The only game where I read all the lore bits was Ghost of a Tale (wasn’t a codex but rather hyperlinks in the text whenever some worldbuilding-related word was mentioned in dialog).
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Thanks for this weeks episode.
I’m not normally a codex person, but I have to agree that Mass Effect had a great one. The game’s premise lends itself to learning about the universe and it has clear, understandable story points to take out of it. I want to know what all the different Star Trek races are about, how they achieved space readiness, what happened when they found a relay, and why they are or aren’t part of the citadel. It helps that a lot feels like potentially relevant context to what I’m doing in the story and doesn’t spend too long in “Flavor Text Country”.
It’s especially worthwhile because ME2 had to explain why weapons now all suddenly reload, after ME1 went into great detail explaining why guns don’t even have bullets anymore.
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For as much as I devour Bioware games and those like them, I’m not really a codex girlie. I will occasionally read things as I pick them up if a title catches my eye but otherwise tend to have trouble switching gears between gameplay and lore-delving
Where they do tend to work for me is in Bethesda’s Fallout games, where terminals and the like feel like little rewards for leveling up my science / hacking skills. Particularly in those games there’s less of an emphasis on talking to NPCs compared to exploration, which I think helps me stay in the right frame of mind to stop and read
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Have y’all seen the insanity that is Guilty Gear Strive’s codex and diagrams?
We’re going to lose an entire generation of Tony Shalhoub Monk-style detectives who will just become Guilty Gear lore masters instead.
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Thanks Ash!
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re: Ash and voiced codexes, COLONY WARS for the PSX is maybe the first big example of that that I saw.
I don’t really know if it’s worth going back for, and Ash doesn’t seem like she’s going to go hard into somewhat mediocre, notable PSX games. But here’s a little taste:
There is SO MUCH in the codex! It’s truly weird how much!
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I was looking for the video I took where I was driving on the Wangan at midnight with the soundtrack from Wangan Midnight blasting but unfortunately it looks like it is stuck on a Japanese flip phone from 2008
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I was surprised by Frank’s opinion that playing Arkanoid is not a tactile experience. Rotating the dial control is pretty tactile in a way that using a track ball isn’t.
I miss having a radio dial in my car. I used to be able to change FM frequencies between preferred stations really quickly and specifically through memorized touch. (Audio Arkanoid)
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oh wow yall i love this podcast, been having a rough time lately because who isn’t and that outro got me all legit misty eyed and lifted me up a bit, so, thanks so much for putting those words and feelings out there
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Pokedex from Pokemon Fire Red:
It happened one morning - a boy with extrasensory powers awoke in bed transformed into KADABRA
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As Ash Ketchum awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a giant Psi Pokémon.
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FYI a fun thing you can do if you have a pet is figure out why kind of pokemon it is. pocket is “normal” and “fighting” type but saber is “fairy” and “dragon” type.
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I realized my partner is probably a ghost type Pokemon after noticing that they took reduced damage from poison (the garbage they eat).
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The story about brandon and the girl and new super mario ds sounds like the beginning of a young adult gaming themed romance novel
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Just wanted to say thank you for this (and every) episode. I really needed that ending.
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Loved ash’s speech at the end and lmao @esper!!
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Oh geez, as far as Alain Badiou “the certainty of misery vs the misery of uncertainty” goes: kinda feel like it is Overwatch vs Concord
I watched someone highly defend Concord on Twitch in that there was a passive stacking mechanic that was designed to make you strategically rotate through characters and play as many of them as possible, and that the demo made zero effort to teach you this so everyone played it basically with all attributes at “level 1” so everyone was slow, squishy, and weak and no one had a good time with it, and if they’d just spent any amount of effort showing people how it was meant to be played it would have been received better. It really made me want to give it a second chance and of course I can never do that now :(
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Jaffe dropped so many Rs in this pronunciation that I thought he had turned British.
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I ALMOST interrupted to ask how many Rs there were
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