JRPG: Gateway Games - DTNS 5308 Experiment Week

0:00This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. Hey, it's Paige from Giggly Squad, and I want to let you know that if you want the newest and hottest beauty products, you have to go to Sephora.

0:36I'm obsessed with the One Size Liquid Blotting Paper Spray. It's the first-of-its-kind blotting spray that mattifies for up to eight hours. It's unreal. There's also the Summer Friday Shade Drops SPF 50, which basically lives in my bag at this point. Oh, and the Kayali Eden Plush Pear smells so good. It's sweet, warm, and addictive. like people literally stop me and ask what perfume I'm wearing, which you know I love. So if you want the makeup, skincare, hair, and fragrance products everyone's about to be obsessed with, shop only at Sephora. I love days like these at the pool, but my moderate to severe plaque psoriasis can sometimes take me out of the moment.

1:15I'm ready to make a splash with clearer skin thanks to Sky Rizzy, Rizinkizumab RZA. Sky Rizzy is a prescription-only injection for adults who are candidates for systemic or phototherapy. At four months, most people saw 90 % clearer skin when measured from head to toe, and many were even 100 % plaque-free. People also saw significant improvement in psoriasis symptoms of pain, redness, itching, and burning. Don't use if allergic to SkyRizzy. Serious allergic reactions, increased infections, or lower ability to fight them may occur. Before treatment, get checked for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor about any flu-like symptoms or vaccines.

1:50Now there's nothing on my skin. Thanks to SkyRizzy. And that means everything. Ask your doctor about SkyRizzy, the number one dermatologist prescribed biologic and psoriasis. Visit SkyRizzy.com or call 1-866-SKY-Rizzy to learn more.

2:09There's a reason millions of people start their day with Morning Brew Daily. Each morning, we break down the biggest news in business from the latest tech headlines to why nobody can afford a house right now. All in a format that fits seamlessly into your day. You'll leave each episode of Morning Brew Daily smarter and ready to take on the world around you. I'm Toby Howell. And I'm Neil Freiman. And we're ready to show you that business news doesn't have to be boring. So join us on Morning Brew Daily, available wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. Tom Merritt here. It is Experiment Week on DTNS.

2:42This is a yearly tradition where we take the show down during one of the slower times of the year for tech news. And we hand over the feed to folks to try out new podcast ideas. You're going to get to hear the very first episode of what could go on to become the next Tech John or Behind the Data. We're also running a special promotion for Experiment Week this year. If you're not already a DTNS patron and you'd like to give a little value back for the value you get from us, use the code EXPERIMENT. And you'll get 26 % off your first pledge, monthly or yearly. That's 26 % off for 2026. Just use the code EXPERIMENT at patreon.com slash DTNS.

3:24Now, on to today's experiment.

3:33Welcome to Jen and Roger Play Games. I'm Jen Cutter. And I'm Roger Chang. And today is all about the games that got us hooked on gaming. How did we get here? Why are we still here? and why after 35 years i still play video games so what was your first roger so so these are the games that really pulled me in because when i saw them it's like man i really want to play that and the first one and this is going way way way back is the star trek strategic operations simulator. Now, if you think of the old Star Wars video game where it was just all vector graphics where you try to blow up the Death Star and you do the trench run and all that, very similar in the kind of stylized graphics that you played.

4:31But the idea was that you would be in the Enterprise and you would have to destroy the enemies within a sector. And you do that through two playing fields. One was what you would be looking at in the view screen if you were in the captain's chair and then another view was on top of it which was a top-down view and so it was 2D one way and then you would spin a dial to rotate the ship so you would be facing the right way and you would press the button and then you would move on to move forward with another one button to thrust. think of it if you played like asteroids but you played it from like sort of as quasi two and a half d sort of uh viewpoint and you went through and you destroyed everything and then when you were done you would dock with the starbase and then you would move on to the next sector now was this at home or in an arcade it was an arcade game but it was so popular that it It came out on a lot of home.

5:31When I say home systems, I mean computers. So C64, Atari 800. I don't know if it ever made to the PC. But I remember seeing it at the Sears. Back when Sears had a. I don't even know if Sears still around. When Sears still had a computer section. Next to the TV and a home electronics section. Were you good at the game? Or was this just like. This is Star Trek. This is why I went to go play it. Because you like Star Trek. Yes. Yes. it was it was very much it wasn't it was very much it was easy to get into but it was a an ip that i really enjoyed as a kid and it was like my first experience with video games that wasn't pong like up until then everything was pong or combat on the 2600 and honestly those games while fun weren't really having me like dreaming about them like when i was away like like my cousins had a 2600 but i didn't like oh i want to go back to my cousin's you know cousin's house so i can play the 2600 it was just a thing that they had and i could play with it i wasn't really bowled over by the experience but that star trek game was like this is so cool it's like i'm on the enterprise you know you you really felt sort of immersed in it and it was one of the first games i think that really caught my imagination.

6:56That's pretty cool. I had a very different experience because my first gaming grab bag, let's call it, I grew up a lot with my grandparents and my grandpa had a computer. I don't know whether it was a 286 or a 386, but it was in the 86 genre. And he had a whole bunch of very, very random games that my brother and I would just kind of cycle through. So there was a donkey kong that wasn't donkey kong like the one where you jump over the barrels kind of thing yeah um i managed to like ask people in the know uh so i was actually able to identify these games i did not know the names of before uh pharaoh's tomb was one of the games just like a little platformer that you run around collecting stuff in pyramids for uh and dangerous dave which was also you run around collecting jewels and stuff grandpa had a type i guess there was a lot of running around and jumping.

7:48There was a thematic with a lot of the games that came out then, especially for PCs. Because PCs, unlike the C64 and the Atari 800, didn't have a hardware sprite generator. So the CPU had to draw and redraw everything. The more simplistic the game was, it was easier for lower-end PCs to run them. I do remember because I did have a Donkey Kong knockoff, but it was called Donkey Kong. What's copyright then? matter you know listen i'm gonna be i'm gonna be straight and level and fully transparent when i was a kid in the 80s and i mean 80s i mean like 86 87 88 uh in junior high all the games i had i got from other people and that was because i had two disc drives and i had a lot of like floppies you were you were the guy i was the guy because that's what you did at school right it's like oh what do you have hey you you know you trade a floppy for a bag of cookies i mean that's the gateway to to it's a fair price honestly um i mean i'll be honest a lot of the games i got were just sort of like what you just described they were just run uh they were either some version of montezuma's um is a montezuma's revenge where you go through you collect the jewels to get out of the temple um or some version of an arcade translation so they had pc man for pac-man i had donkey kong uh they had something invaders it wasn't space invaders but it was in space invaders like i mean honestly those games weren't that difficult to to code well you suddenly remind me of a game called jetpack i think it was jetpack it was cool you went around on a jetpack and collected stuff because that is just what games were back then but what about those games Like, was it just because you were exposed to them?

9:42Because they were there. And, like, we had fun with, like, really silly stuff. It's like, oh, do we want to play an EGA or VGA? What color do we want things to be? Because, yeah, that, like, yeah, so my brother and I, like, we used DOS. And we just, like, typed in stuff to play and learn DIR. And then we could see what the games were. Ooh. It was very fancy. Very exciting. I will say you were sort of spoiled because I grew up in the era of CGA, which meant you had four colors, which meant some variation of barf or gross brown, right? Because CGA had technically a palette of 16 colors. We could only display four at any one time.

10:22Now, I had a Tandy 1000, and because its graphics mode was lifted from the PC Junior, it could do 16 colors at one time, but not a lot of games took advantage of it. So you got puke colors like purple, a cyan and magenta and white or brown, orange, green and another brown for that. And that's how PC games were for the longest time. The rainbow of browns. When VGA came around, that's when things changed. And I will say anyone who grew up around that time as a PC gamer will know that, you know, if you got a sound card and VGA graphics, you were like you were you were the hot stuff. Everyone wanted to be everyone wanted to come to your house because you got real music coming out of your PC speakers.

11:12And you had graphics that were sort of fatal to what you would see on a comparable, say, like a Genesis or Super Nintendo. And so a lot of that, that also meant you had the bucks, right? Cause that stuff wasn't cheap. Speaking of spoiled, the first game I got to actually like go hard on, I never had Atari, never had a Commodore 64, but before my mom's, my dad started dating my mom, he had an Intellivision. So that was my first console that I got to play with the very funny controller. I'll call it a controller. it basically looked like one of those phones that you hang up on the kitchen wall where it had like the number pad in the middle where you would just slide in the cover that tells you what the buttons do and this weird disc button at the bottom so you used to go left and right and dad had astro smash and when my brother and i got good enough at astro smash so that we got a high enough score that the background changed color oh my goodness it was the coolest thing in the world to us back then like nintendo was out super nintendo was almost out but we had an intellivision and uh that was the first game i went super hard on and like just seeing the intellivision being able to put these different colored slides on top of the controller i was like oh oh there's lots of things you can do with this it's just there's not just one game dad had like three games but i understood that there were more games i you know it's it's weird because i didn't get a console until right after high school.

12:45That's because I bought it myself. It was weird because I always went to other people's homes and they always had them. I would play a couple hours, but after that, none of it held my attention. I felt no need to go back and play it. It's very different with PC games because there is a level of game design you have to make up for the fact that at the time, and PCs had really crappy graphics. And you had to make it more about the immersive gameplay style. For example, Microprose was famous for it. They were famous for doing simulation games. But what they did was they broke up the game into different parts.

13:28Outside of like F-15 Strike Eagle, say like you played the silent service, which is a submarine simulation, you had different parts. You had to drive the submarine, you had to navigate, and then you had to shoot. So even though they have to learn to use it once. Well, I mean, this is a great thing. It's all on the keyboard, but it was considered sophisticated because it had the entire keyboard. They even included little paper layouts that would go over the keyboard. So, you know, now this is the thing. They were designed for the IBM AT keyboard. So if you didn't have one of those, it didn't really fit all that well.

14:05It would fit. That was my next question. but it was it was kind of cool because you felt like you were i mean even though if you if you sort of uh distilled it you were just playing like five mini games that was that were combined into one game in a single veneer but it felt like oh i'm really running the boat i'm navigating and then i gotta watch the fuel and you know you're sitting there you're just hearing the the speed because that's the engine noise and then it's like oh there's the there's the japanese destroyer I better get in position. And then, like, it wasn't very, it wasn't hard. It wasn't hardware taxing.

14:42But the game design really kind of pulled you in because it was synergistic. One thing led to another and to another. Microprose was really good at that. They made a samurai game where you had to, a strategy game where you had to unite all the different fiefdoms of feudal Japan into one country. and again they were a bunch of mini games you would you could do one thing where you move your army and you'd find another army and you would have this sort of land battle but you could also have a stealth mission where it was just a single samurai and you would have to sneak in and defeat the ninja and run off with the concubine or something or the princess and that's how you got that territory so it was literally like four or five mini games but again the game design was so clever it felt like one cohesive game and i think that's why it stuck longer with me because you couldn't just rely on one simple you know you know like oh jump duck jump duck shoot shoot shoot this was more like different parts of you know strategy game action game you know kind of uh uh adventure game in some cases so it was pc games just always stuck with me well speaking Speaking of adventure games, I heard you were a big fan of King's Quest.

16:07Yes. Now, this is why I wanted a PC. I saw this video on PBS back when I was in third, fourth grade. On PBS. PBS. Educational then. I mean, PBS raised me during the summer. I didn't really go to summer school. So PBS did all the education for me. I mean, that's where I first met Ben Affleck, right? On the Voyage of the Mimi. and uh yeah it was a long time ago you look it up on youtube uh king's quest was a part of a feature where they were interviewing school-age kids about computers in the classroom and they had this one girl talking about this game she was playing called king's quest it's like whoa that's so cool it's like a story but you're in it and you're playing it and that really hooked me in And that's like, man, look, it's colorful.

16:58It had elements where it wasn't just, there are no action elements, right? There's no Twitch gaming aspect. So it didn't rely on any massive need of canned eye coordination. It just needed me to understand and interact with the story. And I thought that was really cool because at the time I was super into Choose Your Own Adventure books. Hey, those books were awesome. My cousin had like 10 or 12 of them. And it's so funny. I would read those instead of play his Game & Watch Donkey Kong because I was like, I got to know. How do I get out of this? How do I get out of this? It was that whole kind of pick where you go and see what happens, and I thought it was the coolest thing.

17:40And I said, that game, King's Quest, I need to play it. And little did I know when I got my Tandy, so Tandy 1000, because it was based on the PC Junior, and IBM contracted Sierra, back then it was just called Sierra, to develop a game that would take advantage of all the PC Junior's hardware features and they came up with King's Quest. So when I played it on the Tandy 1000, it played exactly like they originally intended and it was great. Other than the fact that the disc loading between screens was kind of annoying, I thought it was like the bee's knees. So even at the time, that disc load felt really annoying.

18:20yes but i didn't know like how to get around it right some people had hard drives but hard drives were like 800 bucks so i wasn't getting a hard drive oh good point i do think it's what you were saying like oh king's quest isn't twitch uh my experience with king's quest is watching speed runs of it and that is extremely twitch yeah you know it's the weirdest thing it's like someone took like an old jazz album and then turned up the uh turned the speed like five times And I know you said that running and jumping and ducking is not your thing, but it is extremely my thing. The first, like, I'm going to call it modern.

18:57I know it's retro now, but like, let me have this. My family got the NES and SNES somehow within like three calendar months of each other because they were both like well out at this point. So we had these huge catalog of games back at places you could rent games because that was a thing. so my brother and i went through mario 3 it was like this is amazing look at all this an airship there's all these powers and because uh we're canadian we had a game genie so we got to cheat and have like the hammer suit and world uh world 2 and it was super great i mean i don't think people understand how liberating those the game genie especially because we were kids so being able to run around and not die like we did eventually learn control but like at the beginning It was a lot more fun to be able to survive multiple levels and not have to worry about getting hit.

19:48So wait, you got an NES and an SNES? And an SNES. Because my birthday is in the summer. My brother's is in the fall. And a lot of times we'll do joint birthdays, joint presents. And some family members had independently saved up separately. Also, I should mention, I am part of a huge family. And like, that is why I was able and my brother able to play hockey so young, because literally everyone chipped in. So spoiled, so spoiled. So I went from Mario 3 straight into Super Mario World on the SNES. And Mario 3 already blew our minds. Mario World, you can save the game. That was incredible. Look at all these worlds.

20:31Look at all these things. Look at all these hidden exits, not just warp zones. The day we discovered Star World, we were running around the house screaming like banshees. We could not believe all of this stuff existed. So that is why I'm still a Mario fan to this day, because those are two of the best games. I don't hate Mario 64, but I never got into Sunshine. So if you want to fight me, it's feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Now, did you and your brother alternate on level? So you would play, finish one level, and then he would take over? What ended up happening is, so he was a Mario fan. I was a Luigi fan.

21:04Worked out that way. So we were never fighting over who is player one. and I can't remember which one of the games did it where that if you didn't die you got to keep going. That is where the fights started because I'm older. I was able to play the system more because his bedtime was different from my bedtime. So I got to play more and I got better. So eventually my mom said, okay, after you do two levels you need to die so your brother can play. You died for your brother. Repeatedly. But, you know, it's weird. You mentioned about game rentals, and that wasn't a thing for me until, like, the 90s.

21:45And one of the things I remember, and I was in JC at this time, we rented a Super Nintendo because we wanted to play Street Fighter. Did it come in one of those cool boxes? Because I've seen the pictures of the renting a console, and it comes in this, like, set box that you can put it all in. It came in this giant Ziploc bag, and they told us not to do it. Well, never mind. Like, it had all the stuff, and it was just in the... it was from the local video store so it was just in a giant like ziploc bag and then the you know the the console itself was not a ziploc bag but everything else was in a ziploc bag and then they would just give it to you and then just you'd sign for it or whatever and then we got um we got street fighter 2 because that was the thing everyone played street fighter 2 including everyone plays street fighter 2 and we were like man we're playing this and we played oh man we played all weekend like we'd just go to richard's house uh at the time he lived in the sticks uh which is great i mean his neighbors were like german baptists like what do they call it they're kind of like mennonites um like the amish uh except that they're a lot more open to technology just at a certain level but they have the bonnets and the rest and the hats and all that um but yeah like you know we just sat there like one o 'clock in the in the night where because you're in the orchards like the with the fog you get the tule fog it settles looks like a graveyard is great but we just scream it and laugh and play in street fighter 2 well i have to know who is your character for me uh i was again being older than my brother i could do the show you can move so i played ken my brother not good at that but amazing at charge characters so he was an e-honda god because he could mash buttons and he could hold back and press forward.

23:29I played because I couldn't do the uppercut yet at the arcade. I mean, listen, I'm like 19, you know, junior college, and I can't do it. But my first character was Guile because I could definitely do a sonic boom and a kick. I never got the hang of it. Oh, my God. To this day, I do not like charge characters. Maybe if I had a hitbox, it'd be easier. But no, I always played with a stick or an SDS controller. him and chung lee were the ones that i would go to because they were the ones i could play okay and once i figured out the the uppercut and the fireball then it was all like uh ken or ryu depending on who played but man it was just like it was it was an epiphany it's like wow but you know what even at that time i had no desire to actually buy a console like none it was it would never like hey i can rent this that's great i only want to play this one game like at the time i was very like oh what game do they have that i want to play i this is the thing my friend rented uh had super nindo but he rented um the zelda what's the zelda that came for the super nintendo link to the past link to the past and i was watching and playing it's like this is so boring like i could play and i was like man like i would rather go out in the field right now and chase the horses in the in the in the corral and watch this because there was something very just i don't know what it is about console games at that time just didn't have a hook for me well not for the guy watching it when you're playing it i will say it is different because like i was never a metroid fan my brother also at super metroid he would play forever and like i couldn't even sit there and watch because to me it was boring because i didn't know what was going on i didn't know what powers were happening but for me link to the past was like amazing and you had this printout map and it was really nice the video story to actually let us take those and give them back because paper things existed at the time i i know i mean i played it i tried playing it it's like man this is so dull like there's nothing i think the part of it was at the time a lot of and zelda was guilty of this a lot of the console jrpgs were heavily dependent on character text to to kind of add a contextual veneer over what the heck you were doing on the screen and so i was like read and then you hit the next one and then the other character speaks it's like oh my god really just give me a synopsis so I know what's going on so I can start punching something.

26:09All right. So since you don't like punching, you need to tell me about a game called Starflight. Starflight. Now, if you were, and I mentioned before, I was a Star Trek fan. Starflight was the closest that you could get in the mid 80s. When I say mid 80s, 85, 86, or was it 87? To a Star Trek-like RPG. and that's what it was. It was an RPG, but not in the sense that you got hit points or anything. It was an RPG slash strategy game, and your whole thing was to go visit other planets and earn currency by mining for minerals, collecting exotic alien lifeforms and selling it while trying to solve a mystery of why this large crystalline object is suddenly heading toward your planet and destroying it.

27:03it was one of the first games to implement a form of copy protection that wasn't disc based. Like for example, King's quest, you couldn't copy because it had a copy protection mechanism that wouldn't let you do a disc copy from DOS to copy over the disc. Instead, instead it uses, used a wheel, used a decoder wheel. And when the game started up, it would ask you a question. You would have to decipher it by spinning the wheel to figure it out. It came with a map. and like everyone that played it at my house was like whoa because there was a level of strategy adventure but also leveling up but not in the way of like your standard like an ultima or wizardry where you just had to go through fight monsters this was about exploration and many you know depending on who you ask a lot of star wars star wars star flight fans have often said that games like mass effect uh are kind of spiritual successors because you go to other planets not necessarily you know i mean to find clues but you also go there to collect things like mineral deposits uh resources that you use to build up your ship because you sell those and you can buy upgrades shielding and all that stuff for your characters or the ship itself yeah like when you had told me uh before the show about like starflight the title makes me think like oh is this going to be like a star wars rebel assault is this going to be like a wing commander where you're also like you bust out a joystick and fly but no this is like just a proper rpg yeah it is and you had ship to ship combat uh in fact that was most of the combat uh was ship to ship and it was kind of cool because you could upgrade the weapons you could upgrade from just like a a weak blaster to like these heavy you know laser cannons upgrade your shielding And then your character roster, instead of having your tank, your mage, your healer, your range attacker, you had communications officer.

29:07You had your science officer. You had yourself. And the great thing is they weren't just superfluous roles. A good comm officer could totally diffuse attention when you're talking to an alien ship and they wouldn't attack you. and depending on the race you picked it can make it easier or worse because certain races were naturally adversarial toward each other so you had to be very cognizant of that when you were creating your crew i feel like after this episode you're going to go and uh load it up again you know it's it's fun but it's also very time consuming and unfortunately uh at at my age time is not as free as it used to be.

29:50Yeah, that's the plus of these early games. Because again, I'm throwing my brother into this because all of my early gaming was with my brother. We had saved up so much money shoveling driveways. Well, I shoveled driveways. He mowed lawns because I hate summer chores. So I did all the driveways. And we'd saved up and saved up. And we went to Square One Mall in Mississauga. And we each bought a Final Fantasy. We did not really know what one of them were. We saw it in a gaming magazine. and was like, ooh, swords. And I bought Final Fantasy II, I think, and he bought three. I mean, we evened out the money.

30:23So even though they were crazy expensive, we bought used coffees back then in the late 90s for 120 and 140 Canadian dollars. Wait, what? Yes. For some reason, we just decided that we are getting these games and we saved and we saved and we saved. And this is why it took us till almost - Wait, they charge you$100? They charge you$100? $120 and$140 for used cartridges. This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love.

31:14It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. I love days like these at the pool, but my moderate to severe plaques risis can sometimes take me out of the moment. I'm ready to make a splash with clearer skin thanks to SkyRizzy, Rizinkizumab RZA. SkyRizzy is a prescription-only injection for adults who are candidates for systemic or phototherapy. at four months most people saw 90 percent clearer skin when measured from head to toe and many were even 100 percent plaque free people also saw significant improvement in psoriasis symptoms of pain redness itching and burning don't use if allergic to sky rizzy serious allergic reactions increased infections or lower ability to fight them may occur before treatment get checked for infections and tuberculosis tell your doctor about any flu-like symptoms or vaccines now there's nothing on my skin thanks to sky rizzy and that means everything Ask your doctor about SkyRizzy, the number one dermatologist prescribed biologic and psoriasis.

32:18Visit SkyRizzy.com or call 1-866-SKY-Rizzy to learn more.

32:25Hey, it's Paige from Giggly Squad, and I want to let you know that if you want the newest and hottest beauty products, you have to go to Sephora. I'm obsessed with the One Size Liquid Blotting Paper Spray. It's the first of its kind blotting spray that mattifies for up to eight hours. It's unreal. There's also the Summer Friday Shade Drops SPF 50, which basically lives in my bag at this point. Oh, and the Kayali Eden Plush Pear smells so good. It's sweet, warm, and addictive. Like, people literally stop me and ask what perfume I'm wearing, which you know I love. So if you want the makeup, skincare, hair, and fragrance products everyone's about to be obsessed with, shop only at Sephora.

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34:08We did get the boxes, though. So that was nice. Yes. Why was it so that? Why was that crazy? Why were they? Oh, the battery backup. It's expensive, don't you know? And also, like, the cash conversion in Canada kind of hurt back then. When we go to the PlayStation era, there was closer parity between the prices. But, yeah, no, back in cartridge days, games were super expensive. I remember a guy in college. I was like, oh, those batteries are standard coin batteries. So you just have to open up the cartridge and pop it out. I mean, the thing is if you pop it out, you lose your game. But you just, you know, man, they really reamed you.

34:47I feel angry and it wasn't even me. For us, these were the first games that we bought ourselves. We didn't have to wait for Christmas and birthdays. We went out and bought these. and so we played like well two and three or if you're counting the other system four and six kind of at the same time so I was playing two and my brother would watch and then when he started playing three I would watch so we would like swap back and forth and playing these games that were technically years apart in development at the same time to see the difference in sprites to see the difference in text to see the difference in systems where you just have in four your guy learns what your guy learns and that's what you get and then in six you can equip espers and if i wanted you know everyone to learn everything we could do that we took turns leveling because sometimes you just wanted to run around fight monsters for an hour before school because we were allowed to play before school as long as all of our chores were done and we got up early so we got a lot of early early morning gaming in and and to see the stories there because that was our first real story game actual characters like okay like we had rented like lincoln stuff but this was was way more in-depth and way more people and way more towns.

36:00It's weird because I should be a total RPG fan, but the early RPGs on PCs just really, I mean, they really were heavy. So partly there's two issues to understand back then. One was, you think, if people want to know why it's grinding is such an element of JRPGs, you just got to look at Wizardry and Ultima because that's where they learned it from, right? And two, they expected you to have a giant pad of grid paper and then graph paper, and you would literally figure out what your map was. They didn't include a map. That whole thing was for you to figure out. See, I didn't have to do that until Etrian Odyssey on the DS where your bottom screen was you draw yourself a map because the game was not going to help you.

36:51but i mean this is the thing like that was that was the standard uh mo uh for these games bardstale like oh they tell you in the structures make sure you have plenty of paper to draw your maps because you want it you don't want to get lost and find out where you are that was part of the thrill of those but for me it took me out of it because i felt like well if i'm playing a game on the computer why wouldn't the map be in the computer why am i taking out of you know like doing this the entire time and it really bugged me it wasn't until they started like might magic i think was the first pc um rpg that started including a limited form of mapping in the game which was a big help but it wasn't until i think wizardry 8 or 7 that i really just got back into pc rpgs because for life of me it's just like man this game is so boring that you even have to take a job in the day in order to get to earn money gold pieces and it was a it was like it was what a feature i think it was called the magic candle or something but it had that feature on the box it's like get a job it's like i had a job how do you think i paid for this stupid game i don't want to i don't want to have a fantasy that involves me going in and getting another job all right so i to ask you a sierra question then because so my first like um sierra type game was lucas arts and the um uh day of the tentacle so when you were navigating around you had houses and stuff so it kind of made sense what room went into what room so when you were playing king's quest games how did you learn how to get king graham around the kingdom because like those were pretty big maps back then right um they were pretty big and like the other rp like rpgs they did you draw a map for that or did you just have a really good memory the the the screens at most i think were eight screens deep this like this way and then eight screens this way wide so totally it's like 64 screen not 64 64 sounds a lot but maybe 64 screens maybe more like 40 there were a lot of king's quest they probably got up to that well well this is a thing when you play got up to king's quest four that's when you really had to start mapping things out because it was it was it was this is the thing that game came on like five three and a half inch flop or three yeah three and a half inch floppies so you know it was a pretty big game at the time and a lot of screens and with that game you actually had to show up at certain parts of the day so only certain things would only happen at night certain things would only happen the day like you couldn't you couldn't deal with the vampire at night because they would kill you so you had to do it during the day while they were still sleeping you know like stuff like that so it was kind of cool but the thing with with king's quest is it like if something was chasing after you you could just go into the next screen and they would disappear you know i mean like oh let me run down to the back down okay so they couldn't like cross that invisible line you were you were safe as long as you made it yeah so as long as they as long as you moved out that screen that they were at you were safe and and the thing with king's quest unlike all the lucas arts games is you could die you could fall off a cloud you could like fall into a hole or so you had to be very you could soft lock those games really easy like if you use an item the wrong way that was kind of it you didn't know your game was over but your game was basically over and and lucas arts when they developed their games thank you i think they really set a trend here was to make the games not frustrating in other words you couldn't die in the game you just had to figure out puzzles so maybe at most backtracking and stuff but with king's quest and a lot of the police quest space quest you could die you could have the wrong item and you just man i gotta load up a save and they told you in the manual to save often because you would have to go back to a previous like oh i picked up the wrong thing now i have to know you can't go back and redo it you have to go back to a previous save and then start from that point over oh you just unlocked a memory for me taunt laura my great aunt one of my great aunts that i also grew up with uh she had a computer and she had adventure like the game where you just like move left right go through that castle but she also had for some reason the first leisure sooth larry game oh yeah my brother and i learned how to beat that copy protection just by guessing our way through the trivia that you know we could not make heads or tails of but our favorite thing in that game was you start right in front of this bar called lefties or something and we would go left into the alley and get beat up and die and then you go to the larry factory they give you another larry or you would uh walk forward towards the monitor into traffic and get hit by a car and we thought these two things were the height of comedy i don't even know if we ever went in the bar we opened the game just to do that that was one of the more adult games not crazy lewd but you know I played like three years.

41:55Oh there's only so lead you could get in that kind of pixels can't you? Well no but they would put you in Oh scenarios okay got it. Yeah the scenarios. Al Lowe was great. He like made a lot of like adult like he would be one of those guys that would probably like write a humor column in Playboy or something but it was definitely there's a lot of shenanigans a lot of you chasing after women a lot of in jokes you know about like dating back and then at that time uh that are totally inappropriate today uh but if they were very much uh games of their time and adult games were a very small subset of that of the video gaming genre on the pc but there are a lot of them right i remember going to the uh uh so in game pc gaming magazines you would have these ads from companies that no names that would mail you a floppy disk and would have like four or five games, like anything you picked, and they would charge you like$2.99 a game.

42:58And they had an adult section, which either meant that you had really lewd text adventure games, Imagine Zork, except a lot of adult content, or just out and out very visually, not even suggestive, just you know uh very racy content right like you know i don't know how the best way to describe it but it was just it was definitely for guys who spent a lot of time alone yeah well because i grew up a nintendo kid uh i found out as an adult that they had uh whenever things came to the states they kind of painted more pixels on top of certain uh certain tops and shorts to make women more modest yeah you know there was a culture at that time in japan where because a lot of in fact almost the entire gaming industry and anime industry and manga manga industry were heavily young men they did a lot of racy content right i'm not even talking like keko camp common you know style stuff but like really like whoa i don't think that's appropriate at all right you would have characters that would be alluding to like sort of a gender norm uh that were totally inappropriate and it was just like now but it was considered normal because a lot in japanese society it was just considered to be sort of a veneer that you just put on put on something like like wrapping paper like oh isn't that funny it's like no but i mean maybe in japan it is all right i gotta take a big left turn to end this what was the first game that you hated like i did not enjoy whether start to finish or something happened middle of the game that made you just turn on this game and to this day you do not like i do not like the original wizardry games at all i just can't stand them there it's not even the wire graphics but it was so tedious to play it um i it kind of sucks because i bought one i thought i would really enjoy it and i was like man this is you you you played a game back then because you spent money on it and you felt obliged to like i spent 30 i should play this and i was like man this game really just makes me annoyed like i just nothing about it just the grinding i didn't feel added anything to the to like how my experience was doing.

45:33And to this day, I look at people getting excited over Wizardry. I guess some people like certain things. Wizardry was not my thing. Ultima was the same way for me as well. Ultima played okay, but at the same time, I thought it was just a little too grind heavy. And to this day, I hate grindy games. Unless games, unless grinding is relatively easy, just doing, and that's why I hate JRPGs, doing classic battles with your party and like, just let me finish this. I hate that part of it. That's why I like action RPGs like Diablo, where you just shoot things and then you move on and you shoot things and you move on or slash things and you move on.

46:22Diablo is a funny counterpoint there because most people consider the modern Diablos to be pretty gosh darn grindy to get what you want it oh no this is the thing though it's mindless grindy like with with a party grind i gotta like sit there for 10 minutes like oh do i want a level up or a heal someone with my cleric oh hold on my my magic user has one magic missile left better throw that like just just let it i want it done with right like i want to and so the thing that Diablo does well was the loot. Loot back then on Wizardry sucked. A couple of gold coins, crappy weapons that you couldn't use until you were more buffed and then buff out your character.

47:06In certain cases, it's too heavy. This is the thing. Back then, your characters were limited to a certain number of items. Too many, they couldn't move. In fact, if you overloaded a character, their hit points would drop. You had to be very super selective about which stuff you kept and which ones you threw away it's like man if i wanted this much work i would have gotten a job and at least i would get paid at the end of the month see now i feel spoiled on console because oh man was i ever and i was i say that like it's past tense i am still currently an item hoarder in games like oh yeah do i use this elixir do i use this like i kept every sword in final fantasy 2 and i turned out to be a genius about that because eventually you get edge the ninja who can throw weapons and i was like yes i am ready for this but see you couldn't do that before that was the thing and that was so annoying it's like what i can't keep all these weapons like the the whole thing like for example skyrim like you get like a you get like a a locker where you could dump stuff that you have too many of in your in your items list right you just put it in and then you can pull it out later none of that like you literally if you picked and dumped the wrong thing it was lost forever and you were screwed and i was like man really like games were not forgiving i know people love to talk about the the good old days where games really made you appreciate the the art and it's like no i mean these games are meant for recreation and de-stressing and all it's doing is the opposite and this is why we talked about zen games last year for experiment yeah but like you talk about the things you hate and uh about uh like the weight items and stuff though i do wonder how much of that was driven also by memory and then they just kind of spun it off as like a feature that affected you as a reason for why you couldn't carry everything i mean i i understand that but also you have a floppy disk just save it on the floppy disk you save the save game on the floppy disk i and on the other side like i'm fine with grinding grinding doesn't bother me because like sometimes like i said like before school my brother and i would just turn it on and you know go fight outside of eblin for an hour and be really happy about that but what i hated was pixel perfect movement and a lot of nes games had let's let's let's call them wonky uh hitboxes where you think you're clear but you're not because an invisible pixel is touching an invisible and there was a game like i kind of hate love it now just because of like the story of it in my life, but it was called Bugs Bunny's Birthday Blowout.

49:40And it was a platformer like Mario, you jump up and down, you go left to right. Thought I would love it. I love Looney Tunes. Isn't this going to be great? It was hard as heck. Oh my goodness. My brother and I, we could pass a couple of levels. We could fight some of the bosses, but it was just too hard and too frustrating to keep up that level of perfection going through. And then one night, got out of bed to get some water and mom is at the last boss like she did this to us in mario too where it turns out like she pretended to be bad playing with us uh like you know like making a big theatrical thing about like oh no i fell down the cliff or i got hit by the first goomba but turns out she was a platforming god and uh so it was really fun to watch her play and like eventually we got her to play in front of us like don't be embarrassed about gaming mom come on let's play together and there was a bonus game too in birthday blowout where if you get like the max thing you get like 50 extra lives but it would play the sound for extra lives and the little jingle 50 times so as we're watching this go mom's like well let's go eat this is just gonna run before we can do the next level but like in terms of playing the game hated it in terms of watch my mom play the game loved it uh yeah you know the one game i could say that i hated at first but then sort of came around liking was zork zork initially was sort of confounding because i really didn't understand the concept behind it it's not that i didn't like text adventure games i played games like amnesia uh i played other zork or other infocon games like border zone um and those made sense but something about zork just really bugged me until i understood that he was just kind of trying to create his version of um colossal cave and so everything was underground and the grew was there because he needed a mechanism to get the characters to move forward you know about the game is oh that's where the grew is from yeah uh and you know it's it it works out sort of at the end um and i thought it was kind of cool once i started getting a hand of it i liked it so much i actually got beyond zork a couple of the other uh zork games uh but overall i mean just just wizardry it was just the one like uh yeah well for people my age the thing that we know probably best about like those little text adventure games is uh do you know Homestar Runner?

52:13Yes. The cartoon. So Strong Bad did a video on Vampire's Castle. It's not a real game. It was apparently like in this world, a text adventure, and then the cheat had done graphics for it. Anyway, it's a long video. It's like half an hour of Strong Bad playing this game. And I laughed my ass off through it. I rewatch it like once a year because I was like, yep, this is all I need to get the flavor of text-based adventure games. I don't need any more than this. I mean, it's everyone who plays it, they get really sucked in. And the best way I can describe it is it's sort of a really well done text adventure game, like with a really big like rich parser is kind of like talking to an LLM.

52:58Like it interacts with you, not at that high level, but close enough where you feel like you're in the world. Like Amnesia, that entire game takes place on man in manhattan and so you walk around you talk to people going stuff uh going to hotels and things and it works really well when it's done well but if you have kind of a a sort of a a low rent or low effort uh version it really puts you off like i played one of the first um lord of the ring games and it was a text adventure slash rpg but it was all text adventure and man was that game clunky like you didn't get the feel for anything it just felt like you were you had mary pippin and and uh and uh frodo and i was like i guess it just doesn't feel like it just feels like i'm supposed to do something and i already know how the game's supposed to where you're supposed to go because i read the book but i can't do it in the game it's very frustrating there were a lot of you know a lot of games with really big um uh felt very ambitious but didn't have the skill or the technology to fill in that ambition it's like me trying to play crusader kings one day one day i will figure out that game because it seems super fun and the stories you can make but uh i just get scared about games with big maps you know big i don't mind games with big mess i don't like games that make you wander aimlessly to find something to do that's like give me a story give me a quest line in whatever and that's one reason why i think mmorpgs are so big on doing events and other things is they just need you to get to play something so you'll pay for another month yeah well i am on break from final fantasy 14 right now because I think I'm going to take a pause until the next expansion because I'm sucked into Pocopia right now.

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