Game Under Podcast 62

Stream below or right-click and download here  You can also listen on Stitcher and iTunes. Why not subscribe to us on RSS ? 

Introduction
0:00:18 Uh, Hi :P

Not Trademark Banter
0:01:00 Pills and Lager
0:01:35 Futbol Talk
0:03:00 Winter is now upon us

First Impressions
0:05:05 Dangan Ronpa 2
0:10:45 First Aid

Tom Surprises Phil by Asking for Final Impressions of:
0:13:39 Costume Quest

Tom Towers' Aural Review
0:20:35 Bayonetta for Wii U
1:33:05 The Score, and Prediction

Proper Trademark Banter
1:42:20 Phil's Tales from the Game Shop
1:44:50 Tom's Gaming Drought/ Shovelware Analysis
1:47:10 Phil Buys some PS4 Games
1:49:30 Tom's Warning to Developers - Obiturization Complete - Gargamel
1:52:15 Trollin'
1:53:00 Our Favorite Star Wars Games and PC Serial Ports
1:54:27 Games We Want to Launch the Next Gen With
1:55:40 Games We Want Sequels Of
1:58:00 Respects to Fellow Podcaster Richie Benaud, who Recently Passed Away, On His Deathbed.

Transcript

Our live on tape, oh, from the famous temple of Australia, to the obeying center of Melbourne.

Welcome to episode 62 of The Game Under Podcast, hosted by the eminent minister of inflatable fun, freelancer, critic, author, musician, polyglot, and senior editor for laserlemming.com, and all-round good guy, Mr.

Tom Towers.

And polymath as well.

Polymath?

Correct.

You can divide as well as you can multiply.

That's right.

And I am merely Phil Fogg, performance artist, senior executive producer of this podcast, and the associated website, gameunder.net.

Tom, good to have you back.

Good to be back.

I was pouring myself a glass of Australia's finest lager just before the show.

Does Australia have any fine lagers?

No, but it's the best of the worst.

And I noticed I had some water leftover from the pills I had just taken, because I have been ill.

You need to take them to be able to drink the lager.

Yeah, that's true.

And there was still water in there, and I was going to pour it out on an unsuspecting pot plant, but then I thought, what's the point?

You know, it's already watered down as much as it is.

I may as well just put it in there.

So I did.

And you wouldn't want the plant to overdose.

How are things doing on the Australian football scene?

Not well.

Not well?

My prediction has...

It's still possible, but recently, in the last match that Melbourne played, they lost 1-0 to the bottom-ranked team.

But Melbourne victory is your team, right?

And they are atop of the whole thing right now.

That's right, but we then have to play twice in Brisbane in a short span of time.

In Brisbane is your guys'...

We're the guys that always beat you despite the lack of skill and all the rest.

Well, actually Newcastle is the team that always beats us in spite of the lack of skill.

So it's perhaps not such a surprise loss, but thanks to Perth Glory, routing the salary cap, Brisbane now actually have motivation to win their matches, meaning we could be in trouble.

Yeah, I think losing to the worst team doesn't mean anything.

It just means that you guys are saving reserves and you don't want to...

or resources, and you don't want to blow it all out by playing the worst team.

And it's quite often that the worst team is more pepped up for a game than the best team.

You know what I mean?

So I wouldn't...

Not necessarily in football.

I wouldn't read too much into it.

So I've also been heating the studio here at the Fogg Manor.

And I should say on the topic of...

I've been heating the manor because it dropped below 27 degrees here in Queensland.

Winter is now upon us.

27 degrees for you American listeners is 80 degrees Fahrenheit.

So I've had the heater on for the last four hours.

For a minute there, the American listeners were thinking 27 degrees, that is pretty cold.

That is cold, yeah.

No, it dropped below 80 here.

It dropped below 27.

So I have the heater on, and I'm just waiting for the nuclear winter to set in and the hoarding.

Or to finish.

I mean, if it's already 27.

Yeah, I know.

I may as well just...

Well, this is why I'm doing the podcast.

This is probably our last podcast.

Before you freeze to death.

I freeze to death due to global climate change.

We're not going to jump right into trademark banter.

We're going to jump...

Because we already did, apparently.

Well, we didn't because that wasn't trademark banter.

That's just me telling you my environment here so you can understand how poor this show is going to be with the watered down beer and the hot studio.

We've had a lot of requests.

I know, well, illicit requests.

They haven't been, you know, spelled out.

I would call them demands, abusive demands.

Yeah, but subversive demands.

I would say they're unspoken demands.

They're the passive aggressive demands of our number one listener, Gagan Singh, the host and founder of laserlemming.com, endlessbacklog.com.

And he hasn't expressly said it, but I believe he has been desiring us to speak up on a game.

I mean, they dedicated a whole podcast to it recently.

So we're just going to jump right into, I mean, my first impressions of Dangan Ronpa 2.

I've also been eagerly awaiting this.

Yeah, Dangan Ronpa.

Dangan Ronpa 2.

What do you know about Dangan Ronpa?

I know that it almost made one of their lists, either the top 10 for 2015 or games of the generation.

I think so, yeah.

I'm pretty sure it won game in the year last year, but I couldn't be sure.

I wasn't listening closely.

The thing about this is, like I went into Dangan Ronpa 2, which is available for the Vita.

It's also available for the PSP in Japan only, I think.

It's a game made by Chunsoft, which made Dragon Quest 1 through 5, and Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, and 999.

And it's basically a raunchy Phoenix Wright, essentially.

And I went into it not knowing anything about it.

Had I known it was a Phoenix Wright type game, I would not have bought it, but I just heard good things about it, so I was like, okay, I'll just get it.

But that's exactly what it is.

It's a raunchy Phoenix Wright.

It's very much more stylish.

So did you play any of the Phoenix Wright games?

No, I haven't.

Well, you know what the model is.

It's basically a murder mystery.

Yep.

The difference is with Phoenix Wright, it's got that frustrating thing where if you know the answer but you guess it in the wrong sequence, you have to start again.

Whereas with Dangan Ronpa, it's set in, first of all, the story takes place in a 2D kind of way, a hyper-stylized 2D kind of way.

It uses visual novel presentation, right?

Yeah, exactly.

But you explore the world in first person.

So you explore the world in first person, and then when you come across a character, you'll click a button and then start to talk to them, and then you basically can give them gifts so that they become your friend, or that you can influence them, or you find clues and all the rest of it.

But it's not finding clues in the traditional adventure game kind of way where you're clicking around, you know, oh, there's a hammer.

Oh, it's got blood on it, you know, and that sort of thing.

You're finding out the clues through talking to people.

So it's one of these games that I don't like because you can't watch TV, you can't watch sports, you can't play sports while you're playing it.

You can't listen to podcasts because you have to actually pay attention to the text.

So I'm not sure why that would preclude you from doing any of those things.

Well, you can't be playing sport and playing this game at the same time.

Why?

You need to look up.

Again, you can't be running around.

I mean, it is a vita, but you can't...

I mean, can't you read very quickly and then just glance up now and then or rather glance down at the text now and then?

You can't play tennis and this at the same time is my bottom line.

That sounds like a challenge.

Yeah, it does.

So you've got the exploration phase, which takes place in first person with the visual novel type thing, and then you go into the trials.

Now, the trials are good.

They're very good.

I mean, they have like mini games that are decent and varied different games.

Like you have like three or four type mini games that you're playing within the trial itself.

But the bummer thing about it is the trials take like three hours to complete.

And you can't stop.

So you've got a portable game where you've got a three hour requirement at some point where you can't put it down.

So you can't save at any point during the entire trial?

At the very middle of the trial, they will break and allow you to save.

So after like an hour and a half.

Okay.

But...

Are you possibly incredibly slow at this?

No, I looked it up and people have said the same thing.

And the other thing...

Now, of course, the other thing is, with the Vita, you can suspend play at any time.

By basically, you know, pressing the home button, if you will.

And then you just plug in your Vita and walk away from it.

I'm not a huge fan of that.

But it is a possibility.

But...

So then, wouldn't that solve the problem?

It would solve the problem.

If you're comfortable with doing that.

But, you know, you're not always able to do that.

But, all in all, I'm finding it to be a very enjoyable game.

In fact, so much so that, you know, I had to reset my Vita, because I had to change my PSN account.

And I lost, as a result, the first six hours of the game.

And I just went back and replayed it without really any sort of concern.

Was the save corrupted?

No, well, when you change your PSN user ID, you have to format your Vita.

So you lose all saves and everything else.

And so that's what happened.

Now, how I got through that, I got through that six hours in about an hour and a half by just, I just listened to a podcast and I was just tapping the screen, because in the exploration mode, you really can just tap the screen.

If you already know the story, you don't have to read.

So you just basically just tap the screen constantly.

And you know the correct answers in court?

Never got up to the court stage, because the court stage has only happened probably about, from what I can tell from the fact, about five times in the game.

So most of it is centered around the relationship building and the exploration.

So you haven't played the court stage yet?

Well, I have played the court stage now, because I went past that initial six hour block and beat it and now I'm on to the second part.

But also yesterday, I should tell you, I passed a first aid course by using the same method.

It's an online test, and basically you just click the forward button through, I ignored all of the information, so you click through about 50 screens, which takes about a minute, and then they have a multiple choice test.

Now, being someone that's slightly smarter than a brick, I was able to answer a hundred questions and get one of them wrong, just using the information that I've learned from watching parental guidance recommended television from the time I was a child.

Because you know, a stingray has stung you, what do you do?

Well, you pour vinegar on it, okay?

Yeah, someone's having a stroke, what do you do?

Urinate on them.

Urinate on them.

You know, and they made it easy, because D was always urinate on them.

The answer A, B, C or D, D being urinate on them, I just kept going with that.

So I beat Dangan Ronpa, you know, they always talk about how video game skills carry over to real life.

I now actually have my first aid ticket.

I can administer first aid.

And on top of that, the answer to all the puzzles in Dangan Ronpa is of course, urination.

Well, not far from it, because when I say raunchy, let's just say it's probably in the hyperdimension, it probably exceeds hyperdimension neptunia in its provocative depictions.

Yes, yes.

So that's it.

That's my first impressions and I'm playing through it now.

I can hear Gargan in the background applaud.

Oh, I don't...

Or urinating.

He's urinating on his...

That is the correct way for one to applaud in high society.

It is.

To applaud.

So, now, we've got...

Because we have foregone trademark banter and we're only talking about video game topics, you know, the anchor point of this show is obviously going to be Euro Truck Simulator 2.

I understand that you've been thinking of playing it recently.

I've been thinking of listening to your impressions of it recently.

Yeah, well, we'll hold that up for another podcast because I want that to actually be the Euro Truck Simulator show.

I'm saving it for a big show.

I'm hoping it can be the theme topic of a big show.

It should be.

You know they have streaming radio in that show, where you can actually stream the radio from the country that you're driving through?

In Truck Simulator?

Yes, so if you're driving through Ireland, you can turn on the radio and you will actually be streaming what Irish radio stations are playing right now in Ireland.

Which is most likely what every other station in the world is playing.

Euro Pop, yeah.

Well, I was wondering, what about Costume Quest?

What about it?

Well, a long time ago, I believe you played a small amount of time of Costume Quest included that it was complete shit.

You have since finished Costume Quest.

Yes.

Has your opinion shit?

Well, it's not complete shit.

I mean, the best part of the game is the concept of utilizing a child's imagination.

Or fear, right?

And so the game is basically a child going door to door, asking people to be tormented or to be given treats, right?

Which in the 21st century you think, wow, that can't be right, right?

I mean, that's not really something that children do.

You dress up in fantasy attire and go door to door and you say, trick me or treat me, right?

Well, interestingly, that's actually something children do in Australia only in the 21st century.

That's true, because we haven't had Halloween down here.

But we now do.

Much to our betterment, I might say.

But in the game, the costumes come to life, which is fitting, given the corollary to actual gaming.

I mean, this is, after all, an RPG.

And so when you think about the people who play video games, what are we doing?

We're bringing costumes to life.

We're bringing our imagination, and we're investing a small part of it and then through some magic transferring our imaginations into reality, right?

And that's what most people get out of gaming.

So, and also, I mean, this appreciation for bringing costumes to life and how that matches up with video games is matched by the art in the game.

I mean, it's technically very good.

When you see the mech in the game or the transformations in the games that the people turn into, whether it's the ninja or the Star Blazers type characters, you know, it's very impressive.

And there's also the collectibles that are around that tie into these collectible cards that were available in the 70s and 80s.

I mean, it knows its source material extremely well.

And those are the treats for the player who actually, you know, can tie into it.

But even if you don't tie into it, you know, it's a very satisfying, mediocre JRPG.

But I would say the one difficult...

Have you played this at all, Incident?

The one difficulty with it is the limited enemy types.

There's basically two sets of three characters that are your enemies throughout the entire game.

As varied as the protagonist characters are, and you can switch between...

You end up with a party of three players that can switch between about nine different costumes.

So as varied as they are, the enemies that you fight are very mundane.

But it does have that exploration where you're, you know, knocking on a door, and you don't know whether or not you're going to get a trick or a treat.

Now, unfortunately, the treats are silly.

It's basically a four-second pre-animated shot of candy, you know, going across the screen into your bag.

Okay.

So just as the enemies are not varied, nor are the treats.

Yep.

And I think they could have done...

They obviously could have done a lot more for it, but it was a very small game, and given its legacy, given its framework, you know, they had very limited resources to make this actual game.

They didn't have a Kickstarter yet.

That's exactly right.

This was basically Double Fine's Hail Mary, where they had that two weeks of, okay, you guys got any ideas, we need to make small games and fast because otherwise we're going to go out of business.

And I can't even remember the other games they made.

They made the...

It was that other game, the one with the Russian dolls that fit...

Stacking, was it called?

And then they had that other game that had to change its name because it was already a board game in Europe, Trenching or whatever it was called, Trenched.

I think that's actually the second name that they had to use.

So, you know, I mean, it's a very good game for what it is, which is a game you can buy for under $6 and beat in under nine hours.

I mean, and if you just want that feeling of playing a very easy JRPG, dressed up in a, you know, a self-knowing 20th century, you know, pop pastiche, if you will, then you're certainly going to find it in this game.

The funny thing about it is that the only thing I've ever heard about it, Sequel, Costume 2, is the exact same thing I've heard from, like, 19 different podcasts, which is, I really enjoyed the first one, I really wanted to play the second one, but I just never got around to playing it, which basically sums up what most people feel about the first game.

You know?

The second one is apparently pretty good, but I couldn't...

So the second one is the one you should have played?

Yeah.

And they should have played?

Yeah, probably, but the second one wasn't the one that was on sale for $2 on Steam.

Yeah, so I enjoyed it the second time around.

Does it get a score?

Yeah, it gets a 6 out of 10.

Excellent.

I was expecting a 5.

No, 6 out of 10 is basically where I am on that game.

I think I gave it a 5.5, but now in recalling it to you, I gave it a 6, so your guess of 5 is pretty much on the spot.

Yeah, it's probably a 5.5, so there you go.

You've haggled me down.

Now, mister, I've been on eBay recently hunting a Wii U.

It has eBay-ed me.

Basically, Wii U's go for $370 down here with Mario Kart right now.

That seems to be the going deal.

You can get the rubbish one for $300, the white Wii U with no memory card and no game, for $300.

Doesn't it come with Nintendo Land?

Well, yeah, but have you played Nintendo Land?

And you've got it, right?

Yeah.

So, that's like saying does it come with firmware?

Does it come with, you know...

You've got the white one, right?

Correct.

For $180.

With Spyro as well.

I understand that you've been exploring your Wii U lately.

I have.

Quite serendipitously, Hyperdimension Neptunia, as we heard in the last episode, ceased working for me, which I was reviewing, and so I wrote a short, something like 500 or 300 word article on it, in place of a review, which allowed me to finally play Bayonetta and Bayonetta 2 on the Wii U.

Bayonetta?

Your favorite game, I believe.

Ah, the game.

I don't know anything about it.

Bayonetta.

I believe it is a beat-em-up, made by, directed by Hideki Kamiya.

Okay.

Of Devil May Cry fame.

And possibly beautiful Joe.

Yes, he was...

I'm not sure about that.

Well, he was involved with it, so...

Yeah, I'm not sure if he's a director on it.

Success has a thousand fathers, as JP said, so there's a lot of people claiming responsibility for a lot of these different properties.

So he had nothing to do with Super Monkey Ball, though.

Sadly not.

So he's clearly not of the highest pedigree.

He's no Nagoshi.

So Bayonetta, it comes on the Wii...

Bayonetta 2 is the game, and then Bayonetta 1, do you have to download it, or is it on the disc?

Well, I bought, in fact, the special edition from Europe, because it comes with both games in their own cases.

Oh, really?

As opposed to the Australian version, where they're both in a single case, and I assume are both on discs.

But I'm not sure about that.

So does it come in a single Bayonetta 2 case, or what is the Bayonetta...

It comes in both normal Wii U boxes, one for Bayonetta, one for Bayonetta 2, in a cardboard overcase.

Oh, that's cool.

So it's got a cardboard sleeve, but it's got an actual Bayonetta 1 case.

Correct.

Either one have a manual?

Both have a manual.

Oh, wow.

And here's a tip for those people out there who are sick of their short manuals.

If you buy European games, not from England, but from Europe, where, of course, everything is still in English anyway, you get a thick manual, because those two pages of random shit that they still include on and off are duplicated in a long list of European languages.

Including Czech and French and German and Spanish and all that sort of stuff.

Exactly.

Well, very good.

So, okay, so did you play them in order?

I did, in fact, play them in order, and I will be reviewing Bayonetta 1.

Okay, great.

Because I actually played it today for the third time, and I got further, as far as I've ever been in the game today.

Where did you get up to?

The end of Chapter 2.

Not bad.

How many chapters is there, do you know?

16.

Oh, shit.

Okay, well, it only took me like an hour and a half, and that was with skipping all the cinematics and everything.

So, go ahead, tell us about Bayonetta 1.

Well, I'm going to begin with actually an interview that Hyper, many years ago, just before it was originally released on PS3 and 360, conducted with Kamiya.

And it, at the time, appeared to be a really bizarre interview, because he spent 90% of the time talking about the story, the character of Bayonetta, and the graphics of the game, and saying almost nothing about the gameplay, much to the chagrin, as far as one could infer, to whoever it was conducting the interview.

And Bayonetta being a beat-em-up, one would not expect them to put so much focus on talking about the story, because of course, generally, the focus for a beat-em-up, with few exceptions like Enslave, would be on the gameplay, right?

I mean, it's an extremely gameplay-heavy genre, and especially when it's Kamea, who made one of the most revered for its gameplay, beat them up to that point, which was Devil May Cry.

But playing the game, surprisingly, a lot of the things he talked about actually came across very successfully.

There's one annoying thing about the look of the game, though, which is it's got an extremely grey visual filter on it, really sucks a lot of the style and colour out of how the game looks early on, at least.

Later on, when you're in more fantastical environments, it doesn't really matter as much, but early on, the environments often look very good.

The settings are...

It begins early on, I'm not sure this is quite the very beginning.

A bit after the beginning, you end up in basically a facsimile of Italy, or that sort of area, right?

Exactly.

And it's got a great aesthetic of Venetian Gothic, I think is the correct term, but basically general Gothic, plaster Italian houses, and it plays music that reminded me very much of the Goblin soundtrack for Suspiria.

Have you seen that film?

No, sir.

Well, that's a Giallo film, I think is the correct term, featuring witches, so it may not be a coincidence.

And the backstory stuff, which I assume you also haven't read, No, no.

is written in a very dry and amusing Gothic novel style.

So, surprisingly, all the things he was talking about are actually there present in the game and do in fact add to the atmosphere.

And beyond the purely atmospheric things, the actually extremely impressive thing about the graphics is the enemy design.

The standard enemies are designed in such a way that you can really easily see when they're going to attack and what things they're going to use to attack.

For instance, when you first come across the angels that have gigantic trumpets, because of what you've seen of the other enemies and how they're designed, you can immediately figure out that they're going to shoot something from the trumpet at you, right?

Yep, yep.

So it's extremely intuitive, and when you come to the bosses, some of the bosses, in a standard sort of video game way, look quite imposing, simply because they're gigantic and have a large weapon, so you can immediately start to imagine what they might be going to do, right?

Which is a standard thing in video games, but they take it to greater levels than in other video games, where they will design an enemy so that it looks incredibly silly.

There's one boss in particular, and I can't remember the name, but it's got basically these tentacling sausage tube fingers on its hands that flail around and ridiculously large arms, and it just looks hilariously stupid, right?

But you see it, and on the one hand, thinking it looks incredibly stupid.

On the other hand, you're thinking, oh shit, because you immediately are aware that these sausage fingers are likely to be shooting something at you, and with arms that large, it's probably going to have an extremely powerful melee attack as well, and its head has a few orifices that could easily be shooting stuff at you as well.

So just from the look of the thing, you've got a great idea of what's going to happen, and because of the basic way it's designed, where all the attacks that it's going to use are apparent, one becomes completely imposing to a greater degree than other enemies might be, but on top of that, because your ability to dodge is so important in Bayonetta, its attacks are actually really obvious and overt, and because you can see exactly where their attacks come from, even if they weren't as slow as they might otherwise be, if you're playing on hard after you've played it on normal, you then already have an idea of what they're going to do, so you can be prepared for an attack that might be coming very quickly, right?

So it's extremely impressive, the graphics from a practical standpoint, not merely an aesthetic one.

And the other hilarious thing about the way the enemies are designed is they're completely original in terms of games, where the vast majority of them, and especially the bosses, you might have a very generic boss design, such as a dragon, right?

But the dragon is actually a mythical statue where it's a dragon but it's got a head stuck in the middle of it, on its torso.

And that's exactly what I...

I mean, in looking at the artwork of this game this afternoon when I played through the first couple of chapters, you know, it brought back that 15th century, you know, concept.

We're basically, if you had to describe the artwork in this game, is that of Da Vinci's Italy, you know, and his grotesques.

And, you know, when you're talking about a head that's coming out of its stomach, and the mundane environments, I think, actually serve to suit the creativity of the bosses that you're facing.

And just as Leonardo and Michelangelo had to, you know, pay tribute to the religious iconography of the time, Bayonetta does as well.

And so with the drab gray environments, you know, I think that...

It's the filter that is gray.

Yeah, the filter, right.

But the environments themselves, you know, they're quite dreamcast in nature.

I mean, or rather, they're like the original Devil May Cry 1 and 2 and 3.

They're very simple, the cobbled streets, the very plain buildings of Italy and all the rest of it.

But I think in this case, as with perhaps Dante in Devil May Cry, it serves to accentuate the accents of Bayonetta, with her colorful butterflies and that sort of thing.

It makes her more interesting.

But that's the environmental design, and I agree with that completely, but the filter itself, I would say, understates those aspects of Bayonetta.

Well, that filter, however, doesn't apply to the butterflies and the roses.

It does when you're playing.

I didn't think it downplayed it that much, but when you think about...

It's also possible that it looks somewhat different on PS3.

Yes, that is true.

You played on Wii U, so it's going to be probably upgraded.

You're right.

But you are right.

It is a rather dank environment, but I think that comes with that whole moldy 15th century art, you know?

And, you know, so in terms of the aesthetic of it, that's basically where I'm coming from with it.

And now you were talking about the bosses, which brought me to think about, you know, DaVinci's journals and that sort of thing.

They are spectacular.

In the early parts of the game, though, they have seemed to be still, you know, having that glowing weak point that you've got to attack.

Does that continue throughout the rest of the game?

Well, it depends on what stage of the boss, because the bosses, as you get up to later on, what you're probably referring to aren't really bosses, but mini bosses that you face early on, they become a standard enemy that you fight very often.

But the actual bosses, which also are sometimes repeated, generally, they've got a few stages, and often they will at some point have a glowing weak point you attack, but that will only be at one particular stage of the fight.

So the rest of the time, it will be a much more fluid thing.

And while we're on the topic of Bayonetta herself, I thought she was, much more than I expected to be, incredibly charming and charismatic.

And the thing that I thought they did brilliantly is the way the script is written, where the bosses, which you may not have noticed if you're skipping all the cutscenes, talk in this ridiculous grandiloquent style, where they're going on long speeches about resurrecting Jubileus and bringing on the resurrection, right?

Yeah.

And she also talks in a somewhat grandiloquent style, but it's extremely sarcastic and tongue-in-cheek.

And apart from simply interrupting in the middle of their long speeches, she will also make comments mocking them and making fun of them in a sarcastic way.

Yeah, I mean, but at the same time, is she charming or is she just a screwball comedian?

I would compare her more to something like James Bond, where as far as the charm is concerned, there is no more depth to it than a screwball character.

But it is played in such a way in the surrounding characters and everything, a la with her responses to the bosses, where it works and is enough to carry.

Absolutely.

So whereas James Bond characters have always been vacuous and quote handsome, so far as we can tell, some more than others.

So let's just take the typical, let's because we're a video game podcast, we'll take GoldenEye.

Who was the chap in that?

His Brosnan.

He's obviously handsome.

He's obviously vacuous.

He could be the news reader for NBC in America or whatever.

He may as well be.

And no one says, oh, that's the sexualization of a character, etc.

Also, however, James Bond, when he's getting his mojo on, doesn't go naked.

But I do take your point, and that is just because she's vacuous doesn't mean she can't also be appealing.

It's not necessarily demeaning for her to be vacuous, because men are vacuous, too.

Yep, and I would say she actually has, and this would be entirely due to, in fact, sexism, sexist portrayals of characters, here where it results in a character with slightly better depth than the male equivalent.

Because as the story goes along, one of the major points of the plot is her interactions with the child, which one can obviously imagine results in some depth being added to her character.

Where if she was a male character, that would likely not be a plot point to begin with.

Exactly.

One other thing I wanted to say about Bayonetta in regards to the character and the story is the voice acting, the English dub, I would say is superior to the Japanese one.

And this I think is actually a common occurrence when it comes to characters like Bayonetta, where they've got a particular sort of arrogance and conceitedness to them.

Which, but this is when they're written, writing a generally an English or American or whatever Western character.

They write characters with this certain sort of arrogance and conceitedness that Bayonetta has.

But the voice acting generally is consistent with very Japanese sort of conceitedness and arrogance that does not translate at all into the character.

It's performed slightly differently.

A more basic and obvious thing would be where once again in Bayonetta, one of the characters is an Italian mobster, so far as one can tell.

Their official job is an undertaker, but they're that sort of cliché American criminal.

And in the Japanese dub, they're performed not as a yakuza, as you might encounter in one of the yakuza games, but as basically a low down thief from the country or from Kansai.

Which, they're in an urban area in America, so it doesn't fit the character as far as it is written as well, as in the English dub, where they're simply a clichéed American mobster with a ridiculous Italian accent.

So I think the issue is more their ability to translate another culture.

Yeah, absolutely.

And that's a good reference to Helsing as well, because it just fits in, I think, well with the whole Bayonetta aesthetic.

Absolutely.

The climax, hair climaxes, in fact, look extremely like in Helsing when Helsing is unleashing the basketball beast, for instance.

When she's got that hair monster, or whatever it's called.

And now that you said that, I will say one final thing about Bayonetta in regards to a character.

I would say, in fact, she's actually a good example of where, in many cases, a strong female character in Japanese media is done significantly better than a strong female character in Western media.

Because if you have an action heroine in the vast majority of Western media, at one point, no matter how strong that character is and how many people they slaughter en masse, she will at some stage be saved by a man.

And in Bayonetta, at no point is she ever in any meaningful way saved by a man, and on multiple occasions does she save a man.

Now, Tom B.

Towers, you reviewed Tomb Raider 2014 or 2013 pretty extensively.

Refresh Me, did she ever get saved by a man or in that game?

I think she might have by her mentor, but I may be wrong.

Yeah, I don't think she did.

There's another one then.

Yeah.

So that's also worthy.

So there's two now.

But you attributed that to the Japanese.

This is a common thing in Japanese media.

That you'd have a female character that doesn't require a male hero.

Correct.

Whereas in most Western media forms, there's always a man, right?

It's that thing we talked about about 20 shows ago where, you know, if a woman isn't in a scene with a man, she's talking to another woman about a man sort of thing.

You know, I don't wish with my prior comments to diminish Bayonetta as a female character or as a strong female character.

I think it's, you know, actually one of the better characterizations of any kind of character in a video game.

I think she's a stronger character than Nathan Drake.

I think she's a stronger character than Dante, Kamiya's other work.

I think she's a stronger character...

Maybe, what do you think?

Where does she measure up with Kratos?

I'm playing God of War.

Yeah, so, I mean, because that's really what we're talking about in this genre.

We're talking about Devil May Cry, God of War and this game in terms of characters.

And I think she's the strongest of the three, because Dante is really just about screaming and power and adolescent fantasy type thing.

So, I really want to ask you as to whether or not...

And perhaps you can just tease us, because does the character develop in Bayonetta 2?

I mean, is there any carryover, or do they just give us an insight on that regard?

Does the character develop more in Bayonetta 2, or does it betray the character that's portrayed in the first game?

I would say it betrays the character in some areas.

That enough for a teaser?

I think so, and that's pretty unfortunate, because that game is more lauded than the first one.

Now this is actually going to be the final thing on Bayonetta, on this subject, but on the commentary of Bayonetta, I can't recall them ever, not that I read particularly extensively the comments promoting Bayonetta's sexuality, them separating the cinematography from the character.

Because the sexualization of Bayonetta is entirely, as far as they depict it, down to the framing and the editing.

How so?

Well, the vast majority, apart from the outfit thing, but her sexuality is generally entirely a sadistic one, which is not used in the way that they're complaining about, where it's just there for completely gratuitous, as opposed to any aesthetic purposes, right?

And that is true of the way that she is filmed, absolutely, but it's not really true of anything that she does herself.

No, absolutely.

And as far as I'm concerned, in terms of titillation factor, while I'm playing the game, I'm not any more or less interested in her than I would be in Kratos, which is not a comment on my sexuality.

It's just a comment on...

It's just a video game.

If I want to see hot pictures of Bayonetta, I'll go to Bing and I'll put in Bayonetta Cosplay, you know?

And those will be far more titillating than anything I'm getting from the actual game.

The game itself, I'm just playing the game.

And now we're finally going to get to the interesting part of Bayonetta, which is the combat.

Once again, as with the enemy design and the bosses, it's incredible how intuitive the combat is.

Now, obviously the basic conceit of it is that it is incredibly simple, where you've got basically two attack buttons you're really going to be using for the majority of the game, which is punch and kick, and you've also got a shoot button, which is for the most part useless, unless you're trying to keep a combo going with an enemy a long distance away.

I usually use it when I'm in the air, just as a long reach kind of weapon.

Yeah, but it's not a major part.

No.

Of that.

And so as you begin playing, you immediately get a feel for what you're doing, and due to how well telegraph the enemy's attacks are, at the start you're never really getting hit when you shouldn't be, so you very quickly learn how to use which time, so that you get a feel immediately for the flow of the combat, because which time ends up becoming a really important part of the cadence of the combat.

Now, which time is basically bullet time, right?

Bullet time, correct, yep.

And it is activated where you dodge an enemy at the right time, just before they attack.

Yep.

Or during their attack, depending on how tough the enemy is and how accurate you need to get your timing.

On the PlayStation 3, you press R2 and then to dodge.

Like, you're playing this on the Wii U, so you're using that game pad thing to play the game, right?

Correct.

So, I mean, how comfortable is that?

How does that feel?

And how do you actually go into which time with that?

You use, I think, in Bayonetta 2, it might change between the two, but you use one of the right triggers, depending on which game it is.

So the same sort of thing.

Yep, except unlike with the PS3, those triggers are buttons, so it actually is responsive, and it's also not at 7 frames per second.

Right.

Well, you said the triggers are buttons, as opposed to an analog input.

As opposed to a genuine trigger, like on the PS3 or PS4 controllers.

Okay, so the triggers on the Wii U pad are actually buttons, not triggers?

I thought there was a proper trigger.

There is one that looks like a trigger, but it's got such a short range that you need to press it in for it to work.

It is basically button.

And I don't think it's got any dynamic feedback.

So using the gamepad is perfectly fine.

That answers that.

Thank you.

You immediately get a feel for the flow of the combat.

And when you do, at the beginning, when you've figured out that you've only got two attacks and that dodging is pretty easy because of how intuitive it is, because of how telegraphed attacks are, there's a small period of time where it feels like the game is just button mashing and you can go through the entire game with no problem with button mashing, right?

At a certain point, probably just before the first boss or the first boss, this is, when you get later on in the game, you will discover that a lot of the bosses are actually an entire level in and of themselves.

Where they can last like 10 minutes or longer, including the cutscenes, perhaps 15 or 20 minutes, where they go through the multiple stages I was talking about before.

When you get to this point, because they've got so much health, and they are really the first introduction yet, when you get to the first boss, you very quickly realize that you actually need to figure out the combos if you don't want these battles to go for an extremely long amount of time.

Because, and here is where the combat has a really basic hook to it, it just works brilliantly over the entire game.

The combos are vastly ranging lengths.

So you can have a combo that is six attacks, a combo that is four attacks, and the shortest attack combo is three.

And when you successfully perform a combo, what it does is it uses the hair attack, which has a proper term, which I can't recall off the top of my head.

And compared to just a basic kick or a punch, the hair attack within the combo does significantly more damage, right?

So when you're in a battle and you're against either a boss, as you are early on, or later on when you're against tough enemies or a lot of enemies at once, you need to be dealing a lot of damage.

So you need to actually be performing combos.

And what tricks you early on is that because there are so many combos and because some of the combos are so long, you can just button mash and be unleashing six combos' attacks, right?

Without even knowing what you're doing.

Yeah, without even knowing.

Like, I'm doing so much damage, I can just button mash my way to victory.

But later on, because there are so many enemies or because the attacks, the bosses have so much health and attack so quickly, you can't perform six combos' attacks.

So you'll be button mashing and you'll just be doing three basic attacks, which is basically doing no damage to the enemies or bosses, right?

So the whole key then is to figure out the timing of how many attacks you can unleash in which time and how many attacks you can unleash without getting hit and figuring out whether you need to be using a short attack or using a long attack or a medium attack or combo, rather, right?

So then when you get to that stage, it completely changes it.

And it becomes this incredibly one...

And because that's the basis of what combos you're using, it's still immediately completely intuitive.

And you don't necessarily need to look into it to the greatest depth areas where some of the combos do significantly more damage than the others and some are even more effective in particular occasions than other ones.

Because it's got that basic thing there, it strikes this being balance where you can play it, you can't just button mash.

You need to pay some degree of attention to it, right?

But you don't necessarily play it as seriously as you would something like Ninja Gaiden.

But you do need to pay complete attention to what you're doing so that it is engaging in and of itself unlike the combatting something such as Enslaved where it does become basically button mashing in a sudden.

Yeah, it's not necessary button mashing, but it's more like, okay, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, done, cut scene, you know?

Yeah.

And so what you're saying is, like, again, I'm only through the first two chapters.

After that, I mean, so I am going to have to pay attention because, I mean, right now I think I've pretty much mastered the controls that they've delivered so far, but when I get to the pause screen and they're showing me all these different combos, I just, like, ignore them.

It's like, no, I'm not going to...

This is not what's going to happen here.

I'm not going to commit to this, you know?

I'm just going to get through this with the simple retinue of the controls presented, you know, at the front with the kicking and the punching and the R2 and the left trigger waggling and the left trigger rotating.

Am I in for a world of hurt?

I don't think you're necessarily in for a world of hurt, because, as I said, the great thing about it is that there's three degrees to it, to the combat, where the basic one is what you're doing now, where you don't really need to pay attention to what you're doing.

I'm paying a little bit of attention.

But not a great deal.

I know what the controls are, I'm not just like...

But I mean, you're knowing the controls, you don't necessarily know the differences between using a short combo or a medium combo or a long one.

And when to apply them, right?

Yeah.

So later on, and once again, it stays just as intuitive as it is early on, you're going to probably need, unless you're happy cheesing a boss for two hours or something, which you may well be...

I usually do...

.

considering the way you play games.

But you will then need to know, you won't need to learn all the combos in the game or anything like that.

But you will need to know a few basic combos that you can rely on.

You'll have a go-to short combo, a go-to meeting combo, and a go-to long combo, right?

And that would be the minimum amount of attention that you'd need.

And...

It still sounds like way more attention than I'm prepared to give.

But at this point, I actually...

You know what?

When I was playing it today, skipping all the cutscenes, because I'd played through the first part twice before, and I'd get all the Sega stuff and the Eggman and crazy taxi references, etc.

etc.

I was actually enjoying the game today more than I've ever enjoyed it before.

And I was just playing it because of the joy of playing it.

I wasn't playing it because I was prepping for a podcast or whatever.

You know, I was hoping that you'd put off this podcast so I could play it some more.

You know, I'm really getting into it.

I beat the first three Devil May Crys, Kamiya's other works.

Beyond the first one, I found two and three to be a slog to the extent that I never even played four.

And then went straight to DMC, which is its entirely different whole, you know, it's its own thing sort of thing.

And, you know, insofar as God of War is concerned, which is a game that owes its, you know, backbone to Devil May Cry, it's a series that I've enjoyed on a 6.5 kind of level throughout and beaten all of them, except for, you know, one of the PSP games.

It's not that I'm predisposed to dislike this kind of game, but it's not really my shtick, it's not really my thing.

But today when I was playing it, I was thoroughly enjoying it once I started skipping all the cutscenes.

And I think in my prior playthroughs, I was too referential to the story and the sagueness of it.

But just getting down to the actual gameplay of it, it was as fun as I, as much fun as I have in playing a video game.

And also early on, the ratio between cutscenes and gameplay is perhaps a little bit weighted towards cutscenes too much than it should be.

Well, particularly on the PlayStation 3, where to skip the cutscenes, you have to press a button, and then it has to load the screen to tell you to skip it, and then you have to go through two more steps to actually skip the cutscene.

So, yeah, it's a bit painful, but it's certainly less painful than actually watching them, because I did watch a few today, and they were horrible.

Yeah.

You know, they got the, what's the guy who was in Leif's Weapon 3?

The short, fat Italian dude.

Danny DeVito.

That's the Italian.

Not the Dan...

Joe Pesci.

He's got the Joe Pesci character, and then you go into the bar with the guy that shows you the weapons, and he's the Dennis Rodman character.

And I can do without all of that.

And fortunately, you can skip all of that.

I had no problem with most of the cutscenes.

I think they were a reasonable complement to the gameplay.

But, at the end, there is one moment of extended exposition.

And at that point, the reason the cutscenes work to me is they're effectively just skits, right?

Yes.

That are shoved in there.

So that's fine.

And the balance is much better later on and in the middle, where there's skits here and there, and then you continue on.

So it's a reasonable place to take a break from fighting, right?

But then at the end, there's a reasonably long expositional cutscene.

And you just have to wonder, no one surely is actually at all invested in the plot, in which case, who the fuck would think you should put in exposition?

Absolutely.

You know, this is platinum shortcoming, really.

The story that's being depicted in the scenes itself is good enough without the cutscenes.

You know?

I just don't see what...

I don't see the need for it.

It also didn't even need the exposition, because the things that were mentioned were pretty much apparent just in the skits leading up to it.

Yeah.

And even in the gameplay, as you said.

And that Joe Pesci character, please tell me he gets killed off at some point.

He does not.

Beyond the middle stage, which we've talked about, when you actually look at all the combos and you completely figured out what levels you had as well, if you then invest in looking at the combos, the next stage is then, of course, buying more moves to add to your list of combos and then within the combat, applying all the correct combos for the correct situations.

And not only the combos though, but the weapons have great effect on the combat.

So if you're using the whip, for instance, it doesn't do a huge amount of damage to individual enemies, right?

But it's got a huge reach, so you can attack enemies from a great distance and when you get up to the later combos, it's got a big area of effect attack.

So you can then use that when you're against enemies, a lot of small enemies that have a low amount of health and don't attack very fast, right?

Because it also doesn't really stun lock enemies either.

Then, so you're then not only using the correct combos for correct situations, you're also then switching your weapons and combining different weapons as well as you're playing through.

And on top of that, there's also various accessories that you can buy that do things like, and I'm not sure yet, no, here's one that is definitely from Bandana, one where if you get attacked and you use the dodge button slightly too late, you transform into bats so that you don't get hit and which time is activated regardless, right?

So, and there are other ones that affect things in ways that actually affect how you're playing.

So, you're not only chopping and changing your combos that you're using and your weapons, you've also got accessories that you're chopping and changing as well.

And once again, I can tell you, you don't necessarily need to use all these things because it was only right at the very end that I had got completed the grips with using three different sorts of combos and figuring out what weapons I was best with to begin with that I started experimenting with more things.

And that lasted only for a very brief period of time because the difficulty can increase further, so I just went back to using the weapons that I was used to.

This leads to my question.

What was your go-to move?

What was your go-to weapon?

I mean, like, okay, you're just grinding through the game.

Like, what was the combo that you used the most?

My go-to weapon was the two swords dual wielded, so using them both on the feet and the hands because they attack extremely fast and do quite a lot of damage, even though their area of effect is pretty low.

And my go-to attack was, for doing the most damage, was simply the easiest attack to use, which is six punches in a row, combined with, depending on the situation, a combination of the punch-kick-punch attack, when I had to be fast, and the punch, I think it was, punch-punch-kick-punch, when I had a bit more time, but not enough time to use the six attack combo.

So using the twelve o'clock position, like on a PlayStation controller, the angle is twelve o'clock, for example.

So on the Wii U pad, what does a kick-punch-kick combo look like?

Twelve, three twelve?

Twelve, three twelve.

Okay, yep, alright.

And then for, what was the other one?

The other one was six twelves in a row.

One, two, three, four, five, six, okay, yep.

And the other one would be, I think it was, twelve, twelve, three, twelve.

Twelve, twelve, three, twelve.

Okay, alright, cool.

So you now know what you should be doing, apparently.

Well, my interest was not nearly intellectual.

I am going to be applying this tomorrow, so.

The other thing that was surprisingly, that surprised me was the way the levels are designed, where it is the basic beat-em-up structure, where you are just walking through the levels, and you go from fight to fight, right?

But along the way, you also have platforming sections, and sections where you are looking for hidden items, and alphimes, which are these battles that are based around a single challenge, such as you need to do a fight without getting hit, or you need to do a fight where only attacks in which time do any damage, right?

Which I thought once again were incredibly fun, and once again highlighted the extreme depth where you can apply these sometimes really restrictive things on the combat that you are not going to be facing normally in combat, and once again it remains completely intuitive how you then have to change how you are playing.

Two, that sometimes you need to apply completely different weapons that you would normally be using to these fights because of the restrictions.

And three, that despite some of these really extreme restrictions that might be applied with in some of the more extreme alphimes that you might come across, it remained extremely fun as well, and challenging for the same reasons that the rest of the game is challenging as well, where even with the restrictions applying, it still comes down to the simple basic of, you need to time your dodging, and you need to know what combos to use at the right time based on attacking speed.

Are those challenges optional?

They are entirely optional.

But if you skip them, are you going to have trouble advancing?

No, you might want to do as many as you can, at least attempt some of them, because if you manage to complete them, they unlock witch hearts, which improve your health, which would be very useful later on.

And also magic pearls, I think they are, which increase your magic gauge, which are once again extremely useful.

And in fact, related to the final aspect of the combat, which once again is well expanded upon in 2, which we will get to when we review 2, but is here useful as well, where if you fill up your mana gauge, you can then use torture attacks, which where you're up to probably wouldn't be very useful, right?

I've been using those left, right and center, man.

Okay, well, later on, when you get up to certain fights where you've got a really tough enemy, in a fight with a lot of small enemies or against 2 tough enemies, they are indispensable, indispensable useful.

So, the combat itself, as we've gone through, is incredibly robust and well designed.

And it managed to be completely intuitive, unlike certain other platinum games, such as Revengeance, and despite being immediately intuitive, having an extreme amount of depth to it as well.

The level design we were talking about, where you're going through the levels, you're doing platforming sequences and looking for items.

The looking for items and fighting elf-hines, I thought, was fun, and they were hidden in areas that were interesting to find and sometimes hard to find as well, so that they made exploring enjoyable.

And also, as you explored, you came across optional fights that you could do as well, which once again, like the elf-hines, unlocked things such as witch-hearts and moon-pearls.

But the platforming...

Bayonetta is not a platforming game, right?

No, absolutely not.

And the platforming you've come across so far is the simple version of platforming.

Some of the platforming gets complicated to the point where the design is of a very mediocre and simple platformer, combined with the jumping mechanics of Bayonetta, which are designed for use in combat.

And when you fall in Bayonetta, you take damage.

So between the fights, you have to do these platforming sequences that sometimes require some degree of concentration and skill, albeit not a great deal, but still some, with awful platforming mechanics that are not particularly responsive, not floaty.

I mean, not particularly responsive, extremely floaty.

And the sense of depth is awful.

The only real clue you have as to whether you're hovering over a moving platform that you need to time you dropping onto them is a small shadow.

Yeah.

I would say of the platforming or exploration level part of Bayonetta 1 is that it's better than Devil May Cry on a PlayStation 2.

The thing that holds it back as with Devil May Cry is the camera.

Technologically, on the PlayStation 2, the camera was more disciplined, however.

Whereas with Bayonetta 1, it is less disciplined because it doesn't have to be, technically.

You can move the camera around, but to a much limited extent.

So the platforming is basically you've got a floaty double jump that you can use.

There's also a way that you can walk up walls and defy gravity.

So there's some of those Super Mario Galaxy type ways that you can apply to it, which is of course a platformer, and we're talking about platforming.

But they're rudimentary and not really worth much of your attention.

If you're an experienced gamer, you're not really going to be thinking much about the platforming elements of this game other than how poorly they've been executed.

But I don't think that they take away from the game as much as they did in Devil May Cry series where it was a true frustration point, a true choke point where...

Yep.

These are never choke points at all.

But you're playing through them, and the feeling is...

Why?

Especially if you've just...

Exactly why.

And also if you do stuff something up and you've just been through a tough battle or are leading up to a boss, the frustration is only in the sense that you're then doubly punished by one, not only having to play through them, which is a mild punishment in and of itself, but two, that you lose health.

So you're then at a disadvantage in combat, which has no relation to the platforming.

Yeah, and if you find yourself in some situations like me, I had gotten through the combat elements and got into a platforming point and died.

And then if you continue, it'll load you up like half a second before you die again, so you just die immediately again.

So you have no option other than to turn the thing off and start the level over.

And then the overarching question is just why, and I think it's just filler.

It is filler, clearly.

And the thing is, why does it need filler?

Because with the filler in it, it's 15 hours.

Yeah, it doesn't need it.

That's a pretty long beat-em-up.

This needs to be an 8-hour game, you know, with the cutscenes.

Yeah.

You know?

Well, when you're playing through it again, and you know what you're doing, it will probably be less than 8 hours easily.

But I'm glad you brought up a camera, because there is one thing that I think, two things actually, that could have been done better with the battle mechanics.

The first is the camera.

For the vast majority of the game, once you've figured out, the first thing you need to do is never adjust the camera.

Right.

Then for the vast majority of the time, it's not a problem, but there are a couple of occasions where you're in these thin corridors that are really compact against large, extremely fast enemies, where at certain times, you're going to get pushed into a corner by the enemies.

And the camera is going to be in an angle, so you literally cannot see them at any point without adjusting the camera.

At which point, when you attempt to adjust the camera, which is completely unpredictable to adjust easily, you're likely to get attacked because they're so fast.

And you're then going to get knocked across the level and have to adjust the camera all over again.

Because by the time you understand how you've repositioned the camera, the guys are still wailing on you, sort of thing.

And their attackers, in fact, propelled you across the level.

So your adjustment to the camera is...

Meaningless.

And you can push R3, I think, for a quick camera turnaround to see behind you, which helps, but, you know, obviously you're absolutely right.

You just don't want to be changing the camera, period.

Just deal with whatever they're delivering up, because by the time you figure out the limited ways you can move the camera, it's not going to be much help anyway.

That's right.

And the one other thing is the movement, like the floating platform, when you're actually just moving Bayonetta, there's a looseness to it, where you start moving, and it actually immediately begins to accelerate in a slightly odd way, and then sort of floats along, which doesn't have the same extreme tightness of the combos and the dodging, which in most action games, it wouldn't feel particularly jarring or out of place because of how precise and tight the dodging and the attacking feels.

Every time when I came out of Witch Time, there was this moment of floatingness where it just felt jarring and not as tight as the rest of the controls.

Yeah, see, now, I didn't...

At this point in the game, I'm not really using Witch Time that much.

Is that going to be to my detriment later on?

Not necessarily.

You don't need to.

It's just that...

What happened to me late on the game, I was never deliberately attempting to use Witch Time because I didn't need it because I could attack enemies at the right time not to get hit, and generally had a combo going so that they were getting stun locked to a degree anyway, right?

But at a certain point, there were enough enemies that even when I wasn't deliberately activating Witch Time, when I was dodging as I had to in between combos or whatever, there was enough enemies that I would get attacked and Witch Time would be activated regardless.

One question for you regarding bosses.

Are there any epic boss moments in this game that spring to mind, and do any of them supersede or surpass the final boss in the game, or is the final boss a letdown?

The final boss, I think, is not a letdown, but it is certainly not, as far as the gameplay is concerned, a highlight of the game.

It is more an exercise in attrition than some of the bosses.

I think the best boss in the game is the first boss you fight that is a single level, simply because of how grandiose and epic it is.

It takes place, not so much in terms of gameplay, but in terms of how epic it is.

It takes place in the Colosseum.

In the Colosseum, you're against the...

This is obviously going to be full of spoilers.

You're against the three-headed dragon, which they've been teasing you with, over several levels where you're fighting it and then it runs away and flies off at a certain point, right?

And it does all the same attacks that it does when you're doing them as well as more.

And as you're fighting it, it goes through several stages where you are...

where it floods the area with lava, and then you have to reverse time so that the lava is removed, and you attack it on the ground and on pillars of the Colosseum.

And there are quick time events where you are jumping from debris to debris to get up close to it to perform a quick time attack that does a huge amount of damage.

And it's this great epic roller coaster specific events.

And in terms of the actual gameplay, as far as pure beat-em-up things you're doing, those moments are not as important as the other things.

So I think in that sense, it's not the best boss in the game.

But for where it comes in the game and how epic it looks, and in terms of the aesthetic, I think it is one of the best moments in the game for that reason.

I think there are...

The other boss that stands out is the one I mentioned earlier, which is also another boss where it's mainly focused on different stages of doing things.

But unlike that boss, because it's much later in the game, you have to be...

It's a lot harder, so you need to be playing well as far as the basics of the mechanics are concerned.

So that aspect of it is really enjoyable as well.

But once again, because of the design of the boss, where you see the silliness of it, but that manages to be imposing and frightening because it looks silly because it has these ridiculous weapons on it that you're going to have to deal with, right?

I think it's another highlight.

And beyond that, the humanoid bosses you come into contact with are, of course, as they are in any beat-em-up, a highlight of the game because it's a pure illustration of the mechanics, because it's based entirely on your dodging and your use of the combos, right?

And I think the bosses are consistently very good.

And the bosses that are more based around the scene of the thing, like the first boss, but not the first boss, let's say the other boss I mentioned with the design that is silly, yet simultaneously scary, they reuse as many bosses later on and they do that extremely well.

And the way they pace the battles, especially later on, is brilliant, where you're constantly coming up against old bosses.

And sometimes as old bosses will be doing slightly different things, and you might be fighting them in a slightly different context, so it completely changes the battle.

And they do this to escalate the combat in a way where it doesn't become too hard, and there's always an error of familiarity to it, but it always manages to escalate successfully, introduce new things, and become more and more epic.

Not necessarily aesthetically, but in terms of what you need to do, in terms of the mechanics.

Beating the character.

Towards that line, one of the things in God of War, and in Shadow, which was basically the whole idea of Shadow of the Colossus, was that you're climbing this enemy that you have to defeat.

So in the later God of War games, there's a whole level where you're climbing up this character that you're killing as you go.

Do they have any of those moments later on in Bayonetta?

I don't think there are any bosses where you're on the boss the entire time climbing them, but there are quite a few bosses where at certain stages, one of the things, as I said, some bosses have weak points that you get to on a certain stage.

At a certain stage, the weak point will usually be on the boss that you can't get to until you've done certain things that enables you to climb on to them.

So it's more of a, okay, I get you.

Yep.

All right.

Yep.

And they also introduce certain gimmicks as well in some of the bosses, which usually work very well.

For instance, one of the bosses, it starts off where you are on a...

The boss is at sea, so you're on a surfboard, and you move really quickly, and you're basically against this spider sort of boss with multiple legs, and you're surfboarding around from leg to leg, attacking the legs in the first stage.

And it is...

Once again, it uses the basic mechanics you're using the entire game, but it applies a tiny little gimmick that just makes it feel different enough that it is a great diversion and makes the boss feel different, where otherwise it might have just felt like you were going through the first stage and it was a basic thing where you were just dodging, pretty easy to dodge attacks and attacking legs, but the movement is changed, it then becomes this fun and fast moving thing.

Which recalls the boss level in the game we just talked about, Enslaved, where you were on that waveboard type thing, right?

Yup, and unlike Enslaved, and I greatly enjoyed that boss in Enslaved, but that boss in Enslaved was extremely awkward at times.

And that's the thing, one thing this does extremely well, is it has all these random gimmick style ideas, but they're implemented in a way where they are as tight and smooth as the mechanics are to begin with.

So it manages to feel different like it does in Enslaved, but not jarring and not awkward to begin with.

You start off, once again, it goes back to the incredibly intuitiveness of everything in Bayonetta, where it introduces a new thing, and it's immediately intuitive, and you can immediately float around on that thing, and it is different to normal movement, but you can immediately do it well, whereas in Enslaved, it took me a few tries to be able to move properly.

As with I, I hit that level, and while I appreciated it from a design perspective, it was like, okay, what?

Yeah.

Not all of its ideas, though, when you move away from the combat are good, and I'm not sure if you will be up to any of these moments.

You may have got up to some of the instant kill QTEs.

Have you?

Yeah, yeah.

No, no, no, no, wait, wait, wait.

For the character, where you actually die.

Yeah, you die.

Well, at certain points, there are instant kill QTEs.

And I can't imagine if you were playing this game to get the first time through, at least, to get a good score, it would be fucking annoying.

Because there's a huge chance you're going to get killed at least by the first instant kill QTE.

That means you're going to have to restart the level.

And there are these awful motorbike levels.

And for the vast majority of time, you're literally just accelerating and holding down attack.

Because it doesn't really matter if you drive into a wall.

From what I can remember, you don't take any damage.

The only time you need to steer is to avoid angelic cars or lasers a la the spy film cliché where there are these lasers projected and you need to not get hit by them, right?

Yeah, well, I imagine so.

Apparently you've never seen a spy film.

No.

Or played a video game.

No, no, I've never played a video game or seen a spy film.

You're just dodging laser attacks.

That's simple enough.

Well, I've done that in, like, they have that in kids' games these days.

Exactly.

And that is all there is to the challenge of it, but the mechanics are so awful that you're basically not even necessarily steering out of the way of the lasers, but simply dodging at the right time to activate which time to get past them.

And then on and off, you have to press, jump at the right time to avoid the freeway collapsing and random shit like that where you can actually get killed if you're not fast enough and take damage.

And I think some of those too are actually instant kills.

Oh, shit.

There's nothing enjoyable to play in it, and if you're trying to get a good score, it's fucking annoying.

And the first time you go through, it's just frustrating.

So if you're going through it to get a good score, there's a good chance you're then going to have to play through the entire thing again as well on top of that.

Were you concerned with getting a good score?

Well, when I figured out how to play, there was a very brief moment where I was.

Because it's part of the fun.

But after I discovered that this sort of bullshit continued, from that point on, I did not give a shit whatsoever.

And another interesting thing is, as far as the scores are concerned, is that you get punished for using items, right?

Your score gets a penalty if you use a healing item.

Oh, okay.

Yep.

Which resulted in me, and this was one reason that resulted in me getting much worse scores than I otherwise would have, because I assume the penalty for using an item is nevertheless less than dying, right?

I would hope.

One presumes.

But because there was a penalty in my mind, I was regardless just thinking, I'm just going to do whatever I can to never use an item.

And that was how I played the game.

So I ended up dying significantly more than I otherwise would have, and completely ignoring the crafting minigame.

I have been ignoring it because I don't want to acknowledge it.

I haven't been using any items or crafting or anything like it, because this is not that sort of game.

This is a beat-em-up.

I should just be able to walk through this and have fun with it, and get punished for not pulling off combos, but not get punished or given an advantage because I wanted to do some weird ass RPG thing.

And once again, sorry, the minigame thing is concerned, the crafting, you can in fact completely ignore that.

All right, good, because I intend to.

As with the cutscenes.

Good.

Even worse than the motorbike section, I would say, simply because it lasts so long.

And this, I believe, caused the VJ Press' poster, Bugs on Glass, to quit the game, was the incredibly awful space shooter level, where you are fairly Star Fox, and you are going through a long, and it lasts for like five minutes, or something like that at least, where you have to avoid enemies that are flying at you.

You're in a, I think you're on a rocket, is the exact thing you're doing, something like that.

This is legendary, yeah.

Yep.

Yep, and you are dodging lots of random shit, and shooting enemies, and the mechanics feel fucking awful.

The flying is about as good as the camera is, and it's not enjoying, there's no real feedback in blowing up the enemies.

They don't explode nicely even, or anything like that, and once again, it's just a fucking bore, and it lasts for five minutes.

And if you're trying to get to the end of the thing, once again, you get damage as you're going along.

So you actually want to pay some attention to it, right?

I just googled, or binged, Star Fox level Bayonetta, and you're not kidding, that's what it looks like.

It says evade incoming enemies to head to the mountain.

And it's got...

That's Bayonetta 2.

It is, okay.

Well, it's got these reticules on there that look very primitive.

That's because that is an easter egg in Bayonetta 2.

Literally, you are in the Star Fox ship, with the Star Fox reticule.

So that would be why.

Is it...

Spoiler, but is it better in the...

I mean, is it necessary in the second game?

It's not necessary in the second game, but it is significantly improved in the second game.

Okay, but in the first game, is it a legitimate problem or...?

In the first game, it's not something that would cause me to quit, but it's something that is awful to play through.

It's not in any way enjoyable.

It's not challenging in any good way either.

It's more challenging in the bike section, but it adds absolutely nothing to it, and is genuinely unenjoyable because the mechanics feel so bad.

And there is...

Here's the thing, though, because the frustrating thing is, at the very end, they do the motorbike thing again, right?

But they do it in hilarious, over-the-top way, where, once again, spoilers, Bayonetta is in space and in trouble, and Bayonetta does need to be rescued at this time, but it's not a man that rescues her.

And her co-witch, John, who rides a motorbike, has to ride a rocket on her motorbike into space and jump from rocket to asteroid debris, or rather statue debris from a statue that has been propelled into space via rockets, right?

And it's hilarious, and because it is so stupid, and it's simple enough that it is then a humorous spectacle and adds something, right?

Mm-hmm.

Unlike the fucking first bike thing, or the By That War's style shooter section.

And it's such a simple thing, you have to think, they surely could have come up with something in a similar vein for those two other sections, right?

Yeah.

Or simply had that one.

That one would in fact have had more impact and been more humorous and unexpected, which fits the tone of the game, if that had been the only part of the game that did that sort of shit.

So those other two sections just are so incredibly bad, and they are genuinely bad.

It's not like they are mediocre or something that is just there, like the platforming.

The platforming is just there, right?

These are genuinely bad, except for the third and final one.

So, like, does this game, in terms of like an arc, in terms of your enjoyment of it, I mean, it sounds like it takes off with a rocket and then plateaus for a while and then just drops off completely, or?

No, not at all, because these things, once again, they last for only a few minutes.

So, they're momentary...

They stick out like sore thumbs, but they are simply sore thumbs.

Right?

And as I said, I already said, the pacing has a great sense of escalation over the entire game, where, as is the cliché in beams ups and a lot of shooters, action games in general, where they introduce a mini boss and then reintroduce it.

That's something that Sirius Sam does very well as well.

But better than is done generally, and what makes the escalation so much more enjoyable, and consistent in its trajectory towards the climax, which is slightly anticlimactic in a sense, but makes up for it with the after boss final sequences, due to the spectacle, with the way that once again, they introduce the mini bosses, they introduce them in either an environment where the fight is then completely different and more challenging, or they do something different, right?

So the overall pacing is exceptionally well done.

And even within the individual levels, once the game gets going, and this is one of the reasons the overall escalation works so well, is within the individual levels, they're not necessarily simply paced as an overall escalation, where the end of the level is necessarily the highest climax, right?

Exactly, yep, yep, absolutely.

They will throw in a really tough battle and then fold it up with something that cools down and so on and so forth.

So I think the pacing is absolutely exceptional, both within the individual levels and in terms of the overall arc as well.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

When you get to the end of a level, it's not like, oh, it's actually more of a surprise than anything else because the peak never necessarily comes at the end of the level.

And the brilliant thing about it is it sets up the next level often as a tease.

Like, for instance, when you get up to the end of the level, leading up to the first boss that is in a single level, you're thinking, this was incredibly anticlimactic.

Why didn't I get to fucking fight him, right?

And then it begins, and you discover that...

Because you're thinking at that stage with how it's been paced.

It's going to do the boss, and then it's going to continue after the boss ride.

And you think you want that to be this really epic climax.

And with the way the levels are paced, you're not expecting that.

And then when you do the level, it is exactly what you wanted it to be.

And because they teased you with it, it's then even more enjoyable because it's a prize as well.

And because they paced the levels in a more complex way than simply making them an escalation, as is the general overall art, it allows them to do these surprising things within the combat, within the individual fights as you go along and within the levels.

Which maintains your interest and keeps you just much more surprised as to what's going on, as opposed to probably 90% of other games where you, if you're an experienced gamer, you know what's going to happen next.

Yeah, and the thing is, it times the bike thing and the shooting thing, and generally the platforming, I think, was put in areas where it made sense to have some sort of plateau, right?

A lot of the time.

Agreed.

The problem is simply that in the case of the platforming, the plateau was uninteresting, which is forgivable because it's simply uninteresting.

And in the case of those two other levels where it's less forgiving, simply completely sucked.

But the pacing is exceptional.

All the things are generally put in the right places to completely retain your interest over the entire game.

I would have replaced the platforming elements.

I mean, because let's be frank, I mean, eight out of ten platforming games suck.

Yeah.

And it's the exception.

And so, like, okay, you have the driving and the shooting.

Well, you know, I mean, there's a pretty good chance.

Most driving, even the most average driving game is still interesting because it's a Twitch game.

They could have done something like more puzzle solving because the puzzles, I thought, worked really well.

Yeah, absolutely.

And even with their playing with the Sega, you know, history, there's plenty of things that you could have drawn into that to make it more interesting.

Hell, I would have preferred a trivia game over the platforming, you know?

Which, once again, could have worked given the general ridiculous time.

Absolutely, yeah.

So is that pretty much all you've got to say about Bayonetta 1?

I think that is indeed everything I have to say about Bayonetta 1.

Okay, because that's my sense of it, and it was a great review.

I appreciate it.

Thank you very much.

I am going to give a score prediction if you're prepared to give a score for the game.

I will indeed be scoring it.

Okay, I think that you're going to give this game a 6.5 or a 7 out of 10.

I am certainly not going to give it a 6.5 or a 7 out of 10.

Oh, or lower, so a 5.5 or a 6.

And you're getting even worse with your predictions.

Really?

Even worse, yes.

And I've got to say, to begin with, Gargan said to me on Steam, or might have been in fact a comment on Game Under, I'm not sure, which that the only valid score for Bayonetta were a 9 or a 10, right?

And the whole time playing this, I'm thinking, I have to give this an 8.5.

There is no question.

Once again, those two sections that are awful, they are awful, but they're only a few minutes in a 16-hour game, right?

I'm listening.

So the whole time I was thinking, I have to give this an 8.5, which I think would be a reasonable score for it.

But then I remembered that I gave Vanquish an 8.5 on this very podcast, right?

Which unfortunately means I have absolutely no choice but to give it a 9, because this is undoubtedly superior to Vanquish.

The mechanics, I would say, and we're going to do a comparison here, which I think is fair, because the two games, I think, work for the exact same reasons, where Vanquish once again did something really new in third-person shooters, at least in the way it instituted it.

It's not the right word, but used it, which was the dash, right?

But it was completely intuitive, and also the much more arcadey battle designs were really intuitive as well.

And it relied on this one single idea in Vanquish, which was the slime mechanic, and it used this in interesting ways.

But in Vanquish, it didn't manage to use it in consistently interesting ways, where after a certain point, until you got to the end where they started to ramp things up, the entire middle third of that game was effectively the same thing over and over again, right?

It was completely monotone, and it was still extremely enjoyable because of how good the mechanics were, and the battles were still generally well designed, but it wasn't exceptional.

It was merely very good, right?

Bayonetta has the same basic ideas, and because it is a beat-em-up, it has a little more room to move with them, because the mechanics in a beat-em-up are more complicated than the mechanics in a shooter.

But even so, it never strays from the basis of its mechanics.

And unlike Vanquish, over what is in fact almost twice the length of Vanquish, it manages to have those individual mechanics be used consistently in interesting ways, because of the incredible variety of the way it uses its enemies.

They're introducing new enemies up to at least until the very final third, and the bosses manage to generally be vastly different from one another, once again up until pretty much the final third.

And when they are similar, they manage to introduce a certain gimmick that changes how a familiar thing or a boss you've faced before plays.

So it once again feels new and interesting and engaging.

I think with all those things, if someone was to give The Game a 9, I would have absolutely no problem with that either.

And if I gave Vanquish an 8.5, there's no question that this deserves a 9.

Really?

Absolutely.

So you're going to take Kamiya over Mikami?

In this instance I am.

At least you're not taking him over Nagoshi.

Because then I'd have to delete this entire recording.

Well, I'm not saying this is better than Resident Evil 4.

What about binary domain?

No, don't answer that.

Please, just let me have that.

Just don't answer that.

This is better than binary domain.

Yeah, well, now you're just being a fool.

Okay, well, you know, I'm going to reserve judgement on your score until such time as I finish the game.

On your score, I think you mean, right?

Yeah, oh, yeah.

Oh, you mean judging my score.

I see what you're saying.

Because I thought you were going to give it an 8.5, which for me is like, you know, well, let's not even talk about my numeric scoring.

You originally said a 6.5.

For this game?

Yeah, your original prediction several minutes ago was 6.5.

Right, yeah.

You just said 8.5.

I thought you were going to give it a 6.5 or 7 out of 10.

Really?

Yeah, I honestly thought, after listening to what you had to say about the game.

On the basis of what?

It's a beat-em-up, you know?

And you weren't too thrilled with the characterization.

You weren't too thrilled with the platforming elements.

I said the characterization was good.

Yeah, but you also said it doesn't really matter, you know?

And, you know, does it necessarily matter in binary domain?

No.

Or Vanquish?

No.

Or PNO3?

No.

It certainly doesn't matter in Vanquish.

I would say it matters more in binary domain.

Absolutely.

Yeah, absolutely.

It doesn't need to matter here.

It needs to matter in binary domain.

It doesn't need to matter here.

And if it needed to matter, it's good.

It's great.

I would take Bayonetta over Big Bo.

Okay, if this is a 9 out of 10...

This is now the Bash Barnum Domain Podcast, by the way.

If this is a 9 out of 10...

Yep.

I want you to tell me what aesthetic form could this game take on and you would still give it a 9 out of 10.

So if we transferred this into the traditional form of the beat-em-up and had it in 2D sprites, could this still be a 9 out of 10 game?

Well, I need to play more genuinely great beat-em-ups to answer that.

I'm just saying take this game, exactly as it's currently composited, with the same exact controls.

And now it's just in 2D.

Would it be just as good?

I would say it would be likely.

It could be better because you wouldn't have the camera problem, which is a minor thing that probably didn't really have any effect on my idea of the game overall.

But that's one thing that would be improved.

The movement, I would say, would be improved in 2D.

The active dodging and attacking would be, you could simply translate that one-to-one into 2D as well.

The battle design, that is an interesting point because it uses the way that the 3D battlefield is laid out with the way the enemies surround you to a great degree.

So I'm not sure how that would necessarily translate into 2D.

That might be...

I don't think you could literally translate that into 2D, so you would have to then change something about that.

I don't think you can actually put that into a 2D game.

Alright, that's fair enough.

If you were to use the control mechanics of this game in a 2D game, in a 2D beat-em-up, you could make an exceptional 2D beat-em-up.

Absolutely.

Yeah, I think so.

Yep.

Okay, very good.

And I have no problem with a beat-em-up being worthy of being a 9.

Oh, absolutely not.

I mean, I've played...

You know, I could probably look at Double Dragon 2 and give that an 8.5, you know.

You know, absolutely.

It is one of the underserved genres.

But one of the most directly, you know, delivering in terms of satisfaction, and it has a lot in that sense linked to first-person shooters, you know.

Yep.

Absolutely.

No, I mean, my first love, you know, at a certain extent after you get past the arcade games, the traditional one-screen arcade games, was the beat-em-up.

Yep.

So, you know, I'm all for that.

I mean, I beat Dragon 2 in the arcade with very little money, so, you know, I'm not here to besmirch that genre, certainly not.

Okay, well, with that, we'll probably explore Bayonetta 2 in the next show.

Yep.

Jeff, like a few seconds for a quick trademark banner?

Okay, here's the quick version.

I went to a GameStop to buy video games.

That would be the general reason.

It worked out okay, all right.

I got some video games, but there was a homeless guy in there.

I didn't immediately identify him as being homeless, but then after a while, I could tell he was completely homeless because he was carrying around, you know, all of his possessions in a single bag that otherwise he wouldn't be carrying around.

Yep.

And also he had no other purpose in life.

Now, the genius...

So you gave him the games you bought.

No, absolutely not.

No.

The genius of his design was that he was hanging out in this gaming store, and he dressed himself in the only clothes that he had as if he were Notch.

So he had the beard of Notch, he had the build of Notch, he had the height of Notch, he had the hat, the nasty hat and trench coat of Notch, and a nice dress shirt and all the rest of it, except he was homeless, and that was the only clothing he had.

So he was a homeless hipster.

Yeah, basically.

And he just hung out near the front counter, boring the clerk in between transactions.

And of course, when I go to a game shop, it's never a three-minute thing.

It's like a, you know.

But I've realized with my last trip to the game shop, which was not that one, I finally realized that there's nothing there for me.

Back in the old days, I used to go to a GameStop or whatever, a game, and easily be able to drop $120 and buy 10 games and walk out a satisfied man.

But that was in the PlayStation 2 Xbox era, where there were a lot more games.

And at this point, when I'm digging through the PlayStation 3...

A lot more good games as well.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And at this point, when I'm digging through the PlayStation 3 games, I've already got all the games from the PlayStation 3 era that I want to play.

And the games that are there that are cheap, I don't...

If I haven't already got them, I don't necessarily want them.

So, sadly, in terms of a form of retail therapy, the used game shop has dissipated for me.

On a...

Just to diverge in a different direction, that is actually perhaps the most bizarre thing about this generation is not the lack of games that are apparently coming out because there's a reasonable trickle of well-received games still being released, right?

If you take into account indie stuff, it's just that there hasn't been a huge amount of blockbusters...

No...

.

this generation.

But if you look at any store page on a...

Go to the PS4 page on any website selling PS4 games or Xbox One, the bizarre thing is the dearth of shovelware and mediocre games being released.

Whereas the in-store base is so much further advanced than it was on the previous consoles at this point in the generation, there's no shovelware.

And it's because I think the shovelware has been drawn away because it's not cheap to make games for these platforms.

And the cheap games that you can make for these platforms, i.e.

the quote indie titles or small team games, they're all available on PC.

So why would you...

Well, most aren't.

Well, which aren't?

To put you on the spot.

Is Axiom Verge on PC?

Coming soon.

So there's one, well played.

Yep, for now.

Yep, for now.

But it is coming to PC.

Yep.

And on PC, of course, one need only book along on Steam, but shovelware is still well and alive on PC.

When you can produce these games for free, there's still plenty of shovelware on mobile and PC.

Yeah.

It's just not hitting the main consoles, and the AAA stuff is all being delayed, and the AA stuff is no longer alive, and it's just like, eh.

So in terms of overall quality, this is currently the golden generation of consoles.

Yeah, I guess so.

Except for the early ages of the SNES and the Dreamcast, where with those two titles, two consoles, you had really high quality games early on.

But here we are two years in.

I must tell you, having been a launch PlayStation 4 purchaser, I have finally indulged and bought some PlayStation 4 games.

I'm shocked.

How long until you sell them all?

Well, I put four on eBay for 100 bucks.

And I got Far Cry 4, which I'll definitely play.

I just need some time to pass because I beat Far Cry 3 a couple of months ago.

So obviously I need some space there.

I got Drive Club, which I am the most interested in.

It's the most interesting PlayStation 4 game out there for me.

Just because I'm drawn to, I don't know, the middle.

And you finally got your graphics horror game you wanted as well.

Yeah, hopefully.

I just want to see what it's about.

I like driving games.

Have you played Drive of San Francisco yet?

No.

And then the other two games were LittleBigPlanet 3, Still Sealed, and infamous Second Son, Still Sealed.

And I'm thinking of selling those right back on eBay immediately.

I just want to get 20 bucks each for them, and then basically I would have got the other two games for do the math.

$60.

$30 a piece, which is well ahead of what you can get in a retail environment.

Yep.

Because I have no interest in LittleBigPlanet 3, and no interest in Infamous 3.

Were these part of a package deal?

Yeah, it was like I just basically put in PlayStation 4 bundle or whatever.

So yeah, it was a package deal, because as has been expressed on the prior shows, Infamous 2 turned me off of Infamous for the rest of my life.

Yeah.

And I've never been a fan of LittleBigPlanet because of Stephen Fry's involvement, though I'm in and that he is no part of the third game.

You are informed wrong.

Really?

I think so.

I have no problem with Stephen Fry.

I mean, at least he's not that guy from Top...

What's that show called?

Top Gear.

Top Gear.

Yeah, at least he's no him.

But, you know, he'll land on his feet.

So I'm going to finish out the podcast, if that's okay.

I have one.

I have one topic of trademark banter.

Yes, sir.

And let this be a lesson to any developer, well, like by the podcast, never reply to an email you receive from Phil Fogg, because you get the obituary treatment.

And if anyone is familiar with the podcast, they would know exactly what that means.

But I actually thought, you know, whoever it was, do you even remember his name?

Well, he was the creative director of the game.

Of course I remember his name.

Of course you do.

What was his name then?

His name is well known to one in line.

You know, everyone knows his name.

So to say it is, you know, he's like Gargamel, the guy from Lord of the Rings.

You don't want to say his name.

Or that guy.

Or Voldemort.

What?

Voldemort.

Gargamel.

We're calling Voldemort.

Voldemort, the director of Jazzpunk, in reply to your question, how did he play Foul Sun Rain?

Because you saw an influence on Jazzpunk, right?

Definitely.

I mean, it's got the retro connection to technology, certainly.

And you know, the setting, you're at a resort, you're solving crime, you know, on and on.

I had an epiphany in the time between this podcast and the last.

It took about three weeks for me to realize the obvious.

He replied to you, but no, he never even played it, right?

Now, what happens when anyone ever plagiarizes something and is accused of plagiarism?

I've never even heard of that.

No, I'm not.

That's a common thing in writing.

I haven't read it, no.

I'm not familiar.

Someone plagiarized something.

Yeah, I'm not familiar.

What?

I'm not familiar with that work and I've never heard of that.

Exactly.

I'm not a fan, actually.

I've never even read it.

No, never.

Never heard of it, never read it?

So, jazz punk is in fact not merely influenced by Flower Sun Rain, but plagiarized it, as objectively demonstrated in your interrogation.

So, I'd like to congratulate you on your fine piece of video game investigative journalism.

Investigative journalism, yes, thank you.

Maybe we can put that up at laserleaming.com and get more...

This should be the subjects on N4G.

Jazz punk plagiarizes Flower Sun Rain.

Except for the fact that I really enjoyed the game, and as I said, it's like my game of the generation, and I don't want to...

I also greatly enjoy jazz punk.

Yeah, and I don't want to disrespect the guy, you know, but it is a humorous thing that you brought up there.

You know, what else is humorous is my favorite kind of troll.

All right?

So, you know, I'm going to let you think about what your favorite kind of troll is, but unless you listen to every video game podcast, you would not be aware of this kind of troll.

And most podcasts have a section where the listeners can e-mail in a question.

And so, of course, my favorite kind is the troll that sends the same question to all the podcasts and gets read, including podcasts that appear on the same network as the other podcasts.

So it might be IGN, Xbox podcasts, but because they never listen to the PlayStation podcast or the UK podcast, they don't know that they're being trolled.

So I have a few questions for you.

What is your favorite Star Wars game?

X-Wing Alliance.

What?

X-Wing Alliance.

What is that?

It is a space sim.

For the?

For PC.

And it originally required a joystick.

You could not use a mouse and keyboard to play it.

And I think I, in fact, bought a joystick to play that game.

Oh.

No, no, no, no.

This was after I got this game.

I think that's the case.

I was confused because the computer after that no longer had the correct port for my joystick.

So I could no longer play.

It didn't have the serial port?

That little thing?

Yeah.

Whatever it was that has disappeared from PC.

Unfortunately.

You used to be able to plug your mouse into it, too.

Yeah.

It was a general peripheral port before USB.

Yep, exactly.

The serial port.

Everyone knows serial port.

So my favorite Star Wars game would be Episode I, Podracer.

That's another great one.

Which was funny for me because the announcer always said, Welcome, Podrace fan.

Which is welcome, Podrace fan?

But it's also the San Diego Padres are a baseball team.

So it sounded like you were saying, Welcome, Podrace fan.

And yeah.

Games you would want to launch the next hardware generation.

So let's just say that after PlayStation 5, Xbox One, two, Nintendo Wii U 2, or Wii U me, what would you want to launch each one of those consoles with?

What, you know, in terms of software?

Something made by Naughty Dog or Guerrilla Games.

And then for Nintendo?

A Mario game.

A proper platforming Mario game.

Along the Galaxy line.

What about for Xbox?

No idea.

Does it have to be exclusive?

I mean, what exclusives do they have?

Halo?

Yeah, they got Halo.

They used to have Gears.

They still have Gears, actually.

Forza?

Forza.

Sunset Overdrive 3, maybe.

Um, and finally, settings in games.

No, that's too deep.

That's one I actually want to talk to you about.

That should be a feature.

Yeah, I really actually wanted to talk to you about that.

That wasn't a part of this trolling.

But game you want a sequel of.

Let's say Psychonauts.

Any sort of game, and Psychonauts is just the first one that comes to mind, that ends with a stupid cliffhanger ending that is setting up the next game.

I would like to let you know that you can be added to the list of people who were trolled who answered that exact same answer.

Yep, I understand that would be common.

Yeah, Psychonauts 2 was a popular one.

The other one, of course, was Half-Life 3.

Well, fuck that.

I certainly don't want a sequel to Half-Life.

And who honestly wants a sequel to Half-Life?

Because even if you love Half-Life 1 and 2, think about how much joy you get from making Half-Life jokes and complaining on the internet.

I think...

At this stage, honestly, I would love Half-Life 3 because it would be the first chance I would have the opportunity of playing a Half-Life game and pointing out how shit it is when it launched.

So when you've got people who hate Half-Life, I'm going to say I would love Half-Life 3.

That's my choice now.

I'm changing it.

The Half-Life 3 answers were probably...

20% were, I just want the game to be released so people stop asking about it, a la Shenmue 3.

And the rest of them, I'd say about 10% were Half-Life 3D.

Steam is going to have a virtual reality goggle, and that's how they're going to release the game.

And then the rest was just Half-Life 3 is going to happen.

Oh my god, bring on Half-Life 3.

That's what they're going to do so that I can't play Half-Life 3.

Put it in a $700...

Make it a virtual reality game.

Let me tell you, if it's just released as a regular game for the PC, I will be buying both you and I a copy because that's going to be our show for four months.

Alright, well there you go.

We've been trolled.

Please visit our site at gameunder.net and go to laserleaming.com to read Tom Towers' latest editorial content.

And I think that pretty much closes out episode 62 of The Game Under Podcast.

It does indeed.

And by an editor, it's you next week.

As well as Euro...

By next week, I mean within the next several months.

Yeah, and also, you know, we want to give respects to fellow podcaster Richie Bonneau.

Boy hadn't been out long, which makes his...

I believe he died in a car crash.

Yeah, his loss is all the more tragic, particularly since, you know, the recent release of Furious 7.

But Richie Bonneau, poor one out, fellow podcaster.

And that ends Game Under.net's 62 exercise in podcasting.

Unless I missed something, that was a surprisingly positive obituary for Richie Bonneau, except for my comment.

Well, I probably confused our international audience by drawing you into Fast and Furious.

So I think it was highly disrespectful.

I don't think we'll be clipping that and sending it to his wife.

It works.

You went along with it, so that's okay.

He was an infamously bad driver.

That's what that is.

Well, if you didn't know...

Fuck, man.

Glad I know the dude's name and how to...

It's not like he's that dude, you know, the guy who drove race cars and died.

Or Walker.

No.

He drove a Ford.

Dick Johnson drove the other car.

He was a guy that rode cars.

He died in a car crash.

He was very famous.

Peter Perfect.

Peter...

The Guy.

Marlboro.

Nothing.

The Guy.

Tigger.

What's his name?

Win.

There was a guy that used to win the Bathurst.

It was a guy once.

It was a guy once.

Yeah, the Bathurst race.

And it was him and Dick Johnson, which is the guy's real name.

And it's Peter.

I know that.

Peter Guy was the guy that drove the competing manufacturer's car.

And most of the...

Peter Brock is the famous staff of Strife.

He's not dead.

He is dead.

He died in a car crash.

When?

Oh wait, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You're Australian, you should know this stuff.

Yes, no, you're right.

He died a long...

Who the fuck am I thinking all day?

He died like a...

I don't care who you're talking about.

I'm talking about Peter Brock, Peter Perfect.

Compete against Dick Johnson.

Anyway, he's dead.

The king of the mountain.

Yeah.

Who, Dick Johnson or this guy?

Peter Brock.

So respectfully, we, uh, obiturize Peter Brock.

And that ends...

He's famous for his comment of career in cricket.

Yes.

Unfortunately, not a podcaster.

But, uh, let's hope that he passes the key test at the pearly gates.

And that ends episode 22 of Game Under Podcast.