Ep. 35: Old Gods old game trapped on the GameCube | Eternal Darkness

Eternal Darkness Transcript

 

Steve (00:00)

Yeah, anyway.

 

Everybody ready to go?

 

Dan (00:06)

Ready.

 

Don (00:07)

almost. Give me a second. Here we go. Okay. Got his name. Great. I found an interesting tidbit of information about this game I'm to share on the show. So not so much about the game itself, but the aftermath of it.

 

Steve (00:26)

I gotcha.

 

Dan (00:28)

Yeah, there's 12 playable characters.

 

Don (00:30)

Where is the essence of Monterok?

 

You mean oblivion?

 

Dan (00:38)

Is that pious? That must be. That was a pretty good impression.

 

Don (00:45)

you

 

Motto!

 

Steve (00:50)

I don't know what the fuck he's talking about. read that book.

 

You think I can read? I'm from the fuckin' like, 400th century.

 

Don (01:03)

You lose sanity when monsters look at you and then you kill them. Show them who's boss and you gain sanity back. Take that, bitch.

 

I lose sanity when people look at me at the coffee shop.

 

Steve (01:18)

He goes, you're an agent of Zellototh, aren't you?

 

Don (01:22)

the fuck are you looking at?

 

Steve (01:25)

Don't make me pull out my enchanted gladius!

 

Don (01:28)

Dude who's the who's the guy in the second chapter? What's his name with like the fucking? Yeah, dude hit with that first sword when he does the killing blow he does like the

 

Steve (01:35)

Entering

 

Dan (01:36)

Yeah.

 

Don (01:46)

You

 

Steve (01:47)

Dude, Kareem

 

Dan (01:50)

A lot of them do that though.

 

Steve (01:52)

I mean you would too if your life was on the line. Fuck this thing.

 

Dan (01:54)

Yeah.

 

Don (01:57)

Kareem's already had a bad day. right. He went through the desert, you know, no water.

 

Dan (01:58)

Dude.

 

Steve (01:59)

Dude, he's the biggest fucking

 

simp.

 

Dan (02:02)

Dude, Edwin Lindsey, MVP. I'm gonna say it.

 

Don (02:07)

I like, the, I like the, yeah, yeah.

 

Dan (02:08)

That dude's a Chad.

 

Steve (02:09)

Alright save it save it for that fight save it for the episode save it for

 

the episode wasting all the good shit Alright everybody ready

 

Dan (02:18)

Let's do it.

 

Steve (02:24)

Welcome to the Cable Club. We're a retro video gaming podcast where three guys get to pick a starter for their arrival first. And we're linking up to talk about the games you love and rank them. This is episode number 35. We're your hosts. I'm Steve.

 

Dan (02:40)

Calm down.

 

Don (02:41)

And I'm done.

 

Steve (02:43)

And I'm here with all these gentlemen and my wife is here too. Say hi.

 

Don (02:51)

Special Valentine's Day guest.

 

Dan (02:54)

kissy kissy.

 

Steve (02:54)

Aww,

 

I got her flowers.

 

Don (02:57)

The only one of our wives that plays video games!

 

Dan (02:57)

Yep,

 

pretty much.

 

Steve (03:04)

And this week's episode is our ninth League episode, and the entry is Eternal Darkness. So get ready to upload data from us to you, but first, set the mood.

 

Don (03:20)

Easy there, easy there. I'm gonna get the spray bottle if you get out of hand, alright? You too. yeah.

 

Dan (03:23)

yeah.

 

Steve (03:23)

at the moon.

 

Bow bow. All right. It's the year 2002 and it's 3 a.m. on a Saturday morning. You've been up so long now you feel as if you're in a drunken stupor. Things have started to slow down for you as they normally do after staying up for God knows how long. The pizza and the Mountain Dew are tapped out just like you. You're playing this interesting game that you just picked up. All of a sudden

 

You seem to hear a woman crying. You pause your game and you listen very closely, thinking to yourself, is someone crying in real life? But you cease to hear it. So you unpause your game and get back to it. Little changes start happening all over. You feel like your reality starts to unravel. Your screen is now tilted. Enemies are acting strangely. All kinds of strange stuff.

 

Once you've dispatched them, it's now time to save your game and get some sleep. All of a sudden, your game starts to delete all of your save files. Panicked, you watch as the bar fills up. But to your relief, it saves your game and doesn't delete it. You're still wondering why this is all happening. You feel like you're losing your mind and you aren't sure if it's just the game or the state of sleep deprivation you've put yourself in. Playing scary games alone in the dark

 

not knowing what's gonna happen around every corner. Once you finally fell asleep, your dreams were just as unnerving and strange. But it all just made you more excited for tomorrow night, for more eternal darkness.

 

Don (05:12)

Definitely is a vibe.

 

Dan (05:14)

For sure is.

 

Don (05:17)

whole game.

 

Well, I'm excited to get into that, but before we do, I have a couple of announcements for you.

 

So the one and only announcement that I have is that, I'm tired of talking about the website that we have up that you could go visit www.thecableclub.com. If you're curious about the league standings or want to hear more about the league or figure out how to enter yourself. But I'm not going to talk about that. Instead, I'm going to talk about the, fight night that we've been challenged to by the switcheroo podcast.

 

So, don't know if this is going to be a candid reaction from you guys, cause I haven't talked to you guys about this, I think almost at all, but, JMo wants us to enter a fight night with his discord and get fighters from our discord. And that's going to take place on March 16th, which is a Sunday. I'm going to block some time out and there's going to be three events. So if you listener are a member of our discord or haven't become one yet and want to become one and come fight for the cable club.

 

There are some stakes involved that involve one podcast writing the other's outro.

 

Dan (06:27)

wow.

 

Don (06:29)

Uh, so every time a cable club member wins, we will score a point. And every time a, uh, switcheroo podcast member wins, they will score a point. And there's going to be three different events. There's going to be street fighter, uh, street fighter three, third strike, which we played on this podcast. And I think we just kind of woke JMo up from a very long sleep. He realized he likes. Yep.

 

Dan (06:51)

I know. That's like home field advantage for him.

 

Don (06:58)

But also Marvel vs. Capcom, which I don't think is anybody's cup of tea so far. Although I've been playing a little bit of it. And Super Smash Brothers. We're going to do a poll in our Discord on whether it's going to be Super Smash Ultimate or Melee. But basically we have two votes for Melee. We have two votes for Ultimate and one vote for Melee so far. So that's a score to beat. I'm personally rooting for Melee because I like I have more fun with the game, but I'll play either. So keep your eye out for that.

 

And the time of day is TBA. We're still figuring it out. So check the Discord often for updates if you are interested in playing.

 

Dan (07:37)

Mm-hmm.

 

Steve (07:38)

Ding ding!

 

Don (07:39)

Ding ding. All right, Dan, take us away for question of the week.

 

Dan (07:44)

Alrighty. Question of the week comes from our good man Hux. He says, forget the console wars. What accessory brands are you brand loyal to and why? Which accessory categories? Controllers, cables, docks, screen protectors, et cetera. All right. Guest of the show, Lady Leeshee. You want to take us off?

 

Steve (08:08)

we don't really buy off name brands. I know, I know. I've always been that way, I guess. We just, you know, buy Nintendo, Xbox.

 

Don (08:15)

Well, ladi dadi.

 

Dan (08:27)

Yeah, I'm kind of in the same boat. Like I guess for me, if like if I had to pick one, it'd probably be Logitech. But like I don't like active actively like seek Logitech, but I do like their their stuff. They're pretty reliable, durable. And I just like the the apps that that comes with because it's just like any time like you have something plugged in, like the app can like figure it out and like it knows like what you have plugged in. So it's just like if you have like a bunch of stuff that like in

 

consolidates it all into that one app and you can like fine tune all the options with whatever you got plugged in. But other than that, I just kind of just like buy like, like what Alicia said, like I'll just buy like Xbox and whatnot or Nintendo. I'm not, I'm not like crazy into like off brand stuff.

 

Steve (09:17)

Yeah, and as far as I go, I have a 360 controller which works really well with Windows, so whenever I play anything on that, I use that. But I have a Razer mount.

 

Dan (09:35)

Hahaha!

 

Don (09:37)

I feel like we have to leave that in the cut.

 

Dan (09:38)

He

 

got deleted dude

 

Don (09:45)

Maybe, maybe in the YouTube cut and then we'll take it

 

out of the, take it out of the audio.

 

Dan (09:52)

that was, dude, that was too perfect.

 

Don (09:58)

No, it's OK. We're actually going to leave that in the YouTube cut, and we're going to take it out of the audio.

 

Steve (10:00)

Okay.

 

Well, like I said, I have a Razer mouse and I have a SteelSeries keyboard. Those are pretty much the only like off-brand type things that I have. I don't do a whole lot of the peripherals and stuff.

 

Don (10:22)

So as I often do with these questions of the week, I'm going to begin with a story and it's the evolution of the off-brand controller. Cause back in the day when I had my Sega Genesis, I don't know how much controllers went for back then because my parents bought them. So I really didn't care. So on occasion, a relative or something would buy one for us and we'd get it and we'd bring it home. And it'd be like these like fat pathetic, like mad cats controllers would have been like the big one.

 

Dan (10:49)

Hahaha.

 

Don (10:51)

where like you get like two hours out of that thing and a button breaks and then it's relegated to the second player for when your friend comes over and you give him that crap and you're trying to like play a co-op game and he can't jump and you're like, sorry, man, it's all I got.

 

And they always had turbo buttons for some reason, like all those crappy off-brand controllers had turbo buttons. and then that mad cats brand like stayed around for a while. I don't know if they're still making things. They don't deserve to be. It was like, it was like Tmoo for the nineties, but they had, made like, if you could imagine the N64 controller gets worse, like imagine it like five and a half inches thick with like no, I don't know what it

 

Steve (11:37)

You

 

just say five and a half inches.

 

Don (11:37)

What do want to call like the? Yeah,

 

yeah, no, I'm serious. You'd like grip this thing like a like a four stack cheeseburger. All right, you gotta like play like this.

 

Dan (11:48)

like a fight stick.

 

Steve (11:49)

Uggghhhh

 

Don (11:53)

Why they needed all that space. have no idea. It was like the size of the actual like of a, of a we probably.

 

But now, nowadays, I actually think third party controllers are better than some of the first party stuff. So I'm looking at the Switch, for instance, and we all know that those Joy-Cons are like god awful, right? But then there's the, there's the like real nice and I'm failing to remember the name right now, but you know, like the GameCube Joy-Cons, the ones that are really popular. Have you seen those? It's basically like a GameCube controller split in half into, into Joy-Cons really high quality hall sensor joysticks, all that stuff, right? And it

 

slides into the Joy-Con spot. when you play handheld, it's like a GameCube controller.

 

Dan (12:38)

Yeah, I have something similar. think it's called, I want to say it's Hori, like H-O-R-I. It's what I have and it's, I love it. The only thing I don't like about it is for some reason, the switch doesn't recognize the controllers as like, so with the switch, you can actually swap the buttons around and stuff, like in the config. For some reason, it doesn't recognize it with the Horis, which is kind of unfortunate.

 

Don (12:46)

Yes.

 

Steve (12:47)

Ahem.

 

I know that the

 

bulk of the Super Mario 64 speedrunning community uses a Hori and 64 controller mostly.

 

Don (13:14)

Yeah, I really want one, but I don't know if they're still being made and they're kind of expensive when you go to buy them from third party sellers. We'll call them scalpers. But I think my favorite third party stuff right now currently comes from 8BitDo. I think their controllers are really, really great for the price that they cost. I have like this 8BitDo Pro controller. It's over there. I can't quite reach it, but it has two nice Hall sensor joysticks.

 

It comes with its own little stand that just stays plugged in. So when it has to recharge, just pop it on there to recharge it. It's not Bluetooth. It has a dongle. I feel like that makes it have less lag. Like whatever signal it's throwing back and forth, it has a lot less lag.

 

Steve (13:59)

have a dongle

 

Dan (14:00)

Yeah.

 

Steve (14:01)

for my wireless stuff, of course. Of course.

 

Don (14:02)

dongle.

 

Dan (14:05)

Yeah, exactly what he was talking about.

 

Steve (14:08)

Mm-hmm.

 

Don (14:11)

So yeah, third party stuff.

 

Dan (14:14)

Yeah, I didn't know about Ape at Do until you guys started talking about it this week in the Discord. And I was looking at their website and yeah, a lot of that stuff looks pretty legit. Like I kind of want to like buy some stuff from there. Like you can customize and stuff too. It's like, it's crazy.

 

Steve (14:23)

I haven't looked at the website.

 

Don (14:27)

Yeah, they

 

Steve (14:30)

Do they have, like,

 

original style controllers to USB? Because I want to get, like, an NES, Super Nintendo, an N64, all the USB that I can plug into my computer and play games with, the traditional feeling controllers.

 

Don (14:36)

Yes.

 

Yeah, that's their wheelhouse really. They set out to replicate that hardware or make it better. so. Yep, very, very nice.

 

Steve (14:47)

Okay.

 

that is something that I'm interested in.

 

Don (15:00)

So those are our answers. about yours? Go ahead, Dan. I'm not going to steal your thunder.

 

Dan (15:05)

All right. So first answer comes from Wingard. He says, again, I love 8BitDo. They're my favorite third party controller by far. Yeah. After, like I said, like after looking on the website, I can't complain. Like I want the Super Nintendo one with the analog sticks. Looks sick.

 

Don (15:27)

it's like a Super Nintendo with two little analog sticks at the bottom, like PlayStation 2 style.

 

Dan (15:29)

Yeah, yeah,

 

it looks really nice.

 

Don (15:33)

It's legit.

 

Dan (15:35)

All right, and then Raelica, back in the day, Madcatz made the best Xbox controllers and I bought those over the Xbox brand. RIP though, because I don't think they exist anymore. Nowadays, the only things that come to mind is my Logitech G Series mouse. I've had three generations of it I probably won't and can't find anything that works as well and has the features I want. Madcatz. That's all I gotta say about that.

 

Don (16:05)

They deserve what they got. Maybe they were fine with Xbox original controllers, because wasn't the original Xbox controller like terrible? Didn't they call it like the Duke or something? It like this big giant.

 

Dan (16:06)

the

 

Now that thing was pretty bulky. Yeah.

 

Steve (16:16)

Yeah, you want to talk about a wee size

 

controller. There you go.

 

Don (16:21)

Yeah.

 

Dan (16:21)

Ha ha ha ha.

 

All right, and the final answer I have is from Lobaca. He says, maybe Prima strategy guides, but I can't really justify why.

 

Steve (16:33)

kind of neat. was like, so one of the cool things about strategy guides, in my opinion, was you got to bring them to school. So like, you know, you, you can't play the game at school, obviously, unless it's a handheld game. So I had an Ocarina of Time strategy guide, and I just thumb through it and look at the pictures and all that while on like, you know, break or lunch or whatever it was. And that was the coolest thing, you know.

 

Dan (16:57)

Yeah, I'd rather read that. Or like look at that than read a book any day.

 

Steve (17:02)

I gotta save Zelda and get the Triforce, man.

 

Dan (17:05)

Yeah

 

Don (17:09)

I have no experience with strategy guys, none.

 

Dan (17:14)

Yeah, I didn't really own too many myself, if ever, really.

 

Steve (17:18)

We had ones for Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie. My brother and I read them every day. So one of the cool things about the Banjo-Kazooie guidebook was that it had a topographic, bird's eye view look of the levels and it would show you where all the notes were. And it would show you where to start the jiggy quests and all that stuff.

 

Don (17:29)

Yeah!

 

Dan (17:30)

you

 

Steve (17:48)

And it was pretty neat. I like that one.

 

Dan (17:53)

you know what I did have actually, and it came in the battle chest for like Starcraft. They had like the, I don't know if they were prima guys, but they had like the big fat books with like a bunch of walkthroughs in it and stuff and a bunch of pictures and arts. I remember looking at that over like a summer vacation.

 

Don (18:09)

Like build orders and stuff.

 

Dan (18:11)

Yeah, like build orders and like it would if you'd played the panca the campaign it would tell you like you know what the enemy would throw at you first and whatnot. But yeah, it was it was pretty cool to look at. Yeah.

 

Steve (18:23)

kind of

 

Don (18:29)

All right, everybody ready? Let's turn off the lights, get in the spooky mood on Valentine's Day.

 

Dan (18:34)

I'm getting kinda scared, guys.

 

Steve (18:37)

Whoa.

 

Don (18:39)

You

 

Alright, so as mentioned already, our game this week is Eternal Darkness. as is tradition on the league, we're going to kick it over to our guest, Lady Lishi, to give us an overview of this game.

 

Steve (19:03)

So Eternal Darkness is a kind of a horror thriller game based off of the creatures of H.P. Lovecraft and it plays into a lot of different types of horror. You have 12 playable characters and you have to go through this book trying to figure out

 

what happened to your grandfather. It's a lot of baggage.

 

We're okay with a little bit of baggage. mean, everybody's got some, right? It's 2025, you know, everybody's got a little.

 

Don (19:49)

It's kind of like a, it's, feel like it's reminiscent of, I'd say more so Silent Hill than Resident Evil series is cause this one is not known for its garbage camera angles and, you know, tank controls.

 

Dan (20:02)

Ha!

 

Yeah, I would agree with that.

 

Steve (20:06)

Yeah,

 

so there is combat in the game, but it is almost more like an exploration style game with some combat, and it relies heavily on horror elements, but there aren't a lot of jump scares. It's a lot more like a psychological horror type game.

 

Don (20:31)

So how did you find this game, Alicia?

 

Steve (20:34)

So

 

my brother is two years older than me and he got this, I don't know if he picked it up or forgot it for his birthday. And my mom was like, you can't play that. Hold on, hold my yoo-hoo. We're gonna play that. To this day, he and I still talk about it. When actually you got it for me for Christmas, I...

 

sent a picture to my brother and he was like, I hate you. it's more than just, I really like this game. It's something that my brother and I did together.

 

Dan (21:06)

Yeah

 

Did you guys ever get scared of the game? Because I know when we were younger as kids, games like that were kind of scary. So I'm just wondering if you guys were kind of afraid when playing certain parts of that.

 

Steve (21:31)

I mean...

 

Yes and no. was like almost 13 when it came out. I mean, I'm older than you guys, But.

 

Dan (21:36)

Not really. Yeah.

 

Yep, fair enough.

 

Don (21:50)

I mean, this game's more like atmospheric, I think. A little bit kind of like Resident Evil, except without the jump scares.

 

Steve (21:58)

Yeah, absent jump scares, things tend to be a lot more on like this spooky side, but not like this scary side. Like it's like, you can feel the tension, but there isn't a lot of release of that tension. And the release of the tension is what like people jump about when the killer jumps out on screen at you, that's the release of everything. And this, it's just kind of like there, you know what I mean?

 

Don (22:28)

Horror Blue Balls the entire time.

 

Steve (22:28)

The real killer could

 

Dan (22:29)

Yeah

 

Steve (22:31)

be green or red balls, depending on the real killer is there's no music in this game. So.

 

Don (22:41)

wait, I actually was going to bring this up because the music in the mansion, when you play in the past, I think it's like the fifth chapter you play is like the chubby guy with the powdered wig music in the mansion slaps. That track is awesome by the way. Yeah.

 

Dan (22:50)

Yeah.

 

Steve (22:54)

the only one.

 

Dan (22:57)

I'm trying to remember it. I'm gonna have to go back and check that out. Yeah, I, yeah.

 

Steve (23:00)

You'll have to post it for the people, for the listeners.

 

Don (23:03)

Yeah,

 

fresh in my mind. But it's so cool to meet someone who is an OG fan of this game, because I went looking for some information and it was wildly unpopular. Like it sold less than 500 copies. So the the original story was that it was going to be made and released in the year 2000 for the N64 if you could believe it, right. And then Nintendo was like, no, no, no, no.

 

Like we want this to showcase the new stuff coming out. This will be the perfect game for it to show that like we're not just for kids kind of thing, keeping up with like the PS2 edginess, right? So they made the developers like heel turn and have to redo all the visuals and stuff and into the high poly figures for a release on the GameCube in 2002. And not only did this game sell poorly during its own run,

 

But the creator Dennis, Dennis, Diac, yeah. Diac, dyac, dyac. So he actually tried twice to crowd fund a sequel and failed two different Kickstarter campaigns to fund it.

 

Steve (24:03)

Yeah, something like that.

 

Dan (24:08)

Dirk!

 

Steve (24:22)

But then you look

 

at the reviews of the game, like player reviews, and they're great.

 

Don (24:28)

Yeah, it's a cult classic. It just got there way too late.

 

Steve (24:30)

So the weird thing is it does feel a lot like an N64 game, and I didn't know that piece of trivia until you said it, but like I could totally place it there.

 

Dan (24:31)

Yeah.

 

It does. I want it.

 

Don (24:36)

It does.

 

Dan (24:40)

No, yeah,

 

I looked at it too and I did see that it was like it was supposed to be for the 64 and it does feel like that, especially like the combat, I want to say, definitely feels like N64-ish.

 

Steve (24:55)

Not that that like totally detracts because I love the N64, but like it's a surprise for me because you know, it feels like it. That's really cool trivia.

 

Dan (25:05)

Yeah, I remember like playing as Pius and like actually fighting the zombies and just going through what they call me. was like, this is a yikes. But.

 

Steve (25:13)

Yeah, because you can't...

 

Don (25:13)

Yeah.

 

Steve (25:17)

you gotta stay in one spot.

 

Dan (25:19)

Well, but the thing is, though, like a lot of the combat, I feel like, comes from the spells. Like they really did. In my opinion, I think they did a fair good job on the spell department in this game.

 

Don (25:33)

Alicia, go ahead and tell us about the spells.

 

Steve (25:35)

Well, there's a lot of them. You technically don't even need the scrolls for them as long as you want to play around with the runes. You need the runes and the codex.

 

Dan (25:49)

I did that actually.

 

Yeah, because it'll give you like a question mark if you figure it out, but you don't have the scroll. I actually did that for one of the spells.

 

Steve (25:58)

So

 

like if you were speedrunning this game right in the beginning, every single time you get a scroll, you could just make a bunch of new spells. I actually played every alignment before we filmed now. And one...

 

Don (26:15)

You

 

mean, you mean in the last two weeks?

 

Steve (26:18)

Last four days. I finished the first one with Steve. don't know. It was like the first week of January. And then I did two in the last week because I wanted the alternate ending. But one of my saves, I think I'm missing two scrolls.

 

Don (26:21)

Wow!

 

Dan (26:22)

She went HELL

 

really? I actually lucked out. I actually found them all on my first playthrough. I was like, wow.

 

Don (26:50)

Well, you you say that, and this game is actually infamous for another reason. If you go looking at forums, you'll find either people that love it or people that are so angry because apparently you can accidentally miss a pretty critical rune that you need to progress at some point in the game, like mid to late.

 

Dan (27:12)

is that the? Bats a rock.

 

Don (27:16)

Right. And if you don't get it, you can't go back. And if you don't create multiple saves, you just are now soft locked from progressing. Yeah. I mean, it's, not an easy thing to miss because you know, you guys, you guys played this game, the, the, environments are not large and they do a pretty good job at showing you that an enemy has a ruin in it. You know, it's like, if you missed it, you were just, I guess, rushing and not paying attention. It's to explore this game is not a huge ask. I feel.

 

Dan (27:23)

Is that really?

 

Yeah.

 

Yeah,

 

he's talking about the Man's Rock Room,

 

Steve (27:47)

No, no, a rune

 

like, you know, Pargon or Tyr or... Yeah. Yeah, no, not the essence, but the...

 

Dan (27:52)

no, I'm talking about alignment. Yeah, nevermind.

 

I which one that is. I'm curious.

 

Steve (28:04)

I believe it's tear.

 

Don (28:05)

It must be one that you don't have to use right away.

 

Yeah.

 

Dan (28:10)

that's like a summoning one, isn't it? Yeah.

 

Steve (28:10)

Yeah.

 

Don (28:13)

Has that ever happened to you, Alicia? No.

 

Steve (28:14)

No, I've beaten it

 

five times since it came out. And that's never happened to me.

 

Yeah, and the game isn't extremely long either. We took our time the first time that we played it together. And we got there in like 11 hours and we got like everything. We got the enchanted Gladius at the end. We got all the runes. got... Effigies. ...like everything. So 12 hours, not too, too long.

 

Dan (28:46)

Yeah, I got all that stuff too. I probably beat it, I would say like 15, 16 hours, my first time playing it. Yeah, but like, I want to like talk about like somewhat like, like what some of the spells do. Like, so like you get like an enchant spell that like just enhances like whatever weapon you have, and it like will, and will fix it. Then you get like your magic like AOE abilities.

 

Don (29:06)

and fixes things.

 

Dan (29:14)

And it changes element depending on which essence you have equipped. You can reveal stuff. You can put a shield on yourself. What else? Summon creatures. You can dispel magic like force fields and whatnot.

 

Steve (29:22)

Summon creature.

 

control creatures.

 

Dan (29:30)

Yeah, with the bind spell. And then I want to say if you ever get the extra essence, the manta rock, I don't know if you guys messed around with the reveal invisible under manta rock, where it just turns your character completely invisible and enemies just cannot hit you at all.

 

Steve (29:51)

That

 

only works once you have the essence.

 

Dan (29:54)

Yeah, but I remember like casting it because I like I just you know, I was I think I was like stuck somewhere. So I was just like casting like reveal invisible under all the essences. And I noticed that I turned my character and invisible and literally like you can just go through the whole game without the without any enemies like hitting you. The only enemies that can see you are bosses. But but that's it. And it's funny because it's like on some bosses, they'll spawn ads and when they spawn, they'll just sit there and do nothing.

 

Steve (30:23)

You

 

Don (30:27)

I'm

 

Dan (30:28)

That's

 

Steve (30:30)

One thing that we haven't really

 

Dan (30:31)

great.

 

Steve (30:31)

touched on is that in this game, you have three different kinds of elements. There's a fourth one, it's aside from the other three. And the three play like a rock, paper, scissors style. And that's why in the beginning of the show, I said where three guys get to pick the starter for their arrival. Because the easiest way for me to remember it is that

 

Green beats blue, like grass beats water. And red beats green, like fire beats grass. And blue beats red, like water beats fire. So.

 

Don (31:08)

Yeah, think all the, you know, I think all the god's names are like, you know, Charthulu and Squirtle Rock and...

 

Dan (31:08)

Yeah.

 

Steve (31:12)

Hahaha

 

Dan (31:15)

Yeah.

 

Steve (31:16)

Chaturga,

 

Ulyaf, and Zellotop.

 

Don (31:18)

Yeah.

 

Dan (31:21)

And then you got Manterok, which beats all of them. Like, yeah, another spell, another spell, magical pool. It's called like magic pool, where like regions like your HP and stuff would like depending on your essence, like Manterok will give you all three will give you like magic, your sanity and health. It's just, it's so broken.

 

Don (31:21)

Yes.

 

Steve (31:22)

right. Yeah.

 

Don (31:26)

Not at the beginning.

 

Steve (31:40)

That's so good. Mantarok will also poison your

 

enemies. Yeah, Enchant Weapon Mantarok. Yeah, it sticks a poison on them, or like a damage over time effect.

 

Dan (31:51)

Yeah.

 

Yeah. I'm team Mantarok for sure.

 

Steve (31:54)

Hahaha

 

Don (31:56)

It's like saying your team ultimate armor.

 

Steve (31:57)

Well, see, you want to know what the best part

 

Dan (31:58)

Hell yeah.

 

Steve (32:00)

about all of this Pokemon relations to the color elements are? Mantra rocks purple, and Psychic in Gen 1 was so broken.

 

Dan (32:09)

You

 

It's like that big daddy quote from the kid. He's like, I win. What do mean you win? It's I win.

 

Don (32:21)

So the game itself, you start as a character named Alex and she's, you know, looks like Buffy the vampire Slayer and she goes to Rhode Island, which is where I'm from, which is awesome to go visit her rich dead uncle's mansion. And I guess he's been turned into a human sock puppet or something under under the blanket. Yeah. But also it looks like, you know, he's been chopped up a little bit too, but

 

Steve (32:42)

He's got no head.

 

Don (32:51)

So she is going around the mansion and she's finding the pages of this like skin book, kind of like the Necronomicon basically. and every time she finds a page, you play through a flashback and the first one you play through, you play as like a Centurion that be, would that be a way to say it? like a, yeah.

 

Steve (33:12)

I think he is. He's a

 

general or something. He's like some higher up military guy.

 

Don (33:20)

You know, he's got the, the, the man chest plate and he's got the, the helmet with the little table brush on it. You know, like he's, he's one of those. This, this game does not deviate very far from movie stereotypes, like in any way, or form in true Lovecraftian style. so he goes through this temple to find an artifact and he stumbles upon the three different essences, which correspond to the gods that.

 

Steve (33:25)

The barbit.

 

Dan (33:27)

Yeah.

 

Don (33:50)

Alicia mentioned, and I'm not sure what it changes about the story. I didn't even know I was picking one. I just walked up to one and it happened to be the red one, which I think is Chiturga. And, he turns into a skeleton guy and I guess that becomes, and he's, he's the main antagonist of the whole game. It feels like, but does that change how, your characters interact? Cause I felt like I had more health than.

 

Dan (34:11)

Pretty much,

 

Don (34:18)

So like the resources in this game are health, guess, mana or magic, insanity. And in that order, they all correspond to the colors of the gods. So because I picked red, did I have more health than I would have if I had picked another rune?

 

Steve (34:33)

So I don't know if you have more but the zombies that you produce are red and they hit harder.

 

Yeah, so basically the main challenge of the game comes in a strength of one of the three, or guess you would say a more common of that type. So if you pick Chaturga, like you did, then lot of the skeletons and enemies are going to be red enemies, and they're going to deal more HP damage.

 

Yeah, if you picked Zellototh Green for Pius, then those enemies are going to deal more sanity damage on top of regular damage, but then, you know, your sanity is going to go faster. Or if he picks Blue Ulioth, they're going to damage your magic so that it's harder to heal and harder to do stuff. So, but it also changes some other stuff. Yeah, the cutscenes, they tell a different story.

 

Dan (35:10)

interesting.

 

Yeah.

 

Yeah, I know.

 

Don (35:37)

So is

 

he just trying to summon a god, like whichever alignment it is? It's just a different god, but is it like a totally different story if you pick a different alignment?

 

Dan (35:42)

Yeah.

 

Steve (35:46)

The characters

 

all appear in the same order, but the cutscenes have different dialogue and there's a boss fight like maybe three quarters the way through the game. at the end. Well, the one at the end is cutscene difference, but the boss that you fight three quarters the way through is different depending on the one that you pick with Pius.

 

Don (36:12)

interesting.

 

Dan (36:14)

So the boss that you fight, is that the one with I'm trying to remember his name Peterson or something? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Cause I actually think I remember like Steve asked this question in discord and he says, what alignment did you guys pick? I completely forgot. Like I actually had to look it up cause I didn't know what he was talking about at first. And then I was like, that's what it was.

 

Steve (36:18)

Yeah, Jacob, Peter Jacobs.

 

Dan (36:38)

And I said, I picked green. I don't think I picked green. I actually picked red. Because I think when you save the game, it has like the little symbol. And mine was red, so.

 

Steve (36:46)

So you got

 

to fight Chaturgo where he shoots his tongue out like a frog and he can grab you and eat you.

 

Dan (36:52)

yeah. yeah. Yup.

 

Steve (36:56)

Bye!

 

Dan (36:56)

dude, that that boss fight was kind

 

of annoying because it was like, you had to like time like your magic spell, like as he like he was casting, it was just, I was having a hard time with it.

 

Don (37:09)

Ike so the the combat in this game at first before you get spells I think is rough like so I had the

 

Dan (37:15)

It is. It is.

 

Don (37:19)

forget who I was playing. it was the so you you play as a different character every single page. I think I didn't actually beat it. got to chapter seven. Yeah. So it's the it's the second page where you play as the guy who's trying to warn the one the Archbishop. I keep I keep forgetting his name Anthony. Yeah, that guy. And he gets the gets the claymore. So I know it's more realistic, but I hate it when games do this.

 

Dan (37:28)

You do. You do play a different character every time.

 

Don (37:47)

when your sword hits the wall and prevents you from attacking. So like what ended up happening to me was like I got stuck in a really narrow hallway with this thing and it was so narrow that even my regular sword like the enemies like boxed me into a corner and no matter which way I turned I could not swing this thing and they were just like wailing on me and I was like my god.

 

Dan (37:50)

yeah.

 

Yeah,

 

the good thing about that character is you can die as him and it's not a game over.

 

Steve (38:13)

That's true.

 

Don (38:14)

Yeah, I found that out. Yeah.

 

Steve (38:15)

There was one time when I was Maximilian Roivas. old man. Yeah, with the powdered wig. And I was stuck in the pantry and the maids wouldn't let me out and they killed me by punching me in the face. Every time she'd go to swing her sword, would clang against, you know, canned goods.

 

Don (38:39)

and just pull out the flintlocks and blow them away.

 

Steve (38:42)

I think we tried. don't know. I was too laughing at the misfortune of Maximillian Rivas in the pantry with the, what's it a flesh, what is it called? Those enemies? Skin walkers? Oh, the bone thief. Bone thieves, yeah.

 

Dan (39:02)

know who had a you know who had like a kind of like anti climatic death. I'm drawing a blank on the guy's name but it's like the Pope the guy with the mace. Yeah yeah like so like I was fighting the was a chat churga whatever and then like he just goes doge one shot so I'm like well

 

Don (39:03)

Those are probably the creepiest.

 

Steve (39:11)

Paul Luper.

 

Yeah.

 

So that cutscene's

 

different depending on the god that you picked too. If you're fighting against Zelototh, the sanity one, your head explodes. Yep, and Ulioth, it's this big jellyfish-like character with three legs and it just steps on you.

 

Dan (39:33)

yeah.

 

Don (39:34)

Bye.

 

Dan (39:42)

Yeah, it's just like no fight back. No, nothing is just like quick and done. Pius is like, delete him. And he's just like, the boss is like, consider it done. One shot.

 

Steve (39:54)

He goes, this is boring.

 

Delete.

 

Dan (39:58)

You

 

Steve (40:02)

No, delete's not funny. That story Steve told about it deletes all your saves, I was trying to finish, I finished with four minutes to spare before we started filming. And it told me it deleted all my games. And I texted Steve and I was like, I quit, I'm not playing anymore. It was just my sanity.

 

Dan (40:05)

you

 

Huh.

 

I think.

 

Don (40:27)

This game doesn't deserve to win the league. I'm done with it. Never liked it anyway. I'm giving it to my brother.

 

Steve (40:29)

Yeah.

 

Dan (40:31)

Yeah

 

Yeah, we should

 

talk about like some of the sanity stuff that can happen in this game, because I think that was like the most unique part of this game.

 

Steve (40:39)

Yeah.

 

We were playing earlier today and the volume on the TV, like it showed green in volume and then it showed a bunch of bars like it was an old CRT and it's going down. like, volume bar doesn't even look like that.

 

Dan (40:52)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

 

Don (40:58)

I know, I get this like big brand new 2024, know, stony TV and I'm like, yeah, no, that's not what that looks like anymore.

 

Dan (40:59)

Hahaha!

 

Yeah, yeah,

 

Steve (41:04)

you

 

Dan (41:07)

I got that one and I got the one that said mute and like the top right so it was like a big green lettuce.

 

Steve (41:11)

Did you get the one that said your GameCube

 

controller's disconnected?

 

Dan (41:17)

I don't think I got that one. I got a lot of them, but not that one.

 

Don (41:20)

I did get the one that it looks like it shuts your TV off. And by that time I had already gotten the mute one. So I knew it wasn't really shutting my TV off, but I was in the middle of a fight and I was like, no, come on. can't see.

 

Steve (41:31)

Pause, pause, pause, pause.

 

Dan (41:34)

Yeah, there was a kind of funny one too with Edward Lindsay where when your sanity is low, you'll enter a room and there's just like tons of like shotgun ammo on the floor, like littered on the ground. It must be like, you know, at least 50 rounds. And then like eventually it like flashback, it flashes back and like into the previous room that you're in. And then you never got all that ammo. It's like, really?

 

Steve (41:58)

Yeah.

 

Don (42:00)

Even funnier

 

if all of your shotgun ammo was gone too.

 

Steve (42:04)

There were

 

a lot of times you'd try and run away from something and your sanity would be low and you'd get into the new room and you'd like take a couple steps and it would teleport you back into the room you were trying to leave.

 

Dan (42:18)

Yeah.

 

Don (42:21)

The

 

so once I got damage barrier, whatever it is that that that spell that lets you throw up a force field that hurts everything that touches it. I was like everybody's God and like I did mess around with the runes and I found one that was just called spell nine and it's just like this big AOE attack. So I just yeah and then one time.

 

Dan (42:40)

Yeah.

 

Steve (42:44)

Yep.

 

Don (42:50)

I trapped myself in a force field with two blue skeletons. I had never seen blue skeletons before. And they were just like getting stunned. And I was like, all right, I guess, I guess they're dead or the game's glitching or something. And they blew up and they killed me. And I was stuck in a corner. I couldn't walk past them. So I was like, all right, I guess I'll just wait till they die and take, take killing blow.

 

Steve (42:53)

no.

 

They start going wah, wah, wah, wah.

 

Yo.

 

took you out. Guess I'll just die.

 

Dan (43:13)

Yeah.

 

Yeah, that's another point is to save often when you play this game. So the Edwin Lindsay part is actually kind of lengthy. And I did that whole part without saving it. And I ended up dying at the end, like right when you get the man to rock rune. I don't know what happened, but like the one of those big guys with like the three heads, I was playing careless or something and then he ended up killing me and I didn't save it.

 

Steve (43:39)

horror.

 

Dan (43:45)

And I had to do that part like all over again.

 

Don (43:48)

Is, is Edwin the Indiana Jones guy, dude, that, that shotgun, was, I was enchanting it with opposing elements and I would take those, those horrors out in two shots. Like absolutely disgusting. Just point blank two shots. like, what a punk.

 

Steve (43:49)

Yeah.

 

Dan (43:50)

Yeah, dude, he's my favorite. He's such a Chad.

 

Yeah.

 

Steve (44:07)

Yeah,

 

Dan (44:08)

Yeah.

 

Steve (44:08)

we put Enchant item on the quick assign because it's just so good.

 

Dan (44:16)

So like.

 

Don (44:16)

Yeah,

 

but I feel like you want to use it for all the elements though, because those horrors in particular seem to come in multiple flavors in every chapter.

 

Dan (44:24)

Yeah.

 

Steve (44:25)

Yeah, near the end they'll almost all be the color of the god Pius Pect.

 

Dan (44:35)

yeah so another reason

 

Steve (44:36)

Sometimes those little trappers

 

came at the right time.

 

Yeah, trappers are these little enemies that'll teleport you into another area and you get to kind of pick what element you want to heal inside of that area, but it's almost more like a speed bump than anything.

 

Dan (44:58)

Yeah, it is.

 

Don (45:00)

It actually saved me a couple of times. I went to go heal up and health, and you can kind of manipulate the little teleporter by running back and forth.

 

Dan (45:05)

Yeah.

 

Steve (45:06)

So Dan would have seen

 

this but Don may not have. At the end of the room, the dimension that the trappers send you to, at one point you have to turn into a trapper and teleport a dead body and it's there every time. And then later on there's like a big dresser or something you can send and then that's just sitting there. Yeah, that was cool.

 

Dan (45:22)

Yep. Yeah, you have to send the dude.

 

Yeah.

 

I thought that was neat too.

 

Yeah, like the dude that like you have to transport there. think in that room, I think that's where you get the seven star like power thing, power upgrade. But yeah, it's kind of neat because it's like whatever you send there as a trapper will stay there for the end of the game. And that's just kind of like a nice little thing that they did there.

 

Steve (45:52)

I'm wondering if you could

 

teleport enemies and then like the next time you go if there would be a live enemy like a horror or something. I never tried it.

 

Dan (45:57)

I know, right? Yeah,

 

I never tried that either. That would be interesting.

 

Steve (46:01)

I didn't think of.

 

I wonder what else you could teleport there.

 

Don (46:07)

It's worth running around and finding out trappers are like this little scorpion thing and they're not killable apparently so like Really cuz I was I was playing as Kareem and Kareem starts with like 19 of these chakrams, which are you know Arabic ninja stars basically

 

Dan (46:08)

Yeah.

 

Steve (46:15)

No, you can shoot them.

 

Dan (46:16)

But yeah, yeah, you can shoot them. Yeah.

 

frisbees.

 

Don (46:31)

And

 

I wasn't using them because they were limited and that's just how my brain works with limited resources in games. Yeah, I'll just die with like 200 potions. But I saved them specifically in case I saw any of those things. He can't hit them with them. Yeah. And in fact, they're pretty terrible against the big horror guys too. I was like, why did they give me these?

 

Dan (46:38)

Just to never use them.

 

really? I don't think I've tried.

 

Steve (46:57)

Yeah. I

 

don't think I use them when I'm cream.

 

Dan (46:59)

Ha ha ha.

 

Don (47:03)

Yeah, don't. Skipperoni.

 

Dan (47:05)

Yeah, he gets the de-willed swords eventually, like a badass.

 

Steve (47:07)

Yeah, the toe wars.

 

Dan (47:13)

So I've noticed like when you get the Book of Darkness as every character, and then each subsequent time you go there with another character, you can see the statues on the sides of you of the previous owners, I guess you could say, of the ones that died with the book. Because if you notice that like Edwin Lindsay's not there, I don't think the... Michael's not there.

 

Steve (47:38)

Michael isn't there, the firefighter.

 

Dan (47:42)

Yeah. But that further cement that yeah, he's a half, but that further cements like why, Edward Lindsay is a such a Chad cause he had that book and he didn't die.

 

Steve (47:44)

Highest is a half.

 

Don (47:56)

Well, I don't think Kareem died either, right?

 

Dan (48:01)

Well, he eventually died. Like his statue was there. I think he died, I don't know how, maybe of old age or something, but...

 

Steve (48:05)

No,

 

girl he fell in love with died and then took his soul and they guard the essence.

 

Don (48:16)

I didn't realize that was him dying. I thought that was him just committing to the act of protecting the book. And I don't know if you guys noticed, but you can't cast spells as a character until you get the book.

 

Steve (48:27)

The

 

Dan (48:27)

Yeah. Right.

 

Steve (48:27)

book allows magic.

 

Don (48:30)

Well, I think it's also them remembering the previous owners of the book.

 

Steve (48:34)

Yeah, it floods your

 

mind in the story. Yeah, it floods your mind of everything, which is why, like, you get the new chapter and it flashes back everything. So you have lived that experience once you pick up the book.

 

Don (48:49)

And I think it's, it's also the reason that when you go back to playing as Alex, she can cast all the spells after, after finding the pages. sorry. Stole your thunder there.

 

Steve (48:55)

That's why I was about to say, no, no, you're fine.

 

Dan (48:55)

Right.

 

Steve (49:00)

Yeah. like, Pius lives forever as an undead. so he's had all this time to amass all of his power, but the book of eternal darkness is what allows regular good humans, like, you know, with good intentions to kind of stay on the same path as Pius to match his power.

 

It's their Cliff Notes.

 

Dan (49:31)

I just let me tell you though that like once you like kind of like learn the formula of the game, because you know, there's like 12 chapters and it's like, you know, like right before you'll get the book, the screen will like will kind of like flutter and you'll go into that room to grab the book. So like by like the fifth chapter, it's like I knew that it was coming. I would be like, thank God I get my spells back. Well, like I went like when you open a door and you see the screen flutter like, yes.

 

Don (49:54)

Ha

 

Steve (49:58)

I bet you really

 

love playing as Michael Anthony. He hasn't get magic for so long. The firefighter. You get guns though.

 

Don (49:59)

The power!

 

Dan (50:08)

dude, he gets like an assault rifle, and that assault rifle is broken dude, it has like a grenade launcher on it and stuff like that.

 

Steve (50:10)

grenades.

 

Mm. Explosive rounds.

 

Don (50:18)

It gets

 

better than the shotgun.

 

Steve (50:19)

Mm-hmm. Well, yeah, so like it

 

Dan (50:20)

Yeah, that too. And I

 

Steve (50:22)

kills

 

Dan (50:22)

think.

 

Steve (50:22)

horrors and like three or four hits like, you know, a little more than the shotgun, but it can hold 30 ammo.

 

Dan (50:30)

Yeah, you know, he's, he's OP because another thing too is I don't know if he gets like the tired animation from running. Cause I was like running forever dude. And he would just not like get tired. So yeah, he's, he's yeah, he's, he's high. Yeah. I think it's like useless bloat.

 

Steve (50:40)

Yeah, his stamina's pretty good. I kind of just wish stamina wasn't in the game, honestly. It's... it's...

 

Yeah. Extra realism, like, hitting your sword against pantry cans and pickled goods and shit like that. But I could die from a punch in the face. Maximilian starts grabbing cans and hitting the thing in the face with them.

 

Dan (50:53)

But like, yeah, I that.

 

Yeah.

 

Don (51:02)

Perfect.

 

Yeah. And if the, you know, these forces of evil can be slain with a sword or a, uh, you know, those crappy pistols that, uh, that Royvis has like, man, I got bad news for you in 2025. But like your, your average, uh, American on a certain side of the Mississippi has access to an assault rifle. So I'm going to have a bad time around here.

 

Steve (51:25)

paint.

 

Well, yeah, that's just like

 

the regular foot soldiers though. The gods are a lot different.

 

Don (51:45)

Well, one person manages to kill the god. Just saying.

 

Steve (51:47)

No.

 

That's not how it goes.

 

Don (51:51)

No. How does it go?

 

Steve (51:53)

You wanna spoil it? No! If you don't want to, I will.

 

Don (51:56)

Yeah.

 

Come on, it's a 23 year old game, it's okay.

 

Steve (52:02)

Yikes. We spoil stuff all the time. It's a retro gaming podcast. You're a retro game.

 

I mean, so you fight Pius and you have to go through this like arc reactor thing to make a giant summon spell and you summon your god. So you're fighting Pius while your god is fighting his god. And the only way to beat his god is to kill his essence, which weakens Pius. So.

 

Yeah, you go to this underground, massive city. what you do is

 

Don (52:50)

Which Royvis sees, right? Like Royvis sees it underneath the mansion.

 

Steve (52:53)

Yeah,

 

it's under his house.

 

Dan (52:55)

Dude, that part's annoying, especially because you have to do it twice. my God.

 

Steve (52:58)

Yep. Yeah, that's

 

that's my least favorite part of the game is those. it's easier as Alex.

 

Dan (53:04)

Yeah.

 

Yeah, so I'll describe it a little bit. So when you're in this like big like city area that's underground of the mansion, you have to light these like, was it like eight or nine towers?

 

Steve (53:16)

It's a nine point

 

spell that you're crafting.

 

Dan (53:20)

Yeah. So you're like, got to tell teleport all around the city to activate all of these towers. And so you're basically running around like for a long time and you do this as the grandfather first. What was it? What's his name? Edward Voivous. Yeah. So you do it as him and, know, doing it like the first time isn't bad because it's like, all right, you know, whatever. But then you got to do it again as Alex. I was like, are you kidding me, And it's like pretty drawn out.

 

Steve (53:33)

slow. Edward Roivas.

 

Well, so Edward is casting a nine-point destruction spell, and Alex is casting a nine-point summon spell. So in the game, the first thing you get is a three-point spell. It casts faster and it's weaker. Then later on, you can start casting five-point spells, which take a little longer and are little stronger. Eventually, you get seven-point spell.

 

Dan (54:00)

Right.

 

Steve (54:16)

which is the strongest you can normally cast, but this city is made to cast spells of a nine point power. So you need the nine point to destroy the city or a nine point to summon your god. Or find. And then yeah, the final- That's how you win. Final option, you know, your god wins and Alex goes, shit, now we have this other god to contend with. you have to cast the nine point seal.

 

or whatever it is. Bind. Yeah, she has visions of your alignment overthrowing your world. And she's like, my bad.

 

Dan (54:58)

Yeah, I kind of thought of that too, as like when I was going through the boss fight, I was like, I low key did think of this. I was like, what happens to like when my God wins? It's just going to sit there and be merry with everybody. Like, yeah. So I was like, and then I, I saw like the flashback play out and I was like, yeah, I knew it, dude. Like,

 

Steve (55:11)

What's up? Yeah.

 

Don (55:12)

They're all bad.

 

Steve (55:20)

You

 

Don (55:21)

So is is Monta Rock your god?

 

Steve (55:24)

No.

 

Dan (55:26)

No, Matarok is like that thing that's like in the temple area with like all the eyes and teeth. Yeah.

 

Steve (55:29)

with Ilya.

 

Don (55:32)

So are you automatically assigned the alliance to the god that's good against, biases? Okay.

 

Steve (55:37)

Yeah, that's what you're summoning.

 

Because if you summon the one that would lose, then Pius is gonna win.

 

Dan (55:47)

Right. And they kind of left off like a cliffhanger too with like manta rock because he's still like alive like in the temple biding his time. I think that's

 

Don (55:48)

Can you do that accidentally?

 

Steve (55:56)

You have to beat it with

 

all three alignments to know what happens to Manorak.

 

Dan (56:03)

really? So what does happen to them? I thought they were setting up for like a sequel or something.

 

Steve (56:05)

Steve knows.

 

They kind of

 

1. The alternate ending goes into say like, Mantarok's still in the temple and he chose the Roivas family because they're on Inurga, which is the Forbidden City. But Mantarok's slowly dying, but now he doesn't have to contend with the other ancients. Yeah, he played chess, he played the long game and he was planning on taking over.

 

So if there was a sequel, then he was probably gonna be the bad guy.

 

Dan (56:43)

Yeah, that's what I thought. So it was like a cliffhanger, right? Yeah, okay.

 

Steve (56:45)

Yeah.

 

Don (56:49)

Although he was pretty weak there for a while, right? Like at one point.

 

Steve (56:54)

Well, he was

 

because Pius had the power of his god. Right.

 

Don (57:01)

Yeah, and he didn't Montarach not have his have his own essence.

 

Steve (57:05)

He gave it to

 

Ilya.

 

Don (57:08)

Yeah.

 

Steve (57:09)

to hide so that Pius couldn't have it.

 

Don (57:13)

Man, imagine that.

 

Almost.

 

Steve (57:18)

close.

 

Don (57:21)

Good stuff. mean, so if it's not readily apparent from listening to this, this is a very, very story driven game. And, you know, I'm going to get into it a little bit. My, my interpretation of it. So it's like, I kind of wish they had made a comic book or a movie.

 

Instead, because I really was enthralled with the story, but like a lot of the stuff they make you do, like it's, it's puzzle E, but it's more like fine thing, use thing. Like, sometimes it's, it's the reverse order. Sometimes it's like, there's a thing. I got to find the thing. wait, one room over. There's the thing I need to do the thing. I'm done. It's very, very cozy puzzle solving.

 

Dan (57:55)

Yeah.

 

Don (58:10)

especially considering the subject matter of the game.

 

Steve (58:13)

Yeah,

 

I wouldn't put this in a puzzle category personally.

 

Don (58:18)

But then the action is kind of rough, right? Like, like the combat kind of takes a backseat a little bit because they don't want you to be able to mow enemies down. But I got pretty. Yeah, no, I got pretty darn efficient at chopping heads off and then one arm and then the other arm and just, you know, finishing them off.

 

Steve (58:25)

I've moved enemies down.

 

They teach you how to do that in the

 

beginning. They say this is the best way. I would just chop heads off and then hack them up. I wouldn't bother aiming for arms or anything. I'd hit the head and then I'd beat the shit out of them.

 

Don (58:40)

Yeah.

 

Dan (58:41)

Yeah, that's what I did. Yeah.

 

Yeah.

 

Don (58:46)

head is

 

head is always first because if you enter a room with like six of them, you you take you take heads off and you walk away and they just sit there and they swing and then you just deal with the deal with the other ones like

 

Dan (58:58)

Yeah,

 

that's what I did. And then they cast invisible on yourself too. GG.

 

Steve (59:01)

in the data.

 

Yeah

 

Don (59:08)

You

 

Dan (59:10)

there's a room full of 12 zombies. Yeah, let me mow them down real quick. That's pretty much what it was. Like they just sit there and just they're like, you could just see them. Like, you know, this is like physical, invisible guy hitting them and they're just going like this.

 

Don (59:24)

And the sanity stuff is neat, but like, wish it happened more, or I wish there was more of a way for it to punish you because like, they tell you very early on that like, Oh, if you get seen by a monster, if they, if they look at you, you lose sanity and then you get it back when you kill them. And it's like, yeah, take that bastard. Like, you know, it.

 

Dan (59:47)

Well, I kind of like

 

the give and take mechanic of it, but it kind of like becomes null and void like once you get the recover spell, because then it's just like you can always just recover like whatever you're missing out on, whether it be health, sanity or magic or whatever.

 

Steve (1:00:02)

You don't recover

 

magic. You just get that by running around. I will.

 

Dan (1:00:06)

Yeah.

 

Don (1:00:07)

The

 

magic one is BS, right? Like it takes it and then gives it back. that, is that what happens?

 

Dan (1:00:11)

yeah, yeah does.

 

Steve (1:00:11)

Yeah, it doesn't it doesn't gain

 

you more. I will be honest if you want more sanity issues or harder ways to recover, play Azuliyath because they take your magic first. Before they take your health. So you can't heal as often. Or, you know, if you really wanted to experience it, just don't set.

 

the sanity restoring heal spell. I mean.

 

Dan (1:00:44)

Yeah,

 

I purposely like played like most of the time with low sanity because I just kind of wanted to see like what the game would throw at me with like the weird little gimmicks and glitches and whatnot.

 

Steve (1:00:55)

It is

 

worth noting that if your sanity is completely gone and something takes sanity from you, it'll start draining health.

 

Dan (1:01:03)

Yeah.

 

Don (1:01:05)

Yeah, which I think is true of Magic too. On the enemies that deal you magic damage.

 

Steve (1:01:09)

could be.

 

Don (1:01:14)

It's like the blue guys take your magic and the green guys take your sanity.

 

Steve (1:01:16)

Yeah. If you

 

get your magic taken and then you get hit, it's really hard to heal.

 

Don (1:01:24)

I mean, so there were enemies that kind of mix it up a little bit, right? Like there's the, there's the bone thief guys and they deal you way more sanity damage than you get back from killing them. So like that's, that was kind of interesting because there was one chapter, I think it was Kareem's chapter actually, where they suddenly hit you with like three in a row and you have like no sanity at that point. And there's like not really much you can do.

 

And then the game becomes I think what it was intended to be And it was it was kind of interesting But it's just kind of a funny mechanic that that that they're like, this is a precious resource sanity and you you know You get it back by going and killing the thing that took it from you But it kind of slows the game down because as a as a new player you're like, I don't want to go, you know bottom bottom of the barrel sanity I gotta go back and get that like You know you go mess them up

 

Dan (1:02:15)

haha

 

Steve (1:02:16)

finishing off enemies gets it back,

 

but if you choose not to finish off enemies then you can keep low sanity.

 

Don (1:02:24)

yeah, but you know, I'm just saying as a new player doing what you're supposed to do or what the game prescribes you to do, it is kind of a funny system design wise.

 

Steve (1:02:32)

Yeah, I don't know if it was necessarily, like, incredibly well thought out, but it is still interesting.

 

Don (1:02:40)

It's N64 thought out.

 

Steve (1:02:41)

Yeah,

 

I mean, you they probably had it set for N64 and never altered, like, the bass mechanics of it.

 

Don (1:02:52)

I don't know how much time they had to do it, because like, I don't know, having to redo all the visuals suddenly, you know, and I believe they added chapters. think the game was only supposed to be like eight, seven or eight chapters because of size restrictions and then they were able to add like four or five more. So we got a little bit more. absolutely.

 

Steve (1:02:53)

I have no idea.

 

Well then I guess I'm glad it's on the GameCube. Because if it was only like six chapters

 

or eight chapters or something, then you'd be done in like... four hours, five hours.

 

Dan (1:03:21)

The good part about this game though is this like you could literally like pull chapters out of your ass if you wanted to. Just like, yeah, let's just make this character and that character and this character. Like it'd be.

 

Steve (1:03:30)

Yeah, like adding chapters to the

 

game would be easy for the dev team.

 

Dan (1:03:35)

Yeah, like, yeah.

 

Don (1:03:36)

Have a samurai chapter.

 

Steve (1:03:38)

Well, then the

 

book would have had to have made it to Japan which they probably could have done but the book was only ever in like Cambodia. Yeah, Cambodia the Middle East and Rhode Island. Persia? think it's Persia. Yeah somewhere. So.

 

Well, I don't know if anybody else has any more they wanna talk about before we get into grading.

 

Don (1:04:05)

One

 

last thing. So Alicia, how do you feel it's going to do in the league?

 

Steve (1:04:09)

Oh,

 

I don't know. To me, it's top tier, but I'm a horror game person. That's really all I play besides Slay the Spire.

 

Don (1:04:26)

Eventually of the 25 games we get, we're going to get one guest. That's that's going to be like, yeah, it's definitely master ball. It's definitely going to win. I'm taking that title.

 

Steve (1:04:37)

I mean, I could totally be that person, but...

 

Don (1:04:40)

I'll just

 

keep asking until we get one.

 

Dan (1:04:44)

slams the desk master ball 100 %

 

Don (1:04:49)

It's better than paper Mario.

 

Dan (1:04:51)

Ha ha ha.

 

Steve (1:04:54)

So I just played that Paper Mario for the first time with Steve. This was his first time playing this one.

 

Don (1:05:01)

That's fair.

 

you

 

Steve (1:05:06)

I love Paper Mario.

 

Don (1:05:07)

All right.

 

So we'll move on to the next segment. We'll take a quick break and then we'll get into our review. We're going to say bye to Lady Lishi.

 

Steve (1:05:20)

Thank you.

 

Don (1:05:21)

Do you have anything you want to plug, Alicia? I don't know if you do any kind of content creation. Okay. Not sure. And if you want to talk more with her, head over to our Discord. She is hanging out over there.

 

Steve (1:05:25)

I don't.

 

Thank you.

 

Telling us all about her favorite heavy metal Disney songs. I've got a whole list.

 

Don (1:05:46)

actually was a really great topic. I had fun with that.

 

Steve (1:05:46)

Yeah

 

Don (1:06:01)

Thanks for coming on. This actually was a really great, really great game. I had a good time with it. I honestly had like a really, I just had like a really shitty couple weeks with schedule and stuff and sleep. So I really didn't get a lot of time.

 

Steve (1:06:07)

She can't hear you.

 

Yeah, so Alicia's assistant manager was supposed to open tomorrow. Her husband fell off the roof of their house and is not going to be in tomorrow because they're at the ER or whatever, urgent care. And so now Alicia, well, yeah, he broke his back in two places apparently.

 

Don (1:06:43)

Urgent care.

 

Yeah, no, needs to go to ER.

 

Dan (1:06:48)

Yikes.

 

Steve (1:06:49)

Or whatever

 

it was, To Nova's, whatever it is. But yeah, so now Alicia has to work tomorrow and we have plans to go to Fleming's for dinner at like six or something like that. Or five it is. And then we're going to see this thing called the Paranormal Circus, which is like, you know, it's like a more adult horror themed.

 

circus that's in town. So we're going to go see that. But unfortunately she has to work in the morning.

 

No, dinner and the show are later tomorrow night.

 

Don (1:07:29)

So you're completely screwed out of your plans there.

 

okay. I was like, fuck that. yeah.

 

Steve (1:07:37)

Well, she's the store manager, so

 

if she can't find someone to cover, she has to go in.

 

Don (1:07:46)

Yeah, Michelle's

 

schedule sucks like that too.

 

Steve (1:07:48)

why I'm glad to be an electrician. I'll be making more than her with not even half the responsibility.

 

Dan (1:07:51)

Yeah.

 

Don (1:07:57)

My job is fucking brutal. There is nobody to do what I do if I'm not there. Like, I have a two day week. I basically have a two day week next week and that stresses me out. Doesn't that sound good to have like only two days you're working? No, it stresses me out because I know that like nothing's gonna get done until I get back and maybe there's gonna be more shit by the time I get back.

 

Steve (1:08:00)

Yeah, see, fuck that, it's not worth the money.

 

Dan (1:08:09)

Ha!

 

I know, yeah.

 

God.

 

Steve (1:08:21)

No, it

 

is good. I'm not saying you make bad money, I'm saying the responsibility sucks.

 

Me too. Yeah, it's better than your last one, for sure.

 

Don (1:08:34)

am I

 

plugs alright fellows ready

 

Steve (1:08:43)

Ready spaghetti.

 

Don (1:08:46)

So if you've made it this far in the podcast, you must like what you hear. And if you like what you hear, you should hit the subscribe button on whatever platform it is you are listening to. And if you're not listening, and you're watching on YouTube, hit the like and subscribe, leave us a comment. If you'd to respond to those and talk about it and hear about, the people that watch this. And of course we do love our discord very much. They're great community, that keep us going. Love to have these, gaming talks basically every single week.

 

you know just about random topics in the in the discord we kind of alluded to it a little bit but we spent like a good portion of last week talking about the best disney songs that would be covered that could be covered by metallica you know just funny funny stuff like that so yeah if you're interested consider joining our discord as well and you can become part of the conversation in several different ways and head over to our website the

 

CableClubPodcast.com. That's your kind of center for all things CableClub. Over there, you can see the current league standings. And you can also see the prizes that we're playing for over there as well. And join our Discord and find a place to listen to us. We post episodes every two weeks.

 

Alright fellas, you ready to get into our review?

 

Dan (1:10:08)

Absolutely.

 

Steve (1:10:09)

Ready.

 

Don (1:10:12)

So one thing we didn't talk about were the visuals of this game too much. Like, you know, we talked about how it's kind of Lovecraftian and that comes with a certain connotation. And I think the gods and like maybe Pius himself and someone like the sanity, like bleeding walls stuff, like I think that's pretty Lovecraftian. But I think the normal enemies, like when I read that this was intended to be an N64 game, I was like,

 

That's why all the normal enemies look like that.

 

Dan (1:10:43)

Ha ha ha ha.

 

Steve (1:10:43)

Yeah.

 

Don (1:10:47)

They're all like pretty low effort skeleton, like low poly. No.

 

Dan (1:10:50)

Yeah, and there's not many of them either, too.

 

Steve (1:10:52)

No,

 

so there's skeletons, trappers, bone thieves, horrors, the... what are those? Guardians, they're the ones with the wings. And then there's a different enemy based on the gods you pick. That is like, if you picked...

 

Dan (1:11:07)

Wings,

 

Steve (1:11:19)

If you picked Ulioth, it's like this... it's like a shrimp looking thing. If you pick Zellototh, it's like a two-headed dog. And if you pick Chaturga, it is like a scorpion enemy. And you see that when you go to this city. It doesn't appear in any of the other areas.

 

Dan (1:11:40)

is it kind of like the mini boss or whatever you're talking about? Yeah, okay. Yeah.

 

Steve (1:11:42)

Yeah, yeah. And the only

 

other enemy that I can think of is like the disappearing one with the monolith. You know the one I'm talking about, Dan? He keeps going down to the basement to heal. He disappears and reappears.

 

Dan (1:11:55)

yeah, yeah,

 

yeah. Yeah, he's like, yeah, he's like attacking the mansion. Like this, the servants. Yeah.

 

Steve (1:11:59)

Yep.

 

And I think that's all the kinds of enemies. So it's only like six or if you count the exclusive ones, there's like maybe eight.

 

Don (1:12:06)

And I

 

Dan (1:12:12)

Yeah, it's not a lot.

 

Don (1:12:12)

If

 

they are as far as the atmosphere goes, kind of a buzzkill because they're so because because they're monochromatic. First of all, so if you pick the Chiturga alignment, you're going to see like red skeletons everywhere. And then if you pick the green one, know, I mean, you'll you'll see all the different groups throughout the game, matter which which alignment you pick, just different numbers of them. But like, man, the the like monochromatic low poly skeletons look so goofy.

 

Dan (1:12:42)

Yeah.

 

Don (1:12:42)

Like

 

if you compare it to something like a, you know, Silent Hill where there's like the little children monsters that chase you around or like the weird nurses and I don't know, man. And that's one generation.

 

Steve (1:12:52)

So the enemies, think they would have come out really,

 

really interestingly on the N64, but making the leap into the GameCube hurt them in that aspect.

 

Dan (1:13:07)

Yeah, for sure. Like it needed to bake more in the oven when doing the transition into GameCube. Yeah, because I agree. It's like they didn't really touch the enemies. feel like the skeletons in particular, like the gray ones, like, yeah, they're bad. Like as far as like polygon count goes.

 

Don (1:13:27)

I wonder how many games were like planned for the N64 and they just staved them off. Cause there's this period of GameCube where it's like, like nothing moves right. And like this game, I kind of figured it out. Like people who have listened to this podcast for a while know that I have beef with the GameCube that like a Nintendo mainline games are pretty much what you would expect, but everything else has this weirdness to it. And I think I figured it out.

 

Like I played PlayStation two, mostly it's the console that I, that I, that I owned. like, when I think of games for the PlayStation two, I think of things like kingdom hearts. think of things like final fantasy 10, like I think of, you know, like mega man X eight or command mission. And there's like the way that the characters move in the environments in those games and even games like, like beautiful Joe, like when Titus.

 

Steve (1:14:27)

That was a GameCube game, first.

 

Don (1:14:27)

in Final Fantasy 10

 

takes a step, right? true. But like when, when, when Titus takes a step in Final Fantasy 10, he's like, you know, bounding the way someone would when while they're jogging and you've kind of like visually you feel his legs hitting the ground and he's springing in, he jumps. GameCube models have this weird tendency to just like weightlessly glide through their environments and don't appear to be

 

like moving at the pace that their walk cycle suggests, or, you know, that they don't like touch the floor with any kind of impact or reality. It's just so weird. Like, and it's, it's a uniquely GameCube thing. I'm sitting in front of my, like entertainment center here of like nine different consoles. And this is like a very GameCube thing to me when this happens.

 

Dan (1:15:00)

Yeah, I know what you're saying.

 

And you got that vibe with this game? Yeah.

 

Don (1:15:26)

Yeah, God, like,

 

when you play as Roy versus ancestor, powdered wig guy, like, man, what is going on with him? He's like, has like, has like half the bones that a normal human being has. He's just like drunk and they walk in.

 

Steve (1:15:34)

Maximillian.

 

Dan (1:15:35)

Yeah,

 

Max. Yeah.

 

Steve (1:15:38)

He's slow.

 

Yeah, that is... The characters all play a little bit differently. Some run faster, some run slower, some have different health bar... Or they all have different, like, health, sanity, and magic differences. But at the end of the day, you don't ever remember a character for how good they are at something. You only remember all the characters that have bad things. You're like, Max is slow, and well, you know...

 

Dan (1:16:13)

Yeah.

 

Steve (1:16:18)

whoever has like no magic.

 

Dan (1:16:21)

I hated those characters. The ones that had like low health and low magic. was like, ugh. Like sanity I could deal with. I didn't care if it was high or low.

 

Steve (1:16:25)

Yeah.

 

But unfortunately, they like, they push that you have all these characters and it's kind of samey, really. I mean, you all the characters, they're pretty much the same, a little bit speed differences, but like you don't notice the health differences and the sanity differences, only the magic differences, because you just have magic to heal those things that get hurt.

 

Dan (1:16:58)

Yeah, magic plays like a huge part in this game. So like if you play a character with like low magic, in my opinion, I really felt it. And you know, like a lot of the time I just count, found myself just like running in circles just to replenish my magic. And that's just like, you know, I didn't really particularly enjoy like doing that.

 

Steve (1:17:20)

you don't get

 

pool magic until so late.

 

Dan (1:17:24)

Yeah, it's like one of the last spells you learn.

 

Steve (1:17:26)

Yeah, but

 

it's a regenerative effect on whatever element you cast. So, like, I always casted it on magic because you can use magic to heal everything else.

 

Dan (1:17:36)

Right.

 

Don (1:17:38)

I did like that there,

 

So a pro to the gameplay, did like that there were what, like nine spells and each of the spell had a different, had three different elements to it. So I did like, as you went through chapters and you fought bosses and stuff, like there was a preparation element because you could, you could quick cast like five different spells, right? So if you were fighting a boss that was a certain color and you started to figure out what it, what it was about, those throwing projectiles or whatever, you could go into your menu and you could queue up.

 

five of the most useful, you know, adverse element spells against that boss, which I thought was kind of My gripe is that there's no, there's absolutely no customization in this game. and I mean, like not even picking your weapons, like in Resident Evil, you could choose to take the Magnum with you or not, right? Like you could leave it, leave it with the chest like here.

 

Dan (1:18:36)

Yeah.

 

Don (1:18:38)

You get a character, have their inventories or what they can pick up in their respective chapters, and then they have the book of spells, right? And every character, you know, is just what they are. There's no real, like, changes.

 

Dan (1:18:49)

Yeah, every character

 

had their own specific loadout, pretty much.

 

Steve (1:18:54)

Yeah, the game's really linear in a lot of ways. I don't personally find that as like a necessarily bad thing. I love Candy Land just the same as I like Sorry, like, you know what I mean? You know, one has more decisions than the other. But at the end of the day, most of the characters get a melee weapon and a ranged weapon and some of them get two ranged weapons.

 

So your choice, and you have spells. So your choice of customization falls under which spells you want to use and which range weapon you want to use, but not necessarily your melee weapon, because that's the only one you usually get per character.

 

Dan (1:19:38)

Yeah.

 

Steve (1:19:39)

mean, nobody uses the blow gun as Ulia or whatever her name is, but you just use it in that one spot and it's bad. So you just use her scimitar or whatever.

 

Dan (1:19:49)

I use the melee weapons a ton in this game just to save resources.

 

Don (1:19:50)

funny story.

 

I actually did.

 

I actually did use the blow gun because the guy like so this is the second chapter so it's I didn't know how the game worked or how puzzly it was right but this is the epitome of what I was talking about about like you find a thing do a thing so you start with a sword and that's pretty good I'd say melee attacks in this game are pretty good because you can cut the pieces off and you know pretty much incapacitate enemies until you want to deal with them

 

Dan (1:20:24)

yeah, it's

 

infinitely better than like older Resident Evil for sure.

 

Don (1:20:30)

Yeah, I think it's better than most of the range weapons you get up until you get like real guns like the shotgun and obviously the assault rifle sounds really good. But like, so you have a sword and then you fall down and your sword breaks and you're like, no, what am going to do to defend myself? I don't want to go punching people. And then you encounter a guy and you save him and because you pick up a blow dart gun. And then he's like,

 

Steve (1:20:45)

no.

 

Don (1:20:59)

thank you for saving me. can fix something for you. So I was like, yeah, no, this is an obvious video game trap. They, they, they broke my sword. I'm going to go look for something better that, that he could fix. Like thinking there's like a better weapon later that if you haven't fixed the sword, you won't get the better weapon. So I went through that whole section with the blow gun, like killing everything. Cause I didn't want to lose my sanity. Like it was, it was so brutal.

 

Steve (1:21:23)

Bad

 

decision making tree.

 

Dan (1:21:24)

Ha ha.

 

Don (1:21:30)

I mean, I would never have done that if it was like chapter five, because I would have known that that's how the game operates. It's like, have a problem, solve a problem.

 

Steve (1:21:37)

Well, if you fail

 

to save him, then you have to play through with the blow dart gun.

 

So, funny story, you went through the blow dart gun the whole time. So funny story is the last playthrough I did the first two or three chapters, whatever, real fast. was like running away from every enemy, trying to speed run the chapters to get this alternate ending after completing it with all three. And I picked up the blow dart gun and I aimed it at an enemy quickly and shot.

 

Don (1:21:43)

neat.

 

Dan (1:21:45)

I don't know if I've saved him.

 

I think so, yeah.

 

Steve (1:22:11)

But I didn't target an enemy, I shot him and I poisoned him.

 

Dan (1:22:15)

You

 

Don (1:22:18)

Hurry up, fix it before you die.

 

Steve (1:22:19)

And then I ended

 

up dispatching the enemies and saving him in time for him to fix the weapon, but he was still poisoned. I don't know if he died, I ran away. He fixed my weapon and I was outie.

 

Dan (1:22:34)

man.

 

Don (1:22:35)

As as Royvitz is ancestor, the maid started to attack me and turn into those bones, natural things. So I didn't have enough sanity and I was starting to like see things. And there was one maid who was cooking with organs, but I think it's just an element of him, him being insane. So I just like killed her and then he went totally insane. Cause if you kill a maid when you're not supposed to, it just completely, it just drains your sanity to nothing. So I had to like,

 

I entered a room and I was on the ceiling and I could explore the ceiling. I was like, is this supposed to happen? Was I supposed to? Cause I really wasn't able to figure out what to do.

 

Steve (1:23:09)

Yeah, it's really interesting

 

the things that they decided to do with the sanity, but it is such a letdown that the sanity thing is fixed so easily.

 

Dan (1:23:22)

Yeah.

 

Steve (1:23:23)

Cause that's like the biggest draw to the game. I'd say that the combat is like below medium. The story is, you know, it's, it's fairly par for the course. I'd say it's a little bit like weaker than Resident Evil 4, but it's better than Resident Evil 1. Yeah. No.

 

Dan (1:23:41)

Yeah, I say it's average. I didn't think it was too, too bad.

 

Don (1:23:45)

I know, I actually think the story is pretty good. Our conversation with Lady Lishi, I think that was great.

 

Dan (1:23:50)

Yeah.

 

Steve (1:23:53)

I guess my problem

 

with story, engaging story, is I grew up playing JRPGs and they have these huge sprawling long stories. But when you put it that way, compare it a Mario game or a Zelda game, the story is better than those. So yeah, I'd say medium's a good place for it.

 

Dan (1:24:10)

Yeah.

 

Yeah, like, I kind of like was super lost in the beginning, like with like how the story was going, like you eventually gets what's happening. But I don't know about you guys. But like, I was so confused, like what the hell was happening with the story in beginning.

 

Steve (1:24:26)

I think it's supposed to be that way. Like, Alex would be confused reading the book for the first time.

 

Dan (1:24:29)

Yeah.

 

Don (1:24:33)

Alex's face is permanently locked in the GameCube confusion.

 

Dan (1:24:36)

Ha ha ha.

 

And I love how she like always ends up in that like room where you find the book like and when you like read a new chapter it's like she's like like sleep reading or something she like ends up into that room.

 

Don (1:24:51)

or she like,

 

she grabs the page and quickly scurries back to the room and gets it.

 

Dan (1:24:55)

Yeah.

 

Steve (1:24:59)

Well, I mean...

 

Don (1:25:00)

I did wonder if that was just me being messed with, because I know the game does that kind of thing.

 

Dan (1:25:06)

Yeah, because I remember like there was quite a few times like I would read a page and I was like, okay, I was definitely not in this room when I was like opened up this page.

 

Don (1:25:16)

So you know what game did sanity really well, and I hate to keep bringing it up, but I feel like Silent Hill did it well. And it was like a passive background thing. Remember the elevator guys? Where like we were exploring every floor and then we go and there's a fourth button and we were like, was there always four buttons? Like, yeah, such good stuff. Yeah. Or like you went in and out of the bathroom and it was like, you went in the bathroom, came out on a different floor and you're like, wait a minute, was I up here already?

 

Dan (1:25:27)

yeah, yo.

 

Dude, I loved how that game like messed with you. Yeah.

 

Yeah.

 

Steve (1:25:43)

Yeah, no, it teleported you to

 

the other dimension.

 

Don (1:25:48)

Yeah. Yeah. It just did that kind of stuff natively without having to have a bar, but I guess they needed something for the third God to do for the, for the sanity, that also made the green God, think the most important.

 

Maybe, I don't know, you don't actually want to die, but the blue God is definitely least important. You can, you can get by without magic. It's okay.

 

Steve (1:26:15)

I I don't have a whole lot more to say. It's fairly short. It's kind of a good length, I think. I think it could stand to be just a little bit shorter. Doubling up on the cities is kind of annoying. And it's tough because you end up going to this temple in wherever it is, Persia, like

 

Dan (1:26:31)

Yeah, definitely.

 

Steve (1:26:43)

four or five times. Like you go as Kareem, you go as... No, that's the other one in Cambodia. In Cambodia you go as the girl, as Edward Lindsay, and I think that's it.

 

Dan (1:26:50)

Lindsay, Edward Lindsay.

 

Cambodia.

 

Yeah, I know what you're talking about. Like you go there as like the architect guy and then you go there as Mike.

 

Steve (1:27:09)

Yep. You're there as Pius

 

first, and then you go as the architect, and then you go again as Mike, and then I think you're there as Kareem, like in the same place like four or five times. That's kind of frustrating.

 

Dan (1:27:25)

Yeah.

 

Yeah.

 

Don (1:27:32)

But the layout was different. At least with, with, with Lindsay, it was, it was different. mean, not, not like totally different. felt similar enough, but there was.

 

Steve (1:27:42)

Lindsay

 

and Ulia had the same Cambodian temple.

 

Don (1:27:48)

Yeah, I could tell it was the same temple, but the map seemed a little bit different and different obstacles and stuff.

 

Dan (1:27:53)

I mean, appearance-wise, it was different.

 

Steve (1:27:55)

but

 

not layout. It was the same.

 

Don (1:27:59)

Well, there were different traps and things. Like it wasn't, you know.

 

Steve (1:28:02)

Yeah, there are differences, but like... I'm talking about the one you go to in Persia. You go there like four or five times. It's a lot.

 

Dan (1:28:10)

Yeah, you do go there a lot.

 

Steve (1:28:13)

and then the city twice and then you're in the mansion in between every single time. like, there's only like, really, feels like four maps.

 

Dan (1:28:22)

Right. And I felt like some of the characters that you played as was just like kind of bloaty. you could have took some of them out and the story still would have felt intact.

 

Steve (1:28:31)

and

 

there's the church, which are there three times?

 

Don (1:28:36)

as a Anthony the first time that one.

 

Steve (1:28:38)

Anthony, Paul Luther,

 

and what was the World War I guy? Peter Jacobs? Yeah. So, five maps.

 

Dan (1:28:44)

Yeah.

 

Steve (1:28:50)

I I don't really have a whole lot more to say. I think it did some cool things and some good things and some not so good things.

 

Don (1:29:01)

I mean, it's hard for me to judge. I'm not really a horror guy, when did Resident Evil 4 come out? Was that 2004?

 

Dan (1:29:10)

Four or five, yeah.

 

Steve (1:29:10)

Yeah, it's four or five.

 

It's like two or three years after this.

 

Don (1:29:15)

Okay, I guess that feels about right then. Because I look at a game like that and I know that that was on the cube and you're like, whoa, graphics are great. You really feel it. It's interesting because when I look at retro gaming communities on Reddit, I don't know if they're just rage baiting or what, but you get people that like these games from the past that nobody liked.

 

Again, I feel like it's got to be trolling, but you'll get people with like no irony being like, yeah, Mega Man X7 is pretty good. I kind of liked it. And you're like, no. like, like just just delete this guy. He's a troll. Like this is the epitome of a game that the devs didn't have time. The devs didn't care to make. Like it's it's it's a bad game. Everything about it's bad objectively, like low quality, almost intentionally so.

 

Steve (1:29:54)

Mods, please delete this thread.

 

Dan (1:29:56)

Yeah.

 

Yeah.

 

Don (1:30:14)

Like, and this game had so many lives, right? Like it, it came out, sold less than 500,000 copies, which is abysmal. Even, even for that time, the guy ended up having some legal troubles with, I think Enix. And then, he tried to start.

 

like spiritual successors to it a couple times failed a couple times. There was a reported like sequel being made in 2018. Couldn't get enough support for that. And now like suddenly it's kind of popular and hidden. And I just don't know if this is like the Reddit community coming out. Like I'm not, I'm not saying it's a bad game. It's not, it's not a bad game. Like it's definitely playable, but it's like, where, where people write the first four times about eternal darkness.

 

Steve (1:30:56)

I don't know, but...

 

Gameplay wise, don't think it's very strong, but interesting, like, provoking wise, I think it did a pretty good job. I think it, for what it is, you could play, what is there, like, 50,000 games out there? Like, this one's kind of unique in certain ways, which gives it some appeal.

 

Dan (1:31:30)

Yeah.

 

Steve (1:31:31)

But, you know, the combat's not great.

 

Dan (1:31:36)

Yeah, I got hooked with the story. Yeah, it was like you said before, it was like see thing use thing. It's basically what it is. But like I got actually got hooked in the story after I would say like, you know, halfway through the game. So like it was interesting enough for at least for me to finish and to see how it played out.

 

Don (1:31:37)

And the puzzling is weird.

 

Steve (1:31:57)

Yeah, and also replaying it becomes more fun because you get to see the differences between the different options you picked or the main option that you picked. And then on top of that, I started optimizing more and running away from a bunch of stuff and letting the sanity be low and just having more fun with it rather than taking it so seriously.

 

Don (1:32:23)

You get a feel for like how, how you can ride it out. Yeah.

 

Steve (1:32:25)

Yeah.

 

Dan (1:32:26)

Yeah, I

 

wish it was like, you know, I mean, this probably wouldn't be for everyone's cup of tea, but I wish it was like more of like a new game plus feel like when you beat the game, like maybe you could have kept some of your spells or whatnot, but like you literally keep nothing in like subsequent playthroughs. It's just like dialogue changes and cutscene changes and a little bit a little bit of gameplay changes.

 

Steve (1:32:47)

Yeah, it would've been cool.

 

I feel like if you did New Game Plus, the difficulty should get harder.

 

Dan (1:32:57)

Yeah, yeah, something like that. Like, I would give you like incentive to like wanting to play through the game again, because it's like, when I beat the game, like, I know, it's like, I didn't really want to play through the game again, just to see like, you know, the minor changes, especially like, you know, not like basically starting with nothing again. It's like, it didn't change enough for what for me wanting to play it again.

 

Steve (1:32:59)

Yeah.

 

Yeah.

 

But on the plus side, like, I can get through the game in probably like eight hours, so, I mean, you know, it's not like this huge ask either.

 

Dan (1:33:31)

Yeah.

 

Don (1:33:31)

No,

 

think pacing wise, it's actually pretty good. Like no one chapter is super long, you know, or at least the parts that I got to, didn't, I didn't find anything dragged, but you guys said the city section kind of sucks because you got to do it a couple of times.

 

Dan (1:33:43)

It's, yeah,

 

it's not necessarily long, it's just tedious.

 

Steve (1:33:46)

Well, yeah, it's tedious because you keep running back to the same room and then teleporting out and then getting into a different room with some kind of a challenge, whether it's a physical challenge or a puzzle challenge. And then you have to, yeah. And then you have to run back to that room again and teleport to another tower, which then teleports you to an area with a different challenge. So, I mean, you know, it's not like it's tedious in the way that they're having you do the same exact thing, but the part where you're running back to that room is the annoying part.

 

Don (1:33:58)

You've chosen the physical challenge.

 

Do you find the game challenging? Like hard?

 

Dan (1:34:23)

No, I didn't really feel that that was that hard. I probably died only a handful of times, really.

 

Steve (1:34:27)

The

 

only times I died were... I mean, you know, every now and then you have like a just a random death, but the times that I died a lot were the three quarters the way through boss fight, figuring those out, and the final boss, the first go-around. After I figured out the final boss on my first playthrough, the other final boss fights were like, they're the same, and once you know it, you know it.

 

Dan (1:34:56)

Yeah, and I also had like a fair amount of deaths where I was just being careless and I got caught off guard. Like if I was playing more cautiously, like some of the deaths that I had should never have happened in the first place.

 

Steve (1:35:06)

Yeah, I

 

wouldn't say it's difficult.

 

Don (1:35:11)

Would you guys also say that horror games, generally speaking, are kind of on the harder scale compared to relative games as a whole?

 

Like

 

it's easier to die.

 

Dan (1:35:25)

I don't think it's like, like if you take like Resident Evil, for example, I think like the difficulty comes from like resource management. Like if you're pretty good at like managing your resources, then like usually the game's kind of a cakewalk. This game, that's not really much of that at all. Cause like your melee weapons good, you know, you got magic, which is infinite essentially. Cause you can regain your magic by walking.

 

So.

 

Steve (1:35:56)

I would say in horror games,

 

it depends on what you're putting them against. I think the game that is easiest to die in is a first-person shooter. But then I think horror is pretty close behind that.

 

Don (1:36:10)

Yeah, maybe it's just me, because I kind of associate horror games with being a little bit more challenging, or like they want to kill you more often. So I played this game carefully, and because I did that, just, like, the challenge just wasn't there. Like, I was able to dog walk enemies.

 

Steve (1:36:22)

Yeah, it is not... It's not

 

Dan (1:36:22)

Yeah.

 

Steve (1:36:25)

difficult, but I think that that's a good thing. I think this is like a really good choice for somebody to get into more horror-based themed video games. Like, my daughter is 12 now, and she's interested in trying this, and I think it might be like the perfect segue for her age group to play something like this.

 

Don (1:36:47)

Yeah, it's not overly graphic or overly bloody either. Like it's not like a... or an evil within kind of a thing.

 

Steve (1:36:49)

Right, it's not Silent Hill.

 

Yeah, so,

 

you know, there's a level in The Evil Within, I beat that game, where it's kind of near the end of the game and you're like in this like insane place and the walls are made of flesh and you're walking through blood that's like knee-high and it's like, it's just ridiculous. So yeah, it's not like that at all this game.

 

Don (1:37:19)

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone.

 

Dan (1:37:20)

No.

 

Steve (1:37:21)

Yep,

 

my heart beats for you.

 

Don (1:37:25)

bleeds for you.

 

Steve (1:37:25)

Yep.

 

I think I hit everything that I wanted to talk about.

 

Dan (1:37:32)

Yeah, same.

 

Don (1:37:34)

Yeah. All right. You guys ready to rate this one then we'll get it over in into the league.

 

Dan (1:37:40)

Let's read it.

 

Steve (1:37:59)

I have to get gameplay of this.

 

Dan (1:38:03)

Didn't you play it on GameCube?

 

Steve (1:38:04)

Yeah,

 

that's why I don't have any.

 

I'll make a note of when I play a game on console, if people are planning on playing it on PC to just throw up OBS and get an hour of footage.

 

I mean, if you're playing it on PC already, then why not, but...

 

Dan (1:38:34)

Yeah, the problem with me, and I don't know if it would really affect the quality. Yeah, so I don't know how that would work. Like it might be just fine. I don't know. I've just never tried it. Yeah.

 

Steve (1:38:37)

Play it on your handheld.

 

Don (1:38:45)

quality wise?

 

I mean, I think it's 720p, which is it only takes up a quarter of our screen. So I think it would be fine. Like it's a smaller, you know, part of the screen.

 

Dan (1:38:52)

Yeah.

 

Yeah, I'll like download OBS and whatnot and keep that in mind.

 

Don (1:39:02)

Doesn't it just natively have a screen record?

 

Dan (1:39:05)

yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right. It does actually.

 

Steve (1:39:08)

Dan, it's easy for you. I mean, it's easy for me if I'm playing on the PC, but Don got this for Alicia for Christmas, so we've been playing it on the Wii.

 

Don (1:39:12)

Yeah, I played on the cube.

 

Alright, and here we are in the league. So I have up in front of me what looks like a tier list because it's on tiermaker.com where people typically make tier lists. However, this league is a little bit different in the sense that these aren't, these aren't tiers in a traditional aspect. They are cups. So at the end of this league, we're going to award some prizes, two games in each cup. We're going to have five games per cup and five cups.

 

So that means every time we reach an interval of five games, this is game number nine, we're to have to create a new cup. And the game of the episode goes, goes into a cup. And if that cup is full, then we have to move a game up or shift things around and kind of debate and yell at each other to get where we need to be. So, and the prizes.

 

I know if you've had a chance to check them out, you can head over to our Discord and look there. And there these awesome golden cartridges with secrets inside. Came out amazing. The Master Ball prize is still TBA.

 

Dan (1:40:24)

They look nice.

 

Don (1:40:32)

top secret.

 

Alright fellas, so let's ask. I know Steve's going to be a little biased. If he knows what's good for him. Is eternal darkness starting in the pokeball tier?

 

Steve (1:40:43)

Valentine's Day boys.

 

Dan (1:40:54)

Not quite.

 

Steve (1:40:56)

They are for me either.

 

Don (1:40:58)

I would agree with

 

Steve (1:41:01)

I had a lot of fun playing it, but I was also playing it with my wife, and we all know that playing games with people is more fun than playing alone.

 

Don (1:41:10)

I think it has a lot going for it. I just don't think it's better than some of these other games that are here.

 

Dan (1:41:14)

Yeah,

 

same. But it's not going to stay in Apricorn. At least for me, it wouldn't.

 

Don (1:41:22)

Yeah, I don't know. We'd have to get, we'd have to get some crazy games, I think for the rest of the year in order for that to stay in, in April corn tier.

 

Dan (1:41:28)

Yeah,

 

exactly. Like I had fun with this game. Like in the beginning, I wasn't so sure, but the more I played it, the more I had fun.

 

Don (1:41:37)

Yeah, the more, the more spells you get, the more, the more fun it is.

 

Alright, so I'm gonna pick two games that I think should move up. I think it's Donkey Kong Country 2 and I think it's Legend of Dragoon.

 

Dan (1:41:49)

Same for me. Same exact two that I would pick.

 

Steve (1:41:53)

we decided whether we could pick our own games or not.

 

Dan (1:41:57)

If there was a tie, like a three way tie.

 

Don (1:41:58)

Yeah, if we

 

run into a ridiculous thing like we did last week.

 

Steve (1:42:09)

So for me...

 

Obviously it'd be criminal for Donkey Kong to not move up.

 

Don (1:42:23)

Well, spoiler, Donkey Kong was both Dan and I's first pick, so Donkey Kong is definitely moving up. It doesn't matter what you say, but we're just interested in hearing it.

 

Steve (1:42:30)

Okay,

 

well, out of these games...

 

Don (1:42:32)

You

 

Steve (1:42:37)

I think it's between.

 

Pokemon, Gold and Silver, and...

 

Probably Legend of Dragoon.

 

Dan (1:42:51)

Wait, wait, that means Legend, Legendary Dragoon

 

Don (1:42:52)

no!

 

Steve (1:42:55)

Yeah, but I can't pick

 

my own game.

 

Dan (1:43:00)

That's how it works, That's why Pokemon's still in there, too.

 

Don (1:43:02)

He

 

Steve (1:43:05)

Yeah, it- it-

 

Don (1:43:06)

Not true, Steve and I have not picked Pokemon.

 

Dan (1:43:11)

I'd be picking Pokemon if I could, I just can't.

 

Steve (1:43:15)

I know, like, I'm sorry, Diddy's Conquest is a very strong game and Legend of Dragoon is not a very strong game.

 

Dan (1:43:22)

The

 

chef dog would be proud.

 

Don (1:43:28)

Look how wonky this is getting. It's so funny.

 

Steve (1:43:32)

Nothing I can do about it. All you Donkey Kong fans, I'm sorry.

 

Dan (1:43:33)

Yeah. Yeah.

 

I have a strong feeling that it's probably going to be the next game to move up. So don't worry, Steve.

 

Don (1:43:39)

you

 

We tried Dan. did Steve. Steve defeated it. I think out of spite because I said it didn't matter what he said.

 

Dan (1:43:45)

Yeah.

 

Steve (1:43:53)

Well, no. think I like Legend of Dagon more than Actraiser, more than JJ Squawkers, and just a little bit more than Eternal Darkness, but not by much. you know, in my opinion, Donkey Kong Country 2, like this is just personally for anybody listening, is like just barely behind Paper Mario on this list.

 

for my personal taste.

 

Don (1:44:26)

Wowie wow. I feel honored.

 

Steve (1:44:29)

Well, I love Paper Mario, but I knew you wanted to pick it, so I did not.

 

Don (1:44:34)

it's so good. Imagine if you scoop me like that. I don't know if our friendship would have survived.

 

Dan (1:44:38)

podcast would have been over.

 

Steve (1:44:43)

Well, Don picked Paper Mario and I picked

 

Don (1:44:43)

All right, so we are gonna.

 

And before we bury the remains of Eternal Darkness, this is what we thought, but let's hear from our community. We had two people write in about Eternal Darkness who gave it a shot. had Lysianthia said he didn't get to play it a lot this time around, maybe an hour or two. But from what I did play, it felt like the game really wants to be Resident Evil with a combat system that's reminiscent of the older games and a similar puzzle scheme of find item, use item in correct place.

 

Wish I got more into the meat of it to see more of the story and horror aspects though. I'd say that pretty much echoes a few of our sentiments here. And then JMo says, eternal darknesses fear based hallucinations are iconic, but what kills me about the system is how easy they are to avoid early in the game. Just keep using items to replenish your sanity meter and you'll miss out on the feature that makes the game noteworthy.

 

I never got past the first few levels, so maybe these become more pervasive as the game goes on, but if you're good at the game, you might never even realize just how clever it truly is. Usually the opposite is true with good game design.

 

Dan (1:45:55)

Yeah, he hit the nail on the head with that one. Like the most unique feature is pretty easy to avoid, honestly.

 

Don (1:46:04)

You guys mentioned sanity traps that I didn't see.

 

Dan (1:46:08)

yeah, yeah, there's quite a few of them. Like I said, I purposely played with low sanity a lot of the game, because I wanted to see what the game would throw at me.

 

Don (1:46:09)

Yeah. Yeah, it is.

 

Right? So.

 

Setting aside Eternal Darkness, we're going to move on to pick our new game for two weeks. And this game was selected by Brandon Hurlz of the Game Junction podcast. And he has picked for us a sports game.

 

Dan (1:46:38)

A what?

 

No way.

 

Don (1:46:41)

But sit back down if you're standing up because this is a sports game played by super fighting robots. Number one sport in Europe. is Mega Man soccer for the, for the super Nintendo entertainment system. Have you guys played this one?

 

Dan (1:46:58)

boy.

 

I've played this game probably a grand total of like 10 minutes. So it's pretty much new for me.

 

Steve (1:47:07)

I

 

have never played.

 

Don (1:47:09)

Yeah, right. So you thought you've played every Mega Man game. Here comes Mega Man soccer. So tune in in two weeks where we have Brandon on and we talk about Mega Man soccer and enter it into this league.

 

Steve (1:47:13)

Almost.

 

Dan (1:47:13)

Ha ha

 

ha.

 

Don (1:47:27)

But for now, game over.

 

Dan (1:47:29)

Game over.

 

Steve (1:47:30)

Game over.