Have you ever heard of a game called Pac-Land? It's very different from the "action maze chase game" we all know and love. These series—the ones that bounce between different genres—are the focus of this episode. Join us for a conversation about game franchises that have explored different genres.
Have you ever heard of a game called Pac-Land? It's very different from the "action maze chase game" we all know and love. These series—the ones that bounce between different genres—are the focus of this episode. Join us for a conversation about game franchises that have explored different genres.
In this episode, we tackle a list of games Willie created that have shape-shifted between different game styles. You know, starting as a real-time strategy game but switching to a first-person shooter—that sort of thing. We highlight games in famous franchises like Pac-Man, Resident Evil, Fallout, World of Warcraft, and Grand Theft Auto. Later in the episode, we speculate how AI could help or hurt the gaming industry, and Willie introduces us to a game called Resident Evil Gaiden—WTF, lol. We wrap with comments about Unreal Engine 5, water?, and misleading thumbnail images on YouTube.
Here's the full transcript for this episode.
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00:00:00
[Alienated by ELFL plays in background]
Willie: For part of that, I was distracted cause I was trying to remember what that Clive Owen movie was, [chuckles] but-
Joseph: Yeah, I don't know what... what did you bring up? Children of Men or some shit?
Taylor: Was that not the name of it?
Willie: [laughing] No, that's not it at all.
Taylor: Men... [laughs] that's a different one. That's the kids in Rio de Janeiro growing up and stuff, I think, in the favelas.
Willie: No, the movie you're thinking about is called Shoot 'Em Up, which is a ridiculous movie.
Joseph: Oh damn.
Taylor: Oh, is that what it's called, Shoot 'Em Up? Where he's running around with the baby in his arm?
Willie: Yeah, yeah.
Taylor: Okay.
Willie: And I feel like I remember a scene where he's-
Taylor: [laughs] Way different movie.
Joseph: Yeah, the... [laughs]
Willie: -driving down the road and has to pick it up off the road out of the... out of the driver's side door or some shit.
Taylor: While he's going.
Willie: I don't really remember, but it's, I just remember it being ridiculous.
Taylor: I might rewatch, we should rewatch that one. [Willie laughs] That should be our next rewatch. I'm not even [chuckling] messing around. We should definitely watch that and then critique it. Because... I was working at Blockbuster, I think, or around that time when it came out, if I'm not mistaken.
Joseph: 2007 it says.
Willie: Yeah, I think we watched, we watched it together, I think.
Taylor: That's right.
Willie: 'Cause I think you had rented it.
Taylor: And for some reason I just didn't, it wasn't memorable for me. I don't know if it just, at the time I wasn't that into whatever it was. But right now I feel like I want to see exactly what that movie had to offer.
Willie: Yeah. I'm sure it wasn't alot.
Taylor: Now that I have a baby, I need to know.
Joseph: Right, right.
Taylor: [chuckling] I need to know how to handle those situations.
[Alienated by ELFL fades out]
[Intro theme plays - Tiger Tracks by Lexica]
00:01:37
Joseph: What's up? Welcome to Berries and Blades. Thanks for tuning in for a casual conversation about video games. My name is Joseph, and I'm here with my friends, Willie and Taylor, and we're just three regular guys thinking about the differences between a trash can, a garbage bin, and a dumpster. But, I digress.
So, how are y'all doing?
Taylor: Mass is the difference, sir. I know that now.
Joseph: Size?
Taylor: Because I've been learned across the universe. I know many more maths and sciences. Space magics.
Joseph: So, you think volume, volume is the difference?
Taylor: Yep. It's definitely that, that volume. Yeah. You're not going to stuff a body into a, uh, what was the first one? A kitchen...
Joseph: A trash can.
Taylor: Oh, a trash can. Naw, sorry. You can definitely do that.
Joseph: That seems like a dumpster is the best idea for a body. I mean, it's not a, it's not the best idea for a body, but if you're going to dump it in one of those three, a dumpster is the biggest, right?
Taylor: Yeah. Yeah, it should be. I mean, it requires a truck with a, like a forklift thing to lift it, so...
Joseph: Can anything else be called a dumpster?
Taylor: Yeah.
Joseph: That isn't one of those big ass, like, you know, those big ass containers.
Taylor: I think people call butts dumpsters, right? Like if, in certain scenarios, I don't know what scenarios I'd have to look at the Google, but ...
Joseph: Scenarios we probably don't want to get into. [chuckles]
Taylor: [laughing] Yeah. Yeah, yeah. [Joseph laughing] We would not do that on the air. That's for sure.
Willie: I was thrown off by the fact that you called one of them a garbage bin. Cause I don't think anybody really says that in the United States.
Taylor: [chuckling] No.
Joseph: Yeah, I think that's at play, like the origin of the words, like British English versus American English.
Willie: Yeah, 'cause they definitely call them bins in, in Europe, in places where they're speaking English. I, I was looking at it because you brought it up just now, and there's definitely some maps that are like, here's where people say garbage can versus trash can.
Joseph: [chuckling] Seriously?
Willie: But it's can, right? 'Cause it's not a bin.
00:03:24
Joseph: Yeah, yeah. You know what the real sad thing is? Is I bet those maps are better than the map in Starfield. [Willie chuckling]
Taylor: Ooh, yikes. Especially that down on the planet map. Oh, ho-ho.
Joseph: Burn. Yeah, yeah.
Taylor: Here's a, yeah, here's a blueprint of what this place might look like, [Joseph laughs] uh, with, uh, without any details on it.
Joseph: Right, right.
Taylor: Thank you. Wow.
Joseph: Here's some, uh, some topography [Taylor laughs] of what this place looks like. You know, the smooth curves of the...terrain.
Taylor: I don't think it's even actually the top, topography of the place. I think it's just straight up digital-
Willie: Yeah, I don't know if it actually matches up. I'd have to go to a spot-
Joseph: Yeah.
Willie: -and find out if it actually matches.
Joseph: I'm going to guess it doesn't.
Taylor: Yeah. Naw, it's bad.
Joseph: I think it's just there for like visual flavor.
Taylor: Yeah, that's all.
Willie: I'm going to guess it does only because they had to use, they used some sort of... Whatever they were using to build terrain and whatever software they were doing, they were like, well, let's just output this as a map with dots all over it.
Joseph: It's like they just didn't finish the map, dude.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: This is the rough cut... [chuckles] of what this map should look like.
Taylor: It does feel that way. That's weird, man. That's exactly... It feels like an unfinished map. Like, Hey, you forgot to put the layers on here. [Willie laughing]
Joseph: Yeah, yeah. You forgot to turn on the visibility [Taylor laughing] of the actual map.
Taylor: Just like there's the things that we have to offer you.
00:04:38
Willie: I mean, that being said, without getting too far into it, because we'll probably talk about Starfield in more depth. Obviously, some of us have been playing it. Taylor and I have been playing it. Joseph has just been watching some of it.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: What are your overall thoughts, Taylor? How...you've been playing it a lot, right?
Taylor: Yeah, I'm liking it. I'm liking a lot. Um, I will say that after I probably have put a legit 40 hours into it or so, it definitely feels like Fallout in space.
They polished it up. It's funny how much it feels like, what was the other game that came out in the last couple years on Game Pass that was by Obsidian? It was okay. Um, Outer Worlds.
Willie: Oh, yeah, yeah. Outer Worlds.
Taylor: It's funny how when they polished up their systems and everything, it feels a lot like Outer Worlds, but it's not a bad thing. Like it does, it was like they cleaned things up and it's a lot of cool stuff to explore.
I've been having a lot of fun with, uh, instead of you just look out, and see the wasteland of a city or area of a state. You know, now you can just kind of go to all these different parts of the universe. That's neat.
I'm having a lot of fun with it. I haven't come across stuff that's just been mind blowing yet, but I'm sure I will. By the time we touch on this.
Willie: Similarly, I think I've got like, probably close to 30 hours in. I know the other day when Joey you're watching, you said it was like, you noticed I was over a day.
And I've played once more since then. I think another four hours. So I think I'm like, nearing 30 hours or so.
Joseph: That sounds right.
Taylor: How are you liking it? Cause you, you haven't ever been just a Fallout-aphile or whatever, like I've been, I don't think. So, that's...
Joseph: A junkie.
Taylor: Yeah. I wonder how, how you're liking it.
Willie: Yeah. It's. It's fine, I guess. It's both good and bad. There's like a lot of good stuff about it. And there's also a lot of stuff that's just tedious. The biggest thing I can say is like they made it really complex in a way that's like, I don't know if this is good or bad.
Taylor: [laughs] Yeah.
Willie: I don't know if in like 10 hours if I'm going to want to continue doing this stuff.
Taylor: Yeah. Yeah.
Willie: Because what I found, I, the one thing I will say is one of the weirdest thing is they've made this really cool ship builder, right? You can change it all up. You can make it look cool. However you want to do it, you know, within limits. But then you don't actually even have to get in the cockpit of your ship lots of times to travel-
Taylor: Yeah.
Willie: -from one planet to another planet, or from one system to another system. You can just go to the map from anywhere. In many occasions, like just go to the map, pick the planet you want to go to and hit set course and then warp there and you never even like got in your ship.
Taylor: Yeah. Which I love that-
Willie: Yeah, it's great.
Taylor: -but it does really take out. It really does take out a lot, but it's it also is interesting, which will, when we dig into the details of it, it creates interesting scenarios where they're gating certain situations in certain ways.
And like, after you see it a couple of times and you start to see behind the curtain, you definitely start thinking like, oh, okay, I can't. Normally, I can fast travel from right here-
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: -where I'm at to somewhere else, but I can't-
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: -all of a sudden for some reason. Oh, ding, ding, ding. I'm about to have an encounter or an attack or there's something story going on or whatever.
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: And, um, I, I'm with you, dude. I think there's, like, I'm enjoying it just because I love a good Bethesda game, but yeah, there's a lot of stuff that. I think that they probably got into it and were like, wow, this is hard.
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: So they had to make some compromises on how it was done and sometimes it's good, sometimes not.
Willie: And I had mixed feelings about the whole, that fast travel thing, right? Cause I'll have playthroughs in Skyrim where I don't fast travel at all-
Taylor: Yeah.
Willie: -but I can see why it's necessary in this game because that other shit is tedious, especially when you, cause the map itself is tedious. Like we talked, we joked about the surface map not being great, cause it's not, but also you have to go through like two or three screens just to get to the surface map or to like-
Taylor: Yep.
Willie: -if you're at the surface map to back out to the, so the system map and then back out again to the galaxy map-
Taylor: Yeah, clunky.
Willie: -there's so many steps in there that it's just like, okay, I understand. You cutting corners-
00:08:34
Taylor: Even the shortcuts don't feel good-
Willie: Right.
Taylor: -Like they don't feel like they help enough.
Willie: Yeah, but they are helpful and without them, it would suck for sure. So it's like a mixed bag of this is really helpful, but also cuts out the whole ship travel stuff. And you can still do that stuff, right? You could just, you could do like I do, and I'm not going to fast travel. I'm just going to always go to my ship.
I'm always going to take off from the surface. I'm then I'll go into space and start flying. But the thing about flying is that you can't fly from one location to another in a reasonable amount of time. Like if you just straight up try to fly, so there's all kinds of stuff there we can talk about later but...
Taylor: Yeah, it'll be cool to dig into it, especially once Joey gets in there too. I would love to, I would love to hear what y'all, what y'all get into and what you like and don't. Cause it's, I feel like it's one of those that no matter what you got to put 40 or 50 hours into to even make the determination of how you feel about it.
Joseph: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Willie: So I heard somebody else say it and it sucks that I don't remember who said it. But I think you're going to get whatever you want out of the game, is the way I've heard it described. If all you're looking for is to go explore and like see a cool Bethesda story and put your ship together and, you know, do some stuff like that, you can go do that.
But if you're going to be like, if you're thinking like, well, I don't want to go sort through my inventory for 20 hours and I don't want to wander across open space forever and I don't want like you're going to see those things and you're going to hate them because you're already looking for them. So, like, whatever gameplay experience you're looking for, you're going to go find because it's both a good game and a bad game in ways. You're going to see whatever you want of that, either the good or the bad, and you're going to focus on it.
Joseph: You can craft your gameplay to whatever you want to do most, but it still doesn't make it a great game.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: You know, like, those are two separate conversations. But I like that there's the option you could fast travel without needing to like get into your cockpit and sit down in the seat and then see the console come up.
Taylor: That's what I thought too. About the time I noticed that you could do that, I was getting annoyed by having to constantly do that.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: Yeah, yeah.
Taylor: Especially running across a planet because there's this thing where you get out of your ship and you're like, oh, shit, the gravity is low. I'm flying across this planet. I'm going to go look at that and that and that.
And then you look at kind of all the things you want to and you're done with it. And then you realize, oh, man, my ship is a long ways from me right now. [Joseph laughs] And that is a long, tedious run. And I've already seen everything that's to be seen. So super smart for them to do that kind of fast, either fast right back to the ship or travel anywhere from there.
I do, I do like the options that they've done. Without them, I think they would be getting reamed on a lot of stuff.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: For sure, yeah.
Taylor: So they countered a lot of, a lot of arguments where it's like, it's going to come more down to personal preference and like, am I okay with, with this style of it happening
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: Or yeah, it's fun overall though. I've been... just a new IP from them. Good fun. Anything where I can see new stuff, new characters, new creations and models and all that.
Willie: I'll definitely be putting another, like, you know. 30 or 40 hours into it before it's all said and done for sure. And it may be more than that if it turns out the story is good or the side missions capture me in a way that I didn't expect or something like that but...
Taylor: Have you been doing mostly, um, uh, have you been doing mostly like story? Have you been staying with the story or are you doing a lot of side stuff?
Willie: I started doing a lot of exploring at the beginning. So I didn't do any of the story for the first like 10 hours, 12 hours-
Taylor: Wow.
Willie: -or something ridiculous.
Taylor: What'd you do? So you just went planet to planet?
Willie: I just was on one planet just walking around checking out shit and sorting my inventory a lot. [Taylor laughs] You know. You know what you do. [Joseph laughs]
Taylor: Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah that.
Willie: But uh, yeah. We'll get into all those details later I'm sure.
Taylor: Yep.
00:12:15
Joseph: Yeah. Okay. So switching gears, today's conversation is interesting to me because I don't think I've heard anybody talk about this topic before. And since our last episode, Willie's been hard at work doing research into game series and franchises that started off in one genre, but then changed course and evolved, or at least experimented with a different genre.
And I would provide a classic example of that right now, but I can't even think of a single one. So I'm just going to turn it over to you, Willie, and out of curiosity, ask how you came up with this topic.
Willie: I, uh, really don't know. I'm not sure what I was doing one day. I mean, I was, I think I was just thinking of topics to cover and it started as I was thinking about mechanics in games.
Like, what's the first time a dash showed up or first time the ability to...
Joseph: Like fast travel or something?
Willie: Yeah. And I was thinking about that and I was thinking about, how could I define that in a way that like works for us to all like, start going to do some research and stuff. And at some point that turned into, well, what if I talked about like first instances of genres and then it became like, how many games have started as one genre and switched to something else because it worked better or because it fit the play style better or how often does that actually happen?
Joseph: Yeah, I wonder why too, like whatever you're going to bring up today, and maybe we might know just based on the games you bring up, but I wonder why some, like, why you would even want to do that.
Taylor: I'm sure there's plenty of reasons, like, especially a change in development or a change in head.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: Sure, sure.
Taylor: Like sometimes you have one person who's a Todd Howard and everything needs to feel like I'm living in, it in the moment. And then you have other people that are like, no, you, how can you do a true strategy like that? You have to be top down, like a commander and different, so.
Joseph: Todd Howard, that's, uh, that's Bethesda, right?
Taylor: Yeah, but also, uh, art styles is a big difference, too. That's, however, your artist, like, whatever they're creating is gonna have a giant say in that.
Willie: Yeah, and I will say, while I did a bunch of, I'll say I did a bunch of research because I like looked at a lot of games, but I don't know how much depth I got with all of these when I was just trying to think of examples or figure them out.
And so some of them I'm going to be like, relying on whether or not you've played them. And if you haven't, or we haven't, we'll just move on because the thing is, we're not going to cover all the games I've picked out. My list is not exhaustive at all, but I identified like. 26 games that have changed genres at some point.
Taylor: Dang.
Joseph: Damn. Yeah. Okay.
Willie: We're definitely not going to cover them all. I don't really know what order we should go in other than like maybe chronological order for some of this. And I was curious, Taylor, if when you heard this topic.
Taylor: Yeah.
Willie: If you thought of anything that has switched and I feel like you have-
Taylor: Yeah.
Willie: -and maybe you might not think of it in this moment, but...
Taylor: naw, Halo for sure. Like they've done that. Uh, I mean, it depends on what kind of switch, but you know, the, um, Halo Wars-
Joseph: Oh, dude.
Taylor: -was a big one.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: That just, that just reminded me Gears Tactics could fit.
Willie: Right.
Taylor: Yeah. Gears Tactics. Yep. Uh, X-Com, I think it was done some different styles.
Willie: Yeah. So I think those are all good examples of like games that have, franchises that have dipped into other genres, but usually come back to what their core genre is.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
00:15:29
Willie: And I think that counts for this conversation, right? Those are good examples. The one that I thought you might go to first is the Yakuza: Like a Dragon game, because that one obviously switched...
Taylor: Oh, yeah, that's a great one.
Willie: I think that switch from turn based tactic, or to turn based tactics is, is a big enough change to think about.
Taylor: Oh, man. From a button masher.
Joseph: It didn't start off as turn by turn?
Taylor: No-
Joseph: Oh...
Taylor: -dude, it's that, that's one of the most hardcore button mashers I've ever seen, like, and I've ever played. And that's coming from, I played them all, you know, [Joseph laughs] from Nintendo, the fucking Genesis, like all those Golden Axes and stuff that you're just, this is more than that.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: Because they, like specific fighting styles would be like a fast style where every time you hit the square button, you're like throwing punches like as fast as you can. And so. Super, super duper button masher to a really, really well thought out and made battle system like that that was almost like a Final Fantasy system.
Joseph: Yeah, wow.
Taylor: Like a live, a live, yeah and that's a great change.
Joseph: I didn't know. I didn't know that it didn't start off turn based.
Taylor: And it made it so good during the battles that it allows for so much, like, and it works for them because they are so good at throwing in silly antics and shit anyways-
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: -and then the fact they leaned into it with that game, and then you change up the battle, like the mech, the mechanics like that significantly.
It allowed them to throw in more silliness, and story, and funniness into the battles themselves which is-
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: -you never even had that before through every single Yakuza game. That's a giant one. That was a pivotal shift.
Joseph: So you're saying that because they can slow down the pace of the combat that they can do other like interesting things like in the middle of the combat-
Taylor: Oh yeah, dude.
Joseph: -And there can be like cut scenes and animations and stuff because it's slowed down?
Taylor: Yeah, to the point that they did it. Summons, you know, where you would summon the, the, uh, baby men that would [Joseph chuckles] come in and like, I mean, their summons were amazing. It, it basically, it took that game from me from being like, even, and I am right now currently just little bits here and there playing through the last Yakuza 6, the latest one Song of Life.
And that one is tight because it, it couldn't hit harder because he, he has a baby in this one. So it's very Clive Owen, like Children of Men, like often you're running around with a baby in your arms.
Joseph: Wild.
Taylor: Like guys are talking shit and you have to like hand the baby off and fight them and button mash and...
But I would much rather be doing that. In, uh, the, Like a Dragon format, because even though this is like really silly and they're still capturing it. And I love Kiryu, like the main character, it's still, they still are nailing it. Would much rather be doing that as, as the style of Like a Dragon, because just the way they're able to cram in so much awesomeness into it because of the change. Yeah,
Joseph: that's a good one.
Okay, so the most recent one went back to not being turn based. Is that what you're saying?
Taylor: Yeah. Yeah. It's stuck with the Yakuza style, which is, you just have fighting styles and just mash the shit out of the buttons-
Joseph: Oh, wow.
Taylor: -and it's like, you know, I don't know, a hundred plus combos of different combos and things you can do to do different... it's mind boggling. It's too many, which is why to somebody like me, Like a Dragon was a great change up because now I don't have to know every single combo.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: I play it like RPG and I'm just sitting here, picking out, you know, the best moves from the stuff that I want and the characters. It's... that one was a fundamental change and I was one of those people that was the most impacted by it.
Joseph: Nice. Nice. That's a great one, dude. I didn't even realize it was jumping back and forth between like a complex combat systems and stuff that's turn based.
Taylor: Yup. There's a lot of differences between them, but that one is the most drastic for sure.
00:19:19
Willie: For part of that, I was distracted cause I was trying to remember what that Clive Owen movie was, [chuckles] but-
Joseph: Yeah, I don't know what... what did you bring up? Children of Men or some shit?
Taylor: Was that not the name of it?
Willie: [laughing] No, that's not it at all.
Taylor: Men... [laughs] that's a different one. That's the kids in Rio de Janeiro growing up and stuff, I think, in the favelas.
Willie: No, the movie you're thinking about is called Shoot 'Em Up, which is a ridiculous movie.
Joseph: Oh damn.
Taylor: Oh, is that what it's called, Shoot 'Em Up? Where he's running around with the baby in his arm?
Willie: Yeah, yeah.
Taylor: Okay.
Willie: And I feel like I remember a scene where he's-
Taylor: [laughs] Way different movie.
Joseph: Yeah, the... [laughs]
Willie: -driving down the road and has to pick it up off the road out of the... out of the driver's side door or some shit.
Taylor: While he's going.
Willie: I don't really remember, but it's, I just remember it being ridiculous.
Taylor: I might rewatch, we should rewatch that one. [Willie laughs] That should be our next rewatch. I'm not even [chuckling] messing around. We should definitely watch that and then critique it. Because... I was working at Blockbuster, I think, or around that time when it came out, if I'm not mistaken.
Joseph: 2007 it says.
Willie: Yeah, I think we watched, we watched it together, I think.
Taylor: That's right.
Willie: 'Cause I think you had rented it.
Taylor: And for some reason I just didn't, it wasn't memorable for me. I don't know if it just, at the time I wasn't that into whatever it was. But right now I feel like I want to see exactly what that movie had to offer.
Willie: Yeah. I'm sure it wasn't alot.
Taylor: Now that I have a baby, I need to know.
Joseph: Right, right.
Taylor: [chuckling] I need to know how to handle those situations.
Joseph: I mean, just reading what comes up in Google, after saving a newborn infant from assassins....
Taylor: Right. Frickin assassins.
Willie: Go ahead, read the next part, I can see it too. [all laugh]
Joseph: I can't...does it say carrot crunching gunman, Mr. Smith?
Willie: [laughing] Yeah. Yeah, it does.
Joseph: What does that even mean? [laughs]
Taylor: They tried to give him a Bugs Bunny flair, dude. Come on. Yeah.
Joseph: Get out of here, dude. Wow.
Taylor: If you're not giving your main character a Bugs Bunny feel-
Joseph: Right, right.
Taylor: -then what are you even doing?
Joseph: I like how you're like, go ahead, read the other part [Willie and Taylor laughing] 'Cause I'm looking at it too. And I see where you paused. [laughs]
00:21:13
Willie: Yeah, that shit's ridiculous. All right. Let's get off that uh, Shoot 'Em Up.
Taylor: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Willie: There's a bunch, like I said, we'll go through some of these really quickly. We'll talk about them or not talk about them depending on how much we know.
Taylor: Yeah, that sounds good.
Joseph: Yeah, let's do it.
Willie: Let's, uh, hop back to December, 1984 to-
Joseph: Oh gosh.
Willie: -a game called Pac-Land.
Joseph: I wadn't even born yet.
Taylor: Golly!
Willie: Do you know what Pac-Land is?
Joseph: Uh, I assume it's Pac-Man related, but you're not in the kind of traditional Pac-Man level.
Willie: It's not a maze game. The original Pac-Man is considered a maze genre.
Joseph: Okay.
Willie: So it's released in 1980. Obviously, it's a huge arcade game. A lot of people played it. Eat some dots, chase some ghosts, you know, that sort of thing. But Pac-Land is a side scroller platforming game.
Joseph: Oh.
Willie: It's general, like, mechanics where you can, you know, walk or dash, and then do some running to platform. But the main thing is like every stage, I think it's called stage, is like divided into, they call them trips. But every trip is divided into four sections-
Joseph: this game is a fucking trip.
Willie: [chuckling] Yeah. [Joseph laughs] -where the first three trips, you were taking fairies that I don't know if you pick up or find but you have fairies and you're taking them to fairyland to drop them off. So you're traveling like you would in any side scroller platform to the right to like drop them off somewhere.
And then the last section of the trip is always going, I think it's always going back left to go back home. So you're actually like traveling backwards [chuckles] on the screen to go back to Pac-Man's family.
Joseph: That's kind of legit. Go, go left.
Taylor: This game is beautiful. This is 1984.
Joseph: I know it looks way more modern than that.
Taylor: It looks so good. I'm sitting here watching some run throughs of the levels and is... so well done. The door at the end [Willie chuckles] like when you go through the door and it...
Are the ghosts pooping [Willie chuckles] or are they having child ghosts?
Willie: They're dropping other ghosts for some reason. Yeah.
Taylor: Okay. Okay. Okay.
Willie: And they don't hurt you for some reason. You just like pick them up.
Taylor: No, they give you points.
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: Evidently, I guess.
Joseph: Interesting, man. Yeah...
Taylor: Also, it looks like you can jump a bunch when you hit the water and stay afloat.
Joseph: Yeah, this looks... I would play this.
Taylor: I would too.
Joseph: I would try it out.
Taylor: I don't understand.
Joseph: I like the going left part. [Willie chuckles] Like games don't usually do that.
Taylor: That's, yeah, that is really tripping me out.
Willie: So there's that one.
Joseph: Oh, it seems difficult too.
Taylor: Oh, he pushes the, what? He pushed a log over and it opened up and a bunch of balloons
came out. What in the world?
Willie: Yeah, he like, there's some secret there that he knew or that, that they knew to move the, the log on the ground that somehow made balloons and all kinds of other shit pop up on the screen.
Joseph: Dude, I wonder if Arcus has a speedrun this game. I'd love to see that. Oh, there's straight up a building that looks like Moe's Tavern [Willie chuckles] without the, without the sign.
Taylor: Wow, this is crazy. I've never seen this game before, or if I have, I didn't even know what I was seeing.
Willie: I didn't know that it existed for sure.
Joseph: Uh, yeah, I also didn't know this existed.
Taylor: So this was before the Pac-Man?
Joseph: No, it's like four years after.
00:24:20
Willie: Four years after. And let's, let's move on, but we're going to stay in the world of Pac-Man.
Joseph: Okay. Okay.
Willie: Because in... wasn't for another nine years... in '93, a game called Pac-Attack comes out, which I think is just capitalizing on games like Tetris and Dr. Mario and that sort of thing-
Joseph: Mm, okay.
Willie: -where there's blocks and ghosts that are dropping from the top of the screen in, you know, a formation like a straight line or, you know, two ghost and a block, and you have to stack the blocks at the bottom and every now and then-
Taylor: Oh, that looks awful.
Willie: -the blocks will go away when they make a whole line, but the ghost usually get in the way. And the ghost can be gotten rid of, by dropping Pac-Man down. So sometimes there will be Pac-Man attached to a block. And when you drop the block down, Pac-Man is released and then we'll go in whatever direction that he can and eat the ghost and clear a line of ghosts.
Joseph: Oh, I see. Okay.
Taylor: Oh, take me back to Pac-Land. [Willie chuckles]
Joseph: Yeah. Or just Tetris, dude.
Taylor: Yeah. Or just Tetris, dude. [Joseph and Taylor chuckle]
Joseph: Such a...
Taylor: There's no reason. There's no world I wouldn't play Tetris instead of this.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: There's something interesting about the complexity of having the ghost and Pac-Man in the blocks-
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: Yeah.
Joseph: But it doesn't look great-
Willie: [chuckling] No.
Taylor: No, it looks awful.
Joseph: -and it just has a clumsy, clumsy appeal.
Taylor: So what happened with Pac-Land? [Willie chuckles] Did it, did it not hit well? Did people not like it? Or was that like the Pac-Man game for...
Willie: As much as I could, I found scores for them, as much as review scores don't really mean shit.
Taylor: Yeah.
Willie: So I g... I should say... the ones that I found from some random computer magazine that I honestly, I don't know where this came from, but it's honestly was on their wiki, most likely that I found it.
It's not an aggregator that did this one, I don't think. But it's 90 percent or 92%, depending on where you're looking. So it got good reviews.
Joseph: For Pac-Attack?
Willie: Pac uh, Pac-Land.
Joseph: Oh, Pac-Land. Okay, so we went...okay.
Taylor: Yeah, for Pac-Land.
Willie: So Pac-Land did do 90, 92%. Pac-Attack on SNES got a 66, and Genesis is like a 70%.
Taylor: But they didn't, they didn't do any more Pac-Land after that. So it was...
Willie: As far as I know, I don't think so. I also, when I was looking, I was just looking at-
Taylor: That's just a weird move to me.
Willie: I don't think so, because I was looking at instances where this game changed in particular, because... There is one other offering of Pac-Man called Pac-Man 2.
Joseph: I think it was just of the time, man. Like, platformers were huge in the mid 80s and they were trying to tap into an already popular game type.
Yeah, trying to...
And that's probably why they did Pac-Land. And they're also, like, really flexing Pac-Man as an IP and as a franchise because that shit's making money.
Taylor: That would make sense. Yeah, it's gonna, it's gonna go wherever the money is and, yeah.
Willie: I don't remember how many games I counted in the Pac-Man series. Cause like, if you look at that, even if you look at that wiki entry, you'll see that there's, you know, there's obviously Pac-Man and Mrs. Pac-Man*. And then there's Super Pac-Man and there's, damn, what is it called? I don't think it's called Pac-Man and Pals, I'm not looking at it right now. But there's like, there's a bunch of versions of Pac-Man that exist out there that are similar puzzle or maze games. There's one that's even a 3D maze version of the game, like an isometric sort of view.
Joseph: Mm, okay.
Taylor: Huh.
Joseph: So you mentioned Pac-Man 2 was the next game, right?
Willie: There is Pac-Man 2 that deviates from the puzzle or from the maze genre. And it is a... What is it? It's a...
Joseph: This is like, yeah, mostly a side scroller.
Willie: It's a side scrolling, scroller, but it's a point and click adventure.
Joseph: Oh, okay. I didn't...
Willie: Like you click on the screen where you want to go, but you also don't just click on the screen. For some reason, at the bottom- middle of the screen, there's a slingshot that you use to... shoot rocks at the screen, basically, and point to where you want to go.
Taylor: Wow.
Joseph: Oh, cool. Okay.
Willie: And like knock stuff down. Like there's one instance where there's like a windmill or something. If you just keep shooting at the windmill, the windmill will fall off. And then Pac-Man can pick up whatever falls off the windmill.
Joseph: This is kinda cool.
Willie: And every now and then, Pac-Man will fall asleep, or get knocked out, and you have to shoot Pac-Man with the slingshot to wake him up.
Joseph: Ah, ha ha ha. [Joseph and Willie chuckle]
Taylor: Hmm.
Joseph: Oh, that's fun. Yeah, I'm not a fan of point and click games in general, but this is kind of fun, like having the slingshot down at the bottom of the screen to shoot stuff with the cursor-
Taylor: Pretty cool.
Joseph: -wake Pac-Man up.
Willie: So that came out.
Joseph: Kick garbage bins.
Willie: [chuckles] Yeah. [Joseph snickers] So that came out in '94, just aft... like a year after the Pac-Attack game. But anyway, we're like, you know, 14 years out from the original Pac-Man and they're just sort of switching it up.
Joseph: Word.
00:28:48
Willie: I think, let's just go to a different franchise and go back to, so like I said, that first change up was an '84, but this next game is in '92 and is Wolfenstein 3D.
Taylor: Hmm.
Joseph: Mm.
Willie: Which, did y'all ever play Wolfenstein 3D?
Joseph: Never growing up.
Taylor: Yes, I played this shit out of that.
Willie: Yeah, there's, I played it at a friend's house who had a computer that played computer games and that was definitely probably my intro to first person shooters.
Taylor: My grandma had it.
Willie: [chuckles] Okay. [Taylor laughs]
Joseph: For real? For real, for real?
Taylor: Yeah, my grandma had it-
Joseph: Oh my gosh.
Taylor: -that's where I played it, was at my grandma's house.
Willie: Nice.
Joseph: Was it like she was getting down? Or was it like-
Taylor: Naw.
Joseph: -I want to have this because the kids play when they come over.
Taylor: Yeah, I think she had a computer for the kids. She, yeah, Granny was not much of a computer user.
But yeah, I would go over there and stay with her, 4 or 5, 6 hours, somedays and just go jam out on some Wolfenstein. This is a good one.
Willie: I never really would have thought that this game was called anything other than Wolfenstein because I called it Wolfenstein growing up, but it's called Wolfenstein 3D.
Joseph: Right.
Willie: The reason this one fits here is because this is an action shooter, first person perspective sort of thing, right? But... the original game is called Castle Wolfenstein and there's a game called Beyond Castle Wolfenstein as well, which are action adventure games that are 2D perspective. It's not quite top down. I guess it is top down perspective, but there's a lot of sneaking and stuff through it.
Joseph: It's like side dude, side perspective.
Willie: It looks like side perspective, but I think it's a lot of top down.
Joseph: Oh, okay, okay.
Willie: And you're just moving your 2-D character around on the screen to like sneak and like drag bodies around and...
Taylor: Hmm.
Joseph: Okay, so this is like The Legend of Zelda.
Willie: Yeah. Uh-huh.
Joseph: Like that kinda top down view.
Willie: So that was the original. And, you know, we talked about why might people do this and Taylor mentioned maybe developer switching and stuff, and that's exactly what happened with this game. I'm not going to remember the order of these things 'cause Wolfenstein 3D came out around the same time as a game called Ultima Underworld, which was very close to, to the same style of first person shooter game, but also Doom came out, you know, like a year after Wolfenstein 3D.
Joseph: Mm hmm.
Willie: So, all of these things were making first person shooters popular, but the idea for the game was something else before, and then I think it's John Carmack, right? And somebody, Romero, were developing this first person shooter. It was going to be like a space game or something, I think. And then they scrapped that idea and were like, well, we need something else.
And they found out... they liked the name Wolfenstein and found out that the name had gone out of trademark or whatever, like the, the rights to it were up for grabs.
Taylor: Oh, ho-ho.
Joseph: Hell yeah.
Taylor: Whoops.
Willie: That it had already expired in like '86 or something, when the original Wolfenstein was released in '81 and the second game was released in '84, but they let the rights to it lapse. And they were like, we like that name, so they used it and they thought about using some of the same stuff. Like they were going to do dragging and looting dead bodies, and like searching containers for stuff and like some stealth mechanics. But they thought that it slowed the gameplay down too much, so they were just like, no, we're just gonna go straight up fast shooter.
Joseph: Hell yeah, it worked.
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: And, and Metal uh. Metal Snake, Solid Sma... Snake or whatever they were like, oh yeah...
Joseph: Smake, Solid Smake.
Taylor: Smake! [Joseph and Taylor chuckle] Yeah.
Joseph: Yeah dude, so '92, Wolfenstein 3D, and Castle Wolfenstein '81, dude.
Willie: Mm-hmm.
Joseph: Wow. I mean, it's 10 years between those two, but when I think of Wolfenstein, I immediately think of Wolfenstein 3D.
Taylor: Me too.
Joseph: Like that feels like the very first Wolfenstein to me.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: Like I wasn't even thinking about-
Taylor: Yeah.
Joseph: -this, like Legend of Zelda looking Castle Wolfenstein.
Taylor: Yeah. Those other ones look awful.
Willie: [chuckles] Yeah. They don't look good- [Joseph laughs]
Taylor: it's terrible. No.
Willie: -but a lot of things look like that, right? I could imagine if you're...
Joseph: That's like '81, man.
Taylor: Oh yeah. Ultima Wonderworlds or Underworld, same thing. Doesn't look very good. That's... but back then, they were bangers.
00:32:45
Joseph: Uh, what's a recent one, Willie? Do you have a game that changed genres recently? Like a more modern game?
Willie: Yeah, let's jump to... Well, the most recent I have on my list... Well, there's some stuff that I don't want to talk about yet, I guess. Let's actually... Let's get this out of the way. I was considering putting Resident Evil on this list.
Because there's been a lot of like controversy around, starting around four through like seven, about how much the game has changed.
Joseph: The control style and stuff like that.
Willie: Control style, perspective, and even the genre in the sense of, the first three games very firmly sit, first three games plus like Code Veronica and Zero are firmly survival horror.
Resident Evil 1 basically created the genre of survival horror, along with some other things that came out around that time.
Joseph: So now is it considered like more like action adventure or something?
Willie: Well, it's returned to survival horror in 7 and 8-
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: -but the first games all had the fixed cameras perspective and were survival horror.
Joseph: Oh yeah. Yeah, awful. Awful.
Willie: I think they're great. [Joseph and Taylor] And then four came around and introduced third person perspective and it was still survival horror.
Joseph: Ching! Cha ching!
Willie: But it was like-
Joseph: Cash register.
Willie: Yeah, it got game of the year when that game came out. It's solidly one of the best games ever made. Most people will tell you that, I think. Five though, if you look at the genre listed for five, does not mention survival horror. It's just a shooter. Like, it's a third person shooter.
Joseph: Mmm. Interesting.
Willie: And some people would say that it's an action game more than anything else, or starts leaning towards action.
Joseph: Uh-huh.
Willie: And six for sure starts leaning towards action. The other thing about five is that it has co-op elements to it. Like, you can play the entire game with someone else. And six continues that trend.
Joseph: Mm-hmm. Okay. And what are we on now? Nine?
Willie: Eight Is the most recent.
Taylor: Eight.
Joseph: Eight was the recent release. Okay.
Taylor: Yeah, 7 and 8, they bounce back to you're by yourself and it's horror survival.
Willie: Yeah, 7 and 8, survival horror, by yourself, no more co-op. And six also did a thing where there were like four stories occurring at once. Like you could play through four different scenarios from different perspectives.
Taylor: Oh, wow.
Willie: And people were kind of not happy with that. But...
Joseph: You ca... can you switch between them at any point?
Willie: They interweave with each other.
Joseph: Okay.
Willie: So you start one and like, you kind of don't know how the other stories are playing out while you're playing the first one, and then you'll play the other one, and you're like, oh, this is where that thing happened, or where you ran into those other people.
Joseph: Right, right. So it's like Crash in video game format.
Willie: Sure.
Joseph: But is there any way to choose which one you start playing, or is that kind of all linear?
Willie: Yeah, no, you start,
Joseph: Oh, you choose?
Willie: You choose which order you want to play in, I think.
Joseph: Oh. That's interesting.
Willie: So the other thing I should say about this thing is like, the first game came out in '96. Obviously we're in 2020, 2021 is, uh, eight, is when eight came out. Between those years though uh, there are actually 29 total Resident Evil games.
Joseph: Good gosh.
Willie: I did not include a lot of this stuff, right? Or not going to talk about all this.
Joseph: Dude, that's more than Call of Duty.
Willie: Yeah. It was...
Joseph: Wasn't Call of Duty like 19?
Willie: It was something ridiculous.
Joseph: Wow.
Taylor: That's because they always are multifaceted. They almost always put them out on multiple platforms. If it's like a Vita, they've got three games on it. If it's a Game Boy Advance, they've got two games on it. Is that, is that including like all their remakes of them or that's just straight-
Willie: It does include remakes too.
Taylor: That makes sense.
Willie: Because there have been the, the remastered versions that came out recently, right? One, two, three, and four all got remasters.
Taylor: Yep.
Willie: The other things that are in that list of 29 that we should touch on really quickly is, there's a series of light gun games that exist. [Taylor chuckles] All, I think for PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3 or no PlayStation and PlayStation 2
Taylor: Arcade too, right?
Willie: Yeah, there's an arcade one, but it started because of Resident Evil Survivor and then Resident Evil Survivor 2 - Code: Veronica and Resident Evil: Dead Aim.
And then there's even an action adventure game that's on Game Boy Color called Resident Evil Gaiden.
Joseph: What the hell? [all laughing] What does that mean?
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: Resident Evil Bros.
Willie: It's a...
Taylor: It's a me! The pyramid head guy. Or I don't know if that's the right. [Joseph and Taylor laugh]
Willie: I believe it's an action adventure game from like that top down perspective. Uh, where you're just walking around like doing, uh... Resident Evil stuff. I don't know. Honestly, I didn't look too far into it because I like don't, I don't really care about Game Boy Color that much. I never, I don't think I ever owned one.
Taylor: Yeah.
Willie: But yeah, that one was a weird one that stood out too, for sure.
Joseph: Yeah. Wow. I didn't realize there were so many games in that franchise. That's pretty wild.
Taylor: Me neither. That is a shit ton.
Willie: Yeah, the ones that I mentioned are sort of the like main storyline. And then there's a bunch of like, uh, was it Resident Evil, like Outbreak is like a multiplayer survival horror game where you can like, there might be like zombies versus like military personnel or some shit in that game. I can't even remember cause I never actually played it,
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
00:37:45
Willie: But I know that it exists. So there's all kinds of games in that series. And that's obviously 2021 for the most recent release. I feel like, I feel like that counts. It's not exactly what we were talking about when we first started. There's some other stuff like, this is still not, this is still quite a long ago. Sorry, this is still, [laughing] I can't even fucking think now. [Joseph and Taylor laughing] Wherever this goes, this is some clip somewhere.
Taylor: My brain broke.
Willie: In 2012, there's a game called Syndicate, which I think Taylor, you and I might've played at some point.
Taylor: Yep. Yep.
Willie: It's a first person shooter. It's like a cyberpunk setting where The syndicates are basically what run the world now. Instead of governments, these syndicates are like what run everything, and are sort of vying for control.
Joseph: Is this an isometric game or...no, you said 2012.
Willie: No, 2012 is the first person shooter. The original Syndicate was made in '93 and is an isometric real time like, tactical and strategic game.
Joseph: Oh, I think that's what I found first.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: Cyberpunk first shooter, first person shooter, Syndicate. And you said you and Taylor played this?
Willie: I definitely played a little bit of it. It's not co-op or anything, but I remember like when it came out.
Joseph: Oh, okay.
Taylor: Yeah.
Willie: But yeah, it's got all the basics of a first person shooter at that time, you know.
Joseph: Okay, okay. Yeah, I'm seeing some video. It looks pretty good.
Willie: Picking up weapons, throwing grenades, like, and it's got the sort of cyberpunk aesthetic to it. Because it is, like, in the future-
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: -and corporations have taken over everything.
Taylor: Yep.
Joseph: Yeah, I don't think I would remember this game existing.
Taylor: Paved the way for, uh, Ex Machina. All the Deus Ex.
Joseph: Oh, I see.
Taylor: They were kind of following the exact same thing, where you could, like, augment yourself, and change yourself, and corporate overlords were keeping us down.
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: Very, like, fiction. [fake laughing] Very fictional.
Joseph: This has me wondering, like, on your list, Willie, or whatever you were coming across, what seems to be the most extreme change you came across?
Willie: Well, so, I think this, this change from real time strategy to, uh, first person shooter-
Joseph: It's pretty big, yeah.
Willie: -comes a lot, like, this shows up a lot.
Joseph: Oh, that there's a pattern of that happening?
Willie: Yeah, yeah.
Joseph: Interesting.
Willie: So, I will just real quick say about the original Syndicate from '93, it is... you are one of those corporations and basically trying to take over and trying to keep other corporations from takeover.
Like you're doing your own sort of city building, but like army building and like, trying to like, build your faction up better than the others
Joseph: And then the swap? Now you're on the other side of that?
Willie: I think you still work for a, you're an augmented agent in that game working for a corporation in this world that you know is deceitful.
I don't remember how that game ends and I didn't honestly look it up. So I'm not sure if by the end you're like, I need to overthrow these people that I'm working for, or if you're just like helping them take over.
Joseph: Gotcha.
00:40:41
Willie: Since we're talking about that, let's talk about the other, there's a couple other switches from real time strategy to. To other things, let's say, I would say the, let's go to Fallout because Fallout was never a real time strategy, but it was a turn based combat with a like trimetric view for Fallout 1 and 2 before Fallout 3 popularized the first person perspective of it all.
Joseph: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay. I didn't know that about the original.
Willie: It was still a role playing game. You still like customized your attributes and like your special stats. That's what they're called in Fallout. They're special because it's strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility, and luck. That's your traits that you level. So you did all that, but it was from a trimetric view instead of first person shooter.
Joseph: Okay, I found some gameplay. So this is '97, right? That first Fallout?
Willie: That first Fallout's '97, yeah. And Fallout 2 was the same style. And it was, yeah, Fallout 3 that sort of... made it even more popular. And I think that was also a, that was also because the owners of it changed.
Joseph: Okay. Yeah. So the first one, it looks like it might be point and click too. Was it? The first Fallout.
Willie: Uh, yeah, I think it is in the way that you move and it's turn based tactics or turn based combat. So like when you're fighting people, you're on that grid and you'll like click your action points to do the things you want to do.
Joseph: Okay, so you have like movement squares and stuff like that?
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: Wow, okay.
Willie: Did you ever play the first two Fallout's, Taylor?
Taylor: Nope. No, I did not. I looked at them, um, after I got so into Fallout 3 and New Vegas. I definitely, you know, you get in those valleys of boredom and you say, Well, what about the other Fallout stuff?
Joseph: Lemme l... you're like Hell no!
Taylor: Yeah, no, [Joseph laughs] it was not my thing at all, cause I've, I've dabbled a little bit in RTS in my days, and the only time I've ever liked it has been more the Warcraft and Starfield, or no, Starcraft, like those types, but I'm not big on the RTS battle stuff, like XCOM, it just does not interest me at all for some reason.
00:42:48
Willie: Yeah, and some of those, there's sort of a difference there, right? There's like strategy and turn based combat versus, Fallout is turn based combat, but it's still role playing, but it's not exactly a real time strategy, right? Warcraft, which you mentioned, is definitely a real time strategy, which you did, play a little bit of that, right?
Taylor: Oh, I played a ton-
Willie: Right.
Taylor: -of Warcraft, uh, two and three, I guess all three of them. But yeah, two and three were big games for me.
Willie: That's obviously another one that changed genres, right?
Taylor: Yeah.
Joseph: Oh, sure, sure.
Willie: It went from real time strategy to a MMORPG, which became huge, right?
Joseph: Yeah.
Taylor: And it became all that that was known of.
Joseph: Uh-huh.
Taylor: Like anybody like me who liked the old ones and was ever like, will we ever see another like Warcraft? Nope. [laughs] No, you will not.
Willie: Yeah, they, they re released Warcraft 3 at some point as like a remastered version-
Taylor: Oh, I forgot about that.
Willie: -and like the DLC for that game or expansion. They coupled those together and released them recently within the last three years.
Taylor: Reforged.
Joseph: Is that Reforged, yeah?
Taylor: That's right.
Willie: Warcraft 3 Reforged.
Taylor: Oh, okay. Might have to look into this.
Joseph: Calm down man, you ain't got time to play that. You ain't got time.
Taylor: Oh man, 23 percent of people like this video game, [Willie chuckles] I don't know-
Joseph: Uh-oh.
Taylor: That's a them problem.
Willie: Yeah, so Warcraft, the original came out in '94 and it was not a full like 10 years later till World of Warcraft came out in 2004.
Joseph: Gotcha. And that's when the, the, it changed, right? The, gamestyle.
Willie: Yeah, that's when it changed. And then. And then it became huge and they've released so many expansions since, since then.
Joseph: Yeah. I guess you don't go back. Right. When, when you take off like a rocket, there's no reason to go back to that original format.
Taylor: Yeah. No, not unless you're doing so good that you just get that sense of, Oh, we better get another team to start building another thing-
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: -which even that seems to have fallen off. Uh, and Blizzard is a, a big example of one of those. I mean, with how far, how hard they've gone into, uh, Overwatch or how, how far, you know-
Joseph: Yeah, yeah..
Taylor: -how deep they go into the IPs they have. It doesn't, doesn't seem like they're keen at all on making new IPs.
Joseph: Well, I think the bigger games get and the longer it takes to make games that are great, the less of an opportunity there is to be working on like two or three big series at once, unless you're a huge company.
00:45:03
Taylor: I wonder how much AI is going to change that, like, as we get to people, people that are super talented. The, um, if you look at, what is it, Hello Kitty**, the people that do, No Man's Sky. That's a small team, right? It was like 20 people or it was small. But if you imagine, okay, like if you take their talents, what they were able to do with how small their team was, and then tell them that, okay, now you have these tools that you can leverage how good you already are to make anything.
I wonder, obviously you could make that choice of, okay, well, we're going to make the best, coolest, biggest one thing ever, but I feel like a lot of these talented people may, maybe they'll start cranking stuff out.
Joseph: The integration of AI, it sounds like it could be great for a small studio-
Taylor: Yeah.
Joseph: -or like indie developers, an indie team, but then have the opposite effect for like a company is, like some of the largest companies, right? Where you were...
Taylor: Well, for them, it's the testing. It's the mass testing. It's being able to have-
Joseph: Yeah.
Taylor: -all that stuff done. But yeah, yeah, it just depends on how you're utilizing it.
Joseph: Right, right.
Willie: But I think that's the key, right? And maybe Joey, this is where you're going. It also depends on who's in charge of using it or implementing it. Are they going to use it for good reasons or are they going to use it to cut costs?
Joseph: That's, that's what I was getting to yeah. The cutting costs part.
Taylor: Yeah. [laughs] Yeah, yep.
Willie: Are they going to cut costs and be like, well, we don't need this many developers because we can produce-
Joseph: Uh-huh.
Willie: -the same amount of work that we were doing before and more without so many people on staff-
Joseph: Exactly.
Willie: -and I think it's just, it's who's using it.
Joseph: Yeah, and how they're using it.
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: That'd be an interesting episode sometime like as maybe as things progress and we can actually get our hands on information and research things like that because they've happened and some time has passed.
Willie: Yep.
Taylor: That'd be really fun to, to dive down some time and see like how different places are using it-
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: -or how it's affecting things or how it created flops here or, or a badass experience here. Uh, that'd be cool.
Joseph: The cutting costs, like that view definitely seems like it could just hurt the industry overall. But like, I think ways of using it in that way or like that, I think are, could be bad for the industry.
Taylor: Yeah.
Joseph: And then on the flip side, you could use it like in a really good way to help you create a game that you wouldn't have been able to create because you're like a three person team, you know, and stuff like that.
Taylor: Yeah.
Joseph: So it definitely feels like it'll be double edged in some kind of way.
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: I bet indie games will see the biggest explosion. That'll be cool. And it just to, to vector back to where we were at, I think it'll make it that much easier to do a flip and try out a new genre or something if you want to.
Because it's not like I spent seven years making this thing and now suddenly I realize that I should never have started this as a first person shooter. I should have done it as a top down role playing game. Maybe it'll allow people to make that quick pivot and do it and still make what they want.
Joseph: Now I feel like you're talking about Starfield again. Seven years.
Taylor: A little bit. Yeah.
Joseph: First person shooter. Shouldn't have made the game. Nah, I'm... [laughs]
Taylor: Yeah. Should have... yeah. Should have...
Willie: While we're, we're still sort of in the World of Warcraft let's uh, it's worth mentioning that Hearthstone is also set within that world, which is that digital collecting card game-
Joseph: Mm. Okay, yeah.
Willie: -sort of thing, like battle scenario, which I've never played.
Taylor: Oh, that's right.
Willie: I've watched people play. That was like an experimental game because they like, like a small group of people liked playing card games and they were like-
Joseph: Nice.
Willie: -let's make one that's better and uses our, our world and our assets.
Joseph: Our world.
Willie: So.
Taylor: Huh.
Joseph: Nice.
Willie: They just did it and they were trying to like replicate the feel of playing in person, like playing a physical game where the way the turns are working in the game.
Joseph: Mm-hmm. Nice. I like that idea. Or, you know, just I like the origin of that.
00:48:49
Willie: Yeah. And again, they just splintered off a small team to take care of that. There are a lot of examples to talk about, but we don't need to talk about all of them today, but I'm trying to think. There's a couple weird things in here that I do want to touch on, and maybe I'll just list off a bunch of these real quick and we can just talk about whichever.
But I'll go to 1997 and talk about Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II. Because this is a game that changes genres within the game, I would say.
Joseph: Really? I don't think I played this, but I know of the game.
Willie: Well, Star Wars Dark Forces is...
Joseph: Oh, maybe it's that one.
Willie: ...is a first person shooter. It was super popular on PC.
Joseph: Okay.
Willie: Got really good reviews on PC. Not so good on PlayStation, but I liked it. It was good. I played it on both. PlayStation and PC at some point. Uh, that came out in '95, but then the follow up was called Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, and that came out in '97. I don't know if I said that part. And then there was also a Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast.
So Jedi Outcast and Dark Forces 2 both start as first person shooters. And then you get a lightsaber. And it becomes a third person game and you get force powers and suddenly you don't have to, I don't think you necessarily have to return to playing in first person. If you don't want to.
Joseph: Like, if you continue using Jedi powers and a lightsaber, you can stay-
Willie: Jedi powers and just a lightsaber. Yeah, so I threw this one in there because it's a little weird that like the game starts, particularly Dark Forces II starts as a first person shooter and you're like, well, yeah, this is the game that I played before-
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: -and then you get a lightsaber and suddenly you're in third person and you have force powers now.
Joseph: That's pretty sick, man. This is kind of like what Destiny is doing with the melee weapons and the swords and stuff.
Willie: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I would say that's pretty true. And the same thing happens in Jedi Outcast. The same, it's the same person, I believe. No, maybe it's a new person, but you start basically in first person in Jedi Outcast and then you, like six levels in or seven levels in you get a lightsaber for the first time and go to train at Yavin Temple to do the Jedi trials and you get your lightsaber, your force powers and you can start playing again in third person.
Joseph: Dude, dude, I'm watching Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II video on YouTube and I saw what you're talking about started off first person and then with the lightsaber was in third person.
Taylor: Yep.
Joseph: But now, there is a first person with the lightsaber.
Willie: Mm-hmm. Interesting.
Joseph: So you can play with the lightsaber, either third person or first person. Unless this isn't a game, dude. I don't even know if this is a game.
Willie: Naw, it probably is.
Joseph: It's weird because the cut scenes look like you're watching a movie.
Willie: Yeah, that...
Joseph: Which is making me think, is this some kind of fan video or some shit, that's actually like a-
Willie: No, that game is a... the cinematics in that game are like FMV sort of stuff in that, in that game.
Joseph: Yeah, this is...
Taylor: Yeah, they're pretty interesting.
Joseph: Wow, yeah. Okay. So I assume you have the ability to choose between whether or not you want to stay third person lightsaber or go first person lightsaber.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: Unless it forces you at like a different point in the game.
Willie: I don't think it does. I think you're right. I think you can switch back and forth.
Joseph: This is pretty interesting, man. I'm down for this. Like if, if, uh, kind of like Destiny 2, like you, like, you know, you're on from first person to third person. I like the elements of switching back and forth. And if you have the option to do it, then I think that's like even better.
Taylor: Yeah.
00:51:59
Willie: I'm trying to look over my list and see what other stuff we should touch on real fast. There's so many. I put some stuff on here like Mega Man, because Mega Man released in '87 originally, and then with Mega Man Legends in '98, it goes to action adv... adventure, third person shooter style.
Taylor: Oh yeah.
Willie: I will also say the same for if you think about Metroid, Metroid star... started in '86.
Taylor: I was just about to say Metroid did the same shit. Yeah.
Joseph: Yeah. Metroid's a good one.
Willie: And then Metroid Prime in 2002 is obviously an action shooter, like first person sort of thing.
Joseph: Mm-hmm. And then we get back to Dread, which is, back to, you know, classic, uh, metroidvania platformer.
Willie: And since we're talking about those, I think it's worth talking about Castlevania because obviously Metroid and Castlevania started the whole metroidvania thing, but it was Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, which actually popularized, not actually by itself, but it's one of the things that helped popularize the metroidvania style gameplay because originally Castlevania was I guess considered, uh, a platformer, right? Original Castlevania.
Joseph: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Willie: You go through stages, you like, do the platforming stuff. You got your whip.
Joseph: Get your ass kicked.
Willie: Mm-hmm. [Taylor chuckles] But then, that was in '86. And then in '88, Castlevania II: Simon's Quest becomes more of an actual, an action role playing game. It adds a little bit of some role playing elements into it, but it's still platform adventurer.
But then, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is what adds the sort of metroidvania style where the world is there for you to explore, but some parts are blocked off based on the materials you have with you and you have to, like, collect things to open up different parts of the map.
Joseph: Right, but that was still a platformer, right?
Willie: Still a platformer, but it's considered more of a, like, RPG at that point, too.
Joseph: Gotcha.
Willie: Because there are things you can, like, level up or... gear you have to gather to move forward.
Joseph: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm
Willie: So those are sort of on the line of changing their game style.
Joseph: Wow. Yeah. I didn't even think, going back to Metroid. I didn't even think of that one, but that's a great series that has kind of swapped.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: Between 2D and 3D.
Taylor: I haven't played a ton of Metroids, but I, I played whatever the main like SNES one was, I think. Um, and then I played the 3D, the Nintendo, like the Nintendo 3DS version-
Willie: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: -which was very interesting, where it had like the map down below, like the touch map.
Willie: Oh yeah, yeah.
Taylor: And, uh, I just remember that being such a trip. And I think you used a stylus to look around and shit. [Joseph laughs] It was very different.
Joseph: Interactive.
Taylor: I guess that's, that can also be a reason for some changes that some of them go through.
Joseph: Technology, yeah. Or the device.
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: Yeah, the technology they're on. Yeah. If suddenly you're on a Nintendo, um, that Switch is a good one, but the...
Joseph: Nintendo Wii.
Taylor: Yeah, the Wii. The Wii is like the biggest example of, hey, suddenly we have a stick now.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: Yeah. Yeah, motion.
Taylor: Yeah.
00:54:58
Joseph: But, uh, Willie, I think you should highlight one more and then just kind of final thoughts so we don't run too long.
Willie: Yeah, yeah.
Taylor: Yeah, this was fun. This was a good one.
Willie: Oh, that's a tough decision. Uh, I'm trying to think, go something that slightly changes. Let's go with popular example, Grand Theft Auto 3.
Taylor: Ooh, yeah.
Joseph: Oh, fuck. I forgot about that too.
Taylor: Yep.
Willie: 'Cause Grand Theft Auto 3 comes out in 2001, is action adventure, a third person, sort of open world. Between missions you can go do whatever you want around Liberty City, right?
But the original two-
Joseph: Those are both top down, right?
Willie: Both top down. I don't know if both of them took place in like real life cities, like just like alternative names to real life cities.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: Like, you know, those other ones do, I guess I never really realized in those. There are, they are split up between Liberty City, San Andreas, and Vice City in the original games too, in 1 and 2.
Joseph: Okay, okay.
Willie: But there's like, 6 levels in those, and they're like, they're timed. You have a goal of money you're trying to get. So you're still top down, taking people's cars-
Joseph: It's hard as fuck, dude.
Willie: -and like-
Joseph: Answering the phones, the pay phones and shit.
Willie: Answering phones, to get new jobs and go collect new cars, or whatever. And you're trying to reach, like, you start trying to reach a million dollars in the first stage.
And you have to go do that and then it gets like, ramps up over and over again to where you're just trying to-
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: -collect more money in a certain amount of time to like complete the stage.
Joseph: Yeah. Yeah, I'm pretty sure I played that in school, in high school, [Willie chuckles] like it was on those machines [Taylor chuckles] like in, you know, we're browsing a Netscape navigator at the time.
Willie: That's weird.
Joseph: Yeah. That's bizarre to think back that it would have been there.
Willie: Yeah. I only played one of them like one time at a friend's house who had it.
Taylor: Was that before or after Narc?
Willie: I think after.
Taylor: After? Why would you ever play GTA instead of Narc? I was just wondering, like, if I was Joey and I was in the library playing on a school computer.
Joseph: Maybe I'm just, maybe I'm just, uh, misremembering where I played it. But it certainly wasn't something I was playing at home on a computer, but I remember playing those games. Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. No, it was on PlayStation, wasn't it?
Willie: It did come out on PlayStation.
Joseph: Those originals were on PlayStation.
Willie: They did come out on that too.
Taylor: Yeah. Yeah, it was. Yeah.
Okay,
Joseph: that's where I played it.
Taylor: That makes sense.
Joseph: I remember it being difficult, dude. Like that would be fun to go back and just because it's so different and so it feels so old in comparison to where the new Grand Theft Auto games are.
Taylor: Oh gosh.
Joseph: I wonder if it's just like super easy to do now, but it was hard like back in those days.
Willie: I think the controls were like super slippery. Like, I think the controls of the cars were moved in a way that made it difficult.
Joseph: Uh-huh. Right.
Taylor: Ye... like the infinite wiggle.
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: You're always countering it. Yeah.
Joseph: Oh yeah. Like oversteering and like trying to correct and then overcorrecting.
Taylor: Yeah. Outrun is a great example of that. [Joseph laughs]
Joseph: I would love, I would love, whenever the new Grand Theft Auto game comes out, if that ever happens. I would love to see like a YouTube video of like young kids that are playing GTA 6 go back and play like the first one and see their reaction to how different the game was.
Willie: I think when we first talked about this and you were like, I don't know any examples. That was the first one that popped out to me that I felt like it's so much different because the gameplay was different too. And I wonder if this is one of those where it's just the technology got better. They were like, I like this idea, but what if you could do it like first person-
Joseph: Yeah.
Willie: -and we added more open world elements where you could just go interact with anything. You didn't have to always be doing missions. You just you got to choose what you were doing and when, and we made it very story driven.
Joseph: I feel like the, the concept for games has gotten better because the technology has gotten better and you can do more.
Taylor: Oh. Yeah.
Joseph: So therefore you think more.
00:58:30
Taylor: Well, GTA 5 was a great example of that with their water. Like how amazing-
Joseph: Mm. Mm-hmm.
Taylor: -the water looked, made you want to go and see all those creatures that they made, all the beautiful, like life under there to the point that, you know, I was out there trying to find a submarine, and scuba diving, and all that shit. That was my whole GTA adventure at the beginning, was that stuff.
Joseph: Nice.
Taylor: I meant to ask y'all earlier, uh, because before we started up, we were talking about, uh, GTA or something came up. And I was wondering if you guys have seen any of the latest, uh, video of Unreal 5 or Unreal Water that they've been releasing. Like the, I forget what they call it, but it's something 2. 0.
Some new water system, but it's phenomenal. Like I follow a bunch of kind of 3D design people and design people in general on, on Twitter. And I've been seeing them, a lot of them are doing the kind of like, here's how you can get real water, you know? Follow this thread. But a lot of them are really good.
They're showing how to literally, you know, make a pool of rocks and then fill it with water. And the water is insane. They'll have a boat in there just kind of cruising and, uh, just the interactivity, interactivity between the boat, the person, the water. All of that is getting insane. So I have to imagine, like, there's no way Rockstar or Take-Two, whoever is in charge of that water, you know that [Joseph laughing] they're killing it right now.
Joseph: Who's in charge [Willie laughs] of the water?
Taylor: Whoever's doing water in the Rage engine.
Joseph: The water builder.
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: Yeah, that's, uh, I think that's what their engine is, Rage.
Willie: I haven't seen that at all, but I did see, you know, in general, Unreal Engine 5 and 5. 3 the most recent update or whatever, I think. People have been doing some cool stuff in it.
I didn't see water in particular, but I shared some gameplay recently of that, whatever horror game that was.
Taylor: Oh, the, um, the, uh, the other thing I saw about the new update was the movement, like people were doing things where, where there's a lot of new movement options on your character when you're setting up your sticks and all that. Evidently, it's way more intuitive now, like the way that your character moves and predicts your-
Joseph: Hmm.
Taylor: -predicts the movement based on stick gyration and things like that. It looks incredible, man. I really, we say this all the time, but I think [chuckles] every episode we [Willie chuckles] do of this, we're getting closer to the inevitability of we're going to make a game, [Willie chuckles] even if-
Joseph: [chuckles] Oh, we're gonna make a game.
Taylor: -it's small and completely ridiculous.
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: Yeah, but it's going to happen. Yeah. 'Cause it's going to be easy enough before too long that we will be able to. And it's only a matter of time.
Joseph: I've come across a lot of videos on YouTube that have Unreal 5 in the title and I almost don't trust any of them. [Willie chuckles] It's like, I feel like they're all click baity.
Like I'm going to click on it and it's like not even what it says it's going to do. So like I've stayed away from a lot of videos because...
Taylor: That's why I only click on the stuff that are, and that's why I make it a point to follow and have a folder of these are good 3D artists-
Joseph: Right, right.
Taylor: -because they're the ones that are always not only like, showing you what it can do, but showing you how you can do that thing that they just did, and that's, those are the good ones.
Joseph: This like, uh, duping, like YouTube duping, like, uh-
Taylor: Oh.
Joseph: -misleading on YouTube with like a thumbnail.
Taylor: I hate it. I hate it, dude.
Joseph: It's so bad in the sports, in the sports realm.
Taylor: Oh, really?
Joseph: Yeah, they'll put like, and this is... This isn't an actual example of what I've experienced, but like, let's say you're an NBA fan and you want like, to hear commentary from like some kind of segment on ESPN, that has like Charles, Charles Barkley or Shaq on it or something. Like they'll put Charles Barkley in the thumbnail and then it's a completely different fucking interview from a different segment.
And it's not even a part of that ESPN segment or whatever it was.
Taylor: I hate it.
Joseph: They're like clearly just trying to get you to click on the video because they have like a photo of Stephen A. on there and you think you're going to get reactions from Stephen A. I'm just like, come on.
Taylor: Dude, it's, it's so bad now that I, I've seen ads popping up recently, that were for, I think, Home Depot, and it was like Home Depot yard furniture, and it was a girl with giant [bleep] like, [Joseph chuckles] and the camera was right on them.
Joseph: Wow.
Taylor: I don't mean just like, I don't mind people looking any certain way in any ads, but the camera was like, literally, that was what they were doing, was getting you to click. It's getting bad.
Joseph: Good gosh.
Taylor: It's getting real bad. Where it's just getting real straight up, we'll do anything to get you to click.
Joseph: Yeah.
Taylor: And I, it's so gross.
Joseph: Mm-hmm. This is fucking super cringe.
Taylor: It is, dude. I just can't stay, like your Home Depot, your yard furniture speaks for itself. [Willie chuckles] Put a beer on there or something. Oh man. Yeah. We're in weird times.
01:03:15
Willie: We definitely are-
Taylor: Only getting weirder.
Willie: -and we're definitely like, now drifting. So I think this is, I think we did it. [Taylor chuckles]
Joseph: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Willie: I think there's so many more examples.
Taylor: Yeah.
Joseph: Yeah, we're done.
Taylor: Yeah, we did it.
Willie: There's so many more examples.
Taylor: We did it.
Willie: I don't want to even name them 'cause it'll start more conversation, but I'll share a spreadsheet with y'all of-
Joseph: Okay.
Willie: -all the stuff that I collected and, uh, maybe we'll talk about some of them in the future or you'll look at them and be like, oh yeah, I thought about that game and we'll have more to talk about next time.
Taylor: Hell yeah.
Joseph: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I feel like this could also spawn more ideas out of this, like the discovery you've done, I think, can lead us into other conversations, which I like.
Taylor: Yeah.
Willie: Yeah, and there's some stuff on here that I think maybe we wouldn't agree that, oh, that's really a genre change. Or, like the last thing I said, it's sort of a blending of... of genres in, in the Dark Forces game, right? Like maybe that doesn't necessarily count as like complete genre switch, but they're blending it in a cool way.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: So maybe there's other games like that, that we could talk about.
Joseph: And just gameplay styles too. Yeah, I like that idea.
Willie: Yeah, but I think that's it for us for today. Uh, so thanks for listening. Follow us wherever you get your podcast at, check us out on Twitch at berriesandblades. I've been playing Starfield on there lately. I'll be doing some Mortal Kombat 1 very soon.
Joseph: Very soon.
Willie: And some Lies of P. And probably finally get back into playing Baldur's Gate 3. 'Cause Joey keeps talking about Tears of Kingdom as game of the year, but I think probably Baldur's Gate 3 might do it.
Taylor: Ooh.
Joseph: I think that could be in contention for sure.
Taylor: Can't wait to have that argument.
Willie: Yeah, it will definitely be in contention for sure.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: But...
Joseph: Yeah. Awesome.
Willie: Thanks for listening.
[Outro theme begins to fade in - Caribbean Arcade by Christian Nanzell]
Joseph: Yeah, everybody, thanks for being here. Taylor, thank you for, uh, for working half the time we were supposed to be recording. Thank you.
Taylor: I do what I can, buddy. I wasn't working, sir. I wasn't working. I was just playing with things.
Joseph: Yeah, yeah, don't forget, uh, put your thumbs on the sticks.
Taylor: Get your thumbs on those sticks. Bing, bing, pow, pow, pow. Up, down, up, down, left, right.
Game over.
[Outro theme continues - Caribbean Arcade by Christian Nanzell]
01:05:10
Joseph: Berries and Blades is an independent podcast created by Joseph Bullard, Willie Garza, and Taylor Garratt. Thanks for tuning in, and consider subscribing if you enjoyed listening to this episode. You can also support us by telling your friends about the show, and we hope to see you in the next episode of Berries and Blades. Until then, thanks again.
[Outro theme fades out - Caribbean Arcade by Christian Nanzell]
Willie: Daryl's in France now.
Taylor: Oh, is that the name of one?
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: Oh gosh.
Joseph: The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon.
Willie: Yeah, he lives in France now. That's where he is.
Taylor: Oh, he's in France. [Joseph and Taylor laugh]
That sounds to me like Norman Reedus just wanted to go live in France for a while.
Joseph: Hell yeah, hell yeah.
Notes:
* This game is actually called Ms. Pac-Man.
** Hello Games is the company that made No Man’s Sky.