I initially read this and felt like I missed something very crucial growing up.
Frantic Google searches were had.
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If my twitter weren’t locked up like an abandoned house, I’d tell you to go search adashtra + Marvel’s Midnight Suns. 
It’s become one of a short list of critically underloved games that I shout everyone should play at least once a quarter.
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I saw “David Cage alarm” in this thread before actually listening to this episode, and this Suikoden track immediately came to mind:
Then when listening to the episode esper’s choice was pretty close!
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I may be conflating this discussion with the previous episode (oops) but on the topic of academic writing in games there’s a great write up on Time Extension covering an event in Birmingham City University last summer covering videogame history from an academic perspective that sounds like it was rather roundly ignored by mainstream and specialist press. All of it sounds absolutely fantastic and it’s wild that something like this would have been almost left to never be shared.
The closest a game came to ruining my life, and it probably did for a while, was Pokemon Diamond / Pearl during my last year of university. I’d then-recently started getting into competitive battling which inevitably led to the endless grind of breeding Pokemon to min-max the team that I wanted. Over the course of a few months I put in about 800 hours into the game, plus research, inconveniently timing it all during my final exams and I’d be lying if I said that my final academic achievement didn’t suffer for it - thankfully only mildly. That’s not to mention the fact that it tore up what little of a social life that my then-paralytically shy self had at the time. Good job, me.
Also, great episode. Kieron was a great guest and had a ton of insight to bring to the table. Please bring him back one day!
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Thank you @Jaffe for calling it the question hole again. It’s growing on me quickly.
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It’s actually that you’re slowly sinking into the question hole.
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Oooh, so it’s a call of the void type deal
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I think you hyped it up on an episode of this very podcast and sold me because I had been on the fence. Definitely a game I’ve been telling a lot of people to play since then
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Nick Cave wrote the screenplay and, along with Bad Seed Warren Ellis, the music for The Proposition, a western directed by John Hillcoat.
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Hillcoat directed a number of Bad Seeds music videos and the Red Dead Redemption promotional machinima short film, The Man from Blackwater.
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NC&WE scored The Assassination of Jesse James…, which clearly inspired Red Dead Redemption II.
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RDRII has, in addition to an original score, a bunch of original pop songs performed by D’Angelo, Willie Nelson, Rhiannon Giddens, etc.
I would be very surprised if Rockstar didn’t at some point try to get NC&WE to do anything for RDR2. I’m thankful they didn’t get them for the score since most of their movie music sounds the same and is not especially interesting
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Nick Cave also wrote a script for Gladiator 2
Don’t think much of it survived to the final cut…
During this time, Nick Cave was commissioned to write a new draft of the script. It was later revealed to be written under the working title of "Christ Killer ". Cave described the plot as a “deities vs. deity vs. humanity” story. The story involved Maximus in purgatory, who is resurrected as an immortal warrior for the Roman gods. Maximus is sent back to Earth and tasked with ending Christianity by killing Jesus and his disciples, as Christianity was draining the power of the ancient Pagan gods. During his mission, Maximus is tricked into murdering his own son. Cursed to live forever, Maximus fights in the Crusades, World War II, and the Vietnam War; with the ending revealing that in the present-day, the character now works at the Pentagon. The script was rejected and scrapped after Steven Spielberg, who had consulted on the original film, told Scott it wasn’t going to work, especially as Cave had written something “too grand” due to his theatre work.
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I knew who Prince was but didn’t actually become interested until I saw that legendary halftime show and I was like whoa…he’s pretty good!
Also tucking my shirt in now cause im cold. Lets see if it works
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I have some thoughts, though I’m not sure they coalesce into a hard thesis about this question. I think ideally we’d see a wide range of players with different skill levels and backgrounds writing about the same subject. The novice provides a lot of insight on how well a game communicates its systems or teaches the player. When I am unfamiliar with a game or genre, this is helpful info. I find those “my boy/girlfriend played […] for the first time” videos kinda interesting from an anthropological level. I am genuinely for low-skilled players being able to play/write about games
I also really liked the point about consumer reviews vs criticism the panel made during this section. I hadn’t ever thought about it in that language before but that’s a helpful distinction. I wish people online were a little more discerning about “okay what is it I’m reading? who is the audience for this article?”
That being said, I do find myself very viscerally turned off when a writer says something that outs themselves as not knowing the systems of the game their talking about. I was watching a video where a guy went on an extended tangent complaining about not being able to sort the menus in the game he was playing, all while the clip he showed on screen had a prompt at the bottom (in small font) that said “Sort [R3].” I see a lot of stuff in this vein of “this game would be better with […] mechanic” and they mention a mechanic that’s already in the game. I understand that it’s hard and that sometimes people just genuinely miss things about how a game works but I read stuff like this and I wonder what I’m even supposed to do with it.
I want to give people credit and/or the benefit of the doubt, but I often find little bits of writing that betray the writer: that they either didn’t explore or understand the game’s systems as much as I, the reader, wanted them to.
I read a review of Final Fantasy VII and the author wrote that Emerald Weapon was so incomprehensibly powerful and difficult and required so much preparation that it wasn’t possible for anyone to beat it without their game clock maxed out to 99:59.
…But that’s just not true. And for some reason, yea, it really irks me. If I could learn the systems then why couldn’t you? My game clock said 32:00. Good luck with whatever you were doing, I guess.
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I know this game is a darling around here, but Yakuza 0 almost ruined my life.
I was living alone when I was playing it, in a long distance relationship, and drinking a lot. I would walk to the liquor store, pick up a bottle of Japanese whiskey to drink while playing and essentially drink myself to sleep on the couch after work everyday.
Long story short, the person I was in the relationship with moved here, we got married, I drink WAY less now, and despite how shitty I felt at the time, Yakuza 0 still came across as a pretty cool game.
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I really like the idea of the main panelists banking up credits on episode wins, feels more tangible and rewarding than homework
That said, I’ve always felt it was a missed opportunity to not just, always have guests win honorarily or not. But with the new credit system I would like if the winner getting homework could just be pushed on guests regardless (if they have something they want to ask of course). Would just be a fun way to tie each episode into the next by having the guest of the last episode ask the first question (altho i do love jaffe having very pointed questions towards guests!!)
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I feel like guests should be invited to submit a question to the next episode regardless of whether they “win” or not. I agree that it’s a nice way to tie the episodes together.
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You kinda nailed it here. At work I spend a lot of time collecting feedback and its easy to shrug off people who are totally unfamiliar with things, but because they don’t know The Rules, they often have unique perspectives that can challenge the way you think.
I love playing D&D with brand new players for the same reason. They don’t know what they can and can’t do so they ask if they can try the wildest, most creative shit - and I get to use one of my favourite canned phrases in D&D, “You can try!”
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Yea I think that’s good advice for playing games or just working in teams in general. I used to do puzzle hunts, which if anyone doesn’t know, are kinda sorta similar to escape rooms and scavenger hunts (they’re very fun and I could talk about them at length and think video game puzzles could stand to steal from them). Anyway, the big rule we established early on is that everyone needs to think out loud. It’s not uncommon for someone in the group to say the dumbest thing you’ve ever heard in your entire life but have that be the thing that causes someone else in the group to find the solution
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I was a big Deadmau5 fan during the 2010’s. > album title goes here < came out in the middle-ish of my time in high school and while (1<2) during the end. I listened to W:/2016ALBUM/ a lot in college.
I have always thought the track No Problem would fit right in as combat music in a game like Hyper Light Drifter. Errors In My Bread with would be a great track for some kind of futuristic racing game. Not quite a WipeOut but maybe like a hypothetical Forza Horizon 2099. I also think it would be kinda funny to have a visual novel license Deadmau5’s music but it’s his piano work like Invidia, Superbia, and Ira.
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Hey sorry this is late but I’ve been catching up on my podcast queue and jaffe mentioning watching every episode of Frasier made me think of this
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