Adam Jensen's Gadget

Featured Image

Players

Squidge

Jay

Chief

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Content Warning

At 55:57, Squidge says:

Who doesn’t like trying to initiate sex, with an oppposite member of the species, on the back of a unicorn.

Please listen responsibly.

Show Notes

We

Squidge, Chief, and myself

start off our conversation based on a prompt from Unaffiliated JZ over on Twitter:

Due to the recent changes at Twitter, we are unable to embed tweets at this time. We apologise for the inconvenience.

but I decided to change it up slightly by asking:

Jay:

What is the best gadget in video games? … What, in your opinion, is the greatest attachment that you get in a video game, which would be cool to have in another video game?

Squidge’s first suggestion is “dubstep mode” from Borderlands 2:

Squidge:

You turned it on, and it did absolutely nothing

Squidge then tells us why he’d love to see the Hookshot from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - for barbaric, yet realistic reasons. Chief mentions some spinny hand thing in one of the Deus Ex games, but I haven’t got a clue what he means; Squidge seem to, though. Chief then decides that Adam Jensen is enough of a gadget in himself, to be the best gadget

almost like a Deus Ex Machina, you could say

And when it’s my time to answer, I turn the question back on the fellas:

Jay:

What’s classed as a gadget, and what’s classed as a trinket?

I eventually give an answer in the form of the Teddy Bear from Shadow Man:

This is the device that you use to warp between the areas of the game, and belonged to the main character’s dead brother. And we also discover that perhaps the alphabet is not one of Squidge’s strong points.

Top Gadgets

• Squidge: Wub Wub Mode
• Chief: Adam Jensen
• Jay: The teddy bear from Shadow Man

Then I hit the guys with a completely different question:

Jay:

What happened in the last 10 years, in video games, that really excited you?

Chief says that the jump between the PS2 and PS3 was so great, and the jump from PS3 to PS4 so small, that he held off buying one for a long time. That’s something I can empathise with; I mean, look at the launch titles for the PS4:

• Angry Birds
• Battlefield 4
• Fifa 14
• Madden
• NBA 2K14
• Need For Speed: Rivals

Whilst all good games in their own right, there wasn’t anything in that line up which couldn’t have been released on the PS3

other than the fact that a new console had just been released, that is

Whereas Squidge chooses to pick two things: the first being a series of games, and the second being Games Done Quick.

Squidge:

It’s amazing what you can do when you get a bunch of speed runners, running games live for a week constant, while raising a metric f*$# tonne of money for charity

We all agree that the work that the GDQ folks do is amazing. If you’ve never checked them out before, it’ll be worth catching the next event that they put on. In a similar vein, I’d also recommend checking out Desert Bus For Hope from the folks behind Loading Ready Run.

Mine was that developers - such as myself - are constantly standing on the shoulders of giants. If I was working on the Mega Drive game

Due to the recent changes at Twitter, we are unable to embed tweets at this time. We apologise for the inconvenience.

back in the early 90s, I would need:

• very sepcific hardware
• very specific software
• to read through the equivalent of these

Due to the recent changes at Twitter, we are unable to embed tweets at this time. We apologise for the inconvenience.

but for the Sega hardware, obviously

and would likely have to have Sega’s technical support line on speed dial.

But because I’m working on it in 2020, there are whole communities that I can turn to for help.

Jay:

Think about the amount of effort that has gone into getting us from Super Mario Bros. (1986) to Super Mario Odyssey (2019)

Top Previous Decade Stuff

• Chief: The Witcher 3
• Squidge
  • Diablo (series)
  • Games Done Quick
• Jay: Technological progression

I then start a discussion on the games which have only made an impact becasue of people playing them on streaming services like Twitch. Games like FNAF

Five Nights at Freddies

Unfortunately this turns into me bursting the bubble on YouTubers like Markiplyer and Jack-Septic-Eye, and how these folks record gameplay footage ahead of time and hire writers to come up with the gags. Live streaming isn’t easy. Heck I did it a few years back with writing code, it’s definitely not easy to manage everything which is why it’s usually multiple people doing it.

Chief then shows that he doesn’t understand podcasting when he says:

Chief:

Nice people listen to podcasts

leave us a rating and a review in your podcatcher of choice! 😉

But that leads us unto a discussion on player supplied reviews for games on Steam, with Chief reminding us of a particularly “interesting” review for Subnautica. I won’t recreate the review here, so it’s up to you to listen to it.

Moving swiftly on, I mention the one time that I’ve written a “review” for the site, when I wrote about Rygar, back in 2017

here’s a link to that 😉

which leads us into a discussion of how all reviews are subjective, and that explaining your review process is hard to do, and sometimes almost impossible. Squidge then tells us about a time when he was looking into getting a new Guitar Hero guitar controller on Amazon - I’ll leave the story to Squidge, but it’s a good one.

On the topic of reviews, I drop the “bomb” of:

Jay:

… people forget that they don’t HAVE to buy something

edgey or what!

Chief then links this to talk about Inspector Spacetime - the show within a show on Community - and Game of Thrones

which seems to be his TV show of choice these days

Squidge:

You’re saying that you can criticise something that you like. Which, quick spoiler, I wrote a blog post about

Chief and I then come up with a fantastic idea for a new YouTube series called “Curb Your Waistline” styled after the amazing Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Chief:

And we can add the Markiplier factor to it, and ham it up, and pretend that we’re more annoyed than we actually are

We come into the final part of the episode with shots being fired at our friends of at Arcade Attack

we love you guys, really!

when we talk about older games that we would love to see re-released on a newer console. These could potentially be exclusives for a console we never had, or just games we’d love to see make a return.

Jay:

Bad example, but Aladdin on the Mega Drive is a completely different to Aladdin on the SNES … Are there any games which came out on a specific console that you didn’t have at the time?

Chief agrees that Gears would have been fun to play on the PS3, but really misses playing U.N. Squadron on the SNES; whereas Squidge’s title of choice is Burning Rangers. I link our discussion to the series of posts that I’ve started all about Mini Consoles

here’s a link to those

and whether they are worth buying and hacking, or just building yourself. And I talk about how the SNES wasn’t designed to be stored under the TV, unlike other consoles, which was why it had comically short controller cables.

External Links of Interest

• Support us on Ko-Fi
• Our Facebook page
• Us on Twitter
• Borderlands 2 Extra Wubs mode does absolutely nothing
• Games Done Quick
• Desert Bus For Hope
• Loading Ready Run
• Inspector Spacetime
• Arcade Attack

Music

Links to the music used in the podcast can be found below. Definitely check them out, because they're amazing tracks by awesome musicians.

• Intro music is Behind the Lines by Ian Sutherland
• Spoiler Break music is Spectrum (Subdiffusion Mix) by Foniqz (BandCamp)
• Pallet Cleanser music is Breath Deep Breath Clear (Wu Chi) by Siobhan Dakay
• Outro Music is I N e e d Y o u 私の側て by G.H (removed from BandCamp)