Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 305: Years in Review Revue - 2010

Episode Date: June 15, 2020

The Retronauts East crew reunites (virtually) to complete their journey through the 2020 Years in Review Revue, wrapping up with a look at 2010—a year overflowing with greatness! Jeremy Parish, Chris Sims, and Ben Elgin buckle beneath its weight.

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network, a collective of creator-owned and fully independent podcasts, focused on pop culture and video gaming. To learn more and to catch up on all the other network shows, check out Greenlitpodcasts.com. This week in Retronauts, you can't spell decadence without decade. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts. I am Jeremy Parrish. And this is a long overdue episode. That stupid global pandemic getting in the way of our plans. Once again, how dare it. Yes, we did the

the tens episode back at the end of the year with Retronauts East and then Bob stepped in and took over for the year 2000,000,000, and now here we are at the year 2010. This episode was supposed to have happened months ago, but I actually haven't been able to have anyone to my house for months. Therefore, the Retronauts East crew has not been able to get together to record this, but here we are now through the magic at the internet, voices speeding over telephlets, phone lines or cables or tin foil like strings I'm using AT&T so I think it's strings but in any case here we are all together but not actually together it's Ben and Chris Ben Chris introduce yourselves in that sequence hey I'm Ben Elgin okay that was yes let's uh let's say a little more about

ourselves Ben who are who is Ben Elgin who is this mysterious man I'm sure you contain multitudes tell us about those multitudes I don't know I'm some guy that got ropes into Retronauts East. I'm just this guy, you know, kind of like Zafod. Okay. I like ran a Macross blog for a while. Man, I'm doing a top 50 mecca list on the form I hang out on right now, which is, you know, the form Jeremy made.

I forgot about that form. Geez. Whoops. Yeah, it still exists. How about that? I'm so proud of you all. And working on robot drills on my day job. Like Macross type robots?

Like Gundam? Or are you talking like? industrial type robots. Yeah, it's actually CNC machines, but we could pretend. I mean, you could totally stick one on the arm of a robot and, yeah, absolutely. Can I ask you a legitimate question? Sure. Is the plural of Gundam, Gunda, is it like a datum data situation?

I feel like it should be. It's not. It's not Latin, sir. It is not neutral genitive or neutral gender. Sorry, genitive is its own thing. Anyway, no, Gundams. Gundams, yes. Actually, I think in Japanese, it's just Gundam.

is like singular and plural because it's Japanese. Yeah, Gundam. Look at all those Gundam. There's a flock of wild Gundam roaming the roaming the valley. Look at them majestically standing. That's right. They've taken over, they've taken over Shinjuku. Anyway,

yes, Chris, introduce yourself. Hi, I'm Chris Sims. In the year 2010, in January, I had just quit working at the comic book store to be a full-time freelance writer writing for comics alliance.com. And yeah, that's where I was when all of these video games happened. It was a very momentous moment in my life. Oh yeah, we should talk about

where we were in 2010. Unfortunately, Benj Edwards isn't able to be with us on this episode and maybe not on many episodes going forward since he is now working full time. And that's, you know, good for him. But disappointing for us, he always adds something interesting and funny to the show, or at least funny in his mind. And that's what's really important. So I will No, it is. It's important. He adds a lot to the show, and I miss having him here. But unfortunately, well, I guess, you know, fortunately for him, it's good to have a steady job, especially these days. But, yeah, unfortunately, he won't be able to weigh in on this stuff. But Ben, you were going to say, yeah, 2010, instead of working with drills, I was working with lasers. So different stuff you could put on the end of a robot arm and fuck shit up with. So you've, you've transmuted from light into matter. What's the, what's the formula there? Uh, you could ask Einstein. He could work it out for you. As for myself, in 2010, I was, uh, in the games press. I was working at oneup.com after the great

one up EGM, et cetera, diaspora. So the, the site was steadily shrinking as, uh, Hearst publishing and UGO mismanaged us into hell. But it was still an okay time and I played a lot of these games, either for review or preview or just saw people playing them in the office. So this is kind of like the peak of, you know, working in the games press for me. So, yeah, I'm approaching this from the like the inside baseball. No, I wouldn't say inside baseball. I didn't actually work on any of these games. Well, you weren't. Yeah, you weren't in the interest.

But definitely someone who is, you know, spent time with these games, significant time, which is, you know, when we get around to doing the 2020 retrospective, it's going to be tough because I don't play a lot of new games these days. But 2010 was okay. So 2010, were we doing GameSpite zines then? What period was that? Yes, actually, the GameSpite, yeah, that zine kicked off in 2009 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Game Boy, if that wants, you want to put a date on it like that. Yeah.

All right, so that's something I was doing back then. Yeah, I wrote a, I wrote an episode or an article about Mega Man X in the year 20X or whatever, kind of tying a connection to two. 2010 and whatever year Mega Man X is in. And I didn't even think that 2010 is MMX. I was such a fool in those days. So just letting opportunities slip away. But I did at least take the opportunity to play a lot of these games. So they're all kind of fresh in my mind.

And it is hard to believe that this is 10 years ago. It doesn't not seem like these games are that old. For sure. Now, was that the year that you invented the term Metroidvania? No, actually that was 2003. That's when I stole it. Okay. So it had been around for a while by that point.

I think by that point it had become fairly common, and people were already starting to say, did Jeremy Parrish make up this word? That asshole. I hate him. But anyway, yes. So that's where we were in 2010. And, you know, in terms of history, pop culture,

like, what was going on in 2010? That's actually kind of fuzzy for me. I can't remember, like, games are very clear to me, but entertainment and real life is kind of, blurry now. Yeah, it was the middle of this kind of long period of my life where I was doing the same thing for a decade. So I really have no idea what happened when in like the mid-2000s to 2010s. Comics were bad. DC Comics especially. DC was getting to the point where it was so

bad that they had to throw out the entire universe and just start over. Was this the year that Superboy punched time and destroyed the universe? That I think was 2008 because that was infinite crisis. which was the 20th anniversary of Christ on Infinite Earth's story. Close enough. So we were still in the aftershocks of that stupidity. Kind of like the real world was in the aftershocks of the whole economic collapse, the recession of 2008, that kind of stupidity. So, you know, lots of real-life parallels there.

Okay, so I just looked up like movies that came out in 2010, and the first thing that comes out is Inception. I'm like, that was that long ago? Oh, yeah. Wow, okay. Inception, Ironman, Tangled. They'll be Iron Man 2. Yeah, Iron Man 2, sorry. Oh, Scott Pilgrim.

Oh, yeah, we'll talk about that soon. Okay, so that kind of puts a finger on things. That's what was up. So, guys, let's talk about some video games from the year 2010. We're just going to do this alphabetically. I decided not to try to go through like week by week, month by month. That's just a big hassle. But there's so many games here.

Most of these were probably just going to breeze past. But please, if there's something that jumps out to you, let's talk about it. Let's dig in and say some things. Well, so I put a note on one so early, it's in the numbers in our alphabetical list here. There's only two in the numbers. Yeah, so this was one of my disappointments for 2010. I guess the thing about 2010 is like retro was kind of starting to get big, but people hadn't really always figured out what to do with it in some cases, I think.

So I actually bought 3D.com heroes, which is basically a Zelda-like only in like 3D perspective and with everything built of voxels. Yep, and it has like every effect on. It's got, you know, like, bocée. Every single, like, weird effect they could throw in, yep, yep, yep. Specular highlighting and all kinds of stuff. Yeah, it's just like, what if you took the pixels of Zelda and made them ultra high definition? Yeah, yeah.

And so it feels like they didn't really know what they were doing with it. There are some cool ideas in it. There's, like, an editor that lets you voxel edit your own player character, which is pretty damn cool. But the actual game is just not. that much fun. It kind of goes overboard with gimmicky stuff. You can get these swords and you can make your swords bigger and bigger and bigger until like the sword fills

like half the screen. It's just, it's a little bit too ridiculous. Like I appreciate that it's tongue and cheek, but it doesn't really play that well. And so I remember spending a lot of time in the editor and mucking around with it and I did not actually play that much of the game because it just really wasn't fun to play, which is sad, because it was basically Zelda

1 with cool effects on it, but they just didn't quite pull it off. Yeah, the interesting thing about this is that when it was released in the U.S. from Atlas, they kept the Japanese title, 3D dot game heroes, even though dot is like the Japanese term for pixel. So they could have called it like voxel heroes or something, but they kept the Japanese title, which was kind of weird, kind of a strange choice. But interestingly, this was published in Japan by From Software. You know, the guys who had just made demon souls and were about to revolutionize things a year. later with Dark Souls. It was developed by Silicon Studio who does a lot of middleware and that kind of thing, but it was basically brought to life by From Software, which is just not really what

people associate from software with these days. Yeah. Chris, any thoughts on 3D. Game Heroes? No. I have actually never heard of it. Oh. But it sounds good because I do like ridiculously large swords. It's okay.

It's not a bad game. It's just kind of like Ben said. It's just kind of like, what are you doing, guys? What's the point here? It is okay. Yeah, they threw a lot of ideas at the wall. It didn't quite come together. I enjoyed it, but it's not something I'd ever want to revisit.

Another one in the numbers, the other one, I guess I would say, in the numbers, is 999. Nine hours, nine persons, nine doors. Yeah. And this is one of those games, kind of like a graphical adventure puzzle type, visual novel. sort of mashup from Chunsoft designed by Kotaro Uchikoshi who is pretty well known for being a little

marching to a different drummer and this game is very highly regarded it's not one that I had a chance to play and it's been on my you should play this Sunday list for a very long time fortunately it's on many many platforms now Ben I don't know if you ever played it I have not actually played it myself

I've heard things about it There's a whole trilogy of these games now, isn't there? Yeah, Zero Escape and Virtue's Last Reward also. Right. And I've missed out on all of those, sadly. Yeah, I have not played them myself. So this would be Chunsoft, the company that I know from making Firebro. Yes, and also ChinSoft, the company that made Dragon Quest, the first three or four Dragon Quest, and all the mystery dungeon games.

That's them. Interesting. They are now merged with Spike. They're Spike Chunsoft. but yes, they do all kinds of cool stuff and have for a long time. This is one of the, you know, they bring the series back every so often. I think they just did a remaster pretty recently. So there's not really not an excuse for me not to have played it.

It's just kind of time intensive and, you know, requires some brain power. So I just haven't had the time to commit that to it. Oh, well, moving on to letters, there's one under the letter A we're talking about it as Alpha Protocol. which strikes me as being a mass effect light. That was one that I did not play myself but watched other people reviewing. And I was like, hmm, this kind of seems like a mass effect, but not quite. I don't even remember hearing anything about that game. Yeah.

It's probably one that, you know, someone who has played really enjoys. And someday we will have someone on the show who will be like, oh, let me tell you all about Apple Protocol, Alpha Protocol, but that is not today. another one that I'm looking forward to playing when the collection comes to switch finally playing Bioshock 2 which I've only dabbled in but I've heard that once you start playing it

it's definitely an interesting take on Bioshock it's much more of a like some people call it the original walking simulator because it's much more about like traveling oh no that's Monevers Den that's the DLC for it Bioshock 2 is just kind of like

more Bioshock, but very well-designed levels, very well-designed stages. And then it has the Minerva's Den DLC, which is the walking simulator. Those people went on to form Fulbright and create Gone Home, which kind of carries forward some of the ideas of Bioshock 2. But Bioshock 2 is interesting because you play as a big daddy, as opposed to playing as a human fighting big ditties. You are a big daddy, and you've got to protect little kids, little girls, specifically. And this is that dating simulator that came out. not too long ago. Oh, the daddy dating sip. Yes, yes. No,

I'm afraid to disappoint you. This is Big Daddy as in a dude in a diving suit, not a dude as in his birthday suit. All right, jumping ahead to the letter C, I think we know some of these games, Castlevania Harmony of Despair. Oh, boy. The extremely cool multiplayer HD game that was basically made by Kojiigureshi on 10 cents and some old walnut shells. Like he had no budget for it and said,

Let's just take all the old stuff that we've done, all the old assets we've got, smash them together, let a bunch of people play around in them, you know, online. And it's really cool. And one of the most unfairly overlooked Castlevania games, and I really, really hope it gets it to do someday. I don't really trust that it will, but it's, it's fun. It's different. It's weird. See, I always looked at that and felt like it would be amazing fun as a party game. but with like you know local play right but it was only online yeah yeah it is very surprising to me

to hear you talk about it in such positive terms because for me this was like a really big disappointment well i guess it depends on what you went in expecting well it's i feel like the idea of a multiplayer Castlevania on a on a console so you could play it on a TV and not just on a handheld which was where real Castlevania lived we will get to that in a moment, that you could remix all of the assets from all of the games, and you had all of your faves that you could team up like Alicard and Shanoa and Jonathan and Charlotte and do all this fun stuff. I don't feel like the game actually delivered on any of that promise. The online play was, it was fine, but like it was essentially,

a, I mean, yeah, it was a party game, but it was essentially like a speed run game, right? Like, the object was to get through it as fast as you could. Well, not as fast as you could, but within like 20 minutes. You had a time limit, so it pushed you to play efficiently, as opposed to like, hey, I'm going to take an hour and just grind for levels and equipment. Like, you had to, you had to kind of keep your, your eye on the timer and make sense of the space within the level and kind of what you, you and your friends had accomplished. So, I don't know.

I thought it was interesting. Well, I feel like what I want out of Castlevania is very different from what this game provided. Because for one thing, I don't want to play with anyone else, which was the big thing with Castlevania. So this game isn't for you. This is not meant to be a Castlevania game that you play solo. Those already exist. This is a way to kind of say, hey, what if Castlevania were a thing you did with other people? What would that look like?

And in this case, that looks like you're given these huge maps full of enemies with bosses in them. and one objective, which is to take down like the real boss at the end of the stage or the middle of the stage or wherever it is. But you can't just like rush to it. You have to kind of solve the puzzle, you know, solve the maze, the labyrinth along the way, collect some items, you know, beef your characters up a little bit so they can survive the battle. But again, you only have so long to do it.

So you really have to kind of get a sense of the lay of the land. You have to coordinate with your friends. you have to kind of play efficiently and you know there is still room for exploration but you know in addition to rewarding exploration it also rewards efficiency so it's it's I don't know to me it's an interesting push and pull

for me I feel like thematically it gets to the idea at the heart of Castlevania which is that like you become the master of the space right but you don't explore the space in the same way you don't traverse the space in the same way. So it looks like Castlevania, but it doesn't play like Castlevania. And I think that was my issue.

Because what I wanted to do is be able to have like a just a Castlevania game where I had my choice of who I would play going through it from all of these characters, you know? So you want the single player Castlevania mashup? Yeah, I wanted a single player, Castlevania game that had the plot of Castlevania judgment, which is also not good. Yeah, I feel like you can't really compare this to Castlevania judgment. It tries to do its own thing, and I think it succeeds pretty well at that. So, Chris, you want the Super Mario Maker of Castlevania's.

You want to throw everything from the franchise into these levels and go. That would be a fascinating thing, actually, Super Castlevania Maker. I've said before that Mario Maker is literally the best video game ever. It's the best video game that it's possible to make, because it contains a theoretically infinite number of new Super Mario where there's three levels. And I just want that for Castlevania. I mean, that's fair. That would be a cool thing.

Well, you didn't get it. That is not this game. No, no, it's not. I remember being really excited about it for like a month. To me, this is, it's closer in spirit to Castlevania's heart than Lords of Shadow was. Oh, buddy. So you've got a note on here, so I'm just going to let you go. I've wound you up now.

Now I release you. Go for it. Okay, so Castlevania, Lords of Shadow, was a hard reboot. of the Castlevania franchise. So for the first time ever, for the third time ever, you were going to find out the origins of the Belmont's. And it was God of War, right? Like, it's full-on God of War, except you're whipping around a whip.

Excuse me, sorry, not a whip. A combat cross. In very stretchy cross. Which I do really like the idea of the Combat Cross. I just don't know why they didn't just call it Vampire. killer not combat cross like i like the idea because they had to work up to that with the whole story and matthias and blah blah blah uh isn't this one of those games where much like bianna commando it turns out that the love of your life gets refrigerated or fridged so that was lament of

innocence oh was it oh man yeah that was lament of innocence which was uh for the first time ever for the second time ever i get i get all these mediocre 3d retellings of the castlevania origin story mixed up in terms of specifics. I will say that as a god of war clone, this was pretty solid, but it's just, yeah, it wasn't really... Gameplay-wise, it's fine. Yeah, it's just, like, it's so try-hard, so serious about everything, and the sequel's just got goofier and goofier.

Didn't this have Patrick Stewart voicing somebody in it? Oh, yes, it did. He was the guy who invented your combat cross. And he narrated each chapter, trying to bring some gravitas. to a pretty ridiculous story. I like Castlevania when it's very self-serious and goofy about it. Like, again, Symphony of the Night is probably my favorite video game of all time. But, yeah, this is, it's so, I mean, try hard is the word for it, right?

Like, it's trying so hard to be what games were in 2010. Right. You know, it's trying very hard to have the gravitas and violence. I do think they probably would have had your beloved wife become your whip if A, they hadn't done that already in Lament of Innocence, and B, there were any women in this game, which I don't think there are. Aside from, like, naked women that you kill. Yeah, I think Carmilla might be in it, and a succubus might be in it.

You don't get to the castle for a long time, which is annoying, but, you know, after Order of Ecclesia did that really well. I'm willing to forgive that as a sin. I mean, they've been doing that since Castlevania 3, then Super Castlevania 4, then Rondo Blah, then like, yeah, they just, they do that a lot. Yeah. But the big thing is the storyline, which we're going to reboot Castlevania. And obviously, it's not good enough to just have, you know, Dracula and the family that hunts Dracula because he's Dracula.

It needs to be tied in more tightly. and this is a thing that I think is prominent in media of the decade. So it's not like it's just this Castlevania game doing it. It's also, you know, like years after this, we had that James Bond movie where you found out that Blowfilp was secretly James Bond's brother all the long. Yeah, it was such a, it was a pretty good movie other than that. Then they got to that part and you're like, come on, dudes.

Yeah. One of my favorite openings of any Bond movie ever, the Dea de los Morto stuff. But the big familial tie for, for this one was the Belmont is Dracula at the end of it you become Dracula

Jinkies and then there's a second twist which is hilarious which is that when you finish the game as Dracula you look out the window of your castle and surprise it's the modern times

it's 2010 now and so we're going to have Lords of Shadow 2 which is a modern Castlevania which I think It has a lot of, like, promise, because you didn't really get that in Aria of Sorrow and Don of Sorrow, which were ostensibly set in the 2030s. They don't, you know, it's just Castlevania, except your dude wears a cool coat. And he is also Dracula. And he can get a gun.

He can get a handgun. He can get a handgun. And a laser pistol. So is this modern day, did this modern day Lords of Shadow actually happen? Yeah, yeah, the Lords of Shadow 2. Yeah, there wasn't a sequel, but I didn't really know anything about it. I wasn't following it. All right.

Anyway, we've kind of gotten sidetracked here. I think we probably punched on... Can I just say one more thing about Lords of Shadow? Okay, one more thing. The best thing that happened in the Lords of Shadow era, which I think is well and truly done now, it did not go well, was when they did the DS game,

which was kind of sort of crappy Metroidvania. 3DS. Oh, 3DS game, yeah. And you find out that since Gabriel Belmont is Dracula, that means that his son, who is Trevor Belmont, is Alicard. Trevor Belmont is Alicard. It's, yeah, you said it yourself. Like, it's media of the era.

Like, let's make the universe as small as possible. Let's, you know, make everything centered around one or two characters and just whittle things down. So everything extraneous is gone. And, yeah, it kind of loses its meaning after a while. Which is a shame. Because in terms of mechanics, like, if they have, hadn't called this Castlevania, if it had been, like, demon dude, the adventure, I think I'd like it a lot more, but, you know, wrapping it in, like, basically they, they murdered Castlevania and

then wore its skin. And that, I'm not a fan. If they were going to remake and reimagine Castlevania as God of War, I would have preferred that to happen today when Dracula would just be a sad dad. Ah, I'm over that. Will we just do the Warren Ellis version? Are you not a fan of that one? I have opinions. Anyway, this is all about 2010, not just bitching about Castlevania. So, on. Onward, Call of Duty, Black Ops came out that year, cementing Call of Duty as the series.

I mean, Call of Duty 4 had been big, and Black Ops really, really cemented it. I don't have a lot of... experience with black ops or call of duty in general it isn't a topic that merits a full episode someday it's the third most popular series in the world after minecraft and animal crossing so that's a big deal is animal crossing more popular than than Pokemon uh the most recent animal crossing the numbers that just came out for the beginning of may when this is recorded uh it is the fastest selling game on Switch, so yes. Anyway, also under the letter C, Cladden or Classic Dungeon.

Cladden, subtitle, Cladden, this is an RPG. This is actually, to my mind, more egregious, like a more egregious take on what 3D. Dot Game Heroes was trying to do, but, like, worse. So it's trying to be like an old school pixel RPG, but it uses pixel graphics, but there's no consistency in the game style. Like some of it is like kind of high resolution. Some of it is low resolution. It's like a mix of 16 and 8-bit style graphics.

And it's not really that fun or good. Just kind of a mess. So don't go back for this one. Yeah. Yeah, I don't have opinions on that because I didn't get suckered into buying that one. But it definitely cements this as an era where people had not really figured out what they wanted to do with retro yet. Yeah, I mean, let's jump ahead because 20.

10 was also Mega Man 10 which was a follow up to Mega Man 9 where they said hey to do retro we should just do retro let's just make this game exactly like it used to be Mega Man 10 was where we realized oh actually

like there's there's kind of a finite value to this like that was really neat once and the second time I don't know I had fun with 10 and and partly it was because they added easy mode to it so you could just kind of breeze through if you wanted to just have a breezy experience through, which, you know,

Mega Man 9 was good, but it was kind of back to like, you know, eight-bit Mega Man hard in some places. Yeah, I'm broken inside, and that's why I liked it so much, but I understand. That's totally fair. That's totally fair. I know that's exactly what some people want. And, you know, Mega Man 10 gave you both options, so that was good. It did, but I just, I feel like it wasn't as well designed,

and it definitely wasn't surprising in the way that Mega Man 9 was. Mega Man 9 was tuned, I've talked about this before. It was tuned to, like, take all the training. you'd had, all the muscle memory, the expectations of how Mega Man works. And then, oh, surprise, it doesn't actually work like you expect and you have to relearn. It's challenging in a different way, even though it looks like it should be challenging in the old way. And that was fun. Mega Man 10 is just kind of like, hey, here's another Mega Man game kids, and it's fine. It just didn't grab me the way Nine did. I felt like they were just

having fun with it at that point. It has Sheep Man in it. How can you not love Sheep Man? that is true it's a prolet message that's cheap and his whole stage has like has like mouse pointers and shit in it which is goofy as hell but I mean lots of Mega Man is goofy as hell so yeah I thought it was fun

there was some fun stage themes I'll give you that it's not a bad game I don't dislike it it's just like coming after 9 which is so revelatory 10 was just kind of like oh I don't know

anyway that's just me being it's the Mega Man like I don't know 4 or something to the original Mega Man yes the Mega Man 4 to the Mega Man 3 that was Mega Man 9 or Mega Man 2 that was Mega Man 9. Anyway, something like that. This is becoming a mess.

Also undersea Crimson Jim Saga, which was the sequel to Astonisha Story, which was a wretchedly bad PSP game. This was not that bad, very obscure, kind of just slipped under the radar, an Atlas release, kind of late in the PSP era,

an okay RPG and not wretchedly horrible like Astonishia story. Okay. Speaking of Castlevania, of Shadow, we also had Dante's Inferno, which was another attempt to do the God of War thing. And this time, instead of mashing it up with Castlevania, mashing it up with classic literature. And this game sure was something. Did you guys play it?

No. I vaguely remember some of the marketing for it. I didn't play it, and I want to. By the time this comes out, we will have recorded it. But for our 64th episode of Apocrypal's right here on the Greenlit Podcast Network, we are doing episode Nintendo 64 and we're covering

the Bible adventures games and if that goes well I will also want to eventually do this because

it is if you were tasked to come up with a parody of video games in the 2010s this is what

it would be yes that is absolutely correct this is video games as satire this is irony

as dead as a game I played some of it And it's fine. It does what it says on the label, which is like Ripoff God of War under the premise of being about an ancient Italian, not ancient, but a very old Italian poem about the afterlife and justice and hell and purgatory and punishment. I think you have to go to hell and you have like a, the skin on your chest has been like

flayed into a cross. Sure. You have to rescue your girlfriend, right? Is that what's happening in this game? Something like that. If Suda 5-1 did not have a sense of humor, this is the game that he would make. Yes. There's a lot of trying hard in 2010.

So much trying hard. I will say, though, that Darksiders is what this game, I think, really wanted to be, which is, what if we did Dark God of War? But instead of being, like, super hardcore about it, we put a kind of a comic book style on it. We get Joe Madera to do artwork for it. And we fill it full of Legend of Zelda mechanics. So it's much more like a classic action RPG. And this is like a game that, you know, it's even more ridiculously over the top and grim dark than Dante's Inferno in some ways.

But it's in on its own joke. And it's meant to be like, you know, it deliberately takes that comic book style and marries it to some very, very good gameplay. Like it is, it is a very well-designed game. the mechanics feel really good. The power up progression feels really good. They looked at the games that work and said, let's try to integrate this into our game and, you know,

bring it into this kind of modern, edgy, grim dark, you know, teenage edge lord kind of style, but also not get too carried away with that and still make it fun. And it's good. I don't, I feel like I shouldn't like this game, but I do. It's good. I have actually, like, I never played it, and that description really makes me want to play it.

Oh, yeah, you've totally missed out. I haven't played a lot of it, but, you know, I've played enough to get a feel for, you know, kind of how the gameplay loop works and just the controls, and it works really well. There's a reason there's three of these games. They're, you know, they don't sell that well. They're not like multi-million selling blockbusters as far as I'm aware, but, you know, there is this kernel of really good gameplay here, and I think the people who like these games really like them and will, you know, continue to support them.

So Dark Siders has kind of continued to exist. And it is a B game in an era where B games did not exist. And it's very comfortable being a B game. And I think that's admirable. Yeah, I do remember at the time hearing people compare it to like Zelda mechanics, which, you know, is not what you would necessarily think from like the marketing and trappings of it, but it did sound intriguing. Yeah, a lot of it has to do with like the kind of power progression of it.

But anyway, yeah, this is the game that should have been wretched, but was actually pretty fun. Another game that is wretched, but is also fun, is deadly premonition. A game so full of ambition and innovation and just crazy ideas. Bob, I think, is doing an episode on this game pretty soon because there's a sequel coming out. It's, you know, from Sway 65, who had previously worked on games like spy fiction, very heavily influenced by cinema. and in this case just nakedly openly inspired by Twin Peaks

and it is a strange game that's full of so many details and just weird like extremely grounded mechanics like very very it gets almost kind of bogged down by just the mundanity of itself and you know when it first came out people were like

this game is terrible but I think you know there were a few critics I think Jim Sterling and Franks of Faldi we're able to look past the extremely janky visuals and the kind of cumbersome interface and the opaque narrative and say, wow, there's something really interesting here and it is very much a passion project. And I'm not able to really speak as an expert on this game,

so I will leave it to Bob to speak about it. Or I'll leave it to you if you guys have strong feelings. Afraid not. Yeah, no, I haven't spent a lot of time with that. I've definitely heard a lot about it. But yeah, I think it's Bob that we need on this one. Yeah. Okay. Well, he has a full episode coming up pretty soon. So that's, listen to that instead of us, us nattering away. Death Spank was another game released in 2010, created by Ron Gilbert.

There's a note here that says Benj likes, so maybe someday Benj will come back and talk about Death Spank. All I remember about Death Spank is that I wrote up the announcement of it, which was presented at, I think, Game Developers Conference, and I misheard when Gilbert said that the main character was a hero. For some reason, I heard that he is a superhero. Actually, I think it was at San Diego Comic-Con, man. maybe. So I just got, I got mixed up somehow. He didn't show any images of the game, any,

any pictures of the hero. So I wrote superhero. And then he got really angry and, like, blogged about how incompetent I was. So that was cool. I made Ron Gilbert angry at me because I just misheard something in an announcement. Good times. Yeah, it's actually got this kind of like comedy medieval look going on. Yeah. I mean, it's called Death Spank. So I don't know. It feels like it might be trying a little too hard, but I honestly haven't played it so I can't say. I have played Donkey Kong Country Returns, however, and I can say that as much as I don't like the Donkey Kong Country games, this one is very good. And sadly, because they keep making these games, we'll never get Metroid Primes again. I know they announced Metroid Prime

4, but it's a lie. This was developed by Retro Studios instead of Rare, and they really brought just a high level of craftsmanship and expertise to it. It was published for Wii and then remade for 3DS a few years back. So it's pretty easy to get a hold of these days and is one of the best platformers of the era and the sequel Tropical Freeze is even better. I definitely remember hearing good things about it. I was never actually all that into the whole Donkey Kong milieu. So I didn't get it.

I didn't get into it at the time. No, I mean, I'm not a big fan of the Donkey Kong country games, but I put aside my prejudices. and I can say that, yes, this was a good game full of fresh ideas, interesting presentation. You know, it did things like that silhouette stage in the sunset that everyone ripped off immediately after. Right, right. It was just really well made, really, really well crafted

and much more, like the level design had a lot more thought and fairness put into it than in the rare games. Like, you can definitely tell going back that the rare Donkey Kong country games are by a European studio because there is a lot of kind of look in places and do arbitrary things and also there are things that will just kill you and you can't know until you die.

This doesn't really do that. And also just like getting a really solid platformer made in 2010 is kind of notable in itself. And yeah, like, you know, for a console too, not a handle. Yeah. Crazy. Right, right. That wasn't just like a retro handheld thing.

Right. Meanwhile, Dragon Quest 9 took a console franchise to handheld. It was the next Dragon Quest game and it was on Nintendo DS and looked way, way worse than Dragon Quest 8. But that is okay because it was a game that was kind of sandboxy and, you know, immerse yourself into this experience and just play for many, many hours. It really kind of brought in elements from Monster Hunter and other series, you know,

the idea that you can continue to play this game even after you finish the story. There's still this world of adventure out there and even greater challenges to take on, potentially infinite challenges thanks to the street pass feature that no longer works. So I have excellent memories of this. We'll probably do a Dragon Quest in mine nine episode at some point

but Ben I know you played this a lot too. Yeah, which I'd love to be asking. So this is the Dragon Quest that finally got me. It's kind of weird as I was an old school RPG not back in the day but I never really played the Dragon Quest games. But I took a chance on nine I had a DS and I loved.

loved it um i played the hell out of it to the point of like i uh organized a swap meet for for the uh street pass maps at dragon con and was probably somewhat instrumental in getting some of the japanese like really good grinding maps distributed on the east coast of the u.s uh from that swap meat um but yeah it was just it's really good it's one of the so it's one of the dragon quests where you have your main character and you basically just create the rest of your party um however you want by recruiting them at taverns. So it's pretty fully customizable. And it just, I don't know, it just felt really good.

The whole flow of the game. It's got all the usual Dragon Quest stuff. But it's just put together really well. And yeah, the extra Street Pass maps were really cool. It pulled in, like, in the post game, you could get all the bosses from the earlier dragon quests and fight them again. It's just full of good stuff. Yeah, I really enjoyed the Street Pass feature.

You know, I did that one year at Pax, where I would basically like walk 10 feet and then I would stop and then I would check my end to see who I had street passed with and then I would walk 10 more feet. I don't know how I actually got new work done at that packs because I was so busy checking my Dragon Quest street passes. But just a really great game and the story mode, you know, people are like, oh, the story's not as amazing as other Dragon Quest games, but it still was focused around that kind of classic dragon quest style of basically each location on the map being its own self-contained chapter

of a story, like a narrative that has a beginning and an end and doesn't always end the way you expect. In fact, I would say most of them, you know, they go in a direction that you don't quite expect. It's more like Grimm fairy tale, Grimm's fairy tales, as opposed to, you know, Disney. It's full of these poignant vignettes, which is something that Dragon Quest does a lot, I think, but it did it really well throughout this game. Also on the handheld RPG front, we had Etrian Odyssey 3, which is the one game in the series that I've never really spent enough time with. I got to like the second stratum out of six or five. And yeah, just never got around to finishing it. And they've never remade this one. This is the only Dragon Entry and Odyssey that is not

available on 3DS. So it's now very expensive. But, you know, it was the first to really kind of rethink how the dungeon crawler mode should be. So it has an overworld. It has subclassing and a lot more options for building your parties. They changed up all the party choices from the first and second Etrien Odyssey. We've done a full episode on Entry and Odyssey that I think will be up by the time this episode comes out, so you can go listen to that one and hear me gush about Etri and Odyssey. But great series, and I do hope to someday actually finish this one because a lot of the ideas that were introduced in this one showed up down the road in the sequels.

Did you guys play Epic Mickey? I remember the ads, but I never played the game because I remember the ads. Yeah, no, I didn't actually play it. I remember it looking really cool. It was a Warren Specter-led game and incorporated a lot of elements from like Disney lore, such as Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. And from what I understand, this game was kind of heavily compromised, of course, because it's a Disney product and Disney puts a lot of stipulations on stuff. But they still managed to get away with creating a game that had a much darker tone than you would expect from Disney. It was a really kind of a weird choice.

And I don't know how it happened, but I'm glad that it did. It's not my favorite game, but, like, there was definitely, it came from a place of passion, I would say, of genuine enthusiasm for the property and a desire to do something surprising and different with it. Let's see. Other games, Enslaved, which is kind of your typical corridor. I don't know. I haven't really played that one. That was, that was Ninja Theory. And they do cool stuff now.

They do, what is the game that just kind of came out a few years ago? It's about PTSD, Sinua's story. there's a that's a subtitle oh uh wait a sinus sacrifice yes sinuous sacrifice that's it yeah okay well i'm not clearly not qualified to talk about this one uh but this was you know a a take on the journey to the west you know the monkey king story um kind of wrapped up in a god of warish sort of modern triple a game oh right yeah i remember seeing ads for that a lot of a lot of god of war here in this podcast it was 2010 the year 2010 fable three was not god of war But it was kind of where I noped out of the fable series.

I just sort of lost interest. I don't know if you guys played it. Yeah, I've, I never played the first one, but I was really into Fable 2 and Fable 3. Fable 2 more so, I think. Okay. So what's different about Fable 3? It's primarily a real estate-based game. Okay.

Like, the way to win the game is literally to buy up real estate. and then use your rent to raise the 6.5 million gold that you need to win the game, because that is the win condition of this game. That is not what I was expecting out of a summary of that game. Okay. Yeah, that's what it, like, the plot in short is that you are a princess, if you're me, and that's how you're playing the game. And your brother is the king, because he is older than you, and he goes mad. So he's a bad king.

but then it turns out that he was just being awful and cruel because he needed to raise a bunch of money to stop this bad thing from happening, which you need a bunch of money to deal with. I feel like Fable 2 got the really interesting, like, Rags to Riches story, you know, classic fairy tale type of thing going for it in a way that I really enjoyed. and in fable three you're literally like the rightful ruler of the country and people are still like there's goblins in me barn and it's like okay i guess this is my job to deal with but yeah it is presented as this moral choice of are you going to be a a good ruler or are you going to be able to raise the money to fight this sweeping evil that apparently just needs six point five million dollars which yeah i was going to say so like what is the fairy tale apocalypse that you can only get out of by throwing wads of cash at it.

Like, I don't understand this premise. I mean, it's a weird one, right? Like, it's to finance your army, because that's how much money you need to raise the army that you need to defend the kingdom. But the win condition is essentially the same as duct tails for the NES, where you're just trying to get a bunch of money. All you need to do is buy up property, and you don't even have to charge, like, heavy rent.

And once I got all the money, I turned rent off, everybody. my Bowerstone was a socialist paradise It's a very weird game In that regard You know? Huh Yeah

I guess I misjudge this game It sounds interesting It's really interesting Like I like it story-wise I think the fable games all Have a very interesting setting I like the sort of You know

Fable 3 has kind of a More steam punkish industrial Style to it Than the previous games Because it's set several decades after Fable 2, a game in which something like 40 years pass over the course of the game. But, yeah, it's a weird win condition for this game that is about becoming the buffest,

most gun-using person you can be. Okay, well, I'll have to reconsider that sometime. You know, you know, The award-winning Go-Nintendo podcast covers the latest Nintendo news while also diving into what's hot and pop culture, music trivia, hands-on impressions, and so much more. Hopefully, we can make you laugh, too. You'll find new episodes of the Go-Nintendo podcast on the Greenlit podcast network every single week.

Running Diagnostics in three, two. Men like that is a podcast. Good so far? That really sucks. Oh, no. Shut her down. Shut her down. They thought they could make something funny.

They can't do anything. They can't do anything. Listen to M. like that. There are a lot of podcasts with comic book reviews and interviews with some of the greatest creators in the industry. But only one will tell you scientifically what the worst comic book of all time is. And the best. We've been ranking comic book stories for six years. We have a list with over a thousand comics on it and we're adding more every month.

Or Rock and Ajax on the Greenlit Podcast Network. You're going to be able to be able to be. All right. kind of plotting through this episode really slowly and I don't want to break this into another episode. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to just plow through these games. And if there is one that you have something significant to say about it, let's go and talk about it briefly. But basically, I just want to give an overview. We, we, yeah, I forgot last time we did this. I was like, oh, we need to go more quickly. And here we are again, making the same mistake. This is what happens

when you wait too long. And when you've got pandemic brain, you've been stuck up in your house for two months and you don't remember what it's like to talk to other people. I'm sorry. Yeah, I was pretty sure the first half of the alphabet was going to get a lot more time in this, but that's how it goes. Yeah, well, we're going to change that right now. All right. Fallout New Vegas. Chris, what is your galaxy brain hot take on this game? I know that this is wrong and that no one agrees with me, so you don't have to tell me that it's wrong and that you don't agree with me, but I do think Fallout 3 is a better game than Fallout New Vegas.

Hmm. In terms of game or in terms of story? Yes. That's interesting because usually people say that the obsidian games are better in terms of story and the Bethesda games are better in terms of gameplay. But you're saying basically Fallout New Vegas is a disaster on both fronts. No, I don't think it's bad. A step down, a disgrace, a shame. I don't think it's bad.

I really like the setting. I really like the design of everything. Um, I like the way it presents like the, the kind of civilization that has arisen. Uh, and I like the nice contrast between, uh, the East Coast, which is clearly like, you know, still in the very early stages of being rebuilt versus, uh, you know, the West Coast setting that's been around since the first Fallout game and is therefore, you know, they, they, they have government out there. It's kind of like now. Yeah. Uh, narratively speaking, I feel like the problem with Fallout 3 is. is that it tries too hard to make you the central character. And narratively speaking, I think the problem with New Vegas is that you don't need to be there. There is no point to you being in that game.

The game happens with or without you. And if that's the case, then why am I there? Also, the most important area of the entire game, the like kind of end game area where you are headquartered for all of the most important stuff, you need to go through like three loading screens to get there from the, from the open world, which is a pain. That does seem highly unfortunate. Yeah.

All right. But again, I understand that I'm alone in this. I don't know if alone, just in the minority. Also, the game that I was trying to think of by the creators of enslaved was Hellblade. Yes, Hellblade's sinuous sacrifice. I've heard very good things about that and haven't played it yet, but everyone who's talked about it has said it's amazing. So I guess we can skip enslaved and play Hellblade instead. All right. Final Fantasy 13, a better.

game than most people give credit for. Yeah, we were speeding up, but I have takes on this one. My take is that Final Fantasy 13 is pretty good, actually, which is not to say it isn't a mess, because it is. It's super clear, you know, you can see all the, like, hell development that it went through of getting scrapped and restarted on different engines and just them wanting to throw in all the stuff they had in it. And so the plot bounces around between, you know, pretty set pieces because they had to use that stuff. And if you actually want to understand the story, it kind of makes sense if you read all the encyclopedia entries, but that is not good storytelling. But despite all that, there's some good characters who, like, you know, come off annoying

at first, but actually have, like, arcs if you stick through it and some actual character development. And there is definitely some good stuff going on in the combat systems, which, again, take a long time to open up. And so at first, it seems really simplified and like you're not doing anything. But once you actually get everything opened up, there's some real strategy there. Although I think actually like the full expression of that system really came in 13-2, which is even more complete nonsense story, but the combat system really clicked in that one form. 13-2's take on time travel is something else. Oh, it's complete nonsense, like just utter pretty nonsense. But they really, they refined that combat system even more.

And I really had fun with it. I went and did all the post-game stuff in 13-2, where I kind of noked out of the post-game at some point in 13. But there's definitely good stuff in there. Well, there wasn't too much post-game in 13. No, he's like, you know, beat the Adamantuses and that stuff. Yeah, 13 was still an undeniably better game than the other Final Fantasy game that came out that year, 14. Now, there is a game that exists now called Final Fantasy 14 that is very, very good, and everyone loves and says is among the best Final Fantasy ever.

The one that launched in 2010 was a different game by a different team. The new game is just like it carved out the hollow shell and moved into it. But, yeah, the original Final Fantasy 14 giant mess at launch, like development hell, stamped all over it, cost people their jobs, was a huge black eye for square. And the fact that Yoship came in and just made it as good as it is now is nothing short of a miracle. And by miracle, I mean, a company that was determined to save an important money maker for itself by throwing tons of cash and talent at it. And it worked. it did it did also one more final fantasy the four heroes of light which was not really well regarded at the time i think it was kind of misunderstood as a throwback RPG but it was the foundation for bravely default and octopath traveler which most people do like yeah my comment on that was it was a good try but i liked it better when it became bravely default um also god of war three the game we keep talking about it was the third god of war game every game this year was trying to be god of war god of war three actually was it was god of three but even more so it was meaner and angrier and bloodier and just just reveled in

its violence and horribleness and uh you know my take at the time was like this is kind of gross and i don't really want to play it it's it's just too much and i feel like that's kind of been borne out by the new god of war which you know is still a violent game but it's very much about kind of taking stock of where the series has been and saying hmm actually maybe all of That was kind of toxic and bad. I only, as far as God of War goes, like, for any considerable amount of time, I've only played God of War 2018. But I, like, this is the one that's, like, weirdly horny, right? Or is that all of them?

That's all of them. And it's not weirdly horny. It's just straight up horny. It's just like, hey, here's some titties. That's it. Okay. I guess that's all we got on that. It's just a big rip-off of Castlevania Lord's the Shadow.

Yeah. Totally. Such a rip-off of Mercury Steam's hard work. So also we have kind of an end-of-the-era sort of thing as well. Halo Reach, the final game by Bungy, the final Halo game by Bungy, before they moved on to Destiny, and Halo moved over to 3-4-3 industries. So what? I'm trying to remember what form that game ended up taking. It wasn't that one that was originally, like, going to be a tactics game or something?

No, that was Halo. Halo was going to be a tactics game. You might be thinking of Halo 3. ODST, which was going to be DLC. Oh, that might be what I'm thinking of. For Halo 3 and then was turned into a standalone game. This was very much a standalone game. It's a prequel

broken into chapters where each chapter you play a different character, but you're always, or you're, you kind of follow a different character. I can't remember, actually. It's been a while. It's been like 10 years since I played it. But I do remember that you kind of played as a nameless rookie and you're basically leading up to the events.

Actually, did you play a nameless rookie? Oh, man. I'm embarrassed. this is all like blurring together in my head. It has been so long since I've played. But this is straight up the prequel to the original Halo and it has a very kind of Final Fantasy 7 crisis core ending where it's, you know, hopeless and you can't possibly survive. And it's very dramatic.

But very well crafted. I liked Halo 3 ODST better just because it was different and unexpected. But in terms of like the classic Halo story experience, like, you know, narrative linear shoot them up this was as good as it got did it have those old bungee marathon vibes in the plotting not really so much it was more straightforward there wasn't a lot of space this one was too like fast-paced too brisk like hey we've got to you know we've got to get to the first game to really take the time to soak in that stuff I think there were hidden terminals and things but not as much of it speaking of linear stories there was heavy rain another

David Cage game, kind of infamous for some of its weird story and dialogue. But Benj likes it, it says in the notes, but he's not here to defend it. Infinite Space, a DS space simulation from Platinum games, which is now very, very expensive. Ben, that actually seems like it may be your kind of thing. It's very, not quite Gundamish, but kind of, kind of Gundamish. Yeah, I have not actually played it. Maybe I should rectify that at some point. It doesn't Yeah, it definitely like looks entry. It's got to, you know, it does have that kind of anime space opera style to it for sure.

But, yeah, I haven't actually had a chance to dive into it. Yeah, they told me when I first interviewed them about it, that it was going to be hard sci-fi, which I thought meant like Asimov, but actually means in anime terms, Gundam. But that's all right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you like space operas and tactics and strategy games

and have a lot of money, that's when to check out. Infinity Blade, a game that no longer exists, I believe, was kind of a big moneymaker for chair and epic. It was designed for iPad, and it was one of the few games that made people say, like, oh, yes, iPad gaming can't be fun. It was basically like swipe motion control punchout with, you know, medieval knights and monsters. With rogue-like elements. Did it have roguelike elements? It did. It had a permadeath.

You were playing multiple generations. Oh, okay, okay. Guy every time you died. Got it. But I remember the thing about this being the, like, you know, kind of console-level looking graphics, which is one of the first things that got a big push for that on the, like, mobile iPad space. It just looked really impressive.

Yep, Steve Jobs is all like, I've always hated video games, but look how cool this looks by an iPad. Pretty much. I remember getting this and similarly being, like, very impressed. because I had gotten an iPad ostensibly because it was going to be and kind of ended up being the big new thing in comics. So, you know, in 2010, writing about digital comics

and what you could do on an iPad was a big part of my job. And I remember playing it and being like blown away by the way it looked and then just kind of realizing that it is fundamentally a bad game. Like, it's, it is mad repetitive. And you say it doesn't exist anymore, which is true. Like, you can't get this game. But you can get many games like it, which I think is a testament to its success. Yep.

Clones are the way of the iPad or the iOS store. Let's see. Moving along, there's Canaan Lynch 2, a game that apparently, I never played it, but by all accounts, was not that great. But it did give us giant bomb. So there's that. Wait, how did that happen? Basically, Jeff Gerstman reviewed it for GameSpot. GameSpot. And the publisher, I can't remember the publisher was IDOS or what. I remember this. Yeah, they were very angry about his low score. And he basically got pushed out of the company for it after, you know, being there for more than a decade at GameSpot they sacked him over it or he left because they basically said leave

I can't remember exactly how it went down but he went independent and created a giant bomb and said you know this content you know there's space and media for authentic you know voices speaking directly to players and enough people agreed that

that's still a thing a decade later so not a great game but important what do you guys stand on Microsoft Connect for Xbox? I had it. It was a Christmas present from my mother because she knew I liked video games and this was the hot thing

but like it was fun. I played the little river. Connected Adventures I guess was the game that it came with and I never played another game with it with it. It was enjoyable but it was not for me

let's say. Okay. So I didn't have an Xbox but my my like sort of intersection with the connect is that for a long time it was sort of the cheapest mass market way to do to get 3D data out of somewhere. And so like from working in like some in old VR and just companies that do stuff with 3D, it was just it was interesting. It was one of the first times we had a mass market way to actually visualize 3D. And I was super low res compared to like, you know, other stuff that existed but wasn't in the consumer markets yet. But it was a really successful first stab at that at distributing 3D capture to the masses, as it were. Fair enough. My Connect story is that I basically disconnected it from my Xbox one as quickly as possible, put it away, and never touched it again. I mean, obviously this was inspired by the massive success of the Wii. But, like, I felt like it was all of the fun of the forced-in motion controls on the Wii.

but without your good friend Mario. Ah, well. All right. Also, going down the list, Kingdom Hearts, Birth by Sleep, another Kingdom Hearts game that was spinning the wheels

of the franchise and the 13-year gap between Kingdom Hearts 2 and 3. This one took place on PSP starred characters that had never shown up in the series before, fighting through the same worlds

that you continued to fight through same Disney properties, as always. It's pretty much where I gave up on trying to keep track of the story in those games. Yeah. Much more successful was Kirby's Epic Yarn, which was an extremely cute and very tactile game designed where everything was designed in the game to look like string or felt or basically made of crafts. Very approachable, very fun. Had a cooperative element, good stuff. There's parentheses here, binge likes. I bet he plays it with his kids because it is a great game to play with your kids. Yeah. I always thought it was really good looking. I didn't have the Wii.

time, so I hadn't played it. But like, I feel like that was one of the first games where Nintendo started really leaning into this, like, how do you make something cartoony high-res? Well, you make it out of interesting textures and stuff. So, you know, whereas other companies are all pursuing photorealism, Nintendo found a way to, like, kind of move into this HD space with their endearingly cartoony properties. And I think that worked out really well for them, and they've applied it to some other things. And yet there is still an element of photo realism to it because of these textures. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

But it's not like photorealism in the same sense of like, here is a grimacing man and, you know, an exploding zombie skull. Yeah, it's this HD photorealistic stuff, but it's being applied to cartoons that are made out of real materials. Yeah, which is a really interesting way to take it. I think it's worked out super well for them. Let's see. What are some other games of note here?

Laura Croft and the Guardian of Light, sorry, British people, Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light is an interesting sort of action isometric game not as all like the other Tomb Raider games but very enjoyable kind of puzzleish action-y I believe it had a multiplayer component I really liked that when I played it binge putter parentheses here

if he were here he would tell us why it's good but he's not very sad did you guys play it? I'm not. You should. All right Lego Harry Potter. Yes, another Lego game. It's another Lego game. The end. Less or more important, I would say, is Limbo, a very sort of pioneering, influential indie game. I remember as being an early one, an early indie game to get a big push.

I like Limbo. Like, Limbo to me feels like it was, I don't think it was where I started with, like, you know, Xbox Live Arcade or like the e-shop or something. But I do remember it being the game where I was like, oh, these are real games. Like, these are not, like, I'm not just getting. you know, old Super Nintendo games or like short experiences or like, you know, oh, Teenage Mutuals 2 is out and I can play it online with my friends now. Limba was like, oh, right, video games. Like, this is a real one.

Yep. Let's see. Lost Planet 2 was kind of where Lost Planet sort of came into its own, great multiplayer that people really liked. If I'm remembering correctly, yes. Mass Effect 2, I think, was kind of a symbol of the times and a very, influential game in a lot of ways. It carried forward the bioware thing of, you know, branching story paths and lots of focus on characters, but it did away pretty much with all the

like the clumsy RPG mechanics that Mass Effect One had carried over from, you know, Knights of the Old Republic and so forth, and really went for much more of a straightforward cover-based shooter style, which, you know, some people reacted to really poorly, but I really think it was important to make the game more accessible. The original mass effect was kind of infamously clumsy. And I got it because I played a lot of RPGs, but I know there were people, kind of there's the famous or infamous story. I think Dean Takahashi played it. Or maybe it was someone at Kotaku, I can't remember, but someone played it and played for like a couple of hours, several hours, without realizing that you had to manually go in and choose your level

up perks. So they were playing and like equip new weapons and stuff. So they were trying to play through the game with just their like their default stats and weapons. And it was just very very frustrating for them because they weren't playing it right.

So the classic blunderer from back in the day of people who hadn't played RPGs before, but in this case it's just that you don't realize you're playing an RPG because it doesn't look like an RPG. Yes. It looks like a third person shooter, but it really was an RPG, whereas Mass Effect 2 was much more of a third person shooter and really kind of brought the, the bio-ware, like, tell your own story, create your

own character's thing into a sort of action game space. And, you know, there was the kind of binary good, evil sort of thing where you could either be nice shepherd or you could be really mean shepherd, and your face would get all grody and cracked up and glowy and stuff. And then at the end, you could either choose to destroy the cyborg reaper baby thing that was brewing somewhere deep in the galaxy or keep it and study it, you know, for your own nefarious purposes.

But the big thing about Mass Effect 2 that made it so cool was the whole thing was basically a heist movie. It was like Oceans 11 or something where you were pulling your whole team together to go on this final mission, I guess more like Dirty Dozen. But basically you were pulling a team together and the way you related to your team

and trained them and, you know, followed through on their stories, determined not only how, you know, the final outcome went in terms of combat, but also determined who would live and who would die. Like, you know, if you played everything right, if you played all your cards right, your whole squad would survive. If you didn't, then everyone died and you got a very grim ending. So, yeah, a very ambitious game and I think very influential. Did you guys play much of Mass Effect one, two, or three? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, what have you just been letting me babble at the mouth about for?

Talk about it. No, like, I, the genius of Mass Effect, specifically Mass Effect 2, is that they figured out how to make a game mechanic out of a story mechanic. Because a lot of times those are like a push and pull, right? Like the, you know, we talk about it in like open world games, how it's like, oh, I need to go rescue this person before this, you know, awful thing. happens and yet you know you spend most of your time like racing chocobos or whatever like it's the side quest problem but mass effect two if you took an interest in the characters which you know you were kind of forced to do by by interacting with them and like going on their loyalty missions uh you had a better chance of surviving at the end which i think is really

interesting and i thought was really well done i wish they would have done more with it because there's a couple of instances where it's like, oh, we need a technician to go here, but it's mostly based on class and not like, I wish it would have been something where you would have had a conversation with Talley. And then like, you had to remember like, oh, she's good at this kind of computing or anything. But yeah, like, I really enjoy the way that's done. I also like that it's a game that opens with you being resurrected from the dead. like oh yeah yeah you basically die at the beginning of the movie or at the game and uh so you're like zombie shepherd all the way through and they do the uh star trek thing of they take this ship that you spent so much time with in the first game uh you know it's it's your home it's recognizable as shepherds home and uh they blow it up and you get a second and larger and better one but that opening sequence of of Mass Effect 2

where the Normandy is blown up and you die is what, like, I feel like it's my favorite, like, prelude mission. Like that and Saints Row the Third are like my favorite prelude missions ever. Saints Row because it is a bonkers wild ride, but the Mass Effect one because narratively

and from a gameplay standpoint, It answers the question, right? Like, why does Mega Man not keep these weapons? Why does Sim does not have all her upgrades? Like, oh, well, they blew it up. They all blew up. Yep. Yeah, so great start.

Pretty good ending. Fun stuff in between. A lot of people don't feel like Mass Effect 3 followed through on the promise of Mass Effect 2, but this game definitely cemented the series. Place in History. I hope they do something with it again someday. So I heard a rumor recently that, they're actually doing a remaster of the trilogy finally.

I can't get a straight story on that, yeah. Yeah, I don't know if it's true or not. I was a Mass Effect 3 apologist. Okay, I thought it was okay. I didn't hate it. I actually liked it. So let's see, Metal Gear Solid Peacewalker and Monster Hunter Try, two sides of the same coin. Metal Gear Solid Peacewalker was Metal Gear Trying to do the Monster Hunter thing.

And I guess Monster Hunter didn't really care about Metal Gear Solid, but yeah, they actually had crossovers and borrowed content. Both multiplayer games, Monster Hunter Try was Wii-based, not portable like most. with the successful games in the series had been. So kind of an attempt to take the series into a new space or back into an old space where it started, whereas Metal Gear Solid Peacewalker was the first real attempt to do a portable game. So a lot of lessons taken there.

And basically like, hey, here's an adventure you can have with your friends, kill some big things, do some missions, have some chewy gameplay. I know I haven't played it. I didn't have a PSP, but I know some people who are kind of into the Metal Gear story who really likes some of the stuff that went on in Peacewalker. Yeah, peace walk, well, story-wise, it's just all over the place, and it's ridiculous,

but it plays really well. It plays really, like, way better than it should. It's shockingly good. It is kind of the foundation of Metal Gear Solid 5, honestly. Let's see. Less successful was Metroid OtherM. I feel like we've lamented that enough on this podcast, but if someone has some sort of parting shot to take with it, go ahead. This is your chance.

all right let it die in ignominium and silence let's see Mr. Drillard drill till you drop naughty bear NIR NIR is a series that was not very popular at the time

but now thanks to NIR automata it is very well liked Yeah so this is the original near right This is the original And there is a remaster in the works Well but so this is the one that we got the different version right So near Replicant versus near Gestalt Yes

which I need to play, yeah, because I've heard lots of good things about it. And so now that it's actually getting remastered, maybe I will have a chance to do it. Let's see. No More Heroes 2, not as interesting to me as No More Hero. Desperate Struggle. Did you enjoy this one? Oh, no. I just wanted to say the name. Oh, okay. Let's see. Persona 3 was ported to PSP.

The big thing here, look at all this writing that you put here, Chris, Pokemon, black and white. There's a lot of text here. Yeah. I could do an hour on it if you want, if you're not doing anything later. But the short version is I feel like this is the best Pokemon game, at least of the generations surrounding it. I think sword and shield have a good shot of just on a pure mechanical basis. But the ideas in Pokemon black and white are so good. It's the one set in fake America. Which is why there's like a garbage Pokemon. Yeah. And for the first time in the franchise, it's all new Pokemon. Like, well, for the first time since Red, I guess. And I love that idea because you get all the other ones later.

Like after you beat the game, it's literally like, oh, there was a truck with a bunch of Pokemon and it went off the road. Now there's a bunch of those other Pokemon everywhere, which I think is very funny. Was that literally the like plot justification for the post game? yep nice there's like canto Pokemon

that like get loose and now they're just in you knowva but the idea of

this is a place that is across the world from where we have played all these previous games so there is

they have completely different Pokemon and a lot of them are just like oh well this is

this is fake pidgy this is fake Pikachu this is you know it's the same ideas

but the idea of seeing them all like as brand new things this far into the franchise i thought was really good um i also like the the way it looks i like the way it plays i think it had some really neat ideas as far as a lot of that stuff goes i think the Pokemon games have a nice tradition of kind of refining and getting better as they go on but i think black and white are certainly better than sun and moon fair enough you have you have opinions that's for sure they're good games yes i haven't i haven't

through most of the actual RPG Pokemon since like Red. But I haven't been playing a lot of Pokemon Go, and we actually just got to Gen 5 releasing it in phone Pokemon. And so it is nice having this whole huge new set coming out. So we definitely feel the impact of that decision they did to do a whole new 151. So what you're saying is that they should look to this game for the future, for good lessons?

I think so. I feel like I wish they would do much. more with the kind of hyper-regionalization, which I think is a nice thing that they've done with Gellar. But it essentially comes down to, in Gellar, people say, like, blimey and call their mother's mum. Whereas in Unova, it felt very different in structure from Kanto or Joto or Hoam. Well, and that was, and like the first four games were all kind of different regions of Japan.

So it was really the first time they branched out to the wider world. Yeah. And I mean, like, and that's, like, I like that too. And I feel like a logical next step for a Pokemon game is, like, in the way that gold and silver put Joto and Kanto right next to each other. And you could, you know, the postgame of that one is you go back to the first game, which is, like, very mind-blowing and super cool at the time. I feel like the next logical step is they make a game where it's Kanto, Joto, Hoen, like, all of it together. know, in one big game. I think that would be really neat.

But I felt like Unova was, it felt like it had a flavor of its own that you hadn't seen before, largely because it was the first time it was taken away from fake Japan of the Pokemon world. All right. Let's see. Also here on the list, we have Prince of Persia Forgotten Sands, which I believe was a remake of Sands of Time.

reciteer, which I've never played, but it seems really interesting. It's like an RPG where you are a shopkeeper, basically. So kind of like Chapter 4 of Dragon Quest 4, where you play as Torneco, but that's the whole game. Also looks extremely Moe. Yes. There's a lot of that. Residence of Fate, which is a very confusing tri-aise RPG that Bob really likes, and I really feel like he needs to do an episode on it some time.

I just found it inscrutable, but he sank some time into it and crack the nuts. So hopefully he can explain that to us someday. That's the one where you're climbing up a tower with a lot of guns, isn't it? Residents of A. So many guns. I remember being intrigued by that, but it did look very, very weird. It has a really complicated battle system. I cannot explain it because I literally do not understand it, but it's very, very complex.

There was the Rocket Night remake by, it was done here in the U.S. and was okay. Soccero Wars finally came to the U.S., I believe, was this correct? Soccero Wars, the five, the Wii game, where you played as like the bikini-clad cowgirl or something. I can't remember exactly how it went, but it was just like, whoa, that's not what I really wanted from a Soccero Wars game. But now there is a new Soccero Wars game that is much more traditional. and is out for PlayStation 4, so I guess I should put my money where my mouth is and finally play that.

There was a strange Xenogiers style RPG for DS from Sega called Sands of Destruction, which was very clumsy and tedious. It was like the whole world was being destroyed and turned to sand, and so it was just very, like, oppressive and punishing. But it really was, like, they looked at Zinogears and were like,

we want to do an RPG like this, which, you know, bless them, not a lot of people have done that. Yeah, that's weird. I don't even remember this game existing, which is weird for something, you know, so you'd think something trying to be Xenogers would be on that radar,

but nope. You missed out. Something that has on many people's radar because I work at Limited Run Games, and here people ask us to publish it all the time with Scott Pillogram versus the world, based on the movie, based on the comics by Brian Lee O'Malley.

And this is a Ubisoft and, tribute games developed brawler multiplayer brawler great animation and art by Paul Robertson very buoyant like just lively and animated and a lot of fun

kind of loosely based on the events of the comic and the movie and an awesome soundtrack great soundtrack was that Anamonoguchi Yeah that was Annamanaguchi Yep so it's just like all the heavy hitters right there and it was delisted from the intro from from sales

all sales on all platforms many years ago due to rights issues so goodbye forever Scott Pilgrim versus the world but so I'm wondering I was wondering if that if like the success of that of pulling off like a more modern 2D brawler kind of paved the way for all the like River City stuff we're getting now

I don't know yeah I would say you know River City girls and streets of rage four also probably were instigated in part by this game like this did kind of bring the brawler back in a lot of ways it wasn't just like hey here's another final fight game or hey here's a port of ninja turtles it was hey here is a new game with new art like it looks different and it's fun and it's buoyant enjoy yeah i did buy that one back then it was it was good like it had a few issues but but overall it was a lot of fun uh i don't think you get river city girls if this doesn't exist like just because this game felt like it was the natural extension of what river city ransom you know felt like it was when it first came out um this and like double dragon neon i think are the the ones to blame for brawlers coming back blame you mean credit yeah you know same thing

same idea i'm i'm for it that's good i'm glad to hear it All right, so moving into the final segment here, it's going to be a madhouse, but we've got Shin-Magame Tensei Strange Journey, which could have been Shin-Magame Tensei 4, but it was not. It was a different game, but it feels very, I don't know, like it feels more timely now than in the past. They remade it a couple of years ago for 3DS. So it's a first-person dungeon crawler,

very traditional, very challenging take on Shin Magami Tensei. This is the one that was in like a dimensional hole over Antarctica or something. Yes. It was on the other side of the Schwartzveld, but something like that. It was basically like a dimensional rift and the movie Oblivion, I want to say, ripped it off or maybe not ripped it off, but was curiously similar in themes. and the like premise but they they this this game gets a lot into the idea of human failure and

greed and just the collapse of civilization is responsible for uh the Schwartzfeld and it is destroying the world because we as humans deserve to be destroyed we we messed up and there's there's some parts of it that like I don't know I feel like they would be very resonant if you played them here in 2020 Let's see. Silent Hill Shattered Memories was kind of a remake of the original Silent Hill, but totally reimagined it as a very different kind of game. It was much more of a walking simulator, you know, if you want to call it that, with occasional jump scares and running away from Monster Girls and the whole world was frozen over. It was a very different take on Silent Hill, but very cool. I don't know if you guys ever played this one. I'm not a Silent Hill fan, but I like this game a lot. I have not Not a silent hill of guy Yeah

Hmm But I was wondering You skipped over Shearing Which seems very out of character for you Oh we've talked so much about Sharon the Wanderer Yes The series came to DS in the US

And it's great The DS one was this year yeah And I believe they announced The fifth game Is being ported to switch I don't know if that's just in Japan Or if it's here also Yeah

So I'm always down for Sharon Good stuff There were two Sonic games one was Sonic 4 and one with Sonic Colors. One of them is widely hated as terrible. That's Sonic 4. And Sonic Colors is one of those like some people

like it. Some people don't. Let's see. Space Invaders Infinity Gene. Binge likes that one. That's another one of those like super wild over the top like Space Invaders extreme kind of games with like pulsating neon lights and techno music and stuff.

Really, you know, kind of takes the Space Invaders theme and livens it up and modernizes it in a way that I think is really smart and I wish more developers would do with classic arcade properties. Take something that was exciting in 1978 and say it can also be exciting in 2010, 2020. So you don't see a lot of that, but Namco... Sorry, Taito did a good job with that.

I don't think I own the game, but I think I played someone else's copy for a little bit. And it was fun. Yeah, it did some really interesting things with the game. Let's see. Spider-Man Shattered Dimensions. rules, actually, according to one CS. I wonder who that is. Yeah, this game rules, actually.

I feel like there was a, you know, there was into the Spider-Verse, obviously, in theaters, and before that, there was the Spider-Verse comic, but I feel like all of that kind of starts here with Shattered Dimensions, because it is a cross-dimensional team-up between different versions of Spider-Man, done as a video game. and each of the different Spider-Man's play differently. And it's Spider-Man, a younger, you know, ultimate Spider-Man, Spider-Man, Spider-Man, and Spider-Man 2099. And the fun thing about it is that all of them play like Spider-Man, but they also play very differently in terms of how the game is set up. Spider-Man-Noars levels are full-assarcum-Asylum stealth levels, where you have

to sneak around and, you know, beat dudes up without being seen. The regular Spider-Man levels are very much like the Spider-Man games of the time. Not too terribly dissimilar from a Spider-Man PS4 or a Web of Shadows, if you know that one. It also rules. Spider-Man 29-9's levels were all, like, big, fast chase sequences where you were, like, plunging through this big megacity version of New York. Very, very fun and super interesting stuff. The coolest thing about it, though, was that everyone who did a voice on this game was a current or former Spider-Man voice actor.

So all of the characters had different voices, but they all sounded like Spider-Man. The Spider-Man from the 90s cartoon, Spider-Man 94, he was Spider-Man noir, and it was very fun to hear him talk like a tough guy and say like, you know, I got to watch out for this poluka. Neil Patrick Harris was, like, The Amazing Spider-Man, Josh Keaton as Ultimate Spider-Man. Lots of really fun stuff that I think is clearly a post-Arcim Asylum superhero game in a lot of ways, but it is a really interesting treatment of Spider-Man

and how he works in a way that I think now, after, like, weird alternate versions of Spider-Man have become such a big part of the character, I think people would, like, really resonate with people. I think this game's awesome. I like it a lot. So you think this game should be sort of remastered, reissued in the wake of Into the Spider-Verse, is what you're saying?

Yeah, that's what I was just going to ask, is why has no one made an amazing game based on it Spider-verse? Because this one's already out. No, like, I... Okay, but it's 10 years ago. We could do it again. Yeah, I do feel like there's a lot to be said for this game. And I do think there was a sequel.

Yeah, there was a sequel. a sequel that I don't think I played, even though I loved the first one. Honestly, I just want to play as Spider-Meck, so that's why I want a Spider-Verse one. Yeah. I think it's really fun. I think it is very

rare to find a bad Spider-Man game in general, though, so. All right. To wind down, we have Splatterhouse, not the original game, but the Gas Power Games developed version that went through development hell, and kind of took the same tack as

Bionic Commando 2009 or Castlevania Lords of Shadow where it's like let's take this old property and make it grim and gritty and by all accounts was not that great

Star Trek online which is Star Trek but online still going you can play as like I believe Star Trek Discovery ships in it now

and it's kind of got its own its own thing that it's doing it has basically its own continuity that the new TV series like Picard just completely ignore. They're like, no, whatever, we're doing our own thing.

But, you know, it is a chance to control the Starship Enterprise or a ship remarkably similar to it and play with your friends and beam down to planets and let people with red shirts die. Well, if it's still getting new content a decade later, it must be doing something pretty decent there. Yeah, yeah, I think so. I mean, for a while it was kind of like

the only source of classic trek that was available. as opposed to, you know, like the J.J. Abrams verse, or I guess even now, like, some people are like, well, yeah, Picard is based in the original Star Trek universe, but it's not my Star Trek, so. Yeah, well, you know, there's something out there for everyone, basically. Nothing but respect for my Captain Picard. Yeah. Let's see. Star Wars, the Force Unleashed two, took the concepts, the over-the-topness of Star Wars, the Force Unleashed, one, and just made it. ridiculous. I don't really know anyone who loves this game the way that they did the first one. Whereas Super Mario Galaxy, too, I know lots of people who love that more than the first Super Mario Galaxy. We just recorded a podcast on this. I don't know if it will be out by the time this

episode is, but it's either in, you know, on your podcast feed now or we'll be soon. But we do have a lot to say about it. Great game. Do you guys play that one? It's Mario. I did. It's Mario. Heard lots of good things about it, but did not have a wee. Did not have a Wii. Well, it's never too late. They're super cheap now. Well, lots of it's getting ported to switch anyway. So we'll see that's true. Yeah, let's wait for that remaster. Let's see. It's not Super Mario Brothers. It's super meat boy. The platformer that is extremely challenging and is about blowing up a little guy who's made of meat and trying again to, it's kind of like N++ except bloodier. Yep. Let's see. A couple of minor things here that aren't any big deal like Valkyria Chronicles 2, White Night Chronicles. There's Warioware DIY, which was a chance to make your own little microgames for Warioware. It was very complicated.

It was like real programming, very versatile, but very time consuming. I made a mini game, microgame for my nephew, and it took like six seconds to play after I spent like three days working on it. And he was like, oh, is that it? so that made me feel really good. It's cool that it exists, for sure. Yeah, it's a high concept game. It's a DS game that is basically a programming tutorial

so that you can make your own Wario game. I don't know why they thought people would want that, but bless them for making it. Absolutely. Yakuza 3, I haven't played this one, but it is pretty much like the other Yakuza games. I think it has been remastered or will be remastered at some point. And finally, there's the two East games.

that came out in 2010. East 7 and East the Oath-Felgana, which was actually East 3, done in the style of East 7. If you like East 7, you like fast-paced action RPGs, that's a good game to play. Either of those, they're both good. Although the more recent ones actually have improved more, like East the Sea of Selcetta or something like that. And East 8, like each one is a little better than the last one. So if you jump into East 8, that would be the place to pick up the most recent kind of take on the East series. But they're all fun. I always been kind of baffled that that series is still going. But it has a hardcore fan base. And I don't think they cost a whole lot of money to make. So, you know, it's kind of, Falcom is a small publisher. So between that and

Legend of Heroes, Trails in the Sky, Trails of Cold Steel, whatever, you know, they have kind of this core fan base that they can rely on so they can get by without spending a huge amount of money on these games and sustain themselves and sustain their fans but I would say East 7 is really where the series turned around it was very kind of I don't know like you know for a long time it did the bump

and grind combat where you just run into enemies and hope that you killed them, hope you hit them at the right angle East 5 or 6 kind of changed that. Konami I think acquired the series or published the sixth game in the US and it was it was not quite there and then like five years later six years later east seven came out and really changed up the style to be this very fast-paced action RPG kind of game where you have three different party members you can swap between at any time and each

of them has a different combat specialty so there's this kind of rock paper scissors element to combat where enemies have a resistance to one kind of attack and they're weak to another kind. So basically any time you go up against an enemy, you need to swap over to the proper character and you'll be able to inflict proper damage. And so it keeps things like really, really moving quickly, which is, you know, that was always kind of easest thing.

It was like it was a very fast-paced RPG, but the new games are really just like blindingly fast. Cool. And I guess that's it for 2010. The other thing we skipped over real quick is VVVVVV, V. which is the letter v six times it's pronounced vse the letter v six times but i feel like that was one of the early like super lo-fi indie games to get a lot of buzz and just like you know take a very simple comps that execute it really well you know it's clearly it's precision platform with lots of spikes

i mean i guess super meat boy is kind of a similar thing although they feel very different um but yeah this just took it, took it very lo-fi and took that one concept, that, like, gravity flipping and spikes and executed it really well. And it just got a lot of, like, slow-build buzz, I think. And now it's on every platform, probably. Yeah, the letter, the letter V-6 times is, it really reminds me of, like, 80s computer games. It has a very, like, C-64 aesthetic to it. Yeah. That I think works in its favor. It has that almost built out of text blocks look to it. Yeah. Like, this is, like, this is. your favorite ANSI game for Xbox 360.

Anyway, that is it for this year, year of 2010. I don't know that we really had anything significant to say. I would say the most notable thing about 2010 is really how much games wanted to be God of War and to a lesser degree how much they wanted to be Monster Hunter. So there were just a few big trends in gaming, you know, you started to see, a lot more significant indie games like the letter V six times and limbo

and that sort of thing. But in the you're really moving toward the current generation of consoles he says before the autumn launches of the next generation with you know people really pushing the previous generation to the maximum. We really didn't, I don't think, saw a lot of

technical improvements but you know between like 2010 and 2013 in terms of the games published on those systems. They kind of maxed out of this point. And it was, you know, minor incremental improvements. I think the other thing we saw a lot of here was bigger companies starting to really pick up on the retro trend and realize that this was a thing that was going to be ongoing, but like struggling to figure out what to do with it.

Yeah. So very much a medium sort of in between, like kind of an in-between place, not quite sure what to make of itself. But, you know, there's definitely some good stuff from 2010. Like I, I enjoyed being a game reviewer in 2010 because I felt like there was always something fun and interesting to play, both on handhelds, which I favored, and also on, you know, HD consoles or Wii. It was kind of the last year for notable Wii releases, I would say. We got some, some Wii games after this. But, but really, this was kind of the last hurrah for first party stuff and third party stuff. So from this point on, it was kind of niche. And people were really starting to kind of look forward to the next generation.

So I think when we do the year 2011, it's going to be kind of doldrums because what, you know, the medium did kind of hit a bit of a trough, I would say, partially in terms of the aging hardware, but also in terms of, you know, kind of the knock-on effect from the recession that really hit gaming in like 2009 and early 2010. So that would affect the games that came out in 2011, 2020. and you really saw like AAA games kind of buckling down to just a few formulas

and indie games exploding to just basically be all the creativity that couldn't fit into AAA games. But 2010, it was still kind of figuring things out. It's a pretty good year all things considered. Like there was a lot of stuff to complain about on this list

but there's a lot of really, really fun games on here. Yeah, for sure. I agree. So, you know, I could go back and do it all over again. I probably would not because time is linear, but that's okay because I have my memories. And there are still some games on the list, as I mentioned, that I need to pick up and play sometimes. So I can look forward to that. I can really have 2010 after the fact. Anyway, guys, it is 2020 now. So who are you and where can

we find you on the internet? Chris. I'm Chris Sims, and you can find me doing several other podcasts in addition to this one. There's Apocrypals, Warwick-A-Jacks, all kinds of stuff. Links to all of those and more, and things you can read are at T-H-E-I-S-B-B-com. Ben? I'm Ben Elgin. I'm not doing any other podcasts at the moment, but you can find whatever I am doing. You can find me on Twitter.

I'm K-I-R-I-N-N on the Twitters. So you can follow me there for anything I'm getting up to and just random junk. And finally, you can find me on Twitter as GameSpite. You can find me writing, blogging, posting videos, that sort of thing, for limited run games at limited rungames.com. That's my day job. And Retronauts, of course, you can find at Retronauts.com.

You can find on podcatchers of your preference. You can also support the show if you enjoyed this conversation or would like to fund even more exciting conversations. You can go to patreon.com slash retronauts, and for, I want to say three bucks a month, you get early access to our Monday episodes and better bit rate quality, no advertisements. If you bump it up to, I believe, five bucks, then not only do you get those Monday episodes, but you get exclusive episodes just for patrons every other Friday. And then there are some other tiers, like, you know, topic requests, or even the ability to

appear in an episode and podcast with us, very exciting. So check that out, patreon.com slash retronauts. And that's it. So Ben, Chris, thanks for joining. It's good to hear your voices again. It's been too long. We should podcast more together. But not together.

We should. You know what I mean. Well, together apart. Distance together. Yes, exactly. Yeah. So thanks again for Skyping in. And thanks everyone at home for listening in.

And we'll be back next week with another episode. Thank you. Thank you.