Comfy Games with CJ

Players

Squidge

Jay

CJ

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Show Notes

Squidge

From active timer battling to zombie slaying, Waffling Taylors covers video games beyond.

In this episode, we are joined by CJ from the Mystery Stone and PhiloSofa Talk podcasts to talk about comfy games. We chat about all manner of comfy games, including everything from frankly insane gameplay challenges no Fill Yoshi and smack talking Gam-gams.

So, without further ado, sit back, grab some snacks, and get ready for this episode entitled "Comfy Games with CJ, Pajama Paladins, and a comfy quest marathon."

Enjoy.

CJ made his return to the show in this episode - you may remember him from the episode we did on Borderlands. But before he could talk with CJ, Squidge wanted to bring attention to Jay’s glorious moustache:

And with the discussion on Jay’s moustache

sadly, the ‘stache had to be shaved off between recording this episode and it being released

CJ was asked to introduce himself, and he had this to say:

CJ

Hi, I’m CJ. I am of the Mystery Stone and PhiloSofa Talk podcast. Thanks for having me out here, guys.

I do have a question about the moustache, though. How long can you smell dinner after you’re done eating?

And an unrelated comment from Jay on his moustache from a few moments later:

Jay

It’s been 18 days of me growing it…

When I first started growing it, I was aiming for a Ted Lasso. And then one of my friends pointed out, it’s what happens if you order Freddie Mercury from Wish, right? Bargain bucket. Freddie Mercury.

And the topic of conversation quickly changed to CJ’s podcasts:

CJ

So Mystery Stone is all about spirituality and the esoteric concepts and the higher truths and obtainment of the higher self. Looking inward to really understand the makings of the universe outside of the third dimension.

And PhiloSofa Talk is just a freeform conversation about modern philosophy. It’s a pretty new show. I’ll have the second episode uploaded in a couple of days. But we take classical concepts all the way back, Taoist times, pre-Tao Te Ching, all the way through Greek and up to modern times and apply those concepts to modern day problems and issues and inside thought. And basically, like, the idea is, like, we don’t want to do research, so we take what we already know about philosophy, and then we just interview people and just kind of see how people feel. So there’s, like, no wrong answers. And it’s nice. It’s like a way to express your opinions and get your thoughts out without having to worry about a debate.

A quick note on something Jay said about “just stream”: he meant Just Watch, which is a web service that indexes all of the shows and movies available across all of the main digital platforms and provides links to where you can LEGALLY watch pretty much anything that has ever been released.

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 game 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.

And this episode was no different.

CJ’s Recent Games

• Fortnite
• Minecraft
• Mario Kart Tour
• Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
• Hollow Knight

CJ wanted to quickly talk about mobile gaming, too; and this reminded Jay of Army of Darkness: Defense - a tower defence game based on Army of Darkness (aka the third Evil Dead movie). Sadly this game no longer runs on modern Android devices.

• Monster Hunter Now

Jay’s Recent Games

• Phantasy Star Online

Squidge’s Recent Games

• Borderlands 3
• Final Fantasy
• You Will Die Here Tonight

When Squidge mentioned Final Fantasy, Jay asked whether he was influenced by GamerChamp3000’s White Mage-only playthrough of the game. You can watch that playthrough here:

And don’t forget to sip a latte, while you watch

it’ll all make sense when you watch it - Jay

Comfy Games

Squidge described the idea behind this episode rather eloquently:

Squidge

The whole point of this episode, the theme is comfort games. Games you like to play when we’re just comfy and we’re vegging and we just want to shut out the outside world and just go get a load of snacks, sit there, blanket on, radiators on whatever it is, and just get nice and comfy. Lots of snacks.

So I’d like to ask what kind of games when we’re in that situation. So specifics of what games? But the first thing I need to ask, considering it’s the theme of this episode, is do we actually do comfort games? Do either of you do actually do games where you just shout the outside world and just get on with it?.

And Jay made a point of saying:

Jay

So if I’m understanding it correctly, then a comfort game would be similar to a comfort show.

So a comfort show is something that maybe, like you said, it’s that one TV show or that group of TV shows that you go back to on a regular basis. You’ve likely seen them all, you’ve likely completed the games, you’ve likely finished them 100 million, billion times, but you put the game on and it just feels comfy. It’s a great way to just sit and chill.

CJ’s Comfy Games

• Minecraft

Bringing up Minecraft allowed CJ to get really deep, too:

CJ

So when it comes to just trying to destress, I work a pretty stressful job fulltime, and I got a lot of stuff going on my life, various hobbies and stuff. So, like, I need, do need time to, like, just decompress destress and everything. And Minecraft really does that for me.

So if we look, we’re going to relate this to some stuff here real fast. There was a philosopher named Aristotle, and one of the things he’s most quoted for saying is, "to live well." It was like his most pertinent philosophy was just to live well. And when he said, "live well," it wasn’t like, "this is how you have to live," live well applied to the individual and how they perceived how they should live well. And decompressing and destressing is a big part of that. And for Minecraft, when you get in there, you have that real gentle ambience. It’s very basic looking. There’s a lot to look at, but it’s not an overwhelming thing with incredible amounts of detail where you’re really focusing and you’re just kind of wide looking at everything. It’s almost like panorama with your eyes and you can see everything and your brain is not working too hard to process the information it’s taking in and you’re going through. And it doesn’t matter how many different times you start that game, or what maps you start on, or the different swan locations, it’s always different.

And that’s almost like this old grumpy guy from, his name was Heraclitus, and he coined the term, or the saying, "you never step in the same river twice." And that’s something that you get with Minecraft. You never step in the same river twice, regardless of how many times you log in and play. So you always have something new and to explore different places to go, regions, different biomes and things. And you really can do something different every single time you’re in there. And there’s no real demands on the game. And if you even want to destress even more, you can take the monsters out of it. You can just play creative. You can basically turn it into a virtual Legos.

• Mario Kart

Jay’s Comfy Games

• Phantasy Star Online

Jay

It is, in my opinion, one of the best science-fiction JRPGs ever. And I’ve never played it online, only ever played it offline.

It’s kind of like I said, it’s like Dance Dance REvolution the RPG. Kind of because of the way it works. It’s an action RPG, so you have to press the buttons in time to do your attacks. And that’s one that I can sit. Ostensibly, there are four stages throughout the game, so there’s Forest, Cave, Mines and Ruins, and each one has two or three areas inside of it and then a boss at the end.

And the idea is you’re meant to play it with friends, but I never played it online, so I never played it with friends.

…

Because as you hinted at, Squidge, and I’m sure you’ve said in the past as well, CJ, it’s so important to have that one thing that disconnects you from everything that’s going on to allow you to just relax. Some people find that in exercise. Some people find that in reading. Some people find that in talking to friends. Some people find that in going to the pub or the bar or whatever

Squidge’s Cross Stitches

When talking about doing whatever you need to in order to relax, CJ learned that Squidge is an avid cross-stitcher. Here’s a VERY small selection of his work:

And to see more of Squidge’s cross stitching, you should checkout out the “i-made-a-thing” area of our Discord server.

• Croc: Legend of the Gobbos

And Jay describes it like this:

Jay

You play as a little baby crocodile and you run around and save these little birds. It’s not birds, but they may as well be. It’s brilliant, it’s lovely.

And actually it originally started out as. So it was made by the same folks who made Starfox for the SNES and they wanted to make a 3D action adventure platformer game starring Yoshi from the Super Mario games. And they presented it to Miyamoto and he said, no, we don’t want a 3D action adventure with Yoshi. We’re going to do one with Super Mario 64. With the Super Mario. Sorry. And make it for the N64. And so they had started working on it way before Super Mario 64 or even the N64 was a thing. And it’s unfortunate because it came out after Super Mario 64 and got compared to it a lot, which is a real shame.

But, yeah, it’s a hell of a fun game. And it’s like really cutesy and fun, silly music and stuff like that. It’s brilliant.

• Yoshi’s Crafted World

Jay

It was the first game I ever bought on my switch. And it is just so good from my perspective.

It’s all of the things that they put into all of the Yoshi specific games from the first Yoshi specific platformer game. And they’ve just perfected it because it’s crafted world. Right? So everything in the game is crafted. So Yoshi is made of wool. The backgrounds are made of recycled cardboard. And if you hit certain things with eggs, they flip around. So you can see some cardboard cut out of grass in the background. You hit it with an egg and it flips over or falls down to reveal that it’s made of cardboard. And you can actually read that it says recycled cardboard or whatever.

• Untitled Goose Game

Squidge

So the good thing about entitled Goose Game is not only is it co op, so there can be two of you, but you play as a goose, and you try and make your way into a small village.

You go through certain bits and you get, like, a list of stuff to do. Your aim at the very end is to steal a bell from a diorama of the town and take it all the way back to the start. And when you do it one time, you get a different list of objectives. So you can just keep going and going and going. But the good thing about untitled Goose game is you play as a goose.

And the whole point of it is you’re a d*ck. You’re an absolute d*ck to everyone that you meet. That’s the premise of the game. You’re a goose, you’re a d*ck. You can honk, you can flap your wings and you can freak people out.

It’s amazing.

Squidge’s Comfy Games

• Resident Evil 2
• Borderlands 2
• Borderlands 3

Squidge

I love the humour, I love the visual style. It’s easy to pick up and go.

The first [Borderlands is] kind of, it was finding its feet, so you got to dedicate a bit of time to get used to it. The second one’s pretty much pick up and go. A lot of humour in it, a lot of comedy. It’s not too difficult. It’s difficult at stages, but if you played it a lot, you know what you’re doing.

• Final Fantasy VIII

External Links of Interest

• Join our Discord server and be part of future episodes
• Our Facebook page
• Us on Twitter
• Support us on Ko-Fi
• Mystery Stone
• Just Watch (what Jay called “Just Stream”)
• Lutris
• VG Myths - Can You Beat Final Fantasy With A White Mage?
• Nuzlocke
• Heraclitus
• Microsoft Excel World Championship
• Jay’s Runaway game
• Borderlands With CJ

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 Massive Scratch - Eight Bit/Chiptune
• Spoiler Break music is Spectrum (Subdiffusion Mix) by Foniqz (BandCamp)
• Pallet Cleanser music is Breath Deep Breath Clear (Wu Chi) by Siobhan Dakay
• Croc - Legend of the Gobbos all sounds
• Dial Up Internet - Sound Effect (HD)
• Elevator sound effect no copyright
• FANTASTIC - Frank west sound effect
• Grandpa Simpson Onion Story
• Batman Opening and Closing Theme 1966 - 1968 With Snippets
• Outro Music is Massive Scratch - Eight Bit/Chiptune