Ep. 383 - The Monster...Hunter

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Ep. 383 - The Monster…Hunter

The finest minds in video games cover both GDC and the Nintendo Direct, furniture options when playing games, and jade dizzies. Plus, a credit is spent! Hosted by Alex Jaffe, with Frank Cifaldi, Ash Parrish, and Brandon Sheffield. Edited by Esper Quinn, original music by Kurt Feldman.

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Discuss this episode in the Insert Credit Forums

SHOW NOTES:

Credit Report (03:16)

1: merritt k asks, what game would you give the modern rerelease treatment? (04:55)

2: Brandon Sheffield asks, what is the wearing a metal band t-shirt of video games? (10:43)

3: How was GDC and the Nintendo Direct? (16:23)

4: What do you look for in a new couch? (23:47)

Insert Credit Quick Break - Crime Lake (30:53)

5: Nick asks, describe the first hour of David Cage’s Monster Hunter spin-off. (32:03)

6: What’s the weirdest video game opinion you’ve ever heard in your life? (36:34)

7: Were video games corrupting the youth? (39:51)

LIGHTNING ROUND: GameFAQ&As - Roblox (44:54)

Recommendations and Outro (48:39):

This week’s Insert Credit Show is brought to you by Crime Lake and patrons like you. Thank you.

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One of the finest buzzers to date

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by the way: no brian david gilbert in this episode due to scheduling issues, but we’ll have him on soon :+1: this is what i get for announcing a guest in advance!!

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Just want to say that I listened to the first episode of DC Action News and really enjoyed it. Good idea and well executed. Looking forward to learning how America deals with its new king-less government.

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I wanted to weigh in here on the last question about games and the youth. I currently am the father of two youths, specifically boys, both not quite teens…

The panel brought up about games don’t corrupt, but culture and online circles related to games can. Absolutely

As parents, my wife and I are really pretty restrictive on the screen time, and what screens our kids get, compared to what their friends get. Both of us grew up when the internet was extremely “wild west” and crazy stuff was everywhere, so we’re well aware of the dangers the internet can bring. We see some of their friends with very open access to what’s out there and I can tell it’s made those friends more wild.

That isn’t to say they aren’t allowed screen time, of course. They have access to a Switch, a Switch Lite, a 3DS, and a gaming laptop (with curated games I went through and shared from my Steam library, or got from GOG). The laptop in particular is setup to a web filter I made, hosted in-house, that blocks certain sites and logs all web requests the laptop makes. Also we don’t allow Fortnite or Roblox as we know those can be just toxic environments. This can lead to some social consequences as they can’t always relate to their peers, but there’s definitely a good intersection with Minecraft and Pokemon.

All in all we don’t want to be the passive parents who end up with kids aspiring to be Andrew Tate or end up as incel bigots. We have active conversations with them on what they heard at school and what things they may hear about in the news. We’re doing our best to give an overall lesson on how to notice toxic things and fake information, so that they don’t fall into toxic areas online, including game fandoms/culture.

For a bright spot, things seem to be working OK as everyone says how polite and kind our kids are, especially service workers who deal with crappy kids all the time.

Lastly, for reference, the web filter I have setup in house is called Pi Hole. It’s free and can be setup on one of those Raspberry Pi computers (which is what I use) or really any other computer, even older ones. Just note it runs on a few versions of Linux, no Windows, so that’s the only learning curve. If you got a friend who knows Linux I’m sure they could set it up no problem for you as it’s really easy.

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Frank has done an excellent job of cutting straight to the quick of the couch decision process. My husband and I cannot agree on the depth criteria (I’m shallow, he’s deep, don’t read too much into it) and as a result we each have one friend couch and one despised enemy couch in the house. Peace has been maintained but for how long??

I’ve worn a cheap Redbubble shirt with the Plato’s Cavern sign from SNATCHER as a bed shirt for years and I believe this to be a green flag but somewhere deep inside I fear it is a red flag.

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A lot of crossovers for me in this episode.

Personally I think that all the extra deep lore in something like Nier/Automata and Drakengard by extension, or Killer7 (a game I feel similarly about) could only be dealt with by another game in the series, rather than remaking and expanding the existing ones.

Also, as someone who has around 20 of the GDQ shirts and many metal t-shirts, Brandon’s question was made for me.

I even have a forbidden Bonk t-shirt, merchandise from a Bonk game that was never released.

However my one anecdote about interactions like the ones he mentioned on the show is much more bizarre and unfortunate:

At the first PAX Australia in 2013, one of the merch booths was selling a Bioshock Infinite (before the shine had worn off that game in my mine) fan t-shirt with the “Murder of Crows” powerup from the game depicted on it.

Having grown up in Adelaide, I’ve supported the Adelaide Crows in the AFL since their inception in 1991, and was a club member for about 25 years. The t-shirt matched the team’s colours (navy blue/red/gold) perfectly, and the club was using “Murder of Crows” as an official slogan in their membership material at the time. So I immediately purchased it.

After PAX finished I was invited by my father to watch the next Crows game in a pub with a group of Melbourne based fans. Every one of them (mostly 50/60 y.o. boomers) commented about how good the shirt was and asked where I got it.

Every time I would make it to an actual game, I would wear the shirt and get positive comments from other fans, occasionally from someone who played Binfinite too.

I had a little under two years of basking in recognition of my good shirt taste. Until July 3 2015 when Adelaide Crows coach Phil Walsh was murdered by his mentally-ill son. This was of course an enormous tragedy, and dominated the news cycle for over a week (This was significant enough that my mother felt it necessary to phone me before 7AM on a weekday to tell me). As a result my cool shirt immediately became close to the single most offensive piece of clothing I could possibly wear. And it now permanently lives in the bottom of one of my drawers.

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I somehow don’t mind monsterfucking, but what Ash wants to do to Dizzy upsets me.

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Clearly he was busy!

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I feel like I tend to be one of the people with the weird or abnormal opinions, more than hearing them myself. I suppose that might be true for many of us here on the Insert Credit Forums, since we’re all oddballs about different facets of video games relative to the broader “gaming public”

I suppose the weirdest things I’ve heard tend to orbit things like “blockchain” games or using AI to spontaneously write dialogue for NPCs and things of that nature, though. I don’t understand how any of those ideas are appealing to people, really—why would I even want to bring loot from one game into another, or to have NPCs in games that have about as much authenticity as a glorified AIM chatbot? None of that has any appeal to me whatsoever

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What Ash said about it being the people rather than the games feels about right to me. My six year old has stumbled into the Minecraft influencer lane of YouTube, and it has raised a set of concerns:

  • (arguably good) talking about what is official versus what is unofficial or legendary, e.g., Herobrine
  • (good) talking about what he learns from what he watches, in terms of design choices (he has been learning about pistons and redstone in really cool ways)
  • (bad) influencers talking up what they are doing in obnoxious ways, like constantly hyping and saying bro while putting on this sort of inauthentic shock and surprise
  • (bad) influencers playing tricks or modeling pranking or other negative behavior
  • (really bad) influencers veering into bad politics or bigoted behavior

We’re always in the room with him when he watches, and we always shut down a channel as soon as it veers into one of the bad things. But the ratio of good to bad has gotten so poor that I told him we can’t watch a video if it has a person’s face in the thumbnail, like so (mockup by me from official Minecraft page + Sonic poggers):

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Before this year, I had been pretty unaware and agnostic on influencer content. (When I do YouTube video content, it is more on the longer video essay side or on explicit jokes/skit stuff. When I have watched streamers, they tend to be pretty relaxed.) But now, the combination of the algorithm and the content have led me to believe that more influencing than not is attention-seeking trash that at best stops there and sometimes (in a couple of examples we saw) seems to be a gateway to far worse content.

Finally, I write all this thinking of how my dad wouldn’t let us watch MTV when I was a kid, that we watched it anyway when he wasn’t home, and we turned out OK. Certainly my reaction to the style of influencer-speak has a whiff of “kids these days.” But I think there is a big difference between the content (the music videos, the games) and the actual harmful thoughts and behaviors in discourse. In this moment, being engaged in how kids engage the discourse around games is vitally important.

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Not all No Fear shirts are created equal

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I just need to drop in before finishing the episode to point out that spending way more time talking about couch preferences than both GDC and the Nintendo Direct put together says a lot about Insert Credit as a show.

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my big take is that somebody blacked out the teeth of this pogging sonic and I want to know whether it was you or you just found it this way and didn’t notice, or found it this way and chose not to address it, or something else. something is afoot!

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Not me! That was from my source. I didn’t notice, so I can’t even take credit for that part.

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Just started listing to the podcast (great show!) and I think this ranks up there for the worst gaming related shirt. It has that ‘don’t mess with a guy born in July’ tshirt energy as well.

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I just realized this post is for episode 383 yet at the start of the show @Jaffe said it was episode 382. I can’t believe the host can’t even keep the episodes straight smh. /s

All praise @esper for accurate record keeping.

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For me, this is a high compliment even if you don’t mean it that way.

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I LIKE the couch talk! It’s not interesting (to me) to hear a podcast just repeat the news.

I am looking forward to GDC bonus content tho.

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