Controllers Down: What Defined Gaming in 2024 - Part One

Players

Squidge

Jay

Matt Bliss

Alyxa

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Content Warning

This episode contains spoilers and swears. But it also contains some seriously bonkers tangents and silliness. You have been politely informed. There are also topics which might not be suitable for the ears of the innocent. But nothing in this episode, or this podcast as a whole, is to be taken seriously.

Please listen responsibly.

Show Notes

It wouldn’t be a Waffling Taylors episode without an intro from Squidge, and he didn’t disappoint with this one:

Squidge

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

Greetings and welcome to a special series of episodes of the Waffling Taylors, where we chat about our year in gaming. I took some time with a good friend of the show, Ike, to come up with a list of questions that I could ask our guests. It is Jay

Matt Bliss

Matthew Bliss

Alyxa

Kept you waiting, huh? Oh, hi everyone, my name is Alyxa

Squidge

To find out all about their year in gaming this year, 2024. We cover everything from entire new replays to save love interests to questionable unlocks.

So without further ado, sit back, grab some snacks and get ready for the first part of this episode entitled "Controllers Down: What Defined Gaming in 2024"

Take it away guys!

Before the episode could begin, Squidge wanted to give the guests a chance to talk about themselves:

Alyxa

Hi everyone, my name is Alyxa. I am a VTuber, a human with fox ears. And I’ve been in the Waffling Taylors podcasts before, like Sonic 2.

And also been participating in Waffling Taylor’s Lite, speaking mostly about Metal Gear games, Metal Gear Solid more specifically, and going on a lot of tangents.

Matt Bliss

I am Matthew Bliss. You may remember me from such popular phrases as, "Wow! That’s a really weird game about odd anime girls that keep repeating and dying," and also "Powerwash Simulator for Game of the Year."

Deliberately trying to avoid the things that are incredibly inappropriate.

Top Three Games of The Year

The first thing that Squidge wanted to know about was what were the top three games that each person had played in 2024:

Squidge

So I started off simple. I asked, what are your top three games of this year?

They didn’t have to be games that were released in 2024, just games that they had played in 2024. Jay went first:

Jay

Okay, so long-time listeners will know that I don’t get a great deal of the time, which is why I tend to play more retro or older titles, less new titles, I guess.

Because I just cannot deal with sitting and waiting for a 500,000 terabyte download just to be able to give me a slightly better look on one of the NPCs that’s standing off in the distance that I’m never going to actually see ever, because I only have like a couple of 36 to 42-inch monitors. I’m literally never going to see them. It’s kind of no point.

Anyway, so I like to play slightly older games. So the top three that I’ve played this year, and they are games I’ve come back to, it’s the OG Resident Evil on PC. Then if we fast forward like 20 years, we’ve got, oh, probably more actually, we’ve got Tiny Tina’s Wonderland. And then we come backwards again, back to around the Resident Evil time, we’ve got WWF Smackdown 2

Which started a discussion about Jay’s hatred for near-constant patching of games. It’s an essential thing these days, because games are way more complex than they were, and the developers aren’t given nearly enough time to work on them coughCyberpunk 2077cough. And Jay ought to know, as he’s a dev.

Up next was Matt, who has also been super busy:

Matt Bliss

Yeah, so a bit of background. My gameplay this year has been very small, if only because I’ve been super busy with trying to tackle my podcast editing entrepreneurship game. Different kind of game. But all the games that made my top three have been games released in previous years. So already matching that rule.

First one of note is Sekiro, Shadows Die Twice. That is a punishment game for me, of course, but I’m a glutton for punishment. And I hadn’t bought Sekiro on PC before. I previously had it on PS4 back in Australia. And being in Ireland now, I need to be entirely PC. So, yeah, Sekiro made that list, played it again. And it’s a great game. I think it’s one of the best that… oh, what is the company that makes them?

Squidge

FromSoft[ware]

Matt

Yeah, yeah. FromSoft.

Most notably Dark Souls and Elden Ring I think. Sekiro just it ticks a box for me in terms of the parry system and all that kind of thing.

…

So the second one is The Last of Us Part I, which came out as the re-re-remaster on pc more recently. I bought it as a bit of a test when I bought a laptop that had a 4050 in it—an RTX 4050 mobile card obviously. And it’s always fun it’s one of those games where that you have the download section, where it’s like over 100 gigabytes of game to get on your computer. And then you spend an hour, an hour and a half, watching it render shaders before you actually start playing the game. So, you know, it is quite literally the Call of Duty of things, where you’re waiting two and a half hours before you get to the actual game again.

But it was really nice to be able to play it again. And I’ve graduated from the laptop, and built a decent pc this year; an actual desktop pc with a 4070 SUPER and a 14th gen i7 and all that stuff, and it just it performed so well it was buttery smooth. But the game itself is just excellent as well.

And the last one is called Nodebuster. It came in clutch a couple of months ago. I saw it on a stream of a bloke who just, he likes making and playing games generally. It’s very cheap. I think it’s about five bucks, depending on where you get it. And it’s essentially a skill tree, of a target, in kind of a Space Invaders sort of environment; where anything that sits within the target takes damage. And you whenever you defeat one of the squares or circles or hexagons or stars or whatever that floats across the screen, you get resources, you spend those resources to improve your damage, and your health, and your armour. And that cycle repeats itself across two to three hours until you, just have like bullet hell kind of set up.

And Matt had a long list of honourable mentions too, because he played a lot of great games in 2024.

Finally it was Alyza’s turn to answer the question, and she almost couldn’t:

Alyxa

Actually, I’ve only played like two games that actually came out this year, and they’re both in my top three.

Squidge

I said three. Get out… Sorry.

Alyxa

It’s all my fault. I don’t have the money to buy more games… Give me money so I can buy more games that I will not be playing.

…

But yeah, my top three games were: Astro Bot, Europa, I don’t know if you’ve heard of that one.

Squidge

It rings a bell.

Alyxa

It came out recently. It’s the one that people have been calling the Ghibli video game.

…

And I’m not even including Astro’s Playroom because that’s kind of cheating. That’s also included in Astro Bot, can I please?

…

And I would say, probably Coffee Talk.

Revisiting Favourites

Squidge’s next question was about walking down the nostalgia corridor:

Squidge

My next question was did you revisit any old favourites this year if so do they still hold up?

As with the previous question, Jay went first:

Jay

Oh absolutely. What I’ve done is, these are some of my favourites. I’ve played a couple of other, older titles throughout the year, but these are some of the ones that are some of my favourites.

Like I remember, again Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands came out like two years ago, I want to say.

Squidge

Three or four years ago, I think.

Jay

Okay, that’s two, three years ago.

It’s pretty snappy on my machine, and I can jump straight into it. And they’re not releasing any updates or patches for it now, so I can actually just play it and not have to worry about Steam going, "hey, before you can play it, I’ve got to download 5,000 terabytes of data, just so you can see something that you weren’t going to see anyway, right?"

And so, yeah, all of them are old favourites. And in my opinion, being able to just pick something up and play it, they’ve all still held up. I know that there are several different, I suppose, camps in gaming. And as soon as you start separating people out into groups, you’ve already marginalized them. But I do know that there are people who, and this is totally a valid opinion, that they care more about graphics over gameplay. And that’s totally fine. and so they won’t pick up and play something from a few years ago because it doesn’t look as good as, say, something from this year.

But for me, it’s all about enjoying the experience. And I can look past what are now seen as, sort of, janky graphics for things like Resident Evil or SmackDown 2 because I’m enjoying the experience, right?

…

And actually, what I’m doing at the moment is I used to play through games and like, skip the scenes where it’s telling you the story, skip the dialogue, skip everything that I can so I could get into the actual experience of playing it. But I wonder if it’s a maturity thing or whether it’s just me slightly changing my opinions. But these days I actually sit, I put down the controller and I’m like, "no, you’re going to tell me your story." And i’m actually enjoying that more than just like "skip-skip-skip-skip-skip. Okay, now I can run around. Wait. Why am I doing this now?"

…Because I’m never going to be a speedrunner. I love watching people who do speedrunning, and speedrunning is a real skill. But for me, it’s not something i want to do. So I’m not trying to get through the game as quickly as possible, because that feels like work to me. I want to actually enjoy some time.

Up next was Matt:

Matt

I did revisit Satisfactory actually. That one is an old favourite. It’s one of those games you can pick up, and I would say it very rarely changes. In terms of enjoyment it does it for me. Its like a 3D factory Builder kind of thing. It’s great stuff, but it moved into 1.0 early this year. That means it’s no longer early access, it means everything should be stable and work, and there’s no glitching.

And Alyxa:

Alyxa

I did play a few games that are quite old, but only one of them is an old favourite because the old ones that I played, I’ve never played them before, which are the MediEvil games, so MediEvil 1 and 2. But the one that I played was Persona 3 Portable again

Squidge

That’s where all your free time went, then.

Alyxa

Yeah. But it’s not this one that I regret.

…

I mean, does it hold up? Here’s the funny thing. I never actually finished it the first time. I stopped playing. I played it on the original PSP. And I stopped playing it on, like, the the eve of the last battle. Not because I forgot, not because I lost interest. But because I just didn’t want the adventure to end.

I didn’t want the game to end, so I just stopped the game. And it’s been quite a few years, actually. I think last time I played it was probably 2019, I think. Probably. And so I decided, "you know what? I’m gonna play the game, and I’m gonna finish it." And I got to the end, and I didn’t even get the ending that I wanted, because I realized I have to play the game twice!

Squidge

It was only then that Alyxa realized she was going to have to play it all over again.

What Did You Regret Starting?

We all regret starting games sometimes. And that was what Squidge wanted to know next:

Squidge

What’s the one game you regret starting this year? Did you rage quit or did you ghost it like a bad date? Or are you still hate playing it?

And Jay’s answer had a huge amount of controversy. So much so that we won’t quote the controversial part (you’ll have to listen for yourself):

Jay

Earlier this year, on the advice of Z-Boy, a.k.a. Zac, I bought… there was like a humble bundle for MetroidVania games. And I think the words that he used were, "Dude, you want to play Axiom Verge because it’s awesome. And it’s worth the price of admission to this bundle just to get Axiom Verge. Because buying Axiom Verge separately is more expensive."

So I bought that and I had an absolute wonderful time. It is such a fun game, and it’s rekindled my drive to play through more MetroidVania style games. I’m sure you’ll already know but MetroidVania are the ones where there’s like a huge overall map, and you slowly unlock power-ups, which gets you to different areas of the map. And the idea is that you complete the map, then you finish the game.

…

But, so yeah, Axiom Verge, I started playing that and I absolutely loved it. Finished that one, haven’t picked up the second one, but that made me go, "do you know what? Why don’t I try out Metroid again?" I actually decided to play Metroid: Zero Mission, which is the Game Boy Advance remake of the first one.

And, I mean, there are parts of it that I’m like, "yep totally get this. Yep let’s do this. Okay. Cool, cool, cool, cool," and then other parts where I’m having to go, "wait. Hang on. I need to find a YouTube video or a guide or something to tell me how to flipin’ do this." but because there is no fully 100% prescribed way of playing the game from start to finish, finding that information is impossible.

…

And I got to a point where I was like, "do you know what? I just, no. I’m rage quitting out of this. I don’t have the time, ability or anything to do this."

But none of that was the controversial bit; Jay launched into the controversy immediately after the end of that quote.

Whereas Matt went 100% the other way:

Matt

Yeah. I think it has to be Satisfactory. That is a, it’s a game with no end. Like there is no way that you will ever finish it, but I always ghost it. It treats me right. It treats me right all the time, but, you know, it might be a few, few months, few years between, between dates, I guess in this context.

But I always regret, like I commit to it and say, "we’re going to get to the last stage. We’re going to automate, you know, plastic fuel production; do all those things." But in the end i invariably drop off, and it’s only because it’s the kind of game that feels like work a little bit.

It gets my mind right, but I found myself in a rhythm where you set yourself a task when you open the game, or you know a couple of tasks, and you do those tasks, and then you close the game, and you’re like, "okay. I know what I need to do next time," and you do that.

It’s like having a to-do list for you know leisure time.

And whilst both Jay and Matt failed to “finish” their games, Alyxa was the completionist:

Alyxa

I’ve actually finished it. I did do, like, I did pause for streaming it for a bit, just for the grinding. Because you know grinding on stream is kind of boring. Because they’re just repeating the same levels all over again and it gets boring to the other people and they’re like, "I’m not gonna do this."

But by gods, I did finish it. But by gods, do I regret having started Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker

Squidge

Oh, you finished it! I remember you saying last time you were grinding to get the final missions done. You wanted that extra ending, didn’t you?

Alyxa

I mean, I did want the ending where you did finish Z, so… And the ending was a bit, I was like, "why is she naked? Why is she naked? She’s not a minor. Oh thank God, she’s not a minor."

…

But yeah, I know people are like, "are you sure you want to go Peace Walker and not go like [Metal Gear Solid] IV, Revengeance, and then Peace Walker?" And I’m like, "nah, it’s okay. I can do this." I have regretted it because I started I started Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker at the same time that I was playing Persona 3 Portable

Squidge

So you had no time to yourself?

Alyxa

It was a terrible decision.

Bestest Pals

Every video game has them (okay, almost every video game), and we love and hate them: NPCs. Squidge wanted to know which NCP was the MVP:

Squidge

Who would win NPC of the Year in your book? And what made them so memorable? And I’ll give you bonus points if they were completely useless, but you loved them anyway.

Jay’s answer came straight out of the Borderlands… the games, not the questionable movie:

Jay

Okay, I don’t think I’m going to get the bonus points because it’s part of the story and it is related to one of the games I’ve played and it is directly tied to the next question. Because, listeners, I’ve looked at the questions earlier, I’m cheating. And I would say the version of Torgue in Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands.

So for those who haven’t played it, There’s a part in the game, you’re essentially playing Dungeons & Dragons, but because Dungeons & Dragons is a copyrighted thing, they call it Bunkers & Badasses. And one of the missions, you have to go find a bard who will help you to bless a boat so that you can sail across the ocean.

You go get Torgue, and he is a bard, and he "plays" guitar. Hopefully, you can hear the bunny quotes there. By strumming the guitar and going, "Whiddley, whiddley, whiddley, woo, whiddley, woo." And when you finally get him to the place where he needs to bless your boat, he’s playing the guitar. But you have to "ring-a-ling on that ding-a-ling," because he spawns a like a a bell. Then you need some "tinkly too" and you have to go up to a piano and start tinkling on that.

And then eventually, instead of blessing your boat, he blows up the fucking ocean. And so, like, initially you think, "twell that’s kind of pointless. Why did he do that?" it’s actually part of the story but that’s why i’m not going to get the bonus points but yeah he is my npc of the year for sure i feel like i’m cheating by picking talk Because he’s designed specifically to be funny.

Matt went some places with his answer:

Matt

It’s almost a a win in the absence of any other contenders. Like Ellie from The Last Of Us that I played this year just makes sense, I think.

The quality of the part one remaster with the new shaders, and with a great quality graphics card, means that some of the stuff… I mean they fix the walking patterns, and pathing, and all that kind of thing as well with that particular remaster.

But sometimes the silly things look a little bit more silly. Like when they try to climb a ladder and they’re kind of backwards, and then suddenly they just whip themselves forwards and start start climbing it.

Squidge

Lovable jank, I call it.

Matt

Yeah. And that kind of partnership has been rare over the last few years I think, in games. Like the only other one that i can think of that’s very similar is BioShock Infinite. But yeah, very similar kind of relationship between the characters there.

But you know, off the back of the TV series there’s… God there’s a lot we could talk about there. But, yeah Ellie gets it simply by being in no contention with anybody else.

Alyxa’s NPC was not Metal Gear, because it’s not a possibility:

Alyxa

So I said that the game that i regretted starting this year was Peace Walker, right?

Chico. Oh, Chico! I absolutely adore that, boy! I was like, pro-tech. Pro-tech at all costs. Most of the things he said were completely useless. He was just geeking over dinosaurs.

Squidge

And Monster Hunter, which is like 40 years away from actually being released.

Alyxa

I’ve only played one level of that monster Monster Hunter thing and I said, "no more. "I’m not gonna play any more of these levels on stream! F*ck off! One hour for one dinosaur! I’m not doing this again!"

Wrapping Up

This is part one of four in this conversation, so make sure that you either subscribe to the show or check back again soon for the second part.

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
• Matt’s active podcasts:
  • Coffee With A Podcaster
  • From My Home to Yours
• Alyxa on the web:
  • Alyxa on Twitch
  • Alyxa on Twitter
  • Alyxa’s VoDs on YouTube
  • Luso Dubs
• Suplex Wrestling, as mentioned by Matt

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
• Chilling by HoobeZa
• Lounge by HoobeZa
• Carefree by HoobeZa
• Bloom by HoobeZa
• Mellow by HoobeZa
• Bruh sound effect
• Funniest Dialogue Voice Lines In Tiny Tina Wonderlands
• It’s Pronounced Nikolag Brooklyn Nine-Nine
• Snake Tasty Sound Clip
• Outro Music is Massive Scratch - Eight Bit/Chiptune