Controllers Down: What Defined Gaming in 2024 - Part Two

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Players

Squidge

Jay

Matt Bliss

Alyxa

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Hey, this is part two of a four part episode. Part one can be found here

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 serious.

Please listen responsibly.

Show Notes

Part two of our end of 2024 conversation started off with the customary intro from Squidge:

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. In this second part, we cover everything from questionable source control, deceptive NPCs, to Matt’s obsession with chickens?

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

Take it away guys!

Questionable Content

No, it’s the not the Underpants Ninja. Squidge wanted to know what questionable things the guests had done in their gaming careers in 2024:

Squidge

What’s the most questionable thing you’ve done in a game this year? Be honest. Did it involve stealing bread, punching NPCs or something worse? And I’ll give you bonus points if it involved chickens.

Jay went full on absurd with this answer:

Jay

So I’m definitely not going to get the bonus points for this one, because I just told you what it is. It is blowing up the freaking ocean. I dropped an f-bomb when I talked about it previously, but yeah, blowing up the freaking ocean.

And it is so, wonderfully and stupidly done. Your your boat, sort of, capsizes and a massive—and I mean frankly massive, like bigger than the rocket in Half-Life—a massive rocket emerges from the ocean, and gets fired off into the distance; where you see a real mushroom cloud explode. And there is a a wave that crashes over you, which pushes you back further along the jetty like it would, because it’s physics. And then you end up with, like, fish splatting against the screen and splopping down; because in real life a fish would hit you in the face.

And it is so freaking fun, and stupid, and ultimately very questionable. Because, obviously, you wipe out the ocean, you wipe out the way that the moon works, and you wipe out entire, like, species of animals and an entire ecosystem. But my goodness is it ever fun.

The episode went from the sublime to the mundane with Matt’s answer… or did it?

Matt Bliss

You’re going to hate me. I never actually came up with an answer for this one.

Squidge

I’m kind of surprised.

Matt Bliss

Me, too. I really am, because usually there’s something. I mean uh like even Sekiro I could probably… I’d forgot. If I’d remembered the chickens were in the game, I could have said, "yeah. I spent, you know, 10 minutes bouncing around on a bunch of cocks, and it didn’t really do anything for me." But, you know, it just…

Squidge

If that’s not the teaser for this episode, I don’t know what is.

Matt Bliss

"Aphrodite WAP Guy, how does he plus one on the previous episode? Let’s hear it."

And Alyxa was the chaotic evil one of the bunch… who knew?

Alyxa

If I were to involve a chicken… So you know Destiny, right?

There is a, apparently it has to be the most famous emote, which is you take out a chicken and you start petting it, right. This isn’t Destiny, I did not play Destiny but I, kind of, need to give this context for what I’m saying.

So in…I mean spoilers for Astrobot because for, like, the newest DLC that came out where you have four more levels, two characters each: on one of the levels you actually acquire your character, the character player from Destiny. Whenever you get the characters if you punch them they have a reaction.

Squidge

Yeah.

Alyxa

If you punch the character from Destiny, it’ll come out with a chicken a chicken will jump off, and then he’ll pick it up and safeguard it again. My reaction doing that live was, "oh my god, it’s the chicken! It’s the chicken! It’s the chicken from the emote!"

But that was the one involving chickens, because that was not the most questionable thing I have done.

Squidge

Okay, hang on. Let me take a sip of this. I don’t want to spray my drink. Just give me a second.

Alyxa

But the most questionable thing I’ve done this year is, once again, from Peace Walker

You’ll have the listen to the episode to find out what that was.

Who Cares About Rent Anyway?

Next up was Squidge’s attempt to look for somewhere new to live… preferably for free or super cheap:

Squidge

Which game this year would you willingly live in if it meant you could skip paying rent, and what’s the catch that makes it a terrible idea?

And Jay’s answer, initially, is about getting as much chill as possible. In a world where everyone is at war, no less:

Jay

So the game I would want to live in is Final Fantasy VIII. Not because I’m a hero, not because I like swords with guns in them, not because I dress in an androgynistic way. But because Fisherman’s Horizon.

Fisherman’s Horizon makes that game. And Fisherman’s Horizon is quite literally one of the chillest places ever. It has the best music. It has the best attitude with the NPCs in the game. It has the best layout. It has everything. The catch would be:

A) The war that’s happening.

B) The amnesiac teenage kids that keep running through the house and nicking all my stuff.

C) The fact that the whole game is in a time loop. I just couldn’t.

That is major spoilers. I do apologise. I should have said spoilers at the beginning. But the whole game is a massive time loop. And it goes round, and round, and round, and round. They’re stuck in time forever

Which lead to a discussion on the Squall is dead theory, which we won’t be covering in the show notes. Y’all will have to listen to the episode to find out their thoughts on this.

Oh, and Jay launches into a mini lesson on software development and why video game companies in the 90s lost the source code for their biggest titles.

And to explain this:

Jay

Sorry, everyone, I’ve slipped into MDNS here.

Jay was referring to his podcast The Modern .NET Show, or MDNS.

But don’t worry, Matt saves the day with some more talk about video games, and being rather classy about it:

Matt Bliss

So, again I was bereft of games that had really adequate examples.

And I don’t think anyone’s going to pick The Last of Us, you know. No one’s charging rent, but you also don’t get to eat or go outside at night and stuff; so it’s not going to be fun.

Jay

Sounds like winter. Just sounds like winter to me. You can’t go outside on a night

Matt Bliss

At time of recording, yeah we’re starting to enter that stage aren’t we?

…

But the the game I went with was the Talos Principle 2. Because, unlike the last game, you are in the real world with a set of up to a thousand robots who have created what they call "New Jerusalem," which is a like a city built in the ideal image of what they want the world to be. And, you know, they’re all somewhat conscious robots, you know, trying to figure out what they want to do with the rest of the world.

So living rent free there would be great. It’s a highly technical city. I mean, there’s no food because they don’t eat. So that would suck. There’s also no animals that exist. All the ones that do are really hard to find; and all of them pretend to be people that they’ve pulled out of archived information from, like, thousands of years old data. So, I think there’s a Mark Walberg running around in there somewhere just being himself. There’s an australian surfer dude who’s like, "yo dude, let’s go gnarly."

I think you’d get sick of the the company after a very, very short amount of time. So that’s the catch: you’d have a great city, it would be powered, it would have running water, maybe wouldn’t have any food, and you’d get very bored and sick of the the other tenants very quickly.

Which led to a conversation about probing, “massagers”, emergent play, and “horn” parodies.

Luckily, Alyxa got everything back on track.

Alyxa

Okay. If I were to forget the second part of the question, probably Europa because it’s super relaxing, it’s super cute, it’s beautiful.

If I had to add the second part then Persona 3.

Squidge

Oh, is it the witching our that it’s called?

Alyxa

It’s dark hour, yeah.

Squidge

The one where everything goes [REDACTED] up?

Alyxa

I mean, apparently they they don’t pay rent, because the dorm belongs to to Mitsuru’s family. So she pays for everything.

So what what’s the catch that makes it a terrible idea? The dark hour.

Squidge

That, and some of the romance options.

Alyxa

Yeah. You can date the little 10 year old.

… Okay, maybe not.

They also discussed the link between Persona 3 Portable and Catherine (Vincent appears in P3P and talks about a number of character from that game), the social link system in the Persona games, and … Shinji asking you to lube his gears. So, that’s a thing.

Everyone Loves A Good Yelling Session, Right?

Next up was what folks had yelled during particularly frustrating gaming moments in 2024:

Squidge

What’s the most ridiculous thing you accidentally yelled at your screen while playing a game this year? Bonus points if it confused anyone else in the room.

Jay leant into the absurd… as is his want:

Jay

So I tend to play games either on my computer or on one of my devices in my office. So I don’t tend to have a lot of people around when I’m playing.

Although, and I know I’m saying this publicly, there may or may not have been an important meeting that I was involved with where I muted my microphone, and turned my camera off, and played a game on my Retroid Pocket 4 Pro. Except that I had forgotten to mute the microphone.

They couldn’t hear the button presses because the microphone is good at not picking the background noises. But when I started yelling in Japanese during this meeting, everyone stopped talking and they were like, "are you all right Jay?" I was like, "oh sorry. Yeah. Dropped something on my toe. Sorry, sorry. I thought I’d muted my microphone. Sorry. Also, there was a delay on the microphone, so bonk. That’s the sound of it dropping on my toe. Thank you."

Does that count?

And Matt confessed that he hides his shame:

Matt Bliss

Never any people in the room with me. I treat games like those birds that you cook and eat, but you have to do it under a towel, you know, to hide your shame.

Matt was referring to the culinary “delicacy” (i.e. horrendous, horrible, shameful, disgraceful) thing that is Ortolan.

Squidge

Depends what you’re playing.

Matt Bliss

Yeah yeah, that’s it. Well, if you’re playing Dead Rising 2 [Off The Record], maybe.

Squidge

Hey, I don’t care.

Going back to it, the previous question, I was in the Uranus zone right and I picked up six of the alien probes, and I was having a laugh right. And I go out and come back in to respawn them, but I had Frank West… originally he was in a mankini, and then i had him in a woman’s dress with a floral hat, running around doing dastardly things.

Matt Bliss

Dastardly things.

Squidge

Yeah. So I had, like, Frank West doing that. And then when I played Dead Rising 2, there wasn’t a Uranus zone but there were massagers, like the combo weapon. So I was running round with this combo weapon, shooting zombies, trying to get trick shots, while Chuck Green was in a mankini.

… Squidge went some places, but Matt got everyone back on track:

Matt Bliss

So yelling at the screen. I think there’s there’s only very few times that i’ve done that very deliberately.

And, again, this year my list is incredibly short, and mostly very, very considered and calm. So I presume in Sekiro, when I was playing Genichiro, the first time, the boss. And if you’ve made it that far, listener, then you know what I’m talking about.

There’s a point where you get to in that game where it’s linear, but you kind of approach a point where you can start bouncing around different areas in the game. So you don’t have to fight this guy straight away, you can kind of do some progression in different sections or fast travel and whatnot. But this particular boss is one of those bosses that you expect from FromSoft, where the area around is quite straightforward and then the boss just rockets up like 10 levels, and it becomes incredibly hard to do. And that one is hard even coming back to it having finished the game already.

And I’m sure I swore plenty of times. Where we’re living now, the walls are quite thin. and we’re between two houses. It’s fortunate that the one that i’m facing right now, that I do when I play games, is largely unoccupied; because I’m sure they would have called the police at some point. But, yeah, it’s usually shouting incredibly rude remarks at a video game character that just neither responds nor respects me.

Alyxa then promised to disappoint. Did she deliver?

Alyxa

Yeah, no. Most of the games that I played here were on stream.

So first of all, I think you’re gonna be disappointed with my answer on the last one. But for this one it’s related to the questionable thing.

Squidge

Okay

Alyxa

I mean, you can only imagine like the where I screamed the most were definitely when I CQC’d, quote unquote, pause; and at the end of the game when she suddenly jumped inside Zeke and just stripped down to her underwear. And I started scrambling around trying to find her age because I thought she was a minor.

Squidge

I’m gonna break some terms of service. Quick-google, quick-google, quick-google.

Alyxa

Like, "how old is…" pause "Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker" pause "age 22. Oh my god, she’s in her 20s everyone calm down!"

And we’re like, "she’s in her 20s. Oh my God." I was like, "okay. Okay, let’s calm down, chat."

Most of the time, I wasn’t even paying attention to what she was saying. And you know how in Metal Gear, you have to pay attention to what everyone is saying. And at that moment, I was just stressing out over, "I am going to get banned from Twitch because I’m streaming a minor getting undressed. Please, somebody help me."

…

In this case, what would confused people was not me screaming; it was the fact that we all thought she was she was 16, and all of a sudden she’s there. I start screaming and everyone’s like, "whoa! What the hell?! No wait, Kojima please! Can we please not?" And then we’re like, "oh she’s in her 20s everyone. Oh thank God!"

Characters! Characters! Characters! Characters!

We all love spending time to create our digital avatars. But just how long do we spend doing it, that’s what Squidge wanted to know:

Squidge

And finally, I want you to be brutally honest: What percentage of your gaming time this year was actually spent in character creation screens? And was it worth the three hours to make a hero you’re really going to see the back of?

Jay, being the predictable person he is, had this to say:

Jay

So you’re never going to believe me, Squidge, but when I was playing Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, I literally just went, "next, next, next, next, next, next, next, next," through the character creation screen until it got to the voice.

So I think I picked "this one" rather than "that one." Which I think is fantastic with Wonderlands, because there is no gendered anything; which is fantastic. And even, like, some of the dialogue in the game, some of the bandits you run across, they say things like, "bandit is a gender neutral term, you bigot!" which is fantastic right. It’s just all those silly little terms, it’s brilliant.

But, yeah, so on the character creation, because I because I’d already completed it a couple of times and unlocked all of the different like armour colors, and all that kind of stuff, and hair colors, and all the stuff that you can unlock, I just hit, "random," and then "next, next, next, random. Next, next, random. Next, next, random," and just accepted it.

But when it came to the voice I was, like, "I want to pick a voice that doesn’t fit the look that it’s generated." So that’s the thing that I spent ages working on. And I’m glad that I did, because I ended up picking this neutral sounding voice that is like a chaos… like, the character class I always try to play is chaotic neutral, but clearly this character is like some form of evil; because it’s, like, every time I die it’s like, "oh, I was so close to the void. Then you ripped me away." Or you know, when you kill things it’s like, "say hello to Death when you see her."

Matt has a similar set up this year:

Matt Bliss

So. again I’m a trend bucker here: I am not a fan of the character creator screen.

I’m someone who, very much, has the mentality that you mentioned there like, "why would I, you know, change the front if I’m just going to be staring at the back of their head, or not at all if it’s a first player game?" There’s also very few character creators in the games that I played this year. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown has costumes that you can change during the game. Satisfactory has a new costume element, as well, to it, where you can change helmet and you know colors and stuff. I don’t think The Talos Principle 2 has one. Senua’s Saga definitely doesn’t.

Aan honourable mention as well that i didn’t mention before is Atlas Fallen: Reign Of Sand, which I played this year. It’s a new game that’s by Focus Entertainment, who created…cannot remember the name of those games now, but they’re like futuristic, you know cybernetic, Dark Souls like sort of games.

Squidge

The Surge? Is that one of them?

Matt Bliss

? Yes I love The Surge I love The Surge 2 both excellent games.

Which started a conversation which involved mods, the latter day Elder Scrolls games, ray tracing and Tetris. None of which will be recreated here.

And finally, Alyxa promised to disappoint again:

Alyxa

So again, like I said, you’re going to be very disappointed with my answer. Because the only game that I played where you have a character creation screen, let me check again, yeah was Elden Ring.

It’s still the back of your head most of the time, unless you don’t. It’s okay, I spent like five minutes doing it because I was like, "I’m not even gonna do a lot of work here because I’m not gonna spend, like, three hours on this just for:

1. I’m not gonna see anything and

2. This is the only day that i’m gonna play this, so I don’t even care."

Ii only random random random put a name start no i i did i still did do a little bit like okay i’m gonna put this hair because apparently i couldn’t even remove the the helmet

Squidge

Random, random random. Put a name. Start.

Alyxa

No. I still did do a little bit like, "okay. I’m gonna put this hair because, apparently, I couldn’t even remove the the helmet." So, yeah, I removed the helmet and the only thing I could see was the hair, and I’m like, "Yeah, okay. The hair is good enough."

…

The thing is, if you had asked me this like last year, which is when Baldur’s Gate [3] came out, I would probably have said that I did spend a little bit more time on that. . Oh, probably. And I’m very, very proud that I did not take this long. That probably took me maybe half an hour. Lightweight

Squidge

Okay, I’ll include last year as well. How long did you spend on Baldur’s Gate? I’m intrigued now.

Squidge

Random, random random. Put a name. Start.

Alyxa

Oh, probably. And I’m very, very proud that I did not take this long. That probably took me maybe half an hour.

Squidge

Lightweight.

Remember to come back, next year, for the remaining two parts of this conversation.

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
• “Random” - Questionable Content (aka, The Underpants Ninja)
• Squall is dead
• The Modern .NET Show
• Ortolan

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
• Outro Music is Massive Scratch - Eight Bit/Chiptune