioning out of having a day job and into being a full-time writer. I had been blogging since 2005, a comics blog that I, it's still out there. You can still find it. The more recent archives are at t-H-I-S-B.com.

But in 2009, I had started writing for Comics Alliance, which was then run by AOL. Laura Hudson hired me for that job. I haven't heard that name in a while. Yeah, me neither. I was just talking to Laura the other day. Tell her we said hi. I will. But she hired me based on things that I had written on my blog.

And so I was able to, at the end of 2009, beginning of 2010, transition out of working at a comic book store where I'd worked for six years and into full-time freelance writing, which is where I've been ever since. And I had been writing all along, but it became my day job, which also meant that I was working from home, which also meant that I was playing more video games. So for me personally, I remember this time very intensely, and oddly enough, looking at this list of games that we had, there were so many of them that I didn't play at the time that I would later go back to. Like, Assassin's Creed 2, I waited for a while to go back to. But obviously, given what my job was, what my interests are, and who I am as a person,

like, Arkham Asylum was a huge, huge game for me, just personally. But yeah, that's about where I was. And I was also writing about video games at the time, like, more for myself and anything else. Ben, how about yourself? Clearly, you were not on Twitter interacting with the president. That's actually, well, it's the first year I joined Twitter was 2009. I was a little late to the game. I had friends who started in 2006 or whatever. But in 2009 was a really good year. Yeah, by 2009, I'd already joined Twitter, used it for like a year or two quit and then started a new account. Yeah. I feel like 09 was sort of the beginning of mainstream adoption of Twitter.

which is probably why I started in the beginning. That's why all the media sites went away. When did Google Reader die? Because I feel like you could put the pin in Google Reader dying as the transition from from blogs and honestly like a lot of content-driven websites to social media. 2012. When did Live Journal get sold? When did Live Journal get sold?

Because I was on Live Journal for a long time in the early 2000s, but then it just died completely. I don't remember. It was bought by Russians and now it's very popular in Russia. Well, it was, no, it was already a popular in Russia. Russia. That's why the Russians bought it so they could clamp down on all the dissidents who are on there. Literally, that's true. Yeah. Yeah. Well, 2009 was a big year for me.

2009 was a big year. I was writing freelance for many sites like PC World and Mac World a lot and Technologizer, a new blog started by my buddy, Harry McCracken, just cranking out the hits. And I had a blog called Vintage Computing Gaming that I still run, but I was still updating it back then a lot and it was a good time and I was expecting my first child at that period so it was a for me personally it was the beginning of a transition because the next year everything changed with a baby you know so 2000 year 2009 was like my my last year as a as a free man like someone who could actually sit down and play video games for more than an hour straight you know that kind of thing and um you know i uh knew jeremy at the time

and that's probably when I stopped writing for One Up around then. It was because One Up stopped having any money. Yeah, it happened a lot. But it was still, the money was fairly good in freelancing at that time until a couple years later. So I was doing pretty well. And it was fun. I was establishing a lot of new, like, things that hadn't been written about before,

but that's a little personal. Yeah, One Up was ahead of the curve in a lot of ways, including being bellwetheres of the transition away from mainstream publishing. I agree completely. Yes. It was exciting. So 2009 for me, 2009 was a very like sort of middle stretch of my life. I had, let's see, I graduated from grad school in like 2000. I was doing this tech job that I was still in in 2009. It would be for a while. And, you know, I also got married in 2000. And that also lasted about the same amount of time. But so, yeah, this was a very stable period of my life.

meant that I actually had time to play video games. So I played a bunch of these, a bunch of all the good stuff that was coming out in this year. We could talk about what we had, too. Like, I had a Wii and a PS3 at that time. You know, if that was what I was gaming on a lot. Wait, PS3? PS3, yeah.

Yeah, PS3, yeah, okay. What about you, Ben? Yeah, I had PS3 and a DS. Yeah, DS. Yeah, DS. Yeah, I had a DS as well. I would have been Wii 360 DS, DS, DS. I think that's

I know at some point I did buy a Neo-Jago Pocket color That was 10 years before And this was actually diversification for me Because I had always been a one platform Yeah like I had the NES and Super Nintendo And then I moved to PlayStation

But I hadn't actually had a handheld Since I like had a hand-me-down Original Brick Game Boy from one of my cousins And then I sort of fell away from handhelds for a long time until like the DS just had so much good stuff on it that I finally caved with one like one of the Zelda's and started picking up stuff on that yeah as for myself you know I was working at oneup.com and at the we kind of I feel like we really hit a stride in 2008 and everything was great and going into 2009 I had lots of ideas for content like I really took an initiative to

break out topic specific blogs on the site you know focusing on the brand new world of iPhone gaming, but also there was a retro gaming blog, a game music blog, a movie and a DVD release blog, and I was in charge of that, and it was great. And then about a week into the year, the layoffs hit, and two-thirds of the staff was laid off. And I was still there, and a lot of other people were still there, but it totally changed everything, changed the nature of this show, Retronauts, back in the one-up era. So, yeah, like, that was kind of the start. for the year, but we still made the best of it. And, you know, from that point on, I was kind of trying to figure out exactly what my angle on gaming was because I was like, well, I don't

want to just do old stuff. Clearly, that's what stuck. But, you know, I was interested in, you know, more critical analysis. And I tried to stay ahead of and abreast of gaming. And it's weird because I had a whole lot more time for actually playing games back then. I feel like now I just don't have time to play anything current. I've got so many projects going on and they've all kind of shifted toward old content. So that's pretty much all I play. But yeah, I look at this list of major games in 2009. And I would say probably three quarters of them I played. And yeah, it was a, it was a pretty solid year. But at the same time, I look at it and I can see like kind of how the video games industry was in some ways losing its sense of direction and moving more toward, you know, the

the desperate monetization that we see now, games as a service and things like that, subscription services. We weren't quite there yet, but I think the writing was on the wall, especially with a launch of iOS gaming at the end of 2008. That really kind of drove a hammer into the coffin of portable gaming for a while. Portable gaming eventually clawed its way out of the grave and came back. but it was a tough battle. And, you know, I was, I was primarily playing on DS and 360 as my platforms.

So, you know, when I wasn't playing games on 360, all the rest of the time, I was playing stuff on DS or PSP to a certain degree, but it was kind of fading by that point. So, yeah, watching DS start to struggle at that point. Like, that was the year that, you know, you really started to see the market shrivel up for DS. And I think that's because of piracy and because of iOS. And that really, that took a toll because before that, the DS had been very vibrant. So, yeah, I don't know. I have mixed feelings about 2009. Lots of great games, but also lots of challenges that would kind of kind of come to light in the coming years. Yeah, I mean, there was still a lot of really good stuff coming out on DS right now,

but I think it was stuff that had been in the pipeline still coming out in 2009. Yeah, I want to say this was the year that Atlas went all in on just releasing all kinds of crazy esoteric stuff on DS, like steel princess and things like that. They had like a dozen games, like really niche RPGs. They were like, man, this market's awesome. Everything's rocking. And those games sold like 10 copies each. And I think they took a bath on them. Well, the things that, like, even though stuff was winding down, like the DS had done so well at this point that it had an enormous install base. And that, right? Didn't it? Oh, it did. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I think that, like, in some sense, like, gave people a sense of comfort in just, like, taking some risks on shoving stuff out there because so many people on this platform that someone was going to buy it. It did. But so much of this install base was, like, R4, I can get one of those. Right. Sure. I mean, I think this was the year that I went to a family wedding and saw a bunch of kids playing DS. And I was like, oh, what are you playing? They were like, I don't know, everything.

And they just scrolled through it our list of games on their R4s. And I was like, oh, well, okay. That's a game that just came out last week. And did not buy it. I had an R4 around that time, but I found it that it was like, I used it as a demoing system. I actually bought way more D.S. games after I got the R4 than I did before it. Yeah, I did have an exception. I mean, I have a ton of DS games, and I got to play the ones I liked and figure them out and not waste my money on the ones I didn't like that. Yeah, I had one, but I didn't really, and you know, this isn't a whole area and now thing. It's just the way I used it.

But yeah, I didn't really put new games on it. It was more like old stuff and had some emulators on there. at that time with the R4 is like wouldn't it be great if Nintendo embraced this and made it so you could just download a game or try it out and you know I was coming on there but yeah there were they didn't have a DS or no sorry

that was until the DSI that was where that started 2010 DSI was where that started I didn't even know that was a year off from that I didn't even know that was a thing I didn't know that you could play pirated games on DS at the time oh yeah the R4 made it insanely easy

yeah you just bought this SD card cart. Yeah, and that's why they released the DSI. In fact, in 2008, on the way to game developers conference, I sat next to Ralph Bayer on the plane with a DS light. The inventor of video games, I had an R4 in there, and we

just sat and played through four or five games together. It was really cool. Thanks to the R4. So piracy is good, because it lets you play games with the father of video games. Pirate responsibly kids. And so the rise to the app store. And so the rise to App Store.

open in 2008 to iOS App Store. That's really the race to the bottom began as soon as that came out. Everyone's chasing the bottom dollar. Quite as soon as it came out. There was like a year of grace where people were like, they put a legitimate effort into it. But then, yeah. What killed everything was the in-app purchases.

And then they allowed the advertising in games. And that really, really killed iOS games. Because I bought for a year or so, there were so many good iOS games on iPad and stuff that were just games you just bought them and you played them and they were wonderful they didn't have they weren't begging you for more money they weren't tricking you to pay 499 and you own the game yeah it was wonderful and so I still have an iPad one full of those games and I'm going to keep it forever my kids play it there's because that's what was my daughter's first platform basically as even like a six month old she was like playing with mitzy bitsy

spider and stuff and then she got into Minecraft on there and oh man so that was that era maybe we should talk about Minecraft first because it is 10 years old now based on the initial dev releases and I think even at the time that it came out I don't know if everyone here heard about it but I was definitely aware of it because you kind of had to be by being in the games media yeah but it was still kind of a niche thing for a while it was niche but it just kind of immediately turned into this like wow this is really cool and this is you know you immediately started seeing people do these huge projects that they would just take on, you know, like, I just built the USS Enterprise D and that sort of thing. I think that might have been a year or two later, but, you know,

from the very beginning, there was a lot of pickup with Minecraft. The first year I played Minecraft is 2009. There was a, there was like a free version. You could play through the browser or something and build whatever you wanted. And then there was the alpha that you could download and it was a Java app and they Notch just kept adding features and adding features and adding features all the time so I had a best friend guy I mean once they added first we were playing

it individually then he added multiplayer and when we had multiplayer I had a friend online who we would build a whole new world and then a new release would come out and we'd just start all over again we did that five times over the next few years and it was really fun and addictive and it was

exciting to see what would be added to the game because at that point it was was a bunch of really necessary and cool additions. At this point, I feel like they've gone way overboard with too many additions, but that's just me personally, because it's 10 years old. But one of the funny things I remember the most of the time of 2009, 2010 Minecraft is that everyone was worried. Notch always intended the torches to run out eventually.

And so everyone was worried in the Minecraft community, like, oh, my God, Notch is going to make the torches run out because that ruins the whole game. you've established the world with torches so monsters don't spawn and you can survive because there's only survival mode and there is only you know and there was no adventure mode with HP and whatever and so the monsters stay away from the light experience points yeah they stay away from the light they don't spawn in the light so you have to establish your base basically in your safe space with these torches that always glow and then there's the rumor always that he was going to make them run out and they're like that will ruin Minecraft forever

So who's this Notch you keep mentioning? I thought the inventor of Minecraft was Hatsunay Miku. Marcus Person. We don't really want to talk about too much. I don't know who Marku, who I missamyuku is. Hatsune Miku? She's a vocaloid. She's Sega's virtual idol character.

Basically, people have said, oh, notch is actually not a great person to look up to. So they've just kind of... That's the thing. You don't have to look up to him. He's still created Minecraft. didn't, though. It's not like he was the sole creator of this series, this game. He was a creator, but there were lots of people involved in the creation of Minecraft.

He was kind of the public base and the driving figure, but, you know, he wasn't the sole person responsible for it. And there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of talk and a lot of kind of oral history about how when, you know, Microsoft bought Minecraft and from Mo Yang, and I think he took like a $2 billion page. check from that. And, you know, the other people who worked in the company benefited, but not nearly to that degree. I'm sorry? Yeah, two billion dollars. Like with a B? Yeah, a billion. I thought I was a billion. That's why he owns a candy mansion. Yeah. Um, this is how I feel about notches is that, like, I try to separate the creator from their art. Yeah, yeah, yeah, by all means. Minecraft is a brilliant piece of work. It was created collectively, not just by Marcus Pearson. There were many

staff members. I don't remember their names, but I remember updates. And the guy who took it over was the main guy after Knotch left. Yeah, I don't really know my Minecraft individuals that well. I just know that, yeah, he basically cashed out and became a recluse

and just kind of exists to social, like, post to be awful on social media. But I don't want to talk about him too much. I just wanted to kind of clarify that he was not the single handed. He's not like a will right. He was not like, I had a great idea. I'm going to do it all by myself. This was no rate on bungling bay or whatever. If I had $2,000, you would never see or hear

from me again. Two billion? Two billion. I'd be pretty happy. Shit, I got it. Yeah, I'm not sure. I'm not sure why you would. If I had two billion dollars, I would be gone. Yeah, I would definitely, um, yeah, I definitely would not buy a candy mansion. But, uh, yeah, I think, I always thought it was kind of surprising that I didn't get into. to Minecraft when it was the new hotness, because I love building things. But I think the problem was back then, actually, similar to now, I don't tend to do a lot of, like, PC desktop gaming. I mostly am on my consoles and handhelds, and it took a long time for it to get there. You know, you can get it on consoles now. I'll tell you why I like

Minecraft, exactly. Two reasons. First is that you could build and create your own world to your specifications. And I was, I came from a world of mushes, these tech based virtual worlds, multiplayer worlds where people could build their own worlds and program in text. In a world full of mush. See the retronauts early online episode where we talked about that too much. Yeah, that's true. We did talk about mushes.

So, Minecraft to me, felt like the most obvious graphical extension of mushes up to that point. It wasn't second life. It wasn't whatever. Because Minecraft, it took something very complicated. How do you build something in 3D space and make it

easy? It simplified it and summarize it down into blocks with simple blocks, block-based system. It's not like you've got to program a whole car and make yourself look like a hamburger and second life and whatever, all this weird stuff that was really obscure, like 3D modeling involved, you know,

but anyone can block out a voxel picture of anything in Minecraft, and it makes it so accessible and so addictive. Of course, when you had to mine the resources to do it before creative mode was a common thing, you just wanted to keep doing it and keep going and finding things, and boy, it was exciting. And the random generation of the world, the procedural generation, you know,

new things that you don't know and that weren't planned out or coming in. That's a really good point, though. Yeah, the simplicity of the system makes it open to anyone doing anything without being beholden to, like, other people creating content to modify. It's like your game, kind of.

Yeah, Minecraft came about 10 years too late for me to be able to invest time in it, but I love that it existed because it really, to me, felt like the realization of the novel microsurfs. Did you ever read that? Douglas Copeland's microsurfs?

Nope. That was a huge formative work for me in college. That was from like 1995, 96. And it was about some people who have an idea for a game. Like, what if we could create like virtual Lego? And they leave their cushy jobs at Microsoft and start this little company and create something that is basically,

it's basically Minecraft. And it took almost 15 years for someone to actually create the game described. in microserves. But when it finally came out, I was like, this is it. People have tried to make virtual Lego simulations and they were terrible, but this is the real thing. This is a building experience. And now, you know, this game was huge. It's, it is one of the biggest games of all time. I don't know how many hundreds of millions of downloads it's had. It's on every platform imaginable, including 3DS. Like, you know, Rebecca

Heineman and, I think, I want to say other ocean programs. programmed a new 3DS version of Minecraft. Wasn't Mike Micah was involved? Yes, Micah was involved. It was an impressive piece of work, but it's everywhere. You can play it on anything. Plushy toys of little pixely tools at Walmart. Little Steve explodes as late.

They turned it into actual Legos. It's so recursive. But the DNA of Minecraft shows up in so many contemporary games. Fortnite is Minecraft, but with, you know, Battle Royale combat. Dragon Quest Builders 1 and 2 is a brilliant extrapolation of Minecraft into the role-playing genre. It's just such a, it's such a fertile basis for a game. And, you know, my nephews and nieces still play Minecraft constantly. For my children, my oldest daughter is nine. She's been playing Minecraft since she was four years old, nonstop. So five years of the same game as it grew and

changed. This is like, that's her generation's bellwether of gaming. I mean, Minecraft, who knows how long it's going to keep going. Of course, we thought that for World of Warcraft that it'd go forever. But, you know, but World of Warcraft was still more finite in scope and more limited. Like, it was a very specific audience. Minecraft is just like, like, if you want to make something, go build it. Go dig a hole and start building a castle or, you know, one time I sat down with my nephew and he loved the, the eight-bit style amoe. And he was like, I want to build those in Minecraft. So we sat down and we spent an afternoon building 8-bit Mario and 8-bit link, like,

exactly to the specifications of the amoe. And it's a great, like, creative tool, like a way for kids to express themselves, but also, you know, if you want to sit down with them and share something with them, it's a, it's a very fun and painless way to do it. And they're apparently working on now the AR version of this. So like Pokemon Go style thing, where you can go out and build your Minecraft stuff and leave it in the real world and have other. people with their phones come out and see it.

Yeah, I played the HoloLens version of Minecraft. Yeah, so they did it. Four or five years ago. Yeah, they've been, there's been demos of this and it works for a while, but apparently, like, the phone game is actually getting close to where they're actually going to be able to do it, I think. Chris, do you have opinions about Minecraft? Never played it.

Never will. Don't get it. Don't understand it. What? You sound like the oldest man in the room, even though the youngest one. I am the youngest person in the room, and this is my oldest, old man opinion. I don't get it. It's just a place to build.

Why? You sound like my brother. Because why not? Why? I mean, why do anything? I got a job. If I'm going to sit down and create something, that's work. I got to fight a Dracula.

Give me a Dracula to fight. I think there are some Dracula's in Minecraft. There's definitely the Chithoulos. Let me tell you. My brother said the same thing. I tried to get him into Minecraft. He was like, why the heck would you sit down? and just build anything and do anything.

It's like it was way too open for him. He wanted a narrated, curated, curated experience from a video game that guided him through it. Is that how you feel? Yeah, I bear no ill will towards anyone. I am not like against Minecraft, but like I cannot see the appeal. And admittedly, I have never played it,

but I've never seen anything that made me want to play it. And I remember at this time and in the following years, I would also see Jeremy like you mentioned like oh somebody built the enterprise somebody built a clock that works or whatever and I was like why somebody built an entire Atari 2,600 emulator in Minecraft with like this like out of redstone switches yes oh my god or command blocks and stuff I mean why not like why would someone sit down to the blank piece of paper and draw something because they want to express themselves because it's there have a thing yeah well in Minecraft you have a thing and you can share with people you have an imaginary thing That's not a real thing. Social. It's because something exists in a virtual space. Yeah. But again, but this is why I have gotten into cooking lately,

because literally all day, all I do is I wake up and I create things that don't actually exist. Like, I write things or I write stuff. You can argue that Minecraft objects, that creations in Minecraft are more real than food because so many people can interact with them. So many people can share them and experience them. That's the worst argument ever. That's not a weirdest argument that a micron object is more real than a sandwich. When you eat a sandwich, it's gone.

What proof do you have aside for maybe some indigestion or a good poop later? First of all, my sandwiches are great and do not cause indigestion. How dare you? I'm saying, like, maybe you use some, you know, a blot of mustard or a bad potato. Crumb of. And then I would see Christmas milk. Yeah, exactly. Okay.

Yeah, look, by all means, have fun. I know the children like it. But I'm not a child. I got a job, so it ain't for me. Damn. That's cold, man. That's cold. On the other hand, you are the world's foremost Batmanologist.

Yes. Again, I only have enough stuff that doesn't exist. Okay. I, yeah, I don't know. Your preferred stuff that doesn't exist is elsewhere. That's fine. And to be fair, like, I do kind of get it because I, but, like, for me, that impulse was taken care of by, like.

Cooking? Well, by writing D&D adventures. Like, I run a game, I run D&D games for my friends, and around this time would have been when I was getting into the dungeon master side of things. So creating these imaginary things that don't exist and then having people interact with them, I get that in a certain respect. I don't get having to work within someone else's limitations to do it. I wouldn't say that Minecraft is necessarily working within limitations. It's just the nature of the medium. You have to interact with something else.

I can sit down and write whatever I want. And admittedly, I am using a pre-existing rule system, but I can break those as I see fit. I mean, if you sit down with, like, you know, a paint set, you can paint whatever you want, but you're still working within paint. And there are limitations and rules that apply to oil paints versus acrylic paint versus watercolor. You just need to know, like, what the boundaries are. And this ties back to what Benj was saying, like, you know, I mean, anything that's like online and is using somebody's framework is going to have.

that framework to work with it. But the fact that this is broken down into just like blocks makes it super flexible compared to something where you're actually like using someone else's models or there's already a world there. It's accessible to anyone. Even a child can put down blocks and build something, just like a Lego set. And I'm not a child. So that's fine. So you've got the capabilities of a child is what you're saying. Are you, are you, are you smarter than a fifth grader. Yes. I was 28 when I first

playing Minecraft and I enjoyed it quite a bit. No, like, again, I am sort of playing it up for humorous effect, but like I have no, I have never seen anything that makes me want to play it. That's fine. I'm just happy that this 2009 retrospective turned into an existential argument about

Minecraft. Yeah, but whether objects in Minecraft are more real than a sandwich. Is this ready player one? What proof do you have, what proof do you have that you made a sandwich last night? I can go downstairs and load up my Wii U and show you the virtual Mario Amibo that my nephew and I created. Okay, well, I will continue living in a few days and you will die if that is all you have.

If all I have is Sandwich, all you have is Minecraft, then I will continue to live. That's actually an even worse argument. My last word on Minecraft is in 2009, I wrote 10 greatest PC games fall time for PC World. It was the weirdest, craziest thing I ever wrote. And number one was like World of Warcraft or something. If I had written it a couple of years later, I would have put Minecraft at number one. That's how I feel about that game. For the record, I also have never played World of Warcraft and never will.

Yeah, I have zero interest in that. And again, Minecraft came to ten years too late for me to actually get anything out of it because I just have way too much going on in my life. And also you talk about people being able to interact with things, but I have also never gotten into online gaming at all. Like, I've never gotten into the only game I play along is a watch. So let me tell you something about other people, Chris, they're the worst. Yes, I know.

Yeah, I don't ever play with them. They're terrible. Like, Twitter, in many ways, has made me want to not play Minecraft. Other humans are terrible and ruined games where you. You play single-player games only, but Minecraft is neat because it is single-player if you want it to be. You can pick your friends, you know. I know. Okay, what's the next game.

Yeah, okay. So let's the next game. Yeah, he's going on the mind. Yeah, okay. So let's talk about some single player games, maybe. Yeah, we, we teased us out. Assassin's Creed, too. All right. I played a lot of that. The first good Assassin's Creek game.

Yeah. The first was really interesting and also, like, extraordinarily repetitive. Yeah. A wonderful concept, a brilliant idea, an interesting framework, which I think the games quickly outgrew in terms of the upstore ghost off. Yeah, yeah. Nearly impossible. Once Kristen Bell left, they were like, well, forget that.

I mean, I played the first Assassin's Creed. I enjoyed it. Like, it had a lot of good ideas. but definitely like It had the three good ideas and you did them over and over again Yeah yeah well I mean I'll hold the frame

I enjoyed it but it was definitely But yes it got very repetitive Because in terms of The actual useful things to do In this open world There were like four or five different things And you did a lot of them A Saturdays Creed one could have used

A much narrower focused Because like it's very cool Like oh you're running around Jerusalem During the Crusades And it's like Now I'm in Akra It's exactly like Jerusalem It doesn't need to

I don't need to write a horse in real time. Yeah, it had this whole, like, open world between its different cities, which they sort of gave up as the series went on because they realized there was nothing to do in the, like, empty spaces between where people actually were. Also, Al-Tayr has the classic protagonist problem in that he is not interesting. Yeah. Like, he is doing interesting things and interesting setting. And Assassin's Creed, too, fixed that.

Yeah, by giving you Etsio. Atseo is great. By giving you a Batman origin. And he's pretty much. And his uncle is a me, Mario. I mean, well, and he's kind of. of an asshole, but that's, you know, a lot of origin stories is him growing out of it. Right, exactly. Growing out of being a self-centered asshole.

Altire never grows out of that. And giving him a great, uh, a, uh, subtextual romantic relationship with Leonardo Da Vinci. Yes. Like, I really, I mean, Leonardo da Vinci had to draw some dude naked. It might as well have been at CEO. Yeah. I think, yeah, I think Assassin's Creed to if Assassin's Creed one, it really hit its stride. I mean, it's, has one like big fatal flaw that it's reach extends, uh,

its reach stretches beyond its grasp, if that makes sense? I feel like to put this in a retro-knox context, it's kind of a Mega Man 1, Mega Man 2 situation. Very much like where this was some people's passion and they had a lot of good ideas and the first go was just not quite there. You can see so much good stuff. It is a game that you play it and you're like, oh, I can't wait to play the sequel to this where they figure it out.

Yeah, I mean, Assassin's Creed 2, one of the things I really like about it is that it pulls back into the series origins. Okay, first of all, Assassin's Creed. is a series in which you play as an assassin in a virtual simulation of the main character's genetic ancestry, trying to find secrets

for some corporation called up Surgo. None of it matters. The important thing is it focuses on stealth and it focuses on individual missions in this virtual space where you try to, you try to complete according to different objectives and you can use like direct combat. It has a very Archimist style

asylum-esque combat system. Lots of counters. Yeah. But you can also just do stealth kills, like sneak up to people. This made use of what they called, I think, social camouflage, which was basically like, in the first game, it was like, well, I see some guys in white hoods. I'm going to go pretend I'm a monk. You can hide in a crowd. But you can also, like, it got better and more refined as a series advanced. And you could hide in, you know, plain sight, basically, to evade enemies. And so it was, it was a different kind of stealth than Metal Gear had,

which was more like a guy sees you and then you have to go hide in the locker. It gave you. Even, even, even, I mean, they definitely kept revising this as a series went on, but even in the first couple of games, it gave you a lot of options as to how to go about things. And even if you screw up the stealth, like, it is possible, not advisable and not easy,

it is possible to fight your way out of any situation. Yeah, the fights tend to go on a long time, and you're just like parrying, paring, paring, but you can do it. But the series evolved, the series evolved out of an attempt to, you know, define, like to redefine the Prince of Persia games.

And Assassin's Creed 2, I think it does a lot of great things. But the best thing it does is, is that your Tomoguchi, Benj? I think your Tomoguchi has been beeping this whole. I think you need to flush its toilet. It's hungry. Okay. Sorry. Anyway, yes, it's 2009, but it's also 1999.

There we go. I flushed it. Okay. Okay. Wrong decade. So Assassin's Creed 2 does a lot of great things, but I love the fact that it makes a conspicuous effort to be more Prince of Persia-like. And there are the cathedral missions, I believe,

are the vaults, which are very much like taking the mechanics of Assassin's Creed, ditching all the combat. There's still some self, still some stealth, but they're much more about platforming and navigation and, you know, traveling through these interior spaces as opposed to the rooftops and the streets. And I loved those. Like, that was some of the most fun platforming I'd had in years and years.

I mean, it's still probably up there in the top, like, 3D. platforming I've ever done. And a lot of it's because all of the architecture is like has a real world business. So when you're in St. Peter's Basilica, you're in St. Peter's Basilica doing stuff. And God, I've been like, I've visited Europe a couple times since I started playing these games. And I cannot look at construed without wanting to climb them anymore. I can't remember which it was. There was one of the ETSO games that I was reviewing.

It might have been Assassin's Creed too. And I, they kept telling me to go to some place. And it wasn't marked on the map. So I was like, where the hell is this? So I pulled up Rome on Google Maps. And I was like, oh, that's where I need to be. Rome is actually the second at sea. Okay.

So that was Assassin's Creed, Brotherhood? Yeah. Brotherhood, I think is Rome. No, not Brotherhood. It was... Whatever it was called. Sisterhood? Revelyation?

No, no, no. It was Assassin's Brotherhood and then Brotherhood and then Revely. Okay. My wife did a semester in Istanbul and when... So like, I was like, how's the Hagia Sophia? Like, is it? Did you climb it? Is it cool?

But yes, I actually... used Google Maps to navigate itself around that game because it was based, you know, on a city that is, you know, has been largely unchanged in 500, 800, a thousand years. And I think Assassin's Creed also, the series as a whole, does a really good job of hitting a sweet spot between accuracy in portraying things from the real world, portraying both locations and historical events and time periods, but massaging it just enough to be a good playable experience. Yeah, the thing The thing that I always say about Assassin's Creed, too, is it is a game that, like, assures you it is historically accurate, and then you fight Pope Alexander the Sixth and the Secret of the Embatement. You kill the Pope.

Well, you knock him out. You know. You knock him out the Pope. I killed the Pope in one of the games. You fight Alexander. I absolutely stabbed him in the face. Kill the Pope 3. He forgot. Plus, like, really, really good character design. And honestly, I think Altaire has a really good clean design.

Oh, yeah, yeah. But the way that it's tweaked. And it stays, like, really good throughout the Assassin's Creed Games. I think that's one thing that you really have to give them is up through all the ones I've played. I just got Odyssey and I haven't played yet. But all the ones I've played and even the ones that I've seen do a really good job of taking the basic Altayir costume, like the Assassin costume, and then modifying it. Yeah, the hood and the belts and the cloaks. Yeah, but then you adapt it to a culture and a period.

And you get like Etzio with his like cool. But yeah, Assassin Street 2 is where that really started to evolve. And they gave Etsio so many different costumes and like variants and you can, you know, colorize your, your costume and tweak it and sort of make it your own style. And they're all like these nice Renaissance motifs. Yeah. It's got the big puffy shoulders. I really like two. I think, you know, Brotherhood and Revelations and Black Flag and three like all like work really.

well. I think the three is the weak one of the chain because they forgot to put in cities. They were going to a new engine and it had a lot of rough spots, but it had good ideas too. Yeah, and also the interface was terrible. And also they put you in like colonial America where everything was like a thatched hut. Yeah.

They forgot to put you in. Whoops. They forgot the verticality. Yeah. I mean, the last one I actually spent time with was unity, which took place in Paris. And that was like, the game itself was okay. It was just like, oh, more Assassin's Creed. But the city and you know climbing around on Notre Dame that was amazing I'm really interested to see how how Odyssey plays with it because I know very like I kind of stopped paying attention after Unity and and uh because I love those games and then it just got to a point where I had played eight of those games and so like I'm very curious to see how they address that in later games but Assassin's Creed too and I know that Uncharted kind of does the same thing but like you see the fingerprints specifically

of what you do in Assassin's Creed, too, like with Etsio and the free running and the climbing everywhere. Like, I've been playing God of War, 2018, obsessively, lately. And, like, there's no reason for there to be climbing and jumping from place to place in that game. But Assassin's Creed kind of revolutionized what an open-world game was. It contributed a whole lot to just kind of the general canon of what you can do in this kind of game. Yeah. And it was up to that point, I feel like, if not the best,

like 3D open world style platformer. Certainly the most intuitive. I actually really like the run fast, run slow, like the high key, low key mechanic. Yeah, yeah. Even though it was ditched later on. I think it's a very interesting way to go about it. The Eustigo stuff, they should have stopped.

Like it's pointless. Like I said, it took Kristen Bell to leave the series for them to say, okay, let's stop doing it. Because all it does is like it puts the brakes on action and drama in a really frustrating way. But I also really like that Assassin's Creed, too, does the big time skips. Yes. That was something that struck me is, like, you start out as a young

Calo, Etzio, and then like, I think your father is assassinated, murdered, and then it jumps ahead, like, ten years. Yeah. Yeah. And then the next few games, jump ahead another, like, couple decades each. Yeah. And then Etzio's an old man who can still, like, take 100-foot vertical drops,

and he just kind of, like, goes, oh, my niece. Yeah, yeah, every once in a while, it's like, it starts to catch up with you. He's no old snake, that's for sure. Yeah. But Assassin's Creed 2, big thumbs up. You do get a gun in that game, which is amazing. So how does that compare to you for you to Batman Arkham Asylum, given that you are

the world's foremost batmanologist? Arkham Asylum, Archim Asylum really set the standard for superhero games in a way that had not been done before. it was the first superhero game that made you feel like you were the superhero. And if you go back to 2018 and look at all the reviews of Spider-Man, the one thing that everyone who loved that game agrees on is the best part of the game is that it makes you feel like Spider-Man. Batman did that for Batman, where you could, like,

it seems so simple, but, like, Batman should be able to fight 10 dudes at once. And you could. If somebody did not have an automatic rifle, you had not. no problem taking him out, which I thought was very full. Because my mom bat don't shiv. Yeah, my mom bat's don't shiv. He nasty. He balls nasty. Oh, I was hoping you wouldn't say it. What the heck are you guys talking about? But I feel like the, um, Arkham Asylum is also, I love it. It is a deeply stupid game. It is a game that, but it's stupid in a very video gamey way and it's stupid in a way that it commits to.

it's not as stupid as Arkham City which is just dumb as a bag of hammers but I love that that is a game that they had to figure out how to make into a game so it's a game that ends

with the Joker turning himself into a big monster you can punch and Batman puts explosives on his hands so that he can punch you with exploding hands which has moving effects

on Batman wow But I think it makes up for that And the reason people like buy into it And the reason people want to think that game is good Because you will still find people who are like Oh but it's got such a good story Paul Dini wrote it

And it's like Is that it gets the atmosphere really well And it also does really good Batman stuff The game makes it very clear It's the first Batman game of note In which he's a detective. Yeah It has a detective mode

Even though detective mode is It's just Metroid Prime Yeah But, like, the game makes it really clear that Batman can leave Arkham Island at any time. He just doesn't, because there's a job to do. And I think that's really, really cool. But, yeah, like, you get a lot of really good stuff. I think it makes crawling around in the ductwork fun in a way that I had never had fun with any other stealth-based games

because those stealth-based games did not, like, end up with me being Batman. Well, because I think that's actually an accomplishment, because crawling around in ductwork is usually really tedious. Yeah. So, like, making that fun as an accomplishment. The reward that you get from picking off henchmen

one by one until there's one one guy left and he's terrified and he's, like, shooting at shadows, you get it, right? Yeah, this is the first game to really, like, turn. I'm not trapped in here with you. You're trapped in here with me

into a game mechanic, into like the essence of the game. Plus, again, like, the aesthetics of the game are dubious at best. this was the start of a bad harley i totally like just ignored this game for a long time no matter how much people said it was good because i was like i do not want to see like batman you know as a 300 pound slab of beef that's not my vision of batman

this is a four foot wide chest batman this is unreal engine batman yeah yeah well it's just like everyone is so beefy it's so gray and grim looking it's not really my my my my cup of tea my cup of bat tea. Yeah. But I do like the commitment to the bat aesthetic, if that makes sense. See, I can Denny O'Neill when I think Batman. I think like a mean guy with the long bat bat fear or whatever. But I also like, like, why didn't they give poison ivy pants?

I don't know. They did not issue her pants. It's a video game. Yeah. But I do like that you can't, like, there is obviously like a gender disparity. in the character design, which is bad. But also, like, if you look at the way they design the male characters in those games, the male characters are also very stupid.

They're just not, like, hypersexualized. Right, this is a different kind of stupid. Yeah, the penguin doesn't have a monocle in Arkham City. He has the bottom of a beer bottle that's been shoved into his face, which doesn't make sense. But it's like, oh, right, in this world, there are no monocles. There's just, like, weird deformities. It's a ridiculously stupid game, but it's also, like, it gets so much right that you, it doesn't earn its failings, but it does make it so it is an enjoyable game to play despite its failings. And I think that you really can't take away how much it does right.

Yeah, this is a game that I definitely dismissed sight unseen because of its aesthetics, but over time I've been kind of, one back over to what it does right. And, you know, a big thing that it does is kind of turn Arkham Asylum itself into a real space. It has a very Metroidvania field to it. We talked about that on the Metroidvania episode. Yeah, like, you know, more so than Arkham City or Arkham Knight or whatever it was. Which I didn't play because the car that you blow up other cars with turned me off on that one. Yeah.

Well, you know, you were only blowing up drones. Drones. Only drones with your car. Only drones. With your gun on wheels. Right. Yeah. So more so than the other games in the series,

it feels very much about a place, a very finite space that you basically come to master. Yes. And that's cool. Which I think has its apotheosis in the reveal that there's a secret bat cave underneath Arkham Asylum, because of course there is. Like, why wouldn't he have put one there? And you just spoiled the whole game for me.

I just thought that way through. The spoiler is that the Joker turns into a monster that you must to know. The other thing, like, obviously, like, they got Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill to be Batman and the Joker, which was, like, Kevin Conroy is the definitive Batman performer of our lives, which is really good. And Mark Hamill, you never had to see his painted over mustache, so that makes him better than Caesar Romano. How dare you? Sorry, man. If you got to, if you're going to commit to the role, commit to the rule. Shave the mustache. It's fine. Yeah. Yeah.

But I also like the way that it approaches Batman in that it takes place in a world. And this is something that you also see in other superhero games. Like Spider-Man takes the same tack where Spider-Man has been Spider-Man for eight years. So he's 23 years old. He just hasn't fought Dr. Octopus yet. And he hasn't fought Green Goblin yet because they were in movies. And so he weirdly fights Mr. Negative before the Green Goblin. one exists. But going around in Arkham Asylum, like, you get all these hints like, oh,

Razal Ghul exists. Oh, Catwoman exists. Oh, like all the stuff that you want to exist in a world of Batman, you have and you can play with in a really cool way. I don't know why Arkham has a, like, if I was in charge of Arkham, I would have gotten rid of the Botanamo Gardens, personally, first thing. Especially if you were holding Poison Avenue. Yeah. I would have maybe, I would have Maybe don't want that. Maybe don't give this lady her ammunition. Yeah. I would have given her pants instead of a botanical garden.

Sounds like a plan. Botanical pants. You never bought me pants. The big flaw with it is that you, you don't save anyone from dying. You just, like, temporarily save them from dying, which is a pain. Which also Arkham City doubles down on. But again, like, it's capital D dark.

Like, capital D with a Q-U-E dark in a way that you kind of have to... Wasn't that an image comics character? Dark? Dark. No, but like, calm me. Hit me up. I'll write, uh, dark for you. I think there's a master dark.

I'm dark with a Q-U-E. I think Valiant had a master dark. That could be. Yeah, Ardustalum, I think, really good. I don't think aesthetically it holds up today, but I mean, if you look at games of the time, I think it fits right in with your gods of war and your, and your gears of war. and your, what are the war games were there? Well, I think you can also draw a very clear line between Batman Arkham Asylum and Demon Souls, which also debuted in 2009.

It was not quite Dark Souls yet, but did you guys play Demon's Souls? Nope. I think I have for a minute. A minute. I was not aware of that. Some depth there. Because this was, yeah, so like from software was like kind of a very niche thing back in the day until they really. They made some great things. Yeah, they made Armored Core. They made the, what are the fantasy ones?

Kingsfield. The Kingsfield ones. They made great things. But I don't think they had a lot of sort of mainstream traction until we got all the way up to Dark Souls. And to the point that this was a Sony published game in Japan. And Sony was like, we're not publishing this outside of Japan. So Atlas stepped up and did it. And then Sony was like, oh, actually, you know, Namco also were like, oh, actually this is really cool. Hey, FromSoft, how about you come and, you know, make us some games, too? So we got Dark Souls, and we got Bloodbourne and Securo. Were these a PS3 exclusive in 2009? At the time, yes. Actually, Dark Souls might have been PS2 exclusive, but Demon's Souls was PS3 exclusive. Okay.

It was a Sony funded and published game in Japan, so it's never been on anything except PS3. That might explain why I've never played it because I had an Xbox at the time. the good news is that actually by the time that you hear this podcast Bob is putting together a Demon's Souls podcast

so we will already have been through that whole journey so we don't have to cover it here but I feel like it does do kind of the same thing with virtual spaces as Archimassian

except instead of you know being about like you are Batman you are indomitable you can counter and attack and just like crush everyone Demon Souls is pretty much the opposite where it's like, you're going to die a lot.

Death is actually a play mechanic, and when you die, you enter a spirit realm and have to restore yourself to life. So very difficult. Yeah. You're going to be able to be able to be. Oh! The

The One The Bhopin. Bhop! Bhop! Bhop! ...toe.

... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

So on the open world side of things, we have a few games. I don't know. Uncharted 2 isn't quite open world. It's actually, actually it's the opposite. It's very linear, very cinematic. But there's infamous, and there's Dragon Age Origins, and Sims 3. Just kidding. I played that a little bit.

I like Dragon Age Origins. I, by all accounts, Dragon Age Origins is very good. I really like BioWare, but I have very little tolerance for Western fantasy. I've heard there's a lot of good fanfic based on it. That would not surprise me. Because I think in a lot of ways, I think the BioWare RPG is because you have Mass Effect and Dragon Age, which are the same game. One has guns, and the other one does not. But they're also very much about their characters.

Yeah, they're very much about the world they create. And much in the same way that I think the strength of Mass. is that it has a really well-realized and interesting world full of, like, interesting species. Like, the thing I've said about Mass Effect is... It's Star Trek as a video game. Yeah. But, like, Mass Effect is a good enough game that they have a race that is entirely sexy blue-skinned ladies, but it's not bad. Like, it's actually interesting.

Well, they also have a race that's, like, diaphanous, like, space octopus. Yeah. And they're extremely... They're extremely religious. They're like, come, brother, join. I don't have the reverb effect here, but come join our, our, you know, tentacle cult. Blasto the Henr Spector is one of my favorite jokes in any video game ever. But I feel like Dragon Age is the same way.

And I feel like if you want to talk about the one thing that sets it apart from other Western fantasy, is that they made the elves, Tolkien elves and Shoemaker elves, at the same time. because there's the they're essentially like Tolkien elves. They're like high forest elf but they have been basically made slaves by humans. Oh yeah. I think that's very

makes the cookies in the Dragon Age world. That's very dicey territory to get into narratively and I'm not going to say it is flawless but I do think it is a very interesting setup that because of the way characters play out specifically in origins. I forget her name but she's

she's the she's the, she's bi-aware character number three. She's the, the, uh, love interest, you feel sympathetic, too. She's Sunderey, uh, what's, what's the other, the opposite of Sundaree? Yandere? Yes, that's it. God, I'm so embarrassed that I know that. No, I do I can count on you, Ben.

It is not shy about presenting you as a character who is in a society that is built on injustice, which I think is really interesting, because that's a very common, I've heard it has a lot of really interesting racial dynamics and actually, like, plays with them in interesting ways. They do the same thing with the mages, where, you know, they will essentially take people who can do magic and put them in cloisters, and if they misbehave, they'll botomize them so that they can't do magic anymore. Which is very dark fantasy trope in a way that I think is super common in postmodern fantasy fiction. but it's executed really well and executed very interestingly in a way that makes origins enjoyable

makes two for me, which I know everybody hated too, but like the larger world building stuff made two at least tolerable for me and makes Inquisition really, really good, I think. All right. So we have already been talking about this for an hour. So I actually want to finish this podcast.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go through a list of all. All the games we identified as major releases for the year, and each of you are going to identify one that you want to talk about. And we will talk about that for like five minutes or so, and then move on to the next and wrap it up. So I actually wanted to real quick, like try to tie together some of the things in here that are not the big AAA releases. Okay. Well, we're going to go through the whole list really quickly. We can each say one sentence about these games.

So make it a very impressive run-on sentence, based. This is going to be a hell of a run-on sentence. All right, here we go. Uncharted 2. Thoughts? One of the most, like, enjoyable attempts at doing movie as video game, I think. Very fun. I've ever played it. Been, Ben. Moving on. Okay. Infamous. Really, you're like Mr. Superhero. You only like real superhero games? And I didn't, I didn't play it. I played the, what's the other one?

Prototype. Yeah, the dark thing. The games that are basically the same game. They are the same time. It's like the deep, you know, deep impact versus, uh, uh, yeah, yeah, I just forgot the Bruce Willis one. Armageddon. Armagedon, yeah. I played, I played, I played, uh, uh, prototype and thought it was very fun. Okay. You know, I think I actually got a free copy of Infamous from somewhere and never got around to playing it, which is how much of an impression it made on me. One of them was on either PlayStation Plus or, yeah, I think it was, I had to be on PlayStation

plus and I got it, whatever came before that, yeah. First Light, I think. Yeah, they struck me too angry, so I never really messed with them. Yeah. I didn't play that one. Sims 3. I played that one. Yes? Yeah. What do you think about Sims 3, Venge? It was good. I bought it for my wife, who was a big fan of Sims one and two. Thank you. And they had a good... Yeah, we're married, aren't we? Also...

No, big fan of Sims. Okay. That's the joke. It's my wife. Thank you. It's funny because it's his last... My name is the name of a very popular video game franchise. Shoot, man. Okay. So, they had a good port for the iOS version. version of it, but it got axed for freeware, freemy premium, yeah, versions. But yeah,

Sims 3 is good game. How is it different than Sims 2? Better graphics. More, more woohoo and money and showers and buying groceries and stuff. You know all that stuff. Mansions. Lots of add-ons, of course. Dozens. That's all I know. I gave Bench my sentences for this one. I'm saving mine up.

Okay. The Beatles rock band I played this a lot. I used to have a good singing voice. It changed about five years ago, and I lost my ability to sing. It's very sad. I played some rock band, but I did not actually play the Beatles spin off. Yeah, like, oh, man, back one up, like one time I jumped in and just randomly picked up Tom Sawyer by Rush, and people were like, what the hell is happening?

He can do that? He can do Getty Lee? Yes, I could. I could, once upon a time. But Beatles was great because it was music that everyone knew. and there aren't a whole lot of like vocal gymnastics in the Beatles. So it was kind of like a, you know, they didn't have a whole lot of hard mode type stuff. But it was, you know, playing instruments, singing, Lennina McCartney songs.

They're just like a good family kind of gathering sort of game. Yeah, my problem with rock band vocals is I'm more of a tenor and a lot of pop songs are not. Really? I feel like pop songs are mostly tenor. A lot of them go higher than I go. I see, I see. I'm a huge obsessive. I'm mostly bass.

Base. I'm Paul. I play bass. I'm a huge obsessive Beatles fan, but I had no desire to play this game. Really? The only regret is that it was my only chance to have an excuse to interview Paul McCartney. Because it was a video game related thing. Did you interview him?

No. No. Of course not. I would have just retired at that moment. But anyway, so yeah, I never played. You could have interviewed him for Destiny also. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. Can't believe I'm singing for Destiny. That's an Irish. I know. Whatever. Liverpool, Ireland.

It's all the same, right? No? Please, please address your complaints to Jeremy Perr. Please please me. Yeah, let's not. They're all in an island someplace. Aren't we all, though? In true, this little island earth?

I want to call the Scottish guy English online, and I never heard the end of it 20 years later. I'm very aware that there are very distinct distinctions between England and Scotland and Ireland and North Ireland and Wales. Yeah, people cannot get... I was just making a goofy joke about pulmonary. That's all.

Moving on. Right. Oh, flower. All right. I've been saving up some sentences for this one. All right. So part of what I wanted to talk about is just like the way, as we talked about at the beginning of the podcast,

we were in this kind of intermediate period where we hadn't started gotten all the indie things online. And like I think PS2 had, because it had such a huge install base, had this big flowering of like, experimental stuff on it that actually got published. And we were sort of at the tail end of that winding notice. We got a few on

PS3. And Flower was one of them and it was awesome. So it was that game company, they started out doing flow that was like a flash game. It got picked up by Sony. And then they made this. And it was just like this is like the most relaxing video game. I have ever played. But it also has

this like whole emotional journey that plays out through the levels without like there's literally not like a single word of text. But it's not journey. It's not journey. That's their next game, which does the same sort of thing, only more so. But, but yeah, it just, it's, it's like, just pulls off this incredible aesthetic and, like, emotional feel with, like, zero text and zero characters. You're like, you are a flower pedal. You control the wind to blow yourself through these settings and pick up more flower petals.

But it just manages through pure aesthetics and setting to evoke a lot of emotions. And I thought that was a really cool accomplishment. So is this your five-minute game? The, my what? I said, you know, we'll go through the list and everyone identify a game that you want to talk about for five minutes. I mean, I'm, well, I just took two minutes on it. Whatever. I'll say my other three minutes for the other thing. Okay.

All right. But yeah, anytime you guys, we come across a game that you want to talk about, you each get one game to dig into. I have one. Who's tackling Fat Princess? Well, I did. I don't know what this is. I added it to the list, but this is not my five-minute game. I just thought it was cool because at the time I had a PS3 and I had, you know,

In-laws, like my wife's... What was fat princess, though? It's a party, team-based party Capture the Flag type game where you... It's cartoon-y over, like, overhead. It almost feels like an early Mova kind of thing, except I don't really understand Movers. It reminds me of like Capture the Flag,

mode and quake or something, but with cartoon characters, and it's a sort of light fantasy setting with the princess and knights and archers and things. And there's a whole team defending the other team's princess You're trying to snatch your princess back from the other team Who's fat of course And you try to keep feeding it cake or something to keep it fat

So it's hard to drag around And then That's a little problematic Yeah well that's so fun about it at the time Because it was so completely un-politically correct But it was a really fun team game Because it's very silly and weird and cartoony And it's a great four-player game

You can play four people at a time And choose your roles If you want to be an archer or mage Whatever And then you defend You know, some people defend Yeah The castle

Some people Go out and be offensive To try to get it back The princess back And I know I'm saying it That's a horrible thing But to get her back You know

And so It's a really cool game I play a few rounds of it It's a cartoony party Party game Capts the Plague I played it more like More Fat Princess

On PS3 As a party game With four people than most of other games, other than Little Big Planet, maybe. It's a neat indie game. All right. borderlands any thoughts i've actually well i played it briefly but i never got into it yeah it's a schluter yeah the loot shooter haven't really played it it thinks it's funnier than it is

oh well uh bayonetta surely surely chris sims this is your opportunity we're passing this one to Chris. The batonetna rules. Bayonetta rules. It is a beautiful and perfect game about a woman who has guns on her feet so that she can kick you in the face and shoot you in the face. So everything is made of hair. Everything's made of hair. And she's sometimes a space harrier.

The hair is demons. And then there's angels. Also, the end of the game is that you, I'm pretty sure it's Bayoneta 1. The end of the game is that you ride a motorcycle up a rocket and then. punch God, which is great. So like a sequel to Final Fantasy Legend? Sure, why not? Star Trek 5.

I love Bayonetta. What does God need with a punch in the face from a motorcycle? An attitude readjustment, evidently. Banetta is Archimus Island I talked about being kind of dragged down by its aesthetics, but it kind of, you know, it's good enough that

you can get through them and be like, oh, okay, yeah, this is, I get it. It's dumb. bayonetta is a game that uses aesthetics that at first look dumb but then turn out to be brilliant to get you in the door to play the game and the it is always very funny to me when when people are like into bayonetta because I feel like bayonetta is so far beyond what the word sexy means that she is definitely not I mean, she was Sarah Palin as an angel goddess warrior. I prefer to think barreness, but, I can see that. Consider the time. Consider the media landscape.

Yeah. But she's also, I mean, she's also kind of this like fashion, like fashion design sketch. Yeah. She was designed by a woman who's into like fashion stuff. Like she's got the weirdly elongated. It's like Neokotakotakiuchi drawings. Like, you know, weirdly elongated body, hands. and the performance aspect, like the performative aspect of what she is doing as a character

makes what she is doing, like what she is physically doing in the game so much more interesting and is kind of like a very much a rejection of what was going on in like super broie games, i.e. God of War. And the way that plays out and the way that it ends up being this weird thing where you're fighting angels who actually are like giant four-eye four-faced babies and wheels made of eyes, I think is very fun and compelling. The only big problem with the game is that the backgrounds are all very kind of samey tan brown. But I think that is made up for it. Like that, that kind of has to be like that so that the characters can be, yeah.

Also, the Fly Me to the Moon shooting up the graveyard sequence. at the beginning is one of the best openings. Wait, did they actually play Fly Me to the Moon? They play a cover of Fly Me to the Moon while she is dressed. The Netflix version of Bayonetta does not have that. She is dressed as a nun fighting angels in a graveyard

and it's beautiful. It's hilarious. She's a very particular aesthetic like rung to life and like recontextualized in weird ways. I feel like Bayonetta is a beautiful game. There's acrobatics and it's beyond six.

It's like what you said. It's like, it's not sexy. It's like incredible. Like in a way that's not human. That's supernatural. And she has six foot long legs and she's like graceful and crazy. And the aesthetics are amazing and the enemies are weird and supernatural and like angelic and stuff like you said. I think Bayonetta is a work of art, honestly.

I played it for a fairly long time. I never finished the game. But I really enjoyed like I remember. This is what I remember. I remember like at that time, I mean, there were. There were folks like Jen Frank, who was talking about women's issues in games and how they're portrayed and all this stuff. I think she liked Bay in it a lot. I think there are other women who enjoyed the sort of empowerment of this character in this world.

And it was interesting to see that because some people were holding it up on blogs as like, this hypersexualized woman that could never possibly exist. And then there's other women who are like, no, wait, this is really cool and powerful. Well, I think one of the things made a big difference there is she's like a sexualized. but empowered woman who is actually designed by a woman. As opposed to being some man's fetish. And in all fairness, we are a room full of dudes. I'm not weighing in here personally. I would encourage you to go seek out other people's opinions on saying that up.

Absolutely. Much like, I feel very similar to lead of this game as I did with Lollipop Chainsaw. And I wrote about Lollipop Chainsaw and how people, there is always a pit that you fall into when you are using exploitative imagery to make a point about exploitation because you're still using exploitative imagery even though you're trying to make a point. But I feel like both of those games are smarter about what they're doing than a lot of people initially gave them credit for. And I think

Bayonetta is very upfront with its whole deal, I guess, on every level. The one place where I think Banda fails on the front of its commentary on hypersexualization is, is Joy, the name of the villain that you... The sort of counterpart rival? No, it's one of the angels. I believe its name is Joy. It's the female presenting angel, and you kind of like bondage her to death in a way that is more explicit than the normal bondage imagery that's going on in Bannetta. But, like... I didn't get that far.

Yeah, I haven't seen that. She's like a mid-game, like miniboss, I think. But overall, I think Jeremy's going to hit us if we don't move on here. Bandit is very good. I love it. The end. All right. So next on the list. Someone put this in bold. New Super Mario Brothers Wii. Who was that? Me? All right. This is for five minutes. Go first. Yeah. This is the only game we should have talked about the whole time. We've already been a new Super Mario Brothers episode. That's true, yeah. You just weren't there. Sorry.

Oh, okay. Well, then I didn't do it. So, yeah, New Super Mario Brothers Wii was a groundbreaking experience for me on Nintendo console because I had previously played Little Big Planet, which I've mentioned before, which was the first four-player simultaneous platform game in modern era that did it really well. And I thought while I was playing Little Big Planet, I was like, man, this is putting Nintendo to shame. They should make something like this with Mario. And so New Super Mario Bros. We basically did that. It has four players simultaneous platforming, like Little Big Planet.

You can interact with each other. You can pick each other up, toss each other around, carry each other through things. And I sat down and played this with my brother-in-law, my two sister-in-laws, and like, I don't know. How many sister-in-laws do we have? Okay, you have two brother-in-laws and two sister-in-laws, and we had a damn good time. It was the most fun I've ever had with a video game with a group of people. we were laughing raucously and just it was incredible it's a really fun game i mean at that time just the experience of playing four people at once on a platform a nintendo platform game with

mario was groundbreaking and fun i mean do you guys did you do that back then absolutely and this is a point that i really stressed in the new super mary brother's episode is that like your feelings on this game really depend on how many people you've played it with because solo it's and it's a good Mario game. But when you play it together, it really takes on a new life of its own. And I have a lot of really fond memories of playing this. And, yeah, like, it's, you know, both professionally and personally,

it's just a fantastic game. Well, didn't you rate, was it this or was it the WiiU sequel that you read it on? The Wii sequel, you rated on top of your Mario rank list. Absolutely. Yeah. Chris? Oh, I don't play games with other people. You don't? Well, I normally don't, but this was an exception.

No, I, like, I had it. And like you said, like, it was, it was a very good Mario game, but I never had the experience of multiplayer. Yeah. So, which is, it's just a very definitely strong point. There's four of us in this room. Let's play it right now. I got it.

I've got a Wii right down here. Yeah. We got plenty of time. We got this entire time. Jeremy. Yeah, I like, well, the, the multi, the interactions between the characters, you can accidentally bounce off each other and stuff,

which makes it hilarious, like, basically, you know, going against the, best interests of each other by accident. I'm sure there's a shorter word for that, but I forgot it. And helping each other, too, cooperatively. German. Yeah, Vishen, Schaden, Spoden.

Yeah, whatever. Something like that. So, the, I'm just going to stop talking. So you can bounce off each other. What time is it? Moving on again. Yeah. It's a great game.

The thing I want to emphasize about it is just that multiplayer aspect was groundbreaking at the time for a Nintendo game and it was just a absolute blast to play and Solo, yes, Jeremy's right, it's sort of like, yeah, this is a cool game, but the real star is four-player co-op Mario platforming, which is

insane. Or it was it that? I agree. Pokemon, Heart Gold, Soul, Silver. Yeah, remake. Wrong game. Wrong generation. That was actually Gen 3. But anyways.

Is this your three minutes? No, I don't absolutely not. It was very good, and mostly I played this game because it came with a pedometer, and I was very into getting as much walking done as I could for health. And so I would walk to the train, like a mile every day, get the train, take it to work, then walk like half a mile to the office. I would take the long route. I could have, like, made this trip in like two blocks, but I was like, no, it's good for my health.

So I got a lot of use out of Pokemon Heart Gold, Soul, Silver. It was the egg-hatching mechanic for the walking? I don't even remember. It was a thing that it tracked my steps, and I was like, yeah, I've been walking along. I'm healthy. I accidentally ran over my polka walker. Oh, it was tragic. That is very tragic.

Yeah. So this was a little pedometer that came with the game. It was kind of like a cross between a pedometer and a VMU from a Dreamcast. And it could connect by, I think, by Wi-Fi or no, by infrared to the cartridge. Yeah. Yeah, you could put a Pokemon in it, walk around. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Really, really great game.

I think it underlines why Nintendo can get away with remaking Pokemon games so often because every time they remake them, they are both, like, substantially improved and also, like, really good and have new stuff in a way that other, like, reissues and remakes don't. Yeah. Really good game. The Legend of Zelda's Spirit Tracks. People hate this game. I liked it.

Your link in a little engineer outfit driving a train around. I realized, I realized, like, the, the DS Zelda's are not the most beloved. And admittedly, I think part of my deal here was I hadn't really played Zelda since Super Nintendo because I didn't have Nintendo's consoles after that. But so I came back to Zelda with Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks. And I really just had a good time. They're not the best Zelda's of all time. They're very good, though.

But they're good. And I thought, like, the touch mechanics were a little gimmicky, but I thought they worked. Like, I liked the little, like, vine whip thing. But Princess Zelda is a ghost who follows around you with you. with you and she turns into a suit of armor and kills stuff. You can make Zelda into a stall post. Yeah, it's awesome. I liked this game a lot.

How I feel about that game is I had bought every single Zelda game ever made up to that point, and this is when I stopped. It was my last obligatory Zelda purchased. I mean, the one before this one. What was it, Phantom Hourglass? This game sucked. It was terrible. It had some issues.

Because of the controls. That's why it sucked. You didn't like the touch because of it? I hated that. I thought they actually kind of worked. I mean, they were gimmicky. I'm not sad to see them go away again, but I thought they worked reasonably well.

But I could see, I've actually never played Spirit Track, so it might be a great game. I just didn't want to buy it. I didn't want to play it. All right, Scribble Knots, also in DS. This is kind of like Minecraft but for words. I actually like this one. Fibble Knots is a lot of fun.

I love it. Yeah. It's fun. You make up words to solve puzzles. Yeah, so the premise of this is you have this like 2D, sort of these short 2D stages, like a little bit of platforming. and there's like characters in them and there's you

and somewhere there's a star that you're supposed to get and the gimmick is you have this magic notebook and you write a word and it makes that thing and the game actually has a pretty dang large vocabulary of things you can make and you can apply adjectives to them so you can make a red thing or a big thing or a angry thing and then the things you make interact with the rest of the world and it's a really cool concept

and it's impressive the degree to which they pulled it off It is incredibly smart because it can interpret so many things that you put in. I played the DC Comics version that came out. Yeah, there was a spinoff with like all the heroes in it. Which is like such a good idea. Like in a just world, there would be as many of those as there are like Lego superheroes games because they're so fun. I would totally go for different licenses with this game. Yeah.

I played Unlimited the most and the most fun I had with that was I actually turned it into a feature on oneup.com. oneup.com called me and my Cthulhu. And I basically just tried to use Cthulhu as the solution for everything. And it was amazing how versatile Cthulhu is. Like the unknowable horror of non-Euclidean space solves so many problems. Make it like a flying, writeable friendly Cthuloo

and it'll oblige you. And there you go, yeah. All right, Mario and Luigi Bowser's Inside Story. You guys play this? Nope. I heard it was good, but I haven't played it. I think this was the only Mario and Luigi RPG that I messed. Oh, it was good. A lot of it you played as Bowser, and sometimes you played as Mario and Luigi inside of Bowser's guts. It was kind of weird, but it was good. That is weird. I've always thought if I ever, I never got around to any of the Mario and Luigi games. And if I did, I thought that's the one I wanted to try, but I haven't done it yet.

Dragon Quest 9, I have a lot to say about this game. It was good. But we don't have a lot of time, so I'm going to skip it. Save it for many other podcasts. But basically, this is Dragon Quest as a sort of, semi-open-world portable game. Like make your own party. Yeah, you can team up with other players and adventure together. It had a lot of very somewhat clunky, like, online connectivity, things you could do. It had the street pass element where you can talk, like, you put your DS in a pre-street-pass mode. And, you know, if you pass to other people who were playing the game in street passing, which was great for packs, or in Japan, they would enter your game and stay at your end.

and they would give you stuff. And you could get cool things that way. There was a year's worth of weekly updates where characters from previous games would come and hang out in your town and bring you costumes and things like that. And the other thing you could trade was these semi-randomely generated treasure maps

which had these like procedural dungeons. But they were made from a few seeds. And so then like so people would start seeing the same maps and the word would pop out about which maps were really good. So there were these famous maps. Like Kawasaki Lacket. The Kawasaki map. There were these maps.

were full of like metal slime emperors or whatever that were great from XP grinding and people would literally trade these maps person to person around the world. And so I actually, the first time after Dragon Quest 9 came out, I took it down to DragonCon and did a meetup. And I think was, I think I was a significant part of spreading the Kawasaki map around the southeast. You are Persian Zero. Yeah. All right, Kingdom Hearts, 35, eight over two days. That is how it's pronounced. I skipped Pickerel 3D. Pickross 3D is great. Is it? Yes. It's awesome. I know. We're running out of time.

Picross, it's Picross. It's in 3D. You've got these cubes instead of squares, and you're drilling down into this thing inside. And it's just a great little puzzle game. And I know we don't have time, but it's awesome. You should check it out if you like the puzzle games. Okay. Metroid Prime Trilogy It's Metroid Prime and 2 and 3 on Wii with updated controls for 1 and 2?

Like worse controls? No. I played Metroid Prime 1 on the GameCube and that's all I need to know. What? No, though. point and shoot command system was great. It depends on your room configuration, how well the sensor bar is set up, whether you have interference from light coming in a window.

Well, I mean, if you set it up in a bad room, sure. That's like saying, yeah, if I like step on my controller, this Mario game isn't very fun, but... I had a bad room. Clearly. No, I mean, the Wii, you know, the Wii remote-based controls made Metroid Prime 1 and 2 really good. It was a big improvement in my opinion. I'll try it. By the time I wanted to buy that, it was hard to find, I think.

I don't remember. I know it's on the Wii U download stuff or whatever. Anyway. All right, retro game challenge. I'm going to, I think I'm going to take my other three minutes. My other two minutes on this one. You've been cut down to two. Okay, cut down to two.

Okay, so I was talking about, like, the sort of indie-ish stuff was kind of winding down on PlayStation, because PS2 had this huge install base. PS3 didn't. You got less of this. Some of it got picked up on DS, and we started to get some of those, like, weird niche, retro and indie-ish things from Japan. And I think this was one of those things where, like, people had, like, people who were into retro stuff knew about retrogame challenge and wanted it. And finally XSED went and did a localization of it.

And it was fantastic. So this is basically your NES childhood fictionalized the DS game. And so you're, like, in this room and you have these, like, games that are very much like several different genres that were big on NES, but they're, like, new versions of it. like they were just made up. And then you have these things that are like the equivalent to Nintendo Power. And you can literally look up cheat codes for the games you're playing. And there's this disembodied head that's giving you weird challenges about them. And it's just this amazing, weird fictionalized retro experience.

And it just captured the feeling of, you know, sitting on the floor in the 80s with your NES, only with a whole new set of weird games. And it was great. And has Retronaut's done an episode on this? We haven't. I feel like that's one with Ray Barnhold. Okay. Since he actually worked on the fan translation

Yeah, okay. Yeah, the second one came out and sadly never got translated because sort of the market for this sort of stuff, it kind of dried up then. Yep. Speaking of retro revivals, there was Castlevania the Adventure rebirth, which is nothing to do with Castlevania the Adventure. I added that to the list.

It's Christopher Belmont, and then that's it. That's the only similarity. But it's good. It's a good game. I really enjoyed it. Street Fighter 4. Street Fighter finally came back after like 12 years. Yeah, there had not been a new street fighter in a long as time.

Since, like, 1999, so it was a decade, and they finally brought it back. There was a home release. The arcade version came out the previous year, I think. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it had been in arcades for a year and finally came out. Sweakening Tirekys, that's no good. It's not a terrible game. It's not a great squeakening game.

It's not good. It's not Suikoden? It's not Suikoden? Nope. Sweakening. No, I think it's a decent RPG. It just disappointed Sweenekinen fans. because it's like a parallel universe

and it's not really what we wanted from another week in it. But it's a decent RPG, handheld RPG. Noby, noby, noby boy. Yeah, that's what Keita Takashi did after Katamari because Namco was just going to rehash Katamari forever and Keita's like, I want to do something else. And he made this and it's basically just a playground

because he also designs playgrounds and he's like, I'm going to make a digital playground and you're just going to play and do stuff. So the weird thing about that game is the cumulatively all the players beat it together over time. Yeah, so like you have this little, the player character. is this little stretchable dude

that you're like controlling. It's actually a really interesting control scheme. Like you have your dual sticks and you're controlling the front half of the back. The character's named boy. The character's named boy. You have, you control the front half of boy

and the back half a boy with your two control sticks. And so you can stretch them out and wrap them around things. And then after you were done playing, like your stretching got added to the cumulative length of girl who initially went off from the earth to the moon and then to Mars. And then they had to start introducing like bonus multipliers because distances in space are ridiculous.

But yeah, eventually we got like girl all the way to Pluto and back and I played the game years later on the PS3 and I was like when did I beat this game why is it say I finished it I understand because everyone finished it together yeah yeah it's just it was this collaborative thing which was kind of cool plants versus zombies plants versus zombies cool game pop cat yeah I mean it's kind of like a take on the terror the tower defense genre which is still a thing I enjoyed plants versus zombies. I think I've probably played it on the iPad or something

first. It was kind of a stripped down tower events right, because it was strictly like right to left marching and you just put things down one side. Right. And the sequel is more of a first person shooter, but the original was kind of an tower defense game. Yeah. And it was very much just like an online web game of the era originally, and then

it sort of went everywhere. Anyway, this kind of got bogged down on a few different topics that we didn't expect to. But hopefully our look back at the games of 2009, the big games of 2009, has kind of given a sense of maybe how the medium has evolved since then. I feel like there are a lot of, you know, kind of seeds that were planted in 2009 or the continued growing that are relevant now, certainly with Minecraft and

things like that. And, you know, even Batman, like Spider-Man is a big thing. Insomniac was just purchased by Sony. So clearly, the big players believe in that style of game, or at least superheroes or whatever the hell. But at the same time, we were just starting to see, like, the very beginnings of the rise of the whole, like, online indie game scene that we have, but it's ubiquitous now. Like, there's millions of indie games coming up all the time through Steam, and then they end up on all the platforms. And we didn't have that then, but, like, the seeds were there. It was starting to happen.

Yep. So, 2009, a pretty big year. And we are living in the shadow of it here a decade later. But I think that's it. That's all for now. And next year, we'll look back at 2010. Why not? Why the hell not? In the meantime, keep playing modern video games and keep playing old video games. And here to promote old video games, yes, Chris?

Real quick, since we moved past it really fast, if you seek out any game that we have talked about, it should be retro game challenge. Because that game is incredible. It is amazing. brilliantly crafted. And people should have bought more copies of it in time so they could have got the sequel. So we got the sequel. But like it's not difficult to, like it's not expensive.

I bought it because I was watching GameCenter CX and there's a bunch of really good making of featureettes on the show. And I ended up just buying it. I think I got it for like five bucks off Amazon a couple years ago. It's really, really good and really smart. They put a lot of love into it. Both in the development and the localization of it. And if you like this show, then you will like that game.

I feel like everyone who's listened to this show has played this game. I haven't played. You don't listen to the show. Well, you should. You should. You're right. Yeah. See? Gotcha.

That's all. Okay. Well, anyway, in advocacy of old games, this has been Retronauts. You can find Retronauts on iTunes and other pod catchers. Look for Retronauts. Retronauts.com is also a good place to go because we put everything there. And you can support us on Patreon to get every episode a week early and a higher bitrate with no advertisements. Three bucks a month, which is less than a cup of coffee at many places.

We'll get all these things for you. And it also helps feed us coffee and other such things. So that's good. It's a noble endeavor. Everyone benefits all around. And that's great. Anyway, guys, where can we find you? Let's go with Chris from the beginning. You can find me at t-h-e-isb.com. That's my blog that I mentioned way back at the start of the show. It has links to everything that I do, including other podcasts, comment books that I write, columns that I Ways to get in touch with me if you want to give me work. Please don't tell me I'm wrong about Bayonetta because I'm not. And I'm also on that terrible website, Twitter, which is at the ISB.

And I'm Ben Jadwards. You can find me lurking on Twitter at Ben Jadwords, and that's about it. And I'm Ben Elgin. I am also on the Twitters at Kieran, K-I-N-N. Maybe someday I'll revive some blogs or do a podcast or something, but that day is not today. All right. And you can find me, Jeremy. Parish on Twitter as GameSpite, but you can also find me on Retronauts pretty much every week.

So check back next week and hear me again. Thank you.