Featured Image

First of all, we’d like to thank the amazing yurricanes for working with us to create the featured image for this episode. I think you’ll agree that it’s an amazing piece of art, and you should definitely check out their work

Players

Squidge

Jay

G

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Content Warning

During the intro skit, Squidge uses the phrase:

Squidge's Avatar Squidge:

sod it

This isn’t so much of a swear outside of British English speaking territories, but could cause offence.

At 09:16, Squidge refers to:

Squidge's Avatar Squidge:

a bit of the Candy Flaps game

which, by itself isn’t offensive, but it could be taken as a euphemism.

At 36:16, G drops this one on us:

G's Avatar G:

I haven’t had a bowel movement in privacy

Please listen responsibly.

Show Notes

We are back for another episode, and we’ve brought G

aka #dontCallMeAudrey

with us. It’s been a while since he was last on the show, with his last appearance being all the way back in December 2019

for the Waffle Christmas two part extravaganza

But he’s also the guest who has appeared on the show the most

at the time of writing these show notes, which is the beginning of September 2020

having been on 13 episodes (including this one). I know that I said 10 in the episode, that’s because I can’t count… apparently.

We recorded this episode back in April, when my home office was still in a state of disrepair. By the time that August had rolled around it was fixed and re-decorated, but here’s a before and after shot for you:

From Jay’s twitter account (click for source)

Hopefully you can see why I referred to it as a dungeon.

Squidge’s Recent Games

The conversation about Borderlands 3 sets Squidge and G off on a wonderfully detailed discussion on the weapons in the Borderlands series, and how some people will only ever use weapons from specific manufacturers

brand loyalty within a game, folks

Squidge’s list of recent games is quite short because we’d recorded the first two episodes in our five episode discussion on th Final Fantasy VII Remake the day before, so check that episode

here’s a link to part one

for a fuller list of he recent games.

we record these episodes way in advance, folks. Like, this one was recorded on April 25th, 2020

We also talked about how G was late to the bandwagon with Borderlands 3 because of the whole EA Epic store exclusivity nonsense. To be fair, I still haven’t played it yet - but that’s because I run a Linux based computer which, at the time, only had a 128GB M.2 hard drive.

G’s Recent Games

Shockingly - at the time we recorded - G hadn’t been playing Destiny 2. But that was because of:

G's Avatar G:

all of the f*#$ing hackers

and this is something we deep dive into, with G’s help. It seems like this is a real problem that Bungie are facing, due to players ruining it for everyone else.

G mentions "white tier", by this he means colour coded RPG items tiers

  • Batman: Arkham Knight

A gamer confession came through during G telling us about revisiting Batman: Arkham Knight, in that he’d forgotten to use any of his upgrade points. Which reminded me of when Unaffiliated JZ had told us about how, when he first played the original Final Fantasy

the one on the NES

he’d almost made it all the way through the game without ever buying new weapons or armour for his characters

here’s a link to that episode

  • Borderlands 3

I’m seeing a pattern emerging here…

Jay’s Recent Games

  • Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel

There’s definitely a pattern to this episode, folks.

My mentioning the Pre-Sequel brought out a conversation about Handsome Jack and just how amazing he is as a character - top tier bad guy, for sure. And, of course, we talked about Butt Stallion

G's Avatar G:

Butt Stallion says hello!

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel Chat

Because both G and Squidge have completed all of the Borderlands games and that I’d recently bought The Pre-Sequel, we decided to have an impromptu chat about it. We talked about Nisha and her ridiculously fun special skill “Showdown”, Pickle and his super annoying accent, the Boganella aka “the sweary gun”, and some of the stupid guns in the game.

Also, Squidge gives me a short, sharp education on how to tell whether a Borderlands (and other RPG) weapon is actually any good.

Hidden Gems

The idea of this segment of the show was to talk about the games that we think are hidden gems - the games that we think folks have missed out on, for one reason or another. They can be for any format, from any generation of video games

anything from this list is fair game… as it were

But you do have to explain why you think it’s a hidden gem.

Jay's Avatar Jay:

There are millions of games out there. And as a real example, I’ve pulled up wikipedia’s list of ZX Spectrum games. The ZX Spectrum has a confirmed list of 1,728 video games. And that’s just the confirmed games… but there’s still games being discovered now that weren’t that well advertised games.

What I’m getting at is that this is back when video gaming wasn’t as huge of an industry as it is now, and because of that… there are so many games that it’s easy to miss one which should be a classic when it’s mixed in (with everything else)

0 A.D

Squidge decided to go first with 0 A.D - the free to play Real Time Strategy game which is completely open source multi-platform

yes, you read that correctly

game from Wildfire Games. We’ve talked about 0 A.D in the past more than a few time, and have interviewed one of the folks behind the game in episode 77: 0 A.D. with Stan Dolcini.

A screenshot of 0 A.D. showing the Persian civilisation
Seriously though, how pretty is this game (click to enlarge)

ICEY

G offered up a game that neither Squidge nor I had every heard of, and the story of how he came to learn about it is just as amazing.

Shortly after recording this episode - and when it was allowed, due to my Switch game purchasing rules

which you can read about here

I bought this game. And I definitely did not regret it. I can’t really say much about the game without spoiling it, and I certainly haven’t found all of the story paths

which should tell you quite a lot about the game, actually

but I’m hoping that I can get it finished sometime soon.

Don’t let the trailer (above) fool you, it’s an incredibly deep game and much more than just a button bashing Metroidvania type of affair.

Aliens vs Predator

Of course I was going to talk about AvP. We’re not talking the PC game from the early 2000s or even the SNES beat-em-up. We’re talking the Atari Jaguar’s killer app: Alien vs Predator.

It is one of THE best 2.5D

2.5D is also known as pseudo-3D

FPS games ever made. It’s right up there with the original Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, and Duke Nukem. Back in 2018, I wrote about how much I love this game

and you can read that article here

Everything I said then still applies.

Even though you had to play it using one of these controllers:

A photograph of a controller for Atari’s Jaguar games console
Seriously who designed this thing? (click to enlarge)

My bringing this game up brought on a huge wave of nostalgia for all three of us. Squidge and I played this game way before we legally should have done (it’s an incredibly violent game, and Squidge and I were very very young). Whereas G was a little older when he played it for the first time:

G's Avatar G:

In an era before 7.1 surround sound, there was nothing on Earth that was scarier than that f*#$ing Predator

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.

All copyrighted material contained within this podcast is the property of their respective rights owners. Please see the above list for copyright details pertaining to music used.

Games Covered

We mentioned 23 games in this podcast. In the following order, those games where: