Rise of the Dragon is a perfectly serviceable first person adventure game, held back by some misguided action sequences and a predictable plot. Cyber drugs? You're kidding me! So once we dispense with the formalities, Gary regales us with a tale of his return to the All-American Magic Show. Sometimes you CAN step in the same river twice.
WiiWare is an untapped market for us, and Gary brought in a doozie: a game about eating a lot in a very short amount of time. And you know what? It's not that terrible. It would at least have kept us entertained for a night in our dirtbag early twenties. So listen in and hear us talk about competitive eating, and learn a little more about Gary's horrible childhood.
Dragonfable is the long-forgotten followup to Adventure Quest, and somehow it still runs, and somehow you can still play it. Cribbing heavily from the hyper self-aware diction of webcomics in the mid-2000s, this is a repetitive, grindy RPG that's perfectly at home on this show.
Gilligan's Island is a hell named after its devil. The incompetent first mate of the S.S. Minnow bumbles about with an efficiency that cannot be accidental, ensuring that the island's flawed inhabitants will never again see another shore. Gilligan's Island is also a corny 60s television show which, for some reason, got an NES game made of it in 1990. It contains multitudes.
Galerians for the PlayStation is a flawed but interesting survival horror game, existing today primarily for people who are passionate about that era of the genre. Galerians: Ash is beloved by none. Picking up right at the end of the original game, Ash follows the continuing adventures of Rion through the world of Basically Akira, trying to stop synthetic humans from destroying the world. But they made it an action game and they shouldn't have done that.
Will Hughes joins Kole once again to talk about the DS launch game "Feel the Magic: XY XX", which is best described as "horny Warioware". We end up talking about the game quite a bit, though Will does frequently bully Kole the whole time. There's nothing to be done about it. Special Guest: Will Hughes.
Gary went and caught Covid, so this week Kole is joined by the AV Club's Will Hughes to talk about Zoop, the shallow puzzle game that magazines in the 90s put a lot of effort into getting people to buy. And since Gary isn't here, we kind of go hog wild on talking about things that would otherwise send him into the stratosphere.
Hey everyone! Announcement time. Gary caught Covid-19 and circumstances conspired to make it so we can't have a show this week. To give him time to recover, we're skipping this week, and I (Kole) will be hosting the next two episodes of the show with special guest Will Hughes, Gary's friend. We hate missing episodes of the show, and we really try not to make a habit of it. We apologize for not having new content for you this week, and we thank you for whatever patience you can extend our way.
It's a classic Gary Butterfield pick: it's an advergame about snack food. But M&M's Kart Racing for the Wii also happens to be the least fun, and least functional, kart racer we've covered for the show. It also leads us to one of the more bizarre and sad wikis we've found for a property.
Somehow it took us 460 episodes to reach Mr. Bones. I don't have an answer as to why. But, man, is it a sight to behold. You play the one skeleton on the side of good (guitars) fighting against a mindless army on the side of evil (drums), playing just the grossest, smelliest white boy blues you can.
Nickelodeon's GUTS, later Global GUTS, was a mainstay of the network's "cheaply produced gameshows" that acted as ballast for some of the other, bigger shows. Each episode, a group of kids competed in physical challenges, culminating in a trip up the Aggro Crag, for a chance to win a "glowing piece of that radical rock". From this setup, we get a really anemic minigame collection that's mostly repeats... so Gary talks about a juggler he saw recently.
The Curious Expedition isn't a bad game by any stretch of the imagination, but it sits at a table set with a lot of outdated tropes that don't look so great nowadays. We're pretty sure this Patron just wanted us to make a bummer episode about colonialism. So we talk about that, along with how people just drown in pig shit and we, as a society, have decided to accept that.
We're not interested in talking about whether or not Joe Rogan is a force for good. You can probably guess how we feel about his show. BUT, we are interested in how wild reality game shows got in the early 2000s, and this is a great inroads to talking about a whole bunch of them. Also, making a video game version of Fear Factor is a terrible idea.
Something is happening with our brains, and we're in this period where we're extremely receptive to schlock. To the point where we can't guarantee that Harvester won't become a WOFF! episode at some point. It's a bizarre FMV adventure game that's all about the glorification of violence, and it's full of some extremely potent, trashy horror ideas.
The kids are going to have to learn about FUB and his obscure war at some point. That's why we're covering Loaded, a bonkers shooter that has all the charm of seven Twisted Metal games rammed together. We also talk about the Miracle of Uncles.
Hugo's House of Horrors is a classic adventure game that's actually quite charming. Doubly so when you see how vehemently the designer insists that he'd never heard of Maniac Mansion before making it. We also talk about how J. Jonah Jameson and Cornholio are related, and how Kole's got snakes.
This SNES has a mission to boringly go where no man has gone before! An interface that mimics the bridge of the Starship Enterprise does a lot to make this feel like a more complex game than it is, but it can't hide the terrible Away Team and ship-to-ship combat. We also talk about our Holodeck fantasies, and Kole finally gets to tell his falconry story.
This is probably someone's favorite game, which is weird to us. After the 16-bit era, Treasure kind of split in two. One part released bullet hell shooters. The other had a habit of making technical platformers that are impossibly ugly to look at. Silhouette Mirage falls into the latter camp, with a projectile affinity system that was a test run for Ikaruga's main gimmick.
This recently revived and translated SNES game is a little less food-oriented than the title would have you believe. It's not a complete lie, but what you get is a Cho-Aniki brawler with a little bit of cooking thrown in. Which is a bummer, all told.
It's no longer safe to be in the water, but that was usually the case to begin with... at least of you're Gary. The Jaws NES game has a bad rap because it's very slight, but it's pretty interesting, if a little grindy. We also talk about the ethical implications of eating shark meat, but only if that shark was a really bad dude.
Imagine if you will a city of dinos. Also imagine a game based on a movie about some teens visiting that city of dinos. And imagine Kole's odds of survival when trapped in the world of Sonic the Hedgehog. Picture all of this in your dreams.
This one gets a little... gross. Of course we begin by talking about ELEX, a game from the team that made the Gothic and Risen series, which we had never heard about before. It's not terrible, just generally shoddy. What IS terrible is the direction Gary takes this episode.
We know about Solid, Liquid, and Solidus Snake, but are you ready to meet their little brother Solid-ish Snake? The concept for this game is good: What is it like to be stranded behind enemy lines as a footsoldier in a time when wars are fought entirely by mechs? Too bad it squanders it by feeling terrible in the hands and being very opaque in how it presents information to the player. So we talk about how we feel we'd fare against a mech instead.
Reventure is a cute little joke platformer about the many ways that quests can end. It's got a little Stanley Parable in it, along with a little Don't Shit Your Pants. It's not a bad game, and actually kinda neat, so we instead talk about Dangerous Animals shows, and Kole tortures Gary with home improvement chat.
Listen, have fun, go mad, get buried in a Dymaxion house. That's about the order of operations in this episode about a UK-only kids game based on a property called the Tweenies. They like to have fun and dance around, and one time a genie trapped them in the jungle with dinosaurs. But is there a more sinister side?
Why would you play a game about making games when you could make a game yourself, said the wise man, you absolute clod. Game Dev Tycoon bears a striking resemblance to Kairosoft's Game Dev Story, and they have caught plenty of heat for that, but if you're going to mimic a light management sim, there are far worse examples to crib from.
The Genesis is home to some very weird and obscure games, and Saint Sword is one of those. We use its strange transformation powerups to launch into a prolonged conversation about the pros and cons of centaurism.
Is it here because it's a late entry in a beloved series that changed hands? No, it's here so we can joyously talk about the opening cutscenes. It's very hard to be mad at this game unless your favorite unit got nerfed. Then you'll hold a murderous grudge for life.
We chose this game on the basis of a misunderstanding, because the UK doesn't know how to name candy. What we thought would be a game about those sweet, sour, chalky tablets, ended up being a game about big M&Ms. Would the game based on the chalky candy have been any better? It's impossible to say, so we'll say yes. Yes, it would have been better.
We take this perfectly fine party game and play it exactly the wrong way... Alone! We also talk about hats, the problem of having a head that's too big, and the meanest thing Gary has ever done.
