Video Gamers Podcast - [Deep Dive] ToonTown Rewritten - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: July 8, 2024

Gaming Hosts Paul, Ryan and Josh are back and we’re jumping into our thoughts on Toontown Rewritten. Chosen for Ryan to play by Legendary supporter Alex, it’s time to see what he thought about this video game and what it’s about. Can a 20 year old MMO stand the gaming test of time or will this sink to the bottom? It’s another awesome deep dive from your favorite gaming podcast!  Thanks to our LEGENDARY Supporters: Disratory and Ole Jake Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/videogamerspod Join our Gaming Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/videogamerspod/  Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/VideoGamersPod  Subscribe to us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q   Visit us on the web: https://videogamerspod.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Rise to rewards with the BMO Eclipse Rise Visa Card. Terms and conditions apply. Hello, fellow gamers. Welcome to the Video Gamers Podcast. We are three dads who love gaming, and we release new episodes on Mondays and Thursdays. Today is a Hijack-A-Host episode. We are going to be deep diving Toontown Rewritten. Please remember to rate our show five stars and leave a written review on Apple Podcasts. I am your host, Paul, and joining me, the tightwad cog himself, calling in from a cellbot factory, it's Josh.

Hi, everybody. I have no idea what's going on today you got to do the whole episode as as mickey mouse that's that's the deal what are you talking about paul this is my normal voice yeah with toontown excellent all right and then joining josh and me he is hosting his own party, paid for with jelly beans, of course. You might see him floating up in the sky after being shot out of a cannon. It's Ryan. Oh, that's why I'm floating. I thought there was something in those jelly beans.

Oh, boy. All right. Well, before we jump into our deep dive here, Josh, I think you're going to read a review. Someone left the show. I am going to read a review because Someone left the show. I am going to read a review because we absolutely love reviews from the listeners. It's a good way to let us know how we're doing, what you like about the show, what you don't like about the show, you know, but it really is awesome just to see, you know, people's responses to what we do and what we kind of just

throw out there into the universe. So it also really does help the show in like rankings and stuff like that as well. So if you haven't left us a review yet, please take a few seconds to leave a five-star review if you're on Spotify. If you are on Apple Podcasts, you can actually write a review. And there's a good chance we're going to read it on the show like this one that comes in from HellsDog22. And it's titled Perfect for a third shift gamer dad and it says i just found the pod recently due to josh being on the fantasy footballers pod that i

also follow it's been awesome to listen to especially during long night shifts i can only play games on the late weekend nights so i've had no real outlet to talk or listen about video games with anyone until i found this pod so i just wanted to real outlet to talk or listen about video games with anyone until i found this pod so i just wanted to give a quick thank you to get to you guys it's very much appreciated oh oh heck yeah well thank you hell's dog yeah thank you man we will keep you company at work yeah uno reverse guard yeah and when you have such limited time for gaming we're going to be able to help you figure out what's worth spending your time on and what to stay away from.

So this is win-win all around. I didn't tell you guys this, but I actually have been working on a secret project where I am just narrating my playthrough on a game. Oh, are you? Yeah. So it's like Twitch, but without any of the visual stuff. Kind of like a podcast too, but it's just going to be me basically going like, oh, yeah, take that. No, no, no, that's cheating. No, okay, okay, the boss is going down. Okay,

yep, nope, nope, this game sucks. And that's basically it. That sounds like just the ramblings of a lunatic, if you ask me. I think there's a market for that, guys, right? All right, we'll see. I guess we'll find out. We'll put it on patreon behind the paywall pay us to not have to listen to that there you go all right and then ryan why don't you tell the people why we're covering toontown rewritten today oh we are here for this especially silly

day from your boy alex uh he he did this uh great little thing we have here called the hijack a host so what we got is you can uh come in you ever wanted to kind of make your friend or somebody that you know play a game that uh they may have not tested out before they may have not had a chance to to dive into but you really think they should play it for uh for pleasure or pain either one but uh you can you can do that with us so we got this uh cool tier on our um our legendary sport on patreon where you can hijack the host pick a game and we have to play it we'll do a pre-dive episode covering what the game is, and then we will do a deep dive and cover everything that you picked. Yeah.

And the man of the hour in this case is Alex. And so we want to say thank you once again to Alex for going legendary. We did release that pre-dive just a couple weeks back, so you can always go back and listen to that episode if you want. And if anyone wants to sign up for Patreon, we do rely on listener support. You can do it at multiplayer squad.com you'll unlock all kinds of perks like bonus episodes all right so i thought it would be fun just to kind of summarize a little bit about what we talked about on the pre-dive especially for any listeners who didn't hear that or maybe it's been a couple

weeks since they last did so basically the original iteration of Toontown Online released all the way back in 2003, which if you remember, makes this by far the oldest game that we've ever covered. It is seven years older than Halo Reach, which is currently our oldest deep dive game. Shockingly, this game is also an MMO for anyone who doesn't know that. It actually released before World of Warcraft and EverQuest 2, making it one of the earliest MMOs. A lot of gamers say this is the first game that they ever played online. And the original Toontown Online game died quite some time ago, but a lot of programmers were able to recreate the game and release their own versions.

Toontown Rewritten is the most popular one. It actually released less than a week after the original game went down. So that gives you a little bit of background. And here is the description of the game on Wikipedia for the original Toontown. Toontown Online was a 2003 MMORPG based on a cartoon animal world developed by Disney's Virtual Reality Studio and Shell Games, published by the Walt Disney Company. Players played as anthropomorphized animals known as Toons to explore a cartoon world, complete quests called Toon Tasks, and engage in combat against the COGS,

robot businessmen who served as the game's antagonists. Players used weapons known as Gags, typically slapstick comedy items such as a thrown cream pie, in combat. Alright, so this is a little different than most of the other games we've covered. I mean, we have covered some games that are based on cartoons like Spongebob, Battle for Bikini Bottom, and some things like that. But this one is just a lot older. Ryan, you were the one selected to play the game. You knew that immediately.

On the pre-dive, as soon as we revealed it was Toontown rewritten, you said, that's going to be for me. You have put in a fair amount of time in this game right yeah i think i got um definitely in the teens on the hours probably 14 15 hours or so on this which you know in old school mmos which this plays like is uh you know barely scratching the surface a lot of time but i definitely got uh i got my time in and i was able to do quite a bit yeah and i hopped in as well i played a little bit because you can play this for free. We also got to play a little bit together, Ryan, just the other day. Josh, I couldn't help but notice you were never present for any of these playthroughs.

Why didn't you come play with us? Well, you see, guys, there was a little game called Lies of P that some listeners convinced me to give a shot. And then right after that came a Shadow of the Erd tree. And then in between there sometime, I got back into Rocket League with our buddy Andy. I also got sucked back into Overwatch 2 with my daughter. It's just a busy life, man. And then when you know, when you see Toontown calling at you like a siren's call off in the distance

and it's singing to you, but then you see these other more modern games that are really more up your alley. More attractive sirens calling from the other direction. A.K.A. Josh was like, I gotta make myself busy. No, I was just, no. I was getting my dark, my. I was just, no. I was getting my dark, my soul's legs on, Ryan. Sure.

Yeah. Yeah. And of course, now the first descendant is out. Paul knows. See, look at that. I mean, just really, just really busy guys. Not that we can even get on. The servers are down again.

That's all right, Josh. Ryan, Josh always gives us a hard time when we don't play with him, but yeah, here he left us. Why weren't you guys playing Torchlight 2 with me? That's a multiplayer game. I played a little bit. Yeah, I think I did too. No, only

only a little. All right, so let's go ahead and I just want to address the elephant in the room right off the bat. All right. When we did this pre-dive, Josh and I had never even heard of this game. I think we were just too old for it to where it was nowhere in our circles. I was not even aware that it ever existed.

Ryan, you were only vaguely aware from your younger siblings. And when this was announced as a deep dive i was kind of shocked at the amount of people that came out of the woodwork on discord to come say how much they loved toontown i mean were you guys kind of surprised at that reaction oh yeah we definitely we all made comments about it because we kept seeing people on our discord and also if you haven't joined the discord get on over there awesome community everybody super nice and friendly and all just talking about games but uh anyways yeah there was just non-stop talking i even um people were messaging me oh man this is uh this is awesome

you're playing this uh i was on till 2 a.m phelps hit me up yeah long time listener uh you had me on here till 2 a.m last night and sending me screenshots of all their gags and stuff so definitely sparked uh some nostalgia um gameplay for a lot of people yeah this this caught me completely off guard man Paul hit the nail on the head I had never heard of this game like usually there's somebody be like hey have you guys ever played this? And I'm like, I've heard the name before. I really don't know what the game is about,

but at least I've heard of it. This game. I was like, what? What to town? What's like an MMO? Like my mind was blown, man.

So, you know, people on discord were very excited about it. And then on social media, which is crazy as well. Like, you know, I always post our episodes,

just new episode out with some graphics and stuff like that. And I did a screenshot of Toontown without anything that mentioned Toontown. And a lot of people were like, oh, Toontown, man, that's my childhood. Oh, I love this game so much. And I was just like, there apparently is a cult of people out there. A pretty good size cult too. I mean, the fact that this game is technically 20 years old and there are still people playing, like I told you guys on the pre-dive, I signed up, I hopped in and immediately I saw like eight people right off the bat and people were fishing.

I started running around fighting and people were joining me in combat. I was shocked. So this game came out when I was in college and I was working full time. So I think it is fair to say, Josh and I were a bit older than you, Ryan. We were certainly not the target audience. And Ryan, you're not that much younger than us. I think it's fair to say you were a little bit older than this target audience as well. But it's clear that Alex is not alone. There are so many people who have such fond memories. But then for us being older and jumping into a game that is just so old, right away, I was like, oh, man, I don't want this to be where we all jump in and we don't have the nostalgia and the fond memories.

And we're just going to come in and crush this't have the nostalgia and the fond memories and we're just going to come in and like crush this super old game that so many people love that was my worry like did you guys have a similar feeling like josh you famously say everquest is your favorite game of all time you tried jumping back in not long ago and you literally said it is unplayable and that's with nostalgia yeah with the nostalgia so this is almost like josh if you hijacked a host and picked everquest and we jump in for the first time like were you guys kind of nervous in playing this one because we do always want to be honest but we also don't just want to like stomp on ants with clown shoes before ryan gives his answer to

that because he has more firsthand experience with this, I will say if I asked one of you guys to play EverQuest, I would fully understand that it was magic at the time for me, but you guys would probably respond to this game is really old. It's really dated. It doesn't have any modern quality of life issues and that sort of thing. We have covered, I mean, we have literally covered multiple games with this question in mind. Ryan, when he picked Metal Gear Solid 5 for me, he was like, I want to see if it's nostalgia. Joff, when he picked SpongeBob Battle for Bikini Bottom, literally said, I want a nostalgia check. I want to see, is this my rosy glasses or does this game hold up? And so there definitely is that nostalgia factor. And that doesn't always transfer to somebody. And that's okay. Because if you loved a game way back in the day, like EverQuest for me,

I think it's okay for people to say, I get if people wouldn't like it now. You know? And there's nothing wrong with that. Gaming has come a long way. Quality of life has come a long way. People don't want that MMO hard, old school grind like you had with EverQuest. And even World of Warcraft to a degree because Vanilla WoW was known as being hard. The problem is, is that when you oversimplify it, like current day WoW, where you can just instantly level up to whatever the max level is now, it takes away some of what made that game great initially. So there is a chance that Ryan will say, I hated this game. but if it's not for Ryan, that doesn't take away people's memories of it either.

Doesn't mean it's a bad game, right? Yeah, exactly. Like anyone could say whatever they wanted about, you know, EverQuest, but you have your memories, you have your experiences. So that's locked up for you and how you feel about the game. So I'm sure I mean everybody I talked to that had played this

in their youth. I didn't talk to a single person that said a bad thing about it. You know, every single one of them loved it and raved about it. Like you said, that's my childhood. So definitely a huge nostalgia thing. It is 20-something years old. It was made for the younger audience. So, yeah, there's definitely a lot we're going to get into. I'm excited to cover it all.

There's a lot to cover. Yeah. So one of the things that was so novel about this game is that it was specifically designed for a younger audience. They even wrote in the reviews that we read in the pre-dive, this was an attempt to stay away from the older creeps who would be toxic and negative. And so Toontown did a lot of things

to help preserve the atmosphere for a younger audience. For example, just so our listeners kind of understand what we mean by that, you do not get to type in your own name. They didn't want to give you a chance to put in something more mature or something that was like profane. And so they have a preset list of titles, first names, and last names. You can scroll down the list, select what you want. And that makes up your username.

You also do not have open chat. They had like a quick chat menu where I got to address this. You're not muting. Josh is just hacking away in the back. I just keep writing Josh cough, Josh cough, Josh cough on my note sheet. Sorry, guys.

I realize that my mute doesn't work if I have the wrong microphone selected in Windows. He just kept coughing, and then he's just sitting there like normal. And I'm like, what is he doing? Oops. I was going to totally ignore it, except that it just kept going. And then Ryan started smiling, and I could see he was writing down time stamps. I wonder why you guys ignore it, except that it just kept going. And then Ryan started smiling and I could see he was writing down. I wonder why you guys were laughing, man. I'm just sitting over here, just coughing away, thinking I'm muted.

Whoops. All right. Well, now I got to be real quiet. Too funny. Yeah. Yeah. The mute button on the correct mic is your friend. So yeah.

So they also had this whole like speed chat system where you can click on the top and then there are preselected messages you can click for anyone who's played rocket league you know exactly what we're talking about short sentences that you can click on and then communicate with other people ryan give us like a couple examples what are some of these quick chats you can throw out in game so it was kind of neat at first it took a minute to get the hang of how to use that whole system because, you know, trying to talk to people and communicate. But they have a little tab at the top where you can click and then they have different categories. So there's simple things like let's go or this way that you could say to people when you're running around, especially if you're in a party.

Or there's like a little bit more complex sentences like where where should we go? Or let's find other tunes. But it was cool because the categories kept going. So you even had like things like taunts. So there was one that was funny. I was like, I'm so scared. And it said it that way too. And then that's going to leave a mark. So there was tons of like, there was other ones that were, I forgot the category was under.

But you could say like, you stink. It was like, the biggest insulting one you could do is like, you stink and please go away. It wasn't just go away. It was like, please go away or something like that. But yeah, it was really neat. And then there was even ones about strategy. So you could kind of try to figure out when you're battling the cogs, how to take them down or what gags to use and stuff.

So yeah, the little quick chat system was, was pretty neat. Yeah. I appreciate stuff like that. Like I remember when my son James first got into online gaming and he was hopping into wow. Like we told him, okay,

you just have to turn off chat. And I'm talking back when he was like five years old because we didn't want him like reading that stuff. And obviously being so young, you never know who's out there and who might be trying to talk to your kids. And so the fact that this game actually had all that built in, I think would have been really nice, especially for parents knowing that you can just kind of let your kid play. Now, as far as names go, I logged in this afternoon, just out of curiosity to go look and

see names of some people that were online. So I got five of them for you. So I logged in and I saw Sergeant Domino Dino Flip. I saw Jester Superscreech, Miss Looney Poodleton, Nutmeg Lemonguber, and Alan. A-L-A-N. Just Alan? Yeah, one guy, just no title, no last name, went total straight laced and just

named himself alan uh i named my tune dr corky funny stink which for whatever reason made me laugh uh ryan what ended up being your name in this game uh my name ended up being uh capon comet mczilla i like the mczilla part i was like you just call me fantastic funny enough I logged on today too just to check a few things and refresh on a couple spots I wanted to and apparently at some point my son had got on and he made a character and he named it

this is the best name I've seen it's just fat Velma I just popped it up and I was like wait what is this i was like who's fat velma i'm like why is this on my my characters but i was like did you do this man oh that's too funny yeah it was pretty good we were just playing the first descendant yesterday and making fun of names like wasn't one like obese will smith and i'm like who makes that like their steam name but here toontown helps you out they they help you with these wacky names all right well let's go ahead and take a short

break and then we'll come back and talk about graphics and gameplay all right ryan why don't you tell us a little bit about the graphic style of toontown like how would you describe the aesthetic what kind of vibe are they going for with this one um i would say the tunes look like tunes it's cartoonish um it's definitely that uh there's not a lot of fine details in it it's kind of set up where the the pictures and the the buildings and everything is kind of um flat if you will there's not a lot of like i said detail to it but it's definitely a very vibrant bright atmosphere you're you start out and kind of in a playground area that uh bright green grass big colorful buildings so it's definitely got a kind of goofy uh cartoonish look to it for sure like like think kind of wow a little more rounded edges but

that colorful kind of pop to it what's what's goofy is without knowing anything about this game i posted just a screenshot of a character with no other context and people knew the game right away oh yeah it's highly recognizable yeah and i think it works really well for the vibe that they're going for it looks like an actual cartoon and the game adds a lot of little flourishes that i love like for example when you first load the game or if you do any kind of fast travel you get like the old looney tunes yeah you would have like the circles and it was kind of like red and yellowish and you had like a face in the middle of like porky pig or whatever this gives you a screen like that with your own face and it says like now starring and it has your name and then like your location while

the game loads so everything really feeds into that cartoony type of feel which i really appreciated you know the the graphics weirdly have both aged poorly and actually quite well i mean for a 20 year old game if they went with a more realistic type graphic it would look so horrible by today's standards but because they chose a cartoony look it's actually not aged as bad as you would think like like you were saying ryan the a lot of the assets are very polygon-esque like there's a lot of flat surfaces all over this game and faces that are kind of just like triangles that come to a point and stuff like that but i don't think it impedes on the game i don't think there's any issue with graphics despite being so old no yeah i don't think so i think it

it is what it's supposed to be um and i think it like you said i think it does hold up well the one thing i was laughing at is and i explained to you when we were playing together is the doors like you know how in modern games a lot of times you can tell this this kind of this area i can go through this door i can open those ones probably not this you they all look the same Every door is just like a flat sheet. And then there's just like a door frame there. And then you just run up to it. And if it opens,

it opens, you know, they all look exactly the same like that. Yeah. And so this game plays in third person perspective. You get to see your tune, which of course you get to design and their clothing and everything else. And so as you run around the game of Toontown,

Ryan, since you've put in the most time, what would you say you're doing in this game? What are you spending your time doing and accomplishing? Well, think MMO. And that's what you're doing. You're killing those bunnies and those boars. But basically, so you kind of start off just like any other one you kind of are dropped into this world and you have to um kind of get your initial training figure out kind of the layout

of the land how to navigate how to use what you have and from there you go on and after you finish your training you start to kind of explore this world that's filled with all these other characters. You got kind of this semi-story with these cogs that have taken over these areas that you have to battle. Tons of mini-games that you can use to earn these jelly beans that are like your currency throughout the game. So that's what you use to buy more gags. You can get them from fishing and and uh other stuff you buy clothes so there's a lot of cool you know standard currency stuff and and uh yeah so you so once you get through there you you battle the cogs go through try to conquer back kind of the land that they're trying to take

over and uh and and just fight off the the evil suits yeah just rinse and repeat right pretty pretty much yeah so jelly beans as currency i i don't know that i've ever seen that in a game before it is very funny you also have back in your house which we'll talk maybe if we have time about like decorating your home later but all of your excess jelly beans get put into this giant gumball machine in your house, and you get to see them all, which is kind of fun. So let's talk about ways that you earn jelly beans. Because if you want to do anything in this game, you have to have jelly beans available in order to buy the mats that you need.

So Ryan, you mentioned fishing. That's where you get to do fishing mini games. Then you get to go sell your fish. There are a whole bunch of mini games that you can play on the trolley, which is like the very first thing that I did. And that's where I spent my initial first hour. You can go complete quests. You can participate in parties that other people host. You can also go racing, you know, so let's break a couple of these down and let's start first with the trolley mini games. When you think back

on those ryan are there any minigames in particular that stand out either good or bad um yes i liked i liked the memory game they had a really cool one which was kind of like the flip the cards memory game that had different kind of goofy goofy stuff on it it is a little bit uh difficult with two people because you can only flip one card at a time so a couple times i got stuck on the trolley with another character and we got in and i'm flipping the cards and and that's when i figured out you can only flip one at a time and then the other person's just standing there i'm like what are you doing yeah and then and then they put in somehow i'm not good at this game or i don't know this game or something like that.

So then I'm stuck there for a minute and a half not being able to do anything while they can't flip. But that was the only one that was kind of a bummer. But it was cool solo. But other than that, the Pac-Man one was really neat. You're stuck in kind of like a maze. A bunch of these cog enemies, which are like the Pac-Man ghosts, are kind of cruising around. What was neat, though, is some are a little slow, some some are medium and then there's usually one that's really fast and if they bump into you just shoot you you do a couple flips and then uh land down in a different area and it could be an area

you already cleared out and then you got to run all the way back down and keep getting those little um things i had a really cool match in there i posted it on our discord but i i got bumped once or twice and then i was able to literally at the last second get the last kind of little pod emblem thing to to get a perfect score on it but it was 100 one zero right as i got it and it ended but yeah the the mini games were cool think just uh just like Mario Party or anything like that. Just kind of cool, fun, little short games that you could play. Are they competitive? Like, are you playing against other people? Or is it always just kind of against like computer AI type stuff?

It's from what I played that I can remember. It's always just kind of most of it. I did solo. It was rare that I was with anyone else. But yeah, it's just against the computer. There's another one where you dive down and you have to dodge these peanut butter and jelly jellyfish and uh and get like a treasure chest at the bottom and swim back up and deliver it to um the ship on top so there's just a lot of games like that and then based on how you do uh you get a certain amount of jelly beans And that's kind of how you can kind of

quickly get some. And it's low stakes. Like you don't die. It's just a matter of how many jelly beans am I going to earn? Am I going to earn zero or am I going to earn up to a certain amount? To also answer your question, Josh, even though it's not necessarily competitive, they do still show your score versus the other person so like for example one is a slingshot minigame that plays exactly like monkey target in super monkey ball you press two buttons it pulls your slingshot and then when you stop it shoots you out and you try to land on a target you get points and at the end everyone shoots at the same time and then it shows your score and everyone else's so when ryan and i did some of those, there was definitely a little bit of, you know,

friendly trash talking back and forth. Same with the treasure dive. I think there were five treasures down there. So it was like seeing who's going to get the third because, you know, it's not going to be an even number. I think almost all those mini games for the most part reminded me of something else there's also a uh mini game that played an awful lot like mario called tune escape there's also the jungle vine game which we were playing ryan we died a lot well not died but you know what i mean we fell into the pit a lot and had to restart

because we were trying to like go as quick as we could runs yeah yeah without hitting the spiders where you're just like swinging on vines, and it's mostly down to timing. So yeah, there's a lot of these mini games that I would say are relatively fun, but at the same time, I will say that there's only so many. There's probably like 10 or so. There's 15, I looked it up.

Okay, 15. From what I read, yeah, there was 15. I think this is the kind where the first three or four times you do them, you're having a really good time. But then once you start getting one for like, oh, I've already done this one like eight times, that's when it starts to lose a little bit of the sheen. Or at least that's how I felt. Yeah. No, I feel the same, especially if it's one that you're not a big fan of. And it's totally random.

So it's not like you can pick the game. So you hop on this little trolley and it takes takes you into a tunnel, and then a game pops up. So if you get one that you're not a big fan of, and then you get it two matches later, it's kind of a bummer in that sense. But one thing within the games, those mini games on the trolley that I thought was really neat, is after each match, and you get your jelly beans, you can actually restock your inventory of your gags, which is cool because they have like an actual gag store where you can go and restock, um, you know,

supplies, but in the mini game, you know, after each one, you can just click what you want to do, spend those jelly beans and then play some more so that you can restock your kind of, uh,

little purse of jelly beans as well. So, so do you get to pick the mini game that you play or do you just say i want to play a mini game and then it's randomized if you play solo i think it's fully random yeah but like there was one time when ryan and i queued at the same time so if you jump on the trolley it it has like a countdown where anyone else can jump on with you and if that's the case it does give you a little mini map and you're on the trolley. And then you have a certain number of votes and you can see on the right

hand of the screen, what games you can play and you vote. Like I want the train to go up or I want the train to go down. So there is a little bit of like a choice there, but you're also betting against the other people. So there's a little bit of choice in that regard. Yeah. I was trying to show you the vine one and then I'm like, vote down, vote down. And then you're like, and you voted three up or whatever. I was like, oh, come on, man. Yeah. Just to mess with you. I got a bonus 10 jelly beans out of it. I had to do

that. Um, all right. So fishing, I am on record record as saying i love any game with fishing i love fishing mechanics and games it's a little overstated for comedy on the pod but i really do enjoy fishing games for the most part i would not say toontown rewritten has a great system of fishing ryan do you want to tell the people how this works? Yeah. So basically, you go on, they have these docks throughout. You kind of walk up to the dock. You have to have your jelly beans to fish. That's what you use as, you know, quote unquote bait. And there's kind of shadows throughout the water that are somewhat stationary and then they tend to move. It's pretty straightforward and simple. You basically click the cast button,

draw back, and there's an arrow that pops up, and you just directionally aim it towards there with how much power you want and try to land it on the dark spot. And if you do, then you really don't have to catch the fish. It just will pop up. You caught, you know, this fish.

And there was a big variety of the fish, which was neat, because it was always kind of something different. There was like elvis starfish or something that when it came up it was like oh yeah we kind of oh that's kind of like johnny bravo there but uh it'd pop up and then go to your inventory um but other than that that's pretty much all the you know mechanics that there is with the fishing so it was it was cool at first but it definitely loses its luster pretty quick yeah it's even a little more simplistic than animal crossing animal crossing you can see the shadows and you try to aim your rod beyond them and then or like where they're going to head

and then you kind of like pull back the line a little and then as the fish goes into it then you grab it this is just straight up aim for the spot and you get it yeah no really yeah the the twist is the funny names of the fish so for example peanut butter and jellyfish you already mentioned in the treasure dive game you can catch those here you can also catch siamese catfish or like arabian seahorses so there's always a little bit of a play on words with all this stuff and of course if you catch them all you get like an achievement and some stuff like that um the fishing i would say is probably the worst fishing mechanic i've seen in a game have you seen any

anything worse ryan well we all know how bad the gameplay is on uh red 2, but I think this just squeaks out. Yeah, I think, I mean, I like fishing mechanics. I like fishing in real life too, but it's just wildly simplistic. There's not much to it. I mean, if they just had it to where you could reel in,

that would have made a big difference so you can catch the shadows across. But yeah, it's just so simple. There's not much to it this sounds terrible fishing fishing in a video game is terrible in the first place it always amazes me that paul loves fishing i get that it's relaxing like there is like something to be said for let me get away from like the grind of this game and just you know do a little fishing mini game but that's bad enough but then when you have like bad fishing on top of that, like that's really bad, man. Well, I think you have to remember they're aiming for like lowest

common denominator. So you're going to have like your five-year-olds playing. And so they make it where anyone would be able to do it. It's very accessible for better or worse. I loved spending time in like World of Warcraft. I would fly around, hit my fishing nodes while having a TV show on my dual monitor, and I would just fish for hours, farming my mats for upcoming raids or stuff to sell. In this game, the fishing didn't quite do it for me, but I'm still glad that it's there. I enjoyed it for a couple minutes and just moved on and said okay that's not where i'm gonna spend my time i'd rather go play trolley games or what i think is probably the

best thing in this entire game the racing um i'm not gonna i'm not gonna say that the racing is like on par with modern racers but it plays a lot a lot like mario kart light i think josh would have enjoyed being in there racing with us. Ryan, we were getting, I mean, not, you and I aren't super competitive people, but we were both trying to beat each other in these races. And there's a whole mode where you pick up items, where you get to like drop bananas

or throw pies at the other driver. There's arrows on the road that give you speed boosts and stuff like that. The racing I thought was actually pretty fun. Yeah, for sure. there's arrows on the road that give you speed boosts and stuff like that the the racing i thought was actually pretty fun yeah for sure the the racing racing in a game to me is fishing in a game to you like i loved i loved uh sparrow racing and destiny um i love racing games gran turismo forza um old school racing yeah need for Speed Underground 2 was one of my favorite racing games. So I love racing, especially in games that aren't just racing games. I, that was probably one of my favorite parts in it. Um, I spent probably an hour,

hour and a half just solo racing, just trying to beat times. Um, you don't get all the cool gags, uh, solo. At least I didn't when I was doing it, but when me and you got on, I was excited and it was fun. Yeah. Like we were throwing pies uh like you know blue shells or green or red shells or whatever and in a mario kart and then dropping the bananas and stuff but yeah the racing itself is pretty cool it's not wildly um hard there's not a lot of mechanics to it you just kind of go and drift around the corners but it is pretty punishing if you hit those rails or end up in the dirt for sure on the edges so you can get hung up pretty pretty good um but other than that yeah the racing the racing was pretty

neat i i know and i talked to a couple people that that's not originally in there they did that they added that later on so some people that i had spoke with about the game said that they had never raced. Oh, wow. I mean, the game was live for 10 years with rolling other stuff out and Toontown Rewritten. I know that they've added some of their own flourishes as well. Yeah, the racing I thought was fun. I think that's the most fun I had playing this game. Let's go ahead and just take our last break right now,

and then we'll come back and talk about the actual turn-based combat. All right, so let's break down combat a little bit here. So when you first load in the game, you're kind of in this town square area of Toontown. There's all these areas you can go. There's the gag shop where you go buy your pies and stuff for the combat. There's other areas you can go. There's like the gag shop where you go buy your pies and stuff for the combat. There's other areas you can go to do various things, but you can leave the town square and kind of go out into, if you want to call it like the open

world, I guess. I guess you could call it an open world game. So you go somewhere like Punchline Place and you see houses and buildings.'s other people running around you see stuff like backstabber law bot level five which is like one of the evil cogs running around ryan why don't you tell us a little bit like what happens as you're running around the world and how do you engage in combat so this this part was pretty neat so in between you have like your town tune central and then there's other kind of towns if you will that you get to by going through these areas you know the open world um which also just kind of look like a roadway with a bunch of buildings throughout and so as you're walking through there there's these

cogs that will come up and down like a little propeller out of their head and just patrol the streets and uh so that's how you engage with them in battle and that's how you kind of get your laugh meter filled up from experience points and whatnot. You run into them and then it starts a battle and anyone can join that battle as well as you're fighting. You just kind of run up into that kind of area and it'll auto-load you.

I loved that. Yeah, that part was really cool, especially if you see somebody that's oh that guy um looks like he's getting his butt kicked by this level six or level eight let me go help him out and you hop in and then you know you can join in right away or if you're getting your butt kicked and you're almost dead somebody can hop in and help you which was which was really cool but um yeah as you're as you're kind of going through that area you can do these battles but another really neat feature was these cogs are trying to take over so there's these little shops

in in town areas along that walkway where they'll take over it turns from this big bright beautiful uh kind of colorful shop front to just plain gray steel looking uh whatever bloodsuckers law office building or whatever you know whatever crazy suits name they have for them it looks all crazy and menacing and then you can go in and you can try to fight them to win that back and me and you did that which was a lot of fun i was like let's try to win this one back and i was showing you that area and we were able to go in you fight a few different bosses, like kind of a few different levels. And then once you beat that final boss, it all changes back to what it was before. And then your character's picture is actually hung up in the little kind of front lobby area, which was really neat.

So the combat, and I think we mentioned too, it's turn-based. So you can kind of throw your different gags you take turns and and there is dodging so you you can miss a couple times with certain attacks especially if they're higher level um but yeah the the whole system and the way they have it set up it's classic mmo you know kind of turn based type stuff like that yeah and you don't have like classes so you don't have like the holy trinity of a tank a healer and dps yeah but everyone can do damage and you do unlock heals and there are times that that stuff's needed oh yeah we were running around with other people ryan and there

were times that you know i was the lowest level and i would kind of get smashed anytime the cog would hit me but then like you guys were there to help heal and bring me back up. I also cannot think of a turn based combat game where like other people can join mid combat. Like I thought that was kind of neat. Like in World of Warcraft way back in the day, it was like there was always a battle of who was going to tag the monster first, and then it would belong to that party. And that was kind of like to avoid the ninja looting, because you did have times where anyone could access that loot. So everyone kind of has like their own system of that.

In this game, everything is individual, but you can join other people, which I thought was very neat. So even if someone else is toward the end of that battle, they can still jump in and fight. And even with me playing in my very first session, my very first time engaging in combat, two other people jumped in with me and we were all noobs just chucking the same pies and squirting water at the cogs. But I like that it encourages that kind of community and play together, which you don't often see in MMOs. You might see like those world events

where anyone can jump in and fight stuff, but on the individual mob level, I love that they encourage that kind of teamwork. Yeah, no, even as I always do, the way of things, I explored way further than I should have at one point, and I was at some high level areas that I should not have been there.

And I'm just, I walk up and I'm like oh no this is not good this guy is doing a lot of damage i attacked him and only did like three damage in the very beginning you should not be here mortal your blood is perfect your blood is forfeit. Your flesh is mine. And some other character walks up and helps me out and does 109 damage on their first attack. And I was like, oh, thank you so much. Oh, my gosh. And then they ended up helping me out a couple more while I was trying to make my way out of there.

I'm like, I got to get out of this zone big time. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about the progression loop, because in some ways, I like this a lot in theory, although I do have some issues with the execution. Basically, the gags, which are your quote weapons, in order to upgrade to the next set, you have to use that gag. And there are different gags that have different stats. So for example, the ones that do more damage tend to have lower accuracy. So if you try doing that, you're more likely to miss. And I love the idea of if you want to upgrade throwing pies, you have to use the pies. And then pretty soon you're throwing birthday cakes and things of that nature. The problem though is part of it is just due to the age. A lot of people have said that their biggest issue with Toontown is that it kind of

feels like a grind fest because the game did cost $10 a month to play. So they had to kind of elongate gameplay. And I think a lot of that was by having so many tiers of gags that you just had to play dozens and dozens and dozens of hours in order to get there. Meanwhile, you just have stronger cogs further away that you can go fight. So I was kind of curious, Ryan, did you agree with the people who say it kind of devolves into a grind fest or is that maybe too harsh shoot it's uh it's more grinding than

the 90s x games um it's it's definitely you can tell it's an early early mmo like that's what that's just what they were that's how the games were developed and made and designed. We've said it with WoW. I'm sure it was the same with EverQuest. You just have to do it. Originally, you start out with your pies. And to upgrade that, I think it's 50. Throw 50 pies or do 50 squirts with your squirt flower thing. So I'm a little confused, though. What do you get out of that? Do you get a cherry pie now? Do you get like a double decker pie? Like, does your pie actually change?

Yes. Or it does? Okay. At least there's something like visual there. Yeah, yeah. So there's kind of like, kind of think like a big, I don't know, maybe like a chess board. And you have different categories. And then you start out with just your regular pie.

And then you get the blueberry pie. And the blueberry pie does six damage instead of three um you know so it's it but it uh you know kind of you unlock them based on how many times you throw them so as you progress it's more and more like paul was saying so the first one you gotta throw 50 of that one that's a lot of cogs to fight especially when if if you're doing uh if you got two or three characters with you fighting you're only maybe throwing one one attack and then so that's a lot you have to go through to grind so you definitely can can feel the the bones of an early 2000s mmo yeah instead of like finding new weapons or having a loot system like that, instead it's use these and it's going to get stronger over time because you unlock the next tier.

And I don't know how many different gags there are, but there's like a good 10 different categories. So in the beginning, you only have those two. You don't have any ability to heal or anything like that. But as you play more and more, you unlock those other ones. And then that kind of like opens up your gameplay where you have more that you can do as far as like aoe damage and heals and things like that yeah it was actually funny because i did a lot of actually reading um for this because i wanted to to you know do my due diligence and make sure i was kind of knowledgeable on this game and it was funny i was reading stuff talking about how they had to make changes because the sound uh tier i believe was just meta and if you weren't running

sound like they were they were like giving you the boot back in the day apparently i thought that was hilarious because even back then on a game like this there was still like meta builds you know classic thank you it was it was i was reading it was cracking me up oh man oh you have the blueberry pie equipped kick this guy out of the way in the boot you stink you stink oh my goodness that is crazy yeah it did seem uh i did not play as much as you ryan but i i could see some of that grind fest d already just in, in what I had experienced one, but at the same, Oh,

go ahead. Sorry. I thought you were going to move on. I was going to say at the same time, if you were a parent and just like wanted your kid to have something they can do and keep them busy over the summer, I can kind of see where that's like, not necessarily the worst thing.

I mean, I put limits with my kids on screen time, but for a lot of parents out there, I bet they didn't mind that. Just pay 10 bucks a month and now your kid can play pretty much as long as they want anytime. Heck yeah, Billy, you throw those little blueberry pies. I know I talked to my brother, I asked him just a few questions to just kind of let me know what he loved about the game, what drew him to it and stuff. And he mentioned that just grinding out, he wanted that birthday cake. And like, you know, when you're a little kid,

you don't have things to do and places to be. So you're like, oh, heck yeah, I'm just going to run around and beat up these cogs and I'm going to try to get that, you know, birthday cake. But one thing I thought was really funny to kind of break up some of the grind fest was the things the cogs would say. You know, their little one-liners that they would put with their attacks.

So as they're attacking you, they'd make some sort of crazy statement and do some graphical effect. Like one would be a finger wag and then they'd shake their finger at you and then it would kind of do like raise at you or let's talk the bottom line and freeze assets. Just all kind of suits business talk.

And then my favorite was tee off. And then the guy pulled out a golf club and a golf ball and actually hit it at you, which I thought was pretty good. But yeah, the little sayings they would do would crack me up a little bit just to kind of break up that like i said that grind fest and we agree that this is extraordinarily ironic that disney created this right that you're fighting against the suits that are squeezing out all the money of toontown and literally charging people for a grind fest mmo it's it's so ironic but it's very funny well well well how the turntables but it's very funny. Well, well, well. How the turntables... Yeah, that part was very... Everybody I talked to, I said,

man, it's just funny that this is a Disney game and this is what they made, you know? And especially in 2024 with everything going on, Star Wars and all that other stuff. Yeah, it's wild so ryan i kind of forget how the quest system works to be honest i i didn't really work on quests the last several days how how does that work with like the tune tasks or whatever they call so it's kind of like any other um mmo like that you you go to this shopkeeper

or this person. In the beginning, you get started with the Toontown headquarters and then you go to the library and you just go kill three of this type of cog and then five of this type of cog. Go get me four gears. And then it's like, go talk to this shop owner

and you talk to them and they're like, we lost our shipment of tires. They fell in the lake you got to go fish out the tires from the lake so just kind of real simple and basic uh missions like that to do the quest the cool thing is when you turn them in you get what's uh i forget the what it's called but it's basically your your laugh meter and that's your health so as you go up you get a bigger laugh meter and, um,

it expands your, you know, your health bar, if you will, from 10 to 12 and then from 18 to 19. And that's, that's how you can kind of progress with that through those quests. And then other ones you'll unlock training videos or different things like

that. But the quests are all pretty, pretty basic standard, you know, go do this or go get this, stuff like that. Fetch quests? Yeah, pretty much. The one thing, unless I was totally doing it wrong, that was obnoxious for me, was you couldn't do more than one at a time.

Yeah, just one. Yeah, I'm like, okay, I have to kill these cogs and kill these types of cogs but i can't do them at the same time so i have to pick one then run out there and i of course naturally i'd see all the other ones for the other quest when i'm out there waiting to find the ones that i needed um and then go back turn it in and then run the next one so yeah it was definitely a lot of fetch quests or go here go there talk to this person things like that so Josh, I know you might've been bored a little bit, but you can perk up because this is now, I know what you're going to care about the most.

You can decorate your own house in Toontown. What? So Josh, I don't know if that changes things. Maybe you're willing to hop in now. Ryan, I don't know how much you messed around with this. I did not mess with it at all. My house looked like a very young bachelor. Ryan I don't know how much you messed around with this I did not mess with it at all my house looked like a very young bachelor it had basic furniture and a giant gumball machine filled with

my jelly beans I I didn't do anything else did you mess around at all with house decorating I don't even know what more do you need than a bed and and uh I always love those those pictures like how can guys live like this with a chair and a TV? A mini fridge and a mattress on the floor. Exactly. It's paradise, baby. No, I didn't really. I was, believe it or not, I was like, I don't really care.

It's obviously not going to be a game that I'm going to play long term. So I wasn't that invested on how is my house going to look. I was more focused on, honestly, playing the games and racing. So I didn't really mess around with it too much. I just know that you're able to go in there, alter things throughout the home and mess with stuff kind of like Animal Crossing and things like that. But no, I didn't mess with it too much. Yeah. Well, to close out the show, just two last things here. And one of them is going to be where you're going to put this on your leaderboard, Ryan, what kind of rating you're going to give it but before we do that who would you say this game is best suited for playing right now in 2024 who is this designed for so i think that this is

100 nostalgia game for a vast majority of the audience and then who it's not nostalgic for it's it's for their kids the people who have played it agree yeah so if if you play this as a kid you're gonna love it it means a lot to you um it doesn't feel boring it doesn't feel uh kind of like this is a kid's game it just takes you back to having that carefree life of just playing video games so i totally get that i i understand that those people 100 are going to play and then they're going to get their kids in it um i think for new players seven or eight to probably maybe 12 13 is probably that kind of range that um they would enjoy it and and it would kind of sit well with them with the way the graphics are and the type of the gameplay. But yeah, those are kind of the two categories that I think.

I could totally see playing this with your kids where you're within distance where you can talk to each other. Maybe if you have like a couple laptops in the kitchen or maybe like two computers that are next to each other. And I think this would be a great introduction to online gaming. And that's exactly what this game was supposed to be. An introduction to play online with other people, engaged in turn-based combat, play these little mini games that are easy to learn and quick to pick up, and you just play it until it's no longer fun. If the game starts to feel like a grind fest, you don't have to play it anymore. But if this game is super nostalgic, you may not mind that grind. There's something to be said for something that's like comfortable and familiar and you can

just grind out an eight hour session and maybe you don't mind doing that. I mean, am I going to play this game by myself in 2024 as a 40 plus year old gamer? No. I mean, but I'm not saying that it's a bad game. I'm just saying it's just not for me. And I think you probably more or less fell in that same category, Ryan, where when you and I jumped in and played together, we had some fun. I don't think it has a lot of legs for us.

And I kind of hate to say that knowing how much a lot of our listeners love it. But if it's got that nostalgia kick, then I totally understand that. Yeah, I think and I think they'll understand that. I think they know when they started playing it and what who it was for. And that's that's why they love it because they played it. I mean, I know even when the wow, the classic or vanilla or whatever came out and it was back to that old school grind and i remember just going hitting up scarlet monastery and all these oh yeah and you just and i was playing and it brought me back but even that i'm like okay i'm

kind of sick of this grind and there's a reason that they progressed to different kind of game mechanics and how they they did it so yeah i definitely um i could see all those kind of things the way the way it's all set up so josh do you feel like you missed out do you feel like you should have played this with us or do you feel like you dodged a bullet no i yeah i dodged a pie on this one i mean i don't it's funny because like we just started playing first descendant right like just came out a couple days ago we We're in it. I'm enjoying it. But there's this part of my brain that already knows that there's going to be a grind involved. It was that way with Lost Ark, which was another MMO that we covered on the show,

where you can have fun with it until the news starts to wear off. And then it just becomes the, how are they keeping me busy? How are they keeping me coming back to their game? And I don't know if it's just because I'm older or because we've seen this two dozen times now. So it's like, we're a little bit more used to it or aware of it or something like that. But I have a hard time justifying the, why am I going to sink 20 hours into grinding out something so that I can hit a bigger number when I shoot something? Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, and I'm like, I'm the king of progression, right? I love progressing in video games, but at some point

I have to just go like, why, like, why am I spending this time to try to hit that, like, 1 million damage shot versus the 750,000 damage shot when I could just be experiencing something else and something new, you know? But I still remember the date. Dude, the amount of grinding I did in EverQuest is legendary, man. I ground a key to Vexthal for a month straight, dude. Like six hours a day of farming trash mobs, waiting for a 2% chance of a drop. You know what I mean? So that I could get a key to go to this new zone

that had just been released. And it's like, I think back, but at the time I loved it because when I finally got that key, I was just like, yes! Finally! I did it! Yeah, you know,

but now that thought is just like terrible to me at the same time so i you know i guess it depends on the game maybe it depends on what you got going on in life where it's like i don't mind grinding this i don't know but like the grind i think i'm past the grind stage at this point like maybe maybe it's just that my time in life is shorter now so it's like i don't want to spend 30 hours grinding this you know yeah 30 hours closer to death yeah uh yeah you know it hasn't been that long when i didn't mind the grind even in wow i would go back and grind the old raids to get the mounts that i wanted so i'd keep doing the Firelands every week when it would reset, go kill those certain bosses and hope for my mounts. This, yeah, it definitely is pretty

grindy. If you didn't play it, I don't know that it's going to attract a lot of new gamers. I think most people who are playing it now are people who have been playing it for a long time. I think that's probably safe to say. All right, well, let's go to our leaderboard. So for listeners who may not know, we actually revamped our leaderboard not long ago. Instead of just ranking the game against everything else, we are actually now assigning scores.

So from 0.0 to a 9.8 for Ryan, since Ryan doesn't believe in the 10.0 score, I'm very curious to hear where you are going to rate this, Ryan. Well, this one's a hard one for me because I understand the nostalgia factor we've talked about. I understand that it's old kind of mechanics and the old way of an MMO with

that kind of grinding nature to it. So I'm trying to take that into account with the rating of playing it today having not played it before. So I'm kind of all over the board on where I want to put it because I don't want to break people's hearts, but I also want to be...

It's subjective. You got to be honest. Where are you going to put it? Is it better than Pacific Drive? Ryan, what? I can see the struggle on Ryan's face. Ryan's nice. He's a nice guy. Ryan is way too nice for his own good. I can tell that he doesn't want to rate this real high,

but at the same time, he's like, dude, this was people's childhood, and I don't want to go pooping on this game. You got to be honest ryan that's the main thing man yeah i know and so but so like am i am i rating this on just a fresh playthrough with not considering yeah this was chosen for you in 2024 to play this game that was 20 years old to get your opinion on it oh um gosh that changes things a little bit and it's free that does come into play so you're not like paying 60 for this you don't have to pay monthly the the guy who made this you can play for free so that comes into it as well yeah i think with all those factors the fact that you can play

for free um the mechanics are there from all the old school games that we loved growing up. It's just a different one of those. So with the way the mini games were, some of the issues with the lack of complexity and the fishing and other stuff, I get why, but I'm playing it now. I'm going to just kind of give it

a middle of the pack five. It's a fair game. I understand what it was made for it's just it's not for me um so actually 5.1 sorry not five can't give those 5.1 okay yeah five on no even numbers very important uh so i gotta have the decimal um but yeah yeah i'd say five it's it's like i said it's a fair game i understand why people would love it and i understand why people would dislike it i am by no means gonna play it probably ever again um but i it was cool to check out and it was really cool to see how many people reached out to me um talking about their love for the game and what it

meant to them so it was it was cool to see that that factor in it as well they offered you their login info if you wanted to go fight bigger stuff like that's how excited people were to to hear us talk about it yep i'm kind of right with you ryan i'm not going to give it an official rating because i don't think i played it long enough to do that i feel like i played it just long enough that i could make an outline without your help is kind of like what my goal was. My impression is it would be pretty close to a five as well.

Now, that's very subjective. That is you and I saying five out of 10 for us, our enjoyment level. If I was an actual critic, I feel like this would be like a seven five or an eight oh, and I would just say, hey, if you're the target audience, this game does exactly what you would want.

I did have some technical issues. I got stuck under the ground a couple of times where all I could see was gray sky. And I had to like reboot and some stuff like that. But by and large, it just, it's a 20 year old game. Like reviewing any 20 year old game now would be shocking.

If it's anything above like a 6.5 that's kind of like sky's the limit go play uh 007 or ocarina of time golden eye was the game that came to mind for me yeah like you know we rave about that game oh my goodness my memories of that with my buddies are second to nine but nowadays people would be like you guys had to play this you know and we'd be like what are you talking about this is this is gold man and they'd be like this game sucks absolutely yeah i was thinking the same thing ocarina of time is so hard to play when you're used to like modern day camera movement and everything it's pretty rough yeah, I don't think that's so much indicative of the game as much as just time passing. All right. Well, I think that wraps everything up here. We

want to say thank you so much once again to the man of the hour, Alex, for going legendary. If you don't already support the show, please swing over to MultiplayerSquad.com. You can sign up to help support what we do, keep our show running, get some great perks along the way. We're also on socials everywhere at video gamers pod, and we would love if you'd rate us five stars and join the free discord. Thank you so much for listening until next time. Happy gaming. See ya.

All right. See everybody. you