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PLAY RETRO 235: X-Men: Legends

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“Your call has been forwarded to an automatic voice message system. A missed call doesn't feel like anything. No red flag, no notification screaming at you, it just disappears into your call log.”From the transcript

Raven Software turned Marvel's mutant super-team into a four-character action RPG in 2004, combining real-time brawling, character progression, destructible environments and couch co-op. We dig into X-Men Legends, then follow the formula into X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse and the strange handheld versions that squeezed the mutant RPG onto N-Gage and PSP.


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PLAY RETRO 235: X-Men: Legends

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Play Retro Show — PLAY RETRO 235: X-Men: Legends. Machine-transcribed; use the interactive transcript above to jump the player to any line.

Your call has been forwarded to an automatic voice message system. A missed call doesn't feel like anything. No red flag, no notification screaming at you, it just disappears into your call log. And nine times out of ten, that was someone ready to hand you money. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O. The business phone system built so you never miss a call. Here's what I like about it. All your calls, texts, and voice mails live in one place, so anyone on your team can pick up a conversation, see the full history, and respond fast. No more, wait, who talked to this customer last? And if you're worried about after hours leads slipping through, Quo's optional built-in AI agent can answer questions and even book appointments while your team's offline. It's the number one rated business phone system on G2, and over 90,000 businesses already trust it to stay reachable. Money is on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free, plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to Quo.com-tek.

That's Q-U-O.com-tek. You need something from Loves, but your day is already jam-packed. Since my Loves rewards and my Loves Pro Rewards members get free same day delivery, we'll make the run for you. Seriously, just lock in your order and we'll do the rest. See you soon. Members get more at Loves. $25 minimum and loyalty membership required. Order eligible items by 2PN. Subject to weight and size restrictions and availability in terms of Loves.com-slash shipping terms. Today on RVN World News, we examine the growing mutant menace. It's a concern of worldwide proportions. This scene took place in Russia two weeks ago as a young mutant stood into the pience of the military. And in the far east, the authorities attempted to quell an uprising at a mutant camp, but they had little success. Yeah.

Magma. Magma man. Look out. Magnido. You're less neat than mag. Magna. Love a girl. Hello and welcome. Why didn't that turn down? Hello. Hey, welcome to. Oh, hello. That was weird. Hello and welcome to Play Retro. I'm one of your host, Scott Johnson. This is a show about old video games. And when I need some heroes in my Diablo gameplay, I don't play Diablo. I play this game. Take my might, Magnido. I am no ex chicken. And watch out. Because now I have a squad guy squad goals. Zipzap. Kethume. Now I am sure the sequel will be just as good, right? Right. Right. And I'm your other host. Brian Dunnoway. And my mutinability is to fail at squad-based action RPG. Dang it. But that's okay because the bald guy in the wheelchair, what's his name? Wheels? Who they ironically call professor of the ex is teaching me all the things I need to know.

Like how to bamf and stick in all the right places. Stop trying to touch me, rogue. You ex chicken. We both use the next chicken. Ex chicken. Here, let's play it for real. So people get the real deal here. Ex chicken. There you go. Greatest thing, Magnido ever said. Well, loud. Right. What do they call you? Wheels? Yeah. Yeah. It's a good name to me. Do that. That's exactly what he said. What's Wolverine's character said in the movie? Oh, the first excellent movie. Full of so many great lines that we all love and hate. We will talk about the movies this week because we're going to talk about the X-Men legends a little bit. Even though that movie is retro at this point, yeah, this this game is also retro. We're going to talk all about who's related. No, not not at all. Thank goodness. X-Men legends. It was called and it was a pretty rad little game. Came from Raven's software. We'll talk about it in a second. But first, what we got up to this week in retro, I got to tell you a funny story. How's that a Taco Bell? I've loved it already.

Grab my order. It's just about there's no more cheap to eat anymore. So that's where I went. And a guy comes to the thing or this lady comes to the thing, hands me all my stuff. She goes, did you want any hot sauces? I said, you got that Dell scorch-o in there? Oh. Because that's what they call it. Yeah, yeah. And they went. Because normally people, I'll bet they get a lot of people going, you have fire sauce and it's like the wrong restaurant. That's a Taco Bell thing. So I know to ask for Dell scorch-o. Okay. All right. So I say Dell scorch-o, please. She goes, all right, I'll get you a handful of those. She leaves and gives some dude back there the job of grabbing the Dell scorch-o and bringing it out. And he comes out. His name is not Dale, but he came out with a big, heaping hand of Dell scorch-o packets. Here's some right here. What? You got leftovers? Oh, my wife cleaned them up. I love what Scott tells us. You're not going to believe what I have to show you. Oh, yeah. My wife took them all. She probably put them in the fridge. But anyway, I probably would have left them out. So she's right to do it. But he shows up with a giant handful. And he reaches out to show him to me an office neck as a necklace.

Yeah. Yeah. And as he's reaching, it swings out from under his work shirt on top of a t-shirt. Okay. So it's previously hidden. And it's an, I couldn't get a picture because that's weird. But it's a super NES controller, uh, but it's all gold. And it comes, it comes swinging out in dangling like right in front of me. And I went, dude, that is a rad necklace. And he goes, that's cool. Thanks, man. Here's some more salt. You're some more Dell scorch. It was great. It was great. So I was, uh, I just shout out to that guy. I don't know what his name was. And I really wish I'd have gotten a petro. You were an interest, matching chains that day. No, no, no. It's very retro, though. 16-bit era of freaking controller, man. He's a, that is. He looked like a Gen Z, I don't know, 1920 maybe. I wonder where he gets such a thing. Yeah. I don't know either. I'd like to find one. Actually, look, can we just do a quick search? Gold, uh, SNES controller, neck lace. Necklace. Necklace. Oh, yeah. Just might be it.

No, that's different. Well, okay. So Etsy has a bunch. Maybe that's where he got it. I didn't ask. There it is. I guess it's silver. Okay. Here I'll show it to you. Ring gold. So maybe got it off the set. Maybe it was silver originally. This is it right here. He's been taco sweating on it. That is sweet. It was cool. I I want to say it was a little more definitive with some maybe. Mel, no, it was still it was. That's pretty nice. Maybe it was gold. I don't know. I can't remember. It was metal like this. It's hard to compare a picture to your real life experience with the Taco Bell for us on lights. Striking it. You know, so yeah, it's hard to recreate that. I mean, there's one like like this one's close, but the difference here is this one. That is hanging on the end of it. Not the middle of it. On the side. Yeah, on the edge. And it's larger than this. So I don't say game life. Nice. Nice. Right. They can't say Nintendo. No, can't. Yeah, they say Nintendo. They get trouble with Nintendo. Gonna do. It's gonna fly to America and yank my chains off.

I don't think so. They see they see season to assist the dumbest things. Like the most we need no I know their channels. They just like after yeah, they're like a business. It's not they're like Barney five man. They're just so excited about it. They get very much time. They see it. They get their little one bullet out. And they're one bullet. I forgot. Well, all right. Anyway, that's about all the retro. I got up to this week. It was very busy week. Lots going on. Lots of cool stuff. In fact, if you wanted to let your retro shine, I mean as well promote this here. You feel like drawn like a dumb retro thing? Yes, I do. Oh, good. Because I got a place for you. It's called it's called my drawings.com. This is a site that I launched this week for people who just want to get creative and do something dumb. And by that, I mean head over and just draw the first thing on the page is just a flat thing to draw. And you can just start drawing with your mouse or if you got a tablet or something, that's even cooler. It does it supports layers. Tons of colors, including a color picker. I can even go into the millions if you really wanted to.

There's a paint bucket tool, a race tool. I've lots of control over it. When you save it, it pops it into this gallery. You can see some recent ones here. But if you hit the gallery, it will show everybody. And these are all the most recent. And there are some crazy cool stuff in here. Like for example, let me look at that. Did Scott draw that one picture down there? Which one was it? Oh, I don't know. Any of them really. I drew this fact down here. I drew that right. That's right. Why isn't this? Hold on. This being dumb. No, it's not. It's doing great. It's just my browser. There. My my drawers.com is my drawing. Drawing. My drawings with an S. My drawings. Okay. I did this bird. So he's just, oh, I love the bird. He's great. Someone made a jug of pee pee. Cause the jokes be inside jokes. Inside jokes. Let's see. It's fun. How did that garbage feel? Pretty good garbage. I did this little turtle thing scotch. I like whoever did this. Was it? Oh, that looks like. Nagle. Nagle. Did okay. There's some, look at that. Good. That's a good Ninja Turtle. Ooh, that is a great Ninja Turtle. Anyway, it's free.

You don't sign in. There are no cookies. It is like the internet used to be. Just to go do shit. There are fun. I love how it's like, you don't say there's no login. You say there's no cookies. And it's like no cookies. Yeah, no cookies for you. But yeah, you don't, it takes no information of yours or from you. The Spider-Man means. The Spooderman's good. It's frog and pants. That's fun. That's good. I like this one a lot. Oh crap. Look at that lizard down there. How long does somebody, geez, I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. Some of these people are serious. Just look at this one. Oh, Nagle. That was good. Looks like some, yes, he's gonna MTV stuff right there. Look at that. Yeah. McFarreg did that. Somebody named Nose, Noseerson did a nose. So that's cool. You don't even have to use it. You don't have to use your real name. You're usually gonna fake it. Just be some fake name. You don't want to be. And you can download your images. You can see here if you want to download it. It just goes on forever right now. We're up to about 14 pages. A hundred and I don't know. You know what's missing here? A lot of retro drawings. That's what I need some. I need some controllers in there

and in the what-nots. That's what I need. Way down here on page 14, I want to say there's a sonic. Nope, let's try another page. It should be all sonics. Sonics all the time. Brian did this cute little peanuts thing down here. Yeah, yeah. I like to end the bad at 530 in the morning. Yeah, on my phone. He really did do it early. It was like, that's pretty good, Homer. I like this did devil face. That is cool. Isn't that cool? It's okay. That person's maybe disturbed. I don't know. Oh, this guy. Look at this. I love this. That is great. Holy smokes that skills and the talents in the community. I know. They're amazing. So not to belabor the point, but where's the sonic? I swear I had one. Well, you know what to do. There he is. There's one. Got to poop fast. Pages. Got to poop fast. Got to poop fast. It doesn't matter if you're a good artist or if you suck just the fun of it. Just go do it. And I'm going to go to a bad artist. There's a big. You can make your pen, man. Oh my god. And it's all smooth. Oh, and I also increased the canvas size. So the idea is, even if you feel like you're a little shaky or it looks a little shitty up close,

when it exports, it now goes to the old size, which is still large. But because you created it larger, it has the effect of like shrinking it, making some of your squiggles a little less squiggly. That kind of thing. Oh, okay. Anyway, let the computer do the, do the adjusting. Yeah, let the computer do it. All the heavy work. So anyway, real simple, super easy to use, free. And I think we need more retro shit. So get in there and do that. Mybrowndroers.com. Yeah, my brown drawers. No, mydrawings.com. Mydrawings.com. If you have any thoughts, there's a discord link there too. Okay, let's get to what Brian got up to this week. What'd you do, man? What'd you do? Well, you know I had to get all my retro on. So my brother calls me up and he's like, hey, I'm like, hey, and he's like, what do you want? And he's like, and jeez, talked to brother much. And I'm like, yeah, what's up? And he's like, I got some NESs that somebody gave me. And they're just turning on and flashing red. I was like, oh, sounds like I need to clean the, clean some contacts. And he's like, okay. And I'm like, I'm like, he's like,

can you do that for me? And I'm like, bring it. And so he brought me to and both of them kind of look like this. Let me see if I can. Can I switch to my other camera? Maybe give you a little bit of a look here because that's kind of, as you can tell, it is kind of yellow and dirty. And I'm like, you're gonna, you're gonna clean that? He's like, whatever. And I'm like, okay, so I took, I took that when I worked on that one. And then I had the other one look pretty much the same as that. And I cleaned it up and I replaced it. Oh, hello, Brian. Wanna go to the front side? Oh, hello. Yep, so as you can tell, here's the OG, here's the original. And I just did some clean. All I do is this wash off. I said, hey, brother, just wash your freaking console off, man. I always forget you had a brother. I don't know why you forget that. Yeah, yeah. Why don't you know, we don't get to hang out much, but you know, he's still there. And so I couldn't get, I cleaned the cards, I cleaned everything, I cleaned the insides, the pins and everything. Wasn't quite working still. They were loose, very loose, but you can order, and this is a no solder solution.

If you ever have your NES and it won't like, it's like, my cards, they'll, they go in, they feel so loosey, goosey, and nothing's playing in the, in the power lights coming off and on and off and on. It could very well be this. You can pick up some more recent ones. Try to make sure that you maybe don't order it from Ali Bob and maybe you have some luck there. I don't know. Anyway, some of these pins are a little too tight, and they will, you know, basically wear out your card. If you get one of this too tight, but yeah, all you do is you own a screw bunch of screws, you pull this off the back of the board, because it just slides in there and you put it in. And then the next day, oh, a Bippity Bippity, boop. Brother, your plan, some video games. It worked. And he was so excited to keep sending videos and of the gameplay, I loaded up by you, Billy. Great game. Because I knew he liked that game. Yeah, plus your brother's a big old red neck, right? Isn't that the deal? Yeah, yeah.

It's older or younger than you. But aren't we all? He's younger than me. Younger, always little brother. Okay. Yeah, all my sisters and brothers are younger than me. You're the oldest. I have 20. I'm kidding. I have four. I didn't know that I didn't know that I'm going by far. I've known Brian for 20 years. I didn't know any of the shit. Yeah, yeah. I was it, I was, I was the only child of eight years. But then there you go. Yeah. So I was able to help him out, got him ready. And now it has to meet him, meet up again and hand him off and he'll be playing some by you, Billy, in no time. He's still out there in the Carolina somewhere, I assume. Near you. Yeah, just right the road. Not too far. It's like, it's far enough away that you can't, you just don't go every weekend, but you know, we can occasion each other. He's like about 30, 40 minutes away. It's not bad. You know, it's just, yeah, it's not bad. We both have kids and family. And that kind of round trip can sometimes be just enough to keep you away. Yeah. Yeah, that'll wear you out. I get it. That'll wear you out. Yeah, that'll wear you out.

Unlike the Del Taco where they had cool retro shit on the guy's neck and a good price taco. Oh, look at your Xbox, your white Xbox. And I, yeah, like you say, yeah, I had this out. So I thought, well, I got turned up. My eyes will show you. This is my, this is my white Xbox OG that got off PayPal years ago. A guy had recapped everything, did all this. I got it off PayPal. I didn't want to. Did I say PayPal? You did. Did you mean eBay? We were talking about PayPal earlier. Of course I meant eBay. Oh, and eBay used to own PayPal. So it's, yeah, no, it's fine. Cause we used to even own them. They sold it to Microsoft after they bought it. Yeah, yeah. So at a brain fart, whatever. Anyway, that'll good. There you go. I'm like, hey, what are you thinking? I want to go check out PayPal.com. They're selling Xboxes, everybody. Say what, Halo, what do you got? Oh, come out of all. Look at that. Yeah. Yeah, we played that one. Do you see where activitions like taking back to Halo and doing, oh, it's going to be fun. Think it's going to be bad. All right. I don't feel good about most of what they said. The announcements. I mean, yeah, I don't either. Yeah.

I also don't feel good about the fact that World of Warcraft's having a moment because they announced the forever version of the game. And everyone's excited. Like universally, people are stoked. The bait is going really well. People are jazzed about this direction. And even then, we just found out yesterday, some pretty reliable rumor sources that Blizzard's about to lay off a bunch of people. So great. Oh, great. Great. Well done, industry. You just keep having losses right after your wins. Well done. They're all profitable. Profitable is hell, but you still got to fire people. It's fantastic. That's right. Yeah, no. Hate it. Hate it. Here's the good news. The good news, everyone. The good news is there's nothing to hate about today's show. We're going to get right into it. Here you go. We will. We'll talk about the aforementioned game that we're super excited about because this game at the time was a big deal. It was a good game. It's still a good game. Raven Software, they were known mostly for a bunch of PC stuff, which is weird.

They come around and do the Marvel first, just their first console things. It is. You're right. Absolutely PC people up until then. Prior to that, famously for me, anyway, they were like, it's software's expansion team, essentially. So Raven would end up getting projects like, well, they did Hexen or Heretic. Or maybe Boretik. Heretic. They do Hexen as well. I'm pretty sure Heretic because one of the developers, I watched a really good interview for this week's and he was talking about that. He was coming off Heretic. But I think they might have done Hexen too, but I'm not sure about that. I remember that might be it. They shared a shared team or something. It didn't never, it never made that either of those internally, but they were like supportive of the whole thing. Yeah. Anyway, Raven was cool. I liked him already. So then they turn around and go, hey, we made this four character action RPG in 2004. It's like brawling, had character progression, destructible environments, couch co-op.

I don't remember what the loot situation was exactly until this playthrough. That's not exactly the oblo levels of like, oh, Wolverines got 14 new claws to choose. It's not like that. So when we say the oblo, do not expect the itemization that the oblo is really famous for. And the developers, once again, I listened to some great interviews and they were talking about being inspired by Diablo. So I mean, obviously many nods to that. So if you do go like, oh, this guy Diablo like elements, of course, it does. Yeah. Intentional. It's unfortunate though that they kind of forgot all that. The sequel because the sequel is not a great showcase of the Diablo part. Like they tried to make sort of a different game. I'll say this to people and if you know, you know, so, you know, if you don't know what I'm talking about, it's okay. But if you're out there and you're listening and you remember when relic entertainment made Don of War II, it was at the time kind of radical because they went from like the

regular RTS of tons of units, highlight them all, zerg them into town, that kind of thing. They took the 40K universe instead made squad based RTS elements, kind of like their World War II game they made. I think we just talked about that in fact as a something that just turned retro. The, um, it's that called anyway, the last week, anyway, last week. I'm all in the place. Was it last week for last, actually, I think was it? It's down here at the bottom. It was. It's going to bug me if I don't say it. Company of heroes, it was last week. Company heroes. So they did that and then they took a bunch of those ideas, smartly, in my opinion, and added those to the, uh, to the, um, the mix. And so Don of War II had these squad tactics and this, this, it was an amazing game. Like two is just like an Alzheimer. Three comes out completely missed the mark. Hmm. And that's how I feel about the second in this series. Interest. I think the first one's amazing. I think it is like genuinely groundbreakingly good. And then rise of apocalypse, the second one. Man, anytime they put apocalypse on this stuff, movies are otherwise.

Just takes a big wet shit. And I don't know why. So that's a good question. So they, uh, you'll get to talk about the differences right now. We should do that right now. It's got, so the second one took a little different angle. They pretty much just took what they had before because it, they knew they had a hit on their hands and they took the same engine and they just started tweaking some stuff. So much the same gameplay, but some balancing that went from, from some of the criticisms they have in the first one. And one of the biggest upgrades though is the cinematics. The cinematics went from, uh, almost laughable, uh, in the first one to really like, really kind of some right now. Blobs picking a guy up off. Is that, oh, he's picking up magma. Anyway, the first one's kind of hilarious. Yeah. As far as the cinematics go. The second one, they really up their game, man. Well, it was a Raven though. Who did the second one? It was, uh, no, well, Raven still did it, but they, they contracted out, uh, the cinematics.

But so you're right. I thought they didn't do the game at all. I guess they did. No, they, they did the game as far as is, is from the interviews I read and maybe I missed something. Well, uh, and who knows? I'm not like it's that big a deal if it was somebody else. Yeah. Well, I mean, they, they could have also done some things where they're like hard out, you know, it's parts of it, but you may be right. Yeah. It was still technically Raven, although different director looks like that's maybe the difference. I believe it was a different. But look at this thing. Like, it's this great three-quarter view thing, but with a, with a camera that's dynamic, so it's not a fixed camera. It doesn't feature random, procedurally generated levels like the oblos does. It doesn't need to though. Everything's kind of crafted, you know, you are, you are in the city or wherever you're fighting or whatever. And I'll tell you what, this game for a game that's that old now, and I, and I kind of think PS2 games, you know, they're, they're at the stage now where they don't look that great to me. They, they, they, I mean, if you're comparing them to new games, I guess I was what I'm saying. It doesn't hold up like it used to, but this game really does because again, the camera

pulls out and it has a way of creating a sense of detail that isn't actually there because you're pulled out. You're not writing where the character is. So this really worked for me visually this week messing around with this game. Yeah, so it's great. You don't really see the seams of, oh, it's an old game until you do get into the cinematics and then you realize like, oh, yeah. And a lot of load times before. I don't like all the load times. Yeah, the load times. And so that was one thing that kind of threw me off at first because I didn't think about that because I'm so used to just, I'm so used to, this is why you know it's retro. The freaking transitions where you go from one area to the next, you know, it's just how it used to be. You would, you'd have to go to an area and you have to click a button and then you would basically teleport to the next area or wait while it loads. Right. You don't have that as much now. Lots of times you'll just jump through. Yeah, here I am. Yeah, and it's, and it's, or they're bigger worlds. They're more seamless or they do tricks to me. The transition. What was the thing Nathan Drake would do?

He'd go through a small crevice in a cave and that was actually loading the next level but it made you feel like you were just moving. Yeah, I can't, I like that. I can't, I like that. Or a crawflator too. I always like that. It makes you feel kind of weird but it's also like, oh, smart. You're going to play that remake of one you're working on. You know about that? Of course. Of course I'm going to try it. Yeah, it got to try it. Kind of looks good. They town. Anyway, that's not what's important because right here what you got is some beat him up, sweet him up. Sweet him up. No, okay. So the criticisms of the time were that you get promised to play at the time. As the X-Men, right? So you're thinking, oh, well, X-Men are all about their team, right? A squad game. You got four player co-op. But what if I, how do I start? I want to play four player. You can't, you got to start and get through a certain portion of the game where you're playing solo as Wolverine. To me, that's fine. That's what I wanted to do. Okay. I like to, I like to be trained on the game mechanics and I'm like, no better answer

than Wolverine but it's not for everybody. So yeah, I learned everything I could. It did seem to take a little while before I got to our first second, which is Cyclops, which is appropriate if you've just, just feels right. That seemed like when I was reading the X-Men comics, the Uncanny X-Men, it was, it seemed like almost all the stories revolved around there too, the conflict between those two. Right. Yeah. They would be, they share sort of a love, love interest they have. Right. Depends on which story you're reading but they are always in those. Annoyed with how each other handles things. Yeah. It's one of the great conflicts. To me, it's the Batman Superman of Marvel. Right. In that the conflict is half the fun of watching them interact. And I believe it was a man of action, which was who was counseling or what's the worst of what I'm looking for when you hire someone to be experts on the matter anyway. What's the worst of the matter where the, was a man of action, which was a group of Marvel

writers and artists who had worked for Marvel previously. And so they kind of guided how the, the stories should unfold. And so a lot of the stories you'll encounter here were very familiar to me because I read a lot of Uncanny X-Men. So I was like, oh, we're going to explore that story from the comic book. Yeah. And so if you like that, you'll love this. Yeah. It gives it an authenticity. It's not just action and no story. The story's actually pretty good. Right. I don't know if they did a tie-in comic. I meant to look that up. Sometimes they do that. I, well, I think this was during the time of the comic should have been ultimate X-Men. You'll know that it's ultimate X-Men or X-Men ultimate. Ultimate. You mean this game? No. No, the comic series. All the comic stories. Yeah. Yeah. It was ultimate everything. So, say this is just X-Men legends. All the ultimate's in supreme and words like that. Yeah, it was ultimate because I remember because one of the things that the avatar graphic here, the head graphic of Wolverine is more of that era.

Right. It looks more like that so that Uncanny X-Men. It's got a good black suit from the movie though. I don't like that. At least initially. Can't you skin it with something later on everything? Yeah. You know, I don't know about that part. I didn't even get to look at him. He's pissed. There is the face. Mer. But you can collect the comic covers to look at later when you get back to the mansion, which is, which is the core. And it's not only the hub of this game, it's also the heart of this game. So you start out, you do some fighting. You pick up on, you pick up cyclops along the way. You go up against Mystique and the blob to rescue a new mutant, not part of the new mutants, but a new mutant that you all have discovered. And you're trying to get to her first and take her back to Professor X. So he can eat her. I don't really do it. Oh, he's so good trainer. So you're out there and that's what you're doing. You get back to the mansion. And then when you get to the mansion, you play as Magma. Now, that is a real character from the comic books, but they've named her Allison here and they give her a little bit different stories.

But she essentially has the same powers. And you're getting an opportunity to explore those powers and get to feel like you're creating a character somewhat. But because you get a chance to put in your stats, you can up your level, be a little bit tougher, be a little more defensive, wherever you want to spend your points, wherever you want to get your extra powers. Because you can use, I think you can map up to four powers, which is the face buttons you can go to. I played this on the Xbox this week. And of course, I use the face buttons and I, once again, it's like every time when I play the Xbox, I forget that they don't have shoulder buttons. Instead, they have the white and black buttons down at the bottom near the face buttons. I always forget that. But, but I wasn't going, oh, so you get, you can choose the, you know, their power-ups and stuff they can do. Or was I going to wear that? Don't remember, but anyway, you go back to the mansion, right?

You go back to the X mansion. Like you do. You can, that's right, you can, that's where you can do, it really puts this game to, it feels like you're a part of it. Everything is shiny and that's important because once you get to the second one, isn't no longer shiny. This one, everything is perfectly, you know, conditioned. You, you've seen, the only thing this kind of has like the movies did is like the mansion and the movies from X-Men. Remember how shiny everything fell in stainless steel and metallic. They keep that. Very fancy in there. Yeah. Very fancy. They keep that here. But you can go to a library and check out the covers you collected. This game rewards you for exploration, which is what you want. I like that in a game. Sure. Yeah. I did too. But one of the really cool things back at the mansion is there's, there's some computers from the, I guess from the early 2000s. And you will have no problem finding them. I got to do as follow the loud 80 millimeter fan sounds in the game because they, they

do. They're like, what are you like? What is that noise? And so you go and you find it and you can play trivia and ask all kinds of great trivia questions from, from the comic books. I think back in the day that sound was masked by the actual sound of my PS2 and making too much noise. I had to turn off. I usually have the game have been playing up on a screen in front of me so that I can kind of, you know, have visual cues and reminders of what I did. I didn't do that this week because the Xbox is so loud. I've ran it before while we've discussed things and you're like, what's that noise? It's my Xbox spinning it up. OG, OG PS3 was way worse, by the way. Way worse. Yeah. Yeah. That was pretty loud. You turn the thing on. I would just go, ha. I love it. But, um, yeah, back at the, but you can, at the back of the mansion, you can choose, uh, word to play for your next mission. Um, you'll have been collecting, uh, like little, you collect this currency.

I can't remember what this called, but you collect this currency along the way. And it looks like little energy boxes or something. Mm-hmm. Uh, if this was, if this was Transformers, I'd say it was some energon or something. Is that right? I mean, I mean, no, that was, that was definitely energon that they had to, right? Right. Um, but I don't know. And here it just reminded me of like, uh, your call has been forwarded to an automatic voice message system. A missed call doesn't feel like anything. No red flag, no notification screaming at you. It just disappears into your call log. And nine times out of 10, that was someone ready to hand you money. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O. The business phone system built so you never miss a call. Here's what I like about it. All your calls, texts and voice mails live in one place. So anyone on your team can pick up a conversation, see the full history and respond fast. No more, wait, who talked to this customer last? And if you're worried about after hours lead slipping through, Quo's optional built-in AI

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I don't know, XP, or just like wasn't it just XP? They're just XP, no, no, no, no, you're gaining XP as you go along. In the election, no, you can either have it, you can't auto level up in this one, but you'll level up and then you have to apply your points, right? Manually, there's a button you can click. If you go in there, it's this extra RPG, you have to pop out and to menus a lot, which can actually be good because it allows you to think for a minute and stop fighting and go, what have I been failing at? Well, my fighting seems to be subpar. Maybe I need to increase that. I'm dying really quick. I need to increase my defense and stuff. You can go in there and I usually just used auto most of the time when I was doing it. The energy that you're picking up, the way of the currency is you go and you can trade that in for supplies.

You can purchase purchase. Why did it feel like I would max out on it and have too much of it? We're not talking about the thing below is life bar, are we? Not that. No, no, no. So there is energy. Maybe that's, yeah, I probably wouldn't think. I probably wouldn't think that. I probably wouldn't think that. I wouldn't think that. So then I got you all confused. The other thing I'm talking about is the currency thing. There is energy you pick up and there is also, we call the flying red scroll bag that you pick up that gives you health. Yes. Flying red scroll bag. These are the bottles. They're bottles. They are bottles. They look like you've scrolled back. But I'll tell you this. I was pretty early on in the game that I was instantly annoyed with the choice between do we make this have good game mechanics or do we make it as true to the role playing part as you could get?

So you start out as Wolverine. He's got regenerative health. Wolverine should never get smacked and then his health bar stay at the same level. It should always come back up. That's a trait of his. It's a trait of his, but you don't get it right away. I feel like if you're going to have Wolverine, I thought it was in there from the kick. No, no. No, no, no, no, no. He does. He does have the ability to increase it so that it does, right? But when you first start, he does it. I'm a little annoyed with that because I was like, ah, that's stupid. You should just have that as a trait. That's weird. Yeah, but it's a game mechanic and they're probably were like, we got to start with the first character where everybody loves to play as Wolverine. And plus he's, you know, he's kind of a solo guy. So it makes sense if we're going to do a trainer, which was probably a foolish mistake at the beginning where they probably should have started with more. They did in the second, when the second, when you start playing four players, four characters,

two X-Men and two evil, you got Magneto and two evils of the brotherhood of evil. Right. But yeah, for me, the way to solve this is super easy. All they had to do was give him a trait that is regeneration, but have it be super low to start with. And then you can up it. So make it crappier at the beginning, but still make it there. I thought it was. I would like to explain it in the story. Oh, Wolverine just got smacked with the mystique stabbed him with the non-reginative potion or something. I'm sure there's been a comic somewhere that someone's probably done something like that. Oh, yeah. He's had this challenge at some point, right? I know. So I mean, come on. Oh, I do like this though. There's so many things about this game. So you got to follow the blob. We'd mention Diablo. Diablo is kind of, you can choose your own path somewhat. You got like objectives and missions you kind of had to do, but this is a lot more, you

got to go this way, man. It feels a little open world because you start outside, but you got to follow those blob footprints. I mean, you're not going anywhere unless you follow those. He's like, it's very linear in the beginning. Yeah. He's like, he's stepping heavy, man. I should say it's kind of linear throughout. It's pretty much linear all through that. Yeah, I'm okay with that though. If it's a crafted experience, like the way Diablo does it, and they got away from it a little bit in four, but Diablo for the most part, one, two, and three, the big innovative selling point or one of them was that everything was procedural. You'd never see the same dungeon twice. Even though you'd have overarching story points that would take you to certain places, getting there was always going to be a new experience. This game opted for a more crafted linear approach, and I think it works just fine. In fact, if you just keep mixing up the city, I'm not sure that's a good idea. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. So this is fine. I think it's telling a story, and they're leading you through, and I appreciate that,

because I don't want to play Brian's version of the X-Men. I want to play the Marvel experience. I want to draw the Marvel way. I'm in. Yeah. Same. Yeah. I'm glad they made it their own, and I think they did a killer job at this first one for a couple of reasons. One, control and combat is awesome. The characters all have a very different style, and it feels great. You can tell they spend a lot of time making sure all of it felt fun. The other thing I think, like I said earlier, I think the presentation holds up better than I expected. You could probably remaster this thing real easy, you know? Oh, yeah. It would scale up nice. I think it still looks good. So yeah, it's a very cool game. I don't know. We'll ever see another one quite like it again, if I'm honest, because Marvel's now in the position where if they're going to do a game, they're going to spend $300 million on it. And this is not that kind of game. Right. And we got Marvel Alliance. We haven't explored ourselves yet.

So I mean, we've still got more of this in our future. But yeah, modern times, I don't know. Yeah. There's definitely Marvel games that just aren't, it's different now. It's different. Marvel's no longer this bottom run comic creator who almost went bankrupt six times and had to sell their best IPs off to other studios. Like, that is not who they are now. So do not expect a more budgeted approach to any of their games in the future, I would say. I did like in this as well. When you're reading the comics, you would usually, the teams will be dispatched. And the X-Men are always like a rotating cast of characters, right? Based on the longer storyline, you may have certain characters in there. And it was fun to put your own team together because once you get back to the mansion, once you leave out for your second mission, you can put your own team together. And you can choose. I think by default, though, I think they try to give you ice man because it's important

for the second mission because it's all out in the, it's out in the frozen area. So he, he benefits from it. But you can play as beast, colossus, of course, cyclops, Emma Frost, Gambit, ice man, Jean Grey. I didn't, I didn't even see Jubilee. So I don't know if Jubilee is like an unlock, but you definitely got to, what magma later on after you go to the danger room enough times, I suppose. Well, considering that Jubilee is the worst character in the history of X-Men. But Nightcrawler is my favorite. And apparently can also play, play Professor X at some point. At some point. What? Later in the game, I guess. I didn't get that far. Silaq, of course, Rogue, who you can play early on Storm, who's great. I love she, she can bring down the, she can bring down the lightning. It's always fun. Yeah. I love her. So all your, all your favorites are here, I suppose. Which you got to have, man. You got to have it. You got to get, yeah, I got the core. But I was really surprised.

I didn't think I was not expecting to have as much fun as I did. And I think I didn't get to experience everything though. I feel like this would be a really, really fun co-op experience. Yeah, I didn't play it, I didn't play it that way either this time. I did back when I first owned it forever ago. And it was probably just either my kids or some friends, or I don't know how I did it. That was the selling point though. I mean, I mean, okay, so this was, so this was the first generation of games I want to say that had four ports, right? So all of our systems were coming out with four ports. Well, except because PS2 did not have that. Oh, but yeah, but everybody had the little adapter. Yeah, they all had some kind of an adapter. I mean, they're all for you. So you could do it on your SNES. The SNES had an adapter. Yeah. The Genesis, I can't remember if Genesis did. But I definitely think at this time, this era, people were definitely going, let's couch

co-op, let's, let's place some, oh yeah, some couch co-op. And this has been a great game to put in in your collection of games. And I think that's the way people probably maybe mostly played it. But I never did. I was always a single player. Yeah, I'm one of a single player guy, even now. I just sort of like, yeah, I'll play games that are good for many people, but I'd really kind of want to just be in there on my own. It's a sad state of existence. It's a sad existence. Yeah. I mean, you know what? You know what? I feel the way about Diablo. I feel that way about Metroid. I feel that way about this. Every, I just won't play alone. Every time I want, every time I think I want to play with somebody, all I can think of. And I'm sorry for telling on, on my children. I try not to. But I just remember my two, I remember Andrew and Ethan playing like all the Lego games, like Indiana Jones, especially. I just remember, I just remember them just being so annoyed at each other. Oh, yeah, they want to kill each other. It's just like, you're just, you're killing me. We got to work together. Yeah, and where are you?

You're making the screen stop. I can't move until you get over. The co-op experiences really need cooperative playing. Right. So if you're with somebody who's like super into, let's, let's work together. Then that's great. But most kids are trying to find their, their, their power differentials and. Yeah. They don't want to play together. They want to do their own thing. I'm going to play with you. But this game gives you the option to play with other people or, since it is Action RPG, you can bounce out and, and you know, it's like, uh, we didn't talk about that yet either. So the, when you're not, when you're not controlling whichever character you've chosen, which is on the fly by the way, you can use the D pad. Just flip around. Yeah, whichever one you want. And when you're not playing the other characters, the AI takes over. And it's not bad. It's pretty good. No, it's not bad at all. And you can, you can set it, uh, the different levels, whether aggressive or they're like defensive. And I kind of, I made the mistake of making my, setting my players to play like I would

expect them to, to act in, in a story. Oh, like, uh, Hulk Hucking Wolverine or not, uh, Colossus Hucking Wolverine or something like that. Right, right. And you know, Wolverine's, Wolverine's very aggressive. So when you're not playing as him, he's set to normal unless you go in and tell them to be aggressive. And I'm like, oh, he should always be aggressive. Right. He's like storm, storm rarely attacks as, but mostly because she's got God like power for like, she's basically a God. And so she usually, she's defensive until she has to step in and blow everybody up. But she's set to normal, I default. And so I started going through and tweaking everybody out and I was getting murdered because the game mechanics don't play like that, right? Yeah. So yeah, I love it. But oh, you said working together like Hucking each other. You can get really cool combos. There are some combos. Yeah. Oh, there's some really sick combos. You can, uh, and Wolverine and, and Cyclops are really good at them. Which they were in the comics too. So yeah, they hate each other.

They got good combos. You know, I love jerking the bad guys around too. Like you can, you can grab them. You swap out to them. You grab them and you flip them. If you flip them into one of your, uh, uh, uh, into one of your teammates, they'll, they'll perform a combo typically, um, also just like throwing them against the wall and watching them. Satisfyingly bounce off of it. Yeah. You guys heard it. Brian likes to jerk the bad guys. I don't know if you heard that. I hear you heard it. You heard it. I'm sorry for gushing over this game. I just, it's really good. I didn't mean to have so much fun this way. No, no, no, this is the thing. Sometimes we get one and we're just like, oh man, that's a classic for a reason. Yeah. I think that's partly why I don't like to is to just didn't quite have it. So the fuck about you? Yeah, let's talk about you. Right. What do you think of to? Did you play too much this time? Cause I did not. I feel like they're, so. I played it back in the day. It was disappointing. Really? I played, I played both of them. I played the first one way more than the second one just because I knew that most of the things were the same except for the cinematics, the stories.

The gameplay is pretty much the same. The pacing is weird though. Don't you think? The pacing is a little weird. The settings are weird. So like in the first one. Okay. So you do, you still do your first level. You know, your character is just in this, your busting out Professor X. Magneto is showed up. And he's you and a couple other you Wolverine and Cyclops and who was that hanging out on Magneto? Is it Mystique? I can't remember anyway. She's always with them. You got, you got two goods and two beds and you're rescuing Professor X and then you got to escape this, this area. And you do eventually and then you end up at the hub world. And in the first one, there was like three stories of cool ass X mansion and trivia and all kinds of stuff. X mansion. Yeah. X mansion. And in this one, you end up in like this burnout hole of a place this got, you know, beast

at the mansion has like this huge giant lab with computers and stuff. And you go on there, you're like, oh, this is cool. And here he's like relegated to like a little workbench in the corner and he looks miserable. And now they're showing the part that I didn't like as well. It's like a job locata comb looking place. Yeah. That's exactly what they felt like they were doing. You're fighting a lot of like bugs and stuff. And I get it because the, you know, the setting there have, it makes sense in that story. But in the first one, it was street level, you know, when you was fighting the bad guys on the street, and this is your like in these dungeons and fighting against, you know, slugs and bugs and it just feels, it doesn't feel fun. It feels like you're smushin' bugs. And the first one I felt like I was fighting against, the bad guys seem to, they seem to, the difficulty level is going up. And I was like, oh, it's like get closer. These henchmen are a little bit better than the last ones. And this just felt like these bugs are annoying. I've got to destroy them all.

And it's dead. Dad, oh no. Maybe it was some of that. Maybe because like I said, I barely, I watched video. I didn't play this one this week, but I played this back in the day and I still just remember the disappointment. I remember spending 49 bucks or whatever and then going, right, this isn't as good as the first one. And I just, I don't know, bummed me out. I got hardly hardly far in it. I don't know what the problem was, but I had a problem with it back then. I think if I was in the mood for something a little darker, this would be the way to go. And that's the reason why I don't want to say it's as bad completely. I think playing back to back though, I didn't feel much, I didn't like this one as much. But you do get to play as the bad guys, right? You get to play as Magneto who hulks above everybody else. He is massive and he's got the, he's got the magnetic powers. He can lift stuff and throw it and, oh, it's just so cool. I came on the whole time looking like I'm bad at it. Yeah. The graphics look better and I'll, oh man, not even, not even close as far as these

cinematic stuff, cinematic stuff is so much better here. With that being said, there's some game engine rendering stuff that they occasionally throw in there and that looks terrible. That looks horrible. But yeah, it's all, it was kind of one of those, it felt like two steps forward, one step back maybe. They fixed a lot of the complaints from the first one, but then they made all new mistakes. And oh, yeah, Dr. Tolbert just reminded me that the thing they do that's hilarious here. So like in the first one, when you get to like a door area, it'll just say, do you want to basically teleport to the, to the next area. And so then you got a little loading screen change over. And this one, a lot of them are blocked off by doors and see what to walk up to the doors. I don't know why they made an animation for him, any of them open indoors, but Wolverines

got like, he always has his claws out. You ever go like to the gas station on Monday morning and the ladies in there working and she went and got everything did up the weekend before like her nice nails, some of those really nice long nails. And then they start typing away on the register and you have to kind of type funny because the, the, the, the, the going out Friday nails or are showing up on Monday, you know, disrupting their workflow, taking her for a hundred from 80 words per minute down to 12. Right. So that's how Wolverine feels here. He's open the door. He just, he lifts his hands up and right in the middle of the door, it just kind of goes, just like, just a little, little move like he's like trying to avoid doing it. It is so stupid. And I'm like, just don't do that animation. Just, just, you know, just, just, I force shit and just doors just open up. I don't know. I'm with you. It was. I don't like that either. Although I've only again seen it in video. I don't know how it feels because I didn't play that much of it back in the day.

I think I gave it to my cousin. Yeah. I think I was like, you'll like this. Play this. It's a little bit disappointed if you play it back to back with the first one. But I think it's just because the flavor is so different. I kind of had the same experience from going from watching the original, the, a new hope star wars to watching Empire Strikes Back. If you watch them back to back, oh my gosh. It at first is kind of like, is it's like, ooh, what is this empire? But if you watch Empire by itself, you just like go, I'm watching Empire Strikes Back to Night. If you watch Star Wars one night, the, you hope and then watch Empire the next night, it's like, oh, Empire is so much better. It's got, it's got to shit together. But if you watch it back to back, it takes a little bit of time to, to get out of the, you know, that, that first movie mode and get into the next one is like, what are they doing? It's kind of weird. Why is he crawling inside of a thing? I don't know. I don't like this. Are there more puppets in this one? And yeah. But you kind of feel the same way. It feels like it's such a different flavor, but I'm with you.

I don't blame anybody for thinking that it's sub. It's just, it's just not the same. That's all. It's just not the same. Even though this one I think was the first one they did. So the PSP, PSP got a version of this and more importantly, mobile and the Nokia in-game. Yeah, I got some video of that. You want to see it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I did. So this is real, real dumb, still, still an activism joint. I don't know if, uh, barking lizards. Oh, that's what it is. There it is. Yeah. The poor, but I'll skip ahead here. So you guys can see this a little, a lot of controller bullshit. There you go. They tried, I mean, look at that. That's fine. It looks okay. I mean, for a phone in 2005, it wasn't a phone. It was, was it just a game device entirely? It was a phone. Yeah. It did phone still. Okay. I thought it was a taco. Remember, you hold up your head. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. That's right. I'm starting to think that, I mean, hardly anything on the end gauge was like really good.

Like nothing really stood out during that era, but it's such an interesting thing they tried to do. Like they were ahead of their time in some ways because now phones play games all the time, constantly. Yeah. They were just ahead of it. They didn't know why this was heading yet. And so I kind of have more respect for them in retrospect. And I don't make as much fun of the engages I used to because they were trying, you know? Right. They were trying. They were taking those first steps. And sometimes those first steps are a little uncomfortable like this. Look at this horrible combat. It's pretty bad, but you know, I mean, it is, you know, together. I'm assuming that's a danger room. What amazed me was that somebody, I went on YouTube, I was like, oh, nobody's played this. No one's captured footage of this. I mean, there's an emulator out there, but it was played more than five minutes of the X-Men legends on the engage. Oh, that's right. I know it. Lisa. Lisa, one with like five or six hours or something like that and someone that was like somebody like played it like all day.

Yeah. No, there's like, well, you can get pretty far in it. Yeah. The game's got a decent length on it. If you're going to play the whole thing through, but yeah, you know, I just think it looks like ass. Now, here's, here's one thing that I see the person doing, which is going through all there, spinning their points, right? You upgraded, you'd got your experience and you've leveled up now time to spin your points. The second one actually is really good at quickly managing your auto upgrades, which you can actually, you can set it to auto upgrade instead of having to deal with that. They streamline the action part a little bit. I want to say good things about the second one because I think the second one's got good things to be said. Yeah, it's all, and look, it's technically better like the plays better, smoother, less load times. Like, it's a technical achievement compared to the first one. Right. I'm still looking at that engage. I've watched the engage right now is compelling. Yeah. It's kind of, and that weird square aspect ratio that the phone had. Yeah.

I don't know, man. It's just like it. It's a good time to be alive. I got a fine mine. I haven't, I haven't engaged buried somewhere. I would love to get that thing out. It ain't going to work though. Thing was shot. But Nvidia sent me one. I'm video. Sorry. Nokia. Nokia sent me one all those years back. I don't even know why. I think what was they doing at the time? We were starting, we started the ELR that year. Yeah. So we weren't like big deals in the game space or anything. I think somebody was just a fan or something and just sent it. That was, we weren't a big name in that way, but a lot of people were doing, let me sponsor your show by sending you my product. Yeah, there was a lot of that. It's like, we've got to have got a whole bunch of product. And I want some advertisement for it. Remember that nerd store guy that you store for too? Oh yeah. What does his name, their debt place was called. Didn't they get consumed by think geek or something? Somebody bought them out. Yeah. And I've got, I still have my, I've got my, I've got my, I've got my, I've got my,

I still have a working like lights, a full lit up lightsaber over there that he sent me as part of that deal. I've had him for 20 years, man. And the same batteries right? It still works. Now you're talking about Brian Welch. Yes. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You got a little, oh, Brian, I haven't talked to Brian in years. It's been, yeah, a decade and a half since I've talked to him. Yep. Anyway, I hope he's all right. Yeah, me too. You remember his name though. I couldn't remember his freaking name. Yeah. I didn't know what it worked for him too. I went and, I went and stayed the weekend with him. Went up to Hershey and went up to the Hershey's chocolate factory. Is it called Hershey's Chocolate Factory? That is a sound right? Probably. Hershey's factory, yeah. Probably. Museum. I don't know. Got some chocolate. Interesting note about the PSP version. It was made by, by Carious Visions. And you probably have heard that name before. We talked about it on the show before. But these guys were the ones that were recently absorbed, absorbed by Blizzard. Prior to that, they made the very highly received remakes of Tony Hawk 1 and 2 and then

got scooped up by Blizzard and immediately made the Diablo 2 remake, which is what Diablo 2 resurrected, I guess it's called. Still, people of that popular, whatever. Here's the thing though, that is perfect. First of all, it's full circle. They do this for Activision. Activision buys or Activision makes Tony Hawk. These guys get hired to do the Tony Hawk conversions. Activision Blizzard buys them. They're not Activision anymore or they're not owned by, it's all Microsoft now. But they have experience in this, you know, making an action RPG. So perfect hire them to make freaking Diablo 2 resurrected. I think it's a great idea. So wonderful idea. Yeah. Although I did, I should say I liked them because they're not on their own anymore. They're just some studio of Blizzard now and I think they're part of these upcoming layoffs. So that's great. Yeah. Well done, everybody. Yes. Yes.

You know, stuff that might have been where I bought that game was the PSP version. I mean, it might be where I played it. It could be a very well could be. I can't remember. Did I have that on? I wanted more time. I had a lot of time to format right here. The UMD. Look at that guy. Where's your UMD Spider-Man? Where's that at? That is somewhere. It's somewhere. It's somewhere. You couldn't buy a PSP without getting Spider-Man for free. But this is the volume one sampler disk. Oh, the sampler disk. Yeah, I remember that one. It's got all kinds of shit on there. Yeah. I haven't had that plugged in anything for ages. Ages. Well, there you go. Those are those games. Quick note. To play these now, you kind of just need to emulate slash have real hardware. There's not a lot of great ways to do it. Yeah. We run into this with things that are heavily like big IPs that have changed hands over the years. This happens typically. They just kind of get, you know, you have to have the original hardware.

But the good news is the good news is you can play it through emulation. Or if you do have that PlayStation 2's, still very abundant out there, fairly inexpensive. And you can also get the games anywhere between $10, $15, $20. Definitely worth it at that price point. I've ordered both the first and the second one off eBay. And I'm waiting for those to arrive. And nice. Not bad. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 does exist. It's on the switch. It plays on the latest. It's actually faster on the Switch 2. Yeah. Pretty fast on there. It's not, it's not technically a port for the two, but it runs better on the two. That's what I've heard anyway. I don't remember how this was. Critics liked it. I think at the time, but there was some technical gameplay stuff that was mostly because it was the old, because the switcher just showing its age. Right. I think anyway, it was average is what happened is what I'm saying. Yeah. It wasn't hated.

It wasn't loved. It just kind of came out. It's on sale right now, by the way. Oh, look at that digital, digital copy for 30% off. 26. Yeah. Not bad, man. It's not too bad. Not too often you find good deals on the Nintendo Switch. No, right on the Nintendo. They even got the game voucher eligible. Well, well, well. Yeah. Oh, yeah, by the way, if you're like, I'm so sick of these Marvel people talking about Marvel. Don't worry. There was Justice League Heroes in 2006. Yeah. That was all right. I'm going to go out. I haven't played that one. Never played it. I did. It was okay. I know. Here's what happened. I thought I put this. This is where DC was about to get in trouble, right? Marvel was about to have a moment. Just about the time Iron Man a couple of years later would come out and it would change everything. And DC would would slip down the slide a little bit. I mean, they would they do okay with Batman, but they weren't going to do well with the larger universe. And then Snyder comes along and probably arguably made it worse.

And then now we're now we're finally getting good shit out of stuff like the lantern shows awesome results. There's cool stuff bubbling over there. I love Superman. I think this stuff is got a great future. But at the time, I remember a bunch of game projects just getting chopped left and right. And the one I was most excited about came out and it was called Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2015 or something. They had a date on it at first, but it was kind of a mass. I'm MMO style, but but the oblo style top down game, not related to the series, but it was point click PC free to play, you bought skins, whatever. And it was actually really generous with what it gave you and it was super freaking fun. It was amazing. And then Marvel canned it at the height of the thing. Those bastards. And then supposedly, oh, I might be thinking of a MOBA, but DC had something going on. Maybe it was a MOBA. I test played that MOBA that they made. And it was all right. I had steam punk Batman doing steam punk shit.

I forgive anyone who cannot remember like, okay, so last week, if you were listening to the show and you're listening this time around, you made this far, you probably figured out we didn't do Wolverines or Venge, which I think is what we said we're going to do because we already did it because we already did. We did it one of those earlier compilation shows like around 100, 150 or so. We were doing a lot where we were just like trying to run through a whole bunch of them. And we didn't give it where it probably deserved, but we already talked about it. So we went with this one instead. So yeah, man, trying to keep up with all the Marvel DC games and just trying to remember them. They're always something stupid to like, there's nothing to me says that legends is like, you know, X-Men legends. That's just to say you're about to play an action RPG. That could be anything. It could be anything. It could be anything. So yeah, I'm terrible at the names on these. They're not getting much better about canceling stuff. I don't know if it's been officially canceled out loud, but no hiding or hair of this thing set in the 40s that's like Captain America and Black Panther thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nothing. They announced it, showed a cool trailer and then I forgot about that. Cricket's dude. Yeah. Nothing. Good luck. And Marvel's out there. Wolverines out now. It's doing well sales wise, but critics, there's critics are all over the place and fans are really all over the place with it. Yeah, fans are all over the place. I've heard, yeah, I mean the internet's a different place. It's not real life. So it's hard to say what's really going on on the ground like they're probably plenty of grandmas are like my grand son. Well, love this Marvel game. You know what I mean? Because he likes everything this Marvel. If it's Marvel, he's a legend. I love him. Grandma like DC. Yeah. Dumo broad. Skid. Dumo broad. I took everyone. Rogue said, I told you should clip that from the price. I know I should have. I might still do it. I'll go. What did she say? I have the guy. I have a lot of guys. Hey, how did you? How do you? I got a question for you. It came up on TMS. I'll ask you. Okay. What do you call the daily bugles? No, the daily bugles chief editor, his name.

Jay Jonah. What? Because it's a trick now. It's not a trick. I promise. Well, how would you say his last name? Jamison. Okay. I just said Jamison. Ibit says Jamison. We found parts of the movies where they say Jamison. Right. Listen to what I have here because this is some bullshit. Oh, did I delete it? I did. You got so mad at you, Julia. Is it like Jameson? Because it's spelled kind of like Jameson. They call it in the old. They spelled like Jameson. In the old cartoon, they say Jameson. Yeah. It's spelled like Jameson. Yeah. But no one says that. No one says that except the cartoon. It's really obnoxious. I thought I kept it. I tossed it. Dang it. Yeah. Not true. My name ain't Jay Jonah Jameson. Jameson. Right. Yeah. And then through the whole thing, Peter calls him that. Everybody calls him Jameson. It's so weird. That is weird. I have really thought about it. But I do remember that the first time I heard the name, I was like, that's not how they spell it. No. No.

It's not. Yeah. It turns out. Yeah. Anyway, great series. Guys, go play it. Super fun. And enjoy yourselves. All right. Let's get to a game we made up. And it goes a little something like this. This is just a guess. We'll have to verify it ourselves. I couldn't find the clip, but I found it. It is time to play against my game. It's an audio file from an old game that we have to try to guess. We stump each other. You have four possible answers in our multiple choice question, year and platform are, of course, given freely. I'm going to start this week with the following information. I decided to put it on the end gauge. Is the platform the wonderful multi generational platform known as the engage? No, yeah. 2005 would be your year. So same year is the second game. I know, the first game is all five, right? The ones we talked about today, I'm saying. Yeah, yeah. No, no, no. No, it's a four, four first one and then five for the second. All right.

So we're a year, same year as the two. Right, right. So we're a year later or the year of the two on the end gauge, year the two. Here is your audio. Then I'll give you your options. Here you go. The end of a 17th century, the Caribbean region was at the peak of colonialism. I howl, baby, go. There's a guy that always yells, keep going, man. This sort of thing. Go ahead, man. Oh, there it is there. Let me turn that up. Hold on. No retreat. Oh, yeah, no retreat. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no retreat. Well here are your options. Is that game called a mile high pinball? Okay. That's where you play pinball and have sex. Right, right. In a mile high stadium in Cal and Colorado. Right, right. The pocket kingdom owned the underworld. These are all engage games of that year.

Wait, wait. It's a pocket kingdom and they want you to own your underwear underworld. Underworld. Okay, I got you. All right. Yeah, like the vampire movie. I got you. See Glimmerati. Glimmerati, yeah, yeah. Or D, it's spelled weird, but it's high seas, but seas have spelled S E I Z E. Oh, see the means of production. You've taken the thing. Yeah, yeah, it's high seas spelled that way. So those are your options. What do you, what's your heart tell you? All real games on the engage from 2005 or just on the end. All of them. All right, all right. Interesting. Interesting. All right. Well, mile high pinball. I didn't hear a lot of ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, you got to have that in your pinball game, right? I mean, come on. Yeah. Glimmerati. I don't know what that is. And it feels like it feels like you'd be putting on some makeup or something in that, but I guess not. Pocket kingdom on the underworld or D high seas. Even though it is, it says high seas, I'm going to go with the Ds. I'm going with it because this pirate month is pirate superhero and ninja month.

So I'm going to say pirates taught like a pirate day last Saturday. All right. I see you did it. You nailed it. And that is why I chose that. There's probably a little obvious given the audio, but yes, it's called high seas and it was this tactical turn based little ship in the water deal. I mean, I'm sure there weren't too many other pirate sounding games that you could have pulled from to compare for the engage. Yeah. It was like a limited library. The engage did not as far as I know have a lot of pirate games, but yeah, you know, maybe I don't remember Brian. Let's get to yours. You've got a you got a year in a platform for me before I play this. Absolutely. I just I had to go with the PlayStation one about five years before then. So yeah, PlayStation one year 2000. All right. Here we go. What the hell? What the hell? This looks like some sort of close pixel. What are they doing with a piece of kit like this in a uranium mine?

Very British thing to say. Yeah. Yeah. Piece of kit. Piece of kit. It's a particle accelerator. Very impressive. All right. And then a lot of that real real for a while. All right. My option. You could tell that was the kind of game where it's like you walk into the room and say, there's a particle accelerator. Then you walk up to the thing and you click the button. It says it's a particle accelerator. Yeah. Basically that established that. Yeah. All right. Hey, is the answer to this PS1 from 2000? Is it a Tomb Raider Chronicles, the in cold blood, C, grudge warriors or D, Dan Gan? Dan Gan? I don't know if I'm saying that right or not. I'm thinking. Oh my gosh. This is hard. I'm taking Tomb Raider off the list because I just don't think that's right. Yeah. This is definitely no high seas. But yeah. No. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I mean, Dan Gan. Dan Gan. I mean, Dan Gan. Dan Gan. I don't know that game.

But it could be that. In cold blood was a book, but it's also a game. Oh, okay. So. And what did he say? He was getting out of the thing. What did he say? Hold on. Let me play this part. Particle accelerator. It's a particle accelerator. There he is. Accelerate. All right. So it could be that. We'll come back to in cold blood. Grunge warriors, grudge warriors. Grunge warriors. Put on your plaid shirt, man. Behicular combat game probably, if I remember right, that was some kind of like drive and shoot deal. Okay. I don't think that's it. What's your remember? Yeah, like twisted mentally. Kind of one of them. Okay. Uh, what was the last one, Dan Gan? I don't know what that is. You know what I'm going with. I'm going with in cold blood. I just don't have a, I have no compass on this. Oh, so not grunge warriors. Mm-hmm. That's too bad. Till when I recognize it, so yeah.

Well, I'm sorry, Scott. The answer is be in cold blood. Oh, it is nice. Look at that. One to one today. One to one. Look, I know and you made, you made mine easy and you had a tough one. Yeah, I did. But it really was just about the ones I knew it was probably process of elimination. Tomb Raider in no way was just too, I don't remember any of that. Also chronicles, what the hell was chronicles? I was trying to recall too. Because there was a remake or a, because there was one, two and three on PS1. Right. Chronicles, I don't know what that was. I don't need a mouth. I thought, it's surely there must be some British in that one. I thought maybe that would kind of throw you a little bit. But as a toy, a 2000 action adventure in stealth video game. I just turned it over. I just looked back at the chat and I see Jerry said exactly. I was thinking, true me, Capote wrote in cold blood. Oh, that movie with Phil Seymour Hoffman replaced him. Yeah. That's about the writing of that book. Interesting. Yeah.

So it's not about, it's not about the writing of Capote is the, no, the writing of Capote. Dangan, what did we say that is? That's a, what is Dangan or Dangan? You know, something that was on the police station that sounded plausible. Well, here it's two years close. Yes, let's see what this is. Dangan. Dangan. Okay. 2000. What is it? The top down action shoot him up, gain developed by Meta Muse, medium use, set in the near future, play your alternate controlling two counter terrorists named Jack and Kate across various military options or operations. Jack and Kate from Lost. Oh, it sounds right. Yeah. And then two years before that show came out, that's great. Right. Right. I love it. Well done, everybody. Well, they want points for all of us, man. Points for all. Everybody gets a point. Now celebrate this. Someone asked last week what that's from. That's from Star tropics, by the way. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Let's start dropping. Sure. Confused. Capcom, another Capcom win this month. 20 years ago, they released classics mini mix on the GBA. Mm-hmm. Pretty sure I bought that. You probably did. I think I did. Yeah. It had all their old stuff on it. It had like, what like, not Street Fighter II wasn't there. On a Commando Strider, Mighty Final Fight among them. Was that it? There were others though. Yeah. I can't remember if I had it. Maybe I did. That was the main three, but I think they had some other ones on there too. I remember being way into like the classic packs, like Willie and Tathlers with like, Jouston stuff in it. Yeah. There was a Sega one I really liked that has. It's still one of my favorite ways, like, especially the PS2 era systems had so many great arcade perfect ports that you can get on those discs and they also used to come with interviews with the developers and those are always fun for me.

Yeah. Big fan. Yeah. There you go. Congratulations and welcome to the fray. We also have some listener. Lishner. You're a listener. I was like, three. We have some listener feedback. This is from Soda Pup and this is a call. He called this in. And I don't know what he says because I didn't preview it. So let's find out what Soda Pup, maybe he says something terrible here. I don't know. He's about to find out together. What is up PlayVetro? First of all, I love your show. Keep on doing the good work. You keep me sane doing my night shifts. And I'd like to suggest for a future PlayVetro, Dr. Muto for the Nintendo GameCube. I'm not sure if it's on PlayStation or Xbox. It feels like it's one of those games that might be on those two. But when I was around like 10 years old, 9.8, something like that, I used to play this game and it's a cool little adventure game. You play as this mad scientist and you turn into all sorts of gross, different creatures.

It has a craft sense of humor and really just like a cool attitude vibe to it from that era in the early 2000s. Anyway, I just, you know, so I for the long message, just, yeah, that's my suggestion. Love y'all. All right. That's awesome. Listen, this thing reviewed pretty well back then and it was on all three consoles at the time. I love it. And also it's Ed Log, apparently, who is this, it looks like midway games, 2002. Oh, good. I can't argue with that. Look at that. No, Ed Log is a guy with a two G's. A legend. Yeah, he's a legend. He's 78 years old now, geez. Yeah, he blew that, but he was like old school Atari guy. Yeah, was. Yep. Later on when he left Bushnell went where? Let's see. Oh, he did the home versions of the San Francisco rush games. Yeah, didn't talk about here. We should do San Francisco rush, dude. Yeah, we totally should. We haven't done a vehicle game in a while.

I wouldn't mind that. I have a floaty, weird game. I love it though, but Dr. Mito, good suggestion. I want to check that out. Yeah, that's the last game he made. Actually, he stopped making games with that. Dr. Mito is the final thing he had anything to do with. Prior to that, he did super break out asteroids in 1979, centipede, millipede, gauntlet, gauntlet, two, Tetris for Atari, wasn't his game, but still talons, a gauntlet for Wingretzky 3D hockey, San Francisco rush, rush two, and San Francisco rush 2049, and then in 2002, Dr. Mito, and then he got out. Magnum Opus. Dude, how do you, how do you be the guy that made asteroids and not just be a legend? Yeah. What a legend. Legend of my head, anyway, right? Yeah, I look at it right there. Oh, gee, look at that. I had that, my basement. Not the gold one though. The gold. I spent a shade. That gold made, wow. Yeah. There's a whole story with that gold when I can't remember what it is. We have to dig in there sometime. Oh, here it is. Gold asteroids cabinet at Atari, very rare.

They're only three made. Nice. Yeah. I don't know what to do. I'm a regular one, but man, I love asteroids. We didn't have no gold. To this day, I think floaty, floaty space physics, dual stick shooters automatically I like and I see something on steam and I go, oh, I bet I like that. And it's almost always because they lineage back to asteroids. Yeah. There's something about that stuff, man. What's that plan recently? That's plan like an asteroid like game recently. This is my recommended. I can't remember. I'll have to come back to it. All right. Good luck to you. On that. He's still up there at a, yeah, he's retired. So that means if he retired no two, he would have been, he retired early. He must have been, yeah, he must have had it. Why not? I don't blame him. This is going to rush it sucks. I'm going to do something else. Mudo, I'm out. Mudo. Anyway, there's that. Let's get now to some discussion about, oh, thanks for that. You know what I should say? Yes. Go to frogpants.com slash play retro and write there on the page as a way to send us those

voicemails or texts or emails, whatever you prefer, all the communication methods are there. You just have to take advantage of them. But the high watermark there with soda pup doing that voicemail, that was, that was on point. That was all business. I liked it. Yeah, he's working late at night and listening to our dumb show. It's fantastic. Perfect. Our next discussion slash game will be because we want, we talked about ninjas earlier. Let's do it. The last ninja. Yeah, yeah. That's going to wrap this September up. We've been kicked off because of dragon con and I'm just thinking about, you know, cosplay. It just felt right because we're about to get into the horror season, right? October's right around the corner. And so yeah, and I've already got, I've already got staged. Audrey's already decorated for Halloween because, yes, I've already, I'm already staging my Halloween stuff. So it won't be long now. The first cold day for us was today, never got above 68 Fahrenheit. We had a nice day too, but not that low.

That's pretty good. Yeah. So if people are starting to fill it, the neighbors brought their crap out and people are like, too soon, too soon, it's like sooner. I am not that I have not seen or played the last ninja in about a hundred years. I played it. We played it recently, you know, on Friday. We played it recently and I was like, wow, this is pretty fun, actually. Yeah. Holds up. Yeah, it kind of holds up. Oh, it's still an old ancient game. Don't get me wrong. But yeah, it's got some things that I probably didn't get when I was playing it back in the day. I just kind of like just fumble through it. This time around, I was like, oh, this has got some pretty game mechanics to it. So it was also what Commodore and then later, DOS, I think, yeah, remember it. I think we'll probably just get up to three. I think so. Last ninja three, I think was to look, we'll find out. That's what it's all about learning everything we can about. We're going to find it out together as a team and as a listership and all that together.

We find out. Here's what else you do right now. You can go support us at patreon.com slash play retro. You can be like this new guy named have cheese will melt. Yeah, something a great idea. How much cheeseburger now? Dude, what did I do? Oh, I went to Del Taco. If I could have you went to deal. If I could have you would tell Taco, right? You didn't go to Taco Bell. No, Del Taco. I thought you said Taco Bell early, but maybe I've misheard it. No, I said that Taco Bell has the has the fire sauce. Del Taco has the Del Scorcho sauce. Ah, and I got a hand. I don't have it. Del Scorcho. We don't have we only have the Taco Bell around here. So I don't talk about it. Del Taco is a for ever. It's a decent alternative. It's not like wildly better. It's not. Yeah. There and their prices haven't gone up crazy like Taco Bell's has. Or I haven't got any long John Silver's. I mean, I don't the last time we had one was the ages ago. I don't think there's much you can do to expect one of those. So when are we going to get like a long John Silver's retro? Were they all wearing a pirate gear?

Like they did in that commercial we watched the pre show last week. I think I do that. So weird, dude. They get that in the patron. Yeah. That's awesome. Speaking of which, hang around after we're going to head over to the Discord and we're going to watch another episode of Thunder of the Barbarian episode three of this episode. Big by dogs. It's going to be awesome. And we'll put that up on Patreon for everybody who maybe missed it. If you hear live, you'll get lucky enough to see it. So check it out. That's it. The FrogPants Discord. Just search for it by name and you'll find it. If you're not already, remember. All right. That's it. Brian, you have anything else you want to add? Is this you? I have a hip-hop. Don't forget on Fridays. I do the eight-bit computer club. I'm going to be doing it for the next six, thirty-pm Eastern time. Brian Dunway. Or Brian Dunway on Twitch, I believe. It tells me Brian never goes anywhere on Friday nights with anyone. He just does that. I hang out with the community and we have a blast. Yeah. Oh, Trivia Murder Party. Also, did you get three yet? I did. And I'm ready. We're doing it for TMS Playdate on Friday. So we will be cracking that open.

I haven't played it yet at all. So I don't have any expectations. Other than I haven't ready to go. So same. Playing it tomorrow night myself. I'm excited about it. Good to be with. All right, head to the channel over there. Everybody, we hope to see you in a second. In the meantime, go play something retro. We'll see you next time. Find all our shows at frogpants.com. We interrupt this newscast with a breaking story. A young woman named Allison Krasimir was identified as a mutiny. Kevin Hart here in this cashbacking season. I'm getting scary amounts of cashback on all my Halloween stuff. Hello, Kevin. No, no, no, no. I know what this is. Do you like scary movies? Well, have you seen my movies? Yeah, big fan just wanted to know what you cashbacked on with Chase Freedom. Oh, man. Now, I cashback on pumpkins, cashback on costumes, cashback on candy. So are you having a Halloween party? I am. But I'm definitely not inviting you.

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