Video Gamers Podcast - Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Super Mario RPG, XDefiant beta - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: June 29, 2023

Video games covered this week:  Super Mario Bros. Wonder Super Mario RPG Remake WarioWare: Move It! Sonic Superstars Manic Mechanics XDefiant   Thanks to our LEGENDARY supporters: Skippy, Kiitaclyzm, Gideon Is Lit, Toro, Scrump, Gaius, Remi, MarbleMadness, Dr. Catatonic, Blackstar (DQ), Glapsuidir, Phelps, Michele B, Redletter, Nevo, Waynerman, TFolls, AceofShame, Jake, RangerMiller, and Ad.   Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/multiplayerpodcast Join our Gaming Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: instagram.com/multiplayerpod/ Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/MultiplayerPod Subscribe to us on YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q  Visit us on the web: multiplayerpodcast.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

TD Direct Investing offers live support, so whether you're a newbie or a seasoned pro, you can make your investing steps count. And if you're like me and think a TFSA stands for Total Fund Savings Adventure, maybe reach out to TD Direct Investing. hello fellow gamers and welcome to the multiplayer gaming podcast since it is thursday that means it is time to cover recent gaming news i am your host paul and today we only have one other host josh is currently in Colorado with his family, white water rafting and eating crazy pizzas. That means it is just a two-man show here for today. Joining me, he is my partner in crime in X-Defiant. We won some, we lost probably a lot more. It's Ryan. Oh, yes, we did. Not having the level matchmaking was uh interesting to say the least yeah i think you and i had also not really played any online shooters in a bit

yeah we kind of had to recalibrate to the speed it took a couple matches yeah just a few yeah all right so we'll talk a little bit about x defiant in a few minutes here but the biggest news of the week that we gotta cover first is nintendo direct so this happened a little over a week ago but they announced quite a few upcoming projects we are going to post all the trailers that we talk about here in our discord so if you guys aren't currently in there there is an invite link in the episode description totally free to join no reason not to so make sure to follow us in there in discord so ryan let's first talk about super mario bros wonder so this is a new game coming out it is a

throwback 2d side scroller very similar to new super mario bros and if you've played that one this one seems to have kind of made some waves in the gaming community. People seem to be very hyped about this one. I don't even really know, Ryan. Are you a big fan of Mario games? Do you normally pick up the newest Mario entries? Or do you even know what the last Mario game you bought is? I don't know what the last Mario game I bought is.

I played a lot of Mario back in the day as a kid but you know you know old mario 64 and then uh you know mario party and all those um but i i never you know after that i got into kind of more you know quote unquote grown-up games and shooters and all those things so i i've not been a big mar guy, but this one actually did look pretty cool. I think this one looks pretty awesome. Yeah. So, like, it has this very chic animation style that I think is really neat. And I think it's just very bright. It seems very charming. They've added, like, a lot of these really cool new elements to it.

The UI is also very different and looks very modern. Yeah. See, I'm a huge fan of all the mario games still to this day so our family will always pick up every mario game and we'll at least play it for a few days or a few weeks you know until we get bored of it but this one here has some really interesting things in it there are new power-ups some of them are very interesting and very unique to mario uh you can eat a new kind of plant and everything gets really warbly and sparkly things start to move around on the screen pipes start crawling around like caterpillars um this is a family-friendly

podcast and it's a family-friendly game but I have no idea where they drew inspiration for this. Oh, I can tell you. They probably went to Mario World at Universal Studios, because that's how I felt. I walked in, and I'm like, dang, what was in that churro I just had? It is the Mushroom Kingdom, after all. I'm freaking out right now, man!

Yeah, this has got some weird power-ups. They show that. I don't even know what you call it i think they called it like a wonder flower yeah it was a wonder flower and you get the wonder seeds i think something like that yeah super trippy like stretches out characters lets you play in the background and not the foreground there's some really weird stuff with that there's also a new power-up that turns Mario into an elephant, which I thought was kind of funny, because we've had the raccoon and frogs.

Why not an elephant? I guess that's just what they thought of. Just got to keep the animals going. They're going to go down on the chain of all the animal kingdom. Yeah, we've already had cats. I thought that the sound of this trailer was also really neat. Anytime Mario does something, it seemed like it impacted the audio design, which was neat. So, like, when Mario turns into an elephant, I don't know if you noticed, but immediately the footsteps sound like an elephant.

Oh, I didn't catch that, no. Yeah, yeah, a little bit of, like, Jurassic Park footsteps, which I thought was funny. And there's little musical notes that you run over that they show multiple times in the trailer that kind of play notes on a piano. I thought this looked really exciting. I would love to play this game. And one of the best things is that it's going to release in October. So Nintendo has been doing this recently where they're not giving us a whole lot of content really early. You have to wait, and then you kind of get everything, and then within a couple months it releases, which I think is awesome. I am so sick of these announcements 12 years before the game even comes out. Bethesda. Bethesda.

Yeah. CD Projekt Red. They're a little guilty of that, too. Yeah, so in this one, there are going to be six different playable characters you can play as mario luigi princess peach peaches peaches peaches peaches peaches princess daisy toad and yoshi did you play mario 2 back in the day like you remember how you could choose one of the four characters but they all had different jump mechanics yeah oh yeah so like princess peach could like levitate in the air a couple seconds.

I hope that this game has something like that where I hope it's not just a different skin for the six characters. I'm hoping that they'll actually play a little different. Like maybe it'll be a different run speed or jumping ability, something like that. But I always thought that was a really neat element of Mario 2. And I kind of hope they bring that back. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's always good when there's different aspects to each character and like you said it's not just a skin

you know because yeah okay cool you're this guy or that guy whatever but when there's some different factor that helps you players more to your play style you know it's it's always neat and then um going back to those wonder flowers and the wonder seeds or whatever how it was so trippy I thought it was so cool watching that scene because there was parts, like you said, where the pipes crawl like caterpillars. You can use that to like get coins that are higher that you couldn't jump to either, you know, before. And then just different factors, other factors in the game where,

you know, those notes, some of them, I think those blocks launch you higher and you have to find the right one. So, yeah, I mean, for someone who's not a big, you know, Mario nerd like myself, I was actually pleasantly surprised with kind of how it looked and thought it might be cool. Yeah, it just had like little flourishes and touches. Like when Mario leaves his hat and then goes through the pipe and then you see like the hand come back out and grab the hat. And then he comes out the other side. All that stuff I thought just looked so awesome.

So since you're not a big Mario guy, did you ever play New Super Mario Bros. where you can play with four characters at exactly the same time? I'm trying to think. I might have. Was it an old one? Yeah, I might have, but it would have been so long ago. I don't remember. Yeah, so New Super Mario Bros. U was the last 2D side-scroller Mario,

and it came out 11 years ago, so it's been a while. But the problem with those games, and I have very fond memories of playing it with my wife and our two oldest daughters when we had our Wii U, but the problem is that whenever you play co-op games, especially with four people like this this is it's very easy to leave people behind so you'll have like one person who's jumping up the platforms and then the other people are getting left in the dust oh yeah and in those mario games if you died it would turn you

into a bubble and you'd have to shake your controller and you'd get closer to the first player and they'd have to pop your bubble and i just remember whenever you had four people playing new super mario bros it just got way too chaotic like you couldn't see what was going on you weren't even sure which character you were we were always yelling at like one of our kids who would fall behind we're like just go into a bubble just go into a bubble and we'll pop you at the top you know so it was always kind of chaotic and and this does have four player co-op which i think is a lot of fun but i do think that these games tend to play best with like two people maybe three at the most four always just becomes a little bit of a mess oh for sure yeah no and that and that's one thing that i saw that i did think

was cool that you know may entice me i'm not i mean not i'm not a big nintendo guy or a switch guy it has its you know purpose and little niche area but um yeah i've seen that it was co-op like that and i could you know get the kids on and we could all just play together for just a fun kind of hangout game you know it seemed pretty cool but yeah i'll have to get on i'm turning into a bubble yeah it's kind of like the perfect family game which is pretty awesome yeah all right so moving on to the next thing here in the nintendo direct super mario rpg from 1996 which released on the super nintendo is being remade for the switch now i know ryan you would have been very young at the time but by any chance did you play super mario rpg on super nintendo i don't think i did no i don't recall past you yeah i was uh i was uh like a sega

guy as a kid i had friends that had you know nintendos and super nintendos and stuff like that but i i was i had sega genesis when i was really little that's because that's whatever my parents bought and i'm like okay i'll play sonic i guess yeah and mad madden 90 combat yeah more combat madden like 95 or whatever it was oh so many sports games yeah for the sega yeah so super mario rpg i i definitely played it but since my parents didn't let me own video game consoles as a kid i remember seeing it and not playing a whole lot of it but i am i'm 95 sure this is the first game i ever played that had turn-based combat and i remember as a kid thinking that that just seemed really weird but i really liked it so i loved this whole idea of like having

this team of three and even that was kind of neat at the time because bowser was in your party as you're like working against smithy and so it was kind of like the enemy of my enemy is my friend uh so even the whole idea of like teaming up with bowser i remember seeming really awesome as a kid and that was i don't remember ever seeing a villain team up with the main character uh so you know i mean the trailer shows updated graphics. I think the score is awesome. You know, the sound seems amazing. It's a perfect example of a game that I would be interested in checking out,

but there's no way that I see myself buying this or playing it simply because of time we have so many games to deep dive is the mario rpg remake anywhere on your radar i'm guessing probably not no it's probably not in in one of the big reasons too is uh i mean i'm playing final fantasy and and what a world we live in now where final fantasy is not turn-based game. It's just an open-action game. And then we've got Mario here. I was watching it. I'm like, what the heck? What's going on here?

Oh, yeah. And you've got Sonic games on Nintendo now. As a child, Ryan would have been shocked to hear that Sonic was going to end up on Nintendo consoles. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about that one, too. So there is a sonic game that is being released it is also a four-player co-op it is also a 2d side scroller so we're getting a lot of these throwbacks uh to like our childhood so it's called sonic superstars you get to play with up to four people you get to play as sonic tails knuckles and amy uh apparently it's been a long

time since i've played a sonic game i had never heard of amy i did not know that was even a character in the sonic world but was there anything from this trailer that kind of stuck out to you um mainly nostalgia because it you know it pops back and you instantly think of, you know, as a kid. Do, do, do, do, do, do, do. Oh, yeah. And I mean, I was. Sega. Yeah. I was.

It came out in 91, the first one, I think. And I was three. And then the second one came out, you know, a year or two later or whatever. So I played him a couple of years later when I was a little bit older and we had the Sega. But, yeah, I know my son my son you know watched a lot of sonic you know cartoons even the old ones and stuff when he was real little and so it brought back this one this one triggered a little more uh you know for me than the mario did but i probably who knows i mean we got so many dang games to play you know i may get it if it if it's not crazy but i mean i think the mario one is going to be 60 bucks right uh 60 or 70 is my guess yeah probably a little but yeah they're they're they're definitely i you know i give them credit for these uh developers and stuff like

just peeking off that nostalgia like well let's just re-release this update it a little bit put some cool features in which they did they look pretty cool but uh then we can charge full price for a game that they've already played yeah nintendo has done a nice job at least giving you something new along with it yeah so i don't i don't remember the exact title but it was like 3d mario all-stars or something and it had a couple mario games but it threw in bowser's fury as well and so that was like a whole brand new thing that you could actually play through, which was really neat. The only thing I have trouble picturing with Sonic is that it's just so fast, and you

hit so many springs and are running through these levels. I don't know how that works with four-player co-op. It seems like you would leave people behind a lot. So I'm not sure how that's going to work. Yeah, I don't think they have bubbles in that either. I mean, yeah, I don't know.

I have trouble picturing four people playing Sonic together when the main draw of the game is speed. Yeah. So four-player co-op, I don't know. That sounds a little tough to pull off. Alright, well, we do want to let our listeners know that we do have a Patreon page.

So if you enjoy our show and like what we do and would like to help fund it and keep it running, you can head over to MultiplayerSquad.com and sign up for support starting at five bucks a month. That will unlock some awesome perks. You get access to special channels in our Discord. It gives you special permissions in a different color. You get of our episodes ad free and a day early and you get two bonus squad cast episodes every month those are very loose and laid back that's where josh ryan and i talk mostly about gaming but we also have silly debate questions would you rathers uh we always cover a little bit of food we always get to hear about you know ryan working on his smoker and and and my smoker and sous-viding steak and all kinds of stuff. So make sure to check that out over at MultiplayerSquad.com. All right. With that being said, we're going to go ahead and take a short break and then we'll come out and finish up our talk on the Nintendo Direct. And we'll also talk a little bit about X-Defiant.

This is an ad from BetterHelp Online Therapy. direct and we'll also talk a few minutes visit betterhelp.com today to get 10 off your first month that's better help help.com okay ryan we are back all right next up it's time to move it Wario style. Oh, gosh. All right. I think I'm just learning here that, Ryan, you've been pretty out on Nintendo for a while. So I don't know if WarioWare has ever been on your radar. It is one of my favorite Nintendo properties. And I think it's probably responsible for thousands of cases cases of gamer add because this is literally the epitome of i cannot pay attention to a game for more than five seconds wario ware says great i've got the game for you wario ware if anyone hasn't played it it's very goofy you play these very fast moving micro games they all last only like three to five seconds you have to very

quickly do a little mini game and if you don't complete it in time you lose a life and you just try to go through and complete this uh the graphics are also like intentionally bad in a humorous way which i've always loved you'll get these like really low rendered low res like baseball players where the one you know because you can play this also with co-op so like one character throws the ball the other one has to swing and try to hit it uh i think that this game is absolutely hysterical but what did you make of the wario ware trailer well it's so funny because yeah my first thing on our show notes is this looks so dumb and i put for me it does look yeah it does look so dumb i will say watching it it's probably a great game for like

a kid's sleepover you know you got a few kids they come over and they're like you just throw on you know the switch and they're going to play that for hours i saw too that's over 200 micro games so it's not like they're going to burn through them all in like 10 minutes you know so there's a bunch of options a bunch of that they can replay if you know they're getting mad and competitive and stuff so yeah it's it's not something that i will probably play but i always do i get super competitive so if somebody has it like i'm over at your house i'll definitely i'll probably play it but it's not one that i would buy myself i could definitely see you like wagering some bets oh yeah oh if we get if we get money in the line okay now we're talking this is your new favorite game yeah they're all just like super silly mini games so like you see a couple examples in the trailer i don't know if there's

any that stuck out for you but i i laughed really hard when it shows on the screen a turtle with dirt on its shell and the micro game is where you hold the joy cons behind you like as if you're drying yourself with a towel like drying your back or washing your back and you have like three seconds to very quickly wash all the dirt off your back uh there's stuff like that uh rapidly punching a bag with your boxing gloves you know seeing how many times you can punch it in three seconds or whatever i mean even one has like the character is tied up in a rope and you just have to wiggle and then the rope falls off the character i mean this is these are the kinds of micro games they come up with and i know 200 micro games sounds like a lot but literally when these games

are three to five seconds each i wario ware is is the perfect game in my opinion to play in one sit through for an hour maybe two hours at the most and i kind of feel like you've experienced everything the game has to offer i think it always was a better game to rent than to buy but wario ware has a special place in my heart. It's very silly and very goofy. That's cool. It fits Wario's personality really well. Yeah, exactly.

I'm a Wario. I'm gonna win. All right. And then last thing I wanted to talk about from the Nintendo Direct. Oh, and I should mention the WarioWare game releases in November. And November is also when Super Mario RPG remake releases. So these are all games that are coming out before the end of the year, which is pretty great. Sonic, we don't have an exact release date, but they did say it would release this fall. So the last thing i wanted to talk

about is manic mechanics and i linked this for us to talk about although really i wanted to talk to josh about it because josh famously hates overcooked and this game is literally overcooked only instead of cooking and plating food you are just working together to fix up vehicles but i thought that this game actually looked kind of funny and i feel like it would be a blast to play for at least a couple hours well i'd say me and paul are i mean uh me and josh are on the same line on this one because i put these all look like stupid mobile games uh yeah i mean the graphics are nothing to write home about i just yeah it's, it's just not my type. It looks like the ones you would just get on your Samsung TV that has ads.

You're like, oh, download it. You can play with your remote. Yeah, yeah. I played through all of Overcooked 1 and 2 with Todd, who used to host the show back in the day. I always enjoyed Overcooked. I think that they're fun but josh really really hates them so we have overcooked we have overcooked near the bottom of our leaderboard so to kind of like summarize the entire nintendo direct like what were your overall takeaways ryan did this

make you more or less excited that you own a switch do you really care about any of this stuff what are your overall thoughts i'm kind of i'd say lukewarm um a couple of the things a couple of the mario ones looked looked pretty cool um something that that you know i may pick up for the kids to have fun on give them something to play um so other than that it's it's kind of was like nothing to me yeah nothing nothing to write home about in my opinion yeah it probably just depends like what kind of gamer you are yeah i i thought they kind of crushed it with this one i really enjoyed this and last week's ubisoft forward quite a bit uh i liked it a lot more than like what we saw out of

xbox oh but i i loved the fact that there's this big push for couch co-op it is hard to find good couch co-op games in 2023 and here nintendo is just crushing those left and right so like our discord community every once in a while we'll talk about the switch and there are people like josh who kind of say i don't know why anyone buys it or plays these games the tech is. The exclusives really aren't all that fun or they're made for younger kids. Why would anyone have these? But I think if you just want easy to play couch co-op games, there was so much to like from this Nintendo Direct. Sometimes you don't want to spend 30 minutes learning all the buttons and the mechanics of a game. Sometimes you just want to hang out with friends or family, just fire up a co-op game and just have fun for an hour and maybe you'll never even play that game

again uh but i feel like this had a lot to offer i love the old school throwback 2d stuff i love the co-op i feel like that's kind of the switch's bread and butter is just nostalgia couch co-op casual gaming and if that's what you're into, I think there's a lot to love. Well, I would say that's primarily what we use the Switch for, is let's play some Mario Party, or let's play this or that. Those types of couch co-op games. And like you said, there's not too many that you can do that with on Xbox or PS5 or anything like that.

But yeah, how often I do that is not very often so but when we do it's always a blast and it's always fun so i mean these did look cool and i and i did like the part when i saw that it was uh co-op and there was multiple you know multiple characters on the screen it seemed really neat so it's definitely something we'll probably check out yeah i think on the list the one thing that i'll definitely check out is mario bros wonder i know our family will buy that for sure hopefully i'll be able to have some time to to dive into that one the rest i i would enjoy playing but i don't think they're ones that i would actually buy all right so moving on here last week when we did talk about the ubisoft

forward we do spend we did spend a little bit of time talking about how x defiant was going to have this open beta for a few days you and i both got in we did play together uh we got several matches in how did it feel to get back into that kind of call of duty multiplayer type game it felt like death over and over and over again. We might have died a lot, especially early on. We hit our stride every now and again. Yeah, we got a little flow going there and there, especially when we got matched up with somebody of, I guess, lower skill.

But yeah, I did have a good time playing. It was fun, and I liked the gameplay. The movement seemed kind of smooth um the abilities were pretty cool i know me and you loved the uh the exploding spider the alien the face hugger the face hugger that thing was so cool it looked like uh what were they uh on half-life the snarks or whatever yeah oh those are so great because you can plop it down and it's just a robotic spider and it will just start running toward an enemy and if it's close to one it just temporarily like blinds their vision and then you can just run around the corner and and blast them yeah i was gonna say they're great for like a pinch point you just throw that down and you just come

around and then you can just you know work your way and then inevitably just get blasted by somebody else but yeah it's a lot of death i felt so slow playing this game at first because our our last few deep dives are like zelda humanity like these are not games that are honing your your reaction speeds even diablo you're clicking a lot but you're not really like pinpointing you know headshots or anything i felt like the first two matches i could i could tell how slow i was playing and it was almost like i had to shake off all the cobwebs and i could feel myself getting faster yeah but it was funny it was almost like winding up an old clock where i feel like 10 years ago i could just hop right back in a game like that it'd be like riding a

bike this time around i kind of felt like i had to rewire my brain oh yeah yeah i gotta start firing right as i turn this corner i can't wait to look in and register and then start shooting but i i thought that we had a lot of fun i mean this game does have no match no skill-based matchmaking yeah so there are some matches where you might just get totally wrecked but then there are other matches when you might totally wreck the other team i felt like we had a lot of balanced matches maybe just by sheer luck um but we had a lot of fun we also had fun taking turns staggering our shield so like we played one match in particular where you had to like push the payload and so you and i were the only people on our team that cared about the payload everyone else is just running off playing

deathmatch kill kill kill kill kill kill and you and i were trying to stagger our shields and throwing them up ahead so that way we could play as a team yeah i i did have i did struggle in that match finishing my kills i i don't know if you remember but i did save a screenshot you had like five million assists i i had 12 kills and 10 deaths and do you remember how many assists i had was it 34 it was 30 assists 30 i knew it's somewhere in the 30s 12 kills and 30 assists i i can't believe that but i think that's also because you and i were playing together so a lot of times we were assisting on each other's kills yeah no that was fun yeah the the different aspects of the like the abilities and stuff were cool uh based on the type of match you had and what you were doing so yeah like that one we weren't

using the spiders we were using the shields but it worked and and we were i think i don't think we won that one because we were able to get the payload all the way down to the end but we did yeah yeah no i i was the same way um i played like i played a million hours of destiny and these other everything else but i was always on a controller same with warzone same with all these so not too much i haven't done like a shooter on a on a pc in a long time so it was definitely i was shaking off some rust and getting that little quick twitch to the head and so yeah it was i need a lot more work as well i think the other thing that's kind of interesting is that some of the maps are actually pretty small.

And you and I weren't always crazy about that because the levels are designed. And I guess it's a two-sided coin because some of my issues with Call of Duty is that people will just hunker down on choke points and they don't move and they'll just try to rack up those kills in x defiant it seems like everything is built where between your power-ups and with the ability to flank everywhere multiple ways it kind of forces to keep everyone moving which i think is good but at the same time it felt kind of chaotic like you're always like sprinting and turning a corner and you still get shot in the back a lot. Like, a lot of the deaths I experienced were because there's just so many ways to aim everywhere. It felt like people were always dropping down right behind me

or things like that. I liked the larger maps more, I guess, is really just what it comes down to. Yeah, they seem to have a little bit of a better flow to them. The other ones that were just almost like a cube of chaos where it was just like same thing. You run around a corner and there's nobody anywhere. And then all of a sudden there's three guys behind you and you're like,

what the heck? You just get blasted. And then you respond, take two steps, you get blasted again. And then you respond and there's nobody anywhere. And you have to run like for a while to find anyone. So it was kind of,

it was kind of weird how it would flop around back and forth but yeah it was i like the bigger ones too yeah i think the way that the game is designed without the skill-based matchmaking is i think everyone is going to have a high level of frustration like one out of every three or four rounds, which I think is a real downside. But I think when you do have the fun matches, I do think that that outweighs the cons. So I was still a big fan. I really enjoyed having another multiplayer game to play with buddies. Cause it's been a while since we've really had that Diablo was fun to pair

up, but there's just something different when it's a shooter and it's more talking and communicating and coordinating yeah and quick rapid call outs yeah that's that's my favorite that's why you know that's why again to back to destiny that's why i love destiny so much and i just love to get on a mic and just talk with your buddies and talk about you know even not the game you can talk about your day but then you're still playing and coordinating and do all that stuff so that i was yeah i was i'd play some play some more today if we were going to hop back on. So it was definitely something I'd recommend,

which I didn't think I would. Yeah. And I will say, I don't know that I have laughed so much playing a game as just setting loose the spider bots, man. That was so much fun. There were so many times that i would just start laughing because i i just i can feel the frustration of the other player getting this face hugger on them as i

just round the corner and i'll just take them out i was sticking with that shield and you're like ryan you got to try this spider and i'm like okay so then i switched over and i was like i started cracking up i was like oh this is so much fun and it's fun to watch like i just started using it as my teammate i'm like i'm just gonna drop the spider and i'm just gonna follow it go buddy go buddy go funniest thing oh i loved it it's it's by far my favorite power-up in that game yeah such a blast all right well thank you so much to everyone for joining us for this episode as a reminder make sure to go check out our patreon over at multiplayer squad.com and hit us up on discord and also on socials you can find us everywhere at multiplayer pod we do have new episodes every monday thursday and saturday so please

check those out as well and until next time happy gaming see ya See ya!