Players

Squidge

Jay

Morgan

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Content Warning

There were a few swears in this episode, but we’ve bleeped them all

bleeps are funnier than swears anyway

We’ve thrown the trigger warning claxon in at the following timestamps, as the subjects we talk about could be a upsetting to some listeners:

  • At 27:20, Morgan mentions a certain something that happened during the Second World War
  • At 41:16, Morgan mentions self-gratification, but only in passing

Check your podcatcher for chapter markings which will help you to skip these sections, should you wish.

Please listen responsibly

Show Notes

Even though Squidge is very special

and I’m sure you’ll all agree that he is, indeed very special

our guest for this episode was Morgan Ritson. Morgan describes himself as:

missingNo's Avatar Morgan:

I am the world’s greatest lover… I am a writer, student, voice actor; a lot of creative things that don’t make money.

When introducing himself, we have a conversation about how we should always be positive around each other. We use the example of Morgan being told that his ability to write things down wasn’t great, and how one of my professors at university has dyslexia and dyspraxia, but both are great people who are achieving great things.

please don’t tell someone that they can’t do something because they are x, have y, or don’t have z. Just be positive to them, and support them if you can

One thing to note: because of the gap in our schedule

as explained in The Lookback: July 2021

we had recorded this episode quite some time ago:

We recorded out interview with Moran on June 18th, 2021.
We really do record these shows way in advance (click to enlarge)

But after that, we wasted almost no time getting to one of Jay’s favourite topics:

Recent Games

The Recent Games segment will not be new to listeners, but in case you’re new to the show here’s how it goes: we go round the table and discuss one or more games that we’ve been playing recently, and whether we think it’s worth the listeners checking it out. We continue to do this until we’ve run out of games to discuss.

Jay's Avatar Jay:

I love to hear what everyone’s been playing, and whether they would recommend it.

And, of course, we shared ours too. Would we recommend the games that we’ve all been playing? Or course!

Morgan’s Recent Games

As is tradition, we asked our guest to go first.

  • Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

Morgan tells us that he is drawn to games which are greater than just person-vs-person, and the first game on his list is one such game. Both Sekiro and Bloodborne as spiritual off-shoots of Dark Souls, with one (Bloodborne) being more about taking the next step as humans, whereas the other (Sekiro) being more grounded in traditional Japanese mythology and being related to fighting for what you care about.

And this leads us into ta discussion on how there aren’t many games

or books and films, for that matter

which explore the stories of the foot-shoulder who has never had to fight before, and how this isn’t THEIR war but that of someone else’s.

And the discussion on interesting characters leads us to a conversation about how villains have the potential to be much more interesting than heroes. The examples we used are Xande (from Final Fantasy III) and Hans Gruber

these two villains are arguably more interesting than the heroes who oppose them

come at me, bro

This lead us into a discussion with Morgan about how he’s looking to pen an article for Lost in Cult’s Lock-On series of journals

we’ve interviewed Jon and Jason from LiC about Lock-On previously

here’s a link to that

  • Final Fantasy XIV

We talk about the Final Fantasy games a lot

and not just when Lulu is on the show

missingNo's Avatar Morgan:

It has the best writing of the Final Fantasy games, in that the world itself feels very real. And the characters feel very real

But that one of the down-sides of playing RPGs is that the biggest resource they take up is time, and how that’s one of the few resources that we can’t renew. And he’s not wrong.

Talk of Final Fantasy brings up hacking, which brings up Red Mages

trust us, there’s a link

which brings us to Maurice Leblanc and the video game Thief.

missingNo's Avatar Morgan:

As far as Final Fantasy XIV goes, I would say yes. It’s an MMO, so there’s a monthly prescription… yeah, you take it in pill form.

Jay brings up a great point when talking about Final Fantasy only RPGs - of which there have really only been two. He asked Morgan whether he’d seen “the TV show”, referring to Final Fantasy XIV: Dad of Light, but Morgan thought he was referring to Brotherhood: Final Fantasy XV

at least it wasn’t Final Fantasy Unlimited

which does have a banger of an intro song

Seriously though, Dad of Light was really good actually. If you have the chance to watch it, please do.

We then take Morgan to…

The Thunder Plain Games

For those who are new to the pod, we have a section called “Thunder Plain Games” which might be vaguely reminiscent of a certain programme on BBC Radio 4

but for copyright reasons, it is completely different

Imagine that you are in Final Fantasy X, and the Thunder Plains is a place that you get banished to. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to open a portal to the Thunder Plains and, very nicely and politely, boot you through it. You will get help, maybe it will be tomorrow, maybe it will be in a week, maybe it will be in an hour.

To stop you from getting bored, we’ve said that we’ll keep the portal open and we’ll throw through up to three video games and everything you need to play them - including an Internet connection. The only rules are that you can’t ask for help, because help is on the way, and you can’t tell anyone that you’re in the Thunder Plains.

So our question is: were we to do throw, boot, or yeet you through the portal, which games are we throwing through with you?

Morgan’s Choices

  • Rocket League

Morgan has a love of cars, racing, football

or "soccer" as some folks know it

and physics; so Rocket League seems like an obvious choice.

  • Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
  • Persona 5 Royal

As the need for something which could sustain Morgan through the potentially longer sessions, he picked Persona 5 Royal. And to be fair, it’s a wonderful J-RPG with a killer soundtrack. It’s just a shame that none of the Persona games are available on the Switch

Yeah! SEGA! Get you’re act together

Get Control of Yourself

This is a segment that we like to do every so often, which is based on a tweet from SinceSpacies - who is an absolutely amazing person, by the way. Seriously, go follow him on Twitter

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

The idea here is that we want to know which is the best and which is the worst controller of all time.

But before we could get Morgan to answer, he turned it round and asked us.

Our Answers

For Squidge, the worst controller is the mobile phone:

Squidge's Avatar Squidge:

To me, a mobile phone is designed to be an emergency contact device.

Morgan’s worst controller is the Nintendo 64 controller

missingNo's Avatar Morgan:

It’s awkward. It’s dangerous. You could use that thing as a f%cking trident, if you needed to.

whereas his best controller is the Nintendo Switch.

The discussion of the Switch, Wii, and Wii-U reminded Morgan of the wonderful Wii commercials like these ones:

missingNo's Avatar Morgan:

[the ads] feel like a relic from a bygone era; like some ancient civilisation left this here for us to find.

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 20 games in this podcast. In the following order, those games where: