Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 426: Gaming in the Year 2002

Episode Date: January 3, 2022

Let's be honest: things weren't too hot in the year 2002. In between two pointless wars, and in the midst of a huge economic downturn, Americans couldn't even turn to their friend the television for comfort—this was the explosion of reality TV, after all. But in the midst of all this chaos and depression, the video games were pretty dang good! This week on Retronauts, join Bob Mackey, Jeremy Parish, Henry Gilbert, and Kat Bailey as the crew peers back into the not-too-distant past to see what 2002 meant for gaming. Retronauts is a completely fan-funded operation. To support the show, and get exclusive episodes every month, please visit the official Retronauts Patreon at patreon.com/retronauts.

This week on Retronauts, that's going to be a no for me, dog. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I'm your host for this one, Bob Mackie, Today's topic is the year 2002. Yes, it's time once again for another retronaut retrospective about a specific year. And because time is progressing rapidly, 2002 is now 20 years ago. It's shocking, I know. We'll get through this together.

It's not quite as packed with console launches and horrifying spectacles as 2001 was, but there are still plenty of games to talk about. Although 2002, we all talked about this before we hit it record, a rotten year we all hate. We loathe it. But it's going to be a fun discussion before I continue. Who is here in the same room with me? Animal Crossing and Habitin, Henry Gilbert. Hi.

And who do we have on the line in the Bay Area? Kat Bailey, and I saw Attack of the Clones in the theaters twice. Wow. Oh, my gosh. I dodged that bullet, actually. We'll get to that. And who do we have our East Coast correspondent? It's a vowed sand hater, Jeremy Parris.

Sandhater, yes. I guess we all have episode. Of course, it gets everywhere, Bob. We have episode two on the brain. Well, Star Wars doesn't exist anymore outside of being TV shows. So, you know, might as well, talk about it begun this podcast has

somehow retronaut has returned uh yeah 2002 defined by Yoda jumping around like a freaking maniac this was the year this was the year of hootaman Yoda man and we all came a running

but before I continue I want to set some context here I want to know where everybody was in the year 2002 I will go last so let's start with cat cat where was a young cat Bailey in the year of our lore 2002 it was the most pivotal year in my life actually uh for a lot of reasons uh it was the year that ultimately defined like where i ended up going it was year that

i moved in i u-hauled with my partner into my dorm uh my sophomore year of college and we were still together all of these years but uh it was kind of it was a really mixed year in many ways And a lot of that year was defined by the summer where I was on the outs with my parents living alone, playing Warcraft 3 for hours and hours and hours at a time. I would get back from work at 7 in the morning after working overnights and just sit down and start playing Warcraft 3 with bleary eyes. It was a dark time in my personal life. But the last quarter of it was pretty good. I was all right with it. And Jeremy, how about you?

were you in 2002? 2002 was definitely the gap year in my life, or as I prefer to call it, the interregnum. So in 2001, I finally got sick of living in Texas and left Texas, but I didn't really have a plan. That was a bad idea as the economy began to collapse. So I ended up just moving in with my parents and admitting defeat. In 2003, I got a job at a up-and-coming website that didn't have a name yet. Eventually we landed on oneup.com. But 2002 was just nothing, a big, old, just a big, big slab of nothing. I was either unemployed or the next best thing to it, working for some shitty newspaper and like rural Michigan. It was just not great times. And there weren't a lot of great games to play or a lot of great movies to watch. It was just like, yeah,

it was just a big gray mass. But here we are, 20 years later and all that. much happier. So all of our 2002 so far are giant bummers. Henry, can you break this trend? Maybe. I mean, so I, I spent the first half of it doing the rest of my first real year of college. But then the second year, half of the year was when college got like harder for me. And I went through my own depression in there. And also I got around November of 2002, I got my first real job. working at an AMC movie theater. So all of the Christmas movies of that year and for the next two years, I all associate with cleaning up popcorn and working at a theater.

But I did use that to buy video games. And as far as being a gamer, it was the height of my gamerdom, I will say, because not only was I a hardcore Nintendo fan going online, every chance I get to be like, did the Megaton drop? Is the Megaton here? but oppositely me and my friends would be playing games a lot more together like we we group played a lot of the big games of this year either if they were multiplayer we just did it together or if one of us got say animal crossing we would just be

like okay I'm going to play an hour in the town you bring over your memory card and we'll play an hour in your town and then we'll all trade and all that stuff so I probably played games more than most years in 2002 but other Otherwise, I was depressed a lot and having trouble in school. Hey, let's continue these stories of depression with my story. So in 2002, it was the first year that I actually moved out of the house. And it turns out it's hard to support yourself on $5.15 an hour, which was the minimum wage in my area. So I was like, 15 an hour?

Yes. I think that was like the standard federal minimum wage maybe. I have a feeling that's pretty much definitely I was in the $5 range at my AMC theater job as well. So, yeah, I mean, it's hard to live on your own with that. So I was like, well, I'm in college and have one job. I can work another job. And it turns out that burned me out in a spectacular way. I dropped out of school briefly and then I moved back in with my parents.

It's a trend in this podcast moving back in with your parents. But I did. And I was like, wow, the economy is scary. I'm going to stay in school for as long as possible. And I did. And I got out just in time for the next depression in 2009. So bad timing all around. But I recovered.

And I will say 2021, a much better year than 2002, despite the past. pandemic overall, I believe. 2002 and 2003, the years that traumatized a generation. Yes. Yep. And you know, going into last year's 2001 podcast, I expected that to be the rough year. Of course, there's a rough incident in that year. But looking

at history, doing research for this podcast, 2002 is bad news. It's like it's like the aftermath of everything that's happened since 9-11. So we're recovering psychologically from 9-11. Our economy took a massive, massive downturn. I mean, I

live through it, I guess I was just working too hard to realize that my money could purchase nothing. But looking at the actual graphs from the time, it was shocking. I was like, oh my God, how many of these did I live through? I think we're in one now. This is like the third one in my adult working life I'm living through. Yeah, third or fourth, it depends on how you count him, I think. Yeah, I guess I didn't have a, I'm the only one who didn't move out of his parents house to move back into it. I just, I just stayed living with my parents. You saved yourself a step, Henry. Yeah, I, I didn't move back to my parents because they wouldn't let me.

Oh, well, yes, that's, I also was in the closet then as well, I should say. So I was enjoying the closet at home, a nice walking closet. But we have a lot of fun to be queer in 2002, let me tell you. But, yeah, so the economy is rough. Enron had happened the previous year towards the end, I believe. I think October of 2002 was the actual, like the bottom and bottoming out of the economy completely. It was really bad. And of course, the dot-com boom happened then as well.

Bad times. What is also bad is that we are in America at least between two wars, a really fun time to be alive because the war in Afghanistan just kicked off in the fall of 01 and we are gearing up to say, hey, Iraq looks pretty scary. Let's lie about that. It's a bad time to be alive. I'm just brought back to my years of wearing the buck-fushed t-shirts. Take that President Bush and, you know, being very, very angry about politics, which Hasn't not really changed. No, no. Now I'm angry at the right people.

O2 was the year of the joking about burnt orange alert. Because that was, it was perpetual orange alert on terror on Fox News or whatever. Yeah, no, it was like, yeah, the, just how everything had to adjust to be like, oh, no, patriotism is back in, support our troops, all that stuff. God to be an American. And just this constant pressure of like, well, look, we all know we're going to the war on Iraq. why are you being silly by not approving of this? Like, it's just going to happen. Like, just let it happen.

And yeah, that was, that was frustrating for sure. Yeah, I think it's hard to not see that as like, one, the first election I vote in is stolen. Then 9-11 happens in the second year. And then the year after that, you just get to watch like, oh, all the Republicans and a lot of Democrats are just going straight to a war in Iraq. This is great. In case listeners don't know, Henry, the first presidential election you voted in one. was in Florida. In Florida for, I voted for Gore.

I did. But yes, yeah, it was. Didn't matter. They just lit it on fire. Yeah. Galgo 13 shot out the hanging chads. Whoa. We needed many of those in the South.

But yeah, it's bad, it's bad news. I mean, like, comedy is ruined because all the jokes are about Bush and, you know, Patriot Act. Just like how for a few years, every joke is about Trump and it was getting very, very tired. So I'm just like, stop reminding me. Really mean in 2002. Yeah. Very bitter. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, it was, yeah, geez, everything thinking about 2002 is just making me so unhappy. We're going to get to the good stuff. So, yeah, let's move on to other. There's good stuff? Yeah, there's some good stuff. So Internet stuff is happening in 2002. So Gawker and Gizmoto both launched in 2002. This is the era in which, like, the idea of the blog was being codified, although WordPress and AdSense would not come around until 2003, making that a more viable market for actually making a living off of writing online.

In 2002 was the first year that I heard the word blog, actually. I will say that journalism was thriving in 2002, thanks to the forward-thinking work of Toasty Frog Zine. That was thriving and entertaining dozens of people across the country. Yeah, zines were still viable in 2002, I think. Oh, not really. I was doing it anyway. I was in journalism school in 2002, and everybody was like, well, this blog thing is happening, but it's fine. if you go get a job at the local newspaper,

you'll just be able to move up the ranks and have a secure job your entire career, promise. This internet thing is a passing fad. I got a job at a newspaper, a local newspaper in 2002. And the following spring, I did not have that job anymore, not by my choice. I remember in my community college computer lab, I'm certain I hit refresh on a Tosty Frog website a number of times. Like, is there a new thing today?

Is there? Like, it was a treat every time. I was doing that in the stinky computer lab. For people were just sleeping. Yeah, you know, looking back at my work, if you want to call it that, my blog posts back from like 2000, 2003, they're mostly like really whiny, complainy, miserable. Like, I'm really honestly surprised people were reading that stuff. We were all. I just want to go back and slap myself and then give myself a reassuring hug.

It'll be okay. It's going to get better. I thought you're going to say wedgey, Jeremy. Maybe, maybe that instead of a slap. I think that was the, just the way. writing was at the time just like i'm going to complain about stuff and you're going to love it i was doing it too oh yeah it's me in my live journal i actually went back and read my live journal from 2002 2003 recently never look back never you know i wanted to give young cat a big old hug

it's like it's okay cat it's gonna be fine she was lost and sad and i you know i wanted to be there for her i did that recently and i wanted to venmo young bob some money like hey i got it and you need dinner's on me buddy but yeah so you know internet writing is now becoming like i can do this for a living and you know it's becoming more viable so websites are also launching in 2002 we have things like game trailers which i think is now defunct uh LinkedIn uh friendster and the web comic that's mostly famous this day these days for being memed uh control alt delete that launches as sort of the me too one of the many me too penny arcade strips yeah and you you mean me too in the old sense.

Right, right. Let's say also ran. Yes. Johnny come lately. Yeah. You know, I was a mega fan of Penny Arcade, but I never got into Control Alt Delete. I could, even though they are.

It wasn't good. Yeah. I think Penny Arcade was better than Control Out Delete always. Yeah. I think. The arcade was pretty witty. Yeah. There's still a lot of comics that hold up.

There's also a lot of stuff that doesn't hold up. And you're like, whoa, guys. But that was also kind of. Very much of its time. Definitely, yeah. But that's when it started. It would take seven years to get to the famous comic loss, or maybe six years, which is the one I'm talking about.

Yeah, I want to design a shirt that says live, laugh, love, loss. Designed in that format. That's my million-dollar idea. Put that in a T-shirt. This really was the era of web comics, wasn't it? I was reading something positive. There was real-life comics. This was when I was getting a penny arcade, eight-bit arcade, was it?

A-bit Theater? It's the Final Fantasy one. Yeah, A bit theater, yeah. Yeah, web comics were really exploding. Bob and George. Oh, yeah, Bob and George, user-friendly. All of these things were exploding, and I guess ads were making them money. There was no, like, Patreon yet or anything like that, but there was like the keen spot days.

Something positive had a tip jar. And people were like going, how dare you ask for money? What, you want to make a living of this? Yeah, some of the more popular web comics, like Sluggy Freelance actually published books, so I think that helped fund them. That too. yeah i remember i have one of like the very earliest penny arcade books from the yeah was this around the time that dumbrella started i have not actually heard of that oh dambrella like um wigoo and and things like that uh it might have been it might have been later but it's it's it's in the odds definitely and i remember game trailers a lot just

what a treat it was like this is video like i had to i i could just go to a place and find all the trailers for video games instead of having to like trawl through IGN of like, did they upload the Metal Gear trailer? That's why I need to download this freaking MP4 trailer or whatever it was. That's why I never ever watch G4. Well, I have the internet. I can just click on a link

and not wait through commercials and Adam Sessler yelling at me. I could have a board cable at the time. I'm not going to watch G4. Well, there you go. I actually didn't have... But now G's 4 is back and they're supporting NFTs. Awesome. What more can we want from life? Yes.

2020. 2020 isn't not actually better. No, no. It's going to get much worse with this NFT crap. Moving on to other stuff, So, yeah, Amazon also posts their first profit. And, you know, we were all rooting for them back then. So good for them. I should open on my Amazon account right now and look at what did I buy in 2002

because they have it all the way back there. They really do. And so what was invented in 2002? Well, we have the Roomba. We have the Apple IMAG4. We have the first version of Firefox and the first smartphone to incorporate instant messaging. That was the Danger Hip Top later rebranded the Sidekick. And somebody I was dating in 2006 had a sidekick, and it was the most marvelous thing I'd ever seen.

I remember updating my live journal from the road because I could. Like, I'm in a car. I'm updating my live journal from a phone, if you could believe it, folks. It was crazy. Living his dream in 2002. Yes. And Japan was still way ahead of us in terms of phones because they're one of the first countries to adopt 3D. Sorry, not 3D, 3G.

So they were always ahead of us. So we were just kind of creeping into what they had been doing for a while. I remember when my friend told me, stop being a dork using Internet Explorer or Netscape. Firefox is the new cool thing. And I was so impressed. It was it cleared history better than any of the other ones. And the tabs, the tabs. Oh, the tabs.

You know, now I'm Mr. Tab. Bob has seen my obscene amount of tabs that I'm addicted. At the end of the day, the tabs get closed. That's my philosophy. Once again, that's Mr. Tab. That's Henry's new song. But yeah, so lots of things are happening. What else is happening in the world is it's the true takeover of reality TV because in the summer of 2000, I believe, that's when Survivor started.

Everyone's getting into that. And, of course, reality TV shows that existed like a decade before that with the real world. But now it's hitting on mass because it's on broadcast TV. And what comes in 2002 is American Idol, which is still airing today after a brief hiatus. So American Idol is just the biggest thing in this era, an era in which I was not watching any of this. But it was pretty great. And Kelly Clarkson's still pretty big these days even.

And where is William Hung? Yeah, I think he, I think you can get a cameo from him pretty easily. I'm sure. That's a good industry for him to be in, I think. Yeah, that's perfect. I'll cop to watching American Idol when it was airing. This was like fall 2002, right? Yeah, I was definitely watching it.

It was fun. I was too cool for it. I was too cool for it. Couldn't do it. I was watching. I watched MTV and all the things MTV told me was good. But I was like, no, I'm American Idol too mainstream. That's Simon Cowell. He's gay, man, or whatever. That Simon Cowell is so mean. Oh, my gosh, taking her down. Can you believe that? So I want to tell. I pretty much just watched news programs and sat with anxiety and dread as the company at the country company. The country just marched inevitably toward another war. Oh, sure. So no different than now. Yeah. So what I did while we were talking is I actually looked at my Amazon orders,

and this proves how little money I had in 2002. I had one order in 2002. It was an Amazon gift card for $15, probably a gift for somebody. This really places us in time. In 2003, my first order was two books. Dude Where's My Country by Michael Moore and Bushwhacked, Life in George W. Bush's America by Molly Ivins. Wow, wow, wow.

Yeah. I had about a dozen orders in 2002. I looked it up also. So like one a month, usually books. That's what they used to do. But unfortunately, some of them, I'm like, wow, why did I do that? There was a book by Michael J. Nelson of Mystery Science Theater fame. And a book by a couple of Cerberus books by Dave Sims.

So, you know, I guess. Sorry. So, you know, like, they seemed innocuous at the time. Is that movie mega cheese? Yeah, that had to be movie. Is that death red? It was mind over matters. Okay, that's, that's okay.

He's like a lesser Dave Barry. Yeah, that's fine. Yes, but. Well, now I feel like I got to look mine up too. I'm negative to pull my up. Well, I will continue while you do that, Henry. So sadly, like Jeremy pointed out earlier, we're you're away from oneup.com. It's just a sparkle in Sam Kennedy's eye right now, and it still kind of exists.

So anything else from 2002 we need to mention, I want to get on to like movies and music and TV, just to set what the culture was for. our discussion. Okay, I will move on to talk about the movies of 2002. So the top five, so like I did last year, these are the top five. The first one I'll mention is the number one movie. So the top five movies of 2002, number one, of course, is Spider-Man. So the first Spider-Man movie, the Sam Ramey trilogy begins. Superhero movies are now, once again, cool. I mean, we started with Batman in the 90s. That kind of fell off. But now Spider-Man is back to make superhero movies cool again. And that'll fall off the cliff, too, with the third movie. But hey. yeah no well hey then the dark night was there to pick back up the the baton that's true

it was the same year wasn't it and then we're straight into the mc u in 2008 but yeah no i look that spider-man movie i'll say it briefly but it was it was uh what i've been waiting for for like a decade ever since i super got into spider-man comics in 1992 and when i did that's when the stories were like yeah next year james cameron's making a spider-man movie it took him an entire decade and 800 lawsuits to finally make a Spider-Man movie. And I was so excited for it. And it was everything I wanted it to be. I loved it so, so much. And I think it actually made watching Star Wars episode two worse for me. Because I was like, oh, Spider-Man's way better. This makes Star Wars a lot worse. Yeah. If you think, if you think waiting 10 years for James Cameron

to make Spider-Man is bad, just just think about what I had to put up with to get 25 years for battle angel elita to finally get around to that yeah spider man was the first like it wasn't the first cool superhero movie i mean definitely X-Men had that cachet to it but it was the first one where you were like oh it's cool and also it feels like

it's true to the source material like they didn't make Spider-Man dress in black leather and make fun of his Spider-Man outfit he's still kind of a nebish dweeb and he gets picked on in school a lot but also he's cool wow this is great this is neat I like this

You know, I didn't see it. This is how you knew it was the era. I think they photoshop the World Trade Center out of the poster. Oh, well. Yes. Out of his lens. Yeah. The first Spider-Man trailer was in the summer of 2001 where he webbeds a helicopter between the Twin Towers.

And then they had to take that out. And then they added the final scene where he swings with the American flag in the background. Oh, man. That has every Spider-Man movie has to do this. But they have to be like, hey, we're in New York. But it's the first Spider-Man is the worst. They're all the guy, all New Yorkers are on the bridge like throwing garbage at Green Gobblets. Like, hey, you mess with one New Yorker.

You mess with all us. Hey, get out of here. So I just noticed that my top five might be a little off because I'm looking at another list. And the one that I have that I pulled together a while ago is missing some notable movies. So let's move on and talk about four other movies that were big that year. So, of course, we have Lord of the Rings, the Two Towers. A huge movie, still a very good series, but they didn't pick up all the Oscars until the third movie, of course.

They were waiting to Oscar them up then. Go check out our Summer of the Rings special over on Acts the Blood Guide. You know, I think the combined length of the theatrical versions of Lord of the Rings are shorter than Peter Jackson's get back. But if you get all the extended editions together, it's longer than get back. But, yeah, no, I was there day one for. two towers, but I also I associate this with working in a movie theater

and cleaning up theaters also. You just smell that rancid popcorn when you put it on. When I hear that end theme of singing about the song from Gallum's perspective, I just think of like sweeping up soda-flavored popcorn of just that it's all in a slurry on the ground. That's what we call a smoothie.

So moving on, we also have Harry Potter in the Chamber of Secrets, last one of these that I saw because I was dating someone that was a fan of the movies but that's the second Chris Columbus one I think correct? Yeah, crappy. Yeah, it's, uh,

that was the first day I worked at a movie theater. Like I was there for that I got, I was working there the day it came out and, uh, that movie sucked like the third one's much better. You, you dropped off at the wrong time, Bob, when the movies got better. I just couldn't stand that disgusting little freak Dobby. Who enjoyed slavery.

Yes. It's the same year that they did Gollum so it was the year of the C.G. Creature. Yeah. One of them did it well and the other did not. Now, I remember the MTV Movie Awards the next year where Gollum like won some award and then he was like, yeah, I'm way better than Dobby and he like, Andy Circus and character

like shit all over Dobby is Gallup. This is really the year of goblins and movies because we had the Green Goblin, we had Dobby who is a goblin in my eyes and Gallum who basically is a goblin. And Bush was in the White House. True, true. Yeah. Are you writing for The Daily Show in

And then finally, speaking of bad movies, we have, we mentioned it up front, attack of the clones. And I've never seen this one or the third one without like a Rift Tracks accompaniment, but I know a lot about it thanks to all of the discourse. And I almost saw this in theaters, but my partner at the time convinced me not to go because a friend of ours got us midnight tickets. And she was like, do you really want to go see this movie? And I had a crisis of conscience. And I was like, you know what? No. I want to be free.

And I didn't see it, but apparently everyone else here has seen it without, like, Rift Tracks, people making jokes. Yeah, I was there for the midnight screening that you did not go to. And the next morning, I started my job. It was my first day on the job at the newspaper. So I was like, this is a terrible idea, but I'm going to do it anyway. And it really was a terrible idea because it wasn't a good movie. You know, and, you know, I was not quite as able to convince myself after that first screening that,

oh, this was okay like I did with the Phantom Menace but I did end up seeing it again anyway because my girlfriend at the time was really honestly touched by the Anakin Padmei love story you know

Jeremy got out of that without killing any younglings this hands are clean any other thoughts on this movie cat the heck of the clones I think it's been discussed to death but it's a popular bad movie at this point in history as long as we're talking relating depressing stories this is when I was crashing on a friend's couch

because that was the place that I could stay and we all went and saw attack the clones so that's what I primarily associated with it but in hindsight it's better than rise to Skywalker it's not a not a very high bar to clear all things considered that's very true you can look back fondly on obiwan fighting jango and the chase to the asteroid belt had some cool sound design but it was horribly edited the sound effect the special effects do not hold up at all all of the see all the digital sets were so ahead of their time at the time that they just age absolutely terribly and i will say this movie this movie gave us dill vallone is uh basically entire his oove so you know it's good in that sense sorry i didn't mean to cut you off i don't know structurally

it's a mess well sure of course i mean i yeah i i i talked myself into thinking I liked it when I saw it the first time and then I think two days later I saw it with friends and once it was like not new information and I was reviewing it I was like I actually really did in the theater first time I'm not gonna lie in acts cool

I thought it was cool that Yoda did lightsaber stuff because as as a kid I had Yoda toys and I was like Yoda should have his own lightsaber and he should fight Darth Vader too and so then seeing Yoda jump around like an animal with his little lightsaber

I thought that was cool first and second time I saw it I was like this looks dumb this looks like crappy Yeah they had They had kind of hyped up in advance The fact that Yoda was going to have a fight With a lightsaber

And I thought well that could be interesting I wonder how that would work And then when I saw how it worked I was like oh no See I didn't know That that was coming in the movie It actually did surprise me And so I got the, you know, excitement from the surprise of it.

And especially because I, but it's funny, too, that in that movie, George Lucas was like, okay, what is the fans want? They hate Jar Jar. I'll give him like they always wanted to see Yoda fight. Here's, here's Yoda doing stuff. I should strip Yoda of his dignity. That's what I should do. Just tell Frank God's to scream.

This was CG Yoda after they did the puppet Yoda in Phantom Menace. And it was so popular. They did a whole marketing campaign around Yoda. flipping around doing the thing. So they basically spoiled the movie. That was the Yoda Man commercial that we all remember. They have to make Frank Oz scream a bunch.

I'm sure he had a great time. Let's move on to TV shows. Not a lot to say here. Technically, this is the 2002-2003 TV season. I was not watching any of this stuff. But the top show of the year was CSI. It's been around that long. And people have always been that murder-focused.

We also have friends. We have ER, which surprised me because I didn't know ER was a top show like eight years into its run. I had just completely forgotten about it. Oh, yeah. And this really shows you where we are. Two other big shows of the year are Joe Millionaire, a very, very short-lived reality show on Fox. And, of course, another Fox reality show, American Idol. Just a massive, massive show.

I think American Idol really picked up where, you know, the game show craze left off. Like people, they had seen who wants to be a millionaire. It was still kind of popular, but that was the next thing to watch. And what Joe Millionaire was the guy who fakes being a millionaire? I think so. I think it is. I think that was the premise that revealed at the end, I think. But yeah, Friends was, yeah, I think after Seinfeld ended, Friends got all this.

And also, it did get to be like the warm hug after 9-11. Like, that was how they advertised the show, just like, your friends are still here. And they're in New York and Strong. and then that they're down at central perk breathing in asbestos yes yeah now remember they yeah what was their first episode back for 9-11 they had like some zoom in on central perk or whatever like there was there was a somber episode every every show had to do a somber episode after 9-11 uh but west wing is in full uh still going right right yeah watching buffy the vampire slayer i actually watched the third season finale last night uh with a friend of mine and it's like it brought me back

Yeah, even Star Trek had an entire season dedicated to the war on terror. Oh, my God. Which actually turned out okay. Like, it works within the context of the show, but it's still so just like, oh, come on. It really puts you back in time to a place you don't want to be. Yep. Thank you, Scott Bacula for saving democracy. There's still time to bring back Quantum Leap.

He's still around. One of them died. Sam passed away. Yeah, we need a new Dean Stockwell, but there's plenty of those guys. he's an AI he can look like anything yeah hey you know what we're bringing back egon we're bringing him back uh princess leahiku and sam becket in a quantum leap exactly if he sign a waiver saying don't bring my corpse back to dance around in cg well let's figure it out that's every show from now on

So let's move on the top albums of 2002. I didn't listen to any of these because I didn't like Weezer anymore. And I was like, what other bands sound like Weezer? And that sent me down a journey of things no one has ever heard of before. But the top five albums of this year were Eminem. with the M&M show, Creed with Weathered, Nelly with Nelliville,

Pink with Misunderstood, and Lincoln Park with hybrid theory in brackets. So I don't have anything to say about any of these albums because I don't know anything about them. Lincoln Park crawling in my skin. Yeah.

The Mood song that launched a thousand AMVs. That's true, yeah. I can just see Naruto in a desperate battle. I guess, I think that M&M show has the without me song in it I think so I and I just know

that because I just played it a just dance 2022 as as my work and it's that you that song is that there's two types of Eminem angry Eminem and Nien yeah yeah Eminem and that one is the is his

Yan Yan Yan makes you angry it's funny angry and makes you angry in 2002 it was like wow this guy's dangerous and he's going to warp children's brains and now it's like well you children will dance to this song in a dancing game and it's fun it's for kids the character who does the dancing is like a little mushroom who then like waves around but and by little mushroom i mean a person in like an average mushroom costume like that the secret of just dances you're just watching a video of

like a european dancer filmed in an okay costume yeah the paceman one's pretty funny sure sure yeah i didn't listen to any music in 2002 because they no longer allowed uh white the spectacled britishman to make a 20-minute guitar masterpieces. So I just couldn't relate anymore. So moving on to the like what were consoles doing in 2002?

I have like a little report on all of these. So let's talk about what's going on. So N64, it's dead completely. Nothing new comes out for it in 2002. Jeremy's wagging a figure. Really? Arrives at the end of the year. At the end of 2002?

Like August 2002. Yeah, I looked it up. Okay. Are they not still making Maddens for them by this time? I looked... The only game for N64 was 2002. Okay. I was 20 Hawk Pro Skater.

Wow. I guess they were... They were... It was popular enough that they could hang on for that long. Activational Squeeze one more dime out of it then. They weren't... That does sound like that. But yeah, I don't remember any...

I put away the N64 this year. You know what, actually... They had the engine, and it was probably really easy to just slam the content to do it and publish, you know, 5,000 copies of it and say good enough. You know, I didn't want to believe that was true, but I now have a memory of opening a box at my video game store and saying there's a new N64

game after eight months of having nothing new. But yeah, that was the only release. So, yeah, it's functionally dead unless you like skateboarding games, and in which case you have one game to play, which is not too abnormal for the N64. It's like, well, here's your one game. Enjoy it. Oh, this is just like 1999,

my one game. Yeah. Nintendo pulls the plug to get people ready for the GameCube, which is out. And that's going to be, it's already becoming a massive, massive failure in the year 2002. It's not cool. Nobody wants it, except for nerds like me and Henry and Jeremy and Kat probably. Dreamcast, dead. Unless you like one hockey game,

then you're in luck because NHL 2K2 comes out. I believe it's the sole final American Dreamcast game, period, unless there's like some fan releases or something I don't know about. There's so many fan releases. There was no NFL 2K2? I thought there was. If it did come out, it came out of no one, but this I do remember working and seeing

this is the last dreamcast game we have one copy and nobody bought it so yeah absolutely dead n64 dreamcast so sad to put away the dreamcast as well i think probably no too i was still playing my dreamcast some because uh my brother and i shared that one and it was like well every remaining dreamcast game that's around is like nine dollars so why don't we just play this tennis game like it probably looks pretty good and it's fun yeah i got mine the day or the week it was discontinued and everything was cheap. So I got in at the right time. My partner and I, when we first started dating,

we played so much Soul Calibur on the Dreamcast. And then when we moved in together, we played a lot of Marvel versus Capcom too and crazy taxis. So the Dreamcast lived on in my dorm room in 2002. Moving on, PlayStation and Game Boy Color. So still plugging away. They're just so popular that people, they can't stop publishing things for these platforms.

So they're mostly budget releases and license games. though there are some interesting releases for the PlayStation, mostly RPGs. I remember this year it's when Final Fantasy Origins came out and Arc the Ladd Collection came out, which is one of the... Is it the last Working Designs game, Jeremy? No, they were around through the PS2 era.

They published a couple of Growlancer games. Oh, right. Growlanser Generations. That's right. I completely forgot about that. But that Arc the Ladd Collection was a long, long time coming, and it was just a giant brick. And I bought it new, and I don't have it anymore. but I have two I have two of the hideous stopwatches

they gave you for pre-ordering it because no one else pre-ordered it at my store and they stopped working after about a year and who's going to carry around a stopwatch in 2002? I still played my Game Boy Color a bit at the time. Well, I still play Game Boy Color games a bit but I was playing them on the GBA pretty much like that was where I was playing up.

There were some pretty notable and interesting GBC games that came out like Shantay, Toki Tori, I want to say Capcom also had like metal, metal fighter, metal warrior, something like that. I can't remember exactly what. But, but yeah, they were still kind of plying that field. And then they realized, whoa, there's no, there's no point in this anymore. So they stopped. But GBC was still pretty, pretty viable, even if you didn't just want license games.

And PlayStation 1 had a lot of those really inexpensive, like super budget games, like $10 games, like Star Shooter. and I think this was the year that board game Topshop came out which is a great troll experience for your friends yeah so there were a lot of like little weird interesting things still happening on the older platforms I picked up a copy of Pokemon Crystal

on a road trip to Milwaukee to go watch the Minnesota Twins play against Milwaukee Brewers and I was like oh Pokemon Crystal I'll pick this up I haven't played Gen 2 yet had a great time Pokemon Crystal is a great game We had a fairly robust Game Boy Color section in my Game Store at the time, right next to the Game Boy Advance section. It wouldn't last for much longer, though.

I was playing all the Dragon Warrior remakes on the Game Boy Color at the time. Yeah. So moving on to the GameCube, it is swirling around the toilet, folks. As much as I like the GameCube, it's only a second year. It was a bad, bad second year. I mean, of course, Nintendo. In 2002, it's still good. Yes.

GameCube's going to be fine. We're going to turn around. Metro Prime's going to be amazing. Let's go. It was, but somehow it was. it wasn't enough to save the system. If you like good games, this is a great year for the GameCube.

Unfortunately, other platforms had much more popular games like Halo and Grand Theft Auto. So Nintendo took some big swings. What's that? Splinter Cell as well, yeah. And I like when Nintendo's in trouble because they take big swings. If Nintendo was doing as well as you did with the Wii, I don't think that we would see a full localization

of Animal Crossing. But they're like, let's just try this. You know? Yeah, it's really interesting because you look at some of the games that came out for games. Cube in 2002, and they are franchises that all of a sudden have become very successful on Switch, like Animal Crossing was the biggest thing on the planet last year. And that was partly down to

timing, but not just the timing, not just the pandemic. You look at, you know, Metroid Dread, which is by far the best-selling Metroid game to date in like a month. So, yeah, like the market, the audience for, I think the Nintendo approach just wasn't there yet. I don't think they'd really you know, we were still kind of in the, you have to be 13 years old and a boy and have a bad attitude to play video games era. And it wasn't okay for people who aren't 13 year old boys with a bad attitude to play video games. And, you know, Nintendo would do a lot of work and mobile games would do a lot of work to break that open, you know, over the coming decade. But at this point, like this is still really kind of just a signifier of what the video games.

games audience was and allowed to be. You look at the performance of those games then versus now those franchises and you really see how much healthier and more varied and diverse video games are. And I don't know, like 2002 is an object lesson to say, wow, things were bad back then. Yeah, it shows you where gaming culture was because along with being a 13 year old boy with a bad attitude, you also had to be heterosexual because in my store, the term gay cube was thrown around a whole lot by customers. And of course, the Zelda's gay. Everything was very, very gay back then

in a pejorative way. But so Nintendo was trying to combat that idea like, oh, this game is for, these games are for a serious adult. So 2002, they also had things like Resident Evil remake, Eternal Darkness. We'll talk about those coming up in the podcast. But they were trying very hard to prove that they weren't like the baby box system. I think this was a console mentality because also two years before that,

the sims had come out and was at that point one of the biggest selling games of all time so it was changing but as usual the PC was kind of ahead of the curve in that regard compared to consoles i was such a game cube booster that year like i had bought it and told my friends like i i was like a person with an electric car or whatever just like any any or like oh you you should listen to this on vinyl it's way better kind of guy uh and and i was that with with a game Cube. Who needs a big disc? Look at these small disks. But I could at least get my friends to admit like, yeah, Animal Crossing

looks good. Resident Evil remake looks good. But I also was like so online that I looked this up of like Know Your meme to see the timeline and they did put it as like the idea of the Megaton was this thing that was shared because of like a mistranslation of a Japanese

magazine or something saying that but it was spread around on say like the IG message boards and other boards that Nintendo has a mega ton announcement coming the big and so you just is you're like thinking what's the biggest thing they could do they're going to get final fantasy back are they going to are they going to buy capcom or all these things in a way they did yes they did yeah but that was and and then on top of that you had the extra like gut punch of if you were a game cube super fan you also probably owned an n64

and loved all the rare games on it and so you're like well i'm buying this buying this game cube to play perfect dark too which you'll obviously be here because they own rare and then in two doesn't you just like, whammo, nope, you're not getting that. Nintendo's dying memes, but I was playing so much smash melee this year. Oh my God, I think I put more than a thousand hours just playing with my friends over weekends. Like, I mean, Halo owned all of the dorms around this time, but melee, I think melee really laid the foundation that would keep it going for like another 20 years in 2002. is when the tournament scene and such started to bud

underground tournament scene but really it was such a good game and like I know it came out in 2001 but it was so big and it had so much staying power as a party game that 2002 was when it really became apparent it's like yeah

this is the GameCube game this is the one that you play with all your friends I was going to a lot of anime conventions in 2002 and I think 50% of those conventions were spent playing melee with people in their hotel rooms for sure. But it doesn't matter that GameCube was losing Nintendo money because Pokemon was still a massive brand for them. I mean, it's bad that they lost money,

but it wasn't going to destroy them. Yeah, but Gen 3 comes out in Japan in 2002, and it's successful, but this was around the time that it starts leveling off as a mega hit, right? Because Gen 1, obviously, that was pure Pokemonia. and then Gen 2 dipping a bit and then Gen 3 is

kind of a reboot actually because they only had 200 Pokemon in the original game, in the initial run of games. You think people were mad at the, not the, you know, Dexit or whatever. Yeah, that was when they were originally doing it. And the GBA versions

had a lot of issues, but they wouldn't become apparent in America until the next year, but got a little preview of what's to come in Japan. Yes. I do want to talk more about that game coming up later in the podcast cat but let's move on to talk about the Xbox so it's a distant second to the PS2

but it's crushing the GameCube holding its own Xbox live launches in 2002 more on that soon the platform in general has some big games they have Morowin the exclusive console port of that game the new brand Splinter Cell also some fun Dreamcast flavor titles that honestly should have been on the GameCube

they feel more appropriate for that audience but there's JetSat Radio Future and Gun Valky and Panzer Dragoon orta I'm sure all massive failure sales wise but it was Sega showing like we can still do creative stuff unfortunately I don't think Xbox most Xbox fans didn't really want these kind of games

I even I didn't like him all that much I was like this isn't as good as a dream in all cases of playing a Sega game on an Xbox I thought this isn't as good as it was on the Dreamcast like all all kind of disappointed me but I despite being the Died in the Wool Super Nintendo fan I was then I still owned an Xbox because

all my bros were playing Halo so I like, well, I guess I better just own one of these, too. They're all playing it. When Orta was announced, that was when Penny Arcade turned around on the Xbox because they had been making fun of it relentlessly for a couple of years at that point. And then as soon as they said, no, Orta is coming out. They're like, all right, we're buying an Xbox. Yeah, I remember that.

At least two more Orta sales, you can chalk up to them. Yeah, pretty much. And then moving on to the PS2 to write out our console recap here. So absolutely kicking ass. You know, it's got out of the box DVD capability. DVD players are still like, oh, this novel. thing that are still kind of expensive. And this is the final year of

Grand Theft Auto exclusivity for the PS2. In 2003, that would change. Those games would start going to Xbox as well. But this is the final year in which Sony owns Vice City and GTA3. You can only get those games on the PS2. And yeah, Vice City

the best-selling game of the year, period. That's not surprising at all. But by being an exclusive, like now today, like that the best-selling game of the year is almost always multi-platform that this could do it by just being on PS2 that is wild to me yeah and now

rock stars like GTA 5 is on everything and we're releasing it 40 times yep yeah it's a decade of it and they don't need to make a different game and that's why it's the best selling game ever yep so and also another big exclusive for PS2 not quite as big as Vice City of course but still fairly big for a Japanese RPG and that's

Kingdom Hearts another massive massive exclusive for that console it trained a whole new generation of webes it really did it It shows a generational divide in weaves. It's your pre- or post-K-H. It's like... And we'll talk more about that game soon.

Yeah, there was a path. There was Sailor Moon to Gundam Wing to Kingdom Hearts. That was the... You're covering your mouth. Did I just call you out? Stop it. We found the Gundam to Kingdom Hearts pipeline. Is that what's happening?

Yep. Okay. Sailor Moon, I think. Oh, Sailor Moon. Okay. Let's talk about launches. So no console launches I could find outside of the Swan Crystal. So, Jeremy, I know you're a Wonder Swan fan. Any thoughts on the Swan Crystal? I believe it's the only 2002 console in quotes launch. It's a portable, of course. Yeah, and I wouldn't even consider it a separate product. It's just a Wonder Swan color, but with a nicer screen. Okay.

Literally, that's it. And I don't think there were any features to it. And at this point, the Wonder Swan was pretty much end of life. Bondi knew that it was basically on the outs so this was just a way to kind of squeeze a little more money at the end of the life so it'd be like calling It's funny because in Gundam Seed which came out in 2002 one of the villains are playing a Wonder Swan at one point Oh in Evangelion 3.0 plus 1 Oscar Langley saw you whatever her name is now

is also playing like a virtual boy Wonder Swan It's pretty wild but yeah actually I remember in Dot Hack in 2003. I watched all that. No, no, the game. Oh, I played all those. There was an in-game message board you could log on to

because it all took place in like virtual space and people were talking about the new like this took place you know 20 years later like the present day now when people were talking about like the new new generation of wonder swans

like hey are you going to get that and this was like immediately after they had discontinued it so didn't aid very well wishful thinking from Bandai it shipped sour milk So, yeah, that's the only thing. I guess it's like calling the new Switch OLED screen a new console.

It's not really that. So, yeah, Steam won't be launching until 2003. We'll talk about that next year. Steam is a big deal. But what is launching this year are online services. So we have both Xbox Live, a huge deal that every other online service would pattern their own service after. And also, PS2 online, very undercooked, but surprisingly supported by a lot of games. Let's talk about Xbox Live first.

So I never had an original Xbox. Maybe somebody out there, if you had Xbox Live, that's on. the podcast now can tell me more about it but again it was the future it set the the framework for this is what the online framework needs to be for online consoles and multiplayer functionality and had things like uh friends list a single screen name throughout all games uh voice chat so all the things we expect now they established with this system of course i i played it uh mech assault day one purchase of it with the headphone you plug into the Duke

and you talk to other people and yeah it and also I was I was ready for like a easier mech warrior game that's like oh yeah this is super simple and you just play online against each other I had friends who got into the what was it crimson skies I had friends

who got into that but it was next year oh right well but mech is all I definitely played a good chunk of but I was only really trying it out of knowing that like we all knew eventually there will be a halo that will be on this and we all love halo so let's just get used to some Xbox Live now like this is the preview of it but I and also I attached it to the hotmail account that I still have today associated with my Xbox Live

account I don't ever want to lose that hot mail accounts that's great I was going to say I think you could roll your Xbox Live account throughout all the consoles you can still have the same one yeah no I just saw that in there that website they made of like oh what's your Xbox journey 20 years of Xbox thing they just did yeah and yeah like the PS2 this did not launch until about a year after the console was out and I was thinking in my head well no console would do that today but the switch did that right the switch exactly they took a long time to figure it out and in four years to figure out a Bluetooth headphone yes dear Lord so PS2 online let's talk about that that launches in August I believe and I think Xbox Live is November of 2002 but this feels like more of an experiment they weren't really putting a lot of resources into so before the slide model the PS2 came out in the fall of 2004. You had to buy the network adapter for this, and there was both a broadband and a dial-up version of that. And unlike Xbox Live, it was not a unified service. You did not have a single screen name. It was up to the publishers to have their own infrastructure for every different game. And I have never played one thing online with my

PS2, even though I've had a Slim PS2 since 2004. Looking at the list of games that supports online functionality, of course, probably not anymore. It's surprising just how many games could go online with the PS2. So calm. Yeah. That was, when I worked at, this is two years later, but for when I worked at a Blockbuster video,

I would look at the odd ducks who would come in to be like, no, so I don't know what you're talking about with this HALO stuff. Socom is the way to go with online games. Like, wow, you're a weirdo. And I think I think it came in a set with a headset. So for all this stuff,

it wasn't in the box with the console. You had buy the network adapter for the PS2, of course, not for the Xbox. And then you also had to buy the headsets, either without Socom or in a bundle with it. Yeah. So then again, here I was throwing stones to these Socom guys when I had a wide

GameCube controller to play PSO with and type. So I... Was this a year of the Wavebird? I think that's 03. I think it might be O'3. Yeah. Okay. So, yeah. Henry, they call those Socom guys ponies now. Sony ponies.

Socom was the game I tried to get online with, and I discovered that when you live in rural Michigan in 2002, you can't actually play video games online. So that was a quick discovery and a $60 wasted. See, I was the coolest kid on my block to have Ethernet cables first. I was like, wow, I can just plug with Ethernet cable right into my Xbox. Other people can't do that. Yeah, I don't know how we had cable internet in the late 90s. It somehow hit our town as an experiment, I guess. But yeah, so these big online services are launching.

They're really setting up what consoles will be like in the future out of the box, having these already ready to go without anything else you need to buy. We're going to be able to be. Let's talk about notable releases in 2002. So, again, we can't cover everything. I know we'll get comments, but this is my decision, and I called out 10 games, and just like last year, I'm going by the original release date. So some of these came out in Japan in 2002, and not in America until early 2003. I'm sorry that just how I'm doing it.

It makes more sense to me. Oh, and apparently Kat just sent a message and Wavebird was summer of O2. I got one then. Oh, wow. And it was amazing until I put my knees up and I was like, oh, this can't go through my knees, this radio signal.

But yeah, Kat can definitely speak about some of these games that I don't have experience with. So 10 big games of O2. The first one was Warcraft 3, a long-awaited sequel to a 1995's Warcraft 2. From what I remember, Kat, maybe you can back this up or let me know if I'm wrong. It was very, very polarizing upon release,

but people have grown to appreciate it. Of course, thanks to Warcraft 3, we now have the Moba genre. If we didn't have Warcraft 3, that probably wouldn't exist. Yeah, and it was also the lead-in to World of Warcraft in many ways, because it was such an RPG. It was a competitive RPG. You were going out and you were killing mobs of enemies to level up your heroes. The army sizes were far smaller.

It was much more of a kind of a macro game than it was a micro game, which meant that I really enjoyed it. I played the orcs a lot. Warcraft 3 kept me happy. through the blighted summer of 2002 and I played hours and hours and hours for that and this was the first time I found fame as an online personality

because I was writing for the website Warcraft3.net. I had a blog and I was blogging about Warcraft 3 in my spare time at work and I developed a following to the point where people were DMing and he's like, are you cat? Are you like, are you the girl who was like blogging? I'm like, yes. And then can we play a game? And it was actually,

actually kind of remarkable. I was like, wow, this is, I went mad with power. I had so many friends. Anyway, so yes, it was somewhat controversial because it was so different from Starcraft at the time. And people just wanted Starcraft, but, you know, it's fantasy. So, yeah. I was a piece of gamer at the time, and I still am. I'm not a fan of RTSs because I'm bad at them. But I remember getting this from my stepdad, and he didn't like it. He loved the other Warcrafts, but it was that focus on, you know, more of the RPG mechanics. He didn't like. He liked the big armies and things like that from past games. This was... I loved it for the RPG mechanics.

Yes. Yeah. I love leveling up. This was the Warcraft game I really played. I didn't really touch anyone's before or after it. And I'm not a big PC gamer, but when I saw the, I had a computer that could play it. And so I got super into it. And I really did love the story and the heroes, like that it was, it was much more focused on

characters than than previous ones, not just about, you know, a faceless army of bugs, which is what playing Starcraft felt like to me all the time. I much prefer the tale of like the rise and fall of that blonde guy. What's his face? Artists, it's Carrigan, but he's a dude. Yeah, an evil sword. A lot of this is in the movie directed by David Bowie's son, right?

Oh, right, right, yeah. Look that up. Instead of zirglings, you have necromancers that are constantly raising so many skeletons that the frame rate would fall to like 5 FPS while you're trying to play online. It was a legitimate tactic. When those wood elves would harvest their trees, I was like,

this is really slowing down my computer to show you wood elves circling around. You guys, you need to overclock. What's going on? We got to move on, though, to the next game on our list. Metroid Prime, so some of these games we have done episodes about some of them we obviously will do in 2022 for the 20th anniversary. We've done an episode about this.

Honestly, this miracle never should have happened. This never should have been translated well into 3D, but it was by Retro Studios. And, you know, we're still waiting for more about Metroid 4 outside of a logo, but it's a pretty solid trilogy as it stands outside of two being a kind of rough game, although

I think people are enjoying it more in retrospect. But, yeah, Metroid Prime, just a miracle of a game. The real miracle miracle is that it shipped day and date with Metroid Fusion. Yes. I really care about. And I bought both of them, and if you bought both of them, you can unlock the Fusion suit in Prime and unlock the original Metroid

in Fusion. So I am a giant weirdo and I guess the sickness that I have where I just want to take video game hardware and make it do things that it's not supposed to do has always been with me because I just remembered that I had my Game Boy Advance modded to produce video output to a television. And when I first played Metroid Fusion, it was on a 27-inch TV. And it wasn't through emulation or anything like that. It was because I don't even remember who did it or what the mod was called, but I had seen it. I went to Japan for the first time the previous Christmas. And like the last day I was there, I was at a department store and saw like a GBA mod kit or something where you could play GBA on television. And it just stuck with me. I was like, I need that so much. And so I finally did that. And wow, this is really a sidetrack from Metroid Prime. But it's, you know, like the one interesting thing I think that I did with the video games is that, you know, you know, year was to have my GBA modded so I could play games like that and, you know, basically everything, Castlevania, et cetera, and actually see them on a television screen as opposed to just on that

terrible old screen. Of course, the following year you would get the GBA SP and the GameCube Game Boy player. So, you know, the money that I invested, the vanishingly small money that I had was basically just thrown away. But I did get like a very brief like up on the video game. experience, the GBA experience. And that was nice. For one year, it was worth it to invest all that. It was like six months. Before the side lit screen came around. So moving

on, we also have Final Fantasy 11. So finally, the first Final Fantasy MMO, although it's only out in Japan at this point. This wouldn't launch in America until 2004 when it was released alongside the PS2 hard drive which you needed to play it. And surprisingly, I guess, or unsurprisingly,

very few American releases actually use the hard drive. And, you know, people are still playing this today. There's still new content fairly recently, although the PS2 version probably went offline a long time ago. But yeah, this is the first online Final Fantasy and as of this recording, the most recent Final Fantasy 14 expansion came out. So the online Final Fantasy brand is still very, very strong. You're all so mad that it was called Final Fantasy 11. I was very mad at his number. Yeah, I was like, I don't play MMOs and I'm not going to play this number one either. Next, you'll ask me to make friends. Yes, yeah. We got 10-2 and that was

that was kind of like an 11. Yeah, that was in 2003. or two? I forget when it was. It was 03 because I could, or at least in America, because I can connect it very specifically to a late 2003 episode of Smackdown. Okay. Which where they, the commentators are,

Square Enix paid a lot of money to advertise on WWE programming. And so the commentator Tad's going on, I'm playing Final Fantasy, bro. I love dressing up, ladies. Yeah, for X2 of all ones. But no, I, this and Metroid Prime, I both overlooked, one for Weeb sensibilities because I was like, no, American can make a good

Metroid game. I don't believe these reviews. And then with Final Fantasy, I was just like, I don't play MMOs. That's not me. But I've warmed a little to 14. I've only played, I've only played a couple dozen hours in it. But I finally, but 11, that was a decade before I'd even give it, no, 15 years before I'd even give it a second thought. It's like before World of Warcraft. So it uses a much different model that is not like very user friendly but i mean if you're playing it back then you might be playing it now uh but moving on i want to talk to cat about this uh Pokemon ruby and sapphire these came out in japan 2002 significant in that it's the first step up really in graphical fidelity for the Pokemon franchise it's like a new generation of hardware although this is where the

series lost me because i thought it was a big step down from gold and silver which i absolutely loved uh cat what are your thoughts on this game in particular this this uh this pairing of games rather The continued love for Ruby and Sapphire always kind of bothers me because this is when the art really went downhill in my estimation. It was kind of a semi-reboot of the series, and so a lot of the Pokemon were just repeats. The story was quite disappointing because you were just playing against Brendan, who just does not touch blue as a villain, blue and silver, much better villains than Brendan. And it was actually a step down from Crystal in some way because Crystal had animations, and Ruby. and Sapphire did not. But of course, the big one was that it only had 200 Pokemon on the box.

And the kicker was that the other 186 were still on the partridge. They were just, you couldn't access them. I forgot about that. Game Sharks just, they're like, what? I paid for these Pokemon that are in the game. I'm going to freaking access them. It was kind of a bad time to be a Pokemon fan, honestly. No, I left it alone because once I found out that my gold and silver carts could not speak

to the Game Boy advance. I was like, well, then what am I? Like, everything was flushed away. All of my, I think only, only in the last few years could emil, like, official Nintendo releases of Pokemon gold and silver, uh, game boy color version actually talk to Pokemon bank and you could take your Pokemon off of that and put him somewhere. But yeah, it was that, it felt like a message of like, no, it's a new generation now. your old Pokemon don't matter, Grandpa.

These are for new children you need to take money from, not you. One thing that stands out to my mind, I never actually played this generation of Pokemon, but I did think Torchick was just the best design. I loved Torchick. And this was when Nintendo really kind of realized, like, we can do, you know, like little micro-customizations to our Game Boy Advance hardware and sell it at a premium. So they started selling, I think these were like the first sort of mainstream custom, like very limited release, Game Boy advances that sold. They sold GBA SPs at the Pokemon centers, which were pretty new in Japan at the time. And I managed to talk Chris Kohler, who was living in Japan at the time, to go to a Pokemon center and buy me the Torchik GPA, which was literally just a GBA SP, but it had a little silhouette of Torchick on the lid. And that was the best and I had to pay a lot of extra

money to get that because it was just so good. Jeremy, your favorite Pokemon was introduced in the Ruby and Sapphire generation. Your pal Tropius. Oh, Tropius? Yeah. Tropius, yeah. There was no Tropius GBA though, which is a real damn shit. I was just looking at the starters and I was

definitely a mud kit man for the like 20 hours I played. Ruby and Sapphire had a bird fan. I see a bird every day Jeremy. Yeah, but I know you're a huge fan of birds, so I'm just surprised. Torchic would be my pick, but I usually go to the fire. Except for Toto Dile, my boy, Toto Dile, number one.

I like Tricco a lot, but then Mud Kipp launched all the memes. I always like the design of the bird Pokemon best, but then I actually end up playing as whatever is the grass starter. It's an easier start. Yeah. Let's move on to the next game. So this is truly the first Ready Player 1 or Game Master Anthony's birthday, of course, and that is Kingdom Hearts, a very weird idea based on the fact that a guy from Square was in an elevator

with a guy from Disney at the same time and that's where it all started and yeah it was square like you know they'd done this before on PS1 they're just creeping into the world of like 3D action RPGs and you know this one is really cursed with all the flaws of 3D action games from that time

they still exist in every HD version but even though it was rough even in 2002 I played through it just for the sheer novelty value of like oh it's a muggle floating next to like Frollo or whatever sorry Frollo wasn't in the game I don't know Ariel who knows Ariel's in every one of these games But, yeah, just a weird idea that would get weirder as Squares ideas like overtook the Disney ideas in these games. Still the best one.

I loved when this was announced. It was just such a weird, outlandish idea. Everyone online was like, what the hell? And I was like, what the hell? This is going to be amazing. But then the game actually came out and I didn't like it at all. But I will say, I do appreciate the original Kingdom Hearts because my girlfriend at the time played through it in Japanese and I saw a lot of what she was playing. and I realized I had not lived

until I had seen Donald Duck say Ohio Gozaimas. That just, that changed my life. Like hearing Donald Duck speak Japanese and it's, it's cogent. Like you can understand it, but it's still Donald Duck. That was, like, I didn't, I'd never really given much thought

to localizations of characters like that, but they, they put a lot of thought, a lot of heart into Donald Duck's Japanese diction. I, my friends all super got into it And I watched them play it, but the novelty of it was amazing of like this, not just that it was square working with Disney and also that everybody had their, or there were so many official voices that it felt real. Like that was really got me into. It was the production standpoint of it.

Like it felt like you go back and watch the cutscenes now. They don't look like a movie. But then. On an SDTV with your limited 2002 brain. Yeah, and though, you know, with the story, I, I already was growing out of that Evangelian style world that it had built, but now, now I mourned Evangelian than ever, but, but like Nomura just lives in such, it's so anime, the world he creates with Kingdom Hearts, a very specific style of storytelling that I, I think this made a whole generation

of weaves because they got used to anime storytelling. in Japanese music and all this stuff through this game. And in a way, like, as a way of selling Japanese culture, it is quite a great trick they play. They're like, hey, are you 12 and you know

all, you know, Hercules and Aladdin? Well, come in here. Oh, we got you. Now it's time to hear simple and clean. You've heard an anime OP. You've got to go online and hear 800 more now. It radicalized so many Disney fans into being anime fans. And that's good. Yeah, putting Japanese anime

adjacent to Disney animation, I think, was a really great way to kind of break down the barriers between like, well, there's American animation and Japanese animation. It was just like, they're all cartoons, there's some Final Fantasy in here, whatever. I don't even know what that is, but it's all my favorite cartoons together, and now I like all the cartoons in the world. And it tricked kids into thinking that the gameplay was any good at all, just because they had such a great experience. And no, and I also like.

Like, Hikaru Utata, they were born to do like the, be the bilingual musician to bring all these people into J-pop styling across the world. And I think it's perfect that Utata now that they do, the closing music for all the Evangelian rebuild films, because it feels like Utata loved Evangelian and then finally got to work on the movies later after K.H. I was staying with my parents in the Christmas of 2002 and I borrowed my friend's PS2 and played all the way through Final Fantasy 10 I was like what an amazing game I really enjoyed it and started playing Kingdom Hearts and I was like this isn't resonating with me

why isn't the sitting and I got to the Tarzan level I want to say and I just bounced on it because I just was not digging at that point but there was an entire generation of kids who were maybe 10, 15 years younger than me, who loved Kingdom Hearts just grew up on it because the combat was just simple enough. The graphics, fun and cartoony and really pretty,

the story kind of simple and understandable with all of the Disney villains coming together at the right time. It was the game that captured a generation of new square kids. Like, if we were being captured by Final Fantasy 4, Final Fantasy 7, that was their game, Kingdom Hearts. Definitely. We have to move on to talk about some GameCube games coming up. So both 2002 in Japan.

The first one is Super Mario Sunshine, and the premise for this game is, what if we made a bad Mario game? So they did, and it was Super Mario Sunshine. And you know what? We were kind of mean to this game in 2017, I believe. That's when we did our podcast about it a long time ago, like almost five years ago. And you know what? There are things to like about this game. But I felt a lot of satisfaction when that Mario 3D collection came out,

and I saw everyone on Twitter complaining about Mario Sunshine. it was not an i was right moment but i thought like no uh my my opinion about this game is being validated oh yeah no i i was feeling i was right over that i was like yeah this sucks like every but i i had that idea anyway like i had barely replayed it since so too but i would watch you know cool youtubeers say like hey let's do a play through a sunshine and every flaw is obvious the second you play it you're like oh i remember this better and but once everybody can play it especially next to Super Mario 64 or Galaxy

do you see the both of those are like oh yeah sunshine just like cannot compare at all like yeah it's it's such a bummer town of a game and it yeah and they I hate that it's full of their response to what was getting big in American games

mainly just all of the talking all of the story it's like pretty aimless shooting yeah shooting it's pretty aimless too and I feel like this game in the next one they were sort of rushed out to combat the GameCube's failure launch because both of these games feel like they needed a lot more time, although the second game is the Wind Waker, and it is a much

better game, although it does, there's some significant things in the game that make it really feel unfinished. But yeah, now that the ugly culture war of this game is behind us, we have embraced Toon Link. He's a Smash Brothers character. Nobody cares when he shows up in things anymore. This has ended up being one of the more timeless Zelda games, even though it's an early 3D game. they managed to make a good one.

And it's unfortunate that the best version of this is trapped on the Wii U. so that's another reason I have my Wii U hooked up still to this day. That is an amazing version of this game. It's perfection, yeah. I was like the last 10 I gave anything in a review. And I was like, yeah, this is, this feels like a 10 out of 10. Like, how could this be a more perfect port of a game? And it's the total opposite of when that port of Sunshine made everybody go like,

oh, sunshine actually suck. meanwhile the few that played it on the WiiU went like oh I was wrong I was wrong about everything with Wind Waker well you know they actually took the time to tweak the design of Wind Waker for the HD version whereas Sunshine was literally just like thrown cube rom please enjoy yeah it's true I really I really enjoyed sunshine at the time that it came out and maybe that's just because of where I was in life and desperately needed something to cling to but yeah going back it's really hard to play just because the the control scheme and the camera mechanics and everything, they just don't really abide by the orthodoxy of how 3D games work now. Nintendo is still figuring things out. And that was kind of like, you know, a trip in the wrong direction and makes it kind of tough to replay. And also, you know, just a lot of the objectives and world design, like, I don't think

they mesh well with the interface and the mechanics. And it's got some really good ideas. And I really wish that for the game, the, the, the Mario collection that they did, was that last year? I wish they had actually taken the time to go into those games and tweak them. But I feel like that was just a stopgap release. So it was just, you know, shovel something out as quickly as possible so we can make our, you know, Q4 goals or whatever. So yeah, that's a, it's a, it's a tough game to go back to. And I think there's something good there that needs to be extracted and refined.

Earlier we were talking about how Nintendo, when they're failing, they're always like more generous and willing to try anything. Going back to the Winwaker, I remember I got that for free because Nintendo was like, just buy any new game and we'll give you this, okay? By any new game. And I bought like Mario Kart 8 and I got Winemaker for free. I think that's how it worked. You know, one new thought I had on Winwaker recently was, and this is promoting a podcast being buffeted, but they're finally released in America was the Miyazaki director. series Future Boy Conan and once you finally watch

you're like wow this has so much in common with Wind Waker like Wind Waker took a whole lot of inspiration from it and on our Future Boy Conan podcast with Ian Jones, Courtney and Rebecca Sugar of Stephen Universe. We all had this whole huge aside of like oh yeah

this was so Wind Waker was so inspired by this series about a young boy who leaves his small island and goes out on a boat to discover the world, it makes a bunch of new friends, and then has to fight somebody who's trying to find the old power of the dead old world. Something that nobody ever talks about is how much fun it is to take photos in Winwaker.

And I spent so much time just trying to get a photo of every single thing in that game and try to get a model made out of it. Because you have to replay the game in order to get to the color camera, I think, and to access certain bosses. Yeah, it was good stuff. And you had to wait a long time to get those photos turned into the little models, right? Yeah, I feel like in-game photography was suddenly this really big concept that all of a sudden hit a whole bunch of games came out around this time. Wind Waker had it.

Dark Cloud 2 was basically built around it. Beyond Good and Evil? Yeah, Beyond Good and Evil was the next one I was going to say. I kept wanting to call it Jade Empire, but it's not. The character's name is Jade, but she is not Imperial. I feel like there were a few others right around this time. Metal Gear Solid 2, right? Metal Gear Solid 2.

There was obviously like Pokemon Snap, but that was a few years earlier. But I just feel like there were some games that really tried to do something meaningful with the idea of taking photos as opposed to just like, hey, you can take photos in the game. And that was a trend that I kind of regret seeing go away.

It was a fun thing to do. Well, it's back in Swearies the Good Life out this year. So it's a game up mostly about taking photos of things, which is pretty cool. And, of course, Spider-Man game is like Photos the game. Right, right.

Yeah. So we got to move on to cover the last three games in the Big Ten of 2002. The next one is Battlefield 1942. So this is when the Battlefield series starts.

Here the latest one's a real stinkeruny, but it's been a very, very popular series. Kat, I'm going to assume that you are a battlefield knower. Is that true? Okay.

Yeah. But I didn't play in 1942 because I didn't have a PC that was good enough to play it at the time because it was a top-end game. I got into Battlefield with Battlefield-1943 when it came out as a downloadable game. But it's a great game

just because it introduced the concept of I think we were playing a lot of arcade arena shooters still at this time. We were playing on Real Tournament. We were playing Halo and Quake. And here comes this massive open-ended game where you're flying. airplanes and driving around in tanks and vehicles and all of that and it was just a totally

different and unique flavor of shooter that we had never really seen at the time and for me this was like this concept was kind of a dream come true because frankly I was the one who wanted to be flying around in the plane you know killing people as opposed to running around as a grunt with a with a rifle so when I discovered battlefield some years later like it caught my attention when it came out uh in 2002 but when i played and it stuck around in my mind just because of the concept when i finally got to play it years later i love this game this is amazing this is my shooter it's a shame uh it's bad now yeah and uh call of duty would not be around until next year and they would soon dominate the space but until then uh battlefield was

kind of first to it yeah we were still living in the saving private ryan era of video games Like, it would still take a few more years before they figure out what, you know, modern war propaganda looks like in video game form. You know, they're still tinkering in it. So instead, it's just a lot of fights on Normandy Beach, like over and, wow, Normandy looks better every year. Normandy was like the Hoth level of these games. That's probably not even my joke, by the way. I think I was a penny arcade actually. Yeah, I'm sorry.

Moving on, we also have, I'm going to cheat. So this game came out in 2001 in Japan. but it got a big overhaul for America and O2, and that's Animal Crossing, this amazing localization of a very Japanese game that should honestly never have caught on, but it did. It's now a major, major series,

although I really wonder if we're going to only associate this with the early days of the pandemic because I only have bad memories about Animal Crossing now. It's the sense memory of just being in despair and not knowing, like, will I not see my wife for a while?

Oh, yeah, it'll be nine months. Well, yeah, for New Horizons, with that big new collection of content I still haven't touched it because I don't like going back to I stopped playing in July 2020 and I was like I

but every breaking my heart I'm still playing it I still love it Every animal crossing game though I pretty much follow the pattern of I play it three months every single day

and then eventually something snaps and I'm like okay I got to just stop what is every day going to be an hour of going to every tree and shaking every tree and digging up all the fossils and doing everything each day. But that cycle got me, like so hard.

And starting with the first Animal Crossing. I would say that to really get the most out of the more recent Animal Crossing, especially New Horizons, you really need to play with other people. You know, I played it for quite a bit when it first came out and kind of did my Animal Crossing thing. But the reason I kept playing it longer than I really wanted to was because it was really, kind of how my wife coped with with the pandemic because her business being like a, you know, non-essential cell phone business was completely shut down and she was like, what do I do with my life? So she put like six or seven hundred hours into animal crossing over the course

of several months. But she turned it into a social experience. And that was how she connected with people. She got involved in Facebook groups and, you know, just online communities where she would meet up with strangers and trade stuff. And for her, that was, you know, like a thing that when she couldn't leave the house and being a social person, it was something for her to do besides talk to me because you can only get so much socialization out of me, unfortunately. And she's gone back to the new additions. She's not playing it nearly as much because her job is back in full swing.

So she doesn't have nearly as much free time. but, you know, she didn't, she didn't, like, look back at new horizons and say, well, this reminds me of the bad times. It was like, oh, this is, you know, something that I really enjoyed and now there's new stuff to do and I can kind of get back into the swing of things and reconnect with some of the friends that I made, you know, online. So, you know, I think there's, it fills different needs for different people and for the people who, you know, approached it a certain way and kind of held on to it as a, I wouldn't say a lifeline, but as, you know, something to. to kind of keep them anchored and secure. Yeah, I think it had, it was very successful in that sense and there's appeal to the new content. And, you know, it's funny to look back at the original Animal Crossing

because it seemed so social because you were writing letters. You could trade stuff with people with codes. But really, it was so small and so limited compared to, you know, the more recent versions of the game. I think it really kind of, the series kind of came into its own with the Wild World on DS. but it's just grown from there and it's interesting how it

it seems to reach aside from the Wii game it seems to reach new people you know with each iteration in O2 what was magical about it for me and my friends who all were just playing it my friends who didn't own GameCubes bought GameCube memory cards

so they could have a town in our on our console like we played it so much and what was magical was you kind of didn't know what you'd find like we had a thing like hey let's stay up till 2 a.m. whoa there's a ghost in the forest who gives us uh who gives us uh stationary or also like you never knew what nes games you might find like and that felt special when they would just give away an nes game in the game and before they knew their worth that ended quickly it's like

this is money on the table people can pay for clue clulandee well and speaking of paying real money that trading codes thing to get stuff like I contemplated, but I didn't do it, but I saw on eBay of like, you know, you could just buy a master sword code off of this person who kind of just generates it and you'll have the master sword in your house. But I don't, I think it was too much of an amount of money. But yeah, and then we like bought one of my friends bought an e-card reader just to do things in it. Like it was, we were that addicted to Animal Crossing. I think those commercials, remember the commercial guys, remember, remember the commercials. of Animal Crossing that were like

real world, like, and it was like a reality show. Oh, yeah. People in it. I just like They were very clever. And the localization, amazing. Like, one of the best locals, like English localization of its time, almost thanklessly how much text they had

to put into that thing. You know what? I like this original localization. I think it's a design choice made by future games. Is that when I was playing the newest one, what I thought about it was animals aren't really jerks anymore. Like, nobody's a jerk. Everyone is too nice. Even the jerky characters just like, they're kind of having a bad day, but they're still friendly. I miss like just the absolute assholes who would move into your town and you

just whack him with a net until they left. Moving on to our final game in this top 10 here, and I'm sure we're going to have an episode about this in 2022, but it's Grand Theft Auto, Vice City. You know, Rockstar did The Impossible. They made a GTA three sequel in just a year, an incredible feat, probably with an unbearable amount of crunch. Who knows who suffered and died to make this game,

but it came out. Some slight improvements to gameplay, but what made me really feel big were, you know, big stars and most especially all the licensed music. And amazingly enough, in 19, sorry, In 2002, 80s nostalgia was just like, this is kind of neat, thinking about the 80s. And you know what?

We are on the dawn of the movie 8-bit Christmas. It never ended. We are still trapped in the 80s nostalgia vortex, which is fine because we make money off of it, but still. Sure, yeah, yeah. You know, all my friends were telling me how great Vice City was, but I was playing Animal Crossing too much. But, yeah, I mean, the tone of it was just, like, really cool

and just hearing like, oh, Ray Leota is the main character of a video game. it felt it felt really special then now movie stars in video games actually like are a downside to be of like oh they got key for sutherland for like an afternoon to record eight lines in metal gear that actually sucks but back then very impressive by city is the one that i've played all the way through and it's the one that i ended up liking the most and it was also the game where whenever it came out resulted in a lot of uh nerds calling into their local radio station being like oh can you play flock of seagulls yeah yeah they came out with like a or they released like a tin cd box set of the radio stations which i absolutely bought despite my poverty and like when i would drive around you know the vast expanses of michigan to get anywhere uh that is what i would listen to for for quite a while it was great stuff but the game itself was um it really fell a foul of of the fact that they built this game

in a year. And it had a lot of really bad mission design. I wasn't super crazy about the story. A lot of pretty, you know, punching down humor. But the soundtrack was great. And, you know, there was a point, like they added the ability to fly, which was great. There was a helicopter. They added, you know, things like motor scooters. I guess those were in the first game, but they, they did more with them here, you know, like pizza delivery mini games and things like that. So it was, it was still a good place to just kind of fool around in. But, you know, eventually I just checked out of the story and said, I think I'm done. So then I just started fooling around with codes.

And, you know, I think once I switched over to the bikini model stripper character, like her character replaced Tommy with her and then took her on a mission to fire at the city, like blow it up with a machine gun from a helicopter. I was like, okay, I think this is peak GTA and I'm done now. So then I moved on. They were like making their own goal and glit. Lobus movie, I think. It was just like the idea of just vibing and driving around listening to that mixtape of 80s

classics. And, you know, there's a lot of negative you can say about rock stars, you know, worldview from that time. But those guys knew music. Like, they were real music fans and could give you the famous things and also like deeper

cuts that got made famous again. And that soundtrack also led to like, one of the coolest it's the iran music video commercial for it of just it was something that looked like a movie and it felt really special yeah yeah that soundtrack introduced me to a lot of music that somehow it just never intersected with my life even though i grew up in that era stuff like uh like the entire hip hop rap CD like there's there's really great stuff on there you know by curtis blow and other like really kind of you know uh just legendary artists that just totally

skipped out on me because or I skipped out on because I was white. I don't know. But it was just like just extraordinary and eye-opening. Lots of really great new wave bands that I'd never heard of like, you know, Romeo Void, a few others that, you know, I just said, wow, these are really great. And I ended up buying a lot of music of these artists, you know, buying their CDs just so I could hear more of their music. And yeah, it really started a trend. Oh, go ahead, I think Grand Theft Auto was in 2002. Like, it was so popular after Grand Theft Auto 3. It was, I mean, maybe it's a little tried to say, but it was everywhere.

Absolutely. And, yeah, it's really started the trend for the series where it's like, well, this game will be about the 80s, this game will be about the 90s. And I wish they would do another one of those. I mean, if they ever do another Grand Theft Auto, which I guess might be happening. But it'd be cool to do another period piece. So by the time they make another one, maybe the 2000s will be up for grabs. I honestly think if six was set in 2002

that would be a real that would be a choice I'd be up for that So yeah that was our top 10 games of this year in terms of like just relevance and dominance we're running short on time

I want to go over some other notable releases if you want to say anything about these please chime in otherwise I'm just going to run down this list very quickly so other things coming on 2002 so we have Sony

explaining their sorry Sony's expanding their roster of 3D platformers with both Sly Cooper and Ratchet and Clank Sly Cooper is kind of dead Ratchet and Clank got a movie way too late

and it's also still making games they have the only PS5 game this year that's right yeah I forgot about that yeah I've heard it's good too yeah I've heard it's good so yeah we talked about it earlier but the PS2 goes online with SOCOM US Navy SEALs the complete version of the complete name of that game you know 2D Metroid has its first Metroid

in almost a decade with Metroid fusion following up 1994 Super Metroid and then we have Resident Evil for GameCube it comes along to show you this is what a remake should be It should be faithful, but also screw with your brain if you think you know the original game. I really love that as a remix of a game you, if you know the game so well, how it messes with you over and over again is just so great. And also, like, it made the GameCube look like it was the most powerful system. Like Capcom knew every trick in the book to do with the fixed camera of Resident Evil to just make it look gorgeous.

to the point that when they were able to port it finally to, you know, consoles a few years back, I still thought it looked like great. It's still a really good looking game, and now it's 20 years old. And as a Nintendo GameCube owner at the time, I was like, see, this is the promise of the Capcom 5. It's only going to get better from here.

It was more like... Until Dead Phoenix gets here. Can't wait. Say Killer 7 was good. Two Sega franchises kind of die on the vine here. We've got JetSat Radio Future and Panzer Dragon Orta. I think there was like a Panthers.

Panzer Dragoon connects the game. Am I right about that? Oh, yeah, with the launch of Xbox One, but it's not like a dragon. Yeah, yeah. But nobody cared about that. I wanted to. We also have the debut of Mega Man Zero. We learned with the world, what the term cyber elves means. And also, uh, Koji, Igarashi returns to Castlevania with Harmony of Dissanins.

You can now play that in the great collection on the switch. I think it's not as bad as people say. I, I, there's only so many, uh, Igarashi, Castlevania games. So I don't want to look at get force in the mouse of this one. It is the weaker one, though, definitely. Not Portrait of Rune, which was the bad one, the genuinely bad one. I know Jeremy begs to differ. I'm kind of ambivalent.

There is a podcast about this far deep in the archives, I believe, when the game was new. There's also Never Winter Nights, which I have never played, but this series starts in 2002 and continues for a while. It has a lot of robust fan creation tools. I know that much about it, and it really empowered a lot of people to make their own campaigns. We also have Silicon Knights Peaking with Eternal Darkness Their next game I believe would be too human And then it's all

Well they did remake Metal Gear Solid Was that really their game? You know no Well I mean the secret with Eternal Darkness And Metal Gear Solid as we would learn Is that Nintendo fixed every part of it And they're like oh hey wait You guys made the thing that sucks

We'll show you how to make it not suck And then that gave some people At Silicon Knights I think a big head that they thought no we're good in spite of nintendo we'll show you and dennis dike has called me bob mackay in youtube videos in the past does that guy still exist i thought i figure he just entirely uh just shrunk so small into a corn cob he had disappeared he might have become corn cob we have to check in on him but but i loved silkenites uh eternal darkness that year like oh boy i can target the arm now i'm targeting the leg but it had some really good tricks There were cool ideas that every magazine spoiled in advance, which was a big downfall. Fortunately, I was unspoiled.

I got to just have the fun. So wrapping up here, we also have Splinter Cell, which really was kicking ass throughout the aughts, and then it kind of fell off. Ubisoft put it on the back burner, because it wasn't really following what their model of game would be, I think. It can't be an open world loaf that

every game of theirs has to be, but it's really hard to farm that out to six different studios. I, you know, I didn't like it as much, Splinter saw, I thought it was too technical. I missed the ridiculousness in Metal Gear. And if I might editorialize here, one of the most truly evil video games to ever exist,

America's Army, an Army recruitment tool, came out in 2002 because you know what, kids, the Army is just like a video game. Pow, pal, it's great. And I'm sure a lot of people ended up, you know, enlisting because of this. And that's a real, a real thumbs down for me on that one. Well, it makes you feel.

Every video game event had freaking America's Army recruiters. Yes. with the video game. It was the worst. Well, if it makes you feel any better, your tax dollars paid for that guy. Oh, excellent. Yeah.

That's why it's free. Yeah, that's why it's a free game. It's the best deal in games. No, I think I recall seeing, like, articles of, like, yeah, they send a drill instructor here to show us the game, and they say it's pretty cool. We didn't know anything about propaganda. We were not smart.

We're between wars. We need fresh bodies, so that's why this game's coming out. And we also have, in happier news, a lot of fun weirdo stuff that I enjoyed that some of it came out of no one but I forgot to mention it last time but games like Cubivore and Mr. Mosquito and Guitaru Man those were all like fun weird ass games

I paid like $53 for in 2002 but I was like the only one buying this at my local game stop and finally in 2002 the most overlooked game of all time BMX triple X the lowest point in all human culture that was 2002 in a nutshell

It's as bad. What a tacky time just in general. Like you, the man, Yoda man, BMX, Triple X. It's just everything. What was it about the early 2000s where everything was just so coarse and tacky and frankly awful? It was really the reign of Spike TV. They were really a symptom, not the cause, but I associate that with this era for sure. Well, it was like a race to the, hey, look, I'd say this as a jackass fan.

It was a race to the bottom thanks to things like jackass. And he was like, no, we can be. oh last year something about Mary did this with a bodily fluid in a movie where we can top that in our in this next movie there's going to be geysers of it every everything would have to like top the next one and

and same with BMX triple X because they had these be you know Tony Hawk had started to get PG 13 year with with jackass stuff so BMX is like well then let's go R rated like let's have some boobs in here let's have strippers let's have every hateful joke we can in this thing

and I just recall that the GameCube version somehow was the dirtiest of them that you could actually see prefaceing modern Nintendo where Sony has strong content restrictions and Nintendo's like, yeah, yeah, put your etchy stuff on here, we don't care. Yeah, oh, do you see three extra seconds of boobs

in this cutscene on the GameCube, then we don't care. Like PlayStation, I just remember that for reviews at the time. Like somehow the GameCube would, have uncensored stuff where the other systems had censored cutseeds of the 30 seconds of strippers which again people said it then and I agree like why are you paying like the internet exists now you don't need to play a video game to

find naked ladies go to the library they welcome it but yeah that has been our summary of 2002 a rotten year with some highlights and hopefully you had more fun in this year than us but you probably didn't because it was bad for everybody but to wrap up here we've been retronauts you could find us on Twitter at Retronauts, and we're also supported, fully fan-supported, on Patreon. So if you go to patreon.com slash Retronauts, sign up for three bucks a month. You'll get everything one week at a time and add-free.

But if you sign it for five bucks a month, you get that and two bonus episodes every month that are full length. And now we've been doing this for two complete years. So if you are not a patron yet, if you sign up for five bucks a month, you'll get access to two complete years worth of exclusive podcast that you haven't heard over 50 of them at this point. So it's a great bang for your buck. Check us out and support us at patreon.

dot com slash retronauts now let's go around the room and see what everyone else is doing cat let's start with you what are you up to these days cat and where can we find and support you yeah i'm on twitter at the underscore catbot and also i work over at ign i'm on nintendo boys chat with parr schneider and seth macy and we talk a lot about this stuff we were talking about metroid prime just recently but and then i also have acts of the blood god and r pggepgast with eric van ellen and nadiah oxford both of whom have been on retronauts and we have our own patreon patreon patreon dot com slash blood god pod go and check us out jeremy what about you uh i am still the media curator at limited rungames dot com which means you don't really see a lot of stuff that i write on the

website but if you buy their books and some of their games that have books in them you will find stuff that i write uh you can also find me in addition to doing retronauts doing a spiritually kindred project over on youtube uh that i just call video works because i'm not very creative but I'm chronicling video game history one to three games at a time sometimes four games, sometimes five games at a time but that's a bad idea. I try not to do that. Anyway, videos, they're fun. And Henry, how about you?

Well, listeners, if you enjoy hearing me and Bob remembering things and talking about our lives at the time it happened, I think you'll really enjoy the Talking Simpsons podcast that me and Bob do weekly, where we cover the Simpsons series in chronological order. Right now, we're wrapping up going through season two and 12 at the same time, switching off each week. And we also have a ton of exclusive podcasts at patreon.com

slash Talking Simpsons, where we cover shows like King of the Hill, Futurama, Mission Hill, and also we do our What a Cartoon movie podcast where you go super duper in depth into that stuff there. So check all that out wherever you listen to podcast for Talking Simpsons or also the What a Cartoon podcast or just check it all out at patreon.com

slash Talking Simpsons. And of course you can follow me on Twitter at H-E-N-E-R-E-Y-G. And as for me, you can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo, but that's it for this week. We'll see you again very soon for another episode of Retronauts. Take care. Thank you.