Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to side Quest. This is our weekly
video game show here at geek Verse. I'm your host,
Dyl Musnag with me the young Deedy Kirkham Pats or
how are you doing, my friend?
Speaker 2: I'm doing really good. I got my fresh brew with me,
hot off the Bunsen burner, and yeah, same for me.
Oh nice, cheers, sir. I'm excerious to be celebrating this
nice early edition of side Quests. It's uh, yeah, it's yeah.
I feel it's unique.
Speaker 1: We always got to mention it if we record side
Quests at a time other than Monday night, which is
normally when it happens, if it happens like early on
a Sunday, or if we have the Monday off and
we do it in the morning like this, because I
feel like it inherently changes the energy in like very
much small intangible ways, but one of them being that
we haven't finished our morning drinks yet getting through those
that were waking up here through the discussions.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I got a casey drink. What are you drinking?
Speaker 1: I just have a classic orange Pico tea going on.
Speaker 2: Oh nice, you usually do like the what was that
like English breakfast? I guess.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I swap I get like Orange Peico and the
English breakfast.
Speaker 2: Breakfast like what's other the exact same. Honest, they they're similar.
Speaker 1: For sure, but they like they have a slight difference
to them, I believe. So when I like burned through
a pack, you know, I get the big pack of
like one hundred whatever, So I've burned through all those
and I'll switch to the other one just for some variety. Yeah, okay,
that's my classic morning morning situation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, hek yeah, I'm just good old black coffee. That's yes,
that's my vice, that's my my addiction, and I fucking
love it.
Speaker 1: Yes, uh yeah, I'm excited for this this episode. We
there's really not much news or even a big topic.
We just have a bunch of games that we have
been playing to break down, so it's going to be
a good time. Just one quick shout out here at
the beginning. I forgot to show this out. It was
a couple of weeks ago now, but I guessed on
the super Switchheads podcast. Again. It's been a while since
I've been on there, but I was over there to
talk about UFO fifty because I can't talk about that
game enough. Clearly. So I went over there and talked
for another couple hours. So if you want more UFO
fifty talk, that's as a good place to go check that.
I'll put that in the link down below. Like I said,
that was a couple of weeks ago. We recorded like
a month ago, but they kind of just pre recorded
it in advance. So yeah, that's up now. People can
go check that out. And that's the perfect segue into
my UFO fifty Game of the Week because on that episode,
I don't know if we brought this game up, but
I don't think I had played it at that time,
but I wanted to talk about well, Kirklan, I got
two tactics things to talk about.
Speaker 2: Are you ready to talk tactics? Tactics?
Speaker 1: Yeah, Monday morning here. So the first game UFO fifty here,
bug Hunter. This is the second game chronologically in the collection.
Like I said, I hadn't played this until kind of recently,
so it is a fresher game for me in the
collection here, and I mean I love it. It is like
the as many things are in UFO fifty. It's like
just the most distilled version of that genre. It's like
the most simplest even like the smallest board size of
any tactics game I've ever seen before, but it's still
like jam packed with depth and like multitool design of
like every mechanic kind of has multiple ways you can
interact with or right that kind of thing. But yeah,
let me let me explain this a little bit, so
bug Hunter. It's on a six by six grid, so,
like I said, yeah, the smallest grid I've ever seen
any firearmblement of the breach, you know, very very tiny,
uh you. The goal of game is to defeat I
think it's like twenty twenty seven enemies across like within
the turn limit, which is like ten turns, nine turns
something like that, And it's pretty simple. It's turn based
in that way. The enemies don't really do attacks, they
kind of just evolve. Will explain that mechanic in a second.
But the way it works for you is you only
have one character. You are the bug Hunter, the titular
bug Hunter, and it's a really interesting mechanic Kirklan, where
you have like at the bottom of your screen you
have six I think they're called modules, and these are
just like different actions that you can take in a
specific day. Once you use one, it goes on cool
down until you end that that day turn same thing right,
and so it starts out pretty basically. You have three
of the same movement ones which you just move two
tiles up or left, right or down. You have one
jump so you can go across gaps or up up
on ledges, and then you have two basic attacks similar
as your movement U's one shoot a straight line that
can hit two enemies that are right next to each other,
or like one lob shot that you can use to
attack tiles that are higher up. And that's it. So
in your turn, you have these six actions to trying
defeed all the enemies or as many enemies as you
can on screen at a given time. And the board's
like pretty simple, like I said, six by six. There's
elevated tiles, so you can't like shoot them directly, have
to kind of get up there or use a lob shot,
and then there's like a hole and a hole you
can't walk over and enemies can follow in it and die.
And then there's also like energy capsules that are dropping
around the screen, and these are where you used to
like upgrade your your character and get stronger abilities. So
pretty simple in terms of like what can be on
the board. But yeah, like the core mechanic of it is,
as you're getting those energy capsules, they're on the side
of the screen, there's like a bunch of upgrades you
can get onto your character. But when you pick one
of those, it's replacing one of the six abilities that
you have down below. But you can get pretty tricky
with it, like you can use your movement and then
replace that movement with an attackability. So now you're essentially
getting like seven actions in one turn, right because you
use that one up and then you're buying another one
on that same turn, And you can sometimes if you
have a ton of energy, you could do that multiple
times and get like i don't know, upwards of possibly
like ten or more actions in a turn if you
do some crazy combo. But then of course that's going
to be your move set moving forward, and so you
might just grab one to use for a couple turns
in the meantime before you get like a stronger one
that costs more up up ahead. So just like a
really satisfying gameplay loop of it is a tactic name,
but it also feels very puzzly of like each turn,
trying to take out as many enemies as you can,
trying to grab as much energy as you can, but
then also like probably trying to end your turn in
a location that's not going to just totally screw over
for the next turn by limiting where you're going to
be next time. Really really satisfying, and like the enemies
are the enemy. The way enemies are designing this game
is pretty interesting. As I said, they don't attack, they
don't move, But essentially what happens is at the end
of each turn, if you there's like four enemy colors
like blue, orange, pink, and something else and whatever you
leave alive at the end of the turn, one of
those enemy types randomly, like one color is going to
evolve into the next tier. So in the first tier
they don't do anything. They're just regular little bugs. They
don't have any specific actions. But then as they evolve,
they get like certain abilities like maybe one will once
you kill it, it'll create a hole underneath it, or
maybe some will like shootout arrows once you kill them.
Some of them get like armors that they can tank
two hits of yours, and so it's kind of also
this push push and pull of like which ones do
I want to let evolve? Or maybe do I want
to target, Like maybe on the second or third turn,
do I want to target the evolved creatures? And so
they don't, you know, have these stronger abilities, but then
I'm maybe letting a one that wasn't evolved. Now I'm
gonna let that one evolve because I didn't kill it,
you know. So it's kind of this constant like push
and pull of like, wow, what's what's the best decision here?
And like I'm not gonna kill all of them? Which
one do I want to kill specifically so that I'm
not like screwing myself out on future turns. And then
they keep evolving and keep evolving, and then once they
get to like their fourth evolution is like an egg,
and if you leave the egg to the end of
the turn, that usually lose the game. It's just a
lose state. And this is a rogue leg so if
you lose, you lose, and you got to go start
back from day one, and then you're at every level
by the way, like you reset your abilities that you
get back to those same like four movement two basic
attack ones, so like each level you're kind of just
having less turns, there's more enemies, but you're always starting
with that same move set, and then you're kind of
upgrading and going through this different pathway this way. So yeah,
just just really satisfying, I think, as I mentioned, like
the part where it really uh kind of evolves, just
like just like the Bugs is kind of in two ways. One,
there's a lot of like hidden interactions because there's no
tutorial in this game, as there pretty much isn't for
anything in UFO fifty, so you kind of just have
to figure things out by trying them. But you'll figure
out certain things like Okay, maybe I don't have enough
tax to take out all these enemies, but if an
enemy is next to a hole, you can push them
into the hole. Or one of my favorites is like
if you're up on an elevated location and there's an
enemy like adjacent to it down below, you can just
like Mario stomp on them and kill them. So now
you're using a movement to get a kill and saving
that like a laser blast for a future turn, or
you can like push an enemy into an energy blast,
so you're taking away one of your upgrade modules. Essentially
you're trading that off, but you're killing an enemy in
the process. And then also energy modules when you shoot
them or attack them, they explode, and if there's another one,
they'll hit that one too and create like a chain
reaction and can destroy like half the map sometimes, but
if you're in the range of that, it's gonna hit
you too and just end your run completely. So there's
like so many ways that you can kind of push
the pole, like, ah, it'd be really nice to grab
those energy upgrades right now, but like I kind of
need to just use them to take out this enemy
in this roundabout way. So just like really interesting things
like that. You'll get like crazy chain reactions going on,
and it's just perfect. It's just every everything like that,
even like the enemy enemy powers when they're evolving, Like
I mentioned, there's the one that shoots arrows out when
it dies, but like you can use that to your
vantage because like maybe that arrow is gonna hit an
energy capsule and explode and kill some other enemy across
the screen, or the one that makes a hole under it. Yes,
you're taking away a square that you can walk on,
but now that's one more square that you can like
throw an enemy into. And get a cheap kill that way.
And I feel like every one of the evolutions has
some downside like this, like once again the armor guy,
Yes he takes two hits, but if you stomp on him,
it's still a one hit kill. If you push him
in a hole, still a one hit kill. So they
are evolving, but they're still like have these weaknesses to them,
and you kind of just figured these things out as
you usual play through it. And yeah, I've just been
like hours on this one game in the collection right now.
It's so much fun trying to get a round going
the cherry. Like the bonus objective is to get like
six wins in a row. I think I've got to
five multiple times, but I haven't quite clinched out that
six win yet. So yeah, just a super super duper
satisfying game. And as I said, like, yeah, just how
do you distill tactics into like the simplest form but
then also have just like so many interesting mechanics that
make it have tons of depth of the same time,
It's just unbelievable how well designed this this simple little
game is. It's crazy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I pulled up just some images just while you're
describing and just to get a good idea, and it's
funny in many ways. Are well, I guess there's the
tactics many ways it reminds me of Into the Breach actually,
just with like the bugs and then like the grid,
the fact that it's a smaller location, the fact that
you like knock enemies into you know, the holes or
I guess rivers it would be, and like into the
breach or something like that. So yeah, there's something just
so fantastic about tactics game on like the simple side
of it. But like it's really like it can get
hard with the mid maxine, but I feel like like
the core principle of tactics is to get that mindset,
like to try in minmax as much as you can,
especially in something like this where you only have limited
movements and attacks like how much like you said, like
get chain reactions to try and cleanse the map in
that sense, So I can definitely understand why it's addicting,
because I think that's like the most addicting part of
those tactics games, like how can I handle the situation efficiently?
And then and then you lose and then it's like okay,
what I learned from that from that situation, so I
think a rogue like game is such a good pairing
as well. Yeah, for the tactics genre.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's kind of like a newer I feel like
End of the Breach was the first tactics roguelike, you know,
because to that point, I don't know, roguelikes just kind
of evolves over time and now like any genre can
be a roguelike, but it wasn't always that way, and
I think tactics works really well for it. I mean,
you got to get the dials just right on it,
but I think something like this is really really nailing it.
And yeah, definitely a lot of Into the Breach influence
is felt here, even just like once again the enemies
they aren't attacking, but you know what they're gonna do.
Ish you know on each given turn. That's such a
big part of Into the Breaches that you have like
perfect information and then each turn new random things are
gonna pop up that you have to deal with, but
at least you can for the most part, like, Okay,
I know if I leave this enemy, there's a chance
it's gonna evolve, and so you kind of know potentially
what's gonna happen, and so I think that's a big
part of it too, is just like that amount of
knowledge that you have as a player, which is really interesting.
So yeah, great game.
Speaker 2: Love it.
Speaker 1: And then my last kind of more esoteric thought with
it is and I feel like a lot of maybe
I'm just in my own head on this, but I
think a lot of UFO fifty is like this is
like a game developer's game, you know, like it it's
there's fifty games in here. The design is very simple
but very very deep, and I feel like it's so impressive,
and I feel like a bit of imposter syndrome saying
that I'm a game developer, but like technically I am.
You know, I have bution problem. Go check it out
sheep plug and Steam. Yeah, I just released another game
jam game that I worked on. It's on itch dot io.
You can check it out called Toaster's.
Speaker 2: Very Busy Day.
Speaker 1: It's kind of a fun little adventure puzzle game. So
you can go check that out. So like, technically I'm
in that bucket. And just the the metaphor of this
game being bug hunter, which I can confirm now making
potion problem is like half the battle is finding bugs.
Squashing bugs, because that's what game development is. You make
a cool new mechanic, but then it creates four issues elsewhere,
and I feel like that's what this game is. It's like, Okay,
I could leave that bug in there, and like, it's
not really now. It maybe causes one little janky thing
to happen, but the more you leave it, it's gonna evolve,
and then eventually it's gonna interact with another mechanic you
add to a game, and then it's gonna make all
these other bugs, and it's gonna cause a chain reaction
of bugs. And then eventually, just like the bugs in
this game, they evolve to an egg and when they hatch,
they end the run, they crash the game. And that's
the same thing. If you leave this bug long enough,
eventually it'll cause a crash and that's gonna ruin everything.
And so I don't know how intentional that was, but
I find the theming very interesting, and the fact that
it's like the second one in the collection very early on,
I feel like is kind of their way of being
a bit of a metaphor of just like game development.
And I'm sure you for fifty making fifty games, the
amount of bugs that they had to hunt and squash
in the development of the eight years of this game
is probably more than any other game ever. It's insane.
So I feel like that's definitely a side of it
that I find particularly pleasing when I'm playing through it
and I kind of think about that, that kind of
meta element to it is kind of fun.
Speaker 2: No, that's awesome.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So there you go. There, there's Bug Hunter, great,
great tactics game. The next tactics game I wanted to
bring up here. It's I'm glad that we talked about.
Into the breach. There is a game called Metal Slug Tactics.
I don't know if you remember doing trailers for one. Yeah,
so pull it on their trailer or some screenshots of this.
This released last week. It's a weird one where they
had twenty twenty four on their release date calendar schedule
thing for a long time, but never had a date,
and then just like randomly, like two weeks ago, they're like, oh, yeah,
it's coming out next week, and it's also on game Pass,
which was not announced until like days before, which was
great for me because I'm back on game Pass. I'm like,
oh cool, I want to check this game out now
I can just play as part of my subscription there.
H so yeah, this game, this game is out in
the blue. Now it's out in the wild. You can
check it out. And uh yeah, I played a ton
of this over the weekend and I have a lot
of thoughts. Let's let's go through this kind of one
step at a time. First of all, Metal Slug. I'm
curious if you have any history or like, when you
hear Metal Slug, what do you what do you think
of Kirkland.
Speaker 2: I think of like a shooter, like a shooter type
game maybe, Like I definitely remember the name. I don't
know if I had necessarily played it, but I just
remember witnessing it and I picture it being like one
of those side scroller did like Big Jack Doie with
the big machine gun.
Speaker 1: Is that it? Yeah, definitely, it's that vibe. It's like
it's like contra. I feel like it kind of was
a contra like and then it kind of came its
own thing. It's a weird series. I've never played any
Metal Slug game prior to this, but weirdly I have
some nostalgia for it because I played, and this is
why I was wondering if you have this connection point.
There's a game I swears on like Mini Clip back
in the day that was just a ripoff of like
Metal Slug and Contra. I had like the same kind
of Yes, I knew, I knew you would have played
this game, but I remember playing a ton of that
game as a kid. I think it was. I was
trying to find it. It might be called Commando if
you look up an image of that. Let me know
if I.
Speaker 2: Literally googled Commandos after I pulled up the first image
of Metal Slug practice, because I was trying to like, yeah,
while you're yeah, look into.
Speaker 1: That, because I was looking at images and like, this
looks like it maybe could be the game that I'm
thinking of, but like it's not one hundred pcent familiar.
But also I haven't played that game in twenty years,
you know, so I don't know if it's, uh, if
that is the one. But it's weird that I'm like
nostalgic for a game that kind of ripped off this game,
but it still feels familiar enough that I am weirdly
a tiny bit nostalgic for what Metal Slug is, even
though I've never played one before, So I don't know,
I think that's like an important part of the framing
of it.
Speaker 2: It was Commando, it was commanded I'm gonna pull up
the image here.
Speaker 1: Nice. Yeah, that's that's such a fun deep cut poll
And apparently there was like multiple of those games, and I.
Speaker 2: Was played this game, and that's so funny. You you
you just opened my eyes to a whole nostalgia window
in my mind.
Speaker 1: Yeah, one time, I feel like we should dedicate a
side quest episode to just like talking about some of
these old flash games that we used to play, because
there's so many of them, and I forget about a
lot of them until like a game like this, I
completely forgot about until Metal Slug comes out and then
I'm thinking about it again. Yeah. Yeah, but like that
that guy, I would like the kind of dark blue hair.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like the health bar and everything.
Speaker 1: Everything is very very metal Sluggie, uh, which which is fantastic.
So yeah, I mean that's that's like my first impression
once again, just like as I could have told from
seeing the trailers, is like the pixelart in this game
is outstanding, some of the best I've ever seen. The
colors are fantastic, the details the animation. I think one
of my things I love about this is like on
the maps, there's so many little details that don't pertain
to anything actually going on, but they're just fun little details.
Like some of the levels have water, and they'll be
just like a soldier in his swim trunks sitting in
like a like a tube, just sitting on the water,
hanging out. He's not a part of the map, he
doesn't you can't interact with him, but he's just like
in the background as set set dressing. And there's so
much of that, and yeah, like the amount of work
that wanted. The pixelart of this game is outstanding. That
the sound effects and all that are really good. The
I had a real I had a rough first impression
of this game though, gameplay wise, because here's what happened.
I boot up the tutorial and and the tutorials like
here's how you move. You click on your character, you go,
you click with the right trigger whatever, you hit confirm
and then and then there's a menu that's telling you that,
and it says click B to close this menu to
do that action. So I'm like, Okay, I hit B,
nothing happens. I'm strange, like do I have to do
the action and then hit B. I mess around for
a few minutes, couldn't figure out. I'm like, this is
the first step of the tutorial and I can't do it.
What's going on? I go back to the menu, boot
up the tutorial again. Oh it was just a bug.
Speaker 2: I hit B.
Speaker 1: Now it closed it. Okay, we're good. We can move on.
I go through the tutorial. I get to the end
of the tutorial, game crashes. Ah shit. I start back.
I load the game up again. I'm like, oh man,
I have to do the tutorial again. That sucks. Boot
up the tutorial, go through it, and eventually get through
it and then no crash this time. Cool. We're all good.
I get to like the menu where like where you
pick your characters then start and start the game proper,
and I just hit B for whatever reason, and it
took me back to the menu. I'm like, oh shit,
what happened here? I can't hit continue continues grade out
what's going on? I'm like, oh, on if, I gotta start
the game and again. And eventually I realize that you
can like skip the tutorial and that new game that
area I was in, It's fine. There was nothing broken
with it, but it was like, man, this game is
ron right off the bad, Like, the menus are really weird.
The game crash for the first like in the tutorial,
which is never a good look. There was a bug
in the first tutorial mission. Not a good look. So
you know, Rough for Suppression. The menu is also crazy.
There's stuff everywhere, there's information everywhere. It's really a mess.
You can at endpoint click the right stick in and
then like hover over keywords and things to like learn
what they mean. Which it's good to be able to
learn that stuff, but it is the first you know,
hour with this game is going to be a mess
of like just figuring out how the buttons work and
how the menus are supposed to look. So yeah, Rough
for Suppression. Okay, we're fine. We get past that. I
get into the game, I figure out what's going on.
I eventually learn a little bit more about what is
happening there. So let me explain like how the game
works a bit here. So this game, surprisingly to me,
I thought this was a single player campaign situation. This
is another roguelike. It's another tactics roguelike, and this game
is I swear half into the breach half new game
mechanics and everything, but it is so close to the breach,
so you know, take a shot anytime I mentioned into
the breach into this episode, you're gonna be absolutely slammed
by the end of it. But Kirkland, first of all,
it starts out with a similar situation where there's kind
of four zones, four islands, and you can there's one
of them that's locked at the start, but you can
pick which one you want to go to at the beginning,
and just like into the breach, you can choose if
you want to go to two islands to and then
face the final boss, go to all four and then
face the final boss, and like try to end the run,
that kind of thing. So it works in that same
sort of structure where it's like, Okay, maybe my run
so far, I haven't got the upgrades I want, my
characters are pretty weak. I definitely can't challenge the final
boss area yet, so I'm gonna go to more islands,
power up my characters, get a bit better, and then
challenge it a bit later. And so it has that
ex exact same structure of like go to four islands,
you know, fight a boss at the very end. You
win or lose, you win, and then if you win,
you got you got the win, you move on to
the next thing. If you lose, you start from the beginning,
that kind of thing. So it is a roguelike in
that way. If you lose a mission at any point,
you uh, you got to restart from the very beginning.
And then it has that same sort of thing too,
where each island you go on, there's it's kind of
like a Mario looking over world, and you can pick
kind of which direction you want to go, usually have
like two or three directions you can pick, and then
once you've complete like three or four missions, then you're
challenged by like the boss level, so you beat that
one and then you move on to the next island.
So once again same structure as into the Breach, saying
roguelike kind of structure there. The way the missions work
is like each one has a objective and a bonus objective.
The main objective is like you have to complete that
to beat this level. If you don't, you straight up
lose the run. And some of them are really difficult,
like one of them you have to destroy this convoy,
which is like a truck that's just driving away from
you constantly, and it does. It has like fifty health
and early on like I don't have a way to
deal with fifty damage, like in a few turns, and
if you just leads the level, you just lose the
run straight up, Like you have to start from the
very beginning of that point. It's not just like an
into the breach, Like you can have a really bad level,
but as long as you still have power on the grid,
you can at least que into the next level, and
maybe it's looking pretty dire, but you can at least
try and make a play for it. But in this
if you don't beat the main objective, you just you
just lose instantly. And then the bonus objective is something
as it will be like get five kills with the
specific character or beat the beat the level in like
four turns. It's just some some bonus objective like that.
And then when of you complete these objectives, you're gonna
get things like upgrades for your characters, maybe a resupply
on Ammo, certain things like that. Right, so you're kind
of going through doing all that sort of stuff, and
then it seems like there is a bit more of
a a campaign like story going on where when I
finally got my first win, I you know, it's me
defeating the final boss, who is like a you know,
he's like a dictator hitler type guy. You know, this
is like a war game, right, yeah, the classic evil guy.
So you kill him, and then of course he escapes,
like at the very end, and that's how they just
to fy the roguelike structure. He escapes, you got to
do the thing again to try and track him down.
But then after I beat the game once, it kind
of introduced these what kind of feel like side quests
where you maybe start in one area and the sand
biome and you kind of have to go to a
specific spot on the map and then you'll fight some
mini boss there, and it seems like there is some
sort of structure like this where there maybe is a
way to get like an ending or like roll the credits,
you know. So even though it is a roguelike, and
it's like more than just beating one run to like
beat the game, if that makes sense, And of course
there's all sorts of unlocks and things like most roguelikes,
you're not just gonna get one win and then stop playing. Ideally,
you've played forever kind of thing, right, So yeah, it
seems like there's something going on there, but I haven't
made it that far. I've got a few wins, but
not enough to like see what that ending kind of
situation would be like. So that's kind of like the
meta structure of the game, zooming in even further down
to like the actual gameplay of it. Similar situation too
into the breach or even at midnight suns where you
have three characters that you're putting into every map and
then there's enemies all over the place. As I said,
you have to complete the main objective. And that's where
I think it works a bit differently, and where I
think there is a good amount of variety to it
is that the objective of each mission could be very different,
where it could just be get to a certain area
like exfiltrate the mission. It could be defend these people
or this tent or something. It could be kill all
the enemies. It could just be like survive the onslaught
for five turns, could be destroyed the convoy could be
escort this person over here. So you get like a
ton of variety of like mission objectives, which is what
makes it feel a little bit different to something like
into the breach, which is always kind of like the
same objective. Then there's like bonus things you can do
on the side, right, But I think that that's one
thing that kind of reminds me of Fire Emblem Path
of Radiance, the GameCube Fire and Bloom game. Why I
think that will always be one of my favorites in
that series is because it had such a variety of objectives,
whereas I feel like modern Fire and Blom games, it's
always just kill the boss at the end of the level,
or kill all the enemies. It's one of those two,
and those always end up virtually being the exact same thing.
Whereas Path of Radius had like, yeah defense like Horde
mode kind of missions, it had escort missions, it had
like get your characters to the certain exfiltration point, and
then it also had the classics, killed the boss, sees
the throne, that sort of thing. And so I know,
that's something I really enjoy with these games, and I think,
especially for a roguel like that's a great thing to
add because that'll just add like a kind of infinite
amount of replayability in a sense, because you have so
many different objects that you're doing, but it means that
you can, like some of them, beat a level in
like two turns. That's my record right now. I've beaten
some levels in two turns because it's like you have
to kill these three specific targets, and the way the
map worked out, maybe it worked out perfectly where I
could just easily take them out and boom. You just
move on very quick and easily, and so that works.
And then some of them where it's like defeat every
enemy or survive for a certain returns, those ones can
take longer. It can take click up to a half
an hour. Some of the boss levels can take even
longer than that. They can be pretty spicy in the
length of it. So yeah, similar situation turn base. You
move your character, you have an action and a movement
each turn, and then there's ways you get like bonus
actions and all that. Here's where the game finally gets
to be a little bit more unique and stand out.
And this is something I've never seen in any tactics
game I've played, and I've played a lot of them
in my life, is that the whole game is kind
of based around movement in a sense where when when
you move when you move in this game, you're doing
two things. You're building up dodge on your character, and
then you're also building up adrenaline. So dodge it just
straight up makes you immune to damage. So if you
if I move my full length like six or seven
tiles with a character, I might build up let's say
three dodge and then if an enemy does three damage,
they will hit me, but they will do zero damage.
It's very simple in that way. And then also if
you move to like cover, because there's a cover system
in this game, so kind of similar like X Calm
or Mario and Rabbits in terms of tactics, that.
Speaker 2: Will all just also just get Rabbits is a tactics game.
Speaker 1: Mario Rabbits is a tactics game.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, I did not know that till right now. Okay,
carry on, Sorry I had to stop.
Speaker 1: You should check them out because they go on deep sale.
I got the first one for like fifteen bucks on
Switch and it's really cool. It's a really really good game.
I hate the Rabbits. They're the most annoying thing ever.
They're like minions to me. But I that game is
really cool. It's a really interesting game. Yeah, Tactics same
where he plays Mario and Donkey kongin that was the
game I just.
Speaker 2: Like wrote off like not for me. Yeah, I'm never
gonna look into that at all, but that just made
me a little bit more interesting.
Speaker 1: Okay, Yeah, it's very XCM like, it's like that's that's
kind of the DNA that it falls to when it
comes to tactics, which you also trick to this because
I think you typically have like three characters in that,
which you know three characters here as well. That seems
to be a trend for a lot of tactics games.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you could like move to cover and get this
bonus dodge, So now you're getting like by default two
block from the cover, but then also this dodge that
you're building.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: And then also when you're moving, you're building up adrenaline
as I said, and that's what fuels special abilities. So,
as I mentioned, on each turn, you get a movement
and then you get a basic action, which is like
shooting your gun. But then also these special actions are
kind of outside of that. They could be a buff,
they could be something that gives you even more dodge,
They could be a summon. Certain characters have summons. They
could just be like a shockun blast, you know, it
could be like any number of different things. And so
you're building up that adrenaline the further you go. So
you're incentivized in this game every turn with all three
of your characters to move the full distance of your movement,
which no tactics game ever has that, right, Like maybe
there's some subclass or something that's based on moving a
lot or like you know, and fire around them, like
give a pegasust and they can move so much and
fly that's like, okay, I'm gonna move them a lot
and trying to like take out flank enemies and things
like that. But it's a really interesting mechanic to implement here,
which I think is cool because, as you mentioned, Metal
Slug as a series is kind of known as like
this run and gun series, and so I think it's
cool that they took like, hey, what's the DNA of
Metal Slug? What does it mean to be a Metal
Slug game? And how do we turn that into a
tactics game, which is so antithetical to like this fast
paced action game, which you know, tactics the slowest paced
games ever, And like, how do we make that mechanic,
how do we find the bridge? And I think they
found a really damn interesting bridge, which is like a
crazy thing because normally these maps are pretty small, right,
So like, if you're moving full distance, the odds are
you're moving close to an enemy, but you also have
that push push and pull of like, O, hey, I'm
moving close to an enemy, but I'm also granting this dodge.
I can just straight up tank that they're hit that
they have. Also, all the characters only have maximum ten
health and they can never have more than ten health.
You can heal, but like you aren't super tank. The
enemies on average do like between two to five damage.
So it's like, if you're not using that dodge mechanic,
you could die super duper quickly. And that's not good
because you only have three units and so one of
them is down. That's gonna make it a lot more difficult.
Now maybe for your bonus objective for the level, it
doesn't matter. You can still accomplish that if the unit dies.
But yeah, it's like that is a really really interesting thing.
I think the other thing too, is like this game
doesn't have telegraphed attacks in the way that into the
breach does or even like fire emblem tells you these
days where opponent's gonna hit a lot of games do.
This game does not have that, so I think it
makes a little harder to part sometimes like what an
enemy is going to do, but you can at least
be like, Okay, only two people are in range of
my guy, I'm building four dodge, I'm behind cover, so
they're not gonna be able to kill me or deal damage
to me, So you can kind of plan out what
the enemy is gonna do. But for the most part,
I think it's like every turn is that improvs session
of figuring out what you're gonna do and how you
can kao the most enemies or complete your bonus objective
in the most amount of time or most efficient way.
That kind of thing so really cool, uh, really really
interesting core mechanic there. And then the other kind of
part of it is that each character has two weapon types.
They have a basic weapons us usually like a pistol
or like a knife, and that you have infinite ammo
you can use that as much as you want. And
then their secondary weapon is gonna be like a stronger
thing usually has like an AoE to it, like a
grenade launcher or maybe a shotgun blast that kind of thing,
but that has AMMO to it, so you can only
use that as many times and that persists. Like between levels,
you do not get a free resupply, so you kind
of have to plan out. I don't really if i
don't have to use this chakum blast, I'm never going to.
I'm gonna save it for like a boss fight or
a harder mission, or when I'm really on the ropes.
And then, as I mentioned, sometimes a bonus objective will
be to resupply that AMMO. So maybe if you know
that the mission you're doing is gonna give you AMMO back,
you'll just start blasting, you know about all your strongest
stacks because you know you're gonna get them back at
the end of the level. So that's really interesting. I
really like the push and pull of that. And then
the other thing, which is fire armble games they've done
this before other tactics games, is sync attacks are a
big part of this too. So if my character has
a gun and is in range of enemy A, and
my character B runs up and attacks the enemy, and
then my other character is still in range, then they're
both going to attack that guy at the same time,
and they'll use their basic weapons so you don't have
to worry about them using up the AMMO. And so
that's like if you factor in like the movement mechanics
and the sync attacks where you're always wanting your units
to kind of be triangulating a position. Also the fact
that you're moving your maximum distance, that becomes like the
real puzzle of the game is like I gotta move
as much as I can, but I gotta comple my
attacks together. But I also got to think about my AMMO.
And so that's where kind of the core gameplay turn
to turn. The interesting things are in this game. So
a really cool mix mechanics, like I said, kind of
like half a ship mix of other tactics games and
interesting things there and like a lot of into the
breach influence, but then also half like let's innovate and
try some new interesting mechanics, at least new to me.
And I've played, you know, thirty Tactics teams ever in
my day, I've played a lot of them. I've never
seen some of these things, so I think it's it's
a really really cool combination of mechanics.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I I like the like the movement incentive
mechanic to it because I find a lot of the times,
especially in like I don't know, something like fire AMM
or something like like you see like the enemies like
attack range, and it's like, Okay, I don't really want
to go in there with like one guy until.
Speaker 1: I'm ready, So I always right on the edge.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I h my troops that maybe get like my
beefest guy like just in there support around my other
troops so that you know, set up for a good
counter attack. But like in this, like I I and
how you're mentioned like just keeping that core element of
what like a metal slug game is like where you're
literally just running gunny. I I like that because it's
just like balls to the walls, run it and try
and just dodge these these bullets, and that's that's that's
the gameplay mechanics. So what actually rewards you for playing
that way? And it's it's a very different way that
I personally play tactics games because I just go slow
broad the waters, you know, like it makes you.
Speaker 1: Rewire your brain on the tactic side of things, which
I think it's such a cool thing that they were
able to achieve it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, totally. So. Yeah, I remember when we first
were talking about this, whether it was I don't know,
it was a games fester.
Speaker 1: So probably I'm guessing because this is a switch game
as well, so I'm guessing it was intended direct. I
feel like that would be a good pocket for a
game like this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I remember just liking the
art style. What type of camera is this as well?
I've always like when it's isometric. I have such a
soft spot for isometric games. And it's funny we're bringing
up Commando Too or whatever it was the game have
you ever heard of the series Commandos? Specifically, the one
I played was Commando's Behind Enemy Lines. I'm pretty sure
I had this game like before Windows XP, like, like
it's an older style game, yeah, but it has this
isometric I do camera to it. I had no idea
how to play it as a kid, but I remember
playing the ship out of it like I just like
would go like through. I love just like the art style.
I guess this game is beautiful.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I love the visuals of this game for.
Speaker 2: Way back in the day, man like it came out
in nineteen ninety eight. The commandos behind enemy lines. But
just like the attention to detail of all, like the
drawings and just just the scale of everything. I just
I always just appreciate the art of that, and I
like how you know, Metal Metal Slick tact is a
little more cartoony, but it's still there's just so much
detail that they have to like put into the world.
You already mentioned some of like the just you know,
the things in the background they can't really interact with,
but it's just adding more for fleshed outness, I guess
of the world. And the other example I had is
that shadow tactic scheme, I remember you and I talked about.
I played a little bit of it, but I like,
haven't haven't given it a good a good go. But again,
just like, the isometric view is just it's really really beautiful.
So I really appreciate games that have that, and Project
Zomboid is actually pretty much all isometric view, So yeah,
there's something about that that camera for me, I just
I just love But yeah, this game sounds really really awesome,
and I mean there's there's no shortage of tactics gas
out there in the world right now, so it's it's
nice that we're kind of in this golden era of
tactics games. But yeah, no, this looks sweet.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've I've looked into because of course I love
isometric as well. I think as a camera angle on
it for tactics games in general, it's it's a it's
a classic combination, and so I want to try and
developing things like that. But I feel like game logic
doesn't normally work on an isometric view like that, so
you're more like building the game in a classic grid,
but then like the way the player sees what's actually
going on is from the isometric view, So it's it's
a little bit more work where you kind of have
to the game. You're like the thing you're actually developing,
and then like what the player sees is going to
be like completely opposite, so you kind of have to
think outside the box a little bit. So someday look
forward to symmetric games from from yours truly. Yeah, some
other things here. So this game does have height, Like
there's there's you can jump up squares, you can jump
down squares, and that's kind of there's limitations to that.
There's even like certain areas where there's a grappling hook
to get up, and so that's something that feels very
final Fantasy Tactics as the inspiration point. There of course
a ton of other games I've done it nowadays, but
I think that works really well. Sometimes the maps can
be huge, like sometimes they're just a small little arena
and it's like just a battle, and like especially those
survival ones where it's like survive five turns and the
map's really tiny, and once again you try to move
as much as you can and also trying to deal
with how small this map is can be tricky. But
then also sometimes yeah, as you mentioned, like the escort
mission with the or taking out the convoy where that
truck's driving away, like more and more map will be
added as you're going through, so you won't necessarily see
the whole map from the beginning, which is interesting. So
at least it is like some really huge maps, which
is cool. I a I wanted to share this one anecdote,
like a completely broken strategy that I had so these
special abilities. That's where characters really get fleshed out, and
that's where, like the start of a run, characters are
pretty basic. They don't have a ton of variety to them,
but as you're upgrading them with passive abilities and then
active abilities that you can use. That's where they get
more specialize in each character. There's like nine playable characters.
At the start of each run, you pick which three
you want to do that run with, and they each
kind of like grow in their own ways. One of
them has this ability where he can but a pretty
big range, like within six tiles. He can grab an
enemy within six tiles and pull them towards him, and
if he kills them, he gets a bonus action, which
means you can pretty much just do that over and
over again and it only costs three adrenaline and you
can build up like I think, I don't know if
there is a limit, but I've had up to like twenty.
Like sometimes if I just am not using my abilities,
I'll just build up a shit ton of adrenaline. It
persists across turns and all that. And so I had
this crazy run with this guy where after you move
a couple turns, you know you're building up like close
to like twelve adrenaline, and then a couple more turns
later you're building up close closer to twenty. And I
would just move to the center of the map with
this guy and just use that ability, and he had
so many buffs that would just allow him to do
bonus damage. When he does that too, he pulls an enemy,
and if my enemy's there and is able to sink
an attack because they're in range, they'll attack as well.
So I would just pull every single enemy into me
and instantly kill them and in one turn kill like
sometimes upwards of like eight enemies because I just played
every single guy in instantly killing them. So I needless
to say I won that run. That doesn't help me
kill the bosses, but it helped me kill everything else
in the level so that I could just focus on
the boss and not be worried about other stuff. Uh,
And it was insane. So that was that was a
super duper fun run. And of course, just like any roguelike,
that's kind of the that's kind of the ideal, right
in like a binding VIZC or something too, is just
getting to a point where your character is so busted
and broken that you can't lose the game, and maybe
so broken that you just crashed the game because of
how powerful you are. Like that, that's like where the
fun comes in. So I guess I should I should
talk about the bos bits a little bit, because that's
that's something that also I feel like it's quite different
from other tactics games. So in into the Breach a
boss battle, it's pretty much just here's a bug that
is purple and has more health than is even stronger.
But it's a similar version what you've seen before, so
it kind of fits within that framework pretty well. The
boss face in this game are much different. They are
essentially like a Kaiju battle. The boss is this huge
thing that takes up you know, sometimes like twenty tiles
or something. They're huge. They're kind of usually on the
side of the map, kind of in any game that
has like a giant enemy, you know how like you
can usually only see like their torso and they're like
swinging their arms at you. It's kind of like that.
And so each each one of the biomes has a
set boss that is appearing at the end of there,
and they do all sorts of crazy attacks and it's
and they have a ton of HP, right, and so
the start of the mission it's like really overwhelming because
there's enemies everywhere and there's the boss. So usually it's
like that thing where you're clearing out a bunch of
enemies and then you can target down the boss. But
then every few turns they'll kind of reset the board,
take you to a new spot, and then it kind
of adds more enemies on the board. So it's this
thing where you're trying to bost down the boss as
quick as you can, but also if you just let
the enemies grow and reinforce, then they're just gonna take
you out too. So they are pretty engaging, pretty good
boss fights. I think my main issue with them is
that they are pretty much the same every time all
four of the bosses, Like each island has its one boss,
it's always the same map, and there might be like
a new box year that wasn't there before, or like
the enemy locations might be different, or of course you're
gonna have a different build that kind of thing, but
it's always the exact same situation, where like there's one
that's a boat and you start on the lower left
side and you kind of got to go around the boat,
circling it and try and take out the boat, and
it's it's always kind of the same. And the boss
fights are the ones that I don't feel like are
cheeseable like you or you could choose them, but they're
always going to take quite a long time just because
tanky the bosses are, and so it ends up being
this thing where I feel like that's what kind of
drags down the runs a little bit, is having to
do these boss fights over and over again because they
don't really change, they don't get different, and maybe they
will on higher difficulties or the more runs you get in,
but so far across like the seven or eight runs
that I've done, I've not really seen much variation in them,
and so, like I said, that is kind of the
one point that kind of drags the rest of the
game down a little bit. So it's a bit of
a bummer because the rest of the levels, like even then,
I am seeing a lot of repetition in levels, but
you know, they'll change up your spawmn points, they'll change
up the enemies on there, so there's enough variety, but
I just kind of feel like the boss fights are
the one the one weak point. And there are mini
bosses or other side quest bosses that you can do
and those are fun and unique and different from what
I've seen so far, but yeah, the big bosses are
a little bit disappointing so far. That would be my,
I think, my main criticism of the game, other than
like the bugs that have occurred so far. Yeah, and
then what else do I want to say about this?
I guess in terms of progression, there's kind of there's
in run progression, then there's like metagame progression between runs.
So in runs, you're getting weapon mods, you're upgrading your
weapons with different upgrades, things like new ammo or maybe
your weapon will now slow or maybe we'll do more
damage or more hits, that kind of thing. And then
you're getting those passive abilities and special abilities as I mentioned,
for your characters. That's all good. There good character variety.
Like one character is like a summoner type. She has
two summons to someone like a little robot who takes
your primary weapons, so it's kind of like you can
now move him in for sync attacks. And then she
still has her secondary weapon, which she can do some
cool things. Or she has one that's just pretty much
like the suicide bought that will fly across the map.
He's like a little it looks like a little doll
on wheels and it just rides across the map. And
then just like self destructs and does a bunch of damage,
which of course also works with sync attacks if your
teammates are in range, that's cool. One of them is
definitely more of like a tank mainly focused kind of guy.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: Some of them are more support like healer type people.
So there's a good amount of variety across them. And
then each character too, like you can pick their weapons
set at the beginning of run that each one of
them has four combinations or it's weapons plus special abilities,
so that even within characters, within the nine characters, there's
like little ways that you can kind of change or
tweak them between runs, so that adds a good amount
of variety there. There's other things in the map, like
there's tons of interactable objects in the map, like you
can break through certain walls. There's destructible environments. There's a
classic like there's a crane holding in much of boxes
and you can hit that crane then will drop the
boxes and instacill enemies. And then one thing that's really
interesting is there's vehicles in this game too, which are
pretty much more they're more like mechs rather than like
cars and stuff. There is cars, but those just blow
up but there's there's mechs that drop around the map
and you can inhabit them and then you deal a
shit ton of damage. But then there's also one guy
who like summons it's pretty much like who's son what's
her name? How so named Miku? You know like that
that that that like holographic like pop star.
Speaker 2: Like oh yes, but yeah, yeah, I've seen her.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, he pretty much summons her and you can
just like summon her from a range into a mech
and then she'll just pop off, which is which is
really interesting. I don't know where that like, I apparently
these metal slug games there's like aliens and like in
one of the areas is like ancient Egypt sort of vibe,
and there's like mummies that are attacking you. So you
get some pretty crazy enemy types in there, in there
and whatnot. So yeah, a lot of good variety there.
And this is funny too. Do you know what a
metal slug is? Do you know what the name refers.
Speaker 2: To metal slug? Is that like a shotgun shell or
something like a slug.
Speaker 1: You might think, But funnily enough, a metal slug is
is a mech. It's one of the mechs. It's one
of the names of the mech, which I find funny
because that was also you know, I hadn't played Metal
gearante Oil this earlier this year, and it's like, what
is a metal A metal gear is just a giant mech,
and that's like the mcguffin of the games usually, So
I'm like, it's kind of weird that Metal Slug has
a similar name. It's sharing the word metal, but then
also it's named after like a mech, which seems like
a very minor part of what the games are. So
I don't know, maybe there's a bit of homage Kojima
there with the name of a metal Slug, But anyway,
sometimes a metal Slug will drop on the map and
you can inhabit it and then pop off a little bit,
so that's cool. I think I've kind of mentioned everything
that I wanted to. I have one last point, but
any any questions about like some mechanics of this. I
feel like I've just talked your ear off here. But
it's an interesting game. Obviously, There's there's clearly a lot
of passion behind me playing this because anytime there's a
tactic scene that comes up, especially when that's greatly inspired
by End of the Breach. I'm going to be all
over it. So this is a fun game to play
this weekend.
Speaker 2: I find when, like a lot of tactic schemes or
just games in general, if they if they have a
unique mechanic, whether it's like the sync shot or you're
mentioning like the anime lady that just jumps in, like
you know like that, like there's certain ways to tackle
tackle things. Do you find that the game kind of
incentivize you, like, hey, this is how you kind of
beat this level, is by using this sort of mechanic
or is it just kind of here's your tools. You
can really tackle it however you want, Like there's many
different ways to beat each level, which I imagine it
would be because it's kind of how tactics games go.
It's kind of up for the user.
Speaker 1: Uh well, I think that's where the uh the objectives
of the map comes into play, where you know the
objective of the map. It could just be as I mentioned,
like get to this exfiltration point, so you could sat
not even kill an enemy in that map. You could
just run to the exit and it's pretty far away,
so it's gonna be hard for you to do that,
but like maybe if your build is leaning towards that,
that could be possible. And so I kind of feel
like that's where the variety comes in of like in
the way that like, hey, there's a bonus objective, but
then also like the enemy placements are gonna be randomized
and stuff, so it's not like there is one puzzle solution.
Then also, all your characters have different abilities. You might
be coming into a level and like maybe you even
just have like it's different than in the breach, which
has like set squads, right, and then there is the
custom one where you can play any combination. But in
this like given that you pick your three characters, you
can kind of pick how your run's gonna go to
a certain extent. But then you're also gonna be based
on like what the upgrades are giving you that you
can choose from, right, So I don't know, I don't
feel like it is ever like narrowed down. Now, if
there is a metal stock on the map, I do
want to grab that, but maybe it's so far out
of the way that it's kind of against the strategy
of the objective to go there. So yeah, I don't know,
I don't. I don't feel like there is just, yeah,
like one set way to beat these given levels. I
feel like there's enough variety in there, and yeah, just
between your characters and the enemy placements and like, as
I said, even like the spawn points change on these levels,
even if you've seen that same level before. So I
feel like, yeah, I don't, I don't. I haven't felt
like that yet. You know, maybe after a few hours
it could feel that way. I do feel with the bosses,
that's maybe where it does feel a bit samey in
that way, because the maps are always the same and
you're kind of be kind of gonna be kind of
doing somewhat the same thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess issue with it being kind of similar
for each yeah, because it's just like a big mech
type enemy that you're fighting every time, so it's pretty
similar strategies there. And then I, uh, the other what
was the one you mentioned? There was one objective where
you have to like stop a convoy or something like
stop it from escaping, right it's got fifty HP. Is
there like unique ways that you can like, I don't know,
slow it down to like add more time to like
the like well, I don't know, shootout a tire or something,
and then you just buy more time for yourself or
is it just no, you just got to destroy it,
and that's just as simple as it is.
Speaker 1: I so far, I've not found a way. Now, maybe
I should, because I feel like sometimes there's been like
a box in this way and I'll just fucking plow
through that. The thing is too. One thing that you
could use your to your advantage here is like the
convoys that's going along it. You know, it tells you
the four tiles that's going to move into and it
deals like ninety nine damage is infinite damage to those tiles.
So if you can get enemies to go into those tiles,
it'll kill the enemies for free for you and the convoy.
I believe it moves first, so it'll move before an
enemy does its action. And there's some characters that have abilities.
As I mentioned that reap is other enemies, and so
I think that's maybe one way you're supposed to do it.
The other thing is too and I started specing into
this when I was giving the options. Sometimes a little
weapon mod that it's called shelling, I believe, and that
makes you deal double damage to uh, like inanimate objects,
so like trucks and like buildings and things. So if
you expecton of that, you're gonna deal a lot more
damage to it. So so far I haven't found a
way to slow it down. But there are ways that
you can optimize your damage or optimize the level around
that kind of thing too. So yeah, I think there
there are some ways to get creative, and I'm sure
there's other ones that I haven't even thought of yet,
or maybe certain characters have abilities that I just haven't
discovered yet that will help me. But you know, the
thing is, when you're looking at the map in that
Mario Overworld situation of picking much mession want to do,
it's gone to the point where if I'm early on
in a run and I don't have those upgrades yet
and I click on the mission and I can preview
it and see that it's a calm, it's store the convoy,
I just won't go there, even if it's good rewards.
I'm like, I'm not gonna be able to beat the level,
so there's no I'm not gonna get rewards if I
lose the run, so I'm just gonna go elsewhere. So
that's The good thing too, is you can just straight
up choose to ignore it. Now, that might not one
hundred percent because the last world, like the the Final
Biome where the final boss always is that one is
more linear, like you have to do three missions and
then the final boss, but you can't pick which missions
those are. However, that is that the point where you're
going to be further in your run, you're probably gonna
upgrade that upoint. So if you do have to do
a convoy mission, hopefully you're stronger at that point to
defeat that kind of thing. So I think it's always
good to keep in mind, like, Okay, I want to
get a shelling upgrade on some of my characters in
case I have to deal with that sort of thing.
So there are some ways around it, yeah, in maybe
a roundabout ways. Yeah.
Speaker 2: My, I've just been like looking through some more like
still images and stuff, and I absolutely just love like
the design of some of these things. Like there's like
this one it looks like a ship with just like
so many different like artillery guns and stuff on it,
where it's just like so dense with how much stuff
is packed on that boat. It's kind of got like
a house moving castle esthetic. Yeah, there's just so much
like stuff going on in there. And yeah, I really
like the designs of all this stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like I said, like, there's like a thousand more
pixels on that boat than there needs to be in
terms of art, you know, like they went so far
above what they needed to. But I think that's just
one that's like what the series is. It's known for
having really great detailed pixel art, but also adds so much,
add so much character to like, Yeah, it makes a
boat have a personality because it's so like, yeah, movie,
it's like it's moving around, right, Okay. My last point
on this game, and I save this to last specifically,
is that yesterday, it was two days ago, I was
doing a run and I finally to unlock the higher difficulties.
You have to beat a run on the earlier ones.
You also unlock characters in a variety of ways. So
I had done a few runs. I want a few
runs to unlock a bunch of characters, and then I
was like, okay, I'm ready for that higher difficulty. So
I jumped out the difficulty and because it's the higher difficulty,
I'm like, I am going to go for all four
Islands because I want to get as many upgrades as
I can before I fight that final boss to make
sure I can do it. I'm in, I'm going through runs,
going great, getting some good builds. Everything's going well for me.
I'm in the final area, the city area. I get
to like the second third mission there, and the game crashes.
Now the game auto saves frequently, so I'm like, Okay,
I'm not worried yet. Boot up the game again, hit continue,
starts loading, crashes. Oh, close the game again, turn my
Xbox off, click buttons of the menu continue loads, crashes, crashes, crashes, crashes.
So this run is now thrown to the wolves. This
it sucks because it's the higher difficulty. I would have
unlocked some stuff. I think I would have unlocked the
last character that I haven't got yet. Yeah, I can
get over that. But now it's in the back of
my head that anytime I do a run of this game,
I could spend in This run probably took me about
three hours. I could spend three hours on a run
and the game could crash and there's nothing I can
do about it, and all that progress is gone, And
you know, I'm playing the game for fun. And it
is a fun game, but I do want my upgrades too,
you know, I'm playing this game to like unlock things
and see things. Yeah, and so I think what I've decided.
I had a ton of fun playing this game for
probably like fifteen hours this weekend. I ham on it,
but I think I'm gonna put it down. I think
I'm gonna come back when because as I mentioned, the
p tutorial is bugged to hell. It was crashing, bugs
aren't working. I've encounted other bugs. I've been on the subreddit.
People are reporting all sorts of bugs. There's bugs all
over the place. The switch performance is apparently dog shit.
I'm playing it on Xbox of course with game Pass.
But I think at this point I like this game enough.
I think it's interesting enough, and I'm not too far
in in terms of progress that I'm gonna put it down.
I'm going to come back in a few months when
ideally all this stuff is patched out, at least the
crashes that are run ending crashes, And I think I
want to pick it up on Switch too when that
eventually comes out, Hopefully the performance is better there. This
is the kind of game I don't want to play
on my TV. I want to play it henheld. I
want to play it on the go. I want to
play it while I'm watching something on TV. Just like
Into the Reach. I've never played on my it on
my switch. I've never played it on the big screen.
It's not that kind of experience for me. Even though
this game is beautiful and it looks great on a
big screen, I want to play it on the go.
So I think that would be my recommendation for everyone.
I just, you know, praise this game for forty five minutes,
but this game is super buggy right now. Do not
play this game right now. Come back later when they
have fixed the issues, because it feels like I'm a
beta tester, and I don't want to be a beta tester.
I want to play the full game. So yeah, that
was unfortunately the last straw for me. And it sucks because,
like from the tutorial to that crash, I had a
couple of minor bugs but nothing really much of an issue.
So I thought, Okay, it was just the tutorial's buggy.
That's fine, I can get away with that. But yeah,
it's it just sucks to spend three hours on a
run and then have it thrown away like that, so
it's too bad, and you know, it's a roguel like
Rolegs usually don't give you great saving options, right because
they don't want you to save them because it's roguelike.
Your consequences are supposed to matter because of that, Like
this game only has that one auto save point rather
than like usually a game will have like three or
four auto saves that you can load back to a
prior one if like this, layer one is bugged out, right,
So it all comes back to bug Hunter and the
fucking bugs that grow into eggs and hatch and crashes
and end the run or in this case, end me
as a player playing this video game for the time being.
So you gotta you gotta fix those bugs. People, You
gotta you gotta gotta hunt those bugs. You gotta take
them out. There you go. There's my thoughts on Metal
Slug Tactics. A really great time, really interesting, great game.
I'm excited to come back to it later, but it's
not ready yet. It's still in the oven, and I
bit into it too soon, and still it's still raw
on the inside. Unfortunately.
Speaker 2: Oh it's so frustrating though I've been there many times.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there is.
Speaker 2: I think a good example for me would be, you know,
come back to my good old classic Warhammer if I
do like do like I don't know, like a like
a thirty minute battle that was like a slog and
I barely win it, and then the game crashes and
then like it doesn't save like right after the battle.
It'll save once you get back to the campaign map.
And I'm like, Okay, I'm not gonna play this for
two weeks now, you know, like I don't even want
to think about this battle. I know I can beat it,
but like I don't want to have to go through
that again right away. Like I need like a buffer
period before I jump back in there. But it's right,
I've been there.
Speaker 1: It is rough. Wow, I talked about that a lot
longer than I expected to. That was that was a
great discussion. I love talking about tactics for the first
hour of side Quest. How about we take a break.
We need a break. After that, We'll be right back
to talk about more video games. All right, we are back, Kirkland.
I know you have two games, and I want to
hear about Hitman. Talk to me about Hitman. Baby, what's
going on in the world of Hitman. So yeah, hit Man,
or sorry, I should say, in the World of assassination,
the World.
Speaker 2: Of Assassination hit Man. Yes, So we dabble a little
bit in the twenty four hour stream. You know, I
did the Chaotic one, one of the highlights.
Speaker 1: Of the stream. It was fifteen minutes, but that was
one of my favorite fifteen minutes off for the twenty four.
Speaker 2: Hours, blindly mumbling through this mansion trying to find my marks.
But yeah, I know it was. It was really fun.
I really really just loved what I was playing there.
And then I think that was like just the free
like I don't know, because on PlayStation the catalog or whatever,
maybe it was a monthly game like they have the
first hit Man. I know, it's all like a collection,
but like it wasn't always a collection. So if you
owned one of the games, you still would have owned
one of the games. And yeah, I believe the one
that we were playing on Travis's system there it was
it was hit Man one for the PS four, like
like that version, which of course is the same one
that I had on the PlayStation catalog. So after the stream,
you know, I downloaded, I'm like, oh, I want to
I want to jump into some hitmn here. So I was.
I was playing through that and did a couple of
missions there, and I'm like, this game is so fucking good.
This is like, this is such a great game, Dylan.
I got the whole game. I got the whole hit
Man's World Assassination combo I and then of course with
that it came with like the PS five version of it.
So it's just like a little bit like Clear and
just just runs a lot nicer on the newer system.
And then of course the big thing there is I
have access to everything. Now. I haven't done any like
the Freelancer. I'm not gonna do that till I.
Speaker 1: Think you should. Yeah, master quote unquote master the maps
as they're meant to be played, and then jumping into Freelancer.
I think that's the way to do it.
Speaker 2: For sure. But this game is so sking good man.
I I truly have a soft spot in my heart
for the hit Man franchise, Like hit Man Coding forty seven,
that was one of like the first like PC games
I had as a kid, and I just love that
game so much. That one was more of like something
like this where you just get a contract and like
there's not really a story to it. I think by
the end they kind of like implement a story aspect
to it. I don't know if it's going to be
the same for this this.
Speaker 1: There is a story, but who care.
Speaker 2: Yes, Hitman Absolution I think is the biggest like story
one where it was like very linear and it's a
very like personal story.
Speaker 1: Hitment three Maps is where they implemented more story tying
things together. But even then, it's like, yeah, that's not
what I'm here for.
Speaker 2: There's like cut scenes in between like some of the missions,
and it like incentivizes you to do like of course,
like in an order, which I have been doing, but
these like cut scenes, I don't really know what's going on,
and I don't really care. I'm kind of just in
it for the actual gameplay aspect of it. But yeah, know,
I love Hitman Absolutions so much. I think I have
like one hundred hours of that game on Steam, and
that is not a game that you really need one
hundred hours on. Like, of course you can replay the
missions and do it in different ways, but like it
is a linear game, so like you're going through the
story in that way, but yeah, to jump in here
and just all of like the like the new mechanics
that they of course have in every hit Man game.
Of course they're adding new stuff that you can do,
and it's just it's just so satisfying. I think, like
going into a mission and just having like a blank slate.
And I don't know how you you do it on
your playthroughs, but for me, whenever I'm doing like my
first assassination, I gotta get the fiber wire kill. I
gotta get the barad that that's like my like, that
is my strategy. I gotta find a way to garat
these people with the fib because that's like.
Speaker 1: The class hard sometimes it is around it with bodyguards
and stuff.
Speaker 2: But as you know, with these like later hit Man games,
they do a good job at like giving you like
a reward when you like get an assassinating assassination in
that way, so it kind of like helps you out
and be like, Okay, you can kill them in this way.
But that's been like the classics since since the original
hit Man is using like the piano wire to get
the execute. So for all of my assassinations on my
main targets, I'm going for just with the piano wire
kill and.
Speaker 1: Then when you don't have that and you have to
like knock an enemy out and then move them. Yeah,
I always feel so clunk. It's like, man, I want
the growut where I can just drag them along the
ground in a closet or something.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, so it's been It's been very, very fun
going through them. I've only done it a couple of
times where I've like finished the mission and I'm like,
that didn't seem as clean. Let's go through it again
and just just really get this a nice, like clean
execution kill here. I imagine there's ways to, like in
the older games, you could always you know, the classic
Kitman mechanic of getting a costume and the skies. I
know there's ways to like beat it with just your
original suit. I know it's a lot harder because you.
Speaker 1: Can't like a challenge run.
Speaker 2: Yeah exactly. I remember getting that one and like hit
Man Absolution, like when I beat that game like four
different times, like the hardest difficult thing, Like, I can't
want to add more difficulty to it. I eventually want
to get those runs too. But that's so nice about
this game. It's just like a blank canvas and you
go in there and something too that really it shouldn't
have surprised me, but it did. Is just like like
how big each level is and how many moving parts
there are, Like I think the very maybe it's the
first mission in the game of I guess hit Man
one is like the like the Paris Gala where it's
like a big like art show and there's so many
NPCs in that level, or the one where you're in
uh Buda Peste or something like that where the Civil
Wars America.
Speaker 1: Yeoh, Morocco, Morocco is that one yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, where you have like the Sweden Embassy and then
like like the Dictator guy and there's just so many
people when you're going through like the bazaars and it's
just so dense and like just crowded, and I don't know,
I feel like I'm playing like Assassin's Creed, like just
going through like like the crowds and whatnot. And I
think because I've played like of course the older Hitman
on older tech, like they couldn't really like just get
the power to like put in all these NPCs that
really feel like they're I guess you get like the
classic NBCs that are just kind of doing their own.
But they feel like it's a living, breathing world and
just so many ways to interact with things, whether it's
you know, just flooding a sink or something to get
some distraction going, yeah, or like just just getting that
that poison to poison someone's drink, to get them just
pukeing their guts out in the in the kitchen. It's funny,
you know. Minor spoiler. I guess for anyone that hasn't
played this game. When I first poisoned food, I thought
that actually like killed them like right away. So I'm like, oh,
I'm gonna poison this guys food and then just like
start walking away from the mission.
Speaker 1: And then there there are different types of there's lethal
pills and then there is lethal pills yeah, ones that
just make them sick and go to the nearest bathroom, yeah,
which terms the nearest bathroom is like fifteen minutes away.
Sometimes it digs forever if you're just following them waiting
for them to go to a bathroom. It's so funny.
Speaker 2: I'm kind of over the place here because it's all
scrambled on my mind here.
Speaker 1: That's maybe they've made it the most all over the
Place game now.
Speaker 2: But something I really appreciate is kind of just like
the accessibility options. I guess if you can really like
tweak the game to your own personal style, and I
know you're like me in the sense of usually like
to be like completely hudless and like just like not
really like objective markers or anything like that, and just
really like going through the world and exploring it. I've
toned it back a couple of times because I found
myself like really lost, especially on like a first going
I'm like, I don't know where the hell I'm going.
Speaker 1: Uh, same thing for me. I turned everything off, and
then I slowly started introducing and then when I got
into Freelancer and you don't know where everyone is it,
you kind of need to turn a little bit more on.
But yeah, yeah, the amount of customization for the UI
in that game, I don't I don't think there's a
game that has more options than that one. Honestly, it's great.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, it's it's so fantastic. So it's it's been
fun kind And I think another thing that's so fantastic
about a game like this is like it's not like
there's a right or wrong way to play the mission,
like you go in there and to shoot the guy
with your gun and then run away and like that's
technically you know exactly. I unfortunately didn't get away, but
but you know, like there's many different ways to do it,
and it's just so satisfying, like like finding those things out,
like the Merrick, Yeah, the Marrakesh Bat not the Bad
not the Battle of the Marrakesh, the like that mission
where it's like the Embassy. Again like a minor spoiler here,
but like when I first found out that like there's
like a hidden like tunnel to get into the embassy,
I'm like, oh my god, this is so sweet. And
then like finding that root and sneaking through those tunnels
and like it's just so satisfying unraveling those those things
for the first time. And then of course once you
like play it more and more, you just really like
min Max and that's where you're become like the Ultimate Assassin,
where you're just like making all the perfect decisions and
I just I feel like something that all the hit
Man games have had, but in this one they're just
like perfected. It is just like going around the world
and getting clues to things, like like in the world.
On the earlier games, where they're a lot more linear,
it was so obvious, like the first guy that you
interacted with is like, oh yeah, blah blah blah, I'm
meeting this man tonight, and it's just like, okay, well,
this is clearly the guy. But like in here, there's
like people having dialogue, which is describing some things that
might help you out. There's people that are like very
much clearly like Okay, you interact with this guy, and
you're gonna get this key card to get in this building.
But like, I think, there's just so much to unravel.
So when I get into a mission, I just kind
of like go around and like just kind of get
a feel for the world, find my mic yeah, yeah exactly,
and just like okay, this is kind of like the
embassy here. You go through and you get the guards
like hello sir, it's like, oh, yeah, no, I'm just
just a casual sitting this way, buddy. There's been a
couple of times too where I found I thought I
had like the perfect outfit. I go through and he's like, oh,
waiting tables or something, and and then I go right
by him. He's like, what the fuck you doing you
can't go in here. I'm like, oh, sorry, sir, I'm sorry.
There's been a couple of moments like that. The fact
that you can like like to go into an area
as a proper disguise, but they have to frisk you.
Like that's a cool mechanic as well, So you have
to like find ways to kind of you know, ditch
your guns here and there. And there's I feel like
there's just so many mechanics that I could explain that
are just like so interesting to me. And there's probably
many that I haven't even interacted with yet in the game.
And yeah, it's been it's been lots of lots of fun.
The game looks so beautiful. Because I've like really played
a lot of the these hit Man games as well,
I feel like just so attached to like forty seven
as an agent, so like have him here, like it
seems like just in his prime in this like anthology
type story where yeah, there's like a guess a story
kind of combining it all, but for the most part,
it's just he's just a hit man. He's just getting
contracts and he's going these places and doing these tasks,
and I think like the scale of it was really
surprising to me, Like I'm I'm not even done the
first game, like worth of missions. Yeah, and I could
do one mission one hundred different times and like still fine,
like probably new unique ways to do it. So I'm
just loving yeah, like now now, so I'm trying to
like not do a mission, and they like go back
and do it. It's like, Okay, there's so much to
enjoy here. I'm just gonna try and go through it.
I'm like my first you know, going to my garat method,
like like just that that's my strategy. Do that get away.
Like maybe if I'm raising alarms then I'll restart the mission.
I find a lot of the time too. This game
does have like an auto save feature, but if I
like get an alarm off like near the end, I'm
usually just like Okay, well I'm gonna restart the whole mission.
That's just kind like my mindset in it. I think
I'm playing it on like the middle difficulty.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you do the highest difficulty, I and it
only gives you one save as well that you can yeah, okay,
or maybe even no saves at the highest I'm not
sure something like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I I I which is kind of how I
am playing it, because like, if something goes wrong, I
just kind of reset the mission. But there was some
other things in the higher difficulty that I'm like, ah,
maybe on another play through, I'll accept this challenge here,
But like even then, I think you could still kind
of tweak the settings. Maybe maybe it's locked on the
hardest stuff that I'm not too sure, but yeah, no, man,
it's it's it's been so sweet. Oh and actually I
wanted to bring up that mission that we did on
the stream, yeah, sat Pienza. When I went back to
it later on, I had like one of the funniest
like endings of that mission. Again my sports, anyone has
to play the game. When you get into like the
lab area, it is so tricky. It is so tricky
to get into certain areas because you like need a
lab coat to get into the lab. But then everyone
in the lab is wearing a lab coats, then they
probably know who you are, I imagine. I also took
off the indicator that shows me like who would be
able to find me out? I think generals, which.
Speaker 1: Is different enforcers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, enforcers.
Speaker 1: That is crazy. That is something I would not recommend anyone,
but I mean, I respect you for trying.
Speaker 2: A lot of the time you have to be like, hey,
this guy might know me, so then you like slightly
go around the corner and if you see that bar
start to go up, then yeah, I.
Speaker 1: Guess part of that would be like because now, whenever
I'm playing the game, I'm just in freelancer mode, and
you kind of you there because like there's different enemies
and things and you're not gonna know that stuff. Whereas
if you play those levels Sapiens over and over again,
you'll eventually be like, oh, I know that guy's an enforcer,
so I can you know, be careful of him that
kind of thing. But even though I think it's a
long time to learn all those things if you don't
have the little white circle above their head.
Speaker 2: No, for sure, there's been a lot of especially times
when it's obvious where let's say, let's say there's like
a soldier with like a red beret. It's like, Okay,
those ones are the enforcers. You know that for sure.
But then there's other characters that just look exactly like
a regular guard, but then they still figure you out.
For me, I think it's fun because because I'm going
through it for the first time, I'm kind of going
around exploring and if I have like a disguise, and
all of a sudden, there's like I walk by a
guard and he's like, wait a minute, you and then
and then it like it draws attention. He's not necessarily
like pulling his gun out on you, but then he'll
follow you. So then I'm like, Okay, I'm gonna I'm
just gonna go down this corridor. I go into an
area that I know no one's there. He comes around
the corner and I just freaking knock him out or something.
But on the Sapienza mission, I was like right at
the end basically about to get to the whatever it
is the labor Yeah, like the what is it? What
are they making? It's like the poison the virus? Yeah,
the virus. H yeah, So so I like found the virus.
I'm getting in there. I finally get in the room.
I'm like about to put on like a hazmat suit
to get in there, and there's this one female doctor
that comes in the room behind me and she figured
me out like right away, and as soon as as
soon as she's like, hey, what are you doing here?
Like the door closed behind her, and I just punched
her like right in the face and knocked her out,
and I laughed so hard. I was sitting on the
couch with sad and I'm like, oh my god, that
is so.
Speaker 1: It might be the funniest video game I've ever played.
It truly does create just like the most slapstick comedy situations.
Speaker 2: Especially like there's another I think it was actually the
Paris mission where I found a way to separate the
gentleman from his bodyguard. There's like this one area where
the bodyguard will be eating some poison. And the first
time that I was in there eating food and then
you poison yeah, eating food. He's eating some sushi and
then I poisoned a sushi. But like I did that,
and like as I did that, the waiter just like
turn around. It's like what are you doing?
Speaker 1: And there was two waiters there.
Speaker 2: I just like I'm like, turned walked to him, punched
him like knocked him right out, and either guy turns around.
He's like what do you do? Knocked him out too.
I just like laughed still hard because it's just like
this dude just like straight and then just all of
a sudden just like knocks him out one punch, and
it's just it's the funniest thing. And then I'm quickly
trying to hide the bodies and like take their disguise
as anyone's coming in. So I think there's just something
so special about like a first playthrough on a game
like this, because you're just like, okay, maybe this will work,
and then okay, I can do the and also it's like, hey,
what do you do? And then like I don't want
to just quit because I got caught here. It's okay,
now let's roll the punches and try and figure out
how to handle the situation. And it makes just I
think the runs so unique, and I imagine like on
the Freelancer mode, it's just it's just that like more so, right,
but you're just a little bit more familiar with the
I guess like where everything is in the mission, but yeah,
still may things around I imagine too on the Freelancer.
Speaker 1: Right, yeah Freelancer, like you know certain like clumps enemies
will always or you know, NPCs will be in the
same spots, but like the targets are randomized, and so
you're not gonna have like in the same way that
the single player campaign has all these opportunities to set
up certain kills. You're not gonna have those, but you're
just gonna have a more hopefully intimate understanding of like
the mechanics and how you can kind of set up
your own. And then there's like other ways that there's
certain mechanics introduced that make other ways for you to
get characters to interact with each other or go to
certain places, that kind of thing. But yeah, that's what's
so great about Freelancers. It just adds like that infinite
replayability angle to it. And it's funny here saying some
of these maps are so big. It wasn't until Freelancer Mode,
after I played already played the game for like one
hundred hours. But you know, some maps I've done fifteen
twenty times, But it was Freelancer Roade that like finally
took me to certain corridors or areas. I'm like, oh, okay,
I've played this map so many times and I didn't
know that section was there because like, it doesn't pertain,
none of the targets ever go there. Maybe there's an
opportunity somewhere nearby, but it doesn't feel like it's ever
really been critical, but Freelancer sometimes like that's where the
you know target will be because you're because it's in
some new location and so that adds like a really
fun angle to it as well. So yeah, Freelancer just
is it's fantastic, But yeah, I do think it is
something as best enjoyed later on once you've kind of
already somewhat mastered the maps, played through them a bunch
of times, and like, yeah, the way that those main
target missions are designed is fantastic, so you should experience
that too. Yeah, and Freelancer offers a bit of a
different experience, but yeah, it's it's like, listen to you
talking about this is so much of like a time
machine to me because I feel like we play these
games in a very similar way, where like turning off
the UI and I did the same thing too, where
I had the different order where I I like bought
for whatever hit Man two, first played through those maps,
got the DLC for that game, played through those maps,
then was in love with it, went back, bought the
hit Man one maps, played through all those, and then
hit Man three came out, and then later Freelancer mode
came out, So I kind of my order was a
bit different, but it was the same thing, where like
I'd pretty much do one play through of each map,
get the win, and then I'd move on to the
next map and one of the next one, and then
when I beat like Hitman, all of hit Man two's maps, Yeah,
then I went through. I'm like, Okay, I really like Miami,
I want to go check with that one, or I
really like the mal Dives episode or episode mission. I'm
gonna go do that one and just play through it
like five, ten, fifteen, twenty times if I really love
the map. But I feel like that is a good
way to do it. It's like, get the sampler platter,
check out a one of these maps. Now, it's tricky
for you because you have all twenty whatever it is
at your disposal now, so that's a lot. But I
think that was like, yeah, I get a feel for
each one, and then when you boot up the game
and you're ready to play Hitman, decide which map do
I want to do? Or maybe for me to be
like I'll just be working, I'll be thinking about a
certain map, and then when I'm done work, I'm I'm
gonna go play that map. Right, you'll kind of just
be beasting for it, and then yeah, Freelancer will throw
you to the wolves and you'll kind of have to
be somewhat familiar with all of them at that point.
But yeah, I think I've played the game in a
very similar way that you're playing it now. I just
had a different order of things. But that's definitely a
good way to go about it, is like get the
variety and then master like the ones that you're really
passionate about.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think something I'm again my mind's all scramble
because this game is so amazing. There's so many awesome
things to talk about it. But like on older HITMN games,
I find there's some missions that are just like S
plus like just design everything about it. I absolutely love
the way that you get your kills is just so fantastic,
and there's others that it's like, oh, Okay, this mission
I have to get through to get the next ones.
I have not had that a single time in this game.
I think every mission is so well designed and there's
so much to it. It's not like there's one that's
like a very basic one, Like there's so much complexity
and depth and like layers to it and like how
you're saying like one hundred hours in and then it's like,
oh my god, I didn't even know this corridor was
down here, like on the the one where I was
in like the Swedish Embassy, like like that mission when
I like I like took out the mark and then
I like revealed that they have like a secret meeting place,
and I'm like, oh man, this is perfect. This is perfect.
Like I know exactly how to get this guy. Now,
I can call this number, you know, get him into
this area, and then like I just feel so satisfied
like finding ways to kill these marks, and I think
that there's many times when maybe I'm approaching situation and
I'm like, man, this game would be so sweet if
you could just handle it this way, and then you
can and it's like, oh my gosh, like they like
this is this is just the perfect hit Man game.
Like like they've I don't know how many titles of
hit Man games. I'm pretty sure a while ago I
bought like the hit Man Collection on Steam, so I
have like basic all the games. There's probably like ten
or something. So I imagine like they just took a
lot of what they learned through all those games and
just brought the best aspects to it into this and
it really feels that way. And yeah, it just looks
so gorgeous. I love I love like the little sound
effects too, like when you when you hit your mark
and just like it does like that little like like
nice little audio effect like you did your objective and
then I don't know, there's there's just something about these
hit Man games that I just love so much. And
I think a big aspect too, is just because I
played the absolute shit out of Code Name forty seven
back in the day like that that just like playing
like all those hours in that original I don't evenk
it's the original hit Man game, but to me, it's
the original hit Man game. Is the is just like
this became like a franchise. It's just gonna stick with
me now for life. And now that I'm playing this,
it's like this is yeah, this is just like perfect
like the golden idol of the Man assassination game.
Speaker 1: This, Yeah, this game is just like an infinite treasure chest.
And especially now that they bundled one, two, and three
all together Freelancer mode, whether or not even playing that
mode yet, like it just it's so much content, there's
so much depth there, and the fact that they kind
of like backwards compative like mechanics that they added in
hit Man three that you can just now use that
stuff in okay, the hit Man twenty sixteen maps, like
the hit Man one maps. It's just really cool, like
they just they just absolutely nailed it. And then yeah,
like I mean, Freelancer adds like a ton of new
content for those old maps too, naturally because you're going
to places that you haven't seen before. So yeah, just
unreal how good that it's. You know, it's it feels
like a cheat to call it just like one game
now because they like, Okay, you made three games and
then you bundled them together later, but like, yeah, now
it is one game, and like if you go to
the store, you just buy one game and you get
all these twenty maps, all these mechanics bundled in one,
and it is just one of the best games ever.
Like I truly mean that it's so freaking good.
Speaker 2: You were not overstating that as well, Like I hope
feel like it's one of those things where like I
knew I was gonna love it. I think I'm yeah,
I don't think I played like maybe I dabbled in,
Like I don't even know. I don't think I dabbled
in this one at all. Until like the twenty four
hours stream. I knew I was gonna like it, but
until I got like my hands on it, it's like, Okay,
I need I need this, I need to get this.
And yeah, I think it was like one hundred bucks
or something for all three games, which is so like,
it's so worth it for how much content you're getting,
so really really satisfied with it. And of course, like
with the World of Assassination version of it, it's like
the more modern version, the p S five version. So yeah,
I've been I've been just just loving it. It's it's
really really amazing, and I'm I can't wait to just
have likee hundred hours of this game. Like I just
feel like I have endless content, and because I'm like
I'm just like that at the tip of the iceberg,
you know, like I haven't even like really gone in
and like.
Speaker 1: You're at you're at wet level one right now, and the.
Speaker 2: Single level in this game, yeah, exactly, and I've gone
through like five of them. So it's it's really exciting.
And of course, uh, like I know a while ago
you did like your your Tier list of the hit
Man levels. I'm excited to. I remember there's that one.
I don't know what it's called, but it was like
your your s tier level where it's like on like
the like the mountain or something like that. It's like, yeah,
I can't wait Hookaido or something like, I can't remember
the name.
Speaker 1: That is another good one, the Japanese Mountain. Yeah, it's
like the Spa resort. I can't wait to get freaky mess.
I think the one maybe you're thinking of is the
Mendoza level that's also in some mountain chain that I forget,
but it's like a, yeah, there's like a vineyard down below,
and then you have like the beautiful pristine winery up
above and like the different all the different areas, the
mansion up on the hill. Like it's it's just so cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you reminded me of a key moment that I
really want to bring out. This was the last level
I did. It was the club twenty seven to one,
where you have like the asshole recording artist guy and
then you have like his lawyer, like you have to
take care of there in that Club twenty seven. Yeah,
that was the name of the mission.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: He's like a recording artist and he like killed his girlfriend,
so like that's the contract you have to He like
pushed her off off the building.
Speaker 1: Oh Bangkok okay the hotel one Yeah, okay, Yeah, the
mission was just called Club twenty seven. That's why I
actually gonna do it.
Speaker 2: But you you can. I don't know you. You probably
played this this way, but you you can take the
disguise of like a drummer. That's like trying out for
the team. I was not expecting when you go up
and he's like, hey, show me what you got, and
then I like go to the drum kit and interact him,
like Kay, what's gonna happen here? This is gonna be
and man him Man forty seven, this guy is like
a jack of all trades, does this crazy like drum
line and it's like a thirty second video of me
just like just just playing the drums. I'm like, man,
I did not expect this. And in hit Man's uh sorry,
in age in forty seven's training, they like just had
him as like a jazz drummers, Like this is just
crazy to me. I was laughing so hard in that moment.
And then of course after he's like, man, you're really good, Okay,
let's go talk, and theneah like, man, that is hilarious.
I just crushed a drum line and I'm about to
rip this guy's throat apart with my my piano wire.
It's just it's just such like an unexpected turn of
events there, and I like many of those moments have
been riddled throughout the Hitman franchise of just like an
unexpected thing that's happened, Like whether you're like I don't know,
like like working at like a Chinese restaurant, as like
a worker there.
Speaker 1: He's a master of all trades. Sure, he's a gardener,
he's working in the vineyard, he's a master sushi chip mixing.
Speaker 2: He's mixing, Like he's just so good at everything that
he does. It's, uh, it never ceases to amaze me.
Speaker 1: So such a legend.
Speaker 2: I like that you mentioned that it's like the it's
it's an assassination game, but it's also like the funniest
game that you've ever played. And I've already had those
moments of like literally bursting out loud of just whether
it was like in the kitchen just knocking out those
poor waiters like they just saw too much. I hadn't
knock them out shove them in the broom closet. But yeah,
it's it's, it's been. It's like, I don't I don't
have a single complaint with this game. It's it's it's.
Speaker 1: Yeah. My only plate is the always online element of it,
which is annoying as fuck and I hate it, and
it means that someday this game will be broken, you know,
and not playable forty years from now or something, which
I hate. But hopefully, but hopefully before they take the
service off on they remove that element so you can
actually play it without having to worry about that. That
is my only complain about the game. That everything else
is perfect and pristine. And somehow when they released the
World of Assassination and combined all three games, it was
less disk space than the three games on their own prior, like,
so it's like it's actually like a cool sixty gigs
or something like that, which is really nice on a
modern hard drive where we're fighting for inventory space.
Speaker 2: Pretty much ye war zone out there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you you've done. Okay, I'm trying to think
of the missions you've done. You didn't you did the
the the Thailand Hotel, the Musician when you just talked about,
you did Marra Cash, You've done Paris Sapienza. Is there
any anyone's other than that? Or is it? I think
came out one only has like six maps or something.
Speaker 2: Right, Okay, pretty short right at the end, then you.
Speaker 1: Still have Colorado? And what else is in hit my line?
Speaker 2: I forget, but I'm not sure. Definitely Colorado. I haven't
gone to yet. That one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that one's not the top tier, I'll put it
that way. So Set your Expectations is a bit different style.
It's more of a combaty sort of one, but it's
still interesting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so those are really only Okay, the one thing
I actually I wanted to mention, which I was going
to ask you about, the like instinct mode you like
hold our one basically just get like aim bot of
like seeing through walls and stuff like that. I've had
to like self nerve myself on that. I'm like, I'm
just standing in a room holding it, and I'm like,
this is just cheating. I'm literally just watching my my
enemy walk to me right now from like three walls
away and hit man am solution. On higher difficulties you
couldn't even use that, and and on lower difficulties it
was actually a bar. So if you would like do
something I don't know, like hit manny, you would get
some of like the bar added onto it and then
you could use it. So it would really like make
you strategically use it, whereas in this game, and then
I imagine a hard difficulty you can't even use it maybe,
but like it just seems unlimited, Like I could walk
through the whole level holding it the entire time and
just see like the red indicator for where my mark is,
and I don't know, I just felt grimy kind of
doing it that way. I'm like, I don't know, I'm
gonna have to turn this off or just not use it.
I guess there is some times when maybe I'm making
like I'm trying to time like when to get my
enemy like in a certain area, so in a couple time,
I'll have to like just keep checking it to make
sure that you're still coming into my direction or something
like that. But even then I'm like, this just feels wrong.
I feel like I really want to be like like
visually seeing the enemy. So I've kind of and again,
like I've had to tweak some of the like the
the UI settings like just through my my just I
guess tailor in the game to me. And it's nice
that it gives you those options, but yeah, I'm I
felt a little grimy doing that. So moving forward, I'm
gonna try not to be using the instinct. And again,
it's just kind of like my own. It's not like
I'm missing on achievement or something for using it. It's
just like, ah, this isn't what Agent forty seven would do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, No, once again, time Machine, I am the exact
same way when I was playing through the game. I
guess like when I was playing through it, and like
the game started and it had all that UI had,
the mini map had like a million things. Anytime you
hear someone talk it like pops an opportunity up. Yeah, ah,
this feels like it's too many bread crumb you know,
like instead of bread crumbs, it's thrown me fucking loafs
of bread over over again. Is the eating them at
my face buttered and everything with buttered and everything covering gym.
And it was the same thing too, where like I
was like, I don't like that. I like, I feel
like the joy of this mission is trying to find
out where the heck this person is and like how
that can take them out, And so I felt the
exact same way, and I almost immediately, well not almost.
It took me like a few hours to figure out
what hit Man was because it's such a weird game.
It's very different than like other games in terms of
the structure and that it's very design about their replayability,
and so after a bit, I was like, what is
what is? What am I missing here? Why did I
Why don't I love this yet? And I think for me,
a big part of it was just turning off all
that UI stuff, turning off the instinct mode. So I
just completely removed it, and that was super fun because
I think there's so many as we talked about breadcrumbs
in the maps for how like, for where that target is,
there's people talking about them. Usually there's some person of
higher status, so there might even just be like, oh,
they're obviously going to be in that big mansion that's
hidden away behind like this huge wall. So now it's sport.
I know there's somewhere in there, but I don't, I
don't know, want to know exactly where they are. And
then maybe if you're doing like a challenge mission where
you're trying to do like the sniper thing where you're
trying to speed around the mission and beat it and
thirty seconds or something, maybe you could turn it on
for that so you can like, Okay, I know exactly
where are I'm just gonna snipe them and the mission
and in a few seconds kind of thing. So I, yeah,
I did the same thing. I turned it off. I
didn't like it, and I found for every mission in
the game that was not an issue like it's it's
very well designed where you can still figure out that stuff.
And it was like, yeah, most of the time, as
I mentioned, as you talked about too, like I'm just
gonna spend an hour exploring the map. I'm not even
doing anything illegal yet. I'm just walking around, I'm taking
in the sites and sounds, I'm having a snack, I'm
talking to people, gathering information, picking up items, and then
that's when I'm gonna go in for the kill once
I find the person. And yeah, so I did the
same thing, turned off instinct mode. Yeah, and then once
again with Freelancer mode where it's not a set person,
or it is a set person, but it's not like
there's isn't a million story beats leading you to that
one person and they could be anywhere. Then I turned
it back on, and I actually didn't have an issue
when I turned it back on in Freelancer because I
don't think that's really the point. The point of Freelancer
isn't like where are they? It's like how do I
kill this person? Because oftentimes there's just in a highly
public location and there's multiple of them, so it would
be a mess to pray play Freelancer mode without Instinct mode.
But I also, like I said, found that it wasn't
really an issue for me anymore when I when I
was using using it there. So yeah, once again time
Machine mean you I feel like Arga, It's like it's
there is so much like Dishonored DNA here, and so
I feel like the way we play Dishonor is the
way we play this turning off the UI really getting
immersed in it. And so yeah, same same experience for
me with with that one.
Speaker 2: Oh it's great. Other thing I wanted to mention that
I just absolutely appreciate and love and adding to the
repellyability aspect to it is you actually so as you
level up your Assassination level whatever it is, you actually
unlock and then you get mastery for the levels, which
is cool, but you unlock like different like openings to
the game. So like like in the Paris mission, for example,
like as soon as I beat it, it's like, well,
now I can be like a waiter in the kitchen
like to start the mission, or or in the Sapienza
you could be you could start as a gardener. And
I just love that so much because in Hitman Absolution,
they didn't have something like Freelance mode, but they had
specific challenges to the levels, which I feel like maybe
would have been like the blueprint for what freelancer kind
of became. Obviously they evolved into something just super unique
and interesting. But like, for example, there'd be a level
in Hitman Absolution which, as you were saying, like a
lot of like story narrative, like this is gonna be
your your target if you get into one of the missions,
you have to kill like a sushi chef or something
like like like that, it just changes the whole dynamic.
And then like yeah. So that's where I feel like
it's like the precursor to that Freelancer mode like and
like just just that aspect is really cool because now
all of a sudden, like I'm not even going to
a certain area of the map that like I've played
this level fifty different times because I just love this
game so much and I was mastering this level, and
now I have to completely switch my strategy, and I
think like or even just like you get different getaways, right,
like like all of a sudden, like the Ica gives you, yeah,
or they they they smuggle something in for you. Like
I just love that aspect to it. So now like
I finished the mission and it's like now you can
start in the basement here, and I'm like, oh, I
can't wait to go back to that mission. And then
that's where like when I was first playing it, I
replayed that French like the Paris mission like three different
times because I was just like, ah, I just want
to explore everything and just mash these levels. But now
I'm like, I'm never gonna get through all three of
these games. I gotta just go through like one mission,
do that, do that, and then go through it. But
it gets me excited for when I get back to
those missions now and just just really try it in
a completely different way. And just the way that you
can start the mission into different areas is really really cool.
So I really really like what they did for that.
And I mean, hit Man's always had great replayability. That's
the big part of the game is we've already talked about,
but the fact that it's like, yeah, just you're unlocking
different ways to explore the mission is really really cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, and it feeds in so well where
you get more bonuses and xp for all the different
ways that you're like every time you use a different
expiltration and you do get a win with like the
different starting situations or kills, the different weapons, or killing
someone with a chandelier, accident, kills electriciit like like electrocution,
all these different things, and so yeah, that's a huge
part of the I almost forgot about that, like how
how rewarding and fun that was early on, or like, yeah,
the first time you'd be a mission, you probably didn't
get a ton of challenges completed. So maybe you got
like one or two tiers up and you allnock like
a new starting location or one expltration. But then when
you're going through like mastering the levels and like I'm
gonna try and knock off as many of these challenges
at the same time as I possibly can, you might
get like multiple tiers leveled up, and it's like, oh man,
all these new choices I have at the start is
really really satisfying. And then yeah, I guess the other
angle I've been talking about is like once you've kind
of got better of these levels, unlocked a lot of
that stuff, then going for like the suit only wins,
or going for the Silent Assassin wins, or going for
the Silent Assassin suit only like combo win. Like I
did that on the missions that I was most passionate about,
and those were super fun, super challenging, but also like
I know these maps so freaking well now that like
I can envision the game plan before I even start
the level. First, I'm gonna go win. I'm gonna go
these five items that I know the location of that
are super helpful. I'm gonna go take out this guy
at this certain point. I know I can like jump
over this fence and then climb up that gutter into
the window, And that's how I can take out this
guy and then I didn't have to get created for
this other one. Maybe I'll bait a couple of guards
into some bushes and yeah, you just like I don't know,
the framework in your mind like expands as you like
really understand the intricacies of all all the levels. It's
just crazy.
Speaker 2: I found It's already happened a few times where maybe
I'm coming to an area it's like I need to
get back there. There's an en forcer here. So even
if I get this costume, like he's gonna see me,
it seems like it's an impossible way for me to
get through this area. Like how am I gonna slowly,
I don't know, throw coins to try and get some
of these guards out of the coins? Yeah, and like
I'm just kind of like analyze it, and it doesn't
seem like it's possible because there's just like like field
of view of like all these guards, like they're just
covering every angle. And then I'm going through it, and
then all of a sudden I noticed that it's like, oh,
at this moment, this guard actually goes in this direction,
and this guard goes so there's actually like a perfect
time to literally like you don't even have to take
away it out. You can literally just walk right through them.
And like it just like expanded my mind in a
certain way where I'm like, wow, I thought this was
an impossible task, but literally it's just like finding the
perfect timing. I could be in street clothes, like it
doesn't even matter I'm going through this restricted area. But
because nobody's seen it just fantastic. And a mechanic that
is in this game that I don't think was in
any of the other hit Man games I played is
like the cameras and even if you're in disguise, if
that camera sees me, I feel like I just lost
the entire game. I'm like, hey, I gotta destroy that footage.
No one can know that I was here, yea the
Silent Assassin. Yeah. And like there's if I'm disguised following
my mark and he's like, hey, let's go this way,
and he's walking through the camera, I'm like, oh god,
I gotta like I gotta like go around or maybe
slowly wait for this skyttle. I don't want to be
seen with this gentleman here. So yeah, I man, the
game is just so good.
Speaker 1: I'm glad you brought the cameras, Like that's that adds
such a good part of it. Especially I noticed that
when I was going through and trying to get Silent
Assassin on a bunch of levels, and like, if you
get caught by a camera, it's like, Okay, you have
temporarily lost Silent Assassin, but if you're able to show
that footage before anyone catches on to you, then you
can regain it. It's like, okay, that ads just like
essentially a bonus target on this mission now because I've
fucked up and now I have to deal with this thing.
Or you could be like preemptive, like okay, I know
where the machine is for this, I'm gonna take out that.
They don't even have to worry about the camera because
the machine for monitoring it is broken, or you know,
I can try and find the just the right spot
to shoot the camera without getting caught. Sila's pistol changes everything,
of course for that kind of thing. But yeah, just
like that is such a great mechanical like layered on
top of everything else. It's really cool.
Speaker 2: Something that really surprised me. I think this was actually
the Sapienza mission, and now that I think about it.
I don't think I got my Garat kill on the
Sapienza mission because I I kinda I was getting bobbed
by it, so then I cheezed it a little bit.
I found the explosive golf ball. Maybe certain take that character,
which is great. You know, he died when I was
like completely the outside of the map, which is great.
But the lady I ended up finding an opportunity to
just like shoot her. But you know, in most games,
you shoot the target, so you hide the body, you're fine,
But there's like bullet holes that can be like like
if you shoot someone, the bullet hole will like go
into the wall, and like there's just blood everywhere. So
even if you hide the body and all the evidence,
like someone will come up across and find.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you leave a gun on the ground or
something like if you take out a guard and move
the guard, but then their gun is still on the ground,
other guards will see that and be like why is
there a gun and the ground here?
Speaker 2: And that makes perfect sense and I love that that's
an aspect. But because I'm used to like non intuitive
maybe you know, not perfectly intuitive, like stealth games like
that you could kill a guard and like his gun's
just there and people just walk through it don't really
care there's a big pool of blood, they don't care.
They just go through. But the game feels like a
real world and I just, man, I love it. It's
I'm just I feel like I'm just smiling like ear
to ear talking about this game right now, Like it's
just so great. I can't wait to just keep like
sharing stories.
Speaker 1: I hope this becomes like a time around side quest. Second, yeah,
the latest hit Man level that you're playing, because that
was me for a few months there too, when I
was like playing Freelancer a lot in the new maps, yeah,
or like Hitman three came out and all that. Just
I could talk about these games for ever because they
just call they just make for fun stories. Like as
you're just playing through the way you go through mission
is gonna be so unique naturally that you're just gonna like,
especially in Freelancer mode where none of it is like,
you know, pre scripted in that in that same sense,
which you know obviously in the main maps that's not
always scripted either, but yeah, it just is like constantly
coming up with like funny anecdotes and crazy situations that
only again with like this many interacting moving parts could
come up with.
Speaker 2: It's just amazing.
Speaker 1: Two funny things about the the Paris mission. One of
these might be might spoiler. I hope you don't. Hope
you don't mind. But I think the funniest thing in
terms of talking about like hit Man and being like
a master of all trades, when you like walk into
that place and like it's like a in that Paris mansion,
there's like this big modeling show that's happening. There's a
people watching it. There's like upstairs there's like all the
text working on the machines and lights, and like when
you walk in, it's funny you see a huge poster
for like the famous model that's showing up. Yeah, yeah,
and he's just a bald guy. And then like it's like, oh,
I know what's gonna happen next, and like there's a
crazy story thread that you can follow, where like hit Man,
we'll get dressed up in the makeup, he'll go in
the chair, I'll get the open on, and then like
he'll do the show, like he'll do the thrut on
the walkway and do the pose. It's like of course,
he's also just a supermodel and he can like do
that kind of thing too. You just there's no there's
no boundaries for him. He's he's perfect.
Speaker 2: I knew that was an option. Just be like I
I kind of some threads in there for it. I was,
I was following the bread crumbs, like you're saying, but
I didn't necessarily find And don't answer this like I
didn't find the gentleman. I didn't find like the call
I didn't.
Speaker 1: I couldn't. I could not even tell you like the
thread you have to follow. I can't remember the exact thing,
but it's it's just I knew it was.
Speaker 2: An option, but it's like, Okay, this is cool, this,
this is gonna be how I'm gonna take tackle this now.
But like you know, I yeah, I'm exciting.
Speaker 1: I forget how that even leads into the kill of
the target. Like it might just be a funny, stupid
thing you can do because it's fun and stupid. Maybe
it's something that you do that and then like the
target wants to meet with you because like you're the
model or something, and they take you in a specific room.
It's probably something like that, and then the other funny
thing with Paris that I noticed when I was playing
that map a bunch is uh the voice actor Uri
Lowenthal who voices like Spider Man and the Spider Man games.
He is like a voice actor in that game for
like random bodyguards, and I noticed it so much in
that mission where I'd be I'm like crawling through the
attic and then I just hear him, Like why the
fuck is Spider Man, because like, I can't unhear Spider
Man as that actor now, especially when he like voiced
Marth in like the most recent Firemblom game, and like,
I don't like this, this is too I need Marth
to be some not Spider Man guy. Yeah, but that
was just such a funny thing going through that mission
and hearing hearing Peter Parker talking to some other random
guard in an alternate universe. But yeah, man, I I yeah,
that game is so good and like, I don't know,
I feel like hit Man two is maybe some of
my favorite maps still, but I don't know, every one
of the games has like my favorite maps because they're
just so good and so layered. So I can't wait
to hear you play through more of these things.
Speaker 2: Yeah. No, I'm definitely gonna keep I can't wait to
get in there, Like like you say, like I'll just
be like not playing the game and then think about
like a certain thing in the mission like oh man, yeah,
I can't wait to get back in.
Speaker 1: I think especially the Thailand map, like the hotel there,
there was a map even like after a couple of
play through was like, so it's okay, not one of
my favorites. I think it was Freelancer that really elevated
that map for making. There's so many areas that never
really get used, and obviously makes use of all those
and I don't know, there's so much fun of just
like interesting sight lines, like a big one set up
in that map is like I don't know, at one
point the target will be in one hotel and if
you're in the other hotel with a sniper in the attic,
like you have a perfect angle and like that's a
fun opportunity. Uh And yeah, like I don't know, Freelancer
really elevated that map for me and made me maybe
I had to learn the map in a different way.
I feel like I didn't really have to learn too
much about it to take out the targets like a
few times. But yeah, yeah, that's just another classic thing,
is uh yeah for once you're once you've already played
one hundred hours, then you have freelancers can play another
hundreds of hours. It's crazy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I found on that on that same mission where
I got my target, there's like an opportunity to just
like shove them over the ledge and I'm pretty sure
you can time it to take out both targets like.
Speaker 1: Them, and I don't know if I've ever done that.
Speaker 2: That's fun, but like it sucks because I gone to
that situation like it was like just mistimed where like
like I wasn't able to like he wasn't on the
on the ledge by the time the guy was walking by.
And I'm like, I don't even know how you're supposed
to time this like perfectly.
Speaker 1: I guess if one of them got distracted at some point,
it would throw their cycle off, or maybe you're supposed
to throw their cycle off and then like sync it up,
which would be pretty complex.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like time, how much time it takes to get
into that situation.
Speaker 1: Throw a coin just far enough away that they you know,
meander off for.
Speaker 2: Five Yeah, I guess you could distract them with that,
So I'm I'm gonna have to figure that one out.
But it's another thing where I'm like, Okay, well, I
can't wait to figure that out the next time I
play this mission, right, Like, it's just it's just yeah,
and that's not even the freelancer, Like that's still like
the base game, which is so that's where it just
feels like it's gonna be like an infinite amount of
runtime potential in this game, which is exactly what you want.
Like I've I've already gotten my money's worth out of
this game, and I'm not even done the first like
the first third of it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, crazy, Yeah, Well, we could keep talking about that,
but we should probably move on.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: Let's take our next ad break and we will be back. Okay,
we are back. What else you've been playing, kirkling o
Ye for the day wanted it, I'll quickly mention, I'm
keep going. I'm keeping on with my Pokemon Emerald progression.
I think I brought that up with you. I found
an emulator for that plane on the iPad. I think
I'm like eighteen hours in. I think I have like
one or two badges left, and it's been. It's been
so great just playing that like the older Pokemon style game,
It's it's been super super fun and kind of I
kind of forget, like how much harder those old Pokemon
games are compared to the new ones.
Speaker 2: Like there's the new ones are super easy. Like you're
starting Pokemon, your your counter part, like your your arch rival,
will always pick like the counter to your or sorry,
like the opposites, Whereas in the older games they would
pick your counter like if I pick water, they would
pick grass, And then now it's like if I pick water,
they're picking fire. So it's like every time I interact
with them, it's just like an automatic one. Yeah, And
like it's just so much easier to figure out where
you have to go in the newer ones, whereas the
old ones. It's not like there's like a journal or
something where I'm describing like where I have to go next.
So like there's been many times I've had to pull
up a guide because I'm just completely lost.
Speaker 1: Man. When I was playing Emerald recently, I needed like
a notepad on my phone to like be my quest log.
I was finding it really tricky, Whereas like this guy
wanted me to deliver a package where and like I
didn't write it down, and then I forget and I'm like,
what the hell is going on here? This is astounding
that this is a Nintendo Pokemon game that I don't
know what to do immediately.
Speaker 2: Whenever I like replay one of those older like I
haven't played every Pokemon game, but whenever I play some
of those older ones again, I try and like, I
don't know, different strategy, like try some different Pokemon because
you can collick them all. That's never been my bag.
I've always just try and like get a nice like
assortment of a like a good powerful team. But here
I'm like trying to get different types that maybe I
didn't always use, like I got I got Cadabra, like
really early on. I was like, oh man, I'm gonna
get myself.
Speaker 1: I grind it hard to get him when I was
playing recently, because I was like, I I just love
I love all those evolutions. I'm obviously deeply nostalgic for
the first Oh my god, what's called the first era
the first original gene? Yeah, first gen word gem. Yeah.
So I was like, but it's hard to get to
the freaking teleport.
Speaker 2: But yeah, he's oh, I know you need like that
master ball, you know, because you can't even attack him.
You got to just catch him right away otherwise the
way and I will say, man, like I don't know,
you probably don't know this Pokemon, but Torcole he's just
like a like a tortoise with like a volcano type ability.
He has been such a sweet powerful because he's like
he's strong and stout, like I don't know what is
what his type spread is. I know he's fire in there,
but he also has like a poison type attack and
it's just really strong fire type Pokemon. Because I didn't
start with the fire type. I started with the Yeah.
Speaker 1: I found when I was playing Emerald recently too that
like I could not find any freaking fire types.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I found him in this, yeah, one of the
volcano levels, because I knew I was gonna need a
fire type at some point. And uh, he's been he's
been super strong, and there's been a couple of gyms
that like I've literally had to like grind for and
then like like go, okay, I gotta go level of
my my guys come back and I win it with
like my last Pokemon, like on on the brink and
it's just I don't know, it's really it's it's been
really fun, satisfying, and yeah, I don't know. Once I
beat it, i'll let you know. You're getting pretty close
to the end.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you did mention that you're switch around trying guys out.
But do you have a main squad or do you
have like a like a core squad that you kind
of constantly have in your group right now?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I pretty much have like the main Like I
got my like for you know, because once you get
mechanics like surf so you can like like ride on
the water. I got my Garrettos. Of course, I feel
like I always take Garrettos for that. It's just that's
kind of my my nostalgic one. Yeah. I think it's swallow.
Terrible name, but it's like one of the birds one. Yeah,
it's like my fly type and tallow I think is
like the first evolution of them becomes swallow. And I
usually always have like a bird type Pokemon and all
my runs, So I got that and then like my
starter grass type. I think it's it's Treaco is like
the first evolution. It's like snivel or something like. It
it's a weird. It's a weird name of the third evolution.
But that's been like my starter type. And then what
else do I got in there? I had my torkle,
Like I mentioned, I was rocking what's his name geo
dude for a long time too. Just have like a
good like rock type and really effective when you get
to the electric type battle and I think the last
the last one I did was fighting type and just
like psychic is so strong against that, so using my
kid over and there was really really powerful. And yeah,
it's been. It's been a nice spread. I'm not really
swapping them out of like my main I think I
like swap out like the six slot, like just to
fill out, but like my main crew the benchwarmer slot.
Yeah exactly, I'm pretty satisfied with it right now. And yeah, no,
it's it's been lots of fun. So I'm glad that
you're scratching that pokemonitch. A while ago when I was
on here, I said I was getting that itch, and
it's been.
Speaker 1: I I kind of picked that up in a little bit.
I should I should probably get back to it. I
forget where I got to. Not definitely less hours than
you have currently, but yeah, I should jump back in
there because it was a good time.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely. And then the other big one I want
to mention here. We brought this up many times on
Side Quest is Cult of the Lamb. Now, you know,
we did a nice for you long time ago and
then kind of got reinvigorated on the PlayStation because Shane
and I were able to play it together on the
co op dealc thing that they had added. And this
game is just so fucking fun. Man. I'm kind of
like torn because it feels like a perfect game to
me until you're like, Okay, it's got some buggy issues
with it. It's got some weird glitches. It's not like
the most like polished in that sense. Every single time
that you interact with certain things in the base, it
just like freezes the game for like ten seconds and
then it brings it up and just like right, I'm
used to it now. I'm used to it now, but
it's still like very annoying, pretty consistent. Like i'd say,
like what's a good like ratio, Let's say like four
out of seven times when we're like finishing a crusade,
it'll just like do an endless load screen have to
close the game and bring up like that that's not
a great ratio, that's yeah, And because we love the
game so much, we just kind of deal with it.
It's like, okay, close the game. And fortunately, unlike Your
Metal was it was a metal slug tactic where it
was just like game breaking, you want to put it down.
It it actually saves at the end of the Crusade,
so it's so I'm not losing anything. It's just kind
of annoying. So you get everything from your right if
it If it like actually ended the Crusade and we
didn't get any like the like it didn't count as
a finish for the Crusade, we probably would have put
the game down all a long time ago because the
combat can get pretty fricking challenging with just I mean,
it's just a challenging game. But later on, like there's
just so many things going on in the levels, and
Shane and I have gotten quite good at the game,
Like I feel like we're just so much better at
like plowing through the crusades. You also unlock just a
lot better things to to tackle them in. But yeah,
I know, I just want to bring up because we
beat the like the game for the first time. You know,
you get you get like the four Heretics or whatever
the hell they are they're called. You defeat them, and
then you roll credits, and then after that it's like
you basically have to go through them all again. There's
like another character that you interact with, and it's it's
like the endgame type content. And once we like went
through and went through all the areas again and finish
all those tasks, it actually rolled credits again for us,
so it's like, Okay, now we beat like I guess,
like the second portion of the game, but there's still
so much stuff for us to unlock where it's like, man,
this game has like serious endgame content now, so like
I think all we can really do is some side
quests for like characters that we haven't really finished those
quests on, and then they I believe this came out
with the co Op delC but it's called like Purgatory
and it's just like endless runs that you can do,
like like the Crusades will just never end. And then
once you situation no, like you just keep going through
like Okay, you finish this room, now you go to
the next room, and then you go through this room,
and you go through and then you go to the
next room and you just like keep going like infinitely.
You can shoot used to go back because if you die,
you'll lose like a portion of your Yeah, so there's
risk reward aspect to it, and it gets more challenging.
We haven't dabbled in it too much because we're just
focusing on I guess it's kind of like a New
Game Plus sort of aspect because because like you're going
through the same areas tackling like similar bosses.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so is your base the same on this new
game Plus or are you resetting it from scratch?
Speaker 2: Yeah? No, it's is your.
Speaker 1: Map not like completely full at this point? Can you
still build new things?
Speaker 2: I should take a photo and show you.
Speaker 1: It's pretty impressive, No wonder there's like a you know,
a bunch of lag whenever you go back there.
Speaker 2: The base is looking really really good right now, like
it's in You probably remember this too. Like early portions
of the game, it's so overwhelming, like trying to keep
up with everything that you have to do, Like it
just seems like like the faith is always so low
because you get back from a crusade and if you
lose the crusade, it goes low and people are like
dying of sickness and you have to figure out how
to do all these things. And until you really get
your shit everywhere up, shit everywhere, until you really get
it up and running and people tasks and have people
to do those tasks. It's just it's just really overwhelming
to like try and like stay stay afloat where you
just feel like you're always drowning. Now, Yeah, it's it's
it's pretty awesome. It's it's pretty awesome how we have it.
Like I think we have like like we're on day
like one hundred and fifty eight. I think of the calendar,
and I think we have consistently like thirty or so followers.
I say consistently because they age and die. So it's
just like constantly people dying and then you get like
different rituals to bring them back, but you're also just
always getting new ones. So we've just been addicted to
the gameplay loop. We we love this game. We love
the just like the city building aspect of it, customizing
the little people you get like different outfits for them
now and when you beat the game, like the first
time it unlocks. Like I don't know if you interact
with this mechanical like the sin do you remember that
at all? I'm pretty sure. Yeah. So I think that
came out with like the Lamb deals, the Goat deals,
which was the co op thing. Yeah, cool mechanic again
that like it just it just adds a lot to it.
Speaker 1: So questioning the on the management side, because I remember
one issue I had was like I was it was
fun at managing the town in terms of like Okay,
this guy maintains this thing, this guy's a janitor, this
guy or whatever doing that thing or the other thing.
But there wasn't like a menu that helped figure out
who's doing what, So you just had to like go
talk to someone and be like, okay, this guy does
that job. And so like reassigning people was kind of
messing have they improved or changed that? Is it like
any better? Because I feel like that, especially when you're
getting more and more stuff like you have now, the
management side of things could get really messy trying to
figure out who's doing what and if you have enough
people doing each each task.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they definitely not like that. They don't have like
a bar showing that I find a lot of the
time it's not really an issue like if like when
we when we get a new recruit, you you like
indoctrinate them and then you give them a task. But
like most of the time, I just like and them wherever,
And it seems like whenever there's something that's like not
being done by someone, they just automatically start doing it.
So I don't feel like I have to necessarily min
max it in that sense, like you probably remember, like
you have to feed people. Now I have like a
kitchen where like I have a guy just making food
for people, so I don't have to do that. I
have like people farming my crops. I have janitors so
they're cleaning up the shit for me. I have a
shit ton of people just praying non stop. I have
people mining. I have people getting lumber in our lumber mine,
Like it's just there's it's so like working on its own.
If people die, I have people that collect the corpses
and put them in our morgue. Like it's just it's
really automous now, which which is fantastic. And for a
long portion it wasn't like that, like we'd get back
and people are dying, people are sick, people are shitting everywhere,
and we don't have people doing it. So then it
was great having two players, right because it's like, okay,
SHA's doing the crops. Well, I'm trying to like clean
up the place and like just get things going. And
we just got an a system going. And now that
it's really automous, it, I don't know, just feel like satisfied.
It's okay. Nice like Kingdom here, they've had it so
much the game.
Speaker 1: That's pretty awesome to hear about.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and there's there's another DLC that I don't even have.
I thought I had it, but it's it's it's some
sort of crusade thing that they added. And I think
there's another type building thing that you can get in there.
I probably won't get it. I don't know. I like,
there's still so much for us to do. We are
going to keep playing it once I'm done here. I'm
probably gonna be booting up there with Cliche right now.
But this game for us, I think would have been
a ten out of ten if it wasn't for the
glitches and stuff, and because we love it so much,
like we are able to look past it. But it's
just annoying when it's okay, we survived the crusade, and
then it's just like loading forever. It's like fuck this game, man,
and then you have to close it reload it. Or
if we're going through the like the Our Cult and
then I accidentally like interact with with a building and
then it just like freezes the game for a while. Yeah,
Or you always know when it's morning because the game
just freezes for like ten seconds and it's like, okay,
well it's morning time, so let's just go to our
temp and start doing our daily sermons and things like that.
We've learned how to work around, like play around it,
but definitely I would have to dok marks because I
remember I think it was way worse on the switch
of just like FPS leg and stuff like that. I
don't really get fps leg. It's mostly just everyone, so yeah,
it'll just be like glitchy and leggy, and we've never
been like in the middle of gameplay and it just
like crashes, which is nice, but it's just like loading
back to the bass. And I don't really remember having
like like the infinite load, So I'm curious if it
maybe is like a co op bug like it. It
just seems like it's a lot more I don't know
relevant now that we're both playing it together, and but no,
it's been it's been fantastic. I think it's been a
fantastic co op experience for Shane and I like it's
it's totally a game for us, and we've just had
lots of fun with it. There's been some really intense
like boss battles where it's like I have half a
heart shaded down and I'm just trying to dodge everything.
There's like a thousand fireballs going everywhere, like sixteen different enemies.
It's like a binding of Isaac type yeah level situation, Yeah,
bullet hell exactly. And we we defeated it, and you're
just like sweaty, your hands crappy. You're like, oh my god,
that was that was intent that you go back to
your base and you have to take care of your
little animals, and yeah, we we truly truly love this game.
It's it's it's really really, really fantastic. Unfortunately, a couple
of bugs here and there, but I think because the
game is so great where it looks past it, no.
Speaker 1: I mean that's a that's a great sign for a
game if it can be super buggy but you still
just want to keep playing it. I mean that's yeah,
the mark of a game that is just too good
you can't put it down.
Speaker 2: So we're so loved this game. I was on the
over digital store like about to buy some like merch
for this game. They have like stuff like they have
a plushy it's sold out right now, which unfortunately, the
Goat and the lamb, which which is great and it's
just great too that like the co op, like they
they made a new character for it. It's not like
there's just two lambs, right, Like you have a goat
character that has like yeah, exactly, is just different mechanics
you can hold. That was another thing I was gonna mention.
With the sin mechanic, you can like make babies now,
so you can make your own creatures, which is so strong.
Speaker 1: Are you like forcing two of your cult members to
hook up kind of?
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's there's like a bone tent to essentially you
choose two characters and they get traits you might remember
positive and yeah traits.
Speaker 1: Okay, so you oh you can like super Breed typically, yeah, member,
do you.
Speaker 2: Typically want to want to pair someone that has really
positive traits with another person that has positive traits, and
then you're able to tick two traits from the mother
and the father or like father and father, like it
doesn't really matter tender for the parents and in that
and then and then yeah, you get an egg and
then you hatch the egg, and then you have like
an incubator and then you have to like go ten
to the egg every day, and then it like it
makes them a higher level when they birth, and then
it'll be like a unique animal that comes out of
it and you put them in like a baby pin,
and then every day you interact with them, and every
day you do that, they get a level. So typically
if I find someone on my Crusades, they come to
my base on their level one. But if I birth someone,
they could come out like level five, which is like
really really strong, and I'm you know, everybody ages, everybody
dies in that game. But you can resurrect people, So
you typically want to resurrect your people that were like
high level because then there's still that level when you
resurrect them again. So there's been people that I swear
to God I did. We've resurrected like six times like Barbados,
that's his name, and I always think Barbados Slim from Futurama.
I love Barbados Slim. But we've resurrected this guy like
six times, and I'm pretty sure he used to be
like brown and now he's just white. Like yeah, I
think he's just like his color's changing.
Speaker 1: This poor soul let me die.
Speaker 2: He just can't rest. Yeah, he's like I think he's
like level ten now, like like he's like max level
for us, and he's just like our favorite guy. And
then everyone's a while, it's like always old and then
he dies of a heart attack, goes on the ground
and we resurrect on this which like cruel soul, we
won't let him, we won't let him rest.
Speaker 1: But yeah, that's that's an amazing addition because I feel
like that was especially early on in the game, that
was one of the most engaging part of it. Parts
of it was finding someone bring them back to the base.
You know, you could customize their appearance to some extent,
I guess, and then yeah, just like the personality of
them and maybe they're kind of annoying, maybe they're a
big fan of you, whether it's their different traits and
like seeing their life transition of like this guy's being
a piece of shit, I'm gonna make him be the
janitor for a few days, or like maybe I'm gonna
put him in the tortured rack for a few days
and learn his lesson. Then'll pop up and then I'll
give him a good job because maybe he's like redeemed himself.
And so I think they have that added lineage and
then eventually you're gonna get to a point where you're
gonna be having kids of other people looking up and
creating the next generation after that, which like goddamn, that's
just gonna add such a great continuity to it because
it eventually gets to a point where you have so
many that it's like, Okay, I can't remember this whole
guy's journey at some point, but that is that is
a great way to add some lineage to it and
kind of further connect the personalities of the characters. That's
that's an amazing addition, that's all.
Speaker 2: It's so great, And we definitely have our favorites, and
we have our least favorites, Like, yeah, there's this one guy,
I think his name was like Fagrie or something, like that,
and for some reason, he was just like a bully,
like every time you walked by him, you would just
push you and you would like lose a bunch of
coins and whatnot, and you would laugh in your face
and you're like, fuck you, Fagrie, I hate you. But
he was also like our highest ranked guy, so it
was like really useful to have him. But he was
such a dick that then he died of old age.
The high achievers everybody has a yeah, exactly, and then
and then we'd i'd have to be like bringing someone
back at like a high level. And then we're like
looking at Fagrey and she's like I don't want him,
like he's terrible. I'm like, yeah, I know, but we
needed stats. So we bring him back and it's awful. Again,
we regret it and we wish we didn't have him.
You can sacrifice people, so we've definitely sacrificed him a
couple of times. But then we have you know, like
Barbados Slim, who I just absolutely love. We've had him
from the get go and he's just he's just great,
or another one that I absolutely love. This was one
of like our first hatchings. His name is Arna. I
call him Young Arna because he was just like our
first child child, and he like he could show that
one he could grow up and be running this cult man.
Like I am so proud of Young Arna. Like every
time ask I give give him you can send them
on crusades. I can't remember if that was in the
base game where.
Speaker 1: They would go out and yeah, I remember that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, every time I send him out, it's just like
a success. He gets me all.
Speaker 1: He died though, I guess you can just revive him
if he dies, but.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm not scared of death anymore. There's certain there's
certain situations when you actually have to sacrifice the follower
and it's permanent, like you can't resurrect them. Those ones
hurt because they actually have to be And I think
that's in the new game mode, like to enter the area,
you have to sacrifice like a level ten follower and
you lose them forever. So so you are losing like
a big character there.
Speaker 1: But Young he's like the madep He's yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, he's the mad deep exactly. The absolutely love
Young Arna. But uh yeah, dude, I I love it.
I love it so much. It's like a Satanic Animal crossing,
I'm mixed with some some roguelike combat in there, and yeah, no, it's.
Speaker 1: It's yeah, it's it's so fun to hear these updates
because I had like a good time with the game
and I put down I was happy to move on,
but like, you know, go back to that review a
week later, like, I would not have expected that this
would be a game that would become such a huge
hit for you and a game that you just want
to come back to for like years at this point.
So it's so cool, like especially because like every time
I see those DL season like, oh those are cool,
but not enough to bring me back in. So I
love that I can kind of vicariously hear about how
those mechanics work out through you. That's that's awesome.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I wouldn't have thought it either. And then,
like I on that review, it's like, oh, whish they
had co op, Like this seemed like would be a
fun game with Shae, and then they added and then
all of a sudden, it's like a completely different gaming
experience for me, and I'm having so much fun. You know,
minus you.
Speaker 1: Should check the co op thing and see if stars
with Shay and that'll help you motivate you to finish that.
Speaker 2: Yeah shit, I'll have to buy it again because they
took it off the PlayStation catalog. But yeah, I it's
important to get through.
Speaker 1: Yeah uh cool. Any other shout outs or was that
that's all for the day?
Speaker 2: I had some like minor ones, but I'm I'm okay
with that, Okay, satisfied. Got back to Marvel Snap again.
I've played that in a long time. You're just a
little bit of a hiatus from it. I think I
just kind of over did it in like the last
past I was on, I was just really grinding, and
then I just I hadn't played for like a month,
got back into it, and I just got some nice
new car finally Arnhemzola. I feel like that's just a
salute to me forever I can.
Speaker 1: And that's the cycle of Snap, where you play it
and you love it, and then you realize at some
point that you're playing it just to unlock things and
you're not even playing it for fun anymore, and then
you're like, Okay, I gotta take a step back. I
did the same thing. I didn't play in the Vendom
season at all, which was last season I still beat
it up. So it's been about a month and a
half for me, and I think I'm fine for that,
and then you come back at some point, maybe when
they had some new modes or something. But yeah, I
was it was getting a bit too much on my
my heart and soul and time and fingers and not
muddy me. I wasn't spending a ton of money on
it or anything, but yeah, I think it's a good
one I have with cycles and hopefully they add some
better acquisition things if you've been away for a while,
because it does feel right now if you come back
after a while that you're like kind of fucked in
the meadow. But you know, that's how these things go.
Speaker 2: I guess Seana the she Devil. That was the the
my last Series three card that I got, which is
which is great because it's been a card that i've been.
I've been just like, the hell is that a name
of the video game?
Speaker 1: I forgot? I couldn't picture in my mind what that meant.
But yeah, yes, yes, of course. Yeah, she's fun in
like a I mean, she's good with Kazar. It's good,
good combo.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So I added her to my.
Speaker 1: Zoo style deck.
Speaker 2: Yeah, my mocking Bird deck. Then it's been lots of fun.
And because I didn't play for like two seasons or
whatever it was, you like drop your level like every time.
But I'm like, I'm like literally level like ten or
something like.
Speaker 1: My right, because every season you dropped thirty, I guess
so you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I'm like, I'm like ranked ten, which is
great because it's really easy for me. Yeah, but you know,
it's a bit of grind to get back to kind
of where I was. I was never like at infant
or anything like that. One day I'll get there, but someday. No,
it's it's nice, just a good game to not be
fully done with, you know, just just jumping in here
and there and cool.
Speaker 1: I I have two very last I promise these will
be quick hits because you know, it's funny going into
this episode, no news, no topic, but then we talk
talk about hit Man for forty five, talk about Cult
Lamb for thirty five, like you know, these things happen
when you least expect them. But once again, Monday Morning
side quest, HiT's different. The coffee, the caffeine is evolving
through our bodies as we go, so it makes sense.
Two quick hits one is they at some point because
I was off game Pass for a few months there,
but at some point they added Mortal Kombat eleven. So
I booted that up yesterday and I was playing a
few matches of that.
Speaker 2: Is.
Speaker 1: It's fun because what we've been playing Mortal Kombat one,
I guess right on the stream, and so that's, as
you mentioned, like the reboot of the series, and so
everyone's kind of fresh and new. But coming into this,
like half these characters are like fucking zombies, Like I
appear they're dead and they brought back from the dead.
My girl Katana is like just to tear like molding over.
I can't remember the names of all of them. Yeah,
it'sunny just looking through the characters, the ones that I'm
like more familiar with now and seeing Okay, yeah, they
must have had some journey. I don't know what it is,
but I'd be curious to find out. But yeah, it's
been fun booting that up and just seeing some of that.
Katana doesn't have a point the same move set as one,
so I'm like less a fan of her. The character
that really was a good surprise hit for me was Garris.
I love Garrison's move set like the kind of he's
kind of got like a Prince of Persia's Sands of
Time situation where he has sand attacks and he's messing
around with time. But he just has some really like
his some of his fatality stuff where he'll just like
freeze someone in time and then just stab them from
all these different angles and like the blood is just
like frozen mid air as he's slashing them up. His
different sand attacks are really really cool, and like his
sandy fist that he's powering up, like really like that character.
He's not in one right he got he got cut
is actually so my god. I feel like we haven't
played him in Allo. Next time we do that, I'm
gonna have to check him out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's in there. He's basically in that game. He's
he's kind of like the Terminator, Like he's like like
like through like the story mode, he is like an
undefeatable immortal that just comes in and fucks you up,
like like you always are interacting with this villain in
the story. So I ended up hating Garris because I
just got absolutely bought by him constantly, and you just
know he's gonna come because when you defeed him, he's
just like immortal, so he just eventually comes and gets you.
But he's he's kind of like like an agent of
like whoever is like the God of Time type people.
So in that game m K eleven, it's actually like
the main villain. And then going into m K one,
it's it's lu Kaning. Now lu Kang becomes like the
fire God mixed with the Lightning God because he's fuses
with Rayden. It's the story is crazy. I fucking love
the stories in these games. They're so crazy, but I
love them so much. Garris is now like an agent
of lu Kang, which which is a good person. So
in MK one he's actually a good guy. So he's
not really he's not necessarily like morally aligned. He's just
he's just a weapon or a tool, so whoever is
using him, it's either nefarious or good means. And really
really cool design though, one hundred percent with like the
stands of Time thing. But I never really played him,
just because I played against him a lot and I
fucking hated him so much. I never wanted to deal
with that character. But yeah, MK eleven, I think m
K one is a better game. For like the characters
and stuff, because like you, I just have a lot
of nostalogia for like the original lu King or like Katana.
So when I got into m K eleven and they
were the I forgot their call. But yeah, like the
ghost versions of themselves, I'm like, I hate this. I
just want my old like I want Katan to be
a good person, and like Luke came to be a
good person, and the whole storyline, like they're just they're
they're just people that you're fighting, essentially revenants. That's what
they're called the revenueves. And of course that you can
get different costumes and like designs for your characters so
you can make them the not revenant version like in
that game. But it was just nice to get back
to m K one and it's like a fresh restart.
Everybody's back to their formula.
Speaker 1: So and I really I I'm missing the cameo fighter feature.
I realized that it's it's just fun to pick a character.
I think those attacks are really cool. The way it's
integrated into the move set is really satisfying. And maybe
I just miss Goro as well, But yeah, like that
that is something that I find that I'm missing in
this It's just one thing I love about this game.
And then when you go to the character select screen,
after you you know you've picked your character, I mean,
and then you go to your level select and then
it's like there's all the levels down below and like
the kind of preview of it, and then there's just
like a silhouette version of the two characters that you
have picked that are just fucking each other. They're just
battling and it's kind of like zoomed out in the background.
It's it's really really cool, almost like a little preview
of what's to come or what could happen. Yeah, you know,
it's not like I don't know if there's really mechanics too.
It's more just like an animation, but it's really cool.
And then the other character is I think his name,
her name is Devora, like the bug the bug Lady.
Because I remember being at Evil like the fighting game
tournament years and years ago, and I don't really know
any of these other fighting in them there for Smash right,
but I remember like getting so invested in Mortal Kombat.
It was just so fun to watch and I remember
some player just popping off with Devora, and I just
loved that move set, and so that was one of
the first ones I gravitated towards. And I was booting
up the game yesterday, and yeah, her moveset is really
fun and weird, and she's just creepy and gross. And
it's funny because I don't know anything about the story
other than like what you've told me, which is like
little fragments, and you know, whenever the characters jump in,
if there's like a specific story beat between them, they'll
have some little line of dialogue. And yeah, there was
just like some really cheesy one. I think it was
like I was Devora against I think it was like,
so like is it Sonia or not?
Speaker 2: No, it's it's.
Speaker 1: What's her name something, sue k, I don't know, something
like that, And they had like some funny little beef
where she was like, oh, the last time I saw you,
you said I'd be a like a bug on the windshield,
but I'm gonna break through that windshield. And it was
like the cheesiest thing, but it was so funny I
was dying laughing. So yeah, it just just a really
good time just to playing through some of this game.
I don't know how into what I'm gonna get, because
it is way more fun playing with with you guys
or other other friends and whatnot. But it's it's just
cool to have access to it and see the other
characters and a little bits of story that I'm picking
up there.
Speaker 2: Uh, Cassie Cage's Cassie.
Speaker 1: That's the one that's the one Cassie.
Speaker 2: In Like when I was playing it, I remember she
was like the most OPE character in the entire game.
Same thing with Jack's daughter's character. I can't remember her name,
but she is like metal Arms as well.
Speaker 1: Oh it's it's it's also it's like Jackie or something like,
it's Jackie Briggs. Yeah, Jackie jack.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's another character that was like the OPE character
of that game. So like Cassie. When I played that game,
my by far my favorite was Sindell. I just loved
her move set so much. I love that character from
the older games that might have been in like the
DLC version of the KYE.
Speaker 1: I don't think she's on the base roster for the
or at least maybe maybe the lockers from playing the
campaign or something.
Speaker 2: But yeah, maybe, but yeah, no, I love Sindell so
much and Scarlett. I actually played a lot of really
cool character. She's like a blood user and.
Speaker 1: Who's the character with like the bow staff, like the
green She's kind of Jade, Yeah, is what's what's her
connection with Katan? Are they like sisters or something?
Speaker 2: They I can't remember. I think it's like Nether realm
or other realm wherever they are there's like Earth realm
and then like, well, the other.
Speaker 1: Realm is the name of the studio, but it'd be
funny if they named it after this.
Speaker 2: I think. I think another realm is like Hell in
that in that world, so it is a canon thing.
But whatever the realm is, like, they're just they're from there.
Like I think Jade was like a guard of like Sindell,
who's like the Empress, and then Katana and Molina are
the daughters of sind Real and then Molina was made
as a clone of Katana of course, So dude, I
I deep gove in these storylines. I haven't played all
the games, but like MK fire and if shouts to
them on YouTube, they literally have like the full movie
of like the games. You know, you know when something
does like the cut scene of like the whole thing.
I I think just randomly. One day, I just like
put on my second model and I was just watching
through it and these storylines are so out there, but
I just love them. I love the MK universe so much.
But I'm really gad that you jumped in there. And
I hope it's just a thing like every time we're
together on streams, were always booting up some mks.
Speaker 1: I hope. So that's good. Yeah, I definitely definitely want
to get better at it, and yeah, try out more
characters and all that. And then yeah, my last my
last game show it here for the day is do
you remember a couple of months ago I talked to
you about Sniper Elite two. I was played through that game,
and then in that we talked about Zombie Army as
like that spinoff series from Sniper Elite. Well, I jumped
into Zombie Army four, which is on game Pass and
I've played through some of that. It's it's interesting. So
I played like, I don't know, I think three missions
or something like that, and it's funny just seeing like, okay,
where the line is between like this being a spin
off of Sniper Elite and where it's just its own
thing gameplay wise, it feels very similar in terms of
like the combat and like you always have a sniper
rifle with you. It's got like the slow motion shots
and all that the craziness. But I feel like this
this is even more arcadie and crazy, whereas Sniper Lea
it's like trying to be a bit more grounded. It's
very silly with the slow most shots and this whooshing
sound as you bust open someone's ball sack or something
like that. But like you know, this this game is
even crazier where there's just like Colm Boat, there's like
a combo meter on the side where numbers are constantly
popping off and climbing, and it's just it's it's like
an arcade game in terms of how savage it is,
with just like particle effects and things popping off all
over the place. And obviously because of the mind the
zombie part of it, rather than it being like pseudo
stealth game pseudo action, it seems like so far it's
like full on into the action side of it, where
you're just ripping zombies apart, getting multi kills one sniper shot,
going through multiple zombies, hitting an explosive barrel, killing like
six of them at the same time. So it's very
over the top, very grotesque, very intense, but it is,
you know, it is a fun things, like just a
mindless shooter. But here's the thing theme of the episode today.
I got to the end of this most recent mission
I was on, which is one where there is a
boat that you're going around and then the boat will stop.
You gotta off, you know, move this bridge, turn the power.
On the end of this mission, or I think I'm
near the end of the mission, fucking game is bugged
out at this certain point where I can't leave. I
leave the boat, the game like visually bugs out, and
then I just reload back on the boat and then
maybe I'll fall through the map. And I tried everything.
I tried to crouch, go prone, go with this close
the game, load my safe, go back, a save or two,
and the game is just freaking bugged here. And again
I'm just like, I'm liking this game, but it's not
nearly as fun to me as like a Sniper Elite is.
I much prefer that series, and so I'm not even
I'm not even gonna I could probably restart the mission
from the beginning and do it, but It's like I've
already spent forty five minutes to get to this point
in this mission. H So, once again a bug, a
game breaking bug. I'm not going to continue with this
game because of it, which I'm not heartbreaking boat once
again because I'm not totally in love with the game,
but just once again really shitty. I've had some bad
luck with bugs recently, and this is like an old game.
This game came like years and years and years ago,
so it's too bad that a game breaking bug exists
like this in there. But yeah, it's interesting, Like I
don't think I'm compelled enough to want to go back
and check out the older games in the series. I
think I just really want to keep playing more the
Sniper League games, considering I even own a couple ones
that I haven't booted up yet, so I think I'm
gonna continue with that. And the funny thing I just
had to mention is like, so once again this game
has the slow mow bullet going through. You're seeing it
go through the body and break some bones. But since
you're shooting zombies there, you know lungs and heart are
just like nasty, cancerous green sacks of the most disgusting
ooze you've ever seen, and it's really gross. Your bullet's
going through and you're seeing their body parts explode and
their bones shattered, all those nasty juice line over the place.
So it is very gross and nasty. But there you go,
finally checked out some zombie army and realize that you
know what. It's not for me, but it's cool that
it exists for someone. I do think this this in
a very Left four deady kind of way. This game,
as well as Sniper Lea, have co op in there,
but I've always played them as single player games. I
think this one would be much more fun playing in
co op where a sniper lead. I'm cool for that
to be a single player game for me and that
kind of pseudo hit Man sort of play style. But yeah,
this I think would be a lot more fun to have,
Like you can have up to four friends there going
through Russian zombies in a very left Furdeddy sort of way.
Speaker 2: You probably mentioned it, but I had no idea Sniperly
even had co op function. That's pretty interesting. Yeah, I
don't seem like not the game that would yeah be
necessary for it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't think it always did but like, even
going back, some of these older games just have like
you know, full on competitive multiplayer in them, they have
co op like they're just fully featured games for whatever reason.
I was something that really surprised me a Sniper Elite
five when I was playing through that. It's just how
much stuff there is in there. And it's like, I'm
never going to engage nonying of that because i just
want to play the single player missions. But yeah, all
that stuff's in there, and I feel like Zombie Army
was probably built as more of that co op shooter
rather than Sniper Elite. Seems like that's more core to
the experience overall. So yeah, interesting to check out, but
probably not going to continue with this series at this point.
Speaker 2: Nice.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there you go. That is the episode at two
hours fifteen minutes. Another juicy one here. It's been a
bit since we've had a longer side coast. That was
a fun one, Kirklean, thank you for joining me. This
was a just super super fun discussion total everyone enjoyed.
And next week I'll be back with Taylor feel talk
about who knows what. But yeah, we will see you
again next time.
Speaker 2: Bye bye, b