Video Gamers Podcast - [Hijack a Host] The War for Mars - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: July 15, 2024

Gaming hosts Paul, Josh and Ryan have once again been hijacked, this time by Legendary supporter Jigglepuf. In this awesome gaming filled episode, one of us gets forced to play a game that has us all excited but none of us have played. Join us as we announce the video game and the host who was forced to play, and what our predictions will be in this awesome gaming episode! 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

Paramount! Behold! My name is Maximus Intertanius, and I come to you with big stars in big dramas, like Gladiator 2, Dexter, Original Sin, and 1923. Stream Paramount Plus for $6.99 a month. Hello, fellow gamers. Welcome back to the Video Gamers Podcast. We are dads who love gaming, and today is a very special Hijack-A-Host episode. We are going to be revealing what game we will be deep diving next, along with what host will have to play it. Please make sure to rate our show five stars

and leave a written review in Apple Podcast. And if you have not yet joined our free Discord, you are absolutely missing out. You can join with a link in the episode description. We've got a family-friendly server with an amazing community. Come check it out. Come discuss gaming, news, connect with other gamers, all kinds of great stuff. I am your host, Paul. And joining me, I can't give away too many hints quite yet, but I know he's a fan of third-person shooters. It's Josh. Oh, I am a fan of third-person shooters. Up to your ears lately in third-person shooting.

Don't threaten me with a good time, Paul. That's why I made this your intro. I like the way this episode is starting already. Yeah, I was like, if Josh is getting picked, I know this is his genre. Right up the middle. All fears are gone instantly for me. Okay. And then joining Josh and me, I'm pretty sure that he likes rocket launchers, assault rifles, and proximity mines.

It's Ryan. Rocket launchers, proximity mines, and assault rifles? Oh, my. That almost sounds a little like golden eye i feel like those are some pretty uh pretty common golden eye weapons right there yep all right well before we get into our hijack a host format here we do have a couple of new patreon supporters that we want to give a shout out to we have both zobey and top lobster who signed up with rare status thank you so much to both of you for the support.

Thank you to you both. Listen, I mean, we say this all the time. I know we have people that have been supporting the show for a very long time. It is not forgotten. It is always appreciated. The reason that we are still here years later and

still continuing to just climb the podcast charts and kind of, you know, honestly sit kind of near the top of the gaming podcast world when we're going up against the likes of like IGN game informer, you know, uh, like the official Xbox podcast, all these things we're here because of the listeners and because of the people that take time out of their day to say, you know what? Let me go support these guys. Let me go to MultiplayerSquad.com. Let me sign up. Let me throw them a tip. Let me tell my friends. Let me leave a review. There's all these different

ways that people actually help the show. And it's not lost on us. We really do appreciate it. We talk together all the time when a new review comes in or somebody new joins the Discord server and it joins the community. And we're always blown away by that. So thank you from all of us to everybody that helps this show happen because it really does mean the world to us. Yep. Second that, it's a really cool thing to see not only everybody that's been long-time listeners, but to see the community grow. One of my favorite things is just hopping on. I start pretty much every day hopping into our Discord and just saying good morning to everybody.

Everybody else does the same. And then we just all talk about games and life and everything else. So really cool, awesome community. And it's been a cool thing to be a part of for the last like year or so i will say i'm i'm slightly disappointed ryan i thought for sure you were going to sing top lobster but it wasn't a rock it was a rock lobster rock lobster rock lobster there it is that comes in my mind every single time because i i saw uh them then hop into the discord and right away top lobster came into my brain so really good game takes by the way uh i think it was cyberpunk red dead and then i think got a war skyrim or skyrim that's what it was yeah i was like you're

gonna fit in fine well not only that same with zobe or zobe however they pronounce it they listed some of their favorites with fallout 4 outer worlds rocket league yep so yeah we've got so many gamers in the discord it's so cool to see all right and then talking about our patreon support that ties right into this hijack a host episode josh why don't you tell people about today's sponsor of this episode well the sponsor uh of this episode is the one and only jiggle puff uh. Jiggle Puff came into our lives long ago, has been an awesome member of the community. Honestly, we really love having you around, Jiggle Puff.

Love how active you are. Love your passion for games. You're always willing to help people. So it's, again, definitely noticed by us. But Jiggle Puff one day said, you know what, let me get even cooler and went legendary on patreon and that gives you the option to hijack a host to make one of us play a game of your choice and jiggle puff reached out

to paul which i'm a little sad because you know they didn't reach out to me but that means that ryan and i are up for nomination on this one. Paul has all the power on this episode because Jiggle Puff has reached out to Paul, told Paul which host that they wanted to pick and which game that they chose for that host. Ryan and I know absolutely nothing. These episodes are always a ton of fun because we legitimately are finding out as the listeners find out. But yeah, all this is because Jiggle Puff decided to go legendary and support the show. And not only that, poor Jiggle Puff let me know what the pick was all the way back in April, because we had a bunch of legendaries in a row, but then we had a couple of must-play games like

Hellblade 2 and X-Defiant and stuff like that. So we are finally getting around to it. So thank you, Jigglepuff, not just for the support, but for your patience as we finally get to cover your game. All right. So let's start out a little bit with why Jigglepuff picked this game. They said that this is the game that got them into open-world games and chasing completionist achievements. So I know this is the game that got them into open world games and chasing completionist achievements. So I know this is a little bit of a side path here, but how do you guys feel about the prospect of this being an open world game? And do you care much about achievement hunting? Ooh, I like, I like open world. Um, I am not a trophy hunter. I'm not certain ones are cool.

If it's, if it's hard to get, but you can get it throughout gameplay i got a buddy that is just he wants to platy everything and he'll sit and spend hours and hours doing one single thing to try to get this one achievement usually i'm not but i mean if it's fun gameplay to try to get it then then heck yeah yeah so have you ever gone after an achievement josh? Never, never in my life. Never. It just doesn't interest me at all. I get it. I get why people like doing it. Like, it's like, Hey, I have, I've done everything that this game offers, you know? And so it's like, there's a part of my brain that can comprehend that thinking, but people know me, man. I'm lucky if I can stick with the game long enough to actually finish the game. The idea of going out of my way to try to get an achievement or a trophy or something is just like, it's like a foreign language to me. It just really doesn't. And again, it's a me thing. It's not that I think it's dumb or anything, because again, I see why people really enjoy that. But as far as achievements go, I don't put any stock into

trying to do those at all. It's just not in my DNA. I do like open world games. Legitimately, and we've said this a lot on the show, not every game needs to be open world. But if a game is open world and is done right, it really can enhance like the game and the ability to just say, you know what, let me go over there and see what's going on over there. It's nice to get off the rails sometimes. It's just, you know, open world has been kind of overdone and not always well done. And so it can be a detriment if it's not done properly. Totally agree. And for me, the achievement hunting rarely is something that calls to me, but when it does, it's open world games.

Like when I play Dragon Age Inquisition or I play Cyberpunk and I see all these decals on the map, and if I go knock one out, that decal disappears. And if I do all of them, I get that achievement. I get it. Like that gives me a little bit of that, like adrenaline rush and endorphins and I get it. So I think this game kind of plays into that where you're gonna see things on the map and you might feel a desire or a want to go over there,

clear out this part of the map as we kind of talk about it more. All right, so this game is a little bit older. It released in 2009 for the PS3 and Xbox 360. It came out later that year on PC. So funny enough, I'm sure you guys remember Alex's pick of Toontown Rewritten was by far our oldest game ever. Well, we now have our second oldest game ever with this game being from 2009.

It is older than Halo Reach. so this is now going to be our second oldest game and i have a couple of stats about when it came out so if you were curious to know the top song according to billboard was boom boom pow by the black eyed peas and the number one movie in the box office was up and to give you a little bit of a time stamp it is a great movie oh don't make me cry i know go watch the first 10 minutes again and some other games that came out in 09 include uncharted 2 borderlandslands 1, Left 4 Dead 2, Dragon Age Origins, and Resident Evil 5. Okay. So are you guys nervous at all with the fact that it's a little bit of an older game?

I don't know, Ryan. You just got done playing Toontown, which was 20 years old. Did that scare you off of older games at all? The fact that I've heard that it's open world and third person, like that alleviates a lot of anxiety for me right now yeah that's something i can definitely live with i this is funny to me because i was literally just talking about this earlier in our discord server about how hard games used to be and um it was og uh og gamer girl, in our discord server. And she was saying like,

Hey, she used to play a planescape torment. If I remember right, was the game people were talking about and saying, Hey, that game's really hard. And it's like, I mean,

I'm an, I'm an old school gamer. These hard games are what I grew up with, which I think is why I like games that have difficulty now, you know? So, but then there's a part of me that goes anytime an older game is brought up, it's a risk. Like Torchlight, for instance.

Nate picked Torchlight for me to play. And it was like, Torchlight was fun. It was fine. But you could definitely tell it was dated. Joff picked SpongeBob for me to play. And SpongeBob held up phenomenally, in my opinion. Ryan got picked to play Toontown, which is 20 years old. And it was kind of like, dude, this doesn't really hold up that much anymore.

So it is a gamble. I think that you have to either look at, does the gameplay, is it good enough that it translates to modern gaming? Or is there a nostalgia factor that you're hoping is going to kick in for people? An open world in 2009, I feel like was when open worlds really started to kind of come into play. I mean, Witcher three came out in like what,

like 2015, 2015. So this is like six years before that. So this sounds like it's almost like the beginning of the wave of the whole open world trend. And I don't know. Maybe it caught that wave and it's done really well. But if it's not early, maybe not. I don't know.

I think it's definitely in the crosshairs of when open world had its heyday. Because you've obviously got stuff like world of warcraft and some of the elder scrolls games that are older but it's before everything got so saturated where like we have a an open world crazy taxi game coming out like do we really need an open world crazy taxi i don't know but the fact that it's 09 and open world i actually think is kind of a good thing what's even funnier is that this game was remastered. And when you buy it in Steam, you actually get a copy of the original and the remaster. And so I actually asked Jigglepuff, like, which one is better? And they said that

both are fine, but they actually prefer the OG with the older graphics because the physics feel a little bit better. But you can technically play the remaster or the old one. The graphics are definitely an improvement, but from what I could tell in my limited time playing for a couple hours, it still looks relatively old, but I would say the game actually plays pretty smoothly. I wouldn't be too worried about graphics, I guess is what I'm trying to say. All right. So actually, you know what? Let's go ahead and take a short break and then we'll come back and talk about some of the critical reviews. All right. So now that we are back, the OG game or the OG version of this game was pretty well received by critics. It's got an 85 on Metacritic for the console version,

and 88% of critical reviews were positive and none were negative. So by and large, critics did like this game. And I have some snippets from three reviews for you guys. Gaming Nexus gave it a 9.5 out of 10. They said, it is a fantastic game that sucks you in and doesn't let you go. It is a seamless merger of technology and storytelling that raises the bar for the industry. I mean, those are some pretty big words. Open world storytelling that raised the bar. And it's a merger of technology, which is kind of funny because now you're going to be playing an older game, but it was seen as like kind of like frontline tech at the time, which is kind of interesting. So official Xbox magazine has the lowest score for it, which is a mixed review at seven out of 10.

They said it is not a glorious revolution yet. Neither is it a wafer thin facade of the sandbox genre. Its foundation is strong it's fun in a mindless way and its design intrigued us but it's ultimately not something that has been built to last so that's as negative as it gets is that it's still mindless fun is like the worst thing anyone said kind of like first descendant you know or, or something. Yeah, exactly. And then the last review here is from Worth Playing. They gave it a 9.3 out of 10. And they said,

this game may not have the name recognition of Halo or Call of Duty, but it has enough depth of play to hold its own against any contender. That's some high praise, guys. You're mentioning Halo and Call of duty in the same vein as this game yes you you better you better live up to that you know what i mean like those words man i assume after hearing all of that neither of you are terribly worried that you're going to get picked like this is such high praise i feel like either of you are would be fine

if you get picked right yeah yeah it's one of those no matter what the game is it's it's most likely going to be a good time even if it's older so i mean we you can even hop into some of these older shooters like old halos or everything obviously those are some of the best ever made but uh you can still hop into them and have a good time. Absolutely. All right. So let's get a few hints here so that way we can share the name of the game. This is part of a series. The first game in the series came out in 2001. And in this game series, you fight on behalf of working people against world oppressors. The first two games are actually traditional first person shooters. But in this third game,

they actually switched it to be third-person, and it's the first one to have open-world mechanics. And the developer of this game actually was sold off as part of a bankruptcy, so they were underneath THQ, but then when it went bankrupt, their assets got sold off, so they are no longer around but this developer did make some other games that i would say are definitely classics uh ryan i don't know if you played this i know josh did but they made descent one and two oh okay no i don't i don't recall playing those but uh but i know of them yes very very popular games they also made the original saints row oh so there's definitely some pedigree here that they've made some good stuff all right

now yeah go ahead i'm just saying i think my brain's really trying to like zone in on this right now figure out what it might be clues and then i i started going down one route and then i think i i switched paths you know as you started talking about like thq and the makers of descent saints row so now i think i have another idea but we'll see where it goes talk about polar different games too by the way like descent a 360 degree like space flyer and saints row like a like a goofy gta parody all right a couple of serious hints now this game does not take place on earth and you can equip four weapons but no matter what you always have a sledgehammer with you do you guys have any guesses to what it might be i i i was initially going like prey like that route but i don't think praise not an open world from what i remember so that's when i was like nope it's not

that and then i started going like i think this is there's like there's all these games that i never played right there was the um like infamous games where you have the oh yeah tentacle things you spawn out and then what was the game that you what's that series that you always mention where the guy winds up like becoming the president going to space and fighting the aliens and oh that's saints row is that saints row okay so then there was like the open world like saints row type thing yeah and and i'm like dude aren't they like a lot of these games are kind of similar to each other so that's like the only guess i have is like it's not going to be saints row obviously but like maybe infamous or another game like that good guesses they are all incorrect yeah ryan ryan you

got any guesses you want to share smarter ryan make a really bad guess uh well i i have a pretty good idea i think i know what it is but i kind of cheated so i don't want to make a guess oh how'd you cheat well i just uh i had typed in everything paul said into google and it came up with this game 2009 i was just thinking 2009 shooters after i had a few guesses and then it gave a big list. And then I was, I think I know what it is from that list, but all right. Well, Ryan, Ryan probably knows,

but let me drop the last couple of hints. I didn't know cheating was allowed. I'm impatient. Okay. It's not allowed. All right. I will say, Josh,

even if you don't know this by name, I do think, you know, the game, or once you see footage, it'll, you know, you know, shake the spider webs off. The game takes place on Mars. You are working to overthrow the Earth Defense Force, or the EDF, and it's largely by destroying their buildings and structures. As you do destroy buildings, they drop salvage, which is this game's currency.

It is probably best known for the game's physics. Does that bring anything to mind, Josh, or all blanks? Earth Defense Force, I've heard of. I started thinking of Destroy All Martians, because that was a game for a while, but I don't think you were on Mars. I think that was them on Earth. Martians. Is it Red Alert? Red something? Red Alert.

Red something. You're warmer. Ryan, do you want to tell us? I bet it has something to do with Mars in the name or Red in the name or something like that. Red Faction Gorilla? Red Dawn. Red Faction Gorilla it is. in the name or red in the name or something like that red faction gorilla red dawn red faction gorilla it is yeah okay great great job ryan you did such a great job you're a genius well the list had like 13 games and that's the one i thought it was it was totally cheap gorilla red faction

gorilla yeah i feel like i've heard of red Guerrilla is just the name of the third entry. Okay, okay, okay. I have heard of Red Faction. I had never heard of Red Faction Guerrilla. So I was like, my brain was putting it all together in like one thing, which is what threw me off. Red Faction, I have absolutely heard of. I don't know that I've seen a lick of gameplay

of a Red Faction game, to be honest with you. I always thought that was like against Rush. I didn't know it was against Mars. The know the hand looks like the sickle yeah yeah when you watch some gameplay footage of this josh i think you're gonna realize oh i did hear about this game at some point so i played a little bit i'm not even sure how many hours i've played i did have to set my steam to private here over the last couple weeks because i didn't want you guys to see what I had been playing, but I did put in a few hours worth. And I would say that the story is very minimal, at least in the early beginning. It kind of reminds me of like a throwback PS2 game where it's like, Hey, here's a shortcut scene.

Here's what we're doing. Let's get in the action. And the game kind of just quickly throws you in there, which I actually really like. You don't need three hours of setup, like in The Witcher 3, before you're doing anything. So basically, there's a minimal plot. You jump into the missions. Don't expect any kind of Witcher 3 storytelling here. But basically, you have these different areas on the map,

and you see where the EDF forces are. You're going to run out. You're going to do a whole bunch of missions for them. And your goal is to liberate each area by completely decimating the EDF forces there. And then you're going to move on to the next area. So for our listeners who have maybe played this game a lot, I fully liberated the opening area of Parker. and then that's when i stopped so i got to see like a good sample of the game but i didn't want to play too much too early before we start recording so that's kind of like where i stopped so do you guys have any like questions about the game or any comments like what are you thinking at this point i'm watching gameplay right

now and this game looks pretty good yeah what are you seeing josh like i'm watching this guy piloting some weird like loader mech thing and just traipsing into some base and laying havoc there's all kinds of vehicles dude has a rocket launcher and has taken down silos oh he just ramped over a canal yeah jumped jumped some big canal in this car that he was in like uh this game looks pretty fun. I'm not going to lie. And I was a little bit worried about the date on it, but apparently there's a remastered version, like you said, Paul.

So it's Remastered. Remastered. Remastered because it's on Mars. Please, let's stop with the terrible remastered puns there. It's the worst name I've ever. It is. Rehydrated? Yeah, I know. rehydrated makes sense for spongebob remastered is a little too much of a stretch but like this doesn't look that dated like like graphically speaking i mean you can tell it you

can tell it's old but it's not like this is a game from like 1997 or something either so no yeah it looks like almost like this looks like dumb fun to me like half-life 2 kind of ish graphics kind of but it definitely looks it looks cool um yeah dang yeah explosions vehicles guns now we're talking baby mars what's not to like about this so far totally agree i will say i've enjoyed my time so far. A couple of things about the game that you might enjoy hearing about. There are vehicles you can ride. There was actually a really exciting mission where I had to run over antenna towers, but the whole time I'm getting rammed by the EDF. And so I'm trying to evade them while knocking out all the antennas before my vehicle gets

destroyed. There's stuff like that that's pretty thrilling like action sequences there's mission types like escorting hostages out of buildings sometimes you just have to make certain buildings fall and get destroyed um you know so there's there's all kinds of different mission types sometimes you get to just set traps and then kill all the edf forces when they come to you so you have all these mines and you can kind of like place them strategically so that way when their vehicles go you'll blast something and then maybe like debris falls on top of them or to like choke off where they can go so there's actually a lot of open variety in how you can do these missions and that's where I think the open

world stuff shines. Like, are you going to go in through the front door or are you just going to take your sledgehammer and start bashing away at the side fence and try to get over that way? There's a lot you can do in this game and I think you guys are going to dig it. That's really cool. I love when games give you the option to beat areas or levels how you want to you can be a little more creative or you can use the environment as as part of a weapon you know so when they when they factor that in i i always love that when you can like you said make stuff fall on people all i know is i'm gonna be the master of destruction yeah maybe ryan it might be me oh i'm gonna play too this looks too fun well the good news is i bought my steam key for one dollar and 69 cents and that comes with the original and remastered so

you're gonna get both for very cheap every time he says it i'm like what oh no we're saying it every time if that's what they name it i'm calling it that remastered it is remastered it is yep so yeah buck 69 hard to beat that price i mean toontown was free i mean that's as good as it gets but a dollar 69 is not bad so the game did have multiplayer but i think it's dead now because i tried queuing to play multiplayer and it sat for about three minutes and it found nothing. And then it put me in a lobby by myself and said, looking for players. And then that timed out and it put me back to the quick search menu. So I looked on Steam charts and there's only 44 people playing Remastered

and 21 people playing the original. So maybe the online works, but I don't think anyone's queuing for it. But the original did have traditional modes like team deathmatch and capture the flag, but it did have destruction-based modes like siege, where you and an enemy team are trying to destroy each other's bases quicker. That sounds like it would have been a lot of fun.

We'll have to try maybe like on a Saturday afternoon, maybe some people log in then. But I am a little bit bummed that multiplayer seems to not be available i wish this game had co-op that's the one thing where like me driving you guys gunning you know that kind of thing i could see being a lot of fun um yeah it does mention it's a single player game but it has online pP, according to Steam. So it's definitely not intended to be like a multiplayer game. Yeah, the campaign is definitely just single player, but does seem to be a lot of fun. All right.

So who do you guys think might have? Who do you think is going to end up having to play it? And does it matter at this point? It sounds like this is this is a really crazy thing to say, but it it's like i don't mind if it's me on this one like you know um i don't know let's see like ryan this kind of fits ryan and i's mo like for what people know about us for gaming like people know i like chaos i like explosions third person shooter vehicles ryan likes all that stuff too. So would Jiggle Puff lean one way or the other? I don't think so. I'm really kind of torn.

I don't know. I'm at a loss as to who Jiggle Puff would pick for this one. I know you mentioned previously about the achievements and stuff. I'm trying to think of what in here would factor into that. Did you have anything that you discovered when you played i looked at the list of achievements and they weren't quite as fun as i was hoping i always love stuff like in cyberpunk they always had things like shoot a grenade out of the air and fun achievements like that for this game it's mostly about like liberating entire areas

and doing a certain amount of damage and stuff like that i think it's mostly just destroying as much as you can is kind of what all the achievements come down to all right so jiggle said it was a toss-up between you both thought both of you would enjoy the game but they said based on the tags which are open world physics third person shooter explosions gunplay and driving that jiggle thought ryan would get a bigger kick out of it back to back the people love me dude don't go to that josh they just they want they want me man what can i say it was me back to back and now you back to back ryan josh it's been a minute for you it's because you why? Because I hate some games. I'm not scared to say I hate this game.

So I think people are a little bit more like, I don't want Josh to hate on my game, man. Plus, Ryan rates everything 5.0 or higher. I was going to say, you're guaranteed to get at least a 5 with Ryan. Hey, you've got explosions in vehicles. You're talking my language. That's all I know. Yeah.

So I'll leave you guys with one last thing. So Jiggle told me when you get to the point that you're kind of feeling done, like if you're not going to finish the game and it is pretty short. I think it said on how long to beat. It's like 15 hours. But Jiggle said, just start using cheats so you can input cheat codes and it'll give you like a way overpowered like sledgehammer and you can like send stuff flying and create all kinds of mayhem and i gotta say i kind of miss cheats being in games like i know we have mods nowadays but don't you miss

the good old days of just inputting codes on the controller and then you get like all your gta weapons or whatever i miss it l1 l2 r1 r2 left down right when you had the 30 lives versus the three because it was the only way you were ever going to beat contra back in the day yeah you know so it's like the yeah i like that developers would say hey let's let people have fun let's just build this into the game and so are they actually built into this yeah so there's like cheats that you can look up and put in the game. Yeah, which is kind of fun. Not that I'll ever know, but sounds cool.

Bull crap, you're playing with me. We're going to be the two people online playing each other. 1v1 me, bro. Let's go. It would be really cool if we get to play a little bit of multiplayer. I'm hoping we can do it like that siege mode, trying to destroy buildings quicker. So like very quickly trying to assess like where are the central beams and chucking these mines and blowing them all up.

I think this is going to be one that you guys like, at least I hope so. I'll Zerg rush you. Yeah. All right. Well, that wraps up everything here for this pre-dive. We want to give a huge thank you once again to Jiggle Puff for going

legendary to all of our listeners out there. Come back in about two weeks or so. And then that's when you'll be able to hear our full thoughts doing our official deep dive. You'll be able to hear Ryan's thoughts for sure. Sounds like probably a little bit from me and Josh as well. And then please check out support options for Patreon at MultiplayerSquad.com, and make sure to rate us five stars and follow us on socials at video gamers pod thank you so much for listening to this pre-dive and until next time happy gaming see ya all right see everybody Bye.