I’ve also never seen the show and was under the impression it was about dog cops. I’m feeling rather elightened right now.
This photo (one of many) drunkenly taken at my buddy’s wedding last year encapsulates most of my Paw Patrol knowledge.
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They may not be bastards but they’re all sons of bitches
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I guess the air rescue one is a girl but I stand by my joke
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Good thing one of those dogs is a fire fighter cause Jaffe’s on fire right now.
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The first Leisure Suit Larry felt bigger than it was too, because there was an “Open World” city where sometimes you would have to walk from one place to another, and the limits were generic city streets where you got beaten up by thugs. Obviously if you could avoid the violence there would be an even bigger city waiting for you!
Also I would speed run Jara Tava: The Isle of Fire for Amstrad CPC. Because I had 3/4 of the parser commands to finish the game (via the Nautilus submarine) memorised at one point.
I was suprised Toriel never came up in the Undertale monster fucking discussion.
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Lots of parallax scrolling always made the worlds look bigger to me as it always made me think about the various car trips I took as a child.
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Chiming in to agree with @adashtra that I also do not care about petting the dog in video games. I’m a huge dog person (we have four!) but I just don’t understand why I would be playing a video game to have that experience
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Interesting copyright fact (perhaps most interesting to fellow comics guy @Jaffe ): Popeye eating spinach is in the public domain!
The first mention of Popeye using spinach to augment his strength comes from this comic in 1931, two years after his introduction:
Duke University’s copyright expert Jennifer Jenkins did some research into this strip and concluded that it too had already lapsed into the public domain. (side note: this strip already being in the public domain didn’t also make Popeye as a character public domain for reasons beyond the scope of this post). At this time in US Copyright law (under the Copyright Act of 1909), the first 28 years of copyright came with the initial registration of the work with an option to renew for an additional 28. The copyright status of many works from before 1976 (another year with a big copyright law revision) is often a matter of research more than anything else. Though we know for certain everything from 1929 or earlier (that isn’t a sound recording for other, dumb reasons beyond the scope of this post) is public domain, many other works are too if they were never renewed or registered correctly in the first place!
I could say a lot more about the public domain status of various works in the United States but that’s no longer about Popeye.
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Please do anyway. It’s fascinating!
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I like this a lot about A Link To The Past. The world also has a lot of optional spaces to explore, and it let’s you check out areas that you don’t need to go to yet. One of my favourite memories of that game is going into the south east of the map early on and finding the ice rod. It felt like I discovered something without any guidance from the game.
The first Final Fantasy would let you go to parts of the world map with monsters of a far higher level. It’s a neat way to gate things off without actually gating anything and it made me wonder wtf is over there. Even moreso because I couldn’t go there, which made want to go there.
Both of these give a feeling of a skinner box and wondering what could be inside, even if it turns out to be nothing of interest, it makes the world feel bigger than the roped off bounds of the scenario design.
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some of the reveals are real wild, too, like when i learned who the leader of one of the florwish factions (beyond the basics) was the whole time i had a moment
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I guess it depends on how you define modern; my understanding of modern policing is that we got it from the English who invented it for the purpose of containing the Irish “radicals” (i.e. colonialism), but yeah every country/region has its own flavor e.g. slave patrols in the south
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Warning: Frank says a major Arkham Knight spoiler in this episode (he says spoiler warning, but then immediately says the spoiler–no human being would be able to hit the pause/skip button fast enough; I would appreciate a bit more warning time next time!!)
So if you want to avoid my fate and not get Arkham Knight spoiled, skip from 00:43:50 to 44:30
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for what it’s worth, it’s actually more of a spoiler for the game before it. arkham knight opens with everything frank said being foregone knowledge, or at least something you find out very quickly, if I remember.
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The bit at the end made me burst out laughing.
“Yahoo Whippy” is what Simon Belmont yells when he’s attacking Dracula’s head.
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Me, several times before reading this post: I really like this The Smile band, they sound like Radiohead before Radiohead went boring as heck about (gulp) 20 years ago
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banger lineup, i hope merrit k is on more! also looking forward to checking out fledgling manor
also eager to hear brandon’s reviews on nazi killing media, been sitting on boys from brazil for way too long myself
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The Radiohead of video games is Jet Set Radio:
- In the early 2000s I quite liked both.
- Both are kind of obtuse and less good than I remember.
- All the best bits of both were just stolen from people who actually were cool.
- High-profile individuals involved in both are into some bad right-wing stuff now.
- Both claim that they’ll return one day and we all know that if they do it will suck.
- This actual radio head:
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great episode. love to hear merrit back on the show. extremely gratifying to know even IRL dog likers don’t understand the obsession with in-game dog interactability. my favourite video game dogs are the elden ring rot dogs and i hate them.
if i could ask a potentially indelicate question, does the show have an abundance of horrible buzzers banked or should i keep making and submitting them? 
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Also have to add to the “I love merrit appearances” comment club. Real fun ep that got some real life lols from me.
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